Category: reason

The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning The Underground Railroad is The Nickel Boys, a historical novel about two black teenagers, Elwood and Turner, and their time at the Nickel Academy in the early 1960s.

The academy is a fictional version of the Dozier School for Boys, an infamous Florida reformatory that operated for more than 100 years. In 2014, researchers began finding unmarked graves on the property.

Elwood is smart and eager to please. His favorite album is a recording of Martin Luther King speeches. He’s college-bound when he hitches a ride in a stolen car, is arrested, and gets sent to Nickel. He quickly discovers that well-manicured grounds hide the ugly reality of brutal corporal punishment, rape, and murder.

Elwood’s best friend at Nickel, Turner, is a runaway who sees the world as a con job. “In here and out there are the same,” he says, “but in here no one has to act fake anymore.” It’s a conundrum for the boys: If the rule of law is a genteel façade, then they have no hope of outside help. But if they submit to Nickel’s degradations to survive, it will ruin them.

The Nickel Boys is a short, haunting novel. Unlike The Underground Railroad, it includes no magical realism, which is to the point. Elwood and Turner are as powerless to wish Nickel away as we are to deny the truth still being discovered under the real-life Dozier School’s green lawns.

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The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning The Underground Railroad is The Nickel Boys, a historical novel about two black teenagers, Elwood and Turner, and their time at the Nickel Academy in the early 1960s.

The academy is a fictional version of the Dozier School for Boys, an infamous Florida reformatory that operated for more than 100 years. In 2014, researchers began finding unmarked graves on the property.

Elwood is smart and eager to please. His favorite album is a recording of Martin Luther King speeches. He’s college-bound when he hitches a ride in a stolen car, is arrested, and gets sent to Nickel. He quickly discovers that well-manicured grounds hide the ugly reality of brutal corporal punishment, rape, and murder.

Elwood’s best friend at Nickel, Turner, is a runaway who sees the world as a con job. “In here and out there are the same,” he says, “but in here no one has to act fake anymore.” It’s a conundrum for the boys: If the rule of law is a genteel façade, then they have no hope of outside help. But if they submit to Nickel’s degradations to survive, it will ruin them.

The Nickel Boys is a short, haunting novel. Unlike The Underground Railroad, it includes no magical realism, which is to the point. Elwood and Turner are as powerless to wish Nickel away as we are to deny the truth still being discovered under the real-life Dozier School’s green lawns.

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Brickbat: See Something, Delete Something

The German government is considering new measures to fight extremism that would force social media companies to report hate speech to the government and to pass on the IP address of anyone posting hate speech. Social media companies are now only required to delete such posts. The proposal would also make it more difficult for German citizens to obtain firearms.

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Brickbat: See Something, Delete Something

The German government is considering new measures to fight extremism that would force social media companies to report hate speech to the government and to pass on the IP address of anyone posting hate speech. Social media companies are now only required to delete such posts. The proposal would also make it more difficult for German citizens to obtain firearms.

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The Daily Northwestern’s Apology Shows the Activist Threat to Student Journalism

The wheel of outrage spins so fast these days it’s difficult to keep up. While some readers may be just learning about The Daily Northwestern‘s capitulation to activist students who said its coverage harmed them, the media has already moved on to the backlash to the backlash.

Earlier this week, Northwestern University’s student paper ran an editorial apologizing to student-activists for the way reporters covered a campus visit by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Activists had claimed that the coverage undermined their safety, and that pictures of protesters violating campus policies—like trying to break into the event space and quarreling with police—could get them in trouble.

“We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night,” the paper’s editor wrote.

This prompted tons of criticism. Charles Whitaker, dean of Northwestern’s famed Medill School of Journalism, called the editorial “heartfelt though not well-considered” and likely to send a chilling message. On social media, many professional journalists piled on.

That, in turn, prompted criticism from those who thought the initial criticizers should leave the kids alone. Cue The Outline‘s Jeremy Gordon, who decreed that “If you’re over the age of 23, you’re not allowed to care what college kids are doing.” He also criticized a whole host of people—including “Robby Soave, a staff writer at provocative centrist website Reason”—for doing just that.

“There’s nothing more that a certain huffy kind of journalist loves than to lazily extol the vague virtues of Journalism as a life calling over the specific concerns that prevent actual journalism from being done,” he wrote.

It’s true that The Daily Northwestern arguably received more opprobrium than was merited—alas, it is impossible to correctly calibrate the anger machine on Twitter—and that college-aged journalists are bound to make mistakes. They shouldn’t be held to the impossible standard of getting it right every time, especially when professional journalists can’t meet that standard ourselves.

But the backlash-to-the-backlash crowd also seems determined to defend the apology itself. Tacitly, they give power to the activists who say journalists should do their bidding.

The best example of this is a piece in The New York Times: “News or ‘Trauma Porn’? Student Journalists Face Blowback on Campus.” One of its three authors, Julie Bosman, previewed it on Twitter with this comment:

Contrary to what Bosman claimed, the story is not more complicated than it first appeared. Indeed, it’s exactly what it appeared: Some student activists said that the standard practices of The Daily Northwestern‘s reporters and photographers hurt their feelings, undermined their goals, and put them at risk of punishment.

One of the irate protesters told the Times: “We weren’t there to get in the newspaper. We weren’t there to get national attention. People still hold dear that their journalistic duty is the most important thing, and that’s not the case.” On Twitter, activists complained that journalism “only serves power” and is illegitimate unless practiced in a manner that serves the activist cause.

The Times also reflected on a related controversy at Harvard, where activists have called for a boycott of The Harvard Crimson because it follows the standard journalistic practice of asking the subjects of stories for quotes, even if the subject is an organization the activists don’t like:

And there has been dissent within The Crimson. Danu Mudannayake, 21, a senior who is an illustrator at the paper, said in an interview, “We just internally want to see more done to address the concerns on campus and not uphold this quite cold front that ‘We are a newspaper at the end of the day, and that is before anything else.'”

She suggested that the era called for a different kind of journalism, particularly for student journalists.

“We can still be serious student journalists, but still have more empathy,” she said. “I think the question of empathetic journalism is, at least for us on the inside, what’s at the heart of it.”

Mudannayake was one of the leaders of the protest against Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan, who was branded “deeply trauma-inducing” for agreeing to represent accused sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein.

The initial concern of those who reacted negatively to the Daily Northwestern editorial is that student journalists feel pressured to compromise their editorial integrity in order to appease an activist agenda. That’s a legitimate concern, and it’s really not “way more complicated.”

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The Daily Northwestern’s Apology Shows the Activist Threat to Student Journalism

The wheel of outrage spins so fast these days it’s difficult to keep up. While some readers may be just learning about The Daily Northwestern‘s capitulation to activist students who said its coverage harmed them, the media has already moved on to the backlash to the backlash.

Earlier this week, Northwestern University’s student paper ran an editorial apologizing to student-activists for the way reporters covered a campus visit by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Activists had claimed that the coverage undermined their safety, and that pictures of protesters violating campus policies—like trying to break into the event space and quarreling with police—could get them in trouble.

“We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night,” the paper’s editor wrote.

This prompted tons of criticism. Charles Whitaker, dean of Northwestern’s famed Medill School of Journalism, called the editorial “heartfelt though not well-considered” and likely to send a chilling message. On social media, many professional journalists piled on.

That, in turn, prompted criticism from those who thought the initial criticizers should leave the kids alone. Cue The Outline‘s Jeremy Gordon, who decreed that “If you’re over the age of 23, you’re not allowed to care what college kids are doing.” He also criticized a whole host of people—including “Robby Soave, a staff writer at provocative centrist website Reason”—for doing just that.

“There’s nothing more that a certain huffy kind of journalist loves than to lazily extol the vague virtues of Journalism as a life calling over the specific concerns that prevent actual journalism from being done,” he wrote.

It’s true that The Daily Northwestern arguably received more opprobrium than was merited—alas, it is impossible to correctly calibrate the anger machine on Twitter—and that college-aged journalists are bound to make mistakes. They shouldn’t be held to the impossible standard of getting it right every time, especially when professional journalists can’t meet that standard ourselves.

But the backlash-to-the-backlash crowd also seems determined to defend the apology itself. Tacitly, they give power to the activists who say journalists should do their bidding.

The best example of this is a piece in The New York Times: “News or ‘Trauma Porn’? Student Journalists Face Blowback on Campus.” One of its three authors, Julie Bosman, previewed it on Twitter with this comment:

Contrary to what Bosman claimed, the story is not more complicated than it first appeared. Indeed, it’s exactly what it appeared: Some student activists said that the standard practices of The Daily Northwestern‘s reporters and photographers hurt their feelings, undermined their goals, and put them at risk of punishment.

One of the irate protesters told the Times: “We weren’t there to get in the newspaper. We weren’t there to get national attention. People still hold dear that their journalistic duty is the most important thing, and that’s not the case.” On Twitter, activists complained that journalism “only serves power” and is illegitimate unless practiced in a manner that serves the activist cause.

The Times also reflected on a related controversy at Harvard, where activists have called for a boycott of The Harvard Crimson because it follows the standard journalistic practice of asking the subjects of stories for quotes, even if the subject is an organization the activists don’t like:

And there has been dissent within The Crimson. Danu Mudannayake, 21, a senior who is an illustrator at the paper, said in an interview, “We just internally want to see more done to address the concerns on campus and not uphold this quite cold front that ‘We are a newspaper at the end of the day, and that is before anything else.'”

She suggested that the era called for a different kind of journalism, particularly for student journalists.

“We can still be serious student journalists, but still have more empathy,” she said. “I think the question of empathetic journalism is, at least for us on the inside, what’s at the heart of it.”

Mudannayake was one of the leaders of the protest against Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan, who was branded “deeply trauma-inducing” for agreeing to represent accused sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein.

The initial concern of those who reacted negatively to the Daily Northwestern editorial is that student journalists feel pressured to compromise their editorial integrity in order to appease an activist agenda. That’s a legitimate concern, and it’s really not “way more complicated.”

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Trade War Cost Republicans In 2018 Midterms, Especially in Rural Swing Counties

Rick Telesz is a farmer from northwestern Pennsylvania who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 after supporting Barack Obama four years earlier. But Telesz says Trump won’t get his vote again in 2020—unless the trade war comes to an end.

“My breaking point with the current president came when I realized his trade war had caused 20 percent losses for the 750-acre family farm I help run in western Pennsylvania,” Telesz wrote in an op-ed that USA Today published last week. Telesz’ farm produces soybeans, corn, and dairy products, all of which have been negatively affected by the retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs targeting Chinese-made goods.

And while a real backlash against Trump’s trade policies might not happen until 2020, new research shows that the Republican Party has already paid a smaller electoral price for Trump’s trade war. During the 2018 midterm elections—and particularly in rural “swing” counties that could be key to Trump’s re-election hopes—researchers from Dartmouth College and the Peterson Institute for International Economics found “a modest but robust negative relationship between local employment exposure to the 2018 trade war and support for Republican House candidates.”

By comparing county-level election results against county-level economic data showing industries harmed by the trade war, researchers Emily J. Blanchard, Chad P. Bown, and Davin Chor argue in a new paper that “Republican candidates lost ground in counties that were adversely affected” by the trade war. In counties where workers were disproportionately protected by new U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, there was “no discernible gains” for Republican politicians.

The 2018 midterms were not good for Republicans, as the party lost 40 House seats and its majority in the chamber. Blanchard, Bown, and Chor argue that about 10 percent of the overall decline in vote share for House GOP candidates between 2016 and 2018 was due to the consequences of the trade war, and the effect was most concentrated, they say, in swing counties where Trump narrowly lost the popular vote in 2016.

“Negative association was driven largely by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, particularly in political swing counties where Trump narrowly lost the popular vote in 2016,” they write.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ballyhooed farm bailouts—payments to farmers that the president has promised would make up for the damage caused by the trade war—didn’t do much to help, politically.

“The 2018 agricultural subsidies offset some of the Republican loss in vote share, although this was likely immaterial to the swing in House seats,” the Dartmouth and PIIE researchers note.

There could, of course, be other factors at play here—and one election is a small sample size. Still, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that voters most victimized by a certain government policy would tend to withhold their support from the party that imposed that policy. And it might say something about Trump’s clout in rural America that the 2018 backlash against the trade war wasn’t worse.

With another year of economic pain since then—and maybe another year of the same to come before the 2020 election—farmers might be looking for better alternatives. They may not find them.

As I’ve written before, Democrats seem willing to waste a political opportunity that’s been handed to them by Trump’s trade war. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has outlined a trade policy that looks a lot like Trump’s. She effectively rules out signing trade deals with developing nations until they adopt American standards for labor laws, environmental rules, and more. She sees tariffs as “an important tool” in achieving those goals.

Few Democrats have been willing to challenge that point of view, and the ones who have done so have mostly failed to gain much attention for it. Former vice president Joe Biden—who championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the Obama administration, and who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement when it passed Congress in 1994—has significantly toned down his support for free trade. So far, not a single Democrat in the 2020 primary field has committed to repealing Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made goods, which would be the most sure-fire way to end the trade war and boost farm exports again.

But even if Democrats don’t seize the opportunity presented to them, Republicans may still be in trouble. In his op-ed for USA Today, Telesz said he was fed up with Trump’s empty promises of trade deals that never seem to materialize.

In January, the president spoke to the American Farm Bureau’s annual convention and promised “trade deals that are going to get you so much business, you’re not even going to believe it. Your problem will be: ‘What do we do? We need more acreage immediately. We got to plant.'”

More recently, Trump said his “phase one” deal with China would result in more exports of agricultural products. On October 11, as he announced that deal from the Oval Office, Trump had a specific message for American farmers. “I’d suggest the farmers have to go and immediately buy more land and get bigger tractors.”

More than a month later, details of that deal have still not been released. There is increasing skepticism that it will come together at all.

“Farmers aren’t as easily fooled as the president thinks,” Telesz wrote. “More and more farmers see his trade promises for what they are: hot air into the cold wind.”

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Trade War Cost Republicans In 2018 Midterms, Especially in Rural Swing Counties

Rick Telesz is a farmer from northwestern Pennsylvania who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 after supporting Barack Obama four years earlier. But Telesz says Trump won’t get his vote again in 2020—unless the trade war comes to an end.

“My breaking point with the current president came when I realized his trade war had caused 20 percent losses for the 750-acre family farm I help run in western Pennsylvania,” Telesz wrote in an op-ed that USA Today published last week. Telesz’ farm produces soybeans, corn, and dairy products, all of which have been negatively affected by the retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs targeting Chinese-made goods.

And while a real backlash against Trump’s trade policies might not happen until 2020, new research shows that the Republican Party has already paid a smaller electoral price for Trump’s trade war. During the 2018 midterm elections—and particularly in rural “swing” counties that could be key to Trump’s re-election hopes—researchers from Dartmouth College and the Peterson Institute for International Economics found “a modest but robust negative relationship between local employment exposure to the 2018 trade war and support for Republican House candidates.”

By comparing county-level election results against county-level economic data showing industries harmed by the trade war, researchers Emily J. Blanchard, Chad P. Bown, and Davin Chor argue in a new paper that “Republican candidates lost ground in counties that were adversely affected” by the trade war. In counties where workers were disproportionately protected by new U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, there was “no discernible gains” for Republican politicians.

The 2018 midterms were not good for Republicans, as the party lost 40 House seats and its majority in the chamber. Blanchard, Bown, and Chor argue that about 10 percent of the overall decline in vote share for House GOP candidates between 2016 and 2018 was due to the consequences of the trade war, and the effect was most concentrated, they say, in swing counties where Trump narrowly lost the popular vote in 2016.

“Negative association was driven largely by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, particularly in political swing counties where Trump narrowly lost the popular vote in 2016,” they write.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ballyhooed farm bailouts—payments to farmers that the president has promised would make up for the damage caused by the trade war—didn’t do much to help, politically.

“The 2018 agricultural subsidies offset some of the Republican loss in vote share, although this was likely immaterial to the swing in House seats,” the Dartmouth and PIIE researchers note.

There could, of course, be other factors at play here—and one election is a small sample size. Still, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that voters most victimized by a certain government policy would tend to withhold their support from the party that imposed that policy. And it might say something about Trump’s clout in rural America that the 2018 backlash against the trade war wasn’t worse.

With another year of economic pain since then—and maybe another year of the same to come before the 2020 election—farmers might be looking for better alternatives. They may not find them.

As I’ve written before, Democrats seem willing to waste a political opportunity that’s been handed to them by Trump’s trade war. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has outlined a trade policy that looks a lot like Trump’s. She effectively rules out signing trade deals with developing nations until they adopt American standards for labor laws, environmental rules, and more. She sees tariffs as “an important tool” in achieving those goals.

Few Democrats have been willing to challenge that point of view, and the ones who have done so have mostly failed to gain much attention for it. Former vice president Joe Biden—who championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the Obama administration, and who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement when it passed Congress in 1994—has significantly toned down his support for free trade. So far, not a single Democrat in the 2020 primary field has committed to repealing Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made goods, which would be the most sure-fire way to end the trade war and boost farm exports again.

But even if Democrats don’t seize the opportunity presented to them, Republicans may still be in trouble. In his op-ed for USA Today, Telesz said he was fed up with Trump’s empty promises of trade deals that never seem to materialize.

In January, the president spoke to the American Farm Bureau’s annual convention and promised “trade deals that are going to get you so much business, you’re not even going to believe it. Your problem will be: ‘What do we do? We need more acreage immediately. We got to plant.'”

More recently, Trump said his “phase one” deal with China would result in more exports of agricultural products. On October 11, as he announced that deal from the Oval Office, Trump had a specific message for American farmers. “I’d suggest the farmers have to go and immediately buy more land and get bigger tractors.”

More than a month later, details of that deal have still not been released. There is increasing skepticism that it will come together at all.

“Farmers aren’t as easily fooled as the president thinks,” Telesz wrote. “More and more farmers see his trade promises for what they are: hot air into the cold wind.”

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California Sued Over Law Requiring Corporation To Adopt Woman Quotas

A new lawsuit is challenging a California law that requires corporations to elect a minimum number of women to their boards of directors.

On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state official in charge of administering SB 826. That law, passed in 2018, requires that, by 2020, all publicly traded companies headquartered or incorporated in California have at least one woman on their board of directors.

Come 2022, companies with five-member boards will need to have at least two female directors. Firms with six or more directors will need at least three women on their board.

Failing to fulfill the law’s gender quota or to properly report the composition of their boards to the state can net companies fines of $100,000 for the first violation, and $300,000 for each subsequent violation. Each board position required to be occupied by a woman, but isn’t, counts as a separate violation.

The purpose of the law, according to its sponsor, state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), is to make the top of the corporate ladder more equal and to improve corporate decision making.

“The time has come for California to bring gender diversity to our corporate boards,” Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in September 2018. “With women comprising over half the population and making over 70% of purchasing decisions, their insight is critical to discussions and decisions that affect corporate culture, actions, and profitability.”

Whatever the intentions behind the law, its means are both unconstitutional and counter-productive, says Anastasia Boden, an attorney with the PLF.

“Equality is meant to allow people to be more than their immutable traits,” Boden tells Reason. “This law reduces women to their immutable straits.”

Boden and PLF are suing on behalf of their client, Creighton Meland, Jr., a shareholder of California-headquartered OSI Systems, Inc., a defense contractor that currently has an all-male board.

By forcing Meland and other shareholders to consider gender when they vote for board members, reads their lawsuit, California’s law “imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination.” This, they argue, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The potential constitutional flaws of SB 826 are not news to anyone. Even supporters of the bill have acknowledged that it might not withstand legal challenge.

“There have been numerous objections to this bill, and serious legal concerns have been raised,” wrote then-Gov. Jerry Brown in a statement after signing the bill into law. “I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation.”

In addition to the PLF’s federal lawsuit, there is also a state-level challenge to the law.

That lawsuit was filed by three California taxpayers with the assistance of conservative group Judicial Watch. It argues that the appropriations necessary to enforce the law violate the state constitution by expending money on an explicit gender quota.

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California Sued Over Law Requiring Corporation To Adopt Woman Quotas

A new lawsuit is challenging a California law that requires corporations to elect a minimum number of women to their boards of directors.

On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state official in charge of administering SB 826. That law, passed in 2018, requires that, by 2020, all publicly traded companies headquartered or incorporated in California have at least one woman on their board of directors.

Come 2022, companies with five-member boards will need to have at least two female directors. Firms with six or more directors will need at least three women on their board.

Failing to fulfill the law’s gender quota or to properly report the composition of their boards to the state can net companies fines of $100,000 for the first violation, and $300,000 for each subsequent violation. Each board position required to be occupied by a woman, but isn’t, counts as a separate violation.

The purpose of the law, according to its sponsor, state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), is to make the top of the corporate ladder more equal and to improve corporate decision making.

“The time has come for California to bring gender diversity to our corporate boards,” Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in September 2018. “With women comprising over half the population and making over 70% of purchasing decisions, their insight is critical to discussions and decisions that affect corporate culture, actions, and profitability.”

Whatever the intentions behind the law, its means are both unconstitutional and counter-productive, says Anastasia Boden, an attorney with the PLF.

“Equality is meant to allow people to be more than their immutable traits,” Boden tells Reason. “This law reduces women to their immutable straits.”

Boden and PLF are suing on behalf of their client, Creighton Meland, Jr., a shareholder of California-headquartered OSI Systems, Inc., a defense contractor that currently has an all-male board.

By forcing Meland and other shareholders to consider gender when they vote for board members, reads their lawsuit, California’s law “imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination.” This, they argue, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The potential constitutional flaws of SB 826 are not news to anyone. Even supporters of the bill have acknowledged that it might not withstand legal challenge.

“There have been numerous objections to this bill, and serious legal concerns have been raised,” wrote then-Gov. Jerry Brown in a statement after signing the bill into law. “I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation.”

In addition to the PLF’s federal lawsuit, there is also a state-level challenge to the law.

That lawsuit was filed by three California taxpayers with the assistance of conservative group Judicial Watch. It argues that the appropriations necessary to enforce the law violate the state constitution by expending money on an explicit gender quota.

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