More than half a century after he says police pressured him into confessing to a crime he did not commit, 81-year-old Paul Gatling has finally cleared his name. On Monday, the Brooklyn District Attorney fully vacated Gatling’s wrongful 1964 conviction for murder, a crime for which he served 10 years in prison, The New York Times reports.
“Paul Gatling repeatedly proclaimed his innocence even as he faced the death penalty back in the 60s,” said the Brooklyn DA in a statement. “He was pressured to plead guilty and, sadly, did not receive a fair trial.”
In 1964, Gatling plead guilty to killing artist Lawrence Rothbort, despite serious issues with the case against him. From the Associated Press:
Rothbort’s wife, nine-months pregnant at the time of the trial, said Gatling was the man who had killed her husband, despite not being able to identify him in a line up previously. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. Defense attorneys were never given some police reports, including a description of the suspect as several years younger than Gatling.
As the trial was underway, Gatling’s attorney and family pressed him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, afraid that he would otherwise face the death penalty if convicted. He agreed, and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison in October 1964. His sentence was commuted by then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller at the behest of the Legal Aid Society and he was released in January 1974.
“The cops told me they would make sure I was convicted and the lawyers said they were going to execute me,” Gatling told NBC News this week. “I was a young black man. With the white, pregnant wife in front of an all-white jury pointing me out, it was over.”
Only regaining his right to vote on Monday, Gatling now says he just wants to cast one more ballot before he dies.
“That’s a big deal for me,” Gatling told the news network. “I couldn’t vote for the first black president.”
Protesters gathered outside the U.N. headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon Sunday to demonstrate against President Bashar Assad. Credit: AP
According to Agence France-Presse, Syrian state media reported Tuesday that rebel forces had launched a rocket attack on a hospital in a government-held neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, leaving at least three dead and 17 others wounded.
State news agency SANA reported that rockets hit Al-Dabbeet hospital in the Muhafaza district as part of a more widespread assault by rebel groups on areas controlled by President Bashar Assad’s regime.
In a statement, the Associated Press reports, the Syrian army said the attack had been launched by groups including the Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch), Ahrar al-Sham, and the Army of Islam. “Armed forces are currently working on repelling the attack and appropriately returning fire,” the statement said.
More than 250 civilians have been killed in Aleppo since April 22, AFP reports. Just last week, 27 people were killed in an airstrike on a field hospital, supported by Médecins Sans Frontières, in a rebel-held neighborhood.
A U.S. military service member has been killed in combat in northern Iraq, the Associated Press reports. The American, serving as an advisor to Kurdish Peshmerga troops, was killed by “direct fire” from Islamic State forces that had breached the Peshmerga’s forward line.
Responding to Rafael Cruz’s allegations that God wants his son, Ted, to be president—and that if anyone else were to be president, it could result in “the destruction of America”—Donald Trump implied in an interview with Fox News that the elder Cruz had something to do with killing John F. Kennedy.
“This is another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage,” Cruz communications director Alice Stewart told the McClatchy news service. “The story is false; that is not Rafael in the picture.”
The Enquirer doesn’t present any actual evidence for its claim, but quotes a number of experts and analysts. “The feature that is most interesting and similar is his insincere smile,” Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness at UCLA, said.
The tabloid has previously endorsed Trump, who on Tuesday seemed incensed that Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor, would use his pulpit to rally support for anyone but him. “You look at so many of the ministers that are backing me, and they’re backing me more so than they’re backing Cruz, and I’m winning the evangelical vote,” Trump told Fox. “It’s disgraceful that his father can go out and do that. And just—and so many people are angry about it. And the evangelicals are angry about it, the way he does that.”
My son Ted and his family spent six months in prayer seeking God’s will for this decision. But the day the final green light came on, the whole family was together. It was a Sunday. We were all at his church, First Baptist Church in Houston, including his senior staff. After the church service, we all gathered at the pastor’s office. We were on our knees for two hours seeking God’s will. At the end of that time, a word came through his wife, Heidi. And the word came, just saying, “Seek God’s face, not God’s hand.” And I’ll tell you, it was as if there was a cloud of the holy spirit filling that place. Some of us were weeping, and Ted just looked up and said, “Lord, here am I, use me. I surrender to you, whatever you want.” And he felt that was a green light to move forward.
Speaking to a group of pastors in Indiana last week, Rafael Cruz also claimed that God wanted everyone to vote for his son. “I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America,” he said.
“And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.”
Empty frames where stolen paintings once hung at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Image: Getty
In 1990, thieves stole paintings worth $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The heist remains unsolved, but officials have repeatedly questioned and searched the Connecticut home of “Bobby the Cook” Gentile, a reputed mobster who is currently serving time on unrelated charges in federal prison. This week, the feds were back at Bobby’s house again.
The Gardner heist is one of the great American mysteries of the contemporary era. In 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers entered the museum early one morning, telling the guard on duty they were responding to a call. They then handcuffed that guard and one other in the museum’s basement and left with 13 works, including three Rembrandts, a Manet, and five works by Degas.
The FBI named Gentile, who is serving a 2.5-year sentence for guns and weapons charges, as a person of interest in the case in 2014. He has denied knowledge of the paintings, and his lawyer claims prosecutors are using the crimes for which he was convicted to pressure him into producing the stolen art.
ABC News reports that FBI agents executed a search on Gentile’s home yesterday, the third time they have done so. A bureau spokesman confirmed the raid to ABC, but did not say whether it was related to the Gardner heist. A. Ryan McGuigan, Gentile’s lawyer, told the Boston Globe that agents were digging within 10 feet of the Gentile’s ranch house and searching near the chimney.
McGuigan told ABC that his client was unconcerned with the raid. “He laughed and he couldn’t believe...that they were at his house again,” he said. “And he said, this is a quote, ‘They ain’t gonna find nuttin.’”
Ted Cruz is not having a great time campaigning in Indiana, one of the few states standing between Trump and the nomination, where protesters have been mercilessly mocking him with insults and fake-out handshakes.
And yet, Cruz presses on. Yesterday, his attempts at debating one of his detractors ended in a flurry of insults. “America is a better place,” Cruz began to say before the protester finished the sentence for him: “Without you.”
But it got worse from there: At a stop in Bloomington, Cruz reached for what seemed like a friendly hand extended in support. But he was too slow.
The fake out came from an Indiana student named Kevin Nichols, who also called the senator a “fish monster.” It’s a burn so brutal it almost makes Cruz seem sympathetic—proof that in this country, truly anything is possible.
During a round table in West Virginia, a recently unemployed coal worker confronted Hillary Clinton over her remark at a CNN town hall in March that “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” In response, Clinton admitted her comment was a “misstatement.”
“How you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?” the man, Bo Copley, asked during the round table Monday.
“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” the former secretary of state said in reply. “It was a misstatement because what I was saying is the way things are going now, they will continue to lose jobs. It didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it.”
“Now I can’t take it back, and I certainly can’t get people who, for political reasons or personal reasons, very painful reasons, are upset with me,” she continued. “What I want you to know is I’m going to do everything I can to help, no matter what happens politically.”
“I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason, or the excuse, to be so upset with me, because that is not what I intended at all,” Clinton said.
Two weekends ago, after Beyoncé released a mythologically forceful visual album that attached the most significant art of her career to the narrative of her husband Jay Z cheating on her with a woman she called “Becky with the good hair,” the fashion designer Rachel Roy—presumably operating of her own volition—inserted herself in that narrative by posting an Instagram with a caption that read, in part, “Good hair don’t care.” When the typically extra Beyhive spammed her with comments and bright yellow emojis, Roy deleted the post. Afterward, she called the response to her caption “bullying.”
“Bullying” describes a situation in which powerful people intimidate a less powerful person about something that the person in question cannot control. Properly used, the word does not apply to Rachel Roy’s situation at all. She might have expected the response her caption elicited, and not just the part where public ire fell harder on her, the presumed other woman who talked about it, than on Jay, the man who cheated on his wife and did not. Specifically, she’d already experienced the scrutiny of these exact circumstances before: Roy had been made out as the woman for whom the dog would step out on Beyoncé, in “Elevatorgate,” in 2014.
This of course was the incident when Solange roundhouse-kicked Jay Z on camera in an elevator after the Met Ball, allegedly because Roy—a former Rocawear designer and the ex-wife of Dame Dash, Jay’s former best friend—was “hovering” too near Jay Z at the afterparty. In the story reported to the press, Solange confronted Roy first; Roy gave it back to Solange, then left to go to the club Up & Down; Jay Z said he would follow, though Beyoncé was going home. Then the grainy footage, the purse swinging, the impervious queen, the sister’s wild-eyed video-game kick.
Afterwards, Roy’s name was all over the place; the story stayed in the news for months. Having even vague knowledge of the incident—let alone being at the center of it—meant that you could not possibly thereafter underestimate how intensely the public responds to any glimpse of irregularity in the life of a pop star like Beyoncé, whose image is fascistically controlled. Roy may not have thought through what she was doing (or the racial implications of asserting “good hair” in this context). But I wouldn’t demean her by suggesting she’d have been surprised by what came next, which was the Beyhive—a slightly more benign version of any name-brand online mob—swarming her comments, editing her Wikipedia, calling her messy and attention-hungry (the lie is nowhere)—but mostly, as trolls do, performing for and entertaining themselves.
The day after she put up the Instagram, Roy tweeted, “I respect love, marriages, families and strength. What shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone, no matter what, is bullying, of any kind.” Her use of the word “bullying” was reinforced and repeated by most outlets that wrote about the developing gossip, including Jezebel, and the term was used interchangeably—as it is very often these days—with “harassment” as well as “abuse.” Last Tuesday, Peoplepublished a statement from Roy saying, again, that the “real issue” was cyberbullying:
Online haters have targeted me and my daughters in a hurtful and scary manner, including physical threats. As a mother – and I know many mothers would agree – I feel that bullying in any form is harmful and unacceptable. I would hope that the media sees the real issue here – the issue of cyber bullying – and how it should not be tolerated by anyone.
But I know from online haters, and it seems to me that the “real issue” is never “cyberbullying” as much as it is the specific (and more interesting) circumstances of every case at hand. For example, when my colleague Julianne had a horde of Gamergaters in her mentions two weeks ago because the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian had linked to her article about Prince, the issue was not “cyberbullying” but reactionary gender politics, the video game industry, the ongoing campaign against Sarkeesian, and the fragile psyches of men. When Jewish journalist Julia Ioffe profiled Melania Trump for GQ last week and subsequently found herself with Trump trolls tweeting Holocaust jokes and imagery at her—something that my colleague Anna has been experiencing for months—the issue wasn’t cyberbullying as much as it was sexism and anti-Semitism and the way Trump has encouraged bald discrimination at every turn.
If there’s ever a general issue at play in these instances, it’s deeper than cyberbullying, and it’s more than either half of that word. Rachel Roy getting called a “dusty side hoe” after she tried to come for Beyoncé is no more about online platforms than a fight in a schoolyard is about that school; it’s not ultimately about “bullying,” either, particularly not in this case, as you cannot be bullied by someone less powerful than you. But Rachel Roy did something canny, something a lot of people are learning to do these days: she identified her opposition incorrectly, by a word that everyone feels automatically obligated to oppose. If you are against bullying, which, of course you are—then you must be for Rachel Roy.
Luckily, this particular misuse of the word is blatant enough that the underlying truth becomes clearer: that the real issue is much more complicated than bullying—that, as always, the problem is people, a group that includes you and me and all our bad behavior. The problem is the way we learn to assert our interests over one another, the way we cheat on our partners, or gossip about that cheating, or gang up on someone for the fun of it, or make people believe that everything personal needs to be worked out in public when probably not much needs to be that way at all.
In March of this year, a blogger named Ella Dawson who writes most frequently about having herpes and working to de-stigmatize it (her three-sentence professional bio on her website reads, in part, “She got genital herpes and just kind of ran with it, professionally speaking”) drew widespread media attention after a journalist trying out the platform Genius annotated one of her blog posts.
In a follow-up post called “How News Genius Silences Writers,” Dawson acknowledged that the annotation itself did not contain abusive content. (Though, as Dawson is not a major public figure, Sara Morrison’s decision to annotate her personal writing about herpes did qualify as punching down.) She then called the platform “worse than Twitter,” because it lacked a block button, and spoke up against its “high potential for abuse.”
Since then, Genius has added a “report abuse” button to all of its annotations, which is smart and necessary; otherwise, the annotation technology remains the same. It’s still relatively new. The company’s core technology, originally intended for crowdsourcing annotations to rap lyrics, now allows any Genius user to put a prefix before an existing page that will then make that website annotatable; the result is a portable, standardized, line-by-line comments section on most any website, which some have compared to graffiti, others to footnoting.
Comments sections (as Rachel Roy or any individual who has ever been on the internet can tell you) are unlawful. They are open for people to respond essentially however they want to, and people (as Rachel Roy or any individual who has ever been on the internet can tell you) tend to be bad. For a prolonged and then publicized period, Jezebel writers were once inundated by rape gifs at their digital workplace; we are all still well-acquainted with the major bad-comment genres, the ones that are virulently racist or aggressively sexist, that comment on our faces, our ethnicities, our subhuman intelligence levels, our personal lives as cobbled together by our writing, our likelihood to be assaulted, etc.
However, those conditions aren’t comments-section-specific. They hold (if to a blessedly lesser degree) in my inbox, and on social media, too. In other words, the Genius tool is not a revolutionary intrusion. It is notable mainly because it is visually startling upon first encounter, laying commentary directly onto your piece. It is, also, crucially, opt-in. You have to click a Genius-prefixed link to see an annotation, the same way that I would have to make myself a Google alert to see what some conservative blogger thinks of my writing, or read Get Off My Internets to see what some barnacle thinks about my personality, or read Ripfork, an annotation site of sorts, to see what some bitter man thinks when I write a Pitchfork review.
Essentially, what Dawson wrote about the platform’s abuse potential was equally applicable to the Internet itself:
When you create a tool that pastes commentary directly on top of my work without letting me opt-in and without providing a way for people to turn off the annotation on their pages, you are being irresponsible. You are ignoring the potential your tool has to be abused, and you are not anticipating the real harm your tool can do. News Genius adds one more way for people on the Internet to be made unsafe. The potential it has to intimidate and silence marginalized voices needs to be recognized.
She continued: “A tool that allows my abusive ex-boyfriend to interact with me and my content is a tool that should not exist.”
That is true, in a sort of abstractly ideal-moral sense. But in practice, it’s fatalistic and mostly impossible. (And here’s what always bothers me about extreme attention to the granular symptom: it often lets the cause, which here is the ex-boyfriend and the system that produced him, off the sharpest point of the hook.) By that definition, if we want to ban any tool that allows my abusive ex-boyfriend to interact with me and my content, we would also ban email, social media, working in an outward-facing industry, and being physically present in public spaces in the world.
What we’re dealing with, in this new rhetoric about bullying and abuse, is a good, generous and necessary moral impulse: the impulse to account for power, and to understand and compensate for the fact that life in America has been so terrible, for so many people, for so long. But when a word enters the public conversation, its meaning gets inevitably diluted. “Bullying” and “abuse” still denote things of life-and-death importance, but that fact is obscured by our growing practice of looking at points on the same spectrum and then collapsing that spectrum—of effectively using these words to mean whatever we want.
Last week, Heather Havrilesky, at the New York Times Magazine, wrote about how objectively powerful people have now begun to deploy the term “bully.” For one example, last month, lawmakers in discrimination-forward North Carolina said last month that Bruce Springsteen’s boycott was a bullying tactic, and:
A few days later, a (white) North Charleston, S.C., police chief refused to attend a community meeting on the one-year anniversary of the death of Walter Scott because of what he called the “bullying tactics” of its (black) members at previous meetings. Last September, Kylie Jenner, a reality star worth millions, claimed that she was being cyberbullied by commenters on social media. In 2009, the blogger Heather Armstrong tweeted that no one should buy a Maytag washer because of what she called the company’s inadequate response to her broken appliance, and onlookers on Twitter accused her of bullying Whirlpool, the company’s $19 billion parent corporation.
So, people think you can bully a corporation. And in fact, the only example I can think of—of a corporation being anything close to bullied—deployed the fake weight of the word “bullying” itself.
The wild dilution of the idea of bullying is an example of what Australian psychology professor named Nick Haslam calls “concept creep.” In April, Conor Friedersdorf wrote about concept creep at TheAtlantic, going into detail about the ways that social progress has made us, for both good and ill, increasingly sensitized to the ways bad things are done to people. He quotes Haslam: concept creep is a phenomenon that exists in the interest of equality, “align[ing ]with a liberal social agenda by defining new kinds of experience as harming and new classes of people as harmed.”
And so “bullying” gets expanded as a concept, and we get the overdue and very correct idea that (for example) when a high school starts widely sharing nude photos taken of a girl while she was unconscious, it is bullying, properly, rather than just the way things are. This is “an entirely beneficial sign of moral progress,” writes Haslam. “It defines previously tolerated forms of abusive, domineering, and discriminatory behavior as problematic, and extends professional care to people who experience adversity.”
But, then, there’s a flip side: Concept creep, in “applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them,” may lead to a “flood of unjustified accusations” (one example here may be hot teenage millionaire Kylie Jenner earnestly saying she’s been a victim of bullying all her life) or “excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes” (another, milder example being, say, a blogger writing 1,600 words about how Genius silences bloggers, or a Congresswoman requesting action against abuse that was already prohibited and had not yet even occurred).
“Concept creep,” Haslam wrote, “can produce a kind of semantic dilution.”
If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.
This is one of the most dangerous political powers we hold in language—that of misusing a word that’s meant to identify a vitally important phenomenon, and obscuring the true nature of that phenomenon as a result. If we believe that violence is important—if we believe that bullying, harassment, and abuse refer to harmful things that are important to identify clearly—it is within our best interest to watch these definitions, to be careful not to think of them as words that, because of our concern for other people and their unknowable experiences, simply cannot be misused.
And yes, we’re talking about fine distinctions. Harm is personal, and so it’s subjective; it’s in the eye, the body, the heart and the mind of the harmed. But this doesn’t mean that the best option is to regress to the point of maximum fear and caution, as Dawson seemed to say to Slate. “The lines between annotating and questioning, questioning and invalidating, invalidating and silencing are unclear in the best of circumstances,” she told them. Even taking that as true—which I don’t personally—wouldn’t the goal be to make these lines clearer? Don’t the terms of every case, of every power relationship, clarify the difference between criticism and silencing? Isn’t protection an abstract idea unless harm is understood concretely?
It is more interesting and more helpful, I think, to consider any case specifically, than to speak in broad categories: to look at what’s actually happening, as the Guardian is doing, rather than what hypothetically might. On her blog, Ella Dawson’s comment moderation policy reads: “Comments that are disrespectful, hostile, or have the potential to harm readers will not be posted. Ask yourself this: would my comment be dangerous to a newly diagnosed, potentially suicidal teenager? Then it won’t appear here.”
This is the ideal standard for some people. (My ideal comment moderation policy/mode of online discourse would be to say anything you want to me as long as you’d have the guts to say it to my face.) But to me, when we’re talking about danger, there’s too much “is” for a “would” to be so prominent. Remove all the hypothetical harm and there’s still plenty to be dealt with, and it probably should be dealt with first.
In a new piece at Harper’s, Rebecca Solnit writes about an attitude she calls “naive cynicism,” a style of engagement that “bleeds the sense of possibility and maybe the sense of responsibility out of people,” that relies on the “heavy artillery of grim confidence.” She’s not writing about speech in that essay—she’s writing about the type of liberal ideology that dismisses Occupy for being imperfect, for example—but see if the motion is recognizable here:
[Naïve cynicism] is a relentless pursuit of certainty and clarity in a world that generally offers neither, a desire to shove nuances and complexities into clear-cut binaries. Naïve cynicism concerns me because it flattens out the past and the future, and because it reduces the motivation to participate in public life, public discourse, and even intelligent conversation that distinguishes shades of gray, ambiguities and ambivalences, uncertainties, unknowns, and opportunities. Instead, we conduct our conversations like wars, and the heavy artillery of grim confidence is the weapon many reach for.
[...] Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.
In other words, there’s a type of conviction that makes a person avoidant—and there’s nothing we love to feel convicted about more than the idea that everything we’ve done is right. It is tempting to oversimplify reality in the interest of a stance against which everything else will necessarily fall short, leaving us victorious. And there, suddenly, is the temptation to think that if people criticize us sharply, they are abusing us; that if they call us names, we are being bullied, no matter the material circumstances, no matter what.
I’m not saying we have an obligation to take the shit, either. Just that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about why. When I block someone on Twitter, I’m reacting to a large, flawed system that made anonymous men feel like I’d care what they think of me. What I’m doing, though, is not laudable in itself. We cannot be avoidant on first principle; we are not, on principle, above the effort, the knowledge, the fight.
And anyway, back to the fun of comment moderation: if we rule out what has potential to be dangerous, we rule out everything. It’s like we’ve wandered into a forest and deduced that some growth within it is poisonous. If we were practical, if we really did care about community, we’d retrace our steps, look at patterns, concern ourselves with identification and prevention, burning and regrowth. If we were impractical, or primarily concerned with ourselves, however—we’d call up People and say “the real issue is poison,” or else we’d sit in the forest feeling put-upon and then burn down all the trees.
At this moment there are two contradictory, devilish trends in play. First, there’s the aforementioned expanding definition of words like violence and bullying, which has done a lot of good on the one hand and on the other made a victim out of the very important concept of victimhood. Imagine a circle of people who understand that something quite bad has been done to them; imagine the boundaries of that circle going out to contain sexual assault victims, and overweight teenagers who get told every day that they’re garbage, and people in minority groups who can’t get a good mortgage—good, we’re on track—and then, horribly, to contain Kylie Jenner, the lawmakers who fear trans people in bathrooms, the publicly charged rapists that email Jezebel asking that we remove their names from our blog posts, and Donald Trump.
Second, and just as troubling, is the contracting definition of what it means to be a shithead. This is enabled by the growing acceptance that success in a creative field is inextricable from a flood of commentary that you didn’t ask for, as well as by the new types of micro-focused mob behavior that is possible online. If you believe very strongly in what you are doing—stanning for Beyoncé, “setting the record straight” on some candidate, sending death threats, telling some woman writer exactly how stupid feminism really is—then you will find out there a community to support you, to echo you, to reinforce you, to tell you to find someone on their own territory and stick a megaphone up your asshole and fart in their ear. Many people who would never, ever do this in the real world—who would never have the indecent courage to approach someone in their physical space and verbally threaten them—have been encouraged to engage in some version of this on the internet. And so the goalposts of egregiousness get moved, and moved again.
And maybe it’s not right, it’s not good for us, that we just mute them or block them and we don’t call it bullying, because we know bullying is what powerful people do to less powerful people in order to get those people to do what they want, and we know we are more powerful than these anonymous commenters, and we know we are never going to do what they want. We don’t call it abuse, either, because we’re numb, mostly, and we’re so accustomed to cruelty that we barely register it anymore. And it’s not fair and not good for us, but we know that if we want to do this job well, if we want to keep writing about real bullying, which is not what happened to Rachel Roy, and real abuse, which is not a hypothetical annotation of a personal blog post, we have to decide to meet the world where it receives us. We have to save these words by using them carefully, by remembering what they really mean.
Yesterday, Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi addressed rumors that her husband is secretly the Zodiac Killer by explicitly not denying the rumors. Today, Ted Cruz took that tactic one step forward, confirming at a press conference that his own father, Rafael Cruz, assassinated JFK.
Donald Trump raised the possibility that the elder Cruz was involved in the 1963 assassination during an interview this morning on Fox News. The theory, initially put forth by the National Enquirer, centers around a photograph which purports to show Cruz, a Cuban exile, handing out pro-Castro pamphlets in New Orleans alongside alleged Kennedy killer Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the shooting. The man in the photo was never officially identified by the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination.
“The whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said this morning. “What is this? Right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”
“I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
It’s a mystery for the ages, because as former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley points out, there’s no real way to prove the man wasn’t Rafael Cruz.
But instead of ignoring the allegations like a normal person, or denying them like an idiot, Ted Cruz instead chose a third path: Admission. Indiana votes tonight; it’s not looking good for Ted Cruz.
The occasion of Prince’s death immediately sparked two parallel discussions. The primary conversation was of course about the life and career of Prince. The second was about how much the public can—and should—trust TMZ, the outlet who, as they often do, first reported this shocking death of a beloved celebrity.
That second discussion took on a life of its own within the self-policing media. “America, It Is Time to Trust TMZ” declared Slate. On his scintillating Sunday morning media watchdog show, CNN’s Brian Stelter debated the topic with Janice Min, who as co-president of the company that owns The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, is one of TMZ’s main competitors in the field of celebrity gossip and breaking news.
Stelter and Min more or less agreed that the media needs to trust TMZ even if it doesn’t want to because the click economy incentivizes reporting celebrity deaths as quickly as possible. In the most diplomatic (and self-serving) manner she could possibly put it, Min essentially said she wants her publications to gulp from the traffic hose switched on by a celebrity death, so they have little choice but to follow TMZ’s lead. Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley makes the more forceful argument that the media should trust TMZ because TMZ is (almost)always right:
Unfortunately—as with a lot of other dark stories it’s been the first to cover, sometimes because it paid for information—TMZ was right on this one. Most famously, the site reported Michael Jackson’s death before anyone else; it also broke news about Heath Ledger’s death, Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna, Ray Rice’s assault on his now-wife, the tape of Donald Sterling making racist remarks, and several more big stories.
But Mathis-Lilley adds a parenthetical that hangs over any defense of TMZ’s reporting chops:
(As this tweet notes, though, the site did report in 2013 that “it doesn’t look good” for Lil Wayne, who TMZ asserted was in critical condition in an induced coma. Wayne, however, after associates said left the hospital a few days later after associates said TMZ’s account of his condition had been exaggerated, and he’s still alive.)
Back in March 2013, Lil Wayne was hospitalized in Los Angeles after suffering several seizures in his home. On March 15, TMZ reported an alarming scene:
We’re told Wayne is currently “unstable,” and has been placed in an induced coma. He is breathing through tubes.
We’re told several people are at Wayne’s bedside crying, and a number of rap artists and family members are on the way. Sources say the scene is violent as Wayne shakes uncontrollably.
As we all know, Lil Wayne is not dead. Three years later, he seems as healthy as ever. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel a few months after the hospitalization, Wayne described the situation as “serious” but also made it seem like a fairly routine occurrence in his life: “It’s just a private matter that I’ve been dealing with my whole life. We’re so used to it happening, so my doctors prepped all my homies.”
The incident is a blip in Wayne’s career. But for TMZ, it looms as a screw-up easily remembered by people who feel like the site’s gutter-scraping approach to gossip reporting makes them unreliable on subjects of hard news. So what happened? There are only two possibilities:
TMZ was wrong
Every publication gets stories wrong. Even big ones. The New York Times reported that there were WMDs in Iraq. It happens. Maybe TMZ’s sources had bad info, or maybe someone was out to embarrass them and purposefully fed them bullshit.
TMZ was right
In the years after Lil Wayne’s hospitalization, the narrative stemming from TMZ’s reporting on the saga has metastasized. Here is a short sampling of Twitter users immediately questioning TMZ’s report of Prince’s death before it was confirmed by other sources:
But TMZ never actually reported that Lil Wayne had died. Though it appears to have been deleted after the fact, the gravest news TMZ relayed was that Wayne was being read his last rites, a crucial bit of info that is still preserved in the aggregations that followed.
In reality, only a select few people on Earth definitively know if Lil Wayne did or did not have his last rites read to him. TMZ, as an organization and as a collection of individuals, sits outside that group, which means their reporting was inherently going to be secondhand. But given the evidence we have—basically, TMZ’s stories and Lil Wayne’s continued existence—it’s impossible to say beyond a reasonable doubt that TMZ’s reporting was inaccurate.
In any event, neither Lil Wayne nor TMZseem ready to relive the incident. Representatives for Lil Wayne did not return a request for comment for this story, and neither did Harvey Levin. But a source who worked at TMZ around the time of the incident told me that TMZ remained confident in its reporting even after Wayne’s recovery and believed that Wayne’s camp went out of its way to embarrass the site.
“I think they were pissed off about it because he manipulated the situation,” the source said of TMZ. “Lil Wayne was gone. They thought he was gone.”
None of this proves that TMZ was right, but, contrary to the accepted narrative, we also don’t know that they were wrong. (One thing TMZ has admitted to screwing up was this JFK hoax.) Eventually—perhaps if J. Randy Taraborrelli ever decides to write about him—we may learn exactly what happened in Lil Wayne Cedars-Sinai hospital room. But for now, Wayne’s entanglement with the tentacles of TMZ proves something we already know to be true, which is that TMZ will gladly report stories that give other publications pause. There may be handwringing over TMZ’s tactics and trustworthiness, but come the next big celebrity death, their competitors will be right behind them nonetheless.
A trans woman named Pearl Love says she was assaulted and threatened last Thursday on the 4 train by a woman who also shouted slurs in reference to Love’s gender identity and race. Love captured part of the incident and uploaded it to her Facebook and YouTube accounts “so now you can understand what’s happening in my everyday life,” as Love writes in her Facebook post on the matter. “That happens all the time. But it’s my first time recording it,” she adds.
Love says this happened between 4:30 and 4:45 on Thursday, as she rode into Manhattan from the Bronx. Her breakdown reads:
When I change 6 train to 4 express train in 125 st station an unknown woman sitting across me starter to verbally abuse me. Make lot of shit comments about how much she hate Trans people and want me to suck her dick. She also made racist comments. I ignored her and kept reading my book. When the train got to 86 st she start getting so loud and crazy yelling at me so I started to record her on my phone can- she start getting even louder and start assault me and hit me. As you can see it’s definitely a hate crime. She attacked me inside the train . When I retreated she threw all my stuff on the floor and chased me around the train and say she is going to find a stick to hit me. It was a crowded train and everyone heard it but no one helped me. Guys acting like nothing happened. For 5 min. Then when the train stop on 42 st. She got out of train but keep yelling at me, I recorded 4 videos around 3.5 min.
The video opens with Love’s attacker pointing out her “woman’s bag” that she’s carrying while “living in a man’s penis...and body with women’s makeup on.” When the woman notices she’s being recorded, she asks Love, who’s Asian, “What you gonna do? Send it to China? What the fuck they gon’ do?” The woman also refers to Love as a “transvestite” and a “homo, fuckin’ gay motherfucker in some fuckin’ women’s products and whatnot.”
“Do you do this on the weekends or is this an everyday event for you?” the woman asks Love. “Like, you sit up and get on the train everyday, like, ‘What do people think about me?’ one day, and then you cut all your shit off, put your extensions back in and go back to work, like...who are you really under all that makeup? Where’d you come from? Are you the emperor of China? Or like how are we supposed to act with you? What should we do about you? ‘Cause this shit right here ain’t appropriate for my child. I’m sorry, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll fight you right now, I don’t even feel comfortable with you right now.”
It’s as though this woman wants to make it extremely explicit that she’s committing a hate crime before approaching Love and hitting her twice, as she does at the end of the clip.
Assaults like the one captured in the video carry stiffer penalties when they’re identifiable as bias crimes, as the woman’s rant makes clear that this was. What a moron! A hate crime, as defined by the Department of Justice, is “the violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious, sexual orientation, or disability.”
I reached out to Love to ask her about this incident and whether she reported it to the police. I will update this post if and when I hear back. The NYPD says that no formal complaints are on file and the video has been forwarded to the Transit Bureau.
Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.”
Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership.
But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.
Launched in January 2014, Facebook’s trending news section occupies some of the most precious real estate in all of the internet, filling the top-right hand corner of the site with a list of topics people are talking about and links out to different news articles about them. The dozen or so journalists paid to run that section are contractors who work out of the basement of the company’s New York office.
“We were housed in a conference room for two-and-a-half months,” said one former curator (all former curators insisted on anonymity out of concerns over violating their non-disclosure agreements with Facebook). “It was clear that Zuckerberg could squash the project at any moment.”
“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”
This section, no doubt, drives a substantial number of monthly views to news outlets. Facebook wouldn’t specify, but anecdotal evidence suggests that being featured in the trending widget boosts clicks to a story by many thousands. The trending news section is responsible for dictating many of the stories the average person reads when they’re using Facebook. But nobody really knows much about how it works—and the company isn’t telling.
The trending news section is run by people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable, and Sky Sports.
According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”
News curators aren’t Facebook employees—they’re contractors. One former team member said they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off after 6 months and transit reimbursement, but were otherwise excluded from the culture and perks of working at Facebook. “A company happy hour would happen at 8 p.m., and we’d be working,” said another former curator. “We were apart from a lot of the things happening. But we were employed under very different circumstances.”
When the curators, hired by companies like BCForward and Pro Unlimited (which are then subcontracted through Accenture to provide workers for Facebook), arrive at work each day, they read through a list of trending topics ranked by Facebook’s algorithm from most popular (or most engaged) to least. The curators then determine the news story the terms are related to.
The news curation team writes headlines for each of the topics, along with a three-sentence summary of the news story it’s pegged to, and choose an image or Facebook video to attach to the topic. The news curator also chooses the “most substantive post” to summarize the topic, usually from a news website. The former contractors Gizmodo interviewed said they were asked to write neutral headlines, and encouraged to promote a video only if it had been uploaded to Facebook. They were also told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets. They were also discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context.
News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didn’t have at least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol was murky—meaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a particularly good reason for doing so. (Those we interviewed said they didn’t see any signs that blacklisting was being abused or used inappropriately.)
In early 2015, when Facebook’s trending news project was still in its infancy, there weren’t many rules about how curators did the rest of their job. “It was all pretty easy breezy,” said one. “We were trained on the basics of everything, then we were thrown into the deep end” with some supervision.
Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a digital media content farm. Managers gave curators aggressive quotas for how many summaries and headlines to write, and timed how long it took curators to write a post. The general standard was 20 posts a day. “We shared documents to see how fast everyone was working,” said one former curator. “They tried to foster inter-office competition to see how many topics we could complete every day.”
Burnout was rampant. “Most of the original team isn’t there anymore,” said another former news curator. “It was a stop-gap for them. Most of the people were straight out of [journalism school]. At least one of them was fired. Most of them quit or were hired by other news outlets.”
According to one contractor, a colleague sent around a letter asking if people were unhappy with their working conditions. Managers told contractors not to mention that they worked at Facebook on their resumes or in any public profiles. “I got the sense that they wanted to keep the magic about how trending topics work a secret,” said another former news curator. “We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.” Despite management’s best efforts, many of the contractors are publicly listed in a simple LinkedIn search.
One reason Facebook might want to keep the trending news operation faceless is that it wants to foster the illusion of a bias-free news ranking process—a network that sorts and selects news stories like an entirely apolitical machine. After all, the company’s entire media division, which is run by Facebook’s managing editor Benjamin Wagner, depends on people’s trust in the platform as a conduit for information. If an editorial team is deliberating over trending topics—just like a newspaper staff would talk about front-page news—Facebook risks losing its image as a non-partisan player in the media industry, a neutral pipeline for distributing content, rather than a selective and inherently flawed curator.
That said, many former employees suspect that Facebook’s eventual goal is to replace its human curators with a robotic one. The former curators Gizmodo interviewed started to feel like they were training a machine, one that would eventually take their jobs. Managers began referring to a “more streamlined process” in meetings. As one former contractor put it: “We felt like we were part of an experiment that, as the algorithm got better, there was a sense that at some point the humans would be replaced.”
When asked about the trending news team and its future, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. As with all contractors, the trending review team contractors are fairly compensated and receive appropriate benefits.”
According to those we interviewed, their peers still at Facebook believe their jobs are being phased out. From a group of about 20, Facebook has fired at least eight people this year, and according to former curators, the company has yet to replace any of them. “They had hired us and promised us a job for at least a year,” said one. “Within three months, six of us were fired. No reason was given. We were just told ‘the company is cutting back.’”
One former contractor thinks that Facebook’s end goal with its trending section is simple: “It’s an experiment,” this person said. “They are just running tests to see what would increase engagement. At the end of the day, engagement was the only thing they wanted.”
The data Facebook is gleaning from upwards of 1 billion users clicking through the trending news module could have a significant impact on the future of news—what we read, how, and from which sources. A future that, if it’s not being determined by a group of 20-something contractors in a basement, will be determined in part by the algorithm that group trained. “They have it down to a science,” said one former curator. “We were truly slaves to the algorithm.”
Back in March, Robert Murray, one of America’s last remaining coal barons and “the sine qua non of climate denying,” hosted a fundraiser for Texas senator Ted Cruz at Wheeling, West Virginia’s White Palace. “I have not picked a candidate, but I do know that Ted Cruz needs some money,” he said at the time. As it turns out, Murray has quite a bit of money to give: FEC filings show that Murray’s super PAC, the Murray Energy Corporation Political Action Committee, has been stockpiling funds since the beginning of last year—it ended the first quarter of 2016 with $333,361 cash on hand.
Since it began raising funds this election cycle, Murray PAC has spent little more than $86,000, the largest portion of which ($36,000) went towards adjusting the PAC’s cash on hand numbers—basically, an accounting error categorized as a disbursement. According to its most recent filing, it only spent $3,000 between January and March.
That is not to say Robert Murray and his personal super PAC haven’t made any contributions in this cycle at all, however: Last year, Murray PAC made two $5,000 contributions to Cruz for President, in April; in March, Murray PAC donated $5,000 to RICKPAC, which supported the now-defunct Rick Perry campaign, in March. That same month, Murray made his only individual contribution of the presidential campaign season thus far—also $5,000, also to RICKPAC. Murray told the Columbus Business Journal in December that his fellow Ohioan, John Kasich, was the best-qualified candidate, based on past experience. “He would make a fine president,” Murray said. Kasich is a “very good man. I like him a lot.” Nevertheless, the governor is yet to receive any of Murray’s money.
Normally, Robert Murray is less circumspect about who should receive his support: In 2012, following an investigative report by Alec MacGillis, then of the New Republic, the FEC opened a still-ongoing investigation into whether Murray intimidated his employees into contributing to the company PAC. (The committee’s treasurer, Mike Ruble, is corporate human resources director for the Murray Energy Corporation. He did not respond to a request for comment.)
After President Obama was re-elected, Murray laid off 54 people at American Coal and 102 people at Utah American Energy, two of Murray Energy’s subsidiaries. He blamed the administration’s “war on coal.” Shares in the St. Clarksville, Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp—the largest privately-owned coal company in the United States—are split evenly among Murray, his wife, and his three sons; however, Murray holds the only voting shares, the Wall Street Journal reported last year, and intends to keep them until he is “incapacitated.” Altogether, Murray Energy employs some 7,500 people.
A Murray Energy spokesman was quick to clarify that the fundraiser Murray held for Cruz was a personal one, however. “This is a personal fundraiser organized by Mr. Murray, and Murray Energy Corp. has nothing to do with it and any comment on it,” Gary Broadbent said in a statement provided to the Wheeling News-Register. “Mr. Robert E. Murray has not, as yet, formally endorsed any Presidential candidate. He has, however, supported two of them, including Sen. Cruz.”
Cruz—and Perry, but he’s dead now—would be a logical candidate for someone like Murray to support. In December, Cruz, who is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, convened a hearing titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” In an interview earlier this year, the Texas senator said that Obama administration has waged an “unrelenting war on coal—and for that matter our entire energy production.” He continued: “There is no industry on earth that the Obama administration loathes more than the coal industry.”
Murray himself has adamantly resisted regulatory incursions into the coal industry, even after a collapse at one of his mines, in Utah, left nine people dead. (Six miners were trapped in an initial collapse; three rescue workers were trapped in a later collapse. The mine was sealed with the miners bodies still inside.) In fact, Murray filed a federal lawsuit against the EPA in 2014, alleging that the agency’s head, Gina McCarthy, “has continued to administer and enforce the Clean Air Act in a manner that is causing coal mines to close, costing hard-working americans their jobs, and shifting employment away from areas rich in coal resources to areas with energy resources preferred by the Agency.”
In 2014, Jean Cochenour, a former foreman employed by Murray Energy Corp—through several layers of subsidiaries—sued Robert Murray, accusing him of firing her for failing to contribute to his super PAC or specific candidates. Murray, court documents alleged, “expects his management employees to support his personal political choices and he communicates his expectations to them by sending them letters...reminding them of his political preferences and of the importance of supporting those preferences in management meetings, and by telling those who attend the Murray defendants’ ‘college’ for managers that the managers are expected voluntarily contribute 1% of their salary to Mr. Murray’s political action committee.”
In a March 2012 memo sent to managers, Murray criticized the “lack of participation in our fundraising events,” which apparently occurred every other month:
Attached to that memo was a list of salaried employees Murray could not recall seeing at his fundraisers.
More recent documents included in the court filings show how Murray also requested that employees to contribute a redacted amount to a variety of federal and local candidates directly. “If you cannot give the requested amount, contribute what you can and join our evening, even if you cannot give at all,” one invitation to a May 19, 2014 fundraiser reads. None of the Murray Energy employees and former employees reached by Gawker were willing to discuss the allegations against Robert Murray.
Murray Energy and Cochenour reached a settlement agreement in August, but Murray is still fighting his lawsuit against the EPA over the Clean Air Act. The case was scheduled to go to trial this summer, but the start date conflicted with the Republican National Convention—Murray is a member of the host committee. His lawyers asked for the trial to be rescheduled. “Mr. Murray has commitments that require him to be in Cleveland,” his lawyers wrote. (A day later, they withdrew their motion: “Mr. Murray has been able to resolve the conflict which prohibited his attendance at trial.”)
Early last month, the Wilkes Barre Times-Leader reported, Murray addressed students at West Liberty University’s Gary E. West College of Business. Coal, he said, “is a local industry. It’s supported families in the Ohio Valley and tri-state area for generations. It’s vital to keeping low-cost, available, reliable electric power and that industry is being destroyed right here in our country.”
“You people are going to have to live through it. Reliable, low-cost electricity is a staple of life, and our federal government is destroying it,” he told students. “I care about my employees deeply. I had 8,400 last May 1. Today I have 5,100, and I know those 3,300 that I had to lay off in less than a year, most of them by name. Thank you, Barack Obama and Democrats, and thank you natural gas.”
On Monday, Murray Energy announced that it would be closing Powhatan No. 6 Mine—Murray’s first mine—in November.
Ted Cruz today was apparently unable to get through a thirty-minute rant about what a liar Donald Trump is without telling a lie of his own. If it wasn’t a lie, then it was either a very bad mistake, or a demonstration of intimate knowledge of Donald Trump’s penis—no real way to say.
Cruz is currently campaigning desperately through Indiana, where he is polling poorly, and his campaign stops have featured swarms of angry protesters. This morning, he reached a boiling point, holding a press conference lambasting Donald Trump as an amoral narcissist and a pathological liar. Which is fair!
But then Cruz said this: (Emphasis ours.)
Donald Trump is a serial philanderer and he boasts about it. I want everyone to think about your teen aged kids. The President of the United States talks about how great it is to commit adultery, how proud he is. [He] describes his battle with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam. That’s a quote, by the way, on the Howard Stern show. Do you want to spend the next five years with your kids bragging about infidelity? Now what does he do? He does the same projection, just like a pathological liar. He accuses everyone about lying.
Pretty damning, if true. But Donald Trump never said he had a “battle with venereal disease,” and what Cruz said is not, in fact, a quote Trump made on the Howard Stern show.
Trump did, in a 2004 appearance, make a comment about dating and Vietnam. But the entire point of his comment was to insist that he never caught an STD, in part because he had his personal physician check his dates beforehand.
“You know, I’ll tell you, it’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world,” Trump said, when Stern asked if it was awkward to have his potential dates screened. “It is a dangerous world out there—it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era.”
“It is your personal Vietnam, isn’t it?” Stern said. “It is, you’ve said it many times.”
So Cruz got the keywords right, but mangled the message, and in doing so falsely claimed that Donald Trump admitted to having sexually transmitted diseases.
When you’re losing an election to someone who has successfully painted you as a liar—not to mention someone who wants to “open up” libel laws—you should probably be more careful in your recollection of their past statements.
Former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was sentenced on Tuesday to 12 years in federal prison. Once one of New York’s most powerful men, he was convicted in November of extortion and money laundering related to a series of schemes that netted him millions in exchange for political favors.
Silver, 72, faced up to 100 years in prison, though prosecutors only recommended a sentence of 14 years. Judge Valerie Caproni did uphold prosecutors’ request that Silver forfeit $5.2 million in ill-gotten gains, and he also faces $1.75 million in fines.
Requesting leniency, Silver’s lawyers had requested the former speaker be allowed to use his “unique talents” for the benefit of others, the New York Times reports, arguing that a sentence of “extensive community service and little—if any—incarceration could do that.”
Those “unique talents” did, according to prosecutors, benefit him in more than a financial manner. Last month, unsealed court documents also revealed evidence that Silver had carried on at least two extramarital affairs while in office, and rewarded his mistresses with government jobs and access.
Earlier today, we published video footage of a trans woman named Pearl Love being taunted last week on the subway with transphobic, homophobic, and racist slurs and then being assaulted by an as-yet-unidentified woman. After publishing that post, I talked to Love by phone, and she contextualized the incident within the broader bigotry and discrimination that she commonly experiences.
Love, an outreach social worker for Translatina Network, told me that as a trans woman living in New York, she’s harassed multiple times a week, although this particular incident was egregious.
“Usually people say two, three sentences that aren’t nice and you’re not looking,” said Love. “She kept going. People around me started looking at me to let me know what she said, but I already knew. I started recording and then she goes further.”
“All transgender people probably know that’s everyday life,” she explained. “People will tell you, ‘Don’t sit in front of me. I don’t want to see you in front of me. Fuck off.’”
“I didn’t know that much was wrong with it until people told me, because I get that all the time,” she elaborated. “I thought it was kind of normal—people are just not nice.”
Love, who immigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. in 1998, has no contact with her family on account of her gender identity. She says she faces further discrimination in job searches, and recently found herself “almost homeless.” “It’s not even the worst thing in my life,” she said of the routine bigotry she faces, as depicted in this video.
Love told me that she did not contact the police—she didn’t sustain serious injury and she wasn’t even sure which precinct to report this incident to. She says she has a meeting set up with the Anti-Violence Project tomorrow after the group reached out offering its assistance. She’s waiting to talk to AVP before deciding what to do with the other footage she shot that afternoon—footage that she says shows her being chased and hit by the woman in the video in a subway station.
I asked if she thinks her attacker should go to jail, and Love said, “I don’t know.” Love said her goal of posting the video was merely to raise awareness of the transphobia that she regularly experiences.
“I posted it because I think people have to be educated,” she told me. “If I can show people that this is what I face everyday, that would be a good thing.”
And that goes for the woman featured in the video, as well.
“Maybe she’ll change if she sees how wrong she is,” she explained. “I don’t want to focus on negativity or hate.”
George Will should have been left unemployed and starving ages ago. Newspapers are dying off and people despise the media more than they have ever despised the media—which is saying a lot—and yet here fucking George Will remains, along with the Noonans and Friedmans and Brookses of the world, gainfully employed despite being a worthless, fart-sniffing boob. Try as the world might, we can’t seem to rid ourselves of idiot columnists who make $300,000 just to sit down and invent political trends from looking out the fucking parlor window. The tea leaves tell me that this election will be decided by what I call The Beta Dads.
I don’t get how these people have retained any credibility. It makes me wonder if the Illuminati really DO exist when hundreds of these fuckfaces gather annually at the White House Correspondents Dinner, all seemingly united in an effort to shield Wolf Blitzer from justified ridicule. Wanna know why Trump is stomping a mudhole in the rest of the GOP field? Look at Will’s fucking placeholder column from Sunday:
Republican voters, particularly in Indiana and California, can, by supporting Cruz, make the Republican convention a deliberative body rather than one that merely ratifies decisions made elsewhere some of them six months earlier.
It’s true, because voters don’t deliberate at all. They’re just lever monkeys who cast their ballot by shooting an AK at a wall of candidates while blindfolded. This kind of “We can’t actually take these voting results seriously!” take isn’t Will’s alone. Earlier this spring, Times columnist and ideal hentai porn consumer Ross Douthat essentially said the same shit:
Americans speak and think in the language of democracy, and so these arguments will find an audience, including among party leaders and delegates themselves. But they cut against the deeper wisdom of the American political tradition. The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions (Trumpian or otherwise) that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash.
I know! I wish this democracy didn’t have so much DEMOCRACY in it, you know? Once in a while, it’s important to disregard the will of the voters and leave the selection process to people who know BEST. And how do we decide who knows best? Who should be the Mecha Delegates? Well… we’ll just KNOW!
Here’s more of Will…
A convention’s sovereign duty is to choose a plausible nominee who has a reasonable chance to win, not to passively affirm the will of a mere plurality of voters recorded episodically in a protracted process.
God help me, I’m gonna defend Donald Trump here, because he has won more than a mere plurality of his party’s moron voters. In fact, he’s on the verge of breaking the all-time record for primary votes in that party. HMMPH! ‘TIS A MERE PIFFLE! As if having a protracted process somehow invalidates the whole thing. WHOA, HEY, THESE PEOPLE VOTED IN CAREFULLY SCHEDULED STAGES IN WHICH THEY HAD AMPLE TIME TO VET EACH CANDIDATE! We can’t have that! By God, some of these voters wear JEANS, Martha!
The minority of people who pay close attention to politics…
This fucking guy. You know who pays attention to politics in an election year? EVERYONE. Fucking every last grown person knows what the hell is going on. My neighbor isn’t like, “Donald Trump? Nope. Never heard of him. I’m afraid I’ve been sticking to sports this whole time.” Will and his cocktail party ilk are under the remarkably mistaken impression that only THEY understand the ins and outs of this process, all because they went to a Bob Woodward key party. Think about how isolated you have to be to believe this. Think how tight that bowtie must be to cut off the circulation to your crème fraiche brain. Will continues:
…[this] includes those who define an ideal political outcome and pursue it, and those who focus on the worst possible outcome and strive to avoid it. The former experience the excitements of utopianism, the latter settle for prudence’s mild pleasure of avoiding disappointed dreams.
Mmm! Ohh! Oh, such pleasure from all this PRUDENCE! I just wanna beat it into a dish towel, so overwhelmed am I by the prudence.
If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party…
You have no identity. I hate to break it to you, but political parties are just hunks of voting beef that drift and adapt their platforms over the course of time in order to remain in power. If anything, your party’s identity today is that of a bunch of corrupt, racist, gun-toting kiddie diddlers who would block Congress just to keep them from building a goddamn road. That’s your brand, amigo. That’s why your boy Trump is winning. Don’t fan yourself and act surprised that this is your crooked party’s handiwork. You’re not above it. You’re the dime-store professor they trot out to make this all sound respectable, and you do a lousy job of it.
If Clinton gives her party its first 12 consecutive White House years since 1945, Republicans can help Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, or someone else who has honorably recoiled from Trump, confine her to a single term.
So true. If you don’t like the result of something, and you think you know better, you should spend all your time blocking the will of the majority. Great idea. Really fucking served us well the past eight years.
A train full of lye just derailed in this town. The Metro is gonna shut down for six months. Everyone in Flint is drinking lead sewage. Portland and Seattle are gonna fall into the goddamn ocean. And here’s George Will—asshole fuckface clown George Will—sitting there with his thumb in his ass and demanding that history stop a little bit longer. I hope a Trump voter keys your BMW, you twit.
