Category: reason

Upload opens with what appears to be a timeshare sales pitch for a fancy resort surrounded by a lush forest and beautiful lake. “You did well. You deserve … Lake View (by Horizen),” a voiceover tells the viewer.

The sales pitch isn’t for a typical summer vacation. It’s for virtual heaven, a digital afterlife that serves as the setting for Upload‘s first season. Mixing sci-fi, satire, romance, and mystery, the Amazon Prime show depicts a near future in which we’ve finally developed the technological capacity to upload our full minds into virtual worlds. Heaven is a place on Earth—a server room with carefully controlled temperatures.

In the show’s beginning, it’s just a one-way trip (though attempts to reverse the process are a subplot). Uploading is presented and sold to consumers as an eternal vacation for those near death or simply no longer interested in living, assuming they can afford it.

Upload focuses on both sides of the mortal divide, advancing interesting ideas about the ethics of a manmade afterlife, who has access to it, and who controls it. We meet digital inhabitants as well as living relatives and customer service representatives. The mix of satire, intrigue, and mortality are at turns darkly funny, clever, gimmicky, and warm.

The 10-episode first season is available now for binge-watching and a second season has already been ordered. The show revolves primarily around Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), a hot up-and-coming programmer who, after a self-driving car crash, uploads to Lake View in a darkly humorous scene that goes to shocking lengths to demonstrate the trip to “paradise” will be one way.

As he settles into “life” at Lake View, Nathan is introduced to his “angel,” Nora Antony (Andy Allo). Nora is actually a customer service representative for Horizen working as a drone in a brick warehouse office, where she spends all day at a computer monitoring and attending to the needs of Nathan and other Horizen clients. They are both young and attractive, and a romantic connection develops in violation of company regulations.

Complicating matters further is Nathan’s somewhat vapid, wealthy, still-very-much alive girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), who is bankrolling Nathan’s stay at Lake View and therefore has complete power over his afterlife experience. This is played for both laughs and serves as a central conflict for the entire first season.

The friction between Ingrid and Nathan also speaks to a recurring ethical issue in Upload‘s presentation of a digital afterlife: Who, exactly, are these interpretations of heaven for and who are the actual customers? There are, of course, costs to maintaining a digital afterlife, and Horizen (and other companies and brands with competing services) require ongoing payments. Plenty of gimmicky jokes surround afterlife upselling and micropayments. Even in the afterlife, the hotel room minibar isn’t free, and Taco Bell still wants to try to sell you food. People who uploaded either saved money in advance, or their living loved ones are bearing the financial burdens.

When Nathan inevitably makes Ingrid angry, she makes his experience of digital heaven a little hellish. One of Nathan’s fellow afterlifers is a young boy who is stuck as a child not by his own choice, but because his surviving parents won’t allow him to upgrade into an “adult” avatar.

This is all played for humor and hijinks—one plot revolves around Nathan and Dylan accessing an afterlife “gray market” where Dylan attempts to hack his own avatar to grow up. But nobody finds it creepy, odd, or problematic that it’s Dylan’s parents and not Dylan who gets to decide what age he’ll be…possibly for all eternity. Another ongoing plot revolves around Nora attempting to convince her skeptical father to commit to uploading when he dies. Nora’s mom died before the advent of uploading, and her dad would rather die a conventional death and possibly be reunited with her in conventional heaven (which he believes actually exists) than upload. This prospect of losing both her mom and her dad fills Nora with despair.

Much of Upload is about how unwilling humans might be to accept the finality of death in a world where they don’t have to. But while the living are drawn to the prospect of not dying, the uploaded dead are consigned to wondering whether virtual eternity sticks them in a pattern of existence that, despite its supposed luxury, mimics and pales in comparison to their former lives.

Upload also presents the virtual afterlife through the filters of class resentment and tech skepticism. People who can’t afford Horizen’s top options are relegated to stark, empty basement rooms on pay-as-you-go plans. Protesters in the real world picket with signs that insist that uploading should be treated as a human right. Horizen apparently treats and pays its workers poorly, though there’s little sign that Nora struggles all that much other than having to take mass transit, live in her NYC apartment with a roommate, and work for a terrible sitcom boss (Upload is created by The Office’s Greg Daniels, and that former show’s DNA is visible every time we visit Nora at work). To the extent there is a revolution brewing against this brave new world, it’s being plotted by the neo-Luddite “Luds,” who we likely won’t see much of until the second season.

While feeling vaguely anti-tech and “late-capitalist,” the vibe is more mundane evil than cruel. Lake View, scenes of which were shot in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains, is a complex technological undertaking and thus prone to glitching. Its a boutique vision of “heaven” only if you like the idea of spending eternity in an occasionally pixelated simulacrum of a midcentury Catskills resort. But we also learn that there are other options when Nathan explores where his digital self might reside if things with Ingrid get rocky.

Despite Lake View’s many deficiencies, Upload also asks the viewer to feel sad and angry that many people can’t afford to go there when they die. This is a recurring criticism dished by a certain type of tech critic: that newly introduced technologies—particularly medical technologies—are available first to only the wealthy. While history shows that the rich get new stuff faster, it also tells us that valuable technological developments scale up rapidly and come down in price. We pay the same amounts for computers and televisions as we did two decades ago and yet get so much more value. There are indications in Upload that similar advancements are taking place in the afterlife tech sector, and that people may one day be able to design their own afterlives. I don’t know about you, but I want a heaven designed by Wizards of the Coast, thanks.

Where will Upload take this conflict? The Good Place similarly explored the ethics of the afterlife and what people “deserve” when they die, and viewers concerned about social and economic disparities determining a person’s quality of afterlife likely enjoyed how The Good Place tackled those questions. If Upload‘s later seasons also wallow in class resentment, the show will miss interesting storytelling opportunities. Hopefully, Greg Daniels et al. resist the temptation to give us a bloodless comedy version of Westworld or Altered Carbon and instead focus on how people communicate between the physical life and the virtual afterlife, and whether technological innovation can flatten inequilaity—not by stacking everybody in a bland version of “rich people heaven,” but by giving people the tools to define their own personal heavens.

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Over the past three decades, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has seen its taxpayer-funded budget doubled. Then doubled again. Then doubled again. And then nearly doubled once more.

But spending nearly 14 times as much as we did in 1987 on the agency whose mission statement says it “saves lives and protects people from health threats” did not, apparently, help the CDC combat the emergence of the biggest disease threat America has faced in a century. In fact, a new report argues, inflating the CDC’s budget may have weakened the agency’s ability to handle its core responsibility by giving rise to mission creep and bureaucratic malaise.

“The CDC devolved into an agency incapable of adequately addressing the serious threat posed by infectious disease, particularly novel diseases for which there is little information about risk, spread, and treatment,” says Michelle Minton, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.

Minton is the author of a newly released study showing just how far the CDC has strayed from its core mission. In addition to combating dangerous infectious diseases like HIV and malaria, the CDC now also studies alcohol and tobacco use, athletic injuries, traffic accidents, and gun violence. While those things can indeed be important factors to public health, Minton notes, they don’t seem to fall within the agency’s original mission.

They do, however, explain why the CDC’s budget has ballooned from $590 million in 1987 to more than $8 billion last year. If the agency had grown with inflation since 1987, it would have a budget of about $1.3 billion today. Total federal spending, meanwhile, has grown from a hair over $1 trillion in 1987 to $4.4 trillion last year—which means that the CDC’s budget has grown faster the government’s overall spending.

Has all that extra funding made America safer? In 2019, the CDC spent $1.1 billion on its National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which focuses on ailments like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The CEI report notes that there are at least 10 other federally funded agencies—mostly within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—engaged in similar health and wellness research.

Instead of spending billions of dollars in recent years to duplicate work being done by other federal agencies, hindsight now suggests that the CDC should have spent more time and money researching emergent influenza-like infectious diseases, a project that received just $185 million in funding last year. This is a failure of priority-setting by both the CDC and Congress, which ultimately controls the purse strings.

Instead, the CDC was doing things like spending $1.75 million on the creation of a “Hollywood liaison” whose job was to help movies and TV shows write more accurate storylines about infectious diseases. A 2007 report published by the office of late Sen. Tom Coburn (R–Okla.) found that the CDC funded the position with money originally earmarked for combating bioterrorism and appointed a semi-retired employee to run the office. The same report calls out the CDC for lavish spending on a new headquarters and visitor center that opened in 2006. The agency blew through more than $10 million in new office furniture and built a $200,000 fitness center and $30,000 sauna on site.

It would be one thing if the CDC was merely wasting money on saunas and duplicative research, but the agency has also been pushing agendas that were counterproductive to public health. In the months before the coronavirus pandemic hit, the CDC was on the front lines of a “war on vaping” that came in response to a brief panic over deaths caused by black market THC vape pens.

“Even though it was clear early on that vaping-related lung injuries overwhelmingly involved black-market cannabis products, the CDC repeatedly intimated that legal, nicotine-delivering e-cigarettes might kill you,” Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reported in March. “That message endangered public health by implying that people—teenagers as well as adults—would be better off smoking, which is demonstrably not true.”

The nonsensical war on vaping may have tarnished the CDC’s credibility on the eve of a crisis that would require the public to trust policymakers. And when the coronavirus did hit, the CDC only confirmed that it should not be trusted to make important decisions by forbidding private labs from developing tests for COVID-19. The federal agency’s monopoly on testing supplies produced inaccurate tests that had to be discarded en masse.

The initial testing delay has certainly cost lives. It is also at least partially to blame for the severe quarantine policies that have tipped the American economy into a deep recession—without adequate testing, there was little else for policymakers to do except close the country in the hopes of slowing the disease’s spread.

The CDC should have done better, given the resources allocated to it during the past few decades. That those resources were squandered is a matter of life and death for many Americans, and the people responsible should be held to account.

And, no, the CDC’s budget was not cut by the Trump administration—as the agency’s defenders have claimed. Although Trump did call for budget cuts to the CDC in each of his proposed budgets since taking office, Congress never approved those proposals.

Indeed, Congress has been stuffing more money down the CDC’s throat on an almost annual basis for the past three decades—with little to show for it when the need truly arose.

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What will the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown of our society mean for the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, refugees, and asylum seekers who apply annually to become Americans? Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 in part by vowing to “build a wall,” deport all unauthorized residents, and massively reduce the number of people welcomed here legally.

COVID-19, which has its origins in Wuhan, China, may help the president to deliver fully on his campaign promises. Is the mythology of America as a nation of immigrants coming to an end?

A deputy national editor at The New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965. The book begins at another dark moment in American immigration policy when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States for the next 40 years. It tells the story of the decadeslong battle that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. And yet almost nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would open the door once again to large numbers of new immigrants—including Yang’s family, who came here from Taiwan in the 1970s.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Yang in early March and again in May to discuss what her book and personal story can teach us about immigration policy in the midst of a pandemic.

Edited by John Osterhoudt, intro and bridge by Lex Villena

Photos: Immigrants arriving, Everett Collection/Newscom; Wall Photo, ID 152963524 © Alexanderphoto7/Dreamstime.com; Trump speaking, Stefani Reynolds/CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; Johnson signing, LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okam/Yoichi Okam—LBJ Library via CNP/Newscom

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I always very much appreciate the work of Stanford Law School Prof. Michael McConnell, one of the very top Religion Clauses scholars in the nation, and am thus delighted to pass along this guest post on the Supreme Court’s ministerial exception oral arguments. (Note that he and I signed the same amicus brief in the case; note also that his and Doug Laycock’s names are quite appropriately listed at the beginning of the signatories’ list, and the rest are in alphabetical order.)

Monday’s argument in the ministerial exception cases, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, made me realize the cases are more difficult than I had originally thought. Not that the outcome is really in doubt. Especially in light of the Alito-Kagan concurrence in Hosanna-Tabor, there seems to be broad agreement that religious schools have a First Amendment right to choose who will teach the faith to the next generation. But neither side put forward an analytical framework for future cases that gained much traction.

[1.] This is a case that never should have come to the Court. Hosanna-Tabor, a unanimous decision, involved a teacher whose function was almost indistinguishable from that of Morrissey-Berru and Biel, except as to factors, such as title, that should not make a difference (especially under the Alito-Kagan concurrence). The Ninth Circuit decisions in favor of the teachers and against the religious schools appear to have been motivated more by resistance to Hosanna-Tabor than to genuine differences in the cases—the ideological mirror image of the Fifth Circuit’s narrow factual distinction of Whole Woman’s Health in this year’s abortion clinic cases. In ordinary times, we should expect the Courts of Appeals to take their cue from a unanimous Supreme Court, not to confine the Court’s decision to its specific facts.

[2.] Our system of case-by-case constitutional adjudication works best when the case under review itself raises the difficult fault-line issues that need clarification. It does not work well when the case itself is straightforward and the disagreement is over hypotheticals. There is a reason that Article III is confined to actual cases and controversies. Monday’s argument was a splendid illustration of the pitfalls of adjudication by hypothetical.

[3.] The defects in the teachers’ “formalistic” test (their term), based on title and training, were most evident.

Chief Justice Roberts focused (at 54) on the problem that the formal-title approach is manipulable: “if you want broad protection, you just start handing out titles to everybody.” This is a serious problem. It is much less costly to switch titles than to change the responsibilities of a job—even assuming that religious institutions are spending their time trying to avoid application of employment discrimination laws.

But in my opinion, the more serious issue is that different religious faiths have different attitudes toward titles, often for theological reasons. My own denomination, Presbyterianism, deliberately abandoned the title of “priest” to describe the worship leader of the congregation, substituting the less-sacerdotal title of “teaching elder,” precisely because of the Reformed Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

Quakers have no ordained clergy at all, but this does not mean they do not have religious leaders or persons performing religious functions. Our Founders, recognizing that Quakers have no “ministers” as such, framed legislation in terms that allowed that denomination to make good-faith judgments for itself about its religious functions.

The term “rabbi” sounds religious to modern ears, but I am told the Hebrew just means “teacher.” In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, young men of good standing in the Church become priests in the Aaronic order at age 12, after going through an ordination ceremony involving the laying on of hands. That does not mean every task they might perform in the Church is a “ministerial” function.

Imams are worship leaders, but in most Islamic communities are not specially trained or ordained. It would be wrong to base constitutional categories on the title on the nametag, when the idea of title varies so widely among faiths.

At one point in the argument, counsel for the teachers, my friend and Stanford colleague Jeff Fisher, seemed to recognize the difficulty. Faced with challenging questions from the Justices about the formal-title rule, he stated that that “we wouldn’t rely solely on titles” and that “[f]unction should be part of the analysis to make sure that you’re not disadvantaging minority religions” (56, 80). Just so. Title might be part of the analysis, so long as consideration of title is sensitive to the particular ecclesiastical context. But it cannot be a “test.”

Respondents’ alternative formalism—an emphasis on training—would be even worse. Controversy over the need (or not) for formal religious training was one of the most prominent flashpoints in the struggle for disestablishment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Old-line Congregationalists (among others) placed great weight on having a “learned clergy,” and worried that unschooled zealots would lead the flock to heretical extremes of “enthusiasm.” Followers of the First Great Awakening disdained professional clergy (whom they called “hireling priests”) and insisted that the gospel must be advanced by preachers who had experienced the saving grace of Jesus Christ, regardless of education. Let us not reintroduce establishmentarian distinctions today that were discarded at the time of the first disestablishments.

The Respondents propounded these formalistic distinctions in a commendable attempt to keep the courts out of the business of making theologically-sensitive, context-specific judgments about religious roles. But their attempt to craft crisp-and-clear criteria ended up treating different religious traditions differently, which violates a core principle of the Religion Clauses.

For reasons explained by Justices Alito and Kagan in their Hosanna-Tabor concurrence, attempts of the formalist variety do not map well onto America’s religious diversity. The problem came to a head during oral argument, when Justice Alito asked Jeff Fisher whether his formal-title test would cover a full-time religion teacher who teaches religion exclusively, but who has no formal title or religious training. Fisher’s response? “That person would probably not be a minister.” (72). This, Justice Kagan said (at 81) “surprised” her. (That is what passes for strong language among the Justices.)

But that would be the inevitable (and unconstitutional) consequence of making title or training a prerequisite for ministerial status: If a religious group doesn’t use the right title or provide the right training, then the government can decide who will, as Justice Kagan said (at 82), “teach religion and … bring up the next generation in important understandings of religious doctrine and practice.”

[4.] Counsel for the schools, my friend Eric Rassbach, got into hot water by sticking to a test of “important religious functions” (language used in both the unanimous opinion in Hosanna-Tabor and the Alito-Kagan concurrence).  He was barraged by questions, even by Justices seemingly sympathetic to his ultimate position, about how courts can determine what religious functions are “important.”

This is a concern of long standing, and there is no clear answer. Justice Scalia reminded the Court that there is a difference between the right to be married in a church and the “practice of throwing rice at church weddings.” (Employment Div. v. Smith.) But how would an outsider know which steps in the preparation of food are “important” to ensure that the meal is kosher? It may even vary from one Jewish community to another. That is why Justice Brennan objected to the requirement of “centrality” in Free Exercise Clause cases. (Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Ass’n.)

Listening to these questions and seeing the inability of able counsel to deal with most of them, it became clear (at least to me) that the Court should not attempt in this case to draw the line. There is no serious doubt that teaching religion on a regular basis to young children is an important religious function. No Justice seemed to doubt that.

Moreover, there are lots of other easy cases out there. Justice Alito’s concurrence in Hosanna-Tabor identified a few—leading the organization, conducting worship services or rituals, and serving as a messenger or teacher of the faith. If such functions are a meaningful part of an employee’s job, there is no need for judicial second-guessing: That person is a “minister.” (Or at least, that person is within the doctrine. I hope the Court will provide a more inclusive terminology.) The large majority of cases under the ministerial exception doctrine over the last three decades have fallen in these easy categories.

The most helpful thing the Court could do at this juncture is to endorse the Alito-Kagan concurrence, thus resolving the easy cases, and not attempt to analyze the more difficult ones in advance or in the abstract. That is the job of the lower courts (assuming they get over any spirit of resistance to the fundamentals of Hosanna-Tabor). Let the cases percolate; let lower courts distinguish one fact pattern from another.

At this point, we don’t know what cases will present themselves. Different functions have different significance in different traditions. Even the same job may be at the core of one congregation’s religious mission—but not another’s. In the church I grew up in, for example, the music director was possibly the most important person in the church for teaching church history and doctrine in way that children and teenagers could appreciate. (I hope you are reading this from heaven, Helen Wick!) In another church, the choir director might be simply someone to teach kids how to sing on pitch. It all depends. That is why the Court should not rush in to supply answers in advance of real cases.

Another reason not to try to answer hard cases in advance is that they may not arise as often as the legal imagination imagines. The Justice rightly worried, for example, about nurses in hospitals run by religious denominations. They (or at least some of them) might present hard line-drawing problems.

But to my knowledge, in the three decades the ministerial exemption has been recognized in the lower courts, not a single hospital has claimed that its nurses are ministers. One reason may be that faith communities care (more than anyone else) about their own religious organization and self-understanding. It would feel creepy for a religious group to call an employee a minister who does not perform an important religious function, just for the purpose of thwarting the anti-discrimination laws. I am not saying it will never happen—just that hard hypotheticals may outnumber real-world controversies. (That has been true of the even harder line-drawing problem of the definition of “religion” under the First Amendment. I bet there have been fifty law review articles for every actual case of a borderline claim to be a “religion.”)

[5.[ One point of notable agreement from yesterday’s argument was abandoning the term “ministerial exception,” and replacing it with a term like “ecclesiastical immunity.” As I explained in an amicus brief, and as Justice Alito emphasized yesterday, that change would be an improvement. Few non-Protestant faiths use the term “minister” for those who teach their faith and guide their choices, and the law’s reliance on it has resulted in some discrimination against minority groups.

Further, the doctrine is not a mere “exception” from certain statutory regimes, but rather a deeper First Amendment “immunity” from state entanglement in core internal church affairs. The Court should take this chance to say so.

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Did Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, suggest that his boss might try to unilaterally (and illegally) reschedule this fall’s presidential election? That’s the way The New York Times portrayed Kushner’s comments, but it is not a fair interpretation.

The Times reports that Kushner “refused on Tuesday to rule out postponing the presidential election in November, a comment that fed directly into Democratic concerns that President Trump might use the coronavirus crisis to delay or delegitimize the contest and one that contradicted Mr. Trump himself.” The headline: “Kushner, Law Aside, Doesn’t Rule Out Delaying 2020 Election.” The subtitle: “The opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held, but his comment played into the concerns of President Trump’s detractors.”

Here is the relevant exchange from Kushner’s interview with Time magazine White House correspondent Brian Bennett:

Bennett: Is there any scenario, including a second outbreak in the fall, where the elections move past November 3rd?

Kushner: That’s too far in the future to tell. Nothing that I’m aware of now, but again, our focus right now is just on getting the country—

Bennett: Will [unintelligible] commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd?

Kushner (laughing): It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other. But right now, that’s the plan, and again, hopefully, by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again. I really believe that once America opens up, it will be very hard for America to ever lock down again.

Note that it was Bennett, not Kushner, who suggested the election might be delayed, and it was Bennett who suggested that the president has the power to do that. Why else ask a representative of the White House to “commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd”?

Far from agreeing with Bennett’s premise, Kushner said, “It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other.” The Times story omits the first part of that sentence, making it seem like Kushner was asserting a power he was actually disclaiming. Maybe Kushner meant that the timing of the election is Trump’s decision, but there is no evidence to support that interpretation, other than the suspicion that the president is eager to assert dictatorial powers for his own political benefit in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some things Trump has said—in particular, his dubious assertion of “total” authority over the imposition and lifting of state lockdowns—have reinforced that view. But in practice, he has not actually tried to override state and local responses to the epidemic. To the contrary, many of his critics on the left have argued that the Trump administration should have asserted more authority in this area.

In any case, Trump has explicitly rejected the idea that the epidemic might force a delay of the presidential election. “Are you taking steps to ensure that the general election will happen even if this pandemic has reemerged or hasn’t gone away?” a reporter asked the president during a press briefing last month. Trump’s reply: “The general election will happen on November 3rd.”

In this context, it is rather puzzling that Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman thought it was necessary to remind us that “the opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held,” since “even the president himself does not have the authority to unilaterally postpone Election Day, which by law takes place the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” Their explanation for that civics lesson is a model of anti-Trump hostility masquerading as reporting:

Mr. Kushner’s comment raised alarms both because of the expansive power Mr. Trump has conferred on members of his family who serve in his administration and because it played into the worst anxieties of Mr. Trump’s detractors—that the president would begin to question the validity of the election if he feared he was going to lose.

The presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., gave voice to those concerns at a virtual fund-raiser last month. “Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow—come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” he said.

For the president’s most vociferous opponents, pretty much anything he or his underlings say “raise[s] alarms.” When those alarms are false, as this one seems to be, the job of serious reporters is not to amplify them but to present the relevant facts.

In the 10th paragraph of the story, we get this response from Kushner:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Kushner sought to clarify his earlier interview. “I have not been involved in, nor am I aware of, any discussions about trying to change the date of the presidential election,” he said. A White House official said Mr. Kushner was fully aware that the date was set by federal law.

In other words, the whole premise of the Times story, which was based on Kushner’s purported “hedge about the date of the election” (as Karni and Haberman put it), seems to be fundamentally faulty.

Last month, Haberman, who covers the White House for the Times, co-wrote an opinion piece disguised as a news story that portrayed Trump as vain, petty, irresponsible, and self-obsessed. While I think that description, which was based on a content analysis of Trump’s comments during COVID-19 briefings, is pretty accurate, the president’s supporters probably would disagree. That sort of blatant bias, along with the subtler but still obvious bias epitomized by the Kushner story, shows that the president is right to view many of the reporters who cover him as political opponents.

That reality does not mean all of Trump’s frequently unhinged complaints about the press are valid. There is a crucial distinction between reporting facts that make the president uncomfortable and manufacturing facts to fit a preconceived view of him. Does the Times understand the difference?

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