The Washington Post National Weekly - October 1, 2017

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2017

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A showdown over sharia In Texas, two militia members and two Muslims meet at Dairy Queen to discuss their differences — and compare guns. PAGE 12

Politics Inside Facebook’s discovery 4

Science How brains interpret art 16

5 Myths Multilateralism 23

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THE FIX

Both parties’ millennial problem E UGENE S COTT

(54 percent) than favorable (33 percent).

But white millennials also hold nearly equally unfavorable views of the Repubverybody has a millennial problican Party (53 percent) and 60 percent lem. of them said the GOP doesn’t care about Although more than 4 in 10 people like them. millennials identify as indepenParty leaders seem to be aware that dents, according to the Pew Research there is a problem and are working to fix Center, history has shown that most it. Republican National Committee young adults vote for the Democratic Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel told Party. But Hillary Clinton learned in Georgetown students recently that she 2016 that millennials don’t always turn knows the GOP has a millennial probout at the rates candidates need them to. lem.

National exit poll data show Clinton Percentage of millennials who disapprove of President “Part of it is showing up,” she told Mo underperformed Barack Obama’s 2012 Trump’s job performance Elleithee, executive director of the share of the vote by one percentage Georgetown Institute of Politics and point with those between 30 and 44 and Public Service. “We have to show up on by three points with those ages 45 to 64. campus. We have to have that dialogue.

She actually outperformed him by one We have to talk about issues that matpoint with those over 65. ter.”

And that may not change in upcomAnd Democratic National Committee ing elections.

Chair Tom Perez is spending the semesOverall, a third of millennials said ter at Brown University as a senior felthat neither party cares about people low engaging millennials on politics and like them, according to a new NBC policy ideas, a party spokeswoman told News-GenForward survey. And the The Fix. group that feels most disaffected is “The millennial generation is one of white men — most of whom voted for the most diverse generations in our lifePresident Trump in 2016.

WASHINGTON POST SOURCE: NBC NEWS/GENFORWARD time and critical to the Democratic ParMost male millennials (57 percent) ty,” Xochitl Hinojosa said. “That is why and most white millennials (61 percent) bethe DNC is committed to meaningful engageBut sizable numbers of millennials in those lieve neither party cares for them. ment year-round and not just every fourth Ocgroups — African American (31 percent), Fewer than half — 43 percent — of millennitober during a presidential election.”

Asian American (30 percent) and Latino (37 als have a favorable view of the Democratic Whether these efforts will be fruitful repercent) — said the Democratic Party does not Party. And almost half — 46 percent — say that mains to be seen. More than 4 in 10 young votcare about people like them. the party doesn’t care about people like them. ers said they are uncertain about how they’ll As much as is made of the GOP's problem Those numbers are better than the group’s vote in next year’s midterm elections. with minority voters, the Democrats are having perception of the GOP. Only 3 in 10 millennials Even if neither party has the millennial vote a problem with white millennials. Most white think the Republican Party cares about them. locked up, they must know that Trump certainmillennials — 55 percent — said the DemocratIn line with other polls, millennials of color ly doesn’t. The group overwhelmingly disapic Party does not care about people like them. have more favorable views of the Democratic proves of the way Trump is handling his job. n White millennials are also the only group that Party. At least half of nonwhite millennials holds a more unfavorable view of Democrats have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. © The Washington Post BY

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Percentage of millennials who say the Democratic Party doesn’t care about them

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 e-mail 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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 51

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SCIENCE BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER David Wright, founder of a militia skeptical of Islam, carries a gun on his way to meet two Muslims to talk.

Photograph by ILANA PANICHLINSMAN for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Coming to terms with foreign threats

BY A DAM E NTOUS, E LIZABETH D WOSKIN AND C RAIG T IMBERG

N

ine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, although Facebook representatives say the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.

The conversation on Nov. 19 was a flash point in a tumultuous year in which Zuckerberg came to recognize the magnitude of a new threat — a coordinated assault on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that exploited the social network he created.

Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn’t foresee the wave of disinformation that was coming and the political pressure that followed. The company then

STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

How Facebook unraveled a sophisticated bid to influence voters grappled with a series of hard choices designed to shore up its own systems without impinging on free discourse for its users.

One outcome of those efforts was Zuckerberg’s recent admission that Facebook had indeed been manipulated and that the company would turn over to Congress more than 3,000 politically themed advertisements that were bought by suspected Russian operatives.

But that highly public moment came after months of maneuvering behind the scenes that has thrust Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies into a multi-sided Washington power struggle in which the company has much to lose.

Some critics say Facebook dragged its feet and is acting now only because of outside political pressure.

“There’s been a systematic failure of responsibility” on Facebook’s part, said Zeynep Tufekci,

as associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies social media companies’ impact on society and governments. “It’s rooted in their overconfidence that they know best, their naivete about how the world works, their extensive effort to avoid oversight, and their business model of having very few employees so that no one is minding the store.”

Facebook says it responded appropriately.

“We believe in the power of democracy, which is why we’re taking this work on elections integrity so seriously, and have come forward at every opportunity to share what we’ve found,” said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy and communications. A spokesperson for Obama declined to comment.

Schrage said that Obama’s conversation with Zuckerberg was about “misinformation and false news” and “did not include any

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg met with President Obama two months before the election. Obama warned that Facebook needed to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously.

references to possible foreign interference or suggestions about confronting threats to Facebook.”

This account — based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the government’s investigation and Facebook’s response — provides the first detailed backstory of a 16month journey in which the company came to terms with an unanticipated foreign attack on the U.S. political system and its search for tools to limit the damage. Among the revelations is that Facebook detected elements of the Russian information operation and notified the FBI. Yet the government and the private sector struggled to work together to diagnose and fix the problem.

A Russian operation Facebook, without realizing it, had stumbled into the Russian operation as it was getting underway in June 2016.

At the time, cybersecurity ex-

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POLITICS perts at the company were tracking a Russian hacker group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, which U.S. intelligence officials considered an arm of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, according to people familiar with Facebook’s activities.

Members of the Russian hacker group were best known for stealing military plans and data from political targets, so the security experts assumed that they were planning some sort of espionage operation — not a far-reaching disinformation campaign designed to shape the outcome of the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook executives shared with the FBI their suspicions that a Russian espionage operation was in the works, a person familiar with the matter said. An FBI spokesperson had no comment.

Soon thereafter, Facebook’s cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts — including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks — to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.

After the November election, Facebook began to look more broadly at the accounts that had been created during the campaign.

Political post-mortem As Facebook struggled to find clear evidence of Russian manipulation, the idea was gaining credence in other influential quarters.

In the aftermath of the election, aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama pored over polling numbers and turnout data, looking for clues to explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events.

One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.

These former advisers didn’t have hard evidence that Russian trolls were using Facebook to micro-target voters in swing dis-

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

tricts — at least not yet — but they shared their theories with the House and Senate intelligence committees, which launched parallel investigations into Russia’s role in the presidential campaign in January.

Sen. Mark R. Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, initially wasn’t sure what to make of Facebook’s role. U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed the Virginia Democrat and other members of the committee about alleged Russian contacts with the Trump campaign and about how the Kremlin leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to undercut Clinton.

But the intelligence agencies had little data on Russia’s use of Facebook and other U.S.-based social media platforms, in part because of rules designed to protect the privacy of communications between Americans.

‘A critical juncture’ The extent of Facebook’s internal self-examination became clear in April, when Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos co-wrote a 13-page white paper detailing the results of a sprawling research effort that included input from experts from across the company, who in some cases also worked to build new software aimed specifically at detecting foreign propaganda.

“Facebook sits at a critical juncture,” Stamos wrote in the paper, adding that the effort focused on

“actions taken by organized actors (governments or non-state actors) to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome.” He described how the company had used a technique known as machine learning to build specialized data-mining software that can detect patterns of behavior — for example, the repeated posting of the same content — that malevolent actors might use.

The software tool was given a secret designation, and Facebook is deploying it and others in the run-up to elections around the world. It was used in the French election in May, where it helped disable 30,000 fake accounts, the company said. It was put to the test again last weekend when Germans went to the polls. Another recently developed tool shows users when articles have been disputed by third-party fact checkers.

Notably, Stamos’s paper did not raise the topic of political advertising — an omission that was noticed by Capitol Hill investigators.

Facebook, worth $495 billion, is the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Although not mentioned explicitly in the report, Stamos's team had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short.

A few weeks after the French election, Warner flew out to Cali-

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, visited Facebook to find out more about whether the Russians had used the company’s tools to disseminate anti-Clinton ads to key voting districts.

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fornia to visit Facebook in person.

It was an opportunity for the senator to press Stamos directly on whether the Russians had used the company’s tools to disseminate anti-Clinton ads to key districts.

Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate.

Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some probably existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.

Finally, Stamos appealed to Warner for help: If U.S. intelligence agencies had any information about the Russian operation or the troll farms it used to disseminate misinformation, they should share it with Facebook. The company is still waiting, people involved in the matter said.

Breakthrough moment For months, a team of engineers at Facebook had been searching through accounts, looking for signs that they were set up by operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin. The task was immense.

Warner’s visit spurred the company to make some changes in how it conducted its internal investigation. Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data, Facebook decided to focus on a subset of political ads.

Technicians then searched for “indicators” that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.

By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface. Nobody really knows how many accounts are out there and how to prevent more of them from being created to shape the next election — and turn American society against itself. © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Moore’s win leaves Trump weakened BY

R OBERT C OSTA

A

s he headed to Huntsville, Ala., in a last-ditch effort to lift the floundering campaign of Sen. Luther Strange, President Trump was fuming — feeling dragged along

by GOP senators who had pleaded with him to go and increasingly unenthusiastic about Strange, whom he described to aides as loyal but “low energy.”

His agitation only worsened on the flight back. Trump bemoaned the headlines he expected to see once Strange was defeated — that he had stumbled and lost his grip on “my people,” as he calls his core voters. He also lamented the rally crowd’s tepid response to the 6-foot-9 incumbent he liked to call “Big Luther.”

“Trump was never fully behind Strange to begin with,” former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said Wednesday after Strange was trounced in Tuesday’s GOP primary in Alabama. “But the party coaxed and cajoled him to get on the Strange train, and he did.”

For Trump, the trip to Alabama marked the dispiriting start to one of the lowest and perhaps most damaging stretches of his already troubled presidency, leaving him further weakened and isolated with few ways out of the thicket of challenges he faces, according to a half-dozen people close to him.

His political vitality within his party — counted upon by Republicans who fear primary challenges in next year’s midterm elections — suddenly stands in question, as neither his vocal campaigning nor millions of dollars from the Republican establishment could save Strange from defeat by insurgent challenger Roy Moore.

Trump’s legislative agenda lies in tatters, as Senate Republicans failed again this past week to rally around legislation that would gut former president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He is also increasingly under siege by members of both parties for his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria, which has left Puerto Rico devastated and begging for help

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

The result of the Alabama Senate runoff left the president dispirited and Republicans anxious from Washington.

By Wednesday, the downtrodden president tried to start anew by unveiling a tax plan at an event in Indiana — a proposal immediately met with withering attacks from the left as a deficit-busting giveaway to the rich and from the right as not aggressive enough in slashing tax rates. The Drudge Report, influential among conservatives, dubbed it “more betrayal.”

Trump also waded back into the health-care debate, falsely stating that the Republican legislation was held up by a hospitalized senator.

“We have the votes for health care. We have one senator that’s in the hospital. He can’t vote because he’s in the hospital,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday — an apparent reference to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who turns 80 in December and has dealt with various health problems.

Cochran responded with a corrective tweet: “Thanks for the well-wishes. I’m not hospitalized, but am recuperating at home in

Mississippi and look forward to returning to work soon.”

Trump’s loose, confident talk extended elsewhere on Wednesday. In Indiana, the president was full of bravado as he made his tax pitch — and if there was lingering frustration with Strange, he did not show it.

“These tax cuts are significant,” Trump said at the state fairgrounds. “There’s never been tax cuts like what we’re talking about.”

But Trump’s critics did not buy the president’s assurance and said the tax speech could not paper over his problems.

“In Alabama and with so many things, Trump has helped to light a fire he can’t control, and there’s no sign he knows how to get out of this situation,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who worked in George W. Bush’s White House.

“It’s going to cause him to lash out more rather than less as he starts to feel like the walls are closing in.”

Roy Moore and his wife, Kayla, greet supporters at an election-night rally Tuesday in Montgomery, Ala. Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, defeated incumbent Luther Strange in a primary runoff election for the Senate. Strange was backed by President Trump and establishment Republicans.

Several of Trump’s longtime friends and associates said he is doing what he always does in times of trouble: attempt to overwhelm with liveliness. But they acknowledged that Trump may not be enjoying the experience.

“I’m told he’s unhappy,” said veteran Republican consultant Roger Stone. “He’s surrounded by people who don’t understand politics and don’t understand why he won the presidency. Instead of sending a message in Alabama to get behind his policies, they sadly lost the opportunity.”

Said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg: “The president will think about what happened in Alabama and remember everybody who told him to go all in. If you sent him polls from the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce or the Senate Leadership Fund, the next polls you send will go in his trash can.”

Together, those groups, along with other mainstream GOP organizations, spent more than $10 million to boost Strange.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, stewed over their own fates, anxious that Moore, a former state Supreme Court judge, would become a national burden for the party because of the long list of incendiary comments he has made on race, religion and sexuality.

Hushed talk of retirements dominated conversations on Capitol Hill, one day after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) announced that he would not seek reelection in 2018, with Republican lawmakers wondering whether they could survive a GOP political storm that seems to be growing.

Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who backed Moore and introduced him at his victory party, encouraged conservative outsiders in Mississippi and other states to move closer to launching Senate bids, one person close to him said.

“There’s a big lesson here: Stick to the program,” Bannon said on Breitbart News’s Sirius XM radio show. “There’s a lesson, stick to the program, your base will be there, and you’ll grow your base.”

Steele, however, said Strange’s

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POLITICS defeat did not mean Trump had lost his political sway with Republican base voters.

“Voters in Alabama knew the whole endorsement for Strange was a wink and a nod. They got that Moore was a Trump guy,” Steele said. “So did he endorse the candidate who lost? Yes. But the reality is more nuanced than ‘Trump lost in Alabama.’ He lost, but his voters know why and still love him.”

In the West Wing, there was relative calm as officials plowed forward. They agreed with Steele that while the GOP was fractured, Trump’s coalition remained.

“He knew what was coming in Alabama on Friday,” said one person close to Trump. “He knew how McConnell had become an issue there — and he said as much over dinner on Monday.” That evening, Trump had met with a group of prominent conservative leaders at the White House.

The person added, “What he wants to do is get back to taxes, make sure the Senate gets that done as soon as possible.”

Aides said that Trump knew that those who privately supported his endorsement of Strange, such as White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, were doing so because Trump at first was eager to do so and saw a chance to patch up relationships in Congress.

Trump was defensive in his remarks about the race to reporters on Wednesday, a few hours after he deleted a series of pro-Strange tweets. He also characterized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as a drag on Strange.

“I have to say, Luther came a long way from the time I endorsed him, and he ran a good race, but Roy ran a really great race,” Trump said, adding that Moore’s campaign used McConnell as a weapon against Strange.

The atmosphere of uncertainty and recriminations after the Alabama race prompted Republicans, even those close to Trump, to feel urgency to pass something — anything — that could somehow stabilize the party.

“If there was ever a time when Republicans feel pressure to perform, it’s now,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “If big things don’t get done by Thanksgiving, there really won’t be enough spin to say Republicans here have done anything but fail.” © The Washington Post

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The anti-Trump industrial complex enjoys boom times BY

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oah Bookbinder may not be the first guy you’d draft to help unseat a president.

For months, panicky liberals have gazed hopefully at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the former FBI director whose legal team has been kicking down doors and questioning countless Donald Trump associates over allegations that sound like something out of a spy novel. But the likeliest person to take down Trump might well be an unassuming lawyer with the demeanor of your neighborhood dry cleaner.

Bookbinder’s nonprofit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the president this year for allegedly breaching the Constitution’s little-known “emoluments clause” by enriching himself with foreign payments. If successful, CREW could win access to Trump’s closely guarded business records and tax returns.

“And if it gets to that point,” said Bookbinder, “he might rather resign.”

Of course, it’s also highly possible that this lawsuit will go nowhere. But CREW will still have won, with its soaring new stature in the fast-growing sector of the Beltway economy devoted to disrupting the Disrupter in Chief.

These are boom times for the anti-Trump industrial complex.

Fundraising is through the roof for organizations that hadn’t been relevant since the Bill Clinton era; the grass roots have never been greener for activist groups; and political hacks may be sexier than ever.

Bookbinder admits the lawsuit is a long shot and cautions that the toppling of the presidency isn’t even the ultimate goal. CREW, he says, simply wants a return to ethical norms.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” said Robert Creamer, an organizer with Democracy Partners.

“And this is the most excitement I’ve ever seen from groups on the left. That includes the civil rights

era, Vietnam. . . . People know to strike when the iron is hot.”

The left is enjoying more donations, more volunteers, bigger budgets, greater enthusiasm. If Trump were to fire Mueller, dozens of organizations that have been gathering on weekly phone calls stand ready to put together a nationwide protest the same day.

CITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS IN WASHINGTON

Noah Bookbinder started a group that sued President Trump over the “emoluments clause.”

Democrats seem destined to relitigate the 2016 election until the end of time. A former Hillary Clinton aide founded Verrit, a website that aims to give liberals the tools to win social-media debates, and kicked off with one post blaming Bernie Sanders for putting Trump in the White House. Members of the Sanders diaspora, meanwhile, have started the Our Revolution organization to try to keep dragging the party to the left.

Big players with bruised egos are looking for redemption. David Brock, the operative behind American Bridge and other Clintonaligned groups, is back at work after having an actual post-election heart attack. The Center of American Progress, founded by John Podesta and heavily seeded with Clinton vets, has created a war room investigating Trump’s ties with Russia.

“Sometimes it feels like we’re players on the same team competing for the home run record,” said Harrell Kirstein, a spokesman for Bridge, which focuses on opposition research. “If somebody gets the glory, we’re going to be excited

and jump on the train, but we’d rather get there first.”

But competition is a good thing, says Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic operative now fighting Obamacare repeal efforts with a group called Protect Our Care.

“Getting a spotlight shone on your work in many cases is a big part of the work,” he said. For a group like CREW, the spotlight helps its mission of keeping the public informed.

“It’s also important,” he added, “for fundraising.”

Democrats like to rage about money in politics and the distractions of fundraising. But when it comes to financing the cause of taking on the president, they’re all in. MoveOn.org has more than tripled its budget this year. New grass-roots groups like Indivisible have flourished thanks to thousands of new donors, many of whom barely gave a whit about politics before the last election.

And although it’s possible to rally the base with issues of actual policy — witness the call-yourcongressman campaign of the health-care fight — nothing gets these folks more energized than the promise of the removal of a president. For them, 2020 and its growing crowd of Democratic challengers just isn’t soon enough.

It’s one of the great ironies of his presidency that many things Trump fights against end up doing well. He’s helped subscriptions soar at the “failing” New York Times. Lobbyists are flourishing in their role as swamp guides. And the left has never felt more emboldened — albeit cautiously.

“I wouldn’t choose to have him as president,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director at MoveOn.org. “But there’s a chance that he ends up really helping the progressive cause by banding everyone together . . . if we can stop some of his worst impulses first.”

“He could help create a lasting progressive movement,” said Creamer, of Democracy Partners.

“If we can avoid nuclear war.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Turning to apps to predict teen suicide BY

P ETER H OLLEY

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n any given week, Ben Crotte, a behavioral health therapist at Children’s Home of Cincinnati, speaks to dozens of students in need of an outlet.

Their challenges run the adolescent gamut, from minor stress about an upcoming test to severe depression, social isolation and bullying.

Amid the flood of conversations, meetings and paperwork, the challenge for Crotte — and mental health professionals everywhere — is separating hopeless expressions of pain and suffering from crucial warning signs that suggest a student is at risk for committing suicide.

It’s a daunting, high-pressure task, which explains why Crotte was willing to add another potentially useful tool to his diagnostic kit: an app that uses an algorithm to analyze speech and determine whether someone is likely to take their own life.

It’s name: “Spreading Activation Mobile” or “SAM.” “Losing a child is my worst nightmare, and we all live with the fear that we might miss something,” Crotte said, referring to mental health professionals who work in education.

“Sometimes we have to go with our gut to make a decision, so this is one more tool to help me make a final determination about someone’s health.”

SAM is being tested in a handful of Cincinnati schools this year and arrives at a time when researchers across the country are developing new forms of artificial intelligence that may forever change the way mental health issues are diagnosed and treated.

Rates of teen suicide, in particular, are on the rise, with the rate among teen girls hitting a 40year high in 2015, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Over the past decade, the CDC reports, suicide rates doubled among teen girls and jumped by more than 30 percent among teen boys.

Despite being the 10th leading cause of death in the United

PHOTOS COURTESY CINCINNATI CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER

‘SAM’ is a new tool being deployed in Cincinnati to help mental health professionals’ diagnostics States, suicide remains extremely difficult to predict. Experts say that’s because many people’s risk for self-harm is paired with another mental illness and fluctuates according to various stressors in their life, all of which interact uniquely within each individual. Complicating matters is that suicidal ideation — which can signal a growing risk for self harm — is far more common than actual suicide. To assess risk, mental health professionals have long relied on timeworn tools — notepads, conversation and wellhoned intuition. Now artificial intelligence — combined with the widespread use of smartphones — is beginning to change the way experts interpret human behavior and predict self harm.

There are thousands of apps dedicated to improving mental health, but experts say the most promising will begin to incorporate predictive machine learning algorithms into their design like SAM. “A machine will find 100 other pieces of data that your phone

has access to that you wouldn’t be able to measure as a psychiatrist or general practitioner who sees someone for a half-hour a few times a year,” said Chris Danforth, a University of Vermont researcher who helped develop an algorithm that can spot signs of depression by analyzing social media posts.

Using data from more than 5,000 adult patients with a potential for self-harm, Colin Walsh, a data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also created machine-learning algorithms that predict — with more than 90 percent accuracy — the likelihood that someone will attempt suicide within the next week. The risk detection is based on such information as the patient’s age, gender, Zip codes, medications and prior diagnoses.

Danforth’s algorithm — which he developed with Harvard researcher Andrew Reece — can spot signs of depression by analyzing the tone of a patient’s Instagram feed. The pair created a second algorithm that pin-

John Pestian, a clinical scientist and professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center within the University of Cincinnati, created the app SAM, or“Spreading Activation Mobile,” top.

points the rise and fall of someone’s mental illness by scanning the language, word count, speech patterns and degree of activity on their Twitter feed.

“The dominant contributor to the difference between depressed and healthy classes was an increase in usage of negative words by the depressed class, including ‘don’t,’ ‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘murder,’ ‘death,’ ‘never’ and ‘sad,’ ” the researchers wrote in their latest study identifying mental illness on Twitter. “The second largest contributor was a decrease in positive language by the depressed class, relative to the healthy class, including fewer appearances of ‘photo,’ ‘happy,’ ‘love,’ and ‘fun.’ ” Danforth said mental health professionals are still dependent on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) and one-on-one interviews, but he believes the data being amassed by smartphones means mental health is on the verge of a “digital revolution.”

Experts said it could take another five to 10 years to create algorithms predictive enough to be reliably deployed inside hospitals, schools and therapists’ offices. Questions will have to be resolved as well, experts said, such as whether predictive algorithms will affect health insurance premiums or what happens if drug companies manage to access people’s predictive data?

John Pestian, a clinical scientist and professor in the divisions of Biomedical Informatics and psychiatry at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center within the University of Cincinnati, said it’s too early to answer those questions. When he created SAM — the app now being tested in Cincinnati schools — he was only focused on one thing: alleviating suffering with technology.

“You go into the emergency department and you go to the intensive care unit and you see technology everywhere, but you go into a psychiatrist’s office and you see a couch,” Pestian said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Hospitals show Puerto Rico’s pain

BY S AMANTHA S CHMIDT AND D ANIEL C ASSADY

San Juan, Puerto Rico

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he intensive care unit was sweltering in the afternoon heat, the doctors covered in sweat and fanning themselves with their scrubs.

Already compromised by weakened physical conditions and a lack of food and water, intubated patients melted under individual fans.

“It’s an oven,” said Cesar Castillo, a surgery resident at Centro Médico Hospital in San Juan. “It’s hard to get their fevers down.”

It has been more than a week since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and the humanitarian crisis that has ensued is nowhere more obvious than in the health-care facilities that often are without electricity and always are overwhelmed.

About half of the island’s hospitals — 33 — are functioning. Those that are accepting patients have intermittent power and have to pray that the diesel fuel running their generators will last until the next truck arrives.

Forced to take people from hospitals that have closed, hospitals outside San Juan are over capacity and overwhelmed by patients.

Some hospitals have become more akin to community centers, with people lining up to use the cafeterias, and relatives of patients trying to use the showers and bathrooms because they don’t have water at home.

Doctors across Puerto Rico say that many patients, particularly elderly ones, are arriving at hospitals in deteriorating condition because they waited too long to seek treatment, in many cases because they couldn’t find the gas to drive.

Others worry that since so many people are without water and electricity, infections and diseases will spread more easily.

Numerous patients already have been treated for dengue — a mosquito-borne virus — in Hospital del Maestro, a small facility in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan. Many people have arrived with herpes, asthma and respira-

DENNIS M. RIVERA PICHARDO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Only half the island’s facilities are functioning after Maria, and their electricity is intermittent tory problems.

“I lost count of how many people have come with conjunctivitis,” said Lisa Matos, supervisor of the hospital’s emergency room.

Conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, is often caused by lack of hygiene, Matos said. Without running water in their homes, people are washing their hands less.

The lack of power, water and fuel is affecting hospitals as it is affecting much of society here.

The San Jorge Children’s Hospital in Santurce was without power for nearly eight hours last week after running out of diesel for its generators; half of the 90 patients there were transferred or released.

Domingo Cruz, a San Jorge administrator, said his hospital desperately needs a steady supply of fuel. Some staff members are staying at the hospital so as not to waste gas commuting.

“Nothing can function without power,” Cruz said. “Outside right now, we have a tank that holds 4,000 gallons of diesel. The hospital’s two combined building use

1,500 gallons every day.”

Cruz said the situation is going to get worse before it improves.

“During November and December, it’s going to get bad,” Cruz said.

“There are going to be cases of dehydration, there are going to be cases of dengue fever. There are going to be people with diabetes who haven’t been taking care of themselves because their focus has been on rebuilding their lives and taking care of their families.”

Centro Médico gained electricity for about two days, but lost it again, forcing the hospital to rely solely on generators. Just four of the hospital’s more than 20 operating rooms have been open on a daily basis, because the others lack water or fuel, said Segundo Rodríguez Quilichini, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus.

Scores of patients have been forced to delay surgeries, and doctors are “desperate to do their jobs,” said Juan Nazario Fernandez, a senior medical officer.

The San Juan hospital is a base

Patients wait outside the Centro Médico emergency room in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Just four of the hospital’s more than 20 operating rooms have been open on a daily basis, because the others lack water or fuel.

of operations for Health and Human Services, a command center for critical and acute care. Seven regional hospitals have been deemed primary medical care hubs for the island’s more than 3 million residents.

Hospital HIMA San Pablo Caguas, about 22 miles south of San Juan, is a hub for the eastern region. A sign on the main entrance doors Wednesday indicated that just one visitor per patient would be allowed in, for security reasons.

The hospital is well over its maximum capacity of 405 beds.

“Every single square foot here is being dedicated for clinical purposes. The logistics are crazy right now,” said Armando Rodríguez, the hospital’s vice president. In the emergency room, hospital beds clogged hallways. “This is not the way to run an ER.” Gloria Dominguez, 81, had been in the emergency room since 8 p.m. the previous night, having called an ambulance because of chest pains. By 2 p.m. the next day, with no bed available, she was still sitting in a chair, receiving oxygen.

Feet away, lying in a bed surrounded by other patients, Pablo Rosario received antibiotics through an IV. After a foot of water had entered his home in Juncos, Rosario developed an ulcer on his left foot. On Sunday, he tried going to a hospital in Humacao, but the roof of the operating room had blown off. So he was transported to Caguas.

He needs surgery, but “they don’t know when” he can have it, said his wife, Liduvina Martinez Rodriguez. There are not enough beds to admit him to a room.

The hospital also was still treating 28 patients from the islands of Tortora and St. Thomas, people who had been rescued in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma earlier in September.

“They opened their eyes and didn’t know they were in Puerto Rico,” said Natalia Rodríguez, a hospital staff member. Many have had no contact with family, and the hospital has been unable to communicate with its partner hospital in Tortora since Irma. n © The Washington Post

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A move to dismiss a tradition K EVIN S IEFF Nairobi BY

T

he British gave up their last colonies in Africa half a century ago. But they left their wigs behind.

Not just any wigs. They are the long, white, horsehair locks worn by high court judges (and King George III). They are so oldfashioned and so uncomfortable, that even British barristers have stopped wearing them.

But in former British colonies — Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Malawi and others — they live on, worn by judges and lawyers.

Now, a new generation of African jurists is asking: Why are the continent’s most prominent legal minds still wearing the trappings of the colonizers?

It’s not just a question of aesthetics. The wigs and robes are perhaps the most glaring symbol of colonial inheritance at a time when that history is being dredged up in all sorts of ways.

This year, Tanzanian President John Magufuli described a proposed free-trade agreement with Europe as a “form of colonialism.”

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe still refers to the British as “thieving colonialists.”

In June, the premier of the Western Cape province of South Africa was suspended from her party after writing on Twitter that modern health care was a colonial contribution.

The relics of colonialism are scattered across the continent.

There are the queen’s namesakes: Victoria Falls north of Zimbabwe; Lake Victoria, bordering three countries in eastern Africa; Victoria Island in Nigeria. There is the left-lane driving, the cricket, the way public education is organised (not organized).

Most cities and streets have received new names since European rule ended. In 2013, Mugabe officially rebaptized Victoria Falls “Mosi Oa Tunya,” or “the smoke that thunders” in the Kololo language.

Yet the wig survives, along with other relics of the colonial courtroom: red robes, white bows, references to judges as “my lord” and

TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some jurists in Africa object to courtroom wigs, which they consider to be relics of colonialism “my lady.”

In nearly every former British colony, op-eds have been written and speeches made about why the wig ought to be removed. In Uganda, the New Vision newspaper conducted an investigation into the cost of the wigs, reporting that each one cost $6,500. In Ghana, a prominent lawyer, Augustine Niber, argued that removing wigs would reduce the “intimidation and fear that often characterize our courtrooms.”

One of the editors of the Nigerian Lawyer blog wrote that wigs weren’t made for the sweltering Lagos heat, where lawyers wilted under their garb. “The culture that invented wig and gown is different from our own and the weather is different,” Unini Chioma wrote.

Increasingly, though, opponents of the colonial outfit aren’t just arguing against inconvenience but against a tradition that African judiciaries appear to be embracing.

Britain’s “colonial courts,” which preceded independence, were sometimes brutal. In response to

Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, for example, the wigged white judges sentenced more than 1,000 people to death for conspiring against colonial rule.

“The colonial system used law as [an] instrument of repression, and we’re still maintaining this tradition without questioning it,” said Arnold Tsunga, director of the Africa program at the International Commission of Jurists. “It’s a disgrace to the modern courts of Africa.”

In Kenya, former chief justice Willy Mutunga appealed to remove the wigs from the courtroom, arguing that they were a foreign imposition, not a Kenyan tradition. He swapped the traditional British red robes for “Kenyanized” green and yellow ones. He called the wigs “dreadful.”

But that outlook wasn’t shared by many Kenyan judges and lawyers, who saw the wigs and robes as their own uniforms, items that elevate a courtroom, despite — or because of — their colonial links.

“It was met with consternation from within the bench and the

British court attire, a reminder of colonial rule, is worn in some countries in Africa even as it is falling out of favor in Britain.

bar,” said Isaac Okero, president of the Law Society of Kenya.

Okero is a defender of the wig and the robe, and argues that they represent more than a British tradition, but something that distinguishes the country’s judges.

This year, Kenya’s new chief justice, David Maraga, has indicated that he wants to revert to the colonial traditions. During his swearing-in ceremony, he wore a long white wig and the Britishstyle red robe. Many Kenyans were perplexed.

“It was his rather peculiar outfit that would send a resounding message to Kenyans,” said a broadcaster on KTN, one of the country’s most popular news channels. “It’s back to the old days.”

The curly horsehair wigs have been used in court since the 1600s, during the reign of Charles II, when they became a symbol of the British judicial system.

Other countries in the British Commonwealth, such as Australia and Canada, also inherited the wigs and robes but have moved toward removing them from courtrooms.

But aside from the wigs, African courts have adapted to a post-colonial context. New constitutions have been written. A new generation of judges has emerged. Even though some judiciaries have bent to political pressure, new legal systems are rooted in British common law but shaped by the traditions and cultures of their own countries.

In Kenya this month, the Supreme Court annulled the recent presidential election, a bold display of judicial independence that infuriated the sitting president.

In the Nairobi courtroom where the ruling was delivered, several lawyers wore their powdered wigs. Behind the bench, a row of men and women in red robes presided.

Maraga sat down before speaking, the sleeves of his black robe hanging over the bench.

“The greatness of a nation lies in its fidelity to its constitution,” he said, “and a strict adherence to the rule of law.” n © The Washington Post

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Wariness over Saudi Arabia’s decree

BY S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN AND K AREN D E Y OUNG

Cairo

A

day after Saudi Arabia’s rulers granted women the right to drive, Saudis and other Arabs expressed mixed emotions Wednesday about the overturning of one of the kingdom’s most widely criticized restrictions on human rights.

In reactions largely playing out on social media, most celebrated the decision as a step in the right direction. But others were cynical and noted the numerous official restrictions on Saudi women that remain in place.

Some sarcastically argued that the decree was a way for the kingdom’s rulers to divert attention from issues such as human rights abuses and the war in neighboring Yemen.

Others took a wait-and-see attitude, noting that the measure to allow women to drive would not take effect until next summer.

They expressed concern that women may need the permission of male guardians, such as a husband or brother, to actually drive, as is legally required for many decisions Saudi women make in their lives.

“Saudi order was about issuing drivers licenses to women by June 2018 pending committee recommendations,” tweeted Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “This is far from letting women drive.”

Still, the change may be the most visible sign yet of a modernizing Saudi Arabia, with reforms implemented by the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Signed by his father, King Salman, and broadcast on state television, the decree said the “majority of senior scholars” had deemed the change legitimate under Islamic law. Salman ordered the government ministries concerned to make whatever legal adjustments are required to implement it by June 24.

For much of the rest of the world, the prohibition on women driving has long symbolized the

HASAN JAMALI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

As many praise the decision to let women drive, others question the motives or if it will happen many restrictions on individual freedoms in Saudi Arabia, particularly those applying to women.

The change aligns Saudi Arabia with other conservative monarchies in the Persian Gulf that have long allowed women to drive. It was unclear whether the lifting of requirements that male relatives accompany women or give permission for them to leave their homes, still implemented in much of the country, would apply to activities other than driving.

The Saudi government, which has long endured negative publicity over its restrictive domestic policies, was eager to broadcast the change. In addition to a news conference at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, the Foreign Ministry contacted reporters offering to arrange calls with selected Saudi women to comment on the policy.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Khaled bin Salman, said the decision was not based on religion but on social and economic considerations, and was part of the modernization reforms

being implemented by the crown prince.

“There is no wrong time to do the right thing,” the ebullient ambassador said. With more women entering the workplace, “they need to drive themselves to work.”

He said the implementation delay was needed to ensure that the legal and logistical environment was prepared for the change. “We have to make sure our streets are ready” for a potential doubling in traffic, he said.

But on Wednesday, some observers questioned whether women would truly be allowed to drive with full freedom.

“The real question is whether this is a short-lived empty PR stunt or the beginning of fundamental reform in the kingdom,” Madawi al-Rasheed, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics, wrote in an column posted on the Middle East Eye website.

“We will only know the answer to this question when we hear about the reforms that will come on the back of this.”

A woman drives in Riyadh in 2014 as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving. The country announced Tuesday that women will be allowed to drive starting next summer.

Rasheed noted that the decree arrives as the kingdom is threatening to sever diplomatic and trade links with U.N. member nations considering a proposal to send independent U.N. investigators to probe possible war crimes by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

There has also been an ongoing crackdown on activists, religious scholars and others critical of the policies of King Salman and the crown prince.

“By allowing women to drive, Saudi regime wants to divert attention from detaining more than 40 [people] since 9 Sept,” Rasheed wrote in a tweet.

Those who deserve the real credit for the decree, Rasheed added, are the female Saudi activists who have spent years publicly protesting the ban, posting videos of themselves driving on Saudi roads. The videos garnered hundreds of thousands of views and often landed the activists in jail.

Loujain al-Hathloul, who was detained for 73 days in 2014 after attempting to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates, was rearrested this year and held for several days. “Praise be to God,” Hathloul tweeted after the announcement.

“I am just happy that I no longer have to tell my 7-year-old to stop ogling at women driving in Europe because, yes, it’s normal and okay for women to drive,” said Loulwa Bakr, a senior financial adviser in Jiddah.

“One small pedal for Saudi women, one giant leap for womenkind,” Bakr said in a telephone interview from Riyadh. She was one of several women independently contacted by The Washington Post.

Asma Siddiki, an educator at King Abdullah Economic City, said the issue was not the top priority for Saudi women but had become “symbolic.”

“We enjoy some rights that other celebrated democracies do not enjoy and yet everything was brushed under the all-encompassing question of the right of women to drive,” she said. “I feel ecstatic that it is about to become a moot topic.” n ©The Washington Post

PHOTOS BY ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

COVER STORY

BY ROBERT SAMUELS in Ferris, Tex.

Facing T their fears David Wright, left, and Christopher Gambino sit with Ali Ghouri, right, and Tameem Budri in August in Ferris, Tex. Wright and Ghouri met months earlier when Wright was protesting outside Ghouri’s mosque. Ghouri says he rarely faced anti-Islam sentiment as an adult until rumors of a sharia takeover began circulating on the right.

he two men drove to an isolated parking lot off Highway 45, a midway spot between their adversarial existences, to try to settle their differences. “Meet me at the Dairy Queen,” David Wright, 44, had suggested. Ali Ghouri, 29, obliged. They each brought a friend, and they each brought a gun.

Wright climbed out of a Ford Lobo, wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt and baggy blue jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Ghouri stepped out of his Toyota Corolla. He had spiked hair and wore a red shirt that matched his red Converses.

The first time they met was five months ago, when Wright led a group of men to Ghouri’s mosque and accused them of supporting terrorists. Wright and the few dozen who came with him were armed with “Stop the Islamization of America” signs and assault rifles.

Ghouri, going against the wishes of mosque leaders, walked up to the protesters with a defiant message: “I have a weapon. You have a weapon. I’m not scared of you.”

The two were on opposite sides in a polarized country, tethered together by a heightening worry over self-preservation. Born and raised

in America, they spent most of their lives thinking their homeland was generally safe, a place where they were free to pursue their dreams. That feeling had started to fray, then wilt, and now suspicion and fear were engulfing street corners in bitter protests and harsh words all over the country. They felt as though they were part of the conflict, teetering between their dueling instincts to build walls and to break them down, hoping not to lose themselves in the process.

Both agreed the government wasn’t doing enough. To fill the void, Wright started a militia intent on weeding terrorists out of Texas. He called it BAIR — the Bureau of American Islamic Relations — a play on the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s leading Muslim advocacy group. He accused Ghouri’s mosque of funding terrorist activities and warned of the dangers of a growing population oppressing women and gay people in secret sharia courts.

“The Muslims make me nervous,” Wright said. “They went to my home town and tried to shoot people. This is Texas. You ain’t going to do that in Texas. I don’t think so. We will kill you first.”

Ghouri said he had been bullied for being

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COVER STORY Muslim at different points in his life, but those forces seemed even more emboldened, more radical — more regular — than ever. President Trump wasn’t doing enough to stop it and, in his view, was enabling it.

“David is scared, but I feel our fears are more rational,” Ghouri said of Wright. Concerned about where things were headed, Ghouri bought a gun to protect himself from men such as Wright and his acolytes.

One of them, Christopher Gambino, a 35year-old construction developer, drove Wright to the Dairy Queen. He was trying to make sense of how the growing Muslim population would affect the country he loved.

“These days, it is hard to figure out who to believe,” he said before the meeting. “It is hard to know what’s good and what’s bad.”

With Ghouri came Tameem Budri, a 33year-old IT specialist who said he wanted to get a sense of how deranged a person must be to carry a gun outside a house of worship. “I don’t know what their goals are,” Budri said. “It just seems like they are peddling an industry of propaganda.”

The Dairy Queen was quiet when they walked in that Sunday afternoon. They ordered onion rings, jalapeño bacon burgers and fries and sat at a table right next to the men’s bathroom. Budri and Ghouri sat on one side, Gambino and Wright on the other.

Gambino gulped his soda and broke the ice.

“So,” he asked, “what do y’all make of the demographic death of white people in America?”

The first confrontation right had been suspicious of Islam since he got an uneasy feeling watching a group of women in niqabs cross the street outside the Islamic Association of North Texas, in nearby Richardson.

“I remember feeling that’s not right, and this was before 9/11,” he said. “This religion don’t look like light. It looks dark. It doesn’t look peaceful.”

His feelings hardened in May 2015 when two men traveled from Phoenix and fired bullets outside an anti-Islam event at a conference center in Garland, Tex., his home town.

Wright, who runs his own construction business, wanted to understand why. He read his old encyclopedia yearbooks, did some research at the local library and then searched on the Internet. His reading reinforced his belief that moderate Muslims were not doing enough to stop extremists and spurred fears that many might secretly support them.

Wright decided the correct response was to become an extremist himself — “but for a cause that is good.”

On Facebook, he posted a meme of a snake looming in a lawn; the grass signified moderate Muslims shielding radicals.

In his Googling, Wright came across something he found particularly troubling: Three members of the mosque in Richardson had been associated with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a charitable organization that was indicted by the George W.

W

Bush administration in connection with donating $12 million to Hamas.

Members of the mosque had argued that the money was going to Palestinian families affected by war; the Bush administration contended it was being used to fund terrorism.

And thus Wright began his personal crusade.

He wanted proof that the mosque was no longer funding terrorism.

In December 2015, Wright showed up at the mosque. He had ditched his normal attire — button-up shirt and loafers, what he called “the Barack Obama style” — in favor of a black T-shirt that showed off his shoulder tattoo depicting the 3 Percenters, an anti-government militia movement. He came with six of his buddies. He carried a 12-gauge. Others carried AR-15s.

“We did it because we needed protection,” Wright said. “I’m not going out like the people in France did,” a reference to the 2015 shooting at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Reporters showed up, too. They stuck a microphone in Wright’s face when two unidentified members of the mosque approached. One man came in camouflage; the other carried a sign that said “Islam is a Religion of Peace.”

The man in camouflage thought Wright’s concern was easy to fix. He encouraged Wright

Men pray at the Islamic Center of Irving on Aug. 19. In 2015, the mayor of the Dallas-area city, Beth Van Duyne, pushed for a state anti-sharia law.

Above, Wright’s AR15 rifle sits in Gambino’s truck.

Wright says he sees himself as an extremist “but for a cause that is good.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

to file a public information request to get the mosque’s financial records.

Wright didn’t want to do that. He declared that he had the right to walk in and examine the books himself. He didn’t trust official tax documents.

The video ends with the mosque members inviting Wright to come with them to meet an FBI agent who could vouch that mosques — not just theirs but across the country — have been working hard to identify and turn in suspected terrorists. Wright said he thought that might be a good idea, but the two never followed up.

Instead, Wright used the footage to recruit more members.

“My first videotaped debate,” Wright wrote when he posted the video on BAIR’s Facebook page. He started getting messages from around the country.

More Texans wanted to join his cause. So did private investigators and veterans, he said.

Their vigilante operation began to metastasize.

There were meetings in undisclosed places “in the sticks” to share information about things they read and heard about Islam. At the meetings, they looked at satellite images of mosques in rural areas in case they were masquerading as training centers for the Islamic State. Despite their suspicions, they haven’t taken any action.

They practiced shooting at targets from up close and afar, and they drilled how to advance in case of an ambush — training for a possible sudden onslaught from counterprotesters.

They felt righteous and saw themselves as modern-day follow-ups to the Founding Fathers — self-motivated and -taught, taking on a larger global force. Standing up against that kind of threat reaffirmed their sense of what it meant to be an American.

“We are exercising our Second Amendment rights to protect our First Amendment rights,” Wright liked to say, even though he grew nervous about what some of his fellow members were saying. Some called for genocide of everyone who wasn’t white. He publicly yelled at the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to become allies.

“Those guys are bigots,” he told news reporters at the time. Others wanted to do something more menacing than just showing up with guns.

“They want to take pigs’ heads and hang them on signs, put bacon on buildings,” Wright recalled one recent day at dinner with a friend.

“There’s a lot of goofy people on our side, and that stuff is counterproductive. My goal is not to make fun of Muslims; it’s to point out the people who are the problem.”

Fears of sharia houri, the son of Pakistani immigrants, moved to Dallas from Chicago in July 2001. He was 13. He was coming out of art class on Sept. 12, 2001, when he got a funny feeling someone was behind him.

“Four white guys jumped me,” Ghouri said.

There were bruised knees and bloody noses. “All of us ended up going to the hospital that day.”

He is now married with two kids, living in Plano, Tex. After the middle school fight, Ghou-

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from previous page

ri said, he rarely encountered intimidation because of his faith — until the sharia debate came to the Dallas suburbs.

The idea of sharia, or Islamic law, had become frightening in conservative circles, where right-wing outlets falsely asserted that Muslims were moving to Europe and setting up “no-go zones” in which police were banned and imams made the rules based on sharia.

Their fear was that such a phenomenon would happen for real in America.

Sharia is not a codified document similar to the U.S. Constitution but refers to guidelines drawn from the Koran and thousands of years of scholarly texts for how to live as a Muslim.

Sharia has a broad range of interpretations, but it has become stereotypically associated with extreme and rare applications in places such as Saudi Arabia, where penal codes allow for beheadings. At least nine states have passed laws stating that foreign codes, such as sharia, cannot supersede the Constitution.

In 2015, months before Wright first protested at the mosque, a Breitbart News article highlighted a sharia court supposedly operating in the Dallas area.

There is, in fact, an “Islamic tribunal” in the Dallas suburbs, but the imam who helps operate it found the debate as laughable as it was disturbing. The tribunal featured three Muslim leaders who were trained in mediation to settle marital disputes, Moujahed Bakhach said. Turning to the tribunal is no different from seeking help from a priest or rabbi, and Bakhach said the idea of sharia courts was being used to “spark distrust” about Muslims in America.

Ghouri said that’s about the time he felt the mood change. Irving also happened to be the place where a 14-year-old Muslim boy was arrested in school when a teacher mistook a clock he made for a bomb. Trump, then a presidential candidate, was calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and also considering heightened surveillance of mosques.

Ghouri said his friends started hearing more people telling them, “Go back to your country!”

One friend who was wearing a hijab said men followed her in Sam’s Club, saying, “Take that rag head off!”

That funny feeling he had back in middle school started to nag at him more often. So Ghouri bought his first gun, a Beretta M9 handgun. His friends started to arm themselves, as well. They started practicing and learned about gun handling on YouTube.

When Ghouri heard BAIR was planning to return to the mosque in Richardson, he was relieved. If they were going to show up with guns, Ghouri and his friends would, too. He wanted to stare into the eyes of hateful men to let them know that he and his friends weren’t scared, that they were willing to defend themselves. He hoped that would lead to a more civil discussion.

The center’s leadership encouraged Ghouri to abandon his plans because engaging Wright

“

B

The best way to handle that is to get to know each other,” Ghouri said. “I can understand it’s uncomfortable, but you have to be courageous.

Otherwise, this cycle of hate is going to continue and the fear we have of each other will never go away.

was fruitless.

“A lot of our community has been nervous because they see no difference between what David is doing and what the white supremacists did in Charlottesville,” Ghouri said. “They don’t want to give them any legitimacy. They say I’m naive, but so what if I’m being naive?”

Wright said he thought Ghouri was kidding when he invited him to talk the afternoon of the first protest; he was ready to dismiss the offer.

But a local reporter covering the protest overheard an invitation to lunch and told Wright he would want to come along in case he ever accepted.

“And then it occurred to me that I could get some good publicity if a camera came on,” Wright said. “Maybe they’ll answer my questions about Muslims.”

Wright turned around to go back to Ghouri.

“Let’s go now,” Wright said.

The men talked for two hours at a branch of the Halal Guys, mostly about Wright’s fear that the mosque was still funding terrorists. Ghouri explained that the mosque’s leadership helps vet donations to ensure they don’t go to bad actors. He explained how their religion is a peaceful one.

“I’m not sure I believed him,” Wright said.

“But I did get a free lunch out of it.”

Wright maintained that he didn’t learn anything about Islam from the conversation, but he allowed that “it changed my perspective a little bit. I have a little more trust for the average Muslim person.”

At first, Ghouri felt that lunch made an impact.

“I think I saw a little bit in him that he did not want to hate Muslims,” Ghouri said. “Maybe over time, he’d change his beliefs.”

If that was the case, he needed more than three months. In June, Wright was out front of the mosque again with guns and television cameras. And this time he had 150 people by his side.

The Dairy Queen meeting y Wright’s side at Dairy Queen was Christopher Gambino, who joined the cause after reading about Wright.

He was what he considered an All-American: a son of two executives in northern Dallas who joined the Boy Scouts and played baseball.

He felt as though he was living out the American Dream of his father, who emigrated from Italy, and his mother, whose grandparents came from Ireland.

Now he was trying to explain to two Muslim Americans why he was so concerned about death rates among white Americans.

“The core issue for me is about America and what it means,” said Gambino, causing Ghouri and Budri to pull back from the table and furrow their eyebrows.

“I’m not a white nationalist,” he went on. “I come from a house with very strong values.

And some people keep trying to change our values. Like, I love Mexico, but I don’t want to be in that place.”

Budri, Ghouri’s guest, jumped in. He explained that he was born and raised in Texas but that his parents grew up in Afghanistan.

He had spent months in their homeland this summer and came away thinking, “It’s not my culture. My culture is American.” In Budri’s mind, more white people dying does not mean America is fading.

“But if you change the nature of a place, then everything changes,” said Gambino, eating fries from a container that said “Se habla Tex Mex.” “I don’t want to see the nature of the culture I’m used to having be changed. I mean, it’s already changed enough.”

Ghouri tried to explain what it means to live as he does, with men like Wright and Gambino targeting him because of his religion. He shared the story about the middle school assault and how those sorts of threats had subsided until last year’s election.

Wright and Gambino weren’t sympathetic.

Islamophobia was “made up,” Wright said.

“Do you think people can tell you’re Pakistani?” Gambino asked. “Most people around here would think you’re Hispanic. It’s Christians here who feel embattled.”

Gambino told them of a story he read about how the once-Polish enclave of Hamtramck, Mich., became the country’s first majorityMuslim city. According to World Net Daily — a far-right website — residents referred to it as “Shariahville.” Arabian-style minarets adorn the tops of buildings, and loudspeakers from mosques bleat out calls to prayer five times a day.

“They’re not assimilating,” Gambino said.

“That’s the problem.”

“You shouldn’t have to assimilate,” Ghouri replied. “We can integrate. We should learn the language. We should learn the institutions and laws and structures, social and economic . . . At the same time, we should not be expected to give up our culture.”

“It’s not that,” Gambino replied. “It’s just for Christians, the culture of America that we’re a part of is sort of being usurped.”

”

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COVER STORY “Why does it matter?” Ghouri asked. “Why do you have to feel superior? Are we forcing them to speak another language or do another thing?

No. You do whatever you want to do. We are living in a growing and thriving community, and we are going to do what we want to do.”

“It can make some people uncomfortable is all I’m saying,” Gambino said.

“The best way to handle that is to get to know each other,” Ghouri said. “I can understand it’s uncomfortable, but you have to be courageous.

Otherwise, this cycle of hate is going to continue and the fear we have of each other will never go away.”

“But it makes us uncomfortable,” Gambino said again.

“Yeah,” Ghouri said. “That’s multiculturalism.”

Wright interjected that some cultures produce bad things, which is why he was so against sharia in this country. He talked about videos he saw of women getting their heads chopped off on YouTube (“Saudi Arabia sucks really bad,” Budri told him. “I don’t know their laws . . . or why that’s okay”) and how offensive it was that Muslims would rather kill gay people than marry them (“So do some Christians,” Budri said) and how he read that leaving the religion is punishable by death.

“You can’t just walk away,” Wright said. “It’s like the mafia.”

“That’s B.S.,” said Budri, adding again that mediation tribunals based on sharia settle civil matters. He described sharia as a guideline for Islam, calling on him to pray five times a day, to treat his wife with respect, to protect his neighbors. He was afraid of no takeover.

“One of the components of sharia law is you respect the rule of law in the land that you live in,” Budri said.

Budri had questions for Wright: Where was he getting his information? To him, it sounded as if Wright was parroting the “propaganda industry” that popularized conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones.

“I ain’t no Alex Jones!” Wright said.

Wright hated the idea of being associated with a man who claimed Hillary Clinton was a Satanist or that Obama was a jihadist or that the Sandy Hook shootings weren’t real. Wright insisted that his ideas were based on looking at court documents and records and, more recently, speaking in an unofficial capacity with members of the local CAIR branch.

Many, he said, made the same points Budri made. Those points did not nullify “flying jetliners into skyscrapers and going to Christmas parties in San Bernardino and mowing down 14 people,” Wright said.

“And what about Barcelona?” he asked.

“But what about Charlottesville?” Ghouri countered.

“What about the man in your mosque who was caught on terrorism charges?” Wright asked. “I sent you the link about him on Facebook.”

Ghouri said he couldn’t remember the incident, which Wright said was the point.

“You should know what’s going on in your

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Do you understand that a man like that would not come and talk to me?” Budri said.

“You’re telling me that if you saw that guy at the mosque, he wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s go to a military base and do this?’ ” Wright said. “There has to be an organizational structure somewhere that makes him feel comfortable.”

“You see, that’s a conspiracy theory,” Budri said.

Wright exhaled: “I am not a conspiracy theorist!”

‘I have respect for you’ he onion rings had gone cold. It had been three hours since the conversation started, and Wright had to stand up because he was so tired of sitting down. Budri said he was exhausted. Ghouri suggested they move to the parking lot, where they could have a cigarette. The four men smiled and chatted in the beating Texas sun. The conversation turned quickly to comparing guns and going boar hunting.

“I have respect for you,” Budri said to Wright and Gambino. “It seems you don’t just want to be a propagandist.”

“You have a lot of philosophical integrity,” Gambino told them. “I’ve learned a lot.”

Ghouri wondered aloud whether they would ever agree on anything other than cigarettes and guns and a love of Texas.

Then Wright said something that surprised him: He was no longer planning to protest in front of Ghouri’s mosque, or any other.

When BAIR started, Wright said, showing up with guns and forcing a controversy was innovative. Now those actions had been taken up by so many fringe groups — antifa, neo-Nazis, the KKK. Wright didn’t want to be associated with any of them.

But there was a group Wright felt proud to be part of. Wright abstained from voting in the election but appreciated the newfound fascination with working-class whites, what some would call Trump voters. In a fearful country, he found himself to be more than a man with a Facebook account, a passion and a gun. The self-described extremist now believed he could help save America through the power of government.

“It’s not like I’m Joe Blow anymore,” Wright said. “I have a name, and people would listen.

The makeup of our government has changed.

The presidency has changed.”

Ghouri wasn’t surprised by Wright’s feeling of empowerment; it was something he was begrudgingly coming to accept from those distrustful of his religion. Yet Ghouri felt that Wright had become so dogmatic that it might not make sense to break bread with him again.

They would never agree on who — or what — to fear in America.

He didn’t mention those thoughts to Wright.

“I’m glad you don’t want to bring guns to the mosque anymore,” Ghouri said.

In a suspicious country, the best he could hope for was that the extremists would stay away. n

T ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

house,” Wright said. “Your house. Whenever I show up, doing what I do, some people are like, ‘You’re a racist, you’re a bigot, you’re the terrorist yourself.’ No, I’m not. I’m none of those things. Instead of focusing on me, why don’t you focus on your own house?”

Budri accepted that Muslims could do more to identify terrorists, but he explained that extremists were fringe characters who were motivated by an ideology beyond their faith in Allah.

Budri noted that Wright was called those names because his ideas weren’t so different from the commentators he despised. Budri questioned why Wright had such little confidence in law enforcement’s ability to do its job.

The mosque “is not just a place where we go talk to God,” Budri said. “It’s a place where we take our kids to play soccer, to play basketball.

There are social events there. How do you expect to dialogue with those people” if you come with guns?

Wright said he had little choice in today’s media climate. It was the large, showy response to fear, the indignant call for self-preservation, that drew people to the cause.

“If I were not to show up with guns, none of y’all would have never paid a . . . bit of attention to me,” Wright said.

Budri cut him off. He said he shared the same goals as Wright: He didn’t want to see more people die. After 9/11, Budri said, he even considered joining the military to fight in Afghanistan, but he wasn’t convinced that war would bring stability.

“My whole point is I’ve been spending most of my life, since I’ve been out of high school, trying to understand what’s going on: What can I do about it?” Budri said.

“You can do the right things as an individual,” Wright said. He reminded them of Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who killed four Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga, Tenn., in 2015. “He looked kind of like you guys.

Young. Americanized.” That is the type of terrorist Budri could stop, he said.

Wright waves goodbye to Ghouri and Budri after the meeting. Wright surprised Ghouri by declaring he would no longer protest at mosques. He said he plans to save America through government.

© The Washington Post

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SCIENCE

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON ART WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION, NEW YORK CITY BALLET VIDEO STILL

BY

S ARAH L . K AUFMAN

I

f you think about it, having a great time at the theater defies logic in many ways. We enter a space where we’re surrounded by strangers. We’re bombarded with unusual actions and images, and understanding them can depend on deciphering a wordless language of symbols.

Once meaning sets in, we risk displaying emotional reactions in public, which in other situations might lead to feelings of shame.

Yet, on a good night, at least, when we’re at a live performance, we somehow overcome our inhibitions to laugh more, cry more and generally enjoy ourselves more than when we’re watching a show at home. The experience may absorb us so much that we even lose ourselves and feel connected to something larger.

How does this happen?

Some of the answers to art’s mysteries can be found in science.

Art is considered the domain of the heart, but its transporting effects start in the brain, where intricate systems perceive and interpret it with dazzling speed.

Using brain-imaging and other

Exploring how the mind behaves in the realm of the heart

tools of neuroscience, the new field of neuroaesthetics is probing the relationship between art and the brain.

Whether it’s a concert, play, opera or ballet, seeing a live performance is a neural rush on many levels. As an example, let’s look at the ballet “Swan Lake” to see how it trips your brain cells, from the moment you take your seat.

Many of the leading neuroscientists studying art and the brain were interviewed for this project.

Their findings suggest new ways to think about the arts and how we relate to them. What is presented here is a compilation of their theories.

We find connection in a crowd Social connection is one of the strengths of our species — it’s how we learn from others by imitation. We’re keenly attuned to the emotions and actions of people around us because our brains are designed for this.

If, for example, you’ve ever gone to an experimental performance-art piece where there’s hardly anyone in the audience but you, and you’ve felt a little ex-

Temporoparietal junction Medial prefrontal cortex

posed and awkward, this is why.

We don’t generally like being isolated from a group. We crave social connection. And the cues we get from those around us, whether in a ballpark, a movie theater or a concert hall, help our brains make sense of our sur-

roundings. This starts from the moment we walk into a crowd.

An audience offers a rich social and sensory environment that engages several parts of the brain.

The “social brain network,” which includes the temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex, is involved in decoding facial expressions. It’s also used in social perception, like sensing that the person next to us is getting restless.

The “mirror neuron system,” which contains cells that represent actions, is activated when we detect the movements and emotions of other people. This system allows us to coordinate our behavior with those around us — to settle as the lights dim and applaud when others do. It also helps us perceive strong emotions and spread them.

When we feel that others around us are emotionally moved — when they’re saddened, startled or delighted — our own emotions can become amplified and sensed by the people next to us.

This social connection is part of a key function of our brains: making sense of human behavior, a large part of which is evaluating movement within and around us.

Movement is irresistible Major parts of the brain are mainly concerned with movement and sending motor commands to our muscles so that our bodies can function and we can move as we need to for survival.

The brain is highly stimulated by motion, body language, facial expression, gestures — all the motor perceptions that could affect survival and our success in social settings. These elements combine in the “Swan Lake” experience.

But we’re not only visually pulled to the movements of others.

We feel them, in some small way, in our bodies. According to the mirror system theory, our brain automatically mimics other people’s actions through its motor system.

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SCIENCE When a dancer leaps or turns, we may empathetically feel a soaring sensation in response.

Many scientists believe we map other people’s actions into our own somatosensory system, which conveys sensation through the brain and body and helps us empathize with others. This allows us to take in a performer’s separate motions as one psychologically rich phrase. A series of jumps become an expression of yearning, because we automatically grasp the emotion attached to it.

Even in the wordless art of dance, with our brains’ capacity for empathy, we can begin to discover meaning — and a story.

We love a story A narrative conveys information from one person’s brain to another’s in an effective way. We can learn vicariously through another’s experience from a safe space, without really being involved, which is why storytelling is so powerful. We embark on a journey constructed by someone else, and, as we see in “Swan Lake,” we can empathize with what the characters go through without suffering the full force of fresh heartbreak.

“Swan Lake” tells a rather straightforward story of good vs. evil. It centers on Princess Odette, who has been put under a spell and must live a double life as a swan by day, woman by night, until she finds true love.

Prince Siegfried pledges himself to her, but he breaks his vow when a seductive villainess named Odile, also known as the “Black Swan,” fools him into betraying Odette.

The ballet ends in tragedy — and paradoxically, we like that.

Research shows we tend to empathize more with characters in sad stories, and this may trigger hormones related to consoling and bonding.

Going back to the brain bonus

of being in an audience, sharing a strong emotional experience with others connects us and makes us feel good.

The logic of art is a neural turn-on Scientists studying various aspects of the arts believe certain components especially excite the brain. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran proposes several universal laws of art, or common patterns found in artworks across time and cultures. These principles powerfully activate our visual centers. In theory, they tap into evolved survival responses. Among those found in “Swan Lake” are isolation, contrast and metaphor.

Isolation: Singling out one element helps the brain block other

sensory information and focus attention. This magnifies our emotional reaction, especially when the element is simplified to bare essentials. Odette is set apart from the rest of the cast, and she is recognizable as a swan with just a few gestures.

Contrast: The brain detects boundaries best when the edges are distinct, especially for objects next to each other. The black and white color scheme of “Swan Lake” sets the main characters apart.

Metaphor: Linking seemingly unrelated elements can heighten emotion and empathy. Our brains create meaning from Odette’s swan movements, and this deepens our perception of her pain.

shapes elicited positive feelings, as in Odette’s whirling images of flight.

Edgy body shapes triggered negative emotions, such as the Black Swan’s spiky, asymmetrical moves. They’re impressive, but also a little alarming.

Music: The perfect partner In another study, Christensen and her colleagues showed subjects silent dance clips and ones that included music. The subjects wore fingertip sweat-detection devices to monitor their raw emotional responses. When the music and dance matched — that is, sad music plus sad dancing — the subjects’ bodily responses and their reported feelings were stronger. If the music did not match, the responses were weaker.

Something happens when emotionally compatible music and dance combine, which is more powerful than a random combination.

Putting it all together When you go to the ballet — or any other show — you’re entering

into a highly controlled experience. If everything works as planned, all the elements contribute to a kind of shared consciousness. In effect, your billions of brain cells are interacting with billions of other brain cells, busily making the microscopic connections that yoke together the brains of those present with an almost inescapable force.

This happens from the moment we automatically tune ourselves to the audience. Soon we’re vicariously feeling and making meaning out of the actions on stage, watching a story unfold that connects us with the performers, responding to the magnetism of specific visual cues, experiencing heightened emotions as music and movement entwine and even bonding with those around us. It’s just as the artists — choreographers, directors, playwrights, composers, performers — intended. And this magical transformation starts within the architecture of one brain. Yours.

Art has emerged from the human brain for tens of thousands of years, and every human culture makes it. Yet scientists are only beginning to understand how the brain perceives and produces art, and why. Like so many artworks, the brain is largely an object of mystery. One secret yet to be discovered is how the fragile folds of matter locked inside our skulls can not only conceive art, create it and contemplate it, but can also experience being transported by it, out of the head, out of the body, out of space and time and reality itself.

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Sharing a strong emotional experience with others connects us and makes us feel good.

©The Washington Post

Body shapes stir varied emotions Neuroscientist Julia F. Christensen and her colleagues at City, University of London, had subjects rate their emotions triggered by brief, silent videos of ballet dancers, with neither music nor facial expressions to influence them.

Soft, round and open body ANDRE CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST; COMPOSITE BY MAY-YING LAM/THE WASHINGTON POST

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BOOKS

Should campuses limit free speech?

N ONFICTION

S FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS

By Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman Yale.

197 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S . R OTH

urveys show that more than 70 percent of college students believe that offensive speech should be subject to disciplinary action, and many commentators profess shock at this lack of commitment to the principle of free speech.

What’s this country coming to?

Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, academic leaders at the University of California, believe that the commitment to free speech is not only an essential value for any democracy, it is the value upon which all other democratic values depend. They take the “free market” approach to campus speech: Just as more competition in the economic marketplace makes it more likely that goods and services will improve, so more competition in the “marketplace of ideas” makes it more likely that better theories and practices will be developed. The cure for offensive, hurtful talk should be “more speech,” not the regulation of speech. It is through more speech that avenues for social change and scientific advances are created. It is through more speech that bigoted attitudes about minority groups are changed. Free speech, in this view, is the fuel for progress, bending the arc of history toward prosperity, understanding and justice.

As a teacher and president of a university, I find much to agree with in Chemerinsky and Gillman’s account of campus speech issues. And I share their concern that too many people fail to recognize that restrictions on expression have most often been used by those in power to censor those who are trying to create social change. I can admire that the authors, themselves in positions of academic authority, maintain what they call “an instinctive distrust of efforts by authorities to suppress speech.”

But I cringe when these senior university officials glorify their favorite examples of liberal social change (such as the first years of

EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A march by white nationalists in August at the University of Virginia brought up debate over free speech.

the free speech movement at Berkeley) and self-righteously proclaim, “If you value social order and conformity more highly than you value liberty and democracy, then you will not support free speech no matter what else we say.”

Readers may be forgiven for wondering whether they must be conformists if they fail to agree.

To find justifications for their dogmatic approach to freedom of expression, these fundamentalists, like so many others, look to the past.

“History demonstrates,” they write with abandon, “that there is no way to define an unacceptable, punishment-worthy idea without putting genuinely important new thinking and societal critique at risk.” Their rhetoric suggests that a succession of horrible events will be the unintended consequence of even modest restraints on expression. If any idea is regulated, they seem to think, all ideas are at risk for censorship. As many have done before them, they quote John Milton’s argument that

individual opinions must be allowed to flourish if we are to pursue truth. But as Stanley Fish has pointed out, Milton indeed defended diversity of opinion — among Protestants but not Catholics: “Them we extirpate,” Milton wrote.

Fish and others have underscored that defenses of free speech always exclude something. For Milton, it was Catholics; for some today, it might be child pornography or incitements to violence.

Usually, the exclusions can be enforced informally by social or professional pressure (appeals to civility, ostracism), but borders for acceptable speech also get codified in rules and regulations. And there are always borders.

Even Chemerinsky and Gillman recognize that the marketplace of ideas on campus needs some regulation. Harassing speech can be punished, they aver, but only if true harassment is taking place. Although they don’t acknowledge it, this is a political determination — a

judgment about discrimination, history and power. They write that “speech should be subject to punishment if it causes a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety,” but they insist that only physical safety counts. This, too, is a political judgment about what really counts as harm. Making judgments about harassment is something professors and administrators have to do — but there is no evidence that this leads to conformism or authoritarian control of expression.

Chemerinsky and Gillman assume that their fervent commitment to freedom of expression is compatible with trying to “protect the learning experience of all students.” This is similar to free speech advocates assuming that their support of the Citizens United decision banning regulation of campaign spending by corporations and unions is compatible with protecting American democracy for all citizens. Both assumptions sidestep issues of power and inequality.

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BOOKS Issues concerning either the Cit­ izens United ruling or the value of equality don’t get much attention in “Free Speech on Campus.” And the failure of the marketplace of ideas to create intellectual diversity on many campuses goes unremarked. To be fair, this is a very brief book, and it does a solid job of exploring some of the issues facing professors, administrators and students today. Chemerinsky and Gillman maintain that professional norms should determine how people speak in class, but they are adamant that outside the classroom any regulation of expression must ignore the content of what is being said. They are convinced that the regulation of content, even when the intention is to protect the vulnerable, puts us on a path to authoritarian censorship.

The appeal to the free exchange of ideas, no matter what the cost to historically vulnerable groups, doesn’t convince most college students because many of them recognize that not all ideas make it to the marketplace and that, when all kinds of discourse are tolerated, certain groups tend to get hurt again and again — creating discriminatory hurdles for their members. Markets, including the ones for ideas, often work very well, but when they are unregulated, real harm occurs, all too often wounding people who historically have been abused by those with power and privilege. Chemerinsky and Gillman quote historian and New Yorker columnist Jelani Cobb in this regard: “Freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered.” But they prefer historian C. Vann Woodward’s warning that well-intentioned restrictions on speech can lead to tyranny.

“Free Speech on Campus” underscores that “the best educational environments remove fears that students may have about asking certain questions or challenging prevailing explanations.” Amen. I am less convinced that the dogmatic commitment to the “marketplace of ideas” approach to speech will consistently produce the best environment for all students. n Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.” This was written for The Washington Post.

KLMNO WEEKLY

9 short-story collections we can’t wait to read this fall N ICOLE Y . C HUNG

Short­story collections are a good solution for folks who are “too busy to read” or are trying to find a way to break up a monotonous commute. If you’re looking to test drive a new author or want to break into a new genre without committing to a long book, take your pick from this fall’s smattering of short­story collections.

Following on the heels of her debut novel, “History of Wolves,” Fridlund’s “Catapult” won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. The collection centers on the hard, ugly parts about relationships ranging from familial to romantic. Fridlund pairs her writing with complex characters who evoke a sense of shock with the familiar.

KISS ME SOMEONE

By Karen Shepard Tin House. 288 pp. $19.95 (out now)

UNCOMMON TYPE

By Tom Hanks Knopf. 416 pp. $26.95 (Oct. 17)

BY

Shepard’s collection draws on the fear of isolation. Floating in limbo, the multiracial women in her stories struggle to claim their identity. Shepard suggests that despite their efforts to move on, they find themselves trapped in self-destructive patterns.

Tom Hanks can now add author to his list of accomplishments, which already include producer, director and Academy Awardactor. Hanks’s debut colwinning actor lection contains 17 stories tackling different visions of the American Dream. His characters include an avid bowler who winds up on ESPN, an Eastern European immigrant and a billionaire trying to make it big in America.

COMPLETE STORIES

By Kurt Vonnegut Seven Stories. 944 pp. $45 (out now)

Vonnegut fans, rejoice! This giant volume contains all the master’s short fiction: classics such as “Welcome to the Monkey House” and “Harrison Bergeron,” posthumously published pieces and five never-before-published stories. Organized thematically under headings such as War, Women and Science, it’s a treat for Vonnegut fans and newbies.

With a foreword by Dave Eggers.

FRESH COMPLAINT

By Jeffrey Eugenides FSG. 304 pp. $27 (Oct. 3)

This is the first collection of stories from Eugenides, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Middlesex” (2002). Five of these pieces appeared in the New Yorker. “Air Mail” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 1997.

HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES

By Carmen Maria Machado Graywolf. 248 pp. $16 (Oct. 3)

Blending science fiction, comedy and fantasy, Machado explores violent acts committed against women. From a wife refusing to let her husband control

SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS

By Charlie Jane Anders Tor. 192 pp. $12.99 (Oct. 17)

her body to a woman attracting unwanted attention after weightloss surgery, Machado’s stories inspire horror as well as sympathy. Longlisted for the National Book Award in fiction and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2017 Edited by Meg Wolitzer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 336 pp. $28 (Oct. 3)

If you feel uneasy choosing just one author’s collection, let a witty novelist pick the best stories of the year for you. Wolitzer, whose most recent novel for adults is “The Interestings,” has selected stories by Mary Gordon, T.C. Boyle, Lauren Groff, Jim Shepard and many other beloved writers.

CATAPULT: STORIES

By Emily Fridlund Sarabande. 240 pp. $16.95 (Oct. 10)

Winner of the 2017 Nebula Award for her novel “All the Birds in the Sky,” Anders is back with a collection of six stories about aliens, the end of the world and time travel. Bonus: For readers who finished “All the Birds in the Sky” and wondered what happened to Patricia’s cat, a story written exclusively for this collection has the answer.

THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE

By Daniel Alarcón Riverhead. 256 pp. $27 (Oct. 31)

These stories explore immigration, family loyalty and redemption. Alarcón throws his characters into high-stakes situations to draw out humanity where it seems little hope is left.

Longlisted for the National Book Award in fiction. n

Chung is the office manager of Book World at The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Middle class wants better government, not a tax cut STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a Washington Post business and economics writer. He is also the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University.

One of the great canards of American politics these days is that the “struggling” middle class needs and wants a tax cut. It doesn’t. What it needs and wants after years of tax and spending cuts is more and better government services for the taxes it already pays.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the average rate of income tax paid by the American middle class — the 20 percent of households in the exact middle of the income ladder — has been going down for decades, and was at 2.6 percent of gross income in 2013, the last year for which statistics are available. For the 40 percent of households below them — what you might call the working class — the average household not only paid no tax, but because of refundable tax credits actually got money back from the government equal to 1.2 percent of income, helping to offset payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare) that averaged around 8 percent. To whatever extent the middle class is struggling, it ain’t because of income taxes.

Indeed, when Gallup asked Americans in April about the taxes they pay, a majority — 61 percent — said they felt the income tax they paid this year was fair. A Pew study found that only 26 percent of Americans felt they paid too much in taxes, in contrast to the 60 percent who felt corporations and the wealthy paid too little. A poll by Bloomberg found that taxes were well down on the list of Americans’ public policy priorities, with only 4 percent claiming it was their top concern.

Obviously, there’s nobody who wouldn’t enjoy the extra spending or saving that a tax cut would bring, but as the researchers at Pew found in April, what Americans would like even better is for government to spend more to educate their

children, rebuild infrastructure, and provide health care and an income safety net for the elderly, veterans and the deserving poor.

Despite years of politicians railing against “big government,” Pew found that as many Americans today wanted government to be bigger as to be smaller.

Like the campaign to repeal and replace Obamacare, the middle-class tax cut is a solution looking for a problem. It’s nothing more than a political totem, an expensive exercise in political pandering. Moreover, at a time when the U.S. economy is running pretty much at full capacity, a tax cut is more likely to lead to price and asset inflation than sustainable growth in incomes and employment.

If Democrats had the courage of their pro-government convictions, they’d be saying all that. But because they’ve spent the past decade reflexively adding the words “middle class” to every talking point, they’ve badly boxed themselves in.

Democrats can rail all they want about the skewed nature of Republican tax cuts, but in framing this and every other economic issue in terms of the greedy rich vs. the struggling middle class, they’ve implicitly forfeited the ability to declare that there’s no need for a tax cut at all, including one for the sainted middle class.

Are rising costs of health care, housing and college education putting strains on some households, particularly those that haven’t had a decent raise in years? Sure. But the solution to

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin arrives last month at the Capitol for a meeting about an overhaul of the tax code.

those problems is to reform the health care and education systems and increase the supply of housing, not to jeopardize the government’s ability to make the public investments needed for sustained economic growth, which is what cutting government revenue would do.

Everyone, of course, is for tax reform. Genuine tax reform would make the tax code fairer by treating people with similar incomes in similar ways. It also would make the economy bigger by eliminating tax breaks that distort economic behavior. But what Republicans propose is a whole lot of old-fashioned tax cutting wrapped in a thin cloak of reform. Genuine reform would raise the same amount of money in a fairer, simpler and more efficient manner. Republican tax reform needs $1.5 trillion in fiscal fairy dust over the next decade to make it appear that their plan won’t reduce government revenue and increase the federal debt.

Another myth driving this year’s so-called reform effort that the American economy has become uncompetitive because business taxes are sky high. For starters, the American economy remains one of the two most competitive in the world, according to the last rankings of the World Economic Forum, not exactly a bastion of socialist thinking. And one reason the United States has remained so competitive is that the effective

tax rate for U.S.-based corporations — not the statutory rate bandied about by the business lobby — is just 24 percent, about the average for all industrialized countries, according to a report this year by the Treasury. At the same time, more than half of business profits now avoid the corporate tax altogether as more and more large businesses have organized themselves as partnerships and limited liability corporations — what are known, in tax parlance, as “pass-throughs.”

According to a recent Brookings Institution monograph, if the proliferation of “pass-through” entities had not been allowed to occur American businesses would be paying $100 billion a year more in taxes on profits than they are now.

Real tax reform would also ensure that when rich people die, their estates would be required to pay the deferred tax on the appreciated value of the stocks, real estate and other investments sitting in their portfolios.

The fake news about the inheritance tax is that it represents an unfair “double tax” on entrepreneurial success. In reality, thanks to loopholes in both the capital gains and inheritance taxes, the wealth of the super-rich now passes from one generation to the next without being taxed even once.

Any tax plan that doesn’t close this glaring inequity doesn’t deserve to be called reform. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Lessons from Ali on brain damage JONATHAN EIG is the author of “Ali: A Life.” This was written for The Washington Post.

President Trump made clear that he doesn’t especially mind if athletes suffer brain damage, just so long as the public is entertained.

“Today if you hit too hard — 15 yards!” Trump said at a rally in Alabama late last month. “They’re ruining the game.”

Perhaps he thinks more brain damage will help keep athletes quiet.

The president’s remark came days after the news that former football star Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself in April at age 27 while serving a prison term, showed signs of severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative brain disease.

The report on Hernandez generated little shock, in part because we’ve come to accept that head injuries are an inevitable result of playing football. Former quarterback Boomer Esiason said in his radio show this summer that he probably had CTE. He added, “All football players probably have it.”

What if it’s true? What if everyone who plays football is likely to develop CTE, and what if we can prove it? What if we developed a test to diagnose CTE in active athletes instead of waiting for autopsies, as is currently the case? Scientists at Boston University say a diagnostic test could be developed in five to 10 years, possibly through blood-based biomarkers or neuroimaging.

Would it make a difference?

Muhammad Ali’s career shows why even better testing might not help prevent CTE in athletes.

In the 1970s, boxers who had suffered brain damage during their careers — and almost surely had CTE — were commonly described as “punch-drunk.”

There was little discussion of brain damage among athletes in other sports.

But Ali’s case was unique.

Because he was so well known and beloved, Ali was often asked whether he was concerned about brain damage. Early in his career, when he was young and fast, he said he wasn’t worried. But as he aged and slowed, he took more punishment, and it was easy to see the effects.

Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s ringside doctor, told me he detected signs of brain injury in Ali as early as

1971, after Ali’s epic fight with Joe Frazier.

Did Pacheco tell Ali he was risking further damage? “Yes, I told him,” the doctor said, his voice rising in anger. “Every . . . day I told him.”

By the late 1970s, Ali’s wife noticed that one of the boxer’s thumbs trembled. Ali complained that he lacked the stamina for long runs and had difficulty sleeping.

Ali’s parents told reporters that Ali — then in his late 30s — shuffled when he walked and mumbled when he talked. They wanted their son to quit. But Ali kept boxing, unable to resist the money and public adoration.

Ali’s success as a boxer stemmed from his ability to take punches and remain standing.

But he paid for it. In his 15-round win over Earnie Shavers in 1977, Ali absorbed 266 punches. In a study, scientists at Arizona State University found that Ali’s speech rate (syllables per second) fell by 16 percent immediately after the Shavers bout.

He regained some of the speech as he recovered from the beating.

But less than three months later, he went back into the ring to face Leon Spinks. He not only lost that fight, he also lost more of his speaking ability.

Afterward, a reporter asked if

Ali worried about brain damage.

“No,” he said slowly. “That happens to people who get hit too much.”

A few years later, he wasn’t so sure that he avoided damage.

“They say I have brain damage, can’t talk no more,” he said in a 1981 interview — 10 years after Pacheco’s warning. He was approaching his 40th birthday and said he wanted four or five more fights before retiring.

Many people think that as awareness of CTE rises, it will cause a decline in the popularity of football, just as happened with boxing.

That could certainly occur, but there is a second question posed

by Ali’s career: If scientists can diagnose CTE in active athletes, what will athletes do? Athletes in every pro sport play with injuries, knowing — or at least suspecting — that they are doing permanent damage to their bodies.

Will football players want to get tested for CTE? Will they decide that living a long life with a healthy brain is more important than their careers? Or will they conclude that the joys and financial rewards of football outweigh the risk?

One hopes the answer would be the former. But if Ali’s career provides a lesson, the latter seems more likely. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

A familiar fall from the pedestal ANNE APPLEBAUM is a Washington Post editorial columnist.

Few countries have ever been so closely associated with a single politician as Burma, whose public “face,” for many decades, was the brave and brilliant dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. I remember her appearance — via a prerecorded videocassette, smuggled out of the country — at the international women’s conference in Beijing in 1995.

Aung San Suu Kyi had just been released from house arrest, but her speech was not about Burma, also known as Myanmar. Instead she used language designed to appeal to a surreally diverse audience, ranging from Indian activists and German feminists to Saudi women in abayas.

Even today, that speech is inspirational. Aung San Suu Kyi declared that “genuine tolerance requires an active effort to try to understand the point of view of others; it implies broadmindedness and vision, as well as confidence in one’s own ability to meet new challenges without resorting to intransigence or violence.” In later years, she stuck to that nonviolent message, even when she was placed back under house arrest, and even when her political party was banned and persecuted.

But Aung San Suu Kyi is not a dissident anymore. In late 2010, the Burmese military junta (known by the enigmatic acronym SLORC) launched a democratic transition that eventually gave a victory to her party. She is no longer an activist

but the de facto leader. She no longer speaks in generalities to an international audience, but in specifics to the Burmese.

She is also the most visible politician in a state whose public institutions and popular mentality were formed by many years of autocracy and dictatorship — a state where the military and police, though now further back in the shadows, still hold an enormous amount of economic and political power, controlling companies and land as well as ministries and armies.

In this sense, she has much in common with other politicians and activists who led authoritarian or totalitarian countries during a transition to democracy: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Lech Walesa in Poland, Boris Yeltsin in Russia,

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

Patricio Aylwin in Chile, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, just to name a few.

Though very different, all of them faced the same structural problem: how to instill tolerance for democratic debate, freedom of speech and the press, respect for judicial independence and the rule of law in countries that were unused to these things or had never had them. All of them had rocky moments or faced coup attempts or corruption scandals. Some of them had some success. Others failed, and no wonder: Democratic values can take generations to instill — or can, as we have seen in the United States, grow rapidly weaker even in countries that have had them for generations.

All of those democratic heroes — with the possible exception of Mandela, who retired early — wound up with vastly diminished reputations. Aung San Suu Kyi now joins their number. For several years, as violence increased between the Burmese Buddhist majority and the Rohingya, a Muslim minority ethnic group whom many don’t consider to be citizens, she kept silent. In August, a Rohingya insurgent group attacked Burmese police posts; the Burmese army responded by

burning villages and chasing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya civilians over the border into Bangladesh. In response, Aung San Suu Kyi condemned “all human rights violations and unlawful violence” but refused to criticize her own generals or admit any errors — a response that seems to have been popular among her constituents in Burma but has produced enormous disappointment among her former admirers around the world.

What happened to “broadmindedness and vision,” or the refusal to bend to “intransigence or violence”? Perhaps Aung San Suu Kyi sympathizes with the popular view of the Rohingya as unwanted foreigners; more likely, she doesn’t control the army, she knows it could still overthrow her government and she doesn’t want to risk a breach with the generals. In truth, the real difference between Aung San Suu Kyi in 1995 and 2017 is the difference between theory and practice, opposition and power, the language of an international conference and the language of a country with an autocratic past. The story of her fall from the pedestal is an old story, it repeats itself regularly, and yet every time we are surprised. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Multilateralism BY

D AVID B OSCO

When President Trump was in Manhattan meeting with world lead­ ers at the annual U.N. General Assembly, his address, and reactions to it, reflected misperceptions about what multilateral organizations really do. Here are five of the most persistent errors.

MYTH NO. 1 The United Nations harms American interests.

It’s true that, since the 1960s, the United States has sometimes struggled to get its way in the United Nations, particularly on issues such as conflict in the Middle East and the economic embargo of Cuba. But most U.N. General Assembly actions are adopted by consensus, and on those that require votes, the United States is often on the winning side. When Washington does lose, the consequences are minimal; these votes are only recommendations. The United States has veto power in the much more influential Security Council, which issues binding resolutions and selects secretaries general.

What’s more, the United States can use its financial leverage as the U.N.’s largest contributor to get its way in many budgetary and staffing disputes.

MYTH NO. 2 Multinational bureaucrats are unaccountable.

It’s not true that senior officials at international organizations are unaccountable. First, the onceopaque selection processes for multilateral leaders have become significantly more transparent in recent years, with candidates facing open questions from states, the media and other nongovernmental organizations.

Once in office, these leaders often encounter stiff political pressure from key member states. And the threat of retaliation for bad behavior is not idle: In the Bill Clinton years, the United States repeatedly vetoed the reappointment of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali

because of anger at how he was managing U.N. peacekeeping operations. Under the Obama administration, the United States blocked the reappointment of a World Trade Organization judge whose rulings it did not like. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has been careful about the situations she investigates, tiptoeing around several involving major powers and focusing mostly on African conflicts.

MYTH NO. 3 Unilateralism does not work.

The recent history of combating nuclear proliferation suggests that the most decisive efforts have been unilateral rather than multilateral. Israel stopped Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs through military strikes that were condemned internationally. By contrast, multilateral efforts to stop nuclear progress in North Korea and Iran have had limited success.

Moreover, nothing about having a multilateral blessing means a venture is likely to succeed. Many attributed the struggles of the U.S. war in Iraq to its lack of international backing.

But troubled U.S. efforts in Afghanistan have enjoyed full U.N. approval and the involvement of NATO — to little avail. Multilateral support can be an advantage, but it’s only one factor among many.

MYTH NO. 4 Abolishing veto power would improve the United Nations.

The use of the veto has significantly declined from the Cold War period. On average,

BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

President Trump addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19.

there has been just over one veto per year since the Cold War ended, compared with three annually in the United Nations’ early years.

Restricting the veto would not lead to more effective or coherent U.N. operations. Imagine what would happen if the United Nations authorized an operation in Syria that China or Russia resolutely opposed: The result might be a crisis that could threaten the organization itself.

Hints of that possibility arose during the United Nations’ Congo operation in the 1960s, which the Soviet Union came to oppose. The Soviets demanded that the U.N. secretary general be replaced by a three-person committee and refused to help pay for the operation, resulting in a financial crisis for the organization. Today’s U.N. operations have plenty of problems, but major powers seeking to undermine them is not among them.

MYTH NO. 5 Trump is damaging multilateralism.

So far, Trump has been much less destructive to multilateralism than feared.

America’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, has voted to reauthorize several peacekeeping missions while

insisting on only modest changes to their mandates and composition. And, like all recent American envoys, she has worked through the Security Council to achieve resolutions against North Korea.

Administration threats to slash U.N. funding appear to be hollow.

So far, the Trump team has not even abandoned the organization’s Human Rights Council, which it regularly derides because of the prominence there of human rights abusers such as Cuba and Saudi Arabia. Administration officials still make threatening noises about the World Trade Organization, but thus far they have chosen to work through the WTO rather than seek to dismantle it.

Trump’s decisions to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris accords on climate change were blows to multilateralism. But Hillary Clinton’s similar opposition meant that the TPP was dead before Trump took office. n Bosco is an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies and the author of books on the U.N. Security Council and the International Criminal Court. This was written for The Washington Post.

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