Month: September 2021

On Monday, jurors in a trial concerning whether former Backpage executives knowingly facilitated prostitution heard hours of biased testimony from an “expert” witness who has worked closely with law enforcement for decades. Again and again, Sharon Cooper—a self-described “developmental and forensic pediatrician” and a witness for the prosecution—conflated all sex work with sex trafficking and waxed on at length about child sexual exploitation, despite none of the defendants being indicted for trafficking or child-related crimes. (For a play-by-play of her testimony, check out this Twitter thread.)

Presented as an expert on online ads for commercial sex, Cooper made a bevy of dubious claims about the language in such ads, describing all sorts of terms used by adult sex workers as evidence of sexual victimization and child sex trafficking. For instance, Cooper suggested that the phrase “100% independent”—used by escorts to denote that they’re not affiliated with an agency—was language meant to trick “buyers” into thinking they weren’t patronizing trafficking victims. At another point, Cooper claimed “wifey” means “a female who is under the control of a male trafficker.”

Meanwhile, the prosecution plied Cooper with question after question of uncertain relevance to the case at hand, in which six defendants are charged with facilitating prostitution in violation of the federal Travel Act and conspiracy and money laundering related to this alleged facilitation. Many were sustained, and many were overruled—but only after jurors heard intimation after intimation about child sex trafficking.

The "expert" witness in the kangaroo trial in Phoenix against the https://t.co/PsqnnYbLeM owners is Sharon Cooper, seen below three years ago giving a smiling presentation to… NCOSE.

One of her slides illustrated the concept of "Prostitution" with a still from "Pretty Woman": pic.twitter.com/zbhvndMYxj

— Gustavo Turner (@GustavoTurnerX) September 13, 2021

Toward the end of her testimony, Cooper—also a purveyor of dubious and disproven “science” about pornography—admitted that she doesn’t personally distinguish between consensual sex work and activities involving force, coercion, and minors.

“I don’t refer to it as sex work, I refer to it as sexual exploitation,” Cooper said when asked a question about sex work by one of the defense lawyers.

Once again, defense lawyers wound up asking U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich to declare a mistrial, citing biased testimony from Cooper and others since witness testimony began last Wednesday. (Defense lawyers also asked for a mistrial after opening statements from federal prosecutor Reggie Jones. This was denied last week, as was the defense’s suggestion that Jones’ accusations had opened the door to allowing the introduction of prosecutor memos—published by Reason—which are not allowed to be brought up at trial.)

“This case has gotten dramatically off the rails,” one lawyer for the defense told Judge Brnovich in a conference while jurors were out of the room on Monday.

“We’ve got all these broad-based statements about prostitution and trafficking—and trafficking, of course, is as inflammatory as all get out,” he said. “I just don’t understand how this jury is every going to evaluate whether these guys had specific intent on any of the counts or things charged in the indictment, when they’re day after day after day just hearing ‘Backpage had prostitution, Backpage had child trafficking,’ from people who don’t identify the particulars and/or tie it to any defendant.”

Brnovich said she could “envision from the evidence already seen” where the government might get to that, so it was “way too early” to make that argument about the prosecution’s case as a whole. But Brnovich said she was considering “the argument about the prejudicial value of the testimony that’s been given so far.”

Last week, jurors heard testimony from a mother-daughter duo about how the girl appeared in Backpage ads—some posted by herself, others by a series of exploitative pimps—when she was 15 and 16 years old and a runaway from home. The girl admitted she had to say she was an adult to post the ads. She also said she was arrested by police in a prostitution sting, told the cops that she was 18, and was let go. After another sting, however, the girl was determined to be underage and returned to her family. One of the adults who exploited her was convicted. None of the ads or actions involved in these incidents are part of the current indictment against Backpage defendants.

Jurors last week and yesterday also heard from Special Agent Brian Fichtner of the California Department of Justice. Fichtner had helped Kamala Harris, then–attorney general of California, bring twice-dismissed charges against Backpage founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin (two of the defendants currently on trial) and former CEO Carl Ferrer back in 2016.

On Monday, defense lawyer Joy Bertrand said that testimony so far had made clear that the government was “going to run up to that line and step over that line every time they can to get in children, children, children.…This is their focus. And they’ve been told repeatedly by this court to knock it off, and they just keep doing it.”

Prosecutor Reggie Jones countered by arguing that “sex trafficking is a subset of prostitution” and thus the testimony so far was relevant to the facilitating prostitution charge. “The government does not believe it is beating a dead horse, we are simply bringing in relevant evidence,” he said. “We do not believe the defendants have been prejudiced against.”

Brnovich told Jones she did “have concerns that the government has crossed that line several times, even after at sidebar I warned you not to do it,” and that there was “some validity to the argument that the cumulative effect” of all the child sex trafficking references would bias the jury. Brnovich added that she had concerns “that the testimony elicited from the victims went beyond what it should have” and that Cooper’s testimony “went well beyond what we had talked about prior to her testifying.”

Brnovich said she would take a look at transcripts from testimony and offer a decision on Tuesday morning about the defense’s concerns.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3CaCZRn
via IFTTT

In the 19th century, we had snake oil salesmen. Today, we have Amazon—or so Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) seems to suggest.

If not the salesmen themselves, then Amazon is certainly the enabler, the means by which the salesmen successfully lure their gullible customers, at least according to Warren. Last week the senator sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy with “concerns that Amazon is peddling misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and treatments through its search and ‘Best Seller’ algorithms.”

“During the week of August 22, 2021, my staff conducted sample searches on Amazon.com of pandemic-related terms such as ‘COVID-19,’ ‘COVID,’ ‘vaccine,’ ‘COVID 19 vaccine,’ and ‘pandemic,'” wrote Warren in her letter. “The top results consistently included highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures.”

“Warren asked Amazon to conduct a review within 14 days and provide public reports on both the extent to which Amazon’s algorithms are directing consumers products containing misinformation and on a plan to change the algorithms,” reported The New York Times.

She’s right: The top result for COVID-19 in Amazon Books includes Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins’ “The Truth About Covid-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal,” which has been blasted for its inaccuracies. Mercola has been a natural health proponent since the 1990s, hawking alternative remedies on his website, sounding off about everything from grain-free diets to the purported harms of 5G. He casts doubt on the efficacy of COVID vaccines, playing fast and loose with efficacy percentages, implying that medical journals and public health officials have lied about the vaccines working. His book may have some nuggets of truth in it—questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, though not appreciated by the public health establishment, is a worthwhile pursuit—but plenty of writers out there manage to question COVID public policy while not peddling bad scientific information that strains credulity.

Still, Mercola’s books should not be banned; people should have access to alternative information, however foul, and be able to judge the veracity for themselves. Other books that pop up when you search COVID-19 in Amazon Books include those authored by mainstream sources like Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, carried alongside charlatans like Alex Berenson, New York Times reporter turned COVID quack. (“As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic’s finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong,” wrote The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson.) There’s a self-published book on COVID through the eyes of the author’s Jack Russell terrier. Even former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic memoir on what a great governor he is/was pops up on the first page of search results for COVID-19. Just as I don’t recommend following Cuomo’s leadership advice, I wouldn’t recommend following Mercola’s COVID prevention and curing advice, or Berenson’s. Content moderation decisions are hard, and Amazon customers are, by and large, adults who don’t need to be nannied by the government.

But Warren’s complaint, which hinges on the idea that Amazon already engages in content moderation, choosing to remove some books rife with misinformation from its virtual shelves, suggests that the American public truly cannot decide for themselves which authors and products to trust. She attempts to insert the government into the buyer-seller relationship, purporting to act for the public’s own good. Warren, a font of bad ideas, does this a lot, proffering the idea that the government ought to intervene out of an always-benevolent, vested interest in consumer welfare.

Amazon doesn’t need to explain its content moderation framework to her, nor should it err on the side of doing more of it; employees have circulated petitions calling for the removal of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and the company already made the controversial decision not to run sponsored ads from Shrier’s publisher promoting the book. (It ultimately chose to sell the book despite the outcry.) When the company wades into ultra-politicized topics like whether people ought to be able to buy books that critique trans orthodoxy—or COVID vaccines, or the efficacy of lockdowns—it runs the risk of making the wrong call, bending to the employees and naysayers who shriek the loudest. It’s probably better for Amazon to allow the Mercolas of the world to sell their products, to let people judge for themselves what to read, and to stave off potential persecution complexes the grifters can later capitalize on.

Time and time again, Warren reminds us that she views wealth in America as a fixed pie, one where the richest overlords are hoarding money, creating little of value at the expense of the poor and downtrodden. She’s been chomping at the bit to regulate Amazon (and those affiliated) for years. So maybe Amazon does need to explain its process to Warren, since she’s appointed herself the guardian of right-think, here to protect the American public from themselves.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/399Gf37
via IFTTT

Today, California is holding its second-ever recall vote for a sitting governor. Unlike Gray Davis in 2003, Democrat Gavin Newsom is widely projected to survive the effort. The recall mechanism itself, however, may not prove so lucky. At least not in its current form.

Why? Because Democrats and their empathizers in the media and academe are talking themselves into the conclusion that one of progressivism’s crowning electoral achievements, originally aimed at a democratically unaccountable machine, has become an anachronism now that Democrats are the ones pulling all the levers.

“For starters, California’s recalls can happen in off-years, which makes them ripe for manipulation by the minority party,” the New York Times editorialized Monday (please note the conspiratorial/pejorative word choice; it’s standard issue in these efforts):

“Voters in off-cycle elections generally skew older, whiter and more conservative, a recent study led by the University of California, San Diego, found. In other words, not very representative of California’s population….The leading candidate is the Republican talk-radio host Larry Elder, whose conservative policy positions—including his opposition to mask mandates, abortion rights and a minimum wage, as well as his troubling views on women’s rights and climate change—aren’t in line with any statewide election result in California for decades.”

Contra the Times, the purpose of the century-old recall feature, which has only made it to the ballot 11 times for state elected officials (six of whom were removed), was not to ensure that California’s public representatives match up demographically and ideologically with the electorate, but rather to act as a between-elections check on corruption, incompetence, or whatever the relevant voters deemed a firing offense. The second California official to be successfully recalled, back in 1913, was Democratic state senator Edwin Grant, whose San Francisco constituents did not care for Grant’s fervent opposition to the time-honored local industry of prostitution.

But “what was path-breaking and innovative a century ago,” warned public policy professors Henry Brady and Karthick Ramakrishnan in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, “looks anachronistic and downright dangerous today.” (“Dangerous,” alas, is a not-uncommon political-class adjective to describe the prospect of having someone else govern the Golden State for the next 14 months, after which the Democratic nominee will almost certainly win again.)

The profs continue: “In these times of intense party polarization, we should be wary of mechanisms that enable electoral losers to win back power through outlandish means or to derail the governing agenda of a popularly elected officeholder.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to note that polarization has helped produce 30 essentially one-party states, in which the same team controls the governor’s mansion, the state legislature, the two U.S. Senate seats, a majority of the House delegation, and a predictable presidential vote. Against that backdrop, recalls could also be interpreted as the last direct-democracy line of citizen self-defense against mono-party hackery.

Unfortunately for Larry Elder—who is only leading the if-Newsom-is-recalled pack because Republicans have precious few California political professionals of note, and Democrats made the conscious choice not to run a viable candidate (recall targets themselves are barred from appearing on Question No. 2)—most journalists and professors swim in the same ideological fishbowl as the state’s dominant political party.

That means not only that every micro-blemish stands out—”Before the California recall, Larry Elder’s charity failed,” panted the L.A. Times, about an Elder nonprofit that in nearly two decades raised all of $20,000—but also that his events are covered in ways inconceivable if he had a different letter beside his name. When a white woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at Elder (who is black) on a Venice street last week, the news media was uncharacteristically subdued about possible racial subtext.

The op-ed pages have shown no such reticence about divining (negative) racial import from Elder’s campaign. Sample headlines: “Larry Elder and the danger of the ‘model minority’ candidate,” “California governor recall hopeful Larry Elder is a soldier for white supremacy,” “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” and “Larry Elder says he’s not a face of white supremacy. His fans make it hard to believe.” Why, it’s enough to make you suspect that there might be dual standards applied to public figures based on their party affiliation!

In a column Monday for Mediaite, California commentator John Ziegler posited that the media imbalance might end up proving decisive for Newsom.

“Given his extreme advantages in voter registration, the power of incumbency, money, and highly favorable media coverage from every single communication outlet except talk radio, it would have taken a near miracle for him to be removed,” Ziegler wrote. “But he will get away with claiming vindication for his Covid polices because the news media, which is similarly deeply invested in not having been very wrong for the last year and a half, will be thrilled to share in his alleged exoneration.”

I suspect that that’s exaggerated, in part because the news media just doesn’t have that much popular pull, but we’ll see. In the meantime, the elites who use the news media to talk amongst themselves and maybe pry open the Overton window a bit have been making every indication that a post-Newsom recall mechanism will be either mended or ended.

Berkeley law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Aaron Edlin got the ball rolling one month ago with an unconvincing New York Times argument that the recall was unconstitutional. Straight news pieces have been given headlines like “Has California’s unique brand of direct democracy gone too far?” The state Senate last week passed a law banning paid signature-gathering, which would gut California’s entire direct-democracy apparatus (and likely invite legal challenges).

Most of the reform proposals being floated would make it more difficult for voters to challenge their leaders. California requires the signatures of 12 percent the number of those who voted in the last relevant election, which is the lowest recall threshold in the country; most are at around 20 percent. “Other states with recall provisions, like Minnesota and Washington, require an act of malfeasance or a conviction for a serious crime for the recall to proceed,” the New York Times notes wistfully. (Such designations being too important to leave in the hands of mere voters.) Newsom himself prefers the automatic installation of the Lt. Governor in case of recall, which would in the current electoral climate lock Republicans out of the statehouse.

The catch is that any such change in the state constitution has to be approved…via statewide ballot referendum. Public opinion surveys show that Californians are open to tinkering, but they do appreciate having the recall power.

As do I, though I forfeited the privilege long ago via U-Haul. There is an available if lonely conclusion to be potentially gleaned from today’s vote, should Newsom indeed survive: The system maybe…works? Six for 11 in recalls, including one for two with governors, across 98 years does not seem to me evidence of a “dangerous” and “outlandish” anachronism, overrun by “manipulation.” Turns out it’s actually pretty hard to recall a popularly elected Democrat in a heavily Democratic state, particularly when the minority party is attracted to nutjob candidates and clownball tactics.

Democrats could just take the W, rather than squeeze ever more tightly on power. Which means you can expect to see degrees of recall-difficulty placed on the ballot in time for the midterms.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3Efx0g0
via IFTTT

I’m a believer in positive reinforcement, and when university leaders do the right thing they should get credit for doing so. Kent Syverud, the president of Syracuse University and a former law professor, did the right thing. Other university presidents should take notes.

An assistant professor of political science at Syracuse chose to use the anniversary of September 11th to make a point about “heteropatriarchal capitalist systems.” Her tweet generated some backlash. The university responded as universities should in such cases—by defending free speech and avoiding any temptation to praise or condemn the professorial speech in question. The full statement:

This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was a time to reflect on the senseless loss of life, the heroism of many and how that event shaped our country and the world.

Recently, one of our professors shared thoughts on 9/11 on social media. These comments have been the subject of much scrutiny and vehement disagreement by critics. That is their right, just as our professor has the right to free speech, however uncomfortable it may make anyone feel. What cannot be tolerated are the harassment and violent threats that we have seen in response that have been directed at this professor. Our Department of Public Safety is in contact with the professor and has engaged the support of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Some have asked the University to condemn the professor’s comments and others have demanded the professor’s dismissal. Neither of those actions will happen. As the home of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, free speech for all people across the political spectrum, within the limits of the law and the University’s anti-harassment policy, is one of our key values. Speech can be offensive, hurtful or provocative. Still, Syracuse University will stand by the principles of free speech and by our commitment to keeping our community safe in the face of threats and harassment.

The statement in this case echoes the language Syverud used to defend a different faculty member a few years ago who drew controversy over her remarks in response an “anti-Sharia Law” protest.

As some have noted, Syverud was much less vocal when a professor was targeted by campus activists and denounced by members of his senior administration for calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan Flu or the Chinese Communist Party virus.” On that occasion, FIRE had to remind Syracuse about its obligations when professors say controversial things. Far from vocally defending that professor, Syracuse instead suspended him and launched an investigation over whether he should be further sanctioned and perhaps fired, contributing to FIRE awarding Syracuse a “Lifetime Censorship Award.” That professor’s case dragged on for months before Syracuse finally reinstated him.

One hopes that Syracuse has learned its lesson and will now aggressively defend free speech regardless of whether it is off-campus right-wing activists or on-campus left-wing campus activists attacking it. In this case at least the university did a good job, and it should keep its statement handy as a template for the next time someone gets upset because a professor said something naughty.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3z7v0Tf
via IFTTT