Sunday, October 28, 2018

Political Violence, Blame, and the Media

Alright... I guess I'm gonna kick a hornet's nest.

In the last few months, we've seen numerous acts of politically motivated or targeted violence. Some of these cases have been plastered all over the news for days or weeks. Some others have been met with deafening silence... and which is which hasn't exactly been random.

What you've probably heard:

-- October 2018: Trump-supporting lunatic Cesar Sayoc, Jr. attempted (but completely failed to) to send (non-functional) bombs to over a dozen Democratic leaders including Obama, Clinton, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, etc. As we learn more about this story, it becomes increasingly clear that Sayoc has a long history of threats and violence going back to at least the mid 90s.

-- October 2018: Anti-semite Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 people and injured 6 others at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and although he seems to have been anti-Trump, the ADL has already blamed Trump for creating the environment that encouraged Bowers' actions... for some reason.

-- October 2018: Envelopes testing positive for Ricin (an incredibly dangerous poison for which 22 micrograms/kilogram of bodyweight constitutes a lethal dosage) were sent to Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis.

-- April 2018: Self-described "Incel" Alek Minassian drove a fan into a crowd in Toronto and killed 10 people. He is considered "right-wing", although "Involuntary Celibacy" has no inherent connection to politics.

And of course, all this is in context of the Charlottesville Riot from last year, where...

-- August 2017: Neo-Nazi James Fields killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others with his car at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally after he drove through a crowd of protesters. What you probably don't know is that his trial is set for November, and he was recently assaulted in prison.

And while this isn't actually a known example of political violence, you'll recall:

-- October 2017: Stephen Paddock opens fire on a crowd of country-music fans in Las Vegas from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 58 people and causing injury to 851 others either directly or via the resulting panic. This was the deadliest mass-shooting in US history, and yet no motive is known, little information has been released to the public, and the press coverage died out relatively quickly.

I include it in this list because it sparked another national gun-control debate, this time over whether or not it should be legal to own bump stocks.

You'll probably also have heard about a number of cases of street violence involving the "Proud Boys", although many of these skirmishes were actually caused by Antifa and Democratic Socialists of America activists -- though you'd rarely know from the way most reporters frame these events.

And you'll have probably heard of various racist/anti-Semitic threats and acts of vandalism against Jewish community centers, churches, and other political targets, which are often assumed to be a product of Trump's rhetoric.

What you probably haven't heard:

-- October 2018: Ricin envelopes were not just sent to James Mattis, but also to President Trump, along with Senator Ted Cruz and Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson. Not only that, but as of FBI arrested a suspect in Utah, William Clyde Allen, believed to have sent all the packages in a coordinated effort. Allen confessed to sending all four letters, but we also learned that - similar to the inoperable bombs allegedly sent by Cesar Sayoc, Jr. - none seemed to contain actual Ricin, but rather Castor Seed from which Ricin is made.

-- October 2018: In Las Vegas, a Democratic activist working for American Bridge 21st Century named Wilfred Michael Stark assaulted Kristin Davidson, campaign manager for Nevada's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Adam Laxalt. Stark had previously been arrested for similar activity at a GOP rally in Virginia.

-- October 2018: In Minnesota, Republican state-representative Sarah Anderson was chased and punched by a man ripping up GOP campaign signs, and two days earlier, Republican candidate Shane Mekeland suffered a concussion after being punched in the back of the head while having dinner at a local restaurant.

-- October 2018: The Republican Party Headquarters in Manhattan, New York was vandalized with spray-paint, smashed windows, and a threatening note that read: "Our attack is merely a beginning. We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologize."

-- October 2018: Jackson Cosko, an intern working for Democratic Senator Sheila Jackson Lee was charged by the United States Capitol Police with "Doxxing" Republican Senators Mike Lee, Orrin Hatch, and Lindsey Graham. While doxxing itself isn't violence, it has frequently led to serious harassment and violence as people have access to personal information such as the home addresses, phone numbers, and email address of the victims.

-- October 2018: Florida man, Jame Royal Patrick, Jr. was arrested for making death threats to people who supported Bret Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

--[UPDATE] October 2018: Shots were fired at the Republican party campaign office in Daytona Florida, breaking the windows. Fortunately, no one was in the office.

-- September 2018: GOP campaign offices in Laramie, Wyoming were set on fire by arsonists. The same thing happened in Hillsborough, North Carolina back in 2016, so this is nothing especially new.

-- September 2018: In San Francisco, a man named Farzad Fazeli attempted to stab Republican campaign worker Rudy Peters with a switchblade while he was working at an election booth at a Castro Valley town festival.

-- July 2018: Martin Astrof was arrested for threatening to kill GOP campaign staffers and President Trump.

-- July 2018: Someone vandalized the Lincoln, Nebraska (my hometown) GOP headquarters by smashing its windows with a brick and spray-painting "ABOLISH ICE" on the sidewalk.

And of course I'd hope you remember...

-- October 2017: In Alexandria, Virginia, James T. Hodgkinson (a Bernie Sanders fanatic angry with the results of the 2016) died with a list of Republican targets in his pocket in a shootout with police after he shot four people: lobbyist Matt Mika, legislative aid Zack Barth, Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, and Republican Congressman Steve Scalise who nearly died. The shooting took place at a baseball diamond where several Republican Senators and Congressmen were practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.

There have also been numerous examples of Antifa violence throughout the United States, many of which (ie. the recent takeover of multiple streets in downtown Portland, Oregon) have not had anything whatsoever to do with protesting "fascists" or any kind of right-wing activity at all, including numerous examples of attacks on journalists.

So...

Why am I talking about this?

I'm mainly talking about this because the way this stuff is reported drives me insane, and it affects us all in really important ways. Mass media essentially determines which of these examples of politically-motivated violence are important and worth talking about, and which are not.

If the news that gets reported doesn't bother to tell readers and viewers about angry left-wing lunatics who assault Republican campaign workers, set fire to GOP offices, or shoot Republican congressmen, and if reporters and pundits don't care to spend much time about a series of threatening letters testing positive for ricin poison or threats of and/or the actual attempted murder of Republicans over their political views, then the people who consume news will not know about those kinds of things.

And of course, this would be fine if reporters and pundits did the same thing whenever a right-wing lunatic did something insane, but.................. That's not what happens.

Most of the mainstream media (arguably with the support of all of the major social networks and even Google) devote tremendous attention to every instance of right-wing violence while utterly ignoring comparable cases coming from left-wing perpetrators. As a result, it's hard for the average person to know what's actually happening in the world, and they end up with a completely one-sided understanding of the current state of political violence.

It also makes it easy for political partisans to split themselves into bubbles that each have entirely different sets of facts.

Liberals/Progressives will hear of every instance of someone who could even remotely be considered "right-wing" doing anything wrong yet remain entirely isolated from the slightest hint that people who share their ideology have ever done anything wrong at all. Conservatives are in a slightly better position, in that it's nearly impossible to avoid hearing about right-wing political violence, but the more social media dominates people's information streams, the easier it is for them to similarly wall themselves off from information that makes them uncomfortable.

Point is, there are legitimate reasons for everyone to be seriously concerned with the quality of reporting that we normally see with respect to this kind of activity.

Part of being well-informed is being able to put things into context and gain a meaningful perspective, and that can only happen when you have all the information... not just half of it as we so often get.

Only getting half the story makes it easy to blame your political opponents for everything that's going wrong in the world, but it's also a mistake. If Trump - for example - is to blame for people like Cesar Sayoc, Jr.'s failed bombing spree, is Bernie Sanders to blame for James Hodgkinson? Is Maxine Waters responsible for Farzad Fazeli? Is Hillary Clinton or Eric Holder the cause of the arson and vandalism?

If you think that Trump's rhetoric is causing right-wing violence, surely it stands to reason that the similar heated rhetoric coming from the other names I just listed should be to blame for the left-wing variants of these kinds of crimes?

Of course, if you only ever saw one side or the other, it would be extremely easy to think that the only people who are out there doing terrible things are your political opponents, and from there you can concoct a grand theory as to why based on how evil the other party is without much challenge when another possibility is simply that it's the individual criminal who is responsible for their own actions.

There's another problem here as well...

Vanishing Trust

When mass media displays such a clear bias - and please make no mistake, whether fully intentional or not, that's exactly what this is - then the people who are on the losing end of that bias are not going to be happy. And since they're actually justified in their complaints, it's very easy for them to convince people who have less skin in the game that media isn't trustworthy as well.

All this does is push people further to the extremes, which makes it easier for the biggest lunatics to find reasons to believe even crazier conspiracy theories and find reinforcement for their belief that violence is the appropriate response.

I want this to stop, and while there's no magic bullet, I don't think that will happen until the reporting on these kinds of subjects gets better and more people are more fully-informed about everything that is going on in our world - not just the parts that confirm partisan biases..

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Immigration Is Actually Complicated

Immigration issues have obviously been in the news a ton the last few weeks, as Trump's new "zero tolerance" policies at the border have resulted in thousands of minors being separated from their parents. According to some reports, many of these kids are being housed in make-shift detention facilities that sometimes lack proper air-conditioning or even acceptable sanitation.

The most insane thing I've read so far has been that some of these people are being force-fed psychotropic drugs disguised as vitamins.

Making matters worse, President Trump recently suggested that the detentions are in some ways a negotiation tool, particularly against Democrats who he said need to get on board with his preferred immigration policies in order to stop this from happening.


Democrats, on the other hand, are calling all of this stuff "cruel and inhumane", and some people are even making hysterical comparisons to Nazi concentration camps.


This has turned into one of the most polarizing issues imaginable, and yet in spite of the absolutely deafening level of anger and hyperbole coming from every angle, I don't think anybody has stopped to seriously consider how difficult an issue this subject actually is.

"What are you talking about!?", you say, "Separating kids from their parents isn't a difficult issue, it's always wrong!"

And... I get it.

The images we've seen in the press are heartbreaking. Crying children, young people in "cages", sad parents who are being arrested just for trying to get a better job or seek asylum while escaping horrifying conditions in their home countries... It's all awful to watch.

I'm sure for a lot of people the imagery alone is enough to make a lot of people think differently about immigration.

There are some challenges, though.

For one thing, a lot of the imagery we've been seeing in the media is extremely deceptive. One of the first major photographs that tens of thousands of people shared on social media was of a crying child in a cage from Jose Antonio Vargas' Twitter:


Trouble with this is... It's not actually a kid detained under current Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies. To the contrary, it was an image taken during an anti-Trump protest on June 10th. That didn't stop over twenty-five thousand people from sharing it or nearly 40 thousand from liking it.

This is what kicked off a lot of the outrage about this issue. Nobody likes seeing kids in cages, so that became the driving narrative immediately.

The other seriously viral image of a crying child was taken by Getty staff photographer, John Moore:


Time Magazine subsequently used this image as the basis for a new cover, depicting President Trump as the cause of this child's misery, along with the caption "Welcome to America."


The problem with this image is that once again, the truth behind it is not as it first appears.

Firstly, the backstory behind the mother being in America is nearly a poster-case for conservatives who criticize illegal immigration and elected Trump partly on the basis of more tightly controlling the border.

In this case, the mother was not here because she was in grave danger and seeking asylum, or because economic conditions in her home country of Honduras were so dire that she couldn't do anything else. She also didn't apply for asylum in any of the ten US consulate locations throughout Mexico that were available for that purpose. Instead, she left her family and her other children, hiring a coyote to get herself and her daughter across the United States border.

Then she was arrested.

But even given that, the child and mother were never separated during the arrest and subsequent detention.

That's not to say that every story being told about the child detentions is false or that it's not happening. Trump didn't invent immigration restrictions, but his "zero tolerance" policy is new and it's meant a significant increase in border arrests. And with that has come over 2,000 children detained in the last couple months. It would not be surprising in the slightest to find that many of these kids were being housed in substandard conditions as there's just no way to ramp up this kind of activity without expanding into random warehouses and temporary facilities that aren't always going to be amazing.

Watching kids get caught up in all this is the biggest tragedy of the whole affair, and if - like me - you don't approve of immigration restrictions, then it's hard not to see it as a nightmare that's wholly preventable by changing immigration policy.

The tricky part is, if you do support immigration restrictions, then it's still a tragedy but it's not one of Trump's making... Instead, it's only preventable once the parents of these children quit trying to enter the United States illegally.

That's only part of what makes the issue so complicated, but before I can get into the rest of it, I want to take a second and talk about immigration itself, and why I support opening the borders to other people as much as humanly possible on both philosophical or practical grounds.

The Philosophical Case for Open Borders

I believe (as I've written here numerous times) that for the concept of "human rights" to mean anything at all, they must inherently be universal.

I normally talk about that in terms of the distinction between negative rights and positive rights privileges, and the way in which rights themselves should be able to be equally applied to everyone simultaneously. For example, if I establish a right to property, this means I'm asserting both an expectation that nobody is allowed to steal from me and also a responsibility to myself not to steal from anyone else. The only thing we're all required to do under this framework is... Nothing. Negative rights are rights against some external action... It's a right to be "free from" coercion.

Thus, the moral concept of, "don't steal from anybody" can be universally applied simultaneously and everyone is made better off as a result.

This is in contrast to claims of rights to some kind of material outcome - ie. the "right" to home-ownership/shelter, clothing, equal incomes, health care, etc. Because material wealth must be produced by others, the only way to equalize it is by taking from some people and giving it to someone else. This framework is impossible to establish universally, and as a result I am loathed to call them "rights", but refer to them instead as special privileges which cannot exist apart from coercion.

Without digressing further into those issues here, something I probably don't talk about enough is the idea of universality in terms of nations and tribes.

For a "human right" to be a "right" at all, it must be universally applicable all the time. And for it to be "human", it must be universal to all humans - no matter where they're born, where they live, what skin color they are, what religion they believe, what language they speak, or anything else.

All this is to say: Immigration restrictions are clear violations of human liberty and all kinds of corollary rights.

On some level, I think we all know this.

Americans would not, and generally do not, tolerate the imprisonment or detention of people who haven't done anything to violate the rights of other citizens. Although it probably happens more today than it should, cops are not legally allowed to arrest someone just for walking from one side of the street to another. Nor can they do this to people who move from one town to another within the same state, or even moving from one state to another state.

I should know, as I've done this many, many times.

Over the course of my own life, I've personally moved to twenty three different homes inside the United States. Most of the times I've done this in my adult life have had to do with seeking (and finding) better opportunities and higher standards of living

And ya know what? Not one single time have I ever been stopped at the border of a city or a state and detained for any length of time because I wasn't "allowed" to move from one place to another. As an American citizen I get to roam free across 3.8 million square miles of beautiful open countryside.

In fact, the only things that mattered to any of those moves were the voluntary, contractual associations I had with current and future landlords, and now my mortgage holder.

Thankfully, I live in a country where I face a very low probability of being imprisoned unless I've actually harmed someone else, and that's how it should be.

But... That's not how immigration controls or border security works. Instead of applying the right to liberty (and its corollary right of free movement) universally to anyone around the world, the government limits the protection of this right only to its own citizens. This makes liberty not something that we're treating as a universal right, but rather as a right limited only to people who were lucky enough to be born here.

We'll get back to that later, but the point here is that I cannot support this on a fundamental philosophical level.

That said, there's also the practical matter of immigration being tremendously valuable to society.

The Practical Case for Open Borders

It's hard to overstate the benefits of immigration from an economics standpoint.

More people mean more hands and more brains, more production and consumption, more specialized skills and the expansion of our ability to produce wealth and meet everyone's needs as a society. It also means more ideas and perspectives to mix and intermingle, thus creating more innovations and entrepreneurship.

Economist Bryan Caplan was interviewed by The Economist a while back and estimated that a world of open borders would likely be about $78 Trillion richer than it is today.

This would be a nearly unfathomable increase in global prosperity, and the reasons why are fairly clear, as the article explains:
The potential gains from open borders dwarf those of, say, completely free trade, let alone foreign aid. Yet the idea is everywhere treated as a fantasy. In most countries fewer than 10% of people favour it. In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, it is a political non-starter. Nonetheless, it is worth asking what might happen if borders were, indeed, open.

To clarify, “open borders” means that people are free to move to find work. It does not mean “no borders” or “the abolition of the nation-state”. On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.

Workers in rich countries earn more than those in poor countries partly because they are better educated but mostly because they live in societies that have, over many years, developed institutions that foster prosperity and peace. It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada. The quickest way to eliminate absolute poverty would be to allow people to leave the places where it persists.
The point here is that most of the time, it's the institutions and not the people themselves that disrupt productivity and wealth-creation. I've been working on a documentary about this as it pertains to the institutions in Senegal vs. the rest of the world for the last few months, and what you will see in the film (and can see if you look around the world without it) are a whole lot of people who are very entrepreneurial and driven, but who are being crushed by a massive tax and regulatory burden, low property rights protections, and the immense amount of corruption that comes whenever the state has so much power over people's economic and personal lives.

Ideally, we'd live in a world where all those other terrible countries were "fixed", but the reality is that we could fairly easily improve tens of millions of lives and dramatically expand the productivity and wealth available in the world simply by allowing more people to move to places where the institutions are better.

On a personal note, it took me two years to be able to hire a photography intern from Spain because our immigration laws are idiotic, and he's already created a tremendous amount of value in the short time he's been in the US. I could have benefited from his services last year, but I didn't.

But of course, this doesn't mean immigration is without problems, as conservatives are quick to point out.

Potential Problems With Immigration

This is where things get complicated, and also where most progressives and libertarians seem to be checking out of the conversation right now. In my current experience, these two groups are spending an immense amount of time denying that any problems could even possibly exist.

See also this ridiculous video from Nancy Pelosi trying to tell a woman whose son was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant outside of Houston that sanctuary cities only ever contain law-abiding individuals and that these kinds of crimes don't happen in those places.


This is arguably every bit as heartbreaking (if not more, depending on who you ask) as the stories of children being separated from their parents at the border.

This woman has lost her son forever.

Libertarians and progressives need to let these kinds of stories sink in for a little while before they rush to outrage over child detention. This stuff happens, it is devastating, and it's why a lot of people don't really care that preventing illegal immigration is tough on families.

Immigration & Crime

Of course this would be the point at which lots of people would start pointing out that immigrants have lower rates of criminality, lower rates of welfare, and generally tend to be more solid contributors to society than native citizens. Alex Nowrasteh as spent a lot of effort compiling data about this stuff, and back in February the Cato Institute produced a paper showing the differences in conviction rates for different groups using 2015 data from Texas.

For homicide, we see the following:

And, for sexual assault, we see this:

This is also the point where people like Alex and Bryan Caplan would correctly point out that natives also break laws and murder people, and in fact they tend to do so at higher rates even than legal immigrants.

I think these rejoinders fall flat for a few reasons:
  1. These charts clearly depict a situation where illegal immigrants are way more prone to crime than legal immigrants, which confirms a general hypothesis a lot of people have expressed over the years: These two groups of people are different.

    Personally, I'd be willing to bet this is always going to be the case.

    Those who come here legally self-select into the highest performing categories and this should not come as a surprise because they're specifically the ones willing to work the hardest inside the law to get here, which is quite difficult. They're also selected by the system to be the best candidates for entry in general - people who have attributes that "we want more of" in the United States.

    People who come here illegally are almost by definition not going to be the most law-abiding or high skilled people. And since the whole point for conservatives is to crack down on the illegal immigration, their non-strawman point seems to be "Sure, let in the high skilled, low crime, good people from other countries, but keep out the bad ones who can't get past our screening system."
  2. Excising the United States of all illegal immigrants may not prevent natives from committing similar crimes, but it does theoretically reduce the population of criminals by a significant degree. We can't really deport home-grown criminals (because... to where, and who would take them?) but we can deport people who are here illegally. So perhaps it's possible that the mother in the video above might have lost her son some other way or to some native murderer, but she knows she wouldn't have lost him the way she did if the border had been more tightly controlled and the specific murder hadn't made it in.
  3. The data behind these numbers is also not nearly as solid as we might imagine. Just thinking through the way the criminal justice system works, US citizens are pretty easy to track and find, what with the lengthy paper trail they tend to leave. As are legal immigrants. Illegal immigrants? Not so much. And there's a shockingly large amount of unsolved crime out there, so it's pretty easy to imagine (or just assume) that a decently large chunk of that unsolved crime is being committed by illegal immigrants who don't get caught or perhaps flee back to their home countries to avoid conviction.
Point being, with a much less porous border, you could argue fairly persuasively for a lot of people - even with Cato's paper claiming the contrary - that you'd prevent a tremendous amount of crime, even though of course you wouldn't be able to stop all of it.

Plus, besides "normal" crimes there's also the question of securing our borders against terrorists which has obviously been an issue before. Three of the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States illegally (I believe having overstayed their Visa allowances).

Again, libertarians might say something along the lines of, "Well, look. Terrorism is a tremendously small problem statistically speaking, and there many terrorists have been living here legally or have even been 'home-grown' such as Timothy McVeigh."

But once again, while this is true, it doesn't stop people from credibly thinking that the tighter our border security is, the fewer additional terrorists will get in.

And they have a point.

Timothy McVeigh was already here, sure...But per the "low-immigration, pro-immigrant" (read: anti-immigration) Center for Immigration Studies:
To gain a more complete picture of the threat and of the holes in our immigration system, we must examine acts of terrorism in this country over the last decade. Including the September 11 hijackers, 48 foreign-born militant Islamic terrorists have been charged, or convicted, or have admitted their involvement in terrorism within the United States between 1993 and 2001. In addition to September 11, the plots examined here include the murder of employees outside of CIA headquarters in 1993, the first attack on the World Trade Center in the same year, a plot to bomb the Brooklyn subway system in 1997, plots to bomb New York City landmarks in 1993, and the Millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Almost all of them have now been linked in some way to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. To be sure, other terrorist threats exist. However, because the threat it poses dwarfs that of any other terrorist group, foreign or domestic, the emphasis here will be on al Qaeda.
...
Terrorists have even exploited America's humanitarian tradition of welcoming those seeking asylum. At the time they committed their crimes, 16 of the 48 terrorists considered in this analysis were on temporary visas (primarily tourist visas); another 17 were lawful permanent residents or naturalized U.S. citizens; 12 were illegal aliens; and 3 of the 48 had applications for asylum pending.
So, I think the closed-borders argument would go something like this:
Close the holes in US border security and perhaps 31 out of 48 terrorists would not have been able to commit their crimes.
Of course, it's also not just crime and terrorism that people are worried about. They're also worried about social cohesion, economic impacts, political effects and other changes that come from an influx of people who speak different languages and don't understand local culture.

A lot of these things are hard to predict, but the claims I hear most often are that:
  • Social cohesion will go down with an influx of immigrants, thus tearing at the fabric of existing communities in America.
  • Immigrants will be competing with Americans for jobs, and that this will particularly affect America's working poor who already are most likely to be in a position to be working in low-skill, low-paid occupations.
  • Immigrants will come here and bring the terrible institutions from their home countries with them, voting in policies that wrecked their local economies (because they don't properly understand the connection between social institutions/policy and economic outcomes).
The last one often gets stated by conservatives as "they'll vote for Democrats!", but I'd like to steelman this argument a bit and make sure that I'm responding to the most substantial version of this claim.

All three of those problems are legitimate concerns (though, you'd never know it if you look at my Facebook feed).

Let's talk about them for a bit.

Social Cohesion

I've produced tons of videos that touch on this over the last couple years, but trade and immigration are fabulous ways of helping disparate groups of people to get along with each other and improve peace and social cooperation around the world. One of the best contributions writer Thomas Friedman has ever made to the world of ideas is advancing what he ended up calling the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Resolution in his book "The Lexus and the Olive Branch".

The basic idea here is that as countries trade with each other and as more people interact with each other via economic exchange, the more they get to know each other, trust each other, and rely on each other for their standards of living.

This is, of course, also commensurate with the point that Leonard Read made in "I, Pencil". Not any one of us could make even something as simple as a pencil by ourselves, but through the power of price signals and profit within the context of trade, we can bring people together with disparate skills and resources from all over the world to produce goods & services for us... And they don't even have to know who we are or care. Each time we do that, though, especially if we can be a part of the cultural exchange, we'll learn to trust and appreciate other people from other parts of the world even more.

Now... This is true. However, it doesn't happen overnight and a lot of studies apparently find that social cohesion (usually defined as generalized trust of one's community) has an inverse relationship to increased racial/ethnic diversity.

Per Oxford University's Migration Observatory:
Most of the empirical literature on this subject finds that the relationship between diversity and trust is negative – the more diverse a community is, the less likely individuals in it are to be trusting. The trend seems to hold especially strong for the US. Costa and Khan (2003) established with the General Social Survey that people in more diverse neighbourhoods trust their neighbours less and are less likely to be politically or communally involved. Alesina and La Ferrara (2000, 2005) found that trust in general and more specifically interpersonal trust is lower in more racially heterogeneous communities in the US. Stolle et al. (2008) comparing US and Canada observed a strong negative effect of diversity on trust; however, they also found that contact may neutralize but not make this relationship positive. Most notably, Putnam (2007) argues that diversity seems to alienate people in general and in his words pushes them towards ‘hunkering down’ i.e. towards segregation and isolation.
This is a genuine challenge to open immigration advocates, and to be honest, I don't have a fabulous rejoinder to it.

I'm confident that over time, people who get to know each other, live near each other, and become economically interdependent will eventually form a cohesive social group and their social bonds will become much stronger, but while we're waiting for that to happen, the society itself could tear itself apart and wind up becoming even more segregated than ever - which is something I've observed living in major cities for more than a decade. There are some communities that cross racial and ethnic lines, sure, but there's also a ton of self-segregation.

I also think the internet makes it easier for people to self-segregate and become economically interdependent with a large trading network of people who are all over the world yet share your various pre-existing traits such as skin color, religion, language, culture, etc.

I used to scoff at Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" as simply missing the fact that while people may not be going bowling as a neighborhood anymore, they're playing Halo 3 on headsets with everyone they know instead. I still maintain that criticism, but I've also come to think that a downside of social media in particular is that it allows us to be social without interacting with our actual, physical neighbors.

We get to expand our friend-group, but we can now do it inside a tightly controlled bubble of our own choosing.

Most people seem to use this power to isolate themselves from contrary points of view or from people they don't already believe are part of their tribe - whatever that tribe happens to be. If anything is going to screw up broad social cohesion in a diverse society, it's that.

Immigration can, therefore, be a very disruptive force in people's communities by reducing trust and creating lines of division that maybe didn't exist before. Lots of it in a short period of time seems likely to put a greater strain on social cohesion than a slow drip. A few families at a time can be effectively assimilated, but hundreds all coming in at once? I'm not so sure.

I don't think libertarians and progressives are wise to dismiss this concern as unimportant, but I have yet to see any serious grappling with the problem from any of the more vocal advocates I know in the last several weeks.

Competition for Jobs

This one's a lot easier to deal with.

Yes, immigrants will compete with native-born Americans for jobs, but all the available evidence suggests that when immigrants come here, they are incredibly entrepreneurial.

About 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Comparative studies show that first and second generation immigrants create far more businesses and are more financially successful than their native born counterparts within racial and ethnic lines. This becomes pretty apparent when you live in really diverse areas of major cities. The most buzzing and entrepreneurial places are the ones where there's a large concentration of brand new immigrants - and why wouldn't it be when those people are coming here with the very specific goal of improving their lives?

This crazy immigrant employs 85,000 people!
As I said above, immigrants do not just represent more mouths to feed, they also represent more
hands, skills, specialties, comparative advantages and ideas. More people means more brains with which to solve more problems more creatively.

Yes, an influx can be disruptive, but the long run economic benefits are quite clear as Bryan Caplan discussed above. So from a policy standpoint, I think the key here is simply to make sure that we are sufficiently promoting a dynamic economy with low barriers to entry, lots of opportunities for education and training, and that we don't use the state to preference one group over another or to subsidize stagnation - which we often do now.

As long as people are able to move about the economy, immigration - even substantial levels of immigration - should not pose a serious economic threat, and at the same time we know it has immense economic benefits.

However... The next one's a bit tougher to answer.

Bringing Bad Social Institutions

This one might be the most challenging problem, although in my experience it's also the one most totally scoffed at and ignored by pro-immigration advocates.

First, let's establish a base premise:

Culture is a product of spontaneous order.

That means that it's not controlled by some omnipresent central committee, rule book, or god, but is rather simply the aggregate product of what everyone living in a given society actually believes and how they behave. In short: We are our own culture.

Now, let's establish a secondary premise:

Our political system flows from our culture and they are inseparable.

The norms, customs, and beliefs that are held by the majority of people in society will determine what norms, customs, and beliefs are instituted into law. For most of US history, we've benefited from a culture that was broadly pro-freedom. As a result, the US was not originally saddled with a government that had power over speech, religion, or most anything in the economic realm. It did not adopt a system of central planners, and it did inherit many particularly strong protections of critical rights in line with John Locke's "Life, Liberty, and Property" natural rights philosophy.

This has always been the best thing about America, and the only times that America's government has gotten better rather than worse have been the times where the courts or politicians formally recognized that these rights weren't sufficiently protected or weren't being protected to an equal degree among different groups of people.

Most people who were born in America have been immersed in some aspects of these ideas from birth, and they've benefited tremendously from the social outcomes that these ideas about how society and government should function have provided to them.

We have been the most innovative and entrepreneurial nation in the history of the world, primarily because our people have been free to do what they wanted to do without state interference and they have always been able to retain the product of their labor to a degree almost no one else ever had or has since.

Not to go into a soapbox rant about the benefits of property rights, capitalism, free trade, but this stuff has been insanely important and has allowed America to become unfathomably wealthy.

However... Not everyone else in the world has grown up with this kind of culture.

Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where the government has nearly unlimited power over their lives, and where they've been taught from birth that the way to succeed is to work within the corrupt systems they inhabit through graft and bribery. Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where the people who are wealthy are the most ruthless or brutally violent. Many people from other parts of the world have grown up in societies where religious extremism and Dark Ages views about women or homosexuals are the norm. Many people from other parts of the world don't have any way of really even understanding the philosophical underpinnings and values of a place like America.

And again, remember that "culture" is not a static, unchanging thing independent of people. It is only the byproduct of the beliefs and values of all the individuals who live in a particular place.

Speaking as someone who tries to contribute to shaping culture for a living, it's already extremely difficult to cultivate good values among people who already live here and bringing millions of people into the United States who don't speak English and grew up under very different types of societies only makes it less likely that a culture filled with people who believe in free speech, freedom of religion, solid property rights, free enterprise, and limited government power is going to continue to exist.

This is a potentially enormous problem that I'm not sure anyone's really got an answer for.

If, for example, an influx of people from socialist nations in South America or Africa come here, or if perhaps a huge number of fundamentalist Muslim refugees from Syria or Iraq show up in the United States, our culture is going to change... And it's absolutely not clear that it's going to change for the better.

This goes beyond just the question of whether or not neighborhoods will be more or less trusting. It goes to what our entire legal and political system could look like in 20-30 years.

And before you say, "Well the people fleeing awful socialist countries or Muslim theocracies
probably don't believe in those systems anymore," I would tell you that this argument is not built on a decent understanding of how people actually think and form philosophical worldviews.

Even people who accept that their home countries have turned to such garbage that they have to leave often have no idea why, because it actually takes quite a bit of work and study to figure that stuff out. Consider that Egyptians participating in Arab Spring (as seen in the photo above) knew they wanted to rid themselves of Hosni Mubarak, but once Mubarak was forced out of office and the autocracy was overthrown, have Egyptians created a liberal democracy with strong protections of individual liberty and property rights?

No. They have not.

This shouldn't be surprising. The only way to get from the corrupt authoritarianism of Egypt to the democratic traditions of the Western world that protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property, is for enough of the entire society to actually understand and embrace those values to turn it into politics. But people don't think about this stuff that deeply. Even when they know that the system they have isn't working, that doesn't mean they understand how to build a system that would work.

Africa and South America in particular are full of examples of this problem. In the 1960s, all these colonialist power structures got torn down, which many people assumed would be a boon for liberty in Africa, but in their place most nations got socialist dictators!

Likewise, people who have lived in the United States their entire life and benefit from institutions that were put in place decades or centuries ago often have no clue why their own living standards are so high. This stuff just isn't that obvious to most people, and people can absolutely decide to leave their home country without changing their beliefs about its fundamental values.

I know many people personally for whom this is the case.

A dear friend of mine from France has openly acknowledged to me in conversation numerous times that his birthplace has created a toxic environment for entrepreneurship and business, and he recognizes that he could not have any hope of making a great living doing what he's incredibly good at in France. He moved to the US for opportunity, and he's contributed a ton of value to everyone here ever since, yet he's still highly sympathetic to most of the heavily restrictive economic policies the French government is best known for.

In spite of knowing about the horrible outcomes in the country he came from, my friend still believes in the very policies that ultimately caused him to leave.

Why?

Because the connection between restrictive policies and poor outcomes just isn't as obvious or intuitive as a lot of libertarian policy wonks like to think it should be, and because when you grow up your whole life in a culture that surrounds you with stories defining the values that are important, you tend to hold onto those values wherever you go. Even if they suck.

Do some people figure it out? Absolutely.

Will everyone, or even most? Don't bet on it.

So where does that leave us?

I'm honestly not sure.

We haven't even covered other difficult topics such as the incentives provided by our welfare system or the strain new immigrants put on government services, which will always be primarily paid for by natives and legal immigrants. Nobel Prize-winning economist and libertarian stalwart Milton Friedman discussed this problem directly in an email to the Polish Minister of the Treasury, Henryk A. Kowalczyk:
Immigration is a particularly difficult subject. There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite. Your proposal that someone only be able to come for employment is a good one but it would not solve the problem completely. The real hitch is in denying social benefits to the immigrants who are here. That is very hard to do, much harder than you would think as we have found out in California. But nonetheless, we clearly want to move in the direction that you are talking about so this is a question of nitpicking, not of serious objection.
Now, to be clear, Friedman still believed the net-effects of immigration were sufficiently positive to justify these costs. Lots of economists and libertarian political theorists have since taken Friedman to task for not being pro-immigration enough and/or not advocating what they call "keyhole" solutions - that is, policies that would widen the opportunity for more immigration over time - such as a highly porous border that explicitly allows lots of illegal immigration.

That said, I think a lot of critics who take this approach are deluding themselves that these kinds of approaches are smart or workable.

For one thing, eroding public faith in laws as an intentional policy "solution" does not strike me as a particularly sound long-term strategy if you also care about having a society that gives a shit about its cultural and political institutions. For another, as we've clearly seen from having a fairly porous border already (DHS estimates about 11 million illegal immigrants are currently living in the US), there are tons of people out there who see this kind of solution as a severe affront to the sanctity of their community, to the upholding of authority, and define it as an "invasion" that is tearing at the fabric of our civilization.

And honestly, that's what a lot of this whole blog post is about... Libertarians and progressives who favor open borders can't simply ignore the fact that the majority of the population doesn't agree with them and that a significant minority is actively, vehemently opposed to what they're advocating.

So all I really know at this point is that this subject is actually really goddamn complicated, and social media outrage stories don't really do well with complexity.

It's All More Complicated Than You Think

Even with respect to the idea of children being "put in cages" or separated from their families, the issues aren't nearly as cut and dry as a lot of my friends and people in the media seem to want everyone to believe.

A lot of those kids are unaccompanied to begin with, and they either don't have parents anywhere near the United States, or they have parents or guardians who aren't willing to come get them for fear of being arrested and deported themselves. But besides that, any parent who commits a crime is going to be separated from their kid and it certainly doesn't make any sense to put children in with populations of adults in a prison.

And once we recognize this, we have to acknowledge that if you try to take border security seriously as Trump clearly does, then you're going to be arresting a lot of people and as a result you're going to have to figure out what to do with a lot of those kids when government facilities aren't enough. More border crackdowns are inherently going to turn up kids and if you don't know what you're doing with them, you're going to end up with the problems we have... Even if you think that the overall border crackdowns are a good idea.

It's also not entirely clear what stories to believe regarding treatment.

As we discussed above, a lot of the images in the press and on social media have been shared in error. But it's not just imagery, last night a prominent and consistent anti-Trump (and pro-immigration) voice on my Facebook shared a story about rapes and sexual assaults being committed by guards and border detention facilities.

Predictably, everyone reacted with horror and outrage, often directly at Trump. Problem is... That report was from 2014.

I find that political outrage tends to turn people into confirmation bias machines, and makes them garbage at fact-checking... Because, really, why bother? If the image or story perfectly fits your pre-existing narrative, fact-checking is only ever going to be a disappointment.

But as I said at the beginning, the cost of failure is that people who aren't as laser-focused on the issues as you are stop believing you.

Adam Carolla recently talked about this on his podcast, and I think it warrants a listen. Start at about 9 minutes and 25 seconds into the show.

Final Thoughts

I'm sorry to say that I don't have a good answer to any of this.

I'd love to say that everything was perfectly clear and easy, and that there's some set of words and phrases that I could give you to say how you convince people that immigration is a net benefit to society and that even though, yes, sometimes an immigrant comes here and commits a heinous crime, that absolutely does not mean that we should restrict all immigration.

I'd like everyone to see other people as individuals and not only as members of identity groups ("foreigner", "American", "immigrant", "Muslim", etc.). If we did this, conservatives would have to acknowledge that the vast majority of immigrants are great, and the progressives and libertarians would have to acknowledge that some of them are not so great.

I'd also like everyone I know personally to accept that there are actually some downsides to immigration and quit acting like the only people who see any negatives in immigration are racist morons who can't get a job.

But most of all, I want everyone to just listen to each other a hell of a lot better than they are and realize that most of what's happening is an utter failure to communicate.

Conservatives believe that the stability of our society is upset by immigrants. Libertarians believe that restricting immigration is an unacceptable abuse of power over individuals. Progressives believe that preventing immigrants from coming to the US is oppressive and harmful to the poorest people.

All three groups have a point.

As for my own opinion, I'm as strong a supporter of immigration and generally open-borders as I have ever been... Because I see people as the most supremely valuable resource to any society. More immigration means more diversity of perspectives and ideas, more productive hands, and more opportunities to connect with other cultures and improve our own. I also see the downsides as mostly minimal compared to the benefits.

This would all be even more true in a society that was more economically free and had a lower rate of welfare dependency, but we work with the society we have.

As for concerns about immigrants bringing in poor values... Well, friends... Look around. Poor values are already here, and we're going to need to figure out how to reverse that trend immediately but as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with immigration. Most of the worst ideas flooding our kids' brains are coming from our entertainment, news media, and universities, not from the dude running the taco stand on the corner.


Saturday, April 28, 2018

According to Will Wilkinson, violent protests on campus aren't a threat to free speech, but this girl's graduation photo is.

A couple weeks ago, I got into a discussion on a thread with long-time Facebook friend and now NY Times commentator, Will Wilkinson about this "controversial" graduation photo taken by University of Tennessee-Chattanooga student Brenna Spencer:



On Twitter/Facebook, Wilkinson wrote:



We'll come back to this issue in a lot more detail in a moment, but first I want to set the stage.

Will Wilkinson is the VP of Policy Research at the Niskanen Center, a relatively new DC-based think tank that styles itself as "libertarian" but tends to advocate policies and ideas that are anything but.

They've also been blasted for publishing or re-publishing studies and reports that are of shockingly poor quality, including recently one by Jeffrey Sachs which claimed that "liberals" were more likely to be victims of firings based on political speech than "conservatives".

There were two major problems with Sachs' report that should have been immediately obvious.

1) It failed to take into account the massive disparity in the raw number of liberal vs. conservative college professors.

According to a September 2016 study by Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein which looked at the voter registration data for 7,243 history, law, economics, journalism, and psychology faculty and found that just 314 had registered as Republican, while 3,623 were registered Democrats which puts the overall ratio at about 11.5:1.

They go on to note:
"The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1. The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher. We provide a breakdown by department at each university. The data support the established finding that D:R ratios are highest at the apex of disciplinary pyramids, that is, at the most prestigious departments."
So naturally, any study that purports to describe the frequency with which problems are happening to a given population should at the very least take into account massive differences in population size rather than providing raw numbers.

If the question is who is more likely to be fired for speaking their mind, then it's pretty important that we're comparing the groups of people on a per capita basis.

Sachs didn't do that, and Niskanen didn't care.

2) As another friend, history professor Phil Magness pointed out, at least 3 of the cases of liberals supposedly being fired for political speech were misrepresented -- and they were huge, well-known cases, so a more in-depth review of Sachs report would be likely to uncover more padding.

Quoting Phil:
1. The database claims that Ward Churchill was fired for "unpatriotic" speech. This is not true. Churchill was actually fired for research misconduct following the discovery that he had engaged in plagiarism and the fabrication of evidence in his published academic work.

2. The database claims that Melissa Click was fired for being "anti-conservative." Also not true. Click was fired after being indicted for physically assaulting a student on campus.

3. The database claims Kevin Allred was fired for making "anti-white" political tweets. He was actually fired for a series of tweets in which he threatened mass shootings and running Trump supporters over with his car. Threatening violence would seem to fall well outside of the protections of free speech or academic freedom.

I would argue that all three of these terminations were justified for reasons unrelated to "free speech."
I think most people would agree with Phil on this, I'd be willing to be that if we looked even more closely at the examples presented by Sachs, we'd find a larger pattern of misrepresenting cases - and that this tendency would not be random.

But Wilkinson used this study to back up a previous claim recently made by the Niskanen Center that there was no free speech "crisis" on college campuses.

In spite of the fact that progressives significantly out-number any non-progressive voices on college campuses in every discipline and in some cases as much as 20:1, and in spite of the fact that there are now dozens of cases of large mobs of progressive students and faculty members shouting down conservative speakers and several instances of professors using or supporting the use of violence such as with Melissa Click and more recently with Randa Jarrar calling for the use of literal terrorism in order to support her agenda, according to Wilkinson, it's the conservatives who are the real threat to free speech.

And of course, this all plays back into his reaction to Brenna Spencer's graduation photo.

Wilkinson accuses Spencer - as a white, Trump-supporting conservative in the South - of playing the victim when she is, in fact, the oppressor.

I found this to be a particularly ridiculous reaction for several reasons, not least of which being that I don't see anything remotely wrong with Brenna Spencer's photo to begin with, and posited that the only way you'd think of it as a free speech-chilling threat of any kind is if you believe that regardless of context, the mere sight of a gun would be terrifying to her fellow classmates.

I find this to be an especially odd claim to make in a state like Tennessee, because most of the students attending the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga probably grew up around guns and regardless of their general political leanings are likely far more familiar with firearms and rural culture than students at most universities.

Even now, I find it hard to imagine a scenario in which I should have ever even seen or known about this photo. When I graduated high school, as a drummer, I took several graduation photos with drums in various configurations... I look at Spencer's photo as basically the same thing, because I'm not an emotional child who faints at the sight of a gun.

So I asked whether or not it just might be possible that far from trying to be a provocateur, Brenna Spencer was actually, genuinely trying to positively express a value - in this case gun ownership - that she felt was under attack.

I further noted that this photograph was taken/shared after we'd already been subjected to two months of national "conversation" stemming from the school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. Following weeks of seeing nothing but people like David Hogg calling the NRA "terrorists", and demanding legislation that would curtail the rights of gun-owners, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine someone like Brenna Spencer feeling defensive about her right to bear arms and if you understand that, you should be able to understand why she might want to express her views publicly as she was exiting college.

In fact, this seems to me like the most obvious and clear motivation for Spencer to take and distribute the image.

She did not seem to be deliberately "triggering" progressives as Wilkinson asserted, and furthermore, if an image like this is enough to trigger other students and offend or upset them, that just seems like evidence that those students were way too thin-skinned to begin with.

Wilkinson responded to my comments with a long statement told from his experience teaching in Tennessee. Subsequently, I was challenged by another person on the thread to reply to it. Thus... What follows is Wilkinson's comment, intercut with my public response.

It's quite long, so here's the abstract:

While I think Will makes some decent points in the abstract, this specific case does not remotely demonstrate what he thinks it does, there are plenty of alternative ways to look at this specific case, he rests his core points on a lot of really shaky conceptual arguments, and in the end he resorts to arrogant moral grandstanding.

With that said... Here we go:
Will: "Many, many, many universities are state schools in conservative states and draw tons of conservative students, who come from places more conservative than the town the school is in, and way more conservative than the ethos of the school itself. But these members of the state's politically and culturally dominant class feel entitled to institutions as conservative as the ethos of the state they dominate, and totally ridiculously feel that the fact that they aren't makes them victims of prejudice."
Me: This may be true in some instances, but seems like a total misreading of the photo in question, wherein the girl is actually part of a group of people that tend to be marginalized and attacked constantly by all the dominant cultural institutions: Media, (National) Politics, Entertainment, and Academia.
Will: "Campuses are places where members of traditionally victimized and marginalized classes feel relatively safe demanding equal recognition and protection of their rights as persons and citizens, which members of the dominant class invariably finds threatening."
Me: Ok, to the first part, but... I think a citation is definitely needed for the "members of the dominant class invariably find[ing] this to be threatening", since quite a large number - possibly even the majority - of the "dominant class" is vocally supportive of providing that equal recognition and equal protection of rights.

This isn't 1961.
Will: "The more effective egalitarian demands are likely to be (at elite schools, because the graduates stand a chance of actually wielding influence) the more threatening the dominant group finds it."
Me: Again, citation needed.

The dominant group at literally all the "elite schools" ARE in favor of these egalitarian demands. And to call a lot of the demands in question "egalitarian" is, itself, a bold claim. Please explain to me how what happened to the Christakis or Weinsteins is an example of egalitarianism, or to Charles Murray, or to Christina Hoff Sommers, and on and on and on... And that's before we get to any of the actually inflammatory speakers that were disinvited like Milo, etc.

To the contrary, many of these demands seem to seek special class protections which go far beyond a situation where everyone is actually equal.

And they have majority popular and institutional support in the places where these things are mostly in play.

Translation: The people who are rejecting this stuff or who are pushing back are rarely if ever the "dominant" group, unless you think that social conditions and attitudes are identical to what they were 50-60 years ago.
Will: "Casting the people asking for equality as oppressors who victimize the class they are dominated by is a venerable trick to protect traditional power relations by inverting the direction of and responsibility for injustice."
Me: Ok.

Two points... First: 20 year old girls aren't responsible for historical oppression, and, second: How is the photo cited an example of this even if they were?
Will: "It's a way of not only denying actual injustice, but of deepening it by implying that forward moral progress requires that the the dominant class resist and roll back the subordinate classes' effective political power."
Me: Again, how is the photo cited in any way representative of this problem?

If you want to talk about the history of gun rights, it was the pro *control* side that used power to oppress minorities. Or had we all forgotten the push to regulate guns as a response to the Black Panthers?
Will: "At schools like UTC, the black kids have grandparents who suffered through Jim Crow. The idea that it can be literally physically dangerous to challenge white people is drilled into them, because it is true."
Me: I'd buy that this can be true for some people, but I've lived all over the United States and made friends with all kinds of people and see absolutely no evidence from my experiences that this is true for the majority or en masse.

Are we not living in the same world where Kanye West used his time at the Grammy's to say that then President Bush hates black people?
Will: "When a white kid in my class insisted that northern Africa "isn't real Africa" -- we were doing the Aeneid and I was emphasizing the African roots of Western civilization -- the black kids (who were VERY engaged by the idea that West tradition is partly African) literally started looking down, or acting slightly distracted, as if they weren't listening and didn't notice anything had been said."
Me: That's a sad story. Still not sure what it has to do with the photo used as an example of the phenomenon in question.
Will: "But they heard and knew exactly what that kid was saying: that *their* ancestors are outsiders to the Western tradition, and have no claim to the dignity and civilization of Alexandria and Cleopatra. Nobody said a peep. Why not?"
Me: Because it's awkward? Because they're insecure college kids in what's probably a 101 class? Because the specific kid who spoke up was convincing or more socially dominant? Because they partly agree or have been taught a similar idea, in that typically Egypt and Libya are seen as a somewhat more Middle East and not "African"? Because Will did not sufficiently create an environment in his class that invites these kinds of challenges?

I'm normally inclined to take the first-person account at face value, but it's not like there aren't other explanations beyond the one that fits exactly into Will's pre-existing ideology.
Will: "Well, this young lady's picture is a nice illustration. Her people (white Republicans) run Tennessee, the whole damn thing, except for the bigger cities, like Nashville and Memphis and Chattanooga, and even these places are run by relatively conservative white people. White people in Tennessee make the laws and they enforce them."
Me: Finally, we're getting to how the photo comes into play... But already he's tying it to stuff that this girl has zero connection to or control over.
Will: "Now, Donald Trump is a populist who relentlessly associates whiteness with Americanness and non-whiteness with marginal or non-Americanness, communicating pretty clearly that non-urban white people are entitled to protect their outsized share of power. That's the core of his message."
Me: Per Washington Post's article: Mostly black neighborhoods voted more Republican in 2016 than in 2012'
"That red line for white neighborhoods is very important and bolsters the focus on white voters after the 2016 election. But that blue line, showing more heavily black neighborhoods voting more Republican than in 2012, has been under-recognized.

There are two reasons this might have happened. The first is a change in support among black voters that favors the Republican. The second is a decrease in black turnout, meaning that the white voters in those neighborhoods who were more likely to back Trump carried more weight in the results."
In other words, while voter turn out was down, the black voters that remained weren't uniformly turned off by Trump. I don't generally ask (or care) how my friends vote, but anecdotally, I have multiple black friends who were sympathetic to (if not voted for) Trump, including a couple very close friends.

Where Will sees Trump as relentlessly associating whiteness with Americanness, it's possible that other people saw Trump as unifying an idea of "Americanness" against foreignness and the joint fears of economic competition and terrorism?

My view is that people tend to see what they want to see with Trump. But I'll accept Will's point for the sake of argument. Still not sure what it has to do with the photo.
Will: "So here's this privileged college-student member of Tennessee's dominant political faction in a Trump shirt with a gun in her waistband. What's displaying the gun *about*? It's not *wrong* to say "pride in the exercise of a constitutional right." But it's just monumentally dense to leave it there."
Me: Is it, though?

Trump and "big picture" stuff that college professors tend to see that no one else cares about aside, we've just spent the last 2 months living through a non-stop media barrage of anti-gun, anti-2nd Amendment voices at the national level.

Nearly the entire tenor of the "national conversation" around guns consists of reporters and anti-gun people routinely calling pro-gun people child murderers and blaming corruption (as opposed to a sincere opposition) and corporate lobbying for the fact that AR-15s have not been banned yet.

If this girl is graduating college now, then she's just spent her entire semester listening to people tell her she's a bad person for being a gun owner.

Perhaps that has more to do with her post than the 2016 election of Donald Trump?

Perhaps she got tired of seeing David Hogg's face every time she fired up Facebook or Twitter?

Who knows, right?
Will: "This young woman is in the heart of a decent-sized historically segregated southern city next to the lovely glassy, art museum flashing a handgun. Even outside the context of a Trump shirt, the gun is a straight-up threat to those who would challenge the inequities of the status quo power structure."
Me: This is straight-up nonsense. Childish nonsense. I'll go into detail in a different comment if necessary, but I think it's the dumbest part of this whole post.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: Expanding on this point, this part of Wilkinson's long comment is the dumbest, most childish part of his whole claim because it assumes that the presence of an inanimate object as held by a 21-year-old white college student is inherently threatening regardless of context. Under this assumption, basically anytime a white person holds a gun for any reason - at the range, at a shooting competition, in a movie, whatever - they're a symbol of racist power struggles dating back centuries.

Worse still, this infantilizes minorities to an extreme degree, asserting that all this historical baggage is dredged up in people at the mere sight of a firearm. This is nothing more than the bigotry of low expectations, and it's made doubly tragic by the fact that Wilkinson is in charge of teaching students.

As had I said earlier in the overall thread, anyone who thinks that should join me at QuickShot or Stoddard's Range in Atlanta, where the majority of patrons and staff are black. In my experience, people in the South are far more familiar with, and thus comfortable with, firearms. The result is that they do not feel "threatened" by non-threatening situations like that which is clearly the case in Brenna Spencers graduation photo.

Anyone threatened by that photo would be among the most fragile, weak-willed people I've ever encountered, and unlike Wilkinson, I don't believe that "People of Color" are inherently that fragile.]
Will: "(Go watch an hour of NRA TV videos if you don't believe that this is what's up.)"
Me: Not one single gun-owner I know or have talked to has shared with me an "NRA-TV" post as a justification for their rights. Not once. And I know a LOT of gun owners & Second Amendment supporters.

The NRA is loud, but as far as I can tell, the only reason they "represent" anyone is because they get headlines and airtime from hyperventilating reporters who see them as the enemy.

[And once again, this doesn't have anything to do with Brenna Spencer]
Will: "But she's also correctly confident that her heavily cultivated whiteness and femininity defuse the sense of threat (that's what Dana Loesch is for), which is why she can do something that really would put one of her black male classmates at risk of being murdered by the police."
Me: Murdered by the police at a photoshoot? For college graduation photos? Black kids take photos with guns a lot. Will's stretching like taffy on this point.

Take Antonia Okafor, for instance:




And Antonia is hardly alone. You might remember this infamous photo from a few years back.



Will doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between the dangers of a kid displaying a gun while interacting with a cop in any kind of situation where that could actually be construed as a threat, and the context of taking what are essentially props to a private photo shoot.

Fortunately, I've worked as a photographer and video producer for a long time and I can differentiate between the two.

It's actually not that hard, though, so I'm not sure why a supposed academic is struggling with it.
Will: "A black kid about to graduate college would NEVER do this because they're literally NOT FREE to do it without imperiling their freedom and safety."
Again... Wrong. Good prose, but wrong. See above.
Will: "But she is free to do it, because she is a well-to-do white southern lady, and does. It is an ostentatious display of unequal power, unequal protection of basic rights, and a signal of the willingness to use violence to protect these inequalities, but winkingly portrayed as an underdog's plucky act of defiance against injustice."
It's definitely easier for pretty girls to get away with stuff like this. I don't suppose we want to get into a conversation about male privilege, here, but anyway.... Wow.

[Wilkinson's just made Brenna Spencer the representative for the entire history of power and oppression in the South. Poor miss Spencer is now the poster girl for white power and inequality, and her photo (scroll up to the top if you forgot which one we're talking about, I won't blame you given the hyperbole on display here) is a symbol of violence in defense of her people's oppressive regime.

At this point, I've got nothing left for Wilkinson's point but sarcasm and contempt.]
Will: "If you think this sort of thing doesn't carry over to campuses in places like Chattanooga and make students fearful of freely speaking their minds, you're wrong."
I don't think I am.
Will: "If you don't think the point of "political correctness" is to resist this fear and create a sense of safety for people who have less power, you're wrong."
Yeah, again... I don't think I am.
Will: "And if you think that the expression-chilling effects of PC on campus is worse than the expression-chilling effects of ongoing invidious inequalities in basic rights and effective political power, as illustrated in this photo, you're wrong."
Definitely not wrong on this.
Will: "And if you look at this photo and say, "I don't see the problem," you're part of the problem."
Blow it out your ass, Will.



Reading through Will's comments again, you'll note that my patience runs out the more he resorts to moral grandstanding and starts accusing people (me) of malicious intentions.

After way too many years of having these kinds of conversations, I've come to realize that people who do that have little intelligent to add. When you rest your argument on trying to paint your opponent as evil, rather than on solid logic built on factual premises, you're skipping past the hard part of thinking and going right to rationalizing your pre-existing beliefs instead.

Increasingly, I get the impression that this basically defines Wilkinson and the Niskanen Center in general.

Today, when challenged on the Jeffrey Sachs report on Phil Magness' thread, Wilkinson had no response to his critics (many whom were much more successful academics) other than a snarky dismissal.



I guess this is what we're reduced to.

To the broader point, if your evidence for the claim that the real "threat" to free speech is coming from conservatives like Brenna Spencer, because of photos like this, you are not engaging in a serious argument. If your evidence for the idea that progressives are more frequently fired for their political speech is riddled with basic errors, and your claim that there isn't really a free speech "crisis" ignores basically everything that's going on at colleges & universities around the country or relies on quibbles over the definition of "crisis", you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.

And if your response to your critics is to be dismissive or call them bad people, your arrogance is out of control.