My nightmare started at the Dubai airport.
I checked in and, after a quick coffee, my mother, who was living in Dubai at the time, walked me to border control to say goodbye. It was May 2018, and I had spent the past two weeks staying with her as I carried out research for my doctoral thesis. We exchanged a hug, and I waited in a queue before handing over my passport for immigration checks. Then, suddenly, as my travel documents were being examined, about a dozen security officers swarmed around me and said I was being detained.
What ensued was a seven-month ordeal, one in which I—a British academic—was kept in solitary confinement by the intelligence service of a friendly government. One in which basic demands, such as access to a lawyer, were denied. And one in which my wife and, eventually, my government had to publicly push for my release before I was finally freed.
[Hassan Hassan: Arab countries are a minefield for scholars]
For years, I had been researching the United Arab Emirates’ national-security strategy, a subject I was well versed in—I had previously worked in the country’s defense and security sector, often on the same topic as my thesis. Before leaving for the Gulf, I submitted my research plans to Durham University, where I was getting my doctoral degree. The school’s third-party risk-assessment firm found nothing sensitive with my plans and cleared me for travel to the UAE from both an ethical and a safety standpoint.
All of that mattered little to the Emirati intelligence-service interrogators—in their view, I had been collecting information on the country’s security installations and procedures, and there was nothing I could say to change their mind.
At the airport, the circumstances of my detention were intimidating and confusing. I asked what was happening, but no clear explanation was given. I asked for a lawyer, and was rebuffed. I quickly told my mother to contact the British embassy and inform a lawyer. Before I knew it, I was blindfolded and put in the back of a car, which took me to Abu Dhabi.
For the next six weeks, I suffered intense and grueling daily interrogations, sometimes for 15 hours at a time. I was repeatedly threatened with physical torture, life imprisonment, and removal to an overseas military base unless I confessed to what my captors were accusing me of. I was kept practically incommunicado, able to make only two brief calls to my mother to report (falsely, under duress) that I was well. On one occasion, the interrogators even asked me to steal documents from Britain’s foreign ministry. Throughout that time, I did not speak to my wife, a lawyer, or a British diplomat, considerably worsening my mental health (I already suffered from depression and anxiety).
At first, I tried refuting the intelligence service’s claims, and insisted that I was innocent. This was met only with increasing hostility. The psychological pressure, compounded by the isolation I was subjected to, finally pushed me to give in. I confessed, signing a statement in Arabic (a language I do not speak or read) that said I was a member of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service. I had hoped, as my captors had suggested on several occasions, that matters would be resolved swiftly, without serious repercussions for me or my loved ones, if I “came clean.”
I truly believed my detention was a mistake, and, indeed, once I signed the confession I was allowed a meeting with a British consular official. Our conversation lasted six minutes, was supervised by guards and the state prosecutor overseeing my case himself, and was cut short when I was asked by the consular officer if I had been tortured. With that, it became clear that my initial hopes had been misplaced. My next visit from the consulate was nearly three months later. I continued to be held in solitary confinement and interrogated without a lawyer. I finally saw my wife in late July 2018—she had traveled to the United Arab Emirates, desperate for answers and pushing for a diplomatic solution. I had no idea she was coming, and our 45-minute meeting was also supervised in its entirety. We were not allowed to discuss anything pertaining to my case, but the fact that she was allowed to see me at all gave us hope that the situation would improve. Instead, I was taken back to solitary confinement, where my grim routine resumed.
[Read: Watching Britain’s influence shrink in real time]
I was arbitrarily given high doses of medication, including antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, antihistamines, and sleeping pills, and as my requests for any further visitations were denied, my depression worsened. I was vomiting on a daily basis, I attempted self-harm, and my suicidal thoughts intensified. When I was sentenced to life imprisonment in November, little changed—I was immediately returned to isolation without being able to say goodbye to my wife, who was present in court, and the interrogations continued.
Still, I am the first to recognize that I was among the lucky ones. The UAE is a serial human-rights abuser, and while I was detained, I regularly heard people being physically tortured in adjacent rooms. At one point during my questioning, I was told the security services had intended to take me only after I had been processed through immigration. Effectively, if that plan had been followed and my mother had not witnessed my arrest, there would be no record of my detention.
It would be easy to dismiss my case as one of overreach by zealous security officers, but it is far from an outlier.
Nasser bin Ghaith, Ahmed Mansour, and Mohammed al-Roken are just a few of the more prominent names currently being held in worse conditions than I experienced. Their crime? Being independent thinkers. Domestic targets of the Emirati intelligence services have no real legal protection and their families are also often intimidated and harassed. The UAE overtly disregards international legal standards in both its foreign and domestic policy, a point made clear at a conference I participated in last week in Washington, D.C., where other people came forward with their own testimonies of abuse and intimidation at the hands of the Emirati security forces. Unbelievably, the Emirati minister of foreign affairs, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, said at a conference with Emirati students in July 2018—while I and others were being held—that failing to learn was equivalent to “failing oneself and failing one’s country.” The truth is that Emirati researchers are among the first to be targeted in the UAE.
This repression of intellectual practices is a common symptom of authoritarian regimes. And you don’t need to look far for chilling examples elsewhere in the Middle East, from the murder of Giulio Regeni, an Italian researcher examining labor unions in Egypt, to that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Free debate and knowledge creation are the antithesis of any authoritarian society.
[Read: The end of American lip service to human rights]
These kind of actions do not happen in a vacuum. Western governments’ complicity, primarily by way of silence, gives authoritarian rulers confidence in their actions. National leaders, Britain’s included, are reticent to condemn countries they regard as security allies over human-rights violations (President Donald Trump has gone further, explicitly dismissing such concerns in favor of arms sales). But it is not simply governments that are to blame. My own university has been criticized for its close ties to Gulf states, and the discussion is even fiercer at institutions such as New York University and the Sorbonne, both of which have satellite campuses in the UAE. If our interactions with authoritarian states do not remain honest, there will be no room to hold them accountable. No person should ever have to experience what I and my family did.
My seven months in detention finally ended on November 26, after an intense lobbying campaign—led by my wife—that culminated in pressure from Britain’s foreign secretary and resulted in a presidential pardon from the UAE. In effect, the Emirati authorities condoned the actions of their intelligence services but found a way to end a diplomatic crisis.
I am now back home, recovering from the traumas and stresses of last year. I will soon finish my thesis. But today is my wedding anniversary, and all we have planned is a quiet celebration. Tomorrow our public fight for justice resumes.
What comes next in the U.S.-Venezuela relationship? Venezuela has been ravaged by an economic crisis under the leadership of President Nicolás Maduro, and yesterday, the Trump administration took the drastic step of recognizing the 35-year-old opposition leader Juan Guaidó—who declared himself “interim president”—as head of the country. The move is heavy in symbolism, but it’s unclear how, if at all, the Trump administration would back up the rhetoric if Maduro weaponizes the military to clamp down on his dissenters. (Get a sense of the scale of these anti-government demonstrations in Venezuela, in this photo gallery.)
It’s never been a walk in the park to run a major university, but the task is becoming all the more challenging, as the recently departed presidents of Michigan State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can attest. College presidents are more likely to get fired than in previous decades, recent research shows, as they’re sandwiched between angry students and governing boards. The endless politicking means that fewer qualified candidates may be willing to take the job.
Will Russian leader Vladimir Putin invade this small city in a small country that borders Russia, the way he did in eastern Ukraine with Crimea in 2014? Russian-speaking Narva, a city located on the easternmost point of Estonia, could become the epicenter of major geopolitical conflict. Estonia is a member NATO, and should Putin make such a push, it would test a fundamental cornerstone of the alliance: Article V, which requires all NATO members, including the U.S., to come to the defense of any other attacked member state. Article V has only been invoked once before.
—Saahil Desai and Shan Wang
Evening Reads
(Left: Shannon Stapleton / Reuters. Right: Courtesy Deborah Copaken)
After Deborah Copaken scoured the internet to find the best possible coat to fend off the wintertime shivers, she had her sights on a $925 Canada Goose parka:
“Aside from my children’s college education, monthly rent, various medical procedures, and a few pieces of long-lasting furniture, I don’t generally spend that kind of money. I don’t own a home. I’ve never owned a car. Could I really walk around with that white Canada Goose patch on my arm? Maybe I could just cut it off.”
But when her coat arrived, it wasn’t what it seemed.
→ Read the rest.
(Lucas Jackson / Reuters)
Ever wonder what happens to that ill-fitting pair of pants or lightbulb of the wrong wattage that you purchased and then returned to Amazon? Sometimes, they get sent to a liquidation website that bundles together the accoutrements and resells them:
“Every box is a core sample drilled through the digital crust of platform capitalism. On Amazon’s website, sophisticated sorting algorithms relentlessly rank and organize these products before they go out into the world, but once the goods return to the warehouse, they shake free of the database and become random objects thrown together into a box by fate.”
→ Read the rest.
(Wang Mingzhu / VCG via Getty)
The above photograph is an aerial view of workers on the roof of what’s being billed as the world’s largest single-terminal airport, set for completion in 2019. The estimated price tag for the construction has soared to $14 billion U.S. dollars, and planners hope that by 2025, this airport would shuttle as many as 72 million passengers a year.
This international airport is located on the outskirts of which major city? (Go here for the answer.)
Urban Developments
Diller, Scofidio and Renfro
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Karim Doumar shares today’s top stories:
Atop the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ agenda this week: How local leaders can insulate their communities from the federal shutdown’s effects.
In some ways, this country is divided into two: Those who take public transit to work, and those who drive. Where do you fall?
London’s next concert hall design looks crazy. But its skewed angled, crazy-Toblerone-stuck-to-a-Modernist-box appearance has a purpose.
For more updates like these from the urban world, subscribe to CityLab’s Daily newsletter.
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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It’s Thursday, January 24. It’s the 34th day of the federal-government shutdown, and The Washington Post is reporting that the White House has asked federal agencies to make a list of their programs that could be in trouble if it continues into March or April.
Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly preparing a draft proclamation for the president to declare a national emergency along the southern border, and has identified some $7 billion in potential funds to use for the wall, should he choose to.
Shutdown Showdown: The Senate voted on dueling proposals to reopen the government: one proposed by Democrats, which allotted $5.7 billion for border-security measures, though not specifically the border wall, and one supported by the Donald Trump administration, which issued temporary protections to immigrants protected by DACA in exchange for border-wall funding. Neither passed.
Pay Gap: Eight hundred thousand federal employees will likely miss their second paycheck tomorrow. Andrew Kragie reports on the human damage the shutdown inflicts as it drags on: Some federal workers have begun applying for unemployment benefits and food stamps in the face of a full month without pay.
President Guaidó?: President Trump has recognized Venezuela's opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate leader. However, his administration offered little detail about what they might do next. Does it have a plan, for instance, if Maduro arrests Guaidó and crushes rising protests?
2020 Watch: The field of Democratic presidential contenders has filled up quickly. But the first stops in the primary process, such as Iowa and New Hampshire, will likely narrow it down, reports Ronald Brownstein.
Failure to Launch: In a soon-to-be-released book, a former White House official writes that, in 2017, Trump offered NASA “all the money you could ever need” to make it to Mars by the end of his first term. Here’s why that ambition isn’t scientifically possible.
— Madeleine Carlisle, Olivia Paschal, and Elaine Godfrey
Snapshot
A National Police officer fires rubber bullets during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela. Manaure Quintero / Reuters
Ideas From The AtlanticFlorida’s New Governor Is Showing the GOP a Different Path Forward (Reihan Salam)
“Rather than simply react to new political currents, as he did when he embraced the Tea Party moment and, later, when he climbed aboard the #TrumpTrain, [Ron] DeSantis is now trying to anticipate what will come next. Though campaigning as a Trumpist was enough to secure him a razor-thin margin of victory, Florida voters seem to want a pragmatic problem-solver ... To ensure his future political success, DeSantis has wisely decided to move in that direction.” → Read on.
Democrats Are Blowing a Golden Opportunity (Peter Beinart)
“Democrats are even willing to give Trump the $5.7 billion in border funding he’s demanding—just as long as it funds ‘retrofitting ports of entry, new sensors and drones, more immigration judges and Border Patrol agents, and additional technology.’ Anything but a wall. As public policy, this makes no sense.” → Read on.
The New American Empire (Bernard-Henri Lévy)
“What is the internet if not a modern panopticon? But it is a two-sided one, a panopticon that can be turned around. Operated from the top down, it gives [Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple], governments, and other actual or would-be major players full power to observe, monitor, and control those under their dominion. But the tools wielded by those at the top are not much better than those available to the people at the bottom.” → Read on.
◆The Silent Majority of Democratic House Freshmen (Ella Nilsen and Dylan Scott, Vox)
◆Young Voters Keep Moving to the Left on Social Issues, Republicans Included (Dan Levin, The New York Times)
◆Trump’s Loyal Senate Republicans (A. B. Stoddard, The Bulwark)
◆The Unfinished Business of Bernie Sanders (Jason Zengerle, GQ)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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“I’ve been looking for you for 20 years. You don’t know me, but I know you. I have a message for you.”
Klara, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, heard those words in 1961 on the streets of Tel Aviv. Like an epilogue, they would alter the course of her personal history, giving her the closure—and redemption—she had sought for years since escaping the Nazis in World War II.
Klara tells her unimaginable story in Matan Rochlitz’s short documentary, I Have a Message for You, aided in part by haunting animations that depict her treacherous journey. Like many Holocaust survivors, Klara owes her life to a particular combination of luck, ingenuity, and sheer audacity.
Rochlitz himself grew up in a family that had “experienced the full wrath of the Shoah,” as he described it. “You slowly understand that something horrific happened to your grandfather and to many other people who were members of your family,” the filmmaker told The Atlantic. “I think I had unconsciously shut down from a lot of that. But this story, because of its redemptive narrative arc, allowed me to go into the darkness.”
On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day this Saturday, Rochlitz said he will be thinking about Primo Levi’s edict: Never forget. Rochlitz quoted Levi’s prologue to “If This Is a Man”:
“Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.”
Updated on January 24 at 4:51 p.m. ET
The shutdown will go on.
Competing proposals to reopen the federal government each garnered majority support in the Senate on Thursday afternoon, but both failed to secure the necessary 60 votes to break an impasse that has dragged on for more than a month and cut off pay for 800,000 public employees.
The votes were technically procedural in nature, to end debate and move to final passage on both measures. But their twin defeat sent the same sobering message: More than a month of shuttered federal agencies and a mounting financial toll on well over 1 million employees and contractors have not been enough to forge consensus or a compromise in the Republican-led Senate. Bills passed by the Democratic majority in the House to reopen the government have gone nowhere. President Donald Trump has not relented in his demand for money for a border wall, and Republicans, frustrated though they are by the president and by alarming poll numbers, have stood by him.
The failure seemed to inject a new sense of desperation into what has been a stagnant situation. Soon after the votes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell huddled with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his office, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters that he had spoken with Trump about a three-week spending bill to temporarily end the shutdown. Schumer, however, was tight-lipped: “We’re talking,” the Democrat, grinning ear to ear, repeated seven times to inquiring reporters as he left McConnell’s office.
Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, acknowledged the fresh talks but added a warning: “As was made clear to Senator Lindsey Graham, the three-week [continuing resolution] would only work if there is a large down payment on the wall,” she said in a statement. CNN reported Thursday evening that the White House has prepared a draft proclamation for Trump to sign declaring a national emergency at the border and had identified $7 billion in funding it would shift to construct a wall under that decree. The president hasn’t ruled out such a move—which would almost certainly be challenged by Democrats in the courts—but he has said he did not want to go that route.
In Thursday’s votes, Democrats blocked Trump’s proposal to trade protections for some undocumented immigrants for the $5.7 billion he has demanded in funding for the border wall, while Republicans largely held the line against a Democratic bid for a two-week break in the shutdown to buy time for more negotiations. There were notable cracks in the GOP position: Six Republicans broke with the party to back the Democratic proposal that would have reopened the government, in addition to supporting the president’s failed plan.
The votes Thursday were the first the Senate has taken to reopen the government since the 34-day shutdown began on December 22. Yet the political dynamic has barely budged. The same GOP lawmakers who have been saying they would consider legislation to reopen the government without funding for the border wall—Cory Gardner of Colorado, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted for both measures on Thursday. They were joined by Republican Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, as well as by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the centrist Democrat who was the only member of his party to back both Trump’s plan and the short-term alternative. The GOP defections were short of the 13 needed for the bill to clear a filibuster, but they ensured that the Democratic proposal secured more support in the Republican-controlled chamber than Trump’s. Two conservative Republicans, Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, voted against both amendments.
“I voted twice today to open the government because it should never have been shut down,” Alexander said in a statement afterward. “It is always wrong for either side to use shutting down the government as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations—it should be as off-limits as chemical weapons are to warfare.”
The outcome on Thursday was expected, although enough Republicans kept quiet about their plans for the Democratic proposal to lend the afternoon a bit of drama. The House left town for the weekend earlier in the day, as the chamber’s Democrats displayed little confidence that they would be needed to send a bill to Trump’s desk.
Tensions were high, however, in the run-up to the votes as it became clear the stalemate would continue. The normally even-keeled Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado lit into Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in a floor speech before the vote, recalling the conservative’s leading role in the last lengthy government shutdown, in 2013. “These crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take,” he said, referring to Cruz’s lamentation that Democrats objected to a bill that would pay the Coast Guard without ending the shutdown. “They’re too hard for me to take, because when the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my state was flooded. It was under water! People were killed!”
“This,” he continued, “is a joke!”
Minutes before the vote, around two dozen House Democrats marched in silence across the Capitol and onto the Senate floor to make clear their frustration with McConnell’s handling of the shutdown. The group included both freshmen and more senior members, like Representatives John Lewis of Georgia and Barbara Lee of California, and Representative Nita Lowey of New York, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.
The glass-half-full view of the Senate’s failed votes is that they could demonstrate to both parties that neither side’s current proposal is viable and that a fresh round of negotiations is needed. To that end, Pelosi acknowledged Thursday that Democrats are preparing a proposal that boosts spending on border security—reportedly by as much as the president’s requested $5.7 billion—but does not allocate funds for a wall. The plan would bolster technology along the border and beef up security at ports of entry, among other measures.
The speaker denied that the plan is “a counteroffer,” sticking to her insistence that Democrats won’t negotiate on border security until Trump agrees to reopen the government. Most of the money would be included in legislation that would fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of 2019. The annual DHS appropriations bill was the only spending plan not agreed to in talks between Democrats and Republicans before the shutdown, and previous efforts to break the logjam had merely extended current funding levels for the department. So the Democratic proposal represents something of a shift, although it’s unlikely to be enough to win Trump or most Republicans over.
“If there’s no money for border barriers, that’s a nonstarter,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a close ally of McConnell.
Immediately after the vote, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican who voted with Trump and against the Democratic plan, called for “a third way” that sounded similar to the emerging Democratic proposal: “It would reopen government in the short term with the commitment to a border-security plan that can be enacted in the next few weeks,” he said in a statement, without providing details of his idea.
Exactly what it would take to end the deadlock—aside from a cave by either Trump or the Democrats—was unclear on Thursday as the Senate rejected first one proposal, and then the other. The only certainty was that the longest shutdown in U.S. history would continue at least one more day, and likely longer.
Venezuela, which has been enduring a long-standing economic crisis, is now in the midst of a crisis of leadership. On Wednesday, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself the country’s “interim president,” until elections can be held, during a mass rally against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Guaidó’s position as the new leader of Venezuela was quickly recognized by the United States, Brazil, Canada, and several Latin American nations. However, Maduro says he is not leaving, and he has the support of the Venezuelan military. Maduro also retaliated by breaking off relations with the United States, his biggest trade partner, and by giving U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. Protests flared up in Venezuela and other countries, among a widespread Venezuelan diaspora, calling for Maduro to step down, with some demonstrations in Caracas ending in violence. What comes next remains uncertain, as President Donald Trump has said “all options are on the table” regarding Maduro, and anti-government protests continue in Venezuela’s streets.
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The government shutdown is now the longest in U.S. history, but President Donald Trump seems no closer to a deal to resolve it. Why does the “master deal maker”—as he sold himself on the campaign trail—seem at a loss in his first negotiation with a Democratic House?
On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the New York Times White House correspondent and “Trump whisperer” Maggie Haberman joins Alex Wagner to explain how Trump’s business career actually predicted his performance during the shutdown.
Listen to hear about how, after he became a celebrity in the 1980s, Trump wasn’t the greatest negotiator. He cut a terrible deal with the very man who authored The Art of the Deal and torpedoed what would have been the real-estate project of his career with a public spat.
Maggie and Alex discuss how the president’s tactics in New York real estate parallel and explain his shutdown politics.
VoicesAlex Wagner (@AlexWagner)
Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT)
It is not the job of presidents to know the specifics of space exploration and its mind-bending physics, or to contemplate deeply the timescales and technology required for a high-stakes mission to another planet. But usually they have some sense of what’s remotely possible, and of what they’ve asked their space agency to do.
In the spring of 2017, President Trump signed a significant piece of legislation about the future of NASA. The bill, among other things, reaffirmed a top priority for the American space program: Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s.
Then, it seems, the president forgot all about it.
A month after signing the bill, Trump reportedly asked the then-acting administrator of NASA whether the space agency could send American astronauts to Mars by the end of his first term, and even offered him “all the money you could could ever need” to make it happen. The NASA official politely turned him down, explaining that such a fast turnaround to a distant planet wasn’t possible.
The exchange, which took place in the Oval Office, appears in Team of Vipers, a forthcoming book by former White House official Cliff Sims, and was first reported by New York magazine this week.
For anyone who knows about space travel, this encounter amounts to a breathtaking misunderstanding by a leader of the state of his nation’s space program. But it’s only the latest such mishap in Trump’s presidency. More than many presidents, Trump has been eager to talk about American ambitions in the cosmos. But his enthusiasm has clashed with his disinterest in the details of the complicated, risky requirements of actually sending people off this planet.
According to Sims, the discussion he describes took place at the White House in April of 2017, as Trump prepared to make a very long-distance video call from the Oval Office to the International Space Station. Peggy Whitson, a NASA astronaut, had broken the American record for the longest time spent in space, and the president was going to congratulate her.
About 10 minutes before the call, which was live-streamed to the public, Trump “suddenly turned toward” Robert Lightfoot, the acting administrator, and asked him: “What’s our plan for Mars?”
Lightfoot explained that NASA hopes to put people on the planet by the 2030s.
“But is there any way we could do it by the end of my first term?” Trump asked.
Sims writes that a fidgeting Lightfoot tried to explain some of the technical challenges of a Mars mission.
Trump was undeterred: “But what if I gave you all the money you could ever need to do it? What if we sent NASA’s budget through the roof, but focused entirely on that instead of whatever else you’re doing now. Could it work then?”
Lightfoot said he was sorry, but no. The interaction, according to Sims, left the president “visibly disappointed.”
NASA directed my questions about this exchange to the White House. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The call with the International Space Station began soon after. The question of Mars seemed to have stuck with Trump and, apparently unsatisfied with Lightfoot’s answer, the president decided to ask Whitson, the astronaut.
“What do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule? And when would you see that happening?” Trump said.
“Well, I think as your bill directed, it will be approximately in the 2030s,” Whitson replied.
“Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term,” Trump said. “So we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?”
“We’ll do our best,” she said, with a laugh.
At the time, the brief exchange came off as a mix of enthusiasm and confusion on Trump’s part. “Based on how he said it, it seemed like it was a tongue in cheek comment,” a White House spokesperson told me then. “I wouldn’t really look beyond that.” But according to Sims’s accounting, the president was apparently serious about getting to Mars during his presidency.
To echo Lightfoot, that’s not possible. The money would certainly be welcome, of course. (Congress would also have to approve it.) What government agency would turn down presidential support for a budget influx? Especially NASA. During the Apollo era, the agency’s annual funding accounted for 4.5 percent of the federal budget. It shrunk to less than half a percent at the end of Richard Nixon’s terms, and has remained there since.
But cash is no substitute for time, and space travel is difficult to rush, even with Cold War tensions hovering menacingly in the background. Seven years elapsed between John F. Kennedy’s declaration to go to the moon and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface, and several Americans died in the effort to get there.
Timing beyond Earth matters, too. A Mars mission would ideally leave Earth when the two planets are close together in their orbits around the sun, a cosmic alignment that occurs every two years. The configuration would help shave off a few months on the journey to the red planet. Trump would have only two chances in the rest of his term, and in a potential second term, to deploy a crewed mission, 2020 and 2022. NASA isn’t ready for either.
The U.S. currently can’t launch its own astronauts from its own launchpads, and pays the Russian government tens of millions of dollars per seat on the Soyuz launch system to carry them to the International Space Station. NASA is working on a rocket designed to someday send astronauts to the moon and Mars, the Space Launch System, but a test flight, with people on board, won’t come until 2022.
Off the ground, the technical challenges of a Mars mission would be immense. Armstrong and two other astronauts got along just fine in a cozy space capsule, but it took the astronauts just over three days to reach the moon. A trip to Mars would take as long as nine months, and astronauts would require a far more complex vessel. It would need to be hardy enough to protect them from cell-warping cosmic radiation, and roomy enough so people don’t get on each other’s nerves. This miraculous technology does not exist.
There’s an easy explanation for why Trump wants to send Americans to Mars during his presidency. It’s the same reason he enjoys speaking publicly about space exploration in general, and has actually done so more than other presidents, according to historians: people think space is cool. That includes congressional lawmakers, and space exploration enjoys some rare bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. For Trump, space policy is a safe topic. It’s an instant applause line. It gets good ratings, and to Trump, that’s what matters.
In February 2017, days after the inauguration, the White House made a surprising request to NASA. The administration asked the space agency to consider including a crew on the first flight of the Space Launch System. NASA had planned to put people on board only after a successful, uncrewed flight, a standard move for testing new rocket technology. NASA conducted a review exploring the option, but decided to stick to the original plan.
The Space Launch System, it turned out, had made it onto a list of moments that could bolster Trump’s legacy. “The common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump’s current four-year presidential term,” The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
The attraction to visible, historic achievements has led Trump to confuse space policy more than once. In February 2018, Trump, like much of the public, was enamored with the spectacular launch of the Falcon Heavy, a massive rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He praised the feat during a televised meeting at the White House with Cabinet leaders. He praised it so much, in fact, that he ended up undermining NASA’s own rocket efforts.
“Rich guys, they love rocket ships,” the president said. “That’s good. That’s better than us paying for them. And I noticed the prices of the last one, that they said it cost $80 million. If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40, 50 times that amount of money. I mean, literally, when I heard $80 million—you know, I’m so used to hearing different numbers with NASA.”
Indeed, he is; NASA has already spent several billion dollars on developing the Space Launch System. Each launch is expected to cost about $1 billion. Whether he meant to or not, Trump appeared to suggest that commercial companies would do a better and cheaper job of launching rockets than NASA. And he did it while a small replica of the Space Launch System sat on the table in front of him.
Despite Trump’s outsized interest in Mars, his administration’s space policy has taken a different direction since that spring meeting in 2017. In October of that year, the White House announced a dramatic shift in NASA’s directive for the future. This was not a complete surprise; new presidents have tended to introduce fresh directives for NASA’s future that diverge from those of their predecessors. George H. W. Bush proposed an ambitious plan that instructed NASA to simultaneously develop a space station above Earth, a mission to the moon, and a mission to Mars. Bill Clinton made no mention of sending Americans anywhere beyond Earth. George W. Bush instructed NASA to establish a program that would return Americans to the moon by 2020. Barack Obama canceled it, and told NASA to work on a Mars mission for the 2030s instead.
Under the Trump presidency, NASA would shoot for the moon, again. Mars would come eventually, but not before American astronauts stepped onto the lunar soil once more. NASA leaders spent eight years talking up a trip to Mars. Now, they’re touting a return to the moon. Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, has said the agency seeks to land rovers on the surface of the moon as early as sometime this year, and “definitely” by 2020. As for a crewed mission, Bridenstine has said, “I don’t have a time frame for that at this point.”
If the Lightfoot encounter is any indication, that’s the kind of answer that Trump doesn’t like. But that is the reality of space exploration. They take years, sometimes decades, and delays are common. If technical difficulties don’t derail the schedule, politics will; programs supported by one president can get tossed out by the next. The actual, real work of building missions usually outlasts presidents. The commander-in-chief who will lead the nation to humankind’s first steps on Mars is not in the White House, and may not be for years to come.
When ecologists watch nature documentaries, sometimes they get ideas for research projects. John Grady, an ecologist from Michigan State University, kept seeing those inevitable scenes in which shoals of hapless fish are demolished by predators, and thinking about the differences between the cold-blooded killers—the tuna, the cod, and other big fish—and the warm-blooded ones. With a group of colleagues, he started tracking down their whereabouts, and soon found a surprising geographical trend.
The warm-blooded predators—the whales, the seals, the penguins of the world—bucked an almost universal pattern. Most groups of plants and animals are richer in species and more abundant in the tropics. In the ocean, that held for cold-blooded predators. But warm-blooded predators were more diverse toward the poles and conspicuously missing from several warm hot spots. For example, in the seas around Indonesia and Australia, which are among the richest in the world, marine mammals are virtually absent, as are penguins and other swimming birds.
Why? This riddle has a simple answer, Grady argues in a new study—but one with chilling implications for the future of seals, penguins, and whales.
It’s not about food. Grady and his team considered the possibility—warm-blooded animals need a lot to fuel their gas-guzzling metabolism. Perhaps colder waters are just richer in algae, plankton, and small fish? But they found that at higher, colder latitudes, there isn’t actually much more food around. It’s more that warm-blooded animals are eating a much bigger share of it than their cold-blooded rivals.
The real explanation for that pattern, the team says, is deceptively simple. An animal’s speed, agility, and mental prowess depends on its metabolism, which in turn depends on its temperature. Since birds and mammals can keep heating their bodies in frigid conditions, they remain fast and alert. By contrast, the fish they hunt become slower and dumber. At some tipping point of temperature, seals, dolphins, and penguins start outswimming their prey. They become more likely to encounter targets, more likely to catch them, and more likely to outpace cold-blooded predators of their own.
In Grady’s words, “Warm-bodied predators are favored where prey are slow, stupid, and cold.” That’s why sharks and other predatory fish dominate near the equator, but colder waters are the domain of whales and seals. By monopolizing food in the poles, these creatures can then specialize on specific types of prey, which makes them more likely to split into separate species. The killer whales of the North Pacific, for example, include mammal-eating transients and fish-eating, year-round residents, who don’t interbreed.
The team’s conclusions about “the thermal constraints of marine predators seem to fit with observations in nature, as well as theory,” says Donna Hauser from the University of Washington. Consider the mammals and birds that, bucking the trend, do thrive in the warm tropics. To Grady, these exceptions simply prove the “slow, stupid, and cold” rule. The penguins of the equatorial Galápagos Islands, for example, feed in areas with cold currents. Sperm whales and their relatives forage by diving into frigid depths. Monk seals in Hawaii go after slow, bottom-dwelling prey. Giant whales, like blues and humpbacks, have evolved a style of foraging—lunge feeding—that allows them to engulf massive shoals of prey in fast surprise attacks.
And dolphins—the only group of marine mammals that have really diversified in the tropics—make up for any physical disadvantages with intellect. They can corral fish into balls using curtains of bubbles, herd them toward one another with tail slaps, and even drive them onto shorelines. When you’re as smart as a dolphin, perhaps everything seems slow and stupid, even when it isn’t cold.
But the world is changing. It’s likely that the surface of the oceans will warm by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius within this century. As that happens, marine mammals and birds should disproportionately suffer, as warmer water robs them of the advantages that they’ve historically enjoyed over cold-blooded rivals.
[Read: A foreboding similarity in today’s oceans and a 94-million-year-old catastrophe]
Signs of that shift are already apparent. In the Barents Sea, off the northern coast of Norway and Russia, stocks of capelin and other small fish have been going up in recent decades. That should be a boon for predators such as cod and harp seals, but while the cold-blooded cod are indeed flourishing, the harp seals have declined. And that may be because the local water has become considerably warmer.
Grady’s team estimates that every time the ocean’s surface warms by 1 degree Celsius, populations of marine mammals will fall by 12 percent, and populations of seals and sea lions in particular will fall by 24 percent. “The threat of warming waters is a real issue for a lot of marine mammals and birds,” Grady says.
But “predictions are hard,” Hauser notes. There’s not a lot of data on how Arctic mammals are responding to changing climate, but what we have paints a complicated picture. Polar bears are the archetypal losers of a warming world, but some populations are still doing well—as are those of bowhead whales. Some groups of belugas have shifted the timing of their migrations; others are foraging in deeper, colder waters. These changes in behavior might make marine mammals more resilient to shifting climates than simple calculations would suggest. Maybe they just need to find the parts of the world where fish remain slow, dumb, and cold.
The problem began mysteriously. I switched on my Samsung Smart TV to watch the Warriors game, and after about 20 seconds, the CBS News app switched itself on for a few seconds in a small rectangle in the upper left corner. Then my TV crashed, which is a thing TVs can do now, and the screen went dark.
This was particularly confusing because I’d never watched the CBS News app. I’d never installed the app, nor did I even know it was on my TV.
I tried the obvious things. I turned off the TV and turned it back on. Same problem. Unplugged, replugged. Happened again. Reset the cable box just to try it. Again. Made the sign of the cross. Checked for software updates for the television. Threw my phone. Screamed into the abyss. But. It. Just. Kept. Happening.
Finally, I turned to the consumer micro-solidarity available in the support forums. Based on the outraged responses of other Samsung TV owners, the issue began sometime in September. No one knows how to fix it. And because of a deal that Samsung struck with app makers, you can’t delete the app from your own TV.
Welcome to the exciting new world of cord cutting! In order to provide the beloved over-the-top experience—or OTT, as it’s known in industry parlance—televisions must now connect to the internet, run apps, and act as platforms for video services such as Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, YouTube, and the forthcoming Disney+. Instead of watching through a specialized second box, like Apple TV or Roku, just hit three buttons and you’re watching Octonauts.
Analysts estimate that smart TVs now make up about 70 percent of all new TV sales. The television is no longer a mere display, but a full-fledged computer, for good and for ill. And what is a computer now? On the one hand, it’s something companies sell to consumers for money. But after you’ve purchased an internet-connected device of any kind, it begins to generate information that the company can use itself or sell to third parties. Earlier this month, Vizio’s chief technology officer, Bill Baxter, told The Verge that the reason his company can sell TVs so cheaply now is that it makes up the money by selling bits of data and access to your TV after you purchase it. Baxter called this “post-purchase monetization.”
“This is a cutthroat industry,” he said. “It’s a 6-percent-margin industry, right? … The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV.”
This is why your TV was so cheap. But it also changes the relationship the TV makers have with their customers. Consumers are no longer their sole revenue stream, but one among several. CBS and Netflix are more important to their business success than you are.
Mix in two other new problems.
First, TV makers didn’t need “customer support” before in the way that, say, Comcast did and does. If your TV was broken, it needed a physical repair, not digital support. Call a guy.
Second, smart-TV app development is a lot more complicated than making software for phones. Dozens of companies provide TVs with their software now. My Samsung, for example, uses the Tizen operating system, which is a form of Linux and related to a bunch of other pieces of software you’ve never heard of: MeeGo, LiMo, SLP, and Bada.
Of course, my particular problem is not with the technology of Tizen; the rest of the apps work just fine. So, as one Samsung support person suggested, “you will want to contact the CBS All Access developers for assistance.”
This response caused a chorus of boos from people on the forums because of the fact that Samsung itself prevents users from deleting the app, thanks to a business relationship with CBS. “Respectfully, that’s a ridiculous and completely unacceptable response. As other users experiencing this issue have already noted, if the issue is an application that is forced upon owners of Samsung Smart TVs that cannot be removed/deleted, then this is absolutely Samsung’s responsibility to address and resolve,” one frustrated owner said. “The company has now been on notice of the issue for months, and apparently done nothing.”
Besides, there is no direct way to get in touch with the app’s developers. It’s not clear from the public record whether CBS developed the app in-house or outsourced it to a developer. Neither Samsung nor CBS responded to requests for an interview.
So now, like many other people, every single time I turn on my television, no matter what I try to watch, the CBS News app takes over, and I have to turn the TV off and on a bunch of times before I can actually watch something. All because, years ago, without really thinking about it, I opted into a crazy system, one that changed the nature of how I own my television.
It’s mine, but not completely, pretty much like everything else that connects to or lives on the internet. This is all clearly laid out in section 5.4 of the terms and conditions. “Certain Services may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Samsung,” it states. “Such updates may be in various forms, including bug fixes, enhanced or new functions or features, new software modules and completely new versions.” As long as everything works, no one notices the TV has become something else. And that includes the companies.
The primary character in Adèle, Leïla Slimani’s grimly vacant novel about a Parisian journalist who’s addicted to sex, yearns to be an object. She has no defining characteristics beyond her insatiable desire to be desired, her self-identification as a thing that gives men pleasure. A journalist married to a gastroenterologist, with whom she has a toddler son, Adèle is a difficult character not to dislike—shallow, lazy, and contradictory. She craves money and luxury as much as any postmodern Marie Antoinette, but despises bourgeois culture; she loathes her husband and resents her child for being a burden; she sleeps with her only female friend’s partner; and regrets, when her husband is injured in a scooter accident after working too many shifts, that he hasn’t died.
It’s challenging to identify what Slimani wanted to do with Adèle, a novel that’s almost as reluctant as its title character to engage in any hard work or deep reflection. It isn’t, Slimani says in an author Q&A, about examining sex addiction, although the character of Adèle is inspired in part by the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the IMF (who was accused of sexual assault, the pedantic among us might point out). Nor is it about the roots of Adèle’s pathological compulsion—Slimani says she wasn’t interested in excavating those, either. Rather, she seems preoccupied by the subversiveness of Adèle as a character, a 21st-century woman who “doesn’t want to be a subject, she doesn’t want to decide, to have power. She just wants to be a little doll, a toy.”
Slimani is arguably France’s most dynamic and lauded living female writer, one of only 12 women to have claimed the Prix Goncourt for literature, which she won for The Perfect Nanny. That novel, which was inspired by the horrific real-life murder of two children by their paid caregiver, is a masterpiece of imagination. Slimani sets up an unanswerable question and answers it: In her hands, the conundrum of who could do such a thing, and why, becomes a surgical interrogation of bourgeois French culture and the tensions of parenthood. Louise, the mousy nanny who’s revealed on the first page to have committed infanticide, is introduced as an abomination and then humanized, layer by layer.
So why is Adèle so flat? Why can’t such a gifted author find any characteristics or qualities in her beyond her overruling addiction to abasement? The novel is Slimani’s first, published in France before The Perfect Nanny, although it’s only now being released in English. It begins with Adèle jonesing for a fix, having spent the last week holding out on her impulses for rough sex with strangers. By page 4 she’s given in, stopping by an old acquaintance’s for an encounter that she laments is “not obscene enough.” Later, at work, she invents quotes for a story about social tensions in Tunisia, plagiarizes lines from existing stories (Slimani’s cynicism about French journalistic ethics is an ongoing theme in the novel), and then gets drunk at lunch, spending the night with a young man whose soft hands and “woman’s bottom” disgust her.
Slimani has mentioned several times that her favorite fictional heroines, the one’s she’s most inspired by, are the great adulterers of classic literature: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Thérèse Desqueyroux, the last of whom tries to poison her husband and is then confined to the countryside as punishment. It’s hard to conceive, though, how Slimani could extract Adèle from literary women whose appetites are so different from hers.
Emma Bovary is all feeling and hunger; she licks the final drops of liqueur from the bottom of the glass with her tongue, and relishes the cold shiver of iced champagne as much as she cherishes her romantic fantasies about the kind of love that “sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.” Adèle, by contrast, barely eats, disdaining French gastronomic hedonism, and drinking excessively only to enable her “planned debauchery.” She has no appetite for love, either. Her compulsions are a black hole absorbing everything except satisfaction.
Adèle is a strikingly dull, joyless book. Stripped of the animating romantic desires of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, the novel offers instead a nihilistic, depressing kind of libertinism that’s hard to endure without any sense of what its purpose might be. (“Obscenity,” the French writer Colette once said, “is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, and to feel bored.”) Slimani might find her heroine’s lack of ambition or motivation to be subversive. But it seems to me instead to be part of a storied French tradition—the literary submission and degradation of women in service of male pleasure.
Consider Anne Desclos’s Story of O, whose heroine’s identifying initial has been interpreted to stand for both Odile (homophonic to “Adèle”) and objectification. Or The Sexual Life of Catherine M., an autobiographical account by the art critic Catherine Millet of decades of group sex that, in The Guardian’s summation, “managed to make orgies boring.” (Millet’s acknowledgment that she never had an orgasm until her early 30s rather dented the book’s credentials as a manifesto for free love.)
Reading Adèle, I was reminded of countless fictional accounts of female erotic compulsion on film—largely rendered by men, like Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour or Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. So many male writers and directors have been called to ruminate on the pleasures that women can supposedly find in perversion, even as they can’t resist punishing those women for it in the end.
With Adèle, Slimani has all the opportunity of an insightful female writer wresting the subject of desire back from her less enlightened contemporaries, Michel Houellebecq and Yann Moix among them. Which is why it’s so perplexing that Adèle as a character is so numb, so repetitive, so intent only on reducing herself to an empty impulse. If Slimani has achieved anything, it’s that she’s written a book that doesn’t even pretend to find pleasure in its heroine’s predilections. Only pain.
At every stage of his short career in Republican politics, Ron DeSantis, the newly inaugurated governor of Florida, has been exceptionally shrewd. It is therefore telling that as President Donald Trump’s approval rating drifts downward, he has spent his first weeks in office pivoting from unadulterated Trumpist bombast to dulcet suburban moderation. Don’t be surprised if other ambitious Republicans soon start following his lead.
First elected to Congress in 2012, DeSantis co-founded the House Freedom Caucus, which captured the insurrectionary mood of small-government conservatives in the Barack Obama years. Always quick to denounce out-of-control federal spending, he voted to shut down the federal government rather than acquiesce to omnibus spending bills brokered by the House GOP leadership on more than one occasion.
Then, after Ted Cruz and John Kasich exited the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis reinvented himself as one of Donald Trump’s most devoted supporters, not least on Fox News, where he later became an indefatigable critic of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Having recognized Trump’s popularity among GOP primary voters—as demonstrated by Trump’s massive victory over Marco Rubio in the 2016 Florida presidential primary—DeSantis was careful to align with the president in almost every respect, including immigration enforcement, an area where many leading Florida Republicans dissented from the party’s restrictionist wing.
[Reihan Salam: The fate of Trumpism rests on the TIGRs]
When DeSantis entered Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, he mostly downplayed questions of merely statewide concern, choosing instead to emphasize national and indeed international matters, such as his commitment to the U.S. alliance with Israel, and his Trumpist bona fides, as immortalized in a campaign advertisement in which he playfully exhorted his small daughter to “build the wall” (with colorful toy bricks).
And the strategy worked, at least at first. DeSantis handily won the Republican gubernatorial nomination before going on to narrowly defeat Andrew Gillum, the decidedly left-of-center African American mayor of Tallahassee, in a general election that many saw as a glimpse of America’s political future. But it is here that the story starts to change.
This being Florida, the 2018 election was marred by irregularities, and the counting of votes in the gubernatorial and Senate races dragged on for days. While Rick Scott, the then-governor of Florida, sought the president’s help in pressuring his opponent to concede defeat, DeSantis wanted Trump to stay out of his own recount battle, reportedly out of a desire to defuse rising political tensions in a state that had become the country’s premier political battleground. Denounced as a racist during his gubernatorial campaign for warning that Florida voters would “monkey this up,” “this” being Florida’s prosperity, by embracing Gillum and his program of higher minimum wages and more expansive social spending, DeSantis seemed keen to prove that he was more than a Trumpist caricature.
[David Frum: The Republican party needs to embrace liberalism]
Since his inauguration, DeSantis has played against type, calling for a sharp increase in funding to protect the Everglades and to mitigate the effects of climate change, even as he remains studiously neutral on its causes; touting the diversity of his senior appointments, and claiming in particular that “if you look at my total appointments, I don’t think there’s any peer recently, at least in Florida, of the number of African Americans we’ve put in”; and adopting a more permissive posture with respect to the regulation of medical marijuana than his predecessor.
He’s chosen a rising Florida Democrat, state Representative Jared Moskowitz, to head Florida’s all-important Division of Emergency Management. Even his more conventional appointments seem geared toward broadening his electoral coalition. For example, DeSantis named an erstwhile rival, former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, to serve as his education commissioner, perhaps out of a belief that Corcoran’s advocacy for K–12 scholarship programs and the expansion of high-performing charter schools would consolidate his support among “school-choice moms.” And he’s given his Cuban American lieutenant governor, Jeanette Núñez, a former state lawmaker from South Florida and a close ally of Rubio’s known for her more moderate stance, a very visible role, as if to signal that he’s not all sharp edges.
One could chalk up DeSantis’s rhetorical shift to the simple fact that governing a sprawling, diverse state poses a different set of challenges than representing a conservative congressional district. But there’s more to it than that. Rather than simply react to new political currents, as he did when he embraced the Tea Party moment and, later, when he climbed aboard the #TrumpTrain, DeSantis is now trying to anticipate what will come next. Though campaigning as a Trumpist was enough to secure him a razor-thin margin of victory, Florida voters seem to want a pragmatic problem-solver who can deliver better public services at a lower cost, all while preserving the wonders of Florida’s natural environment. To ensure his future political success, DeSantis has wisely decided to move in that direction.
[Read: The GOP’s best candidates aren’t the loudest ones]
This isn’t to suggest that DeSantis has forgotten his conservative base. Despite the power of Florida’s agriculture and tourism industries, he is forging ahead on a statewide E-Verify mandate and legislation curbing sanctuary jurisdictions, both of which he championed on the campaign trail. Though immigration advocates insist that E-Verify will damage the prospects of minority workers, regardless of their legal status, restrictionists point to tentative evidence that it might instead slightly boost the prospects of workers of Latin American origin with legal status, a possibility of great relevance to Florida’s large and growing Latino electorate, which has recently grown through an influx of working-class Puerto Ricans.
In short, as Trump continues to fixate on a border wall, DeSantis is choosing to focus on a more substantive policy that he’s pitching as a curb on unscrupulous employers, and he’s doing it with at least part of Florida’s Cuban American establishment in his corner. In time, DeSantis could try to carve out a position on the issue that is even more swing-state-friendly—more effective workplace enforcement, but less of a fixation on the wall; an increased emphasis on skilled immigration, but a greater willingness to budge on amnesty for the long-resident, unauthorized-immigrant population—an approach that will look increasingly attractive if Trump’s political fortunes continue to decline, and if a Democrat is inaugurated as president in 2021. Something tells me that DeSantis is prepared for this eventuality.
For 2020, Democrats appear virtually certain to assemble the largest and most diverse collection of presidential contenders in the party’s history. And with the rise of online fundraising, ever-expanding opportunities to communicate through social media, and the proliferation of political news on the internet and cable television, the candidates, more than ever before, may have an opportunity to make themselves known to voters.
But even with all these new developments, many veteran Democratic strategists believe the window of opportunity for candidates to emerge as viable contenders may be as narrow as ever—and as dependent as always on success in Iowa and New Hampshire, the states that have winnowed the field for generations.
“You have to do something in either Iowa or New Hampshire, or you become irrelevant very quickly,” says Tad Devine, a senior strategist on Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, whose experience working in presidential primaries dates back to the 1980s. “I still think those voters have the loudest voices.”
[Read: Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy: Don’t pick a lane ]
One of the most unpredictable dynamics of the 2020 Democratic race is how and when this kaleidoscopic field will narrow into a top tier of serious contenders. Given the size and diversity of the assembling gaggle, it’s possible that the race will produce a long and inconclusive struggle, with several candidates establishing durable geographic and demographic bases of support that prevent any one from consolidating a clear advantage. But it’s also possible—even likely, the strategists say—that the early states will reduce the field as ruthlessly as they have historically, effectively marginalizing almost all the candidates long before any voters in the largest states have had an opportunity to weigh in. If that’s right, the vast majority of Democratic voters will still be choosing among a much smaller group determined largely by voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, with South Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Nevada joining in the culling.
Bill Carrick, the longtime Democratic strategist, notes that for years campaign operatives have formulated “theories” about how the new dynamics of fundraising and communications might allow candidates to surmount early losses and emerge later in the process—but have yet to actually demonstrate the case. “We can imagine that there is somebody who could survive not doing well in the first four states,” Carrick says. “But we still don’t have an example of that.”
The Democratic field this year could be the largest since the modern primary system began in 1972. Both that year and in 1976, roughly a dozen Democratic candidates competed for the nomination. In those nominating races, won by George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, six of the Democrats mounted campaigns serious enough to attract at least 500,000 votes nationwide during the primaries. No race since has been nearly as sprawling.
[Read: Pete Buttigieg thinks all the 2020 Democrats are too old ]
The 2020 field appears highly likely to blow past those mileposts. With this week’s announcements by Senator Kamala Harris of California and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, eight Democratic candidates have taken formal steps toward running. Another dozen—including former Vice President Joe Biden, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, former Governors Terry McAuliffe and John Hickenlooper, and sitting Senators Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Sherrod Brown—are seriously exploring joining them. Whether measured by gender, race, age, or sexual orientation, this year’s field seems certain to offer the widest range of options ever to Democratic voters.
The field’s potentially record-breaking number is a function of both short- and long-term dynamics. The most important near-term factor is the perception that Donald Trump, with his approval ratings stuck below 45 percent, is a vulnerable incumbent. Perhaps even more important may be long-term changes that have lowered the barriers to mounting a competitive campaign. Changes in communications technology and fundraising have vastly democratized the process in comparison with earlier decades, when candidates found it difficult to emerge without support from powerful fundraisers, hardheaded party leaders, and influential media voices.
The rise of online fundraising has made it easier for candidates to build a national financial base. Social media allows them to communicate directly to millions of potential voters at very low cost. And the seemingly bottomless appetite for political news on the internet and cable television—including televised debates and town halls—helps candidates build name identification and amplify their message to primary voters, activists, and donors alike.
These same structural changes that have made it easier for candidates to enter the race could disrupt the traditional mechanisms through which they have been forced out of it.
[Read: Elizabeth Warren’s early stroke of genius ]
Historically, candidates have been winnowed from the field by three principal forces. The most important has been fundraising, which typically atrophies if they don’t perform well early on, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. “You run out of money, you are out of gas, you can’t continue,” says the veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who served as Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004. “I still think that’s the only reason anybody gets out of the race ever.”
The second factor has been that candidates who lag in the initial contests invariably receive less media attention. Finally, they face the third winnowing force, what Devine calls a catch-22 among voters: Most voters will only support candidates they believe can win, and they take their cues on who can win from the earliest results. “The vote is too meaningful for them in this primary process,” Devine says. “They are not going to waste it on somebody who doesn’t have a legitimate chance of winning.”
The new dynamics of fundraising and communication may largely neutralize the first two factors. Trippi, who pioneered the use of online fundraising in Dean’s campaign, says the huge pool of small donors that Democrats have assembled since the early 2000s could allow even candidates who don’t run well in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina to raise enough money to compete in the larger states that come later. “The harsh fundraising dive that happens to many candidates when they don’t perform in Iowa and New Hampshire may not be as steep,” he says. And while media attention will likely be curtailed for candidates who finish out of the top tier in Iowa and New Hampshire, the prevalence of televised debates, as well as the ability to communicate directly through social media, will leave them more capacity to reach voters in large numbers than earlier also-rans in the first states.
But the third traditional winnowing factor—the credibility and momentum that flow from performing well in Iowa and New Hampshire—may be undiminished, giving those early states the same power they’ve had before. Amid all the other changes in the process, Democrats since 1976 have only once selected a nominee who didn’t win either the Iowa caucus or the New Hampshire primary, and even that example comes with an asterisk. In 1992, home-state Senator Tom Harkin won Iowa, and Bill Clinton, the eventual nominee, only took second in New Hampshire (though his finish, after battling back from a cascade of scandals, nevertheless gave him momentum as the self-proclaimed “comeback kid”).
[Read: Democratic operatives are building Beto O’Rourke’s campaign without him]
In every Democratic-nomination contest since 2000, the total number of primaries and caucuses won by candidates who did not first win in Iowa or New Hampshire is just five. In 2004, John Edwards won his home state of North Carolina and neighboring South Carolina, and Howard Dean won his home state of Vermont and Washington, D.C. (which voted that year before Iowa and New Hampshire). When retired General Wesley Clark took Oklahoma in 2004, he became the only Democratic candidate in this century who, after losing Iowa or New Hampshire, won a state in which he didn’t have a home-court advantage.
This pattern hasn’t always been so inviolate. Through the 1970s and 1980s, and as late as 1992, candidates who didn’t win Iowa or New Hampshire—including McGovern in 1972, Jerry Brown in 1976 and 1992, and Jesse Jackson and Al Gore in 1988—won a meaningful number of later primaries, even if McGovern was the only one who captured the nomination. (None of the others even came close.)
The shifting demography of the Democratic coalition could dilute Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s influence this year. South Carolina, with its large African American population, and Nevada, with its heavy presence of Latinos, may be receptive to different candidates than virtually all-white Iowa and New Hampshire are. Harris, for one, is betting on the former, while former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is banking on the latter. But as many Democratic strategists note, even in 2008, Barack Obama didn’t surge in polls among South Carolina’s African American voters until he demonstrated his viability by beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa.
Trippi says that while it now may be possible to raise money without strong performances in the early states, it could be impossible to catch a candidate who gains significant momentum from a victory or two there. Even waiting for South Carolina or Nevada—much less the bigger states later on the calendar—exposes candidates to the enormous risk of being passed by someone who emerges from Iowa and New Hampshire on a “rocket ship,” as Trippi puts it. “If Beto launches out of Iowa,” he says with a laugh, “good luck, Kamala Harris.”
[Read: Jay Inslee is betting he can win the presidency on climate change ]
Devine’s assessment is very similar. Candidates, he believes, might have more capacity than before to survive poor showings in the early states if they have raised enough money before those results come in to buy “meaningful” amounts of television advertising in the larger states that vote on March 3 (including California, Texas, and North Carolina). But even if they can build that financial firewall, he says, they face the risk that voters will quickly discount them if they perform poorly in the first results. “You have to establish with voters that you can win,” Devine says flatly.
Carrick likewise believes that even with all the new fundraising and communications opportunities, it will be difficult for more than two candidates to sustain truly competitive campaigns past the first four states. “There is no example of somebody who has gotten a pass to states later in the calendar who hasn’t done reasonably well in the first set of states,” he says. “Since the beginning of the modern primary process, the early stages of the campaign have allowed for two viable contenders to move forward, but we’ve never allowed for the third one. And we’ve had an abundance of theories about how that possibly could happen, but it’s always ended up, particularly since 1976, with two people in a face-off.”
This could be the contest that finally breaks that pattern, with three or even four candidates from this vast field plausibly competing well into 2020. But it could also be the race that shows that no matter what else changes, the one constant in the presidential nomination process is that Iowa and New Hampshire shape the outcome more than any other state that follows.
Meme accounts, with their blurry videos, screenshots, tweets, and TikTok clips, pioneered the Internet Ugly aesthetic. But now young teenagers and tweens have developed a new, more aesthetically pleasing format: the meme-and-theme account.
At first glance, a meme-and-theme page looks a lot like a general aesthetics account, a type of page dedicated to posting on a single color scheme or theme, like a digital mood board. Themes rotate frequently, but can be something as simple as all color-washed photos, celestial pictures, or any set of images that are visually similar. Administrators find the pictures on the image-sharing service We Heart It or through Google image searches. Many teens follow a set of aesthetics accounts that post photos related to their interest or the season: fall themes to get excited for Halloween, or Christmas themes for the holiday season.
[Read: Custom photo filters are the new Instagram gold mine]
But teenagers also love memes, and meme-and-theme pages merge these two genres into one. While a meme-and-theme page looks like an aesthetics account, below the surface it’s teeming with memes. Like thread accounts, meme-and-theme pages take advantage of Instagram’s photo-carousel feature: Administrators keep their grids looking pretty by uploading on-theme photos as the first post in each carousel. But when a user swipes left, a series of memes is revealed.
Some teenagers prefer these types of accounts to traditional meme pages because they keep feeds looking clean and innocent to prying eyes. If you’re scrolling in public or a parent peers over your shoulder, you can move through posts without swiping over to reveal potentially dicey content. “When you scroll through Insta with friends, you might not want all the memes to pop up. They’re quite random and can be weird,” said Esther, a 16-year-old who runs a meme-and-theme account and, like all the others under 18 in this story, is referred to by her first name only.
Teenagers who create the accounts say the biggest appeal is that meme-and-theme pages allow for more complex self-expression. “It’s like two parts of yourself in one [account],” said Abby, a 16-year-old who runs one such page. Kenzie, a 14-year-old, said she’d initially contemplated starting a traditional meme account, but she didn’t think it would be personal enough. She likes the creative outlet that her meme-and-theme page provides, and thinks it says more about her than a running feed of screenshotted memes would. “When you make a themed meme account, you go through this process of making the theme,” she said. “A meme account is just like, oh, screenshot and post it.”
Meme-and-theme accounts are overwhelmingly run by young girls, teens say. “Most guys my age tend to use Insta like, ‘Here’s what I did on Fortnite today.’ Girls tend to have themes even for their personal accounts,” Kenzie said. High schoolers who run meme-and-theme pages trade theme ideas in group chats and hold one another accountable for posting. Some teenagers said they collect photos for months related to a potential theme, scouring the internet for hours to find the perfect batch of about 15 to 30 images. A dark and moody theme might represent a person going through a hard time. A K-pop theme might just reflect the administrator’s current taste in music.
[Read: How comments became the best part of Instagram]
Behind the aesthetic veneers, many high schoolers use meme-and-theme accounts to post about their daily lives. Many meme-and-theme administrators told me they had graduated to that posting style after previously running niche-meme accounts, which offered clip-art-like summaries of their daily lives on Instagram. “The theme is like the outside of me, then the memes [are] my inside self,” said Esther. “When you have a rough time, you can write about it in your caption.” The pages also function as a place to meet other people their age, connect with friends, and blow off steam or kill time after school. “Themed meme accounts are a place where you can let it all out,” said Kenzie.
Some kids use meme-and-theme accounts to rant on their Instagram Stories or post detailed accounts of what they like and don’t like, or how their day is going. They post recommendations or life hacks that other kids their age might find useful. “hi my exams are next week i want 2 die,” one teen wrote. Another user announced that her friend was ignoring her, and she was sad. “there’s such a long list of people who hate me and i honestly don’t blame them skjsksksjsksks,” she said in another post.
At their core, meme-and-theme pages are simply the newest way teens are transforming Instagram into a sort of public diary. The accounts also highlight the critical role that Instagram plays in most tweens’ social lives. “Instagram is really important to me,” Madison said. “I think there are plenty of places where you can make friends, but Instagram is the No. 1.” Other kids said they would be devastated if anything happened to the accounts they run. Kenzie said that “a lot” of her social life is “centered around Instagram,” and thinking about losing her account causes her great anxiety. For Mary, a 14-year-old, running a meme-and-theme account is ultimately just “a way to get closer to people.”
Baker Dill (played by Matthew McConaughey) is one of the most pungent movie heroes in recent memory. Just a glance at him summons the scent of salt, given that there are clearly grains of it in his every pore. A grizzled sailor living on a mysterious island, Baker takes tourists out to fish every day, and while his skin has the pallor and consistency of cured cod meat, his true obsession is tuna—specifically, one monstrously large tuna that he’s been hunting for a long time. One of the tourists inquires as to this special fish’s name, as Baker wrestles with it on the line. McConaughey peers over the side of his boat, which is called the Serenity, and rasps an answer in his very particular, memorable Texan drawl: “Justice.”
Just what is going on in Serenity, the writer-director Steven Knight’s extremely peculiar romantic thriller that is laden with Oscar nominees and winners but is opening in the cinematic doldrums of January? I can’t tell you everything—this is a film in which plot really does matter, and the less you know going in about specific twists and turns, the better. But I can try to underline just how baffling this film is from minute one, long before it springs any major surprises on the viewer. It’s one of those projects that initially seems hokey beyond repair but quickly evolves into something genuinely unique. Serenity may not make it onto many critics’ top-10 lists come the end of 2019. But it’s certain to be one of the more unforgettable viewing experiences of the year.
[Read: 25 movies to look forward to in 2019]
Baker Dill lives in Plymouth, a town that recalls the swampy Florida Keys but feels even more isolated from society. He’s on the run from his past, suffering post-traumatic stress from service in an unnamed war and drinking all night at the local watering hole. He dwells in a refurbished shipping container, dreaming of that furtive tuna named Justice, and occasionally romances the local doyenne Constance (Diane Lane), who in return gives him a few bucks if he’s ever hard up for cash. His life is a metronome, repeating the same hard-boiled tasks with little success, a colorful update of classic seaside mysteries such as Key Largo.
The final piece in the noir jigsaw is Karen (Anne Hathaway), an old flame from Baker’s past, who rolls into town with her abusive, rich husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), and a provocative proposition. If Baker takes Frank out fishing, pushes him overboard, and leaves him to die, she’ll give him $10 million, no questions asked. Will he do it? Is she on the level? Are Baker and Karen still in love? These are some of the questions Serenity asks, but there’s a strange stiltedness to how the movie unfolds. A mostly clothed sex scene between Baker and Karen during a midnight rainstorm is particularly laughable, as if the film were a dime-store romance novel come to life.
Knight is, in fact, a very accomplished screenwriter. Oscar-nominated for his Dirty Pretty Things script in 2004, he’s contributed to gritty, satisfying adult dramas such as Eastern Promises and Allied. His last directorial effort, 2013’s Locke, was a form-busting gem, set entirely in a car as a stressed-out man (played by Tom Hardy) tries to navigate a personal crisis and a work crisis, all in a series of phone calls. Compared with that, Serenity initially seems like a major step back, an incredibly derivative thriller that pushes its talented ensemble into giving stereotypical, one-note performances. McConaughey is haunted, Hathaway is icy, and Clarke is comically cruel, barking insults at everyone around him while waving money in their face.
Then, at around the film’s halfway point, Knight upends everything and Serenity’s story veers into entirely different waters. The twist, which involves a nervous-accountant character played by Jeremy Strong who is inexplicably running around the island, helps excuse some of the most egregious plot formulas Knight deploys. It catapults every performance into ludicrous new directions, particularly that of McConaughey, whose character spends much of the second half of the movie screaming wordlessly into the sky, Nicolas Cage–style. It’s the kind of development that’s impossible to predict because it’s just too silly to ever seriously consider.
Yet the twist just about won me over to Serenity, which is officially the daftest movie of 2019, a title I’d wager on it keeping for the entire year. I won’t say much about the film’s climax, but it hinges just about everything—the fate of the whole world—on Baker’s struggle between catching the tuna and throwing Frank overboard. I couldn’t possibly spoil what he decides to do, but even if I did, it wouldn’t come close to explaining what ends up happening in this giddily preposterous potboiler. If you find yourself with a spare couple of hours in the next few weeks, hitch a ride on the Serenity and see what you find. I can promise you this: It won’t be tuna.
My old winter coat was a joke. I bought it on sale at a discount department store five years ago for around $70, and it has never really done what a winter coat is supposed to do. The wind whipped through it. The shell soaked up snow. The thin feather insulation constantly poked out.
Up until a few months ago, I’d never had the extra padding in my writer’s budget to dream of extra padding in my coat, let alone to purchase a new one. But then I had some unusual luck selling words. So when I came down with a cold one particularly chilly December morning, I boiled a cup of tea, blew my nose, wrapped myself in a blanket, and decided enough is enough. I’m 52 years old. If I’m lucky, I have another 30 years or more on this periodically frigid rock. Amortized over the course of what’s left of me, a well-made, long-lasting winter coat made both economic and health sense, I told myself.
I did a little research. Time and again, the Canada Goose Kensington came up as the 2018 editors’ choice for the best winter jacket for women. Yes, that Canada Goose—one of the most expensive coats out there, costing more than twice my first weekly salary in New York. There’s even a Tumblr called Canada Douche. Normally I scoff at the absurd excesses of luxury goods. But a Canada Goose jacket was not, I reasoned, a $250 Supreme sweatshirt that hipsters line up behind police-guarded barricades to purchase or a Birkin bag that starts at the price of a Nissan Versa. This was a quality winter coat made by a no-frills company whose first jackets, back in 1957, were meant for Canadian government employees who worked outside in extreme temperatures. It remains the outerwear of choice for researchers working in the Antarctic.
I divided the price tag—$925, good lord!—by 30. It came out to a little less than $31 a year. I could always bequeath it to my daughter, who wears the same size, if I croaked before 82. The first outdoor-gear site I tried didn’t have my size. The Canada Goose site was sold out as well. So I did what almost any internet-connected American consumer would do: I went on Amazon and typed in Canada Goose Kensington. There I found the mother lode of Kensington jackets in many sizes, all available through a seller listed as “by Canada Goose,” which I assumed was the company itself.
This is where my story goes from wild Goose chase to goosed.
I chose dark green (“volcano,” they called it) in a size small, placed it in my cart, and then spent two more days debating whether to pull the trigger. Aside from my children’s college education, monthly rent, various medical procedures, and a few pieces of long-lasting furniture, I don’t generally spend that kind of money. I don’t own a home. I’ve never owned a car. Could I really walk around with that white Canada Goose patch on my arm? Maybe I could just cut it off.
One of my favorite activities is crossing the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan on foot, a windy journey on even the sunniest day. The coat would be an investment in my own warmth and physical well-being, even if I never travel to the South Pole.
Click! Buy.
The author’s counterfeit Canada Goose Kensington jacket (Deborah Copaken)I had zero buyer’s remorse until the next day, when I got the confirmation email with the tracking information. My new Canada Goose coat was on its way from Singapore, by way of Hong Kong. Wait, what? Wasn’t the whole point that the coats were made in Canada? I checked the small print, and the seller of my coat was no longer listed as Canada Goose, but as someone named Greg Adamserft. I clicked on the name, which took me to an Amazon seller’s page. At that point, Adamserft had only three reviews, all with five stars. (Now, weeks later, the page is riddled with one-star complaints.)
When the coat arrived, it was army green instead of the forest green I had ordered. It was heavy, not lightweight. It didn’t fit. It smelled of chemicals. And the white Canada Goose patch? It looked off; it’s the patch on the right at the top of this article. On Canada Goose’s website, a page dedicated to the dangers of counterfeiting explains that every one of its products has a hologram label with a polar-bear image, proof of authenticity. With a $925 pit in my stomach, I checked my coat. It had a hologram sewn into the seam but, sure enough, no polar bear.
[Read: Amazon may have a counterfeit problem]
Canada Goose’s website also has a search tool where you can type in the URL of an online retailer to check if it’s an authorized dealer. I typed in “amazon.com.” Immediately, a big red X appeared: “This is not an authorized online retailer.”
I should have expected this. Amazon is rarely an authorized retailer of any specific brand. Instead, the platform allows individuals and companies to sell whatever brands they carry, a practice that makes the site largely the modern-day equivalent of a pneumatic-tube system through which sellers can zip off their products to buyers. By U.S. law, e-commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay are generally not responsible for what’s inside those whizzing cylinders, so long as they have procedures in place for dealing with complaints of counterfeits.
A glaring downside to this arrangement is that it has inadvertently provided cover, in plain sight, for bad actors worldwide to create multiple digital storefronts selling counterfeit goods. When these people are caught and shut down, they can often pop up again under a different name. Today’s Greg Adamserft can easily become tomorrow’s Adam Gregserft in an endless game of online Whac-a-Mole. Often, the victims are people like me: those who might have been around long enough to use a pneumatic-tube metaphor, but who are generally unfamiliar with how sites such as Amazon work in the first place.
A representative at Amazon I contacted for this story seemed surprised that I would not know the site itself is rarely the seller. I was surprised that she would not know I would not know this. Or that I would not understand that when a coat appears to be sold “by Canada Goose” itself, it’s not. And therein lies the rub. While plenty of consumers understand the rules of online engagement and are wary of fishy-looking third-party sellers, there are still many of us who once shared our first email address with our spouse—because why would you ever need your own email?—and fall right into the traps the counterfeiters leave for us.
The Canada Goose counterfeit page includes a link to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center along with an email address that led me to Barry Elliott of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Criminal Intelligence Analytical Unit. I sent him photos of my coat, and he sent me a new email the next morning at dawn: Canada Goose had confirmed that my jacket was a fraud. I contacted the account for Greg Adamserft (I assume that’s not the account holder’s real name) via Amazon’s messaging system with Elliott’s findings, and Adamserft refunded my money. Adamserft did not respond to a later interview request.
The tag on the author’s counterfeit jacket has an incorrect hyphen in Canada Goose’s web address. (Deborah Copaken)I wish I could say that was the end of it, but my Kafkaesque attempts to safeguard others from my misstep reflected just how difficult fraud monitoring can be online. Shortly after receiving my coat, I wrote a one-star review titled “Do not buy a coat from Greg Adamserft!!!! He’s selling counterfeits!!!!” This was rejected for not adhering to Amazon’s guidelines. So I wrote another with fewer exclamation points: “Canadian police confirm this man is selling fakes.” This one was allegedly accepted on January 8, but it still has not appeared on the product page. (An Amazon spokesperson explained that, regarding the first review, Amazon accepts reviews of sellers on seller pages, but not on product pages. As for the second review, the team says it is still looking into why it has not been posted.)
Meanwhile, between the time I received my counterfeit coat and the day I presented myself to the company as a journalist, Adamserft was still selling coats, even as other one-star reviews flooded his seller’s page warning of fraud. Now Adamserft’s privileges have been revoked, according to Amazon. The page associated with the seller’s name is still up, as is the page with the coats, but when you try to buy one, a note appears in place of the add-to-cart button: “Currently unavailable. We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.”
In a statement, Amazon said it has many processes in place to combat counterfeit products, including machine learning, automated systems, dedicated teams of software engineers, research scientists, program managers, and investigators. According to the company, more than 99 percent of Amazon pages that customers visit have not received notices of potential infringement.
[Read: Knockoff appeal: Counterfeits can boost sales of the real thing]
Counterfeiting is far from an Amazon issue alone. Elliott, who helps run Project Chargeback, a collaboration between the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center, credit-card companies, and banks, calls the fakery not only of luxury goods but also of strollers, tools, generators, and so much more a “huge problem worldwide” across e-commerce sites. “We have assisted over 40 thousand victims mainly from Canada and recovered approximately $15 million since January 2013, when we started Project Chargeback,” Elliott says. He reports that his team has also identified about 12,000 merchant accounts linked to four banks in China, one of which just lost its Visa privileges permanently.
That’s all on top of plain old credit-card fraud—scams that charge you multiple times or simply don’t deliver what you ordered. On the plus side, Elliott notes, if you use a credit card to pay for counterfeit goods, you should be guaranteed a refund when a product is verified as fake. “Only a small percentage of the public is aware of this,” he says.
According to Elliott, his office for Project Chargeback in Ontario and the City of London Police are the only criminal investigators in the world working directly with defrauded customers and banks to combat the online sale of counterfeit goods. There are some organizations, such as the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center in the United States, that help various law-enforcement agencies work with companies themselves to protect their intellectual property. But that’s not the same as having a dedicated anti-counterfeit agency dealing directly with consumers and banks to recoup their losses. “Other countries have shown interest, but have not started up, including the U.S.,” Elliott says.
Earlier this month, on an unusually cold and windy day, I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge in the new $126.98 coat I had purchased to replace my fake Canada Goose, after a friend who owns one told me that it was “warm enough.” After crossing into Manhattan, feeling both snug and smug over having saved $800 that can now go toward my youngest’s college fund, I wandered through SoHo, where I came upon a long, police-guarded line to get into a store. Must be another Supreme store, I thought. But upon closer inspection, no. It was Canada Goose. Because of course it was.
The store was packed. The line to get in was at least 40 minutes long. The temperature was hovering in the high 20s with gusty winds. For a moment, I was tempted to wait in that line and try on a real Canada Goose. To ask them if I might take that coat outside, if only for a minute, and feel what it would be like, on a frigid January day, to be completely enveloped in Arctic Circle–tested, super-lightweight, wind-and-snow-resistant goose down.
But no, I said to myself. This is not Antarctica. Or even Canada or Chicago. It’s New York City. And in the new coat I bought—on Amazon, of course—I’m warm enough to keep walking.
Not long ago, the Democrats’ strategy during the government shutdown seemed clear. It consisted of two principles: No negotiations over border funding until the government reopens. And no wall, ever. In his rebuttal to Donald Trump’s nationally televised speech on January 8, Chuck Schumer demanded that Trump “separate the shutdown from the arguments over border security.” Then he declared, “The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”
Now Democrats have abandoned principle No. 1. On Wednesday, House Democratic leaders announced that they were sending Trump a letter proposing billions of dollars more for “border security” once Trump reopens the government. So, having said they would not negotiate a border deal while the shutdown continues, Democrats are suggesting the terms of a border deal while the shutdown continues.
But they’re holding fast to principle No. 2. According to The Washington Post, Democrats are even willing to give Trump the $5.7 billion in border funding he’s demanding—just as long as it funds “retrofitting ports of entry, new sensors and drones, more immigration judges and Border Patrol agents, and additional technology.” Anything but a wall.
[Read: There’s a slim chance the Senate will vote to end the shutdown]
As public policy, this makes no sense. In her rebuttal to Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rightly accused him of “manufacturing a crisis.” Jerrold Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, has been even clearer: “There is no crisis on the border.” If that’s the case, aren’t the billions Democrats are now proposing to spend on drones and border guards almost as wasteful as Trump’s wall? And if Democrats are okay wasting billions at the border, why not let Trump waste those billions on a wall in exchange for something Democrats truly care about?
Democrats could demand a permanent solution—with a path to citizenship—for the “Dreamers” and those immigrants who enjoy temporary protected status. Trump might reject such a deal, of course. (His own recent proposal offered DACA recipients only a three-year reprieve.) But he’ll likely reject billions in border funding absent a wall, too. If Democrats are going to negotiate during the shutdown, isn’t it morally preferable to push for secure legal status for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable immigrants than for billions in border funding that Democrats all but admit America doesn’t need?
The counterargument is that, politically, the wall is all that matters. If Trump gets his wall—no matter what he gives up in return—he will claim victory. He’ll renew his bond with his political base. Democrats will be demoralized. And whether or not the wall ever gets built, Trump, who today looks politically feeble, will gain momentum heading toward 2020.
[Read: The pain of the second missed paycheck]
But that logic is hardly airtight. Would a deal that gives Trump funding for a wall in exchange for a permanent DACA solution boost him with his base? Not necessarily. When Trump offered far more meager protections for Dreamers last weekend, Ann Coulter and Breitbart slammed him for supporting “amnesty.” Nor is it clear that giving Trump billions in border funding without a wall would damage him as much as Democrats think. Already, Democrats are calling their “border security” proposals a “smart wall.” What if Trump, having cut a deal for $5.7 billion in border funding, claims that the “smart wall” is simply a wall? Democrats appear to believe that, in the current standoff, political perception matters more than public policy. The most important thing is that they appear to win. But Trump and his Fox News flunkies are virtual-reality generators. Who’s to say they won’t claim victory anyway?
A week ago, I thought Pelosi’s no-negotiation strategy—which echoed her hard-line stance against George W. Bush during the Social Security privatization fight—made sense. But now, perhaps because of restlessness among Democratic moderates, her strategy has changed: Democrats are negotiating. They’re offering to give something in order to get something. If that’s the case, shouldn’t they try to get something that actually aligns with their ideals?
Carol Folt had to make a decision, and none of the options was great. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chancellor was caught between a conservative Board of Governors that seemed to favor returning a monument of a Confederate soldier, known as Silent Sam, to the pedestal from which it had been yanked last fall and a student body that heavily favored its permanent removal. The stakes—her job, but also the security of UNC’s campus—were high.
In a letter to the campus community on January 14, Folt announced that she’d made up her mind. She’d be stepping down at the end of the semester, and she’d be taking down what was left of Silent Sam, immediately. “The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment,” she wrote. “No one learns at their best when they feel unsafe.”
[Read: UNC punts on Silent Sam]
Folt’s choice highlights the tightrope that university leaders walk between ideologically driven boards and their campus constituencies. “When you get right down to it, the relationship with the board—and the extent to which the board is separate from campus, and doesn’t necessarily have a full appreciation for the different views that may exist on campus—that disconnect puts presidents in an incredibly difficult position,” Michael Harris, a professor at Southern Methodist University who has studied the turnover of college presidents, told me. That difficult position may be one that fewer qualified candidates for college leadership are choosing to take. One survey noted that in the past decade, more current college presidents have been sidestepping the traditional pathways to leadership and, anecdotally, even some of those nontraditional candidates have turned down potentially tumultuous positions. But if leaders with higher-education experience won’t do the job, who will?
The Board of Governors was, predictably, furious with Folt’s decision. “We are incredibly disappointed at this intentional action,” Harry Smith, the board’s chair, said in a statement. “It lacks transparency and it undermines and insults the Board’s goal to operate with class and dignity.” The board met the next day and accepted Folt’s resignation, but not effective at the end of the semester. Instead they gave her two weeks.
The accelerated ouster was the culmination of years-long tension at the university between the ideologically conservative board and university leaders. Margaret Spellings, the president of the UNC system, who announced she’d be resigning this year as well, had her own tensions with the board, including over her decision to ask the state governor for help in deciding Silent Sam’s fate. She had been hired after Tom Ross, the former system president, was himself forced out by the board in 2016. The rapid cycle of hiring, resignation, and removal creates a problem for the university. “I don’t know who would want that job right now, given the board and its ideology. And I worry about who they would find palatable enough to put in the position,” Harris told me. “One of the great university systems, and one of the great universities, is going to be damaged by this process.”
That tension between a college’s board and its president isn’t one exclusive to the UNC system. A few years ago, following a string of athletic scandals, Harris wanted to know whether more college presidents had been fired in recent years—or whether they had their resignation accepted on an accelerated schedule. Two years ago, he and Molly Ellis, a graduate student, published what they had found. Yes, the study said, over the past two decades presidents had been getting fired more often. But the why was perhaps more interesting: Boards have always had the responsibility of “hiring and firing” a president, but “there’s a sense of activism among boards now,” Harris said. “Historically there has been a little more deference than boards are willing to give now.”
[Read: The liberal arts may not survive the 21st century]
Of course, it isn’t just board oversight that could make the job of college president seem unappealing. Provosts, or even deans, who may have been groomed for the position might balk at the fundraising and politics associated with it. And these days, many open college presidencies come ready-made with crises. John Engler recently became the second president to leave Michigan State University in one year. The University of Oklahoma’s president, Jim Gallogly, is trying to navigate instances of racism at the institution, notably, a Snapchat video of students wearing blackface and saying the N word that went viral this month, which follows another racist viral video at the institution in 2015. There’s also an ongoing crisis at Baylor University, which is dealing with the fallout from a sexual-assault scandal.
“The number of qualified candidates is probably on the decline due to the job being less attractive, and I think we have boards trying to look for outside-the-box hires that more often than not don’t tend to work out,” Harris said. Those outside-the-box hires could look like Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, who was courted to be the next chancellor of the University of Texas system; or like Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, who met with the University of South Carolina’s board before ultimately deciding that he was not interested in the position of president.
A board has a responsibility to a university, one that can be corrupted when political ideologies are introduced, Harris said. “That fundamentally damages a university, and that can take generations to recover from,” he said. He pointed to the damage that politics have done to the University of Wisconsin system as an example. It’s a public higher-education system that was admired by the world, but it’s been hampered by controversy after budget cut after controversy over the past decade, and, in short, it’s suffering. It’s the kind of situation that UNC is hoping to avoid, but one that it, and other institutions, may be on a collision course toward as boards become more ideologically driven—and if qualified candidates continue to shy away from university leadership.
On Friday, the 35th day of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, 800,000 federal employees will miss a second paycheck, ratcheting up the individual impact of the partial government shutdown. Food banks from the capital to Kansas that have served a growing trickle of federal workers anticipate a jump in those needing help.
An air-traffic controller in Chattanooga, Tennessee, says his family has been doing all right thanks to creditors who are willing to delay payments, but he worries about expenses that can’t be postponed, such as food for his wife and their seven children. “Our grocery bill with nine people in the household is no joke,” said Joe Manley, who’s been working without pay since the shutdown began on December 22.
Manley warned that the growing “sick-out” among Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners might spread to air-traffic controllers as they seek outside work to pay their bills. Growing dysfunction at places such as airports could quickly turn the personal pain felt by workers into public pain—and, by extension, political pain, as people start calling their members of Congress.
Only 15 percent of civilian full-time federal employees live in the Washington, D.C., region, so representatives and senators from across the country could hear from increasingly anxious constituents well beyond the Beltway. According to the federal Office of Personnel Management, nearly 40,000 federal workers live in Alabama, about 90,000 in the battleground state of Florida, and more than 130,000 in Texas, whose Republican representatives hold leadership posts in both houses of Congress. At his first town hall as a senator, Mitt Romney got nervous questions from some of Utah’s 26,000 government employees. A federal union on Wednesday began daily demonstrations at the Senate’s Hart office building.
By any measure, the shutdown is already causing wide-ranging damage. Businesses must consider whether to go ahead with initial public offerings without approval by regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Tax refunds could be delayed as IRS employees are allowed to miss work because of financial hardship. Stores around the country have lost revenue because they can’t accept food-stamp payments; as PBS explained last week, about 2,500 retailers have seen a lapse in their authorization to accept payment by debit-style EBT cards.
Read: [The wheels of justice are grinding to a halt]
Most visibly for the broader public, the TSA “sick-out” results in closed security lines and airport delays. Absentee rates hit a high of 10 percent on Sunday, about three times as high as the typical level at this point last year. The agency has sent out a renewed plea for agents willing to temporarily shift to another city to reinforce the most strained airports, CNN reported. The shutdown’s lost productivity and ripple effects reduce economic growth by 0.13 percent each week, according to President Donald Trump’s own economists. Since Congress has already promised back pay to federal employees (but not contractors) regardless of whether they have to work during the shutdown, that amounts to $8 million to $12 million every hour in pay for work not done, PolitiFact calculated. But the impact has not yet inflicted serious pain on the broader public. A slightly longer TSA line isn’t comparable to hundreds of canceled flights or, worse, a deadly mishap.
Read: [Waiting for a shutdown to end in disaster]
Humans tend to ignore gradual changes, like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heated water (see: climate change, national debt, online privacy). With the president and House Democratic leaders dug into mutually exclusive positions, slow pain hasn’t yet changed the political calculus. However, the second round of missed payments means a rising tide of senseless struggle.
A Department of Homeland Security employee who lives in Northern Virginia says the prospect of a full month without pay forced her and her husband, another civilian federal worker, to apply for unemployment benefits, food stamps, and free school lunches for their two children. “The next missed paycheck will be a game-changer for us,” she said in an email Tuesday. “If the government opened last week, we would not have applied for assistance.” The family was low on cash savings because they had recently renovated their basement so her disabled mother could live with them. Both of their kids have special needs and receive private therapy outside of school, but tight finances forced the family to decide which child could skip that therapy during the shutdown.
A second missed paycheck doesn’t just double the hardship imposed by a single skipped payday. Marty Reid, a certified financial planner in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that while people should keep an emergency fund with enough cash to cover at least three months of essential expenses, most families don’t have that level of reserves, even if they’re not typically living paycheck to paycheck. “Even with households that have higher incomes, oftentimes they simply don’t have the cash reserve that they should,” he said. The publicity surrounding the shutdown means creditors are likely to allow postponed payments for mortgages or auto loans. A typical family may struggle with more than a single missed paycheck, tapping into retirement savings—but that means they lose out on long-term growth and risk taxes as high as 50 percent on withdrawals, Reid warned. He added that the shutdown’s timing could accelerate interest penalties for families who put holiday purchases on their credit cards.
Food banks are gearing up for an increased need. Food for Others, a Northern Virginia nonprofit, started seeing more and more new faces ahead of the first missed payday, on January 11. “We started receiving phone calls and inquiries from households needing food toward the end of the second week in January,” said Annie Turner, the organization’s executive director, in an email. “We anticipate those numbers to keep growing as more paychecks are missed.” The food bank, which kept a count of clients with government IDs, said the shutdown caused a 7 percent jump in demand in the first three weeks of this year.
Food pantries far beyond the Washington area are seeing federal workers as first-time clients. A furloughed fed went to Just Food in Lawrence, Kansas, for free groceries; the woman decided to use her unexpected free time to volunteer with the organization, said Elizabeth Keever, the executive director. The food bank is serving about six to 10 new clients a day because of the shutdown, Keever said, including at least one TSA agent. The nonprofit has already exceeded its January food budget, and she anticipates more need the longer the shutdown continues. “We’re going to see more and more as the second round of no-checks come in,” she said.
Perhaps the second no-pay payday will be a tipping point for centrist members of the Senate, which has largely stayed on the sidelines during the battle between Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The chamber is scheduled to vote on two bills Thursday: the president’s package, which temporarily protects some undocumented immigrants in exchange for wall funding, and a short-term spending bill that would fund the government for about three weeks. Folded into the GOP proposal is a provision that Democrats find toxic, which would require Central American children to apply for asylum from within their home countries.
Read: [Trump’s ‘major’ border deal is no deal for Democrats]
Neither proposal has much chance of getting the 60 required votes, but the two bills could provide a starting point for negotiations in the Senate, where members have more independence from their party leaders than in the House. As Trump and Pelosi fight over the State of the Union address, a second missed paycheck for thousands of constituents won’t change the political calculus overnight, but it might increase the pressure on senators to come up with a compromise.
President Donald Trump’s provocative move to recognize Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela is rich in symbolism but raises the question: What next?
Washington’s move was the latest in a series of escalating punitive measures taken against Nicolás Maduro’s regime. On Wednesday, the United States did not act alone; Canada and several Latin American countries also recognized Guaidó’s authority. Guaidó earlier swore himself in as interim president as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protested Maduro’s rule.
As significant as Washington’s announcement might be, it potentially puts the Trump administration in a difficult position: What happens if Maduro arrests Guaidó, 35, and crushes the protests? Also, how will—or will—the administration funnel support to Guaidó? If Guaidó names new ambassadors to capitals that recognize him as the new leader, how will the international community deal with two rival power centers in Caracas? (In a sign of the messiness to come, Maduro cut off all ties with the United States and gave U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded on Twitter, saying Washington did not consider Maduro to have the legal authority to do so.)
[Read: Venezuela is falling apart]
The uncertainty risks defanging U.S. policy, relegating the latest move to an empty gesture with Maduro still in power and ultimately weakening Guaidó. Alternatively, it could be the harbinger for an escalating showdown, putting Washington in a corner about what actions to take next.
The Trump administration was quick to use strong words, but provided little detail on what it would do. “If they [the Maduro regime] choose the route of violence and seek to usurp the constitutional order and democracy, let us be clear that … they have no immediate future. They will have no immediate livelihood. And therefore, one way or another, have their days counted,” said a senior administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Speaking to reporters later, Trump said, “We’re not considering anything, but all options are on the table,” using a favorite line of successive U.S. administrations to denote the possibility of military action. But it’s far from clear that this White House—whose president last month abruptly pulled U.S. troops out of Syria—has the appetite for any military intervention, as Trump himself indicated. (Nonetheless, Trump has made that threat in the past.) So far, the administration has mostly stuck to sanctions and other diplomatic censures.
Patrick Duddy, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela during both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, told me that Guaidó’s challenge is to keep the momentum going and capitalize on international support. “The international community needs to find ways to make Mr. Guaidó’s status as the interim president substantive and not just a symbolic gesture,” he said.
The United States and its allies should stop dealing with Maduro and pressure allies who have not yet done so to shun the Venezuelan leader, Duddy said.
[Read: Why Nicolás Maduro clings to power]
The administration official said the United States retained “a tremendous amount of leverage” with sanctions. He also said the United States would deal with Guaidó and the National Assembly on economic transactions. That would, in theory, include oil revenues, the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy, but again, how the United States would take action is uncertain. Although the U.S. has previously imposed sanctions and travel restrictions on Venezuelan officials, the Trump administration has refrained from imposing sanctions on Maduro personally. Washington has also so far avoided going after the country’s oil industry—a step that would starve Maduro and his allies, but one that would also strangle the country’s citizens. (Reuters reported that the United States was considering imposing oil-related sanctions soon.)
Trump’s announcement comes amid the longest government shutdown in American history. In that time, the president has focused his attention mostly on trying to secure funding for a wall on the southern border with Mexico, railing on Twitter about Democratic opposition to such a barrier. But Trump’s break from that crisis to focus on Venezuela is a testament to how critical the administration views the situation there.
Nevertheless, the United States has had a spotty record in recent years of backing opposition and protest movements. The Obama administration supported the Arab Spring protests that ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, only to see Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was elected president, ousted in a subsequent coup that had wide popular support. (The administration subsequently backed the then–army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who carried out the coup and became Egypt’s president.) In Syria, the U.S. and its allies threw their weight behind the Syrian opposition coalition that was fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, calling him illegitimate. Seven years later, Assad is still Syria’s president, a situation that has the tacit acknowledgment of the West. It’s unclear whether U.S. support for Guaidó will play out differently.
[Read: Latin America gets its own migrant crisis]
Venezuela has one of the world’s largest oil reserves, but its industry, once the crown jewel of state-run firms, is now a shadow of its former self. Former President Hugo Chávez’s generous oil subsidies to his allies in the region were possible when the price of oil was high in the early 2000s, but Maduro, his chosen successor, was not that lucky. Oil prices crashed and so did Venezuela’s economy, leading to an exodus of its citizens to countries across Latin America. Maduro remains close to China and Russia, which both have substantial investments in Venezuela. Both support Maduro, who since his election in 2013 has steadily eroded democracy, choked the opposition, and stifled dissent. Two weeks ago, he declared himself president again following elections last year that were widely described as flawed. Moscow and Beijing both recognized the results of the vote.
Speculation that the Trump administration would recognize Guaidó had been mounting for days. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence declared “unwavering support” for protests to oust Maduro. Influential lawmakers have kept up pressure. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, said on Twitter that Maduro has “undertaken a fight with the U.S. & international community he has no chance of winning.” But as long as the Venezuelan president retains the support of the military, he has the ability to crush the protests against him and ignore the West, as he has done for years.
Venezuela’s military high command said on Twitter that it is firmly behind Maduro. It’s not clear if that support extends across all ranks of the armed forces.
“It will come down to the military as always,” Moises Rendon, an expert on Venezuela at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me. “The military are the only ones who are capable to use force and remove Maduro from office.”
This story contains spoilers for the film The Favourite.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s 18th-century comedy-drama The Favourite, which collected a whopping 10 Oscar nominations on Tuesday, opens with a familiar tableau. Queen Anne, the reigning monarch of England (played by Olivia Colman), stands stock-still as her handmaidens unlatch a fur cloak. Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz)—the queen’s trusted friend, adviser, and lover—sits to the side and compliments her on a speech well delivered. The setting feels familiar, the characters well worn: Here is the monarch in her straight-backed splendor, and there is her sycophantic companion, prettily fawning.
But as Anne slips off her cloak, the timbre of the scene changes. The queen blindfolds Sarah and pushes her down a secret corridor that enjoins their rooms to surprise her with a gift. In the hallway, the duo stumble as they run, exuding a glee that feels girlish compared with their former composure. Their giggling dash shatters the staid formality often expected of prominent female figures, especially in British period films. The scene also signals that a more chaotic depiction of womanhood lies ahead for Anne, Sarah, and palace newcomer Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). Throughout The Favourite, the three women fight to seize and maintain power through various forms of royal-court intrigue. But understanding what makes these characters so compelling and distinctive requires noticing exactly how they navigate the physical space around them—how they move and how they walk.
Movement as a technique in acting is, of course, nothing new. But one particularly illuminating lens for looking at how Queen Anne and her companions carry themselves is the centuries-old art of Japanese Noh theater. Central to Noh theater is a skill known as suri-ashi, which is sometimes called “the art of walking.” Simply put, suri-ashi is a sliding walk that actors perform as a part of their character building. There are even certain accepted “walks” for different types of characters, implying that the audience ought to be able to ascertain the class, mood, and gender of a character just by watching a Noh actor’s feet. A hero, for example, walks with a wide stance and heavy footfalls. An elderly person limps, dragging one foot to the side.
Suri-ashi is especially crucial when it comes to conveying womanhood. Noh theater only began formally accepting female actors to its stage in the 1940s, and today it remains dominated by male performers who play female parts. To let the audience know that a woman was entering the scene, the actor’s gait had to adhere to a circumscribed notion of femaleness. A womanly gait in Noh is most often built of small, prim steps taken in a slightly pigeon-toed stance; this is meant to allow for a graceful sway of figure, making the character seem submissive and alluring. At its core, Noh and its usage of suri-ashi underline the idea that women are supposed to walk and move in a certain way in order to be viewed as women.
This message is certainly not unique to Noh. How many films has Hollywood made about girls becoming women, about women becoming ladies, that include instructional scenes detailing how one ought to move? Consider 2000’s Miss Congeniality, in which Sandra Bullock is berated by Michael Caine for carrying herself like a man, or 2001’s The Princess Diaries, in which Julie Andrews gives step-by-step instructions to her granddaughter on how a woman should walk (“Drop the shoulders … think tall”). These movies use aristocracy (or, in the case of Miss Congeniality, the faux aristocracy of a beauty pageant) as a framework for unruly female characters trying to learn how to best perform womanliness.
In The Favourite, Colman, Stone, and Weisz upend such rigid standards with their incredible, physical performances; it’s no wonder that all three received Oscar nominations for their roles. In the heady, lush world of the British court, it is obvious that Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill, and Abigail Masham are meant to be viewed as women, garbed as they are in the arch royal drag of furs, lace, and jewels. They visually telegraph their positions of female nobility, painted as exactly the kinds of people who would float from room to room. And yet, they do not move in the manner viewers might expect.
Instead, they stomp, gambol, splay their legs. They tumble down hillsides not in an elegant slump but in a slapstick heap. In one scene, Anne witnesses an orchestra playing in the courtyard. At first she’s delighted. But her joy quickly sours, causing her to take flight down the hall, screaming and sobbing hysterically. She weaves, careening into walls and window sills. Her trajectory is unpredictable, a direct contradiction to the stifling decorum of court behavior. In her portrayal of the queen, Colman also delivers an intimate performance of Anne’s many ailments, adopting affects of gout and stroke. Whether she’s hobbling through the court or speaking out of one side of a paralyzed mouth, Colman’s Anne illustrates discomfort and disability in excruciating detail not often seen on the big screen.
[Read: ‘The Favourite’ is a deliciously nasty satire of royal-court intrigue]
Weisz’s Sarah Churchill also moves in ways that seem transgressive but that distinguish her from Anne. She stalks from scene to scene, commanding and hawkish, more a general than a lady. Her costuming favors gamine, sportsmanlike attire, her hose and leggings allowing for her brassy stride. Sarah walks up to male politicians without averting her gaze, looming over them to forcefully make a point. But this isn’t the extent of her physical expressiveness. As Sarah falls from the queen’s favor, Weisz masterfully breaks her character down. We see Sarah walk the same corridor that she galloped through in the opening sequence. Only now she is alone and staggering. Her body drags to one side as she is met with Anne’s closed door, and her earlier sauntering has devolved into a pitiable shuffle.
It is Stone’s Abigail, however, who most clearly crystallizes the different ways motion can complicate how women are perceived in The Favourite. Though she will later win Anne’s affections, when Abigail is introduced, it seems impossible that she’ll measure up to Sarah’s bravado. At first, Abigail inhabits the stereotypical female body in motion: small, proper, trying not to take up too much space. If The Favourite were a Noh play, Stone would be executing the suri-ashi movements of a female role flawlessly: Abigail scurries behind her superiors, scrunching herself between carriage passengers and scullery maids sleeping on the floor. As she begins to worm her way into the queen’s good graces, though, her body language changes.
Midway through the film, Abigail invites the queen to dance, mirroring the monarch’s gestures and placing her body teasingly close to the royal. In another scene, Abigail is confronted by the man she will later marry, Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn), in the woods. Instead of the expected seduction and tender sexual interlude, what follows is a punchy, vivid sequence: Abigail leaps and cavorts as Samuel lunges and misses. She is coy and edgy, stilling herself for what seems to be a kiss, only to knee Samuel in the groin, traipsing off in merriment. Her movements are broad, almost monstrous in their swagger. Later on, in a bid to cement herself in the queen’s favor, Abigail sprawls on the floor, her arms and legs kicked out in front of her like a cranky, overindulged toddler. Stone is expansive in this scene, taking up as much room as possible, hiccuping and crying. Of course, the queen takes pity on her, and Abigail gets her way; she remains in the palace, and her movements become only more and more audacious.
Stone’s portrayal of Abigail highlights the ineffective, constricted motion of men throughout the film. In The Favourite, male characters are mincing, wheedling, and heavily made-up, whereas the women mostly appear to be barefaced. Nicholas Hoult’s Lord Harley glowers and preens, and though initially he attempts to intimidate Stone’s Abigail, it is he who is physically cornered by her at the end of the film. Samuel tries to kiss Abigail, only to draw back, appalled, after she vigorously bites down on his bottom lip. Men seem to move only as afterthoughts; they’re more like shadow characters whose greatest service is to act as a passive foil to the dynamic activity of women.
Some might watch these performances and conclude that the women of The Favourite are meant to be seen as unwomanly, that they are Noh actors in reverse, conveying an uncanny maleness to embody power. But I’d argue that this isn’t the case. In interviews with cast members, Lanthimos appears to have spent a considerable amount of time in rehearsal focused on physical interaction. Colman, Weisz, and Stone were encouraged to run backwards into each other, to tie themselves into knots and pretzels. The goal of these exercises was, according to Stone, for the actors to be able to “sense each other without seeing each other,” suggesting the importance of developing an intuitive comfort with their own physicality.
Movement in The Favourite is as much about humor and action as it is a marker of authenticity. For all the film’s emphasis on deception and conniving, the characters’ body language often alerts the audience to a truth in the women’s interactions with one other—the jealousy, fear, desire, anger, betrayal, and love that they cycle through from scene to scene. This isn’t to say, then, that real women behave like Anne or Sarah or Abigail. Rather, portrayals like theirs contain refreshing range and complexity, giving the world of film (and beyond) more options for the ways women can take up, and move through, space.
The United States is a superpower that never entirely sought empire’s glory. It has sometimes looked like an empire—but a clumsy, awkward one; sometimes too heavy-handed, at other times too quick on the draw. Imperialistic, yes, but often of necessity, as when no one else was left to confront the Nazis. Since its emergence as a world power, it has not engaged in wars of conquest for the sake of territorial expansion, such as Persia, Sparta, Macedonia, Rome, or Babylon. So it cannot be ruled out that with its present retreat, America is returning to a state that, on balance, it finds more natural than the position of world policeman it has occupied for a little less than a century.
This essay was adapted from The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World, by Bernard-Henri Lévy.Some may find this retreat reassuring. Others, heartbreaking. Yet others might say: Aren’t you crying over yesterday’s American empire? The real empire is busy exerting its global domination through GAFA—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple—which were born on the West Coast of the United States and have become states within a state, empires within the empire. This America that you are not the first to say is in decline, isn’t it the center of a revolution that has changed the face of humanity and made America more dominant than ever?
Yes and no. Yes, because these companies—though they are so completely unrooted as to be almost governed by no law, not even that of the United States—are in their culture and language unmistakably American. At the same time: No, because the new empire with a digital face has no interest in spreading or maintaining what were once called American values.
It took only a short amount of time for a band of young people, working in their garages and dorm rooms, to dream up and put into practice the equations and protocols that underpin this electronic empire, a system of influence and control whose strength is gradually coming to be seen as greater than that of the old empire and its heavy equipment.
The story began like a fairy tale offered up to the rest of the planet: the giddy opening of infinite spaces and labyrinths of intelligence; the vertiginous feeling of having all the known world within one’s grasp; the joy, for those living at the edges in remote villages or peripheral nations, of gaining access to globalized methods of socialization and personal growth.
[Derek Thompson: The attention economy is a Malthusian trap]
For people who previously had no collective importance, who were forbidden to speak or even to possess a narrative and a story of their own, the fairy tale promised new possibilities for expression and freedom.
Then things began to go wrong. A torrent of previously dammed-up speech washed over the internet. The web became a throng, a free-for-all, a venue for the headlong pursuit of the self, where everyone shows up with his opinion, his conviction, his complaint, and his “personal truth.” The point of departure was the equal right of all to express their beliefs; but, somehow, that conviction gave way to the idea that all of those expressions of belief are of equal value.
And here it is necessary to bring up the name of someone who is not a GAFA head but rather an 18th-century English philosopher: Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham invented a model prison that he dubbed the “panopticon,” the chief feature of which is a central watchtower that allows the guards to observe the prisoners detained in chambers radiating like spokes from the tower hub, without the prisoners being able to observe the observers. He conceived the simple idea that it is enough for a person to believe that he is being observed to get that person, without force and even without words, to bend and submit.
What is the internet if not a modern panopticon? But it is a two-sided one, a panopticon that can be turned around. Operated from the top down, it gives GAFA, governments, and other actual or would-be major players full power to observe, monitor, and control those under their dominion. But the tools wielded by those at the top are not much better than those available to the people at the bottom; and provided they are a little geeky or at least use the right websites, they can be just as powerful as the people at the top.
[Read: China’s new frontiers in dystopian tech]
Instead of passively allowing themselves to be watched, the lowly eyes take the initiative; they turn their leaders into objects of insatiable and unforgiving curiosity, with the result that the watchers come to be watched, the informers informed on, and the inspectors inspected.
This reversal has its good side. The laying bare of kings, the possibility of seeing them, as in the tale, without clothes, this new right delivered to the disenfranchised, to nobodies, to those who were called the sans-culottes in the French Revolution for their lack of proper breeches—this power to expose princes, officials, prestigious people, and, of course, tyrants is central to the democratic idea and to democratic resistance.
But still, the machine cannot distinguish between potentates and ordinary politicians. Or between good and bad causes. Should we not worry about the parity in the energy it can bring to bear to topple a tyrant or to smear a democrat? And are we so sure that the risk of being observed always has the effect of discouraging, let alone blocking, abuses of power? The nudity imposed on the powerful may serve less as an incentive to appear virtuous (I know they can see me naked, so I’m going to restrain myself) than as an inducement to let oneself go (How wonderful to be seen naked; why hold back?). Isn’t that right, President Donald Trump?
It is not only kings and their subjects who carry the little spy satellite around in their pocket. You, I, and nearly everyone else—billions of human beings living on every continent and connected by GAFA—have the personal and portable panopticon at our disposal. Everybody is gazing at everybody. It is a corrupt bargain in which the parties agree to share the right to spy on one another and, ipso facto, to denounce one another.
[Read: Why technology favors tyranny]
But in this world, the world of the web, which is fast becoming the world itself, there is no authority charged with receiving and adjudicating denunciations—no one in the policeman’s position that the America of old played in the world of old. GAFA gave everyone on the planet the means to make one another speak, sing, and reveal themselves on equal terms.
As an example—the most terrible example, and for that very reason the most eloquent—I cite the relish shown by the radical Islamists since the torture and execution of Daniel Pearl for filming, editing, and (until the world finally rose up in protest) posting their decapitations on YouTube.
It is impossible not to also see in this exhibitionism a measure of mimicry of the West, whose influence on the Islamic radicals is, on this score, obvious from the fierceness with which they deny it. My hypothesis is that there is, here, a dark fascination with the telling all, the seeing all, and the showing all, and that these are the new laws of the empire. ISIS, in a way, carried into the Muslim world our own thirst for transparency.
How can we best describe an empire that limits itself to spreading its vapors, plumes, and waves over the world’s surface? And what are we to make of an imperial form that is so indifferent to its content that for so long and without too many qualms or scruples it consented to carry over its waves the filth that ISIS produced?
One is reminded of Edom, which is, in the Jewish tradition, the name applied to the last empire. Edom is “drunk on Nothingness,” says the Maharal of Prague, but reigns over the nations with a strictness that is all the more implacable. In other words, it is simultaneously all and nothing. It has nothing special to say, because nothing opposes it any longer and it extends over all the ancient kingdoms. It no longer has to be this, that, or anything else, because it no longer has any particular message and has become another name for the world.
That is where America is in its new imperial form. Vigorous and silent. Preeminent but mum.
This essay was adapted from Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World, which will be published on February 12, 2019.
Updated on January 24 at 10:30 a.m. ET
Federal employees on the verge of missing their second consecutive paycheck should not get their hopes up about the pair of dueling votes to reopen the government that will take place in the Senate on Thursday.
Both proposals—one representing President Donald Trump’s proposed trade of $5.7 billion in border-wall funding for temporary protections for some undocumented immigrants, and another that would simply end the shutdown—are expected to fall short on the floor.
But the failure of one is more certain than the failure of the other: While Republican senators have rallied behind the president’s plan, they have not ruled out also voting for the rival proposal, a measure, backed by Democrats, that would reopen shuttered federal agencies for two weeks while the parties negotiate a broader agreement on border security. And thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to allow Trump to deliver his State of the Union address next week if the government is closed, Republicans might have an added incentive to seek at least a temporary break in the impasse.
After the president wrote to Pelosi on Wednesday insisting that the annual speech go forward “on location” in the House chamber, the speaker swiftly replied that the House would not pass the required resolution allowing that to happen. By late afternoon, a frustrated Trump conceded Pelosi had “canceled” his Capitol address, and suggested he would look at an “alternative” location to hold it. “I don’t believe it’s ever happened before, and it’s always good to be part of history, but this is a very negative part of history,” the president lamented. Late Wednesday night, however, Trump relented. “This is her prerogative,” he said in a tweet, referring to Pelosi. “I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over.”
If Pelosi’s requirement is that the government be open for the State of the Union to proceed as planned, the Senate on Thursday will have its opportunity to make that happen. The votes will be the chamber’s first attempt to end the record-long shutdown.
Both measures would require a filibuster-proof 60 votes to advance, meaning that either seven Democrats would have to back Trump’s plan or 13 Republicans would have to support the alternative. Most Democrats have roundly condemned the president’s proposal, which contains what they consider “poison pill” provisions that would make it harder for refugees to seek and obtain asylum in the future. The Democratic measure, which has already passed the House, is more straightforward—a clean but short-term, continuing resolution with a sweetener of billions of dollars in disaster-relief money—and Republicans have been quieter in their opposition.
On Wednesday, I surveyed the offices of 23 Republican senators who frequently or occasionally cross party lines to see how they planned to vote. Of those that responded—about one-third—all indicated that they planned to back Trump’s proposal, but none definitively came out against the Democratic alternative. A spokeswoman for Senator Lisa Murkowski, for example, said the Alaska Republican supports the White House plan, but added, “She is planning to support anything that allows for a process for us to reopen the government as soon as possible, while addressing border security.” Representatives for Senators Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Mike Enzi of Wyoming said they were each studying the Democratic proposal. By Thursday morning, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado, who are up for reelection in 2020, both said they’ll vote for both the Trump and Democratic plans.
That sampling is not an indication of momentum—none explicitly endorsed the second plan either. But it suggests that Republicans are keeping their options open, raising the possibility that once the Trump plan fails, they could vote with Democrats to temporarily end the shutdown. Republican senators have harbored thinly veiled frustration with the president for the past month, ever since his abrupt decision to oppose a spending bill they voted out of the chamber, precipitating the shutdown’s start. They welcomed Trump’s recent bid to jump-start negotiations by offering limited protections for recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which at least gave Republicans an offer to rally around.
Yet for the president and for his party, the political pressure to end the shutdown is only increasing. Furloughed federal employees protested inside a Senate office building and outside the locked Kentucky offices of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The rate of absences for unpaid Transportation Security Administration agents has been increasing, and The Washington Post reported that hundreds of IRS employees were skipping work because of financial hardship, jeopardizing the completion of on-time tax returns. Federal courts will soon run out of money, and FBI investigations are grinding to a halt.
Polls continue to show that a majority of Americans blame Trump for the shutdown, and a survey released Wednesday by the Associated Press found that the president’s approval rating dropped sharply over the past month, to 34 percent, its lowest level in more than a year. “What more do my Republican colleagues need to hear? The will of the American people is crystal clear: Open the government,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, in a plea to the GOP on Wednesday.
Chances are that the mounting personal toll of the shutdown and the apparent verdict of the public will not be enough to get the government open on Thursday. But the number of Republicans who vote with Democrats will be a measure of the party’s resolve as the impasse moves into its second month, as well as the first sign of how close it is to ending.
A eleição presidencial será daqui a menos de dois anos e as primárias inaugurais, no Iowa, serão daqui a pouco mais de um ano. No fim do mês passado, a senadora Elizabeth Warren anunciou a formação de um comitê exploratório para uma candidatura presidencial, e outros líderes democratas devem se lançar em breve. É possível que haja até 30 pré-candidatos democratas, de senadores a governadores, passado por celebridades.
Nesse vídeo, Mehdi Hasan lista os 10 candidatos com mais chances de serem o nome do Partido Democrata – e os seus prós e contras.
The post Quem será o democrata escolhido para derrotar Trump em 2020? appeared first on The Intercept.
A dramatic, multi-level and increasingly dark scandal has been engulfing the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro for the last month. It began just weeks after his stunning November victory but before he was inaugurated on January 1, and has completely paralyzed his presidency ever since. Just this week in Davos, which Brazil planned to unveil its new face to foreign capital, Bolsonaro and his top ministers left a long-scheduled press conference empty to avoid answering questions about any of this, causing empty chairs abandoned by fear, rather than vibrant investor-friendly policies, to be the face of the new government.
Bolsonaro cancela entrevista em Davos e culpa comportamento da imprensa —-> https://t.co/J7zf6Kme8P
#folha #Bolsonaro pic.twitter.com/27E48r2OZF
— Folha de S.Paulo (@folha) January 23, 2019
The scandal most centrally involves President Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flavio, who has long been a State Deputy from Rio de Janeiro but was just elected to the Federal Senate with a massive vote total in the last election. The scandal began with the discovery of highly suspicious payments into and out of the account of Flavio’s driver, a former police officer and long-time friend of President Bolsonaro’s.
Each new discovery has escalated the scandal’s seriousness: one unexplained deposit was found going into the account of President Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle; both the driver and Flavio himself began using highly suspicious maneuvers to try to stymie the investigation; the amounts of the suspicious transfers began rapidly increasing to $US 2 million; and then deposits were found going into Flavio’s accounts in small increments of multiple deposits in rapid succession: at times up to 10 cash deposits made within 3 minutes, the hallmark of money laundering and evading banking regulations.
But two recent events have converted what looked to be a classic scandal of money laundering and kickbacks into something much more ominous and terrifying. Earlier this week, Rio de Janeiro police arrested five members of Brazil’s most dangerous militia: one linked to the 2018 assassination of City Councilwoman Marielle Franco of the left-wing PSOL party. As it turned out, Flavio Bolsonaro formally praised two of the leading members of that militia; gave an award to the militia’s chief; and, most astonishingly of all, kept the mother and the daughter of the militia chief on his payroll for the last ten years. That the Bolsonaro family has been discovered to have such close and intimate ties with militias, including the one involved in Marielle Franco’s brutal assassination, stunned the country.
Then, on Thursday, Brazil’s only LGBT member of Congress, the long-time leftist critic of Bolsonaro, Jean Wyllys, who just won a third term in the November election, announced that he has fled the country, and will not assume his office due to serious threats to his life. In explaining why he fears for his life, Wyllys specifically cited these new revelations that the Bolsonaro family is linked to the militia blamed for the death of Franco, who was in the same party as Wyllys (my husband, David Miranda, is a Rio de Janeiro City Councilman in that same party and, as the alternate behind Wyllys, will now assume Wyllys’ seat in Congress, becoming the only LGBT member of the lower house).
Earlier this week, prior to Wyllys’ stunning announcement, we produced a short video documenting the key facts of this genuinely shocking scandal that has paralyzed the Bolsonaro presidency before it could even begin and, today, drove the country’s only LGBT Congress member not only from office but from the country. Watch:
The post VIDEO: The Dramatic Scandal Swallowing the Bolsonaro Presidency and Which Just Drove an LGBT Congressman to Flee Brazil appeared first on The Intercept.
A woman speaks during the Indigenous Peoples March on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2019.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
By now, millions around the world have seen the viral video of dozens of Catholic schoolboys sporting “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA, hats tomahawk-chopping and mocking a Native elder, who was drumming and singing at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Nathan Phillips, the military veteran and water protector from the Omaha Nation, waded into the crowd of high school students, as he tried to defuse a tense situation between the students and a group of black Israelites who were taunting Natives and passers-by with racist and homophobic comments. It was an iconic moment loaded with history. And what should have been a time of soul-searching for a nation founded on Indigenous genocide has instead morphed into an attack on Indigenous people.
Concern from both liberal and conservative media outlets shifted from confronting the issue of Indigenous erasure — why were Native people marching in D.C. in the first place? — to defending the innocence of white youth.As soon as the jarring video made international news, an organized media campaign quickly spun the story — turning the jeering Covington Catholic High School students into victims. And concern from both liberal and conservative media outlets shifted from confronting the issue of Indigenous erasure — why were Native people marching in D.C. in the first place? — to defending the innocence of white youth.
Although disgusting, it’s not surprising. And, in perhaps the biggest shame, this pervasive counternarrative quickly wiped the hopeful signs of the weekend out of the national conversation.
Reckoning with the events requires first honoring all that happened last weekend. The confrontation between Phillips and the Covington boys was a single incident, and it shouldn’t eclipse an otherwise historic weekend. These times can be dark, but the Indigenous Peoples March offered a moment of hope: The issues that matter to Native people were put front and center in a show of solidarity. The odds may be daunting, but our communities showed that they’re coming together to fight — with a watchful eye on history and a necessary glance toward the future.
However, the Indigenous Peoples March, which I did not attend, wasn’t the only major event focused on a path forward. Like many, the day after the event, I participated in a local Women’s March in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Organized in concert with the march in Washington and other Women’s Marches around the country, the Women’s March centered life and death issues confronting Indigenous nations, such as the thousands of cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, the government shutdown that has devastated federal services to already hard-hit Native communities, and the extractive industries polluting Native lands.
It was also a celebration of the elections of the first two American Indian members of Congress, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids. Indian Country hailed the elections of Haaland and Davids as a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s anti-Indian agenda and as an affirmation of Indigenous women’s leadership. In tandem with last Friday’s march in Washington, it was a weekend of solidarity and camaraderie with millions of Natives and non-Natives galvanized around Indigenous issues.
The last time there was a nationwide spotlight on Native rights of this magnitude was during Standing Rock in 2016, and the last time that thousands of Native people and their allies marched on Washington, D.C., was in March 2017 — to protest Trump’s escalated attack on Native sovereignty and lands. Native elders like Phillips have been a part of these movements at least since the 1970s.
So how did MAGA hats and a sneer steal the show?
The MAGA hat has become synonymous with white supremacy. It was proudly worn by neo-Nazis who marched, beat up protesters, and killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. It is worn by the throngs of Trump supporters who are still chanting “build the wall!” The youthfulness of the movement shows that racism isn’t fading away with the clichéd image of white-hooded thugs sporting Confederate flags. Racism is alive and well — and it’s young and angry as hell.
It should come as no surprise that the MAGA hat is associated with the anti-choice marchers who descended on Washington at the same time as Indigenous protesters last Friday. After all, racism and misogyny are part of Trump’s brand of politics and the reason for mass protests against his administration.
With all this context, the media could not refute the clear image of anti-Indian racism unfolding that day: a sneering Nicholas Sandmann wearing a MAGA hat, staring down Nathan Phillips, a drumming and singing Indigenous elder. Young white kids wildly bounced up and down around them like a pack of rabid hyenas.
It was encouraging to see the initial coverage, even if it failed to contextualize the larger Indigenous movement for justice. But at least they got the racism part right.
There were many avenues to pursue with this story, among them the setting. The confrontation unfolded at the feet of President Abraham Lincoln, who ordered the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men days before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It took place in a city that sits atop Piscataway land and whose NFL team name is a dictionary-defined racial slur celebrating the scalping of Native people. The students’ tomahawk chops reinforced that sort of all-too-casual pervasive bigotry, a familiar gesture for sports fans of Indian mascots. All of it taking place in the heart of American empire.
In the face of hostility, Phillips sang the American Indian Movement song, known as the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song” in honor of the Oglala elder brutally murdered by white vigilantes in February 1972.In the face of this hostility, Phillips sang the American Indian Movement song, known as the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song” in honor of the Oglala elder brutally murdered by white vigilantes in February 1972. It’s a song of resistance and remembrance, and it was sung during the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973 and at the frontlines of Standing Rock in 2016.
The waves of history and emotion washed over me when I heard Phillips sing. I remember white boys from my high school chanting, “Get the fuck out of our country, faggot!” at me and my friends when we refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I remember being told, “Go back to where you came from!” by a white woman outside Los Angeles International Airport when I marched against Trump’s Muslim ban. I remember seeing my Native friends spat on by MAGA hat-wearing white men at a Trump rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I remember white men shouting, “Go back to the reservation!” at water protectors holding a prayer circle in a mall in Bismarck, North Dakota. In some of those moments of terrible danger, we sang the “Yellow Thunder Song” too and didn’t strike out against the threats in front of us.
This is what many of us saw in that video: steadfast resilience and discipline. We relive these feelings in our daily lives over and over again.
Instead of focusing on the DNA of this settler nation and its profound inability to confront its own history, however, we found out that the sneering MAGA kid’s mom is vice president of Fidelity Investments. The well-to-do family sent their son to a private Catholic school, whose students were once pictured in blackface taunting a Black basketball player in a photo circulating the internet. Sandmann’s family also hired a PR firm to protect his image.
On NBC’s “Today” Show, Savannah Guthrie interviewed Sandmann. The entire history of Indigenous erasure on that day boiled down to a single white boy’s testimony. He appeared without his MAGA hat and calmly mischaracterized his encounter with the Phillips.
You could feel the air being sucked out of the room.
“Umm, I just stood there,” he told Guthrie when asked if he should apologize. With that, the tables switched, and Phillips became the aggressor.
The fault, however, is not with the individual acts of one white kid; it lies with how this story was told and how it has obfuscated a movement and history. That was the greatest loss in this tale: This episode being twisted in order to reverse and then ignore the larger narrative.
Journalists are often the first to write history — and they are also the first to rewrite it. We’ve seen how cops killing Black kids is made to look like self-defense, how children crossing borders become “illegals,” or how Native elders singing songs become violent aggressors.
It’s the founding myth of this country: The cowboy will always be surrounded by hostile natives to make colonial invasion look like self-defense. That narrative won’t end unless we stop telling that story.
Correction: Jan. 24, 2019
An earlier version of this story misstated the state where the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville took place. It was Virginia.
The post Portraying the MAGA Teens as Victims Is an Extension of Native American Erasure appeared first on The Intercept.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign has rolled out a proposal for an annual tax on wealth, becoming the first major Democratic candidate to follow a recommendation outlined in Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”
The proposal, according to two University of California, Berkeley, economists who are leading experts on wealth and inequality, would shrink the wealth of the superrich by $2.75 trillion over a 10-year period, while only affecting around 75,000 U.S. households.
A paper distributed by Warren’s campaign announcing the proposal notes that the United States contains “an extreme concentration of wealth not seen in any other leading economy.” As UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have demonstrated, the top 0.1 percent has had their wealth share nearly triple between the late 1970s and 2016.
Warren actually endorsed the concept of a wealth tax five years ago, in an interview with Piketty and The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. Asked how a bill to tax wealth would sound after Piketty described it, Warren said, “Oh, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in — in on the notion that we have to rewrite our tax code.” She added that the tax code “has to reflect the importance of work and people who achieve and people who accomplish, over being born into wealth.”
Piketty endorsed the Warren plan on Thursday. “In many ways, the US led the world toward the development of progressive taxation and the reduction of inequality at the global level during the first half of the 20th century,” he wrote in a statement. “I am confident that Senator Warren’s proposed progressive wealth tax will not only help curb inequality and ultimately promote growth in the US, but also have a major impact all around the world.”
Targeting wealth instead of income attacks a much larger source of inequality and economic distortion. Concentrated wealth has skyrocketed over the past several decades; an Oxfam study out this week estimates that the world’s billionaires grew their fortunes by $2.5 billion per day in 2018.
A large percentage of these daily gains are derived through capital ownership. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project has estimated that around 30 percent of annual national income comes from holding income-generating assets like real estate, stocks, and bonds. This is wealth created by owning wealth, and naturally, nearly all of it is earned by the wealthiest Americans. Increases to income tax rates, while important to curb income inequality, are mostly irrelevant at capturing capital income, or breaking up concentrated wealth.
America already taxes wealth in a minor way through property taxes, but that only covers one type of asset and does not really correspond to wealth, because homeowners owe tax on the property regardless of what they own in home equity. Some would say that taxes on inheritance are taxes on wealth, but they only come into play after death.
This wealth tax proposal, then, seeks to confront an untapped pool of wealth. While how and whether these revenues would be redistributed is not defined, taxing wealth in and of itself would make society more egalitarian. Indeed, modern monetary theorists regularly point out that the purpose of taxation is not to produce revenue for the government to spend, because the U.S. government controls its spending regardless of taxation. Still, there are numerous potential applications of the revenues that could compress wealth even further.
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax, as Warren’s campaign describes it, would impose a 2 percent annual tax on household net worth on all dollars above $50 million. An additional 1 percent surtax would kick in above $1 billion in income. Wealth is defined in the plan as “all household assets … including residences, closely held businesses, assets held in trust, retirement assets, assets held by minor children, and personal property with a value of $50,000 or more.”
These are marginal tax rates, which conservatives have busily tried to misconstrue during the debate over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent income tax rate above $10 million. Households with exactly $50 million in wealth would pay zero dollars in wealth taxes; the first dollar above that would trigger a tax of 2 cents.
That the Warren tax would raise far more than Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is a function of the extreme concentration of wealth in the United States. “While we must make income taxes more progressive, that alone won’t straighten out our slanted tax code or our lopsided economy,” the Warren proposal paper explains.
The Washington Post credibly estimates that Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent income tax bracket would bring in $720 billion over a 10-year period. The wealth tax above $50 million, according to Saez and Zucman’s estimate, would raise $2.75 trillion, a number that is around 1 percent of national gross domestic product. The economists use the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and other sources like the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans to make the estimates.
Bruenig, of the People’s Policy Project, ran the same calculations as Saez and Zucman using similar data and got a yield of $1.9 trillion over 10 years. He added that this was a lowball estimate and that Saez and Zucman’s figures were plausible, “because I think their methods are plausible.” While Bruenig said that he would add a tax bracket between $10 million and $50 million to avoid “leaving a lot of money on the table by starting so high,” in general he endorsed the concept.
Saez and Zucman build into their figures an expectation of capital mobility, in which the rich hide their money in tax havens in response to attempted taxation. Based on studies of other wealth taxes around the world, and the details of Warren’s plan, they conservatively presume a 15 percent reduction in reported net worth.
Warren’s plan attempts to limit such evasion and avoidance. She would increase the IRS budget to enforce the new tax and apply a minimum audit rate for those 75,000 households subject to it, potentially reversing the long campaign to gut the IRS and let high net worth individuals skirt taxation. If the wealthy attempted to renounce U.S. citizenship in response, the plan proposes a 40 percent “exit tax” on all wealth above $50 million.
In addition, the plan would encourage the IRS to close loopholes in valuing assets that already are used in inheritance tax calculations. Plus, she would leverage the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to adopt third-party reporting and information exchanges with potential sites to park money, like Switzerland.
Those with high net worth but liquidity constraints — such as folks whose money is tied up in financial instruments or business ventures with long-term timelines — could defer payment for up to five years, but they would have to pay interest on what they owe.
The wealthy would still be able to enjoy the vast majority of their wealth. Saez and Zucman estimate that the top 0.1 percent will pay 3.2 percent of their wealth in taxes in 2019, and the wealth tax proposal would only increase that to 4.3 percent. Incidentally, the bottom 99 percent pays about 7.2 percent of their wealth in taxes, because they lack savings and rely heavily on labor income.
An annual tax on wealth exists in several countries around the world, including Spain and Norway. But it is a virtually unprecedented proposal in recent political memory. Bernie Sanders, in the wake of Piketty’s book, proposed a more progressive inheritance tax, but that would only trigger upon death. Sanders floated a wealth tax in a 1997 book, but never offered a formal proposal. None of the other Democratic candidates have suggested anything like an annual wealth tax.
In fact, the last presidential candidate with a legitimate wealth tax proposal was named Donald Trump. In 1999, when he was considering running on the Reform Party ticket, Trump endorsed a one-time 14.25 percent “net worth tax” for individuals and trusts worth over $10 million. According to Trump’s numbers, this would have generated $5.7 trillion, twice that of Warren’s proposal (though those numbers were disputed at the time) and enough to eliminate the national debt. Trump suggested using the savings from annual debt service payments to extend the solvency of the Social Security system (which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about here.)
Conservatives have suggested in the past that a wealth tax would decrease investment and economic growth, as the rich sell off assets to pay the tax. Of course, somebody else would have to buy those assets.
By itself, a wealth tax would begin to curb concentration of assets in U.S. society. The redistributive possibilities are also numerous. Cory Booker’s baby bonds proposal, to give every newborn a $1,000 low-risk savings account, with periodic additional payments, that they can tap as adults, would cost an estimated $82 billion per year, less than one-third of the Warren plan. Sherrod Brown’s child allowance bill, a universal cash payout that would cut the child poverty rate in half, would cost about $108 billion a year, not even half of Warren’s proposal. Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act, a massive series of tax cuts for middle-class families, has a $2 trillion price tag over a decade, again less than the Warren wealth tax.
Another option suggested by Bruenig would be to place the revenues into a social wealth fund, an investment portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other assets for which every American would have a non-transferable share. This would reduce the concern that asset sell-offs from wealthy taxpayers would depress share prices, since the social wealth fund would effectively buy them back up.
A universal dividend from the growth of the assets in the social wealth fund portfolio would be distributed to Americans, not unlike the dividend given to Alaskans from revenues generated by oil wealth (known as the Alaska Permanent Fund). “This way we snag the wealth and hold onto it permanently for the public,” said Bruenig.
The post Elizabeth Warren Proposes Annual Wealth Tax on Ultra-Millionaires appeared first on The Intercept.
Wesley Bell was sworn into office as St. Louis County’s first black prosecutor just after midnight on New Year’s Day, and by the end of his second day on the job, he had ordered a sweeping overhaul of many of the office’s policies.
Effective immediately, he wrote in a detailed interim memo, his office would no longer prosecute the possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana. Prosecutors would end cash bail requests for misdemeanor cases, and they would issue summonses, rather than warrants, for all misdemeanors and class D and E felonies. They would no longer criminally prosecute the failure to pay child support. They would not overcharge defendants to pressure them into pleas, nor would they threaten witnesses to force them to participate in prosecutions. They would not impose further conditions on those failing to appear in court unless they were flight risks, and they would disclose the entirety of their files to defense counsel.
Bell also fired a veteran assistant prosecutor who had been a key figure in the case of Darren Wilson, a Ferguson police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014. The case, which after weeks of foot-dragging by police and prosecutors ended with a grand jury declining to indict Wilson, sparked massive protests in Ferguson and across the country. But almost five years later, Brown’s killing also inspired a steadfast movement for racial justice and police accountability, and exposed district attorneys as the most powerful players in the country’s criminal justice system.
Since then, several old-school prosecutors have been voted out of office across the country and replaced by a wave of criminal justice reformers, including in cities as large as Chicago and Philadelphia. In Chicago, Kim Foxx ousted Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in 2016 after her botched handling of another police killing — that of Laquan McDonald. The grassroots campaign to run Alvarez out of office, and the viral #ByeAnita social media rallying cry that amplified it, became a model to build engagement around prosecutor’s races nationwide. Then, in 2017, Philadelphians elected Larry Krasner — a career criminal defense and civil rights lawyer who had never prosecuted a case but who had sued the Philadelphia Police Department more than 75 times — as their next district attorney. (Other prosecutors who have billed themselves as “progressive,” like former California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Manhattan DA Cy Vance, hardly deserve the title.)
Mia Swisher says a prayer at a Michael Brown memorial outside the Canfield Green apartments on March 14, 2015, in Ferguson, Mo.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
But the push to put progressive prosecutors into office really took off after Ferguson, where the disastrous investigation of Brown’s killing opened the public’s eyes to prosecutors’ unique power to decide whom and when to prosecute. With Bell’s election, the Ferguson protests’ impact on the politics of criminal justice finally came home to St. Louis County.
“I absolutely feel like I am part of a momentum that’s continuing to grow,” Bell told me in a recent interview, adding that he draws inspiration from Krasner, Foxx, and other progressive prosecutors who preceded him. “I think that we have a real opportunity.”
Now nearly a month into the job, Bell hasn’t slowed down. He announced treatment and diversion programs, in partnership with local health organizations, to address rather than criminalize addiction and mental illness. And after promising voters he would never seek the death penalty, he declared that he would seek life imprisonment in a murder and sexual assault case that took place at a Catholic Supply store and rocked the area last fall.
It’s hard to understate how radical these changes are in St. Louis County.
If the Ferguson protests made this collection of more than 80 municipalities and suburbs, home to just under a million people, synonymous with police brutality and racism, they also exposed ingrained inequities in a local government system that funds itself on the criminalization of its poor residents, and whose leadership and power structure are starkly unrepresentative of its population. The St. Louis metropolitan area, which includes both the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, regularly boasts the grim record of being one of the most dangerous in America — though much of the violence happens in a few pockets of the city. Homicides and violent crime have also been on the rise in the county, which like the city is deeply segregated. Many go unsolved.
But other statistics are equally revealing of law enforcement culture in St. Louis County. Missouri has been one of the country’s leading executioners in recent decades, trailing only Texas, but local disparities can be stark within the state. A 2015 study found that a person convicted of homicide in St. Louis County is three times more likely to be executed than someone convicted elsewhere in the state — and 13 times more likely to be executed than a person convicted in St. Louis City. In 2017, there were 530 criminal prosecutions for nonpayment of child support in the county, versus about 40 in the city and 12 on average in other counties across the state.
In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, the Justice Department issued a damning report denouncing “clear racial disparities” in the ways the county’s police and courts operated. “The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities,” the report stated, zeroing in on Ferguson. “Over time, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices have sown deep mistrust between parts of the community and the police department, undermining law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.”
Three newly elected members of the Ferguson City Council, from left, Brian Fletcher, Ella Jones and Wesley Bell, embrace after being sworn on April 21, 2015, in Ferguson, Mo.
Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP
Bell, 44, is the son of a cop and has served as public defender, municipal court prosecutor, and judge. He ran for the Ferguson City Council after the protests and worked on a team that negotiated a federal consent decree following Brown’s killing. “That was a learning experience, working with the Department of Justice and seeing some of these same issues from a different light,” he said. “For the first time, being confronted with the idea that the culture that I was raised in legally did need to change.”
Voters seemed to agree. His campaign against Bob McCulloch — a seven-term incumbent first elected in 1991, when Bell was in high school — seemed improbable at first. But it was propelled by tireless grassroots organizing, a viral #ByeBob social media campaign modeled after Chicago’s #ByeAnita, and the backing of some national players that have prioritized transforming the culture of district attorney’s offices nationwide. His victory in the Democratic primary was both stunning and decisive. With a record turnout, he beat the incumbent by a 14 percent margin.
“There’s a lot of ways to approach a culture change, and that is often times a slower change,” Bell told me in his second week on the job. Yet he seemed to have no interest in taking it slow. His staff was still waiting for building access cards, and packed boxes lined the walls of the office, where a pink print thanked McCulloch for his 27 years of service. But the reforms already underway were transforming an office unaccustomed to change. “I think what we started with is setting clear expectations and making sure that people in this office understand what the policies are,” Bell said.
“He came out of the gate in a way that’s been overt and clear, and he has the support in the community for the stuff he’s moving,” said Montague Simmons, a longtime organizer in St. Louis County. “He’s going to be able to get some stuff done. The question is, what the resistance to that is going to look like.”
Photo: Michael Thomas/Getty Images
Resistance to Bell has already been fierce, a testament in part to the challenge he faces in reforming a system that many key players within the system itself do not want disrupted.
McCulloch, the son of a police officer who was killed in the line of duty, was criticized in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests for being too close to law enforcement. A traditional, tough-on-crime prosecuting attorney who billed himself as “the most experienced prosecutor in the country’s history,” McCulloch never prosecuted a police killing. And he looked a lot like most of the other 2,400 elected district attorneys in the U.S. It’s a remarkably homogeneous group: 96 percent are white, 80 percent are male, and 75 percent run for office unopposed, according to figures provided by the civil rights group Color of Change, which has become one of the leading advocates for prosecutor accountability in recent years.
McCulloch faced few challengers during his tenure, and he was re-elected for a seventh term just days before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. His handling of the investigation enraged the community that had come to the streets to protest the killing, but also illuminated the largely unchecked power with which prosecutors operate, as well as their deep connections to law enforcement. Although the next election was years away, many pledged that it would be McCulloch’s last.
McCulloch did not respond to an interview request, nor did Kathi Alizadeh, the lead prosecutor in the Darren Wilson case, whom Bell fired on his second day in office. Bell also fired two others prosecutors, including Ed McSweeney, who had posted on Facebook after the primary that “voters will soon regret what they did.” “My boss was shockingly defeated in Tuesday’s primary after 28 years,” McSweeney wrote in a thread that revealed the panic ensuing in some circles after Bell’s win. “Defeated by a Ferguson councilman with no trial experience.”
Bell declined to comment on the terminations, which he called “pending employee matters.” A spokesperson for his campaign pointed out at the time of McSweeney’s comments that Bell had plenty of trial experience — as a defense attorney. McSweeney declined to comment.
Last December, before Bell was even sworn in, prosecutors in his own office voted to join the St. Louis County Police Association, the county’s largest police union, which had endorsed McCulloch in the race. That was an unprecedented move, criticized as a conflict of interest by watchdog groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. The union called for the reinstatement of the terminated employees. “Despite Mr. Bell’s rhetoric about building bridges with career prosecutors, he has apparently decided to suddenly discharge three dedicated public servants in his first hours in office,” a union spokesperson said in a statement. The union did not respond to additional requests for comment from The Intercept.
Protestors demonstrate outside the Ferguson Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., on March 4, 2015.
Photo: Michael Thomas/Getty Images
Bell, for his part, told me that he supports prosecutors’ right to unionize, but that he has concerns with their particular choice of a police union. “As prosecutors, one of our obligations, one of our duties to the public, is to serve as a check on law enforcement, and so there are some concerns and potential conflicts with respect to the choice of their union.”
But the backlash — mostly from the police union — only seemed to intensify after Bell was sworn in. His interim policy memo, which he made clear was a work in progress pending internal feedback, was immediately leaked to the media, and the policies were quickly misrepresented. The union said in a statement that it was “disappointed and discouraged” by Bell’s policies and called on him to take “immediate action to stop some of these changes and find a better and safer path to implement this platform.”
In particular, Bell’s decision not to criminally prosecute failure to pay child support — a civil matter which he said should be pursued as such — prompted criticism and sensationalized headlines like “Deadbeat dads in St. Louis County are celebrating.” The union said Bell was putting the “livelihoods of hardworking single parents in jeopardy.”
To Bell, the child support policy, like his decision to end cash bail for misdemeanors, is consistent with his promises to the voters who elected him. “My guiding philosophy is that we cannot and will not prosecute poverty or operate the courts as debtors’ prisons,” he wrote in a Facebook post trying to clarify some of the rumors. “This type of misuse of prosecutorial discretion is why I ran for office in the first place. As we develop our final policies we will do exactly as promised: This office will no longer prosecute or recommend jail time solely because of someone’s lack of income.’”
Bell struck a conciliatory tone when asked about some of the obstruction he’s faced since coming into office. He called the leak and misrepresentation of his policies “unfortunate,” but said he’s received support for his plan both internally and from law enforcement, as well as from the broader public. “There’s going to be some pushback, but overall I’m very excited and very optimistic that everyone is getting on board,” he told me. “I think we’re all in the same place. We want to make sure that people are treated fairly regardless of where they’re from or their socio-economic situation or what have you. I think that we want to make sure we’re not contributing to mass incarceration and that we’re helping decrease prison populations.”
Bell’s hardly alone in facing pushback from law enforcement: Other reformist prosecutors have had to deal with a fair amount of resistance. In Philadelphia, the Fraternal Order of Police has gone to war with Krasner, most recently by suing him over his decision not to call on a list of police officers to testify in court who had a history of lying and racial bias. In Massachusetts, the National Police Association filed a wide-ranging bar complaint against Rachael Rollins, the newly elected district attorney of Suffolk County, which includes Boston, before she was even sworn in. And in Florida, former Gov. Rick Scott transferred more than two dozen cases from the jurisdiction of State Attorney Aramis Ayala after she pledged not to seek the death penalty. (Ayala sued Scott over the move, but the state Supreme Court sided with the former governor.)
“Watching local prosecutors align themselves so closely with the Fraternal Order of Police shows why these elections are so important,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, which focuses on black voter engagement. “For so long, prosecutor offices did not believe that they had to serve the communities. In fact, many of these offices saw black communities as enemy combatants.”
In St. Louis, where the Ferguson protests sparked long-due debate about the area’s segregation and racism, resistance to Bell’s reforms was seen as evidence of just how badly that change is needed.
“Oppression here really tends to be intransient,” said Simmons. “As hard as we push, the opposition will reorganize in whatever way they possibly can.”
“We knew the police officers would act a certain way,” he added. “We didn’t expect to see the prosecutors marry themselves to literally the most racist police union in the region. They are sending a message when they do that.”
But while the police union’s opposition dominated headlines, some in law enforcement defended Bell’s efforts and called out critics for their biases. “The reality is … Bob McCulloch lost,” said Heather Taylor, the president of St. Louis’s Ethical Society of Police. Taylor noted that crime, including the murder rate, steadily increased under McCulloch’s watch, while police and prosecutors devoted resources to policing low-level offenses — criminalizing entire communities while failing to keep them safe. “We lock everybody up. But ‘Let’s lock them up’ has done nothing for our community,” she said. “At least give him a chance to do his job. He hasn’t been there a month yet. You gave Bob McCulloch a chance for 30 years.”
Photo: Michael Thomas for The Intercept
If relationships between law enforcement and St. Louis County’s most heavily policed communities have not improved much since the Ferguson protests, what has profoundly changed is those communities’ resolve to make their institutions and elected officials answer to them.
Just days after Brown’s death, organizers used the Ferguson protests to register voters. For months after the killing, local town hall meetings were standing-room-only, and activists held voter engagement and civic education campaigns. In January 2015, after a grand jury had declined to indict Wilson for Brown’s death, and after prosecutors’ many missteps in the case were exposed, local activists staged a mock “black people’s grand jury” to educate residents about the grand jury process. Some of those who voted for Bell are now hoping he will reopen the investigation into Brown’s killing, a prospect he declined to discuss.
Bell’s election was a direct result of the political engagement that the Ferguson protests ignited in many people, but the bulk of the change happened in the community itself, said Kalambayi Andenet, one of many residents who were propelled into activism by Brown’s killing. “People now are talking about how we control our police,” she told me. “Those conversations weren’t happening before Ferguson but they’re happening on a regular basis now.”
“His election is a testament to the hard, hard organizing work of a lot of people who really pounded the pavement,” echoed Vernon Mitchell Jr., a Ferguson activist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “The point now is to make sure that while he has our support, we also hold him accountable.”
Bell, far left, eats breakfast with members of his staff at a Bob Evans Restaurant in Bridgeton, Mo., on Jan. 21, 2019.
Photo: Michael Thomas for The Intercept
Accountability to the communities they serve — and particularly the black, brown, and poor communities that bear the brunt of the justice system’s inequities — has had little impact on elected prosecutors’ careers in the past.
“What, often times, we have felt is that prosecutors were not nervous about how they treated black communities,” said Robinson. “We had to work to make them nervous.”
Color of Change launched a platform to track district attorneys’ records in an effort to counter the lack of transparency that surrounds their work; organized black communities across the country around local elections; and sought to influence the cultural debate about justice, including by connecting players in the justice system to Hollywood producers shaping the public’s understanding of how law enforcement works. For instance, Robinson said, the group connected Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who unsuccessfully prosecuted the officers responsible for the 2015 death in custody of Freddie Gray, to the writers of the show “Seven Seconds,” about a black teen killed by a police officer, “so they could actually see what a bail hearing looks like, and how the DA acts, and how the judge acts.”
The group got behind more than a dozen district attorney races across the country, but its larger goal is to empower those most impacted by criminal justice policies to shape those policies. “This is not about making heroes of prosecutors,” said Robinson. “This is about building a movement so that those in power realize that they are accountable to us.”
The post Five Years After Ferguson, St. Louis County’s New Prosecutor Confronts a Racist Criminal Justice System appeared first on The Intercept.
In October, Bloomberg Businessweek published an alarming story: Operatives working for China’s People’s Liberation Army had secretly implanted microchips into motherboards made in China and sold by U.S.-based Supermicro. This allegedly gave Chinese spies clandestine access to servers belonging to over 30 American companies, including Apple, Amazon, and various government suppliers, in an operation known as a “supply chain attack,” in which malicious hardware or software is inserted into products before they are shipped to surveillance targets.
Bloomberg’s report, based on 17 anonymous sources, including “six current and former senior national security officials,” began to crumble soon after publication as key parties issued swift and unequivocal denials. Apple said that “there is no truth” to the claim that it discovered malicious chips in its servers. Amazon said the Bloomberg report had “so many inaccuracies … as it relates to Amazon that they’re hard to count.” Supermicro stated it never heard from customers about any malicious chips or found any, including in an audit it hired another company to conduct. Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre said they saw no reason to doubt the companies’ denials. Two named sources in the story have publicly stated that they’re skeptical of its conclusions.
But while Bloomberg’s story may well be completely (or partly) wrong, the danger of China compromising hardware supply chains is very real, judging from classified intelligence documents. U.S. spy agencies were warned about the threat in stark terms nearly a decade ago and even assessed that China was adept at corrupting the software bundled closest to a computer’s hardware at the factory, threatening some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive machines, according to documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents also detail how the U.S. and its allies have themselves systematically targeted and subverted tech supply chains, with the NSA conducting its own such operations, including in China, in partnership with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The documents also disclose supply chain operations by German and French intelligence.
What’s clear is that supply chain attacks are a well-established, if underappreciated, method of surveillance — and much work remains to be done to secure computing devices from this type of compromise.
“An increasing number of actors are seeking the capability to target … supply chains and other components of the U.S. information infrastructure,” the intelligence community stated in a secret 2009 report. “Intelligence reporting provides only limited information on efforts to compromise supply chains, in large part because we do not have the access or technology in place necessary for reliable detection of such operations.”
Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher of the International Computer Science Institute, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, told The Intercept, “The Bloomberg/SuperMicro story was so disturbing because an attack as described would have worked, even if at this point we can safely conclude that the Bloomberg story itself is bovine excrement. And now if I’m China, I’d be thinking, ‘I’m doing the time, might as well do the crime!’”
While the Bloomberg story painted a dramatic picture, the one that emerges from the Snowden documents is fragmented and incomplete — but grounded in the deep intelligence resources available to the U.S. government. This story is an attempt to summarize what that material has to say about supply chain attacks, from undisclosed documents we’re publishing for the first time today, documents that have been published already, and documents that have been published only in part or with little to no editorial commentary. The documents we draw on were written between 2007 and 2013; supply chain vulnerabilities have apparently been a problem for a long time.
None of the material reflects directly on Bloomberg Businessweek’s specific claims. The publication has not commented on the controversy around its reporting beyond this statement: “Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews. Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published three companies’ full statements, as well as a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”
Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. government as a general matter takes seriously the possibility of supply chain tampering, and of China in particular conducting such meddling, including during manufacturing, according to government documents.
A classified 2011 Department of Defense “Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace” refers to supply chain vulnerabilities as one of the “central aspects of the cyber threat,” adding that the U.S.’s reliance on foreign factories and suppliers “provides broad opportunities for foreign actors to subvert and interdict U.S. supply chains at points of design, manufacture, service, distribution, and disposal.”
Chinese hardware providers could position themselves in U.S. industry to compromise “critical infrastructure upon which DoD depends,” according to the document.
Another classified document, a 2009 National Intelligence Estimate about “The Global Cyber Threat to the US Information Infrastructure,” assessed with “high confidence” that there was an increased “potential for persistent, stealthy subversions” in technology supply chains due to globalization and with “moderate confidence” that this would occur in part by tampering with manufacturing and by “taking advantage of insiders.” Such “resource-intensive tactics” would be adopted, the document claimed, to counter additional security on classified U.S. networks.
Each National Intelligence Estimate focuses on a particular issue and represents the collective judgment of all U.S. intelligence agencies, as distilled by the director of national intelligence. The 2009 NIE singled out China and Russia as “the greatest cyber threats” to the U.S. and its allies, saying that Russia had the ability to conduct supply chain operations and that China was conducting “insider access, close access, remote access, and probably supply chain operations.” In a section devoted to “Outside Reviewers’ Comments,” one such reviewer, a former executive at a maker of communications hardware, suggested that the intelligence community look more closely at the Chinese supply chain. The reviewer added:
The deep influence of the Chinese government on their electronics manufacturers, the increasing complexity and sophistication of these products, and their pervasive presence in global communications networks increases the likelihood of the subtle compromise — perhaps a systemic but deniable compromise — of these products.
The NIE even flagged supply chain attacks as a threat to the integrity of electronic voting machines, since the machines are “subject to many of the same vulnerabilities as other computers,” although it noted that, at the time in 2009, U.S. intelligence was not aware of any attempts “to use cyber attacks to affect U.S. elections.”
Beyond mostly vague concerns involving Russia and China, the U.S. intelligence community did not know what to make of the vulnerability of computer supply chains. Conducting such attacks was “difficult and resource-intensive,” according to the NIE, but beyond that, it had little information to understand the scope of the problem: “The unwillingness of victims and investigating agencies to report incidents” and the lack of technology to detect tampering meant that “considerable uncertainty overshadows our assessment of the threat posed by supply chain operations,” the NIE said.
A section within the 2011 Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace is devoted to the risk of supply chain attacks. This section describes a strategy to “manage and mitigate the risk of untrustworthy technology used by the telecommunications sector,” in part by bolstering U.S. manufacturing, to be fully operational by 2016, two years after Bloomberg said the Supermicro supply chain attack occurred. It’s not clear if the strategy ever became operational; the Defense Department, which published an unclassified version of the same document, did not respond to a request for comment. But the 2009 NIE said that “exclusion of foreign software and hardware from sensitive networks and applications is already extremely difficult” and that even if an exclusion policy were successful “opportunities for subversion will still exist through front companies in the United States and adversary use of insider access in US companies.”
A third document, a page on “Supply Chain Cyber Threats” from Intellipedia, an internal wiki for the U.S. intelligence community, included classified passages echoing similar worries about supply chains. A snapshot of the page from 2012 included a section, attributed to the CIA, saying that “the specter of computer hardware subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis, or secretly corrupting crucial data, is a growing concern. Computer chips are increasingly complex and subtle modifications made in design or manufacturing processes could be made impossible to detect with the practical means currently available.” Another passage, attributed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, flagged application servers, routers, and switches as among the hardware likely “vulnerable to the global supply chain threat” and added that “supply chain concerns will be exacerbated as U.S. providers of cybersecurity products and services are acquired by foreign firms.”
A 2012 snapshot of a different Intellipedia page listed supply chain attacks first among threats to so-called air-gapped computers, which are kept isolated from the internet and are used by spy agencies to handle particularly sensitive information. The document also said that Russia “has experience with supply chain operations” and stated that “Russian software companies have set up offices in the United States, possibly to deflect attention from their Russian origins and to be more acceptable to U.S. government purchasing agents.” (Similar concerns over Russian antivirus software firm Kaspersky Lab led to a recent ban on the use of Kaspersky software within the U.S. government.) Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied that it has ties to any government and said it would not help a government with cyber espionage. Kaspersky is even reported to have helped expose former NSA contractor Harold T. Martin III, who was charged with large-scale theft of classified data from the NSA.
Components are seen on a circuit board inside Huawei Technologies Co.’s S12700 Series Agile Switches on display in an exhibition hall at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China, on Tuesday, June 5, 2018.
Photo: Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Beyond broad worries, the U.S. intelligence community had some specific concerns about China’s ability to use the supply chain for espionage.
The 2011 Defense Department strategy document said, without elaborating, that Chinese telecommunications equipment providers suspected of ties to the People’s Liberation Army “pursue inroads into the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.”
This may be a reference, at least in part, to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that the department feared would create backdoors in equipment sold to U.S. communications providers. The NSA went as far as to hack into Huawei’s corporate communications, looking for links between the company and the People’s Liberation Army, as reported jointly by the New York Times and the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The report cited no evidence linking Huawei to the People’s Liberation Army, and a spokesperson from the company told the publications it was ironic that “they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”
The U.S. intelligence community appeared concerned that Huawei might help the Chinese government tap into a sensitive transatlantic telecommunications cable known as “TAT-14,” according to a top-secret NSA briefing on Huawei. The cable carried defense industry communication on a segment between New Jersey and Denmark; a 2008 upgrade was contracted to Mitsubishi, which “subcontracted the work Out to Huawei. Who in turn upgraded the system with a High End router of their own,” as the document put it. As a broader concern, the document added that there were indications the Chinese government might use Huawei’s “market penetration for its own SIGINT purposes” — that is, for signals intelligence. A Huawei spokesperson did not comment in time for publication.
Firmware Attacks Worry U.S. IntelligenceIn other documents, spy agencies flagged another specific concern, China’s growing prowess at exploiting the BIOS, or the Basic Input/Output System. The BIOS, which is also known by the acronyms EFI and UEFI, is the first code that gets executed when a computer is powered on before launching an operating system like Windows, macOS, or Linux. The software that makes up the BIOS is stored on a chip on the computer’s motherboard, not on the hard drive; it is often referred to as “firmware” because it is tied so closely to the hardware. Like any software, the BIOS can be modified to be malicious and is a particularly good target for computer attacks because it resides outside the operating system and thus, cannot be easily detected. It is not even affected when a user erases the hard drive or installs a fresh operating system.
The Defense Intelligence Agency believed that China’s capability at exploiting the BIOS “reflects a qualitative leap forward in exploitation that is difficult to detect,” according to the “BIOS Implants” section in the Intellipedia article on threats to air-gapped computers. The section further stated that “recent reporting,” presumably involving BIOS implants, “corroborates the tentative view in a 2008 national intelligence estimate that China is capable of intrusions more sophisticated than those currently observed by U.S. network defenders.”
A 2012 snapshot of another Intellipedia page, on “BIOS Threats,” flags the BIOS’s vulnerability to supply chain meddling and insider threats. Significantly, the document also appears to refer to the U.S. intelligence community’s discovery of BIOS malware from China’s People’s Liberation Army, stating that “PLA and [Russian] MAKERSMARK versions do not appear to have a common link beyond the interest in developing more persistent and stealthy” forms of hacking. The “versions” mentioned appear to be instances of malicious BIOS firmware from both countries, judging from footnotes and other context in the document.
The Intellipedia page also contained indications that China may have figured out a way to compromise the BIOS software that’s manufactured by two companies, American Megatrends, commonly known as AMI, and Phoenix Technologies, which makes Award BIOS chips.
In a paragraph marked top secret, the page stated, “Among currently compromised are AMI and Award based BIOS versions. The threat that BIOS implants pose increases significantly for systems running on compromised versions.” After these two sentences, concluding the paragraph, is a footnote to a top-secret document, which The Intercept has not seen, titled “Probable Contractor to PRC People’s Liberation Army Conducts Computer Network Exploitation Against Taiwan Critical Infrastructure Networks; Develops Network Attack Capabilities.”
The word “compromised” could have different meanings in this context and does not necessarily indicate that a successful Chinese attack occurred; it could simply mean that specific versions of AMI and Phoenix’s Award BIOS software contained vulnerabilities that U.S. spies knew about. “It’s very puzzling that we haven’t seen evidence of more firmware attacks,” said Trammell Hudson, a security researcher at the hedge fund Two Sigma Investments and co-discoverer of a series of BIOS vulnerabilities in MacBooks known as Thunderstrike. “Most every security conference debuts several new vulnerability proof-of-concepts, but … the only public disclosure of compromised firmware in the wild” came in 2015, when Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of malicious hard drive firmware from an advanced hacking operation dubbed Equation Group. “Either as an industry we’re not very good at detecting them, or these firmware attacks and hardware implants are only used in very tailored access operations.”
Hudson added, “It is quite worrisome that many systems never receive firmware updates after they ship, and the numerous embedded devices in a system are even less likely to receive updates. Any compromises against the older versions have a ‘forever day’ aspect that means that they will remain useful for adversaries against systems that might be in use for many years.”
American Megatrends issued the following statement: “The BIOS firmware industry, and computing as a whole, has taken incredible steps towards security since 2012. The information in the Snowden document concerns platforms that pre-date current BIOS-level security. We have processes in place to identify security vulnerabilities in boot firmware and promptly provide the mitigation to our OEM and ODM customers for their platforms.”
Phoenix Technologies issued the following statement: “The attacks described in the document are well-understood in the industry. Award BIOS was superseded by today’s more secure UEFI framework which contained mitigations for these types of firmware attacks many years ago.”
Successful Supply Chain Attacks by France, Germany, and the U.S.The Snowden documents reviewed so far discuss, in often vague and uncertain terms, what U.S. intelligence believes its adversaries like China and Russia are capable of. But these documents and others also discuss in much more specific terms what the U.S. and its allies are capable of, including descriptions of specific, successful supply chain operations. They also describe in broad strokes the capabilities of various NSA programs and units against supply chains.
The Intellipedia page on threats to air-gapped networks disclosed that as of 2005, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, “has established a few commercial front companies that it would use to gain supply chain access to unidentified computer components.” The page attributes this knowledge to “information obtained during an official liaison exchange.” The page did not mention who BND’s target was or what sorts of activities the front companies were engaged in.
BND has been “setting up front companies for both HUMINT and SIGINT operations since the 1950s,” said Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, German author and BND expert, using the jargon terms for intelligence gathered both by human spies and through electronic eavesdropping, respectively. “As a rule, a full-time BND employee will found a small GmbH [company], which is responsible for a single operation. In the SIGINT area, this GmbH also maintains contacts with industrial partners.”
BND did not respond to a request for comment.
The Intellipedia page also stated that, beginning in 2002, France’s intelligence agency, DGSE, “delivered computers and fax equipment to Senegal’s security services and by 2004 could access all the information processed by these systems, according to a cooperative source with indirect access.” Senegal is a former French colony. Representatives of the Senegalese government did not respond to a request for comment. DGSE declined to comment.
Much of what’s been reported about the U.S.’s supply chain attack capabilities came from a June 2010 NSA document that The Intercept’s co-founder Glenn Greenwald published with his 2014 book “No Place to Hide.” The document, an article from an internal NSA news site called SIDtoday, was published again in 2015 in Der Spiegel with fewer redactions (but without any new analysis).
SIDtoday concisely explained one NSA approach to supply chain attacks (formatting is from the original article):
Shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc.) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO – S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination.
Supply chain “interdiction” attacks like this involve compromising computer hardware while it’s being transported to the customer. They target a different part of the supply chain than the attack described by Bloomberg; Bloomberg’s story said Chinese spies installed malicious microchips into server motherboards while they were being manufactured at the factory, rather than while they were in transit. The NSA document said its interdiction attacks “are some of the most productive operations in TAO,” or Tailored Access Operations, NSA’s offensive hacking unit, “because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.” (TAO is known today as Computer Network Operations.)
Interdicting specific shipments may carry less risk for a spy agency than implanting malicious microchips en masse at factories. “A design/manufacturing attack of the sort alleged by Bloomberg is plausible,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “That’s exactly why the story was such a big deal. But just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s happened, and Bloomberg just didn’t bring in enough evidence, in my opinion, to support their claim.” She added, “What we do know is that a design/manufacturing attack is highly risky for the attacker and that there are many less risky alternatives that are better suited to the task at hand.”
Photo: Manu Brabo/AP
Several months after Syrian Telecom received the devices, one of the beacons “called back to the NSA covert infrastructure.” At that point, the NSA used its implant to survey the network where the device was installed and discovered that the device gave much greater access than expected; in addition to the internet backbone, it provided access into the national cellular network operated by Syrian Telecom, since the cellular traffic traversed the backbone.
“Since the STE GSM [cellular] network has never been exploited, this new access represented a real coup,” the author of the NSA document wrote. This allowed the NSA to “automatically exfiltrate” information about Syria Telecom cellular subscribers, including who they called, when, and their geographical locations as they carried their phones throughout the day. It also enabled the NSA to gain further access to cellular networks in the region.
Document: NSA
Another NSA document describes a different successful attack conducted by the agency. A slide from a 2013 NSA “program management review” described a top-secret supply chain operation targeting a Voice-Over-IP network for classified online phone calls. At an “overseas location,” the NSA intercepted an order of equipment for this network from a manufacturer in China and compromised it with implant beacons.
“The analysis and reporting on this target identified, with high granularity, [the target’s] method of hardware procurement,” stated a presentation slide. “As a result of these efforts, NSA and its [Intelligence Community] partners are now positioned for success with future opportunities.”
NSA Operations in “Adversary Space”In addition to information about specific supply chain operations by the U.S. and its allies, Snowden documents also include more general information about U.S. capabilities.
Computer hardware can be altered at various points along the supply chain, from design to manufacturing to storage to shipment. The U.S. is among the small number of countries that could, in theory, compromise devices at many different points in this pipeline, thanks to its resources and geographic reach.
Document: NSA
This was underlined in a top-secret 2011 presentation about the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA spying program operating out of U.S. diplomatic facilities overseas. It referred to 80 global SCS sites as “points of presence” providing a “home field advantage in [the] adversary’s space,” from which “human enabled SIGINT,” can be conducted, and where supply chain “opportunities” present themselves, a suggestion that the NSA and CIA conduct supply chain attacks from U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. (The presentation was published by Der Spiegel in 2014, alongside 52 other documents, and apparently never written about. The Intercept is republishing it to include the speaker notes.)
One program that goes after computer supply chains in this manner is the NSA’s SENTRY OSPREY, in which the agency uses human spies to bug digital intelligence sources, or, as the top-secret briefing published by The Intercept in 2014 puts it, “employs its own HUMINT assets […] to support SIGINT operations,” including “close access” operations that essentially put humans right up against physical infrastructure. These operations, conducted in conjunction with partners like the CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency, appear to have included attempts to implant bugs and compromise supply chains; a 2012 classification guide said they included “supply chain-enabling” and “hardware implant-enabling” — as well as “forward-based [program] presence” at sites in Beijing, as well as South Korea and Germany, all home to telecommunications manufacturers. Another program, SENTRY OWL, works “with specific foreign partners… and foreign commercial industry entities” to make devices and products “exploitable for SIGINT,” according to the briefing.
The Persistence DivisionThe NSA’s Tailored Access Operations played a critical role in the U.S. government’s supply chain interdiction operations. In addition to helping intercept shipments of computer hardware to secretly install hardware implants, one division of TAO, known as the “Persistence Division,” was tasked with actually creating the implants.
Document: NSA
A 2007 top-secret presentation about TAO described “sophisticated” covert hacking of software, including firmware, over a computer network “or by physical interdiction,” and credits these attacks with providing U.S. spy agencies “some of their most significant successes.”
Another document, a 2007 NSA wiki page titled “Intern Projects,” first published by Der Spiegel, described “ideas about possible future projects for the Persistence Division.” The projects described involved adding new capabilities to the NSA’s existing malicious firmware-based implants. These implants could be inserted into target computers via supply chain attacks.
One potential project proposed to expand a type of BIOS malware to work with computers running the Linux operating system and to offer more ways to exploit Windows computers.
Another suggested targeting so-called virtualization technology on computer processors, which allows the processors to more efficiently and reliably segregate so-called virtual machines, software to simulate multiple computers on a single computer. The proposed project would develop a “hypervisor implant,” indicating that it intended to target the software that coordinates the operation of virtual machines, known as the hypervisor. Hypervisors and virtual machines are used widely by cloud hosting providers. The implant would leverage support for virtual machines in both Intel and AMD processors. (Intel and AMD did not respond to requests for comment.)
Another possible project envisioned attaching a short hop radio to a hard drive’s serial port and communicating with it using a firmware implant. Yet another aimed to develop firmware implants targeting hard drives built by U.S. data storage company Seagate. (Seagate did not respond to a request for comment.)
Illustration: Oliver Munday for The Intercept
One of the reasons spy agencies like the NSA fear supply chain compromise is that there are so many places on a typical computer to hide a spy implant.
“Servers today have dozens of components with firmware and hundreds of active components,” said Joe FitzPatrick, a hardware security trainer and researcher. “The only way to give it a truly clean bill of health is in-depth destructive testing that depends on a ‘gold standard’ good reference to compare to — except defining that ‘gold standard’ is difficult to impossible. The much greater risk is that even perfect hardware can have vulnerable firmware and software.”
The Intellipedia page about supply chain threats lists and analyzes the various pieces of hardware where a computer could be compromised, including power supplies (“could be set to … self-destruct, damage the computer’s motherboard … or even start a fire or explosion”); network cards (“well-positioned to plant malware and exfiltrate information”); disk controllers (“Better than a root kit”); and the graphics processing unit, or GPU (“well positioned to scan the computer’s screen for sensitive information”).
According to the Bloomberg report, Chinese spies connected their malicious microchip to baseboard management controllers, or BMCs, miniature computers that are hooked into servers to give administrators remote access to troubleshoot or reboot the servers.
FitzPatrick, quoted by Bloomberg, is skeptical of the Supermicro story, including its description of how spies exploited the BMCs. But experts agreed that placing a backdoor into the BMC would be a good way to compromise a server. In a follow-up story, Bloomberg alleged that a “major U.S. telecommunications company” discovered a Supermicro server with an implant built into the Ethernet network card, which is one of the pieces of hardware listed in the Intellipedia page that’s vulnerable to supply chain attacks. FitzPatrick was, again, skeptical of the claims.
After the Bloomberg story was published, in a blog post on Lawfare, Weaver, the Berkeley security researcher, argued that the U.S. government should reduce the number of “components that need to execute with integrity” to only the central processing unit, or CPU, and require that that these “trusted base” components used in government systems be manufactured in the U.S., and by U.S. companies. In this way, the rest of the computer could be safely manufactured in China — systems would work securely even if components outside the trusted base, such as the motherboard, carried malicious implants. Apple’s iPhone and Intel’s Boot Guard, he argued, already work in this way. Due to the government’s purchasing power, “it should be plausible to write supply rules that, after a couple years, effectively require that U.S. government systems are built in a way that resists most supply chain attacks,” he told The Intercept.
While supply chain operations are used in real cyberattacks, they seem to be rare compared to more traditional forms of hacking, like spear-phishing and malware attacks over the internet. The NSA uses them to access “isolated or complex networks,” according to a 2007 top-secret presentation about TAO.
“Supply chain attacks are something individuals, companies, and governments need to be aware of. The potential risk needs to be weighed against other factors,” FitzPatrick said. “The reality is that most organizations have plenty of vulnerabilities that don’t require supply chain attacks to exploit.”
DocumentsDocuments published with this article:
DoD 2011 Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace – Supply Chain Excerpts Intellipedia – Air Gapped Network Threats Intellipedia – BIOS Threats Intellipedia – Supply Chain Cyber Threats NSA Supply Chain Attack From PMR 4-24-13 National Intelligence Estimate 2009 Global Cyber Threat – Supply Chain Excerpts PRC Information Warfare & Huawei Special Collection Service – Pacific SIGDEV Conference March 2011 – Supply Chain Excepts Tailored Access Operations 2007The post Everybody Does It: The Messy Truth About Infiltrating Computer Supply Chains appeared first on The Intercept.
With progressive momentum building ahead of 2020, the range of bold agenda items a new Democrat-controlled government might work toward continues to expand. Most recently, a “Green New Deal” has joined free public college, “Medicare for All,” and a significant hike in the minimum wage as likely policy priorities. Early polls show that essentially any Democratic challenger to President Donald Trump would top him in a head-to-head contest.
But that energy is on a collision course with the U.S. Senate, where a 60-vote threshold is needed to overcome a filibuster, which was once an opportunity for open-ended debate, but now is merely used to block a vote on legislation that doesn’t have the support of 60 senators. That threshold, if it remains in place, would mean that all of the progressive ideas being generated will remain ideas. The 47-member Democratic Caucus would need to pick up three seats just to win back the Senate. That will be a challenge in itself, but grabbing 13 is effectively out of the question.
That procedural obstacle has increasingly turned the attention of Democratic activists to the existence of the filibuster itself. They’re calling for it to be abolished entirely, and putting the question to presidential contenders, because that’s likely the only way a Democratic majority could pass major legislation two years from now. It’s also about self-preservation: Maintaining the 60-vote threshold in 2021 would set Democrats up to fail to deliver on promises made during the campaign, leading to the possibility of midterm wipeouts, with nothing to show for their time in power, in 2022.
There’s precedent for narrowing the reach of the filibuster. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reformed Senate rules to eliminate the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations short of the Supreme Court. To change the rules, Reid needed a simple majority of 50 votes, which he got only after years of pressure from progressives pushed the Senate to act.
In 2017, in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court justices. That element of the filibuster died with little more than a whimper in the news.
Not all Senate legislation requires 60 votes. A process known as budget reconciliation allows for a 50-vote threshold under certain circumstances. In 2010, Democrats relied on it to push through pieces of the Affordable Care Act after Republicans won an upset special election in Massachusetts, depriving Senate Democrats of their 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. (The bulk of the ACA wasn’t eligible for the reconciliation procedure, but had already been passed by the Senate before Republican Scott Brown was sworn in; reconciliation was then used for some minor fixes.)
Republicans used reconciliation to bypass the filibuster in 2017 to pass Trump’s tax cut and in their effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Enough Senate Republicans support keeping the filibuster in place that McConnell had no ability to eliminate it, even if he had wanted to. But reconciliation comes with strict limits on what kinds of policies can be passed using the process; it’s extraordinarily complicated, but the gist is that a policy is only compliant with reconciliation if it has a significant budget impact. An attempt to ban abortion, for instance, wouldn’t qualify for consideration under reconciliation.
But in general, the Republican agenda — to repeal Democratic policies, cut taxes, and broadly deregulate — can be accomplished using reconciliation, which sets up an asymmetrical dynamic where progressive legislation needs 60 votes to pass, but just 50 to be repealed. (For instance, it took 60 votes to pass the ACA, but Republicans tried to repeal it with just 50.)
“Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who announced her candidacy for president last week, about eliminating the filibuster during an interview that aired on Tuesday. Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is not typically associated with the more radical wing of the party, and his question is a reflection of how broad the consensus is among Democratic activists that the filibuster needs to go.
.@jonfavs: Would you push to get rid of the filibuster so you could pass something like Medicare for All or a Green New Deal? @SenGillibrand: I'll think about it… if you don't have 60 votes yet, it just means you haven't done enough advocacy and you need to work a lot harder. pic.twitter.com/PpDhLUbkoN
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) January 22, 2019
“As president, would you push — hopefully — Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to get rid of the filibuster so you could pass something like ‘Medicare for All’ or a Green New deal?” Favreau asked.
Gillibrand, who is running as one of the more progressive candidates in the 2020 presidential race, demurred, an indication that the push to abolish the filibuster has a long way to go.
“The filibuster is mostly gone now, so it barely exists,” she said, going on to defend 60-vote threshold as a good thing because it forces the two parties to work together.
“I think it’s useful to bring people together, and I don’t mind that you have to get 60 votes for cloture” she said, using a procedural term for overcoming a filibuster and ending debate on the Senate floor. “That’s not an unreasonable goal, because if people don’t feel like you’re done with debate, and that they haven’t been heard enough, maybe you should debate a little more. And I think government only works when people who care deeply stand up and fight for what they believe in, and know how important their voices are; and so if you’re not able to get 60 votes on something, it just means you haven’t worked hard enough, talking to enough people and trying to listen to their concerns and then coming up with a solution that they can support. And so I’m not afraid of it one way or the other.”
Favreau pressed Gillibrand further. “So you would be open to getting rid of it for something big like ‘Medicare for All’?” he asked hopefully.
“I don’t think we should have gotten rid of it for the Supreme Court justices, because they’re lifetime appointments, and I do think you should be able to earn at least 60 votes,” she said. “I’ll think about it. I believe I can work well under either system, because if you don’t have 60 votes yet, it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy and you need to work a lot harder.”
In short, Gillibrand’s argument is that if advocacy groups and their allies in Congress can’t produce 60 votes for a bill, that’s because they haven’t done enough to convince people that it’s good policy. That’s a romantic vision for government, but it doesn’t align with the reality of a partisan Senate in the 21st century. Republican senators — and, indeed, no small number of Democrats — are not in opposition to a Green New Deal or “Medicare for All” simply because they haven’t debated them enough or thought them through. Entrenched interests are fundamentally opposed to those policies, and come a Democratic majority, they will use their influence to keep the Senate short of the 60-vote threshold. And then there is the GOP’s partisan interest in simply making sure that Democrats can’t enact an agenda.
That would allow Democrats who might prefer not to see those policies enacted to blame the GOP opposition for their failure to get enough votes. John McDonough, a former Senate staffer who played a key role in drafting the Affordable Care Act, wrote in his book “Inside National Health Reform” that some Democratic senators were hoping in late 2008 and early 2009 the party’s majority did not reach 60 members, so that the party’s progressive wing wouldn’t have high expectations for health care reform.
Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, which is also not typically associated with the party’s bomb-throwing wing, called Gillibrand’s answer insufficient. “Senate conservatives used the filibuster to block civil rights legislation for decades. The idea that advocates just need ‘to work a lot harder’ is just wrong. Stop letting a tiny extremist minority block progress,” he said. He noted elsewhere, in the context of filibuster reform, that Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a strident defender of the filibuster, is up for re-election in 2020.
Opposition to the filibuster is an increasingly common view everywhere except inside the Senate. Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., who is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus but also the more centrist New Democrat Coalition, also panned Gillibrand’s answer.
Weak answer from @SenGillibrand. The way the filibuster has been abused in the last 15 years by the GOP is completely at odds with Senate and American history. It used to be rarely invoked. Now it’s automatic. Our founders considered a super majority requirement and rejected it! https://t.co/5YTiBZmhtf
— US Rep Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) January 23, 2019
Brian Beutler, who writes for Favreau’s Crooked Media, previously pressed Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., on the question of eliminating the filibuster. Whitehouse is one of the senators who is most outspoken about the risks of climate change. Whitehouse suggested that doing so would be politically impractical, and encouraged the use of reconciliation for a Green New Deal-type project instead.
“Pod Save America” is widely listened to by Democratic primary voters — an average of 1.5 million people listen to each episode — and all of the 2020 candidates are expected to be interviewed on the program. Favreau told The Intercept that he plans to ask each what they would do to overcome obstruction. “I think one of the most important questions Democratic presidential candidates can answer is how they intend to pass a progressive agenda in an environment where Republicans have refused to cooperate or compromise since 2009. We hope to ask all the candidates that question,” he said.
The post Kirsten Gillibrand Defends Filibuster: “If You Don’t Have 60 Votes Yet, It Just Means You Haven’t Done Enough Advocacy” appeared first on The Intercept.
Grande parte do sistema político dos EUA entrou em parafuso duas semanas atrás, quando uma recém-empossada congressista de 29 anos apresentou uma proposta aparentemente radical no programa de TV “60 Minutes” [60 Minutos].
Eis o que disse de tão desconcertante a deputada Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representante de Nova York pelo Partido Democrata: os Estados Unidos deveriam tributar a renda acima de 10 milhões de dólares anuais com uma alíquota máxima de 60 ou 70%.
Os Republicanos, em resposta, resolveram mentir descaradamente sobre o significado da proposta, fazendo de conta que Ocasio-Cortez defendia uma alíquota de 70% para todas as faixas de renda. Alguns Democratas mais velhos, como o líder da maioria na Câmara, Steny Hoyer, e o ex-líder da maioria no Senado, Harry Reid, adotaram a tática-padrão dos Democratas diante de um ataque mentiroso dos Republicanos – colocar o rabo entre as pernas como cachorros acuados.
O burburinho é compreensível. A defesa direta feita por Ocasio-Cortez mostrou que a política americana pode, apesar de tudo, representar o que os americanos querem. Depois que o episódio de “60 Minutes” foi ao ar, o site de política The Hill encomendou uma pesquisa e constatou que 59% dos eleitores registrados apoiam um aumento para 70% na alíquota da faixa superior de renda. Segundo o The Hill, a ideia tem inclusive um “apoio surpreendente entre os eleitores Republicanos (…) 45% dos eleitores do partido se dizem a favor.”
A única coisa surpreendente desse apoio pelo eleitorado Republicano é que o The Hill tenha se surpreendido. As pesquisas vêm mostrando de modo uniforme, ao longo dos últimos 40 anos, que praticamente inexiste nos EUA eleitorado favorável a reduzir os tributos dos mais ricos ou das grandes empresas, mas há uma grande parcela favorável a aumentá-los.
Dois importantes cientistas políticos, Martin Gilens, da Universidade da Califórnia, em Los Angeles, e Benjamin Page, da Universidade Northwestern, estudaram detidamente o sistema político dos EUA, e demonstraram com gráficos e tabelas aquilo que é intuitivo para a maioria: se você não tem dinheiro, você não importa. Ou, como escrevem Gilens e Page: “Não apenas os cidadãos comuns não detêm um poder especificamente substancial sobre as decisões políticas; eles possuem muito pouca ou nenhuma influência sobre a política em absoluto”. Por outro lado, estima-se que as elites econômicas tenham um impacto bastante substancial, altamente significativo e independente sobre a política.”
Os últimos 40 anos de política tributária nos EUA foram a mais contundente demonstração possível dessa afirmativa. Os americanos, desde que há registro, nunca se opuseram à incidência de tributos mais altos sobre os ricos. A despeito disso, a alíquota da faixa superior de renda do imposto federal despencou de 70% para 28% durante o governo Reagan, e desde então aumentou apenas para 37%.
Evolução da alíquota da faixa superior de renda para pessoa física nos EUA.
Gráfico: Moiz Syed/Intercept
Os Republicanos, muitos Democratas e vários jornalistas televisivos bem pagos ameaçaram os americanos por anos a fio com histórias a respeito do imenso prejuízo à economia do país que seria causado pelo aumento da tributação sobre os mais ricos. O fato histórico, porém, é que a economia já prosperou com alíquotas de 80% ou até mais altas. A bem da verdade, à medida que as alíquotas caíram, caíram também os índices de crescimento econômico.
A alíquota da faixa superior do imposto de renda de pessoa jurídica também caiu vertiginosamente com Reagan, de 46% para 34%. Graças ainda à legislação tributária de Trump em 2017, ela agora chegou a 21%.
Evolução da alíquota da faixa superior de renda para pessoa jurídica nos EUA.
Gráfico: Moiz Syed/Intercept
Essas mudanças não foram motivadas por demandas populares. Uma pesquisa de 1978 do instituto de pesquisa Roper Organization descobriu que um impressionante total de 7% dos americanos considerava que o imposto de renda federal era injusto para as famílias de renda alta. Ainda segundo essa pesquisa, 5% achavam que a alíquota do imposto era injusta para as grandes empresas. Quando a pesquisa foi repetida, em 1986, os números foram quase exatamente os mesmos: 7% e 6%, respectivamente, manifestaram preocupação porque os ricos e as grandes empresas eram excessivamente tributados.
Isso, porém, não foi levado em conta: as alíquotas das faixas superiores continuaram a cair.
Pesquisa da Gallup traz, ao longo dos anos, a opinião dos cidadãos de alta renda sobre a quantidade de impostos que pagam. Cada coluna traz as porcentagens das seguintes respostas, da esquerda para a direita: considera que paga um valor justo, considera que paga muito, considera que paga pouco, e sem opinião formada.
Gráfico: Gallup
O instituto Gallup começou a fazer pesquisas regulares com essa pergunta no começo dos anos 1990. O apoio ao aumento da tributação sobre os ricos tem geralmente flutuado entre 60 e 70%, e aproximadamente 10% pensam em reduzi-la.
Uma proporção ainda maior de americanos, de quase 70%, tem mostrado interesse em aumentar a tributação das grandes empresas. Mas em vez disso, a alíquota para pessoas jurídicas nas faixas superiores permaneceu constante em 35%, de 1995 em diante. Finalmente, em 2017, depois de anos de recursos investidos em lobby, Trump e o Partido Republicano fizeram exatamente o oposto do que desejavam os americanos, e deceparam quase metade da alíquota mais alta para pessoas jurídicas.
No fim das contas, os números das pesquisas são incrivelmente constantes: a imensa maioria dos americanos sempre quis fazer os ricos pagarem mais. É um dos posicionamentos políticos mais populares que se pode imaginar, sendo que apenas uma ínfima minoria pleiteia a redução de tributos para os milionários do país.
O que é ainda mais digno de nota, como apontou Gilens em livro recente, é que mesmo aqueles que estão bem de vida, nos 10% com maior renda familiar – atualmente, nos EUA, acima de 175 mil dólares por ano – apoiam enfaticamente que os ricos paguem impostos mais altos. Existem americanos que não gostam dessa ideia?
Sim.
É sabidamente complicado fazer pesquisas com os super-ricos. Eles não são muitos, por definição. São difíceis de achar. E geralmente não estão interessados em divulgar seus posicionamentos políticos aos entrevistadores.
Até hoje, na história dos EUA, só houve meia dúzia de tentativas bem-sucedidas nesse sentido. Uma das mais recentes foi a Pesquisa sobre os Americanos Economicamente Bem-Sucedidos, que entrevistou mais de 100 moradores de Chicago com um patrimônio igual ou superior a 10 milhões de dólares. Como descrevem Gilens e Page em outro livro, esses multimilionários são muito mais conservadores economicamente que o público em geral, inclusive com relação aos tributos. Por exemplo, 52% dos americanos comuns disseram aos entrevistadores que o governo deveria “reduzir a desigualdade por meio de impostos altos sobre os mais ricos”. O estudo de Chicago constatou que apenas 17% dos ricos acharam que isso soava bem.
Preferências políticas de multimilionários e cidadãos médios (porcentagens a favor)
Isso é o poder em estado bruto. Os ricos conseguem o que querem, ou conseguem pelo menos barrar as políticas que não os interessam – mesmo que elas sejam desejadas por todas as outras pessoas do país.
Em contrapartida, os impostos podem sofrer aumentos repetidos e significativos – desde que atinjam com mais força os pobres. O tributo sobre a gasolina aumentou durante os anos 1980 e começo dos anos 1990: de 4 centavos por galão em 1981 a 18 centavos em 1993, aproximadamente 200% em valor constante. Gilens aponta que essa foi uma rara política tributária que sofreu uma forte oposição dos americanos de baixa renda, mas era vista com tranquilidade pelos mais ricos.
Sim, as pessoas ainda podem votar mais ou menos a cada dois anos. Mas o dinheiro também vota em muito mais volume, e por meio do lobby e das contribuições de campanha, vota todos os dias. Há décadas os americanos comuns vêm tendo muito pouca influência sobre os rumos de seu país.
Isso, porém, nem sempre foi a realidade histórica dos EUA, e não existe nenhuma lei natural dizendo que deva permanecer assim eternamente. A violenta reação contra Ocasio-Cortez mostra o medo que sentem os do andar de cima de que um dia muitos outros políticos decidam que é do seu interesse se alinhar à grande maioria dos americanos.
Tradução: Deborah Leão
The post Ocasio-Cortez: finalmente alguém representa a opinião dos americanos sobre o sistema tributário appeared first on The Intercept.
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There are signs that U.S. opinion might be shifting on Israel and its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. Democrats and younger U.S. voters, including young Jewish voters, are shifting to a more pro-Palestine position, according to recent polls. There are now two members of Congress — Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — who openly support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel. At the same time, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama, under pressure from local pro-Israeli Jewish groups, recently rescinded a human rights award they’d bestowed on civil rights icon Angela Davis because of her support for BDS. In November, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN because he gave a speech at the UN calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” On this week’s Deconstructed podcast, Lamont Hill and Mehdi Hasan discuss the de facto censorship that surrounds discussions of Israel in the U.S. The two are joined by Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
Marc Lamont Hill: There is a very narrow framework that we’re allowed to use to engage in conversations about the question of Israel and Palestine. But do I stand by what I said? Absolutely, I think I was right.
[Music interlude.]
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Mehdi Hasan. Today, the debate over Israel and its occupation. Why is it so difficult in the United States to criticize Israel? And are defenders of the world’s only Jewish state correct to suggest that much of the opposition to Israel stems from anti-Semitism?
MLH: The idea that BDS isn’t anti-Semitic is to me, almost self-evident. Having a boycott, divestment, sanction movement against a particular nation-state is not anti-Semitic. It’s a critique and it’s a response to Israeli policy.
MH: That was Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by CNN for supposedly crossing a line in terms of his criticism of Israel. Just the latest public figure to run afoul of the unwritten codes that govern discourse on this contentious subject here in the United States. But whatever happened to free speech and the right to offend? I’m delighted to say that Marc’s my guest on the show today, as is Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a friend of Israel—though a critical friend.
Lara Friedman: Let’s examine what they’re saying. It’s anti-Semitic to say that some people are not having democracy and that they should. That’s actually holding Israel to a lower standard.
MH: So, this week on Deconstructed, what can’t we say about Israel?
In a world in which it often seems like we can never run out of hot takes and insta-comments, Michelle Alexander’s op-ed in the New York Times this past weekend surely merits the title of must-read, stand-out comment piece of 2019 so far. If you don’t know who Michelle Alexander is, number one, shame on you, and number two, she’s an academic, activist, lawyer and of course author of the acclaimed and searing 2010 book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” She was hired by the New York Times to be an opinion columnist last summer — the first woman of color to make it onto the op-ed pages of the Times, and it’s pretty shameful it took the Times so long to make that hire.
On Sunday, on the eve of Martin Luther King day, she published an op-ed in that paper headlined “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” in which, after referring to Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous opposition to the Vietnam war which cost him a great many liberal friends and allies, Alexander wrote, and I quote: “I am left with little doubt that [Dr. King’s] teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues.” She continued: “If we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions.” And she went on to add: “It seems the days when critiques of Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel can be written off as anti-Semitism are coming to an end. There seems to be an increased understanding that criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government is not, in itself, anti-Semitic.” End quote.
And she’s right. The tide is turning on Israel and its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, its control over 4 million Palestinian people, its colonial-style settlement program, its siege of Gaza. Democrats and younger U.S. voters, including young Jewish voters, are shifting to a more pro-Palestinian position, according to all the recent polls. You now have two members of Congress — Rashida Tlaib, my guest on last week’s show, and Ilhan Omar — who openly support BDS, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. That wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. The Times itself would never have published an op-ed’s like Alexander’s a few years ago. It would have been unthinkable. I often joke that you get more debate about Israel’s crimes and misdeeds in Israel’s own parliament, the Knesset, than you do in the United States Congress. You get more open and honest discussions about the occupation and settlements and apartheid on the op-ed pages of Haaretz, Israel’s main liberal newspaper, than you do on the op ed pages of the New York Times.
But the defenders of Israel, they’re not just going to give up without a fight. They’re not gonna roll over. The pro-Israeli ADL, the Anti Defamation League, called Alexander’s piece “dangerously flawed.” The American Jewish Committee, the AJC, accused Alexander, a black woman by the way, of “shameful appropriation.” Ha! And using MLK to take “potshots” at Israel. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and now deputy minister in the Israeli prime minister’s office, tweeted: “By equating support for Israel with support for the Vietnam War and opposition to MLK, Alexander dangerously delegitimises us. It’s a strategic threat and Israel must treat it as such.” A strategic threat? It’s a fricking newspaper op-ed. I hope Michelle Alexander has no plans to visit any Israeli consulates anytime soon, thank you very much, Michael Oren.
But here’s the thing: Alexander might be right to be optimistic about the direction of travel on this long-contentious issue but that does not mean critics and opponents of Israel aren’t still getting targeted and censored and punished for their views, for calling out Israeli apartheid, for example. As Alexander herself mentioned in the piece, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama, under pressure from local pro-Israeli Jewish groups, just recently rescinded a human rights award that they’d bestowed on civil rights icon Angela Davis, because of her support for BDS.
Prior to the Davis affair, there was Marc Lamont Hill, who’ll be joining me on this show in a moment. Marc, a brilliant, eloquent academic and journalist, was fired by CNN, where he’d been a paid contributor, an on-air pundit, because he gave a speech at the UN calling for a boycott of Israel and said:
MLH: We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea. Thank you for your time.
MH: He was gone within 24 hours.
Richard Gizbert: When you boil it down he was fired for using the following six words: “From the river to the sea.” That was deemed anti-Semitic.
MH: By the way, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who’s on tape basically erasing the existence of the occupied Palestinian people:
Rick Santorum: All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They’re not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.
MH: He’s still employed by CNN as a paid contributor, unlike Marc Lamont Hill. As a British journalist living in the U.S., I’ve always found it weird how obsessed American politicians and journalists are with defending and promoting Israel, a foreign country last time I checked. For example, the very first bill to be put forward this year, in 2019, by the Republican-controlled Senate was not a bill to improve border security or bring in tax reform or re-open a shutdown government, but a bill to protect the Israeli government, by giving state and local governments in the U.S. the authority to boycott any U.S. companies that dare to join in a boycott of Israel.
A whopping 26 states have already passed some form of anti-BDS laws, penalizing U.S. citizens for exercising their right to free speech, people like Bahia Amawi, a children’s speech pathologist in Texas, recently profiled by my Intercept colleague Glenn Greenwald, who was told that she couldn’t work with her local school district unless she signed an oath vowing not to boycott Israel:
Bahia Amawi: It infringed on all my principles and on top of that, my right to speech and also right to protest. It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats, you know, and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protect our constitutional rights.
MH: Whatever happened to the First Amendment? Does that not count when we’re talking about Israel? And how do we get past the constant retort of, ‘That’s anti-Semitic!’, from defenders of Israel? Well, that’s our discussion today.
[Music interlude.]
MH: I’m joined from St. Louis by my friend and former colleague from our HuffPost days, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, and here in the studio is also Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, who is a liberal supporter of Israel. I think it’s fair to say, but who has also been very active in opposing Republican efforts to basically criminalize BDS here in the United States. Marc, Lara, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
LF: Great to be here.
MLH: Pleasure to be here.
MH: Marc, you were fired by CNN for a speech you gave about Israel-Palestine at the U.N. A speech in which you called on countries to boycott Israel, in which you called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which many say is a Hamas slogan. It’s about getting rid of Israel. Looking back now several weeks later, do you think you crossed the line in terms of your rhetoric on Israel or do you stand by your comments?
MLH: I think both are true. I crossed the line in the sense that there is a very narrow framework that we are allowed to use to engage in conversations about the question of Israel and Palestine. And so, certainly within the boundaries of civil liberal western discourse, I certainly crossed a line. There were people who felt — there are people who think one-state solutions are crossing a line and talking about a free Palestine is crossing the line or talking about human rights violations is crossing the line. So, to that extent, absolutely. But do I stand by what I said? Absolutely, I think I was right. I think I was right to use that day and use that speech to challenge the question of human rights and raise the question of human rights and to help us reimagine a world of freedom and safety, peace and self-determination for Palestinian people and for citizens of Israel as well. You know, I don’t think they have to come at the expense of one another.
MH: Were you surprised, shocked even to be sacked as a contributor to CNN or did you see that coming? They were pretty quick about it.
MLH: I definitely did not see it coming. Because I wrote a speech that I thought was critical but certainly honest and fair and empirically supported, because I had no intention of saying anything violent or anti-Semitic or otherwise outside what I think the reasonable boundaries of public discourse, I had no expectation. I thought people would disagree with me. There are many disagreements on this issue but I didn’t expect to be fired because I don’t think that I did anything that was wrong.
MH: What did they say was a reason for your firing?
MLH: I wasn’t really given a reason other than that the speech didn’t cohere with their values. They just said your speech didn’t match our values, didn’t reflect our values.
MH: Their values. What’s interesting about their values is you got fired for calling for democracy and human rights “between the river and the sea,” from the river to the sea whereas former Republican Senator Rick Santorum is still employed as a paid contributor, even though he says Palestinians don’t exist.
MLH: It’s a striking contrast. You know, the idea that within cable news or any form of public discourse that we can’t have disagreements or we don’t have a space for an array of opinions to me is troubling. But if we are going to close ranks around certain opinions and not others, I’d like to think that the call for democracy in the region, the call for safety and peace and self-determination again for everybody is a reasonable one. And I would think that Rick Santorum’s call for or his analysis that Palestinians don’t exist — or many of the other gross things Rick Santorum has said in public and other people — would be outside the boundaries. But in this bizarro world that we live in today, it’s the opposite.
MH: Exactly the opposite and just to be clear for our listeners, there are more than 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who cannot vote for the people who basically control their lives which is the Israeli government. Lara, what do you make of Marc’s firing? What did you make of the award that was offered and then rescinded to Angela Davis? Does any of this surprise you?
LF: I wish it surprised me. I’ve been working this issue for too long really to be surprised. I’m old enough to remember Helen Thomas being essentially sacrificed over this issue.
MH: White House correspondent.
LF: Yes, her entire legacy as a White House correspondent effectively delegitimized over comments she made about Israel-Palestine. It doesn’t surprise me at all. I do think we’re seeing an escalation in this. I think we’re at a moment when either out of fears that at some point Israel is not going to be able to forever maintain the occupation, deny rights, maintain the status quo and the high ground. So, maybe there’s a fear of losing ground or there’s a feeling of this is a moment of opportunity that has to be seized to finally roll back everything that’s happened since Oslo and since Madrid and return us to a status quo ante where any utterance of support for the Palestinians was equated with anti-Semitism, with support for terror.
MH: So on that note about any utterance, a lot of supporters of Israel, if they’re listening to this discussion, will say that’s just not true. Israel’s attacked all the time. It’s held to unfair double standards. As someone who’s worked in this field for a while, as someone who, I think it’s fair to say, would call herself a friend of Israel, a critical friend of Israel. Where do you think the line now stands in what you can and can’t say about Israel and the occupation of the Palestinian territories? Where is it right now?
LF: Look, I think that line is moving and the fact is we live in a democracy. You can say what you want. The question is what sort of price are people going to try to exact for your utterance. On the question of you know, dual standards — I just want to say this really quick. For years, I mean, I come from a community with this great sensitivity, and the dual standard, Israel is held to a higher standard. Today, when it comes to questions of democracy, of human rights, of free speech, the demand from supporters of Israel from the right is not that Israel not be held to higher standards. The demand is that Israel be held to a lower standard.
MH: What about Saudi Arabia?
LF: Exactly.
MH: What about North Korea?
LF: There’s the ‘whataboutism’ which says well, but other people are worse. You know, why aren’t you boycotting everything? If you don’t boycott everything, then boycotting settlements is a sign that you’re an anti-Semite. And you know, the question of democracy between the river and the sea, you would think that setting aside any weighted language there— because that language itself is heavily laden with historical meaning for a lot of people — but even just the question of is it okay to call for democracy? When people say that’s an anti-Semitic call, let’s let’s examine what they’re saying. It’s anti-Semitic to say that some people are not having democracy and that they should. That’s actually holding Israel to a lower standard.
MH: Okay so in terms of where we now stand on this discussion. Marc, do you think the Michelle Alexander op-ed in The New Times, the paper of record, that liberal media bastion which has supported Israel for so long, do you think that’s a sign that the times are changing here in the United States?
MLH: Well it’ll depend on whether or not Michelle is still working there next week. She’s writing for — if her writings are only found at like MichelleAlexander.com, the answer would be no. But I think that the tide actually is turning. And I think that the fact that the New York Times printed that piece and that Michelle Alexander will continue to write provocative pieces on this issue, but many other issues as she so brilliantly has done is a sign that I think, the tide is turning that people are at least open to a conversation. Now, that said, the response to Michelle Alexander, the critics. I mean, people saying that she appropriated Martin Luther King’s legacy.
MH: Yes, the American Jewish Committee made that comment, I think.
MLH: That kind of language to me suggests that people one, don’t have a clear understanding of who Dr. King was. His comments on Israel notwithstanding which I think is a complicated question, as well. But it also means that again there are many people who are simply unwilling to call for democratic practice and democratic principles within the state of Israel. Now, I think it is important to say that Israel should not be held to a higher standard, should be held to no different standard than anyone else. But I think given the fact that our military fund our financial support of Israel is so considerable, given the fact that Israel hails itself as the only democracy in the Middle East because of this language, because of our economic, psychological, and cultural investment in the state of Israel, I think we do have a responsibility to hold Israel accountable. I think we should also have a responsibility to hold Saudi Arabia accountable. And it’s interesting because in the last six months, I’ve been holding Saudi Arabia accountable. I’ve seen you write about the Jamal Khashoggi thing so much and talk about it so much. And it’s like people forget that part and act as if we’re just obsessed with Israel, as opposed to saying hey, we need democracy in the Middle East and we need justice in the Middle East, more importantly.
MH: Well, isn’t it the case that a lot of these other oppressive countries, you know, that you and I have spoken out against, they only get mentioned by supporters of Israel as a way of ‘whataboutism’ as Lauren mentioned. It’s funny they don’t actually give a shit about what’s happening in Saudi Arabia or North Korea or Syria. It’s just a rhetorical tool used to deflect attention from their favorite cause. What was funny about the whole stand of things, something that’s always bothered me is, it’s almost as if only critics of Israel talk about Israel. And I’m always like well, if you don’t want me to talk about Israel, then why don’t you stop talking about Israel? I noticed that presidential candidates feel the need to go out of their way to say how amazing Israel is.
Just before I was recording the show, I saw a clip circulating on Twitter of Kamala Harris AIPAC in 2017, going on about how she stands with Israel. So, it works both ways. If you stop saying you’re standing with an occupier, maybe I’ll stop criticizing the occupier. Isn’t the problem here that lots of supporters of Israel over the decades have successfully in the eyes of many people both Jewish and non-Jewish conflated Israel with all Jews? And that leads to a lot of the problems when we talk about the rhetoric surrounding Israel, the criticism of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. That’s where the — Is that fair to say that’s where all gets muddied?
LF: I think that’s part of where it all gets muddied. I think it also gets muddied since — with the fact that since 1967, a safe political space had been carved out in the community, at the grassroots level, at the political level for people to be progressive on everything except Palestine.
MH: P.E.P.!
LF: And the Trump era is closing the space for that sort of hypocrisy where that sort of, let’s call it cognitive dissonance — It’s simply no longer available and I don’t think progressive leaders overall have caught up to this. But the grassroots gets it.
MLH: Can I jump in really quick —
MH: Go on. Go, Marc.
MLH: — Because I think there’s another interesting piece here. Because I think Lara’s absolutely right with that and I think for Black activists, that understanding and that relationship and even that idea of being a progressive on every issue but Palestine, I think is even more complicated because of the particular relationship between Black American civil rights activism and Jewish American civil rights activism and solidarity practice. There has been such a strong and in many ways, healthy relationship between Black Americans and Jewish Americans on that question. When you look at the foundation or the founding, rather, of the NAACP, when you look at Martin King’s support, when you look at you know so many, so many moments in American history where Jewish Americans have been allies to Black Americans, there’s a sense that we’re in lockstep with one another and so often, we have looked at the question of Israel through the lens of the U.S. Black-Jewish relations.
And in some ways again, that contradiction emerges but there’s also a heightened sense of how dare you, right? You know, Jewish brothers and sisters have been here for Black people in America. So, why are you criticizing the one Jewish state? And so it’s seen as a contradiction when in fact, it’s, I would argue, incredibly consistent. I think Michelle Alexander is arguing this in her New York Times piece as well, that the consistency here is not with who we ally with, it’s what values we ally with. And so, in the United States, we should be fighting anti-Semitism. We’ve been fighting anti-Semitism around the world. But we should also be fighting illiberal practice, to use large language, in Israel. And so, I think those those tensions and nuances play out in very particular ways for Black Americans.
MH: And one of the problems is, Marc, is that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the U.S. undeniably, especially since the rise of Trump. And the irony is that a lot of that anti-Semitism is coming from the far right. The attack on the synagogue which left 11 Jewish worshippers dead, brutally murdered in cold blood was from a far-right nutcase, right? And yet the response to that included people saying well this is why we need anti-BDS legislation. This is why we need to stop boycotts of Israel. And you has Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey coming out and having been opposed to that legislation, then switching saying “Well, this attack reminds us of the dangers of anti-Semitism.” And a lot of people on the left, a lot of people in the pro-Palestinian movement get very frustrated that these things are all locked together. One of the many criticisms of you, Marc and Angela Davis and others is your support for BDS, for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Explain to our listeners why you support BDS and why it’s not anti-Semitic.
MLH: Well yeah, I mean one, I think the idea that BDS isn’t anti-Semitic is to me almost self-evident. Having a boycott, divestment, sanction movement against a particular nation state is not anti-Semitic. It’s a critique and it’s a response to Israeli policy and Israeli state practices. It’s not an attack on Jewish people. It’s not an attack on — It’s not even an attack on individuals. It’s not even a response to individuals. BDS, it does not attack individuals. It does not address or target individuals. It targets institutions. I think that’s an important distinction to make. I think we have to constantly make distinctions between Judaism and Israeli statecraft. I think that’s a necessary distinction to always make here. One, because Israel doesn’t speak for all Jewish people. Two, because Israel is a nation state, not a religion. And three, because I think the grand tradition of Judaism is one that promotes justice and love and healing and support for everyone. And so, I don’t want to — I wouldn’t want to attach some of the practices of the state of Israel to any religion.
MH: But on that note, Marc, you would agree that criticism of Israel can sometimes crossover into anti-Semitism, into anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power —
MLH: Absolutely.
MH: — There are a lot of anti-Semites who hide behind the Palestinian cause in order to be anti-Jewish. I think we can all concede that.
MLH: Hey, it would be dishonest not to. I mean, again, some of the response, even people who were offering support to me at times, some of the support I was like whoa, whoa, no that’s not support, you know. That actually is anti-Semitic. What I said wasn’t but what you’re doing right now absolutely is. This idea of Jewish cabals, this idea of Jewish power, this idea of Jewish conspiracy, this idea of blood libel — all of these things are very real tropes that are deployed against Jewish people and sometimes people absolutely hide behind the question of Palestine or the question of Israel as a means by which to simply prosecute a war against Jewish people, an anti-Semitic war, quite clearly. I absolutely agree with that. BDS however, is not one of those things. Now, could there be anti-Semites in the BDS movement? Perhaps. There can be anti-Semites in environmental justice movement. I mean, again, we need to weed them out everywhere. But the movement itself is not. First of all, it’s a principled call out of Palestinian civil society. That’s an important thing to say because people say “Well why are you supporting BDS in Israel? And why aren’t you supporting it somewhere else?” These other places haven’t called for BDS. This is a call from Palestinian civil society.
MH: Good point.
MLH: Also, it’s a non-violent call. People say, oh, you know, they’re constantly talking about terrorism and the threat of violence. This is a non-violent call.
MH: The Palestinians can’t win. If they’re violent, they’re terrorists. If they’re non-violent, they’re anti-Semites. Lara, let me ask you this. Lara, let me put this to you: since I’ve been in the U.S., one of the things I follow, the BDS debate and even before, I remember Hillary Clinton writing a letter to Haim Saban, the big donor to the Democratic Party, the power-ranger billionaire — who’s really in the wrong party, to be honest — but saying I’m going to fight against BDS. She wrote a whole letter saying it’s going to be one of my big causes to stop BDS. Here in the U.S., even among some liberals, it does seem to be taken almost ipso facto BDS is anti-Semitic which I find odd. You could say there’s some anti-Semites in the BDS movement. Anti-Semites misuse the BDS — But to just smear all of these people including many Jewish voices. My Intercept colleague Naomi Klein is a very prominent Jewish supporter of BDS. I see all that and then I think wow, these guys have done a really good job in terms of smearing the pro-Palestinian movement.
LF: Yes, I mean, I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I think if you go back, the roots of this are — And let’s distinguish a little bit in terms. There are lots of people who support either support or advocate boycotts against Israel, boycotts and settlements.
MH: Do you?
LF: I advocate boycotting settlements and I defend boycotting Israel, if people think they want to do it. I think focusing on settlements is as or more effective but that’s my personal opinion. I will go to the mat for the right of people to engage in free speech. But boycotts are constitutionally protected free speech. Full stop. But there are lots of people who advocate or support who don’t say I am a member of the BDS movement. This is a tactic and it’s a tactic again, going to the question of holding Israel to different standards.
Political boycotts are a proven, legitimate non-violent tactic that is accepted, embraced, endorsed, praised all over the world for use on anything. In Israel, it is legal to boycott literally anything for almost any reason. You can boycott things because you’re a racist against Arabs. You can boycott things because you’re religious and hate non-religious. Only thing you can’t do is boycott settlements. That’s illegal in Israel. The idea that somehow Israel should be insulated from pressure via boycotts and we’re talking, not the Arab League boycott of Israel, which was coercive. That is not a voluntary act of free speech. This is people saying I want to vote my conscience by not buying X, or not engaging in business with Y. Israel is apparently the only country in the world that needs to be protected from this and that is holding Israel to a different standard and it makes no sense.
MH: The whole double standards argument —
LF: Exactly.
MH: — Comes back. Let me ask you this, you’ve been writing and campaigning on this issue, how worried should we be about the legislation at a Senate level and of course, at the state level? I think 26 states, I believe, have already passed some form of legislation criminalizing BDS. How worried should we be? The Senate legislation, for example, that Marco Rubio and others have put forward and it was the first bill put forward in the new Senate in 2019. How worried should we be that that’s going to pass once the shutdown is over and some Democrats get back on board with the Republicans?
LF: Well, I think we should be worried to the extent that this is going to be a question of how much public pressure is brought to bear on members of Congress about free speech and by the way, that’s members of Congress from both parties. Conservatives claim to care deeply about free speech. Libertarians claim to care about this. This isn’t a partisan issue. I am less worried about this legislation or the other piece of legislation in Congress which is the Israeli Anti-boycott Act which is in some ways worse. I’m less worried about them today than I was a month ago because finally people are paying attention. These things have been pending for a long time and at a grassroots level there’s been work. We are finally in a moment and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. We are at a moment when the grassroots is rising up and saying hell no. Hell no to state laws that say an individual speech therapist has to sign an oath to give up free speech to practice her craft. That’s a good thing.
MH: Do you think this will be an issue in the Democratic primaries? Will people like Senator Harrison and Senator Warren and others be asked again and again to be clear that they’re not going to vote for legislation?
MLH: No.
MH: Marc, you’re saying no, it will be an issue?
MLH: It will not be an issue. It will be —
MH: You don’t think will be an issue? Oh, that’s deeply pessimistic. I was trying to be optimistic.
LF: I think it will be.
MH: Lara thinks it will be. Marc, tell us why you think it won’t be.
MLH: I think it’s like, I think saying that you support Israel unequivocally is like kissing a baby in politics. I think everyone will say it. They’ll have their quick purity test and then we’ll move on. I don’t think there’s going to be space for nuance.
MH: In the media, yes but don’t you think the Democratic base is shifting a bit on this?
MLH: Not enough to make a demand in the primary. I don’t, I don’t imagine — Now, the one shift, the one thing that could complicate that is Bernie Sanders because he obviously, in the last election cycle, was a little more nuanced on this issue. He talked about disproportionate —
MH: And he’s moved a lot since 2016, as well. In an interview with me for The Intercept, he actually talked about making aid conditional on progress in peace and settlements which no one’s ever said in U.S. policy.
LF: I would disagree and not because I think, Mehdi, what you’re talking about the Democratic base pushing, although I think that’s part of it. I think more than that, you’re going to see the people who want to see Democrats tearing each other apart, folks from the right are going to insist on raising this. We saw this issue weaponized to effectively destroy the Women’s March. And it’s not because anyone really saw this as the number one issue. This was manufactured as an issue to take what was one of the most significant grassroots movements in my lifetime and shred it. And it was Democrats, it was progressives doing it to themselves at the behest of outside parties.
MH: But interesting on the Women’s March Linda Sarsour turns up at the most recent Women’s March and says, talks about BDS in her speech. So, in that sense, they’re not backing down. Linda’s not backing down. So, there could be a pincer movement on some of the centrist candidates where the right is demanding loyalty tests and the left is saying we’re demanding you speak for justice and equality for the Palestinians.
LF: I think you’re going to get either one of both of those and if either one of those is present, this becomes an issue not because it’s important, not because people actually care about it, not because voters are voting on it but because this is politically —
MH: And not because our politicians have a spine. Let me ask you this, Marc, before we run out of time on the subject of spines, and you’ve shown a lot of spine in recent weeks and we admire you for that — One line that jumped out to me from the Michelle Alexander op-ed in The Times on Palestine was where she wrote “Many civil rights activists and organizations have remained silent as well not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear a loss of funding from foundations and false charges of anti-Semitism. They worry, as I once did, that the important social justice work will be compromised or discredited by smear campaigns.” Marc, that is the case, isn’t it, that there’s been a lot of self-censorship on this issue from progressives who might privately care about the Palestinians but don’t want to go to bat for them because they know they’ll get destroyed and a whole host of other issues? And look at you, I mean, they look at Marc Lamont Hill. They look at what happened and say “See? That’s why I keep my head down.”
MLH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. If I had a dollar for every progressive member of Congress, for every progressive faculty member, for every progressive cable news or otherwise TV commentator who sent me a private message saying I agree with you — you can almost hear the whispers in the midst — I agree with you, stay strong but this is why I don’t say anything, I wouldn’t need a TV job, I’d have so much money. I mean, it’s actually stunning to see how people have responded. And again, I think we have to be mindful of saying that this isn’t because there’s some Jewish conspiracy. It’s because there’s a very powerful political movement that supports a particular point of view and because people are worried about not just their own careers, but as Michelle said, the work of justice. You know, they don’t want to lose funding.
You know, think about the Angela Davis invitation. They caved on the Angela Davis invitation because people were saying they’re going to not donate money anymore and they need the money to do good work in the world. And so, some of it is cowardice, some of it is pragmatism, you know, and some of it is you know, cowardice disguised as pragmatism. But all of it suggests that we’re in a moment right now where it’s very difficult to argue one’s principles on this issue. But we’re going to continue to fight and grow. And I think as we do that, people will realize that it is the principle move that ultimately history will vindicate this position and that again, we will never have a world of safety and peace and justice not just for Palestinians but also for Israelis and also, for Jewish people around the world until we figure out some solutions that work for everybody. And we can’t do that if people aren’t speaking in democratic practice.
MH: Marc, we’ll have to leave it there. Marc Lamont Hill, Lara Friedman, thank you both for joining me on Deconstructed.
LF: Thank you.
MLH: Thank you.
[Music interlude.]
MH: A fascinating discussion there — so much to digest — self-censorship, progressive except Palestine, PEP, BDS, the boycott movement, and the criminalization of BDS, free speech — except on Israel. I do believe the tide is turning on Isreal-Palestine in the U.S. media and in U.S. politics. I do believe that support for Israel will be questioned in these forthcoming Democratic presidential primaries, and I do believe that as more Michelle Alexanders come forward on Palestine, it’ll be harder to treat them in the way CNN treated Marc Lamont Hill.
[Music interlude.]
That’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept, and is distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much! See you next week.
The post What You Can’t Say About Israel (with Marc Lamont Hill) appeared first on The Intercept.
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Jessica Cino is a dean at the Georgia State University law school — and Devonia Inman’s biggest advocate. His plight has shaken Cino’s faith in the criminal justice system. She’s poured hours into his case, trying to help him clear his name. But the odds are stacked against him, and she knows it. But then new evidence comes to light — something the cops should have known about all along.
Liliana Segura: In 1895, a case called Coffin v. United States came before the Supreme Court. It was a complicated case. Alleging, more or less, that three men had aided and abetted a fourth in committing bank fraud.
Jordan Smith: The most important thing that came out of that case: The idea that a person is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Here’s how the court explained it: “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary,” the court wrote, “and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.”
Liliana Segura: The presumption of innocence is fundamental, embedded in the guarantee of due process laid out in the Constitution. But there’s a flip side to this idea of innocent until proven guilty. It’s that once you’ve been found guilty of a crime it is really hard to prove you’re innocent, even when you are.
Jessica Cino: I think one of the biggest myths about the criminal justice system and the way it functions is that most of the time we get it right, but in the slim chance we get it wrong, we’ll be able to correct it down the road. That’s just not true. That’s not true on any level whatsoever.
Jordan Smith: That’s Jessica Cino. She’s a lawyer and a dean at the law school at Georgia State and Devonia Inman’s tireless and most determined advocate.
Jessica Cino: So the system, once you’re convicted, is, I won’t call it rigged, but once you’re convicted, it’s meant to keep you there.
Jordan Smith: That’s because the system operates with the idea of “finality” in mind. The Supreme Court has said as much. What really matters is that you got a “fair” trial. If the courts think you did, then that’s it. And that is, almost entirely, the final word.
Jessica Cino: That’s a complete design fault with the system. Like, it’s designed to keep people there, it’s designed to minimize challenges to convictions. It’s this notion of finality. So we will do everything possible to keep people where we think they belong.
Liliana Segura: But what if you didn’t get a fair trial? What if you’re found guilty, but you’re not? What if you’re Devonia Inman and you’ve been locked up for 20 years, insisting you’re innocent and almost no one with any power to help seems to give a damn? From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.
Liliana Segura: It’s been three years since we started reporting this story. And the whole time there have been lawyers working on the case too, trying to find a way to exonerate Devonia Inman. There are plenty of reasons to believe that he’s innocent, including new information only recently uncovered. So does he have a chance?
Jordan Smith: First, let’s review. Back in September 1998, Donna Brown was murdered in the parking lot of the Taco Bell in tiny Adel, Georgia. She was killed by a single bullet, fired at close range. It tore through her right eye. The Adel police quickly turned the case over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI. That’s pretty routine for small departments in rural Georgia when there’s a major crime to solve. In 1998, this crime and this town fit that bill.
Liliana Segura: GBI agent Jamy Steinberg led the investigation and he quickly focused on a 20-year-old man from California, Devonia Inman. His family had deep roots in Adel, but aside from yearly visits to see his relatives, he was pretty much an outsider. Focusing on Inman, Steinberg ignored other lead, good ones. In fact, as he homed in on Inman, folks around town were pointing to another man as the real killer: Hercules Brown. Some even told the investigators about him and that he was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. They didn’t listen.
Jordan Smith: Inman insisted he had nothing to do with the crime and there was zero physical evidence tying him to it, but he was charged with it anyway. And after an equally messed up trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Liliana Segura: But even before that, even as Devonia Inman sat in jail waiting to be tried and facing the death penalty, there were three more vicious murders in Adel. In the spring of 2000 a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death in a relative’s home. Again, the GBI was brought in. And, again, there were rumors: Talk that Hercules Brown had something to do with it. Patel’s murder remains unsolved. And just months after that, more bloodshed. The gruesome bludgeoning death of William Carroll Bennett, owner of a mom-and-pop grocery and lunch counter, and his employee, Rebecca Browning. They were killed in the store, just before lunchtime. Within an hour, a suspect was picked up. It was Hercules Brown. Steinberg had a hand in that case too. And, ultimately, Hercules pleaded guilty to the double murder, in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. He’s doing life in prison, too.
Jordan Smith: Devonia Inman had been locked up for more than a decade, when lawyers looking into his case went back to a key piece of evidence that had never been tested for DNA: a mask made from gray sweatpants. It had been left on the passenger seat of Donna Brown’s car the night she was killed. When Inman was on trial, the prosecutors said that it was worn by her killer. In 2011, the lawyers finally had it tested. There was DNA inside from a single source. It belonged to Hercules Brown.
Aimee Maxwell: I’m Aimee Maxwell.
Liliana Segura: Aimee Maxwell was the executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project when she received a letter from Devonia Inman asking for help to clear his name. When we met Maxwell, she and her team were working in a former nail salon in a strip mall in Decatur, next to a Wal-Mart. The old carpet had been ripped out to get rid of the smell of chemicals, but otherwise, the space still had all the remnants of the previous business, Nails 4 U, including the price list hanging on the wall.
Aimee Maxwell: Devonia first wrote us in 2002, I believe, so he’s case number 63 of- now we’re up to almost 6,500 cases that we’ve looked at. So we started looking at his case early on and have stayed with his case all through the many years.
Liliana Segura: Maxwell was really affected by the case. There was just so much wrong with it.
Aimee Maxwell: Probably one of the things that stands out first is how many of the witnesses recanted or changed their story and how many of them had to be brought to court from jail or prison. It was very telling who the witnesses were against him and, you know, the recantations- the question is, do you believe them then or now? You can’t figure out when they’re telling the truth. Do you really want to put a man in prison with life without parole? That’s the shocking thing, and it could have possibly been death. Is that really the kind of evidence you want to use when you put somebody in prison?
Liliana Segura: And there was even more crappy evidence. There was the jailhouse snitch who said Inman had confessed to him and then asked what he might get in exchange for telling his story. And the newspaper carrier who came up with an elaborate and implausible claim about seeing Inman fleeing the scene in Donna Brown’s car and who only came forward after Inman had been arrested and after a $5,000 reward was offered. In short? Each of them had a clear incentive to testify against Inman.
Aimee Maxwell: So there really was no witness that put Devonia at the scene or in any involvement at all that wasn’t incentivized.
Liliana Segura: That’s why the DNA found on the mask inside the car was such a game-changer. The evidence against Inman at trial was just weak. And there were all those people who’d said that Hercules was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. And now his DNA, and only his DNA, had been found on the mask. To Maxwell, it was clear that Inman deserved a new trial.
Jordan Smith: Maxwell and another attorney with the Georgia Innocence Project, Christina Cribbs, dove into Inman’s case. Thousands of pages of trial transcripts and police reports. They got volunteer lawyers from a big firm in Atlanta to help out. After getting the DNA results, they filed a motion with the court down in Cook County. Officially it’s known as an EMNT. An Extraordinary Motion for a New Trial. And it was granted. A judge down in Adel would hear what they had to say. That judge would consider the DNA evidence and decide if it was compelling enough to undermine Inman’s conviction and if Inman deserved a new trial. Meanwhile, the Cook County district attorney’s office, the one that was led by Bob Ellis at the time of Inman’s original trial, they would argue against them that the DNA was not important and that Inman was clearly guilty. Ellis wasn’t the DA anymore and he wouldn’t be at the hearing, but he agreed with the state’s position. We met him for lunch at a buffet restaurant. He talked with his mouth full and kept banging his hand on the table.
Bob Ellis: We never once thought that this defendant was not guilty. We tried to have integrity about what we did.
Jordan Smith: Right. Do you remember what it was in particular that really sealed that deal for you that made you think that he was guilty?
Bob Ellis: I honestly can’t remember.
Jordan Smith: The hearing got off to a rocky start. For one thing, there was the fact that the judge who would hear the case was the same judge who presided over Inman’s original trial.
Aimee Maxwell: It makes it so much more difficult because it’s really hard for anybody to say what happened- what I did may not have been the right thing. I sat- I was the judge on this case where there were mistakes made and we may have put an innocent person in prison. That’s a hard thing for any human being to say, to be okay with.
Jordan Smith: This is common — and not just in Georgia. And it does not inspire confidence. Then the judge made clear he didn’t have much time. Maxwell thought their evidence could take two days of testimony. The judge gave them half a day. If that wasn’t enough, he said, they could reschedule. But getting to this point had taken years, so Maxwell decided to go for it.
Aimee Maxwell: I think we were all pretty confident about what we had. I mean, obviously we were nervous because this is the one shot, right, and we had to convince the trial judge that let all that nonsense happen in trial. We’ve got to convince him that what- all those witnesses were all wrong and that what happened was wrong.
Jordan Smith: They told the judge about the DNA on the mask and why it was so critical.
Liliana Segura: Remember, Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent, had gone to see Hercules in prison back when the DNA match first came up. And the interview is a little crazy. While questioning him, Steinberg gave Hercules every single “out” he could think of.
Jamy Steinberg: I mean, is there any way – I’m just tryin’ to figure out – is there any way that you could have tried this mask on or y’all had done something in the past? You know…
Liliana Segura: Is it possible, Steinberg asks, that Hercules tried on the mask at some point?
Hercules Brown: It been a long time man.
Liliana Segura: Then Steinberg tries to figure out what kind of relationship Hercules had with Devonia Inman.
Jamy Steinberg: What was your relationship with Devonia?
Hercules Brown: I didn’t have a relationship with Devonia.
Jamy Steinberg: And I’m not tryin’ to do smoke and mirrors, I’m asking, I mean, did you know that he was in town, even when that happened, he had not been in Adel very long.
Hercules Brown: I don’t know- I don’t remember that. I don’t know. I don’t know him.
Liliana Segura: If you didn’t catch that, Hercules said no. He said he’d seen Inman before. But he didn’t know him.
Jordan Smith: This is a crucial point. At Inman’s trial, the prosecutors, Bob Ellis and Tim Eidson, had pursued a conviction with a simple theory: Devonia Inman acted alone in robbing and killing Donna Brown. If that was the case, there is no reason why the only DNA found in her car belonged to Hercules Brown. Maxwell called Hercules as a witness during the hearing, but he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify. He wasn’t the only one. Maxwell wanted to question the newspaper carrier, Virginia Tatem, about her wild story and about whether she’d collected the reward money after testifying at Inman’s trial. She refused to answer questions, too. The judge said that was fine. And then there was the snitch, Kwame Spaulding. He did answer questions on the stand and said that the story he’d told about Inman confessing was just that: a story. He’d been coerced by the GBI, he said. The judge cut him off, basically said he didn’t want to hear about it. We wrote numerous letters to Spaulding, hoping he would talk to us about what had happened with the GBI.
Kwame Spaulding: Yo, hello, Jordan Smith, how you doing? It’s Kwame Spaulding. I was calling in reference to thousands of notifications you sent me. I’m just trying to figure out, like, how is this beneficial to me? You know what I’m saying? It’s going to be beneficial to me, you know?
Jordan Smith: Yeah, we knew what he meant.
Kwame Spaulding: Exactly what [inaudible] give me a call right now. Kind of dangerous, you know what I’m saying? [inaudible] in that position, so yeah, let me know. I’ll call you back.
Jordan Smith: Dangerous. We don’t know exactly what he was referring to, but we could certainly make some guesses. For one, no one wants to be out there talking smack about the GBI, or about a guy like Hercules, for that matter, even if he is in prison. So, in the end, he just didn’t talk to us.
Liliana Segura: He tried to speak up once and the people who could have done something about it did their best to ignore him. To the state, anything he had to say now didn’t matter and neither did the DNA. The prosecutors used a new theory to explain it away: The gray mask might have implicated Hercules, but it didn’t exonerate Devonia Inman. The two of them must have pulled off the murder together. They pushed this, even though it completely clashed with the theory they presented at trial. We talked to Tim Eidson about this. Remember, he’s the one who told us that Hercules’s mom had provided an alibi for her son and how police and prosecutors believed her, because she was a well-respected lady. When we met, Eidson had gone back to working as a defense attorney, traveling between south Georgia and eastern Alabama. We reached him on Facebook — he’s an avid user and has a penchant for selfies. He remembered how he found out about the DNA.
Tim Eidson: Now I know that my ex-wife called me one day and he was kind of in a tizzy because they had got a call from someone and she says, “Do you remember that mask that you found?” And I said yeah. She said, “Well, they found that it had Hercules Brown’s DNA in it.” Well, it wasn’t like it was a shocking revelation or anything. I just said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah, and they’re saying that he might have been involved in the Taco Bell murder.”
Liliana Segura: You might ask why his ex-wife found out about the DNA before he did. Well, that goes back to the kind of small town Adel was.
Tim Eidson: The reason she called is because Hercules Brown killed her uncle.
Liliana Segura: William Bennett, that is. The grocery store owner who was beaten to death with a bat.
Tim Eidson: And that was my ex-wife’s uncle. That’s how I knew all of these people. You know, I mean, that’s how I found out about Hercules Brown’s DNA. Nobody ever called me on the phone and said, “Hey, let’s tell you about that ski mask.” I hadn’t worked with the prosecution in several years. It wasn’t like it was shocking because his name kept popping up during the hearing.
Liliana Segura: Not just at the hearing, but at Inman’s trial, too. Back then, several people said Hercules either confessed to them or had asked them to rob the Taco Bell with him. But Eidson and Ellis had convinced the judge not to let any of them testify. At the hearing, Amy Maxwell reminded the judge that he had ruled against Inman’s lawyers when they tried to introduce that evidence at trial. “Is that a nice, euphemistic way of saying I screwed up?” the judge said. Maxwell said no, of course not.
Jordan Smith: The judge wasn’t the only one being defensive. When Steinberg, the GBI agent, took the stand, he was downright surly. Maxwell asked if he’d done any more investigation after he got the DNA match to Hercules. Steinberg said no. Did he try to see if the fingerprints from Donna Brown’s car matched Hercules? “I just answered that question,” he said. If there was any doubt the judge wasn’t taking things all that seriously, his ruling would make it pretty clear. They lost the case and Inman would remain in prison. Adding insult to injury, the judge asked the prosecutor to write up his decision for him. That isn’t supposed to happen, but it does. This is Maxwell’s colleague, Christina Cribbs.
Christina Cribbs: He gave no reasoning, he allowed the state to draft the order, to explain why the ruling was coming their way. So we really had zero insight into what made the judge go one way or the other, and we never did. We do know that he told us in an email as well, that he wouldn’t be surprised if he was overturned on appeal, that he thought it was a really close case.
Jordan Smith: We asked Bob Ellis, the former prosecutor, if there was any chance the state might have gotten it wrong.
Bob Ellis: There’s a chance that the sun will rise in the west. You hope you get it right. I just don’t know. Based on what we had at the time, we felt strongly that we had the right guy or we wouldn’t have gone forward.
Jordan Smith: We tried the question a different way.
Liliana Segura: In light of the DNA testing that was done and the fact that there are people asking questions about this conviction, even if you have a different perspective, are you glad that the jury didn’t come back with a death sentence in this case?
Bob Ellis: I think I’m probably neutral. I think it is what it is.
Jordan Smith: It is what it is.
Liliana Segura: It’s easy to say that when you’re not sitting in a prison cell for a crime you didn’t commit. The ruling was confounding to Maxwell and Cribbs. They didn’t understand how the judge could shrug at a clear miscarriage of justice. He knew that the defense had always suspected Hercules Brown was guilty. Now that they DNA to prove it, he didn’t seem to care.
Christina Cribbs: So, to me, that was a no brainer. Here’s what you wanted. Here’s scientific evidence. Here’s objective proof that Hercules was involved in this, and how do you not get a new trial based on that? The jury should know. So let’s have a new trial, let’s present Hercules as an alternate suspect and let’s let the jury hear about the DNA and these people who said Hercules confessed to them. But the judge didn’t go for it.
Liliana Segura: And also, the state was now claiming that their entire theory of the case, that Inman acted alone, wasn’t their theory at all. Instead, Inman conspired with Hercules to kill Donna Brown. Maxwell and Cribbs knew they had to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. But the law says that the Court doesn’t have to review the case if it doesn’t want to.
Christina Cribbs: The Supreme Court decides whether they want to look at the case or not. If they decide they don’t want to look at the case, then you’re stuck with the trial court’s decision and there’s nowhere to go from there.
Jordan Smith: And guess what? The Georgia Supreme Court wasn’t interested. They rejected the appeal.
Liliana Segura: The lawyers were devastated. They were certain Inman was innocent and that Hercules killed Donna Brown.
Aimee Maxwell: I pretty much think about this case almost every day. I can’t believe that this young man is in prison for the rest of his life based on a bunch of liars.
Liliana Segura: It wasn’t long after Maxwell received the news from the Georgia Supreme Court that Jessica Cino walked into her office. Since joining the faculty at Georgia State, Cino had developed a pretty close relationship with the Innocence Project.
Jessica Cino: I wanted to talk and hang out ’cause I love talking to other lawyers and learning about their cases, and they had just gotten the letter from the Georgia Supreme Court declining review and so Aimee started telling me about this case.
Liliana Segura: Cino was horrified.
Jessica Cino: I think even my own notions of how the criminal justice system worked and how pivotal DNA evidence is in cases was tested.
Liliana Segura: She started reading Inman’s case file. The more she did, the more disturbed she was. She knew she had to find a way to help Inman.
Jessica Cino: I don’t even necessarily know if there’s really a way to define what it is about the case other than it’s just so appalling and depressing that if I don’t try to do everything I can, then who I think of as myself as a lawyer doesn’t really matter much. This is a case that cries out for people to look at and to re-examine and I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from it.
Jordan Smith: There were all the recanting witnesses. The people who’d told the GBI that Hercules was responsible for the murder. The fact that Hercules was in prison for killing Bennett and Browning and the rumors that he’d also been involved in Patel’s death.
Jessica Cino: Yeah, I mean, it’s convenient, right? The minute he gets locked up, people stop dying in this little town. That says a lot and it would be great if he could answer questions about that.
Jordan Smith: We tried to reach Hercules Brown a bunch of times. He only responded once with a brief letter. He wrote that he had nothing to say. For Cino, one of the biggest red flags in the case was that the prosecutors changed their theory of the crime. Going from Inman acted alone to Inman and Hercules did it together.
Jessica Cino: I would call it a bait and switch, absolutely.
Jordan Smith: And what the prosecution did? It wasn’t legal.
Jessica Cino: The indictment that says that one and only one person committed this crime. And they never left room in the indictment for anybody else.
Jordan Smith: So how can they do that?
Jessica Cino: Under Georgia law, they should not be able to do that.
Jordan Smith: The case offended her. She gathered together a team of law students. They went to see Inman and made a number of trips to Adel to poke around. Finally, Cino enlisted the help of attorneys from Troutman Sanders, a prestigious Atlanta law firm. She convinced them to take over the case for free.
Liliana Segura: But there was a problem. The Georgia Supreme Court had refused to consider the case and that meant Inman was basically out of options. He had no easy avenue of appeal. Remember that notion of finality the criminal justice system loves so much? That’s what Inman was up against.
Jessica Cino: The US constitution does not guarantee that only guilty people get convicted. The US constitution merely guarantees that you are entitled to a fair trial and if the system has deemed that even you, innocent person, got a fair trial, then you’re screwed. You don’t have a constitutional right to come back and prove your innocence after you’ve been convicted. The whole point to it is we reinforce finality because we want the criminal justice system to be able to sleep at night, so we can’t go around just willy-nilly overturning convictions because that would be a serious problem.
Liliana Segura: The lawyers would have to find a way to squeeze back into court, and it wouldn’t be easy. While they worked on tackling the legal arguments, Cino became Inman’s lifeline to the outside world. For the hundreds of hours she’s poured into the case, in some ways, that’s the hardest part: managing his expectations.
Jessica Cino: It keeps me up at night. Because whenever I talk to him on the phone, and he always asks me “What are the chances of me getting out? Do I have a good chance?” He wants to be optimistic and the lawyer in me knows the reality of what he faces, of it being an uphill battle.
Liliana Segura: The lawyers wanted to prove that Inman is innocent. But in order to do so, they would need to show that his constitutional rights were violated at trial. Without that, the courts wouldn’t even consider another appeal. Not one based only on his claim of innocence. But the chances of finding something new, so many years later, was a longshot. And then they found it.
Jordan Smith: Last year, Troutman Sanders sent an investigator down to Adel to find more people to talk to. They found Kim Brooks. She had gone to work at the Taco Bell shortly after Donna Brown was murdered. In fact, she took over Brown’s position. Hercules was still working there at the time. And what Brooks remembers is a pretty big deal. Big enough that it could get Inman back into court. Brooks said that when she worked at the Taco Bell, Hercules harassed her. He would “play” like he was going to rob her and hurt her. More importantly, she said that Hercules Brown asked her to help him pull off an “inside job” to rob the store. He would “rough her up” to make it look realistic, and they would split the money. This is the same thing that Inman’s cousin Takeisha Pickett told us. She said Hercules had asked her to rob the Taco Bell too. But that’s not the only thing. Brooks says that at one point, Hercules confessed that he had done something “bad.” He didn’t say what. But she asked him if someone else was going to pay for it. He said, “It’s better their life than mine.”
Liliana Segura: This is pretty damning. But it’s not even the craziest part. Kim Brooks didn’t sit on this information. Hercules creeped her out enough that she decided to tell the cops. There was this one police sergeant, Joel Reddick, who would escort her to the bank to do the night deposits. She tried to tell him about Hercules’ suspicious behavior, but he brushed her off. Still, she wouldn’t let it go. So finally, he told her to call the GBI. Jamy Steinberg. In a legal filing, lawyers from Troutman Sanders describe what happened next:
“Ms. Brooks contacted Agent Steinberg to inform him that she believed Mr. Brown to be involved with Donna Brown’s murder. In response, Ms. Brooks was informed that Donna Brown’s murderer had been found, and that the case was closed. Ms. Brooks believes that this conversation occurred sometime in the months after the murder, but no later than December 1998.”
Jordan Smith: In December 1998, Devonia Inman hadn’t even been indicted yet. The information that Brooks provided to the GBI should have been included in the police report and shared with Inman’s lawyers before his trial. It’s what is known as “Brady material.” Facts and evidence that contradict the state’s case. But it wasn’t reported and it wasn’t handed over. That’s a constitutional violation. The kind of violation that could get Inman back into court.
Liliana Segura: This past January, the legal team at Troutman Sanders filed a special appeal seeking to overturn Inman’s conviction. It’s what is known as a “writ of habeas corpus.” The appeal is currently pending before a state district judge. It’s a major long shot and there’s no telling when the judge will rule. It could take years, because the law doesn’t put a deadline on such decisions. We tried to reach Steinberg again. He previously brushed us off, said Inman’s case was closed and he had nothing more to say about it.
Lisa: GBI, this is Lisa, how can I help you?
Liliana Segura: Hi, yes, I was hoping to reach Jamy Steinberg.
Lisa: He will return to the office tomorrow. Can I give him a message to return your call?
Liliana Segura: That’d be great, yea. My name is Liliana Segura…
Liliana Segura: He didn’t call us back. We were able to reach Joel Reddick, the Adel cop Brooks told about Hercules. He wasn’t particularly helpful either.
Liliana Segura: So yea, so Kim Brooks, the reason we were asking you about her is that in the weeks and months after Donna Brown died, she says that she knew you because apparently you used to be one of the police officers who would provide an escort when, you know-
Joel Reddick: Yeah.
Liliana Segura: Yeah. To make deposits at the bank, so she knew you from there and she says that she told you at one point that she had been disturbed by some behavior and some things that were said by Hercules Brown who she was working with at the night shift at the Taco Bell.
Joel Reddick: I don’t remember none of that. I- seriously I don’t. I didn’t even remember that Kim Brooks you just said.
Liliana Segura: This wasn’t a big surprise. For all the cops we’ve talked to over these last three years, hardly anyone remembers anything. To be honest, we didn’t remember who Reddick was until we went back to the GBI report. It turns out he was one of the first cops dispatched to the Taco Bell. Only he and his partner went to the wrong parking lot. Twice. First to the Waffle House and then the Huddle House, before finally finding the crime scene next door. To Cino, Brooks’ story was a bombshell.
Jessica Cino: So I think my reaction at first was, “oh my god, this is huge.” Right? There’s this feeling of elation of, you know, it’s not a smoking gun, but it certainly helps his case, especially from the perspective of, we have to clear some procedural legal hurdles in order for a court to hear this case. So in one aspect, it’s that. You think about it, like, she reported it. She tried to get them to do something. And this was, you know, decades ago. Like, it’s just- It’s staggering and it’s sad. It’s infuriating. And I’m not the one sitting in prison. I can’t imagine how he feels about this.
Jordan Smith: Talking to Devonia Inman is not easy. We’ve talked to him a number of times on the phone. He is despairing and quite often, deeply depressed.
Devonia Inman: These people don’t even care about messing, they don’t care about my life. How somebody can just find somebody guilty for something and they didn’t even did nothing?
Jordan Smith: He doesn’t understand why he is still in prison, even though DNA clears him. His parents, Dinah and David Ray, don’t understand it either.
Liliana Segura: Do you remember when you heard about the DNA evidence?
Dinah Ray: Yes. I remember we were sitting in front of my job in the car on our lunch break when Aimee called us and told us that the DNA had came back and it was Hercules Brown and all we could do was cry. We thought, this is it. He’s going to be coming home soon. But that didn’t happen.
David Ray: It’s been almost what, six years? Six years since they had the DNA evidence, and they still didn’t let him come home. That’s me and my wife, she wrote everybody. The president to everybody. And we still can’t believe this.
Jordan Smith: Jessica Cino has spent a lot of time trying to explain this to Inman and to his parents and to anyone else who will listen.
Jessica Cino: I think the issue that shocks the most people is how it is so different from what they read in the headlines of, oh, there’s DNA, points to somebody else, somebody else who we can actually go and look at who that person is and see, oh, they actually went on to commit similar crimes to this… and the courts don’t care. That they just don’t give a damn. And I think that to most people is probably what shocks them because it does not fit into any of those nice little boxes that we like to put wrongful convictions in. We like to think that they get solved and ultimately, the wheels of Justice turn the way they’re supposed to but in this case, it didn’t.
Liliana Segura: And it’s not just in this case. We’ve written a lot of stories about people who are in similar circumstances. Innocent and in prison, out of appeals, sometimes facing execution, and nobody seems to care. People think that mistakes in the criminal justice system are rare and just get sorted out on their own, but they don’t. In a way, Devonia Inman is lucky, because he has a dedicated legal team actively trying to help him. That’s not a given. Still, they may not be able to help him in the end. He may die in prison.
David Ray: This is supposed to be the justice system? My son been wrongly accused of this justice system. Something is wrong with this system. It needs to be checked again.
Jordan Smith: It’s not too late. But it’s up to Georgia now to fix it.
Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Thanks for listening.
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