Common Cause, Move On, March for Truth, Progressive Mass, Indivisible MA and other groups will hold a Boston rally for impeachment and removal starting at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday on the Common.
Michelle Goldberg has an eloquent and elegiac essay that says something akin to what I was trying to convey a couple of days ago:
The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”
Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.
After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.
In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.
The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”
I don’t think Joe Biden understands any of this. (Yes yes he’s a million times better than Trump and we will all vote for him and work for him in the general if it comes to that. Let’s hope it doesn’t).
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, agree he’s terrific in the Rivette. Well, if Zac and I ever do a film where we’re interested in working with pro, recognisable actors, he’d be on the list, I think quite possibly. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Ah, too bad about ‘APoaLoF’. I may have mentioned this, but one of the main actors in that film, Adèle Haenel, is the star of the ARTE TV series we’re working on. She’s also increasingly a friend and a terrific person. I don’t know ‘Midnight Family’. Everyone, Today’s Steve-generated review/wisdom regards the film ‘Midnight Family’, and it can be found here. ** Kat, Hey! Intense year, yeah, me too. Wait, so how can I hear your music? How can I find it online? That’s very exciting! Gimme gimme. And very cool about the experimental music/sound event running and sound designing. You’re talking my language there since ‘experimental music/sound’ nails 90% of what I listen to these days. Awesome, such good news all around. Very happy for you, pal! ** Bill, Well, I’m not hugely surprised, it’s true. ‘Opium’ is apparently a legendarily terrible and laughable film. It has pretty much disappeared even here in France. Doable is good. Always best or even imperative to start overly ambitious and then find your backwards to doable. That’s my modus operandi at least. Cool. ** Okay. Today I seem to have decided to give you a vertical bouquet of artificially magical flowers just because I like you. See you tomorrow.
ICE quickly redirected McKinsey toward helping the agency figure out how to execute the White House’s clampdown on illegal immigration.
But the money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE workers uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
McKinsey’s team also looked for ways to accelerate the deportation process, provoking worries among some ICE staff members that the recommendations risked short-circuiting due-process protections for migrants fighting removal from the United States. The consultants, three people who worked on the project said, seemed focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations — actions whose success could be measured in numbers — with little acknowledgment that these policies affected thousands of human beings.
In what one former official described as “heated meetings” with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members questioned whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justified the potential human cost.
Imagine how monstrous you have to be to cause people in Donald Trump’s immigration Gestapo to think your ideas are too cruel to be implemented. Our best and brightest!
Avant-garde New York City musician and composer Arthur Russell, known to many as the mastermind behind Dinosaur L’s simmering underground disco gem “Go Bang,” died in 1992. However, Iowa Dream—which was compiled by Russell’s partner, Tom Lee, and Audika Records’ Steve Knutson—illustrates that his posthumous legacy is in very good hands. The album encompasses unfinished archival work (including some songs featuring contributions from New York musicians such as Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, and Jon Gibson) that was fleshed out and completed with great care by musician Peter Broderick.
Although Iowa Dream covers a lot of sonic ground—tender folk, minimalist chamber-pop, stark piano ballads, offbeat no wave—of particular note is a stunning full version of the rarity “You Did It Yourself,” which here is driven by burbling bass and feathery guitar jangle. Other songs are of a piece with Russell’s forward-thinking dance music (“I Kissed The Girl From Outer Space,” a gentle disco-pop song with corrugated guitars and perforated saxophone blips), and his meticulous orchestral compositions (“Just Regular People”). However, Iowa Dream‘s songs frequently make Russell’s voice a focal point, which illuminates the emotional depth to his songwriting. Throughout the spare “Wonder Boy,” he’s inquisitive and open-hearted; the horn-peppered “Come To Life” is introspective and wistful; and the easygoing, country-tinged heartbreaker “I Never Get Lonesome” finds him wrestling with the disorienting sensation of isolation. Iowa Dream puts forth a compelling argument that Russell is an even bigger influence on modern music—and more strains of modern music—than previously thought.
In the past week, judicial-watchdog groups have raised alarm over the meeting of two Supreme Court Justices, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, with Brian Brown, the head of the anti-L.G.B.T. group National Organization for Marriage. Brown tweeted a picture of himself with the Justices on October 29th, three weeks after the Court heard arguments in what are probably the most consequential L.G.B.T.-rights cases ever to come before the Court—and arguably the biggest cases of the year. (N.O.M. has filed an amicus brief in these cases.)
Two days after Brown’s tweet, the nonpartisan organization Fix the Court published a blog post titled “What Were They Thinking? Justices Again Fail a Basic Ethics Test.” On Wednesday, Aaron Belkin, an activist, academic, and director of the group Take Back the Court, wrote an open letter asking the two Justices to recuse themselves from the case. “Posing for photographs with the president of an advocacy organization that has filed briefs in matters pending before the court makes a mockery of Chief Justice Roberts’ assertion that a judge’s role is to impartially call balls and strikes,” Belkin wrote. “If you refuse to recuse yourselves, this incident will further illustrate the urgent need for structural reform of the Supreme Court in order to restore a Court that understands its role is to protect individual rights and our democracy.”
Take Back the Court, which advocates expanding the Supreme Court, among other things, is a fairly radical organization. But Belkin’s letter actually understates the case, making it sound as though the problem with taking a meeting with Brown is that he believes that L.G.B.T. people are not entitled to protection from employment discrimination, which is what’s at stake in the pending cases. In fact, it’s worse than that. Brown thinks that L.G.B.T. people should not exist. I know this because he told me.
So they’re doing exactly what they were put on the Court to do, then.
Workers might feel more pressure to perform on the job when their boss is watching. A new biometric device is letting warehouse bosses make sure workers feel that pressure around the clock.
The device is a wearable gadget connected to a harness that workers wear over their shoulders. It monitors workers’ every move, tracking exactly how much they’re lifting and how much time they spend standing still. Employers like Walmart, Toyota, and Heineken are already testing the device in warehouses and fulfillment centers, according to Bloomberg.
StrongArm Technologies, a Brooklyn-based tech startup, created the biometric device as a way to improve workplace safety and reduce the cost of claims related to workplace injuries. The device senses when workers bend over too deeply or twist too far to lift an object, vibrating to warn them that their movements are unsafe. Employers can track data on workers who repeat unsafe movements and single them out for further training.
But employers aren’t just using the technology for safety purposes — they’re also using it to monitor worker productivity and, in some cases, even plan how to replace workers with automation. Bloomberg reported that the logistics company Geodis is one company aggregating data from StrongArm devices to gauge workers’ efficiency.
…
StrongArm devices have been used by 15,000 workers, according to the company, which is aiming for 35,000 daily average users by the end of next year. StrongArm has raised $6.9 million in Series A funding, according to Crunchbase.
Workers have raised concerns about the panopticon StrongArm offers to employers. Adam Kaszynski, a labor union rep in Massachusetts, told Bloomberg he was unnerved when a General Electric factory he worked at began instructing workers to wear the devices.
“I tried to convince everyone not to do it,” says Kaszynski. “It’s creepy as hell. They have no business knowing that information.”
This seems to me like the first thing unions should demand bargaining over when they are introduced into unionized plants, but unions have so lost the battles over control over the shopfloor that it’s a tough road. But all new technologies do is give employers more control over workers’ lives. If self-driving cars ever do become a thing, employers are going to grab like extra time faster than you can say “free money.” It’s not a great time to be a worker. It never really has been though.
An ISD health inspector today ordered Grasshopper Restaurant, 1 N. Beacon St. in Allston, shut for "gross unsanitary conditions" after an inspection that found a fly infestation and evidence of rodent activity throughout the kitchen, produce being left in direct contact with a "filthy floor," workers not washing their hands, "built up soils" throughout the kitchen, including on walls, the ceiling and cooking utensils and in the ice machine and raw food, including shrimp, being kept too warm.
Even if workers wanted to wash their hands, the hand sink for that purpose had no soap or anything with which to dry their hands, the inspection states. Also:
Upon my arrival there is evidence that the kitchen/ware washing areas are not cleaned prior to closing at the end of the night and reopening for business the next day.
The restaurant can re-open once the owner proves all the violations have been corrected and that he is overseeing "day to day operations to ensure establishment is operating in a safe and sanitary manner in compliance with the food code."
George W. Bush and Ellen DeGeneres Hang Out at a Football Game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Texas
Fox NFL
I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew;
Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?
Epigram engraved on collar of a dog that Alexander Pope gave to Frederick, Prince of Wales
This is a post about elite solidarity and elite impunity, and the close connection between them. A few days ago, Ellen Degeneres got invited to hang out with George Bush in Jerry Jones’s luxury box at Jones’s billion-dollar stadium. She was so swept off her feet that she did a stand-up bit about it on her show, which you can watch here, with certain modifications:
Degeneres tried to get this video pulled, on the basis of a bogus copyright infringement claim — the parodic modification clearly falls within the fair use exception — and the Streisand effect then kicked in with a vengeance.
A whole bunch of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities have rushed to Ellen’s defense, since it’s obvious to them that if you can’t just let bygones be bygones over things like Bush destroying another country via a military invasion sold to the public on the basis of obvious lies, his institutionalization of torture as an official American policy, his catastrophically inept reaction to the drowning of a major American city etc., then things could get slightly uncomfortable for various elites in various social settings, and that would be UnAmerican:
What a horrific commentary about our times that @TheEllenShow should even have to explain herself for hanging with President Bush. Good for her!https://t.co/pZMe1shJka
Yes, that’s truly horrific David. On the other hand, I can think of some other things that were and are happening even as you were tweeting this out that might count as slightly more “horrific” than subjecting a celebrity friend of yours to social media criticism for fawning all over a bigger celebrity, who also happens to be a major war criminal.
There’s almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong, and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion, I’ll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres’s friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn’t a simple playground bully, he’s the president.Americans grant our commanders-in-chief extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump’s critics want to make sure that his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency has to die.
DeGeneres isn’t a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush’s misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power.
A question for Axelrod, Degenres, Cillizza, and the countless other power-worshiping courtiers of the ruling class: Does you celebration of the virtues of “civility” also apply to Donald Trump and his enablers? Or is it OK to treat them as pariahs after they’re no longer in official power?
I suspect, by the way, that the answer is that it’s going to be OK to treat Trump differently, because it may well prove very convenient to everyone to rehabilitate the Republican party by burning this particular witch.
If Trump is driven out of office before next November — which at the moment still seems very unlikely but suddenly no longer impossible — it will be precisely for this reason. Suppose next summer rolls around and it becomes blindingly obvious that Trump is going to get routed, and that he’s likely to take the Republican majority in the Senate with him. Under those circumstances, the fantastically powerful lust among the great and the good to get back to “normal” — to pretending that Trump is some sort of inexplicable aberration, and that we can all get back to enjoying our nachos in Jerry Jones’s box if we just rid ourselves of this turbulent parvenu — is going to be truly overwhelming. Can you imagine the day Trump is ejected from the sacred precincts of the White House, and civility returns to America? David Brooks will have to write his column with one hand.
In sum, the civility mongers aren’t merely wrong: they are the problem. Because the problem is our utterly corrupt ruling class, our sickening combination of old-fashioned plutocracy and new-media 24/7 celebrity worship, and our valorization of insanely immoral levels of social inequality as the natural and good order of the world. This is a world in which Donald Trump became president because that outcome was a predictable consequence — indeed a perfect reflection — of all that plutocracy and celebrity worship and inequality and constant corruption of the public sphere.
Getting rid of Donald Trump is an essential step in fighting that corruption, but it will actually be a step backward if it means having to pretend that Trump is primarily a cause, rather than a symptom of, our extreme decadence.
And nothing illustrates that decadence more clearly than the blindness of people like Degeneres, Axelrod, etc., who more than anything else just want to get back to “normal,” since “normal” had been working out so well for them personally, and more particularly for their masters.
Boston firefighters are at Washington Street and Bexley Road, near Healy Field, where a manhole burst into flames around 11:50 a.m., shorting out power in surrounding blocks. Eversource's attendance has been requested.
Warren’s plan is sweeping, covering not just the well-known concerns about incarceration that criminal justice reformers have raised but also the criticisms that America doesn’t do enough to stop crime and violence from festering on the front end.
It includes many of the policies that have become mainstays in Democratic criminal justice reform plans. She targets long prison sentences, mandatory minimums, cash bail, and drug policies focused on incarceration over addiction treatment. She argues more broadly against criminalizing homelessness, poverty, and mental health problems. She also calls for repealing the 1994 crime law, which has become a bogeyman for mass incarceration among progressives (in large part because Democrats, particularly Biden, supported it when it passed).
She lists several other policy ideas aimed at reducing incarceration and making the overall criminal justice system less punitive: establishing a clemency board to release more people from prison early, decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level, raising the age of criminal liability to 18, restricting civil forfeiture, boosting resources for public defenders, ending the death penalty, increasing oversight of police, eliminating solitary confinement, banning private prisons, and getting rid of fees for phone calls and bank transfers in prison, among other proposals.
Warren also promises to use the federal government’s funding powers to get states to reduce incarceration and reform their criminal justice systems. This is key to reducing incarceration: About 88 percent of people in prison are held at the state level, while 12 percent are at the federal level. (And, crucially, while about half of federal prisoners are in for drug offenses, the majority of state prisoners are in for violent crimes.)
Warren does include a few exceptions in her push to decarcerate, particularly executives whose companies are linked to crimes, including financial institutions and opioid painkiller makers.
Warren also focuses much of her plan on essentially preventing the need for prison — by taking steps to prevent crime and violence in the first place. She would encourage more targeted police strategies, such as “focused deterrence,” that focus on the few people at risk for violence and crime. She points to her gun violence plan, which promises stronger gun laws. She would dedicate more resources to schools with the goal of keeping children in school and engaged. She cites several ideas to address problems that can contribute to higher crime, from mental health issues to drug addiction to unaffordable housing.
In addition to the 1994 crime bill, she’s also going after the worst aspects of the even worse 1996 bill:
Expand access to justice for people wrongfully imprisoned. Defendants who are wrongfully imprisoned have the right to challenge their detention in court through a procedure known as habeas corpus. The Framers believed this right was so important to achieving justice that they guaranteed it specifically in the Constitution. It’s particularly important for minority defendants — Black Americans, for example, make up only 13% of the population but a plurality of wrongful convictions. In 1996, at the height of harsh federal policies that drove mass incarceration, Congress made it absurdly difficult for wrongfully imprisoned individuals to bring these cases in federal court. Since then, conservative Supreme Court Justices have built on those restrictions — making it nearly impossible for defendants to receive habeas relief even when they have actual proof of innocence. We should repeal these overly restrictive habeas rules, make it harder for courts to dismiss these claims on procedural technicalities, and make it easier to apply new rules that emerge from these cases to people who were wrongfully imprisoned before those rules came into effect.
This is all very worthwhile, and a major sea change.
Amazing to watch serious candidates for president try to outdo one another on criminal justice reform. Fairly sure we’ve never seen this before. Certainly not in my lifetime.
For two and a half years, I’ve been fighting for the gay dating app Grindr to bear responsibility for the harms my client Matthew Herrick endured because of its defective product. Last week, Matthew, my co-counsel Tor Ekeland and I petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari in Matthew’s case against Grindr.
The question is whether the immunity provided to platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has any meaningful limits at all. As discussion of Section 230 has become more frequent and mainstream in the last several months, with solemn events—like 8chan apparently hosting the suspected murderer’s racist screed in the El Paso shooting and Facebook being painfully slow to remove the live-streamed Christchurch massacre—forcing the U.S. to rethink liability for third-party platforms, it is important that this conversation not be conducted in fuzzy abstracts. Rather, everyone involved in the discussion must look at the stories of real individuals who have been deeply wounded, their lives upended, because of platforms turning a blind eye or willfully ignoring injuries their products facilitate. In all cases involving a Section 230 immunity defense, there are two stories—the story of the individual and the story of the litigation. This is Matthew’s story.
Herrick v. Grindr is a civil lawsuit born from the urgent need for immediate help in a life or death situation. While the goal of most Section 230 cases—and litigations in general—is financial compensation for past injuries, Matthew’s suffering was ongoing. Matthew’s ex-boyfriend, Oscar Juan Carlos Gutierrez, was impersonating him on Grindr and sending men to Matthew’s home to have sex with him.
It all started one evening in late October 2016, right before Halloween. Matthew had been sitting on the front stoop of his New York City apartment, smoking a cigarette, when a stranger called to him from the sidewalk and started heading up the steps toward him. The stranger’s tone was friendly and familiar. But Matthew had never met this guy before. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do I know you?”
The stranger raised his eyebrows and pulled his phone from his back pocket. “You were just texting to me, dude,” he replied, holding out his phone for Matthew to see. On the screen was a profile from the gay dating app Grindr, featuring a shirtless photo of Matthew standing in his kitchen, smiling broadly. Matthew recognized the picture right away. He’d posted it on his Instagram account a few weeks earlier. But the Grindr profile wasn’t his. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Matthew explained. “That’s not my account.”
They went back and forth for a while. The stranger kept holding up his phone, insisting Matthew had invited him over for sex. But Matthew knew the profile wasn’t his. Finally, the stranger became exasperated and left. “Fucking liar!” he shouted in Matthew’s direction as he walked away. “You’re an asshole!”
Rattled, Matthew went back inside. A few minutes later, he heard his buzzer ring. It was another man insisting that he, too, had made a sex date with Matthew. Two more men showed up that day. And three others came calling the next. “Matt!” they’d holler from the sidewalk, or they’d lean on the buzzer expecting to be let in. At first the strangers only went to his apartment, but by the end of the week a steady stream of men was showing up at the restaurant where Matthew worked as well. Some were in their 20s, others much older. A few arrived in business suits, as though on the way to the office. Others were twitchy and sweaty, looking like they’d been up all night getting high. They’d stalk him at work and at home, all hours of the day and night, each one convinced Matthew had invited him over for sex.
He was pretty sure he knew who was behind the attack: Gutierrez, his ex. The pair had met more than a year prior, on Grindr, and dated for 11 months. As time wore on, Gutierrez became increasingly jealous and clingy, accusing Matthew of cheating and doing things like showing up at Matthew’s job and refusing to leave. Eventually, Matthew couldn’t take it anymore; the pair broke up. The week after he ended his relationship with Gutierrez, strange men began showing up at Matthew’s door.
The impersonating profile sent men for fisting, orgies and aggressive sex. They were told that if he resisted, that was part of the fantasy. They should just play along. It seemed clear to me that Gutierrez was endeavoring to do more than harass and frighten Matthew. He appeared to be trying to recruit unwitting accomplices to perpetrate sexual assaults.
Like many of my clients, before coming to see me Matthew had tried everything he could to take care of the problem on his own. He filed more than a dozen complaints with his local police precinct. The officers dutifully took down his information but didn’t seem to understand the danger he was in. “One guy rolled his eyes,” Matthew recalled. “I think they figured since I’m a big guy, and I look like I should be able to take care of myself, that I should just go beat him up or something. I guess to them I don’t look like a ‘victim.’ ” Another officer suggested Matthew pack up his belongings and “find a new place to live.”
By the time Matthew came to me for help, the Manhattan district attorney opened an investigation and he’d gotten a family court “stay away” order, but neither was stopping the traffic of strangers coming to his home and work for sex. He also did everything he could to get the imposter profiles taken down. He directly contacted Grindr and its competitor Scruff, which Matthew’s ex was also using to impersonate him, and begged the companies to remove the fake profiles from their platforms. In their terms of service, both companies explicitly prohibit the use of their products to impersonate, stalk, harass or threaten. Scruff, the smaller of the two companies, responded to Matthew immediately. It sent him a personal email expressing concern, took down the fake accounts, and blocked Gutierrez’s IP address, effectively banning him from the app. When Gutierrez started impersonating Matthew on Jack’d, yet another gay dating app, that company also banned Gutierrez from using its platform to harass Matthew. But Grindr took a different approach: It did absolutely nothing.
“I emailed and called and begged them to do something,” Matthew told me, the frustration rising in his voice. His family and friends also contacted Grindr about the fake profiles—in all, about 50 separate complaints were made to the company, either by Matthew or on his behalf. The only response the company ever sent was an automatically generated email: “Thank you for your report.”
All in all, more than 1,400 men, as many as 23 in a day, arrived in person at Matthew’s home and job over the course of 10 months.
Grindr is a wildly successful company. In 2018, the dating app reportedly had more than three million users in 234 countries. Like most social media companies, Grindr operates, in large part, as an advertising platform. The free content and services these platforms provide—porn, photo sharing, direct messaging, emailing, shopping, news, dating—are really just lures to get people to show up so the companies can collect data about what users buy, who they’re friends with and where they’re going, and use that information to advertise. Grindr prides itself on its state-of-the-art geolocative feature, which can pinpoint a user’s exact location, allowing users to match with others in their vicinity. This is how they rake in advertising revenue—by customizing the ads that users see based on nearby businesses.
Even though Grindr’s terms of service state that Grindr can remove any profile and deny anybody the use of their product at the company’s discretion, they refused to help. After Matthew’s approximately 50 pleas to Grindr for help were ignored, we sued Grindr in New York State Supreme Court, New York County, and obtained immediate injunctive relief requiring that Grindr ban Gutierrez.
It’s not clear exactly how Gutierrez was exploiting Grindr to send the strangers to Matthew—it might have been through a spoofing app that worked with Grindr’s geolocation software or something more technical. But the strangers who came to Matthew said they were sent through the Grindr app and would show Matthew the fake profiles with his pictures, geolocation maps showing how far away they were from Matthew, and direct messages telling them which buzzer to ring and what kind of sex Matthew was eager to have.
I didn’t need to explain on a technical level how Grindr was being used against Matthew at this stage of the litigation; that’s what discovery is for. What we knew is that Grindr was in an exclusive role to help stop Matthew’s hell, given law enforcement was too slow and Gutierrez had been deterred by neither arrests nor orders of protection.
I knew from the start that Grindr would claim it was immune from liability pursuant to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Section 230 was originally conceived to shield internet companies that ran online message boards—where the majority of user-generated content appeared online—from legal action traditionally lodged against publishers, like defamation and obscenity claims. Today, of course, the internet looks very different than it did in 1996, when the law was passed. Tech companies today wield unimaginable power and influence and offer services that didn’t even exist in 1996, like direct messaging and geolocating. Yet internet companies not only use Section 230 to shield themselves from liability for anything users post on their platforms; they also think that immunity extends to cover any and all decisions they make about how their products operate—even if those decisions cause users harm.
So I made sure not to sue Grindr for traditional publication torts like defamation. That is, I was not suing them for any words that Gutierrez said on the profiles or communications he’d made on the app. Instead, I tried something new—I sued Grindr using traditional product liability torts. I argued that Grindr is a defectively designed and manufactured product insofar as it was easily exploited—presumably by spoofing apps available from Google and Apple—and didn’t have the ability, according to the courtroom admissions of Grindr’s own lawyers, to identify and exclude abusive users. For a company that served millions of people globally and used geolocating technology to direct those people into offline encounters, it was an arithmetic certainty that at least some of the time the product would be used by abusers, stalkers, predators and rapists. Failing to manufacture the product with safeguards for those inevitabilities, I argued, was negligent.
On Feb. 8, 2017, Grindr filed a notice of removal from state court to the Southern District of New York. Our temporary restraining order requiring that Grindr ban Gutierrez from its services expired as a matter of law 14 days after the removal—but when we moved to extend the order, Judge Valerie Caproni denied the extension. Judge Caproni felt our underlying case lacked merit because she suspected Grindr was immune from liability pursuant to the Communications Decency Act, arguing that our claims depended on information provided by another information content provider. If not for Matthew’s ex using the app, she reasoned, none of this would have happened to Matthew. She reduced all the harm as flowing from Gutierrez’s actions, not Grindr’s, and therefore reasoned that the company was immune from liability and had no obligation to Matthew. In April and May of 2017, Grindr and its holding companies filed motions to dismiss our claims. At the time, Matthew’s ex was continuing to relentlessly use the app to send strangers to his home and job—a fact the court knew. However, it was not until the following year that the court ruled on the motion to dismiss. By this time, Tor Ekeland had joined me representing Matthew.
We argued in our opposition papers that because we were suing Grindr for its own product defects and operational failures—and not for any content provided by Matthew’s ex—Grindr was not eligible to seek safe harbor from Section 230. To rule against Matthew would set a dangerous precedent, establishing that as long as a tech company’s product was turned to malicious purposes by a user, no matter how foreseeable the malicious use, that tech company was beyond the reach of the law and tort system.
Nevertheless, on Jan. 25, 2018 Judge Caproni dismissed our complaint entirely. All but a copyright claim was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that even if Matthew learned new information to support his claims, he could not amend his complaint.
Matthew’s case was thrown out before we’d even gotten our foot in the door—even though dismissal at the motion to dismiss stage is supposed to be reserved for situations where a complaint is defective on its face, while ours was a detailed, thorough 43 pages and well-pleaded. The judge relied on Grindr’s immunity under Section 230.
Usually, to benefit from an affirmative defense like Section 230, a defendant has the burden of proving it satisfies the elements of that defense. Grindr would have needed to serve an answer claiming it was immune under Section 230 and allege all three of the statute elements for the company to get the enormous benefit of immunity—that it was (1) “an interactive computer service” (2) being “treated as a publisher” of (3) “information provided by another information content provider.” Instead, contrary to procedural rules but nevertheless common in Section 230 cases, the judge saved Grindr that step by dismissing the case before Grindr had filed a single pleading.
On Feb. 9, 2018, we filed a Notice of Appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The case was scheduled to be heard on Jan. 7, 2019. By then, it had become one of the most closely watched Section 230 cases in the country. It had been covered widely in the media, with attention paid to our novel product liability approach. Plus, because of a string of bad press for tech companies—major data breaches by Facebook, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, stilted testimony by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Congress, and the use of major platforms to disseminate fake news aimed at altering the course of U.S. elections—many people were waking to the idea that Big Tech might not be quite so trustworthy. At the same time, the Communications Decency Act became a major topic of mainstream conversation. Producers at Netflix planning a new show with comedian Hasan Minhaj put together a widely viewed episode on the legislation.
To our disappointment, on March 27, the Second Circuit issued a summary order affirming the district court’s dismissal of the complaint. On April 11, we filed a petition for panel rehearing, or, in the alternative, for rehearing en banc. On May 9, that too was denied.
Which leads me to this moment—our filing on Aug. 7, a petition for a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court of the United States. We are presenting the court with two questions:
Does the Communications Decency Act Section 230(c)(1), which protects interactive computer services from liability for traditional publication torts when they publish third-party content, prevent well-pleaded causes of action for non-publication torts—such as product liability, negligence, fraud and failure to warn—as a matter of law?
Whether Section 230(c)(1) is an affirmative defense and therefore inappropriate for resolution at the motion to dismiss stage.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on the proper scope of Section 230. As Matthew’s case demonstrates, this is a matter of life or death for victims of stalking and violence caused and exacerbated by computer technologies unimagined when Congress passed the law in 1996. Decades ago, lawmakers had this pie‑in-the-sky idea that internet companies would monitor content their users uploaded to protect the rest of us. What’s become painfully apparent, and arguably should have been obvious, is that without the threat of legal liability hanging over their heads, companies like Grindr really don’t care about who gets hurt.
This debate is muddied by the fact that the federal and state court decisions in this country lack clarity and are often contradictory as to the Communications Decency Act’s proper scope, which has led many courts to create an almost absolute immunity for internet companies for their tortious conduct. Courts do this, as the lower courts did in our case, with overbroad definitions of what constitutes an “interactive computer service” and what constitutes information provided by a different “information content provider.” These are, or should be, fact-intensive inquiries, but if cases are dismissed on motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim, as ours was—before discovery and without defendants even needing to plead Section 230 immunity—plaintiffs will never have a chance.
Most industries would also like to be free from liability for harms their product, services or staff could cause their customers. But the reality is, legal responsibility for one’s products and services is the cost of doing business and drives safety innovation. Other business owners purchase liability insurance and—for the sake of reputation, low insurance premiums and morality—run businesses that don’t harm customers or the general public.
All in all, Section 230 is a government subsidy to the industry least in need and least deserving of it. It’s time to fix 230—and if the Supreme Court won’t do it, legislators must act.
Carrie Goldberg owns Victims Rights’ law firm, C. A. Goldberg, PLLC. She is the author of “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls” (Penguin, 2019).
If you are as much of an Event Horizon fan as some of us in these parts, news that the movie is getting new life (sort of) will come as a welcomed surprise.
It appears Amazon is looking for new projects and one of the titles currently in development with Paramount Television, is a series based on the movie with none other than Adam Wingard set to executive produce and direct.
Wingard, best known for horror movies You're Next and The Guest, as well as less interesting fare as the Blair Witch reboot and the live-action Death Note, is a great a choice as any - he can certainly do horror - and though there are no details on what exactly the television show will cov [Continued ...]
glad to see this, Alex Anwandter and Rubio released two of my favorite albums of last year!!
In Chile, one of South America’s wealthiest and most modern nations, a long history of isolationism, political oppression, and religious conservatism has provoked vital voices of dissent from marginalized people within the music scene. The legacy of resistance dates back decades: Folk legends Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara became mouthpieces for the Chilean underclasses of the 1960s and early ‘70s, when extreme socioeconomic disparity and political instability set the stage for a violent military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The September 11, 1973 conflict was backed and largely instigated by U.S. intervention. At the height of Cold War paranoia, they had grown wary of then-President Salvador Allende’s socialist government and the nationalization of the Chilean copper industry. Greed and international meddling led to the rise of Pinochet’s brutal 27-year regime; Spanish newspaper El País reported a total of 40,000 people who were arrested, tortured, and/or had disappeared, including 3,065 confirmed dead and an additional 200,000 driven into exile.
Jara was one of the regime’s most infamous victims, tortured and killed for his unflinching criticism of Chile’s bloody socio-political downturn. Intimidation and censorship also became the biggest roadblocks for the new generation of artists, which included Chile’s definitive rock band, Los Prisioneros. Formed in 1979 and fronted by Jorge González, the groundbreaking trio was one of Latin America’s first rock en español acts to embrace synthesized sounds, cementing their 1990 masterpiece Corazones as one of the genre’s finest documents. But the impact of their music extends far beyond a sonic legacy. Protest anthems like “Tren Al Sur,” “El Baile de Los Que Sobran,” and “Maldito Sudaca” became chart-topping pop hits dissecting classism and xenophobia, anointing Los Prisioneros as essential social narrators as well as frequent targets of government scrutiny and media blackouts.
This proud tradition of dissidence still reverberates through Chilean music, particularly in the case of queer and trans artists using their platforms to protest and subvert. In Alex Anwandter’s “Siempre Es Viernes En Mi Corazón,” the disco and nueva canción-influenced songwriter rages against Congress and church bodies, suggesting he’d rather see them burn than endure homophobic self-righteousness. In the vaporwave-flavored video for Javiera Mena’s bombastic “Espada,” the synthpop goddess drives down a neon-lit highway lined with scantily clad women, later emerging from in between the legs of her digitally rendered love interest in the song’s rapturous crescendo.
“I don’t think the intersection between my trans identity and creative perspective is coincidental at all,” says Kamon Kamon Kamon, a trans woman crafting pop and darkwave with a distinctly non-binary soul. The young producer and songwriter is a core member of the AMIK collective, a growing network of LGBTQ+ artists fostering cooperation and mutual support within an industry that routinely dismisses them as niche or camp. “I would say it’s paradoxical,” they add when asked about the current state of affairs for queer and trans people in Chile. “Despite making inroads with the anti-discrimination law (2012), civil unions (2015), and the gender identity law (2019), we keep experiencing horrifying episodes of violence, and neo-Nazi groups are on the rise.”
Chilean society has evolved at a frantic pace since the early ’00s, when a booming economy and the advent of globalization made Chile—along with Brazil—a key player in trade and tourism in South America. However, cultural homogeneity there is often preserved by the country’s isolated geography, and the recent rise of wildly influential right-wing religious groups, like Evangelicals and Mormons, has helped fuel a very particular kind of national conservatism. Homophobia and transphobia remain woefully common, and while Chile is by no means a theocracy, religious morality and obstructionism have halted numerous sexual education and HIV prevention campaigns. This has contributed to an alarming spike in HIV infection rates over the past decade, as popular youth publication POUSTA reported in painstaking detail, late last year.
“I feel like artists have grown much more comfortable showcasing their identity,” says Namuel, a 26-year-old pop singer who infuses his video and stage work with graphic homoeroticism and feminine aesthetics. “Before it was very taboo, and now it’s almost trendy.”
He’s right. While artsy punk agitators like drag queen Hija de Perra and trans sex worker group Las Indetectables have been instrumental voices of satire and resistance, the momentous student and feminist movements of recent years have made discourse over diversity and inclusive language increasingly normal. Growing independent publications like El Desconcierto, POUSTA, and Raro Magazine now regularly spotlight LGBTQ+ artists, while earlier this year, a highly publicized H&M ad campaign tapped musicians Fran Straube, Gianluca, Fanny Leona, and Francisco Victoria to promote their line of non-binary clothing.
For a closer look at some of these artists, we’ve compiled a list of queer and trans musicians making sure Chilean music remains sharp and subversive.
The crown prince of Chilean indie pop, Alex Anwandter has undergone numerous evolutions since his early days fronting delightfully twee rock band Teleradio Donoso. With his finger firmly on the pop pulse, it’s Anwandter’s solo career that allowed him to finally explore social anxieties surrounding sexuality, identity, and Chile’s sordid political history. His solo debut Rebeldes remains one the most lauded Latin American pop records of the last decade, while Amiga and Latinoamericana bring cutting indictments of misogyny, homophobia, colonialism, and the Pinochet regime to a shimmering club floor. For the complete scope of Anwandter’s oeuvre, check out his brilliantly experimental ODISEA LP, as well as Alex & Daniel, a thrilling collaborative record with fellow Chilean superstar Gepe.
Theatrical singer-songwriter (Me Llamo) Sebastián is yet another social interlocutor following in the footsteps of giants, with a sharp mind and melodramatic voice very much his own. Combining a cutesy pastel aesthetic with disarmingly colloquial language, (Me Llamo) Sebastián’s music oscillates between autobiography and the observed. Songs like “Niños Rosados,” “Masaje,” and “Hijos del Peligro” spin tales of gendered childhoods, sex work, and the perils of queer existence, all while references to video games, anime, and fairytales enrich relatable and often shocking portraits of daily life.
Songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, model, actor—there are few artistic disciplines Fran Straube is unwilling to try and even fewer where they don’t excel. Straube has played in numerous bands, including Picnic Kibun and Fármacos, but it was their star-making turn with alt-rock trio Miss Garrison that thrusted the gifted singer and percussionist into the critical spotlight. As Miss Garrison’s success grew, so did Straube’s sonic curiosity, leading to the launch of their electronic solo project Rubio. Informed by mysticism, folkloric instruments, and digital percussion techniques, Rubio has grown into one of the most exciting and explorative projects out of Chile’s evergreen musical landscape, taking the adventure global with performances at Primavera Sound, SXSW, and Mexico’s Festival NRMAL.
Navigating the music industry can be extremely challenging for LGBTQ+ artists eager to subvert stereotypes and respectability, which is why collectives can provide a comfortable environment for artists to experiment and collaborate freely. AMIK (Asociación de Músiques Independientes Kuir) is a collective creating safe and inclusive spaces where artists can color outside the lines without compromising their creative or personal identities. Synthpop and electronic production are the lingua franca among most of the collective’s members, which include Andre Le Feuvre, Barbacius, Fëik, Index, Kamon Kamon Kamon, and Reinder. As mentioned, non-binary artist Kamon Kamon Kamon makes stylish darkwave pop with irresistible hooks, as on their latest single “Conquistar al Mundo.”
Perpetually heartbroken fashion brat Namuel has walked the precarious line between pop songwriting and queer rebellion since day one. He first made waves with “Lucha Libre,” a weepy reimagining of Jill Sobule’s 2000 song “Mexican Wrestler,” exploring power dynamics and unrequited love along with a controversial video that cast him opposite a much older love interest. Though Namuel’s songwriting is geared towards a pop market, his visual work is devilishly provocative. On “Maldita Ingenuidad,” Namuel and a rowdy group of friends cavort in overtly femme outfits; for “Yugoslavia,” he tapped his boyfriend to rewrite the first romance to ever blossom in the Garden of Eden. Recent releases have seen the young pop star embrace harsh personal truths, exploring the chasms of heartbreak and a life-threatening eating disorder in songs like “Ganamos,” “Payasos,” and the devastatingly intimate “Cascabel.”
While most of the artists on this list cut their teeth in the Chilean scene over the course of many years, Fanny Leona made a splash in record time. The power pop livewire first caught public attention while fronting the groovy indie rock band Playa Gótica, where killer pipes and ferocious stage presence soon gained a devoted online following. The band’s 2017 debut Amigurumi is loaded with sexy, lightning fast jams with a nerdy twist, bringing anime-enthusiasts to the dancefloor with underground hits “Fuego” and “Extraños Visitantes.” In 2018, Leona released their own solo album titled Ningen, further invoking otaku vibes while delivering delicious queer dance anthems like “Mi Chica Favorita” and “Fiesta Paraíso.”
When it comes to Chile’s vibrant indie movement, the international gaze tends to linger over the capital city of Santiago a little too much. Hailing from Concepción in the Bío Bío Region of Southern Chile, Maxwell Morales creates avant-garde soundscapes with little more than his guitar and a fleet of effect pedals. Morales’s productions are evocative of the verdant landscapes and rainy climate of his hometown, also reflecting many of his own apprehensions in love and identity, as beautifully heard on last year’s aptly named Anxiety EP.
At the intersection of synthpop and Andean music you will find Franco Franco, a mysterious producer making danceable manifestos on colonization and indigenous heritage. Active since 2014, he first raised eyebrows with his full-length debut Glamour en el Altiplano, a concept album mixing glossy club sounds with magical realism. Extending beyond his own solo work, Franco Franco also produces and remixes for numerous artists in the Chilean underground including Felipink, Arachnida, and Kamon Kamon Kamon of the AMIK collective.
At a Border Patrol holding facility in El Paso, Texas, an agent told a Honduran family that one parent would be sent to Mexico while the other parent and their three children could stay in the United States, according to the family. The agent turned to the couple’s youngest daughter — 3-year-old Sofia, whom they call Sofi — and asked her to make a choice.
“The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said [you want to go] with mom.’ “
Tania and her husband, Joseph, said they spent parts of two days last week trying to prevent the Border Patrol from separating their family. They were aided by a doctor who had examined Sofi and pleaded with agents not to separate the family, Joseph and Tania said. [NPR is not using migrants’ last names in this story because these are people who are in the middle of immigration proceedings.]
These aren’t state agents grimly following orders, showing the banality of evil — these are authoritarians and sadists who are enjoying it.
Please read this great essay by Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder.
A few excerpts:
Analogizing is not some mysterious operation: It is how we think. Every time someone asks you for advice about a situation beyond your personal experience, or every time you are faced with an unfamiliar choice, your mind makes analogies with what you do know. Then you ask questions that allow you to clarify similarities and differences. At some point, you have understood and can act. “Never again” is nothing other than an invocation of that process. We start from what we know about the present and make our way back to the 1930s and 1940s. Once we understand something about the history of the Holocaust, we make our way forward again, seeing patterns we would have missed. If we notice a dangerous one, we should act. Without this effort, though, “never again” becomes its own opposite: “It can’t happen here.”
Any time someone criticizes an analogy for not being exact, you know that person is either an idiot or arguing in bad faith, or both. Analogies are always inexact, by definition. To point out that analogy isn’t perfect is to say nothing of substance, since all analogies are imperfect. The real question is whether it’s useful to point out the similarities between A and B despite the differences between them.
The point here is not that we all have to agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s declaration that “the U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border.” The point of historical comparisons is not to seek a perfect match—which can never be found—but to learn how to look out for warning signs.
How many people, after all, know that a major act of violence carried out by the Nazi SS was the deportation of Jews deemed to be illegal immigrants? To note this fact at the present moment is to suggest an analogy. Or, rather, the analogy suggests itself, once you know the fact. That is one of the dangers of placing a taboo on analogies: It ensures that we never learn what we need to know.
American policy now is to apply violence to people who lack American citizenship. We subject undocumented migrants to procedures forbidden by international law, such as detention itself, and deny them rights guaranteed by our own Constitution, such as due process of law. These abuses command attention in and of themselves. In historical terms, the worrying thing is that separation from state protection can be the first step toward something much worse. We rightly think of the Holocaust as the attempt to remove Jews from the planet by murdering them all. In its unfolding, however, an important early step was the stigmatization and deportation of Jews who were not German citizens.
On the night of Oct. 28, 1938, the SS rounded up about 17,000 Jews who had Polish citizenship and forced them across the Polish border. Often these were people whose whole lives were in Germany, including children who saw themselves as Germans. Consider the Grynszpan family. Their teenage son, Herschel, was in Paris when his parents and sister were deported. On Nov. 3, he received a postcard from his sister: “Everything is finished for us.” Soon after, Herschel shot and killed a German diplomat. In Berlin, Goebbels used this as a pretext to organize Kristallnacht. It does seem worth asking just how far away we are from a scenario where stigmatization, family separation, and deportation lead to some similar escalation.
The Holocaust could only proceed when state protection was stripped from Jews. The experience of murdered Jews has more to do with statelessness than it does with concentration camps. Roughly half of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were shot over pits close to their homes. These people had almost never seen a concentration camp. But some of their murderers had, as guards. A concentration camp is a lawless zone, and the SS was an institution that existed beyond the law, in a murkier world defined by Nazi racial ideology. Mass murder was possible when a lawless institution operated in the vast, lawless colony the Germans created in Eastern Europe. The extreme case suggests a general lesson: The rule of law should prevail everywhere, and states of exception should be kept to an absolute minimum.
Here’s a little vignette that ought to be told by a presidential candidate in a nationally televised debate:
At Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, the stateless Jews of Poland, enclosed in ghettos for a deportation that never happened, were instead dispatched to killing centers. In the summer of 1942, the SS leadership concluded that the food consumed by the Jews working in the Warsaw ghetto was more valuable than the forced labor they were performing. Famished Jews were lured to the transport site by the promise of bread and marmalade.
Yes, the Holocaust had marmalade—in the exhausted minds of tormented Jews. Working bit by bit, you can perhaps understand this history from the perspective of the victims, because you too can imagine the marmalade. You know something about work and something about hunger. You can ask what it would be like to be very hungry after more than a year of forced labor. You can empathize with Bluma Bergman as she recalls that starving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 would do anything for a bit of food, “even if you know that you’re going to be killed.” Knowing what it is like to fancy a roll with jam, you can try to conjure at least one of the horrible details of this most horrible history. But you can only do so with analogy, factuality, and empathy.
If you do not think, you will not see where you might go wrong. Last year in my home state of Ohio, ICE used doughnuts to lure hungry migrants to a place where they could be arrested, seizing mothers and leaving children behind. While that is not exactly like using marmalade to lure Jews to the Umschlagplatz, it is not a gambit of which we can be proud. The same kind of mind drew suffering people with sugar in 2018 as in 1942. We can insist on the differences all day, but at the end of the day, we should be ashamed.
But of course to say that an American governmental policy can be analogized usefully to the acts of the SS is to imply that America isn’t really exceptional, and that we might not even be Jesus Christ’s extra special favorite country after all.
Shame on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its intellectually absurd and politically toxic demand that the public not consider the relationship between its subject and any other historical or current events, including those happening in this country at this very moment.
Snyder’s essay is an important rebuke of this Orwellian act by a federally-funded organization. Everyone should read it.
(See also this letter signed by hundreds of historians, condemning the museum’s stance, and calling for its official retraction).
aw i had a bit of a soft spot for that place. cash only sucks & the music was always too loud (damn kids!) but i still liked it. i mean not enough to have gone in the last five years but. so it goes!
Boston Restaurant Talk reports the Lower Depths shuts down for good tonight.
Here’s a pretty important wake-up call for those who may need waking up about the growth of support for ‘religious liberty’ exemptions as a tool to provide legal sanctuary for affirmative discrimination. A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows the percentages of public support for certain kinds of discrimination under ‘religious liberty’ exemptions and how they’ve grown in recent years – and substantial numbers support exemptions to discriminate against Muslims and Jews.
Let’s start with gays and lesbians – the group around whom we’ve seen the most litigation – the evangelical baker who won’t bake a same sex marriage wedding cake, etc. In 2014 16% of Americans thought this was okay if it violated the small business owner’s religious beliefs. Today that’s 30%. The big growth is among Republicans (21% to 47%). But there’s significant growth among Democrats and independents too.
What about people who say they’re religious beliefs prevent them from offering their services to African-Americans? 10% in 2014 and 15% today.
What about Jews? In 2014 it was 12%. Today 19%. The internal breakdown? With evangelical protestants it’s gone from 12% to 24%. Not terribly surprising. But it’s gone up even more with mainline protestants – 11% to 26%. Catholics are 10% to 20%. Nonwhite protestants haven’t shifted as much – just 19% up from 14%. Only “religiously unaffiliated” have remained stable at 11%.
Support for refusing service to Muslims is slightly higher than Jews – 22%. But the question wasn’t asked in 2014. So we don’t know the trend.
Here are the breakdowns by targeted group and political ideology.
Clearly this is driven overwhelmingly by Republicans. But the trend shows that there’s been movement in this direction pretty much across the board.
Here is the breakdown by different flavors of Christians and people without religion or at least without an explicit affiliation.
Evangelical protestants support it the most; Catholics the least. What is notable to me though is that mainline protestants aren’t that far off from evangelicals.
While Court’s are increasingly receptive to accepting de facto racial discrimination if it can be explained by some other notional rationale, I doubt many courts would be receptive to religious arguments about not selling products to African-Americans. Maybe I’m not cynical enough. But that’s my hunch. But it seems much more plausible that many people could make plausible arguments that their religious beliefs clash with Jews and Muslims.
This is obviously pretty troubling information if you’re part of one of these groups. A lot of this, most of this is what it seems like on its face: people are getting more supportive of discrimination against people not in their group. But I don’t think it’s entirely that. It seems like the proponents of this theory of ‘religious liberty’ exemption have made some real progress making the argument for the libertarian concept beyond the underlying discriminatory attitudes. Both are troubling.
Mona May has been working in Hollywood as a costume designer since the early 90s, styling movies such as The Wedding Singer, A Night At The Roxbury, Enchanted, and of course, Clueless. We sat down with May to talk about her process for creating costumes for Clueless that have become iconic.
She’s not just running on the individual proposals but on the story tying them together, but it’s still impressive to have that level of detail out this early.
Natick Police say people shouldn't be alarmed by a heavy police and fire presence at the Natick Mall between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. on Sunday: It'll only be a large training exercise.
The simulation will involve multiple assailants (actors) who enter the Natick Mall after wounding a security officer. The assailants will then move through the mall inflicting harm on patrons and employees while law enforcement and public safety entities respond.
Police and firefighters from Natick and surrounding towns will take part, police say. They add the training will take place in a part of the mall where stores are normally closed at that time on a Sunday:
All businesses at the mall that will be open after 6:30 p.m. will not be affected by the training exercise and they will remain fully accessible by the public. In addition, the residents at the Nouvelle at The Natick Collection condominiums will not be impacted.
After the event, Natick's police and fire chiefs will hold two press conferences - a real one to discuss how the training went with actual local reporters and then a simulated press conference to discuss the outcome of the mass-shooting incident.
According to the Department of Energy, the next critical export from the United States is made from “molecules of U.S. Freedom.”
You may wonder, what are these molecules?
The technical answer is liquefied natural gas. Or, if you are in charge of energy policy for the Trump administration, “freedom gas.”
Let that seep in.
On Tuesday, the department announced plans to increase exports of the fuel source from a new liquefaction plant that will be built off the coast of Texas on Quintana Island by Freeport LNG of Houston.
That announcement was quickly overshadowed by the colorful terminology in the release.
“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy,” Mark W. Menezes, the under secretary of energy, said in a news release.
At least Rick Perry in his current tole is a largely harmless dumbshit, which makes him…presumably the best member of Trump’s cabinet.
Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas.
Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.
[…]
“With four decades of military and humanitarian leadership, in-depth understanding of international affairs and knowledge of current economic drivers around the world, General Kelly is a strong strategic addition to our team,” said James Van Dusen, Caliburn’s CEO. “Our board remains acutely focused on advising on the safety and welfare of unaccompanied minors who have been entrusted to our care and custody by the Department of Health and Human Services to address a very urgent need in caring for and helping to find appropriate sponsors for these unaccompanied minors.”
The DHS’ kidnapping victims are worth a mint to companies like Caliburn.
Kelly joined DC Capital’s board in February 2016 and stepped down in January 2017 when he was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly switched jobs in July 2017 to become President Trump’s chief of staff, a position he left at the end of 2018.
[…]
During Kelly’s tenure, the administration pursued ambitious changes to immigration enforcement, and the average length of stay for an unaccompanied migrant child in U.S. custody skyrocketed.
In the past year, Comprehensive Health Services, the only private company operating shelters, became one of the most dominant players in the industry. Last August, it secured three licenses for facilities in Texas, totaling 500 beds, and in December, the Homestead facility began expanding from a capacity of 1,250 beds to 3,200.
Pure coincidence, stop trying to connect the two huge dots that are sitting right next to each other.
I wish I had a better memory for names, I’d like to tell all the people who praised him as a bold leader who would curb the Orange Squash’s worst excesses to go fuck themselves right now.
It’s from an anonymous TPM Reader who I cannot identify but has a specific, professional experience with the questions at hand. The Census/citizenship question is highly consequential in itself. But it is also a critical signal about whether the Court will make any pretense of following a coherent jurisprudence or simply toss the pretense and make openly results-oriented decisions to entrench Republican power. To me this issue is more focused on what will almost certainly be a raft of upcoming cases testing whether the President can defy the the Congress’s constitutional oversight mandate. Will we have an executive power friendly third branch of government arbiter or will the five justice conservative majority remake itself into an off-site annex of the White House Counsel’s office?
The census case is by far the most important case this Term and perhaps of the last several Terms. Because it will tell us whether the Supreme Court is going to uphold its institutional integrity, or buckle to Trump as so many institutions and norms have crumbled in the last two years.
Last year’s Muslim ban decision was a troubling harbinger, but in some ways a hard test: judicial deference to the executive branch is at its height in foreign affairs issues and ruling against Trump basically required the Court to say he was lying about the reasons for his order.
Everyone knows that in the census case Ross “papered” a rationale to justify a decision made for other reasons. But the Court can overturn the decision without finding that he lied – simply by holding that it was arbitrary and capricious to sacrifice the accuracy of the count to obtain citizenship data that could be obtained (at least as accurately, and perhaps more accurately) through administrative records without adding a question to the census. That seems a pretty reasonable holding given that the Constitution itself focuses on an accurate count of the whole population.
But if the Court goes the other way, it is truly an “emperor has no clothes” opinion. The Court will uphold the reasonableness of Ross’s “determination” even though everyone knows those were not his real reasons – in other words, basing its ruling on what everyone knows to be a fictional story, concocted to pass judicial muster. If the Court is willing to tolerate that, what won’t it tolerate?
And then there are the plainly partisan consequences of the ruling. Combine it with the almost-certain rejection of constitutional challenges to gerrymandering, and other election-related decisions and everything points in the same direction – entrenchment of Republican power to resist the forces of demographic change.
By the way, although two degrees of separation in Washington is not unusual, it is interesting that the lawyer representing the Project on Fair Representation in the census case (and who represented the Evenwel plaintiffs) is William Consovoy, who is Trump’s lawyer in the challenge to the House request for Trump’s tax return and in the challenge to the subpoena to Trump’s accountant.
On the Census case itself, in case you missed it, I want to flag your attention to this story Tierney filed in yesterday’s oral arguments reporting. Adding a citizenship question to the Census serves a number of illegitimate purposes, the most direct of which is undercounting immigrant populations – documented in undocumented – disproportionately in Democratic regions. But the real prize is to cue up a future Court decision which would either mandate or allow states to redistrict on the basis on eligible voters rather than population.
To sketch out how this would work in practice, Texas has a large immigrant population. To date, no one is challenging that Texas is apportioned representatives to Congress on the basis of population. (The constitutional language is pretty clear.) But if the districts are created on the basis of eligible voters that would create districts in which more rural, older and less immigrant-heavy districts get significantly more power. In other words, it’s a way to lock in political dominance for Republican leaning regions as well as the allocation of federal funds. In yesterday’s arguments Justice Gorsuch repeatedly got ahead of himself and champed at the bit wanting to move ahead from the Census question (which would make this easier to do and invite a future case to do it) to do just this. Tierney has the story.
If you are as much of an Event Horizon fan as some of us in these parts, news that the movie is getting new life (sort of) will come as a welcomed surprise.
