Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 123

Why are white men stockpiling guns?

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before — that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

So, who is buying all these guns — and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male — but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious — and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story — one in which they are once again the heroes.

Whatever happened to hard work?

When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.

“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families,” she says. “For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability — very motivating emotions.”

But Stroud also discovered another motivation: racial anxiety. “A lot of people talked about how important Obama was to get a concealed-carry license: ‘He’s for free health care, he’s for welfare.’ They were asking, ‘Whatever happened to hard work?’” Obama’s presidency, they feared, would empower minorities to threaten their property and families.

The insight Stroud gained from her interviews is backed up by many, many studies. A 2013 paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent. A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control. This drives political affiliations: A 2017 study in the Social Studies Quarterly found that gun owners had become 50 percent more likely to vote Republican since 1972 — and that gun culture had become strongly associated with explicit racism.

For many conservative men, the gun feels like a force for order in a chaotic world, suggests a study published in December of last year. In a series of three experiments, Steven Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay asked hundreds of liberals and conservatives to imagine holding a handgun — and found that conservatives felt less risk and greater personal control than liberal counterparts.

This wasn’t about familiarity with real-world guns — gun ownership and experience did not affect results. Instead, conservative attachment to guns was based entirely on ideology and emotions.

Who wants to be a hero?

That’s an insight echoed by another study published last year. Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and F. Carson Mencken created a “gun empowerment scale” designed to measure how a nationally representative sample of almost 600 owners felt about their weapons. Their study found that people at the highest level of their scale — the ones who felt most emotionally and morally attached to their guns — were 78 percent white and 65 percent male.

“We found that white men who have experienced economic setbacks or worry about their economic futures are the group of owners most attached to their guns,” says Froese. “Those with high attachment felt that having a gun made them a better and more respected member of their communities.”

That wasn’t true for women and non-whites. In other words, they may have suffered setbacks — but women and people of color weren’t turning to guns to make themselves feel better. “This suggests that these owners have other sources of meaning and coping when facing hard times,” notes Froese — often, religion. Indeed, Froese and Mencken found that religious faith seemed to put the brakes on white men’s attachment to guns.

For these economically insecure, irreligious white men, “the gun is a ubiquitous symbol of power and independence, two things white males are worried about,” says Froese. “Guns, therefore, provide a way to regain their masculinity, which they perceive has been eroded by increasing economic impotency.”

Both Froese and Stroud found pervasive anti-government sentiments among their study participants. “This is interesting because these men tend to see themselves as devoted patriots, but make a distinction between the federal government and the ‘nation,’ says Froese. “On that point, I expect that many in this group see the ‘nation’ as being white.”

Investing guns with this kind of moral and emotional meaning has many consequences, the researchers say. “Put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills,” says Froese. “For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative, which many white man long to feel a part of.”

Stroud’s work echoes this conclusion. “They tell themselves all kinds of stories about criminals and criminal victimization,” she says. “But the story isn’t just about criminals. It’s about the good guy — and that’s how they see themselves: ‘I work hard, I take care of my family, and there are people who aren’t like that.’ When we tell stories about the Other, we’re really telling stories about ourselves.”

How to save a white man’s life

Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren’t the “bad guys,” presumably criminals or terrorists. It’s themselves — and their families.

White men aren’t just the Americans most likely to own guns; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they’re also the people most likely to put them in their own mouths and pull the trigger, especially when they’re in some kind of economic distress. A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man — while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.

A gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer. Most of the time, according to every single study that’s ever been done about interpersonal gun violence, the dead and wounded know the people who shot them. A gun in the home makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed by her husband. Every week in America, 136 children and teenagers are shot — and more often than not, it’s a sibling, friend, parent, or relative who holds the gun. For every homicide deemed justified by the police, guns are used in 78 suicides. As a new study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine once again shows us, restrictive gun laws don’t prevent white men from defending themselves and their families. Instead, those laws stop them from shooting themselves and each other.

What are the solutions? That and many other studies suggest that restricting the flow of guns and ammunition would certainly save lives. But no law can address the absence of meaning and purpose that many white men appear to feel, which they might be able to gain through social connection to people who never expected to have the economic security and social power that white men once enjoyed.

“Ridicule of working-class white people is not helpful,” says Angela Stroud. “We need to push the ‘good guys’ to have a deeper connection to other people. We need to reimagine who we are in relation to each other.”

Fukushima seven years later: case closed?

Fire smokes billow from residences as a coastal area is flooded by waters after a tsunami in Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture (state), Japan, Friday, March 11, 2011. (Credit: AP/Kyodo News)

On March 11, 2011, a nuclear disaster struck Japan. The 9.0 magnitude Tohoku earthquake triggered a 15-meter tidal wave, which hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant approximately 45 minutes later. The plant’s power was knocked out and the backup generators crippled. After the emergency batteries were exhausted, three of the plant’s six reactors soon overheated, and at least two of the cores melted down, releasing immense amounts of radiation. While the reactors are now in theory stabilized, the work to understand and contain the damage continues.

In the seven years that have elapsed since the disaster, much has been written and said about its causes. Yet expert reports have paid little attention to the extensive testimony of Masao Yoshida, who was plant manager at the time and passed away in 2013.

One can only wonder about the decisions Yoshida had to make between March 11 and 15, 2011, to avoid the worst. And his gripping account calls into question some of the keystone principles of nuclear safety.

A ‘made in Japan’ disaster?

The international community and the Japanese themselves quickly characterized the disaster as one that was “made in Japan”, meaning it was enabled by two circumstances specific to Japan: the country’s exposure to environmental hazards (earthquakes and tsunamis) and its cultural acceptance of collusion — real or imaginary — between corporations and government.

Management of the accident, both by its operator, the Tepco Group, and the Japanese government, has been condemned as ineffectual. Serious failings were attributed to Tepco, which was unable to prevent a nuclear meltdown and subsequent explosions. A rare bright point was the heroism of those working on the ground, who risked their own lives to avert an even greater disaster.

Calling Fukushima a “made in Japan” disaster focuses attention on the failures of a socio-technical system apparently disconnected from industry good practices and the norms of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Moreover, its extraordinary scale allows it to be filed in the same historic category as another “aberrant” accident, Chernobyl. The latter was attributed to gross Soviet negligence, implicitly reinforcing a utopian vision of a safe and reliable nuclear industry. But do the nature of the Fukushima disaster and the specificity of its causes really make it an exception?

There have been a wide range of official inquiries. In Japan, reports were issued by both a governmental investigation and a parliamentary commission. Investigations were also conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD.

These analyses chiefly focused on the impact of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami on the nuclear power plant, the way the crisis was managed by the operator and the authorities, and on the cooperation between those onsite (emergency services) and offsite (Tepco staff). Hundreds of thousands of pages of reports have been published as a result. Ultimately, authorities unanimously concluded that upholding IAEA norms alone guarantees nuclear safety.

But the majority of the thousand-plus hearings given by the people involved have remained confidential. This is troubling: Why would a democratic society allow hearings given to a parliamentary commission to remain secret?

During the Japanese government’s investigation, Fukushima Daiichi plant manager Masao Yoshida was interviewed for more than 28 hours, over 13 sessions. His testimony was only made public in September 2014 after critical reporting by Japanese media. Printed in Japanese on A4 paper, it filled more than 400 pages.

Shedding new light on the story

The Risk and Crisis Research Centre of the Mines ParisTech engineering school translated Yoshida’s testimony into French, the first complete version in a language other than Japanese. (A partial English translation exists, made available by the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, but it proved to be inaccurate on several crucial points, and is highly controversial.)

Given that France generates 76% of its electricity with nuclear power, the task of a complete translation should have been undertaken by a nuclear-sector operator. None volunteered, however, no doubt asserting that all had already been said and settled. The Fukushima investigators all followed a pre-set formula, apparently designed solely to confirm hypotheses that would put events down to purely technical causes. Yet Yoshida responded to the investigators’ questions from an entirely different point of view, attributing his decisions and actions to the brutal struggle between men (himself and his staff) and technology or, more precisely, the machines (the reactors) that had suddenly gone out of control.

The brutal reality of the situation in March 2011 was that it was no longer a question of managing a crisis, applying established procedures or rolling out plan A or plan B. Day after agonising day, the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was an island, plunged into darkness, without electricity or emergency diesel generators, and almost completely devoid of resources.

Largely left to their own devices, Yoshida and the plant’s staff risked their lives at every moment. Wearing stiflingly hot protective wear and buffeted by aftershocks, they searched for slightest sound or visual clue in the absence of measurement data. Groping around the labyrinth of the ruined plant, they sought, more or less with success, to protect themselves from radioactive contamination in order to continue their work.

During the hearings, Yoshida confided his fears, doubts and beliefs. He lauded the commitment of his colleagues inside the plant, even as he deplored the absence or incompetence of those outside — Tepco headquarters, the government, the regulatory authority, and so on.

The emotional intensity of his account is both striking and moving. It shatters the all-too-bureaucratic certitudes that underestimate the complexities of situations, to the point of ignoring our humanity: the workers were facing the possibility of their own deaths and, above all, the deaths of their colleagues, their families and everything dear to them.

Almost miraculously, after four days of desperate efforts, the worst — the explosion of the Daiichi reactors, which could have set off those at the close-by Daini and Onagawa plants as well — was narrowly avoided. Yet we have learnt almost nothing from this catastrophe, and the much larger one that was averted.

Beyond safety margins

Of course, re-examining safety standards is important, as are “hard core” safety systems (a kind of fortified line of defence against external onslaughts) and the costly installation of diverse backup power generators. Such measures certainly increase safety margins, but what about the bigger picture?

The creation of “special nuclear forces”, such as France’s nuclear rapid action force (FARN), is a perfect example of such a mind-set. They are on-call to restore installations in accordance with regulations on radiation exposure. But what will such teams do if levels of radioactivity are above those set out in the legislation? Could we count on their commitment, as Japan did for that of Masao Yoshida and his staff, at once heroes and victims, sacrificed willingly or under orders, in order to prevent a nuclear apocalypse?

Translated from the French by Alice Heathwood for Fast for Word and Leighton Walter Kille.

Franck Guarnieri, Directeur du Centre de recherche sur les risques et les crises, Mines ParisTech

Sympathy for Melania?

(Credit: Getty/Saul Loeb)

The recent news cycle has not been kind to Donald Trump’s marriage, no matter what the state of that union had been before Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal spilled their guts on their alleged dalliances with the President of the United States. Even a whiff of celebrity infidelity is usually enough to create a sizable pile-on of public support for the cheated-upon spouse, but over the last two weeks headlines have been conspicuously silent on that front. In the wake of each woman’s televised interview, attention has not exactly pulled away from Melania — we know she stayed behind in Mar-a-Lago as per “tradition” for Spring Break last weekend; she is said to be “focusing on being a mom,” — but noticeably absent has been vocal outrage on her behalf.

Whatever you think about Melania Trump — about her motives for marrying Donald, her public performance as FLOTUS, her intensely ironic campaign against cyberbullying — one has to conclude this is likely a deeply humiliating period for her, and it’s tradition, at least, to express some solidarity with a person experiencing public humiliation over someone else’s actions. After all, the president has humiliated us, the American people, many times over; it’s not exactly the same as a personal betrayal, but we’re not entirely foreign to the feeling.

But the chatter on the matter seems largely focused on whether or not Daniels and McDougal are credible, and on the legalities of the measures Trump’s associates might have taken to keep them from talking, and even on whether or not this story is important at all. This morning, I looked around for stories centered on support for Melania, and found instead in my search results a litany of public issues the first lady has issued her own support for, all standard issue for the job: women, Americans fighting the opioid crisis, students protesting for gun control. I looked for stories centered on sympathy for Melania, and found a number dating back to the Inauguration, when #FreeMelania trended after several videos and still images made her out to be as utterly miserable on that January day as we were. The counter-takes — do not feel sorry for Melania! — were strident and swift, and since then, that sentiment seems to have stuck.

Over on the religious right, the sex scandals may be eroding some enthusiasm for Trump himself. Support among white evangelical women has dropped about 13 points from about a year ago, according to Pew Research Center data published by The Washington Post, which still leaves his approval rating among that group robust at 60 percent. And according to the New York Times, there’s a concern on the right that the sex scandals could be alienating moderate Republican women, too. But alienation from Trump has not so far resulted in a visible groundswell of support for his scorned spouse, which is an interesting departure from the usual playbook.

For many, especially those politically opposed to Donald Trump, possible reasons behind the lack of care for Melania are obvious and rooted in her complicity with her husband’s corrupt and destructive administration, starting with her refusal to disavow and leave him immediately when sexual misconduct allegations began rolling in and continuing through her public defense of his pussy-grabbing comments and her public support for his malignant presidency. It’s hard not to feel like just by publicly condoning the guy, Melania betrayed us first. At a time when many people, including racial minorities, LGBTQ folks and immigrants, are fighting for their right to exist, sympathy for those sleeping across the hall from the enemy can be scarce, with good reason.

Anecdotally, the most common reaction I hear is some version of “she knew what she was getting into.” Supposing that’s true — that a shameless philanderer doesn’t change his stripes, and may not even promise to — we also know for Melania it’s only half true. Unlike most political spouses, Melania likely had no idea that a future with Donald Trump would include the microscope of the presidency and the level of public scrutiny and subsequent humiliation that could bring. Hell, on that front, Donald didn’t know what he was getting into, either. We can speculate that they may have had a bargain — keep affairs discreet, out of their social circle and the tabloids — but any possible such arrangement would have effectively dissolved like an unsigned NDA on Inauguration Day.

Underneath it all is the assumption, with a weary shrug, that Melania’s marriage was more a mercenary act than a romance, which renders it a pathetic sham, without any honor to besmirch.

And that’s the other side to “she knew what she was getting into.” The phrase enjoys a close kinship to “you made your (wholly separate) bed, now lie in it,” which is also a thing people say when someone is being punished. Of all of the reprehensible things Donald Trump has done in the open — the Muslim travel and transgender military bans, sympathizing with neo-Nazis, birtherism, the Central Park Five, boasting about grabbing women’s genitals without their consent — there is now evidence that he might finally be punished by his supporters for what he’s allegedly done in private. But don’t mistake that alienation for support for the women in the story. To the kind of American who finds sex work or sex-adjacent work of all stripes, from provocative photos to porn films, disgusting and shameful — and that’s a bipartisan condition, by the way — the Karen McDougals and Stormy Danielses of the world are inherently suspicious women, if not downright disposable. She takes her clothes off for a living, goes that disturbing line of rape-culture thinking that contributes to a number of terrible policies and attitudes toward women, she knew what she was getting into. What the lack of enthusiastic counter-support for his wife might indicate is that to those willing to take that line of thinking to the next level, maybe Melania — the foreign-born model with the risqué portfolio and much-younger third-wife status — is more of a Karen or a Stormy than an innocently wronged wife.

Melania may not want anyone’s support; she is by all accounts a private person, even appearing to try her damndest to Bartleby her way out of an active first lady role, and this intensely mortifying situation would make even the most extroverted celebrity wife retreat into seclusion. And yet, she is married a very powerful man who has assembled a ruthless machine around him to protect his interests. If she had left him in the first quarter of 2017, she’d be a heroine. Now, she risks facing an apathetic-to-hostile public if she decides to divorce her famously vindictive husband. I will admit it’s hard for me to muster genuine sympathy for Melania Trump, because of her public support for her husband. But I’d like to make room for the idea that just because I believe she knew what she was getting into, that doesn’t means she automatically deserves whatever she gets.

“Roseanne” returns with a vision of grudging tolerance

Roseanne Barr and John Goodman in "Roseanne" (Credit: ABC/Adam Rose)

Reviving “Roseanne,” the highest-rated show on television from 1989 to 1990, makes sense from a business perspective. Bringing the series back some 21 years after it went off the air (and nearly 30 years after its debut) also feels somewhat baffling.

For the most part, it’s easy to see why ABC is resurrecting one of the greatest half-hour series in its history, debuting its first new episode in more than two decades on Tuesday at 8 p.m. Our world quivers with anxiety. Our constantly expanding field of entertainment options is a floodplain. In an environment swollen with plenty, gravitating to familiar brands and faces for comfort is simpler than trawling for new diversions, and classic “Roseanne” episodes are the sitcom equivalent of cozy quilts.

There’s a reason the original episodes of “Roseanne” stand as examples of some of the finest TV of all time, drawing comparisons to the warm and groundbreaking inclusivity of Norman Lear. Then and now Dan and Roseanne Conner (John Goodman and Roseanne Barr) are stand-ins for struggling working-class families left behind by the Wall Street surge of Reagan era or the go-go ‘90s.

Today’s Conners are still a loving couple, still unapologetically plump (though less so that when the series first aired), and more than a little cranky about having to cede their empty nest to Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and her kids Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara).

Becky’s back too, naturally — both of them. Lecy Goranson, the original Becky, struggles to get by on a waitress’s salary. D.J. (Michael Fishman) served a term in the military and Jerry Garcia Conner, an infant in the original episodes, is conveniently away on a fishing boat.

Sarah Chalke, who played Becky in the series’ later years, returns in a different role that slyly connects her character with Goranson’s Becky in a way that nods at the memory of being her double, while tossing in a plot conflict that demonstrates how our differing views on social issues have become regular, frequently bitter-tasting side dishes at American dinner tables.

Yet the sight of that famous kitchen in Lanford, Illinois, teases forth a pleasing nostalgic sensation, a reminder that this brood, actually, is us.

The renovation trend that swept America since the last time we saw the Conners, an obvious sign of prosperity, passed them right on by just as it did many of the nation’s families.  Want to drink in the sight of fancy furnishings and appliances? Tune in to “Black-ish” and “Modern Family.” Meanwhile on “Roseanne,” that crocheted throw still sits in the same place on the back of the worn-in couch they haven’t replaced. It ain’t broke, but this family still is.

Seeing the Conners stand with us and for us in this new territory could be a refreshing diversion. Especially if you can find your way around the fact that its stars one of the least likable people in America.

Mind you, the fact that Barr spent many of two decades between the first finale of “Roseanne” and its revival convincing Americans of all political stripes that she’s either psychologically disturbed or simply odious for the sake of being odious does not preclude us from enjoying this revival. But its clunky politics just might.

Barr is a vocal Trump supporter — much more so than Roseanne Conner, who voted for him for the very simple reason that he promised to bring better jobs to America (It’s never said who Dan voted for; anyway, we’re all just happy he’s alive after all). And her Trumpian view of how America should be permeates the entirety of these new episodes, starting with a premiere focused on how our political rancor has split the Conner household: predictably Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) is pulling for the other team with vexing gusto, still sporting her pink knit hat well into springtime.

Even if you skip the premiere, however, the show takes a while to get past its politically-skewed power dynamic. Roseanne doesn’t pretend to be perfect — this new season highlights her frailty in a surprising way, in fact — but the character’s common-sense paradigm is uncomfortably informed by a blissful willingness to overlook things as opposed to accept them. The most noticeable example of this is D.J.’s black daughter Mary (Jayden Rey), who barely receives any dialogue in the opening episodes and appears mostly to be an accessory, a reminder that Roseanne Conner may have voted for a racist but she sure isn’t one.

And this dissonance twangs through “Roseanne” in more apparent ways, too. Jackie is a clownish representation of lefty liberalism (at this point, Metcalf deserves better, and I hope Barr thanked her for the favor of reprising her character) but she has no equivalent from the other side of the wingnut spectrum to counter her overbearing, know-it-all personality in the preview episodes sent to critics.

These are a few of the ways showrunners Bruce Helford and Whitney Cummings, along with Barr, clumsily attempt to channel the vitality and frankness of past episodes in this new season. To be fair, other top-of-mind social concerns are handled with more nuance and heart than the script’s willful leap over our simmering racial conflicts. The new “Roseanne” is at its best when the story explores the contortions and compromises Americans have to go through in order to secure decent health care or economic stability. An evolving arc that acknowledges our rampant opioid epidemic is handled thoughtfully and with heart.

When these storylines take the front seat in the third episode, the show starts to recapture its old appeal. They also feel less forced than a subplot involving Dan and Roseanne wrestling with the identity issues as they pertain to their grandson and daughter. Even here, the writers ably reflect the internal struggles of previous generations rooted in one perspective attempting to make heads or tails of evolving views on the morality of personal choice and commonly accepted definitions of gender.

Roseanne eventually opts to let her grandmotherly side rule — no spoiler there, that’s what the show does best. When she clasps her kids and grandkids in a hug, kissing them with the strength of a mother bear, we’re reminded of why we this show used to hit us in the heart week after week. Getting there takes a while, though, and requires staring into a refracted image of what we’ve become.

A fair share of the audience will love that about “Roseanne,” embracing it with the same affection that buoyed such ABC hits as “The Middle” and “Last Man Standing” for many seasons. But if you not so sure that America or Roseanne Barr are great, spending time with the Conners probably defeats the purpose of turning off the day’s anxieties.

That’s what “Will & Grace” is for.

How did the slacker generation give birth to these activist kids?

Protesters participate in the March for Our Lives rally at Las Vegas City Hall on March 24, 2018 (Credit: Getty/Ethan Miller)

I, for one, welcome our new teenage overlords. Over the past six weeks — since the February 14 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — the generation born in the 2000s has stepped up in new and extraordinary ways. They’ve participated in town halls, they’ve staged walkouts, they’ve marched and they’ve presented action plans for positive, sensible change. If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have teenagers in your life, the passion and and integrity of these adolescent leaders comes as no great surprise. The only real mystery is how the generation that was literally called “slacker” managed to become the parents of these badasses.

The prevailing image of my Gen-X peers is of mumbly, flannel-wearing whatevers. Our cultural influence appears limited to Smashing Pumpkins and the anguished early seasons of “The Real World.” We associate boomers with student protest. We associate millennials with innovation. We associate our own youth with zines and Chanel Vamp. And then we look at our own kids and are dazzled at how motivated they are in their energy and their ability to mobilize.

If this were a New York Times hot take, this would be the point we would infer here that we’re reaping the benefits of helicopter parenting. That those elite, well-educated moms who declared themselves the “opt-out” trailblazers and immersed their offspring in enrichment! nothing but enrichment! are now to be congratulated for raising articulate and strategic thinkers. Yet we know, thankfully, that the revolution is not centered in Park Slope.

So how did this happen? Is it just possible that we — sandwiched between our showier,  more populous boomer and millennial siblings — and our children — who have been dismissed from an early age as zombies who can’t untether themselves from their glowing bricks — are in fact not so bad after all?

To write off my small generation as historically negligible is to see only its most privileged side. It forgets the global student activism that fought so hard in Beijing and made history in Berlin and Prague. It ignores the students of the anti apartheid movement or the transformational work of youth for LGBTQ rights and AIDS activism in the frustrating early years of the public health crisis. It glosses over the feminism and civil rights and disability rights battles being waged even while “Friends” was on the air. I don’t claim my peers and I personally achieved very much when we were young, but I have massive respect for the unbroken tradition of student leadership, a tradition that has never been dormant.

Yet I know our own kids want to do far more, and better. And they’ve got the numbers to make it happen— they already represent roughly a quarter of the population. They have been raised on Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, on “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner.” They are well-versed in tales of teenagers subverting the dominant paradigm.  They’ve been preparing their whole lives to do it. If my generation did anything at all right, ever, my God, let it be putting books in our children’s hands.

On Saturday, March 24, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators around the world showed up to demand gun law reform, and to register to vote. The marches were led and largely headlined by young people — including Parkland survivor  Samantha Fuentes, who started her speech, vomited and then got right back to it, which is as metal as it gets. This new generation, this group of kids that doesn’t yet have an identifying label that even sticks, is comprised of the children of private school parents and homeschoolers, of Democrats and Republicans and immigrants. They are the most racially diverse generation in American history, the most openly gender fluid and the least religious. They seem to have greater awareness and self-control around their social media habits, unlike their more iPhone addicted parents.

They understand how to step up and organize. The day after the 2016 election, my daughter’s classmates were collaborating with high school students around the city and planning demonstrations. They’ve been doing it ever since. They’re also still just kids — often reckless and rebellious and definitely incapable of picking up their socks. But they are absolutely a force to be reckoned with, and any pundits or politicians whining that they should be quiet and listen to their elders clearly have no idea how revolutions work. These students span economic, racial, social and religious boundaries. They are strong. They are intersectional as hell. They are America. And if you think you’ve heard a lot of noise from them now, just wait till November.

White House denies Jared Kushner is under investigation

Jared Kushner (Credit: AP/Thomas Peter)

Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner is reportedly being probed for violating ethics laws — specifically, over loans obtained by the Kushner family real estate business following a meeting Kushner had with finance executives while he was a senior adviser in the White House, a situation that would seemingly violate conflict of interest rules.

Yet the White House officially denied that Kushner was in trouble during a Tuesday press briefing, during which White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that lawyers are “not probing whether Jared Kushner violated the law.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders refutes reports White House is investigating Jared Kushner for illegal activity:

"[The White House] is not probing whether Jared Kushner violated the law. The White House indicated to OGE that we are aware of news reports and would proceed as appropriate." pic.twitter.com/eBaP3ls6is

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) March 27, 2018

The alleged probe was revealed in a letter to Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., from David J. Apol, acting director of the Office of Government Ethics.

“Your letter raises questions about the ethical implications of a senior White House official holding a broad portfolio of government responsibilities while also maintaining a financial interest in active business entities … and meeting with potential investors and creditors in those business entities,” Apol wrote in the letter dated March 22. “ I have discussed this matter with the White House counsel’s office in order to ensure that they have begun the process of ascertaining the facts necessary to determine whether any law or regulation has been violated.”

“The White House informed me that they had already begun this process,” Apol continued.

Krishnamoorthi reportedly was asking Apol for information regarding the New York Times report in February alleging that Kushner’s companies received $184 million in loans from Apollo Global Management and $325 million from Citigroup in 2017. Kushner allegedly met with executives from both firms prior to receiving the loans.

For the past month, Democrats have been raising public concerns over that Times report. In two separate letters to the aforementioned companies, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rep. Elijah Cummings D-Md., demanded that Citigroup and Apollo Global Management release details on the loans to Kushner.

“Federal ethics laws prohibit federal employees from profiting from their government service, and Mr. Kushner’s refusal to fully divest from his financial holdings raises questions about his behavior as a Special Adviser to President Trump,” one letter stated. “It would be a serious matter if the loans provided to Kushner Companies by Citigroup resulted in a violation of federal ethics laws.”

In a response to that request, Citi wrote its own letter (which appeared in the Wall Street Journal) defending itself, stating that “the Kushner family has been a client of Citi for decades.”

“This transaction was done in the normal course of Citi’s commercial real estate lending business, received the necessary credit and risk approvals without input from Mr. Corbat, and was unrelated to any discussions with Mr. Kushner,” the bank wrote.

Abbe Lowell, Kushner’s private attorney, told the Wall Street Journal in an article published March 26 that “the White House counsel concluded there was were no issues involving Jared.”

Kushner has been under scrutiny for financial and business conflicts of interest since the first day of the Trump administration, though his personal ties to President to Donald Trump have protected him insasmuch as the administration continues to defend him. Indeed, as Trump’s son-in-law and husband of his beloved daughter Ivanka, Kushner remains in an ideal position to indulge in corruption and evade the consequences.

Second judge denies Scott Walker’s request to delay special elections

(Credit: AP/LM Otero)

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker faced his second judicial smackdown in a week on Tuesday, when a second judge rejected his efforts to delay calling a special election to fill two vacant state legislative seats.

Two seats — one in the Wisconsin State Assembly and another in the state Senate — have been empty since December, when two Republican lawmakers resigned to take jobs in Walker’s administration. The seats have remained empty despite a state law that requires that special elections be called as quickly as possible when a seat becomes vacant before the second Tuesday in May in a regularly scheduled election year.

But Walker has refused to call the election after Democrat Patty Schachtner won a special election for a state Senate seat in a district that has been held by Republicans for decades and won by Trump by 17 points in 2016.

On Tuesday, Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess ruled that Walker had no other choice under current law.

“I am not ruling on what the law might be in the future,” Niess said. “I am enforcing the law as it is now.”

Walker has argued that the new legislators shouldn’t be chosen until November, when he is up for re-election, arguing that a special election would be a waste of taxpayer money. Democrats have accused Walker of blocking more than 100,000 Wisconsinites from representation for over a year out of concern that Republicans will lose the seats

“It would be senseless to waste taxpayer money on special elections just weeks before voters go to the polls when the Legislature has concluded its business,” Walker said in a statement Friday. Walker’s statement came one day after Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds, a Walker appointee, agreed with the Democrats and gave the governor until March 29 to call the special elections.

 

Walker instead requested to delay the special elections order until April 6. The delay would give him and Wisconsin Republicans time to pass a bill, Assembly Bill 947, which would get rid of the requirement that Walker call elections promptly and expand the governor’s power to decide whether and when to do so.

“When and if a legislative bill becomes a law, it can be brought to a court and at that time arguments can be made about what the effect of the law is.”

Walker has said he will comply with that order and call for the elections to happen on June 12, the Associated Press reported.

Late last month, the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee led by President Obama’s former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, sued Walker on behalf of several state residents.

The National Redistricting Foundation contended that “Plaintiffs have a clear legal right to select new representation in a special election, and the Governor has a positive and plain non-discretionary legal duty to call for such an election to fill the vacancies ‘as promptly as possible.'”

In a statement, Holder called Walker’s refusal to hold special elections “an affront to representative democracy” and “a plain violation of rights,” which has left nearly 175,000 people without a voice in the state legislature.

“Even for Republicans in Wisconsin, this would be a stunning action to keep citizens from expanding their right to vote,” Holder said. “They appear to be afraid of the voters of Wisconsin. We are fully prepared to take legal action in response to any further attacks on these voters, who have now been without representation since December, because of Scott Walker’s refusal to call elections.”

Exposure to opposing views on Twitter might actually increase polarization: study

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Twitter has become a political battlefield, where users with opposing views frequently engage in digital turf wars. While many subjects of liberal democracies earnestly believe that being exposed to opposing political perspectives can be enlightening and promote mutual understanding, a new study suggests it may actually have the reverse effect.

Indeed, a group of researchers found in a study — approved by the Institutional Review Boards at Duke University and New York University — that when a Republican followed a liberal Twitter bot perpetuating liberal propaganda, the Republican became “substantially” more conservative. When a Democrat followed a conservative Twitter bot, the Democrat became “slightly” more liberal.

The study’s final sample size examined 691 self-identified Democrats and 529 self-identified Republicans who visited Twitter at least three times a week. Those who participated in the study were given financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages from leaders and organizations with political ideologies that conflicted with their own. Participants were surveyed at the beginning of the month, and then they were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of the exposure to opposing political views.

“Our study indicates that well-intentioned attempts to introduce people to opposing political views on social media might not only be ineffective, but counter-productive—particularly if they are initiated by Democrats,” the study states. “Future attempts to reduce political polarization on social media will require learning which types of messages, tactics, or issue positions are most likely to create backfire effects and whether others — perhaps delivered by non-elites or in offline settings — might be more effective vehicles to bridge America’s partisan divides.”

Read: any attempt to reason with a conservative on Twitter is only going to make that person more conservative. And likely vice-versa with a liberal (though perhaps to a lesser extent). In other words, don’t waste your time arguing on Twitter.

The study has important implications for policymakers, and raises bigger questions about the role Twitter plays in politics. If Twitter really is just an echo chamber for each side, is it worth expressing political views on the platform?

The findings also provide fodder for the notion that social media is an ideal platform for bots to deepen the political divide by sowing Twitter with partisan misinformation. One wonders if the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States in February, had a hunch about this backfire effect hypothesis.

Recall that Russian-backed groups weren’t merely supporting Trump campaigns and anti-Hillary groups. They allegedly also worked to organize support for Clinton’s Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, as part of a larger strategy to sow political discord in the United States.

If this study’s findings prove accurate, perhaps many of us social media users are guilty of helping to widen the partisan gap by sharing political content.

Joe Scarborough explains Trump’s lawyer woes: “He doesn’t pay his bills”

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This morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough expressed amazement that President Donald Trump has been unable to find a top lawyer to represent him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The “Morning Joe” host said the job of representing the president of the U.S. is “the dream of a lifetime for any attorney,” however no lawyers are willing to defend a client who would lie and ignore their advice, tarnish their reputation and then fail to pay the final bill.

“This is the dream of a lifetime for any attorney, to be able to represent the President of the United States,” Scarborough said. “Think about it: You’re billing hours while sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the most powerful person in the free world. And, yet every lawyer keeps coming back, telling Donald Trump, regardless of the tweets, the same thing, ‘No, sir. No thank you. We don’t want to have anything to be with you.'”

Scarborough also said no good lawyer would be willing to take on a client that couldn’t be trusted.

“It is very clear, and we’ve heard it around Washington, we heard [GOP lawyer] Ted Olson talk about it — nobody wants to be this guy’s lawyer,” Scarborough continued. “They don’t want to be his lawyer, because first of all, he doesn’t pay his bills. And secondly, he lies to lawyers all the time. They can’t trust him going into court.”

Scarborough’s comments come after John Dowd, President Trump’s lead lawyer on the Russia probe, resigned last week. Dowd allegedly quit Trump’s legal team amid disagreements on handling the response to the Russia investigation, according to CNN.

Dowd’s departure has raised questions about the direction of Trump’s legal strategy, as the special counsel continues to inch closer to the president and his inner circle, Scarborough said, and as his legal team has turned into a one-man operation.

“This is a president that is going into the legal battle of his life, and it’s — he’s basically unilaterally disarmed himself,” Scarborough said.

The “Morning Joe” host added that, while there are many things a lawyer can tolerate, being lied to isn’t one of them.

“The one thing a lawyer can’t put up with is being lied to when it’s you and your client in the board room, and you’re just talking and going through the facts,” Scarborough said. “You just sit down with your client and say, ‘You’ve got to tell me everything, and whatever you tell me doesn’t leave this room. But I can’t prepare for your case unless you tell me the truth about everything, so surprise me now. Do not surprise me in the court room.'”

“And yet here’s Donald Trump knowing that any lawyer he gets, he believes he’s smarter than that lawyer,” he added. “He’s going to lie to him, and then there’s no way he can mount any defense for Donald Trump.”

In response to speculation and news reports that Trump’s legal team is in shambles, Trump, perhaps unsurprisingly, tweeted that he is “very happy” with his existing legal team and stressed there was “NO COLLUSION” during the 2016 campaign.

“Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case,” Trump said. “Don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.”

“Problem is that a new……” he added. “….lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country – and I am very happy with my existing team. Besides, there was NO COLLUSION with Russia, except by Crooked Hillary and the Dems!”

Why mandatory drug tests at work are fundamentally racist

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Mandatory drug testing is not only an annoying, expensive waste of company and employee time; a new Detox.net survey shows that their impact and implementation can also be racist.

Stark racial disparities are apparent in the 1,500-plus person survey. African Americans are much more likely to face repercussions for failing a drug test than white people; the study shows that 9.2 percent of blacks reported being reprimanded or even fired for failing a drug test. That’s more than double the number of whites who reported the same, just 4.4 percent.

According to the survey, 97.6 percent of military service members were tested for drugs at some point in their careers. The other most frequently drug-tested workers were those in manufacturing and transportation jobs and warehousing, at 94.4 percent and 94.3 percent, respectively. People working in health care, utilities and telecommunications were also drug-tested more than 90 percent of the time.

The list of industries that most frequently drug-test their employees looks like a list of industries built of the labor of people of color — a suspicion confirmed by a cross-reference against Bureau of Labor Statistics’ labor force data from 2017. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.3 percent of the U.S. population is black and 12.5 percent is Hispanic. Black and Hispanic Americans make up nearly 30 percent of the military, 39 percent of transportation and warehouse workers and 30 percent of health care workers, three of the most frequently drug-tested sectors.

The survey did not say why industries with disproportionately high numbers of workers of color choose to drug-test their employees.

It is not news that drug testing is a potentially racist practice. The above pattern fits an observation previously made by the ACLU, which wrote on its website that drug-testing policies not only are a “significant and unjustified invasion of privacy, they also single out those living in low-income communities and disproportionately impact people of color.”

Social scientists have proven that some managers often believe black people are more likely to be drug users. Notre Dame economics professor Abigail K. Wozniak writes in her 2014 report, “Discrimination and the Effects of Drug Testing on Black Employment,” that, “In a survey of hiring managers, there is a belief that blacks are more likely to fail a drug test…They also cite a 1989 survey in which 95% of [hiring survey] respondents described the typical drug user as black.”

These latest survey findings confirm Wozniak’s observations about implicit racism in American workplaces.