Slate Voice: Recent Episodes
Slate
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
The early days of 2019—which is to say, the early days of the 2020 campaign—have been dominated by the Democratic Party’s left wing. Early big-name entrants Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand were all quick to plant their flags squarely on progressive soil.
On Monday night, President Donald Trump held a rally in El Paso, Texas. He chose the location based on his claim, delivered in last week’s State of the Union address, that a border wall had rescued the city from rampant crime. By the time Trump arrived, fact-checkers had demolished this lie, pointing out that the wall had no effect. But Trump told his followers to dismiss the numbers and trust him instead.
The day that began with a media furor around Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent tweets did not end the way many on the left feared it would. While centrist Democrats and the party’s leadership predictably criticized the first-year congresswoman from Minnesota for her tweets about the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), most of the party’s progressive base rallied behind her.
President Donald Trump is not a fan of the border deal that congressional negotiators struck Monday night, the one that he would need to sign by the end of the week to avoid the year’s second government shutdown. While he said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday that he would have to “study it,” he was “not happy about it. It’s not doing the trick.” But! He didn’t say he would veto it.
Three years ago, when Donald Trump emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner, critics decried his ruthlessness. Since then, they’ve grown numb to it. They think his State of the Union address on Tuesday night was long, trite, and boring. In reality, the speech was laced with authoritarianism. Here’s what Trump said and why it’s dangerous. 1. I am the savior of the nation.
On Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump called for legislation to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” said Trump. On Thursday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president renewed his plea. “Every life is sacred,” he declared. “We must build a culture that cherishes the dignity and sanctity of innocent human life.” Abortion is a serious matter.
We’re still 368 days away from the Iowa Caucus (Feb. 3, 2020), 532 days from the end of the Democratic National Convention (July 16, 2020), and a whopping 642 from Election Day (Nov. 3, 2020). It is understandable if you prefer to check out from the permanent campaign for at least a few more months.
In the days since a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook was published, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has resisted calls for resignation from all corners of his party. The Democratic caucuses of both branches of the Virginia state legislature have asked Northam to step down, as have Northam’s predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, and multiple Democrats who’ve announced 2020 presidential runs.
Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, swears he’s telling the truth. On Friday, Northam confessed to appearing in a racist photo in a 1984 yearbook. On Saturday, after Democrats called on him to resign, he reversed himself and said it was a case of mistaken identity. “I will stand and live by my word,” Northam told reporters at an afternoon press conference.
President Donald Trump says he has a mandate to build a border wall. “I was elected partially on this issue,” he declared at the White House on Thursday. Trump thinks that by claiming to have won the 2016 election based on his pledge to build a wall, he can bully Congress into accepting it. He’s bluffing. A close look at election results in 2016 and 2018 shows that Democrats who reject the wall—even those who represent states Trump won—are standing on firm ground.
Conservative politicians and right-wing activists have targeted a Virginia state legislator this week and in the process reignited a nationwide debate about third-trimester abortions. Delegate Kathy Tran’s bill, which was tabled by a House of Delegates subcommittee this week, would have loosened some restrictions on second- and third-trimester abortions, which are legal in the state under specific circumstances.
It was most likely the airports that finally broke the dam. Friday afternoon, as news reports of disrupted flights poured in and the shutdown hit Day 36, Donald Trump finally announced that he would cave completely—if temporarily—on his demands for a border wall. The government will now reopen for three weeks, at the end of which time, he was careful to threaten, he may declare a national emergency if he doesn’t get his way.
How long must a government shutdown go on before Congress decides it can’t risk another one? We may soon find out if 35 days was long enough. The longest government shutdown in history just concluded with the instigator, President Trump, suffering the same fate as instigators past: humiliating himself for all to see, enraging elements of his base by caving, and failing to secure even a dime of the policy for which he had been holding out. Shutdowns are lousy leverage.
President Donald Trump has yet to break ground on his great border wall, but already it’s proving to be a powerful deterrent. Republicans are running away from it. In TV interviews last weekend, Republican lawmakers bent over backward to avoid the word wall. “I happen to agree with the president on barriers,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine pledged “to continue to build physical barriers.
Hillary Clinton said that she kept hot sauce in her bag when she was interviewed on black talk radio in April 2016. Jeb Bush released a Spanish-language Cinco de Mayo ad to celebrate the holiday in 2015 and sold a $75 branded “guaca bowle” on his campaign website during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. The person standing next to me immediately said, “We need to primary this guy in 2020.
Last month, a 29-year-old woman who’s been in a persistent vegetative state since she was a toddler went into labor and gave birth. An employee of the Arizona health care facility where she’s resided for more than 26 years swears no one had any idea she was pregnant until she started exhibiting signs of physical distress during labor.
I’d naively hoped that America would spend the anniversary of Roe v. Wade talking about what the future holds for the tired and embattled women of this country, some of whom have finally won a little political power. Instead (and as usual) the nation spent the day arguing over the inflammatory actions of a bunch of dudes. The inciting incident was a short video of an inconclusive confrontation. It was shot—absurdly, but maybe appropriately—in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
These are devastating times for survivors of sexual assault. It is devastating to live through the constant barrage of new accusations, and it is devastating to have witnessed a credibly accused man like Brett Kavanaugh elevated to the Supreme Court. It is also devastating to have lived through the 2016 election, when credible accusations of sexual misconduct and assault from numerous women did not prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.
What does it look like for a legislative stalemate of four weeks, during which time zero progress has been made toward a conclusion, to actually begin getting worse? It looks much like the two central players in the stalemate trolling each other through the cancellation of the other’s plans.
Politics quickly eclipsed horror after Robert Bowers allegedly gunned down 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October. The shooting, the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history, almost immediately became intertwined with Donald Trump’s divisive presidency.
When I attended the Women’s March convention in October 2017, I expected to witness little more than a three-day pep rally. Women with the financial capacity to take time off work, travel to Detroit, and abide the business-casual dress code would spend a weekend listening to rousing speeches and celebrity-stocked panels.
In the last week, we’ve learned several new things about past and ongoing contacts between President Donald Trump, his aides, and Russia. These revelations cast doubt on the president’s denials of collusion. Trump and his surrogates dismiss these stories, but their answers raise further questions. Those questions can and should be investigated. Here are the new developments.
In all the noise surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, much of the attention centered on her has been hostile or leering, racist or white-knighty or paparazzish—and predictably focused on her looks. While the left certainly isn’t exempt, the response from the right has been notable not just for its frenzied ubiquity, but for the gendered stink of the efforts to undermine her.
In a monologue that aired on Tucker Carlson’s nightly Fox News show on Jan. 2, the right-wing pundit did something out of character: He leveled a radical critique of policies supported by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. A prominent host criticizing the right on its favorite network would be surprising enough. But the nature of Carlson’s commentary was shocking.
The dynamics of workplace sexual harassment are often easy to understand. Typically, the harasser is in a position of power, making it difficult for his or her victims to resist or to report sexual advances without risking their careers.
Taken at face value, rhetoric from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security would lead Americans to believe that the United States is facing a terrorism crisis at our southern border. The picture being painted is one in which thousands of terrorists have been stopped from crossing the border to infiltrate the homeland. If that were true, that would indeed be a crisis. In reality, no such crisis exists.
As we enter the 20th day of federal workers being unable to go to their jobs, contractors being unable to get paid, and those reliant on federal services being unable to access them, all because the president is unyielding in his demand that a physical barrier be constructed on the southern border, it is worth considering: Isn’t there a better way? Of course there is. Various options exist for eliminating government shutdowns permanently, some of which have been kicked around for years.
As the shutdown stretches on, the Trump administration is beginning to realize theseverity of its consequencesfor millions of Americans and is desperately searching for a way out. While President Donald Trump did notdeclare a national emergencyduring his speech on Tuesday night and subsequently direct the military to build a border wall, the plan remains on the table.
Last month, special counsel Robert Mueller revealed something disturbing about former FBI Director James Comey. Here’s what Mueller disclosed: In January 2017, when Comey sent FBI agents to interview then–national security adviser Michael Flynn, Comey bypassed his own boss, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. The story sounds innocuous, and it doesn’t serve either party’s narrative, so nobody made a fuss about it. But it’s important.
There’s an extraordinary scene in the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex,in which crusading civil rights attorney Ginsburg takes her rebellious teenage daughter Jane to a rundown street somewhere in Manhattan sometime in the ’70s to meet with civil rights attorney Dorothy Kenyon, played Kathy Bates–ishly by Kathy Bates.
To: Congressional Republicans From: The White House Re: Talking points on the shutdown Over the past two weeks, we’ve noticed that many of you are having trouble articulating where our party stands in the present impasse. You seem confused about whether we support or oppose the shutdown, what we’re waiting for, and what we’re trying to accomplish. We encourage you, as always, to follow the president’s lead. Here are the points he has emphasized since Dec.
House Democratic leaders made public on Tuesday night one of the first big pieces of legislation they would vote on: the rules governing the 116th Congress. The package makes substantial changes to the rules under which House Republicans had governed for the past eight years.
It’s officially 2019, which means it’s time to talk about 2020—or more specifically, who could win the Democratic nomination and the right to take on Donald Trump in the general election. Several dozen Democrats have already emerged as potential challengers, with Elizabeth Warren getting a head start on everyone else by announcing her candidacy on New Year’s Eve.
Since she lost her bid for a third term as a U.S. senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill has been trashing the left to anyone who’ll listen. She’s insulted Democrats who wanted her to be a more vocal critic of the president, Senate colleagues who questioned her opposition to banking regulations, and progressives who try to push their more moderate representatives to the left.
Before Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the relationship between white racial views and partisanship wasn’t as clear-cut as one might think. Yes, Republicans won the large majority of white voters who believed black disadvantage could be attributed to a lack of hard work or effort—a key measure in the “racial resentment scale”—but a substantial minority of white voters was part of the Democratic coalition as well.
In 2009, House Republicans went hat-in-hand to the American people begging for a another chance. After squandering their majority status in the George W. Bush years and getting creamed at the polls in 2006 and 2008, they promised voters that they would do better next time. Specifically, they pledged that they wouldn’t send deficits soaring again. GOP Reps.
Twenty years ago, a sharply divided House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton, against the wishes of a majority of the American people. Now that President Trump has been publicly implicated in serious criminal conduct, the question of whether the president will be impeached and removed from office is once again front and center.
President Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claim that the men around the president have betrayed him. First these “rats” turned on Trump. Then they lied about him. Then they did the dirtiest thing of all: They produced evidence.
Nancy Pelosi has at last put down the rebellion against her and will now have the votes she needs to return to the speakership after eight years in the House minority. She did it, though, by negotiating on the one issue that she had refused to even consider when the rebellion began.
The Weekly Standard shut down on Friday after 23 years of publication. In an unceremonious execution, MediaDC, the magazine’s owner, instructed staff to clear out their desks by the end of the day. According to co-founder John Podhoretz, MediaDC chose to kill the outlet so it could strip-mine its assets and subscriber list.
President Trump thinks he’ll win a fight with Democrats over paying for a wall on the Mexican border. “If we don’t get what we want … I will shut down the government,” Trump told Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker–designate Nancy Pelosi in a televised Oval Office meeting on Tuesday.
Americans may never rid ourselves of our collective need to narrate political conflict in military terms. Everything must be understood as a pitched battle between two clear opposing sides. This is not an especially illuminating way of looking at things—nor does it meaningfully narrate the messiness of the present. Still, for years now, media narratives have tended to flatten complicated dynamics into the simpler concept of battle.
The Supreme Court declined to hear two Planned Parenthood–related cases on Monday, leaving in place two lower court opinions that favor the health care organization. Those opinions held that states violate federal law when they cut Planned Parenthood affiliates out of state Medicaid programs, as many states have tried to do since 2015.
In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won a “trifecta” of legislative and executive power. They used their newfound power to aggressively gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting. In 2016, Democrats reversed those gains, narrowly toppling incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory—and the GOP Legislature responded by stripping the incoming executive of key powers and privileges.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republicans escalated their lame-duck power grab, confirming 82 appointees from outgoing Gov. Scott Walker after passing bills to lock in conservative policy and keep incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers from exercising meaningful power over state government. The hypocrisy is striking. In 2010, then–Gov.-elect Scott Walker asked outgoing Democratic incumbent Jim Doyle not to “finalize any permanent civil service personnel” as he finished his term.
Just in time for the holidays, the New York Times has published a heartwarming tale of Twitter enemies who learned to be friends. In the piece, Bari Weiss, the Intellectual Dark Web–fetishizing Times opinion writer, and Vice politics writer Eve Peyser explain how they came to like each other’s IRL personas better than their Twitter ones.
It feels much longer than 14 years since President George W. Bush declared that the U.S. should have “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world … by force of arms when necessary” in his second inaugural address.
When the CIA catches dictators doing bad things, the dictators often pay lobbyists to lie about what’s been discovered. Now the dictators can save their money because President Donald Trump is doing their hatchet work against the CIA for free. Trump has dismissed the agency’s findings about Russian interferencein the 2016 election. He has brushed offU.S. intelligence showing that North Korea isbuilding new missiles.
Nancy Pelosi cleared the first hurdle to regaining her former position as speaker of the House on Wednesday, earning 203 yes votes and 32 noes from her fellow Democrats. To get the gig, she has to turn 15 of those no votes into yeses by January, when the floor vote takes place. It’s been frustrating to watch members of both parties do battle over who Pelosi is, what she’s done, and whether she deserves another term as speaker, because there seems to be little room for nuance.
Some presidential reputations are like great red wines: They get better with time. There is no modern president about whom this is more true than the one we lost Friday, George Herbert Walker Bush. Twenty-six years ago, when he ran for re-election, Bush received the lowest percentage of the vote of any incumbent since William Howard Taft in 1912. He had been rejected by the American people and felt it.
The special counsel’sdraft statement of offense for Jerome Corsiincludes much extraordinary information.
With most of the votes from the midterm election tallied, we now have a better sense of the scale of the Democratic victory. It is historic. Thus far, Democrats have earned more than 8.8 million more votes than Republicans, flipped 39 seats, and are poised to win a 40th as election officials continue counting ballots in California. In terms of their House margin, this makes 2018 the Democratic Party’s strongest midterm performance since Watergate.
Theprimary mandateof special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is to determine if there are “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
I grew up in Bedford, New Hampshire, an extremely Republican town of about 23,000 people that hadn’t elected a Democrat to state office since before World War II. That is, until earlier this month, when my middle school guidance counselor won her very first political campaign. Sue Mullen, 62, bested six Republicans, five other Democrats, and one libertarian to become one of Bedford’s 6½ (it’s complicated) representatives in the state House.
Ed Stetzer is grappling with a moral crisis. Stetzer, the director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, is preaching the Gospel to his fellow Christians. And they’re not listening. “White evangelicals are highly motivated to support President Donald Trump around the issue of immigration,” Stetzer, a Trump critic, wrote in Vox on the morning of the midterms.
Incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Capitol Hill this week for an orientation program for newly elected representatives. Conservative commentators relished the opportunity to take a few shots at their new favorite political punching bag.
I can’t say I was surprised when Michael Avenatti was arrested on suspicion of felonydomestic violence on Wednesday. It’s not that he seems like someone who’d assault a romantic partner. For one thing, that’s not something you can accurately glean from a guy’s tweets and cable news appearances. For another, Avenatti strongly denies the allegations.
If you watched the first video clip in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story on Monday without knowing a thing about her, you might think you’d stumbled across an extremely popular, refreshingly unpolished lifestyle blogger. “As promised, I’m going to give you the recipe for this Instagram Live black bean soup,” she said, her smartphone camera wobbling from a poorly lit pot of brown sludge to her own un-made-up face. “It is from Bon Appétit.
The midterm elections did not give Democrats a singular leader to rally behind, nor did it settle ideological divides in the party. But the results can tell us a lot about the mood among Democratic voters, and what they might be looking for in a 2020 presidential nominee. First, much hay has been made about the choice between progressives on one hand and moderates or “centrists” on the other.
Following House Democrats’ first full meeting with both their departing members and incoming members-elect, reporters asked Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan—who’s organizing a suddenly serious opposition to Nancy Pelosi’s bid for speaker—whether he and his allies would really follow through with the effort that’s driving such a rift within the caucus, on its first day in charge, during its first vote. “Yes,” he said. He didn’t miss a beat.
This story originally appeared on AndrewGelman.com and has been republished here with permission. What can we really learn from what happened in the 2018 midterm elections? When we talk about election results, we’re always discussing them on three levels: their direct political consequences, their implications for future politics, and what they allow us to infer about public opinion.
This article is part ofWatching Fox, a Slate series about Fox News. When the sun rose on Wednesday morning, Steve Doocy was pouring coffee at a diner in Branson, Missouri. The Fox & Friends co-host had been in Springfield the night before, reporting on Missourians’ reactions to the midterm election results, and he had gone out for some breakfast.
Ever since Donald Trump won 53 percent of white women’s votes in the 2016 election, a predictable back-and-forth plays out in progressive circles when exit polls trickle in from right-leaning states and districts. Analysts and activists tweet out the numbers, remarking that white women supported the Republican candidate over the Democratic one.
In the nine months since Jaclyn Corin survived the Februaryshooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, she hasorganized a lobbying tripto Tallahassee for 100 of her classmates, traveled the country registering young people to vote, and helped lead amarch of thousandson the National Mall.
If you, like me, are a pessimist, you may be startled by the extent to which Tuesday’s election felt improbably hopeful. I expected the far-right takeover to accelerate, as often happens when you concentrate wealth with the rich and leave people to squabble in a state of artificial scarcity.
There are three things you can count on after every election: panic, clichés, and self-serving bullshit. The president will claim to have buoyed his party. The gun lobby will claim to have punished its enemies. The left will fret about racism. The right will boast of a backlash against the left. People on all sides will interpret the results as mandates for their agendas. Fortunately, there’s a way to sort out what’s true and what isn’t: by studying exit polls.
What is it about Democrats’ 2018 election performance that feels so… meh? So bleh? A couple of things pop to mind. The general-election candidates that Democrats became so emotionally invested in nationally—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Andrew Gillum in Florida—all lost (or appear headed for certain defeat). Gillum’s loss was especially painful, since he was ahead in just about every poll of the state.
DALLAS—On an October Saturday morning in a quiet, residential north Dallas neighborhood, one of the most powerful elected Republicans in Washington was wearing a neon-green raincoat, cargo pants, and hiking shoes while holding a half-eaten breakfast burrito on one of his supporter’s lawns. About 50 or so staff and volunteers had joined Texas Rep.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that public-sector employees who are represented by unions in collective bargaining can’t be obligated to pay dues to those unions. Legal observers say that decision, in Janus v. AFSCME, could presage a similar ruling regarding private-sector unions. More broadly, Janus was a stark victory for the 1 percent, underlining a decades-long trend of working- and middle-class wage stagnation.
Vanessa Arredondo began her teaching career five years ago in Phoenix with about 30 students in her second-grade class and a list of supplies she had to pay for out of her own pocket. In her first year, she watched veteran teachers quit out of frustration or desperation, leaving behind their overstuffed classes to ill-equipped substitutes.
Now that Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court, Christine Blasey Ford is no longer making daily headlines. But she’s still making money via GoFundMe, where one of two massively successful fundraising pages is still collecting donations for a no-strings-attached pot that currently contains more than $633,000. An Oct.
By now we’re all sadly familiar with the terrible crime that was committed last week: President Donald Trump was accused of fomenting violence. Some people believe that the true victims were the people targeted, wounded, or killed in multiple attacks. They say pipe bombs were sent to public figures the president had vilified and a Trump supporter was charged with sending them.
Perhaps we should start here: We don’t yet know what we don’t know. Twelve people have been shot, 11 are dead at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. Six are injured. Four law enforcement officers were injured before the gunman was apprehended.Pittsburgh’s Public Safety Director, Wendell Hissrich has called the crime scene “one of the worst I have ever seen.
This article is part ofWatching Fox, a Slate series about Fox News. Around 12:20 on Friday afternoon, in the middle of Fox News’ Outnumbered, the tarp came off the van. The van in question reportedly belongs to 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested that morning in connection with the pipe bomb incidents that have roiled the country all week.
This article is part of Watching Fox, a Slate series about Fox News. Viewers of the country’s most popular and least credible cable-news morning show woke up Wednesday morning to breaking news of America in crisis. “This is a Fox News alert,” announced Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy at 6:02 a.m. “[The] Wall Street Journal is talking about a new caravan—” “Ugh,” interjected Brian Kilmeade, the program’s foremost interjector of grunts.
On Monday night, President Trump declared himself a nationalist. At a rally in Houston, he distinguished nationalists from “globalists,” people who, according to Trump, care more about the world than about their own tribe. Nationalism has a fascist pedigree, and Trump has a history of using race, religion, and ethnicity to turn the people he sees as real Americans—people who look like him—against those who have “Arab” or “Mexican heritage.
Donald Trump runs on fear. Once again, he’s closing out an election season with a direct appeal to the darkest impulses of the American psyche. “The Democrats don’t care what their extremist immigration agenda will do to your communities,” he said at a rally in Arizona last week, packing xenophobia into the false assertion that “Democrats want to throw your borders wide open to deadly drugs and endless gangs.
DALLAS—The morning after his second and final Senate debate with Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz was happy to see me. Late the night before, I had published an assessment of the debate, crediting Cruz with getting the job done, but also mocking his over-the-top, fear-mongering portrayal of Texas under Democratic control, delivered in that famously smug voice that’s riled up millions—not all of them Democrats—for the last five years. Cruz said he liked the piece.
On Thursday night, President Donald Trump celebrated a violent crime. At a rally in Montana, Trump saluted Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty last year to assaulting a reporter. Trump mimicked Gianforte’s takedown of Ben Jacobs, a Guardian correspondent who, on the final day of a special congressional election in May 2017, had tried to ask Gianforte about health care.
Last week, President Trump explained to a crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, how he decides which polls to trust. “I believe in polls,” he said. “Only the ones that have us up, because they’re the only honest ones. Other than that, they’re the fake news polls.” Trump half-grinned, and the crowd laughed. But Trump really does let his beliefs follow his biases. He accepts the word of dictators and police, not of women, immigrants, or elected European leaders.
Donald Trump embraced his role as a radical nativist from the very beginning of his presidential campaign. Whether it was a conscious strategic decision or a product of his substantial populist instincts is almost beside the point.
For all the powerful abusers exposed and censured over the past 12 months, one of the biggest accomplishments of the #MeToo movement has been the reintroduction and reframing of past misconduct.
In a few weeks, the citizens of Georgia won’t just be casting ballots for their governor; they will be deciding the fate of their democracy. The Democratic nominee, Stacey Abrams, has pegged her campaign to progressive policy and voter mobilization, hoping to turn the state’s substantial population of white liberals, black Americans, and other nonwhite residents into a voting majority. If elected, Abrams would be the first black woman elected governor in the United States.
A central architect of the Constitution, James Madison was deeply sensitive to the threat majorities posed to minorities. On important social questions, “[N]o other rule exists … but the will of the majority,” he wrote in 1785 while a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, “but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.
Climate change is a hoax. If it’s not a hoax, it’s overrated. If it’s not overrated, it’s a problem for other countries, not for us. It’s just a pet issue for panicky liberals. If you believe any of these things, I have bad news: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—basically, the world’s best weather and earth scientists—has just issued a report on rising temperatures and the problems they’re causing around the world.
Ana María Toledo Cáceres landed in Las Vegas on a sweltering September day in 2014. In the car with her fiancé, en route to her new home in Utah, the 49-year-old Guatemalan tried to take in the stark, red rock landscape. Cáceres had been sad to leave her two daughters behind in Guatemala City, but now she felt excited and ready to marry the man she loved.
The salient feature of now-seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony during the hearing that was intended to assess whether he had committed sexual assault in his youth was, as many have noted, his anger. It was anger that made him lash out inappropriately, anger that contorted his face in a way that made many viewers feel sick.
On July 10, one day after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, reporters in the Capitol were trying to suss out Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ impressions of the judge. One asked if she was concerned that Kavanaugh might gut the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions, as yet another lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general sought to do.
Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, would like to correct a misunderstanding. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday night, Kavanaugh promises to be an impartial justice, not the liberal-baiting flamethrower he played in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. We’ve seen this from Kavanaugh before: rage, animus, and political warfare, followed by a scramble to clean things up. The cleanup is an act.
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, dramatic action revolves around Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell, in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Atticus Finch is his court-appointed lawyer, and after he gets the case, his daughter, Scout, the narrator, must contend with the disdain and ostracism of their neighbors. Atticus, too, stands against the weight of public opinion, even stopping a mob of men eager to dispense vigilante justice.
“Perhaps we didn’t do too good a job teaching the importance of preserving democracy by an enlightened civic discourse,” said Kennedy on Friday, speaking to high-schoolers in his hometown of Sacramento, California. “In the first part of this century, we’re seeing the death and decline of democracy.
Did Brett Kavanaugh drink a lot as a teenager? Is he lying about what he did while drunk? Should senators take that into account when voting on his confirmation to the Supreme Court? The answers to these questions are yes, yes, and yes. There’s been a lot of indignation on the right, including from Kavanaugh, over questions about his drinking and what they have to do with his merits as a judge.
On Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake was joined by Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other swing-vote senators in calling for a one-week FBI investigation into the recent allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before holding a final vote on his confirmation. Senate Republicans and the White House then announced that the bureau would, in fact, take a week to review “current credible allegations” against Kavanaugh.
Thursday’s judiciary committee hearing was a study in contrasts whose differences were oddly erased by their result. Christine Blasey Ford seemed terrified but brimmed with good will. The extent of her cooperation is measurable: She went to great lengths to be as painfully precise as she could be, clarifying her comments at every turn. She was considerate of the committee and answered every question, repeatedly going out of her way to offer more than was asked.
Every year for the past decade, the Family Research Council has hosted the Values Voter Summit, a convention of conservative activists who vote based on traditional right-wing values. Those values are predictable: They’re opposed to gay marriage, abortion rights, and immigration; they support gun rights, tax cuts, and personhood for both fetuses and corporations.
For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone.
While refusing anything so prosaic as an actual FBI investigation (which Anita Hill’s claims received when Clarence Thomas was a nominee), Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have reached a tentative agreement to hear the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, via a baroque negotiation that insists on their competence to “investigate” something like this while functionally stripping themselves of the power to actually investigate it.
One of the most surprising things about the Democratic Socialists of America is that there are democratic socialists in America. That was perhaps under the radar until Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started making headlines. On a recent episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. * * * Mike Pesca: Let’s go to 2011 and 2012.
On this week’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz and Emily Bazelon are joined by David French, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, to discuss the sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A transcript of this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
It is a remarkable fact of American life that hordes of men are now defending sexual assault. It’s not immediately clear why. It seems like the very definition of an unforced error.
What’s striking about the many defenses of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the face of a credible accusation of sexual assault when he was a teenager is how they put broad concerns over accountability and impunity into sharp relief.
The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, faces uncertainty this week after more details were revealed about accusations of attempted rape that were made by a former high school acquaintance, Christine Blasey Ford. Ford is a California-based professor.
Has American democracy been hijacked by the passions of its people, now a dangerous and untamable majority undermining the republic? In a new issue of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen, head of the National Constitution Center, says yes. “[James] Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.
Andrew Cuomo didn’t need to do much to discredit Cynthia Nixon as a gubernatorial candidate. As soon as the actress and activist announced she was challenging the Democratic governor in March, social media feeds filled with jokes about the bawdy exploits of the lawyer Nixon played on Sex and the City. It was an obvious comparison; Miranda Hobbes was easy to imagine in public office, and it’s by far Nixon’s most-famous role.
The resignation of Les Moonves, CBS’ chairman and chief executive, took many of us by surprise. In the weeks since sexual misconduct allegations against him first broke, we had begun to think Les Moonves wouldn’t go. And that—our pessimistic assumption that big men still get to do as they like—is worth interrogating. Why wouldn’t Moonves go? The accusations against him were credible and well-sourced.
Can journalists on the right honestly fact-check journalists on the left? That question erupted this week in a fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The fight, as promised, has exposed media bias. But in this case, the bias is on the left. The dispute centers on an article published on Sunday by ThinkProgress.
Since the end of World War II, an informal rule has existed in American politics: Ex-presidents don’t play partisan against their successors. Truman didn’t campaign against Eisenhower; Eisenhower didn’t speak out against Kennedy; Johnson left the game under Nixon; Carter left Reagan in peace. This continued uninterrupted into the 21st century.
On Friday, Andrew Cuomo celebrated the opening of a new bridge named for his father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, by driving Franklin Roosevelt’s black Packard east over the Hudson. This bit of primary-season fanfare was short-lived; later that night, the new span was closed over fears that the old bridge being disassembled next door might fall on it. “It is not our bridge.
An anonymous New York Times op-ed written by a senior Trump administration official was published on Wednesday. The person says they are working to frustrate the president because he is amoral, unprincipled, inconsistent, and dangerous. This author described themselves as an unsung hero who is part of the resistance, and the damning essay comes on the heels of an explosive new book about the Trump White House from award-winning journalist Bob Woodward.
Susan Collins talks a big game about reproductive rights. The Republican senator from Maine has said, for instance, that she wants her party to be “as synonymous with protecting a woman’s right to choose as the Democratic Party is with expanded government or raising taxes.
Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president and a majority of sitting Cabinet secretaries to remove the president if they decide he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Crafted in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it’s been cited recently in response to President Donald Trump and mounting evidence that he’s not equipped to handle the office of the presidency.
Framing—the act of constructing a way of viewing an issue—is a fascinating political skill. And in the days leading up to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, I couldn’t help but get a kick out of the disparate ways Republicans and Democrats were framing their answers to the same question: How many pages of Kavanaugh’s records from his time in the George W.
On Tuesday, Florida Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, as their candidate for governor. Gillum, who is African-American, ran an impressive come-from-behind campaign to defeat former congresswoman Gwen Graham; in the fall, he will face Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Trump admirer who kicked off the general election by saying that voters shouldn’t “monkey this up” by voting for Gillum.
The Catholic Church is exposed. A number of wide-ranging, deeply researched reports of molestation, rape, abuse, corruption, and concealment have been released in close enough time to one another that the magnitude of the horror might actually—for the average American, anyway—sink in. It all feels monumental, if also powered in part by coincidence.
One of the #MeToo movement’s lasting effects has been to highlight the strategies routinely used to delegitimize accusers. We know now that people—mostly men—accused of sexual misconduct will typically take several steps: They’ll clamor for “due process” that they privately try to game, usually with secret help from powerful friends.
On Tuesday night, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum won Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in an upset, startling the political establishment and earning immediate comparisons to upstart congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In retrospect, though, Gillum’s unexpected defeat of his closest rival, Gwen Graham, probably shouldn’t have been shocking.
As the specter of impeachment creeps into conversations about where President Donald Trump’s scandals may be heading, it’s worth recalling the specific “high crimes and misdemeanors” that ousted Richard Nixon from office in 1974. On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee approved, and voted to send the full House, three articles of impeachment, which charged Nixon with 15 separate acts of obstructing justice and abusing power.
I did not expect to be so torn up upon Sen. John McCain’s death. It’s difficult to sum up the counter-narrative against the hagiographic portrayal of McCain’s political career, but let’s try: He was overrated, in some ways dangerously. On domestic policy, he ably served the business community of Arizona. But that was never what mattered to him.
Despite President Donald Trump’s high disapproval rating, it’s almost a certain that his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, will be confirmed to the high court. And it’s no surprise—former President Ronald Reagan took steps to make the court a major issue for Republican voters, something that lead to the rise of the conservative Federalist Society, which has spent years sourcing and grooming potential justices.
Rewarding as it is to see a self-dealing mercenary like Paul Manafort—whose previous clients include Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos, and Jonas Savimbi—face some measure of legal consequences, the guilty plea of Donald Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen is, in Trumpworld, the much bigger deal.
On Tuesday, President Trump brushed aside questions about the conviction of his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. The two cases didn’t matter, said Trump, because they didn’t prove the central charge against him. “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion,” Trump told reporters as he arrived in West Virginia.
- Arizona Senate Joe Arpaio’s campaign goes for the murder-suicide against Kelli Ward.With just a week and change left until this final blockbuster Senate primary of the summer, the race has reached its nutty potential. Former state Sen. Kelli Ward and octogenarian former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have been splitting the conservative opposition to Rep. Martha McSally, with Ward getting the bigger half.
For the past week, former Donald Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has been promoting her new tell-all book with claims that she has heard tapes, recorded on the set of The Apprentice, in which Trump can be heard using the N-word. There is reason to consider Manigault Newman an unreliable narrator, but rumors regarding the existence of these tapes didn’t start, and likely won’t end, with her. Here’s what might happen if such a recording came to light.
Unlike her former mentor, whose inelastic deceptions crumble under the slightest scrutiny, Omarosa Manigault Newman repays close reading. I don’t mean her book (haven’t read it). I mean the publicity tour she’s on, which has twin goals: selling books and carefully dismembering the administration she served until she was fired in January.
The meager turnout at the Unite the Right rally in D.C. on Sunday offered real confirmation that the alt-right’s organizing capabilities have seriously atrophied in the wake of last year’s Charlottesville rally as a consequence of both infighting and resistance. Jason Kessler, an alt-right leader and one of the organizers of both rallies, told the National Park Service that between 100 and 400 demonstrators could be expected to show up in front of the White House.
Asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether he identifies as a socialist, Ben Jealous gave a long-winded but generally on-point response implying he does not. Asked a second time for clarification, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Maryland gave a much shorter response: “Are you fucking kidding me?” You can guess which of the two answers people noticed.
One year ago, a torch-wielding mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” invaded my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The following day, I was in the streets watching in horror as the modern-day Klan announced itself, flanked by heavily armed soldiers of hate in full fatigues and alt-righters chanting “Heil Trump” while flashing Nazi salutes.
California is burning. More than 15,000 firefighters have been fighting wildfires across the state. As of Monday, the Mendocino Complex fire became the largest in California history. Donald Trump recognized the tragedy by … inaccurately condemning the state’s water policies. This should give us pause, not because of what the president says, but because of the point this marks in Trump’s long, ongoing war with California.
A foreign adversary trying to curry favor with a major American political party. Surreptitious and illegal efforts to influence the election in that party’s favor. A national officeholder and White House staff targeted. A resulting political furor, followed by criminal and congressional investigations. Replace Russia with China, the 2016 election with 1996, and President Donald Trump with Vice President Al Gore, and there are disturbing parallels.
The first rule for improving the historically lackluster voting rate for millennials is to never, ever call them that. That’s just one of the many nuggets in a major new research project that NextGen America, one of billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer’s political organizations, will unveil at a presentation in Washington on Thursday morning. (This is a separate entity from Steyer’s other well-known project, Need to Impeach.
Welcome tothe Hot Seats, Slate’s weekly guide to the seven midterms races that everyone is talking about now. We’re finally in August, an interminable final stretch of primaries and other weird nonsense that rises to national attention when people are bored in the late summer. The last big special election of the cycle will finally take place on Tuesday. It’s tight.
On Sunday, Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow admitted that his client, President Donald Trump, ghostwrote, and instructed his son Donald Trump Jr. to issue, a false statement to the press about an active criminal investigation. Then, after the falsity of Trump Jr.’s statement was uncovered, the president seemingly lied to Sekulow, telling his lawyer that he had played no role in drafting it, and thereby induced Sekulow to repeat that falsehood to the nation.
In 2001, Laura Bush famously departed from her husband’s stance on abortion by saying she thought Roe v. Wade should stand. The first lady was contradicting her president spouse on an issue of great import, and at the time, I thought it was a gutsy move that could have a positive impact on GOP abortion politics.
Twenty-five years ago, student wrestlers at Ohio State University thought their assistant coach, Jim Jordan, was a stand-up guy. Now they’re learning the hard way that he isn’t. A report published on Wednesday by NBC News adds to the case against Jordan: He’s orchestrating a campaign to cover up what he and other coaches knew about sexual abuse at OSU. The man at the center of Wednesday’s story is Dunyasha Yetts, who wrestled for OSU in 1993 and 1994.
President Trump’s new lawyer has a warning about President Trump’s old lawyer: Don’t trust him. According to CNN and NBC News, Donald Trump’s previous lawyer, Michael Cohen, has said he’s prepared to tell investigators that in June of 2016, he witnessed Donald Trump Jr. tell Trump about a Russian offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton. The offer led to the now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower, which Trump claims to have known nothing about.
Did President Trump ask FBI Director James Comey, in a February 2017 meeting, not to pursue a Trump adviser who had misled investigators about conversations with Russians? If Trump made that request, it could be evidence of obstruction of justice, particularly in light of Comey’s subsequent firing. Trump denies it, but Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seems to think that it may have happened.
Who knows what was going through President Trump’s head when he tweeted out an all-caps threat at Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earlier this week. Perhaps even the president himself doesn’t know. It is possible that Trump has visions of regime change in his mind. Or he may be looking to repeat his North Korea gambit: a self-inflicted crisis followed by a theatrical summit that allows him to assume the mantle of statesman. Either of these scenarios could come to pass.
Given an administration this adept at manufacturing crises, it can be easy to stack scandals until you lose sight of the real problems that need solving. This is the risk of “Russiagate.” The Trump campaign’s Russia connections are probably a scandal, and the attacks on the election are undoubtedly a crisis. But there’s a caveat: Russia’s conduct, formidably strategic though it seems to have been, wouldn’t have worked without American susceptibility.
Last Thursday, 28-year-old Markeis McGlockton, who is black, was killed outside a convenience store in Clearwater, Florida. Surveillance video shows McGlockton, his girlfriend Britany Jacobs, and their three children pulling into a handicapped parking space in front of the store. While McGlockton was in the store with his 5-year-old son, a man later identified as 47-year-old Michael Drejka, who is white, went up to the car to argue with Jacobs.
Last week, moderate Democrats gathered for Opportunity 2020, an invite-only convention in Columbus, Ohio, hosted by the prominent centrist think tank Third Way. “Unlike a traditional conference, expect a stimulating mix of thought provoking presentations and interactive small-group sessions focused on the urgent need for the next generation of Democrats to offer a new social contract for the Digital Age,” the event’s webpage read.
WASHINGTON, July 17—President Trump today walked back comments he made in Helsinki on Monday at a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the press conference, Mr. Trump was asked whether Russia was guilty of interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as alleged in a federal indictment issued last week. He replied, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Today, however, Mr.
The modern pro-life movement isn’t quite sure what to think about frozen embryos. In vitro fertilization helps people get pregnant, and pro-lifers are unlikely to denounce a procedure that has helped create more than 1 million U.S. babies. But almost every person who has undergone IVF ends up with excess embryos that will never get implanted.
On this week’s Trumpcast, Jacob Weisberg talks to Bill Browder, who was mentioned by name by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the press conference with Donald Trump on Monday in Helsinki. Browder is the author of the book Red Notice, which tells the story of the murder of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Russian prison, and his efforts to bring the killers to justice through the sanctions law known as the Magnitsky Act.
At his press conference in Helsinki on Monday, President Trump couldn’t bring himself to say anything critical of Vladimir Putin. Instead, Trump attacked Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who helped lead the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
For the better part of two years now, reporters have been trying to find the issue or offense that could fracture Donald Trump’s base of support. They have traveled to “Trump country” for regular updates from working-class whites and other key Trump constituents, only to find that those voters have been unmoved by each controversy.
This story was published by theCenter for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington. John Bolton needed billionaire Robert Mercer’s attention and support—so badly that Bolton spent more than $1 million of his super PAC’s money on “comically bad” data from Mercer’s now-defunct voter profiling firm, Cambridge Analytica.
On Sunday, New York magazine published an essay by Jonathan Chait that outlines a “plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion” between Donald Trump and his circle and the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.
Early Saturday evening, a Chicago police officer shot and killed Harith Augustus, a 37-year-old black American barber working in the neighborhood where the police had confronted him. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) released body-camera video that shows Augustus becoming agitated after being surrounded and grabbed by officers. As he attempts to flee and appears to reach for a gun in his waistband, an officer begins firing on him, and Augustus falls.
Last spring, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass a bill that would have gutted the Affordable Care Act. That piece of legislation doubled as an ideological manifesto: By letting states waive insurance protections for women who’ve been pregnant, given birth, survived a sexual assault, or experienced domestic violence, the GOP laid out a medical framework that treated women’s bodies as inherently sick, aberrations from the norm.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and a candidate to replace Paul Ryan as speaker, is one of the most firebrand conservatives in the House of Representatives. But Jordan himself is now under fire, after multiple men accused him of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse when he was assistant coach of the Ohio State University wrestling team from 1986 to 1994.
Jim Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio, wants to be speaker of the House. But he has a problem. From 1986 to 1994, Jordan was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University. Several men who wrestled for OSU during those years say Jordan knew that the team doctor, Richard Strauss, was molesting members of the team. Jordan says he knew nothing about it. He swears that if he’d known, he would have rushed to inform the authorities. Accusations such as these can be hard to adjudicate.
Traditionally, conservatives have maintained a monopoly on the kind of rhetoric that imagines dismantling large pieces of the federal government, calling for the abolition of everything from the Departments of Energy and Education to the Internal Revenue Service. In response, Democrats have typically dismissed these calls as the spasms of a lunatic fringe. But President Trump’s outrageous immigration policy has led Democrats to create their own abolition movement.
In 2014, four years before it became synonymous in the public imagination with the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” family separation policy, Southwest Key Programs applied for a permit from the city of Escondido, California, to open a children’s shelter. The wave of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border, which President Obama that summer labeled an “actual humanitarian crisis,” was at its apex.
Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and liberal panic has set in. “You are going to see 20 states pass laws banning abortion outright—just banning abortion—because they know that there are now going to be five votes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade,” CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declared last week. “Abortion will be illegal in a significant part of the United States in 18 months. There is just no doubt about that.” Let me introduce some doubt.
Under the Trump administration, even naturalized citizens are now a target. The government agency that oversees immigration applications is hiring lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants suspected of obtaining citizenship through fake identities or other false information on their applications. Cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, where offenders could lose their citizenship or legal status.
It’s been less than a week since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary, and she’s already risen from longshot newcomer to Democratic household name. The Bronx-born 28-year-old—who ousted 10-term Rep.
On Thursday’s edition of the Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discussed the political and historical implications of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision to retire from the bench. The excerpt from the show below has been edited and condensed for clarity. David Plotz: What does Kennedy’s resignation mean for the court? Is Roe v.
These are confusing times, and they’re getting worse. On the one hand, there’s tons of misinformation: Some of it is disseminated through technology, trolls, and bots; some through Trump’s lies and propaganda (helped by a news cycle he drives); and some by Supreme Court cases like NIFLA v.
Because countries are not people, it’s tricky to translate whatever “loving one’s country” means—it’s quite abstract—into the language of heartbreak. It sounds melodramatic. What can heartbreak mean as a civic matter? And yet it is what I feel. A corrupt but weak president—this has been my comfort, his weakness—has been given a gift that will make him strong.
ASPEN, Colorado—The “intellectual dark web” came to the sunny slopes of Aspen on Tuesday night, when New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss interviewed Jordan Peterson, the popular and provocative University of Toronto psychologist, who has built a best-selling brand on the idea that his ideas about gender and politics are being silenced by mainstream critics.
Fifty years ago this summer, the collapse of this country seemed not only plausible, but imminent. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, touching off a series of riots across the country that led to dozens of deaths, thousands of arrests, and the razing of large swaths of major cities. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was murdered in the middle of a presidential campaign.
When Sen. Cory Booker wanted to convey the progressive potential of Ben Jealous’ campaign for Maryland governor, he didn’t invoke Barack Obama or even Bernie Sanders. “I think he’s going to energize this country,” Booker said at a rally for Jealous earlier this month. “He is really like a Stacey Abrams right now, which really can spark the moral imagination of this country to who we can be when we come together.
On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen pushed through an amendment to an appropriations measure that would force the State Department to reveal travel ban numbers it has previously kept secret. Slate spoke to Van Hollen about his amendment, the imminent Supreme Court decision on the travel ban, and his recent trip to the Mexican border to visit families that had been split by Trump’s since reversed child separation policy.
On Wednesday’s Trumpcast, Jacob Weisberg spoke with Erik Hanshew, assistant federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, about the family separations along the U.S.–Mexico border. After the families’ arrest, the adults are taken into custody for federal criminal prosecution, which is where Hanshew and his office come in to provide counsel. The children are taken into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Under massive public pressure—from his opponents, from his party, from the world—Trump has signed an executive order ending his own administration’s new policy of taking children away from their parents at the border. This is a crucial juncture: Telling this story correctly will require enormous care. In abusive relationships, abusers know how grateful people feel when the suffering they’ve inflicted stops.
A doctor on the television is saying that locking children up in cages away from their parents could be considered child abuse. It is strange to hear this being spelled out—it’s like a herpetologist popping up in your kitchen to shout that rattlesnakes aren’t toys. You never thought they were, but the obvious is being asserted with desperation, afraid that it won’t be believed. It is bad to rip children from their mothers and fathers, the doctor says. Really.
Stephen Miller has always liked to provoke. Before he was a White House adviser, Miller was a teenage provocateur devoting his time and talents to “trolling” his ideological foes. He brought that same ethos to the Trump administration, delighting in the outrage accompanying his travel ban and his push against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, indifferent to the human cost of his favored policies.
President Trump and his attorneys used to demand a high standard for proving collusion. Words alone, they argued, weren’t enough. Trump and his aides might have met secretly with Russians, solicited campaign help, received campaign help, and done favors for Russia. But without proof that all these words and deeds were connected, they insisted, there was no basis for investigation. We can now junk that argument, because Trump and his lawyers have shown they don’t believe it.
Was the FBI biased against Donald Trump in 2016? Trump and his supporters think so, and now they have fresh evidence: a 500-page report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general. The report includes text messages in which two then-FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, spoke of “stopping” Trump.
As a purely descriptive matter, it’s surely true: We are all going numb. As Donald Trump makes war with Canada and peace with dictators and human rights abusers, the narrative is that everyone’s lost all feeling. Polls show the public believes that Trump paid off a porn star, and they don’t care. They believe that he lies habitually, and they also don’t care.
At the press conference following his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on Tuesday, President Trump called himself “an emissary of the American people” and spoke of “my instinct, my ability or talent” for negotiation. “My whole life has been deals,” said Trump. “I’ve done great at it.” Trump is indeed a skilled salesman, and his presentation of the new U.S.-North Korean denuclearization agreement is a fine sales job.
In comments made to GOP donors last week, former Republican presidential candidate and Utah’s likely next senator Mitt Romney predicted that President Trump is likely to win re-election in 2020. “I think President Trump will be renominated by my party easily, and I think he’ll be re-elected solidly,” he told the audience at his E2 political summit.
Though American voters have managed not to elect more populist right-wing businessmen with legal trouble so far this year, the same may soon not be true in its neighbor to the north. In Thursday’s Ontario elections, Doug Ford, brother of infamous Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, could become the second-most powerful politician in Canada.
Last weekend, the New York Times published a long letter that was sent by President Donald Trump’s lawyers to special counsel Robert Mueller in January. The letter argued that Trump shouldn’t have to give an interview to Mueller’s investigators, in part because the president is entitled to pardon anyone, fire anyone, or shut down any investigation for any reason. But beneath these imperial claims, the letter inadvertently substantiates much of the case against Trump.
A little over three months ago, the delegates of the California Democratic Party declined to endorse five-term incumbent Dianne Feinstein for re-election. They instead came just shy of endorsing Kevin de León, her progressive challenger and the leader of the state Senate’s Democrats.
The Enlightenment is having a renaissance, of sorts. A handful of centrist and conservative writers have reclaimed the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement as a response to nationalism and ethnic prejudice on the right and relativism and “identity politics” on the left.
NEWPORT BEACH, California—Last month, at a politically themed chili cook-off in Huntington Beach, Sandy Metcalf’s manila folder went missing. The folder contained copies of documents alleging Hans Keirstead, a neuroscientist running for Congress in California’s 48th District, had slept with his graduate students and, in one case, had punched one of them in a boozy incident following a concert.
NEWPORT BEACH, California—The House race in California’s 48th congressional district was supposed to be like so many others this year: An upscale, suburban, traditionally Republican suburb that had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, where Democrats would target a longtime and suddenly vulnerable incumbent. After 30 years in the House, Rep.
FULLERTON, California—In April of 2017, Phil Janowicz became the first Democrat to announce his candidacy against Republican Rep. Ed Royce in California’s 39th District, a seat that Royce had held, in one form or another, since 1993. For decades, no one had realistically thought Democrats could topple Royce, but Janowicz, a tenured chemistry professor, spent the rest of the year trying to build a Democratic base in the district, which contains much of northern Orange County.
Last week, a supermajority of Irish citizens voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the country’s constitution, which effectively banned almost all abortions. Though polls predicted victory for women’s rights activists, the outcome still came as a shock to those who were too cautious to hope that the overwhelmingly Catholic country would join the rest of Europe in decriminalizing the procedure.
In 2014, as the Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives, Stacey Abrams spearheaded the New Georgia Project, a plan to register hundreds of thousands of black, Latino and Asian Americans who live in the state but don’t vote in its elections. Abrams ultimately registered just 46,000 people, but she held fast to her theory of the case—that outreach and mobilization could turn Georgia blue, or at least make it a blue-tinged purple.
Before the 1950s, what you thought about health care, guns, or abortion had little to do with where your vote went. Then the modern two-party system came along—or was engineered. On a recent episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Sam Rosenfeld, author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, about the evolution of political parties in the U.S. Their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is reprinted below.
If the people who came to see Pussy Riot in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night were expecting an electro-punk show, they were in for a little surprise first: a slideshow. As a scrambled, anonymized voice narrated over the club’s sound system, a numbered list of facts about global income inequality flickered on a projection screen, along with the knit balaclavas that the Russian art collective made famous.
President Trump has harsh words for the undocumented immigrants he’s deporting. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump fumed in front of cameras last week. “These aren’t people.These are animals.” Trump later said he was talking about MS-13, a criminal gang, and aides repeated his message.
Both progressives and moderate Democrats are crowing over the results from Tuesday’s primaries. Stacey Abrams, a progressive endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the group Our Revolution, defeated former state Rep. Stacey Evans to become the first female black gubernatorial candidate for a major party in history. In Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, Amy McGrath beat establishment candidate Jim Gray, the mayor of Lexington.
In some ways, last week was a banner week for limited acts of moral courage in the Trump era. In the Senate, Jeff Flakeannouncedlast Wednesday he would join Rand Paul and John McCain to oppose the nomination of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA, citing herties to a torture regime in which she participated and then worked to obscure. She was still confirmed on Thursday, when six Democrats voted on her behalf. Also on Wednesday, a host of Senate Republicans voted to save net neutrality.
A “dark money” organization tied to a major electric company pumped significant cash into an Ohio congressional race in what a losing candidate describes as an act of retribution over a failed financial deal.
The Trump administration is planning to instate a rule that will bar recipients of federal family-planning funding from educating women about abortion options, making referrals to doctors that provide abortions, or providing abortion care. Conservatives have cheered the move as a way for the federal government to partially “defund” Planned Parenthood without requiring an act of Congress. Reproductive-rights advocates are calling the policy a “domestic gag rule”—a U.S.
The Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday was a big night for women in a state whose 20-person congressional delegation currently includes only men. The state has been represented in Congress by just seven women in its history—three of which filled vacancies left when their husbands died—with at most two serving together at any one time.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an op-ed titled “Liberals, You’re Not As Smart As You Think.” In it, University of Virginia political science professor Gerard Alexander accuses American liberals of arrogance and warns them against making broad negative generalizations about large swaths of the population. “Liberals often don’t realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be,” he writes.
When I asked Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart last year if he would sign a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill to investigate Russian meddling in the election, he didn’t hesitate for a second. “I don’t sign discharge petitions,” he said. “I didn’t even sign an immigration discharge petition.
This past week, journalists in America were struggling to comprehend two major stories: The first was that Donald Trump announced (via tweet) on Wednesday that any news that paints him in a negative light is, by definition, “fake news.” He went on to threaten the press credentials of any journalist who doesn’t portray him in a flattering light.
Since Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, two narratives have shaped conventional wisdom about the Democratic Party. One is that the party is flirting with an ideological crisis, forcing establishment Democrats to decide whether their future lies with more progressive candidates who can turn out the base or more conservative Blue Dogs who might appeal to Trump voters. The other narrative anticipates a more unified path.
On Tuesday, a white graduate student at Yale called the police to report that one of her black classmates was napping in a dorm common area. The ensuing encounter between the police and the student, Lolade Siyonbola, who is getting a master’s degree in African studies, was captured in a video that has drawn national attention to the case.
Gina Haspel was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday facing questions from senators in her quest to become head of the CIA. On Wednesday’s Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, about the hearings. They discussed how Haspel dodged several questions about her involvement in torture as a CIA officer and what that means for the agency going forward. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Did President Donald Trump know in October 2016 about a $130,000 payment to silence a story that threatened his election? Did he deliberately conceal that payment from the Federal Elections Commission? Has Trump now approved a legal strategy to acknowledge the payment in order to buy the silence of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in the Russia investigation? These were largely mysteries until Wednesday night, when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has joined Trump’s legal team, began a crusade to shield Trump from campaign finance charges. In interviews with...
According to the New York Times, special counsel Robert Mueller has four dozen questions he wants to ask President Donald Trump about the Russia investigation. At least 18 of them focus on James Comey, the man Trump fired as FBI director last year in a failed attempt to “lift the cloud” of the investigation. Many of the questions involve meetings between Trump and Comey.
Filtered or unfiltered? We’re not talking about coffee or cigarettes, but world leaders. Gautam Mukunda is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In his 2012 book, Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, he argues that American presidents who enter the White House without first being brought up in the halls of power end up being either great or terrible. On Thursday’s Gist, Mike Pescatalked with Mukunda about the ultimate unfiltered president.
Sean Hannity managed to make news Wednesday night, entirely by accident. Rudy Giuliani, recently tapped for President Trump’s legal team, offhandedly told him that the president reimbursed attorney Michael Cohen for paying hush money to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump and his spokespeople had denied he even knew about the deal.
Arizona teachers again gathered in mass at the state capitol building on Wednesday in what is now the fifth day of a statewide walkout. Some stood outside to remind legislators of their presence—and of their absence from schools. Others waited inside the capitol building for news as the Legislature tried to finalize a budget that would try to subdue their anger.
The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein.
On Thursday’s edition of the Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discussed the arguments before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in Hawaii v. Trump, the case concerning what’s known as the Muslim ban. The excerpt from the show below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In his most recent piece for New York magazine, columnist Jonathan Chait argues that Sens. Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand should stop portraying themselves as victims of sexism if they ever want to win the presidency. Chait’s argument echoes his concern about the many disparaging “cards”—woman, race—that politicians have supposedly played, with some frequency, over the past two decades of U.S. politics.
WHEELING, West Virginia—At a primary debate here on Monday night, six Republicans vying to represent West Virginia in the U.S. Senate were asked if there is any issue where they disagree with President Donald Trump. “No,” said Jack Newbrough, a trucker whose immediate reply was quickly matched by the next four candidates. Rep.
Before his Pulitzer-winning investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual abuse, Ronan Farrow worked in President Obama’s State Department. His new book,War on Peace, documents the department’s loss of personnel and prestige under every recent president—especially the current one.
French President Emmanuel Macron is in Washington this week, meeting with Donald Trump—the man he has been trying to woo since the French election last year—and speaking to Congress. Macron, a former Socialist minister, struck out on his own when he ran for president, creating a centrist platform (En Marche!) and triumphing over Trump’s favorite, Marine Le Pen, and more establishment figures.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says he’s leaving politics to escape the corruption of partisanship. “I enjoy being fair. I enjoy the pursuit of fairness as a virtue,” Gowdy told CBS News in February. In Washington, he lamented, there’s no place for a truth-teller like himself.
It’s mid-April, and a reputable pollster is already declaring that the Senate race between Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas is “too close to call,” at 47 percent to 44 percent. It’s Quinnipiac’s first poll in Texas, and the first major poll of one of the most closely watched races in the country. It’s also very hard to believe.
Last Thursday, an employee at a Philadelphia Starbucks called the police on two black men who were waiting for the arrival of a business partner without having ordered anything at the counter. When police arrived, the men were arrested for trespassing. A bystander caught the encounter on video, which showed the men resigned to their fate as other white patrons protested the arrest, and the incident went viral.
Cardi B has attracted a parade of right-wing supporters over the past week for deciding to have a baby while her rapid rise to superstardom is still accelerating. Anti-abortion websites are posting gleeful recaps of an exchange the hip-hop artist had with radio host Charlamagne Tha God last Tuesday, when she said she “kinda sort of” considered terminating her pregnancy, before determining that she “didn’t want to deal with the whole abortion thing.
ALTOONA, Iowa—Eric Garcetti wanted a do-over. “Well, not a do-over,” he clarified, “but I thought of a better way to say it.” It being an answer to the question of why the mayor of Los Angeles was in Iowa. “I’m not here looking for a new job for me, I’m looking for more new jobs for Americans,” Garcetti told reporters after touring a carpenters’ union training facility in this Des Moines suburb on Friday.
A century or so in political time has passed since 2014’s Conservative Political Action Conference, but there were two speeches given over the course of that weekend that are perhaps worth remembering today. One was an immigrant-bashing midday address delivered by Donald J. Trump, then a sideshow act performing for the party fringe. The other was a speech by Paul Ryan, which became the subject of a brief media dust-up just a few hours later.
The consensus among political pundits is that the Democratic Party is poised to do well in November’s midterm elections. It seems too that Donald Trump will have his work cut out for him in 2020 as he faces what’s sure to be a crowded field of Democratic rising stars.
Randy Bryce saw the same reports everyone else did on Wednesday morning: House Speaker Paul Ryan will retire at the end of the year. “The first thought I had was, ‘I have to see him say these words for myself,’ ” Bryce told me by phone, after months of rumors that Ryan wouldn’t run for re-election.
After the feds raided the office and hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, on Monday afternoon, the president responded with a noticeable public escalation in his rage toward Robert Mueller’s investigation. Although the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York’s office carried out the raid, Mueller reportedly referred the case. That was enough for Trump to entertain a question about why he doesn’t just fire Mueller.
In an opinion delivered on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court offered up some strange ideas about what it means to be gay. Six of the eight justices joined an opinion finding that a former San Antonio gym teacher had no legitimate claims of sexual harassment, in part because she didn’t prove that the alleged offender, a woman, is a lesbian.
Scott Pruitt had one job. He’s done it well. As administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Pruitt was tasked with dismantling every environmental regulation imposed by the Obama administration. Alas, he’s also done so much more.
Donald Trump rode to office promising a deportation force that would arrest and expel undocumented immigrants across the country. He has done what he promised. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Trump reversed the Obama administration’s policy of deprioritizing the deportation of noncriminal immigrants. He also encouraged Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents to step up their raids and collaborate with local police.
Thousands of teachers and sympathetic demonstrators in Oklahoma gathered on Tuesday, for a second straight day, at Oklahoma’s state Capitol to demand higher teacher pay and increased education funding.
Congress will be in recess for the next week or so, and we’ve been given a few peeks recently about what Republicans will set about doing once they get back. According to Politico, one of the items on the agenda may be tax cuts. Yes. Really. Republicans are dreaming of passing another round of tax cuts this year—or at least making vulnerable Democrats squirm by voting against them.
We’re now several days into a roiling debate over whether liberals ought to be upset that the Atlantic hired a man who once argued that a quarter of American women should be executed. Predictably, both sides have progressed from that specific and tedious subject to a debate about liberal bias in media, broadly speaking, of which the backlash against Kevin Williamson’s hiring is supposedly proof.
Most Republican officials have steered clear of directly criticizing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting, but Rep. Steve King has never been one for such caution. One day after 18-year-old Emma González led a tearful, silent tribute to her slain classmates during a march in Washington, King’s campaign shared a conservative meme on its Facebook page mocking González.
On Saturday, 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., to participate in what they expected to be a gun control rally. What they saw was a transformative moment in American politics. March for Our Lives was, of course, a demonstration for stronger gun safety laws, fortified by delightfully specific policy proposals and replete with far-too-clever homemade signs. But it was an awakening of sorts, an introduction to the next generation of political activism.
Based on what President Donald Trump hears on television about the Federal Election Commission, the nation’s cable news consumer-in-chief must be panicked. Day after day, TV talkers squawk about how the independent government agency is poised to pounce.
Jeffrey Goldberg knows that he hired a troll. But he thinks readers should give him a second chance. The Atlantic editor in chief issued a memo to the magazine’s staff this week, explaining his decision to hire conservative writer Kevin Williamson as a columnist for the magazine’s new ideas section. In addition to making the thought leader’s now-familiar case for ideological diversity, Goldberg wrote that he likes to “give people second chances and the opportunity to change.
Stormy Daniels appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, delivering the program its largest audience—21 million viewers—since a post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama in November 2008.
On Jan. 24, it was announced that former White House adviser and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon had accepted an invitation from business school professor Luigi Zingales to participate in a debate on campus. “I can hardly think of a more important issue for new citizens and business leaders of the world than the backlash against globalization and immigration that is taking place not just in America, but in all the Western World,” Zingales wrote in a statement.
Joe Biden’s allies say the former vice president hasn’t decided yet whether to run for president again in 2020. But we know the interest is there. “If, in a year from now, if we’re ready, and nobody has moved in that I think can do it, then I may very well do it,” said Biden on The View in December.
It’s taken them several crucial days longer than they had hoped, but Democratic and Republican leaders on Wednesday closed in on an agreement to fund the government through September at the higher spending levels they set last month. The omnibus spending bill, the last big “must-pass” bill of the year, is a vehicle for legislators to tack on all of their other legislative priorities that they couldn’t get through regular order. If they’re not included in this $1.
The United States has a creative excuse for slapping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.Without the tariffs, the Trump administration argues, American producers of these metals would continue to decline, jeopardizing our military. This rationale has a legal purpose: to exempt the tariffs from adjudication by the World Trade Organization, which defers to claims of national security. But the rationale is a fraud.
Dr. David Shulkin, the current secretary of veterans affairs and the only Democrat in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, has done fairly well running the VA. At a signing ceremony for veterans legislation in June, Trump said of Shulkin, “We’ll never have to use those words [‘You’re fired’] on our David.” Eight months later, that declaration may prove ironic.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Now that Conor Lamb has won a House seat in western Pennsylvania, the national press is already decamping for Illinois, where the next big midterm battle will be about reproductive rights. On Tuesday, Democratic primary voters in the Chicago suburbs will choose between Marie Newman, a progressive, pro-choice challenger, and Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Blue Dog, anti-abortion incumbent.
President Trump has agreed to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Diplomats and U.S. allies are puzzled. They wonder why Trump, without securing concessions, would offer North Korea what it has pursued for decades: the first meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting American president. The question answers itself. Trump wants to have the meeting because no previous president has done it. Trump talks tough, but he doesn’t focus on confronting America’s enemies.
Former congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has a bio that sparkles even in Washington: top of his class at West Point, five years of Army service, Harvard Law, success in business, and now politics. In Donald Trump’s Washington, Pompeo has added perhaps the most important laurel of all: trusted lieutenant to the president.
On Tuesday, Vox released the results of a recent Civis Analytics survey of likely voters on the priorities they’d like to see Democrats take on should they retake Congress and the presidency in 2020. Predictably, the top concerns were largely a reflection of the conversations at the center of current discourse: 31 percent of likely voters want the next Democratic administration to focus on health care.
For the past two weeks, progressive activists and Jewish advocacy groups have been relitigating the character of Louis Farrakhan. The National of Islam minister gave his annual Saviours’ Day speech on Feb. 25, during which he made several characteristic remarks about the “Satanic Jew” responsible for Hollywood’s “filth and degenerate behavior” that is “turning men into women and women into men.
Watching Sam Nunberg’s spectacular public splashdown on Monday was awkward for virtually everyone, but it was particularly painful for anyone who suspected that deriving secret joy from witnessing a public mental health crisis is neither journalistically, nor morally defensible.By Tuesday night, it was boring old news, as all things seem to be these days, but the questions raised by the uneasy spectacle shouldn’t fade so quickly.
Following President Trump’s election, the Democratic Party urged its enraged grass-roots to channel their energy into politics and run for office. But the party didn’t actually want just anyone to run. They wanted candidates with resumes and resources they deem most palatable in a general election, and for everyone else to get out of the way.
On Thursday night, the New York Times put a “BREAKING NEWS” alert across the top of its homepage and sent out an accompanying push notification. The siren was for a story entitled “N.R.A. Suggests Trump May Retreat From Gun Control,” written by three Times reporters.
When the California Democratic Party declined to endorse Sen. Dianne Feinstein last week, it was taken as a sign that progressives might be poised to update the political order in the Golden State. Kevin de León, the leader of Democrats in the state Senate and a proud progressive, won 54 percent of the vote to Feinstein’s 37 percent—shy of the 60 percent needed to win the party’s endorsement but an impressive upset nonetheless.
This piece was adapted from a Spiel on The Gist. It has been edited for clarity. Dana Loesch, National Rifle Association spokeswoman, is kind of a cross between Kellyanne Conway and an Uzi, with cooler glasses. She has physical beauty on her side. She is charismatic. She is capable of unleashing a rhetorical fusillade. But like the Uzi and Kellyanne, she spews stats and arguments with abandon and inaccuracy.
The National Rifle Association knows exactly whom to blame for the Feb. 14 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. The real culprit, says the NRA, is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As the NRA points out, the FBI failed to heed warnings about the shooter. But there’s a bigger story behind this rebuke. To protect its political allies, the NRA has become an enemy of law enforcement. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, likes to talk about “criminals” and “good guys.
An ugly public spat has broken out between two sets of Texas anti-abortion advocates in advance of the state’s March 6 Republican primary. One group, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, is accusing another, Texas Right to Life, of attacking perfectly pro-life Republican incumbents. Texas Right to Life says that the conference supports “death panels” and that conservatives in the state legislature aren’t doing enough to ban abortion.
DES MOINES, Iowa—At a rally on Friday to endorse his former Iowa campaign coordinator, Bernie Sanders dusted off the stump speech that nearly propelled him to victory here two years ago, and added some obligatory references to the man he is backing for a local congressional seat. “Pete D’Alessandro understands that … we need fundamental campaign finance reform,” Sanders told a crowd of about 250 supporters gathered in a converted auto glass shop.
If you believe the accounts of a few anonymous members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Ivanka Trump cried when her father refused to apologize for saying he groped women’s genitals. Frustrated by the then-candidate’s blasé response to the Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments, Ivanka rushed out of the campaign war room, red-faced and weepy-eyed.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—There was much talk, throughout this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, about the supposed crisis of free speech—the purported epidemic of conservative speakers being oppressed, suppressed, threatened, and silenced not only on college campuses but, as the NRA’s Dana Loesch reminded attendees during her speech Thursday, within the mainstream press.
The shape of the Parkland, Florida, shooting’s aftermath is unlike that of any other American massacre. For the first time, the teenage survivors of a school shooting have assumed the mantle of leading the activist response to the tragedy. Their courage in the face of fear and loss has inspired several nationwide actions this week, including student-led walkouts at middle schools and high schools in Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, and Kentucky, among other states.
On the off chance that gun control legislation of some kind passes in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas massacre, we’ll have the kids, and only the kids, to thank.
On Thursday morning, Donald Trump addressed the country about Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left at least 17 dead and 15 injured, many of them children. Trump blamed the carnage in part on the shooter’s “mental health” and on kids feeling alone. He also called on Americans to “work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life.
Mitt Romney is finally going to Washington. And Romney is going there on a mission: to bring “Utah’s values” to the nation’s capital, he explained in a video last Friday kicking off his campaign to replace the retiring Orrin Hatch in the U.S. Senate. A Senate campaign launched from Utah is neither the starting point, nor the D.C. destination that Romney had long envisioned.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that time is a flat circle, Donald Trump has been in office just a hair past one year. Prior to his inauguration, we asked Slate staff and other experts to make predictions on how his presidency would change America. We recently asked the contributors to reassess those predictions, as a window into just how influential—and unpredictable—this presidency has been so far.
Donald Trump used to have a simple message about the Russia investigation: It isn’t really about Russia; that’s just a Democratic excuse for losing the 2016 election. Trump said he had never cared about Russia. So when investigators found people around him doing suspicious things with Russians—Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos—Trump said those interactions had nothing to do with him. The brushoff strategy was smart.
On Tuesday afternoon, the New York Times announced that it would be hiring Quinn Norton as an editorial board member. Shortly before 10 p.m., the paper fired her. Norton has been a prolific tech journalist—covering issues ranging from bioethics to the Anonymous movement for publications like Wired and the Atlantic—and seemed initially to be a remarkably good pick to become the Times’ lead opinion writer “on the power, culture, and consequences of technology.
Every few months, some public figure comes up with the brilliant idea that porn is bad for women. They worry that teens will never have normal, pleasurable sex if all they watch is gang-bangs, that porn allows misogyny to sustain and replicate itself, and that women learn to be aroused by their own degradation when they see ejaculatory “facials” onscreen. None of these arguments are exactly wrong.
“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” This was President Trump’s tweeted response after White House staffers David Sorensen and Rob Porter resigned over domestic-abuse allegations last week.
We aren’t exactly wanting for examples of Republican shamelessness in the Trump era. Pundits, liberal and conservative alike, routinely demand that the party do more to stand up to the president on this or that issue in defense of American political norms and in the hope that defiance might bring us more speedily back to something like normalcy. But normalcy was, itself, deeply rotten and nauseating.
On Wednesday afternoon, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell announced a bipartisan two-year budget deal. The $400 billion dollar package increases military funding and upends caps on domestic spending in place since the 2011 Budget Control Act, a significant win for Democrats. But the deal was reached without a DACA fix.
Last week’s decision by House Intelligence Committee Republicans and the White House to declassify a misleading, politically charged memo about evidence in the Russia investigation is yet another example of our toxic political environment. But it also points to another problem—one that existed long before President Trump—about how the U.S. government inconsistently and ineptly treats classified information and Americans’ poor understanding of that process.
On its face, the so-called Nunes memo regarding government surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016 does little to undermine the case against President Trump and his confederates. It does not contradict the indictments against Paul Manafort or Rick Gates nor explain the plea agreements of Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, nor extinguish questions about the extent to which Russia interfered in the election—either in collusion with the Trump campaign or not.
On May 15, 2015, just a few months before the U.S. and other world powers signed a nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama convened what was to be a high-profile meeting of Middle East leaders at Camp David. King Salman of Saudi Arabia, however, was a no-show. King Hamad of Bahrain elected to go to a horse show in the U.K. instead. The elderly rulers of Oman and the UAE also stayed home, citing health concerns.
President Trump has proposed nothing less than a vast overhaul of the country’s immigration policy, seeking an end to the diversity visa lottery and family sponsorship programs in favor of a system that would privilege immigrants from mostly white countries.
Adapted fromFantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History © 2017 by Kurt Andersen. With permission from Random House. All rights reserved.
Donald Trump hasn’t created the massive “deportation force” he promised as a candidate for president. But he has done the next best thing—boosting, bolstering, and unleashing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, giving it broad authority to act at its own discretion. The result? An empowered and authoritarian agency that operates with impunity, whose chief attribute is unapologetic cruelty.
How far will the Republican Party go to defend Donald Trump? That’s an open question as he accumulates power and insulates himself from accountability. In recent days, we’ve learned that last year, Trump didn’t just fire FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the Russia investigation.
President Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. That fact, reported Thursday night by the New York Times and confirmed by sources for the Washington Post and other papers, shreds the assurances from Republican lawmakers that Trump would never attempt such a thing. It also bolsters key elements of the case for impeachment.
This Spiel originally appeared onThe Gist and has been edited and condensed for clarity. Donald Trump is a lot of things: incurious, incompetent, inattentive, inaccurate, insular, and infuriating. Is he insane, or—more broadly speaking—is he not well? Is he not fit? Is he not stable and also so far from genius as to be judged a blithering idiot? In his book Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff says, “Some believe that for all practical purposes, he was no more than semiliterate.
On the second day of the first government shutdown of Donald Trump’s presidency, one narrative began to rise above the rest: Blame the Democrats. Republican lawmakers and Trump advisers blitzed the airwaves on Sunday to explain why Senate Democrats’ demand for a DACA fix tethered to a funding bill is irresponsible and unreasonable. (DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an Obama-era executive policy that allows undocumented people who came to the U.S.
Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, is becoming President Trump’s right arm in the Senate. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and Cotton, a right-wing ideologue, is helping to steer the president. Either way, Trump’s behavior in the immigration debate—turning against a legislative compromise after Cotton was summoned to a White House meeting to oppose it—illustrates the young senator’s influence.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Ben Shapiro was 5 feet 2 inches and extremely prepubescent when, in the mid-1990s, he enrolled as a sophomore at a private Jewish high school in Los Angeles. The scrawny new kid had skipped ahead two grades, was too smart, talked too much, and got brutally bullied. Things came to a head when, on an overnight school trip, a few of Shapiro’s classmates handcuffed him to a bed and beat him with their belts.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Over the past year, I developed a stock answer for when new acquaintances asked what I wrote about. “It used to be language, books, and culture,” I’d say. “Now it’s language, books, culture, and Trump.” While the rise of the former Apprentice star changed my beat explicitly—after the election, I was tasked with critiquing his political performance as theater—this general turn Trumpward is an experience most journalists share.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Last week, during an Oval Office meeting, Donald Trump disparaged African and Haitian immigrants. Since then, he and his allies have tried to revise or cover up his remarks. To understand what Trump said and why his friends are trying to doctor the record, you have to understand how the immigration debate echoes the debate over another racially charged issue: affirmative action.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Not long after the 2016 Republican National Convention, I got a tip from a friend of mine. An old acquaintance of his in California was close to a woman in the adult-film industry who claimed to have had an affair with Donald Trump. I reached my friend’s friend, who put me in touch with the actress, who is known as Stormy Daniels.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
This article is part of aweeklong serieson President Trump’s first year in office. When a few disparate women—spread across several states and with little history of organized activism—conceived of a women’s march on a whim after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, no one knew how it would turn out, or whether it would happen at all. Nothing about the march went as planned.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Slate is running a weeklong series on President Trump’s first year in office. Read Jamelle Bouie’s companion essay about the only promise Trump has kept from his inaugural address. After eight years of a Democratic administration, the new Republican president came in with a lightning-strike agenda. He confirmed reliable, career conservatives to the Cabinet and stocked the federal judiciary with young, right-leaning judges.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Slate is running a weeklong series on President Trump’s first year in office. Read Jim Newell’s companion essay about Trump’s conventional—and reversible—policy agenda. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” With that promise—the centerpiece of his inaugural address—Donald Trump committed to a populist presidency. In his first year, President Trump has delivered the opposite.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
I don’t like to accuse people of racism. That word is used far too often, unjustly, to smear good men and women. It has been thrown at House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. John McCain, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and other decent conservatives. It has been attributed to anyone who defends law enforcement or opposes a government program. When everyone on the right is a white nationalist or white supremacist, these terms lose their meaning. But Donald Trump is a racist.
The past week has revealed a new principle in American politics: As President Trump grows more unhinged, his allies in Congress grow evermore committed to his administration. The new year began where the last one left off, with a spate of alarming outbursts and transgressions. There was the president’s social media brinksmanship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un about the size of his “nuclear button.
When world leaders came together in 2015 to settle on a framework for action on climate change, the resulting agreement set a goal of limiting the rise in global average temperatures from preindustrial levels to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. The climatologist Michael Mann, voicing what has been the scientific consensus for some time, has warned that warming beyond that could lead to “environmental ruin.
A daily selection of Slate’s best writing, read out loud. Learn more about this members-only feature at slate.com/voice
Nearly two dozen legislators joined the president at the White House on Tuesday for what was supposed to be a private meeting to work out a deal that could decide the fate of millions of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. It was one that members and senators on Monday afternoon had said would be pivotal.
Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s book about chaos in the Trump administration, tells some curious tales. It suggests Trump didn’t know who former House Speaker John Boehner was, even after Trump had golfed with him and had repeatedly tweeted about him. It says Trump used to offer hookers to men while letting their wives listen in on speakerphone. Stories like these sound too juicy to be true, and Wolff has a history of embellishment.
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatened the burgeoning legal marijuana industry by rescinding an Obama administration memo that effectively ensured states could legalize pot without federal interference.
President Trump’s election integrity commission didn’t get far before it was mired in controversy. State officials from around the country refused to comply with requests for detailed information on voters, and on Wednesday, after nearly a year of conflict and litigation, the president finally disbanded the commission. “Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud.
To look back at Donald Trump’s first year in office is to see steady assaults on truth, on propriety, and on the rule of law. Looking forward, we can expect more of the same. Already, on the second day of the year, President Trump has asked the Justice Department to investigate a political opponent, a textbook example of authoritarian behavior.
In 1832, horse racing was by far America’s most popular spectator sport. So when horses named Andrew Jackson and Nullifier appeared at the same racetrack in Richmond, Virginia, thousands of people saw their sporting and political interests overlap. The horses’ names reflected the most divisive political debate of the year, a constitutional crisis over “nullification.
Roy Moore, the former Alabama judge and accused molester, isn’t taking no for an answer. In a lawsuit filed this week, Moore, who lost a special election for the U.S. Senate by nearly 22,000 votes earlier this month, blames his defeat on electoral fraud and demands a do-over. A court has rejected Moore’s request to block certification of the election results. But the lawsuit, even if it goes nowhere, is a marvelous compilation of the derangements of the Trump era.
The U.S. has seen a 14-percent spike in roadway fatalities over the past two years. It’s also seen the biggest back-to-back increase in motor vehicle–related death rates per mile driven in more than 50 years and 37,461 lives lost by drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians in 2016 alone. What’s to blame? Many experts, writers, and organizations are pointing to smartphone use and other tech-related distractions while driving as major culprits. Official statistics from the U.S.
Five times a week for nearly 20 years, Meals on Wheels program coordinator Leisa Cotten would bring warm meals to the immobile and elderly of Cochise County, in the rural southeast corner of Arizona. But for the past decade, she’s had to switch it up. Now she delivers frozen meals, five at a time, once a week. “I haven’t seen you in a while” says Mark, one of Cotten’s clients (and whose name we have changed here), as she walks into his trailer.
China has the strange distinction of being both the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter and the premiere solar energy producer (Trump being in office has really given them an opportunity to firmly solidify that second crown). On Thursday, the country took its latest solar energy leap by opening a new, kilometer-long solar highway in the northeastern Shangdon province.
The statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest had stood in Memphis for more than a century—and inspired protest for decades—when Bruce McMullen, the city attorney who has sought for two years to find a legal way to rid the city of this monument to the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, began to feel a sense of urgency.
Most of the time when a bill is unpopular, Congress doesn’t pass it. But in an echo of Democratic rhetoric after passing the Affordable Care Act, Republicans hope voters will change their minds about the massive tax overhaul they passed on Wednesday once they see the benefits of the law.
The first phase of Echo ownership, especially when you’ve received one as a gift, is skepticism. When John Hebert, a car-dealer manager in Rosenberg, Texas, got his, “It didn’t even come out of the box for the first two months,” he said. Shaunacy Ferro, a writer in Brooklyn, had a similar reaction when she received one from her father.
On Thursday, the second most valuable company in the world announced that one of its chieftains was stepping down. Eric Schmidt, 62 and enormously wealthy, saidhe would leave his postas executive chairman at Alphabet for an advisory role with the company. Alphabet is the parent company of Google, whose online empire Schmidt presided over as CEO and executive chairman for 17 years of unrelenting growth.
Sholom Rubashkin, whose 27-year sentence President Donald Trump commuted on Wednesday, is a corrupt criminal who deserves punishment for his misdeeds. The Rubashkin case was nevertheless a criminal justice scandal, and Donald Trump was absolutely right to commute his draconian and constitutionally defective sentence. The only shame here is that Trump will almost certainly decline to grant clemency to other prisoners whose cases are just as egregious. Rubashkin’s crimes are well-documented.
The biggest laugh line I ever delivered was when I told a group of some 300 women at a big Atlantic event in Washington that my husband believes in Santa Claus.
For many parents, questions about children’s television begin and end with “Why do I have to argue about screen time so much with my kids?” On one hand, parents get worried by frightening headlines such as “Digital Heroin” (no, video games are nothing like heroin) and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” (no, they have not). On the other hand, parents must contend with kids eager to consume limitless hours of screen time.
After his tax bill victory on Wednesday, Donald Trump graciously called a Cabinet meeting—he probably sensed his staff was itching to get something off its chest. If he had not convened his cheerleading squad, it’s possible they would have been borne away by their unvented amazement, swept into the streets like Enoch to heaven. The president of the United States would not dare let such a thing happen to his beloved stuff. Right before the speeches began, though, Trump looked mad.
“None of us thought that much into it,” Ed Sheeran says, right before breaking down in great detailed bit by detailed bit just how much thought went into creating this year’s biggest musical hit, “Shape of You.” As they’ve done in the past with other popular songs, the New York Times released a fascinating video in which the artists give a behind-the-scenes tour of their inspirations and creative processes.
Remember when your parents warned that sitting too close to the TV would hurt your eyes? I didn’t really believe it either, but now that I’m a parent to a 6-year-old who yearns to stare at an iPad all day, I can’t help but revisit the issue.
When 18 Senate Democrats joined Republicans to pass a short-term spending bill on Thursday, it marked yet another day of disappointment for Dreamers and their allies in Congress. Earlier on Thursday afternoon, a dozen members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus had marched across the Capitol to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office, asked his receptionist for a meeting, and soon found themselves in a room with the minority leader.
It has been a tumultuous month for Democrats in Congress, thanks in large part to sexual assault scandals within their own ranks. Few Democrats have seemed to ride that storm quite as smoothly as New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who fronted the initial wave of female senators calling for the resignation of their colleague, Sen. Al Franken. Gillibrand followed that with a call for President Trump to resign over the sexual assault allegations that have been resurfaced in recent weeks.
I’m squinting through the sun at the Polk County Steak Fry, trying to size up Seth Moulton. It’s a late September Saturday in Des Moines, and Moulton’s onstage, an immense American flag rippling behind him. “A lot of you must be asking,” he begins with a coy glance around, his voice echoing through the PA system, “what is a sophomore congressman from Massachusetts doing speaking here in Iowa?” Not really.
In 2009, Chris Brown viciously assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna. His sentencing as ordered by a judge included five years probation, as well as a five-year restraining order. (In 2011, the restraining order was lifted, conditionally.) In 2015, Brown was accused of forcibly ejecting a woman off of a bus during a video shoot. In 2016, former tour manager Nancy Ghosh alleged that the singer threatened her with violence, and she subsequently cut ties with him.
But if reality is indeed in danger here, it’s not because of Donald Trump. The story of the language rules at CDC has quickly broken free of underlying facts. Despite what you may have heard, the alleged “ban” of seven words does not reveal a secret “War on Science” carried out by thought police in Washington; nor is it some evil plot to “enforce a political and ideological agenda,” as the Washington Post editorial board suggested.
Two years ago, Uber was valued at nearly $70 billion—more than General Motors, Ford, or Honda. If it could do for driving what Amazon did for shopping, the thinking went, it could end up controlling more of the personal transportation market than any automaker does today. The road to global ride-hailing dominance has proven bumpy, however.
This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here’s today’s selection: There are a lot of Slate columns I miss, but if I could revive one it would probably be Bryan Curtis’The Middlebrow, a weekly investigation into the obvious. This one about cheerleaders is a perfect example: We never think about cheerleaders, but the whole enterprise is weird as heck.
Welcome to Should This Thing Be Smart? Each month, Justin Peters examines a smart object and try to determine whether there is any good reason for its existence—and how likely it is to be used for nefarious reasons. Previously on Should This Thing Be Smart?: The $60 smart fork and the $199 smart socks. Item: Ember Ceramic Mug Price: $79.95 on the Ember website Function: The Ember Ceramic Mug is basically a coffee mug that is also a thermostat.
Excerpt reprinted from Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History copyright © 2017 by Kurt Andersen. With permission from the publisher, Random House. All rights reserved. One set of fantasies has had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the most important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate. During my lifetime, the love of guns has become a fetish.
It’s that time of year again: Love Actually season is upon us. The modern holiday classic is full of egregious flaws, from the not-so-romantic cue card scene to the constant body shaming of a healthy, attractive woman—flaws that fans such as myself have had to come to terms with in order to enjoy the holiday season staple.
It’s not an overstatement to say that, if you are a young writer who interrogates American race relations and white supremacy, Cornel West is the foundation upon which you stand. Alongside the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and, of course, James Baldwin, West’s work is part of the canon that teaches younger writers how to think and write about race.
Retired gymnast McKayla Maroney filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking damages for the sexual abuse she says she suffered for years at the hands of Larry Nassar, a doctor who recently pled guilty to assaulting several young gymnasts under his care. According to the suit, the Wall Street Journal reports, USA Gymnastics paid Maroney $1.25 million in a confidential settlement last fall in exchange for her silence. Maroney, a 22-year-old gold medalist from the 2012 U.S.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins has not been pleased with the Capitol press corps lately. In recent days the mild-mannered senator has cut off reporters or told them how tired she is of their “cynicism.” On Tuesday, when she was asked for the umpteenth time about her confidence that two health care bills she supports would become law by the end of the year, she unloaded.
MIDDLETOWN, Conn.—Dave Bagatelle and a handful of his buddies sat in folding chairs on a Saturday morning this fall, chomping on thick cigars and sipping Sapporo beers. It was early, still a few hours before that afternoon’s game between the Wesleyan Cardinals and Bates Bobcats, but the party had already started. Bagatelle and his friends played football at Wesleyan in the 1980s and they’ve been tailgating at Andrus Field ever since.
Since the dancing baby delighted our screens more than two decades ago, memes have taken various forms, their popularity aided as tools have made it easier to create memes of our own. Still photos and images, like the now ubiquitous text-overlaid image memes, can be easily created on the fly with some basic Photoshop skills. Giphy offers a whole trove of GIF-style memery. Internet discussion boards like Reddit are a constant source of new viral fodder, too.
As one politician after another resigns in the face of sexual harassment allegations, one man remains standing: Donald Trump. Despite detailed accusations by multiple women, backed up by Trump’s recorded boasts of groping women without their consent, he insists his accusers’ stories are “fabricated.” In fact, says the White House, voters have acquitted Trump. On Dec.
When the entire cast belts out “THIS IS THE GREATEST SHOW” a minute into your movie, the film itself had better live up to it. The Greatest Showman—how shall I put this?—doesn’t. Something feels off right from the beginning, as we see Hugh Jackman’s P.T. Barnum making his way through the space behind the circus bleachers in silhouette, pounding his cane to the rhythm of crashing drums.
House Republicans gave themselves a lengthy ovation on the floor of the chamber Tuesday afternoon when it was clear the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, had met the threshold for passage. They gave themselves another lengthy ovation, a couple of minutes later, when Speaker Paul Ryan enthusiastically gaveled in the vote at 227 to 203. They will presumably re-create these ovations again on Wednesday, when they have to re-vote because certain provisions of the bill violated Senate rules.
For many Alabama voters, the administration of last Tuesday’s special election was a disaster. Republican Secretary of State John Merrill refused to prepare for high turnout, leading to confusion and long lines; poll workers spread misinformation at understaffed precincts; and some citizens were initially denied a ballot due to a recent “refresh” of the voter rolls.
When Matt Lauer was fired last month, TMZ dug up a 2012 clip from the show Watch What Happens Live, in which Katie Couric told Andy Cohen that her then–co-host Lauer’s most annoying habit was “he pinched me on the ass a lot.” Cohen and the audience laughed, and that was the end of it. How is it possible that we thought this was funny so recently? The answer is in our history.
In 1996, Julie Aigner-Clark was a stay-at-home mom in Colorado frustrated by a lack of sufficiently educational entertainment for her 18-month-old daughter. She shot the first Baby Einstein video in her own basement with a borrowed camcorder, a few puppets, and an $18,000 budget. Five years later, she sold the company to Disney for a reported $25 million.
Prosecutors got approval from a federal judge in Utah to sell more than 513 bitcoins and 512 bitcoin cash they had seized from a man allegedly running a counterfeit pharmaceuticals ring on the darknet, Ars Technica reports. The cryptocurreny was taken from Aaron Shamo, who was arrested a year ago. At current prices, the bitcoins would be worth more than $8 million, while the bitcoin cash would sell for almost $1 million. The U.S.
On Sunday, Roy Moore wrapped up his campaign with another volley of falsehoods. In an interview with The Voice of Alabama Politics, he denied knowing any of the nine female accusers shown in a campaign ad by his opponent, Doug Jones. At this point, anyone who still trusts Moore’s denials probably can’t be swayed.
Dave Grohl, who many lifetimes ago was in a band called Nirvana, stopped by Saturday Night Live with his new band the Foo Fighters, and he brought some Christmas cheer with him! After starting off with “Everlong,” from 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters turned in a rocking performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love (off Phil Spector’s 1963 Christmas album) and a guitar arrangement of the Vince Guaraldi classic, “Linus & Lucy,” which first appeared on A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965....
All eyes are on what Donald Trump will do, as the oracles on Twitter and the Hill have predicted that the president may fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller around the holidays. Trump’s lawyers have denied that he is considering such a move, and Trump himself has not directly criticized Mueller. However, Trump has recently expressed dissatisfaction with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, calling him “weak” and a threat.
At least once in a president’s term, the White House releases a document called the National Security Strategy. Mandated by Congress since the mid-1980s, the NSS is usually sheer boilerplate, a collage of clichés about America’s role in the world. Few read it, but those who do come away with harrumphs of reassurance that the current people in power know what they’re doing and, by and large, are following the hallowed principles of their predecessors.
The Sweeneys tell the story of—you guessed it—a baby-sitting co-op, one to which they belonged in the early 1970s. Such co-ops are quite common: A group of people (in this case about 150 young couples with congressional connections) agrees to baby-sit for one another, obviating the need for cash payments to adolescents.
On Wednesday, Google released its annual "Year in Search," which tracks trending queries for the past year. But among the list of top memes, prominent people, and how-to questions for 2017, on both the global and United States lists, one normally inescapable topic was missing: Donald Trump. It’s nice to imagine a 2017 without Trump, but really: How did the 45th president not make it on Google’s list? It’s a matter of relativity.
On Saturday night, the high court of Fox News came to order, Judge Jeanine Pirro presiding. In the opening segment of her show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, Pirro sermonized about the need for a government purge. Wearing a blazing red blouse and enunciating like the irate director of a recalcitrant choir, the jurist-turned-professional-angry-person went medieval on the United States circa 2017.
Read a companion piece from Slate’s science editor on this investigation. On a sunny autumn day three years ago, when Kesia Lyng was 30, she had a visit from her youngest sister, Eva. The two were close, and as they sat at the kitchen table in Lyng’s apartment, Eva confronted her chronically ill sibling with a painful fact: “You almost can’t take care of your own kids,” she told her. “You can’t keep pushing yourself so hard.
One of the greatest pleasures of parenting is introducing things you love to your kids. Since the birth of my two girls, I’ve been anticipating the day I would gift them with the best show of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then my girls stopped watching TV. Once upon a time, we monitored TV time like hawks.
In a dizzying series of tweets and news stories on Monday, the Pentagon appeared to simultaneously embrace transgender recruits while the Trump administration was losing its bid in court to deny their entry into the service. Once the dust settled, it became clear that, for now, the slow policy change on transgender service that began under President Obama will continue under President Trump. Transgender people who want to serve their country in uniform may enlist starting on Jan.
There’s no shame in revisiting a classic, and on this week’s Saturday Night Live, host James Franco riffed on one of the show’s most iconic sketches: Dan Aykroyd’s legendary French Chef bit where, as Julia Child, he sliced a finger and merrily bled to death. Franco’s character, a gift-wrapper at Bloomingdale’s, is motivated by Christmas cheer rather than Bordeaux and chicken livers, but the basic premise is the same: blood, blood, and more blood.
Under Merrill’s regime, a multitude of voters—most of them in majority-black counties—struggled to cast their ballots in the race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. Unprepared poll workers spread misinformation. Bewildered citizens were forced to fill out confusing, redundant paperwork. Qualified voters were told they could not vote. And the state may well have run afoul of federal law.
This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here's today's selection: In 1996, Michael Kinsley famously moved from Washington, D.C.’s political swamp to the salmon-spawning grounds of the Puget Sound to edit Microsoft’s first general interest Web magazine, the publication you’re reading now.
The Federal Communications Commission is poised to repeal its net neutrality rules this week, opening the doors for internet service providers to charge companies that can afford it for faster-lane access to users—a potentially significant blow to the open internet. In this week’s episode of their podcast If Then, Slate’s April Glaser and Will Oremus spoke with Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who coined the term net neutrality.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama—At the viewing party for Doug Jones supporters on Tuesday night, you could feel the energy shift from nervous anticipation to joy and jubilation as it became clear that Jones would be the next United States senator from Alabama, the first Democrat elected to represent the state in the Senate since 1992, and the first Democrat elected to statewide office in nearly 10 years.
The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Wednesday that the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony will be presented by women, women, and more women, as a mark of what womenfolk have been through this year and since the dawn of time. Like many award ceremonies, the SAG Awards usually pairs a man and a women to announce each winner—but this year, only women will have that honor.
The first time I met Alex Kozinski was in 1996. I was clerking for the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and there was an orientation for new clerks in San Francisco. One of my co-clerks and I were introduced to the already legendary, lifetime-tenured young judge at a reception, and we talked for a while. I cannot recall what we talked about. I remember only feeling quite small and very dirty.
Think back to six months or so ago when you first encountered the fidget spinner. (Yes, for anyone experiencing Trump-related time dilation, the fidget spinner craze happened this year.) At the time, did you think the toy was cool but that it could probably be more Jewish? Well then, today—the day of the first night of Hanukkah—is your day: The new miracle of Hanukkah has arrived in the form of the fidget dreidel.
Will the Republican tax bill devastate America’s bluest states? That’s the impression you’d get from two recent op-eds in the New York Times, the first by a pair of liberal academics, and the second by a conservative policy analyst, both of which castigate Republicans for drastically shrinking the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT.
On Monday, a 27-year-old man tried to blow up a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but really he only succeeded in inconveniencing a lot of people, since he was the only one to sustain serious injuries. Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, both of whom tape their shows in New York, were not impressed with this attempt to bring chaos down on the city’s transit system, which is already pretty chaotic.
In a little-noted passage of his speech at a Saturday rally in Pensacola, Florida, mostly devoted to support for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, President Trump revived a theme that some of his aides had hoped he’d abandoned—his demeaning of America’s allies, his dismissal of NATO as an outfit of no real use to U.S. interests, and his threat not to send troops to defend its members from attacks unless they pony up more money.
This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here’s today’s selection: Michael Lewis has an astonishing talent for making any true story both gripping and meaningful. In this piece from 2003, he turns that talent on himself, as an ice skating accident transforms into a rumination on bad parenting, hard work, and personal identity—with a twist of a self-loathing kicker to boot.
Even if the United States Supreme Court does the right thing in Masterpiece Cakeshop v.
On the scale between unbridled enthusiasm for smart speakers and technophobic paranoia, I fall in the ambivalent middle area. I’d read about the potential for these devices to be hacked or gamed by advertisers or to simply make expensive mistakes, and I’d heard others gush of the ways it had radically transformed their homes for the better. But I had never pictured myself having one, and so I didn’t do any real research or form any real opinions.
MOBILE, Alabama—As she sped around the oak-draped streets here on Sunday morning, in a Suburban piled with weeks of campaign detritus, Christian Smith explained that we were in one of the four counties that could decide the state’s next U.S. senator. “Mobile’s not as red as you might think,” she said. “It’s 50-50. It’s winnable.
Hannibal Buress, the comedian whose 2014 stand-up routine about Bill Cosby was, in many ways, the opening bell for the current wave of sexual harassment scandals in entertainment, was arrested early Sunday morning in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, the Miami Herald reports. According to the police report, Buress approached an officer standing on a street corner and asked him to call him an Uber.
In 2014, a researcher in France revealed a disturbing fact about the published scientific literature: At least 120 computer-generated manuscripts had made their way into academic conference proceedings, according to his analysis. Those robot-written papers, containing little more than strung-together buzzwords, had been created with a piece of software known as SCIgen, originally written on a lark by a trio of MIT graduate students in 2005.
Monday morning, a man tried to explode what has been preliminarily described as a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The “low-tech device,” as Gov. Andrew Cuomo described it, may have gone off prematurely. A second device he was carrying failed to detonate. The would-be bomber, identified as a Bangladeshi man, was injured and taken to the hospital.
At a rally in November 2015, Donald Trump heralded, “If I become president, we’re all going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again, that I can tell you.” Of all his empty guarantees, the president has perhaps fulfilled none better than a counterstrike in the War on Christmas, and no battalion has fired more rooty-toot artillery for him than the Hallmark Channel.
I started using the app Strava to track my rides before I’d even purchased my first road bike. I was competitive. After downloading it and getting my first taste of landing on the leaderboards, I was hooked. I never got on my bike without it. In a matter of months, my bike-riding addiction had become a bike-racing addiction. I started donning a heart-rate monitor to quantify my efforts and recovery and after my first year of racing added a power meter to my activity-tracking collection too.
Did Roy Moore write an inscription in the 1977 high school yearbook of Beverly Nelson, who says he forcibly groped her? That’s the question skeptics are asking after Nelson acknowledged Friday, in an ABC News interview and a press conference, that she wrote notes below the inscription.
Michael Idov’s wry, rueful piece from 2005 about his stint owning an unsuccessful NYC coffee shop has stuck with me over the years, perhaps because I, too, have occasionally indulged in my own New York foodservice fantasies. (My latest idea: A Steely Dan–themed pop-up bar called “Doctor Wu’s.
Fifty-one senators and 227 members of the House of Representatives have already voted in favor of Republicans’ tax overhaul. It makes sense, then, to assume the House and Senate conferees will successfully put the finishing touches on a final bill and pass it through both chambers again. But this week has shown that the conference committee and Republican leaders have far more work to do than just dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
Big corporate mergers in the health care industry tend to work out poorly for customers. When hospitals combine, they raise prices. When insurers get together, premiums can leap. But when pharmacy giant CVS announced last week that it planned to buy Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, in a deal worth $69 billion, some experts were cautiously optimistic.
In the real world, you can wave, hug, or high-five your friends hello, and soon you may have a similar range of nonverbal options on Facebook. The social network is testing a new “Greetings” feature that will let users send digital salutations in the form of a wave, high five, wink, hug, or—this will sound familiar—poke. The feature, which the Next Web spotted and appears to be rolling out to some users in the U.K.
A month ago, when Roy Moore was accused of having pursued teenage girls while in his 30s, he equivocated. “Do you remember dating girls that young?” Sean Hannity asked him. Moore hedged: “Not generally, no. If I did, you know, I’m not going to dispute anything, but I don’t remember anything like that.” Hannity asked Moore about Debbie Gibson, who said she had dated Moore when she was 17 and he was 34.
Jimmy Kimmel is taking the week off to spend time with his family after his son’s surgery, but Jimmy Kimmel Live! has continued to air new episodes with a roster of celebrity guest hosts filling in. On Tuesday, Tracee Ellis Ross took the reins and used the opportunity to talk about sexual harassment in the news. “First of all, let’s start with the fact that it isn’t a sex scandal. It isn’t a Hollywood scandal,” she said. “It isn’t even a scandal.
In October, the California Senate passed a new law adding a third gender—nonbinary—to state-issued identification. The Gender Recognition Act (SB 179) additionally removes the requirement that petitioners present a physician-signed affidavit that they have undergone “clinically appropriate treatment for the purposes of gender transition” in order to change their gender marker.
Minnesota Sen. Al Franken announced on Thursday his plan to resign “in the coming weeks” after a series of allegations that he groped women and kissed them without consent. “There is a big part of me that will always regret having to walk away from this job with so much work left to be done,” Franken said in somber remarks on the Senate floor. “But I have faith that the work will continue because I have faith in the people who’ve helped me do it.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week reports that homelessness has ticked up by just under 1 percent, to 553,742 Americans sleeping outside or in shelters. It’s the first national increase in nearly a decade, driven almost entirely by individuals living on the streets of California cities like Los Angeles, where homelessness rose 26 percent since last year. Family homelessness, by contrast, fell by 10,000, and has fallen 10 percent in two years.
The word “dreams” in the subtitle of Caroline Fraser’s new book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is plural for a reason.
Remember “when they go low, we go high?” Yep. So do I. I remembered it in the fall of 2016, when Senate Republicans and then-candidate Donald Trump first made it irrevocably clear there would be no hearing for anyone Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court, ever, even though Obama had put up a moderate, centrist nominee who was once acceptable to Senate Republicans. I remembered it when Trump won, and we realized that that seat would stay stolen.
Trump’s decision was all about placating his base. There is no other strategic rationale for taking this step now, which is why the president’s advisers have struggled in background briefings to explain how it is in the United States’ security interest. And even the domestic politics for Trump are not very compelling: Sure, he promised to move the embassy during the campaign, but this was not a central tenet of his platform.
Jerry Falwell made his living finding gay people where they didn’t belong. “Remember… homosexuals do not reproduce,” the televangelist and activist warned his followers in 1981. “They recruit!” He claimed to have confronted President Carter about why he employed “practicing homosexuals” in the White House in 1980. When Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom character came out of the closet in 1997, he called her “Ellen Degenerate.
In the good old days of 2009, when public figures felt (slightly) less shame about warmly embracing sexual predators, a number of filmmakers and celebrities came forth to say that Roman Polanski deserved lenience in part because of his artistic contributions. Apparently revolted by this obscene logic, the comedian and radio host Sam Seder tweeted, “Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene.
Donald Trump Jr. has all the obvious traits of his father: He’s belligerent, dim, and mired in everlasting childhood. But the president’s firstborn is a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He is to Donald J. Trump as a postcard of the Mona Lisa is to the actual Mona Lisa—the image of the thing, absent its original aura. Don Jr. may be as privileged and petty as the president, but his indistinctness prevents him from commanding our gaze the way his dad does.
Johnny Hallyday, the singer whose French-language covers of American songs helped bring rock ’n’ roll to France, has died of cancer at the age of 74, Variety reports. He had been ill for several months. Hallyday, whose real name was Jean-Phillipe Smet, was born in Paris. An Elvis movie inspired him to start studying music and performing, and he released his first single, “Laisses les Filles,” in the spring of 1960.
FREMONT, Nebraska—The past few years in this Nebraska town of 26,000 have been unusually fraught. “My neighbor is on the City Council. His wife does not wave to me,” explained John Wiegert, as he made his way to a political meeting at the public library this summer. “I could be on fire in the front yard, and she wouldn’t put me out with a garden hose.
When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. It was a Friday night, and I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar.
Is Twitter now such a rough-and-tumble place that even a man as manly as Armie Hammer can’t survive there? On Monday, after calling a BuzzFeed piece about him “bitter AF,” Hammer peaced out of the social network. He’s hardly the first person to have fled the platform—the Twitter hiatus has been a certifiable Thing this year, the online equivalent of a juice cleanse—but his reasons for fleeing seem a little less admirable than the usual ones.
Late Friday night, Senate Republicans passed a hastily crafted $1.5 trillion overhaul of the tax code on a party line vote of 51–49. Only Bob Corker of Tennessee broke ranks to vote against the bill, whose final draft was introduced hours before voting with handwritten amendments scribbled in the margins by lobbyists. This plan, centered on a large corporate and upper-income tax cut, has clear winners and losers, with most of the American public falling in the latter category.
NBC fired Today host Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning following a complaint by a colleague describing “inappropriate sexual behavior,” noting in the statement that “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.
Judging from the coverage surrounding this week’s blockbuster case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it might seem that the legal clash between religious liberty and discrimination in public spaces is a modern controversy that the Supreme Court is just catching up to. But more than 50 years ago, John W.
A decade later, Jill Harth met Trump when she and then-boyfriend George Houraney collaborated with him on a beauty pageant production in Atlantic City. According to Harth’s testimony in a 1996 deposition, Trump told Houraney, in front of Harth, that he was going to try to sleep with her. The next night, Harth says, Trump groped her under the table at dinner.
For a lot of us, Instagram is there to prove that celebrities aren’t so different after all. They too take mirror selfies of their OOTDs. They too share photos of brunch tables that look haphazardly set but are actually entirely staged. And when we follow a celebrity’s feed, their ’grams are seamlessly shuffled in with the posts of our friends, making “them” feel a little bit more like “us.” I am not convinced this is a good thing.
Finally, we know why sexual harassment happens! Peggy Noonan and an unnamed “aging Catholic priest” she quotes secondhand in her latest column seem to believe that harassment is a product of the sexual revolution, and especially of the availability of contraception and abortion.
What would we do without Slate? No, I don’t mean Slate Magazine. I mean Jenny Slate, actress, comedian, and—today at least—queen of our hearts. In a week of news ranging from the gross to the harrowing, Slate has gifted us with not one but two pieces of objectively good news.
We talk a lot these days about how the United States has sorted itself into two distinct media bubbles, and all the ways in which those bubbles become self-reinforcing and reality-denying. But there is another way in which the perfect epistemic closure that characterizes this moment continues to play out. On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
The last days have brought plenty of reasons for schadenfreude. Many of my friends seem to be seized by a mood of dizzy excitement. I get why. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn faces time in jail. Donald Trump may have incriminated himself with yet another impulsive tweet. Impeachment, though still a distant prospect, looks a lot closer now than it did a few weeks ago. If this is not yet the beginning of the end, it may, one day, come to be seen as the end of the beginning.
One of its biggest surprises comes in the first chapter: In 1969–70, when Ellsberg was spending his nights Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers, a copy of which was in his safe at the RAND Corporation, he was also—he reveals here for the first time to anyone besides a handful of friends and loved ones—making copies of everything in his safe, including the top-secret-and-beyond documents from his nuclear studies.
In Tony Earley’s remarkable memoir “Somehow Form a Family,” he interweaves stories from his childhood in small-town North Carolina with stories from the TV shows he and his sister Shelly watched at the time: All in the Family, The Wonderful World of Disney, The Three Stooges, and above all The Brady Bunch. And by “interweaves” I don’t mean that he tells a story from his childhood and then tells a story from the TV.
The conceit of “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” the New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater—a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group—is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.
One might call Melodrama—Lorde’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated sophomore album—high art. The album is not just an aural splendor but a visual one too, with a moody, blue-lit painting of Lordeby Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss on the cover. One fan, it seems, definitely does.
Axios reports today that President Trump plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a speech on Wednesday. It’s not clear yet if this also means he’s ordering the U.S. embassy to be moved to the city, though the Israeli media has reported that he’s planning to do so, and Vice President Mike Pence said this week that he’s “actively considering” doing so. According to the Wall Street Journal, “U.S.
Senate Republicans have the votes to pass their tax bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters late Friday morning after meeting with his caucus. The GOP senators were all smiles on the Senate floor afterwards—except for Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who appears to have gotten rolled. Johnson announced his support for the bill earlier in the day. The deduction for pass-through businesses, which the original bill pinned at 17.4 percent, will now be 23 percent.
Not too long ago, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Utah Sen. Mike Lee were conservative darlings. Both of them first ran for the Senate as Tea Party upstarts against Republican insiders, and both distinguished themselves as creative conservative policymakers who were eager to modernize the Reaganite agenda. This week, however, Rubio and Lee have been branded apostates by an alphabet soup of conservative organizations.
And so the Trump administration’s long-awaited national security shuffle begins. Rex Tillerson is soon to be ousted as secretary of state—no surprise, given that he was once quoted as calling Trump “a fucking moron” (then didn’t deny doing so when given the chance) and that Trump had publicly undermined one of the secretary’s only diplomatic ventures.
Like the rest of us, Lois Heppell and many other older adults use technology to keep up with their friends. But news of hookups and job promotions is not what they’re expecting. “The first thing my mother does every morning is get up, turn on her computer, and go to the bathroom,” says Heppell’s son, Robin Heppell, a funeral marketing consultant.
I grew up without a TV at a time when it was still possible for parents to raise kids screen-free without acting like insufferable prigs about it. Although Jerry Mander published his sweeping anti-TV polemic Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television the same year I was born, my parents don’t remember their decision to raise us without TV as being much of a political one.
Roy Moore has a theory. He says the Washington Post, which has been investigating his foundation and his conduct with teenage girls, isn’t interested in truth. The Post, he argues, is just trying to take down his campaign. This is the kind of thing politicians often say, figuring it’s a matter of irrefutable opinion. They don’t imagine that a charge of political motivation could be factually debunked. But it can. And that is what has happened to Moore’s theory.
After a miserable day like Wednesday, we could all use a news story—just one!—that isn’t part of the torrent of garbage that’s been raining down for the last year. So here’s that story: Aardman Animations, the beloved studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, has a new movie coming out. It’s called Early Man, it’s directed by Nick Park, and here’s its trailer.
Just after Kevin Young handed in the manuscript of his magnum opus on American hucksterism, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, his publisher had to send it back to him. Young—a noted poet, the newly appointed poetry editor of the New Yorker, and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library—has a theory that most hoaxes have a racial subtext (that is, when race isn’t the overt text).
While bent over locking up my bike in Chicago a few years ago, I heard the all-too-familiar sound of a wolf whistle. I turned around to get a look at the jerks accosting some woman on the street, only to realize I was the one who was being cat called. A man passing by from behind had seen my long curly hair and tight jeans and mistaken me for a woman. When I turned around to face him, he was shocked and started apologizing profusely.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, disgraced gymnastics doctor and convicted child sex abuser Larry Nassar stood in front of a judge in Lansing, Michigan. He had just pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexual assault—a small fraction of the crimes he’s been accused of committing. As Slate’s Jeremy Stahl wrote, Nassar’s plea deal will allow all 125 victims who reported their assaults to the Michigan State Police to read statements at his sentencing in January.
Sarah Stevens married a fellow grad student right as she was finishing a Ph.D. in Chinese. Together, they decided they would go wherever one person found a good job. Her husband got an offer first. “I feel like it’s always the way it turns out—the guy getting the job,” she said.
In the internet age, it often seems that what is digital may never die. Even when our loved ones slip their mortal coil, their social media profiles soldier on. Though Facebook, Google, and other companies have developed protocols for shutting down the accounts of the dead, many if not most of us are still caught off guard. When my grandfather died, for example, “he” continued to contact me through his LinkedIn profile.
This post has been updated with new information since it was originally published. As members of the Senate Budget Committee were arriving for a key vote on the Republican tax reform bill on Tuesday, they were greeted by a familiar passel of protesters, chanting, “Shame!” and “Kill the bill, don’t kill us!” The protesters went so far as to talk directly into several of the senators’ ears as they tried to do hallway television interviews.
There hasn’t been a better feel good story in a long time than Project Veritas’ hilariously inept attempt to trick the Washington Post into publishing a false story about Roy Moore, even if, as Slate’s Osita Nwanevu argues, conservative buffoon James O’Keefe won’t face any real consequences. I mean, have you ever seen anything more satisfying than watching Veritas operative Jamie T.
I grew up without a TV at a time when it was still possible for parents to raise kids screen-free without acting like insufferable prigs about it. Although Jerry Mander published his sweeping anti-TV polemic Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television the same year I was born, my parents don’t remember their decision to raise us without TV as being much of a political one.
The occasion took place Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he delivered a speech bubbling over with boilerplate, interesting only for his warnings of Russian aggression and his touting of America’s allies as our most vital strength—both sentiments at odds with those of his president, a sign of his scant influence within the administration.
As we reach the commercial holiday known as Cyber Monday, we can’t help but remember the gadgets and gear that won’t be flying off digital shelves this year—the inventions and technologies that fell by the wayside in 2017. Surely, as you peruse the day’s sale offerings, you’ll barely see a 3D TV in the mix. After a years-long push, consumers made it clear that this living room trend was a big fat no.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan is for the Senate to begin floor consideration of the Republican tax reform bill on Tuesday, pretend to have an open and sincere amendment process, and pass it by the end of the week. It may well work. For a proposal that’s only marginally more popular than Republicans’ universally despised health care reform efforts, their tax reform plans have met surprisingly soft resistance moving through Congress.
Pixar has always been known for making children’s movies adults can love too, occasionally to the point of giving their youngest viewers more than they are ready to handle. The tear-jerking opening montage of Up is the classic example—a four-minute lesson in the cruelty of time and mortality that is way beyond the emotional reach of many children—but let’s not forget the resigned embrace of death in Toy Story 3’s furnace scene, Mr. and Mrs.
The conceit of “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” the New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater—a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group—is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.
If you’ve been following the goings on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s a constitutional crisis brewing in Trump’s America.
On Friday, a federal consent decree to stop potential voter suppression by the Republican National Committee—in place since 1982—is set to expire unless further extended by a federal district court in New Jersey. What happens next, with Donald Trump in charge of the Republican Party, will likely not be pretty.
Still, more than half of infants and toddlers in the United States spend some part of their day being cared for by someone other than a parent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And at both the federal and state level, the U.S. spends almost nothing on helping American families care for their collective 3.9 million 2-year-olds.
If you had asked me last month if I spent too much time in front of screens, I would have said, “No way.” Sure, I’m in front of a computer for roughly eight hours a day for work. And looking at my smartphone screen before, during, and after. And in the evening, my TV is playing Netflix or HBO Go until I head to bed. But that seemed normal. I was forced to re-evaluate that sentiment on a Friday in late October. As I started to sit up from bed, someone tipped the world sideways.
The battle within the Republican Party has come down to this: Is it OK for a 32-year-old man to seduce a 14-year-old girl? On one side are the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Paul Ryan. They have disowned Roy Moore, the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, over allegations that he targeted, and in some cases molested, minors and other teen girls.
Talk to anyone who worked in book publishing this year and no matter how chipper the conversation may begin, once you’re a few drinks in the talk will turn gloomy. Sales are flat, or down. There have been no market-defining breakout hits, no hot new genres to plump up the annual earnings statement. Everyone blames this on the election and the news.
November on Twitter always comes with a sigh of relief. That’s when all the people who were doing wacky Halloween monikers in the lead-up to Oct. 31 switch back to their normal display names. But this year, we didn’t even make it halfway through November before Twitter upended our nicknameless tranquility. You may not have thought much of it last week when, along with doubling the character limit for tweets, Twitter also expanded the character limit for display names from 20 to 50.
Doug Jones has a chance. Allegations of sexual assault have turned Judge Roy Moore’s already divisive campaign toxic, opening the door to a Democratic Party upset. But to make that happen, the Jones campaign has two major tasks. First, he has to build out his base, i.e., the black voters who form the foundation for Democratic Party performance in the state. Second, he has to win an unprecedented share of white voters.
Thanksgiving! Is there any other word that so perfectly embodies the spirit of Thanksgiving? If there is, we should change the holiday’s name to whatever that word is, probably. But whatever name it goes by, Thanksgiving can only mean one thing: Playing 12 hours of turkey sound effects at increasingly high volume until your family goes home and leaves you in peace.
For the last few weeks, the app HQ Trivia had been riding high, earning praise as “addictive”—in a good way!—and “your new favorite mobile game.” Cut to Tuesday: Its CEO freaked out on a Daily Beast reporter, and then its scheduled 9 p.m. game crashed, eventually starting a half-hour late. HQ Trivia is an interactive game show, with all the cheesy appeal its genre implies. With the app, a host beams live into your phone to ask questions at 3 and 9 p.m.
Puerto Rico still lacks power, millions of children are waiting for Congress to reauthorize a vital health insurance program, and a massive pipeline has leaked more than 200,000 gallons of oil into the American heartland. It’s possible President Trump is focused on these problems, but you wouldn’t know it from his Twitter feed. There, he is again preoccupied with well-known black people and their perceived disrespect.
Law & Order recently experimented with true crime, but the franchise hasn’t given up on their usual practice of taking real news stories and turning them into fictionalized, police procedural entertainment. If anything, it’s almost surprising that it took this long for Law & Order: SVU to announce that an episode addressing the Harvey Weinstein scandal is headed to a TV near you in 2018.
Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.
Last week, the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, D.C. When the museum was first conceived, it was intended to “inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible,” according to documents filed in 2010. But then, scholarship and dialogue intervened.
In 2013, L.V. Anderson wrote this sharp, controversial takedown of a culinary Thanksgiving tradition: Apple pie. Just in time for this year's festivities, we've reprinted the story below. It’s practically a law that in late November, every publication must offer a Thanksgiving guide. This year, I would like to draw your attention to two exceptional ones (other than Slate’s).
A few years ago, I spent most of Thanksgiving dividing up the furniture in the house for when the divorce came. My husband had just walked out the door with a six-pack of beer to hang out with a friend, leaving me with a kitchen explosion of vegetable peels and uncooked dishes, a scatter of recipes and cookbooks, a table yet to be set for 18, and one gigantic, raw bird. He could have that fucking blue-leather couch. To say I was livid would be a gross understatement.
That’s not to say they lack an agenda. Repealing the Affordable Care Act would have reshaped a vast swath of the American economy and transformed the social safety net, not just ending Medicaid but striking a blow against the entire project of public subsidy for health insurance. The tax reform bill passed by the House of Representatives would hike taxes for tens of millions of Americans to provide massive tax cuts for large corporations, the wealthy, their heirs, and the merely affluent.
It’s funny because it’s true: Why should pilots be congratulated for managing to do their jobs without killing hundreds of people? (As Handler once pointed out on Twitter, #thatswhattheyresupposedtofuckingdo.) It’s not just a comedian’s pet peeve; frustration with the idiotic cabin clap appears to be widespread. “Please Don’t Clap When the Plane Lands,” wrote the staff of Condé Nast Traveler in a signed editorial last year.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi sits on one corner of an island calledSaadiyat, a large triangle of desert joined to the capital of the United Arab Emirates by a causeway. Scattered in the sand on Saadiyat Island are a handful of other upscale developments: a golf course, a Park Hyatt and a St. Regis, scores of suburban-style villas, and a campus of New York University.
Welcome to Should This Thing Be Smart?, a new series. Each month, Justin Peters will examine a new smart object and try to determine whether there is any good reason for its existence—and how likely it is to be used for nefarious reasons. Read the first installment, which looked at a $60 smart fork.
A tax reform process that had been moving with relative ease through Congress got much knottier on Wednesday, as complicated bills tend to do when the flashy debuts have receded and the thorny details begin to emerge. For Senate Republicans that meant defending two tough propositions: the sudden inclusion of a provision to eliminate the individual mandate for health care, and the decision to sunset tax cuts for middle-class families, while allowing corporations to keep them in perpetuity.
Lil Peep, who earlier this year was dubbed the “future of emo rap” by Pitchfork, died on Wednesday at the age of 21. Through his woozy, melancholic songs like “White Wine,” “Girls,” and “Drugz,” he drew from ’00s emo influences like Limp Bizkit and Panic! At the Disco as well as rapper Gucci Mane, while garnering millions of fans on social media and Soundcloud.
Any honest accounting of the cultural legacy of the 1960s has to reckon with Charles Manson, who died Sunday at the age of 83. Manson was a human monster whose sole talent was being able to identify the most loathsome potentials of that decade’s zeitgeist and bend them to his own hideous will.
Last week, the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, D.C. When the museum was first conceived, it was intended to “inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible,” according to documents filed in 2010. But then, scholarship and dialogue intervened.
Print media has been in decline for more than 15 years, its business model obsolesced by the ubiquity of free online content and the rise of online advertising. But all was not lost: The internet brought with it exciting new opportunities and forms. Eventually, one assumed, it would also bring exciting new revenue structures to replace the ones it had undermined.
Thanks to Donald Trump and his merry band of mall predators, the United States is, of course, still in a class of its own. But the chaos has quickly spread to other countries as well. Britain is hurtling toward a hard Brexit under the leadership of a terminally weakened prime minister.
Donald Trump has made little effort to hide the fact that, as president, he continues to profit off the dozens of properties either that he owns or that bear his name. According to a new report by the anti-corruption organization Global Witness, some of those profits may include money that was laundered by Colombian drug cartels through a Panama property carrying the Trump brand.
Disney released the first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time on Sunday night—that last one was just a teaser—and this time around they’re focusing on the thing we want most from trailers: exposition, and lots of it! The first minute or so of the teaser is built around an explanation of fifth-dimensional travel involving an ant and a piece of yarn.
Our current cultural moment has provoked an unprecedented excavation of the female memory. Recollections of violations large and small, thoroughly traumatizing and mildly annoying, top-of-mind and all but forgotten, have poured onto the internet like a million leaks from an ancient, overfilled vessel. Many have seen themselves in the stories of alleged abuse by Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K.
The Twitter thread, also known as the tweetstorm and the Twitter essay, has had a big year. Virginia Heffernan argued in Politico that the thread is the literary form of 2017. And now TechCrunch confirms that the service is testing a feature that would make it easier to tweetstorm. Twitter’s tradition of following the lead of its users has benefited the service mightily over the years—that’s how we got the hashtag, for example.
The video is said to be graphic. Taken by an officer’s body-worn camera, it apparently shows a man crawling toward the officer, looking confused. The man makes a “quick movement”—maybe it’s a move to pull up his shorts, maybe it looks like he’s about to pull out a gun—and the officer shoots him to death.
Given that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won a combined 17 Oscars and, when you throw in the three Hobbit movies, grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide, you would think that the entertainment industry might be inclined to leave it way-more-than-well-enough alone.
Clocking 52 hours a week at $9.50 an hour to supplement her mom’s housecleaning income left Arredondo little time for homework throughout her high school years. And it showed. Her grades fell and she almost failed to graduate—just like 52 percent of her classmates. Yet just six weeks after she enrolled in a program that helps children who live in poverty remain in school, Arredondo is giddy with the thought that she will soon don a cap and gown.
In the tradition of those Snapchat filters that give your skin an added glow and FaceApp, the less said about which the better, comes MakeApp, an app that uses artificial intelligence to show you what people—you, your friends, celebrities, anyone—look like without makeup. There are of course plenty of apps that stack various filters in order to self-beautify, and MakeApp offers the option of adding makeup to a face, too.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer do not often begin their weeks with urgent, joint press conferences. The two congressional minority leaders did this week, though, delivering grave warnings about the Republican tax plan that is currently barreling its way through Congress despite the best efforts of Democrats.
Tomi Lahren, the conservative commentator who lost her job at The Blaze this spring when she came out as pro-choice—only to immediately fail upwards to Fox News—isn’t for everyone. Ideally, she wouldn’t be for anyone, but there will always be a market for upwardly mobile young people assuring downwardly mobile old people that they’re right to be angry. Still, even in that godforsaken genre, her mean-girl sarcasm can be pretty hard to sit through.
On Thursday morning, Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote a disturbing article alleging that Sen. Al Franken sexually harassed her on a 2006 USO tour. According to Tweeden, Franken coerced her into “rehearsing” a kiss for a skit, then forcefully stuck his tongue in her mouth. She also provided a photograph of Franken appearing to grope her while she slept.
In New York, an unemployed mother left her two children in the car, air conditioning on, while she went in LaGuardia Airport for a job interview. The children were fine but told the cop who discovered them they didn’t know where their mom was. Local authorities stepped in, and the mug shot of the mother made its way across the country. Caitlin Mahoney knows the frustration that comes from not being able to find work.
One of the many remarkable things about this cavalcade of comeuppance for sexual abusers and harassers is that it’s taking down men who once seemed untouchable to the media in part because they were on the right team: editors and executives at media outlets beloved by progressives, actors and comedians who were the faces of prestige TV shows, Democratic donors. Having “good” politics, it turns out, isn’t the same thing as having good sexual politics.
The city of East Palo Alto, California, sent a tow truck on Wednesday morning to haul away a dozen RVs in which homeless families have been living. The tow truck was met by a crowd of protesters, who blocked its way and helped push broken RVs into new curbside parking spaces where they would be safe from the eviction order issued by the city. The San Jose Mercury News called the move “a crackdown on the new mode of low-income housing in the Bay Area.
This article originally appeared in Select All. Getting my hands on an iPhone X was hard. Returning it was easy. I waited in line at the World Trade Center Apple Store, using my rusty German to listen in on an Austrian father and his two sons talk over whether to buy one or two iPhone 8s while visiting New York and taking advantage of cheaper American prices. (They settled on one.
Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Alabama, swears he’s innocent. “The people of Alabama know me. They know my character. They know what I have stood for in the political world for over 40 years,” Moore declared Monday night, after a fifth woman came forward to accuse him of sexually targeting her while she was a teenager (saying Moore assaulted her when she was 16). “I can tell you without hesitation this is absolutely false.
Usually, running news clips of Trump administration officials doing bad things is more of the Daily Show’s beat than Jimmy Kimmel’s, but on Tuesday night, the host got his hands on some footage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions that was so damaging he had no choice.
Things are not going well for the Earth. It goes well beyond the Trump administration’s decision to eventually leave the Paris Agreement and Scott Pruitt’s purge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific experts. Even non-American efforts to curb climate change aren’t going so well: Newly released data from the World Meteorological Organization reveal a record increase in average global concentrations of CO between 2015 and 2016.
Every so often, a new study comes along that challenges conventional wisdom in medicine or science. When the conditions are right, these studies can generate a lot of attention in both the popular press and the medical community. In early November, one of these such studies, called the ORBITA study, was published in the Lancet by a group of cardiologists.
The latest version of the Senate tax plan can more or less be summed up in 10 words: temporary tax cuts for families. Permanent tax cuts for corporations. This is the politically awkward workaround Republicans have settled on in order to move their bill forward with a party-line vote. In the best-case scenario for taxpayers, it’ll be nothing but an on-paper charade meant to satisfy the Senate’s restrictions against bills that add to the long-term deficit.
Zimbabwe’s military has put President Robert Mugabe under house arrest after a night of uncertainty and conflicting reports. Mugabe’s confinement was confirmed by South African President Jacob Zuma, who spoke with him by phone this morning. It is a stunning turn of events for the world’s oldest head of state, who has kept an iron grip on power since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980.
Here are some things you should know about the smart city Bill Gates is building in Phoenix. It’s not a city, nor is it “smart,” nor does the Microsoft founder appear to be involved in any meaningful way. And when outlets like CNBC say it’s in Phoenix, well… the plot of land in question is some 40 miles west of Phoenix, on the western edge of the metropolis’s westernmost suburb.
The way I saw Twitter began to change around 3 p.m. on Oct. 24, when I saw a dumb libertarian meme pop up on my Twitter timeline.