Tag: hit&run

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) is a weird person running a weird presidential campaign. That doesn’t make her a stooge for Nazis or Russian intelligence.

On Saturday, The New York Times published an article whose headline asks, “What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?” Gabbard’s brief flirtation with boycotting the upcoming Democratic debate, Lisa Lerer writes, has “some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media.”

“Alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard,” Lerer continues. “They like the Hawaiian congresswoman’s isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms.” These are, of course, all stances that could appeal to progressive voters as well.

To make the case that something sinister is afoot, the Times relies on a mix of thin evidence, guilt by association, and conspiratorial framing of actions that any single-issue-focused dark horse candidate is liable to do.

That’s particularly true of the Russian support Gabbard is supposedly receiving. The alleged evidence for this includes the popularity of a #kamalaharrisdestroyed hashtag that exploded on Twitter following Gabbard’s criticism of Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) during a July debate, which the Times says “appeared to be amplified by a coordinated network of bot-like accounts.”

The article notes that “no evidence of coordination between these networks and the campaign itself.” It doesn’t mention that a Twitter investigation found no evidence of bot activity boosting the hashtag. A Wall Street Journal article that initially advanced that theory later had its headline watered down.

Also cited as evidence of Russian support is data from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a project of the German Marshall Fund, which purportedly shows Gabbard getting a disproportionate amount of coverage from Russian state-sponsored media given her low poll numbers.

“The Russian activity could be part of a longer-term effort to drive a wedge among Democrats,” mused ASD director Laura Rosenberger in the Times article. “This messaging has echoes of 2016.”

The ASD’s Hamilton 2.0 dashboard, which tracks the coverage of Russian state-sponsored outlets like RT and Sputnik, reports that Gabbard has been mentioned in 33 articles since mid-June, and on three TV broadcasts (two of which were about the Democratic debates as a whole).

So a candidate focused on criticizing U.S. foreign policy is getting mentioned about once every four days by outlets that also spend a lot of time criticizing U.S. foreign policy. This strikes me as falling short of a full-blown influence operation. The fact that Gabbard is polling poorly despite all that coverage from RT and Sputnik suggests this is, at worst, a rather ineffectual conspiracy to disrupt and divide Democrats.

There’s a lot of nut-picking in the Times piece too. It spends a lot of time on ex-KKK leader David Duke’s endorsement of Gabbard, and on neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s evidence-free claims that his support was responsible for getting Gabbard over the donor threshold to qualify for the first two debates.

This might be fair to mention if Gabbard—a stridently progressive congresswoman of color—had actually done anything to court the support of explicit right-wing racists. But she has done the opposite, forcibly denouncing Duke and white nationalism when asked.

Lerer notes her disavowal of Duke, but then immediately implies that Gabbard is seeing support from people like him: “But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show have buoyed her support in right-wing circles.”

Gabbard’s criticism of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) gets the same treatment: The Times acknowledges a non-sinister explanation for Gabbard’s stance while hinting that worse is afoot. Longshots like Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson have joined Gabbard in criticizing the DNC’s criteria for getting into the debates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has gone so far as to say the 2016 Democratic primary was “rigged” in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But when Gabbard says this sort of thing, Lerer writes that it’s “an argument that reminds some Democrats of the narrative pushed by Russian actors during the 2016 presidential contest, when an operation by internet trolls worked to manipulate American public opinion.”

It’s true that no other Democratic candidates have volunteered to go on Tucker Carlson’s show (although Carlson has praised Warren’s economic program). But it shouldn’t be surprising that Gabbard, with low poll numbers and a campaign that’s focused as much on spreading her anti-interventionism message as it is about actually winning the nomination, would jump at an opportunity to go on prime-time television for a sympathetic interview about ending wars in the Middle East.

A byproduct of running an anti-establishment campaign is that you end up criticizing people and institutions that various kooks and jerks also happen to hate. But there’s a distinction between that and actively encouraging the support of those kooks and jerks.

The media should be able to make this distinction, and to criticize candidates’ positions on their own terms. But Lerer prefers to ignore Gabbard’s arguments for a less interventionist foreign policy. I guess that might get in the way of all those conspiratorial speculations.

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City leaders in Fort Worth, Texas, held a news conference today to provide more details on the fatal shooting of Atatiana Jefferson, which occurred while she was watching her 8-year-old nephew.

Jefferson was killed in her own home early Saturday morning after a neighbor contacted the non-emergency line to ask for a welfare check. The neighbor, James Smith, told police that the lights were on in the house and the doors were open. He also noted that the family’s vehicles were parked in the driveway and that it was normal for them to be home at the time.

Body camera footage shows two responding officers walking around outside to investigate. One of the officers, now identified as Officer Aaron Dean (Badge #4598), was seen shining a flashlight through a window and shooting immediately after shouting, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” At no point does the video show the officers announcing that they were law enforcement.

At the press conference, Mayor Betsy Price, Police Chief Edwin Kraus, and City Manager David Cook appeared before reporters.

Price began by apologizing on behalf of the city. Price also apologized to Smith, who says he now regrets calling the police, for having his “sense of security and trust in law enforcement jeopardized.”

Price also addressed the footage of the shooting that was released by the Fort Worth police.

At one point, the video cuts to a blurry still of a gun that police said was inside of the house. At the time, police did not explain whether or not they saw Jefferson holding the gun, or if it was even in the room with her at the time of the killing.

“The gun is irrelevant,” Price told reporters, with Kraus nodding behind her. “She was in her own home caring for an 8-year-old nephew. [Jefferson] was a victim.”

Kraus began his statement by agreeing with Jefferson’s father, who called the shooting “senseless.”

Kraus said that both the Major Case Unit and Internal Affairs are investigating the shooting. He said that Officer Dean was served with an administrative complaint on Sunday, and had his badge and gun taken away. Kraus said he intended to fire Dean on Monday for violating the department’s use of force policy, violating the deescalation policy, and displaying unprofessional conduct. But Dean submitted his resignation prior to their scheduled meeting.

Despite this, official administrative paperwork will show that he was dishonorably discharged from the department. Dean was hired by the department in 2017 and became a licensed police officer in 2018.

While Dean is no longer a city employee, the department will continue to investigate as though he was. Dean also faces criminal charges for his actions.

Dean’s resignation means that his identity is officially released from the protections under state civil law. 

Cook offered condolences to Jefferson’s family and noted that members of the community have called for an independent investigation of the shooting. With approval from city council, candidates for an independent monitor will be interviewed in November. In the meantime, a group of “third-party national experts” will also be tasked with reviewing the police department’s policies and training practices.

The full press conference is available via Facebook:

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Among the multitude of reasons to oppose occupational licensing laws, often overlooked is the degree to which making people ask for government permission before they can work worsens the impact of this country’s habit of arresting, convicting, and incarcerating its citizens in wholesale lots.

Licensing regimes often exclude people with criminal records, putting many legal job opportunities off-limits. So, it’s good news that some state lawmakers are trying to limit the circumstances under which criminal convictions can be used to bar people from licensed jobs.

Roughly a quarter of all jobs in the United States are now licensed, meaning would-be workers must pay fees, undergo training, and often satisfy other requirements before winning government permission to legally work in a chosen field. Depending on specific rules, not everybody is even allowed to apply.

“Occupational licensing barriers often require higher levels of skill and educational attainment than many ex-prisoners have upon release,” pointed out Arizona State University’s Stephen Slivinski in a 2016 policy report. “Additionally, many states have ‘good character’ provisions that prohibit ex-prisoners from ever receiving an occupational license. Other states have very weak restrictions on whether a licensing board can reject at their discretion an applicant for a license based mainly on the existence of a criminal record.”

Criminal records barring consideration for occupational licenses are pretty easy to come by in a country in which a growing proportion of adults—almost a quarter of those born between 1979 and 1988—are arrested before they turn 26 and which has the highest incarceration rate of any country that isn’t an open-air prison, with over 2 million people currently behind bars. As a result, “government-imposed barriers to reintegration into the labor force—particularly occupational licensing requirements—can be among the most pernicious barriers faced by ex-prisoners seeking to enter the workforce,” notes Slivinski.

This led to a 9 percent rise in the criminal recidivism rate from 1997-2007 in the states with the toughest licensing barriers, according to Slivinski. States with the lowest such barriers enjoyed a decline of 2.5 percent in recidivism rates during those same years. Unsurprisingly, ex-cons with few options for paying the bills are more likely to return to crime than those who can find legitimate work.

In fact, occupational licensing requirements have had such a negative impact across the board that efforts to reform licensing are among the rare causes to win bipartisan support in our divided country. That’s not to say that the desire for reform is universal—plenty of people still see big benefits in limiting competition to established license-holders and their generous political action committees—but rolling back licensing laws, or at least reducing the damage they do, wins backing from both Democrats and Republicans.

These efforts bore fruit this year in Mississippi and North Carolina, which both passed laws expanding work opportunities for people with criminal convictions. “Both states have now eliminated vague ‘good moral character’ criteria, and extended procedural protections that should make it substantially harder for boards to deny licenses based on criminal history,” according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, which focuses on the add-on effects of arrest and conviction. “As a result of these bills, both states now prohibit disqualification from licensure unless a crime is ‘directly related’ to the license involved, both require written reasons in the event of denial, and both provide for a preliminary determination as to whether an individual will be favorably considered.”

The laws have to be applied for a while before we can assess how well they work in practice, but the clear intent is to expand opportunities for people with criminal records who have paid the penalty and look to get on with their lives.

Officials in other states and at the federal level are also pushing to limit the damage done by licensing laws to people with criminal records. “Since 2016, 14 states—Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Tennessee—have passed laws revising offender licensing restrictions or requiring boards to track how many people are rejected based on a past criminal conviction,” the ABA Journal reported last year.

In their efforts, some of these officials are helped by model legislation prepared by the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the Mississippi and North Carolina laws explicitly draw on that organization’s proposals. IJ’s model specifies that licensing applicants should be able to find out ahead of time whether they’ll be disqualified for consideration so that they don’t waste time and money, disqualifications should be limited to convictions directly related to the license, and the government should bear the burden of proving that an applicant shouldn’t be licensed.

Model legislation isn’t the only tool IJ offers—the group also sues to overturn restrictive licensing barriers that bar people from work because of criminal records that have nothing to do with their chosen field. The model legislation is offered for lawmakers who want to be proactive instead of waiting for change to be forced on them.

Creating illegitimate barriers to employment for people with criminal records is only part of the harm done by occupational licensing requirements. Licensing also limits choices and raises prices for consumers, eliminates opportunities for poorer workers and would-be entrepreneurs, reduces mobility for those facing new requirements on the other side of a state border, and damages the economy. Frankly, the best criteria for picking who can provide a good or service would seem to be those established by employers and customers who are capable of deciding for themselves where and how to spend money. That’s why so many, including IJ, oppose such restrictions across the board.

But one fight at a time. In country seemingly addicted to busting people and putting them behind bars for any number of crimes, real and imagined, it’s only right that we ease their transition back to life once they’ve paid the penalty.

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A Fort Worth police officer shot Atatiana Koquice Jefferson, 28, in Jefferson’s own home on Saturday night. Jefferson had been playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew late into the night.

A local NBC affiliate reports that a neighbor contacted the police—using a non-emergency line—to do a welfare check on Jefferson’s home. In a recording of the phone call, the neighbor voiced concern that the doors of the house were open and the lights were on. The neighbor confirmed in the call that vehicles belonging to the family were parked in the driveway. But while the family was “usually home” at that time, he felt it wasn’t “normal” for the doors to be open so late.

Two officers arrived at the home between 2:20 and 2:30 a.m. 

Body camera footage shows the responding officers walking around the outside of the house with a flashlight. At one point, an officer sees someone in the window, points his flashlight, and tells the person inside, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!”

A gunshot can be heard immediately after. At no point in the video are the responding officers heard announcing themselves as law enforcement.

The video includes a blurry still of a gun the cops say they found in the house. The police have yet to explain if they saw Jefferson holding the gun or if the gun was even in the same room with her.

(Warning: This video may be disturbing to viewers.)

Fort Worth police have announced that they will investigate the incident. Details of the case are still unfolding, but the footage is enough for family attorney Lee Merritt to call the incident a “murder.”

“You didn’t hear the officer shout, ‘Gun, gun, gun,'” he told NBC. “He didn’t have time to perceive a threat. That’s murder.”

Jefferson’s family and community are still stunned by the loss.

“I mean it’s senseless. My daughter…had her whole life in front of her,” her father, Marquis Jefferson, told CBS. “That’s my one and only daughter. I’ll never forget that.”

Only a week before Jefferson’s death, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, was convicted of murder for entering the wrong apartment and fatally shooting her 26-year-old neighbor Botham Jean. Jean’s shooting death occured about half an hour from Fort Worth.

The community is still experiencing the fallout of Jean’s death, and now it will now be forced to deal with Jefferson’s as well.

James Smith, the neighbor who initially contacted the non-emergency line, has told the local CBS affiliate that he regretted his call.

“If I had never dialed the police department, she’d still be alive,” Smith said. “It makes you not want to call the police department.”

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The Trump administration has reportedly reached an agreement in principle on a trade deal with China. That’s good news, if only because it signals a cessation in hostilities between the world’s two biggest economies.

The White House says it will not go ahead with a tariff increase scheduled for next week while the two sides draft the specifics of the deal. Other trade barriers scheduled to take effect in mid-December have not yet been canceled, and existing tariffs on about $360 billion of Chinese imports remain in place. China has agreed to increase the amount of agricultural goods purchased from the U.S. by about $50 billion.

Speaking from the Oval Office on Friday, Trump described the deal as a “substantial phase one” agreement.

What exactly that means remains to be seen. The deal itself will not be public for at least a few weeks as Washington and Beijing hammer out the details. And keep in mind that the White House trumpeted a similar breakthrough in May only to have the promised bargain collapse before it made it into writing. Already, Chinese media outlets are reporting that the “deal” struck last week might be less solid than Trump made it sound.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the agreement does not include any specific concessions from China on the matter of intellectual property theft or the forced transfer of technology from American firms doing business in China. That’s something that will be dealt with in a later “phase” of negotiations, Trump told reporters on Friday.

If that’s true, then the face-off failed to accomplish any of the major goals outlined by the president and his top trade advisors during the past 18 months.

There were, in broad strokes, three such goals. First, the tariffs were meant to boost American manufacturing (steelmaking, specifically) and encourage companies to make more things in America. Second, they were supposed to reduce America’s trade deficit—the difference between the value of goods a country imports from another country and the value of goods it exports to that same country—with China. Finally, they were supposed to force China to abide by international norms when it comes to respecting private companies’ intellectual property, a rationale for the trade war that had support from some business lobbyists and members of Congress who were otherwise skeptical of the tariffs.

It’s already abundantly clear that the first two rationales have failed. The trade war has been a spectacular failure for American steelmakers. Higher prices created by tariffs have slackened demand for steel, and declining sales have forced some layoffs while wrecking major steelmakers’ stock prices. Since the steel tariffs took effect in March 2018, U.S. Steel’s stock has fallen by a whopping 75 percent—from a high of $45 in the days after the tariffs were announced to a value of just $11 per share this morning.

Manufacturing as a whole has struggled too. The trade war has caused a drop in exports and domestic business investment. There is almost no evidence of businesses relocating from China to America (though some are leaving China for places like Vietnam). And while manufacturing job growth has continued throughout 2019, the rate of jobs being added is about 5,000 per month this year, well below the rate of 22,000 per month added in 2018.

The promise that tariffs would reduce America’s trade deficit has been an even bigger flop. American exports to China have decreased during the trade war, while imports from China have remained relatively flat. The result: The trade deficit widened by 12 percent during 2018, and it has grown by another 8 percent so far this year.

The third argument was the actual legal basis for the tariffs. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives the president the unilateral power to impose tariffs if another nation is engaged in behavior that actively harms U.S. economic interests. The Section 301 report drawn up by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative centers on China’s technology policies, covering everything from cyberattacks to the various means used to obtain U.S. companies’ intellectual property.

Even as trade war’s negative consequences piled up, the Trump administration could argue that losing those battles was necessary to win the war. And getting China to change its behavior around intellectual property would indeed be a major win for many American companies. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.

“A final deal must address the full scope of structural issues identified in” the U.S. Trade Representative’s analysis of China’s intellectual property theft, said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) in a statement responding to the news of a handshake deal between Trump and Chinese trade officials. “After so much has been sacrificed, Americans will settle for nothing less than a full, enforceable and fair deal with China.” Grassley is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a key Republican voice on trade issues.

Other reactions were similarly unenthusiastic.

“While we are pleased that tariffs aren’t going up, this agreement seemingly does nothing to address the crippling tariffs farmers currently face,” said Brian Kuehl, co-executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, a coalition of agriculture special interests, in a statement. “Long-term, sustainable markets are what farmers actually need. From the very beginning of the trade war, farmers have been promised that their patience would be rewarded. To date, the deal they’ve promised has not come.”

A de-escalation of the trade war would be welcome news. And if this signals that Trump is shifting his strategy away from a one-on-one clash and will try to use other means to pressure China to change its behavior, that should be applauded.

But that doesn’t mean the president gets to ignore the damage he’s done. The trade war has cost Americans more than $35 billion, may have permanently reduced American farmers’ export markets in China, and has helped shift American politics away from the post–World War II consensus about the benefits of trade. And for all that, what has it accomplished? China might again buy some of the farm goods that they were already buying before the trade war started?

Without any agreement on intellectual property, the White House isn’t just moving the goalposts for the trade war. It’s pretending they never existed in the first place.

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A 12-year-old girl who attends a middle school in Kansas City made her fingers into the shape of a gun and pointed at several of her classmates. These kids had bullied her relentlessly, her mother told The Kansas City Star.

Here’s how the authorities at Westridge Middle School handled the incident: School Resource Officer Dana Harrison, the school’s police officer, arrested the girl and escorted her off the premises in handcuffs. She was taken to a juvenile detention facility, and will face a felony charge of threatening to commit violence.

“I’m really worried about my granddaughter’s future,” the girl’s grandfather told reporters. He’d been informed, he added, that she could be sentenced to a year in juvenile detention.

According to the police, the girl was asked by another classmate which five people she would like to kill. She then pointed finger guns at several other students—several of whom had picked on her relentlessly, her family claims—and finally on herself.

Neither the school’s principal nor the resource officer immediately responded to a request for comment. But other authorities defended their decision to the Kansas City Star.

“The safety of our children in school is paramount, today more than ever,” said Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez. “We have all seen cases where tragic incidents have occurred, and the first thing people say is, there were signs, why didn’t they see the signs?”

A little girl lashing out at kids who were tormenting her is not a “sign” that the school’s safety is gravely threatened. If even a small percentage of bullied kids turned into mass shooters, violence in schools would be an epidemic. In reality, it’s not: Serious violence in schools remains rare.

These school authority figures—and others in countless districts across the country—clearly have the Parkland shootings in their minds as they overreact to mundane disciplinary issues involving students. The “sign” that something terrible was about to happen in the case of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz was not that he pointed finger guns at people; it was that he possessed a real gun and had threatened to use it to kill people. And this early indication of his possibly murderous intend did not go unnoticed: Cruz’s acquaintances reported him to virtually every agency with authority to act, from the sheriff’s office all the way up to the FBI. Parkland is a story, not of common people blindly ignoring some obvious danger, but of stunning incompetence.

What has happened to this Kansas City girl is also a story of government incompetence, albeit of a different sort. As The Kansas City Star reported, the girl is facing a felony charged for making threats. Actually bringing a gun to school would just be a misdemeanor.

When kids fight or threaten each other, the school’s job is to teach them better behavior and hand out a punishment that is proportional to the wrongdoing. A 12-year-old girl is a child, still growing and developing. At most she should be clapping erasers or writing an apology essay, not sitting in jail. But the unfortunate truth is that the presence of cops in schools makes it vastly more likely than minor disciplinary matters will be handled by the police—especially during this current, seemingly never-ending moment of hysteria about school violence.

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THE TRUMP NATIONAL DORAL MIAMI RESORT—Several hundred of Donald Trump’s most fervent and fevered fans gathered for the weekend at one of his glitzy Florida resorts. Naturally, the biggest news was a meme.

The New York Times reported Sunday night that a video was played at this year’s American Priority Festival, a pro-Trump event featuring the president’s staunchest defenders, showing Trump massacring a church full of people with media brands superimposed on their faces. The video was an edited clip from the first Kingsman movie.

The White House Correspondents Association released a statement calling on Trump “and everybody associated with this conference to denounce this video and affirm that violence has no place in our society.”

I was one of the few reporters allowed into the conference, by virtue of not being a lib or working for a mainstream outlet, and I can fill in the rather sad context. The video was part of an “art exhibit,” located in a room to the side of the Donald J. Trump Ballroom, of videos created by the self-proclaimed “memesmith“ who goes by the pseudonym “Carpe Donktum.” Typing that sentence made me hate myself.

Anyway, inside the room TVs and projectors were playing Mr. Donktum’s greatest hits. They generally all follow the same format. Trump’s face is superimposed onto a clip from The Avengers, and he beats up CNN. Trump’s face is superimposed onto Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy, and he dances while kicking space rats labeled CNN.

I took a short video of the room:

There’s a big empty room here with TVs and projectors playing videos by that “carpe donktum” guy pic.twitter.com/O87stQDfrc

— CJ Ciaramella (@cjciaramella) October 11, 2019

I couldn’t say how many people actually saw the offending meme. The room was empty when I walked in on Friday morning. I didn’t stay in the room very long, because I don’t like high-concept art and the real-life memes were walking around outside.

Nearby in the halls of the ballroom at the Trump National Doral Miami resort, former Trump campaign lackey George Papadopoulos was signing copies of his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, for a long line of festival attendees. Papadopoulos served 12 days in federal prison after being convicted of making false statements to the FBI and is currently on supervised release.

The Bikers for Trump were there in their leather vests, despite the South Florida heat. The Proud Boys, who reportedly take an anti-masturbation pledge when they join the group, were there too. So was guy who’s known for dressing in a brick wall-patterned suit at Trump rallies. These were lifetime customers, the kind who would pay for airfare, conference registration, and $199 a night for a room at the hotel (plus $25 a day for the resort fee, plus parking)—not even to see Trump himself, but just to bask in his brand, be among the faithful, and hear others talk about how great the man is.

The conference was a glimpse inside the hermetically sealed reality where Trump’s most hardcore defenders live, a place where the president is besieged on all sides by an incredible conspiracy to delegitimize and remove him from office. This wide-ranging plot involves the intelligence community, the press, the largest social media companies on Earth, and possibly several foreign governments, depending on which version of the story you hear.

Later on Friday, Papadopoulos appeared on stage with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (author of Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency) and Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, where the trio explained to the audience the ongoing coup attempt against the president.

“The media intentionally wanted to brainwash all of you,” Papadopoulos told the audience. “They wanted to create chaos and division, and attempt a silent coup.”

“These folks are no whistleblowers,” Fitton said of the recent anonymous whistleblower complaints against Trump. “The president is a whistleblower. That’s what he’s being targeted for.”

Like many bunker-mentality movements, the adherents of the theory believe that they are surrounded on all sides by enemies but that their victory is ultimately assured. Not only will the truth prevail, but the deep-state instigators of the Russia hoax and the Ukraine witch hunt will be investigated and, God willing, put behind bars.

“The most common question I get is when are they going to jail?” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fl.), one of the most Trumpian members of Congress, told a delighted crowd.

There was a lot of talk of disinformation and fake news, but some speakers could have used a little factchecking themselves. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk falsely claimed that whistleblower laws had been changed to accommodate the recent whistleblower complaint against Donald Trump. Kirk was relying on a debunked story by The Federalist. Another speaker told the audience that Facebook does not have immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a myth that Reason has repeatedly debunked.

Besides the liberal media and the Democrats, tech companies were the biggest boogeymen in the room. “To put it bluntly, big tech is doing everything possible to prevent the American people from ever deciding their own elections ever again,” Gaetz said.

The American Priority Festival, now in its second year, was envisioned as an explicitly pro-Trump alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, for years the premier conservative gathering.

In the view of many pro-Trump activists, that sort of big-tent event has become unnecessary and annoying. Now that Trump’s cult of personality has subsumed much of the Republican Party, fusionism—”the dead consensus,” as one manifesto in First Things called it—is over, and there’s no longer any need to pretend that nationalist conservatives share much of anything in common with free market conservatives, civility police, or decadent libertarians.

As Ned Ryun, a senior fellow at the pro-Trump journal American Greatness said at the festival, “We don’t need more Ben Sasses and Mitt Romneys.”

The crowd broke into cheers when plagiarist Benny Johnson, who was emceeing Friday’s events, announced that Fox News host Shep Smith was leaving his longtime spot at the cable channel. Smith had reportedly been at odds with the outlet’s rabidly pro-Trump prime-time hosts.

Politico reported that last year’s AMP Fest, held in Washington, D.C. was lightly attended and stocked with conspiracy theorists. This year’s festival, hosted at one of Trump’s properties rather than the swamp, seemed relatively more successful, with a number of high-profile speakers. For example, a prayer breakfast featured former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (book forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2020). 

There were also surprise guests, including Roger Stone, one of Trump’s longtime consultants and a famously sleazy political operator. A federal grand jury indicted Stone in January on seven counts of obstruction of justice, false statements, and witness tampering as part of the Mueller probe.

In August a federal judge rejected Stone’s argument that he was being prosecuted as an act of political retaliation for his support of Trump. Stone is also barred from posting on social media for repeatedly violating the judge’s gag order in the case. 

In the friendly confines of the Trump National Doral Miami, all of this made him a revered martyr in the war to make America great again.

On Friday night, Stone was leaving the steakhouse bar inside the resort when I saw two women stop him, lay hands, and begin to pray over him. Stone solemnly bowed his head, but kept peeking around, as if to see who was watching.

The mystery guests and conservative heroes were all secondary to the headliner, though: the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr.

As The Atlantic reported earlier this month, Don Jr. has, to the surprise of everyone else in his family, become the heir apparent to Trump’s political dynasty. While Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were using the White House to try and worm their way into the international elite, and while Eric Trump was busy tending the family business, Don Jr. was honing his shitposting and stump speeches among his father’s grassroots following. Onstage, he can effortlessly whip a crowd of Trump fans into a hooting frenzy.

For an hour, Don Jr. delivered riffs on topics like Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry or lack thereof, Peter Francis O’Rourke’s plan to take away your guns, the Julie Smollet case, Hunter Biden’s drug problems, and of course the persecution he and his family have faced for nothing more than loving their country.

It was a speech without direction or point, a long windup to nowhere. And at the moment, the crowd wanted nothing else.

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A conviction for growing marijuana turned Rob Jenkins’ life upside down. 

“The police ran in there and took my whole garden apart and trashed my whole apartment,” Jenkins says of the 2008 raid on his Oakland, California, home. “I got a notice two weeks later that said get the hell out.”

Jenkins was originally charged with a felony—he had a firearm in his home at the time of the raid—but the charges were dropped to a misdemeanor after law enforcement officials confirmed the gun was legally registered. He was able to avoid jail time with a plea deal including two years probation, but his criminal record made it difficult to find a job. So he went back to illegally growing and dealing marijuana.

“I had to sell clones and pretty much risk going back to jail while on probation,” Jenkins states. “If you’re keeping me from getting a job, but you want me to pay all these legal fees…it’s kind of hard.” 

Jenkins—who resides in a state where recreational cannabis is now legal—is one of an estimated 20 million people nationwide in the last three decades who have been arrested for a marijuana-related violation. 

In a move reminiscent of the end of the Prohibition era, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued some 1,300 pardons for alcohol-related offenses, officials are now looking for ways to clear these convictions from the public record.

When California voters legalized cannabis in 2016, they also approved a proposition that allowed the state to expunge past convictions. But the law hasn’t worked as intended. There are too many bureaucratic hurdles in the path toward expungement.  

“The way the legislation was written really kind of put it all on the people that had been convicted,” says San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón.  “It didn’t prohibit us from doing anything about it, but then it also didn’t spell out that you should.”

Gascón became aware of the magnitude of the problem when his office first started tackling the process of identifying records eligible for expungement. In 2017, the city had more than 9,000 residents eligible for expungement, but only 23 people had petitioned to wipe their records clean.

“It’s a really small number and often the people who seek relief are the people that are well off. They’re more sophisticated,” Gascón says. “There were people that were harmed by decades of bad policy, and I think the government has an obligation to make some reparation. The question became, ‘How do we do this, and how much work is it going to take?'”

Gascón turned to Silicon Valley for help, partnering with the non-profit Code for America to come up with a technological solution to the problem of too much red tape. 

“A criminal record is an enormous barrier to jobs, to stable housing, to education, to being able to engage in your kids’ school activities,” says Evonne Silva, Code for America’s senior program director. “The technology is actually really simple. It also starts to shift the way in which people relate to their government, because now this is a service provided [by] government as opposed to government being seen as an obstacle.”

Silva’s group is aiming to clear a quarter-million cannabis-related convictions in California by the end of the year. The program, which is an extension of the group’s Clear My Record campaign, uses an algorithm designed in conjunction with each county district attorney. The software examines and flags records eligible for expungement and can automatically file the paperwork with the courts to clear the conviction.

“The difference is, it on average takes an attorney 15 minutes to review one criminal record and evaluate eligibility and prepare the paperwork,” Silva states. “We were able to process over 8,000 convictions in San Francisco in a matter of minutes.”

While San Francisco was the first county in the state to implement this program, Code for America is partnering with other jurisdictions, including Los Angeles and San Jose, as part of a pilot program across the state. It’s hoping to eventually apply its technology nationwide. 

Jenkins, who had to pay thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to get his conviction expunged, welcomes the move in cities embracing technology to deal with tedious and time-consuming paperwork.   

“It’s great,” says Jenkins, who now operates his own legal grow operation. “But there’s still people in jail right now for cannabis-related offenses. I know eventually they might get released and eventually they might have their record expunged, but that’s days lost, time lost with your family. I lost everything when I got arrested. That was a lot of resources that I could have used towards the business im trying to start from scratch right now.”

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and John Osterhoudt. 

Photo credits: Everett Collection/Newscom. Additional footage from the Drug Policy Alliance.

 

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You have probably heard about a so-called “vaping health crisis,” complete with “horror stories” that are growing worse and worse. Over the past few months, more than 1,200 people have become sick and 29 have died from a mysterious acute lung disease. This has led national, state, and local politicians to demand bans on e-cigarettes to protect public health, often invoking emergency powers to implement them.

It has become increasingly clear that the wave of respiratory illnesses alarming health authorities is linked primarily to black market cartridges delivering THC, the psychoactive cannabinoid in marijuana, rather than the commercial nicotine vapor products that have been used by millions of people in multiple countries for more than a decade. Yet opponents of nicotine use have seized the opportunity to further enflame the moral panic around vaping.

New York, Michigan, D.C., Massachusetts, Washington, and Oregon, among other jurisdictions, are enacting or considering bans on vapor products that will wipe out small businesses and deprive cigarette smokers of safer alternatives. In Michigan, the penalty for violating the ban includes a prison term of up to six months, a sentence that could apply to teens as young as seventeen years old, and police are being mobilized to enforce the ban in stores throughout the state. Meanwhile, the media have frequently failed to differentiate between black market cannabis and legal nicotine vapor products, obscuring the actual cause of the disease and exacerbating the public’s misperceptions of the relative risks of smoking and vaping.

To those who haven’t had reason to pay attention to tobacco policy prior to the current controversy, this unhinged response to vaping may seem bewildering. As far as we know, flavored e-cigarettes aren’t killing people. Dubiously sourced marijuana products are. 

But to those of us who have covered tobacco debates for much longer, what we’re witnessing is painfully familiar. The anti-smoking movement has a long history of exploiting dubious science for political gain. Today’s moral panic about vaping has its roots in the decades-long campaign to delegitimize the use of nicotine in pursuit of total bans on public smoking.

This relationship was made clear in a recent congressional hearing about vaping. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), who in the past has claimed that it’s a “lie” to say that vaping is better than smoking, bizarrely asked one witness who testified to having quit smoking using e-cigarettes whether she was a conspiracy theorist. Tlaib also claimed that secondhand smoke is “worse than directly smoking cigarettes,” a remark she subsequently defended on Twitter. 

Scientifically speaking, that assertion is as embarrassingly uninformed as anything one might hear from a Republican congressman in a hearing about climate change. The fact that it came from a House Oversight Committee member is a signal that the people in charge are grossly misinformed about the most basic details about the toxicology of smoking.

The 2006 Surgeon General’s report concludes that long-term exposure to secondhand smoke raises the risk of lung cancer in nonsmokers from 1.12 to 1.43 times that of an unexposed nonsmoker. Studies of direct smoking, by contrast, find relative risks of 10, 20, or 30 times that of a nonsmoker. This isn’t a slight difference in degree; the risks of smoking are a level of magnitude higher than the risks of being exposed to passive smoke. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that of the 480,000 deaths attributable to smoking in the United States each year, less than a tenth 10th are caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.

None of this is remotely controversial. So how did one of the nation’s most vocal anti-smoking legislators come to be so completely, confidently wrong about the facts?

Though Tlaib is mistaken about the science, she was right to note the continuity between today’s vaping controversy and past debates about smoking bans. Advocacy for these restrictions was often premised on alarmist research that failed to hold up to replication. One leading researcher, Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, suggested in 2003 that banning smoking in bars and restaurants could reduce the population-level rate of heart attacks by 60 percent in just six months; subsequent research has thoroughly debunked this possibility. Anti-smoking groups around the country also asserted that just 30 minutes of smoke exposure could “make coronary artery function of non-smokers indistinguishable from smokers.” Another group claimed that just 30 seconds of exposure could do the same. The message was clear: The briefest exposure to secondhand smoke might kill you. And the press left it mostly unquestioned.

Alarmism about secondhand smoke was followed by the invention of a potentially even scarier threat: “thirdhand smoke,” the residue left behind on walls, furniture, and clothing when someone smokes nearby. Thirdhand smoke has yet to be implicated as a substantial cause of any human illness, but it has nonetheless been featured in countless news stories for more than a decade. 

In many of these stories, researchers speak of smokers in ways that are clearly meant to stigmatize them. Jonathan Winickoff, a Harvard pediatrician credited with popularizing the concept of thirdhand smoke, told Scientific American in 2009 that “smokers themselves are also contaminated…smokers actually emit toxins.” Another researcher referred to smokers as “mobile tobacco contamination packages.” Such language portrays smokers as objects of revulsion, their mere existence in social spaces an unhygienic intrusion. Press coverage rarely questions whether the fears and restrictions encouraged by these claims are at all proportional to potential harms.

In his Pulitzer–winning history of the cigarette, Ashes to Ashes (1996), journalist Richard Kluger notes that in early debates over secondhand smoke, health authorities such as C. Everett Koop, who served as surgeon general from 1981 to 1989, got ahead of the evidence in their advocacy of smoking bans. “[Without] a doubt Koop was on the side of the angels,” Kluger wrote, “but without much doubt, either, he was in this instance using dubious means—shaky science—to justify the worthy end of achieving a healthier society.” 

In the decades since, many scientific claims about secondhand smoke have become even shakier, but most journalists have failed to follow Kluger’s example of skeptically reporting them. Because anti-smoking groups are perceived as being “on the side of the angels,” they are free to stretch the science without fear of contradiction. They have also become increasingly illiberal, extending the boundaries of these bans far wider than can be plausibly justified by any need to protect non-smokers from harm.

This degradation of science was easy for most people to ignore when it was done in service of the supposedly noble end of passing smoking bans, but the movement’s illiberal tendencies are now putting smokers’ lives at risk by promoting bans on e-cigarettes.

Researchers who spent their careers demonizing second- and thirdhand smoke are often the source of today’s alarmist fears about vaping. Glantz is one of the most reliable critics of e-cigarettes. Winickoff has likened e-cigarettes to “bioterrorism” and now warns against the dangers of thirdhand vapor. 

The history is clear. Anti-vaping advocacy didn’t arise in a vacuum. It is the latest manifestation of a well-funded and ideologically motivated movement dedicated to eradicating recreational nicotine use in any form.

Before the Big Tobacco companies shut down industry-backed research institutes as part of their settlement of state lawsuits in 1998, journalists knew to distrust their statements as likely motivated by self-interest. Taking them at face value would have represented basic neglect in the performance of their jobs. Yet they routinely make this same mistake when reporting on advocacy groups seemingly operating in the public interest. By doing so, they overlook important sources of bias.

Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, notes in his recent book Getting Risk Right that “the emphasis on financial relationships has created a situation in which advocates with strong partisan views who are aligned with a cause routinely declare ‘no conflict of interest’ because it does not fit the prevailing narrow definition.” Yet ideology can shape perceptions just as surely as financial conflicts. Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and a career anti-smoking researcher, describes the current state of tobacco control as “guided more by ideology and politics than by science.” This was true during debates about smoking bans, and it’s true now in debates about e-cigarettes.

Kabat and Siegel both support indoor smoking bans, but both have been attacked by some peers for questioning the dominant narrative in secondhand smoke research. Siegel sees the same story repeating in the debate over e-cigarettes. “I believe that our movement has largely abandoned truth as a central value in our campaigns against vaping,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “Driven by an almost puritanical inability to accept the fact that a person could obtain pleasure from nicotine without it killing them, we have made the demonization of vaping the solitary goal of the movement, at the direct expense of what I always believed was our primary goal: to make smoking history.”

Sometimes the conflicts are straightforwardly financial, even on the side of supposed angels. Michael Bloomberg has pledged $160 million to the cause of banning flavored e-cigarettes on top of the nearly $1 billion he has previously contributed to other anti-smoking efforts. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has contributed more than $25 million to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation. The Truth Initiative reports net assets of more than $900 million. There’s big money in being anti-nicotine.

None of this is to say that secondhand smoke or e-cigarette vapor are completely risk-free or that we are obligated to take a laissez-faire approach to either. One can advocate for reasonable restrictions on smoking that fall short of the bans in parks, beaches, and other outdoor areas that anti-smoking groups favor today; one can support reasonable regulations on e-cigarettes without banning them entirely and threatening to imprison people who sell them. But getting this balance right requires confronting the financial and ideological conflicts on both sides of the issues—and interrogating the fundamental illiberalism of the anti-smoking movement.

Journalists’ failure to do so during debates over secondhand smoke got smokers banished to the fringes of social spaces. By repeating this failure in the debate over lower-risk competitors to the cigarette, journalists may get those smokers killed.

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Kurds have been staunch allies in America’s struggle against ISIS. Without them, the U.S. would have paid a far steeper price in blood and treasure to defeat the brutal outfit. That’s why President Donald Trump’s move to let Turkey into northeastern Syria to slaughter the Kurds there is being greeted with widespread revulsion.

Trump has reportedly cut a deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he will hand over control of this region to Turkey so long as Turkey relieves America of the responsibility of taking care of captured ISIS soldiers and their families. Trump has been trying to reassure everyone that he will “destroy” and “obliterate” Turkey’s economy if it treats the Kurds “inhumanely.”

His threats would be more believable if he himself treated the Kurds humanely by opening America’s doors to more of them. Instead he’s been cold-bloodedly deporting those already in the United Sates.

It was a foregone conclusion that Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would condemn Trump’s Syria decision. But with the exception of Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul, even Trump’s staunch Republican loyalists are voicing their disgust.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), an enthusiastic Trump cheerleader for the last two years, called the Syria decision “unnerving to the core” and a “disaster in the making.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump’s former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, have likewise expressed strong opposition. Most surprising, however, is televangelist Pat Robertson. He convinced his vast evangelical following to ignore Trump’s serial adultery and vote for him because he was “God’s man for this job.” Yet he is now warning Trump that he risks “losing the mandate from heaven” if he abandons the Kurds.

America has a long history of betraying the Kurds, a non-Arab people who tend to be Sunni Muslims. Henry Kissinger notoriously said, “Promise Kurds anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

So what’s different this time?

Essentially, there is an acute awareness that without Kurdish assistance, many more Americans would have died in the struggle against ISIS. The Kurds offered not only crucial intelligence to guide America’s offensive but also performed the lion’s share of the ground combat.

The upshot is that while America lost 11 soldiers in the last five years in Iraq and Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American-allied group fighting ISIS, lost 11,000, the vast majority of them Kurds. By contrast, during the Iraq War—when America did not have local allies and had to rely on its own soldiers to conduct complex and costly urban military operations—the U.S. suffered 700 casualties, including 82 deaths, during just a single battle in Fallujah, points out Iraq veteran and conservative commentator David French.

Abandoning the Kurds and letting Turkey slaughter them after they put themselves on the line for America’s struggle against ISIS is beyond heinous.

Erdogan pretty much abandoned his talk of creating a “20-mile safe zone” for the Kurds the moment he launched his offensive. Turkish soldiers have been brutally targeting not just Kurdish fighters but politicians—and filming the killings to boot. Reports are also filtering in that Turkish warplanes are pounding civilian Kurdish areas instead of sparing them.

Turkey fears that if Syrian Kurds are allowed to retain control of territory in northeastern Syria, right next to the Turkish border, they will join forces with Turkish Kurds who have long wanted to secede from Turkey and form their own separate homeland. Turkey claims the Syrian Kurds are an extension of its banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for three decades.

Nor is this the first time that Turkey is going after the Kurds. In the last three years, Turkey has tried twice to purge the Kurds from northeastern Syria. In the last operation— ironically named Operation Olive Branch—Turkish forces slaughtered 1,500 Kurdish militiamen along with 300 civilians in just eight weeks, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a U.K.–based monitoring group.

America could safeguard Kurdish lives by offering them a quick way out and arrange their evacuation. There are less than a million Kurds in SDF-controlled Syria. Even if they all came to the U.S., America could absorb them without breaking a sweat. And not all of them would even come. Kurds have been fighting for their own homeland ever since the European powers carved the Kurdish population into several pieces after World War I, handing each to Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. So many of them won’t abandon their struggle and flee. But Kurdish fighters may appreciate a safe haven for their spouses and children. The least America can do is give them that option.

Of course that will require Trump to lift his “Muslim” travel ban and revive America’s near-dead refugee program. Syria is among the countries—all of them Muslim except for two—from which potential immigrants have been totally banned for the last two years. And even though Iraq is not on that list, the Trump administration has been deporting many Kurdish Iraqis back to that country to face almost certain death. In fact, one of Trump’s first immigration crackdowns after assuming office was in Nashville, Tennessee’s Little Kurdistan, where many Iraqi Kurds have long lived. It took place during Ramadan, the holiest celebration in Islam.

Trump is justifying his Syria pullout by insisting that he doesn’t want America to remain embroiled in “endless war.” That’s a worthy goal, but it doesn’t require us to make sacrificial lambs of our allies. The Kurds deserve better.

A version of this column appeared in The Week.

 

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