Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 655

New attack on free speech: Pro-Israel groups wage war on campus freedom

Pro-Israel demonstrators in Times Square,October 18, 2015. (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

College campuses traditionally have been the sites of social and political protest — the combination of youth, intellectual energy, free speech, and academic freedom is a powerful catalyst for vibrant and often heated debate. Given the strain this can sometimes place on the equilibrium of universities, it is not surprising to see limits placed on speech and action. What is unusual is for pressure to come from groups outside the university. That’s precisely what is happening today when it comes to the topic of Israel and Palestine, and the overreach of some pro-Israel organizations into campus free speech is such that even those who oppose an academic boycott of Israel have condemned their actions.

A number of recent cases have come onto the scene just as the academic year has begun. Not only have these cases continued previous trends regarding the stifling of speech and the retaliation against those who are critical of Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians, they have raised such efforts to a new level.

The Amcha Initiative, Canary Mission and other groups claim that they are fighting anti-Semitism on campus. But because they equate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews as a people, any act or speech critical of Israel may be construed as anti-Semitic. These groups then exert political pressure on administrators to punish what they call anti-Semitism, and administrators will often bend to their will to avoid bad publicity, abrogating their responsibilities to protect free speech and academic freedom.

In October 2014, a group of prominent Jewish scholars issued a statement criticizing Amcha’s tactics:

It goes without saying that we, as students of antisemitism, are unequivocally opposed to any and all traces of this scourge. That said, we find the actions of AMCHA deplorable. Its technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built. Moreover, its definition of antisemitism is so undiscriminating as to be meaningless. Instead of encouraging openness through its efforts, AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and has a chilling effect on research and teaching.

Yet Amcha’s tactics pale before those of Canary Mission, which claims: “The Canary Mission database was created to document the people and groups that are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on college campuses in North America. Every individual and organization has been carefully researched and sourced.”

But Canary Mission is not just “documenting people and groups,” it is also contacting their employers and universities to smear reputations with distorted depictions of activities and opinions, endangering these activists’ careers both inside and outside the academy. Writing in the Academe Blog of the American Association of University Professors, Hank Reichman calls Canary Mission a “genuine blacklisting site … which is potentially far more dangerous [than Amcha] for academic freedom.”

Some who have been targeted are speaking out, describing what it’s like to be targeted by Canary Mission and how it has affected their lives.

Liliana, a junior majoring in international relations who did not want to be identified further, said, “Canary Mission gave me the worst anxiety. They launched a Twitter campaign to get me fired from my job. Luckily, my job’s human resources called and were totally supportive. They recognized them as a hate group and were ultimately concerned about my safety. I was so thankful. However, the anxiety that doesn’t seem to go away is the fact that I might not be able to enter Palestine. I have family there and my mother especially is worried about what we will endure at the border crossing next time we go. When my profile first got put up, I had trouble eating and sleeping. I would wake up with bad anxiety and start gagging as if I were going to vomit … I can handle grade-school bullying. What bothers me is the constant worry about what’s going to happen to me because of it. I also feel uncomfortable having my pictures out there. It puts me at risk for sexual and/or physical violence.”

Shezza Abboushi Dallal, who graduated from Barnard College in May 2016 with a history degree, told me that she and about 15 other organizers with the campus groups Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace woke up one day to find newly published profiles appearing on the first page of a Google search. These profiles featured “dozens of quotes, photographs, and videos that had been collected from an array of online platforms — including our private social media accounts,” Dallal said. “Pictures of me accompanied by humiliating and inciting captions were being tweeted and retweeted … It was incredibly shocking to have documentation of involvement of which I am resiliently proud be distorted and manipulated to appear as the exact opposite of what it is — an effort to stand for the human rights and dignity of a people in the face of occupation, oppression, and gross violation of international law. Equally shocking was the knowledge that countless individuals were being empowered to contribute to such an initiative, while having their acts of intimidation protected by the site’s anonymity.”

Sumaya Awad of Williams College wrote: “My future was threatened by this ominous and libelous website labeling me a ‘terrorist threat.’ Canary Mission was created to make students like me feel atomized and threatened, to push us away from activism and to erode the rights of Palestine activists to mobilize.”

Students and faculty being profiled by Canary Mission are proud of their actions and have no desire to disavow them. What they object to is the way they say Canary Mission has taken fragments of statements and recontextualized them, distorting their original meaning, broadcasting them all over the Internet and then contacting employers, future employers and universities, all while operating under the cloak of anonymity.

An open letter opposing Canary Mission’s tactics will be released this week, signed by more than 1,000 scholars including Robin D.G. Kelley, Daniel Boyarin, James Schamus and Joan Scott. [Full disclosure: I am also a signatory.]

The letter reads in part:

As faculty who serve, have served, or are likely to serve on an admissions committee at graduate and undergraduate university programs across the country, we unequivocally assert that the Canary Mission website should not be trusted as a resource to evaluate students’ qualifications for admission. We condemn Canary Mission as an effort to intimidate and blacklist students and faculty who stand for justice for Palestinians…

Although, as individual faculty, we hold a range of viewpoints on Israel-Palestine, we recognize that student advocacy for Palestinian human rights is not inherently anti-Semitic, and that such advocacy represents a cherished and protected form of free speech that is welcome on college campuses. We reject the McCarthyist tactics used by Canary Mission. Canary Mission’s aim is to damage these students’ futures, and to punish them for their principled human rights activism. We urge our fellow admissions faculty, as well as university administrators, prospective employers and all others, to join us in signing below and standing against such bullying and attempts to shut down civic engagement and freedom of speech.

In the case of faculty who are employed at public universities, another tactic used to harass activists has been to delve into their personnel records, as in the case of Simona Sharoni. As reported in Inside Higher Education, Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh who was raised in Israel and previously taught there, is a strong proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). Recently her university informed her that a series of public records requests had been made to gather information on her “hiring, continued employment and conferences attended while at Plattsburgh.”

IHE goes on to note a strongly worded letter written on Sharoni’s behalf by the Middle East Studies Association, which reads in part: “It appears to us that these [open-records] requests are part of the continuing campaign to harass and intimidate Sharoni because she has expressed certain political views … We therefore call upon university officials to exercise extreme caution and responsible judgment in reviewing and approving [such] requests for records pertaining to Sharoni, so as not to be complicit in furthering the campaign of harassment being waged against her.” It also urges the university to “publicly and vigorously affirm its commitment to the principles of free speech and academic freedom as well as its intention to defend Sharoni and other faculty members against harassment and threats by politically motivated individuals and groups based outside the university community.”

Another case among many is that of Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who has long been the target of harassment due to her work as the director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities Diaspora program there. Outside groups have pressed administrators to investigate how she carries our her duties — building research and study opportunities for her campus with colleagues abroad is construed by such groups as association with “terrorists.” Recently Abdulhadi negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding between SFSU and An-Najah University in the West Bank. In this and other ventures she has gone through the proper procedures and secured the requisite authorization. SFSU’s administration has defended Abdulhadi, finding that she acted in accord with its rules and in order to fulfill her job.

In 2014 SFSU president Leslie Wong stated, in response to Amcha’s continued attacks on Abdulhadi, “Faculty can and do communicate with others relevant to their research, communicating by various methods that can involve travel. Professor Abdulhadi’s academic work in race and resistance studies requires examination of some of the world’s most challenging and controversial issues. San Francisco State University will continue to respect academic freedom, and we will not censor our scholars nor condone censorship by others.”

But Amcha and other organizations are not satisfied with leaving universities to manage their own affairs. Besides these acts of intimidation against students and faculty, sometimes reaching into their personal lives, organizations are also trying to influence what kinds of courses can be taught at the university.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a course on Palestine was criticized by Jewish groups, who — in a campaign organized by Amcha — wrote to the U.C. administration urging that the course be censored. A thorough report on this episode by John K. Wilson in Academe Blog explains how administrators suspended the course in midsession, a highly unusual act, especially given the fact that the groups protesting the course had not even asked for such a radical move. This can be seen as yet another instance where university administrators react defensively in ways that violate proper procedure and faculty governance.

The U.C. administration first explained that its decision to suspend the class was because the instructors had not received the proper authorization to offer it. Yet as Wilson’s article documents, the instructors had indeed gathered all the proper authorizations. It was apparently the administration that had erred in not being aware of the necessary procedures in the first place. Of course, there’s a decent chance that the administration’s rationale for suspending the course was simply a pretext for bending to the will of outside organizations.

As Wilson writes:

If there was a breakdown in bureaucratic procedures (and there is no evidence of it), then it is the obligation of the university to fix those procedures in the future, not to ban a course and punish a facilitator and his students who reasonably followed every written rule.

This decision sends a clear message to the campus: controversial speech will be punished, especially if it is critical of Israel.

This course suspension is absolutely indefensible, completely unacceptable and purely motivated by politics and public relations. It is a violation of academic freedom, shared governance, U.C. Berkeley’s guidelines, the Regents Policies, and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

A letter from students in the class, written to the administrators who authorized the suspension, points out the irony of something like this happening at Berkeley:

The decision to suspend Ethnic Studies 198: Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis is a violation of our academic freedom. This is an alarming development to have transpire on the same campus that not only hosted the Free Speech Movement, but which also routinely claims and utilizes the same Movement’s legacy to market itself as a world-class institution, a bastion of tolerance and diversity, and the site of intellectual inquiry — inquiry that is sometimes discomforting, but always enriching. Your decision constitutes nothing less than an act of discrimination against students who wanted to debate and discuss this contentious issue in a spirit of genuine sincerity, mutual respect and open-minded curiosity.

Again: the decision to suspend our course is both discriminatory and a violation of our academic freedom. We demand the reinstatement of the course.

As a result of protests from both students and faculty at Berkeley, as well as elsewhere, on Sept. 19 the administration relented and, in a letter to the instructors, reinstated the course. As John K. Wilson noted in a followup piece, the U.C. dean involved in this case may not have had the authority to suspend the course in the first place, or to insist that instructors alter the course’s content as a condition of its reinstatement. This sets a dangerous precedent, when an outside group can exert such influence as to change the content of a course, bypassing the rights and responsibilities of faculty and interfering with what students can learn and how they can learn it.

Much of this overreach by anti-boycott groups turns out to be unwarranted and unnecessary. When challenged, as in the Berkeley case just mentioned, complaints against pro-Palestinian education and activism as “anti-Semitic” are often shown to be unfounded. The vast majority of the charges anti-boycott organizations have leveled against pro-Palestinian activism has failed to stick. At the University of California at Irvine, as reported by Palestine Legal:

After interviewing witnesses and reviewing extensive video footage, UCI’s Office of Student Conduct released a 58-page report finding that SJP students arrived peacefully at the event but were locked out by its organizers … Members of SJP, joined by students from other student groups, began demonstrating outside the event when they were locked out. The report confirms SJP’s account that their protest was peaceful, and found claims made by attendees of the event that protesters blocked the exits and threatened attendees to be unsubstantiated.

At San Francisco State, a study concluded that contrary to charges brought against demonstrators, a protest against Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat’s visit was not anti-Semitic: “On September 1, San Francisco State University (SFSU) released a report examining a protest of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat who visited the campus in April. After interviewing 20 witnesses and reviewing extensive documentation, the impartial investigator concluded that the protest was disruptive, but that it posed no safety risks and focused on the mayor for the policies he promotes.” As Palestine Legal reports, “Student protestors were accused of threatening Jewish students with violent and anti-Semitic messages. SFSU singled out the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) for discipline despite the participation of many students from diverse groups. GUPS members were also targeted with death threats, rape threats, online profiling and in-person harassment following the protest.”

Despite the failure of these charges, such actions will continue, largely because part of their purpose is to tie up resources and energy, and make administrators act preemptively to disallow events that might pose a problem.

Those not involved in the debate over Israel-Palestine may not be concerned about Canary Mission and its methods. But these tactics can be used by any group. Especially in educational institutions, it is essential to recognize outside organizations whose goal is to interfere with the mission and ethos of education, and who seek to silence, smear and intimidate those with whom they disagree.

“Narcos” isn’t “Breaking Bad”: How season 2 betrays Pablo Escobar’s victims

Bryan Cranston in "Breaking Bad;" Wagner Moura in "Narcos" (Credit: AMC/Netflix)

The last Friday night I spent in my childhood home, five bombs exploded throughout the city of Cali. Like too many other Colombians, my parents had recently given up on the country and, after much hesitation, had decided to seek an uncertain future in the U.S. I had invited my high school friends over for a last hurrah, and after an evening of eating pizza by the pool, we were indoors getting ready to go clubbing.

Suddenly, the house was rocked by a tidal wave of vibration that rattled every window, an overpowering force so deep and dull that one couldn’t really call it a noise. “A bomb,” somebody stated, a little too matter-of-factly. We turned on the radio news. The blast we had heard was a car bomb that had gone off in front of a Drogas La Rebaja, a convenience store at the entrance to the neighborhood. The other bombs, we were dismayed to learn, had exploded on the other side of town — precisely where we were headed. Growing up in the era of cartel violence can really warp your priorities. Darn, we thought, there go our plans.

I bring up this story to make clear, from the start, the baggage I bring to the viewing of “Narcos.” When episode 7 of the new season opens with an attack against a Drogas La Rebaja, I know exactly what that sounds like. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an unbiased reviewer, but that is precisely why people interested in the show should read this article. I wrote about the show’s first season last year, and while my appraisal was not wholly uncritical, I was rather impressed with the show.

Many Colombians had complained about fake accents, unhistorical details, or even the mere idea of returning to the drug wars when a peaceful and prosperous Colombia is finally emerging. By contrast, I found the show surprisingly authentic and saw it as a cathartic opportunity to share with the world my beloved country’s tragedy. But while the new season preserves many of the show’s aesthetic virtues and even gains authenticity by casting more Colombian actors in key roles, in the end it takes “Narcos” in a depressing and disappointing direction.

***

This summer, one of my students gave me a nasty shock at the beginning of class. I teach at a private high school full of diligent, well-meaning teenagers. Yet that morning, as I settled in among the students, I turned left and saw a pair of mocking eyes staring in my direction, framed by a side part and mustache I knew only too well. The face was printed on a T-shirt, and it couldn’t have contrasted more strongly with the kind, innocent look of the girl who was wearing it.

“You shouldn’t be wearing that,” I found myself saying, while my head seemed to be shaking nervously all by itself.

My words took her off guard; she looked confused.

“Your shirt. You shouldn’t be wearing that,” I repeated. “Don’t wear that. That was a very bad man. A very bad man.”

The poor girl stared, mortified, at her T-shirt and said something to the effect that it was her brother’s. Her words allowed me to gain better control of myself, and I explained in a few sentences what Pablo Escobar had done to my country.

“To a Colombian, that’s like wearing a Hitler shirt,” I concluded, and from the look on her face, I could tell she finally understood my reaction. She was merely wearing a design that, for reasons unknown to her, was trending in the popular culture. As her profuse apologies after class made clear, there had been no malice in her choice of clothing.

That’s what disturbed me most about the incident.

Then again, I should have seen it coming. That my student was wearing a shirt stamped with the picture of one of the most ruthless murderers in recent history is unsurprising if one considers the social-media marketing that Netflix has employed to promote the show.

Pablo’s #WisdomWednesday pic.twitter.com/UXsdWg455s

— Narcos (@NarcosNetflix) October 14, 2015

Just a little black humor? Perhaps. But tell that to the families of the hundreds of Medellín police officers that he killed or the orphans of the Avianca flight that he blew out of the sky. My student didn’t know any better, but the show’s promoters have no excuse. To turn those tragedies into marketing is sick.

***

Fans of “Narcos” may object that the show isn’t its marketing. The sad truth though is that the second season falls in line with the marketers’ approach, changing the nature of the storytelling and turning it in a deeply troubling direction. Then again, many critics have praised this turn. The Telegraph has called the new “Narcos” “a slick, stylish delight,” while a Vox reviewer who had panned the first season has now said there is “so much to love.”

Unfortunately, for “Narcos” to become a “delight” is precisely the problem. To tell the story of Pablo Escobar as entertainment — to approach it merely as an alternative to fictional gangster series like “Breaking Bad” or “The Sopranos” — is to rob his countless victims of their reality, to murder them all over again.

When “Breaking Bad” debuted, audiences were captivated by the premise behind Walter White’s character: a brilliant and mild-mannered chemistry teacher driven by dramatic circumstances to become a ruthless meth dealer. The show is an excellent study of the addictive quality of evil, how it forces its users to take ever larger doses — or the way it can metastasize through the soul like the literal cancer spreading through Walter White’s body, claiming ever more of him. In exploring this process, the show brilliantly keeps White’s character sympathetic, human, allowing viewers to become immersed in his experience — not only pitying him but even rooting for him as he destroys his life and those of people around him.

The second season of “Narcos” appears to have taken a page from “Breaking Bad.” As the series follows Escobar during his final fall, the writers’ primary aim seems to have been to develop him into a compelling character that can keep viewers glued to their screens. And they largely succeeded. Coupled with Wagner Moura’s tremendous talent, this approach yields considerable narrative payoffs, turning Escobar into an attractive, memorable anti-hero. Yet for all these gains, Escobar is not Walter White, and by casting him in that light the show lies.

To be clear, the problem is not that the second season strays much deeper into fictional territory — though it does. Even a show based on history has to be watchable, and creative license is justified if it allows a story to communicate its most significant truths. Yet when dealing with historical events, especially ones as tragic and recent as the ones in question, storytellers must adhere to standards that reach beyond aesthetics. A movie about 9/11, for example, bears a tremendous responsibility to the victims of the attacks and their families, and filmmakers would sin in ignoring that duty in pursuit of commercial or even critical acclaim. Sadly, “Narcos” does exactly that when it delves into Escobar’s interior life.

Granted, the divide between Escobar’s two natures as loving family man and psychopathic monster are full of dramatic potential (even if the trope is used in every gangster movie ever made). Moreover, it is perfectly legitimate — even necessary — for stories to humanize the monsters of history. There is a great risk in pretending that Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler were not real human beings. Yet the new season tips the scales too far in the direction of relatability, adopting the kingpin’s point of view far too often, taking almost at face value his claim to be a man of the people.

We’re treated to scenes of poor Pablo, as his empire comes crashing down around him, gazing longingly at his daughter’s abandoned shoe, poor Pablo holding a bunny, poor Pablo dealing with daddy issues, wishing he could become a farmer living a simple life. Like Walter White, he begins to seem like a man driven by the love of his family and desperate circumstances to do some very bad things. Except, of course, that White’s actions were never about providing for his family but about making up for his sense of weakness and failure.

To be fair, “Narcos” does remind us on occasion that its main character is a monster, as when we see the horrific results of a bombing campaign from the point of view of an everyday Colombian family, or when a brief and sad sketch pays tribute to the rank-and-file police officers who dared take up the job. Still, it’s telling that those scenes, which should evoke in viewers a sense of pity and fear, actually filled me with a sense of relief — relief that, at last, the perspective of those of us who lived in terror of Escobar and his ilk had a place at the table. The series gets too close to whitewashing Escobar’s image, developing his character in a way that does little to reveal the truth, and much to obscure it. To approach Colombia’s war with the cartels in this way is not unlike telling the story of 9/11 from Osama bin Laden’s point of view.

In aiming primarily at entertainment, the priorities of “Narcos” have become exploitative. Escobar’s victims weren’t characters; they were real people who even now have families that still mourn them. “Narcos” ought to be a record of a real — and massive — human tragedy, not a “slick, stylish delight.” It can never be just a show.

Don’t watch it.

TV can’t not be political: What Jimmy Fallon’s defenders get wrong about late-night

Donald Trump on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" (Credit: NBC)

After Jimmy Fallon welcomed presidential candidate Donald Trump onto his show with open arms, the notoriously affable host opened himself up to a great deal of criticism, none more scathing than from fellow late-night comedian Samantha Bee. The segment, worth watching in its entirety, provoked some ire of its own.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in lampooning Bee’s view, joked, “When the histories of the Trump era are written from exile in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, they will record that it was none other than Jimmy Fallon who brought down the republic.”

Douthat’s article mimicked a similar piece of commentary in Politico, where Justin Gest asked, “Is it racist to associate immigration with the greater globalization of commerce that has altered the economic prospects of outmoded people? Is it racist to be frustrated that members of ethnic minorities are rendered new advantages unavailable to white people, such as affirmative action policies and ethnicity-specific advocacy?” The answer to these questions and more is, of course, yes.

According to both Douthat and Gest, that answer makes me part of the problem. Which is not racism, staunch opponents of political correctness will tell us, but the use of the word. Tasked with explaining why exactly the accurate identification of these views is unproductive, commentators begin to sound remarkably similar to the bleeding-heart liberals they denounce. They tell us, in so many words, that the characterization is triggering. That it makes white Americans feel vulnerable and under attack, as though their “space” were unsafe. That we fail to recognize the depths of their suffocating, ever-present and seemingly all-encompassing emotional fragility.

The difference, of course, is that the condemnation of immoral views is meaningfully distinct from the assignation of immorality to amoral traits like race. Gest’s piece ends on a bit of clever wordplay. “Silencing and demonizing Trump’s supporters as racists simplistically shuns them into the ideological silos that segregate our society.”

It’s funny, you see, because black children once had to be accompanied by armed federal agents in order to safely set foot in all-white, publicly funded schools. But the comparison is absurd. Pluralism and tolerance are not the same thing as blanket inclusivity; they are inherently alienating to intolerant people who hate pluralism. And tolerance certainly isn’t the same thing as the normalization of intolerant, hateful and thus, yes, deplorable beliefs. It is, in fact, directly at odds with said normalization.

Douthat’s position, however, doesn’t just draw a false equivalence between ideological and racist, sexist or transphobic forms of intolerance. He selectively prizes ideological tolerance above all else. The increased cultural presence of minorities and “bluestocking” women and trans people, by virtue of making conservative audiences uncomfortable, is thus too political, symptomatic of liberalism’s encroachment upon all corners of the public sphere.

But if diversity is political, homogeneity is necessarily equally so. When he describes pop culture as unnecessarily alienating, what he really means it that because it makes others feel welcome, it is inherently alienating to people like him: straight, white, socially conservative cis men.

Douthat’s inescapably white-centric view of late-night television similarly infects his political analysis. He highlights Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark as a symptom of liberal delusion in a culture purportedly dominated by their views. (Never mind that the same media enriched and glorified Trump long after he defined himself as a political figure in 2011 via a series of explicitly racist campaigns meant to question the legitimacy of the nation’s first African-American president, a fact that Bee describes as the inspiration of Monday’s segment.) Douthat argues that liberals lack an understanding of “the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic,” pushing candidates like Hillary Clinton to extremes. Hence the infamous “basket of deplorables” remark.

Clinton’s statement, though bad optics, was in many respects reasonable and measured. She took special care to separate Trump voters into two separate camps: those who are drawn to white nationalism because these ideals are central to their political beliefs, irrespective of their material wealth and social standing, and those who are drawn to racist demagoguery as an outlet for their economic anxiety, which represents a very real government failure.

Her condemnation of the former was a statement to people of color, who form a significant proportion of her coalition, and who are invisible as a political force in Douthat’s eyes, about her unwillingness to make political concessions to those whose political views are motivated by white supremacy. But her dedication to help and serve the latter group was also a testament to progressive values of inclusion, compassion for the less fortunate. It revealed a very clear understanding of the messy process of growing that coalition, part of which (unless you’re Donald Trump) occasionally involves drawing hard lines.

Douthat’s condemnation of this framework raises further disturbing questions. When, if ever, are we allowed to hold white people responsible for racist views and votes? Gest’s piece, which contrasts their “sincere expressions about how their societies are being transformed” with racist ones, suggests the two are mutually exclusive, and that the answer is never. Douthat, too, not only excuses Fallon, a person of tremendous power and privilege, for normalizing racism because he simply doesn’t do politics, he also suggests it was his moral duty. He doesn’t merely relieve Fallon of a moral obligation to condemn bigotry; he argues Fallon had a moral obligation not to.

And in doing so, Douthat himself plays an active role in normalizing racism by setting standards so unbelievable low that nonracist views become fringe. Which only serves to further victimize people of color for whom, I must say, it’s been quite a year.

At times such as this, we also need our comic relief. I loved watching Jimmy Fallon eat buffalo wings with Priyanka Chopra and play Hungry Hungry Hippos with the U.S. Gymnastics squad and blush with embarrassment with Nicole Kidman. That was my escape. Fallon has undoubtedly interviewed racists before Trump. He’ll undoubtedly interview racists again.

But this was the first time I turned on my television to see him mussing up the hair of a person whose political movement threatens my safety, my comfort, my very citizenship in the country I call home. The point isn’t merely that it’s political. It’s that it’s bigoted and selfish and cruel. So while we take a moment to express compassion for the white Americans who’ve turned to Trump because they feel their country is slipping away from them, who feel they must turn to extremism to save it, remember that the rest of us have lost something, too.

Disabling the male gaze: “Longing” to be objectified won’t help shatter narrow beauty standards

A photo of the author. (Credit: Folke Lehr)

“So do you think the fact that you haven’t had a boyfriend yet is because of your dwarfism?” the interviewer asked with a smile.

What a fun thing to ask a teenager on national television, I groaned to myself. I was born with achondroplasia, the most common type of dwarfism. Physical markers include a sway-back, a comparatively large skull, short but wide hands and feet, and hip joints that swing when I walk. More than 60 scars from limb-lengthening procedures traverse my arms and legs. I opted against any procedures to remove them, seeing them as merit badges I earned rather than deformities to expunge.

Returning to the reporter’s question, I wondered, could one answer possibly be better than the other? “Yes, the boys I’ve liked are that superficial?” “No, it must be my personality?” I finally admitted that the possibility had crossed my mind more than once, but then emphasized that I didn’t like to think of either my dating history or my dwarfism that way.

This week, however, the New York Times touts this precise line of thinking in its series on disability with Jennifer Bartlett’s piece “Longing for the Male Gaze.” In it Bartlett explores the ways in which she believes her cerebral palsy has cost her catcalls and compliments from construction workers. She paints this experience as lonely, contrasting it to Jessica Valenti’s recent autobiography of frequent street harassment, saying ultimately: “I still would much rather have a man make an inappropriate sexual comment than [as a disabled person] be referred to in the third person or have someone express surprise over the fact that I have a career.”

Is it safe to assume she is discounting inappropriate sexual comments by abusers and fetishists, both of which disabled people endure at rates far higher than the general population?

Abuse and fetishism are the covert side of the macho male gaze. In public, Bartlett is right that the male gaze does indeed blind itself to the existence of women who don’t meet mainstream beauty standards. This is why it claims that women are picky while men will jump anything they see — the desires of women who are not conventionally attractive simply do not enter into the equation. Rarely are filmgoers asked to follow a visibly disabled heroine on a romantic journey pulsing with passion. Dustin Hoffman explained the problem perfectly — and tearfully — to the American Film Institute in an interview about his performance as a woman in “Tootsie”:

I thought I should be beautiful. If was going to be a woman, I wanted to be as beautiful as possible. And [the makeup artists] said to me, “That’s as good as it gets. That’s as beautiful as we can get ya, Charlie.” And it was at that moment that I had an epiphany. And I went home and started crying. Talking to my wife… I said, “I think that I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen. And I know that if met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have for us to ask them out.” She says, “What are you saying?” I said, “There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.”

In my 15 years of working to broaden beauty standards and find the key to healthy body image for all, I’ve encountered those who echo Bartlett’s longing. They consider themselves unlucky in love and sex because our culture does not deem their bodies to have broad appeal, and they wish ever so much that they did. When this longing devolves into jealousy of the beauty queens, they often seek solace in finding bodies that could be rated below their own rather than in resisting the temptation to compete at all. And that way meanness lies.

Calling out the male gaze for erasing certain body types is crucially important. Pop culture loves to forget that being conventionally attractive — like being disabled — is neither your fault nor your achievement. But basing your body image activism on your personal insecurities earns you at best political solidarity and at worst pity. It doesn’t make people find you attractive.

Being told you’re beautiful can feel fantastic. I’ve heard it from both lovers and strangers on the street. But the street version is at best a cheap high compared to the profound and lasting joy generated by someone who’s come to love you more the more they’ve gotten to know you.

And is the cheap high from strangers worth the fall that will invariably come from being ignored — or insulted — on a day that you look heavier, older or more disabled? Is the possibility of feeling praised worth the risk of feeling threatened? Even the one exchange with a stranger that left me smiling was spent mostly feeling cagey, as I was haunted by memories of the worst experiences I’ve had in public. And those were mild compared to Valenti’s — I’ve never been ejaculated on in the subway.

Bartlett acknowledges this, writing, “I also do understand what it feels like to get attention from the wrong man. It’s gross. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary and tedious. And in certain cases, traumatic.” By “the wrong man,” does she mean someone who is particularly aggressive? Someone she simply doesn’t connect with? Or someone she deems unattractive?

Throughout her piece, Bartlett questions mainstream beauty standards while continuing to use the language that upholds them. “When I was younger, in my 20s,” she writes, “I was a thin, slight woman. I have also always been beautiful and a nice dresser.” In other words, if it weren’t for her cerebral palsy, she would get catcalled with the best of them. While it’s important she can see her own beauty, her self-praise carries with it the implication that not thin and not beautiful women should expect to be overlooked. Which should make anyone who genuinely believes in Liberty and Healthy Body Image for All uncomfortable.

The most interesting part of Bartlett’s piece is when she describes online dating. Her shift from hiding to divulging her disability evoked a shift in both the quantity and quality of the attention she got. “This all feels like a political act, and in some ways it is,” she notes. “Strangely, my disability makes me feel as if I have license to play with and deconstruct sexuality in ways I might not have the bravery to do as an able-bodied woman. One of the privileges of being an outsider is that you are not expected to play by the insiders’ rules.”

But does she not play by them by longing for the same superficial prize? A society that rewards people for the achievement of meeting mainstream beauty standards is doomed to punish others for the offense of not meeting them. For every potentially pleasing catcall, there’s a slimy joke about which bodies deserve to be called ugly. For every chauvinist comment a woman chooses to interpret as a compliment, there’s a woman pressured to obsess over how she should interpret silence. For every beauty pageant where the viewers feel better about themselves by living vicariously through the winners, there’s a reality show where the viewers feel better about themselves by gawking at the freaks. Google “dwarf” or “little people” and you’re a lot likelier to see the latter rather than the former.

We would do well to abandon the modes of thinking that fuel either.

I’ve spent the time since that awkward interview in my teens trying to question the rules of the dating game instead of questioning my body. And my experiences have justified this endeavor. After all, people too myopic to handle exceptional bodies should be the ones crying — like Dustin Hoffman. Having broad appeal is no guarantee of lasting love. Dating scorecards are for those who believe in quantity over quality. Virginity is a social construct. The phrase “out of my league” is by far one of the most useless to me, having witnessed plenty of conventionally attractive friends drop to their knees in awe over those who are anything but. And no number of Facebook likes will ever come close to eliciting the thrill that you get from someone who loves you saying something particularly wonderful about their favorite photo of you.

No matter what I look like to others, I’d rather be one person’s work of art than a million people’s piece of meat. By virtue of having a rare disability, my body has been sliced up enough already.

“Meme magic is real”: Silicon Valley whiz kid is financing an assembly line for alt-right clickbait

Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey talks about the Rift virtual-reality headset during a news conference Thursday, June 11, 2015, in San Francisco. Oculus is expanding its highly anticipated virtual-reality headset to simulate the sensation of touch and gesturing as part of its quest to blur the lines between the fake and genuine world. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) (Credit: Associated Press)

A 24-year-old tech entrepreneur is funding a pro-Trump non-profit that specializes in online trolling. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, has been providing capital for a political organization called Nimble America, the Daily Beast reports.

Nimble America has overt ties to the Reddit channel r/The_Donald, a popular forum for Trump supporters and the alt-right. One of the co-founders of the group is a moderator on the pro-Trump subreddit.

r/The_Donald has almost generated as much controversies as it has produced racist content. Trump’s official Twitter account has tweeted memes and videos that originally circulated on the Reddit channel.

But now the subreddit’s trolls have found a financier in Luckey, resulting in the creation of a 501(c)4 non-profit.

In 2014, Luckey made headlines for selling his virtual reality company to Facebook for $2 billion. It was on the social network where Luckey met the future co-founders of Nimble America. “I came into touch with them over Facebook,” Luckey told the Daily Beast. “It went along the lines of ‘hey, I have a bunch of money. I would love to see more of this stuff.’”

Six days ago, Nimble America announced its operations on r/The_Donald.

“What we’ve been able to accomplish here has been amazing and much bigger than any of us and certainly much bigger than Reddit,” the organization wrote on r/The_Donald. “We’ve proven that shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real.”

Since the launch, the organization has held fundraising efforts on the subreddit. Luckey pledged to match the donations within 48 hours.

A financial statement available on Nimble America’s website accounts for $2,711 in spending for Facebook ads and billboards.

Is Jawbone disappearing? The wearable tech company appears to be slow-fading away

Screengrab from Jawbone website

The wearable tech company Jawbone is basically disappearing into the internet oblivion, Business Insider reported on Thursday. The article revealed that the company has not paid customer service partner NexRep, and that the Jawbone website displays a “sold out” icon under every product. Technically, one item displays the option to “customize,” but after customizing it, too, is “sold out.”

“Jawbone is not able to pay us for past services, and their ability to pay us in the future is uncertain at this point,” said NexRep in an email to Business Insider.

Jawbone, probably best known for its Bose-like wireless speaker boxes and its Fitbit-like fitness tracking wrist accessories, is now struggling financially according to the same email read by Business Insider. In April, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. International Trade Commission had ruled in favor of Fitbit after Jawbone had brought forth several disputes about patents.

Business Insider also wrote that a limited supply of Jawbone items are available on Amazon, but that NexRep hadn’t a clue about the company’s actual inventory since the customer service company has not worked for Jawbone since the September 9.

“Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman is seeking investment from an Asian company to keep the company going as it targets a mid-2017 release date for its next product, the person close to the company said. In the meantime, the company is essentially operating week-to-week, according to the source. Jawbone declined to comment on its cash position and its product road map.” reads Steve Kovach’s article.

But really, when you think of wrist fitness trackers, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Probably Fitbit.

Read the Business Insider article.

Wife of Keith Lamont Scott releases cell phone footage of Charlotte police shooting: “He better live”

“Don’t shoot him. Don’t shoot him,” a woman identified as Rakeyia Scott, wife of Keith Lamont Scott, can be heard screaming to Charlotte police officers in a newly released video of her husband’s shooting death.

Cellphone footage released by Scott on Friday is the first video made public of the fatal police shooting of the 43-year-old father of seven. The killing of Scott, an African-American man, sparked three nights of fiery protests and violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week.

While the newly released video of the incident does not show the moment Scott was shot, it does show the moments leading up to the shooting and the moments immediately after Scott is fatally wounded.

“He has no weapon. He has no weapon,” Scott’s wife can be heard yelling to police in the video. Police have contended that Scott was armed and pointing a gun at police who were in the Charlotte apartment complex looking to execute an arrest warrant on another man. Police, however, have refused to release any corroborating evidence thus far.

One officer can be heard saying in the two-minute, 12-second footage, “Let me get a f—ing baton over here.”

“Keith! Keith!” his wife can be heard screaming from a distance, before adding, “Don’t you do it!” Scott can also be heard informing police that her husband suffers from a traumatic brain injury.

After hearing multiple police yell “drop the gun,” four shots are fired. The shooting is not caught on camera.

“He better not be f—ing dead. He better not be f—ing dead,” Scott then yells at police. “He better live. I swear, he better live.”

“Did you all call an ambulance?” Scott’s wife asks, before the video cuts out.

Nothing left but the dog whistle: Trump, “real America” and the death of the conservative movement

Sarah Palin; Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/AP/Evan Vucci/Photo montage by Salon)

That day 15 months ago when Donald Trump descended that escalator to announce his candidacy, it was obvious to me that whether or not he won, he was going to turn the race into something we had never seen before. He had massive celebrity and a lot of money, and he was tapping into a groundswell of anger over immigration that had shocked the political world just a year earlier when the incumbent House majority leader (Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia) was defeated in a primary largely because of that issue. It was foolish for political insiders to laugh at the possibility that Trump could go all the way. But they did. And they’ve had to play catch-up ever since.

The mainstream Republican establishment was knocked for a loop. They had offered up a dazzling array of GOP all-stars for the public to choose from: former and sitting governors and senators, movement heroes, policy wonks, tough guys, pious religionists, a world renowned neurosurgeon and even a famous high-tech businesswoman. It was beyond their imagination that this crude and inexperienced demagogue could beat any of them, much less all of them.

But as much as political insiders and establishment leaders should have been a more savvy about the potential of a populist celebrity billionaire to throw a grenade into a presidential campaign, it was entirely reasonable for many conservative movement leaders to be shocked that a man like Trump could capture the imagination of their movement so quickly, and without any serious commitment to their cause. After all, the last we heard, the Tea Party was still running the congressional asylum. Those folks may have a flair for the dramatic, but they’re true believers in the conservative movement. There was every reason to believe that the millions of Republican voters who supported them were too.

What conservatives found out was that all those years of carefully and patiently educating their voters in the nuances of small government, traditional values and strong national defense, to the point where they could elicit ecstatic cheers by merely uttering the words “tort reform” or “eminent domain” turned out to be for naught. The voters really only heard the dog-whistles.

This has been a rude awakening for conservative intellectuals who’ve spent their lives developing their elaborate ideological framework only to find their millions of supposed adherents never really cared about it. Zach Beauchamp at Vox interviewed one such leading intellectual, a professor of political theory at George Washington University named Samuel Goldman, about the state of the movement in the age of Trump. Goldman admits that the conservative movement is “doomed,” or at least it is no longer viable as a majority, and rightly attributes the problem to the fact that conservatives no longer attract anyone but white people:

The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America.

If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things. That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.

Goldman says this is the result of a demographic delusion in which conservatives believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their idealized vision of the Real America was literally true.

I’m confused as to why he thinks this trend only goes back 10 or 15 years old, however. This idea that “real Americans” are white small-town folks, hard-scrabble farmers, blue-collar workers and small-business owners who live somewhere in the heartland has been around a lot longer than that. And it’s been used specifically in politics since the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase “silent majority” and the political press began to notice that its own experiences were not necessarily reflective of the nation at large.

I previously noted this piece by Joseph Kraft, a famous newspaper columnist of that era, because it illustrates the point of view that began to pervade the political establishment in the wake of the upheavals of civil rights, the counterculture and the anti-war movement. He wrote it right after the famous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago:

Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans – in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and presidential candidates who appeal to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

The most important organs of media and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.

From there flowed decades of “plenary indulgence” toward this white, provincial Real America by both parties, in which politicians were required to pledge fealty to “heartland values” and ensure that such folk were treated with the deference and respect they required.

In other words, this isn’t new. The only thing that’s changed is that the people Real Americans resent — African-Americans, women, recent immigrants and LGBT folks — are now assuming positions of prominence and power, and the provincial anger, stoked for so long by the Republican Party, has finally boiled over. Donald Trump is telling those folks what they’ve been wanting to hear, exactly the way they’ve been wanting to hear it for a very long time.

“Ted Cruz has defeated himself”: Cruz’s about-face on Trump, as explained by his college roommate who hates him

Ted Cruz (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Craig Mazin, Senator Ted Cruz’s college roommate and number one troll, took to Twitter (@clmazin) Friday to express his feelings about Senator Cruz’s announcement that he would vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Mazin, a screenwriter credited with writing parts II and III of “The Hangover” movies as well as most recently “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” roomed with the senator during his freshman year at Princeton.

It was just two months ago at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that Cruz, who dropped out of the Republican primary in May, dramatically refused to endorse Trump as the nominee, instead urging delegates and voters to “vote your conscience.”

And while his tweets are in reverse chronological order, Mazin has luckily numbered them for your convenience in understanding his ex-roommates thought process:

Waiting for confirmation on Cruz. Hardly surprising. You can't lose "honor" you never had in the first place.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

1) Okay, a lot of people are mystified by Ted Cruz’s apparent upcoming endorsement of Donald Trump. I am not. Let me explain. — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

2) Unfortunately, this requires you to spend some time in Ted’s head. I apologize for that… but hey, it’s not as bad as living with him. — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

3) To understand why Ted is doing this, first make sure to begin every thought with “I am supposed to be President.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

4) It goes like this. “I’m supposed to be President (ISTBP), so I will run for President.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

5) “ISTBP so I will draft behind the front-runner and suck up to Trump in order to help winnow the field.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

6) “ISTBP so now that the field is narrowed, I will begin to attack Trump, regardless of how hypocritical that looks.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

7) “ISTBP so even though I lost, I must present myself as the Trump alternative. I will be rewarded for pretending to have principles.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

8) “ISTBP so I have to make sure I get re-elected to the Senate. My anti-Trump stand is now threatening that. I must endorse him.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

9) Note: *none* of this has to do with honor. Or principles. Or belief. Or standing up for his wife. Or his father. It is all a calculation. — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

10) Of COURSE you’re all confused by it… but Ted Cruz isn’t like you. He has one weapon: calculation. He has one goal: be President. — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

11) Of course, his nature has blinded him to the truth: there’s practically no one left for him to fool. Ted Cruz has defeated himself. /end — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 23, 2016

*Drops mic.*

And if this 12-part narrative of Senator Cruz as a spineless opportunist hasn’t made you giggle, these classic Craig tweets from the primaries are sure to make make you smirk:

Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his. — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016

Trump or Cruz. Herpes or Cruz. Sun Blows Up or Cruz. The answer is always “The one that isn’t Cruz.” https://t.co/2Ul7RdbF5V — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 7, 2016

and finally…

Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The Zodiac Killer actually got things done. https://t.co/HR7Df53Aje — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) February 26, 2016

Burn.

The Cruz-Trump bromance is back on: After vowing to never endorse Donald Trump, Ted Cruz does just that

Ted Cruz and Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell/Chris Keane/Photo montage by Salon)

The on-again, off-again bromance between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is back on again, likely much to the chagrin of Glenn Beck. In a perhaps not-so-shocking move, Cruz announced that after previously vowing to never support his former buddy turned nemesis, that he would indeed vote for the Republican presidential nominee in November.

“In Cleveland, I urged voters, ‘please, don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution,’” Cruz posted on his Facebook page Friday, noting that at the Republican National Convention earlier this summer he refused to endorse Trump. “After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,” Cruz revealed.

Cruz made no mention of Trump’s preferred nickname for the Texas senator, “Lyin Ted,” nor Trump’s repeated assertion that Cruz’s father is linked to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in his endorsement.

How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

“A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment,” wrote Cruz on Facebook. Cruz said he made his decision for two reasons: “First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word. Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.”

On the day that he dropped out of the race, Cruz took his criticism of Trump to a new level, accusing him of being a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer” and an “utterly amoral” “bully.” But since the contentious GOP primary, Trump has hired key Cruz allies such as Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager, and Jason Miller as a spokesman.

“Cruz has nothing to gain from this, and everything to lose,” Cruz’s Iowa co-chair, Joel Kurtinitis told NPR. “His brand is based on principled resistance. Submissive conformity to Trump — a man who personally slandered Cruz’s family and hasn’t apologized — just cements Trump as the unopposed alpha in the GOP and hangs Cruz’s conservative resistance out to dry.”

“This endorsement will not convince #NeverTrump folks to change our minds about The Donald,” he continued, “but we may well be forced to reconsider our support for Sen. Cruz.”

This small sampling from Ted Cruz’s Facebook page is BRUTAL. pic.twitter.com/hYbBm9UM6j

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) September 23, 2016