Michelle Goldberg

Max Berger is a Jewish social justice activist who has long been deeply involved in Jewish communal life. He’s the co-founder of IfNotNow, a group of American Jews devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and recently joined Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.

In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an anti-Semite. If you’ve been following the increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess which one.

That’s right, it was Gorka who called Berger an anti-Semite, for having once joined in an internet in-joke about a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas.” (Gorka’s tweet appears to have since been deleted.) It wasn’t the only time this month that Gorka accused a Jew of Jew-hating; he’s also charged the anti-Trump conservative writer Anne Applebaum with “standing with the anti-Semites,” demanding that she explain “how you justify this to the community.”

If this were just Gorka, you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.

Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Ilhan Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League — theAnti-Defamation League! — of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation — “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue” — at the Jewish civil rights organization.

Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana tweeted Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

It’s true that Omar has said things that were freighted with anti-Semitism, for which she has expressed regret. But it is grotesque to argue that that excuses racism against her, or that Trump’s taunts have anything to do with protecting Jews. This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu “your prime minister,” suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.

The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots — and those politically aligned with them — feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.

“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” Ben-Ami said.

It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-ilhan-omar.html" id="6611fe20-7eb1-3416-ac21-158070ebccb9">The New York Times</a>.

Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to one of Trump’s inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said, “For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite.”

Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields

This captures a pretty widespread feeling among Americans right now — consider all the women who mobilized for Democrats in the midterms — but it’s surprisingly rare to see it expressed in pop storytelling. Part of the dystopian character of Trump’s presidency is his ubiquity; he dominates the news cycle, late-night TV, and book publishing. Yet Trumpism has, with only a few exceptions, gone weirdly unprocessed by fiction, either written or filmed.

Perhaps that’s because people are desperate for a respite from Trump, or because the imagination can’t compete with the strangeness of reality. It means that while there’s an explosion of news stories about the current moment, there’s a lack of the sort of human tales that might help discombobulated Americans make sense of what we’re going through.

Sure, “Saturday Night Live” makes valiant attempts to parody Trump, but it’s hard to caricature a caricature. And there are shows coming out that seem at least obliquely inspired by Trump’s odiousness, like Ava DuVernay’s dramatic miniseries about the Central Park Five, a group of wrongly imprisoned teenage boys demonized by Trump, which debuts at the end of the month. But the feeling that makes otherwise sane people wonder if we’re all living in a computer simulation gone glitchy hasn’t yet been successfully channeled into any art that I’m aware of.

Except, that is, for “The Good Fight,” the only TV show that reflects what life under Trump feels like for many of us who abhor him. Its showrunners, the married couple Michelle and Robert King, have figured out how to alchemize our berserk era into entertainment. When historians look back at this ghastly moment — if there are still historians when it’s over — this fizzy, mordant cult series will likely be one of its richest artifacts. It’s a balm, a reminder, on days when I feel like I’m cracking up, that it’s really the world that’s gone crazy.

“It is therapeutic to be in the writers’ room with seven other writers who are incredibly smart and want to talk about the news in granular detail, and try to make sense of things,” Michelle King told me. Robert added, “We start every morning, before we even start talking about plot and character, just vomiting out the day’s news.”

There’s a character based on Milo Yiannopoulos, played by John Cameron Mitchell, and a mock version of “Pod Save America” called “America Goes Poddy.” The lawyers at Diane’s firm get their hands on the fabled pee tape, and, in scenes that pay homage to “All the President’s Men,” Diane receives information from a porn star who was impregnated by Trump and had an abortion. This season, the show has spliced animated musical shorts into every episode on subjects like Russian internet trolls, nondisclosure agreements and Roy Cohn.

“The Good Fight” is a spinoff of “The Good Wife,” the CBS drama about a lawyer, Alicia Florrick, who has to rebuild her life after her Democratic politician husband is caught with prostitutes. Diane, who was Alicia’s boss on the earlier show, is a glass-ceiling-breaking lawyer who keeps a framed picture of herself with Hillary Clinton. “In terms of making a show that reflects what people are feeling right now, we had the benefit of actually having created a character who deeply identified with Democratic causes,” Michelle King said.

Now in its third season, the series began with Diane in the dark looking stricken while watching Trump’s inauguration, and as his administration begins her life collapses. There are smart subplots on liberal racial hypocrisy and the social disruptions of technology, but much of “The Good Fight” deals with a glamorous, dignified liberal woman in late middle age being systematically unhinged by the Trump presidency.

Diane starts seeing the president everywhere. She has an affair with a guy from Antifa, microdoses on psilocybin, joins an underground Resistance group and takes up ax throwing.

According to the Kings, there are sometimes just weeks between editing an episode and broadcasting it, so while they don’t quite overlap with the news cycle, they’re not far behind it. “We’re making it as we’re showing it,” said Robert, adding, “So it does give us the opportunity to change things if the reality changes.”

“The Good Fight” doesn’t necessarily flatter liberals; most of its (very privileged) characters end up compromising their ideals. It asks how far people on the left are willing to go — and should be willing to go — when they lose faith in the political system. (Diane betrays the porn star in the hope of forcing her to go public.) But the off-kilter world of the show, where Trump exists as a constant atmospheric disturbance, is an only slightly heightened version of the reality that politically attuned liberals have been plunged into. “It feels like something’s come detached,” an old-guard civil rights lawyer played by Delroy Lindo says at the end of Season 1, speaking of America. “Like a piece of machinery that doesn’t sound right.”

It’s both a blessing and a curse for the show that it appears on CBS All Access, the network’s subscription-based streaming service. A lot of people who might love it will never encounter it, but it gets away with things that it couldn’t if more people were watching. Yet it’s not clear how long it can remain a chronicler, rather than a subject, of Trump-era culture wars.

Twice in the past month, there have been minor conservative uproars after scenes from the show appeared on social media. Several people on the right got upset over a recent monologue, delivered by the actor Nyambi Nyambi, endorsing Nazi-punching. “Are they attempting to chill the speech and expression of opinion of millions of people who don’t agree with their worldview?” asked RedState.

Then came outrage over a tweeted image from the show depicting a fictional list of National Security Agency target words. It was a nod to a plot on “The Good Wife,” and the list included a number of references for longtime fans. But the first words on the list — which was supposed to be a compendium of terms that trigger government surveillance — were “assassinate,” “president,” and “Trump.” Soon people, including Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, were accusing the show of threatening the president’s life.

Yet “The Good Fight” appears safe for now, and was recently renewed. Next season’s theme, Robert said, will be “the function of the press in a world where life has taken on a ludicrous aspect.” One of the central questions of our time is whether enlightenment tools can deal with a post-enlightenment information landscape. We need pop culture as well as politics to grapple toward the answer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/the-good-fight-trump.html" id="77eedf03-60a1-3284-a809-c42b690e1287">The New York Times</a>.

In the second season of the serial drama “The Good Fight,” Diane Lockhart, an attorney played by the regal 67-year-old actress Christine Baranski, makes a heated speech at a meeting about a legal strategy for impeaching Donald Trump. “I have spent the last few months feeling deranged,” she shouts, though she uses an expletive before “deranged.” “Going numb! All Trump, all the time. What’s real, what’s fake? Well, you know what? I just woke up.”

The Only TV Show That Gets Life Under Trump

It’s a national disgrace that Trump sleeps in the White House instead of a federal prison cell, but it has been a while since I had any expectation that special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, many of which were finally released to the public Thursday, could set things right. Instead, I’d desperately hoped for something more modest: clarity. A rough public consensus on what happened in the 2016 election and its aftermath, akin to the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John Kennedy, or the 9/11 Commission Report. A set of facts that serious people could agree on, leaving conspiracy theories at least somewhat marginalized.

There are a lot of reasons Trump’s election remains a festering wound. It was a horrifying shock to many of us and, given his decisive loss in the popular vote, an insult to democracy. But there was also so much destabilizing weirdness surrounding it. Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia has long been suspect; as Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was the House majority leader at the time, told colleagues in a secretly recorded 2016 conversation, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” (He was speaking of slavishly pro-Putin former congressman Dana Rohrabacher.)

Several weeks before Trump was inaugurated, U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Russia had engaged in cyberoperations to help him win. In the months that followed, there was one staggering revelation after another about secret conversations between Trump’s circle and various figures linked to Russian intelligence.

At the same time, the new administration unleashed on the public a degrading cacophony of lies, of the sort many of us associate with authoritarian countries like Russia. The day after the new president was sworn in, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, stood in the White House briefing room and insisted that the inauguration crowd had been unprecedented in size. This was terrifying, despite the petty stupidity of the untruth, because Americans were not yet used to being told to believe government diktats over the clear evidence of their senses.

This quickly became our new normal. Once Republicans realized the power they could amass by collaborating in Trumpian mendacity, most of them gleefully abandoned any sense of epistemological solidarity with their fellow Americans. There’s a reason “gaslighting” has become one of the most overused terms of the Trump era. And perhaps the biggest lie of all was that Mueller’s investigation, rather than the events that precipitated it, was the real scandal, an attempt to frame Trump rather than an effort to get to the bottom of an assault on our democracy.

It was probably naive to think that Mueller could cut through such a thick web of falsity. But if anyone could have, it would have been him, the embodiment of a set of old-fashioned virtues that still ostensibly command bipartisan respect. Over the months of the investigation, he came to represent for many an ideal of manliness that rebuked Trump’s insecure machismo. He was a war hero, Trump was a shirker. He was a public servant, Trump a venal con man. He was honest, Trump a liar. America doesn’t have a Walter Cronkite anymore, a person whose word is trusted implicitly across the political spectrum. Mueller was as close as we were going to get.

He and his team have now given us the clearest picture yet of the murky events surrounding Trump’s ascension. “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” they wrote. The Trump campaign welcomed this interference, but, we now know, did not assist in it. “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Once in office, Trump sought to thwart the investigation into what Russia had done. He believed — correctly, as it happens — that Russia’s actions cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory. The report says he may also have feared that what appears to be his advance notice of the WikiLeaks dumps of hacked Democratic emails and his campaign’s now infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian emissaries offering dirt on Hillary Clinton “could be seen as criminal activity by the president, his campaign, or his family.” Further, although “the president publicly stated during and after the election that he had no connection to Russia,” his company was negotiating to build a Trump Tower Moscow throughout most of the campaign, a fact that could have hurt him politically if it got out.

Numerous commentators have said that the report reads like a road map for impeachment, and in a remotely functional country that’s what it would be. Mueller makes it clear that because of the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, “we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes.” Instead, the evidence is laid out for congressional action, or even for prosecutors to indict after Trump leaves office.

The test for us now is how much evidence still matters. Before the report came out, William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, created a fog of disinformation around it, blatantly misleading the public about what it contained.

Weeks before anyone else could read the report, he tried to close the door on obstruction, implying falsely that Mueller meant to leave the decision to him. In a news conference Thursday, Barr repeatedly said that Mueller had found no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller, however, never examined the case through the lens of “collusion,” which isn’t a term in criminal law: “In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion,’ ” the report says. Barr claimed that “evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.” The report is overstuffed with evidence of corrupt motives.

But most people aren’t going to read the nearly 500-page report. Republicans have already seized on Barr’s words — and on the lack of criminal charges in a document that was never going to contain criminal charges — to claim total vindication for Trump. The president’s manifest disloyalty to the country in trying to halt an investigation into a foreign attack on an American election is, to the right, of no account. Nor are the counterintelligence implications of Mueller’s findings, which aren’t part of the report. In the eyes of the president’s supporters, his campaign did not participate in the criminal conspiracy that helped elect him, so no more needs to be said.

The reaction to the report shows that between the minority of Americans who support Trump and the majority who do not, there may no longer be even the possibility of a shared sense of reality or national purpose. Even as exemplary a figure as Mueller cannot change that.

Compounding the problem, Republicans are willing to act unilaterally on their perception of reality, but Democrats are not. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, “Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.” The same logic underlies Republican threats to actualize fantasies about an attempted deep-state coup by opening an investigation into the Mueller investigation’s origins.

Democrats, conversely, have facts on their side, but not conviction. They are reluctant to begin an impeachment inquiry into Trump because majorities, in polls, don’t support it, and there is no Republican buy-in. Whether or not this is politically wise, failing to impeach would be a grave abdication. If you want people to believe that the misdeeds enumerated in the Mueller report are serious, you have to act like it.

To not even try to impeach Trump is to collaborate in the Trumpian fiction that he has done nothing impeachable. And if Congress won’t take the lead in condemning the president’s lawlessness and demanding justice, one of the Democrats running for the presidential nomination should. Mueller has given us the truth of what Trump has done, and in that sense the hokey faith the Resistance put in him was not misplaced. But right now only a political fight can make that truth matter.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/opinion/mueller-report-trump-barr-impeachment.html" id="3006d3ae-a23a-34d6-a6bd-875920e82a0a">The New York Times</a>.

In 2017, a brilliant visual effects expert created a video montage called “It’s Mueller Time! Trump Administration Season Ending.” Set to crooning of the 1963 song “From Russia With Love,” it shows FBI agents rounding up the central figures who brought us Donald Trump’s presidency, culminating in Trump himself being led away with hands behind his back. I’ll admit to having watched this over and over again; it’s one of the most satisfying bits of wish fulfillment I’ve ever seen. Wish fulfillme...

Mueller Did His Job. Now It's the Democrats' Turn.

With the ascension of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, as well as a host of other judges appointed by Donald Trump to lower courts, anti-abortion forces are engaged in a game of legislative whack-a-mole. Sensing their chance to either eviscerate or overturn Roe v. Wade, Republicans are pushing a barrage of anti-abortion measures at the state level, seeing which one goes all the way to the top.

Access to abortion is already as polarized as anything else in this fracturing country, and it could become dramatically more so. Conservatives, as well as some moderates, have argued that ending Roe would ease culture-war hostilities. “Returning the matter to the states would give most people a law they can live with, defusing the rage that permeates politics and has more than once culminated in acts of terrorism against doctors who perform abortions,” wrote The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle last year. The early signs, however, suggest that radically different abortion regimes can’t comfortably exist side by side.

As Roe is weakened, conservative states are becoming more conservative, liberal states more liberal. Mutual antagonism is increasing around abortion, as it is around nearly everything else. If Roe is overturned altogether, it won’t just be a disaster for women’s health care and autonomy. It will further rip America apart.

Seeing Roe endangered, the anti-abortion movement has become more legislatively audacious. So-called heartbeat bills, which ban abortion at around six weeks’ gestation, before some women know they’re pregnant, used to be a rarity. Before this year, only two states had tried to enact six-week abortion bans: North Dakota in 2013 and Iowa in 2018. (Courts struck both laws down.) But in the first weeks of 2019, Mississippi and Kentucky passed such laws, and in addition to Georgia, six-week bans are moving forward in Missouri, Tennessee and Ohio.

Any of these laws could give the Supreme Court a chance to overturn Roe. As that possibility comes into view, anti-abortion lawmakers are showing us what a post-Roe world might look like. Another bill introduced in Georgia, also supported by Kemp, would ban abortion if Roe were overturned, and make “the offense of criminal abortion” punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The bill’s language appears to apply to pregnant women as well as doctors.

So-called trigger laws, abortion bans that would go into effect if Roe is struck down, aren’t new. But according to Ilyse Hogue, president of abortion-rights group NARAL, proposals laying out prison terms for women who terminate their pregnancies are unusual.

“This is not your grandmother’s anti-choice movement, which was bad enough,” Hogue said. “This is Trump’s anti-choice movement. The bills have a sort of Trumpy cruelty to them that is relatively new.”

Responding to the growing threat to Roe, many blue states are taking steps to codify abortion rights. New York recently expanded access to third-trimester abortion in cases where a woman’s health is in danger or where a fetus isn’t viable. Lawmakers in Vermont are attempting to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In Illinois, where the new Democratic governor has pledged to make the state “the most progressive state in the nation for access to reproductive health care,” a new bill would repeal existing anti-abortion legislation and require abortion coverage by private health insurance.

As red and blue states pull further apart, the result is not a lessening of tensions. Republicans, led by Trump, now regularly accuse Democrats of supporting infanticide. Senate Republicans recently attempted to turn anti-abortion propaganda into law with the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which mandated medical care for infants born after a botched abortion, an extraordinarily rare occurrence. The point of the bill seemed to be to pretend that infanticide, which is already illegal, is a consequence of liberalized abortion laws. “The mostly Republican supporters of the bill say that new state-level legislation that has sought to remove barriers to late-term abortions necessitate federal action,” reported The Washington Post.

Even as Republicans seek to harass blue states, Georgia is likely to face a liberal backlash should the six-week ban go into effect. (Legislators are expected to vote on a final version at any moment.) In the past, progressives have boycotted states like Indiana and North Carolina in response to anti-gay and anti-trans legislation. Now, for the first time, there’s a prospect of real economic consequences for an anti-abortion measure.

Georgia is a major center for film and TV production, behind only New York and California. This week, the Writers Guild of America, the union for screenwriters, issued a statement saying that if Georgia passes the anti-abortion law, it would become “an inhospitable place for those in the film and television industry to work.” Fifty actors, including Alyssa Milano, Don Cheadle, Ben Stiller and Sarah Silverman, signed a letter saying that if the bill passes, they will try to “move our industry to a safer state for women.” Business executives, including some from Amazon and Coca-Cola, have come out against the bill as well.

This sort of woke capitalism sends conservatives into paroxysms of resentment; the threatened Hollywood boycott has been extensively covered in right-wing media. It’s the result of asymmetries that, at the moment, seem baked into American life. Our electoral system gives rural conservatives disproportionate political power; that’s why a minority president, backed by senators elected by a fraction of the country, can remake the courts. But the entertainment industry, and corporate America generally, is naturally attuned to affluent urbanites, who tend to be younger and more progressive.

Fighting over the most fundamental questions of human autonomy, each side in the divide is going to use whatever influence it can muster against the other. If Roe falls, liberals won’t like what follows, but conservatives might not either.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/abortion-heartbeat-ban-georgia.html" id="678c5e2a-37ae-3e1a-ae27-d75c2d06cfc8">The New York Times</a>.

This week, a Georgia state representative, Ed Setzler, the sponsor of a bill that would ban most abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat could be detected, spoke to a conservative group in the Atlanta suburbs about the legal fight he’d embarked on. “We need to maximize our influence over the next couple of weeks and then close this deal,” he said. Then, he continued, conservatives must mobilize behind Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, as “he recruits the best legal team in the nation ...

The Abortion Divide Gets Deeper

I won’t pretend that the weekend’s news was not very good for Trump and dispiriting for those of us who despise him. Whatever else is in the Mueller report, it says, according to Barr, that the investigation “did not establish” that anyone from the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its 2016 election interference. The overtures we all know about — the Trump Tower meeting, Trump’s public call for Russia to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails, which Russian hackers tried to do that very day — were not part of a crime, or at least not part of a crime that the special counsel could prove. There will be no deus ex Mueller bringing this wretched presidency to an early end. On the contrary, Trump is emboldened, and his foes momentarily defensive.

Until the Mueller report is publicly released, however, it’s impossible to tell how much of Trump’s victory is substantive and how much is spin. The report, evidently, leaves open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. In his letter to Congress about the report, Barr said that he and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, made the determination that no obstruction of justice occurred. Of course, last year Barr wrote a memo calling Mueller’s obstruction investigation “grossly irresponsible” and “fatally misconceived,” which is surely why Trump appointed him in the first place. There is no reason for anyone to take his finding seriously.

Even some of the underlying questions about Trump’s relationship with Russia remain open. Here, those of us who’d hoped for more from Mueller should be mindful of the temptation to grasp at straws. On Friday, when the news broke that Mueller wasn’t recommending any more indictments, many of us immediately asked whether there were sealed indictments. There weren’t. As we parse Barr’s letter, we should be aware of the human tendency toward motivated reasoning.

But we should be equally aware of the media tendency to capitulate in the face of Trumpian triumphalism. (Recall the pressure to give Trump credit after his first meeting with Kim Jong Un, despite the emptiness of the resulting agreement.) So we shouldn’t overlook the fact that when it comes to Trump’s relationship with Russia, Barr’s letter speaks only to very narrow questions about Trump campaign involvement in Russian information warfare operations in 2016.

Barr wrote that no Trump associate conspired or “knowingly” coordinated with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that spread pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda. Did any do so unknowingly? Barr also wrote that the special counsel didn’t find that Trump associates “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” in hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers, but few thought the campaign had a role in the actual digital break-in.

Still, assuming Barr’s summary is accurate, it means that while Trump was installed with Russia’s help, neither he nor his campaign assisted Russia in committing the crimes that aided his ascent. (If he cheated his way to victory, it was through more pedestrian alleged violations of campaign finance law.) We’re still in the dark, however, about all the steps that Trump took to thwart the investigation and about the extent of his vulnerability to compromise.

On Saturday, left-wing writer Matt Taibbi published a widely shared essay calling Russiagate “this generation’s WMD,” a national security hoax, abetted by a credulous media, akin to the one that justified the Iraq War. “The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star,” he wrote.

That’s silly. The biggest thing this affair has uncovered is that throughout much of the presidential campaign, Trump was seeking to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The deal had the potential to make hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump Organization, and Trump’s lawyer solicited the Russian government’s help to get it done. After the election, Trump lied about the deal to the American people. Vladimir Putin knew the truth, giving him leverage over Trump. Is that the only leverage he had?

It now falls to Congress to find out, and it’s important that Democrats not allow themselves to be intimidated by right-wing chest-beating, particularly if Republicans try to quash the report’s release. Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Devin Nunes, a devoted Trump lackey, called for the report to be burned. Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lawyers, has said he would “fight very aggressively” to stop the president’s written answers to Mueller from being made public. Republicans may be gloating, but it’s Democrats who should be on the offensive. If Trump thinks he has been vindicated, then what is he hiding?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/mueller-report-trump.html" id="fe82a5c5-4f2b-3f65-a594-32cb34a32fd2">The New York Times</a>.

The Mueller investigation is over, and the only people close to Donald Trump who have been criminally charged are his former campaign chairman, former deputy campaign chairman, former personal lawyer, former national security adviser, former campaign foreign policy adviser and Roger Stone, the president’s longtime friend and strategist. The report written by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a quotation in a brief summary issued by Attorney General William Barr, says that “while th...

No Criminal Collusion. Lots of Corruption.

There are cons in every period — in the 2000s we had Enron, Bernie Madoff and James Frey’s pseudo-memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” But there’s something distinct and era-defining about the current crop of high-profile scams. They hinge on the buying, selling and stealing of cultural capital, taking advantage of preconceived ideas of what success looks like. They’re made possible by the ephemerality of an economy where, to quote Ivanka Trump, heiress to a scamming dynasty, “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true.”

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech startup Theranos, raised hundreds of millions of dollars by styling herself as a beautiful distaff Steve Jobs, a Stanford dropout who promised to disrupt the medical field. She incarnated an unattainably ascetic Silicon Valley ideal; as The New York Times T magazine once described her, “She only pauses in her work to run — 7 miles a day.”

Elites adored her — Bill Clinton interviewed her on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015, and Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos invested in Theranos. But her company’s core technology didn’t work, and she’s now facing up to 20 years in prison on fraud and conspiracy charges. Her story is the subject of a best-selling book, a hit podcast and a feature film that’s set to star Jennifer Lawrence. A documentary directed by Alex Gibney premieres on HBO next week.

The Fyre Festival leveraged the modern malady of FOMO, or fear of missing out. Promoters used supermodels and social media influencers to sell packages that cost as much as $12,000 for what was supposed to be a highly Instagrammable music festival in the Bahamas. Attendees, expecting to show off pictures of themselves living like rock stars, arrived to find what looked like a soggy half-built refugee camp. The festival’s co-founder, Billy McFarland, has since been sentenced to six years in prison by a judge who called him a “serial fraudster.” It’s the subject of two recent documentaries.

There are lots more. In a New Yorker piece last month, Dan Mallory, who wrote the best-selling thriller “The Woman in the Window” under the pseudonym A.J. Finn, was revealed to be a charming but highly manipulative fabulist who lied about having a Ph.D. from Oxford, among other things. (His book reportedly has striking similarities to a 1995 Sigourney Weaver movie called, amazingly, “Copycat.”) Anna Delvey — whose real name is Anna Sorokin — posed as a rich woman planning to open a chic arts club and wormed her way into New York society before being indicted for scamming hundreds of thousands of dollars from acquaintances and hotels. Shonda Rhimes is making a Netflix series based on her story.

And now, the high-profile fraudster who has captured the country’s attention is William Singer, who masterminded — and then helped the FBI expose — the college cheating scandal that has swept up famous actresses, wealthy executives and athletic coaches.

Fittingly, it seems that Singer once aspired to make a reality TV show about the college admissions process, which he called, on a 2010 audition tape obtained by TMZ, a “game.” He recognized that the players aren’t high school students, but rich parents who are competing against their friends. Singer described how parents would call him frantically on Sunday morning, after Saturday night dinner parties where they heard all about the accomplishments of their friends’ kids.

Among the many reasons this scandal is so fascinating and so maddening is that it reveals the college admissions process itself as something of a con. Families across the country gear their lives toward a competition to help their children secure a spot in a top college, and hopefully a foothold in the meritocracy. Adolescence becomes, for many, a grind of test-taking and extracurricular activities that leaves kids anxious and exhausted. But poor and middle-class students are playing a game that’s rigged in favor of richer families who wield countless advantages, only the most of extravagant of which are illegal.

If they get in to selective colleges, those who aren’t rich often take out giant student loans that will burden them throughout their adulthood. And for what? Education is a priceless thing, but in most cases that’s not really what the elite college competition is about.

The point is a very specific kind of exchange. Smart kids get to make connections with kids whose parents bought their way in, helpful since the rich kids are the ones who are likely to end up with power in the wider world. Rich kids learn to act smart. They all get a credential that entitles them to a higher place in the social hierarchy than they might have otherwise. In a highly stratified country, social mobility can be a confidence game.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/college-admissions-fraud.html" id="48df330f-6120-3e5a-a9f9-46de79bf83ee">The New York Times</a>.

Scammers and cheats are the paradigmatic figures of our age, and not just because a con man is president of the United States. Again and again in recent years, people who’ve scaled the cultural heights have been revealed as audacious frauds. The systems and institutions that confer status in our society keep being exposed as Ponzi schemes. Grift is turning into our central national narrative.

Status Anxiety and the Scam Economy

Among the most basic anti-Semitic tropes are these: Jews employ semi-occult powers to control world events; they manipulate hapless gentiles with their money; and Jews in the diaspora are disloyal to the countries in which they live. Omar, in the course of making perfectly valid criticisms of Israel and its most powerful American lobby, has invoked each of these tropes.

Twice now, she has publicly expressed regret for saying things that many Jews — including some who are quite far to the left on Israel — see as freighted with anti-Semitism, only to reignite public controversy with new insensitive comments. Most recently, while speaking on a panel last week, she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Writers I respect, including Paul Waldman at The Washington Post, have argued that there was nothing wrong with what Omar said, because she was criticizing those who demand that she show more fealty to Israel, rather than accusing Jews of dual loyalties. But even if you interpret her words that way, she’s committed what might be called, in another context, a series of microaggressions — inadvertent slights that are painful because they echo whole histories of trauma. I assume Omar has been reckless rather than malicious, but it is incumbent on her, as on any public person who wades into fraught sectarian debates, to speak with care. This doesn’t mean she should temper her criticism of Israel, just that she needs to stop giving ammunition to those who want to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

So I think Omar deserves criticism. Criticism, however, is not the right word for what she’s faced. As one of the first two Muslim women in Congress — and the first to wear a hijab — Omar has been subject to a terrifying campaign of racist vilification, including a poster in the rotunda of the West Virginia Capitol linking her to 9/11. She is treated as a dangerous foreign interloper in U.S. politics and the embodiment of anti-Semitism, even though her Republican colleagues routinely demonstrate far worse anti-Jewish bigotry.

Earlier this week, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, accused Rep. Jerry Nadler of doing the bidding of the wealthy liberal donor “Tom $teyer,” whose father was Jewish. (To be clear, this tweet counts both as “inane AND anti-Semitic,” Nadler responded.) Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest defenders, once brought an internet troll who’d denied the Holocaust to the State of the Union. Omar gestured at the idea of dual loyalty, but Trump, speaking to American Jews in December, referred to Israel as “your country.” Indeed, no president has done more to mainstream classically anti-Semitic ideas about an authentic volk at war with parasitical globalists. It’s maddening to watch men who’ve flirted with outright fascism — like former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka, who wore the medal of a Nazi-aligned Hungarian group to one of Trump’s inaugural balls — act like sanctimonious defenders of the Jews.

The point is not to excuse Omar by comparison. It’s to say that Omar said things that are offensive and that she’s the victim of a double standard. She’s been held up for unique opprobrium because, breaking with America’s foreign policy consensus, she empathizes with Palestinians more than Israelis. Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., gave the game away earlier this week when he tweeted, “It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community. Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable.”

House Democratic leaders have been widely panned for their handling of the Omar affair, but its contradictions put them in a near-impossible bind. To ignore her words would be to tolerate mild anti-Semitism, an unsavory proposition at any time, but especially now, when many Jews feel newly vulnerable in a country that’s long been a haven. To publicly rebuke her would mean joining in the over-the-top demonization of a black Muslim woman facing death threats. Ultimately, Democrats on Thursday settled on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim discrimination, and “bigotry against minorities,” a blandly inoffensive document that didn’t seem to satisfy anyone.

As that resolution was being hashed out, The Hill published an interview with House Majority Whip James Clyburn that poured gasoline on a trash fire. Defending Omar, who spent four years of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp, he seemed to describe her suffering as more visceral than that of Jews. “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.'” Clyburn said. “It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.”

I don’t doubt that Omar is living through a lot of pain, but minimizing the legacy of the Holocaust is never a good idea, particularly when your party is managing an internal crisis over anti-Semitism. For a moment I was frightened: With the country in the hands of a repugnant white nationalist, this is not the moment for Democrats to tear themselves apart over race and religion.

Then the voting on the anti-bigotry resolution started. Every Democrat present backed the resolution, but 23 Republicans voted against it. It was a reminder that while Democrats sometimes fail to live up to the ideals of multiethnic democracy, Republicans don’t seem to recognize those ideas at all. Omar needs to do better, but right now there’s still only one political party in America that is a safe place for hate.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/ilhan-omar-antisemitism-democrats.html" id="c30490be-562d-33e0-a3c7-794b77e812e3">The New York Times</a>.

The identity politics fiasco surrounding Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been excruciating. Half of me is angry at her. The other half is furious for her.

Ilhan Omar's Microaggression

An anti-porn, anti-prostitution militant in the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and 1980s, she sometimes seemed like a misogynist caricature of a women’s rights activist, a puritanical battle ax in overalls out to smite men for their appetites. Dworkin never actually wrote that all sex is rape, a claim often attributed to her, but she did see heterosexual intercourse as almost metaphysically degrading, calling it, in her 1987 book “Intercourse,” “the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Feminism would spend decades defining itself against her bleak, dogmatic vision.

So it’s been striking to see that recently, feminists have started invoking Dworkin, who died in 2005, in a spirit of respect and rediscovery. Cultural critic Jessa Crispin castigated contemporary feminists for their wholesale abandonment of Dworkin’s work in her 2017 book “Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.” Rebecca Traister listed Dworkin’s “Intercourse” as one of the books that inspired her 2018 best-seller “Good and Mad.” The Wing, the network of fashionable women’s co-working spaces and social clubs, sells enameled pins of Dworkin’s face.

A new anthology of Dworkin’s work, “Last Days at Hot Slit,” is out this month, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder. (“Last Days at Hot Slit” was a working title for a version of the manuscript that became Dworkin’s first book, “Woman Hating.”) Reading Dworkin now, Fateman wrote in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, “beyond the anti-porn intransigence she’s both reviled and revered for, one feels a prescient apocalyptic urgency, one perfectly calibrated, it seems, to the high stakes of our time.” (Fateman, an art critic who used to be in a band, Le Tigre, with Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna, is also working on an experimental nonfiction book based on Dworkin’s life.)

So what is it in Dworkin’s long-neglected oeuvre that has suddenly become resonant? Perhaps it’s simply because we’re in a moment of crisis, when people seeking solutions are dusting off all sorts of radical ideas. But I think it’s more than that. Dworkin was engaged, as many women today are engaged, in a pitched cultural battle over whose experiences and assumptions define our common reality. As she wrote of several esteemed male writers in a 1995 preface to “Intercourse,” “I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not.”

Dworkin was unapologetically angry, as so many women today are. Even before 2016, you could see this anger building in the emergence of new words to describe maddening male behaviors that had once gone unnamed — manspreading, mansplaining. Then came the obscene insult of Donald Trump’s victory. It seems like something sprung from Dworkin’s cataclysmic imagination, that America’s most overtly fascistic president would also be the first, as far as we know, to have appeared in soft-core porn films. I think Trump’s victory marked a shift in feminism’s relationship to sexual liberation; as long as he’s in power, it’s hard to associate libertinism with progress.

And so Dworkin, so profoundly out of fashion just a few years ago, suddenly seems prophetic. “Our enemies — rapists and their defenders — not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists and teachers,” Dworkin said in a lecture she wrote in 1975, included in “Last Days at Hot Slit.” Maybe this once sounded paranoid. After Trump’s election, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and revelations of predation by men including Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Larry Nassar and countless figures in the Catholic Church, her words seem frighteningly perceptive.

Dworkin showed foresight in other ways. She defended Monica Lewinsky when the young woman was being treated like a joke, and she was unsparing in her disgust for Bill Clinton. She was intersectional before the word was coined. The “closely interwoven fabric of oppression” in America, she wrote in “Woman Hating,” meant that “wherever one stood, it was with at least one foot heavy on the belly of another human being.”

Still, the resurrection of Dworkin’s work and reputation is in some ways quite strange, because her contemporary admirers tend to reject her central political commitments. Dworkin, who’d turned tricks as a broke, bohemian young woman, wanted to outlaw prostitution and pornography, and in the 1980s she made an alliance with the religious right to push anti-pornography legislation. There is no sympathy for such a bargain in feminist circles today, where it’s mostly taboo to treat sex work as distinct from any other kind of labor.

Yet the renewed interest in Dworkin is a sign that for many women, our libidinous culture feels neither pleasurable nor liberating. “Me and my peers, we believed in this sort of fairy tale, that there was a line of demarcation that was very clear between rape and nonconsensual acts, and consent,” Fateman said. “We knew where the line was, and everything on the side of consent was great, and it was an expression of our freedom. But that’s not the experience of sex that a lot of people are having.”

Moira Donegan, the writer best known for creating an online list of alleged sexual abusers and harassers in media, recently wrote an appreciative reappraisal of Dworkin occasioned by “Last Days at Hot Slit.” “It should not be hard to say that heterosexuality as it is practiced is a raw deal for women and that much pornography eroticizes the contempt of women,” she wrote. “It should not be hard to say any of this. But it has become hard.”

Seen from a certain angle, the #MeToo movement — or at least those offshoots of the movement that question the unequal power dynamics behind seemingly consensual encounters — looks like a way of saying those hard things. Indeed, some of Dworkin’s ideas have been reincarnated in #MeToo, and not just because she also sought to challenge oppression by going public with her own stories of sexual abuse.

Think of the woman who told a reporter, last year, about an encounter with actor Aziz Ansari that she’d come to understandas sexual assault, though she didn’t describe force or threat. Decades earlier, Dworkin created a political framework for viewing such an experience — one most would probably write off as bad sex — as a violation. In that 1975 lecture, she described “presumptive rape” as one in which “the constraint on the victim’s will is in the circumstance itself; there has been no mutuality of choice and understanding.” Consent, she insisted, had to mean more than just acquiescence.

Taken literally, much of Dworkin’s writing dead ends in despair. She insisted on being credited for her hard-earned knowledge of the world but would dismiss other women’s testimonies — particularly about their enjoyment of sex — that contradicted her ideology. “The quality of the sensation or the need for a man or the desire for love: These are not answers to questions of freedom; they are diversions into complicity and ignorance,” she wrote.

Yet Fateman suggests that it’s precisely because Dworkin lost the sex wars so decisively that we can now see beyond her most extreme rhetoric. “You don’t have to be afraid that Andrea Dworkin is going to take your pornography away,” Fateman said. That opens up space to consider the rest of her work, and the price she paid for refusing so categorically to make herself appealing to men.

“For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext,” Dworkin wrote in the “Intercourse” preface. “No. I say no.” It’s in part this “no” that women are celebrating when they celebrate Dworkin. To treat her writing with curiosity and respect is itself a way of demonstrating indifference to male opinion. “I’m a radical feminist,” she once said. “Not the fun kind.” She’s back because these aren’t fun times.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/sunday/trump-feminism-andrea-dworkin.html" id="83a85d01-dc5e-3a1a-a873-4e603b956b2c">The New York Times</a>.

For decades now, Andrea Dworkin has existed in the feminist imagination mostly as a negative example, the woman no one wanted to be.

Not the Fun Kind of Feminist

Surveying the American presidency, Skowronek sees politics unfolding in cycles. Every so often, insurgent coalitions bring an agenda-setting president to power who sweeps away the verities of the old regime, fundamentally restructuring our politics. These “reconstructive presidents,” as Skowronek refers to them, create the political framework that their successors of both parties must operate within.

In time, however, insurgencies calcify into enervated establishments. They become dependent on what Skowronek, in his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” called “sectarian interests with myopic demands.” As the regime’s “political energies dissipate,” he wrote, it becomes an obstacle to addressing the country’s most urgent challenges.

In the resulting atmosphere of crisis and upheaval, a new coalition can bring a new reconstructive president to power. When that happens, Skowronek wrote, governing priorities are “durably recast,” and a “corresponding set of legitimating ideas becomes the new common sense.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a reconstructive president. So was Ronald Reagan. The assumptions of New Deal liberalism governed American politics from 1932 to 1980. The assumptions of the conservative movement have dominated thereafter, though perhaps not for much longer.

Viewed through this schema, Donald Trump’s presidency looks more like the end of a cycle than the end of the Republic. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and the early months of the Trump administration, the constitutional law professors Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson exchanged letters arguing about the durability of our system; the letters will be published this spring as a book, “Democracy and Dysfunction.” Balkin is the more sanguine of the two, in part because he sees Trump fitting into Skowronek’s model.

Trump’s presidency, wrote Balkin, could be what Skowronek called “disjunctive,” meaning one “in which a president allied with an aging political regime promises to restore its dominance and former greatness, is unable to keep all of the elements of his coalition together, and as a result presides over the regime’s dissolution.”

If this analysis is correct, intrepid activists have a chance to decide what comes next. “In the next few election cycles, a new regime will begin, offering the possibility of a new beginning in American politics,” wrote Balkin.

The young progressives pushing the Green New Deal have a similar sense of historic opportunity. Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats — the group that recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress — frames the Green New Deal as an overarching vision for political renewal.

“This is not just an environmental sustainability policy,” Shahid told me. “It’s also about rewriting and expanding the social contract that began under the New Deal, was expanded under the civil rights movement and then was completely torn apart over the past 50 years.”

A rapidly congealing conventional wisdom holds that the Green New Deal is likely to be electoral kryptonite for Democrats. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, clearly thinks the proposal is politically toxic, which is why he plans to have senators vote on it.

Maybe McConnell is right. I’ve lived through enough right-wing backlashes to worry about left-wing overreach. But it seems at least possible that, at this moment of social breakdown and planetary emergency, the calculus of what’s politically feasible could be changing. The electorate certainly is; within the next decade, millennials, the most diverse and perhaps most progressive generation in history, will be the single largest voting bloc.

If we are in fact on the cusp of a new political epoch, then a sweeping, idealistic plan for social transformation is not a wild fantasy but a practical necessity.

This is not to say there’s nothing to dispute in the Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress last week. Ocasio-Cortez’s staff certainly made a mistake by releasing a flip document about the resolution saying that it will be impossible to “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes” in 10 years, giving Republicans an opening to claim that Democrats want to ban hamburgers and air travel.

Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith makes a convincing case for a version of a Green New Deal that emphasizes funding for the development and export of green technologies and includes a carbon tax and carbon tariffs. The United States, after all, is responsible for only about 14 percent of current global greenhouse gas emissions; in a hypothetical future where America became a leader on climate, it would probably have to use economic incentives to convince other countries to change their behavior.

Still, the fact that more centrist thinkers are now coming up with their own takes on the Green New Deal is testament to the idea’s conceptual power. If there’s a mainstream debate about how best to completely reorient the economy around environmental sustainability, then the proponents of the Green New Deal are already winning.

Democrats who are dismissive of the Green New Deal, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, have written it off as a “dream.” But if America is going to start again after the nightmare of Trump, maybe dreaming big is what’s needed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/green-new-deal-trump.html" id="9cfa0711-9068-3995-a1f7-1696290c8225">The New York Times</a>.

Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,” which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal.

Donald Trump Is President and Anything Is Possible

When Tran appeared before a statehouse subcommittee, the Republican majority leader, Todd Gilbert, presented her with an outré hypothetical. Could a woman about to go into labor request an abortion if her doctor certified that she needed one for mental health reasons? Tran said that the decision would be between a woman and her doctor, but, evidently taken aback by the question, eventually allowed that it would be permitted under her bill.

Tran handled the moment poorly. She might have pointed out that legislation is not generally written with an eye to prohibiting ridiculous and unprecedented scenarios. It is inconceivable that a doctor would certify a need for an abortion while a woman is in labor; some doctors won’t even let a woman turn down a C-section if they think a baby’s health is at risk. But Tran’s impolitic answer to a ludicrous question gave abortion opponents grist for an explosion of self-righteous outrage.

Things only escalated on Wednesday, when Gov. Ralph Northam was asked about the uproar during an appearance on a radio show. Northam, a pediatric neurologist by training, spoke about what actually happens when a woman goes into labor with a fetus that has severe deformities and may not be viable. The infant, he said, would be delivered and kept comfortable, and the family would decide about resuscitation.

Northam appeared to be pointing out the absurdity of Gilbert’s hypothetical, since even in grave circumstances, no one gets an abortion on the delivery table. But as a clip of the interview went viral, conservatives, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, began accusing Northam of supporting the murder of newborns. It was the right-wing version of an online outrage mob, warping the governor’s innocuous comments into a callous declaration of evil.

Some seemed almost gleeful at the prospect of seizing the moral high ground denied them over two years of rationalizing a depraved administration. “You people keep saying to look at Trump getting elected to see how Hitler could be possible,” tweeted the conservative pundit Erick Erickson. “I’m thinking look at the sudden embrace of infanticide to see how Nazism could be possible.”

In some ways the issue of Tran’s bill is moot, since it was never going to pass in Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature, and certainly has no chance now. But the debate over late-term abortion has been rekindled. For Donald Trump, who tweeted about the procedure on Thursday, it’s a culture war issue he can exploit. Others on the right are genuinely sickened by what they imagine liberals want to allow, even if they also appear to be enjoying the chance to once again scold the left for its purported immorality.

“Under the bill’s actual text, virtually any claim of impairment would suffice to meet the act’s requirements,” wrote National Review’s David French. “Anxiety? Depression? The conventional physical challenges of postpartum recovery? Any of those things could justify taking the life of a fully formed, completely viable, living infant.”

French appears to be worried that women will seek, and doctors will perform, late-term abortions for trivial reasons. But there’s contempt for women embedded in the idea that, absent legal prohibition, someone on the verge of giving birth might instead terminate her pregnancy to avoid the brutalities of labor.

“No matter what the law were, in real life, these things don’t happen,” said Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy and the former head of Catholics for a Free Choice. “I am not saying that there would not be one woman out of 20 million who decided at the 33rd week of pregnancy that she needed an abortion, and I would suggest that she probably does have mental health problems. However, this woman is not going to find anyone who will do this.”

Kissling is well known in the pro-choice movement for thinking deeply about the ethical gray areas surrounding abortion. As she points out, there are only about a dozen doctors in the country who perform third-trimester abortions at all, and she’s spoken to several of them, asking specific questions about patients they’ve turned down. “What I have learned is that all of them have limits and have declined to do abortions in certain circumstances for certain reasons,” she said. (The murderous abortionist Kermit Gosnell, serving a life sentence in prison, is an exception, but he was operating outside the law.)

A person who is ambivalent about abortion might wonder why, if the situations put forward by Gilbert and French are so unthinkable, pro-choice people would object to laws making them illegal. But the law is a blunt instrument for making judgments about extreme and unusual contingencies.

Having extra doctors sign off on each late abortion safeguards against (mythical) cavalier terminations, but it means that women in anguished, urgent situations need to jump through extra hoops. Abortion opponents treat mental health exemptions as easily exploited loopholes, but one instance in which they’re invoked is when a woman learns that her fetus has little chance of surviving outside the womb, and can’t face the prospect of going through labor only to watch her baby die.

This is not to say that there aren’t third-trimester abortions that many people would find morally objectionable. Abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy are quite rare — such procedures make up just over 1 percent of all terminations, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures — and there’s little solid data about the reasons women have them. Thus much of the debate relies on anecdote.

There are many tragic stories of women forced to abort desperately wanted pregnancies because of harrowing medical emergencies, but also more complicated cases of, for example, young girls who hid their pregnancies for months, or whose abortions were delayed by restrictive laws in their states. “Our talking point is, most of these procedures are on women who discover abnormalities late in the pregnancy,” Kissling said. “We don’t know if that is true.”

Conservatives might see vindication in this admission, but it leaves us with the question of whether we want to use the law to make fine-grained moral distinctions, particularly in the absence of good information about the life-or-death choices we’re regulating. “This is so complicated, that we can set this guideline, but then we have to leave it to medicine, to the doctor and the woman, to figure this out,” argued Kissling. There’s certainly no reason to trust the people who elected Trump to make profound ethical decisions for us.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/abortion-virginia-kathy-tran.html" id="ee4a28ff-a621-3a97-a048-c13c69875c41">The New York Times</a>.

Under current law in Virginia, third-trimester abortions are permitted when a woman’s physician and two other doctors certify that continuing a pregnancy would result in a mother’s death, or “substantially and irremediably impair the mental or physical health of the woman.” This week Kathy Tran, a Democrat in Virginia’s House of Delegates, testified in favor of a bill that would end the requirement for two extra doctors to sign off on such abortions, and strike the words “substantially and ir...

Fake News About Abortion in Virginia

Q: With women voters electing more women to both gubernatorial and congressional roles, do you feel we may actually break the glass ceiling in 2020 and elect a woman president and who do you believe could fulfill that role? — Carrie Lin Jones, Dubuque, Iowa

A: I think about this all the time, and to be honest, I’m torn. Because I really do believe that sexism hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, there is part of me that wonders if there is too much at stake to risk running a woman in 2020. I was really dispirited by last year’s backlash against Elizabeth Warren — who, full disclosure, my husband has consulted for — because it reminded me of how people turned Clinton into a caricature of herself.

At the same time, Clinton did win the popular vote, and it wouldn’t take much for a Democrat to flip Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Some of the most exciting potential candidates happen to be women, including Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris. The grass roots of the Democratic Party is hugely mobilized and has shown itself excited about electing women. And it would be profoundly sweet and redemptive if it were a woman who rid us of President Grab-Em-By-The-Pussy.

Q: As a person who hates guns, thank you for helping me understand the argument and perspective of the Socialist Rifle Association. There have been moments where I have wondered if I, too, should consider a gun. Here is my question: I read an article yesterday about the gun restrictions put forth in California and yet they have had three mass shootings, I believe, since 2014? Do we have any proof that legislation, on state or national levels, will do anything to prevent the shootings like we have experienced? —Molly Reynolds Maher, Nashville, Tennessee

A: According to data compiled by Mother Jones, since 1982 California has had more deaths from mass shootings than any other state — 128 fatalities. But that’s because California simply has the highest population. Its rate of firearms deaths is one of the lowest in the country, about half that of Florida’s. State-level gun control can never entirely solve the problem of mass shootings — guns are still legal in the state and are easily available across state lines. But California actually offers pretty good evidence that gun control can curb gun violence.

Q: As a woman, a liberal, a supporter of minority voices, I feel such a sense of sheer panic about the direction I see our culture heading such that I have lost my ability to appraise differing views calmly and objectively. How do you maintain your clear head and not function entirely from a defensive place? —Natasha Brown, Los Angeles

A: I’m not sure I always do! I find it much easier to engage with arguments that I disagree with when they’re made in good faith. I enjoy arguing with Ross Douthat on “The Argument,” the podcast we co-host, because he’s sincere and intellectually honest. I can read a writer like Noah Rothman at Commentary or David French at National Review for the same reason. They don’t write in ways that are deliberately misleading, and it’s useful to think through why I disagree with them.

The people I find maddening are those who don’t really care whether what they say is true or false. I usually can’t bring myself to watch more than a few minutes of Fox News, because it’s just such transparent, intellectually insulting propaganda.

Q: Have or do you ever find that your thinking on a subject significantly changes as you explore the topic? If so, would you share an example? —Lisa Smith, San Diego

A: I’ve written about how multiple visits to the West Bank have really shaken the default liberal Zionism I was brought up with. More recently, as Israel has become increasingly illiberal and has acted to foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution, I’ve become more sympathetic to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It’s not that I’m totally sold on it — I understand the awful historical echoes of singling the Jewish state out for economic punishment, and I hate the way it’s used to shun Israeli writers and academics in international forums. But I feel like I can no longer dismiss BDS or its adherents outright, for reasons I recently wrote about in my column.

I also recently read Alex Berenson’s book about marijuana, “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence,” and interviewed him for our podcast. He didn’t convince me that marijuana should be illegal, but he did persuade me that the drug has more ill effects than the pot lobby would like us to believe.

Q: Michelle, could a third national party ever take hold in the USA? —Barry G. Larocque, Ottawa, Ontario

A: I’m generally skeptical of third parties for reasons I recently discussed on “The Argument.” As long as we have a winner-take-all system, third parties are destined to play a spoiler role, helping the party that is furthest from them ideologically. The history of the last few decades, I think, shows that working within the parties is far more effective than trying to start a new one. Consider how much more the Democratic Socialists of America have accomplished, in terms of building real political power, than the Green Party has. I’m all for electoral reforms, like the ranked-choice voting system in Maine, that would make third parties more viable and practical. But absent those reforms, I think we’re stuck with a two-party system.

That said, those two parties don’t have to be the ones we have currently. It would certainly be fantastic if a rational, decent conservative party emerged to replace the GOP!

Q: What did you learn from your least favorite teacher?—Nancy Barlow

A: I love this question! When I went to graduate school for journalism at UC Berkeley, I was assigned to an introductory class with a notorious hard-ass who ran his seminar like a boot camp. He made us show up at an ungodly hour of the morning, professionally dressed, having read the entire New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. (He’d give us quizzes that included questions about the sports and style sections, so you had to read everything.) Sometimes he would make us file two articles a day, six days a week. He’d assign us to spend the night in an emergency room and come back with a story, or send us out to cover something he’d heard on the police scanner. If I remember correctly, he had us cover a BDSM fetish ball, which he probably couldn’t have gotten away with today. If you missed a class, you lost a letter grade. If you were late, you lost half of one. If you hadn’t placed a story in a legitimate outlet by the end of the semester, you couldn’t get higher than a C. Sometimes he would say to us something like, “Death is better than failure because at least you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror.”

It was a brutal experience, and at the time, I hated him. But I learned more in that class than I did in any other that I’ve ever taken. I was only 20 when I started grad school — I’d gone to college early — and had very little real-world experience, and that class forced me to quickly get over whatever hesitation I had about hitting up sources for quotes or pitching editors. Many years later I taught journalism students and found myself wishing someone had put them through at least a light version of that initiation.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/opinion/michelle-goldberg-columnist.html" id="f55fb139-60db-3477-ae73-f6ad59892607">The New York Times</a>.

The New York Times asked readers to send questions for Michelle Goldberg about her col​umn on the rise of liberal gun enthusiasts​​ or about her other work as a columnist. She has responded to several questions below.

Michelle Goldberg on Politics, Writing and the Journalism Professor From Hell

Serious allegations of anti-Semitism have dogged some of the Women’s March’s leaders for over a year, but they’ve lately reached a crisis point. In December, Tablet Magazine published a 10,000-word article about anti-Jewish bigotry (as well as alleged financial mismanagement) among the Women’s March’s leadership. Many Jewish women have publicly agonized about joining this year’s demonstration.

Leaders of Women’s March Inc. — as the nonprofit organization is officially called — tried to make amends. It added three Jewish women to a steering committee. Two of the four national co-chairwomen of the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, met with a group of 13 rabbis, after which nine of them encouraged Jews to join this year’s demonstration. A third co-chairwoman, Carmen Perez, wrote a repentant column for the Jewish publication The Forward titled, “Jewish Women Should Join Us at the Women’s March, Despite Our Mistakes.”

But on Monday, this apology tour hit a snag when Mallory appeared on the daytime talk show “The View” and refused, as she’s refused in the past, to denounce the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom she once called “the GOAT,” or Greatest of All Time. Last February, Mallory attended a Farrakhan rally where he railed against “satanic” Jews who control the FBI and various foreign countries, and who use their subversive power to promote homosexuality. During his speech, he gave a shout-out to Mallory and the Women’s March, and afterward, she posted positively about the event on social media. On “The View,” rather than disavowing Farrakhan, Mallory said only, “I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.”

Following that interview, the Democratic National Committee, which had been listed as a partner of the 2019 march, appeared to pull out, the latest sign that the Women’s March has made itself toxic in center-left circles. Several groups that have sponsored the march in the past, including NARAL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, are also gone from its public list of backers. Local marches around the country have emphasized their independence from the national Women’s March organization. New York City will have two competing rallies, a tangible symbol of feminist divisions.

Writers I admire have argued that there are good reasons that some black activists hesitate to disavow Farrakhan. Last March, journalist Adam Serwer, no fan of Farrakhan, wrote in The Atlantic of the successful violence-prevention work that the Nation of Islam has done in impoverished black communities. Mallory told him how Nation of Islam women supported her when her son’s father was murdered in 2001. Serwer described a sense in some black communities that “despite the Nation’s many flaws, it is present for black people in America’s most deprived and segregated enclaves when the state itself is not present, to say nothing of those who demand its condemnation.”

Yet even if you’re willing to accept rationalizations for associating with an anti-Semite, the point of organizing is to build political power, and in that respect the leaders of the Women’s March have pretty clearly fallen short. They were put at the helm of a popular mass movement, and under their leadership it has alienated many supporters and become significantly more marginal. In certain ways, their failure recapitulates an old, sad story: Though African-Americans and Jews worked in solidarity during the civil rights era, there were always tensions, and they got worse as the civil rights movement fractured. Part of what went wrong with the Women’s March, however, seems specific to our time, when the internet has transformed activism.

The idea for a women’s march on Washington was born in viral Facebook posts that Bob Bland, one of the current co-chairwomen, and Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer in Hawaii, put up after the 2016 election. On social media, tens of thousands of women committed to travel to Washington before any logistical arrangements had been made. Some of the women making initial preparations realized it would be a disaster if the march seemed to be entirely by and for white women. So, at the suggestion of a celebrity-connected activist named Michael Skolnik, Mallory and Perez, both affiliated with Skolnik’s nonprofit, the Gathering for Justice, were recruited to help lead it. They, in turn, brought in Sarsour.

Mallory, Bland, Sarsour and Perez were part of a group that labored heroically to put the first Women’s March together in just 10 weeks. But there’s no reason to think that the millions of people who took to the streets that day saw any of them as their representatives, or bought into some of the radical positions they’d go on to take. (In 2017, for example, Sarsour, going beyond a defense of anti-Zionism, claimed that Zionism and feminism are irreconcilable.) Because the Women’s March was never a membership organization, there was no obvious way for those who felt aligned with it to help decide who should carry its banner forward.

The Women’s March ultimately faced a problem endemic to protest movements that organize spontaneously on the internet, going back to Occupy Wall Street. As Zeynep Tufekci argued in her 2017 book “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” mass protest once required deep, sustained organizing, with all the compromise and human connection that entailed. The process of putting a major demonstration together would itself allow strong leaders to come to the fore. Digital organizing makes much of that work obsolete. As a result, people are often left trying to create a movement after a high-profile action, rather than before it, without clear common goals or leaders who have broadly accepted legitimacy.

Lissy Romanow, executive director of Momentum, which trains progressive organizers, said movements can now hit their peaks just as they’re beginning — as the Women’s March did — and “then have to figure out what to do next.” She added, “I don’t think we’ve figured out yet what it looks like to be a leader in a mass organization of this kind.”

So while the Women’s March leaders failed in very particular ways, it’s not clear that anyone could have succeeded in their place. Two years ago they helped create something magnificent. The exhilarating energy of the 2017 march went on to fuel countless local Resistance groups that worked because they were organized face-to-face and had definable, practical aims. It’s painful to see the Women’s March fall apart now, but maybe it was always destined to be a moment instead of a movement.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/womens-march-antisemitism.html" id="8cc68c92-dd4a-3ed5-a8ad-c8df8531e6f8">The New York Times</a>.

This year’s Women’s March, set to happen Saturday in cities across the country, has become extraordinarily messy. In 2017, the marches that took place in Washington and nationwide — the largest protests in American history — were radiant symbols of hope and resistance at a bleak, terrifying historical juncture. Two years later, the Women’s March organization has become a depressing study in how left-wing movements so often implode in the digital age.

The Heartbreak of the 2019 Women's March

As these stories proliferated, no one knew for sure whether they were just scattered anecdotes or signs of more serious social change. Then researchers involved with a statewide survey of bullying in Virginia schools realized they had a way to find out.

Every other year, tens of thousands of the state’s public school students complete online surveys about their schools’ social environment. They’re asked a number of questions about bullying, including teasing over race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and other sexual issues. Because surveys of middle schoolers are done in odd years, researchers had data for seventh and eighth graders from both 2015, right before the election, and 2017, right after it. Over 400 middle schools participated. “It was an opportunity to see whether in fact there was this increase in bullying,” said Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia who led the team that developed the survey.

It turned out that there was indeed an increase, but not everywhere. Cornell and a member of his team, Francis L. Huang, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who specializes in quantitative research methods, found that in 2015, there’d been little difference in bullying rates between areas of the state that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and those that would support Trump. But in 2017, students reported 18 percent more bullying in Trump locales than the Clinton ones. In the Clinton regions, bullying actually declined slightly from 2015; in the Trump zones, it increased.

The Trump areas saw particular increases in teasing about race and, to a lesser degree, sexual orientation. The greater the margin of Trump support in the community, “the higher the prevalence rates” of bullying, Huang told me, even after adjusting for factors like socioeconomic status and parental education.

Immediately after Donald Trump’s election, alarming stories appeared of school bullies who seemed to be inspired by the new president. In York County, Pennsylvania, two students marched through their high school hallways holding a Trump sign while a third shouted, “White power!” A teacher in Kansas reported students taunting classmates with the refrain, “Trump won, you’re going back to Mexico.” At several schools, white school sports fans chanted, “Trump! Trump!” at opposing teams with more p...

Michelle Goldberg

Articles written by the author

Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields

The Only TV Show That Gets Life Under Trump

Mueller Did His Job. Now It's the Democrats' Turn.

The Abortion Divide Gets Deeper

No Criminal Collusion. Lots of Corruption.

Status Anxiety and the Scam Economy

Ilhan Omar's Microaggression

Not the Fun Kind of Feminist

Donald Trump Is President and Anything Is Possible

Fake News About Abortion in Virginia

Michelle Goldberg on Politics, Writing and the Journalism Professor From Hell

The Heartbreak of the 2019 Women's March

Is the President Making Middle School Worse?

The Democratic Primary Doesn't Have to Be a Nightmare

Trump Is Doing Something ... Good?

Justice Caught Up With Trumpworld

The Presidency or Prison

Defenders of a racist president use Jews as human shields

Jeffrey Epstein is the ultimate symbol of plutocratic rot

The welcome humiliation of John Bolton