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The New York City Police Department (NYPD) prohibited the public from parking on a Manhattan street on Sunday, then “relocated” dozens of violators’ cars—all for a department flag football game.

NY1 reported Monday the “no parking” signs went up ahead of the NYPD’s annual flag football championship, played on Columbia University’s nearby athletic fields. About 30 cars were moved as a result, the department told NY1.

But the “no parking” warning apparently didn’t apply to department personnel who were there for the game. Per NY1:

Inwood resident Dave Thom took several photos Sunday showing cars with NYPD parking placards up and down the block. Some of the placards were expired. One car had a handwritten sheet in the window reading, “On Police Commissioner’s Flag Football Team.”

As for photographic proof:

“On Police Commissioners Flag Football team” — NYPD tows Inwood residents cars to make space for police officers to park for flag football game. https://t.co/1zxqvSSadK pic.twitter.com/QMkB7LAjZ3

— Nick Encalada-Malinowski (@nwmalinowski) March 5, 2019

“Due to concerns of traffic congestion, pedestrian management, and access for disabled persons, parking was restricted along 218th Street,” the department told NY1, seemingly admitting that the “no parking” rule was put in place solely for the flag football game.

When asked by a reporter about the situation at a press conference Tuesday, James O’Neill was completely unapologetic. “This is a special event. This was the flag football championship,” he said.

O’Neill bizarrely claimed that violators’ cars were simply “relocated” rather than “towed,” and that no one got a ticket. “Special events go on throughout the city,” he added. “This is something that the commissioner’s football league has every year. There were signs put out in advance that said: ‘No parking on Sunday,’ so this is something that takes place very often up in that neighborhood.”

The championship game did indeed take place on the same fields where Columbia University plays its football games. However, the school told NYPD that “no parking” signs don’t ever go up on the street in question for its games.

As for the allegations of placard abuse? “It’s not placard abuse,” O’Neill said. “It was clearly marked: ‘No parking on Sunday.'”

Ironically, this is all came less than two weeks after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new plan to crack down on parking placard abuse by city employees. It seems like that effort is off to a great start.

Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Tom Udall (D–N.M.) announced this morning that they’d be introducing a bill to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and repeal the legal justification that has been used for numerous other conflicts in our long-running war on terror.

“We’ve accomplished our mission in Afghanistan and it’s time to bring our troops home,” said Paul to reporters this morning. “This has been a long war. We’ve spent over $2 trillion total. 2,300 have lost their lives in Afghanistan, and 20,000 [have been] wounded.”

“It is Congress that has failed to conduct its oversight duty of this war. We must step in and step up. We must ensure that another generation of Americans is not sent to fight a perpetual war,” added Udall.

The bipartisan American Forces Going Home After Noble Service Act—or AFGHAN Service Act—would require the Secretary of Defense, within 45 days of the bill’s passage, to come up with a plan to pull all U.S. military forces out of Afghanistan within a year, save for a small number of troops guarding America embassies, consulates, or supporting “intelligence operations authorized by Congress.”

The bill would also repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) either within 395 days of the bill’s passage, or after all U.S. troops have left the country—whichever comes first.

The 2001 AUMF was passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and has been pointed to as the legal justification for numerous American military interventions including not just the one in Afghanistan, but also Iraq, Syria, Somalia, the Philippines, and Niger. Repealing that legislation could hamper the White House’s ability to wage a number of our current overseas interventions, says John Glaser, a foreign policy scholar at the Cato Institute.

“This could have implications for the rollback of the so-called forever war in more countries than just Afghanistan. That would be another huge benefit of this,” says Glaser.

Glaser also praised the bill’s tight timeline and its authors’ willingness to reestablish limits on the ability of the president to fight overseas wars, telling Reason, “it’s a good sign that someone is actually reasserting Congress’ power over the president’s war powers, and it’s obviously a long time coming.”

In a video statement accompanying the release of the bill, Paul noted that original purpose of defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had been achieved, and that the U.S. was now engaged in an expensive, fruitless, nation-building exercise that’s seen American taxpayers pay for massive boondoggles like an unusable natural gas station and an unfinished luxury hotel in downtown Kabul.

Ending our nation-building efforts in the country would save $51 billion said Paul, $7 billion of which would be paid out as one-time $2,500 “victory bonuses” to the three million U.S. military personnel that have fought in the war on terror.

When asked about President Donald Trump’s position on the bill, Paul said he thought his legislation was in line with the president’s non-interventionist impulses.

“I’ve talked to the president many times about this, and I think his instincts and his intentions are that we really have been long enough in Afghanistan and that we have completed our mission,” said Paul, saying that even in private meetings with other Republican lawmakers, the president frequently pushes back on arguments for continued intervention in the country.

The trouble, says Paul, rests with some of the president’s advisors who might not share his views on America’s overseas wars. “He does have some people around him that are more of the ‘stay forever’ crowd that makes it a little hard to get his policy done,” said Paul. “I don’t think his views have changed on this.”

The Kentucky senator was candid about the bill’s slim chances in Congress, pointing to the Senate’s passage of a resolution in early February condemning Trump’s late 2018 statements about pulling out of Afghanistan and Syria.

The bill, argues Paul, is nevertheless an important conversation starter that will help build support for ending America’s longest war. “Sometimes you have to introduce things that won’t pass in the beginning, but it gives us a rallying cry,” said Paul, adding that “war’s a terrible thing and we should only do it when we have to.”

Due to America’s immense power and wealth, our foreign policy actions establish the norms of behavior for other countries, for better and often worse. India’s airstrikes against Pakistan after a terrorist-group sponsored by that country killed 40 Indian soldiers were definitely inspired by President Obama’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s complex.

But India, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, is playing with fire. “America got away with the bin Laden raid without immediate consequences because it isn’t Pakistan’s mortal enemy and doesn’t have to share a neighborhood with it,” she notes. India, however, does not have that luxury. Terrorism is a scourge and a bane. But the hard reality is that containment, for all its flaws, is the least bad strategy for dealing with it.

View this article.

Cory Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act, which he reintroduced last week, would rehabilitate the much-maligned plant by removing it from the federal government’s list of proscribed substances. The New Jersey senator’s bill also aims to rehabilitate the victims of that arbitrary ban, and in that respect it differs from most of the legalization measures that have been passed by states or proposed by members of Congress.

By and large, the lingering impact of laws that criminalized peaceful activities involving cannabis has been addressed as an afterthought, if at all. Booker’s bill, which he has made a conspicuous part of his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, therefore does a real service by raising the issue of what the government owes to people who were convicted of doing things that are no longer crimes, Jacob Sullum says.

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Mark Cuban, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, reality TV star, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told the New York Daily News in a long interview last night that he’s still thinking about running for president in 2020.

“I haven’t decided anything yet,” Cuban told the paper. “We’ll see what happens. It all comes down to how things play out….It’s not something I feel like I have to do. There’s a lot of uncertainty with what’s going on with the Mueller report, there’s a lot of things that have to be figured out before we know how 2020 is going to play out. But it’s something that if circumstances were right I would do.”

Cuban has been publicly mulling a run since at least South by Southwest in March 2017, at which he also said “at heart I’m a libertarian.” But consistent with his comments since then, he rejected the notion of running as the nominee of any third party in this most recent interview.

“They’re all going to have their own internal politics,” he said. “So the idea of just starting a third party, that has been tried time and time [again] for 200 years, and so that defeats the purpose and actually makes things worse and not better.” (Cuban was asked in 2016 by a Libertarian Party acquaintance to compete for the party’s presidential nomination, and responded: “My wife and kids would run away if I did. But I’m flattered.”)

In the new interview, Cuban criticized the Democratic primary field for tacking left (“they’re doing nothing to try to bring independent and Republican voters aboard”), and for failing to tap into the anti-political mood of the country.

“People weren’t voting for [Trump in 2016] because he was calling people names, they were voting for him because he was not a politician, and he was demonstrating to everyone that he wasn’t a politician,” he said. “A big chunk of voters, Republican voters, still want someone who is not a politician. And you’re not getting that from anyone in the Democratic Party.”

Cuban was light on policy specifics, aside from saying, “You have to show people how they can have an upside and how problems are solvable, but you can’t just say ‘the government will figure it out.'” He has unusual if strongly held opinions about health care policy, has praised some of Trump’s deregulatory record, and declared two months ago that he’s a “big fan” of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.).

Compared to potential independent presidential candidate Howard Schultz (a fellow former NBA franchise owner!), Cuban has a very clear advantage: He’s famous outside the world of politics and can get media attention any time he wants. Schultz also comes across like an eat-your-Wheaties scold, whereas the Mavericks owner is more of a rakish rhetorical bombthrower, though this approach has also earned him his fair share of non-fans.

On the flip side, importantly, Schultz has been preparing and financing his run for quite some time now, while his counterpart has shown no visible signs other than occasionally flapping his gums. The former Starbucks CEO has polled between 7 and 12 percent in various three-way matchups thus far, but 1) it’s sooooo early that Stephanie Slade will get mad at you for taking polls seriously; 2) he’s the only third option presented in these surveys, though the Libertarian Party will likely be on all 50 state ballots and may just have a comparatively attractive and well-known nominee; and 3) third-party poll numbers almost always start high then collapse.

Read Reason on Mark Cuban here.

Should we be celebratory or suspicious that the federal government has apparently suspended its program of accessing Americans’ phone records after years of public fighting for the authority to do so?

A quiet sort-of bombshell dropped over the weekend on the national security-focused podcast at Lawfare: The National Security Agency (NSA) appears to have given up on the mass collection and consulting of Americans’ telephone metadata. That’s the information about who we’ve been calling, how long, how frequently—pretty much everything but the contents of the calls themselves.

If true, this is quite the surprise: It has been close to six years since Edward Snowden risked arrest and prosecution, ultimately fleeing to Russia for sanctuary, all to reveal the existence of this program (and others). Following a massive public fight over how much information the NSA should be allowed to collect about Americans (its job is to track information about foreign governments and terrorists), President Barack Obama and Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which brought the previously secret program into the sunlight, but added some restrictions (they had to request records from telecom companies rather than just grabbing them for themselves) and a touch of oversight so that the NSA didn’t have just full rein to traipse through our personal data. Even that oversight wasn’t enough for privacy-minded lawmakers like Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who voted against its passage.

Last summer the NSA announced it was deleting millions of phone and text records it had been gathering that it wasn’t supposed to have. This has been a recurring issue with the NSA’s various tech surveillance efforts: Though the agency is trying to cast a wide net to keep track of potential terrorists, it’s regularly getting records and data that even the NSA grasps it doesn’t have the authority to collect or even look at.

But since then, according to Luke Murry, the National Security Adviser to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the NSA has stopped using this data collection system entirely, and even more surprising, it’s now an open question as to whether Congress will even be asked to renew the USA Freedom Act, which expires at the end of the year.

This admission should be seen as remarkable, if it’s true. The New York Times notes:

The disclosure that the program has apparently been shut down for months “changes the entire landscape of the debate,” said Daniel Schuman, the policy director of Demand Progress, an advocacy group that focuses on civil liberties and government accountability.

Since “the sky hasn’t fallen” without the program, he said, the intelligence community must make the case that reviving it is necessary — if, indeed, the National Security Agency thinks it is worth the effort to keep trying to make it work.

The phone records program had never thwarted a terrorist attack, a fact that emerged during the post-Snowden debate.

“If there is an ongoing program, even if we all have doubts about it, that’s a very different political matter than if the program has actually stopped,” Mr. Schuman said. “Then the question becomes, ‘Why restart it?’ rather than whether to turn it off.”

Now, if the USA Freedom Act quietly sunsets, note that this doesn’t in any way affect the NSA’s ability to snoop on foreign targets in other countries, particularly suspected terrorists. That the NSA isn’t even using this program just highlights what a massive lie it was when supporters of these surveillance authorities insisted that it was vital to protecting national security that the NSA have easy access to these records.

The Wall Street Journal observes that it’s not really certain as of yet whether President Donald Trump’s administration will allow the authorities to sunset or seek renewal. This fight may heat up again in the fall.

After years of covering these federal surveillance issues, I’m reluctant to predict what will happen here. Recall that in the midst of accusing the federal government of illegally snooping on him and his campaign staff as part of the investigation of Russia’s attempts to meddle with the 2016 election, Trump at the same time renewed and expanded a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments that allows secret, warrantless surveillance of Americans for certain types of crimes. Trump has made it clear that his concerns about the violation of privacy rights extends only to those in his orbit. Don’t expect him to go to bat for your right to keep your phone records out of the government’s hands.

And to be clear, the possible end of the USA Freedom Act doesn’t mean the federal government doesn’t have access to all sorts of tools needed to secretly snoop on you, or that your personal data isn’t being collected in any number of ways you have little control over. Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted just yesterday how surveillance authorities granted under the PATRIOT Act to allegedly fight terrorism were used to investigate prostitution rings.

Police detained a reporter for The Sacramento Bee and allegedly forced a photographer to the ground Monday night as protesters took to the streets after learning there would be no charges filed against the officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark last year. The officers had followed Clark on foot, then opened fire after mistaking his cell phone for a gun.

Police made “80 plus arrests,” Sacramento Police Captain Norm Leong tweeted. “Still processing it all,” he added. According to police, many of the arrests were made because demonstrators wouldn’t disperse when ordered to do so.

“We gave multiple orders to disperse,” Sacramento Police Sergeant Vance Chandler told reporters, according to The Washington Post. “Ultimately, we made at least 10 announcements.”

One of the people detained was the Bee‘s Dale Kasler, who was covering the protests and has been working for the paper for more than two decades. One of Kasler’s colleagues, Sam Stanton, captured the moment when Kasler was detained:

“I guess [Kasler] ended up on the wrong side of the street,” Stanton says on the Bee‘s livestream. “Dale Kasler has been handcuffed and is being led away along with the rest of the marchers. The police here don’t seem to care they’ve arrested a reporter.”

“Evidently if you were unlucky enough to end up on the west side of [the street], you get arrested,” he added. “If you’re on the east side like we are, you apparently don’t.”

There’s nothing to indicate that Kasler was actually arrested. However, the reporter’s hands were tied behind his back before police eventually let him go free. “I was following the marchers,” Kasler told KXTV following his release. “It became apparent that there was nowhere to go, that the police had basically created a funnel-type situation and had sealed off any exit routes for the demonstrators,” he said.

According to the Los Angeles Times, police would not let the protesters back to where they had parked the cars, so it would have been difficult for them to disperse. “Then they started arresting people,” Kasler said.

Here is a picture of Sacramento Bee reporter @dakasler being detained by Sacramento police right now. He was put in twist-ties while covering tonight’s Stephon Clark protest. Several pastors have been detained as well, and reportedly other journalists. No update from PD. pic.twitter.com/W8HTxJOs61

— Nick Miller (@NickMiller510) March 5, 2019

Kasler told police he was a member of the media, but that didn’t initially work. “They said: ‘We know that and you refused an order to disperse,'” he recalled to KXTV. “They also said, ‘When we are doing these…a sweep of people, we don’t play favorites, we just basically take everyone.'”

Police soon realized “I was just doing my job,” Kasler added. “It took a while, and they let me go.” He said he was given a release form that read: “Suspect exonerated.”

According to the Bee, photographer Hector Amezcua “was shoved to the ground by an officer with a baton.” Amezcua was not detained, though two pastors, as well as an administrative law judge, were, the Times reported.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said in a statement he has “many questions about what went on that precipitated the order to disperse and the subsequent arrests.”

“No matter the reason an order to disperse was given, no member of the press should be detained for doing their job,” he said.

For more on aftermath of the Stephon Clark shooting, read Reason‘s Scott Shackford here.

Palm Beach County finally unblocked Youtube on its school computers Monday after falling for the viral “Momo challenge” conspiracy peddled by countless news outlets. Having learned from breathless, sensational local reporting that a creepy character named Momo was convincing kids to harm or even kill themselves, the Florida school district had thought it prudent to restrict its 193,000 students’ access to the internet.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to restrict the adults’ access to local television. The Momo challenge is a full-on hoax: There are no videos of Momo—in reality, a statue called “Mother Bird” made by a Japanese artist named Keisuke Aiso—telling kids to hurt themselves. There has been no rash of Momo-inspired murders or suicides. There are no victims of Momo. Put another way, Momo is pure fake news—and a shocking number of journalists are guilty of spreading it.

But this should surprise no one. Though President Trump mainstreamed the term “fake news” during the 2016 election in order to delegitimize perfectly deserved press criticism, people of all ideological persuasions should beware the frequent spread of nonsensical, sensational, conspiratorial, and utterly false news stories—everything from obvious fakes like Momo to the slightly more robust yet equally absurd contentions that sex trafficking and hate crimes are ever-worsening epidemics.

A terrific piece for Nieman Lab names and shames many of the gullible fools in local media who were guilty of spreading the Momo hoax. KBJR 6 in Wisconsin noted that “there’s no proof the Momo challenge is real,” but uncritically interviewed a bunch of people who were scared about it, anyway. An ABC station in Tampa explained that “the challenge is to meet Momo and to do that one must follow a series of instructions, which can include harming others or yourself,” even though no part of this statement is accurate. KUTV News in Utah claimed a terrifying video was encouraging kids to kill each other, and had infiltrated “popular children sites like Youtube Kids.” It hadn’t. It’s made up.

Unfortunately, the media, particularly local media, falls for these kinds of hoaxes all the time. Every year around Halloween, news outlets prey on parents’ unreasonable fears of sex offenders abducting their kids, or malicious strangers feeding them poisoned candy, even though neither of these things ever happen. (Spoiler: The parents did it.) Sometimes a concerned citizen drives the news cycle, like when a woman claimed she got into the wrong Uber and very narrowly avoided being sold into sex slavery. (Fact check: Nope.) Sometimes the hoax gets an assist from the police or schools, as was the case with Momo.

Trump has called fake news “the enemy of the people.” Unfortunately, the president is a serial purveyor of falsehoods, especially relating to immigration. To take just one example: in January, Trump promoted a Washington Examiner article about ranchers finding prayer rugs at the souther border, an indication that not just Mexicans but Muslims—or terrorists, who really knows?—were entering the country illegally. The story is far-fetched, and relies on a single anonymous source. Trump and his conservative supporters often criticize negative White House reporting that cites anonymous sourcing, but when the anonymous sources are pushing an agenda they approve of, then it’s okay.

Conservatives spread fake news as eagerly as anyone else, of course. At the Conservative Police Action Conference last week, Sara Carter, a visiting fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, told the audience, “Our kids are having parties, they call them Skittle parties, where they bring pills and put them into bowls, and everybody just kind of picks whatever pill they want and they take them. It’s kind of a shocking thing when I heard about this, just randomly taking pills. Some of these children, unbeknownst to them, are taking a Xanax that’s actually a contraband Xanax, and they are dying immediately.”

Woah, if true. But it’s not. The Skittles party rumor appears to be a reboot of something called a pharming party; Politico‘s Jack Shafer has debunked its existence over and over again. Yes, teenagers experiment with alcohol and drugs, but they are actually drinking less heavily they used to, and their drug of choice is the comparatively harmless marijuana. In any case, there is little direct, firsthand evidence of teens ritualistically contributing pills to a general supply and then consuming them at random.

Fake news can be used to scare people into supporting terrible public policies. Such is the case with the so-called sex-trafficking epidemic, the existence of which has been carefully refuted by Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown over and over again. Now the narrative—which holds that hundreds of thousands of kids are at risk of being sex trafficked every year, even though those numbers are based on nothing, and almost certainly false—has ensnared Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was arrested in February as part a human-trafficking sting. Kraft is accused of frequenting the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, where women were forced into “modern day slavery,” according to Sports Illustrated. Salacious? Yep. Fake? Of course.

“There’s no allegation that anyone engaged in human trafficking,” Palm Beach District Attorney Dave Aronberg admitted. By all accounts, this was garden variety prostitution, not sex slavery.

Then there’s the hate crime spike. Organizations like the Southern Povery Law Center and Anti-Defamation League have claimed that the U.S. hate crime rate is surging under Trump—the implication being that racists, anti-Muslim bigots, anti-Semites, and homophobes are emboldened by the president’s spiteful rhetoric toward minorities and immigrants. Many celebrities, activists, and politicians opined that they were not surprised when two Trump supporters allegedly attacked Jussie Smollett—the gay, black star of the TV show Empire—in the streets of Chicago and shouted “this is MAGA country.” It now seems overwhelmingly likely that the attack was a hoax perpetrated by Smollett himself.

In fact, it’s not even clear that the prevalence of hate crimes is actually increasing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has tracked hate crimes for more than 20 years, and the 2017 total is actually lower than the 1996 total. The number has gone up some years and down others, but it’s hard to know what’s really happening since the number of agencies submitting data to the federal database had increased over time—nearly 1,000 additional municipalities submitted information in 2017 versus 2016.

Data is often deployed for misleading ends. As I explained during a recent Fox News appearance, the ADL’s claim that anti-Semitic hate, for instance, has spiked 57 percent in the last year is not nearly as compelling as it seems: A rash of bomb threats made by a single Israeli teenager was largely responsible for the jump, and anti-Semitic assaults had actually fallen.

We don’t have to call all these things “fake news” if the term has simply become too politically loaded. But we do need some way of describing this phenomenon, since the basic idea that the American people should not automatically believe everything they hear on TV or read on social media—even if it’s being pushed by a seemingly reputable news outlet—is sound. Be wary of politicians trying to escape scrutiny by claiming their naysayers are peddling fake news, but also be wary of people in the media trying to sell you on the idea that sex traffickers, hate criminals, migrant caravans, and Momo are coming to get you.

Three academics conducted what they call a “grievance studies” experiment. They wrote fake papers on ridiculous subjects and submitted them to prominent academic journals in fields that study gender, race, and sexuality.

They did this to “expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the universities,” say the hoaxers in a video which documented the process.

John Stossel interviewed James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian who, along with Helen Pluckrose, sent so-called research papers to 20 journals.

They were surprised when seven papers were accepted. One claimed that “dog humping incidents at dog parks” can be taken as “evidence of rape culture.” It was honored as “excellent scholarship.”

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

Remember back when Donald Trump was just getting elected and people worried about “normalizing” him and the “extinction-level threat” he posed not just to the United States but the whole of Western civilization? The rude and often disgusting ways he vilified people (especially women), his proud ignorance of basic elements of American governance and policymaking, his calls for violence against hecklers at his rallies—all this and more marked Trump as a break with recent precedent.

Two years into his presidency and about 46 percent of Americans have indeed normalized Trump. That’s where his approval rating has settled in a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Over at RealClearPolitics, which averages a bunch of different polls, his approval rating is currently 44 percent. Over the past six months, it’s been mostly bouncing around in the low- to mid-40s as well. This represents progress for Trump, who was stuck in the 30s for most of the second half of 2017. About 40 percent of respondents said that will vote for him in 2020. That doesn’t sound good, but it’s about where Bill Clinton was at the same point in his presidency.

So what happened? Lots of stuff, including first and foremost the simple fact that the world hasn’t ended yet on his watch. The economy is still growing, albeit weakly in comparison both to what Trump promised and the postwar historical average. Just one in three of us think there will be a recession in the next year, according to that NBC/WSJ poll. A year ago, 64 percent of us figured a crash was coming. Unemployment is low and wages are growing. He was instrumental in passing a major tax bill, he supported criminal justice reform, and he signed “right to try” legislation. He’s talking about pulling out of wars that long ago lost public support. (For an official White House list of accomplishments, go here.) Perhaps more of us are starting to realize that “Trump Is More Like Recent Presidents than Anyone Wants To Admit” (that’s not a compliment, by the way, it’s just reality) and also that American cultural and political institutions are capable of hemming in his worst tendencies. He lost the showdown over the government shutdown. The Democrats winning the House in the midterms might make it easier for people to be at peace with the idea of President Trump. A divided government is one that, at least to some extent, will limit any given party’s or person’s power.

At the same time, I want to suggest that one of the biggest factors in “normalizing” Trump is the rise of self-proclaimed socialists in the Democratic Party. This was a theme in Trump’s Castro-length performance-art masterpiece at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday, during which he begged the Democrats to run on Green New Deal (GND) policies that would give the government massive new powers not simply in the energy sector but in health care and labor markets too. For a rundown of just how expansive the GND being pushed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will be, go here. In his State of the Union address, Trump declared that “America will never be a socialist nation” and if the GND isn’t textbook socialism, it’s close enough for government work. As I noted over the weekend, the agenda and statements of progressive Democrats make Trump seem much more mainstream, as do “comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years.”

Indeed, for all the talk of the growing popularity of socialism, especially among younger people, over the past couple of years, the fact remains that Americans generally don’t like the term or its connotations. The NBC/WSJ poll asked respondents whether they had positive or negative reactions to various people and ideas. When it came to socialism, just 18 percent of people had “very” or “somewhat” positive feelings about socialism, while 50 had negative feelings. For capitalism, the percentages were reversed, with 50 percent being positive and 19 percent being negative.

To the extent that the Democrats take on the mantle of socialism or allow Donald Trump to tag them with it, they will not only make him seem more and more mainstream and acceptable, they will almost surely lose the 2020 presidential election.

Related: “California’s High-Speed Rail Disaster Is a ‘Shot Across the Bow for the Green New Deal'”