Category: reason

Why would a family of undocumented immigrants allow federal agents without a warrant to search their house? Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents misidentify themselves as local police.

“We have repeatedly seen ICE go to people’s homes and coerce people to authorize entry under the mistaken belief that [the agents] are police,” Michael Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, tells Governing magazine.

The practice doesn’t just threaten those in the U.S. illegally. “It undermines public safety in these communities if people feel like they might be getting tricked,” Kaufman says.

Los Angeles authorities worry ICE will undermine decades of work the city has done to convince undocumented immigrants that cooperating with police on criminal matters won’t lead to their detention and deportation.

California recently passed a law (AB 1440) to try to thwart this practice, stipulating that ICE agents in California are “not allowed to refer to themselves as a police officer.” But it’s a toothless endeavor—states and municipalities don’t have the authority to dictate what federal law enforcement officers can and cannot do. (Kaufman says the new legislation was meant to send “a message” to the feds.)

California isn’t the only place upset about ICE’s tactices. From Governing:

In March, city officials in Hartford, Conn., sharply rebuked ICE agents for wearing uniforms that only said ‘POLICE’ while trying to lure a woman to a public safety building so they could detain her. The Southern Poverty Law Center accused ICE of deceiving Atlanta residents by stating they were police officers searching for a criminal and for sometimes even showing them photos of a random black man they said was their suspect.

While it is legal for ICE agents to identify themselves as police, the practice becomes illegal once it leads to an unlawful search of a person’s home or car. In Texas, lawyers successfully argued that ICE agents violated a woman’s constitutional protections when they identified themselves as police and showed her photos of a stranger to coerce her into letting them into her home.

ICE has defended the practice by saying that “police” is a general term for law enforcement agents and that it is necessary to convey ICE agents’ status to non-English speakers.

It’s a weak defense. If ICE agents’ real concern was simply to convey their authority, why not identify themselves as “immigration police”? Why identify as police when talking to people who clearly understand English? Why the pretense of chasing a criminal suspect?

Alas, there’s little anyone outside the federal government can do about the subterfuge. As California Assemblymember Ash Kalra told Governing: “It’s unfortunate, but we as legislators can’t keep ICE from lying. If they want to misrepresent themselves, they can do that.”

U.S. Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D–N.Y.) has proposed federal legislation “to prohibit immigration officers or agents of the Department of Homeland Security, including officers and agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, from wearing clothing, accessories, or other items bearing the word ‘police’ while performing duties under the immigration laws.” The bill has attracted 19 co-sponsors (all Democrats), but it has gone nowhere since it was introduced in April.

I’m tempted to call this an anti-drinking scare film of the pre–World War I era, except I’m not sure it was actually meant as a scare film:

That’s Le songe d’un garçon de café, a.k.a. The Hasher’s Delirium, a 1910 short by the pioneer animator Emile Cohl. The waiter’s hallucinations are the sorts of things you might see in a modern anti-drug movie. But given Cohl’s background—he had been involved with the Incoherent movement, a 19th century precursor to surrealism—and given how inventively weird his other animations are, my suspicion is that his film didn’t have any moral agenda at all; he wanted to draw some strange things, and he thought an absinthe haze would be as good a narrative excuse for that as any.

But that’s just an educated guess. Either way, it’s a nice piece of filmmaking, and I say that as someone who does not want to dissuade you from drinking at all.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, mixed her metaphors this week while trying to argue for free speech restrictions.

During an interview with San Francisco TV station KRON4, Pelosi was asked whether the National Park Service (NPS) should deny a permit to a group of “alt-right” activists who plan to hold a demonstration Saturday in Crissy Field, a federally controlled park along San Francisco Bay. The NPS issued the permit to the Patriot Prayer group, but only after organizers agreed to ban guns and tiki torches from the rally, the AP reported. But Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee have criticized that decision, calling for the NPS to police not just parks, but the speech of individuals within those parks.

Pelosi thinks the government has the authority to do that, and here’s why:

“The Constitution does not say that a person can yell ‘wolf’ in a crowded theater,” Pelosi told KRON4’s Pam Moore. “If you are endangering people, you don’t have a constitutional right to do that.”

It would appear that Pelosi is confused about the distinction between the infamous cliché “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” a line from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, and the clichéd parable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” which warns about not overreacting to imaginary threats.

The whole thing is even better because, in this case, Pelosi is playing the role of the boy (or congresswoman) who cried wolf. She’s calling for a reaction against a threat that hasn’t materialized yet. That’s what all prior restraints on speech are, of course, but she’s calling for a very specific action to be taken against a very specific group of people who haven’t even gathered yet, much less done anything that could be rightfully called “inciting violence.”

But whether we’re talking about shouting “fire” in a theater or “wolf” in a park, the real issue here is that Pelosi seems to misunderstand the very metaphor she’s mangling in an attempt to justify limiting speech.

Start with Schenck. That ruling doesn’t mean what many people—including, apparently, one of the highest-ranking elected officials in the U.S. government—think it does. Here’s the full line: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” Holmes is ruminating on the the limits of constitutional protections in a theoretical way, not laying down a bright line for when the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Holmes was trying to justify the conviction of two Socialist Party members who had done nothing more heinous than distributing flyers that opposed the military draft. The two claimed a First Amendment right to distribute those flyers, so Holmes concocted a limit to the First Amendment.

That ruling, including the “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” bit, is bad law. It’s been almost universally recognized as such in the century since Holmes wrote the ruling, and the Supreme Court has taken steps to roll back its limits on free speech.

The only people who trot out the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” line these days are authoritarians grasping for excuses to censor people. That includes Pelosi, yes, but also Feinstein, who has used it to justify keeping conservative speakers off college campuses. New York City Councilman Peter Vallone tried to use it to get Twitter accounts shut down during Hurricane Sandy. Feinstein has used it as an argument for shutting down WikiLeaks; pundits have invoked it when calling for prosecuting the maker of anti-Muslim YouTube videos. “Holmes’ quote is the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech,” attorney Ken White, a.k.a. Popehat, wrote in a must-read takedown of the Schenck case.

The modern standard for free speech comes from the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, in which court ruled that free speech cannot be restricted “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action.”

It’s true that the alt-right group gathering in San Francisco is likely to espouse some hateful, noxious speech. When they do, they should be criticized and condemned for it, as their friends in Charlottesville were. But even if you assume they’re up to no good, it’s pretty clear that their asking for a permit does not rise to the level of “imminent lawless action.” The National Park Service was right to award the permit. Doing otherwise would have been a violation of the First Amendment, wolves and fires notwithstanding.

The California Public Employees’ Retirment System struck back against small towns and agencies trying to leave its system, to make an example out of them.

Steven Greenhut writes:

California state government observers have wondered in recent months why the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation’s largest state pension fund and one of Wall Street’s most muscular financial players, has taken such a hamfisted approach toward one of California’s tiniest and least-powerful cities. There’s a rational, albeit troubling, reason for its approach.

After the Sierra County city of Loyalton (pop: 862) could no longer afford its monthly payments to CalPERS to pay the pension benefits for its one employee and four retirees, the City Council voted in 2013 to pull out of the pension fund. In response, CalPERS slapped it with a $1.66 million “termination fee”—far more than the city’s annual budget. That means that, as recent news reports reveal, Loyalton’s retirees will soon have their pension benefits slashed by 60 percent, which is a massive hit for a small number of people.

View this article.

• Half of the people killed in a Saudi airstrike on Yemen today were children.
• Canadians can soon apply for passports with an “X” gender designation.
• Australia’s Sex Party has been rebranded the Reason party.
• Violence has erupted in Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country, as Muslim militants staged a coordinated Friday attack on 30 police posts and an army base. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army is claiming responsibility.
• California is seeking approval for a new lethal injection method for death penalty cases.

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Among the several nuts-o-rama action scenes in The Villainess, a new movie from South Korean frenzy specialist Jung Byung-gil, is an entirely crazed auto chase in which the bad-ass lady of the title, pursuing a bus full of thugs, blows out the windshield of her car, climbs out onto the hood—with one hand stretched back inside to continue steering—then rises up and leaps onto the outside of the bus, hanging on desperately as the wind thwacks her around and the heavily armed bad guys inside make things even more difficult. Then…

Well, let’s just say the scene goes on for a while, and it doesn’t get any less delirious. Jung is a director for whom too much is always just the right amount—a compliment, of course. With its swarming squads of black-suited assassins, its overload of guns, swords and corpses, and its cold-eyed killer women, his movie blithely recalls such earlier revenge thrillers as the Kill Bills, the John Wicks (already a part of the international action pantheon), and La Femme Nikita, with maybe a faint whiff of the old Japanese “Baby Cart” pictures as well (little kids make several intrusions here), writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.

View this article.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe says the murderers of white farmers will never be prosecuted. A number of farmers were killed by squatters during government-sanctioned land grabs years ago.

The Supreme Court of India declared privacy a “guaranteed fundamental right” of citizens Thursday.

The landmark ruling, a unanimous 9-0 decision, overturns two previous Supreme Court opinions undermining Indian privacy rights, while its comprehensive language carries far-reaching implications for areas such as LGBT rights.

The ruling was high-stakes for the personal liberties of Indian citizens under their constitution. Citing previous precedents, the government argued against citizens’ right to privacy and bodily autonomy, saying it was the state’s prerogative to collect biometric data, explains Tyler Koteskey.

The Court’s reasoning was firmly libertarian, invoking “life and personal liberty” as “inalienable rights” fundamentally “inseparable from a dignified human existence.” The Court broadly defended privacy among “family, marriage procreation, and sexual orientation” as “important aspects of dignity.”

View this article.

The president covered a lot of ground during his 77-minute speech to adoring supporters in Phoenix on Tuesday night. In case you didn’t have time to watch or read the whole thing, this quiz is your chance to brush up on the 10 key points he made. Answers after the jump.

1. What don’t the fake media want to talk about?

a) anarchists

b) crimes committed by illegal immigrants

c) Barack Obama’s birthplace

d) the link between vaccination and autism

2. Where does Donald Trump draw the line?

a) grabbing women’s genitals

b) driving an old lady from her home to make room for a casino parking lot

c) mocking disabled people

d) attacking the decency of his supporters

3. Who is trying to take away our history and our heritage?

a) the elites

b) the crooked media

c) anarchists

d) Mexicans

4. In what respects is Donald Trump better than the elite?

a) He went to better schools.

b) He was a better student.

c) He lives in a bigger, more beautiful apartment.

d) all of the above

5. What doesn’t Donald Trump understand?

a) comparative advantage

b) how clean coal works

c) how a bill becomes a law

d) why the fake news and the crooked media don’t want America to be great again

6. Who is putting all of America’s safety at risk?

a) dishonest journalists

b) Democrats

c) anarchists

d) neo-Nazis

7. Who doesn’t like our country?

a) Islamic terrorists

b) anarchists

c) dishonest journalists

d) Kim Jong-un

8. What strikes at the heart of America?

a) foreign interference in presidential elections

b) North Korean missiles

c) what happened in Charlottesville

d) too much LDL cholesterol

9. Who is the source of the division in our country?

a) the fake news and the crooked media

b) neo-Nazis

c) anarchists

d) demagogic politicians

10. What is it time for all of us to remember?

a) We are all on the same team.

b) We are all Americans.

c) We all believe right now in America first.

d) all of the above

Answers

1. a

2. d

3. b

4. d

5. d

6. b

7. c

8. c

9. a

10. d

Yesterday I had the pleasure of conversing with Caleb Franz, podcast director for OUTSET magazine, who describes himself as “your neighborhood libertarian” and a media entrepreneur busy “finding new and unique ways to convey the message of liberty.” One of those ways is via MilLiberty with Caleb Franz, a weekly podcast interviewing such characters as Austin Petersen, Isaac Morehouse, and, this week, me.

The conversation ranged from my formative years in post-commie Central Europe under the influence of Václav Havel, Cory Booker’s doomed weed bill, libertarian/conservative overlap with and apologia for the alt-right, the now-curdled enthusiasm for Trump’s foreign policy among anti-war libertarians, the ominous rise of collectivist antipathy in American politics, among other non-controversial topics.

MilLiberty – Episode 45: Exclusive with Matt Welch

Also, I’ll be on Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO Friday at 10 p.m. ET, on which more tomorrow. You can submit questions to the show’s “Overtime” segment at this link.