From the PBS account on Twitter.This evening on the PBS Newshour, the chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, Kevin Hassett, said this about workers who are going without pay as the government shutdown nears its fourth week:
Right now about 25% of government workers are furloughed. Which means that they are not allowed to go to work.
But then when the shutdown ends, they go back to work, and they get their back pay.
A huge share of government workers were going to take vacation days, say between Christmas and New Year’s.
And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work. So then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days. And then they come back, and they get their back pay.
Then in some sense they’re better off.
You can see it for yourself, in Hassett’s talk with PBS’s Paul Solman, starting at time 4:20 of this clip.
I spent enough time in grad-school economics courses to understand the utility-maximization “logic” Hassett is applying. (“Let’s see, the workers are getting all that free time over the holidays, and they still have vacation days in the bank, so overall they come out ahead!”) And in fairness to Hassett, he was talking about the roughly half of furloughed federal workers who are instructed to stay home and not work — rather than the air traffic controllers, TSA screeners, etc, who are told to show up and worry about their pay some other time.
But I have spent enough time in the world to imagine how this will sound to people who have no idea when their regular pay will resume, whose lives and plans are being upended for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their own performance and competence, and who do not consider themselves in any sense “better off.”
1. Negotiations to end the U.S.-government shutdown are still stalled as President Donald Trump remains steadfast in his demand for money to build a southern-border wall—a major campaign promise. Even if a physical wall is built, it might not achieve the president’s desired effect. For one, a border is much more than just a membrane separating one location from another, and “it’s the largely invisible electronic system that forms the real battleground of migration into the country.” Meanwhile, Trump might think the wall is a winning issue for him, but polling data shows that it’s repelling some of his more ambivalent 2016 supporters whose votes he needs come 2020.
“My husband is a senior federal corrections officer at United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia. He has been working up to 18-hour days,” the Atlantic reader Tanya Louise Allen of Morgantown, West Virginia, told us. “We are terrified about what the future may hold. We are a one-income household.” Have you or others you know been impacted by the shutdown? We want to hear from you. Reply directly to this newsletter, or send us an email with your full name, city, and state to letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line The Daily: Shutdown Impacts.
2. Even as R. Kelly is engulfed in accusations of decades-long sexual predation, some fans still stand by the singer. Kelly’s recording contract remains in place, streams of his songs on Spotify have spiked, and die-hard fans continue to justify their support: “I am an R. Kelly fan. I’m here for the music and nothing else,” one woman is quoted saying in the new six-part documentary series Surviving R. Kelly.
Can art be considered apart from the artist? In the second year of the post–Harvey Weinstein reckoning, celebrities such as Kevin Spacey have tried to lean on their talent and fame to salvage their career following sexual-misconduct allegations. “Art, it seems, can survive allegations,” wrote Spencer Kornhaber last month. “What’s more unnerving is the suspicion, now, that artists can weather them, too—by relying on the goodwill engendered by their work.”
3. The wealthiest couple in the world is divorcing after 25 years. The announcement from the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, the novelist MacKenzie Bezos, was hardly the end of the story. How will the Bezoses divide their $137 billion in assets, a process that might make MacKenzie the world’s richest woman? And as the separation became public, the National Enquirer tabloid published a tawdry story accusing Bezos of having an affair. The move is notable because the Enquirer has developed a reputation as an unrelenting attack dog for President Trump, who has frequently directed his ire at the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post.
Evening Read
(Photograph of the young Tommy Tomlinson, courtesy of Tomlinson. Illustration by Emily Haasch.)
“I weigh 460 pounds. Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime,” begins Tommy Tomlinson’s brutally raw and tenderly human essay on the experiences of being too big in America, excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America. → Read the rest.
Snapshot
(Photograph by Steve Marcus / Reuters.)
America’s current bubbling housing crisis cries out for a straightforward remedy, but there is one nationwide impediment to construction, Derek Thompson argues. → Read the rest.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. This German newsweekly continues to reckon with a scandal in which one of its former star reporters consistently exaggerated and invented people and facts across multiple celebrated stories.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. A Chinese spacecraft known by this name, after a Chinese goddess of the moon, landed on the far side of the moon last week.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Paul Whelan, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on December 28 in this country on suspicion of espionage, and now faces lengthy jail time there.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Der Spiegel / Chang’e 4 / Russia
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Jessica Lee Martin shares today’s top stories:
How have 300 years of urbanization and farming transformed the planet? The environmental scientist Erle Ellis has studied the impact of humanity on the Earth for decades—and his team’s results show startling changes.
Thanks to the government shutdown, tens of thousands of low-income renters across the nation are now facing eviction. Kriston Capps reports that they’re largely seniors and people with disabilities.
Your fitness resolution might be easier if you’re rich. A new analysis by Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander finds that the availability of exercise venues reflects broader divides of class and geography.
For more updates like these from the urban world, subscribe to CityLab’s Daily newsletter.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.
Subscribe to Radio Atlantic: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play
Social media platforms once promised to connect the world. Today’s digital communities, though, often feel like forces for disunity. Anger and discord in 2018 seemed only amplified by the social media institutions that now dictate our conversations. Executive editor Matt Thompson sits down with staff writer Alexis Madrigal to find out how we got to this point and whether we can do anything to solve it.
Discussion topics include: why our online problems are really offline ones, what these platforms have lost in pursuit of scale, and how Matt and Alexis’s experiments with solutions have fared.
Last year, Alexis removed retweets from his Twitter (and was pessimistic about new changes bringing back the Old Twitter). Matt just began an experiment with turning his Twitter into a place for conversation rather than performance by reclaiming “The Ratio.” The effort reminds Alexis of another noble attempt at making your own rules online. Has it Made the Internet Great Again? Listen to find out.
VoicesMatt Thompson (@mthomps)
Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal)
It’s Thursday, January 10, and the partial government shutdown has been going on for 20 days. President Donald Trump visited the southern border in the town of McAllen, Texas, where he continued to push for his proposed wall; before he left, he told reporters he was prepared to declare a national emergency to unlock funding for the project.
In a Holding Pattern: Even after Trump’s highly publicized Oval Office address on Tuesday and his two negotiating meetings with congressional leaders on Wednesday, the terms of the shutdown debate haven’t changed. And some Republicans, such as Cory Gardner of Colorado and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, are starting to squirm.
Sticking to His Guns: The president’s determination to build the wall demonstrates his willingness to appeal to his base. But this strategy could cost him some of the more ambivalent supporters he had in the previous election. For example, 25 percent of non-college-educated whites who said they opposed the wall still voted for Trump in 2016. But in a recent survey, only 9 percent of that group now say they approve of Trump’s performance.
Issuing Threats: On Wednesday, Trump threatened to cut off funding for survivors and communities affected by California wildfires amid a political dispute with state politicians, turning an ordinary duty of the federal government into a partisan cudgel, writes Robinson Meyer.
Obama 2.0?: During a trip to Cairo, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo drew a stark contrast between Trump and former President Barack Obama. But the two have something in common: They’ve both struggled to extract Egypt from conflicts in the Middle East.
Snapshot
President Donald Trump holds up a belt buckle given to him by the rancher Monty Awbrey during a roundtable on immigration and border security at U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station, while on visit to the southern border, in McAllen, Texas. (Evan Vucci / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticHow the Housing Crisis Could Imperil Trump’s Presidency (Derek Thompson)
“Young Americans don’t seem remotely interested in becoming cement masons or carpenters. That means the housing industry would vastly benefit from an influx of immigrants—precisely the thing Trump wants to stop at all costs with a giant border wall.” → Read on.
Trump the Toddler (Adam Serwer)
“If Democrats allow Trump to use the well-being of the American people as a hostage, then he will do it again every time he is denied. As any parent knows, rewarding misbehavior only invites more of it.” → Read on.
A Border Is Not a Wall (Alexis C. Madrigal)
“Borders are an invention, and not even an especially old one. Predated by the printing press by a good 200 years, borders are constantly under revision. Even the zone of the border itself, the Supreme Court has held, extends far beyond the technical outline of a nation. Imagine the border as the human-made thing that it is, and it’s no longer surprising that it takes a multitude of forms: a line on a map, a fence, a bundle of legal agreements, a set of sensors, a room in an airport, a metaphor.” → Read on.
Paul Whelan, the U.S. Citizen Arrested in Moscow, Is Not a Spy (John Sipher)
“In any event, Putin certainly knows that Whelan is not a U.S. spy. He knows how the United States operates in Moscow. He has been in the middle of the many cases, arrests, flaps, defections, and efforts to deceive and thwart U.S. intelligence efforts. He is well aware that Whelan’s activities are not consistent with U.S. practice. While there may be any number of motivations for Whelan’s arrest, most attention has centered on the notion of a potential swap for the recently arrested Russian operative Maria Butina.” → Read on.
Steve King Set the Agenda for the Wall and Anti-immigrant Politics (Trip Gabriel, The New York Times)
Robert Mueller Met With Trump’s Pollster (Sara Murray and Katelyn Polantz, CNN)
Freshman Dems Feeling the Heat as Shutdown Drags On (Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris, Politico)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker)
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.
Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up for our daily politics email here.
They’ve weathered blistering attacks from the president, the exposure of sensitive sources, and the politicization of classified information. And now they’re not getting paid. “I’m not going to try to candy-coat it,” Tom O’Connor, a special agent and president of the FBI Agents Association, told me this week. “We really feel that the financial insecurities we are facing right now equate to a national-security issue.”
On Saturday, the current government shutdown will be the longest in U.S. history—and it could remain shuttered for “months or even years,” President Donald Trump warned Democrats last week. While much of the drama has centered around Trump’s demand for a wall on the southern border, thousands of FBI agents and other federal employees whose unfettered work is crucial to national security have either been furloughed or forced to work with no pay and steep budget cuts.
Morale at the FBI had already been steadily declining for months before the government shut down on December 22, according to current and recently departed agents who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss their feelings candidly. President Trump’s open warfare on the bureau has made agents’ jobs more difficult, they say, as trust in the FBI wanes among people who identify as Republicans and right-leaning independents. “Part of it is Trump’s constant attacks,” said one agent who left late last year. “Bigger than that, though, is that it seems like a portion of the population believes him. Which makes their jobs harder to do.”
[Read: The Republican Party turns against the FBI]
Another agent who left the bureau last year told me that certain leads that might be politically controversial were sometimes tabled indefinitely because they were not seen as worth incurring the wrath of the Trump White House. In the two and a half years since the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president has chided the FBI, former FBI Director James Comey, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Russia “witch hunt,” and the “deep state” in dozens of tweets, rallies, and interviews. Last April, he called the FBI and Justice Department’s desire to withhold sensitive information related to the ongoing investigation “an embarrassment to our country.” The withering morale and possibility of having to work without pay has made it increasingly difficult to recruit new agents, the agents said.
The government shutdown, now heading into its 20th day, is the cherry on top of a galling two years. “You know the old adage that crime doesn’t pay? Well right now, agents are starting to feel like neither does the federal government,” O’Connor said. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, O’Connor said that nearly 5,000 special agents, intelligence analysts, attorneys, and professional staff are currently furloughed, resulting in reduced staffing for “critical functions that support field operations.” None of them are being paid, he said. He wouldn’t elaborate on which investigations were being impacted, but emphasized that a lack of funding has hurt agents’ ability to do their job “completely and to the fullest ability we have.”
O’Connor also described a mounting backlog at Quantico labs, which provide forensic-analysis support services to the FBI, and said that funds supporting drug trafficking and undercover operations have been dangerously limited. Some, particularly those who work at Quantico labs, are not even allowed to come to work because of the shutdown. “FBI headquarters is trying to make sure that the most important topics are covered,” O’Connor said. “But that will get more and more difficult as the pot of money gets smaller and is not refilled.” According to an FBIAA spokesman, FBI field offices are responsible for allocating their resources and determining which activities are most central to specific missions or operations. Which areas are prioritized—whether it’s drug trafficking, counterterrorism, etc.—is also at the discretion of field-office leadership. “However, as the pool of resources dwindles, the scope of what can be adequately funded will also shrink,” the spokesman, Paul Nathanson, said.
[Read: The peril of taking on the FBI]
If the issue does not get resolved within the next few weeks, however, agents in various field offices may stage a callout—a coordinated sick day to protest the shutdown. (Transportation Security Administration agents have already begun doing so, according to CNN.) O’Connor said he had not heard of any plans to strike or begin calling in sick en masse, but he emphasized that he would not support it if they did. “Whether we’re paid or not, we’re going to show up and do our jobs to protect the United States,” he said. A coordinated “sick-out” would be one way of protesting the current conditions, since the Taft-Hartley Act, enacted in 1947, prohibits public employees from overtly striking. Federal-employee unions may also find recourse in the courts—some have already filed lawsuits arguing that requiring employees to work without pay violates the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
For now, the FBI Agents Association is simply pressuring elected officials. 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 on Thursday, the 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, O’Connor said that they’ll continue to do “the best with what we have.”
“But 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,” he added.
[Read: The evolution of the TSA]
The FBI is not the only agency whose limited budget and resources could compromise national security. More than half of the staff of the newly established Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of Homeland Security tasked with protecting the country’s critical infrastructure, have been furloughed, according to DHS. Nearly every employee of the Secret Service—which protects current and former government officials as well as the president—is going without pay, too, according to The New York Times, as are TSA agents and air-traffic controllers. “The growing financial insecurity may lead some agents to consider career options that provide more stability,” O’Connor said on Thursday. “The field is trying to be fully funded and staffed. But as we go forward, that’s going to change.”
Since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, Russell Berman wrote on Wednesday, federal employees have been legally prohibited from striking—which means that during a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are not on furlough must continue working without pay, indefinitely.
My husband is a senior federal corrections officer at United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia. He has been working up to 18-hour days. He is a dedicated officer. The inmates respect him, he does his job well. With this shutdown, he still has to go to work, but with no paycheck. Still he works extreme overtime.
We are terrified about what the future may hold. We are a one-income household. I have had some health problems and stay home and support him while he works. Yet we have had to have the frightening discussion, What will we do if this shutdown lasts beyond February?
If he has to leave the [Federal Bureau of Prisons], we lose 12 years of retirement and a decent income. We would have to move in with his mother and try to get jobs to survive. We would never be able to retire.
We really were supporters of the Trump administration, but Trump’s lack of concern for the American people, people just like us, has caused us to feel that the sooner he leaves the White House, the better off America will be.
In truth, no American will be untouched by this shutdown, and for some, it will change their lives forever.
Tanya Louise Allen
Morgantown, W.Va.
Last week, many viewers watched Surviving R. Kelly in horror as the documentary highlighted old and new sexual-abuse allegations against the singer. The six-part documentary series, which premiered on Lifetime on January 3, featured dozens of testimonials from survivors, activists, police officers, and legal experts, as well as Kelly’s family members and former employees. Their collective accounts paint a picture of a predator of vast proportion and shine a light on the pervasive, insidious culture of sexual violence within the music industry.
Though the exposé has done much to erode the singer’s image (and has spurred an investigation into Kelly by Georgia’s Fulton County district attorney), it has also seemingly bolstered his support. Plays of Kelly’s records spiked on Spotify just after the film aired. And despite the fact that black female activists have successfully campaigned to ban Kelly and his music from several national radio shows and event venues, the artist’s long-standing recording contract with RCA records remains intact. (Kelly has largely denied the allegations against him.)
Further, die-hard fans haven’t skipped a beat in enjoying his music and performances. “I am an R. Kelly fan. I’m here for the music and nothing else,” one woman says in the film. Those who have expressed outrage after seeing Surviving R. Kelly are bewildered about how, despite the preponderance of damning testimonies, Kelly’s support from fans—black fans, in particular—remains largely unscathed.
[Read: ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ is an uncomfortable, visual testimony]
In the final episode, some of the singer’s black concertgoers are interviewed while lining up for his show. Presumably, they are being asked what they think of the allegations against Kelly, and most offer hollow justifications such as “There are two sides to every story,” “Who are we to judge?” and “He’s been the same for years.” Coming from people who look like they could be the parents of any one of Kelly’s alleged victims, the comments sting. Within them, however, lies a larger issue: Why do sexual predators often get their staunchest support from the very communities they prey on?
In my professorial work on race, masculinity, and rape culture, I explain this problem as racialized rape myths. You may already be familiar with rape myths: narratives about sexual assault that provide false logic about the “nature” of men, women, or sexuality. The idea that women “ask for it,” for example, shifts the blame onto victims, as sexual-assault researchers have noted. And these harmful theories are essential in buttressing a rape culture where sexual assault is more likely to occur and perpetrators are less likely to be held responsible.
Yet in some of the public opinion concerning Kelly’s alleged exploits, these harmful ideas are taken a step further by those who identify reported perpetrators first as belonging to their same racial group. With racialized rape myths, people compound untrue narratives about sexual assault with their own self-interests. For example, some African Americans might think defending Kelly is a way to push back against the history of false rape allegations from white women against black men—allegations that functioned as assaults on black communities, as they were commonly used by whites to justify the lynching of African American men during the Jim Crow era.
But when used in the current-day context of protecting alleged abusers, notions such as They’re just trying to bring a good brother down jeopardize the legitimacy of valid critiques of systemic racial violence and injustice. What’s more, such a conflation ignores that sexual assaults, like nearly all other violent crimes, overwhelmingly happen within a racial group. Kelly’s accusers are almost entirely black: If the criticism of the criminal-justice system is that it is verifiably racist, then wouldn’t that racism also disadvantage black female victims?
Intra-racial sexual-assault cases also tend to shift some black people’s commonly accepted notions about the fairness of the court system. Kelly was fully exonerated of his child-pornography charges, even with the smoking-gun evidence of the grotesque home video in which he allegedly appears. His fans often point to this verdict as proof of his innocence—a surprising about-face for a group that knows intimately the miscarriages of justice in many police-shooting acquittals, for instance. The George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict and the Darren Wilson grand-jury non-indictment did not convince masses of African Americans of Zimmerman’s and Wilson’s respective innocence. They mainly fueled the protests against what huge swaths of people perceived as gross legal injustices.
This logic-bending as a means to protect black men has an explanation in black feminist theory. In her 1990 book, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, the scholar bell hooks writes, “Many of us were raised in homes where black mothers excused and explained male anger, irritability, and violence by calling attention to the pressures black men face in a racist society … Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now, are fundamentally based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.”
Upholding this idea leads to a culture of shielding black men that consequently injures black women and girls. Common tropes used to excuse predatory behavior, such as “These little girls are fast,” are victim blaming on the surface but, as sociologists such as Patricia Hill Collins note, are layered with centuries of stereotypes about black-female promiscuity.
In 2005’s Black Sexual Politics, Hill Collins explains that justifying the racial hierarchy in America’s founding required “ideas of pure White womanhood” that could only be created in juxtaposition with sexual stereotypes about Native and African women: “In this context, Black women became icons of hypersexuality.” The legacy of these stereotypes, according to the historian Deborah Gray White, was also used to explain why black women and girls were subject to rape by white men during slavery and Jim Crow.
Racialized rape myths are as universal as rape itself, and they occur within nonblack communities as well. When the former Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore faced several allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, support in the politician’s home state of Alabama remained strong with the majority of white voters (some 63 percent of white women stuck with Moore). Although the record turnout among African Americans would help elect Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, many couldn’t understand why Moore’s campaign wasn’t more damaged by the allegations (Jones skated by with only a two-point lead). In one focus group, white voters aligned with Moore mostly absolved him of the allegations, offering defenses such as “Nobody’s perfect” and “Forty years ago in Alabama, people could get married at 13 and 14 years old.”
Similar sentiments are found in the “Boys will be boys” attitudes from some white men and women that cropped up during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. These myths present violence as inherent to masculinity. They also downplay the role of white privilege in the impunity often afforded white men—which in turn benefits white women, whose advantages in the American social hierarchy are derived primarily from race, not gender. “We saw our brothers, husbands, dads, friends, and sons, and we’re determined not to live in a world in which good men are ruined by unsubstantiated allegations,” a female Kavanaugh supporter told The Washington Times. Holding white men accountable with regard to sexual assault would potentially jeopardize white women’s proximity to power.
In Surviving R. Kelly’s opening episode, viewers are reminded of Kelly’s compelling biography: rising from public housing in Chicago to become one of the most famous artists of his generation and an icon of black R&B’s crossover success. For many African Americans, the individual successes of celebrity talents are worn as badges of accomplishment for the race as a whole. When the Grammy Award–winning singer Erykah Badu introduced R. Kelly at the 2015 Soul Train Awards—a show that draws mostly black audiences and celebrates mostly black performers—she lauded him, saying that Kelly “has done more for black people than anyone.” Badu struck at the heart of one of the most injurious racialized rape myths of all: that representing one’s race in the mainstream by achieving individual, odds-defying success absolves people from harm they have perpetrated against other members of the race.
These ideas don’t need to be endorsed by all or even the majority of people within a racial group to be effective rationalizations for excusing sexual violence. They serve a purpose for men who see themselves as competing to achieve a higher social standing and for other men who see themselves as trying to maintain their current social standing. The myths also validate the self-defeating views of women who see their status as primarily linked to their male counterparts, whereby men’s interests and protections stand in for the interests and protections of the race writ large. The survivors in these respective groups, however, continue to suffer the consequences.
During a visit on Thursday to the nerve center of the Arab world, Mike Pompeo declared that reports of America’s departure from the Middle East under Donald Trump had been greatly exaggerated, and that it was Barack Obama who had abandoned the region—to devastating effect.
And yet the irony is that while the conduct of Obama and Trump in the Middle East couldn’t be more different, they’ve in fact ended up engaged in the same struggle: to extract the United States from the Mideast morass.
The U.S. secretary of state accused Obama—who 10 years ago in Cairo famously sought “a new beginning” between the United States and a billion-plus Muslims—of grossly underestimating radical Islamist ideology, willfully ignoring the dangers of the Iranian regime, and mistakenly perceiving the United States as a “force for what ails the Middle East.” This, he argued in a speech at the American University in Cairo, harmed hundreds of millions of people across the region and the world as ISIS “raped and pillaged and murdered,” Iran “spread its cancerous influence,” and the Syrian government “unleashed terror” by gassing its people, all in the face of American timidity.
[Read: Mike Pompeo’s worldview? Do as Trump does]
“We learned that when America retreats, chaos often follows,” Pompeo observed in the chaotic wake of his boss’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria. But in wiping out the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq, exiting the Iran nuclear deal, and twice retaliating against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, he contended, the Trump administration is reasserting the United States’ “traditional role as a force for good” in the region.
Strikingly, however, observers on both ends of the U.S. foreign-policy spectrum saw parallels in Obama’s and Trump’s views on the hard limits to expending American blood and treasure in the Middle East. As Obama’s former Mideast adviser Philip Gordon told me, Trump in a sense represents not “a repudiation of Obama” but a “doubling down of Obama.” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a supporter of the Trump administration’s hard-line Iran policies, similarly characterized Trump as “Obama 2.0” in wanting to disengage militarily from the Middle East, though he cited as an exception Trump’s views on Iran.
Pompeo delivered his message of reassurance to Israel and the United States’ Arab partners in damage-control mode during a nine-nation tour of the Middle East. Just a few weeks ago, his boss blindsided those allies by announcing plans to yank troops out of Syria and leave others to mop up what remains of the Islamic State there, noting that the Iranians could “do what they want” in the country and that it was time for the United States to terminate its “Endless Wars” and “come home & rebuild.” Pompeo and National-Security Adviser John Bolton have since fuzzed up the timeline and the conditions under which U.S. forces will leave Syria, but leave they will, assuming the president has his way.
In another sign that the president isn’t exactly preoccupied with reasserting the United States’ “traditional role” in the Middle East, there is no U.S. ambassador in more than half of the countries Pompeo is visiting on this trip, including Egypt.
[Read: Secretary of a state of confusion]
And there were still other indications: As Pompeo spoke, the president headed to Texas as part of his bid to wall off the southern border through a government shutdown. While some State Department officials helping Pompeo with his travels worked without pay, Trump was venting that he could finance the barrier with a fraction of what the United States spends on the war in Afghanistan (where he’s signaled that the next major U.S. military pullout could soon occur).
Trump is embracing the idea “that we can build a wall around the United States and we can keep out all of these threats, whether they come in the form of immigrants or they come in the form of terrorists,” Dubowitz told me. Meanwhile, his secretary of state is off in the Middle East telling allies, “The United States is not retreating behind walls, but in fact we’re going to be deeply engaged in the region and in the world.”
Obama’s 2009 Cairo address was exceedingly ambitious—an attempt to suture the deep wounds of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Before a packed auditorium at Cairo University, to rounds of applause and even a shouted “We love you,” the new American president expressed determination to remove U.S. soldiers from Iraq and eventually Afghanistan, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, enter into nuclear negotiations and perhaps a more positive relationship with Iran, and nurture democracy, human rights, and economic development in the region. It was a broad, demilitarized vision for U.S. engagement in the Middle East.
Then came the Arab Spring and its awful aftermath, which led Obama to overthrow a dictator in Libya, redeploy U.S. forces to fight ISIS, and wrestle with whether or not to authorize direct military intervention in Syria. (He ultimately declined to do so.)
Obama did strike a nuclear deal with Iran, but he didn’t manage to permanently draw down the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan or make much progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace or transforming public opinion of the United States in the Muslim world.
When I asked Gordon, Obama’s top Middle East adviser from 2013 to 2015, how influential the Cairo address had been in shaping policy by the time Gordon arrived at the White House, he responded, “Not too much, honestly.” The remarks “reflected Obama’s instincts about the region and his desires,” Gordon said, but “I think he would be the first to admit that he wasn’t able to deliver that ‘new beginning.’”
By the end of his presidency, Obama had grown profoundly disillusioned with the Middle East. He darkly described the region to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg as a drain on American lives, power, and attention to parts of the world (such as Asia) that were more vital to U.S. interests—rife with high-maintenance allies, dangerous tribalism, and intractable conflicts.
Gordon argued that the extent of Obama’s disengagement from the Middle East is often overstated. Still, Obama was intent on reducing the United States’ costs and commitments in the region and not getting “sucked into the Middle East.” And what Gordon found surprising about the 2016 election was that the policy pendulum didn’t swing back in the other direction, as it often does when the other party takes control of the White House. Instead, the pendulum swung even further toward disengagement from the region.
Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, pointed to one critical difference between the two presidents, which Pompeo also emphasized in Cairo: Trump’s return to a traditional conception of the United States’ regional allies and adversaries following Obama’s efforts, however limited in scope, to shake up these dynamics.
Obama and his advisers were at times critical of Sunni Arab partners such as Saudi Arabia and unwilling to grant blanket support to them in their rivalry with Shia Iran, Itani noted. Pompeo, by contrast, vowed in black-and-white terms in Egypt to “partner with our friends and vigorously oppose our enemies,” noting that the Trump administration had “fostered a common understanding with our allies of the need to counteract the Iran regime’s revolutionary agenda.”
“I think if you would ask the Gulfies and the Israelis today, they’d probably tell you they prefer a chaotic friend [in Trump] to a cold and methodical frenemy” such as Obama, Dubowitz told me.
Dubowitz said he gathered from discussions with officials during a trip to the Middle East in December that they recognize Obama and Trump as part of a “trajectory” and emerging “bipartisan consensus that we should be out of the Middle East” as a result of war fatigue in the United States and heightened great-power competition. (He attributes Sunni Arab states’ small but serious steps toward rapprochement with Israel to the understanding that Israel and its powerful military aren’t going away, as the U.S. might do.)
Arab leaders understand that “they may not be able to count on the United States going forward,” he told me. “They can read the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy as well as we can. They get a sense it’s about China, China, China.”
Or, as Trump might put it: The Wall, The Wall, The Wall, and maybe China, too. “I don’t want to be in Syria forever. It’s sand and it’s death,” Trump stated shortly before Pompeo jetted off to the Middle East, as the president boasted of how he had decimated ISIS and could now let Iran and Russia finish the battle. “I want to spend money in our country.”
As President Donald Trump descends on the border Thursday to further make his case for a wall, back home in Washington congressional Republicans—the ones whose resolve he needs if he’s going to continue his shutdown campaign—are growing more anxious. While the images Trump broadcasts to the nation may bolster his case to his base, these Republicans are left to talk and share doubts among themselves.
A handful of Republican senators have so far signaled their willingness to reopen parts of the government without funding for a border wall now that the partial government shutdown is tied for the second longest in the country’s history, with no end in sight. Those Republicans include Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who told reporters on Tuesday that Congress “can focus on [Trump’s] very legitimate concerns about border security … through the Homeland Security appropriations bill” and “in the meantime, let’s allow for these other departments to do the work.”
The GOP response to all of this is crucial to ending the impasse. With enough members, Senate Republicans could potentially persuade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and indirectly, the president—to take up legislation reopening parts of the government without the inclusion of border-wall funding. Perhaps more likely, worried Republicans could try to pressure Trump to find another way out of the mess—maybe by declaring a state of emergency in order to unlock funding for the border wall, a move that would almost certainly be met with legal challenges from Democrats. Republicans shifting on the issue may also reflect what they’re hearing from their constituents, indicating to Trump that there’s a potential voter rebellion on its way.
In a political world where government shutdowns have become commonplace, lawmakers from both parties have never quite been here before.
And pressure is mounting. Friday will mark the first day that federal workers won’t receive a paycheck. Transportation Security Administration agents have been calling out sick at higher rates since the shutdown began, and furloughed federal aviation-safety inspectors are holding up signs at airports warning passengers that their airplane might not have been properly inspected. If the shutdown continues after February, some 38 million American food-stamp recipients could be at risk of going hungry.
This, in a nutshell, is where we are: After Trump’s highly anticipated Oval Office address on Tuesday, which yielded no new arguments for the border wall, and his two fruitless negotiating meetings with Republican senators and Democratic leadership on Wednesday, the terms of the shutdown debate remain stagnant.
The partial shuttering of the federal government has furloughed 380,000 federal workers and forced 420,000 to work without pay, and it doesn’t seem likely to end soon: Trump has not budged on his demands for $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall, and neither have Democrats in their refusal to offer it.
House Democrats, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, passed legislation last week to fund most of the government through the end of September and the Department of Homeland Security through February 8, but without including money for a border wall. McConnell has pledged not to bring the legislation to a vote unless Trump indicates that he will sign it, making anything that passes the House, at this point, essentially moot.
While the House legislation likely won’t be taken up in the Senate, it’s notable that eight Republicans split with their party to pass it. “I think building a concrete structure sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security,” Republican Representative Will Hurd, whose Texas district contains more of the southern border than that of any of his House colleagues, told CNN on Wednesday.
Even if McConnell agreed to put the legislation reopening parts of the government to a vote, as of now there don’t appear to be enough Republicans willing to pass it—let alone override the veto it would likely receive from the president. Perhaps that’s why Trump, who has no further negotiations scheduled with congressional leaders, has left one option on the table: declaring a state of emergency.
“If this doesn’t work out, I probably will do it,” Trump told reporters on Thursday, before leaving for a visit to the border town of McAllen, Texas. “I would almost say definitely.”
Donald Trump wants his wall, and he’ll hold your breath until he gets it.
Twenty days into a partial government shutdown, the impact on government workers, their families, and basic services is coming into view. Food is not being inspected. Transportation Security Administration workers are calling in sick rather than working without pay. Millions could be evicted from their home, hundreds of thousands of workers are about to miss their paycheck, and tens of millions could lose food assistance. All because the president isn’t getting his way.
As with so much of what Trump does, holding Americans hostage to partisan goals is a logical extension of what the Republican Party was already doing. During Barack Obama’s administration, Republicans shut down the government demanding the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They threatened to put the U.S. government in default on its debt in order to cut the deficit, then as soon as they regained power, they vastly expanded it by passing upper-income tax cuts. Demanding that the Democrats cough up money for a wall on the southern border or the American people get it is different only in the degree of its absurdity.
[Read: Trump’s wall could cost him in 2020]
The inauguration of a new Congress means that for Trump, the days of easily getting his way are over. And like a child facing his first taste of discipline, he is chafing at the restrictions. But that’s what makes maintaining them so important—if Democrats allow Trump to use the well-being of the American people as a hostage, then he will do it again every time he is denied. As any parent knows, rewarding misbehavior only invites more of it.
What makes this shutdown distinctly Trumpian is not only that the president has taken credit for it, but that it was provoked by his most reliable trigger, being humiliated by a woman. Democrats and Republicans had already negotiated a deal to fund the government and border security without the wall. But after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump that he lacked the votes to pass a bill with money for a wall and Ann Coulter mocked him, Trump erupted and demanded that the lame-duck Republican House pass funding for a wall, scuttling the deal. When Trump met with Democrats on Wednesday and they repeated that they will not fund his wall, the president said “Bye-bye” and walked out. Making maximalist demands, offering nothing in return, and then withdrawing in anger the second those demands are not met is a child’s strategy for getting what he wants.
Others have already pointed out that the empirical case for the wall is thin. Despite what the administration has argued, most drugs come to the United States through ports of entry; terrorists fly to the U.S. rather than engaging in dangerous, grueling overland treks over thousands of miles to enter from the southern border; and the wall won’t halt the smuggling or illegal entries it is designed to stop. It would, however, be a massive, official symbol of American hostility toward immigrants of Latin American descent, which is why it matters so much to both Trump and his fiercest supporters.
[David Frum: Trump has defeated himself]
Trump doesn’t bear all the blame for this state of affairs, despite having preemptively taken credit for the shutdown. It was the Republican Party that embraced a president who, as the professor and commentator Dan Drezner has pointed out, behaves like a moody toddler. Over the past two years, one news story after another has documented how White House staff fear his pouty moods, his nasty outbursts, and his vicious tantrums.
For the past two years, the Republican-controlled Congress, rather than engaging in its constitutional duty to provide oversight of the executive branch, has acted more like bad parents pampering a spoiled child, not only enabling Trump’s corruption and abuses of power but also his fragile ego and tempestuous outbursts. Although some of them might vote to reopen the government, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is dead set on giving the toddler in chief what he wants by preventing such a vote from taking place.
The president is beginning to get wind of how his petulance is being perceived. “I don’t have temper tantrums,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn before departing for a photo op in Texas.
This is another hallmark of the Trump era. Whenever the president makes a sweeping declaration about his own conduct, it is a safe bet that the opposite is true.
This week, the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization of psychologists, did something for men that it’s done for many other demographic groups in the past: It introduced a set of detailed guidelines for clinicians who treat men and boys. The 10 guidelines make suggestions on how to encourage fathers to engage with their kids, how to address problems that disproportionately affect men, like suicide and substance abuse, and how to steer men toward healthy behaviors. The guidelines’ development began in 2005, and has included input from more than 200 physicians and researchers.
This emphasis on understanding the issues men face comes at a crucial time, according to Ryon McDermott, a psychologist who helped the APA craft its new standards. Although people of all genders face no shortage of obstacles in America, “men are struggling,” he says. “The recession has hit men harder than women, men are less likely to graduate from college, men are more likely to complete suicide than women.” To help patients, the guidelines assert, psychologists need to understand what’s making their lives untenable. For a lot of men, it might be the harsh cultural expectations that can come along with manhood itself.
In providing standards for men in the same way that it previously has for women, LGBTQ people, and other demographic groups, the APA attempts to right an enduring wrong in a field that has long glossed over how being a man might impact a person’s experiences and well-being. But by making treatment more accepting of men while also critiquing the way many of them see themselves, the group is trying to thread a difficult needle in taking on the nature of masculinity.
[Read: Today’s masculinity is stifling]
What exactly “traditional masculinity” means depends on who’s talking about it. In science, the term refers to a specific set of traits and behaviors that are considered culturally appropriate for manhood, some of which can become harmful in certain cases. When that happens, it’s “an extreme form of stoicism, dominance, violence, and aggression,” according to McDermott. But he’s quick to note that in many situations, more moderate expressions of those traits, along with other masculine ideals, are totally healthy and advantageous to people of all genders. “Sometimes it’s good to be aggressive. Sometimes it’s good to be dominant,” McDermott says. “But if you operate only on that frame of mind, then what happens when you encounter a situation when you need to be more egalitarian?”
In popular culture, meanwhile, “traditional masculinity” has a fuzzier, broader meaning, which generally encapsulates whatever the person reading or saying it associates with being a man. If McDermott sounds like he’s being careful in his distinctions, it’s because the APA’s efforts to critique masculinity’s most harmful norms have not been universally well received. When an article in the APA’s Monitor magazine characterized traditional masculinity as “on the whole, harmful,” writers for conservative media outlets including National Review and Fox News saw it as an attack on a population that’s suffering exactly the ills the APA hoped to address: elevated levels of depression and anxiety, and higher suicide and overdose rates.
“As we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing?” asks the columnist David French. “And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature?”
Joseph Vandello, a social psychologist and professor at the University of South Florida who was not involved in crafting the APA guidelines, can understand why some people aren’t open to the new rules’ point of view. “It’s positioning traditional masculinity as a problem to be solved,” he says. “If you’re a man who holds traditional values, why would you go see a psychologist when the starting point is that traditional masculinity is the problem?” That conflict, he says, might exacerbate an issue the guidelines seek to manage. “Part of the problem among men is that one of the markers of traditional masculinity is independence and rejection of help.”
The guidelines’ authors say that their goal isn’t to directly change how men think about themselves, but to help psychologists more deeply understand whom they’re treating. “There are some principles by which masculinity has been defined—being strong, being powerful, being courageous—and we’re not taking any of that away,” says Fredric Rabinowitz, a psychology professor at the University of Redlands who stewarded the 13-year process of creating the APA’s guidelines.
[Read: The many possible meanings of the ‘masculinity crisis’]
McDermott says that the guidelines are “meant to protect men, because studies indicate that men receive quite a lot of gender bias in therapy. These are stereotypes that men experience, and when therapists buy into them, that can cause serious problems.” For example, if a male patient wants to address problems with violence or aggression, seeing a therapist who believes men are resigned to those traits probably won’t get him the help he needs.
Vandello believes that a more effective way to understand masculinity and its modern problems, rather than as “traditional” or “toxic,” is to emphasize the sense of insecurity that a lot of men feel about their status as masculine, a phenomenon known as “precarious masculinity.” In American culture, Vandello points out, manhood generally has to be earned and maintained through actions in a way that womanhood doesn’t. That constant test is where harm can fester, he says: “Proving your manhood can be done through risky, aggressive, and violent behavior. And another response is the shaming and bullying of men who don’t fit the masculine mold.”
No matter where the turmoil in modern men’s lives comes from, it seems like there would be a clear benefit to men feeling confident in seeking help to cope with mental illness and change the behaviors that harm their health—and that risk hurting others. “We’re not anti-male. It’s all about helping men be more healthy, helping them be more successful, helping them navigate the difficult situations of life,” says Rabinowitz.
McDermott hopes that the guidelines help doctors see their male patients as a little more human. “We have a chance here to understand men as multidimensional individuals,” he says. “There are many different ways of being masculine.”
Today’s life-in-DC gazette: a little while ago I was in a line at a coffee shop with a middle-aged man, who from his accent I guessed (correctly) was from Nigeria. We talked while we were waiting. His was a standard life-in-our times story: He came to the US about 30 years ago. Now a citizen and small-business owner. Children all born here and in, or headed to, college. One of his nephews is a TSA screener at a DC-area airport.
“His rent was due on the 5th, man,” he told me, of his nephew. “He covered that, but then he was counting on his normal paycheck tomorrow. That’s not going to come, and he’s got his credit card payments. And he has to keep showing up at work each day.” The man I was talking to said he assumed he might have to tide his nephew over through the shutdown.
We all “know” this is happening. But it can be easy to lose sight of how extraordinary and unfair it is. Not a single person within TSA—or the National Park Service, or the Food and Drug Administration, or the Census Bureau, or any other agency—has a single thing to do with the showdown over Donald Trump’s “wall.” But hundreds of thousands of them are being penalized and disrupted by what will soon be the longest shutdown in history.
It can also be easy to lose sight of three baseline realities of this abusive situation. Here’s the summary, with a few more details on each, lower down.
Reality one: As recently as three weeks ago, Donald Trump was perfectly willing to keep the government open and defer funding for his wall— until a right-wing chorus made fun of him for looking “weak.” Reality two: Trump and his Congressional party never bestirred themselves to fund this wall back when they had unquestioned power to do so, during the era of Republican control of the Congress in 2017 and 2018. Reality three: the U.S.-Mexico border has come under more control in recent years, not less. It’s been controlled by fences and walls in the busiest areas — as has been the practice for decades. The “crisis” is the politics of the issue, not its underlying realities.Read on, for more details of each of the three. Or if you stop here, please keep those three points in mind.
A few more details, on facts that everyone knows but that can slip from sight in the froth of “both sides dig in” daily news updates.
Donald Trump and the Republican Senate were perfectly willing to keep the government open, until the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh began mocking them as “losers” and “sell-outs.”You can read the specifics at the end of this piece, but the sequence is indisputable. On December 18, Mitch McConnell’s GOP-run Senate passed, on a unanimous voice vote, a “clean” funding measure, to keep the government open and postpone funding fights about “the wall.” They did so with guidance from the White House that Donald Trump would go along.
Then the right-wing mocking began; then immediate funding for the wall became an “emergency”; then Trump preferred a shutdown to appearing to “lose.” Mitch McConnell’s GOP of course switched right along with him—and against the measure all of its members had supported just days ago.
One man’s insecurity, and his party’s compliance, are disrupting millions of lives.
During the two years in which Trump and the Republicans could easily have gotten funding for the wall, they didn’t bother to try.
Through all of 2017 and 2018, Trump’s GOP held a large majority in the House, and a workable majority in the Senate. Trump and the GOP took care to ram through things they really cared about in that period, from Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Trump tax cuts.
They didn’t bother to try for a wall. The supposed “emergency”didn’t matter when they had power to get their way. As Ezra Klein has argued, the most plausible explanation is that Trump doesn’t actually care about having a wall. He cares about being seen as fighting for it (as Ronald Brownstein has explained).
The number of illegal crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border, like the percentage of undocumented residents and workers in the U.S., has been going down, not up. That’s not the tone of political talk, but it’s what academic and government research shows. For instance, consider this recent report from Pew.
Border security is important, and for decades politicians of both parties have supported fences and walls in populated areas as obvious necessities. The photo at the top of this post, was taken near Tijuana 11 years ago. (The U.S. built the wall; Mexican graffitists provided the illustration.) When I did a big cover story for The Atlantic on immigration more than 35 years ago—yes, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, in 1983—I visited fences and walls in California, Arizona, and Texas.
Walls themselves aren’t controversial. They’re part of what Republicans and Democrats have long recommended for stable controls at the border—and they’re part of what has made immigrant flows more rather than less manageable. The wall, a fantasized Maginot-style structure stretching 2,000 miles from the Pacific to the Gulf Coast, is different. That’s what Trump is pushing for—now that he no longer has a chance to get it.
People obviously disagree on these issues. You could make a case for a much different approach to immigration than the one I might personally favor. But it’s hard to imagine a decent case for knowingly inflicting damage on hundreds of thousands of public servants, who have nothing whatsoever to do with this issue and whose only mistake was to have chosen a vulnerable line of work.
On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and currently the richest person in the world, and MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist, announced that they are ending their marriage after 25 years. In a joint statement posted on Twitter, the couple said they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”
One such adventure, even if it’s not what the Bezoses had in mind when crafting their tweet, will be divvying up the couple’s enormous financial holdings, which are estimated to add up to about $137 billion.
How will that process unfold and who will end up with how much? It’s common for very wealthy couples to come to an agreement out of court, usually in the interest of privacy. But those who work with really, really rich people know from past experience that their divorces stand apart from those of regular folks.
[Read more: The Bezos divorce is a revealing media moment]
One major difference is the nature of couples’ assets. Often, very affluent people hold their wealth in stocks, and in recent decades many of them have been compensated with highly lucrative stock options in rapidly growing companies. “That makes the divorces incredibly more complicated than, say, two schoolteachers who get divorced, with retirement accounts and savings accounts and cars and houses,” says Steve Mindel, a family-law attorney in Los Angeles who works with high-net-worth clients.
Assessing the value of stocks can be an involved process, but those are far from the strangest assets that have to be quantified. “From comprehensive in-the-box Barbie dolls and rare guitar collections to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, everything you’ve acquired as a couple must have a number put on it,” writes Ken Brewe, a lawyer in Washington State, in a post on his firm’s website.
The main determinant of what happens to all these assets is location—where the couple reside—because laws can vary significantly by state. Divorce filers in Washington State, where the Bezoses live, are subject to a legal standard on the books in about one-fifth of states called “community property,” under which everything accumulated during a marriage will be split 50-50 by the courts. “In the case of the Bezoses, since they were married at the time that he moved from Wall Street to start developing Amazon, we would assume that everything in Amazon is going to be community property,” Mindel says.
A possible outcome, then, is that Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos each end up with about $65 billion in Amazon stock. That would wrest the title of world’s richest man away from Jeff (it would revert to Bill Gates), and make MacKenzie the world’s richest woman, overtaking the L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. Another possibility, Mindel says, is that the stock could be transferred into a single entity over which the former husband and wife would have joint control; that arrangement might put Amazon’s investors and corporate directors more at ease, given that there wouldn’t be two separate shareholders. (Perhaps the Bezoses could entrust a close adviser with casting the deciding vote in situations when they disagree about Amazon’s corporate decisions.)
What would change all of this, though, is if the Bezoses had, sometime before their divorce, hammered out an agreement about what would happen should their marriage end; such an agreement would supersede the dictates of community-property laws. But according to the gossip site TMZ, they didn’t have a premarital agreement. And since it’s not known whether they signed any postmarital agreements—which might have happened years ago, when Amazon was transitioning from scrappy start-up to tech colossus—Mindel’s best guess is that everything’s going to get split in half. (Amazon did not respond to a request for information about how the couple’s assets will be divided.)
In states without community-property laws, the default is a principle called “equitable distribution,” under which divorcés’ stuff is instead divided up based on a range of factors, including the role that each spouse played in building up a fortune. “You could have a 75-25 split, a 60-40 split, a 50-50 split,” says Bonnie Frost, a family-law attorney in New Jersey whose clients range from “the regular Joe to somebody who’s super wealthy.”
When a couple in an equitable-distribution state doesn’t agree to a settlement, it gets worked out in court, and the judge considers a variety of criteria. Frost says that generally, the longer the marriage, the closer the split will be to 50-50. But, she says, “if you’re divvying up 20 billion, and you’re getting 1 billion and someone else is getting 19 … a judge might say that’s enough for you.” Even if $1 billion isn’t equal, it’s still plenty to live on, the reasoning goes.
After the Bezoses announced their divorce, allegations surfaced that Jeff Bezos may have been having an affair, but Frost says affairs have little if any bearing on how judges divvy up assets. In New Jersey, she says, “an affair would not affect distribution of property unless one could prove that the dallying spouse used marital assets to further [the] affair.” If that were proved, the cheater would owe the cheated 50 percent of the money spent on the affair.
In the eyes of a judge, a lot can hinge on how responsible each spouse was for earning the money they share. This can lead to some amusing arguments in court. In a post about the divorces of the super-wealthy, Frost discussed the example of an oil executive in Oklahoma who found himself in the strange situation of, she says, downplaying his role in the success of his company—because if the court determined that he was in fact deserving of credit as a superb leader, increases in the value of the business during the marriage would be up for grabs in court.
Sometimes strategies the wealthy use to keep their money during a divorce are outright devious. “We’ve definitely had those types of cases where people try to hide money on the Isle of Man, in Gibraltar, and there’s another island off of Africa they hide things in,” Frost says. She says that’s not as much a concern with divorces between public figures like the Bezoses, because with all eyes on them, they probably aren’t trying to outfox the IRS by stashing money somewhere.
In more modest divorces, the determination of alimony payments can have tremendous effects on spouses’ and children’s basic well-being. Not so much for the super-wealthy. “The reality is, if you have a billion, you probably don’t need alimony, because one of the factors in getting support or alimony is what is your need,” Frost says. She thinks it’s unlikely that Jeff Bezos would be ordered to issue payments to MacKenzie Bezos after they’re divorced.
Still, support payments can be contentious when the sum of money at stake is so large. In one divorce that was settled in 2015, the (now ex-) wife of a hedge-fund billionaire requested $1 million a month for living expenses, including $6,800 a month for groceries and $60,000 a month for paying a private staff. (The full details of the settlement weren’t made public, so it’s unknown how much she got.) Meanwhile, around the same time, the husband of a Walmart heiress was pushing for $400,000 a month in support payments, instead of the $30,000 a month he had agreed to in a prenup.
Frost told me that in the majority of the divorces she’s worked on in which heterosexual couples have amassed a fortune, even though it was typically the man doing the most earning, the woman still usually came out okay. In fact, many of the women on the lists of the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s richest residents came into their money via divorce.
But sometimes even very wealthy spouses can become a lot less wealthy after divorcing: for instance, when one spouse entered the marriage with, say, a large trust fund. During the marriage, when things were pleasant, both spouses might have dipped into it, but if things turn bitter, the original owner of the fund might seal off access. “You can have people who have lived a very, very high-income lifestyle, but all of a sudden … once they’re divorced, they could be in a whole different situation,” Frost says. (Mindel says the assets one brings into a marriage generally aren’t considered community property in states where that standard holds.)
When I asked Frost and Mindel whether the divorces of the super-wealthy were more or less contentious than those of everyone else, they said they didn’t see any such patterns. Instead, they both told me that what tends to matter more is the individuals’ personalities and how much they trust each other. Without mutual trust, Mindel says, “those are going to be the cases that you read about in the papers, where the lawyers make hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars separating the finances of those two individuals, much like you would see in a big corporation that’s having a major shareholder dispute.” But if the harmonious tone of the Bezoses’ divorce announcement is any indication, they should be just fine.
Eighty-six Americans lost their lives last year in the Camp Fire, the largest and deadliest wildfire in California’s modern history. More than 11,000 people lived through the blaze but saw their homes destroyed. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off relief for survivors and communities affected by that blaze, amid an ongoing political standoff with high-ranking California politicians.
“Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money,” he said on Twitter. “It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”
It was not immediately clear whether Trump had actually stopped the funds from flowing. Neither the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to repeated press calls on Wednesday. “Due to the federal funding hiatus, we are not able to respond to general press queries,” said an automated email reply from FEMA staff.
But if Trump does tamper with emergency relief, there is little doubt that Californians will feel the bite. FEMA has already approved almost $49 million in assistance for more than 6,600 individual projects across the state. And until Trump sent his tweet, that number seemed certain to grow. Many residents have yet to apply for aid, since FEMA’s deadline for new grant requests is January 31.
[Read: It’s (mostly) not FEMA’s fault]
Ernest Abbott, an attorney at Baker Donelson and FEMA’s general counsel from 1997 to 2001, told me that the White House could decline to authorize new funds for California without running into major legal obstacles. But it would struggle to withhold the $49 million that FEMA had already approved, he said.
“Under the Stafford Act, the president and FEMA have the discretionary authority to provide assistance to state and local governments,” he told me. The key word there is discretionary, meaning that when a disaster strikes, the president is not legally required to spend any money under the law.
That initial decision, to grant funds or not, cannot be challenged in court except on constitutional grounds (such as accusations of racial bias), Abbott said. But once FEMA has approved funds, courts can oversee any decision to withdraw them.
But Abbott admitted that it was difficult to know what, if any, legal action the president actually intended in his tweet. “I really don’t know how this one-sentence directive will be implemented,” he said.
In that way, Trump’s threat—or is it an order?—captures his presidency in microcosm. If Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce,” then Trump offers the experience of watching farce and tragedy happen simultaneously.
Farce: The president’s tweet isn’t just factually wrong. It points to an understanding of California’s fire problem that conflicts directly with what experts and firefighters describe. It is not clear that better forest management—especially raking and clearing, the techniques that Trump favors—would entirely prevent California’s ravenous wildfires. In any case, the U.S. Forest Service has currently stopped all forest-management work due to the government shutdown.
There are policies that could improve California’s resilience to wildfires. PG&E, the local electric utility, could update its infrastructure, reducing the chance of a power line sparking an errant blaze. For the past century, fire departments have fought virtually every forest fire; western forests are now packed with brush, debris, and dense stands of trees. The state or federal government could try to clear that fuel by attempting controlled burns—although experts say those burns would have to be of a much larger scale than virtually any equivalent burn now attempted in the United States.
The United States could also try to slow climate change, which has turned hot days into heat waves and verdant forests into dry tinderboxes. Between 1984 and 2015, the effects of climate change may have doubled the acreage burned by western wildfires, according to a recent study cited in the National Climate Assessment. But Trump, of course, has rejected both that assessment and most of the conclusions of climate science. He has fixated instead on raking forest floors.
Which brings us to tragedy: Not only is the president wrong, but he may have also turned an ordinary duty of the federal government—providing disaster relief to its citizens, swiftly and fairly—into a cudgel of partisan politics.
[Garrett Epps: The government is trying to silence 21 kids hurt by climate change]
Trump makes no secret of his special ire for the Golden State, dubbing it “High Tax, High Crime California.” He has undermined its environmental laws and attacked its protections for unauthorized immigrants. Now, after reneging on a deal to fund the federal government last month, Trump finds himself battling Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House and a Democrat from San Francisco, over $5 billion in funding for a border wall with Mexico.
Trump has always elided Pelosi and her home state together—he once labeled her “High Tax, High Crime Nancy Pelosi.” It’s hard not to read his sudden, surprising threat to cut off California’s FEMA funding in the context of his siege on Pelosi. Never mind that Paradise, California, the city destroyed by the Camp Fire, voted for Trump in the 2016 election and is represented by a Republican in Congress.
On Wednesday, that Republican, Representative Doug LaMalfa, said that Trump’s threat “is going to get a lot of people upset and concerned.”
“That tweet came out of left field. It didn’t really help in that situation,” he told reporters near the House floor. “Now we’re working to make sure our constituents know—and I will be [reminding] them—that he made the promise [to them] when he came to visit Paradise, which is greatly appreciated, and that FEMA has been great so far in helping.”
Vann Newkirk contributed reporting to this article.
Borders are an invention, and not even an especially old one. Predated by the printing press by a good 200 years, borders are constantly under revision. Even the zone of a border itself, the Supreme Court has held, extends far beyond the technical outline of a nation. Imagine a border as the human-made thing that it is, and it’s no longer surprising that it takes a multitude of forms: a line on a map, a fence, a bundle of legal agreements, a set of sensors, a room in an airport, a metaphor.
As Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter explain in a book on policing, a controlled border creates the notion that domestic space is safe. Protecting “the border” safeguards the home, the family, and a way of life. This idea of safety is so potent that it has shut down the United States government.
But the border itself—the line on a map, or the gate at a crossing—isn’t what’s at issue; it’s the idea of the border, a membrane that defines a nation while maximizing its market power.
A wall does not make a border, or at least it hasn’t in Europe since roughly 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia was negotiated. In previous eras of human civilization, walls were used to define territory, in part because there was not a complex legal regime hammered out over time to rely on. “Rather than being used as political boundaries, such constructions, including the Great Wall built in the Qin Empire, served more as defensive barriers, a basis for further expansion, and a platform for the control and regulation of the flow of goods and people,” writes the political scientist Manlio Graziano in What Is a Border? “The state borders with which we are familiar today have very different characteristics: They are measured, drawn on a map, marked on the ground, and have a legal significance generally recognized by all parties involved.”
In other words, walls used to generate borders, not the other way around. But according to Graziano, beginning in the 17th century, as capitalism began to take root across Europe, borders became the way of creating and enclosing a nation, and with it, a national market. “The subjects of the same prince had to be able to recognize each other, understand each other, and obey the same distinctive characteristics and the same laws. In short, they had to become—even if the word only appeared much later—a nation,” Graziano writes.
Border regions, as at the boundary between the Mexican state of Coahuila and the American state of Texas— which were once a unified political unit— might share a climate, an ecosystem, and a culture, but once a border was established, they could not share an economy.
Which is not to say they don’t have economic relationships. As the United States’ border with Mexico shows, there is a lot of money to be made at the boundary between two different national economies. The border acts as a membrane that keeps labor on one side cheap while consumers on the other retain the high incomes to buy incoming goods. Make a fridge in Tijuana, paying wages in pesos; truck it across the border to San Diego; and sell it for dollars—and you can make a lot of money. (Hence, the decades of the maquiladora system.) The same holds true for Chinese manufacturing and the ports of the West Coast; it’s just that the border zone is the largest body of water on Earth and it takes six weeks to cross in a boat longer than the Empire State Building is tall.
In Western countries, especially since 9/11, this market membrane has run smack into a competing desire to keep out some people, however that group of, as the Border Patrol puts it, “inadmissables” is defined.
[Read: What a border-wall GoFundMe campaign says about America]
In 2007, the British government put its policy like this: “The aim of border control is to sort traffic into legitimate and non-legitimate.” As the scholar Nick Vaughan-Williams points out, there are actually two goals in the United Kingdom’s (as in the United States’) border policy. “Rather than operating simply as a ‘barrier’ or obstacle in the physical sense of a wall, ‘the border at work’ here is one that seeks to enhance mobility, circulation, and flow,” Vaughan-Williams wrote.
To accomplish these two seemingly at-odds goals, the American answer has been to create a more sophisticated, technologized border, one that uses data to allow some people and goods to pass extra fast while slowing or repelling others. The more the border is hardened, the more urgent and complex the programs that allow some valuable people and goods to pass freely become. Hence, the War on Terror’s airport crackdown and watch lists also spawned the Global Entry program for frequent—and “trusted”—international travelers. A tightening southern border led to Free and Secure Trade, a special trucking program for “trusted” shippers, which wants to get as close to the ideal of frictionless border crossing as possible.
Because airports “deterritorialize the border,” as the scholars Zureik and Salter put it, spraying it over the whole country, this is where most Americans encounter its processes. Because those chunks of the border cannot be walled off, they reveal what a border really is: bureaucratic machinations and technological surveillance, databases of databases, systems that determine who gets to leave these borders and who has to get back on a plane and return to whence they came.
The border isn’t really a line around the country, but an agreement between the state and the people who want to enter it. And like many other agreements, its terms are increasingly automated and opaque. The people respect the terms less, too. No one knows for sure, but reports have indicated that 40 to 50 percent of people in the United States who are not technically supposed to be here arrived on a legal visa and just stuck around. And that number is increasing.
[Read: What the waiting list for legal residency actually looks like]
A wall might turn away some desperate people in Texas, but it’s the largely invisible electronic system that marks some people inside and outside the United States that forms the real battleground of immigration into the country. Between Tijuana and San Diego, huge barriers enclose a narrow swath between the technical border and the real insides of America. In some sections, there are guards everywhere, massive surveillance towers, and an invisible wall of sensors, which has never been precisely explained. Even so, life flows back and forth across the border. People have family on both sides. Spanish and English is spoken on both sides. Businesses serve customers north and south.
Where the border fence ends in eastern San Diego County (Alexis Madrigal)Then there’s a spot in the far northeast corner of Tijuana where the wall that runs from the ocean stops right there in the hills. You can simply walk around the fence. Turn around and look, and there’s the bustling manufacturing valley of Tijuana on one side and a piece of San Diego County constantly patrolled by Border Patrol SUVs and officers on the other. Poor people in that neighborhood in Tijuana use the barrier as a convenient fourth wall of their home.
The Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by George W. Bush, appropriated an initial $1.4 billion for this type of structure. At first, it seems ridiculous to have a wall that ends. But if the point is to shore up the idea of the border, rather than actually slow the circulations that the economy requires, then maybe a fence that exists only where people are likely to see it is the perfect solution.
When people pose the old question about whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound, they presuppose that none of the other plants in the forest are listening in. Plants, supposedly, are silent and unhearing. They don’t make noises, unless rustled or bitten. When Rachel Carson described a spring bereft of birds, she called it silent.
But these stereotypes may not be true. According to a blossoming batch of studies, it’s not that plants have no acoustic lives. It’s more that, until now, we’ve been blissfully unaware of them.
The latest experiments in this niche but increasingly vocal field come from Lilach Hadany and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University. In one set, they showed that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by rapidly sweetening their nectar. In a second set, they found that other plants make high-pitched noises that lie beyond the scope of human hearing but can nonetheless be detected some distance away.
After the team released early copies of two papers describing their work, not yet published in a scientific journal, I ran them past several independent researchers. Some of these researchers have argued that plants are surprisingly communicative; others have doubted the idea. Their views on the new studies, however, didn’t fall along obvious partisan lines. Almost unanimously, they loved the paper asserting that plants can hear and were skeptical about the one reporting that plants make noise. Those opposite responses to work done by the same team underscore how controversial this line of research still is, and how hard it is to study the sensory worlds of organisms that are so different from us.
[Read: Trees have their own songs]
The concept of floral communication has long been controversial, especially after decades of pseudoscientific (but very popular) claims about plants growing well to classical music or being attuned to human emotions. Those hokey claims “have never been substantiated by rigorous experiments,” says Richard Karban from the University of California at Davis, and they tainted the entire field of study, making scientists skeptical about the very notion of plants exchanging signals.
But after many careful studies, it’s clear that plants can send airborne, chemical messages, warning faraway relatives about marauding plant-eaters, and that animals can eavesdrop on these communiqués. Plants can also influence one another through the network of fungi that connects their roots—a so-called wood-wide web. And they can respond to vibrations moving through their tissues: Many release pollen only when insects land on them and buzz at the right frequency, while others create defensive chemicals when they sense the rumbles of chewing insects.
To Hadany, one of the Tel Aviv University researchers, it seemed weird to think that plants wouldn’t also make use of sounds—airborne vibrations. “Plants have plenty of interactions with animals, and animals both make and hear noises,” she says. “It would be maladaptive for plants to not use sound for communication. We tried to make clear predictions to test that and were quite surprised when it worked out.”
First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around.
“This shows yet again that plants can behave in remarkably animal-like ways,” says Heidi Appel from the University of Toledo, who has studied plants’ responses to animal vibrations. Crucially, she says, the study is “ecologically relevant”—that is, it involves a sound (bee buzzes) and a response (nectar sweetening) that actually matter to the plant. It’s a far cry from past studies that showed plants reacting to sounds they would never normally encounter, such as classical music, in ways that are hard to interpret (certain genes might switch on or off, but to what end?).
Here, the plants’ responses make clear evolutionary sense. Sweeter nectar is more enticing to pollinators, and by attracting more pollinators, the plant increases its odds of making more plants. But it takes a lot of energy to make supersweet nectar, and the resulting brew could be degraded by microbes or stolen by non-pollinating thieves. Far better to sweeten the fluid when it most needs to be sweet—and the buzz of a bee is the perfect cue that the time is right.
But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!) “The results are amazing,” says Karban. “They’re the most convincing data on this subject to date. They’re important in forcing the scientific community to confront its skepticism.”
[Read: Why panpsychism is probably wrong]
“It’s such a wonderful and exciting finding,” adds Monica Gagliano from the University of Sydney, a pioneer in the study of plant acoustics. She notes that one of the team members, Daniel Chamovitz, “was quite skeptical, or even dismissive, of the whole idea of plant bioacoustics only a few years ago. Now, in the spirit of good science, he is experimentally testing these ideas. That approach deserves to be applauded and encouraged.”
But she and the others are less impressed by the Israeli team’s second study, which looked at whether plants make sounds. For decades, scientists have known that plants give off popping noises, as air bubbles form and collapse in their stems—a botanical version of the bends, which is exacerbated by drought. But these pops have mostly been recorded by microphones placed directly onto stems. Hadany and Yovel wanted to know whether they could be heard from afar, through the air. If so, perhaps they could act as signals for animals—or, more enticingly, for other plants.
The team put individual tobacco or tomato plants inside soundproof boxes, in front of two sensitive microphones each. They then searched for noises they could attribute to a specific plant—sounds picked up by a plant’s two dedicated mics but not by those trained onto its neighbors. It worked: Every few minutes, the plants emitted short ultrasonic sounds, too high for humans to hear normally. But they were still relatively soft noises. At a distance of four inches, they had a volume of 60 decibels, roughly equivalent to normal conversation and perhaps insignificant to any other creatures. “Ultrasonic-sensitive creatures like moths and bats, going around a field, might be hearing lots and lots of sound,” Hadany says.
The team also found that dry or damaged plants produce noises more frequently. A computer could even learn to distinguish the sounds of ailing plants from those of healthy ones, with about 70 percent accuracy. And if software can do it, could an insect? Might a moth use sound to avoid laying eggs on a stressed plant? Could hungry bats head toward the noise of plants being besieged by insects? And could farmers use these pops to tell whether their crops need more water?
Without knowing exactly how the pops of harmed and healthy plants differ, it’s hard to know how informative they’d be, says Rafael Rodríguez Sevilla from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who has called for more careful interpretations of studies on plant acoustics. Would an eavesdropper be looking for some change in how frequent they are? They’re not that common. They’re also very brief, and liable to fade with distance. “Yes, in theory, animals might use the sounds to gain information about a plant’s condition,” says Carel ten Cate from Leiden University, “but how meaningful is it if a plant produces something like 20 soft 0.1-millisecond pulses per hour?” And since the sounds would likely vary with different types of damage, or degrees of dryness, how much specific information could an animal possibly glean from them?
Also, “there is no indication that the pops are specialized signals of stress rather than cues produced incidentally due to the damage,” Rodriguez Sevilla adds. Hadany acknowledges that but says, “If the sounds are out there, they’re informative, even if they’re not ‘intentional’ by the plant.”
To convince their critics, Hadany and Yovel clearly need to do more experiments. They’re already planning to repeat their study in a more natural outdoor setting to see whether those sounds carry amid ambient noise. “We also need to test specific relevant organisms to see if they respond,” says Hadany. “And, of course, the most exciting prospect for us is: Are plants capable of hearing the sounds of plants?”
One of the greatest superhero movies of all time is Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, a bleak fantasia about three comic-book characters (Batman, Catwoman, and the Penguin) whose identities were forged in trauma, and whose costumed alter egos are exaggerated responses to that pain. Batman Returns came out in 1992, before the costumed-hero drama became Hollywood’s predominant genre. At the time, the movie’s protagonist, Bruce Wayne (played by Michael Keaton), still felt like a true oddity, a sad millionaire waiting in his empty mansion for a signal to be lit in the sky so that he could have permission to dress up as a bat again.
M. Night Shyamalan has always given his superheroes, and his supervillains, similar pathos. The director’s very strange makeshift trilogy—comprising Unbreakable (2000), its quasi-sequel Split (2017), and now Glass—is populated with people who filter their terrible pasts through exaggerated, pulpy personae, becoming comic-book characters who somehow exist in our real world. David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the protagonist of Unbreakable, is a taciturn man who realizes he’s invincible after surviving a horrifying train crash. Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), his antagonist, is a brittle-boned evil genius called “Mister Glass” who engineered the crash in search of someone who is physically invulnerable.
Unbreakable was only a modest box-office hit, so whatever plans Shyamalan had for future installments were forgotten, and the director moved on to other projects, some (Signs, The Village) more successful than others (The Happening, Lady in the Water). But with Split, he deployed one of his most surprising twists yet. This cheaply made horror movie, about Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with multiple personalities who likes to kidnap and cannibalize cheerleaders, was actually a stealth sequel to Unbreakable, ending with a shot of an older David Dunn, getting ready to do battle with a new nemesis.
Split made some 30 times its budget, and so Shyamalan has delivered Glass, which unites David, Elijah, and the many-headed Kevin (dubbed “The Horde”), to face off against one another in a crossover that no one could have predicted. The result is a ponderously ambitious project that’s bound to infuriate all but Shyamalan’s most devoted fans, a 129-minute treatise on the nature of comic-book heroism and America’s seemingly unending fascination with these damaged champions. It’s a film that sometimes plays more as a rambling TED Talk than as a straightforward thriller. But, in this case, I admired Shyamalan’s overreach, even as the auteur laid meta-textual twist atop twist in the movie’s giddily loopy ending.
David, Elijah, and Kevin might not be the household names that Batman, Catwoman, and the Penguin were in 1992. But Shyamalan’s characters are all “broken” in one way or another, looking for some kind of purpose through the lenses of their alter egos. David resorts to vigilante justice, Elijah to mass murder, and Kevin to kidnapping people to satisfy “the Beast,” the most malevolent of his personalities. Horrified by these three disturbed Philadelphians, Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) has them all incarcerated and brought to a mental institution, where she can interrogate them together, trying to get to the bottom of what she thinks are just comics-fueled delusions of grandeur.
At first, Glass plays a little more like Unbreakable. It tries to stay as down-to-earth as possible, with Staple claiming there are perfectly rational explanations for David’s and Kevin’s feats of strength and Elijah’s murderous tendencies, all stemming from violence the men suffered as children. But that half of the film is at war with the half possessing the zanier tone of Split, which was dominated by a vamping McAvoy shuffling among a dozen identities (including a preening schoolmarm, a petulant child, and a raging animal) in one body.
[Read: Deciphering the bizarre twist ending of ‘Split’]
What tone does Glass settle on? Silly or serious? It never really decides, just toggling between both, sometimes in the same scene. This is a film where Elijah can introduce himself by intoning “First name Mister. Last name Glass,” and simultaneously earn a laugh and a gasp. It’s a film that expects you to understand the intricacies of Kevin’s condition (if you haven’t seen Split since it came out, I’d advise brushing up on the basics), but also features a comic-book salesman who patiently explains to the audience that superheroes were largely invented with the release of Superman’s Action Comics in 1938. Glass is patronizing and broad while also feeling knotty and philosophical.
So why did I enjoy it so much? For one thing, I appreciate the sheer brashness of Shyamalan’s storytelling, which swirls the mythmaking inherent in characters such as David with the emotional scars borne by orphaned characters such as Superman. If Incredibles 2 was Brad Bird reckoning with America’s superhero obsession, Glass is Shyamalan taking up that mantle and coming away with the observation that, though these heroes might be “broken,” they’re also singular. The director clearly sees them as objects of daily fascination for a country looking to escape the mundane wherever it can; he’s just trying to understand why.
At the end of Glass, as Shyamalan starts to throw twists at the audience thick and fast, he posits that what’s really powering David and his enemies is public scrutiny—that what their superpowers really feed off is the adoration, and fear, of the masses. Shyamalan is not the first to make that connection, but he gleefully wraps that insight in a plain-seeming action sequence that is dripping in fairy-tale-like allegories. As the unbreakable David and the savage Kevin do battle in a field outside their asylum (a scene that’s leagues removed, in grandeur, from the multimillion-dollar celestial showdowns we might expect of a Marvel movie), Elijah sits nearby in his wheelchair, excitedly debating out loud all the plot implications of what might happen next. This sequence might sound tiresome, and it’s certainly bizarre to behold, but in a cinematic landscape drowning in superheroes, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
In some ways, it’s the most expected story in the world. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, are getting a divorce, and a tabloid alleges that a Bezos affair was the reason. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
But because this is such a common archetype, the precise form it took reveals the turbulence and structure of our current media moment.
Yesterday morning, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos made a treacly surprise announcement on Twitter. “We want to make people aware of a development in our lives,” it began, before going on to create a new genre of public testimonial: divorce vows. “If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again. We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures,” they wrote. “Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.”
And though it had that boss’s-speech-before-the-layoffs tinge, it felt nice to see some high-profile couple trying to model a less acrimonious divorce. Good for them, said many people on Twitter.
[Read: Saturday Night Live’s confusing celebration of Jeff Bezos]
Then, a few hours later, in barges the National Enquirer, asserting that Bezos had a long-running affair with Lauren Sanchez, which they knew because they tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star-hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates, and “quality time” in hidden love nests. Somehow, they claim to have come into the possession of messages that Bezos sent to Sanchez.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail claims that a source close to the Bezos family says that his relationship with Sanchez began after the couple’s separation. Entertainment Tonight claims two sources who say the same of Sanchez and her marriage to the Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell.
The different versions are all grimly believable. It is a celebrity divorce, with the gleeful crowd and toxic cloud that entails.
But it is the 2010s, and the National Enquirer is not just any old news outlet. And Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, which frequently draws ire from Donald Trump, who dislikes its coverage of his presidency. There’s more. American Media, the Enquirer’s parent company, under its CEO, David Pecker, admitted that it worked with the Trump campaign to pay Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story about an affair with Donald Trump, which it then killed. “At times, it seemed like the Enquirer operated as a de facto arm of the campaign,” wrote Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair.
So, it’s not surprising that the MSNBC host Chris Hayes pointed out another angle on Twitter. “Given everything we know about how Pecker’s National Enquirer has functioned as essentially an arm of Trumpworld, [the story] prompts some questions,” Hayes tweeted.
The implication, it would seem, is that Trump or Trump’s team hit Bezos, a perceived rival, through his longtime friend’s paper, the National Enquirer. Which: Who knows, and I won’t speculate. But let’s just say that it is not outside the long-established character of the National Enquirer to attempt to out a possibly cheating celebrity.
[Read: The other way the National Enquirer helped elect Trump]
In Leon Neyfakh’s Slow Burn podcast series on how Watergate happened, his sixth episode traces how conspiratorial thinking came to dominate the early 70s. If the very president of the United States could be involved in all kinds of petty duplicitousness requiring cover-ups and secret tapes and payoffs, how could anything be what it seemed on the surface, or just dumb luck? The details of Nixon’s downfall “made Americans more suspicious than they’ve ever been and more desperate to uncover the secrets their government was keeping from them,” Neyfakh says. “Basically, Watergate turned everyone into a conspiracy theorist.”
In our times, the same disease has taken hold, but through the million muted post horns of the internet. For every theory that’s spittle flecked with Alex Jones conspiracism, there’s another one that connects it to an extended diagram of the Mueller investigation. Not even a dirtbag celebrity tabloid can publish regular dirtbag celebrity things without somehow touching a federal investigation.
The distance between obvious and far-fetched has collapsed. Because here’s the episode recap: A presidential candidate rises on the back of a reality-TV program and his constant promotion of a conspiracy that the first black president wasn’t born in the United States. To protect himself, this candidate sets up a gentleman’s agreement with an old friend at the National Enquirer to buy up negative stories about him and kill them, which ends up forming part of the investigation into Russian interference in the election, all of which could somehow tie back into a tryst between the richest man on Earth (who also happens to own The Washington Post) and a helicopter pilot who was also once a local Fox News anchor.
You tell me which clause is the most implausible.
When it comes to health advice, don’t take Instagram’s word for it. The platform is rampant with misinformation about wellness, argues the Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull. Behind many fads are Instagram influencers with perceived authority on health and wellness—the majority of whom have no real nutritional training or expertise.
Take celery juice, for example. In the latest Atlantic Argument, Mull explains how this health obsession went viral, despite the fact that science does not support any of the nutritional benefits that Instagram influencers extol. “When I looked into celery juice’s origins as a trend, most of the people who had given it a try assumed that it was recommended by doctors or medical professionals of some sort … According to every actual medical professional I talked to, none of these claims are actually true,” Mull says in the video. “Celery is almost all water and is relatively low in nutrients.”
The next time you read on Instagram that Himalayan pink salt is a medical miracle, take it with a grain of salt.
My daughter squirmed on her back, rocking the changing table. She bicycle-kicked her 1-year-old legs. No shoes or pants could be removed. She held her arms down. No shirt could rise over her head.
Perhaps she sensed my mood, and my wife’s and Ma’s mood as they talked somewhere outside her closed bedroom door, and responded in kind. But I was not thinking about transference. Irritated, I expected her to feel sorry for me, to smile and comply, to go down easily and happily that night, a year ago today—as if she knew a gastrointestinal doctor had found cancer in my colon that morning.
At some point while reading to her, I stopped. I retreated into my thoughts as my daughter yanked up and started draining her sippy cup like she was between rounds. I checked myself in my mental mirror. Two-sided like a coin, the mirror conveyed what my research saw in society on one side and what my research saw in myself on the other side.
I had been using the mirror to write a book, striving to answer a question people had been asking me since I started speaking in 2016 on my history of racist and antiracist ideas, Stamped From the Beginning. Writing this new book, How to Be an Antiracist, I had spent nearly every one of my quiet hours submerged in examining the mostly racist life of human society, and self-examining my own mostly racist life, to conjure and lay out how we can fashion antiracist lives. My constructive criticism looked painstakingly at society—and at myself.
Writing this book had thrust me into a mental ordeal of healing. It made me more self-aware, better able to see the ugly source of my irritability with my daughter, to admit and correct my idiocy and self-centeredness in the moment. And it prepared me for the physical ordeal of healing that was coming.
As my daughter took her final gulps of soy milk, my irritability lingered, this time directed at the person I saw in the mirror. I realized my daughter was doing what I needed her to do. It was what I would ask of nearly everyone I met in the year that followed.
She did not cover me in pity. She treated me like she always treated me—like it was just another day, like my whole life had not changed, like there was, indeed, a tomorrow. She anchored me for my fight of a lifetime.
She gazed up at me, perhaps wondering why I had stopped reading. “Dada. Dada.” I jumped out of my mind. My frown smiled as I looked down and took her sippy cup. My boisterous reading voice returned like my verve for life. Her frown smiled as she looked up, not knowing.
She did not know that for several months I had been steadily losing weight and becoming easily fatigued and filled with bowel pain. She did not know that for several months I had been sitting on toilets only to produce nothing, returning hours later to produce nothing again. She did not know that since Thanksgiving I had been defecating blood clots almost every hour. She did not know that I had managed these symptoms and pressed on, not self-caring until my life partner saved my life by forcing me to get a colonoscopy that morning, on January 10, 2018. I had become adept at self-examining my mind, but not my body.
As I read to my daughter that night, she did not know my body was going to be scanned the next day. She did not know they would find my cancer was metastatic, Stage 4. She did not know that the five-year survival rate for this type of cancer is about 12 percent. She did not know that her father was likely to die.
My daughter reinforced that night what my partner, Sadiqa, and Ma had formulated earlier that day. Sadiqa’s shock that morning quickly turned into a dogged belief that I could survive. She somehow thinks I can overcome anything; I believe the same thing about her. Months after we wed six years ago, I resolutely believed that she could defeat breast cancer. I likewise believed Ma could defeat breast cancer when she was diagnosed two years after Sadiqa.
For Ma, the cancer diagnosis was like a doctor telling her she had a cold. When Sadiqa and I told her about my diagnosis over breakfast after the colonoscopy, it was like a doctor telling her I had a cold. Ma is nearly unflappable, a steadying force on my emotive Paps, who survived prostate cancer a decade ago. “We will deal with it,” she said that day, as she always says, no matter the adversity. She hits us with that Harriet Tubman look when we slow down. Wallowing in self-pity is a capital crime in her book.
We had a basketball court in my backyard in Jamaica, Queens. An intense and physical two-on-two was halted when I came down all wrong on my wrist. Perhaps Ma was watching from the kitchen window as she washed dishes. I ran inside crying about breaking my 12-year-old wrist. She ran warm water over it and ordered me back out to “finish the game.” Paps provided the emotional support; Ma, the resolve.
Hours after my morning diagnosis, I sent the draft of an essay to an editor at The New York Times. By Friday afternoon, I was bundling through hospital rooms, undergoing testing and visiting doctors. In waiting rooms and while waiting in doctors’ rooms, I exchanged several emails with the editor, finalizing the essay that argued “the heartbeat of racism is denial.”
I argued that the heartbeat of antiracism is confession. Writing the piece forced me to confess my fear of death. I confessed to my loved ones that I did not want to die before finishing How to Be an Antiracist. I wanted it to be my last literary contribution to the world. I wrote it critically and carefully, untroubled about a backlash I might not live to see. And ironically, the book will come out this August, a week after the 37th birthday that I intend to see.
On most days last year, I worried more about whether I’d finish the book than whether I would survive metastatic cancer. Or to be more precise, in the quiet of the day I’d worry about finishing the book, in the quiet of the sleepless night about finishing life. My focus on writing How to Be an Antiracist—and by March, on writing essays for The Atlantic—was perhaps my way of coping with the demoralizing severity of the cancer and the overwhelming discomfort of the treatment, furiously writing and fighting, fighting and writing to heal mind and body, to heal society.
Writing consumes all. In the silence I can scrutinize the collected scholarship and analysis, listen clearly to my assessments and reflections and inventions, paint their picture clearly and attractively on the canvas. Nothing else matters in those moments of creation, until creating brings me—and hopefully the reader—back to what matters. Nothing else humanely exists in those moments of creation, until creating brings me—and hopefully the reader—back to our shared human existence.
In the hours of each day when I managed to submerge myself inside the writing zone, the metastatic cancer was an afterthought. The symptoms from the six months of chemotherapy, from January to June last year, were an afterthought: my marathons of tiredness, the bubbling nausea, my hands and feet tingling and darkening and drying and blitzering, making them unusable at times. I was not thinking about my hypersensitivity to cold, that breathing in cold air and drinking cold liquids hurt my throat, that touching frozen products frostbit my fingers, that strong winds of cold immobilized my body. I was not thinking of the tremendous pain and exertion it took to leave my home, especially in the winter, to exercise, and meet with folks, and interview with folks, and speak before folks—almost all of whom did not know. It was hard to know. My chemo medicines did not kill my hair. My heavy protein consumption and weight lifting actually allowed me to gain weight. I usually kept my discomfort inside.
I was not thinking of any of the symptoms during writing sessions. But after all the writing thoughts, it was back to fighting, or rather, enduring.
Amazingly, the cancer symptoms started receding almost immediately, as the tumors receded. The tumors shrunk to the point surgeons could open me up and remove what was left at the end of the summer. In what they removed, they only found scar tissue from dead cancer cells. All the postsurgical agony felt worth it. Nine months after thinking I might very well be in the dying 88 percent, I had a good chance of landing in the 12 percent of survivors. I have a good chance of joining the more than 15 million cancer survivors in the United States, spanning every race and place, nearly every American family.
I have a good chance of being able to never stop mourning the millions of our loved ones who died of cancer, such as my uncle who died last year, such as an uncle and grandfather who died months before my birth in 1982. And I can return to my work with a new sense of perspective.
America’s politics, in my lifetime, have been shaped by racist fears of black criminals, Muslim terrorists, and Latino immigrants. Billions have been spent on border walls and prison walls and neighborhood walls, and on bombs and troops and tax cuts—instead of on cancer research, prevention, and treatment that can reduce the second-leading cause of death. Any politician pledging to keep us safe who is drastically overfunding law and order, border security, and wars on terror—and drastically underfunding medical research, prevention, and health care—is a politician explicitly pledging to keep our bodies unsafe.
Nearly 600,000 Americans die every year from cancer; roughly 20,000 die annually from homicides. What if we blamed politicians for every single cancer death like we blame them for every single murder? What if a cancer death was as newsworthy as a murder? What if we demanded more medical researchers and doctors and nurses and nutritionists on the streets to keep us safe? What if we demanded more hospital beds like we demand more prison beds? What if we looked at industrial waste and fast food like we look at gangs of organized crime?
For decades, racist ideas nurtured my fears of being murdered by a black or Latino or Middle Eastern body. Today my own striving to be antiracist, my own elementary mathematical skills, my own diagnosis nurture my fear of dying of cancer, suicide, an accident, septicemia, influenza, stroke, diabetes, or heart, kidney, upper-respiratory, Alzheimer’s, or liver disease, which altogether account for 75 percent of all deaths in the United States.
These fears pushed my writing pace last year. But the more my fear of death changed into the wonder of survival, the more I reflected on what I was writing. If I could live on, why not live on to be antiracist? Why not live to be fully human and see all others as fully human, and fight to ensure our policies see and treat all humans fully and equitably?
It was this living on that was hard to envision a year ago. When I stood over my daughter’s crib, I rocked her longer than usual in the darkness. I held her tighter than usual. I did not want to let her go. I did not want to let my own life go as her father. But I thought, in that moment, that we have to let life go to see ourselves and heal ourselves for the better. We have to let life go to have life.
I let her go. She turned on her stomach as if she’d see me again, as if I’d survive.
President Donald Trump may now be talking more about steel than cement, but his proposed border wall remains the Rosetta Stone for understanding both his conception of the presidency and his political strategy.
Nothing better illustrates Trump’s political calculus than his determination to build the wall, a goal that most Americans consistently oppose in polls, even at the cost of shutting down the federal government, a tactic that surveys show most Americans also consistently reject.
Politically, the showdown over the shutdown demonstrates how much more Trump prioritizes energizing and mobilizing his passionate base, often with messages that appeal to anxiety about demographic and cultural change, over broadening his support toward anything that approaches a majority of the country. It sends the same message about his priorities in executing his office. Trump makes no pretense of governing as president of the entire nation. Instead, he governs as the champion of his slice of America against all the forces in the country his supporters dislike or distrust—an instinct he displayed again this week with his latest threats to cut off disaster-relief funding for California.
For a president to consistently steer his governing agenda and political messaging toward a demonstrable minority of the country is, to put it mildly, a novel strategy. But Trump may feel comfortable playing on the short side of the field because it’s worked for him before. In the 2016 election, a majority of voters said they had an unfavorable view of him personally and did not believe he had the experience or temperament to succeed as president, according to the Election Day exit poll conducted by Edison Research. And yet Trump, of course, won a slim Electoral College majority despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million. A critical question looming over 2020 is whether he could squeeze out another victory while facing opposition from a majority of the country.
[Read: What was the point of Trump’s Oval Office address?]
The struggle over the border wall actually provides a revealing gauge of Trump’s prospects on that front. From the start of his presidential campaign, immigration, more than any other issue, captured the potential benefits of Trump’s strategy of pursuing depth of support over breadth. Even during the 2016 Republican primaries, a majority of voters opposed deporting all undocumented immigrants in all but two of the 20 states where exit polls asked their opinion. Yet the minority of voters that supported deportation backed Trump in such preponderant numbers that they provided a majority of his votes in all but two of the 20 states.
The same pattern was evident in the general election. In the exit poll, just 41 percent of voters supported Trump’s border wall, while a solid majority of 54 percent opposed it. Yet Trump won a much higher share of the wall’s supporters (85 percent) than Hillary Clinton did of the wall’s opponents (76 percent). Roughly one-fourth of the wall’s opponents either voted for Trump (16 percent) or drifted away to a third-party candidate (8 percent).
That disparity reflected a clear trend in the exit poll. On questions about Trump’s personal characteristics—such as whether he had the experience or temperament to succeed as president—he consistently won a higher percentage of those who said “yes” than Clinton won among those who said “no.” That pattern may have reflected doubts about Clinton, a willingness to roll the dice on a political outsider, or a desire for change. But whatever the cause, the pattern was decisive: The pivotal votes that made Trump president came from voters ambivalent at best about him and key elements of his agenda.
After two years of arguing for the wall as president, Trump has shown no ability to expand its popularity. In 10 national polls conducted during his presidency, Quinnipiac University has never found support for the wall higher than 43 percent. With his Oval Office address on Tuesday night, Trump may have further consolidated support among Republicans and conservatives, which could raise that number slightly. But his focus on grisly portrayals of undocumented immigrants is unlikely to dent the preponderant opposition to the wall among all the groups that powered the Democratic takeover of the House last fall: minorities, young people, and college-educated white voters. Depending on the survey, the wall usually faces opposition from at least two-thirds of minorities and young people, and between three-fifths and two-thirds of college-educated whites.
Looking back at 2016, Trump may conclude that lopsided opposition from those groups doesn’t matter so long as he maintains strong support for the wall from his base. But there’s evidence that the voters hostile to the wall, and to many other aspects of Trump’s tenure, are less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt now than they were in 2016.
To test that proposition, I compared results from the 2016 exit poll with findings from Quinnipiac’s latest national survey on the wall in December. That comparison shows that Trump’s position among wall opponents has eroded dramatically.
Overall attitudes about the wall in the December poll remained similar to 2016, with 43 percent supporting and 54 percent opposing. (Other surveys, including Quinnipiac’s, have usually found support slightly lower, at about 40 percent.) Among whites both with and without a four-year college degree, opinions on the wall in the Quinnipiac survey showed only minimal change from the exit poll, with nearly three-fifths of whites with a degree opposing the wall and nearly three-fifths of those without a degree supporting it.
[Gerald S. Dickinson: What Trump can and can’t do to get his border wall]
But while overall attitudes about the wall haven’t changed much, attitudes toward Trump have deteriorated significantly among the wall’s critics. Opposition to the wall, just like doubts about Trump’s personal characteristics, was not a deal breaker for a significant share of voters in the presidential election. In the exit poll, 18 percent of the college-educated whites who opposed the wall voted for Trump anyway, according to figures provided by Edison Research. But now, far fewer express support for Trump in general. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, just 3 percent of these voters approved of Trump’s job performance, according to data provided by Quinnipiac. Ninety-two percent disapproved.
Likewise, just over one-fourth of non-college-educated whites who opposed the wall still voted for Trump in 2016. But in the latest Quinnipiac survey, only 9 percent of these whites approved of Trump’s performance, while 83 percent disapproved. In all, fully 88 percent of Americans who oppose the wall say they disapprove of Trump’s performance as president.
Approval ratings correlate closely with the reelection vote for incumbent presidents. So that huge disapproval number suggests that the 2020 Democratic nominee could win a considerably higher share of wall opponents than the 76 percent who voted for Clinton in 2016. By contrast, the share of wall supporters who approve of Trump in Quinnipiac’s latest poll is about the same (83 percent) as his vote among that group in 2016 (85 percent). That means opponents of the wall are now consolidating against Trump’s overall performance at an even higher rate than its supporters are coalescing behind him. That’s a very different landscape than in 2016, and one that springs directly from two years of governing in a volatile, confrontational manner aimed almost entirely at his base, the strategy that he’s escalated again by shuttering the government over the wall.
It’s possible, of course, that with slim victories in key Rust Belt and Sun Belt states, Trump can squeeze out another Electoral College victory even if he loses the popular vote again. His chances will rise if a third-party alternative again divides the voters who are resistant to him.
But these patterns of public reaction suggest that Trump’s relentless effort to cement the loyalty and stoke the outrage of his strongest supporters, compounded by his volatile behavior in office, is building a wall between him and the ambivalent voters who provided him critical support in 2016 (or at least withheld it from Clinton by splintering to third-party candidates). The sharp movement toward Democrats in the midterm elections among independents and college-educated white voters, both groups that broke closely for Trump in 2016, points toward the same conclusion.
Trump’s monomania on the border wall shows that he remains fixated on the priorities and resentments of his core coalition. But even a 30-foot barrier probably wouldn’t protect him in 2020 if he allows the waves of discontent to continue rising among the majority of Americans who don’t consider themselves part of that ardent club.
To say that the Cold War shaped Russian President Vladimir Putin and the 21st-century Kremlin is an understatement. Putin has consistently used the skills and contacts he developed during his KGB career to cement control internally and battle foes abroad. Putin describes himself as a proud “Chekist,” referring to Lenin’s bloody, repressive, and brutal secret police, and celebrates the organization’s birthday every December; he once commented, “There is no such thing as a former KGB man.” It is therefore fair to look at modern-day Russia as the world’s first intelligence-state, and to interpret many of Putin’s actions as those of a superpowered spy chief.
A case in point is the arrest of Paul Whelan, a U.S. citizen, at an upscale Moscow hotel on December 28. The whole mess fits the profile and pattern of a Cold War KGB setup.
[Read: What Putin really wants]
Espionage stings, hostage taking, and efforts to trade the innocent for the guilty were fairly common KGB ploys. When a Soviet spy without diplomatic immunity was arrested and faced prison time, the Kremlin would use its espionage services to stage-manage the taking of a hostage. Francis Jay Crawford, Frederick Barghoorn, and Nicholas Daniloff are a few of the innocent Americans who unknowingly had classified material shoved into their hands immediately prior to an arrest in Moscow. All were held in the notorious Lefortovo Prison in a shameless effort to pressure the United States into releasing guilty Russian spies. Often, this strategy worked.
Whelan’s background almost assuredly rules out the possibility that he really was involved in state-sponsored espionage. Reportedly, he served in the Marines but was discharged for trying to steal thousands of dollars from the government; he is also a citizen of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland. Neither the United States nor any of these other countries employs intelligence officers that were court-martialed for larceny.
His apparent activities in Moscow are also incompatible with professional training. As any spy worth his salt can tell you, the Russian counterintelligence services are among the best in the world, and devote exorbitant resources to uncovering and thwarting collection by Westerners. Foreign visitors can expect audio and video surveillance in their home or hotel and physical surveillance on the street; to have their phones and computers monitored; and to have everyone they meet questioned. No spy would have done what Whelan is said to have done: stay at a posh central-Moscow hotel and accept secret documents in public, let alone join a Russian social-networking site. Further, it is extremely unlikely that the United States would expose someone without diplomatic immunity to arrest, if for no other reason than to avoid pressure from the Kremlin to release traitors such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
[David Frum: Why is Trump spouting Russian propaganda?]
Although any professional would scoff at the notion that Whelan was on an intelligence mission, there are alternative explanations for why he ended up in a prison best-known for holding dissidents, political prisoners, and spies. Whelan’s multiple passports, military background, and purported fascination with the Russian military may have been seen by the Kremlin as useful props to help sell the story that Whelan was involved in undercover activities. Likewise, the Russians may have assessed Whelan as hopelessly naive, self-important, or a fantasist who would be easy to entrap or convince that he could play some sort of valiant role by accepting secret material. Whelan would not be the first naïf to think that if he could make a big score on his own, he could then appeal to his military contacts or others back home to take him seriously. His public support for Donald Trump could have been an added benefit to the Kremlin. If Putin’s goal is to pressure the White House to negotiate or consider a trade, it certainly helps the bargaining process to hold at risk a vocal supporter. Manipulating Trump’s ego has become standard operating procedure among despots.
In any event, Putin certainly knows that Whelan is not a U.S. spy. He knows how the United States operates in Moscow. He has been in the middle of the many cases, arrests, flaps, defections, and efforts to deceive and thwart U.S. intelligence efforts. He is well aware that Whelan’s activities are not consistent with U.S. practice.
While there may be any number of motivations for Whelan’s arrest, most attention has centered on the notion of a potential swap for the recently arrested Russian operative Maria Butina. Butina has admitted to developing and exploiting relationships in right-wing and National Rifle Association circles on behalf of senior Russian benefactors. In this way, she was playing a role familiar to professional intelligence officers: She was acting as an “access agent,” using her natural network of contacts to spot, meet, and assess potential targets for the Russian espionage apparatus. Such people are the overt face of covert work. They act as force multipliers for Russian intelligence and help insure that when professionals reach out to someone of interest, they have a full understanding of the individual’s access, personality, vulnerabilities, and susceptibility to working on behalf of the Russian state.
[David Frum: The great Russian disinformation campaign]
Often, when espionage cases are uncovered, the alleged participants are sent home rather than imprisoned due to their assertion of diplomatic immunity. However, when someone like Butina is captured without immunity, Russia has to find leverage for his or her release. In these cases, the rule of law takes a back seat to the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests. Putin may wish to secure Butina’s release before she can testify publicly. Similarly, he could be sending her a signal to stay silent or face the consequences if and when she’s sent back to Russia. Putin may be simply making clear to Washington that he represents a “great power,” and will always act in a reciprocal, tit-for-tat manner when Russian interests are affected. Likewise, he could be taking offensive action to ward off further sanctions, looking to buy the release of the arms merchant Viktor Bout or some other criminal, or looking to reengage with Trump.
In any event, the Butina and Whelan arrests are another indicator of the breathtaking scope and range of Russian disruptive activity: espionage, cyberattacks, disinformation, subversion, assassination, propaganda, fake news, and the weaponization of lies. This is an arena in which Putin is comfortable and proficient, and the United States less skilled. As Americans seek to understand the Kremlin’s motives, they must keep in mind that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man.”
Donald Trump is right that the United States desperately needs more walls. He’s just wrong about their ideal dimension, purpose, and location. The U.S. need not spend tens of billions of dollars on a single barrier extending along the southern border between the United States and Mexico. Rather, what the suddenly wobbly U.S. economy could really use is millions of walls at 90-degree angles. I mean lots and lots of housing.
America’s last housing crisis was fairly complicated. Too many families bought houses they couldn’t afford, too many banks staked huge positions on housing debt, and when home sales, home prices, and on-time mortgage payments declined at the same time, the deck of cards came crashing down.
Today’s housing crisis is simpler: not enough supply. After the Great Recession, the adult population grew, but construction spending fell. In 60 years of record-keeping by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, home-building per household has never been lower.
[Read: Elizabeth Warren’s ambitious fix for America’s housing crisis]
Scarcity breeds inflation. So the predictable result of the housing crunch has been rising home prices, which have locked out young families from their piece of the American dream. The homeownership rate among late-20- and 30-somethings, which had held steady at around 50 percent since the 1970s, has plunged into the low 30s.
Housing is mostly a local issue. Construction is funneled through local zoning rules, demand is shaped by local jobs and local wealth, and local transportation routes determine the best location for new units.
But one nationwide impediment to more housing is a shortage of construction labor; young Americans don’t seem remotely interested in becoming cement masons or carpenters. That means the housing industry would vastly benefit from an influx of immigrants—precisely the thing Trump wants to stop at all costs with a giant border wall.
Immigrants already account for roughly 25 percent of construction jobs nationwide. They’ve pitched in to relieve construction shortages in some of America’s most housing-desperate areas. In California, the share of foreign-born workers in construction rose from 13 percent in 1980 to more than 40 percent today, according to a UCLA analysis. The construction trades with the highest labor shortages—brickmasons, roofers, and drywall installers—also tend to have the highest concentration of immigrant workers.
“It’s blatantly obvious that we have to find a labor supply to meet demand, or everybody is gonna pay a price,” said Phil Crone, the executive officer of the Dallas Builders Association. But trends are moving in the wrong direction. The number of immigrants entering the construction industry annually has fallen by more than 50 percent from its 2005 peak, according to a survey from the National Association of Home Builders. And it’s not going to recover quickly; not with visas down double-digits in Trump’s first two years in office.
Beyond the sphere of immigration, Washington could help matters by encouraging low-income-housing construction. That’s not happening. Under Barack Obama, Republicans blocked plans to fund the construction of new low-income units, and Trump’s White House has even threatened to slash funding for a public-private housing investment program called the Capital Magnet Fund. The Department of Housing and Urban Development isn’t in the building spirit, either; on the contrary, it has put forward a plan to triple rents for the poorest tenants.
[Read: The unfulfilled promise of fair housing]
Considering that the Trumps made their first millions in middle- and low-income units, one might think the president would leap at the opportunity to make home construction his presidential identity if only as a matter of habit, or familial loyalty. Instead, many of his administration’s most famous policies—its stringent stance on immigration, its attempts to slash HUD funding, and its tariffs on construction materials—are all impediments to affordable construction.
And yet, stimulating the housing economy has never been more important, particularly for the White House. Stocks have been volatile for several months over concerns about global growth and rising interest rates. Other indicators, such as ISM, which measures manufacturing activity, are turning down. Trump is the least popular president in modern history, facing a battery of investigations and an incoming Democratic Congress that’s practically salivating over its broad subpoena powers. A recession could doom this presidency. To avoid one, Trump needs a strong housing sector.
As more economic indicators turn red, the president could save an endangered recovery—and, by extension, his uncertain reelection prospects—by renovating his wall rhetoric. #BuildtheWall? That’s so 2018. Mr. President, #BuildtheWalls.
In 1889, Achille-Claude Debussy, then in his mid-20s, was one of 30 million people to walk through the iron arches of the newly completed Eiffel Tower. Throughout that year, the arches served as the grand entryway to the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair celebrating the cultural, technological, and colonial prowess of France a century after the revolution. A stunning variety of sights greeted visitors: a sharpshooting Annie Oakley, some 16,000 ultramodern machines (housed in the largest indoor space ever constructed), and, of course, the Eiffel Tower itself, the world’s tallest and possibly most bizarre building at the time. But Debussy seems to have been most impressed by something he heard—the work of musicians from what was then French Indochina and is now Vietnam. More than 20 years later, he raved about the opera they performed, in which “a furious little clarinet directs the emotion, a gong organizes the terror … and that’s all! … Nothing but an instinctive need for art, needing ingenuity to satisfy; no hint of bad taste!”
As Stephen Walsh shows in Debussy: A Painter in Sound—published in 2018, 100 years after the composer’s death—Debussy craved this simplicity and directness, but he had trouble finding it in his own musical milieu. He admired older French music—its “clarity of expression, that precision and compactness of form”—but felt it had been corrupted by German influences. French color, lightness, and concision were at odds with the drama, severity, and burdensome forms of Bach, Beethoven, and, most recently, Richard Wagner.
[Read more: Germany grapples with the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth]
This imperfect union was foisted on generations of musicians in France’s conservatories, the most prestigious of which Debussy attended at the ripe age of 10. Blessed with an extraordinary ear, he had an intuitive grasp of sound that outpaced his assimilation of theory. The result was a young student who bewildered his instructors. While evaluating a composition exercise, one commented: “Obviously, all this is hardly orthodox, but it’s very ingenious.” Another, though impressed with Debussy’s “initiative and verve,” dismissed him as “a bit of a fantasist.” School assessors, less equivocal, accused Debussy of being “preoccupied solely with creating the strange, the bizarre, the incomprehensible, the unperformable.”
For Debussy, these were the first of many critics. The respect of the Parisian establishment was long in coming—an appreciation deferred by his musical heterodoxy, as well as a series of romantic indiscretions. (His tendency to mock mainstream artists didn’t help, either.) Only decades after his death was he lauded as the pioneering genius he’s considered today. Walsh—who previously authored a biography of Debussy’s younger contemporary, Igor Stravinsky—explores that genius with erudition and style. Tracing the evolution of Debussy’s methods and imagination, he also probes the toll the composer’s labors took on himself and those around him. The fantasist experienced his share of worldly trials.
“It seems to me that music can make itself more human, more lived, that one can excavate and refine the means of expression”: As a recent conservatory graduate in his early 20s, Debussy voiced this hope before quite knowing how to realize it. But he was convinced from very early on that the musical grammar he learned in school—its thematic structures and harmonic rules—stood in the way. So he set out to create his own grammar: a new system of musical language that preserved the stabilizing virtues of classical theory while escaping its aesthetic limitations.
Walsh’s subtitle, “a painter in sound,” points to Debussy’s primary concern: to elicit an image in the mind of listeners. Take “Reflets Dans L’eau” (“Reflections in the Water”), a piano piece from a collection aptly titled Images. In Debussy’s words, it opens as “a little circle in water, with a little pebble falling into it.” He conjures the resulting concentric waves with a series of D-flat major chords that build harmoniously on one another. First they ascend to the upper register of the piano, as the waves ripple outward. Then they return to a resonant D flat, just in time for a second pebble to fall. As the piece progresses, the waves and their reflected light grow in breadth and complexity, becoming more dissonant and more radiant, too, through the use of intricate flourishes. The pebbles, I think, turn to stones. The water shimmers, unwieldy and brilliant, before settling finally into a new stillness.
Throughout, the image dictates the form. The same is true of “La Soirée Dans Grenade” (“Evening in Granada”), another composition for piano, which evokes the nocturnal bustle of an Andalusian street. Opening in the rhythm of a slow habanera dance, the piece changes suddenly into a haunting melody reminiscent of a traditional Moorish song. Next comes the work’s capering theme, which, like a passerby in the street, recedes as quickly as it arrives, only to reappear with greater energy. Woven throughout are bright, guitar-like arpeggios and various other rhythmic motifs, bells or dancers perhaps. The result is captivating and unpredictable, but never disjointed or confused (the disparate elements of the piece subtly echo one another; the habanera rhythm attenuates without disappearing). By imbuing his music with a sense of improvisation, Debussy disguises the technical skill its composition demanded. He simulates simplicity, the same feat that awed him in the Vietnamese opera. When composing his own opera, La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story), he wrote: “How much has first to be found, then suppressed, in order to arrive at the naked flesh of emotion.”
That opera, like much of Debussy’s work, was never completed. By his own admission, he suffered from “a sickness of delay … and this curious need never to finish.” It was as though the emotional expression he sought resisted closure, with the ironic effect that daily life closed in. Rarely meeting deadlines, he was chronically in debt. According to one observer, small chocolate bars sufficed for lunch during a period when he “couldn’t afford to eat or clothe himself.” Close to the end of his life, when his reputation had spread across the continent, he wrote music in exchange for coal to heat his house one winter. When he died at 55, he owed 66,000 francs to an angelically patient publisher, who seems to have forgiven the debt entirely.
[Read more: Why writers are the worst procrastinators]
Debussy’s emotional and moral trials cast a shadow, too—better suited to Wagner’s dark romanticism than to his own airy oeuvre. After abandoning his first wife to have an affair, he wrote to her: “Do you see! my poor darling, an artist is, all in all, a detestable, inward-facing man and perhaps also a deplorable husband? Besides, if you turn it round, a perfect husband will often make a pitiful artist.” She attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. He wrote to a friend: “In the end I’ve suffered a great deal in my morale. Was I having to pay some forgotten debt to life?” he asked. “I don’t know, but I’ve often had to smile so that nobody suspected I was about to weep.”
Debussy’s final years were plagued by rectal cancer, the debilitating effects of which often prevented him from composing. Expensive and humiliating medical treatments compounded his debts. All the while, World War I raged, driving him to temporarily flee his home when the French government abandoned Paris. He contemplated suicide, resisted, and died from the cancer before the armistice.
At the time of his death, Debussy’s legacy was uncertain. His later music suggested a retrenchment of sorts, as he embraced some of the traditional forms that he’d earlier rebelled against. (He even wrote a piece for his alma mater to use at the exams he’d found so dogmatic as a student.) Meanwhile, successors such as Stravinsky (whom Debussy appreciated) and Arnold Schoenberg (whom he didn’t) moved still further from the old grammar by making increasing use of atonality. Though Debussy’s late works resisted this trend, Walsh contends that some, particularly the two-piano suite “En Blanc et Noir” (“Black and White”), rival the composer’s best and inaugurated what could have been a fruitful period had it not been cut short.
Indifferent to convention, Debussy wrote neither to please critics nor to confound them. His style, which Walsh characterizes as “without ideology and without doctrine,” belongs to no particular tradition. His images do not contain hidden truths, but are, in his own word, “naked.” His music enchants like the sea or the light of the moon.
Nasci e fui criado até os 6 anos pela minha avó na favela do Jacarezinho, zona norte do Rio, o 121° IDH entre os 126 listados na cidade carioca. Filho de empregada doméstica, sempre que lembro da infância recordo da minha mãe contando as dificuldades de trabalhar em “casa de madame”, levando pão duro para casa no final do expediente. Meu pai trabalhou na fábrica de tecidos Nova América, que posteriormente virou o Shopping Nova América, famoso pelos outlets, na zona norte carioca. Após isso, ele trabalhou como terceirizado na Petrobras, não sei qual a função, mas me recordo da foto que ele ostentava com alegria onde usava o uniforme da empresa.
As histórias de minha infância que lembro por ter “ouvido falar” cessam quando eu tinha por volta de 8 anos. A partir daí, me lembro bem do que se passou. Aos 8 anos, a gente foi morar no norte do Estado. A mudança de cidade e vida foi protocolo de segurança para minha família, mas também possibilidade de viver oportunidades de estudo e trabalho, que dentro de uma favela e sua rotina de operações policiais, tiroteios, dificuldade de entrar e sair e escolas fechadas seriam mais difíceis de ser alcançadas.
Meus pais sempre se dedicaram pelos nossos estudos e concentraram suas vidas em cima desse objetivo. Assim como Nem da Rocinha entrou para o tráfico para pagar o tratamento de saúde de sua filha, meu pai também o fez por uma questão familiar. Possibilitar que seus filhos pudessem estudar, ter acesso a oportunidades e uma vida digna que jamais foi possível a ele e a minha mãe.
Desde moleque ele pegava no meu pé com os estudos. Ao primeiro sinal de notas “vermelhas” nos boletins, videogame e escolinha de futebol se tornavam atividades proibidas. Me fazia ler o jornal de esporte para ele, dia após dia – a leitura de periódicos é um hábito que possuo ainda hoje graças a ele. Indisciplina na escola não era tolerada, assim como faltas ou suspensões. Ele dizia que a média lá em casa não era 60 e, sim, 90.
Quando entrei na adolescência, o papo sobre fazer Direito começou. Ele queria um filho delegado. O cargo em si não tinha nenhuma justificativa aparente. O que ele desejava mesmo era um filho formado e em um cargo que valesse como um título, um atestado que você venceu na vida.
Imagina o que era para um cara que ganhava a vida no submundo do comércio varejista tirar um filho do morro e colocar em uma das maiores instituições do país. Seria, efetivamente, vencer a exclusão que o sistema nos impõe. Eu, impressionado pelos detetives policiais dos filmes americanos, me deixei levar e fui tomando gosto pela ideia. Confesso que iniciei a faculdade de Direito, já morando no interior do estado do Rio de Janeiro, também almejando a cadeira de delegado da Polícia Federal.
Como todo bom estudante de Direito, fui percebendo ao longo da graduação que o buraco era mais embaixo e que concurso nesse país virou um negócio, e cada vez mais elitizado. Porém, o curso de Direito se tornou uma paixão.
Não me lembro qual foi a primeira vez que ouvi de meu pai a frase “quando o Joel se formar, eu largo o tráfico”, mas me recordo de ouvir ele dizer isso incessantemente a partir da segunda metade da minha faculdade. Era nítido que ele levava aquela vida apenas para ver o filho com um diploma, fazer “um neguinho virar doutor”. Minha formatura parecia um marco na vida dele, quando tudo o que fez e o que deixou de fazer enfim faria sentido. Seria a prova que aquele tempo exercendo uma atividade demonizada aos olhos de alguns e necessária aos olhos de outros não fora em vão, que os fins, enfim, justificariam os meios.
A realidade é que a favela é um organismo social à parte, em que o traficante tem dinheiro, poder e status social. E sejamos sinceros: a vida dentro desse sistema capitalista gira em torno de alcançar essas três coisas da maneira mais rápida possível. Seja no morro ou no asfalto, em regra, busca-se poder, status e dinheiro. Sem a estrutura familiar que tive, talvez fosse mais difícil não recorrer a esse “atalho”. Como disseram os Racionais nos anos 90, “Tempo pra pensar, quer parar, que cê quer? Viver pouco como um rei ou muito, como um Zé?”
Desde que ouvi essa música pela primeira vez aos 12 anos pensei que viver pouco como um rei fazia muito mais sentido, afinal, só se vive uma vez.
As pessoas do “asfalto” têm a concepção que toda pessoa envolvida no comércio varejista de drogas é um narcotraficante tipo Fernandinho Beira-Mar ou Pablo Escobar, recomendo a leitura de “Acionistas do Nada”, escrito por Orlando Zaccone.
Quantos advogados de favela você conhece? Juiz? Promotor? O judiciário é branco, elitista e classista.O objetivo do meu pai no comércio varejista era simples: criar e possibilitar aos seus filhos oportunidades de estudo e trabalho que, seguindo as regras “lícitas” do jogo do excludente sistema capitalista, beiram o impossível para um preto pobre da favela. Quantos advogados de favela você conhece? Juiz? Promotor? O judiciário é branco, elitista e classista. Como você vai falar que basta correr atrás ou em meritocracia para um cara que tinha 4 irmãos, aos 6 anos já morava em um colégio interno e que nunca me contou uma passagem da sua vida em que seu pai estivesse presente? Em 29 anos, nunca ouvi falar de meu avô paterno. Quando não se tem uma família minimamente estruturada, o ponto de partida é, literalmente, do zero.
Talvez seja difícil para alguém que teve como primeiro trabalho um estágio de 6 horas diárias aos 22 anos e que usava seu salário para comprar vodka e camisa de marca sem se preocupar com contas entender que, sim, as pessoas pobres se socorrem ao tráfico como mecanismo de sobrevivência. Para matar sua fome, de sua família ou ter um mínimo de dignidade social e financeira dentro do processo de exclusão implementado por esse capitalismo de consumo.
Quando me formei em direito aos 22 anos, meu pai explodiu de alegria. Comprou tantos convites que pude levar toda a minha turma do Jacarezinho e ainda sobrou alguns para vender na faculdade. Ele alugou van para levar a galera, terno para meus amigos vestirem. Foi o ponto alto de sua vida.
Passado alguns meses, dava adeus à vida de cativeiro recluso na favela para um processo de ressocialização individual, com conta em banco, vida regrada, trabalho de carteira assinada e atividades voluntárias.
Não pense que se trata de um “gênio criminoso”, que ficou impune das leis do Estado. Há uma cifra oculta entre os crimes que o estado toma conhecimento e pune criminalmente e o universo de crimes praticados todos os dias no país, seja por ausência de interesse ou capacidade de alcançá-los. A verdade é que muitos e muitos crimes não chegam à tutela estatal.
Sejamos sinceros, certamente nos dias que levei construindo esse text,o eu e você cometemos algum crime à luz dos diversos tipos penais existentes no Brasil, e iremos sair impunes disso. Meu pai apenas via no comércio varejista uma possibilidade de produzir uma renda condizente com seu desejo e sua necessidade de educar e criar os filhos longe da cruel realidade das favelas cariocas, uma realidade que ceifa vidas e sonhos diariamente.
Após minha formação, ingressei em uma pós-graduação que me jogou nas ciências criminais. Além da paixão pela área, era a chance de eu ser um instrumento efetivo a serviço do meu povo preto e favelado. Entendo eu que, após a nossa vida, é a nossa liberdade que o estado mais nos atinge – basta ver que temos a terceira maior população carcerária do mundo, com aproximadamente 726 mil presos.
Como ocorreu com meu amigo dos tempos de moleque, preso injustamente durante uma mega-operação na região de Jacaré, Manguinhos, Mandela e Benfica. Ele reside no conjunto habitacional “Bairro Carioca”, alçado a alcunha de favela devido o abandono do estado. Na batida pelas ruas do conjunto, os policiais entraram na sua casa. É uma casa bonita, com cerâmica nas paredes externas e ar-condicionado split, o que levou a polícia a deduzir, do alto de seu racismo e ignorância, que ali seria a casa de um traficante de drogas.
Entraram e revistaram cada centímetro. Ao não achar nada de ilícito, pegaram alguns comprovantes de depósitos bancários armazenados em alguma gaveta. Eram cerca de cinco comprovantes que giravam entre R$ 5 e 15 mil cada. Na falta de algo “melhor” para confirmar sua teoria de que o morador era traficante, encaminharam-no para a delegacia sob acusação de associação para tráfico tendo como conteúdo probatório os comprovantes de depósito.
A história fica ainda mais assustadora ao observarmos que questões importantíssimas sobre o acusado foram relativizadas. Muitas vezes, o direito penal se pauta primeiro por quem é a pessoa que cometeu o delito e não pelo delito em si. Por exemplo, ele é motoboy há sete anos na mesma empresa com carteira assinada, possui uma moto avaliada em torno de R$ 7 mil e um carro financiado. A casa que ele morava na época é de sua sogra que alugava para ele. E era a destinatária dos depósitos, e não o meu cliente, conforme ela mesma explicou na delegacia. O dinheiro era oriundo da venda parcelada de uma casa. O comprador solicitou ao acusado que fizesse os depósitos na conta da vendedora do imóvel, em razão de ele ser motoboy e não correr risco de assaltos no percurso.
Nada foi suficiente. A delegada do caso o prendeu em flagrante pela acusação de associação ao tráfico. Retirando da família um trabalhador de carteira assinada, sem nenhum débito com a sociedade, com dois filhos pequenos e uma esposa por mero preconceito, racismo e necessidade de mostrar serviço diante de um circo armado com 3.500 servidores públicos empregados para combater a esquizofrênica guerra às drogas – na verdade, uma guerra contra os pobres.
No dia seguinte, tivemos a audiência de custódia na qual, depois de reforçar o que já havíamos alegado, conseguimos liberar o rapaz. Dois meses depois, ele foi absolvido de todas as acusações fantasiosas.
Não se trata de ser advogado de marginal, mas, sim, advogado de um grupo marginalizado.Quando expus minha história no Twitter, algumas pessoas comentaram como se meu pai tivesse me educado para “servir ao tráfico”. Cômico! Primeiro, seu desejo era que eu fizesse um concurso e virasse mais um engravatado burocrata a serviço do sistema. Segundo: foi uma briga lá em casa para que meus pais aceitassem minha escolha pela advocacia criminal.
Ele dizia aos amigos que eu poderia fazer tudo menos advogar “pra bandido”. Irônico. Mas graças às oportunidades que ele criou com o que estava ao seu alcance, pude perceber a tempo que meu sonho e missão era ser advogado criminal e ajudar a trazer ao asfalto o debate sobre o quanto é seletiva e racista justiça criminal, e ir para além da dicotomia do bem e do mal. Tentar mostrar, com a visibilidade do meu trabalho, que não se trata de ser advogado de marginal, mas, sim, advogado de um grupo marginalizado.
The post ‘Meu pai entrou no tráfico para eu virar advogado’ appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez failed in her long-shot bid for a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, according to an announcement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday evening. Pelosi named a member of the New Democrat Coalition, the centrist wing of the party, to the seat instead, part of a sweeping set of wins by the Wall Street-friendly caucus.
However, Ocasio-Cortez is in line to get a solid consolation prize — a seat on the House Financial Services Committee, with jurisdiction over Wall Street. Sources close to the process said that it is also likely that Progressive Caucus member Katie Porter, D-Calif., a financial services expert, will get tapped for the committee, and that Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., are in the running. This would put a strong bloc of progressives on an important committee headed by Rep. Maxine Waters of California.
Democrats have struggled to find many members to serve on Financial Services, leading to speculation that the party would actually shrink the size of the committee. Alternatively, that quandary could result in progressives being added as a last resort.
The imminent Financial Services Committee announcement would take some sting out of several disappointments for the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s high-profile rising stars, who on Wednesday were largely shut out of new assignments to three critical committees where they sought expanded representation.
The Progressive Caucus had cut a deal with Pelosi for increased representation on the so-called money committees that handle most domestic legislation. They sought membership on the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Appropriations, and Financial Services committees equal to their roughly 40 percent membership in the Democratic caucus.
Progressive Caucus members did receive several new assignments announced Wednesday night, but only hit 40 percent on Ways and Means, on which progressives had already achieved a 40 percent threshold in the previous Congress. As of now, the total averages out to 38.3 percent across all three, but those numbers will rise to 41.8 percent if three committee members join the CPC as expected.
According to numbers provided by the Progressive Caucus, membership increased on Ways and Means from 42 percent to 54 percent. Energy and Commerce moved from 29 percent to 31 percent, and Appropriations held steady at 36 percent.
Progressives have also asked for increased representation on the Financial Services Committee, with jurisdiction over Wall Street, whose makeup is still to be determined. So far, though, the caucus’s most prominent figures have not been given new committee assignments on the three major committees. Ocasio-Cortez; Tlaib; CPC co-chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; and vice chair Ro Khanna, D-Calif., all vocally pushed for inclusion on the money committees. Justice Democrats waged an outside campaign on their behalf, and other organizations engaged in petition drives and marched on Pelosi’s office. None of that was successful, showing the limits of an outside campaign on an insider issue like committee assignments.
By custom, Ways and Means, the tax-writing committee, reserves one seat for a member who represents one of the five boroughs of New York City. The previous holder of that slot was former Rep. Joe Crowley of Queens, whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated in a primary election. Ocasio-Cortez sought to replace her predecessor, but House leaders instead chose Tom Suozzi, a New Democrat who represents the “Gold Coast” of Long Island and a few blocks of Queens.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., being sworn during the opening session of the 116th Congress in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 3, 2019.
Photo: Susan Walsh/AP
It’s extremely rare historically for a freshman to win a seat on the committee, and indeed, none did this time around, leaving people to cite Ocasio-Cortez’s lack of seniority, rather than her politics, for the snub. But it’s also rare for a man from Long Island to claim a seat reserved for New York City. What’s more, Suozzi is just a sophomore, which drains a bit of the punch from the seniority argument. (While New York City got no representation, Philadelphia picked up two new members.)
Regional politics played a key role. “The regional structure is the heart of the committee seat distribution process. So I think what we learned on the Progressive Caucus is that it’s not about getting the leadership of the Progressive Caucus to go to Nancy Pelosi to ask for seats,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a CPC member who won a position in the lower ranks of House leadership in November, and sits on the committee that that divvies out committee seats. “Like everything else, it’s an organizing operation where you need to organize a movement within each of the regions, because that’s where the action is. Having said that, I think that progressive members did pretty well across the board, and I think are going to do increasingly well in this process,” he said, a reference to the likelihood that several of them will make it onto Financial Services.
Any major piece of legislation — whether it’s “Medicare for All,” a Green New Deal, or free public college — would involve some level of revenue, putting it squarely in the domain of Ways and Means, which makes it a key spot for a legislator looking to have an impact. The seat is also traditionally sought after for its fundraising potential, as every industry in the country is concerned with federal tax policy, meaning that members of the committee are more likely to get their fundraising calls returned. (Suozzi told The Intercept that he had no interest in the committee for that purpose and that he was attracted to it because of his prior career in accounting.)
Jayapal, co-chair of the CPC, also wanted a spot on Ways and Means, but her request for a waiver to remain on the Judiciary Committee, where she has influence given her high-profile work around the Trump administration’s family separation policy, was rejected. “Representative Jayapal had been clear from the beginning that she would only seek a Ways and Means Committee assignment if she could get a waiver to continue her service in the Judiciary Committee,” said Vedant Patel, her spokesperson. “She was notified that there would be no waivers given for the Judiciary Committee, given the desirability of the Judiciary Committee at this important time. Given that, Rep. Jayapal is excited to stay on the Judiciary Committee and continue to bring her experience on the critical issues before the committee.”
Khanna, the CPC vice chair, also failed in his bid to get a Ways and Means seat. The Intercept asked if he thought his public Twitter battle with Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill over the economics of pay-go, a fiscal austerity provision Pelosi entered into the House rules, had anything to do with the decision. “Drew wishes he had that much power here,” Khanna said. “I welcome Drew to have more debates with me and Paul Krugman about economics.”
This is not accurate and no serious progressive economist agrees with you. We could pass policies in the House without an offset, and then negotiate in conference for the appropriate tax increases on the 1%. We shouldn’t be negotiating against ourselves! https://t.co/mAbOYQN09i
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 2, 2019
The Progressive Caucus’s demand for 40 percent representation was stymied by the composition of the caucus itself. There are no real barriers to membership and the caucus rarely whips its members for votes, meaning that members who want to wear a progressive badge without altering their legislative record can do so. Some members of the Progressive Caucus are even also affiliated with its centrist counterpoint, the New Democrat Coalition.
Pelosi and House leadership made skillful use of those progressive/New Dem hybrids in making the committee assignments, which may be cynical from a leadership perspective, but was only possible as a result of the Progressive Caucus’s less-than-stringent membership rules — rules that are within their own control.
And adding CPC members who are not genuine progressives to positions of power on committees could actually be a net loss, argued some operatives. Indeed, it sets up a dynamic in which weak legislation could earn the imprimatur of an influential CPC member, which makes it more difficult for the CPC itself to oppose. A version of that was on display even with Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a strong progressive and a former co-chair of the CPC. He is now chair of the Natural Resources Committee, and while he ultimately endorsed the creation of a select committee to focus on a Green New Deal, it was plain that there was some hesitation related to how it would impact his own committee. (Grijalva said he “didn’t have a great deal of angst” about the new committee, not exactly a ringing endorsement.)
Instead of pushing for proportional representation for a disorganized, amorphous caucus, the CPC should have first organized itself, then pursued power, argued Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Ocasio-Cortez and other freshmen whose bids for the committees were rebuffed. “Numbers won’t mean much if being progressive means nothing. If everyone has their own definition and now has increased personal power through a seat on an executive committee, accountability to the progressive movement will be more difficult,” Shahid told The Intercept.
The move by Pelosi, to tap CPC members who are also in the New Dems, should have been anticipated, he argued. “Pelosi played by the CPC’s rules and appointed some of the least committed progressives to executive committees, including five CPC members who are also members of the centrist, corporate-friendly New Democratic caucus. Nearly all of the CPC members appointed to executive committees still receive corporate PAC donations,” he said.
“Instead of racing for numbers, the CPC should consider demanding stricter membership criteria — such as rejecting corporate PAC money, co-sponsoring priority legislation, and willingness to engage in bloc voting — otherwise progressive ideas risk being significantly watered down,” he said.
Of the 26 new members named to the Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means committees, 13 are members of the Progressive Caucus. However, five of those members are also part of the New Democrat Coalition: Michigan’s Brenda Lawrence (Appropriations), Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester (Energy and Commerce), Florida’s Darren Soto (Energy and Commerce), Virginia’s Don Beyer (Ways and Means), and Pennsylvania’s Brendan Boyle (Ways and Means), who only recently joined the Progressive Caucus.
Blunt Rochester was one of two Progressive Caucus members who voted for last year’s bank deregulation bill, one of the few major bipartisan measures in the last Congress. Soto is part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which pushed Pelosi to change House rules to give Republicans a larger voice in legislation, as is Suozzi.
Meanwhile, 15 of the 26 members selected are in the New Democrat Coalition, which has seen its ranks increase even as its influence over the national conversation has diminished. The coalition, like the CPC, is going through its own identity crisis, as a significant number of its own members have endorsed ideas, such as “Medicare for All,” that the coalition itself stridently rejects.
The Blue Dog Caucus, another Wall Street-friendly group, also punched slightly above its weight on the money committees. The Blue Dogs’ 24 members form only about 10 percent of the Democratic caucus. But they snapped up four of the 26 new seats given out, two of them to co-chairs Stephanie Murphy of Florida (Ways and Means) and Tom O’Halleran of Arizona (Energy and Commerce). All four Blue Dogs who were given the coveted seat assignments are also members of the New Democrats.
The only freshmen members who were chosen for any of the three key committees were those returning to Congress after having previously served. That includes Arizona’s Ann Kirkpatrick (Appropriations), a New Dem; Steven Horsford of Nevada (Ways and Means), a Progressive Caucus member; and Ed Case of Hawaii (Appropriations), who is currently unaffiliated with either caucus, but has deeply conservative politics.
Other Progressive Caucus members who secured slots on these exclusive committees were Lois Frankel of Florida and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey (Appropriations); Nanette Barragán of California (Energy and Commerce); and Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, Dan Kildee of Michigan, and Jimmy Panetta of California (Ways and Means).
Moore gave up a spot on the Financial Services Committee to take over the spot on Ways and Means. Panetta just joined the Progressive Caucus after the election, and Kildee is planning to join.
Reps. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., are also planning to join the CPC. Engel, who sits on Energy and Commerce, represents a district that includes some of the Bronx; Kaptur, a member of Appropriations, has generally progressive politics on economic issues, but has long been one of the most strident anti-choice voices in the House, only retreating from that position recently. The additions of Kildee, Kaptur, and Engel boost the percentages of CPC members on the key committees, but it’s a stretch to connect that to the spirit of the demand made by the CPC. Engel, after all, is a New Democrat, so the CPC didn’t get a new member placed on Energy and Commerce; rather, the CPC added a new member who was already on Energy and Commerce and a New Dem.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also snubbed progressives, filling its leadership team with centrist Democrats. DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos on Wednesday announced the new chairs of recruitment and heads of the Frontline Program, which protects members in swing seats, and every single one is a New Democrat. Pete Aguilar of California, Val Demings of Florida, and Donald McEachin of Virginia, who were all named chairs of recruitment, are New Democrats. Ami Bera of California, Suzan DelBene of Washington, and Brad Schneider of Illinois, all New Democrats, were tapped to manage the Frontline Program.
The good news for progressives in the House is that nothing matters — not this congressional cycle, anyway. As long as the Senate is run by Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the White House is occupied by Donald Trump, a Green New Deal has bigger obstacles than New Dems. But the structures being put into place today will shape the terms of legislative activity in 2021, when it may start to matter if Democrats take back the White House. The onus will be on outside activists to monitor the legislative behavior of the dual-loyalty members of the committees.
Below are the new House committee members announced Wednesday night:
Appropriations Committee: Cheri Bustos of Illinois (NDem) Ed Case of Hawaii Charlie Crist of Florida (NDem) (Blue Dog) Lois Frankel of Florida (CPC) Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona (NDem) Brenda Lawrence of Michigan (CPC) (NDem) Norma Torres of California Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey (CPC) Energy and Commerce Committee Nanette Barragán of California (CPC) Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware (CPC) (NDem) Robin Kelly of Illinois Ann Kuster of New Hampshire (NDem) A. Donald McEachin of Virginia (NDem) Tom O’Halleran of Arizona (NDem) (Blue Dog) Darren Soto of Florida (CPC) (NDem) Marc Veasey of Texas (NDem) Ways and Means Committee Don Beyer of Virginia (CPC) (NDem) Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania (CPC) (NDem) Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania (CPC) Steven Horsford of Nevada (CPC) Dan Kildee of Michigan (CPC) Gwen Moore of Wisconsin (CPC) Stephanie Murphy of Florida (NDem) (Blue Dog) Jimmy Panetta of California (CPC) Brad Schneider of Illinois (NDem) (Blue Dog) Tom Suozzi of New York (NDem)The post Progressives Fought for Key Committee Spots, but Centrist New Dems Came Out on Top appeared first on The Intercept.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., addresses an audience during a campaign rally on Feb. 22, 2016, in Amherst, Mass.
Photo: Steven Senne/AP
Last week, my experience, and that of some of my female co-workers, became the focus of a New York Times story on the sexual harassment and sexism that took place in the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. I told my story to bring attention to the sexist environment that is unfortunately endemic to most workspaces, including political campaigns. However, I was disheartened to discover that the takeaway by many pundits was not that sexism and harassment is pervasive, but that Sanders was somehow uniquely culpable. I was also struck by some of the messages and tweets calling into question the character of the women who spoke out.
As was the case throughout the 2016 campaign season, my personal experiences as a woman of color were sublimated to serve an establishment media narrative that pretends the progressive movement is all white, all male, and runs counter to the interests of women and people of color.
But my story should not be taken to confirm the “Bernie bro” mythology. It should be taken to confirm the pervasiveness of sexism in professional life and distill the hard truths that all campaigns should learn from.
It’s not as if the Sanders campaign alone is nursing the last vestiges of sexism and sexual harassment in the political sphere. Both were reportedly features of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. During her first run at the White House, Clinton’s campaign chose to retain a senior adviser who reportedly harassed a young woman repeatedly rather than fire him. And just last month, an aide for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., resigned after it was reported that he settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $400,000.
Politics reflect society’s general problem with sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.Politics reflect society’s general problem with sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. As a whole, our country does not believe, respect, or even like women as much as men. Our president has bragged about sexually assaulting women and made countless demeaning comments about their physical appearances. Two out of 9 Supreme Court justices have been accused of sexual misconduct. One in 3 women have experienced some form sexual violence. A nonprofit administered an online survey last January and found that 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment. The numbers and stakes are even higher for women of color and transgender women.
It’s not surprising, then, that these systemic problems infect political campaigns — especially since those calling the shots are mostly male, white, and disconnected from the working class. In my experience, women hired as strategists or managers are frequently treated like assistants and translators. Men often pass off our ideas as their own and “put us in our place” if we are too assertive.
It’s the classic double-bind: We are not smart enough or too smart; not attractive enough or too attractive; not dressed appropriately or dressed too nicely; not poor enough or too poor; not confident enough or too arrogant; not likable or too female. To be a woman in politics is to be held to an unattainable standard of perfection. To be a woman of color is even harder. When we see women like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez overcome the odds against her, set these expectations on fire, and score impressive accomplishments like getting the media and Democratic leadership to take a Green New Deal seriously, we should rejoice. But even she’s not immune.
After the New York Times story, I was hoping to see a more productive discussion about the insidiousness of sexual harassment and sexism in politics. In sharing my experiences, I was hoping to highlight this issue for all future campaigns and celebrate the power of women organizers who worked together and successfully got the attention of Sanders and his team. But that’s not what happened.
For one, the corporate media unfairly focused on Sanders — casting the harassment that happened within his campaign much differently than similar cases with other campaigns — implicating his personal ethics in a way that they’ve declined to do with other politicians.
Sanders recently apologized and acknowledged that his 2016 campaign could have handled sexual harassment and sexism claims better, and in his 2018 re-election campaign, he reportedly instituted sharper protocols like better hiring, training, and designating an independent firm that staff could utilize to report sexism and harassment. But new allegations of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign have since surfaced, indicating the depth of the problem was likely deeper than most knew. Now, Sanders should take the rare step of setting up an independent investigation into the 2016 allegations.
At the same time, I was deeply disappointed by the feedback I received from some on the left. Both myself and other women who spoke on the record about our experiences on Sanders’s campaign received messages and tweets from Sanders supporters accusing us of lying and wanting to purposefully attack the Vermont senator. I was told to “enjoy my 15 minutes of fame” and was mocked while the sexual harassment I endured was normalized. Neoliberals and corporate media are unfair to Sanders and his supporters because our movement threatens their supremacy. But to dismiss our claims as mere bias is at best disingenuous and at worst cruel.
By blindly attacking anyone who raises valid concerns about sexism because it’s “not a good look” for the senator, they are actually making him look worse. Ironically, in their defense of Sanders’s campaign, these individuals are behaving as if acknowledging the presence of sexism and sexual harassment in his campaign is akin to calling Sanders a sexist — the implication that the establishment media seems keen to draw.
Accusations of sexual misconduct during a political campaign should not be weaponized to serve a political agenda. Nor should claims be ignored to protect a beloved candidate — doing so only adds to the cycle of shame and punishment that makes sexism so hard to tackle.
Sexism will persist if women are discouraged from openly talking about our experiences. I sincerely hope that neither fear of political exploitation nor personal attacks discourage other women from speaking out against sexism or any abuse they’ve suffered.
The post I Was Sexually Harassed on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Campaign. I Will Not Be Weaponized or Dismissed. appeared first on The Intercept.
Imigrantes da América Central aguardam sobre um morro antes de tentar atravessar de Tijuana para San Diego em 31 de dezembro de 2018.
Foto: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images
Na noite de terça-feira (8), o presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, usou seu primeiro pronunciamento na Salão Oval para falar à nação sobre uma “crise do coração, uma crise da alma” na fronteira do sul do país. A solução que Trump propõe é um “muro”, e ele está ameaçando manter o governo paralisado até obter os mais de 5 bilhões de dólares necessários para construí-lo. Ele talvez esteja certo quando diz que há uma crise. Só que não é a da sua imaginação delirante, mas o oposto: o problema são as políticas do sistema de imigração americano e os poderosos – inclusive o próprio Trump – que pressionam para aprofundar os piores excessos da legislação. Nunca se resolveu uma “crise do coração” com barras de aço. O “muro” só irá piorar a situação.
Nunca se resolveu uma “crise do coração” com barras de aço. O “muro” só irá piorar a situação.Quando Trump usa palavra “muro”, no entanto, ele não o faz no sentido mais comum do termo, de uma estrutura sólida e impenetrável. O que ele tem em mente é uma cerca, ou talvez de barras de aço. Ou quem sabe algum dos protótipos apresentados no primeiro semestre, impossíveis de construir e provavelmente ineficazes, ainda que nem um metro de muro desse tipo já tenha sido construído. E, no entanto, quando Trump fala do “muro”, quer dizer tantas outras coisas. Ele se fala da crescente militarização da região de fronteira. Ele fala do aumento do efetivo da Patrulha de Fronteira, a maior agência com poder de polícia nos EUA, e também a menos transparente, mais cara, e possivelmente menos passível de responsabilização. Ele fala do crescimento dos equipamentos militares, tais como drones, helicópteros, sensores de solo, barcos e quadriciclos que causam danos ambientais e emocionais ao longo da fronteira entre os EUA e o México. “Muro” também significa a desapropriação de terras e fazendas particulares pelo governo americano, com base na legislação aplicável.
O “muro”, esse conceito vagamente nacionalista que Trump transformou em sua marca registrada, se estende bastante pelo interior dos Estados Unidos. Significa a caça às pessoas sem documentos por todo o país, perseguindo-as nos tribunais, nas portas das escolas, arrancando-as de suas casas e expulsando-as do país, ou criando postos de controle internos onde agentes da Patrulha de Fronteira ameaçam pessoas, muitas vezes cidadãos americanos. O “muro” significa gastar mais dinheiro no imenso complexo de detenção de imigrantes, onde cerca de 45 mil pessoas, em média, permanecem detidas. Bilhões de dólares dos contribuintes são injetados nas instalações prisionais com fins lucrativos.
O clamor de Trump por um “muro”, portanto, é, como escreveu numa nota à imprensa Ana María Archila, da organização Center for Popular Democracy [Centro da Democracia Popular], o “mais recente em uma série de ataques racistas e anti-imigrantes com o objetivo de incentivar o ódio”.
Algumas vezes, porém, “muro” realmente significa um muro – já existem mais de mil quilômetros de barreiras de tipos diversos na fronteira internacional entre os EUA e o México. Mas nós não precisamos disso. A crise de imigração é de fabricação própria, e as outras justificativas de Trump para o “muro” não se sustentam diante de uma análise criteriosa.
Em seu discurso na terça-feira, Trump se concentrou intensamente no tráfico internacional de drogas. A maior parte das drogas, porém – inclusive a heroína, quando não é fabricada internamente – entra no país pelas portas de entrada oficiais, que não seriam afetadas por um muro. O governo Trump também destacou o terrorismo como uma questão de fronteira, mas até hoje em nenhum ataque terrorista se encontrou qualquer ligação com alguém que tenha atravessado pela fronteira sul. O que o governo alega sobre imigrantes criminosos é uma mentira deslavada: os imigrantes cometem crimes em menor proporção que os americanos natos, as comunidades de imigrantes são mais seguras, e o volume de supostos “criminosos estrangeiros” presos na fronteira é constituído em sua maior parte por pessoas acusadas de delitos migratórios ou crimes praticados sem violência. Apenas três dos “17 mil criminosos” detidos na fronteira – número citado recentemente pelo chefe de gabinete da Casa Branca, Mick Mulvaney, e que, na realidade, é de apenas 7 mil – tinham registro por homicídio culposo ou doloso.
A travessia ilegal de fronteira entre os EUA e o México está acontecendo na proporção mais baixa das últimas décadas, e cada vez mais aqueles que atravessam o fazem com a intenção de se entregar e requerer asilo. E cada vez mais essas pessoas são famílias e crianças. Crianças que não são “peões humanos”, como sugeriu Trump, e muito raramente são traficadas por “coiotes”, indivíduos que atuam nas áreas fronteiriças para facilitar a entrada dos indocumentados. Em regra, são levadas pelos pais, por entes queridos ou adultos de confiança, porque suas vidas estão em risco, e seus pais querem que elas tenham liberdade e segurança. E elas só estão atravessando dessa forma porque são rejeitadas nas portas de entrada.
Por fim, muros de fronteira não costumam funcionar muito bem. Na maior parte das vezes, é fácil escalá-los, rompê-los, cavar por baixo deles ou apoiar neles uma escada.
Existe uma verdadeira crise na fronteira. Essa crise diz respeito às milhares de crianças que permanecem detidas em barracas na cidade de Tornillo, no Texas. Ela envolve as famílias que continuam a ser separadas e traumatizadas. A crise se concentra no esquartejamento das leis de asilo. E se manifesta nas dezenas de milhares de imigrantes e solicitantes de asilo aprisionados no crescente arquipélago de centros de detenção. O que dá impulso à crise são a instabilidade e a violência na América Central e no México, causadas e apoiadas pelos EUA por meio da exploração econômica e da guerra às drogas.
A crise, porém, atinge profundamente os EUA. É possível vê-la nos bairros de todo o país, onde imigrantes sem documentos estão sendo arrancados de seus empregos, famílias e casas, presos, e mandados para fora do país. Às vezes há também uma crise de políticas imprevisíveis: mesmo as pessoas com status provisório – DACA [a política que beneficiava menores de idade] e Status de Proteção Temporária – não conseguem saber com certeza como o Judiciário irá lidar com os ataques que estão sofrendo do governo. A crise está nos desertos da fronteira ao sul, que as agências de controle de imigração usam há muito tempo como arma – resultando, nas últimas duas décadas, na morte de pelo menos 7 mil pessoas que fizeram a travessia, e transformando partes do sudoeste americano no que o antropologista Jason de León chamou de “deathscape” [“paisagem de morte”].
No seu pronunciamento de terça-feira, Trump resvalou no racismo: lamentou seletivamente as mortes de cidadãos americanos, algumas delas causadas por imigrantes sem documentos. Ele não mencionou, porém, as mortes de Jackeline Call e Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, duas crianças de 7 e 8 anos, respectivamente, que morreram recentemente sob custódia da Patrulha de Fronteira. O governo, de forma cruel, culpou os pais pelas mortes de seus filhos. Mas qualquer pessoa que conheça a dificuldade da travessia de fronteira – uma estratégia deliberada praticada há décadas – e a recusa em apreciar pedidos de asilo nas portas de entrada, ou as “hieleras” [“geladeiras”] onde os imigrantes são depositados enquanto aguardam, em condições insalubres, superlotadas, congelantes e desumanas, sabe que a doença, o sofrimento e as esporádicas mortes não são apenas inevitáveis, são estratégicos. Cristina Fialho, diretora-executiva da organização Freedom for Immigrantes [Liberdade para os Imigrantes], chamou as políticas do governo de “brutalidade sistêmica”.
O que demonstram as caravanas de imigrantes e os campos de refugiados em Tijuana é que a crise não está apenas em curso, ela está perto de se tornar permanente. Um “muro” vai aprofundar a crise e causar destruição ambiental e um imensurável sofrimento humano.
Tradutora: Deborah Leão
The post Há uma verdadeira crise na fronteira dos EUA. Um muro só complica a situação. appeared first on The Intercept.
The “smart home” of the 21st century isn’t just supposed to be a monument to convenience, we’re told, but also to protection, a Tony Stark-like bubble of vigilant algorithms and internet-connected sensors working ceaselessly to watch over us. But for some who’ve welcomed in Amazon’s Ring security cameras, there have been more than just algorithms watching through the lens, according to sources alarmed by Ring’s dismal privacy practices.
Ring has a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house. The company has marketed its line of miniature cameras, designed to be mounted as doorbells, in garages, and on bookshelves, not only as a means of keeping tabs on your home while you’re away, but of creating a sort of privatized neighborhood watch, a constellation of overlapping camera feeds that will help police detect and apprehend burglars (and worse) as they approach. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff wrote last spring to commemorate the company’s reported $1 billion acquisition payday from Amazon, a company with its own recent history of troubling facial recognition practices. The marketing is working; Ring is a consumer hit and a press darling.
Despite its mission to keep people and their property secure, the company’s treatment of customer video feeds has been anything but, people familiar with the company’s practices told The Intercept. Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world. This would amount to an enormous list of highly sensitive files that could be easily browsed and viewed. Downloading and sharing these customer video files would have required little more than a click. The Information, which has aggressively covered Ring’s security lapses, reported on these practices last month.
At the time the Ukrainian access was provided, the video files were left unencrypted, the source said, because of Ring leadership’s “sense that encryption would make the company less valuable,” owing to the expense of implementing encryption and lost revenue opportunities due to restricted access. The Ukraine team was also provided with a corresponding database that linked each specific video file to corresponding specific Ring customers.
“If [someone] knew a reporter or competitor’s email address, [they] could view all their cameras.””At the same time, the source said, Ring unnecessarily provided executives and engineers in the U.S. with highly privileged access to the company’s technical support video portal, allowing unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras, regardless of whether they needed access to this extremely sensitive data to do their jobs. For someone who’d been given this top-level access — comparable to Uber’s infamous “God mode” map that revealed the movements of all passengers — only a Ring customer’s email address was required to watch cameras from that person’s home. Although the source said they never personally witnessed any egregious abuses, they told The Intercept “if [someone] knew a reporter or competitor’s email address, [they] could view all their cameras.” The source also recounted instances of Ring engineers “teasing each other about who they brought home” after romantic dates. Although the engineers in question were aware that they were being surveilled by their co-workers in real time, the source questioned whether their companions were similarly informed.
Ring’s decision to grant this access to its Ukraine team was spurred in part by the weaknesses of its in-house facial and object recognition software. Neighbors, the company’s disarming name for its distributed residential surveillance platform, is now a marquee feature for Ring’s cameras, billed as a “proactive” neighborhood watch. This real-time crime-fighting requires more than raw video — it requires the ability to make sense, quickly and at a vast scale, of what’s actually happening in these household video streams. Is that a dog or your husband? Is that a burglar or a tree? Ring’s software has for years struggled with these fundamentals of object recognition. According to the most recent Information report, “Users routinely complained to customer support about receiving alerts when nothing noteworthy was happening at their front door; instead, the system seemed to be detecting a car driving by on the street or a leaf falling from a tree in the front yard.”
Computer vision has made incredible strides in recent years, but creating software that can categorize objects from scratch is often expensive and time-consuming. To jump-start the process, Ring used its Ukrainian “data operators” as a crutch for its lackluster artificial intelligence efforts, manually tagging and labeling objects in a given video as part of a “training” process to teach software with the hope that it might be able to detect such things on its own in the near future. This process is still apparently underway years later: Ring Labs, the name of the Ukrainian operation, is still employing people as data operators, according to LinkedIn, and posting job listings for vacant video-tagging gigs: “You must be able to recognize and tag all moving objects in the video correctly with high accuracy,” reads one job ad. “Be ready for rapid changes in tasks in the same way as be ready for long monotonous work.”
Image: Ring
A never-before-published image from an internal Ring document pulls back the veil of the company’s lofty security ambitions: Behind all the computer sophistication was a team of people drawing boxes around strangers, day in and day out, as they struggled to grant some semblance of human judgment to an algorithm. (The Intercept redacted a face from the image.)
A second source, with direct knowledge of Ring’s video-tagging efforts, said that the video annotation team watches footage not only from the popular outdoor and doorbell camera models, but from household interiors. The source said that Ring employees at times showed each other videos they were annotating and described some of the things they had witnessed, including people kissing, firing guns, and stealing.
Ring spokesperson Yassi Shahmiri would not answer any questions about the company’s past data policies and how they might be different today, electing instead to provide the following statement:
We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously. In order to improve our service, we view and annotate certain Ring videos. These videos are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes.
We have strict policies in place for all our team members. We implement systems to restrict and audit access to information. We hold our team members to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them.
It’s not clear that the current standards for which Ring videos are accessed in Ukraine, as described in Ring’s statement, have always been in place, nor is there any indication of how (or if) they’re enforced. The Information quoted former employees saying the standards have not always been in place, and indicated that efforts to more tightly control video were put in place by Amazon only this past May after Amazon visited the Ukraine office. Even then, The Information added, staffers in Ukraine worked around the controls.
Furthermore, Ring’s overview of its Neighbors system provides zero mention of image or facial recognition, and no warning that those who use the feature are opting in to have their homes watched by individuals in a Ukrainian R&D lab. Mentions of Ring’s facial recognition practices are buried in its privacy policy, which said merely that “you may choose to use additional functionality in your Ring product that, through video data from your device, can recognize facial characteristics of familiar visitors.” Neither Ring’s terms of service nor its privacy policy mention any manual video annotation being conducted by humans, nor does either document mention of the possibility that Ring staffers could access this video at all. Even with suitably strong policies in place, the question of whether Ring owners should trust a company that ever considered the above permissible will remain an open one.
The post For Owners of Amazon’s Ring Security Cameras, Strangers May Have Been Watching Too appeared first on The Intercept.
Subscribe to the Murderville podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public, iHeart Radio, and other platforms.
William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning were beloved in Adel. There was no reason anybody would want to hurt them. Then they were fatally beaten in broad daylight at a popular lunch spot. Thanks to the actions of a couple customers, their assailant was quickly apprehended: 20-year-old Hercules Brown. But the question quickly arose, was this the only murder Hercules was responsible for?
Liliana Segura: Bennett’s Cash and Carry was a corner store. More neighborhood grocery than 7-Eleven. Half of the store was stocked with groceries. Nothing too fancy. Meat, bread, chips, milk, sodas- or Coke, as they say in Georgia. The front of the store is where it was at. There was a lunch counter. The old fashioned kind. They served hamburgers, barbecue, fries, and the best chili dogs around. The store was owned by William Carroll Bennett. His family was well known in town. They’d been there for several generations. Everyone knew Bennett as a kind and gentle man. His employee, Rebecca Browning, was also well-known and well-liked. Friendly and sweet. She was usually behind the lunch counter.
Jordan Smith: The store was on the south side of Adel, Georgia, near the outskirts of town. It was a concrete block building on West Ninth Street. There was a Weyerhaeuser plant down the way that made particle board, and a few houses scattered nearby. Directly behind the store were the railroad tracks that slice the small city in half. So it was popular with the guys who worked on the railroad. People like Lloyd Crumley, an engineer who drove freight trains for nearly 40 years.
Lloyd Crumley: We’d stop there quite often. We’d have to work in a little place called Weyerhaeuser and it was right beside the track, and we could just get off and go in there and get us a hamburger for lunch and then go finish the rest of our customers. We enjoyed them, they were really nice people.
Jordan Smith: It wasn’t just the railroad people who loved it though. The store was a real neighborhood fixture. Here’s how Gail Bennett, the owner’s widow, describes it.
Gail Bennett: It was actually, really a family business, because my girls grew up there. They grew up checking people out, working in the store, doing hotdogs and hamburgers at lunch and stuff like that when they weren’t in school.
Jordan Smith: And when somebody didn’t have money for groceries, her husband often gave them credit until the end of the month.
Gail Bennett: Yeah, he did. He did that and especially those that were on fixed income, that had social security. He would let them get groceries until they got their check on the end of the month or the first of the month.
Liliana Segura: The community genuinely loved Bennett and Browning. It was inconceivable that anyone would want to hurt them. Yet, two years after Donna Brown died at the Taco Bell and six months after Shailesh Patel was killed, two more shocking murders: Bennett and Browning. Inside the store, just before lunchtime. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia.
Liliana Segura: These last two murders of the four that rocked Adel may be the bloodiest. We wanted to understand what happened and looked for clues that might connect them all.
Jordan Smith: I hope it’s marked, because this is kind of a country road, and it’s a bit unclear. I wonder if we passed it. Doesn’t it seem like that’s the end of the road?
Liliana Segura: Yes.
Jordan Smith: We have to have passed it by now. These aren’t even houses.
Liliana Segura: I didn’t see any houses.
Jordan Smith: There were some over on that side. But maybe it’s up here.
Jordan Smith: We went to visit Lloyd Crumley at his house on the outskirts of Valdosta, about half an hour south of Adel. It’s a tidy white house set far back from a secluded country road. There’s a rooster in the yard and a tractor with its engine running.
Jordan Smith: I’m gonna say we’re here.
Liliana Segura: Okay. Well.
Jordan Smith: I think this is him. Mr. Crumley?
Lloyd Crumley: Come up to the back door.
Jordan Smith: Oh, I don’t even know, sorry. I’m Jordan, nice to meet you, and this is my colleague, Liliana.
Liliana Segura: Liliana, it’s nice to meet you.
Lloyd Crumley: I thought you’d pull up around here like most people do.
Jordan Smith: Oh, well I didn’t even know if we were at the right house, so…
Jordan Smith: Crumley’s retired now. But he still drives a train sometimes, for the smaller railroad operators. We sat with him on a brown leather sofa in his airy, light-filled living room. And he told us what happened the day William Bennett and Rebecca Browning were killed.
Liliana Segura: It was a Friday. Crumley was working with a brakeman named Corbit Belflower. The man he, and everybody else, calls Cornbread, and a conductor named Wayne Peters. The three of them worked together for years. It was just after 11 a.m. when they decided to break for lunch. Peters was starving, so he led the way.
Lloyd Crumley: That day, my conductor, he jumped off a little bit ahead of us, me and my brakeman. He was a little bit anxious. Let’s say it that way.
Liliana Segura: Crumley and Cornbread stayed behind to make sure the train was properly parked.
Lloyd Crumley: The duties of my brakeman and myself was to secure the train to where it wouldn’t roll away, or nobody could jump on it and take it off or anything like that.
Jordan Smith: The train was behind the store, just feet from the entrance. The men were used to working together, so it took them mere minutes to secure the train. As Cornbread recalled it, they were really just seconds behind Peters. As soon as the train was set, Crumley and Cornbread headed over to the grocery store. They were looking forward to a lunch cooked by the woman that Crumley affectionately called Miss Becky. They walked down a path worn through the grass around the side of the building and into a dusty parking lot that ran all the way up to the front of the store. The door was near the middle of the building and there were four large windows across the front. As they approached the entrance, Crumley noticed something odd.
Lloyd Crumley: And as we got off the engine walking towards the train, a guy come walking by me with a baseball bat behind his back and got in a car. And I thought, “My Lord, that sure did look unusual,” you know? Like, “That don’t look right”.
Liliana Segura: The man was black. Twenty-something. Nearly six feet tall. More than 200 pounds. Short hair. He was wearing dark blue pants. The bat seemed to have some kind of stains on it. It looked suspicious. Crumley filed it away in his head but kept going, the way you do with something that seems kind of strange. The man walked toward a blue car parked diagonally right in front of the store. Crumley and Cornbread kept walking towards the grocery. Crumley got there first and reached for the door.
Lloyd Crumley: And then, my brakeman and myself, we went in and went to open the door, and this black guy was holding the cash register in the door. I reached to open the door for somebody coming out, then I looked and he had a big cash register in his hands.
Liliana Segura: A man carrying a great big electric cash register with the cord dangling from the back. He was a big guy, also black, wearing a hockey jersey and white Nikes. There were small red spots on them. He burst through the door.
Lloyd Crumley: I said, “Hey, buddy, what you doing with the cash register?” And so he threw the cash register and knocked me down with the cash register.
Liliana Segura: Crumley threw his arms up to try to catch it.
Lloyd Crumley: I caught it with my hands as it come to me and it didn’t really hurt me at all. I just fell backwards, because it was pretty heavy. A cash register’s pretty large. He had it in his arms and he just went, “He-yah” and just screamed at me, and throwed it at me. Because I said, “Boy, what are you doing with that cash register?” And he didn’t like what I said, so he knocked me down with it.
Jordan Smith: Crumley quickly scrambled to his feet. The man who had thrown the cash register ran toward the blue car. The man with the bat was already inside it, sitting in the passenger seat.
Lloyd Crumley: And the other guy with me went to grab him.
Jordan Smith: Cornbread.
Lloyd Crumley: He’s a big old feller, the feller that was with me. Big old guy.
Jordan Smith: Crumley thought we might want to talk to Cornbread, to hear his version of the events that day. He offered to call him for us.
Lloyd Crumley: Cornbread. What are you doing feller? Working? Look here. You remember when the Bennett store got robbed and them two people got killed? Me and you went in there. You remember all of that? Uh-oh. I called Conrad. I’m sorry. I’m trying to get a hold of Cornbread. I dialed the wrong number Conrad, I’m sorry. Yeah. All right, you’re Conrad instead of Cornbread. All right, let me dial the right number this time. Excuse me, buddy. All right, bye.
Jordan Smith: He tried again.
Lloyd Crumley: Let me try and find Cornbread instead of Conrad. Oh my goodness, what’d I do that for? Good gracious. Now, see Cornbread is the next one down, under Conrad, and I hit the wrong button there. I might not get- He’s an engineer on the railroad now. He may be on the railway. If he is, he can’t answer. Hey, feller. What you up to? You are? Well lord help. Let me run something by you. You remember that Browning guy, where me and you went into the restaurant, the little store there and he killed them people? Yeah. There’s two ladies that’s reviewing that, and wanting to people about it nowadays. Would you be willing to talk to someone about it? Suppose I hand them my phone and let you talk to them and you give them the information. Will that be all right? Are you sure? All right.
Jordan Smith: Okay. Hello? Is this Mr. Bellflower, correct? My name is Jordan Smith…
Jordan Smith: We didn’t have a good way to record what Cornbread told us, but it corroborated Crumley’s story.
Liliana Segura: Cornbread wasn’t able to catch the man with the cash register before he got behind the wheel of the blue car. He tore out of the parking lot, churning up dirt. Speeding off to the west. Toward the Weyerhauser plant. Crumley and Cornbread jumped into action. Crumley pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and quickly jotted down the license plate number. Crumley then turned back to the store. He knew his conductor, Wayne Peters, was already inside. Cornbread noticed that Peters’ baseball cap was caught in the door.
Lloyd Crumley: I opened the door and looked in the door.
Liliana Segura: Peters was on the floor.
Lloyd Crumley: My conductor was laying on the ground over there just bleeding.
Liliana Segura: He had been hit in the head. His scalp was peeled back near his ear. There was a lot of blood. Crumley was horrified.
Lloyd Crumley: I tell you, it’s shocking to see something like that, to see that much blood on the ground. I didn’t know people would bleed that much.
Liliana Segura: Amazingly, Peters was alive.
Lloyd Crumley: But he was hurt pretty bad, he had a big place on the back of his head that the hide was peeled over, on his head you know? But when I walked over there, and went to pick him up, he was alive, he wasn’t dead.
Jordan Smith: William Carroll Bennett, the owner of the store, was also on the floor. Near the meat counter.
Lloyd Crumley: And then I walked on in and I found Mr. Bennett laying in the middle with a big puddle of blood. His whole head was bashed in.
Jordan Smith: The pool of blood extended from his head to his waist. His legs were straight out and his hands were up by his face. There was blood on the ceiling and on the counter. And a space in the blood to his left, where his assailant had been standing. On the floor there were bits of skull and scalp, with the hair still attached.
Liliana Segura: Rebecca Browning, the woman who worked for Mr. Bennett, had also been viciously attacked. There was blood spatter on the lunch counter near a partially-eaten sandwich and a cup of tea. Browning’s purse was next to it. There was $2.19 inside. Dark hair was stuck to the blood. A pair of dentures were found on the floor near her body, which was also drenched in blood.
Lloyd Crumley: And then the lady, that done the little cooking, she was over to my right. I could see her too, she was- tried to get up under the counter but he had killed her too.
Liliana Segura: Bennett and Browning each died of “blunt force injuries” to the head. Injuries consistent with a baseball bat. Only Peters survived the attack.
Lloyd Crumley: Yea, I was very surprised that Wayne was still alive. So I drug him to the door and put my handkerchief over the back of his head an all that and just held it and had dialed 911. And had talked with them, was telling them what was going on. And of course, they got there in just a few minutes, the police and the ambulance both.
Jordan Smith: Crumley’s call came in at 11:12 a.m. The Adel cops arrived soon after. And they called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, to take over. They did that anytime there was a big case to solve. Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent who had investigated Donna Brown’s murder, would take the lead.
Liliana Segura: The Bennett family, which owned the grocery, had deep roots in Adel. Bennett’s widow, Gail, told us it wasn’t just his daughters who had sold hot dogs there in the summer.
Gail Bennett: My husband was raised there. I was raised not far from there in a little town in Nashville. So, yeah, the Bennetts have been there for several generations.
Liliana Segura: They had owned the store for about a dozen years. Bennett’s brother, Derrell, also owned a store, which he’d had for almost 20 years. Derrell told the Adel News Tribune that “running a country store is a good clean way to make a living. You have to have it in your blood.”
Jordan Smith: Gail told us that on the day her husband died, she was out with a friend. They were both nurses at the local hospital. Gail was helping to plan her friend’s daughter’s wedding. They had heard the sirens, but didn’t think much of it.
Gail Bennett: Then I got a call around lunchtime from the director of nurses, saying “I need you to come home.” They wouldn’t tell me anything. When I got to the hospital, everybody was there, most of the family and friends and the deacons of the church were there.
Jordan Smith: What did you think? Can you remember what was going through your mind?
Gail Bennett: That it couldn’t be true. Mostly shock, anger. Wanting to see him, and I wasn’t allowed to. Basically when he kissed me bye that morning, that was the last time. That morning was the last time I seen him.
Jordan Smith: Gail Bennett had been in the area nearly all her life, but she couldn’t bear to stay in Adel after her husband died. It took a few years, but eventually she moved to Maine, where she works as a traveling nurse. She’s on the road a lot and hard to reach, but we caught her on the phone one day. She told us about meeting her husband, when she was 16 and he was 18.
Gail Bennett: Back then we just rode around town and we met and started dating. We went out on a double date to start with and then we started dating and ended up getting married.
Jordan Smith: They got married in 1973. His obituary said that he was an Army veteran and the Sunday School superintendent at his church. They had kids and grandkids.
Gail Bennett: We had three girls and he got to see three of the grandchildren. He didn’t get to see all of the grandchildren.
Jordan Smith: She remembers her husband fondly.
Gail Bennett: He was a very caring person. He would do anything for you. He was the deacon of the church that we went to. He was just a very kind, loving, family father, grandfather.
Liliana Segura: But she isn’t the only one who loved him. Tim Balch, the retired Adel police officer, remembered how he helped out in the community. Both on the black and white sides of town.
Tim Balch: I mean, I can’t tell you, probably two or 300 people that I talked with owed Mr. Bennett over $1,000, because he would give them groceries at the end of the month even when they had no money. He made sure the kids were gonna eat and stuff like that, I mean, he was a big-hearted guy, and it was a very adverse reaction down there on him getting killed.
Liliana Segura: Rebecca Browning was well-loved too. She was married and had a bunch of kids. A son, a daughter and five stepkids. Her obituary ran just above Bennett’s in the newspaper. There’s a picture of her, smiling. She has curly hair, pulled back. She wears glasses and small hoop earrings. Lloyd Crumley, the train engineer, remembered that she was the one who always cooked for them.
Lloyd Crumley: She’d fix us hamburgers and hotdogs, and just as sweet a lady as you ever met in your life. I really hated to see that. It looked like she had tried to get away from him and she was up under the counter. Terrible.
Jordan Smith: The community’s response to the murders of Bennett and Browning was powerful, far more so than the reaction to the grisly murder of Shailesh Patel, which was still unsolved. First there was just shock. Right after the crime, people gathered across the street. They saw paramedics attend to Wayne Peters and watched the police put up yellow crime scene tape. Then there was an outpouring of support. Flowers and cards and remembrances in the Adel News-Tribune. And lots and lots of prayers. By the end of the year, the Bennett family had bought an ad in the paper to show the family’s gratitude. “Words of thanks could never start to express the love we felt from this community at the time of the death of our loved one,” it read. “May God bless you, The Family of Carroll Bennett.”
Liliana Segura: The investigation into this murder started out on much stronger footing, certainly compared to the murders of Shailesh Patel and Donna Brown. This was mostly thanks to the quick thinking of Lloyd Crumley as he watched the men speed off. They drove a blue Cadillac with the muffler hanging low.
Lloyd Crumley: And as it come by me, I just looked at the tag number and I said, “You know, I might not remember that tag number.” So I keep a pen on me at all times, for railroad use. So I wrote it down across my hand, the tag number. It was a good thing I did.
Liliana Segura: The number was 104 WRS. A Georgia tag. After the Adel PD showed up, they put out a call for the car and the tag. Within minutes, an officer on patrol spotted the car pulling into a trailer park right around the corner from Bennett’s grocery. There was only one man in the car now. Police pulled him over.
Jordan Smith: The driver sat in the car for a minute. Then he got out. It was the large man from the grocery store with the red spots on his Nikes. The man who threw the cash register and ran. When the police asked him his name, he lied. He gave them a false one. But he wasn’t fooling anyone. Police knew who exactly who he was. It was Hercules Brown. 20 years old, former Cook County High School student and member of the school’s band. The beloved son of an important woman in town. And a guy with a mean streak.
Liliana Segura: People in Adel knew that Hercules’ behavior had been getting worse and more violent. Some had even told the cops that he might have been responsible for the last two murders in town. In particular, Donna Brown. The crime that Devonia Inman was facing the death penalty for.
On the next episode of Murderville: Now that Hercules Brown appeared to have committed a brazen double murder in broad daylight, would the police finally listen?
Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week.
The post Episode Four: Murder in Broad Daylight appeared first on The Intercept.
No comments:
Post a Comment