Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 885

Let’s make an honest man of Ted Cruz. Here’s how we resolve his “birther” dilemma with integrity

It appears that those who live by the sword of constitutional originalism may be destined to perish by its two edged blade—or maybe not.   Is Ted Cruz a “natural born citizen” under the U.S. Constitution and hence entitled to run for the president? Editorialists, pundits, constitutional law professors, and yes Donald Trump, have all weighed in on this question. The emerging consensus appears to be –well-- that depends on your preferred theory of constitutional interpretation. If you support the idea of a living or an evolving constitution, or even if your support the pluralist methods favored by most modern judges, Cruz clearly meets the constitutional requirements for becoming president. Originalism, by contrast, the theory Cruz himself favors, offers the strongest arguments against his eligibility. To date efforts to defend Cruz in originalist terms have not been especially effective. In a short article in the Harvard Law Review, Neil Katyal and Paul Clement, each a former solicitor general of the United States, argue in broadly originalist terms that Cruz is eligible. Neither Katyal nor Clement have strong originalist credentials, but they are two of the most effective Supreme Court litigators and their arguments are therefore less academic and more attuned to the type of originalist arguments likely to be persuasive in court. These two “super” lawyers point to a series of statutes enacted by the British Parliament before the American Revolution as a key to unlock the meaning of this contested provision of the Constitution. It is true that Parliament extended the rights of natural born subjects to children born abroad to parents who were English subjects.   The problem for Cruz is that these laws only extended these rights to children whose father was a natural born subject. Given that Cruz claims American citizenship by virtue of his mother, not his father; he would not have been a natural born citizen under that definition. A cleverer originalist argument has recently been floated that focuses on Parliament’s authority to change the English common law definition of natural born citizen, something it did several times in two centuries before the American Revolution. If one assumes that the Founding generation believed that Constitution gave Congress similar power under its authority to establish uniform rules of naturalization, Cruz is in good shape, even under an originalist model. If this were true and the term “natural born citizen” was something Congress could re-define as it wishes Cruz might still be able to have his originalist cake and eat it at the Republican national convention. One of the problems this theory must overcome is the obvious differences between the scope of the British Parliament’s authority in the 18th century and the far more limited nature of the powers vested in Congress. Britain’s Parliament was omnipotent, Congress was limited by the text of the Constitution. Although ingenious, this type of originalist argument requires a good deal more historical evidence to prove that this understanding was wide spread in the Founding era. It would mean that Framers of the Constitution used a technical legal term borrowed from English law, but gave Congress the power to change its meaning. There are several reasons to doubt that this was the case. One of the key texts cited by everyone in this debate, including Katyal and Clement, is the first naturalization act passed by Congress in 1790. Courts have always assumed that the First Congress was uniquely positioned to interpret the meaning of the new Constitution. The language of that 1790 text asserts that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.” According to Katyal and Clement, “The Naturalization Act of 1790” expanded the class of citizens at birth to include children born abroad of citizen mothers as long as the father had at least been resident in the United States at some point.” While this reading may be plausible when read against the assumptions and interpretive conventions governing modern law, it seems highly improbable that the First Congress or the vast majority of lawyers or judges in the early Republic would have come to the same conclusion. A much more historically attuned reading of the text would be that the First Congress took the accepted notion of natural born citizenship already articulated in English law which was based on the status of ones’ father and added an additional and more stringent requirement that one’s father also had to have been resident in the US. There is almost no contemporary evidence to support Katyal and Clement’s feminist reading of the text, appealing as it may be to modern ideas of gender equality. There is another problem with the feminist reading of the naturalization act of 1790. Katyal and Clement note that the Founding generation was deeply influenced by Sir William Blackstone, but they curiously ignore the learned English judge’s comments on the legal status of married woman. “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” When an analogous issue about a woman’s freedom to reject her husband’s national allegiance came before American courts a decade later, the Blackstonian notion prevailed. Apart from the most heinous crimes such as murder or treason, it was generally assumed that a woman’s choices were not her own to make. To accept Katyal and Clement’s view of the Naturalization Act one would have to believe that the First Congress not only broke with pre-existing English law, but that they struck a major blow for woman’s rights which went un-noticed by any contemporary commentator, including some of the nation’s leading jurists. Ted Cruz is not the first presidential candidate to face a conflict between his political objectives and his constitutional theory. Thomas Jefferson was in much the same position when he cast aside his theory of strict construction and decided to purchase Louisiana from the French. There are no serious legal obstacles to Cruz moving forward. The only question is will he show some measure of intellectual integrity and reassess his commitment to originalism. The Founding generation was steeped in Roman republican values and Cruz ought to take a lesson from them. Ted Cruz can keep his constitutional ideas and fall on his originalist sword by abandoning his quest for the presidency, or he can admit that the theory he has championed for so long simply does not make sense in this day and age. Most likely, he will try to have it both ways, a craven form of political pandering, and something that would have disappointed leading members of the Founding generation.

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Lissie: “I genuinely want a politician who challenges the corruption of our system”

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The GOP’s Trump meltdown hits critical mass — but can the right’s empty suits stop him now?

All the anguish, infighting and backstabbing within the so-called conservative movement over the rise of Donald Trump boiled over into the public sphere in spectacular fashion this week. Is this good news for progressives or the left or the Democratic Party (which, despite what the right thinks, are not all the same thing), a delicious spectacle to be savored with hempen bowls of artisanal herbed popcorn? I'm not sure about that; the Magic 8-Ball points to “yes and no.” It’s certainly gratifying to see the self-appointed leadership of the American right get its comeuppance at the hands of the mob it created and empowered. On the other hand, the consequences of that might include mob rule. After shamelessly manipulating and exploiting popular sentiment over many years to gain power, the conservative mandarins have suddenly noticed, just a little too late, that popular sentiment has left them behind. They now find themselves leading a movement without followers, and defending a fortress with no troops. Even before we get to the National Review’s pathetic-heroic last stand in this week’s “Against Trump” cover package — and what a strange and anguished testament of conservative conscience that is — we had a blithe but plausible New York Times report about the 2016 dilemma that has split the GOP rulership caste into warring camps. Republican apparatchiks and thought-leaders are faced with two unpalatable nominees, or so the narrative goes: One is a megalomaniacal billionaire with no discernible principles or guiding ideology, running on an incoherent laundry list of populist themes that shifts from day to day. The other is an authentic “movement conservative” who is beloved by the Tea Party faithful, and who may also be the most universally despised person in Washington. (Which is, of course, the source of his popular appeal.) Some prominent conservatives, according to the conventional wisdom of the moment, have virtually thrown in the towel on the 2016 election, in January. Now they’re just trying to figure out what version of losing to Hillary Clinton will be least damaging to their long-term job security. There are several things to say about this hypothesis, even beyond the obvious fact that nothing about its existence reflects a healthy or functional democracy. It’s also the sort of media meme that’s almost certainly not true, created and reinforced by journalists and political insiders eager to congratulate themselves for understanding events more than they do. Those are the same people who repeatedly assured us, until very recently, that Jeb Bush had found a new tone and struck a new rhythm, and would be mounting his big comeback at any moment. Many of the Republicans currently beating their breasts and rending their garments will feel differently come August or September, after their party has presumably nominated someone and after polls begin to show—climbing out on a limb here!—a tightening race likely to be decided by turnout in Ohio and Florida. According to the Newtonian physics of political blather, all the confident pronouncements that Trump or Ted Cruz cannot possibly win the election will produce a raft of equally confident articles explaining how they can and how they will. There is ample time for all your Facebook friends to indulge in multiple waves of panic, and for aspiring Clinton appointees to conclude that they should hold off on those nonrefundable hotel reservations for Inauguration Day just a bit longer. Indeed, as Hillary Clinton is herself discovering, the same internal dynamics of popular discontent and elite disconnection that are devouring the GOP are also bubbling up within the Democratic Party, perhaps in more attenuated form. As I have previously argued, Republican self-destruction does not necessarily lead to a stable and glorious era of Democratic hegemony. The way things look right now, it seems far more likely to produce chaos. Our entire system of partisan politics has been corroded and corrupted, and if the 2016 campaign has told us anything, it has told us that the people have noticed. It would be fatal hubris to assume that the toxin that kills one party will spare the other. So when I read through National Review’s barrage of “Conservatives Against Trump” broadsides, a collection of mini-essays from miscellaneous haters with little else in common, I didn’t just notice the desperation, the flailing, the misplaced snobbery and self-righteousness, or the pervasive sense of abandonment and bewilderment. All of which were considerable: Trump was variously compared to Hitler, Mussolini and Barack Obama (I’m not sure who’s supposed to be worse); derided for his outer-borough accent and the vulgar design of his casinos; accused of being a phony conservative and a phony Christian (guilty as charged) and described both as a hateful racist and a stealth advocate of illegal immigration. But when you get past the outrage, anger, betrayal and name-calling, you get to the unexpected but powerful nuggets of truth. To a significant degree, the National Review roster of right-wing philosopher-kings perceive that the jig is up, not just in terms of the 2016 nomination but in terms of the entire jury-rigged Frankenstein apparatus of the Republican Party. For at least the last several decades, the American right has been an unstable coalition whose factions were never in perfect alignment and often had areas of fundamental disagreement. There wasn't much beyond political expediency, Cold War paranoia and antipathy toward 1960s-style Great Society liberalism that ever bound the small-government libertarians to the foreign-policy neoconservatives to the capitalist oligarchs in the first place, and that's before you factor in the evangelical Christians and the Tea Party and the other cause-driven bands of rebels who have pushed the party ceaselessly to the right. Whatever else Trump has done, or may do, he has blown that coalition apart, and all the “Against Trump” rhetoric about the common core values of conservatism cannot stitch it back together. There is an unwholesome stereotype at work in American society, nervously admits Michael Medved. It holds that “conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful.” This is not true, of course, per Medved, but Trump and his followers sure might make it seem true. Some of the assembled conservatives attack Trump in language worthy of the left at its most heated. Novelist Mark Helprin calls him “a tapeworm invading the schismatically weakened body of the Republican Party,” and after a labored comparison with Allah in Islamic theology (!) adds that Trump “doesn’t know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate, or even, despite his low-level-mafioso comportment, how ordinary people live.” Other panelists, especially the handful of younger voices, barely sound critical of Trump at all. They’re more rueful that he has exposed their entire enterprise. Conservatives have more to learn from Trump’s success than they migh like to admit, writes Ben Domenech. “The Trump voter is moderate, disaffected, with patriotic instincts. He feels disconnected from the GOP and other broken public institutions, left behind by a national political elite that no longer believes he matters.” I have no idea what Domenech thinks he means by “moderate,” but otherwise that’s on the money. Theologian R.R. Reno, who edits a magazine called First Things, goes further. “The Republican Party has become home to a growing number of Americans who want to burn down our political and economic systems and hang our cultural elites,” he writes. “They’re tired of being policed by political correctness, often with the complicity of supposed conservatives. … And they suspect, rightly, that the Chamber of Commerce will sell them down the river if it adds to the bottom line. The middle-class consensus in America has collapsed. This is the most important political and social earthquake since World War II. The conservative movement’s leadership isn’t up to the challenge, and a good number of voters are willing to gamble on Trump’s bluster.” Right-wing heavy hitters like Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz aren’t having any of this Marxist self-criticism, mind you. Podhoretz describes the potential election of President Trump as “the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime.” Kristol actually ends his entry by wondering whether it is “the task of conservatives today to stand athwart Trumpism, shouting Stop.” Yes, he said “athwart.” Why National Review editor Rich Lowry believed that one more counterattack by power-suited, think-tank Washington Republicans—exactly the establishment Trump and his supporters despise and reject—would accomplish anything beyond pouring more fuel on the bonfire is anyone’s guess. Trump responded by mocking the magazine as the failing voice of a bygone generation, and it’s hard to argue with that. When I visited National Review’s website and then navigated away, a pop-up ad appeared, offering me a one-year subscription—free.

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The Bundy fallacy liberals must reject: Why reforming our broken criminal justice system means less violence, not more

It has been three weeks now since the federal government's cautious approach toward right-wing militants occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge sparked outrage on the left and the bigoted hashtag #YallQaeda (read: white trash ). This is a reminder that when it comes to certain crimes, some on the left reserve the right to a law-and-order response. At Slate, Jamelle Bouie observered:

“Why won’t they shoot at armed white fanatics isn’t just the wrong question; it’s a bad one. Not only does it hold lethal violence as a fair response to the Bundy militia, but it opens a path to legitimizing the same violence against more marginalized groups...If we’re outraged, it shouldn’t be because law enforcement isn’t rushing to violently confront Bundy and his group. We should be outraged because that restraint isn’t extended to all Americans.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn critical scrutiny to mass incarceration and abusive policing, and made the point that both impact black people in a grossly disproportionate manner. How disproportionate? ProPublica found that young black males were 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts in recent years. In 2014, black men were 7.6 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men, according to the Marshall Project. Some have also, however, taken that argument a step further and asserted that police and the criminal justice system treat white criminals too kindly. Last June, there was the internet firestorm in response to the news that “Police bought Dylann Storm Roof Burger King after arrest.” That same month, Mic displayed a photo of bikers checking their phones and hanging out after a shootout left nine dead in Waco, Texas as one of multiple “Stunning Images” that “Reveal the Racist Double Standard of Police Responses in America.” In reality, bikers present for that shootout have been subjected to one of the most indiscriminate mass prosecutions (177 people were arrested) in recent history. Before that, in late 2014, the #crimingwhilewhite hashtag exploded. https://twitter.com/grace134/status/5... ThinkProgress dubbed #CrimingWhileWhite “The Only Thing You Need To Read To Understand White Privilege.” White people's confessions of getting away with crimes were intended to highlight the criminal justice system's racism. Some, like Jessica Valenti, criticized the e-movement for highlighting white people's experiences at a time when black suffering needed to be in sharp focus. What was most unfortunate about #CrimingWhileWhite, however, is that it came off like a bunch of affluent white people talking about experiences that poor white people might find entirely unrecognizable. Controlling for class, there is still a major racial disparity in incarceration rates—but far less of one, according to a 2010 study published in Daedalus. The authors looked at men born between 1975 and 1979 and found that, over all, the black men were five times more likely than white counterparts to serve time in prison (27 versus 5 percent) by their early thirties. By contrast, black high school dropouts were two-and-a-half times more likely to enter prison than white dropouts (68 versus 28 percent). Poor blacks are hit much the hardest: the hyperincarceration that governs life in extremely poor and highly segregated black neighborhoods is a unique phenomenon. But poor whites have it bad as well. The black members of the studied cohort with a high school education were less likely to enter prison than a white high school dropout, and far less likely if they had a college degree. Affluent black people share aspects of racial discrimination and disadvantage with poor black people, and poor whites share some white privilege with rich whites. But poor blacks on the South Side of Chicago and poor whites in Appalachia also share an experience of economic marginalization, incarceration included, that is utterly foreign to most well-to-do people of any color.

* * *

Research suggests that when white people are confronted with evidence of the criminal justice systems's racist impact they are actually more likely to support punitive policies. This is because of racism, and because emphasizing racial disparity risks reinforcing racist stereotypes about black criminality. It's also because the American left lacks much in the way of a multiracial working class movement. Anyone who has spent time covering the criminal justice system, or spent time inside of it, is aware of countless stories of white (not to mention Latino) people unjustly jammed up. The majority of the victims of police brutality and unjust imprisonment that I've interviewed and written about, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, are black. But not all. The abusive cops and prison guards I've encountered, contrary to the media's insistent references to certain abusive officers being white, were both black and white. The system is fundamentally racist. But it is also a machine that destroys poor and working class people of all colors. Take Sean Harrington, who I profiled in a Vice investigation last September. Harrington, a white heroin addict, is facing a murder charge and 15 years in prison for providing drugs to a friend who suffered a fatal overdose. North Carolina prosecutor Greg Newman's carceral instincts are mercilessly inclusive: “if you're going to be out peddling the drugs,” he told me, “you're going to have be accountable to what happens on the receiving end of those narcotics.” Rico Moore, a black lawyer representing a poor white man in West Virginia facing similar charges, told me that the system uses the “same playbook” against poor people of all races. "I think, of course, poor defendants get treated like lesser citizens the same as black defendants,” he said. One case that got a bit of national attention was that of Zachary Hammond, a white teen shot dead by Seneca, South Carolina police as he tried to drive away from a drug sting. Most media attention focused on whether he was getting less media attention because he was white. “If Zachary were black, the outpouring of protest and disappointment from the public and the press would be amazing,” Eric Bland, Hammond's lawyer, protested. “You wouldn’t be able to get a hotel room in upstate South Carolina.” In reality, most of the people tweeting about #ZacharyHammond seem to be Black Lives Matters supporters — including after it was announce that the officer who executed the teen would not be charged. It's not the job of black activists to highlight white victims of mass incarceration and police abuse, though they do. The #alllivesmatter camp, to be sure, was not out marching in the street demanding justice for Zachary Hammond. White privilege and white supremacy are very real. But it's also no wonder that white liberal arts graduates have an easier time understanding white privilege than an out of work white miner or factory worker: it's hard to ruminate about one's race advantage when you're getting hammered on the economic margins. The debates pitting race against class are tired and counterproductive (and to poor black people, perhaps entirely ludicrous). More to the point would be a conversation that makes sense of people's different, difficult realities. You can't do that if you belittle poor white people as rednecks, and succumb to a vision of American politics as a cultural phenomenon reflected on Wolf Blitzer's color-coded election maps. In the late 1960s, Black Panthers in Chicago were building a Rainbow Coalition with Puerto Rican Young Lords and Appalachian migrant Young Patriots to take on poverty, police brutality and Mayor Richard Daley before leader Fred Hampton was murdered by police at the age of 21. "There's...people on welfare up here,” said Black Panther Bobby Lee, in a powerful meeting with militant Appalachians. “There's police brutality up here. There's rats and roaches. There's poverty up here. That's the first thing that we...can unite on." [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js7SI... Today, it is prisoners who may be leading us out of the rabbit hole of some of the less productive arguments about race and class. Three years ago in California, alleged leaders of rival race-based gangs—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia—who had spent years locked inside Pelican Bay State Prison's dystopian solitary confinement unit, organized 30,000 prisoners statewide to go on hunger strike. As Sitawa Jamaa, an alleged leader of the Black Guerrilla Family, put it: "We are a prisoner class now." A failure to recognize the fact that mass incarceration poses a threat to Americans of all races misses an opportunity to build the only sort of broad-based coalition that can bring the system down. It also, if history is any lesson, poses a major risk. Liberal criticism of racial sentencing inequities helped pave the way for the 1984 law that created the sentencing guidelines that, alongside mandatory minimums, have helped drive the federal prison system's explosive growth. Sentences are still disparate. And they are much, much longer. Demands that the criminal justice system solve our problems, and that it treat people equally, could once again result in more brutality across the board. The people goading the federal government into a bloodbath in Oregon should be mindful of this history. Black Lives Matter has cast an unprecedented spotlight on the criminal justice system. A rainbow coalition could learn a lot from the brutality they have illuminated.It has been three weeks now since the federal government's cautious approach toward right-wing militants occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge sparked outrage on the left and the bigoted hashtag #YallQaeda (read: white trash ). This is a reminder that when it comes to certain crimes, some on the left reserve the right to a law-and-order response. At Slate, Jamelle Bouie observered:

“Why won’t they shoot at armed white fanatics isn’t just the wrong question; it’s a bad one. Not only does it hold lethal violence as a fair response to the Bundy militia, but it opens a path to legitimizing the same violence against more marginalized groups...If we’re outraged, it shouldn’t be because law enforcement isn’t rushing to violently confront Bundy and his group. We should be outraged because that restraint isn’t extended to all Americans.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn critical scrutiny to mass incarceration and abusive policing, and made the point that both impact black people in a grossly disproportionate manner. How disproportionate? ProPublica found that young black males were 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts in recent years. In 2014, black men were 7.6 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men, according to the Marshall Project. Some have also, however, taken that argument a step further and asserted that police and the criminal justice system treat white criminals too kindly. Last June, there was the internet firestorm in response to the news that “Police bought Dylann Storm Roof Burger King after arrest.” That same month, Mic displayed a photo of bikers checking their phones and hanging out after a shootout left nine dead in Waco, Texas as one of multiple “Stunning Images” that “Reveal the Racist Double Standard of Police Responses in America.” In reality, bikers present for that shootout have been subjected to one of the most indiscriminate mass prosecutions (177 people were arrested) in recent history. Before that, in late 2014, the #crimingwhilewhite hashtag exploded. https://twitter.com/grace134/status/5... ThinkProgress dubbed #CrimingWhileWhite “The Only Thing You Need To Read To Understand White Privilege.” White people's confessions of getting away with crimes were intended to highlight the criminal justice system's racism. Some, like Jessica Valenti, criticized the e-movement for highlighting white people's experiences at a time when black suffering needed to be in sharp focus. What was most unfortunate about #CrimingWhileWhite, however, is that it came off like a bunch of affluent white people talking about experiences that poor white people might find entirely unrecognizable. Controlling for class, there is still a major racial disparity in incarceration rates—but far less of one, according to a 2010 study published in Daedalus. The authors looked at men born between 1975 and 1979 and found that, over all, the black men were five times more likely than white counterparts to serve time in prison (27 versus 5 percent) by their early thirties. By contrast, black high school dropouts were two-and-a-half times more likely to enter prison than white dropouts (68 versus 28 percent). Poor blacks are hit much the hardest: the hyperincarceration that governs life in extremely poor and highly segregated black neighborhoods is a unique phenomenon. But poor whites have it bad as well. The black members of the studied cohort with a high school education were less likely to enter prison than a white high school dropout, and far less likely if they had a college degree. Affluent black people share aspects of racial discrimination and disadvantage with poor black people, and poor whites share some white privilege with rich whites. But poor blacks on the South Side of Chicago and poor whites in Appalachia also share an experience of economic marginalization, incarceration included, that is utterly foreign to most well-to-do people of any color.

* * *

Research suggests that when white people are confronted with evidence of the criminal justice systems's racist impact they are actually more likely to support punitive policies. This is because of racism, and because emphasizing racial disparity risks reinforcing racist stereotypes about black criminality. It's also because the American left lacks much in the way of a multiracial working class movement. Anyone who has spent time covering the criminal justice system, or spent time inside of it, is aware of countless stories of white (not to mention Latino) people unjustly jammed up. The majority of the victims of police brutality and unjust imprisonment that I've interviewed and written about, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, are black. But not all. The abusive cops and prison guards I've encountered, contrary to the media's insistent references to certain abusive officers being white, were both black and white. The system is fundamentally racist. But it is also a machine that destroys poor and working class people of all colors. Take Sean Harrington, who I profiled in a Vice investigation last September. Harrington, a white heroin addict, is facing a murder charge and 15 years in prison for providing drugs to a friend who suffered a fatal overdose. North Carolina prosecutor Greg Newman's carceral instincts are mercilessly inclusive: “if you're going to be out peddling the drugs,” he told me, “you're going to have be accountable to what happens on the receiving end of those narcotics.” Rico Moore, a black lawyer representing a poor white man in West Virginia facing similar charges, told me that the system uses the “same playbook” against poor people of all races. "I think, of course, poor defendants get treated like lesser citizens the same as black defendants,” he said. One case that got a bit of national attention was that of Zachary Hammond, a white teen shot dead by Seneca, South Carolina police as he tried to drive away from a drug sting. Most media attention focused on whether he was getting less media attention because he was white. “If Zachary were black, the outpouring of protest and disappointment from the public and the press would be amazing,” Eric Bland, Hammond's lawyer, protested. “You wouldn’t be able to get a hotel room in upstate South Carolina.” In reality, most of the people tweeting about #ZacharyHammond seem to be Black Lives Matters supporters — including after it was announce that the officer who executed the teen would not be charged. It's not the job of black activists to highlight white victims of mass incarceration and police abuse, though they do. The #alllivesmatter camp, to be sure, was not out marching in the street demanding justice for Zachary Hammond. White privilege and white supremacy are very real. But it's also no wonder that white liberal arts graduates have an easier time understanding white privilege than an out of work white miner or factory worker: it's hard to ruminate about one's race advantage when you're getting hammered on the economic margins. The debates pitting race against class are tired and counterproductive (and to poor black people, perhaps entirely ludicrous). More to the point would be a conversation that makes sense of people's different, difficult realities. You can't do that if you belittle poor white people as rednecks, and succumb to a vision of American politics as a cultural phenomenon reflected on Wolf Blitzer's color-coded election maps. In the late 1960s, Black Panthers in Chicago were building a Rainbow Coalition with Puerto Rican Young Lords and Appalachian migrant Young Patriots to take on poverty, police brutality and Mayor Richard Daley before leader Fred Hampton was murdered by police at the age of 21. "There's...people on welfare up here,” said Black Panther Bobby Lee, in a powerful meeting with militant Appalachians. “There's police brutality up here. There's rats and roaches. There's poverty up here. That's the first thing that we...can unite on." [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js7SI... Today, it is prisoners who may be leading us out of the rabbit hole of some of the less productive arguments about race and class. Three years ago in California, alleged leaders of rival race-based gangs—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia—who had spent years locked inside Pelican Bay State Prison's dystopian solitary confinement unit, organized 30,000 prisoners statewide to go on hunger strike. As Sitawa Jamaa, an alleged leader of the Black Guerrilla Family, put it: "We are a prisoner class now." A failure to recognize the fact that mass incarceration poses a threat to Americans of all races misses an opportunity to build the only sort of broad-based coalition that can bring the system down. It also, if history is any lesson, poses a major risk. Liberal criticism of racial sentencing inequities helped pave the way for the 1984 law that created the sentencing guidelines that, alongside mandatory minimums, have helped drive the federal prison system's explosive growth. Sentences are still disparate. And they are much, much longer. Demands that the criminal justice system solve our problems, and that it treat people equally, could once again result in more brutality across the board. The people goading the federal government into a bloodbath in Oregon should be mindful of this history. Black Lives Matter has cast an unprecedented spotlight on the criminal justice system. A rainbow coalition could learn a lot from the brutality they have illuminated.

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Can cannabis treat epileptic seizures?

Charlotte Figi, an eight-year-old girl from Colorado with Dravet syndrome, a rare and debilitating form of epilepsy, came into the public eye in 2013 when news broke that medical marijuana was able to do what other drugs could not: dramatically reduce her seizures. Now, new scientific research provides evidence that cannabis may be an effective treatment for a third of epilepsy patients who, like Charlotte, have a treatment-resistant form of the disease. Last month Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at New York University Langone Medical Center, and his colleagues across multiple research centers published the results from the largest study to date of a cannabis-based drug for treatment-resistant epilepsy in The Lancet Neurology . The researchers treated 162 patients with an extract of 99 percent cannabidiol (CBD), a nonpsychoactive chemical in marijuana, and monitored them for 12 weeks. This treatment was given as an add-on to the patients’ existing medications and the trial was open-label (everyone knew what they were getting). The researchers reported the intervention reduced motor seizures at a rate similar to existing drugs (a median of 36.5 percent) and 2 percent of patients became completely seizure free. Additionally, 79 percent of patients reported adverse effects such as sleepiness, diarrhea and fatigue, although only 3 percent dropped out of the study due to adverse events. “I was a little surprised that the overall number of side effects was quite high but it seems like most of them were not enough that the patients had to come off the medication,” says Kevin Chapman, a neurology and pediatric professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “I think that [this study] provides some good data to show that it's relatively safe—the adverse effects were mostly mild and [although] there were serious adverse effects, it's always hard to know in such a refractory population whether that would have occurred anyway.”     Stories of cannabis’s abilities to alleviate seizures have been around for about 150 years but interest in medical marijuana has increased sharply in the last decade with the help of legalization campaigns. In particular, both patients and scientists have started to focus on the potential benefits of CBD, one of the main compounds in cannabis. Unlike tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is responsible for its euphoric effects, CBD does not cause a “high” or pose the same type of risks that researchers have identified for THC, such as addiction and cognitive impairment. Rather, studies have shown that it can act as an anticonvulsant and may even have antipsychotic effects. The trial led by Devinsky is currently the most robust assessment of CBD’s effect on epilepsy (prior studies included less than 20 patients) but many questions remain. In a subsequent commentary published this January, also in The Lancet Neurology, Kamil Detyniecki and Lawrence Hirsch, neurologists at the Yale University School of Medicine who were not involved in the research, outlined the study’s major limitations, which include possible placebo effects and drug interactions. Because the trial was open-label and without a control group, a main concern is the placebo effect, which previous studies have shown might be especially strong with marijuana-based products. For example, an earlier 2015 study carried out by Chapman and his group at the University of Colorado revealed that 47 percent of patients whose families had moved to Colorado for cannabis-based epilepsy treatment reported improvement, compared with 22 percent in people who already lived there. The other major issue is the possibility of drug interactions—because CBD is a potent liver enzyme inhibitor it can increase the concentration of other drugs in the body. This means that when administered with other compounds, consequent effects on patients may be due to the increased exposure to those other drugs rather than the CBD itself. Despite these limitations, both commentary authors agree the study is an important step in establishing CBD as a safe and effective epilepsy treatment. “This is a first step, and it's great,” Detyniecki says. Despite the large number of adverse events, he says that overall “there were no surprising side effects—we can conclude that CBD appears to be safe in the short term.” Evidence suggesting that CBD is effective against treatment-resistant epilepsy may be growing but scientists still know very little about how it works—other than the likelihood that it is “completely different than any other seizure drug we know,” as Devinsky puts it. That’s a good thing, he notes: “One fear is that because of the way that the drugs are tested and screened, we've ended up with a lot of ‘me-too’ drugs that are all very similar.” Researchers, including those who were involved in the study published last December, hope to address these limitations in currently running blind and placebo-controlled clinical trials testing CBD on Dravetsufferers as well as Lennox–Gastaut syndrome, another drug-resistant form of epilepsy. In the meantime most clinicians and researchers, including those involved in the trial, advise “cautious optimism” when considering CBD as an epilepsy treatment. “I think, based on the evidence that we have, if a child has tried multiple standard drugs and the epilepsy is still severe and impairing quality of life, then the risks of trying CBD are low to modest at best,” Devinksy says. “[But] I do feel it is critical for us as a scientific community to get [more] data.” Cannabis may be the much-needed treatment for a handful of people with epilepsy, but for now, patients should wait for scientists to clear the haze.

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White Hollywood meltdown: Now Julie Delpy says it’s harder to be a woman than to be black in Hollywood

Hot on the heels of Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling opining that the #OscarsSoWhite controversy is "racist to whites" and Michael Caine's admonishment to black actors frustrated with a second year of all-white Academy Award nominees that they "be patient" because "it took me years to get an Oscar," today former Oscar nominee Julie Delpy (for original screenplays, 2004's "Before Sunrise" and 2013's "Before Midnight") once again spoke out about Hollywood's white-boys' club atmosphere (they can't all be Mark Ruffalo!), telling The Wrap's Jeff Schneider that there's “nothing worse than being a woman in this business.” Referring to the backlash she suffered in 2014 when she blasted the Academy as a bastion of white men (she's not wrong!), Delpy wandered out of her wheelhouse when she said, “It’s funny — women can’t talk. I sometimes wish I were African American because people don’t bash them afterward.” It's true that the Academy has come a long way since 2014 — last year's #OscarsSoWhite backlash against Ava DuVernay's "Selma" snubbing set a groundswell in motion that turned into an undeniable demand for reform after this year's nominations were announced, revealing the second year in a row that no artists of color were nominated in the four acting categories. And it's true that women are woefully underrepresented in the Academy and on the lists of top-honored directors — it's a lonely club of one for Kathryn Bigelow — and that actresses of all colors face ridiculous ageism and sexism in Hollywood that the men never deal with. (To the Academy's credit, they finally realized they couldn't just keep hoping and wishing the problem away, and announced today an ambitious plan to double the number of female and minority voting members over the next four years.) But to say that being a woman, period, is the toughest role to play in Hollywood is myopic — and to suggest that when Black artists speak up against the structural injustice of the industry, as they have been, vocally, over the last year and for decades, they receive no backlash themselves, is absurd. “It’s the hardest to be a woman. Feminists is something people hate above all. Nothing worse than being a woman in this business. I really believe that.” If Delpy thinks it's hard being a white feminist, she should try listening to and amplifying the voices of the women of color in her industry first — she might learn a few things.

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Pro-life fanatics want you to think abortion clinics are terrifying places; here’s what one really looks like

When I hung up the phone after scheduling my abortion, I felt relieved. I knew I had set in motion the necessary steps that would allow me to make the right decision for myself, my future, my body and my (at the time) partner. I knew I was going to have access to an abortion in a relatively safe environment, administered by trained medical healthcare professionals and in a clean, sterile room. My hand was still holding my phone when I let out a large sigh, confident in my decision and thankful for my ability to make it.

But as my hand slid my phone onto the counter so I could continue to go about my day, I felt the very real chill of panic. While I knew where I was going to have my abortion and how my abortion would be administered, I had no idea what an abortion clinic actually looked like. I had never been inside one before, so my only frame of reference was Hollywood representations and manipulated pro-life paraphernalia. Before I knew it, my mind was bombarded with terrifying images of cold operating rooms and intimidating instruments. I felt like I was going into surgery, that I’d be entering a room that was medical and impersonal and nothing short of terrifying.

If only I had known then what I know now. The moments I spent nervous and uneasy, pacing in my living room with a sense of unnecessary anxiety should have been moments of relaxed confidence. An abortion clinic is not a terrifying place of death, like many pro-life advocates would want women to believe. Shouldn’t an abortion clinic be, not an operating room or even a doctor’s office, but a safe, comfortable and welcoming place that makes women feel at ease with their medical decisions and medical procedures?

Carafem, a clinic that provides abortions in Washington, D.C., believes so, and is taking a new approach to abortion services by offering women a calm, soothing and safe abortion experience. Like most other medical procedures, the patient’s comfort level is taken into consideration on every level -- from the moment the patient enters the clinic until well after she leaves. This makes Carafem a clinic of a different color; that doesn't shy away from advertising not only the services it provides women, but the extra steps they take to endure that women feel comfortable and at ease.

These efforts, made by clinics across the country, are stifled by pro-life advocates. In an attempt to shame women for their decisions and the choices they make with their bodies, pro-life advocates insist that having an abortion shouldn’t be a comfortable experience. No, instead a woman should be afraid and in pain and, essentially, punished (physically, emotionally and mentally) for her decision. Not only is this cruel and unusual, it is vindictive and everything abortion clinics and women’s healthcare clinics work tirelessly to combat and avoid.

Fear and a lack of knowledge are the two unbelievably powerful tools that the anti-choice movement has learned to use almost impeccably. Shielding women from factual information or creating false information to further a particular agenda has continued to perpetuate shame, fear and the kind of anxiety that had me pacing back and forth in my living room after scheduling my appointment.

In fact, even the term “abortion clinic” is an attempt to scare and manipulate women. If you go to a physician to have your gall bladder removed, do you call it a “gall bladder clinic”? For a pap smear, do we go to “pap smear clinics”? Anti-choice advocates have used the description “abortion clinic” as a pejorative, deliberately attempting to use language to subtly tarnish or stigmatize the completely legal medical service, and the providers who offer it.

So, in the spirit of factual transparency and open discourse, I took an inside look at a Carafem clinic and documented what it really is like inside this clinic, that provides not only abortions but contraception information and numerous forms of affordable birth control. With permission of the clinic and while there were no visiting patients, I went through the same steps a woman would go through when visiting the clinic, experiencing everything she would experience (except the at-home medication abortion).

I first walked into a relatively small space that felt less like a waiting room and more like a quiet staging area. There were a grand total of three chairs in the waiting room, and I quickly realized how much I would have appreciated that if I was sitting in one of them, waiting to meet with a healthcare professional and start the process of getting an abortion. The patients don’t feel like a number in a long line and they’re given the space to ensure their privacy is protected.

When sitting in one of the chairs, I looked to my left and noticed small cards that were left behind by women who had sat exactly where I was sitting. I read a few of them and became both emotional and (slightly) jealous. I was emotional because it was such a beautiful gift to give a woman, the knowledge that others have been where she is now and the confidence that she made the right decision for her. I was jealous because I didn’t receive such a gift when I had my own abortion, and it would have done wonders for my mental and emotional health if I had known that I wasn’t alone.

I was then taken into a small room and given a tutorial of sorts, about the abortion pill, what to expect, what to look out for, what kind of birth control options were available to me and what  kind of birth control I would be the most successful using. The slide show was given on a large screen, so I could see everything that was being told to me on a screen, while simultaneously looking through pamphlets that highlighted the exact same information. I realized that the clinic and its staff were making sure to present their information in a way that would cover all possible learning styles: visual, auditory, verbal, physical and logical.

I felt respected in my ability to obtain knowledge, I felt acutely listened to and acknowledged and I felt like if I was sitting in that chair, about to get an abortion, I would feel like my choice was being treated like nothing more than a legal medical procedure. Because, after all, that is exactly what it is.

Walking out of that clinic I was both hopeful and sad. I was sad because all I could think about was that scared 22-year-old girl, pacing back and forth in her living room, unsure of what kind of environment she was going to be walking into. I’m sad that I spent so much time afraid and anxious, when I didn’t need to be. I’m sad that I wasn’t privy to the kind of information I have today, and that inability perpetuated an unnecessary fear. I’m sad that there are many women who feel the exact same way -- today, right now -- because they haven’t been able to find the  necessary information to feel completely confidence in what they know to be necessary. I’m sad that as I type, there is undoubtably a woman pacing back and forth in her living room, nervous about walking into a clinic that provides abortions, not because she is unsure of her decision, but because she is unsure of what that clinic looks like.

I was hopeful because there is an undeniable and notable cultural shift occurring and information is more available than ever before. I’m hopeful because with knowledge is power, and women are feeling more and more empowered to take unapologetic control of their bodies and the choices they make with them.

And I’m still hopeful that, one day, women will not be asked to feel shame and pain and suffering because they had an abortion, but will be treated with respect, and given more and more options -- and safe, secure and comfortable places -- to make their own reproductive choices.

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“Boys for Pele” turns 20: Revisiting the year when Tori Amos truly came into her own

On Jan. 23, 1996, Tori Amos released "Boys for Pele" in the U.S. By this time, the fiery pianist was a radio and MTV staple, as well as a beacon of comfort and inspiration to anyone grappling with religion, sexuality and the patriarchy. However, the cover of "Boys for Pele" immediately signified that Amos was coming into her own even more dramatically: She's pictured sitting in an old rocking chair wearing ripped pants, and she's slung a dirt-covered bare left leg over the chair's arm. This position enables Amos to loosely hold a shotgun, while maintaining a look on her face that lands somewhere between defiance, amusement and tranquility. Taken as a whole, the cover comes across like a representation of escape from conventions, gender roles and oppression. Not coincidentally, those same concepts permeate "Boys for Pele": Amos had recently made a creative and romantic break with Eric Rosse—who had co-produced both 1992's "Little Earthquakes" and 1994's "Under the Pink"—and she decided to take control over her music and career. First and foremost, she produced the album herself, recording it both at a church in Ireland and in New Orleans. "I'd never allowed myself to jump off the cliff by myself," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1996. "But with this one, it was like, 'You know, guys, thanks for the lessons, but give me my own Formula One car—let's race!' I was at the point I could not answer to anybody. I'd been answering my whole life to some patriarchal figure." Thematically and musically, "Boys for Pele" is indeed concerned with self-empowerment—or, as she once told George magazine, "women claiming her own power." The album was not only Amos' longest full-length to date, but it boasted richer, more ornate instrumentation and flourishes than her previous records. Harpsichord features prominently on the vaguely psychedelic highlight "Talula," the classical-meets-grunge slink "Professional Widow" and the antique-sounding, hymn-like "Blood Roses." Electronic beats swing like chiming pendulums throughout "Caught a Light Sneeze," while there's a solemn gospel choir on "Way Down," and the legendary Black Dyke Band contributes velvety horns on the otherwise piano-only "Putting the Damage On." The Meters' George Porter Jr. adds funky bass burbles throughout—a vibrant, velocity-laden foundation that matches the album's sense of rebirth. And she even hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart with a brisk, starry-eyed Armand Van Helden remix of "Professional Widow." Still, the recording leaves room for imperfections: "Beauty Queen," the first track on "Boys for Pele," begins with a quiet creaking sound, which is Amos entering a makeshift box constructed in the studio to enhance recording. ("My engineer came up with the idea that instead of blanketing the instruments to improve the acoustics, we'd blanket Tori, put me in a box," she told the New York Times.) These subtle peccadillos enhance the idea that power dynamics are messy and sometimes volatile, a concept that crops up time and time again on the album. "Putting the Damage On" is a wrenching song about the flawed nature of a breakup—the residual feelings that linger despite the pain and separation—while "Little Amsterdam" is a harrowing chronicle of racism's divisive nature: "'Cause girl you've got to know these days/Which side you're on," Amos trills, several verses before the song hints that an interracial relationship led to violence. And on the latticework-delicate standout "Doughnut Song," she very plainly sings, "You told me last night you were a sun now with your very own devoted satellite/Happy for you, and I am sure that I hate you." But while Amos certainly speaks universally on "Boys for Pele," the subtext is her own personal awakening. Many performers opt to keep their stage personas separate from their offstage identities, but Amos discovered this disconnect wasn't a performative defense mechanism; it was a sign that she hadn't embraced and assimilated the various facets of her individual self. "An emotional work like ["Boys for Pele"] is inspired from an emotional place; it’s about stealing fire from the men in my life," she told the New York Post in 1996. "I guess I didn’t realize how much confidence I have in certain areas of my life, and just so little in other areas. It seemed as though everywhere I turned was to male mentors or emotional involvements. I became a vampire needing to feed, needing their energy and I didn’t know how to access it. When I was onstage I could, but when I walked off that stage I began to see that the woman was completely divided and segregated from the work." That reconciliation involves not only casting off the remnants of bad memories and influences—e.g., the "I shaved every place where you've been, boy" lyric on "Blood Roses," the phrase "Nothing's going to stop me from floating" repeated on "Father Lucifer"—but realizing that she needed to do some serious soul-searching. This produced the emotional bootstrapping of "Horses" ("They say that your demons can't go there/So I got me some horses to ride on") and the heartbreaking "Hey Jupiter," an intimate solo piano tune on which Amos confronts the blank-slate reality of being alone. But it also led to "In the Springtime of His Voodoo," a seductive cabaret song with a jazzy underbelly, pop culture references to "Star Trek" and the Eagles, and a decidedly sexual bent. "In my relationships with men, I was always musician enough, but not woman enough," Amos told the Chicago Tribune. "I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough. So when it came time to make this album, I went to Louisiana, back to the South and the old-world church, to the place that deemed wrong Mary Magdalene and the shadow-sorcerer side in the Bible. I went to reclaim that hidden womanhood. Because you can't have grace without the whores." It's a powerful thing to find inspiration and camaraderie in the lives of other women. In fact, the album's final song, "Twinkle," finds Amos meeting someone on the lam ("I killed a man T/I've gotta stay hidden in this Abbey") and realizing that this woman's resiliency is admirable: "When she twinkles—and she twinkles—and I sure can." But "Twinkle" also underscores that these role model women don't have to be perfect, morally or physically. In fact, the complexities mentioned throughout "Boys for Pele" are actually more ideal—and echo the Mary Magdalene story Amos wanted to explore. “I wanted to know why the blueprint of the Magdalene was not passed down,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “What was passed down was the whore that wiped Jesus’ feet. We skipped the whole phase of the woman -- having sexual desire, wisdom, passion. Being an equal to Jesus, in truth. I truly believe that there was a unification there, a representation of the wholeness. Man with his masculine and feminine in balance; woman with her feminine and masculine in balance. Two whole beings, joined together. The blueprint." Amos would explore these dualities—and how they conflict and cohere—on albums in the future. But on "Boys for Pele," she both discovered and amplified the depth of her inner strength, and ended up becoming a role model for women of all ages looking for guidance within an often-turbulent world.On Jan. 23, 1996, Tori Amos released "Boys for Pele" in the U.S. By this time, the fiery pianist was a radio and MTV staple, as well as a beacon of comfort and inspiration to anyone grappling with religion, sexuality and the patriarchy. However, the cover of "Boys for Pele" immediately signified that Amos was coming into her own even more dramatically: She's pictured sitting in an old rocking chair wearing ripped pants, and she's slung a dirt-covered bare left leg over the chair's arm. This position enables Amos to loosely hold a shotgun, while maintaining a look on her face that lands somewhere between defiance, amusement and tranquility. Taken as a whole, the cover comes across like a representation of escape from conventions, gender roles and oppression. Not coincidentally, those same concepts permeate "Boys for Pele": Amos had recently made a creative and romantic break with Eric Rosse—who had co-produced both 1992's "Little Earthquakes" and 1994's "Under the Pink"—and she decided to take control over her music and career. First and foremost, she produced the album herself, recording it both at a church in Ireland and in New Orleans. "I'd never allowed myself to jump off the cliff by myself," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1996. "But with this one, it was like, 'You know, guys, thanks for the lessons, but give me my own Formula One car—let's race!' I was at the point I could not answer to anybody. I'd been answering my whole life to some patriarchal figure." Thematically and musically, "Boys for Pele" is indeed concerned with self-empowerment—or, as she once told George magazine, "women claiming her own power." The album was not only Amos' longest full-length to date, but it boasted richer, more ornate instrumentation and flourishes than her previous records. Harpsichord features prominently on the vaguely psychedelic highlight "Talula," the classical-meets-grunge slink "Professional Widow" and the antique-sounding, hymn-like "Blood Roses." Electronic beats swing like chiming pendulums throughout "Caught a Light Sneeze," while there's a solemn gospel choir on "Way Down," and the legendary Black Dyke Band contributes velvety horns on the otherwise piano-only "Putting the Damage On." The Meters' George Porter Jr. adds funky bass burbles throughout—a vibrant, velocity-laden foundation that matches the album's sense of rebirth. And she even hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart with a brisk, starry-eyed Armand Van Helden remix of "Professional Widow." Still, the recording leaves room for imperfections: "Beauty Queen," the first track on "Boys for Pele," begins with a quiet creaking sound, which is Amos entering a makeshift box constructed in the studio to enhance recording. ("My engineer came up with the idea that instead of blanketing the instruments to improve the acoustics, we'd blanket Tori, put me in a box," she told the New York Times.) These subtle peccadillos enhance the idea that power dynamics are messy and sometimes volatile, a concept that crops up time and time again on the album. "Putting the Damage On" is a wrenching song about the flawed nature of a breakup—the residual feelings that linger despite the pain and separation—while "Little Amsterdam" is a harrowing chronicle of racism's divisive nature: "'Cause girl you've got to know these days/Which side you're on," Amos trills, several verses before the song hints that an interracial relationship led to violence. And on the latticework-delicate standout "Doughnut Song," she very plainly sings, "You told me last night you were a sun now with your very own devoted satellite/Happy for you, and I am sure that I hate you." But while Amos certainly speaks universally on "Boys for Pele," the subtext is her own personal awakening. Many performers opt to keep their stage personas separate from their offstage identities, but Amos discovered this disconnect wasn't a performative defense mechanism; it was a sign that she hadn't embraced and assimilated the various facets of her individual self. "An emotional work like ["Boys for Pele"] is inspired from an emotional place; it’s about stealing fire from the men in my life," she told the New York Post in 1996. "I guess I didn’t realize how much confidence I have in certain areas of my life, and just so little in other areas. It seemed as though everywhere I turned was to male mentors or emotional involvements. I became a vampire needing to feed, needing their energy and I didn’t know how to access it. When I was onstage I could, but when I walked off that stage I began to see that the woman was completely divided and segregated from the work." That reconciliation involves not only casting off the remnants of bad memories and influences—e.g., the "I shaved every place where you've been, boy" lyric on "Blood Roses," the phrase "Nothing's going to stop me from floating" repeated on "Father Lucifer"—but realizing that she needed to do some serious soul-searching. This produced the emotional bootstrapping of "Horses" ("They say that your demons can't go there/So I got me some horses to ride on") and the heartbreaking "Hey Jupiter," an intimate solo piano tune on which Amos confronts the blank-slate reality of being alone. But it also led to "In the Springtime of His Voodoo," a seductive cabaret song with a jazzy underbelly, pop culture references to "Star Trek" and the Eagles, and a decidedly sexual bent. "In my relationships with men, I was always musician enough, but not woman enough," Amos told the Chicago Tribune. "I always met men in my life as a musician, and there would be magic, adoration. But then it would wear off. All of us want to be adored, even for five minutes a day, and nothing these men gave me was ever enough. So when it came time to make this album, I went to Louisiana, back to the South and the old-world church, to the place that deemed wrong Mary Magdalene and the shadow-sorcerer side in the Bible. I went to reclaim that hidden womanhood. Because you can't have grace without the whores." It's a powerful thing to find inspiration and camaraderie in the lives of other women. In fact, the album's final song, "Twinkle," finds Amos meeting someone on the lam ("I killed a man T/I've gotta stay hidden in this Abbey") and realizing that this woman's resiliency is admirable: "When she twinkles—and she twinkles—and I sure can." But "Twinkle" also underscores that these role model women don't have to be perfect, morally or physically. In fact, the complexities mentioned throughout "Boys for Pele" are actually more ideal—and echo the Mary Magdalene story Amos wanted to explore. “I wanted to know why the blueprint of the Magdalene was not passed down,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “What was passed down was the whore that wiped Jesus’ feet. We skipped the whole phase of the woman -- having sexual desire, wisdom, passion. Being an equal to Jesus, in truth. I truly believe that there was a unification there, a representation of the wholeness. Man with his masculine and feminine in balance; woman with her feminine and masculine in balance. Two whole beings, joined together. The blueprint." Amos would explore these dualities—and how they conflict and cohere—on albums in the future. But on "Boys for Pele," she both discovered and amplified the depth of her inner strength, and ended up becoming a role model for women of all ages looking for guidance within an often-turbulent world.

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Amy Winehouse’s mom opens up: “I did not expect to lose Amy when I did”

There are times when Amy catches me unawares. She’s right in front of me and in a second I am overwhelmed. This feeling comes with no warning. There is no route map for grief. There are no rules. I can’t predict what might trigger this: her face flashed up on the big screen at the BRIT Awards; a song of hers playing in the airport lounge en route to New York; the Japanese tea set she bought me from a Camden junk shop that I stumble across while sorting through a cupboard at home; the mention of her name. Whether these moments are intensely public or intensely private, they stop me in my tracks, and I am paralysed with emotion. Yet I find them strangely comforting. They are a reminder that I can still feel, that I am not numb. I worry about a day when that might change. I worry about the day when Amy stops being alive in my head and in my heart. I don’t want that day ever to come. I don’t think it ever will. I loved her. I will always love her, and I miss everything about her. Amy, bless her, was larger than life. I find myself saying ‘bless her’ in the same breath as Amy’s name a lot of the time. It’s my way of acknowledging that she was not a straightforward girl. Amy was one of those rare people who made an impact. Right from the very beginning, when she was a toddler, she was loud and boisterous and scared and sensitive. She was a bundle of emotions, at times adorable and at times unbearable. All this is consistent with the struggle she went through to overcome the addictions that eventually robbed her of her life. Amy’s passing did not follow a clear line. It was jumbled, and her life was unfinished – not life’s natural order at all. She left no answers, only questions, and in the years since her death I’ve found myself trying to make sense of the frayed ends of her extraordinary existence. I lost Amy twice: once to drugs and alcohol, and finally on Saturday, 23 July 2011, when her short life ended. I don’t believe any of the endless speculation that Amy wanted to die. There was no doubt that she battled with who she was and what she had become, but she dreamed that one day she’d have children and there was a large part of Amy that had a zest for life and people. But she was a girl who kicked against authority, a person who always took things that bit further than everyone else around her. She used to say to me, ‘Mum, I hate mediocrity. I never want to be mediocre.’ Whatever else Amy was, she was anything but mediocre. She had a phenomenal talent and she pushed it to its limits; she pushed her life to its limits; she pushed her body beyond its limits. In her mind she was invincible, yet she was as vulnerable as any of us are. I have a recurring vision of her, wherever she is, saying to me through that mischievous smile of hers, ‘Oops, Mum, I really didn’t mean to do that. I went too far this time, didn’t I?’ I did not expect to lose Amy when I did. Since the first night I held her in my arms she had always been a constant and close part of my life. But during the worst years of Amy’s drugs dependency there were moments when I truly thought that every time I saw her it would be the last. Amy had become a slave to her drugs and parts of the daughter I’d raised were slowly being wiped away. In the past she’d have gone out of her way to get to me, wherever I was, but as her addictions took hold she became less reliable, less able to organize herself without an army of people clearing a path for her and clearing up after her. She became wildly sentimental and wildly ill-natured. She’d sit in front of me, her short skirt riding up her legs and her sharp bones protruding from her knees. I could see it happening. I could see her tiny body disintegrating, but there was nothing I could do. As her mother, I was completely helpless. I could ring her and I could visit her, but I couldn’t save her. I knew that if I tried to I would lose myself too. For some time, Amy had tried to protect me from the reality of her life. She wanted to keep me as a ‘mummy’ figure, untainted by everything she was experiencing. Amy had looked out for me from a young age, in particular after the breakdown of my marriage to her father Mitchell, and I suspect she didn’t want to upset me. But mothers have a sixth sense and I was busy filling in the blanks. As Amy’s troubles escalated there were certain things that became more and more difficult for her to hide. The ups and downs of those years took their toll on Amy and everyone around her. Loving Amy became a relentless cycle of thinking I would lose her, but not losing her, thinking I would lose her, but not losing her. It was a bit like holding your breath under­ water and gasping for air every time you reached the surface, then treading water while wondering what the next dive down might involve. Also, by 2006 – the time when Amy’s addictions began to consume her – I had not long been officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I have suffered with the symptoms for more than thirty years, from just after I gave birth to Amy’s older brother Alex, and it is why I now walk with the aid of a stick. Amy’s unpredictability meant I lived constantly on tenterhooks, and my own health had reached crisis point too. I often caught myself thinking, ‘Are all these things really happening to my family?’ But then my own survival instinct kicked in. I have always been a pragmatist, but thinking pragmatically about your own daughter’s addiction is one of the hardest things a mother can do. I worked as a pharmacist until my MS forced me to take early retirement, so my medical background helped me to see Amy’s problems more clearly as an illness. Even armed with that know­ ledge, however, I desperately struggled to keep myself together. I relied on counselling to make sense of everything that was dis­ integrating around me. I needed to talk things through with someone who wasn’t emotionally wrapped up in the drama of our lives. Step by step I began to refocus my own life. I took time for myself, and although there were moments when I felt guilty about doing so, I stopped telling myself it was wrong. A new relationship with my now husband Richard, whom I’ve known since I was twelve years old, began to blossom. I am convinced that all those things, combined with my inner resolve, have given me an enormous amount of insight and strength both during Amy’s life and after her passing. Right up until that summer of 2011 I believed she had turned a corner – we all did. She had been clean of drugs for almost three years and we could see glimpses of a future again, even though her life was still punctuated with bouts of heavy drinking. Nevertheless, our expectations had shifted and I felt optimistic about what lay in store for her. Instead of questioning if or when Amy was going to die, I had begun to imagine a time when she would be better. Sadly, that day never came, and I will always feel tortured by a sense of what could have been, even though I have had to accept the reality. Amy came into my life like a whirlwind and changed it forever. Although I lived through it with her, sometimes her story does not feel real. I am a proud mother who watched her daughter achieve the success and recognition she desperately wanted. But soon that private and intense bond between us became public property. Amy’s entire life became public property and I guess, as a family, we were always in tow. Everybody who took an interest in Amy believed they knew her, and everyone wanted a piece of her, in ways we were completely unprepared for. She, herself, walked an endlessly unsteady tightrope between withdrawing from the limelight and needing to be noticed. In that way, Amy and I were different. Throughout her life and even now, the limelight was and is a place in which I feel uneasy. Unlike Mitchell, I struggle with being in the public eye. I have never felt comfortable walking on the red carpet, even though my husband Richard tells me I look as cool as a cucumber. Whether accepting awards on Amy’s behalf or raising money for Amy’s foundation – the charity Mitchell and I set up in the months after her passing – I’ve graced more stages than I ever thought possible. I do everything now with Amy in my heart. And if anything extraordinary happens – and since Amy’s death lots of extraordinary things have happened – I think, ‘Janis, it’s all part of the story.’ I’m just not sure yet whether it’s my story or whether I’m watching the events of my life as if they were someone else’s feature film. So much of what has happened to me and my family has been almost impossible to process. I find myself filing things in a ‘surreal box’ in my mind, to deal with later, just so I can carry on. Telling the story of my life with Amy was first mooted back in 2007 when I was approached by a literary agent and asked whether I would consider writing a book. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea, but I came away from the meeting thinking I might like to, but only when Amy was well again. I called her and asked her what she thought of the proposal. ‘Don’t do it, Mum,’ she told me in no uncertain terms. ‘I don’t want people to know who I am.’ Enough said. Amy was happy to let the beehive and the eyeliner and the car-crash lifestyle become the only side of her the public saw, even though we knew she was a much more complex person than that. Back then, I never considered going against her wishes. Now life has changed. I thought long and hard before finally agreeing to tell our story, but once I made the decision I found that the trepidation I felt at the beginning slowly disappeared. Recalling happy times as well as confronting some uncomfortable truths has helped me in my own journey. It has helped me understand how our ordinary life grew in so many fantastic ways, and self-destructed in so many others. I rediscovered parts of Amy’s life too, the sort of precious memories that fade in the maelstrom of a working mother’s life and get buried by the avalanche of fame and addiction. Over time, memories get eroded, and MS makes that process worse – that loss of sharpness is, regrettably, part of this degenerative condition – so I wanted to put mine on record before they are lost forever. I have read and heard so many false truths about Amy over the years there was also a strong desire to set the record straight. My family and friends, photos and Amy’s own notebooks have all helped me piece our lives back together again. In sorting through the fragments it has struck me how, at various points, Amy’s life closely mirrored aspects of my own in the years before she was born. Physically, Amy has my features. Our school reports are almost identical. We both loved adventure and, in our own ways, we both pushed the boundaries without necessarily thinking of the consequences. I quietly rebelled against a life of domesticity in 1970s and 1980s suburbia. Amy achieved superstardom by rebelling against the manufactured world of pop music. In the end, she rebelled against everything else too, and turned it inwards on herself. Despite the obvious heartbreak, I am uplifted when I am reminded of what Amy achieved – what we achieved. I graduated with two degrees while bringing up Alex and Amy and I wanted to motivate both my children to imagine what it was possible to achieve. Amy grabbed opportunities with both hands and realized her potential early in life. My only hope is that she would approve of this book as a frank account of her life, although I can picture her shrugging her shoulders and saying, ‘Mum, there’s nothing to say about me, honest.’ Today, I wear Amy’s necklace. It’s a gold Star of David that she was given as a baby. I never take it off. I wear her ring too. On some days I even wear her clothes – her T-shirts – and I feel closer to her. As I said, there are no rules for grief. There are days when I feel at peace with Amy and there are nights when I wake up crying. But I try not to dwell on the negative parts of her life, nor on how her death devastated my family. I keep going, as I have always done, busying myself with anything I can. It seems to be the only way I can get through each day. I celebrate Amy’s talent and appreciate the great gift she gave to the world. It will live on well after I and my family have gone. The Amy Winehouse Foundation, too, has already begun to make a difference to the lives of other children who, for whatever reason, are set on a wayward and downward path in life. It means so much to me that all my proceeds from this book will be donated to Amy’s charity. We want to work with many more children in the future and help them realize their potential, and I know Amy is with us every step of the way. I choose not to mourn Amy. I have her albums and a live concert she performed in São Paulo on my iPod. Hers is the only voice that spurs me upstairs and on to my exercise bike to go through the workouts I do to alleviate the discomfort of my MS. I’m not sure I’d get there otherwise. There are moments, though, when I hear the nakedness of her voice and I wonder how much the world under­ stood of Amy’s vulnerability. She was a singer, a superstar, an addict and a young woman who hurtled towards an untimely death. To me, though, she is simply Amy. She was my daughter and my friend, and she will be with me forever. Excerpted from "LOVING AMY: A Mother’s Story" by Janis Winehouse. Copyright © 2014 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. There are times when Amy catches me unawares. She’s right in front of me and in a second I am overwhelmed. This feeling comes with no warning. There is no route map for grief. There are no rules. I can’t predict what might trigger this: her face flashed up on the big screen at the BRIT Awards; a song of hers playing in the airport lounge en route to New York; the Japanese tea set she bought me from a Camden junk shop that I stumble across while sorting through a cupboard at home; the mention of her name. Whether these moments are intensely public or intensely private, they stop me in my tracks, and I am paralysed with emotion. Yet I find them strangely comforting. They are a reminder that I can still feel, that I am not numb. I worry about a day when that might change. I worry about the day when Amy stops being alive in my head and in my heart. I don’t want that day ever to come. I don’t think it ever will. I loved her. I will always love her, and I miss everything about her. Amy, bless her, was larger than life. I find myself saying ‘bless her’ in the same breath as Amy’s name a lot of the time. It’s my way of acknowledging that she was not a straightforward girl. Amy was one of those rare people who made an impact. Right from the very beginning, when she was a toddler, she was loud and boisterous and scared and sensitive. She was a bundle of emotions, at times adorable and at times unbearable. All this is consistent with the struggle she went through to overcome the addictions that eventually robbed her of her life. Amy’s passing did not follow a clear line. It was jumbled, and her life was unfinished – not life’s natural order at all. She left no answers, only questions, and in the years since her death I’ve found myself trying to make sense of the frayed ends of her extraordinary existence. I lost Amy twice: once to drugs and alcohol, and finally on Saturday, 23 July 2011, when her short life ended. I don’t believe any of the endless speculation that Amy wanted to die. There was no doubt that she battled with who she was and what she had become, but she dreamed that one day she’d have children and there was a large part of Amy that had a zest for life and people. But she was a girl who kicked against authority, a person who always took things that bit further than everyone else around her. She used to say to me, ‘Mum, I hate mediocrity. I never want to be mediocre.’ Whatever else Amy was, she was anything but mediocre. She had a phenomenal talent and she pushed it to its limits; she pushed her life to its limits; she pushed her body beyond its limits. In her mind she was invincible, yet she was as vulnerable as any of us are. I have a recurring vision of her, wherever she is, saying to me through that mischievous smile of hers, ‘Oops, Mum, I really didn’t mean to do that. I went too far this time, didn’t I?’ I did not expect to lose Amy when I did. Since the first night I held her in my arms she had always been a constant and close part of my life. But during the worst years of Amy’s drugs dependency there were moments when I truly thought that every time I saw her it would be the last. Amy had become a slave to her drugs and parts of the daughter I’d raised were slowly being wiped away. In the past she’d have gone out of her way to get to me, wherever I was, but as her addictions took hold she became less reliable, less able to organize herself without an army of people clearing a path for her and clearing up after her. She became wildly sentimental and wildly ill-natured. She’d sit in front of me, her short skirt riding up her legs and her sharp bones protruding from her knees. I could see it happening. I could see her tiny body disintegrating, but there was nothing I could do. As her mother, I was completely helpless. I could ring her and I could visit her, but I couldn’t save her. I knew that if I tried to I would lose myself too. For some time, Amy had tried to protect me from the reality of her life. She wanted to keep me as a ‘mummy’ figure, untainted by everything she was experiencing. Amy had looked out for me from a young age, in particular after the breakdown of my marriage to her father Mitchell, and I suspect she didn’t want to upset me. But mothers have a sixth sense and I was busy filling in the blanks. As Amy’s troubles escalated there were certain things that became more and more difficult for her to hide. The ups and downs of those years took their toll on Amy and everyone around her. Loving Amy became a relentless cycle of thinking I would lose her, but not losing her, thinking I would lose her, but not losing her. It was a bit like holding your breath under­ water and gasping for air every time you reached the surface, then treading water while wondering what the next dive down might involve. Also, by 2006 – the time when Amy’s addictions began to consume her – I had not long been officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I have suffered with the symptoms for more than thirty years, from just after I gave birth to Amy’s older brother Alex, and it is why I now walk with the aid of a stick. Amy’s unpredictability meant I lived constantly on tenterhooks, and my own health had reached crisis point too. I often caught myself thinking, ‘Are all these things really happening to my family?’ But then my own survival instinct kicked in. I have always been a pragmatist, but thinking pragmatically about your own daughter’s addiction is one of the hardest things a mother can do. I worked as a pharmacist until my MS forced me to take early retirement, so my medical background helped me to see Amy’s problems more clearly as an illness. Even armed with that know­ ledge, however, I desperately struggled to keep myself together. I relied on counselling to make sense of everything that was dis­ integrating around me. I needed to talk things through with someone who wasn’t emotionally wrapped up in the drama of our lives. Step by step I began to refocus my own life. I took time for myself, and although there were moments when I felt guilty about doing so, I stopped telling myself it was wrong. A new relationship with my now husband Richard, whom I’ve known since I was twelve years old, began to blossom. I am convinced that all those things, combined with my inner resolve, have given me an enormous amount of insight and strength both during Amy’s life and after her passing. Right up until that summer of 2011 I believed she had turned a corner – we all did. She had been clean of drugs for almost three years and we could see glimpses of a future again, even though her life was still punctuated with bouts of heavy drinking. Nevertheless, our expectations had shifted and I felt optimistic about what lay in store for her. Instead of questioning if or when Amy was going to die, I had begun to imagine a time when she would be better. Sadly, that day never came, and I will always feel tortured by a sense of what could have been, even though I have had to accept the reality. Amy came into my life like a whirlwind and changed it forever. Although I lived through it with her, sometimes her story does not feel real. I am a proud mother who watched her daughter achieve the success and recognition she desperately wanted. But soon that private and intense bond between us became public property. Amy’s entire life became public property and I guess, as a family, we were always in tow. Everybody who took an interest in Amy believed they knew her, and everyone wanted a piece of her, in ways we were completely unprepared for. She, herself, walked an endlessly unsteady tightrope between withdrawing from the limelight and needing to be noticed. In that way, Amy and I were different. Throughout her life and even now, the limelight was and is a place in which I feel uneasy. Unlike Mitchell, I struggle with being in the public eye. I have never felt comfortable walking on the red carpet, even though my husband Richard tells me I look as cool as a cucumber. Whether accepting awards on Amy’s behalf or raising money for Amy’s foundation – the charity Mitchell and I set up in the months after her passing – I’ve graced more stages than I ever thought possible. I do everything now with Amy in my heart. And if anything extraordinary happens – and since Amy’s death lots of extraordinary things have happened – I think, ‘Janis, it’s all part of the story.’ I’m just not sure yet whether it’s my story or whether I’m watching the events of my life as if they were someone else’s feature film. So much of what has happened to me and my family has been almost impossible to process. I find myself filing things in a ‘surreal box’ in my mind, to deal with later, just so I can carry on. Telling the story of my life with Amy was first mooted back in 2007 when I was approached by a literary agent and asked whether I would consider writing a book. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea, but I came away from the meeting thinking I might like to, but only when Amy was well again. I called her and asked her what she thought of the proposal. ‘Don’t do it, Mum,’ she told me in no uncertain terms. ‘I don’t want people to know who I am.’ Enough said. Amy was happy to let the beehive and the eyeliner and the car-crash lifestyle become the only side of her the public saw, even though we knew she was a much more complex person than that. Back then, I never considered going against her wishes. Now life has changed. I thought long and hard before finally agreeing to tell our story, but once I made the decision I found that the trepidation I felt at the beginning slowly disappeared. Recalling happy times as well as confronting some uncomfortable truths has helped me in my own journey. It has helped me understand how our ordinary life grew in so many fantastic ways, and self-destructed in so many others. I rediscovered parts of Amy’s life too, the sort of precious memories that fade in the maelstrom of a working mother’s life and get buried by the avalanche of fame and addiction. Over time, memories get eroded, and MS makes that process worse – that loss of sharpness is, regrettably, part of this degenerative condition – so I wanted to put mine on record before they are lost forever. I have read and heard so many false truths about Amy over the years there was also a strong desire to set the record straight. My family and friends, photos and Amy’s own notebooks have all helped me piece our lives back together again. In sorting through the fragments it has struck me how, at various points, Amy’s life closely mirrored aspects of my own in the years before she was born. Physically, Amy has my features. Our school reports are almost identical. We both loved adventure and, in our own ways, we both pushed the boundaries without necessarily thinking of the consequences. I quietly rebelled against a life of domesticity in 1970s and 1980s suburbia. Amy achieved superstardom by rebelling against the manufactured world of pop music. In the end, she rebelled against everything else too, and turned it inwards on herself. Despite the obvious heartbreak, I am uplifted when I am reminded of what Amy achieved – what we achieved. I graduated with two degrees while bringing up Alex and Amy and I wanted to motivate both my children to imagine what it was possible to achieve. Amy grabbed opportunities with both hands and realized her potential early in life. My only hope is that she would approve of this book as a frank account of her life, although I can picture her shrugging her shoulders and saying, ‘Mum, there’s nothing to say about me, honest.’ Today, I wear Amy’s necklace. It’s a gold Star of David that she was given as a baby. I never take it off. I wear her ring too. On some days I even wear her clothes – her T-shirts – and I feel closer to her. As I said, there are no rules for grief. There are days when I feel at peace with Amy and there are nights when I wake up crying. But I try not to dwell on the negative parts of her life, nor on how her death devastated my family. I keep going, as I have always done, busying myself with anything I can. It seems to be the only way I can get through each day. I celebrate Amy’s talent and appreciate the great gift she gave to the world. It will live on well after I and my family have gone. The Amy Winehouse Foundation, too, has already begun to make a difference to the lives of other children who, for whatever reason, are set on a wayward and downward path in life. It means so much to me that all my proceeds from this book will be donated to Amy’s charity. We want to work with many more children in the future and help them realize their potential, and I know Amy is with us every step of the way. I choose not to mourn Amy. I have her albums and a live concert she performed in São Paulo on my iPod. Hers is the only voice that spurs me upstairs and on to my exercise bike to go through the workouts I do to alleviate the discomfort of my MS. I’m not sure I’d get there otherwise. There are moments, though, when I hear the nakedness of her voice and I wonder how much the world under­ stood of Amy’s vulnerability. She was a singer, a superstar, an addict and a young woman who hurtled towards an untimely death. To me, though, she is simply Amy. She was my daughter and my friend, and she will be with me forever. Excerpted from "LOVING AMY: A Mother’s Story" by Janis Winehouse. Copyright © 2014 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

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Conservatives in a meltdown: National Review’s confused “Against Trump” issue is an amazing testament to the right’s implosion

The big release of the latest National Review edition, with a cover declaring "Against Trump," on Thursday night was above all other things a wonderful gift not just to liberals, but anyone who lives outside of the conservative tribe. Because it gives us a glimpse, however temporary, of what it feels like to be a Trump supporter. I defy readers to take one look at the cover and not feel an overwhelming surge of contempt for these establishment conservatives who love to pander to the camo-crowd when it suits them, but get fussy when the rubes rise up and start demanding real skin in the game. You want to rub their smug little faces right in Donald Trump's ridiculous hair and ask how they like those apples. Any discerning reader knows that, on some level, you're meant to root for the monster to turn on Dr. Frankenstein, for the Pied Piper to take the children away, for Satan to finally come for Dr. Faustus. And so it's impossible not to take pleasure in watching the conservative base come extract its pound of Trump-shaped flesh out of the establishment. It's no mystery why the National Review and their supporters hate Trump. He's vulgar and embarrassing and he does an even better job of exploiting the right-wing rubes and their racism and their provincialism and their ridiculous sense of oppression than they do. They are, in other words, haters. And Trump dismissed them as the haters they are with ease during his press conference Thursday night where he called the National Review a "dead paper" that almost no one reads anymore. This impression is driven home by actually reading the issue. The editors can't quite seem to decide what their exact objections to Trump are. Is it that he's driving the right too far in the direction of fascism or that he's a secret liberal in disguise? Both! Whatever you need to hear! The strategy is argument through overwhelming. They'll throw everything they've got, even contradictory stuff, at the reader and hope the sheer volume of words impresses them enough to vote for Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink strategy produces some hilarious contradictions. The main anti-Trump editorial, written by the editors, darkly warns that Trump isn't the racist that his followers think he is. "Trump says he will put a big door in his beautiful wall, an implicit endorsement of the dismayingly conventional view that current levels of legal immigration are fine," they write, even trying to get the reader to believe that Trump's mass deportation plan is "poorly disguised amnesty". But then, in the writer round-up, we're hearing a different story. "Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign," David Boaz sniffs, adding that America "aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone." So which is it, guys? Is Trump offensive because he's too nativist or because he's not devoted enough to keeping the foreigners out? Whatever will make you not vote for him, I guess. A similar question emerges when it comes to the conservative obsession with masculinity, which they confuse with strength. The editors write that Trump "has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug." On the other hand, Ben Domenech worries that Trump is "a tyrannical monarch" who he believes is too eager to "impose [his] will on the nation". Mona Charen chimes in agreement, saying "conservatism implies a certain modesty about government." So which is it? Does a big ego make one weak or is the problem that it makes one too strong and authoritarian? Both, I guess! Depends on if you're more of an anxious masculinity conservative or if you're one who likes to delude yourself into believing you're a libertarian sort. Either way, don't vote Trump! The self-contradictions are particularly amusing, to me at least, on the issue of women. Charen denounces Trump for his need to "constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women". But she and many of the other writers also warn the reader about Trump's pro-choice past, insinuating that he's not on board with the anti-choice movement. A movement, may I remind you, that is passing mandatory ultrasound and waiting period laws and other medically unnecessary regulations, for the purpose of insulting and shaming women. This self-important National Review manifesto can't even decide how to feel about the practice of insulting and belittling people. On one hand, as Charen writes, they believe it's a sign of "a pitifully insecure person". What then to make of the fact that much of the anti-Trump argument is rooted in cheap shots at the man, from the you're-a-girl insult regarding his behavior around Putin to Mark Helprin's swipe at Trump for having "hair like the tinsel on discarded Christmas trees". I guess everyone at the National Review is a "pitifully insecure person", so why is it only a crime when said insulter is Donald Trump? Is it because he's better at it than you guys? It's tough to say what the National Review expected out of this, besides selling more issues. And even that has a strong possibility of backfiring, as this attack gave Trump an opportunity to imply, with cause, that they are using his name to bolster their declining sales. If the idea was to pry base voters off Trump, good luck with that. All this does is confirm base voter suspicions that the conservative establishment sees them as a bunch of useful idiots who are to be slapped down the second they start thinking they have a real voice in the movement. If the idea was to take a stand and lay out a clear line between the bellicose base and the more refined party elite, well, that's backfiring, too, as the RNC reacted to all this by disinviting the National Review to partner with them in the Republican debates. In his anti-Trump screed, Ben Domenech gets on his high horse about how ours is supposed to be a "government of the people, by the people,"  which he claims Trump is threatening. Keep telling yourself that, buddy. Because it looks a whole lot like Trump's popularity is due to "the people" revolting against a system where the establishment calls all the shots. And National Review's flailing shows that the establishment has no idea what to do with that.

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