Menu
Magazine

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The University of Chicago is attacking academic freedom.

Jay Ellison, dean of students, has sent a letter to the incoming class of 2020 outlining the school’s policy on academic freedom:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

Ellison’s letter is a perverse document. It’s very much like the French Burkini ban: an illiberal policy justified in the name of liberal values. As CUNY historian Angus Johnston notes, “There’s no college in the country where profs are required to give trigger warnings. They’re all voluntary pedagogical choices. Which means a professor’s use of trigger warnings isn’t a threat to academic freedom. It’s a MANIFESTATION of academic freedom.”

Johnston is exactly on-point. Prior to Ellison’s letter, University of Chicago professors had the right to use trigger warnings or not use them. Now, if a professor decides to use them, he or she will face administrative opposition. Academic freedom means that professors get to design their syllabus, not administrators like Ellison. His letter is a prime example of how the outcry against “political correctness” often leads to policy changes that limit free speech.

Update: Responding to queries from the group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) about the issues raised in this article, the University of Chicago stated that this letter was not meant to be a ban on trigger warnings. However, the issue of a ban (which wasn’t raised in the article) doesn’t get at the problem: the university administration is clearly making a stance on a pedagogical decision that has traditionally been left up to professors. That in itself constitutes a chilling effect and breach of academic freedom.

July 05, 2017

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump to Poland: Please clap.

Ahead of a G-20 summit in Germany, Trump will visit Poland on Wednesday, for seemingly no other reason except that he has been promised a warm reception by the Polish government. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who heads Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, is a big fan of Trump, calling the president’s visit a “new success.” Dominik Tarczynski, another Law and Justice party member, said, “It’s going to be huge—absolutely huge.” Reportedly all members of the party have been instructed to bus in 50 constituents each to Warsaw so that Trump will be met by cheering crowds for what’s being billed as a “great patriotic picnic.” Sounds totally normal and fun.

H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, has said that Trump will deliver a speech that will “lay out a vision, not only for America’s future relationship with Europe, but the future of our transatlantic alliance.” As Remi Adekoya writes in the Guardian, “this would certainly be viewed as a diplomatic coup for Warsaw, and a snub to the likes of Berlin and London where such an important speech might have been expected to be made.” Poland’s government has also taken a hard line on refugee policies, something that Trump will likely endorse.

According to a recent Pew Research poll, less than a quarter of Poles have confidence in Trump when it comes to world affairs. But it probably won’t look that way thanks to the Polish government, which has set a new standard for remaining in good standing with the United States: holding a giant pro-Trump picnic.

Trump is about to get an earful in Europe for his climate-change denial.

The president left Washington, D.C., for Poland on Wednesday for the annual G-20 summit. This year’s theme is “sustainability,” so, naturally, Trump is expected to be grilled over his controversial decision to leave the Paris climate agreement.

World leaders do not appear to be taking the U.S. decision lightly. Last week, Newsweek reported that German chancellor Angela Merkel “vowed confrontation” with Trump at the G-20 over his refusal to work with other countries to fight global warming. “The differences are obvious and it would be dishonest to try to cover that up. That I won’t do,” she said.

Though the U.S. has contributed more to global warming than any other country, Trump—though his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and his domestic energy agenda—has isolated the U.S. as the only major country not promising to do anything about it. As such, Merkel is emerging as Trump’s most outspoken critic in the international community. Last week, she shamed him for not accepting the science behind the threat. “We can’t wait for the last man on Earth to be convinced by the scientific evidence for climate change,” she said. Trump also spoke with Merkel about “climate issues” over the phone on Monday, according to a White House press release.

Other countries have been speaking out against the president in their own ways. Following Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris agreement, French President Emmanuel Macron offered American climate scientists grant money to come to France, using the cheeky slogan: “Make Our Planet Great Again.” And in a newspaper editorial this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Merkel called on countries to work together on climate change, implicitly calling out the United States.

STR/Getty

Trump’s approach to North Korea has only made things worse.

Three weeks before taking office, Donald Trump issued a stark warning to North Korea:

Trump has largely stuck to this tough-guy approach. He has threatened China with tariffs if it doesn’t keep its belligerent client-state in check, and has said that if China won’t stop North Korea then the United States will be forced to act unilaterally.

There was a brief pause in this policy after Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” Trump said about China’s complicated relationship with North Korea. But since then, Trump has repeatedly responded to North Korean missile tests with saber-rattling, apparently convinced that the threat of a U.S. strike—which is clearly a bluff—would stop North Korea’s missile program in its tracks.

Then on Monday evening North Korea launched a missile capable of reaching Alaska. In response, Trump has stuck to the same flawed approach:

The problem with this strategy isn’t just that it isn’t working, it’s that it has made things worse. Trump’s belligerence has boxed North Korea in—if it were to stop testing intercontinental ballistic missiles now, it would look like it was giving in to Trump’s bluffs. Trump has almost no good options, but he is proving that it is still possible to make a bad situation even worse.

July 03, 2017

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Trump’s EPA suffers its first major loss in court.

A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is not allowed to delay an Obama-era regulation limiting methane pollution from the oil and gas industries. Pruitt announced last month that he would halt the rule for two years, meaning oil and gas companies would not have to place strict limits on emissions of methane, which is the main component of natural gas and a powerful greenhouse gas.

Pruitt—a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry and a climate-change denier—had attempted to delay the rule at the request of oil and gas industry players, who said they did not have enough time to comment on the regulations, which were finalized in May 2016. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the industry had “had ample opportunity” to weigh in on the rule, and therefore EPA’s decision to delay it was “arbitrary and capricious” under the law.

Environmental groups say the decision suggests Pruitt might have trouble with his slow-walking strategy for dismantling Barack Obama’s climate and environmental legacy. For instance, Pruitt also announced a one-year delay for states to meet the requirements of Obama’s ground-level ozone rule, which limited the amount of emissions that cause smog. “The ruling recognizes that EPA lacks the authority to simply scrap these critical protections,” David Doniger, a director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

However, as Mother Jones’ Rebecca Leber noted, Pruitt is not out of options if this legal strategy fails. There’s much more he can do beyond delaying regulations to meet his goal of weakening America’s environmental policies.

Win McNamee/Getty

Banning Trump from Twitter is a really stupid idea.

The president’s latest round of controversial tweets, including one with a video showing him body-slamming a man with the logo of CNN superimposed on his face, has led to renewed calls that Trump’s twitter account be suspended. Journalist professor and all-around silly person Seth Abramson tweeted out:

As CNN reports, Twitter has rejected such calls and doesn’t believe the body-slam tweet goes against its rules: “Twitter said it considered three factors: the political context of the conversation surrounding the tweet, the various ways it could be interpreted and the lack of details in the tweet itself.”

Twitter’s response is correct and could be extended. Suspending Trump’s account is a singularly idiotic idea. The problem with Trump is not that he tweets out mean things but that he’s president of the United States. Because he’s a powerful figure, there is a manifest public interest in being able to access his thoughts and get a sense of what he considers to be important, which Twitter allows the public to do.

Trump’s tweets are of immense importance politically. They can and have been used against him by opponents and by courts reviewing his executive orders. He’s written at least one tweet that could be the basis of impeachment. If there’s an attempt to remove Trump via the 25th Amendment, his tweets could also be evidence of mental unfitness. The fake civility that will be won by banishing Trump from Twitter is a negligible value compared to the genuine importance of having the tweets as part of the public record.

The circular logic of Donald Trump’s tweets.

On Sunday, Donald Trump tweeted a video of him pummeling a man with CNN’s logo for a face, a choppy edit of an old Trump WWE appearance that was made by Redditor HanAssholeSolo, who has a lengthy archive of racist and anti-semitic posts.

It managed to be both silly and threatening, which is probably as good a description of Trump’s first six months as president as there is. It also, unsurprisingly, ate up coverage on the Sunday shows and space on Monday’s front pages. The usual questions followed: Has Trump gone too far? Why isn’t he taking the threat against journalists more seriously? Shouldn’t he be focused on health care? Or opioids? Or Syria? Or literally anything else?

But Trump, as usual, just kept tweeting. In the 24 hours after he sent the WWE tweet, he attacked the “dishonest media” for trying to prevent him from achieving his goals; he took undeserved credit for the stock market and the unemployment rate; praised the military; announced, for some reason that he would be speaking to Germany and France (and later, Italy) on Monday morning; and expressed optimism (albeit in a somewhat ominous way) about the prospect of peace in the Middle East. And then, the punchline:

Trump is unusually manic right now, but that only means that the normal cycle of his tweets is sped up. This is what Trump has been doing for years now. He’ll say something outrageous, offensive, and/or dangerous, either on Twitter or at a rally. Then the media will cover this statement as the outrageous, and/or dangerous statement that it is for hours or days. And then Trump blames the media for paying attention to his dumb statement which was designed to get media attention, instead of his administration’s (extremely sketchy) successes. But even Trump must know that this is all a game. If Trump really wanted the media to pay attention to things that weren’t his tweets, then he would stop tweeting.

Chris Christie might be privately using a state beach that he shut down but he is definitely NOT getting any sun.

Christie failed to reach a compromise with the Democratic state assembly to pass a budget before July 1, the start of the fiscal year, which means that all of the state parks are closed over the holiday weekend. But any good politician knows that crisis is another word for opportunity and Christie took advantage of the crisis in typical fashion. On Sunday, he and his family took to the deserted beach to catch some rays.

Solidifying his status as the most unpopular governor in America, The Star-Ledger published aerial photos of Christie and his family lounging on Island Beach State Park on Sunday afternoon.

Christie has access to the closed park via a very special retreat known as the “Governor’s Ocean House.” When asked about whether this was fair or not, instead of answering like a normal empathetic human being, Christie told reporters, “Run for governor, and you can have a residence there.” After the photos were taken, Christie was asked at a news conference whether or not he had gotten any sun on Sunday, which he denied. When Christie’s spokesman was later told about the aerial beach photos, he admitted the governor was at the beach but insisted that indeed Christie “did not get any sun” because “he had a baseball hat on.”

July 02, 2017

MANDEL NGAN / Getty Images

How Donald Trump lost his mind.

The Atlantic published an article Sunday with the intentionally provocative and misleading title, “How the Left Lost Its Mind.” The story is instead a “topography of the left’s modern alternative media landscape” (emphasis mine), one that staff writer McKay Coppins hopes “provides a useful start to the kind of exploration and anthropology that’s needed.” Noting that “the denizens of the fever swamps” have taken over the Republican Party, he asks:

Could the same thing happen on the left?

It’s a prospect that deserves more serious attention and debate than it’s gotten this year. The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America.

This prospect has indeed gotten much attention this year. Coppins notes a New Republic blog post by Sarah Jones that pleads, “Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.” But this outlet has also published several lengthier interrogations, as have Buzzfeed, Vox, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Safe to say, the subject has received plenty of “serious attention and debate.”

Which is not to say it isn’t worthy of further exploration, and Coppins’s story is generally a useful contribution. But there are several noteworthy quibbles:

The most glaring issue with Coppins’s article, though, is beyond his control: It was published just hours before the president of the United States tweeted:

This put the problem of alternative liberal media in necessary perspective.

Like Coppins, I cannot deliver on the headline of my piece. I do not know when Donald Trump lost his mind. But there can be no doubt that, to the extent that Trump ever was sane, he lost his mind well before he became a serious White House contender. The left should militate against any creeping conspiracy-mongering among its ranks, even if the problem pales in comparison to the psychosis of practically the entire right-wing media ecosystem. But make no mistake: The right lost its mind a long time ago, and this is not just some pesky trend in one of our two major parties, but a full-blown national crisis that shows no sign of abating.

June 30, 2017

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Republicans governors are joining the Trump resistance.

Civil liberties and voting rights advocates sounded the alarm earlier this week after President Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—which is meant to address the non-existent problem of mass voter fraud—wrote to all 50 states “requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state,” according to The Washington Post. Now a growing bipartisan group of governors is pushing back.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert‏ and Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox—both Republicans—announced on Friday that their state won’t hand over private voter data, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers, to the commission. “While my office is required to provide public records to this Commission, as we would to any other person or entity,” Cox said in a statement, “I assure the voters of Utah that we will only provide information that is otherwise available to the public.” He stressed, “There has been no evidence of mass voter fraud in Utah.”

Democratic state officials are, of course, resisting demands from Trump’s panel, widely seen as a pretext for voter suppression. (“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression,” Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe said in his statement.) But Utah isn’t the only red state pushing back. Oklahoma officials also said they won’t release partial Social Security numbers to the federal government.

The bipartisan backlash on voter fraud coincides with a series of GOP governors joining Democrats in opposing Senate Republicans’ health care bill. As The Hill reported on Thursday, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu joined Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Arizona’s Doug Ducey in voicing concern over the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. Trump is desperate for a “win” in his beleaguered young presidency, but headed into the July 4 weekend, his own party increasingly is declaring independence from him.

Drew Angerer/Getty

There may be evidence of direction collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Donald Trump and those closest to him have repeatedly insisted that there was no such collusion during the 2016 election. It could easily be argued that direct collusion was unnecessary—Trump publicly encouraged Russian hacks and gleefully disseminated information that came from them, making active collusion unnecessary. But it’s no surprise that Trump and his team have taken the allegation so seriously. Evidence that members of the campaign were in contact with a foreign government that was intent on influencing the election would be borderline treasonous.

On Thursday evening, The Wall Street Journal published a story that could be the first step in establishing that there was some collusion between Russian intelligence and members of the Trump campaign. According to the Journal, Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative, attempted to acquire the 33,000 “missing” emails from Hillary Clinton’s email server and reached out to hackers in an effort to get them. Smith, who died in May, implied that he was working with Michael Flynn, and “assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers, and a Russian-speaking investigator” to locate the emails.

“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Smith said. The Journal also reports that U.S. intelligence intercepted conversations between Russian hackers who were discussing how to get Clinton’s emails and then send them to Flynn via an intermediary, possibly Smith.

There are lots of unanswered questions in this story, the biggest being why Russia would choose Smith, seemingly a nonentity, as an intermediary in its attempt to influence the U.S. election. But this story puts cracks in two important narratives. The first is that Smith suggests he knew that some of the hackers were working with the Russian government, which contradicts one possible defense: that Trump campaign officials were interacting with cutouts and weren’t aware of their connection to Moscow.

The second, which is much more important, is that if Smith is telling the truth and that he and Flynn were working directly with hackers they suspected of working with the Russian government, then that blows up Trump’s claim that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. A Trump campaign official tried to preemptively spin this, telling the Journal that any coordination with Flynn “would have been in his capacity as a private individual.” But that only shows how weak Trump’s defense is if this story is true.