It’s been a rough night for Ted Cruz. Across the state of New York, he’s almost guaranteed to come in last place of the three remaining candidates. And in at least one district in Westchester, Ted Cruz coming in last of the remaining candidates and someone who isn’t even running anymore.
That’s right, a hearty congratulations to Dr. Ben “Gifted Hands” Carson. We knew you’d come in handy for something.
I’d like to personally thank New York’s 16th district for this beautiful gift, but I also have some questions. Namely, why are you voting for a candidate you (hopefully) know isn’t actually a candidate anymore? Does Ben Carson actually have a dedicated following? Do you know who Ben Carson is? And what has soup ever done to you?
Of course, the important thing to remember is that, tonight, Ted Cruz effectively lost to a man in a coma who wasn’t even competing in the first place.
Perhaps there’s still some good in this world yet.
According to the paper, sources close to the investigation say multiple people connected with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the City of Flint are expected to be indicted for both misdemeanor and felony crimes.
Citing their own unnamed sources, The Detroit News reports these charges include “malfeasance and/or misconduct in office” and are just “the first of more to come.”
For his part, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder—whose aides appear to have known Flint’s water was contaminated as early as October 2014—promised to drink filtered water from Flint for “at least” 30 days on Tuesday.
In case you needed to be reminded that Ted Cruz is “not” the Zodiac Killer, here you go.
Absolutely adorable, right?
The GOP presidential hopeful decided that it was an excellent idea to state this after his loss to both Donald Trump, an marigold-colored ball of excrement living up to aspirations inspired by the company that makes Cheetohs, and John Kasich, someone who may or may not be a reincarnation of Rhoda from The Bad Seed.
The U.S.-Mexico border isn’t the only place Donald Trump wants to put up a wall: He also wants to build one to protect a golf course he owns in Ireland from storm damage, TheJournal.ie reports, but a planning board this week ruled against the proposal.
Trump bought Doonbeg Golf Club and Resort, in County Clare, for a reported 15 million euros (about $17 million) in 2014. “Doonbeg is an already terrific property that we will make even better,” he said at the time. “It will soon be an unparalleled resort destination with the highest standards of luxury.”
Doonbeg sits right on the Atlantic, at Carrowmore Bay, and is threatened by coastal erosion and storm damage. Trump’s holding company, TIGL Ireland Enterprise Limited, proposed to build a 2.8 kilometer (1.73984 mile) berm along a sand dune.
Seeking approval for the plan, TIGL applied for it to be declared a “strategic infrastructure development.” In its decision, the independent, quasi-judicial planning board An Bord Pleanála conceded that the golf course was a “valuable economic asset to County Clare” but declined the application. From the ruling:
It is noted that the golf resort is located along the Wild Atlantic Way, however, it is a private facility which does not attract passing tourist trade on any sort of regional scale. Although the proposed development seeks to protect existing local economic resources in the area, the proposed new berm structure and armoustone in its own right would not be of strategic economic or social importance to the State or the region in which it would be situate.
In its planning application, consultants for the Trump resort warned, “in the medium term, the ‘do nothing’ scenario will bring the viability of the entire resort and its potential closure into question.” This “would result in a permanent and profound negative economic impact” on Doonbeg and County Clare.
“The failure to protect this asset would have a profound adverse and permanent effect on the local economy,” the consultants threatened. An environmental impact assessment found that the dunes around the golf course are eroding at a pace of about .7 meters (or 2.3 feet) per year. An Bord Pleanála’s rejection of the application means TIGL has to go back to the Clare County Council.
According to the Irish Independent, conservationists opposed the plan over concerns that it would threaten the habitat of the narrow-mouth whorl snail. Earlier this year, Trump referred to his investment in the Irish golf course as “small potatoes.”
Donald Trump, the 69-year-old New York real estate mogul and unrepentant bigot, continues to dominate the Republican presidential primary polls. Trump’s sudden ascendance, accelerated by his willingness to insult virtually any ostensible ally within the conservative movement, has left GOP leaders dumbfounded. How did this caricature of a Republican politician, who has never held elected office, and whose personal ideology is remarkably fluid, usurp more experienced, more conservative, and better-funded candidates like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker? Within this vacuum of understanding, an almost-believable conspiracy theory has obtained currency: Donald Trump is in fact a false flag candidate whose actual mission is electing Hillary Clinton as President.
To understand the contours of this theory, it’s helpful to understand where it came from. A Google search suggests the first person to remark upon Trump’s indirect assistance to Clinton was the anti-war activist and “conservative-paleo-libertarian” Justin Raimondo. In a long blog post dated July 13—just a few days after Trump stole Jeb Bush’s lead—Raimondo argued that the timing of Trump’s entry into the presidential race, which the candidate had long hinted at but until this year never followed through on, could only be explained by a hidden “Democratic wrecking operation” designed to assist Clinton’s parallel campaign:
[Trump’s] ties to the Clintons, his past pronouncements which are in such blatant contradiction to his current fulminations, and the cries of joy from the Clintonian gallery and the media (or do I repeat myself) all point to a single conclusion: the Trump campaign is a Democratic wrecking operation aimed straight at the GOP’s base.
Donald Trump is a false-flag candidate. It’s all an act, one that benefits his good friend Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party that, until recently, counted the reality show star among its adherents. Indeed, Trump’s pronouncements—the open racism, the demagogic appeals, the faux-populist rhetoric—sound like something out of a Democratic political consultant’s imagination, a caricature of conservatism as performed by a master actor.
The idea that Trump is running an elaborate interference campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton may sound absurd. But there is enough truth to Raimondo’s theory—it makes just enough sense—that it’s already begun to infiltrate, and inform the mainstream voices of, the mainstream Republican Party. On July 23, for example, the popular conservative writer Allen Ginzburg distilled Raimondo’s argument into a vexing thought experiment:
Ginzburg’s tweet has since been retweeted over 400 times (including, earlier this week, by Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto, who serves on the paper’s influential editorial board).
It would, of course, be incredible—and virtually unprecedented in modern American politics—if a major party’s top candidate were to run a campaign for the purpose of electing that party’s most imposing political opponent. So what exactly supports the theory that Trump is such a candidate? Though he has recently rebranded himself as the only Republican brave enough to speak the truth about undocumented immigrants, his past associations and political positions suggest the theory is, if not entirely believable, not exactly implausible, either.
There are three main lines of argument supporting the assertion that Donald Trump is running a false flag campaign:
Trump cannot possibly be considered either a Republican or a conservative, once you account for his apparent political beliefs (many of which are remarkably liberal) and concrete policy proposals (or lack thereof).
Trump has close ties to both Hillary and Bill Clinton, and has in fact donated to her and other Democrats’ campaigns in the past.
Trump’s apparent intent to run on an independent ticket—should he lose the Republican nomination—indicates he cares more about splitting the Republican vote (essentially ensuring the election of a Democratic president) than he does about actually electing Republicans. He also lacks the wherewithal and/or long-term funding to mount a legitimate presidential campaign were he to become the actual Republican nominee.
Let’s discuss each of these in detail:
Argument 1: Donald Trump is not actually a Republican (or conservative)
According to voting records, Trump is currently registered as a Republican, but in the past has been registered (and repeatedly voted) as a Democrat. In fact, he appears to have switched between the two parties at least three times in the past 14 years: In 2001, he switched from Democrat to Republican; in 2008, he re-registered as Democrat; in 2010, he re-registered as a Republican (and maintained that affiliation through 2013). So Trump is certainly a Republican, but only in the sense that any voter can register as a Republican; it’s not like party officials perform an ideological litmus tests on mere voters. (Complicating matters further is Trump’s New York City residency. Republican New Yorkers have been known to register as Democrats in order to participate in Democratic primary elections, which are frequently the only elections that matter in municipal politics.)
The question of whether Trump is conservative is trickier to answer. Within the modern conservative movement, for example, it’s more or less assumed that candidates representing conservative interests believe abortion rights should be restricted (in many cases, radically so). It’s also assumed that conservative candidates oppose the 2010 Affordable Care Act—not just the particulars of the legislation itself, but also the general idea of universal healthcare. But, as The Washington Post pointed out last month, Trump has publicly endorsed both abortion rights and universal healthcare in the past. He’s also endorsed increasing taxes on the wealthy and legalizing drugs. It’s true that Trump has since reversed his positions on abortion and the Affordable Care Act, but as many have noted, his change of heart is far from convincing.
One issue on which Trump is very right-wing, however, is immigration. Trump believes the United States is inadequately protected against invading Mexicans, and has accused undocumented immigrants from that country of raping Americans with impunity. The key to Trump’s appeal is his suggestion, which he utters repeatedly, that mainstream Republican leaders are deliberately sidelining both the issue of border security and the broader issue of immigration—a complex topic within both major parties—in order to shore up support among the country’s growing Latino population.
Trump’s implication of GOP cowardice is seductive to the segment of Republican voters who believe they’ve been sold out by the GOP to various elite interest groups who have relentlessly lobbied for immigration reform. At the same time, immigration reform happens to be an issue with which Democrats have bludgeoned Republicans among Latino voters, who are disproportionately affected by the inadequacies of the current immigration system.
In other words: Trump has focused his campaign on an issue that exposes the Republican Party to attacks from both its base (who want the party to move to the right) and Democrats (who have an obvious interest in portraying opponents of immigration reform—that is, most Republicans—as racist lunatics). If you were Hillary Clinton, it would be hard not to appreciate the strategic advantage of Trump’s campaign, which is doing the work of discrediting the Republican Party among its own voters, and the general public, for free.
Argument 2: Trump is friendly with the Clinton family
Based on his public statements, Trump seems to a) admire Bill Clinton, b) admire Chelsea Clinton even more, and c) regard Hillary Clinton with hostility. Here are some representative tweets:
Until very recently, the nature of Trump’s relationship with the Clinton family seemed entirely transactional. After all, Trump is a wealthy resident of New York, and Hillary Clinton, as a former U.S. Senator of the state, was all but required to mingle with people like him. During last Thursday’s Fox News debate, Trump even bragged about getting the Clintons to attend one of his weddings, knowing they wouldn’t refuse an invitation from someone who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to various Clinton causes, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation.
Trump’s relationship with Bill Clinton, however, seems to have deepened in the past few years. On August 5, The Washington Postreported that Clinton spoke with Trump in May of this year about Trump’s political ambitions. Here’s the how the paper characterized the exchange (bolding ours):
Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House ... Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.
An aide to Bill Clinton characterized the exchange as merely “a casual chat” (those are the Post’s words), and Trump later denied the suggestion that the former President somehow persuaded him to run on the Republican ticket, but the fact that the exchange took place at all—that Clinton gives a shit about Trump’s rank within the Republican Party; that Clinton stated, whether obsequiously or sincerely, that Trump’s rank should rise—certainly suggests that Clinton could have pictured what Trump’s campaign would look like, and more importantly, what it would mean for his wife and her own presidential ambitions.
Argument 3: Trump clearly intends to run as an independent
Trump’s current threat to the Republican Party is potentially exceeded by the threat of him running against both the Republican and Democratic candidates on an independent ticket (assuming, of course, he does not secure the Republican nomination). Conservatives believe, with some justification, that an independent Trump campaign would carve away a significant chunk of otherwise Republican voters, thereby lending the Democratic nominee an easy victory. (There’s precedent: The conservative movement still blames Ross Perot’s independent run in 1992 for the election of Bill Clinton. Whether this is an accurate read has been, for years, a matter of considerable debate.)
It remains unclear whether Trump actually intends to run as an independent. But during the debate on Thursday, he pointedly refused to agree to a pledge to endorse whoever wins the Republican nomination—the strongest signal yet that he considers the Republican Party’s political and strategic objectives to be much less important than his own.
What Trump would do if another candidate won the Republican nomination is the key to the False Flag Candidate theory. The best case scenario for the GOP is that he loses and does not run as an independent, allowing the party to dismiss Trumpmania as a passing fancy. Democratic attempts to define the GOP as the party of Trump would be neutered; after all, a lot of Republican candidates look comparatively sane and electable when compared to Trump. In the absence of an independent ticket, Trump’s ridiculousness could help other Republican candidates. (The eventual candidate would still need to secure the support of the nativists Trump appeals to while attempting to win over the moderates he appalls, but that is a dance Republican presidential candidates have been practicing for years.)
But if Trump does run as an independent, then Allen Ginzburg’s suggestion above would prove correct: A Trump campaign based on the candidate’s sincere desire to become President, and a Trump campaign based on his hidden desire to see Hillary Clinton elected President, would be completely indistinguishable.
This scenario would, of course, be an unmitigated nightmare for the Republican Party. At the same time, Trump’s frontrunner status has placed party leaders, in particular the other viable candidates, in the seemingly impossible position of attempting to disavow Trump (in order to shield the party from accusations of vicious racism) without completely pissing him off (in order to lessen the possibility of an independent Trump ticket in 2016). How do you marginalize someone like Trump without marginalizing him too much?
Still, it’s unclear how an actual independent Trump campaign would unfold, given what we know (and don’t know) about both the candidate’s finances and the plans of the wealthy donors who fund Republican campaigns. Whether or not Trump is willing to spend his own money on a campaign that would almost certainly help Democrats, not Republicans — and even whether he believes that an independent Trump campaign would help Democrats — remains to be seen.
So is Trump really a Hillary Clinton plant?
There is, we’re sorry to say, no definitive evidence that Trump and Hillary Clinton are colluding to wreak havoc on the Republican Party’s 2016 primary campaign for the purpose of securing a Clinton presidency. This does not preclude the possibility that Trump has secretly decided that he wants Clinton to be president, and is now sabotaging the GOP in order to help the Democratic frontrunner; nor does it mean that Bill Clinton didn’t encourage Trump to run in order to wreak havoc on the GOP nomination process. Even in those scenarios, however, the likelihood of smoking gun is close to zero.
The lack of evidence is not the biggest problem with this conspiracy theory, though. The biggest problem is that the theory’s most important underlying assumption—that Trump is anomalous, a xenophobic buffoon posing as a Republican—is wildly ignorant of actual Republican policies.
Boiled down, Trump’s appeal to the Republican Party’s base consists of his willingness to say nakedly racist statements and his promises to enact equally racist legislation. But why is that appeal surprising? In its contemporary manifestation, the GOP has repeatedly sought the support of voters who wish to disempower and intimidate racial minorities. This isn’t just about the party’s bizarre obsession with upholding the sanctity of the Confederate flag. To this day, for example, the party continues to advocate for Voter ID laws, which are ostensibly designed to combat in-person voter fraud—a virtually non-existent phenomenon—but in practice help prevent a disproportionate number of eligible non-white voters from actually voting. Its intellectual leaders havedismissed the ubiquitous threat of police violence towards black people as illusory.
Donald Trump’s popularity indicates that this country’s most fervent conservatives are primarily concerned not with reducing abortion rights, or repealing Obamacare, but rather with preserving white hegemony in the United States. For years and years, the Republican Party has happily accommodated these kinds of conservatives under the unspoken assumption that they would never be powerful enough to publicize their own candidate. Trump speaks to the error of that assumption.
In this context, the theory that Donald Trump is secretly helping Hillary Clintongetelected is not really about the Republican Party’s hostility toward Donald Trump or its habit of inventing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. (Although both factors have certainly helped with its formation.) It’s the result of a major political party coming to terms, however illogically, with who exactly its supporters are.
In Politico’s morning recap of yesterday’s New York primary, in which Hillary Clinton trounced Bernie Sanders, reporter Glenn Thrush recounts a conversation he had with a “senior Clinton aide” last night (bolding ours):
“We kicked his ass tonight,” a senior Clinton aide told me Tuesday night. “I hope this convinces Bernie to tone it down. If not, fuck him.”
(Note: Politico, apparently sensitive to the political class’s sense of propriety, rendered “fuck” as “f‒‒‒” in the original report.)
The outburst—a fairly rare one, at least for staffers of both candidates during this year’s Democratic primary—was apparently inspired by Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s appearance on MSNBC last night, during which he insisted that Sanders would win the Democratic nomination, one way or the other:
We’ve reached out to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns for comment and will update this post if we hear back. Also, if you have any idea which Clinton aide said this, definitely get in touch.
Martha Stewart already had her vote taken away once, when the state of New York sentenced her to five months in prison for insider trading. This week it may have happened again.
Though she says she was able to fill out an affidavit, it’s not clear that her vote was ultimately counted if her name wasn’t listed on the voter rolls affidavits get cross-checked against. The state of New York has disenfranchised Martha Stewart yet again, and on a piece of mass-produced, discount computer paper, no less. Voter suppression aside—who will speak for New York’s artisanal Araucana chicken egg farmers?
And if that weren’t enough:
We’ve reached out to Martha to find out the whole story—if you’re reading this, please get in touch, and thank you for this tweet.
This is me as Bob Marley, via Snapchat’s new 4/20 filter, which blends your face with Bob Marley’s. It’s a particularly uncomfortable filter if, like me, you’re a white person. I don’t feel so good and I don’t think everything’s gonna be alright.
We’ve reached out to Snapchat for comment and will update if they get back to us.
UPDATE (10:40 a.m.) A spokesperson for Snapchat says:
The lens we launched today was created in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate, and gives people a new way to share their appreciation for Bob Marley and his music. Millions of Snapchatters have enjoyed Bob Marley’s music, and we respect his life and achievements.
“You’re hoping to get to a second ballot. In other words, in a second ballot people that support Donald Trump or John Kasich or Marco Rubio, if those delegates are still relevant, can then switch their votes,” Hannity said. “So you’re in a process of talking to delegates, and it seems to be very extensive. Could you explain to people what’s going on?”
Cruz deflected: “Sean, with all respect, that’s not what people are concerned about...The media loves to obsess about process. This process and this whining from the Trump campaign is all silly. It’s very, very simple—”
“It’s more than a process question,” Hannity said. “It’s an integrity of the election question, and everybody’s asking me this question so I’m giving you an opportunity to explain it.”
A lightly chuckling Cruz said only hardcore Trump supporters would ask such a question.
“Why do you do this?” Hannity said, raising his voice. “Every single time I — no, you gotta stop. Every time I have you on the air and I ask a legitimate question, you try to throw this in my face. I’m getting sick of it. I’ve had you on more than any other candidate on radio and TV. So if I ask you, senator, a legitimate question to explain to the audience, why don’t you just answer it?”
“I cannot help that the Donald Trump campaign is incapable of running a lemonade stand,” Cruz said. “My focus is on jobs, freedom and security, not this incessant whining from the other side. If you lose, don’t cry about it. Go back and learn how to win an election.”
American colleges and universities are constantly working to diversify their student bodies (or at least appear to diversify on the cover of brochures). A new study finds that we have failed to do much at all to get poor people college educations, though.
The study, from the Pell Institute, examines who goes to college through the lens of family income brackets. The very short answer: wealthier people go to and graduate from college much more than poorer people—just as they have for decades. And we have failed to change this dynamic.
College enrollment itself has been on the rise for decades as well. About three quarters of college students are enrolled at public institutions. Over the past 25 years, the portion of K-12 students who are eligible for free lunch has grown significantly, to more than half now. From this we can conclude that a lot of public school students are poor. So how well are we doing at getting those poor kids into college? From the study:
The good news is that we are getting more poor kids into college than we did 40 years ago. Progress! The bad news is that there is still a 35 percentage point gap in college enrollment between the top and bottom income quartiles. Not enough progress!
There is much more in the report, but we can give you a cheat sheet version of how to mitigate this inequality: increase federal funding for educational aid. Or if you’re feeling real crazy it would help to make people less poor, in general.
Here was the big question, the one underneath the pot-leaf name tags and the thousand-deep crowd of women shouting mantras in the opera house and the slight smell of weed in our parkas and Melissa Etheridge’s ombré sunglasses and the après-ski-hot girls with angled haircuts and the shy 55-year-olds furiously writing down dosage information for their parents’ end-of-life care and the giggling grandmas from Oklahoma sharing their first vape: Of the existing billion-dollar industries, women are in control of none of them. Could legal cannabis be the first?
As women, weed, and control make up three of my top five interests, I had flown to Denver for the annual Women Grow conference to find out.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” shouted Sherry Glaser, an actress and political activist, gesturing from the stage towards the rapt gathering of women in the large, grand, red-velveted auditorium in Denver’s downtown. “Aren’t we beautiful? Where are you from? I hear Toronto! I hear Puerto Rico! I’m from the earth! From my mother’s womb!”
Get it
In fairytale cadence, Glaser told us about how she opened the first-ever dispensary in Mendocino, California—a legendary weed town that now makes up one of the three points of the state’s “Emerald Triangle,” which is a 10,000-square-mile stretch of forest that attracts seasonal “trimmigrants” and is said to produce more of that Dank Sticky What Have You than any comparably sized region in the world.
In 2005, Glaser was arrested on the steps of the California State Capitol while toplessly protesting Arnold Schwarzenegger with the organization Breasts Not Bombs. On March 2014, Glaser found herself in a more unexpected confrontation: she, along with the rest of the Love In It Cooperative, woke up to the DEA pounding down their doors. Everyone was handcuffed, everything was ransacked, eight people went to jail. “They charged me with intent to sell. Sure! I had a store!” she shouted, onstage.
(At that time, it was illegal to profit from marijuana in California; collectives and cooperatives were prohibited from taking in income past what they needed to cover their expenses. This changed in September 2015, with a bill package that brought much more of the industry aboveboard; a ballot measure in November will likely change regulations again, making recreational marijuana legal in the state. For anyone in this business, staying abreast of the shifting layers of local, state, and federal liability is essential and daunting: finance itself is a quagmire with the industry cash-only, federally illegal, but taxed at an especially high rate by the IRS.)
Glaser talked about PTRD, or post-traumatic raid disorder—a joke that seemed flippant and slightly offensive to me until the women around me started murmuring about the risks they ran of arrest, asset seizure, having their children taken away. (If a parent is detained for a reason related to the marijuana industry, Child Protective Services in Mendocino is called automatically.) But Glaser triumphed over her PTRD, re-opening the collective in 2014, she said. The crowd went apeshit. Glaser closed her talk out with an exercise called the “Boom Chakra Laka,” enthusiastically grabbing her “root chakra,” which is, I guess, the crotch.
Everyone is so fuckin happy, I tapped out hastily on my phone, as hundreds of women around me air-grinded, affirming their simultaneous holistic existence as the Boom Chakra Laka slid into whistles and wild applause. Everyone like YAS TIME 2 MAKE MONEY W MY SISTERS. This is the safest space I’ve ever been in my life.
Women Grow, an organization that connects, supports and promotes women in the weed biz, is ballooning as fast as the industry it’s tied to. Last year, the Women Grow conference—the first of its kind—hosted 120 people; this year, it was 1,200, and every single session I attended over the three-day event was packed.
An explicitly professional, Lean-In style organization for women in the weed industry is a quite specific thing, and I’d been curious about what kind of a scene I’d be walking into. The conference branding reminded me of Teach For America, the dress code prescribed was business casual, and there were rooms designated for investor meetings; the welcome email encouraged us to bring extra moisturizer for Denver’s dry climate and to “find your tribe, find your vibe, and thrive.” The whole thing was an especially warm harbinger of the swift, medical-leaning corporatization of the marijuana industry, a movement that runs at odds with the drug’s longtime stereotype as a dirty recreational substance, and may eventually counter it wholesale. Once I got to Denver, I took a shuttle ride to a female-owned dispensary and purchased a fetching little red Women Grow vape, already pre-loaded and charged up for use.
Cute and discreet, perfect for, say, hypothetically, office use
Women Grow was founded in August of 2014 by Jazmin Hupp and Jane West: two ebullient women in their mid-thirties,Hupp formerly a director for Women 2.0 (a tech-centered analogue to Women Grow) and West formerly an events producer who got fired from her previous job for vaping on camera and who later produced the famous “weed night” at the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. In 20 months of operation, Women Grow has developed 45 chapters across North America and has had 20,000 women attend its events; they host online seminars, have a lobbying presence, and maintain an extensive business directory, listing women-owned operations that deal with (among other categories) marijuana compliance, genetics, distribution, insurance, point-of-sale systems, tech, testing and HR.
Women Grow is for-profit, which is important to Hupp. “Fundraising sucks!” she yelled plainly, taking the stage after Glaser. “It’s time for us to take control of the industry, instead of being the nonprofit angels we’ve been for so long.” (The room murmured something that sounded like “Amen.”) Later, Hupp talked to me about how she and West intend to run Women Grow almost as a photonegative of the tech world, with their site citing this explicitly:
This cannabis industry is creating businesses that serve people of all genders, colors, and ages, and the best way to do that is to invite all those people into the industry. Unlike tech, where we screwed up targeting technology education to primarily young men, there was nothing about this new regulated industry that was gender specific. We saw the opportunity to create a new industry in America that [could] be fair from the very start.
“Team first” was a common ethos; the weed for pets with cancer talk was very affecting; an extraction system from Eden Labs
Women Grow currently makes money from ticket sales to local, regional and national events, as well as online education programs (you can purchase the extremely servicey conference on video as a package for a reasonable $95) and individual or corporate memberships into their business directory. It’ll evolve as the industry does.“I want this organization to grow into whatever it needs to be to put women at the forefront of the cannabis space,” Hupp told me. “This industry is the next thing. Women are the next thing.”
I agree with the idea that women are the next thing, but after a life spent in gendered enterprises that are externally cheerful and internally something else—ballet, gymnastics, cheerleading, sorority, women’s media, you name it—I feel immune to group empowerment, and suspicious of it besides. I was surprised, as I listened to Hupp speak at the conference, to feel a lump in my throat.
This was related partly to the emotional urgency with which I had conducted that morning’s journalistic investigation of the official conference vape; it was also related to the fact that the newness of the legal weed field right now makes it a legitimate and almost singular ground for hope. There was a sincerity and wholeness to everyone’s optimism that I found affecting—they hadn’t been burned by this industry, because this industry didn’t exist 10 years ago—and a structural pragmatism, too. “Who had to arrange childcare to get away for this weekend?” Hupp asked on stage, and nearly everyone in the room raised their hands.
Hupp exhorted us to remember and “hold space” for all the women who couldn’t afford to take time off work, who couldn’t pay for childcare. She reiterated why we were all here: to make a new kind of industry, an inclusive one, one controlled by benevolent matriarchs who take care of their own, by people who’ve spent all their lives in a discriminatory, male-dominated economy and wanted to build an alternative. As Hupp talked, a woman next to me breastfed her baby in the open. Later, she got up when the baby started fussing, and the women behind her urged her to stay.
The driving idea behind Women Grow—that women are underrepresented and underserved in business—is burgeoning in many industries right now, accompanied by the perhaps more important idea that, when women are in control, they actively improve work for everyone. In other words, women aren’t just there for quotas; they are good for increasing profit, and tend to create more equitable and sustainable conditions under which to pass the day.
Women aren’t actually in charge of much, though, because of little lasting legacies like not getting the vote till this past century or the right to have their own lines of credit till 1974. The effects of systemic sexism, severe and routine diminishment of women, have recently been a major topic of conversation in Hollywood, in academia, in the music industry, in tech, in media: industries like most industries, where male domination has been standard since the start. In these conversations, we’re still mostly at the “look how bad this is” stage rather than “what’s anyone in power actually going to do about it” stage, and to me things don’t look so auspicious as much as they do entrenched.
Weed is different, because there’s no one quite so firmly in power yet. Of course huge capital investment is hovering, and will pounce as soon as there’s federal legality, and the industry isn’t exactly a blank slate: it’s expensive to get into on a large scale, which skews the population trying to enter the market, and laws barring the previously convicted further ensure that the world of legal “potrepreneurs” is extremely—like 99 percent—white. (Discrimination always finds a way in: how inspiring!) But nonetheless, the whole idea here is that rules can be rewritten. And let’s say we’d rather have this industry controlled by white women than white men—I would. Then we can acknowledge that the weed market is about to explode, that it’s about to be a Scrooge McDuck type of situation; and these women who are trying to get into that whole gold coin thing have an extremely important industry growth period on their hands.
To wit, weed is the fastest-growing industry in America: 24states have already legalized medical marijuana, 20 states have weed initiatives on the ballot this fall, and four states (Alaska, Colorado, Washington and Oregon)sell it retail, as easy to purchase as cigarettes or alcohol. The legal weed business has an astonishing growth rate; it brought in $1.5 billion in 2013, $2.6 billion in 2014, and $5.4 billion in 2015, and sales are projected to reach anywhere from $11 billion to $35 billion by the end of the decade.
There’s a huge and obvious barrier to the aboveboard growth of the industry—the matter of weed being a Schedule 1 federally controlled substance that every year lands hundreds of thousands of (disproportionately black) people in jail. But criminal justice reform concerning marijuana arrests and sentencing may come quickest through legalization: the best argument you could make against a disabled septuagenarian veteran getting a life sentence for growing weed at his house is not that it’s inhumane, which it is, certainly, but that it’s judicially improper in a country where weed is becoming legal left and right.
So, for now, weed remains in an uncomfortable, uneven, in-between area; even when California goes recreational, as it’s expected to do in November, the billion-dollar legal industry will still be shut out of the banking system, and huge quantities of legal weed will make their way to the illegal market. The market for weed in general is large and continually expanding: there will presumably be a saturation point in the future, but marijuana supply has never caught up to marijuana demand. As of now, 41 percent of Americans have tried the drug, and roughly 6 percent self-identify as regular users. But “consumer education,” let’s say, creates a certain percentage of customers for life.
These were all over the conference, and should be handed out at college orientations
In other words, weed people don’t have to be born by way of unsociable and funky temperament; they can be made, particularly through the medical point of view. The Women Grow conference was full of women who had come to the drug through personal health issues, or who had explored marijuana as palliative treatment for sick family members and then discovered its benefits for themselves.
At a welcome dinner, I met a perky Army veteran named Mandy who had gotten into a near-fatal car accident and developed migraines so paralyzing she didn’t get a full night’s sleep for two years. Then she tried weed. “I’m a better mother now,” she told me, putting a couple of gyros in her purse for her two kids.
On a trip to the dispensary dispensary, I talked to Gaynell Rogers, formerly the head of publicity for Pixar, now the head of a PR firm that’s coordinating marijuana brands for the Doobie Brothers and Jefferson Airplane. “I thought I was going to move to Tahoe and write cookbooks. And then I got cancer. Twice,” she told me. Finding treatment hammered it home to her that “weed is a social justice issue.”
(This, about the social justice issue, was a refrain I’d hear over and over, sincerely but slightly impotently: it is impossible to feel as if your life has been salvaged by a substance without understanding how unfair it is that that substance keeps millions of people in jail. But whether leveraging your privilege to make the drug respectable will help those people or just heighten the contrast between your lives and theirs, nobody really seemed to know.)
Even outside the conference, because this was Denver, I kept meeting people with similar stories. One night, my cab driver was a white woman in her early seventies whose friendliness filled the minivan like smoke. She got visibly excited when I said why I was in town. “Oh!” she said. “Let me tell you my story about marijuana! I have a real bad shoulder—my three dogs just pull the heck out of it—and a few weeks ago, my massage therapist said, you know what you should try?”
“A topical?” I said. “I just tried my first one today. Did it work?”
I could not recommend this brand more tbh
“YES,” she said. “At first I was like, are you kidding me? I told my therapist, I’m not smoking anything. I tried marijuana when I was younger, and I just stared at the wallpaper! I didn’t like it at all! But I walked into the dispensary and they fine-tuned the dose for exactly what I needed, and I swear, it’s a miracle.”
She had two blue heelers and a pit bull, she told me; she’d formerly run a rescue group. “But no one tells you how much you need your shoulders until after your dogs mess them up! I couldn’t even dress myself! Until I found a solution!”
“And a fun one,” I said, and this nice woman and I laughed merrily about our shared love of a federally illegal substance that we have both been able to use freely, which has not put us in the criminal justice system, which will not ruin either of our lives.
Throughout the conference, I got regularly flattened by the mental vertigo induced by trying to simultaneously think about weed’s two legal statuses—these two parallel Americas, in which the state alternately serves or dismantles your interests. It would be impossible, for one, to imagine a version of this conference that drew 1,200 young black men in mutual celebration of their place in the legal marijuana industry instead.
Everyone does drugs; white people do slightly more of them. But what you look like in this country tends to determine how illegal certain activities will be for you, and weed brings this fact out on a depressingly large scale. There were 8.2 million marijuana arrests in the United States from 2001 to 2010; an insane 88 percent of these were for possession, and black people were 3.73 times more likely than white people to be arrested for the crime. In 2011, there were more arrests for weed than for all violent crimes combined, and there are still over 600,000 possession arrests every year.
And here I was at a business-casual women’s conference in Denver, about as safe a zone to vape your heart out as you could get. The acknowledgment of this fact was constant but minimal: there was lots of talk of weed and criminal justice—I also don’t mean to downplay the real danger the women there faced against CPS and police themselves—but there was no time wasted loudly calling out the white privilege enjoyed by most people in the room. (I do mean “wasted” there; I can imagine nothing worse than a room full of white women saying how lucky they are to be white.) There was a diversity session, and a queer-tinged frankness about everything—anecdotally, Women Grow estimates its LGBTQ population at double the national average—and a sense of intentional inclusivity that I haven’t sniffed out in years.
The longstanding demonization of marijuana in America makes it easy to forget that things weren’t always like this—that a relatively neutral substance wasn’t always the playing field on which wild games of social division were quietly, constantly fought. Even hemp, a non-intoxicating, industrial, fraternal twin to marijuana, has been outlawed since 1970: it only became re-legalized to grow even for research purposes in 2014.
As any college stoner might tell you: centuries ago, we weren’t so deep in all this bullshit. King James ordered colonists in Virginia to grow 100 hemp plants each; Louisa May Alcott once ended a short story with the line “Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this.” You could be jailed in Virginia in the mid-18th century for not growing hemp in your fields during times of crop shortage, and weed was used medicinally as early as colonial times and recreationally from the mid-19th century on.
Then, in 1906, Congress started passing laws to regulate the market for unlabeled and untested substances; state by state, cannabis was added to lists of habit-forming drugs, and then, to lists of poisons. Anti-immigrant sentiment, exacerbated by the Great Depression, created an intense public distaste for farmworkers who used marijuana, and states began to outlaw the substance completely.
In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established, with a director named Harry Anslinger who made the racist undertones of weed laws clear, writing:
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.
And there, with our extremely lit inaugural drug czar, we were well on our way to the current situation in America, in which weed is a Schedule 1 substance, along with cocaine, MDMA, acid, heroin, and meth.
The Schedule 1 category denotes a high potential for abuse as well as a lack of known medical benefits. Weed’s abuse potential is debatable, but in the relative scheme of things, it’s moot: the New York Times wrote in 2014, in a strongly worded recommendation for federal weed legalization, “We believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco.”
But the argument that weed has no medical benefits is plainly wrong. Though there are other things on the Schedule 1 list that can be used therapeutically—MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, psilocybin for cluster headaches, LSD for depression—weed is mild and palliative; it could feasibly be used primarily in a medical sense. I’m a recreational smoker, but it’s become obvious to me, in an adult life full of dumb behavior but also taxes and dog-walking and cleaning the house on Sunday and settling down at the computer at 10 p.m. on weekdays to go through thousands of words of a draft, that I use weed therapeutically, if not necessarily medicinally. I use it to calm down, to work better, to access some productive emotional vulnerability, to keep my sense of anxiety skewing positive, to feel interested in mundane and necessary tasks.
If I think too much about this, it feels slightly depressing: look, see, here’s how well weed helps me optimize while overextended even in a party sense and/or produce signs of worth within an exhausted, broken culture! But then again, I could say that about anything else I like. And anyway, there is no other Schedule 1 drug you could use on a near-daily basis for a decade and function much better than you would have otherwise, a statement which isn’t true for all weed smokers but certainly is for me. I can forgo pot much easier than I can abstain from coffee, but I have done enough intensive personal research to know that weed improves me; others at the conference, people who’d had cancer or who suffered from epilepsy or arthritis or lupus or MS, were speaking more seriously. Weed, they said, had saved their life.
“Cannabis is the female plant,” intoned Melissa Etheridge, who took the stage in a leather jacket and aviators. “It’s the female spirit demanding attention. It’s bringing back the pagan knowledge we have about wellness that we were burned at the stake for. It’s the feminine energy missing from the female plane.”
Long a marriage equality activist as well as a musician, Etheridge, after surviving breast cancer, is now an advocate for legal weed (and, of course, a weed businesswoman who sells things like “weed-infused wine tinctures”). During her speech, she made a joke about drug use among Americans being “don’t ask, don’t tell,” then compared coming out as a stoner to coming out full stop. “You have to be confident about who you are, to your friends and family and the people in your neighborhood. You have to deal with the stereotypes and break them.”
Etheridge said she’d never been much of a drug user through decades in the music industry (“What was around was the really awful stuff, like cocaine”) but then, in 2004, she got her diagnosis. “I was starting chemotherapy, and David Crosby, you know him? He came up to me, and said, Melissa, you simply must try cannabis.”
She was lucky, she said, to be in a place in her career where she could afford to take a couple of years off work altogether. “And so, when I went through chemo, they took me as close to death as they could get. I was smoking weed to be able to talk to my children, to function. I smoked constantly, then I couldn’t smoke anymore and I vaped, and then eventually I had to eat it. Butter on potatoes: that’s the only thing that got me through treatment. I didn’t take steroids or pain medicine. I came out of it thinking—there’s something deeply wrong with the world if this is illegal.”
Then Etheridge picked her gender proclamations back up and reversed them. “Money was the system. It was them,” she said, meaning men. “It wasn’t us. We did the free services. We helped out. But the way we need to balance the masculine and feminine energies in the world, we need to balance those energies in ourselves. We need to make the money. We, as women, will create corporations that we won’t have to fight against. We can show them how to do it. Cannabis will change the entire conversation around health.”
Before cannabis changes the conversation around health, it’ll be up to women to change the conversation about cannabis. Women control around three-quarters of consumer spending and make 80 percent of family health care decisions, and it’s the “safest” of these women, i.e. white middle-class mothers (and the children and elderly parents whose healthcare they provide) that’ll be the magic bullet in this conversation.
New York Times Magazine screenshot; NYMag screenshot
But there is a reason why the demographic that would be most immediately useful to the marijuana movement is the one that probably least understands it, or openly acknowledges it, as a whole. Weed’s reputation is unsavory primarily because of its illegality: the population of open users has been necessarily composed of people who are comfortable with unlawful activity, and the criminal population slants poor, black and brown. Weed’s effects also slant towards things that a certain type of rich, white, conservative woman avoids for social reasons—like eating, or arousal, or vulnerability, or embarrassment, etc. And so weed’s association with “sketchiness” has endured.
Nevertheless—to return to the presupposition that many of the habits of our time are indicative of acceleration, badly won comfort, and general anxiety and duress—let me suggest that this segment of the population, i.e. women in general and/or white women specifically, needs weed more than anyone else. Decades of weed being positioned as a gateway substance have papered over the fact that weed can also be a plug for a hole that’s currently being filled quite dangerously. Women are binge-drinking 36 percent more now than 10 years ago; almost 200,000 women visit the emergency room every year because of painkiller intake; around 6,600 die of pill overdoses annually. And so on.
And here’s where the line between recreation and medication gets blurry: if we’re talking about substances here, you can choose your statement of purpose, but either way you’re alleviating pressure, you’re filling a need. Pharmaceuticals alleviate pressures, and pressures fall more heavily on women—social expectations, the obligation to do unpaid work caring for others—and so women, as a result, are more dependent on prescription painkillers than men; they are more likely to be prescribed them, and they are more likely to become addicted. The effects of these medicines can in many cases be simulated or at least approximated by a much less addictive substance: weed.
And of course weed doesn’t suit everyone—coffee doesn’t, and neither does wine. Neither do pills. But the world of legal weed allows for an experience with the substance that is controlled, tailored, and otherwise unrecognizable from that one time someone gave you something in high school and you suddenly felt like the air was burying you alive.
Vape packaging; joint packaging
In these new markets, weed is now tracked “seed to sale.” It’s tested batch by batch. It’s calibrated to two percentage points for the active substances CBD and THC, which are usually present to various degrees in bud marijuana and have dramatically different effects. Specifically, THC is psychoactive; CBD is not. THC causes excitement, which can turn into anxiety or paranoia, as well as sleepiness; CBD decreases anxiety, keeps you awake, may have anti-psychotic properties, and counteracts the trippier effects of THC.
Before the recent advances in weed technology, the difference between THC and CBD for users mostly came up when choosing between indica and sativa, the two types of weed strains. Sativa, a skinnier-looking plant, is heavier on the CBD; it’s “day weed,” a head high, cerebral and amusing, and the kind I smoke when I need to work. Indica, a shorter and fatter plant, is heavier on THC; it’s “night weed,” a body high, the kind that locks you to your couch and makes you want to take a bath or go to sleep or have sex, or all three in a different order. And there are lots and lots of indica/sativa hybrids too: one of my favorites is called Larry OG and makes my body and mind both feel extremely interested, and Blue Dream, one of the most nationally popular strains, is a hybrid that relaxes you physically while perking you up.
Image of Medicine Man’s dispensary via WCPO/ YouTube
Now, as was on dizzying display in the Denver dispensaries, you can not only calibrate the substance you’re taking with unheard-of precision, you can change the mode of intake to suit your exact needs. If you want pain relief or mild relaxation and nothing else, you can rub a weed salve on your neck and shoulders; you can take a bath with weed salts; you can put a CBD-only patch on your skin. If you want to get a little stoned for whatever reason—for fun, or for anxiety relief, or to sleep, or for creativity, or to replace a drink or two while you’re out—you can get pre-rolled joints of any strain you want, or a pre-loaded vape, or vape cartridges that tell you exactly what you’re getting on their container. For people trying to get aggressively and recreationally high, there’s dabbing, lighting up a chunk of wax with a blowtorch, and there are formulations-behind the medical counters, always separate from the recreational counters—tailored for every specific medical purpose imaginable, including medical use for children and the elderly and pets.
Of course, the prospect of weed that’s cultivated for unprecedented potency and tailored with pharmaceutical precision is mildly alarming in its own right; it sounds like quick-fix magic, like soma with less of the dystopia part, like something that might smooth down everything prickly about you without you having to de-prickle on your own. Then again, not to repeat myself, a lot of things in contemporary society are like this. And while the possibility of pharmaceutically designed, scaled and distributed marijuana ensures that big conglomerates will be in this space as soon as is legally possible, bringing decidedly non-cooperative incentives to bear (and shutting out a good amount of these new-structures ambitions), weed also persists in 2016 through a unique lineage of counterculture. A strong degree of resistance—a type that’s crucial to Women Grow’s project—remains. For the precious few years in front of us, the rules haven’t yet fully been written; it’s still, for the most part, anyone’s game.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time in Denver test-driving what was around me—sativas mostly, in the interest of being able to report from the conference and simultaneously work most of the days remote—and frankly, this weed ruled. I tried different kinds of weed oil in a vape, all various levels of mellow and suffusive and stimulating, with the quality control really making a difference; all the bottom notes of paranoia or dizziness or fuzziness are gone. I bought a couple of joints there, too, and normally I couldn’t smoke a whole joint the size of these fat little creatures by myself without feeling like I needed to get in a pool immediately and not speak to anyone, but this weed was beautiful: clean and plumey and strengthening and light. I kept trying to blow the selfie camera opaque with smoke; I felt pretty and inconsequential, like my sense of self and my actual self had lined up with each other, and that both were the right size.
But the real difference is the recreational dispensary. I’ve been accustomed to dispensary life since I went to graduate school in Michigan, which has a medical weed program (which I snuck into thanks to a case of active tuberculosis I contracted while in the Peace Corps; thanks, TB!) and it’s so much better, so uncool and silly and bland and above-board. The recreational dispensary took this a step further, into full nerd territory, which is perfect. Weed is not interesting enough to be associated with the forbidden. Legalize it, and young black dudes can walk around with a joint without getting rolled up for Class B misdemeanors; college girls can get an eighth to smoke with their roommates without having to track down a drug dealer who’ll lock the car doors and chop out a line of coke; moms can fall asleep without taking 20 mg of nightly Ambien, or treat their severely epileptic children with a drop of CBD tincture under the tongue without being afraid to tell their doctor what’s suddenly working so well; grandmothers can try some weed to invigorate their gardening practice without having to ask their shitty nephew to ask their skulking friend who knows a terrible guy who’s never taken off his beanie. All of these people, they could just walk right in.
Leaving the Women Grow conference, I made a last stop on the way to the airport: Medicine Man, the largest single dispensary in Denver, founded by brothers named Pete and Andy Williams. It was a reality check, after being in the company of so many women; Medicine Man was insanely efficient, intimidatingly regulated, and staffed, at least that day, mostly by men.
Because weed businesses are cash-only and move a lot of profit—Medicine Man was bringing in $50,000 per day at the end of December 2014—they are uncomfortably and forcibly secured. I got there early for the tour (which Women Grow had organized in the middle of Medicine Man’s all-day, technical and extremely granular seminar about industry best practices) and a male security guard with a gun in his holster stopped me to take down my ID and information; the guy behind the counter, who sold me some excellent oil cartridges, leered.
The women from the tour, polite and taking furious notes and photos, showed up. We were led inside the Medicine Man facility, which is enormous: 40,000 square feet. Inside, it was clean white, Willy Wonka futuristic, big hallways leading to mostly closed-off rooms holding thousands of marijuana plants, all monitored by machines that were originally built for Apple and Google’s server room; here, they checked levels on temperature, humidity, C02. Unassuming twentysomething men walked around in navy scrubs, wearing headphones; they were in charge of watering, scrubbing, checking, noting.
The room in front of us was called The Green Mile, holding plants as far as the eye could see under a bluish light that made their leaves look iridescent. The plants in this room, the guide told us, were in the initial vegetative state. In this phase, a plant hasn’t showed its gender yet, and the gender it evinces is important: only female plants grow buds.
A sign outside the flower room; the aforementioned Green Mile
“All the plants in the building are female,” said the tour guide. “We do everything we can not to surprise them with any change in conditions. If a plant gets stressed, it’ll try to sex itself. It’ll become a hermaphrodite plant.”
Well, I thought, I guess the weed industry is dominated by women. We walked down a long bright hallway that made me feel like I was going through the back entrance to heaven; the weed smell felt natural and permanent, like the smell of salt at the beach. Later, on the way to the airport, my cab driver would pull out a bottle of Tommy Bahama cologne and spray me because he was concerned I wouldn’t make it through security.
We peeked into another room, with shelves and shelves of flowering weed plants sitting under enormous, rectangular, sun-bright lamps. We huddled around the door, everyone’s eyes enormous. This—what Medicine Man has, a company bringing in tens of millions of dollars a year in profit, a top-to-bottom organization that’s beginning to make its shares public—was what they, these moms, these women, wanted to build.
One woman asked how many days they keep the plants in the light.
“Mothers never see a decrease in their light,” the man said, closing the door to the room where the weed plants were growing. “They think it’s perpetual spring. They grow up and up and up.”
According to the Guardian, the Department of Justice is investigating the global tax avoidance scheme revealed by the publication of the Panama Papers.
In a letter to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote that his office had “opened a criminal investigation regarding matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant.” ICIJ obtained the 11.5 million files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, and shared them with a variety of news outlets.
Among them is Wall Street financier Benjamin Wey, who has been charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering for using family members to help him amass ownership of large blocks of stock in companies through so-called “reverse merger” transactions between Chinese companies and US shell companies. He made tens of millions of dollars of illegal profit by manipulating the companies’ stock prices, according to the indictment.
The Panama Papers leak shows that Mossack Fonseca helped set up the offshore companies used in the stock manipulation.
“Ben Wey fashioned himself a master of industry, but as alleged, he was merely a master of manipulation,” Bharara said when he announced the indictment against Wey in September. Wey, the chief executive of New York Global Group, denies the charge.
“The Office would greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak as soon as possible with any ICIJ employee or representative involved in the Panama Papers Project in order to discuss this matter further,” Bharara’s letter reads.
Karim Baker’s face from after the assault. Image: ABC 7
Prosecutors have indicted two NYPD officers on assault charges for allegedly beating Karim Baker, a U.S. Postal Service worker. Baker claims he faced harassment from cops after unwittingly giving directions to Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who shot and killed Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu last year.
Before Brinsley shot Ramos and Liu on the night of December 20, 2014, the killer approached Baker in Brooklyn and asked him for directions to the Marcy Houses, which were a short walk away. Not sensing that anything was amiss, Baker directed him. Police later questioned Baker about the interaction, and he said that Brinsley seemed like “Just a guy asking for directions,” he told the New York Daily News.
Baker’s attorney allegedin November that his client had been stopped by police 20 times since the questioning, and that his “strongly held theory” was that the cops were retaliating against him.
Today, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton announced that Officers Angelo Pampena, a nine-year veteran of the force, and Robert Carbone, an eight-year veteran, will be charged with a variety of assault charges for allegedly punching and kicking Baker as he sat in a parked car in October 2015. Pampena will also be charged with perjury and filing a false instrument.
Baker, who had just finished his shift with the Postal Service, was still in uniform when Pampena and Carbone approached his car in Queens, according to the charges. “While Mr. Baker was seated in his vehicle, it is alleged that the two detectives punched and kicked him multiple times about his face and body and that they then dragged Mr. Baker from the vehicle and onto the sidewalk. It is alleged that the actions of the two detectives caused Mr. Baker to suffer serious physical injuries,” a statement from the DA reads.
“I was being kicked, choked, punched, on the floor, stomped on,” Baker previously told the News about the incident. “I had a foot on my neck and a foot on my head. Someone stomped my head on the concrete.”
Pampena faces additional charges for alleging in a sworn complaint that Baker was parked directly in front of a fire hydrant. Video evidence shows that Baker’s car was actually parked more than fifteen feet from the hydrant, according to the DA.
Pampena and Carbone each face up to seven years in prison if convicted.
According to the Associated Press, we have reached a point in the election cycle (and history) when it is mathematically impossible for anyone other than Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination before the convention in July—there simply aren’t enough delegates left.
Trump won at least 89 of the 95 delegates at stake in New York on Tuesday, while John Kasich won at least three and Ted Cruz may not have won any. There are not enough delegates remaining in the states still to vote for either Kasich or Cruz to reach the magic 1,237 number.
The memo, distributed to aides and surrogates, dismisses concerns about Trump’s abysmal favorability ratings. “On its face the argument is absurd,” it states. “Everyone knows these numbers are quite fluid.”
Composite: Sam Woolley, original image via Facebook
It’s not completely outside of the realm of possibility that Limp Bizkit, a screaming band of white working man messiahs, would put on a show at a random gas station as a 4/20 gag. Unfortunately for thousands of confused internet users, though, Limp Bizkit will not be playing at the Sunoco Station in Dayton, Ohio this evening. Unless that’s what they wantyou to think.
If you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter recently, you may have seen either the following event or tweet, respectively.
At which point, you might have found yourself wondering, what the hell is going on? Why would Limp Bizkit be playing at secret show at a gas station? How is it secret if it’s being announced to 20,000 people on Facebook? And what is Ohio?
Don’t worry. We have answers.
What the hell is going on?
It all started with a Facebook event made by 28-year-old Ohio resident Brian Baker. The page alleged that Limp Bizkit would be playing a secret show at the Sunoco gas station on Wayne Avenue in Dayton on April 20, 2017.
Now, Limp Bizkit will very likely not be playing a show at the Sunoco on Wayne Avenue in 2017, but they are most definitely not playing one tonight, which is what the majority of people read the date as.
But then the City of Dayton announced that, no, Limp Bizkit would not be playing.
Are you sure there’s no Limp Bizkit concert at the Sunoco Station on Wayne Ave?
Pretty sure. A local news station looked into the issue and walked away with a negative Limp Bizkit conclusion.
Local site The News Wheel even talked to some of the Sunoco’s employees after taking photos of some of the signs hanging around:
The woman working behind the counter saw me taking the photo with my phone and asked me to please post it on social media and spread the word. She said it had been a crazy day, and that they had needed to unplug their phone because so many people were calling in to ask about the concert and request VIP tickets.
The official Limp Bizkit Twitter account also jumped on, offering this bit of insight into the Sunoco secret show situation:
Which we’re choosing to take as a “maybe.”
Why would someone go to all this trouble?
I spoke to Brian Baker, the creator of the original event, to ask just that. In regards to what prompted him to make the event in the first place, Baker said, “I’ve been a fan my whole life. Of Sunoco. And the biz. Red Bulls and Limp Bizkit is my shit.” A real Limp-head, some might say.
I then reframed the question, hoping to maybe get something coherent. Instead, Brian answered, “I made this event for the holy day 4/20/17 and I know Wes, Fred, and the Bizkit will come. The people decided they want Bizkit tonight I guess. We all in together now. Just rollin.”
Did Brian have any idea how far his even would spread? “I had faith,” he says. His motivation, of course, was “the nookie.”
Does that mean that Limp Bizkit will be playing at the Sunooco gas station on Wayne Ave. next 4/20?
As there has been no suggestion from any party that this is not the case, we must assume that Limp Bizkit will indeed be playing at the Sunoco gas station on Wayne Ave on April 20, 2017.
So should I still go to the Sunoco gas station on Wayne Ave. to see Limp Bizkit tonight?
Yes. Definitely. Limp Bizkit will certainly be there. Be safe and have fun.
At Brigham Young University, the flagship school of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, the Honor Code rules campus life. The Honor Code, a broad and far-ranging document governed by LDS’s Church Education System, covers everything from drinking coffee to a “chaste and virtuous life,” “homosexual behavior,” alcohol consumption, clothing, and language. It’s the moral centerpiece of the private university, governing not just students, but faculty and staff as well.
In a promotional video produced by BYU, the Honor Code is framed as the fabric which knits the large university together: “Because character is intentional, integrity is a choice, and honor is deliberate,” an artsy blonde says to the camera, while extolling the virtues of the ecclesiastical endorsement system, to which every student who matriculates at BYU agrees to abide.
But this year, four students with recent stories of rape or sexual assault have alleged that BYU has used its Honor Code to target them, unfairly, after the fact. They say that Title IX reports are forwarded to the Honor Code Office, putting alleged victims in line for discipline simply for reporting incidents of assault and abuse. Madeline MacDonald and Madison Barney, both undergraduates at BYU who were subject to Honor Code investigations after reporting theirsexual assaults, told Jezebel that their attacks were picked apart by university administrators who they say hunted for potential violations gleaned from the details of police and Title IX reports.
In addition, both MacDonald and Barney allege that they were never offered counseling or other services, and were shut out of their own Honor Code investigations as well. MacDonald also alleges that BYU Title IX Coordinator Sarah Westerberg “outright doubted” her sexual assault complaint and questioned whether or not Title IX complaintswere generally manufactured by women with “moral regrets.”
Westerberg did not return repeated requests for comment. Instead, in a statement to Jezebel, BYU spokesperson Carri Jenkins said that “victims of sexual assault will never be referred to the Honor Code Office for being a victim of sexual assault.” Jenkins continued:
A report of sexual assault would be referred to the BYU Title IX Office—not to the Honor Code Office. A Title IX investigation at BYU is separate from the Honor Code process. The purpose of the Title IX investigation is to investigate the sexual assault not Honor Code violations. Again, the victim of a sexual assault is not going to be referred to the Honor Code Office for being a victim of sexual assault.
The university refused to comment further, and their statement invokes a matter of semantics: A student may not, as Jenkins wrote, be referred to the Honor Code Office for being a victim of sexual assault. However, it appears that she may be referred to the Honor Code Office as a direct result of reporting that assault, which is a narrow distinction with dangerous implications.
According to MacDonald and Barney,BYU scrutinizes sexual assault reports for possible Honor Code violations, including drinking and premarital consensual contact. The university’s own sexual misconduct policies encourage victims to report, “in order to protect their own and others’ safety,” noting that victims “should make a report even if they have been simultaneously involved in other violations of university policy.”
Screenshot of Brigham Young University’s Sexual Misconduct Policy.
Though BYU claims that the Honor Code investigations are separate from Title IX reporting, Barney and MacDonald say that simply isn’t true: they allege that a Title IX investigation, in practice, turns into an Honor Code investigation.
“The Honor Code creates a culture of victim-blaming and victim-shaming,” Barney said in an interview with Jezebel. “Title IX will investigate you and if they find any grounds for Honor Code allegations, they will forward that to the Honor Code and they can suspend you or expel you.”
Federal Title IX enforcement does not, by the letter of the law, currently prohibit universities for investigating or punishing victims of sexual assault for violating other university policies. In 2013, University of North Carolina student Landen Gambill was brought before the school’s student-run Honor Court for speaking publicly about her rape and creating an “intimidating environment” for her alleged rapist. The incident compelled UNC to sever the connection between the conduct code and Title IX reporting, but religious universities, in particular, have struggled to suss out the interrelationship between the moral dictates of campus policy and the judicious treatment of victims of sexual assault.
A 2014 American Prospect report on Bob Jones University, a private evangelical institution in South Carolina, found a culture in which rape victims were routinely blamed for being victims; according to numerous current and former students, victims were often made to repent for “sin”—like smoking and premarital sex—and told they were responsible for the crimes perpetrated against them. One BJU student, who was raped and impregnated by her pastor, was expelled because she lied about going off campus, which is a violation of the school’s detailed student conduct code. In the Prospect report, Kathryn Joyce described BJU’s culture as one that “paints all sexuality—from rape to consensual sex—as equivalent misdeeds.”
MacDonald and Barney accuse BYU of doing something similar, of prioritizing the enforcement of the Honor Code over rape and sexual assault victims, and of treating Title IX and police reports as little more than evidence in future Honor Code investigations. “BYU likes to look at your rape and chop it up into little pieces and choose the parts that they can punish you for,” Barney said.
BYU’s process also seems to have a dampening effect on rape and sexual assault reporting. On the account of several students present, TheSalt Lake Tribune reported that Westerberg said, at a campus rape awareness event earlier this month, that she would “not apologize” for forwarding victim reports to the Honor Code; she simultaneously is said to have acknowledged that doing so might have a “chilling” effect on reporting.
While BYU’s involvement of the Honor Code might not be a clear violation of Title IX, some experts say that it violates the law’s spirit. Alexandra Brodsky, co-founder of Know Your IX, told Jezebel that Title IX obligates universities to “take affirmative action to reduce gender violence”; the federal law, she added, “is also sensitive to the environment of the school and not just the impact on the individual student.” Brodsky elaborated:
Schools have to make sure that there’s no hostile environment on campus. I think there’s a real argument to be made that having these Honor Code restrictions can be used in a retaliatory way.
[BYU’s procedures] can very reasonably be read as perpetuating a hostile environment because the school is constructing roadblocks to students reporting harassment and assault and abuse, therefore putting future students at risk.
Other Title IX experts agree with Brodsky’s assessment. The coordinator of the victim’s advocate office at a sizable private university told Jezebel that BYU’s approach is far from “best practices.”
“The conduct violations that BYU considers—modest dress, alcohol, previous consensual contact with the perpetrator—those are things that should explicitly not be considered when going through an investigation,” the victim’s advocate said. She added that these factors already lead to underreporting, and that a policy that is “victim-focused” would specifically try to allay those fears.
That rape and sexual assault are already underreported is a well-known fact, but on campuses, this seems to be compounded by social expectations and fear of retaliation. A 2007 study funded by the National Institute of Justice found that 42 percent of college women who were physically coerced did not report their attacks. In response to those statistics, Colby Bruno, Senior Legal Counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center, told Time that underreporting at universities was not surprising; victims are often wary of being exiled from social circles. “The victim loses friends or becomes a social pariah. If you report on a really small campus, it’s really difficult to re-integrate after you report,” Bruno said.
Reporting becomes even more complicated in a religious university setting, in which a sexual act will be judged according to religious considerations (marital status, heterosexuality, the use of alcohol) as well as the consideration of consent. Compound all these factors with BYU’s reporting protocol, in which “other violations of university policy” is invoked directly, as well as the plausible fear of an Honor Code investigation—and it’s unsurprising that the university’s own Title IX Coordinator would not only acknowledge a “chilling” environment, but furthermore, imply that this is simply the natural order or things.
Madeline MacDonald grew up dreaming of going to Brigham Young. A third-generation Cougar, she said that it was always assumed she’d go to BYU. “As a kid my mom woke me up every morning by singing the BYU fight song,” MacDonald, now a junior, said. “When they do the ‘Rah-rah-rah-rah-rah,’ part she would jump on my bed. That was my whole childhood.” But since her alleged sexual assault in December 2014, MacDonald’s perspective about BYU has changed.
MacDonald, she says, was sexually assaulted by a non-BYU student who attended another Utah university. After the attack, she immediately reported her assault to both the police and BYU’s Title IX office. It’s clear from MacDonald’s recounting of events that she was prepared for both investigations to go poorly. “This was right after the whole summer with the Rolling Stone article,” MacDonald said, referring to the magazine’s now-debunked account of rape culture at the University of Virginia.
After her assault, MacDonald said she thought, “I need to be the perfect victim so they can actually prosecute this and not blame me.” She said that the night of the assault, she bagged her clothes and put them in the refrigerator to preserve DNA. MacDonald’s interactions with the police went about as well as she expected; though she provided them with a detailed account of the crime, as well as contact information for the man who assaulted her, the police chose not to pursue a criminal case. MacDonald says that police told her there wasn’t enough information.
She was more surprised, however, by the treatment she received at her own university. “I thought it might be different,” MacDonald said, referring to the spate of recent reports outlining how universities have mishandled victims. “I thought, ‘Those weren’t religious schools, and my school is better than that.’”
But MacDonald’s faith in BYU’s system was quickly dashed. MacDonald said that the Title IX office was “very diminishing of my claim.” Westerberg, MacDonald alleges, “outright doubted me,” and told the computer science major that “in her opinion, almost all BYU rape and sexual assault reports are fake; that ‘they’re put out by girls who feel moral regret after having consensual sex and then decide that to escape that regret by calling it rape.’”
She continued, “I don’t believe that happens, but Westerberg viewed all reports as being false and incorrect. Very much like victims are just trying to ruin the lives of these good, upstanding, young returned missionaries.”
In a statement to Jezebel, BYU said that the office takes Title IX “reports extremely seriously, with our first priority being the welfare and safety of the student.” (Again, Westerberg did not comment on any of MacDonald’s specific claims after multiple requests.)
Yet MacDonald says that simply isn’t true. She says that the Title IX office treated her like a “potential liability and a potential lawsuit, not an actual person. [Westerberg] viewed her job to contain and silence me.” It was after her encounter with BYU’s Title IX office, MacDonald told Jezebel, that she learned she would be investigated by the Honor Code Office. “I was completely upset about that,” MacDonald said.
More troublingly, MacDonald said that the Honor Code Office refused to tell her what they were investigating her for: “There was nothing in my reported assault that was an Honor Code violation. There was no alcohol, no drugs, never anything previously consensual between myself [and my attacker].”
MacDonald said that she repeatedly asked to be in the meetings, but her requests were denied. “Honor Code did an interview with me, but they wouldn’t tell me what was going on,” she said. “They refused to let me be involved with my own investigation.” To this day, MacDonald doesn’t know why the Honor Code Office was investigating her or whether or not they had any allegations against her; the university refuses to release the records to her, though it’s agreed to allow her to read them under supervision, which she plans to do later this month.
“It’s changed how I feel about the institution. I’ve had great experiences with professors and in my department, I’m very involved,” MacDonald said. But the experience with both the Title IX office and the Honor Code Office “has really woken me up to the fact that BYU has a lot of systematic errors. There are a lot of issues that are a direct result of result of the overly religious culture.”
MacDonald plans to stay at BYU and eventually graduate, but she hopes that the university will revisit the relationship between the Title IX office and the Honor Code. “I’m not going to leave this school over a couple of lines in the Title IX policy,” she said, “but they magnify the issues with women here.”
Like MacDonald, 19-year-old Madison Barney grew up in a BYU family. Her family members are alums and, as a little girl, she dressed up as a BYU cheerleader for Halloween. Going to BYU, Barney says, “was definitely a dream for my family.” Now Barney, who is currently in the middle of an Honor Code Office investigation, is planning to transfer out of the university.
Barney says she was raped in her off-campus apartment in September 2015. She reported the incident to the Provo police. Shortly after, Barney’s alleged rapist, a member of the Mormon community, was arrested by the Provo police; he is currently out on bail and awaiting trial for the attack.
Since her alleged rapist was not a BYU student, Barney saw no purpose in reporting the attack to any university judiciary body. Two months after filing a police report, however, Barney says she received an email from the Honor Code Office instructing her to “set up a meeting with us.” She says that after receiving the email, she repeatedly called the office but, “they wouldn’t answer any of my questions, so I finally set up a meeting with them.” Barney met with a representative from the Title IX office and despite her objections, opened an investigation.
Barney was reluctant to detail the charges the Honor Code Office brought against her: “I can outline things in the Honor Code that are usually put against rape victims,” she said. “The Honor Code prohibits drinking alcohol, being in the bedroom of the opposite sex, being in the apartment of the opposite sex after a certain curfew, and of having any kind of consensual contact.” As Barney pointed out, “a lot of these things are circumstances of rape.”
Barney was confused how the university even knew about her rape. She hadn’t told any administrators, and was deeply resistant to the Title IX office’s involvement. According to Barney—in an account confirmed by the Salt Lake Tribune, via the Deputy Utah County Attorney’s office—the university found out about her rape after “my rapist took his copy of the police report to his friend, who then gave it to the Honor Code office because he wanted me to be punished for accusing me.”
In this story, the friend of Barney’s alleged rapist is Utah County sheriff’s deputy Edwin Randolph. Randolph, according to prosecutors, did give Barney’s 20-page police report to BYU’s Honor Code Office. On April 15, the Salt Lake Tribunereported that Randolph was charged with third-degree witness tampering for illegally sharing the police report, charges that were later dismissed without prejudice.
Randolph, a graduate and former employee of BYU, admitted to this in an interview with investigators, and explained why he gave the police report to the Honor Code Office. The Tribune reports:
In the recorded interview, Randolph said he didn’t believe the rape allegation and that the police report showed the woman’s behavior was “unacceptable” for a BYU student.
“I’m not here to judge her, but I think, she’s in school here and she’s screwing around,” Randolph said. “When I was [a BYU student], we had guys get in trouble for this stuff, so I think it’s a problem.”
In an interview with the Tribune, Deputy Utah County Attorney Craig Johnson said that he “implored” BYU to postpone their Honor Code investigation, saying that they “legally” should not be in possession of the police report.
Barney is currently barred from registering for classes until she cooperates with the Honor Code investigation. “Because I’m the primary witness in my ongoing [criminal] case I can’t talk to them about these allegations,” she told Jezebel, “because they’re all only things that are in my police report and my detective found relevant to my rape.”
The university declined to comment directly on Barney’s allegations. Instead, Jenkins forwarded Jezebel a press release from the Utah County Attorney’s Office. “BYU has not interfered with the prosecution of, nor has it acted unlawfully with respect to the pending sexual assault case,” the release says. The Tribunenotes that the release was sent by Utah County Attorney Jeffrey R. Buhman, Johnson’s elected boss, who, confusingly, told the newspaper, “I’m not saying he wasn’t accurate,” in reference to Johnson’s initial comments about BYU’s improper involvement. “I’m saying protecting victim’s rights is of paramount importance to our office.”
Though BYU may not be acting unlawfully, their pursuit of the Honor Code case, Barney says, has left her feeling re-victimized: “BYU is justifying what my rapist did; they’re emboldening him.” The university’s pursuit of an Honor Code case against her demonstrates to the community that “it’s acceptable to retaliate against rape victims.”
When asked about BYU’s insistence that victims of sexual assault are never referred to the Honor Code for being victims of sexual assault, Barney scoffed. BYU, she said, is trying to claim that potential Honor Code violations are separate from her rape. “They’re not,” she insisted. “All of their Honor Code allegations came directly from my police report.”
She reiterated that though the university might believe that they can view her rape in pieces, scrutinizing individual parts, that the story of the night can only be viewed as a whole—that the circumstances of her rape are deeply connected to the crime itself.
Barney, ultimately, is transferring out of BYU. “I can’t stand to stay at this school,” she said.
Barney confirmed to Jezebel that she filed a federal Title IX complaint against the university on Monday, April 18. After Barney filed her Title IX complaint, BYU President Kevin Worthen issued a statement indicating that the university will “study these issues.”
The university recognizes the inherent tension, in some circumstances, in these two important parts of BYU’s efforts to create and maintain an atmosphere consistent with the ideals and principles of the Church. In all Honor Code proceedings, the university strives for fairness, sensitivity and compassion, taking into account all mitigating facts and circumstances. At the same time, BYU has zero tolerance for students who commit sexual violence. The university’s overriding concern is always the safety and well-being of its students.
Both MacDonald and Barney hope that BYU will change its policy, despite the fact that neither of the women expects much. “There’s a lot of resistance to changing the Honor Code on campus,” MacDonald said. “Everyone assumes you’re saying, ‘I want BYU students to be promiscuous heathens.’ But I’m saying we shouldn’t punish victims. The fact that [this means] an Honor Code change makes it very controversial,” she added.
Barney said that, despite her experiences, “I have a little more hope than Madeline concerning the relationship between the Honor Code and Title IX.” BYU, she added, needs to realize that “they have to empathize with the victims.”
Last week, Barney launched a petition requesting Honor Code immunity for victims of rape and sexual assault. In the petition, which has nearly 80,000 signatures, Barney wrote, “BYU is not on my side.”
An Armenian woman with her dead daughter, circa 1915 - 1919
Today’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal contains the following ad:
The content of the ad itself is pretty bland (“Truth = Peace” and a peace sign could be swapped in for almost any cause), but its purpose is not: To deny that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were systematically rounded up and murdered by the Ottoman government in what is now Turkey, mostly in the year 1915. The modern Turkish government has famously scoffed at the truth of this historical event, despite a century of scholarship and eyewitness accounts. Measures in the United States to officially recognize the genocide (through a congressional resolution, for example)have gained wide support but ultimately failed, mainly because of Turkey’s role as a regional military ally.
The ad contains a URL for the genocide-denial group FactCheck Armenia, the unfounded arguments of which boil down to 1) It wasn’t actually that many people, and 2) The Armenians started it. That group is itself a part of Turkic Platform, a pro-Turkey group that attempts to distract from discussion of the genocide with events like Times Square dance routines. That the caption on that Getty photograph refers to the ethnic cleansing as “the 1915 incident” shows how much success the deniers have had in this country.
A request for comment to Ab Kaan, the Turkish proprietor of Turkic Platform, as to how much he paid for the ad and how he sources his funding, was not returned. Neither Kaan nor his advocacy groups are listed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act database, meant to catalog non-Americans who lobby a national cause inside the United States.
The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to Gawker’s request for comment.
Update: A Wall Street Journal spokesperson provided the following comment:
We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints. While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers.
Calling the denial of an act of genocide merely “provocative” seems like an understatement.
