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In my column this week, I praise Cory Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act for addressing the harm that pot prohibition has done to people convicted of violating it, including current federal prisoners and people who have completed their sentences but continue to suffer the collateral consequences of a criminal record. But there may be a constitutional problem with the way the bill handles the latter issue.

The resentencing provision seems legally unobjectionable. It gives someone serving time in federal prison for a marijuana offense the right to a new sentencing hearing, after which the court “may impose a sentence on the individual as if this Act, and the amendments made by this Act, were in effect at the time the offense was committed.” The hearing is required when a prisoner asks for it, but the outcome is left to the judge.

The provision dealing with records of marijuana offenses, by contrast, says “each Federal court shall issue an order expunging each conviction for a marijuana use or possession offense entered by the court before the date of enactment of this Act.” It says nothing about a motion by the offender or anyone else. Margaret Love, a former U.S. pardon attorney who runs the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, says that phrasing is legally questionable.

“We took some time to look carefully at potential constitutional questions raised under Article III and separation of powers where a law purports to direct a federal court to take a specific action in a case that has been finally decided, with no motion from either party,” Love writes in an email. “While there is some authority that might support a court’s compliance with such a directive as a housekeeping matter, despite the absence of a case or controversy, the separation of powers issues raised by mandating specific court action make the bill as drafted constitutionally problematic.”

Love suggests this language, which she says would still be “a bit problematic”: “Upon the motion of any party, or upon a court’s own motion after giving any notice it considers appropriate, the court shall issue an order expunging each conviction for a marijuana use or possession offense entered by the court before the date of enactment of this Act.” Requiring a motion would make expungement mandatory but not quite automatic.

California’s approach to expungement of marijuana records might offer an alternative to the language in Booker’s bill. Under a law enacted last year, the state Department of Justice is required to “review the records in the state summary criminal history information database and to identify past convictions that are potentially eligible for recall or dismissal of sentence, dismissal and sealing, or redesignation.” The review has to be completed by July 1, 2019, at which point prosecutors have a year to object. If there is no challenge within a year, the court “shall reduce or dismiss the conviction.” Love says an approach like that is “much better because the manner of presentation to the court involves a motion by government,” although there might still be “separation of powers issues.”

I contacted Booker’s office on Monday, on Tuesday, and today to ask about the expungement provision but have not heard back. I will update this post if and when I do.

Did you hear the scary news? The Transportation Security Administration seized a military-style rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher at a Pennsylvania airport! Thanks goodness for the TSA’s diligence, otherwise we might have had a Grand Theft Auto rampage-style situation on our hands!

Except, this news is not entirely true. One might even call it fake.

According to a TSA press release, a Florida man flying from Lehigh Valley International Airport to Orlando checked a bag containing “unassembled parts of a rocket propelled grenade launcher and grenade.” It’s not until midway through the release that the TSA notes “the device was not a functioning launcher and the grenade itself was determined to be a realistic replica.” The TSA claims (incorrectly) that “no realistic or replica weapons” of any kind are allowed on planes, even if they’re in checked luggage. In reality, firearms and ammunition are permitted, though RPG launchers are not.

.@TSA officers detected the unassembled parts of a military rocket propelled grenade launcher in a man’s checked bag at @FLYLVIA yesterday. When assembled, the launcher was determined to be non-functioning and the grenade an inert replica. (Thank goodness!) pic.twitter.com/hrBt5ECdpJ

— TSAmedia_LisaF (@TSAmedia_LisaF) March 5, 2019

A surprising number of outlets, no doubt looking for shock clicks, didn’t include in their headlines the rather important fact that both the launcher and the grenade didn’t work. “TSA stops man traveling with ‘military rocket grenade launcher’ in bag,” claimed Fox News. “TSA confiscates parts of rocket-propelled grenade launcher at Pa. airport,” said The Hill. According to ABC News: “TSA confiscates rocket-propelled grenade launcher at Pennsylvania airport.”

The New York Daily News and New York Post‘s stories on the incident had similarly misleading headlines, as did a variety of local TV stations, including KDKA, KYW-TV, WESH, KMOV, KNSD, and WNEP. Each of these outlets did say in the text of their stories that the grenade launcher was non-functioning (meaning it couldn’t actually hurt anyone). But that’s more than just burying the lead. There’s a huge difference between a working grenade launcher and a replica. The TSA misled news consumers, and so did most of the media outlets who picked up the story. (The Associated Press and USA Today did include sufficient information in their headlines, but they were the outliers.)

This is all part of the larger problem of outlets spreading falsehoods, which Reason‘s Robby Soave explored in detail on Tuesday. Unlike with Momo, “prayer rugs,” and “Skittles parties,” this instance is a bit more of a grey area. Sure, the TSA found “parts” of an RPG launcher, but if TSA agents concluded that the RPG was safe, why did the agency feel the need to promote the story?

Because it’s sensational and kind of scary, and it creates the impression that the TSA is all that stands between you and me and a lunatic sneaking his rocket launcher onto a commercial flight. Yet just as is the case with this supposed rocket launcher, the TSA seems to be much better at confiscating plastic toys and bullet-shaped ice cubes than evaluating actual risk.

While it might have been chased out of New York City, Amazon is still getting the red-carpet treatment from officials in Arlington, Virginia, where the company is planning to locate its long-anticipated second headquarters.

On Tuesday, the Arlington county government released the details of its own incentive package for the e-commerce giant. In return for occupying a certain amount of office space, local officials are promising Amazon millions in straight cash subsidies along with a boatload of new infrastructure improvements for its planned $2.5 billion campus.

How much these subsidies will end up costing taxpayers is a bit of a guessing game.

Arlington’s incentive package dolls them out by a formula that promises the company 15 percent of the anticipated increase in the county’s tax on hotel and motel stays. County officials estimate that the direct subsidies will cost $23 million over 15 years.

The infrastructure improvements are estimated to cost another $28 million.

The incentive deal also requires county officials to meet once a year with representatives from Amazon, who will “offer insights on the company’s transportation, open space and other public infrastructure needs.”

These subsidies will be in addition to the $750 million on offer from Virginia’s state government.

Unlike that incentive package—which requires Amazon to hit certain employment and wage targets—Arlington’s corporate goody bag comes with remarkably few strings attached.

The one-way-street nature of the deal has a lot of Arlington activists steamed.

“What does Amazon have to do to get $23 million from Arlington? Just show up!” reads a tweet from one local anti-Amazon account. County officials have said in response that they can always pressure Amazon to make other concessions later, according to the Washington Post.

Activists’ demands are wide-ranging, with the Post reporting that they include everything from the company agreeing to pay union-level wages to construction workers to refusing to do business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

It’s understandable that Arlington residents would want something from Amazon in return for the tax dollars they’ll be forking over.

However, instead of conditioning this public largesse, a better solution might be to just not offer one of the richest, most successful companies in the world corporate welfare in the first place.

Indeed, recent months have given reason to think these kinds of subsidies are far down on the list of Amazon’s reasons for where it will locate its HQ2.

A good example of this is the fact that Amazon decided to place its new headquarters in Arlington and not nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, despite the latter offering $8.5 billion in incentives, or nearly eight times what state and local officials in Virginia have offered.

It was the same story further north, when Amazon picked New York City over the nearby Newark, New Jersey as the site for its other HQ2, despite the fact that the New Jersey location would have come with double the subsidies and incentives.

When fierce local opposition to the terms of New York’s incentive package saw the company kill its plans for a NYC campus, Amazon noticeably declined to move across the river to Newark—despite New Jersey officials aggressively reminding the company that their $7 billion incentive package was still up for grabs. Amazon has also said it will be sticking to its plans to add just 25,000 jobs to its planned Arlington campus, despite Virginia offering the company an additional $200 million if it added 37,250 jobs.

It’s foolish to look at all the money Amazon is leaving on the table and conclude these government incentive packages are what’s driving the company’s decision-making.

Offering them anyway is essentially a middle finger to the residents and businesses that are stuck paying for them. As we saw with New York’s Amazon deal, the unfairness also lends legitimacy to the complaints of left-wing activists, whose critiques of corporations like Amazon extend well beyond the public subsidies they gobble up.

The Arlington County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to debate this incentive package at its March 16 meeting.

Referring to a resolution that would block his national emergency declaration, President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that GOP members of the Senate “are not voting on constitutionality or precedent,” but rather on border security.

Trump has declared a state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. He plans to use that emergency declaration to take money from the Pentagon’s military construction budget and the Treasury Department’s drug interdiction fund to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Last month, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a resolution to block the national emergency.

The resolution now heads to the Senate, where it appears enough GOP senators have bucked their party to ensure it passes in the upper chamber as well. While the resolution challenges the constitutionality of Trump’s actions, the president’s tweet Wednesday suggest he believes constitutional questions are subordinate to his immigration preferences.

“Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall,” the president wrote. “Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!”

The four Senate Republicans who have said they’ll vote to block the emergency declaration—Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), and Thom Tillis (N.C.)—have each expressed concerns about Trump’s action on constitutional grounds.

Essentially, Congress, which has power of the purse, has not approved the billions that Trump wants to spend on the wall, even after considering the issue. As Paul explained: “I can’t vote to give the president the power to spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.”

Even libertarian-leaning members of Congress like Paul and Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) have suggested they’re not necessarily opposed to the idea of border security; they just want the president to obtain funding the right way (i.e. through Congress).

“If you think my job is to support the president one hundred percent, then you don’t understand what it means to be a representative in Congress,” he wrote at the time. “My job is to support the Constitution one hundred percent and to represent all the people of my district by protecting their rights.”

In the new issue of Reason (subscribe now for as little at $14.97 a year!), legendary comics artist Peter Bagge contributes “Immigration Grunts,” a four-page cartoon essay about people trying to help refugees and asylum-seekers stuck in a federal immigration facility in Tacoma, Washington.

Bagge’s career started in the 1970s and he is probably best-known as the creator of Hate, an underground comic that helped to define alternative culture in the 1990s. He has been drawing for Reason for almost 20 years (his Reason archive is online here and his 2013 collection of Reason work, Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me, is available at Amazon).

On today’s Reason Podcast, I talk with Bagge about his new Reason essay, how he chooses topics to draw, and what it’s like to be working in a medium that was once considered unserious but is now heralded as a legitimate art form. We also talk about his forthcoming graphic novel, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, which tells the life story of one of the founding figures of the modern libertarian movement who also helped craft her mother’s stories about her frontier childhood into the beloved Little House on the Prairie books.

Bagge dishes on how his libertarian politics often put him at odds with his fellow cartoonists and reminsces about his apprenticeship to Robert Crumb, arguably the most-important underground-comics artist of them all. Crumb was a “wonderful mentor,” says Bagge, who notes that the two don’t agree on politics. “I once asked him, ‘Bob, what are your politics?” says Bagge with a laugh, “and he said ‘I believe in a communist dictatorship with me as the dictator.'” He also tells a fantastic story about how the higher-ups at Marvel balked at a Hulk comic he drew in which the title character took drugs until he called the substances serums instead.

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President Donald Trump’s attempt at reducing America’s trade deficit with foreign countries seems to have done exactly the opposite.

Data released Wednesday morning by the Census Bureau shows that America’s trade deficit increased by 12.5 percent during 2018, hitting $621 billion by the end of last year (and $891 billion if only goods are considered, instead of goods and services combined). That increase occurred despite the Trump administration’s decision to impose several rounds of new tariffs last year on imported steel, aluminum, and thousands of Chinese-made goods, all with the intention of reducing how much America imports.

Not only did the trade deficit—which measures the gap between the total value of all imports versus the value of all exports—widen during 2018, America actually imported a record amount of goods last year, according to the Census data. That happened despite the new barriers to trade raised by the Trump administration.

That’s good news, because high levels of imports are a sign of a healthy economy. By the same logic, it’s no surprise that America’s trade deficit shrunk dramatically during the recession that followed the 2008 economic crisis.

But a larger trade deficit runs directly counter to the narrative Trump has been pushing ever since he started campaigning for the presidency. In Trump’s zero-sum view of trade, a deficit indicates that America is somehow losing or being taken advantage of—you know, in the same way that a grocery store is taking advantage of you by selling you food. Most economists predicted that Trump’s tariffs would not reduce the trade deficit, and it appears those predictions were accurate.

The tariffs may have failed their primary policy aims, but they have had other consequences—mostly negative ones. American consumers and businesses have not stopped buying foreign goods, as the new data indicates, but they are paying higher prices for the privledge of doing so. Steel- and aluminum-consuming businesses have been hit particularly hard by the higher prices created by tariffs. As I noted yesterday, a new study on the economic costs of the tariffs shows they they are costing $1.4 billion every month—that’s above and beyond the direct costs created by the tariffs, which have transferred more than $12 billion from American consumers to the U.S. Treasury in the form of higher taxes.

Ironically, as NPR’s Jim Zarroli writes, the 2017 tax cuts championed by Trump likely had more to do with the growing trade deficit than the tariffs did. Put more money in people’s wallets, and they are going to spend it. Equally ironic is the fact that Wednesday’s data shows America’s economy to be in strong shape. But as trade attorney Scott Lincicome notes, Trump is unable to claim credit for that good news because he’s spent so much effort promising the opposite.

Still, the biggest takeaway from the new trade data is not that the tariffs predictably failed to do what Trump thought they would; it’s that the U.S. economy is powered by the individual decisions of millions of people and businesses, and that entity is far too complex and powerful to be controlled by the White House.

Here’s a sentence that may surprise many readers: “In general, the most politically intolerant Americans… tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.”

That’s according to a recent article in The Atlantic, which cites the results of a survey conducted by the polling firm PredictWise. The authors were interested in gauging political intolerance—where in the U.S. are people more likely to disassociate from members of the opposite political party?—and were able to assemble a county-by-county index of American intolerance based on poll results.

The findings are certainly interesting. Florida, it seems, is just a horribly intolerant place—or at least contains a large number of intolerant counties—and Jefferson County, New York, is extremely chill. The single-most politically intolerant large county is Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston.

It turns out that being white, highly educated, urban-dwelling, and older all correlate with political intolerance. The authors think this might be because such people are best able to segregate themselves into like-minded bubbles where they may never encounter someone who represents a different political tradition. Less privileged Americans, on the other hand, “have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.”

Of course, it’s very important to note that political intolerance is not the same thing as, say, racial intolerance. Race is an immutable characteristic, whereas membership in a political party is voluntary. We do not choose our skin color, but we can choose our political beliefs (at least in theory; The Atlantic piece notes that the “vast majority of people” stick with whatever party their parents chose for them). If someone has particularly awful political views, it’s not necessarily wrong to show them intolerance.

But if wide swaths of the population routinely refuse to engage with anyone who occupies a different position on the political spectrum, they will probably be more ignorant about what those people actually believe. They will tend to demagogue each other, and assume the worst. It’s very easy to find examples of this: Relatively privileged, elite media folks were among the most eager to wrongly assume that a bunch of MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers were harassing a Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

I wouldn’t overinterpret PredictWise’s findings, since the questons they asked (how would you feel if a family member married someone from another political party, do you think members of the other party are compassionate, etc.) probably don’t fully capture the nuances of people’s beliefs. But they are worth keeping in mind as we race toward 2020.

A federal judge has ruled that San Francisco’s money-based bail system violates the rights of poor defendants, adding more fuel to a push to significantly reform California’s pretrial systems.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court, Northern Court of California, determined that a system of bail schedules—where people accused of crimes have to pay a dollar amount to be freed based on the nature of the charges—harms poor defendants without actually improving public safety.

Noting that dependency on a cash bail system creates a “Get out of Jail card” dynamic that only works for people who can put up the money (or pay a percentage to a bail bondsman), Rogers has ordered San Francisco to come up with new rules for pretrial release that do not use money as the determining factor.

The case spooled out of the arrest of Riana Buffin in 2015. Buffin was charged with grand theft and conspiracy and ordered to pay $30,000 bail if she wanted to be free while awaiting her day in court. She spent two days in jail before the district attorney’s office decided not to charge her. But it was too late—she’d lost her job because she didn’t show up for work.

Was Buffin a flight risk or a threat to the community? Did cash bail prevent her from committing additional offenses? Considering that the charges were dropped, the obvious answer is no. The problem with cash bail is that courts don’t even consider those questions. In some court systems (such as San Francisco’s) defendants are given bail amounts based on a schedule and without first seeing a judge or magistrate. In her ruling on Buffin’s case, Judge Rogers noted that a defendant who cannot afford the bail in San Francisco can sit in jail for five days before getting the opportunity to appear in court and beg for freedom.

These kinds of outcomes are why there’s been such a significant push to reform pretrial court systems, and to reduce or eliminate entirely the use of cash bail. The intent of pretrial detention is to hold defendants who are likely to flee or commit other crimes before or during their trial, or while negotiating with prosecutors. Yet pretrial detention is now presumptive, and freedom requires cash. As a result, many poor people are left in jail because they’re poor, not because they’re flight risks or dangers to the community.

This is not the first court ruling against San Francisco’s bail system. Last year, a state appellate court ruled that San Francisco’s extremely high bail demands were unconstitutional, because they resulted in poverty, not risk, determining whether a person was free from pretrial detention.

California lawmakers passed a bill last year that will dramatically reform the pretrial systems across the state, eliminating the use of cash bail entirely and requiring counties to implement pretrial risk assessments and monitoring systems intended to keep dangerous defendants behind bars, but let everybody else free without demanding that they pay money for that right.

The bail bond industry, which would be devastated (if not completely destroyed in California) by the shift, has fought back, attempting to argue that defendants have a constitutional right to ask for cash bail if that’s what they want. The industry has also attempted to convince the public that bail incentivizes defendants to show up for court. They’ve successfully pushed California’s bail reforms onto a voter referendum in 2020, meaning the law that was passed last year is suspended until the voters weigh in on whether to keep it.

But that doesn’t stop the courts themselves from making their own changes, and a state referendum cannot stop a federal judge from demanding San Francisco change their system. And as for the claim that money bail makes sure defendants show up for court, Philadelphia’s district attorney last year dramatically reduced and eliminated cash demands for a host of criminal charges. A followup study determined that the city did not see a drop in people showing up for court, nor an increase in new crimes caused by people who were free on pretrial release.

Democrats, under the influence of energetic democratic socialists, have recently begun trotting out ideas for new government spending: Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, expanded Social Security benefits, and free public college are the big ticket items.

Yet when it comes to taxes—the means by which government pays for things—the Democrats have been comparatively quiet. Yes, several 2020 hopefuls have backed new taxes on the wealthy; some of these proposals have even included revenue estimates. But as two economists who analyzed Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) wealth tax observe, it’s “not about collecting revenue,” but about “regulating inequality.” Progressive Democrats don’t actually expect increasing the top marginal tax rate will pay for universal health care, not to mention everything else they’ve proposed.

Sometimes, reporters will ask proponents of new spending how they would pay for their ideas, which is another way of saying, “who would you tax, and by how much?” An increasingly popular answer amongst prominent Democrats is that this is no longer a question worth asking. Finding ways to offset new spending doesn’t make any sense, according to Warren. Congressional PAYGO rules, which require new taxes or spending reductions to balance out new spending, are a threat to progressive goals like single-payer health care, says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). When Rep. Pramila Jayapar (D–Wash.) introduced a new Medicare for All bill last week, she did not specify how it would be financed. Fiscal math and single-payer don’t mix.

Asked about financing the Green New Deal, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) took issue with the premise of the question, insisting that it was better understood as an investment. “It’s not about cost,” she said. One recent estimate put the price tag of the Green New Deal as high as $90 trillion. That figure is a cost. Harris and her peers just don’t want to acknowledge it.

That’s partly because of the pernicious influence of modern monetary theory (MMT), a slightly fringey notion borrowed from academic economists that some Democratic politicians have twisted to mean that deficits never matter, occasionally with the help of MMT’s academic proponents. (More on this at a later date.) But, by and large, MMT is just a pretext, an excuse for Democrats to offer the public what every politician dreams of: massive new benefits without any new taxation, or at least none that affects the majority of voters.

Aside from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, most of today’s prominent Democrats are not, strictly speaking, socialists. But they have been influenced by its proponents and its ideas. And in response, they have adopted a partial form of democratic socialism that promotes all sorts of new spending, but not the broad middle class taxes that typically go along with it. These Democrats represent a peculiar, American strain of pop democratic socialism—call it low-tax socialism. It’s easy enough to understand the political incentives, but in some ways, it’s even less sensible than the real thing.

Consider how taxation works in the nordic countries that many American socialists describe as their models. Yes, taxes are high on the rich. But as the Tax Foundation noted during Sanders’ last presidential campaign, they are also high on the middle class. The 70 percent top marginal tax rate floated by Ocasio-Cortez would apply to income earned over $10 million, affecting only about 16,000 Americans each year. In countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, marginal tax rates of near 60 percent hit earners deep into the middle class. Denmark’s 60 percent marginal rate applies to income over 1.2 times the national average, which in the U.S. would hit earners making just $60,000 a year—not exactly millionaires and billionaires. These countries also typically rely on value-added taxes that are inherently regressive, placing a bigger burden on the poor and middle class than on the rich.

The low-tax socialists, or at least those running for office, have tended to sidestep this aspect of the nordic model, focusing on new spending and new benefits, and implying that the rich—and only the rich—will pay.

The job of a politician is, in part, to read the public mood, which makes this a telling dodge. It assumes that Americans won’t go for democratic socialism, or its pared down U.S. equivalent, if it means that middle class taxes will have to substantially rise.

Republicans, of course, have their own version of this ruse, where they push tax cuts without reductions in spending or government services, as if the two aren’t really connected. The low-tax socialists of today’s Democratic party have thus accepted an essentially Republican premise—that most Americans won’t stand for higher taxes, even if those taxes are billed as the price of new government services. In this, and perhaps only this, they are probably right.

Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is not at all happy with this year’s Carnaval, an annual street celebration held in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday.

On Tuesday, he tweeted out to his 3.46 million followers an explicit video from the celebration. In it, one man puts his finger up his anus, then allows another man to urinate on his head:

Não me sinto confortável em mostrar, mas temos que expor a verdade para a população ter conhecimento e sempre tomar suas prioridades. É isto que tem virado muitos blocos de rua no carnaval brasileiro. Comentem e tirem suas conslusões: pic.twitter.com/u0qbPu9sie

— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) March 5, 2019

“I do not feel comfortable in showing, but we have to expose the truth to the population,” reads a loose translation of Bolsonaro’s tweet. “This is what has turned many blocks of street in the Brazilian carnival.”

Peeing on a person as part of a sex act is colloquially called a “golden shower.” Bolsonaro didn’t appear to know that. “What is a golden shower?” he tweeted Wednesday.

O que é golden shower?

— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) March 6, 2019

The Brazilian president’s tweets might be seen as humorous on their face: a world leader tweeting a golden shower video is kind of funny, after all. The reality is much more serious. Bolsanaro “appears to be trying to discredit Carnaval, Brazil’s biggest street party, after people staged massive protests to mock him there,” Business Insider noted. Take this reply to his initial tweet, for instance:

O Brasil te ama pic.twitter.com/uXO1epTZu9

— Lannes Del Rey (@LannesDelRey) March 5, 2019

Bolsanaro also has a long history of making inflammatory remarks on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. “I would not rape you because you are not worthy of it,” he told a female lawmaker in 2014, according to The New York Times. He’s also said he’s “proud to be homophobic,” and that he’d “rather have a son who is an addict than a son who is gay.”

It’s worth remembering that Bolsonaro “is no friend of liberty” in other ways as well, as Cato Institute Latin America policy analyst Juan Carlos Hidalgo noted in October. He advocates executing criminals as a solution to crime, and has defended the use of torture during the reign of a military dictatorship that ruled the nation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. While his chief economic adviser is a fan of spending cuts and privatization, Bolsonaro has proposed expanding welfare programs and signaled he would support economic protectionism as well.

In short, he’s a far-right populist with some disturbing authoritarian tendencies and his golden shower tweets read less funny when you realize they’re meant to scare and rile up social traditionalists.