vox--2020-06-17--Imagining the nonviolent state

Imagining the nonviolent state

Officers of the state conduct a public lynching .
Cities erupt in protest , then in riots .
And then the state demands of its critics what it refuses to ask of itself — nonviolence .
This serves a dual purpose : It sets a bar for legitimate protest that few human beings can clear .
And it discredits the revolutionary teachings of nonviolence by coating them in hypocrisy and cynicism .
In Between the World and Me , Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls that the school year “ could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stories rang hollow , because the teachings were hollow .
“ How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned ?
” he asks .
Lodged within that question is the seed of a better world .
What if our society did not scorn those values ?
What if nonviolence wasn ’ t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless , but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state ?
To conceive of that world requires a fuller appreciation of nonviolence than most of us have been given @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of violence .
It is not a preference for order or lawfulness .
It is , Martin Luther King Jr. wrote , a bid to “ develop a sense of shame in the opponent , and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
” This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence : It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings .
It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another .
As such , it puts changing each other ’ s hearts at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation .
That its answers are radical and demanding does not make them untrue .
“ King thinks human beings are sacred , ” says Brandon Terry , a Harvard sociologist and co-author of a volume on King ’ s political philosophy .
“ We need , above all else , to avoid preventing them from changing for the better .
That ’ s what the whole ethos is about : trying to see in other people what we see in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-correction , and change.
” Nonviolence was , in King ’ s time , and in Gandhi ’ s time , a weapon deployed against the state .
That anyone , anywhere , was willing to offer their broken body as the crucible for their oppressor ’ s change of heart borders on the mythic .
It is easy to speak of nonviolence .
It is annihilating to imagine it , to absorb what it asks of its practitioners , what it inflicts upon those they cherish .
There is a passage in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bus boycott , Stride Toward Freedom , in which he recalls that his father “ had reached the point where he could scarcely mention the protest without tears.
” His mother “ had taken to bed under doctor ’ s orders , and she was often ill after.
” King goes on to write , in a passage that cuts deeper as you sit with it longer , that “ no one can understand my conflict who has not looked into the eyes of those he loves , knowing that he has no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that leaves them tormented.
” That is what nonviolence demands .
That you torment not just yourself but those you love , in the hope that your antagonists will rediscover their humanity within your suffering .
That in order to change them , you risk yourself , your future , your family .
Nothing in modern life , with the possible exception of parenthood , is built atop such self-annihilating logic .
It is the truest radicalism , destabilizing to societies built on transaction and domination because it inverts their workings , lays @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ethic .
In response , the state has done to nonviolence what it does to all dangerous ideologies : domesticated it .
Nonviolence has been sanitized , shrunken to fit children ’ s books and national holidays .
Worse than that , it has been booby-trapped .
It is a demand the powerful make of the powerless , a taunt oppressors fling at the oppressed .
“ The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage , ” Coates told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage.
” Perhaps we should .
We are living amid a profound failure of governance .
America accounts for about 5 percent of global population but 25 percent of the global imprisoned population .
We cage more of our own than any other nation on earth .
But mass incarceration has not brought security .
There are more than 120 civilian-owned guns for every 100 American residents — guns we keep , in many cases , because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or both .
A 2010 study found that Americans were seven times likelier than residents of other high-income countries to be murdered , and 25 times likelier to be killed in a shooting .
Black communities face the heaviest toll from violent crime , yet the police are often seen as contributors to violence , disorder , and oppression : An ABC/Ipsos poll found 57 percent of black Americans supported the movement to defund the police .
“ Gandhi and King believed the state ’ s use of violence would be self-defeating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Karuna Mantena , who is writing a book on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence .
“ All it does is demoralize a population and lose support .
If you have a state with large numbers of people in jail , that has to constantly resort to violence , that isn ’ t a functional state or society.
” We are taught to think of King and Gandhi as carrying lessons for those protesting the state .
But the most profound — and usable — lessons of their philosophy are for those controlling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vocation , the German sociologist Max Weber wrote that the definitional feature of the state is its “ monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force ” — often shorthanded to schoolchildren , including me , as the monopoly on violence .
It is profound to put violence at the core of the successful state .
Institutions built on the control and use of violence will , themselves , be violent .
They will rely on their monopoly .
And so the American government does .
So state governments do .
Violence is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only thing the government does .
The US spends more on health care and education , at both the national and state levels , than on the military and police .
But the enforcement of law and the imposition of order are the bedrock of the state .
They predate the other functions and create the conditions for their emergence .
The federal income tax , for instance , was first levied to pay the costs of the Civil War .
We speak of the state as a singular entity , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans deal routinely with the clenched fist of the state .
Others experience the state ’ s kinetic powers as an abstraction , or a protection .
Being a young black man living in Queens during the stop-and-frisk years bore functionally no relationship to being a young white man living in Laguna Beach during the same period .
As MSNBC ’ s Chris Hayes argues in his book A Colony in a Nation , American policing is built atop “ two distinct regimes .
One ( the Nation ) is the kind of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; the other ( the Colony ) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.
” He goes on to write : The idea behind the state ’ s monopoly on legitimate force is that it keeps citizens safe : If the state uses legitimate force to suppress illegitimate violence , the result , in theory , is security and order .
The clarity of this theory often dissolves amid the racism , rage , and terrors that have shaped aspects of the state across much of America ’ s history .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state says it is , even when any child could recognize it as illegitimate violence .
Eric Garner was choked to death for the crime of selling loose cigarettes , extinguished while his killers were surrounded by cameras , and a grand jury chose not to charge the officer responsible .
But the argument of nonviolent theorists goes further than condemning the most horrific acts of brutality : To them , the state ’ s reliance on force is built upon a mistake ; its banal and even compassionate application is often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change the hearts of human beings through violence or imprisonment , you can only subdue or cage their bodies , incurring a bill of shame and resentment that will come due later .
It is a view worth taking seriously .
And it is a challenge to representatives of a violent state who invoke King ’ s words against protesters .
“ Most of [ the people rioting ] are young , and I just wonder who were their parents ?
” asked Rep. Thomas Massie ( R-KY ) .
“ What did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get educated to believe this an appropriate response ?
Contrast that to what Martin Luther King Jr. did.
” Even putting aside debates over whether violence and rioting is a legitimate political tactic in the face of state oppression , King ’ s actual views indict state officials like Massie .
We are all educated by the state and society in which we live , which is itself suffused with violence , where the strong dominate the weak and name their dominance order .
The government teaches lessons , and those lessons are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That violence begets violence is more than a dorm room slogan : It is a much-replicated research finding .
A study by the US Justice Department of 11- to 17-year-olds , for instance , found that being the victim of violence was an extraordinarily powerful predictor of subsequently being the perpetrator of violence .
“ Violent victimization , ” they concluded , “ is an important risk factor for subsequent violent offending.
” There is much the state does that is meant to protect citizens from violence , including policing , which really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s also much the state does that inflicts violence — and that is nowhere more true than in the state ’ s cramped , self-defeating definition of justice .
As Danielle Sered writes in Until We Reckon : Violence , Mass Incarceration , and a Road to Repair , decades of studies find four key predictors of violence in individuals : “ shame , isolation , exposure to violence , and a diminished ability to meet one ’ s economic needs.
” Those are also , as it happens , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a nation , we have developed a response to violence that is characterized by precisely what we know to be the main drivers of violence , ” she writes .
“ We should not be surprised , then , when the system produces exactly the results we would expect.
” Most studies show higher rates of recidivism among those sent to prison — prison , in this telling , is “ criminogenic.
” There is debate over whether these studies truly control for all variables , and a continuous hope for randomized experiments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but even in the most conservative read of the evidence , there is simply no reason to believe prison reduces the likelihood of committing future crimes when compared to more compassionate , rehabilitative alternatives .
But there is all the reason in the world to believe prison does terrible harm to those who are imprisoned , as well as to their families .
Reams of research show parental incarceration is an independent risk factor for children , leading to higher rates of poverty , homelessness , psychological problems , and criminal activity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unnecessary , and deeply harmful level of violence that the state inflicts on its own citizens , and their families and communities .
And America relies more heavily upon imprisonment than any other country on earth .
America has a particularly violent state , and it has a particularly violent society .
The one is often used to justify the other : The state must be violent — the police armed , the prison sentences long — because the society is violent .
But the nonviolent perspective would say the reverse : The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is violent .
If Massie reveres King so deeply , he should read his words more closely : “ Along the way of life , someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.
” Why shouldn ’ t that role fall to the state , with its superior resources , organization , training , and capacity to absorb harm ?
It is not , however , as easy as saying that if the state simply receded , leaving a vacuum where law enforcement currently sits , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn .
Nonviolence demands more than that .
Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence Nonviolence is a strange word : It describes itself as the absence of its opposite .
It thus presents as a void where violence should be , a narcotized forgiveness that is fine for saints to practice but irresponsible for policymakers to attempt .
It is too easy to imagine disorder , crime , and anarchy stepping into that void .
That is what we are taught to imagine .
“ Nonviolence is very often associated with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effective way to aggression or violence , ” says Judith Butler , the Berkeley social theorist and author of The Force of Nonviolence .
“ It ’ s understood in the popular imagination to be a place of internal equanimity or harmony.
” But that is not what nonviolence is , nor what its theorists and practitioners teach .
Gandhi was startlingly clear on this , in passages that defy our flattened excerpts of his teachings .
He loathed passivity and thought violence preferable .
“ If an individual or group of people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nonviolence , he wrote , “ retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best , though a long way off from the first .
Cowardice is impotence worse than violence.
” In the face of injustice , the absence of violence is not preferable to violence .
It is only nonviolence that is preferable to violence .
And it is only preferable because it is likelier to work .
But like anything worth doing , it is hard — arguably much harder than violence .
The soldier and the police officer accept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threat of being wounded , killed , or captured — but face it with the tools of violence : guns , batons , bombs , combat training .
Those tools work to subdue bodies , but they harden hearts .
The cry of police abolition is testament to that : it is a statement from the very people the police are meant to serve that they refuse to go on in community with the police as an institution .
Nonviolence accepts the same risks — being beaten , killed , or captured — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suffering , forgiveness , boycotts , dialogue , social services , spectacles that embarrass the violent by clarifying their cruelty .
It is , like violence , a path of confrontation and engagement , not passivity .
But unlike violence , its goal is community , not submission .
“ One day we shall win freedom , but not only for ourselves , ” King said .
“ We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process , and our victory will be a double @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the proper application of nonviolence required vast levels of trainings and self-discipline .
It is an incredibly demanding strategy , and one made harder if you add in the demands of politics , where voters often want to see those they loathe punished , those they fear dominated , those who ’ ve harmed them paid back double .
Nonviolence requires a restraint few individuals can muster and few societies have demonstrated .
And yet we have examples all around us .
This is frequently the path we walk with our children , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even with our coworkers .
And we do so because , in those relationships , we know we must keep walking the path together .
We do so because , in those relationships , we aim to change hearts and transform lives .
“ For King , the fundamental question of politics is how you go on in community with each other , ” says Harvard ’ s Terry .
“ Destroying your enemy makes it impossible to go on in community together .
But so does fear .
You need forms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the emotions that make it impossible to go on together.
” The state puts tremendous resources and effort into developing the technologies of violence and training its agents in their use .
It puts tremendous resources — both legal and political — into reducing the risk of violence to its own agents , even as it increases the risk of violence to those they meet .
The tragic shooting of Rayshard Brooks is testament to the costs of this strategy : If the agents of the state who ’ d been called to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wendy ’ s drive-through hadn ’ t been carrying tasers and guns , Brooks would be alive today .
The question nonviolence asks is what if the state put , at the least , equal energy and effort into developing tools of nonviolence and training agents in their use ?
What if it was more willing to absorb harm to itself than to inflict harm on others , precisely because that strategy would lead to more security , safety , and harmony for all ?
And what if it replaced its emphasis on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of forgiveness and change ?
This question does not need to start with the hardest cases — say , when the police are called to intervene in a live shootout .
The vast majority of police calls are to nonviolent incidents .
What if the agents who responded to those calls were , themselves , trained in the tools of nonviolence : mediators , crisis counselors , accident report writers , or even police without guns , batons , or tear gas ?
We have successful pilots , like the Cahoots program in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are beginning to follow suit .
San Francisco Mayor London Breed , for instance , has announced a police reform road map in which police will no longer respond to non-criminal complaints .
And even in the cases where violence is ongoing , there may be space for nonviolent approaches .
What if cities convened respected elders in the community who were prepared to answers calls for intervention — is it possible that deploying a beloved local priest , or teacher , might calm a violent situation that badges , guns , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Patrick Skinner , a police officer in Savannah , Georgia , told me that he always asks trainees : “ If you didn ’ t have a badge and a gun , how would you handle that situation ?
Because I guarantee you , if you walk into that situation with your gun and badge out , you ’ ll use them.
” I am enough of a pessimist to believe there will always be some instances where armed agents of the state are needed to deploy force .
But we are nowhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , there is a vast field where nonviolent approaches could replace violent ones , and do so more effectively .
This approach could carry after the arrest , or conviction , too .
Our legal system is focused on punishment , mostly applied through incarceration .
What if , following the remarkable and potent work done in the restorative justice community , it was focused on the repair of harm ?
In restorative justice , the focus is not on what perpetrators have done but on what victims need .
In some cases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more often , it is answers , amends , the kind of visible transformation in a perpetrator that leads to a continued feeling of safety .
Sered , who directs the remarkable nonprofit Common Justice , tells the story of a man robbed at gunpoint .
Asked if he preferred imprisonment or a restorative justice program , he asked whether the perpetrator could get life without parole for the crime .
Told that he couldn ’ t , the man chose restorative justice .
“ If he can ’ t be gone forever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be changed , ” he said .
A meta-analysis of 84 evaluations of restorative justice programs focused on juveniles found better outcomes for both offenders and victims .
Another analysis of 22 studies examining particularly rigorous restorative justice programs concluded , “ restorative justice programs are a more effective method of improving victim and/or offender satisfaction , increasing offender compliance with restitution , and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared to more traditional criminal justice responses.
” The moral crisis neither begins nor ends within the criminal legal system .
King always @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poverty and economic despair .
“ In our society it is murder , psychologically , to deprive a man of a job or an income , ” he wrote .
“ You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist .
You are in a real way depriving him of life , liberty , and the pursuit of happiness , denying in his case the very creed of his society.
” And that violence is inflicted daily , and broadly .
Many of the communities targeted by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the communities that have borne the brunt of America ’ s history of economic violence , too .
The history of housing discrimination and credit availability — still ongoing today — speak to this reality .
As does our sparse social safety net .
The truth is that our system fails even those it claims to help Harvard economist Alberto Alesina , who died just a few weeks ago , was a central figure in the study of political economy , and one of his key findings was that America lacked a European-style @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the politics of building one toxic .
In a paper co-authored with Ed Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote , Alesina concluded that “ racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor , who are disproportionately black , unappealing to many voters.
” America is the richest nation in the world but has some of the highest poverty and inequality rates among rich nations .
That is a policy choice , made for the cruelest of reasons .
America ’ s approach to economic support has been unusually intent on separating the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poor , ” and the category of undeserving poor has been deeply racialized .
And so top political leaders , even today , worry that social services will become “ a hammock , ” as if being poor is ever easy , and theorize new and more baroque ways to test whether food stamps are used for the right foods , and make applying for benefits brutally difficult under the guise of rooting out fraud .
It was revealing , as the coronavirus began to shutter the economy , that so many had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That reflected those systems working as designed , but as soon as those working began to imperil the livelihoods of a broader swath of Americans , state governments rushed to repair them .
King understood this as both a form of violence unto itself and a spur to violence for those who are crushed beneath it .
And he was right .
We know , for instance , that Medicaid expansion leads to significant reductions in crime .
We know that SNAP benefits reduce crime .
We know that education reduces crime .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ increased crime .
A more compassionate state will create a less violent society .
There is a reason King saw the struggle for racial equity as intimately intertwined with the struggle for economic equity .
A state that sought to help its citizens flourish , to forgive and uplift them when they faltered , would build structures of economic support that were kindest to those who needed the most help , rather than treating them with suspicion , anger , and contempt , and looking for reasons to abandon them to hopelessness .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ piece , to be able to fully imagine the workings of a state that truly seeks to follow the ethos of nonviolence wherever it can .
A state that practices forgiveness , that seeks change , that pursues the harmony of community rather than the false peace of incarceration .
It is easy , of course , to imagine the difficulties and dangers of that path .
But let us not sugarcoat the harms of the path we have chosen instead : We are a violent society surrounded by a violent state , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its own than any country on earth , in which agents of the government slowly choke citizens to death while bystanders beg them to stop , leading to riots that the state then uses as an excuse to deploy yet more violence in the name of order .
It is time to ask a different question , find different answers , pursue better goals .
King , Gandhi , and others in their lineage are often seen as something between dreamers and martyrs .
Perhaps those descriptions are apt , but they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were realists .
They were clear about their ends , and the methods they embraced followed from the world they sought to build .
A world we should still seek to build .
“ The end is redemption and reconciliation , ” King wrote .
“ The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community , while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
” It is time for the lesson they taught to be learned .
Not by protesters , furious at the violence inflicted upon their own by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which should aspire to more than controlling the violence that can be inflicted upon its citizens .
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Officers of the state conduct a public lynching. Cities erupt in protest, then in riots. And then the state demands of its critics what it refuses to ask of itself — nonviolence. This serves a dual purpose: It sets a bar for legitimate protest that few human beings can clear. And it discredits the revolutionary teachings of nonviolence by coating them in hypocrisy and cynicism.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls that the school year “could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.” But the stories rang hollow, because the teachings were hollow. “How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned?” he asks.
Lodged within that question is the seed of a better world. What if our society did not scorn those values? What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?
To conceive of that world requires a fuller appreciation of nonviolence than most of us have been given. Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence. It is not a preference for order or lawfulness. It is, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, a bid to “develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.”
This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence: It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings. It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another. As such, it puts changing each other’s hearts at the center of political action, and then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation. That its answers are radical and demanding does not make them untrue.
“King thinks human beings are sacred,” says Brandon Terry, a Harvard sociologist and co-author of a volume on King’s political philosophy. “We need, above all else, to avoid preventing them from changing for the better. That’s what the whole ethos is about: trying to see in other people what we see in ourselves — the capacity for growth, self-correction, and change.”
Nonviolence was, in King’s time, and in Gandhi’s time, a weapon deployed against the state. That anyone, anywhere, was willing to offer their broken body as the crucible for their oppressor’s change of heart borders on the mythic. It is easy to speak of nonviolence. It is annihilating to imagine it, to absorb what it asks of its practitioners, what it inflicts upon those they cherish.
There is a passage in King’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, in which he recalls that his father “had reached the point where he could scarcely mention the protest without tears.” His mother “had taken to bed under doctor’s orders, and she was often ill after.” King goes on to write, in a passage that cuts deeper as you sit with it longer, that “no one can understand my conflict who has not looked into the eyes of those he loves, knowing that he has no alternative but to take a dangerous stand that leaves them tormented.”
That is what nonviolence demands. That you torment not just yourself but those you love, in the hope that your antagonists will rediscover their humanity within your suffering. That in order to change them, you risk yourself, your future, your family. Nothing in modern life, with the possible exception of parenthood, is built atop such self-annihilating logic. It is the truest radicalism, destabilizing to societies built on transaction and domination because it inverts their workings, lays bare their weaknesses, dissolves their core ethic.
In response, the state has done to nonviolence what it does to all dangerous ideologies: domesticated it. Nonviolence has been sanitized, shrunken to fit children’s books and national holidays. Worse than that, it has been booby-trapped. It is a demand the powerful make of the powerless, a taunt oppressors fling at the oppressed.
“The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage,” Coates told me, “whereas, we don’t call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage.”
Perhaps we should. We are living amid a profound failure of governance. America accounts for about 5 percent of global population but 25 percent of the global imprisoned population. We cage more of our own than any other nation on earth. But mass incarceration has not brought security. There are more than 120 civilian-owned guns for every 100 American residents — guns we keep, in many cases, because we fear our government, our neighbors, or both. A 2010 study found that Americans were seven times likelier than residents of other high-income countries to be murdered, and 25 times likelier to be killed in a shooting. Black communities face the heaviest toll from violent crime, yet the police are often seen as contributors to violence, disorder, and oppression: An ABC/Ipsos poll found 57 percent of black Americans supported the movement to defund the police.
“Gandhi and King believed the state’s use of violence would be self-defeating,” says Columbia University political scientist Karuna Mantena, who is writing a book on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence. “All it does is demoralize a population and lose support. If you have a state with large numbers of people in jail, that has to constantly resort to violence, that isn’t a functional state or society.”
We are taught to think of King and Gandhi as carrying lessons for those protesting the state. But the most profound — and usable — lessons of their philosophy are for those controlling the state.
A monopoly on violence
In Politics as a Vocation, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote that the definitional feature of the state is its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” — often shorthanded to schoolchildren, including me, as the monopoly on violence. It is profound to put violence at the core of the successful state. Institutions built on the control and use of violence will, themselves, be violent. They will rely on their monopoly. And so the American government does. So state governments do.
Violence is not, to be clear, the only thing the government does. The US spends more on health care and education, at both the national and state levels, than on the military and police. But the enforcement of law and the imposition of order are the bedrock of the state. They predate the other functions and create the conditions for their emergence. The federal income tax, for instance, was first levied to pay the costs of the Civil War.
We speak of the state as a singular entity, but it is not a singular experience. Some Americans deal routinely with the clenched fist of the state. Others experience the state’s kinetic powers as an abstraction, or a protection. Being a young black man living in Queens during the stop-and-frisk years bore functionally no relationship to being a young white man living in Laguna Beach during the same period. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argues in his book A Colony in a Nation, American policing is built atop “two distinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.” He goes on to write:
If you live in the Nation, the criminal justice system functions like your laptop’s operating system, quietly humming in the background, doing what it needs to do to allow you to be your most efficient, functional self. In the Colony, the system functions like a computer virus: it intrudes constantly, it interrupts your life at the most inconvenient times, and it does this as a matter of course. The disruption itself is normal. In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty. Police officers tasked with keeping these two realms separate intuitively grasp of the contours of this divide: as one Baltimore police sergeant instructed his officers, “Do not treat criminals like citizens.”
The idea behind the state’s monopoly on legitimate force is that it keeps citizens safe: If the state uses legitimate force to suppress illegitimate violence, the result, in theory, is security and order. The clarity of this theory often dissolves amid the racism, rage, and terrors that have shaped aspects of the state across much of America’s history. Too often, legitimate force is whatever the state says it is, even when any child could recognize it as illegitimate violence. Eric Garner was choked to death for the crime of selling loose cigarettes, extinguished while his killers were surrounded by cameras, and a grand jury chose not to charge the officer responsible.
But the argument of nonviolent theorists goes further than condemning the most horrific acts of brutality: To them, the state’s reliance on force is built upon a mistake; its banal and even compassionate application is often a tragic error. You cannot change the hearts of human beings through violence or imprisonment, you can only subdue or cage their bodies, incurring a bill of shame and resentment that will come due later. It is a view worth taking seriously. And it is a challenge to representatives of a violent state who invoke King’s words against protesters.
“Most of [the people rioting] are young, and I just wonder who were their parents?” asked Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). “What did they teach them? How did they get educated to believe this an appropriate response? Contrast that to what Martin Luther King Jr. did.”
Even putting aside debates over whether violence and rioting is a legitimate political tactic in the face of state oppression, King’s actual views indict state officials like Massie. We are all educated by the state and society in which we live, which is itself suffused with violence, where the strong dominate the weak and name their dominance order. The government teaches lessons, and those lessons are learned. As King put it:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
That violence begets violence is more than a dorm room slogan: It is a much-replicated research finding. A study by the US Justice Department of 11- to 17-year-olds, for instance, found that being the victim of violence was an extraordinarily powerful predictor of subsequently being the perpetrator of violence. “Violent victimization,” they concluded, “is an important risk factor for subsequent violent offending.”
There is much the state does that is meant to protect citizens from violence, including policing, which really does work to reduce crime. But there’s also much the state does that inflicts violence — and that is nowhere more true than in the state’s cramped, self-defeating definition of justice. As Danielle Sered writes in Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, decades of studies find four key predictors of violence in individuals: “shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs.” Those are also, as it happens, the definitional features of prison. “As a nation, we have developed a response to violence that is characterized by precisely what we know to be the main drivers of violence,” she writes. “We should not be surprised, then, when the system produces exactly the results we would expect.”
Most studies show higher rates of recidivism among those sent to prison — prison, in this telling, is “criminogenic.” There is debate over whether these studies truly control for all variables, and a continuous hope for randomized experiments that would settle the question more conclusively, but even in the most conservative read of the evidence, there is simply no reason to believe prison reduces the likelihood of committing future crimes when compared to more compassionate, rehabilitative alternatives.
But there is all the reason in the world to believe prison does terrible harm to those who are imprisoned, as well as to their families. Reams of research show parental incarceration is an independent risk factor for children, leading to higher rates of poverty, homelessness, psychological problems, and criminal activity. Mass incarceration represents an extraordinary, unnecessary, and deeply harmful level of violence that the state inflicts on its own citizens, and their families and communities. And America relies more heavily upon imprisonment than any other country on earth.
America has a particularly violent state, and it has a particularly violent society. The one is often used to justify the other: The state must be violent — the police armed, the prison sentences long — because the society is violent. But the nonviolent perspective would say the reverse: The society is violent partly because the state is violent.
If Massie reveres King so deeply, he should read his words more closely: “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.” Why shouldn’t that role fall to the state, with its superior resources, organization, training, and capacity to absorb harm?
It is not, however, as easy as saying that if the state simply receded, leaving a vacuum where law enforcement currently sits, that society would become less violent in turn. Nonviolence demands more than that.
Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence
Nonviolence is a strange word: It describes itself as the absence of its opposite. It thus presents as a void where violence should be, a narcotized forgiveness that is fine for saints to practice but irresponsible for policymakers to attempt. It is too easy to imagine disorder, crime, and anarchy stepping into that void. That is what we are taught to imagine.
“Nonviolence is very often associated with passivity and failing to respond in an effective way to aggression or violence,” says Judith Butler, the Berkeley social theorist and author of The Force of Nonviolence. “It’s understood in the popular imagination to be a place of internal equanimity or harmony.”
But that is not what nonviolence is, nor what its theorists and practitioners teach. Gandhi was startlingly clear on this, in passages that defy our flattened excerpts of his teachings. He loathed passivity and thought violence preferable. “If an individual or group of people are unable or unwilling to follow” nonviolence, he wrote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence worse than violence.”
In the face of injustice, the absence of violence is not preferable to violence. It is only nonviolence that is preferable to violence. And it is only preferable because it is likelier to work. But like anything worth doing, it is hard — arguably much harder than violence.
The soldier and the police officer accept a measure of daily risk — the threat of being wounded, killed, or captured — but face it with the tools of violence: guns, batons, bombs, combat training. Those tools work to subdue bodies, but they harden hearts. The cry of police abolition is testament to that: it is a statement from the very people the police are meant to serve that they refuse to go on in community with the police as an institution.
Nonviolence accepts the same risks — being beaten, killed, or captured — but deploys different tools in response: suffering, forgiveness, boycotts, dialogue, social services, spectacles that embarrass the violent by clarifying their cruelty. It is, like violence, a path of confrontation and engagement, not passivity. But unlike violence, its goal is community, not submission. “One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves,” King said. “We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
Both King and Gandhi believed the proper application of nonviolence required vast levels of trainings and self-discipline. It is an incredibly demanding strategy, and one made harder if you add in the demands of politics, where voters often want to see those they loathe punished, those they fear dominated, those who’ve harmed them paid back double. Nonviolence requires a restraint few individuals can muster and few societies have demonstrated. And yet we have examples all around us. This is frequently the path we walk with our children, with our parents, with our friends, even with our coworkers. And we do so because, in those relationships, we know we must keep walking the path together. We do so because, in those relationships, we aim to change hearts and transform lives.
“For King, the fundamental question of politics is how you go on in community with each other,” says Harvard’s Terry. “Destroying your enemy makes it impossible to go on in community together. But so does fear. You need forms of politics that allow you to avoid the emotions that make it impossible to go on together.”
The state puts tremendous resources and effort into developing the technologies of violence and training its agents in their use. It puts tremendous resources — both legal and political — into reducing the risk of violence to its own agents, even as it increases the risk of violence to those they meet. The tragic shooting of Rayshard Brooks is testament to the costs of this strategy: If the agents of the state who’d been called to respond to a man sleeping in a Wendy’s drive-through hadn’t been carrying tasers and guns, Brooks would be alive today.
The question nonviolence asks is what if the state put, at the least, equal energy and effort into developing tools of nonviolence and training agents in their use? What if it was more willing to absorb harm to itself than to inflict harm on others, precisely because that strategy would lead to more security, safety, and harmony for all? And what if it replaced its emphasis on punishment and reprisal with a courageous pursuit of forgiveness and change?
This question does not need to start with the hardest cases — say, when the police are called to intervene in a live shootout. The vast majority of police calls are to nonviolent incidents. What if the agents who responded to those calls were, themselves, trained in the tools of nonviolence: mediators, crisis counselors, accident report writers, or even police without guns, batons, or tear gas? We have successful pilots, like the Cahoots program in Eugene, Oregon, and other cities are beginning to follow suit. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, for instance, has announced a police reform road map in which police will no longer respond to non-criminal complaints.
And even in the cases where violence is ongoing, there may be space for nonviolent approaches. What if cities convened respected elders in the community who were prepared to answers calls for intervention — is it possible that deploying a beloved local priest, or teacher, might calm a violent situation that badges, guns, and shouted demands for compliance would escalate?
Patrick Skinner, a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, told me that he always asks trainees: “If you didn’t have a badge and a gun, how would you handle that situation? Because I guarantee you, if you walk into that situation with your gun and badge out, you’ll use them.”
I am enough of a pessimist to believe there will always be some instances where armed agents of the state are needed to deploy force. But we are nowhere near discovering that final boundary. Today, there is a vast field where nonviolent approaches could replace violent ones, and do so more effectively.
This approach could carry after the arrest, or conviction, too. Our legal system is focused on punishment, mostly applied through incarceration. What if, following the remarkable and potent work done in the restorative justice community, it was focused on the repair of harm?
In restorative justice, the focus is not on what perpetrators have done but on what victims need. In some cases, that is imprisonment. But far more often, it is answers, amends, the kind of visible transformation in a perpetrator that leads to a continued feeling of safety. Sered, who directs the remarkable nonprofit Common Justice, tells the story of a man robbed at gunpoint. Asked if he preferred imprisonment or a restorative justice program, he asked whether the perpetrator could get life without parole for the crime. Told that he couldn’t, the man chose restorative justice. “If he can’t be gone forever, then I’d rather he be changed,” he said.
A meta-analysis of 84 evaluations of restorative justice programs focused on juveniles found better outcomes for both offenders and victims. Another analysis of 22 studies examining particularly rigorous restorative justice programs concluded, “restorative justice programs are a more effective method of improving victim and/or offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with restitution, and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared to more traditional criminal justice responses.”
The moral crisis neither begins nor ends within the criminal legal system. King always saw crime and violence as intertwined with poverty and economic despair. “In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income,” he wrote. “You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.” And that violence is inflicted daily, and broadly.
Many of the communities targeted by “law and order” policies are the communities that have borne the brunt of America’s history of economic violence, too. The history of housing discrimination and credit availability — still ongoing today — speak to this reality. As does our sparse social safety net.
The truth is that our system fails even those it claims to help
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died just a few weeks ago, was a central figure in the study of political economy, and one of his key findings was that America lacked a European-style social safety net because racism had rendered the politics of building one toxic. In a paper co-authored with Ed Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, Alesina concluded that “racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” America is the richest nation in the world but has some of the highest poverty and inequality rates among rich nations. That is a policy choice, made for the cruelest of reasons.
America’s approach to economic support has been unusually intent on separating the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving poor,” and the category of undeserving poor has been deeply racialized. And so top political leaders, even today, worry that social services will become “a hammock,” as if being poor is ever easy, and theorize new and more baroque ways to test whether food stamps are used for the right foods, and make applying for benefits brutally difficult under the guise of rooting out fraud. It was revealing, as the coronavirus began to shutter the economy, that so many had so much trouble accessing unemployment insurance. That reflected those systems working as designed, but as soon as those working began to imperil the livelihoods of a broader swath of Americans, state governments rushed to repair them.
King understood this as both a form of violence unto itself and a spur to violence for those who are crushed beneath it. And he was right. We know, for instance, that Medicaid expansion leads to significant reductions in crime. We know that SNAP benefits reduce crime. We know that education reduces crime. There is evidence that restricting welfare benefits increased crime. A more compassionate state will create a less violent society. There is a reason King saw the struggle for racial equity as intimately intertwined with the struggle for economic equity. A state that sought to help its citizens flourish, to forgive and uplift them when they faltered, would build structures of economic support that were kindest to those who needed the most help, rather than treating them with suspicion, anger, and contempt, and looking for reasons to abandon them to hopelessness.
I will not pretend, in this piece, to be able to fully imagine the workings of a state that truly seeks to follow the ethos of nonviolence wherever it can. A state that practices forgiveness, that seeks change, that pursues the harmony of community rather than the false peace of incarceration. It is easy, of course, to imagine the difficulties and dangers of that path. But let us not sugarcoat the harms of the path we have chosen instead: We are a violent society surrounded by a violent state, a country that locks up more of its own than any country on earth, in which agents of the government slowly choke citizens to death while bystanders beg them to stop, leading to riots that the state then uses as an excuse to deploy yet more violence in the name of order. It is time to ask a different question, find different answers, pursue better goals.
King, Gandhi, and others in their lineage are often seen as something between dreamers and martyrs. Perhaps those descriptions are apt, but they were more than that, too: They were realists. They were clear about their ends, and the methods they embraced followed from the world they sought to build. A world we should still seek to build.
“The end is redemption and reconciliation,” King wrote. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”
It is time for the lesson they taught to be learned. Not by protesters, furious at the violence inflicted upon their own by the state, but by the state itself, which should aspire to more than controlling the violence that can be inflicted upon its citizens.


vox--2020-06-16--Facebook still won’t take down politicians’ misleading posts, but it’s trying to register 4 million

Facebook still won’t take down politicians’ misleading posts, but it’s trying to register 4 million new voters

After deflecting criticism that it is not doing enough to stop the spread of political misinformation , Facebook says it ’ s expanding its efforts to get people to vote in the 2020 US presidential elections .
Starting in July and running through November , the company will begin reminding US users to register to vote with a message at the top of their Facebook and Instagram feeds .
It will also point users to a new Voting Information Center that will tell people where and how they can vote in their geographic area , and it will surface verified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election authorities .
The company plans to show this Voting Information Center to 160 million people in total , and aims to help 4 million Americans register to vote — that ’ s twice the number of voters the company says it helped register in the 2016 presidential elections , using similar efforts .
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced details about the plan , which he called the “ largest voting information campaign in American history ” in an op-ed in USA Today on Tuesday evening .
Zuckerberg ’ s announcement follows sharp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advocates , and some of his own employees for taking no action last month on President Donald Trump ’ s posts on the platform that shared misleading information about voting by mail , falsely stating that the state of California will send mail-in ballots to “ anyone living in the state , no matter who they are or how they got there ” ( in fact , California only sends ballots to registered voters ) and that this would lead to “ a Rigged Election.
” While Facebook left Trump ’ s post @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twitter labeled an identical post on its platform as containing “ potentially misleading information.
” Zuckerberg seemed to acknowledge recent criticism for his handling of Trump ’ s posts in his recent op-ed , and argued that encouraging people to vote was a better course of action than moderating politicians ’ posts .
“ Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content , ” wrote Zuckerberg .
“ We have rules against speech that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voting , and no one is exempt from them .
But accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying , even if we viscerally dislike what they say .
Ultimately , I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting , and I believe we should trust voters to make judgements for themselves.
” Internally , some Facebook employees have been calling on Zuckerberg to take a middle-ground approach rather than simply leaving up or taking down controversial posts by politicians .
Instead , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ non-binary ” action that would label those posts as misleading or contentious , similar to what Twitter did with Trump ’ s mail-in ballot statements in May .
Facebook did not respond to a request for follow-up questions about the voter information center in time for publication .
Here ’ s what the reminder to vote and the Voting Information Center will look like on Facebook and Instagram , respectively : The company is also giving people the option to turn off political ads on their feed , following the company ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how many of those ads they see .
Despite public debate and its competitors ’ changing positions , Facebook allows politicians to lie in advertisements on its platform , arguing that it would amount to censorship .
Considering Zuckerberg ’ s longstanding ethos that Facebook should not be an “ arbiter of truth ” on contentious political speech , his decision not to intervene with world leaders on controversial posts about voting , but instead surface more seemingly objective information , makes sense .
The issue for Facebook is that this approach is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politicians , and even the company ’ s own social media competitors .
Zuckerberg ’ s efforts to register more voters likely won ’ t appease critics who argue that the company still isn ’ t doing enough to mitigate the harm that political misinformation on social media can inflict on the democratic process .

After deflecting criticism that it is not doing enough to stop the spread of political misinformation, Facebook says it’s expanding its efforts to get people to vote in the 2020 US presidential election.
Starting in July and running through November, the company will begin reminding US users to register to vote with a message at the top of their Facebook and Instagram feeds. It will also point users to a new Voting Information Center that will tell people where and how they can vote in their geographic area, and it will surface verified posts from state election officials and local election authorities. The company plans to show this Voting Information Center to 160 million people in total and aims to help 4 million Americans register to vote — that’s twice the number of voters the company says it helped register in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, using similar efforts. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced details about the plan, which he called the “largest voting information campaign in American history,” in an op-ed in USA Today on Tuesday evening.
Zuckerberg’s announcement follows sharp criticism from Democratic politicians, civil rights advocates, and some of his own employees for taking no action last month on President Donald Trump’s posts on the platform that shared misleading information about voting-by-mail, falsely asserting that the state of California will send mail-in ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” (in fact, California only sends ballots to registered voters) and that this would lead to “a Rigged Election.” While Facebook left Trump’s post up as-is, Facebook’s competitor Twitter labeled an identical post on its platform as containing “potentially misleading information.”
Zuckerberg seemed to acknowledge recent criticism for his handling of Trump’s posts in his recent op-ed and argued that encouraging people to vote was a better course of action than moderating politicians’ posts.
“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” wrote Zuckerberg. “We have rules against speech that will cause imminent physical harm or suppress voting, and no one is exempt from them. But accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying, even if we viscerally dislike what they say. Ultimately, I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves.”
Internally, some Facebook employees have been calling on Zuckerberg to take a middle-ground approach rather than simply leaving up or taking down controversial posts by politicians. Instead, they want Facebook to consider a “non-binary” action that would label those posts as misleading or contentious, similar to what Twitter did with Trump’s mail-in ballot statements in May.
Facebook did not respond to a request to answer follow-up questions about the voter information center in time for publication.
Here’s what the reminder to vote and the Voting Information Center will look like on Facebook and Instagram, respectively:
The company is also giving people the option to turn off political ads on their feed, following the company’s move in January to let people limit how many of those ads they see. Despite public debate and its competitors’ changing positions, Facebook allows politicians to lie in advertisements on its platform, arguing that limiting them would amount to censorship.
Considering Zuckerberg’s long-standing ethos that Facebook should not be an “arbiter of truth” on contentious political speech, his decision not to intervene with world leaders on controversial posts about voting but instead surface more seemingly objective information makes sense. The issue for Facebook is that this approach is increasingly scrutinized by the public, politicians, and even the company’s own social media competitors. Zuckerberg’s efforts to register more voters likely won’t appease critics who argue that the company still isn’t doing enough to mitigate the harm that political misinformation on social media can inflict on the democratic process.


vox--2020-06-17--The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton’s forthcoming book

Share All sharing options for : The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton ’ s forthcoming book John Bolton is publishing a book that recounts his tenure as President Donald Trump ’ s national security adviser .
The Trump administration on Tuesday sued to delay its release , a week before it was set to be published .
So , naturally , major news outlets have now “ obtained ” the book and are releasing the most explosive passages from the memoir .
Bolton ’ s book , The Room Where It Happened , contains numerous remarkable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did during his interactions with foreign leaders — none of which , it ’ s worth remembering , Bolton felt compelled to speak publicly about in the months since he left the administration or to testify about unless he was formally subpoenaed during the Senate ’ s impeachment trial .
But now that he has a book to sell , the longtime Republican foreign policy hand seems ready to dish .
In the book , Bolton — who , again , declined to voluntarily testify under oath during the impeachment trial because the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accuses the Democrat-led House of Representatives of committing “ impeachment malpractice ” by not going beyond Trump ’ s dealings with Ukraine to investigate other disturbing actions of Trump ’ s .
Like , for example , Bolton ’ s claim that Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping for electoral help and other instances where Trump sought to use his power for personal or political gain .
( Vox hasn ’ t seen the book in its entirety , so we are relying on reports and excerpts published elsewhere . )
As national @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the room where stuff happened , and as such was privy to Trump ’ s conversations with world leaders , maybe more than most .
Which lends some degree of credibility to his claims .
At the same time , this is Bolton ’ s account , and it ’ s not like he and Trump parted on great terms .
Bolton , a conservative hawk , didn ’ t always seem like the right fit for Trump ’ s more isolationist foreign policy approach , and the two clashed over issues like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start wars .
So some of Bolton ’ s claims may be self-serving or tough to verify .
Of course , verifying his claims might have been easier had Bolton testified before Congress under threat of perjury .
Acknowledging that there are no heroes here , below are some of the wildest and most disturbing tidbits from Bolton ’ s memoir .
Read them , and imagine an alternate universe where Bolton ’ s mustache is moving up and down as he delivers an opening statement before the House Intelligence Committee in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helps .
Trump asked Xi for help with his electoral prospects According to Bolton , President Trump brought up his reelection prospects with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Japan .
Xi mentioned China ’ s critics in the US , and according to Bolton , Trump thought the Chinese leader meant Democrats .
So Trump apparently thought he had an opportunity .
Of course , Trump had already publicly asked China to investigate his political rivals back when he was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do the same , so it ’ s not actually as bad as the other thing that allegedly happened in this meeting .
Trump told Xi to go ahead with the internment of Muslims in China According to the Washington Post , Bolton writes that at the same meeting between Trump and Xi at the G20 , the Chinese leader defended the detention of 1 million Uighurs in internment camps .
“ According to our interpreter , ” Bolton wrote , “ Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right thing to do.
” The meeting was attended only by the two leaders and their interpreters , so Bolton is relying on what the interpreter told him after the meeting .
The Uighurs , a Muslim population in China ’ s Xinjiang province , have been forced into so-called “ re-education camps , ” characterized by reports of torture and political indoctrination .
A Pentagon official has described them as “ concentration camps.
” Beijing has imposed repressive policies on the group and has Uighurs closely surveilled .
It is a clear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one Trump has at least condemned publicly .
Bolton ’ s book said Trump opposed putting sanctions on China for the issue because of trade negotiations , according to the Wall Street Journal .
On Wednesday , the same day as Bolton ’ s book was released , Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 , according to the White House .
According to Bolton , Trump was apparently surprised that the United Kingdom — one of America ’ s closest allies — had nuclear weapons during a meeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2018 .
“ Oh , are you a nuclear power ?
” Trump said , according to Bolton .
The UK was the third country to acquire the nuclear bomb , following the US and the Soviet Union .
It conducted its first successful test of an atomic bomb in 1952 .
Bolton writes that Trump once asked his then-Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia .
Maybe this is more forgivable when you consider Bolton also claims that at an August 2018 White House meeting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ really part of the United States ’ and requested military options to invade the South American country and keep it under U.S. control , ” the Wall Street Journal writes .
Trump also apparently said invading Venezuela would be “ cool , ” according to the Washington Post ’ s account of Bolton ’ s book .
Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO with a dramatic made-for-TV scene Bolton claims that during a NATO summit in 2018 , Trump decided he had had enough with the historic alliance and wanted out : Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claims in the book that Trump told China ’ s Xi that Americans wanted him to get rid of the two-term limit imposed on presidents by the US Constitution .
Bolton also claims that Trump , apparently mad about leaks to the media coming from inside his administration , complained in 2019 that journalists should be jailed .
Bolton says Trump said : “ These people should be executed .
They are scumbags.
” Meddling in Ukraine , yes , but so many other things Bolton ’ s book , according to excerpts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ security adviser saw the military aid to Ukraine as tied to investigations involving Hunter Biden , former vice president Joe Biden ’ s son , and Hillary Clinton .
Per the Times : Bolton also claimed that Trump was fine meddling in US law enforcement if it meant helping out his buddy , Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan .
Per the Washington Post : Bolton says he warned Attorney General Bill Barr about Trump ’ s behavior at a meeting , where Barr expressed concerns about the “ appearances ” of Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Bolton , too , says that the House , by just focusing on Ukraine , committed “ impeachment malpractice , ” because if they focused elsewhere , Bolton claims “ there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that ‘ high crimes and misdemeanors ’ had been perpetrated.
” If only there were someone who could have changed that .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
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Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
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Share All sharing options for: The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton’s forthcoming book
John Bolton is publishing a book that recounts his tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. The Trump administration on Tuesday sued to delay its release, a week before it was set to be published. So, naturally, major news outlets have now “obtained” the book and are releasing the most explosive passages from the memoir.
And oh, boy.
Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, contains numerous remarkable allegations about things President Trump said and did during his interactions with foreign leaders — none of which, it’s worth remembering, Bolton felt compelled to speak publicly about in the months since he left the administration or to testify about unless he was formally subpoenaed during the Senate’s impeachment trial.
But now that he has a book to sell, the longtime Republican foreign policy hand seems ready to dish.
In the book, Bolton — who, again, declined to voluntarily testify under oath during the impeachment trial because the White House told him not to — accuses the Democrat-led House of Representatives of committing “impeachment malpractice” by not going beyond Trump’s dealings with Ukraine to investigate other disturbing actions of Trump’s. Like, for example, Bolton’s claim that Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping for electoral help and other instances where Trump sought to use his power for personal or political gain. (Vox hasn’t seen the book in its entirety, so we are relying on reports and excerpts published elsewhere.)
As national security adviser, Bolton was definitely in the room where stuff happened, and as such was privy to Trump’s conversations with world leaders, maybe more than most. Which lends some degree of credibility to his claims.
At the same time, this is Bolton’s account, and it’s not like he and Trump parted on great terms. Bolton, a conservative hawk, didn’t always seem like the right fit for Trump’s more isolationist foreign policy approach, and the two clashed over issues like North Korea and not being able to start wars. So some of Bolton’s claims may be self-serving or tough to verify.
Of course, verifying his claims might have been easier had Bolton testified before Congress under threat of perjury.
Acknowledging that there are no heroes here, below are some of the wildest and most disturbing tidbits from Bolton’s memoir. Read them, and imagine an alternate universe where Bolton’s mustache is moving up and down as he delivers an opening statement before the House Intelligence Committee in the fall of 2019. It kind of helps.
Trump asked Xi for help with his electoral prospects
According to Bolton, President Trump brought up his reelection prospects with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Japan. Xi mentioned China’s critics in the US, and according to Bolton, Trump thought the Chinese leader meant Democrats. So Trump apparently thought he had an opportunity.
Per the Washington Post:
“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” Bolton writes. “He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”
Of course, Trump had already publicly asked China to investigate his political rivals back when he was already being investigated for pressuring Ukraine to do the same, so it’s not actually as bad as the other thing that allegedly happened in this meeting.
Trump told Xi to go ahead with the internment of Muslims in China
According to the Washington Post, Bolton writes that at the same meeting between Trump and Xi at the G20, the Chinese leader defended the detention of 1 million Uighurs in internment camps.
“According to our interpreter,” Bolton wrote, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” The meeting was attended only by the two leaders and their interpreters, so Bolton is relying on what the interpreter told him after the meeting.
The Uighurs, a Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang province, have been forced into so-called “re-education camps,” characterized by reports of torture and political indoctrination. A Pentagon official has described them as “concentration camps.”
Beijing has imposed repressive policies on the group and has Uighurs closely surveilled. It is a clear violation of human rights and ethnic cleansing, one Trump has at least condemned publicly.
Bolton’s book said Trump opposed putting sanctions on China for the issue because of trade negotiations, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Wednesday, the same day as Bolton’s book was released, Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, according to the White House.
Trump learns about nukes ...
According to Bolton, Trump was apparently surprised that the United Kingdom — one of America’s closest allies — had nuclear weapons during a meeting with former British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018. “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Trump said, according to Bolton.
The UK was the third country to acquire the nuclear bomb, following the US and the Soviet Union. It conducted its first successful test of an atomic bomb in 1952.
So, a while ago.
... and about geography
Bolton writes that Trump once asked his then-Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia.
Maybe this is more forgivable when you consider Bolton also claims that at an August 2018 White House meeting, Trump “asserted that Venezuela was ‘really part of the United States’ and requested military options to invade the South American country and keep it under U.S. control,” the Wall Street Journal writes.
Trump also apparently said invading Venezuela would be “cool,” according to the Washington Post’s account of Bolton’s book.
Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO with a dramatic made-for-TV scene
Bolton claims that during a NATO summit in 2018, Trump decided he had had enough with the historic alliance and wanted out:
“We will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid],” read a message Trump dictated to Bolton. Bolton tried to stop Trump from delivering the threat, and became even more alarmed when Trump told him, “Do you want to do something historic?”
Trump had some issues with the Constitution
Bolton claims in the book that Trump told China’s Xi that Americans wanted him to get rid of the two-term limit imposed on presidents by the US Constitution.
Bolton also claims that Trump, apparently mad about leaks to the media coming from inside his administration, complained in 2019 that journalists should be jailed. Bolton says Trump said: “These people should be executed. They are scumbags.”
Meddling in Ukraine, yes, but so many other things
Bolton’s book, according to excerpts, also confirmed that the former national security adviser saw the military aid to Ukraine as tied to investigations involving Hunter Biden, former vice president Joe Biden’s son, and Hillary Clinton. Per the Times:
On Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.
Bolton also claimed that Trump was fine meddling in US law enforcement if it meant helping out his buddy, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Per the Washington Post:
“Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people,” Bolton writes.
Bolton says he warned Attorney General Bill Barr about Trump’s behavior at a meeting, where Barr expressed concerns about the “appearances” of Trump’s behavior, according to the Post.
Bolton, too, says that the House, by just focusing on Ukraine, committed “impeachment malpractice,” because if they focused elsewhere, Bolton claims “there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ had been perpetrated.”
If only there were someone who could have changed that.


vox--2020-06-17--Dexamethasone shows promise as a Covid-19 treatment

Scientists at Oxford University in the United Kingdom this week reported that a trial of the drug dexamethasone shows it may be the first treatment demonstrated to save the lives of Covid-19 patients .
Dexamethasone is a corticosteroid typically used to treat inflammation .
It ’ s cheap , as little as $ 1 per dose .
It ’ s also been around since the 1950s , is cleared for human use , and is available as a generic .
That makes it an ideal option to treat severe cases of Covid-19 , especially compared to more expensive , unproven @ @ @ @ @ @ @ team reported that a 6-milligram daily dose of dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in Covid-19 patients on ventilators and reduced deaths by one-fifth for patients receiving just oxygen support .
“ It ’ s a surprising result in a medication we have a lot of experience with , ” said Jeremy Faust , an attending physician in the Brigham and Women ’ s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School , who was not involved in the study .
“ It took me by surprise.
” Covid-19 has proven to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than 8 million cases and 445,000 deaths reported around the world as of June 17 .
But without a proven treatment or vaccine , health officials have been forced to resort to blunt , expensive tactics like shutting down businesses and stay-at-home orders .
Doctors have experimented with a variety of unproven drugs to treat the severely ill .
So a drug with some proof behind its efficacy is good progress .
Another drug , remdesivir , received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to treat Covid-19 based on early evidence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hospital stays among patients who recovered from the illness .
But dexamethasone is the first drug to reduce the number of fatalities from the virus .
“ This is an extremely welcome result , ” said Peter Horby , one of the lead investigators of the trial and a professor of emerging infectious disease at Oxford , in a statement .
“ The survival benefit is clear and large in those patients who are sick enough to require oxygen treatment , so dexamethasone should now become standard of care in these patients.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has already granted approval to the drug .
“ From today the standard treatment for COVID-19 will include dexamethasone , helping save thousands of lives while we deal with this terrible virus , ” UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement .
It ’ s also remarkable how quickly researchers obtained these results , going from planning the trial , recruiting , and testing to getting results in just a few months .
But there are some important caveats about this preliminary finding and how the results were presented .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ randomized controlled trial known as RECOVERY .
During the trial , 2,104 randomly selected Covid-19 patients received the drug and were compared to 4,321 random patients who received conventional therapies .
The likely mechanism is that dexamethasone modulates the immune system .
For people with severe complications from Covid-19 , the problem often is not from the virus itself , but collateral damage from the immune response .
White blood cells can go into a frenzy and start attacking healthy cells , causing more damage .
Covid-19 is also known to trigger a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ storm that can lead to severe inflammation throughout the body .
Since Covid-19 is a respiratory infection , these effects are often most severe in airways .
That can then lead to breathing difficulties that require the use of oxygen or ventilators .
At this late stage of the infection , tamping down the immune system can stop people from getting sicker and help them recover .
But at earlier stages in the infection or in less severe cases , dexamethasone didn ’ t seem to have much of an effect .
Researchers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who were not using breathing support .
Because it constrains the immune system , it could also backfire if prescribed in an early stage of a Covid-19 infection , leaving a patient vulnerable to the virus or other pathogens .
It ’ s only in severely ill patients that these tradeoffs may be worthwhile .
There are side effects too .
Dexamethasone may cause dizziness , an irregular heartbeat , and psychiatric problems like anxiety and suicidal ideation .
Doctors and other public health experts have also criticized the way in which researchers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instead of releasing them alongside a peer-reviewed paper or even a draft , they summarized the results in a press release .
The scientists behind the trial said that they wanted to get information about their results out as soon as possible , but without publishing their data , it ’ s impossible for other scientists to carefully review them .
Observers are puzzled why the research team didn ’ t include more robust information .
For instance , clinicians like Faust want to know about the demographics of the trial group , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and how the researchers set thresholds for severe illness .
Doctors need this information to understand how dexamethasone will play out in their own patients .
“ As an observer , it ’ s frustrating because if they have this piece of information available [ about lowered fatality rates from dexamethasone ] , there also a lot of other information they could also share , ” Faust said .
“ Right now , it ’ s impossible to know if I had a patient in front of me , whether the patient in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ described by this trial.
” While Covid-19 is rapidly spreading and the world is desperate for answers , hasty reporting of results can be misleading or dangerous .
Some preliminary Covid-19 research has been criticized for promoting results that were based on flawed methods , like a pair of serological surveys in California that found the virus was far more prevalent than anyone had reported before .
Even prestigious journals like the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have had to retract papers relating to treatments for Covid-19 .
Some public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States , promoted the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 based on flimsy preliminary studies .
Later research showed the drug at best did very little and at worst could actually kill more patients .
The Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine this week .
That ’ s why it ’ s so important to see the actual numbers and methodology behind the dexamethasone study .
“ It ’ s either a huge deal or a huge disappointment , ” Faust said .
The research @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make the data behind their findings available to researchers and government regulators as soon as possible .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Scientists at Oxford University in the United Kingdom this week reported that a trial of the drug dexamethasone shows it may be the first treatment demonstrated to save the lives of Covid-19 patients.
Dexamethasone is a corticosteroid typically used to treat inflammation. It’s cheap, as little as $1 per dose. It’s also been around since the 1950s, is cleared for human use, and is available as a generic. That makes it an ideal option to treat severe cases of Covid-19, especially compared to more expensive, unproven drugs still in testing.
The research team reported that a 6-milligram daily dose of dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in Covid-19 patients on ventilators and reduced deaths by one-fifth for patients receiving just oxygen support.
“It’s a surprising result in a medication we have a lot of experience with,” said Jeremy Faust, an attending physician in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. “It took me by surprise.”
Covid-19 has proven to be a fierce and deadly foe, with more than 8 million cases and 445,000 deaths reported around the world as of June 17. But without a proven treatment or vaccine, health officials have been forced to resort to blunt, expensive tactics like shutting down businesses and stay-at-home orders. Doctors have experimented with a variety of unproven drugs to treat the severely ill. So a drug with some proof behind its efficacy is good progress.
Another drug, remdesivir, received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to treat Covid-19 based on early evidence that it could reduce the length of hospital stays among patients who recovered from the illness. But dexamethasone is the first drug to reduce the number of fatalities from the virus.
“This is an extremely welcome result,” said Peter Horby, one of the lead investigators of the trial and a professor of emerging infectious disease at Oxford, in a statement. “The survival benefit is clear and large in those patients who are sick enough to require oxygen treatment, so dexamethasone should now become standard of care in these patients.”
The UK’s National Health Service has already granted approval to the drug. “From today the standard treatment for COVID-19 will include dexamethasone, helping save thousands of lives while we deal with this terrible virus,” UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement.
It’s also remarkable how quickly researchers obtained these results, going from planning the trial, recruiting, and testing to getting results in just a few months.
This trial has moved at incredible speed:
First draft protocol - 10th March
First patient enrolled - 19th March.
First drug shown to be effective - 16th June
From hypothesis to evididence in 3 months!
Huge team effort across whole UK. — Martin Landray (@MartinLandray) June 16, 2020
But there are some important caveats about this preliminary finding and how the results were presented.
The dexamethasone study was part of a large randomized controlled trial known as RECOVERY. During the trial, 2,104 randomly selected Covid-19 patients received the drug and were compared to 4,321 random patients who received conventional therapies.
The likely mechanism is that dexamethasone modulates the immune system. For people with severe complications from Covid-19, the problem often is not from the virus itself, but collateral damage from the immune response. White blood cells can go into a frenzy and start attacking healthy cells, causing more damage. Covid-19 is also known to trigger a dangerous immune condition known as a cytokine storm that can lead to severe inflammation throughout the body.
Since Covid-19 is a respiratory infection, these effects are often most severe in airways. That can then lead to breathing difficulties that require the use of oxygen or ventilators.
At this late stage of the infection, tamping down the immune system can stop people from getting sicker and help them recover. But at earlier stages in the infection or in less severe cases, dexamethasone didn’t seem to have much of an effect. Researchers found it had no impact on patients who were not using breathing support.
Because it constrains the immune system, it could also backfire if prescribed in an early stage of a Covid-19 infection, leaving a patient vulnerable to the virus or other pathogens. It’s only in severely ill patients that these tradeoffs may be worthwhile.
There are side effects too. Dexamethasone may cause dizziness, an irregular heartbeat, and psychiatric problems like anxiety and suicidal ideation.
Doctors and other public health experts have also criticized the way in which researchers shared their results with the public.
It will be great news if dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, really does cut deaths by 1/3 in ventilated patients with COVID19, but after all the retractions and walk backs, it is unacceptable to tout study results by press release without releasing the paper. https://t.co/ZP5GVMUCW3 — Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) June 16, 2020
Instead of releasing them alongside a peer-reviewed paper or even a draft, they summarized the results in a press release. The scientists behind the trial said that they wanted to get information about their results out as soon as possible, but without publishing their data, it’s impossible for other scientists to carefully review them. Observers are puzzled why the research team didn’t include more robust information.
For instance, clinicians like Faust want to know about the demographics of the trial group, what medications those patients were using, and how the researchers set thresholds for severe illness. Doctors need this information to understand how dexamethasone will play out in their own patients.
“As an observer, it’s frustrating because if they have this piece of information available [about lowered fatality rates from dexamethasone], there also a lot of other information they could also share,” Faust said. “Right now, it’s impossible to know if I had a patient in front of me, whether the patient in front of me matches the typical patient described by this trial.”
The purpose of a scientific paper is to report data in an open way so the rest of the scientific community can reproduce the work and assess the robustness of the findings and methods. The purpose of a press release is to basically brag about your awesome study. — Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) June 16, 2020
While Covid-19 is rapidly spreading and the world is desperate for answers, hasty reporting of results can be misleading or dangerous. Some preliminary Covid-19 research has been criticized for promoting results that were based on flawed methods, like a pair of serological surveys in California that found the virus was far more prevalent than anyone had reported before. Even prestigious journals like the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have had to retract papers relating to treatments for Covid-19.
Some public officials, including the president of the United States, promoted the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 based on flimsy preliminary studies. Later research showed the drug at best did very little and at worst could actually kill more patients. The Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine this week.
That’s why it’s so important to see the actual numbers and methodology behind the dexamethasone study. “It’s either a huge deal or a huge disappointment,” Faust said.
The research team behind the RECOVERY trial has promised to make the data behind their findings available to researchers and government regulators as soon as possible.


vox--2020-06-17--How to turn off political ads in your Facebook News Feed

Facebook recently announced that it is now letting users turn off political ads on both their Facebook and Instagram feeds .
Starting Wednesday , people will be able to turn off all social issue , electoral , or political ads from candidates , super PACs , or other organizations that have the “ Paid for by ” political disclaimer on them .
The new move seems to be a compromise to critics who think Facebook shouldn ’ t let politicians lie in ads ( Facebook largely allows this , arguing that moderating politicians ’ speech would amount to censorship ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ half-truths and blatant lies in political ads — but you don ’ t have to see these ads on your feed if you don ’ t want to .
Facebook has faced sustained criticism since the 2016 US presidential election that the company isn ’ t doing enough to limit political misinformation on its platform and , as a result , is hurting democracy .
Most recently , Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire from civil rights advocates and his own employees for not moderating a series of posts by President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by mail in California .
Facebook said it will be giving users more control over seeing political ads as part of a larger announcement defending how it handles politicians ’ controversial posts and its initiative to launch a Voting Information Center that aims to register 4 million users to vote ahead of the 2020 US presidential election .
Facebook ’ s new policy to let you ignore political ads is opt-in .
That means if you don ’ t want to see ads , you ’ ll have to follow a series of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can do that .
Note that this feature isn ’ t yet available for many users — it ’ s only starting to roll out today to some US users .
Facebook says all US users should have this option in the next few weeks .
If you prefer to watch a video that explains how to do this , you can see one here for Facebook and here for Instagram .
• In the Facebook app , tap the menu button ( three horizontal lines in the bottom right corner of your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pop-up menu , tap See fewer ads about this topic .
Or through a political ad in your Facebook feed • Pick any political ad you come across in your Facebook feed ( marked as “ Paid by ” a political campaign , candidate , or group ) .
• In the pop-up menu , tap See fewer ads about this topic .
• In the Instagram app , go to your profile .
• Press the menu button ( the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner ) .
Or through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ • Pick any political ad you come across in your Instagram feed ( marked as “ Paid by ” a political campaign , candidate , or group ) .
• Tap the Paid for by button .
• In the pop-up menu , tap See fewer ads like this .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Facebook recently announced that it is now letting users turn off political ads on both their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Starting Wednesday, people will be able to turn off all social issue, electoral, or political ads from candidates, super PACs, or other organizations that have the “Paid for by” political disclaimer on them. The new move seems to be a compromise to critics who think Facebook shouldn’t let politicians lie in ads (Facebook largely allows this, arguing that moderating politicians’ speech would amount to censorship). Now, politicians can still spread half-truths and blatant lies in political ads — but you don’t have to see these ads on your feed if you don’t want to.
Facebook has faced sustained criticism since the 2016 US presidential election that the company isn’t doing enough to limit political misinformation on its platform and, as a result, is hurting democracy. Most recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire from civil rights advocates and his own employees for not moderating a series of posts by President Trump that made false claims about voting by mail in California. Facebook said it will be giving users more control over seeing political ads as part of a larger announcement defending how it handles politicians’ controversial posts and its initiative to launch a Voting Information Center that aims to register 4 million users to vote ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
Facebook’s new policy to let you ignore political ads is opt-in. That means if you don’t want to see ads, you’ll have to follow a series of steps.
Here’s how you can do that. Note that this feature isn’t yet available for many users — it’s only starting to roll out today to some US users. Facebook says all US users should have this option in the next few weeks.
If you prefer to watch a video that explains how to do this, you can see one here for Facebook and here for Instagram.
Facebook
Through your Facebook app settings
In the Facebook app, tap the menu button (three horizontal lines in the bottom right corner of your News Feed). Tap the Settings button. Tap Ad Preferences > Ad Topics. In the pop-up menu, tap See fewer ads about this topic.
Or through a political ad in your Facebook feed
Pick any political ad you come across in your Facebook feed (marked as “Paid by” a political campaign, candidate, or group). Tap the Confirmed Organization button. In the pop-up menu, tap See fewer ads about this topic.
Instagram
Through your Instagram app settings
In the Instagram app, go to your profile. Press the menu button (the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner). Tap the Settings button > Ads > Topics Preferences. Tap Social Issues, Elections or Politics. Tap Save.
Or through a political ad in your Instagram feed