Month: March 2016

A San Francisco State University student of color harassed and assaulted a white student earlier this week, accusing him of stealing her culture—because he had dreadlocks. 

The encounter took place in the Cesar Chavez Student Center, and was captured on video. The video clearly shows a black female student, identified as Bonita Tindle, confronting a dreadlocks-wearing white male named Cory Goldstein. Tindle is accompanied by a black male: both insist to Goldstein that his dreadlocks are tantamount to cultural appropriation. 

Goldstein responds by insisting that his look is Egyptian, and doesn’t belong to them. They counter by demanding to know whether he is Egyptian. 

“You’re saying I can’t have a hairstyle because of your culture?” asks Goldstein. “Why?” 

“Because it’s my culture,” asserts Tindle. 

Goldstein eventually says, “You know what, girl, you have no right to tell me what I can and cannot wear.” He then attempts to leave the area. Tindle grabs his arm and physically restrains him. After being pushed around for a few moments, Goldstein separates himself from Tindle wand walks off. The self-proclaimed cultural enforcer then notices that she is being recorded by a third-party, and demands to know why. 

“For everyone’s safety,” says the person shooting the video. 

Tindle then appears to attack the cameraman just before the clip ends. 

When I first watched this video, I was suspicious that it was staged: it just seems too ridiculous. But Goldstein posted about it on Facebook and said it really happened. “I just got physically assaulted because I have dreadlocks woe,” he wrote. 

What’s more, the campus police responded to the incident, according to  press release: 

University police were called to the scene of the incident when it occurred. The two individuals involved in the incident are not San Francisco State University employees. Further, no criminal charges have been pressed at this time to the University’s knowledge.  

San Francisco State University promotes the rights of the campus community to engage in free speech, but does not condone behavior that impedes the safety or well-being of others.  We are taking the matter seriously and will promptly and thoroughly investigate this incident through applicable University channels, including our campus student conduct procedures. 

I don’t know whether Goldstein or someone else called the police, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment. If he doesn’t want to press charges, that’s his choice. But Tindle’s thuggish behavior was completely inappropriate, and she deserves plenty of derision—partly for her awful views on cultural appropriation, but mostly because she used violence to back up her opinion. 

Given how obsessed universities are with creating safe spaces for students, I’m surprised SFSU isn’t taking more decisive action. What good is a safe space, after all, if it does not guarantee actual physical safety? 

In any case, shame on Tindle for going full Melissa Click on someone she disagreed with. To borrow a phrase from student-activists, perhaps she needs some mandatory cultural sensitivity training.

Merrick Garland’s been called a “moderate” by a lot of people, but that’s only because he tends to side with the government irrespective of who happens to be in charge.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Garland’s reputation for moderation rests partly on his experience as a former federal prosecutor who, as Painter notes, “has aggressively and thoroughly prosecuted terrorists”—including the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. And perhaps because of that background, Garland is exceedingly friendly to law enforcement.

A New York Times analysis examined 14 criminal cases in which Garland voted differently from other judges. In 10 of them, Garland sided with the government—a record that “has contributed to his image as a moderate,” the paper notes. 

But then, when has Garland not sided with the government?

View this article.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a significant victory for both property rights and for the 6th Amendment right to counsel in “all criminal prosecutions.” By a vote of 5-3 in the case of Luis v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the federal government’s efforts to freeze the non-tainted assets of a criminal defendant before trial violated that defendant’s constitutional rights. “The defendant in this case,” the Court observed, “has a Sixth Amendment right to use her own ‘innocent’ property to pay a reasonable fee for the assistance of counsel.”

The dispute in Luis v. United States began in 2012 when Sila Luis was indicted in Florida on charges of defrauding Medicare of upwards of $40 million. The federal prosecutor in her case sought and obtained a pre-trial order freezing her assets. The reason this matter ended up before the Supreme Court is that the prosecutor sought to freeze not only her “tainted” assets, meaning those assets that can be arguably traced back to the alleged underlying crime, but the prosecutor also sought to freeze Luis’ undisputedly legitimate assets, which amount to some $15 million that cannot be connected in any way to any alleged criminal activity.

Sila Luis has not been convicted of any crime connected to this matter and her case centered on why the Sixth Amendment protects her right to use her wholly legitimate assets to mount her legal defense. The federal government took the opposite position, maintaining that the Sixth Amendment should not stand in the prosecutor’s path. In the government’s view, because all of Luis’ assets could potentially be subject to forfeiture if she is ultimately convicted, federal prosecutors should not be prevented from freezing all of her “forfeitable” assets before she goes on trial.

Today the Supreme Court vindicated Luis’ rights and rejected the federal government’s position. “The Government cannot, and does not, deny Luis’ right to be represented by a qualified attorney whom she chooses and can afford,” the Court said. “But the Government would undermine the value of that right by taking from Luis the ability to use the funds she needs to pay for her chosen attorney.” The property at issue in this case, the Court noted, “is not loot, contraband, or otherwise ‘tainted.’ It belongs to the defendant.” Furthermore, the Court noted, “to permit the Government to freeze Luis’ untainted assets would unleash a principle of constitutional law that would have no obvious stopping place.”

Today’s 5-3 decision divided along unusual lines. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, voted against the federal government and in favor of Sila Luis’ 6th Amendment rights. Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in that judgment, though he wrote a separate opinion whose “reasoning rests strictly on the Sixth Amendment’s text and common-law backdrop.” Those five justices comprised the majority. Writing in dissent, Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the government, joined by Justice Samuel Alito. Justice Elena Kagan filed an additional solo dissent of her own.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Luis v. United States is available here.

Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus recently interviewed me for Free Thoughts, a podcast produced by the Cato Institute. The broad topic was my 2013 book The United States of Paranoia; the specific subjects ranged from Tipper Gore to They Live to the suppression of imaginary slave revolts in the antebellum South. Enjoy:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama castigated the press (again) not only for trafficking in the patently “false equivalence” of “he said/she said” journalism and failing “to probe and to question and to dig deeper” but for abetting the rise of (an unnamed) Donald Trump and creating “the current climate” of political vitriol.

The proper response to this is: Are fucking kidding me? Or, as Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote, “Spare me your hypocritical journalism lecture, Mr. President.” In fact, Obama has not just been hostile to the way he says wants the press to operate, he’s sicced more legal dogs on reporters than any wary property owner ever sicced on bill collectors. From Shafer summary of some of the president’s actions:

“Obama hates the press,” New York Times national security reporter James Risen said not long ago, “and he hates leaks.” AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee has decried the “day-to-day intimidation of sources” by the Obama administration, judging it worse than the Bush administration on that score. And in a 2013 piece, POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen documented Obama’s mastery of “limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.”…

Obama holds infrequent news conferences, and he wastes reporters’ time by refraining from answering questions with any candor. He claims to helm “the most transparent administration in history,” while bending government policies and practices toward secrecy.

All of that (and more) is bad enough, writes Shafer, but things get positively unbearable when the president layers on all the vapid, banal, Hallmark greeting-card level praise of the press:

What makes Obama’s speech so unstomachable is the way he praises reporters at an award ceremony by calling their work “indispensable,” “incredible,” “worth honoring” and essential to democracy while simultaneously blocking honest press queries with all the formidable energies of his office.

Read the whole thing.

Ironically enough, the president was speaking at the award ceremony for the Toner Prize, given annually by Syracuse University to honor “the best national or local political reporting in any medium or on any platform.” This year’s recipient is Alec MacGillis of ProPublica, a watchdog group, Shafer notes, that has reported that at 

the same time the Obama administration has been paying lip service to protecting whistleblowers, it has pursued national security leaks to the press with a vehemence unmatched by any previous administration, using the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to journalists more times than all previous administrations combined.

I’ve been a working journalist basically my entire professional life. I respect the field but don’t think it warrants the often-overwrought mythic vision presented by Hollywood (see Spotlight for a recent, semi-hagiographic example) and journalists themselves. Obama’s speech isn’t simply hypocritical and diversionary (though it is both those things). By stroking the press’s collective ego, he allows us both to pump up our significance in self-flattering ways that have little connection to reality or the news we’re supposed to cover. Hence, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof’s genuinely awful Sunday column, titled, “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump.” 

Screw you, buddy, I didn’t—and neither did anyone at Reason, for that matter. Nor did we help “make” Geroge W. Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Saddam Hussein. It’s interesting that folks at places such as The Times, which never fails to put itself in a different league when it comes to its reputation, start trading in collective responsibility the minute things go south. The fact is, there in no single media and to talk about the tens of thousands (if not more) or news-gathering and free-expression-enabling outlets and platforms under such a term conceals more than it clarifies.

And it also smudges a fact that many reporters or newsgatherers or journalists or whatever you want to call us have never pushed back against Barack Obama because they have been in the tank for him. That is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Toner lecture delivered by Obama: The very people he excoriates—and that he had thrown in jail on occasion and threatened with all sort of legal and other actions—lap it all up with a spoon.

Then there’s what Reason TV’s Todd Krainin has called the “reality show presidency” of Barack Obama. Forget Donald Trump’s roots in The Apprentice. On top of all his other sins against transparency and freedom of the press, there’s this:

“The White House has effectively become a broadcast company,” says Michael Shaw, publisher of Bagnewsnotes.com, a site dedicated to the analysis of news images. Shaw explains how strategically composed photos, taken by official White House photographers, travel from social media sites that are controlled by the administration to the front pages of newspapers around the world.

The press publishes the official White House photographs because independent photographers and videographers are increasingly barred from covering the president. This practice has diminished the power of the independent media as an exclusive distribution channel while empowering official photographers such as Pete Souza, who are on the presidential payroll. 

And so, says Shaw, the public has been fed a steady diet of whatever kind of president the news cycle demands. When conspiracy theorists questioned Obama’s patriotism, we saw images of Obama the American everyman. To celebrate the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ 1955 refusal to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, we saw Obama reenact her famous image. Time and again, we see Obama striking poses out of John F. Kennedy’s repertoire. The official White House photographers have created a presidential identity for every conceivable occasion — as long as the image is flattering, and almost always, larger than life.

Watch Krainin’s video to get a full sense of how Obama is not dissembling to reporters or threatening them and playing fast and loose with them. He’s actually tightly controlling what images are allowed to be published of him and carefully staging photo-ops and other fake press events in ways that erase their own falsity.