Facing Facebook: For years, Facebook has been sharing user data, including private messages, with other large technology platforms including Netflix, Spotify, and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, according to a New York Times report. Few of these data-sharing partnerships have even proven useful for Facebook, writes Alexis Madrigal, and the revelations are, most of all, a testament to Facebook’s sloppy attitude toward user data and privacy over the years. Here’s a refresher on Facebook’s impact on the informational underpinnings of American democracy.
Military Retreat: The White House—including President Donald Trump, via Twitter—confirmed Wednesday that plans to withdraw the U.S. military presence in Syria are under way, though details about the timeline or actual process for the troops’ removal is unclear. Though troops were initially deployed to combat ISIS’s stronghold on the country, their removal could bring immeasurable chaos and unnerve other American allies.
Border Crisis: Hardline views over immigration and borders in France have come to the fore yet again in the recent trial of seven pro-immigration activists who’d assisted at a critical entry point in the French Alps, between Italy and France. The “Briançon Seven,” as the activists would come to be called, were charged with violating a ban on helping foreigners enter the country illegally. Karina Piser writes on what the case means for the tightening borders of Europe.
—Haley Weiss and Shan Wang
Snapshot
Caribou, the undomesticated cousin species to reindeer, are going extinct. Hillary Rosner brings us the story of what’s leading to the disappearance of these herds, and the monumental effort First Nations communities in Canada are leading to save them. (Illustration by Cornelia Li)Evening ReadWill Stancil explains what a scandal surrounding an elite private school’s college-application fraud implicitly reveals about our expectations of the elite higher-education system:
T. M. Landry shows how hungry our society is for what might be deemed “miracle students.” The Landrys are not the only ones to take advantage of this hunger, although their alleged fraud appears to have been especially egregious. Many other schools implicitly offer the same miracle: students who have endured great hardship and succeeded beyond all expectations. An entire genre of charter schools, often called “no excuses” schools, have adopted a similar rhetorical tack. These schools, explicitly targeted at poor students of color, claim to fuse rigid discipline and intense expectations to achieve an academic transformation. Their advocates often imply that only such a crucible can produce poor and nonwhite college-ready students. Like T. M. Landry, these schools have attracted disproportionate attention from colleges, not to mention media and politicians.
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. President Trump announced on Saturday that this cabinet member will be the next to depart the White House, leaving the Interior Department in the hands of the former oil lobbyist David Bernhardt.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. This civil-rights group has called for a boycott of Facebook and Instagram after the release of two reports showing that Russian operatives specifically targeted African American voters on social media before the 2016 election.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Efforts are under way in Canada to protect the last remaining North American groups of this four-legged animal.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: ryan zinke / The NAACP / Caribou
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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Another year in American politics is coming to a close, and what a year it’s been! We saw congressional investigations, turmoil in the administration, debates over consequential policy issues such as immigration and health care, and midterm elections with record-high turnout. For the rest of the week, instead of our usual newsletter format, we’ll be sharing a selection of some of The Atlantic’s best politics stories from 2018.
We’re sharing pieces that touch on some of the key figures and themes that have animated American politics throughout the past 12 months—from an essay about the nuance lacking in the national debate over gun control to an examination of how our political discourse has spun out of control. As always, thanks for reading, and we’ll be back tomorrow and Friday with more to read from the past year.
-Elaine Godfrey and Maddie Carlisle
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics at Harvard University (Charles Krupa / AP)How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Plans to Wield Her Power
Russell Berman
“But, I don't want to be obnoxious either,” Ocasio-Cortez insisted. “Let's just get things done. I'll be really quiet if we get things done. If we pass Medicare for All, I'm going to be silent as a lamb.” → Read on.
How the House Intelligence Committee Broke
Natasha Bertrand
“The panel would be “nonpartisan,” he promised. “There will be nothing partisan about its deliberations.” Four decades later, that promise has proven illusory. The committee’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election so divided the panel’s Republicans and Democrats that the chairman considered building a physical wall between staffers.”→ Read on.
The Bullet in My Arm
Elaina Plott
“I stroked my mother’s hair as she cried and drove me to the hospital. The surgeon said the bullet was small, maybe a .22-caliber, and too deep in the muscle to take out, so it’s still in my arm. They never caught the shooter, or came up with a motive.”→ Read on.
Newt Gingrich at the Philadelphia Zoo (Amy Lombard)How Newt Gingrich Destroyed American Politics
McKay Coppins
“Newt Gingrich is an important man, a man of refined tastes, accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and so when he visits the zoo, he does not merely stand with all the other patrons to look at the tortoises—he goes inside the tank.”→ Read on.
Stacey Abrams's Plan for Georgia's Health-Care Crisis
Vann R. Newkirk II
“Across the country, black women’s health—particularly the fate of mothers and their newborns—is in peril, and mortality rates have spiked. Nowhere is this truer than in Georgia.”→ Read on.
Trump's Gang of Crooks and Liars
David A. Graham
“Collusion with Russia may or may not turn out to be a real scandal, depending on what Mueller finds, but it is not the only scandal...The scale of dishonesty and criminality that is now apparent is an enormous scandal in its own right.”→ Read on.
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
The New York Times has once again gotten its hands on a cache of documents from inside Facebook, this time detailing data-sharing arrangements between the company and other corporations, which had “more intrusive access to users’ personal data than [Facebook] has disclosed” for most of the past decade, the article revealed.
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, got Facebook users’ friends, whether or not the users agreed to grant that access. Netflix and Spotify got access to users’ messages. Amazon got names and contact information. And, of course, Facebook got things in return. The Times states that Facebook used data from other companies, including Amazon, in its “People You May Know” feature, which has long attracted attention for its mysterious suggestions.
But while the story recalls the explosive Cambridge Analytica episode, it’s much more mundane. These were not bad actors, but merely actors playing exactly the role that Facebook wanted them to play. The goals of these integrations were not nefarious, at least from what we currently know, even if the idea that Spotify’s engineers would have access to your Facebook message data is probably not intuitive to most people.
[Read: Cambridge Analytica and the dangers of Facebook data harvesting]
Facebook responded to the story with a long blog post, where the company argued that the data sharing “work was about helping people” to do things on the internet “like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends—on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora, and Spotify.”
Which, sure: That was one thing that these data-sharing partnerships allowed. But it also allowed Facebook to grow, and grow, and grow. To entrench itself everywhere in the social-media ecosystem. Facebook was happy to trade user data to expand its business operations, and to pretend that this was all about users defies reality. Users got a small “improvement” that they didn’t ask for. Facebook got permits to build the pipes underlying its data empire.
Back when the data-sharing partnerships began in 2010, the vision Facebook had of itself could be called Everything-But-With-Facebook. The service would be the social spine for all other services on the web. You’d log in with it, share through it, integrate your Facebook friends into all online experiences. This vision had an arc that began with integrating Facebook with also-ran phone makers and ended in the failure of the concept, overall. But in between, as The Verge’s Casey Newton points out, it gave away more and more data until it overreached with what it called “instant personalization,” which customized results in Bing with Facebook data.
The company has been pulling back on this kind of arrangement for years now. It admits in the Times story, however, that the change was not primarily because of privacy concerns. Most of the deals that Facebook cut simply didn’t work for either party, despite the data transport going back and forth. As Android and iOS took over from the wider world of mobile phones and computers, Facebook’s vision of what it should be evolved. It would no longer be the social spine, but the suite of apps you cannot escape. For years, now, the model has been: everything inside Facebook. Apps that threatened that hegemony were purchased (WhatsApp, Instagram), or battled tooth and nail (Twitter, Snapchat).
[Read: Another day, another Facebook problem]
What’s fascinating is that, as with Cambridge Analytica, we’re mostly talking about the sins of Facebook past, remnants of a different idea of how the internet was going to work. Except that the Times reporting indicates that data access for many companies continued long after it should nominally have been cut off. Other companies purported to be surprised that they had the depth of access that they did. The sloppiness—basically up to the present day—remains the most incomprehensible part. For a company that is user data, Facebook sure has made a lot of mistakes spreading it around.
By the looks of it, other tech players have been been happy to let Facebook get beat up while their practices went unexamined. And then, in this one story, the radioactivity of Facebook’s data hoard spread basically across the industry. There is a data-industrial complex, and this is what it looked like.
When the nurse slipped the IV needle into his arm, Matt Sharp was calm. Yes, he knew the risks: As one of the first humans ever to receive the experimental treatment, he could end up with mutant cells running amok in his body. But he was too enamored of the experiment’s purpose to worry about that. For two decades, Sharp had been living with HIV. He’d watched the height of the AIDS crisis claim dozens of his friends’ and lovers’ lives. Now, he believed he was taking a step toward a cure.
A few months earlier, researchers had drawn white blood cells from Sharp’s body and manipulated his DNA with tiny molecules, deleting a single gene in each cell. He was about to receive an infusion that would reintroduce the tweaked cells back into his bloodstream. The procedure aimed to change the genetic makeup of these cells to make Sharp’s body resistant to HIV. Gene therapies like this had been tried before for other diseases, but experiments were put on hold when a young man died in 1999. Sharp’s body would allow researchers to test the safety of new molecular tools called “zinc fingers.”
The infusion took place in June 2010 at Quest Clinical Research, a nondescript gray building near The Fillmore in San Francisco. Sharp’s cells arrived frozen in a liquid-nitrogen-filled shipping container that looked like R2-D2 from Star Wars. After thawing them in a hot-water bath, his nurse plugged the bag into his IV line. Cloudy yellow fluid slowly drained into Sharp’s arm. Within 30 minutes, he headed back to work with billions of genetically modified cells reproducing in his arteries and veins.
[Read: Chinese scientists are outraged by reports of gene-edited babies]
Over the past decade, HIV patients like Sharp have played a major role in pushing forward the vanguard science of gene editing. The community’s close-knit advocacy networks, paired with the fact that there are clearly identifiable genes that make humans vulnerable to HIV, have made people living with the virus ready candidates for innovative—though sometimes risky—experiments. A gene-editing procedure related to HIV rocked the fields of science and medicine last month, when the Chinese researcher He Jiankui made the explosive claim that he had manipulated the genomes of twin babies who do not carry the virus in an attempt to make them resistant to it, a covert and reckless move that was widely condemned by the scientific establishment. But adult HIV patients have voluntarily participated in scientifically condoned experiments that have paved the way for further gene-editing work on, for instance, cancer and blindness.
Sharp’s journey since he signed up for his pioneering infusion illustrates the potential that DNA editing has in expanding the possibilities of being human—and also the limits of genetic medicine as a miracle cure.
Sharp, who’s now 62, has been campaigning for innovative experimental medicine since the 1980s. As a veteran of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, he says he was arrested at least eight or nine times—he can’t remember exactly—during protests against slow progress in AIDS treatment and research. He first encountered the founder of Quest Clinical Research, Jay Lalezari, in San Francisco back in the early 1990s, when the young doctor was making a name for himself with daring experiments with potentially toxic drugs. Lalezari’s research offered early hope for surviving HIV, but he initially had an uneasy relationship with activists: ACT UP staged a “die in” at one of his talks at an AIDS conference.
Over time, the activists began to trust Lalezari. Hundreds of people now credit him for saving their lives. In 2008, Lalezari was involved in an earlier gene-therapy study, funded by Johnson & Johnson, that reported unspectacular results. So when a small biotech company, Sangamo Therapeutics, approached him with a gene-editing experiment involving the new zinc-finger technology, he was skeptical that it would be a “cure.” But after careful consideration, he decided to launch an experiment and enroll 65 patients with HIV.
When Sharp learned about the gene-editing trial, he jumped at the chance to participate and agreed to be patient No. 2 in the safety study. To everyone’s relief, Sharp experienced only one side effect after the initial infusion: An intense smell lingered around his body. When he returned to Quest the next day for a checkup, his nurse could smell him coming down the hall. Paperwork from Sangamo had said to expect a garlic odor from a chemical agent that would fade after a few days, but the nurses agreed that Sharp and his fellow gene-editing patients smelled more like rancid creamed corn.
When the earliest results came back, Sharp saw dramatic improvements in his medical charts. For the first time since he was diagnosed with HIV, his T-cell count—a key marker of immune-system function—jumped up to normal, healthy levels. Sharp wanted to be in the audience when the full data were unveiled at a leading HIV conference, so he flew to Boston in February 2011. He didn’t know if his cell counts were an idiosyncratic fluke. When Lalezari presented a slide showing a significant increase in the other patients’ T-cell numbers as well, Sharp says the audience gasped.
Over the next couple of years, follow-up procedures were more uncomfortable for Sharp than the initial infusion. During rectal biopsies, he watched a video screen that showed where “the scope was going into my butt, where the clippers were going, and exactly where they were taking the snips,” he says. He was under local anesthesia and didn’t feel any pain, so he decided to narrate the procedure with an omniscient booming voice-over: “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
No serious problems were identified among the patients in the study in rectal exams, blood samples, and general checkups. But Sharp’s lack of complications was unusual. Other patients did have notable side effects, including fever, chills, headaches, and muscle pain. According to one study, these symptoms were likely a reaction to billions of cells being reinfused into the body, rather than from the genetic modifications. Still, there are other concerns. The study’s three-year monitoring period might not have been enough to detect long-term health problems, such as cancer, caused by genetic damage from the experiment.
More pointedly, the experiment did not deliver the dream of a complete cure. Some patients experienced no lasting benefits. Sharp found long-term improvements to his immune-system health. He thinks participation in the study was worth it, but he still takes daily pills to keep the virus under control. Other patients claim that they were “cured” and stopped taking standard medicine when their bodies did, in fact, become able to control HIV.
Lalezari insists that it is irresponsible to bandy about the word cure when interpreting results from this initial research. The study was promising, but preliminary; the “primary outcome was safety,” researchers say. Current HIV medications have few risks, can reduce the virus to undetectable levels, and are becoming more affordable. Lalezari points to other HIV experimental treatments—involving antibodies, pharmaceutical drugs, and small molecules—that seem even more promising than gene editing.
The most important next step for Lalezari after his 2011 presentation in Boston was more research. If his studies could, in fact, produce a one-time treatment, as some of his patients claimed, gene-editing truly would be a game changer. But his work abruptly stalled out when it ran into a fickle reality of cutting-edge experimental work: funding troubles. Sangamo Therapeutics, the biotechnology firm that bankrolled the initial study, decided to sideline its HIV research, and instead develop treatments for other diseases with its proprietary gene-editing technology.
This enraged HIV-positive activists. “The company put it back on the shelf because they couldn’t figure out how they were going to make enough money,” says Mark Harrington, the executive director of the Treatment Action Group in New York City. Sharp, dismayed by the setback, signed an open letter to Sangamo, calling for new research initiatives. “They simply refused to follow up the initial experiment with funding for further studies,” he says.
[Read: China is genetically engineering monkeys with brain disorders]
The reasons the funding dried up are disputed. In 2013, Sangamo had become flush with cash when it signed a $320 million deal. But then its shares plummeted as an insider-trading scandal threw the company into disarray. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sangamo’s then–vice president of clinical research, Winson Tang, with allegedly participating in a scheme that netted more than $1.5 million in “illegal profits.”
“When Winson Tang was carted off to jail, Sangamo completely dropped the ball,” contends Lalezari, who says he maintains contact with the biotech firm to leave open the door to future experiments. “If you want to do research with industry, you can never forget that you are dancing with the devil.”
Sandy Macrae, the president and CEO of Sangamo, disputes such an inference, claiming that the decision to move away from HIV came before the Winson Tang insider-trading scandal. But the company acknowledges that it didn’t see HIV as the most valuable investment. Macrae took charge of Sangamo last year, shortly after the company’s stocks bottomed out at around $3 a share, and he has been working to turn things around. The company’s headquarters sits next to a boat-parts store in Richmond, California, a city at the edge of the Bay Area that is also home to a train yard, a Chevron oil refinery, a yacht club, and Rosie the Riveter National Park.
“I had to make a decision about where our portfolio was best applied,” he says, pointing out that existing HIV medicine is already effective. “My company has only so many things we can do. When I looked at HIV, they had done a lot of work trying to get a product. The current version … doesn’t feel like it is there.”
Sharp remains undaunted. After failing to get funds from Sangamo, he began lobbying U.S. government officials and HIV researchers. Thanks in part to his efforts, Rafick-Pierre Sékaly, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, was inspired to continue gene-editing research on HIV. The National Institutes of Health awarded Sékaly $11 million earlier this year for a new experiment called TRAILBLAZER that pays Sangamo for access to its gene-editing technology.
Sharp “has always been extremely passionate. He has always been very forceful, pushing us to do more,” Sékaly says. Now, a new cohort of HIV patients are joining Sékaly’s experiment. They are helping open up a future where gene editing could be a routine part of medical care.
Exactly what this future might look like remains to be seen. “If we could all be engineered to resist HIV,” Sharp says, “then the stigma associated with the disease might completely disappear.” If the technology becomes more effective, then a wide range of genetic diseases could be fixed. But gene editing carries other risks, besides technical problems. Existing gene therapies are very expensive, up to $475,000 per treatment. Gene editing could produce a new era of inequality in medicine, to say nothing of the fears some people have of “designer babies” or controversies about children engineered to resist HIV from birth.
There are subtler, more surprising possibilities, too. Tim Dean, a queer theorist known for flipping conventional scripts, speculates that gene editing could create a new class distinction among gay men in hook-up culture.* “In some techno-future, I can imagine cruising apps including a category, in addition to HIV status, that would differentiate the edited from the unedited,” he says.
Sharp, for his part, just wants to see research on a cure move forward. He doesn’t care if the cure is DNA editing, an antibody, or a new pharmaceutical drug. “I have already volunteered for 12 clinical trials,” he says, “and I am willing to try anything new if it looks like it might work.”
* This article previously misstated Tim Dean’s HIV status. We regret the error.
The Trump administration has unexpectedly decided to rapidly withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, where they have been fighting ISIS. This decision, which demonstrates that the president’s National Security Strategy does not govern his policies, will have deleterious effects across the strategic waterfront: throwing Syria policy into chaos; rewarding Iranian regional destabilization and Russian intervention; alarming Kurdish forces and American allies fighting in the region, as well as countries to which jihadists might return; and calling into question America’s commitment to stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan.
All of these priorities have been capriciously sacrificed by President Trump for no apparent reason other than that he campaigned on withdrawal and wants it to happen now. There has been no precipitating event to drive a policy change. The president explained himself on Twitter as follows: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” But that is at wide variance with National-Security Adviser John Bolton, who only three months ago publicly affirmed that the administration would remain indefinitely to prevent Iran from gaining further influence and posing greater threats.
While the announcement was unexpected, the president has been telegraphing his unhappiness with Syria policy for some time. Last spring, he said, “I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home.” The Pentagon won a reprieve of “months, not years,” and evidently those months ran out yesterday.
[Read: Trump wanted out of Syria. It’s finally happening.]
Perhaps the president felt boxed in by establishment national-security figures early in his presidency, as previous presidents have felt boxed in, and those advisers have either been replaced or fallen from favor. But the lack of a process to evaluate the consequences of the policy change, and sync America’s actions with those of the 78 other countries contributing to the counter-ISIS campaign, will distress those who are risking their forces and security.
Kurdish forces in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey will be immediately and negatively affected by the decision. The contradiction inherent in the previous policy was that the United States armed and relied on Kurdish military forces that the Turkish government considers terrorists. But the U.S. has not been able to find common cause with Turkey in six years. By abandoning the Kurds—who do share American objectives—the U.S. leaves them to the mercies of Turkey even as it leaves Syria to Iran and Russia. Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Soleimani must be drunk with their good fortune.
This decision will also unsettle every ally that relies on American security guarantees. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be very, very worried. For if Syria can be so lightly written off, the fight arbitrarily declared won, what is the argument for continuing to assist Iraq—where ISIS is even more defeated? And if Trump has so little interest in stabilizing security and assisting governance in Syria, how can Afghanistan have confidence that he won’t make the same decision about them, when the fight there is costlier and progress less evident?
[Hassan Hassan: ISIS is poised to make a comeback in Syria]
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced, “The United States and our partners remain committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that our forces have not already eradicated.” Keeping allies in Syria will be a neat trick, given that the Trump administration had been twisting arms and promising an enduring American commitment. France and Britain are left exposed, as they may not be able to unwind their operations on America’s timeline. And they will fear that jihadist fighters will return to Europe if they are not tied down by operations on Syrian battlefields.
The president’s national-security strategy states, “The campaigns against ISIS and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates demonstrate that the United States will enable partners and sustain direct action campaigns to destroy terrorists and their sources of support, making it harder for them to plot against us.” President Trump’s decision yesterday proves that irrelevant.
It also makes irrelevant the Trump administration’s only persuasive claim to having improved on the Obama administration in the realm of foreign policy: It lifted the time constraint imposed on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The Trump administration had admirably insisted that achieving American objectives should drive the timeline of its wars, not vice versa. Now the only distinguishable difference between the retrenchment of American power practiced by President Barack Obama and the retrenchment practiced by President Trump is that Trump behaves so erratically that the cost to the U.S. and its allies is even higher.
About 75 million years ago, in what is now Alberta, Canada, a dinosaur called Euoplocephalus took its final breath. That exhalation, like every other, was fleeting and insubstantial, but eons later, scientists can still reconstruct the path it took out of the dinosaur’s head. And that path, it turns out, was extraordinarily convoluted.
Euoplocephalus was one of the ankylosaurs—a group of tank-like species covered in bony plates. Their skulls and backs were armored. Their eyelids were occasionally armored. Even the nasal passages inside their skulls were lined with bone, preserving these delicate structures, usually lost to time.
More than a century ago, paleontologists first noticed that those passages included a weirdly complicated series of chambers and tubes. They interpreted these as a set of sinuses that branched from a simple central channel—a slightly more elaborate version of the setup that exists inside your nose. But in 2008, Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely from Ohio University worked out what was really going on when they put the skulls of several ankylosaurs in a medical CT scanner.
The scans revealed the unusual structure of the creatures’ nasal passages—not sinuses forking off a central channel, but a single airway that repeatedly twists and turns, like roller-coaster tracks or a Krazy Straw. These passages are more complex than the airways of other backboned animals, and they’re remarkably long. The skull of Euoplocephalus “is the length of your arm from the wrist and elbow, but its nasal passage, if stretched out, would run from your shoulder to your fingertip,” says Witmer. “I remember standing up at a paleontology meeting, holding up my hands, and saying, ‘I don’t believe it, but this is what we got.’”
[Read:] A dinosaur so well preserved, it looks like a statue
Witmer and Ridgely thought that these convoluted airways acted as an elaborate air-conditioning system for the ankylosaurs’ brains. These were big, car-size animals whose bodies would have retained a lot of heat in the Mesozoic sun. “Hot blood would have come up from the core of their bodies to their brains,” says Witmer. “And while these dinosaurs’ brains were famously small, they were still brains.” Brains are especially sensitive to rises in temperature, which is why confusion and fainting are among the first signs of heatstroke. So how did ankylosaurs and other giant dinosaurs keep their noggins from cooking?
It was all in the nose, Witmer guessed. The vessels carrying blood from an ankylosaur’s body to its head ran alongside its long nasal canal. Every time the dinosaur inhaled, cool air would have meandered through that twisty airway, absorbing the heat from the adjacent blood and cooling it before it hit the brain.
WITMER lab / Ohio UniversityWitmer’s colleagues Jason Bourke and Ruger Porter have now tested this idea. They used medical scanners to create digital replicas of the skulls of two ankylosaurs—Euoplocephalus and Panoplosaurus. Then they simulated the flow of air through these virtual noses, using techniques that are more commonly used by aerospace engineers.
These simulations revealed that, on an inhale, the dinosaurs’ long nasal passages gradually heated air by up to 36 degrees Fahrenheit, taking it from room temperature to body temperature and substantially cooling the adjacent blood. When the dinosaur exhaled, along the same twisty tubes, the air would return most of that heat back to the body. (Our own simple noses work on a similar principle, which is why your breath feels hotter coming from your mouth than from your nose.)
The team members also played around with their virtual skulls. In one experiment, they gave their ankylosaurs short and simple airways, much like ours. In another, they straightened the animals’ airways so they kept their normal length but lacked any twists. In both cases, the heating effect became far less efficient. Inhaled air picked up less heat, and it did so at the very end of the passages—too late to cool the adjacent blood vessels. It’s the passages’ length and their curviness that make them efficient air conditioners.
Read: [Meet Zuul, destroyer of shins—a dinosaur named after Ghostbusters]
“This is a fascinating deep dive into an aspect of dinosaur biology that’s been difficult to study—how a dinosaur’s breath traveled through its skull,” says Victoria Arbour, an ankylosaur expert at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. “It makes a lot of sense [especially since] many ankylosaurs lived in arid or tropical environments. It’s easy to see how this adaptation arose.”
Matthew Vickaryous from the University of Guelph notes that of the two species that the team studied, Euoplocephalus was bigger and had more complex nasal passages. Are those two things related? Do bigger species, which are more likely to suffer from overheating, need twistier noses? What kind of zany structures lurked inside the snout of the largest ankylosaur—the eponymous, eight-meter-long Ankylosaurus? Today it’s possible to answer these questions, because “CT data are now available for an increasing number of ankylosaurs,” Vickaryous says.
Tetsuto Miyashita from the University of Chicago agrees. He credits Witmer’s team for “pioneering a new genre in paleontology” in which they fuse the hard physics with messy biology. “What’s next?” Miyashita asks. “Well, no one has reconstructed resonation in those virtual nasal airway models to see whether [the passages] work like a trumpet. I hope they give that a try.”
After the Obamas shook hands with the Trumps at George H. W. Bush’s funeral earlier this month, Jemele Hill analyzed the implications of the phrase Michelle Obama coined in 2016: When they go low, we go high. “I sometimes wonder,” Hill wrote, “if the people who often cite that quote have a full understanding of the emotional toll it takes on people of color to have to constantly absolve the racism directed at them.”
Jemele Hill’s column on the Obama family’s class in dealing with Donald Trump at former President George H. W. Bush’s funeral is, and will remain, a classic. Citing the recent history of young Jeremiah Harvey, she beautifully described what most every African American I know experiences, in some form, on a daily basis.
For some of us, the experience she described has reached it limits. However, we, like President Barack Obama and the first lady Michelle Obama, must remain dignified and respectful in our responses. I’d like to share the advice of three icons: the late Dr. Arthur L. Johnson, one of my mentors; the late Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent African American author and anthropologist; and Bernard Lafayette, one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s protégés.
When I was named public relations director at Eastern Connecticut State University in 1990, Johnson, knowing how whites have a difficult time accepting a person of color in charge, told me: “Dwight, you’re gonna have to eat some crow some time, and even take some stuff, but you don’t have to take it lying down.”
Hurston offers similar advice: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
Lafayette specifically counsels victims to know the law. When he spoke at Eastern Connecticut State University in 2013, he said: “If you don’t use your God-given rights, you will lose them.”
All three were and are right. Have a bone in your back. Be honest and firm, and if necessary, take people to court who commit their vicious and insidious acts and who behave disrespectfully toward you and expect you to “get over it.” Your beautiful prose shows that African Americans will always show class in facing and dealing with small-minded people.
Dwight Bachman
Willimantic, Conn.
I wonder if Ms. Hill considered the agency that both former President Obama and the first lady Michelle Obama exhibited rather than assuming that grace is weak. Of course grace, which means acting in love even when others don’t deserve the act, is formidable among the great exhibitors of social change. We wouldn’t expect less of these two. It is the strongest response and most revealing when standing next to those who have, in fact, been ungracious.
Rev. Jan Todd
Mulvane, Kan.
Thank you for your candid thoughts. I can identify with the article. As a father of a mid-20s, half-black man, no matter how hard I tried to raise him right and make sure he understood that heroes come in all colors and sizes by educating him through books and conversations, still at times I was frustrated that the reality of our society systematically enforces otherwise.
Combiz Khatiblou
Santa Clara, Calif.
As a woman of color, I am inclined to disagree that there was a problem with the Obamas’ “going high.” My perception of the Obamas is they are “high,” simply that. My take: The Obamas are not in the game. It is just not their style. And what do they have to prove by being obnoxious or belligerent?
Dr. Francine Adams
Lake Worth, Fla.
I disagree entirely with this. I’m partly African American myself, and I teach African American history. The behavior of the Obamas at the funeral was both appropriate and exemplary, in my view. As always, they conducted themselves with dignity and poise, despite Trump’s boorish conduct, and thereby illustrated precisely the sort of graceful bearing for which the late President Bush has been so highly praised.
Brian Alnutt, Ph.D.
New Tripoli, Pa.
I totally disagree with the author. The Obamas’ “going high” is for me one of the few things that can ameliorate the pain of watching the current president and his gang. Because “going high” is more than a chosen behavior; it’s an expression of character that elevates them, and by contrast, reveals the difference between them and the current president. I can’t imagine a worse response than to imitate the president in his emotionally stunted words or behavior. Their “going high” makes me proud and humbled at the same time—proud for their example and humbled at my own failures under less provocation.
R. B. Goetsch
Pioneer, Calif.
The essay by Ms. Hill encapsulated precisely what I was thinking, but could not articulate. I have felt conflicted by the Obamas for many years. To my mind, if a person looks out the window and says it’s raining and another says it’s sunny, it is the job of a leader to look at the evidence (in this case, look out the window) and speak the truth, not cite them both. Yet most blacks understand that, in a country where the lion’s share of resources is controlled by Caucasians, the inherent nature of white supremacy demands we be exemplary. The Obamas understood that racism is as American as apple pie. So much so, the most minor attack on it risked many Caucasians thinking it was an attack on America. This was a risk they were not prepared to take.
However, there is a significant degree of cognitive dissonance involved in taking the high road. Marginalized groups are told to be patient, polite, and civil in the face of the most grievous assaults and, when they hazard to make even the most minor of pleading, are invariably ignored. For marginalized people, the irony is not lost that they are told to do things the “proper way,” knowing America was founded on, oftentimes, very violent protest and conflict. Moreover, when affluent Caucasians are riled up over some perceived slight, they seem to have no problem doing whatever is necessary to preserve and sustain their position in society.
I’ve stopped thinking that if I am palatable enough, European Americans will open their arms to me, and that I will have fair access to opportunities if my personage is more pleasing to white sensibilities. It has not worked, and this is emotional labor I no longer have the strength, nor the inclination, to expend. It is not my responsibility to make European Americans feel more comfortable with me. For me, the old tenet of power conceding nothing without a demand is truth.
Connor Smithersmapp
Halifax, Nova Scotia
What immediately stands out in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is the faces of its subjects. A painstaking restoration of century-old video footage from the First World War, the film is a complex project with a simple goal: to try to convey what it was like to live and fight on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. But the technology Jackson deploys is so advanced that the documentary, which has been colorized and enhanced, captures a surprising degree of character and realism. The British soldiers’ faces smile, wrinkle, and grimace—all without the artificial, sped-up look typical of archival cinema.
“You recognize the minutiae of being a human being; it suddenly comes into sharp focus,” Jackson said in an interview with The Atlantic about how his film—quite literally—offers a different way of seeing the men who fought in World War I. “You realize, for 100 years, we’ve seen these guys at a super-fast speed, full of grain, jerky, jumping up and down, which has completely disguised their humanity.” In creating They Shall Not Grow Old, a five-year process carried out in tandem with the British Imperial War Museums and the BBC, Jackson tried to emphasize that personal touch, crafting a documentary experience that’s far more immersive and tactile than most.
Though They Shall Not Grow Old has already aired on British television, it is best seen in a theater—it will play limited special engagements in North America on December 27. The film is being screened with eerily impressive 3-D projection that adds an extra layer of verisimilitude, but to Jackson these added presentation elements aren’t the main draw. More significant is the restoration itself, which was completed by his company WingNut Films, the main force behind his effects-driven Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. (An American company called Stereo D did the colorization and 3-D conversion for They Shall Not Grow Old.)
When the Imperial War Museums first contacted Jackson and handed him 100 hours of raw footage, it asked only that the video be presented to audiences in a “fresh and original way,” without any new material from the modern era. Unsure at first how to translate those instructions into a full-fledged documentary, Jackson began by tackling the restoration. During World War I, footage was shot on hand-cranked, black-and-white cameras, usually at 10 to 12 frames per second, which creates an “over-cranked” (or sped-up) visual when the film is played at the 24-frames-per-second standard of modern cinema.
“I set about doing four or five months of testing with a little piece of film that [the Imperial War Museums] sent, and I was amazed at the results,” Jackson said. “It was so sharp and so clear, it looked like it was shot now. It was way better than I ever dreamt it could be.” The director and his team carefully filled in the frame gaps, removed damage from the footage, and hired lip-readers to discern what people were saying so that dialogue could be dubbed in along with sound effects. “To me, the colorizing is the icing on the cake,” Jackson said. “But the transformation happens when you take away all that damage and get [the soldiers] moving at a normal human speed. They become real people again.”
[In photos: The fading battlefields of World War I]
Only after beginning the restoration did Jackson hit upon the idea for the documentary’s unique presentation: The film would focus exclusively on the trench warfare of the Western Front, and it would be narrated only by audio interviews conducted in the 1960s and ’70s with British soldiers who fought on those battlefields. “[Our goal] really became, at that point: We’ve got to show the war as the soldiers saw it,” Jackson said.
They Shall Not Grow Old doesn’t try to encompass every aspect of the massive conflict that was World War I, avoiding the potted-history approach of many documentaries. “I didn’t want to impose my own ideas on [the film]. I wanted to listen to everything on the audio interviews, to look at all the footage, and to let that find its own shape,” Jackson said. “To be quite honest,” he added, “the 100 hours of footage could make up seven or eight entirely different films.” So he ended up setting aside material about the air force, the naval battles, the women-led efforts in U.K. factories, and farther-flung engagements such as the Gallipoli campaign, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do them justice with one film.
Jackson was thus able to take a more slice-of-life approach to his subjects. “The mundane parts of being on the Western Front are the most interesting. These soldiers, they couldn’t talk about the history of the First World War, they couldn’t talk about the strategy and tactics,” he said. “There’s one guy who says [in an interview], ‘All we knew is what we could see in front of our eyes. Everything else, to the left, to the right, we had no clue.’ That myopic, super-detailed … view became the story that I should tell. It’s a story you don’t often see in the history books and the documentaries. It’s what they ate, how they slept, how they went to the loo, what the rats and lice were like. The comradeship, the friendship.”
The film begins with soldiers recalling what it was like signing up for the war (and acknowledging their limited understanding of the conflict), going through basic training, living in the trenches, and going “over the top” into the nightmare of no man’s land. As a sort of oral history with expressive visuals, They Shall Not Grow Old succeeds at putting the viewer into the middle of a distant period. I was personally taken aback by the profound sense of camaraderie on display, by the grins on people’s faces despite the bleak surroundings, and by the genuine compassion that many British soldiers expressed for their German counterparts.
“You listen to these guys, and you realize they don’t consider themselves to be the victims that we have turned them into,” Jackson said of the film’s subjects. “They don’t want our pity; they don’t feel self-pity. They were there, they chose to be there, they made the best of it, and for some of them it was a period of intense excitement … Some of them even thought it was fun. That surprised me.”
Still, the film doesn’t hold back in its depiction of the brutality of trench combat, and how most British soldiers started seeing the war as a pointless effort the longer it dragged on. “The strongest opinion they would have had was, ‘The German army’s in Belgium and France, and we’re coming over here to push them out because we’re friends [with Belgium and France],’” Jackson said. “I don’t think people could quite get their heads around why the British and the Germans were suddenly enemies.” As the conflict winds down and more prisoners of war are taken, testimonial after testimonial in They Shall Not Grow Old suggests that British soldiers saw little difference between themselves and their supposed adversaries.
“They were dealing with the same hardships, eating the same crappy food, in the same freezing conditions, and they felt a sort of empathy,” Jackson said. “They were there because their governments told them to be there.” That empathy, mixed with a sense of futility, is what makes They Shall Not Grow Old such a precise triumph. Jackson takes whatever amorphous ideas the average viewer might have about the First World War and uses real human experience to give them shape. As the film’s hundred-year-old footage springs to life, each face—whether muddied, wearied, relieved, or overjoyed—suddenly belongs to a recognizable person again. It’s both thrilling and humbling to witness.
Updated at 5:22 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump is finally getting his way in Syria. Vehemently opposed to the extended presence of American troops in the war-ravaged country, he had been forced to keep them there longer than he wanted. Not, it seems, anymore.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump said Wednesday on Twitter.
The tweet appeared to confirm news reports that the United States would withdraw the roughly 2,000 American troops stationed in Syria who are fighting the Islamic State group. The U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition has made significant territorial gains against the militant group, but has struggled to completely eliminate ISIS from a few pockets in Syria.
But if it is carried out, a U.S. pullout leaves open a question of the militants’ resurgence, and would delight at least two of Syria’s neighbors: Iran and Turkey. American soldiers might have been in Syria to fight ISIS, but they also served as a deterrent to the Islamic Republic, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with troops and militia fighters.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said, “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not be drawn on when the troops would return, saying the administration would not discuss timelines of troop movements. Asked about concerns of ISIS re-emerging and an increase in Iran’s influence, the official maintained U.S. forces would “continue the fight against ISIS” and, citing the administration’s sanctions against Tehran, said “Iran knows the U.S. stands ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests.”
The announcement Wednesday was in stark contrast to senior U.S. officials’ recent remarks on the presence of troops.
As recently as last week, the U.S. had other plans. Brett McGurk, the special envoy for anti-ISIS operations, was asked how long American forces would stay in Syria. “If we’ve learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can’t just defeat their physical space and then leave,” he said.
The American military operates in eastern Syria with the People’s Protection Unit, or YPG, a Kurdish militia group. Turkey says the YPG has links to the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Kurdish separatist group that operates in Turkey and is outlawed by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his troops would “start our operation in a few days” against the Kurdish group in Syria. The U.S. has a smaller presence in southern Syria.
The American withdrawal also bolsters Assad and his Iranian backers.
When the Syrian conflict began in 2011, for a while he was expected to meet the same fate as other leaders ousted in the Arab Spring. Backed by Moscow and Tehran, he remains secure more than seven years later. What’s more, the U.S. is no longer insisting on a Syria without Assad.
James Jeffrey, the American special representative in Syria, said Monday the U.S. would fund Syria’s reconstruction only if the regime is “fundamentally different.” But he immediately added, “It’s not regime change. We’re not trying to get rid of Assad.” He acknowledged that while the U.S. wants Iranian troops to leave Syria, Tehran would continue to exert influence with Damascus.
Jeffrey’s remarks at the Atlantic Council followed two regional developments that signal the beginning of Assad’s rehabilitation: On Sunday, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first member of the Arab League to visit Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Bashir, an international pariah because of his role in the Darfur conflict, is unlikely to have met with Assad without regional blessing. Subsequent news reports said Assad would likely be invited to the next Arab League summit meeting, a boost for the dictator, who was expelled from the organization over the conflict.
Perhaps more significant, Turkey, which armed and funded rebels fighting Assad, said it would consider working with the Syrian president if he won a democratic election. Jeffrey implied Monday that the standard wouldn’t even have to be that high: Assad, he said, mustn’t use chemical weapons or torture Syrian citizens.
“It doesn’t have to be a regime that we Americans would embrace as, say, qualifying to join the European Union if the European Union would take Middle Eastern countries,” he said.
As recently as October, the Trump administration’s stated goal in Syria was for Syrians to “establish a new government that is not led by Assad.” But there is now recognition that the conflict is no longer restricted to the regime fighting the rebels—or indeed the U.S. clashing with ISIS.
Russia has invested heavily in Assad and is unlikely to succumb to outside pressure that could weaken its interests. Iran, whose regional actions are the focus of the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, is a different case. Jeffrey said Iranian troops must leave Syria, even while acknowledging Tehran’s role. “Iran will have diplomatic influence in Syria,” he said. “It’s had it for many decades. It will have more now.” With a U.S. withdrawal, that influence will now almost certainly increase.
Six years ago, Ken Sarafin created his inaugural family Christmas card. Harnessing the aesthetic of Norman Rockwell—the 20th-century painter known for conveying the everyday life of Middle America—Sarafin illustrated a portrait of his sister, her husband, and their then-newborn daughter. The painting showed Sarafin’s niece crying on the floor, with her father nearby wearing a disheveled tie and drinking a martini, and her mother talking on the phone while mixing something in a bowl; in the background sat a small, scraggly, Charlie Brown–esque Christmas tree. “We were kind of going for 1950s Americana and its traditional gender roles on that one,” Sarafin recently told me.
Ken Sarafin’s sister’s 2017 card (Ken Sarafin)At the time, Sarafin—a 33-year-old graphic designer in Denver who doesn’t have children of his own—saw the card as a fun opportunity to put his painting hobby, and his newfound affinity for Rockwell’s style, to use. It was also a way to bond with his family—and to poke fun at the classic family holiday card, with its matching sweaters, forced smiles, and feigned peace. Sarafin and his sister had never been fans of “Christmas cards that are overly cheesy and cutesy and look how great our family is,” he says. He’s illustrated a similar portrait of his sister’s family in disarray every Christmas since.
Americans today are sending far less snail mail than they used to: The overall volume of physical mail in the United States has dropped 43 percent since 2001, according to the U.S. Postal Service. But one form of conventional mail that has somewhat bucked this trend is greeting cards—especially family holiday cards. While the rates of sending cards have declined slightly, today’s Americans buy 6.5 billion greeting cards annually, according to data from the Greeting Card Association. Of those, 1.6 billion are for Christmas, the largest card-sending holiday in the country. And greeting-card mail, it seems, has declined at a much lower rate than overall mail.
Industry data suggest that interest in family holiday cards is on the rise. For example, Google data procured by Shutterfly, a nearly 20-year-old online company whose products include customized photo cards, show a steady increase in the number of queries for family Christmas cards. Etsy, the online marketplace where artists can sell handmade products, has seen a similar uptick: From September to November of this year, the number of searches on the site for custom cards, like those featuring personalized family portraits, was 258 percent higher than it was last year during the same time range, a company executive told me.
These data, experts agree, hint that Millennials are a key component of holiday cards’ staying power. Millennials are the target demographic for sites such as Etsy, as well as newer custom-card companies such as Minted. And while people of all ages participate in the tradition, people tend to start sending holiday cards when they hit a milestone such as marriage or a first child—and Millennials are the generation currently hitting those landmark events. Although the USPS report found that the decline in snail mail is especially pronounced among these Millennials, it also identified this generation as the demographic that could save the post. Amanda Stafford, a co-author of the report, suggests that the Postal Service ought to leverage young Americans in part because the lower volume of the mail they receive makes each piece of correspondence more special. Stafford says this age group may be especially drawn to the personal touch—the handwriting, the tangible photos, the labor of addressing and placing postage on an envelope—that only conventional mail can provide.
According to data from Hallmark, Millennials represent nearly 20 percent of the dollars spent on greeting cards, and their spending is growing faster than that of any other generation. And according to focus groups convened by the company, 72 percent of Millennials enjoy giving cards, while 82 percent enjoy receiving them; a similar number of young adults today typically save the cards they receive, too. Consumer research conducted by other card companies echoed these results. “People use so much less paper these days that when they do use paper, they want it to be really nice and special,” says Mariam Naficy, the founder of Minted, an online marketplace that crowdsources designs for photo cards. The rarity of snail mail, Naficy suggests, makes personal correspondence such as family holiday cards more meaningful. One young adult I spoke with—Alison Cuevas, whose card this year features an image of her and her two rescue pets against a galactic backdrop—described such correspondence as a “novelty.”
Social-media fatigue was a common theme across my conversations—it’s just nice sometimes to get a message from a far-flung loved one that doesn’t entail looking at a phone. “You’re more connected than ever, but in the same way, it’s all transitory connection,” says Mickey Mericle, Shutterfly’s chief marketing executive. “People feel this ephemeral connection, and they want to make it meaningful and lasting at certain points of the year … Holidays are a perfect time for that.”
The photo for Yuliya Goloida’s 2018 card (Igor Tchoudinov)Young adults such as Sarafin highlighted the value of the tactile experience of cards, of the way they allow a degree of personalization that can’t be replicated on social media. “Anything you post on a digital platform gets buried by all the other digital things around it,” says Yuliya Goloida, a 23-year-old graduate student in Toronto whose card this year features a picture of her, her boyfriend, and her black cat Tusya. A family holiday card, on the other hand, is a “tangible memory that is protected from the bombardment of other images—it brings back the privacy and personal aspect” of photos, Goloida told me.
It’s no wonder, then, that consumer researchers have noticed customers gravitating toward old-fashioned aesthetics—echoing the surging popularity, more generally, of gifts such as wooden toys, for example, and items made to look like cassette tapes. Of particular appeal these days are customized cards featuring plaid or white borders evocative of Polaroids, according to Minted’s Naficy.
But while some are keeping it traditional, others are embracing sillier aspects of the holiday card. As Naficy puts it, there’s been “a movement away from formality toward informality.” Christmas cards became popular in 20th-century America in part because they served as a means of signaling a family’s prestige—hence the (bygone) trend of sterile, overly stylized portraits of the clan in front of, say, the fireplace, or of a generic backdrop courtesy of Sears. But times have changed, and these days family holiday cards will typically feature just one such photo, if any, Shutterfly’s Mericle told me. “The rest are silly—they’re everyday moments, they’re spontaneous,” she says.
Read: How Millennial parents are reinventing the cherished family photo album
While children are still the most common characters on holiday cards—data from Minted suggest that kids appear in three-fourths of today’s family holiday cards, for example—the definition of family has steadily expanded. Goloida says that when she was growing up, she dreamed of partaking in the tradition by having a family of her own pose and dress up for photos. But in her early 20s, she didn’t want to wait anymore and decided that she, too, could send out Christmas cards—even if she didn’t have a husband and kids. (Last year’s Goloida-family Christmas card, the first of what she expects to be a lasting tradition, featured a photo of her and her now-deceased three pet rats.) Card-company representatives confirmed that a growing percentage of cards feature pets.
The photo for Alison Cuevas’s 2018 card (Alison Cuevas)Regardless, Christmas cards provide couples and families with a way to express their originality and remind their loved ones that they care with a fun, unique greeting. The irony is that this form of correspondence traces back to the mid-1800s, when a British civil servant—eager to clear a backlog of mail to which he felt obligated to respond in accordance with Victorian social norms—invented the idea as a crafty means of mass-distributing personalized correspondence.
Part of that original motivation lives on: Research has found that consumers want the creation of the cards to be as convenient as possible. So corporations such as Shutterfly and Hallmark are striving to make their services as seamless as possible—using AI to create photo collages, for example, or suggest ideas for customization so buyers don’t have to deal with the labor of sorting through their massive photo libraries.
Ryan and Mallory Wales, a couple in Indiana, made their inaugural holiday card this year, a few months after having their first children, twins. Ryan, 31, took the photo, deciding to go with dim Christmas-themed lighting because of the soft look; Mallory, also 31, used a smartphone to design the card, which featured the twins. But it wasn’t effortless, they stressed. “Even in our busy lives, we took the time out to do this—to actually put them together and mail them out,” says Mallory. “It’s just different from taking that picture and putting it on social media for the likes.”
The photo for the Waleses’ 2018 card (Ryan Wales)The convenience of the digital age married with the personal touch of snail mail may help the tradition last. “A Christmas card is just to show people that we know that we still have contact,” Ryan Wales says. “It’s always more personal than anything Facebook, Instagram, or even an email or text can deliver. And that’s the way I look at it: It’s kind of like we’re mirroring this old and new world.”
When I left Congress after four decades of service, my greatest regret was that we failed to address climate change. As the most pressing and critical challenge of our generation threatens species and civilization with unimaginable upheaval, our inability to legislate a federal solution is a national shame. We got as close as we ever have in 2009 when the American Clean Energy and Security Act was approved by the House of Representatives—in large part due to artful maneuvering by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the bill never cleared the Senate or reached President Barack Obama’s desk for signature.
A decade later, I’m encouraged that young progressives are joining with many of my longtime colleagues in Congress to renew the fight against climate change. Their call for a Green New Deal is smart, politically and substantively.
The frame is right—both economic and historic—and gets to the heart of what we were trying to do a decade ago: use the mechanisms of government to build a cleaner economy. A few small reforms won’t limit the rise of global temperatures; we need a massive movement on multiple fronts.
[Read: The Democratic party wants to make climate change exciting]
By definition, a Green New Deal must place green jobs and transformative innovation at its core. Policy makers will need to look at the industries that drove the 20th-century economy and reshape them for the 21st. They must show that sustainability is not just the right thing to do for the fate of our planet, but an unparalleled opportunity to ensure the prosperity of future generations. That is a hopeful message in a time when hope can sometimes feel out of reach.
But in the short term, the passage of even moderate climate legislation, much less something as bold as the Green New Deal, seems unlikely. So what can we do now?
Progressives can work in states where climate legislation is possible to showcase what a Green New Deal might look like. Already, California and Hawaii, among others, have invested heavily in renewable energy and committed to a carbon-free future. As the clean-energy economy in these states grows, a model for change on a national and global scale will emerge.
Progressives should also exert pressure on industries to help them recognize that sustainability is not only feasible but also smart business. As the price for wind and solar energy falls, and as international markets adapt to meet their obligations under the Paris accord, companies that source renewable energy will find themselves with a competitive advantage.
[Read: The new politics of climate change]
Even in traditionally “dirty” industries, like steel, it’s possible to see what the Green New Deal might look like. Most U.S. steel is produced by using enormous amounts of electricity to melt down scrap; a commitment by steel producers to power facilities with renewable energy would not only decrease their costs and make their products more attractive to international buyers—it would also boost markets for one of steel’s leading customers, wind-turbine manufacturers. It’s a virtuous circle.
Concurrently, investors and institutions must double down on funding the technologies that will make a green economy more viable—from renewable power to more sustainable agriculture to advances in capturing and storing carbon that’s in the atmosphere. Climate change is here, and we will need these tools to mitigate the damage already done.
Lastly, congressional Democrats can use the powers they do have—control of one chamber and the ability to conduct investigations—to show Americans what an alternative path might look like: one in which green jobs are created across the country, where we commit to cleaner, renewable power, and where we invest in the next generation of American industries, all while holding accountable those who seek to profit from practices that jeopardize the future of our species.
And perhaps it goes without saying, but we must assess what’s working and what’s not. We’ve made missteps in the past, perhaps most notably with federal mandates for food-based biofuels. Ethanol and biodiesel seemed cleaner than fossil fuel, but it is now clear that their production is driving the destruction of carbon-rich ecosystems in the United States and abroad.
While the American Clean Energy and Security Act never found its way into law, a decade later, I see its spirit alive and well in a new generation’s call for climate progress.
Here is the plot of the 2018 Lifetime film A Very Nutty Christmas, as summarized by the network that airs it:
Hard-working bakery owner Kate Holiday (Melissa Joan Hart), has more cookie orders than she has time to fill this holiday season, and when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, any shred of Christmas joy she was hanging onto, immediately disappears. After Kate hangs the last ornament on the tree and goes to bed, she awakens the next morning to a little bit of Christmas magic. She gets the surprise of her life when Chip (Barry Watson), a handsome soldier who may or may not be the Nutcracker Prince from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, appears in her living room.
This description, despite its zaniness—I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that this enchanted nutcracker, ostensibly constructed of wood and also coming to life in the home of a bakery owner, is named Chip—doesn’t quite capture the particular kind of film that A Very Nutty Christmas is. The Hallmark holiday movie, whether it happens to be airing on Lifetime or on Freeform or on Netflix or, indeed, on Hallmark itself, is a genre that transcends its network. And, via a magical nutcracker, here it is on Lifetime, distilled down to its essence. There’s the small town and its quaint bakery. There are softly lit Christmas cookies. There’s a climactic Christmas pageant (in this case, a Christmas ball), and ice skating, and lots of snow, and liberal musical use of “The Nutcracker Suite.” And there’s a classic protagonist of the genre—a woman who is frazzled, but who does not need to be—who faces, as Lifetime’s summary suggests, the gravest threat these films can imagine on behalf of their heroines: Kate Holiday, yes, is in danger of losing her Christmas Spirit.
“There’s no Christmas for me this year, okay?” Kate tells her best friend and bakery assistant, Rosa (Marissa Jaret Winokur), after her cad of a boyfriend admits to cheating on her. “I’m just going to muddle through the holidays myself.”
This, when uttered in the context of a Hallmark holiday movie, is a beacon to the Christmas spirits, who know one thing, and pretty much one thing only: No one should simply muddle through the holidays. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not—however you find meaning in the time of year that these movies shorthand as “the season”—the ideal, these films insist, is unmitigated joy. Christmas, here, isn’t a religious observance or even a seasonal festival; it functions, often, simply as a deadline: the day by which, in the framework of the films, it is no longer tenable to keep putting off the thing that will bring that joy, whether it’s a declaration of love or an apology or a reunion or the rediscovery of one’s Christmas Spirit.
The Hallmark film, during a time when so much television is anxious and moody—when so much television, that is, is reflective of the world itself—takes residence in an alternate reality. It will not let you, dear viewer, merely muddle through. It wants so much more for you. It wants love. It wants fulfillment. It wants magic. The genre, the snow globe in video form, offers its own kind of reassurance: of order, of ease, of predictability itself. Within its contained universes, happy endings are not only possible, but also insistently inevitable.
For Melissa Joan Hart, who executive-produced A Very Nutty Christmas in addition to starring in it, that’s a big part of the point: The joy of these movies is their consistency. “They’re sort of predictably charming,” she told me. You could think of them, she added, as very seasonal soap operas, with their fusions of certainty and surprise. They’re aggressively comforting. They’re the kind of light fodder you can have on in the background at home as you’re wrapping presents or getting ready for guests or, say, baking cookies. The films can function “like a soundtrack to your life during the holidays,” Hart says.
That does a lot to explain why these plentiful and relatively low-budget movies are so popular. This is a year that finds Netflix dabbling once more in the genre, with princesses switching places and lifestyle bloggers becoming princesses. It is a year that finds Freeform (the renamed network ABC Family) getting in on the holiday action. The movies they air aren’t merely plays for the audiences of 2018, but also investments in the networks’ futures: One of the features of the made-for-TV holiday movie is that the genre is, compared with others, relatively timeless. New titles blend with old ones, creating, once you’ve been at it for a while, a back catalog that allows for endless recycling. (Hallmark, for example, is airing 22 original movies for the first time this year, but the network’s library of earlier films consists, according to one count, of 232 titles.)
And the casts of the movies, finally if extremely belatedly, are expanding beyond the Candace Cameron Bures and Alicia Witts and other white leads to become more representative of the world at large. Mariah Carey starred in a Hallmark movie, the aptly named A Christmas Melody. Tatyana Ali starred (with Patti LaBelle!) in Christmas Everlasting. Tia Mowry-Hardrict starred in A Gingerbread Romance. (As for rom-com plot lines that revolve around queer pairings? That will have to wait, it seems, for another time.)
Recent entries in the genre have also adopted a certain self-consciousness: There’s often a heavy dose of irony woven into their formulas—the comfort of the weighted blanket mixed with the winking absurdity of the ugly Christmas sweater. In A Very Nutty Christmas, Chip, adjusting to life in the America of 2018, brings some classic fish-out-of-water jokes: He wields a wooden sword (believing his mission to be protecting Kate from the Mouse King, he is ever ready to do battle). He jovially breaks out into renditions of “O Tannenbaum” at inopportune moments. He is also—à la Buddy in Elf, another fish who finds himself suddenly landlocked—excessively fond of sugar.
Chip soon proves himself, as well, to possess a superhuman ability to crack nuts (with his palms, his fist, his flexed bicep)—a development that, after Rosa takes a video of him at work and posts it, makes him, briefly, an Instagram star. And he gets Kate out of a professional jam: Her mechanical nutcracker breaks, and she needs to make nut flour in order to make her cookies. “At your service,” the anthropomorphized kitchen gadget tells her, before putting himself to use.
The absurdity, too, is the point. A movie that titles itself A Very Nutty Christmas is, after all, in on its own joke. It refuses to take itself too seriously, and invites you not to take yourself that way either. And that, during a time of year that can be Magical and Joyful but also pretty Stressful, is its own kind of relief. How, precisely, will Kate give herself over to the magic that has brought this hunk of wood into her life? Will Chip remind her of the joys of the season? Will he save her from the Mouse King? I won’t spoil any of it, but also I am incapable of spoiling any of it: The promise of a Hallmark-style holiday movie is that, effectively, it cannot be spoiled.
Until two weeks ago, T. M. Landry College Preparatory School was the most enigmatic school in America. Small and with minimal resources, this private school was known for one thing: placing an extraordinary number of black, low-income students in America’s most elite colleges and universities. Almost everything else about it was mysterious.
The school’s founders and namesakes, the married couple Tracey and Michael Landry, had promoted it via a series of viral videos. In each of the videos, a young student, usually black, waits in suspense, surrounded by classmates, to find out if he or she has been admitted to a top college—Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, among others. Invariably, the student gets a happy answer, and the entire room erupts in raucous celebration.
T. M. Landry is in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, a high-poverty town of fewer than 10,000. The school’s graduates are overwhelmingly black, poor, or both—a socioeconomic segment that, due to pervasive discrimination, is notoriously underrepresented in higher ed. Statistically speaking, when a poor black student is admitted to a Harvard or a Yale, it’s a minor miracle. The odds of an institution sending graduate after graduate to the Ivy League and similar schools are infinitesimal. Watching T. M. Landry’s viral videos was akin to watching lightning strike the same spot not twice, but over and over again. Had the Landrys cracked the educational code?
[Read more: Why the myth of meritocracy hurts kids of color]
At the end of November, in a blockbuster story, The New York Times solved part of the puzzle. The Landrys’ school seems to have been a fraud all along—faking transcripts, forcing students to lie on college applications, and staging rehearsed lessons for curious media and other visitors. According to the Times, an atmosphere of abuse and submission helped maintain the deception, with Michael Landry lording over his flock of children like a tyrant. In the Times story, Landry admitted to helping children with college applications while denying any fraud. The school did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Still, a mystery remains. Even taking the alleged fakery into account, how did T. M. Landry seem to fool so many of America’s most prestigious universities for years? The work of admissions officers is notoriously secretive, but what little is known about the Landry affair threatens foundational assumptions about American higher education.
The key to the alleged T. M. Landry scam can’t be the quality of the deception, because it was far from airtight. If anything, the story the school told about itself should have sparked immediate skepticism.
This isn’t hindsight speaking; I know from experience. I first encountered the school's viral videos last spring, and as a researcher on race and education, I felt compelled to learn more. What I found immediately raised my suspicions. Outside the videos themselves, the school offered little coherent explanation of how its students managed to win the collegiate lottery so often.
Many aspects of the school were unorthodox. Tuition was modest for a private school, and paid monthly, with students seemingly able to start and stop at any time from kindergarten to 12th grade in an unusual rolling-admissions format. While the Landrys were reliably vague about their instructional methods, the hints they dropped —no homework, no textbooks, and minimal parental involvement—didn’t conform with any successful teaching model I’d ever heard of. Nor did the couple have any prior teaching experience to suggest they should be capable of working educational wonders. Press coverage openly discussed T. M. Landry's apparent dearth of courses, classrooms, and structured teaching—even while celebrating students’ sophisticated subject-matter specialties and high GPAs. Certain inconsistencies, such as how a school without defined courses could have GPAs, were never explained.
[Read: The missing black students at elite American universities]
Pictures of the school facility itself raised other questions. It was little more than an empty machine-shop floor, with folding chairs scattered across a barren concrete surface; children of all ages seemed to mingle freely. The single-room schoolhouses of yore looked elaborate by comparison. While academic achievement is not purely a reflection of school resources, this principle does have limits. Children can’t learn high-level subjects without some sort of formal instruction.
But for all the evidence pointing toward fraud, there was a sticking point: the students themselves. After all, how could fake schooling matriculate students at real Ivy League universities? Encountering the question for the first time, I was tempted toward wilder and wilder theories. Maybe the stars of the viral videos weren’t real students at all, and the whole thing had been a scheme for social media clicks! But no: These were real kids, who really had enrolled in the nation's top colleges. The institutions themselves frequently shared the videos, and the school's Facebook account showed Tracey and Michael Landry hobnobbing with admissions officials on Ivy League campuses.
Frankly, none of the pieces fit together. Still, whatever T. M. Landry was up to, the colleges and universities were fine with it, and presumably the admissions officers were doing their due diligence.
Except it now appears they didn’t.
American higher education is a hierarchy, and the schools at the top wield vast influence, both in academia and in the wider world. Whether they admit it or not, universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia are gatekeepers for the social, political, and economic elite. The T. M. Landry revelations should constitute an extraordinary crisis for these schools. They challenge these institutions’ role as gatekeepers—and perhaps even the need for the hierarchy itself.
How could T. M. Landry allegedly deceive so many? The colleges and universities that admitted the school’s grads aren’t saying publicly. When reached for this story, a number of top-tier institutions only provided brief statements expressing their concern about the situation. In a typical response, Yale stated that it “takes all allegations of fraudulent application materials seriously,” and “when applicable … pursues all cases where potentially misrepresentative application information is brought to our attention.” Princeton emphasized that it was “concerned for the affected students and their families,” and “remain[ed] committed to attracting and supporting talented students, including students from groups that have been underrepresented in higher education.” Admirably, Wellesley College stated its specific and unequivocal support for its Landry graduates, describing them as “thriving and engaged members of the community.” However, none of the institutions contacted—which also included Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, and Syracuse—would offer any public explanation for how they might have gotten tricked in the first place.
But at least in general terms, it’s possible to sketch out the source of the breakdown. Like a lot of scams, the alleged T. M. Landry admissions ploy wasn’t convincing because it was hard to detect, but because it offered something that a lot of people wanted to believe. Their viral videos told a story of black children magically beating the odds, drawing millions of viewers. The school played into this narrative, appending hashtags like “#blackexcellence” and “#blacksuccess” to its videos. The faked transcripts told the same story, one that higher education found irresistible.
[Read more: Elite college admissions are broken]
When it comes to admitting students from underprivileged backgrounds, colleges and universities are facing cross-cutting currents. To start with, most highly selective schools remain committed to promoting racially and economically diverse student bodies. This commitment is sincere, at least to the extent that, all else equal, these institutions would be delighted to admit lower-income students of color who have overcome great hardships.
The problem is, all else isn’t equal. Compared with more privileged children, students from disadvantaged groups often face bigger obstacles, and many live in environments with fewer opportunities for distinguishing themselves. Students who grow up facing discrimination, segregation, and poverty really do tend to have much lower standardized-test scores and briefer résumés, and graduate from less-rigorous high schools. This occurs not because these students have lower aptitude, but because the scars of systemic prejudice are real.
This puts an unavoidable choice to colleges and universities fixated on maintaining sky-high academic standards. Black students and poor students remain significantly under-enrolled in these institutions compared with their share of the population. Achieving truly representative college admissions inevitably would mean admitting many students whose qualifications are far from perfect. Meanwhile, schools of Ivy League caliber use their selectivity to maintain their social and political cachet, which would be threatened by lowering admissions standards. These places thus experience inescapable tension between preserving selectivity and enrolling a racially and economically diverse student body.
What T. M. Landry offered was an Option C: all of the above. Its graduates had all the biographical hallmarks of disadvantage. Indeed, the New York Times story describes the Landrys forcing students to lie on their college applications, exaggerating the hardships they faced. But the school also had students whose purportedly strong academic outcomes reflected little of those hardships. A college or university admitting a Landry student didn’t have to choose between diversity and selectivity; it simply had to open the door to someone with an unusual and underrepresented background. It was diversity made easy.
The numbers leave little doubt about how alluring colleges found this prospect. According to T. M. Landry’s own reports, 38 percent of its graduates since 2016 have attended an Ivy League institution or Stanford. The comparable figure for families in the 99.9th percentile of income—America’s very wealthiest—is about 12 percent. Even if the Landry numbers omit a number of students who dropped out before they could graduate, this is a phenomenal success rate.
T. M. Landry shows how hungry our society is for what might be deemed “miracle students.” The Landrys are not the only ones to take advantage of this hunger, although their alleged fraud appears to have been especially egregious. Many other schools implicitly offer the same miracle: students who have endured great hardship and succeeded beyond all expectations. An entire genre of charter schools, often called “no excuses” schools, have adopted a similar rhetorical tack. These schools, explicitly targeted at poor students of color, claim to fuse rigid discipline and intense expectations to achieve an academic transformation. Their advocates often imply that only such a crucible can produce poor and nonwhite college-ready students. Like T. M. Landry, these schools have attracted disproportionate attention from colleges, not to mention media and politicians.
Ironically, the Landrys claimed to be relying on an entirely different pedagogical approach: a Montessori-inspired model with few boundaries and a family-like atmosphere. In the end, the discrepancy didn’t seem to matter, or even attract any notice. Few in education or media seemed to care too much about the exact process through which the school’s low-income black students were ostensibly transformed into academic superstars. Instead, people took solace in the idea that such a transformation was possible, and moved on.
Miracle fixes can excuse complacency, a point the writer Casey Gerald makes in a searing op-ed last week. Success stories suggest that, even among the poor children of color who face pervasive societal burdens, the truly deserving can prevail in the end. When inequality is defeatable, it stops feeling so much like injustice. For that reason, many people recoil at attempts to depict segregation, discrimination, and poverty as an inescapable trap, even though, for millions of children, they have proved exactly that.
The seductive myth of the miracle student has other appeal as well. It deceives us about our ability to easily recognize true potential, by telling us that there are bright-line markers for brilliance: high test scores, extraordinary academic dedication, or other exceptional personal virtues. Instead, in most people, individual aptitude and the effects of systemic disadvantage are bundled together. When we go hunting for the former, we often find the latter, and we struggle to tell the difference. Complicating matters further, and contrary to the Landry myth, the students with the greatest potential do not typically congregate in a few select schools, where they can be easily identified.
Cruelly, the burden of the miracle-student myth falls not on the colleges, who will never lack for applicants. Nor does it fall on the schools, whose methods are celebrated. Instead, it falls on ordinary children of color, for whom ordinary levels of hard work and perseverance start to seem wildly insufficient. Why would any top-tier college or university admit a student who is merely good, when there are miracles to be had?
But this is where the T. M. Landry accusations begin to look truly destabilizing, because now its miracles appear to be fictions. Many of its graduates were, by all accounts, hard-working and dedicated, but otherwise merely mortal. And yet, they did not implode the moment they breathed the rarified air of the Ivy League. Some struggled or dropped out, but a number of Landry students—particularly those who had spent more time in traditional schools—simply continued to advance.
This, to be blunt, raises some uncomfortable questions about who belongs in those colleges and universities. These are schools that treat selectivity as a necessary precondition for academic rigor, and then rely on that same selectivity to explain their racially and economically lopsided enrollments. One recent study showed that about 25 percent of graduates from the 99th income percentile attend an “elite” school. The comparable figure for the poorest quintile, even before taking race into account, is one-half of 1 percent. Why do the rules seem so different for white students from affluent backgrounds? Surely plenty of them are relatively average scholars, and yet they don’t make headlines when they’re accepted to an elite institution. And, generally speaking, affluent white students aren't asked to surmount drill-instructor discipline and punishing, all-work-no-play schooling to prove their worth.
America’s supposedly meritocratic system of elite higher education revolves around an intensive search for the most capable students. But if no one seems to know how to find those students when they come from the wrong background, and plenty of other people seem at least sufficiently capable, what’s the point of it all? If relatively ordinary people have a chance of success at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, why are so many ordinary people kept out—especially those who grow up black and lower-income? When so many suitable Ivy Leaguers can be found in the nonmiraculous town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, surely plenty can be found in other poor communities of color, too. One could even start to wonder if anything would truly be lost if the gates of the elite academy were thrown open to a much wider range of people.
That’s the real mystery of T. M. Landry. But this one might prove too dangerous to solve.
The Trump administration would like everyone to know that it will shoulder no blame for the death of a 7-year-old child in the government’s care. “Does the administration take the responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get through this country? No,” said the White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, responding to questions about Jakelin Caal Maquín’s death from dehydration and shock after she was taken into custody by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. “This family chose to cross illegally,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen argued on Fox. Also on Fox, former Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz—a reliable defender of the administration—declared that Caal Maquín’s death sent a useful message: “Don’t make this journey. It will kill you.”
Caal Maquín traveled from Guatemala with her father and crossed the southern border into New Mexico on December 6. Much remains uncertain about her death. Caal Maquín’s family has, for example, disputed the initial statement by CBP agents that she had gone without food and water in the days before entering the United States. Because of this ambiguity, it’s hard to say to what extent the Trump administration’s cruelty-first approach to immigration enforcement contributed directly to Caal Maquín’s death. But the government’s response is uniquely Trumpian in its callousness. “Please present yourselves at a port of entry,” CBP admonished immigrants—despite the fact that the agency has placed sharp limits on the daily number of asylum seekers allowed through such ports, possibly illegally, which has pushed more families seeking asylum to cross without authorization. The same policy stoked chaos last spring, when the administration engineered a humanitarian crisis by separating children from parents at the border.
What ties this together with the rhetoric around Caal Maquín’s death is not just the administration’s cruelty but also its posture toward the border—as a place where the law, as it’s commonly understood in liberal democracies, no longer quite applies. The border is not only the edge between countries, but the uncertain line between law and the absence of law. It’s a space where the importance of preserving the rule of law is paramount, yet where that system of protections and responsibility frequently fails to function on any level other than raw power. Caal Maquín was in government custody, but to listen to Nielsen and Gidley, the government had no particular obligations toward her as a person worthy of rights and respect.
[Ieva Jusionyte: What I learned as an EMT at the border wall]
The administration has gone out of its way to portray the immigration-enforcement agencies not only as lawful, but as the very foundation of the rule of law itself. In April, then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried an effort by immigrants to enter the country by traveling together in a caravan as a “deliberate attempt to undermine our laws,” and warned, “Promoting and enforcing the rule of law is essential to protecting a nation, its borders, and its citizens.” His successor, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, emphasized in a recent speech: “We are restoring the rule of law in this country … That means that we are restoring the rule of law to our borders and to our immigration system.” Nielsen defended CBP’s use of tear gas against a group of asylum seekers attempting to cross the border by stating that the Department of Homeland Security “will not tolerate this type of lawlessness.”
The administration has made preserving the integrity of the border its priority. And as it carries out this work—in ICE’s case, by arresting those improperly within the interior of the country, and in CBP’s case, by policing the border itself—the Department of Homeland Security is on the front lines of upholding the rule of law. Speaking recently on Good Morning America, the White House aide Stephen Miller insisted that proper immigration enforcement will determine “whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country.” The stakes, in other words, are high.
Trump has tweeted about “the rule of law” exactly nine times (10 if you count retweets), as Peter Beinart has pointed out. Seven of those tweets are about immigration and the importance of enforcing the border. (“Respect for the rule of law is at our country’s core,” reads one tweet from July 2015, right after Trump first declared his candidacy for president. “We must build a wall!”) Likewise, the president tends to focus particular anger on the courts when a judge hands down an adverse ruling on a matter concerning immigration. (“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” he tweeted after one of the earliest rulings against the first, and harshest, manifestation of the travel ban.) Almost always, he emphasizes that judges who rule against his efforts to secure the border are not the arbiters, but the enemies, of the law. (“That’s not law,” he said in a recent speech railing against a court ruling barring the rollout of his administration’s restrictions on asylum.)
[Read: Trump keeps invoking terrorism to get his border wall]
It’s tempting to dismiss these paeans to the law as incoherent or even hypocritical. After all, this is a president who has encouraged police to engage in brutality while arresting suspects; who pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, previously found guilty of contempt of court in a case involving his targeting of Latinos at traffic stops; and whose new policy limiting grants of asylum is arguably itself illegal. And that’s without even touching on the numerous criminal investigations into Trump’s own conduct and that of his businesses and associates.
But there is a deeper logic at work. Writing in The Atlantic, Beinart argued that Trump’s tweets linking the rule of law with immigration enforcement reflect a preoccupation with stopping what Trump sees as the corruption of racial hierarchy and the pure body politic. Chris Hayes has made a similar case about Trump’s use of law to evoke “the preservation of a certain social order.”
Caal Maquín’s death, in this view, does not raise questions of lawlessness or impunity. Quite the opposite: It maintains the strength of that hierarchy—who is inside the United States and who is out, who is worthy of concern and who is not, who is “legal” and who is not. This is an understanding of the rule of law at odds with the liberal-democratic vision of law as a restraint on power and an assurance against abuse.
Or perhaps not so at odds. The prewar German jurist Carl Schmitt—who later became notorious for his opportunistic alliance with the Nazi Party—famously argued that all systems of law, no matter how carefully regulated, cannot erase the possibility of the moment of emergency in which the leader will need to make a decision outside the bounds of what the law allows. Schmitt called this “the state of exception.” It is a vision of power attractive to someone like Trump, who seems to barely understand the Constitution as a check on his authority.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s caravan hysteria s]parked a massacre
One way to understand Schmitt is that, following his reasoning, the government has the ability to decide, on a whim, who is inside the state of exception and who is out. To be outside the state of exception is to enjoy the protection the government provides and the privileges of membership in the political community. To be within the state of exception is to exist in a space that both is and is not governed by law; it is to be subject to the government’s power without any protections against the cruelest use of that power. Riffing on Schmitt, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “bare life.” It’s life on the margin between law and something other than law. To put it another way, it’s life on the border.
The idea of the border as a space in which law doesn’t quite apply in the same way it does elsewhere long predates the Trump administration. To pick one example among many, the Fourth Amendment’s usual requirements ebb at the boundaries of the United States, where the government may search travelers without probable cause or a warrant. But Trump’s rhetorical commitment to securing the border as a matter of extreme national importance—so dire that, if it should fail to happen, the nation itself might literally cease to exist—shifts the matter into something much closer to Schmitt’s state of exception, as a matter of existential peril.
It seems highly unlikely that anyone in the White House has actually read Schmitt. (Michael Anton, this White House’s self-styled philosopher, departed last spring.) But the jurist’s framework helps crystallize the administration’s vision of the border as existing not only at the edge of two countries but on the edge of the law—a place where the state is not subject to the same legal constraints it is elsewhere, precisely because of the importance of reestablishing the rule of law along that edge. It’s a vision of the absence of law at the heart of the law. Consider Miller’s argument that hard-line immigration enforcement is a matter of “national sovereignty”: Another way to put this is that the ability of the government to place people outside the protections of law is what makes that government the ultimate authority within its territory, which is what Miller means when he describes “sovereignty.”
None of this means anything if it doesn’t come back to the death of a child. It’s not yet clear how the CBP agents on the ground in Caal Maquín’s case handled the situation; Caal Maquín’s father has said he is grateful for their efforts to save his daughter. But from the top down, the administration’s rhetoric around her death echoes this view of the border as a state of exception. It situates Caal Maquín’s death as a regrettable error or possibly a useful deterrent, a body among many other bodies rather than a child to whom the government had some responsibility of care.
This bleak vision of the border is more consistent than it might first seem with the usual American understanding of law as a restraint on government. Schmitt’s unsettling insight, after all, was that the rule of law as commonly understood was centered on a void with the potential to swallow the legal order whole. To put it another way, democratic government will always contain within itself the potential for absolute dictatorship. This president, who has no respect for legal restraints on his power but also no interest in the sustained effort required for genuine authoritarianism, hasn’t bothered to strip away the core protections of citizenship. Instead, he has targeted those who were already weakest, balanced at the edges of the law’s protection.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like 2007. Or 2000. Or 1990. Or 1981.
Stock prices are limping along, housing sales have gone soft, and banks are pulling back from risky loans. The sugar rush from President Donald Trump’s extraordinary round of fiscal stimulus is about to wear off, as the Federal Reserve continues to tap up interest rates. At the same time, global growth is slowing thanks to the trade war, Brexit, and problems in a number of emerging-market economies. Two-thirds of business economists expect the next recession to occur by 2021, with half of corporate chief financial officers anticipating that a downturn will begin next year.
Recession feels inevitable and, using history as a guide, is inevitable. Tides come in and tides go out. The sun rises and the sun sets. The economy expands for a decade or so and then contracts. But using Australia as a guide, maybe not. The country’s current expansion is nearing its 30-year mark, and is now the longest in modern history, leading commentators to brand Australia a “miracle economy,” the “wonder down under,” and the “envy of the developed world.”
At least some of Australia’s seemingly endless spell of growth is due to happenstance, luck, and idiosyncrasy: where the country lies on the map, what its neighbors’ budgets have looked like, what mineral deposits happen to lie underneath it. But it is also due to sound and deliberate government policy—meaning that the Aussie miracle does hold lessons for other countries around the world, including the United States.
[Derek Thompson: Is a recession coming?]
“Will good policy always win? Clearly, the answer is no,” says Stephen Grenville, a nonresident fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute and a former official at the Reserve Bank of Australia. “We can’t rely on another 27 years of growth, and we can’t say that because we’ve gone 27 years without a recession we know how to grow without a business cycle. But what the 27 years do show is that if you get policy right, you can be hit by quite a number of shocks, good and bad, and still maintain steady growth.”
What does “getting policy right” look like? Lesson one: Fight recessions right. Australian policy makers combated the 2008 global financial crisis more adeptly than ones in the United States or in Europe, implementing fiscal stimulus quickly and not turning to budget austerity as the economy recovered. As a result, Australia’s growth rate dropped without the economy actually shrinking, let alone contracting and then stagnating, or contracting for years on end, or contracting over and over again.
Just months out from the recession, congressional Republicans started pushing budget cuts. European governments started slashing spending too, requiring strict austerity in the continent’s debt-laden peripheral economies. Australia, however, showered helicopter money on lower-income households, spent heavily on infrastructure, and debated balancing the budget without ever really moving to do so.
[Read: The U.S. isn’t prepared for the next recession]
Addendum to lesson one: Don’t get into the mess to begin with. Australia had an easier recession to combat because the country had avoided the subprime-lending boom, meaning that its households were not as overextended with debt and its financial institutions were not as heavily invested in exotica as those in the United States. “The financial sector in Australia is quite different,” said John Romalis, an economist at the University of Sydney. “It’s boring. It’s mostly involved in bread-and-butter banking issues—that removes one source of trouble, as not being excessively exposed to risk is a helpful thing.”
Lesson two: Welcome immigrants. More than a quarter of Australians were born abroad, double the rate in the United States or France. In recent years, the country’s population has grown twice as fast as the U.S. population has. Given that Australia’s immigrants tend to be younger than its native-born population, those numbers have helped improve the country’s fiscal outlook, bolstered its government coffers, expanded its working-age population, and lowered its median age. They have also helped power it out of soft patches, recession-free. (The economic math is not complicated: More people means more investment and consumption means less chance of a downturn.)
Lesson three: Open up to the world. Australia has benefited from being in a rapidly developing neighborhood, close to Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and especially China. Their growth has fueled Australia’s growth, with the higher-income economy exporting commodities, as well as other goods and services, to those lower-income countries. Trade between China and Australia alone increased tenfold in the 2000s, with Australian exports to China booming and China investing heavily in Australia, too.
[Derek Thompson: Why Donald Trump’s trade war will fail]
“Openness to trade and investment has been a huge part of our growth story,” says Jarrod Ball, the chief economist at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. “As protectionism has made a bit of a comeback, we have continued to promote and negotiate free-trade agreements. In Australia, we simply can’t afford to do anything else—the economy that we are, the size that we are, where we’re positioned. We have to be open to trade and investment. We just can’t afford to lose that openness.”
None of this means that the country has somehow managed to vanquish the business cycle entirely; indeed, some forecasters anticipate a soft patch or even a recession ahead, due to a correction in the housing market. Nor does it mean that the Australian economy has been problem-free for three decades. Wages have stagnated, for instance. But it does demonstrate that recessions are always due to something—many times, something that policy makers can fight. And it does demonstrate that smart governance is largely, if not wholly, determinative of a country’s growth path, with recessions often a product of human frailty, not fate.
Whenever America’s next recession strikes—whether next year or three or 10 years from now—there likely would have been a way to lessen or prevent it, and there likely will be a best way to fight it. Here in Washington, perhaps borrowing some bureaucrats from Sydney would be a good start.
During the November elections, a number of Democratic House candidates made gun control a central theme of their midterm campaign, and dozens more gave the issue strong emphasis on the trail. Next month, they might have a chance to follow through on their campaign promises with legislation requiring federal background checks on all gun sales.
The legislation isn’t likely to become law. It will be a bit like Republican House efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act back in 2017, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA: a symbolic gesture that never becomes the law of the land, but that nonetheless serves a political purpose.
While the GOP’s attempts to repeal the ACA ultimately hurt some Republicans in the midterm elections, Democrats believe their gun-control efforts will help the cause.“It’ll show two things,” said Representative Mike Thompson of California, the chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, in an interview, “that we care about our community’s safety, and it’ll show that we listen to voters.”
[Read: Gun control is not impossible]
House Democrats, led by Thompson, are planning to introduce the legislation within the first 100 days of the new Congress, according to a report from Politico on Monday. “The new Democratic majority will act boldly and decisively to pass commonsense, life-saving background checks that are overwhelmingly supported by the American people,” incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. And activists want to do it by February 14, the one-year anniversary of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.
The Senate is still under Republican control, which means the likelihood that such a bill would make it to President Donald Trump’s desk is slim. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled that he wouldn’t take up a bill like this, and it’s unclear if Trump would sign it even if he did. Still, Democrats and gun-control advocates view the potential move as an important symbol.
Since 1994, a federal background check has been required for every individual purchasing a firearm from a federally licensed gun dealer. But experts estimate that some 20 percent of gun sales occur over the internet or at gun shows, from unlicensed dealers. Thompson’s bill would change that. The legislation, which will likely be co-authored by Republican Representative Peter King of New York as well as several other as yet unnamed lawmakers, would require federal background checks on virtually all types of gun sales, with just a few exceptions.
[Read: As students ‘march for our lives,’ what are the feasible aims for gun control? ]
A majority of both gun owners and non–gun owners support universal background checks, according to the Pew Research Center, and researchers argue that expanding them works: States that already require background checks on all gun purchases experienced 35 percent less gun deaths per capita than states without the requirement, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Thompson and King proposed similar legislation last year, but their bill was never taken up by Republican leadership for a vote. Now, though, things have changed. Democrats won back a decisive majority in the House in November, and activists claim that the tide is shifting.
“The passage of a universal-background-check bill is something that we haven’t seen in 20 years,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, “probably the most convincing proof yet that American political leaders are catching up with the American people.”
In the 10 months since 17 students and staff members were killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, energy has amassed on the side of grassroots gun-control groups and prompted nationwide marches and student walkouts. In the 2018 midterms, these groups outspent the National Rifle Association for the first time in history, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Revenue at the NRA reportedly declined by 15 percent in 2017, and its membership dues dropped to a five-year low. On Tuesday, the Trump administration unveiled a new regulation officially banning bump-fire stocks.
“The pattern has been pretty predictable, where for too long a tragic shooting occurs, it captures the attention of the nation, the country mourns, political leaders ask for prayers, and then the gun lobby ends up getting its way,” Feinblatt said. “There’s no question [people] are convinced it’s time to break the pattern.”
Indeed, several Democratic candidates ran—and won—in November after placing gun control at the center of their midterm campaign. A U.S. House candidate in Georgia, Lucy McBath, whose teenage son was shot and killed at a gas station in 2012, ran for office because she believed lawmakers weren’t doing enough to address gun violence. McBath narrowly defeated her Republican opponent, Karen Handel, last month. Other candidates, such as Jason Crow, who beat the Republican Mike Coffman in Colorado, and Jennifer Wexton, who defeated Barbara Comstock in Virginia, also chose to emphasize rather than downplay gun control in their campaign messages.
“We have reached a tipping point on this issue. I thought it would have happened a long time ago,” said Crow, who recently joined Thompson’s gun-violence task force, in an interview. After multiple mass shootings rocked his state—the 2012 attack at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora happened in Crow’s congressional district—Colorado passed its own universal-background-check legislation. “We’ve already led on this issue, and it’s well past time we take the Colorado example and extend that to the nation,” Crow told me.
Incoming Representative Haley Stevens, who also made guns a central focus in her bid to represent Michigan’s Eleventh Congressional District, said she recently joined the gun-violence-prevention task force and plans to support Thompson’s legislation. “People are sick of living like this, sick of seeing the mass shootings, the gun violence in our neighborhoods, feeling like nowhere is safe,” Stevens said in an interview. “They’re looking to the government to get something done.”
Both experts and critics of the legislation point out that universal background checks won’t solve America’s gun-violence problem. Many of the recent high-profile shootings that Americans recognize now by mononymous names—Parkland, Newtown, Aurora—probably wouldn’t have been prevented by a federally mandated background check.
Background checks “are designed to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from getting their hands on guns,” said Winkler, the UCLA professor. “How they do that is by looking at adjudications.” In other words, someone who hasn’t been convicted of a felony or confirmed to have a mental illness would still pass a background check.
“We are concerned that it is a solution in search of a problem,” said Michael Hammond, the longtime legislative counsel to Gun Owners of America, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting gun rights. “Which leads to the question: What’s the [Democrats’] objective here? Is it achieving policy or putting points on the board?” Gun-control opponents like Hammond have long been worried about the creation of a gun-control registry that they fear could ultimately be used by the federal government to confiscate Americans’ firearms. To counter this concern, Thompson’s legislation actually includes a provision making it a federal crime to create a gun registry.
But Hammond told me he’s worried that passing background-check legislation is a slippery slope—one that could lead to tighter restrictions, such as a ban on large-capacity magazines or semi-automatic weapons. “I don’t think the other side believes [universal background checks] will stop the shootings. It’s not about policy; it’s about politics,” Hammond said. It’s “the left destroying what it perceives as the strongest remaining pillar of the Republican movement.”
If Thompson’s legislation passes the House next year, it sets up Democrats for a deeper debate about gun control heading into the 2020 general election—when they’ve got a chance to retake the Senate and the White House. It’s a chance both lawmakers and activists are optimistic about.
“The calculus has changed,” said Feinblatt, from Everytown. “When Sandy Hook happened, and the background-check bill went down in defeat, people said [gun control] was still the third rail of American politics. Nobody’s saying that anymore.”
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2018” coverage here.
While 2018 was not a big year for big films, it was a big year for smaller ones. Yes, A Star Is Born was a major hit, and deservedly so. But the bulk of the movies on our two critics’ lists were not Hollywood Oscar bait but intimate fables meticulously told: a septuagenarian bank robber who just can’t quit or a pastor losing his faith in the world; a Japanese family that relies on shoplifting to make ends meet or a Mexican family coping with the absence of its men; a daughter and father hiding out in the woods or a pair of lovers torn apart by the Cold War. Each of our critics, David Sims and Christopher Orr, chose 10 films, and their lists overlapped only three times (hence, “The 17 Best Films of 2018”). After the rankings, our critics hand out some idiosyncratic awards.
David Sims’s picks
Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox1. WidowsA municipal masterpiece that owes equal debts to Michael Mann and Lynda La Plante, Steve McQueen’s vibrant thriller Widows was a cinematic experience like no other for me this year, one that left me buzzing for weeks on end. Many films in 2018 tried to mix topicality and entertainment, but Widows takes on the horror of various patriarchal systems in America and has a blast upending them all. Viola Davis anchors an incredible ensemble that includes Elizabeth Debicki, Daniel Kaluuya, and Colin Farrell all delivering exceptional work. The last 30 minutes of the film in particular are best experienced in a packed theater, with a crowd gasping at every twist.
Magnolia Pictures2. ShopliftersHirokazu Kore-eda has plenty of affecting, subtly told Japanese domestic dramas to his name, but this Palme d’Or winner pierces especially deep. The film centers on the Shibatas, a semi-homeless family trying to survive by any means necessary. When they take in a young runaway girl, the viewers’ connection to her grows just as quickly as the Shibatas’ does. Through warmly observed moments of intimacy and empathy, Kore-eda sets things up for a crushing fall. Seeing this downturn coming doesn’t make the finale any less heartbreaking, and every bit of hope the movie allows feels entirely earned.
A243. First ReformedPaul Schrader’s big comeback is a soothing acid wash of a movie, a penitent piece of horror that wonders whether humanity deserves to survive after what it’s done to the Earth. It’s a tough question for Reverend Toller (played by Ethan Hawke, giving the performance of the year and of his career), a man who has long taken comfort in his unshakable faith. But the question poses an even tougher quandary for the viewer, who watches as Schrader dramatizes the nightmare of a man’s resolute beliefs crumbling into chaos. There’s perhaps no better paean to our wounded planet—even if Schrader allows one bleak note of redemption at the end.
Clay Enos / Warner Bros.4. A Star Is BornA Star Is Born may be the easiest movie of the year to fall in love with, whether from the first twang of Jackson Maine’s (Bradley Cooper) guitar onstage, or the lush red font of the movie’s Old Hollywood opening title, or the moment when the ingenue Ally (Lady Gaga) screams “Fucking men!” in a bathroom. A Star Is Born is the kind of actor-driven blockbuster that rarely gets made anymore, one that lets its stars sing, kiss, cry, and rend their garments all in the name of art and passion. Yes, the movie takes the downward slide demanded of its predecessors in its final act, but Cooper—surprisingly—sticks the landing, and Gaga—expectedly—nails the final song.
Scott Green / Bleecker Street5. Leave No TraceDebra Granik might be the most underrated director working in America today; she’s certainly among the most consistent. Her long-awaited fiction follow-up to Winter’s Bone follows two survivalists, a father and a daughter, who struggle to adapt after being plucked from their isolated lives in the woods and forced to reenter society. But the film is also a tale about how difficult it can be to live by one’s principles and about how choosing an ascetic path can blur the line between love and neglect. Ben Foster gives his career-best performance here; the largely unknown Thomasin McKenzie is his equal as his daughter.
Magnolia Pictures6. Support the GirlsAndrew Bujalski’s tiny-scale dramedy follows one crazy day in the life of a middle manager at a Hooters-style restaurant, and its ambitions far outstrip its budget. The film is a slyly trenchant look at the slights, indignities, and myriad sources of stress that besiege many American service workers (particularly women), and the story is grounded by a patient, wonderfully human performance from Regina Hall. Bujalski, who emerged as a mumblecore director in the 2000s, once used realism as a cudgel. Now he deploys it to make quiet, incisive points about how we live today while getting some big laughs along the way.
paramount7. Mission: Impossible—FalloutIn Hollywood’s age of franchises, the best series America has to offer is still Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible juggernaut, which has produced six entries in 22 years and has miraculously only gotten better with age. Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout, the director’s second go-around with Cruise’s tenacious Ethan Hunt, is a giddy thriller that understands how to match incomparable spectacle with naked sentimentality. From diving out of a plane at 30,000 feet to swooping around the mountains of Kashmir with a helicopter in pursuit of justice, Hunt somehow manages to deliver action sequences you’ve never seen before.
Tatum Mangus / Annapurna Pictures8. If Beale Street Could TalkMaking a follow-up to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight was a virtually impossible task, and adapting James Baldwin for the big screen was arguably even more daunting. Yet Jenkins accomplished both with his new film If Beale Street Could Talk—an intelligent, thoughtfully made love story that depicts society’s grave injustices without letting go of its protagonists’ fierce bond. In re-creating 1970s Harlem, Jenkins paints the frame with luxurious and surprising color, and Nicholas Britell’s astonishing score sets the mood perfectly. But none of it would come off without the work of Beale Street’s magnificent ensemble: the luminous KiKi Layne, the simmering Stephan James, the indefatigable Regina King, and Brian Tyree Henry in a spellbinding cameo.
Well Go USA9. BurningIf Jenkins’s film is an ode to the power of love, then Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is a tone poem about just how curdling and destructive a force love can be. A Korean-language adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning” set in and around Seoul, Burning follows a romantic triangle involving two men (one poor but passionate, the other successful and frighteningly cool) and one bewitching woman, whom they don’t understand. As a frosty, mysterious millionaire, Steven Yeun is a revelation, but it’s the film’s shocking climax that deserves to be discussed and pored over for years to come.
Mongrel Media10. Let the Sunshine InThe director Claire Denis is as adept at horror as she is at romance, and this ostensible comedy (starring Juliette Binoche) is a brilliant mix of both, following one woman’s toil and trouble in the Parisian dating scene. Let the Sunshine In delights in staying with a scene longer than feels comfortable, so that a barbed joke can be followed by a tearful monologue. In short, the film is perfectly French—witty, surgically mean, intensely heartfelt—and it’s helmed by a typically impressive Binoche. Denis is in one of the most creatively fertile periods of her career, and Let the Sunshine In fittingly bubbles with a sense of swooning possibility.
Runners-up: Suspiria, Black Panther, First Man, Paddington 2, The Favourite, The Rider, You Were Never Really Here, Annihilation
Christopher Orr’s picks
Carlos Somonte / Netflix1. RomaOver the years, Alfonso Cuarón has demonstrated that he is good at, essentially, everything, whether it’s a sexual coming-of-age film or a Harry Potter movie, a dystopian thriller or a breathless adventure in space. Roma, which is set in the 1970s Mexico City of Cuarón’s youth, is the director’s most personal movie to date and easily his best. From its opening frames to its closing ones, it is a masterpiece of cinematic technique, the story of a well-off family told through the eyes of its indigenous maid (Yalitza Aparicio). For a while, the film seems like it will be principally an exercise in visual storytelling. (Cuarón handled the utterly stunning black-and-white cinematography himself.) But before it runs its course, Roma will nail you to your seat. It will shock you. It will break your heart and then put it back together again. You will not see a better picture this year.
MK2 Films2. Cold WarThe director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is another film that, like Roma, tells a vast story through a narrow lens. It plays almost as the shadow twin of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: two lovers, separated by geopolitical events, against a backdrop of music. In this case, though, the lovers are Polish members of a musical troupe (played by Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot), buffeted by the upheavals of the Soviet empire in the 1950s and early 1960s. The movie packs more raw emotion into its slender 85-minute running time than many good and far lengthier films do. And its black-and-white evocations of Warsaw, Berlin, and especially Paris will take your breath away. “Time doesn’t matter when you’re in love,” one character tells another. Cold War simultaneously proves and refutes this maxim.
Clay Enos / Warner Bros.3. A Star Is BornAfter two foreign-language films (in black-and-white, no less), it’s time to give Hollywood its due. I was not a particular fan of either the Judy Garland or the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born, and yet another remake of the story—the fifth overall—initially seemed to me a poor idea. But in his directorial debut, Bradley Cooper continues to prove that he can do more, so much more, than almost anyone imagined back when he was pigeonholed in cocky, ladies’-man roles. As an actor, he has a range that has been expanding with every passing year: In the familiar leading roles of this film, he and Lady Gaga are both fresh and both fantastic. And as a director, Cooper gets so many little things right that it’s hard to believe he hasn’t been doing this for 20 years. A star is born, indeed.
A244. First ReformedThis was a year in which the best films I saw were generally triumphs of execution rather than of conception. The writer-director Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is an exception. Schrader is best known for the scripts he worked on for Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. The screenplay for First Reformed is the equal of any of them—and Schrader’s execution is likewise superb. Ethan Hawke gives the best performance of his career as the reverend in charge of a 250-year-old church in upstate New York, forced by its dwindling congregation to rely on a local megachurch for support. Like Schrader’s best work before, First Reformed is a tale of spiritual crisis, of a man who is gradually unraveling before our eyes. It’s a marvel.
Marvel Studios5. Black PantherFrom a marvel to Marvel. Who ever imagined that a superhero movie could be so politically sophisticated? Yes, yes, I know, The Dark Knight. But Christopher Nolan’s film was an achievement as much of mood as of ideology. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther largely maintains the aesthetics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—though the Africa-influenced production (and costume) design is exceptional—while offering multiple layers of political introspection. Twinning a fictional rich and high-tech African state of Wakanda with Coogler’s native Oakland is a tremendous first step. Using the pair to begin a tripartite argument about race is nothing short of brilliant. A film that begins with Wakanda enjoying its wealth in isolation and secrecy asks: What if the nation instead chose to help those of African ancestry worldwide? And then, a step further: What if it engaged in global conquest and an inversion of the colonialist order? A terrific movie with a terrific cast, Black Panther raises the bar for the entire superhero genre.
Fox Searchlight Pictures6. The Old Man & the GunAt 93 minutes, The Old Man & the Gun is a relatively small and unassuming film. It is also a reminder that both of these characteristics can be signal virtues. Based on David Grann’s eponymous 2003 piece in The New Yorker, the film by David Lowery sands down some of the rough edges of its protagonist, 70-something lifelong bank robber Forrest Tucker. But that’s okay, because Tucker is played, with peerless wit and charm, by Robert Redford, in what the actor has said will be the final film role of his almost-60-year career. Whether or not the role proves to be final, it is one of his very best. (Sissy Spacek is wonderful, too.) In a perfect world—and there is very little sign that we are living in anything approaching one—Redford would be taking a Best Actor Oscar statue with him into a much-earned retirement.
Twentieth Century Fox7. WidowsWidows, directed and co-written (with Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame) by Steve McQueen, is that most delightful of cinematic delicacies: a genre film that transcends its genre. It’s a heist movie, but also a film about female empowerment. (The premise is that after an all-male criminal gang gets blown up, the men’s widows take on what was to be their husbands’ final job.) But Widows is also a deep dig into the sociology of Chicago, with a major subplot about an alderman’s race between the scion of a corrupt Irish political dynasty and a black gangster trying to go more or less straight. The cast, headed by Viola Davis, is excellent, and while the script has an occasional head-scratching moment, it is for the most part taut and clever. It all adds up to an immensely satisfying movie-night movie.
IFC Films8. The Death of StalinWhat do you do when the political black comedies on which you’ve based your career can’t keep up with political reality? If you’re Armando Iannucci (who, before making HBO’s Veep, was the creator of The Thick of It and In the Loop, neither of which I can possibly recommend highly enough), you delve into one of the blackest political moments in modern history: Stalin’s Great Purge and the power struggle that followed the dictator’s death in 1953. There are oddities on display here, notably that the multinational cast members all speak in their native accents. (It takes a moment to get used to Stalin’s cockney drawl.) But Iannucci takes an enormous gamble here, and it mostly pays off—at least if you’re open to a comedy that’s premised on mass murder.
Sony Pictures Classics9. The RiderAnother film that is exquisite in its smallness. It’s hard to imagine a more improbable project: The Chinese writer-director Chloé Zhao met Brady Jandreau, a Lakota Sioux rodeo rider, while making her first feature, 2015’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me. He subsequently suffered a severe head injury when he was thrown from a horse, and was then prohibited from further riding. The Rider is a lightly fictionalized version of this story featuring Jandreau himself (his surname is changed to Blackburn), his family members, and the partially paralyzed former rodeo star Lane Scott (who also plays a version of his real-life self). Rarely have nonprofessional actors managed to bridge the gap between reality and mimesis as beautifully as they do under Zhao’s direction.
Peter Iovino / Lionsgate10. A Simple FavorIs this genuinely one of the 10 best films of 2018? Of course not. But different moods call for different movies, and A Simple Favor is custom designed—and wonderfully engineered by the director Paul Feig—for those times when you want a movie that is highly entertaining and in no way challenging. Anna Kendrick is at her Anna Kendrick–iest as a food-vlogging single mom whose best friend has disappeared. And, as said best friend, Blake Lively is a true revelation—a contender for the most effortlessly charismatic femme fatale since Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Runners-up: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Eighth Grade, The Favourite, Green Book, If Beale Street Could Talk, Isle of Dogs, Leave No Trace, Mary Poppins Returns, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
And a Few Idiosyncratic AwardsNicest Bank Robber: Robert Redford, The Old Man & the Gun
Meanest: Liam Neeson, Widows
Coziest Living Accommodations: The shrinkable lab in Ant-Man and the Wasp
Most Depressing: The dorms in Suspiria
Most Crushingly Metaphorical: The mansion in The Little Stranger
Quietest: The family compound in A Quiet Place
Most Wolf-Ridden: The Alaskan town in Hold the Dark
Most Existentially Affirming Cartoon Bear: Paddington
Runner-Up: Winnie the Pooh
Best Use of Dog Shit as a Narrative Device: Roma
Most Gruesome Bone Surgery: Red Sparrow
Most Whimsical Kidney Transplant: Isle of Dogs
Grumpiest Boss: Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War
Worst Father: Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War
Most in Need of New Hobbies: Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War
Best Performance as Sam Elliott: Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Runner-Up: Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Most Likable Dad: Josh Hamilton, Eighth Grade
Most Formidable Mom: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Cleverest Sister: Letitia Wright, Black Panther
Achievement in PowerPoint Skills: Kyle Chandler writing “MOON” in capital letters on a blackboard, First Man
Best Representation of the Internet as an Endless Hellscape: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Worst: Ready Player One
Most Archimedean Gunfight: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Most Pythagorean Chicken: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Best Use of the Song “9 to 5”: Deadpool 2
Best Use of the Song “I’ve Never Been to Me”: You Were Never Really Here
Worst Rendition of the Song “Maybe I’m Amazed”: Jamie Dornan, Fifty Shades Freed
Best Lullaby: Emily Blunt, Mary Poppins Returns
Runner-Up: Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Pleasant Surprise of the Year: Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Runners-Up: Ethan Hawke (First Reformed), Blake Lively (A Simple Favor)
Best Impromptu Cocktail: Pepto-Bismol and Whiskey, First Reformed
The Ace Hardware Award for Lifetime Purchases of Duct Tape: You Were Never Really Here
The Ace Hardware Award for Lifetime Purchases of Ball-Peen Hammers: You Were Never Really Here
Best Rabbit Party: The Favourite
Best Duck Race: The Favourite
Best War Rhinos: Black Panther
Most Surprising Use of “The Macarena” in a Blockbuster That Came Out in 2018: Hotel Transylvania 3
Best Invocation of the Malthusian Trap: Avengers: Infinity War
Runner-Up: How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Most Stressful Boyfriend: Alex Honnold, Free Solo
Runner-Up: Venom, Venom
Most Thrilling Action Sequence on a Maglev: Black Panther
Runner-Up: Incredibles 2
Best Quasi-Feminist Heist Movie: Widows
Runner-Up: Ocean’s 8
Worst Sex: Fifty Shades Freed
Runner-Up: Red Sparrow
Most Egregious Removal From a Script of the Meaning of the Movie’s Title: Annihilation
Entre as poucas ideias que Jair Bolsonaro apresentou em sua campanha, o bordão “pró-emprego” via facilitação da vida do empregador tem sido uma constante. No Programa Roda Viva, ela já havia dito que “é difícil ser patrão no Brasil”, o que repetiu semana passada, acrescentando um advérbio: “hoje em dia, é muito difícil ser patrão no Brasil”.
A frase logo viralizou entre seus opositores como uma mistura de “eu avisei” ou “bem feito”: o “pobre” que votou no candidato irá se “ferrar” e perder direitos. Desse modo, a esquerda, que defende os direitos dos trabalhadores, denunciava que o futuro presidente estaria do lado dos chefes e dos empresários — e não do povo.
Só que, infelizmente, a ética popular do trabalho não é tão lógica quanto a gente gostaria, já que no Brasil uma grande parte da população sonha ser patrão ou se vê como patrão. Num país em que a maioria da população está na informalidade ou trabalha por conta própria, a esquerda acabou falando para uma parcela restrita que trabalha com carteira assinada. Para toda uma outra multidão, Bolsonaro acertou em cheio, acionando uma linguagem que faz sentido no imaginário popular.
No entanto, apesar disso, Bolsonaro irá se dar mal com o povo. Eu explico o porquê de minha aposta ao final da coluna. Antes, eu gostaria de contar umas histórias sobre patrões.
‘Prefiro ser escravo de mim mesmo’Em um antigo camelódromo de Porto Alegre, onde fiz pesquisa etnográfica por seis anos, meu amigo Chico era empregado de seu sogro, para quem viajava ao Paraguai com o objetivo de buscar mercadorias. Quando chegava em Ciudad del Este, ele imediatamente contratava um “laranja” — o Maico, de uns 16 anos — que atravessava a fronteira com parte de suas sacolas em troca de US$ 7. Chico dizia-me com orgulho: “aqui eu quem mando” e exigia que o menino o chamasse de “patrão”, sempre passando ordens ríspidas e dizendo que ele era “lerdo” e que não sabia trabalhar. Para minha surpresa, de repente, Maico — que permanecia de cabeça baixa por todo o trajeto — subcontratou um outro laranja, agora de uns 12 anos, a quem deu US$ 2 e a quem também mandava e desmandava.
Quem conhece o cotidiano de muitos mercados informais urbanos sabe que histórias como essas não são exceção. Muitos ambulantes fazem de tudo para ter um empregado, e empregados, por sua vez, fazem de tudo para ter seu próprio ponto — e tudo isso pode ser sintetizado no que uma vez Chico me disse: “Se é para ser escravo, prefiro ser escravo de mim mesmo”.
Existem muitas razões que explicam esse processo que, à primeira vista, remete a um neoliberalismo “cru” (como eu chamei em meu livro) aplicado nos andares de baixo num mercado selvagem de todos contra todos. A racionalidade neoliberal, nos termos de Dardot e Laval, estaria nesses “sujeitos-empresa” que individualizam o sucesso e o fracasso por meio da narrativa meritocrática. O livro A Razão Neoliberal, de Verónica Gago, avança nesse ponto de vista “desde baixo”, mostrando que ambulantes argentinos, mesmo com táticas de resistência, sucumbem à lógica da exploração.
Apesar de eu concordar com essa interpretação, entendo que ela não dá conta de toda a complexidade da história da precariedade, da segregação e da marginalização do Brasil. O neoliberalismo — acredito eu — acirra (mais do que cria) uma lógica pré-existente de resistência à exploração por parte grupos marginalizados brasileiros, que se recusam a ter patrão.
Na história de Chico, havia uma cadeia hierárquica de exploração de muitos “patrões” na qual ninguém aguentava ser humilhado, e a maneira de lidar com isso era repassando a humilhação (é o que chamamos nas ciências sociais de a natureza reprodutiva da violência). Aí parece-me fundamental entender o papel do autorrespeito que o trabalho por si próprio proporciona, como uma espécie de antídoto contra a humilhação da subordinação. É bom também lembrar o peso de poder simbólico que a palavra “patrão” e “patroa” tem no Brasil.
O antropólogo Roberto DaMatta, no final dos anos 1970, chamava atenção para como o caráter antidemocrático do Brasil produzia um universo de pobres invisíveis, de “ninguéns”, e que se posicionar em uma cadeia hierárquica — como a de Chico — é se tornar “pessoa”: ou seja, existir e ser reconhecido em meio a uma sociedade estratificada em que o Estado de Direito funciona para poucos.
Claudia Fonseca, em seu livro já clássico Família, Fofoca e Honra, escreveu com base em uma etnografia feita em uma comunidade pobre nos anos 1980:
é na área do emprego que o orgulho pessoal [honra] é mais manifesto (…) Por que os empregos assalariados [entre pessoas de baixa renda] são tão desprezados? (…) Autodefesa, já que muitos já foram rechaçados com brutalidade por parte de um patrão (…) Viver de oito a dez horas por dia na evocação constante de sua inferioridade em nada contribui para enaltecer a própria imagem, e o salário, realmente irrisório, não compensa a falta de satisfação pessoal. (…) O sonho de todo homem é ser trabalhador autônomo que ganha pouco, mas sente-se independente. (…) A humilhação sentida por essas pessoas em praticamente todos seus contatos com a classe média não se traduz em uma revolta coletiva. Não se sente compaixão pelos explorados.
Em linhas gerais, ser autônomo e, principalmente, ser patrão são uma forma de reivindicar a existência, quebrar a invisibilidade que impera em empregos degradantes e ter poder em uma sociedade hierárquica.
Mas eu gostaria de findar essa parte do texto com mais um caso, que é o oposto de tudo narrado até agora. É a simples e direta história do Magaiver, que mora em uma das comunidades mais pobres de Porto Alegre, onde absolutamente ninguém é trabalhador assalariado. Depois de três décadas na informalidade, idas e vindas entre “empregos de merda” e bicos de “faz-tudo”, aos 45 anos de idade, ele conseguiu um emprego de carteira assinada como garçom no restaurante do Tribunal Regional da 4ª Região. “As pessoas me chamam pelo nome” — conta ele com a expressão de quem não cabe em si de tanto orgulho. Recebe salário que considera justo, plano de saúde, dentista, férias e décimo terceiro. Ele permanece no emprego já há quatro anos. Ponto final.
‘O trabalhador vai ter que escolher entre mais direitos ou emprego’Bolsonaro não percebeu, mas o trabalhador já fez a sua escolha — e há tempos: ou mais direitos ou informalidade. O que ele propõe para gerar empregos é flexibilizar ainda mais legislação trabalhista. A proposta pode fazer brilhar os olhos de muitos aspirantes a patrões, como Chico, que votou convicto em Bolsonaro na esperança de um dia de reverter seu próprio destino subalterno. O problema é que a fórmula neoliberal de Bolsonaro não se sustenta porque as pessoas aprenderam que “se é para ser escravo, é melhor ser escravos de si próprio”.
Uma das consequências da flexibilização é justamente mais informalidade, como ocorreu com a reforma trabalhista de Michel Temer que, com a promessa de diminuir o problema, jogou 1,7 milhões de pessoas na economia informal em 2017, segundo dados do IBGE.
O Brasil precisa não apenas de mais empregos, mas bons empregos, que sejam capazes de resgatar a dignidade, a identidade e o autovalor dos trabalhadores. Como gerar esses empregos é um debate inesgotável, plural e sempre urgente no campo progressista. Uma parte grande dos setores de centro-esquerda, encarnada em projetos do PT, PDT e PCdoB, defende o fortalecimento do desenvolvimentismo e da indústria nacional.
Mas há também outros importantes debates emergindo, como o encabeçado pela professora Tatiana Roque, que entende que o pleno emprego não existe num horizonte próximo e que, portanto, a ala progressista precisa tomar vantagem dessa massa um tanto “avessa à lógica do capital” e propor novas mecanismos de seguridade aos trabalhadores informais, autônomos e microempreendedores, que hoje são esquecidos — quando não rechaçados — pela narrativa da esquerda.
Apesar de existir um mundo a discutir nesta área, ainda sim resta uma certeza: a de que Bolsonaro está errado. Querendo ou não, a saída está na história do Magaiver: mais proteção social ou nada.
The post Bolsonaro vai se dar mal: trabalhadores preferem informalidade a CLT precária appeared first on The Intercept.
Pouca gente ouvira falar da Vila 29 de Março, uma favela localizada no extremo sudoeste de Curitiba e lar de cerca de 400 famílias, até o início de dezembro. Mas um incêndio criminoso que destruiu 300 barracos poucas horas depois de um policial militar ser assassinado ao lado de um ponto de venda de drogas colocou a comunidade nas manchetes.
Não apenas o fogo: dois moradores foram executados a tiros nas horas que se seguiram à morte do policial. Um deles era um jovem de 17 anos sem passagem pela polícia.
O Intercept esteve no local dias após os crimes, ocorridos entre a madrugada e a noite de uma sexta-feira, dia 7 dezembro. Conversamos com pessoas que relataram terem sido torturadas, testemunharam policiais consumindo cocaína e viram homens encapuzados “andando em fila, como se fossem treinados” espalhando gasolina sobre casas momentos antes do início do fogo .
Também apuramos, no Instituto Médico Legal, que os exames preliminares nos corpos de Pablo Pereira da Hora, 22 anos, e Gabriel Carvalho Maciel, 17, indicam que eles foram mortos em decorrência de ferimentos causados por armas de fogo.
Gabriel Carvalho Maciel.
Foto: Reprodução
Gabriel, um jovem recém-chegado a Curitiba e sem passagens pela polícia, levou um tiro atrás da orelha direita, segundo os legistas. “A arma foi disparada muito próxima do crânio”, afirmou uma fonte que teve acesso ao laudo preliminar. Pablo, segundo moradores, foi preso, algemado e exibido por policiais horas antes de aparecer morto.
Ainda subia fumaça dos escombros deixados pelo incêndio quando oficiais da PM se sentaram diante de jornalistas para garantir que o fogo e as mortes haviam sido causados “pelo crime organizado”. Dias depois, a polícia foi forçada a recuar e anunciar uma investigação após vir à tona uma gravação feita por moradores que mostra policiais atirando contra as casas em chamas.
Essa é, ao que tudo indica, a história de uma vingança.
Foto: Giorgia Prates/Coletivo CWB Resiste
Chega-se à Vila 29 de Março por uma via sinuosa que parte de uma rodovia que corta a Cidade Industrial de Curitiba, ao mesmo tempo um pólo de indústrias onde estão instaladas empresas como Volvo, Electrolux e Toshiba e um dos bairros mais pobres e violentos da capital.
A favela, cujo nome faz referência à data de fundação de Curitiba, é um amontoado de barracos entrecortados por ruas estreitas e improvisadas, erguidos ao redor de uma rua de chão batido que dá acesso a um aterro sanitário privado. Algumas casas de alvenaria, uma delas sede de um misto de bar e armazém, e uma espécie de “largo” indicam o centro da favela.
Defronte a elas, porém, o que se avistava na na quarta-feira de sol e calor em que o Intercept esteve no local era um amontoado de destroços de alvenaria – vigas de cimento e paredes de tijolos nus das casas mais estruturadas – entremeados com madeira carbonizada e milhares de pequenos pedaços de telhas de amianto. O tempo seco e o vento forte que levantavam poeira também ajudavam a espalhar as fibras do mineral – um cancerígeno potente – pelo ar.
Ali ficavam as cerca de 300 casas consumidas pelo fogo da noite de 7 de dezembro. No Google Maps, ainda é possível ver o que havia ali antes do incêndio.
Foto: Reprodução/Google Maps
A temperatura chegou a 12 graus na madrugada daquela sexta-feira, mas o vento fazia parecer que o frio era maior. Eram por volta de 2h da manhã quando uma viatura da PM subiu a Estrada Velha do Barigui e chegou ao centrinho da Vila 29 de Março.
O carro parou ao lado de um sobrado (que pode ser visto, logo atrás do ônibus, no Google Maps). O policial Erick Norio saltou do banco do passageiro – o parceiro dele ficou sentado ao volante – e entrou no beco que margeava a casa. Nela, funcionava o que os moradores chamam de “biqueira”, um ponto de venda de drogas.
Norio caminhou alguns metros beco adentro. A escuridão era total – 7 de dezembro foi, justamente, dia de lua nova. De repente, ouviram-se dois disparos. Um deles atingiu o colete a prova de balas; o outro perfurou o pescoço do policial, que morreu minutos depois.
Segundo a versão oficial, Norio e seu colega tinham ido à Vila 29 de Março apurar uma ocorrência de perturbação de sossego. Moradores negam. “Sou testemunha. Não tinha barulho nenhum. E, mesmo que tivesse, você acha que alguém aqui ia reclamar de festa de traficante? A gente tem medo deles”, relatou uma delas, que, como a maioria das pessoas com quem o Intercept conversou no local, pediu para não ser identificada – naturalmente, temem represálias.
Porque Norio agiu daquela forma ainda é um mistério. Não é procedimento usual que um policial atue sem cobertura numa região considerada perigosa como aquela. Vários moradores comentaram que o policial fora à “biqueira” atrás do que se vendia ali.
“Tem muito policial que usa droga e vem fardado e armado na favela para consumir sem gastar. Esse que foi morto já tinha vindo várias vezes”, disse à reportagem uma moradora. “Ou ele quis ser muito corajoso, ou se descuidou, ou se confirma essa hipótese aí”, falou outro, mais cauteloso.
A mesma moradora que afirmou ter visto Norio ir à Vila 29 de Março algumas vezes atrás de drogas suspeita que naquela noite era Pablo Pereira da Hora quem estivesse no que chamou de “contenção” – a segurança armada da “biqueira”. Posicionado no fundo do beco escuro e armado com uma submetralhadora, ele teria ficado nervoso com a entrada de Norio e disparado.
“O policial estava sozinho. Se fosse ação da polícia, ele [Pablo] ia correr. Mas, como era um policial só, ele ficou escondido no beco. Depois, ele falou: ‘Você acha que ele [o policial] vai falar mão na cabeça, abaixa a arma? Ele ia atirar na minha cabeça. Tive que atirar. Era ele ou eu’. Lá do nosso barraco, a gente escutou a movimentação e o tiro [que matou Norio]”, relatou a moradora.
Escombros da favela.
Foto: Giorgia Prates/Coletivo CWB Resiste
A morte de Norio foi a senha para a Vila fosse ocupada por dezenas de policiais em questão de minutos. Um “carrinheiro” (apelido dado pelos curitibanos às pessoas que puxam pequenas carroças em que recolhem material reciclável nas ruas da cidade para vender a peso) relatou: “eles entraram no meu barraco já perguntando: ‘cadê o cara que fez, que matou meu irmão? Matou polícia, vai ficar ruim pra vocês. Vou por revólver na tua cabeça e te matar'”.
“Eu só falava: vocês vão matar um trabalhador. Daí colocaram uma sacola na minha cabeça [para asfixiá-lo] e me trancaram em casa. Sorte que consegui fugir porque o cadeado estava destrancado”, ele prosseguiu. Quando perguntado quem eram os agressores, ele não titubeou. “Estavam de uniforme de PM e colete preto [a cor da proteção contra balas usada pelas polícias do Paraná]. Um deles, o mais nervoso, um baixinho, ficava passando uma faca na minha barriga, ameaçando me ‘rasgar’.”
Enquanto isso, outra moradora que morava perto da “biqueira” contou ter ouvido soldados chamando um comandante pelo rádio. “‘Ô, tenente, sobe no beco aqui’, ele falou”, disse a testemunha. “A gente pensou que ele estava pedindo pra subir mais polícia para bater em nós (sic). [Mas falaram]: ‘Ô, tenente, ô, tenente, manda aqui.’ [Faz um som de quem aspira alguma coisa]. ‘É da boa.’ Todos eles estavam consumindo cocaína do lado do nosso barraco. Olhei pro meu marido e ele só fez com a boca: ‘Respira fundo. Se eles entrarem aqui a gente vai apanhar muito.”
‘O bicho vai pegar’Quando a sexta-feira amanheceu, a Vila 29 de Março estava tomada pela PM. Viaturas – de carros de patrulha a caminhonetes do Bope e da Rone, versão paranaense da Rota da polícia paulista – entupiam a via principal da favela.
“De carro identificado, eram uns 15, 20. E mais um cinco carros brancos, com gente à paisana, mas com colete [à prova de balas] e arma em punho”, contou uma moradora. Eram, provavelmente, agentes do que se conhece no Paraná por P2, o serviço de inteligência da PM.
“Mandaram fechar o armazém da vila porque ia ter operação policial e o bicho ia pegar. E disseram que era pra todo mundo ir pra casa e fechar a porta”, ela prosseguiu.
A essa altura, a polícia já prendera Pablo na casa dele, localizada numa favela vizinha. “Tiraram ele de casa às 4h30 da manhã. Eram duas policiais femininas e dois homens. Elas disseram para minha nora que, se ela contasse algo, voltariam para matá-la”, relatou o cobrador de ônibus aposentado Vanderley Pereira da Hora, pai do jovem.
Alguns moradores disseram ao Intercept terem visto Pablo passar algemado pela rua principal da favela ainda na sexta-feira. Naquela tarde, uma foto do rapaz morto, com um ferimento no pescoço aparentemente causado por uma bala, começou a circular no grupo de WhatsApp da comunidade. “Era ele sim. Eu o reconheci”, disse uma moradora que pediu para ser identificada apenas como Rose.
O corpo de Pablo deu entrada no IML às 13h38 daquela sexta-feira. Segundo o registro, ele foi encontrado pela PM na Rua Stanislau Felibrante, uma via não pavimentada e sem saída a cinco quilômetros da Vila 29 de Março. A causa da morte, segundo os legistas, foi hemorragia interna de tórax e abdômen. O laudo preliminar aponta “lesões crânio-encefálicas e ferida transfixante no coração, todas produzidas por projétil de arma de fogo”.
“A polícia achou que tinha sido ele [que matou Norio] e o mataram”, disse Vanderley, pai de Pablo. Ele respondia a um processo por receptação e era considerado “problema” pelos moradores da favela. “Mas nada justifica o que fizeram. Fui no velório. Ele foi muito torturado”, falou Rose.
Foto: Giorgia Prates/Coletivo CWB Resiste
“O fogo começou no sobrado da biqueira. Ouvimos tiros. Só podia ser a polícia; a favela estava cercada”, relatou Valdecir Ferreira da Silva, 41 anos, conhecido na região como “Val”, um operário de manutenção predial que se tornou porta-voz informal da comunidade quando ela ganhou notoriedade após o incêndio e as mortes.
“A gente tinha acabado de voltar da igreja. Assim que minha esposa saiu do banho, ouvi um foguetório, seguido de tiros, vários. Daí passaram [pelo beco que cortava o amontoado de barracos] uns quinze sujeitos, encapuzados, com galões na mão. Saí de casa e, quando cheguei na esquina, três barracos já pegavam fogo, e tinha um cheiro forte de gasolina”, contou Thiago Rafael de Oliveira, 30, um técnico em eletrônica que mora numa casa que escapou por pouco das chamas – as tábuas da parede externa estão carbonizadas pelas chamas.
“Mas perdemos colchão, roupas, televisão. Não foi pelo fogo, mas pela água dos Bombeiros”, ele disse, enquanto ajudava vizinhos a recuperar pregos e algo de útil entre os escombros que escondem as fossas que recebiam os dejetos dos banheiros dos barracos e em que chamavam a atenção os incontáveis estilhaços de telhas de amianto – altamente tóxicos.
Apesar disso, Thiago atribui a uma intervenção divina ter salvado a família e a casa do fogo. “O pastor tinha me chamado na igreja aquele dia, me ungiu com óleo e me disse que quando eu chegasse em casa teria uma grande benção”, contou, algo incrédulo.
O fogo se espalhou rapidamente. “A gente ouvia gritos que não sabia se eram de cachorro ou de gente sendo queimada”, falou uma moradora – o IML não recebeu corpos carbonizados nos dias que se seguiram ao incêndio. Fotos feitas pelos próprios moradores mostram as chamas subindo a uma altura mais de duas vezes maior que a dos barracos que ardiam.
“Vieram os bombeiros, mas a PM não deixou eles entrarem. Teve policial que pisou na mangueira pra não passar água. Mas uma moça [bombeira] manobrou o caminhão por uma viela e furou o bloqueio. Daí desceu, pegou a mangueira e começou a apagar o fogo”, disse outra moradora.
A devastação causada pelas chamas, de fato, é incomum. “Incêndio aqui não é raro. Já combatemos alguns. Normalmente, conseguimos dar conta do fogo. Se vemos que não vai dar, destruímos os barracos em volta pra evitar que se espalhe”, relatou Val.
Foto: Giorgia Prates/Coletivo CWB Resiste
Os barracos ainda queimavam quando moradores encontraram o corpo de Gabriel Carvalho Maciel numa obra em que o rapaz, chegado à favela havia cerca de 15 dias, trabalhava. Quase uma semana depois, o sangue que escorreu da cabeça do jovem ainda está lá, sobre o piso de terra, ladeado por luvas descartáveis deixadas para trás por funcionários do IML.
Moradores acreditam que Gabriel foi morto por ter saído de casa – para encontrar um primo – carregando um telefone celular. No boletim de ocorrência, a tia dele informou que minutos depois foi avisada que ele fora baleado e morrera. Àquela altura, a polícia ocupava a Vila 29 de Março.
“[Depois que acharam o corpo] A polícia cercou a casa [em obras]. Não veio perícia, nada. Só o IML, que levou ele acho que umas 3h da manhã [de sábado]. Daí o povo se revoltou. Alguns começaram a tacar pedras, e a polícia revidou, atirou bomba, bala de borracha. Eu não recuei, fiquei ali. Foi quando me acertaram [no rosto; a bochecha direita ainda traz a cicatriz do tiro]”, disse Val.
O corpo de Gabriel deu entrada no IML às 3h38 de sábado, dia 8. Segundo o laudo preliminar, o jovem morreu “vítima de ferimentos crânio-encefálicos causados por arma de fogo”, e teve “retirado projétil da região parietal mediana”. Os legistas apuraram que ele recebeu um tiro na “região retroauricular” (ou seja, atrás da orelha).
Minutos depois do corpo dele ter sido removido, moradores encontraram um cartão bancário ao lado de onde o rapaz foi morto. O nome registrado nele coincide com o de um policial que, segundo o portal da transparência do governo do Paraná, trabalha no 23.o batalhão da PM, justamente o responsável por patrulhar a área onde fica a Vila 29 de Março.
Restos de munição encontrados pelos moradores.
Foto: Giorgia Prates/Coletivo CWB Resiste
A polícia prendeu em 11 de dezembro um homem que, segundo a versão oficial, confessou ter atirado contra o policial Erick Norio.
Mas, uma semana depois, no dia 18, outro suspeito foi preso no litoral do Paraná por dirigir um carro roubado, e segundo a polícia tentou subornar os soldados alegando estar jurado de morte justamente por ter participado da morte de Norio.
Quer dizer: já há duas pessoas mortas – uma delas, com tiro no pescoço tal qual o que matou Norio – e duas presas, e o caso ainda está longe de uma conclusão.
Na entrevista coletiva que concedeu no sábado (8), o coronel Antonio Zanatta Neto, chefe do Estado Maior da PM, foi categórico ao atribuir tanto o incêndio ao crime organizado. “Todos os policiais estavam identificados, inclusive os não fardados. Quem coloca a culpa nos policiais certamente são pessoas envolvidas no crime, jogando a conta dos fatos contra a polícia. Nós não admitimos isso. Que tiver informações, denúncias, procure a nossa corregedoria”, disse.
Os moradores rechaçam a versão do oficial. “Os traficantes fugiram da favela assim que perceberam que tinham matado um policial. E o fogo começou quando a vila estava totalmente tomada pela polícia”, falou uma delas.
Após vir à tona o vídeo que mostra PMs atirando contra barracos em chamas, o coronel Zanatta se tornou bem menos falante. O Intercept pediu uma entrevista com ele à assessoria da polícia. Recebeu, apenas, uma nota lacônica, que diz o seguinte:
“A Polícia Militar esclarece que recebeu as imagens que mostram uma ação supostamente envolvendo dois policiais militares durante os fatos ocorridos na Cidade Industrial de Curitiba, na última semana. A corporação é a maior interessada no esclarecimento e está levantando todas as informações para apurar os fatos apontados pelas reportagens.
Ambos os policiais militares foram identificados, afastados das funções e estão à disposição das investigações, que vão apontar o que houve. Além disso, a PM está colaborando com a Polícia Civil e com o Ministério Público, para a elucidação do caso.
A PM lembra ainda que não compactua com desvios de conduta de seus integrantes e caso sejam comprovadas irregularidades, os canais de saneamento e correição serão aplicados ao rigor da lei. Em razão de as investigações estarem em curso, qualquer outra manifestação sobre os fatos poderá interferir no andamento das apurações.”
Procurada para comentar o caso, a governadora do Paraná, Cida Borghetti, do PP, disse, em nota, que “determinou à secretaria da Segurança Pública e aos comandos da Polícia Civil e Polícia Militar a apuração rigorosa de todos os fatos”.
“A governadora incumbiu o secretário da Segurança Pública, Júlio Reis, de acompanhar pessoalmente as investigações. Atualmente, há três inquéritos em andamento”, prosseguiu o texto.
A assessoria da governadora disse ao Intercept que Júlio Reis estava “à disposição” para entrevistas. A assessoria dele, porém, informou que o secretário estava viajando, e não retornou a pedidos de entrevistas com os delegados que investigam o caso.
O Ministério Público abriu um procedimento investigatório criminal, a cargo do Grupo de Atuação Especial de Repressão ao Crime Organizado, o Gaeco.
Em meio à profusão de notas oficiais, os moradores temem novas ações da polícia. “Tá todo mundo com medo. Tenho esposa e um filho de cinco anos. Moro aqui tem sete anos, ajudei em todas as ocupações. Mas agora não sei o que vou fazer”, disse Val.
A Vila 29 de Março é lar de dezenas de imigrantes haitianos. Uma delas já procura outro lugar para viver. “Nunca vi isso no Haiti. Lá a polícia não é assim. Quero ir embora da vila”.
The post Como a vingança pela morte de um PM terminou com a execução de duas pessoas e uma favela incendiada em Curitiba appeared first on The Intercept.
The race to fill New York City’s public advocate position is heating up, with at least a dozen candidates vying to fill the spot vacated by Letitia James, the incoming state attorney general. The public advocate position has served as a launching pad for higher office since its creation in 1993: Bill de Blasio was the third public advocate before becoming mayor of New York City. But perhaps more significantly, the public advocate is New York’s top watchdog post. They can introduce legislation, hold hearings, and bring lawsuits, and although they don’t have any voting power, they are well-positioned to hold the city government accountable to the people.
Just last month, a group of city council members unsuccessfully tried to abolish the office of public advocate, criticizing it as “unnecessary.” “They don’t do nothing,” Council Member Ruben Diaz Sr. told Politico at the time. “People have been talking about that for many years. I think that the time has come now.”
But Jumaane Williams, who narrowly lost the race for lieutenant governor early this year and is now considered a frontrunner for public advocate, disagrees. “I have always believed it was a very powerful office,” he told The Intercept, adding, “people don’t realize that it’s been around in some shape or form since the 1800s, and when they formalized it into public advocate’s office … they said they wanted this position to rise above politics.”
“I have effectively called out anyone who needs to, whether it’s the mayor, the governor, or the speaker, particularly in the past few terms, and that’s the type of courage that we need.”Williams views himself as someone who is willing to speak truth to power. “What we’ve often seen is that sometimes people from the state will call out the mayor, sometimes people from the city will call out the governor, people will rarely call out the leaders of their own house,” Williams said. “I have effectively called out anyone who needs to, whether it’s the mayor, the governor, or the speaker, particularly in the past few terms, and that’s the type of courage that we need.”
But critics have pushed back against the characterization of Williams as a “true” progressive, citing his previous statements on his personal opposition to LGBT causes and abortion. He has said that he supports legal rights for all when it comes to legislating, but his opponents note that Williams abstained from a 2014 bill designed to allow transgender people to change their sex on their birth certificate. His conservative views on these issues were enough to sink two previous bids for city council speaker.
When asked about his progressive critics, Williams argued that his opponents have misconstrued his positions in the past, and skeptics need only look at his legislative track record for reassurance. “I have always been and always will be a true progressive in every sense of the word,” he said. Williams touted his role in passing a gender-neutral bathroom bill, and said of his position on reproductive rights: “I’ve been consistent on making sure women have a right to access safe and legal abortions, period.”
Williams is a tenant organizer by training and describes himself as an “activist elected official.” He’s running on a platform that includes a housing plan pushing for universal rent control, ending mass incarceration, and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, who has worked with Williams on housing issues over the years, told The Intercept that when it comes to rent control and affordable housing, there’s “no better champion in the state than Jumaane.”
“I’ve literally put my body on the line.”He has been arrested several times for protesting issues ranging from immigration policy to the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “I’ve literally put my body on the line, whether it was civil disobedience that was planned to make a point, whether it was getting tossed around with 16 other people like a rag doll to prevent the deportation of Ravi Ragbir, or making sure that I have people on my mind, in my heart, when i’m getting these bills passed and changing hard policy that people say can’t be changed.”
In addition to housing, he wants to prioritize “fighting real estate effectively, not just in name but actually doing it,” he said. “Transparency and accountability is huge. We have to have someone, again, that has courage to step up. This Amazon deal is a clear example of transparency being missing.”
But Nomiki Konst, who is also running for public advocate, questioned Williams’s willingness to speak truth to power consistently. As critics have noted, Williams’s opposition to Amazon’s plan to develop headquarters in Queens, New York, is a recent development. Last year, Williams joined his colleagues, including public advocate candidate and former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, in signing a letter to urge Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to locate its headquarters in the city. The deal has infuriated activists and residents for a number of reasons, including because of the multibillion-dollar incentives package the state and city is giving the company.
“The worst types of politicians are the ones who reinvent their own bad histories, when it’s all on the record,” Konst said in an email. “Whether taking tens of thousands from the worst NY developers known for rezonings and gentrification or urging Amazon – a transnational corporation known for increasing homelessness and exploiting workers – to come to NY, we need someone who will serve the public’s interest and be independent as our next public advocate. Only then will we have someone who is truly committed to taking on the corruption head on that is hurting working New Yorkers and making this city unlivable.”
Williams responded that the next public advocate should be “someone with a proven track record of fighting for progressive causes and delivering tangible results.”
“I’d like to ask the other candidates running for this position: What have you done?”“I’ve demonstrated this over the past two decades as a community organizer and elected official by using my voice and legislation to take on the real estate lobby, address our city’s affordable housing crisis, hold the mayor accountable and more. I’d like to ask the other candidates running for this position: What have you done?”
Konst has argued that because she isn’t an elected official, she can call out the real estate industry and the political machine more effectively. In an interview with The Intercept from September, Konst said of Williams, “I think he did a tremendous job in the lieutenant governor’s race, and I was so proud to support him throughout the way, but I do believe the public advocate position should be a race that is independent of politics.”
Some of the other declared candidates include New York City Council Member Rafael Espinal Jr. and Assembly Member and Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Michael Blake. Several others have indicated that they intend to run without officially declaring, so it’s not entirely clear who will end up on the ballot yet.
Williams raised his public profile after campaigning alongside Cynthia Nixon as a fellow democratic socialist in advance of the September 13, 2018 primary election, and he came closer to beating his opponent than any other progressive in a statewide race. So far, he has clinched endorsements from the Working Families Party and the New York Progress Action Network. During his lieutenant governor campaign, Williams won the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and the Democratic Socialists of America. In the public advocate race, however, DSA and many of the other large progressive groups will likely refrain from endorsing anyone — perhaps due to the presence of Konst, a fellow DSA member.
Williams plans on applying his brand of activism to the public advocate position if elected. “The best elected leaders that I know are activists, so I’m going to do both,” he told The Intercept.
The post Is Jumaane Williams a True Progressive? A Rising Star Makes His Case to Be New York City’s Top Watchdog appeared first on The Intercept.
Por e-mail, Ana Carolina Fernandes Viegas findou um silêncio que já durava dez anos. Ela havia acabado de ler minha reportagem sobre as denúncias de abuso sexual contra o médico Felizardo Batista, um ginecologista e obstetra conceituado de Teresina, no Piauí, e me escreveu pedindo ajuda:
“Eu também fui abusada por ele! Não sei o que fazer depois de ler isso. Só sei que preciso de ajuda e tenho o dever de me posicionar ao lado das outras vítimas. Me ajuda, preciso de orientação.”
Carol se consultou com Felizardo Batista em 2008, quando o procurou por causa de um sangramento no início da gravidez. Ela estranhou a atitude do médico, que ficou passando os dedos em sua vagina, mas guardou o desconforto para si. Ao ler outros relatos, entendeu que o que ela tinha passado tem nome: abuso sexual.
Ela me mandou um áudio pelo WhatsApp explicando, ou tentando explicar, o que tinha acontecido. Estava desolada e eu mal conseguia entender as suas palavras. “Desculpa, eu não consigo parar de chorar. Eu não tinha noção, ainda era muito nova. Eu não sabia que isso era um assédio. Agora eu não sei o que fazer.”
Felizardo Batista, responsável pela área de ginecologia e obstetrícia de duas clínicas, foi denunciado – até agora – por 11 mulheres. O primeiro inquérito, no entanto, acabou arquivado: o promotor Raulino Neto afirmou que, apesar dos depoimentos das vítimas e dos laudos psicológicos atestando os abusos sexuais, não havia provas suficientes para acusar o médico.
O promotor é investigado pela Corregedoria do Ministério Público, que desconfiou da rapidez com que Raulino analisou o caso. Há evidências de que ele é amigo de Batista. Enquanto o médico era inocentado, mais vítimas o denunciaram, o que motivou um segundo inquérito.
A história de Carol não se diferencia dos relatos das vítimas de abuso sexual que só tiveram coragem de falar sobre o assunto depois de muitos anos, como é o caso de centenas de mulheres abusadas pelo médium João de Deus. Seja por vergonha, medo de julgamentos ou – caso dela – por não ter conseguido diferenciar abuso de um procedimento normal, essas histórias ficam abafadas até que alguém dê o passo inicial na denúncia.
“A gente só cai em si quando aquilo tem um nome. Eu só me vi como uma vítima de assédio sexual depois que li o artigo”, me disse Carol.
Depois de conversarmos, ela decidiu procurar a delegada Adriana Xavier, responsável pelo segundo inquérito contra o médico. O depoimento de Carol vai ajudar a reforçar a denúncia das vítimas que já testemunharam.
Naquela tarde com chuva, duas semanas após o primeiro contato que tivemos, Carol disse que estava mais calma e que já conseguia falar sobre tudo sem chorar. Estava enganada. Depois de alguns minutos de conversa, desabou novamente. “Eu fico pensando que se a minha amiga tivesse entrado comigo no consultório, naquele dia, isso não teria acontecido. De alguma forma ainda fica o sentimento de culpa.”
Ela contou sua história ao Intercept.
Eu tinha 22 anos. Estava com três meses de gravidez, sangrando, com medo. Fui na urgência e tive a infelicidade de cair nas mãos dele. Achei muito estranho aquele comportamento. Estranhei quando ele apalpou o meu seio e a forma diferente como ele tocava na minha vagina. Mas eu não sabia se a conduta de todos os ginecologistas homens era daquele jeito, porque eu só tinha me consultado com mulher. E também, naquele momento, eu só estava preocupada com o meu bebê.
Depois que ele limpou o sangue, ele ficou conversando comigo, só que com os dedos na minha vagina. Falou que quando eu estivesse tomando banho, eu tinha que limpar, mas disse isso passando o dedo ali, como se estivesse me ensinando. Achei aquilo uma grosseria estúpida. Eu não era mais uma menininha que não sabia me limpar. Isso me deixou muito constrangida e aí eu me fechei, me travei. Só que não comentei nada com ninguém.
O pior é porque a gente só vem cair em si que aquilo realmente aconteceu quando a gente tem um nome para isso. Eu só me vi naquela situação de uma vítima de assédio sexual depois que li o artigo. Porque eu me vi naquela situação das outras mulheres.
Durante esses dez anos eu recordava o que tinha acontecido porque o meu pai é amigo do pai dele. Nós éramos vizinhos e papai sempre falava desse médico. Todas as vezes eu sentia um desconforto, me sentia invadida como se estivesse passando por aquilo de novo, mas eu não sabia exatamente o que era. Só depois, quando conversei com a minha irmã, ela disse que isso acontecia porque minha memória acessava o trauma, mesmo que eu não soubesse conscientemente.
A delegada me perguntou se eu tinha visto as notícias das denúncias das mulheres em 2016, mas se eu tivesse visto eu teria denunciado naquela época. Se o que aconteceu comigo há 10 anos tivesse ocorrido agora, eu acredito que teria reconhecido o abuso. Eu acho que a gente só consegue identificar esse tipo de acontecimento na nossa vida quando tem informação e conhecimento de como aquilo se caracteriza.
‘Quando uma mulher denuncia um abusador, as outras mulheres se beneficiam porque a gente está fazendo por todas nós.’A reportagem do Intercept chegou até mim no grupo de WhatsApp de umas amigas. A pessoa enviou o link e comentou que o médico era um bandido tarado. Eu levei praticamente uma hora pra ler porque eu estava naquela agonia e chorando. Eu não sabia para onde correr, para quem pedir ajuda. Eu não sabia o que fazer. Me senti completamente desamparada. Aquele momento foi o mais doloroso, por lembrar tudo.
Hoje eu já consigo falar sem ficar daquele jeito. O olho ainda enche de lágrima, mas já me sinto mais forte e segura. Eu sei da importância de expor o que aconteceu comigo. Quando uma mulher denuncia um abusador, as outras mulheres se beneficiam porque a gente está fazendo por todas nós. Eu estou pelo menos fazendo a minha parte. Esperando o que vai vir de resultado. Esse silenciamento que a gente tem vem de longe. A gente sempre é culpada, sempre procurou. Porque vestiu uma roupa, porque saiu num horário, porque foi em um médico homem e não em uma mulher. Sempre a culpa é nossa, só que não tinha que ser.
Fiquei com medo de falar para as minhas amigas mais próximas por medo do julgamento. Só que depois eu caí em mim que eu não tenho culpa. Eu sou uma vítima. Assim como nenhuma das outras vítimas têm culpa. Aí eu resolvi falar pra elas e pra minha irmã. E depois que consegui me acalmar um pouquinho mandei mensagem para o meu marido. Ele estava trabalhando e eu disse que precisava que ele voltasse pra casa o mais rápido possível, que depois eu explicava direitinho, mas que naquele momento eu só precisava chorar.
Queria dizer para as mulheres que foram vítimas que elas não estão sozinhas. A culpa não é nossa.’A primeira coisa que vem na cabeça é o medo de repressão, de ser apontada como a que facilita o abuso, quando na realidade não é. Eu acho que muitas das mulheres estão em relacionamentos abusivos com pessoas que não vão dar apoio para elas denunciarem. São homens que não apoiam porque aquilo vai ferir a masculinidade deles. Nem todo mundo vai se expor.
O meu marido foi maravilhoso. Ele virou pra mim e disse: “a gente vai na delegacia. Eu vou com você”. E isso foi uma das coisas mais importantes… estar com alguém que está comigo. Um momento desse a gente se sente completamente desamparada, se sente perdida, sem chão. E o apoio de alguém que a gente ama é fundamental.
Só que existem várias questões para as mulheres se calarem. Pelo trabalho, por causa do meio em que vivem. Às vezes a pessoa tem um poder aquisitivo alto e passou por um abuso, mas se chegar a falar que foi vítima, vai ser um escândalo. É como se a vida da pessoa fosse desmoronar.
Eu acho que a mulher tem que falar com uma mulher. Porque muitas vezes o homem que está ali para te ajudar também pode te julgar.’Eu decidi denunciar porque eu quis que não acontecesse com outra mulher. Quis que ele parasse, que ele fosse parado. Enquanto homens não respeitarem a gente, essas coisas vão continuar acontecendo. No primeiro momento que eu fui falar com a delegada, ela me disse que eu teria que voltar e iria falar com o delegado. Eu acho que a mulher tem que falar com uma mulher. Porque muitas vezes o homem que está ali para te ajudar também pode te julgar. Uma mulher tem um pouco mais de empatia com outra, pra que a gente consiga se abrir pra uma estranha. Então eu acho que o primeiro passo seria ter mais mulheres para tratar de mulheres. Fiquei mais arredia e preocupada de falar com um homem, mas eu já havia começado e não queria dar pra trás. Eu tinha que seguir.
Queria dizer para as mulheres que foram vítimas que elas não estão sozinhas. A culpa não é nossa. Precisamos ter força e apoiar pessoas que precisam de nós, apoiar outras mulheres. Ninguém pode nos julgar e devemos procurar os meios de educar nossas filhas e nossos filhos para serem pessoas mais humanas. Para a gente ser mais aberta e um pouquinho mais atenta. Eu só quero que isso pare. E o que for pra gente fazer, a gente que já mostrou a cara, deve fazer. Tem muita mulher que está precisando só de uma ajuda, de uma direção.
Agora não é o momento, mas futuramente eu vou falar para minha filha. Eu sei que a percepção dela com relação ao que é assédio sexual vai ser diferente. Quero que a minha filha saiba que a mãe dela está do lado dela, como mulher, como amiga, como mãe. Uma pessoa a quem ela pode recorrer.
Depois de tudo, passados 10 anos, eu fiquei pensando… Meu Deus, se a minha amiga tivesse entrado comigo naquele consultório, será que teria sido diferente? De alguma forma ainda fica o sentimento de culpa.
The post ‘Por que demorei 10 anos para denunciar o abuso sexual que sofri’ appeared first on The Intercept.
Sen. Bernie Sanders gives a speech at a “get out the vote” campaign event with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Christine Hallquist on Nov. 4, 2018 in Burlington, Vt.
Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Who will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in 2020?
Will it be Sen. Bernie Sanders, who came second in 2016? A growing number of voices, both liberal and conservative, loudly disagree. “I think his moment is passing,” says Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. “Bernie Sanders is Shrinking,” declared a headline in the Weekly Standard (only a few weeks before the neocon magazine, ironically, closed down). “Democrats will soon decide that Bernie Sanders is an indulgence they cannot afford,” opined The Economist.
Yet the arguments that these diverse critics offer against another Sanders bid for the White House seem to be either overstated, irrelevant, or flat-out false. Consider five of the most common criticisms of the independent senator from Vermont:
He’s Behind in the PollsIt is Joe Biden, and not Bernie Sanders, who has been ahead in almost all of the opinion polls so far. A new survey out of Iowa finds the former vice president leading the field with 30 percent support from Democratic voters, followed by Sanders far behind at 13 percent, and rising star Beto O’Rourke, snapping at his heels with 11 percent.
Other polls have produced similar results. But not all of them. A new straw poll of progressives by Democracy for America, released on Tuesday, gave Sanders a 21-point lead over Biden.
But here’s the bigger question: Are the polls really relevant at this stage? The election is 23 months away, and none of the main runners and riders have formally announced that they’re even running yet.
For comparison, guess who came top in a CNN survey of potential Republican presidential candidates in December 2014, 23 months before the 2016 presidential election? It was Jeb Bush, at 24 percent, with a double-digit lead over his nearest rival, Chris Christie. Ted Cruz, who would end up coming in second in the 2016 GOP primaries, was eighth place with 4 percent. Donald Trump’s name didn’t even make the list.
He’s Too White“Mr. Sanders fought Mrs. Clinton to a draw among white voters,” concluded an examination of the exit poll data by the Wall Street Journal in 2016. “The decisive edge for Mrs. Clinton: She won African-Americans by more than 50 percentage points.”
Hence the longstanding narrative that Sanders has a problem with black folks.
Except … that’s not quite true. A whole host of prominent African-American figures — including Keith Ellison, Cornel West, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Spike Lee, among others — backed Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and then-press secretary Symone Sanders were key surrogates of his.
In 2016, the Vermont senator’s problem was with older black voters — not black voters per se. In fact, according to polling by YouGov, Sanders “fought Clinton to a near draw with people of color between the ages of 18 and 44,” and according to polling by GenForward, “among African American young adults who indicated they voted in the primaries, a majority, 54 percent, said they voted for Bernie Sanders.”
Since 2016, Sanders has worked hard to make further inroads into African-American communities, helping to bolster the insurgent campaigns of up-and-coming black politicians, such as Florida’s Andrew Gillum. Last week, a CNN poll found that Sanders had a higher approval rating, at 58 percent, with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate. So, will this latest survey put an end to the black-voters-dislike-Bernie canard? I doubt it. As my colleague Briahna Gray has observed: “Bernie Sanders doesn’t have a black problem — he has a pundit problem.”
He’s Too OldCome Election Day, November 2020, Sanders will be 79 years old, which would make him the oldest person to ever run for the White House.
Yet his likely Republican opponent, Trump, will be the previous record-holder. He was 70 in 2016 and will be 74 in 2020. Yes, the overweight sitting president, who eats junk food, doesn’t exercise, and refuses to release his medical records.
In terms of the Democratic primaries, Sanders will be 79 in 2020, but Biden will be 77 and Elizabeth Warren will be 71. Oh, and did you know that Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi and her top deputy Steny Hoyer are both older than the Vermont senator?
So why should his age be held against him?
He Isn’t a DemocratSo what? He may be an independent but he caucuses with Senate Democrats and is their chair of “outreach.” He won 13 million votes in the 2016 Democratic primaries.
Despite refusing to join the Democrats in the wake of the 2016 election, the party’s base still adores him. As of October 2018, he had a whopping 78 percent approval rating with Democratic voters.
He’s a SocialistAgain, so what? While it may indeed harm him in the presidential election, with a clear majority of Americans claiming that they wouldn’t vote for a “socialist,” it certainly won’t hurt him in the Democratic primaries. According to polling from Gallup, a majority of Democrats have a positive view of socialism — in fact, Democrats have “a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism.”
Even in the presidential election itself, I suspect Republicans would find it difficult to demonize Sanders with the S-word, having deployed it to try and smear the centrist Barack Obama for eight long years. Going beyond the label itself, Sanders’s left-wing policy agenda is hugely popular with the electorate — even with hardcore Republicans.
Let me repeat, however, something I said in a recent column on Warren and 2020: I am not endorsing Bernie Sanders for president or saying that he is the perfect person to battle Trump. The Republicans will throw the kitchen sink at him, and the “socialist” attack line might get some traction with independents. Some of the candidates he backed in the midterms won historic victories, but plenty of others lost.
The junior senator from Vermont has also made his own series of gaffes and misjudgments, especially on race and identity issues, and needs to do much more to woo older black voters in the South. He has been far too reluctant to challenge the racism and bigotry of the Trump base and far too eager to blame the president’s 2016 victory on “economic anxiety.” On foreign policy, Sanders has moved further to the left since his clash with Clinton and is “quietly remaking the Democrats’ foreign policy in his own image,” but he still has a long way to go.
There is also a strong case for the Democratic candidate who takes on the racist and sexist Trump in two years to be a woman, a person of color, or both.
Nevertheless, the case for Sanders in 2020 is as strong as it was in 2016 — if not stronger. He now has much better name recognition, a standing army of loyal and experienced activists, an unrivaled social media presence, an authenticity that cannot be bought or taught, and a string of substantive policy wins under his belt, from big-name Democratic support for his “Medicare for All” bill to the Stop BEZOS Act to the historic Senate vote on Yemen last week.
Will he emerge victorious? In an age of Trump, predictions are a fool’s game. The Democratic primaries will feature more than a dozen talented, ambitious, and experienced presidential wannabes, from a bevy of senators and governors to a popular former vice president.
But ignore the opinion polls and the bogus arguments against him: whether you like him or not, Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner right now.
The post Critics Say Bernie Sanders Is Too Old, Too White, and Too Socialist to Run for President in 2020. They’re Wrong. appeared first on The Intercept.
A painstaking reconstruction of a series of Israeli airstrikes that killed two Palestinian boys on the roof of a building in Gaza City this summer suggests that Israel’s military tampered with its own surveillance footage of the attack, possibly to conceal evidence that the children were visible to the drone pilots who carried out what were supposed to be nonlethal “warning strikes.”
Luai Kahil, left, and Amir al-Nimra, shortly before they were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on July 14.
The visual investigation of the July 14 killing of Luai Kahil and Amir al-Nimra, both 14, was carried out by Forensic Architecture, a research group based in London that works with communities affected by state violence (and has previously partnered with The Intercept), and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that documents Israel’s abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories it has controlled since 1967.
Forensic Architecture created a detailed visual timeline of the incident, which offers compelling evidence that a video report shared on Twitter by the Israel Defense Forces in the immediate aftermath of the attack distorted the sequence of strikes to give the false impression that the roof was unoccupied when the missile that killed the boys was fired.
Moments ago, IDF fighter jets struck a high-rise building in the Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. The building was a Hamas training facility. A tunnel was dug under the building & used for underground warfare training. This tunnel is part of a Hamas terror tunnel network pic.twitter.com/M3C53RKMaC
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) July 14, 2018
Using open-source visual evidence — including a rooftop selfie taken by the boys shortly before the airstrike that killed them, timestamped security camera footage of the sequence of Israeli strikes, witness video of the mangled bodies of the two boys after they had been torn apart by shrapnel from what Israel described as the first in a series of four “warning strikes,” and a YouTube cooking video recorded by three children in a nearby kitchen during the attack — Forensic Architecture concluded that the Israeli army had misleadingly substituted footage of the third missile strike for what it described as the first impact, which had killed the boys.
Why did @IDF take the trouble to switch the clips around? Were Luai Kahil and Amir a-Nimrah visible in the missing clip? It's unlikely we'll ever know – though people are visible in footage of the other strikes. pic.twitter.com/Iv7aLNGJuf
— Forensic Architecture (@ForensicArchi) December 17, 2018
According to the investigators — who also relied on witness testimony, local news footage, and an architectural model of the destroyed building in Gaza City’s al-Katiba Square — by the time the third strike hit the building, nine minutes after the first missile, the bodies of the boys had already been evacuated from the roof.
Eyal Weizman, the Israeli architect who founded Forensic Architecture and was the principal investigator of the strike that killed the two boys, argues that Israel’s own video of the incident proves that the army’s entire concept of warning strikes is flawed. “In a city like Gaza, subject to so many attacks, of so many different types, it is unreasonable to expect civilians to become munitions experts, and to understand that a small missile is a message rather than the normal attempt to kill and destroy,” Weizman wrote in an email to The Intercept on Wednesday. “We can see in this case a demonstration of this misunderstanding. When the first responders ran to the roof to evacuate the teens after the first strike, it was likely because they did not understand that this was a warning, as they wouldn’t run onto the roof of a building about to be demolished.”
Hagai El-Ad, executive director of B’Tselem, told The Intercept that the video posted on Twitter by the Israeli army, along with the boast that the attack demonstrated “the IDF’s intelligence and operational capabilities, which will become deeper and stronger as necessary,” aroused suspicions from the start, since it seemed to include surveillance footage of all four initial strikes but showed no trace of the two teenage boys killed by the first blast.
“We knew from the outset, from our field research, from testimonies we collected, as well as from social media, that Amir and Luai were on the roof of the building when they were killed. They were in plain sight, in broad daylight, on a large, empty roof — in principle, as exposed to aerial surveillance as one could be. Yet in the video footage released by the Israeli army, they are not seen. This was very difficult to reconcile, so it was important for us to try and not leave this unanswered,” El-Ad explained in an email.
“Through the expertise of Forensic Architecture,” he added, “it was possible, step by step, to understand what happened on July 14, including how the Israeli army omitted the first ‘warning’ strike — the lethal one which killed the two teens — from the video it released, replacing it with footage of the third strike, shot from a different camera.”
Since actual footage of the first strike seems to have been concealed by the Israeli army, Amit Gilutz, a B’Tselem spokesperson, said in a statement that “we don’t know if the boys were visible to the military before the first strike.” As The Intercept reported earlier this year, however, Israel’s military has repeatedly claimed that its surveillance drones give remote operators the ability to call off airstrikes when they detect the presence of civilians near targets intended for destruction.
In this case, since other figures — the bystanders who rushed to the roof to try to save the boys — were clearly visible in surveillance video of the second strike, the Forensic Architecture investigators are convinced that the two boys should have been visible in the unreleased footage.
After the Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday that the Forensic Architecture video report was the first visual evidence it had seen of the two boys’ presence on the roof, the researchers responded by daring the army to produce the surveillance footage of the first strike. The investigators tweeted at the Israeli military: “share with us the footage of the first warning strike to hit the Katibah building on 14 July 2018, and we’ll show you Luai and Amir.”
The Forensic Architecture timeline also suggests that an Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, lied to the New York Times on the day of the attack, when he claimed that the first four smaller-scale strikes, intended to warn civilians to evacuate the area, were fired more than an hour before the building was blown up. According to the security camera footage obtained by Forensic Architecture, a high-intensity missile was fired at the building at 6:02 p.m. that day, less than 17 minutes after the first warning strike that killed the boys.
Nonetheless, the perception that Israel takes extraordinary measures to warn Palestinian civilians to evacuate before dangerous bombing begins in Gaza is widespread among Israelis. Just hours after the boys were killed on July 14, an Israeli civilian in the nearby town of Sderot, Refael Yifrah, complained in a radio interview that she had been warned by the local civil defense authorities to take cover just seconds before an incoming missile fired from Gaza exploded at around 6:15 p.m. “It’s better to be in Gaza where they get warning that they’re going to be fired upon in one neighborhood or another and they evacuate,” Yifrah said. “Here, there’s an alert, no one knows where it’s going to land.”
Eyal Weizman has long contested Israel’s claim that firing warning shots to encourage civilians to evacuate is permissible under international humanitarian law.
“Israel has been using warning tactics for many years,” Weizman wrote during Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza in 2014. “They started as phoned-through messages, informing people that they had minutes to collect their belongings and vacate the building before it was bombed. Finding that they couldn’t always get through, however, the Israeli Army began to use so-called ‘roof knock’ strikes. These involve the firing of a low- or non-explosive missile — usually from a drone — at the roof of a building that is to be destroyed. A bomb that devastates the building follows the missile a short time later.”
“Israeli military lawyers argue that if residents are warned, and do not evacuate, then they can be considered legitimate collateral damage,” he added. “Under this interpretation of the law, the civilian victims become human shields. This is a gross misuse of international law. It is illegal to fire at civilians, even if the intention is to warn them. It is ridiculous to ask them to understand, in the commotion and chaos of war, that being shot at is a warning — and it is outrageous to claim that this is undertaken to save their lives.”
Weizman’s team noted in its report on the killing of the Palestinian boys this summer that video recorded by witnesses who rushed to evacuate Luai and Amir after the first strike showed a fragmentation pattern on the roof identified by weapons experts as “consistent with the explosion of a munition loaded with shrapnel — specifically designed as a lethal weapon.”
“The fact that they shoot munitions of enhanced lethality” in the guise of warning shots “is outrageous,” Weizman said in a recent interview with The Intercept in London. “It’s not even just like a kind of standard explosive,” he added. “They say that a warning strike should be noisy only … like a firework, but the design of that is to tear through flesh. If you look at the catalogues, the way they describe those fragmentation shrapnel sleeves is exactly to increase the lethality of those strikes.”
His team’s reconstruction of what happened in Gaza was “very much a way of honoring two lives that have been lost,” Weizman added, but also a way to draw attention to Israel’s policy on warning strikes. “It’s so important because the issue of warning shots is exactly exemplifying the entire paradox of Israel’s self-perception as a humanitarian party or the most moral army in the world,” Weizman said.
Understanding what happened in al-Katiba Square last summer was not just about “showing the IDF is being dishonest about the way they present it,” he said, “it’s also allowing us to ask much larger questions about the use of warning, and whether it’s legal or illegal.” Those questions, for Weizman, “go right to the heart of the humanitarian paradox that underlines Israel’s attitude toward Gaza — that is, Israel saying, ‘We abide by the law.’ We show how a certain interpretation of international law effectively could proliferate violence rather than contain it. It’s kind of the paradox of the lesser evil that is within that approach, i.e. ‘If we warn, we can bomb civilian targets, hence we will warn and proliferate and this will allow us to use that tool much more widely.'”
El-Ad, the B’Tselem director, also stressed that his organization has no faith whatsoever in Israel’s Military Advocate General to investigate the killing of the boys or the apparent faking of video evidence by the army spokesperson’s office. “To be clear: We did not publish what happened on July 14 because we wanted the MAG to ‘examine’ or ‘investigate.’ Based on hundreds of case files B’Tselem worked on throughout the years, we know that an announcement by the army that they will investigate in nothing more than the beginning of an orchestrated whitewash, eventually leading to the closing of yet another file with impunity. We have no illusions in this regard,” El-Ad told The Intercept on Tuesday.
“We published the facts of the July 14 killing of Amir al-Nimra and Luai Kahil because their families deserve to know how they died, and because we at B’Tselem still hold that facts do matter. It is true that just knowing the facts does not suffice in order to bring about accountability or end injustice, but they are the foundation for any such outcome,” he added.
“As human beings we should be morally outraged by what happened on July 14, because it is simply that: morally outrageous,” El-Ad continued. “Our hope is that the public, in Israel and around the world, will be able to see reality through the smokescreen of Israeli propaganda and demand a different future — and that the international community will finally stand up to its obligations in order to bring that future about.”
The post Israel Tampered With Video of Strike That Killed Two Palestinian Boys, Investigators Say appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Lindsey Graham participate in a roundtable on the First Step Act in Gulfport, Miss., on Nov. 26, 2018.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
The bill has been hailed as an historic effort; in a sense, it is. Its enactment would constitute one of the most significant federal reform efforts in decades. For the bill to pass under the presidency of Trump, an open supporter of a racist law-and-order approach to criminal justice, would make the First Step Act an even greater success.
Yet the fact that the First Step Act is the bill that could make it to the president’s desk is not a sign of the possibilities of bipartisan progress on justice — instead, it points to bipartisanship’s limits.
To call the First Step Act limited would be an understatement. The legislation would hardly make a dent in America’s mass incarceration problem.To call the First Step Act limited would be an understatement. The legislation could make a crucial material difference to the lives of thousands of incarcerated people — something that should not be dismissed — but it would hardly make a dent in America’s mass incarceration problem.
If the bill is actually a first step toward a more robust process of ending mass incarceration policies, that would be one thing. But, all too often, when the bar for progressive legislation is set low in the service of compromise with intransigent Republicans, tepid reform becomes the extent of the fight, not a pathway to more profound change. Just consider the never-ending battle over the Affordable Care Act.
If Democrats want to prove that they are more committed to justice than to realpolitik, no time should be wasted celebrating the success of the Koch-backed, Trump-endorsed First Step Act. More comprehensive criminal justice reform must be an agenda priority for the Democrat-controlled House. If not, conservatives will once again set the fulcrum of debate, and this minor reform will be framed as radical.
There are some grounds for optimism on this front. California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris took to Twitter on Monday to stress her dissatisfaction with the bill, for which she voted nonetheless. “[T]o be clear, the FIRST STEP Act is very much just that — a first step,” she wrote. “It is a compromise of a compromise, and we ultimately need to make far greater reforms if we are to right the wrongs that exist in our criminal justice system.”
The reforms in the First Step Act would be very real — just not very big. Measures included in the bill would retroactively end the discrepancy in federal sentences for drug offenses involving crack and the powder form of cocaine; this would reduce jail time for thousands of prisoners already serving time for crack offenses. Federal judges would be granted more flexibility from mandatory minimum sentences, and some mandatory minimums would be reduced. The bill’s provisions also include increased funding for educational and vocational training programs, and would allow prisoners to earn greater sentence reductions through good behavior and vocational training. Up to 4,000 of the 180,000 people incarcerated in federal prison could see early release on the new good behavior standard.
Earlier this year, Harris was among the members of Congress who withheld support for a previous version of the bill on the grounds that it excluded far too many incarcerated people and would deploy a flawed system to determine which cases might pass muster for early release.
The system for determining early release relied on an algorithm that ProPublica found to reiterate the justice system’s racism and socioeconomic bias. It’s little wonder that the Koch brothers, with vested interests in diminishing punishments for white-collar crime, were able to throw support behind such bias-maintaining reform. Some updates to the bill garnered support from previously resistant senators like Harris and Cory Booker, D-N.J., but its limitations remain stark; the risk assessments, for example, will still rely on problematic algorithmic selections.
Yet even those seeking bolder reforms already find themselves on the back foot, forced to defend what is meant to be a mere first step. Republicans Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and John Kennedy of Louisiana — longtime opponents of the reform effort — attempted to slip in a number of “poison pill” amendments to the bill prior to the Senate voting. While unsuccessful, their aim was to further weaken the already feeble legislation. They said that the bill needed further provisions to ensure that violent offenders are not released — though the current bill in no way risks that. In fact, the very idea that so-called violent criminals should benefit from any reasonable reforms is so far off the table that it’s on the floor — ignoring completely that a serious challenge to mass incarceration must deal with these incarcerated people as well.
The First Step Act functions as a compromise precisely because it is not a challenge to the carceral state.Tactics like Cotton’s, even when they fail, further entrench a conservative fulcrum, over which the most minor reforms must be defended. It’s a trap into which civility-fetishizing liberals are prone to fall.
The First Step Act functions as a compromise precisely because it is not a challenge to the carceral state. Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee made this all too clear in a National Review piece expressing his support for the bill. “Unlike some reformers, I don’t think our justice system is fundamentally broken, unjust, or corrupt,” Lee wrote, before noting that his Christian faith and conservative sensibility lead him to make room for (some people’s) redemption — oh, and of course the desire to save people money.
While bipartisanship entails finding compromises with those like Lee who believe in the fundamental justness of our justice system, its reformist results will find low limits. Against a political culture that lauds compromise, the push to end the brutal carceral system must be uncompromising.
The post The First Step Act Is Not Sweeping Criminal Justice Reform — and the Risk Is That It Becomes the Only Step appeared first on The Intercept.
No Labels, a group that works to elect centrist candidates from both parties, has been grappling internally with conflicts of interest tied to its use of political consulting firms linked to the group’s leadership, according to documents and email correspondence obtained by The Intercept.
It’s been a rough few weeks of public scrutiny for No Labels. A Daily Beast investigation published earlier this month revealed that despite the group’s professed interest in reducing partisanship, it had solicited money from wealthy, partisan donors, many of them from the world of finance, on both sides of the political spectrum, and had considered making Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi a “bogeyman.”
The group was also in the news because the No Labels-backed House Problem Solvers Caucus, comprised of 24 Democrats and 24 Republicans, was organizing to block Pelosi’s bid for speaker of the House unless she agreed to a series of their proposed legislative reforms. The Democratic chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus is New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a protégé of Mark Penn, who urged Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama as un-American in the 2008 presidential primary. As The Intercept previously reported, Penn, a longtime partisan and the husband of No Labels’s head Nancy Jacobson, is closely involved with the group’s work.
Jacobson pushed back on Daily Beast questions about Penn’s involvement in No Labels as “shameful and sexist.” She asked if a man were running the organization, would reporters still suggest — “based on little to no evidence — that his spouse is serving as the puppet master behind the scenes?”
Emails obtained by The Intercept show Jacobson consulting her husband on No Labels decision-making, and Penn himself executing strategy for No Labels campaigns. This past May, for instance, when discussing ad buys for the congressional race in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley district (No Labels backed John Morganelli, an anti-choice, pro-Trump Democrat who lost the primary to Susan Wild), Jacobson looped her husband in on discussions and said, “Mark penn can you advise?” Penn was similarly asked to weigh in on ad spending and strategy on behalf of Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., whom No Labels backed in a primary race.
The Intercept confirmed the authenticity of the emails with three sources who previously worked with No Labels.
A lawsuit filed in September by the political consulting firm Applecart alleged that No Labels shorted them on millions of dollars, and terminated their relationship to hire consultants with financial ties to Jacobson and Penn. No Labels maintains that Applecart’s performance was unsatisfactory. Dan Webb, an attorney representing political organizations allied with No Labels, provided The Intercept a statement on behalf of the group. “No Labels is currently in litigation with Applecart, which limits what we can say at this time. Having botched their work for the PACs, Applecart is attempting to spin a false narrative in an effort to harm the PACs and No Labels,” he said.
In 2015, Penn founded Stagwell Group, a private-equity firm that soon bought Democratic consultancy firm SKDKnickerbocker. Stagwell also purchased a polling firm, Harris, and a minority stake in the Republican consulting company, Targeted Victory. Penn remains president and managing partner at Stagwell.
No Labels has employed the services of Harris for polling and uses Victory Passport, an affiliate of Targeted Victory, for its online fundraising. Emails show SKDK’s Andrew Shipley and Bill Knapp also working with No Labels — and Penn directly — on television ads in the 2018 primary season, though SKDK maintains that the company did not work with No Labels on anything.
One email Shipley sent in March to Jacobson, Penn, and others has the subject line “Tentative Media Buy” and is addressed to “Mark and team.”
Another March email cited Shipley as having worked on a television ad for Lipinski, though Jacobson replied that “SKDK was conflicted out” — suggesting that Shipley had either stopped at some point or been removed at the beginning.
In an earlier exchange from February, Jacobson emailed Penn for his advice on how to spend money in the Lipinski race. “Do you have a position if we should spend more?”
“My position is you need to add cable from here to election,” Penn told her.
Jacobson responded by saying that No Labels currently had no plans for cable, but she brought other members of the team into the email exchange to ask if they could trim their budgets so that Penn’s strategy could be executed.
Two days later, emails between Jacobson, Penn, and Knapp show Knapp explaining that SKDK couldn’t work on an ad for Lipinski because his company had clients on the other side of the contest: NARAL and Planned Parenthood were major SKDK clients backing primary challenger Marie Newman. Human Rights Campaign was also heavily involved in backing Newman and has been a client of SKDK.
He offered to refer the work to a separate consulting firm, 2k Strategies, owned by a former SKDK employee, but remain involved. “I would/could be on a first organizing call and will bird dog the creative to make sure it’s right,” Knapp told them on February 26.
Penn clearly believed that he was working with Knapp on the Lipinski project. Later that day, he emailed Jacobson, “Tomorrow cleared to get the ad done with bills [sic] team.”
By March 3, things were moving, and No Labels had budgeted $408,000 for an ad buy, which Knapp, with Shipley copied on the chain, was put in charge of placing. “You are scoping the buy and I’ll then decide who to use based on which one I like better,” Penn wrote to Knapp.
On March 5, Shipley wrote back to “Mark and team” with the news that “we had to go with a new buyer since two of our buyers are conflicted out between the race [and] the IE.”
Shipley on March 7 noted that a $21,000 bill for work to Penn and Jacobson was on its way. “And we have a production bill coming shortly for about 21k,” he wrote.
Knapp told The Intercept that he offered to help as a volunteer and did so by connecting Jacobson to a different media consultant. “We decided as a firm to not work for Lapinski [sic] directly or through any third party organization/group,” he wrote in an email. “We also long ago decided as a firm not work [sic] for No Labels. Nancy is a long time friend and I sometimes look at scripts and help her, but I don’t work for her organization. We didn’t work on the race as a firm, we did not produce an ad for Lapinski [sic] and we have never worked for No Labels.” He said that the vendor erroneously sent the invoice to SKDK, so Shipley simply forwarded it to No Labels, but no money changed hands.
Newman’s challenge to Lipinski — who is anti-choice, opposed to marriage equality, hostile to immigration, and against a $15 an hour minimum wage — was the first high-profile insurgent primary of the 2018 cycle, and she had the broad support of major progressive groups. No Labels spent more than $1 million and made the difference in the race, in the assessment of operatives who worked on both sides. On Election Day on March 21, Lipinski narrowly beat Newman by just over 2,000 votes.
Officials with SKDK also got involved in the Pennsylvania race. An email on May 7 shows Shipley working on a No Labels ad for that contest, with Shipley writing, “We are working on the edit and graphics and plan to have something to share later this afternoon. In terms of a voiceover, do you have a preference of male versus female. My original thinking was going with the white male.”
Later that day, Shipley forwarded a script to No Labels. “Can we confirm this being [sic] paid for by United for Progress,” he asked, referring to a No Labels Super PAC. A No Labels consultant replied that, in fact, it was being funded by a different one, called “United Together.”
Shipley did not return a request for comment, but Knapp said that Shipley shared with him The Intercept’s inquiry and that SKDK did not work on the Pennsylvania race. “Ship knows Nancy and connected the media consultant with our production facilities and Shipley helped coordinate that,” Knapp said. “My recollection was it was a positive ad. Again, we didn’t do the race and did not make money doing the race.”
Additional emails and documents reviewed by The Intercept point to other potential conflicts of interest involving No Labels and Penn’s Stagwell Group.
In August 2017, Jacobson sent an email to No Labels staff, saying, “For republican races would like to use targeted victory.” Targeted Victory is the firm part-owned by Penn’s Stagwell Group.
On April 10, 2018, back when No Labels was still working with Applecart, Jacobson sent an email to an Applecart consultant, copying Targeted Victory CEO Zac Moffatt and wrote, “Matt you are using targeted victory for digital ads for Republicans right?”
And in late March, according to an email reviewed by The Intercept, a representative for a No Labels donor expressed concern over the organization having “perceived or potential” conflicts of interest. They urged Jacobson to disclose potential conflicts to the No Labels governing board. “We believe that all Governing Board members need to be aware of the situation in order to prevent any misunderstanding and confusion going forward,” they wrote.
No Labels then worked to prepare a list of potential conflicts. In an email dated April 13, Jacobson noted that No Labels is “no longer using targeted victory” and suggested leaving that company off its disclosure list. “Why open the door?” she asked.
In a memo prepared for the No Labels’s governing board, the group outlines business it did with Marlin Strategies, which is run by a former SKDK staffer, and Schule Media, which was referred to No Labels by SKDK. The memo says, “Mark Penn wrote and advised on the [Marlin Strategies] TV ad” but “did so pro bono.” With regards to Targeted Victory, No Labels disclosed just that the company worked on the Lipinski race.
The memo also listed business No Labels did with Rising Tide Interactive, a Democratic digital advertising firm founded by Eli Kaplan, the fiancé (and now husband) of No Labels’ vice president and chief of staff, Sasha Borowsky. Borowsky worked at No Labels from 2012 until this past October.
Mark Penn did not respond to questions about the specific nature of the work he has done for No Labels on a paid or unpaid basis, and whether he has recommended that No Labels work with any companies in which he has a vested financial interest.
The post Emails Show Political Group No Labels Gave Work to Firms Linked to Founder’s Husband appeared first on The Intercept.
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