Have you or others you know been impacted by the shutdown?
Here’s how readers responded.
We have two family members who are government employees—they are a family of four with one on the way. Not only have they been working with no pay, but they also need day care for two children. This is an abuse of power on the part of the president! The man has no empathy and no conscience. He is a disgrace to his office.
Linda Castriota
Stamford, Conn.
I live on Plum Island, Massachusetts. Most of the island is a national wildlife refuge (Parker River National Wildlife Refuge). Rangers were a common site before the shutdown—controlling traffic, keeping visitors away from sensitive areas, and doing repairs to rotting, collapsing boardwalks. Now none can be seen and people pretty much have the run of the place. Most people are careful and respectful, but there are others who are not.
This is an inconvenience compared to some of the pictures I have seen of our parks. I am fearful of the harm that might be caused to these national treasures.
Donald Milotte
Newburyport, Mass.
My husband is a Customs and Border Protection canine officer at Logan Airport in Boston. He has been going to work every day, not knowing when he is going to get paid. He had scheduled “use or lose” vacation during the week of Christmas, and had to go to work because all vacations were cancelled. At the same time, my mother was at the end of her life in a hospital in New Hampshire, but he was forced to go to work. We are now planning her funeral and we don’t know when he is going to get paid. People have offered us help, but my husband is not the kind to take help from others. He is the one who always is there to help others when they are in need. He is proud of the work that he does, the paycheck that he brings home, and the family that he supports. He has never been late paying a bill in his life. He doesn’t want help from strangers, he just wants to do his job and get paid. These aren’t the people who should be the pawns in this ridiculous game that both sides of the government are playing. I am a Democrat, but I’m not very proud of my party right now either. Just come up with a compromise, please. And, by the way, a wall is not the only answer. The answer is a combination of multiple things, including a wall structure, updated technology, enforcement to track down people overstaying their visas, more officers, etc.
Elizabeth Casey
New London, N.H.
I live in Boise, Idaho, am on the geosciences faculty at Boise State University, and have been observing the impacts of this shutdown both directly and indirectly on our region.
Many of our geosciences graduates, both at the bachelor’s and graduate levels, work for federal agencies in the West. In Boise, where the economy is diverse and robust, it’s not easy to identify the direct impact, but in small communities across the state where the federal government (Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service) is a major employer, the impact can be profound. I know of several graduates in situations where either they are the primary earners in the family in a small town, or both they and their spouse/partner work for the federal government. Both situations are having a dire impact on people’s personal finances, as well as the community’s economy that depends on their income.
At the university level, as a research institution we rely on federal funds from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and other agencies to support our research and recruit and support our graduate students. While our funding of existing grants is not currently in danger, the approval and processing of previously approved or new proposals is stopped, and work on those projects cannot proceed. This means we can’t recruit staff and students to work, and often opportunities for gathering time-critical data pass by as a lost opportunity. We also are finding it difficult to get data from many federal websites—our department relies on current SNOTEL data and, while there are a few automated stations reporting, much of the data relies on manual collection and reporting on the Natural Resources Conservation Service websites. For our research and for water managers in the western states, these data are critical to model and predict spring supply.
David Wilkins
Boise, Idaho
My 90-year-old father-in-law voted for Trump. Voted GOP for decades. He’s also a retired civil servant.
He’s now mad at Trump because of the shutdown.
If Trump has lost my father-in-law, Trump’s overplayed this hand badly.
John W. Tilford
Bloomington, Ind.
A current member of the U.S. Foreign Service, originally from a non-coastal ag-economy town like those that my wife, Deb, and I have been writing about, describes how the abstraction of “the shutdown” feels to him and his colleagues.
I could set it up further or highlight its implications, but instead I’ll just say, Please read and think about his account:
For the first time in my 20+ years as a federal employee, I won’t get paid this week. That hurts, but fortunately my wife—also a federal employee—gets paid out a different account, one that still has a “residual balance.”
But probably not for much longer. At that point, we’ll live off our savings while Congress and the White House continue to beat their chests and scream at one another, oblivious to the long-term damage they’re doing to our national interests.
My wife and I have savings to cover the gap, but many of our colleagues aren’t so lucky. The State Department stopped paying salaries this week for nearly half the members of the Foreign Service, many of whom struggle to get by given the high costs of housing and child care in the Washington, DC area. I don’t know how many civil servants also won’t get paid, but I assume it’s a lot. Many of them work in low-paid clerical jobs in the DC area, and they can scarcely afford missing a single paycheck.
The so-called Locally Employed Staff, aka the non-Americans who work at U.S. Embassies around the world, are still getting paid, but no one knows for how much longer. Many of these local staff endure harassment and worse because they work for the U.S. government. [JF note: Yes, I have seen this around the world, and know how heavily U.S. embassies and U.S. interests rely on these local workers.] Many of them live paycheck to paycheck, and should we stop paying their salaries, it really will hurt. I suspect many will quit and never come back.
For me, the worst part of this whole thing has been the confirmation—and I say confirmation rather than realization—that few in Washington in either party care about our federal institutions, much less the people who work in them.
My colleagues and I could go bankrupt, and the institutions where we work—the very institutions that made the U.S. the greatest power in the history of the world—could wither and collapse, and almost no one in Washington would care, except to the extent that they could use the personal suffering and institutional failure to bludgeon and blame the other side.
I’ve spent most of my foreign service career working in so-called “developing democracies,” countries where notorious criminals sat in the parliament, and presidents routinely called supreme court justices and told them how to rule on cases. It was always easy for us as Americans to chuckle at this, then smugly lecture our foreign interlocutors about the need to build independent democratic institutions.
Little did we realize that our own American institutions were being hollowed out and destroyed from within by a political class that saw these institutions in the same way my third-world interlocutors did—a place to stash cronies and pursue partisan agendas. This shutdown will only accelerate the long-term decline of America’s federal agencies and institutions.
For me, I’m counting down the days until I can retire. I’ve had a good run, and my time in federal service has been good for me and my family. The Foreign Service has given my children the opportunity to grow up all over the world, all while I served my country with great pride. Federal employees have long gotten used to serving out of the spotlight, while getting blamed when things go wrong and rarely thanked for the many things that go right. We’re used to being derided, sidelined, and looked upon with suspicion by one administration after another (the Trump administration, however, is by far the worst I’ve seen.)
As federal employees, we serve proudly even when no one is looking or seems to care. But enough is enough. This shutdown, and the complete lack of compassion or understanding in Washington, has convinced me that it’s time to go. I can support my family and serve my community or country in lots of other ways, ones where I don’t constantly feel used, abused, and, ultimately, forgotten….
Many thanks to The Atlantic for not forgetting that there are real, human victims of the shutdown. Almost no one in this administration and few in Congress understand or care about federal employees like me or the millions of Americans who suffer when federal employees and the institutions where we serve are politicized, eroded, and eventually destroyed.
Update: As several readers have written in to mention, the Foreign Service officer’s note contains the line “few in either party” care about public institutions or public service.
Since I have written approximately one zillion articles, plus an entire book, on the destructive instinct toward “false equivalence” or “both sides to blame” political analysis, many readers have asked: why didn’t I call out this line in the FSO’s letter?
One answer is, I don’t think I should give line-by-line assents or dissents to each item of reader mail. (Though I did note, in the one above, my parallel experience with locally hired embassy staffs around the world.) Another answer is that the thrust of this reader’s message didn’t seem false-equivalence minded.
But the main point is that two contradictory-seeming points could both be true, and both are part of the reader’s argument.
One is the long-term eating-of-the-seed-corn when it comes to respect for and investment in public service — except, of course, for the military. This has happened over the decades and through different administrations.
The other is the all-out emergency underway now, for which immediate responsibility falls overwhelmingly on two men. These are Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell, for reasons I laid out here. They are of course both Republicans, as are the 53 GOP Senators who enable and stand with them.
By instinct from his decades as a U.S. diplomat, I imagine that the man I quoted would resist putting things that directly. Diplomats are on duty to represent the long-term interests of the nation, and they properly resist getting into partisan arguments. But the acute stage of a chronic problem has been triggered not by both parties but by one of them.
Bonus update: here’s a sample note about both-sides-ism.
I agree with much of what your correspondent says. Many of his observations agree with me as a former Fulbrighter who has witnessed the erosion of that program, and as a faculty member at a public university in Texas, a class for which the state legislature has a particular animus.
However, when he writes, “For me, the worst part of this whole thing has been the confirmation—and I say confirmation rather than realization—that few in Washington in either party care about our federal institutions, much less the people who work in them, “ I must take exception.
No one who cares as much for democratic institutions as this person does should invoke bothsiderism in a case where one man and his obedient partisans are using the shutdown to circumvent the authority and function of those very democratic institutions.
I would be interested to know how he can make that claim, given his experience in “developing democracies.” And let’s also remember that we now live in a flawed democracy, according to The Economist’s 2018 Democracy Index. The Economist is hardly the “Justice Democrats,” but it rates the US as #25 this year and likely to drop thanks to the shutdown that only one part gleefully looked forward to.
A man takes off his baseball glove in Central Park. His wedding ring slips off undetected and disappears into the grass. Hours pass before he notices that it’s missing.
A woman reacts in a fit of anger, tossing her engagement ring into the ocean. As it hits the water, pangs of regret settle in.
A tourist visiting Canada removes five sentimental rings to sanitize her hands while in a rental car. Later, when she steps out, they are sent sprawling into the snow, and she doesn’t realize they’re gone until she’s on the flight back home.
Usually, stories of this variety almost always end in tears. Yet these three people found their lost rings, frantically Googling some iteration of I lost my wedding ring and stumbling upon a network of metal detectorists who help people locate their misplaced jewelry. They had found their way to the Ring Finders, a service that pairs these people with one of 430 sleuths stationed around the world.
According to the British insurance company Protect Your Bubble, 11 percent of people have lost their wedding rings in the past five years. Since wedding rings can cost upwards of $6,000, losing them can be especially painful for couples, and yet it also gives detectives adept in the art of finding lost rings a chance to intervene and be the hero.
[Read: How an ad campaign invented the diamond engagement ring]
Heartbroken couples who come across the Ring Finders are presented with a search bar to enter their location, which leads to a list of nearby metal detectorists who cover that area. While the site’s appeal for those who have lost their wedding rings is clear, there’s much for the hunters themselves to gain. The Ring Finders service mainly operates on a pay-what-you-can system, though most finders ask that they are at least compensated for their gas costs. And while some refuse any payment, others are keen on seeking out cash rewards to make up for their time and effort: One finder told me of a recent bounty of $200, while another boasted of a $1,500 prize. Rewards the finders get are theirs to keep—the site doesn’t take any cut.
Instead, it turns a profit by charging metal detectorists a $65 annual membership fee—and, for more money, they can “lock” cities or regions as their own. Before officially joining, every finder also has to undergo a phone interview with Chris Turner, the Ring Finders’ founder.
Turner, himself a metal-detector enthusiast who has recovered some 600 lost rings over the years, started the website in 2009 from his home in Vancouver, Canada. “I had a smaller version of the business called Finders,” he says. “Somebody saw it and said, ‘I love what you’re doing. Have you thought about helping people on a larger scale?’” The angel investor provided the seed money for the Ring Finders, and a decade later, Turns says that the site has been used to find and return 4,900 rings exceeding $7.5 million in value.
Though the Ring Finders might smack of a scam to hoodwink people into forking over large amounts of cash to recoup their lost talisman of marriage, users of the site I talked to generally had a positive experience. Jazmin Rodriguez, a 35-year-old nurse who lives in Auburndale, Florida, slipped while stepping off a pontoon boat. Her rings caught on a door hinge, sending two of them into the water.
Using the Ring Finders, Rodriguez was connected with a nearby metal-detecting club. Three days later, drinks and warm donuts in hand, she met three men on the dock. “They asked how deep the water was, if I knew where I lost them, and a description,” Rodriquez told me. “One guy took the reins and invited two others to help.”
The men searched for 20 minutes, placing the waterproof part of the detectors into the water and passing them over the area where she thought she had lost her ring. When they heard a beep, they plunged a shovel-like tool into the muck and pulled it up to examine. “The third one to cover that area found the first ring after locating several bottle caps,” Rodriquez told me. “He yelled out, ‘One!,’ held it up in the air, and walked it all the way to me at the boat. Five minutes later, the second ring was found, a few feet away.”
Christopher Martin, a 43-year-old trumpet player in the New York Philharmonic, lost his wedding ring while playing baseball in Central Park. With help from the Ring Finders, he was paired with Jeronimo Barerra, who showed up to the park with two metal detectors—one for each of them. After about an hour of sleuthing and no sign of the ring, Martin was prepared to give up. But Barerra’s persistence paid off: When a family who had been having a picnic cleaned up and left, he swept his detector over the area and heard a beep—it was Martin’s ring.
[Read: The strange (and formerly sexist) economics of engagement rings]
Martin and Rodriguez aren’t the lucky few exceptions who were able to recover their lost jewelry. The metal detectorists have a surprisingly good track record of finding missing rings. Barrera, a 45-year-old vice president of the video-game company behind the viral hit Grand Theft Auto, has recovered 20 of 30 rings he’s been tasked with locating. All the ring finders agreed that if the person knows roughly where the item was last seen, it will most likely be discovered. As Barrera put it, the success rate is “close to 90 percent on the ones where the calls are to a specific spot in Central Park, or to the beach, or a yard,” versus hazier locations such as somewhere in midtown Manhattan.
The metal detectorists run the gamut in age and background, but, like Barrera, they are mostly male. “The members are 90 percent men, 10 percent women, yet that is changing,” Turner says.
One reason the metal detectorists have such a surprisingly good track record is that, through practice, they’ve honed a strategy on how to find rings. “If I can’t find them, I’m not sure that they are where they think they are,” says Mike Fish, a ring hunter who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. The 71-year-old retired firefighter does request a small fee—chocolate-chip cookies.
“It’s a lot of work,” adds Steve Smith, a 63-year-old retired welder based in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “People don’t understand. You find a lot of trash before you find treasure.” He says he’s found about 50 percent of the roughly 500 rings he’s searched for. Sometimes, he’ll spend hours searching for a ring only for the client to realize that it was in a pocket or at home all along.
The process of finding a ring starts, first of all, with figuring out exactly where it was lost. As all the metal detectorists told me, most of their ring-less clients are mistaken on the location—sometimes by a little, often by a a lot. “They are never where people think they are. They are off by 30, 60, 100 yards,” Turner says.
Smith laid out how the process works after that. “Once I decipher basically where the ring is from the questions I ask,” he says, “we arrange to meet in their yard or the beach or the park. They lead me to the area and we go over again how they lost their ring, which way they were facing, what happened at the moment. Kind of like a detective, I figure out where to start my search, being sure to cover the entire area, because if you missed it by an inch, you missed it by a mile.”
From there, Smith—as well as all the other sleuths I talked with—start the “gridding” method: They wave the metal detector back and forth while walking in a short, straight line, and then turn around, retracing their steps just a few inches over from where they had just walked, a process that ensures that they’re not missing any spots.
But gridding only goes so far—endurance and sheer determination are also important. “There’s a lot of detective work involved—persistence is the big word,” says Stan Ross, a 74-year-old retired construction technician who lives in Southern California and estimates he’s recovered about 300 of the 1,000 rings he’s been asked to find.
Ever since men and women started wearing wedding rings, they have had to contend with the heartbreak and stress of losing them. Apart from the prospect of pay, that’s what makes ring finding such a draw for those who seek it out—the euphoria that comes from making a brokenhearted stranger overcome with emotion.
“There’s a high to finding something, especially when it’s a long shot,” says Ross. It “feels like love.”
RIO DE JANEIRO—If you’re shocked by the transformations that Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, is planning for his country, you haven’t been paying attention.
Riding in on a wave of frustration with more than a decade of left-wing leadership, Bolsonaro has promised to bring dramatic change to Brazil, change intended to make leftists squirm. And if his first two weeks in office tell us anything, it’s that those who thought his brash talk—of ending policies creating protected land reserves for indigenous populations or of liberalizing Brazil’s gun laws to make it easier for Brazilians to own guns—was just campaign bluster might want to take a serious look at the president’s plans. He intends to follow through on his promises, even the most controversial ones.
[Read: What populists do to democracies]
What happens in Brazil has consequences not just for the country, but also for Latin America and the world. Brazil is the continent’s biggest economy and home to both the world’s largest rainforest and 211 million people. Globally, Bolsonaro’s critics fear that he could drive South America’s largest democracy toward fascism or even toward a return to military rule. An unapologetic firebrand, he has already signaled that he intends to lead Brazil into a new era. But what exactly will that mean for Brazil, and for everyone else?
Four areas in particular lie at the nexus of Bolsonaro’s priorities and critics’ concerns: land rights, education, the economy, and public security. What changes does the new president promise on these fronts, and which of those can he actually follow through on? These are the topics to watch in the coming months.
Land RightsOne of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president—which he boasted of on Twitter, à la Donald Trump—was to halt all new demarcations of indigenous lands. In effect, that means the decades-long effort by Brazil’s indigenous populations to seek recognition and legal title to land has been foiled.
Bolsonaro has argued that demarcated land for indigenous peoples is akin to keeping them “secluded in reserves like zoo animals” when “an Indian is a human being just like us.” His critics, though, see an ulterior motive: Stopping the demarcation process opens up land—especially in remote parts of the Amazon—to powerful players such as the mining, farming, and logging industries. Functionally, indigenous reserves have been used as a proxy for environmental protections.
And indigenous peoples are not a strong enough lobbying group to fight back. Maurício Santoro, an expert on Brazilian politics at Rio de Janeiro State University, told me that along with the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples are the most threatened social group under Bolsonaro’s administration.
There are structural limits holding Bolsonaro back, though: His ability to strip all of indigenous peoples’ land-demarcation rights is hamstrung by strong protections for those communities under the Brazilian constitution, ones Santoro is confident the Brazilian supreme court will uphold. Toss in a heavy dose of international pressure to protect indigenous peoples, and Bolsonaro might see his land-rights plans backfire.
EducationBrazil’s education system is worse than you might imagine. In the hot north of the country, some students attend schools made of sticks and mud. In Rio’s hillside slums, or favelas, schools are out of session for weeks or months at a time, thanks to regular gunfire in the area. Even in the better-educated south of the country, teachers have been protesting in the streets for better pay for years. And countrywide, illiteracy is on the rise.
These are not, however, the education issues Bolsonaro has promised to focus on. Instead, his primary, and most controversial, proposal is for the removal of what he calls “Marxist garbage”—code for any teaching that deals with sexuality or gender issues, or even evolution—from the classroom. He has also proposed mandatory classroom lessons on “moral and civic education,” a kind of Patriotism 101.
[Read: Can Brazil’s democracy withstand Jair Bolsonaro?]
His new minister of education is a Colombian professor emeritus at Brazil’s military schools who has blogged about keeping “traditional values” in the classroom and who has thus far positioned himself as Bolsonaro’s yes-man. Look for Brazil’s president to press him to make smaller changes, possibly including stripping out essay questions about issues such as gender violence from the national college-entrance exam.
EconomyPart of the reason many Brazilians elected Bolsonaro was because he promised to make Brazil more capitalist. His voters point to Venezuela and its crumbling socialist state as an example of the dangerous path Brazil was on under (now-jailed) former President Luiz Inácio da Silva. (Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, for his part, called Bolsonaro a “fascist” during his inauguration speech.)
How does Bolsonaro want to do this? Privatization. The idea tantalizes Brazil’s most powerful would-be investors, but not so much everyday Brazilians: Polls show that most people here are against full-throttle privatization, and instead enjoy their welfare state and the nationalized health, education, and unemployment systems. Plus, Bolsonaro’s party has only about a tenth of the seats in Brazil’s congress, and the president has yet to cement any political alliances that will help him pass big, expensive legislation.
An easier path than wholesale privatization may be for Bolsonaro to change the pension system, particularly by raising the retirement age. Today military leaders can retire young with their full salary, plus benefits, for life—2017 numbers show that 55 percent of people who served in the military retired before the age of 50, and the minimum age of retirement can be as low as 55 for civilian women. By raising the retirement age and reducing pension benefits, Bolsonaro would be cutting the overall costs of doing business in Brazil, helping win over business leaders and international investors alike. Bolsonaro himself has expressed anxiety over making this change, but Carlos Kawall, the chief economist for the Brazilian lender Banco Safra, notes that the pension-reform battle will be a major indicator of the future success of the country’s economy.
The thing is, one of Bolsonaro’s biggest bases of support is the military; the former army captain will find that stripping the benefits of his former colleagues is unlikely to play well. Instead, Santoro predicts that Bolsonaro will look to pass a watered down, minimalist reform, which may include setting the minimum age for retirement at 65, or even 62, for everyone.
Public SecurityBrazil is the world’s leader in homicides: In 2017, 63,880 people were murdered here, and despite federal intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro and along the Brazilian border with Venezuela, a comprehensive solution still eludes the government.
Bolsonaro has marketed himself as a locked-and-loaded tough guy (his trademark gesture is two fingers pointing two imaginary guns), and that image has resonated strongly with his supporters, who are both fed up with the violence and also intrigued by the idea of American-style gun ownership. Forty-one percent of Brazilians think gun possession should be allowed for a citizen to defend himself. Currently, just to keep a gun at home, most Brazilians have to jump through significant hoops, including regular psychological and physical tests. They even have to justify needing one at all, for example, with a police record showing they have been targeted by personal threats.
[Read: A Brazilian far-right populist and the women who like him]
In one of his first tweets as president, Bolsonaro promised to liberalize gun control in Brazil. For now, the only people who walk around with guns in Brazil are either cops or robbers. Bolsonaro wants to change that, not only making it easier for Brazilians to buy guns, but allowing them to carry guns as well.
Loosening gun-ownership restrictions would be one of Bolsonaro’s easiest successes, Santoro said, because such reforms would not require asking congress for much money, and would win him plaudits from his supporters. The results, however, could be brutal.
The São Paulo nonprofit Instituto Sou da Paz collects data on gun ownership and gun use in Brazil, and its executive director, Ivan Marques, says the figures show that “getting more guns into circulation will mean negative consequences for public security in Brazil.” He points to a study published by the Brazilian government itself in 2013 that shows that a 1 percent increase in guns in an area corresponds with a 1 to 2 percent increase in the homicide rate of that area. “Any weakening of gun laws,” Marques says, “will leave us fated to an increase in the levels of violence.”
When True Detective arrived on television in 2014, it somehow felt both seismic and familiar. The HBO series was the oldest kind of small-screen story—a cop show following one mysterious case—given a crisp, cinematic form. Yes, there were otherworldly embellishments woven into the tale of the detectives Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) on the trail of a serial killer. But there was also a confidence behind the camera and a thoughtfulness to the two lead performances that made the show so special, even though it wound its way to a surprisingly ordinary conclusion.
Then, in 2015, came True Detective Season 2, which was wild, woolly, and largely incomprehensible. It was stuffed with big stars (Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn) but hinged on a story that was as hilariously grim as it was impossible to understand. California real-estate development, a uniquely zoned industrial city, and very male-centric notions of fertility and parenthood were all swirled up in the central whodunit. In general, Nic Pizzolatto’s show had committed the grand error of quickly becoming a parody of itself, and even though the ratings barely dipped, the prospect of future seasons seemed to dim.
Now, after four years of True Detective’s brand power slowly fading, Pizzolatto has returned with a third installment, and it’s clear that the creator and writer has learned some useful lessons. For one, he’s simplified the show, paring back the ensemble and focusing mostly on one haunted gumshoe, the detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), as he investigates the disappearance of two children in the Arkansas Ozarks. On top of that, Pizzolatto has embraced many of the story elements that made the first season such a success, including three shifting timelines and a more Southern Gothic feel.
Yet the original magic is not quite back, and perhaps it never will be. True Detective broke onto the American TV landscape when it still seemed possible for the entire country to screech to a halt and obsess over a show together. It was the macabre details of that first season (which fans extrapolated in all kinds of Lovecraftian directions) that helped it stick out, along with McConaughey’s mesmerizing, soulful performance. True Detective Season 3 is a little more workmanlike and less baroque, perhaps too eager to prove that it can tell a legible story again. But it’s anchored by Ali’s terrific work in the lead role—a little more restrained than stars past, though just as captivating.
The season’s main mystery is this: In 1980, Ali’s Detective Hays, a state policeman in northwest Arkansas, is tasked with finding two missing children, whose parents, Tom (Scoot McNairy) and Lucy (Mamie Gummer), are broken-down, regretful screwups, mostly interested in blaming each other for their loss. Wayne is accompanied by his gruff partner, Roland West (Stephen Dorff), but just as crucial is the connection Wayne forms with the kids’ teacher, Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo), who takes her own interest in the case.
[Read: The Atlantic’s complete coverage of ‘True Detective’ Season 2]
The show also flits forward to 1990, when the case is being reopened after the discovery of new evidence. At this point in time, Wayne seems haunted by past mistakes, while Amelia has become a true-crime expert and is writing a definitive tome on the disappearances. Then True Detective jumps forward again, to 2015. Wayne is now an older man plagued by memory loss and dementia. He’s trying to hold on to the details of a case he’s never been able to escape, while working toward some final, crucial revelation as he’s interviewed for a documentary series on the missing kids.
Ray Fisher and Mahershala Ali in True Detective (Warrick Page / Netflix)It’s the same fungible timeline that Season 1 deployed, but here it has purpose beyond plotting, showing viewers the steady (and tragic) disintegration of Wayne’s mind and dropping hints that his recollections might not be as steady as they seem. In one scene set in 1980, Wayne pokes through a potential suspect’s house, finds himself alone in a room, and then suddenly looks at the camera, saying plaintively, “I’m ready to go now. I don’t want to be here.” Cut to 2015, when an older Wayne is trying to beg out of an interview. Pizzolatto, who largely wrote the series himself, but this time collaborated with the TV legend David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) on the overarching plotting, uses these cuts as shocking little jabs at the audience, and Ali successfully conveys a deep fog of confusion hovering behind Wayne’s eyes as the years wear on.
The biggest problem I had with Season 3 was the primary mystery. HBO provided five episodes of eight to critics, and I’m still unsure if I’m invested in the actual disappearances. Wayne is a tremendously affecting figure, unbound by many of the usual clichés of genius detectives (his cockiness, for the most part, sits in quiet reserve), and his relationship with Amelia is deeply felt enough that it hurts when fissures between them begin to show. But five hours in, whatever conspiracy Wayne is plumbing remains obscure, and it still seems as if there are important revelations needed to fill in the gaps between timelines. For its first half, True Detective’s third season aimlessly plods through details that don’t seem to matter (though they may later). The look and aesthetic of the series remain enthralling, and Ali is one of the best working screen actors. But those qualities might not be enough to return the show to the zeitgeist.
Last week, the Rochester TV weatherman Jeremy Kappell accidentally referred to the legendary civil-rights leader as “Martin Luther Coon.” At first, neither he nor those present on the set thought of it as anything but a passing flub, especially given that Kappell immediately corrected himself and said “King.” However, in the wake of a gradual Twitter uproar and other complaints, Kappell was dismissed from his job.
For this man to lose his livelihood for having supposedly committed a racist act is wrong. He is being misanalyzed and misjudged, and should be reinstated immediately.
From the reaction to the incident, one might suppose that Kappell had actually called King a “coon” on the air as a joke, and was then mystified that anyone minded. Cue the battalions ready to remind us of the power of racist language and the hideous history of black people in America. However, all of this, while necessary in other contexts, is hopelessly misapplied here.
[Read: Obama administration aide tweets racial slur, apologizes]
Kappell did not “say” the slur at all. Rather, he committed what linguists refer to as a speech error. That’s the jargon we use to say: He made a mistake. And no, the mistake was not in having the gall to call Martin Luther King Jr. a coon on the air, but in producing a vowel he did not intend that accidentally sounded like the slur.
A little more jargon: Kappell experienced a typical perseveration, a sound from earlier in an utterance that holds on into a later part, like a bit of food may get stuck going down for a bit. It happens to all of us—you say black blox instead of black box, or Tom gave the goy a ball instead of Tom gave the boy a ball. With Kappell, the oo sound in Luther held on for a bit and bumped out the ee sound in King.
Some may feel that judgment must be different when it comes to race issues. However, there is no reason that an ordinary linguistic phenomenon like perseveration would somehow fail to occur when someone is referring to black people or other minority groups. Human beings can never have perfect control over their running speech, as we know from the small speech errors that all commentators make all the time.
[Read: When slang becomes a slur]
The question, therefore, is whether we apply witch-hunt tactics to the inevitable speech error slipups that will sometimes occur, even when someone is talking about race issues. In deciding whether that is appropriate, we might consider two things.
First, how likely is it that Kappell, even if he wanted to call King a coon on the air, would actually do so, given the likelihood of at least vigorous censure and possible dismissal from his job? Indeed, old-time, serious bigots did refer to King as “Martin Luther Coon.” But leaving aside whether Kappell, a 40ish weatherman raised in the 1980s, actually knew that, even racists (which Kappell has shown no sign of being) are not necessarily self-destructive morons.
Second, slurs, like all slang, tend to have vogues, and coon’s was long ago. Coon is more known of than used these days. I was born in 1965 and have never heard the word leveled at anyone, and almost always hear of it referred to more as an antiquity than as a current epithet. Another term of art, as it were, is much more prevalent than coon used to be. How likely is it that it was on Kappell’s mind?
[Read: An American racial slur crosses the Atlantic]
I doubt my take can be tarred as unrepresentative of black American opinion on the issue. The Today Show’s weatherman, Al Roker, has suggested the response to Kappell was overblown; King’s daughter Bernice feels the same way. Kappell apologized. He should have, and it should be enough.
In language, there will always be gray zones. The use of the word niggardly has more than once led to firings and protests, and while that is, in my view, as overblown as the response to Kappell, that word’s especial chance similarity to the N-word, and its marginality overall—it is largely a “dictionary word”—suggest that it be quietly retired as unsuitably awkward for modern communication.
But to condemn someone to unemployment for simply blurting out a sequence of sounds that parallels a slur, even in an awkward context, is a kind of performed delicacy. Many cherish the opportunity to remind the public that racism exists, but in a case like this one, in which the relationship to racism is essentially a fortuitous formality, we numb the public to the genuine outrage necessary when real racism rears its ugly head.
Saturday marks the 22nd day of the government shutdown, the longest closure in American history. And with neither Democrats nor the White House budging from their positions, and the president threatening to keep the government closed for months or years, there’s no end in sight.
Which is all the more remarkable in light of how the shutdown began—or rather how it almost didn’t. As the nation approached the end of government funding in late December, President Donald Trump was on the verge of giving in. Then he reversed course, announced he’d shut down the government, and hasn’t blinked since. Why has Trump decided to hold firm this time, and what does it mean for the likelihood of a deal?
The proximate cause for his decision to shut the government down is relatively clear: firm pressure from his hard-line allies. In early December, during a meeting with the Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Trump said that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.” But for 10 days afterward, the White House tried to slowly walk that back. Aides said that Trump was looking for ways to build the wall using funds from other departments, and they signaled that he’d sign a clean bill that kept the lights on without money for the wall. On December 19, immigration hard-liners mounted a counterattack.
[Read: Trump is debating the shutdown on Democrats’ “manufactured” terms]
“This is textbook,” Rush Limbaugh fumed. “It’s a textbook example of what the Drive-By Media calls compromise. Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything, including control of the House in a few short weeks.”
Ann Coulter blasted the president as “gutless” (earning herself a Twitter unfollow). Even Laura Ingraham was critical. “It was supposed to be a ‘big beautiful wall’ with a ‘big beautiful door,’” she tweeted. “Now it’s just an open door with no frame. Unreal.” Representative Mark Meadows, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, held out hope that Trump might still veto the bill. Followed by what? “Renegotiating.”
Even though there was no clear plan for how Trump would get money out of the new Democratic House majority once it took office in early January, the pushback got his attention, and he announced that he wouldn’t sign any legislation without wall funding. Positions have been stuck since then. Democrats have not shown any weakened resolve; neither has Trump.
On the Democratic side, the X factor seems to be Pelosi and her newly empowered caucus. Schumer has been inclined to negotiate with Trump in the past, but the House Dems, having campaigned against the president and his wall, show no appetite for compromise.
What’s less clear is why this is the moment Trump has decided to take a stand. Though he styled himself a master dealmaker in the business world, he’s been far softer in politics, showing a surprisingly deferential side at the negotiation table, whether his interlocutor is domestic or foreign. He backed down after promising to go after the National Rifle Association on gun control; he shied away from branding China a currency manipulator; he didn’t follow through on threats to investigate the Justice Department or withdraw foreign aid as retaliation for UN votes.
The timing is also peculiar. Trump’s best opportunity to get funding was when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, during the first two years of his term. But Congress refused, and while Trump griped about it, he never pushed the issue as far as a shutdown. As my colleague Peter Beinart has written, the president shows little interest in actually building the wall. Instead, he appears to view it as an effective political bludgeon against Democrats.
Whether it actually is effective is unclear. Polling since the start of the shutdown has shown that more Americans blame Trump than Democrats for the deadlock, though Democrats haven’t escaped blame altogether. But a Morning Consult poll this week showed a four-point increase in the share of voters who see Trump as the culprit. Even if Trump is losing, there’s no massive shift against him that polls are picking up, and both sides seem to believe that they are winning.
Some Senate Republicans, however, may not be so certain. A small but growing number, especially those up for reelection in 2020, have begun saying that the government should reopen while negotiations over the wall continue—which is tantamount to surrender, since Trump would be giving up his leverage. (A few House Democratic freshmen are nervous as well.)
None of this offers much insight into the way the impasse might break. The negotiation tactics that Trump imported from the private sector have, yet again, failed to deliver much in the way of results in politics. During a meeting this week, Trump walked out after Democrats once again said they wouldn’t compromise on the wall. (It’s a sign of how poorly the talks are going that the two sides promptly got into a quarrel over whether Trump had stormed out or merely politely departed.) Trump’s allies claim that this tactic worked well in his last job, but Democrats seem only to have been delighted by the incident, which demonstrated their resolve.
[Read: Trump (almost) always folds]
By the end of the week, it seemed that the most likely outcome was for Trump to sidestep the shutdown by declaring a national emergency and using those extraordinary powers to build the wall, perhaps with the help of the military. While that would open up a new front of legal and political crisis as he tested the limits of presidential powers, it would also likely end the shutdown, as it would obviate the need for Congress to grant funding.
“If this doesn’t work out, I probably will do it, maybe definitely,” Trump said Thursday while visiting the border. But Friday afternoon, Trump demurred. “What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,” he said.
Once again, Trump had signaled one intention and then swerved at the last minute, a mirror image of his reversal on the shutdown in December. With negotiations frozen and the president ruling out a national emergency—at least for now—the shutdown that almost didn’t happen looks like it’s here to stay.
Este texto foi publicado originalmente na newsletter do Intercept Brasil. Assine. É de graça, todos os sábados, na sua caixa de e-mails.
Fabrício Queiroz, ex-assessor de Flávio Bolsonaro, se define como “um cara de negócios”. Além de seu salário de R$ 23 mil, ele diz que faz dinheiro comprando e revendendo carros. “Sempre fui assim. Comprava um carrinho, mandava arrumar, revendia”, corado e bem humorado, em entrevista bastante dócil ao SBT em dezembro – a primeira desde que estourou o escândalo sobre uma movimentação suspeita de R$ 1,2 milhão em sua conta bancária, que incluiu um cheque de R$ 24 mil à primeira dama Michelle Bolsonaro.
Embora goste tanto de fazer negócios com carros, o velho amigo da família Bolsonaro parece não se preocupar muito com os seus – ou, claro, pode ser apenas um homem que não liga para bens materiais. Além de morar em uma casa simples e sem acabamento e ter dois apartamentos em bairros desvalorizados na zona oeste do Rio, Queiroz tem apenas dois veículos em seu nome: um Voyage 1.0 ano 2010 e uma Belina GL ano 1986, segundo o Renajud, sistema do Conselho Nacional de Justiça que permite buscas no Registro Nacional de Veículos Automotores.
O valor dos dois carros de Queiroz, somados, não chega a R$ 25 mil, segundo a tabela Fipe. Não pagaria, nem de longe, sua internação em um dos hospitais mais caros do país, coincidentemente na mesma semana em que familiares seus deveriam prestar depoimento ao MP do Rio. Não compareceram, afinal. “Todas mudaram-se temporariamente para cidade de São Paulo” para dar apoio familiar ao patriarca, alegaram.
Na entrevista para o SBT, ele não disse – e também, sejamos justos, não foi perguntado pela dócil repórter – se tem comprovantes desses negócios lucrativos que diz fazer, e nem se declarou as vendas para a Receita Federal. Quando um carro é vendido, o comprador tem um mês para transferir o documento para seu nome. É comum que intermediários façam essa transação antes do tempo – e, assim, repassem os veículos para quem comprou sem que isso fique registrado.
Se Fabrício Queiroz era mesmo esse tipo de intermediário, poderia explicar por que a movimentação financeira em sua conta – que ele atribui a seus negócios – costumava acontecer bem nos dias de pagamento da Assembléia Legislativa do Rio de Janeiro. Em 2016, por exemplo, era só a Alerj pagar os assessores que Queiroz recebia dinheiro, sempre em depósitos em espécie, em valores que se repetiam todos os meses. Além disso, os depósitos eram feitos por outros assessores de Flávio e Jair Bolsonaro – inclusive por sua mulher e sua filha, Nathália, que além de receber salário como assessora de Jair Bolsonaro em Brasília também trabalhava como personal trainer de celebridades.
Flávio Bolsonaro também está driblando o MP do Rio, mas decidiu aparecer no SBT para uma “entrevista”. Ele se esquivou das denúncias e disse que “não tem como controlar o que os funcionários fazem fora do gabinete”. Falou que Queiroz precisa se explicar e que há um movimento orquestrado para atingir Bolsonaro. O senador eleito não explicou – e, de novo, não foi perguntado – sobre as movimentações de outros de seus assessores na conta do ex-motorista.
Queiroz está desempregado desde 15 de outubro, quando foi exonerado do gabinete de Flávio Bolsonaro. No mesmo dia, em Brasília, sua filha, também foi exonerada da assessoria de Jair Bolsonaro. As duas demissões aconteceram no meio da campanha eleitoral, a 13 dias do segundo turno e um dia depois que saiu a primeira notícia sobre as movimentações suspeitas na conta do agora ex-assessor.
O Ministério Público do Rio de Janeiro, responsável por investigar o caso, está tentando desde dezembro ouvir o que Queiroz tem a dizer sobre seus negócios. Mas está difícil: o ex-assessor já faltou a pelo menos quatro convocações, alegando problemas de saúde. Sua mulher e filhas também foram chamadas e não apareceram. Restou ao MP tentar ouvir Flávio Bolsonaro, que também declinou – via post em sua página, no Facebook – o convite.
The post Encontramos os carros do Queiroz: uma Belina 1986 e um Voyage 2010 appeared first on The Intercept.
Since its founding in the early 20th century, the U.S. Border Patrol has operated with near-complete impunity, arguably serving as the most politicized and abusive branch of federal law enforcement — even more so than the FBI during J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship.
The 1924 Immigration Act tapped into a xenophobia with deep roots in the U.S. history. The law effectively eliminated immigration from Asia and sharply reduced arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Most countries were now subject to a set quota system, with the highest numbers assigned to western Europe. As a result, new arrivals to the United States were mostly white Protestants. Nativists were largely happy with this new arrangement, but not with the fact that Mexico, due to the influence of U.S. business interests that wanted to maintain access to low-wage workers, remained exempt from the quota system. “Texas needs these Mexican immigrants,” said the state’s Chamber of Commerce.
Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, white supremacists — fearing that the country’s open-border policy with Mexico was hastening the “mongrelization” of the United States — took control of the U.S. Border Patrol, also established in 1924, and turned it into a frontline instrument of race vigilantism. As the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has shown, the patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life. Some had a military or county sheriff background, while others transferred from border-town police departments or the Texas Rangers — all agencies with their own long tradition of unaccountable brutality. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers. They didn’t think that Texas — or Arizona, New Mexico, and California — needed Mexican migrants.
Earlier, in the mid-1800s, the Mexican-American War had unleashed a broad, generalized racism against Mexicans throughout the nation. That racism slowly concentrated along an ever-more focused line: the border. While the 1924 immigration law spared Mexico a quota, a series of secondary laws — including one that made it a crime to enter the country outside official ports of entry — gave border and customs agents on-the-spot discretion to decide who could enter the country legally. They had the power to turn what had been a routine daily or seasonal event — crossing the border to go to work — into a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their heads shaved, and they were subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements and the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.
The patrol wasn’t a large agency at first — just a few hundred men during its early years — and its reach along a 2,000-mile line was limited. But over the years, its reported brutality grew as the number of agents it deployed increased. Border agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas Rangers, tied the feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out of a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California. “Practically every other member” of El Paso’s National Guard “was in the Klan,” one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment.
For more than a decade, the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department of Labor, which in the early years of the Great Depression, before the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his appointment of Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, was a major driver pushing deportation. Perkins, even before she entered FDR’s cabinet, had already criticized Border Patrol brutality. In office, she tried to limit the abuses of immigration officials as much as she could, curtailing warrantless arrests, allowing detained migrants phone calls, and working to extend the protections the New Deal offered citizens to migrant workers, including an effort to make abusive migrant labor contracts more equitable.
Reform was short-lived. The White House, bowing to pressure from agriculturalists, placed the Border Patrol, and migration policy more broadly, under the authority of the Department of Justice. More laws further criminalizing migration reinforced the Border Patrol’s power. For example, the end of the Bracero guest-worker program, along with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which for the first time assigned quotas to Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere, now meant that thousands of seasonal Mexican workers were officially “illegal.”
Exporting Paramilitary PolicingAt the same time, experience gained in migrant interdiction began to be exported internationally. The Border Patrol is often thought of, even by critics of its brutality, as a sleepy backwater federal agency, far removed from the Cold War’s ideological frontlines. But the Patrol played a role in expanding the radius of Washington’s national security doctrine — the tutoring of allied security forces in counterinsurgency tactics — and accelerating the tempo of paramilitary action.
John P. Longan, left, and Owen S. Juvrud, both senior patrol inspectors stationed at El Paso, Texas, photographed in Denver on May 11, 1955, on a recruitment trip on behalf of the U. S. Border Patrol.
Photo: Dean Conger/The Denver Post via Getty Images
In Guatemala, Longan used the intelligence techniques similar to the ones he developed in Operation Wetback to train local police and military officers, creating an “action unit” that could gather information — also mostly from interrogations, many of them including torture — and act on that information in a rapid manner. Within the first three months of 1966, “Operación Limpieza,” or Operation Clean-up, as Longan called his project, conducted over 80 raids and scores of extrajudicial assassinations, including the murder, during one four-day period in early March, of over 30 political activists (I describe Longan’s time in Guatemala in detail here). Likewise, through the early 1970s, the U.S. trained Latin American security forces, the majority from countries run by military governments, at the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, “CIA instructors” trained them “in the design, manufacture, and potential use of bombs and incendiary devices.”
U.S. Border Patrol inspectors from the El Centro U.S. Border Patrol sector headquarters search two Mexican nationals, shortly after the two men illegally crossed the border from Mexico on Aug. 11, 1951.
Photo: AP
Starting in the 1970s, investigative journalists began to report on Border Patrol abuse. Such exposés were damning, but largely ignored. John Crewdson, for instance, won a Pulitzer in 1980 for a series of articles published in the New York Times, including one titled “Border Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails,” yet his 1983 book based on the series, “The Tarnished Door,” is out of print. Crewdson’s reporting on the Border Patrol and the immigration system deserves a revival, for it provides an important back-history to the horrors we are witnessing today.
Patrollers, he reported, regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12. Some patrollers ran their own in-house “outlaw” vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with groups like the Klan. Border Patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as a pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming upon a family, agents usually tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not to be separated. “It may sound cruel,” one patroller said, but it often worked.
Separating migrant families was not official government policy in the years Crewdson was reporting on abuses. But left to their own devices, Border Patrol agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “forever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break.” Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes — forced to survive, according to public defenders, by “garbage-can scrounging, living on rooftops and whatever.” Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a U.S. citizen. The Border Patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her U.S. family. Such cruelties weren’t one-offs, but part of a pattern, encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command. The violence was both gratuitous and systemic, including “stress” techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.
The practice, for instance, as recently reported, of placing migrants in extremely cold rooms — called hieleras, or “ice boxes” — goes back decades, at least to the early 1980s, with Crewdson writing that it was a common procedure. Agents reminded captives that they were subject to their will: “In this place, you have no rights.”
Some migrants, being sent back to Mexico, were handcuffed to cars and made to run alongside them to the border. Patrollers pushed “illegals off cliffs,” a patrol agent told Crewdson, “so it would look like an accident.” Officers in the patrol’s parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, traded young Mexican women they caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets, and supplied Mexican prostitutes to U.S. congressmen and judges, paying for them out of funds the service used to compensate informants. Agents also worked closely with Texas agriculturalists, delivering workers to their ranches (including to one owned by Lyndon B. Johnson when he was in the White House), then raiding the ranches just before payday and deporting the workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” Crewdson reported.
Subsequent reporting confirms that the violence Crewdson documented continued down the years, largely unabated. The remoteness of much of the border region and the harshness of its terrain, the work that straddled the line between foreign and domestic power, and the fact that many of the patrollers were themselves veterans of foreign wars (or hailed from regions with fraught racial relations, including the borderlands themselves) all contributed to a “fortress mentality,” as one officer put it. Patrollers easily imagined their isolated substations to be frontier forts in hostile territory, holding off barbarians. They wielded awesome power over desperate people with little effective recourse. Based on information provided by local migrant advocacy groups, Human Rights Watch wrote in 1993 that in one such substation, in Harlingen, Texas, “physical abuse is often coupled with due process abuses meant to terrorize victims of brutality.” Most captured migrants, beaten or threatened with a beating, signed “voluntary departure agreements” and were “quickly repatriated.”
Photo: Dave Gatley/Mai/Mai/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Between 1982 and 1990, Mexico City sent at least 24 protests to the U.S. State Department on behalf of Mexicans injured or murdered by Border Patrol agents. Just as soldiers use racial epithets for the people they are fighting overseas, Border Patrol agents have a word for their adversaries: “tonks.” It’s “the sound,” one patroller told a journalist, “a flashlight makes when you hit someone over the head.” In neighborhoods filled with undocumented residents, the Patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. “Mind your own fucking business, lady, and go back into your house,” one patroller ordered a resident in Stockton, California, who came out on her balcony to see him “kicking a Mexican male who was handcuffed and lying facedown on the ground.”
It wasn’t just the federal Border Patrol that engaged in such sadism, but local law enforcement as well. In 1980, a Texas lawyer affiliated with the United Farm Workers obtained videos of 72 interrogations of migrants that took place over the course of the previous seven years, recorded by the police department in McAllen, Texas. The images were disturbing: Police took turns beating one handcuffed Mexican man, bashing his head on the concrete floor, punching, kicking, and cursing as he pleaded for mercy. The tapes were made for enjoyment, as a kind of bonding ritual that would later be associated with the abuse committed against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib: As the officers gathered “night after night,” they drank beer and watched “playbacks” of their interrogation sessions. It was, said one of the men involved, a way of initiating new recruits into the cult of border brutalism.
There have been contradictory judicial rulings, but historically, agent power has been limited by no constitutional clause. There are few places patrollers can’t search, no property belonging to migrants they can’t seize. And there is hardly anybody they can’t kill, provided that the victims are poor Mexican or Central American migrants. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On April 18, 1986, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the U.S. side of the border’s chain-link fence, when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force.
Such abuses persisted through the 1990s and 2000s. In 1993, the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees held hearings on Border Patrol abuse, and its transcript is a catalogue of horrors. One former guard, Tony Hefner, at the INS detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that “a young Salvadoran girl” was forced to “perform personal duties, like dancing the Lambada, for INS officials.” (In 2011, Hefner published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by, as Hefner writes, the INS “brass”). Roberto Martinez, who worked with the San Diego-based U.S.-Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee, testified that “human and civil rights violations” by the Border Patrol “run the gamut of abuses imaginable” — from rape to murder. Agents regularly seized “original birth certificates and green cards” from Latino citizens, “leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document.” “Rapes and sexual abuse in INS detention centers around the United States,” Martinez said, “seem to be escalating throughout the border region.”
Brutality continued as Washington further militarized both the border and broader immigration policy — first after the 1993 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and then years later with the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks. Since 2003, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. Last year, a 19-year-old Guatemalan Maya woman, Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles was killed, shot in the head by a still-unnamed Texas Border Patrol agent shortly after she entered the United States. According to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union, young girls apprehended by the Patrol have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children have experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service.”
The viciousness we are witnessing today at the border, directed at children and adults, has a long history, a fact that should in no way mitigate the extraordinary cruelty of Donald Trump. But it does suggest that if the U.S. is to climb out of the moral abyss it has fallen into, it has to think well beyond Trump’s malice. It needs a historical reckoning with the true cause of the border crisis: the long, brutal history of border enforcement itself.
The post The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924 appeared first on The Intercept.
At the height of the 2014 war between the Israeli military and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, the New York Times ran an article headlined, “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate.” It was an apparent reference to the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who had been killed in Israeli attacks by that point in the war. There was no question about who had killed them, yet the language shifted the subject to a “debate” about who was really responsible. A few weeks earlier, after an Israeli airstrike killed several Palestinian soccer fans, the Times ran the absurd title, “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup,” later amending the headline in the face of widespread disgust expressed on social media.
Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.
This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.
“The findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — one where Israeli narratives are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to Palestinians’ day-to-day reality have disappeared,” Owais Zaheer, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
The study, released this week, analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications — the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — employing Natural Language Processing, or NLP, techniques to analyze the massive database of headlines published over this period. NLP is a “Big Data” analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, the researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel-Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel-Palestine have been conducted before, the 416Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the conflict began.
Words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.”The patterns identified seem to show a clear slant toward the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one from the 2014 New York Times story about civilian deaths in Gaza — that used the term “Israel says” — were 2 1/2 times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.” Since 1967, the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85 percent overall decrease in mention of the term “occupation” in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory has in fact intensified over this time. Mention of the term “Palestinian refugees,” meanwhile, has declined a stunning 93 percent. While subtle, a consistent disproportion in article headlines — which by default gives a greater airtime to one side or occludes certain key issues — can impact public perception.
The study also found that media attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States has tended to peak during periods of heightened violence. In a sense, this dynamic reflects how international news is generally covered in the United States. The key difference, however, is that the U.S. government is a vital player in helping maintain the status quo in Israel-Palestine through its provision of massive military aid and diplomatic support to the Israeli government.
Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in overall decline since the time of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords — a negotiated agreement between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. That decline says little about conditions on the ground. The hopes briefly raised by the Oslo Accords effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the then-obscure militant group Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians. Riding a wave of disillusionment, a new hard-line Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, took power in 1996. Since then, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank has expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken a hard line in favor of the Israeli government, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and unilaterally recognizing the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These measures have been taken over the objections of Palestinian leaders, but also some senior Israeli military officials who have warned that they could destabilize the region. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis meanwhile show no signs of reviving, despite repeated promises by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of an “ultimate deal” that will resolve the conflict.
Despite this grim political reality, there have been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue dividing liberals and conservatives in the United States, with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more evenhanded stance on the conflict. U.S. government policy has yet to reflect these shifts in public sentiment, with the Trump administration falling over itself to project an unprecedentedly hostile and uncompromising stance toward Palestinian claims. Hard-line supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning “hearts and minds” to punishing opponents: publishing blacklists of Palestinian activists, censoring public figures vocal about the conflict, and advocating for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods.
Nonetheless, people who have followed U.S. debate on the conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and popular sentiment.
“Although news coverage is not evenhanded and is still generally skewed towards the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States,” said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based progressive think tank. “We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past.”
The post Study: U.S. Newspapers Are More Than Twice As Likely to Cite Israeli Sources in Headlines Than Palestinian Ones appeared first on The Intercept.
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