Justice Samuel Alito testifies about the Court’s budget during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee on March 7, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Court’s “ministerial exception” decision means many Americans just lost their right to be free from discrimination.
Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru is a difficult case, which raises profound questions about how much control a religious institution has over the individuals who instruct others in the faith.
But the Court’s resolution of Morrissey-Berru is also a fairly maximalist decision. The upshot of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for a 7-2 Court is that thousands of teachers at religious schools are no longer protected by anti-discrimination laws. If one of them is fired for being Black, or gay, or a woman, the law may do nothing to intervene.
The case involves the “ministerial exception” to civil rights laws. As a general rule, religious institutions have total control over whom they employ as “ministers.” That means that if a church wants to fire its preacher because of that preacher’s race or gender, it may do so, even though such discrimination ordinarily is illegal.
As Alito explains, the Constitution protects “the right of churches and other religious institutions to decide matters ‘of faith and doctrine’ without government intrusion.” Implicit in this right is a certain “autonomy with respect to internal management decisions that are essential to the institution’s central mission. And a component of this autonomy is the selection of the individuals who play certain key roles.”
Yet while the Supreme Court held in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (2012) that “ministers” are beyond the reach of civil rights laws, it provided only the vaguest guidelines on who qualifies as a “minister.” Alito’s opinion in Morrissey-Berru adds some meat to those dry bones. Under his opinion, “when a school with a religious mission entrusts a teacher with the responsibility of educating and forming students in the faith, judicial intervention into disputes between the school and the teacher threatens the school’s independence in a way that the First Amendment does not allow.”
Thus, a teacher at a religious school whose duties include religious instruction qualifies as a “minister,” and is therefore unprotected by anti-discrimination law.
The plaintiffs in Morrissey-Berru had fairly minimal religious duties
One upshot of Morrissey-Berru is that the ministerial exception attaches even to teachers who spend the bulk of their time engaged in secular instruction. The case concerns two Catholic school teachers, Agnes Morrissey-Berru and Kristen Biel, who claim they were fired for illegitimate reasons.
Morrissey-Berru alleges age discrimination, while Biel’s estate claims that she illegally lost her job after she “requested a leave of absence to obtain treatment for breast cancer” — she eventually died of the disease. The schools, meanwhile, claim that both women’s contracts were not renewed due to legitimate concerns about their job performance.
But these factual disputes will never be resolved, because the ministerial exception places both women beyond the reach of civil rights laws such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Both women were elementary school teachers at Catholic schools. Like most elementary school teachers, they taught a broad range of subjects rather than specializing in any one area. Most of their time was spent on secular topics such as arithmetic or grammar, but both women also spent some time instructing their students in the Catholic faith. Biel, for example, was “required to teach religion for 200 minutes each week” and administer a weekly test on religious subjects.
Under Alito’s decision, this fairly small amount of religious instruction — a little more than three hours a week — was enough to trigger the ministerial exception. “Implicit in our decision in Hosanna-Tabor,” Alito writes, “was a recognition that educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.”
It’s unclear how far the ministerial exception will extend to non-teachers
One upshot of Hosanna-Tabor is that many teachers — perhaps all teachers in religious schools with good lawyers — are no longer protected from discrimination. Teachers who already provide religious instruction are now overwhelmingly likely to be classified as “ministers,” and religious schools could potentially bring all of their teachers within the ministerial exception’s umbrella by assigning them new religious duties.
But what of other employees of religious institutions? As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in dissent, “the rights of countless coaches, camp counselors, nurses, social-service workers, in-house lawyers, media-relations personnel, and many others who work for religious institutions” are now uncertain.
Alito’s opinion is vague regarding these employees, stating that courts must “take all relevant circumstances into account and to determine whether each particular position implicated the fundamental purpose of the exception.” But its heavy focus on individuals who teach religion suggests that the ministerial exception could sweep quite broadly.
Here’s a personal example: Starting when I was 16, I had a summer job as a junior counselor at a Christian-identified summer camp. I spent the bulk of my time on entirely secular activities — like playing capture the flag or teaching students to refer to the rear end of a boat as the “stern.” But a couple of evenings a week, I would lead a group of children in a 10-minute “devotion” and close that devotion with a prayer.
In effect, I spent 20 minutes a week providing religious instruction to these children.
Was that enough to qualify my 16-year-old self as a “minister”? Morrissey-Berru, with its emphasis on employees tasked with “educating young people in their faith,” suggests that I very well may have qualified, as could many other workers with minimal religious duties.
Meanwhile, it is likely that at least some employers will try to game Morrissey-Berru to immunize themselves from liability for discrimination. Consider, for example, a 2015 manual called Protecting Your Ministry From Sexual Orientation Gender Identity Lawsuits, which was published by the Southern Baptist Convention and a leading Christian-right law firm. That manual advised religious employers to assign religious duties to low-level employees in an attempt to bring them under the ministerial exception:
When feasible, a religious organization should assign its employees duties that involve ministerial teaching, or other spiritual qualifications — duties that directly further the religious mission. For example, if a church receptionist answers the phone, the job description might detail how the receptionist is required to answer basic questions about the church’s faith, provide religious resources, or pray with callers. Consider requiring all employees to participate in devotional or prayer time, or to even lead these on occasion.
It is still unclear whether a receptionist, who is told to “answer basic questions about the church’s faith” in a bad-faith attempt to strip that receptionist of their civil rights, would qualify as a minister. Alito’s opinion does instruct courts to “take all relevant circumstances into account” when determining “whether each particular position implicated the fundamental purpose of the exception.”
But, at the very least, Morrissey-Berru is likely to plunge victims of such tactics into months — or even years — of expensive litigation just to determine whether they have any rights at all.
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Rosalie Weisfeld doesn’t skip elections – she just doesn’t.
The 64-year-old lives in McAllen, near the Texas-Mexico border, and she votes in the contests that a lot of people sit out – races for school board, water district and local runoffs. In the more than 40 years she’s been registered to vote, Weisfeld only remembers missing one election.
But last year, her nearly-perfect record was broken. Weisfeld voted by mail in a local race, signed her ballot and mailed it in well ahead of election day. More than a month later, Weisfeld got a letter back saying election officials had rejected her ballot. They examined the signature Weisfeld put on the ballot, compared it to one they had on file, and determined they weren’t from the same person. By then, she had no recourse. The election was over.
“I was shocked, I was sad, I was upset. I became mad and angry that my right to vote was taken away from me without any kind of consultation,” said Weisfeld, now a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the way Texas rejects absentee ballots. “No one called me, no one sent me a letter. No one sent me an email to ask me: ‘Is this your signature?’”
As more Americans vote by mail this year amid the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s concern that thousands of eligible voters like Weisfeld could have their ballots rejected for small errors without a chance to fix them. Mail-in ballots were more likely to be rejected in the 2016 election than ones cast in person. In a typical election only a small percentage of mail-in ballots get rejected (318,728 ballots, about 1% of those returned, were uncounted in the 2016 general election), according to data compiled by the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC). That could rise starkly during the presidential election when an unprecedented number of people are expected to vote by mail.
Election officials examined the signature of Rosalie Weisfeld put on the ballot, compared it to one they had on file, and determined they weren’t from the same person. Photograph: Guardian
“I have a hard time believing we aren’t going to see an increase in rejection rates across the country,” said Daniel Smith, a professor at the University of Florida who has closely studied mail-in ballot rejections. “The odds are you’re having more people who are not familiar with the process, they’re not going to have people there to help and assist as you would in person.”
The vast majority of ballots that go uncounted are rejected for three reasons: the ballot arrives late, there is a problem with the signature on it, or there is no signature at all, according to EAC data. Many states don’t count ballots if they arrive after election day, regardless of when they were put in the mail. But they can also reject ballots if election officials determine the signature on the ballot doesn’t match one in a voter’s file – a decision that can be left to the whims of election officials with little guidance.
Four months ahead of the election, there are already warning signs. In May, New Jersey officials rejected nearly 10% of mail-in ballots during local elections held entirely by mail. In Florida, just over 18,500 ballots were rejected during the state’s March primary. In Nevada, more than 6,700 ballots, were rejected because of signature matching issues. In Kentucky’s June primary, more than 3,800 ballots were rejected in Jefferson county, home of Louisville, because they lacked a required signature.
There is also evidence that first-time, young and minority voters may be more likely to have their ballots rejected than other voters. In Florida’s 2018 election, first-time voters accounted for 5% of all vote by mail ballots cast in the state, but represented 12.7% of the ballots that went uncounted. In the state’s March primary, minority voters were twice as likely to have their ballots rejected than their white counterparts, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.
“There’s not sort of any individual reason at the theoretical level why these voters, these groups of voters, would be more likely to make a mistake,” said Mara Suttmann-Lea, a professor at Connecticut College, who has studied ballot rejections.
‘Less trust in the system because of arbitrary rejections’
Many states verify signatures on mail-in ballots as an anti-fraud measure, but signature comparison is extremely difficult and some states do not provide uniform guidance to election officials on how to do it.
Allowing election officials with no expertise to reject ballots without first notifying voters is extremely risky, say forensic document examiners, who are trained in handwriting analysis. No two signatures from the same person are exactly the same and it can take years of experience to determine whether a signature is a forgery. There can be a number of factors that influence someone’s signature, including the surface they’re writing on, the position they’re sitting in, or their state of mind.
“If you’re going to screen them and then don’t tell the voter, disenfranchise the voter without them knowing, that’s egregious,” said Linton Mohammed, a forensic document examiner who has served as an expert witness in several lawsuits challenging signature matching practices (he is also currently serving as an expert witness in the Texas case challenging signature practices). “It is subjective. You have to be really properly trained.”
In Texas, where Weisfeld’s ballot was rejected, the officials responsible for making signature comparisons are not handwriting experts and are appointed by political parties. They can reject a ballot if a majority of the committee reviewing the signatures agrees they don’t match. Neither the state nor the county is required to offer them training. A state handbook acknowledges those responsible for comparing the signatures are not experts and merely instructs them to use their “best judgment”. Election officials don’t even have to give voters a chance to verify their identity, and they don’t have to tell them the reason their ballot was rejected until 10 days after election day.
“Especially now where we have situation where more people are going to use mail-in ballot because of the Covid pandemic, there will be less trust in the system because of these arbitrary rejections,” said Hani Mirza, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project who is helping represent Weisfeld. “The best you can do is try to sign it exactly the same way. But even that, you have no real control. It’s based on subjective control of other people.”
I don’t mean to be dramatic or anything, but it was unbelievably unfair that my voice didn’t count
Maria Fallon Romo
One of the easiest ways states can prevent this wrongful disenfranchisement is to give voters a chance to fix errors . But less than 20 US states have such policies in place, according to the National Conference for State Legislatures. States can also require uniform and robust training on comparing signatures – already the norm in some states like Colorado. The state, which conducts its elections entirely by mail, rejected less than 1% of mail-in ballots in 2016 according to the EAC data.
Those fixes could have helped Maria Fallon Romo get her ballot counted in North Dakota’s 2018 general election. Romo, 53, has multiple sclerosis, a condition that can make it difficult to sign and hold things. That year, she voted by mail for the election, but it wasn’t until two years later that she found out her ballot was rejected because officials determined the signature didn’t match the one on her mail-in ballot application.
“I don’t mean to be dramatic or anything, but it was unbelievably unfair that my voice didn’t count,” said Romo. “Clearly it was my signature. I mean yes my signature does look a little different at times because of my numbness in my hands, the grip of the pen and my posture. Everything comes into play, but not to the point where it’s just chicken scratch.”
Romo voted again by mail this year in her local election. But before she sent in her application, she took a picture of her signature. When she mailed back her ballot, she opened the picture on her phone so she could mimic it.
In June, a federal judge ordered North Dakota not to reject any ballots without contacting the voter first.
‘It has motivated me to say it stops with me’
Aside from signatures, there is concern that many Americans will be disenfranchised by state cutoffs requiring voters to return their ballots by election day. While the election day cutoff may make it easier for election officials to process votes, it also means that a voter who puts their ballot in the mail a few days before election day might not have their vote counted if it isn’t delivered on time.
That’s what happened to Kirk Nielsen, a freelance journalist in Miami who mailed in his ballot eight days before election day in 2018. Florida requires mail-in ballots to arrive by 7pm on election night, but when Nielsen checked on the status of his ballot on election day, 6 November, he saw that it still hadn’t arrived. When he filed a public records request, Nielsen learned his ballot didn’t arrive at the Miami-Dade supervisor of election office until 14 November. It had taken more than two weeks for Nielsen’s ballot to travel 20 minutes across town.
Nielsen’s ballot was one of nearly 32,000 mail-in ballots rejected in the Florida’s general election that year, according to Smith’s research. In the same election, Rick Scott won a US Senate seat by just over 10,000 votes and Ron DeSantis won the governor’s race by just over 32,000 votes.
Just 14 states allow election officials to accept ballots postmarked on or before election day if they arrive in the days after
Just 14 states allow election officials to accept ballots postmarked on or before election day if they arrive in the days after, according to the Brennan Center for Justice (a few additional states have accepted late arriving ballots for their primary elections). During the primaries, many local election officials have been overwhelmed by a flood of absentee ballot requests and have struggled to get ballots to voters in time to return them by election day.
Democrats have filed a slew of lawsuits across the country seeking to require officials to count ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day and received shortly after (Nielsen is a plaintiff in one filed in Florida).
That small change that could make a huge difference. In Wisconsin, where Democrats secured a court order requiring the state to accept ballots with an election day postmark, more than 79,000 ballots came in after election day for the state’s April election and were ultimately counted (Trump won the state in 2016 by just under 23,000 votes).
In Pennsylvania, where state law requires absentee ballots to arrive by 8pm on election night, tens of thousands of ballots arrived after election day during the state’s 2 June primary. Many were only counted because of a one-time executive order issued by the governor on the eve of the election. Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state was just over 44,000 votes.
Even in states that accept late arriving ballots, however, a new problem is emerging: some ballots are arriving without postmarks because of the way the post office treats different kinds of mail. There’s uncertainty over whether election officials can legally count these ballots, again leading to the possibility some voters could be disenfranchised through no fault of their own.
•••
It’s been more than a year since her ballot was rejected, but Weisfeld, who loves to post pictures of her “I voted” sticker after an election, is still angry. She’s continued her habit of voting in elections since then, but she’s still incredulous that her ballot was rejected before she had a chance to fix it.
“It hasn’t stopped me. It has motivated me to say it stops with me,” she said. “What if someone else had gotten this letter, not me, and said ‘oh why did I even bother? I’m not gonna participate anymore. This doesn’t matter.’”
Nine in 10 Americans believe that racism and police violence are problems in the country, a Guardian/Opinium Research poll has found, a sign that public opinion is shifting away from the views put forward by Donald Trump.
The US president has been criticised for relentlessly stoking white fear and grievance in recent weeks, putting him at odds with Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests that have swept the nation following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
But the Opinium survey of 2,000 US adults, conducted for the Guardian between 19 and 24 June, suggests that Trump is out of sync with the mood across the political spectrum.
Some 91% of Americans now agree that racism is a problem in the US and 72% deem it is a serious one. Similarly, 89% think police violence is a problem and 65% consider it serious.
This opinion also cuts across age groups. Although younger Americans are predictably more likely to view racism as a serious problem – four in five (80%) – the view is shared by nearly seven in 10 (68%) of 35- to 54-year-olds and even more (69%) and those over 55 – a demographic group often associated with Trump’s base.
The president has responded to the demonstrations with animus. Last month security forces used teargas to break up a peaceful protest at Lafayette Square outside the White House so Trump could stage a photo op outside a historic church. He has defended “law and order”, historic statues and, critics say, a legacy of white domination, while fiercely denouncing “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters”.
Opinium’s research found that more Americans disapprove than approve of Trump’s response to the protests (47% v 31%). This is true, predictably, of registered Democrats (75% v 12%) but also of registered independents (55% v 27%). Seven in 10 (70%) of those who voted for Trump in 2016 back his actions: 70% approve while 14% disapprove.
The Black Lives Matter protests peaked on 6 June with half a million people protesting in nearly 550 places across America, the New York Times reported this week, and may be the biggest movement in the nation’s history. They have prompted change everywhere from corporate boardrooms to country music to food brands to sports teams. About 60 Confederate statues have been removed or are set to be, while Mississippi voted to remove a Confederate emblem from its state flag.
There has been much debate over whether this will prove a moment or a movement with more lasting impact than protests of the past. The Opinium survey offers a snapshot. The demographic of 18-to-34-year-olds are most optimistic that Black Lives Matter will lead to real change: 56% believe it will, as opposed to 44% of the general population.
Young Americans are significantly more engaged in the movement: 73% of 18-to-34-year-olds have taken some sort of action in support of it compared with 52% of the general population. Almost one in five (18%) have signed a petition in support of the movement versus one in 10 (10%) of all Americans.
About 9% have gone out to protest themselves, versus 4% of all Americans. And 12% of 18-to-34-year-olds were inspired by the movement to check their voter registration versus only 6% of the general population. Nearly five times as many Americans posted on social media to support Black Lives Matter than contacted their government representatives asking for change: 14% as opposed to 3%.
Police officers in riot gear move forward to form a security perimeter on 16th St NW near the White House in Washington on 23 June. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Trump has launched full-throated defences of the police, about which the survey found contrasting views. Three in four people (76%) believe that most cops are good people but there are a few “bad apples”. More than one in 10 (13%) take the opposite view – that most police officers are bad people, but there are some good ones. The former view holds for black/African American respondents, though by a smaller margin (49% to 32%).
With police reform currently stalled in Congress, Opinium found the most widely supported measures are: investigating all use of deadly force by police (74% approve), ban police use of chokeholds and other neck restraints (67%), make police misconduct records publicly available (66%), require officers to use de-escalation when they can (66%), require officers to use alternatives to deadly force when possible (59%).
Some activists have called for police to be “defunded”, though the exact meaning of that term has been contested, and has also been exploited by Trump to sow fear that Democrats and their allies would allow violent crime to flourish.
According to the poll, only one in four (24%) of Americans say they agree with “defund the police” and more than half (58%) disagree. One in three (32%) say they approve of redirecting funding for police departments towards education/healthcare and community social programmes.
Commentators have drawn comparisons with the unrest of 1968. Americans are divided on whether past civil rights leaders would be proud of this current movement and the recent protests. About 39% think Martin Luther King would not be proud, while 36% believe he would be. Americans are more confident that Malcolm X would be proud of this movement: 39% say he would while 20% say not.
The survey was conducted online and weighted to represent the US adult population according to demographics, education and past voting behaviour.
Among those who say they are registered to vote and certain to do so in November’s election, former vice-president Joe Biden leads Trump by 52% to 40% – a double-digit lead reflected by several other national polls. More than half (52%) of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, while little more than a third (36%) approve.
Enlarge / The Tongariki site, built by Polynesians on Rapa Nui. New data suggests that by the time their ancestors arrived on the island, they had already had contact with South America. (credit: Andres Moreno-Estrada)
The Polynesians were the greatest explorers of the world. Starting from the vicinity of Taiwan, they sailed across vast stretches of the Pacific, settling—and in some cases, continuing to trade between—astonishingly remote islands from New Zealand to Hawaii. But it's never been quite clear whether they made the final leap, sailing from Rapa Nui to reach the nearest major land mass: South America.
There are some hints that they have, primarily the presence of South American crops throughout the Pacific. But there has been no clear genetic signature in human populations, and the whole analysis is confused by the redistribution of people and crops after the arrival of European sailors.
Now, a new study finds clear genetic indications that Polynesians and South Americans met—we've just been looking at the wrong island—and wrong part of South America—for clear evidence. The researchers also raise a tantalizing prospect: that South Americans were already living on a Polynesian island when the Polynesians got there.
Murphy did not specifically say what the penalty would be for violators and admitted this will be more difficult to enforce. He was asked if that means you can get a ticket if you’re walking on a boardwalk at the Jersey Shore without a mask.
“If you’re there by yourself or with your family, the answer is no,” the governor said. “But if you’re congregating with a lot of other folks and there’s no social distancing, you’re gonna at least get a warning, if not something stronger.”
Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are rising in places like Houston, Texas, where hospitals warn they are at risk of being overwhelmed by new patients. | Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images
By the time coronavirus deaths start rising again, it’s already too late.
There is something confounding about the US’s new coronavirus spikes: Cases are rising, but the country is seeing its lowest death counts since the pandemic first exploded.
The numbers are genuinely strange to the naked eye: On July 3, the US reported 56,567 new Covid-19 cases, a record high. On the same day, 589 new deaths were reported, continuing a long and gradual decline. We haven’t seen numbers that low since the end of March.
When laypeople observe those contradictory trends, they might naturally have a follow-up question: If deaths are not increasing along with cases, then why can’t we keep reopening? The lockdowns took an extraordinary toll of their own, after all, in money and mental health and some lives. If we could reopen the economy without the loss of life we saw in April and May, then why shouldn’t we?
I posed that very question to more than a dozen public health experts. All of them cautioned against complacency: This many cases mean many more deaths are probably in our future. And even if deaths don’t increase to the same levels seen in April and May, there are still some very serious possible health consequences if you contract Covid-19.
The novel coronavirus, SARS-Cov-2, is a maddeningly slow-moving pathogen — until it’s not. The sinking death rates reflect the state of the pandemic a month or more ago, experts say, when the original hot spots had been contained and other states had only just begun to open up restaurants and other businesses.
That means it could still be another few weeks before we really start to see the consequences, in lives lost, of the recent spikes in cases. And in the meantime, the virus is continuing to spread. By the time the death numbers show the crisis is here, it will already be too late. Difficult weeks will lie ahead.
Even if death rates stay low in the near term, that doesn’t mean the risk of Covid-19 has evaporated. Thousands of Americans being hospitalized in the past few weeks with a disease that makes it hard to breathe is not a time to declare victory. Young people, who account for a bigger share of the recent cases, aren’t at nearly as high a risk of dying from the virus, but some small number of them will still die and a larger number will end up in the hospital. Early research also suggests that people infected with the coronavirus experience lung damage and other long-term complications that could lead to health problems down the road, even if they don’t experience particularly bad symptoms during their illness.
And as long as the virus is spreading in the community, there is an increased risk that it will find its way to the more vulnerable populations.
“More infected people means faster spread throughout society,” Kumi Smith, who studies infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota, told me. “And the more this virus spreads the more likely it is to eventually reach and infect someone who may die or be severely harmed by it.”
This presents a communications challenge. Sadly, as Smith put it, “please abstain from things you like to benefit others in ways that you may not be able to see or feel” is not an easy message for people to accept after three-plus months in relative isolation.
But perhaps the bigger problem is the reluctance of our government to take the steps necessary to control the disease. Experts warned months ago that if states were too quick to relax their social distancing policies, without the necessary capacity for more testing or contact tracing, new outbreaks would flare up and be difficult to contain.
That’s exactly what happened — and now states are scrambling to reimpose some restrictions. Unless the US gets smarter about its coronavirus response, the country seems doomed to repeat this cycle over and over again.
Why Covid-19 deaths aren’t rising along with cases — yet
The contradiction between these two curves — case numbers sloping upward, death counts downward — is the primary reason some people are agitating to accelerate, not slow down, reopening in the face of these new coronavirus spikes.
The most important thing to understand is that this is actually to be expected. There is a long lag — as long as six weeks, experts told me — between when a person gets infected and when their death would be reported in the official tally.
“Why aren’t today’s deaths trending in the same way today’s cases are trending? That’s completely not the way to think about it,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. “Today’s cases represent infections that probably happened a week or two ago. Today’s deaths represent cases that were diagnosed possibly up to a month ago, so infections that were up to six weeks ago or more.”
“Some people do get infected and die quickly, but the majority of people who die, it takes a while,” Murray continued. “It’s not a matter of a one-week lag between cases and deaths. We expect something more on the order of a four-, five-, six-week lag.”
As Whet Moser wrote for the Covid Tracking Project last week, the recent spikes in case counts really took off around June 18 and 19. So we would not expect them to show up in the death data yet.
“Hospitalizations and deaths are both lagging indicators, because it takes time to progress through the course of illness,” Caitlin Rivers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me late last week. “The recent surge started around two weeks ago, so it’s too soon to be confident that we won’t see an uptick in hospitalizations and deaths.”
The national numbers can also obscure local trends. According to the Covid Tracking Project, hospitalizations are spiking in the South and West, but, at the same time, they are dropping precipitously in the Northeast, the initial epicenter of the US outbreak.
Covid Tracking Project
And a similar regional shift in deaths may be underway, though it will take longer to reveal itself because the death numbers lag behind both cases and hospitalizations. But even now, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia have seen an uptick in their average daily deaths, according to Covid Exit Strategy, while Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York have experienced a notable decline.
There are some reasons to be optimistic we will not see deaths accelerate to the same extent that cases are. For one, clinicians have identified treatments like remdesivir and dexamethasone that, respectively, appear to reduce people’s time in the hospital and their risk of dying if they are put on a ventilator.
The new infections are also, for now, skewing more toward younger people, who are at a much lower risk of dying of Covid-19 compared to older people. But that is not the case for complacency that it might superficially appear to be.
Younger people are less at risk from Covid-19 — but their risk isn’t zero
For starters, younger people can die of Covid-19. About 3,000 people under the age of 45 have died from the coronavirus, according to the CDC’s statistics (which notably have a lower overall death count than other independent sources that rely on state data). That is a small percentage of the 130,000 and counting overall Covid-19 deaths in the US. But it does happen.
Moreover, younger people can also develop serious enough symptoms that they end up having to be hospitalized with the disease. Again, their risk is meaningfully lower than that of older people, but that doesn’t mean it’s zero.
CDC
There can also be adverse outcomes that are not hospitalization or death. Illness is not a zero-sum game. A recent study published in Nature found that even asymptomatic Covid-19 patients showed abnormal lung scans. As Lois Parshley has documented for Vox, some people who recover from Covid-19 still report health problems for weeks after their initial sickness. Potential long-term issues include lung scarring, blood clotting and stroke, heart damage, and cognitive challenges.
In short, surviving Covid-19, even with relatively mild symptoms, does not mean a person simply reverts to normal. This is a new disease, and we are still learning the full extent of its effects on the human body.
But even if we recognize that young people face less of a threat directly from the coronavirus, there is still a big reason to worry if the virus is spreading in that population: It could very easily make the leap from less vulnerable people to those who are much more at risk of serious complications or death.
The coronavirus could easily jump from younger people to the more vulnerable
One response to the above set of facts might be: “Well, we should just isolate the old and the sick, while the rest of us go on with our lives.” That might sound good in theory (if you’re not older or immunocompromised yourself), but it is much more difficult in practice.
“The fact is that we live in communities that are all mixed up with each other. That’s the concern,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, says. “It’s not like there’s some nice neat demarcation: you’re at high risk, you’re at low risk.”
The numbers in Florida are telling. At first, in late May and into early June, new infections accelerated among the under-45 cohort. But after a lag of a week or so, new cases also started to pick up among the over-45 (i.e., more at-risk) population.
“The rise in older adults is trailing behind, but it is starting to go up,” Dean said.
Anecdotally, nursing homes in Arizona and Texas — the two states with the most worrisome coronavirus trends right now — have seen outbreaks in recent weeks as community spread increases. The people who work in nursing homes, after all, are living out in the community where Covid-19 is spreading. And, because they are younger, they may not show symptoms while they are going to work and potentially exposing those patients.
As one expert pointed out to me, both Massachusetts and Norway have seen about 60 percent of their deaths come in long-term care facilities, even though the former has a much higher total fatality count than the latter. That would suggest we have yet to find a good strategy for keeping the coronavirus away from those specific populations.
“There is so far not much evidence that we know how to shield the most vulnerable when there is widespread community transmission,” Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me.
That means the best recourse is trying to contain community spread, which keeps the overall case and death counts lower (as in Norway) and prevents the health care system from being overwhelmed.
Health systems haven’t been overwhelmed — but some hospitals in new hot spots are getting close
Arizona, Florida, and Texas still have 20 to 30 percent of their ICU and hospital beds available statewide, according to Covid Exit Strategy, even as case counts continue to rise. While some people use those numbers to argue that the health systems can handle an influx of Covid patients, the experts I spoke to warned that capacity can quickly evaporate.
“Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” William Hanage at Harvard said. “Hospitals are getting close to overwhelmed in some places, and that will be more places in future if action isn’t taken now. Also ‘not overwhelmed’ is a pretty low bar.”
Hospital capacity is another example of how the lags created by Covid-19 can lull us into a false sense of security until a crisis presents itself and suddenly it’s too late. Because it can take up to two weeks between infection and hospitalization, we are only now beginning to see the impact of these recent spikes.
And, to be clear, hospitalizations are on the rise across the new hot spots. The number of people currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in Texas is up from less than 1,800 on June 1 to nearly 8,000 on July 4. Hospitalizations in Arizona have nearly tripled since the beginning of June, up to more than 3,100 today.
And the state-level data doesn’t show local trends, which are what really matter when it comes to hospital capacity. Some of the hardest-hit cities in these states are feeling the strain, as Hanage pointed out. Hospitals in Houston have started transferring their Covid-19 patients to other cities, and they are implementing their surge capacity plans, anticipating a growing need because of the trendlines in the state.
Once a hospital’s capacity is reached, it’s already too late. They will have to endure several rough weeks after that breach, because the virus has continued to infect more people in the interim, some of whom will get very sick and require hospitalization when there isn’t any room available for them.
“We’re seeing some drastic measures being implemented right now in Texas and Arizona along those lines: using children’s hospitals for adults, going into crisis mode, etc.,” Tara Smith, who studies infectious diseases at Kent State University, told me. “So it shows how quickly all of that can turn around.”
And, on top of Covid-19, these health systems will continue to have the usual flow of emergencies from heart attacks, strokes, accidents, etc. That’s when experts start to worry people will die who wouldn’t otherwise have. That is what social distancing, by slowing the spread of the coronavirus, is supposed to prevent.
We don’t have to lock down forever — but we have to be smart and vigilant
Lockdowns are extraordinarily burdensome. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Drug overdoses have spiked. There has been a worrying increase in heart-related deaths, which indicates people who otherwise would have sought medical treatment did not do so during the worst of the outbreak this spring.
But we cannot will the coronavirus out of existence. Experts warned months ago that if states reopened too early, cases would spike, which would strain health systems and put us at risk of losing more people to this virus. That appears to be what’s starting to happen. And it may get worse; if the summer heat has suppressed the virus to any degree, we could see another rebound in the fall and winter.
So we must strike a balance, between the needs of a human society and the reality that most of us are still susceptible to an entirely novel pathogen that is much deadlier and more contagious than the flu.
That means, for starters, being smarter about how we reopen than we have been so far. There is strong evidence that states were too cavalier about ending stay-at-home orders and reopening businesses, with just a handful meeting the metrics for reopening laid out by experts, as Vox’s German Lopez explained.
“What I’ve seen is that reopening is getting interpreted by many as reverting back to a Covid-free time where we could attend larger group gatherings, socialize regularly with many different people, or congregate without masks,” Kumi Smith in Minnesota said. “The virus hasn’t changed since March, so there’s no reasons why our precautions should either.”
To date, most states have opened up bars again and kept schools closed. Lopez made a persuasive case last week that we’ve got that backward. One of the most thorough studies so far on how lockdowns affected Covid-19’s spread found that closing restaurants and bars had a meaningful effect on the virus but closing schools did not.
That study also found that shelter-in-place orders had a sizable impact. While those measures may not be politically feasible anymore, individuals can still be cautious about going out — and when they do, they can stick to outdoor activities with a small number of people.
Masks are not a panacea either, but the evidence is convincingly piling up that they also help reduce the coronavirus’s spread. Whether a given state has a mandate to wear one or not, that is one small inconvenience to accept in order to get this outbreak back under control.
And, really, that is the point. While the current divergence between case and death counts can be confusing, the experts agree that Covid-19 still poses a significant risk to Americans — and it is a risk that goes beyond literal life and death. We know some of the steps that we, as individuals, can take to help slow the spread. And we need our governments, from Washington to the state capitals, to get smarter about reopening.
It will require collective action to stave off the coronavirus for good. Other countries have done it. But we have to act now, before we find out it’s already too late.
This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inboxalong with more health care stats and news.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
Police officers line up by the AFL-CIO building during a stand-off between law enforcement officers and protesters at the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, on June 23. | Astrid Riecken/Washington Post/Getty Images
Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence.
Arthur Rizer is a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army, where he served as a military policeman. Today, he heads the criminal justice program at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in DC. And he wants you to know that American policing is even more broken than you think.
“That whole thing about the bad apple? I hate when people say that,” Rizer tells me. “The bad apple rots the barrel. And until we do something about the rotten barrel, it doesn’t matter how many good fucking apples you put in.”
To illustrate the problem, Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery, Alabama. They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Hard.
Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until they found out he had once been a cop. They didn’t actually have any problem with what one of them had just done to the woman; in fact, they started laughing about it.
“It’s one thing to use force and violence to affect an arrest. It’s another thing to find it funny,” he tells me. “It’s just pervasive throughout policing. When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [as a researcher],you see the underbelly of it. And it’s ... gross.”
America’s epidemic of police violence is not limited to what’s on the news. For every high-profile story of a police officer killing an unarmed Black person or tear-gassing peaceful protesters, there are many, many allegations of police misconduct you don’t hear about — abuses ranging from excessive use of force to mistreatment of prisoners to planting evidence. African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates, relative to both their overall share of the population and the percentage of crimes they commit.
Something about the way police relate to the communities they’re tasked with protecting has gone wrong. Officers aren’t just regularly treating people badly; a deep dive into the motivations and beliefs of police reveals that too many believe they are justified in doing so.
To understand how the police think about themselves and their job, I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing. These sources, ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists, painted a deeply disturbing picture of the internal culture of policing.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Police officers confront protesters in front of City Hall in New York City on July 1.
Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.
The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.
In that sense, police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests. In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening, Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing, with officers acting less like community protectors and more like an occupying army.
The beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments. There are more than 600,000 local police officers across the country and more than 12,000 local police agencies. The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession. Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness.
However, the officer corps remains overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. Federal Election Commission data from the 2020 cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans. And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers.
“The fact that not every department is the same doesn’t undermine the point that there are common factors that people can reasonably identify as a police culture,” says Tracey Meares, the founding director of Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory.
The danger imperative
In 1998, Georgia sheriff’s deputy Kyle Dinkheller pulled over a middle-aged white man named Andrew Howard Brannan for speeding. Brannan, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, refused to comply with Dinkheller’s instructions. He got out of the car and started dancing in the middle of the road, singing “Here I am, shoot me” over and over again.
In the encounter, recorded by the deputy’s dashcam, things then escalate: Brannan charges at Dinkheller; Dinkheller tells him to “get back.” Brannan heads back to the car — only to reemerge with a rifle pointed at Dinkheller. The officer fires first, and misses; Brannan shoots back. In the ensuing firefight, both men are wounded, but Dinkheller far more severely. It ends with Brannan standing over Dinkheller, pointing the rifle at the deputy’s eye. He yells — “Die, fucker!” — and pulls the trigger.
The dashcam footage of Dinkheller’s killing, widely known among cops as the “Dinkheller video,” is burned into the minds of many American police officers. It is screened in police academies around the country; one training turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop, was shown the Dinkheller video during his training.
“Every cop knows the name ‘Dinkheller’ — and no one else does,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who currently teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The purpose of the Dinkheller video, and many others like it shown at police academies, is to teach officers that any situation could escalate to violence. Cop killers lurk around every corner.
It’s true that policing is a relatively dangerous job. But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees, murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be. The number of police killings across the country has been falling for decades; there’s been a 90 percent drop in ambush killings of officers since 1970. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 13 per 100,000 police officers died on the job in 2017. Compare that to farmers (24 deaths per 100,000), truck drivers (26.9 per 100,000), and trash collectors (34.9 per 100,000). But police academies and field training officers hammer home the risk of violent death to officers again and again.
It’s not just training and socialization, though: The very nature of the job reinforces the sense of fear and threat. Law enforcement isn’t called to people’s homes and streets when things are going well. Officers constantly find themselves thrown into situations where a seemingly normal interaction has gone haywire — a marital argument devolving into domestic violence, for example.
“For them, any scene can turn into a potential danger,” says Eugene Paoline III, a criminologist at the University of Central Florida. “They’re taught, through their experiences, that very routine events can go bad.”
Michael Sierra-Arevalo, a professor at Rutgers University, calls the police obsession with violent death “the danger imperative.” After conducting 1,000 hours of interviews with 94 police officers, he found that the risk of violent death occupies an extraordinary amount of mental space for many officers — far more so than it should, given the objective risks.
Here’s what I mean: According to the past 20 years of FBI data on officer fatalities, 1,001 officers have been killed by firearms while 760 have died in car crashes. For this reason, police officers are, like the rest of us, required to wear seat belts at all times.
In reality, many choose not to wear them even when speeding through city streets. Sierra-Arevalo rode along with one police officer, whom he calls officer Doyle, during a car chase where Doyle was going around 100 miles per hour — and still not wearing a seat belt. Sierra-Arevalo asked him why he did things like this. Here’s what Doyle said:
There’s times where I’ll be driving and the next thing you know I’ll be like, ‘Oh shit, that dude’s got a fucking gun!’ I’ll stop [mimics tires screeching], try to get out — fuck. Stuck on the seat belt … I’d rather just be able to jump out on people, you know. If I have to, be able to jump out of this deathtrap of a car.
Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police, officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits of wearing a seat belt.
“Knowing officers consistently claim safety is their primary concern, multiple drivers not wearing a seatbelt and speeding towards the same call should be interpreted as an unacceptable danger; it is not,” Sierra-Arevalo writes. “The danger imperative — the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety — contributes to officer behaviors that, though perceived as keeping them safe, in fact put them in great physical danger.”
This outsized attention to violence doesn’t just make officers a threat to themselves. It’s also part of what makes them a threat to citizens.
Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks, they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force. Many officers believe that, if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian, that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them.
Scholars of policing call this concept “maintaining the edge,” and it’s a vital reason why officers seem so willing to employ force that appears obviously excessive when captured by body cams and cellphones.
“To let down that edge is perceived as inviting chaos, and thus danger,” Moskos says.
In these situations, the officers aren’t always threatened with a deadly weapon: Floyd, for example, was unarmed. But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands, they feel the need to use force to reestablish the edge.
They need to make the suspect submit to their authority.
A siege mentality
Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely, armed struggle against the criminal element. They are judged by their effectiveness at that task, measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol. Officers believe these efforts are underappreciated by the general public; according to a 2017 Pew report, 86 percent of police believe the public doesn’t really understand the “risks and challenges” involved in their job.
Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher, recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers. One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers. A majority, around 60 percent, said no — for reasons that, in Rizer’s words, “blew me away.”
“The vast majority of people that said ‘no, I don’t want them to become a police officer’ was because they felt like the public no longer supported them — and that they were ‘at war’ with the public,” he tells me. “There’s a ‘me versus them’ kind of worldview, that we’re not part of this community that we’re patrolling.”
You can see this mentality on display in the widespread police adoption of an emblem called the “thin blue line.” In one version of the symbol, two black rectangles are separated by a dark blue horizontal line. The rectangles represent the public and criminals, respectively; the blue line separating them is the police.
In another, the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag, separating the stars from the stripes below. During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati, Ohio, officers raised this modified banner outside their station.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
A demonstrator holds a “thin blue line” flag and a sign in support of police during a protest outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 27.
In the “thin blue line” mindset, loyalty to the badge is paramount; reporting excessive force or the use of racial slurs by a colleague is an act of treason. This emphasis on loyalty can create conditions for abuses, even systematic ones, to take place: Officers at one station in Chicago, Illinois, tortured at least 125 Black suspects between 1972 and 1991. These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower.
“Officers, when they get wind that something might be wrong, either participate init themselves when they’re commanded to — or they actively ignore it, find ways to look the other way,” says Laurence Ralph, a Princeton professor and the author of The Torture Letters, a recent book on the abuses in Chicago.
This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police. Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns.
But it is powerful enough, experts say, to distort departments across the country. It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities, generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens and toward a more militarized and aggressive model.
“The police have been in the midst of an epic ideological battle. It’s been taking place ever since the supposed community policing revolution started back in the 1980s,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. “In the last 10 to 15 years, the more toxic elements have been far more influential.”
Since the George Floyd protests began, police have tear-gassed protesters in 100 different US cities. This is not an accident or the result of behaviors by a few bad apples. Instead, it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies.
A 2017 study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo, examined data on 7,000 protests from 1960 to 1995. She found that “police are much more likely to try to quell protests that criticize police conduct.”
“Recent scholarship argues that, over the last twenty years, protest policing [has gotten] more aggressive and less impartial,” Reynolds-Stenson concludes. “The pattern of disproportionate repression of police brutality protests found in this study may be even more pronounced today.”
There’s a reason that, after New York Police Department Lt. Robert Cattani kneeled alongside Black Lives Matter protesters on May 31, he sent an email to his precinct apologizing for the “horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ demands.” In his mind, the decision to work with the crowd amounted to collaboration with the enemy.
“The cop in me,” Cattani wrote, “wants to kick my own ass.”
Anti-Blackness
Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line. In the South, police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves, facilitate their transfer between plantations, and catch runaways. In the North, professional police departments came about as a response to a series of mid-19th century urban upheavals — many of which, like the 1834 New York anti-abolition riot, had their origins in racial strife.
When talking about race in policing and the way it relates to police ideology, there are two related phenomena to think about.
The first is overt racism. In some police departments, the culture permits a minority of racists on the force to commit brutal acts of racial violence with impunity.
Examples of explicit racism abound in police officer conduct. The following three incidents were reported in the past month alone:
In leaked audio, Wilmington, North Carolina, officer Kevin Piner said, “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering [Blacks],” adding that he “can’t wait” for a new civil war so whites could “wipe them off the fucking map.” Piner was dismissed from the force, as were two other officers involved in the conversation.
Joey Lawn, a 10-year veteran of the Meridian, Mississippi, force, was fired for using an unspecified racial slur against a Black colleague during a 2018 exercise. Lawn’s boss, John Griffith, was demoted from captain to lieutenant for failing to punish Lawn at the time.
Four officers in San Jose, California, were put on administrative leave amid an investigation into their membership in a secret Facebook group. In a public post, officer Mark Pimentel wrote that “black lives don’t really matter”; in another private one, retired officer Michael Nagel wrote about female Muslim prisoners: “i say we repurpose the hijabs into nooses.”
In all of these cases, superiors punished officers for their offensive comments and actions — but only after they came to light. It’s safe to say a lot more go unreported.
Last April, a human resources manager in San Francisco’s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the city’s police force. In an exit email sent to his boss and the city’s police chief, he wrote that “the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme,” adding that “while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness, there are an equal number (if not more) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.”
Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” Individuals with high levels of this trait tend to believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be. The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality,” including “the ideology of anti-Black racism.”
Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
A demonstrator walks past a mural for George Floyd during a protest near the White House in Washington, DC, on June 4.
This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects, even unarmed ones. Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank, has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities. Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don’t.
“If you think the social hierarchy is good, then maybe you’re more willing to use violence from the state’s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that’s your job,” he tells me.
But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one, it’s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing.
The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle. The very nature of policing, in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours, brings out the worst in people. The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers, even ones who don’t hold overtly racist beliefs, to treat Black people as more suspect and more dangerous. It’s not just the officers who are the problem; it’s the society they come from, and the things that society asks them to do.
While overt racists may be overrepresented on police forces, the average white officer’s beliefs are not all that different from those of the average white person in their local community. According to Goff, tests of racial bias reveal somewhat higher rates of prejudice among officers than the general population, but the effect size tends to be swamped by demographic and regional effects.
“If you live in a racist city, that’s going to matter more for how racist your law enforcement is ... than looking at the difference between law enforcement and your neighbors,” he told me.
In this sense, the rising diversity of America’s officer corps should make a real difference. If you draw from a demographically different pool of recruits, one with overall lower levels of racial bias, then there should be less of a problem with racism on the force.
There’s some data to back this up. Pew’s 2017 survey of officers found that Black officers and female officers were considerably more sympathetic to anti-police brutality protesters than white ones. A 2016 paper on officer-involved killings of Black people, from Yale’s Joscha Legewie and Columbia’s Jeffrey Fagan, found that departments with a larger percentage of Black officers had lower rates of killings of Black people.
But scholars caution that diversity will not, on its own, solve policing’s problems. In Pew’s survey, 60 percent of Hispanic and white officers said their departments had “excellent” or “good” relations with the local Black community, while only 32 percent of Black officers said the same. The hierarchy of policing remains extremely white — across cities, departmental brass and police unions tend to be disproportionately white relative to the rank-and-file. And the existing culture in many departments pushes nonwhite officers to try and fit in with what’s been established by the white hierarchy.
“We have seen that officers of color actually face increased pressure to fit into the existing culture of policing and may go out of their way to align themselves with traditional police tactics,” says Shannon Portillo, a scholar of bureaucratic culture at the University of Kansas-Edwards.
There’s a deeper problem than mere representation. The very nature of policing, both police ideology and the nuts-and-bolts nature of the job, can bring out the worst in people — especially when it comes to deep-seated racial prejudices and stereotypes.
The intersection of commonly held stereotypes with police ideology can prime officers for abusive behavior, especially when they’re patrolling majority-Black neighborhoods where residents have long-standing grievances against the cops. Some kind of incident with a Black citizen is certain to set off a confrontation; officers will eventually feel the need to escalate well beyond what seems necessary or even acceptable from the outside to protect themselves.
“The drug dealer — if he says ‘fuck you’ one day, it’s like getting punked on the playground. You have to go through that every day,” says Moskos, the former Baltimore officer. “You’re not allowed to get punked as a cop, not just because of your ego but because of the danger of it.”
The problems with ideology and prejudice are dramatically intensified by the demanding nature of the policing profession. Officers work a difficult job for long hours, called upon to handle responsibilities ranging from mental health intervention to spousal dispute resolution. While on shift, they are constantly anxious, searching for the next threat or potential arrest.
Stress gets to them even off the job; PTSD and marital strife are common problems. It’s a kind of negative feedback loop: The job makes them stressed and nervous, which damages their mental health and personal relationships, which raises their overall level of stress and makes the job even more taxing.
According to Goff, it’s hard to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances. When you put people under stress, they tend to make snap judgments rooted in their basic instincts. For police officers, raised in a racist society and socialized in a violent work atmosphere, that makes racist behavior inevitable.
“The mission and practice of policing is not aligned with what we know about how to keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit biases and mental shortcuts,” he says. “You could design a job where that’s not how it works. We have not chosen to do that for policing.”
Across the United States, we have created a system that makes disproportionate police targeting of Black citizens an inevitability. Officers don’t need to be especially racist as compared to the general population for discrimination to recur over and over; it’s the nature of the police profession, the beliefs that permeate it, and the situations in which officers find themselves that lead them to act in racist ways.
This reality helps us understand why the current protests have been so forceful: they are an expression of long-held rage against an institution that Black communities experience less as a protection force and more as a sort of military occupation.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Police officers often represent more of a military occupation than a protection force for Black communities.
In one landmark project, a team including Yale’s Meares and Hopkins’s Vesla Weaver facilitated more than 850 conversations about policing among residents of six different cities, finding a pervasive sense of police lawlessness among residents of highly policed Black communities.
Residents believe that police see them as subhuman or animal, that interactions with officers invariably end with arrests and/or physical assaults, and that the Constitution’s protections against police abuse don’t apply to Black people.
“[It’s often said that] if you don’t have anything on you, just agree to a search and everything will be okay. Let me tell you, that’s not what happens,” Weaver tells me, summarizing the beliefs of her research subjects. “What actually happens is that you’re bound to get beat up, you’re bound to get dragged to the station. The police can search you for whatever. We don’t get due process, we don’t get restitution — this is what we live by.”
Police don’t treat whole communities like this because they’re born worse or more evil than civilians. It’s better to understand the majority of officers as ordinary Americans who are thrown into a system that conditions them to be violent and to treat Black people, in particular, as the enemy. While some departments are better than others at ameliorating this problem, there’s not a city in the country that appears to have solved it entirely.
Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer’s experience in Baltimore.
“This was a great young man,” Rizer says. “He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.”
Six months after this man graduated from the academy, Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing. It wasn’t good.
“They’re animals. All of them,” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him. “The cops, the people I patrol, everybody. They’re just fucking animals.”
This man was, in Rizer’s mind, “the embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.” Some time after their conversation, he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them, on both sides of the law.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
A farmworker at an egg farm in San Diego, California, on November 6, 2014. California voters passed an animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the state’s egg-laying hens be given room to move around, but did not provide the funds for farmers to convert. | Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images
Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have a new bill, and a new coalition, with far-reaching consequences.
About a year before Sen. Cory Booker officially ran for president, he took a trip through the Midwest, meeting voters in the states he knew he’d need to win. One visit, in particular, sticks in his mind. It was in the home of a Republican farmer, a man who told Booker’s team he wasn’t sure he wanted to host the senator because “this is a Christian household.” Booker is Christian, but he knew what that meant: He’s vegan, liberal, an African American Democrat from Newark, New Jersey. Booker wasn’t the kind of politician this farmer saw as his own.
Booker tried to loosen the guy up with dad jokes. “I told him his cows were udderly amazing,” Booker recalls. Nothing.
The breakthrough came when the farmer began telling Booker about “the hell” he and his neighbors found themselves in. They used to sell their cows to five different companies, which meant if a buyer didn’t give them a good price or demanded practices that compromised their cows or land, they could go to another. But the industry had consolidated. Now there was one buyer, and that buyer controlled everything. The farmers had been reduced from entrepreneurs to serfs. Here, finally, was common ground. The farmer hated what his business had become, and so did Booker.
This was a story Booker heard again and again. And it carried the seed of an idea. Booker is vegan, and so he knows, better than most, how unpopular veganism is — in one survey, only people with drug addiction were viewed more negatively. Asked during a September CNN town hall whether he thought others should become vegan, Booker said “no,” before pivoting to discuss the problems of factory farming. In an MSNBC interview, he laughed off the idea of a “radical vegan agenda,” reassuring voters he doesn’t think “government should be telling Americans what to eat.”
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Sen. Cory Booker, who is vegan, has proposed legislation to reform agribusiness and reduce the power of the largest livestock factory farms.
But Booker realized there was a place that vegans and farmers could come together: Both of them hate the ways agribusiness had consolidated and mechanized the meat market, forcing farmers into using massive, cruel, and environmentally devastating confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
The agricultural industry has an unusual structure: Virtually every node in the industry is highly concentrated around a few megaproducers. That’s true for seeds, for pesticides, for machines, for production. And concentration has been increasing, and fast. In 1980, 34 percent of pigs were slaughtered by the four largest meatpacking companies. By 2015, that had nearly doubled, to 66 percent.
But the food is still grown, and the animals still raised, on family farms. These farms are, in theory, independent, but in practice, they bear the risks of independence without the expected freedoms. The megaproducers they buy from and sell to have all the leverage; farmers are left with little choice save to accept the onerous, binding contracts they’re offered. As the Center for American Progress puts it, “growing corporate power has left relatively small farms and ranches vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of the oligopolies with which they do business.”
The results, for farmers, have been disastrous. In 2018, median farm income was negative $1,840 — meaning most farms lost money. Farmers saw a 50 percent drop in income since 2013. Adjusted for inflation, farm incomes have been stagnant for the past 30 years. As a result, farmers are buried in debt: The sector’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest it’s been since the farm crisis of the mid-’80s. (The National Pork Producers Council declined to comment for this story, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association did not reply to a request for comment.)
As farmers have lost control of their livelihoods, they’ve also lost control of their animals, their crops, and their land. They have no choice but to contract with companies that dictate the way they raise their animals, setting farmers in competition with one another for production speeds and efficiency. The way you win that competition is to pack more animals into your sheds, pump them fuller of antibiotics so they don’t die from infections that flourish amid overcrowding, raise breeds that live lives of pain but grow with astonishing speed, create massive manure lagoons that poison streams and turn air acrid. The result is a brutal incentive to mechanize the process of livestock production in ways cruel to the animals, the farmers, and their communities.
“Independent family farmers and ranchers are being driven off their land, driven into bankruptcy, being forced into a system of industrialized agriculture that our values don’t support,” says Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer, former lieutenant governor, and co-founder of the Family Farm Action Alliance. “It’s either join up with these transnational monopolies or we’re going to bankrupt you. That’s the reality of family agriculture today.”
Booker realized that, as unlikely as it sounds, there was a space in the Venn diagram between the people who believe raising and killing animals for food is wrong and the people whose chose, as their livelihoods, to raise and kill animals for food. Both could agree that the way we are doing it now is cruel, both to animals and to people.
“This is not how we raised livestock 70 years ago,” Booker says. “We’ve gone from raising animals in a far more humane, pasture-based model to one where we’re producing food in hyper-confined, concentrated, enclosed buildings that produce these massive lagoons of waste that are poisoning our streams and our rivers.”
In December of 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Booker unveiled the Farm System Reform Act. It’s sweeping legislation, but at its core it does four things:
Imposes an immediate moratorium on the construction of new CAFOs and phases out the largest existing CAFOs by 2040
Imposes the liabilities and costs of pollutions, accidents, and disasters on the agricultural conglomerates that control the market rather than on the independent farmers who contract with them
Creates a $100 billion fund to help farmers who are currently running CAFOs transition to other agricultural operations
Strengthens the existing Packers and Stockyards Act to prohibit a range of contract terms and structures that let huge meat buyers put farmers in a race for the bottom while denying them political and legal recourse
Booker dropped out of the presidential race in January. But his legislation kept picking up cosponsors. In May of 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signed on to the bill. That same month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, sponsored a companion bill in the House with six co-sponsors, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.
“For years and years, giant multinational corporations have been crushing competition in the agricultural sector and seizing key markets while regulators have looked the other way,” Warren says. “The Covid-19 crisis is making it even easier for Big Ag to get even bigger and gobble up small farms — leaving farmers out in the cold and consumers facing higher costs and fewer choices.”
“My interest in it came because I was spending time with Bernie Sanders in Iowa,” Khanna says. “I saw these factory farms, and I saw miles and miles of land where you couldn’t see farmers. All you could see was machinery and runoff. And when I spoke to actual farmers, they talked about how the people who owned these farms weren’t in Iowa. They had no control over the environmental impact. They felt they didn’t have control over their own economic destiny.”
There is a coalition emerging here, one that could lead to overdue reforms in our food system, but one that also has profound things to say about our politics.
The politics of animal — and human — suffering
David Coman-Hidy is the president of the Humane League, an animal welfare organization. In May, I had a conversation with him I’ve had trouble getting out of my head. My question was innocuous. I wanted to know what he was working on. “Switching from live shackling to the atmospheric killing of chickens,” he replied.
Oh.
I wasn’t familiar with these terms, and maybe you aren’t, either. And I’m sorry for what I’m going to force you to imagine as I explain them. “The process of how we slaughter broiler chickens is the cruelest thing imaginable,” says Coman-Hidy. These are, functionally, malnourished, young birds. Workers flip them upside down to shackle them by their legs. In many cases, the process dislocates their hips.
Chickens aren’t meant to be upside-down. They have no diaphragm. Shackled and inverted, their organs crush into their lungs, making it hard for the birds to breathe. The point of the shackling is to put them on a conveyor that drags them through electrified water, stunning them before the kill. But the birds panic, thrashing in wild terror. Some of them miss the water, or the stun setting is too low. Those birds have their throats cut while they’re still conscious, and then they’re pulled through boiling water to defeather them. If the blade misses the bird, the bird boils alive.
Yuan Chen/VCG via Getty Images
A worker takes feathers off chickens at a chicken slaughtering and processing plant on November 13, 2019, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
Coman-Hidy and his organization are working to convince agricultural producers to slaughter chickens by simply gassing them, en masse. It’s easier on the chickens, and less traumatizing for the workers. And the campaign is seeing some success. McDonald’s has pledged to move to atmospheric killing, for one.
Coman-Hidy is vegan; he’s devoted his life to reducing animal suffering. Didn’t it feel strange, I asked him, to become part of this machine whose very existence he loathes? Even if atmospheric killing was more humane, wouldn’t it unnerve him to become one of the people shaping the architecture of animal slaughter?
“The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas?” He replied. “And the answer is everything.”
There are few movements as alienated from the consensus position as the animal suffering movement. They look at the world and see tens of billions of animals being tortured and slaughtered in ways that poison the earth, warm the planet, and — as we are seeing with particular clarity now, as scores die daily from a pandemic virus that likely began in a meat market — harm human health. The practices of industrial animal agriculture are so cruel that you can’t describe them in polite company, so traumatizing that suicide and abuse are too-common worker hazards, so disturbing that agriculture companies pass laws criminalizing efforts to show the world where their meals are made. It is a structure of suffering with no bottom, no end, and what is most astonishing about it is that almost everyone simply treats it as normal.
And so the animal suffering movement has to practice, in the truest and most challenging sense of the word, politics. They have to find common purpose with those they disagree with profoundly. To have any chance of changing a system they loathe, they must become part of it, even complicit in it. They don’t get to realistically hope for success anytime soon, for a world they could be comfortable in, for an end to the horror they see all around them. They get to hope chickens will die from gas rather than shackled upside down with their throats cut. And they are finding that the best way to get to that world is to focus on human suffering, too.
The coronavirus has created coalitions that didn’t exist before it by laying bare the close connection between animal and human suffering. Meatpacking plants have been epicenters of outbreaks, with the suffering concentrated among immigrant laborers who then transmit the virus to their communities. The League of United Latin American Citizens called for “meatless May Mondays” to protest conditions in the slaughterhouses.
“Until the meat industry, federal and state governments protect the lives of essential workers at all meat processing facilities in a federally mandated and verifiable manner, LULAC will call for boycotts of meat products,” the organization’s president, Domingo Garcia, said in a statement.
It’s in the intersection of human and animal suffering that the animal rights community sees opportunity. Farmers and vegan activists may not agree on the world they want to see, but they can agree that the way both farmer and animals were treated in the past is preferable to the way they are treated today. LULAC and the Humane League aren’t pursuing the same long-term goals, but better conditions for workers would also mean better conditions for animals.
How much change would the Farm System Reform Act bring?
In reporting for this piece, I’ve asked everyone the same question: If the Farm System Reform Act passed, how much would really change?
“It doesn’t ban animal agriculture,” says Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “If you look for the part of the bill banning cages and crates, it’s not in there. But it would end animal agriculture as we know it. It wouldn’t let the system go forward as it does.”
To Garcés, the key element of the bill is the reversal of liability. She’s spent years working with chicken farmers who’ve been driven by contract terms and debt loads to accept practices that repulse them, and who find themselves paying the bill when disease cuts through their flock, or pollution gushes into the waterways that feed the community.
“Currently, integrators” — that’s your Tysons and Smithfields — “have created a system where all the bad parts of animal farming are on the back of the farmer or taxpayer,” Garcés says. “The bill flips that: ‘Integrator, you need to pay for all the pollution.’ I think that would bankrupt the current system if they had to pay for it.”
Jeff Vanuga/USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service via Getty Images
Cows in a confined feeding operation in Yuma, Arizona.
In her work with farmers, Garcés has found many of them want to escape the industrial animal agriculture business, because they appalled by how they have to treat their animals, their land, or both. But the integrators load them up with so much debt that they have no way out but through. So the debt forgiveness and transition assistance thrills her. “The biggest hurdle to getting farmers to transition is the debt,” she says. “I think hundreds of farmers would sign up for this. They just need a bridge.”
Maxwell, of the Family Farm Action Alliance, agrees. “Most of these farmers are just cogs in a big machine,” he says. “Once they borrow money from one of these big companies, they get stuck on a treadmill of poverty and debt that they can’t get off of. That’s why 70 percent of us live at or below the federal poverty level. So many farmers are looking for ways off that treadmill, and that’s what this bill offers.”
There are two wild cards here. One is the rapid rise of plant- and lab-based meats. By 2040, when the Farm System Reform Act is fully implemented, how rapidly have those technologies advanced? How cheap is an Impossible Burger? How tasty is lab-grown pork, or 3D-printed steak? Animal meat is so cheap in part because the true costs are hidden — they are absorbed by the suffering of the animals, the unpriced pollution flowing into communities, the quiet traumas and injuries carried by workers. If a bill like this made animal-based meat more expensive, it might accelerate the transition to other forms of meat. That’s certainly a quiet hope in the animal rights crowd.
Animal meat is so cheap in part because the true costs are hidden — they are absorbed by the suffering of the animals, the unpriced pollution flowing into communities, the quiet traumas and injuries carried by workers
The danger, though, is that the bill could drive production overseas or to Latin America, where standards are lower and even crueler, more dangerous practices prevail. The bill establishes country-of-origin labeling, but there’s little reason to believe that would be much of a hurdle — Americans already buy strawberries from Mexico and steak from Brazil.
The question is what Americans really want, and how easy it will be for them to get it. There is a deep ambivalence in our relationship to the food that ends up on our plates: We want food from small farms, where workers and animals are treated well, where the land is respected, and we want it all to be incredibly cheap and absurdly plentiful.
The average American consumed 222 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2018, according to the USDA. Right now, big agribusiness producers try to ease consumer consciences through misdirection: Their packaging and advertising emphasize small farms, their ag-gag laws and contract provisions choke off the flow of actual information, the massive scale and mechanization of their processes hold down prices, and their political contributions repel real oversight.
“The tilt in America in the last 30 years of policy has been toward consumerism,” Khanna says. “We will do everything possible to lower prices. We won’t care about jobs, real wages, or the environment. My argument is that we ought to care enough about farmers [having] a decent livelihood, about environmental consequences, about consequences to communities, so even if this means there’s a slight increase in the price of meat, that’s worth it.”
The Farm System Reform Act won’t end all the abuses of factory farming, all the environmental degradation it causes, all the economic exploitation faced by farmers. But it’s a start. And if the odd-bedfellows coalition Booker is trying to build materializes, and finds real political footing, profound change is possible.
“We can’t vilify each other,” Booker says. “If we can’t have compassion for people in these broken systems, then we’re not going to have the compassion or coalitions to end these systems themselves.”
Roge Karma contributed reporting.
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There are still a significant number of unknowns about the coronavirus—we're struggling to understand what influences the severity of some cases, why other people remain asymptomatic, and why most people experience only a subset of its total symptoms list. But one thing has been crystal clear in the data: the elderly are most at risk from COVID-19. A disproportionate number of the fatalities have come in those over 65.
As such, many countries have implemented strategies focused on minimizing the risks for the elderly, and appeals to the public have been made centered around protecting older family members. But are the elderly doing their part to protect themselves? Not really, according to a study that analyzed survey data from dozens of countries.
Following advice?
The work was done by Jean-François Daoust, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Daoust took advantage of a huge collection of survey data obtained by YouGov and Imperial College London. The dataset is enormous. While Daoust had to exclude India and China, where the population surveyed wasn't representative of the country's demographics, he was still left with over 72,000 people in 27 countries (Africa is notably unrepresented, and the only South American country is Brazil.) While his main conclusions are drawn from the data as a whole, Daoust also did country- and region-level analyses to look for differences in attitudes.
Google Fiber's wireline broadband is expanding to a new city for the first time in several years as part of a public-private partnership to build an open-access network that any ISP can use to offer service. The new network will be in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Google Fiber "paused" plans to expand to new cities in October 2016 amid lawsuits filed by incumbent ISPs and construction problems that eventually led to the Alphabet-owned ISP's complete exit from Louisville. But in West Des Moines, Google Fiber will rely on the city to build a network of fiber conduits.
"Municipalities like West Des Moines excel at building and maintaining infrastructure. At digging and laying pipes under the roads, restoring and preserving the sidewalks and green spaces, reducing traffic congestion, and lowering construction disruption," Google Fiber said in an announcement yesterday.
The Trump administration has officially withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization, according to a Democratic senator and multiple news reports. But the withdrawal process will take a year, so Trump may not be able to see it through.
"Congress received notification that POTUS officially withdrew the US from the WHO in the midst of a pandemic," Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) wrote on Twitter today. "To call Trump's response to COVID chaotic and incoherent doesn't do it justice. This won't protect American lives or interests—it leaves Americans sick and America alone."
According to The Hill, a senior Trump administration official confirmed today that "the White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization."
There are plenty of times when I have questioned why something that the USPTO granted a trademark on should be allowed to be registered at all. But one example that flummoxes me the most is that you can go out there and trademark area codes. You don't hear about this all that much, but AB InBev made this somewhat famous when it acquired Chicago's Goose Island Brewing, including the trademark for its "312" brand of beer, and proceeded to file for trademarks on allllllll kinds of area codes.
Why? Why can a company lock up an identifier for a geographic region in any market designation? The answer according to some is that the USPTO has decided that area codes aren't purely geographic descriptions.
If consumers encounter an area code being used as a trademark, will consumers likely think that product comes from the region identified by the code, or will it be viewed as a tribute to the region? Perhaps we’ll see if A-B expands its use of area codes. The USPTO generally does not consider area codes to be merely geographically descriptive and thus area codes used as trademarks are registrable without a showing of acquired distinctiveness.
Someone is going to have to explain this to me. Go throw the term "area code" into Google. The returning results will be of one or two categories. Either you will get a link to a series of tables that match a given area code with a state, city, or county, or you will get an actual map showing where specific area codes lie in different regions. Both of those things are denoting geographic reasons. The area code has the word area in it. What the absolute hell is the USPTO talking about?
Fred Gillich, the owner of Too Much Metal and 414 Milwaukee, started his 414 brand in 2012. His stylized version of the area code appears on T-shirts, hats, glassware and flags – one of which hung from City Hall last spring. Beard MKE, a local retail company, partnered with Cream City Print Lounge, also Milwaukee-based, to create a "414 All" shirt to benefit the Cream City Foundation that works to protect the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
Gillich sent Beard MKE a cease and desist letter earlier this month, and was not satisfied with the company's response. And so he went to social media and made a post calling out Beard MKE for using the 414 area code on a shirt with the image below.
The response to Gillich attempting to publicly shame another group that was handing proceeds from merch sales bearing the "414" area code to charity was almost universally negative. Comments from legal experts mostly amounted to: "Yeah, the USPTO gave him the mark, so he can bully whoever he wants over it." As though nobody can get to the next logical question, which is to ask why this is allowed at all? The mark is so broad, and so tied to a geographic region, it serves as the source identifier of nothing at all, save maybe an entire region.
And Gillich has made a habit of this sort of thing.
"This is not the first time he's done this to a small business and no one has the time or the money for legal support," says Crosby.
Gillich says he just wants companies to partner with him rather than use the trademarked 414 without permission.
"I survive on my creativity and when I see it being appropriated, the question becomes who's hurting whose small business?" says Gillich. "I am protecting my livelihood."
Ah, yes, the creativity of noticing that you live in a certain area code and then trademarking it. Hey, USPTO, bang up job here, fellas.
New day, new nonsense. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did his Pompeo thing and went on Fox News saying that the US is looking at banning apps from China in the US, with a focus on TikTok, the incredibly popular social media app that is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance:
The United States is "looking at" banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday.
Pompeo suggested the possible move during an interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham, adding that "we're taking this very seriously."
Pompeo was asked by Ingraham whether the United States should be considering a ban on Chinese social media apps, "especially TikTok."
"With respect to Chinese apps on people's cell phones, I can assure you the United States will get this one right too, Laura," he said. "I don't want to get out in front of the President [Donald Trump], but it's something we're looking at."
It's difficult to know where to start on this, but let's at least start by admitting that TikTok has some sketchy issues. We've talked about how its content moderation practices may be driven from Beijing's moral stance (despite denials) and there were recent claims from someone associated with anonymous claiming to have reverse engineered TikTok, saying that it's a security disaster (it's not at all clear how accurate that is). At the same time, India just banned TikTok and other Chinese apps over security fears.
So there may be some legitimate concerns here, though a lot of that is based on innuendo and rumor rather than concrete evidence. And, again, we've seen this game before. The US spent years spreading security panic about Chinese networking equipment from companies like Huawei and ZTE, without ever actually proving any problems with the hardware (in fact, a massive US government investigation turned up nothing).
But, as we've noted, it's often been difficult to tell where the complaints against Chinese networking hardware end, and where the lobbying from American telco equipment firms like Cisco begin, as there appears to be substantial overlap. There's no evidence to say that's true with this new story of an app ban, but it should be noted that Mark Zuckerberg is clearly very, very worried about TikTok, so the US banning the company that seems to be a favorite of the younger generation certainly wouldn't be protested very much by Facebook.
That said, there are real legal questions about whether or not the US even could ban TikTok in the US. Under what law would they do so? While owned by ByteDance in China, TikTok has spent the last few years separating TikTok's business from ByteDance, hiring a ton of people in the US and insisting that data from TikTok users is kept in the US (or Singapore) and not in China. ByteDance has also considered selling off TikTok to avoid these concerns.
So it seems incredibly likely that any effort to bar TikTok would raise a whole bunch of legal concerns -- starting with a basic 1st Amendment concern. The US government can't just say "you can't use that social media app." That may be how things work in China or India, but not in the US. And, of course, it would likely set off a chain reaction elsewhere as well. China already bans most major US apps and services, but we're still dealing with a pointless trade war that would only be exacerbated by such a move.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about TikTok, it's connections to China, and the security of the app. But none of that means that the US government has the right to just ban it. While Trump may want to pretend he's a dictator, and Pompeo may want to pretend he works for a dictator, that's not how any of this works.
Last week, as predicted, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to replace the original EARN IT Act, with a new one. As part of the markup, they also voted to approve Senator Patrick Leahy's amendment which some might read to say that EARN IT cannot be used to block encryption -- but the reality is a lot more complicated. As I'll explain, this new bill is terrible in a different way than the old bill: it will create a new dilemma in which internet services will either feel compelled to encrypt everything or in which the only way you'll be able to use any internet service is if you hand over a ton of personal information to the service provider -- potentially putting your privacy at extreme risk.
First lets acknowledge an oddity about this new bill. Both bills involve the creation of a commission to come up with "best practices" in trying to stop "child sexual abuse material" or CSAM (the concept formerly known as child porn). In the old bill, if sites didn't follow the commission's best practices, they could lose their Section 230 protections. This resulted in fears that the commission would outlaw encryption as a "best practice." The new bill retains the commission, but for no recognizable purpose. Instead, it does away with the pretense and just says that a bunch of sites should lose Section 230 protections no matter what. It seems quite odd to first say "we need a commission to determine best practices" and then on a second pass say that before the commission has done anything we're just going to make massive changes to Section 230 based on... nothing at all. No evidence saying that this would create better outcomes. No evidence that Section 230 is a problem with regards to CSAM. Just... nothing.
Specifically, the new bill makes a change to Section 230 that looks similar to the change that was made with FOSTA, saying that you don't get 230 protections if you advertise, promote, present, distribute, or solicit CSAM. But here's the thing: CSAM is already a federal crime and all federal crimes are already exempted from Section 230. On top of that, it's not as if there are a bunch of cases anyone can trot out as examples of Section 230 getting in the way of CSAM prosecutions. There's literally no evidence that this is needed or will help -- because it won't.
As we've detailed before, the real scandal in all of this is not that internet companies are facilitating CSAM, but that the DOJ has literally ignored its Congressional mandate to go after those engaged in CSAM production and distribution. Congress tasked the DOJ with tackling CSAM and the DOJ has just not done it. The DOJ was required to compile data and set goals to eliminate CSAM... and has just not done it. That's why it's bizarre that EARN IT is getting all of the attention rather than an alternative bill from Senators Wyden, Gillibrand, Casey and Brown that would tell the DOJ to actually get serious about doing its job with regards to CSAM, rather than blaming everyone else.
But digging into the details, the real problem here is that, as structured, the new EARN IT Act would be a disaster in trying to achieve the goals the sponsors have set out for it. First off, thanks to the addition of Senator Leahy's Amendment, some may see the bill as one that effectively requires encryption to avoid liability for CSAM. Even that's not totally clear, however. While you can read Leahy's amendment to say that encryption is protected, the actual structure of the final bill punts many issues to state law, and that means having to comply with 50 different state laws. Some, like Illinois, have lower standards for the mens rea regarding CSAM, and the worry is that we won't know whether or not offering end-to-end encryption would be seen as violating state laws until long and costly cases go through their lengthy process.
Either way, this weird CSAM carveout from Section 230 is somewhat equivalent to the moderator's dilemma that other attempts to change Section 230 create. Because most of those other reforms put in place a "knowledge" standard, it gives many sites a reason to never look at the content on their platform. In this case, due to the explicit call out saying that encryption isn't impacted, that would effectively say that if you want to keep 230 protections, you should encrypt absolutely everything. Which, ironically, is the exact opposite of what Attorney General Bill Barr has been asking for.
But, as with the moderator's dilemma, there's also a flipside (if you don't want to ignore everything, then you have to greatly restrict what you allow through). Under the new EARN IT, the flipside is that the government more or less says that you are now responsible for being able to track and identify anyone on your service who is not using encryption -- meaning you would need to carefully verify every user of your platform. No more simple signups. No more anonymity. And, incredibly, this would mean that sites would need to collect a ton of data on every user. Want to use this new service? First submit your phone number, driver's license, etc.
At a time when people are saying they trust big internet companies less and less with their data, why would Senators Graham, Blumenthal, Feinstein, and Hawley (HAWLEY!?!?) be encouraging websites to collect even more (and more intrusive) data on all their users?
Since this is somewhat different than the traditional moderator's dilemma, it might be called the "censor's dilemma" or possibly the "middleman's dilemma," in that this is even more tied to the government's demand that websites block certain content entirely, which puts them in the role of a government middleman or censor (which, not coincidentally, would raise serious constitutional issues with the EARN IT Act turning private entities into state censors).
Either way it is difficult to see how these two outcomes are what Congress (or, for that matter, the DOJ) actually wants:
Much greater encouragement for websites to encrypt everything
Much greater encouragement for websites to demand much more personal and private information on users.
And yet, thanks to Congress' standard bungling, that's what we have with the current EARN IT Act. And while it might be nice if the law actually did encourage more encryption, don't pin your hopes on that. As noted above, it's not entirely clear that it really does lead to that outcome, and we might not know until after a whole bunch of litigation. Furthermore, if that is is the end result, it will almost certainly lead to a different kind of backlash and support for even worse laws that seek to blow up encryption through other methods.
In short: the EARN IT Act is bad. At best it might encourage more encryption, but it would also create a whole host of unintended consequences, including much less privacy and no more anonymity on many websites. It's difficult to see how that accomplishes any of the goals of the bill's supporters.
The US Supreme Court today struck down a provision in US law that let debt collectors make robocalls to cell phones, ruling that the law violates the First Amendment by favoring debt-collection speech over other speech.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 prohibits "almost all robocalls to cell phones," but Congress in 2015 amended the law to add "a new government-debt exception that allows robocalls made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States," the Supreme Court noted in today's ruling. The opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"As the Government concedes, the robocall restriction with the government-debt exception cannot satisfy strict scrutiny," the ruling said. "The Government has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, issue advocacy, and the like." Government-backed loans affected by the ruling include student loans, home mortgages, veterans' loans, farm loans, and business loans.
Patients who had the flu shot had 8% lower odds of needing intensive care and about 20% fewer odds of requiring respiratory support. Overall, they found that people vaccinated in the current round were protected but not those vaccinated earlier. Those who were vaccinated before developing symptoms of COVID-19 had 20% reduction in the odds of mortality. Still, if given after the onset, the vaccine was linked to a 27% reduction in the odds of death, though the difference is not significant.
In the latter group, the protection was more significant for those under the age of 60 years when given before the onset of COVID-19 symptoms.
Dominion Energy and Duke Energy have canceled their Atlantic Coast Pipeline project, a natural gas pipeline that was to stretch hundreds of miles across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, citing "legal uncertainty."
Despite a recent win for the project in the US Supreme Court, ongoing delays, litigation and an expected increase in costs threatened the economic viability of the project, the companies said Sunday.
The pipeline, initially announced in 2014, had faced intense criticism and legal challenges from environmental and other groups.
"This announcement reflects the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States," Thomas Farrell, chairman of Dominion Energy, said in a statement. "Until these issues are resolved, the ability to satisfy the country's energy needs will be significantly challenged."
The companies had "worked diligently and invested billions of dollars to complete the project and deliver the much-needed infrastructure to our customers and communities" in the years since it was announced, Farrell said.
The announcement brought cheers from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"This is tremendous news for West Virginians, Virginians, and North Carolinians who deserve clean air, safe water and protection from climate change," Gillian Giannetti, an attorney with the NRDC, said in a statement.
"As they abandon this dirty pipe dream, Dominion and Duke should now pivot to investing more in energy efficiency, wind and solar -- that's how to provide jobs and a better future for all," Giannetti said.
US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette blamed the pipeline's cancellation on "activists."
"The well-funded, obstructionist environmental lobby has successfully killed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have lowered energy costs for consumers in North Carolina and Virginia by providing them with an affordable, abundant, and reliable natural gas supply from the Appalachian region," he said.
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In late June, after three months of near silence on the topic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally weighed in on a question of critical importance to millions of American women and families: How dangerous is the coronavirus for pregnant women and new mothers?
The CDC had been asserting that pregnant women don’t seem to be at higher risk for severe complications from the virus. As recently as late May, a spokesperson told ProPublica, “Current evidence shows pregnant women have the same risk of severe illness from COVID-19 as adults who are not pregnant.”
Then, the agency abruptly changed its tone. In its first examination of U.S. data on COVID-19 in pregnancy, the CDC found that expectant mothers with the virus had a 50% higher chance of being admitted to intensive care and a 70% higher chance of being intubated than nonpregnant women in their childbearing years.
Pregnant Latina and Black women were infected at significantly higher rates than white women, researchers reported. As of July 2, at least 30 expectant and new mothers with the virus had died.
That news was sobering enough. But what many experts found really worrisome were the glaring gaps in data that the study exposed.
The CDC acknowledged that crucial health information was missing for about three-quarters of pregnant women with the virus, including whether they had preexisting conditions or required an ICU stay or mechanical ventilation. For the vast majority of U.S. women of reproductive age who tested positive — about 326,000 women through June 7 — there was no information about pregnancy status at all.
Researchers couldn’t even say how many of the hospitalized mothers-to-be — 31.5% of the pregnant women in the study — had been admitted because of COVID-19, versus how many were in the hospital for other reasons, such as giving birth.
The flawed CDC report highlights a problem that OB-GYN providers and researchers in the U.S. have been fretting about since the pandemic began. Because emerging diseases can have catastrophic consequences for pregnant women and their babies, close monitoring of new illnesses in this vulnerable population is important. So is rapid communication with providers trying to keep their patients safe.
But the U.S. public health system’s efforts to understand the impact of the coronavirus in mothers and babies have been flat-footed, scattershot and agonizingly slow.
The holes in the CDC’s data are “startling. I won’t lie,” said Cindy M. P. Duke, an OB-GYN who runs the Nevada Fertility Institute in Las Vegas. “It’s shocking to realize that we do not have a uniform system in place” for collecting and analyzing basic maternal and infant health information during times of crisis.
“By the time we get the best data available,” said Christina Han, a maternal-fetal specialist who is on the clinical faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school, “this pandemic will be over.”
To track the coronavirus in pregnant women and their babies, the CDC is instructing local health departments to check a box on the standard Case Report Form if a patient is currently pregnant. Jurisdictions can also complete an “optional, supplemental form” providing information about disease severity and outcomes in mothers and babies, a spokeswoman said.
It’s a system that guarantees there will be huge data inconsistencies, time lags and gaps. “We’re talking about millions of cases that are having to be reported back to the CDC right now,” Han said, “And the clinicians who are taking care of these patients don’t have the time to be filling out the full case report forms.”
The CDC has “initiated COVID-19 pregnancy surveillance,” according to its study, working with local health departments to improve data collection going forward. But researchers didn’t give any details.
“We need to be set up prior to an outbreak to capture information about how any new or emerging or reemerging pathogen affects pregnant women and their infants,” said Denise Jamieson, who spent 20 years at the CDC studying reproductive infectious disease and now heads the OB-GYN department at Emory University medical school in Atlanta. “And I think it’s clear … that [the CDC] are not well poised to do that.”
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Bad
When COVID-19 arrived in Europe this winter, researchers in the United Kingdom were ready.
Caught unprepared by the H1N1 outbreak of 2009, and determined not to let that happen again, the National Institute for Health Research issued a call for studies in 2011 that could be up and running as soon as the next pandemic hit. Nine proposals were chosen, all focusing on flu but adaptable to other types of outbreaks; then they were “hibernated” — put on hold, the protocols periodically reviewed and revised, pending government action.
When the sirens began blaring this February, eight of the studies launched, including one by the U.K. Obstetric Surveillance System, a research platform devoted to rare disorders of pregnancy. “I was told to activate [it] on a Friday,” said Marian Knight, a professor of maternal and child population health at the University of Oxford, “and by Monday, we were collecting the data.”
The UKOSS design was ambitious — a comprehensive, prospective study of COVID-19-infected pregnant women at the National Health Service’s 194 obstetric hospitals; it was also straightforward, based on a two-page electronic form, with all patient information kept anonymous. The careful planning allowed researchers to move quickly without being overly rushed, Knight wrote in a blog post for The BMJ journal, “minimizing the risks of publication of, at best, misleading, or, at worst, erroneous, information” — problems that have bedeviled other high-profile COVID-19 studies.
By mid-May, UKOSS released its first findings from an analysis of every pregnant woman hospitalized in Britain from March through mid-April who tested positive for the virus, 427 in total. Mothers-to-be did not seem to get as sick overall from COVID-19 as they had from H1N1 flu and SARS, but Black, Asian and Middle Eastern women were far likelier to be hospitalized with the virus than white women were. About 1 in 10 women became so ill they required respiratory support. Five mothers and five babies died.
The study provided the kind of high-quality data that doctors and policymakers value most: populationwide, scientifically rigorous, immediately actionable. British medical organizations quickly issued new guidance about the heightened risks for women of color.
Medical groups also reaffirmed earlier recommendations that women in their third trimester should avoid job settings, such as working as a doctor or nurse on the front lines, that could expose them to the virus. That’s a much more conservative position than American medical organizations and employers have taken, citing a lack of research that would suggest a different approach. Knight said the UKOSS findings support stringent social distancing in late pregnancy. “That’s where we see the majority of women with critical disease. The good news is that women now know when they should start to be particularly vigilant.”
Public health experts say UKOSS’ proactive, big-picture approach is exactly what was needed in the U.S., which has nearly 4 million births annually — about five times as many as Britain — and wide racial disparities in maternal and infant outcomes that COVID-19 has likely only widened. By one estimate, more than 16,000 American women could be infected with the coronavirus when they give birth this year.
But the U.K. has universal health care, which gives the government access to vast amounts of patient data, making large-scale research like the UKOSS study more feasible. The U.S. health care system is fragmented and inefficient, much of its data hidden in black boxes.
The two nations also have very different approaches to maternal health, exemplified by how they confront pregnancy-related complications and deaths. The U.K. treats every mother’s death like a public health disaster; the U.S. can barelykeep track of its maternal mortality problem.
Women’s health in general tends to be an afterthought for American researchers and policymakers, said Barbara Levy, former vice president for health policy at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, now a consultant in the Washington, D.C., area. In a public health system that’s been underfunded for decades, pregnancy-related issues get especially short shrift.
“If we’re not seeing a red-hot button to raise our concern, then we just aren’t particularly curious about what might be going on.” Yet the stakes of this kind of population-based research couldn’t be higher, Levy said. “This is the future of our world. This is the next generation.”
Patching Together a View
Starting with the first, very limited case reports from China, there’s been a deluge of studies seeking to fill the information void about COVID-19 and pregnancy. In the U.S., much of the research has come from hot spots like New York City, Seattle and Chicago, where physicians in the throes of the pandemic have reported on their own patients and pushed out their findings with breakneck speed.
The general trend has been somewhat reassuring: COVID-19 can make pregnant women very sick, but many seem to remain asymptomatic or become only mildly ill. There have only been a few cases of suspected “vertical transmission” — mothers passing the virus to their babies in the womb — but those remain under investigation, and most infants born to COVID-19-positive women have done fine. Some red flags have also emerged: A couple of cases of heart-related complications, indications of placental abnormalities and reports of asymptomatic women who spiraled after giving birth.
The underlying data in many of these case reports is overlapping and confusing, with little or no peer review to vet the findings. “In none of these series can we be certain of the underlying population denominators nor the degree to which they are affected by the biases” inherent in small-scale studies conducted in a single hospital or city, Knight wrote in her BMJ commentary. “The results are thus almost impossible to interpret.”
Meanwhile, numerous efforts are underway to do larger scale, longer-term, more scientifically meticulous studies that could give a fuller picture of how the virus affects pregnant women and babies in different parts of the U.S. (which is likely to be different from how it affects women in the U.K. or Sweden or Iran). In late May, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development announced a sweeping initiative, a series of studies at the 12 academic institutions in its Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U.S. The network, which dates to the mid-1980s and stretches from the Rhode Island to Utah, is “a very well-oiled machine that can put protocols into place very quickly,” said Diana Bianchi, a prenatal geneticist who heads the NICHD, which is one of the National Institutes of Health.
One big study will compare women who delivered at the various sites between March and December of this year with women who delivered in the same hospitals in the same period in 2019, Bianchi said. “They’re asking, first of all, is there a difference in the number of deaths? Is there a difference in the number of cesarean sections that have been performed? Is there a difference in terms of the maternal near misses?... If we see any increased incidence of complications, death, whatever, then the presumption is the difference is due to COVID.” Another study will follow 1,500 COVID-19-positive pregnant women to understand the course of the disease and its treatment.
A different approach, the PRIORITY study, originates at the University of California, San Francisco, and UCLA. The idea is to build a large nationwide registry of women who contracted COVID-19 at any point in their pregnancy and to follow them for at least a year after they give birth, miscarry or have an abortion. A key goal is to make the registry more geographically, racially and economically diverse than is typical of many academic-based studies, “because we want the results to accurately reflect the true representation of pregnant people that are being impacted by COVID 19,” said Vanessa Jacoby, an associate professor at UCSF who is one of the lead investigators. To that end, the researchers are working with birth advocates in communities of color around the country to get the word out to potential participants directly; they don’t need a doctor or hospital to take part. In the first few weeks, many of the women enrolled were pregnant health care workers.
Another UCSF-based study, the ASPIRE registry, will focus on early pregnancy, when the risks are greatest for birth defects and miscarriages, and aims to eventually enroll 10,000 participants.
“This disease is so humbling because it’s new to humans, and we keep learning more and more about its manifestations in real time,” Bianchi said. “We have not gone through a nine-month cycle with pregnant women. And so I’m very concerned about the consequences of infection in the first trimester.” She points to Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that was once thought to be harmless because the symptoms in men and nonpregnant women were often quite mild. Only after newborns exhibited devastating neurological disabilities did researchers realize how dangerous the virus really was.
Recent reports of COVID-19’s unexpected effects — like a life-threatening inflammatory syndrome in children — have intensified providers’ unease. On a Facebook group for OB-GYNs with 4,400 members, doctors have recently been trading stories about an alarming, if highly anecdotal, increase in miscarriages and stillbirths in some of their practices. But the OB-GYNs didn’t know whether what they were seeing was a real spike caused by COVID-19, an increase caused by something else or a statistical fluke magnified by their own anxiety. And what, they worried, might the reports about clotting disorders in younger, nonpregnant adults mean for expectant and new mothers, who are already more susceptible to life-threatening blood clots?
“The gap in knowledge — it’s chilling,” said Jane van Dis, a Los Angeles-area OB-GYN who is the medical director at the Maven women’s health telemedicine platform and helps administer the Facebook group. “It’s very distraught-provoking to be expected to be an expert on a topic that we’ve spent our whole lives dedicated to, but for which we don’t have the answers right now, and they’re really important answers to be able to have.”
The truth is, answers may be elusive for a long time. “This virus keeps surprising us,” said Sonja Rasmussen, former director of the CDC’s Office of Infectious Diseases, now a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Florida medical school. “That was true for Zika and Ebola, too.” One of the most important lessons of past outbreaks, she said, is that “you can’t be too confident early on. It just shows the importance of collecting data and not being too sure about what you think you're going to see before you collect those data. You’ve got to keep an open mind.”
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SARS-CoV-2 wasn't the first coronavirus that spawned fears of a pandemic; there were worries about SARS and MERS before it arrived. But influenza viruses have also been a regular source of worries, as they can often spread from agricultural animals to us. Earlier this week, a report was released that described an influenza virus with what the researchers who identified it called "pandemic potential." The virus is currently jumping from agricultural animals to us, but it is not currently able to spread between humans.
Under surveillance
The institutions that some of these researchers are affiliated with—the Key Laboratory of Animal Epidemiology and Zoonosis, the Chinese National Influenza Center, and the Center for Influenza Research and Early-Warning—provide some indication of how seriously China has been taking the risk of the newly evolved influenza strain.
For seven years, these centers supported the researchers as they did something that makes whatever you did for your thesis research seem pleasant: taking nasal swabs from pigs. Nearly 30,000 of these swabs came from random pigs showing up at slaughterhouses, plus another 1,000 from pigs brought in to veterinary practices with respiratory problems. Why pigs? Well, for one, some historic pandemics, named for their species of origin, are called swine flu. And there's a reason for this: pigs are known to be infected by influenza viruses native to other pigs, to birds, and to us humans—who they often find themselves in close proximity to.
When Charter proposed its $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler brought in net neutrality advocate Marvin Ammori to help hammer out conditions that wound up actually being semi-meaningful, a rarity in the telecom space. Under the deal, Charter was banned from imposing usage caps, engaging in interconnection shenanigans with content providers like Netflix, or violating net neutrality (even if the rules themselves were killed) for a period of seven years. Charter was also required to expand broadband to 2 million additional locations.
Granted a lot has happened since those conditions were passed in 2016. That includes the FCC basically folding like wet cardboard under pressure from telecom lobbyists, and not only killing all meaningful net neutrality rules, but gutting its authority over telecom creating massive gaps in basic consumer protections. Obviously feeling unfairly excluded from all the corruption, Charter is now lobbying the FCC to eliminate most of the deal's conditions, claiming that because the streaming video market is just so damn competitive, the conditions have proven themselves unnecessary:
"[I]n the years since the Conditions were imposed, [online video distributors] are even more numerous, more popular, and more formidable today than they were in 2016," states the petition. " Seemingly insatiable consumer demand for content only bolsters their already strong interconnection negotiating positions."
But that misrepresents why those conditions were imposed in the first place: Charter's monopoly over broadband, not video. The restrictions on usage caps, which were to expire in 2023, were imposed because with no competitors for users to flee too, it's very easy to start abusing usage caps to hamper streaming competitors, which is what AT&T is already doing. If you use AT&T's broadband service, AT&T's streaming video service doesn't count against your cap, but using Netflix or a competing streaming platform does. Caps aren't technically necessary to manage congestion. They're glorified price hikes.
The other major restriction involved prohibiting Charter from using its power to drive up rates for streaming competitors in interconnection agreements. If you remember back to 2014, Netflix service began mysteriously slowing down for Verizon users. Consumer groups and companies like Netflix and Layer3 said Verizon was intentionally letting its peering points with partners get congested to force Netflix to pay higher rates simply to connect to the incumbent ISP network. This kind of anti-competitive gamesmanship was also prohibited for a reason, and has nothing to do with how competitive the streaming sector was.
With net neutrality dead, Charter now finds itself in a position where it has to adhere to standards its competitors don't, so it's understandable (from their end of the equation) why it's asking they be lifted. The problem is that none of the underlying justifications for those conditions have changed. In fact they've gotten worse as Charter secures a bigger monopoly over broadband as its telco competitors flee the fixed-line residential broadband market in many areas. Ideally you'd fix this problem with pro-competition policies instead of merger conditions or net neutrality rules, but the US has never had the political courage for such an effort.
The original rules included a provision requested by the FCC that lets them lobby to end the rules two years early, so that's what they're doing. The problem here is that Charter has been so terrible at adhering to many of the conditions, it almost resulted in the company getting kicked out of New York State for lying to regulators, something I'd never seen happen in 20 years of watching the sector. So it's not exactly like Charter should be given a break for good behavior, because its behavior has largely been terrible. The FCC probably will anyway, inevitably leading to higher bills for Charter Spectrum users.
It's another reason why instead of imposing conditions that are either ineffective, watered down, or simply ignored, it makes sense to block these kinds of industry-consolidating deals from the start. Something the Obama administration was urged to do, but ignored. Mindless consolidation has never served the telecom sector well, and you'd be hard pressed to find a single major telecom merger in the last 20 years that delivered even a fraction of its promised "synergies." Or for that matter, regulators from either party who've done a good job holding these companies to their promises years after the fact.
Enlarge / This picture taken on April 5, 2019, shows nurses waiting for patients at the Rockland County Health Department in Haverstraw, Rockland County, New York, amid a measles outbreak. (credit: Getty | JOHANNES EISELE )
Test, isolate, trace, quarantine: these are the bedrock public health measures proven effective at stamping out an infectious disease before it flares to the point where the only option left is to foist draconian lockdowns on whole populations.
The World Health Organization and public health experts have uttered and re-uttered the strategy ad nauseam since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in January. And health officials in many places followed the advice, quickly testing those at risk, isolating those infected, tracing people with whom patients had contact, and quarantining anyone exposed. It’s a strategy that requires leadership and resources but also public cooperation and commitment from everyone to do their part to defeat a common viral enemy for the greater good. With all of that, the strategy works. The places that followed the advice and largely stood together—Hong Kong and South Korea, for instance—are among those that have been the most successful at containing the devastating new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
The United States, meanwhile, did not take the advice, and the virus has spread widely, triggering lockdowns and now re-lockdowns. So far, the US has recorded over 2.7 million cases and more than 128,000 deaths—and counting. The country has more than 25 percent of the cases globally, while only having around 4 percent of the world’s population. Still, the lesson has not sunk in.
Left to right, Shay Rudolph, Momona Tamada, Malia Baker, and Sophie Grace as the Baby-Sitters Club. | Netflix
The 213-volume series was built on the pleasures of repetition. Netflix’s new TV series will continue its legacy.
I was raised by the Baby-Sitters Club. And if you were a girl growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, you probably were too.
The Baby-Sitters Club, Ann M. Martin’s book series about a group of middle-school girls who leverage their child care capabilities into their own small business, was foundational for a generation. From 1986 to 2000, Martin and a small army of ghostwriters wrote 213 volumes (131 in the main series and the other 82 in spinoffs), with 176 million copies printed.
Ostensibly the books were for kids ages 9 to 12, but I read them when I was much younger, and so did most of my friends. Young children are voracious consumers, and for much of the series run, the Baby-Sitters industrial complex was putting out one book every month. They were like comic books, only about children taking care of younger children instead of fighting supervillains. (They did occasionally solve mysteries, though; mostly in the Mysteries and Super Mysteries spinoff series.)
And now, a new generation is meeting the babysitters. On July 3, Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club premieres. It’s a triumph of a TV show, faithful to the books in characters and spirit and style, but updated for a new generation. The new babysitters have smartphones (but still use a retro landline for official club business), and a social media campaign (but they still hand out flyers to better access their target clientele of worried parents). But what’s best about Netflix’s version of The Baby-Sitters Club is that it breathes out the old-fashioned warmth and charm the books had at their very best.
That charm wasn’t necessary for a faithful adaptation; the Baby-Sitters Club books were often not at their very best, and generally were not particularly charming or particularly warm. They were churned out in a factory, and it showed.
But the books didn’t actually need to be warm and charming or objectively well-written to do their job. That’s not why they existed. That’s not why they were beloved by a generation. They existed to give their young readers a safe, secure, and unchanging space. And to do as much, they needed to be just a little bit terrible.
In early volumes, Kristy Thomas is as compelling and complex as Ramona Quimby. That complexity fades rapidly, and that’s okay.
Kailey Schwerman/Netflix
Early Kristy is the kind of brash and bold little girl children’s literature can’t get enough of. Here, she’s played by Sophie Grace.
The saga of the babysitters begins with 1986’s Kristy’s Great Idea, in which 12-year-old Kristy — the bossiest of the babysitters and hence their de facto leader — is inspired to begin the club after witnessing her mother struggle to find a sitter on short notice. Taking note of the number of hassled commuter parents in their small middle-class town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, Kristy recruits her best friends Mary Anne and Claudia, plus the cool new girl Stacey. The goal is to create a club so that busy parents only have to call one number to reach a whole passel of responsible, experienced babysitters. Before long, the girls have a business plan and a loyal clientele, and soon they’re raking in the money.
Kristy’s Great Idea is actually a good book, by which I mean that you can read it as an adult and enjoy yourself. Kristy, who builds her first small business at the age of 12 and is completely successful at it, is one of those brash and bold little girls that children’s literature is full of, a close cousin of both Ramona Quimby and Harriet the spy. And she’s a natural story engine: She’s so brimming with ambition and plans that you can’t help but likeher, but she’s so abrasive and bossy to her friends that you can’t blame them when tension arises within the group that will need to be sorted out.
It’s immensely pleasurable to watch Kristy’s determination and drive push her into a bad situation, and then to watch her use that same determination and drive — and the power of friendship! — to make her way out of it.
And the interpersonal tensions between the girls are, at these early stages, beautifully drawn. Kristy and Mary Anne are both plainly still kids, and while they’re responsible enough to take care of smaller children, by and large they dress and behave like kids. Claudia and Stacey, meanwhile, are aspiring toward teendom. They’ve developed new fascinations with clothes and makeup and boys. Kristy and Mary Anne feel left behind and rejected; Claudia and Stacey feel awkward and uncomfortable about hanging out with girls less cool than they are. They all care about each other and enjoy each other’s company regardless. It’s the kind of friend group fracture that emerges all the time around age 12, and reading along as the babysitters navigate it is wildly compelling.
But there’s a steep downhill drop in quality after that first book, perhaps because Martin began releasing new volumes with increasing speed. And after the first 35 novels, when Martin took a step back and the ghostwriters arrived, the quality of the books rapidly deteriorated. They lost their specificity of voice and the distinctive energy that drove Kristy’s Great Idea forward.
Plot developments stopped mattering from one book to another. Under Martin’s auspices the girls aged from 12 to 13 and moved forward from the seventh to the eighth grade, but as ghostwriters took over, the members of the Baby-Sitters Club became stuck in time and stopped progressing. However many summertime beach vacations they would serve as mother’s helpers on, when school came back in the fall, they would always find themselves starting eighth grade all over again. (Except Claudia, who got moved back a year to seventh grade in volume 101, 1996’s Claudia Kishi, Middle School Dropout.)
But these quality considerations don’t matter so much when you’re a small child plowing your way through the series, not when you have the pleasures of formula to look forward to. Children love repetition, and the Baby-Sitters Club books repeat exquisitely.
The Baby-Sitters Club books were built on formula. That’s what made them fun to read.
Kailey Schwerman/Netflix
Left to right, Shay Rudolph, Momona Tamada, Sophie Grace, and Malia Baker. Note the killer pattern combination on Claudia (Tamada).
The formula of each Baby-Sitters Club book is simple. And all 131 volumes of the central series repeated it exactly.
In chapter one, we meet our narrator for the book. (Each book is narrated by a different babysitter in the first person.) She describes her own appearance and personality, and then she lays out her central conflict for the book: Perhaps Stacey is too interested in boys and is losing track of what really matters, or Claudia is having a hard time focusing on her schoolwork when she’s so much more invested in her art and her babysitting.
In chapter two, the narrator attends a Baby-Sitters Club meeting in Claudia’s bedroom, because Claudia has her own telephone line and also is prone to stashing junk food in secret hiding places. There the narrator looks around at her friends, and one by one she describes their clothing, their two central personality traits, and where they fit in the club’s interpersonal network.
Always this section will include a lengthy description of Claudia’s truly astonishing wardrobe, because Claudia’s defining personality trait is that she is artistic and loves clothes. Her outfit descriptions are always the most playful and creative passages of each book, which is probably why they have become the most enduring legacy of the series and there are multipleblogsandInstagrams devoted to Claudia’s sense of fashion. Personally, I will never forget the time she decided to dress up as Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus to go to school because she had a big science test coming up and she thought dressing as Ms. Frizzle would inspire her.
I am reading Kristy’s Great Idea to prep for the new Netflix Baby-Sitter’s Club and can we all take a second to appreciate the very first Claudia Kishi outfit? Truly a legend pic.twitter.com/1k8scCEsOp
From there, the book proceeds through a few episodic babysitting jobs, while the current narrator handles her own interpersonal and/or family issues. By the end of the book, the whole thing will have been resolved, with the help and unfailing support of the Baby-Sitters Club.
For a child reader, this repeated formula is the next best thing to hearing your favorite song on a loop until you’re so tired of it that it’s physically painful to hear it again. There’s a sense of deep comfort, an almost voluptuous feeling of security, that comes in knowing exactly what will happen from one book to the next. It’s pleasurable in the same way that having old episodes of Friends on in the background is pleasurable. You’re hanging out with your friends, watching them do exactly the same thing they always do. How wonderful.
And you also have the pleasure of self-identification. Each babysitter has approximately two personality traits, which is exactly as many as you need to figure out which one you identify with most, like a proto-Sex and the City sorting: Kristy is bossy and tomboyish, while Stacey is a trendy New Yorker and also diabetic. I myself (bookish and shy) figured myself for a Mary Anne as soon as I cracked open my first book. But when Martin promoted 11-year-old Mallory Pike, who is also bookish and shy, into the ranks of the club, I had a minor existential crisis. Which one was I? As an adult, I can see that both Mary Anne and Mallory are the weakest characters in the series, but, ah, I was young.
The Baby-Sitters Club taught a generation of kids how to be human beings. There are pluses and minuses to that.
Kailey Schwerman/Netflix
Netflix’s updated Dawn might not change herself for a boy, but she definitely still drinks green juice. Here, she’s played by Xochitl Gomez.
One of the reasons The Baby-Sitters Club is so precious to so many people is that we read the book series when we were very young children, and it became our guide to developing into fully socialized human beings. The Baby-Sitters Club taught us to dream big, to work hard, to fulfill our responsibilities, and to support our friends. And it taught us less wholesome things, too.
I learned about femininity from The Baby-Sitters Club. Specifically, I learned one of the rules of femininity of the ’90s: You had to be beautiful, but it was not cool to be someone who cared about beauty. You had to look perfect, but you should never ever put in any work to get there.
That message was embedded in a fair amount of pop culture of the ’90s. The 1999 movie 10 Things I Hate About You pointedly showed us Julia Stiles’s Kat washing her face in a contrast to her sister Bianca’s primping and preening, with the implication being that cool girls didn’t obsess over their grooming like Bianca did. They washed their faces and called it a day. But you can only really get away with that attitude if you look like young Julia Stiles did in 10 Things I Hate About You, and in real life, that’s a look that takes some grooming.
Volume 50 of The Baby-Sitters Club, which came out in 1992, is called Dawn’s Big Date. It features Dawn, who joined the Baby-Sitters Club in book 5 (personality traits: from California, hippie), giving herself a makeover so that she can attract a boy she likes. She also revamps her personality so that she’ll seem more cool, acting dumb in math class because she thinks cool kids don’t do well in school. The other babysitters are appalled and outraged at her behavior, and in the end, it turns out that Dawn didn’t need to do any of the things she did because the boy liked her just the way she was. So Dawn ditches her makeup and curlers and reverts back to her old smart and responsible hippie self.
The ostensible message of the story is that you should always be true to yourself, you should never sell yourself short for a boy, and if he’s worth your time he’ll like you just the way you are. But when I read it as a 7- or 8-year-old girl, I remember feeling a vicious contempt for Dawn, a contempt so ferocious it slanted toward hatred. How dare she not know the rules of the story in which she was living? How dare she want something so much that she tried to bend the fabric of reality around it, when everyone knows girls shouldn’t express a desire for anything? How dare she put any work at all into her appearance, especially when — as the cover art for Dawn’s Big Date clearly showed me — she already looked perfect?
I thought it was good and right that Dawn should be punished for her sins through the disapproval of her friends. I found it cathartic. And I knew, although I could never have put it into words at the time, that what she was being punished for wasn’t rejecting her true self. It was that she had let everyone see her put in the work toward building the self she wanted.
The Baby-Sitters Club continued for so long you had time to get sick of it. That’s kind of beautiful.
Marianne Barcellona/LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
Ann M. Martin surrounded by her official fan club at PS 2 in Chinatown in New York City.
The Baby-Sitters Club is the first cultural work to which I can remember having an aesthetic reaction. By this I mean that the first book to ever prompt in me the thought, “Huh, I don’t think this is very good, and I’m pretty sure the fault lies in it and not with me,” was a Baby-Sitters Club book.
Which volume it was, exactly, is lost to the mists of time, but it must certainly have been in the upper reaches of the central series, around the ’80s or ’90s. I stuck with The Baby-Sitters Club regardless into the 100s out of a sense of duty and a completist ethic, but around volume 109 (1997’s Mary Anne to the Rescue — it was one of the one’s about Mary Anne’s boyfriend Logan, and I could never take Logan books), I was overcome with a sense of despair.
I could not, I absolutely would not, keep reading, no matter how long Martin wanted to extend the series. I could not bear to do it. I had listened to the song so many times in a row that just hearing it caused me pain.
Today, more than 20 years later, I think there’s something a bit beautiful about getting to reach that point in a series, the point where you stop reading not because there’s nothing left to read but because you have satiated yourself. Because The Baby-Sitters Club was that rare creature: a series that went on so long that you could outgrow it in real time. It is foundational, and part of what makes it so foundational is that you can depend on it enough to feel secure when you leave it.
Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club is by and large better crafted than the books were. It doesn’t feel as though it’s being churned out by an assembly line on that bruising one-book-a-monthpace. It feels as though it’s been crafted by a team who cares about quality.
It also feels like a show aimed at both nostalgic millennials and their young children. And because it is a show that young children are going to watch, it is also undoubtedly going to be a show from which younger viewers pick up confused and mangled lessons that no one quite realizes the show is teaching them.
The test of whether the TV show will be as enduring and foundational as its source material is not just whether or not it is well-crafted television. It’s whether or not it will grow into such an institution that the children who watch it now will be able to walk away from it when they’re finished with it, secure in the knowledge that it will always be there, as stable and unchanging as that chapter two formula.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Claudia was dyslexic. She was not.
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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
A day after FedEx publicly requested that Washington’s NFL team change its name (which is a racial slur), the team has announced that it is launching a “thorough review” of the controversial moniker. According to an anonymous source quoted in the Washington Post who is said to be familiar with the situation, the process “will […]
FedEx, which has a close relationship with Washington’s NFL team, is calling on owner Daniel Snyder to change the name. The team’s stadium, in Landover, is named FedEx Field, which the company paid $205 million for in a 1999 deal that expires five years from now. FedEx’s chairman, CEO, and president, Frederick Smith, is a […]
Despite a disturbing spike in coronavirus cases in Texas and nationwide last month, tubers took to Texas’s Comal River in New Braunfels on June 25. Officials are now blaming young people and their failure to socially distance this summer for the increases. Texas and other states have since begun to reverse or pause reopening. | AP
Turbulent reopenings and partisan mask wars have only highlighted the nation’s preoccupation with personal liberty above all — even a deadly pandemic.
For months, it’s been clear that the world has separated into two camps: the rule followers, observant of social distancing and hopeful of quashing the pandemic; and the risk takers, who have been storming the nation’s beaches, bars, and burger joints in spite of the coronavirus — and public health efforts to curtail its spread.
Some states, such as New York, have contained new cases, but others, including Texas and Arizona, brazenly reopened even as cases continued to rise,unleashing a torrent of pent-up partiers. Now, even as an illusion of normalcy has slowly returned, rates of infection are reaching new records, with cases surging in dozens of states.
The US is “going in the wrong direction,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and frequent face of the Trump administration’s virus response, warned senators recently.
In March, the new virus pushed dozens of countries to implement strict isolation methods to prevent a global health crisis. In China, coronavirus measures were hard to evade, as authorities sealed apartment buildings and scanned millions for rising body temperatures. But in the United States, these restrictions have been harder to devise and enforce, mostly because democratic norms and a strong sense of individual liberty prevail. So, instead, the crisis has exposed humanity’s tendency to flout the rules.
Masks — although recommended by federal and world health officials as effective in slowing the virus’s spread — have become a polarizing symbol of this dangerous phenomenon. In recent weeks, protesters have descended on government buildings and private businesses to decry face-covering requirements, calling them “muzzles” and “communist.” In one viral video, a maskless Florida man shoved a Walmart employee who tried to enforce the store’s face-covering policy. In another, a woman at a California Trader Joe’s screamed at employees and customers after others in the store criticized her for shopping without a mask. Some scofflaws have taken to brandishing sham cards from a phony “Freedom to Breathe Agency” that purportedly exempt them from mask-wearing.
Adding fuel to this fire, officials say, are the multitudes of young people determined to socialize. Some have tried to pin the problem on the Black Lives Matter protests that have continued for weeks, but preliminary research using geolocation data suggests these events had no impact on the virus’s spread. Instead, public health experts are attributing the surge in new cases to the mask-free masses flocking to reopened restaurants and bars, pool parties and lazy rivers.
“They’re conducting themselves like it’s pre-Covid, and that’s not going to work anymore,” Bruce Dart, director of the Tulsa Health Department, told the Washington Post. Younger people, he said, are“not social distancing, not wearing masks or paying attention to hand-washing.” In one stunning case shortly after Memorial Day, a group of 16 friends all tested positive for the virus after visiting a newly reopened bar in Florida.
In the months since worldwide lockdowns were adopted, there’s been a recurring theme among coronavirus rebels: They do what they want.In the early weeks of the pandemic, people swarmed beaches around the world, from Florida to Bondi Beach in Australia. “If I get corona, I get corona,” one spring breaker told Reuters. “At the end of the day, I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.” (He later apologized, calling his comment “insensitive.”)
Even after quarantines had been instituted, Washington, DC, Metro officials in March had to practically beg riders not to visit the city’s famous cherry blossoms, which they did anyway, in droves. Brits took to crowded pubs to chant “f*** coronavirus!” And one woman went viral when she tweeted about her defiant trip to a crowded Red Robin restaurant. “It was delicious,” she tweeted, “and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”
Even officials are taking smug positions on the public health warnings. “I don’t need his advice anymore,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said of Fauci on Fox News in late June.
Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images
Visitors walk around the Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin on March 21 to see the cherry blossoms, despite social distance warnings and city efforts to dissuade visitors.
The poor reaction of a growing number of people to social distancing and mask policies — even as the virus resurges — comes as no surprise to psychologists, sociologists, and public health experts. No one alive today has experience with a pandemic of this severity, catching even the most experienced researchers off-guard, not to mention the average person sorting through their Facebook feed. Conflicting government messaging and reopenings of restaurants, bars, hair salons, and gyms in many states have only exacerbated the wildly divergent individual responses, and reliance on personal responsibility in public health matters.
It’s created fertile ground for the public to practice the long-held wisdom that we must “carry on” in a crisis: For at least a century, citizens have believed that in the midst of a disaster, their job is to go on with their daily lives as best they can — as if it were a safeguard against an unseen enemy.
“We feel like we have to do something,” said Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University and author of Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats. But without a good frame of reference for the present crisis, we’ve looked to lessons learned from past calamities, including natural disasters, terrorism, war, and economic collapse, to guide us. “We’re a little bit like generals fighting the last war,” he said.
But the old rules no longer apply. The pandemic is unprecedented, said Amy Fairchild, a public health ethicist and the dean of Ohio State University’s College of Public Health. “In this moment in time, ‘carry on’ could be a formula for disaster.”
When the coronavirus first arrived in the United States, people cast about for comparisons. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” President Trump tweeted on March 9. “It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
Experts including Fauci debunked the comparison. “The flu has a mortality of 0.1%,” he told Congress on March 11. “This has a mortality rate of 10 times that.” But the analogy — intended to make an extraordinary threat look like ordinary — persists.
In reality, the coronavirus has no clear analogue. “The normal mechanisms we’re using to predict things don’t work,” said Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London who studies human motivation. “Actually, nothing else that has happened before in our lifetimes is relevant or helpful here.”
Many contemporary disaster mantras emerged in past wars, and they often contained a kernel of a consumerist message. At the outset of World War I, British politicians such as Winston Churchill encouraged “business as usual,” suggesting that both companies and citizens should continue to behave just as they did in peacetime. But the status quo eventually gave way to a coordinated defense effort when the state realized it would need to control manufacturing, trade, and commerce to win the war.
Twenty years later, in World War II, the British government coined “Keep Calm and Carry On” to boost morale in anticipation of a Nazi invasion. But it quickly pulped the test posters; other campaigns about courage in a crisis provoked public outcry as many people found the messages tone-deaf. After half a century, however, the phrase was exhumed — in part as a message to those weathering the Great Recession.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
The Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto bears the famous British wartime poster reading “Keep Calm and Carry On” on March 17.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
An electronic ad from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a Washington, DC, subway station on March 14. The “Keep Calm” message, discarded during WWII, became newly popular in the Great Recession.
In times of crisis, Americans have borrowed English idioms, and coined a few of their own homespun mottos for personal and economic perseverance. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made an enemy of an emotion, telling the public, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush gave this famed aphorism a consumerist spin when he told airline employees, “When [the terrorists] struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It’s to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”
“Get down to Disney World” was probably never meant to apply to the people who actually traveled to the Magic Kingdom in Marchamid public health warnings to avoid crowds. (Disney eventually closed its theme parks to visitors, though some reopenings are imminent.)But that didn’tstop some politicians from applying this logic to the coronavirus. In a White House press briefing, President Trump said, “America will again and be soon open for business,” and later suggested relaxing guidelines by Easter. That jingoistic outlook quickly dissipated as the virus seemed to metastasize, killing more than 120,000 Americans and requiring social distancing to continue for months.
And Americans haven’t been the best socially distant citizens: Memorial Day weekend festivities served as a new catalyst for the spread of the virus, and many officials are desperate to reinstate or expand social distancing policies before the Fourth of July. At the Lake of the Ozarks, for example, a raucous pool party was later linked to multiple coronavirus infections. Alabama students reportedly threw parties attended by infected students that one local lawmaker has alleged were “Covid parties,” aimed at intentionally getting others sick.
“It’s almost like we don’t want the virus to win, so we’re going to go out drinking, go to parties, go out to the beach,” Wuthnow said. But these are risky responses when the enemy is not a person or a bad year for the stock market, but a virus — one that can be transmitted asymptomatically.
“It’s almost like we don’t want the virus to win, so we’re going to go out drinking, go to parties, go out to the beach”
Humans are generally terrible at assessing risk. But it’s proven especially true in the case of the coronavirus. “It’s about our risk to others, and that might make it a little more difficult to understand,” said Cynthia Rohrbeck, an associate professor in clinical and community psychology at George Washington University. People are used to talking with their doctors about their personal health, but taking responsibility for the health of others comes up only infrequently, often in public discourse around smoking, drinking and driving, and getting vaccinated.
Our judgment could be clouded by optimism bias, the tendency to believe you are less likely than others to experience something negative. In late February, researchers polled 4,348 people in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland and found half of them believed they were less likely to get the coronavirus than others, sans real evidence. Another poll, conducted in mid-March on more than 800 people from the US, the United Kingdom, and Germany, suggested this optimism was bolstered by people’s belief that they had fewer human interactions than their peers, making their risk of contracting the virus inherently lower.
When countries finally began to roll out isolation measures, they encountered additional obstacles. “One of the most important things for people is to have a sense that they are in control of their own life, that they have agency,” Sharot said. In a paper in The Lancet, researchers reviewed 24 past publications on the psychological effects of quarantine and found it can cause post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger.
But the desire for agency can have an ideological component, too. In China, the authoritarian government has wide latitude to control the behavior of its citizens. But in the United States, few Americans have experienced government-imposed restrictions on when they can go out and whom they can see.
Many politicians criticized the rules as an infringement on people’s freedom, not to mention a disaster for the economy. In March, Arizona state Rep. Anthony Kern (R) and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) both tweeted (and deleted) defiant photos from crowded restaurants. “We can’t all just shut ourselves and stay home,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The economy has to move forward.”And even the president has refused to be photographed wearing a mask, underscoring the way protective face coverings have become a partisan lightning rod. Now, as states are seeing terrifying spikes in their coronavirus cases, some are reinstating the social distancing strategies they just rolled back.
“Me, personally, I just refuse to live my life in fear,” Katie Williams, the 30-year-old Las Vegas resident who went viral for her Red Robin tweet, told Vox in March. “As Americans, we typically do what we want. It’s kind of that attitude we’ve always had,” she added. “I think if we’re going to start pressuring people that they have to stay home, or publicly shaming them like pariahs, I think we’re just starting to lose a little bit of our sense of country and our sense of rights.”
I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I'm 30.
It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I'll do what I want.
Fairchild, the public health ethicist, said she understands these concerns. But there are other rights to consider. “As an individual, I have a right not to be infected by somebody who is not paying attention,” she said.
Jenny Evans/Getty Images
Frolicking crowds at Australia’s Bondi Beach on March 20 amid coronavirus concerns garnered international news coverage, and led the government to close it and similar beaches.
People may bristle at being told what to do — especially whenAmerican coronavirus quarantine strategies look superficially similar to those used by authoritarian nations such as China or Singapore. But Susan Michie, a health psychologist and the director of the Center for Behavior Change at the University College London, saw it another way: “We elect people to [make] decisions at a national level to look after ourselves. That’s not authoritarianism; that’s democracy.”
And officials are largely dependent on the public’s compliance in a crisis. “This is not something we are doing because we are the fun police,” an Australian official said in a press conference as he implored people to stay home in March. “This is about saving lives.” To convince people to cooperate, Michie said, politicians need to continue tocommunicate a clear sense of urgency, while providing support for everyone who is forced indoors. “We’re interconnected,” she said, and the coronavirus proves it.
Eleanor Cummins reports on the intersection of science and popular culture. She’s a former assistant editor at Popular Science and writes a newsletter about death. She previously wrote about the “death-positive generation” for The Highlight.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
Breonna Taylor in an undated family photo. She was fatally shot in her apartment by Louisville police on March 13. | Justice for Breonna
Demands for justice are widespread and only continue to grow.
It has been more than 100 days since Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own homeinLouisville, Kentucky. Thousands of protesters have chanted her name across the country, demanding justice for the EMT, who would have turned 27 on June 5.
As the country is reckoning with its history of racist police violence, many advocates want to know why charges still haven’t been filed against the officers who shot her dead. Meanwhile, those who want to abolish the carceral state are rethinking what justice in the Taylor case should actually look like.
Most advocates agree that another Black woman is dead because of a lack of police accountability — and something needs to change.
On March 13, three officers with a no-knock warrant entered Taylor’s apartment looking for two people suspected of selling drugs, neither of whom was Taylor. The officers fired more than 20 rounds into the apartment, hitting Taylor at least eight times.
After months of investigation, the Louisville Police Department (LMPD) fired officer Brett Hankison on June 23; the other two officers remain on administrative assignment. A special Kentucky prosecutor is leading an investigation into both the shooting and the department’s handling of the shooting to determine whether to charge the three officers who fired their weapons; the FBI is leading its own investigation. On June 29, the Louisville Metro Council also announced a resolution to investigate the actions of Mayor Greg Fischer and his administration surrounding Taylor’s death. The council hopes to create greater transparency around who made what decisions in the Taylor case, according to a news release.
Taylor’s deathtook place amid a slate of high-profile killings of unarmed Black people — it was just three weeks after Ahmaud Arbery was killed by white vigilantes while jogging and about 10 weeks before the fatal arrest of George Floyd. The suspects involved in Arbery’s case were arrested and charged two weeks after video of the incident went viral. The four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd were fired four days after Floyd’s death, with the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck charged with murder.
By contrast, not much has happened in Taylor’s case.
In the meantime, Taylor’s family, alleging excessive force and gross negligence in her death, filed a lawsuit on April 27 against the officers involved in the shooting. In a court filing submitted on July 5, the family alleges that Taylor received no emergency medical aid as she lay dying. The document also claims that the raid on Taylor’s apartment was part of the mayor’s scheme to clear out a block in the neighborhood for redevelopment.
“I want justice for her,” Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, told the 19th in May. “I want them to say her name. There’s no reason Breonna should be dead at all.”
Police came looking for a drug suspect. Breonna Taylor ended up dead instead.
On the night of March 13, Louisville police had a warrant to enter Taylor’s apartment because they believed that a suspect in a narcotics investigation was storing drugs or money or receiving packages at her home, according to USA Today.
However, according to the suit filed by Taylor’s family, the man police were searching for, Jamarcus Glover, did not live in her apartment complex and had already been detained by the time officers showed up. Taylor had dated Glover two years ago, according to a family attorney, and did not maintain an active friendship with him.
Police said that the three officers knocked on the door to announce themselves. But multiple neighbors say the officers neither knocked nor identified themselves, according to the family’s lawsuit. It was later uncovered that the police had been granted a no-knock warrant by a judge, which allowed them to enter Taylor’s apartment without announcing themselves. They also weren’t wearing body cams.
When police arrived, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, 27, says he woke up and believed someone was trying to break into the apartment. There was banging on the door, he says, but police never announced themselves. He reached for his licensed handgun after he and Taylor asked who it was and got no response, NBC reported. He fired one shot, hitting an officer in the leg.
Police then fired more than 20 rounds into the apartment. Taylor died at the scene. Walker was arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer and aggravated assault.
Police found no drugs in the apartment, and both Taylor and Walker have no criminal history.
On June 11, police released an incident report for the night Taylor was killed, but it was largely blank. Though Taylor was fatally shot, the four-page report listed her injuries as “none.” The report also stated there was no forced entry, though witnesses say the police used a battering ram to enter the apartment, according to CBS News.
The Taylor family’s 31-page July 5 court filing adds two new (and since contested) allegations to the narrative: that Taylor received no medical aid as she lay dying and that the nighttime raid was part of Mayor Fischer’s plan to redevelop a city block in western Louisville.
Taylor’s family said there is no evidence that suggests that Taylor was given medical attention in the six minutes between when she was shot and when she died. However, the coroner who performed Taylor’s autopsy said that her injuries from the shooting were so extreme that she would’ve died in “less than a minute” and that the recorded time of death on the report is “an estimate.”
The family’s filing also alleges that police went after Glover because of political pressure from the mayor’s office due to a redevelopment project valued at more than $30 million, according to the New York Times. Glover was reportedly using a row of abandoned houses to sell drugs in the area that needed to be cleared for development.
“People needed to be removed and homes needed to be vacated so that a high-dollar, legacy-creating real estate development could move forward,” attorneys for the family wrote in the court filing. The city has called the allegations “outrageous.”
Meanwhile, it came to light that the officer who shot Taylor, Hankison, had a history of misconduct allegations. He was already facing an ongoing federal lawsuit at the time of Taylor’s death in which Kendrick Wilson accused Hankison of “harassing suspects with unnecessary arrests and planting drugs on them,” according to USA Today. Wilson alleges that Hankison targeted him and arrested him three times in a two-year period.
After Taylor’s death, claims of sexual assault surfaced, too, with at least two women coming forward in early June to allege that Hankison assaulted them. In both allegations, which are similar to one another, Hankison offered the women rides home after they had been drinking at local bars. In one case, Hankison allegedly followed the woman into her home and assaulted her while she was unconscious. In the other case, Hankison reportedly made sexual advances toward the woman while she sat in his unmarked car, including rubbing her thighs and kissing her face.
On June 23, he was fired. LMPD posted Hankison’s termination letter on Twitter, which stated Hankison “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life when you wantonly and blindly fired ten (10) rounds into the apartment of Breonna Taylor…” The letter also stated Hankison violated the department’s protocol on use of deadly force when he shot through a patio door and window that was covered. This prevented him from determining whether there was an immediate threat or innocent people present; some of the bullets even traveled to a neighbor’s apartment where three people were endangered, according to the letter. Hankison has appealed his termination.
The other two officers who fired rounds that night, John Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, remain on the force and have been placed on administrative reassignment. The case is still under independent investigation with Kentucky’s Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, who has said he will not provide additional details or a timeline for the investigation.
Protests are ongoing, and calls for justice in the investigation continue
In May, Benjamin Crump, the Taylor family’s attorney, argued that the killings of Black women have tended to receive less media attention than the deaths of Black men.
“They’re killing our sisters just like they’re killing our brothers, but for whatever reason, we have not given our sisters the same attention that we have given to Trayvon Martin,Michael Brown, Stephon Clark, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald,” he told the 19th. “Breonna’s name should be known by everybody in America who said those other names, because she was in her own home, doing absolutely nothing wrong.”
Protests where the crowds chant, “Say her name, Breonna Taylor,” have attempted to reverse the lack of attention.In 2015, activists around the country demonstrated and used the hashtag #SayHerName to draw attention to women who had lost their lives, including Gabriella Nevarez, Michelle Cusseaux, and Alexia Christian, as Jenée Desmond-Harris reported for Vox at the time. The death of Sandra Bland in jail after she was arrested during a traffic stop also drew national attention to the impact of police brutality and racism on Black women’s lives.
Around the country, activists organized marches and signed petitions on Taylor’s June 5 birthday, saying she should’ve been alive to see the day. In Louisville, protesters have gathered in Breonna Taylor’s name to protest police brutality in a number of demonstrations since May. After a protest-imposed curfew onMay 31, law enforcement shot and killed David McAtee, 53, a local restaurant owner. Following his death, Louisville Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired, though it is still unclear exactly who shot McAtee, Vox’s Anna North reported.
While there have been other changes in the police department since Taylor’s death — on June 11 the Louisville Metro Council voted unanimously to ban no-knock warrants — advocates, activists, and celebrities are asking why the three officers involved in Taylor’s killing haven’t been arrested. On June 14, Beyoncé wrote an open letter to Kentucky’s attorney general, demanding that criminal charges be brought against the three officers to “show the value of a Black woman’s life.” She also asked that the office bring greater transparency to the investigation.
At a June 18 press conference, Cameron — the first Black attorney general in Kentucky and a former legal counsel for Sen. Mitch McConnell — emphasized that the investigation is ongoing, without giving any specific details.
“To all those involved in this case, you have my commitment that our office is undertaking a thorough and fair investigation,” he said. “This is also a commitment that I’m making to the Louisville community, which has suffered tremendously in the days since March 13.”
Cameron was also the first Republican attorney general elected in the state, according to the New York Times, on a platform that backed Trump and some of the president’s signature efforts, like building a border wall.He has criticized some of protesters’ demands, including the call to defund the police.
“Radical rhetoric and calls to ‘defund the police’ threaten public safety and only serve to divide us further, rather than bringing us together,” he said in a press release on June 24.
Wake Forest Law professor Ronald Wright,who specializes in the work of criminal prosecutors,told Vox that Cameron’s comments regarding defunding the police are worth watching because they are relevant to how Cameron handles the case. “If he starts to sound like an advocate for law enforcement, voicing broad support for police officers and defending them in general terms, that would make me wonder if he can evaluate charges fairly in this case,” Wright said. “It is tough to convince the public that you will hold the police accountable for their wrongdoing if you never find anything to criticize in their work.”
Why there haven’t been arrests in the case so far
Wright told Vox in May that in officer-involved shooting cases like Taylor’s, the length of time the prosecutor takes to bring forth charges should not necessarily be the issue. Rather, people should question and examine what the prosecutor does during their investigation.
“I don’t really fault prosecutors for taking their time, gathering the facts, being thorough. The timing doesn’t really bother me as much as the amount of effort. If what you’re doing is you’re not doing anything and you’re stalling, and you don’t really intend to press the case as hard as you would press any shooting in your district, then that’s a problem,” Wright told Vox.
Since these cases are especially difficult to win at trial, Wright pointed out, prosecutors must take the time to build a really strong case. “The delay could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether they are putting in the effort into building a great case,” he said.
In the high-profile Baltimore police custody death of Freddie Gray, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby arrested the three officers involved just days after Gray’s death and charged them with offenses including second-degree “depraved heart” murder and manslaughter. All three officers in the case were acquitted. “It may have been that it would have been better to go a little slower and get more evidence for charges after some delay,” Wright told Vox.
Many advocates, however, point to the speed at which arrests came in the Arbery and Floyd cases —and the fact that years-long delays in Eric Garner’s case still didn’t lead to justice.Garner died in July 2014 after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a banned chokehold. One day before the five-year anniversary of Garner’s death in July 2019, federal prosecutors announced they would not bring charges against Pantaleo. The NYPD fired Pantaleo in August 2019, more than five years after Garner’s death.
And in the three cases above there were videos of the incidents. Wright said that even with footage, cases against police officers are difficult to prosecute. Videos do represent extra proof — a form of evidence Taylor’s case lacks.
The influence of police unions, which have come under criticism from activists and protesters during the unrest, may also contribute to delays. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, police unions have become engrossed in preventing the discipline of officers who kill unarmed Black people:
In local cases, this attitude has translated to a defense of officers who kill or wound innocent civilians. The Louisville Metro Police Department [had first] been limited to just announcing its “intention” to fire Brett Hankison, a detective who shot his gun 10 times during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, rather than actually firing him outright. This limitation is largely because of the city’s contract with the police union, which gives Hankison multiple opportunities to appeal. He is first allowed a “pretermination hearing” with counsel, and then, once terminated, an appeal to the police merit board, of which Hankison himself is a member.
In May, the Louisville police union also demanded an apology from Louisville council member Jessica Green, who called Taylor’s boyfriend a hero after he was charged with shooting Mattingly the night Taylor was killed. “Calling someone that shot an on-duty police officer, in the performance of official duties, a hero is a slap in the face,” said Ryan Nichols, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 614. Green said she would not apologize.
But Wright said that Hankison’s firing does offer a clue to how a criminal case could swing. That the LMPD found that he showed “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “wantonly and blindly” fired 10 rounds into the apartment means there’s a chance for a conviction if a jury were to find the same conclusion. “If a jury in a criminal trial were to reach the same conclusions after hearing the facts, they could properly convict him of a lesser version of homicide,” Wright told Vox.
At the recent press conference,Cameron refused to discuss any potential roadblocks, stating that “an investigation of this magnitude, when done correctly, requires time and patience.” He added, “To those across the country we have heard from with cards, emails, and letters, and calls, who are asking us to complete the investigation as soon as possible — we hear you and we are working around the clock to follow the law to the truth.”
Defunding the Louisville police and its ties to justice for Taylor
Amid a growing call to “defund” or “abolish the police,” there are others advocating for justice who view the calls to arrest officers as taking away from the larger goal of dismantling the system.
According to anti-criminalization organizer Mariame Kaba, director of the anti youth incarceration grassroots organization Project NIA, celebrating charges for officers signals our dependence on a criminal justice system that was created to uphold white supremacy. “To transform a death-making system, our expectations have to be much higher,” she wrote last month in the New York Times. “Celebrating charges is like celebrating bread crumbs. ... I understand why people do it, but I think according great significance to charges misses the point and it also freezes people in place. It has the effect of demobilizing collective action.”
Kaba explained that justice is not just closing down police departments but making them obsolete. “The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers,” she wrote.
But on June 25, the Louisville Metro Council approved a budget that wouldn’t even begin to defund LMPD. The new spending plan will merely “require police to put the money toward recruiting a more diverse force, additional training and exploring co-responder models that could send behavioral health professionals on calls with officers,” according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Funding will also be directed to a civilian review board that will oversee LMPD, following the 24-1 vote. Black Lives Matter demanded that more money be shifted to community services.
On the same day the budget was approved, a crowd of more than 500 demonstrators, including activists, community members, and celebrities, gathered on the steps of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort for a #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor rally, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Activist Tamika Mallory emphasized the need to keep calling for justice and accountability in Taylor’s case. “I’m sure we all understand that Breonna Taylor is everywhere,” she said. “The issue of Black women being killed and our voices being too low is a problem.”
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Despite a disturbing spike in coronavirus cases in Texas and nationwide last month, tubers took to Texas’s Comal River in New Braunfels on June 25. Officials are now blaming young people and their failure to socially distance this summer for the increases. Texas and other states have since begun to reverse or pause reopening. | AP
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Breonna Taylor in an undated family photo. She was fatally shot in her apartment by Louisville police on March 13. | 
