Tag: hit&run

Lenny Pozner, the father of a boy (Noah Pozner) killed in the Sandy Hook, sued James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, who cowrote the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” The book had claimed, among other things, that

• “Noah Pozner’s death certificate is a fake, which we have proven on a dozen or more grounds.”
• “[Mr. Pozner] sent her a death certificate, which turned out to be a fabrication.”
• “As many Sandy Hook researchers are aware, the very document Pozner circulated in 2014, with its inconsistent tones, fonts, and clear digital manipulation, was clearly a forgery.”

Pozner said this libeled him, and in June 2019 a Wisconsin judge agreed, and granted Pozner summary judgment on liability. In October, the jury awarded Pozner $450,000 in damages, and in December, the judge issued an injunction barring Fetzer “from communicating by any means” these libelous statements. (Such anti-libel injunctions, following a judgment on the merits, are generally viewed as constitutional by most courts that have recently considered the matter.)

But in October, a request was submitted to Google, in Pozner’s name, seeking to deindex material that simply discussed the case and criticized the court decision, such as various copies of “The Legal Lynching of a Truth-Seeker: Jim Fetzer’s Stalinist-Style Show Trial” and “Sandy Hook and the Murder of the First Amendment.” The court’s judgment of course didn’t find these items (posted in response to the judgment) to be libelous, and it offers no basis for Google to deindex them.

In November, I wrote about this, and yesterday I learned that Amazon Web Services had gotten a takedown demand (which, as best I can tell, Amazon is not acting on):

Abuse Case Number: 18997156878-1

* Log Extract:
<<<
This email is being written relating to your website post on reason.com
where you are violating a restraining order protecting the Pozner family.

https://reason.com/2019/11/06/attempt-to-vanish-posts-critical-of-the-sandy-hook-hoax-libel-verdict/

A court recently found that certain Hoax statements
<http://www.poznervfetzer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/fetzer-permanent-injunction.pdf>are
defamatory.

Demand is hereby made for you to remove the link below immediately.
https://reason.com/2019/11/06/attempt-to-vanish-posts-critical-of-the-sandy-hook-hoax-libel-verdict/

Failure to do so will leave no alternative but to seek legal redress and remedies in the appropriate court of law.

PLEASE BE GOVERNED ACCORDINGLY.

Lenny Pozner

Now of course I can’t be violating any “restraining order” through my post, because there is no restraining order that applies to me. The injunction in Pozner v. Fetzer applies to Fetzer, not to anyone else. There thus seems to be no legal basis for Pozner’s demands.

When I corresponded with him, I got two theories:

[1.] “You are repeating the defamatory statements.” But I’m simply reporting on the outcome of the court case—that the court found certain statements to be libelous. In the course of that, I have to explain what those statements were, but any such explanation is privileged against a defamation claim, see Cal. Civil Code § 47(d)(1)(D):

A privileged publication or broadcast is one made: … (d) (1) By a fair and true report in … a public journal, of (A) a judicial … proceeding, or (D) of anything said in the course thereof ….

That’s why newspapers, for instance, freely report on accusations by parties and witnesses in court cases (whether libel cases or otherwise); same for me.

[2.] “The only person who is repeating your article and statements is Fetzer and gang and therefore he is using you as a third party to do which he cannot do himself. You are linked to Fetzer[.]” Now an injunction could bind people who are actively working with a defendant (the one against Fetzer by its terms doesn’t). But I’m writing on my own behalf, not on Fetzer’s or with Fetzer (whose views I do not share). I don’t know how interesting my posts are to Fetzer and his supporters; I write for the benefit of our readers (and for my own pleasure). In any event, though, even if “Fetzer and gang” are just delighted by my posts, that has no bearing on my own First Amendment rights.

In any event, I thought I’d let our readers know about this latest development, both for its own sake and as an illustration of the sort of techniques that people sometimes use to try to vanish online material that they dislike.

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Lincoln Chafee, who served as Rhode Island’s Republican Senator from 1999 to 2007 (after serving as a Republican mayor in the highly Democratic city of Warwick for the previous six years), served as governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015 as an independent, and ran for president in the 2016 cycle as a Democrat, on Wednesday will formally announce his intention to seek the Libertarian presidential nomination at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Chafee’s campaign website says he intends to “Protect Our Freedoms” and “Tell The Truth” and promises that under a President Chafee we’ll see “No More Wars. No More Reckless Spending.”

Chafee officially joined the Libertarian Party (L.P.) back in July, but he says in a phone interview today that he hadn’t been planning a presidential run at first since he “expected other long-term Libertarians with elective experience to continue to want to be involved, Gov. [Gary] Johnson specifically.” (Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, was the L.P.’s presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016.)

That didn’t happen, and Chafee feels he’s gotten “positive feedback” from meeting with Libertarians in “Miami, New Hampshire, Denver, and Rhode Island.” His “anti-war, anti-deficit, strongly protective of civil liberties” message, particularly “after the events of last week in the Middle East” culminated in him thinking it was a good idea to run for president.

Chafee is aware that a significant portion of the L.P.’s delegate base, who will choose their standard-bearer at a May convention in Austin, Texas, are uncomfortable with perceived carpetbaggers attempting to secure the party’s nomination without putting in the work. In a phone interview this morning, the L.P.’s national chair Nicholas Sarwark estimates the percentage likely to find Chafee’s major party background a detriment, not a plus, could be as large as 25 percent.

But Chafee says his “30 year record of holding local, state, and federal offices” shows a politician who, at least a “lot of” the time, “aligns with the Libertarian philosophy” though he confesses “it doesn’t always. Traveling around, not too many Libertarians I’ve met all agree with each other,” he notes, but stresses that “on the big issues I’ve been very consistently anti-war, anti-deficit, [and] strongly in favor of civil liberties.”

As far as conflicts that might be ahead with Libertarian partisans, Chafee says he’s “a good listener” and also anticipates being willing to debate if called upon with his fellow contenders for the Libertarian presidential nomination. He doesn’t think 100 percent agreement with every aspect of a party platform is something normally expected of any candidate with any party, but again thinks he should shine with Libertarians because “I am enthusiastically absolutely dedicated to not getting us into these quagmires overseas and ending foreign entanglements” and trying to curb the “$22.6 trillion debt.” Those are the particular issues he wants to make central to his campaign, both for the nomination and, if he wins it, in the general election.

As far as facing Trump, should it come to that, Chafee says his career has made him skilled in “brass knuckle” political fighting.

One of the issues he’s been dinged for in the past by libertarians is gun control, but Chafee says he’s come to think “the reason there is more advocacy for strong Second Amendment protections is distrust of our government, and that distrust is legitimate.”

“The biggest lie in American history,” Chafee says, is that “Saddam [Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction and we invaded Iraq, and we are still there and it’s getting worse. It’s spread to Syria, Yemen, and it might spread to Iran.”

In the wake of a generation grown up dealing with the dire effect of that lie, Chafee thinks, mistrust of the government makes total sense, and he does “believe the authors of the Second Amendment wrote it with that in mind, and if there is distrust of government we want to have a well-regulated armed militia.”

Through his four major political affiliations, Chafee says, the throughline has been opposition to “fiscal irresponsibility” and “plunging into needless wars.” That’s why he left the Republicans, and why he thinks he’s right for the Libertarians.

His professional political past could help earn media a more obscure Libertarian might not, he thinks, while “I also recognize the establishment [including the media] is in cahoots with the military-industrial complex; there is a bias from the establishment against anti-war candidates.”

Sarwark says Chafee is wise to have begun his communication and visits with Libertarians on the state and local level early, which might help melt some anti-carpetbagger feeling. That he was the sole GOP Senate vote against the Iraq War should be a feather in his cap especially in the current foreign policy environment. Sarwark believes that when non-Libertarians get involved with the L.P., “they invariably become more libertarian by being around Libertarians.”

Chafee has already shown a willingness to meet and talk to other L.P. candidates for other offices and is “trying to make himself helpful [to the L.P.] in whatever way he can,” Sarwark says.

Sarwark suspects other Republicans, particularly those who are currently trying to primary Trump, might come sniffing around the L.P. before May as they get increasingly frustrated with “the president using the [Republican National Committee] to cancel primaries, avoiding debates.” Perhaps people like Mark Sanford and Rocky De La Fuente might find the fairness of the L.P. process—delegates assemble at a convention and vote on a candidate, bare majority wins, with no powers above them (neither primary voters nor party bosses) controlling delegate votes—attractive. Plus, “whoever wins the nomination ends up on all the same ballots the Democrat and Republican will” for president, so why should they beat their heads against the wall of the RNC?

While his intentions remain a mystery publicly, there is always the chance former Republican and current independent congressman from Michigan Justin Amash might want to take his desire to tussle with Trump to the L.P. convention floor.

Chafee campaign manager Christopher Thrasher, an old L.P. hand, says Chafee wants to meet and learn from the L.P. rank and file and does not intend to run a campaign dictated by outside professional consultants or anything that could read as “Republican-lite or Democrat-lite,” he notes. “Chafee has been elected as an independent, and his fundraising and support goes beyond [party affiliation] and is based on advocating issues that matter to Libertarians: anti-war and anti-deficit.”

He adds that Chafee “has been in electoral politics for more than 30 years without a single scandal, which shows his integrity,” part of why Chafee’s campaign slogan is “Lead with Truth.”

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Catherine West Lowry is a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For the past 13 years, she has taught introductory accounting—a “dry and difficult subject matter,” in her words.

To make the class more exciting, Lowry has for years let students make funny videos for extra credit. Some of these have been shown in class. A parody video from 2009 was particularly popular and has resurfaced in subsequent years.

Last semester, when Lowry showed this specific video, many students laughed at it. But at least a few were offended and complained to the administration, which subsequently relieved Lowry of her teaching duties.

The video in question is in the style of the popular Downfall parodies. Downfall, a 2004 German film that depicts the final days of Adolph Hitler and his inner circle, includes an extended scene of Hitler screaming at his subordinates that is rife for parody. People change the subtitles so that Hitler is ranting about something else: Here’s a meta example about the parodies themselves, and here’s one where Hitler realizes Pokemon aren’t real. Lowry’s students made one where Hitler is enrolled in the course and receive a bad grade.

Some of the humor may have crossed a line, in the eyes of a few students. At one point, the Hitler subtitle read: “Don’t you dare finish that sentence or I’ll send you to a chamber. And it won’t be the chamber of commerce. I can guarantee that.”

And yet “there were people laughing,” one student told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “There were some people who were kind of indifferent. They didn’t really care. There were some people that, like, you could tell they were a little bit uneasy about it.”

“People sort of realized that that was a little over the top, maybe, for the classroom,” said another. “But generally, people laughed pretty hard at it [the video]. I certainly did.”

A second video—this one a parody of the 2018 song “Bust Down Thotiana”—also drew the attention of the administration.

Dean Anne Massey removed Lowry from her teaching position and attended the class’s next session to inform students. Many took the news poorly, shouting “bring back [Lowry].” They eventually walked out in protest.

Massey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the university told the Chronicle that the video was objectively offensive, and had no place in the classroom.

Lowry sent an email to students apologizing if any of them were offended. At the same time, she was surprised by the administration’s “snap judgment” that she could no longer teach her class:

“This was an educational opportunity at a major research university. It’s just unfortunate that the university did not take advantage of this educational opportunity. Instead, they chose to follow a punitive process, which doesn’t really help anybody,” Lowry said. “I could have easily dealt with this, if I had been afforded that opportunity. They made a snap judgment and really trampled the reasonable processes we have in place here.”

UMass Amherst is a public university, and punishing a professor for an attempt at humor raises some troubling First Amendment issues. The administration should correct course and reinstate Lowry. No one should be encouraging accounting professors to make their classes even more boring.

(Reason commenters once made a Downfall parody video at my expense, after I had forgotten to post the P.M. Links. I can no longer find the video, but if anyone manages to dig it up, please share.)

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Some regular listeners of the Reason Roundtable podcast have been attempting to give me credit for predicting in last week’s episode that the 2020s would feature a conventional war between two countries with populations larger than 40 million.

But as too many journalists already seem to be missing in the reaction to the U.S.’s drone-assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Sulemaini, this act of war on third-party soil—which comes after years’ worth of Sulemaini-directed war-acts against American and allied personnel, also on third-party soil—nonetheless does not pit conventional army vs. conventional army on the territory of the combatants. At least not yet. What’s more, President Donald Trump has rhetorically ruled out “regime change” war against Tehran, and he claimed with a straight face that his escalatory act of violence was “defensive.”

In today’s podcast, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and I debate a series of questions over Trump’s most notable military action as president. Was it legal? Constitutional? Precedented? Deliberated? Sensible? Impeachable? We also nominate some of the more noteworthy new laws that went into effect January 1, expend yet more oxygen praising Watchman, and touch briefly on the welcome Golden Globes comedy of Ricky Gervais.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music credit: “From Russia With Love” by Huma-Huma

Relevant links from the show:

“Don’t Believe Mike Pence’s Spin About Iran and 9/11,” by Eric Boehm

“Trump Wants to Target Iranian Cultural Sites, Says His Tweets Shall Serve as Notice to Congress,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Without Evidence of ‘Imminent’ Attack on Americans, the White House’s Justification for Killing Iranian General Seems Hollow,” by Eric Boehm

“Reminder: American Officials Lie About War,” by Matt Welch

“Congress Should Debate War, Not Mindlessly Cheer for It,” by Eric Boehm

“Military-Intellectual Complex Looks Forward to More War in 2020,” by Eric Boehm

“A Decade of No Lessons Learned in U.S. Overseas Intervention,” by Brian Doherty

“Media Would Rather Talk About Gary Johnson’s ‘Aleppo Moment’ Than a Damning New Report on Hillary Clinton’s Actual War,” by Matt Welch

“Pot, Guns, Tampons, Narwhals, Bail, Bags, and More Face New Rules in 2020,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Fiscal Analysis of Colorado’s New ‘Red Flag’ Law Assumes Gun Confiscation Orders Will Be Granted 95% of the Time,” by Jacob Sullum

“California Freelancers Sue To Stop Law That’s Destroying Their Jobs. Pol Says Those ‘Were Never Good Jobs’ Anyway,” by Billy Binion

“HBO’s Dazzling Watchmen Was a Show About the Limits and Dangers of Power,” by Peter Suderman

“Ricky Gervais Slams Woke Hollywood’s Sanctimony in Golden Globes Speech,” by Robby Soave

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Nick Flor, whose one-year suspension for alleged sexual misconduct was first reported here at Reason, is now suing the University of New Mexico for mishandling the matter.

“It is just unfathomable to me that a tenured professor could have this type of suspension—it’s essentially a termination—and have no hearing at all,” Flor’s attorney, Nicholas Hart, told The Albuquerque Journal.

Flor’s trouble began in May of 2018, when “Julia,” a graduate student in her thirties, introduced herself to him in the printer room of the university’s Anderson School of Management. (I have changed her name to protect her privacy.) They soon began exchanging texts and emails, which gradually became flirtatious and then sexual in nature.

Flor, who is married, realized he had made a mistake and tried to desexualize their relationship. He also offered Julia a low-paid summer research position, which she declined. (At no point did Julia either work for Flor or take one of his classes.) Julia grew disappointed that he was not taking their relationship more seriously, and she threatened to publicize the more embarrassing messages. Flor thus felt he had no choice but to report the matter to the administration. But a sexual misconduct investigation deemed that he was in the wrong, not Julia. The university suspended Flor without pay for a full year.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Samantha Harris called the school’s treatment of Flor “one of the most egregious cases of university malfeasance” she had ever seen. The professor did not receive a hearing, nor he was afforded any opportunity to present witnesses on his behalf.

The lawsuit, which was filed last week, seeks a temporary restraining order to prevent his suspension from going into effect until the case is resolved. A university spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said today that he will comply with a subpoena if he’s ordered to testify at the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

The possibility of Bolton’s testimony had been up in the air. The White House has been trying to keep witnesses who worked for Trump from testifying to Congress in the matter, which centers around Trump’s temporary withholding of aid to Ukraine to get the country to investigate rival presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son.

The conflict ended up in the courts, as the Trump administration tried to stop former Bolton aide Charles Kupperman from complying with a House subpoena. Kupperman was essentially receiving contradictory orders and wanted a federal judge to tell him which branch of the government took precedence. But then the House withdrew its subpoena and impeached Trump anyway. So at the end of December a judge ruled the case moot, leaving it unresolved whether the administration has the authority to prevent former staffers from complying with congressional subpoenas and whether Congress would have the authority to punish those who do as the White House ordered.

Bolton is in the same position: Both sides have been making potentially contradictory demands. With the Kupperman case unresolved, it was unclear what would happen if the Senate called Bolton in.

Bolton’s statement says:

The House has concluded its Constitutional responsibility by adopting Articles of Impeachment related to the Ukraine matter. It now falls to the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to try impeachments, and it does not appear possible that a final judicial resolution of the still-unanswered Constitutional questions can be obtained before the Senate acts.

Accordingly, since my testimony is once again at issue, I have had to resolve the serious competing issues as best I could, based on careful consideration and study. I have concluded that, if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify.

Bolton already indicated that he would be open to testifying if the judge had ruled in the House’s favor in the Kupperman conflict. Bolton’s lawyer, in correspondence with the House’s general counsel, flat out told them that Bolton was involved in many of the meetings and conversations that are at the heart of the investigation. Bolton’s testimony could be harmful to Trump, given the conversations he was privy to, leading my colleague Jacob Sullum to speculate that the Senate’s Republican leadership might not actually want to hear from him.

Bolton’s public announcement comes right on the heels of Trump’s decision to get aggressive with Iran, a move that Bolton heartily supports. You shouldn’t assume that this announcement is an indicator of how Bolton feels about the administration’s behavior. Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) thinks that Bolton’s announcement is a significant game-changer:

The President & Sen. McConnell have run out of excuses. They must allow key witnesses to testify, and produce the documents Trump has blocked, so Americans can see the facts for themselves.

The Senate cannot be complicit in the President's cover-up. #DefendOurDemocracy https://t.co/TQLJsfn0f5

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 6, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) does not answer to the House, and Bolton’s willingness to testify doesn’t matter if Republicans follow Trump’s wishes and decide not to call new witnesses. So the next fight may be over whether Trump and McConnell can keep Republican senators in line in a vote establishing the rules for the process.

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“The moment we all feared is likely upon us,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) warned after the American drone attack that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani. “An unstable President in way over his head, panicking, with all his experienced advisers having quit, and only the sycophantic amateurs remaining.” The problem, as Murphy sees it, is a lack of “adults in the room” to curb the dangerous, bloodthirsty impulses of an inexperienced and impetuous president. Yet history suggests that the foreign policy professionals Murphy misses are at least as grave a threat to peace.

While running for president in 2000, George W. Bush derided “nation building” and said American foreign policy should be “humble” rather than “arrogant.” As president, Bush brought us the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where thousands of U.S. troops remain 19 and 17 years later, respectively.

While running for president in 2007, Barack Obama rejected the idea that the president has the authority to wage war without congressional authorization whenever he thinks it is in the national interest. “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he explained. As president, Obama did that very thing in Libya, another ill-advised and mendaciously justified intervention that begat chaotic violence.

A few years before his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said the U.S. should withdraw immediately from Afghanistan, where “we have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure.” He also worried that “Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is.” While running for president, Trump unequivocally condemned the Iraq war and the U.S.-supported toppling of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. As president, he sent more troops to Afghanistan, became so committed to staying in Iraq that he is threatening the Iraqi government with sanctions for asking the U.S. to leave, and now may be courting war with Iran for reasons similar to the ones he thought would motivate Obama to launch one.

Three men with little or no foreign policy experience entered an office where they were surrounded by experts, and they quickly shed their initial skepticism of military intervention. If you think that skepticism was naive, that was a welcome development. But the consequences suggest otherwise.

The conflict between Trump’s pre-presidential inclinations and the expert advice he received after taking office was clear in the case of Afghanistan and Syria, where the “adults in the room” passionately, and for the most part successfully, resisted his efforts at disengagement. Even in the case of Iran, where it was Trump who decided that killing Soleimani was a good idea, that was one of the options his military advisers presented, apparently in an attempt to manipulate him.

“Top American military officials put the option of killing [Soleimani]—which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq—on the menu they presented to President Trump,” The New York Times reports. “They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.”

The Times says those military officials were “flabbergasted” by Trump’s choice and “immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region.” If so, the president’s “experienced advisers,” the ones Chris Murphy thinks should be restraining him, played a dangerous game that backfired on them.

Experience is not necessarily the same as wisdom. Hillary Clinton, who boasts an impressive résumé that includes eight years as a senator and four as secretary of state, thinks Obama’s intervention in Libya was “smart power at its best,” and she did not publicly acknowledge the folly of the Iraq war, which she voted to authorize, until 11 years after it was launched. The histories of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam dramatically illustrate how smart, knowledgeable people can make catastrophic blunders and lie for years to cover them up.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Defense Secretary James Mattis, both of whom seem to have resigned because they viewed Trump as insufficiently interventionist and/or excessively skeptical of existing entanglements, surely would count as “experienced advisers.” That does not mean their advice was sound.

Murphy is right that we should worry about a president with little knowledge of the world whose military decisions are driven by anger or domestic political considerations. But it’s not clear to me that such a president poses a bigger danger than the experts who have been disastrously wrong more times than we can count.

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“Ten thousand,” says the New York City cop, when I ask how many people the city’s expecting at the No Hate. No Fear. Solidarity March, an event in protest of a rise in anti-Semitic attacks, primarily against Orthodox Jews, in the New York City area. 

He can’t yet know that an estimated 25,000 will show or that the march, from Foley Square in Lower Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, will be over capacity from the get-go. An hour before march time and the streets are packed solid, people wrapped in Israeli flags and carrying American flags, wearing Yankee caps and yarmulkes, carrying signs that read NO HATE NO FEAR and babies in bunting to keep out the kind of cold where you expect birds to drop from the sky, the kind of cold in which you don’t normally see sixty-something women chattering outdoors about the HBO series Big Little Lies and men standing on a park bench drinking coffee and calling out, “Hey, you a reporter? He gives good quotes.”

Sure. Why are they here today?

“We’re here because we have to play offense and defense against this growing hate in this country and in this world,” says Ariel Nelson. “That means not just standing by and making sure our synagogues and our institutions are secure, but going out en masse and showing the world that we are not going to tolerate it.”

“It” being the rise in hate crimes against Jews: 229 last year according to city officials, including a pair of gruesome incidents in December, the murder of four people in a Kosher supermarket in Jersey City, and a man with a machete storming a synagogue during a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, 35 miles north of New York City. The two attacks got a lot of airtime, the others (some seen in a sickening compilation video), not so much. There are reasons to take some of those statistics with a grain of salt. Does Nelson, who works for a news organization, see the media downplaying the attacks?

“Yes,” he says.

Does he have an opinion as to why?

“Jews aren’t important,” he says. “That’s just the way of the world, and it’s unfortunate.”

“I had been under the view that antisemitism was mostly a thing of the past in the post-Holocaust era,” says David Leit. “In recent months and years, my view has changed, and I think that antisemitism now requires a much more robust response. Whereas previously I thought that maybe some groups were overreacting to it, now I tend to agree more with Ariel, that if anything, we’ve been underreacting.”

Which makes it easy, or easier, for people not immediately affected to see the attacks as just a thing happening in New York.

“Pittsburgh isn’t New York,” says Nelson. “Poway isn’t New York.”

“Paris isn’t New York!” says Leit.

“And New York is where you would think it shouldn’t happen,” adds Nelson. “I mean, New York, there’s lots of Jews here, it’s the most pluralistic place on Earth, practically. You would think there would be, if anything, greater ability to get along. And my understanding is that the current New York police statistics [show] that half of the reported hate crimes [in 2019] are against Jews, which is shocking.” 

A drum boom starts from somewhere.

“There can be skepticism about marches, like, ‘We’re all going to get here, and we’re going to chant,’ and does it actually accomplish anything?” says Nelson. “In some respects, that’s a fair criticism. But I think there also does need to be public displays of unity…whether you’re Jewish or not Jewish, whether you’re black or white, whether you’re Muslim or Christian, we should all be here together today, to say, we’re not going to tolerate it.”

The people who are not going to tolerate it include a handful of young people singing a pop song in Hebrew as they walk amidst many thousands toward the bridge. Where are they from? 

“Israel!” say two 18-year-old girls at once. They’re volunteering with the Jewish Agency for Israel, working with Jewish communities in Brooklyn. Have they noticed an escalation in violence in the five months they’ve been here? Yes, they say. 

“Honestly, I think we are better prepared in terms of, we know how it feels like to be under attack, to be alert all the time,” says one. “But I don’t think we have better tools to deal with terror attacks and anti-Semitism.” 

“Now people understand how this situation in Israel is,” says the other. “We experience it in Israel and now it’s starting to be here and people feel it and now they actually will do something about it.”

And then they go on singing, being joyful despite the knowledge that massacre might be coming for them. But then, what are the options?

“I myself this week filled out an application for a gun permit,” says David Katz, who’s running for Congress from New York District 17 in Rockland County, which includes Monsey, where the machete attack occurred and where Katz grew up.

“I was taught to be worried about stuff like this, and then as I got older, I realized, it’s not such a danger. Now it seems like it is a danger,” he says. “There’s more of a nervousness, and for myself––excuse my French––shit seems to be happening and I want to be prepared in the event there’s a much larger conflagration. Does that make sense?”

Yes. During the Monsey attack, one of the Orthodox men picked up a table and attacked the assailant with that, which, granted, was impressive, but a gun would be a little more—

“Right,” says Katz. “There was a celebration for a new Torah within a couple of days after that, and there were Jews with guns presenting weapons. I know there are plenty of people that have already been training with weapons, preparing.”

How big of a shift is it for the Orthodox community to arm themselves? 

“Is the culture changing? That’s a yes,” he says. “Especially in younger people, at least. I think there’s a change in thinking, like, ‘there is a danger and we can’t count on anyone to protect us in the moment.’ Yes, police will come at some point. But in the moment, we are targets.”

For which the targets are sometimes blamed, as in, if Jews had not formed a community in Monsey, or wherever, there would be no friction with those not of the community and thus no opportunity, no incubator per se, for hatred of Jews to grow. Which history tells us, over and over, is untrue. People can crochet hatred out of nothing. How do we fight a hatred that never seems to go away for good, that comes back every generation with a new virulence? With new people ready to embrace hate and justify what they do with it, and a world willing to watch and prevaricate? 

“Do we need to be shot dead in a synagogue for people to pay attention to the fact that our neighbors are being beat up?” asks Bari Weiss on-air with CNN, as she starts walking across the bridge. An opinion page editor at The New York Times and author of the recent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (and, full disclosure, a friend), Weiss has written heartbreakingly of the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she made her bat mitzvah and where, in October 2018, a gunman entered yelling, “Death to all Jews!” and killed 11 people.

Not today, no death today, today is about believing we can make this about life, we have made it across the bridge to Cadman Plaza Park, where a young man enthusiastically approaches my friend and asks if he’s been “tied” yet today. My friend, who’s flown in from Austin, Texas, for the march, says no, and the young man wraps the leather tefillin up his arm, telling us at a rat-a-tat pace how overjoyed he is by the day, that we are all here together, he has my friend say a few words and then asks, “You’re Jewish, yes?” My friend says he’s not, he’s Episcopalian, and the young man smiles and says, “Well, it’s your bar mitzvah” and, after loosening the ties, walks toward the massive Brooklyn War Memorial, with its larger-than-life figures symbolizing victory and family, and on which in a few minutes Weiss will stand before thousands and explain why she is a Jew, and why we are here. She tells us, “We are the lamplighters, we are the ever-dying people that refuses to die. The people of Israel live now and forever, Am Yisrael Chai.”

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A major Trump administration rewrite of the fair housing regulations that govern federal development grants is inching closer to completion.

In late December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent Congress a proposed rule that would ask localities receiving federal housing funding to report on their housing market outcomes, and then propose concrete steps for improving housing affordability.

HUD would then use the data it collects to rank and incentivize local jurisdictions. Localities that either have affordable housing, or see housing become more affordable over a five-year time period, would be rewarded with additional grant money and other incentives. The department says it would “focus remedial resources and potential regulatory enforcement actions” against the lowest-performing jurisdictions, who potentially could lose access to HUD grants entirely.

The rule, which has yet to be made public, is a marked change from prior regulations issued by the Obama administration in 2015. Those required grantees to collect voluminous amounts of demographic data and then use that data to craft plans on combating racial segregation and concentrated poverty.

The Trump administration argues those rules were “overly burdensome” in their requirements and “too prescriptive” in their desired outcomes.

In early 2018, it delayed the implementation of the Obama-era regulations. In August of last year, HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced that fair housing rules would be rewritten entirely to encourage local jurisdictions to add housing supply by loosening regulation.

The proposed rule still leaves a lot of details to be sorted out. Its early circulation has already provoked a storm of controversy between those who see free, well-functioning markets as the best guarantor of fair housing, and others who argue for a much more proactive federal response.

HUD’s proposal “incentivizes a race to the top among localities based on housing affordability and availability and then offers a chance to put some teeth behind that,” says Michael Hendrix, the director of state and local policy at the Manhattan Institute.

The proposed rule focuses HUD on the things that really matter when it comes to fair housing, he tells Reason, while also reducing the regulatory burden on local governments.

Other housing advocates are less pleased, arguing the new rule is much too narrow and actually weakens, not strengthens, the federal government’s enforcement powers.

“The proposed rule entirely ignores the essential racial desegregation obligations of fair housing law,” Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the Washington Post, saying that Carson “is scrapping years of extensive input and intensive work that went into the fair housing rule and essentially reverting to the agency’s previous flawed and failed system.”

The root of this regulatory dispute goes back to the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA), which outlawed housing discrimination for a number of protected classes—including race, religion, and disability—and required that HUD programs be administered “in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing.”

What exactly is meant by affirmatively furthering fair housing, however, is not defined by the FHA, leaving it up to regulators and the courts to hash out.

For most of the FHA’s history, HUD required communities receiving federal housing money to produce analysis of impediments (AI) reports, which detail obstacles to fair housing.

Those rules were widely considered to be a toothless rubber stamp that did nothing to satisfy the government’s fair housing obligations.

Under the old AI process, for instance, HUD did not give any guidance on what might count as an impediment to fair housing, or what steps localities might take to overcome those impediments. It did not even review the AI reports that localities produced, and did not specify how often they had to be updated.

So in 2015, the Obama administration issued a new rule, called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which was much more complex in its requirements and much more ambitious in its aims.

The text of the rule says it would empower grant recipients “to foster the diversity and strength of communities by overcoming historic patterns of segregation, reducing racial or ethnic concentrations of poverty, and responding to identified disproportionate housing needs.”

The 2015 rule required local governments to complete lengthy fair housing assessments that included some 92 questions on a huge array of topics, including everything from access to transportation and education to labor market outcomes. Jurisdictions that did not complete these assessments to HUD’s satisfaction were required to do them again.

The 2015 rules “asked too much and asked too little at the same time,” Hendrix says. The number of things jurisdictions were asked to report on saw some cities produce tome-sized AFFH assessments, while other localities struggled to complete them at all.

Philadelphia’s AFFH assessment was over 800 pages long. Los Angeles’ was over 400. Meanwhile, of the 49 jurisdictions that were the first to turn in AFFH assessments between October 2016 and December 2017, 63 percent of them either failed to meet HUDs standards or managed to do so only after preparing subsequent drafts, according to the text of Trump’s proposed AFFH rule.

At the same time, the 2015 rules did too little in that they did not require localities to take any specific actions besides completing the AFFH assessments.

This was part of a deliberate effort to allow local communities to set their own priorities based on their local knowledge. But it ended up making the 2015 rule as defanged as the AI process it was replacing, says Salim Furth, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“There were no consequences,” he tells Reason. “It was never spelled out in the Obama rule what happened if they don’t like your proposals except you have to do them again. It was like you were going to keep redoing your homework until the professor liked it.”

In January 2018, the Trump administration started to chip away at Obama’s AFFH rule, suspending most localities’ reporting requirements until 2025. Then in August of that year, Carson announced that the administration would be rewriting AFFH completely.

The new rule, he said, would only focus on encouraging jurisdictions to add more housing supply, in contrast to the Obama-era rules that considered housing supply as just one factor among many that needed to be considered when assessing access to fair housing.

“I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” Carson told the Wall Street Journal, saying, “I would incentivize people who really would like to get a nice juicy government grant” to reform their zoning codes.

For that reason, Carson’s proposed rule asks jurisdictions to narrow their AFFH submissions to reporting on measures of housing affordability and quality, with the idea being that these metrics will provide a quantifiable proxy measurement for exclusionary housing regulations that stand in the way of fair housing.

If housing is cheap citywide, the thinking goes, low- and moderate-income people will have the ability to live in neighborhoods that offer more opportunities.

Localities would also have to list at least three concrete steps they intend to take to further fair housing.

The proposed rule “essentially says do you look like a place where people who want to rent a home can rent one and people who want to build a home can build one, or do you look like a place that is making it really hard to live there through regulation?” notes Furth.

To combat discrimination, the Trump administration’s proposal would also examine if jurisdictions had been the subject of a successful fair housing complaint in the last five years. Those that had would lose access to the incentives HUD would provide to high-performers.

Solomon Greene, a researcher at the Urban Institute and former HUD staffer who helped craft the 2015 AFFH rule, says focusing so narrowly on market outcomes and affordability misses the many ways obstacles to fair housing can present themselves, especially for the classes of people the FHA was designed to protect.

“When talking about affordable housing from a fair housing perspective, you have to look at [what’s] affordable for whom,” Greene tells Reason. “Using a lens that looks at affordability from the perspective of protected classes is absolutely important and seems missing from the proposed rule.”

For example, looking at general affordability in a city—as the new HUD rule proposes—might not tell you whether neighborhoods with good access to handicap-accessible public transportation are actually affordable to disabled people.

By collecting neighborhood-level data on demographics, school quality, transportation access, and job opportunities, says Greene, the Obama-era AFFH assessments were able to give a much fuller picture of what roadblocks there were to protected classes finding adequate affordable housing.

By focusing on affordability in general, he says, the new HUD rule is depriving the department of information it needs to accurately assess if communities are, in fact, furthering fair housing.

Greene also says that HUD was proactive in assisting jurisdictions who had difficulty completing the detailed fair housing assessments required by the Obama-era rule.

Others have made similar comments, saying that the new HUD rule effectively throws in the towel when it comes to fighting housing discrimination.

“Discrimination and segregation will continue unabated when HUD doesn’t provide meaningful fair housing oversight of local governments,” Thomas Silverstein, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post.

Yentel, in comments to Mother Jones, also said that Carson is letting “localities off the hook by explicitly stating there will be no consequences if they keep their restrictive zoning laws.”

The latter criticism is one that Furth is sympathetic to. HUD’s new rule might focus on more appropriate measures of fair housing he says, but it will still largely judge localities on the plans bureaucrats produce, not the actions elected officials actually carry out—a flaw it shares with Obama AFFH rule.

“I don’t see a reason these fictional plans written up by bureaucrats seeking money would be any more real under a Carson rule than they would be under a Castro rule,” says Furth, referencing former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.

Furth says localities should have to show HUD that they’ve actually taken some steps to further fair housing, whatever those steps might be.

There are obvious perils in tying many strings to federal grants. Demanding local governments take specific actions when it comes to land-use planning is a huge intrusion of federal authority into a policy area long held to be the sole domain of cities and states.

There’s also the wider question of what libertarians should make of rules governing federal grant programs that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Hendrix cautions against making the perfect the enemy of the good. So long as these grant programs do exist, they should at least be administered in a way that encourages better, freer housing policy.

“So much of what this new rule points to is a more market-oriented approach to housing, which is what we should all be pushing for,” he says.

The Trump administration’s proposed AFFH rule has yet to be published in the federal register. Once that’s done, the public will have 60 days to submit comment before the rule is finalized.

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In October 2002, when the United States was on the brink of entering a disastrous war in Iraq, a congressman named Mike Pence stood up on the floor of House of Representatives to denounce the television networks for refusing to cover President George W. Bush’s address outlining the case for war.

The Indiana Republian was referring to an October 7, 2002, speech that Bush delivered in Cincinnati, Ohio. In it, the president argued that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism.”

While CNN and other cable news outlets covered the speech, the major networks did not. That infuriated Pence. And so he denounced “CBS, ABC, and NBC for the total abdication of their public duty in refusing to broadcast the president’s address to America in this hour of national need.”

“Rather than the status of the Iraqi nuclear weapons system, The King of Queens [was] on CBS,” Pence continued. “Rather than telling the American people of Iraqi complicity with terrorism, The Drew Carey Show aired on ABC.”

I don’t know whether those network executives were right or wrong to pick Kevin James and Drew Carey over Bush and Saddam that October night, but hindsight tells us that Bush was wrong about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. And the 9/11 Commission—which unfortunately would not finish its report until mid-2004, a year after the U.S. launched its ill-conceived invasion of Iraq—ultimately concluded that there was no secret connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

These days, Pence is vice president; and these days, whether or not the broadcast networks are helping you, it’s easier to use social media to peddle pro-war propaganda. And that’s exactly what Pence did this weekend, dusting off the Iraq playbook to argue that an American airstrike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was totally justified because 9/11.

Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer place today because Soleimani is gone.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020

There is no good reason to believe this is true. (And that goes as well for his follow-up claim about Soleimani plotting “imminent attacks”—more on that here.)

The most obvious problem with Pence’s claim is that 19 terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks, not 12. We’ll be charitable and assume that was a typo. The 9/11 Commission established that between eight and 10 of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran to get to Al Qaeda training facilities in neighboring Afghanistan. That is, presumably, the straw that Pence is grasping for here.

But the report does not link Soleimani or anyone else in the Iranian regime to the plot. In fact, Soleimani’s name is never mentioned in the commission’s 1,200-page final report.

Here’s what the report does say about Iran’s involvement—or lack thereof:

We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack. At the time of their travel through Iran, the Al Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operation.

The 9/11 hijackers—like Al Qaeda frontman Osama bin Laden—were mostly Saudi nationals. Saudi Arabia and Iran are arch rivals, and much of the post-9/11 chaos in the Middle East is due to those two regional powers jockeying for leverage against one another. Iran, run by hard-line Shiite Muslims, is unlikely to forge an alliance with Al Qaeda, a Sunni group with ties to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, after the attacks Iran actively helped the U.S. round-up members of Al Qaeda, including bin Laden’s son.

Writing at National Review, David Harsanyi argues that Pence’s interpretation of the facts surrounding 9/11 is “mostly right” because Iran has backed other terrorist groups, including Hamas, run by Sunni Muslims. But Harsanyi has to concede that there is “no hard evidence that Soleimani himself was involved” in 9/11, and he admits that the “commission could unearth no evidence proving that the Iranians knew what the 9/11 team was planning (which doesn’t mean they did not).”

Mostly right? No. These arguments do not support Pence’s expansive claims, and they certainly shouldn’t convince anyone to go to war. If anything, that kind of Bush-era connect-the-dots-to-9/11 logic should make Americans more skeptical of the administration’s case for war with Iran, because it is exactly the same playbook—sometimes even using the exact same players—that led the country into the Iraq quagmire.

Needless to say, the fact that Soleimani wasn’t involved in plotting 9/11 does not absolve him from a history of plotting attacks that did kill and maim hundreds of Americans, among others. But the question we should be asking is whether killing him keeps Americans safer. By escalating the threat of war, it does not do that at all.

Meanwhile, most of those deadly attacks were only possible because the targets were Americans in Iraq—and those Americans were in Iraq, at least in part, because Mike Pence was wrong about whether to go to war nearly two decades ago. He’s wrong again now.

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