Despite pressure from progressive Democrats, the House rules package for the 116th Congress will include a pay-as-you-go provision, requiring all new spending to be offset with either budget cuts or tax increases, a conservative policy aimed at tying the hands of government.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will be sworn in this week to represent a district in New York, will vote against the package, her spokesperson told The Intercept. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., announced Wednesday that he would oppose it.
Presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will be sworn in on Thursday, has promised for months to restore the pay-go rule, which she instituted when first taking over the speaker’s gavel in 2007. She ran into resistance from progressives, who believe that the rule would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to a Green New Deal to tuition-free public college. Critics also argue that pay-go creates an unlevel playing field, where Republicans get to blow giant holes in the tax code, as they did with the 2017 tax cuts, while Democrats must pay fealty to the deficit.
“There’s enormous appetite in the Democratic Party and among all Americans for major public investment to tackle our nation’s major crises: deepening inequality and structural racism and climate disaster,” said Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, in a statement to The Intercept. “Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership’s support of Paygo makes actually solving these crises all but impossible. The Democratic Party leadership is unilaterally disarming and shooting themselves in the foot.”
Shahid illustrated this on Twitter with a meme:
— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) January 2, 2019
The pay-go rule House Democrats will institute is actually an improvement on what House Republicans put into place in 2011. They created a rule called “cut-go,” which required any new spending to only be offset with budget cuts instead of tax increases. The rule didn’t apply, of course, to the Trump tax cuts. “It is terrible economics. The austerians were wrong about the Great Recession and Great Depression. At some point, politicians need to learn from mistakes and read economic history,” Khanna wrote on Twitter.
The Democratic leadership replaced that rule with the 2007 version. The new rule establishes a point of order against any bill that increases the deficit within a 10-year budget window, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The House could attach an “emergency” designation to legislation to get around the pay-go rule: Congress did this in 2009 to pass the economic stimulus package under President Barack Obama. The point of order could be waived by a majority vote of the House. But this gives the Democratic leadership another lever of control on what legislation can advance, as their assent would be critical to exempting bills from the pay-go rule. And members of Congress tend to resist voting to waive the rule, as they worry it creates readymade attack ads.
There is also a Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, passed in 2010 under pressure from Blue Dog Democrats, which allows the president to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates pay-go. But the prospect of a president implementing such an unpopular policy is remote. So the House rule looms large by constraining new spending at its source.
Liberals, of course, have plenty of ideas for how to raise revenue. The Trump tax cuts alone offer nearly $3 trillion in potential offsets simply by restoring corporate tax rates, “pass-through” rules on individuals, and inheritance taxes. But the pay-go rule forces Democrats to propose tax increases that Republicans gleefully broadcast. Meanwhile, Republicans, unconcerned with deficits, get to play Santa Claus, freed from having to match tax cuts with anything unappealing.
With Republicans in control of the Senate and the White House for the next two years, major Democratic agenda items won’t be passing, muting the near-term impact of the pay-go rule. But eliminating hurdles to activist legislation that increases public investment may matter in the future, should Democrats take the presidency and Senate in the next election. Progressives have been thinking strategically about how to maximize power since the midterms, focusing on relatively arcane subjects like the rules package and committee assignments.
They didn’t come away completely empty-handed. House Democrats’ rules package includes a series of provisions demanded by the Progressive Caucus. For example, there’s the reinstatement of the “Gephardt rule,” which eliminates the need for a standalone House vote to raise the nation’s debt limit. Under the rule, named for former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, every time the House passes a budget resolution, the debt limit increase necessary to accommodate that budget will be deemed as passed.
The rules package also eliminates the mandate on the CBO to include “dynamic scoring” in their assessment of legislation. This means that they don’t have to model the economic impact of legislation and the impact on federal revenues, a pseudoscientific conceit that was used by the Republican majority to make tax cuts look more like they pay for themselves.
Annual ethics training for all members is now mandatory. Nondisclosure agreements can no longer be used to prohibit current or former staff from reporting wrongdoing to relevant authorities. The rules package also bans members of Congress from sitting on corporate boards, a response to the insider trading indictment of Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., who was a board member of a drug company when he received inside information about a failed clinical trial and leaked the information to his son.
House members will also apparently be required to pay for their own discrimination and sexual harassment settlements (although enforcement of that rule is a bit unclear), and House Democrats will be allowed to intervene in the lawsuit attempting to rule the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. On a more symbolic front, Democrats changed the name of the “Committee on Education and the Workforce” back to its original title, the “Committee on Education and Labor.”
Finally, the rules include the re-establishment of a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, seen by progressives as a vehicle to develop a Green New Deal legislative package. This 15-member committee — nine Democrats and six Republicans — can hold hearings and issue policy recommendations, but those recommendations must go through the committees of jurisdiction, and the committee will not have subpoena or deposition authority.
House leaders claimed in their release of the rules package that they worked with numerous stakeholders and took into consideration all the viewpoints of the caucus. But like the somewhat defanged climate committee, Pelosi’s pay-go provision has rankled progressives.
Last month, the Economic Policy Institute put out a damning paper arguing that during the Obama administration, pay-go led to unnecessary shrinking of ambitions in areas like health care and an unsuitable response to the Great Recession. “It is terrible economics to view federal budget deficits as always and everywhere bad,” wrote report author Josh Bivens, pointing out that pay-go stunted the economic recovery: “If … public spending following the Great Recession had followed the average path of the recoveries of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, a full recovery with unemployment around 4 percent would have been achieved by 2013.”
At least one congressional power broker wants progressive Democrats to fight the rules package. “In order for #PayGo to go into effect, it needs to pass the House,” wrote Bernie Sanders adviser Warren Gunnels on Twitter on Tuesday night. “If some 18 Dems vote no, it fails. The vote will take place on Thursday. Will enough progressives have the courage to vote no on the first roadblock to #MedicareForAll, #GreenNewDeal & #CollegeForAll? Let’s see.”
In order for #PayGo to go into effect, it needs to pass the House. If some 18 Dems vote no, it fails. The vote will take place on Thursday. Will enough progressives have the courage to vote no on the first roadblock to #MedicareForAll, #GreenNewDeal & #CollegeForAll? Let's see. https://t.co/9raJ49r5mb
— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) January 2, 2019
It would be highly unusual and dramatic for the House to vote down the majority party’s rules package, especially given the other elements of the bill and the relative irrelevancy of pay-go over the next two years. However, progressives will have the ability to revisit the issue down the road.
Under the deal cut for Pelosi to continue as speaker in 2021, she must win a two-thirds vote within the Democratic caucus. There are enough Democrats in the Progressive Caucus to block that vote. So progressives conceivably have two years to create enough opposition to pay-go to force Pelosi to eliminate the rule as a condition for remaining speaker. Getting 2020 presidential candidates on the record about pay-go could be a vehicle for building opposition.
The post Nancy Pelosi Rams Austerity Provision Into House Rules Package Over Objections of Progressives appeared first on The Intercept.
Five weeks ago, The Guardian published one of the most extraordinary and significant bombshells in the now two-plus-year-old Trump-Russia saga. “Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign,” claimed reporter and best-selling “Collusion” author Luke Harding, Dan Collyns, and a very sketchy third person whose name was bizarrely scrubbed from The Guardian’s byline for its online version but appeared in the print version: Fernando Villavicencio, described by the Washington Post, discussing this mysterious discrepancy, as “an Ecuadoran journalist and activist.”
Guardian online edition, left; Guardian print edition, right.
That the Guardian story would be seen as an earth-shattering revelation — one that would bring massive amounts of traffic, attention, glory, and revenue to the paper — was obvious. And that’s precisely how it was treated, as it instantly ricocheted around the media ecosystem with predictable viral speed: “The ultimate Whoa If True. It’s … [the] ballgame if true,” pronounced MSNBC’s Chris Hayes who, unlike many media figures reacting to the story, sounded some skepticism: “The sourcing on this is a bit thin, or at least obscured.”
But Hayes’s cable news colleague Ari Melber opened his MSNBC show that night excitedly touting The Guardian’s scoop, while meticulously connecting all the new inflammatory dots it uncovered, asking one guest: “How does this bombshell impact the collusion part of the probe”?
From the start, the massive holes in The Guardian’s blockbuster were glaring. As I noted on the day the story published, analysts from across the political spectrum — including those quite hostile to Assange — expressed serious doubts about the article’s sourcing, internal logic, self-evidently dubious assertions, and overall veracity, even as many media figures uncritically trumpeted it.
In particular:
How could it be that Manafort, of all people, snuck into one of the most monitored, surveilled, videoed, and photographed buildings on the planet on three separate occasions without any of that ostensibly “smoking gun” visual evidence having emerged, including in The Guardian’s own story? Why would The Guardian publish a story of this magnitude without first requiring that its Ecuadoran intelligence sources provide them with such photographic or video evidence to publish it or at least review prior to publication? How could it be that Manafort’s name never appeared in any of the embassy entrance logs even though, as The Guardian itself admitted, “visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports”? What was the bizarre, sensationalistic reference to “Russians” that The Guardian included in its article but never bothered to explain (“separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by The Guardian lists ‘Paul Manaford [sic]’ as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions ‘Russians'”).Five weeks later, all of these questions remain unanswered. That’s because The Guardian — which likes to pride itself on flamboyantly demanding transparency and accountability from everyone else — has refused to provide any of its own.
[/newsletterIn lieu of addressing the increasingly embarrassing scandal, The Guardian’s top editors and reporters on this story have practically gone into hiding, ignoring all requests for comment and referring journalists to a corporate PR official who provides a statement that is as vague and bureaucratic as it is non-responsive. It’s easier to get a substantive comment from the National Security Agency than from The Guardian on this story.
The Guardian’s stonewalling appears even more unjustified given the affirmative attacks on the truth of its central claims. The former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Fidel Narváez, said emphatically in an interview with the British outlet The Canary that The Guardian story was “a fake” and provided that outlet with a formal complaint to the paper, in which he said at least one other story from the same Ecuadorian intelligence sources was also fabricated.
The Guardian’s refusal to address any of the very serious questions raised by its own article persisted even after one of the world’s largest newspapers, the Washington Post, published a major story on the paper’s debacle, noting: “One week after publication, the Guardian’s bombshell looks as though it could be a dud.”
The Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi joined the other critics of The Guardian’s story in documenting the multiple gaping holes in its reporting, including the bizarrely disappearing and highly sketchy third reporter, the fact that “no other news organization has been able to corroborate the Guardian’s reporting to substantiate its central claim of a meeting,” that the paper began almost immediately tweaking the language of its story to soften its certainty (a practice highly unusual for a story of this significance, where responsible editors would ensure that every word was accurate before publishing it), that “the story doesn’t specify the date of the alleged meeting,” that “no photos or video of Manafort entering the embassy have emerged,” and that “the Guardian is silent about whether its reporters saw any such photographic evidence.”
The Guardian’s typically public and outspoken editor-in-chief Kath Viner has all but disappeared since the story was published on November 27. Since then, she stopped tweeting entirely except to commemorate the November 30 death of a Guardian columnist. Harding has also tweeted just once since then. And both have ignored these questions submitted by The Intercept, as well as similar inquiries from other reporters:
None of this is an aberration. Quite the contrary, it has become par for the Trump-Russia course. One major story after the next falls apart, and there is no accountability, reckoning, or transparency (neither CNN nor MSNBC, for instance, have to date bothered to explain how they both “independently confirmed” the totally false story that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered advanced access to the WikiLeaks email archive, all based on false claims about the date of an email to him from a random member of the public).
Nor is it atypical for The Guardian when it comes to its institutionally blinding contempt for Assange: During the election, the paper was forced to retract its viral report from political reporter Ben Jacobs, who decided to assert, without any whiff of basis, that Assange has a “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.”
The U.S media has become very adept at outrage rituals whenever they are denounced as “fake news.” They should spend some time trying to become as skilled in figuring out why such attacks resonate for so many.
The post Five Weeks After The Guardian’s Viral Blockbuster Assange-Manafort Scoop, No Evidence Has Emerged — Just Stonewalling appeared first on The Intercept.
The experimental theater maker Tina Satter saw something familiar last winter when she clicked on a link from a journalistic story about Reality Leigh Winner, the federal contractor convicted in June of leaking a classified National Security Agency report describing a Russian attempt to hack American voter databases on the eve of the 2016 elections. “It looked like a play,” Satter said of the document that opened on her screen. At the top of the first page, the phrase “Verbatim Transcription” appeared like a title and, below it, the list of “participants,” like dramatis personae. In fact, Satter was reading the official record of FBI agents’ June 3, 2017, search and interview of Winner at her home in Augusta, Georgia. But to her, the dialogue in the transcript — its stutters, short sentences, and strained geniality — resembled the emotionally cool neorealism of the contemporary American playwright Richard Maxwell. Then, the more absorbed she became, the more the text started to seem like a thriller. Satter knew the outcome of the case but still couldn’t help getting caught up in wondering, “How is she going to get out of this?”
“How is she going to get out of this?”By the time Satter was some two-thirds of the way through the transcript, she had become fascinated by the interrogation’s structure and language, what she calls the “shifts in conversation” that bring Winner to admit — on the 56th of the transcript’s 80 pages — that she had printed out and mailed the intelligence report to an online media outlet. (While the name of that news site is blacked out in the FBI account, several publications reported that Winner sent it to The Intercept, which published a story in June 2017 based on a leaked NSA document detailing Russian phishing attacks against the U.S. election infrastructure. The Intercept has said that it received the document anonymously and has published a statement about its role in the case.)
The transcript set Satter’s theatrical imagination ablaze. “As soon as I finished reading it,” she said, “I’m like, God, I think there’s something I’d love to do with this.” After a year of workshopping the material with actors, designers, and a musical composer, that something has turned out to be an artful staging of the unadulterated FBI text — right down to silent pauses for redacted passages. Titled “Is This A Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription,” the play runs at the Manhattan performance space The Kitchen from January 4 to 12. (The show takes its title from a question an FBI agent asks during the interview, interrupting at a pivotal moment as he presumably looks at a door inside Winner’s house.) Considering the events through an artistic lens, Satter has said, “allows the story to move beyond the headlines into a larger, necessary discourse.”
Photo: Roy Baizan for The Intercept
The play can do so precisely because of its nonrealistic form. Though it stays entirely faithful to the FBI transcript, Satter does not see “Is This A Room” as lining up directly in the tradition of documentary theater, which includes plays like Peter Weiss’s “The Investigation” (based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid-1960s), Emily Mann’s “Execution of Justice” (drawn from Dan White’s trial for the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone), or Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen’s “The Exonerated” (built from first-person narratives and legal records of people wrongly convicted of capital crimes). Satter’s play, she said, isn’t trying to capture “the moral outrage on the surface” of Winner’s story — though she and the rest of the artists involved certainly feel it. Nor are they trying to present a biographical re-enactment of Winner’s life at the moment the FBI snags her — though they have been in touch repeatedly with her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, who said she is “thrilled” by the project; and the actor portraying Winner, Emily Davis (no relation) has corresponded with Winner and visited the town in central Texas where she grew up.
Rather, Satter has set out to “track the dynamics” of the encounter between Winner and the agents. Tightly choreographed and performed on a bare stage, “Is This A Room” unpacks the power relations at play when a 25-year-old woman, a decorated veteran of the Air Force, is cornered by an all-male law enforcement team. What’s more, it reveals how an FBI interrogation resembles the con game of theater: Both try to persuade an audience — the interviewee in the FBI case — to believe in the world created by their language and movement. It feels as sinister as the creepiest Strindberg drama.
“Reality and her story are literally at the center of a vital conversation about patriotism, honor, access, and power in this gut-wrenching American moment.”“Is This A Room” is the most overtly political piece Satter and her company, Half Straddle, have made throughout their decade of work. As Satter wrote on the project’s Kickstarter page, “Reality and her story are literally at the center of a vital conversation about patriotism, honor, access, and power in this gut-wrenching American moment.” (The Kickstarter campaign raised $15,062 from 206 donors.)
The play is also, in some respects, a formal departure for Half Straddle. For starters, their work typically collages a variety of found and invented texts into a complex set of revelatory, high-jinks juxtapositions. “In the Pony Palace/FOOTBALL” (2011), for instance, cast nine female and transgender actors as the players, cheerleaders, and coaches of a high school football team and combined gridiron lingo, sports movie dialogue, and adolescent chatter into a hilarious and insightful parody of masculine athletic culture. For “SEAGULL (Thinking of you)” (2013), Half Straddle mashed up Anton Chekhov’s play with contemporary conversation about love and Russian-inflected metal songs. “Ancient Lives” (2015) followed a teacher and several young students into the witchy woods, quoting Emily Dickinson, “The Crucible,” “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Shakespeare, and 1980s movie plots, among other texts; while “Ghost Rings” (2016) twined a personal story about estranged siblings around the recounting of a fictional romance, all through the medium of an original song cycle. With puppets.
“Is This A Room” — apart from relying on just the single FBI text — has a more sober tone, despite some humorously absurd moments. (The agents’ subject-changing non sequiturs, said Satter, sound just like downtown playwriting.) But at the same time, it extends Half Straddle’s longstanding interest in themes of belonging, commitment, and self-sovereignty, as well as in deconstructing gender. Their work always centers female and/or queer and trans characters and paradigms, and the new play is as much an exploration of male power as it is of nationalistic hubris or, more, of their inextricable connection. As the composer of “Is This A Room’s” score, Sanae Yamada, put it, the play focuses on a young woman of conscience working in intelligence, “at the heart of the patriarchal machinery.”
Becca Blackwell, left, T.L. Thompson, center, Pete Simpson, center right, and Emily Davis, right, rehearsing for the play “Is This A Room” on Dec. 22, 2018, in Manhattan, N.Y.
Photo: Roy Baizan for The Intercept
The play — and FBI transcript — begin with Winner arriving home from grocery shopping one early June Saturday to find a bunch of men looking for her. Two end up conducting the interview — Special Agent Justin C. Garrick (played by Pete Simpson) and Special Agent R. Wallace Taylor (played by T.L. Thompson). A third, “Unknown Male” (played by Becca Blackwell), pokes around, taking photos, and reporting back to Garrick and Taylor, with an occasional remark to Winner. More men helped search Winner’s small, red brick house and Nissan Cube that day — about a dozen agents swarmed in on her in all. Satter represents them through the grunts and unintelligible sounds coming through a walkie-talkie and a cellphone that Blackwell carries. The transcript describes these interactions simply as “noise” or “background conversation”; Yamada has woven them into a soundscape of growls, grumbles, zhoozhes, faint gongs, chimey arpeggios, and low drones, all contributing to the increasingly surreal space of Winner’s world on that stifling day.
The interrogation begins outside Winner’s house, then moves inside and, eventually, into a space behind the kitchen that Winner tells the agents she never uses because she finds it “creepy” and “weird.” We see the feds maneuver the encounter there exactly for that reason, though in the production, that space is established by language and action alone. The set (designed by Parker Lutz) is an unadorned long platform, raised an additional couple feet at each end and covered in thin, gray carpeting — the sort that both Winner and the FBI agents might find in their workplaces. Spectators are seated on either side of the stage, as if we’re watching a sports or chess match, in which we can scrutinize each move and assess its impact.
Satter has staged the action meticulously to highlight this effect, engaging the company in finding what Davis called the “molecular” relationship between Winner and her interrogators at any given moment. The rhythm of Winner’s speech has guided her physicality in the role, Davis said, while Simpson noted that Garrick’s coughs and stammers have been keys to his character-building. Sometimes the three agents flank Winner, sometimes they stand in a wall-like line. Sometimes one gets quietly right up in her face; sometimes they give her room to stride up to their limits, just like her dog, which they secure in an outdoor pen upon their arrival. “She does not like men,” Winner warns drily when they ask if her dog is friendly.
The men never directly threaten her — part of the FBI’s dubious claim that this was a “noncustodial” interview, which meant that they did not have to read Winner her Miranda rights — and they spend a lot of time ingratiating themselves by shooting the breeze about pets (Winner is a devoted animal lover, who expresses concern about her dog and cat throughout the encounter) and CrossFit training (she is a competitive power lifter and fitness enthusiast). They never mention that she could face up to a decade in prison, but cajole her with feigned sympathy. “I don’t think we’re coming in here to say you’re some big, bad mastermind, prolific spy kind of thing,” Taylor tells her. “What we both think is that maybe you made a mistake.”
The staging subtly uncovers the actor-like nature of the agents’ job. The theatrical metaphor keeps resounding once one’s ears are tuned to it: “Look, you’ve had a good career. You have. If there’s something that just pushed you over the edge on this, now is the perfect time,” Garrick says as he and Taylor close in. And he essentially invites Winner into the spotlight: “This is a podium.”
Satter noted, “I really do like the meta-ness” of reminding audiences that they are in a theater space. Even the characters’ names support this distancing effect: The hero happens to be called Reality and the lead interrogator shares a surname with David Garrick, the legendary 18th century actor, who, as any undergraduate student of theater history can tell you, revolutionized his art, replacing a bombastic style of proclaiming from the stage with a quieter new style of realistic acting.
Avoiding bombast and outright bullying, the agents assert their dominance in a way that displays an unspoken principle of masculine power: They simply assume it, as “Is This A Room” lays bare. Simpson comes off as especially menacing when he keeps his deep eyes cast down at the floor, and his voice low. Satter said she knew the show needed to exhibit “male energy” and, simply by casting artists she has worked with before, ended up with two of the agents — “these archetypes” — played by trans actors. “Fuck yeah,” Satter exclaimed, delighted that such casting is inherently political.
Photo: Roy Baizan for The Intercept
The show frames the way the agents are, as Thompson put it, “performing masculinity,” and, as a result, heightens the ways in which Winner is in part defeated by her feminine accommodation. In one telling moment, Garrick compliments her linguistic skills in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, then quips, “I’m barely able to speak English.” Winner replies, so reassuringly, “English is hard.” Davis pointed out that Winner frequently intersperses a “just” into her sentences — “such an inherently apologetic word.” The men seize on her well-trained girlish solicitousness.
In August, in a deal in which Winner pleaded guilty to one count of violating Section 793 of the Espionage Act, she was sentenced to 63 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release — the longest federal sentence ever imposed on anyone for an unauthorized release of government information to the media. As Winner’s mother recently wrote, the punishment seems particularly galling when those who perpetrated and benefited from the Russian hacking that Winner helped expose have gotten off so easily.
Winner-Davis said she is grateful for any efforts to keep her daughter in the public eye, and she is planning to attend “Is This A Room” along with her husband and a group of Winner’s supporters. She’s excited about the play, though, as she has let Satter know, anxious about its potential emotional impact: “I don’t know if I can sit through it.”
“Is This A Room” is just one of a number of artistic responses to Reality Winner’s case. There have been posters, at least one song, and, according to Winner-Davis, Hollywood talks about a feature film. But theater has a unique power that TV, movies, and other genres can’t supply, Winner-Davis said. “Being there live, hearing the music, being with the actors — it gives you the sense that you are there,” she explained. “You’re living it.”
The post The FBI’s Interrogation of Reality Winner Was Like a Play — and Has Now Been Turned Into One appeared first on The Intercept.
New Names: The Washington State governor and Democrat Jay Inslee also has his eye on a run for U.S. president in 2020, with a single-minded focus on the threat of climate change and its radiating impacts on the environment and national security. The relatively obscure entrant tries to give his pitch to Edward-Isaac Dovere. In the foreign-policy space, meet the new (acting) secretary of defense, an MIT-trained engineer and former Boeing executive with a year and a half of experience in the government so far.
In Space: The edge of the known universe has expanded. As 2018 became 2019, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons discovered a new object the size of a city and located 4 billion miles from Earth: It’s the most distant encounter with another celestial object in the history of space exploration, writes Marina Koren. Now we also have pictures of this icy object, 2014 MU69. In other milestones: The Netherlands-based company SpaceLife Origin wants to send a pregnant woman into space to give birth, setting 2024 as the target date for the trip. We have a lot of questions—chief of which is, Why do this?
Bad Apple: The technology giant Apple announced a steep cut to its revenue projections for its most recent financial quarter—from $91.5 billion to $84 billion—the first time since 2002 that the company’s taken such measures. Apple is citing the brewing trade war between the U.S. and China. Alexis Madrigal walks through a few other ways to read this news, including: This seems to be a very bad sign for the global economy. (Want to read another idea on how President Donald Trump can approach the trade wars? Here’s Reihan Salam’s recommendation.)
Snapshot
Step 1. Pay a few thousand dollars for a few months of coaching from a few normal guys, who promise to teach other enterprising people the tricks of a suspect trade—buying cheap goods from China and turning a large profit selling them on Amazon. Step 2. For many, no profit, just expenses. (Illustration by Katie Martin)Evening ReadNew year, new influx of reminders from consumer brands that you, an imperfect human, could do more to better yourself:
In the United States, self-improvement often boils down to being thin and amassing wealth. In the same poll, almost a third of those intending to make resolutions singled out eating habits, exercise, or weight as the problems they hope to fix, and another 10 percent chose finance-related goals. Down the list, being kinder, becoming more spiritual, or worrying less received only faint support. Marist’s historical polling data shows that Americans have been making the most popular resolutions in roughly similar numbers for years.
Not coincidentally, these resolutions are also the centerpieces of most resolution-dependent advertising. No data exist on how American commerce influences resolution choice, so on a statistical level, it’s a bit of a chicken/egg issue: Do we choose these resolutions because that’s how resolutions are marketed to us as a concept, or are these ideas central in year-end marketing because the people creating ads have noticed that’s where people are already trending?
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. In its first act of 2019, a NASA spacecraft passed an object nicknamed Ultima Thule, located 4 billion miles from Earth in this region.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. In a Christmas Day crackdown, this company suspended a series of prominent accounts with large followings, from @pubity to @comedyslam to even @God.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Last month, surgeons operating on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg removed the lower lobe of this organ, after finding through a CT scan nodules they determined to be malignant.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Kuiper belt / Instagram / Lung
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.
In an ugly new year’s surprise Wednesday afternoon, Apple announced unexpectedly that it was cuttings its first-quarter revenue guidance from $91.5 billion to $84 billion. The move is highly unusual. Apple reportedly last revised a projection like this in 2002.
CEO Tim Cook sent a letter to investors that attempted to explain what had changed so much over the last 60 days. An economic slowdown in China chopped down the company’s iPhone business there, Cook explained. And then, in developed markets, they couldn’t make up the shortfall because fewer people upgraded than expected.
It’s a big announcement for one of the world’s largest companies, and for the tech business at large, which is exposed directly to every major economy in the world.
Here are five ways to look at the announcement.
1. Chimerica in action.
“While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” Cook wrote. “In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.”
The American and Chinese economies are inextricably linked. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick coined this symbiosis “Chimerica.” Our own James Fallows has detailed the many linkages not just of financial systems but of all kinds of enterprise. “No other nation outside North America is as tightly integrated with U.S. corporate production, consumption, distribution, and marketing systems,” Fallows wrote earlier this year.
For many years, China has been important to American companies as a site of production, but over the last 15 years, Chinese consumption of American products has become a major part of global corporations’ business models. So, a Chinese economic slowdown is bad for American business.
Is the trade war having an effect? Apple says so: “We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.”
2. Apple is an iPhone company.
While Apple makes laptop and desktop computers, tablets, and speakers, the sheer size of the smartphone market has meant that Apple has become, roughly, an iPhone company. The trouble in China, then, is really about the company’s phone sales there, not much of anything else.
“Lower than anticipated iPhone revenue, primarily in Greater China, accounts for all of our revenue shortfall to our guidance and for much more than our entire year-over-year revenue decline,” Cook continued. “In fact, categories outside of iPhone (Services, Mac, iPad, Wearables/Home/Accessories) combined to grow almost 19 percent year-over-year.”
It’s notable that a slowdown in one country’s iPhone sales could wipe out nearly 20 percent growth in other categories. That’s the relative scale of these businesses.
3. Smartphones are (almost) commodities.
Apple has relied on customers to upgrade their phones regularly, as if the newest phone was a necessity because the technologies were changing so quickly. Toward that end, they’ve created a financing program and incentives for people to trade in their phones on a regular basis.
The iPhone is a great phone, and always has been. But Google and Samsung also make great phones now. Apple has not really been able to maintain, let alone extend its lead in things like camera or battery technology. And it’s those two things, the pull of a new camera and the push of an old battery that, anecdotally, drive most people to a new phone.
While the Chinese business problem seems most acute, Apple also admitted that there were some iPhone growth problems in developed markets, which is to say North America and Europe, too. “[W]e believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance,” Cook said, “including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, U.S. dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements.”
As MG Siegler noted, it was probably only a matter of time before the “law of large numbers” eventually, finally caught up to the iPhone business. If you already sell an ungodly amount of phones, it’s hard to keep selling an even more ungodly amount of phones.
4. For most tech companies, corporate growth and profitability are dependent on overseas markets.
If there is a larger lesson in the news, it’s that the American economy isn’t the only place where American companies make money. Roughly 40 percent of the profits generated by companies in the S&P 500 come from overseas. And in markets like smartphones, where Europe and North America are pretty well saturated, the growth investors crave lies in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and China.
5. As a sign for the global economy, this is ... not good.
The American economy has been through some ups and downs over the last 35 years, while the Chinese economy has largely boomed, averaging 10 percent growth for decades. Analysts expect that the economy will slow down and go through a structural transformation away from manufacturing. But everyone basically hopes that doesn’t happen too quickly, resulting in a “hard landing.” As a Californian, this long-prognosticated Chinese economic slowdown sounds like the global economic version of the predicted Big One earthquake. Everyone knows it is going to happen—it has to—but no one really lives life expecting that rupture.
And here we are in early 2019 and it’s clear that the Chinese economic slowdown is already bad. Today’s news makes it clear that the slowdown might be very bad, and worsening at a pace that took even Apple by complete surprise.
The other Asian economies are already seeing the damage. And that’s before the trade war tariffs snap into place come March
“So, what is the positive signal?” Jayant Menon, the lead economist at the Asian Development Bank, asked the South China Morning Post, rhetorically, this week. “There isn’t one,” he said.
The most distant object that NASA has ever investigated up close, 2014 MU69, orbits near the edge of the solar system, well beyond Pluto. Because of the desolate conditions out there, it’s remained virtually unchanged since the beginning of the solar system. Less than five years ago, astronomers didn’t even know it existed. Now, they know what it looks like, thanks to images captured by a passing spacecraft.
The New Horizons spacecraft arrived at 2014 MU69—4 billion miles away from Earth—on New Year’s Eve, snapped hundreds of photographs, and then continued on, headed even deeper into space. On Wednesday, NASA released the first set of photographs.
Seen from Earth, 2014 MU69 looks like a tiny speck of light. Up close, it resembles, delightfully, a snowman.
2014 MU69 is so far away, details like this could never come into focus from Earth.“There’s no way to make anything like this, this type of observation, without having a spacecraft there,” Cathy Olkin, the deputy project scientist, told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
In 2015, New Horizons flew past Pluto and revealed a stunning icy world with towering mountains, smooth plains, and a feathery atmosphere. The probe had enough fuel to keep going after the encounter, and 2014 MU69 turned out to be along its path.
[Read: NASA hits its New Year’s target at the edge of the solar system]
Nicknamed Ultima Thule, Latin for “beyond the known world,” the object is a contact binary, a cosmic configuration in which two separate objects become joined together. “They obviously came together at such a gentle speed—maybe a mile a hour, or a few miles an hour,” Jeff Moore, the head of the geology team for New Horizons, said. “They really are sort of resting on each other.”
The snowman description is fitting for the conditions in the Kuiper belt, where frozen bits and pieces leftover from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago abound, receiving very little sunlight. It’s an incredibly cold place: The surface temperature of Pluto, the largest object in the region, is nearly -400 degrees Fahrenheit. If you could somehow build Frosty the Snowman out there, he’d last forever.
Unlike typical snowmen, Ultima Thule is red, roasted and darkened over time by cosmic radiation. Below, the photo on the right is a composite image from two of the three cameras aboard New Horizons. (The color looks more like iced coffee with a little half-and-half to me, but by planetary-science measures, it’s red.)
NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research InstituteThere’s more than one kind of ice in the universe, and the flyby data hasn’t yet revealed the composition of Ultima Thule. The object may be made of water ice, nitrogen ice, or methane ice.
Ultima Thule is frozen another way—in time. The frigidness of the Kuiper belt has kept Ultima Thule in pristine shape. The New Horizons data will describe the very material that shaped Earth and the other planets, and scientists hope the spacecraft’s scientific instruments collected some new information about this chapter in our cosmic history.
The newly released images are the first of many still to come. These were taken about a half hour before New Horizons made its closest approach to Ultima Thule, and at a moment when sunlight struck the object head-on. As the spacecraft flew past, the illumination shifted, and shadows emerged. It’s these shadows, scientists say, that will soon reveal whether Ultima Thule has hills, ridges, or craters.
It takes some time for data from New Horizons to reach Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles. Scientists will reveal the best, highest-resolution photographs in the coming weeks and months.
An uncomfortable question, unrelated to the science, hovered over the New Horizons team’s presentation on Wednesday. On Tuesday night, a Newsweek story from March prompted discussion on social media about NASA’s decision to use the name Ultima Thule, which arose out of a public naming contest. The term was coined more than 2,000 years ago by the Roman poet Virgil and has appeared frequently in literature as a descriptor for distant, mythical lands. Newsweek pointed out that the term was also adopted by the Nazi party as the name of a mythical Aryan homeland.
NASA officials were aware of this historical usage when they chose Ultima Thule and decided its ancient meaning outweighed the troubling connotations. “I think New Horizons is an example, one of the best examples, in our time of raw exploration, and the term ‘Ultima Thule’—which is very old, many centuries old, possibly over 1,000 years old—is a wonderful meme for exploration,” Alan Stern, the lead investigator of the New Horizons mission, said, in response to a question from a reporter. “And that’s why we chose it. And I would say that just because some bad guys once liked the term—we’re not going to let them hijack it.”
But this shadow couldn’t dampen the jubilance in the room, as the scientists shared the shape of their new discovery. To anyone used to the smooth, rounded architecture of planets and moons, this distant world might look funky. But the solar system is flush with oddly shaped clumps that don’t fit into neat schemes.
[Photos: The voyage of New Horizons: Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond]
Billions of years ago, some of the material hurtling around the sun began to collide together. The gentler collisions allowed clumps of material to grow with each merger. Small clumps led to big clumps, and if they grew large enough, gravity tugged at their edges and collapsed them into spheres. Ultima Thule, about the size of a city, is too small for this effect.
“Most of the small bodies in the solar system are highly elongated,” Hal Weaver, the New Horizons project scientist, explained recently. “They just don’t have enough mass to form themselves into a perfect sphere.”
New Horizons is now headed deeper into the Kuiper belt. The spacecraft left Earth in 2006 and, despite a few malfunctions along the way, remains healthy. Stern predicts it could keep going for another 15 to 20 years and plans to submit a new exploration proposal to NASA leadership. With Ultima Thule in the rearview, the spacecraft may set its sights on another target, prepared to extend humanity’s reach into the cosmos even further.
Welcome to 2019. The government is in its 12th day of the partial shutdown, on the eve of the 116th Congress, and already scrambling with the beginnings of the 2020 presidential cycle. Here’s what we’ve been keeping an eye on:
They’re Running: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren announced she’s entering the 2020 presidential race, and The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere exclusively reported on Wednesday that Washington Governor Jay Inslee will likely run as well. More below on the emerging 2020 candidates, from The Atlantic.
Shutdown, Day 12: Nearly two weeks into the shutdown, with the worst effects of the closure yet to come, neither political party has changed its position on border-wall funding. As The Atlantic’s David Graham writes, the fight over the shutdown might only be getting started.
New Year, New Congress: The 116th Congress will see many additions, including newly minted Republican Senator Mitt Romney, and a Democrat-controlled “Climate Crisis” committee in the House. More below, from The Atlantic.
A Tweetstorm: As Americans celebrated the holidays, President Donald Trump brooded, watched TV, and tweeted—75 times between Christmas Eve and Wednesday morning.
“I Don’t Want to Be Identified With That”: And finally, some high-powered evangelical donors are rethinking their relationship with Republicanism, The Atlantic’s Emma Green reports.
— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
2020 Watch
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks to reporters at the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston. (Elise Amendola / AP)10 New Factors That Will Shape the 2020 Democratic Primary (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
“For all the Democrats still gushing about Obama, many also see his presidency as full of missed opportunities: What if, for example, he’d included a public-insurance option in Obamacare? What if he had been harder on Wall Street after the crash? What if he hadn’t goaded Trump that time at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?” → Read on.
Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Want to Be Hillary 2.0 (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
“According to Warren associates who’ve spent the past year with her preparing for her bid, she sees the road ahead as a long, hard slog, where she puts together enough of a coalition between Clinton and Sanders voters to win.” → Read on.
Jay Inslee Is Betting He Can Win the Presidency on Climate Change (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
“His campaign, such as it is, seems a lot more seat-of-the-pants than the machines Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris have slowly assembled. For now, he seems to be counting on being able to stand out on his record—and preparing for future battles with Trump by testing out zingers like ‘I wish nothing but the best for Donald Trump, including having the top bunk.’” → Read on.
Senator-Elect Mitt Romney walks the hallway on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)Mitt Romney’s Noisy Arrival in Trump’s Washington (McKay Coppins)
“This is not how Romney envisioned his arrival in Washington going when he launched his Senate bid back in February.” → Read on.
Democrats Are Establishing a New House ‘Climate Crisis’ Committee (Robinson Meyer)
“But the new committee arrives to a delicate family situation in the Democratic Party. A number of activists on the party’s left have greeted the announcement with frustration.” → Read on.
President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. (Evan Vucci / AP)What Trump's Draft Deferments Reveal (Amy J. Rutenberg)
“Trump may have exploited a system to obtain a medical deferment he did not deserve. It’s possible that his expectation of draft avoidance led him to seek out a sympathetic medical professional. If so, his actions would have been morally suspect, but not unusual.” → Read on.
What the Press Won’t Tell You About Elizabeth Warren’s Presidency (Peter Beinart)
“The better explanation for why Warren attracts disproportionate conservative criticism, and has disproportionately high disapproval ratings, has nothing to do with her progressive economic views or her dalliance with DNA testing. It’s that she’s a woman.” → Read on.
The Path to Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Just One (Eric W. Orts)
“There’s a better, more elegant, constitutional way out. Let’s allocate one seat to each state automatically to preserve federalism, but apportion the rest based on population.” → Read on.
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.
In 1959, an American physician named Harry Eagle mixed up one of the most pivotal cocktails in medical history—a red blend of sugar, salts, vitamins, and amino acids that allowed scientists to efficiently grow the cells of humans and other animals in laboratory beakers. This red elixir, known as Eagle’s minimal essential medium (EMEM), became a bedrock of biological research. Sixty years later, the medium and its variants are still heavily used whenever researchers want to study animal cells, whether to investigate the viruses that infect us, or to work out what goes wrong when cells turn cancerous.
As its name suggests, EMEM was designed to be as simple as possible—it has everything a cell needs to grow and nothing more. And in recent years, scientists have started realizing that such pared-down concoctions might be skewing their results, by warping the ways in which cells process nutrients. It’s as if they had spent decades studying the health of people who had only ever been given rations to eat.
Instead of using generic “culture media” like EMEM (or its more concentrated variant, Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle’s Medium, known as DMEM), it might be better to start creating concoctions that more accurately reflect the chemical profiles of our bodies. That’s what Saverio Tardito did in 2012, when he joined the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow. “Around 90 percent of the papers in cancer research are using the same two or three commercially available media,” he says. “We researchers are aware that the medium you choose at the beginning of the experiment will affect the output, but it’s too easy to open the door of the fridge and use what’s there. I think we have been all been a bit too lazy.”
Over several years, he fine-tuned a mixture called Plasmax, which contains around 60 nutrients and chemicals at the concentrations usually found in human blood. “It was a side project—just a way of obtaining a better tool to do better research,” Tardito says. “But from the beginning, we noticed that the medium was making a difference.”
His colleague Johan Vande Voorde realized that cancer cells, when grown in Plasmax, behave more like they would in actual tumors, without several weird behaviors that are triggered by commercially available media. For example, DMEM contains a substance called pyruvate at 10 times its normal concentration in blood. These abnormal levels force cancer cells to grow as if they were starved of oxygen, even when the gas is abundantly present. In DMEM, the cells act as if they were being choked. In Plasmax, they do not.
[Read: How to fight cancer (when cancer fights back)]
Unlike DMEM, Plasmax also contains selenium, an essential mineral. By comparing the two media, Vande Voorde showed that when breast cancer cells are grown at low densities, they die in the absence of selenium, but flourish in its presence. That’s a little worrying. Several researchers have tested selenium supplements as a way of preventing cancer, but despite many studies there’s no strong evidence for a protective effect. Instead, Tardito wonders if such supplements could be risky: If selenium allows cancer cells to survive in sparse populations, it might make it easier for fragments of tumors to spread to other parts of the body. “We’ll need to follow that up in animal studies,” he says.
David Sabatini of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has also been mixing up his own culture medium that mimics the nutrient levels of human blood. In 2017, he showed that cancer cells grown in this mixture are much less sensitive to a chemotherapy drug called Adrucil.
These results come at an interesting time. In recent years, cancer biologists have been grappling with a possible reproducibility crisis, in which results from several experiments involving lab-grown cells can’t be repeated by other teams. More broadly, researchers have struggled to translate the results of basic experiments involving such cells into new treatments that actually help cancer patients. Although there are many possible reasons for these problems, Tardito wonders whether he and his colleagues might get better results if they grow their cells in more realistic media.
[Read: How reliable are cancer studies?]
“Could these new media uncover vulnerabilities of cancer cells more robustly than before?” adds Chi Van Dang of the Wistar Institute, who also wants to know how immune cells might react under these more physiological conditions. “Could these media help us to understand immunotherapy better?”
“These studies are absolutely a step in the right direction,” says Gina DeNicola of the Moffitt Cancer Center. “For this approach to be applied more broadly, these types of media will need to be commercialized. While it’s possible to make these media in a lab, it’s very costly and time-consuming. Commercial media preparations are also more consistent and higher quality, which will help with reproducibility between labs.” (Indeed, that’s partly why researchers have been so slow to move beyond traditional media like DMEM.)
Commercial preparations would also help Sabatini and Tardito, whose teams have been laboriously making up stocks of their own artisanal media and shipping them to collaborators around the world. “I struggle to keep up with the requests,” Tardito says. Sabatini adds, “We are working with vendors, but it is not easy, as physiological media is more expensive and is likely to have a shorter half-life.”
For researchers looking to understand how cancers gobble up nutrients, “testing one’s finding in a medium such as Plasmax would, without any doubt, add unparalleled rigor, and hopefully become a more widespread practice,” says Natasha Pavlova of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
But she notes that such media aren’t perfect. They’re still largely missing many important components of blood, including fats and proteins. They don’t capture the different chemical profiles that exist in other tissues and organs. They don’t reflect the chemical wastelands that exist at the heart of tumors, which grow so quickly that their blood supplies can’t provide them with enough nutrients. Just last month, Alexander Muir of the University of Chicago showed that the fluids inside a tumor, which circulate between its cancerous cells, contain different levels of nutrients to those in blood.
Perhaps most important, Pavlova says, many cancer researchers rely on lineages of tumor cells that were created decades ago. These lines have been grown in conventional media like DMEM ever since, and have likely adapted accordingly. If they were now dunked in Plasmax, would that get researchers closer to real-life biology, or further away? Would researchers have to create entirely new cell lines that are grown in Plasmax from the start?
Tardito acknowledges these issues. “There will never be a perfect medium that mimics the tumor environment beginning to end,” he says. “All we can do is try and minimize those imperfections as much as we can.”
When starlings flock together, wheeling and darting through the sky in tight, fluid formations, we call it a murmuration. These murmurations can range from small groups of a few hundred starlings in a small ball to undulating seas of millions of birds that might block out the sun. I thought today would be a good day to take a few moments and appreciate the simple beauty of murmurations, captured by a number of photographers over the past few years.
Updated on January 2 at 5:19 p.m. ET
New year, new Congress, same old shutdown.
That’s the state of play in Washington this week. As congressional leaders visited the White House Wednesday afternoon for a meeting with the president, and as an increasing number of government offices are closed, the shutdown is headed for day 13—with no obvious exit.
Speaking to reporters before the meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump said the shutdown would last “as long as it takes.”
“Could be a long time, and it could be quickly,” Trump said.
After top members of the House and Senate convened at the White House Wednesday afternoon, the former looked more likely. In brief remarks, Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi said she still intends to move forward Thursday with a pair of bills that fund most of the government through the end of September, and the Department of Homeland Security through February 8, while not providing funding for the border wall that the president wants. As she noted, that mirrors bills passed by the Senate late last year.
“We have given the Republicans a chance to take yes for an answer,” she said. “Our question to the president and the Republicans is, why don’t you accept what you have already done to open up government? That enables us to have 30 days to negotiate for border security.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was tempered and set expectations low in his own remarks. “I don’t think any particular progress was made today,” he told CNN, calling the meeting “civil.” “We are hopeful that somehow in the coming days or weeks we will be able to reach an agreement.”
[Read: The Republican majority’s last act: a government shutdown]
Nearly two weeks into the shutdown, neither side has budged at all. First, the outgoing Republican House decided to punt the issue to the incoming Democratic majority, which will be sworn in on Thursday and promptly vote for the two funding measures.
By splitting off DHS from the larger bill, Democrats hope to trap Trump, daring him to reject funding for most of the government—even though they are flouting his single demand, which is that Congress give him $5 billion for a wall. After Democrats unveiled the plan on Monday, the president promptly announced he would not sign it, and a spokesman for McConnell said the Senate wouldn’t take up anything the president wasn’t going to sign.
It’s hard to imagine Democrats giving way on wall funding. They have said consistently that they will not fund the barrier, and while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has proved willing to compromise with the White House, Pelosi is more rigid—and has a new majority united (at least on this issue) behind her. If Democrats gave in now, it would be an abdication that would take the wind out of the party’s newly full sails and likely split the caucus.
At first glance, Trump also has little reason to compromise. He has staked his presidency on building the wall, and giving in now would betray his base—just as he enters the back half of his term, with the presidential election far closer than perhaps many Americans would like. But the White House was close to compromising before Christmas, only to reverse course after being pressured by conservative media figures such as Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. He also reneged on his pledge, made during a televised meeting with Schumer and Pelosi, to take responsibility for any shutdown.
Trump appears to have no plan now, other than sending a barrage of angry tweets. But those missives have often undermined his case; he has asserted, for example, that the wall is already partly built (it’s not), that border security is already strong (so why is the wall needed?), and that Mexico is already paying for the wall (then why is Congress needed?). Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the president seemed to leave the door open to settling for slightly less money, though he was vague. Trump has a long-standing tendency to fold in negotiations, but given that this is a high-profile case, he may hold strong here.
[Read: Trump almost always folds]
Caught in between is the GOP-led Senate. Republicans could stick with Trump and prolong the stalemate in the hope of making Democrats squirm. Or they could lose patience with Trump and toss the ball to the White House by passing a smaller funding bill. The Senate already passed a stopgap bill with $1.6 billion for border security, far short of Trump’s $5 billion, in December.
Many of these questions are likely to find answers in the next few days. It’s not yet clear what the specific political pain points from this shutdown will be. The current closure is long, but still shorter than those in 2013 or 1995–96. Shutdowns are never popular—one reason Trump’s pledge last month to take credit or blame for this one was so striking—and a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week showed that a plurality of Americans blame him.
But the worst hasn’t been felt yet. Many Americans have been tuned out of politics during the holidays, and will now start to pay more attention. Meanwhile, government agencies have been able to squeak by on existing funds for a few days, but starting Wednesday, they’re flat broke. The Smithsonian, including the National Zoo, has closed its doors, along with a slew of other offices. So-called essential government employees are working without a paycheck, though they’re likely to receive back pay in the future.
With these effects of closure just beginning, and no signs of movement by congressional Democrats or the White House, it might be that the shutdown fight is really just starting now, even though the government’s been out of money for nearly two weeks.
Asked by reporters why Democrats are still moving forward with the spending bills even though Trump and GOP Senate leaders have already rejected them, Schumer said Wednesday, “We would hope that that they would reconsider.” His optimism is uncommon, and seems unlikely to be rewarded.
Americans across the country rang in the new year in the usual way—by kissing their loved ones, partying with friends, watching the Times Square ball drop on television.
President Donald Trump, on the other hand, started off 2019 by urging the nation to “JUST CALM DOWN.”
This all-caps presidential exhortation, delivered to some 56.8 million Twitter followers and, by extension, the country at large, was of a piece with Trump’s tweeted musings for the duration of the holiday period. For a commander in chief who had planned to spend some relative downtime playing golf and mingling with his well-heeled friends at Mar-a-Lago, it was, apparently, a decidedly unrelaxed holiday. With the exception of a long-haul flight for a brief visit with U.S. troops in Iraq, Trump was holed up in the White House for the past 10 days as he presided over a partial government shutdown.
So he brooded, he berated, he watched TV, and he tweeted.
In all, the president sent 75 tweets between Christmas Eve and 9 a.m. eastern on Wednesday morning, and they ran the gamut: from cheery holiday messages (“Enjoy yourselves!” he said in one New Year’s video filmed on the White House lawn), to updates on foreign policy, commentary on lower gas prices, a rebuttal to comments from his departing chief of staff, and the rueful lament of the world’s most powerful man “all alone” on the day before Christmas. There were angry lashings at the Democrats for refusing him his border wall, familiar complaints about the Robert Mueller “Witch Hunt Hoax,” and ripostes at two prominent critics, Senator-to-be Mitt Romney and Stanley McChrystal, the retired four-star general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama,” Trump tweeted after the general said the president was “immoral” in an interview with ABC News. “Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”
Trump also dropped in promotions for positively framed books about his presidency by two of his allies: Sebastian Gorka, the former White House adviser who was forced out amid reports of his membership in a Hungarian group sympathetic to Nazis, and Stephen Moore, a conservative economic adviser. And he trumpeted strong economic news—though he said little about the falling stock market—and other accomplishments by his administration in 2018.
But the bulk of his holiday tweets revolved, in some way or another, around the fight over the southern border wall that precipitated the government shutdown. The president repeated his dubious claims that Mexico would be “paying for the Wall,” as he famously promised during his campaign, through the increased economic output that would be generated by a new trade deal revising NAFTA. At one point, Trump blamed the deaths of two migrant children detained at U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facilities on the Democrats, and he accused them of not caring about “Open Borders and all of the crime and drugs that Open Borders bring.” He oscillated between that hard-edged tone on the shutdown and the hint of a more flexible position, which was embedded in a tweet inviting Nancy Pelosi, the incoming House speaker, to “make a deal?”
Among the more notable tweets was a false accusation that the Obamas had built a “ten-foot Wall” around their D.C. house, along with a message that compared the efficacy of walls in general to the enduring utility of wheels.
...Remember this. Throughout the ages some things NEVER get better and NEVER change. You have Walls and you have Wheels. It was ALWAYS that way and it will ALWAYS be that way! Please explain to the Democrats that there can NEVER be a replacement for a good old fashioned WALL!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2019Perhaps the most jarring tweet, however, was Trump’s initial New Year’s message to the country, delivered in the digital scream of caps lock. (Note: This was not Trump’s first tweet of 2019—that honor was reserved for a book plug for Gorka.)
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE, INCLUDING THE HATERS AND THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA! 2019 WILL BE A FANTASTIC YEAR FOR THOSE NOT SUFFERING FROM TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. JUST CALM DOWN AND ENJOY THE RIDE, GREAT THINGS ARE HAPPENING FOR OUR COUNTRY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2019Part celebratory, part boastful, and part resentful, it was a fitting message from a president who sees himself constantly under siege, and one that resembled an often recirculated 2013 tweet, in which Trump extended best wishes to those commemorating the anniversary of 9/11, “even the haters and the losers.” A day later, the president even suggested that he should take his own advice: In a rare moment of self-reflection during his first Cabinet meeting of the year, the president said his job would be “a lot easier if I just relaxed and enjoyed the presidency like a lot of other people have done.”
Midway through his term, Trump is a president struggling to staff his White House and Cabinet, who orchestrated a shutdown over a campaign promise his own party could not deliver, who is dreading the denouement of a damaging investigation, and whose prospects for future legislative achievements have likely been doused by the ascendance of the Democrats in Congress.
Trump’s Twitter feed may not regularly pack the same punch it once did, as a Tuesday piece in Politico argued. But at least over the holidays, it remained the clearest reflection of the president’s current, chaotic reality.
“It’s going to be a great year,” Trump, mustering some optimism, said in one tweeted video message. He quickly caught himself: “Complicated,” he added, “but great.”
In June, the airy romantic drama Love Is joined a slate of original scripted programming at OWN, the television network co-owned by Oprah Winfrey. The series, executive-produced by the husband-and-wife pair Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil, was billed as a celebration of real-life romance and the journey of sustaining it. Its summertime arrival drew a wealth of excitement from fans of the veteran entertainment duo, who had previously collaborated on such series as Girlfriends and Being Mary Jane.
Among the show’s champions was Winfrey herself. At its Hollywood premiere, Winfrey spoke effusively about her hopes for the series: “Mara walked in with this story about her actual courtship with Salim, and before she even finished the pitch, I said, ‘Yes, I’m in,’” Winfrey said of her first meeting with the showrunner. “I think the intimacy, the tenderness, the true affection, the real trust, and the most important—wanting you to be the best you can—that’s what real love is.” But while Love Is was renewed for a second season in July, OWN recently announced it would be canceling the show in the wake of allegations against Salim Akil. “OWN has decided not to move forward with the second season of Love Is,” the network said in a statement. Although OWN did not name Akil’s alleged abuse as the reason for the cancellation, the timing of the statement and its reference to the show’s (now seemingly compromised) inspiration—“the real-live love story” of the Akils—suggested a link.
In late November, news surfaced of a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by the actor Amber Dixon Brenner; in it, she alleged that she and Salim Akil were involved in a 10-year relationship during which he physically and sexually abused her. The lawsuit describes graphic assaults; Brenner claimed Akil often slapped her, forced her to perform oral sex, threatened her life, and once sodomized her against her will on the patio outside his home on Martha’s Vineyard. (Salim Akil has denied the allegations in statements through his lawyers.) The complaint also contended that Akil had stolen portions of the 2015 script for Luv & Perversity in the East Village, which Brenner had written partially based on both the affection she felt and the abuse she says she endured during the relationship. Brenner alleged that he’d used her script for both OWN’s Love Is and Documenting Love, a series the Akils pitched to ABC but ultimately didn’t produce.
Though the show’s stated ambitions are now difficult to extricate from the allegations against one of its co-creators, Love Is once seemed like an earnest exploration of one couple’s relatably complicated romance. Set in ’90s Los Angeles, the series followed Nuri (Michele Weaver), a bubbly television writer who commits far more easily to her job than to any relationship, and Yasir (Will Catlett), an aspiring director who struggles to maintain both employment and honest relationships. While the season showcased the multiple barriers in their way, the two manage to navigate the pitfalls of love by leaning into its promises. Told primarily through extended flashbacks, the show was framed as a revisiting of the early years of Nuri and Yasir’s romance, timed to the pair’s 20th anniversary.
At the time of its premiere, Love Is registered to some critics (myself included) as saccharine but benign. Throughout the show’s run, the couple, who have been married since 1999, repeated a set of familiar refrains. They championed the importance of openness in art and emphasized the necessity of vulnerability in intimate relationships, as well as the rarity of finding programming that explores what happens after the oft-chased happy ending. “We know the guy gets the girl, the girl gets the guy, but you didn’t tell us how to do the rest of it!” Mara Brock Akil said of some post-’90s romances in an interview the pair did with Winfrey. “I wanna honestly answer it, because I think the audience is now ready for the truth. They may be able to handle the truth!”
For his part, Salim Akil underscored the importance of not adhering to strict blueprints when it comes to love: “I think that designing your own relationship for yourself, I think hopefully this will inspire people to do that.” In a television landscape characterized by darkness (both literal and figurative), it felt a tad discourteous—or at least unnecessary—to critically disparage the couple’s somewhat cloying rendering of their own romance. Why bother broadcasting an eye roll when schmaltz was likely the worst of it?
But following the news of Brenner’s allegations, it’s hard not to feel queasy when considering the show’s central dogma—and one plot point in particular. The actor’s claims about Akil are particularly disturbing given the prominence that sexual violence plays in the series. Toward the end of the season’s penultimate episode, Nuri wakes from a nightmare and tearfully confesses to Yasir that she was molested as a child. “We have more in common than you think, Nuri,” he replies. The two embrace, and the shared revelation is understood to have paved the way for a deeper kind of closeness. “Sometimes I ask for a sign to validate that I’m on the right path,” the present-day Nuri says in a reflection on the ’90s flashback. “That moment, God confirmed that we were meant for each other, not because we shared a similar experience but because we made space for each other that night to be honest and vulnerable.”
That Nuri and Yasir, two black protagonists in a romantic series, would admit to histories of sexual trauma without fear of judgment was a story line Brock Akil said she felt both attached to and challenged by. “This is probably one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made in my creative career, especially when I’m telling the inspired-by version of our story, to be fully honest about who we are as individuals … ” the writer-director said in one of the show’s behind-the-scenes web clips. “For both me and Salim being survivors of sexual abuse, it’s a big part of who we are. It’s also a part of the beauty, the resiliency of who we are, and why we fight so hard and why I’m so thankful to God that we found each other, because we’ve been able to heal through our relationship. You can not only heal from it—we can turn such pain into love, and we can also talk about how to survive it.”
But if, as Brenner alleges, Brock Akil has long been aware of her husband’s abuse, whose survival had the showrunner been prioritizing? In the Love Is rendering of the Akils’ relationship, the pair’s victimhood and attendant healing take precedence over any possible harm either has committed. It’s not uncommon to write one’s transgressions out of artistic retellings, but Love Is didn’t just fail to mention the alleged harms of its creators—it also profited from them. The show marketed itself as a love story unafraid to excavate the ghosts that haunt its protagonists; if the allegations of Salim’s behavior are indeed true, then Love Is missed opportunities for both interpersonal accountability and artistic achievement. In light of the series’ sentimental promotional script, the possibility of the former misstep feels especially pernicious.
Brock Akil has made only one cryptic reference to the Love Is news. In an Instagram post shared shortly after OWN’s statement about the show’s cancellation, she wrote, “I am saddened that this great group of #artists and #storytellers will no longer get to create together on this project in this way.” Brock Akil, who has been vocal about harassment in Hollywood following the Harvey Weinstein reports last year, has not addressed her husband’s alleged actions (or the claims that she had been contemporaneously aware of them).
For now, the future of both Brenner’s lawsuit and the Akils’ standing within Hollywood, and particularly black Hollywood, remains uncertain. Salim Akil is reportedly staying on as showrunner of Black Lightning after an internal investigation by Warner Bros., but Love Is has become impossible to separate from his alleged actions. Nuri and Yasir, however complex their traumas and their love for each other, do not exist except as projections of Mara and Salim. Whatever healing the characters may have attained—for themselves and for viewers—has been thwarted. “It’s a terrible situation that I was ever in the predicament of having to call him out and her out,” Brenner said to Deadline after the show’s cancellation. “It’s tragic to me that these things ever happened.”
As Mitt Romney prepares to join the U.S. Senate on Thursday, this much at least seems clear: He’s not worried about being friends with Donald Trump.
In a sharply critical op-ed published Tuesday night in The Washington Post—notably, one of the president’s least favorite news outlets—Romney took aim at what he considers to be the president’s defective moral character:
On balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office …
With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.
The immediate reactions to the op-ed were predictable enough, with Twitter pundits from across the political spectrum lining up to play their part.
[Read: Mitt Romney is not joining the resistance]
The MAGA crowd rushed to dismiss Romney as a sore loser consumed with resentment that he never got to be president. “I won big, and he didn’t,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “Jealously is a drink best served warm and Romney just proved it,” Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, wrote mysteriously.
Never Trump conservatives, meanwhile, rejoiced at the incoming senator’s gauntlet-throwing, with Bill Kristol declaring him “the leader of the Republican resistance to Trump.” And skeptics on the left rolled their eyes at the whole spectacle, predicting that Romney would end up voting for the president’s agenda when it really mattered.
This is not how Romney envisioned his arrival in Washington going when he launched his Senate bid back in February. In conversations over the past year with allies and advisers close to the then-candidate—many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly—I heard repeatedly that Romney was determined not to define himself by his roller-coasterlike relationship with Trump. He had his own ideas, his own agenda, and he wanted to devote his energies toward advancing a Republican alternative to Trumpism without wading into endless Twitter fights and feuds with Trump himself.
Romney didn’t necessarily shy away from criticizing the president on the campaign trail. In a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed published in June, he made essentially the same pledge he made Tuesday in the Post: that he would support Trump’s policies when he agreed with them, oppose them when he didn’t, and continue to speak out against the president’s behavior when he deemed it significantly “divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions” (as he put it in both op-eds).
Still, Romney had hoped to enter the Senate on at least relatively good terms with Trump, in the interest of working with the White House on areas of common ground. (In the Post, he expressed support for the president’s corporate tax cuts, his confrontational approach to China’s trade policies, and his support for criminal-justice reform.) But Romney was apparently alarmed enough by recent events in the White House to sacrifice that conciliatory approach in favor of speaking out.
“The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December,” Romney wrote in his op-ed. “The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a ‘sucker’ in world affairs all defined his presidency down.”
[Read: The foiled plot to kick Mitt Romney out of the Republican Party]
Romney, of course, must have known that Trump—obsessed as he is with loyalty—would interpret this op-ed as an assault. That he chose to write it anyway suggests, at the very least, that the incoming senator is not prioritizing his relationship with the president. Nor is he laboring under the delusion that he can simply ignore Trump as he goes about his business in the Senate. To some extent, everyone in Washington eventually gets sucked in to the Trump vortex. Romney, it seems, is preparing for that inevitability.
How long the senator from Utah will maintain this posture is anyone’s guess. But if he continues to keep the president at arm’s length, it’s unlikely he’ll face electoral repercussions back in Utah, where Trump has never been as popular as he is in other red states. According to polling data published recently by the Associated Press, 64 percent of voters in the state want to see Romney stand up to Trump in the Senate.
This is a nonideal scenario for Trump—and one he probably didn’t expect to face. After the 2016 election, in which Romney famously refused to endorse his party’s nominee, Trump made a show of dangling the secretary-of-state job in front of his adversary, only to yank it away.
“Judas Iscariot got 30 pieces of silver; Mitt Romney got a dish of frog legs at Jean-Georges. And even at that, it was the appetizer portion,” a high-ranking White House official boasted to my former colleague Molly Ball in 2017. “We’ve sort of taken out his larynx—how can he criticize [Trump] now?”
Two years later, Senator-elect Mitt Romney is coming to Washington, his larynx very much intact.
This article contains major spoilers for the film Destroyer.
Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, currently in limited release and expanding around the United States in January, at first presents as a rather typical murder mystery. It’s centered on a veteran LAPD detective, Erin Bell (played by Nicole Kidman), who has been hardened by her decades on the force and by some mysterious trauma in her past as an undercover cop. She’s tasked with investigating a death that ties into her time masquerading as a gang member years earlier, and soon finds herself on a crooked path of vengeance. At the same time, she’s trying to reconnect with her teenage daughter, who represents Erin’s last tether to a happier life.
But Destroyer, written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (who also co-wrote Kusama’s films Aeon Flux and The Invitation), has a surprising twist ending that complicates its pulpy story. Kusama has worked in many genres, helming excellent cult horror films such as The Invitation and Jennifer’s Body, the superb boxing movie Girlfight, and the Charlize Theron–starring Aeon Flux, which was a notable flop following its 2005 release. In an interview with The Atlantic, Kusama spoke about her aims in making Destroyer, the thinking behind the movie’s biggest plot twist, and the perils of being in so-called director jail after a box-office failure. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
David Sims: I know Destroyer was written by your collaborators, but what drew you to the project?
Karyn Kusama: Well, Phil [Hay] and Matt [Manfredi], whom I’ve worked with three times now, had started talking about this story around the same time they were talking about The Invitation. They were talking about a circular story—a structure that was going to somewhat aggressively be living between the present and the past, and it was all anchored by this incredibly complicated, damaged woman. And I would say the emotional heart of the film lived in her relationship to her daughter. [The writers] brought me in at the outline phase, and we talked through, scene by scene, what they hoped to achieve, and I pointed out areas that I’d be open to emphasizing or amplifying, and then areas that felt more like the business of telling the story. They wrote it pretty quickly once we got through those years of dinner-table conversations.
Sims: Was the script what drew Nicole Kidman to the project?
Kusama: It was. She had been given the script by her agent and had reached out to me, saying, “I don’t know if you’ve considered me, but I’d like you to.” It was really interesting, because, truth be told, until that moment, I hadn’t. And the script had been written for somebody who was 39 instead of 49.
Sims: Someone you’re aging up rather than down.
Kusama: Exactly. And yet, as I was talking to [Kidman], she brought so much inquiry into the process of talking about the script. She was never saying, “I know exactly what to do.” She was always saying, “I actually don’t know what to do, and that feeling is obsessing me.” That kind of creative thirst from her made me think, She is the one.
Sims: Was there the appeal that she’d never tackled a role like this?
Kusama: I think that really excited her. It’s true that she hadn’t, and yet for me, in entertainment circles, movies that people talk about wanting to evoke [are often films that Kidman has been in]—To Die For, The Others, movies that we still don’t see high-quality versions of very often. When she told me that she’d hunted down [the director] Yorgos Lanthimos and said, “I’ll do anything you give me to do,” and that’s how she ended up in [The Killing of a Sacred Deer], I just think that takes some platinum ovaries to say, “I’m your girl, and I trust your artistry.” She was refreshingly unstrategic and so attuned to the idea that [the movie] just may not work. Being open about that is a rare thing to encounter in the business.
Sims: So when you’re breaking this story, what are the things you want to emphasize?
Kusama: I was really hoping we feel a totality of character by the end of the film. That the mission of the film could be to slowly draw the audience into a layered and complex tale of crime and crime gone wrong. And that by the end of the film, we actually feel like we have uncovered some degree of the mystery that drives humans. That there was this human we got to spend time with, whom we know a little bit better.
Sims: What did you ask for from the screenwriters?
Kusama: A lot of the scenes I [initially] asked for were much more behavior-based. How does she eat? Her routines, her home. [But] a lot of that stuff couldn’t really live alongside the narrative thrust of a crime thriller [and so we moved away from that approach]. It would have been a really interesting movie if I had just focused primarily on simple, behavioral, routine-oriented tasks, but I wasn’t really looking to make Jeanne Dielman. I was more interested in seeing if I could crack this intellectual puzzle that [Hay and Manfredi] had first proposed.
Sims: The circular story.
Kusama: Yes, this idea that we watch the investigation of a crime until we understand that what we are really seeing is that the detective is hunting herself. That was just such a cool idea.
Sims: Because there are these two mysteries at play: There’s the one you’re talking about, where Erin Bell is investigating this murder that eventually we realize there’s more to [because she herself committed the crime and is trying to cover it up], and then there’s this mystery of what happened to her in the past. And you don’t want to put too much emphasis on one or the other.
Kusama: Right. Also, we make this assumption that time moves forward. And obviously the movie is attempting to give the audience a sense that we make assumptions about stories that are very linear or forward thinking, forward moving. But perhaps that’s not true of [all] stories. In Erin’s case, she has never moved on from the past. So she is constantly toggling, psychologically, between these two states of mind. You could argue there’s been [mental] degeneration, but there hasn’t been “progress” for her.
Sims: Especially in this genre, the cop mystery, we’re given this tableau of a crime scene and the dead body. There are clues, and Erin is on the case. Initially when you’re watching Destroyer, you understand that she is personally wrapped up in the case, and she’s not in a good headspace about it, but we still expect the conclusion of her figuring it out.
Kusama: That’s what our brains do the fast math on. And it’s interesting: Even right now where we are culturally, we believe progress moves forward, and then are despairing when it feels like we are moving backwards. But you could make an argument that there’s tremendous progress happening right now, and there have been progressive eras that were filled with crimes against humanity of every kind. On a story level [with Destroyer], I think you emotionally get to experience, in this pure, forward-marching way, Erin Bell being accountable to her daughter and taking some shred of personal responsibility.
Sims: That’s the progress.
Kusama: Yes, and if you watch the film a second time, you watch Erin make that progress and then go murder someone. On second viewing, we can get closer to the notion that we contain multitudes, and that good people can do bad things and good things. That there’s no simple reduction of the character.
Sims: Because there’s also the genre of a man or woman on a revenge mission, where the notion of progress is implied—that the audience will be satisfied at the end because the vengeance will be achieved, even if the character ends up dying or being broken spiritually.
Kusama: Vengeance movies are sent to me a lot, as if there’s something obviously pleasurable about them. I think unfortunately the sad truth of it is that [the genre is often] deeply unsatisfying. And so, for the most part, the feedback I’ve received is that it’s weird that, in Destroyer, the killing itself is a nonevent. There was no part of me that wanted to make it remotely heroic or emotionally satisfying. What I hope we are left with is the sad fact of [the murder Erin commits]. It tells us about who she is—a very damaged, morally compromised, broken person—and might ask us to reconsider the idea of vengeance in general.
Sims: When the story was being developed, were you thinking about challenging the tropes of a cop movie?
Kusama: I wanted the movie to be satisfying on that [genre] level. I’m not a snob about movie culture in many ways. I think [David Fincher’s] Seven is one of the greatest works of art and a statement about the impending apocalyptic state of the world. I see a lot of possibility in these popular forms. And yet ultimately I feel like I’ve had such profound art experiences, and I’m trying to find a marriage of the two. I’m starting to feel like if you can reach people working in both [populist and art-film] frequencies, there’s a possibility that the work persists. That’s ultimately my goal with all of these films. So there are going to be films that I myself don’t want to remember, like Aeon Flux, but then movies like Jennifer’s Body are getting some reevaluation as they age.
Sims: I think Jennifer’s Body is quite well remembered at this point.
Kusama: Which is funny, because it was just completely dismissed at the time, and I was at that moment of “You know what? I’m learning to move on.” Which is a skill that one must cultivate if you’re going to stay alive in this business. So I think I always start from a personal place. For me, The Invitation or Destroyer or Jennifer’s Body or Girlfight, all of them started as an emotional pull toward something.
Sims: Did you perceive a difficulty in getting your next movie made after Jennifer’s Body? Because there’s the idea of a director being in “movie jail” [where it’s hard to get hired after a string of box-office failures]. Do you think that’s still very much a concept?
Kusama: Absolutely. I think it’s pretty real. I think it’s a question of how you internalize it or don’t. For me, there was a point where I was like, “You know what? The outside world may perceive me as being in movie jail, [but] there’s a lot of work I want to do, and there’s a lot that I can do in the meantime to get me to that work.” For me, it was enormously helpful to start directing high-quality television.
Sims: AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, which you directed several episodes of, is one of the best shows of the past 10 years.
Kusama: That show completely changed my understanding of what you could do with TV. I was such a collaborator with the creators [Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers], and I went back every season and felt so close to what they were investigating. Halt isn’t some secondary career [to me]; it’s an amazingly rich show that gives me so much to work with. Finding shows that give you that kind of reinvigorated attachment to interesting stories, interesting characters, playing with form and visuals and language … it’s just a really interesting exercise. [I did] that for a couple of years when I was trying to get all these indie films off the ground that no one wanted to finance, including The Invitation. And then I got to make that movie, where I had final-cut [rights] again, the same as with Destroyer. And I was like, “Oh, I see a pattern developing. I should just figure out ways where I can work with a strong sense of creative authority.” It makes me a better collaborator, a better listener, a more attuned filmmaker.
President Donald Trump’s Vietnam-era draft deferments made headlines again last week when The New York Times reported that, as a favor to Trump’s father, a Queens podiatrist may have written the letter that led to Trump’s I-Y medical deferment. That the story dropped on the same day as Trump made his first visit as commander in chief to American military forces in a conflict zone certainly makes for some interesting optics. But Trump is hardly unique. By the time Trump received his deferment, young men from privileged backgrounds had come to expect they would be able to avoid active-duty military service. His story says less about the president as an individual than about the choices America has made as a society about who should bear the burden of military service.
More than 15 million men of Trump’s generation sought to avoid active-duty military service, including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Dan Quayle. Up to 60 percent of men in the Vietnam generation took active measures to qualify for a deferment from the draft, while up to 90 percent of enlistments in the National Guard were draft-motivated by 1970. The idea that a privileged young man’s father may have leveraged connections with a local medical professional—who just happened to rent office space in a Trump building—to get a medical excuse for his son seems, as the military historian David Kieran tweeted, “an unsurprising nothingburger.”
American men have been consistent in their ambivalence to serving in the military. Through most of American history, men who chose peacetime service were viewed as the bottom of the social barrel. One soldier, stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1942, observed that the popular perception of the American soldier was “still a National Guard jag staggering drunkenly down the street at 2 a.m.” The situation in wartime, of course, was supposed to be different. The ideology of civic republicanism defined military service as a masculine obligation. Male citizens had the duty to serve in an emergency. Most American men, however, from Thomas Paine’s “summer soldiers” who vanished from the winter encampment at Valley Forge up until the present, have tended to reject military service as a patriotic obligation. Conscription during wartime has been necessary because men have rarely been eager to put themselves into mortal danger, regardless of the cause.
During World War II, government agencies and private corporations launched a massive propaganda campaign to promote the importance of soldiering. Organizations from the War Department to the American Red Cross to Coca-Cola used heroic imagery to equate military service with masculine strength. In 1942, Harold Gauer, who did public relations for the National Youth Administration in Washington, D.C., was reminded by a friend that soldiers had become “the personification of the cause,” giving “America a beautiful personal stake—emotional stake—in [the war’s] success.” The friend urged Gauer to leverage the symbol of the soldier. On a wider scale, such imagery was necessary because neither the federal government nor private interests could persuade Americans that they should fight out of political obligation.
Many men of military age internalized the messages that connected manhood with military service. Veterans who have given oral histories repeatedly return to the theme of joining up to become men. Although Robert McClure’s father obtained a deferment for him, as the oldest of nine children on a western Kentucky farm, he decided to join up anyway. “I was afraid that people would think that I was afraid to go … and I didn’t want people to think that,” he later told a Library of Congress interviewer. Ralph Chase of Connecticut worried that he would be “blackballed” as a coward if he did not join up. Such stories form the backbone of the “greatest generation” narrative.
Yet this narrative, no matter how ubiquitous during and since the war, did not capture the full range of men’s experiences. Many others either outright rejected the connection between manhood and military service or simply failed to let it dictate their decisions. Close to 18,000 conscientious objectors chose either alternative public service or federal prison rather than be drafted into the armed forces.
More commonly, men tried to avoid induction in any way they could. After Arkansan John L. McRee married one of two sisters in a double ceremony, he learned that his new brother-in-law had received a marriage deferment from the next board over. He appealed his own I-A draft classification. Gauer and his friend Robert Bloch, who later wrote Psycho, spent much of 1942 scheming to keep Gauer from being conscripted. Bloch’s circle of friends believed he married as a way to disqualify himself from the draft. Even the U.S. Military Academy at West Point developed a reputation as a haven from combat. Once World War II ended, more than 20 percent of cadets left their training before being commissioned.
[Read: Trump’s ‘Da Nang Dick’ tweets and the definition of hypocrisy]
Nevertheless, as avenues for deferments narrowed, most men grudgingly acquiesced to the Selective Service. Eighty percent of men born in the 1920s ultimately served during World War II, creating an unusual degree of shared experience and contributing to the civic republican myth of the “greatest generation.”
After World War II, the military, and the conscription system used to man it, retooled to fight the Cold War. Within the Cold War environment, the Selective Service defined certain civilian roles, including careers in science, engineering, and fatherhood, as important to defeating communism. Although his congressional mandate was to secure military personnel, by the late 1950s, Director of Selective Service Lewis B. Hershey had expanded his agency to guide the choices of civilian men through a policy called manpower channeling.
Under this policy, deferments would be used to encourage—or bribe—men to take civilian jobs in the national interest. “From the deferment of men to do, came the transition to defer to train to do,” Hershey explained. Rather than conscript all men into military service, Hershey advocated modifying the meaning of deferments. Instead of signaling that a man had little role to play in national defense, deferments should signify the vital security nature of civilian work. His agency made student and occupational deferments widely available to middle-class and elite men.
The military certainly would have taken Trump had he not obtained his deferments, but by the time the Vietnam War escalated, the system that administered the draft was set up to provide privileged men like Trump with exit strategies. Until 1965, college students, graduate students, huge numbers of men in white-collar occupations, fathers, married men without children, and those with minor medical ailments could be deferred. These deferments overwhelmingly went to men with means—those who could afford college and graduate school, who could support families, and who could pay for medical care.
As during World War II, when military needs escalated, the Selective Service tightened its deferment criteria. Trump, for example, sought the I-Y because deferments for graduate school had become largely unavailable by the time he graduated from college. But after more than a decade of being able to gain deferments relatively easily, men like Trump had come to expect them.
Trump may have exploited a system to obtain a medical deferment he did not deserve. It’s possible that his expectation of draft avoidance led him to seek out a sympathetic medical professional. If so, his actions would have been morally suspect, but not unusual. The more than 15 million men of Trump’s generation who avoided military service built on long-standing historical ambivalence, and they worked a system that had been designed to devalue such service. Trump potentially acted out of self-interest and entitlement, but he grew up within a system that encouraged both.
[Read: The military has become Trump’s favorite prop]
That system drowned under its own weight, killing the draft in 1973. In the political and moral morass that the Vietnam War became, conscription no longer provided an effective fighting force. Poor morale, racial conflict, and widespread drug use among soldiers who did not want to fight had pushed the armed forces, in the words of Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., to a “state approaching collapse.” But the draft also ended because activists on both the left and right came together to oppose it. While civil-rights and antiwar activists claimed that men had the right not to be drafted into an imperialist war they despised, libertarian economists persuaded Nixon that the draft was an unfair “time tax” exacted inequitably from conscripts. In the eyes of men like Milton Friedman, conscription was akin to slavery. By 1973, when the draft ended, the right to free choice trumped civic-republican obligation.
The inequities of the Cold War draft, made possible by the inequitable availability of deferments, may have ramifications in today’s all-volunteer force. A study recently published in Armed Forces & Society suggests that the descendants of men who were conscripted to fight in Vietnam, men who were disproportionately of minority and white working-class backgrounds, were more likely to enlist in the all-volunteer force than the children of men who avoided service. Even though the modern public almost universally reveres soldiering as an important profession, at any point in time, 99.5 percent of us leave it for someone else to perform.
Trump’s quest for deferments, therefore, was emblematic of a wider social and political shift in the last quarter of the 20th century. Republicans and Democrats both came to center their agendas on the rights of the individual, albeit in different ways. Trump, by himself, is in no way responsible for stratification in American society or the uneven nature of enlistment in the U.S. military. But understanding the context for his draft avoidance helps us understand the modern military. Trump was a product of the system in which he grew up, and if we don’t like how that system functioned, then we need to think about how we can avoid the same problems moving forward.
SARAJEVO—Few national leaders would call their own country an “impossible state.” Fewer still would actively advocate for it to be broken up. Almost none would risk a decades-old peace accord to do so. And then there is Bosnia’s Milorad Dodik.
“I am a Serb ... Bosnia is only my place of employment,” Dodik proclaimed just a day after his inauguration as Bosnia’s head of state. A Serb nationalist, he has publicly called for the statelet he comes from, Republika Srpska, to break away from Bosnia. And, as Bosnian president, he has said he will not use his Bosnian passport for overseas travel. It’s these kinds of outbursts—almost Trumpian in their ability to provoke—for which he has become notorious.
The story of Dodik’s rise is one of a far cannier political operator than his brash public image might suggest. He was once hailed as a “breath of fresh air” by Madeleine Albright; she, like others, hoped he symbolized a clean break from the war criminals who had ruled the territory. Two decades on, though, he is seen as a nationalist enfant terrible threatening a fragile peace. What changed, and how?
In some ways, Dodik’s story is a familiar one, that of a politician changing his stripes when the moment suits, and courting Russia as an ally. But here in Bosnia, the stakes are higher, not just for the people who live here, but for the legacy of a significant American foreign-policy achievement, too. By taking aim at the Bosnian state, Dodik is, in effect, targeting the Dayton Accords, one of the signature peace deals of the 20th century. When signed at an American air base in 1995, the agreement ended what had been Europe’s most devastating conflict since the Second World War, one which had cost more than 100,000 lives. (Unsurprisingly, Dodik’s threats to undermine the accords have earned him U.S. sanctions.)
[Read: Has international intervention helped or hurt Bosnia?]
The Dayton Accords left all sides dissatisfied and nurturing grievances, but brokered a brittle peace. In the process, they shaped modern Bosnia—the country’s entire constitution is an annex of the document—by cleaving it into two ethnically based “entities” of roughly equal size. These are the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, home predominantly to Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats, and the Bosnian Serb–dominated Republika Srpska. Both entities have their own president, their own prime minister, and the trappings of extensive autonomy, with a weak central government in the federal capital Sarajevo presiding over them. There is no hard border, but Bosnia’s various communities largely live separate lives.
Besides the country’s presidency, Dodik has also for the past eight years led Republika Srpska, which encompasses much of the country’s north and east (Republika Srpska should not be confused with Serbia, a separate country with whom its people share ethnic, linguistic, and religious commonalities). He appears to have grand designs for the territory: like many Bosnian Serbs, Dodik views Republika Srpska as a state-in-waiting, whose full sovereignty is stymied only by the Dayton Accords, which clearly forbid its often postponed secession from Bosnia.
In October, Bosnians elected three members of the country’s presidency, each representing its main ethnic groups; the chairmanship of the presidency rotates between the trio. For the next eight months, it’s Dodik’s turn in the driver’s seat, and he has started in predictably inflammatory style. Before his inauguration in November, Dodik brought the flag of Republika Srpska to Sarajevo, where he planted it outside his new office in the presidency building. The act seemed calculated to spark anger, given that Republika Srpska has flirted with secession more than once. Politicians from the Bosniak and Croat communities demanded that the flag be removed. Dodik not only stood firm but upped the ante: If Republika Srpska’s flag was not displayed in the building, he said, he would refuse to hold presidency sessions.
Beyond that bellicosity, Dodik is taking legislative steps to further his cause, too. A new reform package consolidates even more powers in Republika Srpska’s hands. For example, the statelet might get its own intelligence service alongside its burgeoning, militarized police force.
Banja Luka, a Serb city in northern Bosnia, flaunts its alter ego as the capital of this state-in-waiting. The red, blue, and white flag of Republika Srpska is ubiquitous here; few Bosnian flags grace its streets, and the city’s museum and theater are proudly prefixed with the word national.
“Many young people in Republika Srpska today have no conception of any other political reality,” remarks Miloš Šolaja, a political-science professor at the University of Banja Luka, adding that some of his students had never even been to Sarajevo. “This mental geography is very strong; it’s as if there’s an iron curtain in the brain.”
This part of what is now northern Bosnia is where Dodik cut his teeth; he grew up in Laktaši, a town of 35,000 just north of Banja Luka. He played for the local basketball team and went on to lead the municipality during the twilight of socialist Yugoslavia. Locals are proud of their prodigal son. “He protects Republika Srpska,” said a resident, Branka Trninić, at a bus stop. “I admire his energy and resolve.”
“Dodik is the only politician I remember seeing on billboards as a kid, and whose face remains on them today,” says Ljupko Mišeljić, a 22-year-old student. That longevity may be thanks to Dodik’s capacity for reinvention.
He first came to power as Republika Srpska’s prime minister in 1998, in opposition to the war criminals then holding sway over the territory. In subsequent years, Dodik had some success in cleaning up Republika Srpska’s image, offering to cooperate with war crimes tribunals and hand over war criminals.
“Milorad Dodik was indeed a breath of fresh air,” says Valentin Inzko, the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, speaking in his office in Sarajevo and referencing Albright’s characterization. Inzko and his team are tasked by the international community with ensuring adherence to the Dayton Accords and that Bosnia does not descend again into violence.
But before long, the Serb’s stance was changing. “Dodik has said ... publicly that when he used moderate, constructive speech, nobody supported him, that he switched because in order to gain votes, you have to use ethnic, nationalist rhetoric,” Inzko told me. “In a way, he was right: Since then, he has won every election.”
By 2013, Dodik was defending Radovan Karadžić, a former leader of Republika Srpska who was found guilty by an international tribunal of committing genocide at Srebrenica, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed. When a new student dormitory in the town of Pale was named in honor of Karadžić in 2016, Dodik unveiled the plaque bearing Karadžić’s name. The Bosnian leader has also frequently clashed with Inzko and his predecessors. (Neither the office of the Bosnian presidency nor Dodik’s political party, SNSD, responded to multiple requests for comment.)
[Read: Radovan ]Karadžić’s day of reckoning
Dodik isn’t just fighting battles at home, either. While he supports Bosnia’s bid to join the European Union, he is opposed to the country joining NATO, which decided last month to start a membership action plan for Bosnia. It’s no surprise, then, that Dodik is characterized in the West as pro-Russian, a label he flaunts. In March, he welcomed the Night Wolves, a pro-Kremlin biker group, to Bosnia, and in October even called for Republika Srpska to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea. These ties with the Kremlin are becoming more and more formalized: The weekend after bringing his flag to Sarajevo, Dodik headed to St. Petersburg to open Republika Srpska’s trade legation in the city.
Russia’s ties to Dodik need not be such a cause for alarm, argues Dimitar Bechev, the director of the European Policy Institute—a think tank based in Sofia, Bulgaria—and the author of a book about Russia’s role in the Balkans. In an email exchange, Bechev noted that Moscow’s influence over Dodik means the Kremlin also has the ability to restrain him. For now, though, the Bosnian president’s ties to Russia appear to be paying off for him politically, allowing him to show that he has Moscow’s blessing. As a result, there are few serious challengers to the tight control he and his allies have over Republika Srpska today.
Dodik also has Bosnia’s political setup to thank for amplifying his success. Many analysts of Bosnian politics now believe that Dayton may have facilitated the rise of its loudest detractor: By institutionalizing ethnicity on every level of government, Bosnia’s political structure works against politicians who try to appeal across ethnic divides. As one major study of Dodik’s political language put it, his “rhetorical politics is made possible by the unresolved legacy of the Bosnian War.”
The response to one case in particular is instructive. In March, David Dragičević, a 21-year-old man, was found dead in Banja Luka. The local authorities insisted that his death was an accident; Dragičević’s father suspected murder, accusing the police and prosecutor’s office of protecting his son’s killers. A protest movement was born, under the name Pravda za Davida (“Justice for David”), holding daily vigils and railing against an official culture of impunity. But the protests failed to become a real political movement capable of challenging the authorities. Local officials who showed support for the protests said they quickly found themselves demoted after Dodik’s election win in October.
[Read: Denying the Bosnia genocide, despite DNA evidence]
On Christmas Day, the Bosnian leader’s allies in Banja Luka went on the offensive; police cracked down hard on the protest movement, cordoning off a square in the city center where vigils for Dragičević had been regularly held. Several opposition politicians, journalists, and protest leaders, including Dragičević’s father, were detained. Standoffs between the police and remaining protesters continue.
Some vocal Bosnian Serbs complain of a “siege mentality” eagerly encouraged by the authorities and a pliant local media. “Dodik turned our frustration during the 1990s into conspiracy theories, which paralyze any rational discussion about the country’s current situation,” explains Srdjan Puhalo, a Banja Luka–based psychologist and popular blogger who covered the protests from the start. “Those who want a strong leader vote for him, and those who don’t simply leave.”
Šolaja, the University of Banja Luka professor, says this is not an accidental response to events. “At first I thought [Dodik] was just good at improvising, but now I get the impression that there’s some system [to his provocative statements].”
There certainly is a system: Dodik’s media savviness has blossomed into a multimillion- dollar PR operation. Not only did his party hire two former Trump campaign associates as lobbyists, but the Republika Srpska government has spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying in the United States, reportedly among the highest such figures in Europe. Dodik may well be aiming to bypass international representatives in Bosnia, such as Inzko, and appeal to Washington directly, or he could be trying to remove the American sanctions against him (which the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Bosnia has confirmed will remain).
“This was something Dodik and other Bosnian politicians learned long ago, but was only mentioned in Western politics recently: that elections are won by emotions, not by issues,” says Srećko Latal, a Bosnian political analyst. “For many years, we’ve been told that Bosnia has been falling behind the West,” he adds, “but it’s actually ahead of the curve.”
As a narcotics cop, Kevin Simmers locked up hundreds of drug users. In Jeremy Raff’s documentary and the accompanying article he published in November, Simmers explained how his ideology on drug treatment and punishment changed when his 18-year-old daughter became addicted to opioids: “I now think the whole drug war is total bullshit,” Simmers said.
This article was informative and deeply touching for several reasons. I used to live in Hagerstown, and I remember Kevin Simmers. I’m grieved to learn of his loss and offer to him my deepest condolences. When the YMCA was located downtown, we played basketball there two to three times a week for years in what was known as the “Lunch Bunch.” I was involved in the trafficking of illicit drugs and when the Feds from New Jersey came to apprehend me, Kevin was involved as a member of the local drug task force. Now my own daughter is addicted to opioids and I’m praying, hoping, searching for something that will help her.
Ray Archie
Killeen, Texas
The article “A Narcotics Officer Ends His War on Drugs” offers a false choice: treatment versus incarceration. I’m a doctor who specializes in treating drug addicts. I use medication-assisted treatment, but the No. 1 reason my heroin-addicted patients come for help is the fear of going to jail. Drug courts are one of the most successful programs for hard-core addicts, and they work because the threat of jail gets cooperation from addicts who otherwise wouldn’t care about treatment. Most addicts and alcoholics don’t want to quit, but if we use the threat of jail to get them into treatment and keep them there, many of them gradually realize that living clean and sober is far preferable. This is happening all across the country. The pro-legalization forces want Americans to believe tough drug laws work against treatment, and this story pushes that false message. We need tough drug laws not to punish but to convince addicts to get the help they need.
Tough drug laws as a means of getting addicts into treatment and keeping them there are the best hope for helping the nation’s huge number of heroin addicts.
Ed Gogek, M.D.
Prescott, Ariz.
My family lives near the border between Baja California and California. Officer Simmers knows what we all know: As long as drugs are illegal, we force users into deadly situations, and innocent people die daily either at the hands of the cartel or at the tendrils of addiction. Of course, as soon as the drugs are legal, all of the usual profit takers line up for the dollars: corporations and politicians. I believe in capitalism, but the war is lost. Legalize the drugs and move forward. We will never end these stories, but drug legalization may reduce the stigma and alleviate some of the guilt and pain. Thank you to Brooke and her family.
Brenda J. Martin
San Diego, Calif.
Opioids hit home, but the ramifications of the drug war are felt every day in narco-terrorized regions south of the U.S. border. Prohibition causes more death than the prohibited substances. Why can’t we manage drug use like a symptom that should be harm minimized? Drugs should be controlled completely without capitalistic actors selling them. As ridiculous as it may seem, the only way to really control a substance is to be the only seller of it, and that means our government should monopolize the sale of these controlled substances in a way to reduce their usage and minimize their harm while denying black-market money going to cruel and cunning capitalistic actors. The Drug Enforcement Administration should sell all controlled substances as a non-capitalistic agent and work with scientists, doctors, and treatment professionals to ensure people who use controlled substances do so as little as possible, through direct price control and professional treatment programs.
James Kim
Los Angeles, Calif.
Sergeant Kevin Simmers has suffered a terrible loss in the overdose death of his daughter, and as a father my heart goes out to him. I also commend him for being brave enough to reflect on his part in the completely misguided and unjust War on Drugs.
That said, it cannot go unnoticed that Mr. Simmers (at least by the details presented in the story) failed to recognize the very real damage that his police work did to others—specifically African Americans—until tragedy visited his life.
Nearly 50 years of the War on Drugs and we have accomplished nothing. The effort was never meant to “help” anyone, but rather to utilize a new tool in ruling over the poor and the nonwhite.
I sincerely hope that Mr. Simmers continues to speak out about the damage of the drug war, with some emphasis on the falsehoods used to justify it in the first place.
Joshua C. Powers
Lawrence, Kan.
You might have recently noticed Queen Latifah, Ted Danson, and a Jonas brother in a series of TV commercials, encouraging you to take care of yourself with Cigna health insurance in 2019. They’re part of a sweeping campaign that also includes a website and sponsored Twitter trending topic, and that gives the impression Cigna has invested a lot of money in associating itself with the neuroses that haunt Americans as they look to ways to improve themselves in the new year: too much work, a bad diet, not enough adventure. The website has infographics about mental health, articles about dietary dangers, and the general vibe of self-improvement that often permeates end-of-year advertising.
Attempts like this abound to influence consumer behavior by reminding you that it’s almost next year, and you’re still the same imperfect person you’ve always been. On December 31, Target’s website featured an array of fitness products under “Wellness for the Win,” which sat directly under an assortment of New Year’s Eve party supplies. Equinox, a chain of high-end gyms, abandoned its normally sleek, neutral aesthetic for a colorful, blinking GIF advertising its New Year’s Eve membership sale.
With New Year’s resolutions, the commodification of inadequacy can be explicit in a way that might seem rude during most of the year, and the message is clear: You’ve got some work you should be doing, and these companies have some related products they’d like to show you. New year, new you, new gym membership!
[Read: New Year’s resolutions are predictions about the future]
New Year’s resolutions have a long history in many forms, dating back at least 4,000 years to ancient Babylon, where people celebrated the feast of Akitu and promised to repay debts and return things they’d borrowed in an attempt to please fickle deities. Versions of the practice were also common in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and the concept was carried into modern cultures by religious traditions like Christian watchnight services and the Jewish High Holidays, which emphasize taking stock of the previous year and making amends to move forward.
As American culture has become more secular, resolutions have been mostly stripped of their religious origins, pivoting instead to focus on the self. That’s been especially true since the self-help and personal fitness booms of the 1960s and ’70s, when self-improvement practices that had previously been confined to the fringe started seeping into mainstream use. Forty-four percent of American adults intend to make resolutions for 2019, according to a poll conducted in December by NPR, PBS Newshour, and Marist.
In the United States, self-improvement often boils down to being thin and amassing wealth. In the same poll, almost a third of those intending to make resolutions singled out eating habits, exercise, or weight as the problems they hope to fix, and another 10 percent chose finance-related goals. Down the list, being kinder, becoming more spiritual, or worrying less received only faint support. Marist’s historical polling data shows that Americans have been making the most popular resolutions in roughly similar numbers for years.
Not coincidentally, these resolutions are also the centerpieces of most resolution-dependent advertising. No data exist on how American commerce influences resolution choice, so on a statistical level, it’s a bit of a chicken/egg issue: Do we choose these resolutions because that’s how resolutions are marketed to us as a concept, or are these ideas central in year-end marketing because the people creating ads have noticed that’s where people are already trending?
At the very least, it’s worth noting that the top resolutions tend to be the ones for which it’s easiest to market products or services. Gym memberships, workout clothes, and meal-delivery plans are easily targeted to someone who feels pressure to change their physical self, but it’s less clear what kind of subscription pairs with the intention to be kinder. I’m sure someone’s working on it.
[Read: The chart that explains why your New Year’s resolution will (probably) fail]
At this point, American conceptions of what self-improvement might entail are so static that it probably doesn’t matter whether the resolutions or the pressure from brands came first. Many Americans feel constant anxiety about whether they might be too fat or poor, and they can suffer real-world consequences for failing to lose weight or make more money. It’s not hard to imagine why people might choose those options when prompted to explain what they don’t like about themselves, and that they might buy things meant to assuage their fears of being unable to change. So much of modern cultural messaging about those changes comes from brands. The solutions they offer are their products.
In reality, though, changing yourself is hard work even when the results are worth it, and as few as 8 percent of people will accomplish their New Year’s resolutions. In particular, research suggests that lasting weight loss is nearly impossible for most people who go on diets, and the long-term health implications of the yo-yo cycle of losing and gaining weight could damage your well-being in the long term.
Just because resolutions usually don’t work doesn’t mean everyone is doomed to their worst habits, though. Research shows consistently that habit change is possible, even if it’s not easy. To be successful, motivation for the change has to come from personal desire, which is a problem for resolution marketing as a concept. Brands may successfully get you to buy products, and those products might even be useful for habit change in some way. But if your desire to change is prompted by an arbitrary date on the calendar or the appearance of a good deal, those dollars are almost certainly wasted.
The end of one year and the beginning of the next feels for many like a natural time to take stock of well-being progress, so maybe it’s not necessary to throw out the concept of New Year’s resolutions as a whole, even if “New Year, New You” has long since reached its sell-by date. I’ve been new to a job or new to a city, but the person who showed up to those things on the first day was always just me, to my occasional disappointment. And that’s totally fine. Accepting the fundamental fact of myself has allowed me to take stock of the things I do and to change the things within my control that I dislike. None of that has involved buying something on sale.
The moment has arrived at last. A woman in a hospital gown steels herself, ready to push. A nearby monitor displays her baby’s heart rate in big, neon numbers. A nurse in crisp scrubs coos in her ear, offering words of encouragement, advice. The scene would resemble any other delivery room if it weren’t for the view outside the window: the soft curvature of the blue Earth against the blackness of space, 250 miles below.
Delivering a child in microgravity may sound like science fiction. But for one start-up, it’s the future.
SpaceLife Origin, based in the Netherlands, wants to send a pregnant woman, accompanied by a “trained, world-class medical team,” in a capsule to the space above Earth. The mission would last 24 to 36 hours. Once the woman delivered the child, the capsule would return to the ground. “A carefully prepared and monitored process will reduce all possible risks, similar to Western standards as they exist on Earth for both mother and child,” SpaceLife Origin’s website states. The company has set the year 2024 as the target date for the trip.
The concept raises a host of questions—we’ll get to those later—but perhaps the most immediate may be this: Why?
Egbert Edelbroek, one of the company’s executives, says spacefaring childbirth is part of creating an insurance policy for the human species. Should a catastrophe someday render Earth unlivable—climate change, Edelbroek suspects—he hopes the human species will move off-world and settle elsewhere. Wherever they land, they will plant roots, build homes, and start families.
“Human settlements outside of Earth would be pretty pointless without learning how to reproduce in space,” Edelbroek says.
Fair enough. If human beings someday venture far beyond this planet and land on another—not to visit but to stay—it’s not impossible to imagine that a pregnancy could occur during the journey or on the ground. One can picture toddlers in puffy spacesuits running around on Mars, the oxygen packs on their backs rattling with each leap.
Of course, this future assumes that human beings have resolved many other challenges that come with traveling to other worlds. Scientists are still trying to figure out how to keep adult humans healthy during long stays on the International Space Station, which is indeed in space, but still within Earth’s magnetic field, an invisible bubble that protects the station and its inhabitants from the worst of space radiation. On top of that, the technology for deep-space travel doesn’t exist. Human beings are a long way from becoming an interplanetary species, and reproduction is just one rung on a very tall ladder.
Edelbroek says he has met with private spaceflight companies that may be willing to launch the delivery mission, and with people who will pay for it. He’s visited survivalist communities in the United States; he believes “preppers” are more likely to appreciate the company’s ethos, and some are quite wealthy, spending thousands of dollars on high-end shelters. He’s even chatted with some women who are interested in claiming the historic title, for themselves and their offspring.
Let’s say Edelbroek gets all three: money, a rocket, and a volunteer. What happens then?
Long before anyone gets off the ground, SpaceLife Origin will face a barrage of questions from regulatory authorities, perhaps even from more than one nation. Commercial space travel is not confined by national borders, and it’s not uncommon for customers in one country to pay the government of another to launch their payloads. SpaceLife Origin’s ambitious mission could include an American woman, in a Japanese capsule, on an Indian rocket, accompanied by a team of doctors from multiple nations.
In this scenario, it’s difficult to say who will regulate what. The pregnant woman’s actions may be subject to regulation, too. In the United States, women are harassed and even arrested for leaving their kids unattended, shamed for apparently putting young children in danger. Space is far more dangerous than the sidewalk outside a store. Would the law consider a woman’s decision to give birth there a criminal act?
[Read: “Free range” parenting’s unfair double standard]
Even if SpaceLife Origin finds a willing participant—and Edelbroek stresses that she will be calling the shots—would it be ethical for the company to send her? The doctors who would supposedly accompany her, too, might risk violating the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.” It seems difficult to make the case that helping launch a pregnant woman into space follows this promise.
“Most of the pregnant women I know feel great comfort in knowing that they have access to medical help if there’s an issue during a delivery—or prior to a delivery, or after a delivery,” says Virginia Wotring, a professor of space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “Putting people in a situation where they are many, many, many miles away from medical help does not seem to be advisable.”
Let’s set aside, for a moment, the question of how SpaceLife will time labor contractions with a rocket launch to get their participant into space just in time for delivery. Astronauts usually experience three times the force of gravity during the ascent to orbit. In the case of a botched launch and emergency landing, that force triples. It’s unclear what effect such extreme pressure could have on a pregnant person.
There’s little in the literature to guide us on what may transpire in orbit. Experiments on reproduction have been conducted in space, but they have been limited to mice, fish, lizards, and invertebrates. In the 1990s, pregnant rats gave birth after a week on a U.S. space-shuttle mission. Each rat pup was born with an underdeveloped vestibular system, the inner-ear structure that allows mammals to balance and orient themselves. As scientists suspected, the absence of gravity had thrown the pups off-kilter. The animals’ sense of balance recovered not long after birth, but the lesson was clear: Animal infants need gravity.
Imagine childbirth without it. The expectant woman would be unable to take walks to ease the pain of labor, to take advantage of gravity’s downward tug as she pushed. The thought of administering an epidural seems terrifying; the anesthesiologist would have to make sure her patient didn’t float away as she carefully weaved a needle toward the spinal cord. Bodily fluids would clump into blobs and glide through the capsule.
When the time came, the baby’s first breaths would suck in the air of a sealed metal box, composed of oxygen made by complex artificial systems, not plant life. “A baby might be breathing a gas mixture that is different from Earth air,” Wotring said. “Adult humans seem to handle it just fine, but if you’re using your lungs for the very first time, would it make a difference? I don’t know.”
After the delivery is over, mom and baby would have to survive the descent back to Earth. For current astronauts, that involves a bone-rattling free fall through the atmosphere, followed by a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert. On the ground, the team would be faced with yet another unusual question: Where do you get a birth certificate for someone born in space?
[Read: A birth certificate is a person’s first possession]
The list of unknowns goes on and on. SpaceLife Origin seems like an unusual player in such a perilous endeavor. The top three employees named on the company’s website are business executives with no experience in medicine or spaceflight, including Edelbroek, whose biography describes him as a “serial entrepreneur.” Five advisers are listed, two of them women. (Edelbroek says the company is working with dozens more, but declined to name them.) Edelbroek says his interest stems in part from his experience as a sperm donor, which led him to father several children and learn about in vitro fertilization techniques. Another of SpaceLife Origin’s missions involves launching sperm and egg cells into space to form an embryo and returning it to Earth for implantation.
Gerrit-Jan Zwenne, one of SpaceLife Origin’s advisers and Edelbroek’s cousin, is convinced that if this company doesn’t do it, another will. Zwenne, a law professor at Leiden University, cited the case of He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who announced in late November, to the world’s surprise, the alleged birth of healthy twins whose embryos he had altered with a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. The news prompted international outcry. His work, conducted in near-secrecy, flouted conventional norms in gene-editing technology, a fast-moving field that has avoided attempts at modifying human embryonic cells.
“I think at some point this will happen anyway, so we better do it in a very open and transparent manner,” Zwenne says. “If it’s somebody working on his own, in isolation, not in contact with the rest of the world, you may discover that something happens and you can’t reverse it.”
We’ve gotten used to so much in Donald Trump’s two years in office, from the cruelty of his immigration policies to his childlike understanding of international trade, and from his apparent fear of Vladimir Putin to his whipsawing of the financial markets. Too many Americans have simply become accustomed to the president’s antics as a normal part of the background noise of their lives. Sometimes Trump’s disjointed thoughts are merely an embarrassment; at other times, he makes dangerous policy changes or wipes out great amounts of wealth in a tweet.
Now, however, the president has opened a Pandora’s box by escalating his attacks on senior U.S. military leaders. No American president has ever dared risk the American civil-military relationship for less cause or with such childish malice.
American citizens don’t think much about civil-military relations. That’s good: It’s a sign of a healthy polity. We don’t worry about tanks rolling up North Capitol Street or paratroopers lolling about in Lafayette Square. We’re not that kind of country. But the president has taken a dangerous path, excoriating retired military leaders who criticize him and lavishing praise and make-believe pay raises on the active-duty military voters who he believes support him. A precious heritage built on the dual pillars of military obedience to civilians and civilian respect for military professionals is now at severe risk.
The president began New Year’s Day with a blast at retired Army General Stanley McChrystal, who in a recent interview indicated that he would never be able to join a Trump administration because he thinks the president is “immoral.” Trump, resorting to the limited vocabulary that has marked his later years, tweeted that President Barack Obama had fired McChrystal “like a dog” and that McChrystal is known for his “big, dumb mouth,” and that he is a “Hillary lover!” (The exclamation point, of course, is de rigueur.)
[Read: A former general’s new broadside against President Trump]
This wasn’t Trump’s first shelling of senior military leaders. In December 2018, he referred to unnamed critics of his slapdash decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria as “failed generals.” During the 2016 campaign, he lashed out at Colin Powell and John Allen, Obama and Hillary Clinton supporters, respectively, not for their politics but specifically to ridicule their abilities as commanders.
Once elected, Trump hired a number of well-known generals, not only to assuage the fears of his own party, but in order to bask in the reflected glow of their stars. He put John Kelly at Homeland Security and, in a departure from tradition, sought a waiver from Congress to bring recently retired Marine General James Mattis into civilian government sooner than the law allowed. Congress, relieved to have a man of Mattis’s character and experience between Trump and the Pentagon, granted the request.
Of course, he also put retired Army General Michael Flynn—now a convicted felon—in the national-security adviser’s chair. When Flynn had to be forced out, Trump reached out to an active-duty officer, H. R. McMaster, who could hardly say no to a direct request from the president of the United States. By the summer of 2017, generals headed the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the White House staff (once Kelly replaced the hapless Reince Priebus), and even the U.S. prison system.
This, in itself, was a bad idea. Retired generals and admirals are invaluable national resources who should be called back into government service sparingly and only for the most important reasons. Even when they retire, they can never really take their stars off, and placing them in positions of senior civilian leadership should be done with great caution. It should not be done purely to spackle the cracks in a president’s ego, or as a shot of political Xanax to calm the fears of a jittery nation. It is the most anti-republican of sentiments to have Americans reassuring one another, as they have for two years, that all is well because the generals are really in charge.
[Read: The president is visiting troops in Iraq. To what end?]
Worse, it is fundamentally anti-American to disparage the courage and ability of senior military leaders merely because they are exercising their First Amendment rights on return to civilian life. Trump’s shots at everyone from John McCain to McChrystal should be regarded by any person of goodwill as despicable, but that is a personal judgment each of us must reach on our own.
From a political standpoint, however, what the president is doing is corrosively dangerous. He is impugning the character and competence of senior U.S. military leaders purely for political reasons. He is making clear that the “smart” generals and admirals are those who support him, and that “dumb” or “failed” officers are those who disagree with him. And he has no compunction about leveling blistering insults—in public—against some of America’s most highly respected military leaders.
Think of how far we have come—or how far we have fallen—from the days of the Cuban missile crisis, when John F. Kennedy called his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, for advice. Each man knew the importance of his rank and position; more to the point, they respected each other’s rank and position. Eisenhower, who was old enough to be JFK’s father, even called him “Mr. President” and “sir” in private. Kennedy, speaking to the man who had only recently sat behind his own desk, called Eisenhower “General.”
Yes, presidents have blown their stacks when hearing things they don’t like from their military advisers. (Lyndon Johnson supposedly unloaded on his service chiefs with such fury in a private meeting in 1965 that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought of resigning.) The Oval Office and the Pentagon are places where the survival not only of the country but also of the planet is decided, and tempers can run white-hot.
[Read: The military has become Trump’s favorite prop]
And, yes, retired military officers have not helped matters. Many of them have spoken out against Trump, in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. (It is important to remember that as recently as 1992, there was considerable tut-tutting about retired Admiral William Crowe’s endorsement of then-candidate Bill Clinton.) Retired generals including James Clapper, Mark Hertling, and Michael Hayden are regular critics of the president; even retired General Martin Dempsey’s Twitter feed, which never mentions Trump specifically, seems to be a continuing sub-tweet of the president, hashtagged under “#Leadership.”
But it is the president, not the generals and admirals, who have made this unthinkable situation part of the new normal in the Age of Trump. No modern president has been so reckless in his criticism of both active and retired military professionals. When Trump said he knew more than the generals—a laughable claim from almost any civilian when it comes to military affairs—he apparently meant it. And that means he has no respect for military advice, from any direction. This, more than any personal clash, was the clear message in Mattis’s resignation.
If Trump continues on this path—and he will—we could face the most politicized and divided military since Vietnam, or even since the Civil War. Generals and admirals could be faced with betraying their professional code either by giving the advice they know will keep them in the good graces of the president or by ignoring the president’s orders and protecting their troops in the field as they think best. The rank and file, meanwhile, will become accustomed to showing up at political rallies where their commander in chief will pander to them and air his grievances against other elected officials, all while they wave banners in uniform and cheer for a growing cult of personality.
I remain optimistic. The oath of the professional officer, like the oath of the federal servant, is to the Constitution. The men and women of the armed forces have withstood greater temptations than the empty praise and illusory bribes of a desperate president. But in civil-military affairs, as in so many other areas of our national security, we shall have much damage to repair before this business is over.
Read enough news reports about Elizabeth Warren’s declaration that she is running for president, and you notice certain common features. In its story on her announcement, The New York Times noted that Warren has “become a favorite target of conservatives” and that, in a recent national poll, “only about 30 percent [of respondents] viewed her favorably, with 37 percent holding an unfavorable view.” The Washington Post observed that Warren’s claim “that she was Native American” has “come under relentless attack from Republican opponents.” It also quoted a Boston Globe editorial that called Warren “a divisive figure.” On CNN, the election analyst Harry Enten suggested that Warren’s “very liberal record, combined with the fact that Donald Trump has already gone after her” has made her a—you guessed it—“divisive figure” whose “favorable ratings are not that high.”
These observations are factually correct. But they also help create a false narrative. Mentioning the right’s attacks on Warren plus her low approval ratings while citing her “very liberal record” and the controversy surrounding her alleged Native American heritage implies a causal relationship between these facts. Warren is a lefty who has made controversial ancestral claims. Ergo, Republicans attack her, and many Americans don’t like her very much.
But that equation is misleading. The better explanation for why Warren attracts disproportionate conservative criticism, and has disproportionately high disapproval ratings, has nothing to do with her progressive economic views or her dalliance with DNA testing. It’s that she’s a woman.
[Read: Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want to be Hillary 2.0]
As I’ve noted before, women’s ambition provokes a far more negative reaction than men’s. For a 2010 article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, two Yale professors, Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto, showed identical fictional biographies of two state senators—one male and one female—to participants in a study. When they added quotations to the biographies that characterized each as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” the male state senator grew more popular. But the female state senator not only lost support among both women and men, but also provoked “moral outrage.”
The past decade of American politics has illustrated Brescoll and Okimoto’s findings again and again. During the 2012 campaign, Republicans attacked Nancy Pelosi in television commercials seven times as frequently as they attacked her Democratic Senate counterpart, Harry Reid. In 2016, the disparity was three to one. Pelosi’s detractors sometimes chalk up her unpopularity to her liberalism and her hometown of San Francisco. But Reid’s successor as the Democratic Senate leader, Charles Schumer, a liberal from Brooklyn, is far less unpopular than Pelosi—and far less targeted by the GOP.
Or compare Hillary Clinton with the men who preceded her as Democratic presidential nominees. In a spring 2016 study, fivethirtyeight.com subtracted the percentage of Americans who felt “strongly unfavorable” toward Democratic nominees from the percentage who felt “strongly favorable” at the same time in the presidential cycle. For almost every nominee from 1980 to 2012, the result was roughly zero. In other words, the percentage of Americans who really liked them equaled the percentage of Americans who really disliked them, which makes sense, given the roughly even nature of America’s partisan split. (The one exception was Michael Dukakis, who, as a little-known governor in the spring of 1988, enjoyed a net positive score of more than 10 points.)
Then, in 2016, everything changed. The percentage of Americans who felt “strongly unfavorable” toward Hillary Clinton exceeded the percentage that felt “strongly favorable” by 20 points. Was Clinton uniquely liberal or uniquely dishonest or uniquely inauthentic enough—compared with the seven male Democratic nominees who preceded her—to explain such a large disparity? Probably not. Gender likely played a key role.
[Read: Why Trump is the favorite in 2020]
Now the same dynamic is playing out with Elizabeth Warren. Pollsters keep recording her unusually high unfavorability ratings. Last September, CNN found that Joe Biden’s net approval rating among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents was 30 points. Bernie Sanders’s was 18 points. Warren’s was two points. In December, when Quinnipiac University surveyed Democrats, Republicans, and independents, Biden’s net approval rating was 20 points. Sanders’s was two points. Warren’s was negative seven points. Warren’s relatively low numbers appear driven by her unpopularity among men. When the University of Massachusetts asked state residents whom they support in the 2020 Democratic primary, Warren tied with Biden among women. Among men, she trailed him by 16 points.
These polls often find their way into newspaper articles. The New York Times cited the Quinnipiac survey in its article about Warren’s presidential announcement. On CNN, Harry Enten discussed her polling ratings at length. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with journalists discussing public perceptions of a candidate.
The problem is that when journalists ignore what academic research and recent history teach us about gender’s role in shaping those perceptions, they imply—whether they mean to or not—that Warren’s unpopularity can be explained by factors unique to her. They start with the puzzle of her low approval ratings and then, working backward, end up suggesting that her policy views or (pseudo) scandals explain them. Reporters dwell on issues such as Warren’s alleged Native American ancestry not necessarily because they think those issues matter, but because they assume that voters think they matter. If voters didn’t, why would Warren be so unpopular?
What all this ignores is the harsh truth that when women politicians—especially women politicians who embrace a feminist agenda—overtly seek power, many American men, and some American women, react with “moral outrage.” They may not express that outrage in explicitly gendered terms, just as they may not express their anxiety about a black candidate in explicitly racial terms. They may instead cite DNA testing or hidden emails or San Francisco’s cultural liberalism. Or they may simply say they find the candidate’s mannerisms off-putting.
The media’s role is to dig deeper: to interpret these specific discomforts in light of the deeper discomfort that Americans again and again express with ambitious women.
Journalists shouldn’t ignore electability. Elizabeth Warren’s comparatively low approval ratings are a legitimate news story. But the bigger story is that Americans still judge women politicians far more harshly than they judge their male competitors. Unless journalists name that unfairness, they risk perpetuating it.
In 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “Sometime in the next century the United States is going to have to address the question of apportionment in the Senate.” Perhaps that time has come. Today the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of population, is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California, and the disparities among the states are only increasing. The situation is untenable.
Pundits, professors, and policy makers have advanced various solutions. Burt Neuborne of NYU has argued in The Wall Street Journal that the best way forward is to break up large states into smaller ones. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School has suggested a national referendum to reform the Senate. The retired congressman John Dingell asserted here in The Atlantic that the Senate should simply be abolished.
There’s a better, more elegant, constitutional way out. Let’s allocate one seat to each state automatically to preserve federalism, but apportion the rest based on population. Here’s how.
Start with the total U.S. population, then divide by 100, since that’s the size of the current, more deliberative upper chamber. Next, allocate senators to each state according to their share of the total; 2/100 equals two senators, 3/100 equals three, etc. Update the apportionment every decade according to the official census.
Using 2017 census estimates as a proxy for the official one coming in 2020, the Rule of One Hundred yields the following outcome: 26 states get only one senator (having about 1/100 of the population or less), 12 states stay at two, eight states gain one or two, and the four biggest states gain more than two: California gets 12 total, Texas gets nine, and Florida and New York get six each. This apportionment shows how out of whack the current Senate has become.
[Read: The people v. the U.S. Senate]
In the new allocation, the total number of senators would be 110. The total is more than 100 because 10 of the smallest states have much less than 0.5/100 of the U.S. population but are still entitled to one senator each.
The obvious reply is, “This is impossible! The Constitution plainly says that each state gets two senators. There’s even a provision in the Constitution that says this rule cannot be amended.” Indeed, Article V, in describing the amendment process, stipulates that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
This seems like a showstopper, and some scholars say it’s “unthinkable” that the one-state, two-senators rule can ever be changed. But, look, when conservative lawyers first argued that the Affordable Care Act violated the Commerce Clause, that seemed unthinkable, too. Our Constitution is more malleable than many imagine.
First, consider that Article V applies only to amendments. Congress would adopt the Rule of One Hundred scheme as a statute; let’s call it the Senate Reform Act. Because it’s legislation rather than an amendment, Article V would—arguably—not apply.
Second, the states, through the various voting-rights amendments—the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth—have already given their “consent” by directing Congress to adopt legislation to protect equal voting rights, and this delegated power explicitly applies to “the United States” as well as the states. The Senate Reform Act would simply shift seats according to population. No state or its citizens would lose the franchise.
Note that even states that did not ratify the voting-rights amendments have, functionally, consented to them, and thus also to the constitutional logic supporting a Senate Reform Act. As Justice Clarence Thomas explained in 1995, “The people of each State obviously did trust their fate to the people of the several States when they consented to the Constitution; not only did they empower the governmental institutions of the United States, but they also agreed to be bound by constitutional amendments that they themselves refused to ratify.”
Remember, too, that the Constitution is a complex framework document that has evolved over the course of more than two centuries. The Civil War inaugurated a century of ever-increasing recognition of voting rights through the aforementioned amendments, which created a new constitutional principle that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State” on specific grounds of race, color, sex, or age. All of these amendments include exactly the same enforcement provision as well: “Congress shall have the power to enforce this [amendment] by appropriate legislation.”
Congress has exercised its power under these amendments in legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court applied the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to declare Senate-like malapportioned state legislatures unconstitutional in a number of cases, such as Reynolds v. Sims in 1964, which established a “one person, one vote” standard. As recently as Bush v. Gore in 2000, the Supreme Court affirmed equal voting rights of all citizens as an essential constitutional value. Although the Court trimmed a portion of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, reaffirmed the authority of Congress to regulate in this field and endorsed a forward-looking orientation. “The Fifteenth Amendment commands that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or color, and it gives Congress the power to enforce that command,” he wrote. “The Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.”
[Read: The electoral college conundrum]
Race and what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the color line” are crucially at issue here because the current Senate allocation is heavily biased in favor of small states with predominantly white populations, and against large states where whites are in the minority or close to it. For example, in California, 38 percent of citizens are white. In Texas, that figure is 43 percent. Compare the two smallest states: Vermont is 94 percent white, and Wyoming is 86 percent white. A comprehensive empirical review comparing the national population of whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians with the median representation in each state found that “whites are the only group that Senate apportionment advantages.” Other, statistically smaller inequalities are present with respect to sex, age, and other constitutionally protected categories, such as sexual orientation.
Constitutional originalists will surely argue that the Founders meant “equal suffrage” in Article V to mean one state, two senators, now and forever. But the Founders could never have imagined the immense expansion of the United States in terms of territory, population, and diversity of its citizens.
Remember also that even if one takes original intent as definitive, the intentions informing Article V at the founding must be balanced against those behind the voting-rights amendments adopted a century or more later. These amendments clearly and repeatedly authorize Congress to protect “the right of citizens of the United States to vote” against any abridgement “by the United States.” The plain dictionary meaning of abridge is to “reduce the scope” of a right or to “shorten the extent” of it. Unequal Senate apportionment abridges the voting rights of citizens in large states, including nonwhite citizens in those states. This kind of inequality is within the delegated power of Congress to address.
Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School has recommended that when an earlier constitutional text conflicts with later textual amendments, we should follow “time’s arrow.” We should keep in mind that the original one-state, two-senators rule was written and ratified by property-owning white men, almost half of whom owned slaves, and that the voting-rights amendments were adopted after a war to end slavery. Frederick Douglass said the Civil War was fought to “unify and reorganize the institutions of this country,” and otherwise would have been “little better than a gigantic enterprise for shedding human blood.” He was right. Equality of voting rights is an essential constitutional principle that emerged from this struggle—and it’s been expanded since then in women’s suffrage, the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, and beyond.
There are therefore two strong constitutional arguments in favor of a Senate Reform Act. It protects the equal right of every American citizen to a rough mathematical equality of voting weight and power in their national government—with a constraint, recognizing the virtue in federalism, of allocating one senator to every state at a minimum. And it corrects a heavy, unjustified bias favoring white citizens in the Senate. It doesn’t go too far to describe the current Senate apportionment as a vehicle entrenching white supremacy.
[Read: Voter suppression is warping democracy]
Again, some originalists will stand against this argument, saying no state can lose a senator (old-style “equal suffrage”) without its “consent.” Again, this argument fails because states have already given their “consent” in the voting-rights amendments that give Congress the power—even the duty—to protect U.S. citizens against the denial or abridgment of equal voting rights.
An additional argument supporting the plausibility of a Senate Reform Act is that the Supreme Court might see fit to stay out of the mix. The unelected, nonrepresentative justices might revive an old but good doctrine against overturning a federal statute unless Congress makes a “clear mistake” about its constitutionality. Or the Court might defer to Congress on this issue by invoking the “political question” doctrine, which requires treading lightly in areas where a democratically elected branch has been explicitly granted constitutional power.
Several other structural benefits would follow from a Senate Reform Act. It would automatically mitigate the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College, which allocates presidential electors to each state equal to the number of its congressional delegation—that is, the total number of representatives and senators. (I should point out also that if this reapportionment would have, hypothetically, occurred prior to the most recent presidential election, the result would not have changed. Red gains in Texas and Florida would have offset a blue gain in California, and blue losses in New England would have balanced red losses in lightly populated western states.)
In large states, the election of multiple senators could allow a broader spectrum of political representation—e.g., both Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke—which might help reduce the poisonous polarization that characterizes our politics.
Last but not least, a new minimum of one senator for small states could ease the path toward statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which are currently unrepresented in Congress. Adding one senator for each of these new states to a Senate of 110 would prove less difficult politically than adding four to 100.
The immediate political likelihood for passage of the Senate Reform Act is not great, in large part because it’s not only more democratic than the status quo, but more Democratic, too. Taking the Trump electoral victory map of 2016 as a template, and applying it to the 110 senators created under the reform, yields a gain of plus-eight senators for Democrats and plus-two for Republicans. From a political point of view, then, Democrats should favor the reform—and one can imagine it passing in some alternative future, even if some Democratic senators from small states would have to vote in favor of fairness and principle rather than parochial and racial privilege. Republicans in large states might also be hard-pressed to vote against their own citizens’ prospects for fairer and broader representation.
If a Democratic wave continues into 2020, then who knows, a Senate Reform Act could make America a democracy again.
It has been said that enslaved Africans wore necklaces of seeds for good luck, seeds from the ackee plant, when they were forced onto ships’ hulls bound for the New World. Ackee, which is now known as the national fruit of Jamaica, is not indigenous to the land, but is native to western Africa. It made its debut in Jamaica in the late 18th century during a peak period of the British slave trade, which by its official end, in 1807, had brought more than 1 million Africans to the island.
Saltfish and ackee is one of the most popular dishes from Jamaican cuisine today. For those unfamiliar, ackee has a unique and earthy taste. It is a pear-shaped fruit whose skin ripens red, then opens petal-like, revealing three or four arils with black seeds atop each. As a source of protein, the fruit was essential for the survival of the women, men, and children forced to work grueling hours on the sugar plantations scattered throughout the Caribbean.
Salted fish was an imported commodity, too, from North America, and planters would occasionally share that bounty with their hungry slaves. African women, who were charged with arduous and unyielding labor on plantations, and who also had to generate sustenance for themselves and their families, mixed the leftover salted fish with ackee along with “Food,” shorthand for the prepared combination of starchy root vegetables like cassava, yam, and taro, which they grew and cultivated themselves. Saltfish and ackee represents the unseen labor of generations of women who, in the two centuries since the end of slavery, shaped how millions eat and survive in the Western Hemisphere.
[Read: ‘How to Love a Jamaican’ complicates the idea of home]
It is in this context that the sisters Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau situate Provisions: The Roots of Caribbean Cooking, a lush and artful work—one part cookbook, one part canonical and historical text. A modern collection of vegetarian comfort-food recipes, the book details the lineage of the invisible contributions of African women, and the savvy meal refinement of their descendants, self-reliant and creative West Indians who innovated the region’s most beloved foodstuffs.
(Da Capo Lifelong Books)The Rousseau sisters, who are both professional chefs, discovered through research of their own family stories that they are not simply outliers in their decades-long journey with cooking, entertaining, and entrepreneurship. Their path is, in fact, an inheritance. The sisters’ great-grandmother, Martha Matilda Briggs, began as a domestic and became a business owner, opening a café selling her much-reputed patties, baked black crabs, and pastries. She later expanded to a restaurant in the downtown district of Kingston, Jamaica, in 1936—an unusual feat for a single mother of seven during that time. Yet, Briggs was the embodiment of the resourceful creativity demonstrated by multitudes of Afro-Caribbean matriarchs, who had to innovate with meager resources to feed and sustain their families.
Provisions is bookended by deeply researched stories mined from the 19th century: journals once belonging to planters’ wives, rare narratives from enslaved women, and old cookbooks that give readers some sense of how Africans essentially made manna from heaven in the crucible of slavery. The Rousseaus draw a definitive line connecting the foods of survival from the past to their present iterations as delicacies.
Cassava, they highlight in the section covering recipes for ground provisions, is native to the region and similar to yam, a food familiar to African slaves. Yet, it was the indigenous communities of the Caribbean, the Rousseaus write, who taught early slaves “methods for its processing and consumption.” For instance, when cassava is grated and dried, it can mimic the qualities of flour. This dried iteration lends itself to bammy, a Jamaican flatbread made from “grated cassava that has been soaked in water, transferred to a cloth, and pressed to extract as much liquid as possible. The cassava is then flattened into a thick, disc-shaped flatbread and cooked over dry heat.” The sisters highlight this staple in their updated recipe for steamed bammy with coconut, pumpkin, ginger, and tomato.
Readers are also informed that plantains—ubiquitous in so many Caribbean dishes—did not originate in the area, but were also imported and planted everywhere to feed enslaved masses and supplement starchy provisions. In their modernized recipe for roasted ripe plantain with African pepper compote, the sisters write, “This knowledge has been passed down over generations, and it never ceases to amaze us how intricately connected we still are to our motherland, Africa … It is easy to see that the roots of our dining habits are deeply entrenched in a shared heritage with our ancestors from across the seas.”
Provision grounds, small tracts of the least desired land, were allocated by planters to slaves so that they could grow their own food for their survival. The planters conceded to this arrangement to avoid absorbing the expense of feeding the slaves they imported to power their sugar plantations. The deal only compounded the burdens of the enslaved—specifically the women, who were charged with duties that sustained the operations of the plantation (as kitchen cooks, servants, seamstresses, or field workers), in addition to being responsible for preparing meals for other parties. Yet this subterfuge lent itself to expedient invention.
And it had to. In the Caribbean of the 18th and 19th centuries, sugar cultivation dominated the region, spiking the demand for labor. Moreover, as the New York Times columnist Brent Staples notes, it was “an industry that earned its reputation as the slaughterhouse of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by killing more people more rapidly than any other kind of agriculture.” The enslaved were never really meant to survive. But on the backs of black women, they did. Through the sisters Rousseau’s mindful curation of foods that generations have come to cherish, readers learn more about how women created a life out of such brutality. Their names may never be known, but their epicurean knowledge passed around kitchen tables in times of feast or famine will endure for posterity.
If the 2016 election was a reminder that white evangelical voters can determine who wins the White House, the past few years have also been a testament to the influence of Christian cash. Betsy DeVos, a juggernaut funder of religious and Republican causes in Michigan, is the U.S. secretary of education. Foster Friess, a conservative mega-donor in Wyoming, was an early backer of Donald Trump. And the Greens, the Hobby Lobby–crafts–chain owners who rank among the richest families in America, helped secure the Supreme Court’s consequential 2014 decision on religious freedom and birth control. They recently opened an elaborate museum dedicated to the Bible on the edge of the National Mall.
Donors such as these have helped solidify the identity of evangelicalism in the American popular imagination: a movement that’s solely about politics and the culture wars. But behind the scenes, a group of Christian elites is quietly working to create new ways for rich evangelicals to affect the world around them—and to foster a different public image for the church.
As these elites work to shape the world of Christian philanthropy, they are joining a great generational wrestling match over the way Christians should accumulate and use power. The outcome will help determine what’s ahead for the evangelical movement, including a new attitude toward the rightful role of the church in public life.
In 2005, Time magazine crowned Howard and Roberta Ahmanson the most powerful evangelical financiers in America. As an heir to the assets of Home Savings and Loan, a mortgage and insurance empire, Howard Ahmanson became an influential philanthropist, backing projects in Bible translation, art, and—perhaps most notably—politics. The Ahmansons poured millions of dollars into ballot initiatives and Republican campaigns in California; in 2008, they gave more than $1 million to support Proposition 8, which successfully banned same-sex marriage in the state. The couple back the Discovery Institute, a think tank that promotes intelligent design, and the Claremont Institute, which promotes limited government.
[Read: The tiny blond Bible teacher taking on the evangelical political machine]
This history makes Howard Ahmanson’s recent transformation all the more remarkable: One of the most stalwart backers of religious-right causes has become disenchanted with the GOP and many of its associated institutions.
“The Republican Party is a white-ethnic party. And I don’t want to be identified with that,” Ahmanson told me recently. He dislikes that white evangelicals are largely supportive of Donald Trump—“Whatever this is, it’s not the Gospel,” he said—and has stopped giving to groups such as the Family Research Council, an influential advocate for socially conservative causes in Washington. These days, his giving is focused on issues such as land use and zoning in California—connected to his father’s work in facilitating home building—and he’s funding a project to create a digital illuminated Bible. “God is using this time, and Donald Trump, to purge the church,” he told me. “Are you about Christ and the Gospel first, or is your church just a Sunday extension of your political team?”
To say the least, Howard Ahmanson is not representative of American Christian philanthropists of any generation. His religious journey has been distinctive, and he has eclectic taste in causes. Moreover, several of the influential evangelicals who were Ahmanson’s peers on Time’s 2005 power-player list have redoubled their pursuit of national political influence: Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of the late Billy Graham, spent his summer on a political speaking tour across California, and Jay Sekulow, who runs the American Center for Law and Justice, is one of Trump’s lawyers. Evangelical influence reaches all the way to the White House: Vice President Mike Pence has been a fixture at Christian-right events over the past two years, and political operatives such as Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed are enjoying greater influence under Trump than they’ve had in years.
Yet the question Ahmanson posed—about the right way for Christians to live out their faith in public, and how to put money behind that vision—is something that a number of people in evangelical philanthropy circles seem to be asking. In large part, Trump’s presidency is not the context for this question. Evangelicalism, writ large, is going through intense cultural and structural shifts that are also shaping how wealthy Christians use their money.
The history of evangelical giving is best understood in terms of waves of institution building, said Andy Crouch, a former executive editor of Christianity Today. The first came after World War II, when a group of prominent organizations emerged. For example: World Vision, now one of the largest charities in the United States, was founded in 1950 as a missionary and relief organization. And Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru, was started in 1951 to bring Christianity to college students. These groups, and others like them, are often referred to as parachurch organizations: They further the mission of the church, but aren’t necessarily associated with a particular congregation or denomination.
Then came “a time of a lot of stress and ferment,” Crouch said—the tide of Christian political activism in the 1970s and ’80s. The rise of the so-called religious right “was driven by a lot of anxiety, and a sense of urgency: If we don’t act, the country will be taken away from us,” he explained. While a lot of money poured into this movement, from both wealthy backers and grassroots supporters, “it was always a smaller proportion of evangelical charitable dollars than you might think,” Crouch said.
In the late 1980s and into the ’90s, a new organization, the Gathering, was established to help guide wealthy individuals and families who wanted to give to Christian causes—the vast majority of them in nonpolitical ways. Thomas McCallie, one of the founders, said it was created in response to changes in philanthropy: A rising class of evangelicals who had been successful in industry or business had a lot of money they wanted to give away, but there weren’t a lot of best practices available for them to draw on. The founders—who met at the Cedars, a gathering place for groups involved in the religious right—drew up an invitation list of industry titans “who had a reputation of being Christian,” McCallie said. Then, as now, people were required to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars annually—with some giving significantly more—in order to attend.
In many ways, this is where the popular conception of evangelicalism gets stuck: The movement is still framed in terms of legacy, ’50s-era institutions, and the religious right. But some Christian leaders—including and especially a new generation of wealth-holders—are slowly trying to redefine what evangelicalism looks like.
“What Christian philanthropists see now, maybe more than in past generations, is the full landscape of how they can deploy their [money] toward the entirety of what God cares about,” said Josh Kwan, who was recently appointed the head of the Gathering—the organization’s first new leader in its three-decade run. Several years ago, he helped found Praxis, which supports entrepreneurs and investors who are building for- and non-profit ventures fundamentally shaped by their faith. The organization was created out of a desire to widen the scope of Christianity’s social influence. “God cares about more than just the realm of church-planting and politics and changing laws,” Kwan said.
One of the clearest shifts among Christian mega-donors is demographic. Gen Xers and early Millennials are just starting to take the reins of legacy family foundations or come into their giving potential, and their sensibilities differ from their parents’. “From a young age, being involved in work that was serving others was something I felt really drawn to,” said Robin Bruce, the 35-year-old president of the David Weekley Family Foundation, her family’s philanthropic organization. It gave away roughly $7.1 million in 2015, according to tax documents, with roughly $114 million in assets.
“For a long time, especially with Baby Boomers, there was so much wealth created so quickly,” Bruce said. “People just started giving where it was comfortable, which was usually local, with causes … they become familiar with … through their local church or network.” By contrast, her generation wants giving away money to be part of who they are, she said: The causes they support, whether it’s developing health clinics in Africa or mentoring kids in Houston, are central to their sense of identity.
As the shape of wealth in America changes, the shape of evangelical wealth is changing along with it: Some members of a new evangelical donor class made their money in entrepreneurship and are drawn to evidence of innovation, transparency, and accountability in the organizations they support. This “generation is … more concerned with outcomes, with causes, with getting things done,” said David Wills, the former head of the National Christian Foundation, which has given more than $10 billion in grants since it was founded in 1982 and is one of the largest donor-advised funds in the country.
This overlaps with another trend in the evangelical-donor class: Over time, it may become more diverse. Kwan described a community of second- and third-generation Asian American Christians in Silicon Valley who “aren’t necessarily beholden to the culture wars of the past,” he said. The causes that have come to be associated with evangelicalism—issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty—don’t necessarily resonate outside a specific, white-evangelical milieu. As money shifts, those concerns will shift, too.
[Read: Conservatives are scared, even under Trump]
All of these trends have shaped the way Christian dollars are spent. In a 2018 study, Giving USA and Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found a sharp decrease in religious giving over the past four decades, declining from well over half of all giving in the late ’70s through the early ’90s to roughly a third as recently as 2017. This does not necessarily mean evangelicals are giving away less money, said David King, the director of the university’s Lake Institute on Faith and Giving. Instead, they may be donating to organizations and causes that aren’t explicitly associated with church and parachurch organizations.
This matters, because it suggests that wealthy Christian influencers are reaching outside traditional Christian worlds to have an impact. For leaders who are thinking about their giving in terms of public witness—the way they can fundamentally shape perceptions of the church—this change is huge.
“If you look at the current perception of the American church now, compared to historic witness of the church, there is a gap,” said Joshua Crossman, one of the board members of the Pinetops Foundation, a relatively small, new family foundation. He pointed to data from the Pew Research Center showing a sharp decline in the percentage of Americans who believe houses of worship contribute a “great deal” to solving social problems. In 2016, only 38 percent of religiously unaffiliated people said that was the case. “It would behoove all Christians to think about that gap and to figure out what we can do to best be a witness for Christ in our communities,” he said.
Above all, this seems to be the greatest shift in how rich evangelicals are thinking about their influence at a moment of juncture for their church: At least some of them seem more interested in living out their faith than in asserting an agenda onto American culture. “One of our deeper hopes … would be that praxis, which means faith in action, would be the reputation of the church over a long term—not in the brand, but in posture,” said Dave Blanchard, who helped found Praxis along with Kwan. “That we would be more known for redemptive action than political position.”
The kinds of changes that are happening in American evangelicalism right now don’t bear out in two-year election cycles. They take root over the course of decades. While Trump has rocked evangelical politics, this era of American evangelical history had already taken shape before he came on the scene: “The church may be moving toward a time of the church in exile rather than the church as the dominant cultural institution,” as Kwan put it.
In previous years, evangelicals responded to a sense of declining cultural power with anxiety—that is what yielded the age of “ferment” that Crouch described. But at least among this subset of next-generation evangelical mega-donors, there doesn’t seem to be much of a desire to fight the culture. Their hope, instead, is that they will be known by their fruits.
OLYMPIA, Wash.—What if a meteor were hurtling toward the Earth, about to kill millions and reshape life on the planet as we know it?
And what if the president, instead of doing anything to help, made it worse in just about every way, and called it a hoax (and any solutions a scam) instead of the very real, very clear disaster taking shape?
And what if all the Democrats running to beat him in the next election went on and on about how concerned they were and how it’s our most pressing problem—but none had ever done much more than talk about the problem, and for the most part only started doing that in just the past few years?
That’s where Jay Inslee thinks America is when it comes to climate change. And that’s why he’s going to run for president. The question is whether he can convince anyone else that he’s a big-enough player to be a serious candidate.
“When you’ve been working on something for over a decade, and now seeing people awakening to that, it’s just really gratifying and heartening,” the Washington governor recently told me, sitting in his private study on the top floor of the governor’s mansion. When it comes to climate change, there now appears to be “an appetite for someone who has credibility and a long track record and, most importantly, a vision statement. It’s changed to show an opening in a Democratic primary, I believe.”
Inslee has been on the expansive list of would-be Democratic presidential contenders since the 2016 election, mostly because he was then one of the few Democratic governors left in the country. He didn’t take the talk seriously at first, nor did anyone else, and he certainly wasn’t doing anything to help it along. But as the 2018 midterm campaigns came to an end, he read through searing international and federal climate-change assessments, took a trip to view the wildfire damage in California, and thought through the larger moment for the country—and he shifted.
Now “we’re laying the groundwork that would make this a feasible thing in the relatively short term,” Inslee told me.
If there is a new Democratic president come 2021, he or she will get pulled in all sorts of policy directions. Inslee says he has one priority: global warming. It’s not theoretical, or a cause just for tree huggers anymore. Putting off dealing with it for a year or two or kicking it to some new bipartisan commission won’t work, he says. He plans to focus on the threat that climate change poses to the environment and national security—the mega-storms and fires causing millions in damages, the weather changes that will cause mass migrations, the droughts that will devastate farmers in America and around the world.
Even more so, he wants to talk about the risk to American opportunity. “We have two existential threats right now: one is to our natural systems, and one is to our economic systems,” he said.
As he did in Washington State, Inslee would propose a mix of government investments and incentives to spur other investment, restrictions on power plants and emissions, and programs to promote R&D and job growth. An endless number of jobs can be created in the climate arena, Inslee says. It’s the way to make a real dent in income inequality and have the Democratic Party bring tangible solutions to communities in rural America that have been left behind. With his inaction, President Donald Trump—Inslee calls him “the commander in chief of delusion”—is engaged in a “disgusting selling-out of the country,” a “crime” against the aspirational optimism of America.
Inslee is lining up donors and adding them to the political-action committee he launched in December. An official presidential exploratory committee is next. Aides note that he’s attracted new supporters and fans after serving as the Democratic Governors Association chair last year; with Inslee at the helm, Democrats in November picked up seven governorships. He’s put together an email list of 200,000 climate advocates, which could become a beachhead of support around the country. Friends have offered to move to Iowa for him.
His campaign, such as it is, seems a lot more seat-of-the-pants than the machines Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris have slowly assembled. For now, he seems to be counting on being able to stand out on his record—and preparing for future battles with Trump by testing out zingers like “I wish nothing but the best for Donald Trump, including having the top bunk.”
Inslee has been in politics for 30 years. He started off in the Washington State legislature and served for more than a decade in Congress. He was elected governor in 2012 and has, without much national notice, pursued arguably the most progressive and greenest agenda in the country, with fields of solar panels, fleets of electric buses, and massive job growth to show for it. And years before anyone was tweeting about the “Green New Deal,” Inslee wrote a climate-change book while he was in Congress: Apollo’s Fire, a 2007 blueprint for how much economic and entrepreneurial opportunity there is in saving the planet.
Other Democrats are, suddenly, talking about climate change. Bernie Sanders prioritizes it in all his speeches, and a few weeks ago he held a “national town hall” on what he called “the great crisis facing our planet, facing humanity.” Michael Bloomberg used a screening of a documentary on clean-energy alternatives as the feint for a trip to Iowa last month, and says he’ll push his fellow candidates to develop climate-change plans. Booker, Harris, and Warren have all voted in the Senate on progressive environmental bills, and Tom Steyer has written huge checks to many green causes.
[Read: 10 new factors that will shape the 2020 Democratic primary]
Inslee is the only one who has actually run a government that has made climate-change policy central. He points to the towns in Washington that have become solar-cell farms, among other accomplishments. There’s also his plan to expand the use of electric ferries. “Without having a vision and having a sense of what could be, we would not be launching that effort right now,” says Brian Bonlender, the outgoing director of the state commerce department and Inslee’s longest-serving aide. “As a country, we’re certainly not going to be able to do it if we’re hiding from facts from the world around us.”
A poll from September caught the governor’s eye. Among the qualities that 500 Iowa caucus-goers said they were looking for in a candidate, “someone who will reestablish America’s leadership in the fight against climate change” scored highest. True, Inslee wasn’t listed among the 13 possible candidates they could choose from in the poll. But he sees good news anyway. This is like gay marriage, he figures: America is at a tipping point. Things are about to change. And voters will be looking for leaders who were already out front on the issue.
“Forty years ago, it was not easy to get people’s sustained attention for this looming crisis. It’s much easier now,” says former Vice President Al Gore, who spent years getting made fun of for talking about global warming.
Gore and Inslee met on the House basketball court in the early 1990s and have stayed in touch. Recently, they’ve been checking in with each other on the phone and talking about plans for the future. “He’s demonstrated leadership on this issue for a long time, both in the Congress and as a successful governor,” Gore told me. “He’s written about it, he’s spoken about it, he’s legislated about it, he’s made bold proposals.”
Gore said he won’t be endorsing a candidate in 2020—at least not yet. But he is eager to see Inslee’s candidacy and how it will boost the conversation about climate change.
“This election in 2020 is almost certainly going to be different from any previous presidential election in that a number of candidates will be placing climate at or near the top of their agenda,” Gore said. “I think that by the time the first primary and caucus votes are cast a year from now, you’re going to see a very different political dialogue in the U.S.”
Inslee wants to be the climate guy. But some of the people around him worry that if he is actually going to do this, he can’t be only the climate guy—written off as an issue candidate who’s not a serious contender to be president. In a field this big, with candidates running hard against Trump, the rest of the field could try to pigeonhole him as a flake who’s not really part of the top tier.
Inslee’s answer to that anticipated attack is “the other Washington”: the experiment in progressive governance that he’s led for the past six years that’s cut against the conventional wisdom of economics. On his watch, the state has boosted health care, increased access to early-childhood education and college, raised the minimum wage, expanded paid family leave, invested in infrastructure, and established in-state net neutrality, all while leading the country in job growth, overall personal-income growth, and GDP. As other states shed residents, people are moving to Washington. It’s hard to drive through the parts of Seattle where Amazon has sprouted neighborhoods of coffee shops and artisanal seafood kitchens and argue that the lefty policies Inslee’s been pushing have had the kind of economic downside that their opponents always warn they will.
“We have blown up that myth,” Inslee said. “That’s a fundamental message that many Democratic politicians can talk about, but I have the unique ability to show the proof in the pudding that we’ve actually done this.”
Mark Schoesler, the Republican state-Senate leader, says Inslee is trying to claim credit he doesn’t deserve. “I don’t think things would be appreciably different if he never would have been elected governor,” Schoesler says. “Market forces, consumer demands, commonsense policies would have done about the same thing that we’ve had under six years of Jay Inslee.”
Schoesler argues that Inslee is incidental to most of the state’s environmental policy, too. Inslee calls this kind of argument sour grapes coming from an out-of-touch Republican.
Inslee’s voice, even on the attack, sounds like he’s constantly marveling, his midwestern accent from a few generations back crossed with the northwestern spruce trees. He has an ever-present good-natured goofiness. He likes to brag that Washington has “the best weed in the United States of America,” and he paints Christmas books for his grandchildren every year. (In the 2017 edition, he and his wife, Trudi, his high-school sweetheart, appear as colorful bears.)
He can come off as the happy, easygoing jock. But he has always been hard-edged about winning. When I told him I’d found out that his nickname on the high-school basketball team was “The Black Hole” because he never passed the ball, he said it was simple: He would have happily thrown the ball if he’d seen anyone on the court with a higher shot percentage, but he never did. “I tried passing once, but the ball didn’t come back,” he said.
To him, a key part of the formula for running against Trump is being ready to take him on directly. He’s had some experience in that. It was March, during the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C., and he was at the White House with the other governors for a lunch. Every year, a few governors get up and ask questions, and so the night before the event, Inslee and a few staffers brainstormed how to make the best use of the chance.
[Read: The new politics of climate change]
The governor didn’t like any of their suggestions, and ended up improvising a question inspired by his brother-in-law, a teacher, about the proposal Trump was pushing after the Parkland shooting to arm teachers with guns. Inslee called it ridiculous. He told the president to stop tweeting and start listening. He watched the president’s arms cross into his telltale grumpy self-hug, his hands shoved back behind his armpits, elbows up, lips pursed. (“If he’s ever carved on a mountain, it won’t be Mount Rushmore, it’ll be Mount Petulant,” Inslee told me later. “And that’s the pose.”) Other governors in the room were considering jumping into the presidential race. None of them said anything.
Want to know what Inslee 2020 would be like? Like that, he says.
“I’m really happy to be in a confrontation with this person. I’m comfortable in that conversation,” Inslee said. “You have to do two things in beating Donald Trump: One, you have to show dignity and that you can help America to become united again, and you can help America rise to the better angels rather than our lower behavior—[while] at the same time, demonstrating a strength of character and a core conviction that you’re not going to be pushed around or bullied, and you’ve had it with his lower human behavior.”
People who love Inslee—who have been loyal to him for years, who gush about him and his record—know this is all a bit kooky. Come on: He has no name recognition. He’s done nothing to prepare for running. There’s no team of consultants; there’s no operation.
But … maybe?
“He wasn’t ever working to become president. That was not his operational goal,” says Bonlender, the outgoing commerce-department director. “He would observe what the president was doing, any given president, in particular those that he wasn’t fond of, and would have no problem viewing himself doing a better job.”
Truth is, Inslee might not be in a much worse position than the so-called front-runners in the race. They’re barely known, so he’s not that far behind. He’s not showing up in any polls, but neither are most of the people the D.C. crowd has been playing fantasy baseball with for years.
One factor that could be a liability is his identity as an older white guy at a time when many in the party say they’ve had enough of those. When I bring the matter up, he notes that he just did a 30-mile bike ride, and that his record of reaching out and working with minority communities is long—it goes all the way back to one of his first votes as a young state legislator, when he supported extending unemployment benefits to the mostly Latino farmworkers in the Yakima Valley.
“I’ve never had somebody refuse to look at my résumé because I had a name that sounded like it was African American. I’ve never walked into a store and had someone follow me around because of my ethnicity,” Inslee said. “I’ve never had those experiences. You have to recognize the humility of that—and that humility leads you then to be really dedicated to doing everything you can to embrace what you have to do to deal with our implicit biases.”
If he’d been cooking this campaign for a while, Inslee said, he might have schemed a little better. He might have had the Democratic Governors Association invest more in the New Hampshire governor’s race. Or he might have spent the midterms parked in Iowa or Nevada or South Carolina. Instead he spent the Friday morning before the election on a side trip to Miami Beach, where he went on a private tour with the mayor to see how the city has already had to raise the boardwalk to deal with sea-level rise.
Scheming is what he’s up to now—and not only for the presidential race. When Inslee first became governor, the state Senate was under Republican control. A 2017 special election gave Democrats a one-seat majority, and 2018 was even better. Inslee now has a 10-seat majority, and a chance to further build a legislative agenda that he can tout to American voters while his competitors in Washington, D.C., keep talking about what they might do, what they’d want to do, if only they had power.
“He’s obviously got his eye on the shiny object in Iowa,” Schoesler scoffed.
Around the conference table in his office at the end of December, Inslee and his top aides held a brainstorming session for his State of the State address. Washington’s spike in homelessness and the local orcas facing extinction were both on the table. The time might be right, they discussed, to tease his plan for a public health-insurance option, or to explain how he’s going to pay for the green agenda he announced earlier that month.
“How do you argue, at the same time, unbelievable success and urgency? Is that too discordant in the human mind?” Inslee asked.
“Is the rallying cry that we’re the state that steps up?” an aide offered.
Before breaking for the morning, his deputy chief of staff quickly ran through the state’s contingency plans to handle the federal shutdown.
The governor was seated in his chair at the head of the table, the high leather back embossed with the worn-in seal of the state: George Washington’s softly caricatured head, framed in a circle. He marveled at what had become of the negotiations in D.C.
“I want to play poker with Donald Trump,” Inslee said. “I really do.”
It was only after they’d sunk $40,000 and nine months of precious nights and weekends that Jordan McDowell and William Bjork realized how hard it is to make a passive income selling things on Amazon.
The couple had hoped to strike it rich—or at least quit their day jobs—buying goods from China and reselling them on the e-commerce site. Instead, they lost their savings. For that, they blame Matt Behdjou and Mike Gazzola.
In late 2016, McDowell and Bjork stumbled across a podcast hosted by Behdjou and Gazzola, normal guys who claimed they were making thousands of dollars working less than two hours a day on Amazon. The pair promised that anyone could do the same—all they needed to do was pay $3,999 for three months of coaching that would teach them everything they needed to know about the business. They’d learn how to source and ship a product from China, how to list it for an attractive markup on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, how to advertise it to consumers, and how to get them to leave good reviews. Amazon would take care of the logistics of storing and shipping, for a fee, through its Fulfillment by Amazon program. Behdjou and Gazzola even provided class participants with a manufacturing contact in China, and organized paid tours of Chinese merchandise markets.
At the time, the couple was living in a tiny New York apartment, struggling to make rent. McDowell was working a job she hated. Behdjou and Gazzola were offering a way out, and they seemed credible. They even posted screenshots showing the money they had made from selling supplements on Amazon. Bjork emailed a few people who had taken the class, all of whom said they were happy with their experience.
So the couple put the class fee on their credit card, started attending Monday night webinars, and picked their first two products: a glass wine decanter and plastic wine aerator, both sourced from China. Following Behdjou and Gazzola’s advice to purchase the minimum mass order possible, they ordered 3,000 decanters and 1,500 aerators and had them shipped directly to Amazon warehouses across the country, from which the company would send them directly to consumers.
Six months later, they had sold only about 100 decanters and a few hundred aerators. Customs taxes and shipping costs were starting to add up. The aerators kept breaking, and so Bjork and McDowell had to pay for returns. Amazon changed a seller fee of $39.99 a month, a per-piece fulfillment cost of a few dollars a unit, and a storage fee of 70 cents per cubic foot that increased during the holiday season. Then there was the cost of advertising, which they needed to actually get their product noticed amid the thicket of other people also selling wine accessories, also bought cheap from China, also on Amazon.
Maybe worst of all, the couple told me they were left alone to deal with all these headaches: Though their payment guaranteed them three months of coaching, they couldn’t reach Behdjou after the first few days, they say. (Behdjou disputes that he and Gazzola disappeared, writing in an email that all students get a response within 24 hours Monday through Friday.)
Within six months, McDowell and Bjork had spent nearly $40,000, with almost nothing to show for it. So they auctioned off what inventory they could, paid Amazon to destroy the rest, and got out of the business. “It’s not a passive income; [it’s] a ton of work,” McDowell told me. “We lost all our savings—everything we had.”
[View: A visual story on the Amazon gold rush]
They’re frustrated with Amazon, which they say is making money off the failures of people like them. But they’re even angrier with Behdjou and Gazzola and their company, which was, at the time, called Amazon Secrets. “It’s a scam,” McDowell said. “They take your money and don’t deliver.”
Behdjou and Gazzola deny these allegations. They say that one of the first things they teach students is to make sure the product will be profitable, and that anyone who loses money simply isn’t following their advice. Losing $40,000, Gazzola told me, would be very difficult following their methods. In an email, Behdjou told me that nearly 1,000 students have paid to receive training from him, with only a “small handful of complaints.” People are quick to complain when they aren’t making money, yet are less forthcoming when they succeed, he said. Some, he said, generate more than $200,000 a month in revenue.
Behdjou and Gazzola declined to put me in touch with any of their clients, even happy ones. But I spoke with 34-year-old Travis Tolman, who sells a travel product—he didn’t want me to say what specifically, in case competitors tried to copy him. He makes roughly $4,000 a month, he said—enough to allow him, his wife, and four children to leave Houston after Hurricane Harvey and travel throughout Southeast Asia for four months, working just an hour or two a day.
But Behdjou and Gazzola have a growing list of unhappy clients. One, Molly Cox, lost around $40,000 selling meal-prep containers on Behdjou and Gazzola’s advice. Others told me they’re out $4,000, $4,600, $9,000. In a secret Facebook group, dozens of them have gathered to discuss attempts to get their money back and seek advice about how to unload hundreds of unsold jar openers, locking carabiners, and lemon squeezers.
They all thought they’d bet on the right horse: Amazon captures nearly half of all online retail spending in the United States, and more than half of its sales come from third-party sellers. It’s where America shops online.
But if selling things on Amazon is the new internet gold rush, the web abounds with people pledging to help followers find the treasure, for a hefty fee. They have names like Amazing Wealth System and Sellers Playbook, and their pitch is not dissimilar from the various iterations of “make millions working from home” schemes that have cluttered chumboxes since the dawn of the internet. Yet instead of touting shadowy multilevel-marketing schemes or obvious scams, they’re pitching something we can all understand: Amazon, opaque as it is lucrative, and the bottomless appetite of the American consumer, who can’t seem to stop buying wine aerators and meal-prep containers and insulated water bottles. It’s an irresistible sell to a nation that loves the side hustle.
In the first nine months of 2018, 48 consumers filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission about “business opportunity schemes” regarding Amazon, according to data obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Atlantic. That’s up from 18 in 2017, and 14 the year before that. Nearly half of those complainants say they lost more than $35,000. One of them, who described himself as a disabled veteran, lost $45,000 trying to sell a work-out kit on Amazon. Another said he had just lost his job, and used his retirement savings to pay for coaching.
In March, the FTC sued the three men behind Amazing Wealth System, alleging that it made unsubstantiated earnings claims. Vulnerable people—including retirees, students, and non-native English speakers—were lured in through free “Amazon workshops,” where they’d be pitched on a three-day, $1,995 seminar, according to a complaint filed by the Washington State attorney general. After that, the proprietors would offer more “education” packages that cost anywhere from $4,000 to $35,000, and would encourage people to apply for multiple credit cards or obtain third-party financing to pay for the workshops, according to the complaint. A settlement in June required the defendants to pay $10.8 million to the FTC. (In the settlement, the defendants neither admitted nor denied the underlying factual allegations.)
And in July, the agency charged Sellers Playbook, run by the former Apprentice contestant Jessie Conners Tieva and her husband, Matthew Tieva, with making false claims. According to the complaint, the Tievas charged customers up to $32,997 for Amazon coaching sessions, raking in more than $15 million through credit-card payments from April 2017 to May 2018. In November, a Minnesota district court required the defendants to surrender any assets related to the company, requesting $20.8 million in a judgment. (In the settlement, the defendants neither admitted nor denied the underlying factual allegations.)
Neither Matt Behdjou nor Mike Gazzola have been accused of any wrongdoing by the FTC. The agency prohibits deceiving customers about moneymaking potential, and requires that any earnings claims be supported by proof. But it leaves a crucial bit of wiggle room: If sellers say somewhere in tiny print that their method doesn’t work for everyone, they can still promote the stories of their successful clients without mentioning that hundreds of people have lost money. Behdjou and Gazzola both make those disclaimers in their promotional materials.
Amazon declined to provide comment about Behdjou or Gazzola. A spokesperson told me the company worked closely with the FTC to bring both of last year’s cases. Entrepreneurs and small businesses are important to Amazon, according to the spokesperson, “and we aggressively pursue those that attempt to harm their selling experience.”
In 2016 and 2017, Behdjou and Gazzola were a coaching powerhouse—in the summer of 2017, their podcast about earning a passive income on Amazon reached No. 3 on Apple’s charts. But in February, they parted ways, and now offer competing coaching services, Amsecrets.com and Amsecrets.net, respectively. They say they’re both doing well on their own. Gazzola told me his videos have been downloaded “millions” of times and that he’s helped “thousands” of people; Behdjou, meanwhile, told me that he has trained “thousands upon thousands” with his free and paid classes.
Because Behdjou and Gazzola no longer work together, I spoke with them individually. Gazzola told me that in the beginning, the two just wanted to share the mistakes they had made selling on Amazon, so other people didn’t make the same ones. People need coaches, he said, because Amazon changes its rules so often that it can be difficult for an individual to keep up. But he still maintained that students could make a lot of money following his advice, and when people don’t succeed, it’s usually because they quit too early. “There’s no such thing as get rich quick,” he told me. “But it would be hard for you to fail if you literally worked your butt off.”
Behdjou told me largely the same thing: that many of his clients have actually made a lot of money selling on Amazon. He recently put out a series of video “case studies” with happy students, some of whom say they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars. “You can’t deny video proof,” he said. Those who have failed selling on Amazon, he maintains, usually haven’t followed the steps he outlined. Besides, people who fail aren’t bitter, he said—they understand that selling on Amazon is a financial risk, and it’s a risk they’re willing to take. What’s more, it’s a risk they can afford. “Looking at people in the red, it’s not like they’re losing their shirts,” he told me. “It’s a loss anyone can take. It’s not like they’re losing their home because of this.”
Indeed, none of Behdjou and Gazzola’s former clients—those who paid thousands to join what the pair call the “Inner Circle”—told me they lost their home. But several lost their savings, or went into deep credit-card debt, or took time off from high-paying jobs to pursue what they thought was a can’t-miss opportunity.
It may seem surprising that so many people—many with stable finances and professional careers—gave money to two strangers they’d met on the internet. But Behdjou and Gazzola’s disappointed former clients told me it took them a while to discover the many obstacles to making a passive income on Amazon.
One of them is Jeffrey Sanders, a 61-year-old white-collar aerospace-industry worker who lives in Seattle. He told me he believes that Behdjou and Gazzola’s pitch is deceptive by design. Customers pay for three months of webinars and coaching, but, he told me, it takes much longer for products to actually arrive in Amazon’s warehouses from China and start selling. The fees from Amazon don’t start accumulating until then, either. (Gazzola disputes this, saying many people could actually start selling in two to three weeks.) By the time people realize that selling on Amazon is harder than it looks, he said, the three months have passed, credit-card companies won’t refund the money, and Behdjou and Gazzola tell clients they need to pay more for more advice. “They advertise all this money you’ll be making, but by the time the bottom drops out, they say, ‘Too bad, it’s been more than three months,’” he said. “It’s really the perfect scam.”
Eight former clients told me that Behdjou and Gazzola failed to deliver even on their promise of basic coaching. When the clients asked for help, they’d either be told that their coaching had expired, or given an answer that didn’t help at all. “They can help you with rudimentary problems,” said Sanders, who lost $4,000 trying to sell wine-bottle openers. “But as soon as it gets below surface depth, they have no answers.” He founded the secret Facebook group to share tips about solving problems Behdjou and Gazzola wouldn’t address, he said.
Brian Ash, who signed up for Amazon Secrets in October 2016 and tried to sell miniature camping tarps, told me that when he mentioned in a webinar that he was having trouble signing up to sell on Amazon, Behdjou’s solution was for him to email Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO. He also told me that although Behdjou and Gazzola promised one-on-one coaching and small group sizes, they often took weeks to respond to questions. He and others were asked to write positive reviews of their coaching experience in exchange for a chance to win a financial prize that never materialized, he said. Ash said that it seemed that while the pair were good at marketing, they actually knew little about how Amazon worked. “I don’t want to sound like a sore loser, but it’s definitely deceptive,” he told me. “They hyped how easy it is and disguised the risks.”
Some of the advice Behdjou and Gazzola gave the group violated Amazon’s terms of service, Ash said. According to six former clients, Behdjou and Gazzola told them to use their Inner Circle Facebook page to encourage other members to buy their products and write five-star reviews, after which the sellers would compensate the buyer for the cost of the product through PayPal. Amazon has banned the practice of giving away products in exchange for reviews since 2016, but, according to the former students, Behdjou continued to tell them to use the method to boost reviews.
One former client sent me a dozen screenshots from Inner Circle members who had bought his product and asked to be compensated via Facebook in 2017, long after Amazon had changed its policies. (Gazzola told me that Behdjou handled the Facebook group, but Behdjou said that both were in charge of it. Behdjou said that he never advised students to compensate one another for products, or to solicit five-star reviews.) When Amazon figured out what the Inner Circle members were doing, it wiped the reviews from the site. Products without reviews rank lower in search results, so many clients saw a precipitous drop-off in sales as a result.
Molly Cox and her husband flew from Texas to China on a trip organized by Behdjou and Gazzola, only to find that the prices quoted by Behdjou and Gazzola’s Chinese suppliers were higher than ones they could find online, she said. Behdjou and Gazzola were often unavailable for questions, and when they were reachable, they gave bad advice, Cox told me. “They are selling free information, all of which you can find yourself online very easily,” she said. “But they package it up and market it as if it’s some secret that only they can tell you, which is very misleading.”
Behdjou told me, in an email, that he and Gazzola merely introduce clients to a sourcing agent, and that some students do find better pricing on their own. He again denied that he was unavailable for questions, and said that he never encouraged students to give away products in exchange for compensation. As for violating Amazon’s terms of service, he said, the rules change all the time, and he encourages students to understand them and keep up to date on changes.
Sanders said that Behdjou and Gazzola give students too little information about the challenges of selling on Amazon, though. They brag about how much money they’ve made, he said, yet seem unable to help most students follow a similar path, disappearing when complicated problems arise. Indeed, he said, they make struggling students feel like failure is their own fault—a way to mask their lack of knowledge about the intricacies of selling on Amazon. “They say, ‘Nobody else is having problems,’” he said. “‘It must be you.’”
In late July, Behdjou invited me to attend his Ecommerce Mentors LIVE Mastermind seminar, held over two days at a Marriott in Woodland Hills, California, amid the sunny sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. It was free to Inner Circle members, though attendees still had to pay for their own airfare and lodging. About 50 of them had, coming from places as far as New York; one couple had driven all night from Arizona. They included an ER doctor who wanted a passive income so she could get a vacation home in Cancun, a young couple celebrating their wedding anniversary, and a man who owned a brick-and-mortar medical-supplies store trying to migrate his sales online.
Behdjou, who is 31, opened the seminar by repeatedly emphasizing his success stories. He pointed to two young men in the back of the room who he said were making $100,000 a month selling sunglasses on Amazon, and encouraged people to seek advice from those in the room who were “killing it” with their business. Another man, who said he’d made $30,000 from selling a wrist exerciser on Amazon, implored his fellow guests to “trust the process—it’s amazing.”
But most of the attendees were not so effusive. When Behdjou asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves, many said they were struggling. “I have launched, but I really need to crank up sales,” said Alicia Nager, a 52-year-old from New Jersey. She launched a knife-sharpener business in October 2017 after deciding to stay home with her son, who has juvenile Huntington’s disease. Another man noted that he’d made money in Bitcoin but hadn’t been able to crack Amazon yet, despite trying to sell vitamins for eight months. A Maryland woman, Allyson Pippin, who sells slime, said she was about ready to scrap her product and start all over. Henry Serrano, the man with the brick-and-mortar store, had spent $4,600 on wholesale medical kits, and hadn’t made any money back at all.
The first day of the seminar was broken up into lectures by Behdjou and other experts. Much of the content was focused on how sellers could get onto what those in the Amazon business reverently call “page one”: the first page of search results, placement on which is widely considered to be crucial to moving products. Their names included “Finding the Hottest Products that YOU can run on Page 1 in 10 days or less,” and “Keyword Research & Optimization for Page 1 Ranking.”
Behdjou’s spiel was similar to the one he gives online. “If you just stick with this, you will get amazing results,” he said. “It’s not going to guarantee that you make money. But it’s going to be very difficult to lose money.” He reminded attendees to pay for a subscription to a site called Jungle Scout, which monitors which Amazon stores have good sales, so they could then pick a product in one of those stores that can be retailed for five to 10 times what it costs to produce it in China. He advised clients to find keywords that will rank their product top in search results, and to offer discounts and giveaways that generate a lot of web traffic.
Behdjou is no stranger to coaching businesses. In October 2015, he paid $25,000 to attend a seminar put on by Russell Brunson, an author, an entrepreneur, and a self-described marketing expert. There, he met a few people who were making thousands of dollars selling stuff on Amazon, so he decided to try it out. He and Gazzola, who previously coached people on how to make money investing in real estate, started selling supplements on Amazon. In their first 90 days, they had $60,000 in sales, Behdjou told me. They launched their coaching program in 2016.
Yet Behdjou himself isn’t a particularly convincing authority. He loses his train of thought easily. His lectures are punctuated by phrases like “I forgot how I got sidetracked,” and “Where was I? What was my damn point?” He spent much of one session teaching attendees how to pick the right keywords to sell a baby carrier, because “anything having to do with babies is pretty much going to sell well”—but then seemed to know little about why people would buy baby carriers or what search terms they’d use. When attendees asked simple questions like how many words they could have in their product description, he didn’t know.
And then there are the everyday issues that come with shipping and selling internationally: People at the seminar told me the products they’d ordered from China were defective, and customers started leaving bad reviews. Or they got hit with a copyright-infringement lawsuit and Amazon took down their listing, even if they’d diligently researched their product to make sure it did not violate any copyrights. Advertising on Amazon is necessary and expensive, storage fees are unavoidable, and new competitors pop up every day undercutting prices.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” said Nager. Though Behdjou said at the seminar that people who followed his methods “will always get to page one” of search results, Nager said she had never made it anywhere close. Altogether, she’d spent around $4,000 on her product, shipping, and storage, and $5,000 on the class. She doesn’t blame Behdjou completely—Amazon’s algorithm changes all the time, the page-one system is nebulous, and what it takes to sell products is changing as more sellers go online. But, she told me, “there is a little bit of deceit to it. They’re making it out to be a little easier than it is. I don’t even know if they really know what they’re doing.” After attending the seminar in Woodland Hills, Nager decided to give up selling on Amazon. Her disabled son is requiring more and more care, she said, and it turns out that selling things on Amazon is actually closer to a full-time job.
Behdjou disputes all these accounts. He told me that Nager must not have read his disclaimers that say selling on Amazon is not a get-rich scheme. He said that he, like all entrepreneurs, is learning and growing, and never claimed to know everything. And when I expressed doubt that it was easy to make a passive income on Amazon without working very hard, he wrote to me this: “That’s funny my new store is doing 100k per month on Amazon and I work on it maybe 3 hours per week because I have a team who handles it for me. So I can easily prove that it is very possible to make passive income with Amazon.”
Many of the seminar attendees I interviewed seemed determined to keep following Behdjou’s methods on Amazon, even if it cost them more money. When I asked Pippin why she thought her slime hadn’t sold, even though she’d followed Behdjou’s advice, she blamed herself. She’d picked the wrong item, she said, and because she works a 9-to-5 job as an IT consultant, she hasn’t been able to put in the hours at night to work on her site. Like many of the clients I spoke with, she had come to the seminar because her products weren’t selling, and emerged from it more determined than ever to make her business work. The world is moving online, Pippin told me, and she doesn’t want to miss out. “Amazon is going to take over the world,” she told me.
It may seem obvious to an outsider that most people aren’t going to become rich by selling things on Amazon. But that’s the thing about gold rushes: Some people do find gold, and it is sometimes hard to tell what distinguishes the people who make it from those who don’t. Travis Tolman, the travel-product seller, is about to launch his second product on Amazon, and said he thinks he’ll be able to make about $8,000 a month. When I asked him why he succeeded while so many others at the seminar failed, he said he wasn’t quite sure. “I think I just did a really good job of following directions,” he told me.
There’s something uniquely American about believing that with a little bit of hard work, anybody can make money fast. In the 19th century, advertisements promised people exclusive selling rights to a certain product, for a fee. They’d pay the money, and then find out that the product didn’t exist, or that dozens of other people were selling it. “In the U.S., the depth of commitment to social mobility and uplift seems to give some degree of distinctiveness to how fraud operates,” said Edward J. Balleisen, a professor at Duke University who has written a book on the history of fraud in America.
The success of the Amazon-coaching market says something about the current state of the economy. As the American middle class disappears, many people feel as if they’ve lost their financial footing and are seeking an easy shortcut back to stability. “The best indicator of whether someone will be amenable to being defrauded has to do with financial insecurity,” David Vladeck, the former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, who is now a professor at Georgetown, told me.
Earning extra money is especially appealing to people who look around during economic booms, see all the people benefiting, and wonder how they can benefit, too. They hear the pitch and think they are that one gold digger who is going to strike it rich. “There is a really strong democratic ethos that suffuses the marketing—anyone can do this, you just have to have the guts,” Balleisen said.
It’s not low-income people who fall victim to online frauds, Vladeck said—they don’t have the thousands of dollars needed to pay scammers in the first place. It’s people who have a little bit of extra money, and want to invest it to get more breathing room. When, during the Great Recession, millions of families lost jobs or saw their income reduced, business-opportunity scams proliferated, he said. Many of the people I talked to at the seminar said they just wanted a little bit more money than they had—to build a bigger retirement fund, work less, buy a vacation home.
Investigating potential fraud is hard: Regulators have to find the bad actors, get proof of the claims they made, subpoena their records, talk to credit-card companies, see how many of their clients actually lost money, and engage in the thorny business of separating the criminally defrauded from the merely naive. The Federal Trade Commission is staffed “significantly” below where it was in the early 1980s, Vladeck said. And it can be difficult for investigators to even learn about get-rich-quick schemes because so many people are embarrassed that they’ve been so gullible.
“One of the constant themes is the silent sucker—the person who was taken in but doesn’t want anyone to know,” Balleisen told me. Today’s America is very pro-entrepreneur, anti–big government; many Americans don’t have sympathy for people who lose their money to these kinds of schemes, he said. We celebrate the self-made man who starts a successful business from scratch, but mock the people who get duped trying to do the same thing. No one wants to admit that they’re the only one who can’t make it work.
The Internet has made it easier for salesmen like Behdjou and Gazzola to find a potential audience, but it has also made it easier for those who believe they have been victimized to find one another. One D.C. woman who lost thousands trying to sell balance boards on Amazon with Behdjou and Gazzola’s help told me that she might still be trying to sell on Amazon had she not been invited to Jeffrey Sanders’s secret Facebook group. In the original Inner Circle Facebook group, everybody was positive, she said, and no one discussed the troubles they were going through. It wasn’t until she signed onto Sanders’s group that she realized that lots of other people were losing money, she said.
Behdjou seems determined to quiet malcontents. Though people who paid to take the class were guaranteed “lifetime” membership in the Amazon Secrets Inner Circle Facebook page, he kicked out anyone who joined Sanders’s separate Facebook group, McDowell, Ash, and Sanders told me. In emails to his original Facebook group, Behdjou warned members that they were allowed to post only “POSITIVE” comments, and that he had a “zero tolerance” rule for negativity. He demanded that Sanders shut down his separate Facebook group, saying another client asked for a refund after seeing that group. “We do not want any of our members in that group under any circumstances,” he wrote to Sanders. Behdjou told me, in an email, that coaches were available to answer questions about setbacks, and that he was trying to create a positive environment in the Facebook group. “If anyone was removed it was for good reason,” he wrote. He acknowledged that he had told Sanders to shut down the secret Facebook group, and said that group was in violation of the terms of the class.
In August 2017, Nick Sanders, Jeffrey Sanders’s youngest son, responded to a Quora thread asking if amazonsecrets.net is a “get rich quick” scheme. In it, Sanders alleged that Gazzola and Behdjou had breached contracts with customers, censored criticism, and faked podcast reviews, and that when he traveled with them on a trip to China, they wrote him a $2,000 check that bounced. They sued him for libel. In the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in October, Behdjou and Gazzola alleged that Sanders’s Quora post has lost them $300,000 in revenue. Gazzola told me that Sanders is a “disgruntled employee” and said that his check bounced because Sanders had tried to cash an American check in China. In separate court filings, Sanders denied all of Behdjou’s and Gazzola’s allegations and requested that the court dismiss the libel suit. The case is currently stayed, pending Sanders’s appeal of the trial court’s rejection of his motion to dismiss.
Yet below Sanders’s Quora post, there are other skeptics of Behdjou and Gazzola, as well as many answers supportive of the pair. One supporter of Behdjou and Gazzola, “Huxley Finch,” is accompanied by a photo that appears to be of a Yemeni boy who talks in a BBC video about cutting off his leg to escape a burning building after a bombing; another, “Nail Brain,” uses a photo of a male model named Heath Hutchins; another, “Tomas Kulo,” is accompanied by a photo of Jeff Bezos. (Some of the accounts that support Behdjou and Gazzola are real—I corresponded over email with an actor named Anthony Preston, who told me that “their coaching is stellar and I’ve made good money on products.”)
While the Sanderses characterize Behdjou as confrontational, in person, he can be affable and relaxed, and admits that as Amazon changes, he’s trying to understand the changes, too. Watching some of his and Gazzola’s early videos, it’s easy to see why someone might sign up for the class: Dressed in button-down shirts in a dimly lit room, speaking earnestly into a webcam, they seem like two average guys who had cracked the code and wanted to share their knowledge. They would talk about how many people had tried to get into the course and how many weren’t able to join, and listeners might feel as if they’d stumbled across one of those rare and wonderful secrets of the internet.
“Time freedom is more valuable than anything,” Behdjou says in the introductory video for his solo project, telling people that if they work all the time and don’t see their spouse and kids, “that is not living.” He talks about how he’s now able to take care of his mother, pay her rent every month, and buy her a new car. “It’s up to you to decide whether you want to be typical or nontypical,” he says. He has figured out how to sell something online that people didn’t need, and he is making a good living doing it. For all the people out there who don’t believe in what he does, Behdjou is living proof: There are people out there willing to give away their money online. You just have to perfect the art of the sell.
No comments:
Post a Comment