Quando chovia forte no centro do Rio de Janeiro dos séculos 18 e 19 era comum que corpos mortos e apodrecidos de pessoas escravizadas boiassem na enchente. Quando não era o corpo inteiro, muitas vezes os passantes cruzavam com pernas e braços dilacerados, vagando pelas esquinas. Insetos, bactérias, cães, gatos e urubus aproveitavam-se. A repugnância diante dos corpos destroçados ficou bem registrada em centenas de documentos da Câmara de Vereadores e nos relatos de viajantes. Em 1814, o alemão G. W. Freireyss escreveu: “Havia um monte de terra da qual, aqui e acolá, saíam restos de cadáveres descobertos pela chuva que tinha carregado a terra e ainda havia muitos cadáveres no chão que não tinham sido ainda enterrados”.
Freireyss estava de certa maneira enganado. Os cadáveres a que se referia não seriam “ainda enterrados”. Pelo contrário, eles já tinham sido enterrados, com quase nenhuma terra sobre seus corpos, e agora era a chuva que ia desenterrando esses homens e mulheres. Freireyss, na realidade, descrevia a indignidade de um Cemitério de Pretos Novos, espaços dedicados ao enterro (ou ao descarte) dos corpos de escravizados africanos recém chegados ao centro do Rio de Janeiro.
Em vez de dar visibilidade a sua história, a prefeitura preferiu esconder o cemitério dos cariocas.É sobre um desses cemitérios, o que funcionou em frente à Igreja de Santa Rita, que a terceira linha do Veículo Leve Sobre Trilhos, o VLT carioca, acaba de ser construída. Em vez de dar visibilidade a sua história, a prefeitura preferiu esconder o cemitério dos cariocas.
No início dos anos 1700, a corrida pela exploração do ouro na região de Minas Gerais fez disparar o número de desembarques no Rio de Janeiro. Eram dezenas de milhares de crianças, mulheres e homens que, a cada ano – sequestrados desde a Costa da Mina, na Guiné, do Senegal, de Angola e de muitos outras partes da África – desembarcavam na Praia do Peixe, centro do Rio que, naquele começo de século, ia se transformando na mais brutal cidade escravagista que o mundo já conheceu. Se houvesse compradores, os escravos eram comercializados ali mesmo, onde hoje é a rua Primeiro de Março, na região da Assembleia Legislativa do estado. Às vezes, agentes de inspeção de saúde entravam nos barcos para fiscalizar e impedir o desembarque de algum escravo muito doente. Outros, também muito doentes, eram vendidos a preços baixíssimos para comerciantes pobres, que assim faziam uma aposta: se houvesse melhora, o preço subia na revenda. Quem não era negociado, mas resistira à viagem com saúde, era levado aos mercados.
A frequente morte de quem descia sem saúde dos navios negreiros virou problema público importante no Rio por volta de 1710. A falta de dignidade dos enterros estava angustiando o clero do Rio. Foram os religiosos que exigiram que o rei Dom João V enviasse dinheiro para construir um cemitério especialmente dedicado a esses africanos. A primeira ideia é que ele fosse construído aos pés do Morro do Castelo, onde hoje está a Biblioteca Nacional, na região da Cinelândia. Mas o local decidido foi outro, muito mais próximo ao ponto de desembarque: em frente à Igreja de Santa Rita, na Freguesia de Santa Rita, na atual rua Marechal Floriano, também no centro do Rio.
No século XIX, o Cemitério de Pretos Novos de Santa Rita já estava soterrado pela falta de memória. Na imagem, negros e negras buscam água no chafariz que havia na região.
Pintura de Eduardo Hildebrant - Largo de Santa Rita (1844)
Foi lá, aproximadamente entre os anos de 1722 e 1774, que funcionou o primeiro cemitério de Pretos Novos do Rio. Os enterros não eram gratuitos. Quem operava e cobrava pelo serviço era a igreja de Santa Rita. “A entidade católica cobrava do Estado pelo serviço. Apesar disso, além de serem os enterros feitos em cova rasa, os corpos eram enterrados nus, envoltos e amarrados em esteiras, sem qualquer ritual religioso, reza, encomendação ou sacramento”, escreveu o historiador Murilo de Carvalho na introdução do livro “À flor da Terra” do também historiador Júlio César Medeiros.
Se sequer havia ritual religioso para os escravizados que já eram católicos, convertidos ainda na África, é bem razoável pensar que menos respeito ainda recebiam aqueles escravizados devotos de religiões africanas ou mesmo do islã. A pergunta que fica é: quantos seres humanos foram descartados ali em Santa Rita, sem roupa, respeito religioso ou dignidade?
Começaram longos meses de debates sobre como o presente respeita o passado. Ou como o passado grita para ser ouvido pelo presente.Essa conta é bastante difícil, mas pode seguir a pista de um único documento sobrevivente, hoje no Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Nele, o historiador João Carlos Nara encontrou a Procuradoria da Câmara de Vereadores tentando convencer o Tribunal a levar o Cemitério dos Pretos Novos de Santa Rita, uma região então bastante movimentada, para um local mais afastado, conhecido como Valongo – o que de fato aconteceu. Ao descrever as atividades, a Procuradoria apontou que houvera 220 enterramentos apenas no primeiro semestre de 1766. Se a média deste ano se mantivesse, ao multiplicar as mortes pelos 52 anos de cemitério, chegaríamos a total de mais de 20 mil pessoas “enterradas” por ali.
<u>Era sobre esta história de escravidão e morte, em Santa Rita, que a prefeitura projetou passar a terceira e última linha do bilionário projeto do VLT<u/>, que custou, ao todo, R$ 1,1 bilhão aos cofres públicos. As obras da linha 3, que liga o aeroporto Santos Dumont à Central do Brasil, começaram em abril de 2018, sem qualquer conversa com a sociedade civil ou movimentos negros. Mas, ao saber dos trabalhos, não demorou para grupos de negros organizados reclamarem alto. Eles identificam ali ancestrais de suas histórias. Muitos arqueólogos também ligaram as sirenes, fizeram barulho, exigindo uma proteção atenta do Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, o Iphan, órgão diretamente responsável por preservar sítios arqueológicos.
O VLT foi obrigado a contratar uma empresa de arqueologia para realizar escavações. Foi formada então uma comissão, chamada de Pequena África, nome de uma área do centro do Rio, para acompanhar a execução das obras e, principalmente, para exigir que houvesse respeito à memória do povo negro do Rio de Janeiro. O primeiro pedido do movimento foi de que as obras da linha 3 fossem paralisadas, especialmente no trecho da igreja. O VLT atendeu, e começaram ali longos meses de debates sobre como o presente respeita o passado. Ou como o passado grita para ser ouvido pelo presente.
Obras demoraram 8 meses e reviraram o asfalto de toda a extensão da rua Marechal Floriano Peixoto.
Foto: Caetano Manenti
O VLT tinha pressa. O dinheiro do Ministério das Cidades e da Prefeitura (na Parceria Público Privada com o VLT) estava disponível, numa época de vacas magérrimas para obras urbanas no Brasil e no Rio. Para piorar, o início dos trabalhos, marcado para janeiro, atrasara em quatro meses.
‘Era a chance que se tinha de, finalmente, conhecer o passado do cemitério.’Enquanto Iphan, VLT e movimento negro discutiam, a prefeitura do bispo Marcelo Crivella lavava as mãos. Os representantes do Instituto Rio Patrimônio da Humanidade fizeram questão de dizer que a polêmica não era deles, mas do Iphan. O prefeito Crivella estava muito mais preocupado com o Memorial do Holocausto. Em junho, chegou a fazer um show beneficente e, cantor gospel que é, se apresentou de graça para ajudar na arrecadação.
No primeiro momento das conversas, havia pouco consenso. Mercedes Guimarães, presidente do Instituto dos Pretos Novos, entidade criada para gerir a memória daquele que foi o segundo cemitério de Pretos Novos do Rio, na região da Praça da Harmonia, não queria que os trens passassem por cima dos mortos de Santa Rita: “Eu acho não tinha que ter VLT aí. Tinha que ter era monumento, dizendo o que foi ali. Aquilo é um bloco testemunho. Ali tinha que se falar o que foi o cemitério, qual a intenção daquele cemitério, contar o período que ele funcionou”.
Empresa contratada de arqueologia realizou escavações em outros trechos, mas não no local onde havia o Cemitério de Pretos Novos de Santa Rita.
Foto: Tatiana Nukowitz/Divulgação Iphan
Muitos historiadores e arqueólogos, claro, queriam escavações, principalmente para proteger os ossos que sempre estão em risco em grandes obras de infraestrutura como essa. Era a chance que se tinha de, finalmente, conhecer o passado do cemitério, como defende Nara: “Se não temos muita documentação, é a arqueologia que deve suprir essa deficiência. Muita gente tem medo de que os remanescentes sejam tratados como fósseis. Artefatos arqueológicos serão aquilo que nós dissermos que eles são. Se nós dissermos que é um fóssil, ele será tratado cientificamente como tal. Se dissermos que é uma ossada, isso terá uma perspectiva forense. Se nós dissermos que são remanescentes humanos, isso implica que existe uma solidariedade, existe uma preocupação e uma afeição por aquilo”.
No meio de toda essa discussão, a prefeitura dava suas caneladas ou, no conceito do líder da oposição, o vereador Tarcísio Motta, do PSOL, suas “Crivelladas”. Em nota divulgada nos grandes jornais que se debruçavam sobre o assunto em agosto, a Companhia de Desenvolvimento Urbano da Região do Porto, que representa a administração de Crivella no imbróglio, minimizava a certeza de que ali sim havia funcionado um grande cemitério de Pretos Novos. O documento dizia que “o trecho passará por pesquisa arqueológica como determina a legislação para melhor compreender o sítio arqueológico que se supõe que exista no Largo de Santa Rita, hoje ainda no campo da especulação”.
‘O trecho passará por pesquisa arqueológica como determina a legislação para melhor compreender o sítio arqueológico que se supõe que exista no Largo de Santa Rita, hoje ainda no campo da especulação.’Este repórter estranhou tanto a declaração que fez questão de questionar a representante da prefeitura presente em reunião promovida pelo Ministério Público no fim de agosto. Afinal, a prefeitura desconhecia a existência do cemitério? A pergunta simplesmente não foi respondida. Eu voltaria a questionar o governo municipal em setembro, dessa vez em seminário no Arquivo Nacional, mas o representante de Crivella, Antônio Carlos Barbosa, presidente da CDURP, assinou a lista de presença logo na chegada do evento e foi embora.
Fato é que a prefeitura não se dedicou em dar visibilidade à existência do cemitério. Nenhum release, nenhuma postagem, nenhum debate, nenhum pronunciamento, nada foi feito para chamar a atenção de que a cidade tinha, à frente dela, com a avenida aberta para obras, um Cemitério de Pretos Novos ali. Na única oportunidade de falar da cultura e história africana no período, em cerimônia no Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, o bispo apresentou um rodízio de gafes para todos os gostos, provando que sabe tanto de história do Brasil como governar a cidade, ou seja, quase nada.
“Villegagnon condenava a morte os soldados que furnicassem com as índias, embora a natureza fosse muito forte para atraí-los. Foi expulso dessa cidade. E vieram para cá os portugueses que já eram uma raça mestiça. Foram com as índias que os portugueses nos deram nossos primeiros heróis: os bandeirantes”, disse Crivella.
“Nem o Ibérico, nem o índio poderiam suportar o esforço da indústria do açúcar. Ela necessitava de uma força muito maior. Então vieram para cá muitos africanos. E hoje nós não somos brancos, nós não somos negros, nós não somos amarelos, nós não somos vermelhos, somos brasileiros”.
Voltando ao debate do cemitério, Luiz Eduardo Negrogun, presidente do Conselho Estadual dos Direitos do Negro, estava revoltado com os nomes das estações que o VLT havia apresentado. A companhia insistia que as paradas tinham que ter referência geográfica e, assim, decidira que a última estação, próxima ao Palácio Duque de Caxias, quartel-general do Comando Militar no Leste, se chamaria Estação Duque de Caxias. Negrogun exaltou-se: “Não queremos esses nomes! Não vão ser esses nomes! Principalmente Duque de Caxias, racista, assassino, homofóbico!”.
Mas ainda havia a questão das obras e das escavações. O que fazer? Paralisar tudo? Desviar o traçado do VLT? Escavar para pesquisar? Para expor? Para ressepultar?
Negrogun disse que, mesmo dentro do movimento negro, havia muitas opiniões: “Tinha quem queria tirar os ossos. Outros que tivesse as escavações mas que deixassem janelas com os ossos à vista. Tinha uma outra discussão para impedir a obra. Mas nós não somos contra o progresso. Queríamos um diálogo para que houvesse uma reparação, um reconhecimento mínimo”.
O cemitério que a Prefeitura não deu nenhuma atenção virou, ao menos, nome de uma estação.Negrogun trouxe enfim a opinião do Comitê: a comunidade negra não queria as escavações. “Se tem escavação, tem remoção dos artefatos encontrados. Aquilo não são artefatos, são ossos de nossos ancestrais. Não queríamos que fosse removido dali para serem levados para outro lugar, para ficar exposto, ou abandonado, encaixotado. Quando escava, você sabe como começa, mas não sabe como vai terminar”, diz. “É como se teus antepassados estivessem enterrados num sítio de vocês e aí passasse uma draga revirando todas aqueles ossos, aquilo ali seria uma profanação do leito eterno dos nossos parentes”.
O professor Nara não concorda com o termo profanação. “Salvamento arqueológico não é profanação. Salvamento é para salvar o que seria destruído”. Outra historiadora, a professora Mônica Lima, trazia, no entanto, um meio termo. Aceitava que pequenas mostras fossem coletadas para o estudo, mas preferia que o sítio arqueológico fosse preservado.“Eu fico pensando sempre nas pessoas e nas suas relações com a morte. Para os africanos, a relação com a morte tem uma importância enorme. Que direitos temos nós? Nós abriríamos as covas que se têm nas igrejas mais antigas do Rio para estudar aqueles corpos da sociedade branca?”
Enfim, quando o VLT mostrou disposição para alterar os nomes das estações, instalar tótens informativos sobre a história negra na região e ainda demarcar o espaço do cemitério com pedras portuguesas com desenhos de Rosas Negras, o Comitê da Pequena África, então, deu o ok para a continuação das obras. O Iphan também autorizou que os trilhos passassem sobre o cemitério. A prefeitura se deu por satisfeita e a obra, a partir de então, seguiu em ritmo acelerado até o fim de 2018.
Foto: Caetano Manenti
Negrogun disse que a única sugestão que não foi acatada foi de alterar a última estação de Duque de Caxias para Almirante Negro João Cândido, um dos maiores heróis do movimento negro contemporâneo. No fim, nem um, nem outro: ficou estação Cristiano Ottoni (nome da Praça)/Pequena África. Uma outra agora se chama Camerino/Rosas Negras, enquanto a derradeira se chama Santa Rita/Pretos Novos. O cemitério que a Prefeitura não deu nenhuma atenção virou, ao menos, nome de uma estação.
De toda forma, Crivella, como era de se esperar, não foi poupado das críticas. A prefeitura tinha a responsabilidade de ter tratado a história negra com muito mais respeito e atenção. Assim como Pereira Passos, o bispo que virou prefeito, ao revirar o centro, não lembrou daqueles que construíram a cidade. A professora Mônica Lima considera que faltou uma compreensão do que o cemitério poderia significar. “As obras do centro do Rio não podem ser tratadas apenas como questão de mobilidade urbana, mas de uma relação com a história da cidade”. Mercedes Guimarães foi ainda mais dura: “Os pretos novos estavam esperando uma coisa melhor: um monumento, mas pessoas se meteram e, em vez de fazer uma coisa bacana, legal, infelizmente, aceitaram as migalhas do colonialismo”.
‘As obras do centro do Rio não podem ser tratadas apenas como questão de mobilidade urbana, mas de uma relação com a história da cidade.’Até mesmo o prefeito Marcelo Crivella não parece muito satisfeito com o VLT, herança de Eduardo Paes e das administrações mdbistas na cidade, no estado e no país. Disse ele, recentemente, ao Valor Econômico: “Você acha justo um VLT, que foi negociado no tempo deles, que o município deve bancar, todos os dias, se não houver 300 mil passageiros? Hoje tenho 70 mil passageiros. E tenho que pagar 230 mil passagens diariamente. Você acha um bom negócio isso? São R$ 293 mil por dia, R$ 9 milhões ao mês”.
A linha 3 do VLT, que deveria ser inaugurada antes do natal de 2018, ainda não começou a operar. Crivella agora bate o pé e afirma que a prefeitura quer alterar o contrato que, segundo ele, dá prejuízo para os cofres da cidade. Não há mais uma previsão para o início das viagens. A instalação dos tótens também não tem prazo definido, tampouco a construção do mosaico em pedras portuguesas que vão delimitar a área do cemitério.
A comunidade negra espera que seja rápido, mais rápido que os 240 anos que já se passaram desde que o último Preto Novo foi descartado por ali.
The post Está aqui, sob o VLT, o cemitério de escravos que a prefeitura do Rio dizia ser ‘especulação’ appeared first on The Intercept.
Paranoid conspiracy theories about George Soros — the liberal philanthropist and financier cast, in starkly anti-Semitic terms, as a shadowy puppet master bent on toppling governments — are now so common that it is easy to forget that this viral meme was first injected into the far-right imagination by Fox News more than a decade ago.
An otherwise valuable new article for BuzzFeed by the Swiss journalist Hannes Grassegger — which explains how Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, focused his entire re-election campaign on the imaginary threat posed by Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew — is marred by an incomplete history of the meme. Grassegger, who is perhaps lucky not to have access to Fox broadcasts, incorrectly attributes the creation of the anti-Soros meme to the late Arthur Finkelstein, an American political consultant who advised Orbán.
Grassegger is right to report that Finkelstein and his partner George Birnbaum “turned Soros into a meme” in Hungary, starting in 2013, portraying the billionaire as an enemy of the Hungarian people in posters and attack ads disguised as public service announcements. But his claim that the two men “created a Frankenstein monster that found a new life on the internet,” ignores the earlier role that Fox News played in pushing the coded anti-Semitic attack on Soros.
Years before Finkelstein advised Orbán to use Soros as a punching bag — casting his financial support for education, human rights, and democracy in Hungary as somehow nefarious — the Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck had already vilified the Holocaust survivor in similar terms. O’Reilly started by accusing Soros of secretly giving “millions to politicians who will do his bidding,” before Beck went full Stürmer by describing Soros as “the Puppet Master.”
O’Reilly first introduced Fox News viewers to his caricature of Soros as a shadowy financier bent on “imposing a radical left agenda” on Americans on April 23, 2007. The goal of Soros, O’Reilly warned darkly, was “to buy a presidential election.”
To do this, O’Reilly claimed, “Soros has set up a complicated political operation designed to buy influence among some liberal politicians and smear people with whom he disagrees.” O’Reilly’s complaint about Soros-backed smears was a reference to the billionaire’s support for Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that had irked the Fox News pundit by regularly fact-checking and debunking his false claims.
O’Reilly’s analysis was then echoed by one of his guests, the conservative talk-radio host Monica Crowley, who claimed that Soros’s donations to liberal groups were “a brilliant way to get around the campaign finance laws in this country,” which he had been able to keep secret “before you just exposed him, because the mainstream media protects him.” Another guest, the far-right political activist Phil Kent, later chimed in to describe Soros as “really the Dr. Evil of the whole world of left-wing foundations” who “really hates this country.”
Although O’Reilly did not refer to Soros’s ethnicity, his criticism of the financier as a shadowy string-puller appealed to the imaginations of anti-Semites online. Less than a year later, Soros was portrayed as “a Jewish tycoon,” secretly directing American foreign policy from inside the White House, in a bizarre animated propaganda film broadcast on Iranian television.
In 2008, an animated Iranian public service announcement featured George Soros.
The public service announcement produced by Iran’s intelligence ministry warned viewers that Soros was “the mastermind of ultra-modern colonialism,” who “uses his wealth and slogans like liberty, democracy, and human rights to bring the supporters of America to power.” In the cartoon, Soros was shown plotting to overthrow Iran’s government, with the help of the CIA, John McCain, and Gene Sharp, a political scientist whose theoretical work on nonviolent protest influenced color revolutions in Eastern Europe.
By October 2008, the idea that Soros was secretly controlling American politics was even lampooned on “Saturday Night Live,” in a sketch that identified the financier in an on-screen graphic as “Owner, Democratic Party.”
Will Forte played George Soros in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch broadcast on Oct. 4, 2008.
The actor playing Soros in the sketch, a mock C-SPAN broadcast, even joked that he had drained hundreds of billions of dollars from the American economy during the financial crisis and was planning to devalue the dollar.
Two years later, Fox’s Glenn Beck made the echo of anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda impossible to ignore, calling Soros a “puppet master” who “collapses regimes” in a broadcast — complete with actual puppets — that columnist Michelle Goldberg described as “a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles.”
In his long indictment of Soros, what Beck did not say about the list of governments he claimed the philanthropist had helped to topple was striking. Before claiming the United States would be Soros’s next “target,” Beck ominously intoned, “Soros has helped fund the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in the Czech Republic, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in the Ukraine, the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia.” Beck failed to mention that in each of the countries he named, Soros had provided support to popular pro-democracy groups battling repressive regimes led by Communist or former Communist autocrats.
There were also no coups in Slovakia, Croatia, or Yugoslavia. Slovakia was created by the so-called velvet divorce, the peaceful dissolution of the federal state of Czechoslovakia by democratically elected leaders in 1993; Croatia’s wartime president, Franjo Tudjman, an authoritarian former Communist general, died in office in 1999 and was replaced by a former member of his party after a democratic election; Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader who was most responsible for the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed tens of thousands in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, resigned in 2000, following street protests after his loss in a democratic election.
Beck’s elaborate conspiracy theory, sketched out on both sides of a series of blackboards, was so unhinged that it inspired an extended parody by Jon Stewart.
Asked at the time what he made of Beck’s claims “that you are the mastermind who is trying to bring down the American government,” Soros told Fareed Zakaria of CNN: “I would be amused if people saw the joke in it, because what he is doing, he is projecting what Fox, what Rupert Murdoch is doing — because he has a media empire that is telling the people some falsehoods and leading the government in the wrong direction.”
“Fox News,” Soros added, “has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, Newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them.”
While it is difficult to trace the influence of Fox News in Europe, where it is not broadcast on television, copies of Beck’s program, “The Puppet Master,” have been widely shared online, and the conspiracy theory soon became a matter of faith for far-right commentators on American websites.
An online editorial cartoon, published in 2011, showed how well-established conspiracy theories about George Soros were by then.
The conspiracy theories about Soros are now so widespread that earlier this week, Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s son, shared a link to a post by Pamela Geller, a far-right blogger, who distorted remarks made by Soros about how he survived the Holocaust to falsely accuse him of having been “a Nazi collaborator.”
Yair Netanyahu is retweeting Pamela Geller who is spreading antiSemitic lies https://t.co/DTjEqea9lG
— Mairav Zonszein ??? ??????? (@MairavZ) January 22, 2019
Even after parting company with both Beck and O’Reilly, Fox has continued to focus obsessively on spreading invective and false claims about Soros as a hidden mastermind of liberal causes.
In April, one of the network’s new stars, Tucker Carlson, declared on air that “George Soros hates the United States.” Another new arrival, Laura Ingraham, claimed that Soros was behind protests against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, despite a credible allegation of sexual assault. And in October, Lou Dobbs of Fox Business News made no objection when Christopher Farrell, the head of the far-right Judicial Watch, claimed that Soros was funding a caravan of asylum-seekers marching to the U.S. border, through the “Soros-occupied State Department.”
Straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just moments ago, Lou Dobbs guest Chris Farrell (head of Judicial Watch) says Caravan is being funded/directed by the "Soros-occupied State Department". pic.twitter.com/QBSong7uk1
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 27, 2018
The same week, Fox News reported that a pipe bomb had been sent to the home of “Democratic mega-donor George Soros.”
“This comes at a time,” the Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas observed from outside Soros’s home, “when Soros’s name has been recently evoked by right-wing activists, including with the caravan moving forward. Rep. Matt Gaetz, just a few days ago tweeted, suggesting that Soros perhaps was part of the funding — funding the migrant caravan moving to the border. And the president himself has evoked Soros’s name recently, in Missoula, Montana, talking about Soros perhaps funding liberal protesters.”
The post The Plot Against George Soros Didn’t Start in Hungary. It Started on Fox News. appeared first on The Intercept.
Defense attorneys for the accused mastermind of the USS Cole bombing asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday for a fresh start to his trial, alleging that a glaring instance of judicial misconduct tainted their client’s military tribunal.
Lawyers for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri asked the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to take the extraordinary step of vacating decisions made under Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the military judge who was in charge of Nashiri’s case between 2014 and Spath’s retirement from the military last year.
They argued that Spath presided over the case with an undisclosed conflict of interest, noting that for years, he was angling for an appointment with the Justice Department while advancing Nashiri’s case on terms favorable to the prosecution team.
In November, the Miami Herald revealed that Spath had applied for a job with the Justice Department in 2015 to work as an immigration judge. At the same time, he was presiding over Nashiri’s case, in which Justice Department lawyers were part of the prosecution team seeking the death penalty.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been an outspoken supporter of Guantánamo’s military commissions. In 2017, he called the prison “a very fine place” to put new terror suspects, and he reportedly intervened last year to scuttle a plea deal that would spare 9/11 defendants the death penalty.
According to defense filings, in the years after he applied for an appointment with the Justice Department, Spath touted his “aggressive trial schedule,” while accusing Nashiri’s defense lawyers of creating “constant roadblocks, recalcitrance, and disobeyance of orders.”
Michel Paradis, a Defense Department counsel representing Nashiri, told the three-judge panel that Spath had “angled for an appointment from the Attorney General at the same time the Attorney General and Department of Justice had substantial interest in [Nashiri’s] case,” and that “he traded on the fact that he was the judge in this capital case for his own personal gain.”
Paradis also said that Spath had used one of his rulings favorable to the Justice Department in Nashiri’s case as a writing sample for his application. Spath ultimately got the job and was sworn in as an immigration judge in September.
Military judges are appointed to oversee cases by the Defense Department, and do not have the same lifetime tenure that federal judges enjoy.
Joseph F. Palmer, an attorney for the Justice Department, told the three-judge panel on Tuesday that it was normal for military judges to seek employment while trying a case. He also raised a procedural objection, saying that Nashiri’s attorneys should have allowed the military commission to rule on Spath’s recusal before bringing the case to federal court.
“Judges rule on decisions regarding their own recusal all the time,” Palmer said, “and it’s within the discretion of an appellate court to decide, ‘Let’s hear from the judge himself. Let’s have him explain why he did what he did.’”
Alka Pradhan, a human rights lawyer who represents a different Guantánamo detainee, told The Intercept that it wasn’t unusual for a military judge to seek employment elsewhere, but that didn’t excuse the conflict of interest.
“In this particular situation, where [the judge is] in a military commission presiding over a prosecution that is run entirely by the Department of Justice and has to pronounce on motions being brought by Department of Justice attorneys, that is a situation where it’s inappropriate for a military judge to be looking for employment with the Department of Justice,” Pradhan said.
Tuesday’s argument ruling is not the first time Spath has been in the national spotlight. In August 2017, Nashiri’s defense team found a surveillance microphone in the room they used to meet with Nashiri. In response, the lawyers sought to find out whether their privileged communications had been spied on. Spath denied the request, dismissing the claims as “fake news.”
“That in and of itself caused a legal conflict,” said Pradhan. “The client has no reason to trust them if the client can’t trust that their communications are privileged. The second level of conflict is that they were not allowed to tell Nashiri about the eavesdropping.”
Three of Nashiri’s lawyers resigned after consulting a legal ethics expert and getting permission from Guantánamo’s chief defense counsel, Brig. Gen. John Baker. In response, Spath held Baker in contempt of court and sentenced him to be confined to quarters for three weeks, a ruling later overturned by a federal court. Spath also told prosecutors to draft warrants for U.S. marshals to seize two of Nashiri’s lawyers and force them to appear before him, but instead shut down the trial, pending review by a higher court.
Nashiri is accused of planning the USS Cole bombing in 2000, when Al Qaeda operatives sailed a boat carrying explosives up to the U.S. Navy destroyer, which was refueling in the port of Aden, Yemen, and detonated the bombs, killing 17 U.S. sailors and injuring 39 more. But in the more than 16 years since, Nashiri’s case has repeatedly stopped and started, hamstrung by constant procedural hurdles. It has become a symbol of the inability of Guantánamo military commissions to prosecute alleged terrorists.
An artist rendering shows Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri during his military commissions arraignment at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Guantánamo, Cuba, on Nov. 9, 2011.
Image: Janet Hamlin/AP
Nashiri was captured in the United Arab Emirates in 2002 and rendered to a secret CIA prison in Thailand. According to a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA interrogators tortured Nashiri even after they deemed him “cooperative and truthful,” shackling him in stress positions, waterboarding him, and on at least one occasion, force-feeding him rectally. Part of his interrogation was overseen by now-CIA Director Gina Haspel.
Legal commentators have held up Nashiri’s case as an example of how the military commissions system creates a web of procedural problems. Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the University of Texas law school, wrote last year that Nashiri’s case was a “ten-layer dip” of procedural hurdles — from basic jurisdictional problems, to the fact that much of the evidence against him was obtained under torture, to ethics complaints against the presiding judge and requirements for qualified defense counsel in capital cases.
If the court grants Tuesday’s request, it could have ramifications beyond Nashiri’s trial.
Pradhan told The Intercept that a ruling in favor of Nashiri would give defense attorneys more power to challenge violations of attorney-client privilege, which have occurred in other cases before the military commissions.
“For the people who work on these cases, it would mean that we have more freedom to act in accordance with basic legal ethics than we thought we had,” said Pradhan, who represents 9/11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi. “We’ve been operating under conflicts or potential conflicts for a very long time.”
The Miami Herald reported earlier this month that Spath’s successor overseeing Nashiri’s case, Air Force Col. Shelley Schools, recently accepted a new job as an immigration judge, a Justice Department position. Schools has not yet heard arguments in the Nashiri case, but her new position does not begin until summer, meaning that she could potentially preside over motions until then.
Paradis argued Tuesday that Schools’s upcoming retirement further underscores the need for a federal court to intervene.
“We’re going back before a judge that, at a minimum, will have a jaundiced view of our arguments here,” he said.
Prosecutors have said they would not oppose a defense request to reassign the case to a new judge. If that happens, whoever is chosen would be the fourth judge to oversee Nashiri’s case.
The post Guantánamo Prisoner Says Judge Used Pro-Government Rulings to Curry Favor With the Justice Department appeared first on The Intercept.
The Trump administration on Wednesday made a quiet move that opens the door for the religious right to use the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act to discriminate against able foster parents whose religious views are in conflict with those of an agency.
On the 33rd day of the government shutdown, Steven Wagner, principal deputy assistant secretary at the Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, signed a waiver giving special permission to a federally funded Protestant foster care agency in South Carolina to break federal and state law, using strict religious requirements to deny Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic parents from fostering children in its network.
After months of lobbying by Reid Lehman, president and CEO of Miracle Hill Ministries, South Carolina lawmakers, and Gov. Henry McMaster, Wagner signed a waiver that lets the agency keep its federal funding, despite warnings by the state Department of Social Services that it’s violating federal and state nondiscrimination law, as well as internal agency policy, by denying parents of the Jewish faith from fostering children. The agency also rejects parents who are agnostic and atheist — anyone who is not a Protestant Christian.
“We have approved South Carolina’s request to protect religious freedom and preserve high-quality foster care placement options for children,” Lynn Johnson, assistant secretary for HHS Administration for Children and Families, said in a statement. “By granting this request to South Carolina,” she continued, “HHS is putting foster care capacity needs ahead of burdensome regulations that are in conflict with the law.”
The signed waiver, stalled for months, could have larger ramifications for other states waging battles over religious freedom in the foster care system, legal experts say. The waiver argues that HHS nondiscrimination regulations are broader than those outlined in the specific Foster Care Program Statute, which specifies that agencies receiving federal funding can’t deny foster parents based on race, color, or national origin — but not religion.
“You state that South Carolina has more than 4,000 children in foster care, that South Carolina needs more child placing agencies, and that faith-based organizations ‘are essential’ to recruiting more families for child placement,” the waiver reads. “You specifically cite Miracle Hill, a faith-based organization that recruits 15% of the foster care families in the SC Foster Care Program, and you state that, without the participation of such faith-based organizations, South Carolina would have difficulty continuing to place all children in need of foster care.” The letter then goes on to make the case that if Miracle Hill isn’t provided an exception to federal rules, other “faith-based organizations operating under your grant would have to abandon their religious beliefs or forego licensure and funding,” in violation of RFRA.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in December issued a similar request to the HHS Administration for Children and Families to either repeal the nondiscrimination rules governing federal child welfare funding or to exempt Texas and providers in the state from it. It’s unclear whether the current waiver will apply to the Texas request.
The Texas request clearly asks for permission to discriminate based on religious belief and sexual orientation. The letter to ACF argues that the federal rules governing funding for child welfare programs “does not authorize HHS to prohibit discrimination on characteristics other than race, color, or national origin, or to mandate particular treatment of same-sex marriages.”
“Congress knows how to include or exclude nondiscrimination policies in its welfare funding statues,” Paxton’s letter reads, “and its decision to focus on only race, color, and national origin in Title IV-E means no other forms of discrimination are prohibited by funding recipients.”
The Trump administration has prioritized religious freedom for those of a Christian faith, and conservative lawmakers have used that momentum to try to chip away at a body of federal nondiscrimination law that they argue unfairly burdens organizations that only want to serve people within their own religion.
Eighty Republican legislators in May signed a letter to President Donald Trump on behalf of faith-based Child Placing Agencies they say are being targeted because of their mission. The letter includes a specific recommendation to repeal the federal rule that protects people from discrimination in HHS-funded programs on the basis of religion, race, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other “non-merit” characteristic. The letter condemns the shortage of foster care parents and the growing population of children in the system, citing the opioid epidemic as a major contributor, and then requests a change to federal rules to allow agencies to deny qualified parents in the name of religious freedom.
“The decision by HHS to allow for taxpayer-funded discrimination is an affront to American values, jeopardizing the safety and protection of vulnerable children in South Carolina, and potentially across the country,” Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement to The Intercept. “It’s appalling that the Trump administration continues to throw the interests of children out the window. There are foster kids sleeping in hotels and living in temporary shelters. To turn away qualified parents because of their religion, sexual orientation or gender identity and deny these kids a secure home is immoral.”
The episode bodes poorly for advocates of civil liberties and religious freedom alike, and opens the door for foster care agencies in other states and players at other HHS-funded agencies, including the offices for Medicare and Medicaid, National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others, to discriminate in the name of religious freedom while keeping their federal funding.
The post Trump Administration Grants South Carolina Foster Care Agencies Authority to Discriminate Against Jewish and Muslim Families appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump has been reasonably condemned for attempting to trash the Constitution. But there’s only one active politician in America working to actually reverse a standing constitutional amendment.
He’s a freshman Democratic House member from Maryland’s 6th Congressional District.
David Trone was elected in 2018 to fill the seat of John Delaney, who seems to think that he’s running for president. Trone won a spirited primary with the assistance of $14.2 million in self-funded contributions and another $3.25 million in personal loans. This available fortune was generated from Trone’s personal alcoholic beverage empire. Total Wine, which Trone co-founded with his brother, is America’s largest privately owned retailer of beer, wine, and liquor, with 193 stores in 23 states. Trone served as president of Total Wine until December 2016 and is still listed as co-owner of the company on its website.
Total Wine is currently embroiled in a Supreme Court case that challenges the 21st Amendment, which ended Prohibition. In Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association v. Blair, Total Wine claims that Tennessee cannot impose a two-year residency requirement for obtaining a retail license to sell alcohol. This has proven a barrier for Total Wine and for Doug and Mary Ketchum, who recently moved to Tennessee after agreeing to take over a mom-and-pop liquor store in Memphis.
But the residency issue is a stalking horse for the question of whether states have the right to regulate alcohol sales within their borders. While the 21st Amendment is seemingly very clear on that, alcohol producers and retailers have persistently fought it. If the Supreme Court sides with Total Wine, state alcohol laws will have little or no force, making it easier for retail giants to dominate the sector and potentially roll back health and safety measures on alcohol in a drive for profit.
So you have David Trone, a proud member of the new Democratic congressional majority, trying to use a conservative judiciary to deregulate an industry so that his wine shops can pop up on every street corner in America.
Section 1 of the 21st Amendment, ratified on December 5, 1933, simply repeals the 18th Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition 14 years earlier. But Section 2 bans “the transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof.” In other words, all alcohol producers or distributors had to follow local laws in order to make legal sales. This was seen at the time as a compromise to allow “dry” counties or states to continue with their local preferences. (In fact, parts of Trone’s district were dry until recently.)
In this case, the Ketchums moved from Utah in July 2016 to open a wine shop in Memphis. The Ketchums’s daughter has cerebral palsy, and the weather in Tennessee was deemed better for her ailment. The Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission was actually ready to approve the application; the state hasn’t really enforced the two-year residency rule for several years, and Tennessee’s own former attorney general once claimed that it’s “probably unconstitutional.”
But the Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association, a local trade association, threatened to sue the state for not adhering to the residency requirement. Tennessee’s law is actually even more restrictive: The initial license expires after one year, and applicants looking to renew must be residents for 10 years.
At the same time, Total Wine wanted to open two new outlets in Nashville and Memphis, which would have faced hurdles if the residency rule was newly enforced because a retailer’s directors and officers must all be residents (thanks to the lax enforcement, Total Wine already has a store in Knoxville). Total Wine, at the time still under Trone’s direction, argued that the 21st Amendment was in conflict with the so-called dormant commerce clause doctrine, which prohibits states from discriminating against out-of-state or foreign commercial enterprises.
In 2005, the court ruled that laws allowing in-state wineries to ship to local residents had to be available to out-of-state wineries as well, to conform to the Constitution’s delegation of interstate commerce to Congress. According to the ruling, even if Congress made no law specifically on wine sales, the very existence of the commerce clause prohibited restrictions.
But Congress did ratify the 21st Amendment, which gave exclusive regulatory rights over alcohol to the states. Therein lies the dispute.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Total Wine and threw out the residency requirement, further opening the loophole to the 21st Amendment first breached in 2005, from alcohol producers and products to retail businesses. The Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association appealed to the Supreme Court.
You could view Tennessee’s residency requirement as protectionism to prevent outside companies from doing business in the state. After all, it’s not like Tennesseans, in the home of Jack Daniels whiskey, are forced to do without liquor; they’re just restricted from purchasing from out-of-state sellers.
But Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute argues that opinions about the regulation are besides the point; in plain fact, states have been empowered with oversight over alcohol. The 21st Amendment “sought to ensure that alcohol would still be subject to close public oversight and gave this power to the states to structure markets for alcohol in accordance with local preferences,” Vaheesan and John Laughlin Carter write in an amicus brief to the court.
Vaheesan and Carter believe that the 2005 ruling “violated the plain language of the Twenty-First Amendment” and worry about the broader degradation of states’ ability to regulate alcohol, particularly based on a judge’s prerogative to deem a regulation protectionist. “States should have the authority to structure commerce in alcohol to promote a range of public ends, including but not limited to the protection of public health, the promotion of the responsible use of alcohol, and the maintenance of decentralized markets with many distributors and producers of alcohol,” they write.
Much more is at stake than whether the Ketchums have to wait two years to open a liquor store (indeed, since the Ketchums moved to Tennessee in July 2016, they could legally procure a state liquor license today, at least for the first year). If the ruling is broad enough, it could nullify retail bans on direct-to-consumer wine shipping. That would allow Amazon or Walmart to sell wine over the internet.
More immediately, Total Wine would have fewer restrictions to expand its business from 23 to all 50 states. The national chain has already overrun states without residency laws and would almost certainly use its market power to dominate Tennessee and everywhere else. Ironically, the Ketchums, who teamed up with Total Wine in the lawsuit, may be at risk from Total Wine’s power if they prove victorious.
And if that succeeds, Total Wine and other giants can gain political power in the states, threatening other laws regulating the usage of alcohol. Whether by extrapolation from judicial precedent or brute force lobbying power, those laws could fall. Alcohol markets in the United Kingdom have been effectively deregulated, leading to high rates of intoxication among young people and a veritable public health crisis. Breaking the state regulatory apparatus could worsen alcoholism in America.
At the Supreme Court last week, in oral arguments held on the 100th anniversary of the original Prohibition amendment, several justices appeared skeptical of the residency requirement, with Justice Elena Kagan intimating that it is “clearly protectionist.” But Kagan and Justice Neil Gorsuch did seem to understand the slippery slope at play; Gorsuch wondered whether the next step would be to ask for license to “operate as the Amazon of liquor.”
Gorsuch added that “alcohol has been treated differently than other commodities in our nation’s experience,” and the 21st Amendment provided a barrier to an easy adjudication of the case. Attorneys for the Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association made similar claims about the amendment’s granting of near-total regulatory power over alcohol to the states.
With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg absent and uncharacteristic silence from Chief Justice John Roberts, SCOTUSBlog called it “a hard case to handicap.” But the outcome matters enormously for Trone and the ability to extend his wine empire.
Total Wine has often used tactics designed to corner markets. The company has paid fines in Connecticut for selling wine and liquor below cost, a form of predatory pricing to gain market share and drive competitors out of business. Massachusetts accused Total Wine of the same tactic in 2016, but the company sued the state and won on appeal. In 2016, Maryland cited Total Wine for giving campaign contributions above state limits.
Through it all, Total Wine has continuously expanded across the eastern seaboard and the Southwest, and it ships wine wherever state laws allow. Where expansion has been curtailed, Total Wine has employed lobbyists and lawyers, suing Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts over its alcohol laws.
The midterm victory was Trone’s second attempt at a House seat; he unsuccessfully ran in 2016 for the seat vacated by Chris Van Hollen and now occupied by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. In 2018, he switched seats and ran in Maryland’s 6th, where residents mysteriously started receiving Total Wine circulars even though there are no outlets in the area.
Hannah Muldavin, communications director for Trone, told The Intercept to contact Total Wine directly for comment. A spokesperson for Total Wine replied that the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Correction: January 23, 2019, 4:59 p.m.
A previous version of this story referred to 19th century oligarch Jay Gould as having served in the Senate. He did not.
The post The Monopolist in the House: Rep. David Trone’s Wine Company Seeks to Overturn a Constitutional Amendment appeared first on The Intercept.
When Kara Eastman pulled off a primary upset this past spring in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, a swing seat in the Omaha metro region, she did so with no help from the national Democratic party. Eastman, a social worker and first-time candidate running on an unapologetic left-wing platform, was competing against former Rep. Brad Ashford, who served for years in the Nebraska legislature and one term in Congress between 2014 and 2016.
Despite Ashford’s long track record of supporting abortion restrictions, pro-choice groups like EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL Pro-Choice America opted to stay out of the race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, elevated Ashford to their “Red to Blue” list, a signal of official party support for competitive races, and political action committees controlled by House leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., kicked in over $28,000 to Ashford’s bid.
Eastman, who embraced not only reproductive freedom but also policies like “Medicare for All,” tuition-free college, a $15 minimum wage, and increased gun control, struggled early on to compete. While her proposals and personal story were popular, finding donors was hard.
Yet by the time her primary rolled around, Eastman emerged the winner, raising close to $400,000 and benefitting from a flurry of late-stage media coverage. Using a new digital fundraising company to target customized groups of donors across the country — such as all Democrats who identify as social workers or those who back “Medicare for All” — Eastman’s team was able to change the trajectory of the race.
Her campaign credits Grassroots Analytics, an obscure tech startup that’s quietly shaking up the Democratic campaign finance world. Not a single article has ever been written about or even mentioned it, despite the company having aided some of the biggest upsets of the 2018 cycle, including Joe Cunningham in South Carolina, Lucy McBath in Georgia, and Kendra Horn in Oklahoma.
“Grassroots Analytics absolutely was what allowed us to be competitive in the primary and get on TV, otherwise there is no way we would have won,” said Dave Pantos, the finance director for Eastman’s campaign. “We were definitely not the mainstream candidate, and we didn’t have access to donor lists that more establishment candidates have.” Eastman ended up losing the general election, earning 49 percent of the vote, but has already announced that she’s jumping back in the fray for 2020.
Grassroots Analytics says it wants to level the playing field and to make it easier for candidates to run who don’t already have a built-in network of wealthy family, friends, and co-workers. Using an algorithm to clean and sort publicly available data spread across the internet, the company provides campaigns with customized lists of donors who they believe are most likely to support them. If you’re involved in the world of political fundraising, a thought has probably occurred to you just now: Wait, isn’t that illegal? Hold that thought.
Establishment groups like the Democratic National Committee, the DCCC, and EMILY’s List have largely given the firm the cold shoulder, despite its goals and the fact that it worked with 137 campaigns in the last cycle. Not even mainstream progressive organizations like Our Revolution or Justice Democrats would return Grassroots Analytics’s entreaties to work together.
Photo: Justin T. Gellerson for The Intercept
Danny Hogenkamp, the 24-year-old founder and director of Grassroots Analytics, wasn’t expecting to end up in this kind of business. He had no background in politics; he studied Arabic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and assumed he’d end up doing foreign policy or refugee resettlement work after college.
But after graduating in 2016, with no job yet to speak of, he decided to go crash with some relatives in Syracuse, New York, where he was born, and try his hand in a congressional campaign. He enlisted with first-time candidate Colleen Deacon, a 39-year-old single mother who had worked as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s regional aide in upstate New York. Deacon, who previously lived on Medicaid and food stamps, campaigned on putting herself through college with minimum wage jobs and student loans.
Hogenkamp was placed on the finance team, where he was charged with raising money and managing a team of 20 unpaid interns. It was there that he first encountered the opaque world of political fundraising — a world that even many organizers, pundits, and journalists can hardly grasp.
“I had no idea what campaigns were like, and it turns out that literally what candidates actually do to raise money, unless you’re really well-connected and famous, is sit in a room and call rich, old people to beg for $1,500, $2,000, or preferably [the federal maximum] of $2,700,” he said.
To run a competitive House race, Deacon’s campaign knew it needed to raise between $1.5 million and $2 million. Syracuse is one of the poorer metropolitan areas in New York, and after the campaign exhausted all the local prospective donors it could think of, the next step was the big open secret in political campaigning: finding similar candidates in other states and races and then researching who donated to their campaigns. So, for example, Deacon staffers would search for similar candidates — like Monica Vernon, who was running for Congress at the same time in Iowa — and then try and track down the contact information for the donors listed on their Federal Election Commission reports.
“Our interns would literally just Google people and try to find their phone numbers,” Hogenkamp said. “But donors change their numbers all the time, and they’re hard to find.”
The whole thing was invariably slow and disorganized. “It was the stupidest process,” he said. “It’s not digitized; there’s no math; it’s just random and stupid.”
Hogenkamp, still pretty much an idealistic novice, was convinced that there had to be a better way, some obvious step he was missing. So, from his perch as a relatively high-level finance staffer on Deacon’s team, he reached out to everyone he could think of — like the DCCC, EMILY’s List, liberal consulting firms, and other politicians — to find out how to make this fundraising process easier. “No one had any good answers; they said, ‘Well, this is just how you do it,’” he said. Hogenkamp recalled Gillibrand’s team telling him about its personal wealthy contacts in New York and how fundraising for the campaign meant going to those people and asking each of them to go out and find 10 more donors within their own networks.
Eventually, Hogenkamp connected with David Chase, a Democratic political operative who was then managing the campaign for Rubén Kihuen in Nevada’s 4th Congressional District. Chase offered a bit of help: He had developed a very rudimentary tool to aid his team’s fundraising efforts.
“Using OpenSecrets, I built some product that allowed you to search through all the federal and state contributions,” Chase told The Intercept. “It was very simple — I don’t have any advanced technological skills — but I wrote a script that allowed you to upload a list and it spit back the stats on the amount of times someone had given to state races and their average contributions.” In other words, for someone looking to discover who had given $500 or so to multiple candidates, Chase’s tool provided a way to more quickly glean that information.
Chase explained his tool, and Hogenkamp realized that there was a lot more he could do with an idea like that. During college, he had interned at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he learned to model how likely students were to default on their student loans. “I just randomly had a background in R and Python and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions from my time at the CFPB, so it was really just serendipitous that I actually knew what to do,” he said. Following that conversation, Hogenkamp went back and recruited a bunch of Syracuse University computer science students to help him build out his vision.
The result was effectively what he calls a “cleaner” of publicly available data, scraped from across the internet, that analyzes and sorts information for more than 14.5 million Democratic donors over the last 15 years. The tool would generate lists of individuals most likely to support a candidate given shared characteristics and shared views — ranging from race and ethnicity to a passion for yoga or universal health care.
“We know where you live; where you used to live; what issues you care about; if you’re trending Republican or Democrat; what other kinds of candidates you like to support; and contact information” he explained.
The lists aren’t perfect or fully comprehensive. They exclude some websites for legal reasons, and when I asked to see my own donor profile, recalling a $25 donation I gave in college to an Ohio Democrat, Grassroots Analytics had no record of it, because I’ve never given above the $200 reporting minimum to a federal candidate, and only some states and localities disclose small-dollar donations. Had I donated $5 to Stacey Abrams’s gubernatorial campaign, by contrast, I would have shown up in their system.
Nevertheless, the tool offers candidates — especially insurgent and working-class ones who lack rolodexes of wealthy friends — a real window into what is arguably the most important part of any political campaign: early-stage fundraising. The unspoken rule of viability in federal campaigning is that if you haven’t amassed at least $250,000 by your first quarter financial report, you’re probably not a candidate who people will take too seriously. EMILY’s List, an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” was founded precisely to help female pro-choice Democrats compete against men who have long received the bulk of political contributions from the heavily white and male political donor class. Yeast makes the dough rise.
Connor Farrell, the finance director for Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing former candidate who ran for Michigan governor this past cycle, credits Grassroots Analytics with fast-tracking his campaign’s fundraising, allowing the team to target progressives and doctors across the country. (El-Sayed campaigned on his credentials as a physician and public health expert.) “The applications of this new tool were valuable for our call-time operation, building for events, and some digital solicitations,” Farrell told The Intercept. “Grassroots saved us enormous research time, while allowing us to pivot quickly to new avenues of research. For a bootstrapped campaign, saving time and being flexible in your finance department is critical.”
Photo: Justin T. Gellerson for The Intercept
Is Grassroots Analytics legal? And moreover, in the age when big tech companies are under fire for sharing personal information — not to mention Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm, hired by the Trump campaign in 2016, which gained access to more than 50 million Facebook users’ private data — is it ethical?
Depends on who you ask. Federal law prohibits “any information copied from” Federal Election Commission reports from being “sold or used by any person for the purposes of soliciting contributions or for commercial purposes.” Subsequent regulation prohibits “information copied, or otherwise obtained, from any [FEC] report or statement, or any copy, reproduction, or publication thereof” from being sold or used for soliciting contributions. But because these laws date back to before the advent of the internet, and campaigns across the country already scour through FEC lists for leads, Grassroots Analytics says it’s effectively just simplifying the process that hordes of interns and finance staffers already do every day when they set out to research donor prospects.
To comply with the legal prohibition, Grassroots Analytics bars its algorithm from scraping the FEC website and websites like OpenSecrets that aggregate data directly from the FEC. Instead, Grassroots Analytics collects campaign contribution data only from public record caches, newspaper articles, nonprofit reports, and secondary websites. However, there’s little question that most of the campaign finance information they do collect originated at some point from FEC reports.
The company, in other words, exploits an ambiguity in the law, which is whether they have in fact “obtained” information from FEC reports. How many layers removed does information have to be in the age of the internet to pass legal muster? In an advisory opinion produced at the request of Grassroots Analytics that was reviewed by The Intercept, an attorney with one of California’s top boutique firms specializing in political and election law determined that existing law, court cases, and the FEC’s enforcement history “provide no clear answer to this question.” But because Grassroots Analytics takes steps to omit FEC data and sites that aggregate directly from the FEC, the attorney hired to assess their legal status determined that the company has a “legally defensible” position that its products and services do not violate federal law and that in their expert opinion, the FEC, especially with a Republican majority, is unlikely to conclude that the firm or its clients are breaking the law.
“I obviously didn’t go into tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt to get this thing going without getting extensive legal advice from multiple law firms,” said Hogenkamp. “I’m a little rash sometimes, but I’m not that stupid.”
But should donor information, even if it’s technically public, be made so easily accessible?
“They’re donor pimps, that’s all they are,” said one fundraiser. “If you don’t know people, if your staff doesn’t know people, then you actually shouldn’t run for office. You’re not actually a good candidate.”
Others shrug off the critics, saying that while the FEC and secretaries of state should work to clarify campaign finance rules in the age of the internet, including for political advertisements, right now it’s no secret that most campaigns utilize FEC data in some fashion for solicitation purposes. “Most people think it’s fine to use those lists to research people a little further, to get a better picture of their donor history, and then turn them into leads,” one senior finance director told me.
“I think part of the debate is that the folks who’ve traditionally run the finance side of our party tend to be a little older, more focused on relationships and identifying event hosts and bundlers,” said Chase, who now works for a Democratic consulting firm. “But I think from the last cycle or two, you’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in the way our party raises money. Digital fundraising exploded, and with that came folks like Danny who said, ‘Well, maybe we can do some of this stuff better than the traditional way of just calling rich folks and trying to get nice checks.’”
The debate also stems partly from confusion over what Grassroots Analytics is or actually does. Some suspect they’re just farming out lists of rich people to clients and engaging in another disapproved practice that’s rampant in the campaign industry — taking donor data from one campaign to another. Trading rich donor contact information is also not unusual among senior finance staffers.
Hogenkamp understands the mistrust. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m so skeptical of everyone in this industry. I totally understand how very smart people would think we’re just some kids with a list of like a hundred thousand donors and that we just make money off that same list,” he said. “But it’s like, no, we have more than 14 million people.”
There is another data analytics company that bills itself as helping candidates (and nonprofits and universities) become more strategic in their fundraising efforts. RevUp, which promises to “revolutionize your fundraising,” was started in 2013 by a top Obama fundraiser and Silicon Valley investor named Steve Spinner. It’s a software company that works with both Republicans and Democrats, helping campaigns to analyze their existing social networks, like their email contacts or LinkedIn connections, to more efficiently find new prospects to hit up. (Grassroots Analytics also analyzes clients’ LinkedIn data for donor prospects.) In October, RevUp, which has won several campaign industry awards for fundraising and innovation, announced a new $7.5 million round of investment.
A key difference between RevUp and Grassroots Analytics is that the former doesn’t expand the universe of donor prospects beyond your own network — it just helps you navigate and analyze the contacts in your existing universe more efficiently. From one vantage point, that’s more respectful, and skirts the thorny questions of legality and ethics. From another, it doesn’t do much to change the problem of connected people hoarding access to connected people.
“At RevUp, we believe successful fundraising is all about respecting prospective donors,” Spinner told The Intercept. “Through our data analytics software, RevUp uniquely allows a candidate, staff, or volunteer to reach out to the right person, at the right time, with the right ask. Our mission is to expand the donor universe and grow the pie beyond the ‘low-hanging fruit’ — the 25,000 major donors that get constantly called.”
Photo: Justin T. Gellerson for The Intercept
When Hogenkamp first developed Grassroots Analytics, he hoped someone in the Democratic establishment would recognize the potential of this technology, buy him out, and give him the institutional support to make it grow. But despite his persistent appeals, almost no one would return his emails.
Yet while no groups would publicly associate with Grassroots Analytics, staffers for some major Democratic political organizations were discreetly referring their candidates to the company throughout the 2018 cycle. Two emails reviewed by The Intercept showed an EMILY’s List campaign operative connecting Grassroots Analytics to Sol Flores’s primary campaign in Illinois and to Veronica Escobar’s race in Texas. “Thanks again for all your work with all o[f] EMILYs List candidates,” they wrote.
Other emails showed Democratic consultants setting up deals with Grassroots Analytics, explaining that the DCCC would be the organization actually writing the check on behalf of their clients. (This was the case with Linda Coleman’s unsuccessful bid for Congress.)
The DCCC and EMILY’s List did not return multiple requests for comment. When the DNC rolled out its “I Will Run” program in April 2018, which was essentially a list of vetted technology companies they recommended campaigns to hire, DNC Tech Manager Sally Marx announced the committee had “surveyed the progressive tech ecosystem looking for tools that campaigns and state parties can use to upgrade their work.” Their list, the DNC said, was a “curated compilation of the best-in-class tools currently used by campaigns.”
RevUp was on there for recommended fundraising companies, but Grassroots Analytics was not. The DNC declined to make Marx available for comment, but in a statement provided by a spokesperson, the party committee claimed Grassroots Analytics “was not on our radar until recently. As we head into this cycle, we look forward to re-evaluating and potentially adding new vendors to our I Will Run marketplace.”
Spokespersons for Our Revolution and Justice Democrats also confirmed that they do not have relationships with Grassroots Analytics and have not referred their candidates to the company.
One person who did show an early interest and helped Hogenkamp break into the field was Molly Allen, a political consultant who runs the political action committee for Blue Dog Democrats. She met with him in 2017 and referred Grassroots to their first three clients.
“I’ve only met Danny a few times and haven’t formally worked with them more than a short-term one-off, so I can’t speak to their work in details, but Danny seems great and I respect his start-up idea and success!” wrote Allen in an email.
I asked Hogenkamp how he felt about his company breaking out by representing Blue Dogs, when they had envisioned being a fix to the barriers blocking progressives from running for office.
“It was weird, but I was desperate,” he said.
Over the course of the last two years, though, Grassroots Analytics has decided to work with anyone running in the Democratic caucus, a decision Hogenkamp says was made to avoid pitting themselves as arbiters of the left. (This could also just be a handy rationale to bolster their client lists and profit margins.) But Grassroots Analytics, Hogenkamp adds, does have some red lines for clients, saying they turned down someone last year who they felt had too strong of ties to charter school backers.
Photo: Justin T. Gellerson for The Intercept
But if this all could be started by a young person with barely any political experience, why hadn’t it been done before?
Multiple people interviewed for this article chalked the problem up to monopoly in the political industry and the disincentives to innovate that come with monopolies.
Sean Adler, a New York-based software engineer, said he ran into this problem when he tried to insert some innovation into campaigning four years ago. A friend of Adler’s had mounted a bid for Congress in New Jersey, and Adler, then 23 years old, started developing phone banking tools for the campaign’s volunteers. He ended up co-founding a company to sell the technology and called it Partic.
“I wrote the whole thing from scratch. We took the whole data file of voters, and it would distribute lists and show a script and do all sorts of custom assignments,” he explained. “But one thing that ended up being a bummer was the DCCC had their own thing they forced campaigns to use, so we ended up only getting the real scrappy campaigns, the real mega-underdogs.” Adler was referring to VAN, an omnipresent software company that provides what they describe as “an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital, and social networking products.”
Adler built a host of new design features and capabilities to make phone banking more useable and successful than he found VAN’s technology offered. Partic worked with eight campaigns in the 2016 cycle, but has since ceased operations, citing the enormous barriers new companies face to compete effectively.
“No one can enter this market without a lot of connections, and that’s fair, but the customer base of this market also completely goes away every two years, so the only people who can sustain that are people who are already in it,” Adler told The Intercept. “I think I was too much of an idealistic liberal,” he continued. “I thought, ‘Oh sure, the Democratic Party might not be as technologically advanced as Google, but they certainly wouldn’t try to shut out people with better ideas and products in order to protect their friends.’ For the state of the world to change, people like Danny have to succeed. The establishment monopoly not only screws over local candidates no one has ever heard of, but it also screws over candidates at the very top.”
Ultimately, Hogenkamp says he wouldn’t mind being put out of business, citing the new bill introduced in the House this month for publicly financed elections.
“I sort of stumbled into this. I think the whole campaign fundraising system is stupid, and you know, if our country gets serious about publicly funded elections, I would so gladly shut down the business and go work in the State Department like I had planned,” he said. “I don’t care enough about this; the whole campaign finance system needs to be completely overhauled, but until that happens, the only way you’re ever going to do it is helping Democrats raise money to win competitive elections.”
The post A Democratic Firm Is Shaking Up the World of Political Fundraising appeared first on The Intercept.
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BuzzFeed or Buzzkill? This week on Intercepted: Longtime investigative journalist Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News analyzes the BuzzFeed News bombshell report that Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie to cover up a planned Trump Tower in Moscow. Robert Mueller is disputing the report and Isikoff offers his own critique of the story and what we know to be true thus far. Stephanie Kelton, the popular economist and adviser to the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign, talks about Modern Monetary Theory, the lies told by Republicans and Democrats about deficits, and whether young workers will ever get Social Security benefits. Los Angeles public school teachers appear to have won some major victories as a result of their historic strike. We speak to Noriko Nakada, an 8th grade English teacher at Emerson Middle School in LA, and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe, who covered the strike for The Nation.
Transcript coming soon.
Correction: January 23, 2019, 1:50 p.m.
In a previous version of this episode, Jeremy Scahill misidentified Rep. Joaquín Castro as a possible 2020 presidential candidate. In fact, his brother, Julián Castro, is a possible 2020 presidential contender. The reference has been removed.
The post Donald Trump and the Media Temple of BOOM! appeared first on The Intercept.
NARVA, Estonia—If you haven’t heard of Narva, you might very soon. This small, mostly Russian-speaking city lies along Estonia’s boundary with Russia, separated geographically from its larger neighbor only by a partially frozen river. A 13th-century castle towers over passersby, while an intimidating medieval stronghold stares back across the river from the Russian side. A short walk away stands a monument to the late chess grand master Paul Keres, who was born here and lived through decades of Soviet occupation, but always attributed his success to the Estonian school of chess.
This city is also the epicenter of what could be an epic challenge for Western military alliances—what NATO calls the “Narva scenario”—one that would test the foundation underpinning the security partnership.
When Estonia regained its independence after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Narva became a border town. Street signs here are in Estonian script, official business is carried out in Estonian, and the country requires that anyone who becomes a citizen must speak the language. But Narva’s population remains overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and ethnically Russian, leaving a sizeable number ineligible for Estonian citizenship. Instead, many are either Russian citizens or stateless residents of Estonia, who possess gray “alien passports.”
[Read: Trump’s biggest gift to Putin]
All of that, Western security officials fear, makes it a prime target for Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. Under the “Narva scenario,” NATO worries that Putin could try to claw Narva into Russia. Such a move would mimic Russia’s incursion into Crimea, a Ukrainian territory it annexed in 2014, and its efforts to sow unrest in eastern Ukraine. But a similar push into Estonia would have even farther-reaching consequences: Estonia is a member of NATO.
Such a situation would then be a test of NATO’s commitment to Article V of the Washington Treaty, the one-for-all, all-for-one provision that requires the 29 NATO members, including the United States, to come to the defense of other member states.
Article V has only been invoked once, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States. If it were used again, this time at the request of Estonia in response to Russian aggression, would the entire alliance—crucially, the United States under President Donald Trump—come to Estonia’s aid? The New York Times reported this month that Trump has considered withdrawing from NATO, and the president has questioned the alliance’s efficacy publicly on several occasions. Remarks and reports like these are once again raising questions about his commitment to countries like Estonia, and sparking fears that he is emboldening Putin.
In 2014, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and swallowed Crimea, Putin painted himself as the protector of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority. “Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,” Putin said, referring to the fall of the Soviet Union. “Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics.” Kremlin-controlled media claimed that the new government in Kiev posed an imminent threat to the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine. After the invasion, Crimea held a (widely discredited) referendum in which 95 percent of the population purportedly voted to become part of Russia. Across eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists continue to wreak havoc and undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.
[Read: Ukraine is ground zero for the crisis between Russia and the West]
Estonian defense officials I met this month in Tallinn, the capital, bristled at the notion that Narva could be the next Crimea. Estonia is not just a member of the European Union and NATO, they say; it is also far less corrupt than Ukraine, and while the average income in Narva is the lowest in Estonia, it is still almost double the level across the river, in Ivangorod, Russia.
But even as Estonian government officials dismiss concerns about Narva’s future, they are racing to further incorporate Narva into the rest of Estonia. A nationwide survey last year found that while almost 90 percent of Estonian-speaking respondents favored NATO membership, just 32 percent of Russian speakers backed Estonia being part of the alliance. The last thing the Estonian government wants is for Putin to claim to be the defender of Russian speakers in Narva, as he did in Crimea. For one month last year, Estonia’s president, Kersti Kaljulaid, took the unprecedented step of moving her office from Tallinn to Narva. To counter the influence of Russian-language media, Estonia is also pouring in development funds and using arts and culture to try to improve life here.
Estonian officials project confidence that if Russia decided to invade, NATO allies—and particularly the United States—would come to their defense. They cite the mutual-defense provision of the Washington Treaty, and add that Estonia has not only deployed troops to Afghanistan, but also been one of the few nations to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense, a Trump hobbyhorse. Lauri Kuusing, the foreign-policy adviser to the Estonian president, notes that Kaljulaid visited Washington last year for an Oval Office meeting with Trump, and Estonia has regular contacts with the Pentagon, the State Department, the vice president’s office, and Congress.
But Kalev Stoicescu, who was Estonia’s ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2000, was not so sanguine. Trump “worries everybody” in Estonia, he told me. Trump called NATO “obsolete” during his campaign and reportedly “threw a tantrum” during a NATO heads-of-state meeting in July. At a G7 summit last year, Trump apparently told fellow world leaders that Crimea should be part of Russia because most people there speak Russian.
[Read: Trump flirts with leaving NATO, and ‘zero’ Republicans in Congress are impressed]
Congress has sought to limit Trump’s damage to the alliance, including by overwhelmingly passing a bipartisan resolution affirming U.S. commitment to NATO last year. Legislators could also seek to prohibit the president from unilaterally withdrawing, as a bipartisan group of senators proposed last week. The House of Representatives passed such a measure by a 357–22 vote this week, and while the Senate has not yet taken it up, the new head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has said that there is no appetite in the upper chamber for pulling the United States out.
But ultimately, whether Trump moves to formally withdraw from the alliance or not, his skepticism toward NATO could have an immediate effect on borders and lives in parts of Europe like Narva. The president’s words and tweets can still inflict grave damage on the alliance. Uncertainty about Trump’s commitments to NATO makes a military miscalculation more likely, not less.
If Putin assesses that under Trump, the United States will not follow through on its treaty commitments to allies in Europe, NATO—and with it, America’s word—could turn into a house of cards, and Narva might be the first to fall.
‘Nobody is going to believe you’: The director Bryan Singer has been dogged by sexual-misconduct accusations for decades. The Atlantic spent 12 months investigating various lawsuits and allegations against Singer, whose Bohemian Rhapsody just this week received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Here, Singer’s alleged victims now tell their stories.
When a Harvard professor talks about proof of alien life, reporters come knocking. The astrophysicist Avi Loeb made the case in a recent paper that a mysterious space rock known as ‘Oumuamua, stunning in that it resembles nothing else in in the solar system, could in fact be an alien probe. That the theory took off might have a lot do with Loeb’s willingness in interviews to speak of his theory as a certainty—as well as the cachet of the institution he works for.
The media narrative on the fracas between MAGA-clad high-schoolers and an American Indian elder has shifted as more details have emerged, and the zigzagging isn’t always in pursuit of the truth: “The overcorrection is not about getting it right; it is about convincing people who will never trust the media to trust the media,” argues Adam Serwer.
Evening Reads
(Reuters)
What is covering that car? Hagfish are writhing, tubular animals that look conspicuously similar to eels, with one big difference: They emit a staggering amount of slime. A hagfish can release a teaspoon of gunk from its glands, and in half of second, that amount can balloon to 10,000 times that size.
→ Read the rest.
(Tim Clayton / Corbis)
Since the 1970s, dozens of city and state governments have aimed for “potty parity”—the goal of giving men and women equal access to public bathrooms. Yet, while toilet access has improved somewhat, women still have to endure longer lines than man. Sexism, of course, is a major factor at play, but the disparity also has to do with plumbing codes that often don’t account for the needs of women
→ Read the rest.
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 Wednesday, January 23. On the 33rd day of the partial government shutdown, we’re looking ahead to tomorrow, when the Senate is expected to vote on two competing bills to end the stalemate—but neither is expected to pass.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, President Donald Trump said that he’ll deliver the State of the Union at the Capitol on January 29, despite Pelosi’s request to postpone it until after the shutdown is over. In response, Pelosi published a letter declining to allow the State of the Union in the House Chamber until the government reopens.
But today’s turmoil isn’t confined to U.S. soil: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced the nation would cut off diplomatic relations with the U.S. after Trump recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s interim president.
Another One Jumps Into the Race: Pete Buttigieg (Boot-uh-judge, roughly meaning “lord of poultry”), the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is running for president. He told Edward-Isaac Dovere that his youth is a selling point: “When I took office, I drilled into people ... that the one phrase that is just not welcome here is, We’ve always done it this way.”
The Shutdown Strikes Again: FBI agents say that the loss of funding due to the partial government shutdown is impeding investigations and has created a serious national-security threat.
Zooming Out: While the shutdown rolls on, long-term national-security questions still plague the Foreign Service. Kathy Gilsinan reports on the United States’ uneven approach to prosecuting terrorist suspects.
‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You’: Bryan Singer, the Bohemian Rhapsody director, has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for 20 years. In the March 2019 issue of The Atlantic magazine, his alleged victims tell Alex French and Maximillian Potter their stories.
Constant State: Trump has repeatedly threatened to declare a state of emergency to secure funding for a border wall. He’s not the only president to use emergency powers to bypass Congress: There are roughly 30 ongoing states of emergency in the U.S., some of them decades old.
— Elaine Godfrey, Olivia Paschal, and Madeleine Carlisle
Snapshot
Demonstrators protest against the partial government shutdown in the hallway outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office. Leah Millis / Reuters
Ideas From The AtlanticThe Trump-Era Overcorrection (Adam Serwer)
“It is an understandable impulse to want to repair a relationship with an estranged audience—news is about informing the public, and you can’t inform the public if a large segment of it doesn’t trust you. But the only goal that really matters is getting it right. The overcorrection is not about getting it right; it is about convincing people who will never trust the media to trust the media. And it is certain to fail.” → Read on.
The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story (Caitlin Flanagan)
“I am prompted to issue my own Ethics Reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will causally harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.” → Read on.
I’m Doing a Reverse Marie Kondo on My Life (Jenny Shank)
“My family and I are not poor. We’re lucky to have a used piano, a houseful of books, and some resources. Those harder hit by this shutdown are likely, at this moment, trying to cling not only to the things that keep them alive, but also to those that keep them human.” → Read on.
Supersizing the Second Amendment (Garrett Epps)
“Legal history can be read many ways; adding in ‘tradition’—that is, a freewheeling assessment of the history of firearms not limited to legal sources and spanning the years from 1787 until now—creates a jurisprudential bullet that probably can pierce precedent, or public policy, or both.” → Read on.
◆ Iowa Prepares for the Mother of All Caucuses (Natasha Korecki, Politico)
◆ A ‘Go Big’ Idea to End the Shutdown (Jonathan Swan, Axios)
◆ ‘I Figured It Was Going to Be a Horrible Death, and It Probably Will Be’ (Cat Schuknecht, NPR)
◆ How an Atlanta Neighborhood Died on the Altar of Super Bowl Dreams (Max Blau and Dustin Chambers, The Bitter Southerner)
◆ Plants Are Losing Their Capacity to Absorb Human C02 Emissions (Daniel Oberhaus, Motherboard)
◆ This Is Nancy Pelosi’s Finest Hour (Alex Shephard, The New Republic)
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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On Friday, January 18, a group of white teenage boys wearing MAGA hats mobbed an elderly Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, chanting “Make America great again,” menacing him, and taunting him in racially motivated ways. It is the kind of thing that happens every day—possibly every hour—in Donald Trump’s America. But this time there was proof: a video. Was it problematic that it offered no evidence that these things had happened? No. What mattered was that it had happened, and that there was video to prove it. The fact of there being a video became stronger than the video itself.
The video shows a man playing a tribal drum standing directly in front of a boy with clear skin and lips reddened from the cold; the boy is wearing a MAGA hat, and he is smiling at the man in a way that is implacable and inscrutable. The boys around him are cutting up—dancing to the drumbeat, making faces at one another and at various iPhones, and eventually beginning to tire of whatever it is that’s going on. Soon enough, the whole of the video’s meaning seems to come down to the smiling boy and the drumming man. They are locked into something, but what is it?
Twenty seconds pass, then 30—and still the boy is smiling in that peculiar way. What has brought them to this strange, charged moment? From the short clip alone, it is impossible to tell. Because the point of the viral video was that it was proof of racist bullying yet showed no evidence of it, the boy quickly became the subject of rage and disgust. “I’d be ashamed and appalled if he was my son,” the actress Debra Messing tweeted.
A second video also made the rounds. Shot shortly after the event, it consisted of an interview with the drummer, Nathan Phillips. There was something powerful about it, something that seemed almost familiar. It seemed to tell us an old story, one that’s been tugging at us for years. It was a battered Rodney King stepping up to the microphones in the middle of the Los Angeles riots, asking, “Can we all get along? Can we get along?” It was the beautiful hippie boy putting flowers in the rifle barrels of military policemen at the March on the Pentagon.
[Read: Stop trusting viral videos]
In the golden hour at the Lincoln Memorial, the lights illuminating the vault, Phillips stands framed against the light of the setting sun, wiping tears from his eyes as he describes what has happened—with the boys, with the country, with land itself. His voice soft, unsteady, he begins:
As I was singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall, build that wall.’ This is indigenous land; we’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did … We never had a wall. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders. We took care of our children … We taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see … the [young men] could put that energy into making this country really great … helping those that are hungry.
It was moving, and it was an explanation of the terrible thing that had just happened—“I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall.’ ” It was an ode to a nation’s lost soul. It was also the first in a series of interviews in which Phillips would prove himself adept—far more so than the news media—at incorporating any new information about what had actually happened into his version of events. His version was all-encompassing, and he was treated with such patronizing gentleness by the news media that he was never directly confronted with his conflicting accounts.
When the country learned that Phillips was—in addition to being, as we were endlessly reminded, a “Native elder”—a veteran of the Vietnam War, the sense of anger about what had happened to him assumed new dimensions. That he had defended our country only to be treated so poorly by these MAGA-hatted monsters blasted the level of the boys’ malevolence into outer space.
The journalist Kara Swisher found a way to link the horror to an earlier news event, tweeting:
And to all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.
You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.
Celebrities tweeted furiously, desperate to insert themselves into the situation in a flattering light. They adopted several approaches: old-guy concern about the state of our communities (“Where are their parents, where are their teachers, where are their pastors?”: Joe Scarborough); dramatic professions of personal anguish meant to recenter the locus of harm from Phillips to the tweeter (“This is Trump’s America. And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body”: Alyssa Milano); and the inevitable excesses of the temperamentally overexcited: (“#CovingtonCatholic high school seems like a hate factory to me”: Howard Dean).
[Adam Serwer: The Trump-era overcorrection]
By Saturday, the story had become so hot, and the appetite for it so deep, that some news outlets felt compelled to do some actual reporting. This was when the weekend began to take a long, bad turn for respected news outlets and righteous celebrities. Journalists began to discover that the viral video was not, in fact, the Zapruder film of 2019, and that there were other videos—lots and lots of them—that showed the event from multiple perspectives and that explained more clearly what had happened. At first the journalists and their editors tried to patch the revelations onto the existing story, in hopes that the whole thing would somehow hold together. CNN, apparently by now aware that the event had taken place within a complicating larger picture, tried to use the new information to support its own biased interpretation, sorrowfully reporting that early in the afternoon the boys had clashed with “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.”
But the wild, uncontrollable internet kept pumping videos into the ether that allowed people to see for themselves what had happened.
The New York Times, sober guardian of the exact and the nonsensational, had cannonballed into the delicious story on Friday, titling its first piece “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”
But the next day it ran a second story, with the headline “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.”
How had the boys been demilitarized from wearers of “Make America Great Again” hats to “Catholic students” in less than 24 hours?
O, for a muse of fire.
It turned out that the “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression” had made a video, almost two hours in length, and while it does not fully exonerate the boys, it releases them from most of the serious charges.
The full video reveals that there was indeed a Native American gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, that it took place shortly before the events of the viral video, and that during it the indigenous people had been the subject of a hideous tirade of racist insults and fantasies. But the white students weren’t the people hurling this garbage at them—the young “African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” were doing it. For they were Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny sect of people who believe they are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and whose beliefs on a variety of social issues make Mike Pence look like Ram Dass.
The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.
[Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test]
It seems that the Black Hebrew Israelites had come to the Lincoln Memorial with the express intention of verbally confronting the Native Americans, some of whom had already begun to gather as the video begins, many of them in Native dress. The Black Hebrew Israelites’ leader begins shouting at them: “Before you started worshipping totem poles, you was worshipping the true and living God. Before you became an idol worshipper, you was worshipping the true and living God. This is the reason why this land was taken away from you! Because you worship everything except the most high. You worship every creation except the creator—and that’s what we are here to tell you to do.”
A young man in Native dress approaches them and gestures toward the group gathering for its event. But the Black Hebrew Israelites mix things up by throwing some dead-white-male jargon at him—they are there because of “freedom of the speech ” and “freedom of religion” and all that. The young man backs away. “You have to come away from your religious philosophy,” one Black Hebrew Israelite yells after him.
A few more people in Native costume gather, clearly stunned by his tirade. “You’re not supposed to worship eagles, buffalos, rams, all types of animals,” he calls out to them.
A Native woman approaches the group and begins to challenge its ideology, which prompts the pastor’s coreligionists to thumb their Bibles for relevant passages from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He asks the woman why she’s angry, and when she tells him that she’s isn’t angry, he responds, “You’re not angry? You’re not angry? I’m making you angry.” The two start yelling at each other, and the speaker calls out to his associates for Isaiah 58:1.
Another woman comes up to him yelling, “The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit.”
Black Hebrew Israelites believe, among other things, that they are indigenous people. The preacher tells a woman that “you’re not an Indian. Indian means ‘savage.’ ”
Men begin to gather with concerned looks on their face. “Indian does not mean ‘savage,’ ” one of them says reasonably. “I don’t know where you got that from.” At this point, most of the Native Americans who have surrounded—“mobbed”?—the preacher have realized what the boys will prove too young and too unsophisticated to understand: that the “four young African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” are the kind of people you sometimes encounter in big cities, and the best thing to do is steer a wide berth. Most of them leave, exchanging amused glances at one another. But one of the women stays put, and she begins making excellent points, some of which stump the Black Hebrew Israelites.
It was heating up to be an intersectional showdown for the ages, with the Black Hebrew Israelites going head to head with the Native Americans. But when the Native woman talks about the importance of peace, the preacher finally locates a unifying theme, one more powerful than anything to be found in Proverbs, Isaiah, or Ecclesiastes.
He tells her there won’t be any food stamps coming to reservations or the projects because of the shutdown, and then gesturing to his left, he says, “It’s because of these … bastards over there, wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.”
The camera turns to capture five white teenage boys, one of whom is wearing a MAGA hat. They are standing at a respectful distance, with their hands in their pockets, listening to this exchange with expressions of curiosity. They are there to meet their bus home.
[Conor Friedersdorf: This is how the left destroys itself]
“Why you not angry at them?” the Black Hebrew Israelite asks the Native American woman angrily.
“That’s right,” says one of his coreligionists, “little corny-ass Billy Bob.”
The boys don’t respond to this provocation, although one of them smiles at being called a corny-ass Billy Bob. They seem interested in what is going on, in the way that it’s interesting to listen to Hyde Park speakers.
The Native woman isn’t interested in attacking the white boys. She keeps up her argument with the Black Hebrew Israelites, and her line of reasoning is so powerful that it throws the preacher off track.
“She trying to be distracting,” one of the men says. “She trying to stop the flow.”
“You’re out of order,” the preacher tells the woman. “Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.”
By now the gathering of Covington Catholic boys watching the scene has grown to 10 or 12, some of them in MAGA hats. They are about 15 feet away, and while the conflict is surely beyond their range of experience, it also includes biblical explication, something with which they are familiar.
“Don’t stand to the side and mock,” the speaker orders the boys, who do not appear to be mocking him. “Bring y’all cracker ass up here and make a statement.” The boys turn away and begin walking back to the larger group.
“You little dirty-ass crackers. Your day coming. Your day coming … ’cause your little dusty asses wouldn’t walk down a street in a black neighborhood, and go walk up on nobody playing no games like that,” he calls after them, but they take no notice. “Yeah, ’cause I will stick my foot in your little ass.”
By now the Native American ceremony has begun, and the attendees have linked arms and begun dancing. “They just don’t know who they are,” one of the Black Hebrew Israelites says remorsefully to another. Earlier he had called them “Uncle Tomahawks.”
The boys have given up on him. They have joined the larger group, and together they all begin doing some school-spirit cheers; they hum the stadium-staple opening bars of “Seven Nation Army” and jump up and down, dancing to it. Later they would say that their chaperones had allowed them to sing school-spirit songs instead of engaging with the slurs hurled by the Black Hebrew Israelites.
And then you hear the sound of drumming, and Phillips appears with several other drummers, all of them headed to the large group of boys. “Here come Gad!” says the Black Hebrew Israelite excitedly. His religion teaches that Native Americans are one of the 12 tribes of Israel, Gad. Apparently he thinks that his relentless attack on the Native Americans has led some of them to confront the white people. “Here come Gad!” he says again, but he is soon disappointed. “Gad not playing! He came to the rescue!” he says in disgust.
The drummers head to the boys, and keep playing. The boys, who had been jumping to “Seven Nation Army,” start jumping in time to the drumming. Phillips takes a step toward the group, and then—as it parts to admit him—he walks into it. Here the Black Hebrew Israelites’ footage is of no help, as Phillips has moved into the crowd.
Now we may look at the viral video—or, as a CNN chyron called it, the “heartbreaking viral video”—as well as the many others that have since emerged, none of which has so far revealed the boys to be chanting anything about a wall or about making America great again. Phillips keeps walking into the group, they make room for him, and then—the smiling boy. One of the videos shows him doing something unusual. At one point he turns away from Phillips, stops smiling, and locks eyes with another kid, shaking his head, seeming to say the word no. This is consistent with the long, harrowing statement that the smiling boy would release at the end of the weekend, in which he offered an explanation for his actions that is consistent with the video footage that has so far emerged, and revealed what happened to him in the 48 hours after Americans set to work doxing him and threatening his family with violence. As of this writing, it seems that the smiling boy, Nick Sandmann, is the one person who tried to be respectful of Phillips and who encouraged the other boys to do the same. And for this, he has been by far the most harshly treated of any of the people involved in the afternoon’s mess at the Lincoln Memorial.
I recommend that you watch the whole of the Black Hebrew Israelites’ video, which includes a long, interesting passage, in which the Covington Catholic boys engage in a mostly thoughtful conversation with the Black Hebrew Israelite preacher. Throughout the conversation, they disrespect him only once—to boo him when he says something vile about gays and lesbians. (Also interesting is the section at the very end of the video, in which—after the boys have left—the Black Hebrew Israelites are approached by some police officers. The preacher had previously spent time castigating police and “the penal code,” so I thought this would be a lively exchange, but the Israelites treat the cops with tremendous courtesy and gratitude, and when they leave the pastor describes them as “angels.” So let that be a lesson about the inadvisability of thinking you can predict how an exchange with a Black Hebrew Israelite will end up.)
I have watched every bit of video I can find of the event, although more keep appearing. I have found several things that various of the boys did and said that are ugly, or rude, or racist. Some boys did a tomahawk chop when Phillips walked into their group. There is a short video of a group that seems to be from the high school verbally harassing two young women as the women walk past it. In terms of the school itself, Covington Catholic High School apparently has a game-day tradition of students painting their skin black for “black-out days,” but any attempt by the school to cast this as innocent fun is undercut by a photograph of a white kid in black body paint leering at a black player on an opposing team.
I would not be surprised if more videos of this kind turn up, or if more troubling information about the school emerges, but it will by then be irrelevant, as the elite media have botched the story so completely that they have lost the authority to report on it. By Tuesday, The New York Times was busy absorbing the fact that Phillips was not, apparently, a Vietnam veteran, as it had originally reported, and it issued a correction saying that it had contacted the Pentagon for his military record, suggesting that it no longer trusts him as a source of reliable information.
How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.
At 8:30 yesterday morning, as I was typing this essay, The New York Times emailed me. The subject line was “Ethics Reminders for Freelance Journalists.” (I have occasionally published essays and reviews in the Times). It informed me, inter alia, that the Times expected all of its journalists, both freelance and staff, “to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism.” This meant, in part, safeguarding the Times’ “reputation for fairness and impartiality.”
I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will causally harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.
More than a million people have sought refuge in Europe over the past few years; some will eventually become citizens. Still more have moved for work and the promise of ultimately securing a permanent place. But a select group does something else entirely: They pay. A lot.
Over the past decade, some European Union member states have earned tens of billions of dollars overall by selling residency and, in some cases, citizenship to the super rich. But critics say that the opaque nature of these schemes makes them vulnerable to corruption. Now the EU is getting involved, telling its member states to increase scrutiny of applicants vying for these “golden visas.”
An individual with residency in an EU member state can travel across much of the bloc without additional paperwork, while those with citizenship can work and travel anywhere within the EU, as well as to non-EU countries that have visa-free arrangements with its members. In its first report on golden-visa schemes, the EU said Wednesday that elements of the programs heighten the risks to security, and open the door to money laundering and tax evasion across the bloc.
[Read: Should Congress let wealthy foreigners buy green cards?]
Supporters of the programs say that most of the applicants are not untoward. Perhaps more important, the visas have been a financial boon for the EU countries that offer them. In all, golden-visa schemes have pulled in an estimated 25 billion euros, or $28 billion, over the past decade, according to a joint report released last October by Global Witness and Transparency International. Of the bloc’s 28 member states, 20 sell residence permits for prices ranging from the hundreds of thousands of euros (a Greek residence permit can be had for a 250,000-euro investment in property) to millions (British residency starts at 2 million pounds, or 2.3 million euros). Three countries—Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta—also sell citizenship. But the screening requirements for the potential investors vary drastically by country, prompting worries in Brussels, and beyond.
“People obtaining an EU nationality must have a genuine connection to the member state concerned,” Věra Jourová, the European commissioner for justice, consumers, and gender equality, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We want more transparency on how nationality is granted and more cooperation between member states.”
Indeed, the sale of residency and citizenship to those rich enough to pay challenges the very idea of citizenship and immigration. From Britain and Germany to Italy and Hungary, Europe is mired in a debate over mass immigration and integration, but the super rich have largely been left untouched. The beneficiaries of golden-visa schemes aren’t photographed walking across borders, jumping over fences, or crossing the Mediterranean. They are wealthy, welcomed by governments, and mostly anonymous.
The EU’s recommendations this week come with golden-visa schemes under increased scrutiny. In Malta, for instance, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in October 2017 while she was investigating her country’s own visa program for the rich, which she believed was rife with corruption. Last month, Britain said it was suspending its own program and said it would formulate new rules. It has since reversed its position, though the visas granted to 700 rich Russians are reportedly being reviewed. Portugal’s program is also under the microscope because of allegations of misuse and a lax requirement for residency (those who get Portugal’s golden visa only need to be in the country seven days a year).
Proponents—such as David Lesperance, whose firm, Lesperance & Associates, helps wealthy clients secure residency and nationality in countries like Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.—insist that the overwhelming majority of residencies or citizenships obtained through these programs are legitimate. Applicants are coming, supporters of golden visas say, for many of the same reasons that less-affluent migrants cross borders: to escape political instability and for a better quality of life. And, according to Lesperance, because these visas are open only to the super rich, the number of applications are tiny compared to overall numbers of immigrants, which means that governments can dedicate more resources to screening them. (Over the past decade, the program has created 6,000 new EU citizens and about 100,000 residents.)
“If I’m a scoundrel, I would not be looking at an economic residence or citizenship program,” Lesperance told me.
[Read: ‘Expat’ and the fraught language of migration]
The visas are especially attractive to the super rich in countries with weak institutions or fickle rule of law: Indeed, China and Russia, in that order, account for the overwhelming majority of golden visas in the EU countries that provide such data. Global Witness and Transparency International said in their report that Chinese nationals were the top recipients of such visas in six countries (Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain), while Russian nationals were the highest number in two (Bulgaria and Latvia).
The EU in its report Wednesday said that it planned to set a up a panel of experts who would recommend ways to improve the programs and develop common security checks by the end of the year. But the bloc’s ability to bring about change is limited—nor is it certain that the countries that have benefited financially from golden-visa programs will go along with recommendations. Nicos Anastasiades, the president of Cyprus, which sells its passports for 2 million euros, said Wednesday that the EU’s report singled out his country.
“At some point, these double standards must end,” he said.
Judging for the seventh annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, organized by the Underwater Photography Guide, has wrapped up, and the winning images and photographers have been announced. Duncan Murrell took Best in Show with a photo of the courtship behavior of spinetail devil rays. The contest organizers have shared with us some of the winners and honorable mentions below, from the 16 categories of underwater photography. Captions were written by the individual photographers and have been lightly edited for content.
By and large, marijuana legalization represents progress, argues writer Annie Lowrey. It’s well documented that prohibition has a tremendous fiscal cost, not to mention a far worse human cost. Researchers have also convincingly argued that cannabis is far less dangerous than legal substances such as alcohol. As a result, a solid majority of Americans support legalization.
But are there significant public-health risks associated with legalization? In a new animated video, Lowrey highlights some pitfalls of free-market marijuana, including how the current lack of federal oversight has led to the absence of safety tests and standards. Furthermore, marijuana dependence and frequency of usage is increasing, and knowledge of the negative health effects of cannabis is not widespread.
With a couple hundred dollars and a few minutes, you could go to a liquidation website right now and buy a pallet full of stuff that people have returned to Amazon. It will have, perhaps, been lightly sorted by product category—home decor, outdoor, apparel—but this is mostly aspirational. For example, in one pallet labeled “home decor,” available for sale on liquidation.com, you could find hiking crampons, shimmer fabric paint, a High Visibility Thermal Winter Trapper Hat, a Mr. Ellie Pooh Natural White Paper List Pad, a St. Patrick’s Pot O’ Gold Cupcake Decorating Kit, a Spoontiques Golf Thermometer, a Feliz Cumpleanos Candle Packaged Balloon, and five Caterpillar Hoodies for Pets.
A dog in a caterpillar hoodie (Amazon / Rubie’s)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. Most likely, never will this precise box of shit ever exist again in the world. On liquidation.com, each pallet’s manifest comes with suggested prices for each product in a pristine state. If you add them up, the “value” of the box might be $4,000, while the auction price might only come to $200.
While Amazon doesn’t publicly talk about how it chooses which returned products go back up for sale and which go to the liquidators, it does sell some products through Amazon Warehouse at a discount. If it sounds crazy to sell products at massive discounts, consider that goods sitting in a warehouse are a cost. So is the labor necessary to repackage something for resale. If Amazon and other retailers let another company pay them something, they avoid those costs and add some revenue.
[Read: What Amazon does to poor cities]
So, Liquidity Services, the operator of liquidation.com, became a major (though not exclusive) handler of Amazon’s American liquidations. The company calls dealing with returns “the reverse supply chain”—a part of the retail business that has been growing in importance as online shopping becomes more popular. Liquidity Services now has 3,357,000 registered buyers on its various liquidation websites. In the past fiscal year, it sold $626.4 million worth of stuff.
Amazon represents a growing chunk of Liquidity’s business. In its most recent SEC filing, the company disclosed that it spent approximately $33.7 million on Amazon liquidation inventory, which it then turns around and sells for maybe 5 percent of the supposed retail value. And, assuming the company is trying to turn a profit, it must buy the inventory for a fraction of that. Doing the rough math, we’re talking about inventory that once had a collective value reaching into the billions, before it landed in some box on a doorstep.
Of course, once people do buy all these unwanted goods, they rearrange them into more profitable configurations. It seems so easy: Sort the still-good stuff from the broken objects, the trash, the worthless, and then post that stuff to Amazon or eBay. Who couldn’t sell $4,000 worth of stuff for more than $200?
My colleague Alana Semuels demonstrated in her story on the proselytizers selling get-rich-quick classes about retailing products on Amazon that the lure of the high-margin, online business is nearly irresistible. This is a variation on that hustle: Buy liquidation, sell high. This idea has won serious viewership for some YouTubers. It’s become a micro-genre on the video service, where different personalities unbox dozens of things and oooh and ahhh at how much money they are worth relative to what they paid for the box of stuff.
[Read: How to lose tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon]
YouTuber Safiya Nygaard got 12.6 million views for her unboxing of a liquidation pallet. YouTuber Kristofer Yee racked up 2.7 million views with a similar video. Another YouTuber, Randomfrankp, got 1.8 million. There’s an undeniable appeal to watching someone go through a whole bunch of strange stuff on camera. And these videos appear to have driven a noticeable spike of interest in liquidation on YouTube.
The implication in most of the videos is that the value of what’s in the box far exceeds the cost. Of course, two Yahoo reporters did it for themselves and got soaked. There’s a difference between something having a suggested retail price of $40 and actually getting someone to pay you $40 for it. The exchange value of most of these items is incredibly low outside the retail context in which they were purchased.
A level-headed Flint, Michigan, liquidation reseller named Walter Blake Knoblock offered a more realistic assessment in a live video he posted last year. He proffered five rules for Amazon pallets. The first? “Don’t expect it all to be good.” “ Don’t get discouraged if you’re halfway through your pallet and it’s all trash,” he said. In his business, it’s typical to throw away a third to half of everything.
After other rules about electronics (“boom or bust”), shipping (“Understand freight cost”), and sales strategy (“Speed through your inventory; don’t squeeze it for every dollar”), he gave his final lesson: “Don’t invest money that you absolutely need. It isn’t like a savings account at your bank. You’re taking a risk.”
Staring into his camera from his warehouse in Michigan, the young entrepreneur implored his viewers to consider the bad things that could happen, not merely the potential profits.
[Read: How online shopping makes suckers of us all]
“I don’t want to let anyone believe the fallacy that pallets are a guaranteed way to make money. They’re absolutely not. You’re going to see a bunch of videos of people making a bunch of money on pallets,” Knoblock said. “But just keep in mind that, just like everything else in social media, you’re probably only seeing the top 10, 5 percent of what they do.”
“I’m just pulling this number out of my ass; I don’t know,” he added. “But just like everything else in social media, always take people’s benefits and their profits with a grain of salt.”
But who wants to hear that? That video has just over 30,000 views, orders of magnitude fewer than the hype videos.
The people who seem to have decent success have to work hard and stay disciplined with their purchases and sales. Which is, more or less, the opposite of getting rich quick, or as Knoblock put it in the title of one video, “There Is No Such Thing as Passive Income.”
Terrorism haunts the Middle East, targeting Americans as well as their allies, with civilians bearing most of the pain. A major bombing in the region threatens to derail a top administration priority. The U.S. president declares a state of emergency.
It’s 1995.
President Bill Clinton declared terrorism a national emergency precisely 24 years ago, as a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel imperiled peace talks between the two sides. Executive Order 12947 named groups whose activities, Clinton said, posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At first, that list was largely limited to Palestinian armed groups, but in 1998, Clinton added Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to the list. Bin Laden is gone and the peace process is moribund, but a version of the state of emergency remains in effect. In fact, Donald Trump renewed it just last week.
[Read: What the president could do if he declares a state of emergency]
Clinton’s declaration is a case study in presidential powers, which, once activated, chief executives are often reluctant to roll back. The United States has roughly 30 ongoing national emergencies—one of them has been in place for four decades, having been issued by President Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.
That most Americans could live in a “national emergency” for 40 years without noticing says something about the broad—some would say insidious—expansion of emergency powers. The United States has ongoing emergencies for everything from unrest in Burundi to the movement of vessels near Cuba. It’s not that Cuban maritime malfeasance will end in U.S. martial law, or even that Clinton was invoking the same kind of emergency Trump has flirted with to fund his border wall. But the basic legal concept—an emergency allows the president to exercise powers not otherwise granted to him by Congress—is common to all these scenarios.
Who really cares, you might ask? There’s still terrorism in the Middle East, and still no diplomatic relations with Iran, and emergencies invoked in contexts like this allow the president to impose sanctions even if the legislature hasn’t gotten around to it. Another ongoing national emergency, first issued under Trump, declares that foreign corruption and human-rights abuses threaten U.S. national security. Why wouldn’t you want to combat corruption and human-rights abuses?
But many of these issues are probably more accurately described as a “state of problem” rather than as a “state of emergency.” The common-usage meaning of emergency as something sudden, extraordinary, and, above all, temporary should be an important prerequisite to letting the president bypass Congress. It’s useful for the executive to have access to emergency powers in cases, say, when the legislature doesn’t have time to pass a law to help deal with an immediate, genuine threat or natural disaster. Over time, though, it undermines constitutional safeguards to keep giving the president extraordinary powers in circumstances that have long since become ordinary.
“States of emergency that last decades are not only a linguistic oxymoron,” Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who serves as a special rapporteur on countering terrorism to the United Nations Human Rights Council, told me. “They function to degrade the rule of law, often consolidate executive powers imperceptibly but distinctly, and more broadly loosen the boundaries between the normal and the exceptional.”
[Read: Fifteen years after 9/11, is America any safer?]
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor who has also studied states of emergency, put it another way. There are more than 100 laws on the books with language built in allowing the president extra latitude or exceptions in cases of emergency—extending far beyond foreign-policy sanctions powers, such as those in Clinton’s 1995 declaration, and into domestic issues such as, say, deploying the National Guard and federal funds to help with hurricane relief.
“There are some just perfectly sane things that you could only do” by invoking emergency powers, Scheppele said. Yet she noted that there is also the potential for grave abuse, and that case studies around the world suggest “emergencies” can start small and grow severe—even to the point of ending up in authoritarianism, as in Venezuela and Turkey.
In the United States, that remains a remote possibility, though Elizabeth Goitein recently detailed for The Atlantic the many ways it could be realized under a president like Trump. Certainly the laws of the United States provide no shortage of opportunities for the president to seize more powers, perfectly legally. “There’s enough sharp knives hiding in the house there,” Scheppele said of such laws, “that you really wouldn’t want to leave a maniac alone with them.”
She paused, then clarified. “It’s just a metaphor.”
Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” lets you know, in its very first verse, that it’s copying. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s and bottles of bubbles / Girls with tattoos who like getting in trouble,” she sings in place of the “Raindrops on roses / and whiskers on kittens” made famous by Rodgers and Hammerstein, who are listed among the 10 songwriters for the pop star’s latest single.
But this is not an Austrian-alps show tune. It’s a rap and R&B song, inspired by—or taking from—black artists. For the chorus, a marching-formation beat kicks in and Grande whispers, in a clipped rhythm, “I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it.” In the bridge, she raps in a kind of ranging, liquid style reminiscent of Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj’s “Flawless (Remix),” with a reference to The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Gimme the Loot.” After the single was released last Friday, two rappers—Princess Nokia and Soulja Boy—posted videos accusing Grande of stealing their flows. 2 Chainz suggested the music video ripped off the pink trap house he set up as a promotional and public-health effort in Atlanta, and other people noted similarities with his song “Spend It.”
Whether Grande has a serious plagiarism scandal on her hands is unclear. Rap flows—particular verbal rhythms and rhyme patterns—can be viral and collaborative things, bubbling up as one emcee’s innovation then quickly becoming ubiquitous. To my ear, Grande’s delivery and lyrics do recall all the songs “7 Rings” has been compared to, but not so precisely that you can bet on a slam-dunk copyright-infringement case against her. Then again, we’re living in the era after the “Blurred Lines” judgment, which determined that the “feel” of a song can be actionable. A lawyer just has to convince a jury.
What Grande is definitely facing, though, is that familiar pop-star chapter: a cultural-appropriation backlash. In addition to her extraordinary voice, neurotic charisma, and glittery bath-bomb aesthetic, Grande’s success has increasingly relied on elements of rap and R&B culture: its slang (last year, issa was every third word Grande said in public), its beats (Pharrell injected her 2018 album, Sweetener, with thump recalling that of his band N*E*R*D), and its stars (all of the guest vocalists on 2016’s Dangerous Women, the album where she made a show of leaving behind child-star innocence, were black).
This history hasn’t led to the sort of controversy that, say, met Miley Cyrus when she made herself over as a gold-toothed twerker in 2013. But it has been remarked upon in ways positive and negative. Patti LaBelle lovingly called Grande a “little white black girl” while presenting an award to the star in December. But some commentators have grumbled that her “blaccent” and even her spray tan seemed part of an old story about white people profiting off of black aesthetics to project a sense of edge without feeling any of the associated struggle.
Appropriation remains one of the hardest-to-talk-about phenomena in pop culture, which is, fundamentally, a hodgepodge of widely circulated ideas that originated in specific subcultures. One line of thought puts it in economic terms: Are marginalized creators being materially harmed and erased? But on another level, there are questions of aesthetics and tastes. Does the pop star draw upon her influences in a way that feels original? Does her work disrespect or honor those influences? Is there a double standard in how her work is received?
Grande teetered the line on those questions without much incident till now. But “7 Rings” is raising hackles because it regresses to a more cartoonish, and imitative, use of black music than she’s done before (not to mention the video’s evocation of Japanese kawaii). She’s wearing the culture as a costume—or even as a joke—not unlike white frat guys putting on fake grills for a “ratchet” party.
The lyrical concept for “7 Rings” originated from Grande coping with her super-public breakup from the comedian Pete Davidson last year. After calling off their engagement, she went with six of her best friends to Tiffany, got drunk on champagne, and bought everyone in her posse her own engagement ring. It’s a tale of mega-wealthy indulgence that’s both charming and sickening, a combination that Grande tacitly acknowledges with this song. She’s bragging, not apologizing, about doing something wasteful—an empowering rebellion, supposedly. “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems must not have had enough money to solve ’em,” she sings.
Grande and her fans would say that this materialist flex is earned defiance for someone who has faced a series of profound public setbacks in recent years, and who’s been underestimated time and again for being a young woman. They would also say that men get to conduct themselves this way in public all the time. True enough. But the song exploits hip-hop signifiers so insistently that the gap between Grande’s experiences and the cultures she’s taking from are as glaring as the reflection off a De Beers product.
The video may or may not reference 2 Chainz’s pink trap house, but it does channel the notion of a pink trap house via spray paint, beat-up cars, and barking dogs (just look at the album art). The song’s defining lyric goes, “You like my hair? / Gee thanks, just bought it,” which also—combined with the rest of her chorus—recalls 2 Chainz’s refrain “It’s mine / I spend it.” But “Spend It” was a victory lap for someone who’s had to deal drugs since he was a teenager: “I’m riding ’round my side of town / Boxing gloves, I beat the trial.” On Princess Nokia’s “Mine,” the chorus, “It’s mine, I bought it,” referred to the hairpieces of black and brown women—which, Nokia complained in song, are regularly ridiculed.
Grande’s hair lyrics, by contrast, are about her famous ponytail and the extensions she buys to create it. That’s certainly a reference that’s authentic to her, but also one that draws a shaky connection to former drug dealers having escaped poverty and to women of color showing pride in the face of marginalization. Of course, drawing shaky connections is how all pop music works: Singers’ specific stories offer metaphors that are scalable for all sorts of lifestyles. You can be white and still feel a sense of empowerment by listening to trap. But most listeners at home don’t then project their fantastical appropriation of someone else’s struggle to the masses in a hit song about their mega wealth.
Grande has now had to acknowledge the backlash, if not fully reckon with it. On Instagram, she reposted the podcast host Aminatou Sow’s message “White women talking about their weaves is how we’re gonna solve racism” and then apologized for doing so, writing about the original post:
I think her intention was to be like… yay a white person disassociating the negative stariotype [sic] that is paired with the word ‘weave’… however I’m so sorry my response was out of pocket or if it came across the wrong way. Thanks for opening the conversation and like… to everyone for talking to me about it. It’s never my intention to offend anybody.
It’s a weird apology. If it helped black women to have a famous white woman brag about her weave, then it would stand to reason that Miley Cyrus’s butt-shaking phase might have prevented Cardi B and City Girls from being slut-shamed for twerking—a story that unfolded in the past few days. What culture-jacking often does is simply take advantage of the racist way that different people receive different treatment for the same activities. “When black women wear weave it’s ghetto and trash and we’re bald,” tweeted one listener, “but now miss Ariana says that corny ass line everyone and their mom is hype [about] it.”
Many appropriation critiques incite their own backlash from people who talk about “online mobs” looking for the next target to “cancel.” But the truth is that even in the face of controversy, “7 Rings” is a streaming smash, and Grande’s most forceful critics say they’re not out to destroy a career. “Accountability doesn’t automatically mean cancel,” wrote the blogger Erin Dyana. “It’s literally informing said person of their wrongdoings and offenses, bringing it to their attention and other people’s attention as well, since we’re talking about celebrities.”
Indeed, depending on how Grande handles this situation, she should be fine. She’s not someone like Iggy Azalea, who built a career on racial drag. But the fact remains that a sound and an attitude that black artists used to articulate specific things about their lives in a racist society is being pushed further into the realm of catchall cliché. The average, non-black listener, after being exposed to “7 Rings,” may be less able to discern the particular meanings—and social circumstances—of the original documents. In a very real way, Grande has taken other people’s shine.
At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.”
Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously. They slime when attacked or simply when stressed. On July 14, 2017, a truck full of hagfish overturned on an Oregon highway. The animals were destined for South Korea, where they are eaten as a delicacy, but instead, they were strewn across a stretch of Highway 101, covering the road (and at least one unfortunate car) in slime.
Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times—enough to fill a sizable bucket. Reach in, and every move of your hand will drag the water with it. “It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater,” says Douglas Fudge of Chapman University. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.
The slime looks revolting, but it’s also one of nature’s more wondrous substances, unlike anything else that’s been concocted by either evolution or engineers. Fudge, who has been studying its properties for two decades, says that when people first touch it, they are invariably surprised. “It looks like a bunch of mucus that someone just sneezed out of their nose,” he says. “That’s not at all what it’s like.”
For a start, it’s not sticky. If there wasn’t so damn much of it, you’d be able to wipe it off your skin with ease. The hagfish themselves scrape the slime off their skin by tying a knot in their bodies and sliding it from head to tail.
The slime also “has a very strange sensation of not quite being there,” says Fudge. It consists of two main components—mucus and protein threads. The threads spread out and entangle one another, creating a fast-expanding net that traps both mucus and water. Astonishingly, to create a liter of slime, a hagfish has to release only 40 milligrams of mucus and protein—1,000 times less dry material than human saliva contains. That’s why the slime, though strong and elastic enough to coat a hand, feels so incorporeal.
Read: [Why are there so many more species on land when the sea is bigger]?
Indeed, it’s one of the softest materials ever measured. “Jell-O is between 10,000 and 100,000 times stiffer than hagfish slime,” says Randy Ewoldt from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who had to invent new methods for assessing the substance’s properties after conventional instruments failed to cope with its nature. “When you see it in a bucket, it almost still looks like water. Only when you stick your hand in and pick it up do you find that it’s a coherent thing.”
The proteins threads that give the slime cohesion are incredible in their own right. Each is one-100th the width of a human hair, but can stretch for four to six inches. And within the slime glands, each thread is coiled like a ball of yarn within its own tiny cell—a feat akin to stuffing a kilometer of Christmas lights into a shoebox without a single knot or tangle. No one knows how the hagfish achieves this miracle of packaging, but Fudge just got a grant to test one idea. He thinks that the thread cells use their nuclei—the DNA-containing structures at their core—like a spindle, turning them to wind the growing protein threads into a single continuous loop.
A microscope image of a hagfish’s coiled slime thread (Courtesy of Douglas Fudge)Once these cells are expelled from the slime glands, they rupture, releasing the threads within them. Ewoldt’s colleague Gaurav Chaudhury found that despite their length, the threads can fully unspool in a fraction of a second. The pull of flowing water is enough to unwind them. But the process is even quicker if the loose end snags on a surface, like another thread, or a predator’s mouth.
Being extremely soft, the slime is very good at filling crevices, and scientists had long assumed that hagfish use it to clog the gills of would-be predators. That hypothesis was only confirmed in 2011, when Vincent Zintzen from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa finally captured footage of hagfish sliming conger eels, wreckfish, and more. Even a shark was forced to retreat, visibly gagging on the cloud of slime in its jaws.
“We were blown away by those videos,” Fudge says, “but when we really looked carefully, we noticed that the slime is released after the hagfish is bitten.” So how does the animal survive that initial attack? His colleague Sarah Boggett showed that the answer lies in their skin. It’s exceptionally loose, and attaches to the rest of the body at only a few places. It’s also very flaccid: You could inject a hagfish with an extra 40 percent of its body volume without stretching the skin. The animal is effectively wearing a set of extremely loose pajamas, Fudge says. If a shark bites down, “the body sort of squishes out of the way.”
Read: [Mysterious ocean blobs aren’t so mysterious]
That ability makes hagfish not only hard to bite, but also hard to defend against. Calli Freedman, another member of Fudge’s team, showed that these animals can wriggle through slits less than half the width of their bodies. In the wild, they use that ability to great effect. They can hunt live fish by pulling them out of sandy burrows. And if disturbed by predators, they can dive into the nearest nook they find. Perhaps that’s why, in 2013, the Italian researcher Daniela Silvia Pace spotted a bottlenose dolphin with a hagfish stuck in its blowhole.
More commonly, these creatures burrow into dead or dying animals, in search of flesh to scavenge. They can’t bite; instead, they rasp away at carcasses with a plate of toothy cartilage in their mouths. The same traveling knots they use to de-slime themselves also help them eat. They grab into a cadaver, then move a knot from tail to head, using the leverage to yank out mouthfuls of meat. They can also eat by simply sitting inside a corpse, and absorbing nutrients directly through their skin and gills. The entire hagfish is effectively a large gut, and even that is understating matters: Their skin is actually more efficient at absorbing nutrients than their own intestines.
Hagfish on display at a seafood market (Elizabeth Beard / Getty)Hagfish are so thoroughly odd that biologists have struggled to clearly work out how they’re related to other fish, and to the other backboned vertebrates. Based on their simple anatomy, many researchers billed the creatures as primitive precursors to vertebrates—an intermediate form that existed before the evolution of jaws and spinal columns.
But a new fossil called Tethymyxine complicates that story. Hailing from a Lebanese quarry, and purchased by researchers at a fossil show in Tucson, Arizona, the Cretaceous-age creature is clearly a hagfish. It has a raspy cartilage plate in its mouth, slime glands dotting its flanks, and even chemicals within those glands that match the composition of modern slime. By comparing Tethymyxine to other hagfish, Tetsuto Miyashita from the University of Chicago concluded that these creatures (along with another group of jawless fish, the lampreys) are not precursors to vertebrates, but actual vertebrates themselves.
Such work is always contentious, but it fits with the results of genetic studies. If it’s right, then hagfish aren’t primitive evolutionary throwbacks at all. Instead, they represent a lineage of vertebrates that diverged from all the others about 550 million years ago, and lost several traits such as complex eyes, taste buds, scales, and perhaps even bones. Maybe those losses were adaptations to a life spent infiltrating carcasses in the dark, deep ocean, much like their flaccid, nutrient-absorbing skins are. “Hagfishes might look primitive; they’re actually very specialized,” Miyashita adds.
Their signature slime might have also evolved as a result of that lifestyle, as a way of fending off predators that were competing for cadavers. “Everything about hagfish is weird,” says Fudge, “but it all kind of fits.”
When Russell Baker imagined his own death for The New York Times in 1979, it was because he’d just experienced something delightfully unsettling while taking a walk near his apartment on 58th Street. There he was, about to reenter the building, when something huge splatted on the sidewalk at his feet.
It was a raw potato. And for a deadpanning humorist on deadline, the potato was a gift. Somebody had chucked the thing off the roof of the 48-story apartment building across the street. “After a certain age most people probably speculate occasionally on the manner of their ultimate departure, but the possibility of becoming a potato victim was one that had never occurred to me, and I did not like it,” Baker mused in his next column. “On a slow-news day, it might merit a paragraph or two on the Associated Press wire: ‘Potato Mashes Man.’ ”
The truth was, Baker was tickled by this ridiculous brush with death. “If it had hit me, it would have killed me,” he later told the writer Hal Gieseking. “And I was delighted. Here’s a column. What a way to die!”
Baker, who died this week at 93, was the longest-running columnist in the history of The New York Times. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1979, for commentary, and was so beloved that he made the cover of Time magazine that year. He won a second Pulitzer, in 1983, for a biography about his Depression-era childhood, Growing Up. In the early 1990s, he became the host of Masterpiece Theatre. He announced the end of his “Observer” column at the Times on Christmas Day 1998. He’d been writing it since 1962. (“Don’t make too much of it,” he joked in an interview soon thereafter with The Baltimore Sun, where he’d started his career as a police reporter. “It’s only daily journalism.”)
About six years ago, I was working my way through the Times’ archive, rereading Baker’s columns from the 1970s and ’80s, and I got to wondering what he was up to. When I found him in the phone book and realized he lived a short drive away from me, I dialed. Had I reached Russell Baker the writer? Yes. Might he consider an interview? Well, okay.
So I drove to Leesburg, Virginia, a little courthouse town outside of Washington, D.C., where he was living at the time. Baker and I met in the sunny library of his brick house. A grandfather clock kept time from the hallway. Baker had chosen to live a mile or so away from the countryside where he was born. In Growing Up, Baker recounted his earliest memory there, the moment that first startled him into consciousness, when a cow bowed its gigantic head through his open bedroom window.
The way Baker told that story was, like so much of his writing, deeply funny—marked by a mix of defiance and curiosity, and a deep appreciation for the absurdity of living. Here’s a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation that day.
Adrienne LaFrance: We’re not far from where you were born.
Russell Baker: I came back in, I think, 1985. Forever ago. I worked at the Times for 30 or 40 years. Just endlessly. I came down here in 1985, but it was still fairly undeveloped, nothing like it is now. It was charming then. Strange kinds of cities nowadays, these little urb-oids. You think, My God, there are enough people for a city but there’s no place to get a bottle of milk. You’ve got to get in a car or charter an airplane or something.
It reminds me of places in North Jersey around Englewood. Leesburg has spread like an ominous growth. It’s just turned into a kind of place I wouldn’t have come to if it had been like this before. But it’s agreeable. I had to get out of New York. I kind of used up New York. I had written there for 12 years. With that kind of work, you use it up.
LaFrance: You wanted to have fresh eyes again.
Baker: Yeah. New York wears you out most of all. So I was ready to get out.
LaFrance: What have you been reading lately?
Baker: I’m reading old books mostly. I’m reading The Mauve Decade, by [Thomas] Beer, which is a literary critic’s take on the 1890s. But it’s sort of a sociological view. He wrote it in the 1920s. So the book is almost 100 years old. It’s an interesting view of how people in the ’20s looked at the ’90s. I’m also reading This Is How You Lose Her [by Junot Díaz]. He’s just damn good. The stories aren’t that interesting but really well written. Let’s see, what else? I’ve been reading another book on [the former Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee because I know Ben. It’s not special, not very good. There’s nothing in it that I don’t know. We rehash Watergate endlessly, over and over.
LaFrance: Enough already.
Baker: Having lived through Watergate, I don’t need to go there again.
LaFrance: Which writer do you most admire?
Baker: You know, I did Masterpiece Theatre for a long time and I read the Victorian novels, which I should have read when I was in college. I took a degree in English. I was supposed to be reading Victorian novels but never did, of course. I was in the period that read Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
LaFrance: They still assign those.
Baker: I have a granddaughter who was assigned The Great Gatsby a few years ago. I think teachers assign it because they love it. I said to my granddaughter, who was in junior high , I said, “Do you know what a bootlegger is?” She hadn’t the faintest notion. I said, “How can you read Gatsby if you don’t know what a bootlegger is?” But it’s a wonderful book, beautifully written. And I grew up in that era. I recently reread Gatsby just to see how he did it. You learn a lot about writing from Fitzgerald, at least in that book.
LaFrance: What strikes you about the mechanics of it?
Baker: I’ve read it off and on over the years. It’s a short book. It’s an easy book. It’s really not much more than a long story. But this time I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before, which is how he handles conversation among a large group of people. If you’ve ever written any fiction, trying to create a big scene with a lot of people talking, you tend to do it by everybody talking, with a lot of quotation marks, which is extremely dull and wears out quickly. And you can’t get it right.
But he creates the sense of these big parties at Gatsby’s house where hundreds of people show up, and gives you a sense of what everybody’s talking about with a very sparse use of quotation marks. He’s sort of paraphrasing. It’s beautiful to see how he does it. Because you really know what these people’s minds are like in a very short space. It’s a gift to be able to do that, to write that way.
LaFrance: And you’re still writing for The New York Review of Books.
Baker: I do an occasional piece for them, just to keep my hand in. My mind is too slow now to do much. With age, everything slows down, your mind the most disconcerting of all. I don’t write with the glibness and facility that I used to. It’s a labor for me to write now.
LaFrance: Did it never feel like a labor before?
Baker: I’m writing because I love to write, of course. It was just a pleasure to write. I’d write things for fun and throw it away. Of course, once you start making money it becomes work and it ceases to be fun, but your writing gets better.
LaFrance: That’s true, isn’t it?
Baker: I’ve always found that when writing is fun, it’s not very good.
LaFrance: I’m afraid you’re right.
Baker: If you haven’t sweated over it, it’s probably not worth it. So it’s always been work. But it’s the kind of work you enjoy having done. The doing of it is hard work. People don’t usually realize what it takes out of you. They just see you sitting there, staring at the wall, and they don’t know that you’re looking for the perfect word to describe a shade of light. I did enjoy writing. Also, I’ve probably said everything I’ve wanted to say.
LaFrance: So much of your writing has been inspired by ordinary observations—and so much of your humor comes from articulating the absurdities that other people simply accept. I’m curious whether you’ve seen a change over time in the kinds of things you notice. How has the way you observe the world changed?
(Dirck Halstead / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty)Baker: I don’t think my view of the world has changed much since I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I look at things very critically. I’m one of those awful people who’s looking for flaws. Everybody has flaws. This son of a bitch, he spots them right away. It’s an untrusting eye looking at the world. You try to make an argument to me, I immediately will spot the flaw in it. I loved covering politics because politicians are always telling you what they’re doing, and it’s easy to spot.
LaFrance: It seems like you still keep a close eye on politics.
Baker: I do. It’s a habit. I spent so much of my life covering politics and I still read the papers closely every day. I get the Times and the Post and various other little papers. I’m always reading politics. But what else is there to do in Leesburg?
LaFrance: When I covered national politics, the longest-serving senators would always tell me about how Congress used to be so civilized and bipartisan. You were around in those days. That’s not really true, is it? Because if you look back at the history, there’s always been fighting.
Baker: Well there has, but not like now. It’s another world. At one point I covered the Senate for several years. I knew everyone. The Senate’s easy to cover. There are only 100 guys. It’s just the right size.
But the Senate now has become something quite different than what it was when I covered it. It was an important body when I covered it. I started covering the Senate during the Eisenhower years. It was important in any number of policy matters. To be on the Foreign Relations Committee was to be a heavyweight. I mean, [Senator J. William] Fulbright’s resistance to the Vietnam policy had real weight in the events that followed. And that was true on the financial side. The Finance Committee chairman really had influence.
Now nobody has any weight. Nobody listens. As a matter of fact, they don’t have any respect for the job anymore. Trent Lott was the majority leader for the Republicans and chucked the job to become a lobbyist. If that had happened in the days that I was covering the Senate, he would have been disgraced. A senator giving up a Senate seat to become a lobbyist! That just wasn’t done. And they all do now. The decline of the Senate. That’s a big story.
When I covered the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader and he was working with Eisenhower. [Sam] Rayburn was the speaker of the House. They worked closely with Eisenhower to get things done. It’s inconceivable that any of those men would have taken it upon himself just to frustrate Eisenhower.
Politics is almost a nonstop activity now. There’s not much government that goes on. But with Rayburn and Eisenhower and Johnson and Kennedy —all those people—they governed. Governing is tough. Now they don’t spend much time governing. It’s mostly posturing.
LaFrance: Who were the most complex or interesting politicians to cover in those days?
Baker: You cover Lyndon Johnson, you don’t need to cover anybody else. He was such a gross character. He was like somebody out of a bad novel. He had Shakespearean depth. He was a comedian. He was an ass. He was brilliant. He was aggressive. He was dangerous. He was a fool at times. There was always a show with Johnson. He dramatized himself and he enjoyed the drama. Tough guy.
LaFrance: I wonder if you know [the former Washington Post reporter] Jules Witcover. You must have been hanging around Washington at the same time.
Baker: I know Jules well.
LaFrance: I once interviewed him about how presidential-campaign coverage has changed. He told me about covering the Eisenhower election in 1956, how the copy boys on the trains would collect copy and rush off at the next stop to transmit it back to the newsrooms.
Baker: It’s true. Traveling with Eisenhower, you’d file by Western Union and Western Union always had a guy on the plane or train wherever you were. You’d pound this stuff out on a typewriter and give him a page at a time. How it all got to New York, I never knew. I left it to the Western Union guy. I don’t know how people do it nowadays. Reporters, they seem to do everything. They take pictures, they interview people, they transmit. The reporting is really terrible, isn’t it?
LaFrance: Some of it is. But how you transmit your work isn’t what makes a difference, quality-wise. There has always been bad reporting and there is still some exceptional reporting.
Baker: There is. Most of the exceptional reporting is in magazines, though. What I find about reporting now is you don’t know what you don’t know, because there aren’t reporters there anymore. There’s nobody covering closely the things they used to. The real valuable reporter is the guy who goes to the beat every day.
That’s the only way to do it. It’s the guy who goes every day and says ‘Hi,’ talks to the secretaries, bumps into people in the corridors, urinates beside them in the men’s room, they wash their hands together. And pretty soon he knows. You want to know what’s going on in City Hall? We don’t have many of those guys anymore. They’re the people who have taken the buyout. We have too many stars now. I was aware of that when I started doing the [New York Times] column. I had to give up reporting and I hated it. I loved reporting. I just loved bumming around the Senate and talking to those people.
LaFrance: You mentioned your column, so I want to get your view on comedic writing generally. Do you think that humor is more parts truth or more parts absurdity?
Baker: I don’t know! I don’t know what it is. You know, you laugh, it’s humorous. I am curious about the decline of wit in humor. That may be a cyclical thing. But humor’s much cruder than it was when I was working in that area, when humor required certain cleverness. Whereas now you say a nasty word and the audience will break up. It’s a nervous tic. You just say a four-letter word.
Everyone watches Jon Stewart, right? And they have the bleep thing when he really obviously says “shit” or “fuck,” and he’s cute about it. It’s a cheap laugh. It’s not funny. But the audience reacts. When you’ve got to do as much work as he does, I can understand why you go for the cheap laugh.
LaFrance: Which contemporary writers do you find funny?
Baker: It seems to be a dying form, doesn’t it? But the guys that you think of were never really that funny with any consistency. I certainly wasn’t. In fact, I thought it was a mistake to try to be funny.
Are there any humor columnists left? There must be. The Post carries a lot of columns. Richard Cohen strains at it now and again but it’s just not his thing. [Maureen] Dowd has a sharp tongue, and she had a gift for phrase making, cruel stuff. But I wouldn’t say that she’s a humor columnist.
Poor ole Art Buchwald, he went on forever. He hated to give it up. At some point he was moved out of the Style section. Ben [Bradlee] said Art had called him up nearly weeping and said, “You’re killing me. You’re killing my column.” But he always knew what Art was going to do. No one’s ever funny in the newspaper. It’s too ephemeral.
LaFrance: I want to ask you a little bit about Baltimore, because I was born there and—
Baker: Oh, you were born there?
LaFrance: Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Baker: I spent a lot of time hanging out at Hopkins when I was a police reporter. Haunting the emergency room, watching people die, and flirting with the nurses.
LaFrance: And you worked at The Baltimore Sun. You know, when I first learned what a newspaper was, it was the Sun.
Baker: It was a pretty good newspaper when I worked for it. Not because of me, but before I came. The Sun! Baltimore. I love Baltimore. Of course, I have a lot of connections to it. I went to school there—I went to high school, I went to college there—and went to work at the Sun. My mother’s house was there. I met my wife in Baltimore. Mimi, I met her on a blind date one night. She was not the blind date, but I got an introduction to Mimi through the blind date. They lived down around the Peabody Institute. I love Baltimore. I’m still an Orioles fan.
LaFrance: I remember Memorial Stadium.
Baker: Memorial Stadium! A terrible place to take a car. You go to the game and they’re playing the Yankees. The Yankees score 10 runs in the first inning and you can’t move your car for three hours. But the Sun was a really good paper. They put a lot of money into journalism. I really learned the trade in Baltimore. It took me 30 years at the Times to learn what I learned at the Sun in maybe a year.
LaFrance: Of all the jobs you’ve had, which did you like best?
Baker: Well I’ve had such good jobs, it’s hard to say. There’s nothing like being a columnist for The New York Times. That’s childhood’s dream of paradise, is it not? I loved being London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. I was foolish to come back. They lured me back with the White House. We used to sit in the lobby of the West Wing, just outside, most of us sleeping. These great reporters like [makes exaggerated snoring noise].
LaFrance: What magazines do you read? I see The Nation over there.
Baker: The Nation, they seem to publish twice a day now. Every time I look up, there’s The Nation again. I still subscribe to The New Yorker. That’s a childhood habit. And [the editor David] Remnick has done a great job. He’s brought it back from the grave, I think. They have very good reporting. Jane Mayer is a wonderful reporter, well edited. But magazines tend to promise more than they deliver. Vanity Fair is like that. That’s where journalism is now. I don’t envy you.
LaFrance: Oh?
Baker: Hardest thing in the world to make any sense of a conversation like this. I contemplate it and I’m grateful I gave up reporting.
LaFrance: I know we’re running out of time. Is there anything I should have asked you but didn’t?
Baker: Probably! But what does it matter?
“More circuitry was necessary.”
How is it that in a book as rich in description, as full of imagist sound-summonings, spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars as Ian S. Port’s The Birth of Loud, this rather bald little line should be my favorite? Two reasons, I think.
First, it comes at a mythic moment in the story. It’s 1966, and Jimi Hendrix, newly arrived in London, is looking for a heavier sound. The universe, in other words, is tensing up for another leap in self-awareness; dimensions of noise are about to disclose themselves. Hendrix already has some of the required equipment. He’s got his Fender Stratocaster (quite atypical—most of his fellow guitar heroes like the Gibson Les Paul); he’s got his 100-watt Marshall amplifier; and he’s got his own supple and godlike relationship with electricity. He’s got power. But he wants more; he wants, as Port puts it, “nuclear distortion.” To achieve that, somebody—some wizard/boffin/mad professor—is going to have to invent something. More circuitry is necessary.
[Read: The history of rock and roll in 1 song]
Second, in these four words is contained, philosophically, the whole book. Les Paul, born in 1915, was an auteur, a pop star, a musical innovator, and an unstoppable tinkerer who could hear sounds just beyond the rim of the technically possible. Leo Fender, born in 1909, was a low-key workshop sorcerer who ate a can of spaghetti for lunch every day and would scramble onstage with a screwdriver, while the musicians were playing, to fiddle with the gear he had built for them. Opposites in style and temperament, both men had the Promethean itch; both men sought, in the name of music, to master the strange and volatile element of loudness. And it led them both in the same direction—toward the creation of the solid-bodied electric guitar. More circuitry was always necessary.
At the beginning they were fellow voyagers, companions in obsession. Port conjures the scene at Les Paul’s Hollywood garage in the late 1940s, where Paul, Fender, and like-minded gearheads would mingle with a seasoned crew of country-and-western sidemen, swapping tips and stories. “None could have foreseen the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, but it was clear that music was growing louder and more driving, challenging the limits of acoustic instruments … There was a sense among these men that the potential for electric amplification in music hadn’t yet been realized, that there was still a lot of power waiting to be harnessed, incredible new tools waiting to be built.” Later they became competitors and rivals in the legend, with different versions of the origin story.
[Read: Did rock and roll pacify America?]
Les Paul, high-flyer, late-night charmer, is the interesting one. His pursuit of a purely electric guitar sound is more feverish and ego-driven, has more personal velocity than that of the monastic Fender. So it’s Paul, fiddling with guitars and mics in a Queens basement in 1941, who gets the huge electric shock: the divine flick of reprimand. It tears his muscles and takes away the feeling in his hands. “Electricity,” explains Port, “the very force Les believed would give him the prominence he so desired, had thrown everything into jeopardy.”
He recovers, however, and by 1947 he and electricity are ecstatically cooperating. “It began with layers of bright electric guitar runs racing over each other,” writes Port of Paul’s sci-fi instrumental “Lover,” which became a massive hit. “Some tracks mechanically sped up, their pitch raised, so that the strings seemed to twinkle.” Then in 1948, Paul is in a car crash that leaves him with his right arm bent at a permanent 90-degree angle. (“Just point it toward my belly button,” he tells the doctors before the final operation, “so I can play.”)
But biography is not the point here. The point is the inevitability—via the spangled accelerations of Les Paul’s studio experiments, and Leo Fender’s selfless mechanical futzing-about, and Muddy Waters, and Buddy Holly, and space-age design, and amplifiers stuffed with newspapers, and a host of other currents and convergences—of the electric guitar.
Port can write lovingly, such as when he describes an early, solid-wood model that belonged to the country twanger Merle Travis. (“The accent pieces around the bridge were intricate, even florid. The headstock was a flowing, avian shape …”) And he can write with technical lyricism: “The high output of Gibson’s dual-coil, humbucking pickups pushed amplifiers into thick, aggrieved distortion, while the guitar’s heavy body and glued-in neck produced a crying, mournful sustain.” He even made me like Eric Clapton for a minute. And from the fumbled genesis of the electric guitar to its expressive climax, he draws us a beautiful, educational arc.
It starts with Junior Barnard in 1946, onstage with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, overloading his little guitar amp and wincing at the feedback. It concludes 23 years later, with Jimi Hendrix, feedback’s Stravinsky, at Woodstock. End of the rainbow: The sun’s come up and there’s Jimi, extending over a dazed crowd the shattering celestial ironies of his “Star-Spangled Banner.” Port gives the performance a whole chapter, his prose rising to the occasion. “Each phrase arrived slowly and deliberately, the original melody still amazingly legible in the din.” Three minutes and 45 seconds: a piece of 20th-century art to stand beside Guernica and “The Waste Land,” produced just once, on an electric guitar.
Were I the editor of this book, I might have instructed Port not to stop here but to direct his narrative toward industrial England—to Birmingham, where a brooding mustache called Tony Iommi was about to turn the electric guitar into a tool of quantum investigation. A cosmic probe, as it were. That’s another story, perhaps: the story of Black Sabbath, and electricity, and what happened next. But someone needs to tell it. More circuitry is necessary. More, more, more.
Boys from a Catholic high school in Kentucky are hanging out near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., doing pep-rally cheers to drown out slurs and homophobic taunts from the Black Hebrew Israelites, when an American Indian man unexpectedly arrives on the scene, beating a drum as he interposes himself between the groups.
It’s the sort of conflict that … virtually never happens.
Yet after watching a viral video of that singular event, many observers felt that it was … a symbol of all that’s wrong with America. “The clip focused on one red-hatted boy staring directly at the man with the drum,” Katie Herzog wrote in The Stranger. “His stupid, smirking face seemed to symbolize everything wrong with America right now.”
Like many, she reconsidered her initial reaction when additional video of the encounter offered context that cast the boys in a better light. Newspapers published follow-up stories. Pundits issued mea culpas. They were right to do so; and commentators who stood by their original condemnations even as new facts emerged were wrong. (Though it was fair to scold the couple of boys who acted badly by miming tomahawk chops). Even that “smirking” facial expression was more changing and nuanced than it appeared in the initial video.
[Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test]
For the sake of argument, however, imagine there were a way to prove what that kid was thinking, and it turned out that his inner monologue was, Ha ha, I’ll disrespect this man approaching me by refusing to move out of his way and smiling in an irritatingly smug, conceited, and silly way.
What would that signify?
I have no pithy answer. But I know that this would not follow:
People are responding so strongly to these videos because they are so emblematic of the violence that indigenous people have suffered for over 500 years in the United States. We have been raped, relocated, trafficked, separated, degraded, demoralized, and massacred by the United States government and a culture of media, economy, education, and religion that has dehumanized indigenous people for the entire history of this stolen country. Presently, this country continues to poison indigenous people by defiling our water and pumping drugs and alcohol into indigenous communities; regulate native bodies through tribal numbers and blood quantum laws; and force assimilation (culturally, spiritually). These are tactics of genocide.
How strange to treat a smirking teen’s face, something known to every parent and schoolteacher in the world, as an emblem of “tactics of genocide”—as though the root of ethnic cleansing were adolescent insolence.
[Adam Serwer: The Trump-era overcorrection]
And that claim was not uniquely inapt.
“What was happening was clear and unmistakable, not just resonant but immediately recognizable as iconic,” Laura Wagner wrote at Deadspin. “If you wanted to compress the history of relations between the powerful and the powerless in America, or the dynamics of the current moment, into a single image, you couldn’t do much better than to present a white teen in a MAGA hat, surrounded by a screaming horde of his peers, smirking into the face of an old Native American man.”
I could do much better.
If I were compressing “the history of relations between the powerful and the powerless in America” into a single image, I’d represent “the powerful” with someone old enough to vote, not a scrawny high-school kid. My horde would look like the Confederate army, not a pep rally.
Treating a smirking teenager as a stand-in for the wanton slaughter of indigenous people, the brutal abomination of chattel slavery, the persecution of anti-war activists, the racial terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, or the internment of Japanese Americans utterly trivializes bygone atrocities. Did these commentators swallow the trendy notion that microaggressions are “violence,” and apply it backwards in history?
[Read: Stop trusting viral videos]
Were I to distill “the dynamics of the current moment into a single image,” focusing on negatives, I’d seek out photos of children forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexican border; or addicts dead from opiate overdoses; or mass-shooting victims at a synagogue; or white supremacists beating counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia; or lobbyists facilitating rent-seeking; or homeowners blocking the construction of apartments in their neighborhood; or segregated schools; or signs of climate change.
If you think the better choice is a photo of a smirking white 17-year-old, I suspect that the Donald Trump reelection team would thrill at letting you define the 2020 election. And I say that as someone who hates both the MAGA caps and the vicious campaign that popularized them.
Rebecca Traister wrote:
It’s the easily extracted concern for these grinning boys—amidst the deportations & family separations, the harassment & assaults, the low wages, poverty & incarceration, the shootings & police brutality, the lack of access to medical/repro care—that’s going to finally do me in.
Many who are sympathetic to the blue coalition’s concerns are baffled that a large faction within it spends so much energy on culture-war pile-ons, even opining that children are punchable or irredeemable or deserving of doxing. It’s the bizarre focus on these boys as what ails America, rather than on any of the many powerful people doing identifiable harm, or on any of the things that might end family separations, avert assaults, increase wages, reduce poverty, reform police, or increase access to medical care, that’s going to do in the left.
In 1987, a man, a woman, and their daughter attended a Tchaikovsky concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The most notable thing about their outing, all these years later, is something that actually wasn’t the least bit unusual: The two women waited in an interminably long line for the bathroom, while the man did not.
What separates their uncomfortable experience from those of innumerable others is that the man in their party was a California state senator. After witnessing just how long his family members had to wait, he introduced legislation to guarantee the state’s women more toilets.
In the three decades since, dozens of cities and states have joined the cause of “potty parity,” the somewhat trivializing nickname for the goal of giving men and women equal access to public toilets. These legislative efforts, along with changes to plumbing codes that altered the ratio of men’s to women’s toilets, have certainly helped imbalances in wait times, but they haven’t come close to resolving them.
“It still remains a huge problem today, overall,” says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the issue for more than a decade. The issue persists for many reasons: the exigencies of real estate, the building codes that govern construction, and, of course, sexism.
[Read: The private lives of public bathrooms]
One would think that developers could neutralize this problem by simply building more toilets for women. And they could—there’s no rule or regulation that would stop them. They’re beholden to local or state plumbing codes, but those only stipulate the minimum number of toilets for men and women in a given building, based on occupancy numbers and use.
Anything that exceeds those prescribed minimums becomes a question of spending. “From an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to increase the number of toilet fixtures if that’s going to decrease the amount of rentable area in a building,” says Christopher Chwedyk, a building-code consultant at the firm Burnham Nationwide. In other words, toilets don’t make money (and are quite expensive to install), so developers don’t have a financial reason to go beyond what the code requires.
Chwedyk told me about the variety of ways in which building design does account for occupants’ time. Most urgently, developers bring in experts who estimate how long it takes to exit a building, in case of an emergency. Less life-threatening considerations get attention, too. There are traffic consultants who model the building’s contributions to nearby congestion, and even estimators of elevator wait times. But it’s rare for developers to undertake any sort of timing study for bathrooms, even though it’s not clear that waiting for a toilet is any less important than waiting for an elevator.
Meghan Dufresne, an architect at the nonprofit Institute for Human Centered Design, says it’s hard for potty-parity advocates like her to go up against the end goals of real-estate companies. “Nobody is paid for work in this area,” she says. “There’s no career for this, so I think it’s a hard sell to get people to provide extra restrooms.”
If most developers aren’t going to install more toilets than are required by local or state plumbing codes, then perhaps the solution is to change the requirements. Indeed, that strategy has produced a measure of progress in the past three decades.
To understand how much better regulations have gotten on the issue of wait times, it helps to understand just how horrendous they were. The customs of public-restroom construction began to coalesce in the 19th century. Then, “the main concern of the male city fathers was to provide toilets for men, whose role in public space was accepted and indeed regarded as important to the industrial economy,” writes Clara Greed, an urban-planning scholar in the United Kingdom, in her contribution to the 2010 academic anthology Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. “From the outset,” she explained, “public toilet provision for women was seen as an extra, as a luxury, or as problematic in other respects.”
As plumbing codes took shape in the following century, they generally overlooked women’s needs. As Greed and others have noted, this was probably not a coincidence, given that architects, engineers, and code officials have historically been much more likely to be men.
John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, told me that when he started following the issue of potty parity closely three decades ago, it was common for men’s and women’s restrooms to be equal sizes. “Sometimes,” he told me, “they would in fact be built one on top of the other, exactly the same size. The men’s would be on the first floor, third floor, and fifth floor; the women’s on two, four, and six.” Of course, thanks to urinals’ compactness, more fixtures could be crammed into men’s bathrooms than women’s, so floor space was not a great proxy for equality.
[Read: There’s no toilet like home]
As state legislators started tinkering with restroom laws in the late 1980s, they thought about fairness not in terms of square footage but in terms of the number of toilets. This was finally a recognition that women take longer to use the restroom—not just because they have to enter a stall to pee, but also because they menstruate. Many jurisdictions started apportioning more toilets in women’s rooms than in men’s; New York City, for instance, passed a bill in 2005 that required all new bars, arenas, and movie theaters to have a 2-to-1 ratio of women’s to men’s stalls. From 1987 to 2006, at least 21 states enacted potty-parity legislation.
These laws have no doubt helped, but there are many downsides to treating wait times as a matter of toilet ratios. For one, most potty-parity laws don’t apply retroactively, which means that even if the numbers are tweaked in favor of women, older structures will remain unchanged.
Another issue: The difference between men’s and women’s wait times is most pronounced at times when demand spikes, such as halftime at a sports game or intermission at a play. And plumbing codes, even when they account for what women need, aren’t calibrated to reduce wait times to zero during these extremes. “The ideal condition is that there’s always a facility open—whenever you walk into a toilet facility, you never stand in line, ever—and you can’t have that,” says Fred Grable, a senior staff engineer at the International Code Council (ICC), an organization whose model plumbing code has been adopted in a majority of U.S. states. “You’d have [to] double the toilet facilities in the building.”
Still, there seems to be a mismatch between women’s experiences and the code-development process. Grable, who administers the process through which the ICC’s plumbing code is updated, told me that “if there was a problem, that people were just really having an issue with, well, ‘We don’t have enough women’s facilities,’ then they would be coming to the process. Everybody knows by now that you’ve got to make proposals to the code and demonstrate [the problem] somehow, even if it’s just taking photographs of events where people are standing on line, or some sort of counting process.”
But regular old bathroom-goers are probably not keen on familiarizing themselves with the intricacies of plumbing-code development. “The average person wouldn’t understand these ratios and understand which codes apply, so they don’t really know where to complain—they’re just miserable,” says Dufresne, of the Institute for Human Centered Design.
The last objection to fixating on codes is a more philosophical one, about the limits of thinking numerically. As I spoke with architects, plumbing engineers, and design scholars for this piece, it became clear that building codes are looked to as a neutral, value-free lodestar, even though they have a strongly gendered history. As Greed has written, when it comes to restroom design, “an obsession with structural and technical issues predominates over social, ergonomic, health, equality, accessibility, and livability issues, with women’s needs peripheral.”
Reflecting on the progress that has and hasn’t been made, Dufresne said, “I think the ratios are a good try at improving things … but the main thing we’re looking to focus on is equal speed of access to the restrooms.” “Equal speed of access” is a standard of fairness that points to a solution that now, unfortunately, often leads to political flare-ups: gender-neutral bathrooms. That is, one way to guarantee that men and women wait the same amount of time for a toilet is to make them wait for the same toilets.
Potty parity is just one salutary outcome of gender-neutral bathrooms. As Joel Sanders, a New York City–based architect who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, explained to me, they don’t force people into a gender binary and they are safer, particularly for trans women and trans women of color, who tend to suffer disproportionately from violence in bathrooms. Sanders favors an arrangement, common in Europe, in which rows of unisex stalls (partitioned more fully than standard American stalls, without all those “peekaboo cracks”) are accompanied by a bank of sinks for “communal grooming and washing.”
In buildings with lower occupancies, single-user gender-neutral bathrooms—lockable rooms open to anyone—would be similarly helpful. As Anthony, the Illinois professor, notes in her book Defined by Design, these bathrooms are particularly helpful to families. She writes of single fathers who “may have no choice but to bring their young daughters into the men’s room” and of an elderly woman who “worries about her husband who has Alzheimer’s disease” when he enters a larger men-only restroom. (The 2018 edition of the ICC’s plumbing code is the first to include guidelines for such single-user gender-neutral restrooms, and the 2021 code will establish standards for the layout Sanders likes.)
These approaches are promising, but they might be too expensive an undertaking for existing buildings. Banzhaf, the George Washington law professor, has a suggestion for when that’s the case. He told me about a campus building that recently converted a men’s room into an “all-gender room,” simply by changing the sign. Most of the time, he says, it functions as it used to, as a men’s room. But when demand surges—for instance, right after a mock-trial session ends—women are able to use the stalls there as well as those in the nearby women’s room, whose sign remains the same.
I was skeptical that this arrangement would fly—that women wouldn’t mind being in the presence of men using urinals, and that men wouldn’t mind women being there either. But Banzhaf says that he has heard few complaints from students. “Since most public buildings—especially theaters and sports venues where the potty-parity problem is most likely to occur—have paired men’s and women’s restrooms, the same simple approach to the potty-parity problem could be used anywhere at virtually no cost,” he says.
Of course, not every American bathroom user is likely to have the same sensibility as Banzhaf’s urban-dwelling law students, and men do not have a record of responding well when forced to cede facilities to women—see the irate male football fans in Nashville who in 1999 pushed for a potty-parity exemption when a new state law resulted in stadium-toilet ratios that had some of them waiting 15 to 20 minutes.
There are myriad ways to address potty parity, if the public would accept them and if builders would implement them. It’s easy enough to change a sign. Changing minds is harder.
“It appears the votes are now there to supersize the Second Amendment’s protection for guns,” Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, told me.
He was referring to the Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday to grant review in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York.
It has been 11 years since a 5–4 majority, in District of Columbia v. Heller, announced that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess handguns in the home for purposes of self-defense. It has been nine years since the same majority held in McDonald v. City of Chicago that an identical handgun-possession right is “incorporated” by the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which means it applies to states—and cities—as well as to the federal government). The Court in Heller indicated that it was deciding only a narrow question. Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion cautioned that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
Then, for a decade, the high court retreated from the field, while lower courts wrestled with gun-rights challenges around the country. Those courts had a tough job: Heller and McDonald were not self-explanatory. The Court found an individual “right to bear arms” for the first time in American history, but did not explain its full scope. Is gun ownership for purposes other than self-defense also protected? Does the “right to keep and bear arms” extend to semiautomatic weapons? Are license requirements themselves violations of the right—especially if local police must approve them before they are issued? Can localities charge fees to handgun purchasers to offset the costs of gun crime? Are restrictions on public carrying of handguns—or carrying in public of concealed handguns—constitutional?
[Read: The second amendment does not transcend all others]
The lower courts have been split on those issues, but the Supreme Court remained obdurately silent—until Tuesday.
Almost of necessity, the result is likely to give lower courts what they have lacked—a constitutional test that can be applied to a wide variety of handgun restrictions. And as Winkler suggested, the new conservative majority seems likely to create a test that will invalidate many local laws—and may in fact shred the entire fabric of state and local gun regulation.
The petitioners in Rifle & Pistol are a gun-advocacy group and a number of individual New York City residents. The individuals have “premises licenses” to possess handguns in their homes, à la Heller and McDonald, but not the harder-to-get “carry licenses” to take their handguns with them when they go out.They are free to use their handguns at gun ranges for target practice and shooting contests—but only if those gun ranges are located in New York City. These limitations, the plaintiffs complain, make it difficult for them to visit out-of-town gun ranges, and to carry their guns for self-protection to second homes outside the city.
Until 2001, New York issued “target licenses” that allowed transport to out-of-state target ranges. However, the state said in its brief opposing Supreme Court review:
[The New York Police Department] observed widespread abuses of the target license. Over many years, NYPD received reports of target licensees travelling with their firearms when they were not travelling to or from an NYPD-authorized range. These reports included licensees travelling with loaded firearms, licensees found with firearms nowhere near the vicinity of an authorized range, licensees taking their firearms out on airplanes, and licensees travelling with their firearms during hours when no NYPD-authorized range was open.
In effect, it seems, the city decided that allowing the “target exception” to its transportation rules was making it too easy to evade them entirely. The “premises license” limitations are unusually stringent. Nonetheless, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld them. That decision noted that Heller and McDonald did not create a general Second Amendment test. So the court measured the restrictions by their effect on the Heller right: possession in the home for self-defense.
The appeals court also noted that the city has not barred all target ranges; the plaintiffs can go to licensed gun ranges to learn to shoot. Those who prefer to go to out-of-town ranges may do that as well—most gun ranges have weapons available for loan or rent. As for second homes, the plaintiffs need only buy a second handgun and store it there for self-defense when in residence.
Without a test issued by the Supreme Court, the Second Circuit employed “intermediate scrutiny.” Unlike “strict scrutiny”—a test almost impossible to pass—the intermediate test asks whether a law is “substantially related to an important governmental interest”—that is, whether it does a pretty good job of helping the government achieve a goal that seems pretty important. Balancing the mild burden on the challengers’ right against the city’s need to keep guns out of public areas, the appeals court upheld the transport regulations.
The long-term aim of the gun-rights movement is to move the Second Amendment up into the tier of rights that are insulated from virtually any regulation; most prominent among these are free speech and religious freedom. The challengers’ petition in this case argues that the Supreme Court would never tolerate, for example, license fees for newspapers; it further quotes McDonald as saying that the “right to bear arms” should not be treated as a “second-class right.”
There are signs that the Court’s new conservative majority may be ready to move sharply in the direction of stricter review of gun laws. Justice Samuel Alito was in the majority in Heller andMcDonald; as an appeals-court judge, he had argued that the federal government could not ban machine guns. Justice Neil Gorsuch heard no gun cases as a circuit judge, but in 2017, he joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a hard-line dissent that advocated broad gun rights. In that case, the Court denied review to a case challenging a California locality’s restrictions on carrying handguns in public. Thomas wrote in his dissent, “The right to bear arms extends to public carry.” In joining that dissent, Gorsuch sent a strong message about where he stands.
[Read: The slave-state origins of modern gun rights]
As for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he has left no doubt about his view. After the Supreme Court decided Heller, the District of Columbia revised its firearms laws to require registration of all weapons—and prohibited registration of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. In 2011, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the new law by a 2–1 vote.
The dissenting vote came from Kavanaugh. According to his reading of Heller, Second Amendment rights are not to be decided by a constitutional “test” in the ordinary sense. Courts need not “balance” a state’s interests, such as preventing crime, against the burden on gun ownership. Instead, gun-ownership rights stand on their own and need no justification in any situation. Judges should assess “text, history, and tradition” only. First, a court is to ask how a given restriction compares with those accepted by the framers of the Second Amendment (this inquiry includes “appropriate analogues [to“traditional” weapons] when dealing with modern weapons and new circumstances”). Next, it must ask how the restriction at issue compares with the role of weapons in society since the framing. Using his “text, tradition, and history” analysis, Kavanaugh wrote that he would have struck down both the assault-rifle ban and the magazine restrictions. One of his reasons was that most places in 2011 didn’t ban assault rifles; that meant the D.C. statute was not “traditional.”
Classic “originalism” is already at best subjective; we really can’t know with certainty what Americans “understood” about the Constitution when it was adopted. Legal history can be read many ways; adding in “tradition”—that is, a freewheeling assessment of the history of firearms not limited to legal sources and spanning the years from 1787 until now—creates a jurisprudential bullet that probably can pierce precedent, or public policy, or both.
The Rifle & Pistol case begins, then, with four virtually certain votes against the New York law—the two newcomers, Thomas, and Alito. Chief Justice John Roberts voted for the gun owners in Heller and McDonald. He may have been trying to keep the Court out of the Second Amendment area for institutional reasons since then, but that’s not likely to make him go back on his earlier votes when the time comes to throw down.
“The impact of this case could be huge,” Winkler told me, because the Court may decide that the right to gun possession extends outside the home. The Court could undermine long-standing restrictions on concealed carry in America’s major cities, leading to hundreds of thousands more guns on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Beyond that, a sharp jurisprudential turn on guns may signal that a confident conservative majority feels ready to make big leaps to the right in other areas, ranging from campaign finance to religious freedom to civil rights to abortion.
At the beginning of The Kid Who Would Be King, Britain is inexorably divided. What has sown such chaos in the country? It’s unclear, but the newspaper headlines scream about war, impending catastrophe, and a future even more doomed than the present. Reading this, you’d be forgiven for thinking Joe Cornish’s new film is a sober piece of nonfiction, but it’s actually a delightful modern fantasy: a recasting of classic Arthurian myth via a group of middle-school adventurers. In The Kid Who Would Be King, Britain’s turmoil can be undone only by a youngster pulling a sword from a stone. Would that it were so simple.
Still, it’s heartening to finally see the return of Cornish to the big screen. An inventive comedian who seamlessly made the leap to filmmaking with his 2011 debut, the trenchant sci-fi thriller Attack the Block (which starred a young John Boyega), he has been long overdue for a follow-up. But The Kid Who Would Be King is a worthy successor, an original and sprightly caper that recalls midsize, Steven Spielberg–produced hits of the 1980s, such as The Goonies. It’s a film that somehow takes one of the oldest “chosen one” narratives around—the story of King Arthur—and finds something fresh in its tale of heroism.
The movie’s 21st-century Arthur is a plucky 12-year-old named Alex (played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, the son of Andy Serkis). Picked on at school for looking like a “Lego mini-figure boy” and living with his stressed-out single mother (Denise Gough), Alex relates to many larger-than-life figures of contemporary pop culture—orphaned dreamers like Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker who are fated to perform great deeds. Alex’s dad, who disappeared when Alex was a small child, left behind a book of Arthurian legends. So when the boy chances upon a sword in a concrete block at a housing development and pulls it out with ease, it’s easy to imagine where his mind goes.
Accompanied by his only friend, Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), an adorably squeaky sidekick who encourages all of these heroic fantasies, Alex realizes it’s up to him to save the day and knit Britain back together. This involves doing battle with fantastic creatures emerging from a dark nether-verse and eventually winning the trust of his perpetual bullies, Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris). If those names seem familiar, they’re supposed to, as is that of the gawky new student Mertin (Angus Imrie), who arrives at Alex’s school out of nowhere and offers to teach the boy how to be a proper king. Cornish makes all of the mythical parallels straightforward in case viewers don’t know of Lancelot, Kay, and Bedivere, cutting to gorgeously animated footage of classic Arthurian tales and lending the movie some sweeping Lord of the Rings–esque scale.
These kids are the knights of Alex’s modern round table (a coffee table with collapsible sides), and Mertin (who admits his name is really Merlin) begins to educate them on the forgotten enchantment of their country, whisking them to Stonehenge and the remote English coasts of Tintagel, and teaching them the basics of magic. Imrie is the film’s biggest discovery: The 24-year-old actor, who’s known for his stage and radio work, inhabits his iconic mentor role with unique flair. This Merlin performs magic by clicking his fingers wildly and replenishes his powers by stuffing himself with chicken nuggets. Sometimes, he’ll sneeze and turn into either an owl or his older self (played by a garrulous Patrick Stewart).
The film hums with energy anytime Merlin is on-screen, but even when it’s in the hands of its very sweet preteen ensemble, it’s a lively watch. Cornish showed off his particular skill for ensembles composed of young, unproven actors with Attack the Block; on top of that, The Kid Who Would Be King adds some large-scale action featuring fantasy monsters. There’s a fair amount of peril for Alex and company to deal with, and Cornish communicates it all cleanly and simply, never overwhelming the frame with CGI chaos.
The action is only half the point, however. The true journey for Alex is one of self-discovery, away from the fatherless heroes of the movies he loves; the mystery of his parentage, which is teased in the first half of the film, isn’t as crucial as it initially seems. Cornish is trying to push back against the familiar beats of those stories, while borrowing from an even more primal part of the Arthurian narrative—the strength of community and the power one draws from bridging gaps. Just as King Arthur united his rivals, Alex finally gets his classmates on his side, and for the film’s final set piece, they all work together to defend their school against fiery beasts on horseback. A sword in a stone may not be the solution for our real divided world, but for two hours in the theater, it makes for a pretty entertaining fantasy.
A surging number of Americans understand that climate change is happening and believe that it could harm their family and the country, according to a new poll from Yale and George Mason University.
But at the same time, Americans are not any more willing to pay money to fight climate change than they were three years ago, says another new poll, conducted by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago.
The polls suggest that public opinion about climate change is in a state of upheaval. Even as President Donald Trump has cast doubt on climate change, most Americans have rejected his position. Record numbers of Americans describe climate change as a real and present danger. Nearly a quarter of the country says they already see its tidings in their day-to-day life, saying “personal observations of weather” helped convince them of climate change’s reality.
Despite this increasing acceptance, there is no clear political path forward. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes” were needed to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius. Such a transformation would be, in other words, expensive. But almost 70 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t pay $10 every month to help cool the warming planet.
The data are still striking, suggesting that U.S. concern about climate change has leapt by several points in just the past year. More than seven out of 10 Americans now say that global warming is “personally important” to them, an increase of nine points since March 2018, according to the Yale poll. More Americans than ever—29 percent—also say they are “very worried” about climate change, an eight-point increase.
[Read: How I talk to my daughter about climate change]
These changes are basically unprecedented. “We’ve not seen anything like that in the 10 years we’ve been conducting the study,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, a senior research scientist at Yale who helped oversee the poll.
It reflects a large shift, as an outright majority of Americans—a record-high number—believe that climate change could endanger their loved ones. Historically, most Americans have said that global warming “will harm people in the United States” while insisting that it would “not harm me, personally.” Now 57 percent of Americans say global warming will harm their neighbors, 56 percent say it will harm their family, and 49 percent say it will harm them personally.
These changes show up in both new polls. The AP survey found that seven out of 10 of Americans understand climate change is happening. Even more notable: A slim majority of Republicans—52 percent—understand that climate change is real. (The AP asked questions about “climate change,” while Yale polled about “global warming.” The difference in language didn’t seem to change how people replied.)
Climate change itself may be driving this remarkable shift. Nearly half of Americans say that the science supporting climate change is “more convincing” now than it was five years ago, the AP poll found. The vast majority cited “recent extreme weather events”—such as hurricanes, droughts, and heat waves—as especially persuasive.
Yet it’s not clear that Americans are willing to do anything about fighting climate change. Many economists support a carbon tax, a policy that makes polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Forty-four percent of Americans say they would support such a tax, according to the AP.
Americans become more supportive of a carbon tax, though, when they know where the money it collects will go. Sixty-seven percent of Americans would support a carbon tax if it were used to restore forests and wetlands. Majorities also endorse a tax that would support renewable-energy R&D or public-transit improvements. But even then, most people are not willing to spend much. Seventy percent say they would vote against a $10 monthly fee tacked on to their power bill. Forty percent would oppose a $1 monthly increase.
These results don’t lend themselves to straightforward answers about what actions to take next.
Recently, some oil companies and Washington elite have endorsed a deficit-neutral carbon fee, a type of carbon tax that regularly mails revenue collected back to every American as a check. The same proposal would also roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules. The AP poll found Americans were least supportive of this plan: Three out of four said they would oppose a carbon tax that “eases climate-related regulation,” and only half liked the idea of a monthly rebate.
Yet the opposite strategy hasn’t worked either. In November, voters in Washington State considered a carbon tax that would have supported forest restoration, wind and solar energy, and public transit—everything that people just told the AP pollsters they like. Oil companies spent $31 million to defeat the measure, and voters rejected it by a 12-point margin.
[Read: The new politics of climate change]
The AP and the University of Chicago did not directly ask people about a Green New Deal, a still-hazy progressive plan to fight climate change while expanding federal programs. “But this [poll] sort of supports the idea that it could be politically popular among voters,” says Sam Ori, the executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
So what’s going on here? One possibility is that Americans are slowly, grindingly, coming around to the reality of climate change. But political scientists talk about an idea called “thermostatic opinion.” It holds that U.S. public mood works like a seesaw: When one party occupies the White House, voters immediately start to turn against its favored policies and outlook. Though more of an observation than a law, it helps explain why Americans were more conservative in 2013—just after Barack Obama’s second victory—than they had been in decades. Since Trump is both unpopular and linked to climate denial, isn’t it possible that the public mood will just shift again once he leaves office?
Leiserowitz, the Yale scientist, isn’t so sure. Americans are more certain about climate change now than they have been since 2008, he said. But 2008 was a different moment: Both major parties endorsed the reality of climate change, and the Republican candidate in that year’s election, John McCain, even had his own climate plan. So strong cues from both parties’ political elite suggested that it was okay to accept climate change—and public opinion followed.
Now the country’s president has vacillated on the reality of climate change, calling it an “expensive hoax,” then revising his view. Climate change “is one of the most politically polarized issues in Americans,” Leiserowitz said. “So the fact that Trump is now a hoaxer in chief and yet these numbers are going up is actually really interesting.”
FBI agents have lost irreplaceable sources. Joint Terrorism Task Force officers can’t get into the bureau’s computer systems. Federal investigations are being stymied by a lack of resources. The partial government shutdown, now in its 33rd day, has become a serious national-security threat, the FBI Agents Association said on Tuesday.
Over the past several weeks, the association has been compiling stories from agents about the the shutdown’s impact on the bureau’s operations. One agent, speaking anonymously, said his unit had “lost several sources who have worked for months, and years, to penetrate groups and target subjects” due to the inability to pay confidential sources. “These assets cannot be replaced,” the agent said. “Serving my country has always been a privilege, but it has never been so hard or thankless.” Another agent reported: “Not being able to pay Confidential Human Sources risks losing them and the information they provide FOREVER. It is not a switch that we can turn on and off.”
[Read: FBI agents say the shutdown is a threat to national security]
Others complained that their investigations were being slow-rolled, with dozens of grand-jury subpoenas going undelivered. “The operational impacts of this shutdown are immeasurable,” said one agent in the Northeast region. “We have postponed the indictment of subjects due to the shutdown.”
President Donald Trump, who said last month that he would take responsibility for shutting the government down if Congress refused to appropriate $5.7 billion for his border wall, proposed what he described as a compromise over the weekend. But he continued to insist on the wall. Democrats rejected the proposal immediately.
The president did not mention the more than 800,000 federal workers affected by the impasse, let alone the effects it has had on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and drug-trafficking and cybersecurity operations by the FBI—an agency for which he has little affection. In the two and a half years since the bureau launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president has chided the FBI in dozens of tweets, rallies, and interviews. The withering morale and possibility of having to work without pay has made it difficult to recruit new agents, current and former agents have told me.
[Read: The Republican Party turns against the FBI]
The thousands of FBI agents and other federal employees whose unfettered work is imperative for national security have received “no assurances” about when their next paycheck will come or when they will be reimbursed for travel expenses—including overseas trips crucial to operations, one agent told me. The agent, who works in a particularly sensitive counterterrorism unit, was recently asked to travel to Africa out of his own pocket should his counterparts there need assistance.
Another agent told me that “funding for all day-to-day operations is gone. There is no rainy-day fund of cash sitting somewhere.” He wryly added that he and his colleagues are “getting about as much [information] as you are hearing from press office—very little and very late.”
An FBI spokesperson would not elaborate on the funding mechanisms available for daily operations. But she said that FBI agents and support personnel in field offices are excepted from furlough, meaning they are allowed to come to work but still won’t be paid. “FBI operations are directed towards national security and violations of federal law, and must be able to continue during a lapse in appropriations,” the spokesperson said.
Despite their best efforts to proceed with business as usual, however, agents say their investigations are being put on hold by forces out of their control, such as a lack of funds from U.S. attorneys’ offices to issue grand-jury subpoenas. “Operationally, I requested a subpoena from the U.S. attorney’s office yesterday and was told it may take a while because their legal assistants are furloughed,” one agent said. “Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, it could be several weeks before my subpoena is issued.”
The federal judiciary is running out of money, too—the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said in a statement on Tuesday that the federal courts can sustain funded operations through January 31, 2019 through an extension made possible by moving funds around. Courts will continue to conduct criminal trials, but some federal courts have had to issue orders “suspending or postponing civil cases in which the government is a party,” according to the statement. A federal judge in Illinois said on Tuesday that the court may run out of money to pay jurors and employees if the shutdown continues past February 8.
Ultimately, the obstacles facing FBI agents during the shutdown will have a boomerang effect on the work of the U.S. attorneys’ offices, whose federal prosecutors are “heavily dependent on law-enforcement agents for fact gathering,” said Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. “Bottom line in terms of investigations: There’s very little prosecutors can do on their own if federal agents are sidelined,” he said. “Prosecutors obviously cannot execute field operations (search warrants or surveillance or arrests, for example), so without agents, those investigative avenues are completely cut off.” Honig also noted that prosecutors are trained to never speak with a witness or target without a law-enforcement agent present as a witness.
Mimi Rocah, who was also a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, agreed. “It’s very hard to effectively and thoroughly work investigations and cases when the FBI is not fully functioning,” Rocah said, noting that the U.S. attorneys’ offices were dealing with their own employees not being paid and other budget constraints. “Some cases can wait, but some are urgent matters of public safety and can’t, such as anything related to violence, guns, minors, etc. But then the nonurgent cases get pushed to the back burner and things get backlogged, and that can have really lasting impacts.”
In a petition sent to the White House, the vice president’s office, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other House and Senate leaders earlier this month, the FBI Agents Association warned of the effects of the ongoing shutdown on the bureau’s work. “The operations of the FBI require funding,” the petition reads. “As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources—this situation is not sustainable.” Asked what the agents’ next steps will be if the funding is not restored, the association’s president, Tom O’Connor, said that they’ll continue to do “the best with what we have.”
“But,” he added, “I think it’s the public that will have an outcry when they see things not being done because we don’t have the funding for it.”
Almost 20 years have passed since suicide bombers blew a hole into the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors in a brazen prelude to the September 11th attacks that came a year later. Yet the U.S. still hasn’t fully settled the question of how to bring terrorism suspects to justice—and the diverging fates of two of the Cole plotters show how the confused approach haunts U.S. national security.
In the first case, Jamal al-Badawi, who helped coordinate logistics for the attack, was caught, tried, and incarcerated in Yemen, where he escaped prison twice and was finally set free before being killed in an American air strike this month. In the second, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the actual alleged mastermind of the attack, remains in legal purgatory in Guantánamo Bay—yet another pretrial hearing took place this week—in part because his confessions were obtained under torture.
Their stories demonstrate not just the failures of some U.S. counterterrorism experiments, but just how difficult those failures are to correct. The families of civilians accidentally killed in air strikes have borne some of the highest costs. Early missteps have also hurt the United States: Some of Badawi’s co-conspirators in the Cole attack went on to plot 9/11; even later, some of his prison cohorts founded al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, now the most virulent branch of the group.
“These problems pre-existed 9/11, this question of what are the proper array of options for incapacitating a dangerous person,” says Robert Chesney, a law professor at University of Texas at Austin who worked on detention policy in the Obama administration.
The U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remains open and its justice system ineffectual; air strikes on terrorism suspects have disrupted dangerous plots but have also engendered bitterness and helped foment radicalization. In Syria, where U.S.-backed Kurdish forces are holding hundreds of isis suspects from dozens of countries—including in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States—a new test is coming. The Kurds can’t hold them indefinitely, and absent some plan for what to do with them, they could be sent home to regimes that will torture them—or might simply walk free to help isis rebuild just as the U.S. is leaving.
[Read: The danger of Yemen’s secret prisons]
“The most reliable system, by far, by any measure is criminal prosecution,” Chesney told me. Over the period Nashiri has been in Guantánamo, for instance, American courts have produced more than 600 terrorism-related convictions; Guantánamo has had only a handful, and Nashiri himself hasn’t even been brought to trial. So once a terrorism suspect is captured, criminal prosecution is far more efficient than a military commission at Guantánamo, but Chesney noted it’s not always feasible to apprehend a terrorism suspect regardless, for instance when doing so might be too dangerous.
In the Cole case, the spectrum ranged from military detention, to proxy imprisonment, to lethal force. The crime at the center was grave. The Navy destroyer was part of a mission to enforce sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and had stopped to refuel at the Yemeni port city of Aden on October 12, 2000. A skiff bearing two suicide bombers approached it and blew up, ripping a hole in the ship and killing 17 sailors. Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen at the time, recalled of seeing the ship afterward: “It was like seeing a wounded eagle. It had that sense of violation and tragedy.”
Al-Qaeda had already been targeting the U.S. for years at that point, notably with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Cole attack secured al-Qaeda’s highest American death toll to that point. The lack of U.S. retaliation in the aftermath also directly encouraged the September 11 attacks, the 9/11 Commission later found. Osama bin Laden had been expecting a military response to the Cole bombing, and when none came, he became convinced that he had to try something bigger.
[Read: Is Guantanamo a terrorist recruitment tool]
Nashiri was the alleged field commander, acting at bin Laden’s direction and with his funding. He spent months observing the activity of U.S. naval boats in the Red Sea and personally recruited the two suicide bombers, according to a Defense Department memo. Apprehended in Dubai two years later, he became the subject of an early U.S. experiment in dealing with terrorism suspects: He ended up at a CIA black site, where he was tortured and then shipped to Guantánamo Bay. His case remains bogged down in pretrial hearings; at one point his defense team quit in protest after claiming their communications with him were being monitored. He has been charged with war crimes but has yet to see a trial.
Badawi’s case took a different path. He was in charge of logistics, such as securing safe houses. Nashiri instructed him to buy the boat, according to a U.S. indictment. Soon after the Cole bombing, a joint Yemeni and U.S. investigation turned up a lead to Badawi, who eventually admitted his role to FBI agents. He endured no torture in FBI custody. The Yemeni government declined to extradite him to the United States, instead imprisoning him at home. But whether through the incompetence or complicity of Yemeni prison authorities, Badawi escaped in 2003. Then in 2004, a Yemeni court sentenced him to death and jailed him again. Again he escaped, in 2006—this time in a dramatic prison break involving more than 20 prisoners, many convicted al-Qaeda members who fled through a 450-foot tunnel from the prison terminating in a mosque.
The cohort included men who would become leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Well before the Islamic State became famous for its recruitment videos, AQAP was an innovator in English-language propaganda aimed at inspiring attacks overseas, with its own magazine, Inspire, dedicated in part to that purpose. The magazine frequently cited Guantanamo in its case against the United States.
In 2007, Badawi turned himself back in, only to be set free after pledging loyalty to then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh. A Newsweek report from the time described him receiving guests at his home outside Aden—about five minutes from the prison he’d first escaped.
[Read: Is closing Guantanamo still conceivable?]
More than a decade would pass before an American missile found him. A spokesman for the U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, alleged that he had “remained an active adviser and member” of AQAP prior to his death. By then, President Saleh had been deposed and killed. Other USS Cole conspirators had been killed in air strikes, along with leaders in AQAP, including Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen whose taped sermons helped inspire attacks overseas, including in the United States. Yemen had descended into brutal civil war, during which AQAP continued to be active. It remains the most lethal franchise of al-Qaeda, despite a drone campaign against the group that intensified under the Obama administration and has continued into Trump’s.
The two Cole conspirators helped jump-start the War on Terror that drags on to this day. U.S. officials at the highest levels of government now seek to turn the page, declaring explicitly that terrorism is not the primary threat to national security. But the country is still struggling to bring even pre-9/11 plotters to justice. And a new generation of terrorism suspects is taking their place, whether or not the U.S. is ready.
Astrophysicists usually don’t get chased by reporters, but that’s what happened to Avi Loeb last November.
They bombarded Loeb’s phone lines. They showed up at his office with television crews. One of them even followed him home and confronted him at the front door, demanding Loeb answer a question.
“Do you believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists?”
Days earlier, Loeb had published a new research paper in an astrophysics journal. Scientists publish thousands of research papers every year in journals big and small, prestigious and obscure. Usually, aside from some basic coverage by science journalists, these papers attract little public attention. But Loeb’s latest work covered a topic that is historically very attention-getting: aliens.
The subject of the paper was a mysterious space rock known as ‘Oumuamua. When it was discovered in October 2017, the rock was the talk of the astronomy community. ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object astronomers have seen in our solar system; it did not originate here, but likely traveled for billions and billions of years, past countless other stars, before reaching our own. Telescopes caught it just after it sped past the sun. They can’t see it anymore, but ‘Oumuamua is still going. Eventually, it will cross the edge of our solar system and into interstellar space, again.
The leading hypothesis among astronomers is that ‘Oumuamua is an odd-looking comet, a remnant of another solar system that was kicked out by natural forces and sent barreling through the cosmos.
Loeb offered a different explanation: ‘Oumuamua could be a probe that was deliberately sent to the solar system by an alien civilization.
[Read: ]Looking for solar panels on distant planets
It’s no surprise that news of Loeb’s theory took off. The detection of extraterrestrial beings, whether they’re the wrinkly ET kind or the teeny microbial type, would be among the most significant scientific discoveries in human history. The thought of finding sapient life beyond Earth, of learning that we are not alone, is exhilarating and disorienting. The suggestion that it might actually have happened is doubly so.
But there’s another reason the paper was so widely covered: Loeb is a tenured Harvard professor.
“If this was some random astronomer that you had never heard of from, say, Equatorial Guinea, you probably wouldn’t write a story on it,” says Bryan Gaensler, the director of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and a former colleague of Loeb’s at Harvard. “There’s a lot of astronomers that have outlandish ideas, and most of them aren’t taken seriously by the community, and most of the time the media don’t really give attention to them.”
Loeb has two decades’ worth of experience and is well regarded in the field. But that background doesn’t come up in news stories. Harvard does.
Loeb even looks the part of someone you’d believe about, well, an extraterrestrial spaceship zooming past Earth. Bespectacled, with a neat haircut, Loeb is the antithesis of the History Channel’s disheveled, wild-haired man-turned-meme, who mentioned aliens one too many times. If both men approached you on the street and told you aliens existed, which one would you believe?
[Read: ]I don’t believe in aliens anymore
Several astronomers I spoke with echoed Gaensler’s sentiments. So did Loeb himself. He recognizes that his name-brand employer likely attracted the news organizations—and probably primed their readers to trust him.
“It’s not just affiliation; it’s the fact that I’m chair of the astronomy department [at Harvard],” Loeb said. He rattled off a series of other legitimizing titles: director of the Institute for Theory and Computation; founding director of the Black Hole Initiative; chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies; chair of the scientific committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative.
Coming from an expert at a high-prestige institution, with credentials in the relevant field, news of an encounter with extraterrestrial life would be more believable to most people, says Michael Varnum, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. Varnum studies a very niche and very relevant topic: how the public might react to the news of an alien discovery.
The prestige effect is magnified, too, “if the evidence or arguments are technical enough that it is not easy for laypeople to understand or evaluate them,” he says. The journalists who cover Loeb make him seem even more trustworthy. “Part of what reinforces that credibility is coverage in news outlets with reputations for serious journalism,” Varnum says.
Loeb, pleasantly surprised by the media reaction, has leaned into the press interest. He has given dozens of interviews to a variety of news organizations since his paper was published in November, from The Verge to The New Yorker.
Some astronomers, however, wish he’d stop.
“‘Oumuamua was exciting, but I’m getting a little frustrated,” says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and one of the people who discovered the interstellar object. “Now it just won’t die.”
Meech, you might have guessed, doesn’t buy Loeb’s theory.
‘Oumuamua is unlike anything else astronomers have seen in the solar system. It doesn’t orbit the sun, like everything else around here. It has an extremely elongated shape. It’s moving very fast, and even seemed to accelerate as it sped through our part of the solar system.
NASABut many astronomers, including those who discovered ‘Oumuamua, say that these features can be attributed to natural phenomena. That acceleration, for instance, could have been caused by icy particles of comet melting in the sun’s warmth.
Astronomers also checked ‘Oumuamua for signs that it came from a technologically advanced alien civilization. (I use “checked” loosely here, because the best way to truly determine where ‘Oumuamua came from is to chase after it with a spacecraft, which modern technology can’t do.) In December 2017, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, one of the world’s most powerful radio observatories, tuned toward ‘Oumuamua and listened for faint radio transmissions. The idea to do it came from Loeb himself. The telescope didn’t detect anything.
[Read: ]Astronomers to check mysterious interstellar object for signs of technology
“That doesn’t necessarily prove anything, of course,” says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “The fact that we didn’t pick up transmissions doesn’t rule out the possibility that [‘Oumuamua] could be something directed here.”
It’s not the suggestion of alien origins that bugs Meech and other astronomers. When faced with puzzling cosmic phenomena, astronomers must explore myriad possibilities, including extraterrestrial ones. The alien option is the least likely explanation, as history has shown, but it’s always on the table.
What bothers them is how Loeb has presented this potential explanation to the press. Unlike in his paper, which hedges with many a “may” and “might,” the astrophysicist sounds certain in news stories. In The Verge: “I cannot think of another explanation for the peculiar acceleration of ‘Oumuamua.” In The New Yorker: “It is much more likely that it is being made by artificial means, by a technological civilization.” To me, in a recent interview: “In my mind, it’s not speculative at all.”
“It doesn’t look identical to things we would see in our solar system, but why should you expect that if it’s coming from elsewhere?” Meech says. “We would all love to have discoveries of aliens, but if you’re going to go down that route, you have to have ironclad evidence.”
Loeb says that the peculiarities of ‘Oumuamua are evidence. In his view, the acceleration could be a result of ‘Oumuamua, an artificial probe, taking advantage of free solar energy for an extra push.
Loeb and his colleagues at Breakthrough Starshot, a million-dollar project, are trying to develop such technology, known as lightsails, to send to the star nearest our own. He resists the suggestion that his work is unscientific speculation, and says public discussion of potential explanations—all of them—gives laypeople a real-time look at the scientific process.
“Very often scientists say, Let’s not communicate to the public; let’s talk among ourselves,” he said. “They build this ivory tower, don’t explain what they’re doing, and then they come out with a statement once they know the answer.”
Some astronomers are grateful for Loeb’s approach, even if they’re wary of his certainty. “He is using tenure and his stature the way we all imagine it’s supposed to be used: As a shield so that he can explore potentially unpopular research avenues without fear of retribution or ostracism,” Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a recent blog post. “We all imagine that’s what we would do in his position (I hope!) but too often it ends up just being a club to get junior scientists to conform to one’s vision for what ‘proper’ science looks like and what ‘good’ problems are.”
Wright proposed a controversial theory of his own in 2015, when telescopes detected a strange clump of matter orbiting a nearby star. He and his fellow scientists suggested that the material could be megastructures built by an advanced civilization. A few years later, the same scientists concluded that the megastructures were likely just cosmic dust.
“History is on the side of skepticism when it comes to this stuff,” Shostak says. Scientists who do think we could be closer to discovering extraterrestrial life worry that breathless news coverage of weird cosmic phenomena could negatively affect the reception of the real deal—whenever that comes along.
“If and when we do find extraterrestrials—and I think there’s a real chance that we might detect some sort of life, intelligent or not, in the next decade or two—we’re going to have a ‘boy who cried wolf’ problem,” says Gaensler, the University of Toronto astronomer. “The people who find real evidence of this are probably not going to get the credit they deserve, because we’ve heard this all before.”
In popular culture, Earth’s first encounters with extraterrestrial life are unequivocal. One moment, we’re alone; the next, we can’t deny the existence of aliens. But in reality, the first evidence of alien life—like the early evidence in many scientific breakthroughs—could look much less certain. If there’s one lesson from this story, it’s that the public’s willingness to get excited about it might depend on where the people who first discover aliens work. An Ivy League affiliation wouldn’t hurt.
Over the past two decades, Bryan Singer’s films—The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Superman Returns, four of the X-Men movies—have earned more than $3 billion at the box office, putting him in the top tier of Hollywood directors. He’s known for taking risks in his storytelling: It was Singer’s idea, for instance, to open the original X-Men movie with a scene at Auschwitz, where a boy uses his superpowers to bend the metal gates that separate him from his parents. Studio executives were skeptical about starting a comic-book movie in a concentration camp, but the film became a blockbuster and launched a hugely profitable franchise for 20th Century Fox.
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Singer’s most recent project debuted in November. Critics gave Bohemian Rhapsody—which chronicles the rise of the rock band Queen—only lukewarm reviews, but it earned more than $50 million in its opening weekend. By the end of December, it had brought in more than $700 million, making it one of the year’s biggest hits.
The film’s success should have been a triumph for Singer, proof of his enduring ability to intuit what audiences want. In January it won two Golden Globes, including the award for best drama. But Singer was conspicuously absent from the ceremony—and his name went unmentioned in the acceptance speeches. He had been fired by 20th Century Fox in December 2017, with less than three weeks of filming left. Reports emerged of a production in chaos: Singer was feuding with his cast and crew, and had disappeared from the set for days at a time.
On December 7, 2017, three days after The Hollywood Reporter broke the news of Singer’s firing, a Seattle man named Cesar Sanchez-Guzman filed a lawsuit against the director, alleging that Singer had raped him in 2003, when Sanchez-Guzman was 17. The day after that, Deadline Hollywood published an interview with a former boyfriend of Singer’s, Bret Tyler Skopek, in which Skopek described a lifestyle of drugs and orgies.
According to multiple sources, Fox had no idea that the Sanchez-Guzman lawsuit was coming when the studio fired Singer. Still, Sanchez-Guzman’s claims shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Almost from the moment his star began to rise, Singer, who is now 53, has been trailed by allegations of sexual misconduct. These allegations were so well known that 4,000 students, faculty members, and alumni at the University of Southern California had signed a petition asking the school to take Singer’s name off one of its programs, the Bryan Singer Division of Cinema and Media Studies—which the school did immediately after Sanchez-Guzman filed his suit. As one prominent actor told us, “After the Harvey Weinstein news came out, everyone thought Bryan Singer would be next.”
We spent 12 months investigating various lawsuits and allegations against Singer. In total, we spoke with more than 50 sources, including four men who have never before told their stories to reporters. A man we’ll call Eric told us that he was 17 in 1997 when he and Singer had sex at a party at the director’s house; another we’ll call Andy says he was only 15 that same year, when he and Singer had sex in a Beverly Hills mansion. Both men say Singer, who was then in his early 30s, knew they were under 18, the age of consent in California. (They asked The Atlantic to conceal their identity for fear of retaliation, and because they didn’t want certain details about their past made public.)
The accusations against Singer cover a spectrum. Some of the alleged victims say they were seduced by the director while underage; others say they were raped. The victims we interviewed told us these experiences left them psychologically damaged, with substance-abuse problems, depression, and PTSD.
The portrait of Singer that emerges is of a troubled man who surrounded himself with vulnerable teenage boys, many of them estranged from their families. Their accounts suggest that Singer didn’t act alone; he was aided by friends and associates who brought him young men. And he was abetted, in a less direct way, by an industry in which a record of producing hits confers immense power: Many of the sources we interviewed insisted, out of fear of damaging their own career, that we withhold their name, even as they expressed dismay at the behavior they’d witnessed.
When asked for comment, Singer’s lawyer, Andrew B. Brettler, noted that Singer has never been arrested for or charged with any crime, and that Singer categorically denies ever having sex with, or a preference for, underage men. (He also disputed specific details in this story, as noted throughout.) Singer himself wrote an Instagram post in October that read, in part:
I have known for some time that [there may be] a negative article about me. They have contacted my friends, colleagues and people I don’t even know. In today’s climate where people’s careers are being harmed by mere accusations, what [these reporters are] attempting to do is a reckless disregard for the truth, making assumptions that are fictional and irresponsible.Singer continues to enjoy the benefit of the doubt in Hollywood. This fall, Millennium Films signed Singer to direct Red Sonja, an adaptation of a sword-and-sorcery comic book, for a reported $10 million. (Asked why Singer was hired despite the allegations against him, a Millennium publicist said, “I am afraid the response is ‘unavailable for comment.’ ”) The protagonist of Red Sonja is a survivor of sexual assault.
In the spring of 1997, when Victor Valdovinos was in seventh grade, he showed up to school one day to find a big-budget film production under way: All around him were tractor trailers, mobile dressing rooms, and people with walkie-talkies behaving as though they owned the place. The movie was Apt Pupil, Singer’s first project after his breakthrough, The Usual Suspects.
Filming took over Eliot Middle School in Altadena, northeast of Los Angeles. Late one afternoon, after basketball practice, Valdovinos stopped in an empty restroom. While standing at a urinal, he says, he felt a presence behind him. He turned and saw a bespectacled man in his early 30s. It was Bryan Singer. He looked Valdovinos over; Valdovinos remembers him saying, “You’re so good-looking. What are you doing tomorrow? Maybe I could have somebody contact you about putting you in this movie.” (Through his attorney, Singer said that he did not know who Valdovinos was and denied that anything had happened between them.)
Bryan Singer on the set of Apt Pupil, which was filmed, in part, at a middle school in Altadena, California (John Baer / Phoenix Pictures / Alamy)The film, which was based on a Stephen King novella, starred Ian McKellen as Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi concentration-camp commandant living in Southern California, decades removed from the war and trying to keep his past a secret. The other lead was a 14-year-old named Brad Renfro—cast as Todd Bowden, Dussander’s neighbor, who discovers the Nazi’s secret and threatens to turn him over to authorities unless the old man tells him in graphic detail about the atrocities he committed. One scene has Todd taking a shower in his school’s gym, which triggers images of Jews in a gas chamber.
That scene would lead to a series of lawsuits against Singer and the production. At least five plaintiffs, all minors between the ages of 14 and 17, were extras in the film and, in essence, claimed that members of the crew had bullied them into stripping naked for the shower scene. The boys and some of their parents said they’d been aware that the job called for partial nudity, which they had been led to believe meant wearing a Speedo or a towel. One of the crew members later said he thought that there had been a screwup the day of the shoot—that only the adult extras were supposed to have been asked to appear naked, and that somehow the minor and adult extras had been mixed together. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to press any criminal charges; the suits—which alleged negligence, unlawful sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress—were settled for an undisclosed sum, and all parties were bound by confidentiality agreements.
By Valdovinos’s account, his experience on the Apt Pupil set was far more upsetting. After being dropped off by his father one morning, he was directed to the locker room. Shooting was about to begin. He remembers that the locker room had been divided—a screen here and lights over there. A crew member gave him a towel and told him to disrobe completely and wrap the towel around his waist. He was 13 years old. He hadn’t yet had his first kiss.
“I’m hanging out,” Valdovinos says. “All of a sudden, Bryan comes in. He goes, ‘Hey! How are you?’ Real cheerful. And I’m like, ‘Hi.’ I can’t remember his exact words, but he was kind of just saying ‘Come back here.’ He kind of directs me; he kind of grabs me; and he takes us to the back area, which was kind of closed off. Like, this is the whole locker room”—Valdovinos gestures to suggest the space—“they’re doing their stuff over there, and I was back here, in the towel, with no shirt and no clothes on, sitting on one of the locker-room benches. Bryan’s like, ‘Just hang out here. It’s going to be all day. Don’t worry.” Singer left, and Valdovinos waited for what seemed like hours.
Eventually, he says, Singer came back and made small talk. How are you doing? Do you need anything? “Every time he had a chance—three times—he would go back there … He was always touching my chest.” Finally, according to Valdovinos, Singer reached through the towel flaps and “grabbed my genitals and started masturbating it.” The director also “rubbed his front part on me,” Valdovinos alleges. “He did it all with this smile.” Valdovinos says that Singer told him, “You’re so good-looking … I really want to work with you … I have a nice Ferrari … I’m going to take care of you.”
“I was frozen. Speechless,” Valdovinos continues. “He came back to where I was in the locker room throughout the day to molest me.” (Three sources confirmed that Singer did drive a Ferrari at the time, and we were able to verify Valdovinos’s description of how the set was arranged and of certain people he says he met there. His father told us he remembers dropping him off for the filming and thinking that perhaps his son would become an actor. Singer’s lawyer said that he could find no record of Valdovinos’s having been an extra and questioned why Valdovinos was not able to produce a pay stub or other documentation.)
Victor Valdovinos says Singer molested him on the set of Apt Pupil when he was 13 years old. He’s shown here at age 17. By then he’d had a child and temporarily dropped out of school. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times / Getty)Valdovinos says that although he did end up being used as an extra in a number of takes, he couldn’t ever bring himself to watch Apt Pupil. His brother Edgar did, though, and when Edgar told Valdovinos that he didn’t appear on-screen, Valdovinos replied, “That dude was, like, touching on me.” Edgar pressed for more details, but Valdovinos didn’t explain what he meant to his brother, who is now deceased. “It was embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone to know. So I locked it away.”
By Valdovinos’s account, his life changed after the molestation. When he was 16, he got his girlfriend pregnant, and they had a daughter. “I was trying to prove that I was a man,” he says. He had been an A and B student and a standout football prospect, but he stopped going to classes and was kicked off the team. He dropped out of school for six months and worked a series of minimum-wage jobs—at a fast-food restaurant, a deli—before returning and eventually graduating.
Valdovinos and the baby’s mother argued; he was arrested after a neighbor reported a domestic disturbance. They broke up when their daughter was six months old. Valdovinos had other failed relationships. Years later, an affair with a married woman, estranged from her husband, ended in catastrophe: an arrest and a year-long jail sentence for domestic battery, drug possession, and driving a car without the owner’s permission. He lost one job after another.
Valdovinos began to question how his life might have gone differently if not for that locker-room encounter with Singer. “What if he never did this to me—would I be a different person? Would I be more successful? Would I be married?” As he watched the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfold, Valdovinos thought, “Me too—only I was a kid.” He considered going to Singer’s house and knocking on the door and asking him, Why? He thought about going public. But who would believe him?
He contacted Jeff Herman, the same attorney who is representing Cesar Sanchez-Guzman, and another lawyer to discuss bringing a civil suit, but they told him that too much time had passed. Not knowing what else to do, Valdovinos filed a complaint with the California attorney general’s office this past spring, using a form intended for consumer complaints. He says he felt rushed, and the form didn’t provide much space. He quickly scribbled a short summary of his story; it differs on a couple of points from what he now swears is true—whether he went to the shoot one or two days after meeting Singer, and whether Singer molested him in the bathroom as well as the locker room. Because he had signed a retainer agreement with Jeff Herman’s law firm, he listed Herman as his attorney. The attorney general’s office sent Valdovinos a letter suggesting that he report the incident to the police, but he didn’t, because he’d been told the statute of limitations had lapsed.
Victor Valdovinos in December 2018 (Rozette Rago)In December, Valdovinos emailed Singer’s attorney and warned him that this article was forthcoming. “I would like to get an apology and a settlement from Bryan,” he wrote. “I prefer this article not come out and have my name and picture all over the news.” He received no reply. He told us later that he knows a financial settlement is unlikely, but he’s angry and frustrated at being ignored. He wants Singer to apologize for what he did.
As Singer completed Apt Pupil, the industry’s expectations were high: Stephen King had agreed to sell the film rights for $1 in order to get the wunderkind Singer, hot off The Usual Suspects—winner of two Academy Awards—as the director. Many thought he might be one of the blossoming greats, like his idol, Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg was the reason Singer had wanted to be a filmmaker. Singer saw E.T. when he was 16, and then watched a television profile of the director. Like Spielberg, Singer had begun making 8-mm films for fun when he was 12. He was a Jewish teenager who would eventually come out as gay, living in a mostly Catholic neighborhood of West Windsor, New Jersey. In E.T. he saw a story about a bunch of outsider nerds—kids who feel like aliens who find an actual alien.
Singer applied to the University of Southern California’s film school but didn’t get in; he settled for the Division of Critical Studies instead. He made a short film, Lion’s Den, starring his childhood friend Ethan Hawke; that short got him financing for his first feature, Public Access, a low-budget thriller that shared a Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, which in turn enabled him to secure funding for The Usual Suspects.
One of the Oscars The Usual Suspects won was for best original screenplay. The other, for best supporting actor, went to Kevin Spacey for his performance as Verbal, the unlikely villain, who utters one of the film’s most memorable lines: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The Usual Suspects showcased what many who have worked with Singer say is among his greatest skills: an ability to spin a narrative in which the audience is never quite sure who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, a suspenseful uncertainty rooted in Singer’s instinct for clever misdirection.
In a 2001 interview, Singer reflected on The Usual Suspects this way: “At one point I shot Gabriel Byrne pointing the gun and firing, and he said, ‘I don’t understand why I’m doing this.’ I kind of didn’t either. But that’s one of the things I like most about moviemaking—that sense of power, manipulating an audience. Saying, ‘This guy could be the murderer, or maybe it’s this guy.’ ”
By the late ’90s, Singer also had a reputation on the gay Hollywood scene—in part for the pool parties he threw at a house he lived in on Butler Avenue, in the Mar Vista neighborhood. A friend of Singer’s recalls attending one of these parties when he was in his early 20s (and Singer was in his early 30s) and being shocked by how young many of the guests looked. “It felt like a high-school party,” the friend says. He remembers wondering: How did all these boys get here? Where are their parents?
Ben was one of the boys at those parties. (He, too, asked The Atlantic to withhold his real name.) His family had kicked him out when he was 16, and he met Singer soon after, through a friend and housemate of Singer’s. He says he was passed around among the adult men in Singer’s social circle.
Ben says he and Singer made out once, and another time, when he was either 17 or 18 (he can’t remember his exact age), they had oral sex. He recalls Singer seducing him this way: “One time after a party, Bryan went to bed early. He said he didn’t feel well and needed me to tuck him in.” Singer was fine; that was when he and Ben had oral sex. (Ben was able to tell us the address of the Butler Avenue house and the name of its owner, and to accurately describe details of the interior. Another source in this article recalls seeing him at parties during this period.)
Ben describes Singer as someone who liked to cross boundaries. “He would stick his hands down your pants without your consent,” Ben recalls. “He was predatory in that he would ply people with alcohol and drugs and then have sex with them.” But, at least in Ben’s experience, “it wasn’t a hold-you-down-and-rape-you situation.”
“I was a fat kid, and socially awkward,” Ben continues. “But then I was getting all this attention. It led me to believe that was the way it’s supposed to be—that the way to get attention is to be sexual.” At the time, he thought the parties and the sex were fun. But then he realized he was being used. “I just felt like an idiot. It’s like when the victim blames himself for what happened.”
David Lisak, a clinical psychologist who studies the impact of childhood sexual trauma on male survivors, says this kind of thinking is common. “Boys are expected to be strong, capable of defending themselves, and far less vulnerable than girls,” he says. As a result, “they are very likely to blame themselves for the abuse that they suffer, and are therefore less likely to disclose the abuse, until much later in their lives.”
Lisak adds that even when a teenager is a willing participant, sex with an adult distorts what is supposed to be a period of exploration and discovery. “I have seen this firsthand in interviews I have done with men in this situation—their vulnerability is taken advantage of,” Lisak says. “It creates really long-lasting harm.”
Around the time Singer was finishing Apt Pupil and about to begin directing the first X-Men movie, he invested in a Hollywood start-up, Digital Entertainment Network, that would eventually end in scandal. Singer contributed $30,000 and pledged $20,000 more, according to records kept by the founding CEO, Marc Collins-Rector.
Collins-Rector’s idea for Digital Entertainment Network, or DEN, was to produce TV shows and movies for 14-to-24-year-olds, with an emphasis on stories for gay teens, and distribute them online. Collins-Rector had arrived in Hollywood in the mid‑’90s with his much younger business partner and lover, Chad Shackley. (Shackley had been 16 when he’d started dating Collins-Rector, who had been about 32.) They predicted that DEN would upend Hollywood.
Collins-Rector had already founded and sold several tech companies for tens of millions of dollars, and he was able to raise more than $60 million for DEN within two years. Corporate investors included Microsoft, NBC, Dell, and Chase Capital Partners. Along with Singer, some of Hollywood’s most powerful executives and filmmakers also chipped in.
Collins-Rector and Shackley launched DEN from a mansion on Benedict Canyon Drive, in Beverly Hills, but around the fall of 1997 they moved the company to a mansion in Encino; it was dubbed the “M&C Estate,” for “Marc and Chad.” They also brought on a third co-founder: Brock Pierce, a 17-year-old actor who’d appeared in Disney’s Mighty Ducks movies. They made Pierce an executive vice president with a salary of $250,000, and he moved in with them.
On paper, DEN was indeed a forward-thinking idea. But according to a series of lawsuits, criminal complaints, and a federal investigation, the company’s Encino mansion became a party house where teenage boys were allegedly given alcohol and drugs, encouraged to have sex with older men, and in some cases raped.
One early, senior-level DEN employee remembers asking why so many teenage boys were on the payroll and being told that they did computer work. The employee also recalls attending a company party and seeing teenage boys filing into a movie theater in the Encino mansion. The employee tried to go inside but was stopped by a bodyguard, who said: “Kids only.” The employee asked a colleague what was going on. “[He] said that he had seen some of it, and that it was definitely porn … [The kids] were all laughing and eating candy. But we were totally not allowed into that room.”
Singer and Collins-Rector were close friends, and according to at least five sources, Singer was a regular at the M&C Estate. He even starred in what amounted to a digital station identification for DEN—in a short promotional clip, he reclines in a chair while announcing, “You’re watching www.DEN.net.”
Marc Collins-Rector (left) founded the Digital Entertainment Network with Chad Shackley (center) and Brock Pierce (right). (Illustrations by WG600; photographs by Alamy; Alessia Pierdomenico / Bloomberg / Getty)It was at a DEN gathering that the man we’re calling Andy first met Singer. According to Andy’s account, he entered the DEN orbit in 1997, during spring break of his freshman year in high school, when he started chatting online with Collins-Rector, who was then 37 years old. Collins-Rector boasted that he had a private jet and suggested they meet. The next day, Andy says, Collins-Rector sent a cab to pick him up in front of his apartment complex in Las Vegas and bring him to one of the big casinos on the Strip. Andy says he stayed with Collins-Rector until late that night, maybe until the next morning, and that they had oral sex. Andy was 14.
According to Andy, in the following weeks Collins-Rector made himself part of Andy’s life. He returned to Vegas for visits and ingratiated himself with Andy’s mom—Andy says she saw Collins-Rector as a successful man who had taken him under his wing, someone who could be a role model for a son with an absent father.
Collins-Rector arranged for Andy and his family to visit the set of Apt Pupil. “They were filming the scene where Ian McKellen’s character puts the cat in the oven,” Andy recalls. “It was really weird, because the cat was the most lethargic thing in the world. So they’re trying to make it seem like he was afraid—picking it up and spinning it around. The cat didn’t do shit.” (A source who worked on the movie confirmed this description of the cat’s behavior.)
Afterward, Collins-Rector took Andy on a Rodeo Drive shopping spree and then he and Andy had sex. It was Andy’s first time.
That summer, Andy began taking all-expenses-paid trips to visit Collins-Rector. One night Andy, now 15, got to talking with Singer, who led him away from the other men in the living room of the Benedict Canyon mansion and up a flight of stairs. “First room on the right, top of the stairs,” Andy says definitively, as if making the walk all over again. (His description of the mansion matches its layout, based on photos that were posted online when it was for sale.) Inside was a waterbed. He says he and Singer had talked about what grade he was in. “Bryan knew I was 15,” he says. Singer would have been about 31.
As Andy tells it, he and Singer weren’t alone in the bedroom. Singer had brought along Brad Renfro—the star of Apt Pupil, who was now 15. (According to two sources, Singer sometimes referred to Renfro as his boyfriend.) Renfro sat sheepishly next to the waterbed, looking unsure of what to do while Singer and Andy fooled around. Clothes came off, but Renfro didn’t move. “I remember wanting Brad to join in,” Andy says. “I don’t think Brad was gay, or even bi. I think he was going with the flow. We talked about it. Like me, he looked around at all of the things these guys had, all of the money. Maybe he thought the guys were going to do things for him.” (Renfro died of a drug overdose in 2008, at the age of 25.)
Andy says Renfro left the room, and then Andy had sex with Singer. “I just remember how loud the moaning was. I remember thinking, God, there’s a big group of people downstairs hanging out in the living room, and they can probably hear him. That bothered me, so I stuck my hand over his mouth or in his mouth just to stop it. When we went downstairs, it was really awkward. I just acted like it was no big thing.”(Andy was listed in a DEN address book kept by Chad Shackley’s younger brother, and another source for this article recalls seeing Andy at DEN parties and says that Andy told him years ago about his sexual relationship with Singer.)
Andy says he slept with Singer a handful of times after that. One night, around 1999, he met up with Singer in Las Vegas. They took a long walk. “I showed him where all the gay bars were,” Andy recalls. “It was awkward. He had another boy or two with him and had no interest in me.”
Meanwhile, Andy was falling apart. He had started prostituting himself and got hooked on meth. He missed 53 of the first 60 days of school in his junior year of high school and was expelled. He did jail time. He appeared in porn films.
In his early 20s, Andy moved to West Hollywood, where he says he ran into Singer a few times. “I was such a wreck,” he says. “I gave him a sob story about how I was just trying to survive. I was looking for money for drugs, just enough to get through the day. He gave me, like, $1,200. Another time it was five or six grand. I had his phone number. We talked here and there.” Andy thought maybe if he could come up with the perfect business idea, Singer might help him launch it. “Instead, he blocked my calls.”
In his late 20s, Andy was caught dealing drugs and faced nine years in prison. “I asked the judge to send me to rehab instead,” he says. That stint in rehab led to two more. “I was depressed, miserable.” On New Year’s Day 2014, he decided to try to get clean again, and he’s been sober ever since.
Andy is now 36 years old. He lives outside L.A., in a sleepy town where he is happily employed. Neatly dressed, with a buzz cut and a polite, understated demeanor, he could pass for a military veteran. “I sort of wonder,” he says, “if I’d never met Marc and then Bryan, if I would have ever got into the drugs.”
At 17, Eric was a bright kid from a small town in Northern California. He was handsome, and desperate for attention. He graduated from high school a year early and in 1997 moved to Los Angeles, where he became a regular at the M&C Estate—swimming in the pool, soaking naked in the hot tub after dark, even working for the company. And sleeping with older men there. “I was passed around like a party favor,” he says.
Now an executive at a film-production company, Eric says he first met Singer at a party at the director’s place on Butler Avenue. The Apt Pupil controversy was then big news in Hollywood. According to Eric, Singer mocked the lawsuits. “He imitated a southern lawyer: ‘Mr. Singer, please tell the court exactly, did you or did you not put your hands on that boy? Mr. Singer, answer the question!’ ”
Later that evening, Eric says, he and Singer got to flirting in the hot tub. “Just so you know, I’m 31,” Singer said. “Just so you know, I’m 17,” Eric responded. He says they had sex that night.
Over the following weeks, Eric says he hooked up with Singer a few more times—at Singer’s place and at the M&C Estate. Eric understood that he had no purchase on Singer: The director, he says, had people who brought him other boys just like Eric. “If you weren’t young and cute enough to be their boy, you could still ingratiate yourself by bringing boys to them,” he says. “That’s how I met Bryan, and that’s how I wound up at the DEN estate—people trying to ingratiate themselves.”
Eric says he and Singer had sex on and off for about five years, into Eric’s 20s, when Singer’s interest waned. In 2002, when Eric decided to go to film school, Singer was finishing X-Men 2, and Eric reached out. “He brought me around on a tour of the Fox lot,” Eric recalls. A few years after that, Singer helped Eric land an internship on a big-budget feature.
His history with Singer sometimes comes up at his current job in the film industry. Eric says he’s been asked whether he knows Singer, whether he was one of “those boys” at the pool parties. “I never want people to think of me as a victim, so I always put up the front of ‘I’m good. I was in charge.’ But I spent a decade in therapy trying to figure out if what happened was bad or not bad. And if it was bad, was it my fault? What I’ve decided is that adults are supposed to look out for kids.”
Eric has been in a steady relationship since 2016. His boyfriend confirmed that Eric had told him about his sexual experiences with Singer well before we contacted Eric for this article. Like Andy, Eric was listed in the address book that Shackley’s brother kept.
Eric goes to regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings now, and he says he’s met other men there who have their own stories about Singer. “There’s a bunch of us,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You were one of Singer’s boys? Me too.’ ”
In August 2000, a federal grand jury indicted Marc Collins-Rector on charges related to transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sex.
Collins-Rector fled the country and was a fugitive for almost two years before being arrested in Spain, where authorities discovered a cache of weapons and 8,000 images of child pornography in the villa where he was living. He was held in a Spanish jail from May 2002 until October 2003. Upon his release, he was extradited to the United States and ultimately pleaded guilty to nine charges of transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sex. He was sentenced to time served in Spain plus three years of court supervision and is now a registered sex offender.
Chad Shackley and Brock Pierce had accompanied Collins-Rector to Spain, but neither was charged with any crimes. (In an interview, Pierce, who is now a cryptocurrency promoter, told us he was never aware of anyone associated with DEN having sex with or abusing minors in any way. Shackley and Collins-Rector could not be reached for comment.)
Singer wasn’t named in any of the DEN lawsuits or investigations, and his involvement with the company went largely unnoticed. Though Apt Pupil proved to be a box-office disappointment, X-Men secured him a spot among A-list directors. At its core, the film is about a group of kids who feel alienated until the much older Professor Charles Xavier shows them that their mutations are really superpowers—a compelling allegory for gay teenagers struggling to come to terms with their sexual identity.
Along the way, there were media reports of Singer’s erratic behavior on set. In 2002, production on X-Men 2 was delayed for a day because producers determined that Singer had taken too many painkillers to do his job, according to a source who worked on the film. (Singer said the delay was due to an argument he’d had with one of the producers.) In 2005, while he was directing Superman Returns, Singer again appeared to be “heavily medicated,” as The Hollywood Reporter later put it, and he failed to show up on the set often enough that an executive producer camped out at the Australian location to ensure that Singer completed the film. (Singer’s lawyer said that he took medication for back pain.)
Singer’s personal life didn’t come under close scrutiny until 2014, when a man named Michael Egan brought a lawsuit against him. The case made headlines from the start: Egan’s attorney, Jeff Herman, held a packed press conference at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. Filed in Hawaii federal court, the suit alleged that Singer was part of a group of powerful entertainment executives who “maintained and exploited boys in a sordid sex ring.” Egan also sued three other men who had been affiliated with DEN.
In 2014, Michael Egan brought sexual-abuse lawsuits against Singer and three other men who were involved with DEN, but his case fell apart in pretrial discovery. (Mario Anzuoni / Reuters)Egan claimed that he had been abused at the M&C Estate from the age of 15. He alleged that Collins-Rector had passed him to Singer for a sex act, and that Singer had abused him during two trips to Hawaii. (The fact that some of the alleged offenses took place in Hawaii enabled Herman to file in that jurisdiction, where the statute of limitations had not expired.)
According to the four complaints, the Hawaii trips took place between August 1, 1999, and October 31, 1999. One night after a long walk alone, according to the suit against Singer, Egan came across Singer in the pool area. Singer was angry that Egan had gone missing. He allegedly gave Egan a drink that “impacted his motor skills.” Egan claimed that Singer laid him down on a lounge chair and “spit on [Egan’s] buttocks, spanked him, and forced a handful of cocaine onto [Egan’s] face. He then anally raped [Egan].” Egan alleged that Singer raped him multiple times on that particular trip and that the three other defendants—Gary Goddard, an amusement-park designer and DEN investor; Garth Ancier, a television executive who had also invested in DEN; and David Neuman, who had left his job as president of Walt Disney Television to become president of DEN—committed similar acts on him in Hawaii.
After an initial wave of publicity, the cases began to unravel in pretrial discovery. Egan was caught in numerous inconsistencies—most notably, regarding whether he and the defendants were in Hawaii at the times he’d specified. During a deposition related to a 2000 lawsuit, Egan had indicated that although he had taken trips to places like Lake Havasu, Arizona, with DEN executives and others affiliated with the company, his mother hadn’t allowed him to go to Hawaii with them. (The back-and-forth between Egan and the attorney who questioned him was confusing, and according to Herman, Egan’s mother later said that she had, in fact, allowed him to go to Hawaii at least twice.) All four men denied the allegations and offered evidence that they had not been in Hawaii. Neuman produced a signed statement he had obtained from Egan in 2003, saying that Neuman hadn’t sexually abused him. (It read, in part: “I have never been in any hot tub or swimming pool at all at any time or any place with David Neuman … I have never seen David Neuman naked, and he has never seen me naked.”)
Meanwhile, Egan was hit with criminal fraud charges related to a Ponzi scheme in North Carolina, to which he pleaded guilty. Ancier and Neuman countersued both Egan and Herman for “malicious prosecution,” for wrongfully including them in the suits. Egan declared bankruptcy and Herman ultimately settled with them, agreeing to pay the two men a total of more than $1 million and issue public apologies to both. Egan withdrew his cases and was branded a liar and a con man in the media. Singer’s allies seized upon the fraud charges in North Carolina as proof that his allegations were part of an elaborate shakedown.
Despite all this, there are reasons to believe Egan may have been abused. He was a regular at the DEN estate and appeared on one of the company’s shows, Royal Standard. (The senior-level employee who recounted the party where underage boys had been shown porn also recalls once seeing Egan—so high that he could barely stand up—getting out of a limo with four DEN executives.) Before withdrawing his lawsuits, Egan passed a polygraph and was interviewed for nearly seven hours by a psychiatrist, who found him to be credible. At one point, Singer agreed to pay Egan a $100,000 settlement, but Egan rejected the offer, refusing to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He also said that he had felt pressured to sign the Neuman statement.
David Lisak, the clinical psychologist, says he sees dozens of sexual-abuse cases thrown out every year because the plaintiff “misremembers some sequence of events or a detail that’s really inconsequential, and the credibility of their entire story is spoiled.” Exploiting the symptoms that flow from trauma in order to undermine a victim’s credibility—whether substance abuse, a subsequent criminal offense, or holes in a victim’s memory—has become a common defense and PR strategy. “There is something uniquely diabolical about this cycle,” Lisak says.
The collapse of the Egan case was a huge win for Singer, creating the lasting impression that the director had been exonerated. In interviews for this article, numerous people told us that Egan was a proven liar and several asserted—incorrectly—that Egan had publicly apologized to Singer. Meanwhile, other alleged victims said that they had taken note of the price Egan paid for coming forward and decided not to do the same.
Egan wasn’t Jeff Herman’s only client with a claim against Singer, however. “In addition to your case, this firm is handling several other sexual abuse cases against Defendant Bryan Singer,” Herman informed Egan in a letter in June 2014. “We represent three other victims such as yourself and another potential client.”
One of these cases involved a civil suit Herman filed against Singer and Gary Goddard in a California district court on behalf of a “John Doe.” The complaint lays out the following allegations: In 2003, Goddard started a relationship over social media with the plaintiff, who was then 14 years old and living with his parents a few hours north of London. Goddard told the boy “he had ‘good looks’ and inquired whether he wanted to be an actor,” because Goddard knew people, including Singer, who could help his career. Goddard allegedly sent the boy chocolates and told him he loved him. In return, the boy participated in nude webcam sessions.
The boy claimed that he had sex with Goddard in London when he was 16, the age of consent in the U.K. In 2006, Goddard introduced the boy to Singer over the phone. The two men then allegedly invited him to the U.K. premiere of Superman Returns. According to the complaint, Singer brought him to the VIP party after the screening. He offered the boy a quaalude, which he declined. Later, Singer gave the boy a drink that left him extremely intoxicated and brought him to a hotel room with Goddard.
“Once in the bedroom,” the complaint states, “Singer and Goddard started grabbing John Doe in a sexual manner.” The complaint alleges that Goddard and Singer, with the help of an unidentified third man who was apparently working for Goddard, forced the boy onto the bed and took off his clothes. Singer then allegedly fellated him against his will, and asked the boy to sit on top of him and ejaculate, which the boy did, the complaint says, because he feared he would otherwise be raped. The complaint states that Singer then attempted to have anal sex with the boy. The next day, the director allegedly called to apologize.
Singer’s lawyers dismissed the accusations as baseless and malicious, and Goddard denied the charges as well. The suit against the two men was voluntarily dismissed. Herman told us he couldn’t comment on any of his cases against Singer and the other men involved with DEN, but in May the Los Angeles Times reported that he had reached a settlement in at least one of the 2014 cases.
In 2017, Goddard faced a fresh batch of allegations, when the ER actor Anthony Edwards and seven other former child actors accused him of sexual abuse. He again denied the allegations.
“I remember that kid,” Bryan Singer said through his tears, according to the 19-year-old who was lying in bed next to him. “I swear to God, I never touched him.” It was the spring of 2014, not long after Michael Egan filed his lawsuit. Crying himself to sleep had become Singer’s routine, according to his lover of almost six months, a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid named Bret Tyler Skopek.
Skopek says Egan’s lawsuit turned Singer’s life upside down. His latest X-Men sequel was coming out, and Singer withdrew from the publicity tour to avoid being a distraction. Gossip blogs began digging into his sex life, and mounting legal fees became a source of stress. (Singer was also trying to have a baby with his close friend Michelle Clunie. When they conceived, Skopek was among the first to know. Their son was born in January 2015.)
Bret Tyler Skopek met Singer when he was 18. He says they partook in drug-fueled orgies. (Bret Tyler Skopek)Skopek was 18 in 2013 when he moved to L.A. from Phoenix, hoping to launch a music career. Shortly after, a friend brought him to a Halloween party, where he met Bryan Singer, who was dressed in a priest’s habit, with lipstick kisses all over his face. Skopek and Singer took a photo together and exchanged contact information.
A month later, Singer invited Skopek to a birthday dinner at Nobu, an upscale restaurant in West Hollywood, that he was hosting for a friend. (According to Skopek and two other sources, this friend was one of several people who curried favor with Singer by introducing him to young men they thought he would like.) After dinner, Singer, Skopek, and several others went back to Singer’s house, where they all took the party drug Molly and went to Bryan’s bedroom. “Bryan had me [and two other men] in the bed,” Skopek says. “And we probably all took turns fucking Bryan.”
Skopek says Singer liked to call him his “favorite late-night snack,” and Skopek felt certain the director liked him because he looked very young. As he told Deadline Hollywood, Singer would sometimes offer him up to his friends. In that article, he recounted Singer texting someone: “Hey, I have little Bret here. I want you to come over and do him.” Skopek told us he didn’t participate that time.
Skopek says Singer told him he could help him with his career, even dangling an X-Men audition. (Singer denied this and said that Skopek asked him for a role in X-Men: Apocalypse. He also said that Skopek frequently asked him for money.) “I got a photograph with him, and my sister would be like, ‘That’s so cool you know the director of X-Men,’ ” Skopek recalls. “I had my grandparents saying, ‘Keep making contacts like that; that’s so awesome.’ ”
Skopek never got an audition. He worked at a fast-casual restaurant, but didn’t earn enough to afford a permanent place to live. Sometimes, when he left Singer’s house after an overnight, he says the director would hand him $400, for “cab fare.” When he didn’t sleep at Singer’s mansion, Skopek would crash with friends, or stay with one of Singer’s pals, swapping sexual favors for a night of lodging. When all else failed, he stayed in a homeless shelter.
Not long after Egan filed his suit against Singer, Skopek says, Singer’s assistant handed him a big roll of cash—he recalls that it was about $10,000 in hundreds—and passed on a message that Skopek should find a place to stay. Skopek assumed this was because Singer’s private life had come under scrutiny.
By then, Skopek was growing tired of the drug-fueled orgies, and of waking up feeling used. He eventually moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where his father lived, and started writing a novel based on his time in Los Angeles. Skopek self-published The Prince of Darkness last spring.
Bret Tyler Skopek in December 2018 (Rozette Rago)Bohemian Rhapsody started generating buzz back in 2010, when it was still making its way through development. By the time the film went into production in September 2017, 20th Century Fox was clearly counting on it to be a hit. Rami Malek—the Emmy-winning star of Mr. Robot—was cast as Freddie Mercury, Queen’s front man, and Singer was at the helm with a budget of $60 million.
According to three sources who know what happened on and off the set, both Stacey Snider, the chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, and Emma Watts, Fox’s vice chair and president of production, had had concerns when the project came their way with Singer already attached. But Singer had the support of the surviving members of Queen. The choice for Fox was to do the film with him or to not do it at all. According to the three sources, it wasn’t an easy decision.
Snider’s concerns weren’t about sexual-abuse allegations. As far as she knew, there had been only one case against Singer—Michael Egan’s—and it had been dismissed. Instead Snider was worried about Singer’s reputation for disappearing from sets. Before the film went into production, according to the three sources, Snider and Watts met with Singer, and Snider told him that she had two rules and that if he violated either one, he’d be fired: “Don’t break the law. And show up for work.”
Once production got under way, Malek and Singer feuded and Singer threw tantrums, at one point ripping a video monitor off a rig and slamming it on the ground. Tom Hollander, who plays Queen’s manager, reportedly found Singer’s behavior so abhorrent that he briefly quit the movie. The studio dispatched a team to the set, in London, to investigate.
Gregg Schneider, a now-estranged friend of Singer’s, says that he was with the director in London, and that Singer stormed off the set on November 21 and then didn’t leave his hotel suite for four days. Schneider describes Singer during this time as a “vortex of brokenness.”
At one point, Singer told Snider he was exhausted and asked that the production be delayed for more than a month—an extraordinary request on a major feature shoot, given salaries, schedules, and equipment and studio rentals. Snider angrily replied that she, too, was exhausted and told him to suck it up and finish the film. On November 26, Singer abandoned the movie entirely and returned to Los Angeles.
When Fox fired him a week later, Singer issued a statement saying that he had wanted to finish the film, but the studio had declined his request to delay production. He attributed his absences, in part, to “pressing health matters concerning one of my parents.”
Though it wasn’t yet public knowledge, Singer’s attorneys were again dealing with Jeff Herman, the attorney who had represented Michael Egan and the John Doe client. Herman was seeking a settlement for Cesar Sanchez-Guzman, the Seattle man who alleges that Singer raped him in 2003. “Bryan kept quiet about it at the time, but I could tell something was eating him up,” Gregg Schneider says.
Schneider was close with Singer from early 2014 until the spring of 2018. He says he used to feel certain the accusations against his friend were false. Like others we spoke with, he says he’s seen Singer check the IDs of young guys who approached him to make sure they were of age. But now he has doubts. Why was Singer friends with those men who allegedly found sexual partners for him? Why was he friends with Marc Collins-Rector, and why is he still friends with Gary Goddard?
Schneider says there are two sides to Singer: “When Bryan is sober, he can be great—generous to a fault, engaging, and so analytical when talking about films and history or doing his job so well, which he loves.” But Schneider says Singer becomes another person when he’s drinking and taking pills.
Two of Singer’s friends recounted a 2016 New Year’s Eve party they attended, at which Singer grabbed his much younger boyfriend by the hair and dragged him down a hallway. “Many of us regarded it as just another Bryan Singer moment,” one of the friends says. He figured Singer would eventually sober up and apologize. “That kind of behavior—out here, people put up with it.”
Cesar Sanchez-Guzman is 32 years old now; his civil complaint against Singer details an alleged rape in 2003, when he was 17. As soon as Sanchez-Guzman’s suit was made public, Singer’s attorneys seized on Jeff Herman’s involvement. “We are confident that this case will turn out the same way the Egan case did,” the statement said. “And once Bryan prevails, he will pursue his own claims for malicious prosecution.” (Singer denies ever having met Sanchez-Guzman.)
Sanchez-Guzman says that soon after he filed the complaint, men in trench coats began loitering outside the watch boutique where he works. (His boss confirmed this.) Sanchez-Guzman called mall security and then the police. One of the men revealed himself to be a private investigator from a firm that specializes in “civil-litigation support” but told police that he was surveilling someone else at the store. Sanchez-Guzman has also received anonymous, threatening voicemails, which he shared with us: Hey, Guzman, fuck you, you scumbag cocksucker. Give me a call, you faggot. He’s gotten dozens of calls like this. (Singer’s attorney said that no one associated with Singer has ever threatened or harassed Sanchez-Guzman.)
Sanchez-Guzman’s parents are born-again Christians, and as a teen he felt he had to hide his sexuality around them. But he hung out at a Seattle LGBTQ center, where he made friends who introduced him to the local party scene. He was figuring out who he was. “You went to those parties to find your first boyfriend,” he says. That’s what he wanted.
Some of these new friends invited him to parties thrown by a local tech millionaire named Lester Waters. Sanchez-Guzman recalls that sometimes 60 kids would show up at Waters’s mansion, many of them under the age of 18. Booze flowed freely. Waters was friendly but didn’t say much, and Sanchez-Guzman thought he looked harmless—like a middle-aged dad. During a party one night, Waters invited Sanchez-Guzman to join him and some close friends on a yacht the next day—they would sail from Lake Union into Lake Washington. Sanchez-Guzman was floored by the offer. The next morning, at the marina, Waters introduced him to his friends, including Bryan Singer. (Waters did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
According to Sanchez-Guzman, roughly 20 people were on board the yacht—most of them teenage boys. He didn’t know anyone but Waters. Early in the night, Singer was friendly and flirtatious. Later, the director offered to give Sanchez-Guzman a tour of the yacht. They found their way to a small room.
Sanchez-Guzman says he’s relived what happened next many times. In conversation, he seems physically unable to repeat the details, saying only “And then Singer did what he did.” But the civil complaint describes the alleged attack in detail:
[Singer] approached Cesar and thrust his body on him. Bryan Singer then forced Cesar to the floor, shoved Cesar’s face against his crotch area and demanded Cesar perform oral sex on him. Bryan Singer pulled out his penis, smacked Cesar in the face with it and forced it into Cesar’s mouth.Later in the attack, according to the suit, Singer “forcibly anally penetrated Cesar. Cesar pleaded for him to stop.”
Afterward, Sanchez-Guzman says he found Waters above deck and told him what had happened; he says Waters laughed and told him he should feel lucky. Then, Sanchez-Guzman recalls, “Bryan approached me wearing this grotesque smile. Like he was laughing.” Sanchez-Guzman says Singer told him to keep his mouth shut: “Nobody is going to believe you.” Sanchez-Guzman says Singer told him he was working on the next X-Men movie and he could help him get into the business. “I kept turning all of this around in my head, and I wanted to stay as far away from it as I could.”
Sanchez-Guzman says he couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents what had happened; they still didn’t know he was gay. But the next day he called his best friend, who asked to be identified only as Rene. By her account, Sanchez-Guzman was in tears when he called her. He went to her house and told her what had happened the night before. “He told me everything,” Rene says. “Singer locking them in the room. The assault. Afterwards how Lester Waters blew him off, saying it was normal. And then Singer saying afterwards that nobody would believe him, because money talks. My mom and I tried convincing him to go to the police, but he said he couldn’t. Coming out was the hardest thing for him to do.”
Cesar Sanchez-Guzman filed a lawsuit in December 2017 claiming that Singer had raped him when he was 17. (Rozette Rago)Sanchez-Guzman tried to erase the event from his life. In 2005, he married a woman with whom he’d been friends since childhood. She was from the same small town in Mexico as Sanchez-Guzman’s family. “Marriage was the easy thing for me, the best way to hold my parents at bay,” he says. “When this thing happened to me, with Bryan, that just made it even more difficult for me, because I was like, If my parents find out about this situation, if my family finds out about it … My mother has high blood pressure. She would have had a heart attack.” The couple stayed married for eight years but never lived under the same roof. Sanchez-Guzman didn’t bring his wife to London when he went there to study fashion and marketing the year after their wedding. He says being with him wouldn’t have been good for her: He suffered from extreme anxiety and depression. He didn’t have health insurance and, back in Seattle, went deep into debt. Eventually he filed for bankruptcy.
In April 2018, four months after he filed his complaint, a British media consultant and journalist named Lee Harpin emailed Jeff Herman with disconcerting information. Harpin said a source had told him that associates of Singer’s were reporting Sanchez-Guzman and his ex-wife to the IRS and immigration authorities. That the couple had failed to live together meant they’d violated naturalization eligibility laws, leaving Sanchez-Guzman worried that his ex‑wife’s green card could be revoked. (Singer’s lawyer said that no one connected with Singer has reported Sanchez-Guzman.)
In May, Singer’s lawyers forced Sanchez-Guzman to reopen his bankruptcy case, on the Kafkaesque grounds that he hadn’t declared a potential lawsuit against Singer as an asset. Until the bankruptcy proceeding is settled, the Singer suit cannot proceed.
When Sanchez-Guzman filed his lawsuit, he was certain that doing so would help him heal. More than a year later, that feeling is long forgotten. He’s depressed by how slowly his case is moving, and frustrated that months go by without an update from his lawyers. He wasn’t surprised when Bohemian Rhapsody won the Golden Globe for best drama. “The industry will brush things under the rug and pretend nothing happened,” he says. “Most people don’t see the truth.”
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “’Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’”
It was like a scene out of left-wing protest literature: a group of white, parochial-school boys in “Make America Great Again” gear taunting an American Indian protester, jeering and laughing, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after attending the anti-abortion March for Life.
The video lit up social media, leading to harsh condemnations of the school and the children in the video, and linking their behavior to the president. Disgust was, for the most part, bipartisan, and both the school, Covington Catholic, and the March for Life issued condemnations. Many observers, including me, saw another dramatic example of people publicly affiliating themselves with the president acting in cruel or prejudiced fashion.
But wait: Maybe it didn’t happen like that. An analysis by Reason’s Robby Soave posited that “far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby.”
[Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test]
Although Soave’s post added relevant context, it led to a sweeping counter-narrative that also failed to adequately describe what had occurred. The post, as Deadspin’s Laura Wagner wrote, was widely shared by media figures who apologized for jumping to conclusions, and the narrative shifted entirely in the other direction: It wasn’t the teenagers who were misbehaving; they were reacting to a circuslike atmosphere in which they were being taunted with insults by an extremist faction of the Black Hebrew Israelites in Washington, D.C.
The whole saga is an example of the Donald Trump–era overcorrection. The president has no use for facts; he simply says whatever he wants, and his followers repeat it uncritically. That has made it even more important for journalists to get the facts right, and to acknowledge when they get them wrong, to prove that they abide by facts rather than sentiment. The president’s conscious attempts to delegitimize the media make this task even more difficult. Much of the mainstream media, meanwhile, is working tirelessly to win back the trust of Trump’s followers, whether by conceding the president’s framing, offering endless watercolored portraits of Trump supporters in Midwest diners, or making other displays of sympathy.
Video of the incident posted by the American Indian outlet Indian Country Today shows the beginning of the confrontation. Far from being “calm and restrained” in response to the taunts of the five Black Hebrew Israelites, the students are shown responding with loud chants, gestures, and shouts of their own, as though facing off against a rival team at a sporting event, escalating the confrontation. When the American Indian activist Nathan Phillips walks between the groups with his drum, many of the students respond by performing the “tomahawk chop” gesture, laughing, or doing a mocking imitation of his singing. Not all of the children are being disrespectful; others are confused about how to react, and say so out loud.
The Black Hebrew Israelite faction that was present in front of the Lincoln Memorial does not reflect most of the loose grouping of congregations, which can be roughly described as synthesizing Jewish and Christian ideas and practices, but it is a frequent bother for D.C. residents. Its members stand on crowded street corners with bullhorns and yell vile things, including racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs, at anyone who passes by. D.C. residents do not respond to these provocations with confrontation. They ignore them. They do not engage in chants or taunts of their own in an attempt to display their dominance. They don’t engage in their own taunts of people who happen to be nearby.
[Read: Stop trusting viral videos]
The incident reflects most poorly not on the children, but on their adult chaperones. Much of the initial reaction to the children’s behavior—calls for doxing, violence, or permanent shunning—was indeed over the top. The school closed Tuesday for security reasons; officials said the institution was receiving death threats. That is an absurd overreaction.
No children deserve to be thrown away like refuse because they make a mistake, even a cruel one. Part of being a child is not understanding how your actions affect others, and part of growing up is learning to understand that.
The real issue raised by the video is the messages these kids are being sent by adults and authority figures about how to treat people, especially those who are different from them. And in both cases, the escalation with the Black Hebrew Israelite faction and the jeering of Phillips, what is most clear is that in this regard, the adults in their life have failed them.
The incident became a national story in part because of the way the images seemed to confirm first one sweeping narrative, and then another, opposite one: the first, that the heart of Trumpism is prejudice; the second, that anti-prejudice, abetted by the liberal media, has become a malevolent force comparable to racial oppression. But only one of these bears any resemblance to empirical reality, and that would still be the case no matter what unfolded in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
As the Covington students ascend to right-wing martyrdom, some perspective is in order. The disproportionate reaction to their behavior does not, as some conservative commentators have suggested, represent a new kind of oppression comparable to that experienced by historically disfavored groups. While all children deserve forgiveness and understanding, in America, children who are not white are often simply not seen as children at all.
The Covington students are not likely to have their summary executions by police officers justified; they will not be separated from their parents for the crime of seeking asylum; they are not disproportionately more likely to be charged as adults for crimes they committed as children; they are not likely to be stalked in the night and murdered by grown men who become folk heroes for acting out the violent, racist fantasies of others. The president’s campaign merchandise remains a favorite of white-supremacist groups, and his name remains a racist taunt for those seeking to antagonize people of color of any age. None of this has changed, and the disgraceful overreaction of some liberals does not change it. If the right extended the sympathy the Covington students are now receiving to children who don’t remind them of their own, this would be a more just society.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Social-media outrage is collapsing our worlds]
A similar overcorrection happened last week with BuzzFeed News’ story that Special Counsel Robert Mueller possesses evidence that Trump told his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a straightforwardly impeachable offense. News outlets reported on the story with caveats—offering attribution and plenty of “if true” statements—but on Friday night, the special counsel’s office took the rare step of disputing the story, saying “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
Mueller’s office has built up a great deal of credibility because of the special counsel’s record of public service, and because it so rarely comments. Nevertheless, despite the fact that under both Republican and Democratic presidents many government statements denying significant stories have proved either to be wrong or to omit relevant details, much of the media simply concluded or suggested that the story was wholly false. BuzzFeed News, where I formerly worked for several years, maintains that its story is accurate.
Over the weekend, the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, allowed that Trump might have told Cohen to lie to Congress or tacitly approved of his intention to do so. Giuliani said that Trump was negotiating a real-estate project in Moscow right up until the moment ballots were being cast in the 2016 election, even as he deflected responsibility from Russia for the very hacking and disinformation campaign that Mueller is investigating. He said that Cohen and Trump might have discussed Cohen’s testimony, but insisted that there was no proof the president told him to lie—a suggestion that the president may have committed an impeachable offense but that there may not be as much proof as BuzzFeed News had reported there was. The story may turn out to be incorrect, but the special counsel’s statement doesn’t, on its own, prove it was, and there is not yet enough public evidence to adjudicate its claims.
In both instances, the initial reaction would have benefited from additional context. But once that context was revealed, much of the media overcorrected by assuming the exact opposite of the original story was true, when that overcorrection was just as mistaken. The overcorrections are a symptom of the mainstream media’s ongoing preoccupation with winning the affection of the president’s most enthusiastic supporters—an impossible task, because those supporters believe what the president wants them to believe. If you write something they don’t like, you’re fake news. If you correct something you got wrong, you’re also fake news. The only way not to be fake news is to say what they want you to say, the way they want you to say it. News outlets should neither ignore legitimate criticism based on the source nor go out of their way to assuage critics in the hopes of improving their brand.
It is an understandable impulse to want to repair a relationship with an estranged audience—news is about informing the public, and you can’t inform the public if a large segment of it doesn’t trust you. But the only goal that really matters is getting it right. The overcorrection is not about getting it right; it is about convincing people who will never trust the media to trust the media. And it is certain to fail, since in the end, it can only prove that these same critics are right about the fake-news press and its habit of shading the truth. When journalism becomes about popularity, getting the facts right becomes secondary.
The government shutdown has forced me to perform a reverse Marie Kondo analysis on my life: If something brings me joy, and that’s all it does, it probably has to go.
I spent the first weeks of the new year teaching a creative-writing workshop in Denver. I told my students it’s a good idea to introduce some kind of ticking clock into their stories to add tension and focus—a deadline, contest, appointment, or trial. Then my husband emailed me a ticking clock.
He was in Phoenix at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting—but the hundreds of scientists who usually attended from NASA and NOAA were absent. The president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, where he works, informed UCAR’s 1,400 employees that if the government shutdown didn’t end soon, they would have to choose between furlough or receiving half pay, and then get the other half when the government reopens again. UCAR is a private nonprofit, but NCAR, the federally funded research-and-development center it runs, relies on federal funding through the National Science Foundation for some 95 percent of its budget. “How long can we last?” my husband asked.
Good question. The same day, I learned that The Dallas Morning News had laid off 43 employees, including the books editor, Michael Merschel, for whom I’d been writing reviews for eight years. I wrote 122 book reviews during that time. The job brought me great joy, and I like to think that some readers picked up books I’d recommended, thus sparking their own moments of private joy. But book sections, joy-giving as they might be, are often the first thing to be cut.
[Read: Why federal workers still have to show up even if they’re not being paid]
In class, I shared with my students the literary agent Donald Maass’s advice to cut all scenes featuring their character alone, mulling things over in the shower or while brewing a cup of tea. Or, say, pondering their troubles while shopping solo at the grocery store. These scenes are usually low in tension. But I found that shopping with the prospect of my family’s income soon being halved—the option my husband would take over being furloughed—brought a clarifying snap of tension to the normally somnambulant experience.
I determined to spend half what I usually do per week. The aisles seemed garish in their bounty. While other shoppers breezed around, tossing items into their carts, I analyzed sale signs, calculating which products offered the best price per ounce, and determining which sales could be combined with coupons. I’d scrutinized our cupboards before shopping, selecting recipes that required only a few ingredients. I had carrots, celery, and broth for chicken soup—I could buy a small bit of chicken. I’d found some eye-riddled potatoes in the pantry that were only slightly green. These could be redeemed with cheese.
In class, I told my students that detailing a character’s financial pressures is a reliable way to build sympathy. I guess that’s true in all cases except if your characters are members of a different political party from your readers.
At home I labeled granola bars and yogurts with the kids’ names so there would be no fights about who got more, and I told them this was all the groceries for the week, so they had to pace themselves.
[Read: The impact of the government shutdown is about to snowball]
I can’t pay half a mortgage, half a car payment, or half an electricity bill, so I searched for other items to cut. Our monthly donation to PBS. My newspaper subscription. Maybe Netflix. The bill for the kids’ piano lessons loomed. Although I have to cajole and bribe them into practicing, when they finally play, there’s nothing that brings more warmth and life to a house than the sound of a piano. Practice, I tell them. Give yourself something no one can shut down or take away. Even their hesitations and missed notes are beautiful to me. I love the sound of the same measure repeated until it’s learned.
In college at Notre Dame, I took a theology class from John Dunne called “Religion and Autobiography.” He taught us about Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. Maslow believed that there were five categories of human needs and that the ones most essential for life—the bare minimum of food, shelter, and safety—must be fulfilled before a person could consider more ethereal needs, such as the “self-actualization” at the top of his pyramid.
But Dunne, who had a more generous conception of what it takes to sustain a human being, had one reservation with respect to this theory. “Really poor people are not just concerned with necessities,” he said. “They’re concerned with all the levels.” He had us read Child of the Dark, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, who lived in abject poverty with her children in the favelas of São Paulo. “Carolina steps back at night and writes in her diary,” Dunne said. “This is her precious moment every day. She’s sunk in poverty and misery, but there’s a basic liberation in writing that diary.” The Brazilian journalist Audálio Dantas discovered de Jesus’s writing and helped her publish it. The book became a best seller.
Even without that ending, which I might call unbelievable if it appeared in a student’s work of fiction, de Jesus’s story is instructive. My family and I are not poor. We’re lucky to have a used piano, a houseful of books, and some resources. Those harder hit by this shutdown are likely, at this moment, trying to cling not only to the things that keep them alive, but also to those that keep them human.
[Read: Marie Condo and the privilege of clutter]
I’m thankful to those 800,000 federal employees who are enduring weeks without pay. If this shutdown ends, it will likely be because enough people were finally moved by the suffering of these workers—or at least by the inconvenience the suffering of, say, a TSA employee causes in other people’s lives—to end the impasse. These workers are on the front lines of this crisis, taking the hit for the rest of us further down the federal funding stream.
My ancestors survived the Dust Bowl and Depression years on farms and in small towns in Nebraska. Further back, they immigrated here from Ireland and Bohemia, fleeing famine and political instability. My farm-raised mother, one of nine siblings, taught me that there’s no dab of tomato sauce too tiny not to save, and that the rejected ends of bread grind up nicely into bread crumbs that stretch a meal. Last Sunday, I baked bread with a motley collection of bananas I’d been freezing since July, one at a time, before they went bad.
Some ancient instinct inside me recoiled after the 2016 election. I knew as surely as I’d ever known anything that with this president, we were not safe. This one would prove indifferent to the suffering of his fellow citizens. In January 2016, I stocked up on canned food and pasta. I’m glad I did.
In class, I told my students not to solve the problems of their plots by sending in the cavalry. But I was glad for the cavalry when it arrived, at least temporarily, in my life. On Thursday, we received a reprieve—UCAR announced that the NSF had extended its funding for 30 days, staving off the furloughs and half-pay jobs for the moment. But I have no confidence that the shutdown will be resolved by then; and for hundreds of thousands of others whose livelihoods depend on the federal government, there has been no reprieve.
As trouble visits my own home, I might have to eat ramen. But I will do everything I can to keep the piano. And I wonder whether together, as a nation, we might reframe the conversation about what is essential. If we keep cutting the things that bring us joy, insight, and wonder and those that promote empathy and cross-cultural connection—from books to music to scientific research to national parks to museums and cultural institutions—won’t we just end up with more of these unbridgeable deadlocks?
Pete Buttigieg, the Millennial mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will formally launch an exploratory committee on Wednesday and make official the presidential run he’s been not-so-subtly edging toward for the past year and a half. His run will be explicitly about a generational contrast not just to the people in power, but to most of the people running in his own party.
“I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways we are the party with more long-term thinking,” Buttigieg said, in his first interview officially discussing his run.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani have both said that if there are bad consequences to what they’re doing, they’ll be dead and gone by then.
Trump is turning 73 in June, and Giuliani will be 75 in May. Buttigieg just turned 37 over the weekend.
“If you’re my age or younger, you were in high school when the school shootings became widespread; you’re going to be dealing with climate change for most of your adult life in specific, noticeable ways,” Buttigieg told me recently over a lunch of tempura fried chicken in New York. “You’re going to be dealing with the consequences of what they’ve done to the debt; you’re on track to be the first generation ever to make less than your parents, unless something changes; and your generation furnished most of the troops for the post-9/11 wars. It just gives you a very different relationship to political decision makers and decision making.”
For all the growing power of young voters, Buttigieg (it’s Maltese, pronounced Boot-uh-judge, and means, roughly, “lord of the poultry”) is one of the few candidates under 50, and one of the even fewer under 40.
Other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who’s also 37 and running for president, and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who’s continued flirting with a run at 40, Buttigieg is the only candidate in the giant field who’s a veteran, who did a tour in Afghanistan as a Navy lieutenant. He will be the first and only openly gay presidential candidate. He is also one of the few midwesterners looking at the race, and might end up as the only one who actually jumps in. And he could be the only mayor to run for president in 2020.
Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar, is clearly a very smart guy, so he knows this is a long shot, or maybe a loooong shot, just as he knows that ending up with the nomination or the White House would obliterate whatever conventional wisdom is left in presidential politics.
But he’s not the only one who thinks that in a field like this, at a time this wacky, when the race might be defined by impeachment or recession or war, anything could happen. He’s been encouraged by Howard Dean, who’s in love with his youth, and the Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod, who talks about his distinct profile and potential in this moment.
“Pete has the background and profile to do well in Iowa,” said another top Obama-campaign alum, who didn’t want to be public about praising any one candidate at this moment. “It will be a very crowded field, but caucus-goers will want to hear his vision for the country and give him a shot. South Bend isn’t that different from cities in eastern Iowa, too.”
Buttigieg has been making the most of those connections. In November, he got together with the Obama mega-donor Robert Wolf when the University of Notre Dame played Syracuse University at Yankee Stadium, and talked up the story of South Bend and his ambitions for more. “The people who know him better than me feel he’s one of those special guys,” said Wolf, who concurs.
Buttigieg was back in New York in January to record the audio version of his new book in a studio a few blocks over from where we were eating. Shortest Way Home is his story of quitting the fancy but amorphous consulting job he had, like all of his Harvard friends who’d moved to either coast, and heading back to the small city he grew up in. He ran for Indiana state treasurer at 28 and got crushed. He turned around and ran for mayor the next year, winning in a blowout.
But the book, which will be out in March, is obvious about the greater political mission it’s part of—the subtitle is One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, the cover photo is a shot of him crossing the street and rolling up his sleeves, and the epigraph is a proverb from Afghanistan, where he served.
My interview with Buttigieg paused briefly so that he could taste the wasabi honey that came with the fried chicken. He dipped his fork in, tasted it. Considered. “That sauce,” Buttigieg announced with the intrigued wonderment that’s his natural tone, “has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s fantastic.”
He is slight and soft-spoken, and looks even younger than he is. He has thoughts. He has theories. He’s spent the past year wowing the intelligentsia at dinner parties and in aggressively courted press coverage. He comes across more as a pretty regular guy than as a rip-roaring politician who’ll get people riled up at rallies.
Except crowds take to him. In March, I saw people line up for an hour to shake his hand and take photos after a speech he gave to the Kansas Democratic Party at the Topeka Ramada. In December, a few days after announcing that he wasn’t going to run for a third term in City Hall, he was in Des Moines as one of the featured speakers at the holiday party for Progress Iowa, a statewide activist organization.
“The reaction that I saw in the crowd while he was speaking was that he inspired people and got people fired up. He just really connected,” said Matt Sinovic, the executive director of Progress Iowa.
Sinovic said he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why—maybe it was Buttigieg’s youth, or maybe some of what he was saying, but the personal connection was palpable to him among the 300 people in the room, the organization’s largest turnout ever.
There’s a big difference between that and getting enough votes for the third-place finish in the Iowa caucus that Buttigieg figures he probably needs to prove he’s serious.
“Whether it’s him or whether it’s any of these candidates, all of them are going to want to have that kind of impact,” Sinovic said. “He certainly shows that he has that ability. He has that capacity to connect.”
Buttigieg doesn’t have a tactical plan of the states to prioritize. But he does talk about how “political affinity is so overdetermined” and how he’s overcome being unknown and overlooked in his past campaigns by putting himself out there and talking to people. He’s basically unknown nationally, but he makes sure to note that “an average member of Congress who’s been in office for 12 years has been on national television probably 10 times more than I have. But I have been on television 10 times more than they have, total.”
He’s run a city, and along the way he’s led it through a revival and modernization that has earned him some notice. So now all he has to do is convince people that he’ll be a better president than all the candidates with national experience, and a more viable candidate against Trump than all of those with higher name identification and bigger bank accounts.
Buttigieg’s answer: “Part of it would be the strength of some ideas that are compelling. And part of it would be demonstrating that at least the experience of a mayor of a struggling city is government experience that in many ways is better preparation than some other, more traditional pathways into the office, right? That’s our job: to make that case. It’s not an easy one, but I can do it.”
The plan is to transmogrify the ins that he’s built up with the insiders and turn them into enough recognition to get himself a moment in the sun.
He doesn’t have much time.
The first two Democratic debates are in June and July, each a mix of front-runners and long shots. Even the strongest candidates right now view those as moments likely to help define the race, and they’ll all be looking for breakout moments. As Buttigieg himself acknowledges, he’ll likely have to get to the stage with some momentum and profile already behind him so that he’s spending his allotted minutes doing more than correcting the pronunciation of his last name and explaining where South Bend is.
“I’m not like the others. And that’s going to be really important. The other thing is, ‘How much depth is there to your account of how America works, how politics works, and where the world is going in our lifetime?’ ” he said. “Mine will have to be an account of how the country and the world works, which makes more sense than what the others are saying.”
Being the toast of the Democratic circuit over the past year has meant that Buttigieg hasn’t been spending a lot of time in South Bend. He’s about to spend even less time there, though his term goes all the way through the end of the year. He’ll be traveling to Iowa, New Hampshire, and all the other states presidential candidates rush through, with appearances in Washington, D.C., and meetings with donors in New York, California, and beyond.
That’s exactly the kind of far-from-home itinerary that people in Los Angeles and New York have griped about when thinking about their own mayor going national and maybe running for president. Buttigieg says no matter where he is, the people of South Bend will get “a full-service mayor,” and that in this, being a small-city mayor is an advantage. But he also argues that he’ll help the city by being a walking commercial for South Bend’s growth, and by bringing more reporters and supporters in to see him and what he’s done there. He’s a particular fan of Dyngus Day, the Polish holiday celebrated the Monday after Easter by people spending the day stuffing themselves full of sausages and beer.
“South Bend, in many ways, is our message,” he said.
He’s also privately talked up the possibility of tapping into a network of gay donors and supporters, in the way Howard Dean did for the 2004 campaign because of his support for civil unions, which at the time put him far out ahead on LGBTQ rights. One of the people Buttigieg has laid that plan out to argued that with gay marriage legal, the energy may have dissipated, historic as his candidacy is.
When I floated that response to Buttigieg, he tensed up. Whoever said that must be from a big city, he figured. (He was right.)
“In one sense, obviously that’s correct, but also you can still get fired in Indiana for being gay. There’s no rule against that. Not in South Bend, we have an ordinance about this, but in other parts of Indiana it’s all the time. We had a kid beaten to death for being gay in South Bend last year. So it’s not like the fight’s over,” Buttigieg said. “Some people may not find this interesting anymore.” For others, it “may really mean a lot to them to—especially the older generation, who, you know, spent most of their lives at a time when it was inconceivable you could be out and in office anywhere. They’re just so thrilled to live to see this.”
Buttigieg didn’t come out himself until the spring of 2015, right before the Supreme Court same-sex-marriage decision, when he was already running for his second term. He got married last June at a South Bend church with about 200 guests, including Axelrod, and walked with his new husband from the ceremony to the city’s gay-pride parade, adding rainbow beads around their necks to go with their dark-blue wedding suits.
It was another demonstration of how much the world has changed, and how quickly, Buttigieg said. Younger Americans can’t get mortgages, because they’re drowning in student debt; economic mobility is sputtering because there aren’t enough good-paying full-time jobs; bridges are falling apart; debt is mounting because generations of government have kicked the can down the road; and it’s the people who haven’t been in power who are going to be around when the bill comes due. And when China is trying to collect on that bill.
“Consequences are being exposed now. And I do think there’s a way generationally to say, ‘Look, we weren’t around when you all decided for some reason it was okay to, like, not have D.C. be a state, but we think that’s dumb, doesn’t make any sense, and nobody can explain to us why that’s right, so we’re going to change that,’ ” Buttigieg says.
Very Millennial, I tell him.
“I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. When I took office, I drilled into people, especially people retained from previous administrations, that the one phrase that is just not welcome here is We’ve always done it this way,” Buttigieg said. “Now, if you can explain why we’ve always done it this way, for some reason why this is better, then of course, but not if We’ve always done it this way is literally the only reason we’ve ever done it this way.”
Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who’s 62 himself, said voters “are going to be looking for people that are real successful problem solvers, and people that have demonstrated skill sets, and he offers a new generational perspective.” Adler hails from the home state of two of the younger 2020 Democrats, Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke, and he said Democrats are lucky to see all of them looking at the race. About Buttigieg, he said, “He’s different.”
So different that he’d become the first Millennial, the first mayor, the first gay person, the first person from South Bend, and the first virtual unknown to be elected president. That’s a lot.
“There’s a moment where you need to prove that you’re viable,” Buttigieg said. “Up to that moment, low expectations can be pretty useful.”
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