Search Results for: The New Republic

Can This Tech Company’s Digital Border Wall Secure it More Government Defense Contracts?

AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File

Building a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexican border threatens human beings and entire ecosystems, and it signals America’s increasing nationalistic isolationism. To head Trump’s call to “build a wall,” new tech company Anduril Industries is testing a digital border wall that mixes virtual reality with radar and cameras to monitor human movement. So far the Lattice system works. If the Department of Homeland Security approves it, Anduril hopes to use this project to do what few companies in Silicon Valley do: become a major player in the defense industry. So who are the people behind the company?

For Wired, Steven Levy explains how Lattice works and spends time with Anduril’s controversial co-founder Palmer Luckey and others inside the company’s California headquarters to see what they’re about. Lattice isn’t the first attempt to secure the U.S. border electronically, but its cost and relative simplicity make it one of the most promising. Backed by the pro-Trump venture capitalist Peter Thiel ─ the billionaire who bought land in New Zealand to survive the end times ─ Anduril’s political leanings bring its ambitions and projects into question.

Meanwhile, Luckey’s political activities had made him the object of tech-press scorn. News reports claimed that Luckey was involved in an alt-right group called Nimble America, paying for billboards ripping Hillary Clinton as “Too Big to Jail” and allegedly penning vicious Reddit posts for the group. On his public Facebook page, he denied many of the allegations but confirmed that he donated $10,000 to Nimble America because he “thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters.” He apologized for “negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.” When asked about this now, the normally buoyant Luckey drops his smile and chooses his words carefully, claiming that his politics are misunderstood. “The alt-right, as it exists, as it’s defined, I do not support, never have,” he says. He describes himself as “fiscally conservative, pro-freedom, little-L libertarian, and big-R Republican.”

On the last day of March 2017, Luckey was ousted from Facebook. Neither party is sharing the details of his exit. (The issue even came up at Zuckerberg’s April 2018 Senate hearing, when Republican senator Ted Cruz, who has received $5,400 in political donations from Luckey, demanded, “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” Zuckerberg said only that it wasn’t because of his politics.) And what did Luckey learn from his experience at Facebook and Oculus? “Be careful who you trust,” he says. “Be careful who has control.”

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When ‘The Real World’ Gave Up on Reality

MTV / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | June 2018 | 9 minutes (2,208 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

The most appropriate single epithet for MTV’s unscripted housemate drama The Real World is pioneering. Granted, given what the show and the oeuvre it birthed have since become — an indistinguishable procession of aggressively vapid ab models who take turns getting alcohol poisoning in a hot tub, no matter the show’s setting or purpose — the positive connotations of that word make it painful to use.

But alas, pioneering is accurate. Before producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray had the idea in 1992 to choose seven strangers at random, deposit them in a New York City loft, have their lives “taped” at a totally grungified 42-degree angle, and find out what happens, the very thought of someone going on television for no other reason than to live in an apartment with a bunch of randos was extremely novel.

What we so easily forget now, in an age where the country’s only housewives are Housewives, is that The Real World‘s early seasons were beloved by young adults precisely because they showed the largely-unremarkable exploits of largely-unremarkable (if mildly telegenic) young people. By “early seasons” I mean 1992-1996 — the 1997 season, shot in Boston, would mark the show’s transition from unscripted soap opera to unapologetic grotesque, a.k.a. what we now consider the reality-television standard. This transformation is one of the most notable — possibly most ignominious? — legacies of the ’90s, perhaps even more so than the mushroom cuts, black chokers, and off-kilter camera work.

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A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

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Stacey Abrams’ Historic Win in Georgia: A Reading List

ATLANTA, GA - MAY 22: Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams takes the stage to declare victory in the primary during an election night event on May 22, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. If elected, Abrams would become the first African American female governor in the nation. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, former state representative Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia, becoming the first black woman gubernatorial nominee of a major political party in U.S. history. She defeated her opponent handily, beating Stacey Evans with a three-to-one margin with a platform calling for Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform, gun safety measures, affordable childcare, and universal pre-K.

Abrams faces a tough general election in November. Only four African-American politicians have served as governor in the U.S. ever, with none in the Deep South since Reconstruction. A run-off election will be held in July to determine the Republican nominee, and of the candidates likely to oppose Abrams, both support looser gun laws, tax cuts for high earners, and defunding sanctuary cities as part of a “crackdown on illegal immigration.” Abrams hopes to win by building a multi-racial coalition of progressives (including new voters) that taps into Georgia’s shifting demographics.

Abrams is part of a national wave of women running for office in record numbers, as well as a galvanizing energy among progressives partly inspired by opposition to President Trump. Her candidacy has drawn national attention; should Abrams win, one of the most populous red states could be in play for progressives seeking national office for the first time in decades. It could also signal a significant shift in values and priorities for the Deep South.

For a deeper dive, here are a few pieces that smartly contextualize Abrams’ victory, as well as what’s at stake in the fall.

On Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Primary

“Stacey Abrams Wins Democratic Primary for Governor, Making History.” (Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns, New York Times, May 2018)

Martin and Burns consider the history-making moment of Abrams’ primary win and why the candidate has drawn support from Democrats at the federal level. The reporters also note other primary successes among progressive Democrats Tuesday night, especially women candidates like Amy McGrath of Kentucky.

“Stacey Abrams Makes History in the Georgia Primary.” (Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, May 2018)

Bethea talks to a cross section of conservative and progressive Georgia political insiders about Abrams’ chances in the general election.

“America Has Never Had a Black Woman Governor. Stacey Abrams Has Something to Say About That.” (Jamilah King, Mother Jones, April 2018)

Reporter Jamilah King profiles Abrams, capturing the candidate’s appeal to black women voters and her push to assemble a “rainbow coalition.”

On Change in the South

“Reverse Migration Might Turn Georgia Blue.” (Alana Semuels, Atlantic, May 2018)

Young, unmarried blacks and single women are moving to the South, especially Atlanta and its suburbs, in large numbers. Searching for lower housing prices and better quality of life, transplants tend to be more progressive than other residents. They could be instrumental in helping Abrams achieve victory.

“Racism is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” (Reniqua Allen, New York Times, July 2017)

Allen takes a closer look at why black millennials like her are flocking to southern cities.

“Slavery’s Southern Legacy.” (Sophia Nguyen, Harvard Magazine, May 2018)

Nguyen reports on a new book (by researchers Avidit Acharya and Matthew Blackwell), which claims that political attitudes in the South, especially on issues of race, can be predicted by how deeply individual counties relied on slavery prior to the Civil War.

 “’Please God, Don’t Let Me Get Stopped’: Around Atlanta, No Sanctuary for Immigrants.” (Vivian Yee, New York Times, November 2017)

According to Yee, “the regional ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.” The Republican contenders in Stacey Abrams’ race have run strident anti-immigration campaigns.

“When the South Was the Most Progressive Region in America.” (Blain Roberts & Ethan J. Kytle, Atlantic, January 2018)

Roberts and Kytle, both historians, discuss how the post-Civil War’s South created multi-racial democracies based on state constitutions that were more progressive than many in the North. Reconstruction era activists and politicians, the authors contend, “[provide] a blueprint for a liberal resurgence that may already be under way in the 21st century South.”

On National Trends

“Red State, Blue City.” (David A. Graham, Atlantic, March 2017)

Graham posits that U.S. politics are growing increasingly polarized along a rural/urban divide.

“A Progressive Electoral Wave is Sweeping the Country.” (John Nichols, The Nation, June 2017)

Nichols details the importance of down-ballot victories, across the country, that signal a rising tide of resistance to the policies of President Trump.

More than Make-Work

Jobs Guarantee
Illustration by Lily Padula

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,366 words)

In the past several weeks, a flurry of U.S. Senators have come out in support of a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders announced that his office will propose a plan; Cory Booker filed legislation for a pilot program with Jeff Merkley, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren as cosponsors. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work, and by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers,” Booker said.

The idea—that the government should provide a job for anyone who wants one—is both radical and impressively well-liked. A recent study found that 52 percent of Americans support it, compared with just 29 percent who say they’re opposed. David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, which conducted the research, told The Nation, “This is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled.”

That’s not all that surprising. Americans overwhelmingly believe that everyone who can work should work, and the obvious corollary is that everyone who wants to work should be able to find a job. In its broadest form, this premise appeals across the political spectrum, not just to liberals who want to raise wages and improve labor’s bargaining power. A Trump supporter I met while covering the 2016 New Hampshire primary, a guy deeply convinced that the country is being ruined by lazy moochers, told me, “If you can work, maybe we need to put you to work in government offices or something.” Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…

Wild At Heart

A Bureau of Land Management park ranger tries to corner a steer that escaped from a cattle trailer outside Yuma, Arizona in 2011. (Craig Fry/The Yuma Daily Sun/AP)

Tove DanovichTopic | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,954 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

It was breaking news in New York City. News helicopters thrummed overhead, the police were called in for backup, and a crowd of rubberneckers peered through the chain-link fence at the edge of the Prospect Park soccer field. Over 3,400 viewers watched a livestream online as police exited their vehicles and walked onto the grass, nets in hand, hoping to subdue the escapee: a young chocolate-colored steer with oversize tan ears that stuck straight out from its head, like a disguise that didn’t fit right.

The Brahman steer—one of the most common cattle breeds used in meat processing—had been on the lam since the morning, when it likely escaped from one of South Brooklyn’s live slaughter markets. These aren’t the assembly-line slaughterhouses of factory farming, but rather small establishments where customers can walk up to pens of live chickens, goats, rabbits, and other animals, point to the one they want, and have it killed on the premises. Often such live markets serve immigrant communities used to eating their meat when it’s still fresh, or religious communities who want to ensure their meat was prepared kosher or halal. Apparently, the Prospect Park steer didn’t want to linger long at a place like that.

First, the steer took a breakneck tour of Flatbush and South Park Slope. As early as 8:30 a.m., Twitter lit up with people reporting sightings of the steer as it charged down the sidewalk. “I thought there was nothing new to be seen after a lifetime in NYC,” one woman wrote. Eventually, the little steer got itself into the park, and it was there that the news cameras, and the NYPD, caught up with it. The police tried to use the soccer nets to corral the animal, tipping them over and awkwardly maneuvering the enormous nets around the field. But the steer slipped out of their grasp. This went on for hours. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Three: A Clan Not to Cross

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 29 minutes (7,300 words)

Part 3 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

Since Cliven Bundy took in his first desert breath as a free man this past January, the old cowboy has found himself more in ballrooms and meeting rooms and on stages across the West than back in the saddles he fought so hard to sit in again.

Just two days after his release, he stood in front of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in Las Vegas, bullhorn in hand, goading the sheriff to come outside: “Is this man going to stand up and protect our life, liberty, and property?” he asked the small crowd gathered around him, smartphones livestreaming his words. The sheriff never emerged.

“My defense is a fifteen-second defense: I graze my cattle only on Clark County, Nevada, land, and I have no contract with the federal government,” Bundy told his flock.

Later that month, on a rural Montana stage flanked by ruffled red curtains, there he stood in jeans and boots and an ash-gray sport coat as a crowd of a couple hundred welcomed him with whoops and whistles fit for rural royalty. “I have a fifteen-second defense,” he said. The crowd listened, rapt.

And there he was again, in February, on an amateur YouTube talk show, in a blue plaid shirt and bolo tie, expounding for well beyond 15 seconds on his ideas about government.

If Cliven Bundy was a star among constitutional literalists after the standoff in 2014, two years in jail transformed the old man and his family into the full-fledged glitterati of the far, far right.

His trademark 15-second defense line is mostly true: Cliven has no contract with the federal government and, yet, continues to graze his cows illegally on public land. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Two: By a Thread

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Part 2 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

It’s mid-November, the end of the first week of the trial in Las Vegas. I’ve found that my favorite time of day here is early morning, when the only people to talk to are those calling “good morning!” from the doorways and brick plazas where they’ve slept. It’s when Fremont Street is free of tourists and populated only by guys with hoses whose jobs are to wash away the things that seem always to fill this city street: spilled margaritas and cheap beer and puke.

I’m staying in a cheap casino on Fremont Street in a room that’s not expensive enough to have a coffee maker, which means I have to eject myself into the world without any caffeine, a thing I would never do at home but here I’ve come to look forward to. It’s the only time it’s quiet enough to think, to not lose yourself in the things Vegas asks you to become.

At night on Fremont, blocks from the federal courthouse, you will be offered whatever you need. Booze, drugs, money, beautiful women, beautiful men. Your fortune, told to you in cards. Your name etched on a bottle opener, a license plate, a flashing keychain, a pair of dice. Get drunk. Get high. Get wild. It’s Vegas, baby — a line people repeat here like a mantra in packed elevators, in coffee shops, in the security line of the “fed castle” where Bundy’s followers empty their pockets of change and pocket-size Constitutions before going through the metal detector. When Judge Gloria Navarro strolls to the bench each morning — always late, always carrying an iced coffee — people explain it with a shrug: “Vegas, baby.”

I’ve avoided the Vegas life this week, but on my last night — a Thursday — I stop into a bar on Fremont Street and take the only seat left at the bar, next to a Mr. T impersonator. There’s no court tomorrow, so I’m OK with staying out a little late and seeing what’s so appealing about this city. Vegas at night, despite my resistance to it, is fun — and I’ve had enough to drink with Mr. T that I strike up a conversation with a couple of guys who’ve traveled here from the East Coast to sample the legal marijuana. I ask them if they’ve heard of Cliven Bundy, and one responds immediately, “He’s that cowboy the government is trying to steal land from, right?”

This must be what poker face feels like.

The next morning, I’m a little hungover and way out in the suburbs of the city. I’m sitting in this bright-white, fluorescent-lit office, guzzling complimentary bottles of water. I’m in the office of an ex-Bundy follower who used to be close with the family, Melissa Laughter. She went to Bundy Ranch in 2014 and to Malheur in 2016. She has spent holidays with the Bundys.

She’s since become a vocal detractor of the Bundys and the wider Patriot movement that supports them. She says the Bundys demand loyalty, allegiance. She has come to think of them as cult leaders.

“A cult is is a blind following of some enigmatic leader,” she says. “They don’t question. They don’t act independently. They act as one.”

Laughter is a devout member of the Mormon church, and the granddaughter of a Utah dairy farmer. She explained what initially attracted her to the Bundys. “I’m like, OK, we have something in common. I’m interested in talking to them and hearing what they have to say,” she says. “So like many people, I was sympathetic to them to begin with.”

Laughter is a staunch conservative — a woman who has run for public office in Nevada as a Republican. She has bright white teeth and wears big cowboy boots with dresses. She’s pro-gun, vehemently anti-marijuana.

She grew up in the church and felt like something was off about how the Bundys talked about the Gospel to friends and family. “We would often have these philosophical religious debates where they would talk about LDS doctrine,” she says. According to Laughter, her differing perspective on church teachings wasn’t well received around the ranch. “They constantly take offense if you say anything against what they’re saying.”

But the Bundys were seeing things in the Gospel she couldn’t understand.

“I’m going to show you something else no one else has but the federal government,” she says. She reaches to grab something from the floor, then plunks a big black binder onto her desk.

“Have you heard about The Nay Book?”

Yeah, I’d heard murmurs of it. I just didn’t think it was real. Read more…