The Washington Post National Weekly - April 7, 2019

SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2019

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CANDACE OWENS IS THE NEW FACE OF BLACK CONSERVATISM BUT WHAT DOES THAT REALLY MEAN? PAGE 129

Politics Trump’s shifting policies 4

Nation In Calif., debating fatal force law 8

5 Myths Floods 23

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A new A new fight fight over over Mueller Mueller report report

BY A SHLEY P ARKER,BY E LLEN A SHLEY N AKASHIMA, P ARKER, E LLEN N AKASHIMA, DEVLIN BARRETT AND DEVLIN C AROLBD ARRETT . L EONNIG AND C AROL D . L EONNIG

The political debate over Thethe political minimal debate inforover the minimal information released so farmation about Mueller’s released so lengthy far about Mueller’s lengthy report seems to have led report to cracks seems into the have special led to cracks in the special counsel’s tight-lippedcounsel’s team. The tight-lipped displeasure team. The displeasure evelations that specialevelations counsel Robert that special counsel Robert among some who worked among onsome the closely who worked held on the closely held S. Mueller III’s still-confidential S. Muellerreport III’s still-confidential report inquiry has begun to surface inquiry in hasthe begun days to since surface in the days since may contain damaging mayinformation contain damaging information Barr released a four-page Barrletter released to Congress a four-page on letter to Congress on about President Trump about ignited President a fresh Trump ignited a fresh March 24 describing March what he 24 said describing were the what he said were the round of political fighting round onofThursday, political fighting usher- on Thursday, usherprincipal conclusions principal of Mueller’s conclusions report. of Mueller’s report. ing in a new phase ofing theinnearly a newtwo-year-old phase of the nearly two-year-old In his letter, Barr said the In his special letter,counsel Barr said didthe special counsel did battle over the Russia probe. battle over the Russia probe. not establish a criminal not conspiracy establish a between criminal conspiracy between Members of Mueller’s Members team haveoftold Mueller’s associ-team have told associthe Trump campaign the andTrump Russia.campaign And he said and Russia. And he said ates they are frustrated ates with they theare limited frustrated infor-with the limited inforthat Mueller did not that reachMueller a conclusion did not“one reach a conclusion “one mation that Attorney mation Generalthat William Attorney P. Barr General William P. Barr way or the other” as to way whether or the Trump’s other” asconto whether Trump’s conhas provided about has theirprovided investigation aboutinto their investigation into duct in office constituted duct obstruction in office constituted of justice. obstruction of justice.

Russian interference in Russian the 2016 interference election and in the 2016 election and “It was much more acute “It was thanmuch Barr more suggestacute than Barr suggestwhether Trump sought whether to obstruct Trump justice, sought ac-to obstruct justice, aced,” said one person, who, ed,” said like others, one person, spokewho, on like others, spoke on cording to multiple people cordingfamiliar to multiple with people the familiar with the BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST the condition of anonymity the condition because of of anonymity the because of the matter. matter. subject’s sensitivity. subject’s sensitivity.

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Thursday letter calling Thursday for Barrletter to “immedicalling for sion Barrgot to started “immedi-

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CONTENTS

This publication was prepared This publication by editorswas at The prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing Washington and distribution Post for printing by our and distribution by our partner publications across partner thepublications country. All articles across the andcountry. All articles and columns have previously columns appeared have in previously The Post orappeared on in The Post or on POLITICS washingtonpost.com and washingtonpost.com have been edited to and fit have this been edited THE to fitNATION this format. For questions orformat. comments For questions regardingorcontent, comments regarding THEcontent, WORLD please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. please e-mail weekly@washpost.com.

If you have a If youCOVER have a STORY question about printingquestion quality, wish abouttoprinting subscribe, quality, or wish to subscribe, or LIFESTYLES would like to place a hold would on delivery, like to place please a hold contact on delivery, your please contact your BOOKS local newspaper’s circulation local newspaper’s department.circulation department. OPINION © 2019 The Washington Post©/ Year 20195,The No.Washington 26 Post / Year 5, No. 26 FIVE MYTHS

WEEKLYWEEKLY

CONTENTS ONOwens THE COVER Candace Owens is ON THE COVER Candace is 4 POLITICS 4 leading Blexit, a campaign 8 THEleading NATIONBlexit, a campaign 8 blacks and other blacks other 10 THEencouraging WORLD 10 andencouraging minorities to leave the Democratic minorities 12 COVER STORYto leave 12the Democratic Party. Photo Party. Photo by KYLE for by KYLE GRILLOT for 17 LIFESTYLES 17 GRILLOT The Washington 18 Post The Washington Post 18 BOOKS 20 OPINION 20 23 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

The Internet needs new rules and regulations MARK ZUCKERBERG is founder and chief executive of Facebook.

Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks. These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone. ¶ I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

First, harmful content.

Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, we have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more.

Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree. I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own. So we’re creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions.

We’re also working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.

Internet companies should be accountable for enforcing standards on harmful content.

It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the

Internet, but when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach.

One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards. Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.

Facebook already publishes transparency reports on how effectively we’re removing harmful content. I believe every major Internet service should do this quarterly, because it’s just as important as financial reporting.

We can see which companies are improving and where we should set the baselines.

Second, legislation is important for protecting elections. Facebook has already made significant changes around political ads: Advertisers in many countries must verify their identities before purchasing political ads. We built a searchable archive that shows who pays for ads, what other ads

JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

they ran and what audiences saw the ads. However, deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.

Online political advertising laws primarily focus on candidates and elections, rather than divisive political issues where we’ve seen more attempted interference. Some laws only apply during elections, although information campaigns are nonstop. And there are also important questions about how political campaigns use data and targeting. We believe legislation should be updated to reflect the reality of the threats and set standards for the whole industry.

Third, effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. I believe it would be good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework.

New privacy regulation in the United States and around the world should build on the protections GDPR provides. It should protect your right to choose how your information is used — while enabling companies to use information for safety purposes and to

provide services. It shouldn’t require data to be stored locally, which would make it more vulnerable to unwarranted access. And it should establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes.

As lawmakers adopt new privacy regulations, I hope they can help answer some of the questions GDPR leaves open. We need clear rules on when information can be used to serve the public interest and how it should apply to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Finally, regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete. But this requires clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services.

This also needs common standards, which is why we support a standard data transfer format and the open source Data Transfer Project.

The rules governing the Internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives. It’s time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for people, companies and governments going forward. n

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BY DAVE WHAMOND

NATO’s biggest problem is Trump NICHOLAS BURNS AND DOUGLAS LUTE Burns, a U.S. ambassador to NATO from 20012005, is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Lute, a U.S. ambassador to NATO from 20132017, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center.

As NATO marked its 70th anniversary this past week, this unique, often unwieldy, 29-member alliance is confronting one of the most difficult set of challenges in its history.

NATO is still the world’s strongest military alliance. But its single greatest danger is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history. Starting with NATO’s founding father, President Harry S. Truman, each of our presidents has considered NATO a vital American interest. President Trump has taken a dramatically different path.

Never before has NATO had an American leader who didn’t appear to believe deeply in NATO itself. During his first two years in office, Trump has questioned NATO’s core commitment embedded in Article V of the alliance’s founding treaty — that an attack on one of the allies will be considered an attack on all. He has been weak and reactive in defending NATO against its most aggressive adversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Fortunately, the vast majority of Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress disagree with Trump on NATO’s value to the United States. They should vote to approve the bills working their way through committees that would reaffirm America’s commitment to Article V and to require congressional approval

should Trump try to diminish our commitment to NATO — or to pull the United States out altogether.

Critics who agree with Trump present three main arguments for why he is right to question NATO. First, they say NATO’s core job was finished with the end of the Cold War. That ignores, however, Russia’s campaign to destabilize NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It also ignores Putin’s attacks on the U.S. and European elections in 20162018, designed to weaken our democracies from within.

Containing Russian power until Putin’s Soviet-trained generation passes from the scene remains a core NATO aim. And, as our report shows, there are new challenges beyond Russia confronting the alliance.

BY DAVE WHAMOND

Second, Trump has claimed the allies are “taking advantage of us.”

Low European defense spending is indeed a problem for NATO’s future. Germany, in particular, must do much more. But NATO allies have produced real growth in defense spending for four consecutive years, starting with Putin’s annexation of Crimea — a collective increase of $87 billion.

On this issue, Trump would be smart to continue to push but while doing so strive to transform himself from chief critic into the unifying leader NATO needs.

A third criticism is that NATO no longer contributes significantly to U.S. security in the world. Consider the facts: Canada and the European allies came to our defense on 9/11 and invoked the Article V mutual defense clause of the treaty. They viewed Osama bin Laden’s attack on America as an attack on them as well. NATO allies went into Afghanistan with us where they and partner nations have suffered more than 1,000 combat deaths.

Most of those countries remain on the ground with our soldiers to this day.

American air and naval bases in allied countries also bring the United States a continent closer to contain Russia in Eastern Europe and confront terrorist threats in the Middle East and

South Asia. This is a decisive advantage for the United States.

The reality is that NATO is a net plus for the United States in political, economic and military terms.

In the decade ahead, the United States will fight two battles with authoritarian powers China and Russia. The first is a battle of ideas that will center on Moscow’s and Beijing’s growing confidence in the superiority of their own systems. We will need the full weight of our democratic allies in NATO to repudiate the authoritarian model in this intensifying global debate.

NATO allies will also be critical in a battle of technology, as the West competes with a more assertive China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology. The United States has a better chance to maintain its qualitative military edge over China if we enlist the scientific and productive capacity of all our allies in Europe as well as in the Indo-Pacific. NATO remains the great power differential between the United States and Russia and China, which have no real allies of their own.

The United States will be far stronger inside NATO as it faces these challenges than it would be alone. n

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TOM TOLES

Joe Biden’s intent does not matter MOLLY ROBERTS is a Washington Post editorial writer covering technology and society.

Is Joe Biden a bad man?

He’s obviously no Harvey Weinstein, allegedly harassing and raping his way through Hollywood during a decades-long reign of terror. He’s no Donald Trump, boasting of grabbing women “by the p---y” and accused of doing more or less that to at least 14 of them. He’s not even an Al Franken, posing in an attempt at comedy as his hands hover over a woman’s breasts and allegedly kissing her forcibly.

No, Biden is just Biden. And according to many of his defenders, that’s excuse enough.

Biden’s encroachments, proven and unproven, are creepy. Lucy Flores, a former Nevada legislator, says he sniffed her hair and slowly kissed the back of her head. A Connecticut woman says he pulled her toward him at a fundraiser to rub noses with her.

A review of meet-and-greets and swearings-in featuring Scranton’s favorite son looks like a highlight reel of competitive handsiness: lips hovering centimeters from ears, cheeks stroked and waists clasped. In one bit of footage, Hillary Clinton seemingly strains against an endless hug.

Ask anyone whether it’s generally okay for a guy to whiff a woman’s conditioner or nestle his nose nearly into her neck when she’s not his romantic partner and has expressed no desire for physical contact, and that person

will probably tell you “no.” Ask whether it’s okay for Joe Biden to do those things, though, and a number of people seem prepared to give him a pass.

Why? The Biden camp argues that all those instances of cringeworthy touching are “expressions of affection” from a self-proclaimed “fingertip politician.” They’re not about gaining sexual gratification. They’re not about displaying power. They’re the opposite: Biden is trying to make women feel comfortable. He’s trying to show that politicians don’t have to be removed from the people — that in fact, they can be very, very close.

“Not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately,” Biden said in a statement last weekend. “If it is suggested I did

so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.”

Biden’s insistence that he never meant to upset anyone is perfectly plausible. There is no photo of him grinning oafishly as he pretends to grope a sleeping woman. There is no “Access Hollywood” tape. But here’s the problem: Talking up Biden’s good intentions keeps men at the center of the harassment conversation when the real project is to put women there.

Stephanie Carter, wife of former defense secretary Ashton Carter, says she didn’t mind when Biden held her by the shoulders for 28-straight seconds and whispered familiarly into her ear.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) says his 13-year-old daughter wasn’t taken aback when Biden kissed the side of her head because she views him as a grandfather figure.

Flores, evidently, felt differently. And that should be the beginning and the end of the conversation.

Biden can’t know when a woman will welcome a head-kiss as an exciting interaction with a beloved leader and when she will want to melt into the floor because it feels like a violation.

That’s why he shouldn’t go around kissing women’s heads — a policy plenty of other politicians don’t seem to have any

trouble adhering to.

On Wednesday, Biden released a video again defending past behavior, but also saying he is able to change.

“The boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. I get it, I get it, I hear what they’re saying and I understand it,” he said. “I’ll be much more mindful, that’s my responsibility and I’ll meet it.

Joe Biden has been able to go his whole life just being Joe Biden, and not worrying too much about how others react.

Sure, that has led to a few gaffes, but otherwise his authenticity has been a selling point. As long as he means well, the consensus has been, all is well. That’s a radical luxury. It’s certainly one women are rarely able to afford.

And it’s why Biden’s incessant touching, while eye-poppingly public for years, has until now been little more than a punchline.

Biden may be a good man in his heart of hearts, and that may distinguish him from the hordes of bad men who hurt women and mean to do it. But men have to do better than not meaning to hurt people. They have to not hurt people, period — even if that means recognizing that sometimes, just being yourself isn’t the best thing for everyone else. n

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Maneuvering Trump’s shifting plans

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans try to adjust as president rolls out new ideas on immigration, health care

BY S EUNG M IN K IM AND E RICA W ERNER

P

resident Trump has left his advisers and GOP lawmakers reeling from policy whiplash this past week, cycling through new ideas on health care and immigration that underscore his continuing struggle to pursue a coherent domestic agenda in a divided Washington.

Trump surprised Republicans with a new pledge to replace the Affordable Care Act, only to backtrack after being confronted with the realities of another all-consuming fight over President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law on Capitol Hill.

Trump has also sent aides and a large part of the federal bureaucracy scrambling to respond to his expansive vow to close the entire

U.S.-Mexico border unless “ALL illegal immigration” is halted by Mexico.

Alarmed lawmakers and business leaders warned that any such move would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy, and administration officials signaled mid-week that they were seeking more limited options to address a surge in migration at the border. By Thursday, Trump had backed down, an-

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) helped dissuade President Trump from pursuing a new health-care fight.

nouncing he is placing Mexico on a one-year warning before taking any action.

Even efforts on which the White House has worked closely with congressional GOP leaders have seen setbacks, such as a massive disaster funding bill that stalled Monday amid partisan sniping over aid to Puerto Rico. Trump has inflamed the fight by repeatedly denigrating the island’s leader-

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ship and implying that Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory — is separate from the United States.

The battles illustrate the difficulties Trump and Republicans have had in adjusting to Democratic control of the House after two years of uncontested GOP power in Congress and the White House. But many Republicans say they have adapted to the pandemonium — learning to privately sway Trump by warning him of the consequences of his policy declarations.

GOP lawmakers, for instance, think they have successfully headed off any major health-care effort, which they fear would open them up to damaging Democratic attacks. Even so, a legal challenge targeting the Obama-era health law, and backed by the Trump administration, virtually ensures that the issue will remain at the forefront of the president’s reelection campaign.

“Obviously this is a president who tends sometimes to move on his own and then obviously has some of those conversations later,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Tuesday of Trump’s recent push on health care and the border. “That’s the dynamic that everybody up here deals with.”

Trump had several such conversations on replacing the health law, commonly known as Obamacare, amid days of upbeat proclamations that the GOP would become the “Party of Healthcare.” By late Monday night — and in subsequent comments in the Oval Office on Tuesday — Trump bowed to the political pressure by announcing he would rather vote on health care after the 2020 elections.

“If we get back the House, and on the assumption we keep the Senate and we keep the presidency — which I hope are two good assumptions — we’re going to have phenomenal health care,” Trump said as he sat next to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office.

He promised that Republicans will unveil their Obamacare replacement plan “at the appropriate time” and blamed Democrats for turning health care into a political issue.

Despite the punt, officials at the White House continued meetings to discuss a potential health-care plan, led by Domestic Policy Council chief Joe Grogan, and circulated principles earlier Tuesday, according to a senior aide.

But congressional Republicans made it clear they would direct

their attention elsewhere. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), whom Trump tapped last week as one of his point men on health care in the Senate, instead rolled out legislation Tuesday to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.

When asked about Trump’s idea to hold a vote on a health-care plan after the election, Scott responded: “I think you’d have to ask the president. I know what I’m going to focus on. I’m going to focus on drug prices.”

One genesis of Trump’s public retreat was private nudging from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who along with most Senate Republicans was displeased by the unexpected healthcare push.

In at least two phone calls during the past week, McConnell pressed Trump to listen to those around him — his advisers, senators and political strategists — who were urging the president to reverse course on health care, according to an official familiar with the conversation. McConnell questioned why Republicans would want an intraparty fight over health care at a time when Democrats are divided on their own proposals, said the official, who spoke on the condition of

Trucks line up to cross the border at Tijuana, Mexico, this past week. President Trump threatened to close the southern border multiple times during the week before saying on Thursday that he would give Mexico a one-year warning to improve conditions at the border.

Throughout the week, lawmakers and advisers warned the president of the potential economic consequences of closing the border.

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anonymity to discuss private calls.

During a conversation Monday, the majority leader made the case that while the GOP-led Senate could pass a health-care bill endorsed by Trump, the president would not be able to support the product that would emerge from the House once Democrats got their hands on it, the official said.

McConnell told reporters Tuesday that he had a “good conversation” with Trump and that he and the president were now on the same page.

“I made it clear to him we were not going to be doing that in the Senate,” McConnell said of health care, stressing the challenges of writing legislation that could pass muster with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “We don’t have a misunderstanding about that.”

Many in the GOP sympathize with Trump and his frustrations — and with his tendency to act on his own on immigration or to push Republicans on something they don’t want to do, like health care.

“Listen, before the 2018 election, certainly in Wisconsin, I was saying, ‘Don’t elect Democrats to the House; if the Democrats take over the House all we’re going to be talking about is investigation, talk of impeachment, it won’t be about legislation, it won’t be about solving these problems,’ ” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “I hate to say I was right.”

Still, some Republican senators have grown accustomed to not taking Trump’s threats seriously.

One such threat was Trump’s vow to seal the border, which he reiterated in the Oval Office on Tuesday despite having been warned of the potential economic consequences by his top advisers.

Even as he insisted that Mexico must do more to stem the numbers of migrants arriving on the U.S. border, Trump softened Monday’s threat on Tuesday, saying that he would close “large sections of the border, maybe not all of it.”

“It’s the only way we’re getting a response, and I’m ready to do it,” Trump said. “And I will say this: Many people want me to do it.”

On Capitol Hill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) brushed off Trump’s remarks: “Until he closes the border, I don’t believe it.”

On Thursday, that threat was removed when Trump issued his one-year warning. n

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2020 hopefuls push sweeping ideas BY

C HELSEA J ANES

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ete Buttigieg wants to abolish the electoral college. Sen. Elizabeth Warren hopes to ban gerrymandering. Sen. Cory Booker talks about limiting terms for Supreme Court justices. Beto O’Rourke is weighing an expansion of the high court.

The Democratic presidential hopefuls, prodded by a frustrated base, are pushing fundamental changes to the American political system. Aimed at changing how presidents are chosen and laws are passed, the proposals go beyond typical campaign issues such as health care and taxes to challenge the basic rules of American democracy.

Many of those ideas face long odds against enactment. But the conversation speaks volumes about the state of the Democratic Party in the age of Trump, reflecting a sentiment in the party that the system has stopped working fairly — a grievance once voiced more often by conservatives, including President Trump.

The list of Democratic complaints is long. Trump captured the White House despite losing the popular vote to a Democrat. So did George W. Bush (though he won reelection with a majority).

Republicans draw congressional districts to elect themselves, and Democrats remain angry over what they consider the hijacking of a Supreme Court seat by Republicans in 2016.

Trump’s willingness to flout long-standing rules has prompted Democrats to look for their own ways to reshape the system.

“When we’re talking about things that might entail constitutional reform, it’s a very long game,” said Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind. “But I think you do it out of the gate, if only to remind people of the level of ambition we have. . . . We’ve sometimes underestimated how much America can handle.”

Republicans say these proposals are radical efforts by Democrats to change the rules because they’re losing the game. After

BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

Frustrated Democrats propose changes to courts, elections, but likelihood they’ll pass is low years of benefiting from left-leaning judges, Sen. Marco Rubio (RFla.) says, liberals now want to pack the courts because Trump is appointing conservatives.

“We must prevent further destabilization of essential institutions,” Rubio tweeted recently.

“Court packing is quickly becoming a litmus test for 2020 Democratic candidates.”

Democrats and Republicans are also waging a state-by-state battle over voting logistics, including what kind of ID to require and when to purge electoral rolls.

Democrats accuse Republicans of suppressing votes; GOP leaders say Democrats are protecting electoral fraud.

The ideas bubbling up in the 2020 campaign are far-reaching, encompassing all branches of government, and sometimes raising constitutional issues.

Few of these notions have sparked as much passion as the

push to abolish the electoral college, the winner-take-all system in which each state is apportioned a certain number of votes based on congressional representation.

Under that system, the last two Republicans to win the presidency received fewer votes than their Democratic opponents: Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 3 million votes but prevailed in the electoral college, and George W. Bush received about 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000.

Republicans say the electoral college rightly preserves the influence of small states; Democrats warn that if presidents regularly win with a minority of the vote, Americans will reject the system as unfair.

Warren (D-Mass.) has been among the most outspoken, arguing that the electoral college encourages candidates to ignore any solidly red or blue state.

Demonstrators rally against gerrymandering outside the U.S. Supreme Court last month. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 candidate, has called for abolishing the practice.

“Here’s the deal,” she said in March at a CNN town hall meeting in Mississippi. “We get to the general election for the highest office in this land, and no presidential candidate comes to Alabama or Mississippi. They’re not going to Massachusetts or California, either. They are not coming because we are not the states that are in play.”

Before he won the presidency, Trump agreed, calling the electoral college “a disaster for our democracy.” But a few days after his victory — when he won the electoral college and lost the popular vote — he called it “genius.”

Democrats have also become increasingly impatient with partisan gerrymandering, the process of redrawing district lines to benefit one party. It’s a practice both parties have used to their advantage, but Republicans have benefited more in recent years with majority control of more state governments.

Booker (D-N.J.) has called gerrymandering “undemocratic,” and Warren says it should be abolished. A bill approved by House Democrats in March, dubbed H.R. 1, “provides for states to establish independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions” in addition to addressing voter access and election integrity.

Few events in recent years have also angered Democrats as much as the decision by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to deny a hearing in 2016 for President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland — a move that paved the way for Trump to appoint Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to the high court and ensure a narrow conservative majority.

The idea of adding justices to the Supreme Court — “court packing” — has carried a negative connotation since President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to expand the court in the late 1930s. Roosevelt hit a political wall and suffered one of his most resounding political defeats on the issue. That some Democrats are willing reconsider the idea is perhaps a testament to their frustration.n

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LEADING A NEW BLACK CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

T

he lights must be low, the music deafening, the bass thumping — this is not your grandmother’s Republican mixer. No, really: Candace Owens knows that the grandmothers of the people coming most likely vote Democratic. Their parents probably do, too. Hell, the people who’ve shown up no doubt did as well, unthinkingly, before they opened their eyes and their ears and their minds. ¶ All the more reason for things to pop, which is why Owens, a 29-year-old rising right-wing star and communications director for conservative student group Turning Point USA, is agitatedly giving directions to the crew at the Globe Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. This is the inaugural rally of Blexit, her three-month-old campaign to encourage African Americans (and Latinos, and other minorities) to leave the Democratic Party — that is, mount a massive “black exit” from the left. For too long, Owens tells me, African Americans have been “mentally enslaved” on the Democratic plantation, and it’s high time they became “free.” “Sixty years black people have been voting the same. What have we gotten back?” she says. “That’s the plantation. We do the work, we make sure you get elected every four years. You get the power, and we get absolutely nothing back.”

BY REBECCA NELSON

PHOTOS BY KYLE GRILLOT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

Around her, volunteers in neon Blexitbranded sweatshirts mill about, waiting to be called into service. One asks Owens which media outlets are covering the festivities.

“Breitbart,” she rattles off. “Vice. The Washington Post Magazine, in all my insanity.” She gives me a wide smile and points to my open notebook. “I never want to read that.”

The Globe is outfitted to accommodate what Owens has christened a “declaration of independence”: Neon-colored signs — “Build the Wall,” “Off the Plantation” — have been placed carefully among the hundreds of black folding chairs, ready for attendees to hoist in the air.

Two giant fans flank the stage, filled with confetti, because what coup d’etat is complete without confetti? Outside, in the placid sunshine of Southern California in January, volunteers pass out Blexit sweatshirts and instruct those entering to put them on. (Even the attendant in the women’s washroom, handing out paper towels and selling Kit Kats, is wearing one.) The revolution will be live-streamed, tweeted and Instagrammed, and Owens knows what it takes to put on a show.

A few minutes before she kicks things off, she finally stops running around, and we perch on black leather couches in the green room. “This means everything to me,” she says.

She’s still on edge but feels better now that the theater has filled with patriots in red “Make America Great Again” caps and phones, so many phones, lifted in the air to document everything, even before anything starts. There are 500 or so people in the audience; it’s standing room only. Owens sports what can only be described as rally-chic: neon yellow Blexit sweatshirt, black skinny jeans and strappy three-inch stilettos that she wears, impossibly, throughout the afternoon (her secret, she tells me, is to buy a half-size bigger, which leaves room for the swelling). From backstage, we hear a chant erupt from the crowd: “Build! The! Wall! Build! The! Wall!”

Owens grins. Her fiance, George Farmer, the chairman of Turning Point UK and son of Conservative British politician Michael Farmer, lets loose a jubilant fist pump.

Since her career in politics began just a year and a half ago, Owens has become a provocative force on YouTube and Twitter and, of course, as a frequent contributor to Fox News.

Police brutality, she says, is not a concern “whatsoever” for the black community, and accounts of rising white supremacy are media fabrications. She’s racked up nearly 9 million YouTube views and 1 million followers on Twitter. She has met with President Trump in the Oval Office and, perhaps more impressive, has dazzled Kanye West.

Just 8 percent of black voters identify as Republican or lean toward the party, according to Pew Research Center. Owens represents a counternarrative, a surprising poster child for an old set of ideas around African Americans and conservatism. With her youth, charisma and innate instinct for viral outrage, she has supplanted the staid likes of Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson as the face of the

African American right. But how seriously should we take her?

“This is the revolution,” she tells the crowd in Los Angeles, “and we are going to save America.”

Never mind that Trump’s approval rating with black voters hovers around 10 percent, according to Gallup. This is just the beginning.

B

lexit was born from a chance encounter with Nigel Farage in February 2018. For her entire political career — at that point, seven months — Owens had dreamed of helming a black revolt against the left. At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, where she had participated in a panel discussing “How the Far Left and the Mainstream Media Got in Bed Together,” she was sitting backstage when Farage, the British politician who spearheaded Brexit, waltzed in. It hit her like a thunderbolt: There needs to be a Blexit.

She created a website, a line of colorful merchandise and a tagline: “We free.” “Black people aren’t free in this country,” she says, “but we’re on the way.” It’s the morning after the Los Angeles rally, and we’re having coffee in the restaurant at the five-star hotel where Owens is staying. Farmer is also here, because his unremitting presence at her side this weekend is nonnegotiable. It is 8:30, and I am still exhausted from the rally. She managed the entire event and is upbeat and effervescent.

“The left thinks black people are stupid,” Owens tells me. “Black people, we keep proving them right. That’s the problem.” Her logic is so certain, her presence so self-assured, that it feels like everything would be easier if you just believed her. She punctuates her statements with “okay,” but it sounds more like “uhkay?,” which makes you feel like you must

Owens backstage with her fiance, George Farmer. In the rear is conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who spoke at the event.

be some kind of idiot if you don’t see the sense in what she’s saying.

Owens’s approach mirrors Trump’s in its brash, personality-driven rhetoric, in her frequent use of the third person, in her caustic skewering of the left. During our interview, when I ask her what happened after she left college, she smirks. “What happened! I can’t even hear that anymore without laughing.”

She’s referring to the title of Hillary Clinton’s post-2016-election book. “What happened? I lost. The end.”

She says she doesn’t understand why critics think Trump is racist for calling certain nations “s---hole” countries (“They are s--holes”), and questions the modern-day existence of the Ku Klux Klan. When I ask whether she believes white supremacy still exists, she shoots back, “Define white supremacy,” and then defines it as “third-wave feminism.” It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day when we meet for our interview, and she is certain that King would have voted for Trump.

Says Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator and longtime adviser to Ben Carson who counts Owens as a friend: “She’s channeling Trump when she’s speaking. Because sometimes she can be unfiltered, and sometimes she can be pretty sassy and not always sound like a lady. She can be a little gangster-esque.” But, he says, “her message is very substantive.”

Central to that message is that African Americans — all minorities, really — have been used by the “Democrat” Party (never “Democratic,” a verbal tic common on the right and intended, it seems, as a pretty sick burn). We can draw a straight line, Owens says, from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which expanded welfare, to black

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COVER STORY single mothers dependent on government today: Welfare is generally directed to single parents, which encourages fathers to leave their children and would-be wives. The problem, she argues, is not contained to politicians and policy. It’s the left writ large: the liberals who run the mainstream media, who craft Hollywood movies and public school curriculums and “Sesame Street.”

To Owens, the left’s espousal of permanent victimhood is one of its most insidious lies: “It’s because of racism, because of some imaginary white boogeyman, that you’re never gonna be successful.” That mentality, she says, leads to excuses rather than action. “We call it the Oppression Olympics,” she says. “ ‘I’m black, you’re white, so I’m more oppressed than you.’

‘Well, I’m a woman and you’re a man, okay, so I’m more oppressed than you.’ ‘I’m a lesbian black woman and so I’m more oppressed than you.’ ‘I’m a disabled black woman’ — that’s really, if you want to get to the top of the hierarchy of oppression, you’ve got to be a disabled, black, lesbian woman, and then you win.”

Do you think a black, lesbian, disabled person, I ask, has it harder in life than, I don’t know, a white man? “First off, no. Let me tell you, if anything in this society, there’s almost a level of black privilege now.” She explains: “He can’t say anything” — she gestures toward Farmer, who’s white — or else “he’s called a racist. I can say anything that I want because I’m black. So that’s a whole new privilege, that black people get away with saying things that white people could never, ever, ever in any context say.”

America, she says, is not a racist country.

While she says there will always be individual racists — “There’s always going to be somebody ignorant that hates somebody because of the color of their skin” — “the question is, is it affecting me from getting from point A to point B? Is it societal? Are there laws in place that make it impossible for me as a black woman to do something that a white man can accomplish?

And the answer is no.” She waves a dismissive hand at the tony Beverly Hills restaurant. “I don’t give a s--- if someone is sitting in this restaurant going, ‘Oh, my God, look at that black girl.’ I don’t care. Have a good day.”

What about systemic racism? I ask. What about housing policies from the 1950s and ’60s that discriminated against black people, largely preventing them from accumulating wealth that white people have through homeownership? Do you think any of that has affected — She cuts me off. “No, none of it has affected anything. No. I think any person today can be successful if they follow very simple rules in their lives. Stay out of trouble, don’t have children before you get married. And get a job.” These steps, she says, are proven to decrease poverty. “Our community does not follow these rules at all.”

O

wens grew up in Stamford, Conn., in a low-income housing tower on the edge of downtown, what she remembers as “a pretty s--- apartment.” She’s the third of four children and shared a room with her two

TOP: Owens with libertarian radio host Larry Elder at the rally.

ABOVE: Placards await the audience.

sisters. Her younger sister, Brittany Davis, says that as a child, Owens constantly asked, “Why?” — like “a sponge that just wanted to be soaked for more knowledge.” She went all-in on whatever she did, from cheerleading to a fifth-grade production of “Annie,” and stood up for Davis and others when she felt something was unjust. “Whether she was wrong or right,” Davis recalls, “she was always fearless.”

When she was 11 or 12, her family moved in with her grandparents. “I had a pretty dysfunctional childhood,” Owens says. “I probably lived through more in my first eight years of life than most people live through in their entire lives.” She’s vague about the specifics and says she plans to reveal what she endured in an upcoming book.

Owens learned early on that she didn’t want to be a victim. During her senior year of high school, a group of boys left her a series of voice mails saying they would kill her because she was black and threatening to tar and feather her family. She told her principal, and because one of the boys was the son of then-Stamford mayor (and later Connecticut governor) Dannel Malloy, the story quickly attracted media attention.

The NAACP got involved, and Owens had to leave school for six weeks to wait out the firestorm. Her family ultimately settled with the school district for $37,500.

Owens, who struggled with anorexia for years afterward, had unwittingly — unwillingly — become a poster child for racial victimhood. “I

KLMNO WEEKLY

think it made her have her eyes a little more open as far as being in control of who she is and her image,” Davis says. “She will never allow herself to be presented as someone that’s weak.”

After high school, she studied journalism at the University of Rhode Island but dropped out during her junior year because, she says, her loan was declined. Now, journalists are the target of much of her ire. At the Blexit rally, when speaker Ann Coulter asserted that reporters “have got to be killed for democracy to live,” Owens cheered from the side of the stage. In our hotel interview, she bashed the media repeatedly, including The Washington Post. As she went on, it got awkward. If The Post is an “anti-Trump publication” that’s “not interested in pursuing truth or trying to get to know Trump supporters,” why accept my interview request?

“I don’t care. I mean, you want to profile me, it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt me,” she says. In fact, all the coverage only boosts her profile. “The more you smear me, the more you help me.”

Owens has been called an “Uncle Tom,” a “bed wench” — and even worse. The insults serve to underline her point, that her skin color is “proprietary” to the left and deviation is not allowed. But they can get to her. “She comes across as throwing the hammer down nonstop,” says Brandon Tatum, who works with Owens at Turning Point. “But if you were ever to sit down with Candace in a more personal setting, she’s a very compassionate person, and she’s emotional. She takes this stuff seriously, and sometimes when people say stuff to her, it hurts her feelings.” She’s had to hire a bodyguard because of the constant threats.

And in reality, friends say, she is much more interested in hearing new perspectives than her hard-line public persona suggests. “While Candace may appear to some people as this irrational person, I can assure you, at least from my own personal conversations, that is far from the truth,” says her friend Shermichael Singleton, a black Republican political consultant. “She is someone who’s willing to grow, is amenable to learning things and amenable to testing out her ideas and challenging herself.”

T

he story of Owens’s political awakening has become part of her viral lore. Until her mid-20s, she wasn’t especially political — she voted for the first time in last year’s midterm elections — but identified, in broad strokes, as a liberal. In 2016, after working at a private equity firm and running a lifestyle blog, she launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign for a start-up called Social Autopsy, an anti-bullying company that promised to create “the first-ever search database that compiles and allows the public to easily access the digital footprint of individuals and companies.” To many people, it sounded like an unchecked way to dox — or publish private information about — anyone, not just trolls.

(Owens had never heard of doxing.)

The day the Kickstarter went live, she got a call from Zoe Quinn, a target of the sexist online harassment campaign Gamergate.

Quinn urged her to end the project. Owens

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COVER STORY

believed that this — along with the influx of racist emails she received later that evening — was proof that Quinn was making up the harassment and was terrified that Social Autopsy’s technology would reveal her scheme.

Owens told her side of the story to multiple outlets, including New York magazine and The Washington Post. The New York article pointed out the holes in her logic, essentially painting her as someone who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t understand how the Internet worked. “I was talking to all these journalists thinking that they were gonna run the story about this crazy girl who’s been faking her harassment, that they would want to crack this story,” she told me. “Instead, they’re all writing horrible things.”

The only publication that wrote the story from her point of view was Breitbart, the conservative news outlet. “It changed everything for me,” she says. Before that, she believed, like many liberals, that the website — which has a history of peddling alt-right views — was a “white nationalist, white supremacist, racist publication.” She started reading it every day. She devoured works by conservative economist Thomas Sowell, listened to interviews with libertarian radio host Larry Elder, watched speeches from free-market theorist Milton Friedman. She turned on Fox News for the first time. Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-media rhetoric and broad allegations of fake news were skyrocketing, and Owens found herself nodding along.

“I had this anxiety,” she tells me of her initial foray into politics. “How could the whole world not know that everything is not what it seems to be and that we’re all being manipulated and lied to?” After a year of soul-searching, she wanted to share the gospel. She made a YouTube channel, new Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and a Patreon to collect monthly donations for her “funny video clips and political commentary.”

Her first video, posted in July 2017, featured her “coming out” as a conservative to her parents. In it, she plays herself, and also her mom and dad (she wears a terry cloth bathrobe as Mrs. Owens, and her Mr. Owens sports a backward cap). In subsequent videos, her style is bracing and in-your-face. She speaks directly into the camera, breaking into a whiny, infantilized voice to mock feminists, sexual assault victims and gun control advocates.

Owens frames her videos, her speeches — her career — around the idea that she is sure about things, and if you opened your eyes, you would be, too. “Candace Owens is like the alarm clock. If you’re asleep, she’s going to wake you up,” says Tatum. “She’s not afraid to get in your face. She’s not afraid to come up with something like Blexit. She’s not afraid to do anything.”

A few months after she posted her first video, she spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Fla. Charlie Kirk, the founder and executive director of Turning Point, saw

her speak. “Within 30 seconds of seeing her onstage, I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, I have not seen a talent like this in my six years of politics,’ ” Kirk told me. “This is a counternarrative. The media says people like her don’t exist. She’s courageous, she’s confident, she’s clear, she cuts through a lot of the B.S., and she doesn’t back down.” He hired her on the spot.

A big part of Owens’s appeal is just that: A young black woman who unabashedly supports Trump is unexpected. Just 4 percent of black women voted for him in 2016. But Corey D. Fields, a sociology professor at Georgetown University and author of “Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans,” says her chastising rhetoric could turn off more black people than it attracts. “Is the audience for Candace Owens actually black people?” he says. “Or ... white conservatives who don’t want to think of themselves as racist, but in some ways want to support an agenda that’s racially questionable?”

At Turning Point, Owens had a larger platform. She launched a nationwide college tour to spread the group’s program of limited government and free markets. Then, one day in April 2018, Kanye West thrust her into the national spotlight. “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” the rapper tweeted, followed by a series of distinctly Ye distillations of her message. Owens, a longtime fan, reveled in his adulation.

I

was preparing for an interview with Owens on a Friday in February when a video of her began making the rounds online. In the clip, from a December Turning Point event in England, Owens responds to a question about the future of nationalism and globalism.

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism,’ ” Owens says. “I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. ... Whenever we say

Owens greets supporters after the rally. The communications director for the conservative student group Turning Point USA has had a rapid ascent in right-wing politics.

‘nationalism,’ the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine.”

“The problem,” she continued, “is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany.

He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.”

Shortly afterward, I got an email from Owens’s spokeswoman that she would need to push back our call. I clicked over to Owens’s Twitter feed, where she was broadcasting a live video response to the controversy. “Leftist journalists are crazy, and they’re trying to make it seem like I said something I would never say,” she told viewers. Hitler, she said, was “a homicidal, psychotic maniac,” and there is “no excuse or defense ever for ... everything that he did.”

When we got on the phone, she was worked up. The liberal media was twisting her words again, trying to make her seem anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler. She’d attended the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Israel, for God’s sake! “I’m trying to say that I think Americans are super-ignorant about what nationalism is. The only context — if you ask any American about nationalism, they think of Hitler, which is kind of ridiculous. Because a nationalist wouldn’t kill [his] own citizens, and that’s what he did,” she said, the words gushing out of her mouth rapidfire. “The question was about whether or not ‘nationalism’ is a dirty word. It had nothing — the question wasn’t even about Hitler.”

Owens views the world through a meme-ified, battle-ready right-wing lens, where there are globalists and there are nationalists, and the systematic genocide of millions of Jews is beside the point. It makes sense: She came to political consciousness during the Trump era, where everything is a Twitter fight to dunk, and owning the libs is not just a cable-news objective, but an Oval Office agenda, too. Yes, there are historical similarities between her ideas and those of previous generations of black conservatives — but her style is entirely of a new era. If she is indeed destined to be the long-term face of black conservatism, the movement is going to be very different from what has come before.

She does, for what it’s worth, appear to be sincere. Black conservatives, and particularly black Trump supporters, are often criticized for being brainwashed or opportunistic. While Owens scoffs at the criticism (“Who isn’t an opportunist?”), it’s clear that her heart is in this. She truly believes that if black Americans defected and ushered Trump into another term, their collective fortunes would rise. “I feel like it’s my life’s purpose,” she tells me, in the most earnest moment of our interviews. “I think I was put on this Earth to do this. It’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than Candace Owens.” It would be so much easier if the rest of us just opened our eyes. n

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LIFESTYLES

KLMNO WEEKLY

The purr-fect traveling companion He set off to bike around the world by himself.

But soon a four-legged partner was along for the ride.

Dean Nicholson is biking around the world with a cat, Nala, at his side.

BY

I SAAC S TANLEY- B ECKER

D

ean Nicholson was pedaling up a hill in Bosnia, near the border of Montenegro, when he heard a plaintive meow.

He looked over his shoulder. In the lambent December light, he saw a gray-and-white kitten chasing him up the incline.

The burly and bearded 31-yearold itinerant, with a thick Scottish brogue and a Maori design inked on his left upper arm, pressed on his brakes and dismounted.

Nicholson had set out three months earlier from his home in Dunbar, a town on the eastern coast of Scotland, to traverse the world on his green Trek 920 bike.

He cycled from Scotland to England, hopped on a ferry to the Netherlands, and then traveled through Belgium, France, Switzerland and down to Italy. From the coast of the Adriatic, he caught a ferry to Croatia and then made his way into Bosnia.

He was seeking distance from his job as a welder, which had left him listless and depleted.

“I couldn’t do the 9-to-5 thing,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I wanted to see the world and see what state it’s in."

That meant choosing a bike and the open air over a bus or train compartment. “Otherwise you miss out on the smaller towns,” he explained.

And it meant going alone.

Or so he thought. The Balkans had a surprise in store for him, in the form of a feline and fellow traveler. He called her Nala, after the lioness friend in his favorite film, “The Lion King.” The tiny animal, with eyes like jewels, wouldn’t leave his side.

So began a second, not-so-solo leg of his round-the-world ride, as Nicholson and Nala took their place in the pantheon of epic duos melding man and beast, from Snowy and Tintin to Snoopy and Charlie Brown.

Their journey became a sensation on social media this past week. A video posted by the

DEAN NICHOLSON/INSTAGRAM

Dodo, an animal-centric website, had been viewed nearly 8 million times on Twitter by Thursday morning.

At first, Nicholson didn’t know what to do with the desperate kitten on the side of the road. He was already carrying too much cargo. Besides, he had grown up with dogs and considered himself loyal to man’s best friend. But the animal seemed intent on joining him.

“As soon as I got her to relax, that’s when I decided to bring her with me,” Nicholson said.

He plopped her in his front basket, clearing out some digital equipment to make room for his companion.

She wasn’t satisfied with that perch, however, and instead climbed up onto Nicholson’s shoulder. From there, she kept watch and nuzzled him. Quickly becoming accustomed to the bumps and swerves of the road, she dozed off.

Nicholson found a vet in Montenegro, where he learned that she was about 7 weeks old and had no microchip.

“So I was like, ‘I’ll just keep her,’ ” he recalled thinking. He had a chip installed, and made sure Nala got the vaccinations that would allow her to accompany him across borders.

He found a proper cat compartment — which even boasted a small window allowing Nala to peer outside — and purchased a harness to make sure she stayed by his side.

With that, the pair returned to the open road, making their way to the ancient Montenegrin city of Budva, with winding stone streets and sweeping views of the Adriatic.

“Nala stole the attention of every passing tourist and even managed to get me a free pint,” Nicholson wrote of the visit in December on his Instagram page, which quickly drew loyal followers.

The two were inseparable, as Nala clung to Nicholson’s back when he was cycling or burrowed in his armpit when he stopped to pitch his tent at night.

They shared meals at their deserted campsites, as he devoured

pasta and fries and she ate cat food. He sipped coffee. She lapped water.

Bouts of bad weather slowed the journey to Tirana, the Albanian capital, but the time passed quickly for Nicholson, who was distracted by his furry friend.

Passersby were distracted, too.

Nicholson wasn’t used to getting so much attention. But he understood why heads turned to follow the cyclist with a cat strapped to his handlebars or hanging from his neck. “It’s an unusual sight,” he allowed.

At the end of the year, Nicholson briefly put their journey on hold. The rain and cold that had trailed them down the Albanian coast had left Nala with a chest infection. She was given antibiotics, and he posted up with her in a hostel for several weeks of recovery.

By early January, things were looking up, as Nicholson documented his companion’s second cough-free day.

“She’s fearless,” he said of the feline.

On Jan. 17, they were ready to set off once again, with a more secure — and waterproof — setup for Nala. Greece beckoned.

They tootled through the birthplace of democracy, sunned themselves on beaches and hiked through forests. Nicholson scored his first shower in a month when a random family in Athens agreed to take them in for a week.

Now, Nicholson and Nala are in Santorini, the crescent-shaped island in the Aegean Sea where they plan to pass the summer months. He landed a job as a sea kayak tour guide.

When autumn rolls around, he’ll pack his bags and head for Australia, passing through Turkey and Georgia and then making up his route as he goes.

From Australia, he plans to fly to Argentina, and then to cycle all the way up to Canada.

By the time he’s finished, Nicholson will have seen remote corners of the world.

“I’ll also have seen this cat grow up, which is maybe even more incredible,” he said. n

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SUNDAY, April, 7, 2019 23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Floods BY

S AMANTHA M ONTANO

Flooding, the costliest and most common disaster in the United States, leaves no part of the country untouched: from nor’easters along the coast of Maine, to king tides in Florida, to overflowing rivers in Nebraska, to mudslides in California. After a “bomb cyclone” swamped the Midwest earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned that this spring might be “an unprecedented flood season,” putting 200 million Americans at risk. Images of entire cities underwater, boats floating down interstates and bridges washed away capture the public’s attention. Despite the frequency of floods, dangerous myths persist, shaping how we prepare and respond to them. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 Floods are “natural” disasters.

Disasters are created by the interaction of a hazard and our communities. It may be natural for heavy rainfall or snowmelt to cause rivers to overflow their banks, but the actual destruction that results — damaged infrastructure, destroyed homes, ruined crops, washed-away topsoil — is a result of human behavior. Human activities destroy natural flood protection and put more people in harm’s way. When forests are cut down and bayous paved over to make way for development, it exacerbates a community’s overall flood risk.

MYTH NO. 2 Homeowner’s insurance covers flood damage.

Finding out your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover floods is an unwelcome surprise when you’re standing in the middle of your inundated living room.

Nearly all home insurance policies exclude floods. When widespread flooding nationwide in the early 1900s overwhelmed private insurance agencies, they stopped offering flood coverage.

In 1968, in an effort to fill the gap, Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

It is now the primary source of flood coverage for the United

States, with more than 5 million policies issued in 2018. This covers only a fraction of people who might need it, though. In Southeast Texas, which has relatively high rates of NFIP enrollment, 80 percent of residents were uninsured during Hurricane Harvey.

MYTH NO. 3 A “100-year flood” is a historic, once-in-a-century disaster.

Describing floods in terms of “100-year,” “500-year” and “1,000-year” often makes people think the disaster was the most severe to occur in that time frame — as encapsulated by President Trump’s tweet calling Harvey a “once in 500 year flood!”

In fact, the metric communicates the flood risk of a given area: A home in a 100-year flood plain has a 1 percent chance of flooding in a given year. In 2018, Ellicott City, Md., experienced its second 1,000-year flood in two years, and with Harvey, Houston faced its third 500-year flood in three years.

That risk constantly changes, because of factors such as the natural movement of rivers, the development of new parcels of land, and climate change’s influence on rainfall, snowmelt, storm surges and sea level.

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG

The March deluge that swamped the Midwest, causing at least $3 billion in damage, may be only the beginning. Federal weather officials predict that this will be one of the worst years for flooding.

MYTH NO. 4 Looting is common after floods.

This myth partly stems from a misunderstanding of what “looting” means. There is a clear distinction between ransacking a jewelry store and taking emergency medical supplies from a pharmacy, and some reports of looting mistakenly describe the latter.

Decades of research has found that looting after disasters is extremely rare. In a study of 100 such events, Disaster Research Center experts found many stories and rumors about looting, but very few verified cases. Instead, people engage in pro-social behavior: They act rationally, even generously, to help one another.

This myth has dangerous consequences: It can deter people from evacuating their homes. In interviews with researchers, residents who refused to leave before Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Bonnie in 1998 cited the desire to protect their property as a reason.

MYTH NO. 5 Floods discourage people from building in risky areas.

Our approach to emergency management encourages people to rebuild rather than move. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that for every $100 the Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent to rebuild flooded homes, it has allocated only $1.72 to move people and buy their properties.

And residents aren’t just staying put: People are moving to floodprone areas. An analysis by the magazine Governing found that population growth within 100year floodplains was faster than in areas outside flood zones. And a report by Climate Central and Zillow found that in New Jersey, about 2,700 new homes, worth an estimated $2.6 billion, rose in the flood-risk zone in 2009, “most likely driven by reconstruction following Sandy.” n Montano is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Management at North Dakota State University.

15 19

SUNDAY, April, 7, 2019 SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2019

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Exploring the costs of colonialism

The poster-boy artist of catharsis

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

N

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARK A THITAKIS

ovels about the fate of nations tend to be complex affairs. But novelists have developed a particular knack for bringing a freewheeling spirit to a messy, multivalent country.

Namwali Serpell’s vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, “The Old Drift,” is about colonialism in Serpell’s native country of Zambia, but it addresses themes of oppression and victimization from a slant angle. It is a multigenerational saga, stretching from the late 19th century to the near future, but the family tree gets so knotted that it complicates matters of legacy and inheritance.

The story opens in the colony, where the British uneasily intersect with natives, and the natives with an Italian family running a hotel there. Those three groups provide the novel with three families followed across three generations, a trio of threads that dangle and eventually braid. The most peculiar is Sibilla, a daughter of an Italian hotelier born coated in hair, Cousin Itt-like — “if you suspended it from her body, it would form a sphere.” That mane will become an important plot point.

But more immediately, by marrying a civil engineer, Sibilla will bear witness to a massive dam construction project in the 1950s that kills local workers and floods a town.

Alongside Sibilla, Serpell introduces Agnes, a blind young Englishwoman who falls for a young Zambian history scholar and is promptly banished by her racist parents. And alongside her, a young revolutionary named Matha will become enmeshed in Zambia’s nascent and absurd 1960s space program. The effort was much mocked by Western outsiders, but it also played a meaningful role in its political resistance.

On one level, this oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author’s set design is

intentionally surreal and ironic.

Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail. But her three root characters are also, pointedly, women who are to some degree marginalized by the muzungu society they were raised in or forced to confront, and the generations that follow them suffer its consequences; their children will enter prostitution, suffer from AIDS and grow eager to escape.

Zambia’s history as colony and independent state is critical to the narrative. But Serpell feels no particular loyalty to the demands of the historical novel, and as the story moves toward the present day and then beyond it, she is on her own turf, imagining a vaccine for AIDS and the unforeseen consequences that it, too, might present. Two half-brothers, one researching the cure while the other works on micro drone technology, have an idea about how the country might mobilize to resist further exploitation. But the exploitative technology is advancing too, most visibly in the form of the “Bead” — effectively a smartphone installed into your hand. Where some see progress in the device, Naila, a spitfire revolutionary in the closing chapters, sees only the African continent once again leveraged for somebody else’s profit.

Here too, Serpell gets to have it both ways. She delivers a satisfying, dramatic climax that represents the comeuppance of 19th century colonialism, as Naila and the half-brothers monkey-wrench the tools of the oppressor. And yet Serpell is too much the realist to believe the fate of a nation can be resolved so tidily. After more than 550 pages, the novel is breathtaking, yet it feels like only one chapter in an ongoing story about people who see profit in Africa and who get sacrificed for profit’s sake. n Athitakis is a reviewer based in Phoenix.

I THE OLD DRIFT

By Namwali Serpell Hogarth. 566 pp. $28

SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE The Art of Edvard Munch

By Karl Ove Knausgaard Penguin.

256 pp. $17

l

REVIEWED BY

R EAGAN U PSHAW

f I had been feeling sufficiently penitent this Lent, I might have played a Nordic version of the old parlor game, “Which three famous people would you like to invite for dinner?” My guests would have been philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, author of “Fear and Trembling”; Edvard Munch, whose painting “The Scream” is probably the most parodied work of art in the world today; and Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of a six-volume autobiographical novel titled “My Struggle.”

We shall now allow Kierkegaard to amble away on one of his solitary walks and consider the other two diners, for Knausgaard has written a book on Munch, “So Much Longing in So Little Space.”

A more accurate title would have been “Munch and Me: The Most Famous Norwegian Writer Since Knut Hamsun Considers the Most Famous Norwegian Painter Ever.”

Very little space is given over to the details of Munch’s life; instead, the book considers what it means to be an artist in general and what it meant to be a highly talented artist from a restrictive Scandinavian background, obsessed with a peculiar set of personal issues, and living in a time of radical change, artistic and otherwise.

For Norwegians, Munch looms as an inescapable cultural emblem. The filmmaker Joachim Trier, whom Knausgaard interviews in the book, speaks of Munch as “a paradoxical figure whom we were told about, a master of sorts and an important national figure. At the same time, everything he stood for was very remote from what we faced in our daily lives.”

Seeking a more technical account of Munch’s achievement, Knausgaard reaches out to helpers and interpreters from the world of visual arts. He flies to Paris to visit the studio of renowned German artist Anselm Kiefer, though the encounter doesn’t yield much in the way of insight: “I asked Kiefer about his relationship to Munch,

he more or less dismissed the question with an impatient gesture of his head while saying that Munch was a good graphic artist.”

He talks to photographers, painters and film directors, reproducing his conversations with them in the book.

Knausgaard is driven to this scattershot who-can-I-talk-tonext quest in 2017 because, two years after giving a lecture on Munch, he has been invited to curate an exhibition of Munch’s work from the holdings of the artist’s estate, which were entrusted to the Munch Museum in Oslo.

The works in any artist’s estate, however, usually consist of unfinished compositions or of works the artist was unable to sell.

Hoping to avoid putting together a show of duds, Knausgaard enlists the aid of art historian Stian Grogaard to go through the racks of paintings. Grogaard’s comments as they look through a passel of what can be described only as “lesser works” are worth the price of the book. He speaks insightfully of the young Munch’s struggles to break out of the prevailing academic trends.

Grogaard, however, has issues with the leftover late work.

Not having seen the show, I don’t know how well Munch came off, but his reputation was in no danger. Technical achievements aside, Munch’s success came from his ability to give visual form to the stifled passions of a stratified and sexually inhibited society: He let the scream out. Whatever resistance he may have encountered initially, he was soon rewarded for his achievements. At 26, he won a scholarship to Paris, and by his early 30s, he was making good money. Patrons continued to come his way, and he was made a Knight of the Royal Order of St. Olav in 1909. If he chose to spend the next 35 years of his life living in relative isolation, that was his choice. n Upshaw is an art dealer and critic in Beacon, N.Y.

16

SUNDAY, April, 7, 2019

Issuer Free Writing Prospectus, dated March 5, 2019 Filed Pursuant to Rule 433

Redeemable Preferred Stock & Warrants • 6% Annual Dividend Rate* PAID MONTHLY • Senior Position TO THE PUBLICLY-TRADED COMMON STOCK • Growth Potential WITH BRG WARRANT

Relating to Prospectus Supplement dated November 16, 2018 to Prospectus dated May 23, 2018 Registration No. 333-224990

Securities offered through Crown Capital Securities, LP, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment Advisory Services offered through Family Financial Services an SEC Registered Investment Adviser.

PRICE PER INVESTMENT UNIT: $1,000 ($5,000 minimum investment) $500,000,000 Redeemable Preferred Stock & Warrants Offering

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TO OBTAIN A PROSPECTUS, CONTACT:

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Russell Indexes

General Securities Principal & Registered Investment Advisor

by Russell Investments

Included in both the Russell 2000 & 3000 indexes

509.421.1051 • rivanick@crownmail.net www.FamilyFinancialServicesWA.com 1513 APOLLO PLACE • WENATCHEE, WA 98801

Bluerock Residential Growth REIT (“BRG”) is a publicly traded, NYSE American listed Real Estate investment trust (REIT) that acquires well-located, Class A apartment properties in growth markets across the United States. With over 14,700+ units and approximately $2.0 billion in property assets, BRG seeks to maximize returns through investments where we believe we can drive substantial growth in funds from operations and net asset value.

The advertisement does not constitute an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein.

Such an offering is made only by means of a

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The security investment described herein relates solely to BRG’s Series B Preferred Stock and Warrants, a non-traded securities of BRG which have not been listed on any exchange. The risks and rewards of investing in the Series B Preferred Shares and Warrants are separate and distinct from an investment in BRG’s common stock listed on the NYSE American.

This is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein. An offering is made only by the prospectus. This sales and advertising literature must be read in conjunction with the prospectus in order to understand fully all of the implications and risks of the offering of securities to which it relates. A copy of the prospectus must be made available to you in connection with this offering. Neither the Attorney-General of the State of New York nor any other State regulators have passed on or endorsed the merits of this offering. Any representation to the contrary is unlawful.

The issuer has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the SEC for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus in that registration statement and other documents the issuer has filed with the SEC for more complete information about the issuer and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC Web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, the issuer, any underwriter or any dealer participating in the offering will arrange to send you the prospectus if you request it by calling toll-free 1-877.826.2583. * Dividends have been paid on our Class A common stock since May 5, 2014 through the quarter ended December 31, 2018. Through December 31, 2017, such dividends have been declared and paid on a monthly basis at a quarterly rate of $0.29 per share. Effective January 1, 2018, the common stock dividend was reduced to a quarterly rate of $0.1625 per share. From May 5, 2014 through December 31, 2018, we have paid total common stock dividends, including dividends reinvested through our dividend reinvestment plan, of $94,568,133, of which on a cumulative basis, approximately 7% were paid from sources other than cash flows from operations, including from the proceeds of our equity offerings. In addition, the Company has issued Series A preferred stock, Series B Redeemable Preferred Stock, Series C preferred stock and Series D preferred stock. The Series A preferred stock carries an 8.25% stated dividend rate, the Series B Redeemable Preferred Stock carries a 6.00% stated dividend rate, the Series C preferred stock carries a 7.625% stated dividend rate and the Series D preferred stock carries a 7.125% stated dividend rate. From May 5, 2014 through December 31, 2018, we have paid total preferred stock dividends of $70,720,200, all of which were paid from cash flows from operations.

V-19-34

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