Category: reason

Donald Trump began his presidency by asserting, based on “alternative facts,” that he had attracted “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” He is ending his presidency by averring that Saturday’s pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., attracted more than 1 million people. And just as he claimed that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 if it weren’t for “the millions of people who voted illegally,” he is now insisting that the Democrats stole this year’s presidential election by altering “millions of ballots.”

These are fitting bookends for a president who often seems to live in a parallel universe shaped by his ego’s demands. While Trump’s fantasies about massive election fraud may be more consequential than his fictitious crowd numbers, both kinds of misrepresentations reflect his need to twist reality into grotesque but self-flattering shapes. While that tendency is often amusing, it is also more than a little disturbing to anyone who thinks truth should count for something in political debates.

The president’s endorsement of the claim that “more than a MILLION people showed up to support this President” took the form of a retweet. But White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany made the same claim directly. “AMAZING!” she tweeted on Saturday. “More than one MILLION marchers for President @realDonaldTrump descend on the swamp in support.”

It would indeed be amazing, if it were true. Trump himself put the size of the crowd in the “hundreds of thousands” later the same day. But he also said “tens of thousands.” The Washington Post said McEnany was “vastly exaggerating the crowd size.” The Post put the number of participants in the “thousands,” as did The New York Times and Fox News. USA Today went with “tens of thousands.” So did conservative columnist Miranda Devine in a New York Post piece declaring the victory of “Trumpism.” Voice of America reported that “it is not clear how many people turned up in Washington, and the city’s police department does not estimate crowd sizes.”

According to ridership data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, rail use was slightly higher on the day of the rally than it was the previous Saturday (80,000 vs. 77,000), while bus use was slightly lower (137,000 vs. 142,000). Those numbers would not capture people who drove in for the rally and then drove out without using public transit. But “more than one MILLION” visitors, or even “hundreds of thousands,” should have had a more noticeable impact on transit use, especially since parking was restricted ahead of time.

Although there is a big difference between “tens of thousands” and “more than a MILLION,” Trump has embraced both estimates. But as with his claims about election fraud—the main motivation for Saturday’s rally—many of his supporters seem to think actual numbers are less important than the sentiment underlying them.

“You just had to see the enthusiastic cheer of tens of thousands of pro-Trump protesters who flocked to Washington, DC, over the weekend to understand it doesn’t really matter what the final electoral vote tally is: Trumpism has won,” Devine writes. “Even if, as seems probable, Joe Biden ends up living in the White House, and inviting his son Hunter to dinner with new business prospects from China, the corrupt bipartisan globalist establishment is not back in the ascendancy.”

Doesn’t it sort of matter whether Biden was duly elected president or, as Trump still maintains, stole the election through a massive criminal conspiracy? “Even if there was no skulduggery, the Trump campaign lawsuits come to nothing and the Dominion voting machines and their suspicious-sounding software get a clean bill of health, it’s a service to public trust for the Trump campaign to go through a process that is legal and accounted for within the Constitution,” DeVine says. “If there has been no fraud or miscounting, then public faith will be restored in the integrity of our elections going forward. That is a good thing which Biden should embrace if he really believes in unity and healing.”

Yet the president is hardly serving the cause of “unity and healing” by asserting, over and over again without evidence, that he actually won the election, which according to him was “rigged” by systematic fraud involving “millions of ballots.” Whether or not that’s true is of more than passing interest to Americans concerned about “the integrity of our elections.” And if it’s not true, what does that say about a man who would casually engage in such reckless accusations? Whatever you may think of “the corrupt bipartisan globalist establishment,” the fabulism that is inseparable from Trumpism makes it impossible to have a meaningful discussion about that subject, or anything else.

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Class 25: Equal Protection IV: Sex Discrimination

• Frontiero v. Richardson (1107-1114)
• Craig v. Boren (1114-1119)
• United States v. Virginia (1119-1133)

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The ordinance:

Speakers [during the public comment period] shall observe the commonly accepted rules of courtesy, decorum, dignity and good taste and shall not use foul language, display unacceptable behavior, or be disruptive of the proceedings….

Any person making offensive, insulting, threatening, insolent, slanderous or obscene remarks or gestures, or who become boisterous, or who makes threats against any person or against public order, and security while in the Board Room, either while speaking at the podium or as a member of the audience, shall be forthwith removed at the direction of the presiding office.

Any person removed from a public meeting at the direction of the presiding officer may be charged with disorderly conduct in accordance with New York State Penal Law Section 240.20.

Judge Gary R. Brown (E.D.N.Y.) concluded that this violated speakers’ rights, largely because many of the terms were unconstitutionally vague. If this were a moot court problem, the judge mentioned, it would be condemned as too easy. (I’m paraphrasing here, based on what I heard at the argument.)

I think a clearer rule might well be constitutional; a public comment period at a meeting is generally viewed as a “limited public forum,” where reasonable, viewpoint-neutral restrictions are permissible. It’s possible that a flat ban on the use of vulgarities, for instance, might be constitutional. (Truly threatening remarks, of course, can also be banned, and can indeed be criminalized in general, not just in a limited public forum.)

But this set of restrictions, the court held, didn’t qualify; the court therefore issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the ordinance. If a written order is issued, I’ll add a link.

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So voters repudiate President Donald Trump yet refuse to embrace the Democratic Party, while also passing some freedom-friendly ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, the noisy center of American politics these past five years characteristically refuses to concede, and concocts increasingly implausible conspiracy theories attempting to explain away his loss. Where does that leave the modern GOP, and whatever vaguely libertarian muscle memory it may have buried somewhere?

That discussion takes up the second half of this week’s Reason Roundtable. The front end is devoted to exploring the difference between Trump’s and Joe Biden’s COVID-19 policies, the wonderful news of another vaccine, and the less salutary news of widespread infection and hospitalization increases all around the country. The phrase “Gadsden Flag mankini” is invoked.

Speaking of which: Got questions for Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward? Please email them to podcasts@reason.com before December 1, and we will try to get to each and every one of them during our annual Webathon, which begins at the end of this month. You’ll be glad you did!

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music: “Day Bird” by Broke for Free

Relevant links from the show:

“Moderna’s Preliminary Results Indicate That Its COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective,” by Ronald Bailey

“Masks Are a Tool, Not a Panacea,” by Ronald Bailey

“Trump Touts Operation Warp Speed’s COVID-19 Successes,” by Ronald Bailey

“Biden Has a Plan for a New National ‘Supply Commander,’” by Max Gulker

“New York, Shamefully, on the Verge of Shuttering Public Schools,” by Matt Welch

“Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Death Forecast Looks Less Plausible Every Day,” by Jacob Sullum

“Here Come the New Lockdowns,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New COVID-19 Restrictions on Private Home Gatherings Violate Personal Liberty,” by Robby Soave

“Will Biden Use the Broad Pandemic-Fighting Powers Originally Claimed by Trump?” by Christian Britschgi

“Don’t Buy the Debunked Dominion Voting Machine Conspiracy Theory,” by Eric Boehm

“The Supreme Court Won’t Save Trump,” by Damon Root

“‘I Won the Election,’ Tweets Trump as Legal Losses Stack Up,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“No, Trump Did Not Concede the Election (Even Briefly),” by Jacob Sullum

“California Voters Rebuked Their Governor, Legislators at the Ballot Box,” by Steven Greenhut

“Trump Lost in Part Because 2016 Third-Party Voters Heavily Preferred Biden,” by Matt Welch

“Mike Pompeo Jokes, Hopefully, About ‘a Smooth Transition To a Second Trump Administration,’” by Christian Britschgi

“Would a Less-Nativist Republican Have Won in 2020?” by Shikha Dalmia

“Before Drug Prohibition, There Was the War on Calico,” by Virginia Postrel

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Before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man who a white police officer shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Brown’s death helped fuel the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement, a response to the too often ignored problem of police violence in black communities.

In contrast to other police killings that have energized Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests—including that of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot while wielding a plastic gun; of Eric Garner, who died while an officer held him in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes; and of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that there’s no reason to believe that by shooting Brown, Wilson was acting unreasonably, because Wilson was under attack.

“Hands Up. Don’t Shoot,” a line derived from accounts of Brown’s final words, has been a rallying cry at protests against police violence. But Michael Brown is unlikely to have spoken those words. An exhaustive Department of Justice report concluded that the claim that “Brown held his hands up in clear surrender” came from sources who later “acknowledged that they didn’t actually witness the shooting, but rather repeated what others told them.” And that account was “inconsistent with the physical evidence,” which instead corroborated Officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him and tried to grab his gun. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum concluded in 2015, “Wilson’s use of deadly force probably was legally justified.”

Writer and filmmaker Shelby Steele went to Ferguson to investigate the meaning of Brown’s death and the reaction that it inspired. His new documentary, a collaboration with his son Eli, is called What Killed Michael Brown?

Born in Chicago in 1946, Steele, a former college professor who specialized in Russian literature, is the son of a truck driver and the grandson of a slave. His views on how to correct America’s racial injustices were deeply influenced by his experiences in the late 1960s and early ’70s working in a poverty program in East St. Louis. Steele believes, provocatively, that what killed Michael Brown is the “liberalism that put him in public housing, that expanded welfare payments so that his family broke up, the fatherless home, the terrible education, terrible schools, terrible public housing, uh, the destructive school busing.” In place of today’s increasing focus on identity politics, Steele believes we need to emphasize citizenship and the experiences we have in common if we are to deliver fully on America’s promise as a land of opportunity.

Listen to the full podcast interview here.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by John Osterhoudt. Additional graphics by Isaac Reese.

Music: “Calling (Instrumental),” by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License

Photos: Everett Collection/Newscom; Emilee Mcgovern/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Rudoff/Polaris/Newscom; Javier Galeano/Polaris/Newscom; Imagespace/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Seth Herald/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Stephanie Keith/Polaris/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Nigro/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Imagespace/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Circa Images/Newscom; Joe Brusky/Flickr/Creative Commons; Elvert Barnes/Flickr/Creative Commons; Tim Dennell/Flickr/Creatives Commons; Joe Brusky/Flickr/Creative Commons; Fibonacci Blue/Flickr/Creative Commons; GPA Photo Archive/Flickr/Creative Commons

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Big Sky. ABC. Tuesday, November 17, 10 p.m.

A few weeks back, in a review of HBO’s The Undoing, I wrote of David E. Kelley’s “amazing transformation” from the ratings-restrained world of broadcast television to cable, where he’s turned out a string of intelligent and exciting suspense series unequaled by any another producer I can think of in the history of the medium.” It seems I was a little premature—not about The Undoing, which is a brilliant piece of work—but about Kelley’s ability to work within the constraints of broadcast TV. Big Sky, his new ABC series, is a muzzle-velocity suspense drama that’s easily the best broadcast show of 2020.

Unlike Kelley’s other recent works, which use violence as a lens to refract class conflict (The Undoing and HBO’s Big Little Lies) or aging and redemption (the now-defunct Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy), Big Sky is an unadorned crime thriller that goes straight for the throat.

A couple of teenage sisters on a road trip to visit a boyfriend are snatched off a remote stretch of Montana highway by men whose appetites fall somewhere between those of Hannibal Lecter and the Marquis de Sade. A team of ex-cop private investigators with a personal connection to the missing girls swings into action before the thinly stretched local law enforcement and quickly discover the abductions are not a one-off crime but part of a years-old pattern.

Shots are fired, Tasers are zapped, tables are turned, genders are bent, and stomachs are twisted. With echoes of Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and the old Steven Spielberg film Duel, Big Sky is a wild, fast and contorted ride that leaves its audience gasping—sometimes for breath, sometimes to control gag reflexes.

For all the action, it’s the writing that makes Big Sky sing. Kelley has taken a bunch of hopelessly cliched characters and made them sing. Jerrie Kennedy (played by former makeup artist Jesse James Keitel) divides her time between gigs as a country singer and a truck stop hooker (or “human relations,” as she calls it). The teenage Sullivan sisters Danielle (Natalie Alyn Lind, The Goldbergs) and Grace (Jade Pettyjohn, Little Fires Everywhere) have allowed genetics to define their relationship. “I got the good judgment,” says Grace. “You got the boobs.” Adds Danielle, reprovingly: “And the butt.”

Long-haul driver Ronald Pergman (Brian Geraghty, Chicago PD) grates under his mother’s complaints that when her friends brag about their lawyer and doctor kids, her only reply is that her 40-ish live-at-home son “drives a really big truck.” Retorts Ronald, sounding like a Peterbilt version of Milton Friedman: “This country’s in a supply-chain crisis. The trucker is today’s American hero.” Glad-handing highway patrolman Rick Legarski (John Carroll Lynch, The Americans) turns broody when the subject of his wife and her “menopause talk at the dinner table” comes up. And the private investigators (Katheryn Winnick of Vikings, Kylie Bunbury of Pitch and Ryan Phillippe), all former cops chased off for breaking rules, are no more adept at following the regulations on office romances in their new firm. Big Sky has plenty of bang-bang and vroom-vroom, but even when the noise level drops, the interest level doesn’t.

If you like these characters, you may be seeing a lot of them. Many of them  recur throughout the 20 or so books of best-selling Wyoming novelist C.J. Box, whose The Highway was the source of Big Sky. I don’t know Box’s work, but he’s apparently touched a nerve in Hollywood—four of his other books are under option for films or TV series. Be careful who you kill off, Mr. Box. You may need some of these guys later.

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