Tag: hit&run

Kanye West is now reported to not be running for president. The controversial hip-hop artist and fashion mogul made a very late in the game announcement of the intention of a presidential run on July 4. As this Reason article reports, had he chosen to pursue that goal as an independent, it was not too late for him to get on a majority of state ballots if he was willing to scramble and spend money to gather petitions.

In the only substantive interview about politics after his announcement, with Forbes, West said he intended to start a whole new party to be called the Birthday Party, which would unfortunately for him, if attempted, present in many states harder and earlier deadlines for actually getting on the ballot, making the whole effort a likely complete waste of time.

Still, he only commenced with part of the necessary Federal Elections Commission filing and did not seem to begin the state-level petition drives that an actual run would have required. West told Forbes in essence that he figured he’d be able to sue his way on to ballots (Forbes paraphrased him merely using the word “argue” but such arguments would need to be made in court to be effective), never mind official filing deadlines. (The Libertarian Party had some success this year with that strategy in Illinois, but it was a risky stance had West really wanted to contend.)

Since he would ostensibly have been trying to unseat Donald Trump, West rescinded his previous loud public support for the president to Forbes, though the only quasi-substantive thing said against him was, “I don’t like that I caught wind that he hid in the bunker.”

West agreed that his actual effect in the race would likely harm Democratic candidate Joe Biden more than Trump, but posited it as a feature, not a bug: his whole point, with his public MAGA campaign, was proving Blacks were not required to be Democrats. “To say that the Black vote is Democratic is a form of racism and white supremacy,” he told Forbes.

As discussed in my February 2019 Reason feature trying to make sense of West’s pro-Trump dabblings, besides generic appreciation of the man’s “dragon energy” the only actual policy stances West seemed serious about was criminal justice reform to get more people out of prison, support for returning jobs to American cities, and the very un-Trump causes of asylum for those “fighting to protect their children from violence and war” and “common-sense gun control.”

To Forbes, he added strong anti-abortion and anti-vaccine beliefs to his set of political ideas. But mostly he seemed to think in some inchoate way that he, and also Trump, were “special” in a way Biden was not. (“And Joe Biden? Like, come on man, please. You know? Obama’s special. Trump’s special. We say Kanye West is special. America needs special people that lead. Bill Clinton? Special. Joe Biden’s not special.”)

Randall Lane, who nabbed that Forbes interview, writes now that it all seems to be over that another fresh obsession of West’s is something he could pursue running for president or not: Making it easier for more people to vote.

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Donald Trump’s pitch to “Make America Great Again” included a commitment to rethinking America’s interventionist foreign policy.

“After the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course,” then-candidate Trump told an audience at the Center for the National Interest in April 2016. “Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another.”

Trump’s promise to unwind America’s foreign commitments won the vote of some anti-war libertarians, who argued that, while many of his political views were odious, foreign policy mattered most.

“Donald [Trump] is a peacenik, practically, certainly compared to the war-mongering Hillary [Clinton],” libertarian economist Walter Block told the audience at a November 2016 debate over whether libertarians should support Trump, which was hosted by the Soho Forum.

On the campaign trail, Trump also attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a senator, for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya as secretary of state, and for her hawkish approach to foreign policy in general.

“Almost everything [Hillary Clinton] has done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it’s been a disaster,” Trump said in an October 2016 debate.

In a November 2016 Reason podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell made the case that Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton.

“Whenever there’s a dictator or tyrant [America doesn’t] like in any part of the world, we are obligated to remove him,” Russell said. “Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that very claim…And in doing so, I think he may do great service for actual peace.”

But now that we’re ending his presidential term, do noninterventionists believe Trump actually has moved the world closer to peace?

“I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace,” says Russell. “At the very same time, he’s moved us into more wars. So it’s a terribly mixed bag.”

But Russell says that Trump’s rhetoric alone still was an important victory for the noninterventionist cause.

“He called into question the need for America to invade countries, to change their regimes and to stay there…Specifically, he called into question the Iraq war.”

Trump isn’t the first modern president to promise an end to foreign entanglements on the campaign trail only to double down on those commitments once in office. Candidate Barack Obama called the Iraq War “dumb” and promised to end it.

Obama temporarily withdrew troops from Iraq on Bush’s pre-negotiated timetable, but then re-intervened a few years later after ISIS filled the power vacuum. He also expanded the war on terror into several new countries and began personally ordering covert drone strikes, one of which killed a 16-year-old American, and another that killed at least 13 people headed to a wedding.

Even George W. Bush, who as president started the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran against nation-building on the campaign trail.

“I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way. So should you,'” Bush said in a 2000 debate.

Scott Horton, a popular anti-war podcast host and author of a book on the history of the war in Afghanistan, says modern presidents often campaign against war because it’s a popular position in the abstract.

“The American people want peace,” says Horton.

He agrees with Russell that Trump’s rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment, and specifically on Jeb Bush and the Iraq war, helped the anti-war cause.

“He really got the…Tea Party, Republican voters of America to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush,” says Horton.

But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably anti-war.

“The problem with Donald Trump, of course, is that he’s a millimeter deep,” says Horton. “He has some instincts, but he doesn’t have…thinking really on these things.”

Trump’s wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters have meant that Americans are paying less attention than ever to our actual wars, which nevertheless are still being waged.

Trump hasn’t invaded any new countries, but he has ramped up the nearly 19-year-long, $2 trillion Afghanistan war that’s cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghanis and more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops.

Trump deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 and dropped more bombs and missiles in 2019 than in any previously recorded year.

“Once they get in there, all the incentives are to keep the [wars] going,” says Horton. “Afghanistan is the greatest example of this.”

Instead of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria once he took office, Trump vowed to stop publicly reporting troop numbers. 

The Trump administration did strike a deal with Taliban leaders in late February to wind down the war within 14 months if they pledged to prevent terrorist groups like al Qaeda from operating in the country, and the Pentagon announced a reduction in forces and withdrawal from five Afghanistan bases on July 14.

“The fact that Trump was willing to break with Bush and Obama’s policy to go ahead and negotiate directly with the Taliban was a clue that he was really serious,” says Horton.

But he worries that deal could be scuttled by uncorroborated reports that Russia paid bounties to Afghanis who killed U.S. troops, which prompted Republican Liz Cheney to partner with several House Democrats to place conditions on the withdrawal.

Horton also points out that Trump has increased U.S. involvement in Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen alone, the United Nations estimates that the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported bombing campaign has resulted in almost a quarter of a million deaths.

“These are two of America’s most horrible wars and no one pays any attention to them whatsoever,” says Horton.

Trump has continued and escalated the war on terror, which could make the U.S. susceptible to getting involved in even more conflicts around the globe. He also undid Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and ordered a targeted assassination of Iranian Gen. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom he accused of plotting an attack on an American base.

But after Iran fired back, Trump backed off. He pulled back a strike in 2019 after Iran downed a U.S. drone, and political allies and media commentators portrayed it as a weakness. He faced widespread criticism for moving troops out of northern Syria and praise when he fired missiles into a Syrian airfield after allegations of a chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad.

“Look at the narrative and the agenda in the media,” says Horton. “How dare Donald Trump try to end any of America’s wars ever.”

Russell worries about the increasingly belligerent rhetoric on both sides of the aisle towards China. Trump has escalated tensions with China through his trade war and  the reported placement of low-yield nuclear weapons in the region. But Russell still believes Trump’s rhetoric was useful.

“The best aspect of the foreign policy of Trump is that…he has revealed the mind of not just the foreign policy establishment…[but] really government workings and the workings of the state,” says Russell. “The worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy is that he’s a mass murderer, just like the rest of them.”

In the end, Trump, as commander in chief, has had ample opportunity to begin making good on his promise to begin extricating the American military from its endless wars. Time and again, he has failed to formulate a coherent strategy for doing so.

“It never should have been this way. We screwed up, got the whole 21st century off on the wrong foot,” says Horton. “But we didn’t need to. We could call the whole damn thing off…and just forge that new [foreign policy] consensus and stick with it. It should be easy because we’re right.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena and Isaac Reese.

Photo credits: “Liz Cheney,” Stefani Reynolds/CNP/MEGA/ Newscom; “Mother at military funeral,” Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom; “Carrying flag-draped casket,” Kevin Dietsch/Newscom; “Woman at veteran’s gravesite,” Michael A. McCoy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; “Trump and Jeb Bush at debate,” Max Wittaker/UPI/Newscom; “Trump holding up fists,” Yin Bogu Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; “Chinese ballistic missile,” Kyodo/Newscom; “Donald Trump campaigning at podium,” by Gage Skidmore

Music credits: “Truth or Reality,” “Temerity,” “Unforeseen,” “To Begin Again,” by Sean Williams licensed by Artlist. 

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Nationwide protests following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police were met, in many cities, by even more police violence. In York City, dozens of incidents in which police responded with excessive force were caught on camera. But so far, the department says only four NYPD cops have been disciplined.

The NYPD has had excessive force problems for years and years, but even folks familiar with cases of NYPD misconduct may still be surprised to learn that the department continues to twiddle its thumbs in the midst of an unprecedented protest movement.

On Twitter over the past several months, T. Greg Doucette did yeoman’s work tracking and maintaining a thread of hundreds of violent responses by police directed toward protesters, media covering protesters, and people just in the vicinity of the protests. His thread currently ends at 775 tweets.

It looks like many people used these protests as an excuse to lash out and engage in violent and dangerous behavior. Some of them were rioters and looters breaking into stores and setting fires. And some others were men and women in uniform, carrying badges and guns, looking for a reason to hit people.

The New York Times has looked over video footage showing the NYPD responding to protesters (some of which they gathered from Doucette’s feed) and found case after case of officers shoving, beating, and violently assaulting people who do not appear to be engaging in illegal behavior or, often, even resisting the police. They looked at 60 incidences of troubling behavior by NYPD officers in just the first 10 days of protests.

In one video, in less than a minute, the same police officer harshly shoves an unresisting protester to the pavement, pushes a cyclist, and then picks up and body slams a third protester who was standing and pointing at the gathered police officers as they were apparently breaking up a protest. In another, police beat a man on the ground after chasing him, and one even steps on the man’s neck, notable given that Floyd died from having an officer kneel on his neck for several minutes.

The Times looked over video of police just randomly lashing out and shoving people as they walked by them. They found a video of police officers slamming a man to the ground after he had been arrested and they were leading him away. They found video footage of an NYPD officer grabbing a man and hurling him into a parked car, but not arresting him, and just leaving his body on the street.

And despite the constant refrain from police that these are “isolated incidents,” the Times found behavior repeating itself and multiple examples of each questionably violent response from police.

The Times acknowledges that the videos lack full context, and we don’t see what happened before or after these violent outbursts. But they also note that the city’s policing guidelines order officers to use only the amount of reasonable force “necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.”

An NYPD spokesperson told the Times that four officers have been disciplined for their conduct during the protests in late May and early June, and the department is investigating 51 other instances of possible protest-related police misconduct. The spokesperson declined to actually watch or respond to any specific videos. The Police Benevolent Union that represents most NYPD officers also declined to respond to the Times.

But experts were willing to look over the videos at the Times behest, and while they found some uses of force acceptable (to detain those who were trying to evade arrest), many other incidents raised concerns.

“A lot of this was ‘street justice,'” Philip M. Stinson told the Times. Stinson is a criminologist at Bowling Green University and a former police officer who focuses on studying police use of forces. He saw many of these cases as “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.” He described some of the tactics he saw as “sloppy” and “downright criminal.”

Weeks after the protests, people in New York City (and elsewhere) are still capturing and distributing disturbing footage of NYPD misconduct. Here’s police body camera footage from late May that was publicly released Tuesday showing a transit officer getting shockingly violent when a homeless man mildly resisted getting tossed off a train for the crime of taking up more than one seat (even though the train car was mostly empty):

A homeless man left a crowded shelter the night of May 25 and sat on the train with a few tote bags. Cops told him to leave. Then: https://t.co/DJQ3oK4Eha pic.twitter.com/6j5UGDDZmu

— Rosa Goldensohn (@RosaGoldensohn) July 15, 2020

The transit officers then pepper-sprayed the man while he was simply standing against a wall in the train station terrified and begging them to stop. He required medical treatment after the encounter. More body camera footage can be viewed here.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s office responded to this encounter by filing felony assault charges not against the officer but against the homeless man, identified only as Joseph T. by New York media outlet The City.

Joseph was arrested for resisting arrest and “obstructing government administration.”  Arresting officer Adonis Long claimed that while they were cuffing him on the platform, Joseph kicked Long’s right hand. As a result, Long “sustained swelling and substantial pain to the knuckles of his right hand and was transported to the hospital.” And so prosecutors subsequently added felony assault charges. The video, meanwhile, shows Long striking Joseph across the face twice before dragging him off the train. Maybe that’s how he hurt his hand?

Even as his office defends overcharging a homeless man, Vance says he supports efforts to defund and scale back policing. Just last week he penned an op-ed in the New York Amsterdam News, writing in part:

In light of the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, it is unquestionable that substantial community reinvestment is essential to our era’s antiracist criminal justice reckoning, and that grassroots organizations based in communities of color severely harmed by police violence and unnecessary incarceration should receive the bulk of funds divested from law enforcement.

Reinvesting taxpayer dollars into our historically underserved communities of color demonstrates that municipal leaders are listening and acting on the democratic principle of the “consent of the governed,” which holds that the moral right to use state power is only justified to the extent that our constituents consent to it. So too do other actions taken by state and city governments, including banning police use of chokeholds, making police misconduct reports public, and ending qualified immunity. But these actions over the past weeks don’t suggest our work, as government and law enforcement leaders, is anywhere close to healing centuries of trauma caused by systemic racism in our justice system.

It’s unclear how terrorizing a homeless man on a train helps achieve these goals Vance says he supports. Going after the rotten cops captured on video seems to better fit the bill.

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At least eight people across the country were hit in the face with rubber bullets and other less-lethal projectiles during the May 30 anti-police brutality protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd. Videos of these partial blindings, which challenge official statements put out by the various police departments, were released yesterday by The Washington Post.

While many of the departments involved claimed to have deployed rubber bullets, tear gas, and other less-lethal munitions to disperse protesters who were throwing objects at officers, footage from the incidents show many people who were partially blinded posed no “obvious threat” to police.

Before Balin Brake was struck in the eye by a tear gas canister in Fort Wayne, Indiana, video shows him standing with his hands in the air and then running away with other protesters. Brake turned his head for a moment to check the scene behind him when he was hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Other protesters helped him away from the scene.

Following the incident, the Fort Wayne Police Department issued a statement saying Brake was bending over to pick up a gas canister, presumably to throw it back towards police (in their telling), when a second canister was deployed, bounced, and hit him in the eye. Yet slow-motion video does not show Brake bending over, nor does it show the second canister bouncing on the ground.

Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist, was also included in the report. After being hit in the eye with what she believed to be a rubber bullet while covering a Minneapolis protest, Tirado described the sensation as her face “exploding.” Tirado was struck after putting her camera down for a moment between shots. She was carried away by protesters and was later informed by a doctor that she is unlikely to ever recover her sight.

Use of force incidents during anti-brutality protests have renewed criticisms of the use of kinetic impact projectiles such as rubber bullets.

As Reason has previously reported, less-lethal munitions like rubber bullets can contain metal cores and are covered by rubber, plastic, and other materials. These munitions can cause penetrative damage and lacerations, both of which are contrary to their marketed use.

Footage from anti-police brutality protests shared on social media has highlighted the gruesome bodily injuries that can be sustained from such rounds. And while law enforcement describes rubber bullets as “non-lethal” or “less-lethal,” 15 percent of rubber bullet injuries resulted in permanent damage—there is even risk of death if struck in the face.

Manufacturers and some law enforcement departments encourage officers to aim for lower extremities, such as buttocks and thighs, but videos like those collected by The Washington Post have shown officers failing to properly use these munitions.

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A worsening COVID-19 pandemic in much of the country is prompting state governments to shut down or delay the reopening of their bars, leading in turn to calls for a government rescue of drinking establishments.

On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, ordered all bars in the state to close in response to that state’s rising number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Last Friday, Nevada closed bars in seven counties, including Clark County, which contains Las Vegas. Texas, Arizona, and Florida have all closed down their pubs and clubs again.

The closures come in response to a wave of public health warnings about the unique hazards of the bar environment, where loud talking, closely-spaced (often fixed) seating, dancing, socializing, and sealed windows make it easy for COVID-19 to spread.

“Bars: really not good, really not good. Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in late June. “Except for maybe a hospital with sick patients, I couldn’t imagine too many more risky places than a super cramped indoor bar with poor ventilation and hundreds of people,” said one Harvard Medical School professor to The New York Times.

For fans of both a nice draft beer and government-imposed lockdowns as a tool for fighting the pandemic, this has created a dilemma, neatly summed up by a tweet from The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson:

Indoor bars and pubs are not the most important business in America, but they are

a) exquisitely designed to spread COVID-19, and
b) frigging awesome

So, let's shut em down and bail em out, until things change.https://t.co/j8HNXmeMmH

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 10, 2020

The solution for many is a bailout of regrettably shuttered bars.

This, argued Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann last week, would prevent many bars from permanently closing, and reduce the pressure on politicians to rush reopenings.

Weissmann argues:

The problem with shutting bars and nightclubs down indefinitely is that it would put many of them out of business permanently. And so long as bar owners are worried about going bankrupt, and bartenders are worried about losing their jobs, they are going to put political pressure on local elected officials to let them reopen, whether or not [it’s] actually safe.

“The obvious solution to this bind is to bail the bars out,” Weissmann continues. “Give them money so that they can cover their expenses, including rent, even while they are shut down. That way, mayors and governors will no longer face a choice between containing the virus and sentencing beloved local businesses to likely death.”

There is a cool—if authoritarian—logic to the idea of the government paying off aggrieved parties with the explicit goal of quelling political opposition to its lockdown policies. But so long as governments view lockdowns as their primary tool for combating COVID-19, they are in effect sentencing bars and other shuttered businesses to likely death regardless.

Bailouts will only delay that while reducing pressure on policymakers to scale up responses to the pandemic that don’t involve locking everyone in their homes until a vaccine is rolled out.

And it’s not like the federal government’s last small business bailout program, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), was enough to prevent many recipients from going under.

Some of that can be chalked up to the design of the program, which forced businesses to spend most of the money they received within eight weeks on retaining staff in order for their loans to be forgiven. Yet as The New York Times noted Monday, “the [PPP] rules were later relaxed, but in a sign of how many small-business owners did not feel confident that they would be on steady ground by the time repayment was due, roughly $130 billion of aid money remained untapped when the program ended in June.”

Given business owners’ wariness to participate in a reformed PPP, we shouldn’t be too bullish on the idea that another few more months of bailouts will tide bars over until they can hit profitability once again. Ultimately, bars need customers to survive.

It’s possible that even if bars are allowed to reopen, many of them will still fail. Restaurant reservations, a proxy measure for people’s willingness to go out, are still down by as much as 60 percent from last year even in states that are largely reopened. The recent surges in some states that are linked to bars will likely make even fewer people willing to return to them if they do in fact reopen.

This is a feature, not a bug, of lifting lockdowns. Giving businesses the freedom to reopen means we will discover which of them can actually hang on in a world where COVID-19 is an ongoing concern. Letting some of these businesses fail will allow the workers and capital tied up in them to flow to other economic activities that can survive during a pandemic.

The alternative proposal of combining continual lockdowns with bailouts will only set the stage for a zombified economy where the still-productive sectors of the economy are required to prop up firms that may take years to be profitable again.

And though paying businesses to stay closed might reduce pressure on the government to avoid hasty reopenings, it also reduces pressure on the government to increase testing, contact tracing, and universal mask-wearing strategies that have been successfully deployed in other countries to curb the spread of COVID-19 and which are allowing bars and restaurants to reopen.

The practical case against bailouts aside, there is a more principled argument for providing aid to forcibly closed bars; namely that the government owes you compensation when it takes away your ability to earn a living with your property.

“If the government shuts down only certain businesses on the grounds that they’re areas where the pandemic can be spread more quickly, that’s an action that the bar owner then is taking on behalf of the public,” says Oliver Dunford, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation. “Arguably the public should have to pay for it.”

That’s a reasonable argument, but it can also be addressed by letting bars reopen. Business owners would then be free to ply their trade, and taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook.

America has badly bungled its COVID-19 response to the point where we’re currently facing the options of perpetual lockdowns or letting things reopen without sufficient means of controlling the virus’s spread.

Neither is appealing, but if forced to chose between the two, I think the latter is preferable in perhaps all but the hardest-hit cities. Months into this pandemic, people are about as informed of the risks of COVID-19 as they’re ever going to be and can decide for themselves which activities they think are safe.

That’s not a perfect solution. There are externalities to individuals’ behavior during COVID-19. But lockdowns and business closures are only one—increasingly costly and rather draconian—means of dealing with those externalities.

Instead of bailing out bars, states should let them reopen. Potential patrons should exercise caution in deciding whether to go to them. Businesses that can’t offer a safe enough environment to attract patrons should be allowed to fail. And governments worried about the health consequences of operational pubs should get serious about adopting other strategies for containing COVID-19 that don’t involve locking people in their homes for months on end.

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Against a backdrop of cancel culture, what is the statute of limitations on being canceled for having once held opinions shared by a large majority of Americans? Boeing’s top communications officer has resigned over an article he wrote for a military publication over 30 years ago. The piece argued against women fighting in combat, a position shared by 56 percent of Americans as recently as 1991.

In 1987, Niel Golightly was a 29-year-old Navy pilot. In an article for the U.S. Naval Institute’s publication Proceedings, he took pains to come out in favor of workplace equality in civilian life. “A woman may have as much or more to offer in mental and manual skills as her male competitor; her uniquely feminine emotional qualities are largely irrelevent [sic], if not assets,” he wrote. “Legislating equal access to those roles is imperative in a society dedicated to the free pursuit of happiness.” But after running through a series of cultural and biological arguments against women serving in combat, Golightly concluded:

On a 5,000-man aircraft carrier where 19-year-old sailors are working 12, 15, sometimes even 20 hours a day on a blistering, howling flight deck where a simple mistake can kill even during routine peacetime operations, there is simply no room for the problem of sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, pregnancy, love triangles, and adolescent emotional crises that have plagued most Navy supply ships and tenders since the Navy began its experiment in coeducation in the 1970s.

Golightly had been at Boeing for six months when he tendered his resignation. He told The New York Times that he no longer opposed women serving in combat, a position reached by a majority of Americans in 1992, according to Gallup. A colleague of Golightly at his previous company, Royal Dutch Shell, told the Times that he “promoted female talent within the team and was an exemplary employee. … ‘This is just astounding that something someone wrote 33 years ago should lead to termination like this.'”

The Times notes that Boeing has been rocked by “fallout” from crashes of two of its 737 Max jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, as well as the downturn in air travel. Additionally, the company has recently dismissed “several employees” for making racist comments. David Calhoun, the CEO of Boeing, told the Times that he valued Golightly’s contributions but also readily accepted his resignation. “I want to emphasize our company’s unrelenting commitment to diversity and inclusion in all its dimensions, and to ensuring that all of our employees have an equal opportunity to contribute and excel,” Calhoun said.

Even in a world where art curators are forced out for saying they would continue to collect work by “white men,” opinion writers leave plum posts complaining of hostile workplaces borne out of ideological zealotry, and leading liberal academics are attacked for being insufficiently woke, Golightly’s case staggers the imagination. He no longer holds the views that led to his resignation, which can only be seen as forced. His expression of those views back during the second Reagan administration are starkly out of step with contemporary sensibilities but betray none of the rhetorical excesses one might associate with irredeemable misogyny. He has, apparently, a track record of promoting women under his supervision. Yet out of the C-suite he must go.

“Cancel culture” doesn’t exist, we’re told, yet we see its manifestations everywhere around us. If every thought and word ever uttered is open for reinvestigation, the present will be unlivable. Last fall, in discussing “wokeness” and politics, former President Barack Obama cautioned against creating impossible purity tests. “People who do really good stuff have flaws,” he noted. Such basic wisdom has sadly gone missing, it seems.

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Will the COVID-19 pandemic hasten the abolition of cash? That was certainly the hope of central bankers and politicians who don’t like the uncontrollable nature of physical money. Banknotes and coins are virtually impossible to trace, allowing people to engage in anonymous transactions and to store value out of reach of grasping officials, which had officials hoping that the arrival of the pandemic would taint physical money as a nasty virus vector and so accelerate the move to a cashless world.

But that’s not what’s happening. Sure, contactless transactions have increased while people make purchases from home. But demand for cash is also up, as people hedge against uncertainty by holding on to a means of exchange that weathers emergencies and circulates beyond the reach of political whims.

It’s not that officialdom hasn’t put in the effort to kill cash.

“We know that money changes hands frequently and can pick up all sorts of bacteria and viruses and things like that,” a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman told The Telegraph in March. “When possible it’s a good idea to use contactless payments.”

Amidst massive uproar, WHO immediately backpedaled from the notion that it had ever warned against the use of banknotes. And well it did—cash and coins are popular in most parts of the world. Cash enjoys public support largely for the same reason it is unpopular with officials: it makes it difficult to track and tax transactions, and to impose negative interest rates.

The popularity of cash was quite healthy even before the pandemic.

“It would seem that physical currency should be fading out as the world of payments is increasingly electronic, with new technologies emerging at a rapid pace, and as governments look to restrictions on large-denomination notes as a way to reduce crime and tax evasion,” Ruth Judson, a Federal Reserve economist, wrote in 2017. “Nonetheless, demand for U.S. dollar banknotes continues to grow, and consistently increases at times of crisis both within and outside the United States because it remains a desirable store of value and medium of exchange in times and places where local currency or bank deposits are inferior.”

Many U.S. dollars are held outside the United States by people who have limited faith in the political and economic stability of their own countries and see American currency as a reasonably stable store of value. But about a quarter of Americans make little or no use of banks, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found in 2017. These “unbanked” and “underbanked” Americans primarily do business in cash, fueling demand for banknotes and coins.

That’s not just an American phenomenon. “Banks are issuing more notes than ever and yet they seem to be disappearing off the face of the earth,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the end of 2019. “Central banks don’t know where they have gone, or why, and are playing detective, trying to crack the same mystery.”

The article went on to add that demand for banknotes is not that big a mystery, since central bankers are quite aware that “households feel distrustful of the banking system or people want to make transactions anonymously” out of sight of regulators and tax collectors.

Such distrust only increases when you add to the turmoil, such as with a pandemic and with tight economic controls imposed by panicked governments. That’s caused a surge in demand for physical cash in the U.S., Europe, Australia, India, and elsewhere in the months since the virus began spreading.

This doesn’t mean that people are spurning the convenience of digital payment systems; to the contrary, contactless transactions are surging—by 10 to 15 percent, according to some reports. Unsurprisingly, during a health crisis, people like the flexibility and perceived safety of paying for things from home and with a minimum of physical contact.

But people also like the reliability and anonymity of old-fashioned cash. Payment methods that were supposed to replace paper and coins are instead coexisting with them. That’s because people’s priorities are very different from those of the powers-that-be.

“The drive toward cashlessness is mostly driven by two factors: fiscal concerns over revenue collection and industry interest in capturing additional data about people’s lives,” notes Bill Maurer, dean of the University of California’s School of Social Sciences. “If you’re a state tax authority, eliminating physical currency means that transactions have to pass through a bank or other institution. Despite secrecy rules and privacy regulations, if they have due cause, officials can still peer into people’s financial affairs.”

Easily peering into people’s financial affairs runs exactly contrary to what many members of the public actually want. Add to that the large number of Americans who live almost exclusively in the cash economy, and the fact that “when there’s a natural or manmade disaster, paper money becomes absolutely essential to community resiliency,” and you have Maurer’s rationale for why banknotes and coins are “not going away anytime soon.” But he does worry that continued efforts to marginalize cash will hit the poor hardest.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the European Central Bank (ECB) shares that concern. It came out against the Spanish government’s plan to gradually eliminate physical money, warning that many poor Spaniards rely on the cash economy.

The ECB’s own figures (ECB) show that, as of 2016, 79 percent of all point-of-sale purchases in the Eurozone—87 percent in Spain—were made in cash.

Eliminating banknotes and coins would require massive changes to the way people conduct their lives. And, as the pandemic-era surge in demand for physical euros, dollars, and other currencies demonstrates, that would certainly be change imposed from above, against the wishes of the people earning, buying, and selling through their preferred means of exchange.

Those preferred means of exchange may well be through cards and apps when it’s convenient and the stakes are low. But when privacy is a concern, or when a global crisis threatens the infrastructure required to keep digital payment systems up and running, people continue to rely on physical money they can hold in their hands.

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Sessions shows where trusting snakes gets you. There’s a parable President Donald Trump loves to tell, about a woman who trusted a snake. The tale, from the 1968 Al Wilson song “The Snake,” ends with the reptile admonishing a woman: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” (It is, like so much of Trump’s reign, on the nose enough to make living-in-a-simulation theories seem a little less kooky.) Former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions might have done himself well to listen better when Trump told this story the first few times. 

Sessions was an early cheerleader for Trump—among the first in the Washington establishment to welcome him in. And, as the very first senator to endorse him for president, Sessions was rewarded once Trump took office with a promotion to attorney general. Once there, Sessions pushed for and presided over some of the worst of the Trump administration’s immigration initiatives. (Sessions “was not only for ‘the Wall’ before Trump thought it was cool, he’s against legal immigration, too,” as Anthony Fisher pointed out in 2016.) 

But Sessions quickly crossed Trump by recusing himself from the Russia investigation. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the president in the past few years it’s that he can’t stand any perception of less than lapdog-like loyalty.

“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump told The New York Times in July 2017. The president then continued to slag Sessions in public and private for the rest of his time leading the Department of Justice (DOJ), eventually showing Sessions the door in November 2018.

Trump apparently wasn’t satisfied with pushing Sessions out of the DOJ, however. Come Sessions’ announcement that he was running for his old seat in the Senate, Trump starting cheering on his Republican rival, former college football coach Tommy Tuberville.

On Tuesday, Tuberville beat Sessions with 60.7 of the vote to Sessions’ 39.3 percent, and Sessions became “a one-man cautionary tale about the risks of linking one’s career to a mercurial president to whom loyalty meant everything,” as The New York Times put it.

Still, let’s be clear: Sessions’ loss is America’s gain. “Reminder: Jeff Sessions Is a Drug War Dinosaur and Should Be Nowhere Near Government Power,” is a good place to start for more on that, though you may also want to see “8 Ways in Which Jeff Sessions Sucked” or “13 Reasons Jeff Sessions is a @$#/!“

Tuberville will face off against Democrat Doug Jones in November.

Wow, just called! @TTuberville – Tommy Tuberville WON big against Jeff Sessions. Will be a GREAT Senator for the incredible people of Alabama. @DougJones is a terrible Senator who is just a Super Liberal puppet for Schumer & Pelosi. Represents Alabama poorly. On to November 3rd.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2020

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QUICK HITS

• The White House is dropping plans to deport international students.

• Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said he “took on an Asian trafficking ring” and freed a dozen women from sex slavery. It’s not true.

• Nearly 90 protesters were arrested for gathering in the front yard of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron to call for the arrest of the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor.

• “Trump’s former White House physician, Ronny Jackson, won in Texas and is all-but-certain to come to Congress in January,” reports Politico.

• Perhaps the dumbest controversy of the past 24 hours: “Ivanka Trump tweet featuring can of Goya beans sparks backlash.”

• “Will tech companies resist orders to cooperate with demands for information to root out dissidents” in Hong Kong?

• “The pandemic has already prompted fresh scrutiny of alcohol laws, medical testing rules, occupational licensing, and more. But marriage licenses, the most intimate of the lot, deserve particular attention,” writes Bonnie Kristian.

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From Judge Matthew F. Kennelly’s decision Monday in A.J. v. Butler Ill. School Dist. #53 (N.D. Ill.):

Rahul Julka and Komal Julka are the parents of two children who, at the relevant time, were elementary school students in Butler School District 53. The two children, A.J. and R.J, were registered to participate in the 2016 National Geographic Bee (GeoBee) hosted by the district. Before the GeoBee was held, it was discovered that Komal had acquired the actual contest questions. This led to the withdrawal of A.J. and R.J. from the GeoBee as well as actions by the District and administrators that led the Julkas to file the present lawsuit….

After a series of pretrial rulings that resulted in the dismissal of some of [plaintiffs’] claims, … [a] jury found for Rahul on his IIED [intentional infliction of emotional distress] claim against the school board and its president but awarded him no damages….

In 2016, R.J. and A.J. were both elementary school students in Butler School District 53 and registered to compete in the 2016 GeoBee, an academic competition administered each year by the school district. In January 2016, a few days before the start of the competition, Kelly Voliva, the elementary school principal, Heidi Wennstrom, the district’s superintendent, and Alan Hanzlik, the school board president, were informed that Komal had obtained the official contest questions for the upcoming GeoBee. Wennstrom, in consultation with Hanzlik, investigated this allegation. She concluded that it was true and sanctioned the Julkas.

Specifically, on February 8, 2016, Wennstrom sent a letter addressed to Rahul and Komal detailing the findings of her investigation and explaining the sanctions she was imposing. She found that the Julkas had improperly acquired the contest questions and shared them with the Jain family, who also had a child in the school district who was registered to compete in the 2016 GeoBee.

Wennstrom’s letter to Rahul and Komal stated that “[t]he academic dishonesty and cheating which you and your children engaged [sic] put all of the District students participating in the contest and the District at risk of being banned from current and future National Geographic Bee contests.” Wennstrom prohibited A.J. and R.J. from participating in any Butler School District 53 academic competitions and prohibited the parents from volunteering in any school contests or competitions. Wennstrom testified at trial that she sent a similar letter to the Jains, describing her findings and imposing sanctions. Like the Julka children, the Jain child was prohibited from participating in academic competitions in the district.

That same day, Wennstrom mailed a letter to other families in the school district reporting on her investigation and findings. This letter did not mention the Julkas by name. Wennstrom stated that she had imposed restrictions on those who were involved in the academic dishonesty related to the GeoBee competition, but she did not describe the sanctions.

Rahul and Komal filed a grievance with the school board, challenging Wennstrom’s findings and sanctions. The board hired an attorney from the Robbins Schwartz law firm to investigate the grievance. At the conclusion of her investigation, the attorney issued a report recommending that the school board affirm only Wennstrom’s findings of misconduct by Rahul and Komal but not her findings regarding cheating by the Julka children. The attorney also recommended affirming the sanctions Wennstrom had imposed. The school board adopted the attorney’s recommendations and affirmed Wennstrom’s findings of misconduct by the Julka parents and the sanctions imposed upon the family.

In April 2016, Hanzlik wrote to Rahul and Komal, reporting on the grievance investigation, the Robbins Schwartz attorney’s findings and recommendations, and the school board’s decision. He also noted that “[i]n light of an error” in Wennstrom’s February letter, the school board had directed that her letter be revised to delete the reference to academic dishonesty and cheating by the Julka children….

Hanzlik and the school board have moved for judgment as a matter of law on Rahul’s IIED claim against them…. Under Illinois law, an IIED claim has three elements: (1) extreme and outrageous conduct by the defendant; (2) intent by the defendant to inflict severe emotional distress or knowledge of “at least a high probability” that conduct would cause severe distress; and (3) severe emotional distress experienced by the plaintiff. The defendants argue that they are entitled to judgment as a matter of law because the evidence was not legally sufficient to establish any of these three elements.

The first element, extreme and outrageous conduct, requires that the defendant’s actions “go beyond all bounds of decency and be considered intolerable in a civilized society.” Whether conduct is extreme and outrageous is “based on the facts of the particular case.” A defendant’s conduct may be deemed outrageous if it is directed to an individual that the defendant knows is particularly susceptible to emotional distress. “The extreme and outrageous nature of the conduct may arise from the defendant’s abuse of some position that gives him authority over the plaintiff or the power to affect the plaintiff’s interests.”

As the Court explained in its decision denying the defendants’ motion for summary judgment on the IIED claim, a jury could reasonably conclude that the actions of Hanzlik and the school board constituted extreme and outrageous conduct. These two defendants are school authorities—the “types of individuals who in exercising their authority can become liable for extreme abuses of their positions.”

The sanctions they imposed and their public accusations of cheating were directed, in part, to the Julka children, who Hanzlik and the board knew had heightened susceptibility to emotional distress due to their young age. Additionally, Hanzlik had threatened to sue the Julkas to recover $100,000 in litigation expenses. This evidence was legally sufficient to support the jury’s finding that the conduct of Hanzlik and the school board was extreme and outrageous.

Hanzlik and the school board argue, however, that the evidence was insufficient to support a finding that their conduct specifically was extreme and outrageous. They argue that they were not the defendants who imposed the sanctions on the Julkas. That contention is contrary to the evidence. After the Julkas filed the grievance challenging Wennstrom’s sanctions, Hanzlik and the board affirmed them.

As for the public statements about the Julkas and Hanzlik’s letter threatening litigation, the defendants point to evidence—primarily Hanzlik’s testimony—suggesting that these actions were not extreme and outrageous. The defendants’ reliance on this evidence is unavailing, because in ruling on their renewed Rule 50 motion, the Court must disregard all evidence favorable to the defendants, refrain from weighing the evidence, and give Rahul the benefit of every reasonable inference. As previously discussed, the jury reasonably concluded that the actions by Hanzlik and the school board directed to Rahul constituted extreme and outrageous conduct.

The defendants argue that even if their conduct was extreme and outrageous, the evidence was legally insufficient to support the jury’s finding that Rahul experienced severe emotional distress. To establish this element of an IIED claim, the plaintiff must show that his distress was so severe that “no reasonable man could be expected to endure it.” Rahul testified at trial that the defendants’ actions left him feeling shocked and humiliated. Additionally, the stress and behavioral changes he observed in R.J. and A.J. in the months following the filing of the grievance made Rahul feel hurt, disappointed, and frustrated.

The defendants first argue that Rahul’s distress was not sufficiently severe because he failed to provide any evidence that he sought medical treatment. This argument lacks merit. “[N]either physical injury nor the need for medical treatment is a necessary prerequisite to establishing severe emotional distress.” …

Finally, Hanzlik and the school board argue that the evidence was legally insufficient to support the jury’s finding that they had the requisite intent for an IIED claim. Illinois courts have “generally found this element to be satisfied either when a defendant’s actions, by their very nature, were likely to cause severe distress or when the defendant knew that a plaintiff was particularly susceptible to such distress and that, because of this susceptibility, the defendant’s actions were likely to cause it to occur.” Some of the defendants’ conduct—public accusations of cheating and prohibition from participating in any academic competition in the school district—was directed to Rahul’s children, A.J. and R.J., who had heightened susceptibility to distress due to their age.

Though the claim at issue was brought by Rahul, any reasonable person in the defendants’ position would understand that an attack on one’s children by a person in a position of authority—particularly a public accusation of cheating—would be highly likely to cause the children’s parents severe distress. With this in mind, the jury could have reasonably concluded that Hanzlik and the school board, who knew that their sanctions and public statements targeted Rahul’s minor children, acted with knowledge of “at least a high probability” that their conduct would cause distress….

The court rejected plaintiffs’ motion for a new trial (which was based chiefly on procedural arguments), so the plaintiffs are stuck with their $0 recovery.

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7/15/1819: John Marshall publishes defense of McCulloch v. Maryland in the Alexandria Gazette under the pseudonym “A Friend of the Constitution.”

 

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