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Cook County Judge Keeps Limit on Publication in Place in Child Welfare Case

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by Mick Dumke and Steve Mills

A highly unusual judicial order blocking ProPublica Illinois and other news organizations from publishing some information about an ongoing child welfare case will remain in place for at least several more days.

In a hearing on Friday, Patricia Martin, presiding judge of Cook County Juvenile Court’s child protection division, said she will rule on a motion by ProPublica Illinois to lift the order within five business days of reviewing a transcript of the proceedings.

During the 90-minute hearing, Martin questioned attorneys for ProPublica Illinois and for the children in the case about how they would balance the First Amendment right to publish with the minors’ privacy interests.

Child protection cases involve victims “who have done absolutely nothing but be born,” Martin said. “Does that truly innocent victim have a [privacy] right?”

Martin barred ProPublica Illinois and other organizations last month from publishing “the names and/or any other information that would permit the ready identification” of the children or foster parents involved in a case ProPublica Illinois is investigating, “including specific address or other demographic information.” Her order was a rare instance of a judge restricting a news organization before the publication of a story, and it drew widespread criticism from other journalists.

Martin issued her order in response to a request from Bruce Boyer, a professor at Loyola University Chicago’s law school and director of the Civitas ChildLaw Clinic, which represents children in child protection cases. Boyer represents the children involved in the case and had argued that he wanted to protect their privacy.

No one has argued that the minors don’t have privacy rights, said Gabriel Fuentes, an attorney at Jenner & Block representing ProPublica Illinois. But ProPublica Illinois has no plans to reveal the identities of the children in the case, he said, and the court should not address privacy concerns with a “broad” prior restraint order.

ProPublica Illinois reporters learned the identities of the children and foster parents independently and outside court hearings.

“The harm we’re talking about is the state acting as an editor for ProPublica — the invasion of the power of the state into a newsroom,” Fuentes said.

Michael Weaver, an attorney from McDermott Will & Emery who is representing the children, said the order was specific and necessary.

“The issue here is not ProPublica’s general First Amendment rights,” he said. Instead, it’s about “whether the primary rights of minors are outweighed by ProPublica’s right to publish.”

A coalition of 40 news organizations, led by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a group that advocates for press rights, submitted a friend-of-the-court letter that argued Martin’s order violated ProPublica Illinois’ rights under the First Amendment.

The judge was undoubtedly trying to protect the children’s privacy, the letter said, but the order is “an unconstitutional prior restraint” and a “direct attack on the marketplace of ideas.” The letter was signed by news organizations that included Chicago’s daily newspapers, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Hip-hop samaritan who lifted up city…

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Nipsey Hussle: a hip-hop samaritan who lifted up Los Angeles

Ermias Asghedom, the rapper better known as Nipsey Hussle, knew his worth and implored his community to know theirs. Raised in Los Angeles, where he also died on Sunday afternoon in a shooting outside his Marathon Clothing store, Asghedom’s unshakable belief in his own rap and business excellence regularly spilled over into outlandish expressions of that confidence: in 2013 he famously set a $100 price tag for physical copies of his cult acclaimed Crenshaw mixtape (Jay-Z bought 100).

Five years later, when his debut album finally materialised, having refused industry attempts to prise an album out of him more quickly or not on his terms, he billed it not as an introduction, but as a celebration of his already established greatness. Victory Lap dropped in February 2018 to rave reviews.

He was well within his rights to give his debut full-length such a bold title. His thrilling brand of hip-hop – a gleaming crucible of LA rap styles past and present – across 12 street-acclaimed mixtapes in the run-up to Victory Lap had brought him a place in the hearts of rap A-listers, and increasingly on their hits, too. Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Childish Gambino and YG were collaborators, with Rihanna and J Cole among his burgeoning brigade of fans. But Nipsey’s success wasn’t limited to music.

Growing parallel to his success was an impressive business empire, operated out of his native Slauson Avenue, offering opportunities to local youths and aiming to take his community with him on the route to riches. A barbershop, learning centre for kids, fish store and cryptocurrency company are just some of the ventures he leaves behind, in addition to the clothing store where he was gunned down in an act of violence that’s sent shock waves through the rap world.

His mercurial force in both the booth and the boardroom were intertwined, with the black politics surging through anthems such as Dedication (“This ain’t entertainment, it’s for niggas on the slave ship / These songs just spirituals I swam against them waves with,” he spat on that Kendrick-assisted behemoth) mirrored in his work in the community. The day after he died, Asghedom was due to meet with LAPD officials to discuss programmes that could be put in place to curb gang violence. “Artist. Activist. Angeleno,” read the tribute from the LA Lakers basketball team. His death is a loss not just for rap, but for LA at large, and especially the neglected neighbourhood he parlayed so much of success into trying to enrich.

It wasn’t all bright: homophobic comments posted to Instagram in October were a blot on his altruism and incredible magnetism on the mic. However, the dominant picture of Hussle emerging today as hip-hop mourns is of a gentle, polite soul and doting boyfriend. (In a February 2019 profile in GQ, his partner Lauren London boasted of Asghedom’s excellent bed-making abilities.) What can’t be questioned is his talent for sumptuous, G-funk-flecked rap. Introspective tracks such as Hussle and Motivate – a homily to financial independence built on a chopped and screwed sample of Hard Knock Life – and recent single Racks in the Middle exhibit unhurried, riveting flows that had Asghedom on course for a place in rap’s elite.

That is, if he had wanted it. Asghedom gave the impression in interviews that he may have been about to leave hip-hop behind and focus his efforts on the business empire blossoming in Slauson Avenue. “I got an album concept called Exit Strategy, that might be one of my last ones,” he told Complex after Victory Lap’s release. Whatever his next move was to be, rap has been robbed of a limitlessly talented rap samaritan whose story was just beginning – but whose impact will continue to reverberate.

That New York county can’t ban unvaccinated kids from public places, judge rules

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A judge in Rockland County, New York, sided with dozens of parents who sued to overturn a ban that kept their unvaccinated kids from public places during a measles outbreak, according to ABC affiliate WABC.

Unvaccinated children will now be allowed to return to schools, parks, and hospitals, and other public places, ending the county’s state of emergency, at least for now. It’s not clear whether the county will appeal. The state Supreme Court judge, Rolf Thorsen, said the outbreak didn’t rise to the level of an epidemic, according to the Rockland/Westchester Journal News.

Rockland County, just north of New York City, has seen 166 cases of measles since October. As a last resort after failing to stem the outbreak, County Executive Ed Day instituted the controversial ban on March 26 in an effort to protect more children from contracting the highly contagious, sometimes deadly respiratory illness.

Earlier this week, however, parents filed lawsuit that argued the ban was “capricious,” if not unconstitutional, and prevented their kids from being able to learn. None of the children, nor their parents, involved in the lawsuit, had measles.

Day said in a statement to WABC that the judge’s decision to strike down the ban surprised him, and he urged more children to get vaccinated. But counties usually have the legal authority to institute quarantines in times of public health emergencies. The county had previously kept unvaccinated kids from their public schools during the outbreak, and a federal district judge agreed in March that was within the county’s right.

“We sought to find a new way to fight back against a disease that was eradicated almost 20 years ago and refused to sit idly by while those in Rockland were put at risk,” Day said.

Cover image: A woman receives a measles, mumps and rubella vaccine at the Rockland County Health Department in Pomona, N.Y., Wednesday, March 27, 2019. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Russiagate is Not Watergate

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Photograph Source White House Press Office

Richard Nixon was a complicated man.

He was arguably our last liberal president.  He transformed the political scene in countless ways; some good, some far from it. Together with Henry Kissinger, he was a geopolitical strategist of distinction who served the empire and the military industrial complex well.

Like Kissinger, he was also no slouch when it came to war crimes, crimes against the peace, and crimes against humanity.   He got a whole lot of people killed and maimed — in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and throughout the world.

And while neither he nor the administration he superintended were unusually corrupt, he could boast, were he so inclined, of having many a “high crime and misdemeanor” under his belt, and of taking his oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States lightly or not at all.

He was, in short, a later-day version of the sort of villainous and tormented figure that readers might encounter in a historical drama authored by William Shakespeare.

Ironically, in light of all he deserved punishment for, Watergate, “a third rate burglary,” and the bollixed cover up it precipitated, did him and his administration in.

To this day, in the public imagination, Nixon and Watergate are joined at the hip in ways that, for example, Nixon and his secret war in Cambodia will never be.

Thus Watergate, like George Washington’s cherry tree, has become part of the American story.

Despite the best efforts of Democratic Party functionaries and their media flunkies at MSNBC and CNN, Russiagate is not destined for a similar fate.

Among the many reasons why is the plain fact that there is nothing remotely Shakespearean about the pathetic figure cut by Donald J. Trump.  The writers for “The Apprentice” were more than subtle enough to convey every facet of his one-dimensional (or less) personality.

Indeed, there is no need for subtlety at all; it is all right there in the open.  Everybody who has been paying attention, even if only slightly, knows that the Donald is a narcissist with emotional maturity “issues” which he wears on his sleeve, and that he is an ignoramus who is proud of it even as he also claims always to know best.

Thus Trump is quite unlike George W. Bush, another president not entirely shipshape upstairs; Bush understood his limitations.  To his credit, he took care to compensate for them, recruiting capable people to work in his administration, and ceding power to them whenever he could.  Especially at first, he even let a lesser Nixonian figure, Dick Cheney, a respectable enough villain in his own right, operate as if he were a co-president.

Trump is something else altogether.  He thinks that he is the smartest person not just in the room but on the planet.  It is therefore no surprise that even minimally competent people don’t last long under his thumb.

Trump likes it that way; he likes to surround himself with bona fide kakistocrats, even less knowledgeable and less skilled in the arts of governance than he.  Because he could care less, they govern on his behalf and, when necessary, clean up the messes his semi-literate and frequently incoherent tweets bring on.

In short, unlike the sublimely villainous Nixon, Trump is a world-class mediocrity, interested only in glorifying and enriching himself.  He is avaricious, egotistical and emotionally immature.  The man cannot even hold a thought or stay on target for much more time than it takes to reveal the incoherence at his core.

Because of the position he holds, he commands attention, but, as a person, he is of no interest whatsoever.  Unlike Nixon’s, his sould is not conflicted; he is far too shallow for that.

With Watergate, a mass of contradictions was brought down by a trifle.  It now seems unlikely that anything, including G-Man Mueller’s report in whatever form it eventually reaches the public, will bring Trump down. To the dismay of leading Democrats and the liberal commentariat, Russiagate is turning out to be a dud.

“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up,” the saying goes, but in Watergate the crime was trivial; therefore, the cover up was all.

In marked contrast, the purported crime in Russiagate was a doozy, nothing less than colluding with an historic enemy — assuming, that is, that history began a century ago, with the Bolshevik Revolution.

However, it is far from clear that the underlying crime alleged actually occurred.  If it didn’t, how could Russiagate be any kind of cover up?

For that matter, could it be that Trump’s “no collusion” mantra is actually spot on right?

Democrats say No; they insist that whatever the Mueller report says, it is inconceivable that there is no there there; and that when they finally get their hands on the G-man’s complete, unredacted report, this will become clear.

My hunch is that they are both right – that there is a there there, but also that, strictly (and narrowly) speaking, the Trump campaign and the Russian state did not collude.

***

By far, the best, arguably even the only plausible, explanation for nine-tenths of Trump’s tweets and for his campaign rally rants is that “Putin” – shorthand nowadays for all that is Russian and nefarious — does have something on him, perhaps enough to turn him into a Russian asset.

But if that is what he is, then shame on Russian “intelligence” for not understanding, long before anything like Russiagate is supposed to have happened, that, with assets like him, who needs neocons and liberal imperialists, and military-industrial complex flunkies, or, for that matter who needs Hillary Clinton!

Has he done anything at all for Russia except getting a few words on sanctions changed in the 2016 Republican platform?  They were only words; the sanctions are still there.

The conventional wisdom, conveyed by corporate media at every opportunity, is that “Putin” wants to meddle and collude in order to undermine Americans’ faith in democracy.

Newsflash: what democracy? One that countenances minority rule, which is, after all, how Trump got into the White House in the first place?  One that makes it all but impossible to be rid of him for at least four perilous years?

Newsflash: we Americans are quite capable of undermining faith in democracy without any help from Russians or, for that matter, from foreigners of any kind.  A few gerrymandering Republican legislators or, better yet, a handful of malicious Secretaries of State – they are the officials that superintend elections at the state level – are worth a thousand Russian spies.

And what about all those venal donors exercising what Republican Supreme Court Justices deem their Constitutionally protected First Amendment rights — by buying and selling candidates in ways that make a mockery of all sound notions of democratic deliberation and collective choice?

Any intelligence agency worth its salt, much less the purportedly omnipotent and omniscient Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, successor of the mighty KGB, would have concluded from Day One that, as an “asset,” Trump is worse than useless – because he cannot hold a thought long enough to stay on track with whatever program they are promoting, and because the one thing he can be counted on to do is bail the second he sees some percentage in it.

This is just what has been happening since the GOP’s 2016 convention.  Can anyone plausibly claim that Russian-American relations today would be worse, from Russia’s point of view, had Hillary Clinton won the blessing of the Electoral College?

The Russian collusion hypothesis also gives Russian intelligence too much credit.  How could they have figured out that America’s far right “populists,” the latest in a long line of “deplorables” extending back to before the days of the Palmer Raids, who having imbibed anti-Soviet and then anti-Russian propaganda with their mother’s milk, would flip abruptly from a “better dead than red” frame of mind (where “red” still meant red; not Republican) to philo-Putinism just because some flunkies of Rupert Murdoch moronized them with AM radio, a rightwing cable news network, social media, and all the tabloid reading material that’s unfit to print.

Rupert Murdoch isn’t that good and Russian intelligence is neither that stupid nor that smart.

And so, I think it more likely than not that Barr’s four-page account of the Mueller findings, though strictly correct, was nevertheless seriously misleading.

I suspect that it will turn out that Mueller did indeed conclude that there is nothing he found that “rises to the level” of an impeachable offense, whatever that means.  Or maybe he figured that, with an election “only” nineteen or twenty months away, there is nothing worth disturbing domestic tranquility over.

But his report will not show that there was no collusion, according to perfectly reasonable, non-technical, understandings of the term.

If there was no collusion, what was he investigating in the past two years, and what was  the point of all the trouble he and his staff went to by securing so many indictments and convictions?

And what about the idea that where there is smoke, lots of it, there is fire?

And why would the Donald act like he had much to hide if he did not?  Doesn’t consciousness of guilt count for anything anymore?

In the face of all these indications, rightwing media, make the point that the official story, conveyed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, is that there is no actionable evidence of “collusion” between agents of the Russian state and the Trump campaign, and that this consideration cancels out all suspicions, and therefore ought to lay all doubts to rest.

If the polls are on track, most Americans do not believe that official story.  But a large minority do – roughly about as large as the minority that still stands by Trump, either because they have somehow managed to convince themselves that he is not unfit for the office he holds, or because their personal and political priorities lead them not to care.

There is no way to account for this without acknowledging the fact that Trump’s unfitness for office, already clear beyond a reasonable doubt in 2016, has become so glaringly obvious over the past two and a half years that anyone who is still a Trump supporter, who is not morally corrupt or of unsound mind, is in a state of profound self-deception.

Are those who insist that, the official story notwithstanding, there was collusion after all, also deceiving themselves?  Until actual evidence of collusion is produced, I am inclined to think that they are, but also that it doesn’t much matter because the Russian collusion question is a good deal less important than it is generally made out to be.

***

There is something unseemly about the whole issue, no matter what the facts of the matter turn out to be.  The problem is not just with the charge itself, with its gross disproportionality, but also with what Donald Trump famously called its “oranges” (origins).

If everything Rachel Maddow and other Cold War mongers of her ilk say about Russian malfeasance were true, it would still be the case that the premier meddler in the political affairs of other nations is not, and never has been Russia, or the Soviet Union before it.  It is the United States of America.

This has been the case in the Western hemisphere since the early days of the republic; since the reconstruction of the world order after World War II, it has been the case nearly everywhere.

From that time on, the Soviet Union and then, after it imploded, the Russian Federation and former Soviet republics in close proximity to it have received more attention from American meddlers than anywhere else on the planet.

In the heyday of the Cold War, the Balkan republics, then effectively incorporated into the Soviet Union, and the Soviet “satellite” nations in eastern and central Europe also bore the brunt of intense American meddling.

So did China, to the extent that our intelligence services were able to operate there, and, of course, the countries of eastern and southern Asia and nearby Oceana. Some of them suffered especially egregiously; Vietnam and Cambodia are obvious examples, but there is also Indonesia and the Philippines.

Thus the United States is not only the world’s foremost meddler, it is also the most hypocritical nation on the face of the earth.

And because there is no way to meddle effectively in other country’s affairs without actively colluding with locals, it is also among the premier colluders of all the nations of the world.

If there really was no collusion between the Trump campaign and “the Russians,” it only goes to show how devastating the Trump presidency has been to longstanding American behavioral norms, and therefore how much of an anomaly Trump is.  Ironically, we could add that to the already large and overflowing list of ways that he is unfit for the office he holds.

I am inclined to think, though, that Trump and his people must have colluded a lot because of the vehemence with which he proclaims “no collusion.”  Trump’s thinking is incoherent, but his behavior is full of what poker players would call “tells.”   For anyone tuned into them, an adamant denial from the Donald is as good as a confession.

In a similar vein, so are attributions of unseemly character traits, especially when they are spot on right about their target. “Crooked Hillary” was among the best, or at least the most descriptively accurate nickname in the Trumpian repertoire.  But when it comes to being a crook, compared to Trump Hillary doesn’t even begin to compete.

It is also relevant that, as far as meddlers in American affairs go, Russia, even if it is as bad as the Cold War mongers on MSNBC claim, is still small potatoes compared to Israel, against which, even nowadays, with the Israel lobby finally encountering serious opposition, one hears nary an unkind word on liberal cable outlets.

What all this goes to show is that, at root, what sets the blood of our political and media leaders boiling is not foreign meddling or colluding or violating the “sanctity” of one or another of our vaunted institutional arrangements.  It is getting their friends and enemies lists wrong.

The Israeli Right has understood this well for a long time.  It took some doing to make an enemy — an “existential threat,” no less – out of Iran, notwithstanding some of the rhetorical stances to which Iranian theocrats are prone.   It was even harder for them to befriend Saudi Arabia, covertly but undeniably.

However, with America’s evolving “friendship” with the Saudis and the other Gulf monarchies taking shape as they were, Netanyahu et. al. had no choice but to rise to the occasion.

Thus, by now, it is practically axiomatic in their circles, and therefore in the thinking of Christian Zionists that those damn ayatollahs are standing in the way of the End Times, while rightwing Jews in Israel and around the world worry that, unless beaten back to the stone age by force of American arms, Iran will deprive them of their G-d-given “birthright.”

Therefore now, with Trump in tow, the Bibster or whoever succeeds him could soon lead the United States into a far more devastating fiasco than anything encountered during the two Bush family Iraq wars.

Until recently, Clintonite Democrats, spurred on by a military maxed out by the never-ending war on terror and by the several Bush-Cheney and Obama led counter-insurgency wars of the twenty-first century, have generally had a harder time finding suitable enemies than the Israelis have had with Iran.

Because it was so pointless and potentially dangerous, reviving Cold War hostilities with Russia took some doing.  “Pivoting” towards Asia – the Obama-Clinton euphemism for targeting China – was proving even more difficult.

Then two things happened that accelerated the quest for turning Russia back into a serviceable enemy. Goaded on by Western, especially American regime-change meddling in Ukraine, Russia annexed the Crimea and occupied (sort of) a few other territories in the east of the country.  This made it possible at last for the United States to see Russia as the “adversary” it was again its destiny to become.

And then Hillary Clinton flubbed egregiously in her race against the laughing-stock that Trump plainly was.   She and her team, being incapable of acknowledging their own ineptitude and culpability, did what came naturally to that superannuated  Goldwater Girl – they blamed the Ruskies.

Thus the “orange” of the collusion obsession was born.

And with it came faith in the probity of the FBI, the most flagrant enemy of progressive politics in America in living memory.

With it too came a yearning for deliverance from the consequences of the mess Hillary and her team and her party made.  In practice, this meant hoping for a Second Watergate, by now, in the collective psyche of the American public, the archetypical mode of deliverance from presidencies gone rotten.

But regardless what Trump and the Russians did or did not do, this hope was always a snare and a delusion.

Trump is no Nixon; to think that he is is to disrespect honest, authentic villainy.  The Donald is a mediocrity in way over his head; neither more nor less.

And regardless of its factual basis or lack of one, Russiagate is no Watergate.  The problem now is neither a crime nor a cover up; it is a political culture, anchored in inequality, which serves no one except the miscreants at the very top.

Thus there is no quasi-legalistic remedy for what ails the body politic now.

There are only far-reaching, radical political remedies for which the collusion obsession is ultimately a distraction.

What is called for now is not just voting Trump and Trumpians out of office when we finally get a chance, late next year.  It is also, starting now, organizing to turn power away not just from a Republican Party in thrall to the Trumpian menace, but also from a Democratic Party dedicated to maintaining the conditions for Trump and Trumpism’s possibility.

Fortunately, there is more to the existing Democratic Party than that; a lot more since the 2018 midterms.

Meanwhile, calls for Democratic Party unity – in other words, for maintaining the power of those who made Trump and Trumpism possible and even necessary – are becoming deafening.

Don’t even think of challenging “moderate” or “centrist” (actually, rightwing) Democratic incumbents we are told.  This is nonsense, nonsense on stilts.

In the months ahead, as much as it is urgent to “resist” Trump and all things Trumpian, it is urgent to fight back against the Democratic Party establishment and its media epigones, the lesser enemy, as it were, but an enemy nonetheless.

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Cob Save America

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What We’re Following Today

It’s Friday, April 5.

‣ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said it will no longer classify people in same-sex marriages as “apostates,” and will allow children from same-sex marriages to be blessed and baptized as infants.

‣ The U.S. economy added 196,000 jobs in March, a rebound from the February jobs report, and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.8 percent.

‣ Senator Elizabeth Warren called to abolish the legislative filibuster, the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass laws.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

More From Michael Cohen: Attorneys for Donald Trump’s former lawyer submitted documents to lawmakers alleging that Trump “encouraged Cohen to lie” to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow. The memo goes further than Cohen’s public testimony before the House Oversight Committee in February, when Cohen said Trump told him to lie “in his way.”

(Kathryn Gamble / The Atlantic)

Socialism, but in Iowa: One popular perception of socialism in America is that it’s a sort of pastime for affluent and cerebral hipsters. But the Democratic Socialists Elaine Godfrey met in Iowa don’t come from wealthy families, and don’t have Ivy League educations. Instead, they’re using socialism as a vehicle to change their immediate circumstances—and build a movement that goes beyond 2020.

Is Faith an Asset for 2020?: The religious left is wild for South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg because of how outspoken he’s been about his faith. But while “speaking the language of faith” will get him media attention, religious rhetoric isn’t enough to win votes, writes Emma Green.

A $100 Billion Heist: As the federal tax deadline looms, consider that the IRS itself is in a pretty dismal state. The agency is understaffed and operating with archaic equipment, which means it doesn’t have the resources to conduct necessary audits. And corporations and the wealthy are benefiting from the lack of oversight, according to an Atlantic–ProPublica investigation.

+ Speaking of tax returns: Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns, but a lawyer for the president is warning the IRS not to comply.

–Elaine Godfrey

Snapshot

People line the road as President Donald Trump heads to the border with Mexico in Calexico, California. Friday April 5, 2019. At the border, Trump made a renewed push for border security as a central 2020 campaign issue. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

A Warning From Wisconsin (Charles J. Sykes)
“A funny thing happened Tuesday to the Democrats’ momentum in Wisconsin: It sputtered out. Despite being heavily favored to win a crucial seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, the candidate backed by liberal groups was apparently upset by a conservative.” → Read on.

It Hurts to See Nipsey Hussle’s Life Not Mattering (Jemele Hill)
“If Hussle hadn’t been a well-known rapper, the story of his death would be sadly ordinary because of the grim statistics on the proliferation of violence in the black community.” → Read on.

Yemen Cannot Afford to Wait (Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper)
“The United States is left with painful questions: What would have happened if it had rejected the Saudis’ original pleas, or set tighter limits on its support, or exerted earlier and more meaningful pressure on its partners?” → Read on.

The Scams Are Winning (Megan Garber)
“The logic of the scam has permeated American life so completely that it has found its way to the Justice Department itself. The particular brand of absurdity at play in the report, the one that translated a multi-hundred-page work of investigation into an announcement of “Total EXONERATION,” is a rule much more than it is an exception.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ Democratic Candidates Visited 115 Cities Across 20 States in One Month (Shane Goldmacher, Weiyi Cai, and Jugal K. Patel, The New York Times)
‣ How Trump Conspired With the Freedom Caucus to Shut Down the Government (Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, Politico Magazine)
‣ The Violence Against Women Act Is Turning 25. Here’s How It Has Ignited Debate. (Emily S. Rueb and Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times)
‣ If Biden Runs, They’ll Tear Him Up (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal) (? Paywall)

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Bernie Sanders Isn’t Scared of Fox News. Why Is the Democratic Party?

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Howard Schultz has it all figured out. The real problem with Democrats is that they don’t reach out to the other side. (This, incidentally, is also the real problem with Republicans.) So Schultz is showing them how it’s done. On Wednesday, he appeared on the Fox News rundown podcast, where he made the case that he would work with both parties. On Thursday morning, on Fox News’ website, he published yet another one of his deeply misguided diatribes about the national debt; in the evening, at a Fox News town hall hosted by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, he parroted Clint Eastwood with an empty-chair shtick. There’s an implicit message in all of this political theater: The Democrats are too afraid to appear on Fox News, but Howard Schultz is not.

There’s a bit of truth to that. Last month, the Democrats said they wouldn’t invite the network to host any of the party’s upcoming primary debates. But one Democratic candidate is willing to dance with the devil: Bernie Sanders. Fox News announced on Wednesday that Baier and MacCallum will host a town hall with the Vermont senator on April 15 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Sanders has taken heat for his decision from Democrats of all stripes. “WTF is Bernie doing?” tweeted ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser. Daily Kos’ Carolyn Fiddler told The Washington Post the move was “unfortunate and dismaying,” adding, “I don’t know why he would lend his considerable presence to a network that routinely pushes sexist and racist tropes about progressives and his supporters.” Splinter’s Katherine Krueger cast the town hall as a waste of time: “The chance that Sanders brings over some Trump voters is a spectral vision that remains to be seen, but I’d argue that the ones who are already tuned into Fox News when that town hall starts aren’t going to move an inch on this pinko socialist.”

The debate over whether Democrats should engage with Fox is a microcosm of the broader debate within the Democratic Party about engaging with Trump voters. Just as many Democrats believe that appearing anywhere on Fox legitimizes the network’s most offensive bloviators, many believe that courting Trump voters will require legitimizing the president’s views. Both fears are understandable, but quite overblown. If Democrats want to win back white voters—and that’s a big “if”—they need to meet those voters where they are.

In early March, Tom Perez, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, released a withering statement that cited a recent New Yorker investigation into Fox News’ symbiotic, often propagandistic, relationship with the Trump administration. “I believe that a key pathway to victory is to continue to expand our electorate and reach all voters,” said Perez in a statement. “That is why I have made it a priority to talk to a broad array of potential media partners, including Fox News. Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and Fox News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. Therefore, Fox News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates.”

The announcement was more than a little opportunistic. It’s not as though Perez and the DNC were oblivious to Fox News’ relationship with the Trump White House until the New Yorker story came out. Nor is this a novel stance for the Democratic Party. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, the DNC hasn’t scheduled an event on Fox News since 2007—a debate that was canceled after then-honcho Roger Ailes made a dumb joke comparing Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden. If anything, Perez was underscoring his party’s longstanding position that it would not cooperate with a news organization that has a nakedly partisan interest in supporting the opposition.

It’s a defensible strategy. Fox News’ primetime and early-morning lineups have always been a parade of right-wing nitwits, but under Trump the network has practically become the communications arm of the administration. It pushes stories—often fished from the far-right web—that inflame or excite the president, who then tweets about the story. Fox News then covers his tweets, which inspires more tweets, and so on. As Jack Shafer argued, “the ensuing feedback loop serves both the man and the network, making both seem larger than they really are.”

Fox also pushes racist narratives to its viewers, particularly on its primetime shows. Tucker Carlson’s program has been criticized repeatedly for its sympathy toward white nationalism, and for his attacks on diversity and feminism. Jeanine Pirro was recently suspended for being a raging Islamophobe. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, is a blubbering hype man for Trump who has more in common with Flavor Flav at this point than a journalist. For most of the last three decades, Fox has retained a patina of credibility by employing real journalists like Shep Smith and Chris Wallace. But even that fig leaf has been stripped away during the Trump administration: As The New Yorker reported, the network killed a damaging story about Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. The argument against Democrats appearing on Fox News is that it would only serve to legitimize a network whose existential purpose is to excite Republican voters.

The argument for Democrats appearing on Fox News is that winning back the older white rural voters is important if the party wants to win back the White House in 2020, something that has obsessed some in the party since the midwestern “blue wall” crumbled in 2016—and how can you do that without engaging with those voters? Sanders created a handful of viral moments in a Fox News town hall in 2016 when he evangelized about universal health care.

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His team surely hopes he can recreate that magic later this month, albeit with the same old message. (Sanders’s message has remained largely unchanged since he became Burlington’s mayor in the early 1980s.) But the broader goal is to figure out what kind of messaging works with Fox’s almost exclusively white audience.

This, too, is a defensible strategy. Rural voters have abandoned the party in recent years. As many as nine million Americans who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump four years later. The Democrats won a landslide victory in the 2018 midterms in part by converting voters with retrograde beliefs on identity issues. Although the midterm results suggested the upper Midwest may return to the Democratic fold in 2020, the results of a recent judicial election in Wisconsin, where a deeply conservative judge won thanks to overwhelming rural margins, show that it’s not guaranteed.

Fox News’s influence is probably overstated. Its prime time programs consistently draw between two and three million viewers—increasingly old ones. “Fox is in essence a retirement community,” New York magazine’s Frank Rich wrote in an astute piece about Fox published back in 2014. “The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers.”

Letting Fox News host a Democratic debate doesn’t make sense for the DNC, given the network’s antipathy toward the party. But there’s no reason for candidates to cower, either. Pete Buttigieg’s appearance on Fox News Sunday last month certainly didn’t hurt his standing within the party, which has rocketed upward in recent weeks. Sanders’s town hall is a low-risk, and probably low-reward, move. He might produce a viral moment or two. He might even convert an Obama-to-Trump voter or two. But he won’t suddenly make Fox News seem legitimate. Sanders has accomplished a lot in the past three years, but even he isn’t capable of that.

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