Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 143

Samantha Bee Asks the Right Questions About Orlando

Since the departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show last August, the oft-repeated question has been who would step into his shoes and assume the role of America’s late-night conscience. The incredible evolution of Stewart from journeyman stand-up comedian to his generation’s Walter Cronkite was one Stewart himself mocked because he hosted, as he put it, “the fake news.” Nonetheless, his straightforward breakdowns of political hypocrisy and media obfuscation were a valuable service in an increasingly polarized cable-news world, and his retirement left a vacuum waiting to be filled—perhaps by none other than his former colleague Samantha Bee.

 

Bee’s TBS show Full Frontal only airs once a week (Mondays at 10:30 p.m.), but unlike her peer John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO, she’s used her platform to quickly and adeptly react to current events with blunt language (Oliver will often zero in on less widely reported topics). Her seven-minute opening monologue addressing the mass shooting in Orlando has already spread across the internet since it aired Monday night—and its power comes from its stark candor. “Is it okay if, instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes until we cut to commercial?” Bee asks. It’s not just okay—it’s exactly what her audience wants.

In this new age of late-night TV, ratings matter less than having an online industry of viral content ready to react to every episode of your show. Dozens of websites got used to simply linking to Stewart’s segments on YouTube as a way to drive easy traffic, and the practice has also become commonplace for Oliver and Late Night’s Seth Meyers (less so for Stewart’s direct successor Trevor Noah, who has struggled to find his voice at The Daily Show). Since its acclaimed launch in February, Full Frontal has merited that kind of online attention, and TBS quickly extended its 13-episode order through the end of 2016. It still only airs weekly, a distinction Bee prefers because it lets her and her writers hone the message of every episode.

The daily grind that Stewart faced at The Daily Show (which aired four times a week) may have contributed to his overall tone, which was far more arch and cynical, only rarely breaking to advocate for causes Stewart thought were particularly underserved (like the plight of 9/11 veterans). Bee is much more direct, and her segment on Orlando forcefully brushed aside the language of “thoughts and prayers” that many politicians lean on in times of crisis, advocating for more direct action.

“Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems,” she said, before laying out clear statistics about America’s lax gun control and its relationship to mass shootings. Bee explored the success of assault-weapons bans in countries like Australia, which enacted them after a series of mass shootings in the ’80s and ’90s, and has seen no mass shootings since. She railed against the wishy-washy speechifying of Florida Governor Rick Scott; she groaned at a particular line from Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who said, “This could have happened anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, today was Orlando’s turn.”

“Orlando’s turn? Mass shootings are so normalized now that we’re taking turns?” Bee cries in response. “This wasn’t even Orlando’s first high-profile gun murder of the weekend. Stop thinking, and do something to improve our society!”

In a recent interview with Vulture, Louis C.K. named Bee as the comedian he’s most excited to watch on television, saying that while lots of hosts are “talking about the same shit,” she’s “hitting a chord like nobody else,” an observation he credited to her polemical style, her ability to be fearlessly and unapologetically angry. “All of these guys, even Jon Stewart, who’s a fucking genius, he would get upset but he always stayed cool. Guys like to be a little above it ... Even after ranting, they suddenly calm down and smile,” C.K. said. “But Samantha doesn’t do that.”

Indeed, Bee doesn’t do that—and that’s why her straightforward approach seems refreshing in such polarized political times. Comedians like Stewart helped redraw the lines between comedy and advocacy, and not only is Bee taking up his mantle, but she’s also doing something new with it. In a crowded media world, viewers appreciate directness, even from their entertainers. Bee’s voice stands out precisely because she’s not trying to appeal to broad common denominators. She knows her audience, and she knows how to appeal to them: by speaking loud and clear.

BrainDead: A D.C. Satire ... With Alien Bugs

There’s a paradox at play in the fictional American politics of nonfictional American television: A show must be, to get the kinds of audiences it requires to stay on the air, inclusive. It must not alienate. It must not offend. It must revel in politics, yes, but it must do that while avoiding political partisanship. Most recent shows (Madam Secretary, Parks and Recreation, House of Cards, Veep) have done a delicate dance around that tension, downplaying party politics, and their deep penetration of American political life, in favor of broader portrayals of politics’ mechanisms and machinations. If they don’t do that—if they choose instead to revel in their own partisanship, in the (in)famous manner of The West Wing, they risk alienating as many viewers as they attract. The result of all that is, on top of everything else, a series of televised takes on American politics that are not just fictionalized, but also sanitized.

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Bartlet for America, Forever

BrainDead is the exception that ends up proving the rule. The show, whose first episode premiered on CBS on Monday night, refers to itself, in its promotional literature, as “a comic-thriller set in the world of Washington, D.C. politics.” It is more specifically, however, attempting to be a sci-fi-laced satire of the American political system writ large, and of all the bodies—Congress, Congressional staffers, constituents, the media—that circle, complacently, in its orbit.

The premise is this: Laurel Healy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a young documentary filmmaker from a political family, gets bribed into doing a six-month stint working for her brother, a Democratic senator from Maryland, in the Capitol. Laurel hates politics, resenting its niceties and superficialities; she also, as soon becomes clear, has a knack for the family trade. Will she end up making deals, in spite of herself? Will she flirt with a cute aide to a Republican senator? Will she be forced to walk the sometimes extremely thin line that divides partisanship and idealism? Yes. And yes. And yes.

BrainDead is, as its ants-in-our-pants premise suggests, both pessimistic and whimsical; that frees its writers of the immediate need for realism.

But that’s the House of Cards-y/Scandal-y/Veep-y side of BrainDead. The other side, the much more compelling side, is this: During Laurel’s first week on the job—as the threat of a partisanship-rooted government shutdown looms—space bugs attack earth (and, specifically, Washington, D.C.). The creepy-crawlies look like very large ants, and they tend to attack, through ducts and open windows, in CGI-tastic waves. And, hold on to your metaphor, they do their work primarily, it seems, by … infiltrating people’s brains. (Hence, the show’s title; hence, as well, the many, many jokes, in the show’s first episode alone, about “people losing their minds.”)

Infection by the space-ants will either 1) cause people’s brains to explode (this is graphically depicted, blood and ooze and all), or 2) allow people to live as they have, only overcome by a form of extremism. So, in BrainDead’s first episode, one victim of the number-two strain of ant-infestation, the Republican senator Red Wheatus (Tony Shalhoub), stops boozing and becomes more Freedom Caucus-y in his political orientation. Another, a feisty woman who is one of Senator Healy’s constituents, manifests her infection by becoming downright Stepfordian.

The mechanics of the bug-to-brain infiltration are left exceedingly unclear (there’s a long scene depicting Senator Wheatus’s brain popping out, intact, through his ear—at which point it explodes). Then again, they don’t necessarily have to be. BrainDead is a show that, as its title and definitely as its ants-in-our-pants premise might suggest, is equal parts pessimistic and whimsical; if you’re a writer, the nice thing about working on a show like that—sci-fi, bugs, the spontaneous combustion of gray matter—is that it frees you of the immediate need for realism or a semblance thereof. That could seem to be a good thing: BrainDead, as its advertising has gone out of its way to emphasize, is brought to you by the dream team—Michelle and Robert King, and the producer Ridley Scott—who fostered a quiet revolution at CBS through The Good Wife, the show that brought the prestige of cable to network drama.

And BrainDead, to its credit, takes the very thing that made The Good Wife a small weekly miracle—the speed of production, which allowed the full urgency of a “ripped from the headlines” posture to be realized—and doubles down. Last night’s episode began with a montage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (It also blamed the invasion of the space bugs on that meteor that fell in Russia in 2013. And the plots of its early episodes borrow heavily from the real-world government shutdowns of … 2013 and 2015.) The show took a broad approach to its headline-ripping premise: It took all of those media condemnations of “the do-nothing Congress,” and all those polls measuring people’s dissatisfactions with their government, and a general cultural atmosphere that takes the frustrations and failures of American democracy for granted … and made a show of it.

The problem with that, though, is that BrainDead never, in its execution, gives the impression that it truly groks the political system it mocks. It serves up all the stuff you’d expect of political satire—the betrayals, the dramas, the jokes at the expense of overeager staffers—but never blends them deftly enough to suggest the deep knowledge that is required to make satire truly scathing. BrainDead may have gleaned much of its comedy through the borrowing of real-world events; last night’s episode, though, also borrowed heavily, almost ridiculously heavily, from the fanciful fictions of The West Wing. (Laurel, on her first day as her brother’s aide, engages in a constituent-management event that is essentially a Senate-based version of the Bartlet White House’s Big Block of Cheese Day. And remember the West Wing episode that found a Republican senator being willing to vote with the other side in exchange for a $47 million earmark for autism research—because his granddaughter was autistic? In BrainDead, it’s a sister who is autistic, and the proposed earmark is … $48 million.)

It’s a fine line, paying tribute to a former show—or perhaps, mocking it—and being simply derivative of it. In this case, it’s hard to tell which is which. BrainDead’s wild tonal shifts—exploding brains one moment, monologues on political idealism the next—never coalesce into the ideological assurance of The West Wing or of the many other shows that inform its plots and its messages. (Even Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a work that also seems to have inspired BrainDead, channeled contemporary anxieties about communism and the individual sacrifices that come with collective governance.) BrainDead, instead, is aggressively apolitical. It avoids political alienation by way of, you know, actual aliens. It navigates the paradox of partisan TV by mocking partisanship itself.

BrainDead’s posture is one of equal-opportunity pessimism: Politicians are the worst! Government is awful! Lolnothingmatters!

It also lacks any obvious sense of conviction about the world. In trying to mock a system that already quite effectively mocks itself, it doesn’t seem to know where to go. There’s a certain nihilism to the whole enterprise. BrainDead seems to pride itself, as The Good Wife deservedly did, in its proximity to the real world—to headlines, to events, to life as lived by its many, many viewers. It’s about Congress and the presidency and the media. It co-stars Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and a faux Rachel Maddow and a faux Megyn Kelly. These would seem to be ripe targets of satire. And yet, without convictions to bolster it—without a coherent vision of what would be a better alternative to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Rachel Maddow or Megyn Kelly—everyone gets mocked, equally. Everyone gets accused, in some way, of possessing a deadened brain. BrainDead’s posture is one of equal-opportunity pessimism: Politicians are the worst! Government is awful! Lolnothingmatters!

What that amounts to is not only a “comic-thriller” that is only occasionally comedic, and even less occasionally thrilling; it also amounts to a political satire that, in indicting everyone, ends up indicting no one. The ultimate targets of the jokes here are “partisans,” but if that’s the case then American democracy has another joke in store: It’s the partisans who tend to be heard, and who tend to have influence, and who tend to determine what “American democracy” is going to become. BrainDead may pride itself on its ripped-from-the-headlines relevance; the problem, though, is that the headlines of the moment—about Trump, about terrorism, about inequality, about what America is and will be in the future—reveal nothing if not how destructive political pessimism can be. The democratic system the Kings are satirizing will be, during BrainDead’s 13-episode run, engaged in a fight for its own future; with stakes this high, sometimes the best thing one can be is political and passionate and, yes, partisan.

Paul Ryan (Again) Rejects Trump's Muslim Ban

Paul Ryan may be on board with Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, but the House speaker is not getting behind his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

“I stand by my remarks. I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interests,” Ryan told reporters on Tuesday morning, again rebuking Trump a day after the presumptive Republican nominee renewed his proposal in the wake of the terrorist attack in Orlando.

The speaker had spoken out against the Muslim ban in December, saying it was “not conservatism” and an affront to America’s constitutional values. But with Trump now his party’s standard-bearer, Ryan’s statement on Tuesday carried more significance, and it reflects a broader discomfort among GOP congressional leaders with Trump’s “America first” vision for national-security and foreign policy. House Republicans last week released their own plan for protecting the homeland, and it was notable for how little it overlapped with Trump’s call for a temporary Muslim ban, a border wall paid for by Mexico, and a policy of mass deportation of immigrants.

 

Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, last week suggested Trump’s rhetoric against Muslims could “inflame or help the recruiting efforts” of terrorists. Like Ryan, he flatly rejected the idea of a religious test for entering the country. 

In responding to Sunday’s massacre in Orlando, Ryan summoned the post-9/11 language of former President George W. Bush to further distance himself from Trump—albeit without mentioning his name. “There’s a really important distinction that every American needs to keep in mind,” Ryan said.

This is a war with radical Islam. It’s not a war with Islam. Muslims are our partners. The vast, vast majority of Muslims in this country and around the world are moderate. They’re peaceful. They’re tolerant. And so they’re among our best allies, among our best resources in this fight against radical Islamic terrorism.

Ryan and other House GOP leaders criticized President Obama’s handling of the war against ISIS, and they said they would be repackaging anti-terror bills the House passed last year to again send to the Senate. “Right now, the president doesn’t have a plan to get the job done,” Ryan said. Yet for all of his complaints about Obama, the speaker’s bigger challenge seems, once again, to be Trump.

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A Win for 'Net Neutrality'

Updated on June 14 at 2:09 p.m. ET

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied challenges to the Obama administration’s rules for “net neutrality,” which ensure consumers get equal access to internet.

More from Bloomberg:

The ruling is a win for Alphabet Inc.’s Google, online video provider Netflix Inc. and others who championed the notion of an open internet where internet service providers are prevented from offering speedier lanes to those willing to pay extra for them. Challengers including AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. had said the rule would discourage innovation and investment.

The three-judge panel heard arguments on Dec. 4. U.S. Circuit judges David Tatel and Sri Srinivasan voted to uphold the FCC, while the third member of the panel, Stephen Williams, issued a partial dissent.

James Gibson, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, in a statement called the ruling “a complete win for the FCC and for net neutrality.”

“The decision gives the FCC authority to regulate broadband like a public utility,” he said. “But it does not mean that the same regulations that apply to, say, the telephone system will apply to the internet. The FCC can craft different rules, as indeed it has.”

Tom Wheeler, the FCC’s chairman, called it a “victory for consumers and innovators.” But Michael O’Reilly, an FCC commissioner who opposes “net neutrality,” called the ruling “more than disappointing,” adding he expected it to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“If allowed to stand, however, today’s decision will be extremely detrimental to the future of the Internet and all consumers and businesses that use it,” he said. “We all will rue the day the Commission was confirmed to have nearly unmitigated power over the Internet—and all based on unsubstantiated, imaginary ‘harms.’”

 

 

Euro 2016: Russia Sanctioned

Russia has been handed a suspended disqualification and fined 150,000 euros ($168,000) by UEFA for the behavior of its fans during a soccer match against England on June 11 at the Euro 2016 tournament.

Here’s part of the statement:

Charges relating to crowd disturbances, use of fireworks and racist behaviour had been brought against the RFU, and the CEDB decided to impose the following sanctions:

• A fine of €150,000.-

• A suspended disqualification of the Russian national team from UEFA EURO 2016 for the crowd disturbances. In accordance with Article 20 of the UEFA Disciplinary Regulations*, this disqualification is suspended until the end of the tournament. Such suspension will be lifted if incidents of a similar nature (crowd disturbances) happen inside the stadium at any of the remaining matches of the Russian team during the tournament.

The decisions of the UEFA Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body is open to appeal.

This decision only relates to the incidents which occurred inside the stadium and are therefore under the jurisdiction of the UEFA Disciplinary Bodies.

The key here is that Russia’s disqualification is on hold until the end of the tournament on July 10, but that hold can be lifted if Russian fans repeat their behavior in any other Euro 2016 game.

Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister and formerly the president of the Russian Football Union, said Russia will comply with UEFA’s decision. 

“What other position can there be?” he said.

The June 11 game between Russia and England ended 1-1, but Russian fans engaged in clashes with English fans inside the stadium after the game. There were also, Sky News reports, “three days of violence in the old port area of Marseille, which resulted in dozens of injuries,” mostly to English fans.

Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns?

Could legislation now stalled in Congress have stopped Omar Mateen from buying the guns he used to murder 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning? Democrats made that case aggressively on Monday as they renewed their push for a bill that would block people on the terrorist watch list from being able to purchase firearms. 

It’s not clear that this is true, however. Mateen was under FBI investigation for connections to terrorism two separate times in 2013 and 2014, the agency’s director, James Comey, confirmed on Monday. During that time, the government placed him in the Terrorist Screening Database, more commonly known as the terror watch list. (The no-fly list is a smaller subset of this list that forbids suspected individuals from boarding a commercial plane.) When those inquires ended, the government removed him from the list, the Los Angeles Times reported. Even if the legislation had been enacted, it would not have ensured that the FBI would have flagged Mateen when he went to buy an assault-style rifle and handgun in the days before Sunday’s massacre.

 

As it happened, Mateen was a security guard licensed to carry concealed weapons in Florida, and he passed the necessary background checks to legally buy the guns he used. Beginning in May 2013, the FBI’s Miami field office investigated Mateen for 10 months, Comey said, based on reports that he made statements that were “inflammatory and contradictory” concerning his coworkers and terrorism while working as a contract security guard at a local courthouse. During that first investigation, officials questioned him twice, placed him under surveillance, and “introduced confidential sources to him” to determine if he was a terrorist. At one point, his colleagues said, he claimed family ties to al-Qaeda. At another, Comey said, he voiced support for Hezbollah and said he wanted law enforcement to raid his home and assault his family so he could be martyred.

Mateen told investigators he made the statements out of anger, and the FBI closed the inquiry. Two months later, however, his name surfaced again when the FBI learned that Mateen had “casually” known an American citizen who had committed a suicide bombing for the al-Nusra front in Syria. “But our investigation turned up no ties of consequence between the two of them,” Comey said. Another witness told investigators he was concerned about Mateen because he mentioned the recruitment videos of the notorious American imam, Anwar al-Awlaki. But after Mateen turned his life around, got married, and secured a job, the witness said, he was no longer worried.

Since the ISIS-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino last fall, Democrats on Capitol Hill have seized on the watch-list issue as both an anti-terrorism policy and a politically savvy way to pressure Republicans to move on gun control. Legislation sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California would allow the attorney general to block sales of firearms or explosives to people as long as there is “a reasonable belief that such individual may use a firearm or explosive in connection with terrorism.”

“If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.”

The bill failed on a party-line vote in December. Democrats said they would try to attach the measure as an amendment to an appropriations bill on the Senate floor later this month, hoping the Orlando attack will jostle a few more Republicans running for reelection this fall. Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for the effort during a speech in Cleveland on Monday. “If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked,” she said. “You shouldn’t be able to exploit loopholes and evade criminal background checks by buying online or at a gun show. And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.”

Clinton also pushed to reinstate the ban on assault weapons—a move that might have more direct relevance to the Orlando shooting. But despite their agreement on the policy, Senate Democrats downplayed the effort as a matter of legislative strategy. “It is my move that in terms of terrorism, this is the most effective legislation that could pass,” Senator Charles Schumer of New York told reporters of the watch-list bill.

Republicans and the National Rifle Association have argued that the measure short-circuits due process and gives added legal weight to a flawed, sprawling list that once flagged Ted Kennedy as a threat. As David Graham wrote last year, the politics of the watch list have pretty much flipped in the decade-and-a-half since 9/11. Democrats said Feinstein’s bill is virtually identical to one proposed by the Bush administration in 2007, and they countered the GOP’s due-process concerns by noting that the legislation provided for “a quick and speedy appeals process.” Feinstein cited a report from the Government Accountability Office finding that 265 people in the terrorist database had passed a background check to buy a gun. “Our laws are riddled with loopholes,” she said. “A background check really isn’t enough.”

More than anything else, the Democratic senators—as well as Clinton and President Obama—were venting a frustration with a Republican-controlled Congress that, they complained, had done nothing in the face of repeated gun-related atrocities. “Congress, in a sense, has been complicit in these mass killings,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, where the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School spurred the most recent push for tighter gun restrictions.

Yet while lawmakers argued that their legislation would prevent future massacres, they had no definitive answer for whether it would have stopped the killing in Orlando, or whether the FBI had simply let Mateen slip through its screening procedures. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said the FBI had been doing a great job but had been “handicapped,” and congressional aides said Feinstein’s bill would have allowed the attorney general to block Mateen’s gun purchases even if he were no longer under formal investigation.

It wouldn’t have required the government to stop him, though. On Monday, Comey gave no indication that his agents were hampered by loopholes in the law. The FBI is now going over its history with Mateen to determine if it should have taken its inquiry further. “So far the honest answer is, I don’t think so,” the director said. “I don’t see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently.”

A Dramatic Police Operation Outside Paris

A man who reportedly claimed allegiance to the Islamic State killed a French police officer and his partner in a Paris suburb, French news reports say.

Here’s France 24:

Witnesses told investigators the man may have shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) as he stabbed the policeman repeatedly outside his home before holing up inside with the woman and the couple’s three-year-old son.

Sources close to the inquiry told AFP the attacker had claimed allegiance to the Islamic State jihadist group while negotiating with police from the elite RAID unit.

“The anti-terror department of the Paris prosecution service is taking into account at this stage the mode of operation, the target and the comments made during negotiations with the RAID,” one source said.

When negotiations failed, Pierre-Henry Brandet, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said a decision was made to launch an assault in Magnanville, which is about 35 miles northwest of Paris. Explosions were heard as the RAID unit moved in. They found the woman’s body inside; the attacker was killed during the assault. The three-year-old son was unharmed, but “in shock,” a French prosecutor said. Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, expressed his “infinite sadness” at the night’s events. The victims have not yet been named. 

The killing comes as France hosts the Euro 2016 soccer tournament under tight security that were imposed after last November’s deadly attacks on Paris that killed 130 people.

Trump's Angry Broadside Against Muslims and Immigration

In a fiery, disjointed speech in New Hampshire on Monday, Donald Trump angrily denounced the attacks in Orlando, political correctness, immigration, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the American Muslim community.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee reiterated his call for an indefinite ban on immigration from Muslim countries, and asserted that the president would be empowered to establish such a ban on his own. “The immigration laws of the United States give the president the power to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons that the president deems detrimental to the interests or security of the United States, as he deems appropriate,” Trump said. That’s an unusually expansive view of executive power on immigration, building on President Obama’s own actions, which many conservatives have criticized as overreach.

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Trump: Obama Was Maybe Involved in the Orlando Shooting

His assertion of power was one of several striking moments in the speech, which Trump read sometimes unsteadily from a teleprompter, occasionally ad-libbing interjections. (Although he has given a few such speeches in recent days, he has still not quite found his rhythm, nor have his speechwriters found a way to write in a way that mimics his distinctive voice.) In a vague line, he demanded that President Obama “release the full and complete immigration histories of all individuals implicated in terrorist activity of any kind since 9/11,” without differentiating those cleared of any involvement.

He also delivered a thinly veiled threat to American Muslim communities, accusing them of sheltering terrorists in their midst. “We have to form a  partnership with our Muslim communities. We have Muslim communities in this country that are great,” he said, but added: “They have to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement. They have to turn in the people who they know are bad. They have to turn them in, and they have to turn then in forthwith ... They know what’s going on.”

It was a far cry from the approach President George W. Bush took after September 11, when he visited an Islamic center, called Islam a religion of peace, and pleaded for tolerance for American Muslims. But Trump also delivered perhaps the warmest remarks about LGBT Americans of any Republican presidential candidate ever.

“Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando's LGBT Community,” he said. “A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation. It is a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation. It is an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”

He promised to be stronger on both LGBT issues and women’s issues that Hillary Clinton, contrasting his “actions” with Clinton’s “words.” (There are reasons why Trump might not want to be judged on his words about women.) Confusingly, he accused the Obama administration of being weak on gay rights.

Having implied Monday morning that President Obama may have been involved in or was sympathetic to Islamist terror attacks, Trump did not repeat the attack in New Hampshire. But he did accuse the president of “restraining our intelligence gathering,” without explaining to what he was referring. He criticized the administration for weakness, and for its policies in Syria and Libya, which he said had allowed ISIS to grow.

“We have Muslim communities in this country that are great. They have to turn in the people who they know are bad. They know what’s going on.”

Trump’s speech was light on policy, suggesting a belief that if he repeated the phrase “radical Islam” frequently enough, it would solve the problem. While he complained that Obama and Clinton were unwilling to recognize terrorism, he himself put forward no plan for how to counter it, other than attempting to prevent would-be terrorists from entering the United States. (Clinton’s proposals have also been laughably vague.) He did not propose any specific steps for countering ISIS, saying only that he would “have an attorney general, a director of national intelligence, and a secretary of defense who will know how to fight the war on radical Islamic terrorism,” and that NATO should focus more on terrorism. 

But the meat of the speech was about immigration, Trump’s signature issue since the start of the campaign. In a neat bit of political jiujitsu, Trump portrayed his own immigration proposals as “mainstream,” while labeling Clinton’s “radical.”

“We have to stop the tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States—we don’t know who they are, they have no documentation, and we don’t know what they’re planning,” Trump said, though as PolitiFact points out his claim the U.S. does not vet incoming refugees is “wrong.” The U.S. is far behind its modest goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees, though other Syrians have immigrated through other means.

“I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism,” Trump said. He later clarified that he was referring to “nations tied to Islamic terror,” though that would still include many European nations that have faced their own homegrown Islamist attacks. He said that Americans deserved to know of immigrants, “Why are they here?” and said of radical Islamists, “They’re trying to take over our children.”

But as Trump acknowledged, Omar Mateen, the shooter in Orlando, was an American citizen, born in New York City to Afghan parents. (He initially seemed to say that Mateen was an Afghan himself, though he quickly corrected himself, making it seem more like a teleprompter miscue than intentional misleading.) When Mateen was born, the United States was funneling support to radical Islamists in Afghanistan fighting an invasion by the Soviet Union.

“The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here,” Trump said. 

Yet his ban would seem to conspicuously fail to handle people like Mateen, native-born Americans who are radicalized within the United States. Even if banning Muslim immigration three decades ago would have prevented the spread of terror, a tenuous argument, it would do nothing to stem “self-radicalized” or “lone-wolf” terrorists.

Obama, in remarks earlier Monday, acknowledged the threat from Americans who are radicalized over the Internet. “As far as we can tell right now, this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time,” he said of Mateen. Obama also put heavy blame on easy access to firearms.

Trump, meanwhile, briefly noted the problem of homegrown radicals, but quickly waved it away: “Yes, there are many radicalized people already inside our country as a result of the poor policies of the past. But the whole point is that it will be much, much easier to deal with our current problem if we don’t keep on bringing in people who add to the problem.”

The levers of American policy are effectively frozen. The president and the Congress cannot reach consensus on new gun policies, changes to immigration law, or even congressional authorization for U.S. action against ISIS, even as strikes have been occurring for months. With action out of the picture, leaders are increasingly obsessed with words. For example, there is Obama’s steadfast, controversial, but fully intentional aversion to the phrase “radical Islam,” and its mirror image, Trump’s denunciation of “political correctness.” During his speech Monday, Trump warned, “We cannot afford to talk around issues anymore. We have to address these issues.” This was not a speech that did so.

How An American Basketball Player Can Compete for Armenia

A University of Connecticut basketball player, born and raised in the United States, is joining an unusual squad this summer: the Armenian national team.

Steven Enoch, an 18-year-old sophomore from Norwalk, Connecticut, is filling out the necessary paperwork to get dual citizenship for Armenia. Come July, he’ll compete with the under-20 team at the Division B European Championships in Greece.

Even though he has no Armenian ancestry, and has never visited, Enoch is still allowed to play for them. As the Associated Press explains:

Once he plays for Armenia, he won't be allowed to play for USA Basketball or any other country. Under international rules, players can suit up for only one country after they turn 17, except under special circumstances, such when their participation might benefit the advancement of basketball in the country for which they wish to play.

But there are no rules preventing a player who has never visited a country from playing for that nation, as long as they obtain a passport from that nation. Each nation gets one slot per team for a dual-citizenship player.

Armenia was looking for a center to compete with the team with summer, and Enoch answered the call.

While this doesn’t happen often, players have competed with other nations to get more playing time in the past. Tyrese Rice, a North Carolina native who played for Boston College, played for Montenegro in 2013. Similarly, Becky Hammon, a South Dakota native, competed for Russia in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.

As Enoch’s former high school coach, Jere Quinn, told the AP, “With USA basketball, I don't think people are knocking at his door for that right now, so this is a good opportunity for him.” Enoch has also been reassured that most of his future teammates speak English.

Standing by Their Man

Actress turned conservative activist Stacey Dash is standing at the front of a small meeting room in the National Press Club in downtown Washington, explaining to a couple of dozen reporters and other activists why she is a Donald Trump fan. “I feel like the leader of the superpower of the free world should be fearless. Should be smart. Should not apologize for anything we do!” proclaimed Dash (whom some of you might recall from the 1995 teen flick Clueless, and probably nothing since). “And he should let the world know that we should not be messed with—that if there is an enemy in this world that is threatening us or our allies that we are going to wipe it off the face of the Earth!”

“The enemy is Islamic fascism,” clarified Dash, her Bronx accent thickening as she got revved up. “He is going to wipe it off the face of the Earth! And I am with him! He’s not going to be bullied by anyone!”

It is difficult to convey the weirdness of the June 9 launch of the new Women Vote Trump super PAC. Watching a tiny, smiley, meticulously coiffed actress, resplendent in a black cocktail dress and kick-ass red heels, fantasize about going medieval on radical Islamists was among the more incongruous moments in the hour-long roll out. But it was hardly the most colorful—or the most illuminating—one.

 

The overall tone of the event was striking, a blend of defiant pep rally and nurturing support group. The PAC’s trio of founders—Amy Kremer, Kathryn Serkes, and Ann Stone (ex-wife of Trump buddy and unofficial adviser Roger Stone)—are all hard-chargers, active in conservative politics and causes. Kremer is a founding mother of the Tea Party movement (who actually worked for, then resigned from, a different pro-Trump super PAC last month). Serkes, a long-time health-care consultant, bragged about being involved in the litigation that helped tank Hillarycare back in the 1990s.  (She has been similarly focused on repealing Obamacare.) And Stone (the chairwoman of Republicans for Choice) claims to have worked in politics since she was 12—with a more recent focus on high-level fundraising. (In addition to spearheading Women Vote Trump, Ann Stone sits on the advisory board of the Committee to Restore America’s Greatness, the pro-Trump super PAC run by her ex, Roger.)

Among the morning’s line up of speakers, there quickly emerged a common, nakedly defensive message: that the main reason so many women aren’t embracing Trump—whose unfavorables among women voters hover around 60 percent—is because they’ve bought into some misguided notion of sisterhood-solidarity with Hillary Clinton. Thus, a key theme for the day became: Women are too strong and savvy to fall for that squishy, liberal identity-politics B.S. As Serkes declared, “I’m not going to be told I need to vote for somebody just because she has the same body parts we do!”

At the same time, there was more than a whiff of old-fashioned girliness and victimhood in the air. (The PAC’s logo includes a sweet pink heart wrapped around the “T” in “Trump.”) People constantly gushed about how Trump wasn’t going to let himself or them or America be “bullied.” Stone borrowed a line from conservative pundit Laura Ingraham: “They say Donald Trump is a bully. But he’s a bully for us. He’s bullying back people who have bullied us for years!” Bully this. Bully that. It was like listening to a group of primary-school guidance counselors.

Of particular concern was the need for Women Vote Trump—which, incidentally, will also be handling the coalition-building effort typically run from inside a presidential campaign—to “make it safe” for women to “come out” about their feelings for the Donald. “Some of our speakers are going to talk about that a little bit more,” Serkes assured the audience in her opening remarks. “Because some of this also involves an act of courage!”

And talk they did. Kremer admitted how scared she was initially to tell anyone about her political orientation. “My heart was going toward Donald Trump, but I didn’t want to say anything to anybody because I was afraid of being reprimanded.” And once she came out? “Of course I have been beaten about. I’m still beaten about to this day. But you know what? It doesn’t matter, because you have to stand strong for what you believe in.”

Dash, currently hawking her new book about the tribulations of being a conservative in Hollywood, spoke repeatedly about the abuse she has taken. After all the speeches, in fact, Serkes kicked off the Q&A by noting that “women across the country are afraid to come out and talk to their friends about” their support for Trump, and she asked Dash to share any advice she might have. For her part, Dash made very clear that she supports Trump because he is a man’s man.  Don’t try to “define” Trump by his words—“He’s a New Yorker. He’s street”—but by his family, which is simply “beautiful,” she said. “He’s the head of the household. He’s a real man. And I’m so tired of the way men are behaving these days. I want men to be real men, like him!”

Then there were the event’s headliners, Diamond and Silk: video-bloggers from North Carolina who have become two of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. (The ladies even started their own group, called WOMEN United for Trump—the WOMEN part of which stands for Women Of Many Ethnicities Nationally.) In introducing the YouTube duo—sisters whose real names are Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson—Serkes called them “at least groupies if not borderline stalkers.” (The ladies actually didn’t look all that pleased about that.)

African American and theatrical, Diamond and Silk have become quite the celebrities at Trump events and rallies. (They will be hitting the road even harder once Women Vote Trump gets the money flowing.) They have a high-energy, high-volume, dizzying patter that makes Trump look low key. Diamond does most of the talking, while Silk spends a lot of time serving as her sister’s amen chorus. It’s a two-woman call-and-response show to rival the most spirited tent revival—only daffier and way more profane. One of their vlog entries, titled “A Message to Mitt and All of the Dumb Sh!% that Comes Out of His Mouth,” is nothing but 25 seconds of Diamond cursing at top volume (partially bleeped out for fans with delicate sensibilities) about what a loser Mitt Romney is and how he needs to “shut the fuck  up!”

Conversation alternated between talk of how smart and competent women are and how great it will be to finally get a real man in the White House. 

On Thursday, the ladies were keeping it slightly more civil—though they did send a gentle warning to “these elites of the Grand Old Party” who “don’t want to get behind Donald J. Trump and you want to withdraw your endorsement”: “We will vote your ass out!” Nor did they miss the opportunity to smack down anyone who might have ideas about what candidate they should support based on their gender or skin color. (Both women are former Democrats.) “Close to eight years ago, we were almost trapped into this guilt trip where, ‘Okay, you have to vote for the black man!’” said Diamond. “Well, you’re not gonna do that this here time! Because we don’t have to vote for the woman! We can vote for the businessman, and that’s who we’re gonna vote for!”

And on it flowed, alternating between talk of how smart and competent women are and how great it will be to finally get a real man in the White House to protect them from the mean and scary world. 

The moment that perhaps best captured the whole surreal vibe? Toward the end of the hour, an elderly woman stood to ask a question. She was clearly both anxious and irate: “How do women protect themselves who go to a Trump rally, come out the door, and find they’re accosted by paid leftists thugs who are out to harm them? We have seen this on TV!”

Without missing a beat, Dash fired back with a perfect mixture of tough-broad chutzpah and girlish dependency: “If you’re a woman, I suggest that you be with a man who is carrying a Second Amendment right!”