Category: reason

On Saturday, April 24, for the first time in 40 years, an American president summoned the courage to use the accurate term to describe a century-old war crime.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” President Joe Biden declared, in the White House’s annual message marking the National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.

Previous residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., most brazenly Biden’s former boss Barack Obama, had shied away from using the word genocide to describe the organized Turkish slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians from 1915–1923, despite campaigning piously on the promise to call evil by its proper name. (Donald Trump never made that promise, though George W. Bush did.)

Why the cowardice? Because the subject is considered near taboo in Turkey, due to any whiff of suggestion that the sainted founder of the post-Ottoman country, Kemal Ataturk, might have his fingerprints near a crime scene. Over the years, Ankara has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on increasingly ineffective diplomatic efforts to prevent its fellow NATO members from using the g-word, implicitly threatening to revoke America’s access to the strategically important Incirlik Air Base.

As former U.S. ambassador to Armenia John Marshall Evans—who was encouraged to resign from the State Department after publicly uttering the word “genocide” in conversation with the passionate Armenian-American diaspora—explained to me a decade ago, “Turkey is a hugely important ally, and little landlocked Armenia, population 3 million at best, is never going weigh in those scales in such a way as to even make a showing.” From Washington’s point of view, it was too much potential real-world pain for too little linguistic gain.

So what changed in 2021? Congressional impatience with the increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for one. The House and Senate in late 2019 each overwhelmingly passed, over Trump’s objections, resolutions stating that “it is the policy of the United States to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance.”

Ankara and Washington have been at loggerheads over U.S. support for Syria Kurds (who Turkey regards as terrorist threats); Turkey’s purchase of Russian missiles (which America believes could jeopardize NATO technology secrets), plus Erdoğan’s human rights record, which Biden finds more appalling than his predecessor.

In a December 2019 interview with The New York Times, Biden called Erdoğan an “autocrat” and vowed to take “a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership,” helping them “to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan. Not by a coup but by the electoral process.”

In a television address this weekend, Erdoğan called Biden’s new wording “groundless and unfair,” adding: “We believe that these comments were included in the declaration following pressure from radical Armenian groups and anti-Turkish circles.” Erdoğan also advised his U.S. counterpart to “look in the mirror,” since “we can also talk about what happened to Native Americans, Blacks and in Vietnam.”

Many libertarians and other skeptics of U.S. military adventurism get tetchy when Washington escalates adjectives to describe faraway slaughter. For decades, “humanitarian interventionists” such as Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power and their neoconservative counterparts on the right have used the g-word, and in Power’s case the Armenian genocide recognition explicitly, as a necessary precursor to the use of force. Obama, with Power’s encouragement, used the spectre of a possible “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “mass graves” in Benghazi to justify his disastrous war of choice in Libya.

But the standard for language should be accuracy, not how words might be leveraged into disagreeable policy. One of the reasons that foreign policy “realism” has gotten such a bad name is that all too often it has been conflated (by practitioners as well as commentators) with realpolitik—with the situational ethics and conscience-straining two-facedness required by maneuvering through a fallen world.

In fact, it is interventionism that requires such grubby compromises, as I have argued when writing about Samantha Power and her ilk. We would care much less about the owners of Incirlik Air Base if we stopped using it so damned much. Using precise language undistorted by political necessities—which, to be fair, does not come naturally to the State Department—need not be a trigger to war. After all, Ronald Reagan, the last sitting U.S. president to use the phrase “Armenian genocide,” was able to issue clear-eyed condemnations of several regimes he had zero intention of bombing.

The Biden administration could—but almost certainly won’t—use America’s long-overdue presidential recognition of the Armenian genocide to more firmly decouple language from interventionism, thus freeing up space for more blunt but less fraught international relations. As Thomas Jefferson said in the famous quote, whose overlooked emphasis is mine: “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

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Police officers in Loveland, Colorado, violently arrested a 73-year-old woman with dementia and allegedly dislocated her shoulder. Then they watched body camera footage of the incident and joked about it, as video released today by the woman’s attorney shows.

Surveillance video from the booking area of the Loveland Police Department shows three officers reviewing the footage of the June 26, 2020, arrest of Karen Garner.

“Ready for the pop?” an officer in the video, identified by Garner’s attorneys as Austin Hopp, says to the other officer as they watch the footage.

“What’d you pop?” another officer asks.

“I think it was her shoulder,” Hopp responds.

Garner filed a lawsuit on April 14 alleging that Hopp fractured her arm and dislocated her shoulder after stopping her for allegedly shoplifting $13.88 worth of items from Walmart.

According to the lawsuit, Garner suffers from dementia and sensory aphasia, which makes it difficult for her to communicate and understand other people. Garner was walking home and picking wildflowers. She didn’t initially respond to Hopp’s commands to stop and appeared not to understand him.

“I don’t think you want to play it this way,” Hopp said as she continued to walk away from him. “Do you need to be arrested right now?”

Body camera footage of the incident, released with the lawsuit, shows Hopp then throwing a disoriented and confused Garner to the ground while twisting her arm behind her. “I’m going home,” Garner yells.

The Loveland Police Department has placed Hopp on administrative leave and reassigned Daria Jalali, another officer named in the lawsuit, to administrative duties while it investigates the incident. 

The local district attorney also announced last week that his office is investigating the incident for possible criminal charges.

“I hate it,” Jalali says as they watch the body camera footage together.

“I love it,” Hopp responds.

“I can’t believe I threw a 73-year-old on the ground,” Hopp says elsewhere in the video.

Garner’s lawsuit alleges she did not receive medical care for more than six hours after her arrest.

Loveland police chief Bob Ticer told the Loveland Reporter-Herald last week that police officials did not learn about Garner’s injuries until the lawsuit was filed.

“These videos cannot be unseen or unheard. I am sorry to have to share them with the public,” Sarah Schielke, Garner’s attorney, said in a statement released with the booking video. “But as it often goes with bad police departments, it seems this is the only way to make them change. They have to be exposed. If I didn’t release this, the Loveland Police’s toxic culture of arrogance and entitlement, along with their horrific abuse of the vulnerable and powerless, would carry on, business as usual.”

The Loveland Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The Biden administration announced Sunday that it will send assistance to India, a country whose COVID-19 daily case rate has exceeded a record-setting 350,000 cases. Reports from the country are horrifying: Many hospitals’ oxygen supply has all but run out, and they are being forced to turn away dying patients.

“The United States has identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine that will immediately be made available for India,” said National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne in a press release Sunday. “The U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is funding a substantial expansion of manufacturing capability for BioE, the vaccine manufacturer in India, enabling BioE to ramp up to produce at least 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2022.”

Now the administration is adding an item to that list. Millions of AstraZeneca doses are currently collecting dust in the U.S. because the regulatory state has refused to approve the vaccine. “The U.S. will begin sharing its entire pipeline of vaccines from AstraZeneca once the COVID-19 vaccine clear federal safety reviews,” the Associated Press reported today after President Joe Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone. Up to 60 million doses were expected to head that way.

It’s good to see them finally put to use. But that still raises the question: Why has it taken so long for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve this vaccine, which has already been deployed in over 70 other countries? Indeed, the vaccine still hasn’t been approved here—and India won’t get those shots until it is, even though the majority of the developed world accomplished this months ago.

The United Kingdom and many countries in the European Union rolled out AstraZeneca in December. But the FDA required the company to publish results from a large-scale trial, even though the vaccine had already been shown to be effective around the globe. The company did that on March 24, reporting that the shots are 76 percent effective at stopping symptomatic cases of COVID-19. And yet those life-saving doses have continued to pile up in U.S. warehouses without going into people’s arms, because AstraZeneca has not yet finished jumping through the many hurdles required by the FDA’s application process.

“This is nearly indefensible,” wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm last month. “On the long list of ways that the government has screwed up the COVID-19 response, hoarding lifesaving vaccines that it won’t allow to be used deserves a place at or near the very top.”

Public perception of the vaccine and its approval received no favors in mid-March, just days before the company released their Phase III trial data, when a group of European countries temporarily barred the use of the vaccine over a rare blood-clotting side effect. Seventeen million people had received the vaccine, and 37 developed the reaction—a 0.0002 percent chance. Regulators realized their error and reversed course, noting that the chance of death from the coronavirus is perhaps a more pressing concern.

That didn’t come without a cost. “Earlier this month, a Harris Poll in France found that just 43 percent of respondents trusted the AZ vaccine,” reported Reason‘s Ron Bailey in March. “A new poll by the Elabe Institute, published Tuesday, shows only 20 percent of the French people trusting the vaccine.”

But people in India are being killed at alarming rates. The country saw more than 2,800 COVID deaths yesterday, an enormous spike from previous levels. They do not have the luxury of being so cautious. Whether they receive the vaccine should be left up to the judgment of each individual, and they should have that choice—now.

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Today, the Court GVR’d South Bay III in light of Tandom v. Newsom. At long last, I think the California COVID cases are over. Keep in mind that this cert petition was filed way back on November 24, 2020–the day before Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo was decided. Over the past five months, there has been a revolution in Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence.

By my count, there is still one COVID case remaining from Maine: Calvary Chapel v. Mills. The state waived the response on April 26. It should come up for conference soon, and be GVR’d. At that point, I think we will finally be done with COVID cases.

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) presented a not-even-veiled threat to American Corporations in the New York Post Sunday evening: Support the Republican Party’s policies or face some sort of undescribed punishment.

Rubio doesn’t say “the Republican Party’s policies,” of course. He insists that the GOP’s goals are actually “American values.” If companies resist them and instead embrace “woke politics”—of, say, Major League Baseball pulls the All-Star Game out of Georgia to protest the state’s new voting law—that makes them somehow anti-American.

Rubio’s commentary exhibits nostalgia for a wholly imaginary past where corporations and government were always on the same side about what is good for America—which, coincidentally, was also whatever the GOP stood for. But then, apparently, corporations greedy and stopped caring about Americans and their values:

Corporate America began to view these good jobs, families, communities and even the nation as an afterthought. American workers of all backgrounds suffered as a result. Corporate greed annihilated an entire way of life.

Then a culture shift followed. It became trendy for executives to view themselves as “citizens of the world.” Love of country, free speech and traditional faith and other bedrock American ideals became unfashionable.

Tellingly, the New York Post links the words “culture shift” to a story about CEOs attending a Zoom seminar to discuss how to respond to states considering new voting laws, particularly those who propose making it harder for Americans to vote via new restrictions or identification demands. The Post notes that some of the CEOs came away saying that they’ll reconsidering campaign donations and investments in states where lawmakers pass such laws.

To Rubio, this is apparently un-American. The senator is apparently under the delusion that all the previous political logrolling throughout our history was politically neutral. He also seems to think it was for the benefit of all Americans, not just a select group of connected people who had the ears of Congress.

Rubio opens the piece talking about how “What’s good for GM is good for America” was a “defining adage for the last century, because it was true.” Except that it wasn’t, at least as far as U.S. policy-making is concerned.

It’s true that when GM does well by meeting market needs efficiently, the financial windfall radiated outward and benefited large swathes of the population. Alas, that isn’t all that GM did. For example, it got a bailout from President Barack Obama’s administration, and taxpayers took it in the shorts. The company and the unions got paid; the rest of us got hosed.

Americans do not, in fact, all benefit from federal subsidies and other forms of largesse directed to corporations. Those should be curtailed, because they redirect our tax dollars in ways that help a small group of Americans at the expense of all the rest. That’s bad whether or not corporate leaders hold positions at odds with those of Marco Rubio.

The Republican response to allegedly “woke” politics influencing corporate decision-making has the inadvertent consequence that politicians are actually saying out loud that a company’s treatment by government is dependent on how these companies treat politicians.

Points for honesty, I guess. This has always been the case, right? Corporations and unions influence policies that benefit themselves and often harm potential rivals and upstarts by introducing regulatory barriers and various occupational licensing demands that punish competitors, especially overseas ones. And the politicians are rewarded with donations.

In the meantime, corporate leaders, athletes, and celebrities have the same First Amendment rights as every other American, and it’s flat-out grotesque for politicians to threaten punishments because of those disagreements.

By all means, Rubio (and everybody else) should feel to critique the hypocrisy of American corporations exercising their free speech and free association rights here while acquiescing to China’s totalitarian rule in order to do business there. Rubio spends several graphs criticizing Facebook and other countries who do just that.

Alas, Rubio thinks the solution is a trade war with China—and he seems to be using this attack on “woke” corporations to push that part of his policy agenda as well. Meanwhile, he’s espousing ideas that would make America more like China.  “America’s laws should keep our nation’s corporations firmly ordered to our national common good,” he creepily concludes. Senator, if you’re going to attack Mark Zuckerberg for cozying up to Xi Jinping, maybe you should try harder not to sound like a Chinese dictator.

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