The Washington Post National Weekly - December 4, 2016

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Survive this

In the era of mass shootings, a movement has developed around how we should respond. PAGE 12

Politics Trump’s loyal son-in-law 4 Nation Drones to roam the sea 8

5 Myths What alt-right means 23


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THE FIX

A lost generation BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

he news last week that Rep. Xavier Becerra will leave Congress to become California's attorney general takes another potential Democratic leader off the board in Washington and further highlights the remarkable thinness of the party’s bench of rising stars in the nation’s capital. For Becerra, it makes sense. His stock in Washington had fallen somewhat in recent months and with Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s reelection as minority leader on Wednesday — and the retention of the two other top leaders for House Democrats — it would be at least two more years before Becerra could move up the leadership ladder at all. For the Democratic Party in Washington, Becerra’s decision is part of a broader, troubling trend: Young, ambitious lawmakers either falling by the wayside or giving up on the House entirely. Consider the fates of the handful of Democratic legislators seen, as recently as a few years ago, as the next generation of House speakers-to-be: l Xavier Becerra (Calif.) was appointed California attorney general. l Chris Van Hollen (Md.) won an open Senate seat in 2016. l Steve Israel (N.Y.) is retiring from Congress this year. l Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) was removed as chair of the Democratic National Committee. It’s remarkable. An entire generation of Democratic leaders in Washington has been washed away — and the generation younger than the Van Hollens and Israels of the world look to be too young right now to step up and fill the leadership vacuum. There are lots of reasons for this lost generation — some of them unique to the individuals.

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From left, Reps. Xavier Becerra, Chris Van Hollen, Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were at one time seen as the next group of House speakers-to-be, but that is no longer the case.

But the common thread that connects them all is that Pelosi along with Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and James E. Clyburn (S.C) have had a death grip on the party’s top leadership slots for a very long time. While that’s great if you are — or work for — Pelosi, Hoyer or Clyburn, it’s bad if you are young, ambitious and looking to move up the political chain in Washington. It’s hard to disconnect the long run of power by these three House Democrats from the atrophying of the caucus below them. Consider it this way: A legendary basketball coach just keeps coming back for the next season — then the next season after that. The guy is a legend. No one — not the boosters, not the athletic director, not anyone — is going to push him out.

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 8

But what usually happens in those situations? The coach loses a bit of his edge even as his top assistants, who have served loyally but are ready for a chance at the big job, leave the program for other opportunities. When the legendary coach finally does call it quits, the program is typically in bad shape — and there’s no natural heir waiting in the wings to rebuild it. That’s what appears to be happening among House Democrats. No one in their right mind would question the historic nature of Pelosi’s run in leadership or her remarkable effectiveness in keeping her caucus together. But, as rising stars continue to walk away from the House, the party needs to ask itself whether it’s setting itself up for a massive leadership void down the road. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SOCIAL MEDIA BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER In the age of the active shooter, learning to survive has become a routine part of life. Illustration by JEFF ÖSTBERG for The Washington Post.


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POLITICS

Kushner’s history of fierce loyalty BY

S HAWN B OBURG

J

ared Kushner was just an undergrad at Harvard when politicians began receiving big-dollar campaign donations bearing his name. In reality, the money was sent by his father, a powerful New Jersey real estate mogul. Over the course of several years, Charles Kushner pumped half a million dollars into political campaigns, avoiding legal limits by attributing checks to family members and business associates without their knowledge. The scheme sent the elder Kushner to prison and engulfed the family in scandal. It was a defining and pivotal episode for Jared Kushner, now 35, who is poised to become one of the most trusted advisers to his father-in-law, President-elect Donald Trump. The donation scandal provides a glimpse of the privilege and influence that marked Kushner’s upbringing in a prominent family. But friends say it also reveals in Kushner a fundamental trait that Trump prizes and has strengthened their bond: unflinching loyalty. Far from seeing his father’s actions as a betrayal, the younger Kushner flew to Alabama almost every Sunday to visit his father during his 14 months behind bars. He took the helm of the family business. And he publicly insisted that his father was unfairly prosecuted. “Jared is a devoted son in an almost old-world sense of respect and duty and devotion,” said former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey (D), who counted Charles Kushner as his biggest donor until McGreevey resigned in 2004 amid a sex scandal. The same dynamic — this time between Kushner and Trump — played out on the campaign trail, when Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, publicly defended his father-inlaw against claims that his rhetoric was fueling anti-Semitism and racism. And it seems likely to carry over into the White House, where Kushner is expected to play the role of informal gatekeeper and

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

Trump’s son-in-law was first tested when his father was sent to prison confidant to the president and may be entrusted with the enormous task of trying to broker an end to conflict in the Middle East. Kushner married into a family that, much like his own, keeps its business in the bloodline. He and Ivanka Trump were introduced at a business lunch, and ever since they got married, they have been trusted advisers to her father. During the campaign, Kushner and the elder Trump complemented each other with contrasting styles, according to multiple people who have observed them over the past year. Trump was brash and confrontational while Kushner was soft-spoken and discreet; Trump focused his energy on traditional media and rallies while

Kushner worked with digital strategists to build a data operation. Kushner carved out a portfolio of sorts on foreign policy, with particular interest in the Middle East and Israel, and helped to shape Trump’s speech in March to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a well-received address during which Trump stuck to his prepared remarks. Trump told the New York Times recently that, once he is in the White House, Kushner would probably keep his role as an informal counselor and envoy to the Middle East, where Kushner already has close relationships with people close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, are seen at the New York Hilton Midtown in the early morning hours of Nov. 9 after election night. Kushner has become a confidant to President-elect Donald Trump.

Several Trump associates have said that Kushner will be a chief of staff in all but name, with wideranging — if sometimes hard-toquantify — influence and a voice equal to incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon. Proximity to power Like his ascent in the family business, and perhaps even his Ivy League education, Kushner’s influence on the future president is partly a by-product of his proximity to power. Few families in the Northeast enjoyed more political wattage than the Kushners in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Jared


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POLITICS Kushner’s grandparents, Holocaust survivors, had laid roots in New Jersey and started a family business in construction. Charles Kushner grew the company to encompass office buildings and thousands of condos and apartments. The Kushners gave millions to political, charitable and pro-Israel causes. As a teenager, Jared Kushner became accustomed to seeing national leaders pay their respects to his father. In 1998, as Jared Kushner was starting to fill out college applications, his father pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in $250,000 yearly installments, according to a book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges,” by journalist Daniel Golden. Jared’s test scores were below Ivy League standards, Golden wrote, citing an unnamed official at the yeshiva high school in northern New Jersey that Jared attended. But he had powerful people vouch for him. Then-Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) made a call to the Harvard admissions staff on Kushner’s behalf — at the urging of a Democratic senator from New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg, who had received more than $100,000 in donations from Charles Kushner, according to the book. Jared Kushner was admitted. Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said the suggestion that Jared Kushner’s acceptance was connected to his father’s gift to the school “is and always has been false.” “Jared Kushner was an honors student in high school, played on the hockey, basketball and debate teams. He graduated from Harvard with Honors,” she said in a statement. Kushner’s parents, she said, have donated more than $100 million to universities, hospitals and other charitable causes, she said. Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, founder of Chabad House at Harvard, who met Jared his freshman year and became close to the Kushner family, said that as a student Jared was devoted to his family and his Orthodox Jewish faith and had the mature bearing of a graduate student. He made the trip home to New Jersey to celebrate the smallest family milestones and celebrations. “His exceptional respect, devo-

POOL PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE VIA REUTERS

“His exceptional respect, devotion and love for his family always came across.” — Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who met Jared Kushner during his freshman year at Harvard

tion and love for his family always came across,” Zarchi said. A family embroiled in scandal That loyalty appears to have been tested as the Kushner family became embroiled in scandal. By the time Jared finished his studies at Harvard, nearly $90,000 had been donated to state and federal campaigns in his name, records show, almost entirely to Democrats. The giving spree pulled Jared into the crosshairs of the Federal Election Commission. Just before he began his senior year in 2002, a letter from the FEC addressed to the younger Kushner arrived at his New Jersey home, a 7,300-square-foot mansion in a wealthy suburban neighborhood. In the letter, federal regulators wrote that Jared Kushner appeared to have broken campaignfinance laws by contributing more than they allowed. Jared Kushner, who was later cleared when the donations were found to have come from his father, declined to comment on anything related to the investigation involving his father. Records also show that Kushner was among 15 people, whose names had appeared on checks for campaign contributions signed by

his father, who were issued subpoenas by the FEC after initially not answering questions about donations. Although Kushner eventually cooperated with FEC investigators, it is not clear if he did so with prosecutors in the subsequent criminal investigation. In any event, the scandal does not appear to have damaged his relationship with his father. That was not true of other family members, including an uncle who had been cooperating with federal prosecutors; Charles Kushner apparently did not take lightly to the betrayal, records show. He paid a prostitute $10,000 to seduce his brother-in-law in a hotel room set up with hidden cameras to record the rendezvous. He later instructed a private detective to mail the tape to his sister as a warning — he wanted it to arrive at her house shortly before a family party, records show. Instead, she took the tape to the FBI, leading to Kushner’s arrest. Kushner learned of the arrest when his father called him on a July morning. Jared was on his way to an internship in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, he told New York magazine in a 2009 interview. In the interview, he sounded more angry that the

After the third presidential debate, Donald Trump is greeted by, from left, his son Donald Trump Jr.; son-in-law Jared Kushner; daughter Ivanka; son Eric; Eric's wife, Lara; and Trump's daughter Tiffany.

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tape had been deemed illegal than he was about his father’s role in producing it. “They’re going to arrest me today,” Charles Kushner told him. “For what?” Jared Kushner recalled asking. “Is it because of the tape? I thought your lawyers knew about that. I thought it’s not illegal.” “Apparently they’re saying that it is,” his father said. Charles Kushner decided not to fight. He pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FEC, witness tampering and tax evasion stemming from $6 million in political contributions and gifts mischaracterized as business expenses. Among the allegations were that he paid for an unnamed individual’s private school tuition out of company accounts and declared them charitable contributions on his tax returns, according to court documents. He was sentenced to two years in prison. His son stood by him, visiting most weekends and insisting, as he still does, that his father’s prosecution was unjust. If Charles Kushner taught his son deep loyalty, he may also have taught him its flip side, revenge — at the very least modeling that behavior with his decision to target his brother-in-law. For Jared Kushner, the evidence of whether he absorbed the lesson lies in his actions toward Chris Christie, the hard-charging federal prosecutor — and future governor of New Jersey, 2016 Republican presidential candidate and endorser of Donald Trump for president — who put the elder Kushner behind bars. Speculation has swirled that Kushner helped convince Trump not to pick Christie to be his vice president. Friends said privately that Kushner was smart enough not to have made his argument a personal one. The residual damage from a Christie scandal that became known as Bridgegate was enough reason, they said. His father’s arrest changed Jared Kushner’s career path: He no longer wanted to be a prosecutor. “Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him,” he told the Real Deal in 2014. “I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong.” n


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POLITICS

Galvanized to win their own seats BY

I SAAC S TANLEY- B ECKER

O

n that Wednesday, she woke up inconsolable. On Thursday, angry. But on the Friday after the election, as she prepared posters to join thousands in protesting President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, Mia Hernández came to a quiet realization: If she found her country’s direction intolerable, she would have to try to change it. She would change it not just by signing petitions, or protesting, or calling her legislators. For the first time, she sketched out a plan to run for elected office. In 2020, Hernández intends to make a bid for a seat on the San Jose City Council or the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Her focus will be reproductive rights and community empowerment, she said. “Everybody says organize, don’t mourn, make a change,” said Hernández, 22, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “So I said to myself, ‘How am I going to be an active member in this? You know what, I need to run for office. I need to be a part of that decision-making. I need to make sure Trump’s voice is not the only voice out there.’ ” Among young, liberal women who expected to see the country elect its first female president Nov. 8, Hernández is not alone; many are responding to Hillary Clinton’s defeat with a sense of obligation to seek political power. After years of never imagining a career in politics or only vaguely entertaining the idea of working in politics, these women are determined to run for elected office. They don’t speak for all women, many of whom voted for Trump — 42 percent of them, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. Notably, a majority of white women favored the Republican. But Clinton still benefited from an overall gender gap, and young women supported her by 32 percentage points. For many of those rooting for Clinton to break the glass ceiling her campaign repeatedly invoked, her loss, painful as it was,

COURTESY OF MIA HERNÁNDEZ

COURTESY OF AUREA BOLAÑOS PEREA

COURTESY OF EMILY SHERIDAN

could be an even greater mobilizing force than a victory might have been. “It’s incredibly ironic,” said Alexandra Melnick, a 22-year-old from Florida who recently decided to run for a spot on a local school board after she obtains her master’s degree in education. “But to think this could inspire women like me to run for office — it’s the only belief one can have without losing hope.” For Hernández, the ascent of a man she sees as menacing to her full inclusion in American society — and menacing to the safety of her undocumented friends — has changed everything. Her focus had not been on electoral politics. She considered herself an activist, concentrating on rent and eviction issues in her home town of San Jose. She used to spurn city council members and state legislators, politicians against whom she had “spent so much time fighting.” But the election convinced her that these offices wield unparalleled influence, and it made clear to her the scope of the power she could exert and the scale of her responsibility.

Clockwise from top left, Mia Hernández is aiming for a seat on the San Jose City Council or Santa Clara Board of Supervisors. Aurea Bolaños Perea, right, has dreamed of serving in Congress since immigrating from Mexico a decade ago. Emily Sheridan has decided to run for office in Boulder, Colo.

Michele L. Swers, a professor of government at Georgetown University who specializes in gender and policymaking, said this response has historical precedent. In the early 1990s, televised hearings brought the Senate debate over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court into living rooms across the country. The all-male Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, helped motivate women to run for office, Swers said. In 1992, four successfully ran for the U.S. Senate, increasing the number of women in that body threefold. They were Patty Murray of Washington, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, all Democrats. Their electoral success branded 1992 the “Year of the Woman.” Swers said this election may be another pivotal consciousnessraising event for women “deciding the only way to change things is to get into the halls of power.” The volume of calls and the amount of cash coming in to Emily’s List, a political action

Protests and petitions are not enough for these inspired Clinton backers.

committee that seeks to elect Democratic women, testify to this effect, said the organization’s spokeswoman, Marcy Stech. More than 1,000 miles from Santa Cruz, where Hernández watched the election returns in her dorm room, Emily Sheridan, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, sat in a crowded theater and watched Trump notch a victory in Florida. Then she saw Pennsylvania begin to take on a red tint. It was then she decided she would stay in Boulder after graduation and run for a position at the county level. “I wanted desperately to be able to do something but I couldn’t. . . . I felt so powerless as something so historic for all the wrong reasons was happening,” said Sheridan, 21, who studies evolutionary ecology and biology and serves as president of the campus’s college Democrats. Many young people are motivated but directionless, Sheridan said. They’re angry but lack an outlet for that anger; they flocked to Bernie Sanders but disengaged from the election after he failed to win the Democratic nomination. Sheridan said the election’s outcome could be a wake-up call. It has been Aurea Bolaños Perea’s dream to be a congresswoman virtually since she immigrated to the United States from Mexico about a decade ago. A student at California State University at Chico, she plans to run for a local position in San Joaquin Valley or San Diego area in the next four years, before ultimately moving to the federal level. She sees her life story as a refutation of Trump’s rhetoric. For immigrants who fear for their safety under his presidency, she said, “there needs to be someone in power who will understand. That has to be me.” But she now knows how difficult her path will be. “You see men who do not internalize failure like women do,” Bolaños Perea said. “If before I thought I would need to prove myself five times over, now I see that it’s more like 10 times.” n


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POLITICS

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Deporting criminals won’t be easy Despite Trump’s vow, many nations refuse to cooperate or delay the process

BY

C AROL M ORELLO

P

resident-elect Donald Trump’s vow to begin deporting undocumented immigrant criminals means confronting two of the United States’ biggest trading partners as well as dozens of other countries, allies and foes, that have refused to cooperate on the issue or significantly delay the process of repatriation. The State and Homeland Security departments list 23 countries as “uncooperative” for refusing to take back many of their citizens who came to the United States — in some cases decades ago — and have been ordered deported after receiving felony convictions. Cuba tops the list followed by China, Somalia, India and Ghana. Traffic offenses, especially driving under the influence of alcohol, accounted for the largest category of convictions, followed by drugs and larceny. In most cases, the immigrants, who do not hold U.S. citizenship, have no passport or birth certificate to prove their original citizenship, and their home countries refuse to issue new travel documents. Once they have completed prison time in the United States, they cannot continue to be held pending deportation, following a 2001 Supreme Court decision that found that the United States cannot detain them indefinitely. The court ruled that they must be released within 180 days of serving their sentence, even if their home countries won’t accept them. An additional 62 countries — led by Vietnam, Haiti, Brazil, Pakistan and Senegal — are accused by the U.S. government of dragging their feet in issuing travel documents — and without valid travel papers, authorities here are unable to put people on planes home. This list includes allies such as Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Sweden and Turkey, as well as foes such as Syria and Russia. Absent from both lists is Mexico, which has been the focus of some of Trump’s most heated

The 23 countries labeled ‘uncooperative’ Morocco

Algeria

Afghanistan

Mauritania

Cuba

China

Iraq Iran

Gambia

Libya

Cape Verde

Eritrea

Mali

India Somalia

Guinea Sierra Leone

Ghana Ivory Coast

Burundi

South Sudan

Liberia Zimbabwe Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

statements about undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. During the presidential campaign and in interviews after the election, Trump said he would make it a priority to track down and deport as many as 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records — gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million,” he said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “We are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country; they’re here illegally.” Many immigration experts say the numbers are probably not nearly that high. In 2012, the Obama administration estimated that 1.9 million people in the country were “removable criminal aliens.” But that number includes people with green cards, who are legal residents, and people convicted of nonviolent crimes. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, estimates that about 820,000 of 1.9 million deportable criminals were undocumented. The State Department has played hardball twice to force repatriations, both times targeting small countries. In 2001, the United States imposed a visa ban on government

THE WASHINGTON POST

officials from Guyana, a South American country that had delayed receiving its immigrants. It complied within months. In September, the State Department stopped issuing visas to government officials in Gambia, an African country with about 1,200 citizens in the United States who have final deportation orders. The following month, according to a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Gambian Embassy issued travel documents to 11 citizens. Gambian officials say they have complied and are hopeful the visa ban will be lifted soon. “We could not identify them, that they really were Gambians,” said Hamba Manneh, a consular officer with the embassy. “We asked ICE to send us another list. We’ve issued travel documents, and now they are sending them back home.” Cracking down on countries that are blocking or delaying deportations can invite reciprocal measures, impacting international business, tourism and human rights, said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As a result, the State Department has tried to negotiate with countries reluctant to get their immigrants back. “Typically, the country would retaliate and say, ‘If you’re not issuing visas to us, we won’t issue visas to you,’ ” said Meissner, now a

fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “Or they will suspend visas they already have issued. Right away, it puts a lot of stuff into play that hurts the United States. Business travel, the transfer of executives, foreign students going back and forth, tourism.” But some lawmakers want a more forceful response. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has accused the Obama administration of failing to use its authority to stop issuing visas as leverage to force cooperation. “Lives are being lost, the public’s safety is at risk and American families are suffering,” he said in a June letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. “It cannot continue.” Chuck Ambrose, a retired federal prosecutor in Kansas City, said he has dealt with the failure to act. In 2005, he said he prosecuted an Afghan citizen who conspired to distribute cocaine, but after his release from prison, the criminal was not repatriated. Ambrose said that the Afghan subsequently took part in the vicious assault of a Marine and Ambrose had to prosecute him again in 2009. “Among the 23 countries that are listed, two stuck out at me — Afghanistan and Iraq,” Ambrose said. “I cannot imagine two nations we would have more leverage over. . . . I think our State Department should grow some teeth, rather than flapping their gums.” In testimony before the House Oversight Committee this summer, Michele Thorne Bond, assistant secretary for consular affairs, said her staff and Secretary of State John F. Kerry raised the issue in meetings with some of the laggard countries. But she said repatriations of convicted criminals sometimes get tangled up with conflicting interests. Cuba, she said, will consider taking back its citizens only if there are changes to U.S. policy on Cuban migration. China links its cooperation with the return of fugitives accused of criminal acts in China, but who may, in fact, have fled the country for political reasons. n


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NATION

The new frontier for drone warfare BY

C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

A

s unmanned aerial drones have become a critical part of modern warfare, the Pentagon is now looking to deploy autonomous robots underwater, patrolling the sea floor on what one top Navy official called an “Eisenhower highway network,” complete with rest stops where the drones could recharge. Although still in the development stages, the technology has matured in recent years to be able to overcome the vast difficulties of operating underwater, a far more harsh environment than what aerial drones face in the sky. Saltwater corrodes metal. Water pressure can be crushing at great depths. And communication is severely limited, so the vehicles must be able to navigate on their own without being remotely piloted. Despite the immense difficulties, the Navy has been testing and fielding several new systems designed to map the ocean floor, seek out mines, search for submarines and even launch attacks. While the unmanned crafts are now able to stay out for days or weeks, the goal is to create an underwater network of service stations that would allow the vehicles to do their jobs for months — and eventually years. Military officials say there is a sense of urgency because the undersea domain, while often overlooked, could one day be as contested as the surface of the sea, the skies — and even space. While Russia and China are investing in their submarine fleets, the Pentagon has sought to seize an advantage by introducing new technologies, especially those where humans team up with highly capable robots and autonomous systems. In 2015, the Navy appointed its first deputy assistant secretary for unmanned systems. And the Pentagon plans to invest as much as $3 billion in undersea systems in the coming years. In October, the Navy partici-

U.S. NAVY

Navy envisions robot submarines that can map sea floor or attack pated in the multi-nation Unmanned Warrior exercise off the coast of Scotland. Autonomous subs worked in concert with aerial drones to pass along intelligence that could be relayed from undersea to the air and then to troops on the ground. It’s too early to tell how the Trump administration might view the plans. But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said advancements in undersea warfare should continue to be a priority for the Navy. “The Pentagon feels like the U.S. is well positioned to do undersea warfare and anti-submarine warfare better than any other country,” said Clark, the author of a report titled “The

Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare.” “What’s changing, though, is other counties are developing the ability to deny above the water. . . . So the U.S. is thinking it’ll have to rely much more on under the water.” The goal is to have the unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) deploy from manned submarines or even large autonomous drone subs the way fighter jets take off from aircraft carriers, he said. The Chinese and others have built sensors that can detect large manned submarines, but the military could still send in small, hard-to-detect drone subs. The Office of Naval Research (ONR), which looks to develop advanced technologies, is seek-

Researchers launch an unmanned vehicle from a British ship during the Unmanned Warrior exercises off Scotland last month.

ing to “build the Eisenhower highway network on the seabeds in the seven oceans,” Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, head of the office, said at a conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies this year. The ultimate goal is to “have large-scale deployments of UUVs,” he said. “We want them to go out for decades at a time.” While the project is still in the conceptual stages, the Navy would one day like to build service stations underwater, similar to highway rest stops. There is even a name for them: forward-deployed energy and communications outposts. “A place where you can gas up or charge your underwater vehicles, transfer data and maybe


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NATION store some data,” said Frank Herr, the head of the ONR’s ocean battlespace sensing department. While that may be a long way off, the Pentagon is testing vehicles that are capable of going out for weeks or even months at a time. In recent years, Boeing has developed the Echo Ranger and Echo Seeker, autonomous vehicles capable of carrying out dayslong operations. This year, it debuted the Echo Voyager, a 51-foot-long autonomous submarine with the ability to stay out for months; it isn’t dependent on a support ship the way others are. This year, General Dynamics boosted its underwater offerings when it acquired Bluefin Robotics, which makes several types of underwater robots. Its 16-footlong Bluefin-21 vehicle is capable of launching what the company calls “micro UUVs,” known as SandSharks, that weigh only about 15 pounds. The SandSharks could scan an enemy shoreline and pop up to the surface to relay data to aircraft flying overhead. The Bluefin-21 could even launch a tube that goes to the surface, sticks up like a large straw and then shoots out an unmanned aerial vehicle like a spitball. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a plan to plant 15-foot-tall pods across the ocean floor that could sit there for years waiting to be awakened. When they received a signal, they would float to the surface and release aerial drones, which could perform surveillance over shorelines. Raytheon, meanwhile, is working on a torpedo that instead of blowing things up would be the military’s eyes and ears underwater, scouting for mines or enemy submarines, mapping the ocean floor and measuring currents. The new generation of undersea vehicles would require powerful computer brains. “The undersea environment is particularly challenging and unpredictable,” Navy Rear Adm. Bill Merz said at a recent conference. “I would even go out on a limb here to say we are truly the unmanned of the unmanned vehicles, and in most cases we don’t even have a man in the loop. So what we field and put in the water is on its own until we hear from it again.” n

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As U.S. burns less coal, its tuna is becoming safer to eat BY

D ARRYL F EARS

A

new study of tuna caught in the Gulf of Maine between 2004 and 2012 revealed that levels of mercury in their bodies decreased rapidly as nearby coal-fired power plants closed down. The findings are being greeted as some of the most positive news from recent reductions in powerplant emissions. “The decline is almost in parallel with declines in mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and the decline of mercury in the air,” said Nicholas S. Fisher, a marine scientist at Stony Brook University in New York, whose team conducted the research. “It appears that the fish are responding almost in real time. We thought that was pretty exciting.” The decreases occurred as coalfired power plants began closing in 2008 — with 300 now shut down, according to the National Mining Association. Four years before 2008, the carcasses of bluefin tuna, regardless of age, size and sex, had much more mercury than four years after. The research was published recently in Environmental Science and Technology. Two years ago, a researcher in Massachusetts offered Fisher samples of nearly 1,300 frozen Western Atlantic bluefin tuna. His team found that mercury in the animals decreased at a rate of 2 percent per year, or nearly 20 percent over a decade. The fish still contained dangerously high levels of mercury, a substance that is especially harmful in pregnant women and children. But the research showed that the benefits of lowering coal emissions as power plants switch to natural gas are almost immediate and measurable. Consumption of tuna accounts for more than 40 percent of mercury concentrations in humans — more than any other source, the study said. Bluefin tuna, which often

EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

An Atlantic bluefin tuna is hoisted from the water at the start of the 2011 season in the port of Barbate in southern Spain. Bluefin, often used in sushi, typically has the highest level of mercury of any tuna.

winds up as sushi, tends to have the highest levels of mercury of any type of tuna. Yellowfin tuna tends to have more moderate levels, and skipjack tuna’s mercury levels are relatively low. Since tuna are an apex predator, near the top of the marine food chain, mercury in the fish they eat accumulates in their bodies. “Fish acquire about 95 percent of mercury from their diet,” Fisher said, with a much smaller amount absorbed from swimming in toxic waters. No research has determined whether mercury levels also have dropped in the smaller fish on which bluefin prey. “We can only speculate that that is the case,” Fisher said. But he suspects that would be the result. He would not speculate about mercury levels in fish outside the Gulf of Maine. “In the Pacific, increased emissions in China and Asia could be increasing it. It may be an entirely different story,” he said. The National Fisheries Institute, an industry group that represents restaurants and seafood wholesalers, called the study interesting but said that Americans eat only a tiny amount of bluefin

tuna per capita. “This study is not particularly relevant to the safety or healthfulness of the fish we eat with any regularity in the U.S.,” said a spokeswoman, Lynsee Fowler. There is a heated debate over the safety of canned tuna, and the NFI aligns with those who say consumers have nothing to worry about. “The level of mercury in canned tuna remains not only unchanged but completely safe. . . . On the whole it’s a study worth looking at, but the levels of mercury in seafood are simply not making consumers sick,” she said. Next, Fisher’s team would like to study whether the mercury that also is found in the brains of tuna affects their behavior, such as how they swim or relate to each other — both of which are unknown to science. For now he said he will settle for his study’s good news. “You don’t have to look at all the mercury in the seafood and wring your hands and say, ‘Oh my God, there’s nothing that can be done about this,’ ” Fisher said. “It appears that something can be done, and there’s a positive benefit in real time. You don’t have to wait for decades.” n


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Cuba faces Trump without Fidel’s fire N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

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idel Castro once called George W. Bush a “functional illiterate.” President Ronald Reagan was “the worst terrorist in the history of mankind,” Castro said, with ideas “from the Buffalo Bill era.” Castro thrived on confrontation with U.S. leaders, and he almost surely would have enjoyed facing off against America’s next one. In his statement Nov. 26 on Castro’s death, President-elect Donald Trump denounced him as “a brutal dictator,” and that’s the sort of dig that wouldn’t have gone unanswered in the past. But brinkmanship and barbthrowing are not the forte of his successor, Raúl Castro, who replaced his elder sibling as president a decade ago. Raúl Castro, 85, has refrained from criticizing Trump and even sent congratulations after his win. Raúl Castro’s plans to secure the legacy of his brother’s 1959 Cuban Revolution appear to be on a collision course with the incoming Trump administration, whose top members said last Sunday that Cuba would have to make significant “changes” in order for the normalization path charted by President Obama to continue. Both Castros have long insisted they would never kneel to American pressure. If tensions between Cuba and the United States ratchet up again under a Trump presidency, it would be a new stress test for Raúl Castro and his quieter, more austere leadership style. Cuba will enter the Trump era with Fidel Castro’s one-party socialist state firmly in command but without the supercharged politics and nationalist fervor he relied on to sustain it. A return to more hostile relations with the United States could also bring a new crackdown in Cuba and further slow the pace of Raúl Castro’s modest liberalization measures at a time of stalling economic growth. Hard-liners in Cuba’s Communist Party would gladly take the country back to a

LISETTE POOLE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

If tensions with the United States are renewed, it could test the quiet leadership of Raúl Castro simpler time, when the antagonism of the United States — not the failure of government policies — was to blame for the island’s problems, and the threat of attack, real or imagined, was used to justify authoritarian political control. In a possible warning shot, Trump tweeted Monday that he could revisit the landmark pact cut by the Obama administration to end the diplomatic estrangement with Cuba. “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal,” Trump wrote, without offering specifics on his concerns. Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, has told Fox News, “There’s going to have to be some movement from Cuba in order to have a relationship with the United States.” Castro would have to take steps to allow more political, economic and religious freedoms, Priebus said. “These things need to change in order to have open and free relationships, and that’s what President-elect Trump believes.”

Obama announced in December 2014 that the United States would reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were severed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Obama said that engagement with Cuba, including fewer restrictions on U.S. travel and trade, would facilitate the type of long-term democratic changes Washington had failed to bring about during a half-century of punitive sanctions. But Trump said during his campaign that Obama didn’t get a good “deal” and that Cuba must do more. While only Congress can lift the Cuba embargo, Trump could reverse many of the executive orders that have brought a surge of U.S. visitors here and a rush of new interest from U.S. companies. If Trump moves to roll back those measures and attempts to apply more economic pressure, the Castro government could dig in. During the last major peak in U.S.-Cuba tensions in March 2003, when Fidel Castro was still in charge, he ordered the roundup of 75 dissidents, sentencing them to

A man uses WiFi in Havana. There are more than 100 WiFi hotspots in Cuba, allowing greater access to international communication.

harsh prison terms. A few weeks later, Castro crushed a spate of boat and airplane hijackings by Cubans trying to get to the United States, executing three men who commandeered a Havana passenger ferry and tried to steer it to Florida. But Cuba was a tighter-run ship then, where few dared to criticize the government in public. The government’s security services are still pervasive, allowing no organized opposition, but the constant marching and mass rallies of Fidel Castro’s Cuba have mostly disappeared under the rule of his younger brother. Also, the government’s monopoly on information has been broken. Millions of Cubans have cellphones, and more than 100 new WiFi hotspots across the island allow Cubans to go online and chat with friends and relatives abroad. Foreign television shows and news programming circulate widely on portable memory sticks. Raúl Castro praises planning, modesty and preparation. Those qualities helped facilitate the secret negotiations with the Obama administration on restoring relations, but they may not help him counter more aggressive language from President Trump. Raúl Castro doesn’t tweet, doesn’t give media interviews and shows no enthusiasm, unlike Fidel, for being in the spotlight. He could have a hard time leading younger Cubans back into the trenches of his older brother’s “anti-imperialism” with calls for more sacrifice and obedience. Then again, Cuban national pride remains a powerful force on the island, and nothing stirs it like a perceived threat from a swaggering American leader, said Arturo Lopez-Levy, a former Cuban intelligence analyst who teaches at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. “Even if there is no Fidel, do not underestimate the power of mobilization of Cuban nationalism,” Lopez-Levy said. Intense Cuban nationalism “preceded Fidel,” he said, “and it will survive as a major actor in Cuban politics well beyond his passing.” n


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A mile a day to keep obesity at bay In Britain, students are making strides in an attempt to stave off what has been called a crisis

K ARLA A DAM London BY

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orriano primary school in north London doesn’t have lush green grounds or an outdoor running track or a leafy campus quad. But on most days, its students do something that is being replicated in schools across the country: They put down their pencils, step into the great outdoors and run a mile. For one ruddy-faced 9-year-old who was breathing heavily after his run, the experience “makes me feel like I’m proud of myself ” and means that “during lessons, I can concentrate a bit more.” On a recent day that looked like autumn but felt like winter, he joined his classmates in lapping the perimeter of his Victorian school 12 times before heading back inside to get on with his day. Every day, tens of thousands of schoolchildren across Britain — in addition to regular physicaleducation classes — run, jog or walk a mile under a voluntary scheme dubbed the “daily mile.” They don’t change clothes. They don’t compete. They don’t know when their teacher will give the green light to rush outside. But at some point during the day, come (non-torrential) rain or shine, children complete a mile. This running craze adopted by schools up and down the country comes amid an obesity crisis in Britain. Simon Steven, NHS England’s chief executive, has called obesity “the new smoking.” The British government estimates that nearly a third of children ages 2 to 15 are overweight or obese. According to a 2015 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — the latest available that compares all OECD countries — Greece, England and the United States rank the highest for child obesity based on measured data. In a more recent OECD report, published Wednesday, England ranks fourth in a comparison of European-only countries. Obesity is, of course, an exceedingly complex, multifaceted issue

KARLA ADAM/THE WASHINGTON POST

Schoolchildren run a “daily mile” at Torriano primary school in London. The school is one of about 1,000 in the nation engaging in the program.

Measured overweight among children 20% of children

England

30

Boys

40

Girls

35.6%

36.3%

U.S.

33.2%

35.2%

OECD

22.1%

24.3%

Sources: World Obesity Federation (2015), KiGGS (2003-06) for Germany and KNHANES (2013) for Korea

that involves a number of factors including physical activity and nutrition. Diets have changed over the years — Britain plans to ratchet up its battle against sugar with a tax on sugary drinks — and so too have lifestyles, with countless hours spent on computers, tablets and phones. To be sure, sports programs here are highly developed — Britain came in second in the medals tables at the Rio Olympics. But changing levels of physical activity at a population level is “incredibly difficult,” said Franco Sassi, a health policy expert at Imperial College London. A recent study comparing the physical activity of children in 38 countries placed Scottish kids among the least ac-

THE WASHINGTON POST

tive in the world, despite acknowledging the region’s various policies for promoting it. But there is a growing grassroots effort by some schools here to get kids moving. Over 1,000 schools across the country have adopted the “daily mile” scheme, including a small village school in Scotland that invites the local community to join in. A number of schools around the world have also jumped on board, too, including about 100 in the Netherlands and 500 in Belgium. The scheme is the brainchild of Elaine Wyllie, the former principal of St. Ninians, a primary school in Stirling, Scotland. Four years ago, a volunteer told her that her students were unfit. Tak-

en aback, she asked a class of mostly 11-year-olds to run around a field and was surprised to see what a struggle it was. But after a month of daily running, most of the students could finish the route, which was roughly a mile and took about 15 minutes. Educators do not have infinite time, and schools cannot be expected to do everything — some argue that parents should be the ones to get children moving more. Plus, 15 minutes a day is an hour and 15 minutes a week that is not being spent on studying math, English or history. But when Wyllie was a principal — she retired last year — she found that interest in running the mile swept quickly across her school and then to others, as well. “It’s not PE, it’s not sport, it’s not competitive,” she said. “There is no kit, no cool or uncool clothes, no body-image issues, no equipment, no staff training. The children just go out, and they are expected to run if they can, or walk.” The idea is manifestly simple and inexpensive, which is perhaps part of the reason it has spread so rapidly. But Wyllie insists the real key to its success is that children enjoy it because it is a social activity in the fresh air. Parents and teachers also have reported a raft of benefits — increased fitness, improved concentration, reduced weight, enhanced well-being — and researchers are testing to see if there is evidence that links the reported benefits to the daily mile. While some teachers may see the daily mile as “yet another thing to do” in an already timestretched day, Jack Holmes, a teacher at Torriano primary, said that once children are exposed to it, they become its biggest champions. “They love it,” he said as he watched a group of students lap the school — some walking, some running hard, some punching the air as they sped by. “They are always asking: ‘When can I go? When can I go?’ ” n


ACTIVE shooter active resistance

COVER STORY

T

BY DAVI D M ON T GOM ERY

he door does not lock. It opens inward. The bookshelves would make a good barricade, but they are bolted in place. I am wearing a leather belt. I am not wearing flip-flops. This is important data. It could determine whether I will live or die. We have retreated to the Rainbow Lounge in the Center for Student Diversity at Maryland’s Towson University, normally a safe space for students to celebrate their identity. Today we are asked to imagine that it’s under attack. An “active shooter” is headed this way. “If you hear the shots, don’t deny something bad might be happening,” Cpl. Joseph Gregory of the Towson campus police advises the assembled staff. They ask detailed questions about different courses of action. I’m tagging along to get answers to my own questions about the hold mass shootings have taken on America, and what the effect has been. “You’re trying to buy that three minutes until the police get here,” Gregory says. Learning to process threats quickly — Gunshots? Construction noise? — is vital. But it’s difficult because “freeze mode,” as Gregory calls it, is such an understandable paralysis. When horror erupts amid the routine, the mind wants to explain it away. Once we accept that the threat is real, we must start to breathe in a special way, or the paralysis of denial will be replaced by the paralysis of panic. It’s physiological, Greg Gregory explains. As our pulse races to 120 beats per minute, we will begin to lose fine motor skills — the ability to fit a key into a lock, say. For a time, fear will enhance our gross motor skills — good for physical exertion. But as our pulse gallops faster, we’ll have trouble thinking. We’ll develop tunnel vision. We’ll lose the ability to interpret sound or react in any way. Soon we’ll be helpless. Then we’ll be murdered. So we must try “combat breathing”: Inhale, hold it, exhale; inhale, hold it, exhale. That’s better. Now we can think and act. The diversity center is a suite of offices, conference rooms and lounges, most of which lock. The outer door is glass and is kept unlocked in accordance with the welcoming spirit of the center. But what if we’re caught in the Rainbow Lounge, which doesn’t lock? Gregory demonstrates how to stand to the side of the door and wrap your belt around the handle to keep it shut, though this works best if the door opens

JEFF ÖSTBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


outward. If the door opens inward, “Flip-flops are great for improvised door jams,” he says. As a last resort, we must convert our fear into anger. We must swarm the attacker, swinging laptops, coffee mugs, scissors. “Work as a team,” Gregory says. “It might not be perfect. I’m not going to say the shooter might not get off a round or two.” When the lesson ends, the staff makes a to-do list — get a lock for the lounge, test the speakers for receiving campus alerts — and briskly returns to work.

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he siege of the Rainbow Lounge took place after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, in June, but before the Macy’s rampage north of Seattle, in September, and the only remarkable thing about studying how to defend against a killer in such a mundane environment was how unremarkable it was. Something has happened to us. Like moviegoers acquainted with the ruse built into the opening scenes of scary films — so many likable characters, only some of whom will survive — we are getting used to conceiving of the most quotidian spaces as potential kill zones. A year ago this week, a married couple killed 14 county workers gathered at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Calif. It’s almost as if a cubicle, a sales counter, a blackboard or a popcorn machine could signify the front line of a new war. But we do not capitulate. As with so many changes and challenges from our history, we innovate and begin to adapt. We make lists, do drills, come up with plans. We may not abolish the horror, but if we factor it into our contingencies, we can tame it and hopefully reduce the death toll. As these national tragedies bleed into one another and the timeline blurs — Amish school in Pennsylvania . . . Trolley Square in Utah . . . Fort Hood in Texas . . . Aurora theater in Colorado . . . Washington Navy Yard . . . Umpqua Community College in Oregon — a phenomenon sometimes called “civilian response to active shooter events” is rolling across the land. What gained urgency after Columbine (1999) and Virginia Tech (2007) as specialized tactics for police has been modified into slide presentations conveying best practices for civilians. Hundreds of thousands of adults have received training of one sort or another through federal, local, corporate or educational institutions. Schoolchildren get mandatory “lockdown” drills — lights out, shades drawn, retreat behind the teacher’s desk — which is a gentler name for age-appropriate precautions against someone trying to shoot them. Every era has its own terrors. Once we practiced civil defense drills, sitting in hallways with no windows in hopes of surviving a nuclear bomb. Now we feel better about the bomb, but it makes perfect sense for poll workers in Denver to have been given activeshooter training for the presidential election. Many of the places where we work and shop are redrafting emergency preparedness protocols to place active shooters on a par with fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and other threats to the continuity of operations. The latest human resources innovation is combat medical tips for the workplace: CPR is useless when an

active shooter strikes, but handiness with a tourniquet can save lives. Yet the live-or-die training boom is just one aspect of a seismic shift in outlook we’re all undergoing in response to this latest killer on the loose.

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hen did we start calling him “active shooter”? In 2000, the phrase appeared 17 times in the Nexis database of Englishlanguage news sources. In 2010, it was 915 times. Last year, 11,214 times. (“Mass shooting” is similarly trending.) Fear him or shrug him off, we’ve all thought about him, even though, unlike most killers, we can’t picture him because he fits no profile except for almost always being a man. He strikes anywhere — work, school, mall, movie theater. City, suburb, countryside. The places we know best, our daily havens. This killer is after just one thing: “A body count,” says one expert. Another says he “flows like water”: He shoots his way along a path of least resistance — which is why even a door stuck with flip-flops might channel him onward.

NO LONGER SHOCKED

BY FREQUENT

MASSACRES, WE’RE INCREASINGLY

FOCUSED ON DEFYING

WOULD-BE

KILLERS

Every time there’s an attack, we picture ourselves in that same club, department store or classroom. We see what worked and what didn’t for those people, and we run scenarios. These are our mental active-shooter drills. Perhaps not surprisingly, false alarms are spiking. This past August, phantom active shooters caused stampedes and evacuations at Kennedy International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and malls in Raleigh, N.C., and Orlando. Given that most of us will never face an active shooter, his rise to prominence is more about us than him. He’s the perfect nightmare, an avatar of the minute-to-minute possibility of terrorism ripping the facade off the familiar. Can we do what it takes to be ready without letting him haunt our lives?

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e are not entirely under a hysterical media-induced spell. By some measures, active-shooter attacks really are on the rise. Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States,” has counted 181 mass public shootings with at least four fatalities since 1900. There were 30 through 1965. Since 1965 there have been 151, including 64 in the past 16 years. The reasons for the increase over the long period aren’t clear. Social upheaval and more alienated, underemployed men could be factors. There may also be a copycat effect. In recent years, controlling for population growth, the rate of increase has leveled off, according to Duwe. An archetype of the modern active shooter was former Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman, who picked off passersby from the tower of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, killing 14. During the 1980s, a cluster of workplace killings — not just at post offices, though this was the age of “going postal” — launched a flurry of trend stories on “the middle-aged berserker, seething with occupational resentment and bent on revenge.” By then, the Everyman active shooter was expanding his portfolio to more everyday locations, including the slaughter of 21 at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Calif., in 1984, and the slaying of 23 at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., in 1991. For those of us watching, he was getting closer to home. Mother Jones’s database of mass public shootings has logged 84 since 1982 in which at least four people were killed (or at least three starting in 2013, when the definition of mass shooting changed). The FBI and researchers from Texas State University counted 200 cases from 2000 to 2015, irrespective of the number of fatalities. Peak years were 2009 (19 attacks), 2010 (26), 2012 (21), 2014 and 2015 (20 each). The first eight years averaged seven attacks per year; the second eight averaged 18. There were 1,274 casualties in all, including 578 killed. And yet, the annual carnage — 90 deaths in 2012, a peak year — is minuscule compared with total gun homicides of about 11,000 a year. So is our preoccupation with active shooters reasonable? Consider another threat: the school fire. Deaths are exceedingly rare. More children have been shot to death than burned to death at school in the past two decades. Still, we’d never consider canceling school fire drills, would we? The outsized impact of mass shootings emanates from the sheer ordinariness of their circumstances. The cliched stammer of witnesses — “We never thought something like this could happen here” — is the moan of illusions being lost. continues on next page

MASS SHOOTINGS IN THE U.S. Many researchers generally agree that the rate of mass shootings is increasing, but they have different ways of counting, depending on their definition of this crime. 2016 322 mass shootings through Oct. 31 The Gun Violence Archive counts all incidents where four or more are killed or wounded. 6 mass public shootings Mother Jones discounts gang violence or other conventional crimes to capture indiscriminate rampages where three or more are killed.

PAST YEARS 47 incidents, 2000-2015 Mother Jones counts shootings with four or more deaths before 2013. 200 incidents, 2000-2015 The FBI and Texas State University count active-shooter events irrespective of the number of deaths.


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from previous page

Who the shooter is matters less than who the victims are and where they died, says Jonathan S. Comer, professor of psychology and director of the Mental Health Interventions and Technology Program at Florida International University in Miami, who studied the psychological impact of the 9/11 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing. “One of the best predictors of extended difficulty coping is how much the viewer identifies with the victim,” Comer says. “When large numbers of viewers see events happening at places they could imagine they would be at — they might be at a mall just like that, a family gathering, a marathon — that identification accentuates the emotional connection and makes it more compelling and concerning.”

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e do our best to meet this new reality on our own terms. The active-shooter response movement is driven by people like Daniel Nietzel, who calls himself a “child of Columbine.” He was an eighth-grader in Muscatine, Iowa, watching coverage of the mass murder on television until his mother made him turn it off. He told her he wished he were at Columbine “to help.” He became a teacher and in 2013 found himself in an active-shooter training at West Middle School in Muscatine. Many of the doors could be locked only by going out to the hallway, turning a key in the lock, then ducking back inside. The trainer made it clear the hallway was no place to be when an active shooter was on the prowl, and it was questionable whether anyone would have the fine motor skills to work a key, or the mental clarity to remember whether the door was already locked. So, in the drill, Nietzel and some fellow teachers tied their door closed with computer cords. The trainer pushed his way in, pointed at each one and said, “You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.” “Everyone was pretty upset,” Nietzel recalls. There wasn’t money to install new locks on all the school’s doors, according to Nietzel. He pondered the problem. Memories of Columbine made him security conscious, attentive to strange noises; he had noticed that after the shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, his students could be startled by a loud locker slam. They were children of Sandy Hook. One night after grading papers, he cut shapes out of a rubber kitchen container. He showed his colleagues. His next-door neighbor, a metal fabricator, made prototypes. Nietzel formed a company called Fighting Chance Solutions, along with the school principal, vice principal, guidance counselor, art teacher and his neighbor. Their product: the Sleeve. The Sleeve is a narrow sheath of steel designed to fit over the closer arms found near the top of many institutional doors. When the Sleeve is in place, the door won’t budge. The day the company launched in June

2014, there was a shooting at a high school in Oregon. Now thousands of Sleeves have been sold to universities, Fortune 500 companies and every branch of the military, according to Nietzel. One costs $79; bulk orders get a discount. The Sleeve (and now the Rampart, also by Fighting Chance Solutions, to barricade a type of door not susceptible to the Sleeve) is part of a growing industry to help defend us from active shooters. Door barricades are just the beginning. LiveSafe is a free app that allows patrons and employees of malls, universities and other locales to share security alerts. First aid “active shooter kits” with tourniquets, seals for sucking chest wounds and “Israeli bandages” that apply pressure by themselves cost $89.99. “I know there’s a narrative that ‘You guys are profiting off fear, off very unfortunate events,’ ” Nietzel says. “That was never the intention. The intention was to keep my [school] kids safe. Do you say that about door-lock companies? “To know that something you developed from your head was giving somebody safety and comfort in probably the scariest moment of their life is the culmination of our work.”

ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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e are the first responders now — those of us with no badge, no training, no weapon and, frankly, not much of a workout program. In my time attending all manner of activeshooter classes, earning certificates of achievement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, I kept meeting police trainers who confessed how strange this feels. Here they were coaching the public to take care of itself. They always thought protecting the public was their job, the reason they got into law enforcement, not something they would outsource back to the public. The reason they must lies in that threeminutes statistic that Cpl. Gregory mentioned at Towson, where 2,300 people have been trained so far and where, by the way, the door to the Rainbow Lounge now locks. Three minutes is an estimate of the average time it takes police to arrive at an active-shooter scene. Until then, you’re trying to run out the clock. More than half the incidents end before police intervene; the shooter commits suicide, or he can’t find any more victims because the living have scattered, or, in nearly one in five cases, because potential victims — usually unarmed — act against the shooter, says J. Pete Blair, executive director of Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) at Texas State University, a leading purveyor of active-shooter response research and training. “What we see in the data is that what people do at the attack site is critical,” Blair says. “Actions they take can save their lives, or save the lives of others.” Fighting the shooter is the last resort. ALERRT preaches a mantra dubbed Avoid Deny Defend: First try to avoid the shooter. If you can’t, then deny him access to your

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

From top: An April 1999 photo shows a memorial erected days after two students killed 13 people and themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Virginia Tech students in 2007 after a gunman killed 32 people on campus. Military personnel pass Washington Navy Yard, where 12 were killed in a shooting in 2013.

location. If that doesn’t work, defend yourself. The Department of Homeland Security and some police forces advocate a rival slogan called “Run, Hide, Fight.” Homeland Security coaches companies and schools on how to make active shooter response plans and has trained more than 700,000 people inside and outside the federal government in workshops and online courses, says Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. At a church in Salisbury, Md., one evening, Cpl. Ted Antal and Trooper 1st Class Stephen Hallman of the Maryland State Police teach Avoid Deny Defend to about three dozen members of the community. The pair are evangelists of active-shooter response training, sometimes working on their own time. They’ve converted about 2,000 people on the Eastern Shore to new security consciousness in the past year. “Do you have the knowledge base to stay


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K JESSICA HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

MELISSA LYTTLE

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

From top: White roses bear the faces of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 dead, including 20 children. A vigil after a gunman killed 49 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June. Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., where a shooting during a Bible study class left nine dead in 2015.

alive until law enforcement gets there?” Hallman asks the group. “We are coming, but we’re not going to be there at the beginning.” When police do arrive, they’ll step right over the wounded on the hunt for the shooter. Since it will be awhile before medical technicians are cleared to enter, Hallman shows how to use a tourniquet. He mentions that when his daughter is old enough for school, he will send her with a tourniquet in her backpack. He also says he carries a plastic baggy in his wallet, for sucking chest wounds, in case he is ever without his first aid kit. “Knowledge diminishes fear,” Hallman tells me afterward, explaining a subtler purpose for these classes, beyond the practical tips. “Knowledge helps us understand how not to be afraid. My goal is for this to be such an educated community that it’s not a good target for an active shooter. That’s an idealistic view, but in my mind that’s what drives me.”

ristina Anderson heard “incredibly loud” bangs somewhere outside the classroom. “Almost like an ax being taken to a piece of wood. It felt like a very quick chop, chop, chop.” Her French teacher opened the unlockable classroom door to see what was happening, shut it and said to call 9-1-1. “The last thing I see is two students at the front of the classroom with their arms extend­ ed. I think they’re trying to help Madame push their desks to get to the door. But literally as they push — he walks in. He shot them first.” Anderson’s class was one of the first Seung Hui Cho entered. The students had no time to avoid, deny or defend — a rubric they would not have known anyway. Two years passed before Anderson spoke publicly about what happened that April 2007 morning in Room 211 of Norris Hall at Virginia Tech. Now she gives presentations across the country: “He goes down the people one by one by one. It is very quick, it feels very methodical, it feels very intentional. For a few seconds I thought it was a prank. I thought someone might pop out and say, ‘Okay, it’s all over.’ Because your mind tries to put words and logic and mean­ ing around what could be happening. And we didn’t have words for someone who’s shooting in my French class. . . . And I thought, ‘Your turn is going to come.’ ” Anderson was kneeling with her torso on the chair of her combination desk-chair unit, with her hands over her head. The first bullet hit her in the back. The shooter departed for other classrooms, where in some cases barricades saved lives, and students leapt from second-story windows. He returned to Anderson’s room. “The second time, you could tell he was looking to see who was alive. There was more time between shots.” He shot her in the buttocks. A ricochet also hit her toe. Ultimately, a few feet away, he killed himself. Eleven French students and the teacher were slain in Room 211. In all, 32 students and faculty were killed. Anderson, now 29, was a sophomore. With surgery, physical therapy and counseling, she graduated on time. At first, “I didn’t see the value of me retelling what I think of as the worst day of my life,” she told me. That changed when she began to understand the effect her experience had on listeners. Hers is more than a tragic tale or a motivational speech. Anderson has journeyed to the center of the nightmare and returned with hard information. Her voice has become one of the most compelling in the active-shooter response movement, through her Koshka Foundation, which provides education on the personal and institutional responsibility to prevent, respond to and recover from violence. “I have an unfortunate advantage in that

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people are usually interested to know what happened during the Virginia Tech shooting,” she said. A video of Anderson speaking is part of the curriculum of several active-shooter response trainings I attended before I met her in person. We went to a coffee shop near Burlington, N.J., where the state department of education had invited her to give two presentations, one at a symposium for K-through-12 school administrators and law enforcement, the other open to the public. She picked a table in a corner. She knows that being shot and watching friends die changed her, but she doesn’t feel as though she walks under a shadow. She thinks she just might see life a little more clearly. She was explaining this when there was a sudden loud bang from the kitchen. She paused. “Like, I noticed that noise,” she said. “I wouldn’t have noticed that noise before.” I hadn’t heard it, but it is clear on my digital recorder. She returned to the conversation, unfazed. She struck me not as a nervous person, but as a highly observant one. “You feel like your bubble’s been burst,” she said. “The perspective I take is I feel very fortunate because I feel like the gift I’ve received is the gift that most people don’t receive until they’re much older, or until they have some unfortunate disease and they realize they might lose someone in 10 days or 10 months.” The gift is a profound sense of mortality, which is inseparable from its opposite, a powerful appreciation for life. That’s the note she ends her speeches on. “Wherever I go, whatever I do, I’m vigilant, and I’m cautious,” she said. “Like right now, you like to sit with your back toward the wall, to be able to view things, and I’m constantly scanning. . . . But the other belief I have is that people are good. And until someone gives you a reason not to trust them, you don’t overreact, you don’t overgeneralize, you don’t profile. You lead with the fact that they’re good.” That evening, more than 100 people came to a high school auditorium to hear Anderson give a presentation titled “Safety Is Personal: Lessons Learned as a Survivor of the Virginia Tech Tragedy.” Her talks give us permission not to feel sorry for her. And not to be afraid. She speaks of situational awareness and urges institutions to create “threat assessment teams” to field tips about threatening behavior or nascent plans for violence. Most of all, she’s trying to show us by example how to discuss these situations, because, she insists, such conversations should be normal. “If we have the conversations, we’ll be at least mentally preparing,” she said in the coffee shop. “And then if something still does happen, a person feels less victimized because hopefully they took actions to minimize how bad it could have been.” n


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SOCIAL MEDIA

All about getting clicks and bucks T ERRENCE M C C OY Long Beach, Calif.

night when the number of people following Liberty Writers News on Facebook will swell by more than 20,000. “We’re the people on the side of the street yelling that the world is about to end.” But for now, it’s only 7 p.m., readers on both coasts are still awake, and there are several more stories that need posting.

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ewer than 2,000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience. “Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modernday digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story. “CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves President-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil. He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back . . .” Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumor. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then he looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics and watches as the readers pour in. “Down with the globalists,” writes a woman in Cape Girardeau, Mo., one of 3,192 people now on the website, 1,244 of whom are reading the story he just posted. “Down with the globalists!” writes a man in Las Vegas. Now 1,855 are reading the story. “DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS !!!” writes a woman in Helena, Mont. Now 1,982.

PHOTOS BY STUART PALLEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

These self-proclaimed ‘new yellow journalists’ play loose with facts to profit off alt-right anger At a time of continuing discussion over the role that hyperpartisan websites, fake news and social media play in the divided America of 2016, Liberty Writers News illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology, quickly go from nothing to influencing millions of people and make big profits in the process. Six months ago, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, were unemployed restaurant workers. Now they’re at the helm of a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone and say they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it because they don’t want people to start asking for loans. Instead, Wade hums a hip-hop song and starts a new post as readers keep reading, sharing and sending in personal messages. One comes from a woman who frequently contacts his page. “YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE I TRUST TO REPORT THE

TRUTH,” is one of the things she has written, and Wade doesn’t need to look at her Facebook profile to have a clear sense of who she is. White. Working class. Midwestern. “And the economy screwed her.” He writes another headline, “THE TRUTH IS OUT! The Media Doesn’t Want You To See What Hillary Did After Losing . . .” “Nothing in this article is antimedia, but I’ve used this headline a thousand times,” he says. “Violence and chaos and aggressive wording is what people are attracted to.” “Our audience does not trust the mainstream media,” Goldman, 26, says a little later as Wade keeps typing. “It’s definitely easier to hook them with that.” “There’s not a ton of thought put into it,” Wade says. “Other than it frames the story so it gets a click.” “True,” Goldman says. “We’re the new yellow journalists,” Wade will say after a day and

In Long Beach, Calif., Paris Wade, left, and Ben Goldman work on their website, LibertyWritersNews .com, which has gotten tens of millions of page views.

An itinerant lifestyle Everything about the lives of Wade and Goldman has the flimsy feel of something that can be taken apart in a matter of hours, boxed up and carted away, from the fake bylines they use — Wade is Paris Swade; Goldman is Danny Gold — right down to the rental they found on Airbnb. It is stripped of accoutrements, except for some clothes strewn across the bedroom floors, a pair of laptops and a PlayStation 4. They say they plan on spending two more months here and don’t know where they’ll be after that. Every evening, they write stories on the couch, watch them go viral, schedule more for morning, head off to bed, and now, on another morning, comes Goldman, creaking down the steps. “My article got banned,” Goldman says, explaining Facebook had removed a trending piece headlined: “Right After LOSING The Election, Hillary Clinton Just Humiliated Herself In Worst Way Ever!!” “F--- Facebook,” Wade says, knowing its algorithms sometimes assume that rapidly shared articles are spam and temporarily blocks them if posted by an alternative outlet. Wade calls their server technician in Texas. “I don’t know what we have to do to get through these spam filters,” Wade says into the phone. “But we’ve probably lost thousands of dollars because of them.” Goldman sits on the couch, logs onto an advertiser’s website and looks up how much money they’ve nonetheless made. “Super great election sales,” he says. “There were some days where we were getting $13, $14 per 1,000 views.” Between June


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SOCIAL MEDIA and August, they say, when they had fewer than 150,000 Facebook followers, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month running advertisements that, among other things, promised acne solutions, Viagra alternatives, ways to remove lip lines, cracked feet, “deep fat,” and “the 13 sexiest and most naked celebrity selfies.” Then the political drama deepened, and their audience expanded fivefold, and now Goldman sometimes thinks that what he made in the last six months would have taken him 20 years waiting tables at his old job. Wade and Goldman now have a lawyer and an accountant, employ other writers and are expanding so quickly that they’re surprised to think the majority of their adult lives were spent scraping by. They graduated from the University of Tennessee — Wade in 2012 with an advertising degree and Goldman in 2013 with a business degree — but could only find unpaid internships and ended up working at a Mexican restaurant. Neither thought much about politics. Raised in liberal homes, they both voted for Obama twice, but as they struggled to find better jobs, they began to doubt those votes, their college education and the progressive values with which they were raised. They moved to California, first Wade, then Goldman, and started an advertising business that quickly failed. But it did attract one client who ran numerous altright Facebook pages. He needed more writers, and in 2015 Wade and Goldman started doing stories and getting paid based on how many clicks they got. The first story Wade did aggregated a South Korean news report that claimed an anonymous source had said that a North Korean scientist had defected with data from human experiments. Wade knew he needed a picture to sell the story to readers. He searched online for an image of a human experiment that, as he describes it, would make people think, “What is that? I got to click.” He found what he recalls was a “totally misleading” photograph of a fleshy mass and made it the featured image. He wrote the headline, “[PROOF] N. Korea Experiments on Humans,” published the story and made $120 off 10 minutes of work. It was, he says, a

revelation: “You have to trick people into reading the news.” Now settled into the career that has grown from that revelation, Wade turns the television to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist with nearly 1.4 million followers on Facebook, who is the opportunist they would most like to become. What works on Facebook and what doesn’t work occupies many of the conversations between Wade and Goldman. Explicitly telling people to prove that they support Trump by sharing their stories works, so they do that. Neither of them is particularly religious, but their readers are, so in their writing they ask God to bless the president-elect, and that works, too. So does exaggeration: “OBAMA BIRTH SECRETS REVEALED! The Letters From His Dad Reveal Something Sinister . . .” And stoking fear: “Terrorists Have Infiltrated the US Government! Look Who They Want to ASSASSINATE!!” And inflaming racial and gender tension: “BREAKING: Michelle Obama holds Feminist Rally At HER SLAVE HOUSE!” And conspiracy theories: “BREAKING: Top Official Set to Testify Against Hillary Clinton Found DEAD!” Writing for audience There are times when Wade wonders what it would be like to write an article he truly believes

in. “In a perfect world,” he says, it would have nuance and balance and long paragraphs and take longer than 10 minutes to compose. It would make people think. But he never writes it, he says, because no one would click on it, so what would be the point? Instead, as 4,000 people are on the website one night, Wade and Goldman keep writing and feeding, writing and feeding. Goldman is typing a story — “It was a literal Hell Storm at DNC headquarters today” — and laughing at what he has written. “God, I just know everything about this statement is so wrong,” he says, and adds, still laughing, “What is a hell storm?” He finishes it as Wade is putting an old headline on a story about billionaire George Soros, one that has nothing to do with what he has written but once brought in a lot of page views. He shares it on their Facebook page and watches as readers stream into the website — first a few hundred, then nearly 1,000. “Boom, dude, look at that,” Wade says. “That one is doing super well.” Goldman scans through what Wade had written. “When are we going to go after this traitor!” it says. “It is time to take this traitor out! He should be pursued to the depths of hell and beyond.” He looks up and smiles nervously.

Paris Wade works on election night in the apartment he shares with Ben Goldman. Six months ago, they were unemployed. Between June and August, they say, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month from their site, and their traffic has grown since.

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“Maybe there’s a less violent way to say that.” “I’m going to change that one, actually,” Wade says, suddenly looking panicked as he grabs his laptop and moves to replace “take this traitor out” to “take this traitor down.” But the comments are already coming in fast. “Arrest and hang him for war crimes,” one woman writes of Soros. “This man should go straight to F@#KING HELL,” another woman posts. “I gladly volunteer to take this Traitor to America out,” another says. “Jail is way too good for him.” Goldman and Wade often tell each other they aren’t creating anything that’s not already there, that they’re simply fanning it, that readers know not to take their hyperbole and embellishments seriously. And even if the comments suggest otherwise, they try not to pay them too much attention. People will say anything on Facebook, they remind themselves. They tell one another they’re only minor participants in a broader “meme war” between outlets such as The Other 98% on the left and Nation In Distress on the right, but then they see the protests in the streets, the divisions in America, and wonder if their work is making things worse. What if one of their readers actually does harm Soros? Would they be complicit? Is their website dangerous? Or is it savvy entrepreneurship? Their opportunity? And if it is opportunity, how far can they go with it? One afternoon, Goldman has an idea. “It would be a perfect time to open up a small liberal newspaper right now,” he says. “It would,” Wade says. “There is so much animus on the left right now.” “You could get more traffic than we do now,” Goldman says. “It wouldn’t be very hard to argue the other side for me,” Wade says, as he types a post that says, “LIKE + SHARE IF YOU LOVE TRUMP! It’s time to heal the nation. All the lies that we have been fed about him were wrong. He is not a Nazi, he is not a Xenophobe, he is not Deplorable, he is not racist and he is about to make America great again!” Goldman keeps typing. So does Wade. There are 2,268 readers on their website, and it’s time to get more. n


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BOOKS

How U.S. forged new kind of empire N ONFICTION

I A NATION WITHOUT BORDERS The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 By Steven Hahn Viking. 596 pp. $35

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D AVID O SHINSKY

n February 1941, as the armed forces of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan gobbled up great chunks of the globe, Time-Life publisher Henry Luce penned an editorial that resonates to this day. Calling upon Americans to accept their unique responsibilities and Godgiven destiny, he wrote: “Throughout the 17th Century and the 18th Century and the 19th Century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn would respectfully disagree. Freedom has long been among the most elusive of our national goals, far from triumphant, he argues in “A Nation Without Borders,” a massive and masterly account of America’s political and economic transformation between 1830 and 1910. As to the first great American century, Hahn is certainly partial to the 19th — the one, he says, in which the United States harnessed its unrivaled resources to forge a new kind of empire. What happened afterward was simply an extension of what came before. Hahn, a recent addition to the history department at New York University, where I hold a parttime appointment, views the American experience as a continuum of an imperialist ideology dating back to our British forefathers. Expansion of one sort or another, he insists, is part of our national DNA. Whether clearing Native Americans from their land, obtaining close to 800,000 square miles from France in the Louisiana Purchase, or defeating Mexico in a one-sided fight that added Texas, California and much of the

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Andrew Carnegie, center, poses in front of a railroad tunnel under construction in 1885 in Pennsylvania.

Southwest to the American map, the pursuit of empire — or Manifest Destiny — became a unifying force, supported by merchants looking for new markets, slaveholders dreaming of new possibilities in places like the Caribbean and small farmers seeking no more than a plot of land to till. The problem, Hahn says, is that the young United States lacked the capacity to govern and develop the land it acquired. The watershed moment, in his view, was the Civil War. Before the war, the United States was an agrarian nation with a weak central government and political power dispersed among the states and localities. Its ruling elites had come from the merchant and slaveholding classes. There was no national currency, no central bank, no transcontinental railroad, no firm connection between the political and economic sectors. The war changed all that. To recruit and supply an enormous army, President Abraham Lincoln, along with Congress and the federal courts, assumed unprecedented authority, including the power to

suppress dissent. Huge government contracts were awarded to foundries, shipyards and factories. Hoping to move troops quickly and to populate the western territories with small farmers rather than slaveholders, the government promised 160-acre homesteads to families willing to work them, and encouraged railroad-building projects of staggering size and often dubious value. By war’s end, Hahn says, “a new class of finance capitalists” had arisen for these purposes, known popularly over time as Wall Street. Hahn paints the latter half of the 19th century as an era of unchecked corporate expansion and imperial conquest. In the transMississippi West, which Hahn views as the key region of this era, Native Americans were pushed aside to make way for the settlers, railroads, gold miners and extractive industries that fueled the industrial revolution. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, all was in place. America had become a nation without borders, Hahn asserts. Taking a page from William Appleman Williams

and previous revisionist historians, Hahn speaks of an American imperialism based on economic rather than physical domination. Unlike England, for example, the United States didn’t have to plant its flag, its troops and administrators in far-flung regions of the world. All it needed, given its growing commercial dominance, was a level playing field, or “open door,” backed by a navy to keep the sea lanes open and an occasional acquisition (Hawaii, the Philippines) or intervention (Cuba, Mexico) to ensure its superiority. Hahn describes his book as telling “a familiar story in an unfamiliar way.” It is much more than that. Attempting a synthesis of a century’s worth of American history is a daunting task. Writing one as provocative and learned, if at times predictable, as this one is a triumph, nothing less. n Oshinsky, director of the division of medical humanities at the NYU Langone Medical Center, is the author of “Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital.”


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Thrills, intrigue fill papal election

A film bomb that became a treasure

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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D ENNIS D RABELLE

he subset of novels devoted to an election is small but impressive. Now comes Robert Harris’s splendid “Conclave,” which centers on an election that, for the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, rivals the one that jolted the United States last month: a papal election. We Americans chose a mere maker of earthly policy, but the Catholic cardinals will choose a new keeper of the Keys to the Kingdom. When a papal vacancy arises, the electors — Catholic cardinals under age 80 — gather in Vatican City for a session governed by dramatic rituals. (For example, black smoke rising from a chimney means “not yet,” while white smoke means a pope has been chosen.) You need a two-thirds majority to win, at least in the early going; after 30 tries, a simple majority will do. But the cardinals are under pressure not to drag things out. The more ballots taken, the more divided the church will appear. And the church of “Conclave” is deeply divided. At stake is control of a hierarchy grappling with such issues as the Church’s stances toward women and homosexuality. Harris’s protagonist is Jacopo Lomeli, dean of the College of Cardinals and the man charged with running the election. Like Lomeli, the deceased pope was a liberal; the dean and his leftleaning brethren would like to see the Keys of St. Peter entrusted to one of their own, the Vatican’s secretary of state. The conservatives are backing the patriarch of Venice, whose laundry-list of throwback reforms starts with represcribing the Latin Mass. A dozen or so other cardinals, along with a few nuns, play leading roles. That’s a lot of characters to conjure with in a mid-length book, but Harris keeps them all distinct. Since the cardinals deliberate in secret and tell no tales, Harris can give his imagination a long leash. Who’s to say that some can-

didates don’t troll for votes, even offering what look like bribes; that others aren’t hiding checkered pasts, which, if revealed, will plunge the Church into scandal; or that popes don’t behave erratically from time to time? The aberrations of the late pontiff, a liberal in the mode of Pope Francis, came during his final days of life. He ordered one of the cardinals most likely to succeed him, a swaggering Canadian, to resign all his church offices. Odder still, the pope appears to have created a new cardinal in pectore — i.e., secretly. (This can actually be done, but hardly ever is.) The outsider arrives in Vatican City unannounced and little-known, but his credentials are accepted. These two bombshells will have much to do with the story’s denouement. Harris has written thrillers (“Fatherland,”“Enigma”) and historical novels, notably his Cicero trilogy (“Imperium,”“Conspirata” and “Dictator”), which can hold its own with the best fiction written about ancient Rome. “Conclave” is a departure: suspenseful but not violent, steeped in religious history but taking place the day after tomorrow. Harris also sprinkles in some clerical gossip, such as the Canadian cardinal’s take on the fiasco surrounding the 1978 death of Pope John Paul I after only 33 days in office. “We’ve spent the last forty years trying to convince the world that he wasn’t murdered, and all because nobody wanted to admit his body was discovered by a nun.” A surprise result is almost de rigueur for an election novel, and Harris does not disappoint. Not only do the cardinals choose a dark horse, but the new pontiff guards an astonishing secret. Regardless of whether you have faith in God, the Church, or neither, “Conclave” will keep you richly entertained. n Drabelle is a former contributing editor of Book World.

I CONCLAVE By Robert Harris Knopf. 304 pp. $26.95

KING OF JAZZ Paul Whiteman’s Technicolor Revue By James Layton and David Pierce Media History Press. 302 pp. $50

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D AVID R OBINSON

n 2013, when the Library of Congress inducted “King of Jazz” (1930) into the National Film Registry, it turned out that there was no complete or technically authentic copy for the Library to acquire. Such national recognition, however, encouraged NBCUniversal to finance a digital restoration from the scattered elements that had come to light in the years since the 1950s. The restoration inspired this appropriately glamorous and exhaustive book by James Layton and David Pierce. With an infectious mix of scrupulous scholarship and undisguised delight in the film, they chronicle its participants and turbulent history. That history is inextricably linked to the story of Universal Pictures, established in 1912 by a German immigrant, Carl Laemmle, who left his job in a Wisconsin clothes factory to go into the nickelodeon business in Chicago. He came to prominence with his successful opposition to the Motion Picture Patents Company and its oppressive control over filmmaking. In 1928, Laemmle put his 20year-old son, Julius, in full charge of production. Inevitably, this youngster, baby-faced and bandbox elegant, was mistrusted and permanently disparaged with the nickname “Junior.” Layton and Pierce’s book illuminates that injustice. Junior was determined to raise the quality of Universal’s “A” pictures, and his personal projects included “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the great horror cycle that began with “Frankenstein” (1931) and “Dracula” (1931), the triumphant “Show Boat” (1936) and “King of Jazz.” If he believed in a film, he supported his artists and bravely faced escalating budgets — a virtue that, in the end, was his undoing. By 1936, Universal was virtually ruined, and Junior’s career ended at 28. But “King of Jazz” was his. The screen revue had seen a vogue in

1929 as sound became more confident and flexible. Universal came late to the genre, but “King of Jazz” was the first to be shot wholly in the still-evolving “twostrip” Technicolor process. It also had the biggest musical star of the 1920s: Paul Whiteman, with his 35-piece dance band — all named and credited, many introduced personally on screen. Whiteman, an incorrigible clown looking very much like Oliver Hardy, hardly gives the impression of a sophisticated musician and an inspired conductor, but he unquestionably was. His development of symphonic jazz and his association with George Gershwin, from whom he commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue,” left a permanent mark on American music. The 300 illustrations in Layton and Pierce’s book, most published for the first time, include many of Herman Rosse’s original designs alongside stills that show how faithfully they were realized in the film. “King of Jazz” was a disaster at the box office. Times had changed. October 1929 had seen the start of the Great Depression. Audiences had had their fill of revue films, and the swing era was already on the way. So how does the film look today, and does it justify a book of this size, range and study? Seeing it now, at this remote distance in time, we can recognize it as art in its own right, enhanced by the exquisite soft hues of early Technicolor. As Michael Feinstein puts it in his preface, “With an audacious co-mingling of film, art, Broadway, vaudeville, mixed music, and social attitudes, it’s striking in the way it evokes both the sophistication and innocence of the era.” n Robinson is former film critic of the London Times, director emeritus of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and author of a number of books on film history.


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OPINIONS

Early interview with OSU attacker now feels chilling KEVIN STANKIEWICZ is an Ohio State University student who works for the Lantern student newspaper.

Abdul Razak Ali Artan was sitting alone at a red table outside Mendenhall Lab when I met him. It was a little before 6 p.m. on Aug. 23, the first day of classes for the semester at Ohio State, and he was the first person I came across as I headed onto campus that evening. That he was alone was primarily why I approached. I was on assignment for the Lantern, looking for students for a new feature in the student newspaper called “Humans of Ohio State.” Several paragraphs and a photo profiling members of the campus community, introducing readers to different perspectives. I wanted to find someone who had a moment to talk that day; Artan would be the first such profile. I found a thoughtful, engaged guy, a Muslim immigrant who wanted to spread understanding and awareness while expressing muted fears that U.S. society was becoming insular and fostering unfair stereotypes of his people. He was measured and intellectual, not angry or violent. When I introduced myself, Artan initially seemed surprised. It was his actual first day of classes at Ohio State, as he had just transferred to one of the largest college campuses in the country from a community college nearby. But he opened up quickly. He was soft-spoken, in a slightly accented voice, and friendly. In a 20-minute, wide-ranging conversation, Artan told me about his major in logistics management. He told me about his family fleeing Somalia when he was about 10 years old — including fuzzy memories of his native, war-torn land — and then about living for years in Pakistan and how much he enjoyed it. He bemoaned what he felt were Western misconceptions about Pakistan: “It’s not like people believe.” He told me about his family’s journey once they got to the United States just a few years earlier, first spending some time

in Dallas before coming to Columbus, which has a large and vibrant Somali expat community. Artan spoke calmly but seriously about his acute awareness of what he saw as major American misconceptions about Islam, his religion. From memory, he ticked off examples of Islamophobia that garnered media attention. He told me, in great detail, about the biggest struggle of his first day on campus: finding a place to pray. That became the central element of the feature in the Lantern, something that felt both important and relevant, enlightening and humanizing, the whole point of our new feature. “This place is huge, and I don’t even know where to pray,” Artan told me. “I wanted to pray in the open, but I was scared with everything going on in the media.” His tenor remained the same, but it was clear those examples saddened Artan and likely contributed to his fear to pray openly. He even told me the possibility of being shot if he prayed had crossed his mind. At the time, in the final stretch of a divisive presidential campaign, he spoke of his fears of then-

KEVIN STANKIEWICZ VIA THE LANTERN

Abdul Razak Ali Artan was killed by law enforcement after injuring 11 people at Ohio State University with a car and knife on Monday.

candidate Donald Trump’s rhetoric toward Muslims, what it might mean for immigrants and refugees, what it might mean for those, like him, who practice Islam openly. How ignorance about Islam propels bigotry and hatred. He said it is so important to travel and see different parts of the world, as he had. That if everyone could see the world with their own eyes, they’d be so much more informed and have less prejudice toward people who are different than they are. There is nothing I heard from Artan that day that would have ever made me think he could be responsible for the brutal, senseless attack that would come just three months later. Nothing to indicate his thoughtful frustrations and fears would lead him to drive a car into a crowd of people on campus, that he would lash out with a knife at students and faculty, that he would make national news for what many believe was a terrorist attack. That he would be dead, shot by a police officer trying to prevent him from killing others. I was out at the scene of Artan’s attack near Watts Hall on Monday morning reporting with colleagues when we began working to see if we could confirm the suspect’s identity. I thought about Artan and his story a few times since late August, but nothing prepared me for the Monday phone call I received. It was one of my journalism

professors who called to tell me that reports of the attacker’s identity had surfaced from media reports; it was Artan. My heart sank; that thoughtful, engaged student I had met on the first day of classes had snapped. He had tried to kill people. I wished the whole day was a dream in the first place; I wished a gray Honda sedan never drove over a curb, struck a group of people, before being lunged at with a knife; I wished the sirens I heard on my walk to class were phantom. And then I wished — like I’ve never wished before — that the assailant was not Artan. A lot of people have asked me if I regret, or wanted to rethink, what I published on Artan in August. I don’t. I don’t know what was in his heart when we spoke and exactly how, when or why that morphed into violence. The goal of the “Humans of Ohio State” project was to share stories about the people who make up the Ohio State community, from all walks of life. On Aug. 23, Artan told me part of his story, one that I still believe is important on so many levels. But what he said about his wishes for open-mindedness and unity make little sense now given what happened on Monday, the terror he inflicted. His comments to me about his fears of a nation divided by hate and lack of understanding are now chilling, and what happened Monday has shaken me, as it has much of the Ohio State community. n


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Jobless by choice — or left behind? ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics.

The work ethic is such a central part of the American character that it’s hard to imagine it fading. But that’s what seems to be happening in one important part of the labor force. Among men 25 to 54 — so-called prime-age male workers — about 1 in 8 are dropouts. They don’t have a job and, unlike the officially unemployed, aren’t looking for one. They number about 7 million. Just what role, if any, these nonworking men played in Donald Trump’s election is unclear. What’s not unclear is that these dropouts, after being ignored for years, have suddenly become a hot topic of scholarly study and political debate. There’s been a sea change. In the mid1960s, only 1 in 29 prime-age male workers was a dropout. The explosion of dropouts strikes many observers as dire. The “detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor . . . can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is also a social crisis — and . . . a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but

undermine the American family.” A recent report from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers echoes similar concerns. The erosion of prime-age male workers “is particularly troubling since workers at this age are at their most productive,” says the CEA. Greater joblessness is linked to “lower overall well-being and happiness, and higher mortality.” Why are men abandoning the labor market? (Though women’s labor-force participation rates have decreased, they haven’t experienced the prolonged drop of men’s.) One obvious reason is the impact of the Great Recession, but this effect has diminished as the recovery has continued. Besides, the rise in male dropouts dates to the mid-1960s. Nor can it be blamed on two other trends: more men going to college and an increase in early retirement. True, both keep men out of the labor force. Still,

focusing on the 25-to-54 age group should minimize these problems, because it covers many men who have finished school and haven’t yet retired. The most important cause of dropping out is declining wages for low-skilled workers, concludes the CEA study. The demand for low-skilled workers is falling faster than the supply, causing wages to drop. From 1975 to 2014, the CEA reported, wages for high-school graduates fell from more than 80 percent of wages of college graduates to less than 60 percent. As this happens, “more primeage men choose not to participate in the labor force,” the CEA says. Put plainly: They decide that working isn’t worth the effort. As for shrinking low-wage employment, the CEA blames “technology, automation, and globalization.” Dropping out also has other causes. One is the large number of incarcerated men. Although this doesn’t directly affect people not in the labor force — prisoners aren’t counted — it does so indirectly. When prisoners get out, their criminal records make it harder for them to find work, says the CEA. What’s more controversial — and unsettled — is how much, if at all, government welfare programs encourage labor-force dropouts

by providing an alternative income source. Eberstadt believes this is crucial, citing studies that show roughly two-thirds of households with male dropouts receive disability benefits or other government aid. By contrast, the CEA argues that benefits haven’t increased fast enough to explain the surge in dropouts. What can be done to minimize dropouts? Any debate may turn on whether dropouts are “shirkers” (able-bodied men avoiding work) or “victims” (workers left behind by disability or bad luck). There’s evidence of both. Eberstadt cites surveys that only 15 percent of dropouts “stated they were unemployed because they could not find work.” Other surveys indicate that dropouts spend about eight hours a day “socializing, relaxing and leisure.” But nearly half of male dropouts report taking pain pills every day, according to a study by Princeton University economist Alan Krueger. Two-fifths of respondents said their disabilities prevented them “from working on a full-time job for which they [were] qualified.” Male dropouts report they are “less happy, more sad, and more stressed” than workers or the unemployed. In a society that worships the work ethic, being a labor-force dropout is often a ticket to misery. n


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY DANA SUMMERS

How the election was really rigged DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

A voting scandal of epic proportion tilted this election. The scam involved millions of people. No, I’m not talking about the recount the Clinton campaign joined in Wisconsin and may seek in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton and her aides were correct before, when they said voting fraud is rare. The recounts won’t change the election’s outcome. Neither am I talking about Trump’s outlandish and baseless claim that millions of non-citizens and dead people voted illegally. That’s as absurd as his preelection claims that the voting system was “rigged.” Both distract from the real scandal, which is happening in plain sight. Millions of would-be voters didn’t participate because of obstacles designed to discourage them. The hurdles were, thanks to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling invalidating key parts of the Voting Rights Act, largely legal. And they arguably suppressed enough minority voters to cost Clinton the election. Fourteen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election, and 20 have had such restrictions put in place since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a group that opposes such laws. These include strict photo-ID requirements, cutbacks in early voting and new restrictions on registration. Other states are resisting efforts that would make

voting easier with same-day, online and motor-voter registration. At the same time, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights group, found that counties previously covered by the Voting Rights Act have closed down at least 868 polling places. The closures (often without adequate notice) disproportionately affect minority voters. “We have across most states some significant element of voter suppression,” says Zoltan Hajnal, a University of California at San Diego political scientist specializing in voting rights. “Over time these have shrunk the electorate in significant ways and tilted the electorate toward the Republican Party.” The total number of would-be

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY GAMBLE FOR THE FLORIDA TIMES-UNION

voters deterred is in the “millions,” he said. “If you were to superimpose the most liberal voting laws on all the states, it’s quite likely we would have had a different winner” on Nov. 8. Though it’s difficult to quantify the effect of voter suppression in 50 states, Hajnal reports in a new study that after Texas implemented a strict voter-ID law, Latino turnout dropped sharply between 2010 and 2014, and the gap between white and Latino turnout increased by 9.2 percentage points. In the rest of the country, the gap between white and Latino turnout decreased over the same period. Wisconsin adopted a tough photo-ID law, and in Milwaukee, where a large number of African Americans don’t drive or have licenses, turnout declined in 2016 by 41,000 compared with 2012, a 15 percent drop. Turnout was significantly lower than in 2004 and 2008 as well. The dropoff was steepest in the poorest precincts. “No matter how hard one tries to attribute this to lower voter interest in this election, the stark drop must be attributable to impact of the photo-ID rule,” argues Kristen Clarke, head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Elsewhere, suppression efforts have grown more brazen. After a

federal appellate court knocked down North Carolina’s voting restrictions because they targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision,” dozens of counties still cut hours for early voting, which minority voters use disproportionately. In Texas, officials disregarded parts of a federal appellate court decision limiting that state’s voter-ID law. In Pennsylvania, there were widespread reports of elections officials demanding voters show IDs even though that state doesn’t have such a law. In the short run, this makes tactical sense for Republicans. Democratic-leaning minority voters — African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos — are forecast to grow to a majority of the voting-eligible population at mid-century, from 31 percent today. By suppressing this vote, the effect of the demographic change can be delayed. The Trump administration seems to be fine with holding back the tide. So let’s not get distracted by Trump’s fantastic claims of millions of illegal votes, nor by Clinton’s search for a voting-system cyberattack that even the computer scientist urging the recount says has “probably not” occurred. Focus instead on the scandal that really is rigging American democracy. n


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The alt-right BY

O LIVIA N UZZI

The phrase “alt­right” was conceived as a catchall for various unsa­ vory subcommunities of the anti­establishment conservative right by white nationalist Richard Spencer. For several years, the movement festered on the periphery of mainstream political discourse. Now, with the election of Donald Trump as president, the alt­right has be­ come a subject of fascination — and revulsion — nationwide. Here are the five most commonly repeated myths. MYTH NO. 1 The alt-right is different from regular neo-Nazism. While the amorphous term “alt-right” can be helpful for characterizing a certain kind of young white nationalist who’s technically savvy and culturally literate, as distinct from the unreconstructed racists and anti-Semites of yore, the distance is shorter than they would have you believe. At a National Policy Institute conference in Washington in November, excited members of the alt-right shouted: “Hail our people! Hail victory!,” and Tila Tequila, the Vietnamese American former reality-TV star who’s been praising Hitler on Twitter for the past year, was photographed performing a Nazi salute with two young men. The alt-right is the same old hate, in other words, just with trendier packaging. But if it salutes like a Nazi, you can safely call it one. MYTH NO. 2 The alt-right is a bunch of juvenile pranksters. There’s more here than cheeky irreverence. The altright’s swift ascent occurred in part because its members bombarded journalists, particularly Jewish or nonwhite ones, with racist and antiSemitic messages and imagery on social media, especially Twitter. There, they praised Hitler with a twinge of irony, the way hipsters drink PBR, and they corrupted the harmless meme Pepe the Frog by dressing

him up as a Wehrmacht soldier. They told adversaries they’d be heading to the ovens. It was a real riot. The alt-right also exists offline. After Trump’s win, reports of bias-based crimes have ticked up, and pro-Nazi, racist graffiti has begun appearing across the United States. Meanwhile, one of the movement’s purveyors now has the president-elect’s ear and will get his own dignified perch in the White House: Until recently, Stephen K. Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart News, which he once proudly called “the platform of the alt-right.” MYTH NO. 3 The alt-right is rapidly gaining power and numbers. The alt-right began online and mostly lives there, where its devotees post to message boards and troll “cucks” (milquetoast conservatives) and “normies” (people with conventional, mainstream views) with such frequency that it can seem as though they’re everywhere. But how many people constitute the movement is virtually unknowable. It’s a loose and informal congregation: They don’t have memberships, and the majority of those who selfidentify do so through anonymous accounts. Easy to quantify, however, was the turnout at the National Policy Institute’s recent event in Washington: 275 people, or roughly 3,300 fewer than attended a June convention in

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Richard Spencer speaks at an alt-right conference hosted by the National Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18.

Reno, Nev., for people who enjoy, among other pursuits, dressing up in anthropomorphic animal suits. “Alt-right” didn’t even win word of the year in the Oxford Dictionaries’ annual contest — that prize went to “post-truth.” While the alt-right is real and visible, there’s no reason to believe it’s a very vast group or one that will stick around for very long. MYTH NO. 4 Trump doesn’t agree with what the alt-right stands for. Trump’s spokesmen have gone to great lengths to distance him from the alt-right. Recently, Trump told New York Times reporters and editors, “I don’t want to energize the [alt-right], and I disavow the group.” But when Clinton delivered her speech about the alt-right in August, Trump responded not by disavowing the movement but by labeling her a bigot. And outside his post-election comments to the Times, Trump hasn’t specifically addressed the alt-right. He has never asked its members to stop photoshopping Jewish journalists into gas chambers in his honor. What’s more, he has often seemed to

wink in their direction by deploying their rhetoric, with his talk of opposing “globalism,” his repeated retweets of alt-right Twitter accounts and his use of imagery — such as a Star of David illustration — that originated on Nazi websites. MYTH NO. 5 The alt-right is just an extension of European nationalist movements. Actually, the alt-right is a very American movement, and we have plenty of historical precedent for fringe right-wing malcontents. When you add up our history of racial segregation, Know-Nothing nativism and right-wing populist movements, it’s not hard to see how today’s alt-right has plenty to anchor itself to in the American story. It should come as no surprise that a prominent “race-realist” publication that tracks closely with alt-right ideology calls itself “American Renaissance”— which echoes hopes of making America great again. n Nuzzi is a political reporter for the Daily Beast and a contributor to GQ magazine who has covered Donald Trump for the past 17 months.


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2016

24

MEDICAL HEALTH & WELLNESS 2017 NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

DIRECTORY

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Deadline: Friday, December 9

Publishes: Friday, December 30


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