ABUJA—Politics in Nigeria can be like General Hospital or Coronation Street—a long-running soap opera in which the cast rarely changes. Except here, it’s all about the military.
In 1979, General Olusegun Obasanjo handed over power to Nigeria’s first democratically elected government. The parade ending 13 years of military rule was organized by a young colonel, Abdusalam Abubakar. The elected administration was ousted in 1983, in a coup led by General Muhammadu Buhari, and the military remained in charge until 1999, when Abubakar, who by then had taken the reins, stood down in favor of Obasanjo, who had run for president as a civilian. Buhari himself won Nigeria’s most recent election (as a civilian) and is currently running for reelection against Obasanjo’s former vice president, with voting taking place Saturday.
In short, the same band of characters has run this country of about 180 million people for upwards of half a century. And while Nigeria is entering its third decade of uninterrupted democracy, it does so with the omnipresent influence of the military in its politics. Like in Egypt or Pakistan—countries where elected leaders are often overshadowed by senior officers—the military plays an outsize role here, and not just in the form of prospective political candidates. Former officers hold seats in private-sector boardrooms and bankroll political campaigns, too. The longer that continues, the harder it becomes to separate the civilian leadership from the military’s top brass, and the worse the impact on public life in Nigeria.
[Read: Nigeria democratically elects its former dictator]
“As a result of the kind of funds that they had access to while the military was in power, and the fact that they ingratiated themselves into Nigeria's power structures, they wield a lot of access to Nigeria's patronage networks,” Cheta Nwanze, the head of research at the Lagos-based SBM Intelligence, a risk advisory firm, told me about the military’s influence.
In 48 of the 58 years since Nigeria won independence from Britain, it has been led either by a general or by someone with a link to the military. The exceptions were in the first five and half years of Nigeria’s modern existence, and then during the leadership of Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan, who made history in 2015 as the only incumbent in Nigeria to lose an election, only rose to the presidency when his boss, Umaru Yar’Adua (the younger brother of, you guessed it, a general) died of an illness in 2010.
And in the business world, military officials have had their pick of jobs, from controlling stakes in oil fields to executive roles in shipping companies and defense contractors, as well as board seats on charities. Three of the biggest farms nationwide belong, respectively, to two ex-generals, one of them former President Abubakar, and a one-time air vice-marshal. It doesn’t end there: Just months after his airline lost its license and went bust, another retired general was appointed ambassador to South Africa, while Yar’Adua’s elder brother was, until his death, a major shareholder in a Nigerian bank. In 2010, one former army chief of staff told a stunned public gathering that he made $500 million from oil wells (to say nothing of his board positions with a telecom firm and a beverage manufacturer).
The enormous role the military holds in public life here has consequences beyond the positions officers hold, and is affecting both how the law is applied and how Nigerians view their own democracy.
[Read: How to undermine a democracy]
As president, Obasanjo routinely instigated impeachments of state governors who refused to do his bidding, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to extend his tenure beyond the two terms presidents here are limited to (a former chairman of Nigeria’s human-rights watchdog has claimed that Obasanjo tried to bribe lawmakers to do so). Buhari, whose deputy is a law professor, has shown a spectacular disdain for the courts. Under his watch, secret police arrested judges in a midnight raid and detained journalists. In January 2019, the president suspended the chief justice, an unconstitutional move. And last summer, he told a room full of lawyers, including the now-suspended judge, that the “rule of law must be subject to the supremacy of the nation’s security and national interest.”
Support for elections remains high here—an Afrobarometer poll this month showed that 72 percent of Nigerians believe elections are the best way to choose the country’s leaders, but that figure was down from 82 percent in 2003. And public backing for democratic norms appears to be declining. Some Buhari supporters have suggested that the constitution be suspended temporarily for the president to enact reforms, arguing in favor of a strongman in the face of “unruly behavior”, as Buhari himself put it during his first address to the nation, on October 1, 2015—Nigeria’s Independence Day. Older Nigerians point to coups as useful ways to displace corrupt politicians, or reference Rwanda and Ghana (under Paul Kagame and Jerry Rawlings, respectively, both of whom commanded armed forces) as examples of strongman states that Nigeria could learn from. Expressions and mannerisms from the days of military rule are still part of the democratic lexicon; phrases such as with immediate effect, an inference that orders must be implemented without procedural hurdles, are commonplace on TV and radio.
“If you look at African history, you will come to the conclusion that even in cases where military intervention may have been a quick fix in a particular context, in the long run, strongman rule was extremely detrimental to our continent,” Chris Fomunyoh, the Africa director of the National Democratic Institute, which has observed all national elections in Nigeria since 1999, told me. “In today’s Africa, with youths who see themselves as citizens of the world and who aspire to have [the] same liberties as elsewhere, there can be no rationale for throwing them and the continent back to the dark days of strongman rule.”
There are, however, positives. Though the military has a significant impact on Nigeria’s politics, no serving officer has ruled the country since 1999. When Jonathan lost to Buhari four years ago, he conceded without much drama; Buhari himself could be defeated in Saturday’s elections. Fellow West African countries such as Ghana and Gambia have shown a commitment to democracy, which can itself have a positive knock-on effect.
But more needs to be done. Nigeria’s political structure has thrust too much authority into the hands of the president, and few updates have been made to the country’s constitution, which is little changed from when the military handed over power. “Nigeria’s constitution … has managed to over-concentrate power at the center, à la military command, rendering other operating units weak and ineffective,” says Adewunmi Emoruwa, an Abuja-based analyst who is the chief operating officer of the Nigerian consulting firm Gatefield. The country’s leaders, military or not, are also an elderly bunch. Legislation has been passed cutting the minimum age required to run for state and federal positions and, buoyed by this, a 35-year-old MIT graduate is contesting a senatorial race in Lagos, but Buhari is 76 and his challenger, Atiku Abubakar, is 72.
“I am still optimistic about Nigeria,” the National Democratic Institute’s Fomunyoh told me, before adding that the country still has to focus on strengthening its democratic structure. “You have to improve it—that’s a natural component of the democratic process.”
About two years ago, Republican Representative Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, went on a “midnight run” to the White House that changed everything.
Nunes embarked on the late-night excursion just as the panel he oversaw was opening an investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. He then used the information he’d obtained from White House sources to allege surveillance abuses by President Barack Obama’s administration, raising critics’ concerns that his chumminess with the administration delegitimized the House’s Russia probe. It was also a sign, critics said, that the committee couldn’t operate in a bipartisan way.
So the public looked to the Senate Intelligence Committee for a comprehensive, bipartisan examination of Trump’s Russia ties—a reputation the panel’s Republican chair, Richard Burr, who had served as a senior national security advisor to the Trump campaign, has largely upheld by keeping the investigation scandal-free. “Nothing in this town stays classified or secret forever,” Burr told the Associated Press last August. “And at some point somebody’s going to go back and do a review. And I’d love not to be the one that chaired the committee when somebody says, ‘well, boy, you missed this.’ So we’ve tried to be pretty thorough in how we’ve done it.”
Though Burr and Mark Warner, the committee’s Democratic vice-chairman, have largely agreed on the parameters of the investigation, they have recently begun to disagree more publicly on what the facts they’ve collected add up to: Conspiracy? A series of coincidences and bad decisions? Or something in between?
The new Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, does not believe those questions can be answered without a thorough examination of Trump’s financial history and his potential entanglements with Russian money launderers, especially given new revelations about Trump’s efforts to pursue a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow in 2016. So he has revived the panel’s floundering Russia probe by hiring upwards of a dozen dedicated staffers with expertise in corruption or illicit finance, or prosecutorial experience. That brings the total number of investigators, which could increase, to 24 on the House panel alone. Many are bringing specific skills to the committee that the nine staffers working on the Senate’s Russia probe—despite their extensive intelligence-community experience—do not have, according to two people with direct knowledge of that committee’s work.
The reinvigorated House probe intends to pursue avenues of inquiry that may have been overlooked by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee investigation, including the substance of Trump’s closed-door conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the past two years. A particular emphasis will also be placed on Deutsche Bank—the Trump family’s bank of choice for decades, which was fined in 2017 over a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme involving its Moscow, New York, and London branches. “The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” Schiff told NBC in December. “This, apparently, was the one bank that was willing to do business with the Trump Organization. If this is a form of compromise, it needs to be exposed.” Deutsche Bank representatives said last month that the bank was working with the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees to “determine the best and most appropriate way of assisting them in their official oversight functions.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing a separate federal investigation into a potential conspiracy between the campaign and Russia in 2016. While he can issue indictments, the congressional committees can pursue a broader inquiry assessing misconduct that may not rise to the level of criminal activity.
***
It is undeniable that the Senate Intelligence Committee has traditionally been far more unified than its House counterpart, mostly by virtue of longer term limits and different rules. The committee produced important bipartisan reports over the past two years, including one last July that reaffirmed the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia worked to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016, and another that provided a sweeping analysis of Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns. The panel has also interviewed more than 200 witnesses and sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
Nevertheless, the bipartisan ground on which the Senate purported to have built its inquiry may be cracking. On Tuesday, Warner said he disagreed with Burr’s claim that the probe had found no “direct evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The comment left some legal experts perplexed, too. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where I have direct evidence of a conspiracy,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a Justice Department veteran who served as former FBI Director James Comey’s chief of staff until 2015. “If there is snow on your front lawn, you can safely conclude that it snowed,” Rosenberg told me. “Is that direct evidence? No. It’s circumstantial—someone could’ve driven up to your house and thrown snow on your lawn. But that’s unlikely. The law treats circumstantial and direct evidence as being of equal weight.”
Some Democratic aides were also confused by Burr’s recent claim that a key witness in the probe, the former British spy Christopher Steele, had not responded to the committee’s attempts to engage with him. In fact, Steele submitted written answers to the panel last August, two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the investigation told me.
The Senate’s subpoena for his testimony was dropped shortly thereafter—indicating that the senators were satisfied enough with his responses that they weren’t planning to compel further testimony.
Moreover, the House Democrats’ willingness to launch a full investigation into Trump’s financial history may not be “politically realistic” in the Republican-controlled Senate, said one of the people with direct knowledge of the Senate’s investigation. “The follow-the-money pieces of this are really important, but the question is, who is best positioned to do it?” this person said, referring to the committee’s jurisdictional limitations. The source added that it was “absolutely fair” to criticize the panel’s decision not to bring in outside investigators with expertise in financial investigations, ethics, and money laundering. “But I give full credit to Burr and Warner for keeping this investigation bipartisan, in a very difficult environment on such a fraught issue,” the source said.
Burr recently defended the decision not to hire outside investigators, telling CBS that they “would’ve never had access to some of the documents that we were able to access from the intelligence community.” A spokesperson for Warner declined to comment on whether the senator agreed with that assessment. A Republican committee aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the panel’s staff, reiterated that Burr has “full confidence in the bipartisan investigative staff, who were selected by both himself and the vice chairman. Over the last two years, members of the committee on both sides of the aisle have praised the investigators’ work and integrity.”
But Ryan Goodman, an expert in national-security law, told me he saw “red flags” in the way the investigation was being carried out, including the chairman’s “failure to hire outside staff with professional expertise and experience in complex investigations, and the failure to use the subpoena power to easily obtain financial records from entities like Deutsche Bank.”
“A successful congressional inquiry like this can stand or fall on the size and investigative skills of its staff,” Goodman added.
Another contention in the Senate’s inquiry is the extent to which Steele, the retired MI6 officer who in 2016 authored a collection of memos known as the Trump-Russia dossier, has cooperated with the committee. The body had prepared a subpoena for Steele’s testimony in March 2018, but withdrew it after he provided his written testimony in August. Investigators who have traveled to London since then have not approached Steele for an interview, according to Steele’s lawyer, who declined to be identified due to sensitivities surrounding the probe. Burr suggested in an interview with CBS last week that Steele remained out of reach. “We’ve made multiple attempts,” to elicit a response, Burr said.
Steele’s lawyer said that was “flatly not true,” and that the committee had actually agreed in writing not to seek further information from Steele after he submitted his written testimony. The panel has not reached out to request another interview, the lawyer said.
The Republican committee aide did not dispute that the panel had received Steele’s statements. But the aide said the committee had “made clear to Mr. Steele and his attorney that there is no substitute for a face-to-face interview when it comes to answering some of the committee’s most pressing questions.” A spokesperson for Warner confirmed that the committee “would like to speak with Mr. Steele.” The committee did not respond to Steele’s lawyer’s comments.
The dossier, which alleges serious misconduct and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in 2016, was presented to Trump by the nation’s top intelligence officials in January 2017. Trump dismissed it as “phony,” but many of the document’s core allegations appear to align with events during the campaign and are slowly being corroborated.
It’s getting harder for the Senate committee’s Republicans and Democrats to remain in step as they near the point where they’ll have to draw conclusions from their findings. One Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee aide put it simply: “There is a common set of facts, and a disagreement on what those facts mean. We are closer to the end than to the beginning, but we are not wrapping up.”
Amazon announced Thursday that its expansion of a second headquarters in New York wouldn’t happen after all (its plans for the D.C. suburbs remain intact). The deal fell through after intense opposition from activists and politicians, the latest sign that cities are souring on the tech industry. That this activism somehow proved victorious could signal the start of a broader movement nationwide against the type of lavish tax incentives that lured Amazon to New York in the first place. Detractors might be on to something, argues Derek Thompson: This type of corporate welfare rarely is worth the cost for cities, and the tens of thousands of new Amazon workers would’ve exacerbated New York City’s spiraling housing-affordability crisis.
Thursday marks one year since the Parkland, Florida school shooting, which left 17 students dead and dozens more injured. After hearing shots, Sarah Lerner, an English and journalism teacher at the school, recalls that she huddled in her classroom with a group of her students for several hours. In the foggy year since, a sense of normalcy has been elusive—especially when she returned to school just 9 days later. She’s not the only one who found the process of going back to school traumatizing; after the shooting, some of the students were gutted to see the empty desks of lost classmates. Post-Parkland, there’s still one big question flummoxing investigators: How to prevent the next one.
Then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe is now sharing details on what he considers the ethical and moral lines President Trump crossed during his tenure, in an exclusive adaptation from his forthcoming book. McCabe recalls that on his first full day in the acting director role, shortly after the President had fired then-director James Comey, he received a call from the White House; the president wanted to chat. Like his former boss, McCabe said he took contemporaneous notes of the conversation.
The White House said Trump will sign a compromise bill to avert a government shutdown but will take an “executive action,” including declaring a national emergency, to bypass Congress to secure funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. The president has dangled the prospect of declaring a national emergency for weeks—here’s what powers might be afforded to a president under such a declaration. (It’s also worth remembering that the U.S. currently is under roughly 30 other ongoing national emergencies, one of which was issued by President Jimmy Carter a full four decades ago.)
—Saahil Desai and Shan Wang
Evening Reads
(Erin McCluskey)After a married couple found out that the wife had terminal breast cancer, they made an unusual choice: keeping it a secret from the kids.
“Marla and I launched our stealth treatment strategy together: Everything would be tried; little would be shared. We saw no need to alarm friends, worry relatives, or derail the girls. Subterfuge was essential for survival—not just the literal, existential kind, but survival of the spirit. Our kids would not be robbed of stability; protecting their sense of the ordinary was everything. The ground would stay steady, and we would extend the runway for as long as possible.”
(Illustration: The Atlantic)
Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who runs the Archdiocese of Boston, is one of the closest confidantes of the pope, yet he has struggled in his quest to remedy the Church’s lingering sexual-abuse problem:
“In an interview on a recent cold morning in Boston, the cardinal spoke about the progress he believes the Church, and Pope Francis, have made in recent years, and what’s still lacking. He detailed his proposal to establish Vatican tribunals to deal with bishops accused of wrongdoing—one of the major problems the Church has yet to address. The pope ‘was convinced to do it another way,’ O’Malley said. ‘We’re still waiting for the procedures to be clearly articulated.’ He often described problems in the Church passively, without directly assigning agency or fault. ”
Urban Developments
(Photo: Warren M. Winterbottom / AP)
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
Why did California Governor Gavin Newsom scale back the quest for high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles? The new plan, Laura Bliss writes, risks turning the transportation project into an economic-development tool.
Looking for love this Valentine’s Day? Apparently, America left its heart in San Francisco: Residents of the Bay Area may be among the "most romantic" in the country, according to data from OkCupid.
In urban marketing campaigns, cities often focus on the same basic ingredients: hipster coffee shops, bike lanes, and farm-to-table restaurants. City branding needs a shot of creativity, Aaron Renn writes—it’s time to showcase distinct identities of place.
Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently accused the National Enquirer of “extortion and blackmail” over private photos of him obtained by the tabloid. In a Medium post, Bezos shared emails from the Enquirer that threaten to publish those photos unless he accedes to their demands. How did a celebrity magazine get into the rough and tumble world of extortion?
On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Alex Wagner is joined by Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker staff writer and CNN’s Chief Legal Analyst. He shares insights from his 2017 profile of the man who runs the tabloid. How did the National Enquirer become what it is today? Why does it pay to silence stories about Donald Trump? And why is it at war with Jeff Bezos?
Listen for:
The unexpected history of the tabloid and what Jeffrey Toobin learned from spending time with David Pecker, CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company An episode ten years ago just like L'Affaire Bezos — except the celebrity subject of the Enquirer’s photos did as the tabloid asked How the Enquirer’s actions could impact journalism. As Bob Bauer, former White House counsel for Obama, put it in The Atlantic: Can Freedom of the Press Survive David Pecker?Voices:
Alex Wagner (@AlexWagner) Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin)It’s Thursday, February 14. President Donald Trump plans to sign the congressional deal to avert a government shutdown, but the White House says Trump will “take another executive action—including a national emergency” in order to bypass Congress for border-wall funding. (Here’s a refresher on the legal showdown that might result.)
Meanwhile, William Barr was sworn in as the new attorney general after being confirmed by the Senate earlier today. Here’s what else we’re following:
“A Deliberate Liar”: Andrew McCabe writes in an exclusive book excerpt for The Atlantic that “the president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.” The former acting FBI director describes interactions with Trump himself—including when the president called him on an unsecured phone line to talk about his firing of former FBI Director James Comey—and his conversations with deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about protecting ongoing investigations into Russian interference.
One Year After Parkland: How have students tried to recover from the trauma of a mass shooting, while still keeping the memory of their classmates alive? And although schools across the country have worked to improve security, administrators can only do so much to prevent another attack, Adam Harris reports.
Is This Just Fantasy?: In a speech yesterday at a gathering of police chiefs, Trump praised Art Acevedo, the police chief of Houston, Texas. The only problem? Acevedo has been consistently critical of Trump. His criticisms show that Trump’s “caricatured view of a uniformly macho, tough-on-crime law-enforcement establishment doesn’t totally match reality,” writes David A. Graham.
An Inside Look at the Church in Crisis: Cardinal Seán O’Malley has been at the forefront of the Catholic Church’s response to clergy sexual abuse for years. In the lead-up to next week’s gathering of top bishops at the Vatican to take steps toward addressing the crisis, O’Malley, in an exclusive interview, told The Atlantic’s Emma Green that he has been frustrated by the bishops’ inability to respond to the scandals that have rocked the Church for decades: “Every time we thought we were rounding a corner, there will be another explosion.”
2020 Vision: How many people are running for president anyway? Warren, Booker, Harris? Biden, Sanders, Clinton? What about de Blasio? O’Rourke? How does one pronounce Buttigieg? Here are the answers to all your most fundamental 2020 questions.
— Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle
Snapshot
Students at Seminole Middle School in Plantation, Florida, participate in a moment of silence for the 14 students and three staff members killed one year ago at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They are sitting in front of a new mural, depicting musicians from around the world, that was dedicated to the shooting victims. (Terry Spencer / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticAmazon Got Exactly What It Deserved—And So Did New York (Derek Thompson)
“New York City doesn’t need an Amazon headquarters to be the global capital of advertising and retail, and Amazon doesn’t need New York subsidies to expand its footprint in the city. The larger truth is that corporate subsidies, including the $3 billion package offered to Amazon, are often pernicious and usually pointless.” → Read on.
How the Parkland Shooting Changed My Life (Sarah Lerner)
“I went to school the morning of February 14, 2018, to give a quiz to my senior English classes. I joked that I was ruining their Valentine’s Day by giving them the quiz. To make them smile, I put Hershey’s Kisses on their desks. Later that day, 20 minutes before school ended, my world changed forever. I left school shattered, broken, lost.” → Read on.
John Dingell Was a Gift to America (Norm Ornstein)
“This country is a better, more just, and cleaner place than it would have been without Dingell’s service in Congress. Which makes our current backsliding even more frustrating.” → Read on.
What Will Trump Do If He Realizes He’s Lost the Shutdown Fight? (Peter Beinart)
“Preventing the cycle from starting all over again may require allowing Trump to maintain his delusions of grandeur. It’s like dealing with small children: It’s safer to let them think they’ve won than endure the temper tantrum that will ensue if they realize they’ve lost.” → Read on.
◆A Year After Parkland, a Family Searches for Closure (Gabby Deutch, Politico)
◆ ‘Here’s the System; It Sucks’: Meet the Hill Staffers Hired by Ocasio-Cortez to Upend Washington (Jeff Stein, The Washington Post)
◆ TVA to Close Coal-Run Plants in Kentucky, Tennessee (Jim Gaines, Knoxville News Sentinel)
◆Green New Deal Activists Shift Focus to Vulnerable Republicans Ahead of Senate Vote (Alexander C. Kaufman, Huffington Post)
◆Texas Student After School Shootings: ‘I Feel We Are Always on Guard’ (Diane Smith and Anna M. Tinsley, Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
◆Inside the Largest and Most Controversial Shelter for Migrant Children in the U.S. (John Burnett, NPR)
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When the filmmaker Sindha Agha first went to the doctor about her pain, she experienced a phenomenon familiar to many women—she was not taken seriously. Then, it happened again. And again.
“It took me nearly 15 years of going to doctor after doctor to finally receive adequate treatment,” Agha told The Atlantic. “It's absurd that most people have never heard of a condition that one in 10 women have.”
Agha was ultimately diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition in which the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus begins to grow outside, spreading to the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, and even the pelvis. Women with endometriosis often experience severe pain, most commonly during their menstrual cycle or while having intercourse. Many seek treatment, only to be sent home with Tylenol and a shrug. Instances of the gaslighting of women’s pain litter the history of health care.
Agha’s powerful short documentary tells one such story. A woman whom Agha connected with through an online endometriosis support network recounts her experience of painful sex and demurring doctors. Like Agha, it took years for the woman to have her pain acknowledged. We hear her story over evocative, stylized imagery.
“I wanted the visuals to make viewers experience something viscerally,” Agha said. “I can't physically transport you into the body of someone with endometriosis, but maybe if we poke a hundred nails into some Jell-O, you might get an idea.” Agha underwent a process of “unnerving free association” to create the specific visuals. “I'd think of an object, like a sheet cake, and think of what I wouldn't want to see happen to it. And then I'd do that.” She hoped to represent the sense of discomfort that women with endometriosis often feel inside their own bodies.
Agha believes that the overall cultural shift toward believing women should extend into the doctor's office. “When women say they're in pain,” she said, “they deserve to be believed.”
This film originally appeared on BBC Three.
An established musician lavishes an unknown one with praise and career help: recording sessions, songwriting advice, a spot on a tour. What to call the two of them? Boss and employee? Nothing so straightforward. Collaborative equals? Not if one’s success depends on the other’s largesse. Really they’re mentor and mentee, a central arrangement in pop-music mythology, most recently given Hollywood glorification in A Star Is Born.
But in real life, that story can involve the mentor exploiting their power for sex, and without actually helping the mentee. The #MeToo tales to emerge in the music industry have, to an overwhelming extent, exposed men who tried to trade access to the music industry for access to a musician’s body. Many of the women allegedly abused by R. Kelly were young, aspiring singers lured into his orbit by the prospect of professional development. It happens in formal arrangements, too: Among the women alleging rape by Russell Simmons is Tina Baker, an artist he managed. Now, the accusations surfacing about the rocker Ryan Adams offer a stark reminder of how such mentorship can be weaponized.
Adams’s country-tinged rock won acclaim and sold hundreds of thousands of albums in the early 2000s, and since then he’s been an alternative-music fixture, releasing a steady stream of songs and engaging in splashy collaborations. A New York Times article published on Wednesday quotes multiple women—some famous and some not—who allege Adams dangled career boosts only to then pursue sex. Again and again, that pursuit is reported to have resulted in exactly the opposite of the fruitful partnership Adams promised. These women say he sabotaged their ambitions.
Ava, a bass player who was 14 when Adams reached out on Twitter, says his texts and video messages mingled talk of recording together with explicit come-ons. Phoebe Bridgers, a now-acclaimed singer-songwriter, received promotion, distribution, and production assistance from Adams—and says their relationship quickly turned not only romantic but also emotionally abusive. Another musician, Courtney Jaye, says she received a Twitter message from Adams asking her to jam with him, but when they met up, Adams made physical advances on her.
There is also Mandy Moore, the onetime teen pop star who now acts on the NBC show This Is Us. She and Adams were married for six years. During that time, she alleges he took over her music career, promising to record her next album—while shooing her away from other music producers—but never following through. Moore reports that belittling comments (“you’re not a real musician”) intermingled with other forms of harsh treatment by Adams. The experience resembled the emotional abuse alleged by another Adams ex, Megan Butterworth.
In many of the cases, the women describe Adams damaging or derailing their careers. Jaye told the Times, “Something changed in me … It made me just not want to make music.” Said Moore: “His controlling behavior essentially did block my ability to make new connections in the industry during a very pivotal and potentially lucrative time—my entire mid-to-late 20s.” Regarding Ava, the Times writes, “the idea that she would be objectified or have to sleep with people to get ahead ‘just totally put me off to the whole idea’ of being a musician, she said. She never played another gig.”
Adams’s lawyer has denied the allegations and called some of them “grousing by disgruntled individuals.” Adams took a somewhat more conciliatory tone on Twitter, writing, “To anyone I have ever hurt, however unintentionally, I apologize deeply and unreservedly.” But he added, “the picture that this article paints is upsettingly inaccurate. Some of its details are misrepresented; some are exaggerated; some are outright false. I would never have inappropriate interactions with someone I thought was underage. Period.” He also tweeted this: “As someone who has always tried to spread joy through my music and my life, hearing that some people believe I caused them pain saddens me greatly.”
As someone who has always tried to spread joy through my music: It’s a statement that resurfaces old bromides about creativity and genius. Over the years, Adams’s general public presentation has been that of a hard-partying bad boy who’s also arguably the dean of alternative rock, prolific with albums and team-ups and covers. The allegations in the Times piece draw a clear line between his clout and his reported ability to manipulate and hold back women. “Music was a point of control for him,” Moore said, and the pattern even predates the Times story. When Moore in 2017 spoke publicly about their divorce, Adams hit back on social media by mocking her as a cultural lightweight, someone he was now embarrassed of. In one tweet he wrote, “She didn’t like the Melvins or BladeRunner. Doomed from the start … .” Another compared being married to Moore to being “stuck to the spiritual equivalent of a soggy piece of cardboard.”
The dichotomy he drew in those tweets—which he later apologized for—painted him as a serious man who deigned to associate with an unserious woman. It is a deeply ingrained idea in pop culture, bound up with the way mentor-mentee relationships between men and women are so easily and destructively sexualized. Take the 1960s story of the singer Marianne Faithfull. She found entrée into the industry through the Rolling Stones, whose manager referred to her as an “angel with big tits.” In 1967, she became the object of public mockery when she was discovered wearing only a fur rug during a police bust of Keith Richards’s home. It took a decade before she returned to music-making, and her string of profoundly moving albums has continued up through the present. “The whole thing of being considered a chick on the arm of a great rock star is an insult to me,” she said in 2014.
You see glimmers of the alleged Ryan Adams pattern even in A Star Is Born, a basket of beloved tropes about men conferring greatness upon unknown women—and falling in love with their bodies at the same time. Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s version explicitly plays with the notion of gravitas-steeped guys who first lend credibility to women, and then try to control them by calling them frivolous and putting the woman’s professional goals in tension with their personal relationship. The fable Hollywood clearly wants to tell is how a woman can benefit from a man’s affections, and then transcend his resentment and vindictiveness. But the reality, as Adams’s accusers hint, doesn’t often work out that way.
It’s of course not just a myth that men can help aspiring women succeed—it’s simply a reality based on who holds power. #MeToo-era conversations about why it’s been so hard for women to “step up” into successful music careers make clear that the story told by the Adams allegations is part of a systemic problem. How to unwind it? For many musicians, the workplace has no formalized hierarchy or HR departments. When an unsigned artist gets harassed by the rock star who’s positioned himself as her A&R man, producer, and promoter, who does she complain to? When a consensual relationship devolves into manipulation and career undermining, what’s the recourse?
The law only gets you so far: The Times story overtly suggests one potential criminal violation, regarding the case of Ava, who Adams’s attorney says he didn’t know was underage. For Moore, Bridges, Butterworth, and Jaye, though, the alleged offenses are to the women’s careers and senses of self. Protecting other aspiring artists will take the rewriting of myths and the naming and shaming of supposed heroes. It will also take replacing some of those heroes from the ranks of women who’d otherwise be thwarted.
Summertime in Antarctica is winding down these days, with the first sunset of the year coming to the South Pole in about two weeks. The people living and working at Antarctic coastal stations were able to experience a few weeks of constant daylight around Christmastime. Gathered below, recent images of the Antarctic landscape, wildlife, and research facilities, and some of the work taking place there.
Amazon said on Thursday that it will cancel its plans to add a second corporate headquarters in New York City. The company had pledged to build a campus in Queens’ Long Island City in exchange for $3 billion in subsidies.
In a statement, Amazon blamed local politicians for the reversal. “For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term,” the statement read. “A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.”
In a period of growing antipathy toward billionaires, Amazon’s corporate-welfare haul struck many—including me—as a gratuitous gift to a trillion-dollar company that was probably going to keep adding thousands of jobs to the New York region anyway. The company has more than 5,000 employees in the five boroughs, including 2,500 at a Staten Island fulfillment center and at least one thousand more in the Manhattan West office building.
[Read: Amazon’s HQ2 will only worsen America’s “great divergence”]
At first, Amazon seemed to withstand the backlash, comforted by polls showing that the deal enjoyed broad support. A recent poll from Siena College Research Institute found that 56 percent of voters statewide support the Amazon deal, including a majority of union households and people between the age of 18 and 34.
But over time, Amazon’s patience wore thin. Executives were reportedly livid at the nomination of the Queens state Senator Michael N. Gianaris, an outspoken opponent of the deal, to a Public Authorities Control Board that would give him power to “effectively kill the project.” Amazon leaders were grilled at a February city council meeting about the company’s resistance toward unions and the working conditions of its fulfillment centers. (By contrast, Virginia—the other winner of the HQ2 sweepstakes—has embraced Amazon with open arms, and the state has already authorized $750 million in state subsidies for its Crystal City headquarters.) Last week, The Washington Post (which is owned by the Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos) reported that the retailer was having second thoughts about its New York campus, given the level of opposition from local politicians, advocacy groups, and the media.
Within a week, the company officially canceled the project.
The company said it does not plan to reopen the HQ2 search. “We will proceed as planned in Northern Virginia and Nashville,” the statement said.
The most obvious losers in Amazon’s reversal are real-estate speculators. In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that brokers embarked on a “condo gold rush” in anticipation of the Queens campus construction. “This is like a gift from the gods for the Long Island City condo market,” one realtor told the Journal. Alas, the gods, like the billionaires, giveth and taketh away.
[Annie Lowrey: Amazon was never going to choose Detroit]
But it is not clear that either New York City or Amazon will suffer with this announcement. In fact, it is more likely that neither the city’s nor the company’s economic trajectory will be materially altered. New York City doesn’t need an Amazon headquarters to be the global capital of advertising and retail, and Amazon doesn’t need New York subsidies to expand its footprint in the city.
The larger truth is that corporate subsidies, including the $3 billion package offered to Amazon, are often pernicious and usually pointless. Studies show that these sorts of measures “have no discernible impact on firm expansion, measured by job creation.” Yet every year, local governments spend more than $90 billion to move headquarters and factories between states, a wasteful zero-sum exercise whose cost is more than the federal government spends on affordable housing, education, or infrastructure. In the most garish example of corporate-welfare absurdity, Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing company, solicited up to $4 billion in subsidies from Wisconsin in exchange for a factory and tens of thousands of workers. Now it’s an open question whether that facility will ever get built.
But even the less garish examples are galling. New York City doesn’t have an employment problem; it has a housing-affordability problem. Yet the original language of the Amazon deal used tax breaks that might have gone to infrastructure or low-income housing investment in the Long Island City region. While it’s hard to draw a direct line between corporate handouts and foregone public spending, the fact that states and cities cannot run persistent deficits or print their own currency, like the federal government can, implies that tax dollars lavished on corporations limit the amount of money available to other public projects. Meanwhile, the New York City subway is a disaster, and tuition is rising at the City University of New York system.
“I am a bit surprised that Amazon pulled out,” Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told me by email. “The unrest over inequality and gentrification is starting to have tangible business consequences.” The irony is that the quasi-socialist revolution behind this unrest has voided a corporate-welfare deal that is more corporate cronyism than capitalism. It has taken far-left protesters to inject a measure of sanity into the free market.
Well, that didn’t take long.
Amazon announced today that it was “not moving forward” with the plans to build out a massive corporate office, which it called HQ2, in Long Island City, Queens. The announcement followed months of intense opposition by activists and local politicians dismayed that Amazon would receive up to $2.5 billion in tax subsidies to—as they saw it—accelerate the gentrification of local neighborhoods.
“While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment,” Amazon sniffed, “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”
Critics such as state Senator Michael Gianaris blasted the statement. “Like a petulant child, Amazon insists on getting its way or takes its ball and leaves,” Gianaris told The New York Times. “The only thing that happened here is that a community that was going to be profoundly affected by their presence started asking questions … Amazon admits they will grow their presence in New York without their promised subsidies. So what was all this really about?”
Securing subsidies was certainly one thing the HQ2 search was about, using the great game to paper over what has become a common tactic—leveraged by corporations from sports teams to Tesla to Foxconn—of playing local regions off one another to secure sweet deals. These economic-development deals have not always gone well. Companies don’t deliver on their promises or change plans. Teams leave. Cities, somehow, are usually left holding the bag, and by bag, I mean debt.
[Read: Amazon’s HQ2 spectacle isn’t just shameful—it should be illegal]
Nonetheless, cities kept doing it, driven by a model that the sociologist Harvey Molotch described as “the city as growth machine.” It’s as if Molotch was describing the actual HQ2 search in his 1976 paper.
“An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another,” he wrote. “Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal level, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities.”
As residents of the biggest winners of the city lottery—say, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Denver, Washington, D.C.—have found, a rich city is great for the rich, but it’s very hard on everyone whose labor is not valued as highly as tech engineers and financiers. The poor are forced to the outer reaches of the metro area, or suffer ever greater alienation from the changing city around them. As the West Oakland activist Brian Beveridge once put it, in a rising tide, “all boats don’t rise, because people don’t have a boat.”
San Francisco now serves as a metaphor for how tech money can transform even one of the most charming and irascible cities into a place where no teachers can afford to live, even young rich people are terrified of losing their apartments, and longtime residents mutter under their breath as they wander through suddenly alien streets.
These cities are the spatial embodiment of the rocketing inequality of the past several decades, which shows that it’s quite easy to grow a city, or a nation, or a global economy while only the very, very, very rich eat up all that income growth.
And what better avatar for this situation than Jeff Bezos, currently the world’s richest man, versus Queens? Deposed Uber CEO Travis Kalanick played a similar role in the company’s canceled new corporate headquarters in uptown Oakland. These guys are bad, opponents said—why are we inviting them into our city? Or as activists put it candidly, in nearly daily graffiti on the in-progress building, “Fuck Uber!”
For decades, cities’ answer to the questions posed about their economic practices has been simply, These projects bring jobs. But urban activists have finally found an opponent that is easier to beat than the Raiders or even a condo builder: the technology industry.
Self-driving cars promise to change cities, mint billionaires, and push robots into the everyday lives of millions of people. The only problem is, no one knows quite when or how. And with all the research and development locked up inside private companies, the public has little information to judge the progress of the technology, aside from the occasional PR reveal or disaster.
We have one (imperfect) yardstick, however: the numbers that the California Department of Motor Vehicles requires that any company testing an autonomous vehicle in the state file every month. Those are rolled up and released in January of each year. Though people in the industry don’t like what they see as the uneven comparisons between companies, this is the best we’ve got. The data include two primary numbers: the number of autonomous miles driven, which gives a rough indication of the scale of a program in the state, and the number of disengagements, or when a human driver takes over for the computer.
For every year of these disclosures, Waymo, the self-driving-car project within Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been the leader by a wide margin.
The year 2018 was no different. Waymo drove 1.2 million miles in the state, which is not even its primary testing ground. Its cars disengaged 114 times, for a rate of 0.09 disengagements per 1,000 miles. That’s down from 0.18 in 2017. GM Cruise cemented its position as the key challenger to Waymo supremacy, logging nearly 448,000 miles with 162 disengagements, for a rate of 0.19 per 1,000 miles, and that’s on San Francisco’s difficult streets, a fact that GM Cruise’s Kyle Vogt is fond of pointing out. Together, the two companies’ cars drove 86 percent of the autonomous miles in the state.
[Read: Inside Waymo’s secret world for training self-driving cars]
Apple, whose self-driving program is less high-profile, came in at No. 3 in miles driven, with nearly 80,000 autonomous miles. However, the company’s disengagement rate was 871.65 disengagements per 1,000 miles, according to the DMV methodology—the highest of the 27 companies that submitted data.
Apple’s cover letter to the DMV indicates that the company changed its reporting methodology halfway through the year, and that after July 2018, the company’s rate of “important disengagements” would land it in the realm of 0.5 disengagements per 1,000 miles, which would be in the top tier of performances.
That enormous discrepancy highlights what the various companies don’t like about the reporting processes. They don’t have a true standard for what must count as a “disengagement,” leaving room for companies to make their numbers look better (or even worse) than they might otherwise be. Where the miles are driven obviously matters, too: It’s harder to drive in Manhattan than Palo Alto. And these cars are trying to learn, which means you don’t necessarily want to encourage drives on empty highways, where the learning rate per mile is low.
Nonetheless, no other state requires any kind of disclosure about miles driven or disengagements. These numbers are all we have, in large part because none of these companies want to self-report, nor do their interactions with the DMV seem to indicate that they’d like more stringent standards.
Huge, huge, huge money is at stake in the race to build autonomous vehicles of all kinds, and no company wants to give away more secrets than it has to.
This year, the field of real competitors has grown. More companies have attained the basic ability to run a self-driving car on the streets of California for fairly extended periods of time. The most advanced ones have expanded their driving greatly. And it’s worth noting that much of the action occurs in special training facilities outside California (whether that’s in Arizona or the traditional seat of the car industry, Michigan), or in simulated worlds filled with real data.
In just the past week, two new players received $1.4 billion of funding: $940 million to Nuro, a driverless delivery company, and $500 million to Aurora. Amazingly, both companies can trace their lineage to the Google self-driving-car project that eventually spun off into Waymo, a company that financial analysts value at tens of billions of dollars. In 2018, self-driving-car company Zoox also raised $500 million. Many others have secured or are eyeing tens of millions, a hundred million, or even a billion dollars.
Nuro, Aurora, and Zoox all appear on the DMV list. Zoox and Nuro both posted top-five disengagement numbers and ranked fifth and sixth in miles driven (30,000 and 25,000, respectively). Aurora drove almost 33,000 miles (fourth in the pack), but showed a very high disengagement rate of 10.01 per 1,000 miles. That could be consistent with the kind of long-term-oriented program that founder Chris Urmson has outlined.
[Read: All the promises automakers have made about the future of cars]
Nuro’s regulatory filing was also unusually detailed in its description of the problems that its vehicles encountered, making concrete the general problems that self-driving cars can encounter. Among them: Cars can have trouble identifying objects; the mapping information they rely on to function can be out-of-date or inaccurate; they can have problems with their sensor inputs. And they can simply make bad decisions with the information they have; the filing includes entries such as “planned trajectory failed to leave adequate room for parked car on narrow road” and “planned trajectory resulted in erroneous sharp braking, recklessly tailgating motorist may have been unable to stop.”
What about Tesla, which has talked a big self-driving game? Like last year, the company used the necessity of filing a letter with the DMV to lobby for its heterodox mode of self-driving-car development, which included huge numbers of real-world miles logged by human drivers and its Autopilot mode, albeit with a more limited range of sensor data than other self-driving cars. Tesla drivers have logged 1 billion miles in Autopilot mode, according to the company’s filing. If that turns out to be the winning strategy, clearly Tesla will suddenly come into focus as the leader in autonomous driving. But until that day, we don’t really know how far up the ladder toward true autonomy their approach can take them.
The ways in which schools and students think about the possibility of mass violence on campus changed a lot between the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School and the 2018 one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Dave Cullen’s last book, 2009’s acclaimed nonfiction work Columbine, chronicled the public and private lives of high-school students who survived the 1999 Columbine massacre as they grappled with the question of why this unthinkable horror had happened at their school. Cullen’s newest book, Parkland—about the activism of the survivors of the February 14, 2018, attack that killed 17 students in Parkland, Florida—follows a group of students determined to not let the world forget that of course this horror had happened at their school. Why wouldn’t it have? It was happening everywhere else. These students, unlike those who survived the tragedy at Columbine, grew up under the ever-looming threat of school gun violence, and then it materialized. Still, the Parkland kids’ back-to-school experience looked a lot like the Columbine kids’. They missed their dead classmates; they feared more violence in their classrooms; they had to fight through post-traumatic–stress symptoms to get to calculus on time.
There’s a developing set of protocols for how to handle the process of reintroducing kids to school after a shooting takes place on campus. As I reported last year, there are now “best practices” for how to reopen a school after a shooting, and that’s partly because many administrators at schools where a mass shooting has taken place call the administrators of the school that had the last mass shooting to ask for advice on how to ease kids back into the school setting. It’s one thing to hear about post-shooting protocols from experts, though, and quite another to see them in action through students’ eyes. Parkland, reported over the course of the 10 months after the shooting, mainly focuses on the gun-reform movement that took shape after the Douglas shooting, but it also paints a vivid portrait of what going back to school after a shooting is really like for students.
Douglas students returned to class two weeks after the shooting, on February 28, but on the Sunday prior, the school held an open house. In one of the book’s more heartbreaking scenes, Cullen notes how painful and scary the first reunion between students and their terrorized school can be. The high school that Sunday still felt, in some ways, like a crime scene: Helicopters hovered, capturing video of the school for TV news, and the sound of the chopper triggered anxiety and panic for some of the students who had heard the motors over their school the day of the shooting. One student notes that walking around that day, he and his friends heard a car engine go pop pop pop, “and we all started hyperventilating.”
When classes did resume, though, Cullen describes a school transformed into something more like a rehab center. Classes weren’t really classes at first: “So much Play-Doh, so many comfort dogs,” one student, Daniel Duff, says. (The Play-Doh he found somewhat ridiculous; the comfort dogs he found wonderful.) Another student, Lauren Hogg, describes coming back to school to find “therapists literally everywhere,” even in the school library. Their on-call availability, she says, was immensely helpful for students who were experiencing grief that came in waves, washing over them at unpredictable and sometimes inopportune moments.
[Read: The developing norms for reopening schools after shootings]
The weeks that follow a school shooting, Cullen writes, are shaky. Students’ routines resume, and many find comfort in the returning familiarity and controllability of their days, but many still experience sudden moments of fear, worry, and sadness at school. When Matt Deitsch, the older brother of two of the survivors, tells Cullen about his little sister’s accounts of being at Douglas after the shooting, he says she’s one of many students who get anxious when they use the bathrooms. “She says, ‘Now when I go to the bathroom I think if I take a little longer to wash my hands maybe I’ll survive if it happens again,’ ” Deitsch says. Or sometimes she’ll take the long way back from lunch and wonder if this choice will save her life.
Many of the students Cullen spoke with mention the never-quite-normal presence of empty desks where students killed in the shooting used to sit. One student says sitting next to a slain friend’s empty desk in classes they used to share is “when it hits [him] the worst.” Another finds it haunting that during other periods of the day, “people probably sit there [in the conspicuously empty desk] and they have no idea this desk is the one we all look at in our class.”
Parkland also illustrates all the tiny ways in which the memory of a shooting can find ways to disrupt students’ lives even after their daily schedules and routines have long since picked back up. Before Douglas students performed their much-publicized production of the musical Spring Awakening last May, for example, their theater director had to confront the question of how, or even whether, to portray a fatal gunshot scripted into one of the final scenes. It was necessary to the plot of the show, she told Cullen, but it also seemed like an especially ghastly thing for this particular audience to have to witness. (Ultimately, the directors decided to keep the gun in the scene, but instead of a gunshot sound effect, they simply blacked out the lights.)
Throughout the rest of the school year, Cullen notes, certain events caused the student body’s emotions to flare up again—and they highlight the fact that the school is full of kids who are moving forward at different speeds and in different ways. Hogg, for example, found herself crying at school in April while looking over a special edition of the school paper dedicated to the 17 victims. Other students nearby laughed at her for weeping. Many kids felt bad about enjoying springtime school events such as prom when they knew their dead classmates couldn’t, while others balked at the idea of incorporating a memorial for the shooting victims into their prom event.
“Somebody brought up this idea of having something about the shooting at prom, and we were like, ‘That’s the worst idea you’ve ever come up with!’ ” one student told Cullen. Prom, the student added, needed to be a night when students could feel some modicum of normalcy kicking back in. In the end, prom included a 17-second silent tribute to the victims.
And graduation—“the most conflicted day” of recovery for school-shooting survivors—was a similarly fraught occasion, Cullen writes. To some seniors, it felt like a statement of strength, of fortitude in the face of tragedy. To others, moving forward into their college and adult years without their fallen classmates felt unfair.
Most of how Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School handled the aftermath of the shooting last February, it’s worth noting, tracks closely with what experts consider to be best practices, such as the open-house event before classes resume, the many counselors and therapy dogs stationed all over the building or campus, the slow easing back into academics in the classroom, and the heads-up to teachers that kids will be moody or upset or weeping on particular days for the rest of the school year. Cullen’s Parkland offers a rare and vital glimpse into what all these measures look like in action—and a reminder that no matter how many active-shooter trainings or lockdown drills have been implemented, no matter how many school-reopening protocols are in place, these tragedies cannot be prepared for before they happen or quickly resolved after they do.
It is a very odd thing to think of myself as a school-shooting survivor. The first time I acknowledged that I was a survivor was on October 5, 2018, when I attended an event as a guest of Everytown for Gun Safety. I went over to the Moms Demand Action table to sign up to be a volunteer. As I filled out the form, I stared at the question asking how I was connected to gun violence. I stood there for what felt like an hour. Finally I checked the box to indicate that I was a survivor of gun violence. I had never thought of it that way before.
I wasn’t in Building 12. I didn’t see anyone get shot. I never saw the shooter. I didn’t think of myself as a survivor. When I said that to my husband, he told me that I absolutely was. I was on campus that day. I heard the shots when I got outside after the fire alarm went off. I returned to my classroom, where I kept 15 students safe in my classroom for two and a half to three hours, until the SWAT team entered my room. I might not have seen anything, but I was there and didn’t know whether I’d be next.
I remember the day vividly. It’s the hours, days, and weeks following that are a blur. I went to school the morning of February 14, 2018, to give a quiz to my senior English classes. I joked that I was ruining their Valentine’s Day by giving them the quiz. To make them smile, I put Hershey’s Kisses on their desks. Later that day, 20 minutes before school ended, my world changed forever. I left school shattered, broken, lost.
[Read: The next Parkland could happen anywhere]
On February 15, I did a 12-hour media marathon, appearing on TV stations across the country. It was surreal to stand across the street from my school and talk about an event that had happened less than 24 hours before. In the afternoon, I attended a vigil at Pine Trails Park, a mile north of the school. I saw students who I had seen only the day before, but it felt like a lifetime ago.
On February 16, I attended the funeral for Meadow Pollack, whom I had as a freshman in my English class. That was the first time I cried since leaving the school two days earlier.
On February 17, I met with my yearbook staff. I told them how much I loved them, and how glad I was that they were safe. Several members of the staff not only were in Building 12, but were in the classrooms the shooter turned his gun on. They watched their friends and classmates die. They were injured. If the shooting had happened one day later, it would have taken place during yearbook class. I couldn’t wrap my head around how many of them could have been traveling around the building getting quotes, or taking pictures. The thought that I could have lost anyone was too much to take. I began to cry. They cried too.
On February 18, I attended the funeral for Jaime Guttenberg, who was in my Journalism 1 class that year.
After that, I don’t know what I did most days. I just know that I tried to keep myself busy.
On February 23, I went back to school for the first time. I entered my classroom, and it looked like a freeze frame of the moment before the shooting, like time had stood still. The date February 14 was still on the board; the quizzes were still on the desks; students’ phones were still plugged in; the computers were still on. I began to have an anxiety attack and couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there. I was in the room for a total of five minutes.
When school resumed on February 28, I hugged each one of my students. I told them that I would always be there for them. Within the next few weeks, my students started opening up about what they had experienced. I never prompted them. I always listened. It broke my heart that these things had happened at all, but especially to children—because that’s what they are.
In the months that followed, we put together a yearbook like no other; one that was perfect, that honored the victims. We added pages for profiles of those we had lost, and yet more pages to cover what happened that day and in the weeks after. I edited and published a book, Parkland Speaks, that features Parkland students’ writing about that day. I have worked hard to take care of myself. I see a psychologist weekly. I also spent much of 2018 planning my son’s bar mitzvah, which was last month. That would have stressed me out in a different period of my life, but it turned out to be a nice diversion from the stress and pain that permeated every other second. It was nice to make sure he felt special and to not focus so much on myself. Perhaps this was my way of putting off the feelings I knew I’d have as February 14 drew close again, but I was okay with that.
Moving forward, I plan to take things one day at a time. That’s really all I can do. I’m a survivor, after all.
Donald Trump has again folded in his negotiations with congressional Democrats—accepting a second budget deal that includes nothing close to the $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall that he demanded. This outcome was entirely predictable. The sequence of events that led here has occurred again and again when Trump negotiates. Think of it as a play in four acts.
Act I: Trump Invents a Crisis
Since entering the presidential race, Trump has relentlessly described unauthorized immigration—which has been decreasing—as a national emergency. In the final days before last November’s elections, he returned to that theme with a vengeance. In a November 1 speech from the Roosevelt Room, he offered “an update to the American people regarding the crisis on our southern border—and crisis it is.” Later in the speech, he called it “an invasion.”
He’s employed similar hyperbole on trade. During the campaign, Trump called NAFTA “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country” (a statement with which, Politifact noted, “few [experts] agree.”) He was still at it last August, when he declared, “We lost thousands of factories and millions of jobs because of NAFTA” (a statement The Washington Post gave three Pinocchios).
[Read: Why Trump keeps creating crises]
Trump also invented a crisis with North Korea. Rather than see Pyongyang’s nuclear program for what it was—an effort at deterring an American invasion—Trump in his first year as president described it as an immediate threat. And rather than contain North Korea’s nuclear program via diplomacy—as Bill Clinton’s administration did fairly successfully in the 1990s—Trump described negotiations as a waste of time. “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years,” he announced in October 2017. “Why would it work now?”
Act II: Trump Creates a Crisis
Having described an imaginary crisis, Trump—in all three cases—created a real one. To combat the supposed emergency at the border, he demanded billions for a wall and thus provoked the longest government shutdown in American history. To remedy the supposed catastrophe of NAFTA, he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico (among other countries), which prompted Ottawa and Mexico City to retaliate with tariffs of their own, thus plunging America’s relations with its neighbors down to their lowest level in decades. And to protect the United States from the supposedly imminent threat of a North Korean missile strike, Trump repeatedly threatened war—and, according to Bob Woodward’s book, Fear, came close to actually starting one.
Act III: Trump Folds
As the crises took shape, it became clear that Trump lacked the power to achieve his stated goals. Congressional Democrats—buoyed by polls showing that most Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown—held firm against a border wall. The governments of Canada and Mexico—buoyed by public revulsion against Trump’s bullying—held firm in trade negotiations. And Trump’s military advisers warned him that he couldn’t launch a preventive military strike on North Korea without incurring hideous costs.
[Read: Trump was always going to fold on the border wall]
So in all three cases, Trump ended up accepting deals that were little better—if not worse—than the ones he had derided in Act I. He inked a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that, according to Politifact, constituted “mostly a symbolic shift” away from NAFTA. (Congress has yet to ratify it.) He signed a nuclear deal that secured fewer concessions from Pyongyang than the previous agreements Trump had scorned. And this week, he accepted a budget deal that includes less money for the border wall than the one he spurned last December.
Act IV: Trump Claims Victory
Having failed to achieve his goals, Trump returns to the deception of Act I, but with a twist. Instead of pretending there is a crisis, he pretends the crisis has been solved. While most experts noted that Trump’s successor to NAFTA—the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA)—wasn’t much different, Trump called it a “model agreement that changes the trade landscape forever.” Although Kim Jong Un provided no concrete guarantees of denuclearization in his summit with Trump last year in Singapore, Trump tweeted that the “problem is largely solved” and “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” And although not one inch of new border wall has been built since Trump took office, he now justifies his shutdown gambit by claiming that the border wall is almost complete. During Trump’s speech this week in El Paso, Texas, when the crowd chanted “Build the wall,” he replied, “You really mean finish that wall, because we’ve built a lot of it.”
[Read: Trump’s NAFTA strategy: bluff, rebrand, declare victory]
Act V? Back to the Beginning
What remains unclear, in all three cases, is whether the show stops at Act IV. Can Trump sustain the fiction that he’s won a glorious victory, or does reality intrude, thus starting the cycle all over again?
Last November, The New York Times published a remarkable front-page story entitled, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.” At first glance, the headline implied that North Korea was deceiving the United States government about its ongoing nuclear efforts. But the text of the article suggested that the actual deception was quite different. The authors reported that “North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.” In other words, North Korea wasn’t deceiving American intelligence.
One interpretation of the Times article is that Trump was deliberately deceiving the American people so as not to puncture the illusion that he had successfully “neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.” But it’s also possible that the intelligence agencies deceived Trump, withholding evidence for fear that, were Trump forced to acknowledge that his apparent triumph had been a sham, he would take America back to the brink of war.
The question is whether, when Trump declares victory, he’s merely pretending to have won, or actually believes it. As bad as it would be for a president to deliberately and repeatedly lie to the public, it might be worse for a president to deliberately and repeatedly lie to himself. If Trump wakes up one morning and realizes that, despite the USMCA, American manufacturers are still relocating to Mexico, he might tear up the agreement and provoke a new trade war. The more Trump is forced to admit that his border wall isn’t actually being built, the more likely he is to declare a national emergency, thus creating a legal and even constitutional crisis.
Preventing the cycle from starting all over again might require allowing Trump to maintain his delusions of grandeur. It’s like dealing with small children: It’s safer to let them think they’ve won than endure the temper tantrum that will ensue if they realize they’ve lost. As dangerous as Trump is when he lies, he might be even more dangerous when forced to temporarily admit the truth.
After this week’s CNN town hall, it’s more and more clear that any money Howard Schultz might spend on an independent presidential bid would function as an in-kind campaign contribution to Donald Trump.
Schultz offered few policy specifics during the hour-long session Tuesday night and repeatedly retreated to platitudes when pressed to clarify his position on core issues, including taxes and health care. But to the extent that Schultz did explain his views, they stamped him as a moderate Democrat, tilting toward the party’s center on economics while firmly identifying with its solidifying liberal lean on social and racial issues.
It’s hard to imagine that the mix of perspectives Schultz presented—from opposition to a border wall to support for new limits on gun ownership—will ultimately attract many voters drawn to Trump’s hard-edged racial nationalism. That means that if Schultz runs and his views become better known, he’s likely to draw mostly from the pool of voters discontented with Trump, not the president’s previous supporters.
Though Schultz repeated again Tuesday that he doesn’t intend to do anything to help Trump get reelected, almost everything else he said underscored the likelihood that he would do exactly that. “The fact that he’s doing this is potentially catastrophic,” says Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “Republicans are very unlikely to vote for him in this tribal moment. The only votes he would get would come at the expense of our nominee. And if he peels away some Democrats and independents, he could reelect Trump.”
[David Frum: Howard Schultz may save the Democratic Party from itself]
Schultz, who described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” before exploring this independent candidacy, has quickly endorsed an array of positions that distance him from the vast majority of Republican-leaning voters, especially those enthusiastic about Trump.
On Tuesday, Schultz embraced legal status not only for Dreamers, the young people brought to the country illegally by their parents, but for all the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. And he dismissed Trump’s signature call for a border wall.
On guns, Schultz clearly affirmed his support for banning assault-style weapons. “I have a hard time understanding why people need to carry an AR-15 around in the streets of where they live,” he said. In a speech at Purdue University last week, he’d previously endorsed “universal and enhanced background checks with no loopholes.”
On climate change, his concern is “at the highest level” and dealing with it “would be a top priority” for him as president, Schultz told a questioner Tuesday. And while he steadfastly resisted specifics, Schultz did clearly say that he would seek to raise taxes on the wealthy and roll back at least part of the GOP’s huge tax cut for corporations. He denounced the Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and took a “Mend it, don’t end it” approach to next steps: “Now we got to go back in and fix the Affordable Care Act.”
And he clearly signaled sympathy for those arguing that the nation must do more to expunge systemic racism and discrimination, saying Americans must recognize “unconscious bias” and expose themselves to “uncomfortable conversations.”
That isn’t exactly a catalog of positions designed to drive wedges in Trump’s coalition. Take the border wall: Just 5 percent of voters who approve of Trump’s job performance said they disapproved of the wall in the latest CNN survey. That compares with 90 percent opposition to the wall among voters who disapprove of Trump.
Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute has found a larger share of Republicans supporting ideas such as a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. But nonetheless, only a minority of Republicans accept those ideas; they attract much broader backing from Democratic-leaning voters. In recent Quinnipiac University polling, only about one-fourth of voters who approve of Trump said the U.S. is not doing enough to combat climate change, compared with more than nine in 10 of those who disapprove. Likewise, in Quinnipiac polling, three-fourths of Trump approvers oppose stricter gun laws, while more than four-fifths of those who disapprove want more stringent regulation.
Schultz’s embrace of a tolerant, diverse America also collides directly with the anxiety about cultural and demographic change that remains the most powerful cement for the Trump coalition. How many blue-collar, white, rural Trump supporters share Schultz’s desire for more conversation about unconscious bias or his belief that immigration is the nation’s “foundation”?
Schultz has signaled only a handful of views that place him closer to Republican preferences. On Tuesday, he suggested that he might support interstate sale of health insurance, a perennial Republican idea (though one that most experts believe would fatally undermine the ACA that he says he wants to preserve). And he’s indicated that he’s open to cutting entitlement programs, another long-standing GOP goal (though one that faces substantial resistance among the blue-collar and older whites most connected to Trump).
To obscure his tilt toward the Democrats on almost all issues, Schultz has quickly settled on a strategy of loudly criticizing ideas popular on the party’s far-left flank. On Tuesday alone, he condemned single-payer health care, the Green New Deal, a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent, and the calls for eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But while those ideas have indisputably acquired some momentum on the party’s left, they remain far from consensus positions among congressional Democrats as a whole: The Green New Deal has around 60 co-sponsors between both chambers, and previous single-payer proposals have never come close to 218 supporters in the House. The growing ranks of Democrats from comfortable white-collar suburban seats seem unlikely to tell their voters they can no longer keep their private health insurance.
If the Democratic-controlled House this year legislates in these policy areas, it is much more likely to pass bills closer to the positions Schultz has endorsed: improving the ACA rather than lurching toward a single-payer system; encouraging more renewable-energy production rather than seeking to eliminate the use of fossil fuels; legalizing Dreamers rather than abolishing ICE. The key gun-control proposal that might pass the House is exactly the universal background check Schultz has endorsed. If Democrats do anything about taxes, it’s much more likely to involve rolling back the corporate tax cut, which Schultz supports, than restoring a much higher top marginal rate on personal incomes.
In both policy and political positioning, Schultz so far has resembled nothing so much as the Democrats who, from the mid-1980s through Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, were members of the centrist group the Democratic Leadership Council. Schultz has expressed views common among DLC Democrats during those years, supporting fiscal responsibility, free trade, and limits on government’s role in the economy. If anything, Schultz has taken positions on cultural issues like immigration and guns that are to the left of the DLC-era Democrats, reflecting the party’s overall evolution since that period.
[Read: The miseducation of Howard Schultz]
Schultz also shares with the DLC Democrats the strategy of positioning himself as a centrist by denouncing the extremes of “the far left and the far right.” In that, he distinctly echoed Clinton, who famously ran in 1992 against the “brain-dead politics of both parties.”
But the similarity ends there. Clinton and his allies in the DLC actually fought for years inside the Democratic Party to shift its ideological balance toward the center. Like those views or not, the contemporary backlash against some of Clinton’s policies—on crime, welfare reform, deficit reduction, and trade—is a measure of how much they succeeded in that effort. Clinton’s policy program was centered on his determination to rebuild a political majority that would allow Democrats to regain control of the national agenda from the increasingly militant conservatism within the GOP.
Schultz is taking a very different approach toward a very different possible outcome. Exaggerating the power of the left in the Democratic coalition, he’s portraying the party as beyond redemption for anyone holding centrist views. To make that case, Schultz is echoing claims from Trump and other Republicans that Democrats have become radical. At times, Schultz has even called some of the Democratic ideas he opposes “un-American” or “not American,” not to mention “punitive” and “ridiculous.”
By validating the Republican efforts to portray Democrats as outside the mainstream, Schultz is helping Trump already. He would help him even more if he runs as an independent behind a platform that aligns much more closely with the views of Democratic voters than with those of Republican voters. An independent candidacy that splinters the vote would reduce the share of the vote required to win, inexorably benefiting a president who has never sustained support from more than about 45 percent of the public. Unlike Clinton, who sought to remake the Democratic Party from within, Schultz could debilitate Democrats.
With minorities and Millennials replacing working-class whites in the Democratic coalition, the party is more liberal than during Clinton’s era. But enough voters inside the coalition still share the views Schultz has expressed for him to exert influence within the party if he chooses to. Instead, he’s pursuing a course that may only help Republicans. At several points during his town hall Tuesday, on issues like the number of states an independent candidate might reasonably contest, Schultz displayed a surprising degree of naïveté and misunderstanding about how the political system and government works. But Schultz should have no misunderstanding that his candidacy could undermine the causes he claims to support and reelect a president he says he deplores.
President Donald Trump’s appearance this week at a conference of police chiefs and sheriffs demonstrated the peculiar relationship that the president continues to have with law enforcement. On the one hand, Trump styles himself as the foremost advocate and defender of police. On the other, there are serious differences of opinion between the president and prominent cops on some key issues.
The actual content of Trump’s remarks on Wednesday was typical for him. He praised police and complained that the “fake news” doesn’t convey the deep respect that the American people hold for law enforcement. He lied that “violent crime is now going down for the first time in a while,” and that his border wall is under construction. He criticized the Obama administration for blocking sales of military equipment to police departments. He attacked the “radical left” for criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
But Trump also praised Art Acevedo, the chief of police in Houston and the president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, one of the two groups that hosted the conference. He singled out Acevedo for praise early on, saying he was “proud” of him, and later called the chief up onstage briefly for recognition of the Houston Police Department’s work during Hurricane Harvey.
[Read: Trump’s vision of lawless order]
This is notable because Acevedo, who is nearly as adept a Twitter user as the president, has been a respectful but fierce and consistent critic of Trump’s. Who knows whether Trump is unaware of Acevedo’s past remarks or simply doesn’t care (though he’s not known for magnanimity toward critics), but he didn’t mention the past disagreements. The things on which Acevedo has differed from Trump aren’t just picayune matters—though Acevedo did pointedly rebut a bogus claim about crowd size at a Houston rally last fall. Many of them cut straight to the heart of Trump’s perspective on police.
For example, on Wednesday Trump said, “In my administration, we understand that reducing crime begins with respecting law enforcement. We will not tolerate smears, or slanders, or assaults on those who wear the badge and police our streets. In order to keep every American safe, we are making officer safety a top priority—unless you’d rather not have that.”
This is a familiar refrain. Trump has often been more blunt, making it clear that he endorses police brutality. In July 2017, speaking on Long Island, Trump said this:
When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over? Like don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said you can take the hand away, okay?
Acevedo was one of many top cops who criticized Trump at the time:
To be clear, inappropriate attempt at gallows humor does not reflect values of respect & commitment to constitutional policing of profession https://t.co/lGJeLa6nm1
— Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo), July 28, 2017Trump also devoted much of his speech Wednesday to immigration, speaking about the need for a border wall and tough immigration policies.
“It is the core responsibility of government to establish and enforce clear rules for entry and admission into our great country,” he said. “These immigration laws exist to protect our families, our communities, and the security of our entire nation. When these laws are violated, innocent Americans—including millions of hardworking legal immigrants—are left to pay a very heavy price.”
Here, too, Acevedo has taken issue with the administration’s policies, especially separating children from their parents at the border:
American values? Conservative values? Progressive values? Judeo-Christian values? Family values? History & God will be unkind to those who are silent or support this oppressive, inhumane, unGodly policy. God is watching us, we can’t hide from him. WWJD? https://t.co/pPsFvLQv57
— Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo), June 17, 2018Acevedo wasn’t the only officer whom Trump called onstage. The president also recognized John McMahon, the sheriff of San Bernardino County, California. McMahon praised Trump’s support for police as “incredible,” but he also said that “the relationships we have with our federal law-enforcement partners are absolutely incredible.” That could be read as a veiled criticism of Trump. As much as he has adopted “Blue Lives Matter” rhetoric, Trump has also consistently undermined the rule of law and attacked the integrity of the FBI, the top federal law-enforcement agency.
[Read: How Trump radicalized ICE]
On this matter, Acevedo has also pushed back against the president. When Trump attacked the FBI on Twitter for executing a search warrant on his former fixer Michael Cohen, the chief had words for him:
As a suggestion, a nation & leaders committed to the “rule of law” would replace “BROKE INTO ATTORNEY’S OFFICE!” with “lawfully executed search warrant” & “Rat” with “cooperating witness”. As our Chief Executive I urge you to please do the same Mr. President.
— Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo), December 17, 2018To be sure, Acevedo does not speak for all police. Though reliable polling is hard to come by, all indications are that rank-and-file law-enforcement officers support Trump; several unions, including the Fraternal Order of Police, endorsed him in 2016. Chiefs in big cities and big counties, like the voters in those areas, tend to lean further left than the rest of the country does. Still, Acevedo is the elected president of the Major Cities Chiefs, which makes his outspoken disagreements with Trump noteworthy.
Those disagreements show that while Trump claims to speak for police, his caricatured view of a uniformly macho, tough-on-crime law-enforcement establishment doesn’t totally match reality. This is hardly the only case when the president has conflated his own positions with those of people he claims to speak for—witness his consistent overstating of voter support for his wall—but it is one of the most glaring.
Given their differences, Acevedo seemed a bit surprised when Trump called him to the stage on Wednesday. “You are spontaneous, Mr. President,” he said. “I think you’re off script here.” Given the script Trump usually follows, Acevedo may well have welcomed the detour.
Life is tough in Iron City, the postapocalyptic setting of Alita: Battle Angel. It’s an industrial trash heap of a metropolis piled high with forgotten technology from the time before a vaguely defined, cataclysmic war known as “the Fall.” Cybernetic bounty hunters stalk their prey through town, along with gearhead street gangs looking to strip robot folk for parts. The popular local sport is called Motorball and involves machine-people tooling around a futuristic velodrome and trying to murder one another. I’m not opposed to hustle and bustle, but Iron City might well be the noisiest place imaginable—a clanking, screeching pit of a town with rusted-metal streets and an aesthetic that could kindly be described as “junkyard.”
Into this bewitching sci-fi environment plops Alita (played by Rosa Salazar), who’s dumped from Zalem, the magical sky city that floats overhead, into a garbage pit. Did I forget to mention the floating sky city before? Well, I’m just following the storytelling approach of Alita, which is fond of dropping seismic bits of information into the viewer’s lap out of nowhere. There’s a sudden flashback to a spectacular battle on the moon and the introduction of a mysterious supervillain called Nova, who can possess people and make their eyes turn blue. At one point, the Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz says the phrase Panzer Kunst with the utmost seriousness—and the audience is supposed to immediately grasp what he’s talking about.
I loved it all. I’m defenseless before any dizzyingly silly sci-fi epic that downloads gigabytes of lore into the viewer’s brain by means of a simple hero’s-journey narrative. Think of films like Jupiter Ascending, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, even last year’s Aquaman—colorful, mega-budgeted nonsense splashed onto a grand canvas. Alita: Battle Angel is based on Yukito Kishiro’s manga series Gunnm. Adapted by James Cameron (who also produced) and Laeta Kalogridis, the film is directed by Robert Rodriguez, whose previous efforts include bewildering CGI-boosted epics such as Spy Kids and Sin City. True to its origins, Alita is a living cartoon of a film, which only makes its ridiculousness easier to absorb.
The biggest ask the movie makes of its audience is to accept the unusual look of its leading lady, which no other character shares. Alita is performed via motion capture by Salazar (an up-and-coming star who made a significant impression in the Maze Runner series). When Alita falls from the sky, she’s just a head and torso ready to be plugged into a cyborg body. The kindly Doctor Dyson Ido (Waltz) obliges, and Alita wakes up, opening two eyes the size of dinner plates. It’s amazing that nobody sings “Jeepers Creepers” at any point, because these are some hefty peepers, computerized onto Salazar’s face to mimic the exaggerated style of manga and to set her apart from the regular old humans wandering around Iron City.
Still, if you can take the mental leap demanded by Alita’s distinctive appearance, then the rest of the film should follow. Alita doesn’t have one main story. It has a loose, episodic feel, illuminating different stages of its heroine’s past and eagerly setting up a potential sequel that will likely never come to pass (if box-office tracking is to be trusted). After receiving her robot body, Alita learns the rules of Iron City from Dr. Ido, then runs into the mysterious robotics expert Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), the Motorball crime lord Vector (Mahershala Ali), the bounty hunters Zapan (Ed Skrein) and Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), and the heartthrob street urchin Hugo (Keean Johnson). The film is a coming-of-age teen caper that evolves into a sports movie that evolves into a Bourne Identity–style action drama, as Alita unlocks the full range of her powers from her previous, forgotten life.
Most importantly, there’s action and lots of it—beautifully rendered, clean action, the likes of which only Cameron can provide. Though he’s only a producer and writer here, Cameron nearly drowns out Rodriguez’s directorial voice in the process of transposing the motion-capture technology he deployed so well in his last film (Avatar) onto this future-punk extravaganza. This is a world where people’s hands can turn into spinning chains or projectile spike-balls, and where Waltz’s character wields a 10-foot-tall hammer powered by a rocket engine. As in so many blockbusters of the moment, the set pieces have all the potential to be chaotic CGI messes. But Alita takes special care to have the choreography of its elaborate clashes make sense at every moment.
As the generously proportioned story (running at 122 minutes) rounds into its third act, there’s a gooey romantic subplot that slows down an otherwise propulsive narrative. The film is also a little too eager to set up those would-be future installments (there’s even a surprise cameo from another Oscar nominee as a last-minute twist). But the scale of Alita’s ambition is matched only by its joie de vivre; it’s as if every ramshackle contraption in Iron City is powered by energetic silliness alone. We may never get an Alita sequel, but the next time Hollywood tries to mount an outrageous sci-fi spectacle like this one, I’ll be there to hold up my cybertorch.
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
Doug McLean What is lost when a culture disappears? That’s the question at the heart of a new book about the Lamalerans, a tribe of about 1,500 living on a remote, eastern Indonesian island in the Savu Sea. The Lamalerans are one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups: For hundreds of years, they have fed themselves by hunting sperm whales, some of the world’s largest mammals, using nothing but small boats and handmade harpoons. But this perilous endeavor—an almost unthinkable feat of coordination, athleticism, and bravery—will probably prove less difficult than resisting the homogenizing forces of the outside world.
The journalist Doug Bock Clark spent months at a time living with the Lamalerans to write The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific With a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life. In a conversation for this series, he explained how one Lamaleran saying—an ancient plea for unity—taught him how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history, whose ancestral knowledge survives only in the memories of a select few. The saying helped Clark develop the unorthodox interviewing technique he used for the book, which involved speaking with large groups of people at a time—letting individuals correct, refine, and deepen one another’s narratives.
Although the authorial “I” has become a hallmark of narrative nonfiction, Clark barely appears in his own book, instead weaving tribal voices together just as a whaler might braid the cables of his harpoon line. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner has called the result a “feat of journalism” with “the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel.” Clark’s writing and investigative reporting have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, GQ, Wired, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic, and he was the winner of the 2017 Reporting Award. He spoke with me by phone.
Doug Bock Clark: I was on a Fulbright scholarship to Indonesia, living on a semi-remote island, when I first heard about the Lamalerans. At first, I didn’t actually believe they were real. The people I lived with at the time would sometimes tell me fabulous-sounding stories—that dinosaurs lived up in the jungles on the volcano above town, and other things I knew weren’t possible. I thought the Lamalerans were like that: a story, nothing more.
But one day I was able to look them up on the internet. And I was amazed to see that there really is a tribe of people who hunt 60-ton sperm whales with bamboo harpoons. They were only a few hundred miles east of me, so I decided that I would go and see them. I spent about two weeks at the end of 2011 island-hopping down the archipelago until I reached Lembata, a backwater island so remote that today other Indonesians call its region “The Land Left Behind.”
My first memory is of walking down the beach, which is kind of the center of things—it’s where the boats are, and where the tribe hangs out. I was a complete stranger, an American walking alone with a backpack. One of the guys called me over, and people started to gather around me. The first thing he did was grab the prow of a boat, which is basically a large phallic symbol coming off the front of the vessel. “Mine is bigger than this,” he said. I don’t know if he understood that I was basically fluent in Indonesian, but I made a raunchy joke back. And from that moment, I was in.
Part of the discovery for me was about the pleasure of seeing the world through the lens of a foreign language, especially through the untranslatable idioms that reveal the way a culture thinks. For instance, there is a phrase, nuro menaluf, which literally means “hunger” and “spoon.” This is something people will yell to one another as they’re rowing after a whale—the oars move in a way that resembles the motion of a spoon when you’re eating rice very quickly. It’s such an evocative phrase, and an example of how Lamaleran expressions, symbolism, and ways of thinking tend to revolve around food. You can see how the primal sense of getting up every morning to go find what you’re going to eat that day completely shapes their language and culture. The same way that office jobs and the internet shape our minds, their hunt shapes theirs.
To take down a 60-ton sperm whale with bamboo harpoons, you need to coordinate dozens and dozens of men. Then, once you actually catch a whale, you have the problem of—well, one person can’t own the whole whale, right? That guy would never be able to eat it all, and everyone else would starve.
So the Lamalerans have evolved something anthropologists call “reciprocal altruism”: Basically, anytime anyone gets some prey, they just share it out until everyone has some. Any single boat might only catch one whale a year, but they’ve evolved these systems where everyone shares out everything they get, which means that everyone always has enough. So it’s maybe not surprising that a profound sense of communal sharedness is central to Lamaleran life.
After nearly a year of living with the Lamalerans—on and off, over the course of three years—I’d generated a huge volume of notes: multiple Word files of hundreds of thousands of words. My challenge was to distill that vast bulk of material into a compelling single narrative. In the beginning, I thought I would tell the story of the tribe through the perspective of one young man as he learns to hunt and master his tribe’s traditions. The story I was trying to tell was a very traditional Western coming-of-age story, focused around the experience of a young apprentice harpooner, Jon.
I spent several months working with this in draft form, but it just wasn’t working. I kept feeling that this one person’s story just couldn’t capture everything about the tribe. Then one day, while reading over an interview, I was reminded of one of the most important sayings in the Lamalerans’ native language: Talé tou, kemui tou, onã tou, mata tou. Translated, it means, “One family, one heart, one action, one goal,” and almost all of the Lamalerans’ oral histories reference it at some point as the primary directive from the ancestors to the tribe.
There was this moment—this sudden sparkle of realization—when I realized that the book’s hero wasn’t Jon. It was really about the tribe itself, and the ways it’s trying to reckon with the outside world as it encroaches, pressuring it and forcing it to change. Once I realized that my job was to tell everyone’s story, it was like this light bulb went on. Over the next two or three days, I got up, scrapped the outline, and rewrote—merging the individual perspectives together, thinking about relationships rather than individual characters, and weaving their stories together like a braid.
This approach started to influence my reporting in my remaining time in Lembata, where I realized that interviews were best conducted in a group setting. As a Western journalist, my instinct was to sit one-on-one with a subject in a quiet, secluded place—the cashew-nut orchard, or up in the mountains, anywhere I could have some time alone with the person. But then I realized, what better way for people to tell me their story than communally, sitting around the fire or with a jug of palm wine, the way they’ve been doing for hundreds of years?
When I started interviewing that way, something incredible happened. It was as if the group would speak in a tribal, communal voice, which added all these layers of detail an individual source could never have provided. You could almost watch as the group worked though the event, adding layers of information, refining specifics, resolving disputes of memory—almost like watching a Wikipedia page being made in real time. I came to see how much everyone’s combined, communal memory is stronger than just an individual’s recollection, which can often be faulty, subjective, or full of holes. And so the goal for me, as a journalist, was to become part of that. I didn’t want to be this objective-seeming eye in the sky as much as one voice in this larger chorus of voices.
The UN estimates that there are about 370 million indigenous people living what’s considered a “traditional” lifestyle today, and almost all of them are undergoing the same shocks the Lamalerans are. In the last generation or two, outside forces have started to transform their lives—whether that’s culturally, through Hollywood movies or Western pop songs, or physically, through changes in climate that have turned oceans more acidic or disrupted the monsoon rains they depend on.
That’s what I found so poignant about the Lamalerans’ situation: They are facing a monumental choice. Do they want to join the modern world, with everything that industrial civilization offers, for better or for worse? Do they want to try and maintain their traditional lifestyle, against all odds? Or will it be possible to find a balance of some sort, without losing touch with the traditions that make their culture unique? And the difficult thing is, that choice may not be made freely.
When a culture fades away, that’s not just a tragedy for that group of people. We all lose out. The Lamalerans, and the many other indigenous tribes worldwide, know their environment many, many times better than outsiders—better even than biologists and other scientists. So to begin with, we lose a huge trove of practical knowledge. And in a global monoculture that’s just variations on the same industrial society, it’s much easier for something to go very wrong. Humanity is only the aggregation of all of its cultures, and the loss of any one of them is a diminishment to everybody.
I’ll continue to think about Talé tou, kemui tou, onã tou, mata tou in my life and work. I’m grateful to the Lamalerans for teaching me this: The idea that we all are one, paradoxically, means being strong enough to accept the differences in others. Our oneness becomes richer when it’s more diverse, when it’s large enough to contain all of us.
We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.
They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.
Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wasn’t very good with women, monosyllabic in their presence. We all went to a bar after one game, and I came home with a napkin on which I’d jotted down words to describe Marla: “Hot. Fast. Fun. Sweet. Flint.” Yes, flint as in Flint, Michigan—her hometown—but also flint as in flinty—steely, speedy, mighty, glinting.
A month later, I mustered the nerve to call her house phone (we only had landlines in 1987). We would spend the next 31 years together.
Marla could water-ski barefoot. I was a rabbi’s kid; I rarely even went on boats. She made a habit of taking me places.
If you had asked me on our wedding day, I would have told you with confidence what our love would look like: We’d be a couple who jogged together in Scarsdale, danced in Nantucket together, carved through snow or lakes on skis together, spun the Hanukkah dreidel together with our children, and sang along together to Bruce Springsteen (her prescient favorite was “Tougher Than the Rest”). I would not have said we’d be a couple who fought a fatal illness together. Nor that this private act would be the thing that united us the most.
In 2009, Marla’s radiologist called to tell her that she had early-stage breast cancer. She was also BRCA-positive, meaning that she carried the inherited gene for the disease—a troublesome marker. After a double mastectomy and ovary removal, she needed eight rounds of chemotherapy to clear the cancer found in her lymph nodes.
Our kids were 8, 9, and 11 at the time, and though they understood then that she was undergoing treatment (wigs were hard to hide), we never told them the news we soon learned from Memorial Sloan Kettering’s head of breast-cancer oncology: Marla had a triple-negative cancer cell, the fiercest of them all. When linked with the BRCA mutation, it is commonly referred to as “the breast-cancer death sentence.” This specialist bluntly told her: “Go live your next 1,000 days in the best way you know how.”
[Read: What I learned from cancer]
I always joked with Marla, once she had been diagnosed: “I’m not sure what you’re afraid of more, cancer itself or the thought of my being responsible for the kids as a single parent.” I’m pretty sure it was the latter. I still believe that was a determinant in her longevity.
When Marla beat back the first assault in 2009, we all celebrated. When the cancer returned two years later, we told only our parents and siblings. Aside from them, we were alone with her illness and its lethality. Marla and I launched our stealth treatment strategy together: Everything would be tried; little would be shared. We saw no need to alarm friends, worry relatives, or derail the girls. Subterfuge was essential for survival—not just the literal, existential kind, but survival of the spirit. Our kids would not be robbed of stability; protecting their sense of the ordinary was everything. The ground would stay steady, and we would extend the runway for as long as possible.
Some might not have made the same decision, believing that the girls had a right to know they should savor diminishing moments. But Marla didn’t want her girls to savor; she wanted them to sail, and that meant less information—not a lie, but a lacuna. Marla refused to let family time together feel too precious, too heightened, too sad.
How does one fight cancer on the sly? When Marla needed Neulasta shots for her bone strength, she slipped the doctor into our house quietly in the evenings, while the kids were upstairs doing their homework.
Despite the fatigue and nausea of chemo, she continued to run long distances, for her own mental fitness, and more important, so her kids would see her strong. I knew these miles were a miracle.
Bimonthly Amtrak trips to Boston for treatment were disguised to our daughters as volunteer efforts to participate in cancer trials, but the truth was that she was the trial. Marla was lucky enough to enroll in medical Hail Marys at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute that kept her alive.
When tumors in Marla’s neck made her hoarse, she told friends she had laryngitis. When those tumors started to protrude, she wore scarves in warm weather. The girls were confused as to why they were suddenly “gifted” Marla’s favorite running tank tops, but she could no longer wear them—they exposed the port that had been inserted near her bra line, an essential catheter due to hardened arm veins from years of infusions and blood draws.
We threw everything at her disease: lectures, research, involvement in cancer organizations, yoga, meditation, teas, soups. She even went to a storefront healer who lit incense, read her palm, and led her in prayer. He declared her a “badass” because of her restorative powers. It was a nickname that I promoted with all her doctors and nurses because it was not only hopeful, but true.
She didn’t just buy time; she cheated it, squeezed months and years out of it. Marla was a statistical freak, an aberration, an outlier. One thousand days landed firmly in our rearview mirror.
Finding quiet time for the two of us in a house with three active young girls was challenging. We caught up with each other during walks, in the shower, or on a rare date night out.
The treatments organized our lives and demanded our optimism. I tried to be Marla’s cheerleader and coach to reenergize her for the next checkup, infusion, injection, or worse. Her smile, her lack of Why me?, took my breath away. Our affection became a kind of anesthetic.
Every six weeks, when she got scanned, Marla and I braced ourselves for results. This past fall, we had to confront that we were running out of options.
At Thanksgiving, Marla and I gathered the kids at the kitchen table and told them the story we’d spared them. She had effectively been undergoing chemo for seven straight years. She had chosen to give our family a routine without a morbid spotlight. She did not want endless questions, pity, or gossip.
An unanticipated complication developed shortly after, resulting in Marla’s death on December 19.
Our girls have talked often about their mother’s sacrifice and said to me without prompting, “I am so glad I didn’t know what Mommy was going through. I would have worried every single day.” In these past two months, they have reassured me again and again that not telling them was the loving choice.
Marla insisted on giving our daughters their youth, convinced that normalcy would allow them to discover their own strengths. And she gave me something just as extraordinary: the resilience of romance in the face of a sure, premature ending.
When Marla went into hospice, Sara—one of Marla’s favorite doctors at Dana-Farber—called to check in. After nearly 10 years of a shared relentless combat, Marla hit her with the final zinger, “How do I die?”
I admired the question, but knew Marla already had a game plan. She’d been practicing her goodbyes for a decade. Our girls, now nearly 18, 19, and 21‚ sat on her hospital bed, one at a time, listening to their mother’s final words. Marla kept her eyes closed, as though reading from a teleprompter on the inside of her lids. She was unfiltered, loving, grateful, and her usual tart self. She left nothing unsaid.
Marla earned and survived a little more than 3,500 days instead of 1,000 since her initial diagnosis. In her lifetime, she celebrated 25 anniversaries (about half the norm for a happily married couple), 57 children’s birthdays (parents average about 45 per child), three bat mitzvahs, three college acceptances, and two high-school graduations.
The next numbers make me numb:
Zero college graduations.
Zero weddings.
Zero grandchildren.
Marla said to me at the hospital, “No glory days for us. We almost had the kids out of the house, and now you’re alone. I’m so sorry.”
I replied, “Sorry about what? You made life worth living. When you kissed me, I melted. I admired your pureness, your power. You outran science. Thank you for taking me on your magic carpet. Rest easy, my one and only girlfriend.”
It wasn’t so long ago that it was a bad idea for Americans to post a photo of their weed on the internet. Your employer might see it. The cops might come. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, if the juice was just an edgy Instagram.
For most people in America, this is still the case. Even in states with some level of legal weed, using cannabis can cost you your job, and the belief that the drug might be in someone’s house, car, or pocket has been a pretense for an untold number of police searches, the consequences of which have disproportionately affected people of color.
But thanks to an emerging class of high-end cannabis products and services, tweeting or Instagramming your stash is becoming a bit more common. Now, a heavyweight has stepped into the ring: The luxe department store Barneys New York announced this week that it would launch a new Instagram-ready cannabis department called The High End. Given luxury shoppers’ average demographic—wealthy and white—the launch is a stark reminder of how much the risk of smoking a little weed in America can vary from person to person, and whose interests legalization is primed to serve first.
[Read: Weed weddings are now a thing]
Barneys is the first major American department store to get into the weed game, but it’s natural that both large-scale and luxury retailers would take an interest in the growing market for cannabis-adjacent products as state and local laws about the plant loosen. In inviting customers to order cannabis for delivery and shop for gilded vapes and art-object bongs, however, Barneys has joined businesses like vegan bakeries and glossy lifestyle publications in rushing to sell a suite of products whose legality varies wildly, and whose sale or consumption can still have real consequences for most Americans.
The High End, which Barneys describes as a “luxury cannabis lifestyle and wellness concept shop” in its press materials, will make its debut in March at the company’s Beverly Hills location. When it arrives, it will be lovely: Renderings show it as a nook filled with marble surfaces and green (get it?) accents, with glass displays, a metallic sales counter, and a seating area. It looks like an environment made for chic Instagrams, and the store hopes it will be.
Barneys had to nudge some of its vendors in the direction of cannabis in order to find properly high-end products to stock. “Instead of just taking product from the existing world, it came from partnering and customizing and making new things that don’t exist,” says the company’s creative director, Matthew Mazzucca. The results are a $1,475 grinder rendered in sterling silver, French-made rolling papers from organic hemp, and hand-blown glass pipes.
What you won’t find on the premises is tetrahydrocannabinol—more commonly known as THC—which is cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient. Recreational weed might be legal in California, but to sell it, the state still requires a dispensary license that Barneys doesn’t have. To circumvent that technicality, Barneys has enlisted the help of Beboe, a company that has been called “the Hermes of marijuana.” Beboe will act as the conduit between Barneys and California’s legal weed market, educating shoppers in-store about cannabis and taking orders that will be processed off-site and delivered via a service called Emjay.
Beboe’s co-founder, Scott Campbell, thinks of the partnership between his company and the Barneys shop as a natural expansion of the plant’s wide appeal. “I’ve always loved weed culture and head-shop culture, but they’re sort of grimy places full of pipes and paraphernalia,” he says. “I kind of yearned for something that’s a little more grown-up, in the same way the 15-year-old stoner kid in me has grown up.”
Together, Barneys and Beboe are trying something new in the American consumer market. But its newness is closely tied to the fact that, until legalization began in earnest just a couple of years ago, the cannabis market was risky, illegal, and pushed to the margins of polite culture. This market survived (and, in the majority of America where weed is still partially or entirely illegal, still survives) on the labor of the largely young, nonwhite population whose economic precarity made the risk of selling weed seem worth the reward.
[Read: Is it too late to stop the rise of Marijuana, Inc.?]
The optics of luxe cannabis aren’t great in this regard. Weed’s legality—and the business opportunities created by it—is expanding against the backdrop of modest-at-best state efforts to redress the harms done by old drug laws. Although Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California, makes it possible for people in jail on state-level cannabis charges to petition for release, that generally requires the often expensive services of a lawyer. Some local jurisdictions, like that of San Francisco’s district attorney, have taken a more proactive approach in freeing those jailed over weed, but thousands remain in California prisons on federal marijuana charges, over which the state’s laws have no sway.
Even for non-THC products, what’s allowed and where is constantly changing. Recently, local health departments in New York and other cities have started cracking down on the proliferation of cannabidiol-laced food products in bars and restaurants, which had gained quick, unregulated popularity with many American consumers.
With these concurrent and contradictory layers of weed legality, cannabis entrepreneurs such as Beboe are attempting to adapt to the new laws and determine how to assimilate into existing cannabis culture. “Our initial fight was to be able to do this and navigate it legally and make sure we don’t end up in jail ourselves,” says Campbell. “As the smoke is clearing and this is congealing into a real thing, the question we’re asking ourselves now is, What’s the responsible thing to do?”
Beboe has helped UCLA’s cannabis-research unit fundraise to offset what Campbell characterized as chronic underfunding and omnipresent bureaucratic issues, and he says he and Kwan have discussed how the brand’s resources might be used toward prison reform and fighting stigma. Mazzucca told me that although Barneys didn’t have any specific plans to wade into cannabis-adjacent philanthropy, it’s something the company would look at in the future.
Even the most socially responsible cannabis entrepreneur can only do so much to directly affect positive change, but the investment of large, traditionally respectable companies like Barneys probably does make it more difficult for anti-marijuana hard-liners to convincingly characterize the drug as a health scourge for dangerous deviants for much longer. Elected officials might be able to tune out advocacy, but they seem historically less inclined to tune out money. Campbell agrees: “This genie is out of the bottle in a way that it is never going back in.”
Andrew Gotzis, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple, whom we’ll call Jane and John, for several years. They have sex about three times a week, which might strike many as enviable, considering that John and Jane—who are in their 40s—have been together for nearly two decades. Based on numbers alone, one might wonder why they need couples counseling at all.
But only one of them is happy with the state of play. And it isn’t Jane.
“The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Or frequency. It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.” John, meanwhile, feels criticized and inadequate. Mostly he can’t understand why, if his wife is having sex with him and having orgasms, she wants more. Or different.
Despite “fears of seeming sex addicted, unfaithful, or whorish” (Gotzis doesn’t like these terms, but they speak to his patient’s anxieties, he explained), Jane has tried to tell John, in therapy and outside of it, what she’s after. She wants to want John and be wanted by him in that can’t-get-enough-of-each-other-way experts call “limerence”—the initial period of a relationship when it’s all new and hot. Jane has bought lingerie and booked hotel stays. She has suggested more radical-seeming potential fixes, too, like opening up the marriage.
Jane’s perseverance might make her a lot of things: an idealist, a dreamer, a canny sexual strategist, even—again channeling typical anxieties—unrealistic, selfish, or entitled. But her sexual struggles in a long-term relationship, orgasms and frequency of sex notwithstanding, make her something else again: normal. Although most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.
Marta Meana of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas spelled it out simply in an interview with me at the annual Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in 2017. “Long-term relationships are tough on desire, and particularly on female desire,” she said. I was startled by her assertion, which contradicted just about everything I’d internalized over the years about who and how women are sexually. Somehow I, along with nearly everyone else I knew, was stuck on the idea that women are in it for the cuddles as much as the orgasms, and—besides—actually require emotional connection and familiarity to thrive sexually, whereas men chafe against the strictures of monogamy.
But Meana discovered that “institutionalization of the relationship, overfamiliarity, and desexualization of roles” in a long-term heterosexual partnership mess with female passion especially—a conclusion that’s consistent with other recent studies.
“Moving In With Your Boyfriend Can Kill Your Sex Drive” was how Newsweek distilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults aged 16 to 74. It found that for “women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship of over one year in duration,” and that “women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories.” A 2012 study of 170 men and women aged 18 to 25 who were in relationships of up to nine years similarly found that women’s sexual desire, but not men’s, “was significantly and negatively predicted by relationship duration after controlling for age, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction.” Two oft-cited German longitudinal studies, published in 2002 and 2006, show female desire dropping dramatically over 90 months, while men’s holds relatively steady. (Tellingly, women who didn’t live with their partners were spared this amusement-park-ride-like drop—perhaps because they were making an end run around overfamiliarity.) And a Finnish seven-year study of more than 2,100 women, published in 2016, revealed that women’s sexual desire varied depending on relationship status: Those in the same relationship over the study period reported less desire, arousal, and satisfaction. Annika Gunst, one of the study’s co-authors, told me that she and her colleagues initially suspected this might be related to having kids. But when the researchers controlled for that variable, it turned out to have no impact.
[Read: Multiple lovers, without jealousy]
Many women want monogamy. It’s a cozy arrangement, and one our culture endorses, to put it mildly. But wanting monogamy isn’t the same as feeling desire in a long-term monogamous partnership. The psychiatrist and sexual-health practitioner Elisabeth Gordon told me that in her clinical experience, as in the data, women disproportionately present with lower sexual desire than their male partners of a year or more, and in the longer term as well. “The complaint has historically been attributed to a lower baseline libido for women, but that explanation conveniently ignores that women regularly start relationships equally as excited for sex.” Women in long-term, committed heterosexual partnerships might think they’ve “gone off” sex—but it’s more that they’ve gone off the same sex with the same person over and over.
What does it all mean for Jane and the other straight women who feel stultified by long-term exclusivity, in spite of having been taught that they were designed for it and are naturally inclined toward it? What are we to make of the possibility that women, far from anxious guardians of monogamy, might on the whole be more like its victims?
“When couples want to remain in a monogamous relationship, a key component of treatment … is to help couples add novelty,” Gordon advised. Tammy Nelson, a sex therapist and the author of The New Monogamy and When You’re the One Who Cheats, concurs: “Women are the primary consumers of sex-related technology and lubricants, massage oil, and lingerie, not men.”
Of course, as Jane’s example shows, lingerie might not do the trick. Nelson explains that if “their initial tries don’t work, [women] will many times shut down totally or turn outward to an affair or an online ‘friend,’ creating … a flirty texting or social-media relationship.” When I asked Gotzis where he thinks John and Jane are headed, he told me he is not sure that they will stay together. In an upending of the basic narrative about the roles that men and women play in a relationship, it would be Jane’s thirst for adventure and Jane’s struggles with exclusivity that tear them apart. Sure, women cheating is nothing new—it’s the stuff of Shakespeare and the blues. But refracted through data and anecdotal evidence, Jane seems less exceptional and more an Everywoman, and female sexual boredom could almost pass for the new beige.
[Read: Why are young people having so little sex?]
It’s not uncommon for women to let their straight partners play in a “monogamy gray zone,” to give guys access to tensional outlets that allow them to cheat without really cheating. “Happy ending” massages, oral sex at bachelor parties, lap dances, escorts at conferences … influenced by ubiquitous pop-cultural cues, many people believe that men need these opportunities for recreational “sorta sex” because “it’s how men are.” It’s how women are, too, it seems.
Women cannot be pigeonholed; the glory of human sexuality is its variation and flexibility. So when we speak of desire in the future, we should acknowledge that the fairer sex thirsts for the frisson of an encounter with someone or something new as much as, if not more, than men do—and that they could benefit from a gray-zone hall pass, too.
In the wake of a tragedy, there’s a race to understand exactly why it happened and what could have been done to prevent it. Maybe local law enforcement could have done more; maybe armed teachers would have helped; maybe the federal government should have been investigating the shooter as a terrorist. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last Valentine’s Day, in which 17 people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured, was no different.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission, an investigative panel convened by the state of Florida, was tasked with laying out the facts of what happened in the 78 minutes between when a gunman was dropped off by an Uber near campus and when he was detained by police. In January, it released a 439-page report providing some answers about what went wrong, cataloging breaches of security, chaotic protocols, and a lack of communication systems for teachers to relay the seriousness of the situation across campus.
“School safety in Florida needs to be improved,” the report opens. “All stakeholders—school districts, law enforcement, mental health providers, city and county governments, funding entities, etc.—should embrace the opportunity to change and make Florida schools the safest in the nation.” But often, tragedies are tragedies for a reason; they’re not supposed to happen, but they do—even in the most secure environments.
[Read: What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns]
The report is a searing indictment of the failures that day and those that led up to it, but it also offers several best practices for preventing the next school shooting. For many school-safety experts, the recommendations are all too familiar. “Overall, there were some solid recommendations in terms of best practices that came out of Parkland. That’s the good news,” Kenneth Trump, who runs National School Safety and Security Services, a school-safety consulting firm, told me. “The bad news is they’re the same as the best practices that came out of Sandy Hook, which were the same best practices that were learned after Columbine. So they’re not new.”
Trump, who is of no relation to the president, says that in the wake of high-profile shootings, school districts and legislators will often rush to implement fixes that aren’t ultimately maintained. Cameras are found to no longer be working once the incident has faded; security protocols are forgotten with turnover. School safety isn’t always just the security measures you can see, Trump says, but also the ecosystem on campus that creates an environment that shuns bullying, encourages students to report suspicious behavior, and fosters a healthy school climate.
That’s a difficult thing to explain to parents who fear losing their children in school shootings, which are still extraordinarily rare, Trump says. “You can’t just point to a culture of safety as easily as you can point to a camera and say, ‘Trust us, your child’s school is safer,’ ” he says.
The search for active prevention measures has led some people to believe that the federal government should play a larger role. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, among other agencies, are already trying to prevent domestic terrorism, the thinking goes. And many school shootings fit the mold, says Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, as a “type of violence that shocks or surprises, something that provokes outrage.” That outrage could stem from the nature of the crime or the nature of the victim, she says. “Who could be more innocent than schoolchildren?”
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, at the University of Maryland has been tracking terror incidents through the Global Terrorism Database. And there has been a disconnect between the government definition of terrorism, particularly domestic terrorism, and the working definition used by START, Gary LaFree, the group’s founding director, told me. To the organization, an incident of terrorism needs to be intentional; involve violence; be committed by someone other than a government agent; and, perhaps most importantly, have a political, economic, religious, or social goal. Under that definition, school shootings could be considered terrorism in some cases, as Columbine was and as the Parkland shooting likely will be, LaFree says.
[Read: Dave Cullen’s new book on the Parkland shooting is surprisingly illuminating]
The government has a definition of domestic terrorism in the federal code—acts of violence that are intended to influence government policy or “affect the conduct of the government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping”—but there is no federal domestic-terrorism law to back it up, David Schanzer, the director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, told me. That means the federal government can’t charge people with a violation of a terrorism law; instead, it could charge them with a hate crime, or violations of interstate-commerce laws, or a similar offense. (Murder is a state crime, not a federal one.) “You have to bring a charge that reflects the circumstance of what occurred,” Schanzer says.
But that’s all reactive, the what comes after the shooting. How could the government treating potential school shooters as terrorists help prevent them? That depends on whether potential shooters are flagged for monitoring by the FBI or any other agency, perhaps after a friend or family member reports a potential plot.
Trump noted that after the Columbine shooting, there was a focus at the federal and state level to take a comprehensive look at school safety—“from prevention to preparedness, from threat assessment to prevention, mental-health services for kids, school resource officers, emergency-planning drills and exercises.” These are things that have worked, he says, not only in warding off a school shooter, but in keeping a school safe on a day-to-day basis.
But identifying perpetrators ahead of time is a much harder challenge. Like terrorist incidents, school shootings are rare, tragic, and can only sometimes be explained. After every school shooting, Crenshaw says, “people wonder what happened—missed opportunities and interventions, lost chances” to find shooters before they wreaked havoc. Yet, Crenshaw adds, sometimes school shootings, like terrorist incidents, are virtually impossible to prevent. “If you went back and replayed, it might be just really hard to find that [intervention] point.”
BERLIN—Last month, foreign-policy-focused members of Germany’s Bundestag met for their regular committee meeting here. On the agenda were two major issues: the consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria, and rumors that a similar move was planned for American forces in Afghanistan.
What, they wondered, did the conflicting signals out of Washington actually mean, and how was Germany, as a major ally of the U.S., supposed to react?
“The worst thing wasn’t just the decision itself, but that it happened in a way that one couldn’t prepare for,” Stefan Liebich, a lawmaker on the committee and the foreign-policy spokesman for the Left Party, told The Atlantic. Calling those issues the latest example of the “American zigzag,” Liebich added, “German politics is still learning to adapt to this new situation.”
It was hardly the first time that Berlin had been blindsided, disappointed, or just plain confused by the messages coming out of Washington since Trump took office two years ago. Across Europe, this administration has forced leaders and governments to rethink the way they deal with their old ally. From the president’s criticism of NATO and his tirades on trade to his decision to pull the U.S. out of international agreements like the Paris climate accord, leaders here have gotten the message loud and clear that the status quo no longer applies—and that at any point Twitter rhetoric could turn into tangible policy.
[Read: How do you know when it’s officially a trade war?]
As political and security leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, gather this weekend for the annual Munich Security Conference, that shift is felt especially strongly here in Germany. Germans have long considered their relationship with the United States to be a special one: The U.S. helped rebuild Germany after World War II; it supported Germany’s reunification efforts after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and even today, it effectively serves as the guarantor of German security. But Trump and his “America first” mantra have slowly chipped away at that goodwill, leaving Germany feeling abandoned by, and losing trust in, an ally many view as akin to a parent or a big brother.
Where they might have followed the U.S.’s lead in the past, German leaders now acknowledge that they, and Europe more broadly, must chart a course for themselves—and, in Germany’s case, step onto the world stage to an extent they’ve been reluctant to do. And the once-common view of the U.S.’s reliability as a partner, from issues of trade to rising threats from Russia or China, has been called into doubt in a way that creates nervousness in foreign-policy circles here.
“Today we see much more clearly than we did two years ago: Trump represents a turning point in transatlantic, German-American relations,” Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign-affairs committee and a member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, told The Atlantic. “In his thinking, the postwar conception of alliances and systems, and the claim of the U.S. to lead and spread these alliances internationally, does not really matter.”
In many ways, the world order remains unchanged: The U.S. has not pulled out of NATO or formally called its commitments to the military alliance into question, and the transatlantic bond, while weakened, still consists of shared security, economic, and even cultural ties. Ask any major politician here, and they’ll argue that the relationship with Washington remains relevant and important. (Pence is also a more senior official than is typical at the Munich conference, which might also go some way toward addressing European concerns about Washington’s commitment to its friends.)
But the dynamic under the surface has experienced a real change. At first, the hope remained that the president’s advisers could moderate his more impulsive tendencies. But one by one (from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis) those advisers have left—leaving German diplomats with few strong contacts in the administration, and the administration with hard-line national sovereigntists such as McMaster’s replacement, John Bolton, and the divisive U.S. ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell.
[Read: A slow, somber end to the Merkel era]
“It's become very difficult for us, as German politicians or the German government, to discuss anything sustainable with the White House and especially with Trump,” says Nils Schmid, the foreign-policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who are part of Merkel’s governing coalition. “We are making contacts, but with limited success."
And though no one would say (publicly, at least) that they worry about Trump pulling the U.S. out of NATO, there’s a sense among German leaders and policy types that it’s difficult to trust the U.S. to uphold its end of the bargain security-wise—leading to a call for Europe to think about its own security and foreign-policy interests.
“We need to be able to engage, of course, with the United States,” says Almut Möller, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “but also realize that the predictability is no longer there.”
That is perhaps why Schmid’s party is reportedly questioning Germany’s involvement in a decades-old agreement to support the deployment of American nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict on the continent. The move came after the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would withdraw from a treaty with Russia that eliminated a class of nuclear-capable missiles in Europe. Though Merkel’s Christian Democrats have reiterated the importance of the “nuclear sharing” agreement, the fact that one of Germany’s leading parties would so openly question it demonstrates an erosion of trust in U.S. commitments in Europe.
These views aren’t just confined to politicians and foreign-policy elites: New polling from Atlantik-Brücke, a transatlantic organization, finds German public opinion turning strongly against the United States. Asked whether they had a positive or negative view of the U.S., 85 percent said they had a negative view; just over 10 percent had a positive view. And when they were asked to choose if the U.S. or China is a more “reliable partner,” Germans picked China, by a margin of 42 to 23 percent (with a third of those surveyed undecided). Annual surveys from Pew Research Center show a sharp drop in confidence in the U.S. once Trump took office: In the final months of Barack Obama’s presidency, in 2016, 86 percent of Germans believed that he would do “the right thing” regarding world affairs; under Trump, that figure plummeted to 10 percent in 2018.
The response here to Trump’s foreign policy, at least publicly, can be summed up by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’s frequent statement: The answer to “America first” should be “Europe united.” But the idea of a united Europe, while something most leaders have supported in theory, is not the easiest prospect at a time when the continent is facing rising populism, continuing challenges related to accepting and integrating refugees, and fears of impending economic slowdown (to say nothing of the fact that one of its biggest economies and its foremost military power, Britain, is leaving the European Union).
Joe Kaeser, chief executive of the German conglomerate Siemens, reflected this doubt during a December visit to the United States. In a kind of geoeconomic manifestation of Newton’s Third Law—every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction—he spoke in terms that Trump has injected into transatlantic discussions.
[Read: The president of the United States asks, ‘What’s an ally?’]
The businessman, who has often accompanied Merkel on foreign trips and been described as the “unofficial captain of Germany Inc.,” echoed Trump in describing Europe as not just an ally of America’s but also a competitor. And he urged the leaders of his country, Europe’s largest economy, to formulate a “Germany first” economic policy as a hedge against the potential failure of his preferred option: the European Union crafting a unified strategy for contending with economic giants such as the United States and China. The term, which Kaeser first used at a conference last fall, is controversial in Germany, where it has been invoked by the German far right to oppose immigration and shunned by many officials.
“Germany needs to have a Plan B,” Kaeser told The Atlantic. “If we can’t go together, we need to go it alone and understand what exactly does that mean.” As an example, he noted that the heads of the three largest German carmakers had been meeting with Trump at the White House amid the president’s threats to impose steep tariffs on automobiles imported from the EU.
“That’s applying a Plan B already, because a Plan A would be that the Europeans would [jointly] get something done. But in absence of that, there are now people cutting bilateral deals,” he observed.
Kaeser has considerable interests in how these questions are resolved. Siemens has been fiercely jockeying with the American company General Electric for multibillion-dollar energy contracts in Iraq. His dissatisfaction with European competitiveness might stem in part from his own frustrations with Brussels. This month, EU regulators blocked a merger between Siemens and France’s Alstom, which the companies touted as a way of creating a railway behemoth to rival China’s, on the grounds that the deal could stifle competition and raise prices within Europe. He noted that the kind of contingency planning necessary to develop an alternative to a European economic strategy can motivate reluctant partners to get serious about Plan A or risk being “left behind.”
But his comments nevertheless indicate just how fluid the debate is about Germany’s place in the world—a long-thorny issue within German political circles, given the country’s history and subsequent reluctance to take on more active global leadership.
Citing the enormous challenges that Europeans face from the rise of China as a strategic competitor and the reemergence of Russia as a military power, Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, rejected Kaeser’s premise.
“The answer in Europe is not ‘Germany first,’” Haber told The Atlantic. “Don’t fool yourself … We know that we need the much larger shadow of the European Union and of European integration in order to leverage our power. So it’s not ‘Germany first.’ It’s not ‘Luxembourg first.’ It’s not ‘France first.’ Because that’s a diminishment of power.”
She added that while German policy makers are not treating the United States under Trump as more of a competitor than an ally, there is one worrying exception: the administration’s criticisms not of particular EU policies or actions, but of European integration itself, which is “existential for us.”
“Do we see eye to eye in regard to the strategic irrefutability of the European Union?” Haber wondered. Asked whether she had arrived at an answer, Haber responded, “Let’s wait and see.”
In any case, the German (and European) response to the Trump era of American foreign policy is predicated on the assumption that, even if a different president enters the White House in 2021, some of these shifts are more lasting than Trump’s tenure.
The current situation "may shift back, or it may change again at the level of style and tone ... but what will remain is this withdrawal from the Near East, the decline of the willingness to engage in international affairs, the withdrawal of America from international agreements,” Schmid, of the SPD, says. “This separation will not be changed back so quickly."
Emily Schultheis reported from Berlin, and Uri Friedman from Washington, D.C.
The last time I saw John Dingell was a few months ago, back at the home he shared with Debbie in Dearborn. My wife and I were in Michigan for another reason, but called to make sure we could pay a visit. John was in his study, seated in his big chair because of back issues, but he stood up when we arrived and gave us both hugs. We talked about issues large and small with him and Debbie for a few hours. The TV was on in the background, on a cable-news channel, and John had a legal pad next to him. He used it to jot down ideas for his next tweets. Every one of them—the tweets that gave him 264,000 followers, that made him master of the Twitter universe—came from his fertile, active mind, his wicked wit, and his passion for speaking out about justice, Congress, and the current presidency.
Physical infirmities and advanced age aside, it was the same old John. He was warm, even effusive, toward us, asking over and over how we were doing, talking with incredible love and reverence about “the beautiful Deborah,” who made sure he was comfortable and cared for.
My first formal encounter with John Dingell, more than 30 years earlier, was quite different. My colleague, friend, and collaborator Tom Mann and I had been working on a project to reform Congress, and had recommended major changes in the committee system, including removing some jurisdiction from the Commerce Committee, as well as the Ways and Means panel. We were summoned by the House committee chairs to explain ourselves. Tom and I sat on one side of a conference table—directly across from Dingell, Dan Rostenkowski, and a cigar-chomping Jack Brooks. Three powerhouses, feared by many, respected by all, and all pissed off by our temerity. Their power was shaped by their skills, knowledge, and personal force, but of course it was rooted in the important areas of public policy they controlled. And they were going to make clear to us naive academics that none of what we had proposed would happen.
Tom and I were not naifs; we knew that tampering with jurisdictions was like recommending to parents that they give up one or more of their children. As the National Journal once put it, Dingell “claims jurisdiction over anything that moves, burns or is sold.” And we knew there was not much chance our ideas would sail through an appreciative House. We knew all three of these chairs and had very good relationships with them. They never raised their voices, issued threats—veiled or otherwise—or bullied us. But we came away knowing exactly who was in charge, and it was not us.
By that point, I had watched the tough, strong-willed Dingell in action, especially performing oversight, for some time. John grew up in the House, serving as a page, helping his father’s long and admirable service, and then embarking on his own record-setting tenure. He believed to his bones in the importance of Congress, and in its power to protect the public interest and promote the public good. It mattered not a whit to him whether the presidents were from his own party or the other—they and their appointees and all executive officials would be held to account for any hint of miscreance or malfeasance. At times, as in the hearings surrounding the scientist David Baltimore and allegations of scientific fraud by a colleague of his, I thought he went overboard. But overall, his work, and that of a staff dedicated to him and the mission, were exemplars of what Congress should do and often does not.
My ill-fated foray into altering his committee’s jurisdiction notwithstanding, my friendship with John, and my admiration for his service, deepened over the years. I saw a man who understood the legislative process, knew his colleagues well, and nearly always maintained good relationships with the Republicans on his committee, which were reciprocated and often resulted in bipartisan support for his initiatives. John knew how to build coalitions and make laws as well as anyone I have seen in almost 50 years of immersion in the process. But most important, he did so out of passion for social justice and a desire to create a better country and world.
And his accomplishments were staggering. When he announced his retirement, after surpassing in service every other member of the House and Senate in history, I wrote in The Atlantic, “Dingell has had a hand—a hugely constructive hand—in nearly every major advance in social policy over the past five-plus decades, including civil and voting rights, health, and the environment.” I was not totally in sync with him on all issues—I learned through experience that it was best not to talk about guns or auto emissions—but when it came to health policy or the environment or civil rights, he was a huge, important, and constructive force. This country is a better, more just, and cleaner place than it would have been without Dingell’s service in Congress. Which makes our current backsliding even more frustrating.
One more story. A couple of decades ago, I was on a plane with John and had my foot in a walking boot, because I’d badly sprained an ankle on the tennis court. I told him that I was a bit worried; I was supposed to travel to China the following week, with a trip scheduled to the Great Wall, and I did not know how I could walk the steps. A few days later, the receptionist in my office called me to say there was a guest in the lobby. I went up, and there was John Dingell, with a beautiful shillelagh carved out of mahogany that he handed to me. He said it had been his grandfather’s, and he had used it when he had his periodic knee problems but wanted to give it to me, since I now needed it more than he did.
I still have it, and treasure it. A gift from a wonderful friend, who himself was a gift to America.
Is it too early for this? Or is it … too late?
Roughly four years ago, when I compiled a cheat sheet of the 2016 candidates, it seemed like an exercise in absurdly early coverage of the presidential election. Yet because so many people were contemplating running (largely on the GOP side of the ledger), it also seemed like a useful service to voters, who might have trouble keeping track of everyone.
What a quaint time that was. Halfway through Donald Trump’s first term, the potential field is even more sprawling—this time mostly, though not entirely, made up of Democrats—and the primary feels as if it is, if not in full swing, definitely in partial swing. There are more than 20 likely or potential Democratic candidates, some of whom are already campaigning hard. President Trump’s weak position in public opinion means he could draw a GOP primary challenger, or several (though his strong position among Republicans means they would have a difficult row to hoe). There will be independent candidates and third-party candidates as well. If you thought keeping track of the race four years ago was hard, we have bad news for you. But we also have a handy, always informative, and occasionally serious guide to all of those candidates.
As the presidential primaries progress, this cheat sheet will be updated regularly.
* * *
The Democrats
(Aaron P. Bernstein / REUTERS)AMY KLOBUCHARWho is she?
She has been a senator from Minnesota since 2007.
Is she running?
She announced plans to run in Minneapolis on February 9.
Why does she want to run?
Klobuchar represents a kind of heartland Democrat—progressive, but not aggressively so—who might have widespread appeal both in the Midwest and elsewhere. She’s tended to talk vaguely about middle-class issues.
Who wants her to run?
She’d probably build a constituency among mainstream Democrats. Her exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing won her a lot of fans.
Can she win the nomination?
Maybe! CNN’s Harry Enten rates her one of the most “electable” potential candidates, a trait that Democratic voters are especially fixated on this cycle. Her launch has been tarnished by a series of stories about harsh treatment of staff, though.
What else do we know?
Sadly, she is not using this fly logo.
(Jonathan Bachman / Reuters)ELIZABETH WARRENWho is she?
A senator from Massachusetts since 2013, Warren was previously a professor at Harvard Law School, helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and wrote a book on middle-class incomes.
Is she running?
Yes. She kicked off her campaign on February 9.
Why does she want to run?
Warren’s campaign is tightly focused on inequality, her signature issue since before entering politics. She has proposed an “ultra-millionaire tax” on people worth more than $50 million and a major overhaul of housing policies.
Who wants her to run?
People who backed Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016; people who were Bernie-curious but worried he was too irascible; people who didn’t like Bernie but are left-curious; Donald Trump.
Can she win the nomination?
Who knows? Warren’s platform is in step with the current Democratic Party’s, and her initial Iowa events went well. But she has also underperformed Democratic presidential nominees even in her super-liberal home state, and her handling of a DNA-test reveal to show her claimed Native American heritage was widely seen as a botch.
What else do we know?
She’s got a good doggo.
(Dimitrios Kambouris)KAMALA HARRISWho is she?
Harris, a first-term senator from California, was elected in 2016. She was previously the state’s attorney general.
Is she running?
Yes. She declared her candidacy on January 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Why does she want to run?
Harris seems to think that a woman of color who is an ex-prosecutor will check a range of boxes for Democratic voters. She has so far staked out a broad platform, trying to appeal to a wide swath of the party.
Who wants her to run?
Mainstream Democrats. She put up immediately impressive fundraising numbers, and she’s enlisted a number of former Hillary Clinton aides.
Can she win the nomination?
Sure, maybe. Harris has impressed in her short time in Washington, but it’s been a short time. Most of the country hasn’t seen her campaign yet.
(City of South Bend, IN)PETE BUTTIGIEGWho is he?
Beats us! Kidding—but Buttigieg, the 37-year-old openly gay former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a veteran of the Afghan War, is one of the lesser-known candidates in the field.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced an exploratory committee on January 23.
Why does he want to run?
Buttigieg’s sell is all about generation. He’s a Millennial, and thinks that his cohort faces new and unusual pressures and dilemmas that he is singularly equipped to answer. Plus, it’s a useful way to differentiate himself from the blue-haired bigwigs in the blue party.
Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg isn’t really popping up in polls at this point, but he has the support of some Obama alumni. He hopes to reach midwestern voters who deserted the Democrats in 2016.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not. No mayor has been nominated since New York’s DeWitt Clinton in 1812. Buttigieg also fell short in a 2017 campaign for Democratic National Committee chair.
What else do we know?
It’s “BOOT-edge-edge,” and it’s Maltese for “lord of the poultry.”
(DEPartment of Housing & Urban Development)JULIÁN CASTROWho is he?
Castro was the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, before serving as secretary of housing and urban development under Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017.
Is he running?
Yes. He announced his bid on January 12 in San Antonio.
Why does he want to run?
Castro has long been saddled with the dreaded “rising star” tag, and with Texas still red, he’s got few options below the national stage. He’s emphasized his Hispanic-immigrant roots in early campaign rhetoric.
Who wants him to run?
It’s not yet clear. He’d like to take the Obama mantle and coalition, but that doesn’t mean he can.
Can he win the nomination?
He’s got a tough battle. Four years ago, he seemed like the future of the party; now the stage is crowded with rivals, potentially including fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke. "I am not a front-runner in this race, but I have not been a front-runner at any time in my life," Castro said during his announcement.
What else do we know?
Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who serves in the U.S. House, once subbed in for his brother in a parade during Julián’s mayoral campaign, so if you go to a campaign event, ask for proof that it’s really him.
(KC McGinnis / Reuters)JOHN DELANEYWho is he?
A former four-term congressman from Maryland, he might be even less known than Pete Buttigieg, who at least has a memorable name.
Is he running?
Is he ever! Delaney announced way back in June 2017, hoping that a head start could make up for his lack of name recognition.
Why does he want to run?
Delaney, a successful businessman, is pitching himself as a centrist problem-solver.
Who wants him to run?
Unclear. He’s all but moved to Iowa in hopes of locking up the first caucus state, but even there his name ID isn’t great.
Can he win the nomination?
Nah.
(Marco Garcia / AP)TULSI GABBARDWho is she?
Gabbard, 37, has represented Hawaii in the U.S. House since 2013. She previously served in Iraq.
Is she running?
Yes. She officially announced on February 2 in Honolulu.
Why does she want to run?
Gabbard says her central issue is “war and peace,” which basically means a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Who wants her to run?
Gabbard is likely to draw support from Sanders backers. She supported Bernie in 2016, resigning from a post as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to do so, and she’s modeled herself largely on him.
Can she win the nomination?
Unlikely. Not only did she have to apologize for past anti-gay comments, but she’s perhaps best known for her unusually friendly stance toward Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Also, her campaign sounds like a bit of a mess so far.
What else do we know?
If elected, she would be the first Hindu president.
(ary Altaffer/ AP)KIRSTEN GILLIBRANDWho is she?
Gillibrand has been a senator from New York since 2009, replacing Hillary Clinton. Before that, she served in the U.S. House.
Is she running?
Yes. She announced her exploratory committee on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on January 15 and also in this kind of weird video, which feels like a joint marketing venture with Google.
Why does she want to run?
Gillibrand has emphasized women’s issues, from sexual harassment in the military and more recent #MeToo stories to equal pay, and her role as a mom is central in her announcement video. Once a fairly conservative Democrat, she has moved left in recent years.
Who wants her to run?
Gillibrand could have a fairly broad appeal among mainstream Democratic voters, and she hopes that her time representing upstate New York gives her an advantage with nonurban voters. She has, however, earned the enmity of Clintonworld for her critiques of Bill.
Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps. Coming from New York, she has a fundraising and media leg up.
What else do we know?
Sometimes people say she’s a little boring, but do they realize she went on Desus & Mero?
(JOSHUA LOTT / AFP / Getty)ANDREW YANGWho is he?
Yang is <checks Google> a tech entrepreneur who created the test-preparation company Manhattan Prep and then Venture for America, which tries to incubate start-ups outside New York and the Bay Area, and which is based in New York.
Is he running?
Apparently, yes! He filed to run on November 6, 2017.
Why does he want to run?
Yang’s big idea is a $1,000 per month universal basic income for every American adult.
Who wants him to run?
His family, presumably.
Can he win the nomination?
No.
(Amy Harris / Invision / AP)MARIANNE WILLIAMSONWho is she?
If you don’t know the inspirational author and speaker, you know her aphorisms (e.g., “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”).
Is she running?
Yes. She announced her candidacy on January 28.
Why does she want to run?
It’s a little tough to say. She writes on her website, “My campaign for the presidency is dedicated to this search for higher wisdom.” She criticized Hillary Clinton for coziness with corporate interests in 2016, and she ran for the U.S. House in 2014.
Who wants her to run?
Williamson has a lot of fans, but whether they really want her as president is another question.
Can she win the nomination?
Stranger things have happened, but no.
(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)CORY BOOKERWho is he?
A senator from New Jersey, he was previously the social-media-savvy mayor of Newark.
Is he running?
Yes. He launched his campaign on February 1.
Why does he want to run?
In the Senate, Booker has been big on criminal-justice reform, including marijuana liberalization. He has recently embraced progressive ideas including Medicare for All and some sort of universal nest egg for children.
Who wants him to run?
He’ll aim for Obama-style uplift and inspiration to attract voters. Booker has previously been close to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and to Wall Street, both of which could be a liability in a Democratic primary.
Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.
(Jeff Roberson / AP)JOE BIDENWho is he?
Don’t play coy. You know the former vice president, Delaware senator, and recurring Onion character.
Is he running?
Even Biden doesn’t know, though he says he’ll decide soon.
Why does he want to run?
Biden has wanted to be president since roughly forever, and he thinks he might be the best bet to win back blue-collar voters and defeat President Trump in 2020. (Trump reportedly agrees.) But Biden seems reluctant to end his career with a primary loss, knows he’s old (he’ll turn 78 right after Election Day 2020), and is possibly out of step with the new Democratic Party.
Who wants him to run?
If you believe the polls, he’s ahead of the rest of the Democratic pack. It’s not clear that you should really believe the polls at this point in the race.
Can he win the nomination?
It’s possible. Being Barack Obama’s vice president gave Biden a fresh glow. Then again, we’ve seen him run for president twice before, and not very effectively.
(Yuri Gripas / Reuters)BERNIE SANDERSWho is he?
If you didn’t know the Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist before his runner-up finish in the 2016 Democratic primary, you do now.
Is he running?
He’s hemming and hawing, though Yahoo News says that an announcement is imminent.
Why does he want to run?
For the same reasons he wanted to run in 2016, and the same reasons he’s always run for office: Sanders is passionate about redistributing wealth, fighting inequality, and creating a bigger social-safety net.
Who wants him to run?
Many of the same people who supported him last time, plus a few converts, minus those who are supporting Sanders-adjacent candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, or Tulsi Gabbard.
Can he win the nomination?
Possibly. He didn’t last time around, and while this time he has more experience and credibility, he also has more competition from candidates inspired by his success.
(Department of Labor)JOHN HICKENLOOPERWho is he?
Hickenlooper was the governor of Colorado until January, and previously held the most Colorado trifecta of jobs imaginable: mayor of Denver, geologist, and brewery owner.
Is he running?
Basically. “We’re beyond mulling,” he told the Associated Press in December 2018. He even told a waitress in New Hampshire he was running, but then backtracked.
Why does he want to run?
Hickenlooper brands himself as an effective manager and deal maker who has governed effectively in a purple state while still staying progressive. He’s said he thinks the Democratic field could be too focused on grievance and not enough on policy.
Who wants him to run?
Hard to say. Hickenlooper’s aw-shucks pragmatism plays well with pundits, but he doesn’t have much of a national profile at this point.
Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but Hickenlooper might be too business-friendly (and just plain friendly) to succeed in this primary.
(Mary Schwalm / AP)JAY INSLEEWho is he?
Inslee is a second-term governor of Washington, and was previously in the U.S. House.
Is he running?
He sure sounds like it, but hasn’t declared.
Why does he want to run?
Climate change. That’s been Inslee’s big issue as governor, and it would be at the center of his campaign for president, too.
Who wants him to run?
A campaign would presumably attract environmentalist support, and he hopes that his time as chair of the Democratic Governors Association would help, though he’s already hit some turbulence in New Hampshire.
Can he win the nomination?
It’s a very long shot.
(Simon Dawson / Reuters)MIKE BLOOMBERGWho is he?
The billionaire former mayor of New York, Bloomberg is a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat-again.
Is he running?
Not officially, but he told the Associated Press last year that he thought the latest he could decide was February.
Why does he want to run?
For starters, he is convinced that he’d be better and more competent at the job than anyone else. A Bloomberg bid would likely center on his pet issues of gun control, climate change, and fighting the more fiscally liberal wing of the Democratic Party tooth and silver-plated nail.
Who wants him to run?
What, is his considerable ego not enough? Though his tenure as mayor is generally well regarded, it’s unclear what Bloomberg’s Democratic constituency is beyond other wealthy, socially liberal and fiscally conservative types, and it’s not as if he needs their money to run.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not. Bloomberg has also previously toyed with an independent run, but says that would only help Trump in 2020.
(Matthew Brown / AP)STEVE BULLOCKWho is he?
Bullock is the governor of Montana, where he won reelection in 2016 even as Donald Trump won the state.
Is he running?
Maybe. In August, he said in Iowa, “I do have a story of how I’ve been able to bring people together, and I think that’s in part what our country desperately needs.”
Why does he want to run?
Bullock would portray himself as a candidate who can win in Trump country and get things done across the aisle. He’s also been an outspoken advocate of campaign-finance reform.
Who wants him to run?
Unclear. The Great Plains and Mountain West aren’t a traditional base for national Democrats.
Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but it’s an outside chance.
(Phil Long / Reuters)SHERROD BROWNWho is he?
By statute, I am required to mention the senator from Ohio’s tousled hair, rumpled appearance, and gravelly voice.
Is he running?
Not yet, but he is seriously exploring the idea.
Why does he want to run?
Brown’s campaign would be focused on workers and inequality. He’s somewhat akin to Bernie Sanders, but his progressivism is of the midwestern, organized-labor variety, and he thinks he can win blue-collar voters in the Midwest while still pushing a strongly liberal platform.
Who wants him to run?
Leftist Democrats who think Sanders is too old and Elizabeth Warren too weak a candidate; lots of dudes in union halls in Northeast Ohio.
Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.
What else do we know?
Like Warren, Brown has a very good dog.
(J. Scott Applewhite / AP)ERIC SWALWELLWho is he?
Swalwell, who is 38, is a U.S. representative from California’s Bay Area.
Is he running?
He said in November that he was seriously considering it and would decide soon. A source told Politico it was a sure thing.
Why does he want to run?
Swalwell says the Democratic Party needs fresh blood. “We can’t count on the same old leaders to solve the same old problems,” he told The Mercury News. “It’s going to take new energy and new ideas and a new confidence to do that.”
Who wants him to run?
Swalwell’s seat on the House Intelligence Committee has made him a prominent Trump persecutor, but it’s still a bit of a mystery.
Can he win the nomination?
No? Let’s go with no.
(Mark Tenally / AP)TERRY MCAULIFFEWho is he?
Once known primarily as a close friend of Bill Clinton’s and a Democratic fundraising prodigy, McAuliffe reinvented himself as the governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018.
Is he running?
He told CNN on February 3 that he’d “like to” run, but hasn’t decided yet.
Why does he want to run?
McAuliffe holds up his governorship as proof that he can be a problem-solver and deal maker across the aisle, and his Clintonesque politics would be a contrast to many of the candidates in the field.
Who wants him to run?
It’s hard to say. McAuliffe’s tenure in office quieted some doubters, but the Clintons—both the people and their centrist policy approach—are out of style in the Democratic Party.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not.
(Jonathan Bachman / Reuters)TIM RYANWho is he?
The Ohioan is a member of the House, representing Youngstown and America’s greatest city, Akron.
Is he running?
Not now, but he is toying with the idea and visiting Iowa and New Hampshire.
Why does he want to run?
Ryan is a classic Rust Belt Democrat and friend of labor, and he’s concerned about the fate of manufacturing. He is also an outspoken critic of Democratic leadership, mounting a quixotic challenge to Nancy Pelosi in 2017.
Who wants him to run?
Ryan comes from a part of Ohio that traditionally votes Democratic but swung to Trump, and he’d have supporters there.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not. Members of the House seldom win the nomination; he’s got little national profile; and he might be competing against another Northeast Ohio Democrat with an overlapping set of concerns, Sherrod Brown.
What else do we know?
He’s big on meditation.
(Brian Snyder / Reuters)SETH MOULTONWho is he?
A third-term congressman from Massachusetts, Moulton graduated from Harvard, then served in the Marines in Iraq.
Is he running?
He says he’s thinking about it.
Why does he want to run?
In an interview with BuzzFeed, he said he felt the Democratic Party needs younger leaders and, alluding to his military career, “someone ... for whom standing up to a bully like Donald Trump isn’t the biggest challenge he or she has ever faced in life.”
Who wants him to run?
That’s not clear. With his sparkling resume and movie-star looks, Moulton has grabbed a lot of attention, but he doesn’t have an obviously strong constituency, and a rebellion against Nancy Pelosi’s leadership after the 2018 election fizzled.
Can he win?
It’s hard to say, but it’s inauspicious. Moulton is an untested campaigner outside of the House, and he wouldn’t even be the first young veteran to jump in, after Pete Buttigieg.
(Kathy Willens / AP)BETO O’ROURKEWho is he?
The man, the myth, the legend, the former U.S. representative from El Paso and Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas.
Is he running?
Not right now. O’Rourke seems genuinely torn about whether to try to capitalize on his election-losing-but-attention-winning 2018 Senate run and says he’ll decide by the end of February.
Why does he want to run?
O’Rourke is trying to figure that out. He’s young, hip, and inspirational, like Obama; like Obama, his reputation is perhaps more liberal than his voting record.
Who wants him to run?
A lot of livestream watchers and thirsty tweeters, a coterie of ex–Obama aides, and a bunch of operatives running the Draft Beto campaign.
Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but don’t bet the farm on it.
What else do we know?
This video is very important.
(Samantha Sais / Reuters)MICHAEL BENNETWho is he?
The Coloradan was appointed to the Senate in 2009 and has since won reelection twice.
Is he running?
Not yet, but he sounds like he might. “We’ve got a million people that are going to run, which I think is great,” he said on Meet the Press on February 10. “I think having one more voice in that conversation that’s focused on America’s future, I don’t think would hurt.”
Why does he want to run?
Like his fellow Rocky Mountain State Democrat John Hickenlooper, Bennet presents himself as someone with experience in business and management who knows how to work with Republicans.
Who wants him to run?
Probably some of the same people who want Hickenlooper to run. Bennet gained new fans with a viral video of his impassioned rant about Ted Cruz during the January 2019 government shutdown.
Can he win?
Perhaps, but he’s got a crowded lane and only a small national profile.
(Lawrence Bryant / REuters)STACEY ABRAMSWho is she?
Abrams ran unsuccessfully for governor of Georgia in 2018, and was previously the Democratic leader in the state house.
Is she running?
At the moment, it seems more likely she’ll run for U.S. Senate against David Perdue in 2020, but she could still jump in.
Why does she want to run?
Throughout her career, Abrams has focused on bread-and-butter issues like criminal-justice reform and education, and since losing a 2018 election stained by problems with ballot access, she’s made voting rights a special focus.
Who wants her to run?
Abrams has drawn excitement from young Democrats, the liberal wing of the party, and African Americans. Her rebuttal to President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address won her new fans, and former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer says she should run.
Can she win?
Maybe.
(Mike Segar / Reuters)BILL DE BLASIOWho is he?
The mayor of New York City.
Is he running?
No, but he hasn’t ruled it out, either.
Why does he want to run?
De Blasio was the harbinger of the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on economic issues, and they’d be at the center of his campaign, though the movement seems to have left him behind a bit.
Who wants him to run?
That’s precisely the problem. De Blasio’s term as mayor has been a little bumpy, and his attempts to build a national profile haven’t gotten far.
Can he win the nomination?
Doubtful.
What else do we know?
De Blasio would probably be the tallest candidate since Bill Bradley, in 2000. Both men are 6 foot 5.
(Yuri Gripas / Reuters)ERIC HOLDERWho is he?
Holder was the U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015, and he’s currently leading a Democratic redistricting initiative with help from some retiree named Barack Obama.
Is he running?
No, but in July he answered a question on the topic by saying, “Am I interested in it? Yeah, I’m interested!” He says he’ll decide in March.
Why does he want to run?
Holder has three big areas of interest: redistricting, civil rights, and beating Donald Trump by all means necessary.
Who wants him to run?
Tough to say. Obamaworld isn’t really lining up behind him, and he’s never held elected office, despite a successful Washington career.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not.
(Faith Ninivaggi / Reuters)MITCH LANDRIEUWho is he?
Landrieu served as the mayor of New Orleans from 2010 to 2018. He was previously Louisiana’s lieutenant governor.
Is he running?
It seems unlikely. “Probably not, but if I change my mind, you’re going to be the first to know,” he told the New York Times editor Dean Baquet in December.
Why does he want to run?
Like the other mayors contemplating a run, Landrieu considers himself a problem-solver. He’s also become a campaigner for racial reconciliation, taking down Confederate monuments in New Orleans, and staking a claim for progressivism in the Deep South.
Who wants him to run?
Not clear.
Can he win the nomination?
Probably not, especially if he doesn’t run.
(Jeenah Moon / Reuters)ANDREW CUOMOWho is he?
Cuomo is the governor of New York. He was formerly the secretary of housing and urban development under Bill Clinton.
Is he running?
No. Though he's long toyed with the idea, Cuomo said in November 2018, "I am ruling it out." Then again, his father was indecisive about running for president, too.
Why does he want to run?
One can adopt a Freudian analysis related to his father's unfinished business, or one can note that Cuomo thinks he's got more management experience and success, including working with Republicans, than any Democratic candidate.
Who wants him to run?
Practically no one. Cuomo's defenders bristle that he doesn't get enough credit, but his work with Republicans has infuriated Empire State Democrats without winning any real GOP friends.
(Yuri Gripas / Reuters)ERIC GARCETTIWho is he?
Garcetti is the mayor of Los Angeles.
Is he running?
No. Garcetti flirted with the idea, visiting South Carolina and naming a hypothetical Cabinet full of mayors, but said on January 29 that he would not run.
Why did he want to run?
Garcetti’s pitch was that mayors actually get things done and that his lack of experience in Washington was a positive.
Who wanted him to run?
Garcetti was reelected in a landslide in 2017, but he had no apparent national constituency.
(Andrew Harnik / AP)HILLARY CLINTONWho is she?
Come on.
Is she running?
No, but until she issues a Shermanesque denial signed in blood—or the filing deadline passes—the rumors won’t die.
Why does she want to run?
She doesn’t.
Who wants her to run?
Pundits, mostly.
Can she win the nomination?
See above.
(Mike Blake / Reuters)MICHAEL AVENATTIWho is he?
Stormy Daniels’s lawyer
Is he running?
Nope nope nope nope.
Why did he want to run?
Attention, power, self-aggrandizement
Who wanted him to run?
Some very loud, very devoted fans.
Could he have won the nomination?
No, and his comment to Time that the nominee “better be a white male” was the final straw.
(Matthew Putney / Reuters)TOM STEYERWho is he?
A retired California hedge-funder, Steyer has poured his fortune into political advocacy on climate change and flirted with running for office.
Is he running?
No. He announced on January 9 that he would sit the race out.
Why did he want to run?
Impeachment, baby.
Who wanted him to run?
There must be some #Resistance faction out there that did.
Could he have won the nomination?
Nope.
(Leah Millis / Reuters)DONALD TRUMPWho is he?
Really?
Fine. Is he running?
Yes. He filed for reelection the day of his inauguration, though some speculate that he might decide not to follow through.
Why does he want to run?
Build the wall, Keep America Great, etc.
Who wants him to run?
Consistently about 35 to 40 percent of the country; a small majority consistently says he should not.
Can he win the nomination?
Yes. While his low approval ratings overall have stoked talk of a primary challenge, Trump remains very popular among Republican voters, and as president has broad power to muscle the GOP process to protect himself.
What else do we know?
There is nothing else new and interesting to know about Trump. You’ve made your mind up already, one way or another.
(Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters)JOHN KASICHWho is he?
Kasich recently finished up two terms as governor of Ohio, previously served in the U.S. House, and ran in the 2016 GOP primary.
Is he running?
Not at the moment. On December 23, he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “I’m not trying to be coy. We are seriously looking at it.” Then, on January 15, he signed on as a CNN contributor, which is either a sign he’s decided against or a clever way to get airtime.
Why does he want to run?
Kasich has long wanted to be president—he ran, quixotically, in 2000. But Kasich has styled himself as a vocal Trump critic, and sees himself as an alternative to the president who is both truer to conservative principles and more reliable and moral.
Who wants him to run?
Maybe some dead-end never-Trump conservatives. It’s tough to say.
Can he win the nomination?
He doesn’t think so. Kasich previously ruled out an independent or third-party run, but has since reopened that door.
What else do we know?
John Kasich bought a Roots CD and hated it so much, he threw it out his car window. John Kasich hated the Coen brothers’ classic Fargo so much, he tried to get his local Blockbuster to quit renting it. George Will laughed at him. John Kasich is the Bill Brasky of philistinism, but John Kasich probably hated that skit, too.
(Patrick Semansky / AP)LARRY HOGANWho is he?
In November, Hogan became the first Republican to be reelected as governor of Maryland since 1954.
Is he running?
No, and people close to him doubt he will, but he has pointedly not ruled it out.
Why does he want to run?
Hogan is a pragmatic, moderate Republican who has won widespread acclaim in a solidly Democratic state—in other words, everything Trump is not.
Who wants him to run?
Never-Trump conservatives; whatever the Republican equivalent of a “good government” type is.
Can he win the nomination?
As long as Trump is running, no.
(Stephan Savoia / AP)WILLIAM WELDWho is he?
Weld, a former Justice Department official, was the governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997 and was the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016.
Is he running?
No, but he could reportedly make an announcement in February.
Why is he running?
Weld is a lifelong public servant with a commitment to the Justice Department and a libertarian approach to government—so a pretty radical difference from Trump’s vision for the country.
Who wants him to run?
Weld always inspired respect from certain quarters, and the 2016 Libertarian ticket did well by the party’s standards, but Weld’s unorthodox politics and hot-and-cold relationship with the GOP probably don’t help his support.
Can he win the nomination?
No.
(Official Senate PhotO)JEFF FLAKEWho is he?
The Arizonan, a former U.S. House member, decided not to run for reelection to the Senate in 2019.
Is he running?
No. When he took a contributor role with CBS on January 23, he said he was not running.
Why did he want to run?
Starting in 2016, Flake was perhaps Trump’s most outspoken critic among elected Republicans, lambasting the president as immoral, unserious, and unconservative.
Who wanted him to run?
Liberal pundits.
Could he have won the nomination?
No. Flake retired because he didn’t even think he could win the Republican Senate nomination.
(JASON REDMOND / Reuters)HOWARD SCHULTZWho is he?
That guy who used to sell you over-roasted coffee. Schultz stepped down as CEO of Starbucks in 2018.
Is he running?
Maybe. Schultz says he’s exploring it, but after a wave of backlash to his candidacy, his adviser Bill Burton said on January 29 that he wouldn’t decide until at least mid-2019.
Why does he want to run?
Personal pique over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a 70 percent marginal tax rate. No, seriously. Schultz has offered some vague platitudes about centrist ideas and bringing the country together, but most of it aligns with standard Democratic positions.
Who wants him to run?
Donald Trump.
Can he win the nomination?
The great thing about being a billionaire self-funder as an independent is that you don’t have to win a nomination. The downside is that you still have to win votes eventually.
Davi Alcolumbre não dormia havia duas noites quando deixou o apartamento funcional localizado em área nobre de Brasília na manhã de 1º de fevereiro, uma sexta-feira. Passara as horas anteriores em conversas com 20 senadores, um périplo que só terminara às 5h da manhã. Mesmo assim, saiu cedo de casa, levando, no carro oficial, o colega Randolfe Rodrigues, da Rede, também eleito pelo Amapá.
Minutos depois, no Senado, os dois se dirigiram ao gabinete do tucano Tasso Jereissati, que havia se transformado em um bunker contra Renan Calheiros, do MDB alagoano. Apesar de ser visto com ressalvas até pelo próprio partido, que preferia centrar esforços na eleição de Rodrigo Maia na Câmara, Alcolumbre estava confiante. Fora treinado para enfrentar o que sabia que viria pela frente.
Ele carregava uma maleta preta recheada de documentos – que ficaria famosa ao ser roubada por Kátia Abreu, do PDT de Tocantins, horas depois – preparados dias antes para driblar as intempéries da sessão que iria terminar, só no dia seguinte, sábado, com sua eleição à presidência da casa.
Também havia estudado os cenários possíveis e antecipado atos da oposição. Sabia exatamente quais manobras regimentais teria de fazer para contorná-los. Sabia, também, que teria que sustar um ato que o impedia de presidir a sessão e que o Supremo Tribunal Federal seria chamado a intervir. Também levava consigo discursos que escrevera dias antes.
A vitória de Alcolumbre não foi um golpe de sorte de um político de pouca expressão beneficiado pelos efeitos de uma rebelião contra o longevo Calheiros, senador desde 1995 e presidente do Senado por três vezes a partir de 2005. Ela foi construída com o suporte de uma ala do DEM igualmente oriunda do baixo clero do parlamento e alçada ao topo após a eleição de Jair Bolsonaro: os ministros Onyx Lorenzoni (Casa Civil), Tereza Cristina (Agricultura) e Luiz Henrique Mandetta (Saúde) – que somam 23 anos de Congresso. E também de Abelardo Lupion, um tradicionalíssimo político ruralista paranaense, e seu filho Pedro.
Como depois diria Calheiros, Davi, o Alcolumbre, foi mais Golias do que aparentava ser.
Um collorido articulando a ‘nova era’Duas presenças chamaram a atenção de quem acompanhou a tumultuada votação: Abelardo e Pedro Lupion. Ex-deputado federal por seis mandados, fundador e primeiro presidente da União Democrática Ruralista do Paraná e da bancada do agronegócio na Câmara, Abelardo hoje é braço-direito de Lorenzoni. Pedro, o filho, acabou de ser eleito pela primeira vez para a Câmara.
Herdeiro de oligarquia do Paraná, Lupion fundou a bancada ruralista na Câmara.Uma das oligarquias políticas do Paraná, a família Lupion nada tem de “nova era”. Abelardo é neto de Moisés Lupion, duas vezes governador do Paraná nos anos 1940 e 50 e acusado até por aliados de se beneficiar de ações que expulsaram posseiros de suas terras nas fronteiras agrícolas do estado – teve que se exilar na Argentina para não ser preso por isso nos anos 60. Elegeu-se suplente de deputado pela primeira vez em 1991 pelo PRN, partido do então presidente Fernando Collor de Mello. No ano seguinte, já no cargo, Abelardo votou contra o impeachment de Collor. Na Câmara, foi dos primeiros a classificar o MST como “terroristas” e a reforma agrária de “ameaça à propriedade privada”. Em 2017, foi citado em delação da Odebrecht. Em 2010, Abelardo declarou ter patrimônio de mais de R$ 4 milhões em empresas de pecuária e madeireiras.
Abelardo Lupion (primeiro à direita) com Rodrigo Maia, Ronaldo Caiado e Onyx Lorenzoni em reunião do DEM em 2010
Foto: Lula Marques/Folhapress
Os Lupion são amigos de Alcolumbre há mais de 20 anos. Abelardo está hospedado na casa do senador, a quem chama de “irmão”, enquanto procura um lugar pra morar em Brasília. Com cerca de um metro e noventa de altura, Abelardo chegou a atuar como guarda-costas de Alcolumbre. Lorenzoni foi padrinho de casamento de Pedro Lupion e é amigo íntimo de Abelardo. Sua esposa, Denise, trabalha no gabinete de Alcolumbre, num caso ostensivo de nepotismo cruzado.
“Davi disse em novembro ‘eu posso ser o anti-Renan, me ajudem a me viabilizar'”, me disse Pedro, depois da eleição no Senado, durante uma conversa na Câmara. “Ele é esforçado e muito querido. Mas é óbvio que todos nós estávamos trabalhando, o Onyx principalmente, que é muito ligado a todos nós”, continuou Abelardo.
R$ 900 mil para fretar aviõesVislumbrando a possibilidade de uma vitória – improvável para boa parte dos analistas políticos –, Davi Alcolumbre, um senador ainda no primeiro mandato, empenhou-se. Entre novembro e janeiro, viajou por 19 estados em voos fretados pelo partido que custaram quase R$ 900 mil, tomou centenas de cafezinhos e promoveu jantares que entraram madrugadas adentro. O DEM, cabe lembrar, é nada mais que um novo nome do velho PFL, que por sua vez surgiu em 1985 de uma dissidência do extinto PDS, o partido que deu suporte à ditadura militar de 1964.
Dizendo-se representante da “nova política”, lançou mão de uma estratégia agressiva. Fez incursões por estados como Goiás, Mato Grosso, Ceará, Bahia, São Paulo e Rio Grande do Sul para visitar senadores e pedir votos durante o recesso parlamentar.
Alcolumbre usou Onyx Lorenzoni para prometer a senadores “trânsito livre” no governo Bolsonaro.Segundo aliados próximos como os Lupion e assessores que o acompanham há anos, Alcolumbre apertava a campainha da casa dos colegas e pedia para tomar um café. Dizia, então, ser “amicíssimo” de Lorenzoni e, portanto, ter trânsito livre no governo Bolsonaro. Não seduziu a todos os interlocutores. No próprio partido, teve que driblar a desconfiança do prefeito de Salvador, Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto, o ACM Neto, herdeiro do velho cacique baiano e presidente da legenda, e de parte dos colegas que preferiam apoiar um nome de outro partido – tinham preferência por Simone Tebet, do MDB. Muitos demistas achavam que a prioridade deveria ser a eleição de Rodrigo Maia na Câmara e que brigar pelo comando das duas casas seria um passo ousado demais.
“Queríamos apoiar um candidato anti-Renan, mas nem o DEM abraçou a candidatura do Davi integralmente no começo”, comentou comigo Izalci Lucas, do PSDB, partido que apenas decidiu o apoio a Alcolumbre na véspera da eleição. Até aquele momento, outros competidores também se vendiam como “o anti-Calheiros”: Esperidião Amin, do PP catarinense, o paranaense Alvaro Dias, do Podemos, o baiano Angelo Coronel, do PSD, e Major Olímpio, do PSL paulista.
Assim, até a véspera de 1º de fevereiro, Renan Calheiros circulava pelos corredores do Senado dizendo a quem quisesse ouvir que Alcolumbre era um “coitado” que não merecia ser levado a sério, me contou Pedro Lupion.
Oito horas sem banheiroMas a sorte sorriu para Davi Alcolumbre no dia 1º, data da sessão inaugural do Senado em 2019. Único remanescente da mesa diretora de 2018, coube justamente a ele presidir a reunião. Minutos antes dela começar, o senador recebeu a visita de ACM Neto e do ex-ministro da Educação Mendonça Filho. Deles, ouviu que aliados de Renan Calheiros planejavam ocupar a mesa do Senado para impedi-lo de presidir a sessão. O amapaense correu ao plenário e sentou-se na cadeira principal, de onde só sairia mais de oito horas depois.
Ciente da missão que tinha pela frente, Alcolumbre não se abalou nem mesmo quando Calheiros e Kátia Abreu sentaram-se ao lado dele, numa clara tentativa de intimidação. Também fez a egípcia diante de perguntas sobre sua candidatura à presidência do Senado – se confirmasse a intenção, daria munição aos que queriam tirá-lo do comando daquela sessão, já que um candidato não pode presidir eleição.
Votação aberta serviu para constranger eleitores de Renan Calheiros.
Com a caneta na mão, Alcolumbre ficou livre para evitar atos que o prejudicariam e avançar nos que o beneficiariam, como o voto aberto. A intenção era constranger os senadores que pretendiam votar em Calheiros, que se tornou um símbolo da “velha política” nas redes sociais.
A partir de uma coleta de assinaturas promovida por aliados, o senador pôs em discussão a proposta votação aberta, que venceu por 50 votos a 2. O regimento do Senado exige aprovação unânime para que essa mudança seja adotada, mas o presidente interino patrolou a regra.
Provocado por MDB e Solidariedade, que questionaram a manobra de Alcolumbre, o presidente do STF, Dias Toffoli, iria decidir, já na madrugada de sexta, que a eleição ao Senado deveria ter voto secreto. A sentença já era prevista pelos aliados de de Alcolumbre.
Enquanto Alcolumbre se mantinha agarrado à cadeira de presidente, os Lupion, pai e filho, circulavam pelo plenário conversando com senadores e levando relatos ao presidente. Tal qual jogadores de futebol quando reclamam com o árbitro, cobriam a boca com a mão ao falar, para não serem entendidos por quem os observava. O conteúdo das conversas era a apuração – em tempo real – dos votos a favor do demista.
Calheiros: “Vou te dar porrada”A sessão foi a mais quente do Senado em anos. Calheiros, exaltado, berrava contra Alcolumbre, atropelando contra o protocolo de pedir a palavra no microfone. Trocou ofensas com Tasso Jereissati, do PSDB cearense, e foi contido para não partir para cima do adversário. “Seu merda”, bradou. “Vou te dar porrada”. Jereissati, que seria candidato, desistiu, e os tucanos aderiram a Alcolumbre.
‘Se Alcolumbre é o presidente, qualquer um pode ser.’Enquanto isso, Kátia Abreu, a ruralista famosa pela amizade com Dilma Rousseff e naquele momento aliada de Calheiros, gritava a plenos pulmões que, se Alcolumbre era presidente, “qualquer um poderia ser”. Ela conseguiu furtar a pasta preta do demista – que continha uma espécie de manual sobre como agir às manobras dos adversários –, colocou-a debaixo do braço e desceu ao plenário. Depois, voltou à mesa, sentou-se ao lado de Alcolumbre e passou horas abraçada à pasta.
Em meio à refrega, o novato Jorge Kajuru, do PSB goiano, resumiu a situação: “O Brasil inteiro está nos vendo e dizendo: ‘isso não é um Senado Federal’. Talvez um hospício. Ou pior, aquela outra palavra que toda cidade de interior tem.”
Eram mais de 22h quando Alcolumbre aceitou a sugestão de suspender a sessão e continuar no dia seguinte, sábado, com o paraibano José Maranhão, do MDB, decano da casa, comandando a votação. Àquela altura, depois de mais de oito horas de sessão nas quais não levantou nem para ir ao banheiro, Alcolumbre acumulava duas vitórias: apoios declarados ao voto aberto e a chance de se lançar candidato no dia seguinte.
Ao finalmente se levantar da cadeira de presidente, Alcolumbre saiu do plenário cercado por aliados e com o jornalista político Fernando Rodrigues dependurado em seu pescoço, dizendo-lhe que aquela havia sido “a melhor sessão que ele já viu”. Já sozinho, foi direto ao banheiro da liderança do DEM, onde ficou por vinte minutos.
“Ele cresceu com a postura naquela sessão. Mostrou que tinha maturidade”, derreteu-se o tucano Izalci Lucas. “Achamos que a vitória de Rodrigo [Maia, na Câmara] poderia atrapalhar o Davi, mas ele se mostrou hábil em incluir todos os partidos na divisão da Mesa e isso o favoreceu”.
‘A única vitória do governo até agora’Refeito, Davi Alcolumbre teve ainda mais uma madrugada de pouco sono – enredado em mais conversas e pedidos de apoio, dormiu menos de duas horas. Valeu a pena: no sábado, ouviu que Simone Tebet iria retirar sua candidatura para apoiá-lo. Foi o sinal de que a vitória estava próxima. Tebet era um nome forte na disputa, mas acabou engolida pelo partido, o MDB, que decidiu lançar Calheiros. Alvaro Dias e Major Olímpio fariam o mesmo pouco depois.
A confirmação, porém, só viria após mais uma longa e tortuosa sessão, assim como a do dia anterior. Como esperado pelos apoiadores de Alcolumbre, Toffoli restabeleceu o voto secreto. Para seguir constrangendo senadores dispostos a votar em Calheiros, os apoiadores de Alcolumbre sugeriu que o grupo revelasse cada voto em redes sociais e para a imprensa, o que tornou a sentença judicial inócua.
Na hora da contagem dos votos, surpresa: surgiram 82 cédulas para 81 senadores. Mais uma hora de discussão até Maranhão refazer a votação. Coube ao senador Acir Gurcacz, do PDT de Rondônia, que cumpre pena em regime semiaberto na penitenciária da Papuda, em Brasília, destruir as 82 cédulas – fora ele escolhido para fiscalizar o pleito.
Na segunda votação, o novato Flávio Bolsonaro, do PSL fluminense, filho do presidente Jair Bolsonaro, abriu o voto, o que não fizera antes. Especulava-se que o clã apoiava Calheiros – Flávio, acossado por movimentações financeiras suspeitas, recebeu um demorado abraço do emedebista ao chegar ao plenário; Jair, por sua vez, chegara a telefonar para cumprimentar o alagoano depois dele vencer a prévia do MDB.
O veterano Calheiros acabou com apenas cinco votos; Alcolumbre teve 42.Possesso, Calheiros foi à tribuna: “Flávio Bolsonaro, diferentemente da votação anterior, abriu o voto. Abriu o voto! Abriu o voto! Abriu o voto!”, repetiu. “Este processo não é democrático”, atalhou, sob vaias. “E para demonstrar que esse processo não é democrático, eu queria lhes dizer que o Davi (Alcolumbre) não é Davi. O Davi é o Golias. Ele é o novo presidente do Senado e eu retiro a minha candidatura, porque não vou me submeter a isso.”
A renúncia surpresa transformou o clima do plenário. As vaias cessaram, e ele foi aplaudido. Porém, como Calheiros só abandonou a corrida após o início da votação, o alagoano ainda contabilizou cinco votos. Alcolumbre teve 42.
Encerrada a sessão, Simone Tebet e Alcolumbre se abraçaram por quase um minuto, ambos aos prantos. Em seguida, ele passou a escrever o discurso da vitória no celular, ajudado por Randolfe Rodrigues, a esposa Liana Andrade, que o acompanhava de um canto do plenário, e assessores. Levou cerca de oito minutos para finalizar o texto.
Era hora de sair do plenário e celebrar na residência oficial da presidência Senado. Por coincidência, era aniversário de Samuel José Tobelem, pai de Alcolumbre e comerciante em Macapá, e havia um bolo de chocolate à espera. A adrenalina finalmente baixou. O amapaense se afastou do celular e aproveitou a festa, virando mais uma madrugada – a terceira. Horas depois, Pedro Lupion me diria que a inesperada eleição de Davi Alcolumbre foi “a única vitória do governo Bolsonaro” até agora.
The post FOI A VELHA POLÍTICA QUE FEZ DE DAVI ALCOLUMBRE O PRESIDENTE DO SENADO DA ‘NOVA ERA’ appeared first on The Intercept.
On March 17, 2016, Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff emailed out a company-wide declaration of war. The message, under the subject line “Going to war,” made two things clear to the home surveillance company’s hundreds of employees: Everyone was getting free camouflage-print T-shirts (“They look awesome,” assured Siminoff), and the company’s new mission was to use consumer electronics to fight crime. “We are going to war with anyone that wants to harm a neighborhood,” Siminoff wrote — and indeed Ring made it easier for police and worried neighbors to get their hands on footage from Ring home cameras. Internal documents and video reviewed by The Intercept show why this merging of private Silicon Valley business and public law enforcement has troubling privacy implications.
This first declaration of startup militancy — which Siminoff would later refer to as “Ring War I” or simply “RW1” — would be followed by more, equally clumsy attempts at corporate galvanization, some aimed at competitors or lackluster customer support. But the RW1 email is striking in how baldly it lays out the priorities and values of Ring, a company now owned by Amazon and facing strident criticism over its mishandling of customer data, as previously reported by The Intercept and The Information.
Ring and Siminoff, who still leads the company, haven’t been shy about their focus on crime-fighting. In fact, Ring’s emphasis not only on personal peace of mind, but also active crime-fighting has been instrumental in differentiating its cloud-connected doorbell and household surveillance gear from those made by its competitors. Ring products come with access to a social app called Neighbors that allows customers to not just to keep tabs on their own property, but also to share information about suspicious-looking individuals and alleged criminality with the rest of the block. In other words, Ring’s cameras aren’t just for keeping tabs on your own stoop or garage — they work to create a private-sector security bubble around entire residential areas, a neighborhood watch for the era of the so-called smart home.
“Dirtbag criminals that steal our packages … your time is numbered.”Forming decentralized 19th-century vigilance committees with 21st-century technology has been a toxic move, as shown by apps like Citizen, which encourages users to go out and personally document reported 911 calls, and Nextdoor, which tends to foster lively discussions about nonwhite people strolling through various suburbs. But Ring stands alone as a tech company for which hyperconnected vigilance isn’t just a byproduct, but the product itself — an avowed attempt to merge 24/7 video, ubiquitous computer sensors, and facial recognition, and deliver it to local police on a platter. It’s no surprise then that police departments from Bradenton, Florida, to Los Angeles have leapt to “partner” with Ring. Research showing that Ring’s claims of criminal deterrence are at the very least overblown don’t seem to have hampered sales or police enthusiasm for such partnerships.
But what does it mean when a wholly owned Amazon subsidiary teams up with local law enforcement? What kind of new creature is this, and what does it mean to live in its shadow? In a recent overview of Ring’s privacy risks, the Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler asked the company about its data-sharing relationship with police and was told, “Our customers are in control of who views their footage. Period. We do not have any plans to change this.” Fowler wrote: “But would Ring draw an ethical line at sharing footage directly with police, even if there was consent? It wouldn’t say.” The answer is that no such line, ethical or otherwise, exists.
A Ring video that appears to have been produced for police reveals that the company has gone out of its way to build a bespoke portal for law enforcement officers who want access to the enormous volume of residential surveillance footage generated by customers’ cameras.
The site, known as the Ring Neighborhoods Portal, is described in the video as a “community crime-fighting tool for law enforcement,” providing police with “all the crime-related neighborhood alerts that are posted within their jurisdiction, in real time.” Ring also allows police to monitor postings by users in the Neighbors app that are categorized as crime-related “neighborhood alerts” and to see the group conversations around those postings — a feature left unmentioned in Ring’s public descriptions of the software. “It’s like having thousands of eyes and ears on the street,” said the video. A Ring spokesperson clarified that police are not given the real names of users chatting through the Neighbors app.
Not only does this portal allow police to view Ring customers on a handy, Google-powered map, but it also makes requesting customer surveillance video a matter of several clicks. “Here, you can enter an address and time frame of interest and see a map of active cameras in your chosen area and time,” the narrator of the video said. Police can select the homes they’re interested in, and Ring takes it from there, creating an auto-generated form letter that prompts users to provide access to their footage. “No more going door to door to look for cameras and asking for footage,” the video said. A Ring spokesperson told The Intercept “When using the Neighbors portal, law enforcement officials see the same interface that all users see: the content is the same, the locations of posts are obfuscated, and no personal information is shared.” It’s unclear how placing Ring owners on a map is considered an obfuscation of their locations.
“Consent here is a smokescreen.”Although Ring owners must opt in to the Neighbors program and appear free to deny law enforcement access to the cameras they own, the mere ability to ask introduces privacy and civil liberties quandaries that haven’t previously existed. In an interview with The Intercept, Matt Cagle, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said “the portal blurs the line between corporate and government surveillance,” making it unclear where the Silicon Valley initiative ends and constitutional issues begin. With Ring marketing Neighbors as an attractive, brand-defining feature (“The Neighbors App is the new neighborhood watch that brings your community together to help create safer neighborhoods”), it’s not as if the company can treat this as some sort of little experimental pilot program. In response to a question about why the company doesn’t publicize the special enforcement portal on the Ring website, a spokesperson pointed to language on its website about how users can “get alerts from the Ring team and updates from local law enforcement, so you and your community can stay safe and in the know,” which makes no mention of the law enforcement portal or the access it permits. The spokesperson added that “Video Requests [from police] must include a case or incident number, a specific area of interest and must be confined to a specific time range and date” and that “users can choose to share some, none, or all of the videos, and can opt out of future requests.”
Even for those who’ve opted in to Neighbors, the power dynamics of receiving an unsolicited digital knock on the door from a local police officer muddies the nature of any consent a camera owner might provide through the portal, which Cagle believes gives law enforcement “coercive power over customers” by virtue of its design. “Many people are not going to feel like they have a choice when law enforcement asks for access to their footage,” said Cagle. Indeed, the auto-generated message shown in the Ring demo video contains essentially zero details about the request, beyond the fact that an officer is “investigating an incident that happened near you.” Imagine receiving a remote request from a police officer you’ve never met about a crime you know nothing about, all because you happened to buy a particular brand of doorbell and activated an app. Are you implicated in this “incident”? What happens if you refuse? Will you merely be a bad Ring Neighbor, or an uncooperative witness?
Consider as well the fact that Ring cameras are designed and sold to be placed not only outside you front door or garage, but inside your home too. What if a Ring owner provides footage from their camera to assist with a nearby “incident” that inadvertently reveals them smoking pot or violating their parole? When asked how people who live or pass by Ring cameras but are not Ring users can opt out of being recorded and having their image sent to police, the Ring spokesperson told The Intercept, “Our devices are not intended to be and should not be installed where the camera is recording someone else’s property without prior consent nor public areas.” It’s difficult if not impossible to reconcile this claim with the fact that Ring’s flagship product is a doorbell camera that points straight outward and captures anything or anyone who passes by a home’s entrance.
The video ends on an eerie note, adding that “in future versions we will also be enabling Ring’s smart search functionality that will allow for suspicious activity detection and person recognition.” What constitutes “suspicious activity” is anyone’s guess, as is how Ring will “detect” it. Given that the company still uses a team of clickers in the Ukraine to help tell the difference between cars and dogs, there’s little reason to have confidence in Ring’s ability to detect something worthy of suspicion, however it’s defined.
Even with the consent of owners, Cagle worries that the simple existence of a program like the Neighbors Portal threatens to blur, if not eliminate, the distinction between private-sector surveillance services and the government’s role as enforcer of the law. With regards to the latter, we have powerful constitutional safeguards, while with the former we have only terms of service and privacy policy agreements that no one reads. “Consent here is a smokescreen,” said Cagle. “Folks online consent to policies all the time without being meaningfully explained what is happening with our data, and the stakes are much higher here: Under guise of consent, this could invite needless surveillance of private lives.”
These possibilities don’t seem to have concerned Siminoff, whose giddiness about Ring’s future as a law enforcement asset is palpable throughout internal emails. Indeed, it’s clear that the anti-crime push wasn’t just an aspect of Ring according to its chief executive, but integral to its identity and fundamental to its company culture. In the March 2016 internal email, Siminoff added a special message to “the dirtbag criminals that steal our packages and rob our houses … your time is numbered because Ring is now officially declaring war on you!” In a November 2017 email announcing a third “Ring War” against alarm company ADT, Siminoff declared that Ring “will still become the largest security company in the world.” Another internal email from earlier in 2017 (subject: “Why We Are Here”) includes a message from Sgt. John Massi of the Philadelphia Police Department, thanking the company for its assistance with a recent string of thefts. “Wish I had some better wording for this,” wrote Siminoff, “but to put it bluntly, this is just FUCKING AWESOME!” In his message, Massi wrote that Ring’s “assistance allowed our detectives to secure an arrest & search warrant for our target, resulting in (7) counts of theft and related charges,” adding that the company “has demonstrated that they are a supportive partner in the fight against crime!”
The Intercept provided Ring with a list of detailed questions about the access it provides to police, but the company’s response left many of these unanswered. Ring did not address the consequences of bypassing the judicial system to obtain customer videos (albeit with consent), nor did the company answer how it defines or identifies “suspicious activity” or answer whether there are any guidelines in place regarding the handling or retention of customer videos by law enforcement. Without clear answers to these and other questions, Ring owners will simply have to trust Amazon and their local police to do the right thing.
The post Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police appeared first on The Intercept.
Elliott Abrams, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Venezuela, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Relations on Wednesday.
About two hours into the hearing, committee member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., noted that Abrams pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair from Congress. “I fail to understand,” Omar said, “why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”
Omar’s skepticism was well-founded: Just moments later, Abrams told her several egregious lies.
Abrams’s most notable lies occurred during this exchange about his actions as assistant secretary of state in the 1980s during the Reagan administration:
OMAR: On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre at El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl, girls, before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” Yes or no, do you still think so?
ABRAMS: From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.
Abrams’s words were “not only factually, demonstrably untrue, but grossly so,” according to Alejandro Velasco, a professor of modern Latin American history at New York University. His testimony, said Velasco, “continues a pattern he has shown since the 1980s of hubristically rejecting out of hand any suggestion that defeating social justice struggles in the 1980s, through the most brutal means, should in any way be seen as anything other than a resounding victory for the U.S.”
To start: When José Napoleón Duarte was elected president of El Salvador in 1984, it was not “a free election.”
Duarte was one of many Salvadoran politicians who spent time on the CIA’s payroll. In March 1980, he joined a junta that had recently seized power, and by the end of the year had become the junta’s head. He stayed there for the next year and a half — a period of stunning, gaudy brutality by the Salvadoran military against the country’s population. Tens of thousands were slaughtered with U.S support, including those killed during the El Mozote massacre described by Omar.
Pratap Chitnis, a member of the U.K. House of Lords, traveled to El Salvador to witness the 1984 election on behalf of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group. “Crucial to the whole standing of the exercise,” he reported, “was the fact that no politicians to the left of [Duarte’s] Christian Democrats” could participate. Why? Because, said official British observers, “had these representatives campaigned openly, they would have run a very high risk of being assassinated” by right-wing death squads.
This was something like a U.S. presidential election in which the furthest-left candidate was Ted Cruz. Duarte’s only real competition was Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of the ultraright wing ARENA party, who several years before had ordered the assassination of Óscar Romero, the beloved archbishop of San Salvador.
Many Salvadorans he encountered, Chitnis wrote, “laughed at the significance of the elections” given “the atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality.”
However, the Reagan administration realized that D’Aubuisson would be a PR disaster. So after enabling the elimination of El Salvador’s left, they intervened with massive covert support for Duarte, the “moderate.”
Thomas Carothers, a colleague of Abrams at the State Department, later wrote a book titled “In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years.” Carothers was sympathetic to Abrams’s perspective and in fact, interviewed him for the book. Carothers states that “the administration approached the elections with two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held and that the Christian Democratic candidate, José Napoleón Duarte, won.”
To that end, Carothers said, the CIA provided “a significant amount of funds, possibly between $1 million and $3 million, for Duarte’s campaign.” In addition, the U.S. Agency for International Development overtly provided significant funds to help him. Jesse Helms, then North Carolina’s far-right senator and a supporter of D’Aubuisson, complained bitterly that the CIA bought the election for Duarte, whom he described as “a socialist.”
“An election was held within a very limited range of the political spectrum; choices were given but very few,” Chitnis wrote. “I asked relatives of the disappeared and brutally murdered, ‘Do you think things will be better now that President Duarte has been elected?’ ‘It was under President Duarte that these things happened in the first place’, they replied.”
Thus, Abrams obviously knows that this was no “free election.” As in the past, he was consciously attempting to deceive Congress.
Needless to say, it also is not the case that “El Salvador has been a democracy” since 1984. Control of the country remained in the hands of the military, with Duarte a largely powerless figurehead. The cruel war of the government against Salvadorans ground on for years. In 1986, the archbishop of El Salvador condemned indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the air force, and the establishment of free fire zones in which any inhabitants were deemed to be guerrillas and hence worthy targets.
When Duarte’s term was ending in 1989, the FMLN guerrilla group proposed a peace plan under which they would participate in the elections for a new president. Duarte rejected it, setting up a second election in which his party would be the left-most boundary of the possible. This time, however, ARENA “won.” According to the center-right Economist magazine, the “army frightened the voters, [ARENA] fixed the results, and its electoral commission delayed announcing them” until the vote tallies could be adjusted.
ARENA celebrated its democratic triumph with the notorious murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper at Central American University in San Salvador. When Congress sent a delegation to investigate what was going on in El Salvador, they found that 14 of the top 15 highest-ranking Salvadoran military officers had ties to death squads.
By the time the next two elections came in 1994 and 1999, Abrams was out of office. Perhaps coincidentally, both were largely legitimate, at least formally. By 2004, Abrams was back in government in the George W. Bush administration, and the U.S. again attempted to intervene to pick the election’s winner. In 2009, with Abrams out of power once again, the FMLN won a presidential election for the first time.
The Economist now characterizes the Salvadoran political system as a “hybrid regime,” meaning that “elections have substantial irregularities that often prevent them from being both free and fair.” They have not permitted any genuine change that would allow the deep wounds of Salvadoran society to heal.
El Salvador now has by far the highest murder rate in the world — 15 times that of the U.S. and about 50 percent higher than Venezuela, itself notoriously violent. It is beset by “pervasive criminal gangs.” At $8,900, its per capita GDP ranks 146th in the world. According to the CIA Factbook, at least 20 percent of its population lives abroad, compared to 10 percent of Venezuelans — a situation which is rightfully seen as a crisis.
So Abrams is just as willing now as he was 30 years ago to mislead Congress. But what’s most ominous is that — given that he sees El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement” — he presumably would see a similar outcome for Venezuela as a fabulous achievement as well.
“No one who even marginally believes in democracy, human rights, and the self-determination of peoples can count Abrams as an ally, as his actual record amply demonstrates,” said Velasco. “Anyone who does so is either willfully ignorant or worse, complicit in the very crimes they say they are trying to combat in Venezuela.”
The post Rep. Ilhan Omar Went After Elliott Abrams for Lying to Congress. Then He Did It Again. appeared first on The Intercept.
#HomofobiaÉCrime. #CriminalizaSTF. #ÉCrimeSim. Durante a maior parte desta quarta e desta quinta, o apoio às ações que pretendem criminalizar a homofobia e estão sendo julgadas no STF dominou o Twitter. Eu queria fazer parte da mobilização. Depois de ver chegar à presidência alguém que disse “se eu vir dois homens se beijando na rua, vou bater”, ver a homofobia ganhar status de violação inadmissível pareceria uma mensagem de que nem tudo está perdido. Mas esse alívio se transformaria rapidamente em desilusão.
Eu sou bissexual e contra a criminalização. Acredite, é duro escrever isso. Tudo que parte de mim quer é deixar esse texto de lado, aderir ao otimismo e me juntar ao movimento pela aprovação – especialmente depois de ver Bolsonaro e Silas Malafaia se posicionando, previsivelmente, de forma contrária às ações. Mas esse não é um debate de apenas dois lados, e o meu jamais será o deles. A discussão não é simples assim. A LGBTfobia com que essas figuras compactuam é um problema grave. Não sou contra as ações por negar essa realidade. Sou contra porque as propostas são ruins.
Que adianta criminalizar a homofobia em um país que fala em "ideologia de gênero" e se nega a discutir diversidade de gênero.
Criminalizar não resolve, aumento o problema inclusive.
— Winnie, por causa da Winnie Mandela. (@winniebueno) February 13, 2019
A maioria das manifestações que vi de apoio às ações tinham como base a situação revoltante em que vivem nossos LGBTs. O Brasil é o país que mais mata pessoas por não serem hétero ou por não se identificarem com o gênero que receberam ao nascer. Mesmo quando não se chega a esse extremo, a vida das pessoas LGBT é permeada por agressões verbais – o presidente em exercício nos agraciou com uma coleção delas –, psicológicas e, por vezes, físicas e sexuais.
Sei por exemplo que, como bissexual, o subgrupo mais invisibilizado da comunidade LGBT, estou quatro vezes mais propensa a pensar em suicídio do que os heterossexuais e duas vezes mais do que lésbicas e gays, segundo reportagem da Vice. E, como mulher bi, tenho 2,6 vezes mais chances de ser estuprada do que minhas amigas hétero e 3,5 a mais do que as lésbicas. Além disso, segundo um estudo da revista Journal of Public Health, tenho 64% mais chances de ter um distúrbio alimentar do que uma lésbica, 37% a mais de me automutilar e 26% a mais de ter depressão.
É um dado da realidade que ser LGBT no Brasil é perigoso e algo precisa ser feito a respeito disso. Mas vi poucas pessoas apoiando as ações em julgamento por conta de seu mérito enquanto propostas. Vamos lá: o Supremo Tribunal Federal está julgando duas ações, uma proposta pelo PPS, o Partido Popular Socialista e, a outra, pela ABLGT, a Associação Brasileira de Lésbicas, Gays, Bissexuais, Travestis, Transgêneros e Intersexos. Elas são bem parecidas e e, resumo, propõem três coisas: que a homofobia seja entendida como crime de racismo; que o STF dê ao Congresso um prazo para criar essa lei; ou que o próprio tribunal crie essa lei de forma temporária, até o Congresso legislar – opção que pode criar um precedente perigoso, segundo a pesquisadora de Direito Penal e Criminologia Luciana Boiteux.
Sou apoiadora da causa LGBTT mas questiono a estratégia da criminalização do discurso de ódio no STF. Não cabe ao judiciário tipificar crime nem dar interpretação ampliada a uma norma penal. Imaginem uma corte bolsonarista o que faria com essa mesma estratégia? +thread
— Luciana Boiteux (@luboiteux) February 13, 2019
Essa discussão eu deixo para ela. Meu problema com a lei que se pretende criar é a seguinte: como o único foco é na punição, ela será incapaz de prevenir a homofobia, de acolher suas vítimas e de reeducar os agressores. E, se a lei em que se baseia serve de exemplo, ela será incapaz de fazer até mesmo a única coisa que pretende (punir). Como já escrevi em junho de 2018:
O último Levantamento Nacional de Informações Penitenciárias do Departamento Penitenciário Nacional, de 2016, é detalhado a ponto de indicar que há sete pessoas presas no país por genocídio. Já os crimes de racismo e injúria racial – com penas equiparadas por decisão do STF no último dia 4 – sequer aparecem entre os tipos penais listados para justificar as mais de 620 mil detenções de que o relatório dá conta.
Eu sou uma mulher bissexual, preta e tenho uma leitura de que criminalizações em países conservadores e sem acúmulos relevantes sobre as questões de gênero e sexualidade servem apenas para criar um cenário de maior punitividade e violência para quem é vítima de opressões.
— Winnie, por causa da Winnie Mandela. (@winniebueno) February 13, 2019
Não precisamos de uma lei que se proponha apenas a colocar mais pessoas – pretas e pobres, convenhamos – atrás das grades. Como escreveu a historiadora Suzane Jardim, que estuda o encarceramento em massa e também se posicionou de forma contrária à aprovação das ações:
Em 2006, comemoramos a promulgação da Lei Maria da Penha e, em 2014, celebramos a Lei do Feminicídio. Estávamos, então, corrigindo erros do nosso direito penal e fazendo uso dele para proteger as vidas de mulheres. Meu despertar se deu ao perceber que o que chamamos de “erros do direito penal” são, na verdade, parte do projeto político que o estrutura – um projeto seletivo, pautado em racismo e em elitismo, moldado a partir de sujeitos dos quais o Estado quer se ver livre.
[…] O sistema penal é formado por escolhas que se escondem atrás de uma máscara de universalidade. Desde a formação da lei até sua aplicação, existe um projeto em que se define quais crimes são prioridade, quem são os suspeitos ideais e as vítimas com as quais não irão se importar.
A gente pode dar passos que não sejam organizados em punição e cárcere? Alguns passos como por exemplo combater a homofobia nas escolas ? Alguns passos como normas que obriguem o ensino para o combate às lgbtfobias na escola por exemplo?
— Winnie, por causa da Winnie Mandela. (@winniebueno) February 13, 2019
Aprovar uma lei que reforça o encarceramento como solução para todos os problemas, ignorando o racismo presente nesse sistema de punição, e que não propõe nenhuma política pública é um erro. A LGBTfobia está profundamente enraizada na cultura brasileira. E cultura não se muda com prisão. Se muda com conscientização, especialmente aquela voltada às crianças e adolescentes – coisa que o governo atual pretende expressamente proibir com projetos como o Escola sem Partido. Lembremos que a ministra Damares Alves foi uma das pioneiras na mentira do “kit gay”, nome dado ao programa que pretendia justamente debater diversidade sexual nas escolas e prevenir a homofobia.
É verdade que aprovar a criminalização na “nova era”, em que “menino veste azul e menina veste rosa”; “quem ensina sexo pra criança é papai e mamãe”; e “[o governo vai] combater a ideologia de gênero”, seria algo muito simbólico. E que existe a possibilidade de a criminalização inibir alguns discursos de ódio, já que os homofóbicos teriam que lidar com o fato de que seu preconceito não poderia ser mais mascarado sob o rótulo de “opinião”. Também concordo que dar nome às violências que sofremos todos os dias é importante para dar visibilidade a elas e aumentar o debate público.
Acreditem, o peso de todas essas possibilidades me faz mais uma vez pensar se não devo deixar esse texto de lado. Mas, aprovando uma lei deficiente depois de décadas de luta, temo que possamos correr o risco de levarmos muitas outras para aprovar uma segunda, que de fato nos beneficie. E, lendo os tweets espalhados por texto, firmo ainda mais minha posição.
Você vai criminalizar conduta sem conseguir aplicar educação de gênero e sexualidade, no fim vai super lotar prisões ainda mais, sem combater a raiz do problema. Pq como diz Ângela Davis, as pessoas tiraram as cadeias como depósito de problemas que não querem lidar.
— blogueirinha da classe trabalhadora (@andrezadelgado) February 13, 2019
A comunidade LGBT não merece a migalha ineficaz que pretendem nos oferecer. Merece um texto à altura da Lei Maria da Penha, considerada a terceira melhor do mundo quando se trata de enfrentamento à violência doméstica. E, para uma lei como essa sair do papel, é preciso vontade política. Construir e manter os centros de referência para mulheres, os núcleos especializados de defensorias públicas, promotorias e juizados, por exemplo, exige verba. Alguém acredita que nosso Congresso seja capaz de aprovar uma lei desse porte voltada aos LGBTs nessa legislatura, depois de mais de 18 anos barrando projetos muito menos ousados? Ou que governo vá repassar recursos para a implementação de políticas pró-LGBT?
Eu não. Mas, mesmo pessimista, não hesitaria em me juntar ao movimento pela aprovação de um projeto como esse. Já o que está sendo proposto no momento, para mim – ou, talvez, para 99,9% de mim – é um tiro no pé.
The post A homofobia pode virar crime. E isso é um tiro no pé. appeared first on The Intercept.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam during a funeral at the Chilhowie Christian Church on Feb. 9, 2019, in Chilhowie, Va.
Photo: Steve Helber/Pool/Getty Images
It feels unfair to be forced to entertain the question of forgiveness when someone has transgressed as badly as Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. For too long, calls for forgiveness have been used to elide real accountability. Apology letters — some better than others — anticipate social absolution while victims still smart from harms. Understandably, a counterculture has emerged that all but shuts out the possibility of forgiveness in favor of “canceling” transgressors. But forgiveness and personal accountability needn’t be at odds. What’s missing in this conversation is a fulsome discussion of repentance.
Northam, of course, is infamous for including a picture of two men, one in blackface and one dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. The governor first apologized for the photograph before denying he was in it, but has admitted that he “darkened” his face to dress as pop icon Michael Jackson on another occasion.
Either way, Northam has much to atone for.
To don blackface is to choose to degrade a population of Americans whose free labor and exploitation enabled the fortunes of men like Northam — men who continue to enjoy enormous power. It’s a choice, in short, to punch down. Even worse, dehumanizing black Americans serves the purpose of justifying continued inequities. That was the case in 1884 and in 1984, and it remains the case today.
Who, a person flipping through the yearbook might ask, is Ralph Shearer Northam? A man who enjoys cars, cowboy hats, and Klansmen.Northam didn’t “just” participate in a one-off racist joke, either. Weeks, months, or years later, he chose to incorporate a picture of the episode on his yearbook page — a space students typically use as a time capsule of their experience in school. Of all that he experienced during those four years, this incident made the curated pastiche of Northam’s life. Who, a person flipping through the yearbook might ask, is Ralph Shearer Northam? A man who enjoys cars, cowboy hats, and Klansmen.
The governor now says he didn’t understand the full social implications of blackface. But he certainly understood enough to be in on the “joke.” Transgressive humor doesn’t work without understanding the transgression, and it’s not credible to think Northam didn’t know that blackface and the KKK were potent symbols of racism. There’s a reason the man in KKK robes is posing with a mocking simulacrum of blackness. It’s a tableau vivant of racial violence.
But as Northam’s defenders have pointed out, rarely can a person’s character be understood in such black-and-white terms. The governor’s record includes plenty to recommend it. For eight years, Northam served in the U.S. Army as a medical officer. He became a pediatric neurologist before entering politics. He opposed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to get vaginal ultrasounds; opposed right-to-work laws; advocated for the state to adopt a $15 minimum wage; and voted against a bill that would have banned sanctuary cities in Virginia. On Tuesday, he restored voting rights to 10,000 former felons.
A blue governor in a historically conservative state, Northam represents a symbolic victory for Democrats — a model for how to gain a foothold on an electoral map that skews red, even as demographic trends predict the opposite. Moreover, the timing of the photo’s release — days after Northam defended late-term abortions — casts a political tint over the controversy. Would supporting his resignation ultimately be a capitulation to Republicans, whose political agenda threatens black American interests much more than a 35-year-old photograph?
Unsurprisingly, the public is divided on this issue.
One camp believes Northam is disqualified from holding office. In an op-ed titled “Ralph Northam must resign,” the Washington Post’s editorial board argue that “Northam can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia.” It pointed to his “shifting and credulity-shredding explanations for the racist photograph” and the fact that after promising to do the “‘hard work’ of atonement,” he slipped into silence for days. “Facts do matter,” they write, “and the ones surrounding the Northam fiasco remain unsettled and unanswered. How could he possibly have admitted to something as damning as appearing in the photo if he wasn’t one of the people in it? How did that photo wind up on his page if he didn’t furnish it to the yearbook editors?” How, they ask, does Northam’s response to the controversy reflect on his judgment? “Virginians deserve better,” they write. “Mr. Northam’s time is up.”
Others disagree, citing the age of the picture, the fact that there’s an outstanding question of whether Northam is actually in it, and the absence of any evidence that Northam committed other racist acts between 1984 and the present.
“Ask yourself this,” writes Virginia conservative Daniel Payne in the Washington Enquirer. “Do we want to be a culture that can forgive very old, offensive behavior when a transgressor recants and seeks forgiveness? Or do we want to be the kind of culture that ruthlessly seeks out past transgressions and savagely drives all transgressors from polite society, whether or not they are sorry?”
There’s truth, I think, in both takes.
When Payne asks whether we want a society in which forgiveness is possible rather than one where mistakes are irredeemable, my answer is yes. It seems clear to me that progressive politics require that response.
But as my former colleague Zaid Jilani recently pointed out, there can be “a curious dissonance” between the compassion the left extends to some, like the formerly incarcerated, versus others, like those who’ve committed more minor social transgressions. When it comes to crime, factors like poverty and a lack of educational opportunity are understood to constrain individual choice. There’s a distaste for punitive measures both because they’re inhumane and because they’re known to have little deterrent effect: When we consider that various social factors predict crime, it makes sense to broaden our focus to root causes — not just punishing individuals. The result isn’t to diminish the role of individual responsibility; in properly contextualizing the role of individual will, it increases our faith in rehabilitation.
The problem isn’t just Northam. It is the culture from which he sprang.The broad left understands that rehabilitation is not only a social good — a benefit to both individuals and their communities — but is ethically compelled. We understand that human lives have intrinsic value that must be protected and that a humanistic approach to crime can be more effective than punitive alternatives.
But even though liberals acknowledge external factors that influence bigoted behavior (we live in a racist culture, just as we live in a rape culture and a heteronormative culture, etc.), blame and retribution are often focused on individual bad actors while broader social forces are dismissed as less significant. Northam’s yearbook page is abhorrent, yes, but not anomalous. As disconcerting as the image is, more unnerving is the reality that perhaps a dozen decision-makers who produced the yearbook didn’t think twice about including it, because it wasn’t disconcerting to them. The problem isn’t just Northam. It is the culture from which he sprang.
Acknowledging this doesn’t absolve Northam. But it does shift one’s consideration of whether his bias is static and irredeemable or fluid and forgivable — informed by the world around him and subject to change. And that, of course, informs what you think should happen next.
To be clear: None of this means that Northam deserves to keep his job.
Where I depart from Payne and Jilani is that their analysis insufficiently considers the role of atonement. Preserving space for Northam to be forgiven does not mean that Northam is entitled to stay governor of Virginia. To justify remaining in office, he must earn forgiveness. Repentance precedes absolution.
Penance is an effort to fix the damage caused by a transgression. It’s an act, not merely a feeling. The restorative justice approach to criminal justice is helpful here in teasing out the path forward. It emphasizes accountability and making amends over punishment. It asks victims what they need to repair the harm done to them, not merely what vengeance should be exacted on the transgressor.
In his recent piece on Northam and the question of mercy, Jilani compared the governor to Lewis Conway Jr., who, after two decades in jail for murder, ran for the Austin City Council. Jilani questioned why some on the left championed Conway’s rehabilitation while remaining skeptical of Northam’s ability to evolve from a much less heinous offense. But the difference is in how they’ve atoned for their crimes.
The governor has spent more effort creating factual ambiguity around his yearbook photo than engaging in the hard work of penitence.Whereas Conway served 20 years in prison, Northam couldn’t sit in judgment for 24 hours before revising his apology into a disclaimer: It wasn’t me. The governor has spent more effort creating factual ambiguity around his yearbook photo than engaging in the hard work of penitence. In his Sunday CBS interview with Gayle King, he claimed that “this is really the first time I have ever really seen that picture,” citing as proof how unprepared his reaction was. When asked why he apologized for being in a picture he now claims he isn’t in, he blamed the “state of shock” he was in following the revelation. This is the opposite of accountability.
Northam’s dodge is even more frustrating given that it only marginally improves his moral position. Yes, traditional blackface — with its coal-black paint, crimson lips, and affected minstrelsy — is technically worse than efforts to achieve a facsimile of a black person as part of a costume. Why? Because while the intent to degrade can exist in either instance, it’s always present in the former. But this isn’t a criminal trial, and the lack of intent doesn’t save Northam from critique. The effect of blackface is always degrading, because of the historical legacy of blackface in this country. To wear blackface is to trade in either ignorance or indifference. The latter is more forgivable. But it is not above rebuke.
Moreover, Northam has shown little to no substantive understanding of what he’s done wrong. At an initial press conference, he seemed to take the controversy so lightly that he contemplated doing the “moonwalk” when asked if he had the moves. (He owes his wife an above-average Valentine’s Day gift for steering him away from that disaster.)
Although the purpose of the CBS interview was ostensibly for Northam to demonstrate his new understanding of racial issues, he compounded public frustration by calling slaves “indentured servants from Africa,” appearing to sanitize the subject. And while Northam (sort of) acknowledged his racial privilege, he failed to connect that privilege to his behavior — missing the point that his ignorance about race is not just an excuse for his actions, but a symptom of a larger problem that might continue to undermine his effectiveness as governor.
Northam characterized the racist yearbook photograph as reflecting “unconscious attitudes” and said that white people did not realize how “impactful” and “offensive” certain “racial insensitivities” were to black people. “I have learned, I admit to my mistakes,” Northam told King, “and I am going to improve my life and do better and be in a position where I can help other people.”
But he hasn’t fully admitted his mistakes or demonstrated that he understands why, precisely, he’s in the wrong. He’s said nothing concrete about how he is going to improve his life and “do better” or help others, and he certainly hasn’t said anything about how he specifically plans to help the constituency his actions have harmed: black Americans.
Northam told King that “the man you’re looking at and talking to right now is not who I was in my early 20s.” But he’s offered no evidence of this, pointing only to the absence of a smoking gun from the last 34 years that would “prove” the yearbook incident was a one-off. But that’s not how racism works.
Racial ignorance often manifests in the indifference to policies that are racist in outcome, if not in design. Connecting the dots between his subconscious biases and his policymaking really would make this a “teaching moment.” Instead, what we have is a lesson in how cheaply absolution is bought.
Northam says he’s not stepping down. Instead, he’s embarking on a “reconciliation tour” to engage with his constituents about race and healing. Given what we’ve heard from him so far, I’m not optimistic, but it could be the start of a restorative process that turns this yearbook controversy into a genuine opportunity for Virginians. What will make the difference is whether the public pressures him to take active responsibility for his actions — to find solutions in collaboration with the injured parties and community members and make amends — or whether it focuses exclusively on his resignation. At this point, Northam has made clear that he’s “not going anywhere.” But that only means justice can’t be served if the public maintains a narrow, purely punitive framework for what justice entails.
As Rev. William Barber eloquently put it in an op-ed on Northam last week:
Scapegoating politicians who are caught in the act of interpersonal racism will not address the fundamental issue of systemic racism. We have to talk about policy. But we also have to talk about trust and power. If white people in political leadership are truly repentant, they will listen to black and other marginalized people in our society. They will confess that they have sinned and demonstrate their willingness to listen and learn by following and supporting the leadership of others. To confess past mistakes while continuing to insist that you are still best suited to lead because of your experience is itself a subtle form of white supremacy.
Amen.
The post Ralph Northam Still Doesn’t Understand What It Takes to be Forgiven appeared first on The Intercept.
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Hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over live in democracies of some shape or form, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims live in — and participate in — Western democratic societies. The country that is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next couple of decades is India, which also happens to be the world’s biggest democracy. Yet a narrative persists, particularly in the West, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Islam is often associated with dictatorship, totalitarianism, and a lack of freedom, and many analysts and pundits claim that Muslims are philosophically opposed to the idea of democracy. On this week’s show, Mehdi Hasan is joined by the man expected to become Malaysia’s next prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and by Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, to discuss Islam, Muslims, and democracy.
Anwar Ibrahim: We represent Islam the sense that is has to tolerant, liberal, plural, and even accept some of the values of the west.
[Music interlude.]
Mehdi Hasan: I’m Mehdi Hasan. Welcome to Deconstructed.
It’s a never-ending debate. Why do so many Muslims live in undemocratic countries? How do you get more freedom in the Middle East? Does Islam have a problem with democracy? They’re age-old and often quite cliched questions. So, on today’s show, I want to do a bit of debunking and deconstructing, with the help of a very special and a very relevant guest.
AI: You have corrupt, oppressive, tyrannical states and they use the label Islam.
MH: That’s my guest today, the renowned Malaysian leader and former political prisoner Anwar Ibrahim, who is on course to become the country’s next democratically-elected prime minister. I’m also joined by Dalia Mogahed, the American Muslim writer, scholar and former White House adviser.
Dalia Mogahed: When you look at the facts, they simply don’t support the idea that there is a clash of civilizations or a clash of values.
MH: So, on today’s show, what’s the deal with Islam, Muslims and democracy?
Islam and democracy. Is there a clash? Is there a contradiction? I’ve been hearing this question posed by right and left alike my entire life. Since before 9/11 but especially since after 9/11, when we were told by George W Bush, Tony Blair, the neocons and others, that the real problem in the Muslim-majority world is the lack of democracy and freedom and political pluralism. And guess what’s to blame for that? Islam or at least political Islam, whatever that is.
Now, I have a lot of problems with this rather lazy and simplistic narrative, which completely and conveniently overlooks the role played by Western governments in propping up Muslim dictators like the President of Egypt or the King of Saudi Arabia, but here’s my biggest one: it’s factually inaccurate. Right now, in 2019, hundreds of millions of Muslims, possibly the majority of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims, live in democracies of some shape or form, live in countries where they have the right to vote, the right to choose and to change their own governments — from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey, not to mention the tens of millions of Muslims who live in Western countries, in Germany, France, the UK, Canada, the United States. The mayor of London, last time I checked, was a Muslim. And in fact, the country which is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next couple of decades is India; which also happens to be the world’s biggest democracy.
So why is it that in the West, in particular, people still associate Islam with dictatorship and totalitarianism and a lack of freedom, why is it so many folks still think Muslims have some sort of inherent objection to, or problem with, the idea of democracy? That we’re not interested in, or grown up enough, or liberal enough, for democracy? What’s the actual reality? It’s a big question but it’s a question I’m asking on Deconstructed today and we’re lucky to have two fascinating and very clever guests who I hope are going to enlighten us all.
[Music interlude.]
More than twenty years ago, Anwar Ibrahim was on the cover of Time magazine, which called him “the star of a rising generation of Asian leaders.” But the then deputy prime minister of Malaysia and devout Muslim leader spent the next two decades in and out of prison on trumped-up charges.
News Anchor: Malaysian reformist leader, Anwar Ibrahim, has been released from prison. The release comes after his opposition alliance won the elections earlier this month.
AI [at press conference]: Now, there is a new dawn for Malaysia. I must thank the people of Malaysia […] regardless of race and religion who stood by the principles of democracy and freedom.
MH: Today, this long-standing advocate for democracy, dialogue and human rights who’s become a bit of a rock star in the Muslim-majority world, is a step away from becoming prime minister of, yes, democratic Malaysia, having come out of prison and helped pull off the unlikeliest of election victories last year. Anwar Ibrahim joins me now to talk Islam and democracy.
[Music interlude.]
MH: Anwar Ibrahim, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
AI: Thank you.
MH: To many in the west, Anwar, many here in the U.S., there is a clash, a contradiction even, between Islam and democracy, but you come from a Muslim majority country of more than 30 million people that is a democracy, a flawed democracy. But which democracy isn’t? So what do you make of this constant claim both from right-wing Islamophobes, but also from well-meaning liberals who genuinely seem to think that Islam and democracy, Muslims and democracy don’t go together?
AI: I think, to quote Edward Said, it’s a clash of ignorance. There’s very little understanding what’s happening on the ground, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. It is as democratic as the United States, Turkey, of course, there are some criticisms, but there was elections which was seen or perceived by the West even as independent and no militia. As you know in the last year’s elections, and now proceeding towards a vibrant democracy. India, although Muslims are the minority but they support the Democratic process. You have Christian democracy in Europe. Why can’t we have Muslim democrats in the Muslim world? The issue is the fundamentals of the democratic process cannot be compromised — judicial independence, free media, equal rights for citizens — and that is being observed.
MH: It’s more than just having elections. A lot of countries have elections which turn out to be not so democratic.
AI: Exactly, with elections in an undemocratic society will always be flawed.
MH: So what’s your explanation then for the preponderance of dictatorships across the Muslim-majority world, especially across the Middle East and the Arab world?
AI: Well, there are also internal dynamics within Muslim societies that must be addressed, but you can ask the similar questions at the Washington elite, the London elite, who actually has been to a large extent complicit in this arrangement. They support the dictators and authoritarian regimes, but I would not use that as a complete argument because I think the Muslim societies themselves need reform and need a further commitment towards this and it is happening in the Muslim world, in Indonesia, Malaysia. It is not happening, unfortunately in the Arab world. The problem is the Arab nations and not a Muslim problem.
MH: And unfortunately, as you yourself have noted Arab nations are often conflated with all of the Islamic world, even though Arabs are a minority of the world’s Muslims. As you mentioned, Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. You said in 2014, that “All eminent Muslim democrats must condemn not just groups like ISIS and Boko Haram but the dictatorships and autocratic regimes in the Muslim world that have persistently denied democratic rights to their citizens and whose human rights records could even put North Korea to shame.”
And when I read that quote Anwar, I’m kind of torn because on the one hand it’s so refreshing to hear a Muslim leader willing to criticize Muslim-majority countries when a lot of Muslims as you know, in our communities turn a blind eye to our own problems and we’re very happy to criticize Israel or America or the West. We don’t want to say things about Muslim countries. So I’m glad that you’re willing to say that. On the other hand, there is this view that it feeds into a dangerous narrative that says Muslims are all collectively responsible for bad things that happen in Muslim societies that we have to constantly play this condemnation game and some would say, you know, what do I have to do with Saudi Arabia? Why should I condemn them? Nothing to do with me. I’m not Saudi. I’m not to blame for Saudi Arabia. I’m not responsible.
AI: That is a problem. I endured these atrocities and imprisonment for two decades. I don’t expect much either from the West or the Muslim world, but the bare fact, the reality is capitals, Western capitals including the United States were more, at least, committed though oftentimes ambivalent, but at least, they have been seen to be more supportive. So they —
MH: Rhetorically.
AI: — Rhetorically, at least, which is not happening in the Muslim world. So, I think that my position is we must be morally coherent and consistent if you condemn atrocities in, for example, some other countries, Latin America, Africa, you must be prepared to do the same.
MH: You’ve noted that in the West, we often equate the Arab countries, as I said, with Islam. You’d like to talk about Indonesia, Malaysia, Muslim democracies, which are culturally politically distinct yet Malaysia does have an official religion. The constitution states that Islam is the religion of the federation but other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in any part of the federation. Is it your view that you don’t need to be secular in order to be democratic that you can be an Islamic or Muslim democracy?
AI: The Constitution stipulates Islam [as] the religion of the federation. It’s not an Islamic state. It stipulates judicial independence, free media, which need not necessarily be tied to the religious precepts. That must be clear. Secondly, I think, the issue of secular or Islamic, it depends on how you you conceptualize. If it is laïcité in the extreme sense—
MH: The French, the French secular model.
AI: — Secular model. But I think to my mind, what is essential is every citizen must be given equal right.
MH: So Muslims don’t have preference over non-Muslims in a society or extra rights.
AI: Yes, because we have a certain number of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists in this country.
MH: You mentioned the very thorny, contentious idea of Islamic State, which of course ISIS have given a whole new meaning to but generally there are people in the Muslim-majority world who have peacefully non-violently want to work towards a “Islamic State.” What do you understand to mean by Islamic State? Does such an idea even, can such a state even exist?
AI: I would say that Muslims would need to suggest that they need [an] independent state that allows for freedom of expression and worship and you want to call it Islamic or secular, It does not matter. I would go for the content. Now, if it is an interpretation of Islamic State as promoted by Boko Haram certainly, I totally reject and I think it’s nonsensical. It cannot be defended.
MH: Or even Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan — they all call themselves Islamic Republics or Islamic kingdoms in some shape or form.
AI: It doesn’t mean anything. I mean Pakistan —
MH: But in practice, they do some pretty un-Islamic and horrible things.
AI: Clearly, yes, yes, it’s a gross contradiction. You have oppressive states. You have undemocratic, corrupt, oppressive, tyrannical states and they use the label Islam.
MH: Hmm, it’s a problem. As someone who’s been tried and convicted twice for sodomy, these trumped-up charges that you were accused of. A sentence in Malaysia that can lead up to 20 years in prison. It can lead to whipping under the Malaysian law. You told the Wall Street Journal back in 2012, many years ago, that Malaysia’s sodomy laws a “archaic,” that they should be amended. You said “It’s not my business to attack people, arrest people based on their sexual orientation.” Now you’re a free man. Now that your party is in power, you’re on the verge of, some would say, soon becoming prime minister — we can talk about that. Do you still stand by that? Will Malaysia be repealing its sodomy laws anytime soon?
AI: Yes, it is archaic, introduced by the British in 1947 to India. We replicate these laws.
MH: Colonial hanger.
AI: Colonial and has nothing to do with Islam or Christianity. So, I believe, well, I’ve said it’s archaic. It has to be revised, amended. You cannot condemn people for their sexual orientation. Although, as a country, not only Muslims, Christians, Hindus, we reject the notion of people displaying open sexual acts in public and which is consistent with many countries in the West. Your sexual orientation is your business.
MH: No, but just to push back a little bit there in the West, of course, there’s something such as — there are there are gay pride marches, for example. Even in Turkey you mentioned until very recently there were gay pride marches in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country. Is that something you can see happening in Malaysia or are you saying, we won’t punish you but you got to keep it behind closed doors? No public affirmation of being gay.
AI: Because I think the general moral standards is a concern not only Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, we are quite conservative in that light, liberal in terms of political orientation. But I think rather conservative in one thing, this display of, public display of sexual acts in public and other.
MH: Whether heterosexual or homosexual?
AI: Yes, so it is not a prejudice against any sexual orientation, but I think it will take time it would evolve. If you mean —
MH: I mean, even your stance of coming out against punishment is controversial in Malaysia. There’s “Islamic parties” that want to keep those archaic punishments.
AI: Yes, and I endured that for years because they came to condemn me. Look, this guy is supportive of all these acts against religion, for example. I do not agree, but I stand my ground and I think I have a solid argument to support our contention.
MH: Would you describe yourself — and this is loaded language, I know — as a liberal Muslim or a conservative Muslim? What do you think of those labels?
AI: A Muslim must be liberal in the sense that they tolerate and try and understand the other. So, conservative in the sense that you do accept the fundamentals of religion. You pray, I mean, so it depends on your connotation, but I think the important point here is do you tolerate differences? Yes. Do you allow people to criticize or condemn somebody’s religious beliefs? Yes.
MH: We need a reassertion of pluralism.
AI: Clearly, it is a multiracial country. It is plural. I mean and Islam itself promotes that or accepts that as a reality.
MH: In theory, but now with Muslims in practice.
AI: Exactly, the contradiction is because the flaw of the neoconservatism not only in the West but also in Islam.
MH: Neoconservatism in Islam, that’s a good line. You said in the past that “Sharia law” which is real bogeyman of a phrase here in the West has been misunderstood. It’s been conflated in the eyes of both many Muslims and non-Muslims with “Hudud punishments,” the stonings, the beatings, the lashings, the amputations, the really brutal and violent stuff that we see on our screens on the news almost nightly. You said you’re more interested in the maqasid of the law, the higher aims of the Sharia. Explain to our listeners who are not familiar with these concepts. What do you mean when you talk about Sharia law and the higher aims of the Sharia?
AI: The relevance of religion Islam or Christianity, Judaism is justice and compassion. You ignore this and then talk about punishment. Certainly, the entire approach is wrong. So, to my mind religion requires understanding, compassion. And legal precepts should be at the tail end even then there must be a clear legitimate interpretation. Most of the interpretations are by the neocons of the Islamic world.
MH: How do you push back against them?
AI: We will have to continue to be vigilant, to be active. Those of us who believe in justice must be more assertive and the courage although condemned by many of the neocons.
MH: And you talk about the neocons of the Muslim world, some of the neocons in the Western world are very keen to pathologize Islam, to treat Islam as a kind of oddity in the modern world and Muslims who don’t sign up for liberal secular values overnight or yesterday are somehow backward, primitive, barbaric, you know, need to get on the modernity train. How do you push back against that line of thinking?
AI: I consider it a paradoxical situation because the neocons of the West should be friendly to the neocons of the Muslim world. They are blinkered in their views non-tolerant and completely unjust to the other. We represent Islam in a sense that it has to be tolerant, liberal, plural, and accept even some of the values of the West.
MH: Samuel Huntington of the Clash of Civilizations fame once declared that Islam has bloody borders and here in the West a lot of people again, both conservatives and liberals will look at the violence and insurgency and terrorism plague in countries like Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, even Indonesia, and they will say yeah, that’s undeniable. Islam has bloody borders. What do you say to them in response?
AI: Selective amnesia when you talk about all the atrocities, the many atrocities in the world are by ideologues. the wars in Europe, the murders and death in China, and nothing to do with religion. I will not condone excesses whether in the name of Islam or religion or secularism, but I think to treat history in such a blinkered view is certainly not acceptable. That is why I started by suggesting this notion used by or the phrase used by Said as a “clash of ignorance”.
MH: Clash of ignorance over a clash of civilizations. When do you plan to replace Mahathir as prime minister? That’s the plan, right? You’re going to be prime minister of Malaysia? That’s the plan?
AI: What the agreement was — the word agreement — that he will surrender power, he has come up repeatedly will not be more than two years. So, unless he had to go. I think we should be patient and I should use my time, this transition to prepare, to listen, to interact with Malaysians and also my friends overseas.
MH: And you have been very patient. You were in prison. Then you were in the opposition. Now your party’s in power and you’re waiting to take over. Let me ask you this final question. I really you know, it’s something that’s quite interesting about you. You’ve said on the record that you forgive Mahathir for putting you in prison. You forgive Najib Razak, the former prime minister who you defeated last year for helping putting you in prison. How does someone like yourself — who spent, I think, more than 10 years behind bars away from your family in pretty horrific conditions — How do you find it within yourself to forgive these men who’ve treated you in this way?
AI: I think, my discussions with Mandela, we joked about we being a bit either mad or crazy. But since we have been certified as not being mad, we are certainly crazy and doing what we have to do and the sufferings endured by Azizah, my wife, and family and friends. But on hindsight, what do we do? I mean, is our personal interest more important than the welfare of our citizens? We talk about religion, humanity, compassion, and forgiveness. Why is it when we come to our turn, we can act or implement these ideals? So, I think finally, it’s not choice. It’s an imperative that we have to act upon.
MH: Anwar Ibrahim, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
AI: Thanks, Mehdi.
[Music interlude.]
MH: That was Anwar Ibrahim, who is amazingly now on course to become Malaysia’s next prime minister. What a journey he’s been on. I’m joined now by Dalia Mogahed, from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, ISPU. She’s a former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. She served on President Obama’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — the first woman in a headscarf to ever do so — and is the co-author, with Professor John Esposito, of the acclaimed book, “Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.” Dalia, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
DM: It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Mehdi.
MH: Dalia, just listening to that interview with Anwar Ibrahim. What do you make of his answer that this endless debate over Islam and democracy is the product not of a clash of civilizations, but in the words of the late, great Edward Said a clash of ignorance?
DM: I’d really have to agree with Anwar on that. When you look at the facts, they simply don’t support the idea that there is a clash of civilizations or a clash of values. I worked on the largest, most comprehensive study of global Muslim opinion when I was with Gallup as the executive director of Muslim studies. We interviewed tens of thousands of people from all over the world and asked them questions about their views of their own society of the West, their own aspirations, politically and personally, and when you do that, when you allow Muslims to speak for themselves, you get a very different picture than what the pundits would have us think.
MH: Surprise.
DM: Right, surprise. It’s always interesting to me that vocal extremists from the Muslim side say exactly what Islamophobes say. They seem to have perfect agreement but it’s very different from what the vast majority of Muslims think. When Gallup asked citizens of Muslim-majority countries from around the world what they admired most about the West one of the most frequent responses to that open-ended question was democracy.
MH: But Dalia, George W. Bush told us that they hate our freedom.
DM: Right, they don’t hate our freedom. They want our freedom. They want the same thing for themselves.
MH: Here’s a question for you — you hear people like Sam Harris and Bill Maher and others talking about “Oh, Muslims in the Middle East in particular, but across the world, they want Sharia law, they want Islamic State. They don’t want what we want. There’s a difference between us and them.” What do you say in response to that?
DM: Well, I think there’s a lot to say in response to that. First of all, I’m wondering what they mean by we because a lot of people in our country definitely want their religious values reflected in our law, and I’m not talking about Muslims.
MH: Yes.
DM: So in our research at The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, as well as in Gallup’s research, we found that lots and lots of Americans say that they want the Bible to be reflected in law. And that’s — you don’t need a poll to tell you that, just look at our politics. So, the idea that religious people want to see their values reflected in their law is not exclusive to Muslims. Now, it’s also interesting to see what Muslims around the world mean when they say Sharia. So, one of the questions we asked in the polling we did when I was with Gallup was a series of questions about what they associate with Sharia compliance. So, when they say Sharia, what do they mean? Sharia compliance to them meant things like the rule of law that government had to abide by the same laws as the people. Women associated Sharia compliance with gender justice. Now, that’s how they’re interpreting Sharia and it’s interesting. I know Anwar was explaining the differences between you know, the way Sharia is interpreted by Muslim neocons as well as Islamophobes and the way he thinks about Sharia law is as a set of principles.
MH: And that’s a widespread view, according to your research.
DM: It’s a very widespread view according to the research we did, yeah.
MH: Dalia, you’re not just a Muslim-American. You’re an Egyptian-American. When you listen to Anwar Ibrahim saying that the problem for democracy in the Muslim-majority world is really a problem for the Arab world. That’s where the Democratic deficit is right now not in Indonesia or Malaysia or turkey. It’s in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf countries, Jordan. Is that fair point, do you think?
DM: I think it’s absolutely a fair point and unfortunately, has always been the case. I don’t, I think the Arab Spring and as well, as a lot of research has proven that it’s not because the people are not interested in democracy, don’t aspire for democracy, but that there’s lots of other complex geopolitical factors that keep democracy away. So, I agree with him. Actually the majority of Muslims live under a democratic system or another. It’s just the Arab world where that has not been the case.
MH: So here’s a question about Muslim Americans who are also under the spotlight these days for good reasons and bad. Where do they fit into this in terms of attitudes towards democracy, political engagement, especially religious or practicing Muslim Americans, if I can call them that? What are their attitudes like?
DM: Muslim-Americans, if I can generalize according to research, are a community that believes deeply in our democracy. One question I remember from a Gallup poll found that Muslims were the most likely faith community to have confidence in our electoral system.
MH: And Dalia right now, you have Ilhan Omar, congresswoman, first one of the first two Muslim-American women to be elected to congress. She’s in the news being attacked. The president of the United States says she should resign from Congress. To me, it’s so frustrating that Muslim Americans are told to integrate, to be more democratic, to run for office. And then when they do, they’re vilified, they’re demonized, they’re held to standards that other politicians are not held to.
DM: That’s absolutely true and I have been so disappointed in the way that our two congresswomen have been treated. They didn’t go to Congress to fit in, right? They knew it was going to be tough. And that speaking about certain topics was going to be met with some response. But even I was surprised by how difficult it’s been for them.
MH: And how much of this discussion on Islam and democracy and integration is driven by Islamophobia whether witting or unwitting?
DM: I think that some of the underlying assumptions that animate this discussion are Islamophobic and it is often times unwittingly. But I really challenge even the framing of words like assimilation or integration. It implies, you know, the mental model behind it is a host and an outside, you know, group coming in and trying to integrate or assimilate.
MH: One-way traffic.
DM: A one-way traffic, exactly. And it is always the other being hosted by the real Americans and it’s on the other to accommodate and assimilate. And so, I think that we simply have to reframe and rethink that entire model. You know, America is supposed to be a place where we’re all equally American. There is no second-class citizenship. And that’s the model we have to hold our country to.
MH: Dalia, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.
DM: Thank you, Mehdi.
MH: That was Dalia Mogahed from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and co-author of the book, “Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.” And before her, of course, was Anwar Ibrahim. A lot of food for thought, I think you’d agree. And a reminder that on thorny and contentious issues like this one, we all need to dig deeper and get past simplistic binaries, lazy media coverage and, perhaps unconscious, Islamophobia.
[Music interlude.]
That’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept, and is distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review. It helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!
See you next week.
The post The Truth About Islam and Democracy (With Anwar Ibrahim) appeared first on The Intercept.
Ser jogador de futebol. Quanta gente já não sonhou com isso?
Com 11 anos, eu levei essa ideia a sério e entrei para as categorias de base de um time de Porto Alegre. Fiquei apenas seis meses. Felizmente, minha família tinha condições financeiras que me permitiram priorizar os estudos. Depois dessa breve experiência, só voltei a pensar no assunto aos 17 anos.
Engraçado que, quando você entra nesse mundo, percebe que os sonhos vão ficando cada vez mais distantes. E, ao mesmo tempo, você está lá, lutando. As pessoas de fora veem você como uma “estrela”, como se sua vida fosse igual à dos caras que aparecem na TV. Mas a realidade é uma merda. Acham que você tem dinheiro, um carro bom, roupas de marca, sendo que às vezes nem tem travesseiro para dormir ou cobertor para se esquentar. No caso do meu ex-treinador Emerson, que jogou nas categorias de base, o cobertor era sua toalha de banho. Ele a deixava secando de manhã cedo para se cobrir de noite. Aliás, sorte a sua se houver arroz e feijão em dia de jogo, diferente do meu amigo “Índio”, que jogou o campeonato estadual no Mato Grosso. Lá o seu almoço era um pote de bananas – e isso que ele já jogava no profissional.
Uma vez perguntei se o treino iria continuar, e o treinador respondeu, me xingando: “tu tá com medo de raio?”Fora as condições precárias, vocês acham que a gente ganha quanto por mês? Dedicamos todo nosso tempo, esforço e foco para isso, dormindo regrado, acordando cedo, dando a vida nos treinos, faça sol, chuva, calor, frio e até raio caindo – uma vez perguntei se o treino iria continuar, e o treinador respondeu, me xingando: “tu tá com medo de raio?”
Depois de nos doarmos ao máximo, longe de nossas famílias, quanto vocês acham que recebemos de remuneração? Menos de um salário mínimo. Ou às vezes nenhuma, como ocorre com meu parceiro Luquinhas, que joga na quarta divisão de Portugal. Em outros clubes, é só um vale-transporte mensal, porque, querendo ou não, os jogadores precisam ir para os treinos durante a semana. Pelo menos disso os dirigentes se dão conta.
Mas e quando não dá para reservar a grana só para o transporte? E quando você tem filhos? Quando tem que ajudar a família com o pouco que ganha? Sua mãe? Seus irmãos? Eu tenho amigos que seguem no futebol, mas já abandonaram o sonho de se tornar grandes ou de ter uma vida melhor: eles jogam apenas porque é o que lhes resta, é isso que eles têm, e pronto. É o que eles foram ensinados a fazer, é o que eles sabem fazer em um país com cada vez menos investimentos em educação pública. E essa é a única saída “limpa” e “justa” que eles encontram, para quem sabe um dia sair da pobreza. Na verdade, eles têm outro caminho a seguir, e vocês sabem de qual eu estou falando. Esse mesmo: o crime. Às vezes, alguns até conseguem conciliar os dois, tráfico e futebol.
Na segunda-feira, mesmo dia em que o alojamento do Bangu pegou fogo, um ex-companheiro de clube, que está jogando a segunda divisão do Campeonato Gaúcho, no profissional, me pediu dinheiro emprestado porque a polícia pegou a droga dele, e ele estava devendo para os donos da boca. Decidiu vender drogas para aumentar sua renda, que não é suficiente para sustentar sua mãe e seus irmãos.
Imagem: arquivo/Ramiro Simon
Situação parecida aconteceu com meu amigo Adilio, que jogou comigo no profissional da segunda divisão do Rio de Janeiro. Ele nunca vendeu droga, nada disso. Mas, com o salário de R$ 1 mil que recebia, já ajudava a manter sua família e sua casa na favela. Só que a temporada durava apenas seis meses. No resto do ano, fechava “contrato” com o pai dele e virava pedreiro na pré-temporada. E o Léo, um dos melhores volantes do campeonato nessa mesma temporada? Lá estava ele, vendendo chá-mate na beira da praia durante as férias – quando não fazia um bico de barbeiro.
Em 2017, disputei a Copa São Paulo de Juniores pela equipe sub-20 da Chapecoense. Os clubes de cada grupo ficam no mesmo lugar durante a primeira fase. Dividimos hotel com o Nova Iguaçu, do Rio de Janeiro, e o Sampaio Corrêa, do Maranhão. Na sala de jogos, jogando pingue-pongue, um dos meninos do Nova Iguaçu perguntou quanto que a gente ganhava por mês. Eles ficaram impressionados: R$ 600, um salário do qual nós mesmos reclamávamos o tempo inteiro. Eles ganhavam R$ 80 por mês. Com o time do Maranhão não tivemos a oportunidade de conversar sobre isso, mas sei que eles ficaram três dias dentro de um ônibus para chegar até São Paulo, algo comum com equipes do Norte ou Nordeste que tentam jogar a principal competição de base do Brasil. As federações ajudam pouco ou nada.
Em 2015, mais de 82% dos jogadores de futebol recebiam menos de R$ 1 mil por mês, segundo a CBF.Eu poderia escrever um livro sobre todas as histórias que eu ouvi ou testemunhei no verdadeiro mundo do futebol. Isto que eu descrevi é a situação atual da imensa maioria dos atletas no Brasil. Mesmo entre os profissionais: em 2015, mais de 82% dos jogadores de futebol recebiam um salário inferior a R$ 1 mil, de acordo com a Confederação Brasileira de Futebol. E deve ter muita história pior, que eu nem sei ou nem imagino. Cada dia é uma surpresa: quando você acha que já viu de tudo, você acaba tomando banho de mangueira na frente do vestiário, porque os chuveiros estão todos estragados. No clube onde isso aconteceu, a água que tomávamos vinha em um cooler – na verdade, era uma mistura de água com grama, com bolhas de óleo por cima. Um amigo meu até brincava “rapaz, a piscina lá de casa é mais limpa que essa água”. Nós que vivemos do futebol não temos ideia do que pode acontecer. Sempre tem algo novo, mas nós não nos damos conta, porque estamos sempre focados no nosso sonho, que é o que nos motiva perante as inúmeras dificuldades e humilhações.
Ramiro jogando pela seleção gaúcha durante a Copa de Seleções Estaduais Sub-20, em 2017.
Foto: arquivo pessoal/Ramiro Simon
Acho que é por isso que o futebol continua. Porque no fundo, no meio de tudo isso, nós temos fé de que um dia sairemos dessa situação, de que um dia vamos alcançar este lugar privilegiado, que poucos conquistam, e que todo mundo assiste na televisão. Por mais impossível que pareça, e que a realidade do mundo grite na nossa cara que não dá, que é um em um milhão que chega lá.
Ainda assim, continuamos. A gente carrega a alma daquela criança sonhadora. Ela ainda sonha dentro de nós, esperando o dia em que nos tornaremos jogadores de futebol. Agora, aos 21, sigo correndo atrás desse objetivo. Sou volante e estou em teste para jogar em um time da primeira divisão do Canadá.
E é por essa persistência que a ganância de quem organiza o futebol passa despercebida. Às vezes até percebemos, mas não tem o que fazer, né? Vamos arriscar nosso sonho reclamando que gostaríamos de um salário digno? Ou de uma alimentação melhor? Ou de uma cama melhor? Ou um ventilador? É assim e deu. Se você incomodar muito, é mandado embora, e eles acham outro por aí. O que mais tem é garoto querendo o nosso lugar. Para a maioria dos que financiam o futebol no país, esses princípios básicos são “desperdício de dinheiro”, porque não dão retorno a curto prazo. Ninguém entrou nessa para perder, não é? E quem paga a conta somos nós. No pior cenário, pagamos com a vida. Foi o que aconteceu com os garotos do Flamengo.
Este é o mundo do futebol: milhares de sonhos no meio de falsidade, ganância, corrupção e egoísmo. E tudo isso longe da família, longe de casa, desde bem cedo. Abrimos mão de tudo pelo nosso objetivo.
Muitos falam que jogador de futebol só fala em Deus. Não é para menos: só Ele é capaz de nos manter firmes diante disso tudo. No papel, as chances são mínimas.
The post A vida de um jogador de base na bagunça dos grandes times do Brasil: sorte a sua se houver arroz e feijão appeared first on The Intercept.
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