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This past week, the self-described libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was showered with mainstream media kudos after his non-clownish questioning of Michael Cohen and his vocal opposition to President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration along the southern border. The attention culminated with an appearance today on CNN’s State of the Union, during which host Jake Tapper asked Amash, “Would you be willing to run for the White House as the Libertarian nominee in 2020?”

Amash replied: “Well, I’d never rule anything out,” though “that’s not on my radar right now. I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting.”

At Students for Liberty’s LibertyCon in Washington, D.C., six weeks ago, Amash told Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward that the ideal third-party candidate “wears Air Jordans” (he was wearing Air Jordans at the time). While also declining to state his 2020 intentions, the congressmen then went on the sketch out specifically what an L.P. nominee should look like.

“The ideal candidate has to be very libertarian, because if you’re running in the Libertarian Party, you better be a libertarian,” he said. “But it has to be a person who is persuasive to other people, can bring Republicans and Democrats on board, or bring a large part of the electorate on board, because you can’t just appeal to diehard libertarians and win the election….I think that too often the party has made concessions to have more sort of squishy Republican candidates run as the Libertarian Party candidate.”

The latter comment was widely seen as a dig against Bill Weld, who at the time looked like the highest-profile Libertarian contender in the race, but has since launched an exploratory GOP primary challenge against Trump. The highest-profile declared candidates for the L.P. presidential nomination—which will be determined at the Libertarian Party National Convention in May 2020—are activist Adam Kokesh, controversialist Arvin Vohra, and man-of-mystery John McAfee.

In his CNN interview, Amash struck a note of national conciliation amid constant political warfare.

“Right now we have a wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides,” he said. “And Congress is totally broken; we can’t debate things in a clear way anymore. Everything has become ‘Do you like Presisdent Trump?’ Or, ‘Do you not like President Trump?’ And I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people—because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans—and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time.”

Noted Tapper: “Sounds like a platform.” (You can watch the whole interview at this link.)

In July 2017, Amash told me that he preferred the descriptor “libertarian” to “libertarian-leaning Republican,” and said that “hopefully, over time, these two parties start to fall apart.” Watch below:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Saturday that he will vote to block President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border—potentially providing the tipping-point vote that would allow Congress to block Trump’s attempt to use the declaration to obtain funding for a border wall.

“I can’t vote to give extra-Constitutional powers to the president,” Paul said during a speech at a Republican Party dinner in his home state on Saturday night, the Bowling Green Daily News reported. “I can’t vote to give the president the power to spend money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.”

Trump declared a national emergency along the southern border on February 15, shortly after the conclusion of a weeks-long government shutdown that failed to convince Congress to grant his request for $57 billion to build about 230 miles of fencing. The emergency declaration seeks to redirect about $3.6 billion in defense funding already appropriated by Congress to the border wall project.

But the House of Representatives voted last week to terminate the national emergency declaration. House Democrats voted unanimously for that resolution, and 13 House Republicans broke with the White House to support it.

It’s been less certain whether that resolution can pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but Paul’s stated opposition to Trump’s emergency declaration likely means it will. Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski of (R-Alaska) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) have already said they would vote to block Trump’s declaration. With all 47 Senate Democrats expected to oppose it as well, four Republican votes would be enough to secure the resolution’s passage. With a number of other senators on the fence, it seems likely the final tally will be higher than the 51 votes necessary for passage.

That likely will not be the end of the drama over the border wall funding, as Trump has promised to veto the disapproval resolution. Overriding that veto would require 290 votes in the House—45 more than the resolution received last month—and 20 Republican votes in the Senate to reach the 67-vote threshold.

Even so, congressional opposition to the emergency declaration is a welcome rebuke to the Trump administration’s executive overreach in this instance. The emergency declaration is an obvious end-run around Congress and could set a precedent to be exploited by future presidents eager to spend money on projects not approved by Congress.

Leaving aside those broader issues, the emergency declaration is deeply flawed on its own. The president may have the authority to redirect spending due to the emergency declaration, but he does not have the authority to seize private lands or to use military funding for a civilian construction project—even under the vague and broad powers granted to the executive by the National Emergencies Act.

It remains to be seen how Paul’s opposition to Trump’s emergency declaration will affect the senator’s relationship with the White House. In recent months, Paul has made a concerted effort to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy and has praised Trump’s efforts at ending America’s decades-long conflicts in the Middle East—though he also broke with the White House by voting against the confirmation of Attorney General William Barr. Paul cited concerns about Barr’s stance on warrantless surveillance.

On Saturday night, Paul reportedly praised Trump in his speech to about 200 Kentucky Republicans, the Bowling Green Daily News reported, before turning abruptly to announce his opposition to the president’s emergency declaration.

“We may want more money for border security, but Congress didn’t authorize it,” Paul said. “If we take away those checks and balances, it’s a dangerous thing.”

On Saturday, President Trump promised CPAC 2019 attendees that he would soon sign an executive order to force universities and colleges to do a better job protecting the free speech rights of students.

“Today I am proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars,” said Trump.

The White House declined to answer The New York Times’ questions about the matter. But an official with knowledge of the executive order confirmed to Reason that a draft exists. Indeed, the plan is to penalize universities that do not protect free speech by taking away their federal grants.

“I will be signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars” @realDonaldTrump #CPAC2019 #WhatMakesAmericaGreat pic.twitter.com/hyeNZ3jI6F

— CPAC 2019 (@CPAC) March 2, 2019

To justify the executive order, Trump referenced an incident involving Hayden Williams, a young conservative activist who was punched in the face at the University of California, Berkeley, while helping with recruitment for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. The police arrested a suspect on Friday. Neither Williams nor his presumed assailant are Berkeley students.

Whether free speech is currently in crisis on college campuses is a hotly debated issue. There are plenty of examples of students at a number of campuses enduring free speech violations—often at the hands of other students or college administrators—over the years, though evidence of a systemic or worsening epidemic is not as compelling.

To the extent there is a college free speech problem, much of it is cultural. As I explain in my forthcoming book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (pre-order here), there are some far-left activist students who view speech with which they disagree as a form of violence, and they insist on shutting down controversial speakers on self-defense grounds. It is this tiny illiberal minority making life difficult: When they threaten violence against conservative speakers, they force university administrations to spend more money on security—costs that are sometimes passed along to other students.

It’s not obvious that a presidential order would really address the cultural dimensions of the campus free speech issue. It might, however, worsen a very different problem: executive overreach. Congress, after all, is tasked with funding higher education, not the president.

The education system must do more to uphold the First Amendment, and to encourage students to cherish the principles of a free society. But a top-down, unilateral imposition on colleges and universities does not strike me as the best idea.

Pot is bulky and pungent. That makes it difficult to conceal in, say, a suitcase or a truck. For that reason, marijuana traffickers tend to avoid legal ports or entrances, preferring instead to traverse the expanses of deserts and canyons where Border Patrol agents are often the only signs of human life. To the extent that other drugs cross outside normal entry points, they are most often hitchhikers along for the ride with the weed. In 2013, for example, Border Patrol agents seized 274 pounds of marijuana for every one pound of other drugs.

So for those familiar with the history of drug smuggling, there was a dog that didn’t bark in Donald Trump’s early January Oval Office address, which was intended to frighten Americans into supporting a border wall and give him leverage to end the shutdown. While Trump described the southern border as “a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs,” he only specifically mentioned “meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl”—all drugs that typically come in through formal points of entry. He did not speak of what has been, for most of living memory, the most-smuggled item over the Mexican-American border: marijuana.

Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American, writes David Bier for Reason.

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It’s way too early to be thinking this, much less saying it, but what the hell: If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C., his reelection is a foregone conclusion.

There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn’t be absolutely blown off the stage by him. I say this as someone who is neither a Trump fanboy nor a Never Trumper. But he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations.

In a heavily improvised speech that lasted over two hours, the 72-year-old former (future?) reality TV star hit every greatest hit in his repertoire (“Crooked Hillary,” “build the wall,” “America is winning again,” and more all made appearances) while riffing on everything from the Green New Deal to his own advanced age and weird hair to the wisdom of soldiers over generals. At times, it was like listening to Robin Williams’ genie in the Disney movie Aladdin, Howard Stern in his peak years as a radio shock jock, or Don Rickles as an insult comic. When he started making asides, Trump observed, “This is how I got elected, by going off script.” Two years into his presidency and he’s just getting warmed up.

First and foremost, Trump was frequently funny and outre in the casually mean way that New Yorkers exude like nobody else in America. “You put the wrong people in a couple of positions,” he said, lamenting the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, “and all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bullshit.” He voiced Jeff Sessions in a mock-Southern accent, recusing “muhself” and asked the adoring crowd why the former attorney generally hadn’t told him he was going to do that before he was appointed.

Democrats backing the Green New Deal (GND) “are talking about trains to Hawaii,” he said. “They haven’t figured out how to get to Europe yet.” He begged the Democrats not to abandon the GND because he recognizes that the more its details and costs are discussed, the more absurd it will become. “When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your energy,” he said at one point. “Did the wind stop blowing, I’d like to watch television today, guys?” “We’ll go back to boats,” he said, drawing huge laughs when he added, “I don’t want to talk [the Democrats] out of [the GND], I just want to be the Republican who runs against it.”

He railed against Never-Trump Republicans: “They’re on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he said, adding “they’re basically dishonest people” that no one cares about. He joked about being in the White House all alone on New Year’s because of the government shutdown. “I was in the White House and I was lonely, so I went to Iraq,” he said, recounting that when his plane was approaching the U.S. airstrip in Iraq, all lights had to be extinguished for landing. “We spend trillions of dollars in the Middle East and we can’t land planes [in Iraq] with the lights on,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We gotta get out.” He then riffed on the generals he met there who, contrary to the Pentagon brass he dealt with, said they could vanquish ISIS in a week. He claimed to have talked with a general named “Raising Cane,” which might be Brigadier Gen. J. Daniel Caine, but Trump is the farthest thing from a details guy, right? “Sometimes I learn more from soldiers than I do generals,” he said, deftly moving from jokes to more-substantive discussions of policies or issues.

In all seriousness, this is quite a performance from Trump: he is just about two hours into this speech and shows no signs of flagging. And far as I can tell, the CPAC crowd is still with him.

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) March 2, 2019

You can cover a huge amount of material in two-hours-plus, and Trump certainly did that. After speaking sympathetically of immigrants who want to come to the United States and saying that we need more people because the economy (well, his economy, as he takes credit for it) is doing so well, he immediately dismissed the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans traveling north in caravans across Mexico. In a bizarre display of simultaneous empathy and contempt, he talked at length about how female migrants are being systematically “raped” but also how the caravans were filled with criminals and drug dealers. It was “sad to see how stupid we’ve become” to think that the caravans are filled with good people. As he has been doing since his State of the Union address, he has been laying out a partial, inchoate case for a skills-based immigration program. He explained walking away from the table with North Korea even as he noted yet again that he has a great relationship with the dictator Kim Jong Un. In a long riff on trade policy, he invoked the “Great Tariff Debate of 1888” and how China “and everyone else” had been taking advantage of us until he started pushing back. He took time to talk about how no, really, the crowd at his inauguration was in fact historically large despite all publicly available evidence.

All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, “one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time.” It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and 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. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today’s speech, Trump has mostly ditched the “American Carnage” rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. “We have people in Congress right now who hate our country,” he said. “We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad.”

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. “We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare,” he averred at one point. “Now you have a president who finally standing up for America.” The future, he said “does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country.” That’s a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

None of this is to suggest that this speech wasn’t as fact-challenged as almost every utterance Trump has given since announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination (go to Daniel Dale’s Twitter thread for a running count of misstatements of fact). He hammered trade deficits in a way that will remind anyone with an undergrad economics course under their belt that he fundamentally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He misrepresented both NAFTA and the new trade bill he crafted with Mexico and Canada, and at the exact moment that hundreds of wearied listeners started leaving the ballroom at The Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, he claimed that not a single person had left their seat.

But the 2020 presidential race is not going to be decided based on which candidate is more tightly moored to reality. It’s going to be decided, like these things always are, by the relative health of the economy and the large vision of the future the different candidates put forward. As the economy continues to expand (however anemically compared to historical averages) and he continues to avoid credible charges of impeachable offenses, Trump is becoming sunnier and sunnier while the Democrats are painting contemporary America as a late-capitalist hellhole riven by growing racial, ethnic, and other tensions.

Trump isn’t the creator of post-factual politics in America, he is merely currently its most-gifted practitioner (oddly, his ideological and demographic counterpart and fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may become a challenger to him on precisely this score). Trump may have next to no credibility in profoundly disturbing ways, but American politics has been drifting away from reality for the entire 21st century, when the 2000 election was essentially decided by a coin flip, the United States entered the Iraq War under false premises, and Barack Obama took home Politifact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” award and dissembled unconvincingly in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations.

That Trump didn’t invent the current situation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about it, but if he can continue to perform the way he did today at CPAC, it remains to be seen what Democratic rival can rise to that challenge.

Today is the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest annual gathering of right-wing political activists, which is being held just outside of Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at 11:30 A.M. and a massive crowd of several thousand people have already assembled at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.

I spoke to a number of people waiting to hear the president to get a sense of what drew them to the event. If they were old enough to vote, they all voted for Trump in 2016. Dan, a middle-aged man, said Trump’s top achievement was the economic growth since the president took office. His fellow attendee Gunther, also middle-aged, said his top issues were fiscal responsibility, family values, and faith, which he said was related to values but distinct. Gunther granted that deficits have increased under Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress but he said that the way to address that is through cuts to entitlements.

Nasim, a twentysomething Iranian American, was attending with her mother, who emigrated to the United States after the Islamic revolution in 1979. Nasim said she was a conservative pretty much across the board and wasn’t concerned by Donald Trump’s or Republican hostility toward immigration. “We want to help people, but we can’t help everyone,” she said. We should only be bringing in “top people,” educated immigrants who are going to add to the economy. I asked Nasim and her mother what they thought of Trump’s refugee and asylum policies—last fall, the president moved to cap refugee admissions at 30,000 in 2019, a recent low (and a reduction from an earlier stated cap of 45,000). Would Nasim’s mother have been able to emigrate here after the Islamic revolution if Trump were president? She granted the point but talked about larger immigration issues in terms of “national security,” which is a common refrain at CPAC. Discussions of immigration quickly become conversations about keeping the country safe from terrorism (this, despite essentially no link between immigration and terrorism). Indeed, a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay-rights group, told me one of his organization’s top priorities was calling for stricter immigration as a way of furthering national security.

I spoke with a group of girls named Katrina, Tori, and Katy, who were between the ages of 18 and 22. For Katrina, she liked Trump’s positions toward abortion, immigration, and stopping drugs from entering the country. For Tori, border security was the top issue, again conflating the issues of immigration and national defense or security. She and Katy both also liked that Trump “doesn’t back down” to Democrats or political opponents.

Finally, I talked with Amira, Batya, and Javier, who were between the ages of 18 and 26 and all were either immigrants or first-generation-born in America. Amira had an Israeli parent and for her, national security and immigration were again linked issues. She wasn’t necessarily against more legal immigration but illegal immigration was a “big” problem (like some other people I’ve talked to here, she wasn’t necessarily against allowing more people to enter here legally). Batya’s family was from the former Soviet Union and while she liked that the economy was expanding under Donald Trump, she said she was growing increasingly skeptical of him.

Javier was of Dominican heritage and proudly sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat that been signed by both Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens. He was strongly pro-life and in favor of a border wall. While conceding that all Republicans are pro-life, Javier said that Trump had announced he would sign any legislation limiting abortion that crossed his desk and “he clearly meant it.”

When I asked him about pervasive Republican hostility to immigration—apart from all the fearmongering over the declining number of illegal entries, GOP senators have introduced legislation to cut legal immigration by 50 percent—Javier invoked security issues but also added an argument I’ve heard from a number of other people at CPAC. It’s bad for America to take too many educated and successful people from other countries, he said, because it will create a brain drain and vacuum in those sender countries. That’s a strange sort of empathy to my ears, but it’s a line of argument that conservatives are developing to bolster their anti-immigration policies.

More interestingly, Javier said that most of his relatives—”90 percent”—were Democrats but to him the Republican Party was more welcoming. “In 2016,” he said, “people like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, people who looked like me were running for president.” He said that what drew him to the GOP was that he believed its policies would help him succeed over the long run and in the long term. “I don’t like to feel like I’m being controlled,” he said, explaining what he didn’t like about Democrats, especially people such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Amira and Batya agreed that the leftward feint by contemporary Democrats turned them off too.

This is an obviously limited sample of people at CPAC, much less of Trump supporters more generally. But a pretty clear picture of what they care about and why is emerging. I find the linkage between immigration policy and anything related to national security genuinely unconvincing and troubling, but that’s where Trump-supporting conservatives are. If libertarians want to engage them and change their minds, that’s worth knowing. As I noted yesterday, these are essentially cultural issues, not policy ones—nobody is interested in what sorts of facts are real or what sorts of policies might be effective.

In a short period of time, Trump has radically altered the character of the Republican Party and the character of the conservative movement. In the wake of the midterm elections, Gallup found Republicans want their party to become even more conservative while Democrats actually want a more moderate party. Oddly enough, even as the most-visible Democrats (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) talk more openly about democratic socialism, they may be unrepresentative of where their party is going (hell, Beto O’Rourke just came out as a “capitalist”). And Donald Trump, even as he pulls the Republican Party away from its historical associations with free trade, being friendly with immigration, and being pro-military intervention, may simply be getting warmed up.

This week Dean Foods, the nation’s largest dairy, reported steep quarterly losses. The Wall Street Journal notes the company is trying to sell its “struggling business” even as its share price sinks and the company cancels contracts with dairy farmers thanks to poor demand and a glut of dairy products.

It’s not just Dean Foods that’s listing. Dairy farmers around the country are in the same leaky boat. Many people agree that dairy farming in America has reached a crisis stage. How’d it get there?

A closer look at the problem reveals that decades of meddling in the market by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (at the behest of Congress) is likely responsible for the scope of today’s crisis. While the USDA works really hard to make the dairy industry thrive, writes Baylen Linnekin, the agency’s actions ensure just the opposite.

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No matter how many “huge, if true” stories collapse, no matter how many Nunes memos fizzle on the launch pad, partisans on both sides of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump/Russia investigation keep banking on some huge exogenous event to settle the issue once and for all. Such pining, argues Matt Welch, absolves politicians and voters alike from responsibility not only to make a judgment about the president’s actions, but to consider how their own behaviors got us to the point where electing a bull in a china shop seemed better than sticking with a discredited status quo.

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In 2017, the journal Child Development published results from a study showing that young children worked more diligently at difficult tasks when dressed as Batman. Research like this can feel a little bit gimmicky, but the essential idea is easy enough to understand: Superheroes are simplified models for living, showing us what we can aspire to when we adopt their values and mindset.

There’s a similar idea at play in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a Academy Award–nominated animated movie that works from the notion that anyone can be—or at least be like—Spider-Man. It’s a movie that casts Spider-Man not as a specific, singular hero but as a symbol of a set of eternal values, and it’s a pop-culture parable about choice, responsibility, and the power of individuals to construct their own identities.

Since his debut in 1962, the web-slinging comic book character has usually taken the form of Peter Parker, a nerdy white guy from Queens who was somewhere between a teenager and a 30-something. He split his time between the ordinary experiences of a struggling dweeb and a fantasy existence as a superhero with spider-like powers.

In one part of his life, he was a nebbish everyman who dealt with mundane problems—rocky relationships, paying the rent, a callous boss, demanding teachers. In the other part, he was a larger-than-life character in a red and blue suit who swung effortlessly through the urban canyons of Manhattan using wrist-mounted web-shooters that he built at home.

In his dual identities, Spider-Man was a stand-in for many of his readers, writes Peter Suderman.

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The Washington Post published an editor’s note Friday admitting the paper’s early reporting on the January 18 incident involving Covington Catholic High School students at the Lincoln Memorial was not completely accurate.

“Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in” the paper’s initial story, the editor’s note concedes.

The note specifically cites Native American activist Nathan Phillip’s assertions about being taunted and prevented from moving by the Catholic teenagers as claims that did not stand up to scrutiny.

In a statement to Reason, Washington Post Vice President for Communications Kristine Corrati Kelly told me, “While we do not accept the characterizations and contentions regarding our reporting of the incident at the Lincoln Memorial, we have taken steps to address the concerns expressed to us.”

Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington student wrongly described as cruelly smirking at Phillips during the encounter, is currently suing The Post over its coverage of the viral video. The Post would not confirm whether the lawsuit motivated the paper to post the editor’s note, and defended its handling of the matter in general.

“The full story did not emerge all at once and throughout our coverage, we sought to produce accurate reports,” said Coratti Kelly. “Even the comments of the school and church officials changed, and The Post provided ongoing coverage of the conflicting versions of this event and its aftermath, giving prominent attention to the student’s account and the investigative findings supporting it. We thus have provided a fair and accurate historical record of how this incident unfolded.”

Attorneys for Nicholas Sandmann—the Covington student accused of smirking at Phillips—were not satisfied with the editor’s note.

“What The Washington Post put out is barely worth comment,” Todd McMurtry, an attorney for Sandmann, told Reason. “WaPo committed gross journalistic malpractice and cannot undo its deeds with an editor’s note that purports to correct the record over a month after it led a frenzied mob in trashing a minor’s reputation. The Sandmanns would never accept half of a half-measure from an organization that still refuses to own up to its error.”