Category: reason

The University of Edinburgh is investigating a law student, Robbie Travers, for allegedly harrassing and discriminating against minority students. As evidence of this behavior, the person making the accusation cited a Facebook post in which Travers celebrated the bombing of an ISIS stronghold in Afghanistan last April.

“I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins,” Travers wrote.

These and other Facebook rants directed at Muslim extremists were deemed offensive by an Edinburgh student, who submitted screenshots of them to the administration as evidence that Travers “has consistently mocked, disparaged, and incited hatred against religious groups and protected characteristics on numerous occasions.”

Travers tells me he stands accused of the following campus infractions:

12.3 Violent, indecent, disorderly, threatening or offensive behaviour or language (whether expressed orally, in writing or electronically) including harassment of any Person whilst engaged in any University work, study or activity.

12.7 Harassing, victimising or discriminating against any Person on grounds of age, disability, race, ethnic or national origin, religion or beliefs, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, pregnancy, maternity, marriage or civil partnership, colour or socio-economic background.

He also shared with me the text of the complaint and screenshots of the posts that landed him in trouble. They are provactive statements, often aimed at members of the left. (In one such post, Travers chides “prissy, hypocritical, over-sensitive minorities” who accused the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side” of being transphobic.) But they hardly seem violent, indecent, or harassing. If a university forbids merely offensive speech, then almost any statement could qualify.

The Daily Mail‘s story about the investigation cites Edinburgh student Esme Allman as Travers’ accuser, but the copy of the complaint I received suggests that another student who objected to Travers’s behavior toward Allman filed the complaint on her behalf. This student alleged that Travers quoted Allman out of context when he publicized a comment she had made referring to black men as “trash.” Allman is a candidate for student government, and a “self-proclaimed feminist and womanist” with a “strong interest in intersectionality,” so one can see why she might be angry about being associated with racist comments.

“Travers published a decontextualized quote by Allman from a privileged conversation generated by minority students in a safe space he is neither subscribed to nor a member of without her consent,” according to the complaint. This student accused him of putting “minority students at risk and in a state of panic.”

The university confirmed the investigation into Travers but disputed the way it has been characterized by the media.

“We can confirm that complaints alleging misconduct have been received against Mr. Travers and these are being investigated,” university spokesperson Ronnie Kerr tells me. “It is, however, untrue to suggest that Mr. Travers is ‘under investigation’ for ‘mocking ISIS’.”

Kerr is right. It’s more accurate to say that Travers’ Facebook post mocking ISIS was submitted as evidence that he makes violent and abusive statements about minorities. This is not quite as scandalous as The Mail‘s headline, but it’s still fairly absurd.

Edinburgh is a public university in Scotland. Its students don’t enjoy the same free speech protections as American public university students, and so the university might very well be within its rights to investigate Travers. As Kerr said in his statement, “We are committed to providing an environment in which all members of the University community treat each other with dignity and respect. Our Code of Student Conduct sets out clear expectations of behaviour.”

But do those clear expectations of behavior actually prevent a student from writing a Facebook post that belittles the views of religious extremists, or takes the social justice left to task for casually labelling a trans-friendly song transphobic? If a student wanted to make the case that Travers had mistreated Allman, the student should have focused on that. By including all those screenshots of Travers’ posts, his accuser lends credence to Travers’ contention that his opponents are “prissy, hypocritical, and over-sensitive,” though it remains to be seen whether pointing this out is some kind of crime at Edinburgh.

The response has been swift and furious to today’s announcement that in six months the Trump administration will rescind the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which deferred deportations and granted work permits to some 800,000 individuals who’d been brought illegally to the United States by their parents.

As you’d expect, the move has received unconditional condemnation from civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union’s Gabriela Melendez, for example, issued a statement saying that “there is no humane way to end DACA before having a permanent legislative fix in place. President Trump just threw the lives and futures of 800,000 Dreamers and their families, including my own, into fearful disarray, and injected chaos and uncertainty into thousands of workplaces and communities across America.” Elected Democrats struck a similar tone, with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeting: “Turning our backs on Dreamers makes us weaker, makes us less safe, & betrays our values.”

It’s not just lefties opposing the change. Right-leaning business groups have come out against Trump’s plan as well, saying the move would be bad for businesses, workers, and the economy. “Terminating their [DACA recipients] employment eligibility runs contrary to the president’s goal of growing the U.S. economy,” said Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President Neil Bradley, adding that the his organization wants Trump and Congress to “work together to quickly find a legislative solution before the program expires.”

The decision has critics within the GOP as well. Arizona Sen. John McCain—a frequent Trump critic—called it “the wrong approach to immigration policy at a time when both sides of the aisle need to come together to fix our broken immigration system and secure the border.” McCain promised to work with Democrats to pass a legislative fix, saying that the proposed DREAM Act, which would give DACA recipients permeant legal status, is on the table for him.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul offered a somewhat similar sentiment, though he declined to call out Trump by name. “President Obama’s executive order [DACA] was illegal,” he tweeted. “However, this is a real problem we should solve in a bipartisan fashion.” He also said that “There are ways to make sure people who have been here for many years since childhood are allowed to stay,” adding that any legislative action on DACA should include efforts to “reduce and reform immigration in other areas.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, a necessary participant in any immigration reform, said he hoped for “a permanent legislative solution that includes ensuring that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country.”

Running through all these reactions is a seemingly widespread consensus that immigrants brought here illegally by their parents should not be the targets of immigration enforcement, and that the ball is in Congress’ court to protect DACA recipients.

Trump himself has said as much, and in a Tuesday morning tweet urged Congress to act: “Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!”

A Utah hospital that became the center of a holiday weekend media blitz has enacted new controls on police access in order to avoid a repeat of a nurse’s abuse and arrest.

A Salt Lake City police detective’s terrible treatment of University of Utah nurse Alex Wubbels was the outrage story of the weekend. In the July incident, Wubbels refused to comply with Det. Jeff Payne’s demands for the blood of a man put in a coma when he was struck during a high-speed chase. (The patient in question was an innocent bystander, and he was not suspected of any misconduct.) This past Thursday, Wubbels released body camera footage that showed Payne responding to her refusal by roughly manhandling and briefly arresting her.

Everything about the video footage cast Payne in a terrible light. Wubbels didn’t just randomly decide on her own to defy his orders: She had hospital administrators on the phone with her to explain that she was following hospital policy. Payne didn’t have a warrant, the patient was not under arrest, and the patient was not able to consent to the blood draw. Wubbels said she was not permitted to assist. Payne responded by dragging her out of the hospital.

On Monday, hospital officials revealed that they were so appalled by Payne’s behavior that they’ve changed their rules to control how and where police officers may seek access. (This policy shift had apparently already happened before the publicity caused by the videos.) Police are no longer permitted in patient care areas, and they’ll have to go higher up the supervisory ladder when they have requests rather than dealing directly with the nurses.

To see how little support Payne is receiving even from other authority figures, consider the reaction from one of the employers of the comatose patient, William Gray of Idaho. Gray is a trucker, but he’s also a reserve police officer with the Rigby Police in Idaho. As Wubbels’ story was going viral, the Rigby Police posted a message on Facebook that, in no uncertain terms, defended the nurse’s decision to resist Payne’s orders:

Within the first hours of Officer Gray being admitted into the burn unit, an incident occurred between hospital staff and an officer from an agency in Utah who was assisting with the investigation. The Rigby Police Department was not aware of this incident until August 31st, 2017. The Rigby Police Department would like to thank the nurse involved and hospital staff for standing firm, and protecting Officer Gray’s rights as a patient and victim. Protecting the rights of others is truly a heroic act.

The Rigby Police Department would also like to acknowledge the hard work of the involved agencies, and trusts that this unfortunate incident will be investigated thoroughly, and appropriate action will be taken.

It is important to remember that Officer Gray is the victim in this horrible event, and that at no time was he under any suspicion of wrongdoing. As he continues to heal, we would ask that his family be given privacy, respect, and prayers for continued recovery and peace.

Possibly not getting enough attention in all this is Wubbels’ concern that what happened to her might not be an isolated incident. I don’t mean the arrest; I mean nurses being pressured to assist police in drawing blood when the cops don’t have warrants and the patients are not consenting. In interviews since she’s gone public (such as this one with KUTV2), Wubbels has said that her original goal in releasing the videos was to reach nurses and police in rural areas of Utah to “get the education out there” about appropriate conduct in these cases.

At Reason we have regularly documented brutal police searches. Cops frequently run roughshod over citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights in zealous attempts to get evidence of even the pettiest of crimes. It would not come as a surprise if other nurses felt like they had little choice but to cooperate with police demands to draw blood, even after the Supreme Court ruled a year ago that a warrant was required under such circumstances.

It’s good that Wubbels’ treatment by Payne (and by his watch commander—let us not forget that Payne was “following orders”) inspired mass outrage. But it’s not just Wubbels, or just nurses, who face this problem. This is part of a much larger pattern of police routinely violating the Fourth Amendment, often aided and abetted by courts.

The Daily Mail called it “Cuba’s first ULTRA luxury hotel”—a gorgeous five-star complex in Old Havana featuring more than 200 guest rooms, a high-end shopping arcade, three restaurants, multiple bars, a spa, a rooftop infiniti pool with spectacular panoramic views of the capitol, and the swankiest cigar lounge I’ll bet you’ve ever seen.

It’s Gran Hotel Manzana. The newly renovated cenutury-old downtown structure is operated by the storied Swiss hotel chain the Kempinski Group. But if you’re thinking it might be nice to spend a night there, I’ve got bad news for you: Because it’s owned by Gaviota, the Cuban military’s tourism arm, no Americans will be permitted to experience it for themselves, thanks to changes to the United States’ Cuba policy announced by President Donald Trump just one week after the Manzana’s grand opening in early June.

“We will very strongly restrict American dollars flowing to the military, security and intelligence services that are the core of Castro regime,” the president said in his Miami speech. “They will be restricted. We will enforce the ban on tourism.”

A recent FAQ sheet from the Treasury Department suggests Americans will still be able to visit Cuba, so long as the purpose of the trip is educational—and so long as their arrangements do not directly benefit the military. Staying at a pricy luxury resort owned by Gaviota will certainly be out of the question, as Cuba hawk Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) explained at the time of Trump’s speech:

Americans who travel to Cuba can stay & spend with any non-military business on island. Now it’s up to Castro govt. to allow them to benefit

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 16, 2017

It’s a shame. By all reports, the investments into Gran Hotel Manzana were made in response to President Barack Obama’s 2014 opening up of relations with our island neighbor, in an effort to prepare the way for more Americans to comfortably visit the country. Now it seems the sparkling new establishment will be barred to U.S. travelers—not because the Communist government of Cuba has told us we’re not welcome, but because our own government has told us we’re not allowed.

While reporting in Havana this summer (check out my story “Whiplash and Backlash in the Republic of Cuba” in the brand new issue of Reason for more on that), I had the chance to tour this forbidden destination. The gallery below gives you just a taste of what I saw.

In her forthcoming book about the 2016 election, What Happened, Hillary Clinton complains that her chief opponent in the primaries, Bernie Sanders, consistently undercut her by one-upping her “bold” and “ambitious” proposals without explaining how his policies would work.

In other words, Sanders did to Clinton what Democrats have done to their critics for years: Frame any worry about the costs and unintended consequences of a program as a lack of concern for the problem the program is supposed to address. After years of cultivating economic illiteracy, the party reaped the results.

In an excerpt tweeted by a supporter ahead of the book’s release, Clinton compared Sanders to the deranged hitchhiker in There’s Something About Mary whose get-rich-quick scheme involves cribbing the famous “eight minute abs” program with his own “seven minute abs.” Ben Stiller, who picks him up, points out that nothing’s stopping him from cutting it down to six-minute abs.

“On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs,” Clinton complained of Sanders. “Magic abs!”

Clinton continued by sharing a Facebook post she said someone sent her. The post compared Sanders’ various positions to a belief that “America should get a pony.” When Clinton expresses skepticism about the idea, Sanders says she thinks “America doesn’t deserve a pony” and his supporters declare that Clinton hates ponies. Her clarification that actually she loves ponies is then treated as a flip-flop.

The reaction to the excerpt helped illustrate Clinton’s point. Several Sanders supporters in the Twitter thread complained that Clinton dared to compare single-payer healthcare to ponies. “Funny that she likens no one dying or going into debt because they don’t have enough money to a ‘pony,'” a typical response read. Projecting the worst possible motives onto your opponents is a lot easier than explaining your own positions.

On the specific case of single payer, the same process has been playing out in California this year. Supporters of single payer didn’t have a plan to overcome the procedural hurdles they faced. So instead they disingenuously blamed Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who had to shelf the bill, and for that was the target of mass protests and death threats.

“Rather than committing to raising the millions of dollars that would be needed to overcome special interests and pass that initiative, they would, apparently, rather deceive their supporters, hiding the realities of California’s woeful political structure in favor of a morality play designed to advance careers and aggrandize power,” The Intercept‘s David Dayen explained. “That may sound harsh. It’s gentle.”

Clinton has identified a real problem in American politics, even as she elides its roots. Both parties have promoted economic ignorance, because that makes it easier to make wild promises and then find scapegoats when the promises fall through. The consequences are all around us.

Should the government offer a Medicare-like health insurance plan to all Americans? That’s the debate resolution at this month’s Soho Forum, the Reason Foundation’s Oxford-style debate series held monthly in New York City. The September 19th event will kick off the Soho Forum’s second season, and it’ll be an exciting evening.

Arguing for the affirmative will be Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and author of the 2016 book American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.

Professor Hacker will be squaring off against David Goldhill, the former CEO of GSN and author of the exceptional 2013 book, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It, which grew out of a much-discussed 2009 cover story in the Atlantic.

The Soho Forum has a two-fold mission: to provide an arena for intellectual adversaries to talk in paragraphs (as opposed to 140 characters), and “to enhance social and professional ties within New York City’s libertarian community.” It’s held at the Subculture Theater at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, and after the debate wraps there’s free food, a cash bar, and everyone’s encouraged to hang out and chat. Doors open at 5:45, and the event convenes at 6:30—at which point the party has already begun.

Tickets, which must be reserved in advance, are $18 and $10 for students. Get them here.

You’ll be able to watch and listen to the event on both Reason TV and the Reason Podcast a week or two after the event.

Subscribe to the Reason Podcast at iTunes.

Subscribe to Reason TV at YouTube.

Watch Kmele Foster’s 2014 Reason interview with David Goldhill about his book:

Star Trek gave us a glimpse of what might be possible in the future. Now our technology is catching up. But would we be able to fly the Enterprise today?

Probably not. We have so many rules and regulations that the Enterprise wouldn’t get off the ground.

The food replicator would curtail our eating choices, the TSA would make it hard to board, the Transportation Department would ban “transporting.”

Is “Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition” possible? William Shatner sat down to debate the idea with John Stossel at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.

Stossel on Reason

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President Donald Trump’s decision to scrap DACA six months from now—DACA being Barack Obama’s deferred deportation program for “Dreamers,” immigrants brought to this country without authorization as minors—is fiscally dumb, economically counterproductive, and morally reprehensible. The only upside of his move, which Trump didn’t even have the cojones to announce himself, is that it might finally prod Congress to get off its derrière and create a path for permanent legal status for Dreamers instead of leaving their fates to presidential whims. But it’s by no means certain that Congress can do this cleanly, if at all.

Congress has given the president immense statutory discretion in enforcing immigration law. And just as Obama had the legal authority to create the DACA program, Trump has the authority to scrap it, regardless of Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims that the Obama action was illegal.

Obama gave qualified Dreamers with clean records a two-year reprieve (“parole”) from deportation and temporary work authorization—not permanent green cards, mind you. After that, if they had remained in school or gainfully employed and if they generally kept out of trouble, they could apply for renewal. About 800,000 people obtained DACA status out of an estimated Dreamer population of a million-plus.

Up until now, the Trump administration had not only continued to renew the status of existing DACAs but also extended it to new Dreamers, all of which was “illegal” if AG Sessions is to be believed. This had raised hopes that Trump would preserve at least this program even as his Department of Homeland Security cracked down on the rest of the undocumented population. (Indeed, among former DHS Secretary John Kelly’s first acts upon assuming office was to end the late Obama-era policy of limiting deportation action to criminal aliens and making all undocumented aliens, even those with no criminal records, fair game for removal.) Trump did, after all, say he has a “big heart” and would “take care” of Dreamers.

Apparently, he overestimated the size of his heart.

The vast majority of Dreamers have lived in America practically their entire lives, with little to no contact with their birthland. Many of them work, have served in the military, volunteered in relief efforts after Hurricane Harvey. So exiling them from a country where they have family, friends, and community ties to one where they have no roots at all is beyond cruel. To add insult to injury, the Dreamers who obtained deferred action status under DACA are especially vulnerable to deportation, because the government now has all their contact information.

Not only is there no harm in letting them stay, but there is a major upside to keeping them around.

Dreamers are 12.5 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives with the same socioeconomic characteristics. The average DACA beneficiary is 22 years old, is employed, and earns about $17 an hour. Projecting from that, Ike Brannon calculates that they contribute $215 billion to the economy annually. Meanwhile, their fiscal costs are comparable to the fiscal costs of H-1B workers, which are minimal. Under current law, DACA beneficiaries are ineligible for means-tested welfare benefits that are provided by the federal government or funded through federal matching grants to the states. And few states extend welfare benefits to DACA Dreamers on their own. As a result, DACA beneficiaries contribute $60 billion more to taxes than they consume in benefits. All of that works out to about $275 billion in economic and fiscal contributions. And given that it costs Uncle Sam $10,000 to deport a Dreamer, the total deportation cost of all of them would be about $10 billion, adding up to over a quarter trillion total hit to America.

So even if you buy the idea that Dreamers are “lawbreakers,” if there is any group worthy of a presidential “pardon,” it’s them. After all, over the last 50 years, almost every president has used his prosecutorial discretion to offer a reprieve to entire groups of unauthorized foreigners.

And yet Donald Trump, the man who had no compunctions pardoning a rouge cop like former Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio, couldn’t find it in his “big heart” to pardon the Dreamers. The White House is spinning this decision as an “emotional struggle” that was forced on the president by a group of red state legislators threatening to sue the program if he didn’t scrap it by today. This would have put the president in the untenable position of having to defend the program, they claim, that the Supreme Court was likely to rule against given that a tied decision last year let a lower court ruling against DACA stand.

But the president doesn’t know that. The fact of the matter is Trump put himself in a bad position with his harsh anti-immigration rhetoric that left him little wiggle room to manuver without losing face with his base. Otherwise, he could have taken the wind out of the lawsuit by declaring support in advance for a myriad bills—some by his own party—to protect the Dreamers. For example, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recently dusted off the DREAM Act, which would hand green cards to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children so long as they (1) graduate from high school or serve in the military, (2) pass a background check, (3) speak English, (4) demonstrate knowledge of U.S. history, and (5) pay a fee.

Likewise, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fl.) and 10 other Republicans have introduced the Recognizing America’s Children Act, which would grant five-year conditional permanent status to immigrants who arrived before the age of 16; have been in the U.S. since January 1, 2012; have graduated high school; and have been accepted in college or vocational school, have applied to enlist in the military, or have existing valid work authorization. Their conditional status would be cancelled if they go on welfare, are dishonorably discharged from the military, or are unemployed for more than a year. The bill is arguably too harsh, since it leaves Dreamers so little margin for error.

Trump’s move today seems designed to give the immigration hardliners in Congress vital ammunition to hold the fate of Dreamers hostage in order to extract concessions on enforcement action—funding to build the Great Wall of Trump, more appropriations for border patrol agents, etc. Indeed, immigration advocates who’ve approaching Congressional Republicans for legislative action are finding little wllingness among them to move anything Dreamer-related unless it’s tied to enforcement. The question is whether they’ll settle for a modest or a large “pound” of flesh.

Maybe this will change now that the legislators actually have the Dreamers’ fate in their hands. It’s up to Congress to avert the humanitarian train wreck that this administration has set in motion.

Last week an array of liberal-leaning media outlets reported that the Trump administration had axed an Obama-era report on campus sexual-assault. “The White House Deleted a Sexual Assault Report From Its Website,” read the headline at Jezebel. “The White House has removed an important report on sexual violence from its website,” said TechCrunch. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) even put out a statement condemning the move, which was portrayed as a covert action driven by Donald Trump’s disdain for sexual-assault survivors.

The report, “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action,” was “a summary of really important and, in some cases, government-funded work that was done to understand the causes and effects of sexual and gender violence,” Alexandra Brodsky, co-founder of the advocacy group KnowYourIX, told The Huffington Post, in a piece shared more than 100,000 times. “What does it mean that the Trump administration doesn’t want the public to have that information?” she asked. (“No one knows for sure, but we can certainly speculate,” added HuffPost Women Editor Alanna Vagianos, perfectly summing up the editorial ethos of #Resistance “reporters.”)

The DNC declared that “removing this report is the latest example of the Trump administration’s efforts to systematically undermine critical policies that protect survivors and combat sexual violence.”

Like other too-perfect anti-Trump narratives, this one falls apart under scrutiny. It turns out the paper—part of Joe Biden’s work with the White House Council on Women and Girls—was slated for removal from the White House website before Donald Trump even took office, as part of the government’s normal archiving process between presidential administrations.

The report can still be found on the archival Obama White House website.

“At the conclusion of a Presidential Administration, web content from that Administration is archived by [the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA] and typically made available on an archived website,” the Trump White House said in a statement. “The policy, process, and extent of archiving of Obama Administration content was determined by the Obama Administration, in consultation with NARA and other stakeholders.”

In other words, the report’s removal was totally standard operating procedure, approved by federal bureaucrats before Trump was in power.

Vagianos still tries to assign some blame to Trump, noting that we don’t know “exactly when the report was taken down” and it could have been “taken down during the administration turnover on Inauguration Day…or in the months since then.” But even if it was removed from the White House website after Trump’s inauguration, this is hardly Trump’s fault, as his website people would have simply been following the digital archiving plan laid out by Obama’s team.

At least HuffPost has offered a correction, stating at the bottom of Vagianos’ article that it “previously suggested that the removal of the report from the White House site was in some way unusual. As the White House notes, such removals are not uncommon in the routine transition between administrations.” Most of the pieces summarizing HuffPost‘s inaccurate story have yet to be corrected.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to give a press conference today addressing President Donald Trump’s decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA, the Obama executive action offering certain protections for undocumented immigrants that arrived in the U.S. as children.
• Hurricane Irma is headed for the U.S. and may hit southern Florida this weekend.
• Vladimir Putin on Donald Trump: “He’s not my bride.”
• U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on North Korea: “The time has come for us to exhaust all of our diplomatic means before it’s too late.”
• “South Korea’s Asia Business Daily, citing an unidentified source, reported that North Korea had been observed moving a rocket that appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) towards its west coast.”
• Tronc Inc., which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, has acquired the New York Daily News.

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