Author: admin

In the aftermath of August’s mass shooting in El Paso, a cursory glance at the news might have left you with the impression that there were two villains that day: the white supremacist who viciously killed 22 people and wounded 24 more, and President Donald Trump, who supposedly incited him. 

“The president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso,” read a New York Times piece. Democratic presidential contenders echoed this sentiment, with Beto O’Rourke saying Trump’s rhetoric “has a lot to do with” the shooting and Kamala Harris alleging that Trump was “tweeting out the ammunition” used by the El Paso shooter.

Blaming the words of controversial politicians for the acts of terrorists and lunatics without hard evidence is not new. However, a recent academic paper, reported on by numerous outlets before it went through the peer-review process, suggests that Trump actually is to blame. 

Studying the effects of Trump’s many campaign rallies on reported hate incidents, three professors at the University of North Texas and Texas A&M—Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers—claim that Trump rallies are associated with a 226 percent increase in such incidents. 

Naturally, their study went viral. Vox, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN all published articles reporting that Trump’s words are so bad that exposure to them leads to a wave of hate crimes.  

Once again, Democratic politicians piled on. “Your language creates a climate which emboldens violent extremists,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) in a social media post. “Your rhetoric is directly and indirectly inciting hate, Mr. President,” tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.).

Is that where the story ends? Not quite. Using the same data and statistical procedures as Feinberg et al., we replicated their study’s headline result. Since we did not have access to the original paper’s data and code, this involved collecting each of the variables mentioned in the original paper, and then independently performing the same analysis. Wherever possible, we copied the decisions that are mentioned in the original paper. Our headline results were very close to those reported in the original paper.

Using additional data we collected, we also analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallies using the identical statistical framework. The ostensible finding: Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.  

This should be enough to give any reader pause. The implied reasoning of those who cited the initial study was that Trump’s caustic and seemingly racist rhetoric contributed to a crueler, more discriminatory climate, ripe for hate crimes. If this interpretation is correct, why did Clinton inspire as many, if not more, hate incidents as Trump did? Did calling millions of Americans “deplorables” promote violence?

Probably not. Both of these results rely on comparing counties with rallies to other counties without them. This produces a glaring problem. Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live. And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher. Simply put, no one should be surprised that Orange County, California (population 3.19 million) was home to both more reported hate incidents (5) and Trump rallies (2) than Orange County, Indiana (population 19,840, which had zero of each). 

Nor is it sensible to interpret that one of these differences (hate crimes) is caused by the other (political rallies). Indeed, adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero. The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway. 

How could this happen?

Even if researchers attempt to be unbiased, it is easy for ideology to interfere with the practice of the scientific method. Empirical work requires numerous small assumptions and choices, often without obvious right and wrong options, that collectively affect the findings. The hypotheses that researchers choose to test often reflect their beliefs, and when initial statistical findings do not match the researcher’s gut intuition, it is easy to tweak these choices until the analysis “works.” By comparison, when a result “feels right,” it is easy to conclude the analysis with minimal further checks. In short, falling prey to confirmation bias is easy. Attempting to find errors in a result that, deep down, you want to be true, is hard. Furthermore, the ideological imbalance of academia—where liberals outnumber conservatives six to one—can worsen this. While claims deemed conservative may receive much scrutiny, those that comport with liberal sensibilities are more likely to go unscrutinized.

In principle, this need not have much impact outside academia. A neutral press, acting as a gatekeeper, need not report unquestioningly about every unpublished study. However, like academics, journalists as a profession are overwhelmingly liberal, with four times as many reporters identifying as Democrats than as Republicans. Given how little scrutiny was required to reveal the flaws in the thesis that Trump rallies cause hate incidents, one cannot help but wonder whether its viral status was aided by journalists predisposed to believe its message. Would a study claiming Clinton rallies caused hate crimes to increase by 226 percent have been seized on equally enthusiastically? We are skeptical. Because of this, we have some sympathy for the authors of this study—such errors are typically found during peer review and quietly corrected before publication. Yet, these errors have profoundly different implications when they result in widespread, extraordinary-but-false claims in the popular media. 

Many of Trump’s fiercest critics have proclaimed themselves to be staunch defenders of science in the face of a supposedly rising tide of anti-scientific sentiment. By rushing to promote academic results that are most in line with their own preconceived notions, Trump’s critics risk committing the very error they decry. It is bad for America when Trump expresses falsehoods or unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. News organizations of record shouldn’t do it either.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/34DnWQq
via IFTTT

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

An honest living is one of the best ways to prevent re-offending. But across the country, people with criminal records face more than 10,000 regulations that block them from obtaining a license to work. As an in-depth Washington Post article reveals, these regulations are “often arbitrary and ambiguous,” like denying a license based on one’s “good moral character.” Fortunately, over two dozen states have enacted reforms to pare back these restrictions in recent years. Click here to read the full Post article.

• Suffolk County, N.Y. officials retain nonprofit organization to visit the homes of registered sex offenders and verify their addresses. Registered sex offender: That’s an unconstitutional seizure. District court: Even if the home visits amounted to “seizures,” they were justified under the Fourth Amendment’s special needs doctrine. Second Circuit: Just so. Even though the nonprofit refers noncompliant sex offenders to the police—which sounds a lot like crime control—the main goal of the program is to improve the accuracy of the sex offender registry. Which is a special non-law enforcement need, so the program is A-OK.
• Under federal law, children born outside the U.S. to unmarried noncitizens can automatically gain citizenship if their mother becomes a citizen, but fathers can only pass on citizenship to their out-of-wedlock children if they first legitimate them. But what if the mother is deceased and the only way to legitimate the child is through marriage of the parents? Third Circuit: Creating a system where fathers—but not mothers—are forever precluded from passing on citizenship to their children violates equal protection.
• Allegation: TSA screeners falsely accuse traveler of assault. She spends 18 hours in jail and is charged with 10 crimes, all of which are resolved in her favor after TSA declines to turn over video and the screeners either don’t show up to court or give contradictory testimony. Can she sue? Third Circuit (2017): One can sue when federal law enforcement officers commit intentional torts, like fabricating criminal charges. But screeners aren’t law enforcement, and Congress hasn’t waived sovereign immunity for mere employees. Third Circuit (en banc, over a dissent): Screeners search people. They are law enforcement, and the suit can proceed.
• Man is barred from purchasing a gun but, because of a lapse in the FBI’s background check system, buys one anyway from a federally licensed firearms dealer. Two months later, the man uses the gun to murder nine people in a Charleston, S.C. church. Can the survivors and families of the deceased sue the feds? The Fourth Circuit says yes.
• Did Mississippi officials dilute African Americans’ voting strength in District 22, which includes the Mississippi Delta, when they redrew its legislative boundaries in 2012? (The majority of the district’s voters are African American, but African American-preferred candidates consistently lose there.) Indeed so, says the Fifth Circuit, which violates the Voting Rights Act. The boundaries cannot be used in the November 2019 election. Dissent: “Districting is the politics of politics.” And the district court’s order to redraw the lines to increase black voters by 11% violates the Equal Protection Clause.
• As a Detroit woman is stirring a pot of macaroni on Thanksgiving eve, masked police officers break down her door, handcuff her tightly, and respond thusly when she complains of pain: “[S]hut up, bitch, you shouldn’t be so fat.” In the excessive force lawsuit that ensues, officers invoke qualified immunity. Officers: “Handcuffing that results in bruising does not violate any clearly established constitutional right.” Sixth Circuit: Point of fact, it can. So to trial the case must go.
• Allegation: Detroit woman legally purchases firearm after her home is robbed. Seeking to familiarize herself with it, she fires several rounds from her front porch into the abandoned house next door. Police are called and quickly home in on the woman’s fiancé (despite her loud protestations that she shot the gun), whom they beat and arrest. One cop informs the man he’s “going down for attempted murder of a cop” and writes a report alleging the man fired shots at the cops, though no other officers or evidence corroborate the report. On the morning trial was to begin, the prosecutor learns—for the first time—that an evidence tech’s report contradicts the cop’s report. Case dismissed. Sixth Circuit: No qualified immunity for the cops.
• Chicago man, on Facebook: “Keep pushing me and it won’t end well.” “I’ve given plenty of warnings.” “I swear to Allah and everything I hold dear that I will resort to murder in the next 30 days.” Chicago man, on trial: These “emulations of rap songs” are protected by the First Amendment. Seventh Circuit: They are not.
• Allegation: After car does U-turn to avoid roadblock and woman admits to possessing marijuana, St. Louis police conduct strip and body cavity search on the woman—out of public view but in view of a male officer. (No additional contraband is found, it seems, and the woman is not charged.) Eighth Circuit (with a pair of partial dissents): Her unreasonable search claim can proceed. But she can’t sue for excessive force because there’s no precedent saying officers can’t slam handcuffed and unresisting (if distraught) suspects into hard surfaces. Nor can she sue over the (concededly) inaccurate incident report that police filed.
• Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, are mandatory state bar association dues now unconstitutional? Eighth Circuit: Not at all! You see, Janus was about unions; it didn’t say anything about guilds.
• Thirty-seven-year-old man and 16-year-old girl have sex, which is legal in Nebraska. He records it and shares the video only with her. Eighth Circuit: Which is child porn. Conviction and eight-year sentence upheld. Concurrence: This result is “unseemly and quite possibly unfair” but compelled by Supreme Court precedent. 
• Allegation: Fresno, Calif. police carry out a search warrant, report they seized $50k cash. But according to the targets of the search, they actually seized $150k cash and $125k worth of rare coins. Can the property owners sue? Ninth Circuit (March 2019): No. There’s no precedent saying cops can’t steal things they seize while executing a search warrant. Ninth Circuit (this week, a revised opinion with a new concurrence from Judge M. Smith): Yeah, we got this right. (Head over to California Appellate Report for more.)
• Man becomes convinced that, as a result of mistreatment by a Veterans Affairs medical center, he is entitled to millions of dollars and is the legal owner of the center itself. He is, alas, mistaken, but he makes multiple phone calls in a single day in which he asserts his position to a staffer in terms both vulgar and personal. Does it violate the First Amendment to charge him with violations of Washington state’s telephonic harassment law? Two-thirds of this Ninth Circuit panel says no.
• People who suspect their names have been added to the Terrorist Screening Database can find travel to be a nightmare, but they’re always permitted to seek review by the Department of Homeland Security. Constitutionally sufficient process? Eastern District of Virginia: Well, DHS doesn’t ever actually tell you if you are or were in the database, so no, no it’s not.
• “Honey, you’ve got to read this! The New Mexico Supreme Court just abolished the spousal privil … oh crap.”
• Instead of the will of the people, elections in North Carolina reflect “the carefully crafted will of the map drawer,” says a state trial court, ruling that legislative boundaries drawn by Republican lawmakers violate the state’s constitution. (There will be no appeal.)

In July, Mississippi outlawed veggie burgers—or at least calling them veggie burgers. Which violates the First Amendment! The label—and other banned labels like “meatless meatballs” and “vegan hot dogs”—is not confusing to consumers. Rather, the ban served to protect the meat industry from competition from vegan and vegetarian food companies. But this week, and in response to an IJ lawsuit, officials reversed course, proposing new rules that replace criminal penalties with common sense. Click here for more.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2A0aOH0
via IFTTT

The late Justice Antonin Scalia was nobody’s idea of a gay rights activist. When the Supreme Court struck down a state ban on “homosexual conduct” in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Scalia faulted the majority for embracing “the so-called homosexual agenda.” When the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Scalia denounced the ruling as a “threat to American democracy.”

Scalia’s views on legal protections for gays will be front and center once again next month when the Supreme Court hears a far-reaching case that asks whether anti-gay workplace discrimination is illegal under current federal law. Except this time around, Scalia’s jurisprudence will be favorably cited and employed by the openly gay petitioner and his lawyers.

The case is Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. Gerald Lynn Bostock was employed by Clayton County as a child welfare services coordinator. He claims that he was fired solely on account of his sexual orientation. He argues that such actions by his employer violate federal law.

According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is unlawful for an employer to discriminate against a job applicant or employee “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The question before the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County is whether employment discrimination because of sexual orientation qualifies as employment discrimination “because of…sex.”

In their principal brief to the Supreme Court, Bostock and his lawyers rely in part on Justice Scalia’s unanimous 1998 ruling in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. At issue was whether same-sex workplace harassment violated Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because…of sex.” Scalia held that it did.

“Male on male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,” Scalia acknowledged. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.” The protections of Title VII, Scalia concluded, “must extend to sexual harassment of any kind that meets the statutory requirements.”

Scalia, a self-described textualist, often argued that the plain meaning of a statute should trump the ostensible intentions, purposes, or expectations of the statute’s authors and supporters. That was one of the reasons why Scalia famously rejected the use of legislative history in such statutory cases.

Bostock and his lawyers are now hoping that Scalia-style textualism will help them achieve victory and secure broader legal protections for gay workers nationwide. “In holding that same-sex sexual harassment is actionable under Title VII, the Court in Oncale confirmed that the statute prohibits forms of sex discrimination that Congress may not have envisioned in 1964, and instead goes beyond what was contemplated to cover ‘reasonably comparable evils,'” they told the Court. “Sexual orientation discrimination is clearly such a ‘reasonably comparable evil,’ and is therefore also prohibited.”

Oral arguments in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia will be held on October 8.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ZH1MOk
via IFTTT

Fainting-couch conservatism strikes again: A University of Alabama dean of students is out of a job after conservative media dug up some of his old tweets.

Jamie Riley had dared to criticize the American flag and the police, writing in 2017 that they represent “a systemic history of racism for my people.”

Breitbart decided that this and other tweets of Riley’s merited an article. Reporter Kyle Morris wrote that “a series of resurfaced tweets from Dr. Jamie R. Riley, the University of Alabama’s assistant vice president and dean of students, show he once believed the American flag and police in America are racist.” But the tweets didn’t just resurface on their own—they were publicized by the right-wing news site in order to send a social media mob after Riley.

Just 24 hours later, Riley lost his job. The Crimson White reports:

Jackson Fuentes, press secretary for the UA Student Government Association, confirmed at 4:15 p.m. that Riley is no longer working at the University.

“For us right now, basically all I can tell you is that the University and Dr. Riley have mutually agreed to part ways,” Fuentes said. “So yeah, that’s true, and we do wish him the best.”

In an email at 5:03 p.m., assistant director of the Division of Strategic Communications Chris Bryant released an official statement on behalf of the University confirming Riley’s resignation.

“Dr. Jamie Riley has resigned his position at The University of Alabama by mutual agreement,” Bryant said in the email. “Neither party will have any further comments.”

It seems clear that it was bad publicity from Breitbart that got Riley terminated. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of writing such an article.

Many pundits on the right constantly inveigh against cancel culture: the drive to shame, punish, and ultimately destroy people for having said something trivially offensive at some point. Comedian Dave Chapelle torched cancel culture in his recent Netflix special, and conservatives applauded. The clip of Chapelle scornfully imitating cancellers has been all over right-leaning media for the last two weeks.

I very much agree that cancel culture is bad. (In fact, it’s one of the main themes of my book.) But as long as the right is perfectly willing to enforce its own version of political correctness, it is difficult to to believe that they really agree in principle that you shouldn’t do this kind of thing. If you only defend the cancelled when you agree with them, then you’re not actually against cancelling. You’re just protecting your tribe.

Conservatives, please condemn Breitbart for this hit job and demand the immediate reinstatement of James Riley.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2HQ5FFG
via IFTTT