Tag: hit&run

President Donald Trump’s freewheeling press conference on Wednesday evening included a number of truly surprising moments, like when the president identified a reporter from a Kurdish news agency as “Mr. Kurd,” and when he offered probably the most honest assessment of his own presidency—”I was saying things that nobody in the room even understood,” Trump said of a conversation with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Japanese officials.

What’s not surprising is that the press conference also contained a number of outright lies about the status of the Trump administration’s trade policies, and the ways in which tariffs are affecting the domestic economy and America’s relationship with key trading partners. It’s not surprising because the Trump administration has spent months peddling misleading claims and outright fabrications (“trade wars are good and easy to win!”) to defend policies that are economically indefensible.

This is the same man who, according to Bob Woodward’s recently released book, couldn’t even offer a solid explanation for why he wanted tariffs in the first place. “I just do,” Trump reportedly told Gary Cohn, the White House’s economic adviser. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

Here are the three biggest departures from reality Trump offered on Wednesday.

1. “A lot of money is coming into our coffers, and it’s had no impact on our—absolutely, by the way—no impact on our economy, which I said it wouldn’t.”

Trump is half-right about the first part. Tariffs have brought more than $1.4 billion into the federal goverment, because they are taxes. Those payments are being made by American importers, not by China. In fact, if the current set of tariffs remain in place for a full year, they will suck more money out of the economy than the major taxes included in the Affordable Care Act.

The second clause is the big whopper here. Just hours before Trump’s press conference on Wednesday, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said the tariffs were costing his company more than $1 billion in the form of higher prices for steel and aluminum—two things that you need a lot of if you want to build cars. Even though Ford sources most of its steel and aluminum in the United States, Hackett said, the tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were causing domestic producers to hike their prices as well.

This is, well, exactly what everyone knew would happen when Trump slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum earlier this year. But it’s not just Ford paying the price. Businesses from coast to coast have announced plans to close, lay off workers, delay expansions, move overseas, or postpone investments because of the tariffs. While the economy as a whole continues to perform well, the tariffs are an undeniable drag on dynamism, and economists warn that the latest round of tariffs on Chinese imports could have a significant impact on consumers and retailers during the upcoming holiday season.

And, of course, tariffs are meant to bend consumer behavior towards politically favored industries and firms. If tariffs truly were having no impact on the economy, they would be failing to achieve their one and only goal.

Absolutely no impact? Absolutely false.

2. “Steel is incredible. U.S. Steel is opening up a minimum of eight plants. NuCor is opening up plants. And these are big plants…What’s happening with the steel industry is very exciting to me. It’s being rebuilt overnight.”

This claim requires significantly less parsing, because Trump helpfully provides us with clear, exact numbers. They are also completely made up. While some American steelmakers have announced plans to increase production at existing plants, there are no plans to build new steel plants—and even if there were, they aren’t exactly the sort of thing that can be built overnight (or in the span of a few months).

Trump has previously claimed that U.S. Steel would open six new plants because of the newfound success they are having under his trade policies. That was false. Then he started claiming that U.S. Steel would open seven new plants. Also false. Trump’s claims keep inflating, but the number of new steel plants opening continues to remain the same.

What U.S. Steel and Nucor are doing is using their political influence to direct parts of the Trump administration’s protectionism. Businesses affected by the steel and aluminum tariffs can appeal to the Commerce Department for waivers from those taxes, but both major American steelmakers seem to be using their influence to block waiver claims.

Rep. Jackie Walorski (R–Ind.), whose office has conducted a review of the waiver applications granted and denied by the Commerce Department, found that not a single application has been accepted if U.S. Steel or another domestic steelmaker had objected to its granting. It’s a far cry from the “fair and transparent process” that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross promised in March when the steel and aluminum tariffs were unveiled.

To summarize: Trump’s trade protectionism isn’t causing steelmakers to open new plants, but it is causing them to engage in more cronyism. This, too, should have been expected.

3. “His tariffs are too high and he doesn’t seem to want to move, and I told him ‘fuhgeddaboutit’…We’re very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada.”

Asked whether he had canceled a planned one-on-one meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement—something that is supposedly a priority for Trump—the president admitted in the most casual way possible to standing up Trudeau.

Canada says this whole thing is a lie and there was no plan for a meeting.

Maybe so. But the bigger lie here is that Canada’s tariffs “are too high.” Trump is fixated on a few Canadian tariffs—a tariff on dairy products is a favorite target—and while those are admittedly not good, the vast majority of trade between the U.S. and Canada is tariff-free.

Sinking the entire negotiation over a single issue seems like an odd way to reach an agreement, but it’s no more outlandish than Trump’s claim that Canada is negotiating in bad faith. After all, Trump admitted just weeks ago to having deliberately undermined NAFTA negotiations with Canada simply because he could.

If Trump wants foreign leaders to negotiate in good faith with the United States, perhaps he ought to demonstrate an ability to recognize the reality of his trade policies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will convene today to hear from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused him of sexual assault when both were in high school in the early 1980s (her opening statement is printed here in full). Over the past two weeks, all manner of charges have been lobbed at Kavanaugh, including suggestions that he not only was a drunken slob in high school and college but participated in and helped to organize gang rapes during his years at Georgetown Preparatory School. He has admitted to drinking heavily but flatly denied all accusations of sexual impropriety.

It was clear going into the confirmation process that no Democratic senators would vote for Kavanaugh, who is widely seen as being staunchly anti-abortion and almost certainly in favor of limiting its practices through added restrictions if not an actual overturning of legal precedent granting women a right to terminate pregnancies in their early stages. Only three Democratic senators voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch (Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota), presumably out of political concerns, not ideological sympathy with him. And it was similarly clear that all Republicans would vote in favor of Kavanaugh, especially if he assuaged fears among one or two senators (especially Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) that he wouldn’t challenge the core ruling in Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions guaranteeing a right to an abortion. From a libertarian point of view, it’s disturbing that Kavanaugh’s bad positions on the Fourth Amendment and related issues didn’t rise to a higher level of scrutiny.

All of that is politicized enough, but the Kavanaugh confirmation has fused with a number of other potent cultural currents, especially widespread partisan hatred for Donald Trump, the upcoming midterm elections, and the #MeToo movement.

We know where political partisans stand, but what about the rest of us who do not identify primarily in partisan terms? The latest Gallup poll on party identification finds just 26 percent of us identifying as Republican and 27 percent as Democratic. Forty-four percent call ourselves independent, a near-record high. Here are three questions political independents should be asking ourselves before today’s Senate proceedings get underway:

1. Is there any evidence or testimony that would change your mind about Kavanaugh? Some of the accusations are credible on their face, though there has been little in the way of concrete corroboration. Kavanaugh has flatly denied everything and said that even though he drank heavily at times, he never blacked out. If old letters from him confessing guilt and the like emerged, that would undermine his protestations of innocence in a definitive way. The last-minute nature of the gang-rape accusations from Julia Swetnick and her representation by publicity-hungry lawyer Michael Avenatti—whose language is oddly imprecise when actually saying Kavanaugh did this or that—raises doubts. At this point, at least two men have supposedly emerged claiming that they were the men who attempted to rape Ford, but how can anyone really verify their accounts? This battle has very much emerged as a marker for forces that overwhelm the specific individuals at the center of the drama. Even stories about the lurid atmosphere at elite prep schools in the D.C. area (such as this one in Vanity Fair, which has been relentlessly anti-Trump and Republican since at least 2016) cannot locate Kavanaugh at the scene of specific crimes. Most Americans (59 percent) think he should not be confirmed if Ford’s allegation is true, but a majority of Republicans think he should be confirmed even if he did assault her.
2. Is there any way to depoliticize the selection of Supreme Court justices? Almost certainly not, and it probably would be inadvisable in any case. The Supreme Court is part of the government after all, and the justices read the opinion polls and headlines too. They are selected by one politician (the president) and vetted by others (senators). Getting politics out of the process is impossible and ultimately, elections do indirectly change the makeup of the bench. One argument that Kavanugh is guilty as charged is that the sexual assault accusations didn’t come up against Neil Gorsuch (also an alum of Georgetown Prep, by the way). Conservatives counter that activists are targeting Kavanaugh because the seat he might be taking will change the balance of the Court, the midterms are nigh, and this is a way for Democrats to derail Trump’s presidency. There’s no question that Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who knew about and disregarded Ford’s allegations since July, acted poorly in the matter. Had she raised these concerns when they first surfaced—or even during the actual confirmation hearings—they could have been dealt with in a less super-charged way. But maybe that was the point of withholding them until the last minute? It’s also true that Supreme Court nominations have always been flash points for politicking, even before the watershed moment of Robert Bork back in the 1980s. Yet if there is no way to completely drain politics out of the process, there are surely ways to make Supreme Court nominations less ridiculously and obviously politicized. The problem here resides with the Senate, which in recent memory flipped back and forth between getting rid of the filibuster rule for judicial appointees. Democrats and Republicans have reversed sides on this issue in the most brazen ways possible, reducing legislative process to mere politics. Both houses of Congress have shown themselves to be tied to their parties first, and Congress, a branch of government that should be fully independent of the White House, second. The hyper-politicization of this is all on the Senate’s head and it is up to them to fix it.
3. Will things ever get back to “normal”? At least since the 2000 election, which was ultimately decided by a coin flip, there has been a pervasive sense of unreality in American politics that calls to mind the novels of Philip K. Dick. The 2016 election, in which the eventual victor promised to contest the results if he lost and the loser is now claiming Donald Trump is illegitimate, is simply the latest episode. But all of this started in earnest at least during the early 1990s, when literally any charge, however unsubstantiated, was being lobbed at Bill Clinton. By 1994, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, erstwhile preacher, president of Liberty Baptist University, and the head of the Moral Majority, was hawking a completely insane documentary that said the president was directly implicated in “countless” murders in Arkansas (and let’s not even start talking about Vince Foster). Falwell was not a fringe player and by the time George W. Bush was “selected” president a few years later, similarly grandiose conspiracy theories about him and stolen elections were being showcased in well-regarded news outlets. We have crossed a line where if someone can dream it, someone will publish it. And there doesn’t seem to be any directional change on the horizon. We have made it acceptable to say anything, believe anything, and still flourish in the political arena.

It’s the tragicomedy of America that we get the government deserve. If there is any grand takeaway from not just the past few weeks but the past few years, it’s that all of us, but especially the growing ranks of non-partisan independents need to insist on and demand better from the representatives of the dying major political parties, who have shown a willingness to lie to the American people about everything from state surveillance and war to policy implications to basic biographical details.

The House and Senate have agreed on compromise legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The legislation must pass by the end of the month to prevent the aviation safety agency from shutting down.

On Wednesday, the House passed H.R. 6897 which gives the FAA the legal authority to operate for the next five years and appropriates some $17 billion a year for its mission. The Senate is expected to pass the same bill this weekend.

At 1,200 pages, this year’s FAA reauthorization is a brick of a bill, dealing with everything from mandated rest breaks for flight attendants, to designating an official national airmail museum. Despite its length, the legislation contains few substantive reforms.

“Overall, it’s a rag bag of everything under the sun, but largely status quo. There’s no major policy changes,” says Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

Notably missing from the bill are long sought reforms to spin off the operation of the air traffic control system from the FAA to a nonprofit corporation, and an increase in the limit on fees—called “passenger facility charges”—that airports collect from passengers to pay for things like expanding airport terminals.

A coalition of free market groups, airlines, pilots, and even the air traffic controllers union had lobbied hard to include corporatizing the air traffic control system in this year’s reauthorization bill, arguing that separating it from the FAA—and by extension the Congressional appropriations process—would enable quicker adoption of new technology, making for a more efficient air traffic control system.

The proposal gained traction in the House, and even got a personal endorsement from President Donald Trump, but was ultimately shunned by Senate Republicans and died on the vine.

Increased limits on passenger facility charges also went nowhere, sunk by opposition from airlines—who saw an increase in this independent revenue stream as weakening their bargaining power with airports—and some conservative groups who viewed the change as an impermissible tax increase.

Coupled with these missed opportunities, however, were some dodged bullets.

Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) introduced an amendment that would have given the FAA the ability to regulate fees charged by airlines for ticket changes. Consumer rights groups, meanwhile, demanded a provision requiring the FAA to regulate the size, width, and pitch of airline seats. These policy changes could have opened the door for even more regulation down the road.

Neither made it into the bill as proposed. The seat regulations will require only that the FAA regulate seat size to prevent potential safety hazards (which will likely leave seat size unchanged), while the change-fee amendment was stripped out entirely at the last minute, which Poole considers a real victory.

“We’re not going to start down the slippery slope of reregulation of the price to fly on planes,” he tells Reason.

The bill also paves the way for emerging aerial technologies, including commercial drone operations, which have been in a holding pattern for years. The new bill directs the FAA to come up with final rules for cargo-carrying drones within a year, instructs the agency to expedite rules for certifying air traffic control systems for unmanned vehicles, and adopts a risk-based approach to drone regulation. All of these policies have delighted the commercial drone industry.

“What this bill says is it’s time to move forward with a robust, path for commercial UAS [unmanned aerial systems],” says Marc Drobac of the Small UAV Coalition, a trade group.

In opening the door for commercial drone operators however, the FAA has also put the squeeze on model aircraft enthusiasts, requiring them to take online knowledge tests, register their vehicles/toys, and also forbids them from flying above 400 feet.

Supersonic flight, currently prohibited in the United States, also might be on track toward legalization. This new legislation directs the FAA to consult with the aviation industry on what a regulatory framework for supersonic flight should look like, and issue a report to Congress within a year.

“From our perspective, this is the most forward-leaning language from Congress on supersonics since the 1960s,” says Eli Dourado of Denver-based aviation company Boom, which is working on creating an airliner capable of going Mach 2.2. “It’s clear that Congress wants a supersonic renaissance, and we think that, with policymaker support, the return of commercial supersonic flight is only a matter of time.”

While this language about supersonic flight and commercial drone operations is encouraging, says Marc Scribner, a transportation expert with Competitive Enterprise Institute, it also insufficient without the broader aviation reforms that Congress punted on this year.

Our outdated air traffic control system, relying on World War II-era radar technology, forces planes to fly farther apart. Caps on passenger facility charges constrain the ability of airports to fund expansions of terminal facilities. Between those two outdated policies, airports can handle only so many passengers and planes, which in turn makes flying slower, and more expensive.

“Until we have a modern air traffic control system and until our airport policies modernize to deal with terminal area congestion, you’re not going to see the benefits of supersonic, particularly transcontinental, because they’re going to have to slow way down as they approach terminal areas,” says Scribner.

Mass market supersonic flights and commercial drone deliveries are still a ways off, but so, too, are chances for further reforms. Provided the FAA bill passes—a near certainty at this point—it will be likely another five years before Congress takes up these issues again.

That could well feel like a lifetime for technologists trying to innovate in compliance with outdated government regulations.

Everybody and nobody is guilty. Allegedly. Despite my most fervent wishes to stop blogging daily about Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual past: here we are again. The halls of power, the TV networks, and Twitter today are filled with new and increasingly bizarre allegations about Kavanaugh and his accusers, as the Supreme Court nominee and research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford prepare to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee beginning at 10 a.m. this morning.

Since we left off here bright and early yesterday—when the world was just meeting Julie Swetnick, the third woman to accuse a teenage Kavanaugh of sexual assault or impropriety—Kavanaugh has said he has no idea who she is and that he felt like he was in the Twilight Zone; President Trump tweeted shade at her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, and then went on to give a typically trainwreck-esque press conference about it; and the Senate released prepared written testimonies from Kavanaugh and from Ford.

Trump’s press conference defense of Kavanaugh centered on the fact that he, too, had been accused of sexual assault by a lot of women. These allegations were false, he said. Therefore, Kavanaugh’s accusers were probably looney, too (in so many words). You can read the whole thing for yourself here.

And that was just the beginning! As Wednesday evening wore on, the pace of new accusers, new dirt on accusers, allegations of false identities, volunteer suspects, and all hell loosening continued to accelerate. Ahem:

• Lawyer Michael Avenatti dodged questions about whether Kavanaugh and his high-school friend Mark Judge had personally attacked his client, Swetnick.
• People began to point out that according to public records, Swetnick is around two years older than Kavanaugh and graduated from high-school in 1980, therefore making her an adult during the time period in which she claims to have attended myriad parties with Kavanaugh and Judge and implies that they were involved in serial gang rapes.
• The results of Ford’s polygraph test were released (which should not matter to people, because polygraphs are junk science.)
• An anonymous fourth accuser appeared, saying that Kavanaugh had physically assaulted a young woman in 1998, when he was an assistant to Kenneth Starr. The allegation came from a woman who said her daughter and others had been around for the incident. “When they left the bar (under the influence of alcohol) they were all shocked when Brett Kavanaugh, shoved her friend up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” the mother wrote to Sen. Cory Gardner. “There were at least four witnesses including my daughter.”
• An anonymous fifth accuser appeared, having already submitted a letter to the Senate—then retracted his story.
• Senate Democrats suggested these anonymous accusers were false flags from Republicans intended to discredit the real accusations.
• An alleged ex-boyfriend of Swetnick’s has spoken out about a restraining order he secured against her in 2001.
• Senators say two men have come forward and claimed they, not Kavanaugh and Judge, were the ones who assaulted Ford in high-school.
• Swetnick participated in an interview with Showtime’s The Circus. If Kavanaugh’s appointment is going to be legitimate, “all of these things should be investigated,” she said. “From what I experienced firsthand, I don’t think he belongs on the Supreme Court. I just want the facts to come out and I want it to be just and I want the American people to have those facts and judge for themselves.”
• All 10 Democrats who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee are saying that Kavanaugh must withdraw.

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Libertarian postmodernism? Nick Gillespie defends it.

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Thousands of Chuukese immigrants living in the U.S. plan to vote in March on whether the island state should become an independent nation. There’s pressure to add voting sites in Texas, Oklahoma and Utah because so many want to have a say in the decision. https://t.co/dPAxnp4Tbl

— Anita Hofschneider (@ahofschneider) September 27, 2018

• Sweden says the “distracted boyfriend” meme is sexist.
• Rand Paul’s push to lift some Russian sanctions failed.
• The House succeeded (albeit relatively narrowly) in passing it’s latest sham sex-trafficking bill, this time with language from the PATRIOT Act.

Thanks to @iDueProcess @FreedomWorks @ACLU @adctweets and others for opposing #HR6729, which expands the #PatriotAct to violate the privacy and rights of potentially millions of innocent Americans.https://t.co/Ren5orBjEghttps://t.co/S6VK2vmlnX https://t.co/DIHTNgd3Ua

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 26, 2018

• More bad news from crime-lab DNA testing.
• Voter enthusiasm for the midterms is at a two-decade high.

State of Indiana: Making lethal injection drug records public would subject drug makers to “public shaming, public protests, hate mail and lawsuits” & thwart Indiana’s ability to get execution drugs. https://t.co/MZL1smUGhB via @markalesia

— Tony Cook (@indystartony) September 25, 2018

If there’s something the government does well, observes Veronique de Rugy, it’s spend money. It does it with great fervor, no matter who’s in charge of Congress or the White House. And it’s made easier these days, thanks to our legislators’ collective unwillingness to follow a regular budget process and their carelessness about the fiscal health of this country. Case in point: the $854 billion Senate spending bill making its way to the House this week.

View this article.

Murphy Brown has returned to the airwaves! But as television critic Glenn Garvin sees it, we may have all been better off letting her enjoy her golden years:

The show, a workplace comedy that starred Candice Bergen as an inquisitorial reporter on a fictional 60 Minutes-type show, was a ratings monster in its early-1990s heyday. It was so widely watched that Dan Quayle, the actual for-real vice president of the United States, got into a public squabble with Bergen’s character, who was a fictional construct of some probably not entirely sober screenwriters. A squabble about single parenting that—I am not making this up—led the front page of The New York Times.

But Murphy Brown died in 1998 after several years of declining ratings. Most of its characters would now be in their 70s, not too credible as members of a hard-charging cable news crew and even less so as participants in impromptu anchor-desk, a key plot point one 1990s season. Why on earth resurrect it?

The answer was revealed last weekend, when 60 Minutes (the real one) disclosed that the new Murphy Brown is not really a sitcom but a video weapon for the Resistance to Trump. (“So, if Hillary had won, you guys probably wouldn’t be here?” a reporter asked. “I don’t think so,” replied Bergen.)

View this article.

Read Bill Steigerwald’s withering review of the new book Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows in the latest issue of Reason. A snippet:

With the Fallowses in the cockpit, you’d expect a smart, serious, and enlightening work of high-quality journalism—a 408-page Atlantic cover piece. James has 11 previous books under his belt, and Deborah’s writings about women, education, and travel have appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, and elsewhere. Yet this collection of small-town snapshots is a plane wreck.

Our Towns sometimes reads like a bunch of travel notes stapled together chronologically. Other times it feels like it was written from 2,500 feet. It’s overloaded with chamber-of-commerce details and laden with dull quotes from local politicians and other civic big shots. Repetitive and often stale, it contains no edge, no humor, no hate, not even any photos. It’s the worst kind of serious journalism: the boring kind.

View this article.

John McDonnell, the likely finance minister if the Labour Party takes control of the British government, says Labour would move quickly to nationalize key industries and might not compensate owners in some cases. McDonnell named “rail, water, energy, and mail” among the industries the party would like for the government to take over.

Floridians heading to the polls in November can expect to see a voting rights amendment on their ballots.

Amendment Four, called the Voting Restoration Amendment, seeks to restore voting rights to those in the state who have been convicted of a felony and served the full length of their sentence, including probation, parole, and the payment of restitution.

There are exceptions, however. Those convicted of murder or sex crimes would still require permission via executive clemency. If the amendment receives 60% of the vote, it will be added to the Florida Constitution.

As it currently stands, ex-felons in Florida are ineligible to vote unless they receive executive clemency.

The restoration of voting rights has been a particularly difficult sell due to the political subtext. Last year, Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Ed Gillespie, released an ad criticizing his opponent’s support for the restoration of voting rights after an ex-felon was found with child pornography. Roy Moore, the controversial Republican challenger in Alabama’s 2017 senate race, made the accusation that Democrats were supporting the restoration of voting rights simply to help increase the votes against him.

The Sentencing Project has reported that the suppression of voting rights has effectively removed six million voters from the voting pool, and the black Americans are disproportionately affected. While black Americans hold diverse political opinions, Republican politicians who oppose reenfranchisement tend to assume they will vote exclusively for Democrats.

Support and disapproval transcend party lines, however. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and fellow Republican Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin have both worked in various capacities to secure the votings rights of ex-felons. (However, prior to Bevin’s work, he reversed a last minute executive order made by Democratic predecessor Steve Beshear, which had restored voting rights en masse.)

As the National Constitution Center notes, the suspension of voting rights has faced several challenges in the Supreme Court, including Richardson v. Ramirez and Hunter v. Underwood. Opponents of disenfranchisment have been unsuccessful in their attempts at court, which is why they’re banking on Florida’s ballot initiative process.

Now that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of not just attempted sexual assault and harassment but also of helping to organize a gang rape during his high school years, some people have asked whether the allegations called to mind the infamous University of Virginia gang rape hoax.

But the Kavanaugh accusations, while not totally solid in every way, are significantly more plausible than the story an anonymous victim, “Jackie,” told to Rolling Stone in 2014.

Because I was an early skeptic of the UVA gang rape, a few people have asked me whether I am similarly skeptical of the Kavanaugh accusations. The journalist Richard Bradley—who expressed doubts about Jackie even before I did—has received the same queries. Like Bradley, I think there are important differences between what the Kavanaugh accusers—Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and now Julie Swetnick—have claimed and what Jackie claimed.

First, a refresher: Jackie’s story, told only to Rolling Stone‘s Sabrina Rubin Erdeley, on condition of anonymity, was that her date, an older male student at the University of Virginia, brought her to a fraternity party during the fall of her freshman year. This unidentified male—”Drew” in the story—lured her to a dark second-floor bedroom, where a group of men ambushed her. They knocked her through a glass table and viciously gang-raped her as the glass shards cut up her back. She passed out from the pain and blood loss, recovered consciousness hours later, and fled the room. Her friends told her not to go to the police, out of fear that this could impact their reputations.

Eventually, it turned out the whole story was a lie. “Drew” did not exist at all: Jackie had cat-fished her friends, and messages sent from Drew to other people were almost certainly sent by Jackie herself. The fraternity hosted no party on the night in question. And Jackie’s friends contradicted her account when journalists reached out to them for comment (Erdeley had neglected to speak with them, instead trusting Jackie’s memory of their comments).

Two details of the Rolling Stone story had struck me as false after I read it for a second time. For one thing, even a tiny cut from a shard of glass causes a person to bleed profusely: that people could roll around in glass for hours and survive the encounter beggared belief. For another—and this is relevant to the Kavanaugh accusation—Jackie claimed to be sober. The vast majority of campus sexual misconduct disputes involve alleged victims who were incapacitated by alcohol to some degree. Perpetrators rely on victims having a diminished ability to resist or be aware of what is happening. It was very hard for me to imagine a pre-planned fraternity gang rape that did not involve getting the victim drunk enough to make her next-day memory unreliable.

The Kavanaugh accusation is not as outlandish as this. (I’ll just discuss Swetnick’s claims in this article, since I’ve already written plenty about Ford’s, and Ramirez’s is less serious.) For one thing, Swetnick has chosen to out herself, in a sworn statement, which means her claims are more credible. (Jackie hid behind anonymity—and to this day, has suffered little consequence for lying: No mainstream news outlet has chosen to name her, even though every journalist who has written about her case knows exactly who she is.) For another, Swetnick has accused a specific person: Kavanaugh. (Jackie refused to tell Erdeley her attacker’s real name until after it was too late.)

Swetnick has alleged that Kavanaugh’s circle of friends at Georgetown Prep hosted parties in which women were given copious amounts of alcohol, and possibly drinks spiked with sedatives. Sweentick has claimed, “I was drugged with Quaaludes or something similar [was] placed in what I was drinking.”

Quaaludes, of course, are the sedatives Bill Cosby—who was sentenced just this week—used to incapacitate his victims so he could rape them. It’s possible Seetnick is trying to link Kavanaugh with Cosby here, because even though the use of these drugs to incapacitate people are a real problem, some evidence suggests they aren’t used nearly as often as people seem to think. Alcohol, voluntarily consumed, is by far the substance most commonly used to facilitate rape. Swetnick might sincerely think she was drugged, but lots of sexual assault victims have thought the same, when really alcohol was the culprit.

Swetnick has also claimed that the boys at the Georgetown Prep parties—including Kavanaugh—would line-up outside a room containing an incapacitated woman, “waiting for their turn” to rape her. This is a somewhat more difficult circumstance to accept on face value—would the men really just wait outside the door, in a manner that made it obvious they were patiently waiting for their opportunity to commit rape, in full view of other party attendees? Note that the most plausible of the allegations against Kavanaugh, the one made by Ford, involves no such thing: She claimed that Kavanaugh dragged her into a bedroom when she was away from the rest of the group, and attempted to rape her with just his close confidant, Mark Judge, watching. For Ford to be telling the truth, it only requires that Kavanaugh and Judge consumed tons of alcohol and made a spur-of-the-moment, terrible mistake. If Swetnick is telling the truth, a lot of people plotted to do something terrible, were content to make everyone else aware of what they were doing, and waited patiently to do it.

It’s the premeditation aspect of Swetnick’s story that most strongly resembles the UVA hoax. Fortunately—for the truth’s sake, if not any one party’s—Swetnick named names, and there should be other witnesses who can shed light on the truth of the matter.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to dismiss the allegation as beyond the realm of possibility. Given the number of people who have accused Kavanaugh and Judge of teen sexual misbehavior and serial alcoholism—misbehavior that Kavanaugh has denied completely, rather than claimed to not remember or at least acknowledged was not unheard of in his private school set—one would have to think that this is essentially a conspiracy to derail his nomination. At this point, I’m not sure conspiracy is the most plausible explanation. We shouldn’t accept these accusations on blind faith, but it’s starting to seem like blind faith is what Kavanaugh’s defenders are requiring of us.