Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 158

This city just took a major step to reform its oppressive and inhumane bail system

(Credit: Getty/Spencer Platt)

Atlanta’s City Council just unanimously voted and adopted a move to reform Atlanta’s cash bail system, which frequently targets, jails and ultimately upends the lives of its poorest citizens for some of the most minor and non-violent misdemeanors. The decision took a heated six hours to reach a 13-0 vote, and has become the latest protest in a growing number of concerted efforts against the American justice system’s notorious bail scam.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms signed the proposal that stipulated people guilty of nuisance offenses should not be jailed for unnecessarily lengthy durations — think in terms of days, weeks and months — simply because they do not have the financial power to pay fines starting at $100 and going up to $500 and more. The reform will take effect a month after Bottoms signs the proposal. Once active, the Atlanta Detention Center will be authorized to let people guilty of minor misdemeanors out on their own personal recognizance as long as they promise to appear in court on demand.

Efforts to address the city’s oppressive cash bail system have been taking place for a while now. According to the AJC, the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Civil Rights Corps demanded former Mayor Kasim Reed to acknowledge and rectify the conditions of impoverished people who couldn’t quite literally buy their way out of prison due to hefty bails for petty crimes.

To paint a picture of just how morally dubious the city’s bail process was, Southern Center for Human Rights lawyer Sarah Geraghty told Atlanta radio station WABE that the system criminalizes poverty. “Here’s how it works now,” she said. “People who can afford to pay are immediately released after booking. And those who cannot pay are detained as a result of that. The city jails are filled nightly with people charged with misdemeanors and ordinance violations only because they cannot pay.”

Ultimately, the cash bail system, according to Geraghty, “is a two-tiered system: one for people with money and one for people without money.”

The issue is not confined to the City of Love alone. Suffocating and towering bails set for petty crimes is a social, moral, economic and political dilemma that plagues the entirety of the United States and has been a civil rights conundrum since the 1960s. Recently, in Los Angeles, UCLA’s Million Dollar Hoods project showed how the city was cashing in billions upon billions of dollars by jailing poor people of color and keeping them chained to the city’s exorbitant bail system.

In New Hampshire, on Mar. 8 in 2016, Jeffrey Pendleton was sent to jail for possessing marijuana — a misdemeanor in the state — and set on a $100 bail. The Burger King employee had no money to pay the amount and died in jail six days later. Pendleton’s story is similar to that of Sandra Bland, who couldn’t afford her way out of prison and died in custody in Texas.

Such stories are distressingly common in the United States, especially for people of color, who are twice as likely to remain in jail for failing to post bond. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study titled Jail Inmates at Midyear, the majority of jail bookings in America are for petty and generally nonviolent crimes. Yet, according to the same Department’s Felony Defendants in Large Counties study, 90 percent of those Americans don’t have the money to post bail. It’s not a cheap system either. The VERA Institute of Justice estimates that our American justice system burns $14 billion taxpayer money for unjust incarceration.

Perhaps through Atlanta’s example, other cities and states will bolster their efforts and seek more humane legal means that hold citizens accountable but don’t criminalize poverty for minor nuisances.

Scholars rank U.S. presidents — and Trump’s ranking isn’t so great

(Credit: AP/Getty/Salon)

The results are in.

In honor of Presidents’ Day, the New York Times published a list that ranks every American president from best to worst. Despite Donald Trump’s recurring claims that he is a “genius” and the most-popular president ever, his report card following his first year in office is far from excellent.

"@itsblakec: @realDonaldTrump Trump is a genius. Rubio and Cruz are not. I want a brilliant mind to run this country."

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2016

How was the list derived? The Times surveyed 170 members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section. To briefly outline Trump’s first year and foreshadow his possible place in history, the scholars voted along partisan lines.

Trump ranked No. 44 among Democrats, No. 43 among independents and No. 40 among Republicans. In other words, he ranks among the five worst presidents, according to scholars of every political stripe.

Since the Times’ last survey in 2014, some president’s stocks have climbed, while others have sunk. Four years later, Trump’s Oval Office predecessor, Barack Obama, earned the largest boost, catapulting into the top 10. The biggest decline was for Andrew Jackson, who fell six spots. He was followed by Bill Clinton, who dropped five.

The new top 10 list is as follows: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Lyndon B. Johnson.

The bottom 10 are Zachary Taylor, Herbert Hoover, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, William H. Harrison, James Buchanan and Donald Trump, who ranked last.

While Trump’s initial rating is historically low, several presidents have gone on to improve their public perception over time. Because Trump loves poll numbers, popularity contests and TV ratings, it is within the realm of possibility that he would change course to preserve his legacy. But all clues suggest no one can change Trump, and Trump doesn’t want to change. It may always be Trump’s way or the highway.

If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016

Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017

Trump once shared his rule for success on Twitter. He said, “What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.” Will the president take his own advice in order to climb out of last place? Only time will tell.

What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2014

“Sonic weapon attacks” on U.S. Embassy don’t add up — for anyone

(Credit: AP Photo/Ismael Francisco, Cubadebate)

Havana — Heated charges have flown back and forth for months between the two countries that bracket the Strait of Florida. U.S. State Department officials contended Cuba staged a sonic attack on employees of the American embassy, causing a variety of neurological symptoms. Cuba has not only denied such an attack ever took place but has also emphasized the physical impossibility of a sound wave causing neurological damage trained on such a distant target.

But physicians and scientists from both countries now appear to be in agreement on one critical point: Both sides acknowledge they are baffled as to what happened to 24 embassy employees who were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain damage between November 2016 and August 2017.

The latest development is a preliminary publication in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association on Thursday, authored by the team of doctors at the University of Pennsylvania who examined 21 of the U.S. government employees. The study, commissioned by the federal government, found the patients had suffered from concussion-like symptoms — but without any blunt trauma to the head. The medical issues varied widely among the patients, and included cognitive difficulties and problems with balance, eye tracking, sleep disturbances and headache.

Adding yet another element to the mystery, the new findings show normal MRI brain scans in all patients, and normal hearing in all but three individuals. The authors of the JAMA study also discount the likelihood of sonic injury, infection or toxic agents — and they even downplay the frequent suggestion of mass hysteria. Many of the findings in the new report echo a previous investigation carried out by Cuban officials.

The new report’s inconclusiveness does little to break the impasse. The State Department has issued multiple warnings in recent months that U.S. citizens should not travel to Cuba, because numerous embassy employees here had been targeted in attacks. The culprit was thought to be some form of unidentified sonic weapon trained on embassy employees, primarily in their residences near the post, including at the Capri Hotel.

The precise mechanism of the alleged attacks remains unclear. Between November 2016 and August 2017, some embassy staff complained of hearing strange sounds that targeted specific individuals — one person would hear them and another in the same room wouldn’t. By August 2017, physicians at the University of Miami and Penn had diagnosed 24 of 80 embassy employees with mild traumatic brain injury, likely caused by “trauma due to a non-natural source.” This report led to an angry response from U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.), who described the incidents as “brazen and vicious attacks” on diplomats.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), who chaired a January 9 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee hearing on the attacks, described the supposed sonic weapon as “very sophisticated technology that does not exist in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world.” Without knowing more about the causes of the incidents, Todd Brown, now — acting assistant director for international programs at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, testified he could not assure the safety of diplomats coming to Cuba.

Throughout the series of alleged attacks, however, questions have persisted as to how any sonic weapon could, without deafening levels of noise, have produced hearing loss and cognitive symptoms. In an attempt to address these questions, the Cuban government formed a technical committee of officials and academics to investigate the incidents; a report was issued late last year. At the Cuban Neurosciences Center, a towering concrete building situated near President Raul Castro’s heavily guarded estate well outside the tourist area, Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, general director of the center and an expert in auditory physiology who served on the technical committee, reviewed the report with me in late December.

The authors—a team of scientists including neuroscientists, physicians and physicists, among others—examined the available medical reports on afflicted embassy employees. The scientists and criminal investigators set up sound and radio-electronic spectrum surveillance devices at the U.S. embassy, the Capri Hotel and in residential areas where the diplomats lived.

During the investigation, the team gathered witness statements from embassy employees and residents, and performed medical exams and hearing tests on 20 people interviewed in the area surrounding the embassy. They analyzed hospital records in Havana for admissions of patients with medical complaints similar to those reported by embassy employees and for incidents of possible infections known to damage hearing. They also performed experimental tests and mathematical modeling of sound propagation and attenuation through walls and windows. They inspected buildings in the surrounding areas for unusual equipment, and searched customs records for evidence of any sound-emitting equipment brought into the country. On the basis of these data the committee found all the proposed explanations for the alleged sonic attack implausible and, in many cases, contrary to the laws of physics. The report addressed a number of hypotheses, listed below, for the alleged attack. Valdés-Sosa explained why the committee had dismissed them all:

Audible sound

A blast of sound loud enough to damage hearing, Valdés-Sosa says, would have been obvious to anyone near the embassy, and the source could not selectively target different individuals in the same room. No loud sounds were reported by witnesses or nearby residents, and none were detected by surveillance equipment. Physicists on the committee found even deafening sounds beamed into the buildings would be diminished by the walls and windows to a level well below that required to cause hearing loss.

Cell phone recordings of the alleged sonic attack were provided to an Associated Press reporter by an anonymous source in the State Department. But the sounds were identified by Yamile González Sánchez, an official at the Ministry of Public Health, and physicist Carlos Barceló Pérez, a professor at the National Institute of Hygiene, as those made by local insects, which they recorded on the scene. Moreover, the sounds, all in the audible range (about 7 kilohertz), would have overdriven the microphone — preventing it from recording— if they were loud enough to damage hearing.

Audiograms (tests of hearing sensitivity) would have been useful in pinpointing the precise sound used in a sonic attack, because loud noise inflicts hearing loss at the specific frequency of the damaging sound. But despite requests from the committee, the U.S. declined to provide them. Hearing tests of residents in the surrounding area, made by audiologist Alida Suárez Landrián, found no abnormalities.

Sound outside the range of human hearing

The physics of sound propagation and the existing medical literature do not support the concept of a weapon that uses sound waves above or below the audible range. The long wavelength of infrasound, as is it known, is difficult to focus and requires very large speakers to generate — and it would have been difficult to conceal, Valdés-Sosa says. “Ultrasound [frequencies too high to hear] can be focused, but it dissipates very fast,” he notes. “It would certainly be attenuated by the walls of the room.” Furthermore, he adds, ultrasound is used medically — for example, to image a fetus — but is not considered damaging to tissue. The device routinely placed in contact with a pregnant woman’s body typically uses a gel to improve sound penetration through skin.

Infection and intoxication

Antibiotics and antimicrobial drugs can produce hearing damage. But Valdés-Sosa says the investigation could find no plausible way for such an agent to be administered selectively to people of such different ages who were affected in different places and times. The attacks are alleged to have occurred on multiple occasions between November 2016 and August 2017.

The Caribbean Basin is home to many viral infections — dengue, chikungunya, Zika — but none have produced this constellation of symptoms. Indeed, Charles Rosenfarb, medical director of the State Department’s Bureau of Medical Services, describes the wide-ranging symptoms as a “novel syndrome” never seen before.

The investigation was hampered by the cursory information provided to the Cubans by the U.S., Valdés-Sosa says. Rather than detailed medical records, the committee said it only received a single-page summary of complaints reported by embassy employees and family members — a list that included hearing loss, vertigo, tinnitus, memory problems, difficulty concentrating and visual disturbances. “If we had the medical records, maybe we could exclude [a toxic agent], but this hypothesis seems also unlikely,” Valdés-Sosa says. The committee said its request to interview and examine victims was denied.

Mass hysteria

Termed mass psychogenic illness by psychologists, mass hysteria has been suggested as the cause of the embassy employees’ complaints. A group of people can share a psychological state. For example, seeing someone else vomit may make another person feel nauseated. But diplomats and State Department employees are selected and trained to function in high-stress environments — including countries at war. Rosenfarb has ruled out the possibility of enough stress to produce sickness from a hysterical reaction.

Peculiar structure outside the embassy

An array of metal poles and awnings in a park outside the embassy, also in a direct line of sight with the Capri Hotel, was thought to be a possible antenna system for a sonic or microwave weapon. But the structures are simply flag poles erected to obscure an electronic sign on the embassy that formerly flashed information objectionable to Cuban authorities. If it had served as a sonic weapon, “it would affect everyone in the building,” Valdés-Sosa adds.

White matter damage

After the Cuban report was released, the Associated Press reported that magnetic resonance imaging scans by physicians at the University of Miami and Penn showed damage to white matter in the brains of embassy employees, and that this information would be published in a paper submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). White matter is brain tissue comprised of bundles of cables (myelinated axons) that connect neurons (gray matter) to form circuits. But experts quoted in the AP article stated that sound does not damage white matter. Such damage would require violent concussive forces, something I learned in my own laboratory research on blast injury and myelin.  The lead author of the investigation finding white matter damage in embassy employees was identified by the Miami Heraldas Michael Hoffer, a University of Miami ear, nose and throat specialist and former U.S. Marine physician. Hoffer referred my inquires to the University of Miami Press Office, which declined comment, unable even to clarify whether a manuscript showing white matter injury in the U.S. diplomats had been submitted for publication. At this point, no medical evidence of white matter damage is known to have been reported.

The position of U.S. officials on the issue is still unclear. Officials at the State Department press office declined to comment on the reported evidence of white matter damage, or on questions about audio recordings purported to be a sonic weapon matching cricket sounds, or the possibility of mass hysteria afflicting the diplomats. They replied that they had no comment beyond department spokesperson Heather Nauert’s statements at a December 7, 2017 press conference.

“This is part of the same pattern,” Valdés-Sosa says. “Something is leaked to the press, but in such a vague way you can’t confirm it or de-confirm it.”He also wants to know why data in the report had not been shared with the Cubans. “If there was any evidence of a real attack by anybody,” he says, “the Cuban government would react strongly—and as a scientist I would be very worried. I think the word would have to be spread so people could protect themselves.”

In an editorial accompanying the article by the Penn team, Christopher Muth, Fishbein Fellow on the board of JAMA, and Steven Lewis, chief of Neurology at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania, wrote additional evidence must be obtained before reaching conclusions. The JAMA study depended on subjective reports made by patients and thus lacked the types of procedures brought to bear in a formal scientific study—it was not known, for instance, what the neurological status of the diagnosed patients was before they became ill. Many of the tests were only given to a small subgroup of patients. Just six patients received cognitive and neuropsychological tests. From a medical perspective, Muth and Lewis noted the range of symptoms is shared by many different medical illnesses apart from concussion.

Those concerns were echoed by Valdés-Sosa in an e-mail after reading the report: “The study has serious limitations,” he wrote, but he was more disturbed by how this information was released. “The most alarming consideration is that medical data was withheld from the Cuban side to protect the patient privacy, but then it goes directly to publication,” he added. The Cuban scientists never questioned that these individuals experienced a range of health issues, he noted, but this new information does not clarify the cause or causes; indeed, it complicates matters. “The argument for a ‘new syndrome,’ or even of a ‘health attack,’ is very weak.” He added: “The objective findings [for example, abnormal audiograms] are present in only very few of the cases, and are inconsistent. It is not possible to know if any of the results are due to preexisting diseases or if their prevalence is larger than expected for any group of persons of the same age. The published conclusion that all the diplomats ‘sustained injury to widespread brain networks’ was not demonstrated by the data presented.”

Some U.S. officials have suggested various theories for what might have happened. Rubio and others have suggested a rogue faction in Cuba could be responsible for the attacks. “People who think a rogue faction in Cuba is responsible do not know Cuba,” Valdés-Sosa says. “There is no rogue faction in Cuba.” In Cuba, often described as a police state, only the Communist Party is permitted by law—and an aggressive intelligence apparatus tracks and suppresses any dissident activity.  Under direct questioning by Sen. Rubio in the Senate Hearing on the sonic attack, Francisco Palmieri, acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, testified that he has never heard of any reports from any U.S. diplomats of a possible rogue faction in Cuba.

The Cuban investigators do not question that some embassy employees became ill, but they say they can find no evidence this was caused by an attack. Embassy employees with military experience, Valdés-Sosa suggests, may have been exposed to loud blasts causing mild injury that worsens with age, resulting in tinnitus or sudden hearing loss as in Meniere’s disease, for example.

Who would have a motive to advance a false story? “I think it is people that the U.S. government listens to, who want to roll back Obama’s work with Cuba, and they are taking advantage of this,” Valdés-Sosa says, suggesting perhaps some embassy personnel became ill from natural or preexisting causes—but when U.S. officials told them a secret weapon was involved, their anxiety may have skyrocketed.

Many ordinary Cubans were also incredulous about the idea of an intentional attack, and insisted that their country is highly motivated to improve relations with their gigantic neighbor.

“Science fiction,” says a restaurant worker in Havana, using a phrase often heard on the streets of the capital when this issue comes up. And one night in a remote village, as people dance salsa to the rhythm of Congo drums in the town square, a professional dancer says to me about the idea of an advanced new weapon: “I invite Americans to live in Cuba six months. We don’t have anything. No internet, no weapons program, not even cars.” Another Cuban adds, “If we had such a weapon, which we don’t, why would we use it on embassy employees and their families? We would not need bombs. We would take it to Trump Tower.”

Back in Havana, a taxi driver in a 1942 Ford Fleetwood that jostles its rickety way through the streets in a predawn rain—the darkness pierced by one working headlight as the taxi driver squints through a streaky windshield—says point blank in broken English: “Story is false.”

“Who is responsible, then?”

“Donald Trump.”

Asked why the U.S. would entertain such false information, he twists his two extended fists as if breaking a branch and says, “to break la cuerda [the rope]” tying the U.S. and Cuba together.

The incident has also mystified some U.S. officials. “Very perplexing,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D–N.M.), after questioning Palmieri at the January 9 Senate hearing. “We need to be careful not to jump to conclusions until we know what really happened.” The same day, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced he would request an independent review board to investigate the matter.

Valdés-Sosa ends our meeting, reflecting aloud: “If this is a hoax, it is cruel to have these people living under a shadow for the rest of their lives. Establishing what happened is important not only for the two countries, but for the people involved. The only way to do it is to share scientific information.”

Timeline of events related to the alleged Cuban sonic attacks:

November 2016: Embassy employees first report strange sounds. The State Department concludes it was harassment.

December 2016–January 2017: Employees first visit the State Department medical unit.

February–April 2017: 80 employees are examined; 16 are determined to have suffered mild traumatic brain injury.

July 2017: The State Department’s Bureau of Medical Services convenes a panel of academic experts to examine case histories and medical records. They conclude victims suffer “trauma from a non-natural source.”

August 2017: The Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania reevaluates the initial cases and later ones occurring until August 2017, bringing the total to 24 employees with mild traumatic brain injury.

There is some surprising progress for the rights of incarcerated women

(Credit: Getty/sakhorn38)

Women incarcerated in Arizona state prisons are currently allowed only 12 free menstrual pads a month and can possess a maximum of 24 pads at a time when they are on their periods, Mother Jones reports. To acquire more pads or tampons, which are not automatically provided, female inmates must purchase them, despite the low, 15-cents-an-hour base pay for Arizona prisoners.

Arizona Rep. Athena Salman (D-Tempe) introduced House Bill 2222 last week to ensure that women prisoners will receive free feminine hygiene products. During a hearing of the bill in front of the House Military, Veterans and Regulatory Affairs committee, a number of former inmates from the Perryville state prison, the only women’s prison in Arizona, testified about the conditions in the facility. According to Arizona Central, Sue Ellen Allen said officers have denied requests for more pads. Adrienne Kitcheyan, another former inmate, said, “Bloodstained pants, bartering, and begging for pads and tampons was a regular occurrence.”

Arizona is not the only state trying to guarantee free access to feminine hygiene products. Last year, Colorado added an amendment in the state’s budget bill that would provide tampons to female inmates.

Rep. T.J. Shope (R-Coolidge), the chairman of the Rules Committee, recently said he does not intend to hear the bill, which effectively kills the bill, according to Arizona Central. However, the Arizona Department of Corrections announced Feb. 14 that it will triple the minimum number of pads that are given to inmates, from 12 to 36.

In Maryland, a bill introduced to the General Assembly at the end of January would require state prisons to provide free pads and tampons to inmates on demand. The bill currently has support from 33 state senators. And in Nebraska, a policy change from the Department of Correctional Services in January announced that female prisoners will be able to get tampons and pads without cost. They will also be able to purchase brand-name products at the prison canteen. In Virginia, House Bill 83 intends to provide feminine hygiene products such as napkins, pads, and tampons, without charge.

While several states are moving to make menstrual products free, women in federal prisons are guaranteed free menstrual products after the Federal Bureau of Prisons changed this policy last summer. However, the majority of incarcerated women are housed in state facilities — female inmates only make up 6.8 percent of the federal prison population. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 99,000 women are housed in state prisons and another 96,000 are in state jails, compared to the 14,000 in federal facilities.

One issue inmates face is having to go through prison guards, most of whom are male, to receive pads or tampons. In a case represented by the ACLU, Parsons v. Ryan, that centered on health care in Arizona prisons, “clients have reported asking for menstrual products and being given only toilet paper.”

“Another client with a history of heavy periods reported that when she woke up with blood-stained clothes and sheets, she had difficulty convincing officers to let her bathe or even wash her bedding.” the ACLU writes. “… Many are simply denied access to any feminine hygiene products.”

In some states where tampons or certain brand-name menstrual products must be purchased, inmates hardly make enough money to afford these products. In Arizona, a box of 16 Always pads costs $3.20. With the base pay for inmates beginning at 15 cents an hour, female inmates would need to work about 21 hours to afford just one box. A box of tampons cost $3.99, which would require between 26 and 27 hours of work. Removing the financial costs of menstrual products, and making pads and tampons more accessible to inmates, ensures that incarcerated women are treated humanely and that their menstrual needs are treated as a right, rather than a privilege.

It’s getting harder to prosecute politicians for corruption

FILE - In this Dec. 7, 2011 file photo, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, left, speaks to reporters as his wife, Patti, listens at the federal building in Chicago.A federal judge will decide Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016, whether to cut the 14-year prison term given to Blagojevich after he was convicted of corruption, including charges that he tried to exchange an appointment to President Barack Obama's old U.S. Senate seat in exchange for campaign donations. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File) (Credit: AP)

The high-profile corruption case against New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez was recently dropped by federal prosecutors after a five-year investigation into gifts and campaign contributions given to the senator by a friend who wanted political help.

The trial had ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors then decided they did not have enough evidence to prove corruption and decided not to try Menendez again.

That decision had its roots in another failed corruption case against a prominent politician, former Virginia Republican Governor Bob McDonnell — a case whose resolution before the U.S. Supreme Court has made it manifestly more difficult for prosecutors to prove political corruption.

The Supreme Court described the events that sparked McDonnell’s 2014 bribery prosecution as “distasteful,” comprising “tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns.”

Nevertheless, the justices struck down McDonnell’s convictions in a lower court for accepting over US$175,000 in gifts from a businessman who wanted help from the state. They unanimously found that the Justice Department had overreached in prosecuting him.

How could actions that look so corrupt not be a crime?

The answer lies with the Supreme Court’s increasingly narrow definition of public corruption, including the crimes of bribery and extortion.

Constituent services or bribe?

I teach at Wayne State University Law School and wrote “The Prosecution and Defense of Public Corruption: The Law and Legal Strategies,” a comprehensive volume on the federal law of corruption.

The McDonnell case signals an erosion of federal corruption laws. I contend that this ruling effectively allows elected leaders to do favors for donors while raking in bountiful campaign contributions or gifts from them — with little fear that they might cross the line into illegality.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in the McDonnell case. He explained that the real concern was not McDonnell’s tawdriness. It was “the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”

Roberts warned of the danger of viewing too broadly what constitutes an “official act” that can be exchanged for a bribe. That broad view, he wrote, could mean elected officials risked being convicted of crimes when they simply help out people who contribute to their campaigns.

Not every act that helps donors is corrupt, wrote Roberts.

“Conscientious public officials arrange meetings for constituents, contact other officials on their behalf, and include them in events all the time,” he wrote. “Representative government assumes that public officials will hear from their constituents and act appropriately on their concerns.”

A new, limited standard for corruption

What’s the net result of the McDonnell decision?

It is that buying access to elected officials is, in most cases, not a crime.

To prove a bribe after the McDonnell decision, federal prosecutors must show more than just general efforts to aid a favored contributor. A conviction requires proof that the official committed an act that goes to the core of their office, like voting on a bill or approving a new policy. An official act, wrote Roberts, “must involve a formal exercise of governmental power.”

Short of that, steps like arranging a meeting or passing along recommendations to an agency head will not be enough to constitute corruption. That’s because these are not considered “official acts,” according to the Supreme Court ruling.

Prosecutors had evidence that McDonnell got gifts and loans from a businessman who wanted special treatment from the state for a nutritional supplement he was developing. But, after the Supreme Court’s decision, the Justice Department decided it no longer had enough evidence to retry McDonnell on the corruption charges.

The McDonnell decision directly affected the corruption prosecution brought against Menendez.

Menendez denied the prosecution’s contention that he had put pressure on federal agencies to take actions to benefit a friend and donor to his election efforts, saying he and the man, physician Salomon Melgen, were just friends. Over the years, Melgen had given Menendez many valuable gifts. Charges against Menendez were dismissed after a jury could not reach a verdict in his first trial. Prosecutors then decided not to try Menendez again.

Political system run by money

Our election system revolves around campaign contributions, both in Congress and increasingly at the local and state level. And politicians doing favors for donors is not new.

The Supreme Court recognized as much in McCormick v. United States, a 1991 decision. A West Virginia state legislator had faced prosecution after demanding campaign contributions from a lobbyist who wanted help for his client.

Justice Byron White wrote, “Money is constantly being solicited on behalf of candidates, who run on platforms and who claim support on the basis of their views and what they intend to do or have done. Whatever ethical considerations and appearances may indicate, to hold that legislators commit the federal crime of extortion when they act for the benefit of constituents or support legislation furthering the interests of some of their constituents, shortly before or after campaign contributions are solicited and received from those beneficiaries, is an unrealistic assessment of what Congress could have meant by making it a crime…”

But the power of money to get donors political access and influence has expanded with the whittling away of corruption laws. I believe that because of the Supreme Court’s erosion of limits on many kinds of campaign contributions, our current means of financing campaigns has devolved into a form of legalized bribery. Donors pour money into races to get officials who will support their favored goals.

When the officials deliver, the money keeps rolling in. One example: After passage of the tax bill in December, conservative billionaire Charles Koch and his wife gave nearly $500,000 to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s PAC.

In my opinion, the Supreme Court majority’s decisions on corruption have demonstrated little concern about the corrosive effect of the decisions on the public’s faith in their government. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, the court struck down limits imposed on corporations to make “independent expenditures” on behalf of candidates because they “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

According to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion, “the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.”

After years of the Supreme Court narrowing even minimal protections against public corruption, the U.S. now has a system where what looks like bribery and corruption to the public is, in most cases, not illegal. Our political leaders are no longer kept in line by federal corruption law. They do not need to worry that if they bend over backwards to accommodate a donor’s wishes, it could spark a bribery charge.

Peter J. Henning, Professor of Law, Wayne State University

Why we still can’t stomach Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy Fallon (Credit: AP/Rich Fury)

Late night host Jimmy Fallon comes off as a sweetheart, a huge fan of pop music who improvises a song for any occasion and appears to have the entertainment industry’s A-list on speed dial. Guests on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” present an extra dose of sparkle when they join him onstage, their smiles artificially switched to a high beam setting as if to match the amplified pep of its host.

Depending on the day you’ve endured, an hour of Fallon can serve as a gentle, non-habit forming sleep aid. Or it can come off as the equivalent dumping a box of aspartame on to your tongue in an effort to chase away the bitterness of the previous 12-to-18 waking hours of that preceded his show. More and more, encounters with “The Tonight Show” have come to feel like the latter.

Historically “The Tonight Show” has been the dominant late night telecast, even when NBC fumbled its handoff from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien before, to the public’s great displeasure, handing it back to the-very much-past-his-sell-by-date Leno in an act of desperation. That reign continued after Fallon took over, and would have steamed along full throttle, if not for the dawning of the stressful political era we now find ourselves in.

Few relationships are sunk by voicing a lack of love for Jimmy Fallon these days. Demonstrations of general disdain at the mention of his name, in fact, are all but expected among viewers who still care enough to watch late night talk shows in their timeslots. And this general sense of tsuris bears out in the ratings.

At present “The Tonight Show” is pre-empted until February 26 by NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics currently underway in PyeongChang, South Korea. But this week, NBC is airing a five-minute version of the late-night talk show called “Tonight Show Fallon 5″ following NBC’s primetime coverage of the games.

Five minutes of Fallon works pretty well, actually. Or it could be that SpongeBob and Paul Rudd make anything palatable. Hard to say.

Regardless of how that taster spoon of “Tonight Show” strikes you, in late November, a New York Times story indicated that Fallon’s audience declined by an average of 700,000 per night between the fall 2016 season and fall 2017. Meanwhile, the audiences for Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, the two broadcast hosts offering spikier political humor that has, in Kimmel’s case, inspired conversation and dinner table debate, have gone up.

According to Nielsen, in the season-to-date ratings race “The Late Show” is averaging an audience of 3.86 million to the 2.77 million who tune in for “The Tonight Show.” “Kimmel” is pulling 2.29 million on average. That’s total viewers. In the advertiser-attractive 18-to-49 demographic Fallon is still on top, with Kimmel and Colbert just about neck and neck. But even in that demographic, Fallon’s lead has diminished.

The larger question is why Fallon still inspires a level of low-grade animus in a number of viewers. It’s not just about his famous tousling of Donald Trump’s comb over anymore. Surely that has something to do with it, but Americans are famously forgiving and forgetful when it comes to celebrity gaffes, even the ones that normalize racists.

Rather, it’s a matter of Fallon’s stubborn inability to pivot into the new role of the late night host as mordant satirist and truth teller in an era marked by the obfuscation of truth, constant bitterness and endless anxiety.

Fallon opens nearly all of his monologues with some variation of, “Guys, here’s what people are talking about.” What follows is a string of punchlines that barely meet that qualification. Take his monologue from the night after Trump’s State of the Union address, in which the harshest joke was a crack that Trump is keeping Guantanamo Bay open because he thought it was an amusement park (Rimshot!). Then he took a mild swipe at the annoyance of CNN’s new alerts.

Colbert dissected the speech, the Democratic response, and other political headlines, including Trump’s refusal to impose restrictions on Russia congress already approved; Trump’s dodging of a meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller; and congressman Devin Nunes’ promotion of releasing the memo on the FBI supposedly proving the organization’s bias against the president. You know, the stuff people actually are (or were, at that time) talking about.

Where Colbert, Kimmel and other late night hosts rip into the absurd obscenity of today’s presidential politics, Fallon opts for harmless yuks delivered with a Borscht-belt “hey-o!” insincerity. He’s a man obstinately camped out in a place he believes to be the middle ground in an era where such a place no longer exists, especially in comedy.

Here is where we touch upon the subtle-though-important difference between middle ground and common ground. In essence, the first term speaks to the effort to please everybody. The second acknowledges that regardless of a person’s political, religious or social affiliations, there are specific issues that hold a shared interest for all of us, or fundamental beliefs that are worth acknowledging. Our individual views on such issues vary wildly but, in essence, we can all agree that they are important.

This is why Colbert’s relentless hammering on the Russia investigation and Trump’s pathological mendacity has lifted the fortunes of “The Late Show,” and Kimmel’s heartfelt statements about healthcare and DACA, have increased his audience numbers. Colbert’s approach may be the more partisan of the two, but both speak to a shared feeling that something has gone very wrong with our political leadership and the soul of this nation. Kimmel’s takes, in fact, have gone viral.

Fallon’s continued strength in 18-to-49 is based on the viral nature of his “Tonight Show” episodes, which he and his producers have structured into a series of digestible and social media-friendly bits made to be circulated. The “Classroom Instruments” series in particular, featuring pop stars singing hits to tiny xylophones, toy synthesizers and miniature percussion kits, was made for the Internet audience.

But Fallon also styles his monologue content to mirror the broad appeal of his viral segments, which is to say they’re soft and consciously written so as not to offend anyone. In any age that’s a recipe for comedy poison. In these days, on almost any day, it’s kind of like fiddling and doing a soft-shoe shuffle while Rome burns. Just slightly.

The late night landscape fractured long ago, with entities on broadcast and cable speaking to small niches based on personality. And part of the shift we’re seeing in post-prime time has to do with dueling schools of comedy. One could posit that Colbert and Kimmel studied at the feet of David Letterman, Carson’s protégé. Fallon, and current “Late Night” host Seth Meyers, honor kings of late night that came before as well. They also made their bones under Lorne Michaels and “Saturday Night Live,” and as we’re seeing now, that second mentorship culminates in different approaches. “Saturday Night Live” is a laboratory meant to develop personalities with distinct styles into individual brands and stars.

What this translates to is an emphasis and sharpening of individual strengths which,  in this moment, favors Meyers, the one-time co-host of “Weekend Update” alongside Amy Poehler. The “Late Night” brand as Letterman developed it is a place where the host can push the comedic edge, enabling Meyers to comfortably serve up brutally incisive headline driven observations. Over on CBS, Colbert stepped into Letterman’s slot gingerly but, owing to the precedent set by his predecessor, was soon unleashed to go for the political jugular.

Against this we have Fallon’s doomed insistence upon clinging to the old vision  of “The Tonight Show” as established by the hosts who came before him – Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, notably – men who adhered to a sense of being smoothly agnostic in their political humor.

Those men also performed in eras when the country was split between conservatives and liberals, as it has been throughout our history. They found a way to please all comers. The greatness of Carson, in fact, was that he was seen as a uniting force. He was also only late night talk show game going for many years. But he excelled at making the lives of the rich and famous accessible to everyday people, and getting an audience to break up simply by, say, puckishly  mentioning “Bimini” as the preface to his last one-liner about one-time presidential contender Gary Hart.  Even the unctuous Leno cultivated an audience for his blandness.

Fallon is trying mightily to capture some version of these old feelings, but either he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that our worship of fame, an idolatry that he perpetuates, is in part what brought us to our dangerous and distressing social and political now. Today’s best late night hosts still feed the entertainment industry beast, but they also distill each day’s new serving of political rhetoric and spin into plain language, showing the horror for what it is while inviting us to laugh at the cosmic farce of it all. Their work is medicine for our sanity.

Fallon wears “The Tonight Show” like an off-the-rack suit that’s slightly too large and slides around on his slight frame, as if it’s not quite his but it’s not meant for anyone else in particular, either. One day he may tailor it to fit the times, and maybe that will help. Problem is, we’re used to seeing him like this, and that makes him a symptom of the problem when what we really need is potent relief.

Berlinale 2018: “U – July 22” is a mass shooting movie that’s as horrifying as it has to be

"U – July 22" (Credit: Berlin International Film Festival/Agnete Brun)

Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s new film about the 2011 terrorist attacks in Oslo begins with a nifty trick of identification. Following an brief prologue depicting white nationalist terrorist Anders Breivik (never named, and only barely depicted, on-screen), “U – July 22” cuts to the island of Utøya, where Breivik killed 69 people (many of them teens and young adults) taking part in a Labor Party camping retreat. 

Poppe’s camera hangs static in the woods, peering through the trees at the tiny village of pop-up tents, watching as young people pass by. It’s a maneuver straight out of the horror film toolbox, in which the viewer is locked into first-person identification with some heavy-breathing, stalking-and-chopping killer (think Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas,” John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” or the movie-within-a-movie that opens Brian DePalma’s “Blow Out”).

Then something happens. A teenage girl named Kaja (Andrea Berntzen) steps into the frame, looking straight down the barrel of the camera, and says, plainly, “You don’t understand.” It’s soon revealed that she’s bickering with her mother on the phone (her plug-in ear piece becomes visible only when she turns away from the camera). But the third-wall-busting gesture sets the stakes for “U – July 22”: this is a film about understanding; about extreme affect and radical empathy. 

That Poppe’s fictionalized account of the Utøya massacre indulges, and explores, certain tropes of horror cinema (the presumed-killer POV establishing shot, the very scenario of teenagers being hunted down at a summer camp) is likely to rankle. Indeed, the film’s press premiere at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival was met with scattered boos and jeers amongst the requisite post-screening applause. It may strike some as tasteless and manipulative, exploiting the real historical tragedy and the memory of the dead. While it would be wholly disingenuous of me to argue that the film is not manipulative (or even a bit exploitative), I maintain that its crassness and cruelty can be productively regarded as virtues — and ones which distinguish the film as one of the most effectual (and, yes, topical) condemnations of gun violence ever put across on screen. 

In its structure, “U – July 22” is a kind of inside-out horror movie. Imagine “Friday the 13th,” except instead of gazing through machete-wielding killer Jason’s eyes as he lumbers through Camp Crystal Lake, where caught looking through the eyes of his victims. For the bulk of its running time, Poppe’s movie unfolds in a single, unbroken (save some hidden cuts, tricky to spot) long take, which effectively situates the camera (and so, the viewer) as a would-be fatality ducking and hiding and scrambling for survival as a mass shooter stalks through a vacation resort, killing indiscriminately. Where a recent film like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” elevated the tropes and cliches of horror cinema to the level of socio-historical allegory, “U – July 22” does the opposite. It mires the real material of history in the tropes and cliches of horror cinema. Far from constituting a “problem,” this decision elevates the facts and figures of the Breivik attacks into the realm of pure terror.

There’s a genuine verve and daring here. Breivik, after all, was a prototype for subsequent mass shooters, and for the uptick in white nationalist ideologies that decry the boogeymen of Islam, immigration and “cultural Marxism.” Before Dylann Roof, before Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz (who was reported to have a keen interest in issues of race and ethnonationalism, even if explicit white nationalist ties were subsequently debunked), there was Anders Breivik. Instead of affording Breivik the dignity of a pathology — or, again, of even being named at all — this film concerns itself exclusively with the experience of the victims (culled from first-hand testimonies) and with the real threat of violence. As Poppe’s camera weaves through the woods, peeking over bows and branches, and hunkering into the mud, one gets a keyed-up, highly affective sense of the horror of attempting to survive such an attack. The film is unbearably tense and scary without ever being “exciting” in any conventional regard. To watch it is to experience it, and to experience it is an ordeal.

The pathologies and motivations of killers like Breivik, who are motivated by extremist racist ideology, are no doubt important in understanding them, and in the prevention of subsequent massacres. Yet there’s also something of a double-standard in such depictions, which tend to depict white, male murderers as either psychologically complex or psychologically broken, while other extremist groups (such as Muslim terrorists) are rendered as mindless appendages of a corrupt ideology, unthinking and de-individuated. “U – July 22” offers something different, and equally valuable. Instead of another “true crime,” portrait of a serial killer-styled docudrama (yawn), it depicts something like “true horror,” or docu-horror. 

It’s a film that gets close to what must be the incredible panic of running for one’s life, of clutching the bodies of dead friends close by, of being submerged into the lived, material, blood and guts and gunk horror of gun violence. Each of the film’s countless gunshots is forceful and terrifying. Each run-and-gun camera movement from one hiding place to the next is defined by a heart-in-the-guts horror. It is experiential, not intellectual; a film that abides to the regime of the body instead of the mind. And horror films, the scholar Linda Williams has noted, have been historically marginalized as aesthetically and morally unserious precisely because they rely on such affective, excessive, ostensibly low-brow bodily reactions. Poppe’s film is audacious precisely because it is unashamed to explore this visceral register, to stir fear as a way of encouraging feeling.

“U – July 22” cuts through so much of the contemporary cant around gun violence, around white nationalism, around xenophobia, around the politicization of historical tragedy. It doesn’t engage with the ideological particulars of Breivik or like-minded killers because it doesn’t need to. Depicted plainly, and with requisite terror, the effects of such callous extremism will always make the case against extremism itself.

This defense of Harvest Boxes leaves me very hungry for answers

(Credit: Getty/LightFieldStudios)

The Harvest Box — the so-called “Blue Apron for poor people” that existed as an apple of the Trump administration’s eye for a brief moment in time — is Schrodinger’s Food Stamps. By which I mean, it existed in a state of PR flux: it was the next best big thing for the government to reform, then suddenly it wasn’t being seriously considered anymore.

Yet, Harvest Box seems to be a real thing, because on Monday, Brandon Lipps, the USDA’s acting deputy undersecretary for food nutrition and customer services came out with a USA Today op-ed in support of the plan. And if the administration is wheeling out the bigwigs, you know they think it’s important.

The op-ed is light on actual details — the things that people want to know. For instance, how does someone get government cheese delivered to their door, and how do they make this palatable? And who will be paid for shipping all this delicious food to your front door?

Sadly, that last question is left wide open. But Lipps does have a great shipping analogy that he’d like to use instead:

They probably laughed at Fred Smith when he conceived of FedEx and the efficient distribution of packages to customers. In Washington, it is a favorite pastime to criticize new ideas and claim they won’t work. But innovation has always been one of the keys to success, and innovation is what America’s Harvest Boxes represent.

The op-ed is nothing more than a promotion for something that doesn’t exactly exist yet, and likely won’t exist. While the op-ed boasts about recipients’ “ability to make food choices for themselves,” it doesn’t get into how it would do this. Is there a catalog somewhere that facilitates “shopping” for groceries? Will this whole scheme be online? And, more importantly, will these Harvest Boxes be subject to market pricing — meaning, if there’s a spike in the price of canned green beans, will they suddenly become unavailable?

Instead of details, Lipps’ op-ed treats readers to standard-issue pro–free market doublespeak:

Recipients will retain the ability to make food choices for themselves. America’s Harvest Boxes will use our agricultural abundance to provide wholesome staple foods, while allowing people to make their own food purchases with the remaining portion of their SNAP benefits. Because states know their populations best, they will have the flexibility to offer food options for people with differing dietary needs.

One thing we do know about the Harvest Boxes: the federal government is hands-off, and wants to let the states manage them. Likewise, there are hints in the op-ed of privatized facets to this scheme; Lipps mentions both “non-profits or the private sector” as being involved:

As true laboratories of innovation, states can determine their own methods of connecting people with their Harvest Boxes. Some may choose to partner with non-profits or the private sector to arrange for boxes to be picked up at non-profit or retail outlets, while others may work with private sector innovators to deliver boxes to doorsteps.

Harvest Boxes: Empty calories and leaving us hungry.

It really is lonely at the top

(Credit: Getty/stevecoleimages)

According to the Small Business Administration, in 2016 there were nearly 28 million small businesses operating in the U.S. And of those, 78.5 percent were individually owned. We idolize the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, but many of those entrepreneurs struggle with anxiety and loneliness on their way to the top — if they ever reach it.

Brian Bordainick was on his way to reaching it. The owner of Dinner Lab, a member-based pop-up dinner event company that spotlights up-and-coming chefs, his company was growing — and fast.

“You build up these expectations, which you try to temper, but everyone’s always looking to what’s going to happen,” he told “The Lonely Hour.” “Right now, we’re adding about 500 people a day onto our platform. That may be cool and intriguing for a little bit, but then people are constantly asking, ‘Well, how does it get to 600? How does it get to 700?’ It’s sort of this never satisfied moment. You just never get to feel like, ‘Ah, I’m done.'”

Bordainick said it’s hard to be honest about his professional struggles with other entrepreneurs.

“Everyone’s sort of in a pissing contest with one another. You’re an entrepreneur. You know there are probably things that happened during your day today that sucked, but when people ask you at these little happy hours and meet-ups and things like that, you just say, ‘Oh my god, things are going great. We got this going on, we got this going on.’ I haven’t found too much solace in other entrepreneurs.”

Unfortunately, some months after The Lonely Hour’s interview with Bordainick two years ago, Dinner Lab shut down.

“At the end of the day, as a CEO of a company, you get a lot more credit when things are going well than you probably deserve, and you get a lot more blame than you probably deserve when things are going bad. That’s what you sign up for,” he said. “If, say, an event doesn’t go as well as planned in Miami, people immediately want to talk to you about it. You may have had 30 events going on, but that’s still your responsibility. The buck starts and stops with you. You just have to get more comfortable with that.”

“The Lonely Hour” also talked to Patrick Janelle of Spring Street Social Society, a kind of club and dinner theater company that produces events in New York City and Los Angeles. It’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among other publications, and continues to grow. Is the growing success — and growing staff — alienating?

“Being the boss means that you have to create some sort of divide,” he said. “In order for a team of people to have confidence in you, you have to set yourself apart. That certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t be compassionate and you can’t be friendly, but you do have to isolate yourself from the basic kind of runnings of what happens. I feel sort of guilty about that sometimes, while at the same time feeling like that’s kind of the way that it needs to be.”

Finally, Jill Lindsey cashed in her 401K two years ago and put all of her money towards opening her Fort Greene boutique, also named Jill Lindsey.

“I miss my friends every day,” she told “The Lonely Hour.” “It’s hard to explain to people that the job doesn’t end. Yes, we close at 9:00 or 10:00, but I have at least 20 to 50 emails, and I’m restocking things, ordering things, managing my staff . . . It’s constant.”

“Most of my friends work nine-to-five or ten-to-six, and not on the weekends. For me, it’s a real challenge to get to spend time with them,” Lindsey said. “On one hand, it’s heart-wrenching that I miss them and I don’t get to see them. And on the other hand, I get to follow them on Instagram and Facebook and kind of make sure they’re good and that everything is OK, and then I get to meet new people and share my life with those people.”

Listen to the episode below.

Anti-abortion group Operation Rescue has become fully “red-pilled” by an 8chan conspiracy theory

(Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

It was concerning enough when in January 2018, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue encouraged followers to look into the allegations of an anonymous conspiracy theorist on the 8chan message board. Now, it appears that Operation Rescue, with its history of violent rhetoric and harassment, has become fully converted and is seeking to cultivate anti-abortion followers into believers in a far-right conspiracy theory.

Headed by longtime extremists Troy Newman and Cheryl Sullenger — the latter has served time for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic — Operation Rescue has been described as an organization dedicated to “shut[ting] down abortion clinics by systematically harassing their employees into quitting.” Operation Rescue initially signaled that they’d been “red-pilled” — a term popularized by the “alt-right” to refer to an ideological conversion to “seeing the world as it really is” — in a January 7 press release, in which the group a series of posts from a far-right community on 8chan.

8chan is a message board system — similar to 4chan and Reddit — that enables users to engage in discussions anonymously. This has made such communities hotbeds of racist commentary, misogyny, and politically motivated harassment campaigns, in addition to serving as fertile ground for those in the so-called “alt-right” or white nationalist movement. As Mother Jones’ Mariah Blake explained, “men’s rights forums on sites like 4chan and Reddit are awash in misogyny and anti-feminist vitriol” — a trend that has turned such sites into what Vox’s Aja Romano called a “gateway drug” that leads people into the “alt-right.”

In the January 7 release, Operation Rescue focused on an 8chan conspiracy theory called “The Storm” in which a user who refers to himself as “Q” claims to be a “high-level government insider” secretly sharing clues to “inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state.” The scope of the conspiracy theory has expanded to encompass all types of events, ranging from a fire at Trump Tower to a train accident involving Republican members of Congress. Most recently, followers of The Storm have joined a campaign calling for the release of a four-page classified memo drafted by House intelligence committee Republicans that allegedly shows illicit behavior by the FBI and Justice Department during the early phases of investigating connections between Trump associates and Russia — a campaign organized around the Twitter hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. According to The Daily Beast, right-wing figures as well as online message board communities “have since turned the hashtag into a rallying cry, imploring fans to tweet the hashtag.” On February 2, the President Donald Trump authorized the release of the memo, despite explicit warnings from the FBI about the veracity of its contents.

In the January 7 press release, Operation Rescue acknowledged that “Q” is a conspiracy theorist — or at least inspires conspiracy theories. Since then, the social media activity of the group and its leadership indicates that they’ve gone full Sean Hannity. Between January 7 and February 12, both Sullenger’s Twitter account and the official Operation Rescue account have increased their engagements with accounts promoting #ReleaseTheMemo and related hashtags (#Qanon, #TheGreatAwakening, #FollowTheWhiteRabbit). In the past month alone, Sullenger’s changed her account handle to “CherylS sez #ReleaseTheMemo” and followed a number of right-wing media personalities’ accounts, including Alex Jones, Jerome Corsi, Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, and Sara Carter.

Since January 2018, Sullenger and Operation Rescue’s social media accounts have demonstrated a precipitous slide into full-embrace of The Storm and #ReleaseTheMemo:

Cheryl Sullenger

January 10 — Sullenger tweeted a National Review article and included the hashtag #Qanon.

January 16 & 17 — Operation Rescue sent a press release, calling on followers to participate in the “Mother of All Tweet Storms.” According to the release, followers of The Storm were “asked to create memes that express truths that have been misreported or ignored by the Main Stream Media (MSM) and call them out for their dishonest reporting.” Operation Rescue characterized the event as “a tweet war of Biblical proportions with folks joined together in a concerted effort to break through to the masses with the truth about governmental corruption, human trafficking, and even Planned Parenthood.” The Operation Rescue Twitter account then spent the better part of January 17 tweeting a variety of memesattacking Planned Parenthood and promoting hashtags related to The Storm.

January 22 — Sullenger tweeted #ReleaseTheMemo and included a screenshot from Fox News’ Hannity, in which host Sean Hannity was talking about it. Hannity has been an active promoter of so-called “deep state” conspiracy theories.

January 24 — Sullenger reacted to news that Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards is leaving the organization sometime in 2018, by tweeting multiple memes of Richards depicted in prison with the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The official Operation Rescue account also tweeted a press release about Richards’ departure using the hashtags #ReleaseTheMemo and #FollowtheWhiteRabbit. Sullenger also tweeted a link to a YouTube video about #Qanon, calling it, “Must watch!” In addition to Sullenger’s Twitter activity, the Operation Rescue account also liked a tweet about #ReleaseTheMemo.

January 25 — Sullenger retweeted a video about Qanon from the account @RoystonPotter (who appears to frequently post about The Storm) and later tweeted about #ReleaseTheMemo.

January 27 — Sullenger retweeted a Jerome Corsi tweet about #ReleaseTheMemo, featuring a story from far-right blog The Gateway Pundit about Hannity and the memo. Sullenger additionally tweeted an explainer video about The Storm, writing, “#TheStorm is real. #ReleaseTheMemo.” Sullenger also tweeted @realDonaldTrump, asking him to read the memo during the State of the Union address because “Americans need to know the #truth.” Meanwhile, The Operation Rescue account liked a tweet about #GreatAwakening and #QAnon.

January 28 — Sullenger attacked Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — a frequent right-wing target — on Twitter, citing a clip from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight. This tweet included the hashtags #GreatAwakening and #ReleaseTheMemo. In addition to her own tweet, Sullenger also retweetedcontent from Jerome Corsi and Hannity about #ReleaseTheMemo.

January 29 — Sullenger quote-tweeted a claim from Corsi about the memo, writing that she would not “be happy until we can all see the memo with our own eyes.” In addition, Sullenger also tweeted aboutthe resignations of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Democratic National Committee CEO Jess O’Connell from their positions — linking each to #ReleaseTheMemo. Notably, Sullenger shared an image from an account (@Thomas1774Paine) about the memo supposedly being delivered to the White House — writing in a public post on her Facebook that “we are on the brink of history!” The Operation Rescue Twitter account retweeted a user, @LadyStephC, calling the memo “the tip of the iceberg” and including a number of hashtags related to The Storm.

January 31 — After a train crash involving Republican members of Congress, Sullenger retweeted a conspiracy theory from Corsi that suggested the accident was part of a “deep state” plot to stop the Republicans from releasing the memo.

February 1 — Sullenger tweeted several memes linked to the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, suggesting that if the memo is released some Democratic politicians will go to jail. Another meme that she tweetedshowed “Q” as a revolutionary standing up to the “deep state” and implied the only way Americans would be “free” is by following him. Sullenger retweeted “alt-right” troll Jack Posobiec, in addition to tweetinga screenshot of an 8chan message board comment (allegedly from “Q”) and including the hashtags #ReleaseTheMemo and #Qanon.

February 2 & 3 — Retweeting a comment from Trump’s Twitter account about opposition research firm Fusion GPS, Sullenger argued that the same firm had “issued fake ‘forensic analysis’” in order to “cover up [Planned Parenthood]’s illegal baby parts trafficking” — referring to a debunked allegation from the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress. In her tweet, Sullenger included the hashtags #ReleaseTheMemo and #ThesePeopleAreSick. Sullenger also retweeted right-wing media personality Mark Levin. After the release of the disputed memo, Sullenger retweeted several of Corsi’s tweets hyping allegations of widespread wrongdoing by government entities. On February 3, Sullenger retweeted Trump claiming that the memo “totally vindicates” him.

February 4 — Sullenger tweeted a video alleging that Super Bowl LII attendees were at risk of being targeted by terrorists, commenting, “Better safe than sorry!” For good measure, Sullenger also tweeted a Life News article about Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards calling her “evil” and using the hashtags #LockHerUp, #AbortionIsMurder, and #GreatAwakening.

February 5 — Retweeting an account that previously shared screenshots from 8chan, Sullenger commented that both Clinton and Planned Parenthood “both must pay for crimes.” Sullenger also shareda press release published by Operation Rescue further connecting the memo to the organization’s typical talking points about Planned Parenthood.

February 6 & 7 — Sharing a post from Corsi about “Q”, Sullenger excitedly tweeted “OMG!! LOOK!!!!!!!!” Sullenger also shared the LifeSite News and WorldNetDaily pickups of Operation Rescue’s February 5 press release. On February 7, Sullenger tweeted several times, citing accounts that were promoting claims about the memo.

Troy Newman

Throughout much of this timeline, the social media accounts of Troy Newman did not engage as often with topics related to The Storm, #ReleaseTheMemo, or even right-wing media personalities. However, on January 31, a public post on Newman’s Facebook page directed followers to what appears to be a conspiracy theory blog for a man named Jim Stone.

The site seems to house blog posts about a number of conspiracy theories, including one about an alleged plot by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to smuggle a gun into the State of the Union and assassinate Trump:

Among other extreme conspiracy theories, Stone claimed the January 31 train accident occurred because Republican members of Congress had “received death threats over the memo, and were heading to a safe place when they were stopped by a staged ‘accident’”:

Perhaps the most outlandish conspiracy theory of all: “If Trump gets killed, they can produce a fake Trump and have him say whatever they need him to say in real time.” The blog continued that this technology had been used “with Hillary [Clinton] during the campaign” and that it was “critical information you cannot skip seeing”:

After the memo was released on February 2, Newman tweeted and posted on Facebook, wondering if it was “too early to call this an attempted coup” against Trump.

One thing is certain: If Sullenger and other members of Operation Rescue have been fully “red-pilled,” they are not only exposing their audience to a wellspring of conspiracy theories, but also potentially becoming further radicalized themselves. And if exposure to rapidly misogynist online communities is truly a “gateway drug,” as Romano warned, the cross-pollination between these 8chan conspiracy theorists and anti-abortion extremists is an incredibly dangerous prospect.