Category: reason

CBS says it won’t air an ad touting the benefits of medical marijuana during Super LIII on February 3. The network’s decision, while understandable, serves as more proof that the era of marijuana prohibition is far from over.

The goal of the ad from Acreage Holdings, a marijuana investment firm, was to “create an advocacy campaign for constituents who are being lost in the dialogue,” Acreage President George Allen told Bloomberg. “It’s hard to compete with the amount of attention something gets when it airs during the Super Bowl,” he added.

It’s a valid point, as the Super Bowl is usually the most-watched television event of the year. Last year’s game drew a whopping 104.3 million viewers, which was actually down 7 percent from 2017. Those massive viewership numbers mean ad time costs a pretty penny—upward of $5 million for a 30-second commercial.

Acreage was willing to pay that and more, as they hadn’t decided whether to run a 30-second ad or a 60-second one during the big game. But it won’t end up mattering. “CBS will not be accepting any ads for medical marijuana at this time,” the network wrote in a return email after receiving storyboards from Acreage’s ad agency, according to USA Today. A CBS spokesperson confirmed to the outlet that the network does not allow marijuana-related ads.

It’s not hard to understand CBS’s decision. While marijuana is legal for recreational or medical use in 33 out of 50 states, it’s still classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. Pot prohibition may be collapsing, as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum argued in November, but federal law has not yet caught up.

That not to say there hasn’t been progress. In June, the DEA approved Epidiolex, an epilepsy drug containing cannabidiol (CBD), as a medical treatment. And in September, the agency reclassified Epidiolex as a Schedule V drug, which is the least restrictive category for controlled substances. Plus, while former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was an enemy of legal marijuana (among many other things), the man nominated to replace him, William Barr, says he won’t target state-licensed marijuana businesses.

The fact remains, however, that marijuana is still illegal under federal law. This means, as Barr noted in his confirmation hearing, that the current conflict between federal prohibition and state legalization is “untenable.”

This conflict manifests itself in the affairs of some companies. The NFL, for instance, still prohibits its players from using marijuana, even though recreational weed is legal in eight of the 32 states the league plays in. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm pointed out Sunday, this policy remains in place largely because team owners see the policy as a bargaining chip. However, it’s not hard to imagine that if weed were legal (or at least not outright banned) under federal law, the owners wouldn’t have this leverage.

Similarly, CBS probably wouldn’t have had a problem airing a pro-medical marijuana ad if federal law regarding the matter was less stringent. After all, polling shows that the vast majority of Americans believe medical marijuana should be legal. Considering the conflicts between federal and state laws, however, the network probably decided it was better to stay out of it.

Acreage, for its part, seems to understand the situation. “We’re not particularly surprised that CBS and/or the NFL rejected the content,” Allen told USA Today. “And that is actually less a statement about them and more we think a statement about where we stand right now in this country.”

It’s unfortunate nonetheless. The ad was more a “call to political action” than a commercial for the company itself, Acreage told Bloomberg. “We’re not marketing any of our products or retail in this spot,” Chief Marketing Officer Harris Damashek added to USA Today. The 60-second version of the ad introduced three people who have benefited from medical marijuana, including a young boy suffering from seizures and a military combat veteran who lost part of his leg.

While the ad won’t air during Super Bowl, people will still be able to see it. The company plans to post it online once it’s out of production.

It’s school choice week. Many kids don’t have choice in where they go to school. The school choice movement is trying to give them that opportunity.

Of course, having choice when it comes to what kids learn is important too.

Many schools teach kids that capitalism hurts people.

So John Stossel started a charity called Stossel in the Classroom. It offers teachers free videos that introduce kids to free market ideas. Students rarely hear about these ideas in school.

Graduates from Queens Technical High School in New York City who watched the videos while they were in high school explained that the videos were different from what they were used to.

“They really opened up my mind to think differently” said Xiomara Inga. Antonio Parada added the videos “changed the way that I viewed the world.”

Click here for full text and downloadable versions.

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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.

View this article.

This year’s Oscar nominees have been announced, and in most ways, the list is incredibly conventional: The Best Picture nominations include a widely praised blockbuster hit by an up-and-coming young director (Black Panther), a crowd-pleasing, star-driven remake with a musical bent (A Star Is Born), a biopic about a rockstar (Bohemian Rhapsody), a couple of movies with sharp political overtones (BlacKkKlansman, Vice), a well-reviewed period drama about racial reconciliation (Green Book), as well as a pair of arthouse favorites by auteurs in their prime (Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma).

Perhaps the most striking thing about the list is the inclusion of Roma, which was produced by Netflix. This isn’t the first Oscar nod for Netflix (Mudbound scored four nominations last year, but came home empty-handed), but it is the studio’s first Best Picture nomination. And with Roma scoring 10 nominations overall—tied with The Favourite for the most—it’s positioned to potentially take home the Academy’s highest honor.

It’s perhaps the clearest sign yet that movies are moving out of the theater and into your living room, or perhaps onto the screen of your phone. Although Roma played in limited release in theaters, its primary home is on the streaming service, and that’s likely where the majority of its viewers will see it. I have argued in favor of the analog theatrical experience in the past, but in this case, I think Roma‘s streaming availability is a good thing.

The movie’s online distribution is more than a little bit unusual for such a high-profile nominee (Amazon’s Manchester by the Sea was nominated for Best Picture, but it followed a relatively conventional theatrical release pattern). The small-screen availability has caused some consternation in the movie industry; as one Variety critic wrote, Netflix has been “viewed by various sectors of Hollywood as a force arrayed against the primacy of the theatrical experience.” Even Cuaron himself seems slightly uncomfortable with the company’s watch-at-home ethos. He’s said he thinks the film is best experienced the old-fashioned way, on the big screen, declaring in December that “the complete experience of Roma is unquestionably in a movie theater.”

I don’t really disagree. I am a lifelong regular moviegoer, and Roma is exactly the sort of movie that would seem to justify the time and effort it takes to get out of the house and into a theater. It’s a visionary, personal epic constructed of intricately designed long takes that benefit from both the larger viewing format and the (hopefully) distraction-free setting of a movie theater. It’s a film to lose yourself in, rather than just another movie to have on in the background.

Yet there’s something to be said for, and even gained from, Netflix’s platform agnosticism. For one thing, the company’s deep pockets—it reportedly had a content budget of $13 billion in 2018—and revenue model, which doesn’t live or die on box office receipts, are at least part of what allow a black and white, foreign-language exercise in auteurist ambition like this to be made.

It’s also what allows a movie like this to be seen. Netflix has historically been secretive about exact viewership figures, but last week the company released a glimpse into some of its numbers: Bird Box, a genre thriller starring Sandra Bullock, was watched by 80 million households during its first four weeks in release; some of its original series have been seen by about 40 million households. The streaming service now claims it accounts for a full 10 percent of the TV screen time in the country. These are huge numbers, and they make a case that Netflix can deliver audiences as large or larger than any other distributor.

Just a few years ago, a movie like Roma might still have been made and nominated for various awards. But at least on the surface, it’s the sort of less-than-approachable, “difficult” film that, at least when the nominations were announced, probably would have been seen by a relatively small number of people, mostly cinema enthusiasts who live in major population centers with arthouse theaters. Although Netflix has not shared viewing figures for Roma, the film’s streaming release makes a movie like this accessible to a much larger group of people. If you live in a small town far from a major urban hub, you don’t have to wait several months, until long after the awards hype has settled, for a home video release.

I grew up in a place with no arthouse or revival theaters, where it was often difficult to watch critically acclaimed, limited-release favorites, or old classics on the big screen. It often took me months, in some cases years, to track down copies of certain movies, especially obscure, foreign-language films that the local video rental stores didn’t carry. And when I did eventually see them, it was on VHS or later, DVD, at home, on pre-HD TV screens far smaller than what’s common now. I went to the theater about as often as I could, but a lot of my favorite movies are films I’ve never seen on the big screen.

As it happens, that includes Roma. I watched it at home, on a large flatscreen television, and I can only express my appreciation for the movie, and my admiration for what Cuaron has accomplished with it, in terms of awe. It’s not only the best movie of 2018 by a wide margin, it’s one of the two or three best movies of the decade, the sort of film I’m comfortable calling a masterpiece after just one viewing, and a movie I expect to watch many, many more times. And while I’d like to see it in the theater at some point, I know that most of those viewings will occur like the first one, at home. That may not represent the complete experience, but it’s a pretty good one—and, importantly, it’s one that just about anyone can have.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that the Trump administration’s policy barring many transgender people from joining the military can take effect while lawsuits challenging the ban are ongoing.

The justices voted along ideological lines. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito voted to let the policy take effect. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer dissented.

President Donald Trump announced the policy via Twitter in July 2017. Transgender people would be barred from serving “in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” he tweeted at the time. The announcement represented a reversal of an Obama administration policy that allowed transgender troops to serve openly.

The legal challenges soon followed. As Reason‘s Scott Shackford documented, various civil rights groups filed suits that the new policy violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth Amendment. In the midst of those lawsuits, the administration announced a modified policy last March. Under the new ban, transgender people can join and serve in the military as long as they publicly represent themselves by their biological sex and don’t have a history of gender dysphoria. Transgender individuals who are already in the military can continue to do so, even if they pursue gender transition.

Implementation of the amended policy, however, had still been blocked by various trial courts around the country, according to The New York Times. But earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the policy should not have been blocked by one of those courts because it was not a “blanket ban.”

“The government took substantial steps to cure the procedural deficiencies the court identified in the enjoined 2017 presidential memorandum,” the appeals court said at the time, according to USA Today, adding that the ban “appears to permit some transgender individuals to serve in the military.”

The Supreme Court’s decision today addresses two other injunctions against the ban issued by district court judges in California and Washington State, the Times reported.

The policy can now be implemented pending a ruling on the ban’s constitutionality from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court said. “If a writ of certiorari [following that ruling] is sought and the Court denies the petition, this order shall terminate automatically,” the ruling reads. “If the Court grants the petition for a writ of certiorari, this order shall terminate when the Court enters its judgement.”

According to a range of research, government-run schools are academically inferior to homeschooling, riddled with crime and abuse, and producing graduates less tolerant than their counterparts who were educated at home. But rather than fix their pet institutions, writes J.D. Tuccille, politicians prefer to grab for power over people fleeing from their grasp.

Meanwhile, homeschooling in the U.S. is booming, as a growing numbers of families with diverse backgrounds, philosophies, and approaches abandon public schools in favor of taking responsibility for their own children’s education.

Unsurprisingly, writes Tuccille, as the numbers of homeschooled kids grow, their ranks expand beyond the niche populations—religious families, in particular—that originally rejected public schools.

View this article.

Twitter has suspended the source of a short video clip that started much of the outrage surrounding a group of Covington Catholic High School students. The account—which shared a short clip of students’ encounter with Nathan Phillips and other Indigenous Peoples March ralliers—purported to be a California school teacher but was using the photo of a Brazilian blogger, thus violating Twitter’s rules against “fake and misleading accounts.” From CNN:

The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020,” its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.

Late on Friday, the account posted a minute-long video showing the now-iconic confrontation between a Native American elder and the high school students, with the caption, “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.”

CNN notes that “The video had been posted earlier on Instagram by someone who was at the event, but it was @2020fight’s caption that helped frame the news cycle.” An editor at Twitter-monitoring service Storyful said “the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.”

From there, the teens’ reaction is debatable. Many are mocking Phillips and his drumming, chanting crew. It goes on for an uncomfortably long time. Wherever the chaperones are on this trip, they just let it happen. One kid gets in a sort of starting contest with Phillips—in the image and clip that would initially go viral.

None of it should have blown up into days of national news. But the symbolism was apparently too toxic to resist virality; the initial error-filled claims and their swift spread led to a need for setting the record straight and the whole thing quickly gave way to everyone’s favorite sort of 2014-forward culture war battle… which it seems increasingly like we’re doomed to repeat in ever-more nauseating ways for all eternity.

ELECTION 2020

Kamala Harris is running.

Kamala Harris was thrown a softball question to begin to explain her purported journey from tough-on-crime prosecutor to progressive criminal justice reformer and mass incarceration opponent. Instead, her first thought was about additional people she would’ve liked to prosecute. https://t.co/iEE3yKwvRu

— Essential Employee (@amyep9) January 21, 2019

QUICK HITS

• Google may pull its Google News service from the entire European Union in light of the country’s disastrous new “data privacy” rules.
• Gary Johnson sighting in the wild:

ABC World News Tonight was just doing a story tragic avalanches in Colorado and New Mexico when out of nowhere and unidentified on screen, Gary Johnson was interviewed pic.twitter.com/AAcSPIWt7Y

— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) January 21, 2019

• This can’t end well:

I really wish I could go get this sex worker. I know I can’t. I’m frankly surprised she hasn’t already been murdered. And it’s breaking my heart that she’s begging the US to help her, a Russian sexworker, and that’s just so….not going to happen. https://t.co/2N2ziPX1RH

— Mistress Matisse (@mistressmatisse) January 22, 2019

• Joe Biden: tough on crime and truth….

That’s funny, because he bragged about the crime bill in his book just last year. https://t.co/zBwhDW6GOz https://t.co/Ysb7h3SKUA

— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) January 22, 2019

Technology and the state are caught in a constant cat-and-mouse game of surveillance and evasion. As soon as one side gets wise to the other’s tricks, they modify tactics to again outpace their rival. Rinse and repeat until either everyone is in jail or law enforcement just gives up. Then the next technological phase change emerges and the race starts all over again.

The brief history of virtual black markets—often called “darkweb” or “darknet” markets—is an excellent example of the never-ending battle between technologies of resistance and state efforts to repress them.

In the not-so-distant past, darknet markets like the Silk Road were the cutting-edge in transactional freedom. Today, that model is already obsolete, displaced by a more decentralized alternative called “drop gangs.” Drop gangs use invite-only encrypted chatrooms to connect buyers with sellers, who then “dead drop” the wares in a public place where the buyer later retrieves. It sounds crazy and risky, but there are good reasons why black markets would move in this direction. Andrea O’Sullivan explains more.

View this article.

In the nearly two hours of video footage that greatly elucidate what happened between a group of boys from Covington Catholic High School and Native American veteran Nathan Phillips, there are many moments that turn the media’s initial, false narrative—racist teens harass well-meaning elderly man—on its head. Here is one of them.

This video shows the confrontation between Phillips and teenager Nick Sandmann—accused of harboring racist intentions, as evidenced by his unfailing smile—from a different angle. One of Phillips’ associates, another Native American man, is standing near Sandmann, and enters an argument with a different MAGA-hat-wearing teenager (start watching at 6:55). The Native American man says, “Go back to Europe where you came from. This is not your land, you have been here two, three generations compared to us. We’ve been here a million fucking years.” The MAGA teen responds, “That’s not true. Let’s go all the way back to Africa,” and proceeds to tell the story of the land bridge that once connected Asia to North America, which allowed humans to settle these lands some thousands of years ago. (His opponent counters that this a “bullshit theory.”)

Keep in mind, the teen saying that all human beings originally came from Africa is a member of the group of young people initially described by countless pundits as obviously, undeniably racist.

But the next moment is what really matters: Sandmann takes notice of the argument and quietly signals to the other teenager. It’s very quick and easy to miss: He makes a cut it out gesture.

Surely if Sandmann’s objective had been to harass the Native Americans and sow racial discord, he would not have attempted to defuse the situation. In fact, this gesture supports the claim he made in his official statement that he “motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.”

That’s just one moment from the video footage. There are others. There’s the moment when the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black nationalist cult, tells one of the few black teens that his friends are going to kill him and steal his organs, and a young white man turns to his classmate, touches him affectionately, and says, “But we love you!” There’s the moment when the black nationalists declare that “your president is a homosexual” and a high school kid responds, “Who cares?” There’s the moment when some of the teens begin to suspect that Phillips has not waded into their midst with the best of intentions (he would later assert to media reporters that the teens were “beasts” and the cult members “their prey,” a false and possibly willful misreading of the situation) and one shouts, “I’m so confused.”

There are also moments that cast some of the teens in a less-than-favorable light. At least one appears to make a tomahawk chop—an offensive gesture from sporting events in which team names have been taken from Native American culture. That is insensitive behavior that an adult in a position of authority over these young men should discourage in the future.

But most of the Covington kids do not perform tomahawk chops. Most jump, wave their arms, and cheer—and many do so before Phillips arrives. Their stated explanation—they were attempting to drown out the torrent of hate coming from the Black Hebrew Israelites—makes sense, and it squares with the timeline evident from the video.

If we are to construct a hierarchy of blame for what transpired, it is crystal clear who belongs at the top: the Black Hebrew Israelites. The poor choices everyone else may or may not have made look pretty insignificant by comparison.

Phillips also engaged in wrongdoing: His choice to blame the boys rather than the hate group exacerbated the fury on social media. And at least one of the members of his entourage appeared to be looking for an argument.

Some of the young men—not Sandmann—should have made other choices, and comported themselves differently in a highly charged and very public setting. Let this be a teachable moment for them.

Undoubtedly, it is a teachable moment for everyone who rushed to join the social media mob condemning the kids as abominable racists, including prominent journalists on the left, right, and center. To their credit, many have admitted their mistake.

Others have doubled down, offering a variety of explanations for why the new evidence doesn’t sway them. Some of this is just goalpost shifting: Maybe Sandmann didn’t do anything wrong, but what about the kid who made the tomahawk gesture? An image of Covington Catholic high school students in black body paint at a basketball game in 2012 is somehow supposed to be damaging to Sandmann’s credibility (The New York Daily News: “This won’t help Nick Sandmann’s case”), as is the fact that public relations experts reviewed his statement (uh, of course they did).

But the most frustrating and worrying reactions have come from those who have convinced themselves that the extended video footage confirms their initial oppressions. Of all the myriad examples of this, perhaps none is more contemptible than the effort by Deadspin‘s Laura Wagner, who writes, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes.” Wagner accuses the Covington kids’ defenders—me among them—of “siding with some shithead MAGA teens and saying that 2+2=5 in the face of every bit of evidence there is to be had.”

But I know what I saw, and I think I know what Wagner saw, too. She saw a group of white teens wearing MAGA hats who had just engaged in partisan political activity on behalf of a cause she opposes (this last detail is more than sufficient on its own to convict the teens, according to several prominent progressive feminists). And that was enough.

In writing and speaking about this, I have drawn parallels to the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia gang rape hoax of 2014, which provides a powerful example of mainstream media getting a story very wrong in ways that permanently damaged the magazine’s reputation.

But in the less insane media world of 2014, at least the Rolling Stone debunking was accepted by pretty much everyone. When friends of “Jackie,” the alleged rape victim, came forward to help clarify that her alleged attacker did not exist, and was in fact a persona she had invented in order to catfish them, I don’t remember many major pundits sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending not to hear this.

The ongoing effort to pretend that videos of boys doing pep rally type cheers in opposition to a hate group is in fact of evidence of deep-seated racism makes me wonder whether Rolling Stone truther-ism would have been much more common had the story come out in 2019.

So far the #NeverTrump presidential pre-primary season has had precious little raw material to work with. Sure, John Kasich is out there “very seriously considering” a run while fundraising off his new paid CNN gig, but the former Ohio governor’s dollar amounts have been lackluster so far. Former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake doesn’t seem enthused about competing, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) has flatly ruled it out, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is mostly just a gleam in neoconservatives’ eyes.

Pickins are so slim that The Bulwark, that post–Weekly Standard Bill Kristol publication and go-to source for 2020 GOP primary fanfic, has been reduced to writing open letters pleading for candidates to step “unto the breach.” (Portentous sales pitch: “The time is now. The game is afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge, who knows? Maybe when all is said and done you’ll be 46.”)

So it’s no wonder that Larry Hogan is having a bit of a moment. The popular and recently re-elected Republican governor of Democratic Maryland delivered a second inaugural address Wednesday that was long enough on national/presidential themes that it spawned big articles in Politico and Buzfeed News, plus speculation in National Review, Vanity Fair, and (of course!) The Bulwark.

“Although Hogan doesn’t have much of a national profile, it’s less of a stretch than you might think,” The Bulwark‘s Andrew Egger insisted. “Hogan’s constituency isn’t made up primarily of Trump fans….In other words, Hogan doesn’t stand to lose much politically by taking on the president.” He may be a relative unknown, but at least he doesn’t have much of a future!

Hogan’s potential run, like all pondered Republican challenges to Trump, is interesting in what it says about the values, attributes, and philosophies of an imagined post-Trump conservatism. Pushed by perennial politician-whisperer Bill Kristol as well as the ex-libertarian post-ideologues at the Niskanen Center, assisted at his second inaugural by Jeb Bush and former John McCain alter-ego Mark Salter, and boosted by Trump turncoat Chris Christie, Hogan’s candidacy invites us to ask what these seemingly disparate strands of dissident Republicanism hold in common.

Judging by his big speech, the answer is a whole lot of “civility” and “moderation” and “bipartisan, commonsense solutions,” and very little on the specific content of, or philosophical approach toward, actual policies.

As prepared for delivery, there are 11 combined paragraphs in Hogan’s second inaugural dedicated to George H.W. Bush and John McCain (“As we look back on the lives of these leaders, it makes us yearn for something better and more noble than the politics of today”), seven understandably proud paragraphs about how his late father was the first GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment (“‘No man, not even the president of the United States, is above the law,'” he quoted Larry Hogan, Sr., as saying), and all of six terse sentences that mention any specific achievements. “We faced our fiscal challenges with steady resolve and eased the tax burden….We funded education at historic levels,” etc.

The real gooey center of the speech, and presumably Hogan’s national selling proposition, is just paragraph after paragraph of problem-solving centrist moderation. A slice:

Four years ago, I committed to usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation and prosperity in Maryland, one filled with hope and optimism.

I pledged to govern with civility and moderation, to avoid attempts to drive us to the extremes of either political party, and to uphold the virtues that are the basis of Maryland’s history as “a state of middle temperament.”

I believe it’s because we kept that promise to put problem-solving ahead of partisanship and compromise ahead of conflict that I’m standing here again today….

Let’s repudiate the debilitating politics practiced elsewhere—including just down the road in Washington—where insults substitute for debate, recriminations for negotiation, and gridlock for compromise; where the heat, finger-pointing and rancor suffocates the light, and the only result is divisiveness and dysfunction.

Hogan ended with a call for a government “that tolerates contrary views among a diverse citizenry without making them into enemies or doubting their patriotism,” that “can discuss and debate with as much civility as passion and with a view to persuade, not intimidate, to encourage, not demonize or defeat,” and so forth.

You can see the attraction of pragmatic, non-divisive civility in an American political nerve system rubbed almost intolerably raw by the incivil passions stirred up by both President Donald Trump and his fiercest critics. I for one would prefer a president who wasn’t (in the recent words of George Will) “incessantly splentic,” “almost inexpressibly sad,” and a “fountain of self-refuting boasts.”

But there’s more to the presidency than personal comportment, and more questions about the future of conservatism than whether it will be nice or mean. George H.W. Bush seemed like an affable fellow, and he managed the end of the Cold War with prudence, but he approved a tax increase without commensurate spending cuts and led the country into an ill-thought war. John McCain served his country with honor and taught us important lessons about torture, but he was the single biggest military interventionist on Capitol Hill.

One key area where Donald Trump sometimes challenges Republican orthodoxy—and drives the #NeverTrump right into apoplexy—is on foreign wars, occupations, and deployments. Where does Hogan stand on this critical, presidentially latitudinous issue? He isn’t really saying yet, nor are his interventionist op-ed boosters, such as The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin and The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens. But Hogan’s ally Jeb Bush, for one, was making the playground argument as recently as 2016 that, “The next president of the United States is gonna have to get the United States back in the game, and if a preemptive strike is necessary to keep us safe, then we should do it.”

If post-Trump conversativism doesn’t grapple with its own pre-Trump mistakes, then it’s hard to see what the value proposition is for those of us who wouldn’t be on the hiring shortlist for the Hogan administration. I presume that he, like his boosters, would be more traditionally pro-trade, and that he wouldn’t base as much of politics and policy on the negative collective demonization of disfavored groups based on their immutable characteristics. But even there, I would hesitate before pronouncing Hogan & Co. significantly better on immigration. As I pointed out last month, while the Maryland governor is “a critic of Trump’s family-separation policy and talks like a comprehensive immigration reformer…he has also bashed sanctuary policies and balked at Syrian refugees.” His fan club ain’t Trump, but funny things happen to even the most immigration-friendly of Republicans when they have to face GOP primary voters—Jeb Bush starts playing the “anchor baby” card, Chris Christie proposes treating legal immigrants like FedEx packages, John McCain suddenly wants to complete the danged fence.

Trump rocketed to popularity in part because he convinced grassroots conservatives that he, unlike the GOP establishment, actually meant what he said about doing whatever it takes to restrict both legal and illegal immigration. Regardless of who steps unto the breach, I’m waiting to hear more self-reflection from those who made a living for so long pandering insincerely to a base they not-so-secretly loathe.

Will Trump’s challengers be as aggressive as he in slowing the growth of regulation? Hogan did brag in his 120-word section on tangible accomplishments about “clear[ing] away the tangle of regulatory undergrowth,” so maybe, but the last time the #NeverTrump crowd had sway in a Republican administration, they contributed to the biggest regulatory ramp-up since Richard Nixon.

And will our tanned, rested, and ready GOP dissidents come back to power with as much heretofore unseen enthusiasm for criminal justice reform? Recall that the leading Senate opponent to the First Step Act, the odious Tom Cotton, was not so long ago a protégé of Bill Kristol.

I sincerely look forward to some vigorous political competition for 2020, whether inside the GOP, among independents, or in third parties. It is entirely possible that, given the rancor and dysfunction in Washington, there’s at least some market for common-sense, bipartisan problem-solving featuring candidates who come across as functioning adults instead of outer-borough towel-snappers. But this would not be the first time we were sold the fiction that do-something politics is somehow non-ideological. The longer Larry Hogan’s slate remains blank, the more we should treat it with skepticism.

“Independence requires infrastructure.” That line captures the essence of The Design of Childhood. In this book Alexandra Lange, a design critic and mother, examines the history of how children’s items and spaces have been designed. These designs, she shows, can either expand or inhibit kids’ autonomy.

Consider the Tripp Trapp, an adjustable child’s chair from the early 1970s. Designed to afford children more independence, the simple seat enabled kids of different sizes to comfortably navigate in and out, as it will never be too big or small. That was the original idea, anyway. The new versions have elaborate harnesses and straps; as Lange explains, the Tripp Trapp “now comes with more binding accouterments to meet the high chair safety standards of the United States and European Union.”

The evolution of the Tripp Trapp illustrates the push and pull at the center of this book: When designing children’s items and spaces, we can design for independence or dependence, for freedom or containment, writes Kevin Currie-Knight.

View this article.