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The Trump administration’s aggressive response to the demonstrations and riots that have broken out in U.S. cities following the police killing of George Floyd continues apace, with U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly suggesting that prosecutors charge demonstrators with sedition.

Barr, according to a story published today by The Wall Street Journal, encouraged prosecutors on a conference call last week to charge violent protestors with federal offenses wherever possible. The attorney general encouraged the use of sedition charges even in contexts when state charges would apply, reports the Journal, which spoke to several people familiar with the call.

Federal sedition law makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the U.S. government, and it comes with a potential penalty of 20 years in prison.

The invocation of rarely used sedition laws to go after protestors is raising alarm among civil libertarians and some legal experts.

“If you start charging those people, even if you don’t get a conviction, it may make people think twice before going out to exercise their right to free speech,” said Jenny Carroll, a University of Alabama law professor, to the Journal.

“Treating protest as a form of sedition won’t stand up in court, but that is clearly not the point here,” Somil Trivedi, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), tells Reason. “This is a tyrannical and un-American attempt to suppress demands for racial justice and an end to police violence. Independent and ethical prosecutors should reject this administration’s authoritarian impulses.”

So far, the federal government so far charged 200 people with violent offenses, including gun charges, related to recent protests. That includes two New York lawyers who’ve been charged with federal explosives charges for torching an empty police car. If convicted they could face life in prison.

Barr’s reported encouragement of sedition charges follows a summer of federal agents deploying aggressive tactics against protestors.

In Washington, D.C., Barr himself ordered police to clear peaceful demonstrators out of Lafayette Square so President Donald Trump could pose in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

In Portland, Oregon, U.S. marshals and agents under the control of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took to arresting protestors in unmarked vans. The federal courthouse building in Portland had become a target of both nonviolent and violent protests.

The ACLU of Oregon filed a lawsuit against DHS and the U.S. marshals in July, accusing them of assaulting journalists covering the Portland protests and other aggressive tactics.

Earlier this month in Washington state, a task force that includes federal agents killed  Michael Reinoehl, a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter during a Portland protest. In a subsequent interview, Trump said: “This guy was a violent criminal and the U.S. Marshals killed him…And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

Both Trump and Barr have both pointed to antifa and other leftist radicals to justify an aggressive federal response to violence at protests around the country.

Left-wing groups aren’t the only ones being subjected to a federal crackdown. In late August, the FBI conducted a truly absurd sting on two Boogaloo Boys (an ideologically heterodox movement that predicts a coming civil war) who attended demonstrations in Minneapolis. The feds accuse them of trying to sell weapons to Hamas.

Arson, vandalism, and other acts of rioting have accompanied many of the anti-police-brutality protests around the country. But since this violence is often adjacent to protected First Amendment activities, law enforcement’s response needs to be careful, targeted, and proportionate. We should try to stop the violence and vandalism, but peaceful protesters shouldn’t be unjustly punished or otherwise dissuaded from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.

By encouraging prosecutors to be as punitive as possible, Barr appears to be taking the exact opposite approach. His suggestion that they dust off sedition laws should alarm all civil liberties advocates.

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A recent survey conducted on behalf of the Conference on Material Jewish Claims Against Germany has attracted widespread  attention, because it finds extensive ignorance about the Holocaust among millennials and members of “Generation Z.” Here is an excerpt from the Claims Conference’s summary of its findings:

Gideon Taylor, President of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), today announced the release of the U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z. The surprising state-by-state results highlight a worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge….

Nationally, there is a clear lack of awareness of key historical facts; 63 percent of all national survey respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent thought that “two million or fewer Jews” were killed during the Holocaust. Additionally, although there were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, 48 percent of national survey respondents cannot name a single one…

56 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z were unable to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there was virtually no awareness of concentration camps and ghettos overall. Only six percent of respondents are familiar with the infamous Dachau camp, while awareness of Bergen-Belsen (three percent), Buchenwald (one percent) and Treblinka (one percent) is virtually nonexistent…..

When asked how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust, 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z did not know six million Jews were murdered. The states with the lowest scores for this question are Arkansas with 69 percent, followed by Delaware with 68 percent, Arizona with 67 percent, Mississippi and Tennessee with 66 percent, and Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, and West Virginia with 65 percent.

When broken down further, 36 percent of Millennials and Gen Z thought that two million or fewer Jews were murdered. Arkansas ranks as the state with the lowest awareness of this widely known data point, with 37 percent believing two million or fewer were murdered, followed by 36 percent in Georgia, Indiana and Ohio; 35 percent in Minnesota; and 34 percent in Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky and New Hampshire….

In perhaps one of the most disturbing revelations of this survey, 11 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust.

The findings were more disturbing in New York where an astounding 19 percent of respondents felt Jews caused the Holocaust; followed by 16 percent in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Montana and 15 percent in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico.

These results are consistent with previous studies finding widespread public ignorance about the Holocaust, particularly among younger survey respondents. Such ignorance is unfortunate, and commentators are right to worry about its potential implications.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that public ignorance about the Holocaust is part of a much broader pattern of widespread ignorance about history, science, politics, and even the basic structure of government. In a world where a majority of Americans cannot name the three branches of government, don’t know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA, it isn’t surprising that many do not know how many Jews died in the Holocaust and cannot name a single ghetto or concentration camp.

Ignorance about the Holocaust is not a unique phenomenon driven by anti-Semitism or by some desire on the part of educators to cover up the truth about this specific event. It is one of many manifestations of a more general problem of public ignorance. Indeed, I suspect that more systematic analysis would find that public ignorance about the Holocaust is actually less severe than that about many other historical events. For example, it is likely that many more Americans know what the Holocaust was than have heard of Mao  Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, the  largest mass murder in the entire history of the world, with a death toll several times greater than the Holocaust.

The point here is not to suggest that ignorance about the Holocaust is unimportant, or that the Great Leap Forward and other similar communist atrocities were necessarily worse than the Holocaust. Any comparison of the latter type cannot focus solely on numbers alone; and in any event, there is no doubt that the Holocaust was a massive atrocity of world-historical scale that only a few other events can even begin to be compared to. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no desire to somehow downgrade its importance.

Rather, the point is that ignorance about the Holocaust is part of a broader pattern. Any solution to the problem probably cannot focus on the Holocaust alone, but must consider the broader issue of historical and political ignorance, as well. For reasons elaborated in my book, Democracy and Political Ignorance, increasing public knowledge of politics and history is likely to prove a much tougher challenge than some imagine it to be. In the meantime, public ignorance about the Holocaust, communist mass murders, and other historical events makes it more likely that we will fail to learn the lessons of these tragic events, and thus be at greater risk of repeating them.

While many of the findings of the Claims Conference survey are indeed troubling (even if unsurprising), one has been overblown: the result that 11 percent of millennial and Gen Z respondents believe that Jews “caused” the Holocaust. The Conference calls this”one of its most disturbing revelations.” But in fact, it is a poorly worded question. The full wording asks respondents to say “Who or what do you think caused the Holocaust?” It also allows them to give multiple answers. For example, 72% said “Hitler,” 62% said “Germany” and 13% indicated “World War I.” Thus, it is likely that many of those who listed “the Jews” also indicated other causes.

In addition, the word “caused” has multiple meanings. In some situations, it indicates moral responsibility for the even in question. In others, it might merely indicate that X “caused” Y in the purely empirical sense that Y could not have happened without it, even if X doesn’t bear any moral responsibility. This understanding of “caused” is likely in play for those respondents who indicated World War I as a cause (since an event is not a moral agent that can be assigned moral blame).

Similarly, one can say that Jews “caused” the Holocaust in an nonblameworthy sense of that term. For example, the mere existence of Jews as a distinct ethnic and religious group in Europe was a causal prerequisite to the Holocaust (and other anti-Semitic persecutions). In the same way, the relative success of Jews in some economic and cultural endeavors sparked envy and hatred that might have contributed to anti-Semitism, even though it is wrong to assign moral blame to the Jews for that state of affairs.

It is likely that some of those who said the Jews “caused” the Holocaust really do buy into anti-Semitic tropes to the effect that the Jews were morally blameworthy for their own persecution. But we should not assume that all or even the majority of respondents who referenced the Jews necessarily had that idea in mind. The designers of the survey should have done a better job of wording this question.

At the same time, there are plenty of disturbing findings in the survey even if we discount this particular question. And better-designed questions do sometimes find large numbers of respondents endorsing anti-Semitic tropes. For example, a 2009 study found that some 25% of Americans believed that “the Jews” deserved at least “a moderate” amount of “blame” for the 2008 financial crisis (note the use of the  morally loaded word “blame” rather than “cause”).

The relatively “good” news is that public ignorance about the Holocaust is not a special case, and that one of the most disturbing findings in the Claims Conference survey may be the result of poor question wording. The bad news is that this is just the tip of a much larger iceberg of dangerous public ignorance about politics and history.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports on this matter, which I covered when it arose in June (see here and here):

[UCLA] reinstated a professor who was put on mandatory leave for the tone of an email to a student who asked him to alter his grading policies for black students during the protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called on UCLA in June to reinstate lecturer Gordon Klein, citing the university’s academic freedom promises, as well as its obligations under the First Amendment. Klein faced public backlash for his email, including a petition for his firing signed by more than 20,000 people.

“We’re happy to confirm that Gordon Klein is teaching once again, and hope that in the future UCLA will consider its constitutional obligations before throwing educators out of the classroom,” said Katlyn Patton, author of FIRE’s June 10 letter to UCLA. “UCLA investigated his ‘tone’ in an attempt to quell public backlash. But regardless of how many people demand his firing, UCLA cannot justify using that anger to erode Gordon’s rights.”

On June 2, a student emailed Klein to suggest he adjust his final exam requirements for black students — including extending deadlines, shortening exams, and implementing a policy that would ensure an exam could only help, not harm, a student’s grade.

Klein responded with several rhetorical questions to argue that the request was infeasible and would be improper to grant, asking whether he would also have to change the policies for students of mixed race, how to treat students from Minneapolis who may have also been affected, and how the request would square with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for people not to be judged by their skin color.

UCLA claimed that the investigation and suspension stemmed from the tone of Klein’s email, not his decision to maintain his standard grading policies — despite the fact that the student responded by thanking the professor and noting that Klein’s efforts “really do help us students during these trying times.”

UCLA placed Klein on mandatory leave effective June 3. In an email to the UCLA community June 4, Dean Antonio Bernardo characterized Klein as having “a disregard for our core principles” and called Klein’s email an “abuse of power.”

The university formally closed the investigation against Klein on July 22. Klein confirmed the resolution to FIRE Monday….

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Almost 70 years after a U.S.-backed coup deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the leader of Iran, relations between the two countries remain at a fever pitch. Just days ago, President Donald Trump, responding to unspecified intelligence reports, threatened that “any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”

In the new documentary Coup 53, Taghi Amirani tells the story of how British and American secret agents overthrew Mossadegh after he nationalized the oil industry, starting a series of events that would lead to the rise of the autocratic, U.S.-hating Islamic regime that continues to reign to this day. Beyond its tragic effects on Iran and the Middle East, Amirani argues that the seemingly easy 1953 coup became the “playbook” for future U.S. covert actions in countries such as Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and beyond, forever changing the face of global politics.

In a wide-ranging conversation about immigration, foreign policy, and filmmaking, Amirani tells Nick Gillespie that Trump’s policies, like those of all U.S. leaders, are “the product of the military-industrial complex and that, ultimately, matters more” than whatever a president enters office thinking.

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With the public school year underway nationwide—or else delayed beyond its normal start by labor actions and fearful policymakers—families getting an eyeful of what classes mean this year aren’t impressed by what they see. Even as school resumes, localities across the country report that parents are pulling their kids out to take a crack at one or another approach to home-based education. Nationally, the percentage of children being homeschooled may double, to 10 percent, from the figure reported in 2019.

“As COVID-19 continues to disrupt schools in the U.S., parents of school-age children are significantly less satisfied than they were a year ago with the education their oldest child is receiving,” Gallup recently reported of its survey results. “While parents’ satisfaction with their child’s education has fallen, there has been a five-point uptick (to 10%) in the percentage of parents who say their child will be home-schooled this year.”

Aware that many schools are teaching children remotely, Gallup was careful to specify that its homeschooling question referred to children not enrolled in formal school. So the survey seems to reveal a real increase in the ranks of families taking on responsibility for the education of their own children.

The same survey forecasts a drop in traditional public school attendance, from 83 percent of all Kindergarten through 12th-grade students to 76 percent.

Gallup’s results square with anecdotal reports from around the country. News stories from Texas to Kansas to Ohio to Pennsylvania tell of families dissatisfied with chaotic public school schedules, strikes and sick-outs, and teaching arrangements that fail to meet families’ widely varying tolerances for risk in the midst of a pandemic.

“The pandemic has driven an increasing number of parents around the region and the country to give new consideration to homeschooling, spurred by uncertainty about school schedules and aversion to virtual learning programs,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported earlier this week. “Officials have said online learning this fall will be far improved from when the pandemic abruptly closed schools in the spring. But a number of parents choosing to homeschool said their experiences with virtual instruction were simply too frustrating.”

The Inquirer noted that Pennsylvania is considered a high-regulation state, which has acted as a deterrent to many would-be homeschoolers. But frustration with public school offerings may be all the push many families need to overcome such barriers.

Elsewhere, legal hurdles to homeschooling are far lower, making DIY education an easier choice for those with the interest and ability to take advantage of the opportunity.

Even though public schools are the easy, default option, pre-paid through taxes, the ranks of homeschoolers have doubled over the past two decades to include an estimated 3.3 percent of K-12 students by 2016. As those numbers grew, homeschooling expanded from the fringes to become an increasingly mainstream choice, especially in areas of the country where it was more common.

Now, the pandemic appears to be accelerating the acceptance of DIY education—encompassing a variety of approaches including unschooling, co-ops, learning pods, microschools, and variations and permeations of the same—to a tipping point. For many Americans, homeschooling has become the safe and reliable approach in a world of failing government schools.

“COVID-19 has created a strange natural experiment in American education: Families who would have never otherwise considered taking their kids out of school feel desperate enough to try it,” observes Emma Green for The Atlantic. “The question is whether COVID-19 will cause a temporary bump in homeschooling as parents piece together their days during the pandemic or mark a permanent inflection point in education that continues long after the virus has been controlled. Some families may find that they want to exit the system for good.”

Many observers think that we’re seeing a world of accelerating alterations wrought by a combination of pandemic fears and imposed political choices. And these transformations, they say, are here to stay.

“While COVID-19 has and continues to impact communities worldwide, it is also changing, in perhaps sometimes positive ways, how we manage our daily lives,” writes Hamilton Lombard, a research specialist for the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia. Lombard continues:

“The pandemic has … required many parents who have school-age children to jump head first into the world of home schooling while also managing their own work schedules. Despite the difficulties that come with the shift in the way we work, learn and live, it is likely that we will continue to adopt a more technology-reliant and home-based lifestyle even after the pandemic. And this is particularly true with homeschooling, which will inevitably remain more commonplace after the pandemic than it was before it.

An aspect of homeschooling’s growth that draws Lombard’s attention is that it’s very much not a niche phenomenon. The families choosing to educate their own children look like cross-sections of America.

“Growth in homeschooling is being driven by parents who increasingly come from a wide range of backgrounds and who choose to homeschool for a variety of reasons, which indicates that the demographic constraints on how much further homeschooling can grow are looser than they might appear and possibly that a fundamental cultural shift is taking place,” Lombard notes.

One potential downside Lombard sees in the permanent expansion of home-based education and the corresponding reduction in the importance of government schools is a resulting decline in shared values. This, he warns, “has the potential to increase social fragmentation in communities.”

But in an era of curriculum wars—in which political factions battle one another over which spun version of history, economics, and social relations will be presented to students held captive in government classrooms—that may well be a very healthy development. Families choosing DIY education (or private and charter schools, for that matter) have greater ability to select learning environments and curricula that please them than do those who are subject to the whims of public-school bureaucracies. That means fewer battles over lesson content and vastly improved viewpoint diversity.

The graduates of varied approaches to education taught from different points of view may be more socially fragmented in the sense that they just don’t always agree with one another. But they’re also unlikely to share a misplaced faith in monolithic “truths” taught to them by government educators.

The pandemic is forcing many of us to do things differently, and it’s bound to leave behind some permanent alterations to our ways of life. Losing faith in government schools and taking on more responsibility for educating our children will be a positive outcome from a very difficult era.

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When 46-year-old Holly Barlow-Austin was detained in the Bi-State Justice Center jail on a probation violation on April 5, 2019, her vital signs were normal. Barlow-Austin was HIV-positive and suffered from bipolar disorder. Nevertheless, her white blood cell count and blood pressure were in healthy ranges when she was admitted to the jail, which sits on the border of Texas and Arkansas, a region known as Texarkana. The morning after she was incarcerated, her blood pressure was 118/73. She had no problematic vital signs.

Three days later, her husband went to the jail personally to hand over her medications, which were correctly labeled and showed up-to-date prescriptions. They included pills to manage HIV, depression, and bipolar disorder, as well as an antifungal. But jail staff initially withheld some medications and only gave her others sporadically, in a way that undermined their efficacy, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. 

Soon after, she became seriously ill, complaining of a headache and a lump on her neck. Her blood pressure clocked in at higher than usual and she was placed in a medical observation cell in the jail. 

Blood work performed by the medical staff at the jail on April 14 showed her white cell blood count at 87. The normal range in healthy adults is 500 to 1,500. Disturbing video footage shared with Reason by her family’s lawyer shows Barlow-Austin splayed on the ground of her cell, clutching her head. On April 30, she told jail staff her legs were numb. She was taken to the jail medical office, where they gave her Tylenol before returning her to her cell. Jail staff brought her to an outside mental health provider, who relayed the information to jail staff that Barlow-Austin had been fainting. In response, according to the lawsuit, a nurse on staff said that Barlow-Austin “pretends to be weak” and “knows how to play the sickly role.” 

***

The Texarkana jail is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private company that administers jails and immigration detention centers throughout the country. This week, the firm was in the news after a whistleblower claimed that another facility run by the company has failed to follow standard protocol to guard detainees and employees from the spread of COVID-19. “They’re still not taking this seriously,” nurse Dawn Wooten told The Intercept about the immigration detention facility in Georgia. “Enough was enough.”

Wooten also claimed that the detention center performed a staggering number of hysterectomies on immigrant women, Vice reported. “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” a source told Vice. She said she’d met five women who’d received hysterectomies after being detained between October and December 2019. “It was like they’re experimenting with their bodies,” she said.

Previously LaSalle Corrections had been in the news after 20-year-old Morgan Angerbauer died of ketoacidosis, a condition which results from high blood sugar, while in custody at the Bi-State jail in 2016. She was denied medication to adequately manage her diabetes. Her pleas for help were ignored by staff despite the fact that she was unable to stand and was vomiting for hours, according to a lawsuit reported by the Texarkana Gazette. Lawyers for Angerbauer’s family eventually reached a settlement in a wrongful death suit with LaSalle.

In 2015, 35-year-old Michael Sabbie, who suffered from diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, told guards at the Bi-State jail that he couldn’t breathe. Guards reported him for “creating a disturbance” by “feining [sic] illness and difficulty breathing,” HuffPost reported. Guards threw him on the ground and pepper-sprayed him. He was found dead the next morning. A federal magistrate judge found the facility guilty of extreme medical neglect. “Here, the evidence shows that at various times during his confinement, the security officers knew Mr. Sabbie faced obvious health risks,” Judge Caroline Craven wrote. “She said there is sufficient evidence that several staffers ‘knowingly disregarded Mr. Sabbie’s complaints, thus acting with deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs.'” 

LaSalle did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.

***

By May 2, 2019, Barlow-Austin’s blood pressure had climbed to 160/90. Staff found that she had a urinary tract infection. She complained to jail staff about headaches, vomiting, and blurred vision. She reported fainting frequently. She was not taken to a hospital. 

By June, the lawsuit alleges, Barlow-Austin was blind as a result of her various undertreated conditions. Video shows her in distress, emaciated, flailing around on the floor of her jail cell, repeatedly soiling herself. Video shows a staff member setting a styrofoam cup of water in her cell on June 10, then falling back and holding their nose at the smell emanating from the cell. It was only the second cup of water she’d consumed in 16 hours, according to the complaint. In the video captured the same day, she appears to mouth “Help me” to two female inmates who’d been sent to her cell to clean it up. 

During this period, her husband and family were repeatedly told she didn’t want to see them, when in fact she appeared to be unaware she had visitors and unable to communicate her desires.

On June 11, Barlow-Austin stopped moving. Two hours later, jail staff called 911. Her husband once again tried to visit her at the jail, on June 15, only to be told she was no longer there. It took days for him to figure out that she had finally been transferred to the hospital. 

On June 17, she was dead. Cause of death was listed as fungemia/sepsis due to fungus, cryptococcal meningitis, HIV/AIDS, and accelerated hypertension.

Barlow-Austin was in the Bi-State Justice Center jail in part because, according to her family, she had decided to get help after years of struggling with drug addiction. They say she had violated the terms of her probation for a misdemeanor by deactivating her ankle bracelet and traveling to a rehab facility in nearby Dallas, and that she was jailed upon her return home—hardly an offense that should be punishable by death. Since the jail had technically released her to a hospital prior to her death, there was no formal criminal investigation into the case.

Erik Heipt, a civil rights attorney who handles police and jail brutality cases, is litigating the case. He tells Reason that he’s not easily disturbed. “I’ve handled many grotesque cases. I am not easily rattled,” he says. But the negligence in this case got to him. “What happened to Holly Barlow-Austin was cruel and inhumane. It was beyond all bounds of human decency,” Heipt says. “It was tantamount to torture. If a prisoner of war were treated this way, it would be a war crime.”

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