Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in America, and the majority of it comes from cars and small trucks. That’s a major reason why President Barack Obama, in 2012, introduced a rule requiring automobile manufacturers to make their vehicles more fuel efficient—from 37 miles per gallon to more than 51 miles by the year 2025. As a side benefit, drivers would save money on gas and America’s oil reserves would last longer, reducing the incentive for energy companies to extract more of it.

But now President Donald Trump wants to “Make Cars Great Again”—by letting them remain as dirty as they are now. In an op-ed with that title in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new chief, Andrew Wheeler, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced a proposal to end those Obama-era requirements. Freezing fuel-efficiency standards, Chao and Wheeler wrote, will benefit consumers by giving them “greater access to safer, more affordable vehicles.”

This claim is based on specious evidence, experts say. In truth, the administration has concocted a tortured, flimsy argument—that cleaner cars will cost thousands more, and kill thousands more people—to scare Americans into believing that the government should scrap its most consequential policy for reducing emissions.

The administration’s 978-page proposal is called the SAFE Vehicles Rule—SAFE being an acronym for “Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient”—and it argues that cleaner vehicles are more dangerous than dirtier ones. “Today’s proposed rule is anticipated to prevent more than 12,700 on-road fatalities and significantly more injuries as compared to the standards set forth in the 2012 rule,” it states. It’s not entirely clear where that statistic comes from, but as Brad Plumer explained in The New York Times, it’s based on three arguments:

First, people who buy fuel-efficient vehicles will end up driving more, increasing the odds that they will get into a crash. Second, the fuel-efficient vehicles will themselves be more expensive, slowing the rate at which people buy newer vehicles with advanced safety features. Third, automakers will have to make their cars lighter in response to rising standards, slightly hurting safety.

Dirty cars, in other words, are heavier—and when heavy cars get into accidents, the people inside them are less likely to die. Thus, the administration argues, “It is now recognized that as the stringency of [fuel efficiency] standards increases, so does the likelihood that higher stringency will increase on-road fatalities. As it turns out, there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

But this argument has been “largely debunked,” David Greene, a civil and environmental engineering professor professor at the University of Tennessee professor, told E&E News. “The problem with that argument is that it didn’t take into account that all of the light-duty vehicles would be made lighter,” he said. “That leads to a simple physics equation—if all cars are lighter, there’s less kinetic energy involved in any crash. Therefore, the force between two vehicles is reduced when they collide.”

It’s also unclear whether increased fuel efficiency causes people to drive more, by any substantial amount. As Plumer noted, the Obama administration’s estimate was that people would drive about 0.1 percent more for every 1 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The Trump administration’s analysis found that the “rebound effect,” as it’s called, would be about twice as high as Obama’s analysis said—though that’s still not a very significant increase.

Experts also questioned the argument that lighter cars will cause more deaths. “The most important question is whether cars on the road are getting more similar in weight, or more dissimilar,” Mark Jacobsen, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, told Plumer. “If you’re bringing down the weight of the heaviest vehicles but not the lightest vehicles, then in the average accident, the cars will be better matched.”

The Trump administration admits that, under its proposal, both fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions would increase by about 4 percent. But it argues that if automakers are forced to make cleaner cars, which may cost slightly more, people will hold onto their dirtier cars for longer. Thus, “smog-forming pollution would actually decrease” by 0.1 percent.

Dave Cooke, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, doesn’t buy it. “There is no consistency to this logic,” he wrote. “They claim that these newer and more efficient vehicles will be so great that everyone will travel more, but not so great that people will want to buy them.” He argued that car manufacturers have been doing well since fuel efficiency standards have been in place. Currently, they’re “on pace for 17 million in annual sales for the fourth consecutive year, extending an industry record.”

The administration can’t say it wasn’t warned about the flaws in its logic. According to The Washington Post, an earlier version of this proposal was presented to the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, and officials said it contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”

As the Trump administration claims that freezing fuel efficiency standards will actually reduce pollution, it also ignores the health benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The draft proposal explicitly notes that it would only consider the domestic—not global—health benefits of slowing climate change. That could reduce the estimated climate benefits from the Obama-era car rules by about 87 percent, according to a recent paper.

On Thursday morning, 20 attorneys general pledged to sue the Trump administration over the proposed rule. That afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to soften the administration’s position, saying that the proposal “asked for comments on the range of options. We’re simply opening it up for a comment period, and we’ll make a final decision at the end of that.”

But Trump’s aims here are clear, and so are the consequences. Weakening the Obama standards “would clear the way for vehicles to, by 2030, spew an addition 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Canada,” HuffPost reported. That’s also equivalent to “firing up 30 coal power plants,” said Paul Cort, a lawyer with Earthjustice. And to justify this regressive policy, Trump is using two familiar ingredients: fear and falsehoods.

Campus novels have always been about much more than university life. When in 1954 Kingsley Amis published Lucky Jim—perhaps the most widely read contribution to the genre—conventional wisdom held that the campus was a place of intellectual pretensions and retrograde hierarchies. Amis narrated and satirized the tribulations of a haphazard lecturer, but his true target was the vicious class hierarchies that lingered in postwar Britain despite the nation’s promise to democratize. The university was not a closed system but a sandbox in which students and faculty played out social troubles that were roiling the country.

R.O. Kwon’s debut, The Incendiaries, squats subversively in this tradition. The novel begins with a disaster near Edwards University, its fictional East Coast school: “The Phipps building fell,” recounts Will Kendall, its student narrator. “Smoke plumed, the breath of God. Silence followed, then the group’s shouts of triumph.” The group is a cult of Christian fanatics, and they have bombed an abortion clinic. Among them is Will’s college love, Phoebe Haejin Lin, who has left him after a relationship defined by his obsession and violence. Against the notion that college today is a hotbed of left-wing radicalism disconnected from the real world, Kwon tells a story of right-wing extremism embedded in a patriarchal order.

How has Phoebe become a zealot? “You once told me I hadn’t even tried to understand,” Will imagines saying to her. “So, here I am, trying.” Bound by his own worldview, he never quite manages. Kwon’s lush imaginative project is to help us understand for him. With the needle of her prose, she plucks at the fabric of the university, exposing the reactionary impulses that run through American life.

A “juvenile born-again” who has lost his faith, Will arrives at Edwards by way of bible college with his soul a gaping void. There he gravitates toward the old-boys network. He pledges Phi Epsilon and works internships at financial institutions, lying about his modest background and his side job waiting tables (“I wanted a new life, so I invented it”). But all this comes second to his dramas with Phoebe, a Korean-American student he meets in his first term, and John Leal, the leader of the cult. They fill the “God-shaped hole” in him.

The abiding sense of purpose Will finds in Phoebe quickly tips into infatuation and controlling behavior when she proves elusive. Not knowing what he has “the right to ask” her, Will indulges lurid fantasies in passages like “I imagined Phoebe’s sidling hips, the fist-sized breasts” and “I bit her lips. I licked fingers; I grabbed fistfuls of made-up skin until, sometimes, when I saw the girl in the flesh, she looked as implausible as all the Phoebes I’d dreamed into being.” These dorm-room images—the aggressive porno-poetry of fists and biting and grabbing—establish the push and pull of their relationship. Having “claimed each inch of Phoebe’s skin” is not enough. He rifles through the notes in her books, seeking to channel the “shining, inmost psyche” she withholds from him. His desire is wholesale possession.

Kwon weaves this power dynamic into the fabric of the novel itself, allowing Will to speak in Phoebe’s voice. What often sounds like her first-person account is in fact Will ventriloquizing. Through him, we learn she was a sheltered child pianist who quit when she discovered her limits (“I hoped I’d be a piano genius”). She’s wracked with guilt and grief at her mother’s recent death, which resulted when she crashed their car during an argument. She’s “broken, desperate for healing.” But trust Will like you trust Charles Kinbote, the self-deceiving narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s kaleidoscopic campus novel Pale Fire—which is to say don’t trust him at all. In truth, we have no idea what of Phoebe is “real” and what’s a figment that he has “dreamed into being.”

Will and Phoebe haven’t been together long when the mysterious John Leal, a former Edwards student, strides barefoot into the narrative. An incursion from the outside world, he serves as Will’s double and rival. Where Will wants Phoebe’s mind and body, John wants her soul. Where Will has lost a God, John has lately gained one—an outcome, he claims, of time he spent imprisoned in a North Korean gulag for his role in shuttling refugees from that country into China. He knows Phoebe’s father, from whom she’s estranged. He too has lost a mother. No matter that his story never quite adds up. “If you can find delight in this lack as you did with presence, you’ll gain what you think is lost,” he says, in one of his typical spiritual riddles. The promise he offers is relief from suffering. But it has its costs.

Part of The Incendiaries’s power lies in the way Kwon contrasts this campus with stereotypes of American campus culture today. When, for example, a friend of Phoebe’s accuses another student of rape, she’s met with immediate doubt and backlash, even as Phoebe defends her. It’s easy to decry student appeals for “safe spaces” on campus, but harder to remember that, for certain students, neither campus nor the world that surrounds it is reliably safe.

Fittingly, the strongest bond in the book forms between the men who represent this lack of safety. It’s unlikely that Will, who studies finance, reads gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal work on male “homosocial” desire during his time at Edwards. But, if he did, he might notice the classic “erotic triangle” that his relationship with John and Phoebe constitutes. Whether friends or rivals, the men’s power struggle serves to uphold a toxic status quo. “In any male-dominated society,” Sedgwick argued, “there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.” This kind of stuff got Sedgwick maligned by conservative academics as a
“tenured radical.” But she wasn’t wrong.

You can see how this works in practice when Will and Phoebe visit the cult house. By the end of the night, John has thrust his hand creepily into Phoebe’s purse while she holds it open for him: “He dipped his fingers into the bag’s opal slit. The bright satin lining showed. I’d have liked to stop him, but she let it happen. The bag might as well have been his.” Will looks on in horror at this intimate usurpation. In moments like this, Kwon signals to the reader in Freudian dream-terms just what’s at stake between these men. Their tactics are different, but their claims are the same.

Gradually, the power balance shifts. Phoebe immerses herself in faith, and Will loses his grip on her. The cult Kwon has imagined is into pretty standard stuff, but their confession rituals and absolution rites escalate to flagellation and anti-abortion violence. Here’s that reactionary strain. “I’ll ask you what I’ve asked myself, late at night, as I wait upon His Spirit: if the likes of you and I won’t be radical for God, who will?” says John Leal to a crowd of demonstrators outside a clinic.

As Will retreats from the cult, he tries to understand why Phoebe tolerates this call to violence, or at least to simulate understanding for the gentle reader:

This situation, well, it was a crisis. The girl I loved was in a cult—and that’s what it is, I thought, a cult. It was a problem, but I’d solve it, because I was intelligent. The sun’s heat intensified. Disquiet thawed until, tranquil, awash, I almost sympathized with these people. If I were convinced that abortion killed, I, too, might think I had to stop the licit holocaust. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d believed as they did. In fact, I pitied them.

Pity, of course, can be its own form of cruelty. And all this comes before Will commits his final, awful act of domination. “I kept seeing the point in time, and choice, when I pressed Phoebe down against the floorboards,” he reflects. “She’d flinched with pain, then surprise. I’d found it satisfying: I enjoyed frightening the girl I loved.” Admire the matter-of-factness with which Kwon, in both of these passages, invokes the phrase “the girl I loved.”

If nothing else, it helps illuminate why it feels not just wrong but malicious when commentators dismiss college as a kind of four-year escape from reality, where left-wing professors indulge spoiled students’ frivolous identity explorations and demands for safety. The truth is that the campus is the exact opposite of an escape. It’s a place that confronts kids who are barely out of adolescence with the most distressing and complicated realities of American life: the cultural claims of love that routinely justify violence, the limits on autonomy for whole classes of people, the protections afforded to some and not others, the social systems that underwrite it all. It requires that students, in a very short time, make real and serious decisions about who they are, what they value, and how they’ll respond if they find themselves implicated. Who wouldn’t seek reassurance?

There are moments when Kwon’s novel verges on didactic. She sometimes puts lessons in her characters’ mouths that they’re ill-suited to deliver, as when Will’s boss, a tough-talking fraud, fires back at Will for questioning him: “If you’re hoping to wipe down that soul of yours, do it on your own time.” There are other odd bits of reader wish-fulfillment as Will leaves the campus and Kwon brings the novel to an uneasy close.

In the same way The Incendiaries isn’t about religion or the “culture wars” or abortion, it also doesn’t try to create a believable world of college kids or, really, a believable world at all. Instead, it’s an impression of the mysterious social forces and private agonies that might drive a person to extremes. Losing faith is painful because it sends you grasping in all sorts of directions for the “illusion of love,” as Will’s boss puts it, that everyone else is seeking. But gaining faith can be painful, too. For the disempowered, it might mean a further loss of agency. Phoebe escapes Will’s narrative, but Kwon offers no easy answers.

What lingers is a sense of understanding, a rare bit of actual wisdom from the cult. “I often thought about what John Leal liked saying,” Phoebe says, “that if we could believe all people existed in their minds as much as we did in our own, the rest followed. To love, he said, is but to imagine well.” Imagining what others experience, even if those people are loathsome and violent, is as much a literary task as a spiritual one. It’s not a solution to extremism, but it’s a beginning.

Yiannis Boutaris stared back at a sea of angry faces on May 20—a few muttered insults. Boos erupted from pockets of the crowd. “Leave,” they demanded.  

The 76-year-old winemaker-turned-mayor’s body tensed: “I heard voices from here and there, and these voices came little by little closer,” Boutaris recalled.  

More people joined in the jeers, and he suddenly realized he was surrounded.

Boutaris first became mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, in 2011. A reed-thin recovering alcoholic who hasn’t “even smelled whiskey for the last 27 years,” he has a timeworn face, a silver stud in his left ear, and tattoos on his arms, hands, and fingers.

His tireless advocacy for LGBTQI rights, outspoken opposition to unchecked nationalism, and push to highlight the city’s Ottoman past and Jewish history have made him a central target of Greece’s far right. In seven years as mayor, Boutaris has championed Pride parades in the northern coastal city, initiated plans for a Holocaust memorial museum, and expanded tourism from Turkey, Israel, and the Balkans.  

In early 2018, right-wing nationalist sentiments building throughout Greece over the refugee crisis and economic troubles erupted in protests tied to the ongoing naming dispute between Greece and neighboring Macedonia. On January 21, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Thessaloniki to oppose any inclusion of the word “Macedonia,” which is also the name of a northern region of Greece, in the official title of the former Yugoslav republic. Amongst banners reading “There is only one Macedonia and it is Greek!”, some far-right participants distributed fliers dubbing Boutaris a “slave of the Jews,” and others attacked a pair of anarchist squats, setting one ablaze. By the time the squares and streets emptied, unknown assailants had defaced the Holocaust monument in the city center. They left behind the logo of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which first entered parliament in 2013.

Although he had long been an obsession of the far right, Boutaris began to receive threats and hate mail more frequently. He ignored most of them. “Since I took over [as mayor], I have calls, I have letters saying, ‘you are fucking Jew,’ ‘you are a fucking Turk,’” he said.

But at the annual commemoration event in May, a mob attacked him.

Boutaris has attended every commemoration of the early twentieth-century Turkish killings of ethnic Greeks since assuming office. Although only two weeks past a heart operation this May, he was determined to attend the ceremonies held throughout the city. In an unassuming navy suit—tieless, but with a commemorative yellow badge on his lapel—Boutaris went from one event to the next. Last on the day’s program was a flag-lowering ceremony at Thessaloniki’s White Tower monument, situated on the three-mile promenade tracing the city’s coastline.

Leaving the small black sedan on a nearby street, Boutaris, his driver, a bodyguard, and Kalypso Goula, the president of Thessaloniki’s city council, approached the tower where more than a thousand people were already present.

Panayiotis Psomiadis, the right-wing former regional governor of Thessaloniki, cursed at the approaching mayor. Boutaris stopped near the tower.

Boutaris wasn’t fearful when the shouts first started, but the hostility swelled. The moment lingered, pregnant with tension until someone in the back shouted, “Let’s go.”

Within seconds, he was encircled by frantic young men, who shoved him and spat. Bottles flew in his direction. A punch came, and then another. His small entourage gripped him by his rawboned arms and guided him toward the car as the mob lashed out at them, several punches landing on city council president Goula as well. The attackers followed, some sprinting from the back to catch up. A tall, limber young man in a black, skin-tight Everlast shirt and matching athletic shorts delivered a series of powerful kicks to the mayor’s sternum. Boutaris lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, the crowd kicking at him. The guards got him back up. Finally, they reached the car, Goula prying open the passenger-side door. Boutaris slid in, and the car sped away as a final string of strikes burst the rear window into a scatter of jagged shards.

Goula stayed behind: The mob’s anger was gone, and in its place was deafening applause. 

In Greece, far-right violence isn’t new. Vigilante attacks and far-right gangs were common during the meteoric rise of Golden Dawn during the 2012 parliamentary elections. Modeled off German national socialism, the party’s street-roaming assault battalions paved the way for other would-be attackers seeking to redirect blame for the country’s economic crisis to foreigners, leftists, and other political opponents. A brutal wave of violence, mostly targeting migrants, reached a climax in September 2013, when a Golden Dawn member stabbed to death 34-year-old anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. Following that murder, much of the party’s leadership was arrested, and 69 members are still on trial for allegedly operating a criminal organization. The rising tide seemed, finally, to have ebbed.

In the last year, though, a startling resurgence of xenophobic violence has again worried observers. From 2016 to 2017, the number of hate crimes documented by Hellenic Police more than doubled, growing from 84 to 184 incidents. In early 2018, the violence showed little signs of letting up. Fueled by frustration over the refugee crisis, anger over the Macedonia name talks, simmering tensions with Turkey, and discontent with the left-wing-led government, protests were staged in several cities, and xenophobic violence regularly made headlines: Pakistani migrant workers were attacked in their homes and in fields, refugees were pelted with bottles and stones on Greek islands, and non-profit organizations working with refugees received a spate of death threats. Jewish memorials and cemeteries were desecrated several times in Thessaloniki and Athens, and a neo-Nazi group, Crypteia, took credit for an arson attack on the Afghan Community of Greece’s office in March.

Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias has received more than 800 death threats against himself and his family this year, he told the Greek radio station 247 FM in June. Prompted by the name talks with Macedonia, they included envelopes containing bullets and boxes of blood-soaked soil.

“I don’t know that it’s a revival, I think it’s always been there,” University of Reading professor and Golden Dawn expert Daphne Halikiopoulou said of recent developments, explaining that there is a long history of far-right political violence in ebbs and flows. “Drawing on this nationalism at a time when Greek people are quite radicalized because of the crisis and discontent, makes [violence] okay [for some].”

Boutaris was lucky: His injuries turned out to be minor. But after the attack, police officers insisted that the mayor go to the hospital. Inside, he spotted one of his attackers being bandaged in the corner.

The attack rattled Greece and captured national and international headlines, signaling the far right’s willingness to carry out violence in broad daylight. Several people were arrested over their alleged involvement, including a 44-year-old police officer and a minor. Political parties across the spectrum issued formal condemnations, and the Pontic organizations that hosted the event denounced the violence. Syriza described the incident as a “fascist assault,” while the center-left Movement for Change political alliance called it “embarrassing” and “unacceptable.” Although the right-wing opposition party New Democracy decried the attack, left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused the party of contributing to nationalist sentiments, saying it “lays out a carpet for the far right.”

Some, though, reveled in the moment. In the northern city of Kavala, Christos Paschalidis, an ultra-nationalist official, wrote on Facebook that Boutaris “got what he deserved.” Writing on Twitter, Dimitris Kambosou, the mayor of the southern village of Argos, rushed to label Boutaris a “traitor” for his moderate position on the Macedonia re-naming in the wake of the incident. (Weeks later, New Democracy expelled Kambosou over an intensely anti-Semitic rant in which he said Boutaris “can say what he wants because he wears the [kippah].”)

Golden Dawn openly praised the incident. A party statement celebrated it as “popular rage,” and a separate press release accused Boutaris of “tarnishing” the commemoration’s sanctity. Ourania Michaloliakou, the daughter of Golden Dawn chief Nikolas Michaloliakos, complimented the assailants. “Bravo to each and every one who carried out his duty in Thessaloniki today,” she posted on Twitter. “Respect.”

The response, Halikiopoulou said, “actually highlights the absence of liberal thought in Greece. It shows that many semi-accept that it is okay to punch people in the face for having different ideas.”

Threats, intimidation, and physical violence have failed to deter Boutaris so far. Reelected in 2014 by those who favor his liberal policies, he plans to run for a third term in May 2019. Though under no illusions about the fragile political climate, he insists he will continue his efforts to foster a more tolerant climate in the city and broaden tourism from diverse countries: Racism and xenophobia, he believes, have no future in Greece.

“I am considered a traitor because ‘I love Turks,’ ‘I love Jews,’ I love gays,’ ‘I love refugees’… This is totally foolish, so I don’t pay much attention anyway,” he said. Taking drags from a filter-free cigarette, he sat on a July afternoon in a deep, cushioned chair in his souvenir-adorned office. A dull black-and-grey lizard hand tattoo wriggled as he crushed the cigarette into an ashtray. On his desk lay a cluster of folders and papers. “If I am a traitor, I ask them: What did you do for your country apart from saying ‘Alexander the Great’? Alexander the Great died more than two thousand years ago. Did you create jobs? Did you support the market [through] tourism?”

Since he was attacked, people passing Boutaris’s home have yelled and cursed at him. He remembers the attack clearly: coaching himself to remain calm. He also remembers the small child one of the men cradled while chasing him, shouting. 

 “Nationalists are always violent,” he said. “They don’t hear anything else other than what they believe.”

Apple beat Amazon and Google in the race to become the first trillion-dollar company in the U.S. on Thursday afternoon, when its stock hit $207.0425 a share. (It closed slightly higher.) It’s another milestone for what might be the most important company of the century thus far—one that’s even more impressive given that, 20 years ago, the company was being written off by nearly everyone and was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Apple survived both near-bankruptcy and the 2011 death of the company’s visionary founder, Steve Jobs. BusinessWeek marked the achievement with a bit of self-deprecation, tweeting its 1997 cover on “The Fall of An American Icon.”

The road to a trillion was paved with iPods, iPads, and iPhones—and, crucially, with the rollout of stores that NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway has described as “temples to the brand.” But Apple’s recent success on Wall Street isn’t due to its technological innovations or its sleek products. Instead, its stock has been juiced by a record-breaking number of buybacks, in which the company buys shares of its own stock, causing the supply to drop and the price to rise. In May, several months after Congress passed a massive corporate tax cut, Apple pledged $100 billion to stock buybacks in 2018—and is halfway to that goal. With $285 billion in cash on hand, it can afford to buy even more.

Viewed over a period of decades, a number of products and achievements played a role in getting Apple to where it is today. But as the company’s profit margins have shrunk, stock buybacks played a crucial role in getting Apple over the trillion-dollar finish line first. This asterisk should be something of a scandal. Apple is the poster child of the current spate of stock buybacks, which are starving investment and exacerbating inequality.

Though never banned outright, buybacks were largely curtailed in the wake of the Great Depression, thanks to rules that limited the ability of corporations to manipulate their own stock. As Vox explained earlier this week, even the threat of action largely kept buybacks from happening: “Companies knew that if they did a stock buyback, it could open them up to being accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of having tried to manipulate their stock price, so most just didn’t.”

But as enforcement loosened, notably under the Reagan administration, buybacks began to increase. Now, they are omnipresent. A Roosevelt Institute study released on Tuesday found that corporations spent 60 percent of their net profits on stock buybacks between 2015-2017. Buybacks have continued to boom in the wake of the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in December. J.P. Morgan estimates that $800 billion will be spent on buybacks in 2018, obliterating the previous record of $587 billion in 2007—a spree that ended when the economy collapsed.

The goal of buybacks is straightforward: They prop up share prices and reward shareholders by increasing the value of the piece of the company that they own. There is no conclusive evidence that buybacks boost share prices in the long term, but as The Motley Fool explains, “In the near term, the stock price may rise because shareholders know that a buyback will immediately boost earnings per share.” But buybacks may not be a particularly efficient way to prop up a share price. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal found that “57% of the more than 350 companies in the S&P 500 that bought back shares so far this year are trailing the index’s 3.2% increase.” (Apple’s stock, however was an exception—its shares had jumped 11 percent at the time of the report.) Nevertheless, given the amount of pressure that CEOs are under, and the fact that buybacks are applauded by the shareholders that profit from them, it’s no wonder that public companies in the U.S. have spent the majority of the windfall they received from last year’s tax cut buying back their own stock.

Because companies are spending so much on buybacks, they’re neglecting to invest in their workers or their products. “Stock buybacks undermine the productive capabilities of companies and their ability to generate new products that compete on the market, and this is going to, at some point, show up in stock price,” University of Massachusetts professor William Lazonick, who studies buybacks, told me. Buybacks, as the Roosevelt Institute study found, also keep wages low by giving money to shareholders rather than investing it in workers.

All of this is direct result of the short-term focus of the economy. “I attribute it a lot of it to the financialization of the economy,” Lazonick said. “Once you’re willing to spend two or three or four billion or more a year on buybacks for a large company, you start becoming much more willing to lay off 5,000 people even in a prosperous period to pump your stock price up.”

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has argued that stock buybacks are ultimately good for the economy, because investors have to pay capital gains tax when they sell stock. This is something of a novel argument—it was made in a MarketWatch article published a few days earlier—but it’s not a particularly convincing one because most of the money would go directly to shareholders and executives, rather than the government or workers. Cook’s argument is also at odds with history. “Usually the conventional wisdom is the opposite,” John Cochrane, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, told Business Insider. “Stock buybacks started in the 1990s as a way of helping people to avoid taxes.”

Apple has pledged to add 20,000 jobs this year, but little is known about what exactly that means. Apple has increased its research and development spending over the past year, but the company is still only spending about five percent of total sales, a relatively low number, especially given the fierce competition between Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. And consternation among investors about how that money is being spent—Apple’s biggest product of the last few years is the AirPod wireless headphones, which aren’t exactly the iPod, whatever Cook says—may be playing a role in Cook’s decision to buy back so much stock.

Apple is, by its own standards, in a bit of a lull in terms of profit margins. But the company has so much money on hand that it can afford to spend billions to keep investors happy, buying itself some time to develop the next breakthrough product. Ultimately, Apple crested the trillion-dollar mark not through technological brilliance, but stock manipulation. That’s hardly cause for popping the champagne.

In the new David Wojnarowicz show at the Whitney, there’s a room with nothing in it. A 1992 recording of the artist reading from his memoir Close to the Knives plays to the white walls. The blinds are drawn on the room’s single window. If they weren’t, you’d be able to look out over the Hudson River Park, where derelict shipping piers once stood. Wojnarowicz cruised those piers, wrote about them, painted on their ruins. There’s no sign of them now.

Wojnarowicz’s New York is gone, and so is he; he died of AIDS in 1992, at age 37. The nature of his death is the thing people are most likely to know about him, apart from the facts that he had a beautiful face and a terrible childhood, and hustled as a teenager in Times Square. The most famous images he made are about homophobia and AIDS. The poster for the 1989 Rosa von Praunheim film Silence = Death, which shows him with his lips sewn shut, comes directly from his 1986-7 art film Fire In My Belly. The 1990 work Untitled (One Day This Kid…) frames a picture of Wojnarowicz as a child with a series of declarations: “One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid....Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus....All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.” These works function as advocacy as much as art.

Because the best-known pieces in Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre draw from his direct experience, the curators of the museum’s retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake At Night, were stuck in a bind: To what extent would the show commemorate the man, and to what extent would it focus on the art? They seem to have gone with “as much as possible of both.” The nine rooms hold paintings, prints, collages, photographs, and journals, as well as films and recorded music, drawn from the last decade and a half before his death—the only thing the exhibition stops short of including, it seems, are the walls of the East Village building on which Wojnarowicz stenciled the image of a burning house.

This maximalist approach is thrilling but can feel somewhat incoherent, an effect not least of the sheer breadth of media Wojnarowicz employed. Among his most affecting projects is a series of black-and-white portraits he took of himself and his friends, each in delicate chiaroscuro. In his 1980 study of Iolo Carew, fingers flutter over skin. The pictures are poetic, the kind of thing that you want to see in isolation so that you can swoon over them in peace. The most famous are a trio he took of Peter Hujar, his long-time friend and sometime lover, just after Hujar’s death. One shows the man’s Christlike, absent face. The next, his hand. The next, his feet, toes bunched together. What I felt looking at these photographs must be what devout Catholics feel when they look at images of suffering saints.

In another black-and-white series, which he called Arthur Rimbaud in New York, Wojnarowicz dressed friends in a mask of the French poet’s face and photographed them in places that had been important in his own life (Times Square, Coney Island, the piers). The prints are quite small and modest. In an adjoining room, meanwhile, hang his stencil works—big, bright collages mixing Kraft posters and maps and images of sex. Playing in the background is a recording of Wojnarowicz’s tinny band 3 Teens Kill 4. The contrast between the rich Rimbaud material and the jittery mood of the stencil room is jolting.

Hujar proves to be the link between the soulful photographs and the more antic colorful work. A series of works with the words “Peter Hujar dreaming” in their titles juxtapose outlines of that man in repose with bright acrylic-painted backgrounds and the stenciled shapes that Wojnarowicz grew so fond of. Peter Hujar Dreaming /Yukio Mishima: Saint Sebastian (1982) is the best of them. You can see the photographs’ elegance in the grace of the reclining form, but the color-blocking behind it adds a special force.

Perhaps the finest images, however, are Wojnarowicz’s rhetorically powerful screenprints, in which he joins text and image to speak truths about AIDS, as in the 1990s work Untitled (ACT UP). The work consists of two prints. The first layers a breathless rush of words in green lettering over black-and-white images of floating bodies: “I was told I have ARC recently and this was after watching seven friends die in the last two years slow vicious unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and drug addicts are expendable in this country ‘If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers’ says the ex-governor of texas,” it reads. (ARC was a common way of referring to HIV-positive status at the time.) The other layers a stock-market printout, in green, over a bull’s-eye in the shape of the United States. Like Untitled (One Day This Kid...), the prints advocate for the destigmatization of HIV/AIDS. They are elegant images that are optimized for mass communication. They are designed to be seen out in the world, not hidden in a gallery.

This summer, Semiotext(e) published transcripts of Wojnarowicz’s audiotape journals, mostly recorded between 1987 and 1989, which until now have languished in NYU’s Fales collection. Wojnarowicz was a fine writer, as can be seen in his memoirs Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992), and in his many catalogue essays and diaries. Close to the Knives opens with Wojnarowicz’s recollections of street life in Times Square, memories of hallucinating from hunger and marketing his body to pedophiles. Elsewhere, he writes of those piers on the west side, “night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films.” This new volume, titled Weight of the Earth, shows a different side of him. It is a record of the present rather than a recreation of the past—he is preoccupied with dreams, little romantic dramas, what he feels like eating for dinner, his health.

Wojnarowicz used the audio diary to record his thoughts as they happened, and the transcripts have an off-the-cuff immediacy that is hard to find in the Whitney show. He describes a shift he worked at the Peppermint Lounge, muses on a fling he’s in the middle of—“I think of the silliest things,” he interrupts himself to say. He knows he has “ARC,” the term in currency then to describe being HIV positive, but he isn’t interested in memorializing himself in some grand way. He made masks of Rimbaud, he didn’t want to be Rimbaud. “I don’t think about death very much,” he says, “because it won’t let itself be thought of.”

Yet the presence of death inevitably made his days more vivid. In one journal entry, made while on a road trip, Wojnarowicz describes “a mortality hallucination,” a moment in which he realizes “just how alive I am and also the impermanence of it”:

Yeah, I’m alive, but, you know, I could be dead another year from now or two years from now. And I won’t see this road, and I won’t see the sunlight, and I won’t see these fast trucks driving by—the long, long road up ahead of me, and a long, long road in the rearview mirror. And time just moves so slow, and time moves so fast—and then time stands still for some, and time just speeds up for others. For me, at this moment, I’m in quite a dislocation of time, from both outside of time and inside of time at the same time. And all the world looks pretty great.

The joy Wojnarowicz took in his work—the joy of bright color and the sheer beauty of being a living body—resists museumification. All those strange paintings, the tender photographs, the audio diaries, even the silly band—everything exists passionately in the present tense. He cared about how the light reflected off the trucks, not about understanding death. And so this museum’s attempt to make for him a legacy, to delve inside the man as political symbol and to unite that identity with his playful art, just doesn’t quite work. If death won’t let itself be thought of, it certainly won’t let itself be curated.

New York will never be a neutral place in which to look back on the history of New York, or at the people who have lived and worked here. It’s a place with a truly abnormal way of treating memory. As communities engaged in frantic remembrance of all the people who died of AIDS—whole groups of friends just deleted by its breathtakingly rapid spread—their mourning got digested by institutions into themes, grad school classes, and nostalgia, even as people throughout the city are still living with the illness. Wojnarowicz’s activism defined how we see his work. How could it have been otherwise? He lived and worked during an epidemic that eventually took his body, too. We still need symbols of resistance against misinformation and stigma, because we are still defending the rights of queer people to medical access, to lives lived free of abuse, to visibility amid normative culture. But a symbol is not the same thing as an artist. The works on display at the Whitney show that although Wojnarowicz has become a very specific icon, his art had many strands. Wojnarowicz sewed his lips shut to protest the silence that helps HIV/AIDS flourish, not because he wanted to make himself mute. Wojnarowicz the symbol sits uneasily beside the flowering multiplicity of his work. This show is a rare chance to see the many David Wojnarowiczes at once, beside one another; just don’t mistake the poster for the man.

Tech journalist Sarah Jeong, recently hired to the editorial board of The New York Times, became the target of venom and outrage Wednesday and Thursday after conservative outlets found and published collections of her old tweets, which contained complaints about white people. “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?” read one tweet, published in a National Review article.

As of Thursday, Fox News, The New York Post, and The Daily Caller had all run stories that referred to Jeong’s tweets as “racist” either in headlines or in the body of an article. On Twitter, a number of right-wing writers took up the claim. Andrew Sullivan, writer at large for New York Magazine, shared a retweet of the post that started the furor, published at far-right pro-Trump website Gateway Pundit. At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher called Jeong a “honky-hater.” The Week’s Damon Linker called Jeong “a racist. A flagrant one--one whose views are indistinguishable at the level of principle from Richard Spencer’s. She just hates different groups.” Incredibly, Linker was not the only writer to invoke Spencer—a prominent white supremacist whose Third Reich salutes and imitations of Nuremberg rallies have made it clear he is in fact a neo-Nazi. “Richard Spencer is more subtle than this woman,” tweeted Geoffrey Ingersoll of The Daily Caller.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Times published a tepid defense of Jeong, saying she would keep her job. Jeong’s work, race and gender “made her a subject of frequent online harassment,” the Times wrote. “For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to further the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it.”

For those intimately familiar with the sort of harassment women, non-binary people, and people of color face online, these episodes can be maddening to watch play out. Though defending Jeong, the Times did not explain why Jeong’s tweets were different, for example, from those of Quinn Norton, who lost her own new gig at Times in February over her friendship with a white supremacist, in addition to tweets containing racist and homophobic slurs. And as these controversies proliferate—another took place at The Atlantic in April, involving conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson—failing to advance a clear vision of what is and is not acceptable in public discourse only plays into conservative narratives about leftist hypocrisy, leaving many minorities as vulnerable as ever. 

To cite one example: At New York Magazine, Sullivan argued on Friday that “today’s political left” believes Jeong “definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority.” Instead, he declared, leftists believe “racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin.”  But Sullivan’s straw man misses the entire point of the leftist argument: Racism is about prejudice, but it is also about power imbalance (a definition Sullivan himself rejects). Jeong might have imitated the tone of her harassers, but she did not imitate the substance of their vitriol, and that distinction is key. Jeong’s harassers subjected her to racist, misogynist hate speech; they punched down. Not only did Jeong punch up, she did so as a reaction to sustained abuse.

No reasonable person would entertain a comparison between a woman of color, who occasionally loses her temper at her trollers, and a neo-Nazi. That’s not because women of color are inherently sacred, as Andrew Sullivan’s caricature of leftist thought posits, but because they belong to a class subject to centuries of institutional violence and social marginalization. Jeong’s tweets are distinct from those of Quinn Norton, who lost her own new gig at the Times for tweeting homophobia and befriending the white supremacist hacker Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer, known as “weev.” Jeong’s sentiments are similarly distinct from comments made by Kevin D. Williamson, who lost a job at The Atlantic for repeatedly suggesting that women who have abortions be hanged and comparing a black teen to a “primate” and “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg.” Abortion providers and patients are targets of real violence in the U.S.; abortion rights are really under threat, from individuals who believe much as Williamson does. White supremacists have murdered people. The Three-Fifths Compromise legally enshrined counting slaves as a fraction of a human. Jeong, meanwhile, cracked some jokes about a racial demographic that dominates her industry, the industry she covers, and the country she inhabits. Distinguishing between those situations isn’t an eccentricity exclusive to a mythical self-serving left: It’s the moral distinction behind an entire genre of literature. The word societies for centuries have used for punching up is satire. The word we generally use for punching down is bigotry.

Without telepathy, it’s impossible to know whether Jeong’s critics understand the gulf that separates her from writers like Norton and Williamson. But whether they understand it or not, the rhetoric they’ve deployed against her aligns all too well with the harassment that has driven her to vent in the first place.

I am far more aggressive on Twitter than I am in my offline life, where I rarely translate internal outrage to external reaction. I have over 36,000 Twitter followers—Jeong has over 69,000—and reading my mentions sometimes feels like holding out an arm for Cerberus to chew. In an average month, Twitter users call me everything from a hack to a whore. If I’m lucky, the comments are random. If I’m unlucky, the comments are part of a wave of similar comments, and that wave can last for days. Surrounded by misogynist abuse intended to silence, I often feel like I have no choice but to shout—much as it seems Jeong did. It’s fair to argue whether venting is the wisest or most effective response, but it’s certainly an understandable one. It may not stop the bigotry, but nothing else does, either.

Human beings write those tweets. They log off and walk in the world beside me. Their opinions do not exist only on the Internet, suspended in amber. Opinions are animating forces. They inform law and policy, and influence interpersonal violence. When a person hates you, when they think you should be punished for what you are or what you believe, manners won’t protect you. You can’t compromise with people who think you shouldn’t be—and who demographically hold the wealth and political clout necessary to codify such beliefs.

The morning after a gunman killed five journalists in Maryland, I walked into a police station to report an emailed threat. It wasn’t graphic, as threats go, just pointed. Whoever wrote it wanted to put me in my place, and that place is silence. For me and for so many other writers who are women or non-binary or people of color, threats exist on the same continuum as harassment and bad-faith interpretations of a person’s statements and work: Whether or not this was their conscious goal, the conservative attacks on Jeong work toward the same end as the troll harassment she lashed out against—to force our departure from the public sphere.

Right-wing writers, even ones who have lost jobs over printed bigotry, do not face anything like the same obstacles. Williamson still places regular bylines, even if they are not at The Atlantic. Damon Linker will probably face no repercussions for comparing Jeong to a neo-Nazi. The American Conservative still employs Dreher, who praised Hungary’s anti-Semitic prime minister with an unequivocal defense of blood-and-soil nationalism hours before calling Jeong a “honky-hater.”

The lines that separate Jeong from a writer like Williamson map onto differences in power, and these are distinctions her critics choose to ignore, comparing a joke at power’s expense to a political philosophy directly responsible for violence, intimidation, and death. The effect of this false equivalence is to shift the so-called Overton window of acceptable political discourse rightward: if you want The New York Times to employ Jeong, these critics insist, the price is to accept open advocacy of white nationalism, hangings for abortion, and more. And by stripping racism of any meaning associated with structural injustice, they absolve themselves of any possible complicity in systemic oppression.

Jeong’s jokes are an affront to many. But they are jokes, launched against a sea of abuse from people who look a lot like those who think she deserves to be fired.

Earlier this week, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reported that Rudy Giuliani, who has served as one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers since April, is falling out of favor in the White House because of a “series of erratic television interviews” this week. “Trump thinks he’s saying too much,” an unnamed source told Sherman. This is a story we’ve heard before: Back in May, the Associated Press reported that Trump was “growing increasingly irritated with lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s frequently off-message media blitz.” And it is a story we’ll probably hear again.

It’s all noise.

The Russia investigation’s myriad threads can be overwhelming to follow, even for the most dedicated observer. The intense secrecy surrounding special counsel Robert Mueller’s work, while giving him a degree of insulation from political attacks, has also made it hard for the public to discern where his investigation stands and where it’s headed. After all, it’s not just Mueller and his team who aren’t talking; few of his targets are, either. Into that epistemic void leaped Giuliani, who gives journalists a steady streams of quotes and comments about the investigation.

This dynamic is increasingly untenable for journalists—or ought to be. Giuliani’s statements cannot be verified, since Mueller would never confirm or deny them, and his modus operandi is clear. He says outlandish things, like that presidents can “probably” pardon themselves or that Trump couldn’t be prosecuted if he murdered James Comey, in order to control the news cycle and muddle the narrative about the Russia investigation, the hush money to former mistresses, and so on.

Finding the signal in this noise is easy enough: Ignore Rudy Giuliani, and pay attention to the narratives that aren’t making daily headlines.

Giuliani’s strategy largely works because his relative fame qualifies him as a newsmaker, and because most other figures in the investigation—including Trump’s other lawyers—are keeping a low profile. It’s also a strategy that Giuliani himself acknowledges.

In June, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a long-awaited report that criticized FBI officials for their conduct during the 2016 election. That evening, Giuliani took to Fox News to demand that Sessions and Rosenstein “suspend” Mueller and shut down the Russia investigation. He also said that Peter Strzok, a former FBI agent who sent texts criticizing Trump during the election, “should be in jail by the end of the week.” These remarks received wide coverage: The New Yorker described the assertion as a “moment of truth for the Republican Party,” while Politico wrote that it represented a “major turning point for the Trump lawyer.” The following week, Giuliani admitted to Politico that his bombastic remarks were a stunt to undermine the Russia investigation’s credibility. “That’s what I’m supposed to do,” he told the reporters. “What am I supposed to say? That they should investigate him forever? Sorry, I’m not a sucker.”

The trend continues. Last month, CNN obtained a recording made by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in which he and Trump discussed payments to silence one of his former sexual partners on the eve of the election. The tape’s release was objectively bad news for the president. At a minimum, it conclusively proved that the White House had repeatedly lied about Trump’s foreknowledge of the payments. Giuliani quickly offered a different, credulity-straining version of events: that the tape proved Trump was doing the right thing, by counseling his lawyer to keep the payments above-board. (Whether that’s true is hard to discern due to poor audio quality.)

It’s hardly unusual for someone in Trump’s orbit to mislead reporters and the American public. What sets Giuliani apart is the speed and scale with which he accomplishes these feats. Sherman’s piece came after the former mayor gave a series of madcap, contradictory interviews on Monday. At one point during his whirlwind media tour, Giuliani made the audacious and misleading claim that collusion with foreign powers to win an election is “not a crime,” which dominated headlines for days. At another point, he suggested that Trump may have played a greater role in the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016 than was previously known.

What’s more, Giuliani often tells reporters versions of events that can’t be readily corroborated, especially when it comes to Mueller’s activities. Could Trump face criminal charges from the special counsel? Giuliani told The New York Times in May that Mueller’s team has assured him they won’t indict a sitting president. How long will the Russia investigation last? Giuliani said a few days later that the special counsel’s office is aiming to wrap up the obstruction-related part of his inquiry by Labor Day. And because Mueller only speaks publicly through indictments and court filings, there’s no way to tell if Giuliani’s claims are accurate.

To a certain extent, Giuliani is just doing his job: defending his client and discrediting the prosecutor. But there’s also more than just the usual defense work at play here. Shortly after Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team, I noted that he appeared to be managing his presidential client through his media appearances, using his public stature to change the narrative surrounding the Russia investigation. “I’ll give you the conclusion: We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda,” he told The Washington Post shortly after taking the job.

Giuliani isn’t the first lawyer who’s tried to placate Trump with short-term reassurances for long-term legal problems. Ty Cobb and John Dowd, who led the president’s legal team until this spring, kept reassuring Trump and the public that Mueller’s inquiry would wrap up by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas. That timetable was never realistic: The Watergate investigations lasted for more than four years, while the Whitewater probe spanned most of Bill Clinton’s tenure in office. Some observers have speculated that Trump’s periodic eruptions against Mueller—most recently, his demand this week that Sessions shut down the Russia investigation—stem from learning that his expectations don’t match with reality.

Instead of Giuliani’s media sprees and Trump’s remarks, there are three ongoing threads that deserve closer scrutiny. While they only offer a partial window into how Mueller is pursuing his investigation, these glimpses may indicate where the inquiry will go next. Foremost among those threads is Roger Stone. The veteran GOP political operative and longtime Trump adviser played a peripheral role in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Now he appears to be squarely in Mueller’s sights.

In 2016, Stone exchanged messages with Guccifer 2.0, a purported Romanian hacker who played a key role in distributing stolen emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign during the election. In an indictment unsealed last month, Mueller declared that Guccifer 2.0 was actually a persona adopted by Russian government hackers who had undermined Clinton’s presidential bid. Stone has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and claimed that he did not know who Guccifer really was.

Mueller has so far sought or obtained testimony and evidence from nearly a dozen people close to the longtime Republican political operative, including former Trump advisers Sam Nunberg and Michael Caputo. In April, the Guardian reported that federal agents stopped Ted Malloch, a professor and political consultant with ties to Stone, at Boston’s Logan Airport and asked him about his interactions with Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Malloch told the newspaper that the agents “seemed to know everything about me.” Reuters reported in May that Mueller had issued subpoenas to Jason Sullivan, a social-media consultant who worked with Stone. This week, a federal judge rejected Stone aide Andrew Miller’s effort to quash a subpoena for him to appear before the grand jury.

Mueller’s activities don’t necessarily mean that Stone will be indicted, and it’s unclear what he would be charged with. The sequence of events and the use of a grand jury instead of less formal interviews mirrors the run-up to last year’s indictment of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and his former deputy, Rick Gates. In the months before Mueller filed formal charges, multiple aides close to Manafort testified before a grand jury. Manafort is currently on trial in northern Virginia for some of those charges; another trial in D.C. is scheduled for next month.

A second thread of interest worth watching relates to a secret meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian banker in 2017. In March, the Post reported that unidentified witnesses have told Mueller that the meeting was set up to establish a back channel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin for unknown purposes. Prince, who is the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, has denied those allegations. A spokesman told reporters in April that Prince gave the special counsel’s office “total access” to his phones and computer.

Finally, it’s worth following the mercurial story surrounding that Trump Tower meeting in 2016 between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and top Trump campaign officials, including Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and son-in-law Jared Kushner. A lawyer for Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, who played a role in setting up the meeting, said earlier this week that the special counsel’s office wants to interview his client—a sign of Mueller’s continued interest in one of the key moments so far in the Trump-Russia saga.

Making matters worse for Trump are reports that Michael Cohen is willing to testify that the president knew about the meeting in advance. In this week’s media tour to dispute Cohen’s claims, Giuliani appeared to disclose the existence of a pre-meeting among Trump campaign staffers. The dueling accounts suggest that the story surrounding the Trump Tower meeting could change yet again. If those comments ultimately shed more light on that famous encounter in the summer of 2016, the slip-up may be Giuliani’s most substantive contribution to public discourse all year.

Since the Russia investigation began, a single question has loomed over it: How will this end? Will special counsel Robert Mueller provide enough evidence to Congress to justify impeachment charges? Or President Donald Trump try to stop Mueller from doing so by triggering a repeat of the Saturday Night Massacre? The most persistent of these questions is also the most pernicious one: Is there a smoking gun that would decisively prove that Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the 2016 election?

Some journalists and observers believe that Trump provided them with one, or at least something close to it, in a tweet on Sunday morning.

Trump’s tweet is apparently a response to a Washington Post article about his turbulent state of mind lately. Trump, the paper reported, “has confided to friends and advisers that he is worried the Mueller probe could destroy the lives of what he calls ‘innocent and decent people,’” chief among them his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. “As one adviser described the president’s thinking, he does not believe his son purposefully broke the law, but is fearful nonetheless that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal ­jeopardy.”

It’s the latter half of Trump’s tweet, though, that drew the most attention: the acknowledgment that Trump Jr., as well as campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in 2016 “to get information on an opponent,” namely Hillary Clinton. Some journalists saw this as a direct refutation of Trump’s frequent denials of wrongdoing. The Huffington Post reported that the president “finally admits his campaign colluded with Russia at [the] Trump Tower meeting.” The Post’s Jennifer Rubin called the tweet “a gift to prosecutors.” The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson even compared it with the release of President Richard Nixon’s “smoking-gun tape” 44 years earlier to the day, framing it as a signal moment in Trump’s presidency.

It was possible, just days ago, to believe—with an abundance of generosity toward the President and his team—that the meeting was about adoption, went nowhere, and was overblown by the Administration’s enemies. No longer. The open questions are now far more narrow: Was this a case of successful or only attempted collusion? Is attempted collusion a crime? What legal and moral responsibilities did the President and his team have when they realized that the proposed collusion was underway when the D.N.C. e-mails were leaked and published? And, crucially, what did the President know before the election, after it, and when he instructed his son to lie?

While the president’s latest tweet is noteworthy, it’s at risk of being overanalyzed. Trump’s characterization of the Trump Tower meeting is consistent with what the public has known since last summer, when Trump Jr. posted incriminating excerpts from an email conversation with Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist who worked for the son of a Russian oligarch. In that conversation, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that his employer could “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” He made clear that this information came directly from Russian government officials and that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The president’s eldest son welcomed the offer, writing that “if it’s what you say I love it.” It’s hard to get more conclusive than that.

If anything, Trump’s tweet highlights the extent to which he and his allies can’t get their record straight about that meeting. In a statement in July of last year, after the news broke about the meeting, Trump Jr. insisted that it “was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.” His father reportedly played a role in the crafting of the statement. But the following week, Trump Sr. tweeted a different defense—one similar to what he tweeted this past weekend:

A week after that, Trump insisted, “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son.” That claim hasn’t been disproven, but Trump Jr.’s phone records show that he called a blocked number at Trump Tower on June 6 while setting up the June 9 meeting. Later that night, the elder Trump told a campaign rally audience in New York that he would give a speech the following week on “all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.” The curious timing raises questions about whether Trump Jr. told his father about the planned meeting and whether then-candidate Trump approved it.

The Trump Tower meeting itself is already a matter of interest to Robert Mueller. He is still reportedly trying to interview Emin Agalarov, Goldstone’s client and the meeting’s facilitator. The special counsel’s office has questioned multiple witnesses about the circumstances surrounding the meeting, as well as Trump’s role in crafting his son’s statement about it. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, is even reportedly willing to testify that Trump knew about the meeting in advance, which could undermine Trump’s tattered defenses even further.

All of this is already pretty damning. So why was Trump’s tweet treated like a major development in the Russia saga? One answer may lie in the expectations set by past presidential scandals.

Nixon might well have survived the Watergate crisis but for the White House taping system, which provided undeniable proof of his complicity in the cover-up. Most of Watergate’s closing stages—the Saturday Night Massacre, the back-and-forth negotiations with Congress, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on executive privilege—revolved around whether those tapes would become public. Once they were, Nixon resigned within days.

Ken Starr’s sprawling investigation into President Bill Clinton’s scandals also failed to turn up a smoking gun until 1998, when Linda Tripp revealed that White House intern Monica Lewinsky had preserved her blue dress after a sexual encounter with the president. A DNA sample from the dress conclusively proved Clinton had lied in denying he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. The House of Representatives impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice later that year, while the Senate acquitted him of the charges in 1999.

Not every investigation turns up evidence that directly implicates a president, however. Inquiries into the Iran-Contra affair in the late 1980s uncovered plenty of wrongdoing by high-level officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration. What it ultimately failed to find was any direct proof that Reagan had sanctioned the illegal diversion of funds to support Nicaraguan rebels. The Tower Commission concluded in 1987 that Reagan “clearly didn’t understand the nature of this operation. Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh’s final report in 1994, six years after Reagan left office, sharply criticized the former president but found insufficient evidence to warrant criminal charges.

Ultimately, the frenzied search for a single piece of evidence that proves Trump illegally colluded with Russia works in his favor. It creates a public expectation that will be difficult for Mueller to meet, thereby setting the stage for disappointment when the inquiry concludes. In doing so, it minimizes the considerable amount of evidence that’s already public: Trump’s supine performance at last month’s Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, the constant outreach efforts between the Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries throughout the 2016 election, the sudden dismissal of FBI Director James Comey last May, the persistent efforts to discredit and shut down investigations into what really happened, and so much more.

If this story were a film, it would build to a thrilling climax in which a final bombshell revelation brings down the White House and Mueller walks off into the sunset (or perhaps starts tweeting and writes a book). Real life, however, is rarely so tidy. By holding out for a smoking gun, Trump’s critics may be downplaying the gunpowder residue that’s already coating his hands.

Last year was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in California’s history. But that soon could change. As the state enters the peak month of fire season, wildfires have already burned more than 290,000 acres and killed eight people. This time last year, only about 220,000 acres had burned, and no one had died. The 2017 season would eventually claim 44 lives.

Why are these wildfires so bad, and why do they seem to be getting worse over time? President Donald Trump offered his opinion in a Sunday night tweet, writing that “bad environmental laws” have been diverting water away from firefighting efforts. He also wrote that the state “must tree clear to stop fire spreading!” (Hours later, he deleted the tweet and tweeted a near-identical version.)

There is an ongoing debate about the merits of “thinning” forests to reduce wildfires, but a lack of available water? That’s not a common complaint of wildfire experts, who instead point to extreme drought and heat, human development in vulnerable areas, and an outdated federal funding system for firefighting.

Presented with Trump’s tweet, the state firefighting agency said it had “no idea” what Trump was talking about. “We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires,” Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, told The New York Times, “but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.”

What “bad environmental laws” did Trump have in mind, then? On Monday afternoon, he elaborated—sort of.

Some reporters have speculated that Trump is referring to endangered species protections—most importantly, the federal Endangered Species Act. These laws prohibit farmers and other industrial sources from taking lots of water from certain rivers and streams, in order to protect the habitats of endangered fish. Trump is currently seeking to dramatically weaken the Endangered Species Act, so it’s possible he wanted to bolster his administration’s case by linking the federal law to wildfires.

But I think Trump’s tweets reference something more specific: His administration’s escalating attempts to prevent California from regulating its own water systems.

California’s State Water Resources Control Board is expected soon to implement a plan to prevent the imminent collapse of fisheries in the state’s largest estuary. This plan—nine years in the making—would limit water use “in three tributaries to the San Joaquin River, which joins with the Sacramento River to feed into the delta, a key California water source and home to endangered species such as the Chinook salmon,” Pacific Standard reported last month. More water would flow through the system as a whole, so some water would inevitably flow into the ocean, as Trump notes.

Many farmers are opposed to this policy, claiming limits on water use would hurt the agricultural economy. Enter the Trump administration. Last month, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke travelled to two reservoirs in the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where he told reporters that his agency may intervene. “There is a federal interest—the federal interest as the water master,” he said. He was joined by Republican Congressman Jeff Denham, who called the state’s water conservation proposal a “disastrous plan to flush water from valley rivers to the ocean,” foreshadowing the language Trump would eventually use in his Sunday tweet.

Denham has attempted, on several occasions, to enlist the federal government’s help in halting California’s new plan. Most recently, he tucked legislation to stop it in a spending bill for the Department of Interior. Now, he has Zinke and the Trump administration in his corner. Last Friday, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation commissioner sent a letter to California’s water board threatening possible legal action if the plan is adopted.

Republicans like Zinke and Denham have long argued that water conservation policies are the real cause of California’s drought—that environmentalists, not climate change or overuse, are to blame for water shortages. But they have never gone so far as to suggest, as Trump did on Monday, that environmentalists are the real reason that wildfires are raging out west. That’s especially concerning because people have died in those fires, as many more likely will. Inventing a bogeyman won’t change that. Only smart policies will.

As vocations go, none is so venerated and simultaneously disdained as motherhood. Fraught with essentialized and limiting views of femininity, being a mother often entails demanding recognition for one’s labor while resisting conflation with it. Even as more mothers run for office and take executive positions, countless others are regularly passed over for promotions, based on the assumption that motherhood has whittled down their non-domestic ambitions. It can be nearly as complicated to have a mother as to be one. Every Mother’s Day, those of us who have lost our maternal figures face shrieking pastel reminders of our grief, while those who grew up with abusive or absent mothers are shunted to the side. Our ideals of motherhood both heave with contradictions and lack room for ambiguity.

These are just some of the reasons that Laura June’s joyful, empathic, but uncompromisingly irreverent memoir, Now My Heart Is Full, is such a balm, whether one regards parenthood with clear-eyed enthusiasm or with leery ambivalence. Intertwining her experience of becoming a mother with the memories of her own, late mother, June reckons unflinchingly with the muck of motherhood and daughterhood without disavowing the precious particularities of both. Her book is less preoccupied than other recent works (Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors) with the disquietude inherent to choosing parenthood or with the agitated reconceiving of identity once she has become one; through the tapestry of memory, she tries to forge a new, more capacious narrative for her experiences of motherhood, one that situates pain and pleasure alongside one another, where they neither compete nor cancel each other out. 

Her story begins in 1995, during her senior year of high school when she discovered that she was pregnant. After some contemplation, she decided to have an abortion—a choice fully supported and facilitated by her Catholic mother. In fact, when June asks for advice, her mother firmly sets the tone of their conversation by affirming her daughter’s autonomy. She asks June what she wants to do, and, after oscillating and taking stock of her circumstances, June calls Planned Parenthood. “[There’s] no doubt that this act, enabled by my mother,” she writes, “is the single most important thing to have happened to me.” Terminating a pregnancy is a portentous decision—June makes no bones about that—but it need not become a cross to bear. On the contrary, it can be a deliverance all of its own, a threshold leading to something else, perhaps something better.  

After terminating her pregnancy, June graduates from high school and proceeds, somewhat haltingly, from college to graduate school. In unexpected circumstances, she meets the person she will eventually marry, and who will become the father of her child. Did her abortion ensure a better future? She doesn’t say, and resists contemplating an alternative path—what might have been. Instead, her memoir nimbly laces together the yen for a legible history with the uncompromising assertion that we can only own the choices we make. And even then, we have to contend with the fissures and contingencies. There is an unyielding chasm between the desires that shape the plans we make and the options that are, ultimately, available to us.

Pregnancy compelled June to question her own narrative and how much control she’d been able to have over it. Although she had planned to deliver her daughter, Zelda June, without medicinal intervention, the safest method for her was Caesarian section—a procedure often bemoaned as a worse-case scenario, as if the delivery of a baby were somehow diminished or rendered “unnatural” through surgery. “Natural as opposed to…what?” June demands, illuminating the word’s own socially manufactured meaning. After all, Zelda came into the world with relative ease and in health. Moreover, the surgery didn’t put June in danger: “What more could a mother ask for?” she remarks. “An unnatural, beautiful birth.”

Accordingly, she possesses little patience for those who purse their lips or offer sympathy at the mention of a C-section. “When people ask if I was disappointed by my birth experience, I want to tell them to fuck off,” June writes. “I want to scream at them and tell them they’re terrible people who don’t know anything, that they’re one step away from vaccine deniers. Instead I just say, ‘No. Were you?’” With this breezy, defiant attitude—towards her Caesarian section, towards her decision to feed her daughter formula—June doesn’t scoff at the complications of motherhood or the issues of identity tethered to it, but rather gives us permission to set them aside. Agonizing over how to be a mother—this may be relatively unavoidable, but anguish doesn’t need to characterize maternity. What’s more, we’re not obligated to suffer the passive aggressive culture of competitive parenting with submissive politesse. We can set the course of our own battles, and we can vanquish our doubts on our own terms.   

June strives for a similar equilibrium as she contends with memories of her own mother: to honor and accept the memories that comprise her own story even when they are unchangeable, and sometimes bitterly tragic. Laura June’s mother, Kathleen June, died in 2007, several years before the birth of her granddaughter, after decades of acute alcoholism. “I loved her so much,” Laura June tells her readers, “but she was my greatest—really my only—source of pain.” Aware of her mother’s illness from early childhood, Laura June brooked the emotional whiplash that so often attends alcoholic parenting: She shared a deep intimacy with her mother, who in turn was nurturing and open-hearted—until, after a bout of drinking, she wasn’t:

This dissonance—that my sober mother loved me very much, that she braided my hair and sang to me, bought me little matching jumpers and sock sets, and made sure I was inoculated and had a lunch packed with little love notes in pen on the napkin tucked inside but then forgot to even bother picking me up occasionally, with barely a nod in my direction in apology after the fact—that I began to experience, where suddenly I wasn’t first on her list but now seemed last, was quite confusing. Years later, it was still hurtful, and even now as I sit here typing I feel overwhelming sadness for the eight-year-old me…all the other kids filing out with their mothers, me just standing there, getting more nervous by the second.

Years of this domestic volatility weighed heavily on June. She eventually left home at the age of 18, and over the next decade, the relationship between mother and daughter thinned, as June established boundaries to safeguard her own welfare. They spoke for the last time when, in 2005, June left her hometown outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to live in in Brooklyn with her husband. She returned home two years later, after her mother was hospitalized, in order to join her siblings in making the impossible and wretched decision to cease life support.

As June observes, her mother died before her own life gained momentum. She married in October 2007, began a career as a writer, and gave birth to a daughter in February 2014. And on that first foggy day of motherhood, a feeling, not wholly unsurprising, reared its head. “I wanted my mother,” Laura June writes. “Not for guidance or even support, but simply for her to be there.” The experience of giving birth, so often rendered as a moment out of time, transforms into an event impossibly, painfully, intertwined with one’s own history. Motherhood, however it may direct our gaze towards the future, will inevitably connect to the past and to what we have have lost.

I came to Laura June’s book not as a mother, but as someone who is raw from her own unmothering: My mother, who, like June’s mother, was called Kathy, died in November 2017 after three and a half years bearing the ravages of metastatic ovarian cancer. When it was clear that she wouldn’t live much longer, I recalled an image—a fantasy—that I had long nurtured of a hypothetical, but already dearly beloved trio: my hoped-for newborn, my own mother, and me, united by precious, certain proximity. Realizing that whatever the future held, I now harbored my own “very normal but impossible wish,” I’ve since attempted to suppress it with positively no success.

I don’t pretend that this desire can be assuaged, or that I expect to ever mourn my mother less, but June understands something that I didn’t until I read her book—that death does not necessarily condemn a relationship to stasis. “And though much in my life has changed in the decade since she died, nothing has changed as much as my relationship with her,” June writes. “And in some ways, her dying led me here: the space she left behind opened a new place for me to make new thing; happier things and, in many ways, better ones.” Each new, flourishing relationship casts the previous ones in new, more varied and pacific hues. Memories of remarks made in passing assume a different, more consequential valence. The long-throbbing aches from past discords may not fully dissipate—but sometimes we find new ways to bear grief when our prospects shift.

Now My Heart Is Full doesn’t debate the pros and cons of having children, or take on the futile task of defining a mother’s role. Instead it offers tender ambiguity, indicating that something as overdetermined as a “mother” can never mean precisely what we want or expect or fit the contours of our fluctuating hopes. It can be difficult to know what you want, or what to ask for, until you detect that pang—something lost before it had been discerned. I couldn’t know what I would want from my mother until she was no longer here to provide it. But like Laura June, I’m taking stock. Inheritances are built when we know what we miss.

“I promise to these younger kids and younger generation that I’ll continue to be a role model to them and I’ll continue to lead by example,” LeBron James said in 2013. James kept his promise.

Last week, the basketball star opened the I Promise School in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. A joint project of James’s foundation and the local school district, the school differs from other celebrity forays into education in key ways. Notably, it isn’t a charter school, which would be privately run. Instead, I Promise is a public school under the jurisdiction of the Akron school district, so it’s subject to the same regulation and oversight of all public schools. And as Education Week reported, I Promise shares DNA with the community school model, which envision schools as centers where community members can receive wraparound social services in addition to a K-12 education.

By eschewing the charter model, James not only avoids what many critics consider to be the privatization of education; he may also shore up the school system’s ability to address, rather than aggravate, existing inequalities. I Promise deliberately chose, via lottery, students with records of truancy or disciplinary problems, and will provide psychological counseling to both students and teachers.

Charter schools, by contrast, often enforce draconian conduct codes and can be quick to expel students. A 2015 investigation by The New York Times found that some administrators at Success Academy, a prestigious charter network in New York City, “singled out children they would like to see leave.” In April, NPR reported that Chicago’s Noble charter schools enforced such a strict disciplinary code that teenage girls regularly bled through their pants because their schools did not allot them enough time to use the bathroom.

Some charter schools, like the Harlem Children Zone’s Promise academies, provide wraparound social services that resemble those on offer at I Promise. But even at Promise academies, results are mixed. A 2014 study published by the Abdul Lateef Jamil Poverty Action Lab showed that students who won a lottery to attend a Promise school were more likely to finish high school, but Promise attendance didn’t correlate to improved mental and physical health, or to lower reported rates of drug and alcohol use. Charters also have variable academic outcomes overall, and they don’t reliably outperform public schools on average.

I Promise isn’t a typical public school, though. The school will employ 43 staffers for classes of 20 students each, a ratio lower than the city’s reported average of 23 elementary school children per teacher. It will also provide additional services for the at-risk elementary school students it serves: It will provide free bikes and laptops for students, run a food pantry for school families, offer GED classes and job search assistance for parents, and pay for students to eventually attend the University of Akron.

James isn’t the first wealthy person to try to shape public education by funding extra services. Sarah Reckhow, a professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, cited Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “He has given hugely to the San Francisco public schools as well as other public schools in the Bay Area, and has had a pretty dramatic impact,” she told me. “The Mark Zuckerberg grants to Newark involved quite a bit of money to the traditional public schools.”

Zuckerberg’s $100 million grant, announced in 2010 on an episode of Oprah with then-Newark mayor Cory Booker, and later matched by another $100 million in donations, did reshape public education in Newark. The state of New Jersey, which had controlled Newark city schools since 1995 due to underperformance, closed 14 struggling public schools and laid off hundreds of teachers. The New Yorker’s Dale Russakoff reported in 2015 that $20 million of the funds went to consulting firms. A recent study (funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation) found more positive academic gains in English for Newark students at charter schools whose enrollments increased after the grant; but it didn’t examine social or health outcomes.

Benioff and Zuckerberg are both part of a wave of Silicon Valley billionaires funneling money to traditional public schools, but according to a 2017 story in The New York Times, they face limited oversight, and there’s little research to test the efficacy of the “innovations” they fund. “They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told the Times. “It does subvert the democratic process.” School district control doesn’t necessarily guarantee that officials will rigorously oversee large donations.

But if I Promise sticks close to the community school model, and Akron school officials apply the same level of oversight they’d apply to any other public school, the school could be a boon to struggling students. Community schools, which partner with non-profits, churches, and local agencies, often provide health care and adult literacy services in addition to traditional academic offerings. While charter schools can operate a community school model, as the Harlem Children Zone’s charters try to do, the Coalition for Community Schools says on its website that most community schools are public. New York City currently operates 215 community schools, and it isn’t alone. There are publicly run community schools in Oakland, Chicago, and Boston. And though the specifics of the community school model vary from school system to school system, there is a consistent emphasis on providing additional social services for students and parents.

“Just looking at what is online and what’s been reported in the press so far, it is striking how simple it is to build a school like I Promise, at least on paper, and it’s a little startling that we don’t have more,” said Donna Harris-Aikens, who directs the education policy and practice department at the National Education Association. Harris-Aikens credited James and his foundation for beginning first with programming—the I Promise network provides mentorship and extracurricular opportunities for Akron children—before trying to start a school.

Speaking of the traits I Promise shares with community schools, Harris-Aikens added, “I think one of the things that becomes very clear, and not just with community schools but with any strategy that supports public schools, is that it’s about the kids. Start with what the kids have and what the school can do as a part of that community to make sure that they graduate ready for the next stage of their lives. It can be done. It’s a proven model in schools.”

There is some evidence to support the community school model. A 2017 brief produced by the Learning Policy Institute and the National Education Policy Center attributed positive results to schools that incorporate what analysts called the “four pillars” of the model: wraparound social services, expanded learning time, family engagement, and collaborative efforts with community institutions. “By the third and fourth years, students at fully implemented community schools scored significantly higher than their peers in other schools on standardized math and reading tests,” analysts said of the Tulsa Area Community Schools Initiative in the Oklahoma city.

A 2016 Brookings paper asserted that while there are benefits to the community school model, community schools tend to face significant challenges when the services they provide intersect with other sites of social inequality. School funding still often depends on zip code, which reinforces inequality. Community schools can struggle to fund their services over time. Most public schools don’t have celebrity athletes committed to their welfare after all, and the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s educational philanthropy show that wealthy patrons aren’t always a net benefit to schools in any case. If I Promise succeeds, James won’t just show why schools should be community centers; he may convince public-education skeptics that if you want good schools, you have to pay for them.

On April 3, President Donald Trump sat down to a private dinner with some close associates, including Peter Thiel, his most loyal supporter in Silicon Valley. Thiel had brought Safra Catz, the co-CEO of Oracle, along to discuss a $10 billion Department of Defense contract to build the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, a cloud computing platform that will eventually run much of the Pentagon’s digital infrastructure—from data storage to image analytics to the translation of intercepted phone calls. According to Bloomberg News, Catz objected to the DOD’s plan to award the entire JEDI contract to a single organization, rather than parceling it out to multiple contractors. Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM were all bidding, but Amazon, Catz said, with its massive cloud services business, had an unfair advantage. (Trump, in a rare display of restraint, reportedly said he wanted to ensure a fair competition but went no further.)

JEDI plays a significant part in the Pentagon’s strategy to ensure that its war-waging capabilities keep pace with technological change, and Amazon is probably best positioned to build it. The company’s web services division (AWS), officially founded in 2006, grew out of a project hatched by two of its employees, Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham, to use Amazon’s growing resources to provide technical infrastructure to anyone who might want it—whether a retailer selling their wares through Amazon’s platform or someone starting a new company. The initial product, called EC2, helped Amazon launch an entirely new industry, broadly called cloud computing but encompassing a range of services, including data storage, analytics, machine learning, and other tools. While Amazon’s vaunted retail business frequently lost money over the last decade, AWS has been one of its most reliably profitable divisions, bringing in $5.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2018.

Microsoft, Google, and others eventually started their own cloud computing divisions. But as the competition over JEDI shows, the desire to challenge AWS has led major technology firms into the national security complex, with promises to analyze imagery for drone strikes and to run communications links for soldiers fighting in the Middle East and North Africa. As these companies move into military work, their claims about the benevolent role that technology can play in modern society—already damaged by scandals ranging from Uber’s labor exploitation to Facebook’s electoral mismanagement—are running squarely up against the realities of their profit motive.

In truth, government and the technology industry have always been partners. Some companies, like IBM, have relationships with the military that extend back to World War II. The development of the early internet owes much to resources provided by the Pentagon’s advanced research division, an agency founded in 1958 to counter Soviet expansion into space. Later, during the Cold War, microchips developed by industry pioneers like Fairchild Semiconductor found their way into ballistic missiles. Even Stanford University’s rise as an engineering and entrepreneurial powerhouse depended heavily on millions of dollars in government funding for high-tech research (a relationship that became controversial during the Vietnam War).

More recently, Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks revealed the tech industry’s complicity in the National Security Agency’s global surveillance operation. Major companies had complied with—and profited from—government demands for unwarranted data collection. In one telling detail made public by Snowden, Americans learned that even as the NSA was making secret deals with Yahoo and other companies to access customer information, the intelligence community was hacking into those same companies and collecting personal data.

With the exception of a few notable court challenges to government subpoenas, the Snowden leaks did little to change the industry’s close relationship with the military. Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt still sit on Pentagon advisory boards, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos entertains strategically important heads of state like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s ritual shaming before a congressional committee this past spring, the quasi-governmental reach of these companies remains self-evident.

Take Palantir, perhaps this era’s paradigmatic tech company, if not also its most controversial. Established in 2004 by Peter Thiel—Trump dinner companion, PayPal co-founder, Facebook board member, and slayer of Gawker Media—Palantir organizes and parses vast amounts of data for corporate and government clients, particularly in the defense and intelligence communities. Considered one of the country’s most valuable privately held startups, Palantir was initially funded partly by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. This government pedigree has ensured that its products are as popular in Washington as they are in Kabul, where they’re used to track the locations of improvised explosive devices.

Palantir’s lucrative government contracting business is perhaps more overt than some of the other tech giants’, but it’s far from an outlier. Amazon, whose AWS division provides the digital infrastructure for everything from NASA to Netflix, is already the official cloud-computing provider of the CIA. Even before it began competing for JEDI, the company provided similar services to the Defense Department and other government agencies as a subcontractor. Microsoft’s operating systems power millions of DOD devices; in 2016, it earned a $927 million information technology and consulting contract from the department, and in May it announced a deal to provide its Azure Government cloud service to the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. Google has dipped into government contracting, too, though not without internal resistance. This spring, more than 3,000 Google employees signed a letter of protest, and roughly a dozen resigned, in response to the company’s participation in Project Maven, which provides image analysis technology used in drone strikes to the Air Force. (Google announced in June that it would not renew the contract.)

Meanwhile, Amazon has attracted a great deal of scrutiny for its enduring march toward retail monopoly, but in reality, the company’s future now rests as much in securing the top-secret data of CIA activities as it does in delivering groceries—a spectacular broadening of its reach, which ought to bring up questions about whether Amazon’s market share buys it the same leverage in the federal government as it does in the retail economy.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the government, for its part, would seek out the data and expertise of Big Tech. (Former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter held regular meetings with Silicon Valley VIPs while serving in the Obama administration.) Only the large firms have the capacity to build and manage the secure databases and sophisticated computer networks that governmental bureaucracies need to operate. And these companies, in collecting so much user data, present a tempting opportunity for intelligence agencies looking to expand the scope of their mass surveillance; the NSA and others want the same data these companies collect in the normal course of business. But that doesn’t mean that the technology companies are obliged to respond to the call for government cooperation, nor do they necessarily need to rush willingly into the defense industry.

Much has changed since the first ties between the government and technology companies were forged during World War II. Today’s tech giants have immense influence over everything from social media to restaurant reviews, autonomous vehicles to health care. They are some of America’s most valuable, and often most admired, companies, with interests deeply intertwined with the global economy. And while contracts like JEDI may comprise a growing share of their profits, the government probably needs tech firms more than they need the government. Because the DOD and others rely so heavily on their tools, they could, in theory, resist invasive data requests. They have the power, and the ethical obligation, to decide what kind of companies they want to be and, increasingly, to help decide what sort of country the United States should be.

That, ultimately, is why the fight to win the JEDI contract represents something larger than the profit margins and stock prices of Silicon Valley firms: It is a crossroads at which tech companies will be forced to choose whether they can feasibly continue to preach the values of liberal-minded innovation and independence from big government while serving as its well-paid and compliant partners. It may be unrealistic to expect large, profit-seeking corporations—the Everything Store exists to create loyal consumers, after all—to decline work that’s both wildly remunerative and earns them outsize influence with the very entities that wield the power to regulate them. But it is fair to expect that these companies would act with the ethical standards they so proudly claim to uphold. In recent years, monopolistic tech giants have reaped fantastic gains in efficiency and cost savings, often at the expense of individual privacy and labor rights. To add “war profiteer” to that list would only further diminish an industry that, with equal parts naïveté and swagger, has so often failed at trying to do good.

What does it take to get banned from Facebook? In the case of Alex Jones, quite a bit. Jones, the proprietor of InfoWars, pushed the PizzaGate conspiracy that led to a gunman firing an AR-15 through the ceiling of a Washington, D.C., restaurant. He has claimed that “no one died” in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. He has claimed that the “Jewish mafia” controls a number of powerful entities, including the American health care system, and that several prominent Democrats are demons posing as human beings. A week ago he mimed shooting special counsel Robert Mueller, who he has called a “demon,” a “pedophile,” and the head of a Deep State conspiracy against President Trump.

Jones has amassed sizable audiences across multiple platforms, which he uses to push insane conspiracy theories and dubious dietary supplements. Jones’s YouTube page alone had 2.4 million subscribers as of this week. But in response to a rising drumbeat of calls for Jones and InfoWars to be banned, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook all pulled the plug on Jones on Monday. Apple led the way and Facebook followed soon after, with both outlets citing Jones’s “hate speech.” YouTube has largely stayed quiet about its decision to ban Jones, but has suggested that unspecified violations to its Community and Service Guidelines are responsible. Twitter is, as of this writing, the only social network where InfoWars still has a platform, while Facebook has indicated that Jones can appeal its decision.

Is Jones’s ban an indication that Silicon Valley is finally purging toxic sites like InfoWars? Or are tech companies doing the bare minimum to free themselves from what they see as primarily a public relations problem? The difficulty they had in banning Jones suggests the latter. Furthermore, it shows that, even if Silicon Valley truly wanted to get clean, there are limits to managing the speech of unimaginably large platforms composed of hundreds of millions of users.

The bans on Jones came in a flood, but they weren’t coordinated. It seems that Facebook and YouTube were waiting on some other company to ban Jones first. When Apple made its move, they followed in quick succession. Facebook had, until recently, defended Jones’s right to make statements that were destructive and demonstrably false. Asked by Kara Swisher last month about the conspiracy theories that outlets like InfoWars circulate on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that he was fine with Holocaust deniers using his platform because they might earnestly believe that Nazis did not systematically murder millions of Jews. (He later apologized.)

Free speech has become an increasingly thorny issue for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (which is owned by Google), particularly after the election of Donald Trump. With conservatives claiming that they have been unfairly targeted by tech companies, Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have attempted to curb the backlash by presenting themselves as champions of free speech. Squeezed by angry conservatives spoiling for a culture war on one side and investors demanding constant user growth on the other, Facebook and Twitter have indicated that they are open to just about everyone—including frauds like Jones.

The decision to ban Jones, then, is an indication that concerns about hate speech, conspiracy theories, and fake news are being taken seriously—or at the very least, that these concerns can be serious PR headaches. Previously, the threat of a vocal and organized response from right-wingers—who are up in arms about Jones’s ban—would have spooked Facebook and YouTube. Twitter, the lone holdout, is now in a strange position. With all of its peers having kicked Jones out, keeping him on the platform (where he is verified) looks an awful lot like an endorsement.

To be fair to Twitter, Jones has hardly been silenced. The InfoWars app is still available from the Apple store and Android’s Google Play. Jones has high-profile defenders in right-wing media, like Matt Drudge, and may very well become a cause celebre for conservative politicians who are courting the far right, like Senator Ted Cruz, who has attempted to walk a line in which he protects the conspiracy theorist’s “free speech” without explicitly endorsing the crazy stuff he has said. Cruz even appropriated a famous poem about the Holocaust to defend Jones, saying, “You know how the poem goes, First they came for Alex Jones…”

But the pressure on Facebook, YouTube, and others to block Jones had reached a critical mass. These companies were faced with two options they did not care for: Either ban Jones and deal with a backlash from the right or keep him and deal with a backlash from those demanding that they not facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories that not only mock the deaths of massacred children, but also result in real-world violence. It’s now clear that Facebook will remove a dangerous hatemonger if a lot of people demand it.

It’s not clear, however, if it will swiftly remove a figure of Jones’s ilk without a larger public campaign. The problem with Jones is a problem with enormous social media platforms in general. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook—all owned by Facebook—have a combined 2.5 billion users. Five billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. These companies have grown so large that they can’t effectively regulate speech.

Their incentives, moreover, point in the opposite direction. These companies try to cater to the interests of all of their users, which is how people like Jones thrive in the first place. And in his Holocaust comments, Zuckerberg did get at something true: Facebook doesn’t technically have a responsibility to suppress hateful speech. The InfoWars mess is symptomatic of an industry that has grown too large and unruly, with an outdated legal and regulatory framework that both under-regulates platforms and gives them little motive to self-regulate. Jones and InfoWars may be barred from Facebook. But the problems that they represent are here to stay.  

What is it about Canadians that irritates Arab leaders? At the end of last week the Canadian foreign minister made a rather direct call for the Saudi government to release some recently detained Saudi civil rights activists. The Saudi response was instant and intemperate.

Riyadh suspended flights, threatened trade, sent the Canadian ambassador home, and ended scholarships for Saudi students in Canada (which surely hurts these students as much as it does Canadian universities).

It was not the first time that Canada has provoked an angry reprisal from a Middle Eastern ruler. In 2010, frustrated by Canada’s refusal to agree new landings rights agreements for its commercial airlines to Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, the UAE’s rulers swiftly booted Canadian troops from their logistics base in the Gulf nation.

In both cases the responses were so disproportionate you suspect that the rulers in question took the Canadian affront a little personally. (It would be easy, here, to crack a joke about Canadians’ worldwide reputation for niceness, although in the strange world of diplomatic disputes it wouldn’t be the first time something this trivial had given an opposing side the wrong idea.) In fact, in speculating about the cause of the current crisis between Canada and Saudi Arabia—and absent a candid interview with the key Saudi decisionmaker, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), all we can do is speculate—we should not lose sight of this personal dimension.

Sometimes rulers in the region, who run their country’s like one would a family business, simply get annoyed. In any event, it would be hard to imagine such dramatic reprisals being conjured up by anyone other than rulers themselves; certainly not their more cautious officials.

Having said that, as a number of observers of Saudi affairs have ventured, there may well be some method here, too. One theory is that Canada is being made an example of; a warning to other countries that injudicious commentary on Saudi affairs could be an expensive exercise. Perhaps Canadian companies with business interests in Saudi Arabia are already pushing Ottawa to make amends.

Another possibility is that MBS is using the Canadian intervention in Saudi domestic affairs to stoke a bit of nationalism, not least to keep dissenting Saudis in line. It is noteworthy that the activists arrested in recent months have been labelled traitors and foreign agents on traditional and social media in the Kingdom. A bit of nationalist clamouring is a great way to drown out dissent.

If either of these theories is correct it would be another interesting data point on MBS and his reformist agenda. Some analysts have been too quick to dismiss the young tyro and his reformist plans. I think he is serious about refurbishing the ruling system and Saudi society, not least to keep himself and his family at its head.

Like others in the region, that system is starting to seize and splutter, even if it’s better lubricated than most by its oil wealth. And in many ways, MBS is not so much reforming the country from top-down as responding to the demands of Saudi society for change that have been building for many years.

But herein lies the problem for MBS. He may well fear that in reforming the country he could loose ideas and forces that he will not be able to fully control. The arrests of leading women’s activists over recent months just when he was introducing some of the very reforms they had long advocated—such as the right to drive—might be read as a message that he, and only he, will dictate the pace of reform.

But he probably also understands that like greater historical reformers of the modern Middle East—from Attaturk in Turkey to Gamal Abdel Nasr in Egypt—he needs to mobilize his people if he is to truly transform his country and its society.

In this regard (and at the risk of being accused of interfering in Saudi Affairs), an argument could be made that the best way to do this is to empower and mobilize the very women that he has been locking up of late.

Many Saudi women are highly educated. Many also don’t work—or work in limited sectors—because of cultural, legal or practical barriers (such as, until recently at least, not being allowed to drive). Like the vast oilfields that transformed Saudi Arabia after World War II, tapping this enormous economic and intellectual potential could rapidly change the country’s economic future—precisely what MBS has said he is trying to do with his reforms.

By contrast, mobilizing Saudi nationalism, especially by preaching to anti-foreigner instincts, as increasingly popular as such a strategy might be around the world these days, will offer some short-term advantages. But it could also prove counterproductive in all sorts of nasty ways.

One episode in the current Saudi drama with Canada possibly highlights that danger. As the dispute erupted, a Saudi youth group took aim at Canada on Twitter with what it claimed was an Arabic proverb: “He who interferes with what doesn’t concern him finds what doesn’t please him.” More menacing than the proverb was the image accompanying it: a Canadian airliner seemingly on a collision course with Toronto’s CN Tower.

The offending tweet was condemned by Saudi officials, and promptly taken down by the group that published it. The latter claimed that the intent of the image had been misconstrued. Maybe the intention was innocent. But just the possibility that it wasn’t should be alarming to Saudi authorities—as it clearly was to those officials who swiftly censured it.

Even if it was just a bit of youthful macho posturing, it is something Saudi Arabia’s international image could do without, especially as it tries to attract foreign investment. Then again, the same might be said of the indignant way that Saudi Arabia’s rulers have handled their contretemps with Canada.

In July, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina became the first ever graphic novel to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The nomination—even on the longlist—feels like an event: What kind of book using pictures would be sophisticated enough to compete with the usual Booker fare of prestige prose? A lesser work would have undermined this genre-bridging nomination, making it look like a stunt. But Sabrina—short on words, big on humanity, succinct of plot—is not a lesser work.

On the first page, we see Sabrina herself in a large top panel. Her expression is difficult to read. Like all of the characters in the book, her eyes are just dots, her mouth a line. She is reminiscent of an old-fashioned airplane safety manual person. Below, six panels show her wordlessly looking around her house for ... what? She peers down the hallway and into the bathroom and then, on the next page, under the bed—where her cat is hiding. The scene exudes the specific quiet of being home alone. Her sister, Sandra, comes over and they have an extraordinarily naturalistic conversation. “It was good to see you,” “You too,” and “See you later” all get their own panels. Then, quiet again.

There are a lot of pages without any words on them in Sabrina. No commentary, no thought bubbles.
The story that plays out across its 204 pages is simple, brief even. But the book takes its length from its pacing. Nick Drnaso moves his story at the speed of ordinary human life. In the real world, it takes about six panels to get ready for bed, and nobody talks while they do it. Events both small (conversations) and large (tragedies) do occur, but so do the many interstitial hours we spend alone, driving or just thinking. In this sense Drnaso’s scenes play out like the opposite of an old-school comic. In the work of Aline Kominsky Crumb, say, life is sped up and boiled down and whipped into crackling humor. But Drnaso takes it slowly, and that’s what makes it feel like a novel.

After the opening sequence, we turn abruptly to Teddy and Calvin. They are old friends from high school. Teddy is Sabrina’s boyfriend, we read, but Sabrina has gone missing. He’s losing his mind with stress and Calvin takes him in. Teddy stares at the wall and does nothing. Calvin brings Teddy home a hamburger every night. He works for the military in systems security, which means that each day Calvin fills out a psychological health checklist that asks: How many hours of sleep did you get last night? He has to rate his stress level from 1 to 5. He has to say whether or not he is having thoughts of suicide. It is as if the military is asking Calvin to put together a crappy comic book version of his inner life. He fills out the boxes.

Sabrina has disappeared. Then it turns out that Sabrina has been killed. Teddy stays with Calvin, Calvin helps Teddy, Sandra tries to adjust. These are small people dealing with a blow so big and so bad that it would fit better in a horror movie. Drnaso writes the murder, however, in order to trace its fallout.

The world does something strange with Teddy’s loss. He spends his days horizontal in Calvin’s spare room. Out of a radio in that room a voice appears. He listens to the voice griping about conspiracy theories, false flag operations. He seems to find some comfort in hearing this crazy right-winger grieve for the fate of America. “Our masters will flee to their compounds, leaving us to endure unimaginable plagues and ‘natural’ disasters,” the voice laments. “Sometimes I hope I don’t live to see it.”

Sabrina’s death, unfortunately, has been both violent and captured on camera by a killer intent on turning his crime into personal notoriety. Drnaso draws websites and listicles and comment sections. He draws the way that Teddy’s personal devastation becomes just another piece of news-cycle flotsam, seized by readers eager to find some secret narrative behind the simple, sad one.

After journalists turn up at Calvin’s house to look for Teddy, an image of Calvin in his camouflage gear shows up on the internet. Online whispers flourish into full-on conspiracy theories. Was the army involved in Sabrina’s death? Did Sabrina ever exist? Calvin is subjected to Sandy Hook truther–style scrtiny, but he doesn’t really say how he feels about it. The radio that had seemed like Teddy’s only connection to the world has circled back to victimize him. We just see him lie on the ground.

The nasty conspiracy theorists of Sabrina exist outside the radio, too. Calvin’s colleague warns him against taking a mysterious new job, claiming that all kinds of “black ops” secret government terror is lying in wait for him. It’s just an expressionless drawing on a page, but the switch of this character from buddy coworker to deranged truther is frightening.

That fear comes from the way Drnaso has chosen to tell this story. These characters’ bodies act out the plot: We see where they go, what they’re doing. But their faces don’t teach us what they feel. It’s as if we are navigating a world with prosopagnosia (face blindness) and relying only on speech for clues, for patterns that give sense to the world.

The plot stakes of Sabrina are almost lurid: abduction, murder, conspiracy. But it is a gentle book. A great deal plays out inside cars, living rooms, bedrooms. The quietest and saddest panels in this quiet and sad book are the drawings that contain no people at all, like the Skype window after Calvin’s daughter has run out of frame, or a park with nobody in it. These scenes make the difference between absence and presence very clear. A person is there, or a person is not. It’s not complicated. Death is so basic and so powerful that we think up conspiracies to impose sense on it. Sabrina is a political book, in many ways, because it looks at the madness we provoke in each other on the internet. But it is also about walking through a room and then leaving it.

It’s not every day that you read the vice president’s case for impeaching a president. On Tuesday, CNN resurfaced two columns written by Mike Pence in the 1990s in favor of the push to impeach Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. “For America to move on, and we must, the Clintons must move out of the White House,” Pence, an Indiana talk-radio host at the time, wrote. “Either the President should resign or be removed from office. Nothing short of this sad conclusion will suffice to restore the institution of the presidency to its former and necessary glory.”

Pence’s argument was multifold, with some parts more convincing than others. He detailed how Clinton had broken the law—a matter of fact, given that the president lied to a grand jury about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky. “The President’s responsibility to faithfully execute the laws of the land begins in his own administration,” Pence wrote. “The President committed perjury. Perjury is a crime. President’s who commit crimes should resign or be impeached.”

But Pence also argued that presidents should be held to higher moral standards than average citizens, and that Clinton should also be impeached because had committed moral wrongs while in office. “In a day when reckless extramarital sexual activity is manifesting itself in our staggering rates of illegitimacy and divorce, now more than ever, America needs to be able to look to her First Family as role models of all that we have been and can be again,” he wrote.

CNN focused on this latter argument, declaring in its lead sentence that “Pence once argued the president of the United States should be held to the highest moral standards to determine whether he should resign or be removed from office.” The article further described the columns as a “a far-reaching argument about the importance of morality and integrity to the office of the presidency,” and noted that Trump has been accused of multiple extramarital affairs as well as sexual assaults.

The implication was clear, and the president’s critics took the bait:

But the rest of Pence’s argument was more nuanced than some observers made it seem. He wasn’t making the case that presidents should be impeached solely because of their moral conduct, instead drawing a crucial distinction between purely private conduct that he may personally find immoral and the conduct undertaken by Clinton in his capacity as the president of the United States.

On the first count, the President has admitted to having taken advantage of a college intern working at the White House (that’s a public building) who was on the White House Staff (that’s public employment) on many occasion in and around the Oval Office (again a public building). Also, the President lied about the affair in public and (very likely) under oath in Jones [v.] Clinton. He also may have used the power of his PUBLIC office to cover up the whole sordid matter. This was not a private matter and cannot legitimately be argued as such. A truly private matter in this realm might be an affair between the President and a friend not working in the White House for whom no favors were granted and no cover-up attempted. That, it seems to me, could be argued as part of one’s (immoral) private life. Ms. Lewinski [sic] is a part of the President’s public life not his private life.

Twenty years later, it’s hard to disagree with this part of Pence’s assessment. Clinton and his defenders frequently assailed independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigations as a politicized Republican effort to bring down a Democratic president, and for good reason. At the same time, it’s clear that there was a strong case that Clinton committed perjury and obstruction of justice in his efforts to cover up the Lewinsky saga, both of which are impeachable offenses.

Clinton’s underlying conduct was also disturbing. While facing impeachment charges in 1998, he enjoyed the near-universal support of the Democratic Party and the American left. That’s much less true amid the rise of the #MeToo movement. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said last November that it would have been “appropriate” for Clinton to resign the presidency over the scandal. What was largely seen as an act of sexual infidelity and immorality in the 1990s is seen today as an abuse of power against a female subordinate by the most powerful man in the world.

In the chaotic days that followed the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals with impunity, Pence reportedly made it known in private conversations that he would be willing to replace his running mate atop the ticket. But there was never a groundswell of support among Republicans for such a last-minute change. That November, a majority of the American electorate rejected Trump, but he and Pence won the White House anyway, thanks to a flaw in the nation’s democratic system. Today, as CNN notes, “Pence has largely remained silent on the allegations” of sexual impropriety and misconduct against Trump.

Fortunately, the Constitution anticipates that bad men will become president and structured the rest of the republic to constrain them. There’s a non-zero chance that Trump will face impeachment proceedings at some point during his presidency, especially if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in this fall’s midterm elections. There’s also a non-zero chance that special counsel Robert Mueller will uncover evidence in the Russia investigation that could persuade a sufficient number of Republicans in the Senate to support Trump’s removal from office.

If this comes to pass, and Pence remains silent, it wouldn’t be hypocritical so much as sensible: Supporting Trump’s impeachment would transmute a congressional effort to hold the president accountable for his actions into a power grab by the president’s constitutional successor. Ultimately, any hypocrisy on Pence’s part when it comes to the morality of the presidency won’t come from how he treats an effort to remove Trump from office. That ship already sailed when he helped place Trump there two years ago.

On Monday more than 25 opposition groups flooded the streets of colonial Potosí to disrupt the government’s official celebration of Bolivia’s independence day. It had snowed in the city on Saturday, and melting snowmen decorated the main plaza.  

Alongside the national army and Congress there for the official events, hundreds of people turned out to protest President Evo Morales’s plans to run for a fourth term in 2019. His bid was announced in late November 2017 despite a national referendum opposing a constitutional amendment to grant him another term.

The protesters had wanted to fall in amongst the official government parade held in the morning, according to Bolivian newspaper El Deber. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, by 7 a.m. all entrances into the plaza were blocked by police barricades. Only pre-registered organizations and people with press credentials were allowed to enter. “We are not even allowed entrance into our own independence day ceremonies,” muttered one indigenous woman angrily, as she pushed past me in her pollera, a traditional Quechua skirt.

Inside the plaza, a more modest crowd waved blue cardboard thumbs-up hands that said “Bolivia dice sí”—“Bolivia says yes.” Yes to the re-election, that is.

The morning ceremony was relatively uneventful, with the expected military parades followed by Vice President Álvaro García Linera’s address and Evo’s state of the union. The real action picked up after the official ceremonies were over: After the military parades and addresses from the president and vice president, the police barricades were disbanded, which allowed protesters to flood in with massive “BOLIVIA DIJO NO” banners—“Bolivia said no.” No to the re-election, no to Evo’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) party, no to the addresses that had been made by Evo and Linera less than an hour before.

By many metrics, Bolivia has seen remarkable progress under President Evo Morales, popularly known as Evo. The country’s “first indigenous president,” as Linera emphasized to the crowd on Monday, can boast of achievements in economic growth, literacy rates, improved public health, and education initiatives—to name just a few. “We are in Bolivia’s golden age, and it is defined by progress, production, and a digitalized youth,” said Linera.

Evo came to power in 2006. Following on the heels of a string of neoliberal, U.S.-backed presidents who struggled to maintain order without resorting to violence, his tenure has marked a new era of Bolivian politics—especially because he kicked out the U.S. embassy and refused all U.S. aid when he first entered office. And as he stretches for a fourth term, the president has emphasized this contrast between him and his predecessors. “The nationalization of our natural resources instead of privatization—that is one grand difference between us and them,” he gave as one example. He also praised “Bolivia’s incredible working class” to cheers from the crowd.  

But perhaps most strikingly, during Evo’s presidency Bolivia has made unprecedented strides for indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples have been marginalized for almost all of Bolivia’s colonial and modern history. Parents chose not to teach their children their native tongue to protect them. Bolivia was one of the poorest countries in the world, and its majority-native population were the poorest of the poor.    

Under Evo’s new constitution in 2009, things began to change. The official name of Bolivia changed from “The Republic of Bolivia” to “The Plurinational State of Bolivia”, plurinationality recognizing the diverse array of nationalities within one state polity. Thirty-six indigenous languages were recognized as official.

The plurinationality of the new constitution seeped into many sectors of modern Bolivian life, such as education and public offices. The 2010 education law, titled Ley 070, required all school children to learn not only Spanish and “a foreign language” (usually English), but also the native language of the department in which they live. Currently, 34 of the the 36 officially recognized indigenous pueblos have their own language institutes located within their own communities. As of 2012, every public official has been required to speak not only Spanish but also the native language of the region in which they work. For the first time in Bolivian history, a woman can walk into a bank in La Paz and converse with her teller in Aymara. A man can walk into a hospital in Cochabamba and receive treatment from his doctor in Quechua.

These policies, and many more, have changed the lives of millions of indigenous peoples in Bolivia. “Now in professional offices you see a woman wearing a pollera,” a woman said to me during the protests Monday afternoon. “That never happened before Evo. Now people like me are ministers in the government. That’s why I am a MASista, until I die,” she said.     

On Monday, Evo ended his speech pointing to the global significance of his Bolivian experiment: “With all of our economic growth, Bolivia has a lot of hope. But what has been perhaps one of the most important changes? Bolivia has begun to be recognized internationally.”

Regardless of where you fall on the merits of Bolivia under Evo, this statement is undeniably true. A leftist experiment appearing to resist the scripts set by Cuba and Venezuela, Bolivia has set a precedent, and the world is watching.

Bolivia’s 2009 constitution, however, also limits presidents to two terms—which Evo has now served, in addition to his term prior to creating that constitution. And in February 2016, voters across the country rejected Evo’s proposal to change the term limits, 51.3 to 48.7 percent.

The opposition groups that travelled to Potosí on Monday are part of the “F21 2016 Movement”—named for Feb. 21, 2016, the date of that referendum vote. However, in November 2017 Bolivia’s constitutional court annulled the referendum and struck down re-election limits on all public offices, claiming that re-election limits are a violation to human rights. A few days later, Morales announced his candidacy for the 2019 elections. If elected, he would remain in office until 2025, a term of 19 consecutive years.

The F21 2016 “Bolivia dijo no” movement has been growing ever since. In the week following the court’s decision, protests and blockades were staged across all major cities in Bolivia. That same week during judicial elections, over 50 percent of the ballots cast were null ballots—an apparent response from the opposition to intentionally cast null votes as a form of protest to Morales and his government. Throughout Bolivia’s major cities, such as Cochabamba, La Paz, and Santa Cruz, graffiti in full view declares “Mi Voto Es Valido” (My vote is valid) and “NULO” (Null).

This past Monday, the protesters held nothing back. “¿Si esto no es el pueblo, dónde está el pueblo?” (“If this is not the people, then where are the people?”) was one repeated chant, referring to Evo’s claim that he respects the people’s wishes. “No es Cuba tampoco Venezuela, Eso es Bolivia y Bolivia se respeta” (“this is not Cuba or Venezuela, this is Bolivia and you respect Bolivia”) was another. One especially strong one was “Muere muere Evo, Evo criminal” (“die, die Evo, Evo criminal”).

Some protestors were less harsh. People of all ages marched, many donning homemade “Bolivia dijo no” and “F21” shirts. Women marched with their babies. One woman had her child’s stroller decked out in “F21” memorabilia. I asked a nearby woman why she thought so many people still support Evo, and she turned to me and said: “Those people have clearly not lived what we have lived. We have nothing, Evo has not helped us. And we are sick of it,” she said.  In her view, Potosí remains impoverished, especially in the countryside.

Beyond specific grievances with Evo’s policies, many are also concerned about what an ignored referendum means for the state of democracy in Bolivia—and a democracy that has close ties to Cuba and Venezuela, the latter which under Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has become what appears to be a failed state.

“Bolivians, across all economic classes, are nervous about the implications of a President who is directly ignoring a vote of the people that he himself called for. They see the rise of violent authoritarianism in Venezuela and Nicaragua and wonder if this will be their country’s future as well,” said Jim Shultz, an activist and co-author of a book about Bolivian indigenous resistance to globalization, who recently returned from Bolivia to the US after living outside of Cochabamba for 20 years.   

In Potosí, the opposition appeared diverse and not necessarily unified. Ranging from groups called “Another Left is Possible” and “Bolivia Promised Me” to mining syndicates and coca leaf farmers from the lowlands, they declared their support for F21 from a diverse array of ideological and political motivations.

Many of the opposition come from the left, claiming that Evo has failed to keep his promises as a truly decolonial and anti-extractivist president. Evo has opened up the country to massive mineral exploration—particularly to Chinese companies—despite claiming to be dedicated to the “Rights of Mother Earth”. Dam projects in the Amazon on the Bala and Beni rivers have been approved by the government, despite indigenous protest. For many, the construction of the national highway in the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) despite indigenous and international protest was the final straw. How pro-indigenous and anti-capitalist, leftist critics ask, is Evo and his administration, really?

Linera ended his speech by quoting Karl Marx and declaring that “capitalism has brought blood all over the world”—a nod to the millions of indigenous people that have died in Potosí’s silver mines since the colonial period and are still dying today.

“There is not another future,” he said. “If there is something different, it is a cliff—it is the return to neoliberalism. The abuse of water and gas. The privatization of natural resources,” he said, referring to the Cochabamba Water War of 2000 and the El Alto Gas Wars of 2003 that ultimately led to the resignation of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada “Goni” and Evo’ selection. “The Agenda 2025 is the only option,” he declared to a cheering crowd, referring to the prospect of Evo being in power until 2025. Revolution, according to this line of thinking, is tied to a particular man and his necessary re-election in 2019.

“The insistence on re-election at all costs is a sad development for Morales and his legacy,” said Schultz  “His presidency has been historic and has accomplished a good deal, but ignoring the basic rules of democracy will put a stain on that, and maybe worse.” The protesters who flooded the square following Linera’s and then Evo’s speeches seem to agree.

Can Bolivia have a government in which all public officials speak their own indigenous languages, but not because it is required by Evo? Can its teachers imagine a Bolivia in which their students learn within tri-lingual, decolonial classrooms that are not funded by the MAS party?

Can the revolution live beyond a man? Many Bolivians want to find out.

Donald Trump’s antipathy to immigrants has been a defining feature of his rise to power and his presidency. He has focused much of that ire, personally and in his policies, on undocumented immigrants. But there are signs he wants to target documented immigrants, too. In February, Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Security was “considering making it harder for foreigners living in the United States to get permanent residency if they or their American-born children use public benefits such as food assistance.”

A draft rule, which has not been released to the public, reportedly stated, “Non-citizens who receive public benefits are not self-sufficient and are relying on the U.S. government and state and local entities for resources instead of their families, sponsors or private organizations. An alien’s receipt of public benefits comes at taxpayer expense and availability of public benefits may provide an incentive for aliens to immigrate to the United States.”

These restrictions may now be close to fruition. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that Trump’s immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is preparing a rule that would penalize documented immigrants for using certain public benefits: Use of food stamps, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or even Obamacare could cost a documented immigrant a green card or prevent them from gaining citizenship.

“Any proposed changes would ensure that the government takes the responsibility of being good stewards of taxpayer funds seriously and adjudicates immigration benefit requests in accordance with the law,” said a DHS spokesperson who confirmed that changes are in the works. Trump officials have sent the proposal to the White House Office of Budget and Management, the last step before the rule is released to the public for comment.

The rule is premised on the notion that non-citizens burden citizen taxpayers by taking welfare benefits or other public funds. But the evidence doesn’t support this. Not only is it extremely difficult to immigrate legally to the United States, it’s even more difficult to access benefits after doing so. A fair examination of the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: Trump’s policy isn’t intended to shore up the welfare state for citizens, but to undermine it by reducing immigration.

The administration’s explanation for these proposals are the latest chapter in the longstanding, racialized disdain in America for welfare recipients (of which The New Republic itself has been guilty). The specter of the welfare queen still looms large in conservative imaginings, and now Trump has added immigrants to this bogeyman. “At its core, Trump’s [immigration] rhetoric is the same as Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign against ‘welfare queens’ that’s reared its head in just about every election since,” CityLab reported in 2015, after Trump’s campaign hit full swing.

In recent years conservatives have pushed the notion that immigration threatens America’s public resources. “Most of these illegals are drawing welfare benefits, they’re sending their kids to school, they’re using the public services,” Tom Delay said in 2016, though he conceded most still pay taxes. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank founded by a eugenicist, claimed on its website that households headed by immigrants, both documented and undocumented, “make more extensive use of welfare.” Trump’s reliance on CIS’s analysis is well-established. As Laura Reston previously reported for The New Republic, Trump has repeatedly cited CIS’s data and analyses in speeches, and in return, CIS has consistently defended the administration’s immigration restriction.

Immigrants, legal and otherwise, actually pay billions of dollars in taxes per year, though they often aren’t legally eligible for a full range of welfare benefits. States have some discretion, and can expand access to welfare if they choose, but generally, permanent residents can receive means-tested welfare benefits like Medicaid only after five years of residence in the United States. Documented migrants who have temporary status aren’t eligible for any benefits at all.

It’s particularly strange that the Trump administration reportedly sees Obamacare use as evidence of an immigrant’s welfare dependency; Obamacare allowed states to expand Medicaid, but in states that have chosen not to take advantage of that benefit, it only subsidizes private health insurance. Beneficiaries often pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for premiums every month. It’s hardly a universal entitlement for anyone, let alone immigrants.

There’s no evidence that immigrants take up disproportionate space in America’s pool of welfare beneficiaries, either. Existing welfare restrictions tend to work as intended. As Vox noted in 2017, CIS skewed the data. Its analysis compared immigrant-headed households directly to citizen-headed households, without considering discrepancies in household size. Immigrants tend to have larger families, and their households therefore often include citizen children. When an immigrant-headed household participates in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps, those benefits go to everyone in the household, citizen and non-citizen alike.

When researchers at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, examined CIS’s data set, they produced different results. “Overall, immigrants are less likely to consume welfare benefits and, when they do, they generally consume a lower dollar value of benefits than native-born Americans,” Cato concluded. “Immigrants who meet the eligibility thresholds of age for the entitlement programs or poverty for the means-tested welfare programs generally have lower use rates and consume a lower dollar value relative to native-born Americans.” Another report by a different libertarian think tank, the Niskanen Center, supported Cato’s conclusion: Low-income immigrants are less likely to use means-tested benefits like SNAP, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Immigration may even be a way for Trump to kickstart the economic growth he’s promised to deliver. A 2016 analysis by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that there are long-term economic benefits to immigration, with few downsides. Immigration doesn’t depress the wages of native-born workers, and while it does increase the pool of available labor, that trend is matched by another: Immigrants spend money, which in turn grows the economy. And if American birth rates continue to decline—last year marked a 30-year low—there’s even less reason to restrict immigration. Without immigrants to ensure America’s population growth, aging Americans could find themselves in need of a welfare state with too few taxpayers to support it.

The probable benefits to the welfare state aren’t the only or even the most important impact of immigration, as Alex Press recently noted at Vox, but it’s undeniable that an aging population of Boomers, Gen Xers, and eventually Millennials may find themselves reliant on a welfare system that lacks the tax base it needs to survive. This impending threat might not trouble the Trump administration, or Republicans who view welfare as a pernicious drain on public resources. But in fulfilling his promises to restrict immigration, Trump may sacrifice America’s economic health.