Atenção: imagens fortes abaixo.
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“Vão invadir o Morro da Coroa, no Catumbi”. Recebi essa mensagem às 22:18 da sexta-feira, 01 de fevereiro. Muita gente no whatsapp também. Em seis dias, a “profecia” se cumpriu. Houve tiroteio na região por três dias seguidos até que a Polícia interviesse, uma semana depois, e deixasse 13 mortos – 10 deles, segundo testemunhas, dentro da casa de uma moradora que nada tem a ver com tráfico, no Morro do Fallet/Fogueteiro, a favela vizinha e também controlada pelo Comando Vermelho.
“Fica no prejuízo. Faz essa merda aqui e vai embora. E a família, como é que fica? Fora o prejuízo psicológico né? Que é o mais alto. Senhora de idade, família dos outros, todo mundo trabalhador”, explica consternado o filho da dona da casa. Sua mãe aparenta ter 60 anos e, claro, não quis falar com ninguém. Todos têm medo.
O filho é carregador e estava trabalhando quando soube da chacina cometida dentro da casa da mãe. Ele mora em outra residência, no mesmo terreno, onde seu filho estava. Teve medo de perder o menino. Voltou correndo e encontrou tudo destruído: incontáveis buracos de bala pelo teto, pelas paredes, pelos móveis – sangue por vários cômodos, a pia da lavanderia no chão, rebocos também.
A assessoria de imprensa da PM disse por telefone: “A gente não tem como confirmar que estes disparos de hoje tenham sido efetuados pela Polícia Militar”, se referindo ao confronto entre os traficantes na noite e semana passada. Duas facções brigam pelo controle da zona: o Comando Vermelho e Terceiro Comando Puro. A assessoria afirmou ainda que será necessário um laudo pericial, pois “toda ação do Estado em que o cidadão se sentir lesado é preciso que ele, o cidadão, acione a Defensoria Pública”.
Em comunicado, a PM disse que “após cessarem os disparos, 10 criminosos feridos foram encontrados em vias da comunidade”. Imagens obtidas pelo Intercept, mostram que ao menos três pessoas foram mortas dentro de casa.
Execução de pessoas já rendidas“O tiro foi aqui dentro. Aqui na casa. Foi à queima roupa. De cima pra baixo” disse *Josias, um vizinho da casa, apontando para os buracos no telhado do imóvel. O relato corrobora com o de *Josué, que trabalhava numa rua próxima. “Estávamos há 20 metros da casa onde os policiais estavam. Eles fecharam um cerco. Não tinha moradores do lado direito. Aí fomos pro lado esquerdo e vimos. Depois da rajada, colocaram os corpos nas caçambas”, disse. O relato de execução com as pessoas já rendidas foi confirmado ao Intercept por três pessoas diferentes.
Os policiais envolvidos na operação estão sendo ouvidos na Delegacia de Homicídios da capital. De acordo com a DH, as armas dos PMs foram recolhidas e encaminhadas para a perícia.
Além dos mortos, outras quatro pessoas foram presas em outra casa. Saíram vivos porque conseguiram negociar com os policiais após fazer a família dona do imóvel como refém. Esta foi a operação policial mais violenta do Rio de Janeiro em mais de dois anos. Em campanha e já durante o mandato, o governador Wilson Witzel prometeu uma guerra. Ele já está entregando a promessa à população.
The post A guerra prometida no Rio já começou: era uma casa como a sua, virou o cenário de um massacre appeared first on The Intercept.
Four photojournalists gathered on the southern side of the U.S.-Mexico border wall shortly after Christmas in Tijuana. They were there to document the arrival of the migrant caravans from Central America, the latest chapter in a story that had drawn President Donald Trump’s increasing outrage.
As the photographers waited in the dark, a pair of Mexican police officers approached.
The officers wanted to know the photographers’ names and where they were from. They asked to see their passports and photographed the travel documents once they were handed over.
The photographers represented multiple nationalities and included American citizens and international award-winners contributing to the world’s best-known news organizations. They were an experienced crew, and, to a degree, were accustomed to being documented as they did their work. Still, having their passports photographed by Mexican cops was unusual.
In the weeks that followed, each of the photographers at the wall that night found themselves pulled into secondary screenings by U.S. and foreign officials while attempting to cross borders in multiple countries. In one case, a photojournalist was barred from re-entering Mexico. During questioning, a U.S. official later indicated that he knew about her encounter at the wall. In another case, a photojournalist was taken into a private room at a U.S. port of entry, shown a book full of images of border-based activists, and asked who he knew.
Photo: Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP
In early January, a second group of photojournalists was approached by Mexican police while working near the wall. Again, their passports were photographed. When one of the photographers asked the officers why they were taking the photos, the answer that came back was “for the Americans.”
By the end of the month, at least one of those photojournalists had also been barred from re-entering Mexico.
Last week, two attorneys with a leading legal organization challenging the Trump administration’s border crackdown were denied entry into Mexico. In a press conference, the lawyers — Nora Phillips and Erika Pinheiro, senior litigators with the Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based organization Al Otro Lado — blamed the U.S. government for their removal. Pinheiro, a U.S. citizen living in Mexico, was heading home to her 10-month-old son. Phillips, Al Otro Lado’s legal director, was on her way to a long-planned vacation with her husband, her 7-year-old daughter, and her best friend when she was flagged by officials at the Guadalajara airport. She spent nine hours in detention without food or water.
“It was literally just hell on earth,” Phillips said in an interview with The Intercept.
The attorneys’ expulsion was the latest in a series of escalating tactics used by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement to target legal service providers, humanitarian groups, and journalists on the border.
Through interviews with journalists and advocates who have worked in the Tijuana area recently, The Intercept has uncovered a pattern of heightened U.S. law enforcement scrutiny aimed at individuals with a proximity to the migrant caravans.
Nineteen sources described law enforcement actions ranging from the barring and removal of journalists and lawyers from Mexico, to immigrant rights advocates being shackled to benches in U.S. detention cells for hours at a time. Multiple sources, including members of the press and advocates, described being forced to turn over their notes, cameras, and phones while plainclothes U.S. border officials pumped them for information about activists working with members of the caravans.
Secondary screenings in the San Diego area have become so routine, one source said, that he has taken to leaving several hours early for his cross-border trips, anticipating being held by U.S. border guards. The freelance photojournalists swept up in the dragnet, meanwhile, have been left to worry about whether they will be able to freely continue their profession, or if state interference — in some cases from their own government — will prevent them from documenting some of the most important stories of the Trump era.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for U.S. ports of entry, has denied responsibility for the immigration attorneys’ denied entry into Mexico. The Intercept sent CBP a series of questions on Monday regarding the targeting of journalists, lawyers, and immigration advocates. The agency did not provide responses on the record. The Mexican government did not respond to a request for comment.
Responding to The Intercept’s findings, Alex Ellerbeck, North America program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, and lead author of a recent report on CBP searches involving journalists, said that while “CPJ has documented dozens of cases of journalists asked about their work in secondary screening or asked to hand over their devices … the sheer number of cases back to back in a single point of entry and the incredibly blatant attempts to get journalists to act as informants for the government stand out as an escalation.”
“The government can’t use the border to prevent journalists from gathering information, especially on issues it would rather they not report on,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told The Intercept. “If CBP is interfering with or retaliating against journalists, that raises serious constitutional questions and bears further investigation.”
At least one U.S. lawmaker is already investigating.
Sen. Ron Wyden’s office confirmed to The Intercept the opening of an investigation into CBP’s newly revealed border crackdown, including specifically the barring of an American journalist’s re-entry into Mexico to continue her work.
“These are extremely disturbing reports,” Wyden said in a statement to The Intercept. “It would be an outrageous abuse of power for the Trump Administration and CBP to target people for searches based on their political beliefs or because they are journalists. CBP needs to explain exactly what happened in these cases, and whether this was an aberration, or a coordinated effort to punish political opponents.”
Photo: Kitra Cahana
In the first hours of 2019, as many Americans were still ringing in the new year, a dramatic display was unfolding on the U.S.-Mexico border.
On one side of the wall separating Tijuana from San Diego were roughly 150 migrants, including women and children; a small group of American activists; and press from around the world. On the other side, in a dirt lot, was a considerable contingent of well-armed border guards.
CBP later claimed that what happened next began with rocks being thrown, which required the use of three volleys of tear gas and an unknown number of pepper-pellet rounds fired over the border. The Associated Press, however, reported that rocks were not thrown until after the gas canisters were launched.
By all accounts, the scene was chaotic, with white plumes of noxious smoke rising into the air, and migrants running to and from the border wall.
Kitra Cahana, a freelancer with dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, was one of the photojournalists on the ground that night. Though she was shot in the leg with a nonlethal round, she continued on undeterred; her work at a migrant shelter days later was published on the front page of the New York Times. Cahana was also one of the four photojournalists whose passports were photographed by Mexican law enforcement days earlier.
Cahana arrived in Tijuana in late November, following the exodus of thousands of Central Americans who crossed Mexico before filtering into the border city. Like many of the photojournalists covering the caravan, she gravitated to the border wall and was soon shooting photos there on a daily basis. By late December, Cahana told The Intercept, the Border Patrol’s interactions with the photographers there were becoming increasingly hostile. By day, agents would snap photos of the press. At night, they would shine blinking flashlights capable of destroying a camera’s sensor at the photojournalists’ cameras as they worked.
Cahana left Tijuana in early January. She flew home to Quebec for a quick assignment, with plans to return to Mexico days later to continue her coverage of the migrant caravans. Cahana began her second journey on January 17, attempting to travel to Tapachula, Mexico, where a new caravan was set to take off, via Detroit, Michigan. That’s when the trouble started.
When Cahana put her American passport through the check-in machine at the Montreal airport, it printed out an image of her face with a huge X on it. Cahana approached an airport official, explaining what had happened. When Cahana told the official that she was a photojournalist heading to Mexico to cover the migrant caravan, she was taken to a back room to wait. A second official questioned Cahana about her assignment and how she made money, but eventually let her go to board her flight.
It was a little after 8 p.m. when Cahana landed in Mexico City. After telling Mexican customs officials of her plans to head to Tapachula, Cahana was taken to another back room, where she would begin 13 hours of cold, incommunicado detention.
Though conversational in multiple foreign languages, Cahana was a beginning Spanish speaker and struggled to understand what was happening. Her phone was confiscated and her requests for an interpreter, or contact with embassy officials, went nowhere. She worried about the photos on her hard drive being accessed — they included images of vulnerable asylum-seekers. Cahana was given an unofficial-looking document — later shared with The Intercept — consisting of 27 basic questions written in English. She quickly filled it out.
Cahana asked if she was being detained because she was a journalist.
“No, it’s not us,” she recalled a Mexican official saying. “It’s Interpol.”
“Interpol?” Cahana asked. “Yes,” the official said.
“Los americanos?” Cahana asked. “Yes,” the official replied.
Hours ticked away. After midnight, Cahana was taken to a separate room and urged to sign a Spanish-language document that would authorize her removal to the U.S. “Just sign here. I’m trying to help you. If you don’t sign, you will not be allowed to come back to Mexico for five years,” she recalled a Mexican official saying. Still without a translator, or any real explanation as to why she was being detained, Cahana refused to sign.
She was moved to a multiroom holding area where people were sleeping on mats on the floor. An official with Aeroméxico told her that she would be flown to Detroit in the morning. When she asked if she could be flown to Montreal instead, offering to pay her own way, she was told that would not be possible. While in detention, Cahana befriended a woman from Spain who spoke English.
Together with the woman, she spoke to a Mexican official overseeing the holding area. Cahana asked him if she could speak to someone from her embassy or someone who at least spoke good English. The man told her no. She again asked if she was being detained because she was a journalist. The man said it was because of the Americans, Cahana recalled, not the Mexicans.
Through the Spanish woman’s translation, the official told Cahana that in order to photograph the Americans by the wall, she needed written permits from U.S. and Mexican authorities. Cahana asked him if he meant CBP. “Yes,” he told her.
At that point, Cahana had gone hours without food or adequate sleep. She couldn’t tell if the man was describing some official policy or just offering his opinion.
At 9:10 a.m., Cahana flew out of Mexico City. When she landed in Detroit hours later, she again ran her passport through the check-in machine — again, it returned an image of her face with a giant X on it. After two airport officials tried and failed to scan her passport, Cahana was taken to another back room, where two plainclothes officials, who said they were from Homeland Security, arrived to question her. The officials, a man and a woman, were looking at a computer as they asked Cahana questions about her interactions with Mexican authorities on the border. The officials specifically asked about “the day after Christmas.”
“He kept prodding at that,” Cahana recalled. Somehow, staring at their computer, the officials seemed to know the date and place where her passport had been photographed.
Remember this, Cahana told herself, this is significant.
Cahana left the airport with plans to return to her work. On January 24, she flew to Guatemala, hoping that if she crossed the Mexico-Guatemala border by land, she might not have the same troubles that she experienced at the airport in Mexico City. Cahana arrived in Guatemala without any issues, but when she presented herself at the port of entry to Mexico two days later, she was denied, told that there was a “migration alert” on her passport.
Photo: Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP
Cahana was not alone. From November 25 — the first time CBP used tear gas to repel members of the migrant caravan from the border — through the New Year’s incident, tensions on the border had been mounting. Along the way, U.S. border enforcement came to see members of the press and immigrant rights advocates as part of the problem and took a series of steps in response.
On December 2, Guillermo Arias, a Mexican photojournalist with Agence France-Presse with years of experience covering the Tijuana area, headed to a canyon along the border to shoot photos of a family looking to cross. He wasn’t the only one.
Journalists from around the globe had descended to document the families seeking to cross the border and present themselves to the Border Patrol for asylum. The international media attention that came with them was new, both for local press and for local enforcement. In years past, Arias told The Intercept, Border Patrol agents alone in the field, with nobody watching, could turn away migrants who made it onto U.S. soil without having to process them.
“When you have media, you can’t do that,” Arias said.
Turning away asylum-seekers is against the law. On December 1, photographer Fabio Bucciarelli and videographer Francesca Tosarelli, both Italian citizens, captured video that appeared to show agents doing just that.
The day after the Italians shot the footage, Arias sensed a change at the border. That was the first day that Border Patrol agents “got really aggressive with us,” Arias said, yelling at journalists and routinely taking photos of them.
Carol Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, also recalled the shift on December 2. “The agents were there, and they said women and children could come over, but not men. So a ton of women and children went over the border,” Guzy told The Intercept. “Afterwards, they came down to the fence, to the journalists that were standing on the Mexican side, with a camera, filming us all, basically yelling at us, saying we were the reason, we made these people climb that fence and we’re endangering children, and then all the while filming us.”
“It was so uncalled for and it was so ridiculous,” she said. Guzy, who was pulled into secondary screening in San Diego when she left Mexico later that month, added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a flag on my passport — that gives me the creeps that now they have a picture of all of us standing there. They must’ve done something with it.”
A week after the Border Patrol’s meltdown, tensions escalated even further. A video Bucciarelli and Tosarelli shot that day and shared with The Intercept shows a Border Patrol agent addressing members of the press through the border fence. “My agents say that some of you are aiding and abetting these people to enter the United States illegally, OK?” the agent, identified on his name patch as S. Gisler, told the press, informing them that they could be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony.
A journalist off-camera can be heard telling the agent that the accusations weren’t true.
“I’m just saying that if you come to the United States, we could conceivably get [an] arrest warrant for whoever was doing that, and if you ever come to the United States, we just charge you with that,” Gisler replied. “I don’t know if they’d actually prosecute you for it or not.” As he walked away, Gisler advised the press to let the migrants “just do what they’re gonna do,” and added, “some people say that reporters are helping them climb the fence.”
Video: Francesca Tosarelli
Four days later, Arias was back at the wall, shooting photos of migrants crossing the border to turn themselves in for asylum. As he returned to his vehicle, Arias was approached by a Mexican police officer. The officer said he was with Unidad de Enlace Internacional, a municipal Mexican police unit that works closely with its law enforcement counterparts on the northern side of the border.
With a decade of experience in Tijuana, including years covering the narco violence there, Arias was familiar with the unit and their relationship to the Americans. “These are the guys they call,” he said.
According to Arias, the officer told him that the unit was responding to a “suspicious activity” call from the Americans. Arias noticed the officer was holding a fistful of foreign journalists’ passports, Arias recalled. The two men argued about the law for about 15 minutes, with the officer claiming that the journalists did not have the credentials to shoot there, and Arias responding that the officer was trying to enforce laws that were not within his jurisdiction.
Arias was eventually allowed to leave. Two days later, the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector released a statement reporting that on December 13, surveillance footage had captured video of migrants illegally crossing the border “as photographers and media outlets filmed and, apparently, encouraged the group to cross illegally.”
The statement went on to claim that among more than 20 migrants were individuals “carrying professional-grade recording equipment, believed to be associated with the press.” It added that “agents reported hearing someone tell the group to climb over the [border] barrier,” and that camerapeople climbed to the top of the barrier as they crossed in “what appeared to be a staged event to capture the illegal crossing on video.” The Intercept requested to see the Border Patrol’s footage, but CBP did not provide it.
Cahana’s passport — along with the passports of the three other photojournalists she was working alongside — was photographed by Mexican police officers two weeks after the statement was issued. The municipal police department in Tijuana did not respond to a request for comment on its officers’ relationship to the press and U.S. law enforcement, but according to Arias, “They were pretty obsessed with the foreign journalists.”
On New Year’s Eve, hours before the tear gas was launched, the core group of foreign photojournalists documenting crossings over the international divide was back at the wall. It was dark and rainy. On the northern side of the border, four Border Patrol agents stood watch. Three were dressed in tactical kits. One shined a strobing flashlight at the journalists, while the other filmed them.
As shown on video footage provided to The Intercept, the agents accused the photographers of bringing migrant children out in the rain, so they could take photos of them attempting to cross the border. One agent turned his attention to a photographer with an umbrella. “That’s a man right there,” he said. “Yeah, I like that. That’s a fucking man right there. Yeah, the kids over there — who gives a fuck, right?”
A second agent added, “The reporters, they bring these people down so they can stand in the rain, so you guys can make a couple bucks. Shame on you, man. Shame on you. That should be the story. That’s the real story, how you guys are taking advantage of these poor people.”
“You guys are going to the shelters and telling them to come over here,” an agent said. “This is not happening naturally. You guys are enticing these people to come over here. You know it.”
According to Emilio Fraile, a Spanish freelance photojournalist, the agents’ comments at one point turned from condescending and accusatory to threatening. Fraile said he was focusing on shooting photos of a family preparing to cross when a fellow photojournalist told him, “They’re saying your name.”
Fraile didn’t believe it until he heard it for himself. “Where is Emilio?” the agents called out. “Where is Emilio?”
“They said it two or three more times,” Fraile told The Intercept in Spanish. “It was like, Fuck. Why do these people know my name?”
Fraile had not passed through a U.S. port or given his name to any agents on the line. The agents likely wanted the photographers to move back from the wall, Fraile said. “But of course, to a civilian, it’s quite a frightening gesture, right? To know your name, the American police, knowing who the president is in the United States.”
Mining for IntelligenceOn January 3, Fraile and two other Spanish freelance photojournalists, Santi Palacios, and Daniel Ochoa de Olza, a longtime AP contributor whose coverage of the New Year’s tear gassing was shared around the world, were approached by Mexican police.
Like Cahana and the others, the Spaniards’ passports were photographed. Palacios asked the officers why they were taking photos. It “was because the ‘Americans’ were asking them to do so,” Palacios told The Intercept. “They wanted to know who we were.”
“I asked if they send them to the police on the other side, and the officer said yes,” Palacios said.
According to Palacios, the officers then told the journalists that they couldn’t be in the area because they were on Mexican tourist visas and that if they saw them again, they would take them to the police station. Palacios added: “I also asked them if this was because of the collaborative police team that works on both sides of the border. They said yes, that they do work together and share info.”
Fraile, who also heard the exchange, added, “We were really surprised that the Mexican police told us they shared the information with the U.S. police.”
As the Los Angeles Times reported last week, Ochoa de Olza, who was with the other two Spaniards, was denied re-entry into Tijuana from San Diego in late January. Thus far, of the seven photojournalists known to have had their passports photographed by Mexican law enforcement, two have attempted re-entry into Mexico: Cahana and Ochoa de Olza. Both have been denied.
Days after their passports were photographed, Fraile and a colleague headed to the U.S. for a shopping trip via the San Ysidro port of entry. The two were directed to secondary screening, Fraile said. “They wouldn’t let us talk to each other,” he explained. “We were each taken to separate rooms where they interviewed us.” According to Fraile, the U.S. officials’ questions focused on the mood in Tijuana among participants in the caravan, and the activities of American activists there.
“He was asking us if there was any North American, anyone from the United States, collaborating with the migrants to help them cross the border,” Fraile said.
The Intercept interviewed the three other photojournalists who were with Cahana the night their passports were photographed — a week before the Spaniards’ encounter — and who similarly spent much of late December near the wall in Tijuana. Each described how, in the weeks that followed, they, too, were pulled into secondary screening by U.S. law enforcement as they returned to the U.S.
Photo: Mark Abramson
Mark Abramson, a freelancer whose December work in Tijuana was also featured in the New York Times, was pulled into secondary screening at the El Chaparral port of entry as he returned to the U.S. on January 5. It was approximately 3 a.m., Abramson told The Intercept, when he approached the port on foot. “I had a feeling that it would happen,” Abramson said. “Because I knew that people were being stopped.”
The moment he arrived at the port, he was taken to a lobby in the secondary screening area. CBP officials told Abramson to sit and put his phone down, as they began going through his backpack and notes. Abramson explained that he was a photojournalist. A plainclothes agent then led him to a windowless room, illuminated with florescent light. With Abramson’s phone and belongings now in a separate room, the agent began a 30-minute interview.
The conversation was cordial, Abramson said, but the agent “was mining for intelligence.” The agent first focused on the leadership of the caravan. Abramson reiterated that he was a photojournalist, and that he, too, was interested in those sorts of questions. “I don’t know much,” he recalled saying. “I just know that the people are suffering and they’re definitely running from something, and my job is just to make as powerful a picture as I can of the scenes.”
The agent had a clear familiarity with the migrant camps on the other side of the border, Abramson said, and took a particular interest in how freelance photojournalists earn their money. The agent asked Abramson if he planned to come back to Mexico. Abramson, who had never been through secondary screening before, said that he’d like to, but he wanted to know if this was the kind of experience he could expect to repeat on a return visit. The agent assured him that it was just because Abramson was new to CBP. Abramson had his doubts.
The agent then asked if Abramson had any information about groups on the southern side of the border that might be helping migrants. “I knew he was referring to the gassing on New Year’s Eve,” Abramson said.
The events that night had been complicated and chaotic, and included not only migrants and journalists, but also American activists who had responded to the scene. In the aftermath of the gassing, the activists maintained that they had come to help, while others accused them of antagonizing law enforcement and placing migrants at risk. Abramson told the agent that he had seen medics present but left it at that.
“I didn’t want to feed him information — that’s not my job,” he said. “But they’re clearly mining for something.”
Photo: Go Nakamura
Bing Guan and Go Nakamura, both freelance photojournalists whose passports were photographed by Mexican police, described a similar experience. The two entered the San Ysidro port of entry by car early on the morning of December 29. Guan was driving and the vehicle was his. Just a few weeks before, he had crossed through the same port without any issues. This time, however, he was directed to secondary screening.
After roughly an hour of waiting, a pair of plainclothes officers separated the journalists for questioning. Guan was led to an interrogation room where one of the officers launched into a series of questions. Guan said the officer told him that his agency was looking for information on “instigators” on the border. He then presented Guan with a double-sided, multipage photo lineup.
“Maybe nine or 12 pictures per page of people who have been kind of around the caravan,” Guan recalled. “Including anti-migrant activists, as well activists who have been affiliated with the caravan, that have been kind of shepherding them through Mexico.”
Guan recognized three or four of the individuals included on the sheet. Two were anti-migrant activists, he said. A third, he believed, was associated with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the immigrant rights organization most prominently associated with the migrant caravan. “They’re pretty much just blatantly telling us that they’re pumping us for information and trying to ID people around the caravan,” Guan said. “Which is weird and highly problematic.”
According to Guan, the images in CBP’s possession were a mix of what looked like travel document headshots, mugshots, and surveillance photos. Nakumara described being shown a similar set of photos. After being presented with the lineup, Guan was then asked to open up the images on his camera. He complied, reasoning that his images were too dark to be useful in identifying anyone.
After 2 1/2 hours, Guan and Nakamura were released.
Journalists who were in Tijuana in December, but did not have their passports photographed, have also experienced unusual scrutiny when returning to the U.S.
Manuel Rapalo, a freelancer with Al Jazeera, was among the journalists at the wall on New Year’s who Border Patrol accused of helping to facilitate migrant crossings. Since that night, Rapalo told The Intercept, he’s twice been pulled into secondary screening when flying back to the U.S. via Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. “They’re going through my bags, they’re going through my camera,” Rapalo said. “I’m used to that if I’m trying to enter Nicaragua, not trying to enter the United States.”
During the most recent screening, on January 18, Rapalo asked the officer who was detaining him why he keeps getting pulled aside. “The CBP officer told me it was likely due to the line of work I was in,” Rapalo said. Rapalo suspected that his New Year’s exchange with Border Patrol might have had something to do with what’s been happening. The first time he had been pulled into secondary, Rapalo said, the first question he was asked was, “Why did you have trouble at the border?”
“Honestly, there’s no reason he should have even known that I was at the border,” Rapalo said, noting that nothing in his travel documents, which reflected a flight from Mexico City, said anything about the border. “That was the first question.”
Photo: Mark Abramson
Multiple sources who went through secondary screening in the San Diego area described CBP’s focus on border-based activists and humanitarian groups, as well as officials’ efforts to access personal electronics.
Sindbad Rumney Guggenheim, an independent documentary filmmaker who spent two months with the caravan, was sent to secondary screening in the last week of December and the first week of January. During his second encounter, he was questioned about the New Year’s gassing and whether he was an activist. U.S. officials asked him to unlock his phone, which he did, and then they disappeared with the device for approximately 15 minutes.
“For all I know, maybe they cloned it,” Guggenheim said, adding that one of the women who questioned him wrote down his phone’s IMEI number. “They really took everything,” he said. “There was no privacy at that point that mattered.”
At least two volunteers with Border Angels, a humanitarian group that leaves water for migrants in the California desert, have been subjected to secondary CBP screening in the last two months. Volunteer Hugo Castro told The Intercept that he was detained by the agency for more than five hours on December 20. James Cordero, meanwhile, said he was first sent to secondary on Christmas Eve, when he was bringing a load of toys to children at a Tijuana shelter where many of the migrants who had participated in the caravan were staying.
Cordero described being taken into an interrogation room at El Chaparral, where a pair of plainclothes officers pressed him for information on who ran the shelter and what the mood was like there. Cordero, too, was then presented with a series of photographs.
“Some were like mugshots, some were like real bad security camera photos, and then some were photos from people’s driver’s licenses,” he recalled.
By the time he got to the last page, Cordero recognized three members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras — depicted in driver’s license photos — and a friend who organized rallies on the U.S. side of the border on issues like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
Alex Mensing was one of the Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteers included in CBP’s photo lineup. A longtime organizer with the group, Mensing told The Intercept that he began noticing an uptick in pressure from the border enforcement agency in the spring of 2018, during the first migrant caravan that drew Trump’s ire. “I started getting sent to secondary in May 2018,” Mensing said. That was around the same time that migrants taken into U.S. custody started reporting that they were being asked about Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Since then, Mensing estimates that he’s been pulled into the heightened screening process between 15 and 20 times.
When the most recent caravan arrived in Tijuana in November, giving Trump a pretext to deploy thousands of troops to the border, Mensing got a call from a fellow Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer who had been taken into secondary screening. “The very first thing they asked them was, Who is Alex Mensing?” he recalled. According to Mensing, the officer told the volunteer that while the agency did not suspect that they were involved in human trafficking, “that doesn’t mean that your friends aren’t.”
The pressure since then has been intense, Mensing said, with every Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer who has crossed the border since December — six people in total — having been sent to secondary screening.
Jeff Valenzuela, a Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer living in Tijuana, told The Intercept that he has been sent to secondary screening a half-dozen times since late December.
On Christmas Day, Valenzuela approached the El Chapparal entry on foot. After waiting for two hours, two plainclothes officers, both women, escorted him to an interview room where they asked a series of general questions about the caravan and the condition of the shelters in Tijuana. During the questioning, Valenzuela was told that the officers needed to look through his phone. “You can hold it the whole time,” he recalled being told. “It’s standard procedure to make sure you don’t have child pornography.” It was either that, Valenzuela was told, or the phone could be seized and sent to a second location.
Valenzuela did as he was requested, allowing the officers to watch as he scrolled through his photos for approximately 30 seconds. He was released roughly 2 1/2 hours after he arrived.
Two days later, Valenzuela again came to the border, this time by car. He was on his way to visit his family in Los Angeles. A pair of officers approached his vehicle and told him to get out and put his hands behind his back. As one of the officers reached for a pair of handcuffs, Valenzuela was told that he was not being placed under arrest. Again, he was told, “this is just standard procedure.” Valenzuela was led to a “discreet door” nearby, where he stepped into what he described as a “jail-like booking room.”
Valenzuela’s belongings were confiscated, and he was walked to a steel bench.
Valenzuela said the officers then shackled his ankle to the bench. “Meanwhile, they’re telling me that I’m not being arrested,” he said. According to Valenzuela, he spent more than four hours shackled to the bench before two plainclothes officers arrived and took him to another interview room. The questions were much the same as the last time, Valenzuela said. This time, however, the officers told him to unlock his phone. When Valenzuela questioned whether he could really be compelled to do that, he was presented with a document, which said that his phone had been “detained for further examination, which may include copying.”
“At that point, I had been there for about five hours,” Valenzuela said. He gave in and unlocked the phone. He now regrets the decision. When the phone was returned some 40 minutes to an hour later, Valenzuela discovered that his email had been refreshed, and it seemed that most of the apps on the device had been accessed. Valenzuela was pulled into secondary screening four more times in the weeks that followed and, on January 25, was again shackled to the steel bench in the nondescript processing room.
Now, Valenzuela told The Intercept, he gives himself several hours of lead time before heading into the U.S., makes sure multiple people know he’s crossing, and leaves his phone behind.
David Abud, another Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer, has been sent to secondary screening twice since December, with his longest interview taking place at Los Angeles International Airport in early January, following a trip to visit friends and family in Mexico and Honduras. “It’s an escalation of the attack on asylum rights,” Abud told The Intercept. He described it as a Trump administration experiment, one that began by targeting a highly marginalized population — noncitizen migrants — and steadily expanding outward.
“They’re threatened first by the migrants, and then they’re threatened also by the people that are supporting them,” he said. “I think it just sets a really dangerous precedent if there isn’t more pushback against this.”
Photo: Go Nakamura
While CBP has said that it did not flag Nora Phillips and Erika Pinheiro, the Al Otro Lado attorneys who were denied entry into Mexico last week, the lawyers are not taking the claim at face value.
Pinheiro suspected that U.S. officials called counterparts in Mexico and urged them to flag the lawyers themselves. Roughly a year ago, she said, Al Otro Lado learned that CBP had asked a Mexican official to inquire about the immigration status of one of the organization’s lawyers. “This isn’t the first time they’ve looked into our immigration status,” Pinheiro said in an interview from Los Angeles.
The lawyers are already moving to launch inquiries in Congress, in the Mexican government, and with Interpol. “I think we’ll get to the bottom of it,” Pinheiro said. “In the meantime, I’m stuck here.” For an American attorney residing in Mexico, who represents 43 parents who were deported without their children during the Trump administration’s family separation campaign, an inability to cross borders is no small matter.
All of the individuals who spoke to The Intercept about the disruptions of their work along the border described a profound impact on their lives. Valenzuela, the Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer living in Tijuana, has missed time with his family in California because of his repeated referrals to secondary screening, and he now worries about his ability to commute to a new job in San Diego. For the many photojournalists who worked in the Tijuana area in late 2018, particularly the freelancers who lack the institutional support of a news organization, there is deep concern about future trips.
For now, Kitra Cahana remains in Guatemala. She continues to shoot photos, documenting the families moving north through the country, though she can only follow them so far. She’s spoken to several lawyers and press advocacy organizations, and she hopes — though she does not necessarily expect — that something will give in her case. Keith Chu, a spokesperson for Wyden, told The Intercept that his office “has been in contact with Ms. Cahana, and is in the process of investigating her case.”
“It seems like both governments are pointing the finger at the other government,” Cahana said of the U.S. and Mexico. “Maybe that’s how they want it.”
Cahana feels an obligation to determine exactly what happened in her case and why, both for the sake of her colleagues — especially the freelancers now worried about whether a ticket to the border is worth the risk — and for the issues they cover. “There’s a lot of opaqueness around migration issues,” Cahana said. “It’s our duty as journalists to shed light and bring about some clarity so that the public can make more informed decisions.”
“If we can’t do that, then I think society at large suffers.”
The post Journalists, Lawyers, and Activists Working on the Border Face Coordinated Harassment From U.S. and Mexican Authorities appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Matt Gaetz takes a selfie with President Donald Trump after Trump’s State of the Union address in Washington D.C., on Jan. 30, 2018.
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Joaquin Oliver, nicknamed “Guac,” was only 17 years old when he was gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018, along with 16 other students and staff members.
On Wednesday morning, almost exactly a year later, his heartbroken father, Manuel, sat in the audience of a House Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence — “the first of its kind in nearly eight years” — as Republican lawmaker and National Rifle Association lackey Matt Gaetz ludicrously argued that “the greatest driver of violence … was not the firearm, it’s the fact that we have an immigration system that allows people to come here violently.”
“That’s a lie,” Manuel Oliver shouted as he stood up. “That’s not true.” (For the record, Joaquin’s killer was a U.S.-born citizen.)
How did Gaetz respond to the interruption? He jabbed his finger at Oliver while loudly demanding that this grieving father of a teenager killed in one of the deadliest shootings in modern American history be kicked out from the hearing. And then he doubled down on his ridiculous and racist claim that “if we really cared about safer streets, we would build the wall and secure the border.”
.@Repmattgaetz is interrupted by Manuel Oliver, father of Majory Stoneman Douglas shooting victim Joaquin "Guac" Oliver. Parliamentary inquiries follow on reprimanding members for being untruthful and audience member disruptions. pic.twitter.com/gIfZJgY99Y
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 6, 2019
Question: Is Matt Gaetz the most despicable and shameless member of the United States Congress?
The 36-year-old Gaetz, elected to the House of Representatives from Florida’s 1st Congressional District in 2016, is a favorite of Fox News and a rising GOP star. He represents, however, everything that is wrong with the modern Republican Party: from racism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism; to conspiracism and anti-intellectualism; to a slavish and sycophantic loyalty to Donald Trump.
Consider his record.
Racism? Where to begin? In 2013, in the wake of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, Gaetz offered a “full-throated defense” of Florida’s “stand-your-ground law,” which multiple studies have found to be racially biased. In 2015, Gaetz, then a firebrand member of the Florida House of Representatives, suggested two black members of the state’s Senate did not know how to write or spell. In 2016, he lambasted “illegal immigrants,” who he said were “sucking us dry.” In 2018, he tried to justify Trump’s description of Haiti as a “shithole” by referring to the “deplorable” and “disgusting” conditions in that country.
It is worth noting that Steve King of Iowa is far from the only Republican member of Congress to offer cover to white nationalists. In January 2018, Gaetz invited notorious far-right internet troll Chuck Johnson to be his guest at Trump’s first State of the Union. Johnson was banned from Twitter for wanting to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson and once said he never “believed the 6 million figure” for the Holocaust. Gaetz, however, defended Johnson on — where else? — Fox Business: “He’s not a Holocaust denier; he’s not a white supremacist. Those are unfortunate characterizations of him.”
The loathsome Gaetz is also a fan of conspiracy theories. He has appeared on 9/11 truther Alex Jones’s Infowars show, on which he was described as “one of the strongest, most focused, eloquent, on-target voices” defending Trump. In March 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation into the 2016 presidential election. Gaetz’s response? Sessions, he claimed in May 2018, “has become sympathetic with his captors over there in the deep state.” In July 2018, his fellow Republican congressperson Jim Jordan was accused by eight former students of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse while working as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. Gaetz’s response? “The deep state,” he told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, is “out to get Jim Jordan.” In October 2018, a caravan of migrants set out from Central America and headed for the U.S.-Mexico border. Gaetz’s response? George Soros, he suggested in a tweet, might be “giving cash 2 women & children 2 join the caravan & storm the US border.”
Trump later retweeted the Florida congressperson. The president of the United States is a big admirer of Gaetz — and the feeling is more than mutual. The latter’s Twitter bio contains this quote from Trump about him: “He’s a machine…handsome and going places.” In November 2017, Gaetz introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for Robert Mueller to be removed as special counsel. Is it any wonder that Politico called him the president’s “best buddy in Congress,” one of his “most enthusiastic defenders … on cable news,” and a “proud Trump protege.”
I would go further: Gaetz is Trump’s “mini-me” in Congress. As with the president, though, it is difficult to work out whether Gaetz is dishonest or … demented. What is indisputable is that his behavior in Congress on Wednesday was a very Trumpian mixture of cowardice and callousness, of needless cruelty and brazen bigotry.
Listen to Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was also killed in the Parkland shooting, and who was sitting next to Manuel Oliver at the House Judiciary Committee hearing. An angry Gaetz tried to have both Oliver and Guttenberg ejected from the room.
“I found what he did — to treat what happened to our families that way — it’s disgusting, despicable and vile,” Guttenberg said. “But I’m actually thrilled Mr. Gaetz acted like Mr. Gaetz. I think it was wonderful for the American people to see who he is as a person.”
The post Rising Star Matt Gaetz Represents Everything That’s Wrong With Trump’s Republican Party appeared first on The Intercept.
The proposed $28 billion merger announced Thursday between large regional banks SunTrust and BB&T is the biggest banking tie-up since the financial crisis, creating what would become the nation’s sixth-largest bank. And it’s a direct result of actions taken by the Trump administration and the bipartisan group of lawmakers who passed a bank deregulation bill in 2018.
While Democrats insisted that the bank bill, S.2155, was merely about community bank regulatory relief, critics and industry experts expected that it would lead to consolidation of the sector, which began to occur almost immediately after passage. “I’m concerned about the negative impact of increased consolidation caused by S.2155 on community banks and on customers who benefit from more competition for their business,” wrote Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in April 2018, just a month after the bill’s passage.
Warren singled out by name her own Democratic colleagues who were supporting the bill, catching internal blowback from the caucus. But Warren’s warnings have proven prescient, as the SunTrust-BB&T merger represents the latest in a wave of deals in the financial sector. “Once again, big bank deregulation is leading to more consolidation,” said Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., a Warren protégé and first-term congressperson who sits on the House Financial Services Committee. “I opposed last year’s bank giveaway bill, and the Trump administration’s loosening of protections, precisely because it would make ‘too big to fail’ even worse. This merger will do the same and end up hurting our nation’s community banks.”
The merger was made possible by a series of gifts granted to banks since Donald Trump took office. The December 2017 tax cut has had perhaps its most dramatic effect in lowering the tax burden for financial institutions. The nation’s 23 largest banks, which include BB&T and SunTrust, paid around $21 billion less in taxes in 2018, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That built up massive cash reserves at these banks, most of which were channeled to investors and executives rather than line-level workers. Dividends and stock buybacks went up 23 percent, while the companies cut around 4,300 jobs, with more firings on the way. Even lending growth slowed at these big banks.
Meanwhile, S.2155 weakened regulatory standards for banks between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets, a category that also includes SunTrust and BB&T. This allowed them to reduce projected spending on regulatory compliance. The combination of this and the tax windfall gave the banks operating funds to devote to mergers and acquisitions.
Experts believed that firms under $250 billion in assets would feel free to grow through consolidation, without concern for a higher regulatory burden. The new bank created by the deal between SunTrust and BB&T would actually breach that threshold, creating a bank with $442 billion in assets. But an obscure — but certainly not accidental — provision of S.2155 enabled the Federal Reserve to provide relief for banks at that level too.
Section 401 of S.2155 changed the authority for tailoring heightened regulatory standards for banks above $100 billion in assets. By changing one word in existing statutes, from “may” to “shall,” the bill required the Fed to assess all its rules to ensure that they’re tailored to each specific bank, based on size or amount of risk.
The Fed took this loophole and drove a truck through it. Last October, it proposed assembling four categories of banks, with different regulatory standards provided to each. Firms between $100 billion to $250 billion would get the lowest scrutiny, followed by those between $250 billion and $700 billion, the category the new SunTrust-BB&T bank would fall into. Those banks would no longer be subject to certain capital and liquidity requirements, which the Fed labels as “advanced approaches.” They also would only be subject to company-run stress tests, where the bank must show how it would fare under adverse economic conditions, every two years, as opposed to semiannually. The American Bankers Association cheered this “right-sizing” of bank regulations.
While none of the specifics were explicitly required under S.2155, the law clearly gave the Fed the excuse to engage in this further deregulation. In fact, Randal Quarles, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, stated in a speech last July that S.2155 “requires the Board to tailor its framework of supervision and regulation of large firms.”
In its proposal, Fed staff acknowledged that the changes would “slightly lower capital requirements under current conditions and reduce compliance costs related to capital planning, stress testing, and, for certain firms, the advanced approaches capital requirements.” By lowering these barriers for going above $250 billion, the Fed greased the path for SunTrust and BB&T to merge.
Sixteen Democratic senators and 33 Democratic House members voted for S.2155, making the legislation one of the most notably bipartisan efforts of Trump’s first term. At the time, Democrats said the law was narrowly intended to only help community banks. But it appears to be facilitating this big bank merger.
The weak supervision of the Trump administration on banking matters also makes the step up above $250 billion less burdensome and therefore more attractive. For example, SunTrust and BB&T would still be subject to annual supervisory stress tests, administered by the Fed. But the Fed just changed those as well, proposing to give banks more upfront information on the testing process, including the scenarios it uses to probe bank balance sheets and the results of how simulated loan portfolios perform. This is the equivalent of giving banks a cheat sheet before the test, which they can then exploit to ensure a passing grade.
In theory, antitrust authorities will scrutinize this merger before it advances. In reality, there’s been an 18 percent drop in staffing at the part of the Justice Department’s antitrust division that reviews mergers since Trump’s inauguration.
One final hurdle to big bank mergers is the Community Reinvestment Act, which assesses banks for lending into low- and moderate-income areas. The CRA really only has one enforcement mechanism: Regulators examine it when banks attempt to merge. But the lead regulator that would do the examining, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is headed by Joseph Otting, former CEO of OneWest bank, who has expressed his disdain for the CRA both before and while in office.
Otting has cited his experience from when OneWest merged with CIT, previously the largest merger since the financial crisis, as cementing his views on the CRA. “I went through a very difficult period with some community groups … who came in at the bottom of the ninth inning that tried to change the direction of our merger,” he told a banking conference last April.
There is credible evidence that Otting and OneWest submitted fake public comments in support of the merger, which went through in 2015. The text of the fake supportive comments is identical to a sample letter placed on the OneWest website in 2015 encouraging customers to support the merger. Otting, then OneWest CEO, sent emails to his contacts on Wall Street at the time, pointing to the sample letter on the website and soliciting support.
Now at OCC, Otting has proposed “modernizing” the CRA. Critics believe the changes would eliminate bank commitments to low-income residents and local communities. Even if the CRA update is not completed before the merger approval process on SunTrust-BB&T begins, it’s unlikely that Otting, a committed opponent to the CRA, would use it in any way to hold up the merger.
Meanwhile, SunTrust and BB&T have said that the merger would cut costs by $1.6 billion by eliminating jobs in accounting, legal, and bank branches.
The merger combines two “stadium banks,” a moniker that came out of the debate over S.2155, referring to banks that separately aren’t big enough to be global names, but are big enough to have a stadium named after them. SunTrust Park is the home of the Atlanta Braves; BB&T Ballpark houses the Charlotte Knights, and BB&T Field is where Wake Forest University’s football team plays.
The post Elizabeth Warren Was Right: New Law Is Already Making Banks Bigger appeared first on The Intercept.
The National Enquirer has engaged in behavior so lowly and unscrupulous that it created a seemingly impossible storyline: the world’s richest billionaire and a notorious labor abuser, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, as a sympathetic victim.
On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which were apparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct.
In a perfect world, none of the sexually salacious material the Enquirer was threatening to release would be incriminating or embarrassing to Bezos: it involves consensual sex between adults that is the business of nobody other than those involved and their spouses. But that’s not the world in which we live: few news events generate moralizing interest like sex scandals, especially among the media.
The prospect of naked selfies of Bezos would obviously generate intense media coverage and all sorts of adolescent giggling and sanctimonious judgments. The Enquirer’s reports of Bezos’ adulterous affair seemed to have already played at least a significant role, if not the primary one, in the recent announcement of Bezos’ divorce from his wife of 25 years.
Beyond the prurient interest in sex scandals, this case entails genuinely newsworthy questions because of its political context. The National Enquirer was so actively devoted to Donald Trump’s election that the chairman of its parent company admitted to helping make hush payments to kill stories of Trump’s affairs, and received immunity for his cooperation in the criminal case of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, while Bezos, as the owner of the steadfastly anti-Trump Washington Post, is viewed by Trump as a political enemy.
All of this raises serious questions, which thus far are limited to pure speculation, about how the National Enquirer obtained the intimate photos exchanged between Bezos and his mistress. Despite a lack of evidence, MSNBC is already doing what it exists to do – implying with no evidence that Trump is to blame (in this case, by abusing the powers of the NSA or FBI to spy on Bezos). But, under the circumstances, those are legitimate questions to be probing (though responsible news agencies would wait for evidence before airing innuendo of that sort).
If the surveillance powers of the NSA, FBI or other agencies were used to obtain incriminating information about Bezos due to their view of him as a political enemy – and, again, there is no evidence this has happened – it certainly would not be the first time. Those agencies have a long and shameful history of doing exactly that, which is why the Democratic adoration for those agencies, and the recent bipartisan further empowerment of them, was so disturbing.
Indeed, one of the stories we were able to report using the Snowden documents, one that received less attention that it should have, is an active NSA program to collect the online sex activities, including browsing records of porn site and sex chats, of people regarded by the U.S. Government as radical or radicalizing in order to use their online sex habits to destroy their reputations. This is what and who the NSA, CIA and FBI are and long have been.
If Bezos were the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.
That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.
In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”
“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”
BuzzFeed obtained documents showing details of Amazon’s work in implementing the technology with the Orlando Police Department, ones that “reveal the accelerated pace at which law enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.” Citing Amazon’s work to implement the software with police departments, the ACLU explained:
With Rekognition, a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone. If police body cameras, for example, were outfitted with facial recognition, devices intended for officer transparency and accountability would further transform into surveillance machines aimed at the public. With this technology, police would be able to determine who attends protests. ICE could seek to continuously monitor immigrants as they embark on new lives. Cities might routinely track their own residents, whether they have reason to suspect criminal activity or not. As with other surveillance technologies, these systems are certain to be disproportionately aimed at minority communities.
Numerous lawmakers, including Congress’ leading privacy advocates, wrote a letter in July, 2018, expressing grave concerns about how this software and similar mass-face-recognition programs would be used by government and law enforcement agencies. They posed a series of questions based on their concern that “this technology comes with inherent risks, including the compromising of Americans’ right to privacy, as well as racial and gender bias.”
In a separate article about Amazon’s privacy threats, the ACLU explained that the group “and other civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that face surveillance poses an unprecedented threat to civil liberties and civil rights that must be stopped before it becomes widespread.”
Amazon’s extensive relationship with the NSA, FBI, Pentagon and other surveillance agencies in the west is multi-faceted, highly lucrative and rapidly growing. Last March, the Intercept reported on a new app that Amazon developers and British police forces have jointly developed to use on the public in police work, just “the latest example of third parties aiding, automating, and in some cases, replacing, the functions of law enforcement agencies — and raises privacy questions about Amazon’s role as an intermediary.”
Beyond allowing police departments to “store citizens’ crime reports on Amazon’s servers, rather than those operated by the police,” the Amazon products “will allow users to report crimes directly to their smart speakers,” an innovation David Murakami Wood, a scholar of surveillance, warned “serves as a startling reminder of the growing reach that technology companies have into our daily lives, intimate habits, and vulnerable moments — with and without our permission.”
Then there are the serious privacy dangers posed by Amazon’s “Ring” camera products, revealed in the Intercept last month by Sam Biddle. As he reported, Amazon’s Ring, intended to be a home security system, has “a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house.”
Among other transgressions, “Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.” Biddle added: “This would amount to an enormous list of highly sensitive files that could be easily browsed and viewed. Downloading and sharing these customer video files would have required little more than a click.”About the Ring surveillance in particular, the ACLU explained:
Imagine if a neighborhood was set up with these doorbell cameras. Simply walking up to a friend’s house could result in your face, your fingerprint, or your voice being flagged as “suspicious” and delivered to a government database without your knowledge or consent. With Amazon selling the devices, operating the servers, and pushing the technology on law enforcement, the company is building all the pieces of a surveillance network, reaching from the government all the way to our front doors.
Bezos’ relationship with the military and intelligence wings of the U.S. Government is hard to overstate. Just last October, his company, Blue Origin, won a $500 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to help develop military rockets and spy satellites. Bezos personally thanked them in a tweet, proclaiming how “proud” he is “to serve the national security space community.”
Thank you to the @usairforce for your confidence in the @BlueOrigin team and our #NewGlenn rocket. We are proud to serve the national security space community and are committed to providing safe, reliable access to space for the nation. #GradatimFerociter pic.twitter.com/AeO3xXhnUi
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) October 10, 2018
Then there’s the patent Amazon obtained last October, as reported by the Intercept, “that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice.” In particular, it would enable anyone using the product to determine a person’s accent and likely place of origin: “The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent.”
All of this is taking place as Amazon vies for, and is the favorite to win, one of the largest Pentagon contracts yet: a $10 billion agreement to provide exclusive cloud services to the world’s largest military. CNN reported just last week that the company is now enmeshed in scandal over that effort, specifically a formal investigation into “whether Amazon improperly hired a former Defense Department worker who was involved with a $10 billion government contract for which the tech company is competing.”
Bezos’ relationship with the military and spying agencies of the U.S. Government, and law enforcement agencies around the world, predates his purchase of the Washington Post and has become a central prong of Amazon’s business growth. Back in 2014, Amazon secured a massive contract with the CIA when the spy agency agreed to pay it $600 million for computing cloud software. As the Atlantic noted at the time, Amazon’s software “will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.”
Given how vital the military and spy agencies now are to Amazon’s business, it’s unsurprising that the amount Amazon pays to lobbyists to serve its interests in Washington has exploded: quadrupling since 2013 from $3 million to almost $15 million last year, according to Open Secrets.
Jeff Bezos is as entitled as anyone else to his personal privacy. The threats from the National Enquirer are grotesque. If Bezos’ preemptive self-publishing of his private sex material reduces the unwarranted shame and stigma around adult consensual sexual activities, that will be a societal good.
But Bezos, given how much he works and profits to destroy the privacy of everyone else (to say nothing of the labor abuses of his company), is about the least sympathetic victim imaginable of privacy invasion. In the past, hard-core surveillance cheerleaders in Congress such as Dianne Feinstein, Pete Hoekstra, and Jane Harman became overnight, indignant privacy advocates when they learned that the surveillance state apparatus they long cheered had been turned against them.
Perhaps being a victim of privacy invasion will help Jeff Bezos realize the evils of what his company is enabling. Only time will tell. As of now, one of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his privacy invaded. As the ACLU put it: “Amazon is building the tools for authoritarian surveillance that advocates, activists, community leaders, politicians, and experts have repeatedly warned against.”
The post Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else appeared first on The Intercept.
Here’s a riddle any Democrat hoping to be elected president at the crest of a progressive wave in 2020 should be able to solve: what do you call Israel’s military rule over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians in the territories it seized by force in 1967?
The answer, “an occupation,” is obvious to anyone familiar with the laws of war, but in recent years American progressives who use that term to describe Israeli control of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights have come under intense pressure from Democratic leaders concerned about exposing the party to charges of bias against Israel.
This hesitancy to acknowledge that the territories are indeed occupied, rather than contested or disputed as right-wing Israelis insist, is particularly strange to anyone who recalls that one of Israel’s most revered leaders, Ariel Sharon, made a point of using the term repeatedly in a televised news conference almost 16 years ago.
WATCH Fifteen years ago the Israeli prime minister and longtime hawk and backer of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, Ariel Sharon, said the occupation has to end. #TBT
"To hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation, is, in my opinion, a very bad thing." pic.twitter.com/7NBgnzAt5n
— Yachad UK (@YachadUK) December 6, 2018
Sharon, who was then Israel’s prime minister, told fellow members of the Likud party in 2003 that a political solution to the conflict with the Palestinians was necessary because “the idea that we can continue holding under occupation — and it is occupation, you might not like this word, but it’s really an occupation — to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is, in my opinion, a very bad thing for us and for them.”
“It cannot continue forever,” Sharon added. “Do you want to stay forever in Jenin, in Nablus, in Ramallah, in Bethlehem? I don’t think that’s right.”
Of course, Ariel Sharon was eventually succeeded as Israel’s leader by the man who sat silently to his right during that news conference, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the current Israeli prime minister has led the way in making a very opposite case: that the territories Israel conquered in 1967 are not occupied at all. Netanyahu recently told members of his party that speaking of describing lands that have either been annexed by Israel or will remain under its control forever as “‘the occupation,’ is nonsense.”
While right-wing Israelis prefer to say that the land where they rule a Palestinian population that is denied basic civil rights is contested, the occupation is a fact under international law, and is routinely referred to that way left-wing Israelis.
So what explains the skittishness of the American political establishment, both Democrat and Republican, to be as candid about using the word occupation now as Israel’s ultranationalist leader was in 2003? That question has been particularly evident since the election of a handful of young Democrats — Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — openly critical of the occupation, unafarid to call it what it is, and supportive of measures to end it, like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. All three Congresswomen have been attacked by Republicans and members of their own party for denouncing the occupation as a humanitarian and moral outrage akin to Jim Crow segregation in the United States or apartheid in South Africa.
Their outspoken support for Palestinian rights — which reflects a growing unease among young American progressives with unconditional support for an increasingly far-right Israel — has even prompted a new group, the Democratic Majority for Israel, to launch an online ad campaign intended to convey the message that “Israel is a progressive country.”
That group’s president, Mark Mellman, also accused another progressive Democrat, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, of “employing an anti-Semitic canard” in her criticism of Israel. “The right-wing, extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its apartheid-like policies are at the core of what is alienating Democrats and a growing number of Americans,” McCollum told Vice News. “What has changed is that there are now members of Congress who are not willing to ignore the Israeli government’s destructive actions because they are afraid of losing an election.”
In 2017, McCollum, along with 30 Democratic co-sponsors from what was then the House minority, introduced legislation that would have prohibited “U.S. assistance to Israel from being used to support the military detention, interrogation, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children,” which described the occupation in frank terms. ” In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, there are two separate legal systems, with Israeli military law imposed on Palestinians and Israeli civilian law applied to Israeli settlers,” the bill’s text explained. “Approximately 2,700,000 Palestinians live in the West Bank, of which around 47 percent are children under the age of 18, who live under military occupation, the constant fear of arrest, detention, and violence by the Israeli military, and the threat of recruitment by armed groups.”
McCollum’s bill, introduced in November of 2017, also cited statistics from the State Department’s annual human rights report on “Israel and the Occupied Territories.” The 2018 version of the global report, however, dropped the term “occupied territories,” referring instead to the region of “Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza.” The report’s executive summary noted that “Problems primarily related to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are covered in the ‘West Bank and Gaza’ section,” underscoring that, despite Israel’s claim to have annexed East Jerusalem, and the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital,” the State Department still sees the final status East Jerusalem as undefined.
Simone Zimmerman, a co-founder of IfNotNow, a progressive group working “to shift the American Jewish public away from the status quo that upholds the occupation,” pointed out in an interview that Democrats had confronted their differences over this issue in 2016 too. That summer, representatives of Bernie Sanders tried, and failed, to amend the 2016 Democratic party platform to include language calling for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements.” That amendment was opposed by representatives of Hillary Clinton, and the platform’s final version called only for solution to the conflict “that guarantees Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state with recognized borders and provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity.”
“I think today,” Zimmerman said, “definitely among the more progressive elements of the Democratic party, that it would be impossible not to use the word occupation” in the 2020 platform.
“I think that’s the fight that’s playing out right now,” she adds. “What’s happening is that supporters of Palestinian rights are becoming way more vocal and way more organized and the establishment is trying desperately to stop that shift, and that kind of cracking open of a more critical discourse. And it’s frankly what we’re seeing happen on a lot of issues right now. We’re seeing a backlash from the establishment that wants to preserve the old business as usual, as younger, bolder, more progressive voices are starting to really lead inside the party.”
Meanwhile in Israel, Zimmerman notes, dozens of ministers and senior lawmakers from Netanyahu’s Likud party and other right-wing parties just signed a pledge to support massively increased settlement construction, with the goal of settling an additional 2 million Jews in the occupied West Bank, which would more than triple the current Jewish population.
Of course, establishment Democrats are not alone in their willingness to acquiesce to the official Israeli preference to not even use the word occupation. Republicans are far more united in their refusal to call the occupation what it is, and have even admitted to journalists that their recent support for an anti-BDS bill in the Senate was proposed in part to expose rifts in the Democratic party. (Although one of the bill’s co-sponsors was a Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, nearly half of the Democratic minority in the Senate opposed the measure, including six declared or likely presidential candidates: Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sherrod Brown of Ohio).
The intensity of this identification with Israel’s position on the American right was obvious last summer, when Ocasio-Cortez came under sustained attack from Fox News pundits simply referring for to “the occupation of Palestine” when she was pressed to explain why she had described the killing of dozens of Palestinian protesters by Israeli soldiers as “a massacre.”
Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, suggested last month that the long-running Israeli effort to contest the use of the word occupation seems to have had an impact on how Israel’s control of the territories has been described in the American press. As evidence, Munayyer points to a recent study by a Canadian research group, 416LABS, looking at 99,594 headlines on articles about Israel-Palestine published in the first 50 years of the occupation, from 1967 to 2017, in five leading American newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.
The researchers found that over time, in headlines focused on Israel or Israelis, “a large decline in the term occupation can be observed. From the late 60s till the end of 80s, there was a 42% drop in the instances of the word occupation and its affiliated unigrams, and then a further 70% decline from the 90s to the 2010s, an overall drop of 85%.” In headlines focused on Palestine or Palestinians, “there was a 67% increase in the use of the term from the late 60s to the end of the 80s, but subsequently declined by 76% from the 90s onwards – an overall decrease of 65%.”
It is important to keep in mind that this attempt to constrain the debate over the occupation, which has seeped into the American political discourse, originated in Israel immediately after the territories were conquered in 1967.
“In the early years of the occupation, the state argued the territories were not at all occupied, as before Israel seized control of them, they had not been recognized as the sovereign territory of any other country,” Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, explained in an email. “Therefore, goes Israel’s argument, it is exempt from upholding the rules governing occupation. Israel declared that, nonetheless, though not required to do so by law, it would uphold the ‘humanitarian provisions’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which addresses the protection of civilians. Israel has never stated which provisions it considers humanitarian.”
“It’s totally absurd that after more than half a century this is still somehow an issue,” El-Ad continued. “Of course it’s a non-issue – there is no serious factual or legal question with regard to the status of the, well, occupied territories. What does exist is an ongoing propaganda effort, both in Israel and abroad, not only to solidify Israeli control over Palestinians and their land, but also to control the mere conversation discussing this injustice.”
As the Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf explains, perhaps the most important reason for Israel to deny that the territories are occupied is that the Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit occupying powers from moving any part of their own civilian populations into such lands. That means that admitting that the territories are occupied would force Israel to confront the fact that all of the Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where over half a million Israelis now live, are illegal.
In 2012, an expert panel of Israeli legal experts appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu attempted to obscure that reality by concluding that the territories were not, in fact, occupied. “Now that we found out that there is no occupation and there never was,” Sheizaf observed when the panel’s report was released, “I wonder how the great minds of the Israeli legal community would justify the two separate legal systems Israel has in the West Bank — one for 20 percent of the population (Jews) and one for the other 80 percent. If it’s not occupation, how do we call a situation in which millions of people are deprived of freedom of movement, tried in military tribunals, and don’t even have a recognized nationality or a passport? And don’t say Apartheid, because you’ll be called an anti-Semite.”
Daniel Seidemann, director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, focuses professionally on crisis management and conflict resolution in the city, but he also devotes a portion of his time to correcting people on Twitter who argue that the territories seized in 1967, including East Jerusalem, are not occupied.
Perhaps cuz theyre built ilegally in occupied territory, on lands seized from Palstinians to build for Isralis, destroy prospects for peace? https://t.co/E3qQ416ewR
— Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) November 4, 2016
The Israeli military, which enforces the occupation, “defines this as occupied territory, so does the Israeli Supreme Court,” Seidemann explained in an interview. “That is not a value judgement… that is the fact. You may like it, you may not like it, but that is the fact.”
I agree, Harry. This is good,
But the Palestinians in the West Bank are not a persecuted minority – they are an occupied majority.
ADL should be at the forefront of the campaign to end the occupation of the West Bank.
Anything less is craven. https://t.co/xv1feOhwFp
— Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) April 25, 2018
“Personally, when I started dealing with Israeli rule over East Jerusalem, and that was 27 years ago, I would not use the term occupation,” Seidemann recalled. “I bought into the mantra this is part of Israel, and it took years for me to acknowledge empirically that that was the case.”
“One of the pillars of Netanyahu’s policy is to bully both Israeli society and the international community into what I call Clinical Occupation Denial,” Seidemann added. “His approach is that the world will acquiesce to Israeli rule and the Palestinians will submit to it.”
Seidemann holds out little hope for the Trump administration’s peace plan, since it has been formulated by envoys who appear unwilling to press Netanyahu to end the occupation, and an ambassador who refers to the “alleged occupation.”
Netanyahu goes full-on Trump at entrances to Jerusalem & Tel Aviv. “Netanyahu: A Different League” pic.twitter.com/9wAFVEA1jK
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) February 3, 2019
“If you are incapable of recognizing the reality of occupation, you will not understand this conflict,” he says, “and if you don’t understand the conflict, you won’t be able to formulate policy, and whatever plan you come up with that is a denial of occupation is going to be a train-wreck.”
Updated: February 8, 2019
This article was revised to add an explanation of legislation introduced in 2017 by Representative Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, which described the Israeli occupation in frank terms.
The post Democrats Echo Israel’s Far-Right by Refusing to Even Use the Word “Occupation” appeared first on The Intercept.
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Republican casino mogul, is associated with a singular political project: his long-running mission to uproot the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and plant it in Jerusalem instead.
But there’s a second project — lower profile, but no less of a passionate priority — that Adelson has long been gunning for, and that’s his war against online gambling. Adelson’s casino empire is comprised of brick-and-mortar establishments, to which online gambling is a major threat, but Adelson says he is at war with online gambling for the good of society: Gambling in casinos is one thing, but gambling online is a public health nightmare.
Adelson’s crusade against online gambling led to an attorney general recusal, tense debates within the Justice Department, and a standoff with the White House that culminated with an extraordinary reversal of policy in the middle of the government shutdown, when the Trump administration issued the legal opinion against online gambling that Adelson had long sought.
His mission dates back to 2011, when the Justice Department issued an opinion clarifying that the Wire Act, a 1961 federal statute designed to stop interstate betting, only applies to sports betting and no other forms of gambling. The opinion paved the way for states to begin establishing legalized online gambling, so long as they did not create interstate sports betting arrangements. Today, Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania have all legalized online gambling, and 22 states have pending gambling legislation for a mix of casino, poker, and sports.
For years, Adelson has poured money into lobbying efforts to override the Justice Department opinion, corralling his closest congressional allies to pass legislation, bluntly called the Restoration of America’s Wire Act, or RAWA. Adelson pledged to spend “whatever it takes” to ban online gambling, claiming his motives are purely altruistic, an effort to prevent the exploitation of children and the poor. “I am in favor of [gambling] as a form of entertainment, but I am not in favor of it exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people,” he said of his opposition. “I know I am a Republican, and I am not supposed to be socially sensitive, but I am very socially sensitive.”
In 2014, Adelson began bankrolling a new advocacy group called the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, and that same year, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, first introduced RAWA in Congress. Graham had not previously been a vocal opponent against online gaming, but in 2013, Adelson began significantly scaling up his political contributions to the South Carolina senator, even hosting a high-dollar fundraiser for Graham at his Las Vegas Venetian hotel. Also in 2014, Adelson emerged as the top GOP donor, giving $13.2 million to help Republicans take control of the Senate.
Despite all this, RAWA gained little traction. Republicans felt uncomfortable pushing for a new federal ban, and many Democrats were both interested in the new tax revenue streams that could be directed toward things like public education, and suspicious of helping a pet cause of Adelson.
“Adelson worked with [John] Boehner, [Harry] Reid, and Chaffetz for years trying to move legislation on this, and wasn’t able to get so much as even a hearing in the committees of jurisdiction,” said one Republican lobbyist, referring to the House and Senate judiciary committees. “He also tried to get [RAWA] inserted in must-pass omnibus legislation, but they could never get it through. Lawmakers knew it would look terrible to pass a bill that couldn’t even get a hearing in the committees of jurisdiction.”
RAWA did manage to get one House Oversight Committee hearing in 2015 when Chaffetz was serving as chair, but the proceedings backfired, with both Democrats and Republicans challenging the witness testimony and voicing opposition to the legislation. Most Republicans opposed RAWA on the basis that it’s an intrusion on states’ rights. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., noted that if RAWA passed, it could pave the way for a national ban on firearms. Rep. Elijah Cummings,D-Md., came right out and said this whole debate was “about money” — namely the profit margins of brick-and-mortar casinos.
But Adelson was not deterred and poured more than $83 million into Republican races in the 2016 cycle, including at least $20 million to elect Donald Trump.
Shortly after the inauguration, at a small dinner at the White House, Adelson, accompanied by his wife, brought up two issues he said were extremely important to him: relocating the U.S Embassy in Israel, and online gambling, according to two gaming industry sources who learned of the dinner. A spokesperson for Adelson did not return request for comment.
In January 2017, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Jeff Sessions testified that he was “shocked” by the 2011 Justice Department opinion on online gaming, and would “revisit it” as attorney general. The question had been put to him by Graham.
A month later, a law firm headed by Charles Cooper, a former lobbyist for Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, drafted a legal memo outlining why the 2011 Wire Act opinion was incorrect. By April, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, an attorney, Darryl Nirenberg, who has worked as a registered lobbyist for Adelson for the past two decades, delivered the legal memo to a top-ranking official at the Justice Department. By May, the department’s criminal division forwarded the Cooper memo to the Office of Legal Counsel and asked them to “reconsider” their 2011 stance.
Then came June, and Sessions hired Cooper, his longtime friend, to personally represent him in the ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. By July, Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from all gambling matters, given the involvement of his own lawyer.
That left the online gambling issues under the jurisdiction of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, just like when Sessions recused himself from the special counsel probe into Russia, also for conflicts of interest.
According to people close to Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general wanted little to do with the gambling brouhaha. “We’ve checked in over the last two years with Rod Rosenstein and he’s consistently said he has no interest in this issue, that there’s more important issues going on,” said one gaming industry executive who opposes the ban.
Adelson hadn’t fully given up on Congress, and in 2017, Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., tried to squeeze language banning online gambling into appropriations bills. He was unsuccessful, and Dent ultimately resigned from Congress in the spring of 2018.
But finally, Adelson found his golden opportunity, in the middle of the five-week government shutdown, which coincided with the transition between U.S. attorneys general. The new nominee to lead the Justice Department, William Barr, is a well-known, staunch advocate for states’ rights, and supporters of banning online gambling knew his confirmation would make overturning the 2011 opinion that much more difficult.
Barr made his opposition to revising the 2011 memo known during his prep time for his confirmation hearings, people familiar with the deliberations said, which is why Graham ended up not asking him any questions about it, unlike the questions Graham posed to Sessions during his 2017 hearings. Asked whether the senator had advance knowledge of Barr’s stance on the question, Graham’s spokesperson did not respond directly to the question, and instead forwarded a public statement praising the new Wire Act policy.
Barr was asked about his views on enforcing marijuana laws, and he pledged in his confirmation hearing “to not go after companies” that had been relying on a separate Obama-era memo that said the Justice Department would not prosecute companies in states that legalized the drug. Sessions had overturned that memo at the start of 2018.
Knowing both Barr’s position on the Wire Act memo and that Barr was planning to give a states’ rights defense of marijuana legalization at his confirmation hearing, Justice Department officials scrambled. Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and other Justice officials met with their White House counterparts and described the plan to overturn the previous memo. White House officials, according to sources briefed on the meeting, advised caution, but ultimately left the decision to the Justice Department. The night before Barr’s hearing, the Justice Department circulated a new legal memo attributed to Steven Engel, an assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. That document conspicuously lacked a signature, leading some to wonder if this was even real or just a draft.
The circulated opinion was dated November 2, 2018, but released publicly on January 14, raising further questions about whether it was a draft or was official. The new memo insisted that most forms of online gambling are in fact illegal under the Wire Act, and that this new analysis “supersedes and replaces” the 2011 opinion on the subject. Observers noted that much of the new opinion mirrored arguments and language reflected in the Cooper memo submitted to the Justice Department in 2017. On January 15, the agency circulated a memo to U.S attorneys, Assistant Attorneys General, and the FBI Director, announcing their new Wire Act position.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not return request for comment.
Blanche Lincoln, the former Democratic senator from Arkansas and a current lobbyist for Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, praised the Justice Department for its new legal opinion. “Today’s landmark action to rightfully restore the Wire Act is a win for parents, children, and other vulnerable populations,” she said in a statement.
Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, has paid Lincoln’s lobbying firm $820,000 since 2014, according to federal disclosures.
Ron Reese, a spokesperson for Adelson, did not answer questions about the casino mogul’s involvement with the new Justice Department opinion or his general reaction to it. In a statement to the Washington Post, Reese claimed that the new Justice Department opinion would have “little or no impact” on Las Vegas Sands.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told The Intercept that the online gambling issue has not been a real focus in Congress. “I really don’t know who, besides Sheldon Adelson, was supporting the ban. It’s not as though it’s hit our radar screen. In my view, the world is in flames right now with so many other Trump [things],” she said. Hawaii and Utah are the only states that outright ban online gambling, and in 2015, Chaffetz tried to argue that a federal ban on online gambling would serve to further protect states like Utah and Hawaii.
Sara Slane, a spokesperson for the American Gaming Association, released a statement calling the Justice Department’s new opinion “unfortunate” and said the federal law enforcement agency has provided no “compelling reason” to reverse their 2011 stance. Casino gaming, she added, “is one of the most highly regulated industries in the country” and her association encourages the Justice Department to investigate and shut down illegal and unregulated gambling operators.
Mark Brenner, the president of the Poker Alliance, an advocacy group that focuses on the rights and interests of poker players, told The Intercept in an email that his group strongly opposes the Justice Department’s decision. “Make no mistake, DOJ’s Wire Act reversal was a well-coordinated attack against the regulated iGaming, sports wagering, and poker industries carried out by Las Vegas special interests seeking to protect their own bottom line,” he said. “In doing so, they are trampling on states rights and individual rights, while undermining a growing bipartisan coalition of Governors and legislators across the country who are responsibly modernizing gaming in their respective states. Perhaps worst of all, this move will expose more innocent consumers to a gambling black market that is beyond the reach of law enforcement and regulators.”
The ultimate impact of the Justice Department memo is not yet clear, and some expect it will face further challenge in court. Online gambling supporters say that despite Barr’s stance on respecting states’ rights, if investors think they could potentially be at risk of criminal sanction, far fewer businesses will want to get involved.
“I think the gaming community is still uncertain about what this means, and the opinion is now open for interpretation for how far it reaches,” said Jennifer Roberts, the associate director of the International Center for Gaming Regulation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “It’s pretty clear that according to this new opinion that it would affect interstate gaming, but what’s not clear is does it affect any activities intrastate?”
The North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries said the new Justice Department opinion would have a “substantially detrimental impact” on their lottery industry, which “currently provide[s] more than $23 billion in annual revenue to … good causes [governments] support within their jurisdictions, from education to the environment to economic development to senior citizen and veteran programs, and much more.”
On Tuesday, the state attorneys general in New Jersey and Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Justice Department, saying the new Wire Act opinion “undermines the values of federalism and reliance that our states count on.” The attorneys general, Gurbir Grewal of New Jersey and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, urged the department to withdraw the opinion or guarantee that the Justice Department “will not bring enforcement actions against companies in our states that are acting lawfully under state statutes.” They also filed Freedom of Information Act requests for, among other things, any information that relates to outside lobbying efforts to influence the Justice Department’s opinion on this issue. The FOIA request specifically names the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, Charles Cooper, Darryl Nirenberg, Blanche Lincoln, the Lincoln Group, and Sheldon Adelson.
The post Sheldon Adelson Got a Surprise Gift in the Middle of the Government Shutdown appeared first on The Intercept.
A few politicians who have yet to announce are looming over the 2020 Democratic field. Bernie Sanders, the democratic-socialist senator who caught fire in 2016, has long demurred on whether he’ll run for president again. Yet behind the scenes he is setting the stage for another run, under the premise that a crowded Democratic primary could give him a path to squeak through and unseat President Trump. Joe Biden, the former vice president, also looks to be heading toward a 2020 run, positioning himself as a more moderate foil to lefties like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
A spate of yearbook photos have upended Virginia politics. The state is still reeling from racist images in Governor Ralph Northam’s med-school yearbook page and in yearbook pages edited by Tommy Norment, the majority leader of Virginia’s state Senate. Yearbooks are meant to serve as time capsules, and are by nature insular—the text can sometimes only be deciphered by those who are in its pages. That’s the defense that Brett Kavanaugh successfully marshaled when passages from his yearbook came under attack last year. But what makes the latest yearbook allegations so damning is that they are images that provide a stark reminder of how American culture has—or, rather, hasn’t—changed over the past decades.
The U.S. has long stationed troops in South Korea to fend off North Korea. But the deal between the two countries expired at the end of 2018, with the U.S. requesting that South Korea contribute more money to fund the 28,500 troops deployed there. Now, a South Korean lawmaker has indicated that a one-year deal had been struck that only incrementally increased its share of the total cost. American allies are playing close attention to the negotiations, as they’re proving to be a petri dish for how the Trump administration will approach other contract negotiations being hammered out in Japan and elsewhere.
The Supreme Court voted 5–4 to block a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s liberal block and Justice Kavanaugh writing a dissent. Here’s why Roberts just might be the most interesting conservative on the Court in recent history.
Evening Read
(David Williams)
At the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, the perfectly manicured canines get all the attention, but their handlers have to do all the dirty work to ensure that they’re in tip-top shape before getting in front of the judges. For one mother-daughter team, life revolves around their show dogs:
“With four days to go before the prestigious 2019 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Mara Flood is spending a good chunk of her waking hours keeping Poe, a two-year-old smooth collie (full name: Travler SugarNSpice Witches Do Come Blue), from impulsively humping the young female in heat who’s been staying in the next room over. Flood has been taking the two outside in shifts, making sure one or the other is always in a crate. It’s a hassle, but then again, it’s right on schedule for a dog of Poe’s age: “He’s my teenage boy,’ Flood laughs. ‘He doesn’t even eat. He’s like, Oooh, a girl!’”
(Alex Brandon / AP)
John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, passed away Thursday night at the age of 92. The Majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives Steny Hoyer writes:
“On Wednesday, I traveled to Michigan to say goodbye. For two and a half hours, I sat by his bedside; Debbie sat nearby. Before I left, I leaned over and kissed John on his forehead and whispered: ‘I love you—that’s not just from me, but from all of your friends in the House.’”
Our Critic’s Picks
(Focus Features)
Read: In 1986, the artists Run-DMC and Aerosmith struck up a somewhat ill-fitting collaboration and recorded a cover of one of the latter’s songs from a decade earlier. In Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever, Geoff Edgers writes that this partnership propelled rap from an underground subculture into mainstream entertainment.
Watch: Abducted in Plain Sight, a new Netflix documentary, chronicles the strange, bewildering story of a teenager who has been kidnapped by a close family friend. The revelations in the film are so extraordinary that they dull the filmmakers’ goal of ending the culture of silence around sexual assault.
Listen: Ariana Grande’s new album, Thank U, Next, her second in six months, is filled with a brash attitude and honesty that evince how her music, and life, have changed since she first emerged on the scene.
Poem of the Week
Here is an excerpt from “Progress Report,” by George Mills:
I had a ball,
it rolled out of sight.
I ran after it
into adulthood.
I learned to believe
the right lies
and sign myself
with unreadable flourishes.
→ Read the rest, from The Atlantic’s December 1995 issue.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult throughout the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Friday, February 8.
Testy Testimony: Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker testified before the House Judiciary Committee that he has not discussed the special counsel’s investigation with President Donald Trump, nor denied funding for it. Tensions ran high: At one point, Whitaker reminded committee Chairman Jerry Nadler that his allotted time was up. This is likely Whitaker’s last testimony before the committee, because the Senate is set to confirm Trump’s nominee, William Barr, to take over the department.
Bernie 2020 Is a Go: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is about to jump into the Democratic primary pool, reports Edward-Isaac Dovere. He’s confident that he can successfully take on Trump in the general elections—and he’s already got a big campaign network ready to push him through the primaries. But the Sanders team is keeping tabs on potential Democratic competitors who haven’t yet formally entered the race, including former Vice President Joe Biden. They’re also watching Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is expected to formally announce her campaign tomorrow, and will likely be Sanders’s closest ideological competitor.
A Tenuous Agreement: The United States and South Korea have quietly resolved a months-long disagreement over how to pay for the American troops currently based in Korea. But the deal is only a temporary one—and it’s a sign of how the Trump administration’s treatment of United States allies is making its alliances more and more fragile. A second summit between Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is looming; North Korea has made it clear that it’s not a fan of the presence of American troops so close to its borders.
A Lion of the People’s House: Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest-serving member of Congress in United States history, died last night at the age of 92. The congressman, who served in the House from 1955 to 2015, lived long enough to see his brand of politics come back into style.
In one of Dingell’s last acts as a public figure, he wrote in The Atlantic about how to improve America’s system of governance. Among his recommendations: abolishing the Senate and instituting automatic voter registration.
Meanwhile, in Virginia: Governor Ralph Northam reportedly told staffers that he isn’t planning to resign amid the controversy surrounding a racist photo in his medical-school yearbook. And Northam’s No. 2, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, was accused by a second woman of sexual assault.
— Elaine Godfrey and Olivia Paschal
Snapshot
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker arrives to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill. (J. Scott Applewhite / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticWhy the Wall Will Never Happen (Richard Parker)
“There will be no ‘concrete structure from sea to sea,’ as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.” → Read on.
How the “U-S-A” Chant Became a Political Weapon (Ben Zimmer)
“Why did members of Congress sound like a rowdy crowd at a national sporting event?” → Read on.
The State of the Union Was Political Malpractice (Rahm Emanuel)
“Using the past as a guide, Trump could have set the stage for future wins, reset his presidency heading into reelection, and proved he has grown and matured in office. Instead, at the State of the Union, he came up short as he has done time and again throughout his presidency.” → Read on.
When a Yearbook Is a Current Event (Megan Garber)
“There has been a remarkable amount of receipt sharing this week in the state of Virginia ... It was telling that yearbooks would be such a common factor in the revelations.” → Read on.
◆ The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise (Sam Adler-Bell, The New Republic)
◆ Democrats Need an Ambitious Climate Plan. The Green New Deal Isn’t It. (Jonathan Chait, New York)
◆ Trump Cornered on Border Wall (Eliana Johnson, Burgess Everett, and Gabby Orr, Politico)
◆ An Ominous Moment for the Pro-Life Movement (David French, National Review)
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When I nominated John Dingell for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he received in 2014, I quoted President Lyndon Johnson signing Medicare into law. “History shapes men,” Johnson said, “but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history.” Johnson was speaking about former President Harry Truman, who would shortly become the first Medicare enrollee. He could not have known that his words would apply so aptly to the representative from Michigan standing nearby.
When I arrived in Congress, John Dingell was already a legend. A 26-year veteran of the House at the time, he was revered as the architect of Medicare, as an author of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and as a forceful advocate for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I was among those who decided to pursue a life of public service in large part because of watching great leaders like John Kennedy and John Dingell accept the torch of leadership for a new generation in the 1960s. Shortly after arriving in Congress, I befriended John and Debbie Dingell. I have been blessed to call both dear friends ever since.
Already at that point, John had gained a reputation for championing working people and crusading for health-care reform—as well as for his sharp wit. He deployed that wit alongside his hallmark blunt style of communicating. In one instance, after being told that his advocacy for a strong civil-rights plank in the Democratic Party’s 1960 platform might alienate certain supporters, he declared: “I’ll hold the door for them—and slam it after them!” It speaks volumes of the man that in his 90s, even after retiring from office, he became a sensation on Twitter with his acerbic tweets and tell-it-like-it-is responses to President Donald Trump. The Twitter feed in heaven just got a lot more entertaining.
“Dad died, and his friends suggested I run for Congress,” John told an interviewer in 2005. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I did, and I was elected … I was assigned the last committee choices and the last office in the place, but I made quite a success out of it.”
He had a gift for understatement. For nearly six decades, the people of Southeast Michigan voted to send John back to Congress again and again, placing their trust in him to be their voice. His constituents loved him, and so did those of us who had the honor of serving with him in Washington.
Over the years, I watched John approach policy with a unique blend of ferocity and tact. He never missed an opportunity to help auto workers and their families, who returned him to Congress a record 29 times. Nothing would stand in the way of his responsibility, he believed, to put his constituents’ interests above all else. Sometimes that meant joining with Republicans against other Democrats. “Work with them when you can, and fight them when you have to,” he’d say about his colleagues across the aisle in a show of the type of pragmatism so rare nowadays in Washington. Throughout his career, he preached civility—and practiced it religiously.
Much will be written and said in the coming days about John Dingell’s achievements. From Medicare to the Affordable Care Act, from civil rights to Wall Street reforms, his legacy is undeniable. But as I look back on his life, I will see the man whose proudest titles weren’t congressman, chairman, or dean but son, husband, father, and grandfather—and U.S. Army veteran. He saw himself primarily as a citizen and public servant. Every year, he’d come through the Capitol carrying a box of paczki—the Polish filled donuts—reminding his friends of the pride he had in his immigrant roots. He’d hand them out to members and staff and visitors alike. That was classic John, finding such joy in the act of sharing what he loved. To all our benefit, he deeply loved this country and took such joy in fighting for its future to be brighter.
It is hard to say what Congress will be like without John Dingell watching over our shoulders. Even after he retired, we were blessed by his regular company as a congressional spouse, his wonderful wife and partner, Debbie, now serving the district that John, his father, and now his wife have represented for 86 years. He’d come back often, and I’d see him talking with the freshmen, much as he did with me when I arrived, and dispensing pearls of wisdom and wit. He’d make them feel like part of something larger than their own service, because in many ways John Dingell was the living connection between the New Deal and Great Society and Democrats’ 21st-century agenda.
Sadly for our country and for all of us who served with him, John will no longer be here to share his sage and frank advice as we move through the days of uncertainty and challenge ahead. On Wednesday, I traveled to Michigan to say goodbye. For two and a half hours, I sat by his bedside; Debbie sat nearby. Before I left, I leaned over and kissed John on his forehead and whispered: “I love you—that’s not just from me, but from all of your friends in the House.”
A moment at a piano on the front lines in Ukraine, motorcycles on the ice in Kazakhstan, snow monkeys in hot springs in Japan, President Trump’s State of the Union address, World Hijab Day in Kyrgyzstan, eel fishing at night in Japan, a Titan missile silo in Arizona, a Super Bowl celebration in Boston, a Year of the Pig parade in Hong Kong, and much more
Courtesy of Ariana Grande, here’s a new breakup phrase to fear: “Don’t want you in my bloodline.” Yes, the 25-year-old singer has thought ahead to the far-off century when she is but a leaf on Ancestry.com. She has determined the desired height and hair-shininess of the future influencers who will call her nonna. Your genome, sir, has been sequenced and found wanting. Take your trash DNA and go.
What a reversal. Grande’s bubblegum used to peddle true love and triumph, or it offered escape: Unplug your brain, take home a stranger, surrender to the stair machine. In the singer’s brief but seismically active career—quakes of news, aftershocks of hits—child-star rituals (like discovering sex) and awful realities (like terrorism) have been polished into tales of uplift. The starkly beautiful 2018 hit “No Tears Left to Cry” could well have been her last word on trauma. But only six months after the confetti-strewn therapy session of Sweetener, a fresh Grande album tends to new wounds while insisting, per one chorus, “Fuck a fake smile.” Thank U, Next, brittle and biting, could be called February: The Album.
Grande’s post-Sweetener life has been tough, with an ex’s fatal overdose and a kiss-and-break-up saga that could hardly have been more public. As important, though, has been her realization about why the imperial-diva business model of the Katy Perry class faltered in recent years. “It’s just like, ‘Bruh, I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do,’ ” she told Billboard, contrasting her cumbersome promotional machine against the single-a-minute flexibility of SoundCloud rap. So when the chatter around her split from the comedian Pete Davidson began to hijack her image, she quickly cut a song that snatched back control. “Thank U, Next” wasn’t musically pioneering, but it packed personality and specifics. Like with the hip-hop guys she’s jealous of, her new music names names.
Both the strengths and flaws of Thank U, Next stem from a sense that, with just a few months to make an album, a brash attitude and the appearance of honesty are really all that matter. Which is not to slight the music, created by Grande with the seasoned smash-makers Max Martin, TB Hits, and Pop Wansel, as well as with younger songwriters in her posse, such as Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét. Again and again, the team alloys Grande’s old tools—toy-box chimes, cutesy background refrains, satiny whispers and yodels—with stainless steel. The poignant opener, “Imagine,” for example, revisits her first flirtations with the now-deceased Mac Miller, using dreamy waltz time, airy whistle tone … and gear-grinding clanks. It’s a sandcastle built on rock bottom.
If the instrumentation is distinctive, so are Grande’s vocals, which continue her career-long melding of Broadway-isms, breathiness, and tricky rap imitations. But there’s something locked in, by the book, about the underlying tunes. With Police-like guitars, sludgy trip-hop interludes, and Grande cleverly underplaying her delivery, the Martin-produced “Bad Idea” has the elements of a future-pop breakthrough. Yet it distractingly cops the melody, cadences, and even abject but defiant tone of that Gotye hit from a few years ago, “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Elsewhere, the swirling R&B of “In My Head” slathers on Grande’s tics—including a glass-shattering vocal run in the chorus—without landing a clean, memorable hook.
Yet Grande’s personal edge ensures that even the duller portions of the album will leave a mark. Rewriting mushy clichés with a wary eye, the singer empathizes with an omnipresent “you” but doesn’t ever give up agency to him. On the top-tier bop “NASA,” which evokes Grande’s sonic godmother Mariah Carey without recycling her, she kindly but firmly asks a lover for a night apart. The confessional centerpiece “Ghostin,” all whooshing synths and sad strings, appears to time warp back to her wrenching moment of mourning Miller while trying to stay connected to Davidson. Then there’s “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” whose story line is right in the title. With Grande acknowledging the ugliness of the home-wrecker impulse, the song does a rare thing in pop: It takes a risk.
Still, nothing jolted me like “Bloodline,” that track informing a fling that he’s just not mating material. Martin’s crew conjures fake dancehall, and while cribbing from the Caribbean is certainly an overplayed move for white pop stars (Grande went reggae-lite back on 2016’s “Side to Side”), there’s somehow still a live energy in the song’s horns and pulsing bass. Thank U, Next is generally icy, but this track is hot, and despite the curt dismissal at its core, it actually doesn’t read as bitter. “No need to apologize,” Grande sings: the kind of truth-telling born of neither hurt nor callousness—both of which she has absolutely earned a right to—but mere freedom.
On the 15th anniversary of Facebook, the Atlantic senior editor Julie Beck writes that the popular, all-encompassing social network is like unicorn blood in Harry Potter. Much like the substance that keeps Voldemort barely alive in a semi-lifelike state, Facebook allows relationships with old classmates and distant relatives to drag on well beyond their natural life span. “Facebook is where friendships go to never quite die,” Beck writes. “The site has created an entirely new category of relationship, one that simply couldn't have existed for most of human history—the vestigial friendship.” While people often have hundreds, if not thousands, of “friends” on Facebook, research shows that most people can’t maintain that many relationships in real life. But that network of weaker ties with people you haven’t seen or talked to in years can sometimes come in handy if you’re searching for information or advice—like an old encyclopedia gathering dust on a shelf until the moment you need it.
HighlightsWhen an Italian economist raised his London-born daughter in Switzerland with his Spanish wife, he started wondering why parenting styles vary so widely in different countries. That question became the basis for Fabrizio Zilibotti’s new book, Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. The Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker interviewed Zilibotti on the rise of helicopter parenting, and how the level of income inequality in a society plays a major role in how parents raise their children.
In the March issue of The Atlantic, Erika Christakis looks at active-shooter drills in schools, and how the threat of gun violence and mass shootings has become normalized for young students—in one kindergarten classroom, students sing a macabre version of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star,” to help them remember to lock the doors, shut the lights off, and stay quiet. But are these drills demanding too much emotional maturity from children?
BIANCA BAGNARELLIEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a mother writes in about her daughter’s new friends after the family’s recent move abroad. After discovering sexually explicit texts between her daughter and a boy—to make matters worse, the son of a colleague—she doesn’t know what to do.
Lori’s advice: This could be an opportunity to establish open lines of communication with your daughter. The key is to exercise restraint and withhold judgment, which is crucial for navigating tricky conversations about sexuality and relationships.
Remember, your job is mostly to listen. If you do want to share your thoughts after you’ve heard her out, you can tell her … how his text felt to you, which might be a springboard for more discussions around relationships, online behavior, intimacy, expectations, social pressure, the short- and long-term consequences of what people send online, and good decision-making.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
In so many ways, Jeff Bezos isn’t a relatable guy. As the CEO of Amazon, he’s the world’s richest man. He lords over much of the internet’s infrastructure. He turns the municipal governments of America’s largest cities into slavering lapdogs at the prospect of his company’s arrival. In at least one way, though, Bezos is exactly like a huge number of Americans in 2019: On at least a few occasions, he apparently has dashed off explicit texts and some predictably composed nudes to a romantic partner with little apparent regard for whether it could come back to bite him in the ass.
Bezos’s moment of reckoning came on Thursday, when the Amazon founder chose to publicize what he described as a blackmail and extortion attempt by American Media Inc. AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer, had obtained intimate photos and messages that Bezos had previously sent to Lauren Sanchez, the woman now rumored to be his girlfriend. He announced last month that he and his wife, MacKenzie, would divorce after 25 years of marriage.
In a Medium post, Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, alleged that AMI wanted him to disavow publicly any knowledge of the publisher’s political dealings. In exchange, Bezos wrote, AMI would withhold publication of those private messages. In 2018, AMI admitted to federal authorities that it had paid off women on behalf of then–presidential candidate Donald Trump, and rumors abound of the company’s additional involvement with both the Trump campaign and the Saudi royal family.
[Read: Jeff Bezos brings the receipts]
For plenty of people, though, the details of high-level political backbiting aren’t the headline here, or at least not the only headline. Why was someone like Bezos, who has such an enormous and singular public profile and who’s known to be canny and relentless, lured in by the base, risky pleasures of taking dick pics?
According to researchers, the smart and powerful probably aren’t any less prone to sexting than the rest of us. Human history suggests that you can’t intellectualize your way out of being horny, no matter how much you’d like to.
Like most sexual behaviors, sexting can be healthy or harmful, depending on the context and the people involved. By all indications, Bezos’s sexts were consensual and reciprocated by Sanchez, and those kinds of exchanges have become a very common part of early-phase intimate relationships, according to Michelle Drouin, a psychology professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne. “It’s a way to establish intimacy with a partner, to tell them you’re having sexual thoughts about them, to convey sexual plans that you might have with them later on,” she says. “This is all part of the normative sexual experience now.” According to research by Drouin and others, more than 80 percent of young American adults have sent or received an explicit message or photo.
Most of the research on digital sexuality concerns adolescents and college students, but another area of sexting study might be more closely applicable to Bezos’s relationship with Sanchez: cheating. Drouin says that the structure of sexting lends has helped make it popular with those stepping out behind a partner’s back; it happens more frequently in these situations than between long-term, committed paramours. “Your cheating partner is not usually the person you go home to every night,” Drouin says. “It’s a way to express sexual desire at a distance in a way that can be hidden a little bit.”
Not only was Bezos in a new relationship and rumored to be cheating on his wife, which are a set of circumstances in which sexting is common, but he’s a man in America in 2019, which means that, on a cultural level, sending a dick pic just isn’t the scandal it was even a few years ago. Scores of celebrity nudes have been leaked by hackers, and so many regular people have tried and enjoyed sexting. For a person with even a modicum of cultural power, the risk (if it was even considered in the moment of dick-pic reverie) could seem negligible. “It adds a dimension of normality to him. Billionaires send sexts just like the rest of us,” Drouin says.
Which isn’t to say that sexting has no cultural risks, because it does. Consensual nude photos are still frequently repurposed to harass people—especially young women—which is a remnant of the fading cultural attitudes that likely made AMI think it might be successful in bending Bezos to its will. In the past, for instance, evidence of repeated extramarital sexting was used to derail the promising career of the politician Anthony Weiner.
[Read: In Weiner’s wake, a brief history of the word ‘sexting]’
But there are real differences in structural power between an ascendant-but-unproven political star and a hyper-wealthy business leader, and between sending salacious messages to a number of strangers online and to one romantic partner. If the blackmail allegations are true, it seems as if AMI’s math was a little off on exactly how scandalous a few racy photos are at this point in America’s smartphone saturation, and how much an already powerful person could be harmed by their revelation.
“Very powerful people feel protected, and that they’re so high up that nothing will happen to them,” says Susan Lipkins, a psychologist who has researched both sexting and bullying. “[Bezos’s] life is so fantastic and unreachable, it feels like it’s outside of the atmosphere of normal life.” Indeed, researchers have found that people who feel as if they have irrevocable power are significantly more likely to make risky decisions.
Whose power is more irrevocable than the world’s richest man’s? It’s hard to imagine a situation in which consequences for Bezos’s sexts go beyond personal embarrassment, and since he published evidence of AMI’s alleged extortion attempts, he’s been the star of a news cycle far more positive than any for him or his company in recent memory. Bezos, who sits atop a technology empire, was probably well aware of a small risk of hacking or interception when he sent those messages, and he appears not to have cared. He’s a smart guy. In this case, it seems he read the room correctly.
Whether you’re the dreamiest of romantic optimists or a determined skeptic of fairy-tale endings, you can’t deny that love makes for a compelling story line—or that it can have an impact that reaches far beyond “happily ever after.” Throughout the course of his career, James Baldwin wrote not only about the ways that love could transform American race relations, but also about the relationships that hold black families together. Jane Austen’s classic marriage plots have profoundly influenced pop culture, creating a legacy that the author herself might have questioned.
Today the novelist Jasmine Guillory is pushing back on some of the problematic conventions of the romance genre, in part by affirming her female characters’ agency and consent. Meanwhile, Alex Woolfson and Winona Nelson use sci-fi tropes to celebrate the gay protagonists often missing from mainstream story lines. And the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen’s analysis of women’s friendships shows how platonic relationships can be as rewarding and tricky to navigate as romantic ones.
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out.
Check out past issues here. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
Making peace with Jane Austen’s marriage plots
“No one did more to challenge the conventions and strictures of marriage for women in the 19th century, while simultaneously enshrining it as the ultimate happy ending for her worthy, intelligent, and independent characters.”
📚 NORTHANGER ABBEY, by Jane Austen
📚 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jane Austen
📚 SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, by Jane Austen
📚 MANSFIELD PARK, by Jane Austen
📚 EMMA, by Jane Austen
📚 PERSUASION, by Jane Austen
The sci-fi comic book that portrays gay romance as completely conventional
“Artifice tells a story about an android assassin (Deacon) who falls in love with a young man (Jeff) his corporate owners want him to kill.”
📚 ARTIFICE, by Alex Woolfson, illustrated by Winona Nelson
How to write consent in romance novels
“[Jasmine] Guillory is particularly skilled at writing the men who woo her novels’ female protagonists with compassion and empathy … Guillory’s male leads aren’t perfect, but they’re unwavering in their respect for the women at the center of these stories.”
📚 THE PROPOSAL, by Jasmine Guillory
📚 THE WEDDING DATE, by Jasmine Guillory
Friendships can be as fulfilling and fraught as their romantic counterparts
“The love in the platonic relationships [Deborah] Tannen describes … can be passionate, and comforting, and life-defining, and occasionally heart-breaking.”
📚 YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE I CAN TELL: INSIDE THE LANGUAGE OF WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS, by Deborah Tannen
How James Baldwin’s writings about love evolved
“If Beale Street Could Talk, which was published in 1974 and follows a young black couple whose lives are torn apart by a false criminal accusation, … marked a crucial turn in how the author sought to characterize the most abiding theme and moral principle of his work: love.”
📚 IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, by James Baldwin
📚 THE FIRE NEXT TIME, by James Baldwin
Last week, we asked you to share your most challenging and rewarding reads. Candace Polson, of Eagle Mountain, Utah, stuck with Paradise Lost and discovered that “if the reader looks and listens to every line, every image, a stronger, slightly more self-possessed view of Eve emerges.” Richard Gess, of Atlanta, Georgia, recommends Miniatures, a novel by Norah Labiner that expands from “riffing on the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes mytho-history” to include “everything from radical slowing of narrative time to continuing allusions to 1970s–1980s childhood pop culture … a vast swath of the world.”
What’s a story that’s expanded your understanding of love? Tweet at us with the hashtag #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. The book she’s been texting her friends about lately is Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid.
Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.
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After Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos proposed a new rule on the obligations of colleges under Title IX, focusing on the due-process rights owed to students accused of sexual misconduct, members of the public submitted more than 96,000 comments. The ACLU’s contribution is of particular interest.
By way of background, Title IX is a law that states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education published a letter setting forth a new interpretation of what colleges had to do to meet their obligations under the statute. Any failure to comply would risk their ability to receive federal funding.
“Universities reacted with panicked over-compliance,” argues the Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen. “In renewing their attention to the rights of alleged victims of sexual assault, many began to disregard the rights of accused students ... It has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses.”
[Conor Friedersdorf: The ACLU declines to defend civil rights]
Emily Yoffe reported on related injustices for The Atlantic. Later, when DeVos was drafting a new rule to supersede the Obama-era approach, Yoffe commented that the Donald Trump administration’s proposed guidelines “aren’t without their flaws—but they move the policy in a more just direction.”
At the time, the ACLU seemed to disagree, vehemently.
The civil-liberties organization published a tweet complaining that DeVos’s proposal would “tip the scales” against accusers. “The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment,” it said. “It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence. We will continue to support survivors.”
At the time I published a critique, “The ACLU Declines to Defend Civil Rights,” that asked, “Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?” Many other civil libertarians objected, too.
So I was pleasantly surprised last week to read the more formal, official comment that the ACLU submitted to the Department of Education. As the Brooklyn College professor K. C. Johnson observed, the ACLU’s lengthier, more considered statement is strikingly different from its earlier social-media reaction. It encompasses significant criticisms of the new rule, many of which warrant attention.
But on matters of due process, it aligns more closely with the Trump approach than the Obama approach, bolstering rather than weakening vital procedural protections.
“The ACLU supports many of the increased procedural protections required by the Proposed Rule for Title IX grievance proceedings, including the right to a live hearing and an opportunity for cross-examination in the university setting, the opportunity to stay Title IX proceedings in the face of an imminent or ongoing criminal investigation or trial, the right of access to evidence from the investigation, and the right to written decisions carefully addressing the evidence,” it states.
[Read: The uncomfortable truth about campus rape policy]
It urges a requirement that universities “provide counsel for both parties for the hearing if either party requests counsel.” And it questions the ascendant notion that protections for accused students and justice for victims are at odds:
Conventional wisdom all too often pits the interests in due process and equal rights against each other, as though all steps to remedy campus sexual violence will lead to deprivations of fair process for the respondent, and robust fair process protections will necessarily disadvantage or deter complainants. There are, however, important ways in which the goals of due process and equality are shared. Both principles seek to ensure that no student—complainant or respondent—is unjustifiably deprived of access to an education. Moreover, both parties (as well as the schools themselves) benefit from disciplinary procedures that are fair, prompt, equitable, and reliable.
At the same time, the ACLU still objects to the way that the proposed rule grants colleges the discretion to decide whether the burden of proof in sexual-misconduct disciplinary hearings should follow the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, requiring a 50.1 percent chance that the charges are accurate, or a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, a higher burden of proof.
I previously argued against the lower burden of proof.
The ACLU’s latest articulation of its position states, “By authorizing recipients to impose a clear and convincing evidence standard instead of a preponderance standard, the Proposed Rule frustrates the purpose of Title IX. Under that standard, even where it is more likely than not that the respondent sexually harassed or assaulted a complainant, the school would have no obligation to provide a remedy.” Notice the way in which “to provide a remedy” and to punish the accused student get conflated in that formulation of the matter.
“The preponderance standard is the appropriate standard of proof to apply for complaints involving peer-on-peer harassment or disputes, including Title IX grievance proceedings, for two reasons,” the ACLU continues. “First, it ‘is the burden of proof in most civil trials’ and requires the factfinder to determine that the complaint is more likely true than false … Second, the preponderance standard makes sense because it treats the complainant and the respondent equitably. That is why it is used in civil litigation, where there is no ex ante reason to favor one side over the other.” Notice that technically, even the preponderance standard favors the accused, insofar as they prevail in cases where the evidence for and against guilt are exactly 50 percent in both directions. (Elsewhere, the presumption of innocence itself is now being attacked.)
[Caitlin Flanagan: Mutually nonconsensual sex]
The ACLU goes on to argue that a “clear and convincing” standard “tips the scales against the complainant,” adding that “in Title IX grievance or disciplinary proceedings, both the complainant and the respondent have a significant interest in access to education. Serious disciplinary sanctions will undoubtedly affect a respondent’s access to education. And, as the Department acknowledges, a school’s failure to address sexual harassment or assault will affect the complainant’s access to education.” Thus, it concludes, “A preponderance standard provides the most equitable approach for resolving the complainant’s and respondent’s equal interests in access to education.”
I still think the ACLU has this wrong. That intuition flows in part from my understanding of 50.1 percent. Imagine that a roulette table appears in your garage. You’re obligated to cover the bet of the first passerby. Yikes! For numbers one through 36, half are red and half are black. And then there’s zero, which is green.
Darrin Zammit Lupi / REutersA neighbor walks in, puts $1,000 on black, and demands that you spin the wheel. The odds are slightly in your favor. You’d be correct to conclude that you’re more likely than not to win. Now think of your confidence level that you will win as that wheel is spinning, but before the ball settles into its ultimate slot.
Based on that same degree of confidence, would you be willing to expel a student from college while permanently branding that person a rapist? I’d need something more than 50.1 percent confidence to impose that consequence on someone.
What’s more, many of the most serious campus disciplinary hearings strike me as very unlike most civil trials in important respects. At public institutions, agents of the state are bringing charges against a student and perhaps imposing discipline, compared with one party suing another to try to recover damages. As Scott Greenfield, a criminal-defense attorney, writes on his blog Simple Justice, “this is no ‘grievance procedure’ but a subconstitutional criminal prosecution that has consequences more severe than the vast majority of crimes.”
The ACLU’s argument also posits a false symmetry. While the educational access of both accusers and respondents are indeed implicated in Title IX hearings, there are relevant differences, too. A wrongly accused student who is expelled utterly loses access to an education, whereas a victim doesn’t necessarily lose access to an education if a respondent is wrongly acquitted, in part because punishing a given perpetrator is not the only tool at a college’s disposal for safeguarding the educational access of victims.
[Read: The bad science behind campus response to sexual assault]
Finally, an acquittal under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard may be harder on some accusers than an acquittal under a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, because only the former will strike many as implying an unreliable accuser. The latter better enables adjudicators to find someone not responsible without seeming to say that the accuser is more than likely a liar. That difference could conceivably spare some innocents a wrongful conviction, too, because some adjudicators are averse to implying that any accuser did something wrong or deceitful by coming forward with a claim of sexual misconduct.
These are the thorniest of questions, and neither approach to determining the burden of proof will yield the optimal outcome in all cases. People of goodwill who are genuinely concerned with the rights of accusers and respondents are on both sides of this debate.
And that strikes me as a final argument against the ACLU’s position. That is to say, because this is a tough question about which reasonable people can and do disagree, it makes sense to give different educational institutions leeway to adopt different burdens of proof. Perhaps the relevant tradeoffs vary with local circumstances in a way that makes different standards right for different institutions. Or perhaps a diversity of approaches is the best way to evaluate which burden is best and ought to be adopted universally at some point in the future.
Regardless, I suspect that the legislators who passed Title IX would agree that in doing so, they had no intention of prohibiting a “clear and convincing evidence” standard in campus disciplinary matters involving sexual misconduct. The thorny tradeoffs, with implications for access to education on both sides, are such that private institutions should be free to do what’s best as they see it rather than being coerced by the changing whims of a politicized central authority.
How old were you when you first joined Facebook, and do you remember why you joined? Has the way you use it changed over the years? What might cause you to leave the platform for good?
Here’s how readers responded.
I first joined Facebook in June of 2007, the summer before my junior year of high school. I joined because I had heard my friends talking about Facebook for a couple of months, and posting pictures and having conversations, and I wanted to have access to that information, too—a symptom of what we would now call fear of missing out (FOMO). So after returning from a mission trip that summer with a full disposable camera, I had the pictures developed and requested a CD with digital copies in addition to the prints. With digital photos in hand, I created a Facebook account and began posting. At this point in time, in order to join, you still had to be associated with a school of some sort, whether it was a college or high school.
When I first joined, I used Facebook mostly for posting pictures, updating people on my status, posting on friends’ “walls,” and “poking” people. I’d go searching for all different bumper stickers, flair, and random affiliate groups (“I spell Caitlin the right way”; “I flip my pillow to the cool side”) so that anyone who checked out my profile would have no doubt about my sense of humor and what I “cared” about.
Two years later, after going to college, I mostly used Facebook to keep up with old friends through messenger and keep a tally of new college “friends.” For the most part, it was a repository for all of my pictures (now with a digital camera) and a way to show my high-school friends that I was having a fantastic time at college. When I studied abroad a couple of years later, I religiously posted all of the pictures I took so that family back home could keep tabs on my whereabouts and adventures.
Since college, my Facebook use has mostly tapered off. I usually check it one to two times a day, but don’t really post anything. Mostly Facebook is now used as a way to remember people’s birthdays and to plan and schedule events with large groups of friends. If I post anything, it’s usually sharing interesting news articles I think people should read.
To be honest, I would have probably deleted Facebook by now, if it weren’t for groups and events. Currently, there just isn’t any other app or service out there that allows the easy creation and dissemination of events for free. I’ve tried Slack and GroupMe, but neither has the ease or the user base of Facebook. If something were to ever come out that allows the creation of events that can be shared quickly and keep track of RSVPs, and if it were free and widely adopted, then I would probably quit Facebook for good.
Caitlin Roetheli
Austin, Texas
I refused to join Facebook—and the more I read and learn about Facebook, the happier I am about that decision.
John K. Alexander
Cincinnati, Ohio
I joined Facebook about 10 years ago, when I was around 40. I had some friends who had joined, and they were telling me that it wasn’t just for young people anymore. I ended up finding people I hadn’t talked to in ages, and it was fun to see how people were doing after all those years and in different parts of the country. It was also a good place to make announcements to a wider audience, such as the passing of a parent or birth of a child. People shared their kids’ photos, and it was nice to get caught up. I stopped going on as much after a few years, when a couple of friends began posting everything they were doing in a day. It got to be tiresome. It was eating up a lot of time, and I felt that it was time wasted. The only times I use Facebook now are when I want to pass around a petition I am signing or want to make people aware of a cause or issue. I also use a different page to reach out to fans of my band.
Christina Taylor
Natick, Mass.
I’ve been off Facebook for years—having joined in my mid-40s, and resigned my account a couple of years later, years before the recent revelations of Facebook’s privacy breaches and malfeasance—for two reasons:
Facebook actually works against intimacy and deep connection. A dear friend of mine who lives across the country and I had corresponded with long letters at intervals for several years—not often, but in depth. Once we became Facebook friends, that relationship flattened out. Keeping sort-of-halfway in touch obviated the necessity of long, intimate (email) letters to intentionally maintain the friendship at a distance. Once I deleted my account, my relationships recovered.
The last straw, though, was privacy. One of our children was having trouble with transitioning to a new school, and began seeing a therapist for anxiety. A couple of months later, the name and photo of the therapist appeared as one of Facebook’s “suggested” friends for me. This therapist was not someone we knew socially, we didn’t have her as an acquaintance in common (to our knowledge) with anyone we knew, and I had not mentioned her on the site. There was no reason Facebook should have made any connection between us and this therapist. It was beyond creepy. I deleted my account that day.
Diana Dubrawsky
Silver Spring, Md.
As an American citizen who has lived in France for the past 45 years—my husband was French, and I’m now an 82-year-old widow—I have a Facebook account for only one reason: getting my far-flung family news. I do not write anything on Facebook. Every once and a while, I will click on “like.” It’s a mystery to me to learn that people want to, and will, reveal so much of their personal lives to the public!
Since I do know that this platform takes—or, I could say, steals—one’s information to use it for commercial purposes, I disapprove.
Valeria Wolff
St. Rémy, Saône-et-Loire, France
I joined Facebook about 10 years ago, when I was 45.
At first I was a bit bewildered by the technology, but fairly quickly I was able to reach other people I knew in other states and enjoyed a level of access to them I’d never had before. That was, and remains, a lovely thing.
Then I discovered Facebook games, which all required you to add “friends” in order to advance in the game. Eventually I had 3,500 “friends” mostly from these games. That has lost its glitter. The games were a nice distraction but profited me nothing. The “friends” were just clicks in a game.
Then came volatile elections in which all those 3,500 “friends” filled my News Feed with a kitchen-sink soup of mostly unwelcome commentary.
With a tidal wave of social-justice videos, my view of what my country was began to change. I realized over several years’ time that on an international stage, we are no better or worse than the majority of countries out there. That hard, unwelcome, and mostly ugly awakening created a paradigm shift in which I began to question everything around me.
We live our lives in bubbles of our own making or in the pleasant bubbles of others for as long as we can. I think Facebook broke every bubble I had and then some. I removed every friend I had, and changed Facebook to a News Feed composed entirely of interest pages. I am pleased with that change. Now Facebook is full of gardening, cooking, and do-it-yourself posts that I profit by. But all my bubbles are gone. This country has been exposed for what it is and continues to be exposed every day.
Would I do it differently if I could? No. I am wiser and stronger as a result of Facebook. The anger and bitterness at my broken bubbles will pass. I owe Facebook a debt of gratitude for its unwelcome news along with its endless stream of things that make me laugh. After all that, could Facebook do something to make me leave?
Never say never.
Joan Taylor
Manitou Springs, Colo.
Our middle son died in 2001, at age 25, of undiagnosed heart failure. Eight years later, a college friend of his let us know that he’d started a Facebook group called I Miss Chuck O’Neill. My husband and I hadn’t thought Facebook had anything to offer us, but when we heard about the I Miss Chuck group, we immediately checked it out and loved it. We joined the group, as did the rest of our family, followed over the years by his friends from the many chapters of his all-too-short life. The photos, reminiscences, and messages always make us smile, and they keep him close to us, no matter how many years have passed. Given all that, we’re pretty likely to stick with Facebook as long as that groups thrives, shares, and grows.
Kate O’Neill
Pennington, N.J.
I was 49 or 50 when I joined; it seemed a useful way to keep up with some old colleagues who had found me through that medium. When I told my 19-year-old daughter I was signing up, she said, fully deadpan, “Why would you join Facebook? You don’t have any friends!”
Abraham J. Shragge
Honolulu, Hawaii
I joined Facebook reluctantly about a year ago, at age 57, solely to get an idea of what my teenage daughter was posting. Having it allows me to have some handle on my child’s wanderings in a dark and lecherous jungle. It’s too late to put a stop to it now; this social-media thing exploded on us parents before we realized what was happening.
Jon L. (last name withheld upon request)
Little Rock, Ark.
“They invented a game on top of a game.” So says Spence (played by Bill Duke), gruffly reflecting on the history of organized basketball to his friend and protégé Ray (André Holland), in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, High Flying Bird. In this movie—shot on smartphones and distributed both online and in a few theaters—no professional game is ever played, and no team is ever named. Everything about the film has a surreptitious air, almost as if the audience is being given a rare peek into an executive boardroom. If basketball is the primary game that Spence describes, the NBA is the game on top of the game. High Flying Bird wonders what would happen if that second layer—the business of the sport—went away.
This is the second project in a row that Soderbergh, the form-shattering godfather of the indie drama, has shot on iPhone cameras, which lend a crisp but unsettling vibe to the proceedings. The iPhone sands away a lot of the cinematic sheen one might get with a bigger, more robust camera, but it can also be put anywhere in a room without taking up much space. In High Flying Bird, that makes it an ideal device for listening in on conversations between agents, executives, owners, and players during a fictionalized NBA lockout.
Soderbergh’s last film, Unsane, used the iPhone to smuggle audiences into a malevolent mental hospital for a queasy viewing experience. High Flying Bird has a little more snap and crackle. Powered by a fantastic script from the playwright and Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight), the film imagines what could happen if pro players took their careers into their own hands during a labor shutdown, and how they might use the internet to get the word out. That sense of business-busting online innovation corresponds to the film’s streaming release, which itself bypasses the traditional movie business. I’ve never seen a Netflix movie do a better job of noting the dramatic irony of its very viewing format.
After an introductory interview with the Detroit Pistons point guard Reggie Jackson (the film includes documentary-style chats with three real NBA stars), High Flying Bird opens at a glitzy Manhattan restaurant. Ray, an agent, is counseling his client Erick (Melvin Gregg) against accepting any exorbitant loans during the lockout. Ray then learns his credit card has been frozen, his funds having slowed to a trickle while basketball isn’t being played. He embarks on a quest to upend a sports system dependent on rich owners and lucrative TV deals, and to give power back to stars like Erick.
McCraney’s script is designed to challenge viewers’ preconceived notions of how the NBA treats its players, but it does so without feeling like a TED Talk about the economy of sports. The banter between Ray, Erick, Spence, Ray’s wise assistant Sam (Zazie Beetz), and the players’-union lawyer Myra (Sonja Sohn) sings with intelligence and wit. Holland, who worked with Soderbergh on the wonderful Cinemax series The Knick, is an obvious star, giving Ray the right amount of swagger and brooding intelligence. He’s a much smarter, more self-assured Jerry Maguire for the 21st century, carefully laying out a plan to disrupt his industry without tipping the audience off as to how he could possibly carry it out.
Soderbergh and McCraney let information dribble out slowly through bits of overheard dialogue and furtive glances between characters. Ray’s commitment to shaking things up has something to do with his past—he once represented a cousin who played basketball—but what exactly happened back then is for the viewer to figure out. The same goes for Spence’s motives. Duke, a venerable character actor and director in his own right, plays Spence as a sort of hangdog relic of a previous age. He’s easy for younger characters to dismiss, but he also possesses a wealth of knowledge about how the NBA’s image rights and legal infrastructure keep players from acting independently.
High Flying Bird builds to a showdown and a stunt that on paper seem borderline outrageous. But anyone who’s a fan of professional basketball will realize how plausible this specific labor action seems—and how differently the 2011 lockout could’ve gone had players managed to leverage their own images, and their online brands, against the owners who were demanding that they sacrifice future salary to get back on the court. That scenario is what High Flying Bird has fun pondering, and why it’s such an unusual delight to watch. Soderbergh’s unorthodox film release and cheap, idiosyncratic shooting style are ideal fits for the director’s fascinating, speculative story about the future of the NBA.
On Thursday afternoon, The Virginian-Pilot, the daily paper based in Norfolk, Virginia, broke news that was at once shocking and deeply predictable: another Virginia politician, another instance of racism captured in a yearbook. This time around, the lawmaker was Tommy Norment, the majority leader of Virginia’s state Senate; the publication was the 1968 issue of The Bomb, the Virginia Military Institute’s yearbook, for which Norment had served as managing editor. Among the images the Pilot cited from that year’s issue were one of a man standing in a bank of snow, clutching a Confederate flag, and another of white men in blackface, their arms slung around one another, grinning, posing, amused, proud. They are wearing sunglasses.
There is racist text, too, in the book meant to mark the passage of another year within the violence and turbulence of the late 1960s. “The N-word is used at least once,” the Pilot reports. And “a student from Bangkok, Thailand, is called a ‘Jap’ and a ‘Chink.’ A caption under another unidentified man’s photo reads: ‘He was known as the “Barracks Jew” having his fingers in the finances of the entire Corps.’ ”
Norment initially professed indignation at being associated with words and images that had, until this week, lived mostly in archives and attics. In a statement issued through a spokesperson on Thursday, he said, “The use of blackface is abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it. As one of seven working on a 359-page yearbook, I cannot endorse or associate myself with every photo, entry or word on each page.” He added that he had supported VMI’s integration and, later, its inclusion of women. He also blamed the messenger: Norment was “not surprised,” the statement read, “that those wanting to engulf Republican leaders in the current situations involving the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general would highlight the yearbook from my graduation a half-century ago.”
But that’s the thing about a yearbook: It is its own evidence. (This particular yearbook, as it happens, is fully digitized.) Later on Thursday, by the time Norment gave an interview to the Pilot, his indignation had adopted a note of contrition. Norment reiterated that he hadn’t taken the photos and that he’d been one of several editors of the yearbook—“I was kind of the first sergeant,” he said of his role—but he also allowed that, as one on a team responsible for the content of the yearbook, “I’m still culpable.” He didn’t have much choice about admitting that: The words and images, made permanent in pulp and ink, admitted it for him. The yearbook has the receipts because the yearbook is the receipts.
There has been a remarkable amount of receipt sharing this week in the state of Virginia. Yearbooks—publications meant to capture the truths of a gauzy past—have taken on a revealing kind of currency. There was, first, Governor Ralph Northam’s medical-school yearbook from 1984. Northam’s page featured a photo of a man in blackface, holding a beer, posing next to a person wearing the outfit of American racial terrorism: Ku Klux Klan robes and a hood. Northam initially apologized. But then he changed his mind, insisting that, on second thought, neither of the people in the photo on his yearbook page was him. And then he amended his story once more: Though the yearbook was false evidence, he maintained, he had, indeed, engaged in blackface on another occasion.
On Wednesday, Virginia’s attorney general, Mark Herring, acknowledged that he, too, had worn blackface—this time at a college party in 1980 (he’d dressed and performed as the rapper Kurtis Blow). The week wasn’t limited to revelations of racism: On Thursday, Vanessa Tyson, a professor at Scripps College and a fellow at Stanford University, came forward with her allegation that Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, sexually assaulted her in 2004.
Fairfax has denied Tyson’s claim, insisting that he’d thought their encounter was consensual. He remains in office, as do Northam and Herring and Norment, leaving the past to hover like poison in the present. The unsettled events of the week—their interplay of evidence and denial, of accountability and impunity—have done, in their way, what yearbooks are meant to do: mark a moment in time. Their contradictions serve as their own neat parable. It was me, it wasn’t me; maybe we should use facial-recognition software to determine that it wasn’t me: The news follows the beat of a Shaggy song, its whiplash fit for a country that reliably assumes itself to be better than it is.
It was telling that yearbooks would be such a common factor in the revelations. “It has been the objective of this year’s Bomb staff to concentrate on the VMI as it exists in actuality, not in theory,” Norment wrote as part of his managing-editor’s note in that 1968 yearbook, and the insight was apt: Yearbooks are meant to double as time capsules. There’s aspiration woven into their portrayals of things, certainly—evidence of how individual people wanted to remember themselves, and of how communities did—but the aspiration also “exists in actuality.” Yearbooks began as school-specific extensions of commonplace books—notebooks that rose in popularity in early-modern Europe, journals people used to cite bits of information and wisdom they wanted to remember. In the America of the late-17th century, the writer Jennifer Billock put it, students began taking the idea of the commonplace book—Evernote, basically, for the analog age—and applying it to their classmates. They began creating scrapbook-style books meant to preserve physical artifacts of the school year just passed (among them dried flowers, newspaper articles, and … hair clippings).
If commonplace books were meant to convert collective insights into individual ones, the yearbooks that have suddenly become news stories do the opposite. They take individual truths and put them into a communal context. The objective element of the yearbook (things captured, as evidence of a moment in time, for anyone to read) collides with the subjective (these are stories told by people about themselves). Reading someone else’s yearbook—whether it’s Tommy Norment’s from 1968, or your mom’s from 1988, or even your own from 2008—can be an intensely alienating experience: all those unfamiliar acronyms. All those references to extremely school-specific traditions. All the bits of humor whose whole point is how aggressively unfunny they will be to anyone who isn’t already in on the joke.
Yearbooks as metaphors for insularity: It’s hard to read the news about Northam and Norment and not think about another yearbook that recently became, against all odds, a current event. Brett Kavanaugh’s yearbook page—this one from 1983, this one from Georgetown Preparatory School—initially read as its own kind of receipt about the man whom Christine Blasey Ford accused of drunkenly assaulting her at a party: “Malibu Fan Club.” “Beach Week Ralph Club.” “Devil’s Triangle.” “Judge—Have You Boofed Yet?” “Renate Alumnius.” All those in-jokes converted, through the workings of news stories and Senate testimonies and Saturday Night Live, into collective truths.
The New York Times spoke with the woman referenced in that last caption, Renate Schroeder Dolphin, one of many women of Kavanaugh’s acquaintance who had signed a letter of support testifying to his character. Dolphin had not been aware of the yearbook caption in which the future Supreme Court justice seemed to brag about sexual exploits with her. The claim wasn’t true, she said. It was “hurtful,” she said. It was, in fact, “horrible.”
But in arguing against the claims made about him by Ford and other women, Kavanaugh employed, essentially, the yearbook defense. He summoned the idea of yearbooks—and of elite institutions—as fundamentally insular things, their meaning opaque to anyone who isn’t part of them. He suggested, in the testimony to Congress that focused on his yearbook page, that the content of the page was effectively irrelevant to the matter at hand: The yearbook had been misinterpreted, he implied, by those who did not speak the very specialized dialect of Georgetown Preparatory School as it existed in 1983. Devil’s triangle, Kavanaugh told Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, was merely a drinking game. And his fellow Georgetown Prep alums backed him up. What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep: The point of a yearbook is that its signals and symbols are legible only to those who are remembered in its pages.
Except, of course, it is not fully that. The kind of insularity that, last fall, helped to convince a sizable enough portion of the U.S. Senate that Kavanaugh deserved a Supreme Court seat is the same kind of insularity that a group of Northam’s schoolmates summoned when they put out a statement, this week, in his defense: “We attended classes with the Governor,” they wrote. “We socialized with him. We knew him very well.” And “we do not believe the Governor ever engaged in, promoted, tolerated, or condoned racism.”
This time, the argument was less successful. Pictures speak for themselves in ways even words cannot. The images in a yearbook are different from the words in a yearbook—and they are, as Northam is learning, extremely difficult things to argue out of. There will very likely, and very soon, be more yearbooks excavated from the archives, their contents damning not only because of how much American culture has changed over the past decades, but also because of how much it hasn’t. There will very likely be more lawmakers who defend themselves by insisting that they can’t be blamed, because they were part of a team of editors, a collective of participants—simply one of many who treated hatred as a joke. More power brokers who fail to see the irony of using systemic failure as their defense.
This week, news broke about Eastern Virginia Medical School, Northam’s alma mater: In 2014, The Washington Post reported, the school’s administration stopped publishing yearbooks altogether. The reason for the decision was the revelation of a yearbook in which three white students had chosen to dress, in the pictures meant to serve as warm memories for their future selves, in the uniforms of the Confederacy. One of them wore a thin smile. Another held a gun. All of them, those soon-to-be doctors, posed before that most regressive of in-jokes: the Confederate battle flag. Their yearbook was published in 2013.
With four days to go before the prestigious 2019 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Mara Flood is spending a good chunk of her waking hours keeping Poe, a two-year-old smooth collie (full name: Travler SugarNSpice Witches Do Come Blue), from impulsively humping the young female in heat who’s been staying in the next room over. Flood has been taking the two outside in shifts, making sure one or the other is always in a crate. It’s a hassle, but then again, it’s right on schedule for a dog of Poe’s age: “He’s my teenage boy,” Flood laughs. “He doesn’t even eat. He’s like, Oooh, a girl!”
On Sunday, Poe will travel from the Floods’ home in Orange County, New York, to Manhattan, along with five-year-old Tiger (SugarNSpice Hear Me Roar) and potentially eight-month-old Cherry (SugarNSpice Cherry On Top), to show at the Westminster Dog Show on Monday. (Flood will decide on Cherry’s participation “Sunday—maybe on the way out the door.”) So when Flood, a vegan, cooks up the assortment of steak, chicken, hot dog, and liver that she’ll use as bait for the collies in the ring at Westminster, she’ll add lots of extra seasoning for Poe’s bait—because in the ring, “you could have a bitch in season three dogs behind you.” When you take an easily sidetracked dog like Poe to a high-stakes show, she says, the bait has to have a powerful and seductive enough scent to distract from the fragrance of animal allure.
DAVID WILLIAMSOver the next three days, Flood will also bathe each dog, condition its coat, and trim its nails and whiskers. Given that all three dogs have been romping around in the Floods’ muddy backyard all week (“They’re in ‘pet’ mode,” Flood says), this will be no easy feat. Especially now that Becca’s gone off to college.
Eighteen-year-old Becca Flood—the youngest of Mara’s three children and her partner, until recently, in managing SugarNSpice Collies, their home kennel—moved out six months ago to start her first year at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, a three-hour drive from home. When Mara and Becca would groom their dogs as a team, Mara says, “I would bathe a dog, she would take them out and start blow-drying them, [and I’d start on the next dog]. Now I’m bathing everybody, towel-drying, and then I start the blow-drying process. So right off the bat, it’s double the time.” And now, she adds, “I’ve gotta lasso my husband or my son and say, ‘I’ll buy you dinner if you come help me out with nails!’”
Becca and Mara Flood grooming one of their dogs at a show. (Ashley Fetters / The Atlantic)Down in Manhattan, meanwhile, Becca has been dutifully preparing for the big event. On Monday—with her professors’ permission—Becca will be by her mother’s side all day, powdering the collies’ faces with CoverGirl 115 loose powder (to give their fur “a little bit of a finish” and obscure any scratches or cuts) and then taking them out on the floor. But not too much loose powder—otherwise, Mara says, “Some judges will say, ‘Why is there so much makeup on the dog?!’ And they’ll boot you right out of the ring.”
It’s a truth well known to the dog-showing community—but perhaps less so to outsiders—that the lives of families who show dogs revolve almost invariably around said dogs. But even among dog-showing families, Mara and Becca Flood might be an extraordinary case. Every dog in a dog show is bred by a human, owned by a human, trained (or “handled”) by a human, and showed by a human. For any given dog, four different humans might perform each of the four different functions; for another dog, one human (or team of humans) might perform every duty. The Floods work in tandem on all four.
Mara and Becca breed litters of collies every few years at their home, which for puppy-proofing reasons has few low-sitting shelves and no rugs on the floor. Though Becca’s dad and two brothers have never taken much of an interest in dog showing, delivering (or “whelping”) a litter of puppies is still sometimes a whole-family affair: “Someone’s gotta get the coffee and someone’s gotta get the clean towels. Somebody’s got to take the dirty ones out and give you fresh ones,” Mara says. (One brother’s old bedroom was converted into SugarNSpice’s second kennel room after he moved out.) Once, Becca says, she was almost late for a spring AP exam in high school because a litter of puppies was arriving just as she was getting ready for school.
[Read: A new origin story for dogs]
And while many know the chaos one new puppy can introduce to a household, the Floods are the rare family who can tell you what kind of pandemonium a dozen puppies—the size of their most recent litter—are capable of. “When we have a litter, our life stops for, like, 12 weeks,” Mara says. She and Becca move the furniture around so that they can sleep next to the whelping box for the first two weeks, when they take care to make sure every puppy is nursing and gaining weight. “You think you’re over the hump after two weeks,” she says, “but then they start eating! And then they start pooping! Can you imagine, 12 eight-week-old puppies … ? It’s brutal.” Most of the puppies are eventually sold to other families.
DAVID WILLIAMSMara and Becca also train dogs at SugarNSpice—some are their own, and some live at the Floods’ home while the Floods train them on commission. (Becca describes herself as a stricter trainer than her mother.) No matter what, though, “all the dogs that are at our house are, like, forcibly part of the family,” Becca laughs. “They all come and cuddle with us on the couch; they all eat off the table. They sleep on your feet when you eat dinner.”
But what sets the Floods’ family life apart most drastically from other families’ is arguably their grueling show schedule. Before Becca left for college, she and Mara traveled some 50 weekends of the year to show their dogs, sometimes driving as far as Wisconsin or Florida.
“I was almost never in school on Thursdays and Fridays, and some Monday mornings,” Becca remembers. She would email in her homework from the road. “My teachers just got used to that.” As a result, most of the major dramas of Becca’s teen years have taken place not in school but in the junior division of the dog-show circuit; her first boyfriend was a fellow junior handler whom she met at a show.
Becca and Mara began showing dogs together in 2009, when Becca turned nine—the minimum age at which a child can participate in the junior divisions of dog showing. Becca went on to win the Collie Club of America’s Best Junior Handler title an unprecedented three times before aging out of the division when she turned 18 last year. (Because Becca qualified for Westminster before turning 18, she will show a dog in the 2019 Westminster show as a junior handler, but it will be her last time as a junior.) Over the past few years, Mara and Becca’s dogs have made consistent appearances in the top 10 of the Collie Club of America rankings and the Canine Chronicle smooth collie and all-breed rankings. In 2016, their year-old female Gretel won the Best of Variety prize at Westminster; Mara showed her in the Best of Herding Group.
That year, Becca remembers, Mara almost didn’t show Gretel. Becca had entered a well-established, nine-year-old smooth collie; Mara had brought Gretel along to compete, as Becca puts it, “just for fun,” but got a bad feeling the morning of the show and considered backing out. Still, Becca talked her into it. “I had all their leashes on, they were ready to go, and I handed her her number. I was like, Mom. Go in and have fun with the puppy! There’s no stress. You’re not supposed to win,” Becca says. “Then she goes in and she beats me.”
Becca, whose dog finished second that day to Mara’s, laughs incredulously telling the story. “Had I let her not show, I would have won. At 15 years old, I would have won [Best of Variety at] Westminster. But I talked her into walking!” What happened next? “I just laughed. I just laughed and laughed and laughed,” she says. “I was like, You know it’s because I groomed her, right?”
Gretel, the dog Mara showed, was the granddaughter of the dog Becca showed.
Today, both Floods are admittedly still learning how to live independently. It’s been a trying time for both of them—and for the dogs.
“It was really, really tough when she first went to college,” Mara says. Tiger became shy and needy, often hanging around Becca’s bedroom door: “I’d have to to open it and show her that Becca wasn’t there.” Poe, meanwhile, started eating poorly, and then started showing poorly—but when Becca came home and showed him at an event over Thanksgiving, Mara says, Poe “looked like a million bucks.” Becca, not Mara, will show Poe at Westminster on Monday.
[Read: Dogs (and cats) can love]
Becca, for her part, is adjusting to life without pets—and life in one place. In her new neighborhood in lower Manhattan, she often finds herself wandering around, just exploring, for entire mornings or days. Before college, “I wasn’t used to being settled in one place. I was used to being in a new place every weekend,” she says. In the end, her time on the road and her time at home probably came to an even 50-50. “Even my childhood bedroom, I wasn’t in it that much.” Becca admits, too, that she didn’t quite realize what an unusual lifestyle hers was until college, where some of her new classmates have raised quizzical, I’m sorry, you did what in high school? eyebrows. Still, sometimes she thinks about the possibility of bringing Poe into the city to live with her next year, when she moves out of the dorms and gets an apartment. “I think he could get his therapy-dog license, with the little vest,” she says. Maybe he could come with her to her long classes and lie down in the corner.
DAVID WILLIAMSMara’s daily routine has a conspicuous void, too. She’s hired a helper on dog-show days for tasks that require extra hands or heavy lifting (and Becca, meanwhile, has noticed she’s lost some core and bicep strength, now that she’s not regularly lifting 60-pound dogs onto grooming tables and into a van). But when Mara drives the dogs to a show, the passenger seat of her hulking Ford Transit 350 empty beside her and the dogs quiet in their travel kennels, she can get a little lonely.
“Becca and I have our going-to-a-dog-show soundtrack—‘It’s Another Day of Sun,’ from La La Land, that’s our 4 a.m. [getting-on-the-road] song,” she says. “But I can’t listen to it now! I start crying.”
“I used to go away for summer art programs and she’d be fine, because she knew I’d be home after four weeks,” Becca explains. “Sometime in October, though, it hit her that I wasn’t going to come home and go back to life as usual. And that things most likely won’t ever be like that again.” And that’s when Mara purchased a new puppy—a Cardigan Welsh corgi named Harper (Sanddigger PD Indecent Proposal To SugarNSpice).
“She’s my replacement,” Becca jokes.
“I was joking around when we first got her—people would ask, ‘What’d you name her?’” Mara says. “I’d say, ‘Rebecca.’”
On Monday, when Mara and Becca show their dogs at Westminster, Tim Flood—Mara’s husband and Becca’s dad—will be sitting with the Westminster Kennel Club app open on his tablet, watching from his desk at work. According to Mara, Tim goes to about one dog show a year (“maybe just to remind himself why he doesn’t go to dog shows,” she jokes), and usually he elects to go to one that’s outdoors and near some good hiking or an interesting restaurant. He loves dogs, Mara says, but isn’t all that passionate about the competition aspect.
DAVID WILLIAMS“It’s really their thing,” Tim agrees. “I love animals, but I think it was, quite frankly, better that way, to just let them have it, as a mother-daughter thing. I think it’s helped their relationship through the years. It’s gotten them closer.”
But when Mara and Becca travel with whichever dogs they’re showing that particular weekend, Tim stays home to look after the dogs they leave behind. Tim points out that he doesn’t share the same working relationship with the dogs that his wife and daughter do—“so to me, they’re all pets, all family members,” he says. On those weekends, Tim carefully arranges his schedule to make sure he’s home at feeding times (5 a.m., 4 p.m., and occasionally a lunchtime meal for certain dogs in between) and to chase the dogs around in the yard a little during the day. And that’s where he’ll be for at least part of the time while his wife and daughter are away for Westminster—at home, playing outside, maybe carving out some time to watch TV on the couch, a dog under each arm.
Everybody Knows, the new film by the acclaimed Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, opens with an image of ancient, heavy gears clanking away. These are revealed to be the workings of a clock in an old church tower, and they perform purposes both literal and metaphorical. It is in this clock tower that one character offers another the titular phrase, “Everybody knows.” (It is the first, but not only, time we will hear this line.) The gears also represent the film that is about to unfold: a meticulous, methodical tale of interlocking secrets and misunderstandings.
Penélope Cruz stars as Laura, a Spanish expat returning home from Argentina for her younger sister’s wedding. Laura brings her two children—a teenage daughter and preteen son—but not her husband (Ricardo Darín), who has remained behind for work-related reasons. After she arrives, she settles into the family’s large, charmingly dilapidated townhouse, which she shares with her aging parents, her older sister, and said sister’s husband, daughter, and infant granddaughter.
It is a fairly long while before menace intrudes. In the meantime, we’re treated to the picturesque town, the Iberian sunlight, and a procession of beautiful people. Among them are Paco (Javier Bardem, Cruz’s real-life husband) and his wife, Bea (Bárbara Lennie). As a boy, Paco had been Laura’s best friend; as a man, he became her lover. Before Laura left for Argentina, she sold him family land that he and Bea have since converted into a successful vineyard. Cruz and Bardem smolder provocatively, of course, because for either not to smolder would take altogether too much effort.
The wedding takes place and, following it, a party that goes late into the night. (Farhadi captures the festivities so vividly, one would think he’d lived in Spain his entire life.) Laura’s rebellious daughter, Irene (Carla Campra), sneaks wine and cigarettes, but later feels ill and goes to bed. The adults continue to dance and (especially) to drink, even after the power goes out for the whole town.
When Laura finally goes to Irene’s room to check on her, the girl has vanished. Left behind on the bed is a pile of newspaper clippings about children who have been abducted for ransom. Soon, Laura receives the first message on her phone: “We have your daughter. If you call the police, we’ll kill her.” Oddly, subsequent demands are sent not only to Laura, but also to Bea, Paco’s wife.
As the mystery of Irene’s kidnapping moves forward, suspicion begins to fall on those who attended the wedding and, ultimately, on the household itself. Who else could have known that Laura’s husband had the wealth for a ransom? Why is it that Bea is also receiving texts from the kidnappers? To answer such questions, Farhadi’s film burrows into the past. Laura’s once-wealthy family is no longer so wealthy, and resents the vinicultural success of Paco, the son of one of the family’s former servants. And while “everybody knows” that Laura and Paco were once lovers, it is studiously unclear what else there is to know, and who might know it.
Farhadi has specialized in tales of long-buried family secrets, of grudges and jealousies, in such movies as The Past, A Separation, and The Salesman—the latter two of which both won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, placing Farhadi in rarefied company. As one would expect, his writing and direction are precise, each new revelation fitting together as neatly as the gears in his opening shot. The cast is exemplary, from the leads down to the supporting players.
[Read: A marriage crumbles in the gripping Iranian drama ‘The Salesman’]
But while Everybody Knows is a family drama and a character study, it is also a mystery, a crime film, the story of a girl’s abduction. And while Farhadi is a master of the drama, his gifts are at times an awkward fit for a kidnapping thriller. It is almost as if one bought a ticket for a Liam Neeson movie and wound up instead in a Strindberg play.
I exaggerate, of course. But Farhadi’s slow, deliberate style—Everybody Knows clocks in at more than two hours—inevitably ratchets down the tension and leaves on the table much of the suspense that might otherwise have accrued. Despite the film’s edge-of-your-seat premise, most viewers will probably find that their fannies remain comfortably ensconced. Which is fine. Not every thriller needs to literally thrill. But the slight mismatch between Farhadi’s talents and the story he’s telling render Everybody Knows a movie that, while very much worth seeing, is not at the level of the director’s best work.
Bernie Sanders has seen himself as on a mission since he started running for office in the 1970s, and he sees no reason to stop now. He thinks he’s dramatically changed the conversation over the past three years, and he feels like he’s close to achieving his ultimate goal.
Plus, there’s Donald Trump.
When the president used his State of the Union speech on Tuesday to preview his own reelection campaign and warn against creeping socialism, Sanders was only encouraged. He’d love to take on Trump directly, and people around him think he’ll be able to use Trump’s threat to coalesce support in the primaries.
“Nothing unifies Democrats like being made a villain by Trump,” said one Sanders ally.
The senator from Vermont has been huddling with staff in meetings and brainstorming on phone calls over the past few weeks, chewing over plans. Barring a surprise, last-minute change of heart, he will jump into the 2020 race, convinced he can win, according to people familiar with his plans. His spokeswoman, Arianna Jones, did not return a request for comment on Sanders’s plans.
[Read: A lot of people want Bernie Sanders to run in 2020]
Last time, he didn’t get in until the end of April 2015. This time, the launch will be in February. He sees advantage in a much more crowded 2020 field. The left-leaning politics he campaigned on in 2016 have been broadly embraced in a progressive surge among Democrats, and Sanders has succeeded in diminishing the nominating power of so-called super delegates, the elected officials and party elders who help consolidate establishment power within the Democratic National Committee.
Sanders will likely announce an exploratory committee in the coming weeks, followed by a rally. One major early focus will be finding a campaign manager and other top-level staffers who are not white, and preferably not male, in light of his problems appealing to minority voters in 2016 and recent revelations of sexual harassment by lower-level staffers on the 2016 campaign. Staff interviews have been quietly under way.
But a core team of advisers will return from 2016, spearheaded by Sanders’s wife and closest adviser, Jane O’Meara Sanders.
[Peter Beinart: Bernie Sanders offers a foreign policy for the common man]
His aides know this race will be different from his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, when he surprised even himself with how close he came to knocking her off. Democratic leaders have been impressed by the extent to which the ideas from his campaign have carried forward, injecting far-left populism into the mainstream of Democratic politics—even as many in the party still bitterly point to his candidacy as weakening Clinton to the point that Trump was able to win.
Sanders has heard the argument that his stature would be diminished by running again if he doesn’t end up winning the nomination. He’s heard the argument that he might split the progressive vote and allow a more moderate candidate to win, but that hasn’t moved him either. That’s not how Sanders thinks, people who know him point out.
“He understands what happens in the streets is what prompts actions in Washington,” said Vincent Fort, a former Georgia state senator who supported the last campaign and has been in touch with Sanders’s team about this campaign.
There are also the nuts-and-bolts political considerations that Sanders doesn’t focus as much on, but that his team pays close attention to: He’s the one with the massive email list. Alone among those eyeing the Democratic nomination, he’s the one who had 40,000 people watching various live-streams of his State of the Union response. He’s the one whose team thinks he could, on day one, raise more money online and get more attention than any of the other candidates.
Sanders believes that he continues to have the strength in Iowa and New Hampshire to either win or come close there—especially with other candidates fragmenting support and lowering the bar for what it will take to win. Likewise, in a South Carolina primary that has both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris competing for African American votes and, likely, Joe Biden drawing on his own decades of connections there, Sanders sees a path to slip through and win.
Biden in the race, after all, would make it so that the senator isn’t the only white man in his 70s in the field.
If the early states all come together, Sanders would be positioned to power through the front-ended primary calendar that has California, Texas, and several other big states voting on the first Super Tuesday, March 4, just a month after Iowa. No one else in the field has anything like his proven success with both grassroots supporters and the small-dollar online fundraising that it will take to fund the kind of massive national operation any 2020 campaign will require.
“With all the other people in, the fact is, Bernie is the one whose ideas everyone else is ‘borrowing,’ whether it be Wall Street reforms, or Medicare for all, or free college. These are all ideas that Bernie came up with first and best,” Fort said. “I’m a little bit skeptical of the sincerity of some of the latecomers.”
Changes to DNC procedures, which Sanders and his team fought for, have diminished the role of the caucuses where Sanders ran the strongest in 2016, but they have also taken power away from the elected officials and party elders who might, for example, help tilt a tight race to Biden or another candidate who isn’t an outsider insurgent.
Sanders’s team has been eyeing Beto O’Rourke nervously, given the former Texas congressman’s strong online presence and appeal with many of the same types of voters that Sanders taps into. O’Rourke also drew significant support from young former Sanders staffers who helped build the 2016 campaign into what it was. But there’s a sense that O’Rourke’s support is flagging, as he continues to talk about running without making a decision.
Now a Sanders candidacy would seem to be the biggest threat to Elizabeth Warren, who’s been campaigning on her own anti-corporate platform, with proposals such as a new tax on the ultrarich. Aides to the senator from Massachusetts have been preparing her on how to respond. But though they will clearly compete for some of the same voters, Sanders and his aides have always seen him as a greater threat to her than she is to him, and have been encouraged by the continuing problems she’s facing from the controversy over her claims of Native American heritage. He’s the one with the devoted followers, Sanders and his aides believe, and some of them are still angry at Warren for deciding to sit out the 2016 primary race rather than endorsing him.
[Read: Sanders and Warren are heading for a standoff]
What a Sanders candidacy may do for Warren, though, is enable her not to seem as radical as his democratic socialism. It might also enable her to note that she’s a generation younger than Sanders, as opposed to currently being the oldest Democratic candidate in the field. And a Sanders candidacy might allow Warren to argue that she’s largely in line with him politically, but the one who could actually win.
A Warren spokeswoman declined comment on how Warren would position herself if Sanders runs.
Sanders boosters note that with a field this big, coming in first in Iowa might take only about 30 percent of the vote, and that he came just shy of 50 percent of the vote there against Clinton. Rules changes to the caucuses might also play to Sanders’s favor, clarifying an arcane process that weighs votes in a way that can make the final results not fully representative of the number of people who actually show up on caucus night.
But Sanders skeptics doubt that he fully appreciates how much of the approximately 45 percent of the primary vote he received in 2016 was fundamentally an anti-Clinton vote, and doubt that he realizes how many of those people might leave him once they realize how many other choices they have. Unlike in his last run, he will start right away with the spotlight of a presumed front-runner on him, and issues involving his background and record that were overlooked in 2016 will likely receive new scrutiny. Warren, Biden, and Harris have been the focus of most of the Republican attacks and reporters’ digging so far, but that dynamic may shift if Sanders continues to run as strong as public polling suggests.
There’s the potential that once he’s in, any stumbles will be higher profile, and any drop-off in the polls could suggest he’s leaching support. Already, in the past week he waited until after all the declared Democratic candidates to call for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to resign over the blackface/Ku Klux Klan–hood photo. He also faced outrage for doing his own State of the Union response for the third year in a row; this year’s followed Stacey Abrams’s official Democratic response. Some griped that he was being disrespectful, a charge that Sanders and his team found ridiculous, even as they dealt with the fallout.
He spent most of his response explaining how Trump’s supposed economic miracle hasn’t reached many people in the country.
“I know that this will probably not shock you—I hate to say this—but not everything Donald Trump said tonight was true or accurate,” Sanders said in a live video on social media.* “For many of President Trump’s billionaire friends, the truth is, they have never, ever had it so good. But for the middle class, and for the working families of our country, the truth is that the economy is not so good.”
*This article originally misstated that Sanders delivered his response to the State of the Union address immediately after Trump spoke. In fact, Sanders delivered his response after Stacey Abrams finished giving the Democrats’ official response to the president’s address.
President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam for more nuclear talks wasn’t the only big news for the Korean peninsula this week.
Quietly, with none of the pomp of the State of the Union address, U.S. and South Korean negotiators reached a new deal “in principle” for sharing the costs of the tens of thousands of American troops who have been based in South Korea for nearly seven decades, a State Department spokesperson told me on condition of anonymity. The previous deal expired in late 2018, after the South Korean government balked at U.S. demands for a huge hike in Seoul’s contribution.
A lot is on the line in this arrangement. Ever since the 1953 cease-fire that halted the Korean War, the United States has maintained forces in South Korea to deter North Korean aggression, and as a counterweight to Russia and China.
An unsettled spat with South Korea over money would have put a damper on the second Trump-Kim summit scheduled for February 27–28, especially because South Korean President Moon Jae In has been the principal mediator when diplomacy between the two leaders has faltered.
[Read: The beginning of the end of the Korean War]
Nevertheless, it’s a tenuous resolution that could easily unravel and stoke tensions between the United States and South Korea, given that the deal appears expressly designed to be fleeting (rather than long term)—to keep the military alliance in a state of flux at the very moment when America’s allies around the world are doubting its commitment, while adversaries angle to exploit those doubts.
Renewals of military agreements between the United States and its allies, which revolve around who pays for what, have never been all sunshine and rainbows. But they were routine because they were premised on the idea that the defense of those allies was a defense of U.S. interests. The logic was that the U.S. derived considerable benefit from having troops stationed in places like Japan or Germany, and should therefore shoulder a corresponding share of the cost.
In challenging that basic premise, and signaling that even something as core to America’s post–World War II identity as membership in NATO isn’t sacrosanct, Trump has turned burden-sharing negotiations like the present one with South Korea into something decidedly out of the ordinary: a testament to how he’s seeking to transform the United States’ role in the world.
In the case of South Korea, talks for a new special-measures agreement (SMA) stalled in December when the Trump administration abruptly demanded that Seoul shell out around one and a half times its current contribution for the 28,500 American troops deployed there. At one point in the negotiations, the U.S. was reportedly requesting nearly the full amount of $2 billion, which largely goes toward wages for Korean workers at U.S. military installations.
On Thursday, Lee Soo Hyuck, a lawmaker with South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party, indicated that the United States had ultimately relented on the numbers, with Seoul set to only incrementally increase its share of the cost to a figure less than $1 billion.
Yet he also announced that South Korean officials had acceded to another U.S. demand introduced late in the process: The pact will last just one year, rather than five years like the prior agreement. (When asked about these terms, the State Department spokesperson declined to “discuss details of ongoing bilateral consultations.” The office of South Korea’s president did not respond to requests for comment.)
[Read: Letting the Korean breakthrough run its course]
Imagine carpooling to work with a friend for decades, checking in every few years on how much gas money you should chip in, only for the friend to one day slam on the brakes, ask you to cover most of the cost of the commute, and when you demur, insist on a new weekly check-in to encourage hikes in your contribution. Those drives would get tense fast, and you might start wondering how much longer you’ll have a ride to the office. That’s a bit like what’s happened in the U.S.–South Korea alliance in recent months.
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration will continue to pursue one-year contracts beyond this one. But given that the latest round of talks has dragged on for close to a year, a one-year time frame means that “almost as soon as you sign the first [agreement], you have to then start negotiations on the next one,” Bruce Klingner, a former Korea analyst at the CIA who’s now with the Heritage Foundation, told me.
The Trump administration might view an annual negotiation as “leverage to increase Seoul’s defense cost-sharing,” and it’s “quite possible” that the administration could call on South Korea to pay the full cost of maintaining U.S. troops in the country, said Moon Chung In, a foreign-policy adviser to South Korea’s president who told me he was speaking in his capacity as a professor at Yonsei University.
If the United States goes that route, Moon noted, the challenge will be for both countries to arrive at some common understanding of how to calculate Seoul’s contributions for the upkeep of U.S. forces in the country.
Moon said that if the Trump administration were to press South Korea for new ways to cover the costs of the alliance in the coming years, he hoped that these would not include salaries for American soldiers and expenses associated with their weapons and equipment, all of which are not currently governed by the SMA. “If that is the case, South Koreans are not likely to accommodate such [a] request, because American forces in South Korea would then be like mercenary [forces], not [an] alliance force,” he told me.
He added that he didn’t expect Trump to slash U.S. forces in South Korea as part of a deal reached during his next summit with Kim, as many Korea-watchers in Washington and Seoul fear. For evidence, Moon pointed to a recent interview in which the president said he had “no plans” to do so. (Granted, in that same interview, Trump inflated the number of American troops in the country, described their presence there as “expensive,” and mused that “maybe someday” he would take them out.) “I trust [Trump’s] words,” Moon said, “and therefore I do not worry about it.”
[Read: The mystery at the heart of North Korea talks]
North Korea’s leaders have not specifically called for a U.S. military drawdown as part of their nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration. But they’ve stated that they see U.S. forces in South Korea as an obstacle to peace, and that they define the “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” as encompassing the U.S. withdrawing from the region all elements of its military presence that pose a nuclear threat to North Korea in order for Pyongyang to consider giving up its nuclear weapons.
Plenty of American presidents have modified the U.S. military presence in South Korea as geopolitical realities have shifted. As he sought to end the Vietnam War and reconcile with China, for example, Richard Nixon withdrew tens of thousands of U.S. troops and prodded Seoul to “assume more of the burden of its own defense.” George H. W. Bush removed U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from South Korean territory at the end of the Cold War. His son diverted a combat brigade from South Korea to Iraq.
What makes this moment different is that Trump’s view of the value of the United States’ alliance system is unlike any of his predecessors’ in the post–World War II period. One of his most consistently held convictions, dating back to the 1980s, is that allies are getting rich at America’s expense and should either pay a hefty price for U.S. military protection or lose that protection and defend themselves. And while the president might have started putting this belief into practice with South Korea, it is unlikely to stop there: Negotiations on a new cost-sharing agreement with Japan, which hosts more U.S. troops than any other country, are on the horizon.
As for South Korea, the State Department spokesperson noted that the nation “has stood as an exemplary ally, partner, and friend of the United States” for almost 70 years, and that the U.S. likewise remains committed to the security of South Korea.
But Klingner told me that the White House’s sudden, steep demands during the SMA negotiations were “in line with the president’s view of alliances as transactional relationships, as opposed to military relationships built on common values and common history,” like fighting together during the Korean War.
The motto for the U.S.–South Korea military command, he said, “is katchi kapshida” (“We go together”), “not ‘We go together, if I get enough money as reimbursement.’”
The first speech that Oliver, a West Coast fraternity-chapter president whose story I closely followed for a year, gave his new pledges was not the lecture one might expect from a fraternity brother. “We’ve worked really hard to build a reputation as a house of nice guys. If you endanger that reputation, you’ll immediately be kicked to the curb,” Oliver told the pledges. “That’s not the kind of people we want. We’re not the douchey frat house. We’re not here to ‘get bitches and get fucked up.’ We’re here to learn how to grow up a little bit. And with that comes learning how to be a nice human being; how to look out for each other, for guests, and for girls; and how to properly treat girls. If you’re consistently nice and respectful, you’re going to build a good reputation, and that’s going to help you a lot in life.”
As I learned in more than two years of reporting for my book, Fraternity, about fraternities and masculinity on campus, Oliver’s attitude is much more common than the dominant narratives about college men suggest. (I used a pseudonym for Oliver so that people in his story are not easily identifiable; similarly, other sources in this article are not identified because they appear anonymously in the book.) Too often, when the public hears about boys in college, the context is negative: sexual-assault cases, for example, or boys’ dreary academic performance compared with girls’. Media coverage about college guys tends to lament the problems they cause rather than explore the challenges they face. The message that doesn’t come across often enough is that the same forces that have led to what has been called “toxic masculinity” on campuses do more than oppress girls; they can suffocate boys, too. And, surprisingly, the college organizations that might be best positioned to battle this culture are the ones that publicly take the most heat for representing it.
For boys who attend college, the experience is usually when they begin to determine their identity away from their family and the anchors they’ve known since childhood. Experts say that the college years, when they are expected to somehow independently transition from boyhood to manhood, are also the stage at which they feel the most vulnerable. Researchers have described boys’ freshman year as characterized by separation anxiety, loss, and grief. At the same time, these boys frequently think that they can’t express those feelings, because they are strongly pressured to fit into what academics call “traditional masculinity.”
[Read more: Today’s masculinity is stifling]
What does it mean to be masculine in the 21st century? Masculinity can, of course, take multiple forms, but psychologists say that men are commonly expected to suppress emotions, desire multiple sexual partners and casual relationships, engage in risky behaviors and physical aggression, want to dominate situations, assert independence, and have control over women.
Just because these are the prevailing masculine characteristics doesn’t mean that the majority of men want to follow them, however. Surveys have found that most college guys don’t endorse traditional masculine norms, but believe that most other men do. More specifically, college men overestimate their peers’ use of alcohol and other drugs, amount of sexual activity, desire to hook up, willingness to use force to have sex, acceptance of homophobia, and tolerance of behavior that degrades women. They don’t necessarily know what their peers truly believe, possibly because they think that having intimate conversations about those things would be unmasculine.
At many colleges across the country, fraternity brothers told me that, in general, the guys who are considered most masculine are the ones who hook up the most—and, especially among underclassmen, the ones who drink. To be considered masculine at one Florida college, “you gotta be fit, very social, good-looking, love to party, be able to talk to girls, play the field well, hook up,” a sophomore fraternity brother told me. “And on my campus, everyone loves to be involved, so also having high-up positions or a good job.” At an Oregon school, a junior said, “a zero-cares attitude makes you more masculine.”
Several studies have found that men who adhere to traditional expressions of masculinity (such as the aforementioned) have comparatively worse mental and physical health and increased chances of illness, injury, and death. College students who follow this path are more likely to drink more, become depressed, and commit sexual assault. And it’s common for men to become emotionally isolated because they worry that showing vulnerability isn’t manly.
But researchers have found that the traditional idea that men are innately tough, independent, and stoic is not true. Actually, in infancy, boys are more emotional than girls. As children grow up, however, while girls are permitted to express their feelings, boys are taught to suppress them. “But this doesn’t mean men aren’t experiencing the same feelings,” the neuroscientist Lise Eliot wrote in Pink Brain Blue Brain. “In laboratory studies, men respond even more intensely than women to strong emotional stimuli.”
Now consider the predicament of a new college student, an 18-year-old boy who is expected to become a man, with these masculine norms discouraging him from expressing his emotions or seeking intimacy—important tools for forming meaningful connections—at precisely the time when he is most vulnerable and alone. At precisely the time when he most yearns to make friends.
That’s where some healthy fraternities can be helpful. They specifically promote their friendships as “brotherhoods,” seeming to promise the kind of supportive relationships that could alleviate a freshman’s separation anxiety, loss, and grief.
Fraternity brothers told me that because the point of fraternities is to form close friendships, they bonded more quickly than they otherwise would have. “Guys are more expected to hold emotions back and [have] everything in control. Classes and organizations only get you so far in terms of having personal connections. So for guys, it’s much more difficult to meet a lifelong friend,” the Florida brother said. “There’s always the fear of not being accepted anywhere. It’d be very tough to open up to people if you didn’t already have a fraternity as a catalyst for your emotions.”
[Read more: Psychology has a new approach for building emotionally healthier men]
Then how do we explain the disturbing fraternity behavior in headlines? We could call it the result of a clash between nature and culture.
Non-Western cultures don’t necessarily have the same prejudice against male intimacy. It’s acceptable in many countries for male friends to hold hands or shed tears, the NYU psychology professor Niobe Way says. But in the U.S. (and other countries influenced by Western culture), boys’ emotional skills and intimate same-sex friendships are often ignored or insulted. It’s possible, then, that fraternities are such a distinctly American phenomenon because other cultures don’t stigmatize men who seek these relationships.
Fraternity culture changed significantly in the first half of the 20th century, when the term homosexuality entered popular usage. Because fraternity brothers lived, ate, and slept together in close quarters, outsiders began speculating that fraternities were dens of homosexuality. To prove that they weren’t gay (though some were), members loudly boasted about their dating lives and heterosexual conquests. Some fraternities still struggle to reconcile male intimacy with society’s pressure to perform heterosexuality, per traditional masculine standards. Rituals and living conditions encourage guys to bare their souls. Some chapters participate in activities that brothers might worry could be perceived as having gay overtones. Members might discuss the physical attractiveness of male recruits, for example, or in a small minority of chapters, participate in nude or seminude all-male rituals, as did the chapter of another brother I spoke with. (“Showing private parts is probably the most expressive way of proclaiming, ‘You’re in our brotherhood now! No more walls or secrets between us!’” he told me.) And recruits and pledges want fraternity members to desire them as brothers. A recent ASHE Higher Education Report noted, “This is a challenging concept for men to express when most language they know at their age about desire depicts a romantic or sexual connection, rather than an emotionally vulnerable relationship.”
That might be one reason some fraternity brothers overcompensate, resorting to stereotypically hypermasculine behaviors to try to prove their manhood and gain acceptance. Or why some pledges are willing to, for example, drink life-threatening amounts of alcohol. “There’s a lot of fear when you feel like a little boy being yelled at by all the big kids. You don’t feel like a man,” a recent Massachusetts grad said. Some of his pledge brothers created a challenge they called “Team Savage”: They voluntarily drank a Solo cup of their own urine (talk about toxic masculinity). “It’s disgusting, but it made them seem tough, and they gained status.”
This is not to defend the fraternities that haze or engage in other dangerous behavior. But understanding how students might get to the point where they want to participate in such things is a step toward changing that culture. Oliver’s chapter was relatively healthy partly because it didn’t emphasize masculine stereotypes, but kindness and respect. It’s probably not coincidental that this chapter had fewer alcohol and sexual-assault issues—and was more vigilant about preventing and addressing them—than a typical fraternity.
Many chapters like this exist; people simply don’t hear about them, because they aren’t embroiled in scandals and focus more on their members’ inner qualities than their chapter’s external image. Chapters like these have the power to free men from the constraints of society’s narrow definition of masculinity. A recent Rhode Island grad entered college with “the view [that] I gotta go in and drink well, get a lot of girls, never show emotion, always tell everyone classes are going great, I’m not having any issues. I was trying to make it look like I could fit in and have a great time, even though I wasn’t sure of myself. But I wasn’t finding the traditional hookup scene and what I’d seen in the movies.”
Second semester, he joined a fraternity in search of that stereotypical environment. To his surprise, the fraternity’s alternative views on masculinity made him reconsider prioritizing toughness and hookups. “Yeah, it had partying and the social aspects, but it also had the idea that you can do all that stuff without having to put on a show. You can be yourself entirely in front of these people. I didn’t think you’d find a fraternity who wanted to talk about toxic masculinity and sex assault. That was eye-opening. It changed me,” he said. “I wasn’t a douchebag at heart; [I was] just thinking [that acting stereotypically masculine] was how you become successful in college. When I saw these leaders in my fraternity having success without being those guys, I realized, Wow, I don’t have to do that if I don’t want to.”
This article is adapted from Alexandra Robbins’s new book, Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men.
When President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union address earlier this week, chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” broke out several times among the lawmakers in attendance. This wasn’t a new phenomenon in the Trump era. At last year’s State of the Union, the “U-S-A” cheer broke out when Trump extolled the Capitol building as “the monument to the American people,” and then again at the end of the speech. This time around, the chant was even more prominent—and its use was more politically fraught.
How, exactly, did we get to this juncture, where intoning the initials of our country has become such a flash point in American politics? And why did members of Congress sound like a rowdy crowd at a national sporting event?
When Trump delivered his expected line, “Members of Congress, the state of our union is strong,” he heard the “U-S-A” refrain from Republicans in the audience and responded, “That sounds so good.” He might have been more surprised to hear the chant coming from the Democratic side of the aisle as well, when he acknowledged the record number of women elected to Congress in 2018. (Emily Cochrane of The New York Times noted on Twitter that when the “U-S-A” cheer started, some tried to show their gratitude to Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a “Thank you, Nancy” chant that didn’t catch on.) As Lisa Ryan observed on New York magazine’s The Cut, “The moment could potentially be read as some members attempting to reclaim a chant that has become synonymous with MAGA rallies and Trump’s demand for a border wall.”
[Rahm Emanuel: The State of the Union was political malpractice]
But that fleeting moment of reclamation was followed by a more MAGA-style use of the “U-S-A” chant. Republicans repeated it when Trump condemned Venezuela’s Maduro regime and then declared, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”—as network cameras zoomed in on the reaction of Senator Bernie Sanders (whose brand of democratic socialism is a far cry from Maduroism). The cheering support of Trump’s applause line underscored how foreign-policy posturing could be turned into a taunt of domestic political opponents, carrying a not-so-veiled implication of anti-Americanism for the likes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who don’t view socialism as a dirty word.
The “U-S-A” cheer has evolved over the years. Sporadic mentions of such chanting can be found in press accounts going all the way back to World War I. The earliest examples approximate the “rah rah rah, sis boom bah” style of athletic college yells. Paul Emory Putz, a history lecturer at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, shared an example from the Daily News of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, from June 5, 1918, describing a patriotic rally at the Bethlehem Steel plant. A “most capable cheer leader” led the employees in “the Bethlehem company yell”:
Hooroy, Horray, USA, USA.Hooroy, Horray, USA, USA.Bethlehem Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Bethlehem Steel.Putz also uncovered a mention of a “U-S-A” chant a couple of years later at a more expected venue: the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. During the preliminary events, the Associated Press reported, “Americans in the grand stands and amphitheaters made their presence known by dominating the cheering.” The chant made by Americans in the stands went: “U-S-A, U-S-A, A-M-E-R-I-C-A!” As at Bethlehem Steel, the crowd was egged on by a “cheer leader,” in this case Gustavus T. Kirby, president of the United States Olympic Committee.
[Read: How the women of the House flipped the State of the Union speech]
“U-S-A” cheers would become a staple at Olympic Games. During track and field events at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, captured chants of “U-S-A” in footage for the documentary Olympia. But the cheer really heated up during the Cold War, at international athletic competitions that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union and other Communist states, such as at a baseball game against Cuba at the 1963 Pan American Games. The chant’s Cold War resonance could be heard beyond sports, such as when it was used by students at an anti-government demonstration in Czechoslovakia in 1969 before authorities cracked down.
Czechoslovakia, as it happens, would serve a more prominent role in the chant’s popularization during the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, as the American men’s hockey team staged its improbable run to the gold medal. Team USA’s upset victory over Czechoslovakia in the second round solidified its exciting underdog status, as “U-S-A” was roared over and over again by the home crowd. Those roars grew louder when the Americans knocked off the Soviet powerhouse team in stunning fashion.
That “Miracle on Ice” game cemented the “U-S-A” chant into common sporting usage, but it wasn’t always such a feel-good refrain. In the summer of 1993, the New York Yankees hosted a series with the Toronto Blue Jays when the two teams were locked in a pennant race. Yankees fans “turned ugly,” the AP reported, with the crowd booing the visiting team during batting practice and chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at them. (The Blue Jays, the AP reporter noted, did not actually have any Canadians on its roster, though it had plenty of Americans, along with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.)
Pro wrestling also brought the cheer to the fore, used by rabble-rousing stars like “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan and Hulk Hogan, who played up patriotic story lines against opponents with cartoonish foreign personas. And speaking of cartoonish, the cheer has often been used for comic effect on The Simpsons, particularly by Homer at inappropriate moments.
[Read: Trump started his reelection campaign last night]
As a political expression of national pride divorced from its athletic roots, the “U-S-A” chant reached its zenith after 9/11. Most famously, when George W. Bush visited first responders at Ground Zero, the crowd’s cheering of “U-S-A” crescendoed as Bush responded, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Ten years later, when U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the news was greeted with “U-S-A” chants in many places—including at baseball games.
Trump, the proud “nationalist,” has basked in the glow of pugnacious “U-S-A” chants at his rallies, and it is difficult not to hear the State of the Union cheers as an echo of these jingoistic outpourings. Democrats in attendance seemed to try to split the difference—not joining in except when they could appropriate the chant for their own purposes to celebrate the influx of women joining the ranks in the House. That act of reappropriation, however, was lost in some right-wing circles—such as on the website Townhall, which covered the moment with the disingenuous headline, “Wow: Trump Got Democratic Women to Give a Standing Ovation AND Break Into USA Chant.” The lesson may be that chanting “U-S-A” does not lend itself well to irony, but a once-simple refrain has now undoubtedly become weighted with multiple, at times conflicting, political meanings.
The State of the Union address was a golden opportunity for President Donald Trump to reset his presidency, create a blueprint for the next two years of his administration, and launch his uphill battle for reelection. He failed on all fronts.
The president’s approval ratings hover around 40 percent, a shockingly low number, given the robust health of the economy. The only other recent presidents whose approval ratings reached such lows were President Ronald Reagan, in the midst of a recession, and President George W. Bush, during the worst years of the Iraq War.
These presidents and others used their State of the Union addresses to correct their course, articulate audacious agendas, and sell the public on the victories they had achieved and the wins they saw coming over the horizon.
[Read: How the women of the House flipped the State of the Union speech]
Trump could have followed this well-worn path. Previous Republican presidents, such as Reagan and Bush, used these speeches to buoy sagging poll numbers; Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama used them to lay the groundwork for progress, after midterm defeats in 1994 and 2010, respectively, left them facing a divided government.
Instead, Trump just kept deepening the hole he has dug for himself and his party, doubling down on hard-line demands for a wall that the country doesn’t want and that congressional Democrats will never fund. What did he learn from his first government shutdown that he thinks will change a second time around?
The president also used the speech to make calls for bipartisanship and unity that sounded neither sincere nor authentic. For three years, Trump has shown himself to be a divider, not a uniter; a partisan and not bipartisan.
[Read: Trump’s call for unity was never going to be real]
If the president and his advisers were thinking strategically, they would have first looked to the past to guide them. There are three areas in the next six months that could help redefine the Trump presidency, make Trump look like a commander in chief, and give him a shot at reelection in 2020.
First—through no effort of his own—Trump is in a position to end the longest sustained combat mission in American history: the war in Afghanistan. Many Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike—would be happy if the president brought the war to an end with a responsible agreement that brings our troops home. My views on Trump are well known, but I also know that achieving a settlement in Afghanistan ain’t beanbag.
Second, Trump may get a breakthrough agreement with China on trade. If he is successful, the president will be able to say he pulled it off because he was willing to go to the brink with China. That’s another area where Americans across the political spectrum could applaud him, because they will benefit from his efforts.
Third, the president has rallied European, North American, and South American countries in opposition to an autocratic failed government in Venezuela. Helping to end a dictatorship in Venezuela would be the first sign that Trump can be a multilateral president who builds coalitions and consensus overseas to achieve strategic goals.
Those achievements, if they happen, aren’t nearly enough to get Trump out of the hole he and his party find themselves in, let alone reelect him. But it’s political malpractice for the president’s State of the Union address not to give more than a fleeting reference to what little he has to work with.
[Peter Beinart: Trump shows why he can’t be counted out]
Trump devoted a mere 140 words to Afghanistan, 118 to trade with China, and 62 to Venezuela. By contrast, he devoted 463 words to immigration and 180 to the wall—a total of 643 words on a subject where he is bound to lose. Think about that. Trump spent twice as much time trying to coax a political lead balloon into flight than highlighting these three promising areas.
Similarly, the president lip-synched political pablum about bipartisanship and unity that no one buys from him. Being willing to support objectives that garner bipartisan support is what it actually means to be bipartisan. Feigning bipartisanship with an obvious head fake is a good way to get legislators in the chamber to groan while Americans at home hit the mute button and head to the fridge.
Using the past as a guide, Trump could have set the stage for future wins, reset his presidency heading into reelection, and proved he has grown and matured in office. Instead, at the State of the Union, he came up short as he has done time and again throughout his presidency. He has one more shot to get the speech right, in 2020. I’m not holding my breath.
The brush country along the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border grows thick: a jagged, tangled landscape of thorny trees, prickly pear, and grass so tall, it can hide a horse. Eight-foot rattlesnakes blend into rocks. Feral hogs wallow beneath mesquite thickets.
If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.
More than 250 years ago, José de Escandón, a Spanish army officer, established the first colonial settlements along the Rio Grande in South Texas. Later on, the Spanish crown divided the land into porciones, or “plots.” Down in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the plots were small, radiating from the river. These fertile slivers could sustain more livestock, crops, and people than the more arid land upriver, removed from the warm gulf moisture. Over generations, the plots were subdivided by heirs into tinier and tinier holdings.
[Read: Trump was always going to fold on the border wall]
Starting in 2006, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the federal government used eminent domain to seize these plots and put up barriers, as high as 18 feet. More than 345 condemnation suits by the federal government resulted in a strip of land 128 miles long, according to a 2017 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Yet dozens of cases are still tied up in court, and settlements have been wildly unequal: A retired schoolteacher got $21,500 for two acres; a lawyer and banker who hired one of the state’s biggest law firms got nearly $5 million for just six acres.
The cost has been staggering. The most recent 33 miles in the valley have set back taxpayers $641 million, or $19.4 million a mile, for a hodgepodge of fences, vehicle barriers, and some bollard fencing—with lots of gaps. And no one can really say, definitively, whether this project is worthwhile. To date, no federal agency has systematically audited what all the barriers cost and what, if any, effect they’ve had.
“First, this suggests that this is all theater. There is no operational decision making about what will actually work, because there’s not really a security crisis,” says Denise Gilman, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Instead, these federal agencies rush, saying, ‘We’ve just got to get the wall up,’ when what we need is real, targeted law enforcement.”
As messy as land seizure has been in the valley, it would be even messier upriver. The original Spanish porciones grew larger as the soil grew more arid, and that disparity remains visible today; on the drive to Laredo, tiny plots give way to expansive ranches controlled by richer landowners—with more power to oppose eminent domain. I know this place. I’m a Texan who grew up a border rat. And though I’m no cowboy, until recently I lived on a working cow-calf operation, and I know a few ranchers. Over the years, some have allowed me to hunt and fish on their land and treated me like family.
[Read: Trump can’t get what he wants and he doesn’t know why]
So I can say this, generally speaking: Although many big ranchers and landowners backed Trump, they are conservative in the most traditional senses. They actually believe in small government, free enterprise, free trade, and private property. And nobody puts a wall through their brush. These men and women are a pretty private bunch, too. You won’t find their names in the newspaper screaming bloody murder.
But they know how to make their presence felt. Last year, a couple of dozen border barons from the Laredo region summoned local politicians, cops, and representatives from the Customs and Border Patrol. It was a private, even secret event—no cameras, no press. According to Steve LaMantia, who led the group, the landowners delivered a warning to the feds not to build a wall through their land. To underscore their point, they held another meeting. And just in case it wasn’t crystal clear, they’re going to have another one.
“The general sentiment—to a person—is that everybody is in favor of additional border security,” said LaMantia. But seizing land through eminent domain? “That is diametrically opposed by everybody, from Zapata to Del Rio.”
LaMantia is reserved about his family’s holdings. He will admit to just a cattle ranch and natural-gas wells that front about five miles of the Rio Grande. But the land has been in his family’s hands for generations, even as the clan has made its fortune in beer. Its company, privately held L&F Distributors, controls the entire Anheuser-Busch operation from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to El Paso. It’s a big, big business.
“Everything down here sticks, stings, or bites,” he says, jokingly, about the mesquite-studded landscape. But I don’t think he’s talking about just the flora and the fauna. These landowners may be few, but they’re powerful. Campaign contributions can dry up. Local sheriffs can get the message to stop cooperating quite so much with Border Patrol agents.
“There are people there who have the resources that can fight this,” says Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar, whose district hugs the river from Mission to Laredo.
[Read: Trump’s wall could cost him in 2020]
Dennis Nixon is one such person. The president of the International Bank of Commerce in Laredo, he is a potent force in Texas and national politics. He fought for NAFTA in the 1990s, but he backed Trump, who vowed repeatedly to dismantle the trade agreement, over Hillary Clinton in 2016 because the Obama administration, in his view, was rough on banks like his. (His community bank has assets of $12.2 billion.) Now he’s against a border wall.
“Those with influence and power have the ability to hire big lawyers,” says Gilman, the law professor. “There is no doubt about that.”
The region’s border barons also have the people of their state behind them: Texans have consistently opposed the wall in polls. So far, however, they haven’t received much support from their Senate delegation. Senator John Cornyn has turned from staunch opponent of eminent domain to total squish, saying that some fencing is needed—without saying how much or where. Senator Ted Cruz backed $25 billion for Trump’s wall in December and suggested, preposterously, that Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the jailed Mexican drug kingpin, could pay for it.
Despite Republican subservience to Trump, however, it seems Democrats in Congress will manage to stand fast against Trump’s wall. Every single member of Congress from the border— from Brownsville to San Diego—opposes it, including the sole Republican, Will Hurd of Texas. If Trump declares a national emergency, Congress can act to terminate it. And if Congress can’t get its act together, the last line of defense for the border barons will be federal court.
Texas just successfully opposed a federal taking of farmland along the Red River border with Oklahoma. Although the courts have upheld eminent domain under the Secure Fence Act, a national-security declaration is another matter. The border barons would have standing in court to challenge a declaration—they would be directly affected—and they would have reason on their side. After all, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants are down from 1.6 million in 2000 to 300,000 in 2017. There is no disorder in the streets. Crime in every border city is down. Way down. Among the lowest in the nation.
And here’s the kicker: The borderlands between Laredo and El Paso see the smallest number of undocumented immigrants anywhere along nearly 2,000 miles of border, according to the Customs and Border Patrol’s latest figures.
“The president can declare whatever he wants,” says Gilman. “They could just challenge the premise that this is a national-security crisis.”
[Gerald S. Dickinson: What Trump can and can’t do to get his border wall]
If the border barons lose in court, that still won’t mean victory for Trump. They could simply chew up the wall by chewing up the clock on Trump’s time as president. They could demand an injunction blocking the government from taking the land before arriving at a settlement. And their lawyers could wrap the government up in years of haggling over dollars.
Here is the final, insurmountable barrier to Trump’s wall here: money. The government has already paid nearly $1 million an acre for that six-acre plot in the Rio Grande Valley, potentially setting a precedent. If the Trump administration seized 700 miles of private land along the border, one mile wide—640 acres per square mile—the tab could come to $448 billion. Nearly 20 times the wall itself.
“The federal government is much more cautious in taking land from wealthy landowners,” says Gilman. “Agencies just say, ‘Let’s build a wall elsewhere.’ There are ways that wealthy landowners can limit the construction of the border wall.”
That “elsewhere” might mean Big Bend National Park. It is federal land, after all. Environmentalists will point out that the park’s Chisos Mountains are home to golden-fronted woodpeckers, mule deer, and black bears; many would be blocked from crossing back and forth to Mexico if Trump were to get his wall. Trump, though, has never shown interest in environmental concerns.
The land beyond the park, en route from Presidio to El Paso, is owned by still more land barons, of a different sort. Most didn’t come by their land through royal land grants; some don’t even have a long family history here. But these owners are often rich, influential big-city dwellers—lots of bankers, lawyers, and doctors, with lots of clout in Congress. And they don’t want Trump’s wall either. They can also easily help bankroll legal challenges.
“The closer people get to the border, the less enchanted they are with the wall,” says David Yeates, the CEO of the Texas Wildlife Association, a San Antonio–based association of 10,000 large landowners who own about a quarter of Texas. “And we are a private-property state.
“Border security is critical,” Yeats continues. “But there’s a big difference between a wall and security.” Like everybody else I spoke to, Yeats points to the same solution the polls and Democrats identify: more border security, including agents, patrols, drones, and sensors.
[Read: What a border-wall GoFundMe campaign says about America]
In Texas, Trump may wind up getting just a few sections of his wall, concentrated in cities, where the structure—concrete or steel slats, or some alternative—would be redundant with the tangle of barriers already there.
But nobody thinks a 30-foot wall will do anything more than invite 32-foot ladders. And nobody I know wants to wind up with a story like that of Phyllis Price, who lives in San Elizario, east of El Paso, not far from where the open country ends and the bollard fence begins. In 2008, when the big, ugly rust-colored fence had just gone up in her picturesque village, founded in 1789, she drove to the river to scout a place to ride her horse. There she met a Border Patrol agent.
“Can I ride through that gate?” she asked.
“Absolutely not,” he answered.
“Why?” she asked.
He answered: “You might get shot.”
She hasn’t ridden her horse down there since.
Trump, like most other people in Washington, doesn’t know what he’s getting into down here.
He doesn’t know his history and so certainly doesn’t know his Texas history. But perhaps someone should tell him that the most popular symbol of resistance here is the Gonzales battle flag. Hastily painted on cloth in 1835 by Texan rebels, it was hoisted at the outset of revolution against Mexico. The rebels dared the Mexican army to seize back an artillery piece with these words: “Come and take it.”
So, yes, everything down here sticks, stings, or bites. And if Trump wants this land for his wall, he’ll have to come and take it.
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