The Washington Post National Weekly - March 11, 2018

SUNDAY, MARCH 11, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

The rescuers Patrol officers are trained to spot drunken driving and drug trafficking. Why not child trafficking, too?

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POLITICS

The White House’s staff exodus BY

P HILIP B UMP

P

resumably knowing what was coming, President Trump assured the world last week that he could hire absolutely anyone he wanted to.

“It is a great place to be working,” he said of the White House during a news conference with the Swedish prime minister. “Many, many people want every single job. I read where, oh, gee, maybe people don’t want to work for Trump — and, believe me, everybody wants to work in the White House. They all want a piece of that Oval Office. They want a piece of the West Wing.”

This argument was undercut a few hours later when it was announced that Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, was leaving the White House.

There was no point at which Trump’s statement about working in the White House was more true than when he arrived in January 2017. The incoming president, who once bragged about hiring the best people to work with him, assembled a cadre of key staff members who were sworn in on Jan. 22, 2017. These, it seemed, were the survivors of a Darwinian contest who had proved that they were exceptional choices to fill their assigned positions.

By our analysis, of the 23 people sworn in that day whom we could identify, nine remain or have not planned to leave. (One, Andrew Bremberg, was reported to be planning an exit in November but is still in his position.)

The reasons for the departures vary. Some have been forced out by scandal, including national security adviser Michael Flynn and staff secretary Rob Porter. Some have been fired, including Omarosa Manigault and chief of staff Reince Priebus. Others have left because of disagreements with the president, such as Cohn and press secretary Sean Spicer, who left

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NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL DIRECTOR GARY COHN; PHOTO BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Core team departures Stephen K. Bannon Reince Priebus Omarosa Manigault Hope Hicks Sean Spicer Katie Walsh Michael Flynn

K.T. McFarland George Sifakis Rob Porter Rick Dearborn Gary Cohn Reed Cordish Andrew Bremberg*

* Bremberg was reported to be planning an exit in November but is still in his position.

after the hiring of Anthony Scaramucci.

We appear to be in a boom time for departures. Beginning with the resignation of Porter last month, three others have announced their

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 22

departures: Reed Cordish, who was leading the president’s technology initiatives; communications director Hope Hicks; and Cohn. That’s the most departures in a one-month period since Trump took office.

And it includes departures only from that core team at the White House sworn in Jan. 22.

It excludes, for example, Josh Raffel, a key communications staff member for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Incidentally, we first compiled this list after the announcement that Hicks planned to leave her position.

“This list will be updated as necessary,” we wrote then. “Hopefully not until at least next week.” n

© The Washington Post

ON THE COVER Capt. Derek Prestridge of the Texas Department of Public Safety developed the Interdiction for the Protection of Children training program in 2009.

Photograph by TAMIR KALIFA for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s hard line on trade is not new BY

M ARC F ISHER

D

onald Trump has always looked askance at people whose decisions derive from ideology. He likes to take his stands in the moment, from the gut, even if that means changing his party affiliation seven times in 13 years.

But there’s one issue on which the president has been rock-solid consistent for four decades: his fiery demands that the United States punish countries that take advantage of American workers.

Despite pleas, lessons and arguments from corporate executives, politicians and economists who say trade wars are destructive to U.S. interests, Trump has stood his ground. Starting in the 1980s, he saw the trade issue as a way to build a national reputation as more than a playboy millionaire developer — and a way to connect with struggling American workers despite his life in a gilded Fifth Avenue tower.

The issue spoke to him personally: Driven since childhood by his resentment that others didn’t respect him or take him seriously, he believed his country was similarly being taken advantage of. The idea that Japan, Germany or, in later years, China was boosting its economy by selling goods in the United States, even as fewer products made the return trip, incensed Trump, according to people who worked closely with him.

His country, he believed, was being laughed at and abused. Worst of all, America was losing.

“People think he just came to this issue last year, but he came to it on his own, decades ago, seeing what was going on in the ’70s and ’80s with job losses and manufacturing in decline,” said Dan DiMicco, the former chief executive of Nucor, an American steel company, who advised Trump on trade during the 2016 campaign. “He was a very proud American, and he saw, in his business and around the country, that this trade situation was hurting our workers.”

Through most of the first year of his presidency, Trump peppered his staff with reminders

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

His view has been consistent for a president often changing his mind that he had promised voters he would push back hard against countries he contended were sucking jobs out of the United States. Last week, even as some of his top aides continued to warn him that tariffs on foreign goods could damage relations with U.S. allies, Trump made his move.

“I’ve been saying it for 25 years,” the president said Tuesday. “Our country’s been taken advantage of.”

The result, so far, has been the resignation of his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn; unusually open criticism from his party’s leadership; a decline in stock prices Wednesday; and warnings of

retaliation from several nations.

Given Trump’s four decades of standing his ground on trade and tariffs, however, there is little reason to expect him to back down.

Beginning in the 1980s, Trump has used the issue — at first, mainly against Japan, which he portrayed as a job-stealing destroyer of the American middle class — to put himself on the map as more than a real estate developer.

“A lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States,” he said in 1987. “They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our own stupidity.”

In the 1990s, as he explored

President Trump, shown at a news conference last week, said in 1987 that “people are tired of watching other countries ripping off” America.

running for president, trade was again at the core of his appeal.

“The world is ripping off this country,” he said on Larry King’s CNN show in 1999. “You look at what’s happened, Japan, for years, I mean, we’re like a whipping post for Japan. . . . Look what Japan does with the cars and the subsidies they get.”

At a time when Japanese interests were buying U.S. film studios and even iconic landmarks such as Rockefeller Center, Trump latched onto an issue with great populist appeal. The nation’s rivalry with Japan had poked its way into the popular culture; for example, Michael Crichton’s best-

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POLITICS selling 1992 novel, “Rising Sun,” which later became a movie pitting Sean Connery as an L.A. detective against a shadowy network of Japanese business executives, portrayed Japan as a nation asserting economic hegemony against American business.

“First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan,” Trump told Playboy magazine in 1990. “So either way, we lose.”

With Japan as his initial focus, Trump quickly turned the issue into the seed for a political debut that would have a 28-year gestation period.

For Trump, trade was a crucial part of a larger argument about the folly of the United States paying to defend countries that gave back little in return.

“There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” said the headline on a full-page ad that Trump ran in The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Boston Globe in 1987. Trump spent $94,801 on the ads, which won him many times that value in news coverage.

The ad demanded that the United States send Western Europe and Japan a bill to pay for the protection of oil tankers moving through the Persian Gulf — oil that those countries depended on just as much as the United States did.

“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” the ad said. The Japanese, he said, freed from having to pay for their own defense, “have built a strong and vibrant economy,” and it was “time for us to . . . make Japan, and others who can afford it, pay.”

The ad was developed by public relations executives who had been key members of Ronald Reagan’s Tuesday Team, the group that made Reagan’s much-admired TV ads in his 1984 reelection campaign.

“The reason they hired us was to PR the fact that these Reagan boys were working on his ad,” said Tom Messner, one of the executives. “We assumed [Trump] was going to run in ’88.”

The same day the ad ran, Trump let it be known that he would visit New Hampshire to explore a run for the Republican presidential

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

“People think he just came to this issue last year, but he came to it on his own, decades ago.”

Dan DiMicco, former CEO of a U.S. steel company and a trade adviser to Trump during his campaign nomination. He drew a big, enthusiastic crowd that cheered as he railed against Japan and Wall Street, saying that when the Japanese “negotiate with us . . . they laugh like hell.” Trump quickly decided not to run, but he had seen how effective the issue of trade could be in convincing working-class audiences that the millionaire from Manhattan was on their side.

The trade plaint became a core element of Trump’s speeches to business groups and college commencements. In 1988, at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Trump told the story of a Japanese tycoon who visited him at Trump Tower and slammed his fist on Trump’s desk, demanding, “We want real estate!”

Trump warned students that “so many countries are whipping America . . . making billions and stripping the United States of economic dignity. I respect the Japanese, but we have to fight back.”

Trump has consistently argued that U.S. politicians lack the spine to stand up for American jobs. In 1989, he suggested that corporate bigwigs should do the nation’s negotiating with recalcitrant trade partners. He said that as presi-

dent, he would pick someone like George Steinbrenner, the heavyhanded owner of the New York Yankees, to confront the Japanese and make clear that the United States would “tax the hell out of them.”

Trump’s decision to dive into a controversial political issue wasn’t as much of a stretch as it seemed to some at the time. In the late 1980s, Trump was still building his reputation as a wealthy and successful developer — an image he molded as much through aggressive rhetoric and media exposure as through construction projects. He believed his business would succeed if Americans came to see him as a winner who would never back down.

“I deal with the toughest, smartest people in the world,” Trump told The Post in 1987. “If they think Donald Trump can be walked on, if they think Donald Trump is a rollover, like most people are, the litigation will increase tenfold. It’s very important in life to establish yourself not to be a patsy, and if you don’t, you don’t end up sitting in this chair.”

Even as Japan became a less succulent target for populist politicians, trade remained a key issue

President Trump announces that the United States will impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on imported aluminum during a meeting at the White House.

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driving popular dissatisfaction with Washington politicians of both major parties. Between 1996 and 2004, the Reform Party’s candidates for president — Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader — argued that Democrats and Republicans would never address the trade imbalance that they said was devastating American workers.

In the 2000 campaign, when Trump was briefly a candidate for the Reform Party nomination, he announced that if he won, he would appoint himself U.S. trade representative and would personally negotiate deals with Japan, which was “ripping us big league”; Germany, which “wants to take over the world economically”; and France, which needed “to be taught respect.”

Trump was being consistent on trade, even as he ranged across the political landscape on so many other issues. In the same Larry King interview in which he launched those attacks, Trump pronounced himself “quite liberal and getting much more liberal on health care and other things. I believe in universal health care,” Trump said. “It’s an entitlement to this country, if we’re going to have a great country.”

As Trump remade himself as a TV reality show celebrity, he would still bring up his resentment of the Japanese. Once, asked why he eschewed handshaking, he said the practice transfers “tremendous germs. . . . I wouldn’t mind a little bow. In Japan, they bow. I love it. Only thing I love about Japan.”

Even during the 2016 campaign, after two decades of stagnation in Japan’s economy, Trump would single out the country, listing it with China and Mexico as countries in which “we are getting absolutely crushed on trade.” Japan exports about twice as much to the United States as it imports from this country.

“He has a certain belief system, and that got him into office,” DiMicco said. “Trump knows we’ve been in a trade war with China for 20 years. He knows that after we helped them come back from World War II, Japan and Germany took advantage of us.

And he knows that even if the politicians oppose him on this, the people who put him in office have his back.” n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

A diplomatic coup secured — for now BY

K AREN D E Y OUNG

F

or the moment, at least, it appears to be a clear-cut victory — the biggest foreign policy win of his young administration. President Trump has brought his arch-nemesis, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a.k.a. “Little Rocket Man,” to the table to negotiate away his nuclear arsenal.

Optimists declared a major breakthrough. Even pessimists acknowledged that Trump’s hard line against Pyongyang, after decades of less forceful U.S. effort, played a significant role in moving one of the world’s most vexing and threatening problems in a potentially positive direction.

But in the afterglow of the surprise announcement — hinted by Trump in a teasing visit to the White House press room and soon confirmed by South Korea’s national security adviser, standing in the West Wing driveway — questions were fast and furious.

Were direct talks between Kim and Trump, two notably volatile leaders who have traded public insults for more than a year, the best way to start what are sure to be complicated negotiations? Was the administration, whose thin bench of experienced experts seems to be growing slimmer by the day, ready to face those wily and untrustworthy North Koreans? The talks, U.S. and South Korean officials said, would take place before the end of May. By some assessments, this is really a victory for Kim, who for years has sought proof of his status and North Korea’s power by dangling the offer of leader-to-leader talks with the United States.

Some analysts said it remains unclear what Trump is prepared to put on the table opposite Kim’s apparent offer to stop testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and discuss denuclearization. “Sanctions? Normalization?

Peace treaty?” tweeted Victor Cha, the expert who was once Trump’s choice as ambassador to South Korea, before he voiced concern that the White House was contemplating a preemptive military

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Volatile U.S., North Korean leaders agree to meet

by May to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal strike against Pyongyang.

According to a senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, the answer is not very much.

There would be no reward for talks themselves, the official said.

Trump would expect a dismantled nuclear weapons program, with complete “verification” and “will settle for nothing less.”

But “President Trump has a reputation for making deals,” the official added. “Kim Jong Un is the one person able to make decisions in their uniquely totalitarian system and so it made sense to accept the invitation with the one person who can make decisions instead of repeating the long slog of the past.”

Trump has a vibrant track record of surprise announcements that have distracted attention, at least temporarily, from concern over tariffs and border walls and the growing threat to his presidency posed by the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

At the same time, he has claimed a long string of successes

over the past 14 months that others have challenged as lacking a strategy for long-term sustainability, from the currently robust economy to the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The North Korea gambit may be his highest-wire act of all.

“A Trump-Kim summit is a major diplomatic gamble,” tweeted Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for New American Security.

“But let’s see if it actually comes off.

Recall that yesterday, we were set to impose steel tariffs on Canada.”

Among experts, there were widely divergent views of what had happened, and why, and what the risks were.

“Beyond the initial shock value of the invitation from Kim Jong Un to Trump,” and Trump’s acceptance, “I think the real underlying questions are still what are they going to negotiate,” said Lisa Collins, a fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Two months doesn’t give workinglevel officials much time to pull things together.”

South Korean National Security Adviser Chung Euiyong, speaking outside the White House, tells reporters about the invitation for talks between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump.

“It’s certainly the start of talks.

Whether or not it’s a true breakthrough in terms of change in North Korea’s calculus, I’m still a little skeptical,” she said. “I tend to be more of a pessimist.”

Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was “absolutely right to extend the nuclear and missile test pause” declared by Pyongyang during recent talks with the Seoul government. “It will help repair ties with South Korea and keeps us back from the brink of war.”

“Unfortunately,” Mount said, “denuclearization is a distant fantasy.”

The administration “has not equipped itself for success. They have not laid the groundwork for credibility in talks [and] lack leadership with experience in international negotiation. . . . In accepting the invitation outright, Trump has already lost much of his leverage over the terms and agenda of the talks.”

The “better play,” he said, “is to start by offering a credible plan to stabilize the peninsula and halt nuclear and missile tests sustainably, and then build out to a more ambitious agreement.”

Others were less skeptical. Robert Carlin, who led numerous U.S. delegations to North Korea and served in various senior intelligence and diplomatic roles during previous outreaches to Pyongyang, cited North Korean statements over the years that indicated its nuclear weapons program was largely developed as leverage to gain economic stability.

In a seminal statement in March 2013, Carlin recalled, Kim said that North Korea’s nuclear policy would proceed rapidly to “blunt the American threat and create a peaceful environment so that we can concentrate on the economy. This is his victory. It’s really important for him and they probably believe it.”

“We can’t push them around.

They do have nuclear weapons,” Carlin said. But “they do have a leader who wants to pivot to the economy. Let’s test that. Let’s see if we can use [Kim’s] own momentum, like jujitsu, to help accomplish what we want.” n © The Washington Post

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Populist forces rise across Europe

BY G RIFF W ITTE AND M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM

Berlin

A

fter voters from the snowy peaks of the Alps to the sunny shores of Sicily delivered a verdict so fractured and mysterious it could take months to sort out, the banner headline last week in the venerable daily La Stampa captured the state of a nation that’s left no one in charge: “Ungovernable Italy.”

The same can increasingly be said for vast stretches of Europe.

Across the continent, a oncedurable dichotomy is dissolving. Fueled by anger over immigration, a backlash against the European Union and resentment of an out-of-touch elite, antiestablishment parties are taking votes left, right and center from the traditional power players.

They generally aren’t winning enough support to govern. But they are claiming such a substantial share of the electorate that it has become all but impossible for the establishment to govern on its own. The result is a continent caught in a netherworld between a dying political order and a new one taking root.

“This has been a postideological result, beyond the traditional left-right divide,” said Luigi Di Maio, whose populist Five Star Movement trounced its opponents last week to become Italy’s largest party.

Now the country has plunged into uncertainty.

“The traditional structures of political alignment in Europe are breaking down,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It started in the smaller countries. But now we see that it’s happening everywhere.”

As Italians were voting Sunday, Germans were learning that they would finally have a government, a record five months after they went to the polls.

The establishment had hung on.

But just barely, and with no evident enthusiasm, either from the voters or from the centrist politicians who will continue to lead the country

ANDREW MEDICHINI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Political fragmentation across the continent makes it difficult to form government coalitions even as the public increasingly gravitates to the margins.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in countries from east to west, north to south. It took the Dutch 208 days to form an ideologically messy four-way coalition last year after an election in which 13 parties won seats in the parliament.

The Czechs still do not have a functioning government after voting in October yielded an unwieldy Parliament populated by anti-immigrant hard-liners; promarket liberals; communists; and a loose alliance of libertarians, anarchists and coders known as the Pirates.

The fragmentation of European politics takes what had been seen as one of the continent’s great strengths and turns it on its head.

Unlike the United States and Britain, where winners take all, continental Europe primarily uses proportional systems in which the full spectrum of popular opinion is represented in office.

That worked fairly well when

the major parties captured 80 or 90 percent of the vote, as they did in countries across Europe for decades after World War II. But lately, the major parties have been downsized.

In Germany, the “grand coalition” won just 53 percent of the vote — hardly grand. In Italy, neither of the traditionally dominant centrist parties cracked 20 percent. A grand coalition is not even mathematically possible.

As voters vent their discontent with sclerotic political systems that never seem to address their grievances, hyper-fractured election results add layers of difficulty to the process of forming governments, passing meaningful legislation or achieving the sort of consensus needed to reform the European Union.

“The age of the tall European leader is over,” Janning said. “This political climate doesn’t breed leaders. It breeds people who can manipulate the situation in such a way that things don’t derail.”

Luigi Di Maio, center, is the leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement, which won big in last week’s election.

In Italy, it’s not even clear the country will have that. Sunday’s vote appeared to knock the foundation out of the current political system — more than half of voters opted for anti-establishment, Euroskeptic parties — without offering a clear alternative.

E.U. bigwigs in Brussels and a section of Italy’s elite had hoped there would be a fallback option of a super-establishment coalition of the willing. But in Italy, the two mainstream parties together barely managed to exceed the vote share of the Five Star Movement — an Internet-based movement founded by a comedian that pulls voters from either end of the political spectrum and didn’t even exist a decade ago. Other votes were sprinkled across a range of far-left and far-right forces.

“It’s a confirmation that there’s a very strong sentiment in favor of change,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor of political science at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. “We are entering uncharted territory because the Five Star Movement is so unusual, so unconventional. We’re going to be in for a prolonged period of uncertainty.”

If there was a silver lining for the establishment forces trying to hold Europe together, it was that reaction to the vote was relatively muted. The restraint reflected a more stable footing for Europe, which is not facing economic, migration and security pressures with the same intensity of recent times.

“The situation is less volatile than three or four years ago,” said Janis Emmanouilidis, director of policy studies at the Brusselsbased European Policy Center.

“Back then, markets would have gone crazy. There would have been fear and panic.”

The mild reaction, Emmanouilidis said, also reflects something Europe has learned about its antiestablishment forces once they take power: Their vicious bark turns out to be a far gentler bite.

“Some of these movements have become demystified,” Emmanouilidis said. “They’ve become part of the establishment.” n The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MARCH 11, YEAR2018 COVER STORY

When a Texas state trooper couldn’t find a program that trained patrol officers to recognize the signs of child trafficking, he created one.

Could this be a breakthrough?

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BY STEVE VOLK hen Deputy Patrick Paquette pulled to a stop on Interstate 20 in Georgia in January 2013, he didn’t anticipate a career-altering experience. He saw a young man and a far younger girl standing on the side of the highway. Both were handcuffed. The pair had been detained by an officer who had pulled them over for speeding, smelled pot and discovered a bag of marijuana. To Paquette, a Greene County sheriff’s deputy with 11 years of experience, it seemed like a routine case of drug possession.

The man looked sullen. The young girl looked . . .

Paquette took a closer look at the girl. She seemed to be about the same age as one of Paquette’s sons and weighed down by some combination of sadness and fear. She kept glancing warily toward the young man.

Paquette moved the girl out of the man’s sight and earshot and started asking questions. How old was she? “Seventeen.” Who was the young man? “My sister’s boyfriend.” The two had traveled from her home, in Montgomery County, Ala., the girl told Paquette, through Georgia, seeing relatives. They had spent the previous night in an Augusta hotel. As she talked, she avoided looking Paquette in the eye.

“It didn’t really add up,” Paquette says now.

“How many 17-year-old girls spend the night in a hotel with their sister’s boyfriend?” By this time, he says, the signs that this wasn’t a routine drug-possession case were “just slapping me in the face.” The disparity in ages between the man, 29, and the girl; the unlikely story of their travels together; the girl’s evident fear; the illegal drugs, enough for personal use but not enough to imply intent to sell — all of these factors suggested a more sinister story.

The drugs provided grounds for a wider investigation, so Paquette ordered a search of the girl’s suitcase. Inside, he and the other officer discovered additional clues: dozens of continues on next page

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condoms, lubricant, sex toys and a small pile of lingerie. The girl and the man, Johnathon Nathaniel Kelly, were still separated. Kelly could not see or hear the girl. But Paquette, returning to her, kept his voice low.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“No,” she told him.

She still refused to look at him, and Paquette didn’t believe her. In a different situation, he might have gotten tough. But he eased off, gently asking the girl to recap her story. Then he leaned down to look into her eyes.

“Do you need help?” he asked again.

The girl opened her mouth as if he’d just turned the key to it. “Sir,” she said, “please get me some help,” and began to cry.

Paquette uncuffed her, loaded her into the car and drove her to the station for an interview with a specialist in sex crimes. The girl, Rebecca (she asked that her last name be withheld, to protect her identity because she is a sex-trafficking victim), sobbed. “I’ve been praying,” she told him, “every second I could, to be rescued.” Kelly was arrested and later sentenced to 11 years for interstate transportation of a minor for prostitution.

The truth is, if Rebecca had encountered Paquette just months earlier, she would have been arrested. “Right when I felt like she was lying to me,” he says, “I know I would have just said, ‘Lock them up.’ ” But Paquette had recently taken a Texas-based training program, called Interdiction for the Protection of Children (IPC), which taught him how to spot indicators of child-sex trafficking and conduct roadside investigations. Among the warning signs: drivers who are older and unrelated to their victims, who tell unlikely stories to the police, or who possess illegal drugs in amounts consistent with personal use — to keep their companions docile. Victims, Paquette learned, often lie to the police in obvious ways, sometimes appearing scattered or nonsensical — telltale effects of fear and trauma. They continually try to make eye contact with their abuser, as if looking for signals or orders. And they frequently possess sex toys, condoms, lubricant and lingerie inappropriate for their age.

Some of these details might seem obvious; but, surprisingly, before the development of the IPC program in 2009 by a Texas Department of Public Safety officer named Derek Prestridge, there was no comparable, comprehensive training program to help patrol officers — those most likely to encounter children in distress — identify missing, exploited or at-risk kids.

The success of the program has been, unavoidably, difficult to quantify. Before the creation of IPC training, Texas DPS kept no record of “child rescues.” But Texas state troopers have made 341 such rescues since the program’s inception; and in formalized follow-up interviews, virtually all of the troopers said the training was key to spurring them to action.

The DPS has made the training available outside of Texas, and states that have participated are also reporting upticks in child res-

cues. But the training is far from standard.

According to Prestridge, now a captain, IPC training has reached 7,709 patrol officers and child services professionals; according to the Justice Department, there are about 750,000 police officers in the United States (the statistics don’t seem to break out patrol officers). “If this training becomes routine,” Prestridge says, “we could be saving thousands of children.”

Unfortunately, as he has learned, even the most promising approaches to the most disturbing problems can be difficult to implement.

Thus far, IPC training has spread mostly through word of mouth and chance encounters. For example, after Cathy Meyers, executive director of Maryland’s Center for Children, met Prestridge during a 2016 law enforcement seminar in Austin, she arranged a Maryland training session through the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention. That’s how Derek Prestridge wound up standing in a basement conference room of the Maryland Department of Transportation last summer, walking an audience of about 80 officers through the epiphany that led to this program.

One afternoon in 2005, he told them, he came across an article describing the breakup of a multistate sex trafficking ring, which regularly drove through Texas with captive children. The traffickers even used Interstate 10 through Prestridge’s jurisdiction. “I wondered,” he recalled, “if any of my officers had come in contact with this car.”

These were the days before the state kept child rescue statistics. As Prestridge told the audience, he could readily discover that, in 2008, Texas state troopers recovered 1,812 stolen cars, arrested 12,615 fugitives and seized 69,063.99 pounds of pot — wryly noting the department’s zeal to “record all the marijuana we recover, to the fraction of an ounce.” But how many recovered missing or exploited children were listed? “That number,” he said, “was zero.”

He knew zero couldn’t be true. Runaways are sometimes discovered on the highway, for instance. What was true was that no one had thought child-related cases were important enough to break out as a statistic. The lack of rigor wasn’t specific to Texas; Prestridge surveyed 10 other states and found the same thing.

Now Prestridge stood before his audience and asked: “How many of you have ever said, at the start of a shift, ‘I’m gonna get me a drunk driver tonight’?” Numerous hands rose.

“How many of you have said, ‘I’m gonna bust a drug dealer’?” Again, many hands.

“How many of you have ever said, ‘I’m going to rescue a child tonight’? Or ‘I’m going to catch a child molester’?” No response.

Prestridge asks this question at every training session — this was his 97th — and he’s become accustomed to that reaction. “Why is that?” he asked. “Why don’t police make that a goal before their shift?” His audience was silent. “I’ll tell you one reason why,” he offered.

“Because there’s no box to check.”

The 44-year-old trooper noted that there are boxes to check for arrests, confiscated

drugs, speeding tickets, drunk drivers, even seat-belt infractions. Those boxes, he argued, invariably reflect and influence any officer’s priorities. “This isn’t to say that police don’t want to rescue children,” said Prestridge. “Of course we do. The problem is that we haven’t really known how.”

DAVID PETERSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“I was impressed by Derek and what he had to say, but I was also a little skeptical. . . .

I knew you had to be careful vetting these indicators” of child trafficking.

Michael Bourke, U.S. Marshal.

After identifying this worrisome gap in Texas DPS statistics, Prestridge looked for a training course about recognizing — and rescuing — endangered children. After all, police are taught readily observable details that are possible indications of drug trafficking: Vehicles that lean to one side on level ground could be hiding contraband; a tire jack on the passenger seat could signal narcotics hidden in the wheel well.

When he found no comparable program for child trafficking, he gathered a team within Texas DPS — including Texas Rangers, criminal analysts and victim services counselors — to build a training course.

They found and interviewed police who had made child rescues, asked what raised their suspicions and searched for commonalities.

They pored over reports of the ways trauma, abuse and trafficking victims think and behave, searching for best practices police could use in the field to gain trust and information. The initial effort took more than a year, culminating in 2009, when Texas DPS trained its first class.

“We made our first rescue in 2010,” says Prestridge, “and they kept coming after that.”

The program triggered a policy change at Texas DPS, which now records a statistic for all “child rescues” generated by traffic stops, most of which fall into the categories of sex abuse, Internet crimes, familial abduction or sex trafficking. By 2014, Texas DPS had logged more than 140 rescues.

One particularly remarkable rescue occurred in July of that year. In Hidalgo County, then-Sgt. Virgil Verduzco of Texas DPS spotted a vehicle with a defective taillight. He stopped the car around 2 a.m., discovering a 20-year-old man, according to his license, and a younger girl. “Police normally think about guns and drugs,” he recalls, “but the training really opens your mind to think about children.”

Verduzco ordered the young man to exit the car and walked him behind the vehicle. “What’s the girl’s name?” he asked.

The young man didn’t know. “We met through social media,” he explained. “We’re gonna hang out.”

Verduzco left the man there, then approached the girl and asked for her mother’s number. The woman answered, groggy with sleep.

Verduzco named the girl, asking: “Is that your daughter?”

“Yes,” she said. “But my daughter’s asleep in her room.”

Verduzco requested that she check, and in a flash she returned, thanking him. He’d recovered a 14-year-old girl — lured out by an adult she met online — before her mother even knew she was missing. Joel Contreras Jr. later pleaded guilty to enticement of a child.

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COVER STORY In the early years of the program, Prestridge began supplying the training to a few outside agencies, where it was well received. In 2014, Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw gave him a mandate to share it with any police department that asked — anywhere in the United States. “It was an easy decision to make when we realized we had a new way to protect children,” says McCraw. “Our great hope is that this program becomes part of the routine application of officers’ duties everywhere — so that it is no longer considered unique.”

That same year, Prestridge made an important connection in the federal government. He was attending an invitation-only summit on long-term missing children at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., when he struck up a conversation with Michael Bourke, a forensic psychologist in the U.S. Marshals Service in Arlington.

Bourke’s role as chief of the Marshals’ Behavioral Analysis Unit requires him to develop psychological profiles of fugitives on a case-by-case basis — a kind of daily, ongoing experiment testing preexisting models against individual examples. “I was impressed

by Derek and what he had to say,” says Bourke, “but I was also a little skeptical. . . . I knew you had to be careful vetting these indicators” of child trafficking.

Prestridge told Bourke about one potential indicator he’d been mulling: Some IPC-trained police reported that the trafficking suspects they arrested often bore tattoos on their neck or face.

Bourke didn’t “see how there could be a connection” but volunteered to conduct an experiment using the U.S. Marshals’ national database. He pulled 600 random samples of people arrested for trafficking children and 600 arrested for assault and found that, yes, child traffickers were more likely to bear tattoos on their face and neck (assault suspects were more prone to have tattoos on their hands).

The individual numbers were small — 20 hits among the sex traffickers, for instance — but Bourke said they were statistically significant enough that Prestridge could include facial tattoos as an indicator. And he joined the team. From his U.S. Marshals office, Bourke now vets Texas DPS’s evolving list of indicators, which has swelled to 361, including large numbers of condoms, particularly of brands sold in bulk online; and loose hard drives or SIM cards, which are often used for transporting child pornography.

The program has also evolved to include a section on what patrol officers can look for inside homes. “The presence of any one indicator might not be that big a deal,” says Bourke, “but when officers know them, and certainly if they see a cluster of them, they can use them in the field to guide their investigation.”

The program has racked up results and received praise outside Texas. In April 2015, six children were rescued as part of a 72-hour initiative involving multistate trafficking checkpoints (similar to sobriety checkpoints) led by the Texas DPS. “That may not sound like

a staggering number,” said Col. Frank Milstead, director of Arizona’s DPS, when announcing the results, “but I assure you if one of those six kids was your kid, that number is staggering.” Arizona DPS Capt. Jennifer Pinnow says the IPC program has been “vital” in her state, which now tracks child rescues, recording 42 in 2016 and 57 in 2017.

In 2016, Prestridge won an award from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Pete Banks, retired director of training and outreach at the center, says the IPC program “provides exactly what’s needed, an intensive training that focuses on the population in law enforcement that can make the greatest difference.”

The federal government is taking notice as well. Two FBI agents co-wrote a long, laudatory essay about the program in the bureau’s Law Enforcement Bulletin in 2015. Alexandra Gelber, deputy chief in the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, says she’s “convinced of the program’s merits” and likes the cost-effectiveness of using an existing resource: patrol officers.

But a program needs more than praise to spread across the country; it needs funding and a federal agency willing to take on the task of disseminating it. The fight against drug trafficking has benefited from money allocated to the war on drugs and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to spearhead training.

In contrast, Texas DPS has been providing the IPC training on just $95,945 in federal grant money it received in 2014 from the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Larger federal grants, Prestridge learned, are too narrowly focused to cover IPC’s range of crimes and victims. And even if Texas DPS found a pot of money somewhere, it simply doesn’t have the staff to train the nation’s patrol officers: Prestridge, who is assigned to the training academy, and his team hold many other responsibilities within the department.

Help may come from what might first seem like an unlikely agency: the U.S. Marshals Service. While marshals are mostly known as the officers who protect the federal judiciary, operate the witness protection program and capture fugitives, they have long leveraged their ability to find missing bad guys into finding missing children. In 2005, they installed a program manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In 2015, aided by a law allowing them to assist law enforcement agencies in missing-children cases, they established a Missing Child Unit, which has assisted in the recovery of more than 1,000 kids. Late last summer, the service agreed to become what Bourke calls “the force multiplier” that will push out IPC training across the nation; the plan is for the Marshals Service to begin training local police departments this year. “We’ve already seen how successful the IPC program is by the number of children who’ve been rescued since its inception, and we are committed to seeing that continue with more training opportunities,” says Derrick Driscoll, assistant director for the U.S. Mar-

“The growth of this thing, as we develop Marshals to disseminate the training, should just be exponential.”

Derrick Driscoll, assistant director for the U.S. Marshals Investigative Operations Division

KLMNO WEEKLY

shals Investigative Operations Division.

Texas DPS and Bourke will train and certify classes of U.S. Marshals to present the program; those Marshals will then teach colleagues and classes of local officers. “We’ve got 3,000 deputy Marshals stationed all over the country with preexisting relationships at every level of law enforcement,” says Bourke. “The growth of this thing, as we develop Marshals to disseminate the training, should just be exponential.”

Back at the Maryland training session, Prestridge told a story involving the Washington region. A 16-year-old girl in Abilene, Tex., met a man online who took her to a series of hotels, seeing 12 customers per day, all the way to Pentagon City in Arlington. He then headed west again, on a circuitous path back toward Texas, and evaded two police encounters.

The first officer stopped them in Fairfax County, Va., for a routine traffic violation, and arrested the man for drug possession. The officer didn’t recognize the large quantity of condoms, or $4,000 in cash the man possessed, as signs of sex trafficking. The man made bail the next day, and the pair continued their trip.

The second officer, a state trooper in Denver who pushed them back onto the road after their car ran into an embankment during a snowstorm, also missed the signs. Finally, about 15 minutes from Abilene, Trooper Connor Hardin, an IPC graduate, stopped them and recognized the indicators. He started asking questions, arrested the man and sparked an investigation.

By the time Prestridge finished this story, the second and final day of the Maryland class was nearly over. Attendees glanced at one another with a new resolve. Prestridge said he expected them to start rescuing kids, too. “One of you,” he said, “at least one of you will.”

Since that first training, a small group of Maryland officers that underwent a special, intensive version of the IPC course has trained an additional class of 35 Maryland state and local police. The plan is to conduct new classes every six months, including a course that will begin on March 8 with 80 more officers. Though Maryland keeps some child-related statistics — calls to Child Protective Services, for example — like Texas initially, it has no category for child rescues. Maryland State Police spokesman Greg Shipley says that an initiative to gather this new statistic is in progress.

Prestridge says recording child rescues as a separate statistic is “important because it just sends a message, through the whole organization, to be mindful of the children we see — and to be able to recognize and investigate any sign that something might be wrong.”

That’s exactly what Paquette did back in 2013 on that Georgia interstate. Two years later, Rebecca invited him to her high school graduation. “I wanted him to see,” she says, “that I am not wasting this second chance at life he gave me.” Paquette attended, sitting there with a rare kind of satisfaction. “It was kind of overwhelming,” he says, “and an honor.” n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE INTERNET

Why almost no one is making a living on YouTube

ISTOCK

BY

T ODD C . F RANKEL

O

ne of the main attractions of YouTube is that anyone can become a star: There are no gatekeepers, no talent agents and no television executives who need to be won over.

Stars can come from anywhere — and they do.

Forbes’s recent list of the richest YouTubers is proof: It’s filled with people who post clips about playing video games or kids playing with toys. The top spot went to Daniel Middleton, known as DanTDM. He’s a 26-year-old British gamer — and he earned $16.5 million last year.

But a new study finds that the odds of striking it rich on YouTube — or even making a modest living — are small.

Reaching the top 3.5 percent of

YouTube’s most-viewed channels — which means at least 1 million video views a month — is worth only about $12,000 to $16,000 a year in advertising revenue, according to Mathias Bartl, a professor at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany whose study is one of the first to examine YouTube data for clues about how it works for creators.

Bartl found that it has gotten harder for new creators to reach the top, as YouTube — which is owned by Google — adds 300 hours of video every minute and the biggest stars become more successful.

The median views per video plummeted to 89 in 2016; a decade earlier, that number was 10,262. At the same time, YouTube’s biggest channels are gobbling up more eyeballs.

The top 3 percent of channels received 64 percent of all views in

2006. A decade later, the top channels took 90 percent.

A YouTube spokesman said in a statement that the services continues to see “tremendous growth” for its content creators, with the number of channels earning at least $100,000 a year increasing more than 40 percent in the past year.

What’s happening on YouTube is occurring across the Web, where creators are finding that long odds of success in the online world are not so different from IRL (Internet-speak for “in real life”).

In fact, they might be worse.

In music, song streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have mostly benefited superstar acts. No one needs to fight a music label to get their song distributed, but getting listeners is a different problem. Less than

Last month, YouTube suspended all advertising on channels run by star Logan Paul, shown above at the 2017 Teen Choice Awards.

1 percent of songs represented 86 percent of the music streamed last year, according to the market research firm Nielsen.

And because few people buy music these days, making even a little money from streaming requires songs to be played millions of times. That has hurt the music industry’s middle-of-the-road acts the most, the kind of musician who once could eke out a decent living selling several thousand albums a year and touring the nation without breaking into the mainstream. Increasingly, such acts face the pressure of going viral or going home.

In television, so many new shows are being made that no one can watch them all; nearly 500 scripted original series aired last year. The traditional networks are being challenged by cable outlets

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HEALTH and streaming services. That has led to new opportunities for actors and writers. But the new era has distinct challenges, including shorter seasons and less predictable schedules that make it harder for many to make ends meet.

Competition among creators on YouTube is fierce, and that has also led to trouble.

In February, YouTube suspended all advertising on channels run

by Logan Paul, one of its biggest stars, after his controversies included videos he made showing his visit to a “suicide forest” in Japan and jokes about eating Tide detergent pods.

Another star, Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, was found to have used a racial epithet and made anti-Semitic jokes in some of his gaming videos. He was dropped from Google’s lucrative ad service for high-performing videos, and his planned series on the paid-subscription channel YouTube Red was canceled.

Now, YouTube is taking steps that make it even harder for creators at the bottom. The company recently said channels need to have reached 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time over the past 12 months before they can earn money from ads.

YouTube said the change is aimed at discouraging videos with objectionable or offensive content and that it would “affect a significant number of channels.”

Bartl’s study did offer some hope for YouTube aspirants — hints on how to boost the chances of financial success. YouTube offers 18 genrelike categories, and selecting the right one “is a highly significant predictor of channel success,” Bartl wrote. The most popular categories over a decade were entertainment videos, which took in 24 percent of all views, followed by music and gaming categories.

The chance of a channel making into the rarefied top 3 percent was best for comedy, entertainment, how-to and style, and gaming. It was worse for sports, education, nonprofit and activist groups, people and blogs.

Bartl also noted that YouTube’s upper echelon still featured a mix of both professional and usergenerated videos, writing that “it does give hope that YouTube’s ‘broadcast yourself’ rhetoric is not a complete fiction.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Could a single fast food meal affect your overall health?

BY

C HRISTY B RISSETTE

A

client recently asked me, “How often can I get away with eating junk food?” She knows that my nutrition philosophy is the “80:20 rule”: Eat healthy foods as often as possible (at least 80 percent of the time), but also enjoy the occasional less healthy food (less than 20 percent of the time), if that’s what you really want.

I’ve seen this approach work well with clients who were previously chronic dieters yet hadn’t been able to lose weight. Once I give them permission to have “forbidden foods,” those foods lose their power and they’re often able to make healthier choices.

JOHNNIESHIN/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCK

There is some evidence that “cheat meals” (although I hate that term) can help boost fat loss and mental health among dieters.

Yet I wanted to give my client a more quantifiable answer. Could a few days of junk food or even a single fast food meal make a difference in your overall health?

Junk food and fast food defined What is “junk food”? Essentially any food that is highly processed, high in calories and low in nutrients. It’s also usually high in added sugars, salt and saturated or trans fats. Some evidence points to junk foods as being as addictive as alcohol and drugs.

“Fast food” is prepared quickly and is eaten quickly or taken out.

Although there are a growing number of healthier fast food options, most fast food can still be classified as junk food.

Long-term effects of eating junk food Eating a poor quality diet high in junk food is linked to a higher risk of obesity, depression, digestive issues, heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and early death. And frequency matters when it comes to the effect of junk food on your health. A review of studies on fast food and heart health found having fast food more than once a week was linked to a higher risk of obesity, while eating fast food more than twice a week was associated with a higher risk of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and death from coronary heart disease. This is disturbing considering nearly half of American adults eat fast food at least once a week.

Short-term effects of junk food It’s human nature to think about benefits and risks over the short term rather than considering the impact our choices have over the long term. So how does consumption of junk food affect your body over the short term?

Just a few days of junk food could change your metabolism. A small study of 12 healthy young men found eating junk food for just five days led to a reduced ability of their muscles to turn glucose into energy, even though they didn’t eat more calories as part of the study. Over the long term, this change could lead to insulin resistance and eventually type 2 diabetes.

Another effect of just a couple of days of junk food is poor digestion. Because junk food lacks fiber, eating too much of it could lead to constipation.

One junk food meal That single fast food meal can narrow your arteries, leading to an increase in blood pressure.

And the quick spike in your blood sugar from eating junk foods high in refined carbohydrates and added sugars can cause a surge in insulin, leading to a quick drop in blood sugar.

That leaves you feeling tired, cranky and hungry for more.

Just one serving of junk food can increase inflammation throughout your body. Further, an Australian study suggests that in people with asthma, a fast food meal high in saturated fat can increase inflammation in the airway, potentially making an asthma attack more likely. So it seems the quick hit of junk food does carry short-term risks.

The good news: Every healthy meal helps The amount of inflammation and oxidative stress your body will experience after eating occasional junk food seems to be a function of the “big picture” of your choices over time.

If you want to enjoy junk food once in a while but are concerned about the impact on your health, take a look at your overall habits.

Do you smoke or overdo it on alcohol? Are you exercising regularly and eating plenty of nutritious foods such as vegetables, fruit, legumes, fish, nuts and seeds, and whole grains? When it comes to your health, it seems you can “get away with” the occasional junk food more easily when you follow a healthy lifestyle most of the time. So think about your ratio of healthy to less healthy foods.

Consider that just one healthy meal a day worked into the typical American diet could reduce overall stress and inflammation in your body. Every meal is an opportunity to positively affect your health. Based on the current research, my advice to my client essentially remains the same: Once you’re aware of all of the shortterm and long-term effects of junk food and you still really want some, have it less than once a week and really savor it. Then get right back to enjoying nourishing, nutritious foods. n Christy Brissette is a dietitian, foodie and president of 80TwentyNutrition.com. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A love affair with a familiar literary lion

Can VR make everything better?

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

K AREN H ELLER

nitially, Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” appears to be a roman à clef. A young publishing assistant named Alice embarks on a love affair with the American literary lion Ezra Blazer, who sounds and behaves very much like Philip Roth.

In fact, any identification with Roth, with whom Halliday once shared a romance, seems there for the reader’s delight and plucking.

An incorrigible flirt, with no progeny and every literary honor but the Nobel (a recurring joke), Ezra has a weakness for almost everything older — Yiddish humor, vintage music, forgotten movies — except companions. Women he prefers absurdly young.

Ezra is Alice’s teacher, her patron, and in danger of being her everything if she doesn’t stake a claim. Alice muses, “As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again.”

In the midst of becoming a writer, wise Alice realizes that she cannot bloom as an artist as long as she is enveloped by Ezra.

Halliday’s coruscating work takes you down roads you hadn’t planned on taking. Alice’s name is no accident; Lewis Carroll’s heroine is invoked several times. Even the book’s structure is initially bewildering. “Asymmetry” delivers two seemingly disconnected novellas, followed by a brief third coda. And that is the magic of this exquisite, impressive book: the way it plays with influence and assumption. As Ezra notes: “Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all.

But I’m the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what’s ‘real’ versus ‘imagined’ in a novel.”

After the first novella, titled “Folly,” the book takes a hard left into “Madness.” Amar is on his way to visit his brother in Iraq, in possession of two passports and few wiles about airport security.

The result is a prolonged detention in a Heathrow holding room,

a contemporary purgatory.

Amar’s story, the less familiar, is relayed in the first person, while Alice’s story, which seems deeply rooted in Halliday’s own biography, is told in the third. These two smart, perceptive characters are the same age, well-educated, yet unlikely to collide.

A girlfriend tells Amar, “Once we know the end of an unfortunate story, it’s tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate.” Amar contemplates what he knows and has failed to learn, the violence of other places, the constant of war, the absurdity of his situation. He considers the writing of Stephen Crane: “It perhaps might be said — if anyone dared — that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by men of one nation concerning the men of another.” Which is precisely what Halliday is doing.

But, Amar asks, “wasn’t it also Crane who said that an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through experiences sideways?” This passage also moves sideways in the novel, Ezra having typed it in “Folly” for Alice to discover.

“Asymmetry” concludes with a section titled “Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs,” based on the BBC radio program that asks guests to name the songs they would want on a deserted island. Halliday has blessed Ezra with unexpected events in his late age, gifts that deviate from Roth’s biography. In Ezra’s wide-ranging interview on the radio show, he becomes the key to understanding the novel’s wonders. For us, the ride is in surrendering to falling down rabbit holes to unknown places.

The moment “Asymmetry” reaches its perfect ending, it’s all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again. n Heller is a writer for The Washington Post.

V

ASYMMETRY

By Lisa Halliday Simon & Schuster.

288 pp. $26

EXPERIENCE ON DEMAND What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do

By Jeremy Bailenson Norton. 290 pp. $28.95

l

REVIEWED BY

A NDREW K EEN

irtual reality is a bizarre idea. Here is technology that so simulates physical and mental experience that it mimics reality. But it’s far more than just a crazy idea. Today there are affordable headsets from multibillion-dollar companies, such as the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, that enable wearers to “virtually” escape their physical and temporal realities and immerse themselves in alternative universes or states.

In “Experience on Demand,” Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson tries to explain what VR is, how this revolutionary technology works and what it can do to change the world.

Wired magazine has described VR as “the dawn of an entirely new era of communication.” But this revolution, which by 2016 had attracted some $6 billion worth of investment in consumer VR companies, is actually much more disruptive than that. This new technology is an attempt to turn the universe inside out.

By reinventing the world so that it revolves around us, VR represents a kind of inversion of Galileo’s telescope. Now, for about the $500 price of an Oculus Rift headset, the virtual world is ours. No wonder VR has seized the imaginations of Silicon Valley futurists, with their libertarian fetishization of individual rights and their obsession with personalizing products and experiences.

Stanford University, with its abundance of scientific, financial and human capital, is at the forefront of the VR revolution. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got his first taste of Oculus Rift’s technology in March 2014 at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, donning one of the headsets to experience what it’s like to be a virtual senior citizen or to walk a narrow plank over a deep pit. He was so impressed with Oculus Rift’s technology that a few weeks later, Facebook acquired the little California start-up for $2 billion.

While VR technology might allow us to fly through the universe, “Experience on Demand” is, in its simple narrative, quite a down-toearth read. In some ways, it’s an accessible introduction, a cogent primer, to the potential and pitfalls of VR. Bailenson’s book is a well-intentioned and partially successful attempt to provide a general audience with a front-row seat on what he calls “a wild ride” of the VR revolution.

But the problem with “Experience on Demand” is that it is rather too well-intentioned. Like so many other naive Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Bailenson believes that technology can make the world an infinitely better place.

It’s as if Bailenson has donned the most rose-tinted of VR headsets to observe mankind. VR, he seems to think, can improve us, thereby magically also improving the world. “There are many ways,” he tells us, that “the unique power of VR can be applied to make us better people, more empathetic, more aware of the fragility of the environment, and more productive at work.”

Once upon a time, Silicon Valley futurists promised that the Internet would democratize the world and make us better people. But all it seems to have delivered is an infestation of fake news; a digital descent into mass xenophobia, narcissism and technological addiction; and the creepy dominance of winner-take-all goliaths like Zuckerberg’s Facebook. But there’s little about this in “Experience on Demand.”

“VR engulfs us,” Bailenson declares. But I’m afraid that there isn’t much engulfing about his book. Like the simulations delivered by a VR headset, the book is mostly fantasy. It’s a retreat from the world, an example of the very escapism and distraction that he warns are inherent in VR. n Keen is author of “How to Fix the Future.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Women, youths will decide 2018 — if they vote DAN BALZ is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.

President Trump continues to define the political conversation of the country with Twitter blasts, public statements and often alarming reports of his behind­the­ scenes behavior and moods. But two groups of voters — women and young people — will define the politics of this year, and probably 2020 as well.

These are the voters who stand most apart from the president and who are most at odds with many of the priorities he has advanced in office. Their opposition and energy will determine the level of losses Republicans suffer in the November midterm elections.

Come 2020, they are likely to determine whether the president wins a second term, should he indeed seek reelection.

There has long been a gender gap in politics. In the latest Gallup poll tracking of the president’s performance, 44 percent of men give Trump a positive rating compared with just 31 percent of women. But there is something materially different about the gap between men and women when it comes to judging this president that polls alone cannot fully capture. Many women have a visceral and negative reaction to Trump, and that has changed little during his time in office.

They appear less forgiving of the president than many men are.

In a period in which reports of sexual abuse and sexual harassment by prominent men have led to the powerful #MeToo movement, the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the president — as well as a $130,000 payment by his personal lawyer to a porn star with whom Trump was alleged to have had an affair — have helped widen the gap further between Trump and many female voters.

But there is a big question mark about what will happen in the upcoming midterm elections,

and that is the issue of just who will show up to vote. Trump’s success in 2016 owed in part to the fact that non-collegeeducated voters — both women and men — turned out in greater numbers than did those with college degrees.

If that’s the case again this year, then Democrats could fall short of their expectations. But if the antiTrump sentiment propels significantly more collegeeducated women — white and nonwhite — to vote, then Republicans will probably suffer significant losses. So far there appears to be more energy among those most intensely opposed to Trump, a contrast to sentiments that shaped the 2016 electorate.

Polling has sometimes been a misleading indicator of who will actually vote, and exit polls have turned out to be unreliable on who actually showed up. The 2016 exit polls badly misstated the composition of the electorate based on education levels, overstating the percentage of voters with college degrees and understating the percentage without degrees.

The online polling firm SurveyMonkey cast doubt on the exit poll findings shortly after the election, highlighting the degree to which non-college voters outnumbered college-educated voters. Subsequent analyses, including from the Pew Research Center and the Census Bureau, showed the same thing.

Given the issues that have risen to prominence early in this election year — school safety and

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Attendees cheer and hold placards during the second Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 20 at the Lincoln Memorial.

guns — along with the continuing focus on sexual misconduct in the workplace and elsewhere, women could be more motivated to turn out, especially women in suburban districts that will play a big role in deciding who controls the House in January.

Last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and the public visibility and lobbying activity of high school students since has again highlighted the potentially important role young voters could play this November and beyond. They are an increasingly important part of the electorate, with the one big caveat being whether they will turn out to vote.

Often, young voters haven’t turned out in numbers that matched their share of the population.

Evidence continues to accumulate highlighting the degree to which the attitudes of younger voters differ from those of older Americans, especially on cultural and social issues. A new Pew study finds that the two youngest groups of voters — millennials and Gen Xers — have markedly different attitudes than the two oldest groups — baby boomers and those in the “silent” generation — and that the gap is wider than ever.

Just 27 percent of millennials and 36 percent of Gen Xers approve of Trump’s job performance in the Pew survey, while 44 percent of baby boomers

and 46 percent of those in the silent generation approve.

Millennials are now the most Democratic-leaning group in the population, with 59 percent identifying or leaning toward the party, according to Pew. They also support or lean toward Democratic candidates in the upcoming election by a wider margin than others, with 62 percent saying they prefer Democratic House candidates in their districts this fall.

Most striking in that finding is the shift since the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, both of which resulted in sizable Republican gains. In 2010, 53 percent of millennials said they preferred Democratic candidates; in 2014 it was just 50 percent.

There is also an increase in interest in this midterm election among millennials, up 16 percentage points compared with 2014.

Among many women and younger people, attitudes toward Trump and the issues he has made his own appear relatively hardened. Absent dramatic events, they aren’t likely to change much between now and November. But Democrats can’t take this to the bank. The key will be whether those attitudes result in a surge in turnout among those voting groups. That remains the most important question for this year’s elections. n

©The Washington Post

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21 SUNDAY, MARCH 11, 2018

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Fight fraud in public commenting JESSICA ROSENWORCEL is a member of the Federal Communications Commission. This was written for The Washington Post.

What do Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from Upstate New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common?

They appear to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal Communications Commission. That ought to mean they went online, submitted their names and addresses, and typed out their thoughts about Internet regulatory policy. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals — along with 2 million others — had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments.

These fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality record. In the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the agency logged about half a million comments sent from Russian email addresses. It received nearly 8 million comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical wording.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. Researchers, journalists, and public servants have found a wide range of fake comments and stolen identities in the public proceedings of the Labor Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission.

This is a serious problem.

Administrative decisions made in Washington affect Americans’ day-to-day lives and future. They involve everything from Internet access to retirement planning to the availability of loans to the energy sources that power our homes and businesses.

Since 1946, the Administrative Procedure Act has required agencies making decisions on major policy changes to open their process to the public. They are required to give “interested persons” an opportunity to voice their opinions, and only after considering these public comments may agencies proceed with proposed policies and adopt new rules.

This system served us well for decades, but it is growing creaky and showing its age. In

proceedings at the FCC and elsewhere, it is apparent that the public is increasingly shut out of decision-making by the fraud that is flooding public channels for comment. And it’s a good bet that this is only going to get worse. The mechanization and weaponization of the commentfiling process have only just begun.

No one said digital age democracy was going to be easy.

But it’s time to brace ourselves and strengthen our civic infrastructure to withstand what is underway. This is true across government. You can find disturbing parallels between the flood of fake comments in regulatory proceedings and the barrage of posts on social media that was part of a now-infamous campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. In short, there is a concerted effort to exploit our openness. It deserves a concerted response.

This has not yet happened. At the FCC, for instance, anyone who has found their name stolen and misused in the net neutrality docket has been advised to file another statement to that effect in the public record. This is too narrow a solution for such a monumental problem.

Moreover, in its latest budget request, the agency has not

pursued any funding to improve the security of our public comment system. This is hard to fathom. At a minimum, the FCC, like other agencies, should be requesting funds to study the scope of fraud in its public processand putting in place simple security measures.

Even more alarming, the agency has refused to work with those who want to get to the bottom of this mess, such as the attorney general of New York, who has found that tens of thousands of residents in his state — as well as in California, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas — have had their identities stolen. This is not right. Identity theft is a violation of both state and federal law.

In January, the Government Accountability Office announced that it would be reviewing the “extent and pervasiveness of fraud and the misuse of American identities during the federal rulemaking process.” The letter noted the investigation could not begin for five months.

That’s a start. But it’s not enough.

If we do this right, we can find a way to give all Americans — no matter who they are or where they live — a fighting chance at making Washington listen to what they think. n

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SUNDAY, MARCH MARCH 11, 2018 SUNDAY, 11, YEAR2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Disease outbreaks BY

S ETH B ERKLEY

One hundred years ago, Pvt. Albert Mitchell, an Army mess cook sta­ tioned at Fort Riley, Kan., received the first diagnosis of a new strain of influenza that eventually infected approximately 500 million peo­ ple across the globe — about one­third of the world’s population — and led to at least 50 million deaths, far more than the lives lost in the still­raging World War I. The Spanish flu pandemic brought new ur­ gency to the quest to comprehend infectious diseases and the way they work, but the subject is still beset by scientific challenges and popular misunderstandings. Here are five of the most tenacious.

MYTH NO. 1 A pandemic on the scale of Spanish flu is unlikely today.

It’s true that we’re much better than we were a century ago at detection and containment. We have antiviral drugs that save the lives of some infected patients, and the 575,000 lives that swine flu took were a small fraction of the Spanish flu total.

But most global health experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before a combination of risk factors makes us vulnerable to another pandemic. We may even be overdue. Unlike in 1918, a disease can cross the globe in a fraction of the time it takes to show symptoms and before health officials realize that a crisis is brewing. And increasing urbanization worldwide, alongside weak health systems, means vulnerable people are living on top of one another.

MYTH NO. 2 Most adults don’t need the annual seasonal flu vaccine.

It’s true that, in a good year, the vaccine is about 60 percent effective. Still, the seasonal flu vaccine remains the best way to prevent infections. For millions, it can stave off serious complications and even death.

Since 2010, influenza has resulted in up to 60.8 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations and 56,000 deaths per year in the United States, according to the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The seasonal flu vaccine also creates herd immunity, stopping the disease’s spread when a critical mass of people get vaccinated. Some protection is far better than none.

Ideally, as Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and other researchers have recently argued, we’d replace the annual seasonal flu vaccine with a more effective universal one that would cost much more to develop but result in permanent immunity.

Several members of Congress recently proposed $1 billion to fund research for this.

MYTH NO. 3 Some of the deadliest pathogens don’t pose an imminent threat.

Unless we’ve eliminated infectious diseases everywhere in the world, Americans will remain susceptible to them. Viruses travel. Another error some epidemiologists make is to focus on the near crisis at the expense of the far one.

Today’s vaccines prevent fewer than 30 human pathogens. But since 1940, researchers have identified more than 340 new diseases, and the number of annual outbreaks globally has increased from fewer than 800 in 1980 to more than 3,000 by 2010.

The World Health Organization warns that several emerging pathogens with few or no medical

DAVID GOLDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A chest X-ray taken last month shows a child suffering from flu symptoms at Upson Regional Medical Center in Thomaston, Ga.

countermeasures may cause havoc in the near future, including such nasty ones as Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, MERS and SARS coronavirus diseases, Nipah, and Rift Valley fever. That doesn’t include other potentially epidemic diseases such as HIV/ AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, avian influenza and dengue fever, which already have major disease-control efforts but still would benefit from effective vaccines.

MYTH NO. 4 We need bigger vaccine stockpiles to halt outbreaks.

Logistical and economic challenges limit the size of any vaccine stockpile. It’s a complex business to get it just right. Eggbased vaccines, for example, are hard to scale up quickly; vaccines have a shelf life; and producing large quantities of vaccines that may never be used can be expensive and can take scarce resources away from routine immunization. Rather than focus too much on stockpiles, government and nongovernmental organization money would be better spent helping struggling countries immunize their populations to

prevent infection. They should also build health systems capable of detecting and responding to outbreaks before they spread further — the objective of a valuable CDC global health initiative that’s now in danger of substantial downsizing.

MYTH NO. 5 Closing our borders will keep the nastiest bugs out.

Such responses rarely work; pathogens don’t respect borders.

Also, cutting off contact with outbreak-affected countries can compound the problem by grounding supplies and personnel they need to fight the spreading disease. Most countries already take precautions to ensure that potential pathogens don’t cross borders: They require travelers to show immunization records or report symptoms, and subject them to thermal temperature scans at ports of entry. Still, there’s no real substitute for preventing outbreaks at their source, through routine immunization, improved surveillance and other proven public health measures. n Berkley, a physician and epidemiologist, is CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. This was written for The Washington Post.

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