Full disclosure: I got into a little physical altercation yesterday with the Chicago police and lost my notepad in the scuffle. We'll get to that, but for now please forgive any errors in the timeline.

The first march organized by the March for the Democratic National Convention was set to take off from Chicago's Union Park at 1 p.m. Reporters were invited to get there at 7 a.m; I have no idea if any did, but at 10:30 a.m. a friend texted to say, "Union Park right now is very underwhelming." This seemed to be the consensus going in; that the anticipated 30,000 marchers would come nowhere near, and that the press would be overrepresented, which turned out to be the case—while reporting I ran into seven journalists in I know, when the average is about zero. But some of the protesters were also following the trend of pasting "PRESS" across their chests. A young woman I met on the bus around noon did the same. When I asked who she was reporting for, she looked confused; it was just a shirt. Okay, but why?

Those entering Union Park were handed a gazillion pamphlets with slogans like "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR SMASH IMPERIALISM WITH COMMUNIST REVOLUTION," "12 ESSENTIAL FACTS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT ISRAEL-GAZA CONFLICT," "WORKERS STRIKE BACK, WHEN WE FIGHT—WE CAN WIN," and "NEITHER PARTY REPRESENTS THE WORKING CLASS—CLASS WAR 2024,"—the all-cap emphasis conveying the commitment of the pamphlet distributors. Nearly everyone at the rally turned out to be in their 20s, dressed in today's radical chic—keffiyeh as cape, keffiyeh as neck scarf,  keffiyeh as headwrap. There were a few women in full Handmaid's Tale regalia, many young people in pro-Socialist red, and one dude wearing, refreshingly, an old Star Wars t-shirt. There was no police presence inside the park proper, but just outside there were at least 100 officers, half of them on bicycles, all of them waiting in the shade for something to happen. When I asked whether they'd be accompanying the marchers on their 1.1-mile city-approved route, I was given two short nods.

Before any marching began, there were speeches from the stage—speeches about genocide in Palestine, abortion, student debt, colonial settlers, Black Lives Matter, and cops being bastards. On and on it went, past 1 p.m.; the chanting the speakers requested was rarely very chanty. It was hot and people were thirsty and the line for the porta-potties stretched over 200 people long. 

"Can someone help me spread this out so it can be seen by the helicopter?" asked a young man, unfurling a 50-foot sheet painted with the words, "LOOK UP 'NAKBA.'"

"Would you like to carry a sign?" asked another young man, trying to offload one of the 400 or so signs strewn across the field. The sign-makers had been industrious, affixing emphatic messages like "STOP THE CRIME—FREE THEM ALL" and "GENOCIDE JOE'S LEGACY: BUTCHER OF GAZA" to wooden stakes. The problem was, there weren't nearly enough takers. How many people did the guy next to me estimate were actually here?

"Five hundred," he said, after a beat, just before someone on stage shouted into the microphone how great it was to see 15,000 people in attendance. The guy adjusted his estimate to 1,500, which I'd say was about right.

What they lacked in numbers they made up for in enthusiasm, waving Palestinian flags, communist flags, anarchist flags, "land back" flags, and a flag whose exact origin the person holding it said he did not really know. Someone mentioned they'd seen some Israeli flags earlier but I didn't see any. As for American flags, I saw exactly one, carried by a veteran named Shawn, who said he had not liked seeing American flags burned during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Congress.

"I think that's greatly deplorable," he said, as several young men with their faces covered moved close to him. But when they noticed that several members of the press also wanted to talk with the one dude carrying an American flag, they backed off. 

"Earlier they were saying derogatory things towards me like, 'get that shit out of here. What the fuck's wrong with you?'" he said. "But at the end of the day, nobody's going to intimidate me. Nobody's going to prevent me from voicing my opinion."

If there was a similarity in the way the crowd looked and behaved, their many and multiple demands were perhaps what gave the gathering a lack of cohesion and group energy. That changed at 2:02 p.m., when it was announced that there was a special guest speaker.

However you feel about independent presidential candidate Cornel West, you would have been as energized by his 5-minute speech. He roared and he cooed, talking about "our profound love for our Palestinian brothers and sisters" and how we must extend that profound love to all our brothers and sisters. It was the adrenaline shot everyone needed to get through the next hour. With the bike police edging closer, the marchers funneled out of the park and into the streets. Messages were shouted into bullhorns, girls danced, boys drummed— they were on the move to Park 578 a mile away. The sun was still shining and the press—there must have been one for every three marchers—walked on the sidewalks. Between them and the marchers were the bike police, pushing their bikes in formation, and astride yellow-vested "safety team" members, who kept themselves between the marchers and the police. It was all very choreographed, and one would not be faulted for thinking that this whole thing would go off without a hitch.

But of course, there would be a hitch, and it came in the form of young men with their heads and faces covered. Though they may have had no affiliation with them, they marched beneath an Anarcho-brat flag and a People's Defense Units (YPG) flag, representing the Kurdish militant group in Syria. A colleague mentioned he'd seen maybe eight of the men trying to start something earlier but they had not gained purchase, the other marchers not wanting to be part of whatever mayhem they might want to commit. But now we were at the mouth of Park 578, the turnaround spot for marchers and the closest point to the United Center, where the DNC was taking place.

"That way!" one of the young men shouted, pointing toward the United Center, trying to get the group, which had grown to maybe 15 men, to make a break for the tall barrier fences. It was not going to happen—not with the cops forming a triple-line barrier of bikes and other marchers yelling for the YPG brats to stop, shouting that the march had been planned for nearly a year! It was supposed to be peaceful! Stop fucking it up! At least that's what I imagined the girl in the keffiyeh was yelling at the young men, her voice so hoarse with emotion I could not make out the words.

My colleague and I tried to interview the young men, but they had the same response to every question: "We don't talk to media." It's a catchall phrase common among young protesters, the eyes above their masks growing not bolder but shakier with each iteration. You could see them thinking it was better to stonewall than risk having one's responses scrutinized and memorialized.

But this is not always the case! As I would find ten minutes later, when some of the protesters had had enough of longingly looking at the United Center and decided to breach an exterior fence. Pop pop clang, down went the barriers, in went maybe 75 protesters. Busting shit down was an exciting change, if entirely predictable, meanwhile, a gentler strain of protesters, mostly women, were shouting from the other side, "Come back!" It was time to march back to Union Park, they said. They did not like the risks people were taking, and they were not going to do their many causes any good.

I followed the protesters over the fence.

"Come on everybody! Come on!" shouted a tall lanky guy all in black, with a garbage can lid painted with the anarchist A strapped to his back. What was he wanting everyone to do?

"I want to get all the way inside the DNC!" he said, pointing toward the United Center. "I mean what are we doing here? Isn't this what we came here to do?"

Maybe not everybody; maybe not the 70-year-old lady peace activist who I'd watch gasp as the fence came down. Maybe this kind of bravado was not for her.

"I've seen 70-year-olds do it!" he said. "We can do it if we do it together. If we can dream it, we can do it!"

He was clanging his garbage can lid when someone shouted, "Cops on all sides!" We turned toward the phalanx of blue uniforms, in the jubilation no one had seen them form a walking line, or I hadn't seen it. Shouts of "Nazi motherfuckers" and "Fuck you!" lasted maybe 30 seconds before the cops were on us. I did my best to duck into a little alcove in the fencing. Yeah, that didn't work.

"Move it! Move it!" cops shouted, as people fell down or were grabbed; when they were variously combative or trying to flee.

"You're in a restricted area!" an officer shouted at me. Another prodded me with her nightstick.

"Don't hurt her!" a protester shouted, which I thought was kind of adorable and which I caught on video, just before finding a small egress to the other side. Two men pulled me through—thanks guys—and into the waiting path of another journalist pal calmly taking in the proceedings.

"Hello Nancy," he said, adding that he thought things were about to calm down—and they did. The bulk of protesters marched back to Union Park, perhaps unaware of the side streets lined with hundreds of waiting officers, who (I'm told) were instructed to pull down their face shields, in case they needed them. On this night, they did not.

The post The Anarchist Dreams: Dispatch From the DNC appeared first on Reason.com.

Depending on how you feel about protesters, there's good news or bad news about the estimated number expected to converge on Chicago this week for the 2024 Democratic National Convention: 30,000. Either way, you would not be faulted for thinking the number is possibly aspirational, based on the fewer than 50 who showed up yesterday for an outdoor event and press conference organized by the Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention.

"Almost 270 organizations from across the U.S. have joined the Coalition to March on the DNC. And tens of thousands will be out on the streets starting tomorrow," Hatem Abudayyeh, coalition spokesperson and U.S. Palestinian Community Network national chair, told the assembled, who politely took notes and asked him to repeat the marching schedule. They nodded in commiseration at the city's "approved march route," a 1.1-mile stretch that threatened to become a human parking lot and did not take marchers past the United Center, where the DNC is taking place.

"Which means that the thousands do not get their First Amendment rights upheld," he said. "They do not get to be within sight and sound [of United Center] to say, end Israeli occupation, end U.S. aid for Israel, end U.S. support of the genocide."

Abudayyeh vowed to keep pressure on the city until the very last minute, hoping that after months of legal wrangling, it would allow the 2.4-mile route they had originally hoped for. It sounded rather self-limiting and not perhaps in the spirit of the protests that have roiled the country since October 7, a refashioning perhaps of rage into something potentially more politically expedient.

There was no rage at yesterday's event, no black hoodies or keffiyeh-shrouded faces, no shouting or snapping when Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesperson for the coalition, cited the "horrific genocide of Palestinians that's being aided and abetted by the Democratic leadership and its representatives, Genocide Joe Biden, Killer Kamala Harris, Baby Killer Blinken." Even when Mijana enjoined the crowd to chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," the response was muted.

Maybe it was activism fatigue. Maybe the long run-up to the convention—the march had been in the planning stages since before October 7—had sapped some spontaneity. Maybe the multifariousness of those looking to coalesce under the coalition's umbrella—Abudayyeh mentioned "the Black Liberation Movement and the Immigrant Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement and the LGBTQ Movement and the Workers' Rights Movement and the Reproductive Rights Movement"—rendered the movement more PTA, less punk rock.

Not that the event was without anger. Mijana, an organizer also for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, was especially critical of the Chicago Police Department, claiming that "the same Israeli occupation forces that are committing the genocide in Gaza, train police departments like the Chicago Police Department, who then implement the offensive tactics they learn onto our communities."

Still, no one anticipated any violence and certainly would not be participating in it. "We intend to have a family-friendly, peaceful march," Mijana told me. "That's why we're fighting for the permits, because we know that will keep the police away from us and allow us to march on our own with our own people."

But any movement of size creates a collective effervescence that can spill over and attract people outside the cause, including bad actors and those seeking a perverse type of heroism. This was evident when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counter-protesters during a 2017 "Unite the Right" protest in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, and when Michael Reinoehl, in an effort to prove his commitment to Black Lives Matter, shot Jay Danielson point blank during a 2020 protest in Portland. 

This suggests DNC protesters might welcome some police protection, if only for themselves.

"I'm from Minneapolis, so I know a little something about some mayhem," said Jess Sundin, of the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice. "Every time I've seen that on any significant scale, it's been police attacking demonstrators, is what starts it. I am not trying to be dismissive, but my experience is that if the police refrain from using violence against the demonstration, we won't see any sort of significant no mayhem, no significant outbreaks of drama."

Perhaps. And if Sunday's event was a foretaste, the protests will be disciplined, even mild. But I wouldn't count on it.

The post Muted Outrage and Aspirational Crowds: Dispatch From the DNC  appeared first on Reason.com.

Gird your loins, it's DNC time: The Democratic National Convention starts today in Chicago, and the Israel/Palestine-related tensions that have been coursing through the left since October 7 may very well come to a head this week.

Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to set up right outside of security to protest the party's support of Israel; presumptive nominee Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, is expected to speak about Judaism on stage; and, just like during the Republican National Convention, some families of hostages taken by Hamas will plead onstage for the return of their loved ones.

Some delegates who eschewed voting for Kamala Harris, calling themselves the Uncommitteds, have broken from the party pick precisely because they do not support U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war. The Uncommitted factor is especially relevant to Michigan, a swing state with a large Middle Eastern population, and Democratic officials have been attempting to make inroads with the vocal disgruntled in recent weeks; they want a DNC that signals unity, and the likelihood that massive protests will be taking place just outside the gates undermines this.

"The key question for Democrats this week is whether the demonstrators represent a meaningful group of voters who could swing the election in November, or if they are outliers on the left who should be resisted in an appeal to the center," sums up The New York Times. 

Hamas rejects latest ceasefire proposal: On Sunday, following days of tense negotiating and Secretary of State Antony Blinken shlepping to Israel believing an agreement was imminent, Hamas rejected a proposed ceasefire deal with Israel.

"After being briefed by the mediators about what happened in the last round of talks in Doha, we once again came to the conclusion that Netanyahu is still putting obstacles in the way of reaching an agreement, and is setting new conditions and demands with the aim of undermining the mediators' efforts and prolonging the war," declared Hamas in a statement, adding that the U.S.-brokered ceasefire "aligns with" Israel's demands.

At issue is the fact that the ceasefire did not force full a Israeli withdrawal from the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Israel had proposed maintaining a large security presence on the border between Egypt and Gaza, as well as maintaining control over the Netzarim Corridor, which divides the Gaza Strip's north from its south.

Blinken has called this round of negotiations a "decisive moment" for Israel and Hamas. In the last few weeks, Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah, have vowed to strike Israel in retaliation for its July assassinations of Hezbollah official Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Thus far, wider war has been staved off, but it's unclear for how much longer that will last; the fact that negotiations were in progress may have played a contributing role. Now that may not be so.

Scenes from New York: One of the New York City hospital systems, Northwell Health, is starting a studio to make its own movie and TV shows following the success of the Netflix show Lenox Hill, which followed doctors and patients within the system. But just a few years ago, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center had to pay out a more than $2 million settlement to federal regulators for failing to protect patient privacy when a television crew was filming inside the hospital. Expect more issues, both ethical and legal, to arise.

QUICK HITS

• "The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which account for roughly a third of all US container imports, had their third-strongest month ever in July, just shy of an all-time high reached in May 2021. Back then, a wave of inbound consumer goods caused supply bottlenecks on land and a queue of cargo ships waiting for a berth offshore was getting longer by the day," reports Bloomberg. "Demand now is driven by retailers and other importers that are stocking up ahead of US tariffs on Chinese goods and a possible strike by a large group of American dockworkers—adding to the usual frenzy of pre-holiday ordering that occurs this time of year."
• Planned Parenthood Great Rivers is offering free vasectomies and abortions for DNC attendees at a van near the convention center, which seems a little self-defeating if the idea is to grow your political party.
• Also in DNC abortion news: Some protesters have dressed up as abortion pills.
• Officials in Georgia "like the prosperity that could come with making [electric vehicles], but not the California-style mandates that prop them up. They like the jobs but agree with many of their voters who think electric vehicles are a sheet metal-clad tenet of the Democrats' woke ideology," reports Politico. 
• Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, responded this weekend to news of a Kamala Harris poll bump by saying the "media uses fake polls."

The post DNC Readies for Protesters appeared first on Reason.com.

This week has been especially chaotic for the Middle East. On Saturday, a Lebanese rocket killed 12 children and youth at a soccer game in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. (The victims were Syrian citizens with Israeli residency.) On Tuesday night, Israel took revenge for the rocket by killing Fuad Shukr, a commander in the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, along with two children.

A few hours later, a bomb killed Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas' political bureau and the lead negotiator with Israel, while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian president's inauguration. Israel is widely believed to be the culprit. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have both promised to take revenge.

The same night that Shukr and Haniyeh were killed, U.S. warplanes rained down fire on an Iraqi militia base, killing four pro-Iranian fighters. An anonymous U.S. official told reporters that the militiamen were launching an attack drone that "posed a threat" to U.S. and allied forces. It was not clear whether the Iraqi drone was really aimed at U.S. troops—or Israel.

Soon it may not matter. The Biden administration affirmed again on Wednesday that it will help defend Israel in case of a conflict with Lebanon or Iran, as it did during clashes this April. And the administration has hinted before that it will get involved directly if Israel faces military setbacks in Lebanon. Israeli leaders may have been betting on exactly that outcome.

Unnamed "sources in the security establishment" told The Jerusalem Post that they could have assassinated Haniyeh in Qatar, where he usually lives. Instead, those sources explained, "the choice to carry out the assassination in the heart of Tehran was precisely because Haniyeh was under Iranian security responsibility, which placed Iran at the heart of the world's focus as a host, director, and supplier of terrorism."

In other words, killing Haniyeh was possibly meant to turn the Israel-Hamas war into an international crisis involving Iran and Israel's allies.

Months before the October 2023 attacks, Israeli policy makers had gamed out an Israeli strike leading to a U.S.-Iranian war. The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank close to the Israeli government, ran a simulation in July 2023 that was eerily similar to the current escalation. The scenario began with an Israeli assassination campaign in Tehran, which provoked Hezbollah and Iraqi militias into attacking Israel and ended with direct U.S. attacks on Iran.

"Former top political and military leaders from Israel, the United States and a number of European countries took part in the simulation," reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

For years before that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders had been demanding U.S. support for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. It's not hard to understand why. Khamenei has called Israel a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised, and Israeli leaders have in turn said that Iran is the head of an evil octopus, which must be cut off.

The attacks on October 7, 2023, by Hamas seemed to confirm the Israeli perception. Whatever role Iran did or didn't have in planning the attacks—the U.S. government believes that Iranian leaders were just as surprised as everyone else—Iran's allies immediately jumped into the fray, attacking Israel in the name of the Palestinian cause.

And plenty of American politicians want conflict for their own reasons. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) had called for bombing Iran whether or not there was evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. On Wednesday, he claimed to have intelligence that "Iran will, in the coming weeks or months, possess a nuclear weapon" and introduced a bill calling for war with Iran.

A conflict with Iran also helps Netanyahu alleviate some of the domestic political pressure on him. Before the October 7 attacks, he was facing protests over his proposal to defang the Israeli Supreme Court. And instead of rallying Israelis around Netanyahu, the attacks galvanized opposition, as many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the security lapse and the failure to rescue hostages.

This week, those tensions exploded into an outright mutiny. After months of international pressure regarding the treatment of inmates at the Sde Teiman prison, Israeli military police began a probe into one of the most egregious cases. Nine soldiers had allegedly raped a Palestinian prisoner so hard that he was sent to the hospital with a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs.

Police detained some of the accused soldiers, and Israeli nationalists accused the government of betraying its troops. Nationalist rioters, including members of parliament, stormed both Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military courts in support of the accused rapists. The army was forced to pull three battalions away from the Palestinian territories to guard the courthouse.

Killing Shukr and Haniyeh, then, was a good political bet for Netanyahu. At the very least, Netanyahu got to drown out headlines about the Sde Teiman riot with a dashing military victory. And if Iran hits back hard enough, then Israel may be able to get the world's superpower to fight Israel's greatest enemy.

But a full-on U.S.-Iran war would be a disaster for the region and for Americans. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned The New Yorker in December 2021 that Iran has missile "overmatch in the theatre—the ability to overwhelm" U.S. air defenses. American troops would face attacks in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and a few well-placed Iranian strikes on Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi could do serious damage to the world economy.

It would be a disaster of the Biden administration's own making. Soon after the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden embraced the "bear hug" theory of diplomacy. By giving Israel public reassurances and unlimited military support, the theory went, Biden would earn enough goodwill from Israelis to keep their war contained and eventually broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.

Instead, the bear hug has turned out to be a sleepwalk. Netanyahu has taken U.S. support as a license to continue expanding the conflict. And the Biden administration seems to be at a loss for words about the latest escalation. Asked what impact the assassination of one side's chief negotiator would have on ceasefire negotiations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken played dumb.

"Well, I've seen the reports, and what I can tell you is this: First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in," Blinken told Channel News Asia. "It's very hard to speculate, and I've learned never to speculate, on the impact one event may have on something else. So I can't tell you what this means."

The post Will Biden Sleepwalk Into a War With Iran? appeared first on Reason.com.

On March 14, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), a man who 13 months prior had vowed at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center that "as long as Hashem breathes air into my lungs, the United States Senate will stand behind Israel with our fullest support," peered solemnly over his glasses into the Senate's C-SPAN cameras and informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was time for him to go.

"The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7," Schumer declared, referring to the shock Hamas massacre and mass kidnapping event just across the militarized border separating the Palestinian Gaza Strip from the Israeli envelope around it. "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution….At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

And if Netanyahu, in such an election, were to win enough votes to form another government, then continue prosecuting the war against Israel's attackers in ways Schumer doesn't approve?

"Then," the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history warned, "the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course."

It's an increasingly common refrain among American critics of Israeli policy, including many who are otherwise wary of Washington thumbing the scales on world affairs: The $3.8 billion that the U.S. gives each year should directly influence Israeli behavior—on war, on humanitarian assistance to Gaza, on settlements in the West Bank, even on proposed reforms to the judiciary branch—or be withdrawn.

"The Netanyahu government, or hopefully a new Israeli government, must understand that not one penny will be coming to Israel from the U.S. unless there is a fundamental change in their military and political positions," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said last November, reiterating a critique he and several other candidates made when seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden, a stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his half-century in public office, seemed this spring to be moving closer to Sanders' point of view. Three days before Schumer's well-telegraphed speech, Politico reported, based on "four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking," that Biden "will consider conditioning military aid to Israel if the country moves forward with a large-scale invasion of Rafah."

The Rafah offensive was indeed tabled a few days later. But then, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on April 1 pulverized a World Central Kitchen aid convoy in Gaza, killing seven, Biden informed Netanyahu in a tense phone call that (in the words of a White House readout) Israel needed to "announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers," or else, for the first time in a generation, the U.S. would hold up military aid.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and three dozen other members of Congress sent a letter to the president April 5 urging him "to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed." NBC declared this a potential "turning point" in U.S.-Israeli relations.

But that turn lasted fewer than 10 days. On April 14, Iran fired more than 300 potentially lethal missiles and drones into Israel, marking the first time the Islamic republic had directly attacked the Jewish state, after decades of supporting proxy harassments from Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, and various armed factions in Syria and Iraq. Largely thanks to the technological and regional military agreements that the U.S. and Israel have jointly forged, virtually all of the projectiles that did not misfire were intercepted.

"Now is not the time to abandon our friends. The House must pass urgent national-security legislation for…Israel, as well as desperately needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza," Biden wrote in The Wall Street Journal three days later, in support of a supplemental $26.38 billion Israeli package. "I've been clear about my concerns over the safety of civilians in Gaza amid the war with Hamas, but this aid…is focused on Israel's long-term defensive needs to ensure it can maintain its military edge against Iran or any other adversary."

That same day, after months of delay, embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) announced that the aid bill would finally be introduced on the House floor. The only attached condition was imposed not on Israeli policy makers but on the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency operation in Gaza. So much for a turning point.

Yet the conversation about leverage is precisely the one America needs to be having while confronting yet another deadly and seemingly intractable standoff in the Middle East. A realistic contemplation of Washington's regional and global system of carrots and sticks, at a time when American imperial appetites are on the noticeable decline, might reveal some awkward if potentially game-changing truths. Beginning with: There are many on the pro-Israeli side who want the same policy result as Bernie Sanders, for precisely the opposite reasons.

End it, Don't Mend it

Three months before the October 7 massacre, the American Jewish publication Tablet published a provocative essay by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz bluntly headlined "End U.S. Aid to Israel."

The brief: "Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington. That's because nearly all military aid to Israel…consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers," they wrote. "In return, American payouts undermine Israel's domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country's autonomy—giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales to diplomatic and military strategy."

Critics of Israel, particularly in light of the subsequent war with Hamas, will surely blanch at the notion that Washington has anything like "veto power" over Tel Aviv. Yet America has nonetheless coordinated and consulted on policy far more closely with Israel, including during this conflict, than it has on, say, nearby NATO ally Turkey in its ongoing battles with Syrian Kurds. All at a time when the comparative purchasing power of America's Israeli aid has plummeted.

"The Israel of 2023," Siegel and Leibovitz observed, "is immeasurably wealthier and more powerful than the dusty socialist country of 40 years ago, where local electrical grids could be overloaded by American hair dryers." Boy howdy is it.

Israel now has a highergross domestic product (GDP) per capita than Japan and Italy, and is closing in fast on France and the United Kingdom. In 1981, as the hawkish former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pointed out in Commentary last year, "the United States provided Israel with $4.5 billion in economic and military aid at a time when the entire GDP of the Jewish state was only $25.4 billion." Now? GDP is north of $500 billion.

Annual U.S. aid has gone from 17.7 percent of the Israeli economy to 0.7 percent; even with the big new cash infusion, that figure goes up this fiscal year to just 5.7 percent. And as Biden himself crassly observed when selling the supplemental, the strings attached include "send[ing] military equipment from our own stockpiles, then us[ing] the money authorized by Congress to replenish those stockpiles—by buying from American suppliers….[We're] help[ing] our friends while helping ourselves." So America is sending money that Israel no longer needs to lock in long-term contracts for the military-industrial complex. (The 10-year, $38-billion Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama in 2018 allowed for Israel to spend about a quarter of the annual total on its own domestic defense production until this year, after which the percentage is to be ratcheted steadily down to zero.)

This close military partnership, which has been the basic bilateral setup since not long after the 1967 Six Day War, has produced benefits for both Washington and Jerusalem. Israel gets some of the world's most advanced defense tech, such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling missile-interception systems; the U.S. gets premium intelligence in a volatile region and a privileged seat at the table for making commerce-lubricating peace deals.

But it's also true those contracts could be freely entered into, without a cent of U.S. taxpayer money, just as both Sanders and anti-interventionist Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) would prefer. What would happen to American influence then?

"Weaning Israel off of American assistance would have the added advantage of removing the issue of conditioning such aid or using it as leverage, ideas that sometimes surface when the United States and Israel differ on important policy issues, such as the peace process," former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer wrote four years ago in The National Interest.

In other words, say goodbye to Schumer's—and Biden's—serially insisted-upon "two-state solution," which has been a political non-starter in Israel especially since October 7. And don't be surprised if the country's regional Qualitative Military Edge, enshrined in U.S. law, would be deployed more freely in preemptively striking Iran's offensive capabilities, whether in missile production, nuclear development, or senior-level military planning.

So would cutting aid to Israel actually lead to more, not less war? Making predictions in the Middle East is a fool's errand. But one way to think through the scenario planning, and move faster toward a world where foreign policy commitments are more commensurate with the domestic public opinion of the countries involved, is to remember a factor that too often escapes attention: Israel is hardly the only country along the Arabian Peninsula to receive billions in American military aid.

What Leverage Bought

If the U.S. permanently cut off all aid tomorrow—and even if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous "Israel lobby," were suddenly to close up shop—the bonds of affection between the two countries would still remain strong. According to a Gallup poll, Israel has for the past quarter-century been among the leading countries toward which Americans have the most favorable opinion. Eighty-five percent of the world's Jewish population lives either in the U.S. or in Israel, in roughly equal numbers (the numerical capital of Jewry is not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but New York City). There are some 200,000 dual citizens living in Israel; at least 33 were killed by Hamas on or after October 7, and five more were still believed to be held hostage as of May 1. Even as Americans—particularly Democrats, and the young—have soured on Israel's prosecution of the war, there remains between the countries a shared liberal democratic (and capitalistic) culture and decades' worth of human intercourse.

Now consider Saudi Arabia.

The country that has purchased more U.S. military equipment than any other—at $140 billion and counting—has been unpopular with the American public for the entire 21st century, and not only because it was home to most of the September 11 hijackers. The House of Saud's dictatorial monarchy routinely ranks near the bottom of global freedom indices, women only recently were granted the right to drive a car, and the regime infamously assassinated Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi Arabia has been a prime mover in the brutal, decade-long Yemeni civil war, a conflict that the United Nations estimates has led to nearly 400,000 deaths, most of them civilian.

Yet in the absence of any American sympathies at all, Riyadh has still been a key strategic partner with Washington for going on eight decades. Why? Oil production is certainly part of it, though Russia and Venezuela also have tons of the stuff. The truth is that the kingdom has been deft enough diplomatically, and flush enough with spendable petrodollars, to keep insinuating itself into whatever preoccupations the American empire has at the moment: the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, containing Iran, and doing the often messy work of behind-the-scenes negotiations on military logistics, CIA skulduggery, and peace deals.

It is in that latter category that the Saudis find themselves yet again the object of not-quite-requitable American desire, this time in the form of a tantalizing peace pact with Israel, one that could potentially dwarf in practical and symbolic significance the historic 2020 Abraham Accords between the Jewish state and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi asking price thus far? Just a military security guarantee, the likes of which America has only with Japan, South Korea, and the members of NATO.

Such are the realities of American leverage in the Middle East. Washington now includes among its major non-NATO allies Qatar (circa 2022, in exchange for help with U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Tunisia (2015, for its role in the Arab Spring), Morocco and Kuwait (2003, for assistance in the war on terror), Bahrain (2002, ditto), and more than a dozen other countries, including Israel and Egypt.

When states are both relatively poor and militarily insecure, as Israel was in the 1970s and Egypt remains to this day, the lure of access to the world's dominant military can persuade otherwise reluctant leaders to do things they and/or their populations would rather not. Like siting U.S. military bases, or taking the American side in a regional conflict—or recognizing Israel's right to exist.

Israel since its 1948 inception has been the single largest recipient of U.S. aid, at north of $300 billion in constant 2024 dollars. Clocking in at No. 2, with more than $150 billion, is Egypt. This American money bought the modern Middle East's most foundational peace treaty. That 1979 deal, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, not only formally ended the longtime antagonists' various wars; it marked the first time an Arab country formally accepted Israel's existence. For that move against the preponderance of his country's public opinion, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid two years later with his life.

Such are the inherent and ongoing tensions of bribing authoritarians to make unpopular deals, particularly in countries predisposed toward resenting Israelis and/or Americans. The basing of non-Muslim U.S. troops near Saudi Arabia's holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina was the original radicalizing complaint of Osama bin Laden. The Jordanian population, long encouraged to treat neighboring Israel as the enemy, was ill-prepared to accept King Hussein's 1994 signing of mutual recognition, nudged in part by President Bill Clinton's promise to forgive $700 million of the country's debt. A 2022 poll of the Hashemite kingdom by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies found opposition to diplomatic recognition at a staggering 94 percent.

That number would almost certainly be lower if the Jordanian monarchy didn't choose to stoke anti-Israeli sentiment in public while cooperating privately to such a degree that the country shot down several Iranian missiles before they could even cross into Israeli airspace. King Abdullah II called for three noisy days of national mourning last October over the deadly explosion outside of Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital even after Israel's involvement and the initial death toll had both been convincingly debunked. Queen Rania that same month told CNN that the world "silence" in the face of Israel's war was "deafening," and that "to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit." The kingdom tamps down criticism of the normalization deal (which it still publicly defends) and prevents protesters from ransacking the Israeli embassy but otherwise keeps the rhetoric ratcheted.

A poor country with rampant unemployment, Jordan is a top-10 recipient of U.S. aid, and it relies heavily on Israel for trade and resource cooperation. Caught literally between Iran and Israel, home to a large and restive Palestinian population, beset by months of anti-Israel protests, the monarchy is increasingly fragile and constantly triangulating. If the U.S. were to suddenly pull the rug out from underneath Jordanian aid, some 6 percent of the country's GDP would go poof.

It is easy to look upon such realities as an excuse to keep perpetuating the American foreign policy status quo. If leverage in the authoritarian Arab neighborhood has bought peace deals with Israel, the reopening of the Suez Canal, and the forging of an anti-Iran axis in the Persian Gulf, why threaten to unravel these projects by beating a hasty retreat?

That question implies a far-too-rosy picture of the status quo, and it ignores the extent to which American public opinion deviates from the conventional wisdom in Washington.

Imperial Autopilot

The American-led world order, with its emphases on international cooperation, tariff reduction, and mutual military treaties, arose out of the ashes of World War II as a bulwark against communism. That comprehensible project, while the source of semi-constant controversy in implementation, was broadly popular in the United States; it was articulated regularly by every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. With the end of the Cold War, and the failure to secure an explicit postwar settlement, came the end of domestic support for America's starring global role.

What happens when institutions wheeze on long after their rationales have collapsed? Elite corruption and populist revolt.

Corruption doesn't necessarily have to mean self-enrichment, though surely the people near the top of the American foreign policy pyramid rarely have to scrounge up their next meal. It's more about the temptations of using America's unmatched power. In the immortal 1993 words of the United States' then-ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, spoken to the more restraint-oriented Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Albright's interventionist point of view ended up winning the battle for Clinton's foreign policy, and then Powell became the chief salesman for President George W. Bush's disastrous war of choice in Iraq.

Afghanistan was America's longest and least popular war, yet imperial autopilot, along with the fallacy of sunken costs, meant that it took more than two decades until Biden finally (and messily) ended it. NATO, and Washington's preeminence within it, is still the dominant military paradigm on the decidedly non-American continent of Europe, even with the open skepticism about the alliance expressed serially by the former and possibly future president Donald Trump.

America has already retreated under both Trump and Biden from its legacy role in reducing global tariffs, embracing instead the kind of made-in-America mercantilism that generations of their predecessors had mostly resisted. Wherever there is some 75-year-old, Washington-forged institution and commitments thereof, there is active domestic politics railing against it.

Washington's leading role in the Middle East is somewhat younger, at around a half-century, but similarly archaic. We no longer need to counter the Soviet Union, no longer depend on foreign oil, and no longer cling to the messianic delusion that liberal democracy in the region can be spread at the point of a gun. If you could somehow wipe the slate clean and craft a new U.S. approach to the Middle East that would better align with public opinion, what would that look like?

Almost certainly, the vast majority of foreign aid to this and other regions would vanish overnight. Nos. 3 through 10 on the 2022 aid-recipient list—Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan—would be cut off. But Nos. 1 and 2 might well remain.

The Intolerability of October 6

The Republicans who unsuccessfully opposed the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were onto something, as have been such presidential candidates as Pat Buchanan, 1992 Clinton, and 2000 George W. Bush. Americans are generally weary of throwing billions abroad at problems that should be solved by someone else, particularly when there are unresolved problems galore at home.

But specifically, Americans favor helping with the defense of Ukraine (No. 1 on the 2022 aid recipient list), Israel (No. 2), and Taiwan. In the absence of a coherent and comprehensible strategy, one that reflects the more modest ambitions of voters, foreign policy remains subject to the temporal emotions and legacy attachments of the public. Jordan probably wouldn't win an up-or-down referendum on U.S. support; Israel almost certainly would. Both, however, could benefit from being cut off.

The Israeli case for independence is largely about latitude, but not only: Having to spend $3.8 billion a year rather than receive it means making some responsible choices about budget priorities. Authoritarian Arab governments, too, need to take, rather than continue to shirk, responsibility.

The horrors of October 7 revealed that the seemingly operable status quo of October 6 was in fact untenable. It was, and is, untenable for Israel to live next to neighbors, to the north and southwest, who regularly fire rockets into the country and sporadically dig tunnels to execute acts of terrorism. It's untenable for Gaza's residents to live under the dictatorial whims of a theocratic death cult that takes money from foreign governments not to build prosperity but to harass and murder Israelis. It's untenable for the region's autocrats to loudly pin the blame for their own heavy-handed misgovernance on American and Israeli scapegoats while quietly reaching out for assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Qatar enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally with the U.S. while also financing and sheltering the leadership of Hamas. That too is untenable, and the designation should be withdrawn. Residents of the Palestinian West Bank live in a harassed and conflict-ridden uncertainty and emasculation, with second-class property rights and lousy government services. Untenable. Iran flexes its muscle to turn parts of Israel's neighbors into vassal states rather than fully fledged independent entities. None of this is tenable.

Meanwhile, the U.S. floats above the whole region, handing out aid and military contracts like a grand seigneur, hoping on Mondays to build peace, on Tuesdays to launch airstrikes, and on Wednesday try to tamp down the resulting messes from spreading into a regional war. It does deals with some of the most hideous regimes on earth while the captive populations seethe.

It is axiomatic, yet catastrophically underappreciated in Washington: Those with the most power will inevitably behave corruptly, and those without responsibility will inevitably behave irresponsibly. An Israel less tethered may feel less constrained, sure, but it may also find itself more isolated on the world stage, and therefore a tad more cautious. Arab leaders without the American security blanket may find themselves having to speak blunt truths to their populations, including about the true sources of their comparative lack of prosperity and freedom. And a United States less compromised by getting its thumbs in every pie will potentially have more, not less, moral standing in the world.

So cut off Israel. And Egypt, and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well. Let them bear the responsibility of their own actions, and the costs of their own security. It's time to consciously manage America's imperial drawdown, rather than careen between fading Atlanticism and resurgent populism. What's the point of having this superb military? To defend America.

The post What If the U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Israel? appeared first on Reason.com.

Nikki Haley shows her true colors: The former presidential contender, United Nations ambassador, and South Carolina governor visited Israel this week. A photo was taken of her writing "finish them" on artillery shells that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will use in either Lebanon or Gaza, along with "America [heart emoji] Israel always." (She was visiting the north, so using the artillery shells against Hezbollah seems more likely.)

Finish them!

זה מה שכתבה היום חברתי, השגרירה לשעבר, ניקי היילי על פגז במהלך ביקור במוצב של תותחנים בגבול הצפון.

הגיע הזמן לשינוי משוואה - תושבי צור וצידון יתפנו, תושבי הצפון יחזרו.

צה"ל יכול לנצח! pic.twitter.com/qvLNCXPl7o

— Danny Danon ???????? דני דנון (@dannydanon) May 28, 2024

Interpreted charitably, Haley could have meant "them" as Hamas, the terrorists responsible for perpetrating the October 7 attack which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 hostages, or Hezbollah, a terrorist group and key Hamas ally based in Lebanon that's been assaulting the north. But given how much criticism Israel has received from international onlookers—including the International Criminal Court, whose prosecutor issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—for purported war crimes and conducting what has been described as a "genocide" in Gaza, "finish them" seems liable to misinterpretation. Her follow-up comments didn't exactly exonerate her.

"Israel, they're the good guys," Haley said in an interview with the newspaper Israel Hayom (more coverage here). "And you know what I want Israelis to know? You're doing the right thing. Don't let anybody make you feel wrong."

Haley then criticized the Biden administration's decision earlier this month to pause heavy bombs shipments to Israel over the military's Rafah invasion: "You can't hold back weapons from an ally. So if we want to be a friend to Israel, the best thing America can do is let Israel do its job and just support we shouldn't be preaching to Israel, we shouldn't be telling them how to win the war, we shouldn't tell them what they can or can't do."

"We should just be saying, what else do you need?" Haley continued.

Biden's side of the story: "Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those [2,000-pound] bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers," President Joe Biden said on CNN. "I've made it clear to Bibi [Netanyahu] and the war cabinet: They're not going to get our support, if in fact they go on these population centers."

It's easy to look at Haley as nothing more than a war hawk and, indeed, her comments suggest that she wants the U.S. to provide fully unconditional support for Israel—contra how the Biden administration has been handling the situation. The "finish them" comment was probably referring to terrorists, not civilians—making it a bit less horrifying than some of the loudest voices would have you believe—but Haley's inability to describe the situation with sufficient nuance is disturbing nonetheless, and more evidence of why her 2024 presidential campaign so sorely missed the mark.

Military assistance: The U.S. provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid each year. This year, legislators here have already passed a supplemental $26 billion in funds for Israeli defense and humanitarian aid in Gaza. At least 25,000 Gazans have been killed so far, though there are disputes over the death toll (controversy explained here), with some 10,000 believed to be buried in the rubble that covers the Strip. U.S. taxpayer dollars are going toward Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas, which includes a lot of horror and destruction, in the form of both civilian lives and an almost completely wiped-out Gaza Strip that will be hard for residents to inhabit if they're ever able to return. Roads, hospitals, schools, mosques, and all the buildings needed to support the functions of daily life have been obliterated over the last six months; it's not clear when the bombing will cease or what will be left when it does.

Hamas, of course, is partially responsible for foisting this amount of destruction on the people they tyrannize (some of whom voted them into power years ago): They hide among civilians, whether it's putting entrances to their tunnel network on sacrosanct hospital grounds or storing weapons next to MRI machines. Some of the destruction is also a function of the dense geography of the Gaza Strip. But some of it is also surely due to Israeli military failures and a poorly calibrated sense of what is just: A recent strike near a displaced persons camp which took out two valuable Hamas members also killed 45 innocents via a fire that the airstrike accidentally started. (The bombs responsible were GBU-39s, designed and manufactured in the U.S.)

When the act of finishing Hamas involves so much collateral damage—in the form of civilian life especially—it's fair to expect politicians not to treat the war in Gaza like a sporting match, or to decorate bombs with hearts.

Scenes from New York: Policing discourse following the death, at the hands of cops, of 26-year-old Brooklyn resident Andre Mayfield, who was wielding two knives and appeared to be having a mental episode.

Dispatch whomever you want. Cops would love to not be part of this. The problem here is 1) the armed man approached the cops. And 2) there are no workers who can or should approach a man holding a knife in each hand to "make clinical decisions and deliver care." https://t.co/KF3iOYIIyt

— Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) May 30, 2024

QUICK HITS

• Update on FlagGate: "My wife is fond of flying flags," Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a letter to legislators who asked that he recuse himself from cases related to the January 6 insurrection. "I am not. She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years." At issue is the fact that detractors claim that the flags were linked to stolen-election theories.
• Who is actually behind Elon Musk's business empire?
• A court in Hong Kong just convicted 14 pro-democracy activists using the Beijing-imposed national security law.
• Incredible immigration policy:

https://t.co/sOZGoy0klC pic.twitter.com/PDI2SyFVhs

— ????burga????burganonics????burgaology????burgamatics???? (@C_hoffmanni) May 28, 2024

The post War Hawk Autographs Bombs appeared first on Reason.com.

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It's a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a "tragic mistake."

British doctor James Smith called the fire "one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I've been working in Gaza." CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

"The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific," Warren stated on social media. "Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu's assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire."

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. "Ma'am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel," he wrote in a response to Warren's statement.

Warren's office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid "follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid."

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are "reasonable" accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave "credible and reliable" assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be "supplying the weapons" for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: "A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that's very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage."

Last October, the Israeli military used two American-made 2,000-pound bombs to assassinate a Hamas commander, killing dozens of civilians in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Austin is right that 2,000-pound bombs, which can kill everything within 600 feet, are more likely to harm bystanders than lighter alternatives. And as the name suggests, the Small Diameter Bomb has a smaller lethal radius. However, that doesn't make the bombs any less lethal for people inside the radius—or people caught up in secondary fires caused by the weapon.

Much of the Israeli army's "precision" targeting is carried out by artificial intelligence programs. The Israeli publication +972 Magazine has reported that one AI targeting system called "Lavender" is allowed to kill a large number of civilians per Hamas fighter, and is believed to have a 10 percent error rate when identifying fighters in the first place.

Another program revealed by +972, called "Where's Daddy," targets Hamas fighters who have left the battlefield and gone home to their families.

In other words, the type of weapon matters but how the weapon is used matters more. Despite Biden's earlier threats and assurances over human rights, the Biden administration is keen to defer to Israeli claims.

"As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to," White House spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. "It just happened. The Israelis are going to investigate it. We're going to be taking great interest in what they find in that investigation. And we'll see where it goes from there."

The post Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People appeared first on Reason.com.

Across the nation, college administrators are cracking down on pro-Palestenian speech. In Texas, police violently broke up peaceful protests, and one college even reportedly told students that they couldn't use the phrases "Israel," "Zionism," or chant in Arabic. At Brandeis University, police shut down a pro-Palestine protest because its president said it had "devolved into the invocation of hate speech."

While progressives have tended to support campus censorship efforts in recent years, an article in Vox by writer Eric Levitz argues that the left should embrace free speech—and that its push to censor speech in the name of inclusion and social justice was misguided. 

"Should students concerned with social justice rethink their previous skepticism of free speech norms, for the sake of better protecting radical dissent? I think the answer is yes." wrote Levitz. "There is reason to believe that progressives would be better equipped to resist the present crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy had social justice activists not previously popularized an expansive conception of harmful speech."

Levitz's article also argues that rejecting censorship could lead the left to find more allies when their ideas are on the chopping block.

"In a world where right-of-center intellectuals had more cause for believing that their defense of leftists' free expression would be reciprocated," Levitz wrote, "it seems plausible that opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act might be a bit more widespread and its prospects for clearing the Senate somewhat dimmer."

While Levitz's piece is refreshing, its support for free speech isn't about adopting a new appreciation for the principles of free expression, regardless of political viewpoint. It's about adopting the best policies to protect left-wing ideas.

Save several paragraphs reminding progressives that debate is necessary for finding the truth and that "the more insulated any ideological orthodoxy is from critique, the more vulnerable it will be to persistent errors," Levitz's argument is pragmatic in nature. He spends most of the piece—correctly—arguing that if progressives had been willing to take a stand against censorship of right-wing beliefs, the current norms allowing for the censorship of pro-Palestine activists would not have been set in place. 

However, if your reason to defend speech is purely practical and self-interested, it becomes much easier to indulge in exceptions to your free speech principles. Surely, allowing the censorship of the most offensive, unproductive viewpoints couldn't be used to justify the suppression of your own, much better, ideas, right?

Levitz even hints at such exceptions. "If adopting a permissive attitude toward campus speech entailed significant costs to progressive causes, then doing so might be unwise," he wrote, later adding, "Defending free speech and standing up for the disempowered may sometimes be competing objectives."

When your defense of free speech comes from a core, universal principle, calls for censorship are unthinkable. This is why, for example, it's so frustrating to see Levitz group the First Amendment nonprofit the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) with a long list of "conservatives" who have spoken out against censorship of pro-Palestinian activism. 

FIRE—and everyone else smeared as "conservative" for standing up against censorship—doesn't begrudgingly defend left-wing speech so that right-wing speech will stay protected—they're a nonpartisan organization that defends First Amendment rights because they believe fiercely in the importance of free speech.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that Levitz's piece still doesn't make the core realization that there can be true, principled, defenders of free speech—those who truly think a nation with more ideas and more voices, even offensive ones, is better than one with fewer. Instead, he sees speech protections as a kind of truce, a decision from both the left and right to leave each other alone so they can both best further their political goals.

We would have a better, more functional world if more people—left or right—were willing to passionately defend the free speech rights of those with whom they disagree. However, getting to that world requires that people let go of the idea that censorship is ever a good idea, not merely that it's impractical. 

The post <i>Vox</i> Wants Progressives To Support Free Speech for the Wrong Reasons appeared first on Reason.com.

Remember when Republicans were against using the tax cops to go after political opponents? Well, they seem to have changed their minds.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R–Ky.) has made no secret of his desire to use finance laws against left-leaning activists. A few months ago, he complained that the IRS was going too easy on progressive nonprofits. Now he's found another angle of attack: insinuating that these organizations are part of an anti-Israel conspiracy.

Comer and House Education Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R–N.C.) are "investigating the sources of funding and financing for groups who are organizing, leading, and participating in pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American protests" on college campuses, they announced in a Tuesday letter.

"This investigation relates both to malign influence on college campuses and to the national security implications of such influence on faculty and student organizations," Comer and Foxx wrote.

Foxx objected when the shoe was on the other foot. In 2013, it was revealed that the IRS had been placing extra scrutiny on nonprofits whose paperwork included terms such as tea party and patriot. Foxx wrote an op-ed criticizing the "outrageous" demands for information that IRS investigators had made.

"The problem at the IRS is with more than the search terms it used. Whether conservative or liberal, targeting Americans is wrong," she stated. "The deeper problem is that government's taxing arm ever came to consider itself the arbiter of what constitutes legitimate free speech in the first place."

Asked about Foxx's earlier statements, her spokesman Alex Ives wrote to Reason that "what you are positing amounts to false equivalencies on many levels." He stated that Foxx was seeking to "ensure groups do not have financial ties to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations," without citing specific examples.

"Do groups on campuses have a right to free speech? Of course," Ives said. "Do they have a right to have their ties to foreign financiers connected to terror organizations to go unscrutinized? Of course not."

The letter from Foxx and Comer demands that the Department of the Treasury provide all Suspicious Activity Reports, or bulletins on potential tax evasion and money laundering, for 20 different organizations. The list includes Students for Justice in Palestine and its sponsor, the WESPAC Foundation. It also names off-campus Muslim and Palestinian-American groups, Jewish peace movements, and many organizations that are not primarily focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"This is part of a broader effort to demonize parts of the tax-exempt sector that a part of the Republican Party views as a key target in the war on woke," says Lara Friedman, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, which has been tracking Congress' stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "If you make this about supposedly fighting antisemitism, you bring parts of the Democratic Party with you."

Many of the groups listed are big names in progressive philanthropy: George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Pritzker family's Libra Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Rockefeller organization gave several hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jewish Voice for Peace; another Jewish group for Palestinian rights called IfNotNow; the Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian-American rights group; and Palestine Legal, a legal aid service for pro-Palestinian advocates in America.

"The RBF has had no direct involvement in the campus protests nor have we earmarked funds for them," Rockefeller Brothers Fund spokeswoman Sarah Edkins said in a statement last week. "Some RBF grantees have provided training, messaging, and/or legal support to student protest leaders. The Fund does not direct the activities of any grantee organizations."

Edkins added that the fund "respects Israel's right to exist and supports the right to self-determination for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples."

The Open Society Foundations also gave several hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, according to Rolling Stone. The grant-making network told Politico that it "has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel."

It's not clear why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Libra Foundation wound up on the list. Last week, Politico named them as supporters of pro-Palestinian protests, because of their donations to the Tides Foundation, a clearinghouse for progressive groups that funds Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Adalah, and Palestine Legal. But the Gates and Libra donations were earmarked for other causes.

Jewish Voice for Peace says that the congressional letter is "inaccurate, dangerous and a desperate attempt by right-wing legislators to criminalize public protest. These legislators are falsely and libelously smearing tens of thousands of students as antisemitic, simply because they are protesting the use of their tuition dollars in the massacres of Palestinian families."

Two of the groups listed in the letter, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also offered statements to Reason. The Libra Foundation declined to comment, and the Gates Foundation pointed to its comments to Politico. None of the other groups responded to emails asking for comment.

"AMP looks forward to demonstrating in any jurisdiction that it operates wholly within the laws of the United States, compliant with all laws and regulations governing U.S. nonprofit entities," the organization's attorney Christina Jump says. "AMP operates completely within the United States, raises funds completely within the United States, and utilizes those donations completely within the United States to support its mission of educating American Muslims and the American public on the rich history and culture of Palestine."

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says that the letter "reads like a bad impersonation of Joseph McCarthy. Instead of advancing the goals of a foreign government by pursuing witch hunts against the American people, Rep. Foxx, Rep. Comer and other genocide-enablers in Congress should focus on washing the blood of over 30,000 slaughtered Palestinian civilians off their hands."

Republicans are not the only ones trying to bring the U.S. tax code into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In New York, some Democrats are trying to strip away nonprofit status from organizations that operate in Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. New York–based nonprofits have raised money to buy drones for settler militias and to maintain a military academy in a West Bank settlement.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing in November 2023 on the "nexus" between campus protests and "terror financing." Soon after, the House passed a bill allowing the secretary of the treasury to shut down nonprofits based on vague insinuations of terrorist support. Last week, 15 Republican senators called on the IRS to revoke the nonprofit status of any organization that supported Students for Justice in Palestine.

Friedman, the Foundation for Middle East Peace president, believes that the congressional letter is more likely to have a "chilling effect" on nonprofits than to turn up any real evidence of illegal activity.

"It's partly a fishing expedition," she says. "And by lodging an accusation, they hope to paint a picture in the mind of the public."

The post Congressional Republicans Launch 'Fishing Expedition' Against Progressive, Jewish, and Palestinian Nonprofits appeared first on Reason.com.

What should colleges do about pro-Palestinian encampments?

College students across America are camping out to demand their universities divest all investments with Israeli-linked companies that they claim profit from the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It's gone on for weeks, and even administrators at schools known as bastions of progressive activism are finally getting fed up. Harvard's president is threatening "involuntary leave" for protesters. Columbia announced on Monday that it canceled its main commencement ceremony for safety reasons. The University of Southern California has, too.

UCLA called in the cops to clear its encampment, and police have arrested more than 2,100 protesters across all U.S. campuses since April, according to the Associated Press.

Congress has continued to interrogate Ivy League presidents, and a bill to explicitly define antisemitism for civil rights law enforcement purposes just passed the House with overwhelming support last week.

Joining us today to talk about the protests, the backlash, and what it all means for free speech on campus and the wider world is Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and host of the free speech podcast So to Speak.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

1. Full Text of the Antisemitism Awareness Act
2. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism.
3. Columbia students define "divest"
4. Harvard President Garber Breaks Silence on Encampment, Threatens 'Involuntary Leave' for Protesters
5. Columbia cancels commencement amid campus protests
6. Map: Where College Protesters Have Been Arrested or Detained
7. Polling 1,200 college students on Encampments
8. What Americans think about recent pro-Palestinian campus protests | YouGov
9. Americans' Views of Both Israel, Palestinian Authority Down
10. Majority in US Say Israel's Reasons for Fighting Hamas Are Valid | Pew Research Center
11. Letter from judges saying they won't hire Columbia grads as clerks

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:33 Free Speech on Campus: A Conversation with Nico Perrino
• 02:13 The Historical Context of Campus Protests and Free Speech Debates
• 07:28 The Legal and Social Implications of Campus Encampments
• 31:38 The Role of Civil Disobedience in Campus Activism
• 38:31 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Campus Protests Through Polling Data
• 43:07 Congressional Involvement in Campus Free Speech Issues
• 50:48 The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2023: A New Legal Battleground
• 54:56 The Complexities of Free Speech and Political Expression on Campus
• 59:17 Navigating the Tensions of Privacy and Free Speech
• 01:03:42 The Role of Public Shaming and Cancel Culture in Free Speech Debates
• 01:20:03 Nico Wants You To Ask Yourself This Question About Censorship
• 01:23:58 Just Ask Us Questions: A Libertarian's Evolving Stance on Immigration

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Nico Perrino: When Does Protesting Become a Crime? appeared first on Reason.com.

No more! Earlier this week, some 3,500 bombs that were meant to be delivered to Israel did not actually make it there. President Joe Biden, long a major arms supplier to Israel, decided that the best way to make his opposition to the Rafah invasion known would be to temporarily stem the flow of weapons.

Biden also "said on Wednesday that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells that could be fired into the urban neighborhoods of Rafah," per The New York Times. Note that the Biden administration is not pausing all arms shipments, but rather trying to exert specific pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rethink the Rafah offensive.

"Israel…took control of the Gaza side of a key border crossing to Egypt on Tuesday, securing a strategic corridor as negotiators met in Cairo for talks on a truce and hostage releases," reported The Wall Street Journal. "The seizure of the crossing closed a critical gateway for humanitarian assistance for Palestinians, prompting the U.S. to renew calls to reopen the gate."

Bear in mind, also, that the Rafah invasion was not merely to attempt to starve the remaining Gazans in the region through blocking humanitarian aid; an estimated 5,000–8,000 Hamas fighters are believed to be hiding in that city in southern Gaza. The Israeli offensive, which has been smaller in scope than originally thought, aims to stamp them out. It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration exerting pressure in this way will affect Israeli military actions—or how the Rafah offensive is perceived on a national stage.

Many Republicans in Congress reacted unfavorably to this unilateral action by the Biden administration. "It wasn't the Israelis that started this conflict. And I'm just very concerned that we do not try to micromanage Israel's right to defend itself against the terrorist group backed by Iran," said Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) at an Appropriations subcommittee hearing yesterday.

Of course, the Biden administration is really just interested in using leverage. Once a humanitarian plan for getting refugees safely out of Rafah is communicated by Israel, the White House says the weapons shipments will likely resume.

Climate Guy Gavin: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who continues to very convincingly swear that he's not running for president, seems to be eyeing the climate-concerned demographic of voters.

All the way back in 2020, when the grid faced blackouts and the state was roiled by wildfires, Newsom pinned blame on climate change, and majorly misrepresented his prioritization of wildfire management strategies like controlled burns.

During a visit to China last year, Newsom made headlines over a glitzy new partnership between California and Shanghai, which Newsom's press office said are "teaming up to fight the climate crisis by cleaning up ports and reducing emissions from the transportation sector." (Whether this has any real effect on emissions coming out of Shanghai seems beside the point.) During an audience with Pope Francis scheduled for next week, Newsom is expected to emphasize how "global temperatures [are] hurtling towards alarming new heights." This is his talk track, possibly responding to the fact that a far greater percentage of California's likely voters tell pollsters that "stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost" compared with a decade ago.

"A key part of his strategy has been to ascribe high gas prices and utility bills to corporate greed and gouging while beating back proposals that he believes go too far like Proposition 30, which would have raised taxes on the rich in 2022 to funnel money to electric vehicles," reported Politico. Phrased differently: Newsom does not want to alienate his French Laundry dining companions, and other rich donors who may be considering fleeing the high-tax state, but is very much trying to position himself as someone who takes climate change seriously.

Something to watch in the event that Newsom gets elevated out of his Biden-surrogate position and into the presidential campaign spotlight at any point, whether by the cruel tricks of nature or simple patience.

Scenes from New York: 

Over the weekend, a cruise ship appears to have accidentally killed and dragged a 44-foot endangered Sei whale through the East River. Upon being discovered, the whale was towed to New Jersey for a necropsy.

More whales have been living in the waters surrounding New York City for the last few years—I saw whales from Queens' Rockaway Beach two days ago, which is not totally uncommon here—and meeting all kinds of disturbing fates as a result.

"The increase in beached whales could be an indication that the whale population as a whole is growing. Or, less optimistically, rising water temperatures could be changing the hunting and migration patterns of whales, pushing them into areas where they're more likely to become injured by human activity," reported Curbed last year.

QUICK HITS

• "Saudi authorities have permitted the use of lethal force to clear land for a futuristic desert city being built by dozens of Western companies," an ex–intelligence officer told the BBC.
• Do you feel the Burgumentum?
• It looks like Congress might take another stab at a border deal, sure to please no one.
• Sweetgreen is introducing beef to its menu. Some people are worried it won't hit its climate goals as a result.
• Lots of people are criticizing Ann Coulter's blatant bigotry toward Vivek Ramaswamy during a recent podcast appearance in which Coulter went on Ramaswamy's show. What they're missing, though, is that Coulter's entire argument is that "the core around which the nation's values are formed is the WASP" (wrong!) and that she thinks we need more selective criteria as to which immigrants we let in—ignoring the contradiction present where Ramaswamy himself fits the criteria she describes, yet is still discriminated against by Coulter.

.@AnnCoulter told me flat-out to my face that she couldn't vote for me "because you're an Indian," even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back https://t.co/neVjKSs6e9

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) May 8, 2024

• Pro-Palestine protesters at Princeton don't seem to grasp that their victimhood mentality is getting in the way of their message being taken seriously:

NEW: Pro-Palestine protester at Princeton says she is "literally shaking" because she is starving and "immunocompromised."

The woman accused the school of purposely "physically weakening" her and her peers.

"This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are… pic.twitter.com/54TL9lIKOV

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 8, 2024

The post Biden, the Arms Supplier appeared first on Reason.com.

Raucous pro-Palestine protests have taken over college campuses across the country for the past several days. At UCLA, protesters declared areas of campus off-limits to pro-Israel students and blocked them from entering certain spaces, even just to get to class. At night, masked counter-protesters attacked the pro-Palestine encampment, tearing down barricades and shooting fireworks at the protesters.

At the University of Texas at Austin, police brutally dispersed student protesters. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was among those arrested at Washington University in St. Louis. Administrators at Brown University persuaded protesters to disband their encampment peacefully after agreeing to discuss their demands for financial divestiture from companies that do business with the Israeli military.

Events at Columbia University came to a head after the authorities finally tired of the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Protesters had smashed the windows of the administrative building, entered it, taken over, held a janitor hostage, and demanded humanitarian aid—not for Gaza, but for themselves. (I.e., they wanted snacks.)

Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:

"It seems like you're saying, 'we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food'." pic.twitter.com/vNczSAM4T1

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 30, 2024

It is easy to make fun of these protesters, many of whom seem to know very little about why they are even protesting. And some of their antics deserve not just mockery, but condemnation: Statements in support of terrorist violence and exhortations for "Zionists" to be killed "or worse" are contemptible, as are tactics that involve preventing other students from moving about campus and pursuing their education.

But critics of the campus left should not lose sight of the much greater threat, which is that campus authority figures, members of law enforcement, and even national legislators will act in a manner that gravely threatens the free speech rights of everyone. Indeed, in response to the protests, identity-obsessed busybodies are already working overtime to criminalize protests on the grounds that offensive speech is a threat to the safety of Jewish students.

Safe Space Reprise

These are not new arguments; for years, university bureaucrats have subtly chipped away at their institutions' stated protections for free speech by invoking dubious safety concerns. You might remember the concept of the safe space: A very real notion, frequently invoked by progressive student activists, that being forced to confront speech with which they disagree is a form of physical violence.

In my first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, I traveled to college campuses and interviewed activists. What I learned was that for a variety of reasons—their upbringing, their ideology, their social circles—they did not want free and unfettered debate. They thought that outside speakers, professors, and even other students should be silenced for expressing nonprogressive views. In fact, they viewed the university administration's role as that of a parent, shielding them from painful speech. Administrators were all too happy to comply, and school after school took steps to shield their most unreasonable students from emotional vulnerability. Not all of these efforts are explicitly contrary to free speech principles, even though they were universally silly: In 2016, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania created a safe space so that students spooked by former President Donald Trump's rise to the presidency could take time to breathe, play with coloring books, and pet some puppies. Duke University's 2016-era safe space—a production of the campus's diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy—included the presence of a social worker.

More perniciously, hundreds of campuses created bias incident reporting systems, whereby students were instructed to call the campus authorities—in some cases, the literal cops—if they overheard anyone say something that could offend another person on the basis of a protected class, such as race, gender, sexuality, or ability status. At Colby College, someone filed a bias incident report when they overheard the phrase "on the other hand," with no explanation given, though I gather the ever-vigilant person worried that a one-handed person might take offense.

These developments on campuses produced widespread mockery from many Democrats as well as Republicans. Aside from a minority of extremely difficult young people, and the administrators who coddle them, most people do not think the university's job is to protect students from having their feelings hurt.

Enter Congress

Unfortunately, many elected officials are hypocrites, and during a perceived crisis—like the one unfolding on college campuses right now—they are all too eager to pass bad laws. Case in point: On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act by a margin of 320–91. This bill empowers the Education Department to take action against educational institutions that do not sufficiently combat antisemitic speech on campus. It also defines antisemitism incredibly broadly; Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who voted against the bill, pointed out on X that political statements about Israel would be effectively criminalized if the bill became law.

Do you agree with all of these examples of antisemitism? Should people in America be prosecuted for saying these things in all contexts? I think not. This is a poorly conceived unconstitutional bill and I will vote no. pic.twitter.com/L3AI5MCFGw

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 1, 2024

Some of the statements deemed impermissible antisemitism include "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" with respect to a Jewish state and "applying a double standard" to the state of Israel. It should go without saying, but the First Amendment robustly protects the right to disagree with the political project of Israel. This bill is obviously unconstitutional, and moreover, a clear violation of the idea that college students don't need protection from uncomfortable speech. Universities must protect their campuses from violence and harassment, whether motivated by antisemitism, some other political animus, or any other cause. It's the action that should count, not the content of the belief.

The collective national media are obsessed with campus protests, and understandably so—the spectacle of disproportionately elite, privileged young people resorting to histrionics is frequently amusing to general audiences. People should feel free to mock them, but let's not forget that Congress is using them as a pretext to grant vast new powers to federal bureaucrats, with the explicit goal of enshrining into law a new right not to be offended: one giant safe space.

This Week on Free Media

Reason's Emma Camp and I mocked Drew Barrymore's cringeworthy interview with Vice President Kamala "Momala" Harris, surveyed media coverage of the campus protests, criticized the Biden campaign's youth outreach strategy, and argued about RFK Jr.'s appeal.

Worth Watching

Famed satire website The Onion was recently acquired by Ben Collins, a former disinformation beat reporter for NBC News. (Regular readers will know Collins and I have clashed before.)

That said, I have to give him props for his plan to revive The Onion's TV department. I am particularly eager to the see return of Today Now, the site's mock morning show. The entire archive is available here; the humor has only become more relevant for me over time, now that I, too, host a morning show. It's hard to pick a favorite, but here's one.

The post The Antisemitism Awareness Act Will Make It Illegal To Criticize Israel on Campus appeared first on Reason.com.

Which side were you on in the allergy wars? Over at UCLA, the pro-Palestine protesters have reached peak Angeleno zoomer by figuring out how to be victimized by bananas.

According to Twitter user Linda Mamoun (with video footage to back it up): "There was a protestor in the liberated zone…with a potentially fatal banana allergy. Counterprotestors invaded the encampment and saw all the no bananas warnings. The next day they came back waving bananas like settlers waving machine guns & smeared bananas everywhere."

Yes, just like settlers!

Meanwhile, over on the East Coast, the Columbia protesters have decided that actually they are the ones who need "humanitarian aid."

"They're obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here," said one spokesperson-protester. "Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean, it's crazy to say it because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for."

The protester appears to be referring to the fact that the university has limited meal-hall access and that the protesters were occupying and barricading Hamilton Hall, wanting assurances that the college would not stop deliveries of food from entering.

Crackdown: Now, it's effectively a non-issue: Dozens of protesters were arrested last night as New York Police Department officers entered the building at around 9:30 p.m., called in by President Minouche Shafik. "We regret that protesters have chosen to escalate the situation through their actions," wrote Shafik in a statement. "After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized and blockaded, we were left with no choice."

Shafik also noted, interestingly, that "the group that broke into and occupied the building is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university."

Meanwhile, police cracked down on other protests across the country—like one at Washington University in St. Louis—sometimes using what looks like excessive force. In St. Louis, reports emerged of police beating up a professor from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, named Steve Tamari; Tamari reportedly suffered injuries including a broken hand and ribs.

It's very difficult to sort out all the different threads of this loose campus movement, along with the very different responses from university administrators and local law enforcement. For anyone inclined to forget: speech should be given a wide berth (even that which is ugly and offensive). Campus speech restrictions—to the extent that they ought to be permitted at all—should be content-neutral, a quite legitimate case can be made that tent cities are not permitted by university policies, but nobody should cheer agents of the state exerting more force than is absolutely necessary to break it all up.

Updates from the actual war zone: Hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas keep breaking down.

The U.S. is trying to hastily broker yet another deal as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made sounds indicating that the military will invade Rafah, an area in southern Gaza where some 1 million Palestinians—plus an unknown quantity of Hamas terrorists, in the thousands—are sheltering.

But mediators—Americans, Egyptians, and Qataris—"worry that Hamas appears willing to sacrifice even more Palestinian civilians," according to The New York Times. "[Hamas] officials believe that the deaths in Gaza erode support for Israel around the world." As a result, they're not willing to do very much to prevent an invasion of Rafah and are also resistant to more hostage-for-prisoners deals, including one offered by Israel that would have been imbalanced in Hamas' favor.

Hamas has rejected previous offers, claiming that they cannot meet Israel's demand for 40 living hostages who are female, sick, or elderly, leading many to speculate that Hamas has killed more of the hostages than previously thought. "Throughout the months of negotiations since the last ceasefire Israel has repeatedly asked for a list of the hostages and their conditions," reports CNN. "Hamas has argued that it needs a break in the fighting to be able to track and gather down the hostages, the same argument it made in November before a week-long pause that broke down after Hamas failed to deliver more hostages."

Of the roughly 250 hostages taken on October 7, some 129 are still being held by Hamas, with 33 of those believed to be dead.

One of the Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, appears to be at least responsible in part for the sinking of deals. He has reportedly been negotiating while surrounded by 15 hostages, whom he uses as human shields to prevent Israel from taking him out. (I wonder if he's banana-vulnerable; have we tried that yet?)

Demands for a ceasefire from pro-Palestine activists in the U.S. are fine and good, but they look hollow when it's Hamas that's refusing to agree to a ceasefire or a plan to return the hostages.

Scenes from New York: A meta take that's pretty much spot-on (though that one guy's crop top is beautiful, at least in his own imagination).

More than anything, these people are boring, and artless, and ignorant. They are a total repudiation of everything beautiful about humanity, which I think is what's most irritating of all. The specific cause - which changes seemingly by the month - is in actuality irrelevant https://t.co/EkJtaRW739

— pjeffa (????,????) (@jeff82874662) May 1, 2024

QUICK HITS

• "Since 2019, prices for many types of consumer purchases in the U.S. have shot up," reports The Atlantic's Amanda Mull. "On average, goods cost nearly 20 percent more than they did before the pandemic."
• A good point, raised by Just Asking Questions guest Peter Moskos:

Crime. People, it's about crime. There's tons of cheap housing in American cities. Virtually free to buy. But you won't live here because of crime. Not race. Crime. (Well crime and schools.) Reduce crime in cities and double affordable housing. Quadruple in some. https://t.co/IWJPdrttqE pic.twitter.com/A2zmxNF2nl

— Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) May 1, 2024

• Elon Musk went to China to try to convince regulators to approve his self-driving cars.
• "Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced on Tuesday to four months in prison, a much lighter penalty than other crypto executives have faced since the industry imploded in 2022," reports The New York Times.
• Good observation:

Europe is falling behind the USA in effectively every area of technology

SpaceX completely killed the EU launch ecosystem etc

The one area EU is keeping up?

Biotech…

Because even though they try to regulate innovation to death… at least in biotech the US does the same ????

— delian (@zebulgar) April 30, 2024

The post Weaponized Bananas appeared first on Reason.com.

This column was written before police entered Columbia University's Hamilton Hall

One challenge of free speech advocacy is holding the line even when the speech in question is vile. Then you must make distinctions between acceptable forms of expression and those that violate the rights of others. That's why it's important to have clear, firm principles applied equally to all points of view. In the absence of clarity, you find yourself making things up as you go along—like too many institutions of higher learning at a moment of campus unrest.

Muddled Boundaries for Expression

"Early this morning, a group of protestors occupied Hamilton Hall on the Morningside campus," Columbia University advises. "In light of the protest activity on campus, members of the University community who can avoid coming to the Morningside campus today (Tuesday, April 30) should do so."

The school subsequently locked down the campus. That was two weeks after over 100 protesters were arrested at an encampment on campus grounds and days after administrators then muddled boundaries by vowing not to summon police again to handle demonstrations against Israel's response to the October 7 attack by Hamas. The protests frequently feature antisemitic language, sometimes turn violent, and passed the point of violating Columbia's rules and control over its own property weeks ago.

Columbia has done a poor job of defining what is and isn't acceptable. Without firm guidelines, the protests have lingered and spread to other institutions. Some are dealing with the protests better than others—particularly those that respect speech rights but also make clear where the line is drawn.

Free Speech With Respect for Others

"Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, college administrators are confronting a flurry of student activity on campus that includes peaceful protest and lawful self-expression, punctuated at times by bursts of severe disruption and even isolated acts of violence," notes the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which consistently calls for respect for expression and regard for the equal liberty of others. "Separating First Amendment-protected speech from illegal conduct in these situations can present challenges, but it's not an impossible task."

The key is setting expectations ahead of time. That's true at public universities bound by the First Amendment and at private schools educating students to function in a society where people disagree.

"Whenever you have protests, universities will define the time, manner and way in which it's done," Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, told NPR last week. "So for example, you're not allowed to disrupt classes, and you're not – you know, injuring a security guard and forcing your way into a closed building is not an expression of free speech."

When Vanderbilt students did exactly that in March, police ejected them within a day. Three were expelled and about two dozen others received lesser discipline. They were punished not for their message—others criticized Israel without consequence—but for occupying property and attacking a guard. There's a distinction between the two that must be maintained if institutions are to simultaneously preserve speech rights while forestalling chaos.

"To provide clarity—and to ensure freedom of expression—universities must adopt free speech principles and enforce them consistently," emphasizes FIRE. "Harmful, hateful, and offensive speech" is protected by the First Amendment, the organization points out. That includes expression directed at specific groups, like the antisemitic slogans sometimes encountered at recent protests.

That said, FIRE adds that "a campus where unprotected conduct and expression—such as violence, true threats and intimidation, incitement, and discriminatory harassment—go unaddressed is a campus where faculty and students will be afraid to speak."

A Difficult Balancing Act

Yes, that is a balancing act. It's one that leaves room for criticism of both Columbia's paralysis over its campus encampment as well as the crackdown by public colleges in Texas on demonstrations that may be offensive but are peaceful and conducted within constitutional boundaries.

In March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed state institutions "to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution." That impermissibly targets speech protected by the First Amendment.

A better take is found in the Chicago Principles developed in 2014 at the University of Chicago and adopted elsewhere with varying degrees of consistency. The principles embrace freedom of expression and state that "it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive," but also that "the University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University."

In response to recent protests at the University of Chicago, within hours administrators reaffirmed the school's commitment to free expression. They also reminded participants that the encampment "clearly violates policies" and reserved the right to take "disciplinary action" over disruptions of campus life.

In FIRE's free speech rankings of 248 universities, the University of Chicago ranks "above average" at 13, while Columbia is "below average" at 214.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

Columbia's low score represents not wholesale suppression of all expression, but years of selective tolerance of some points of view and crackdowns on others. That's been a feature of life at many Ivy League and other elite institutions, where those with the "right" ideas have grown accustomed to doing what they please while muzzling opponents. That likely contributed to the current unfortunate moment of confusion over where boundaries lie, if anywhere.

For those concerned over the need to tolerate vile speech, even within limits, it is worth knowing that trumpeting offensiveness to the world may carry its own penalty.

"33% of those making hiring decisions said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates today than five years ago," Forbes's Emma Whitford reports of a survey of employers intended to measure the impact of campus chaos. "Only 7% said they were more likely to hire them."

We all have a right to voice our views—peacefully. But we can't make people like them.

The post For Peaceful Campus Protests, Colleges Need Free Speech Principles appeared first on Reason.com.

In England, a judge has ruled that London's Metropolitan Police cannot bar Niyak Ghorbani from attending pro-Palestinian protests. Ghorbani, an Iranian dissident, has become famous for attending such protests while carrying a sign that reads "Hamas is terrorist." He has been arrested by Met police three times at those protests. At his last arrest, he did not have the sign, but he was arrested for refusing to stand where a police officer told him. After that arrest, the police gave him a piece of paper saying that one of his bail conditions was "not to attend any protest relating to Israel or Palestine in the City of Westminster." The judge said that condition was not "necessary or proportionate."

The post Brickbat: Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign appeared first on Reason.com.

Tinder has pretty loose community guidelines, arbitrarily enforced it seems. I have a friend whose picture was removed for "sensitive content". It featured them sitting on the toilet, fully clothed. Just a little visual joke but deemed a bit much by the powers that be. — Read the rest

The post IDF soldiers using selfies from Gaza on Tinder appeared first on Boing Boing.

President Joe Biden announced Friday that the U.S. military will work with Jordan to begin airdropping aid to starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Ever since it was proposed, this idea has attracted criticisms from experienced humanitarian workers, who say the airdrops are an expensive, wasteful gimmick to avoid addressing the political problems causing the starvation.

The charity Oxfam America, for example, issued a statement Thursday arguing that airdrops "would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza." Instead, it said, Biden should "cut the flow" of American weapons to Israel.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former disaster relief official in the Obama and Biden administrations, outlined the problems with airdrops in a PBS interview a day before Biden's announcement.

"We only used them when we had absolutely no other option, because they're the worst way to get aid in. They cost a lot of money, they're difficult to mount logistically, and they get very little volume," Konyndyk said. "We're only resorting to airdrops because of the blockages by the Israeli government."

Airdropping food costs about $16,000 per ton, as opposed to $180 per ton on average to move food aid by truck, according to a U.S. Air Force study from 2016.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government has opened a land crossing into the Gaza Strip—but Israeli nationalist protesters have physically blocked the crossing several times. Meanwhile, goods entering Gaza from Egypt must still go through the arduous Israeli border inspection process.

Sen. Chris van Hollen (D–Md.), who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing in January, told The New Yorker that some shipments were being held at the border for 20 days, and that he saw entire shipments turned back because they contained just one banned item, such as a tent with a metal pole.

The U.S. government itself has admitted that the starvation is a political problem, although it blames Hamas rather than Israel.

"It is not a question of aid going in," U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller told reporters on Thursday. "There is a distribution problem inside Gaza right now because there are police officers—some of whom are members of Hamas—who have been providing the security for that distribution inside Gaza. And what Israel says is that they have a legitimate right to go after Hamas. We would obviously prefer to see members of a security force inside Gaza who are not Hamas members."

Inside the Gaza Strip, distribution has been chaotic. Riots have broken out around aid convoys, and Hamas-affiliated police shot a teenager in a December incident. Israeli forces have also bombed the police officers guarding aid convoys. U.S. official David Satterfield said last month that the attacks on police in Gaza have made it "virtually impossible" to protect aid from "criminal gangs."

The deadliest aid-related incident of the war, known as "flour massacre," took place Wednesday, when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians seeking aid. According to the Palestinian health ministry, 112 people were killed. The Israeli military claims that its troops opened fire when Palestinians approached them in an unsafe way, that their gunfire caused only 10 casualties, and that most of the deaths were produced by a stampede.

That day, the war's Palestinian death toll reportedly crossed 30,000 deaths. Half a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a quarter of the population, are facing imminent starvation, according to U.N. officials.

In addition to announcing the airdrops, Biden said that he was seeking an "immediate" six-week ceasefire and a "surge" of aid on the ground. He has so far resisted calling for a permanent end to the war. When the war resumes, the aid that cost Americans so much to fly in may soon be bombed by American weapons.

The post Airdropping Aid to Gaza Is an Expensive Gimmick appeared first on Reason.com.

Reporter and podcaster Eli Lake and author Jeremy Hammond debated the resolution, "The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist."

Taking the affirmative is Lake, the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is currently a reporter at The Free Press and host of The Re-Education podcast. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast, and Bloggingheads.tv.

Hammond, an independent journalist and author, takes the negative. He is the author of several books, including Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

• Video and Audio Editing: John Osterhoudt

The post What's the Root Cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? appeared first on Reason.com.

Earlier this week, protestors at the University of California, Berkeley, violently shut down an event organized by a Jewish student group, which featured Israeli attorney Ran Bar-Yoshafat. Protestors organized by the student group Bears for Palestine prevented students from entering the building where the talk was supposed to take place, chanted "Long live the intifada," and broke glass doors.

Several students who attempted to attend the event claim they were physically assaulted by the protestors. One attendee claims she was grabbed by the neck and another says he was spit on.

"It was an extremely frightening experience," Berkeley student Veda Keyvanfar told Fox News on Wednesday. "The door to the venue was ripped out of my hand by a mob of protesters and my hand was injured in the process…we are allowed as students to host any type of speaker, and to attend any event we want to, we are not in the wrong at all."

The disruption wasn't simply a protest that got out of hand—it was a pre-planned attempt to prevent the event from going forward. An Instagram post from Bears for Palestine about the event said "We are 'combatting the lies' by SHUTTING IT DOWN," adding that Bar-Yoshafat "is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on."

The event was canceled after university officials determined that they couldn't guarantee student safety "given the size of the crowd and the threat of violence," according to a university statement. Students attending the event had to be escorted out the back of the building. According to the Associated Press, the local police department received multiple calls over the event, and a university spokesperson confirmed that the school was opening a criminal investigation into students' behavior.

So far, the Berkeley administration has taken a strong stance against the students who disrupted Monday's event. 

"We deeply respect the right to protest as intrinsic to the values of a democracy and an institution of higher education," reads a Tuesday statement from Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin. "Yet, we cannot ignore protest activity that interferes with the rights of others to hear and/or express perspectives of their choosing. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to violate the First Amendment rights of a speaker, no matter how much we might disagree with their views."

Videos of the protestors have received significant social media attention, leading to calls to expel or discipline students who engaged in the disruption.

"Everyone has a right to due process. But violent rioters have no place at any institution devoted to the fearless pursuit of truth. Certainly not at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement," Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) President Greg Lukianoff and FIRE senior writer Angel Eduardo wrote in a recent column in The Free Press."Violence is not extreme speech, but the antithesis of speech—and the antithesis of what higher education is supposed to be all about."

Lukianoff and Eduardo are right—if you care about securing university students' free speech rights, punishing disruptive and violent protestors is absolutely necessary. While students have the right to peacefully protest an event, preventing individuals from hearing a speaker, damaging a building, and physically assaulting attendees obviously crosses a line into unprotected conduct. 

The only way to prevent speaker disruptions is for administrators to take a clear stand against them, and punish those responsible. When universities crack down on disruptive or violent protest tactics, they set a precedent, and send a clear message to student activists who are planning on protesting an event: that disruptive, speech-quashing conduct won't be tolerated.

The post Berkeley Students Violently Shut Down Event Featuring Israeli Attorney appeared first on Reason.com.

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.

Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.

They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.

This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?

Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage. 

So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes. 

But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.

Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?

Amash: Well, I resigned from it.

Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?

Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.

Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.

Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?

Amash: The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant. 

When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world. 

I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so/" Well, tell me why. 

Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?

Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.

Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.

Amash: I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.

Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.

Amash: Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.

Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?

Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues. 

I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty. 

But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.

Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?

Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.

It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.

Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.

All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that. 

That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?

Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way. 

I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together. 

Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him. 

Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?

Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance. 

Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.

Amash: That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement. 

Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?

Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.

Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.

Amash: Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot. 

Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?

Amash: I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative. 

Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?

Amash: One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky. 

Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach. 

For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least. 

Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?

Amash: I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that. 

For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.

I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair." 

Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.

Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?

Amash: The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions. 

When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.

Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?

Amash: For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok. 

You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.

Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.

Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?

Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate. 

If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Motion Graphics: Isaac Reese
• Cameras: Students For Liberty

The post Justin Amash: 'I'd Impeach Every President' appeared first on Reason.com.

U.S. works to negotiate ceasefire: The United States, via a U.N. Security Council resolution, is urging a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas "as soon as practicable"—using ceasefire language for the first time—as well as rebuking Israel for plans to possibly invade Rafah.

"Until now, the United States alone has publicly and consistently rejected demands for an outright cease-fire in U.N. resolutions on the war in Gaza, siding with Israel in its war against Hamas," reports The New York Times.

The changed language "reflect[s] President [Joe] Biden's shift toward criticism of Israel's prosecution of the war and of its planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah," per the Times.

About half of Gaza's civilians are sheltering in Rafah, and an offensive there "would have serious implications for regional peace and security," per the language of the draft resolution.

Julian Assange returns to court: The WikiLeaks founder who has been held in London's Belmarsh prison since 2019, and whose lawyers have been fighting possible extradition to the U.S., will have his case return to court this week.

The two-day hearing will determine whether Assange has reached the end of his ability to appeal his case in the U.K. and whether he will be extradited to the U.S., where he faces a possible 175 years in prison if convicted of espionage charges.

Back in 2010 and 2011, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who was at the time an Army intelligence analyst serving in Iraq. The documents brought information to light about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan for which the U.S. military had been responsible.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Assange with 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act—a case with huge implications for press freedom, if Assange does in fact stand trial and receive a conviction.

For more on Assange's case, check out this conversation Zach Weissmueller and I had with Julian's wife, Stella:

Scenes from New York: The Roman Catholic Diocese of New York was duped into allowing a funeral mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral for a vocally atheist transgender activist.

"The cathedral only knew that family and friends were requesting a funeral Mass for a Catholic and had no idea our welcome and prayer would be degraded in such a sacrilegious and deceptive way," wrote Fr. Enrique Salvo—who is one of my priests (he splits his time between St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, where I am a parishioner)—in a statement.

"The pews were packed with mourners, many of them transgender, who wore daring high-fashion outfits and cheered as eulogists led them in praying for transgender rights and access to gender-affirming health care," reported The New York Times. A video circulated of mourners approvingly calling the deceased "mother of all whores" inside the cathedral.

"Several mainstream media outlets had framed the event as a breakthrough occasion and a sign of the Catholic Church shifting its teaching—or at least its tone—on sexuality and human anthropology," reported Catholic News Agency. But many Catholics, contra mainstream reporting, feel as though the funeral made a mockery of our faith.

Both St. Patrick's in Midtown and Old St. Patrick's in Nolita are frequent targets for activist stunts due to the Catholic Church's positions on trans issues and abortion.

QUICK HITS

• "As of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn't run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats," writes Nate Silver. "Since then, Biden's situation has become considerably worse…to borrow the poker term, Biden no longer has as many 'outs'—meaning, contingencies that could improve his situation."
• Germany will decriminalize recreational weed this week, allowing adults to grow up to three plants and possess up to 25 grams of cannabis.
• "Flying got safer last year almost everywhere except Russia," reports Bloomberg. Someone tell Tucker Carlson, who is possibly still wandering around a Russian grocery store, eyes wide with delight.
• "What is the 'migrant crisis' in New York and Chicago?" asks Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic. "It includes visible signs of disorder like migrants sleeping outside as hotel rooms fill up, anger among native-born Americans that limited resources are being spent on migrants, and an expensive bureaucratic scramble to arrange health screenings, translation services, housing programs, legal services, school placements, school buses, and other needs for newcomers." But some of the problem, Demsas says, stems from the red-state governors busing migrants to these big cities in particular: "When immigrants make their way to a city in an organic fashion, they usually are drawn to a place where they have family ties, job leads, or other connections and resources available. When they're resettled through an official government program, as the displaced Ukrainians were, the federal government coordinates with local governments to ensure a smooth transition."
• A look inside the deep tech scene in El Segundo:

Along with YCs call for more deep tech applications, this is just the beginning of a broader transition of venture capital towards businesses with defensible moats in atoms-first industries, where AI and ML are in the stack but not the main show. pic.twitter.com/BnGQxfIJnz

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) February 19, 2024

• A look at all Donald Trump's incredible props over the years.
• lol:

Obama's daughter trying to sneak past Nepo baby discourse by not using her last name. Bro you are Obama's Duaghter pic.twitter.com/Z8PtkAYsSh

— McRib (@McR1B69) February 19, 2024

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