George Packer's Blog, page 198

Policing the Police in Newark

“Policing the Police” is a documentary by the PBS investigative series “Frontline” that premières Tuesday, June 28th, at 10 P.M. E.S.T./9 P.M. C.S.T.

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Related:
How Real Is the New Far Right?
The Hate That Remains, a Year After Charleston
What’s Wrong with the Redskins

How Real Is the New Far Right?

In Sacramento on Sunday, two white-supremacist groups, the Traditional Worker Party and the Golden State Skinheads, held a demonstration outside the California State Capitol “to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in,” according to the Traditional Worker Web site. They meant the white race, not the Presidential one, but they cited as evidence the “brutal assaults” by protesters at Donald Trump rallies in California. The skinheads had gotten the right permits and advertised their demonstration long in advance, allowing local activist groups to organize a counterprotest, which was much larger than the rally itself. Many of the counterprotesters were there with a local “anti-Fascist” group called Antifa Sacramento. (One of the dark realizations of this event was that midsized American cities now have anti-Fascist organizations.) The counterprotesters carried signs that denounced “Nazi scum”; they chanted, “Nazi go home.” Just a few minutes after the white nationalists arrived, the two groups began fighting. “They attacked each other without hesitation,” one member of the counterprotest told the Los Angeles Times. “It was a war zone.”

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Related:
The Far Right’s Plans for the G.O.P. Convention
Policing the Police in Newark
A Perilous Nationalism at Brexit

A Perilous Nationalism at Brexit

In 1989, while working for the British glossy magazine Harper’s and Queen, I was called to a meeting at which the staff was told that the year’s autumn issues would tell stories of the world’s three great superpowers. September was to spotlight women of the United Kingdom; October, women of the United States; and November, women of the Soviet Union. I looked around the room to see how others were responding to this proposal, which I presumed to be tongue-in-cheek, but no one was laughing. The memo about the loss of empire had apparently not yet been circulated in London. The three issues went forward as planned.

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Related:
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe
What Brexit Means for British Food
How Real Is the New Far Right?

Why Brexit Might Not Happen at All

As I noted on Friday, Britain won’t be exiting the E.U. anytime soon. If and when the U.K. government invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty of 2007, which grants member states the right to leave, there will be at least two years of negotiations about the terms of Britain’s future relationship with Europe. And that invocation of Article 50 is likely to be delayed for quite a while.

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Related:
On Brexit, the 2016 Euro Championship, and Trump
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 27th
The Day After Brexit

The Supreme Court’s Bribery-Blessing McDonnell Decision

As the governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell solicited a fifty-thousand-dollar “loan” from a nutraceutical entrepreneur named Jonnie R. Williams, Sr., and, minutes later, he texted an aide about making sure that Williams got meetings he wanted with Virginia state officials. McDonnell also accepted a Rolex watch and a twenty-thousand-dollar “loan,” plus the payment of the catering bill for his daughter’s wedding, all the while making calls and arranging meetings on Williams’s behalf. McDonnell’s wife, who had suggested to Williams that her husband could use a Rolex, also let the businessman pay for about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of clothing for her, including designer dresses and (my personal favorite) a full-length white leather coat. The gifts and loans added up to a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Today, the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that a Virginia jury was wrong to think that McDonnell’s actions obviously counted as official corruption. What’s more, in vacating his conviction, the Court set a new standard for official-bribery cases that is so absurdly narrow that it will likely be almost impossible to convict any but the most bumbling politicians of the crime. As Jeffrey Toobin predicted a few weeks ago, “Citizens United let rich people buy candidates; now they may be able to purchase office-holders, too.”

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Related:
The Supreme Court’s Just Application of the Undue-Burden Standard for Abortion
An Unexpected Victory for Affirmative Action
What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For

The Supreme Court’s Just Application of the Undue-Burden Standard for Abortion

With its ruling today in the Texas abortion case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court reinvigorated the “undue burden” standard, and with it the fundamental right to abortion. “Undue burden” is the test that courts have been using since 1992 to evaluate whether state laws on abortion are constitutional. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey that year, the Court declared, “An undue burden exists and therefore a provision of law is invalid if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” As a bulwark protecting abortion rights, that language sounded fairly solid: the application of the purpose-or-effect test to abortion jurisprudence was one of the signal contributions of Sandra Day O’Connor, and it had the markings of her pragmatic approach.

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Related:
The Supreme Court’s Bribery-Blessing McDonnell Decision
An Unexpected Victory for Affirmative Action
What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For

Idi Amin’s Israeli Connection

On June 27, 1976, an Air France jet carrying around two hundred and forty passengers, twelve crew members, and four hijackers took off from Athens Airport. Before it could reach its destination, in Paris, it suddenly veered south to Libya, where it refuelled and then headed toward the equator, finally landing at Entebbe, in the East African nation of Uganda. The passengers and crew were herded into a stuffy, mosquito-ridden airport building; three days later, most of those hostages who were not Israeli were released. In exchange for the freedom of the remaining hostages, the hijackers, who claimed to represent the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, demanded the release of fifty-three pro-Palestine militants from Israeli and European jails. On July 4th, nearly all the hostages were freed in an Israeli commando raid led by Jonathan Netanyahu, the brother of Israel’s current Prime Minister. But Jonathan himself was killed during the rescue operation, by sniper fire from the airport control tower.

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Related:
How Israel Lost Its Latest Chance for a Peace Process
A Missed Opportunity to Support Secular Life in Israel
At the AIPAC Conference, Trump and Clinton Try for a Do-Over

The Security Firm That Employed the Orlando Shooter Protects American Nuclear Facilities

Omar Mateen, the killer responsible for the carnage at the Pulse night club in Orlando, two weeks ago, began training to become a corrections officer during the fall of 2006. He worked at a prison in Indiantown, Florida, while attending a correctional academy at a community college. His training didn’t last long. In April, 2007, the Florida Department of Corrections “administratively dismissed” Mateen, and he was kicked out of the academy. Mateen had felt slighted for being a Muslim, warned that a massacre like the one at Virginia Tech could occur at the academy, and talked about shooting his classmates at a school cookout. Administrators worried that he might show up on campus with a gun. Five months later, he was hired by G4S Secure Solutions USA, Inc., to work as an armed security guard. He obtained a license to carry a concealed weapon and, over the years, fulfilled various assignments for the company. At the St. Lucie County Courthouse, where G4S had a contract, one of Mateen’s tasks was screening visitors for guns.

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Related:
Queer, Arab, and Onstage After Orlando
Forget Congress—The Gun Business Faces a Judge
Lessons from the Justice Department’s Orlando Transcript Bungling

Can John McEnroe Help Milos Raonic Win Wimbledon?

John McEnroe was seated courtside at the Queen’s Club, in London, earlier this month for the start of the final of the Aegon Championships, the premier warmup before Wimbledon. He was protected from sporadic sunshine by a new Mets cap, and he was elbows-to-knees absorbed as play began, his face expressionless, which can’t be easy for him. He was on hand not as a commentator—he is tennis’s best—but as a new, part-time consulting coach to Milos Raonic, the towering Canadian with a big, big serve who spent a moment last year ranked No. 4 in the world, and who may, at twenty-five, be poised to secure a steady place in that stratosphere, as the vaunted Big Four of men’s tennis begins to crumble. (He’s currently ranked No. 7.) McEnroe has joined a team of coaches. (These days, most tennis stars are supported by similar crews.) His immediate responsibility is to hone Raonic’s play on grass, which should be a prime surface for the Canadian, given that his game begins with a serve that routinely reaches a hundred and thirty miles per hour and that grass is a slick and fast surface. “He can get in your head with that serve,” McEnroe told the Guardian earlier this month, explaining why grass suited Raonic.

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Related:
The Next Great Men’s Tennis Player?
Serena Wins—Next Question, Please
Next in Line at Wimbledon

The Day After Brexit

A strange atmosphere set in on Friday, after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that he would step down, and the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, faced a vote of no confidence. Once the institutions of British politics proved they could not hold—both major parties had pushed adamantly for the Remain cause—individual politicians hung out their banners. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister for Scotland, promised to prepare legislation for another Scottish independence referendum and said she would begin a conversation with Brussels about how Scotland might remain part of the E.U. Sturgeon said that she had spoken with Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London—which, like Scotland, had voted to remain—and that he was of a similar mind. Khan did not confirm this, but he did post a statement on his Facebook page assuring European residents of London that, at least in the city, they are still “very welcome.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”