Harvard President Lawrence Bacow to Activist Students Who Shut Down His Talk: ‘The Heckler’s Veto Has No Place’ Here

Last week, activist students at Harvard University rushed the stage to prevent President Lawrence Bacow from speaking at a Kennedy Center event. They did so in support of divesting the university’s $400 million budget from fossil fuels and for-profit prisons.

Administrators implored the 30 protesters to leave the stage and continue their activism toward the back of the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum so that the event could proceed. They refused, shouting, “If we don’t get it, shut it down,” a common activist refrain.

Eventually, Bacow eventually gave up, and some members of the audience followed him to a classroom for a discussion.

On Wednesday, Bacow published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson condemning the activists’ tactics. “To my knowledge, everyone ever invited to speak at the Forum—indeed, everyone who has been invited to speak at Harvard in recent memory—has been able to do so,” he writes. “That is no longer the case as of last Thursday.”

What I saw last week was not a group of students looking to engage in conversation about things that matter to them. It was, instead, an effort to obstruct the rights of others to speak and to listen. A university committed to truth cannot function if some members of our community shout down others. Our University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities makes clear the right to protest and dissent, but it makes equally clear that this right may not be exercised in a way that interferes with values that are essential to the nature of our enterprise, among them the freedom to exchange ideas.

The heckler’s veto has no place at Harvard. When we shut down conversation, when we shut down debate, we shut down the opportunity to learn through reasoned discourse. It would be a shame if the state of our national public discourse, which has become so coarse, becomes the state of our campus discourse as well. We should strive to model the behavior we would hope to see in the rest of the world. Now is the time to ask ourselves: What kind of community do we want to be?

In a recent essay for RealClearEducation, I argue that while there is no free speech “crisis” on college campuses, there is certainly a problem:

Irrespective of the polling, most students are not inclined to take steps to censor a visiting speaker, or retaliate against a professor who offended them. But many campuses possess a small number of extremely far-left students who view speech that discomforts them as a threat to their mental well-being, and ultimately their physical safety. When these students take matters into their own hands, the rest of campus—other students, faculty, and administrators—often have no idea what to do. Many disagree with the mob, but do not wish to become their next target. Indeed, professors routinely tell me that they are afraid of provoking their most liberal students….

It would be wrong to succumb to generational fatalism: As a whole, the “kids these days” probably aren’t significantly less enthusiastic about the First Amendment. But there’s more than enough reason to be concerned that an anti-speech minority is getting its way, and the majority isn’t sure what to do about it. For all those who want college campuses to remain places where controversial speech is welcome, something’s gotta give.

Consider Bacow’s testimony as yet more evidence that something has gone wrong on elite college campuses.

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The ACLU Defends Gun Owners’ Constitutional Rights, Except for the Second Amendment Right to Own Guns

When the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey announced its lawsuit on behalf of two public high school students who were suspended because they posted pictures of themselves at a gun range on Snapchat, the first reply on Twitter congratulated the organization for “defending all of the civil liberties.” But while the ACLU is commendably willing to defend the First Amendment rights of gun owners and Second Amendment advocates, the national organization still takes the position that, contrary to what the Supreme Court has said, the Constitution does not guarantee an individual right to armed self-defense.

“Given the reference to ‘a well regulated Militia’ and ‘the security of a free State,’ the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right,” the ACLU says. “In striking down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia. The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court’s conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment.” It adds, however, that “particular federal or state laws on licensing, registration, prohibition, or other regulation of the manufacture, shipment, sale, purchase or possession of guns may raise civil liberties questions.”

On its face, that position is quite different from what Ira Glasser, then the ACLU’s executive director, told me back in 1991, 17 years before the Supreme Court first explicitly recognized that the Second Amendment imposes limits on gun control legislation. Glasser conceded that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, but he said that still leaves room for government regulation. If the federal government tried to completely ban private gun ownership, he said, the ACLU would challenge that policy.

In a subsequent letter to the editor, Glasser elaborated on his views, which he said were consistent with ACLU policy:

Once we concede the constitutionality of government bans on some weapons, we are not talking any longer about whether the government may restrict weapons but rather what constitutes a reasonable restriction. If the Second Amendment provides no basis for such distinctions, as it does not, then it is up to the legislature.

The ACLU does not believe that the Second Amendment provides individuals with an unlimited constitutional right to possess any and all weapons; we therefore believe that legislatures may adopt reasonable restrictions. The question is, What is reasonable? An absolute ban on all handguns under all conditions might well be unreasonable. So would licensing and registration schemes that invaded privacy or enforcement methods that resulted in illegal searches.

The ACLU would likely support challenges to any such unreasonable restrictions.

In practice, an individual right that is consistent with just about any gun control measure a legislature is likely to pass may be hard to distinguish from a collective right that imposes no limits at all. After Heller, Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator running for president against John McCain, insisted that “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms.” At the same time, he said that right did not preclude Chicago from imposing a blanket ban on handguns similar to the Washington, D.C., law that the Supreme Court overturned in Heller. Two years later, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Court disagreed.

Since Glasser said “an absolute ban on all handguns under all conditions might well be unreasonable,” his view of the Second Amendment evidently was not quite as narrow as Obama’s. As for the ACLU’s current approach to gun control, the organization’s deputy legal director, Louise Melling, explained it this way last year:

When analyzing gun control measures from a civil liberties perspective, we place them into one of three categories. First are laws that regulate or restrict particular types of guns or ammunition, regardless of the purchaser. These sorts of regulations generally raise few, if any, civil liberties issues. Second are proposals that regulate how people acquire guns, again regardless of the identity of the purchaser. These sorts of regulations may raise due process and privacy concerns, but can, if carefully crafted, respect civil liberties. Third are measures that restrict categories of purchasers — such as immigrants or people with mental disabilities — from owning or buying a gun. These sorts of provisions too often are not evidence-based, reinforce negative stereotypes, and raise significant equal protection, due process, and privacy issues.

In other words, as far as the ACLU is concerned, certain gun control policies might raise constitutional concerns, but those concerns have nothing to do with the Second Amendment. Melling said “many of the options now being considered”—including “raising the minimum age for all gun ownership to 21” and “bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks” —”raise no civil liberties concerns.” So called red-flag laws, which authorize court orders that prohibit gun possession by people deemed a threat to themselves or others, “can also be a reasonable way to further public safety,” she said, although “they must at a minimum have clear, nondiscriminatory criteria for defining persons as dangerous and a fair process for those affected to object and be heard by a court.”

Melling said the ACLU also does not take issue with “universal background checks,” “laws that keep guns out of sensitive places like schools and government buildings,” “requirements that guns include smart technologies (like password protection) that ensure that only the lawful owner of the gun may use it,” and “requirements that gun owners first obtain a permit, much like a driver’s license, establishing that they know how to use guns safely and responsibly.” But she correctly noted that “the categories of people that federal law currently prohibits from possessing or purchasing a gun are overbroad, not reasonably related to the state’s interest in public safety, and raise significant equal protection and due process concerns.” She added that “the proposal to ban individuals listed on the No-Fly List from purchasing weapons…is constitutionally problematic, because that list lacks basic due process protections and its standards are unconstitutionally vague.”

The ACLU also opposed an Obama administration rule, overturned by Congress in 2017, that would have banned gun ownership by Social Security recipients who have been assigned “representative payees” because they have difficulty managing their finances. “Gun control laws, like any law, should be fair, effective and not based on prejudice or stereotype,” it explained. “This rule met none of those criteria.” Since gun control supporters generally viewed the rule as the epitome of “commensense gun safety” and its repeal as utterly reckless, the ACLU’s position was admirable and courageous.

In short, the ACLU is prepared to defend the civil liberties of current or would-be gun owners, but only if the policies they challenge impinge on something more than the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. That is not nothing, but it is definitely not “defending all of the civil liberties.”

[I’ve corrected the reference to Obama’s opponent in 2008.]

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Steve Bannon’s ‘Economic Nationalism’ vs. Libertarian Globalism Is the Battleground of 21st Century Politics

If you want to understand the “economic nationalism” that undergirds the right- and left-wing populism currently sweeping Europe and the Americas, Alison Klayman’s new documentary The Brink is essential viewing.

Klayman embeds with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon as he crisscrosses America and what Donald Rumsfeld once caustically dismissed as “Old Europe,” trying to create an international movement devoted to tightening national borders. He bounces from meetings with Trumpy Republicans, Brexiters such as Nigel Farage, National Rally Frenchies, and unapologetically xenophobic Beneluxers who are barely distinguishable from each other as they fret over the loss of uniquely Belgian and Dutch cultures.

Klayman is immensely talented as a filmmaker (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry rightly took home a fistful of awards in 2012), and she fully captures Bannon’s arrogance, pettiness, and delusions of grandeur. He comes across by turns as charming, fake, cringey, and a deeply committed ideologue who really thinks he is saving the future from the clutches of globalists, rootless cosmopolitans, and Davos-dashing liberal elitists completely out of touch with the dreams, hopes, and fears of regular people all over the planet.

What I took away from the movie was less about whether Bannon might personally be able to scale Trumpism up to the international level and more about the realization that nationalism vs. globalism is the fundamental political cleavage in the 21st century. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have far more in common with each other than they do with many people in their own parties; one reason American politics is increasingly spiteful and stupid is because we’re speaking in terms—right-wing and left-wing, liberal and conservative, even socialist and capitalist—that have become outmoded. There are socialist populists and socialist internationalists, right-wing populists and right-wing internationalists, and on and on.

Friedrich Hayek famously dedicated The Road To Serfdom to “the socialists of all parties.” In the 21st century, libertarians are going to have make common cause with the globalists of all parties, with the people whose core value is the right of individuals to move freely around the planet. There will be lots of arguments over whether globalism also means that goods and services should move freely too, but that may be a secondary issue for some time to come. We live in a hopelessly mixed economy and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon (though we should always be pushing for more choice and less top-down control). The real question is whether it will become harder or easier for people to cross borders.

Bannon’s vision is of a world of distinct nations and cultures that might be defined by any number of factors, including race and ethnicity, but also a common history, religious values, or shared geography. His economic nationalism is a reaction, partly correct but mostly false, to the belief that large, global forces—some impersonal, some embodied in specific elites and individuals, from Hillary Clinton and George Soros to Warren Buffet or Richard Branson—are calling all the shots.

This outlook holds that free trade, automation, and other forces are taking work from the regular guy or gal, even as newcomers—low-skilled immigrants hungry for work opportunities, refugees and asylees, professional-class globe trotters—seem to be swamping the mother country and simultaneously flourishing economically and sucking off the teat of the welfare state (this is known as “Schrodinger’s Immigrant“). This is Donald Trump’s worldview, and it isn’t far from Bernie Sanders’ too. The Vermont socialist is a critic of “open borders,” denouncing the very concept as “a Koch brothers proposal” that would drive down wages for Americans. Trump and Sanders (and other populists, such as Elizabeth Warren) are all against free trade because they believe that stuff from poor countries will always undercut anything made in America. They express themselves witf very different tonalities and words, but the policy implications aren’t so different.

The message that populists, whether right-wing or progressive, articulate is mistaken, but it does contain elements of truth. The “rich” did not capture all the income gains of the past 30 or so years, and economic mobility remains the rule rather than the exception. But there’s no question that a sizeable percentage of Americans are not doing well and, as important, feel as if they have no control over how their lives turn out. Limiting the flow of people and goods over borders—economic nationalism—makes sense from this point of view. Such actions strongly imply a collective identity that will limit interest in individual rights, inciting yet more populist policies.

Libertarians and others who believe in free movement and free trade need to acknowledge the emotions that undergird economic nationalism. We need to explain how we can build resilience into the system, and we need to explain the benefits of a globalized world—that, for example, cities that welcome immigrants experience increased wages and lower unemployment. We need to update our arguments about why individuals are ultimately more important than groups, and about why empowering individuals creates a richer, freer, and ultimately more socially cohesive world. We need to show that there is no inherent tension between being a citizen of the world and a proud son or daughter of one’s country, region, and hometown. And we’re going to have reach out to liberals, conservatives, and progressives who identify with freedom of movement as a moral right and economically superior.

Watching The Brink made me think that for all the other differences Reason has with the socialist magazine Jacobin, it may matter far more that we share a belief in open borders.

Here’s the trailer for the documentary.

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Alabama Cops Raided Their House, Seized Their Cash, and Ruined Their Lives Over $50 of Marijuana

On January 31, 2018, a Randolph County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the home of Greg and Teresa Almond in Woodland, Alabama, to serve Greg court papers in a civil matter.

Greg, 50, wasn’t home, but his wife Teresa told the deputy he would be back before long. About two hours later, after Greg had returned home, he heard loud knocking on the door. He remembers shouting “hang on” and walking toward the door when it suddenly flew open. The next thing he knew he was on the floor—ears ringing, dazed, wondering if he’d just been shot.

Several deputies from the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department had kicked in his front door and thrown a flashbang grenade at his feet. The officers handcuffed and detained the couple at gunpoint, then started searching their house. The deputy from earlier had reportedly smelled marijuana, and so a county drug task force was descending on the Almonds’ home, looking for illegal drugs.

“I’m confused, I feel violated, I’m thinking the people who are supposed to serve and protect you basically just threw a bomb in my lap,” Greg recalls.

One may wonder what sort of dangerous criminal enterprise the Almonds were running to warrant such a display of force. The total drug haul for the Randolph County narcotics unit that day: a small amount of marijuana worth $50 or less, which the Almonds’ 27-year-old son later claimed ownership of, and one Lunesta sleeping pill found outside of a prescription bottle with Greg Almond’s name on it.

The Almonds now face misdemeanor charges for 2nd degree possession of marijuana for personal use and possession of drug paraphernalia (a glass pipe). But that’s among the least of their troubles.

The Randolph County Sheriff’s Department also seized thousands of dollars in cash and valuables from the family, through civil asset forfeiture. Greg Almond says that as a result of the raid and seizures, their business was ruined, they lost their house, their reputation was tarnished, and their ability to earn a living has been practically destroyed.

Now the Almonds are suing. A federal civil rights lawsuit filed last month alleges that the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department illegally seized roughly $8,000 in cash and dozens of firearms, some of which were antiques, from two safes. The raid, the couple argues, violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures as well as their due process rights. Police took the money right out of his wallet, Almond says. According to the lawsuit, his wife’s wedding rings, his guitars, and other valuables were lost, were stolen, or do not appear on the sheriff department’s inventory of seized items.

The Almonds’ allegations against the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department, first reported by Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, exemplify the worst aspects of civil asset forfeiture—the heavy-handed use of a tool meant for major drug traffickers against petty offenders and innocent owners. Cases like these have led Alabama lawmakers to propose reining in the state’s forfeiture laws, which rank among the most aggressive and unchecked in the U.S.

It’s hard to say just how many cases like the Almonds’ are out there. Alabama currently doesn’t have any mandatory transparency or reporting requirements surrounding civil forfeiture. Although the Alabama District Attorneys Association announced earlier this year that it would begin voluntarily collecting data and publishing annual reports on the practice, Carla Crowder, executive director of Appleseed Alabama, says there should be mandatory rules in place.

“Just having the information would allow the public to know the kind of stuff that we found out in our report,” she says. “Are police just taking $1,500 from the homes of people they arrest for marijuana possession, which we documented, or are they truly going after assets that are connected to or the result of criminal activity? Our report shows they’re not.”

A 2018 report by Alabama Appleseed found that state law enforcement raked in roughly $2.2 million through civil asset forfeiture in 2015. The report revealed a widespread lack of transparency, uncovered large racial disparities, and showed that marijuana offenses, like the Almonds’ case, were a major driver of forfeiture actions.

The report highlighted the case of Royce Williams, an Alabama resident who his family says had been growing and using marijuana to manage pain from several surgeries. He wasn’t a drug dealer, they say. But that didn’t matter to local law enforcement, which initiated court proceedings to seize the 40 acres of property that had been in his family for generations.

Prosecutors continued to pursue the property even after Williams’ 2009 suicide—a last-ditch attempt to keep it in his family’s name. Williams’ wife, battling terminal cancer, continued to fight in federal court and ultimately won, but she went deep into debt in the process.

In the 2010 case of Frank Ranelli, the police department in Homewood, Alabama, seized 130 computers from his computer store, acting on a tip that he was selling stolen electronics. The sole charge against Ranelli was eventually dismissed, but he never got the computers back.

“Here I was, a man, owned this business, been coming to work every day like a good old guy for 23 years, and I show up at work that morning—I was in here doing my books from the day before—and the police just fucked my life,” he tells Al.com.

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property—including cash, cars, and even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even in cases where no one is charged or convicted of a crime. Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool that allows police to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by targeting their illicit proceeds. But civil liberties groups say it has far too few protections for innocent property owners and too many perverse incentives for police.

Last week, an Alabama senate committee advanced a bill that would require police and prosecutors to obtain a criminal conviction before seized property could be forfeited to the state. Misdemeanor charges, like those levelled against the Almonds, wouldn’t be eligible for forfeiture either.

“I’d like to see it where no one else would have to go through something like this,” Greg Almond says. “It would be one thing if I had been running some kind of drug enterprise or something, but that’s just not the case.”

Following the raid, the Almonds—both of whom had no prior arrest record, according to their lawsuit—were booked overnight and much of the next day in the county jail. Their relatively brief incarceration had an enormous impact on their lives.

In addition to a tombstone engraving business they had inherited, the Almonds were raising chickens. Large poultry companies often contract with independent farmers to raise chickens, but the business, at least for the farmers, is notoriously tough. The companies provide the chicks and feed, but the contract grower has to build the chicken houses, often requiring large loans.

Prior to the raid, the Almonds were in a financially precarious spot. The poultry producer they contracted with required them to change their chicken houses before it would send them any more birds, so they lost an entire year of payments while they were making the upgrades. They had already mortgaged their house and 16 acres of property to start their farm.

The Almonds were in the process of refinancing their loans to try and stay afloat, but the deadline to refinance happened to be the same day they were stuck in jail. As a result of their incarceration, the Almonds missed the deadline. A month later, their bank foreclosed on their house.

The Almonds now live in a utility shed. According to Alabama Appleseed,

Greg insulated the shed, but the Almonds have no running water or indoor plumbing. They cook over an open fire outside their front door and keep food cool in a portable cooler. A small solar panel provides enough electricity to power their television and a floor lamp at night, but they do not have enough power to run an air conditioner. For Christmas, Greg’s boss gave them a wood-burning stove to supplement the propane heater they had been using. Some mornings, Greg wakes up to indoor temperatures in the low 50s.

Meanwhile, Greg Almond says the arrest and initial charges ruined their reputation in town.

“What I’ve been hearing since then is we were meth dealers and meth heads,” he says. “People we had been knowing for years would turn their head when they saw us and wouldn’t speak. It’s gotten where we avoid going to public places. It’s made me—I don’t how to put it in words—it’s made me not want to be out. It’s like people are whispering behind our backs.”

The Almonds’ son tried to go to the police to confess ownership of the marijuana, according to the lawsuit, but the local district attorney continued to pursue prosecution against the couple. On February 22, more than a year after the initial raid, a local grand jury returned an indictment against Greg and Teresa Almond for two misdemeanor charges: unlawful possession of marijuana for personal use and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, thus violating “the peace and dignity of Alabama.”

The Almonds attorney in their civil suit, Mike Segrest, says the misdemeanor charges show that the use of civil asset forfeiture, which is supposed to require law enforcement to show a “nexus” between the seized property and criminal activity, was wholly inappropriate. (The Randolph County Sheriff’s Department directed a request for comment to Webb and Ely, a law firm representing the department in the Almond lawsuit. The firm declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.)

“If you got possession of marijuana in the second degree [i.e. for personal use], then how are you going to establish a nexus between that and the money and the guns?” Segrest says. “By definition, any crime involving drugs for personal possession, civil forfeiture shouldn’t even come into play.”

Greg has found work as a handyman. He says he has a constant roaring in one of his ears and vision problems as a result of the flashbang, and his wife constantly worries that the police will show back up to plant evidence on their property, even though she knows it’s irrational. “I don’t think she’ll ever be the same,” he says.

And it’s made him look differently at the local police, many of whom he had known for years prior to the raid.

“It’s made me distrust law enforcement on every level,” he says. “Going down the road I can see a police or state trooper, not that I’m doing anything wrong, and it’s kind of like my adrenaline goes up. My heart just pounds seeing them.”

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Watch Matt Welch (and Dave Barry!) Tonight on Real Time With Bill Maher

Tonight at 10 p.m. ET I will be on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher program, along with co-panelists Cornell Belcher and Wendy Sherman, both former Obama administration hands. Kicking off the show is Trump/Russia conspiracist Seth Abramson, and I am delighted to announce that the mid-show guest is none other than America’s greatest working newspaper humorist, Dave Barry.

There will be no web-only “Overtime” segment this time, alas. Here’s what I did with that the last time around:

Here’s Glenn Garvin’s classic Reason interview with Dave Barry from a quarter-century ago. And I wouldn’t call it a classic, but in this 2004 Democratic National Convention interview with Barry I did manage to gash open my finger on a beer can.

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Amid Legal Challenges, Trump Administration Implements Transgender Military Ban

It has been two years since President Donald Trump abruptly announced in a tweet that he was going to implement a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. This came out of the blue, and it caught many people (including military leaders) by surprise.

Today the policy is being launched, even though several legal challenges to it remain unresolved.

The ban itself is a stranger variation of the old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that allowed gay troops to serve as long as they remained in the closet. Transgender people may join and continue to serve in the military as long as they present themselves as their biological sex and do not have a history of diagnosis with gender dysphoria. Transgender troops currently in the military are going to be allowed to stay, even if they receive transgender-related medical treatment (which the military will not pay for).

It’s a bizarre compromise probably intended to counter one of the legal arguments presented by challengers to the ban: that it violates the Fifth Amendment due process rights of transgender troops already serving. The military under President Barack Obama implemented a plan to allow transgender people to serve openly in the military. Changing the rules and booting them once they’ve started outing themselves would be a problem.

Several federal courts determined that these lawsuits had merit and blocked the administration from implementing its plans. The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court to get the injunction lifted. In January, the justices sided 5–4 with the administration and allowed the plan to move forward.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the Trump has won this fight. The legal fights haven’t ended; the Supreme Court decision just allows Trump to implement this policy while the challenges continue. Openly transgender troops within the military may continue to serve. Those who want to join or those who have joined but have not come out as transgender have to continue presenting as their biological sex.

Opponents of the policy argue that there’s no evidence that allowing transgender troops to serve openly is causing any problems to troop morale or readiness.

Diane Mazur of the Palm Center, which studies LGBT military policies, worries that despite what the White House claims in its memo, the underlying service guidelines actually will allow the military to dump transgender members in active service. Mazur notes in Politico that commanders have the

authority to order a mental-health evaluation if they suspect a member is gender dysphoric. Continued service would then depend on whether military authorities believe that an individual is “unable or unwilling” to adhere to standards based on birth sex. Fitness for duty is irrelevant.

In practical terms, this means that if you’re serving in uniform and it becomes known that you are transgender, your commander has authority to start a process that can end in your dismissal. It’s out of your control. Hiding your identity—rather than serving openly as who you are—is the only safe option.

So the whole thing is a big mess. If an active member of the military is booted for being transgender, that’s certain to launch even more lawsuits. And if transgender troops aren’t booted, that’s essentially evidence that the policy itself is unneeded and doesn’t serve a real purpose other than to discriminate.

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Chicago Cops Dragged, Punched, and Tased a 16-Year-Old Girl. Can You Guess Who Was Charged With Battery?

After an altercation with two Chicago cops at her high school, 16-year-old Dnigma Howard was charged with assaulting peace officers. Newly released surveillance video tells a very different story, one in which she fought back only after the officers physically assaulted her. By the end, Howard had been dragged down a flight of stairs, punched, and tased.

The incident occurred January 29 at Marshall High School. Howard had admittedly been using her cell phone in the classroom, prompting her to be told to go to a different room, which she didn’t want to do. “I went to the second floor at the top of the stairs,” she told the Chicago Tribune in February. “The police came up the stairs and they was like, you need to get your coat and go to the in-school room. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go in there.’”

According to police’s version of events, Howard was the aggressor. She did resist the officers, and she admits to biting one of them during the struggle. But the video shows who escalated the incident into violence, and it wasn’t Howard.

The video, first published by the Chicago Sun-Times, shows Howard standing in a hallway between two officers. Howard steps away, only to be forcefully grabbed by one of the cops, who drags her toward a stairwell:

The video then picks up from the bottom of that stairwell. Howard falls down the stairs and is punched multiple times by the officers while she’s on the ground, and eventually tased. Her father, Laurentio Howard, who was supposed to take his daughter home, found himself watching as police hit her.

“I couldn’t believe I seen two sworn police officers of Chicago abusing my daughter like this and I’m standing right there watching them do this and can’t do anything about it,” he tells WLS. “I thought maybe they were going to try to choke her out or she would lose consciousness or something like that,” he says. “They had their foot on her chest.”

Howard’s resistance was a “natural reaction,” her father tells WITI. “She wasn’t really fighting back. She was defending herself. They were kicking her and stomping her and stuff. She tensed up.”

The teen was charged with aggravated battery against both officers, but the charges were dropped days after the incident with little explanation. The Chicago police union isn’t happy about that. “They did everything they could to protect her from being hurt and they used the Taser because she seriously injured those two officers and she needs to be recharged,” Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham tells WGN.

The family, which is being represented by civil attorney Andrew Stroth, has filed a federal civil rights complaint against the city, the public school system, and the individual officers. “The video evidence completely contradicts the narrative given by the police,” Stroth tells BuzzFeed.

The officers, who the Sun-Times identified as Johnnie Pierre and Sherry Tripp, have been reassigned and are no longer working at that school. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) is investigating the incident, as is the district’s inspector general.

This kind of thing is nothing new for the Chicago police. Whether it’s crashing a 4-year-old’s birthday party and pointing guns at the terrified kids or using handcuffs to beat a teenager over the head, there’s plenty of evidence that the department could use more oversight.

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Punishing Assange Isn’t Worth Killing a Free Press: Reason Roundup

Julian Assange is exactly the kind of person that prompts bad policy to be made. A polarizing figure with the wrong politics for America’s media establishment and a history of lurid allegations against him, Assange’s fate is easy for many to dismiss as what the WikiLeaks founder deserves.

When Assange, who had been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was arrested by British police Thursday, “few, if any, politicians defended Assange or suggested that it might be wrong to prosecute him,” Joe Setyon pointed out yesterday. Even libertarian-leaning folks like Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) have thus far been mum.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) is pretty much the only elected politician to stick up for Assange’s rights. She told CNN yesterday that Assange had successfully “informed the American people about actions that were taking place that they should be aware of” and that his prosecution by U.S. law enforcement is “some form of retaliation.”

For President Donald Trump’s part, he simply claimed not to know anything about WikiLeaks at all, despite heaping praise on it in the past.

Twitter

Let’s put aside Assange for a moment—because when laws are written or precedents set based only on whether Bad People are bad, we all lose. We let powerful figures convince us that giving that Bad Person what they deserve is what matters most, consequences be damned. And then we end up creating all sorts of new injustices to “correct” for a perceived past one.

What the government and its cheerleaders are really asking here is for us to suspend fundamental principles and practices underlying free speech and a free press.

It is not uncommon for confidential sources in government, business, and other powerful institutions to leak information to journalists and publishers. This is how we’ve found out about some of the biggest political scandals of the past 100 years. But now the U.S. Department of Justice is suggesting that these basic news-gathering and reporting functions are criminal.

And officials are relying on hurt feelings about Russia to distract people from what’s really going on.

The American charges that Assange faces relate to WikiLeaks’ publication of documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, using files leaked by Chelsea Manning. The feds also accuse Assange of “conspiring” with Manning to uncover more classified information along these lines. The case does not have anything to do with any alleged Assange ties to Russia, or WikiLeaks’ publication of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, or the 2016 election at all.

“The Assange indictment is weaker than you might expect,” tweeted the constitutional lawyer and former federal prosecutor Ken “Popehat” White yesterday. “It charges that Assange and Manning conspired to access government computers (to hack, in the vernacular). BUT it doesn’t say they succeeded.”

At The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan suggests that the situation hinges on whether Assange crossed “a crucial line by allegedly encouraging the password hack” instead of just passively receiving the information. I don’t think that’s quite such a clear demarcation. Suppose a source says she has information on huge government abuses and could get proof of more if she can guess one password. Should simply saying “Sure, go for it” count as a crime? How could it be that this is beyond the pale but otherwise encouraging a source to turn over classified information is not?

First Amendment lawyer Barry Pollack tells Sullivan that the indictment against Assange was narrow and didn’t criminalize the mere receiving and publishing of classified information. But the line there is a little too close for comfort for me, and many others.

“Reminder, *everything a reporter does* to facilitate a source anonymously sending that reporter classified info is ‘helping them commit a crime,’” tweets Cato policy analyst Julian Sanchez. “That’s not a useful way to talk about what distinguishes the Assange case.”

The indictment may not directly call certain journalist practices criminal, but it does include them—things like using encrypted communications and attempting to protect a source’s identity—as among the elements that suggest Assange is guilty of conspiracy

The indictment “poses grave threats to press freedoms, not only in the U.S. but around the world,” write Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee at The Intercept:

The first crucial fact about the indictment is that its key allegation—that Assange did not merely receive classified documents from Chelsea Manning but tried to help her crack a password in order to cover her tracks—is not new. It was long known by the Obama DOJ and was explicitly part of Manning’s trial, yet the Obama DOJ—not exactly renowned for being stalwart guardians of press freedoms—concluded it could not and should not prosecute Assange because indicting him would pose serious threats to press freedom. In sum, today’s indictment contains no new evidence or facts about Assange’s actions; all of it has been known for years.

The other key fact being widely misreported is that the indictment accuses Assange of trying to help Manning obtain access to document databases to which she had no valid access: i.e., hacking rather than journalism. But the indictment alleges no such thing. Rather, it simply accuses Assange of trying to help Manning log into the Defense Department’s computers using a different user name so that she could maintain her anonymity while downloading documents in the public interest and then furnish them to WikiLeaks to publish.

The Assange prosecution “would be unprecedented and unconstitutional and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations,” the ACLU’s Ben Wizner tells Sullivan.

QUICK HITS

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What If Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Had Been a Maoist Revolutionary Epic?

From the 1965 Chinese film The East Is Red, a “song and dance epic” based on a stage show that had been produced under the personal supervision of Premier Zhou Enlai, I give you the fabulous dance steps and rat-a-tat gunfire of “March of the People’s Liberation Army”:

You can see the seeds there of the infamous Maoist model operas that were performed throughout Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. But during that period, this Springtime-for-Mao extravaganza was banned from China’s stages and screens. Apparently, even The East Is Red‘s heavy-handed propaganda wasn’t heavy-handed enough for the authorities. Only after the Cultural Revolution ended and the so-called Gang of Four were ousted from power did the regime allow the film to be screened again.

That’s right: In 1977, this exaltation of a totalitarian party represented liberalization. I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.

The whole movie is embedded below, complete with an opening message denouncing the Gang of Four and celebrating the decision to let the film be shown once more. Mini-review: The dancing is much better than the writing.

Bonus link: “What If the Beach Boys Had Been Communists?”

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. If you just want the installments that feature kitschy propaganda for Marxist-Leninist dictatorships, you can watch artifacts from North Korea here and from the Stalin-era Soviet Union here.)

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The Hellboy Reboot Is a Damned Awful Movie

As I watched Hellboy, Neil Marshall’s sloppy attempt to reboot a franchise begun 15 years ago by director Guillermo del Toro, I could not help but think about the original. When it hit theaters 15 years ago, Hollywood’s superhero transformation had barely begun. Spider-Man and the X-Men had been spun into successful big-screen franchises, but Christopher Nolan’s Batman was still a year away, and the Marvel juggernaut wouldn’t begin until the final days of the George W. Bush presidency. Comic book movies were still something of a niche product, made for—and by—people who liked, and even loved, actual comic books. People, in other words, like Guillermo del Toro.

His Hellboy, which starred the block-headed Ron Perlman as the titular demon, was nothing if not a labor of love. Although he drew plenty of inspiration from the Lovecraftian pulp of Mike Mignola’s cult horror comics, he embedded the movie with his own distinctive sensibility: His Hellboy was, on the one hand, an overpowered comic-book action hero who blasted away at giant demons while spitting out quips and catchphrases. But he was also a lovelorn, middle-aged sad sack, a curmudgeon who lived in a dingy bachelor pad with a horde of cats and had domestic squabbles with the love of his life, a woman who occasionally burst into literal flames. Perlman imbued the role with surly, action-hero bluster, but also with genuine feeling, a sense of tragedy and heartache. His Hellboy was a monster, yes, but a monster you could relate to, because he was a monster who could love.

Del Toro shot and designed the movie with his usual fussy reverence, creating a slew of startling characters and memorable setpieces on a mid-sized movie budget. Hellboy was a model of what a comic book movie could be—funny, thrilling, emotionally engaged, a platform for a director’s distinctive vision, broadly appealing but not burdened by blockbuster formulas and expectations; a perfect balance of niche and mass appeal. The movie and its 2008 sequel, which upped the monster quotient while largely retaining the panache and charm, remain high points in the history of superhero filmmaking.

So it’s difficult not to compare any revival to the original. Sadly, although they share the same name and central character, Hellboy (2019) and Hellboy (2004) have little else in common.

In contrast with the gentle charm of del Toro’s PG-13 films, Marshall’s R-rated movie is loud, obnoxious, and pointlessly grotesque. Its gore is mostly cornball, the stuff of cheesy direct-to-video splatter films and adolescent shock-horror. Despite the stronger rating, he has somehow made a film that is less suitable for adults.

Marshall has directed some fine low-budget horror movies, including Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and he is responsible for some of the most viscerally exciting, action-heavy episodes of Game of Thrones, including the excellent fourth season climax, “The Watchers on the Wall.” But working on the larger canvas of a comic-book feature, he’s out of his depth: The effects work looks cheap to the point of being trashy, and the action scenes are often sloppy, with frenetic computer-assisted long-takes that whirl hectically through virtual space, as if the camera had been attached to a beach ball, then tossed around for fun. Presumably this is supposed to generate excitement, but mostly it’s exhausting.

The story casts Hellboy as an agent of the apocalypse brought on by a long-simmering battle between man and monster, but the script is a tedious, unevenly paced mess. Throughout my screening, I found myself checking the time; when, I wondered, would the end finally be nigh?

As Hellboy, meanwhile, David Harbour makes a poor replacement for Perlman, who gave the character depth and range, shifting deftly betwen boyish glee, middle-aged exhaustion, and timeless heartache. There was a lot going on beneath his whittled-down horns and lava-red skin. Harbour cuts a passable demonic figure underneath layers of prosthetics and makeup, but he offers little more than varieties of ornery exasperation, as if he is perpetually irritated to discover the quality of the movie in which he is in. Fair enough.

The other characters, and the performers who play them, are even less engaging, a marked downgrade from the del Toro era, where every supporting character—from the silent, wind-up henchman filled with sand to the gaseous paranormal colleague to the blustery, bureaucratic boss—was a fully realized oddball in his or her own right.

In many ways, the very existence of del Toro’s Hellboy poses a problem for this new incarnation: The original was so idiosyncratically delightful that it set a nearly impossible bar for any successor. Del Toro is, admittedly, a singular filmmaker and it would be hard for any director to match his unique combination of pathos, precision, and sheer creepiness. But Marshall doesn’t help himself by including a sequence that essentially replicates the origin sequence that opened del Toro’s Hellboy, showing just how comparatively limited a filmmaker he is.

Marshall’s Hellboy fails on its own terms as well. Although it occasionally manages to hint at the jaunty, heavy metal acid trip it clearly aims to be, more often it comes across as cheap and slapdash, like an over-produced TV movie that somehow snuck its way onto the big screen. The movie wants to be over the top; viewers, I suspect, will just want it to be over.

Perhaps it is too much to ask for a comic book movie about a grumpy demon who works for the government as a monster-slayer to have a heart, or wit, or be pleasing to the eye. Certainly, the trend in superhero movies over the last decade and a half has been towards a certain blandness, in which audience expectations are dutifully acknowledged and then met in comforting, routine fashion. As they have taken over the multiplex, these movies have also lost some of their eccentricity and niche appeal. Yet del Toro’s Hellboy films are reminders that comic-book movies, at their best, can be genuinely magical experiences, and that even a fantasy film about a super-powered hell creature can have a soul.

Marshall’s schlocky rehash, on the other hand, is two hours of cinematic torment. There are still bright spots in the comic book movie industrial complex, but the trajectory in this particular case is worrying. If this is a preview of the future of comic book movies—which is to say, the future of movies—then Hollywood and everyone who loves it is surely damned.

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