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For years, white supremacists in the Dothan, Alabama, police department allegedly planted drugs and guns on black people.

According to the Henry County Report, Internal Affairs records show that 
their superiors, several of whom have since been promoted, knew about the practice and helped cover it up. The lieutenant reportedly implicated by the documents is now the chief of the department. The sergeant said to have obstructed the Internal Affairs investigation went on to become sheriff and then director of homeland security for the state, a position he continues to hold today. The district attorney at the time (still in office) sat on exculpatory evidence and proceeded with felony prosecutions against the individuals the officers had framed, Henry County Report writes. 

There’s a lot going on in this story, which the Alabama Justice Project is said to have helped break thanks to anonymous whistleblowers within the Dothan Police Department. But one detail that’s worth highlighting is the alleged affiliation of the dozen or so officers involved with a secretive neo-Confederate organization that holds the Civil Rights Movement to be a Jewish conspiracy and believes the path forward on American race relations is to ship black people back to Africa. 

Often, our discussions of police criminality revolve around concepts of structural racism and implicit bias. That is as it should be. But it’s also important to remember that sometimes it really is just plain, old-fashioned bigotry. 

UPDATE: The Southern Poverty Law Center, which helped disseminate the report and is cited as one of its references, has since issued a retraction via Twitter, explaining that “questions have arisen about the reporting and readers should not assume the claims are true until more information is provided.” The language of this post has been changed to reflect these uncertainties. The New Republic will continue to track and update this story. 

July 03, 2016

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Elie Wiesel, the boy who lived.

Wiesel, who died yesterday at the age of 87, in many ways was the mirror of Anne Frank, the author of the other foundational text of Holocaust literature. Frank was secular, cosmopolitan. The power of her diary partly stemmed from the fact that, if it could happen to the Franks of Amsterdam, then it could happen to anyone. Wiesel, in contrast, was devout, Orthodox, hailing from what used to be Transylvania. Even though he is only 15 years old at the beginning of his memoir Night, he is already on the path toward a life of cloistered study: “By day, the Talmud, at night, the cabbala.” As Philip Roth would write in The Ghost Writer of the universal power of Frank’s diary: “To expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious, bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals—that was pure folly.”

But the world did care, if belatedly—Night was first published in English in 1960, and it would take many more years before it became a staple of high school and college courses. (It was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in 2006.) Sequentially and substantively, it is a kind of sequel to Frank’s diary: It is about what happens when the Nazis get you. If Frank’s diary is the story of a family heroically holding on to the vestiges of civilization in straitened circumstances, then Night is about the total collapse of that civilization, unfolding with the abrupt logic of nightmare: death marches; humans crammed in train cars like cattle; truckloads of babies dumped in fiery ditches; the thick column of smoke rising from the crematory. It is also, emphatically, about the death of Wiesel’s faith in God—his faith in anything at all: “Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”

Yet unlike Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski and other haunted survivors, Wiesel continued to live, for seemingly no other reason than that, like him, no one would ever forget. RIP.

July 01, 2016

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Donald Trump should speak every night of the Republican National Convention.

In a typically megalomaniacal flourish, Trump claimed in an interview published on Friday in The New York Times that he’s been asked to speak every night of the RNC—but he won’t because it would make him look big-headed. “What they’ve asked me to do is to speak all three nights. I turned it down,” he said. “I don’t want people to think I’m grandstanding, which I’m not. But it would get high ratings.”

It’s hard to imagine that anyone at the RNC with the power to allow Trump to speak every night would think it would be a good idea. But setting aside the truth of his assertion, Trump should speak every night at the convention. Trump should put his money where his mouth is—it probably would be good for ratings, especially if the draw for night two is going to be Jon Voight, but there’s only one way to find out. Plus they’re having a hard time lining up speakers, so he might have to, whether he likes it or not. (He likes it.) When Politico asked 50 prominent Republicans if they would speak at the convention, most said they had no interest; in fact, many said they wouldn’t even attend the convention. And finally, Trump has promised an unconventional convention for an unconventional candidate—what’s more unconventional than three primetime speeches from that candidate?

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NBA free agency is nuts.

The NBA’s salary cap shot up $20 million this year, after the league signed a ginormous TV deal, which means that pretty much every team in the league has space to sign free agents, even the teams that don’t deserve it. (The Knicks.) Here’s brand fetishist Darren Rovell, surveying the carnage:

Everyone is getting paid, including a lot of people many casual fans probably aren’t terribly familiar with. The Orlando Magic got Evan Fournier on a sneaky good four-year, $85 million contract. Timofey Mozgov, the NBA’s greatest pitchman, landed with the Lakers on a four-year, $64 million deal. Solomon Hill, who averaged 4 points last year, landed a four-year, $52 million deal. And trigger-happy Evan Turner’s four-year, $70 million contract with the Portland Trail Blazers. Matthew Dellevadova, whose only skill is his ability to injure other players, is going to make $9.5 million a year playing for the Milwaukee Bucks. (As for some of the league’s marquee free agents: Kevin Durant hasn’t decided where he’s going yet, but Andre Drummond and Hassan Whiteside are staying put.)

One of the strange things about this year’s free agency is that, in a time when fans of all stripes pore over the CBA and advance metrics to try to figure out who is and is not actually good at basketball and what is and is not a good contract, it’s incredibly difficult to figure out if any of these deals are actually bad, given the huge cap spike. I briefly panicked when I found out the Knicks were offering Joakim Noah, who has no knees, $18 million a year, before realizing that was the equivalent of him getting $12 million last season. The other strange thing is that people seem to have mostly stopped complaining about how much athletes make—at least compared to some of the hyperbole from a decade ago, when pundits lost their shit over A-Rod’s gigantic Rangers contract. Maybe we’ve just finally come to terms with the fact that owners, not athletes, are the real enemy. Or maybe that will all change when Kent Bazemore gets a max contract.

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Gay Talese has disavowed his disavowal of The Voyeur’s Motel.

On Thursday night, Gay Talese disavowed his upcoming book The Voyeur’s Motel, after The Washington Post presented him with evidence suggesting the book’s primary source lied to him about key details. “I should not have believed a word he said,” Talese told the Post. “I’m not going to promote this book. ... How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”

Well, The Voyeur’s Motel’s credibility may have been flushed down the toilet, but Talese has backtracked on that disavowal. The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter reports that Talese told her that he will, in fact, promote the book.

In a statement released Friday afternoon by Talese and his publisher Grove Atlantic, Talese claimed that he was caught off-guard by the Post and said things he did not mean. “When I spoke to the Washington Post reporter, I am sure I was surprised and upset about this business of the later ownership of the motel, in the eighties,” the statement from Talese reads. “That occurred after the bulk of the events covered in my book, but I was upset and probably said some things I didn’t, and don’t, mean. Let me be clear: I am not disavowing the book and neither is my publisher. If, down the line, there are details to correct in later editions, we’ll do that.” Grove Atlantic’s publisher, Morgan Entrekin, reiterated the fact that most of the book takes place before the 1980s and that the publisher will work with Talese to “address any questions” in future editions.

Talese was almost certainly contractually obligated to promote the book, and disparaging its credibility also was almost certainly a violation of that contract. I’ve reached out to Grove Atlantic for comment.

This post has been updated.

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Donald Trump likes the worst professional athletes.

Back in 2012, he attended an auction in Palm Beach to benefit the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation and got into a bidding war to buy an autographed Tim Tebow helmet. Trump eventually won the bid and agreed to pay $12,000 for it, which is absurd. The rub is that Trump didn’t pay himself. Instead he used “money from a charity he founded in 1987, but which is largely stocked with other people’s money. Trump is the foundation’s president. But, at the time of the auction, Trump had given none of his own money to the foundation for three years running,” according to The Washington Post.

This is a violation of the IRS’s rules against “self-dealing.” It’s also another indication that Donald Trump has absolutely godawful taste in athletes. I mean, Tebow! And while Tom Brady is successful, he’s justly hated by much of the country for being a cheater and a Trump supporter. Other athletes Trump likes include: Mike Tyson (a convicted rapist), Ben Roethlisberger (an accused rapist who also may not like Trump back), Dennis Rodman (a crazy person, who was, to be fair, a very, very good basketball player), Paul O’Neill (a Yankee), Johnny Damon (a sellout), Dana White (a monster), Bobby Knight (a megalomaniacal tyrant), and Mike Ditka (in the running for the worst of the bunch). All of these people suck.

Donald Trump hinted at how he would run against Elizabeth Warren 23 years ago.

These days, Trump gets a lot of guff for calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” But it turns out he has a decades-long history of questioning people’s claims to Native American heritage based on their skin complexion and nothing else.  

In the course of trying to shield himself from competition from Indian gaming, Trump said Native American casino owners were pulling a scam. “They don’t look like Indians to me. And they don’t look like Indians—now maybe you say politically correct or not politically correct—they don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.”

Pocahontases, every one of them.

Getty Images / Bloomberg

A bad week for Europe just got a little worse.

To cap off what will possibly be remembered as a fatal week in the history of the European project, an Austrian court ordered a repeat of May’s presidential run-off election between moderate Alexander Van der Bellen and far-right candidate Norbert Hofer, citing a controversy over absentee ballots.

It appeared that Van der Bellen had won the vote by a slim margin, thwarting Hofer and his Freedom Party’s dreams of winning a national office. Though the position is a largely ceremonial one, Hofer pledged to serve as a more activist executive, running on a platform of xenophobia and Euro-skepticism.

The repeat election, which is slated to occur sometime in September or October, will be a test of whether the right-wing revolt against the European Union and its open-borders policy can gain traction following the Brexit results of last week. A victory for Hofer could likewise be an indicator of even more worrisome developments to come, as France and Germany hold presidential elections in 2017. Surely Marine Le Pen will be looking to Austria for confirmation of her declaration in The New York Times of a pan-European “People’s Spring.”

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Is the media’s dream of a contested Republican convention finally dead?

A convention coup has seemed incredibly unlikely ever since Donald Trump locked up the nomination in early May. Trump won the nomination outright by any metric—stopping him would surely disenfranchise a substantial portion of the Republican electorate—but that hasn’t stopped many from dreaming. As recently as mid-June, there was still talk of an insurrection in Cleveland.

But stopping Donald Trump from accepting the Republican nomination would require the RNC’s rules committee to be stacked with #NeverTrump conservatives. But Politico reports that is far from the case: “At least 72 members of the [112-member] panel intend to smooth Trump’s path to the nomination—not hinder it.” RIP Contested Republican Convention, Feburary 2016-July 2016.

Robin Marchant/GEtty

Gay Talese screwed up.

His upcoming book The Voyeur’s Motel has been controversial since The New Yorker published an excerpt earlier this year. It traces Talese’s decades-long correspondence with Gerald Foos, a voyeur who owned a motel that he modified so he could watch people from the ceiling and record what he saw (mostly people doing it). Foos was bad with ethical issues, obviously. He tells Talese he witnessed a murder but delayed contacting the police. He also has a strange habit of throwing out drug dealers’ stashes, inviting violence. And Talese was implicated as well: He signed a confidentiality agreement with Foos, and joined him on at least one peeping session.

But the book apparently suffers from more than just ethical issues. The Washington Post reports that Foos did not even own the titular motel between 1980 and 1988, which means that much of the information in Foos’s journals was possibly made-up. When presented with this information, Talese renounced the book, saying, “I should not have believed a word he said. ...I’m not going to promote this book. ... How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”

But with or without Talese, Grove Atlantic will still put out the book on July 13. Grove’s publisher, Morgan Entrekin, told the Post that most of the events in the book took place before 1980, though he also said later printings may include an author’s note. Whether there will even be subsequent printings, now that the book’s credibility has been tarnished, is another question, however.

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Bill Clinton just can’t help himself.

He had to go over and say hi to Attorney General Loretta Lynch when they were both at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport earlier this week, even though her Justice Department is investigating whether Hillary Clinton broke the law by setting up a private email server in her home during her tenure as secretary of state. Lynch claims they spoke about personal matters: “He did come over and say hello, and speak to my husband and myself, and talk about his grandchildren and his travels and things like that.” But it obviously doesn’t look good, allowing Republicans to suggest that he used the meeting to strongarm Lynch into a favorable outcome. Lynch now says she will defer to whatever decision federal prosecutors and the FBI make about the email server, a bid to ease concerns that she could personally affect the outcome of the investigation. As someone who takes almost an obscene enjoyment out of glad-handing, particularly with powerful people, it is more likely than not that Bill Clinton actually did just want to chat. But sometimes you just have to say no to that voice in your head that needs to know what Loretta Lynch is up to these days.