Category: reason

Critics of the Trump administration policy of separating children who enter the country illegally from their families continued to blast Republicans for failing to curtail this draconian measure. Actor John Legend tweeted “fuck you” at House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had posted a “Happy Father’s Day” message on social media.

Seriously, fuck you. Reunite the families at the border and we can talk about father’s day. https://t.co/bbG0gVqfzq

— John Legend (@johnlegend) June 16, 2018

First Lady Melania Trump released a statement saying that she hates seeing children separated from their families and “hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.” This remark drew a “fuck you” from Kathy Griffin (of course). Former First Lady Laura Bush also weighed in.

But according to President Trump, the whole mess is Democrats’ fault, since they won’t work with Republicans to pass new immigration legislation. “This is why we need more Republicans elected in November!” the president tweeted.

Between April 19 and May 31, at least 2,000 children were separated from their parents at the border. Contrary to what Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump officials have claimed, this policy is not required by the law, according to the Volokh Conspiracy‘s Ilya Somin:

The Trump administration claims that their policy is required by the 1997 Flores court settlement. But that settlement in no way mandates family separation and detention of children away from their parents. To the contrary, it instructs federal officials to “place each detained minor in the least restrictive setting appropriate” and to release them to the custody of family or guardians “without unnecessary delay.” The settlement also mandates that federal immigration officials must “treat, all minors in its custody with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.” Detaining children under harsh conditions, separated from their parents, is pretty obviously not “the least restrictive setting” possible, and it most definitely doesn’t qualify as treating children with “dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability.”

Sen. Susasn Collins (R–Maine) described the policy as traumatizing for the children and inconsistent with American values on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Congressional Republicans have expressed willingness to axe this “zero tolerance” approach, but only in exchange for increased funding for border security, an end to the diversity visa lottery, and several other things.

Meanwhile, Breitbart thinks it was wrong to describe the children as being kept in cages—rather, they are being held in “chain-link holding areas.”

FREE MINDS

Harvard University admissions officials consistently gave Asian American applicants low marks in the subjective “personality” category—a tactic that concealed the university’s efforts to discriminate against Asians in order to increase the number of black and Hispanic students admitted.

That’s according to documents that were publicly revealed last week as part of a lawsuit against Harvard over its race-conscious admissions policies. (I previously wrote about the lawsuit here.)

Asian American applicants had higher standardized test scores, and more extracurricular activities, than other applicants, and alumni officials who interviewed them rated them among the highest applicants. But admissions officials who did not interview the applicants still found something in their applications that supposedly merited low marks on personality.

“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” Students for Fair Admissions, the group suing Harvard, said in a court document. “Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”

Blogger Stephen Hsu has a useful breakdown of the info here. Long story short: when one looks at just the “fair” applicant pool—i.e., the applicant pool that doesn’t include athletes and legacy admissions—it seems quite obvious that Asians are discriminated against.

How do we know @Harvard is lying about its racist admissions policies against Asian-Americans? Because it won’t release its own internal reviews from 2013 showing discrimination.

Release the information Harvard. What are you hiding?

Oh, and do you like my personality traits? https://t.co/LSgHBMl5Bh

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 15, 2018

FREE MARKETS

Trump fired another shot in the trade war with China, and China is striking back:

The Trump administration on Friday escalated a trade war between the world’s two largest economies, moving ahead with tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods and provoking an immediate tit-for-tat response from Beijing.

The president is battling on a global front, taking aim at allies and adversaries alike. The United States has levied global tariffs on metal imports that include those from Europe, Canada and Mexico, while threatening to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement.

These countries are fighting back, drawing up retaliatory measures that go after products in Mr. Trump’s political base. China’s response was swift on Friday, focusing on $50 billion worth of American goods including beef, poultry, tobacco and cars.

QUICK HITS

• Speaking of Harvard, journalist Salena Zito took a bunch of Ivy League students on trips into America’s heartland to interact with Trump voters and learn something about the world beyond the quad.
• Four #NeverTrump Republicans discuss the future of the Republican Party.
• Comedian and AMC host Chris Hardwick has been accused of emotional and sexual abuse by a former girlfriend, who cited the #MeToo movement as one of her reasons for coming forward.
• Embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok expressed willingness to testify before Congress.

Outraged by cases of child protective services taking children from their competent, loving parents on flimsy medical grounds, a group in Minnesota has filed a motion in federal court to do what their organization’s name suggests: “Stop child protective services from legally kidnapping children.”

Fox 9 reports that Dwight Mitchell, the founder, had his child taken away from him “unfairly” for 22 months. His group now has over 1,000 members. One of them is Amanda Weber, whose son was taken from her for a week after she brought him to the hospital to be examined for a cough:

The doctor deemed him stable and notes show the diagnosis was, in fact, a cough. However, the recommendation was that the patient should have stayed. Weber took him home.

“After waiting, I had asked to leave because I wanted to put my kids to bed and I had my three-year-old with me and I asked if there was anything else that had to be done,” said Weber. “They said ‘No, there was no other testing or anything that needed to be done.'”

In a couple of days, police were at her door and took Zayvion to the doctor.

“She checked him out, all his vitals were stable,” she said. “They already had a foster parent in the room, in the room to remove my son before they ever proved … before they ever proved there was an emergency situation.”

This practice—overly suspicious government officials seizing children from their parents—isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago, a mom named Stephanie took her toddler, “A,” to the doctor because the girl’s arm seemed tender. The doctor said it was probably just a case of “nursemaid’s elbow,” but suggested mom follow up at the hospital, where it was discovered that the girl had a fracture. Emergency room doctors assured Stephanie that fractures were very common in toddlers learning to walk. However, the one doctor on staff who specialized in “child abuse pediatrics,” thought otherwise.

The Family Defense Center in Chicago took the case. In its newsletter, the group writes that the Department of Child and Family Services allowed the child to go home:

….but only on the condition that Stephanie move out of her own home and have supervised contact with A. Because Stephanie has no relatives in Chicago, her parents flew to Chicago each week from the San Francisco Bay Area to care for A. This exhausting ordeal continued for nearly four months.

During the investigation, DCFS blatantly ignored the opinions of the leading orthopedists and relied exclusively on the child abuse doctor’s opinion. In March, the State’s Attorney’s office filed a petition to take custody of A., initiating a court proceeding that lasted for two and a half months.

Finally, in mid-May, the State’s Attorney’s office concluded that it did not have enough evidence to proceed further, and it asked the juvenile court judge to dismiss the petition. Eventually, the “child abuse” doctor rescinded his conclusion that abuse had caused the fracture.

While the Minnesota group would like CPS to shut down immediately on the grounds that its practices are unconstitutional, there are, of course, horrific tales of children truly abused by their caregivers. In those cases, CPS can save lives.

Emily Piper, commissioner of Minnesota’s Human Services, released a statement saying:

Every day, trained professionals in counties across Minnesota go to work to protect our children and families. To call their work ‘kidnapping’ is an affront to the extraordinary service they perform for all of us, particularly the most vulnerable children in our community. Our highest priority is keeping children safe and Minnesota’s child protection system is an integral part of that work.

Mitchell, the Minnesota dad who started the anti-CPS group, thinks financial concerns improperly influence the agency’s practices. He told Fox 9, “[CPS] can’t even start collecting the money until the child is taken out of the home, put into foster care, then they can start billing a minimum of one social worker a month and one supervisor a month per child.”

Diane Redleaf, legal director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and author of the forthcoming book, They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Welfare System Puts Families At Risk, summed up the problem in an email to me:

Far too many children in far too many states are being taken from parents for reasons that defy logic and common sense, magnified by racial and class biases. Instead of supporting reasonable parent decisions, child protective services has become an integral part of the surveillance society. This has become especially insidious where health care providers work hand in hand with police and caseworkers when children show up for routine or not-so-routine care.

We need to get back to a system in which only cases in which there is clear and convincing evidence of serious imminent harm to the child at the hands of the parent [warrant intervention]. The Minnesota parents are simply demanding a child welfare system that protects children and families—something that is everyone’s right.

The answer is to stop incentivizing both worst-first thinking and the seizure of kids whose loving parents are just trying to do their best.

If you hate urban sprawl, you’re probably familiar with the complaints of the “smart growth” movement: Roadways blight cities. Traffic congestion is the worst. Suburbanization harms the environment. Fortunately, say these smart growthers, there is an alternative: By piling on regulations and reallocating transportation-related tax money, we can “densify” our urban communities, allowing virtually everyone to live in a downtown area and forego driving in favor of walking or biking.

Smart growth proponents have been gaining influence for decades. They’ve implemented urban growth boundaries (which greatly restrict the development of land outside a defined area), up-zoning (which tries to increase densities in existing neighborhoods by replacing single-family homes with apartments), and “road diets” (which take away traffic lanes to make room for wider sidewalks and bike lanes).

Alas, there are inherent flaws in the “smart growth” approach—beginning with the idea that it makes sense for everyone to live and work in the same small area, writes Bob Poole in the latest issue of Reason.

View this article.

If you had told Ronald Reagan in 1988 that in 30 years, the president of the United States would be chummy with communist dictators in China and North Korea, eager to please a brutal Kremlin autocrat, and indifferent to the needs of our military allies, he might have said: That’s what you get for electing a Democrat.

Today’s Republicans, writes Steve Chapman, make up a party he wouldn’t recognize. For decades, the Russians and Chinese dispatched spies and enlisted American sympathizers to try to harm the United States and tilt its policies in their favor. Under Donald Trump, they don’t have to. They have a friend in the Oval Office.

View this article.

In New York City, Andre Hinkson’s mother called cops to say her son had just busted up their home and left. Cops went looking for him and jumped a man they believed was Hinkson, tasering him three times. But when the mother got to the ambulance they put the man in, she told cops that was not her son. Police say it was an honest mistake because the man was wearing clothing similar to what the son was reported to be wearing and he cursed at them when they approached him.

Lyn Ulbricht moved to Colorado last year. She uprooted her life to be near her son, Ross Ulbricht, who is an inmate in a federal maximum security prison an hour outside of Colorado Springs.

Ross is serving two concurrent life sentences for his role in the founding and running of Silk Road, a dark web bazaar where users could buy and sell drugs and other illicit items, often using bitcoin. The charges against him included money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. In a separate indictment, he was charged with procuring murder. Though that charge was dropped, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York cited it as central to her decision to go well beyond the minimum sentence of 10 years and instead imprison him for life without parole.

At his sentencing, Ross made a modest request: “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age.…Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel.” Although Forrest was not moved, the Ulbrichts hope the Supreme Court may feel differently. If their case is accepted, it could trigger a landmark decision about digital privacy and autonomy, as well as about what responsibility the creators of online tools bear for what others do with them. Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Lyn by phone in April, shortly after she got a small piece of encouraging news from the high court about Ross’ appeal.

View this article.

The Reason Podcast is a free, thrice-weekly (and sometimes more!) audio program that features in-depth conversations, interviews, and occasional shouting matches with leading authors, personalities, newsmakers, and Reason staffers. The Monday program is a roundtable hosted by Matt Welch and featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and yours truly. The week’s other offerings are usually hosted by Mangu-Ward and me and sometimes are podcast versions of our video interviews.

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I’m excited to announce the five finalists for the 2018 Reason Video Prize, which honors short-form films and videos that explore, investigate, and enrich our appreciation of the libertarian beliefs in individual rights, limited government, and human possibilities. The winner will receive $5,000, second place gets $2,500, and third place takes home $1,000.

The Reason Video Prize will be awarded as part of the 2018 Reason Media Awards, which will be held at FreedomFest in Las Vegas on Saturday, July 14. We’ll also be awarding the Bastiat Prize for Journalism and the Young Voices Award.

In celebration of Reason‘s 50th anniversary, we’ll also have two special days of programming at FreedomFest featuring John Stossel, Robert W. Poole, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Jim Epstein, Jacob Sullum, Zach Weissmueller, me, and many other Reason faves.

For ticket information, click here.

In random order, here are the five finalists:

We The Internet, Rob Montz: “Silence U Part 2: What Has Yale Become?”

Institute for Justice: “Why is Teaching a Crime? California Denies Blue-Collar Workers Entry to Trade Schools”

American Enterprise Institute, Sally Satel: “What if You Could Legally Sell Your Kidney?”

Competitive Enterprise Institute, Passing Lane Films: “I, Whiskey: The Human Spirit”

Pacific Legal Foundation: No Boys Allowed: Freddie Linden’s Story

The Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship program runs year-round in the Washington, D.C. office. Interns work for 12 weeks and receive a $7,200 stipend.

The job includes reporting and writing as well as helping with research, proofreading, and other tasks. Previous interns have gone on to work at such places as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ABC News, and Reason itself.

To apply, send your résumé, up to five writing samples (preferably published clips), and a cover letter by July 1 to intern@reason.com. Please include “Gray Internship Application” and the season for which you are applying in the subject line.

Paper applications can be sent to:

Gray Internship
Reason
1747 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009

Fall internships begin in September. Exact start dates are flexible.

John Perry Barlow, who died this year at age 70, was a Grateful Dead lyricist, a pioneer in the fight for online civil liberties, and possibly a mutant. As Barlow recounts in his posthumously published memoir, Mother American Night, his mother as a girl was treated for tuberculosis by a quack who administered a prolonged beam of X-rays right into her hip. Forty-five minutes of this treatment gave her radiation sickness. Her hair fell out, she suffered severe burns, and she was informed that, oops, she’d been sterilized.

The sterilization didn’t take. Two decades later, in 1947, she gave birth to John Perry Barlow. One of his X-Men superpowers seems to have been to unerringly locate centers of the American zeitgeist and discover some pivotal role he could play in them, writes Mike Godwin.

View this article.