Category: reason

“Fuck Trump!” shouted Robert De Niro at last night’s Tony Awards, pumping his fist in the air. “It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump, it’s ‘Fuck Trump.'” And with those two lines, the actor set off this week’s first round of pointless culture-war posturing.

De Niro’s outburst, given during his scheduled introduction of Bruce Springsteen, was greeted with loud applause from the Tony’s audience and bleeped out by CBS for viewers watching along at home. But by Monday morning, the usual suspects from cable news hosts to members of Congress to JohnnyDeplorableMAGA and PatriotsPunchNazis99 on Twitter were commenting on the matter, bitterly divided over whether De Niro’s words were a courageous act of truth-speaking and #Resistance or the tedious tantrum of a childish old man who mistakes cinematic moments for activism.

I can’t stop thinking about that swift, incisive editorial last night. Two monosyllables. Underscoring the presidency’s baseline indecency with a violation of “decency.” The satire of “norms.” I’d say Robert De Niro deserved a Pulitzer for if he didn’t deserve a…Tony.

— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 11, 2018

Sorry but “F Trump” is not a political message. https://t.co/UQYSWGx8mT

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) June 11, 2018

I’m not particularly offended by the substance of Robert DeNiro’s profane outburst at the Tony Awards (a bit predictable, really).

I am angry that his words, and not the winners, are now the biggest headline coming out of the Tonys. Theater deserves better.

— Peter Cook (@_Peter_Cook) June 11, 2018

Let’s keep in mind that Robert De Niro already did the curse Trump on a microphone at an awards show thing in January. It’s sort of his thing. https://t.co/aKqoMMvsUG

— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) June 11, 2018

I am no foe of celebrity activism per se, nor a strict subscriber to “there’s a time and a place for politics” rules. (Some things are too important for convention or civility.) And I am no fan of our current president, his administration, his aesthetic style, or his policies. “Fuck Trump” is not a sentiment I stand against on principle.

But what De Niro did last night was not productive activism, and his was absolutely the wrong time and place for it. This is not a man who has only periodic access to the televised spotlight, as in the case of, say, some NFL football players. This was not a situation where De Niro’s message counteracted another prevailing message at the event in question. And it was not as if De Niro was using his massive platform to persuade, to draw attention to an overlooked issue, to advocate for anything in particular.

Instead, De Niro’s self-satisfied, virtue-signaling, substance-free outburst only served to make him and other Hollywood liberals feel good about themselves, give Trump supporters fodder for their persecution fantasies, steal the spotlight from theater at an award show supposedly dedicated to honoring it, and further convince a whole lot of ordinary Americans that there is no respite from red/blue divisions. In other words, it showed that De Niro is a lot more like Donald Trump than the actor thinks.

FREE MARKETS

A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/Nqjis7bN0f

— Real Press Sec. (@RealPressSecBot) June 11, 2018

Here’s how European and Canadian leaders have responded. A few choice responses:

It was not a surprise. The president acted and reacted in the childish way he could be expected to.—Norbert Röttgen, chair of the foreign affairs committee in German parliament

International cooperation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks. Let’s be serious and worthy of our people.—French President Emmanuel Macron’s office

The withdrawal, so to speak, via tweet is of course . . . sobering and a bit depressing.—German Chancellor Angela Merkel

QUICK HITS

• Google is making its salad emoji “more inclusive” by removing the salad’s egg so vegans can share it in good conscience. (Insert crying-laughing emoji here.)
• Why so many abortion cases are being brought before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
• “Regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators…” Fox News’s Abby Huntsman said on air this weekend about Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.
• White House Chief of Staff John Kelly used a compromised cell phone for months.

Boston College suspended a male student for a year after he allegedly reached his hand up a girl’s skirt at a dance. The student claims not just that he didn’t do it, but that another male student admitted his guilt.

So says the suspended student, “John Doe,” in a lawsuit filed against the college. Doe achieved a partial victory in court on Friday, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated a lower court’s ruling against Doe. His claim that the college violated his contractual rights, as well as basic fairness, should proceed, according to Circuit Judge Juan Torruella.

That decision makes sense, given Boston College’s egregious handling of the matter. Not only did the school ignore Doe’s evidence that he was not responsible and that another man had committed the assault, but a dean actively encouraged reluctant adjudicators who were considering a “no finding” verdict to rule against Doe anyway.

It has taken years to litigate the case, which stems from an incident on October 20, 2012. Doe was moving across the dance floor of a cruise ship when a female student, “A.B.,” screamed at him and accused him of sticking a hand up her dress and inserting two fingers into her anus. Security took Doe into custody and handed him over to the police after the ship docked.

Doe claims that A.B. had simply identified the wrong person. Another man was walking right in front of Doe; according to Doe, this man, “J.K.,” turned to Doe after A.B. confronted him and said, “Sorry, dude, that was my bad.” The following day, J.K. texted Doe’s friends to inquire whether he had gotten into trouble.

A swab of Doe’s hands failed to produce forensic evidence that he had assaulted A.B., and he eventually produced video surveillance footage that led the prosecutor to drop the criminal case. But Boston College’s sexual misconduct investigation—conducted under the auspices of the Title IX, the federal statute interpreted by federal Education Department officials to require such procedures—was another matter.

Sexual misconduct charges against Doe were adjudicated by a committee of Boston College professors, administrators, and students. J.K. was forced to answer questions at the hearing, but college officials assured him that he wasn’t under suspicion. He denied having admitted any responsibility, and the adjudicators never reviewed the text messages.

At the time of the hearing, the police had not yet obtained the results of the forensics examination. Doe asked the college to delay taking any action until the forensic report was released, arguing that this was important evidence that would exonerate him. College officials rejected this request and pressed on.

Then something remarkable happened: One member of the adjudicating committee told an associate dean of students, Carole Hughes, that they were having trouble reaching a decision and were considering a “no finding” determination—i.e., that there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence to find Doe responsible. Hughes informed the dean of students, Paul Chebator, and Chebator “discouraged” the adjudicators from taking this course of action.

Doe was ultimately found responsible for indecent assault and battery and suspended for one year. He appealed the finding but was rejected. He returned to Boston College a year later and eventually graduated. After the criminal case collapsed, Doe implored Boston College to revisit the matter. But the administration determined that “the new evidence…an enhanced analysis of the surveillance video from the ship, the results of the forensic tests, and the results of a polygraph test—did not justify reconsideration of Doe’s case.”

The court disagreed. In his ruling, Torruella specifically cited the dean’s decision to influence the adjudicators and officials’ favorable treatment of J.K. as grounds for Doe’s lawsuit to proceed. These aspects of the case violated “the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealings imposed on every contract by Massachusetts law,” according to the court.

The decision was not a total victory for Doe. The judges rejected his claim that Boston College’s Title IX procedures discriminate against men, saying that this was mere conjecture on his part. They also declined to hold the Department of Education itself accountable for encouraging colleges to adopt sexual misconduct policies that violate due process rights.

Now the case will return to the lower court, which will rule on the basic fairness and breach-of-contract claims. Doe is seeking $3 million in damages.

[Hat tip: The College Fix.]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created in the panicked days after 9/11 to enhance national security. But its primary purpose has become hunting down and ejecting people whose main “crime” often is that they can’t obtain a piece of paper from the government authorizing them to live and work in the United States.

America got along just fine for 225 years before ICE, the monstrous child of the wars on drugs and terrorism, was spawned. It can do so again, writes Shikha Dalmia.

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Last month, Donald Trump responded to unwelcome statements from North Korea by abruptly canceling the historic summit meeting with Kim Jong Un scheduled for next week. This decision came because the North Koreans “said they were going to go to nuclear war against us and they were going to defeat us in a nuclear war,” Rudy Giuliani said at a conference in Israel. “Well, Kim Jong Un got back on his hands and knees and begged for it, which is exactly the position you want to put him in.”

In a normal administration, functioning with a modicum of discipline and direction, the president’s personal attorney would not be braying on national TV about critical matters of foreign policy, and the president would not be letting him. But today, writes Steve Chapman, our security and survival are in the hands of fools, knaves, and incompetents.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says electric vehicles are too quiet at low speeds. It has ordered manufacturers to add artificial sounds so that pedestrians and bicyclists can hear them.

In the latest edition of Reason, Steven Kurtz reviews the new book Improv Nation by Sam Wasson. Writes Kurtz:

It wasn’t originally supposed to be funny. But improv has taken over comedy and, according to Sam Wasson’s lively book Improv Nation, become “a great American art.” Can he make the case?

I hate to give away the punchline, but no, he can’t.

View this article.

“Prepping” has gotten a bad name because of the loony obsessives on TV. But exhibitionist nuttiness aside, prepping is nothing more than extending to the rest of your life the same foresight that compels you to keep a spare tire and a first aid kit in your car, and maybe a puncture kit and a compressor, too, writes J.D. Tuccille in his guide to living off the the grid.

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Earlier this week, reports indicated that Republicans in Congress, now taking another stab at passage of another bloated farm bill, would attempt to eliminate an Obama-era change that had reined in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies paid to many of the wealthiest American farmers. Also now on the chopping block, the reports claim, are limits on subsidies paid to family members serving as nominal farm co-owners—such as spouses or kids.

When these caps were put in place, they were little more than baby steps in the right direction. They were the first of many needed agricultural reforms, nearly all of which involve Congress and the USDA giving away less of your money, writes Baylen Linnekin.

But elimination of these minor reforms would confirm almost all of what critics of both Washington lawmakers and farm subsidies have long contended: they are unnecessary, embarrassing, shambolic, shameless, ossified, counterproductive, abominable, and grotesque.

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Television critic Glenn Garvin pours himself a drink and sits down with the Smithsonian Channel’s Drinks, Crime, and Prohibition two-part documentary:

One of the silver linings of Prohibition, if you’re looking for them, is the birth of the cocktail. Bartenders, for the most part, didn’t experiment much with flavored drinks; Americans mostly took their liquor hard and straight. But, confronted with the truly heinous taste of the rotgut stuff coming out of jury-rigged stills during Prohibition, customers revolted. Bartenders started disguising the stuff with with exotic mixes of sugar, fruit and liqueurs.

One that caught on quickly was a concoction of gin, absinthe, and lemon juice that the bartenders called, in a fit of mordant whimsy, the Corpse Reviver No. 2. Except some of the whimsy began to wear off as the government cracked down on the bootleggers by lethally contaminating one of their common ingredients, industrial alcohol. When 65 people died of the additives in a single day in New York City, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 sadly failed to live up to its name. As federal spin doctors might have put it had they existed, sometimes you’ve got to poison the village in order to save it.

I learned everything in those two paragraphs from the excellent Smithsonian Channel documentary Drinks, Crime, and Prohibition, a two-part affair that airs on consecutive Mondays. Funny at times, appalling at others, it makes it clear that Prohibition was not just a short and inexplicably nutty chapter in U.S. history but a sinister, mutually exploitative alliance of moralists, racists and Progressive power-mongers that still distorts American politics. “Prohibition looms in our minds unto this day,” says Derek Brown, a bartender and informal historian of American drinking habits. “It split us. It changed us.”

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With medical and recreational marijuana legalization spreading across the country, Reason attended the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition in New York City to get a sense of where things are headed with commercialized weed and weed-related products.

We encountered retired NFL greats Leonard Marshall and Christian “Nigerian Nightmare” Okoye promoting non-psychoactive CBD oil, which they say has replaced the opioids they once needed to dull their pain; we sampled cold-brewed coffee infused with a marijuana extract that won’t get you stoned but still makes for a calmer morning; we learned why candy is the go-to product for edibles; and we talked to Kate Bell, legislative counsel at the Marijuana Policy Project, about going to state by state where weed is legal to fight for laws that clear away the criminal records of non-violent drug offenders.

But by far the most vision-inducing part of the conference was keynote speaker Billy Tauzin. He’s a former conservative congressman from Louisiana, who went on to head up PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s massive lobbying group. Now he works for LenitivLabs, a medical cannabis company founded by TV host, multiple sclerosis sufferer, and longtime legalization advocate Montel Williams. Tauzin himself survived a life-threatening bout with cancer, and now says he wishes he could have smoked weed to ease his pain.

Click here for full text, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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