“Half the country has heard for two years that Pence had the ability to stop a rigged election but chose not to. The other half isn’t likely to forget that Pence enabled Trump for the four years leading up to January 6.”
THE WOMEN THAT ‘ME TOO’ LEFT BEHIND
by natalia galicza
michael j mooney
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Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 25, ISSN PP325, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Ste 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/subscribe. Copyright 2023, Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
DESERET, PROPOSED AS A STATE IN 1849, SPANNED FROM THE SIERRAS IN CALIFORNIA TO THE ROCKIES IN COLORADO, AND FROM THE BORDER OF MEXICO NORTH TO OREGON, IDAHO AND WYOMING. INFORMED BY OUR HERITAGE AND VALUES, DESERET MAGAZINE COVERS THE PEOPLE AND CULTURE OF THAT TERRITORY AND ITS INTERSECTION WITH THE BROADER WORLD.
Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The father of six children, he is the author of a forthcoming book on parenting. Carney’s report on religion’s influence on parenting and birthrates is on page 68.
Brewer is an award-winning writer and journalist, an artist and poet laureate of Ogden, Utah. She is responsible for the “Ogden Ar(t)chives Mailbox” installation, giving the opportunity for the works of residents and visitors to be published and historically archived. She also teaches creative writing at the OgdenWeber Boys and Girls Club. Her poem is on page 76.
JACQUELINE C. RIVERS
Rivers is executive director of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies and is a lecturer in sociology at Harvard, where she earned her doctorate in African American studies and sociology. She was a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her essay on civil rights is on page 11.
Singleton is a designer and illustrator. She graduated from Ontario College of Art & Design University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her clients include HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Los Angeles Times, TED and Smithsonian, among others. Her illustrations are on page 14.
Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. His previous books include “Why Liberalism Failed,” “The Odyssey of Political Theory,” “Democratic Faith” and a number of edited volumes. An excerpt from his newest book “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future” is on page 60.
Shnykina is an illustrator with experience in editorial, advertising and corporate projects. She is the recipient of the 2019 Merit Award in 3X3 Illustration Annual and her work was selected by Creative Boom in 25 of the best illustration projects in 2020. Shnykina’s clients include The New Yorker, Google, Harper’s Magazine and Vice. Her work is on page 52.
ANGELIKA BREWER
TIMOTHY P. CARNEY
DARYA SHNYKINA
PATRICK J. DENEEN
STEPHANIE SINGLETON
TO THE SOURCE
This spring, in the backwoods of Louisiana, the magazine’s Michael J. Mooney sat down with former Vice President Mike Pence. As Mooney tells it, there was a light chill in the piney woods just west of the Mississippi River and Pence seemed at ease. They sat in the back of a Baptist church where Pence had come to speak a half-hour before, to a rapt audience of believers. He spoke of his faith, the animating force of his life, weaving in verses from the Old and New testaments effortlessly. It wasn’t a sermon exactly. Nor was it a stump speech. But to Mooney it seemed like the launch of a presidential campaign.
Pence has said he will decide whether he’s going to run this month. If he does, he will join a field of Republican hopefuls that likely includes Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and of course, the former president, Donald Trump.
Mooney’s profile of Pence, which begins on p. 34, offers a candid look at the role faith plays in the life of a potential 2024 presidential candidate. Reams of newsprint will be dedicated to the race. Stories will focus on the candidates’ positions on immigration, crime, the war in Ukraine and even the integrity of elections. While all these issues are important and are topics we have covered as a magazine and will continue to cover, we think we’re uniquely positioned to explore the relationship a candidate has with their faith. We hope this brings something to the national conversation you can’t find anywhere else and we hope to bring our readers more of this as we move into campaign season.
Speaking of things you can’t find anywhere else, I hope you’ll take a moment with the photo essay on the Colorado River that begins on page 42. We’ve sent photographer Spenser Heaps to Nepal
and Haiti and the Darién Gap for this magazine, and I’m always blown away by the images he brings back. I also don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the photographs of the Colorado River are breathtaking. They represent months of reporting that took Spenser from the headwaters of the river in Colorado to Mexico, where its last remnants flow into the Sea of Cortés.
“We’ve squeezed every drop of water we can manage out of this river system for a century with no thought of what role that water plays in the natural world,” Spenser told me when I asked him what he learned, camping in canyons and sweating through 112-degree days for this piece. “Now we’re seeing a shift in that because there’s not enough water to go around.”
As alarming as the future of the river may be, and how difficult it will be to meet our need for water as the population continues to boom in the arid West, Spenser said he was reassured by the resilience of nature. In Glen Canyon and the delta in Mexico, the natural habitat is springing back to life. “We spend millions of dollars restoring habitat, but sometimes we just have to get out of the way and let nature do the work,” Spenser told me.
In conversations with friends and family I’m often reminded trust in the media is at an all-time low. I’m told readers are hungry for information but don’t know what they can trust. That’s why we send reporters and photographers to where the story is, to talk to the people actually impacted, whether that means a sit-down with a former vice president in the backwoods of Louisiana or to a farm near Tijuana. We hope in doing so we help you navigate an increasingly complex world and give you information you can use to make it a better place.
—JESSE HYDE
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ATHE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION
WHY PEOPLE OF FAITH SHOULD UNITE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
BY JACQUELINE C. RIVERS
n electrifying example of Christian love in the face of great racial tension occurred in 2020 immediately after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. Scott Hagan, then president of North Central University, welcomed Floyd’s grieving and traumatized family to the Assembly of God’s premier university where the family had asked to hold a funeral for Floyd. News coverage of the funeral may have reached well over one billion people. This act of compassion and courage, standing up for a man who had been unjustly killed at the hands of the police, was later vindicated by the conviction of the murderer, Derek Chauvin. Today a scholarship in honor of George Floyd at North Central University benefits the young man who now deeply regrets his role in bringing the police to the scene where Floyd was murdered. And several other schools have established similar scholarships. The message promoting justice still echoes around the world today; Christians defend those who are the victims of injustice even when it is costly to do so.
Through the prophet Isaiah, God tells us that the fruit of his justice is peace, calling his people to act as Scott Hagan did. Racial problems are rooted in a long and bitter history of slavery and oppression, which has left intractable systems that still pose enormous barriers to African Americans. The most important step is to educate ourselves about the issues. Our churches, mosques, temples and synagogues provide the perfect venue. Spiritual leaders can develop reading lists of accurate, balanced accounts of the history. They can establish study groups among their congregations and teach on these topics in their sermons. People of faith can learn how sharecroppers were trapped in poverty because white farmers repeatedly cheated them. And how successful Black people, in places like Black Wall Street in Tulsa, repeatedly had their property destroyed and their lives ended by envious white people.
Education is the basis for action. One fruitful approach is to build relationships with local Black churches, supporting their work on issues in their community, establishing friendships over time with pastors and members. The partnership between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a network led by the Azusa
Christian Community in Boston, which distributes several tons of food to the needy, is one example. The famous friendship between the Rev. Dr. Martin King Jr. and Abraham Heschel is another. Contact like this is an opportunity to learn how racism affects people’s daily lives. Many Black people are trapped in poor neighborhoods because, as recently as the 20th century, the New Deal implemented in the 1930s was designed in a racially biased way that created a lasting and growing racial wealth gap, although it also brought undeniable benefits to Black people. Redlining in northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit established the basis for the wealth of the white middle class while blocking Black people from accessing the same resources. Rectifying these injustices is consistent with God’s commands to the ancient Israelites to protect the widow, the orphan and the stranger. We too must act to defend those who suffer.
Further action can grow out of collaboration between Black and white congregations. Much of the injustice that African Americans have experienced has been the product of policy decisions by the U.S. government, from codifying slavery to implementing redlining. Current disadvantages like entrenched residential segregation, extremely limited access to high quality education and subtle employment bias continue to hold Black people back. Steps to implement policies that reverse that harm must be taken. Some recommendations, such as increased funding for inner-city public schools and protection of Black people’s voting rights, are obvious. But a deep understanding of the problems is essential in this process. So, we must oppose efforts to limit the study of an unvarnished history of the United States.
Finally, our congregations can provide philanthropic support for families in need, for scholarships for Black youth, and for other local, statewide or national efforts to support the advancement of African Americans.
Reducing the racial tensions in our society is no easy lift and will take courage, resilience and persistence. But as people of faith, it is surely a critical task to which God calls us.
JACQUELINE C. RIVERS IS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE SEYMOUR INSTITUTE FOR BLACK CHURCH AND POLICY STUDIES.
SUGAR RISING
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAUREN GRABELLE
montana-based photographer Lauren Grabelle celebrated the human-canine bond in Sugar Rising, a solo exhibition featuring images of her beloved Weimaraner, Sugar. Grabelle documents Sugar’s paralysis and subsequent recovery after their move to Bigfork, Montana, “where we could finally be who we were supposed to be: humbled by the earth on a daily basis, and creatively inspired by the simple things like a walk in the woods.”
THE LONG EMANCIPATION
THE STORY BEHIND JUNETEENTH AND WHAT THIS FEDERAL HOLIDAY MEANS FOR RACE IN AMERICA
BY ALEXANDRA RAIN
JUNETEENTH, the newest federal holiday, reminds us of the work it takes to forge a reality that matches our ideals. Abraham Lincoln may have legally ended slavery, but the practice outlived him, continuing even after the Civil War. Black Americans have long commemorated Juneteenth — named for June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers finally brought word of their liberation to slaves held in Galveston, Texas. Now, it’s a day for all to celebrate how far we’ve come as a nation, but also to remember the cost and recommit to our ideals of freedom.
On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, at the head of about 2,000 Union soldiers. There, he delivered General Order No. 3, which declared that “all slaves are free” — effectively liberating roughly 250,000 people in that area — and advised them to stay at their posts and work for wages. Across the former Confederacy, masters often waited to tell slaves they were freed until a government agent arrived, or after the harvest.
Nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died in the Civil War, fighting to free their people after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation made newly freed Black men eligible to serve in the military. About 198,000 took up arms in segregated units, notably marching with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman in his famous march across Georgia and South Carolina to the Atlantic Coast, wresting Atlanta and Savannah from Confederate control.
“Dear Wife, … I would like to know if you are still in slavery. If you are, you will not be long before we have crushed the system that now oppresses you. … Great is the outpouring of the colored people that are now rallying with the hearts of lions against the very curse that has separated you and me. ... I am a soldier now and I shall use my utmost endeavor to strike at the rebellion and the heart of this system that has so long kept us in chains.”
— FORMER SLAVE SAMUEL CABBLE
An early emancipation celebration was held in Galveston on January 1, 1866. A local newspaper reported that hundreds of men, women and children gathered in the “colored church.” Among the speakers was Brig. Gen. Edgar Mantlebert Gregory. The Emancipation Proclamation was read from the pulpit and the congregation sang hymns like “John Brown’s body.” The first Juneteenth happened that summer, and soon came to embody the spirit of liberation, with “monstrous and brilliant” parades through the Texas city.
DuringWorld War II, Black soldiers found comfort in celebrating Juneteenth even as they served in racially segregated units. One group of veterans, civilians and soldiers from Fort Bliss gathered at a community center in El Paso, Texas, in the summer of 1943. They played baseball, hosted a marathon and shared food at a picnic, probably including barbecue and red velvet cake. But at the other end of the state, celebrations were canceled as about 10,000 men at a Ku Klux Klan convention rioted in Beaumont.
Coretta Scott King highlighted a different kind of festivities in 1968. On “Juneteenth Solidarity Day,” more than 50,000 people gathered at Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., to carry on the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Poor People’s Campaign” for economic freedom. Mrs. King joined other luminaries from the civil rights movement, like Ralph Abernathy and Rosa Parks. Eartha Kitt entertained the crowd, singing in Spanish.
The “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” longtime activist Opal Lee, walked 1,400 miles from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., at age 89. This was the culmination of years of shorter walks, 2.5 miles for the 2.5 years it took slaves in Texas to learn they were free. As a child, she’d seen a mob of 500 burn down her family’s home on June 19. Now she was determined to make it a federal holiday. By 2021, when the holiday came up for a vote, she had gathered more than 1.5 million signatures of support.
Juneteenth passed unanimously in the Senate, and 415-14 in the House, in 2021. A year after Black Lives Matter protests spilled through the nation’s streets, drawing attention to yet another division in society, signing the bill was an easy call for President Joe Biden to enact this new holiday for all Americans. Opal Lee received a standing ovation during the signing, but Juneteenth also had the passionate backing of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, of Texas, and thousands of activists.
Hibiscus tea and watermelon are staples at Juneteenth celebrations. Marching bands and dancers perform in parades. Festivals showcase Black culture like hiphop music, soul food and African cuisine. Many walk the streets in hopeful demonstrations or sing Juneteenth classics like “Many Thousands Gone” and “Go Down Moses.” The celebrations are often tinted in red, black and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag, representing the blood, soil and prosperity of Black people. `
“WHAT I LOVE ABOUT JUNETEENTH IS THAT EVEN IN THAT EXTENDED WAIT, WE STILL FIND SOMETHING TO CELEBRATE. EVEN THOUGH THE STORY HAS NEVER BEEN TIDY, AND BLACK FOLKS HAVE HAD TO MARCH AND FIGHT FOR EVERY INCH OF OUR FREEDOM, OUR STORY IS NONETHELESS ONE OF PROGRESS.”
— FORMER FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD
EXPLORING HOW TRANS ATHLETES FIT INTO ELITE SPORTS
BY ETHAN BAUER
WHILE TRANSGENDER ISSUES ARE CHALLENGING MANY SOCIETAL NORMS, TRANS ATHLETES HAVE BECOME A PARTICULAR POLITICAL FLASHPOINT, WITH 21 REPUBLICAN-HELD STATES BARRING THEIR PARTICIPATION IN SCHOOL SPORTS SINCE 2020. AT THE PROFESSIONAL LEVEL, IT FALLS TO GOVERNING BODIES LIKE THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE AND THE NCAA TO DEVELOP POLICIES THAT BALANCE FAIR COMPETITION WITH SOCIAL VALUES LIKE INCLUSION. SOME ARGUE THAT THE LATTER HASN’T BEEN THEIR STRONG SUIT. OTHERS WORRY THAT TRANS ATHLETES — ESPECIALLY TRANSGENDER WOMEN — BRING UNFAIR ADVANTAGES TO THE FIELD OR COURT.
UNDENIABLE ADVANTAGES > < AN EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING
THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT against trans women competing against biological women is that male and female bodies develop differently, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who gained national notoriety in 2022 for vetoing legislation that banned trans girls from school sports, summarized this argument in Time magazine last year: “I don’t believe that biological males should be competing against biological females,” he said. “I don’t think that that’s fair, and I believe that most of society agrees with that.”
Indeed, a 2022 poll by Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Americans favor requiring trans athletes to compete against members of their birth sex. Even many who support the right of trans athletes to compete with others of their gender support transition requirements — such as hormone therapy or a preexisting gender declaration — for eligibility in elite sports, in an effort to maintain competitive fairness.
“To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organization is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies,” tennis legend and gay rights activist Martina Navratilova argued in a 2019 op-ed for British newspaper The Times. “It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.”
Some athletes who’ve competed against trans women — and even some teammates — echo Navratilova’s concerns. Consider the case of Lia Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania swimmer who transitioned, meaning began taking hormones like estrogen and testosterone blockers, in college, then switched from the men’s to the women’s team and won a national championship. Later, according to a 2022 Sports Illustrated profile, 16 of her own teammates opposed her participation in the conference championship, while some of their parents questioned her success. “We support Lia as a trans woman and hope she leads a happy and productive life, because that’s what she deserves,” one anonymous team parent said. “What we can’t do is stand by while she rewrites records and eliminates biological women from this sport.”
ADVOCATES FOR TRANS athletes point to flaws in the gender binary system itself, including challenging exceptions like South African runner Caster Semenya. Semenya was born and raised a woman and competed in women’s events her whole life — until she learned that she had naturally occurring intersex characteristics, including elevated levels of testosterone. Subsequently, the governing bodies of track and field introduced rules requiring that intersex athletes take testosterone-depleting medication in order to qualify for certain events — including every event Semenya focused on. She refused and has been unable to compete in those events ever since.
While most athletes do fit into the binary system, some critics contend that sex was always a poor way to organize sports. The roots of that system go back to a time when there was no question of gender. “The modern Olympics were by men, for men,” says Arizona State sports historian Victoria Jackson. “They did not want women participating, and they did not create an organization for women’s participation.”
Jackson argues that women’s sports, as a historical afterthought, should be reimagined, opened up to any athletes who don’t fit the traditional masculine mold. “Not all bodies fit into two categories of competition,” Jackson says. “And if this first one is the exclusive, elitist one, shouldn’t the second one be the inclusive one for all of the bodies that were forced out and pushed out and denied access to that original category?”
Some also contend that this issue should be examined through a lens driven less by competition than simple humanity. Competing against one’s gender, rather than their biological sex, can have affirming benefits for trans athletes at any level of competition. “That’s the number one reason that I want to see trans women in the female category,” says Cyd Zeigler, founder of LGBTQ+ and sports culture website OutSports.com. “Some of them say it feels like it saved their lives. And balancing that with ‘fairness,’ and who wins and who loses — it’s a complicated web.” Zeigler does, however, favor some level of transition requirements, depending on the event. “There are some sports,” he says, “like curling, where you just don’t need to have the transition requirements that you might need in powerlifting.”
REAWAKENINGS
A SON GRAPPLES WITH HIS FATHER’S DEMENTIA, AND LEARNS THE MEANING OF LIFE
BY ERIC SCHULZKE
I’m sitting with my 88-year-old dad in his tiny room in the dementia ward of a care center. We’re watching an Italian documentary about a fisherman and his dog who work in freezing weather on Lake Como. “What a lousy job,” Dad says.
He’s reading the subtitles. The fisherman wants his son to follow in his career. “Why would he do that?” Dad snorts. The fishermen and scientists puzzle about why fish are disappearing from the lake. “Well ... you’re fishing,” Dad says, with a bemused smile. Now the fisherman’s teen daughter is seeking her own path. “What matters is to be free,” she says. “I agree,” Dad says. He repeats: “What matters is to be free.”
Witty, pithy and poignant repartee with the subtitles of an Italian documentary. I had not fully realized how sharp Dad’s mind still was until now. Now I wonder how many dementia ward patients are like this.
Dad has dementia. But it’s not very progressive. He never forgets who he is or who we are, and he has bursts of insight and focus. But his hearing is poor, and he no longer reads much. He walks with a shuffling,
unsteady gait. He muddles through the day, sleeping too much. He’s then often wakeful at night. He exercises only under duress. He can’t do his own laundry or cooking. He has urinary incontinence. He asks repetitive questions. With unwashed hands he gloms sliced turkey from the fridge. He tries to feed the cat chocolate milk.
“THAT’S MY SON!” HE SAYS, GRABBING MY ARM AND FIXING ME WITH PIERCING BLUE EYES. “DON’T LEAVE ME!” HE PLEADS.
THE MAYO CLINIC estimates that 6.5 million Americans now have Alzheimer’s — the most common form of dementia. The gap between diagnosis and death for Alzheimer’s, Mayo says, ranges from 3 to 11 years. The average age for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is 80, says Dr. Lon Schneider, a
professor of psychiatry, neurology and gerontology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. “People die with Alzheimer’s,” Schneider says, “more than they die from it.”
The National Institutes of Health says there are four main types of dementia. Alzheimer’s predominates, with the rest distributed among vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy body (Robin Williams), frontotemporal dementia (Bruce Willis) or a combination of these. Then there is the 5 or 6 percent slice that falls outside these boxes.
Most elderly patients who have one form of dementia also have bits of another, Schneider says, and dementia symptoms seen in life often do not fit smoothly with results in postmortems. It’s all still rather fuzzy, he says.
Dad’s key symptoms don’t match the main boxes. He lacks the muscle rigidity of Lewy body; the sharply progressive decline of Alzheimer’s; the cardiovascular, stroke or circulation risk factors of vascular dementia; or the early onset and personality factors of frontotemporal dementia.
OUR MINDS SPIN WITH QUESTIONS. SCIENCE HAS MAPPED THE HUMAN GENOME, BUT WE KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT HOW THE BRAIN FUSES THE BODY AND SOUL.
But Dad’s case is not entirely nebulous. For over a decade he has had a distinctive shuffling gait, bouts of vertigo, urinary incontinence and mental fog. It turns out these are the key markers of normal pressure hydrocephalus, an odd name for an abnormal and rare condition, in which cerebrospinal fluid pools in and puts pressure on the brain.
As a teenager in Canada, Dad once took a hockey puck to the head. Seven decades later, he can vividly narrate that moment: he’s skating backwards on defense, the opposing player launches a slapshot, the puck careens off his temple into the stands, they patch him up and send him back on the ice. He touches his temple where the puck hit. All his life he’s had a soft spot there.
From my verbal description, Schneider agrees that NPH sounds highly likely, though he suspects some degree of other dementia as well. Normal pressure hydrocephalus is one of the few dementia diagnoses that is highly treatable with a shunt that drains fluid from the area. Dad got his shunt in 2011. It’s helped, but managing it has been difficult. There are limits to what it can do.
Now it’s the summer of 2022. For over a decade, Dad’s mental fog has remained fairly static. In July he is nearly knocked out with an illness that left him incapacitated for weeks; he feared he was dying. He was taken to a local care center, the dementia ward. The illness passes, and he recovers physical strength. Now he’s confused and lonely. One afternoon I find him agitated in the hallway. He’s causing trouble. An attendant raises the possibility of sedatives.
Dad sees me. “That’s my son!” he says, grabbing my arm and fixing me with piercing blue eyes. “Don’t leave me!” he pleads. We walk to his room. We talk. His plea becomes a mandate.
FOR THE NEXT two months, I come every afternoon directly from work and stay late, usually after 10 p.m. My brother, Stuart, does the same with the morning shift.
Dad and I go on outings most every day, to mountains and rivers, to an aquarium, to visit my grandkids or his sister-in-law. At night we watch movies and documentaries.
One evening, delayed, I arrive at 6:30 p.m. Dad’s sitting in the dining room. A nurse walks by, leans over and says to him, “I told you he would come.”
His mood improves. Now he’s cheerful and courteous to staff. “You remind me of my Aunt Liesl,” he tells a nurse. “In what way?” “She was coquettish,” he says. There’s that impish smile. A nurse wants to change his sweater. “It has food on it,” she says. “Are you hungry?” he asks. The care staff laugh with him. He’s popular.
But Dad wants to live with family. We assess our shared capacities and resources and find it feasible. Robust in-home nursing support is no more expensive than the care center, we realize. And Dad has the capacity to decide. On October 6, he leaves the care center to live with family.
On that first night, he converses for 40 minutes with Sarah, my adult daughter. My wife and I witness the conversation but are not involved. They discuss Sarah’s recent divorce. “Papa began asking me a series of very insightful questions,” she later recounts. “He then asked what I learned from the experience. He asked if I would consider marrying again and, if so, how soon. He asked if I was going to have a better life now. The whole time he was extremely engaged and listened carefully to all my answers. The whole conversation was his idea, not spurred on or encouraged by anyone else. He was the one who kept it going.”
“I have had many conversations in the past eight months about my divorce,” Sarah says, “but I don’t think I have ever had one where so many insightful and compassionate questions were asked. He was so focused on me the whole time, and so kind. It was a great experience, and I felt a strong connection to him through it.”
I had asked Dad at the care center one night if he knew the Latin phrase fait accompli. “Of course,” he said. “I was a lawyer.”
One night several of us watch “Knives Out,” a witty murder mystery with a large cast of narcissistic characters. Dad watches the entire film, leaning forward, focused. After the climax, during the resolution scenes, he removes his headphones and appears distressed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“How do these people live with themselves?”
“You do know it’s fiction?” I test.
“Yes, but it’s very realistic.”
“OK. To be fair, there are people like that.”
“Yes, I know,” he says. “I was a lawyer.”
Dementia experts I speak with are not surprised that Dad remembered the hockey injury. Deeply rooted memories from early youth often survive long into dementia. But his capacity for ethical abstraction after watching “Knives Out”? That is another matter.
THERE IS A flavor of “Awakenings” here, the story of British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who used an experimental drug to temporarily restore consciousness to victims of encephalitis lethargica, or the sleeping-sickness, who had been catatonic for decades. The drug treatment proved temporary, but it opened a window into the unyielding humanity of those whose minds seem to slumber.
Months later, speaking with Schneider at USC, I pose the haunting question first formed as I watched Dad respond cogently to the subtitles of an Italian documentary. How many dementia patients have such capacity?
“We don’t know,” Schneider says, “because it hasn’t been tried.”
Few patients, he says, receive sustained time and attention from loved and trusted people, the conditions that could evoke lucidity. “If you’re told that Alzheimer’s disease is the worst thing in the world,” he says, “then you see a blank face and you say, ‘Oh, that’s Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve lost them.’ And then you don’t engage.”
During his last month in the care center,
Dad got physically weaker. We realized too late that the care center diet had ignored his missing dentures. He couldn’t chew. He lost muscle mass. On October 24, after he left the care center, a geriatrician doctor diagnosed him with calorie and protein malnutrition.
Now he eats even less and walks not at all. There is an element of choice here. His life is grueling. He is weary. Swallowing is now hard, and talking is difficult. On December 6, he leaves us, peacefully, in his own bed in his own room in our home.
We are at peace. But our minds spin with questions. Science has mapped the human genome, but we know next to nothing about how the brain fuses the body and soul.
Wherever the answers lie, I believe, friendship, family and human relations will not be far behind. “Feeling the fullness of the presence of the world,” Oliver Sacks wrote in “Awakenings,” “depends on feeling the fullness of another person, as a person; reality is given to us by the reality of people; reality is taken from us by the unreality of un-people; our sense of reality, of trust, of security, is critically dependent on a human relation. A single good relation is a life-line in trouble, a pole-star and compass in the ocean of trouble.”
In his final days, Dad and Sarah enjoyed a wordless connection. “He could barely communicate,” she later said, “but he was so sweet and gentle. I would come in, and he would be smiling peacefully, watching TV or listening to music. He would look over, and his eyes would light up to see me. I would sit with him and hold his hand. Sometimes his cat, Sofi, was with him, and he would point to her at the end of the bed, silently telling me, ‘Look. Isn’t Sofi cute?’ I would laugh and confirm that, yes, she was indeed cute. Then he would point to his big-eyed stuffed sloth with the same smile. That twinkle in his eye stayed with him. I hope that when I reach the other side, he’ll be there to greet me with a witty comment and a wry smile.”
“WHAT WE DO KNOW IS THAT, AS THE CHEMICAL WINDOW CLOSED, ANOTHER AWAKENING TOOK PLACE; THAT THE HUMAN SPIRIT IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ANY DRUG.”
THE END OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT
THE ATTEMPT TO ERASE THE 26 WORDS THAT SHAPED THE INTERNET IS UNDERWAY
BY NATALIA GALICZA
Nohemi Gonzalez had two dreams: graduate from college and experience Paris. She came close to achieving both. The 23-year-old traveled to France in September 2015, not 10 miles from the center of her sought-after city, as part of a semester-long study abroad program to bookend the final year of her undergraduate education. She struggled to acclimate to the new language, one that differed wildly from her family’s native Spanish and her own American English. But still, the new environment held such promise for the future designer. Until one Friday in November, when it all came to a sudden end.
Two months into her program, Gonzalez sat outside a Paris bistro with a group of friends. They braced the cool autumn evening from under a covered terrace, tucked in front of candlelit tables that straddled the streetside. The café, La Belle Équipe, stood about half an hour from the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. The location proved convenient for tourists like
Gonzalez. Though, on that particular occasion, it also proved fatal. A group of gunmen who were later identified as members of the Islamic State terrorist group fired assault weapons into the crowd at the bistro. Nineteen people were killed, Gonzalez included. It was one terrorist attack out of
“EVERY DIFFERENT FORM OF MEDIA HAS ENCOUNTERED THIS QUESTION: WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT OF THE SPEECH?’”
six across Paris that same night.
The Islamic State claimed more than 140 similar attacks across 29 countries in less than two years before the Paris massacres. Repeated attempts to contain the group have failed due in large part to the internet.
Social media has proven a powerful tool for violence. Terrorists use it to propagate their recruitment content and lure in new members from across the globe. And although the criminal trial held for the assailants behind the 2015 Paris attacks became the biggest in France’s modern history, that fact alone did not feel like enough for some of the victims’ families in search of justice. Reynaldo Gonzalez, Nohemi’s father, has filed a lawsuit against Google for liability in his daughter’s death.
The move to sue Google, which also owns YouTube, arose when Reynaldo Gonzalez realized its online algorithms serve content to users who have viewed similar material — even if it was posted by a terrorist group. Since YouTube not only hosted recruitment videos uploaded by the Islamic State, but also amplified them to viewers through its recommendation algorithm, Gonzalez’s family argues the company should be held accountable for the response to that footage. “Every different form of media
“IF THE UNITED STATES WERE TO MAKE ONLINE SERVICES RESPONSIBLE FOR CONTENT ONLINE, ONE RISK WOULD BE THAT THE SPEECH ONLINE WOULD BECOME MUCH MORE MUNDANE AND LESS INTERESTING.”
has encountered this question,” says John Morris, principal of U.S. internet policy and advocacy for the Internet Society, a nonprofit that advocates for global internet accessibility, “‘Who’s responsible for the content of the speech?’”
First filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last April, the Gonzalez v. Google lawsuit is now barreling toward the Supreme Court. The case could also spur reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law credited with the birth of the internet as we know it.
TWENTY-SIX WORDS OF legal jargon make up Section 230 (c)(1), the sentence responsible for free speech as it pertains to the internet. Shielding websites big and small — from social media platforms like Twitter or YouTube to independent blogs scattered across the nooks and crannies of cyberspace — the law inhibits internet platforms from being held liable for hosting third-party content, which means Yelp cannot be sued for the reviews posted on its site, Google cannot be sued for emails sent or forwarded through Gmail, and Twitter cannot be sued for tweets.
Those protections have grown so broad and expansive, both Democrats and Republicans have fought for years to narrow their scope, which isn’t a simple task. “If the United States were to significantly step back from Section 230 and make online services broadly responsible for content online, one absolute direct risk of that evolution would be that the speech online would become much more mundane and less interesting and less controversial,” Morris says. He headed the policy office of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for the U.S. Department of Commerce from 2013-2016. Yet he’s never seen the political fervor around Section 230 come to a head as much as it has today. “A lot of the creativity, a lot of the robust debate on the internet could be seriously threatened if all of a sudden the infrastructure providers were legally liable for that content.”
Back in the early days of the internet, little online seemed so dire. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia did not exist. Only about 20 percent of Americans used the World Wide Web, and paid by the hour to do so. When they did, it would, on average, be for less than half an hour each month. The internet was small enough to easily fade from public consciousness.
Then the disputes came. In 1995, internet service provider Prodigy faced a $200 million libel lawsuit for content that users posted on its forum — a case that would shape the political idea that a law detailing content moderation was needed to eschew similar claims from happening in the future. Since Prodigy moderated its user-generated content, a New York court deemed that the company exercised “editorial control” by enforcing some level of regulation — although still not enough to monitor every single post across its forum — making the service liable for content posted by a user. After the May 1995 ruling, Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., argued the companies should have protections “from taking on liability such as (what) occurred in the Prodigy case in New York.” So, Congress passed Section 230 less than a year after the court decision to protect future tech companies from being legally at risk for the content that their users uploaded.
“It was formed at a time where the concern was basically website bulletin boards,” says Marc Berkman, CEO of Organization for Social Media Safety, a national nonprofit that offers educational outreach on internet security. “Platforms now use algorithms to suggest content to people. They’re literally filtering content out there that generally is based on what gets the most likes, the most views and shares, the most engagement. Unfortunately, salient content tends to accomplish those objectives.”
Algorithms have been used since before Section 230 was even the idea of a bill to draft, but that doesn’t stop these algorithms from being expanded across a wider cultural context now nearly 30 years later, in which they can be used to bring relevant
and educational content just as easily as they are able to disseminate damaging, hateful and violent content to millions of Americans. That’s why Gonzalez v. Google is now aiming to poke a hole in Section 230’s protections with a critical lens trained on those algorithms. Does the law protect platforms that don’t merely host content, but suggest it to users?
WHILE DEMOCRATS AND Republicans are jointly in pursuit of more tech industry regulation this year to make the internet a safer place for Americans (especially teens and kids) and to check and balance the power of tech giants, there are still plenty of both who oppose any reform to Section 230 out of fear that reform could create a new internet devolved beyond recognition.
“Section 230 is thought of in public consciousness, rightly, first and foremost as a liability shield for the online services,” says Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of 78 different groups to file amicus curiae briefs in the case. “But I think what people need to understand is that shield exists to benefit every internet user.”
Some nonprofits, including Mackey’s, have existed since before Section 230 became law. Among them is a shared concern that history will repeat itself and losing certain protections could move the Information Age backward. “You’re going to see platforms react by being unwilling to host certain types of content because they’re not willing to take that risk, right? If they have billions of pieces of content, but a very small fraction of them could put them in legal hot water, their incentives are going to be to never host that material,” Mackey says. “The ability for people to find their audiences, to connect with people, receive information that they want. All of that is going to be put at risk.”
Yet, since Section 230 offers internet programs the jurisdiction to decide how they moderate their content, there is a level of potential censorship from these companies
— and therefore infringement of free speech — at risk. Companies set their own rules for what is and isn’t allowed to be posted on their platforms. And that leads to the flip side of Gonzalez v. Google: Where is the line between liability protection and infringement of free speech?
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ruled in a separate case from 2021 that “the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms.” The same year, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy created a task force to “preclude Big Tech from discriminating against Americans based on their political affiliation.” That sentiment has boiled over in large part due to President Donald Trump’s executive order three years ago, which sought to reform Section 230 after Twitter affixed fact-checks to the former president’s tweets criticizing the vote-by-mail process. His attempt at reform fell through, but depending on the court’s decision in Gonzalez v. Google, similar efforts could resurface. “I mean, in a way, this issue is really quite a small issue. But like everything, it has potentially large ramifications,” says Adam Candeub, who joined the Trump administration in 2019 as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information. “We drafted the petition to the FCC for reinterpretation of Section 230. It is sort of the ‘get out of jail free’ card that the major internet platforms use to sustain their business. ... And as their role has become more controversial — the role they play not just in the internet, but politics, society, everything — Section 230 becomes more of a question.”
Since the entire landscape of the internet is crafted in the light of a single law, any change made to Section 230 will bring about more shadows. When deciding this case, the Supreme Court has an opportunity to either stick with legal precedent or launch the internet into a future shrouded with uncertainty. If nothing else, it could finally pose a blow to the online world strong enough to topple the industry giants who guard it. But those giants could take free speech down with them.
WHERE IS THE LINE BETWEEN LIABILITY PROTECTION AND INFRINGEMENT OF FREE SPEECH?
AS THE WAR WITH UKRAINE CARRIES ON, A TINY BALTIC NATION WORRIES IT COULD BE NEXT LINE OF FIRE
BY JAMES L. WALKER
Within the forest of Estonia, the clearing is still. A dozen green camouflaged soldiers are on a morning patrol on the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. They march two by two, flanked by towering fir trees.
The crack of gunfire shatters the quiet morning. A soldier named Erni Metsal, who is 30 years old, drops to his knees, arches his AK-4 rifle up and returns fire. Whip-like cracks reverberated across the forest.
Estonia, a tiny Baltic nation tucked in the corner of northeast Europe, is not at war. On that morning earlier this year, no one was actually shot. Instead, I was watching a training exercise for paramedics run by the Estonian Defence League, a voluntary paramilitary organization that operates under the Estonian Defence Forces. It is made up of regular civilians — accountants, teachers, lawyers — ready to support and lay down their lives in the defense of their country.
With a population of just over 1 million, Estonia may not seem like a critical linchpin of global security. But Estonia doesn’t
only defend its own borders. Alongside its Baltic cousins, Latvia and Lithuania, it also defends NATO’s eastern flank with Russia. It’s a NATO member, meaning if it were attacked it would guarantee the intervention of its fellow members, including the United States.
And since the annexation of Crimea by
“THIS ISN’T ONLY THE UKRAINE WAR. THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE ARE ALSO FIGHTING FOR THE FREE WORLD.”
Russia in 2014, and the subsequent invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there is a growing fear of a once unthinkable conflict pitting Russia against the West. With a large ethnically Russian population and its strategic location and ports on the Baltic Sea connecting to the rest of Europe, Vladimir Putin’s eyes could be set on Estonia. If
so, it could dramatically heighten the stakes and global tensions over expanding war in Europe. And the Estonian people would be NATO’s first line of defense.
ESTONIA’S POPULATION IS barely larger than Russia’s standing army, but if you think that means Estonians aren’t prepared to defend themselves, you’d be wrong. While the country only has 7,200 active army personnel during peacetime (the U.S. Army has nearly half a million), it is bolstered by some 60,000 reservists, in part due to mandatory conscription, as well as its volunteer force, the Estonian Defence League. Organized into regional units across the country, the league counted some 15,000 voluntary members at the start of 2022, plus 10,700 in its youth organizations and Women’s Defence League. Since the war in Ukraine began the organization has received roughly 4,000 new applications.
“If you want to live in peace, you have to be prepared to protect yourself,” Estonia’s defense minister, Hanno Pevkur, tells me. Sitting in a gray chair at the red-brick
Ministry of Defence building in Tallinn, Pevkur has a calm but serious face framed by neat brown hair swept to the left. He wears a navy blue suit with an Estonia/Ukraine flag on the right lapel. “We all know that our biggest threat is behind our eastern border,” he says. “We have to be ready. NATO has to be ready.”
NATO already maintains a significant and growing presence in Estonia. Currently, this includes the deployment of multinational battalion-size battlegroups — roughly 1,500 troops from NATO member countries including the U.K., Canada and Germany — which are stationed in the country as part of the organization’s Enhanced Forward Presence initiative. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg promised more presence in June last year as the war in Ukraine waged on. “Our main responsibility is to prevent any attack on Estonia, or any other ally.”
Estonia takes its defense seriously. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the country increased its defense budget to 770.6 million euros — 2.35 percent of its gross domestic product — the third highest proportionately among NATO countries. And defense spending is now set to increase to 3 percent of GDP after Prime Minister Kaja Kallas won a landslide victory in Estonia’s general election in March. Her beaten rival, far-right party leader Martin Helme, had campaigned against further arms deliveries to Ukraine and said Estonia shouldn’t be “further escalating tensions” with Putin.
Pevkur disagrees. “This isn’t only the Ukraine War,” he says. “The Ukrainian people are also fighting for the free world.” Estonia has led international calls over the past year to send more military aid to help Ukraine fight off Russia. Its government, meanwhile, has provided assistance worth €370 million. At over 1 percent of GDP, it’s the biggest contribution of any country relative to the size of its economy.
One of Pevkur’s main priorities as defense minister is to improve Estonia’s self-defense capabilities; he says the country is the most secure it’s ever been. Since the war in Ukraine, he has led his country’s
efforts to modernize the armed forces. This includes acquiring new military equipment — Javelin anti-tank missiles, K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzers and Mistral surface-to-air missiles — with a keen eye on the war. “We have to bring all the lessons learned from Ukraine back to Estonia,” Pevkur says. Having enough ammunition is crucial, for example. “During the last year, we have acquired more ammunition than the 30 years before that combined.”
With the increasing reliance on digital technologies in modern warfare, it’s not only about guns and tanks. Estonia has also invested heavily in cybersecurity, partly in response to the Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks launched by Russia’s security services in 2007 that severely disrupted digital networks. Now, the country has a cyber secu-
“WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE PEOPLE WHO ARE READY AND WILLING TO PROTECT YOUR COUNTRY, YOU CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT FREEDOM.”
rity industry that ranks fourth worldwide, according to the National Cyber Security Index.
Pevkur doesn’t believe that Estonia would be able to hold Russia off on its own indefinitely. But he is confident that his fellow Estonians would be able to hold back the Russian invaders long enough for the NATO combined forces to join them. That Estonia can hold out is contingent on one large if, though: that the Estonian people are ready and willing to defend their country if called upon. “We need to be ready to protect every meter of our land,” he tells me. “When you don’t have people who are ready and willing to protect your country, you can’t even talk about freedom.”
AT THE TRAINING exercise in the Männiku forest, two uniformed soldiers drag Erni
Metsal to a safe zone after he is shot in the leg. The “Russians” have retreated after a short firefight, but the remaining soldiers are still closing in as Estonian paramedics get to work.
One of the instructors sprays fake blood over Metsal’s leg to signal heavy bleeding. A paramedic ties a tourniquet around Metsal’s lower leg while the squad leader radios for an army ambulance. It only takes 10 minutes before Metsal is loaded on a stretcher and hauled away, but a fellow soldier tells me if the exercise had been real Metsal may have lost too much blood to survive.
Metsal signed up for the Estonian Defence League in 2014 shortly after Russia occupied and annexed Crimea, a majority Russian-speaking peninsula in the Black Sea that was previously part of Ukraine. Given that roughly 25 percent of the country’s population is ethnically Russian, Metsal honestly thought Estonia could be next. “I joined out of fear the past would repeat itself,” he tells me.
Estonia has a long and painful history with Russia, dating back centuries. It’s also a history of successive occupations. Metsal remembers hearing about it in school. He was taught that Estonia was first conquered by Danish crusaders in 1219. During the Livonian War in 1561, it submitted to Swedish control. Then, it was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1719.
In 1918, Estonia declared independence from Russia following the collapse of the Russian Empire after World War I. However, this independence was short-lived, as the Soviet Union invaded Estonia in 1940 and annexed it as part of the USSR. It was then occupied by the Nazis during World War II before returning to the Soviet Union.
During the following decades, many Estonians — particularly members of the political or social elite — were deported to gulag prison camps in Siberia and other remote regions of the USSR. Thousands more were killed or imprisoned by the Soviet secret police, and the country’s culture and language were suppressed. Estonia regained its independence in 1991, following
the collapse of the Soviet Union. During that time, it had lost an estimated fifth of its population.
“My family tree was bled dry,” Metsal tells me. “My family line is the only one that survived.” He explains that his grandfather on his father’s side lost all his brothers. They were mostly executed. This painful legacy touches upon many Estonians, not just Metsal. It forms a large part of Estonia’s national memory and goes a long way in explaining why its people are so wary of their eastern neighbor, and why it’s seen as crucial that the country can defend itself from Russian aggression. It’s not just geopolitically shrewd. In Estonia, it feels deeply personal.
That’s certainly the case for 27-year-old Martin Reisner, the director of the newly created defense resolve department within the Estonian Ministry of Defence. Born in 1995 in Tallinn, both of his grandfathers were deported to camps in Siberia. He remembers growing up with a poster on his wall with a man pointing down, a bit like Uncle Sam, saying that Estonia wants you to defend the country. From a young age, he would play war games in the garden with his neighbors. And he continues to do so, to a certain extent, as a member of the Estonian Defence League today.
“The U.K., the U.S. and other countries, they’re not in a situation where they have to actively defend themselves. They’re more in a situation where they fight for their interests and values across the world,” Reisner says. “In Estonia, we’re not planning on doing any conquests. We’re only looking to protect ourselves.”
According to the latest survey conducted shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 81 percent of the population believe that armed resistance is necessary in the event of an attack on their country, an increase of 9 percent compared to 2021. Additionally, two-thirds of respondents expressed their willingness to participate in defensive activities themselves, which is a 10 percent increase from 2021. The will is certainly there but, if push comes to shove, there are some concerns. That same poll indicated that
only one-third of Estonians would know what to do in case of an attack by a hostile state. And just over 30 percent said they’d try to leave if the country were attacked.
“You really need the support from fit and healthy men and women who are ready to take up arms and have a meaningful impact on the battlefield,” Reisner says, “so now we’re looking at how we can motivate the younger part of the population.”
One solution is to make national defense courses, an optional scout-like program with some military undertones, mandatory in all Estonian schools for grades 11 and 12. “Some people might say this is propaganda. That we are militarizing society,” Reisner says. He sees, to an extent, where they are coming from. “But the other perspective could be that this is just a practical calculation of living in Estonia. You have to prepare for the worst.”
Getting as many people as possible engaged and participating in defense efforts is also necessary given Estonia’s size, Reisner says. “It’s different with big countries like the United States or Germany. We can’t really afford the luxury of having 50 percent of the population not participating in Estonian security and defense. We need pretty much everyone.”
METSAL WAS LYING down in his stretcher in the back of the ambulance as it set off toward the field hospital. Or, in reality, a couple laps around a parking lot. Despite “dying” in the exercise, he was happy with how the exercise went.
Joining the Estonian Defense League is a commitment that has impacted Metsal’s life and relationships. He had a long-term girlfriend but training exercises up to two weekends a month put a serious strain on their relationship.
Sometimes, his mind wanders to the seriousness of it all. If Russia did invade, many of his squad would likely die. He tries not to think about it; it’s too depressing. And of course, he could be killed too. “I don’t want to die,” Metsal tells me, “but I’m not a coward. I will do my duty.”
“IF YOU WANT TO LIVE IN PEACE, YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO PROTECT YOURSELF.”
THE TIPPING POINT OF NATIONAL PARKS
’TIS THE SEASON FOR CROWDED TRAILS AND HISSY FITS AT THE PARK GATES. WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
BY HEATHER HANSMAN
Evan Clapper says he could literally feel the increasing number of visitors to the area eroding the landscape. “Our sandstone is fairly brittle, so climbing holds wear away,” the Grand County commissioner and multisport guide from Moab, Utah, says. “What were once crisp sharp edges in the rock have become rounded slopers from so many people using them.”
It’s not just the climbing areas that are seeing the signs of overuse. Noise pollution has increased in town, trails are more crowded, fragile ecosystems have been trampled. At the gate to enter Arches National Park north of town, Park Service public affairs specialist Kaitlyn Thomas says the line could stretch for hours in the hot desert sun, and every trailhead was packed. Bathroom breaks in the line became a public nuisance and visitors who were turned back threw hissy fits at the gate. “The staff has to process more visitors through the gate, and it was hard on those visitors,” she says. Plus, “folks who offer guided tours or other services in the parks couldn’t predict when they’d have access.”
The number of visitors to the Moab area has more than doubled in the last decade, according to Madeline Logowitz, director of the Grand County Trails Division. Arches
National Park sees nearly 2 million visitors annually now, thanks to a combination of marketing campaigns, the pandemic and the rise of social media. “Because the internet exists, now people have popularized going to places where there isn’t infrastructure. We’re seeing more impact and more diffusion in new places,” Logowitz says. The visitorship is good in a lot of ways. In tourism-dependent towns like Moab,
“WE DON’T WANT TO CREATE INDUSTRIAL TOURISM. A LOT OF IT HAS TO DO WITH PROTECTING THE FEELING OF COMMUNITY, AND A SENSE OF PLACE AND BELONGING.”
recreational visitors keep the economic engine chugging along. According to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, the two-year change in tourism-related taxable sales has jumped over 51 percent from pre-pandemic years in Grand County, with $400 million more coming into the state from Utah’s national parks as a result. But Moab, and
the landscape around it, is hitting its limits. Recently, land managers, government officials and local businesses started making changes to rein in the negative impacts of land use and to try to answer the question: How do you ensure everyone can get time on public lands in a way that’s not destructive for the park and for the community? Logowitz says that some consequences of increased visitation include a surge in search and rescue calls. “At one point they were the most active search and rescue in the state,” she says. There’s also vandalism to archaeological sites, increased trash, human waste, trail widening and a growing number of conflicts between users, especially between motorized users and hikers or bikers.
The trails program decided that the best thing to do was to educate visitors about how to lighten their impact. In fall 2021, they piloted a responsible recreation program, staging employees at trailheads to talk to hikers, bikers and motorized users about how and where they should travel. It was so successful that last year it was formalized into a full-time program. Seven ambassadors have talked to 55,000 people on the trails around Moab. “We have talking points about how to protect themselves
“WE’RE THIS RURAL SMALL TOWN — IT’S NOT DISNEYLAND OR VEGAS. AND IT’S A FRAGILE PLACE.”
and the environment, and to respect other users,” Logowitz says. “But we also make sure they’re talking about issues specific to place. At a place where there’s a lot of cliff jumping, we talk about broken ankles.”
Even if everyone who steps foot on public lands is educated about their impact, increased crowding still changes their experience. As traffic ramped up at Arches, the Park Service management decided it needed a way to control crowds. So, last summer, Arches initiated a timed entry pilot program, where visitors had to make reservations ahead of time, and were given a time slot when they could visit the park. Arches’ timed entry plan was initially proposed in 2017, as crowds started to ramp up even before Covid. But local businesses in the Moab area worried that it would impact their bottom lines, especially because a 2018 report from the National Park Service found that the program could cost tourism $22 million in its first year, in large part because of how it would impact tour buses and big groups. Hundreds of travel businesses signed a letter in July 2022 asking Chuck Sams, the director of the National Park Service, to stop the program, because they worried it would deter visitors, especially international ones.
So the park leadership got together with the county commissioners and the Chamber of Commerce and tried to see how they could tweak the plan for everyone. “There were a lot of ideas they thought of that we hadn’t,” Thomas says. For instance, officials were thinking of doing timed entry from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and local restaurants proposed a shift to drive business back into Moab for dinner.
Clapper says sustainable tourism is a matter of balancing open access with choices that support the community and the landscape. Tourism will dry up if the experience — and the ecosystem — aren’t protected, so policies and practices that bring people in, support the local workers and respect the land are crucial. “We don’t want to create industrial tourism,” he says. “A lot of it has to do with protecting the
feeling of community, and a sense of place and belonging.”
Even when existing red tape pushes for increases in tourism, there are ways to create balance within the demands. Currently, Moab collects a tourism tax on hotels and restaurants, but part of the existing law dictates that the lion’s share of that tax must be spent on promotions. And right now, that promotion outpaces the mitigation of human impact. So the county passed an ordinance that any promotion has to include an educational or sustainability component. Now, all ads and marketing materials have to include “Leave No Trace” education material.
At Arches, management is turning to data to figure out the best ways to control impact. Officials had a social science intern in the park all last summer to track when they were turning people away and how they could best ensure that the most people had good experiences. They found that they were turning away about nine percent of people who came to the entry gate because they didn’t have reservations. Most of those people were able to come the next day. They gauged line length and parking lot crowding to figure out when they could have flexibility. Going into the current season, the park has adjusted the number of reservations that could be made the day before. “I know that a lot of the businesses became really well-versed in timed entry; hotels ended up helping people make reservations,” Thomas says.
Communication between businesses, land managers and policymakers is crucial because they can decide what they want their community to be like, and then share it with visitors. They can come up with a plan to protect the landscape, the needs of their workers and their town, and the desires of the visitors their economy depends on. “We’re this rural small town, it’s not Disneyland or Vegas. And it’s a fragile place,” Clapper says. “We want people to treat it with respect not just as a place now, but as a place you can save for your kids and grandkids when they want to come.”
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CAN THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT CONVINCE TRUMP VOTERS TO TURN HIS WAY?
By Michael J. Mooney
Illustration by Nadia Radic
IN a TALL mahogany chair with leather cushioning, in the middle of a massive, LED screen-laden megachurch in downtown Dallas. It’s a Sunday morning in January 2023 and Pence is wearing a crisp dark suit and perfectly Windsor-ed tie, fielding questions from First Baptist Dallas’ senior pastor, Robert Jeffress.
Jeffress is a Fox News regular who’s spent the last seven years as former President Donald Trump’s most prominent evangelical ally. The pastor spoke at Trump campaign events in Iowa before the 2016 primaries. He publicly defended Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out. The First Baptist Dallas choir made national headlines in 2017 when they sang a hymn called “Make America Great Again.” And Trump himself visited this church the week of Christmas 2021, attracting a thunderous crowd and a throng of protesters.
Today is much more sedate, and absent protesters. But both levels of the amphitheater-size sanctuary are pretty full for the 9:15 and 11 a.m. services. Jeffress gives Pence a glowing introduction and reminds his congregants that Pence is a “great friend.” In front of a live audience of thousands and a television-and-streaming audience of thousands more, Jeffress asks Pence what role faith should play in politics, and Pence says “freedom of religion is not freedom from religion. … This is a nation of faith.”
Then Jeffress invokes the Old Testament’s testing of Abraham and asks about January 6.
“Gallows had been built on the Capitol grounds. A noose had been attached at the gallows for your execution,” Jeffress says. “The Secret Service urged you and your family to leave for your own safety, and yet you refused to abandon your duty.” What,
Jeffress asks, gave Pence the courage to stand strong that day?
For most of the conversation during both services, Pence has leaned back in his chair, smiling that close-lipped smile that’s become his trademark. It’s the same bulletproof smile he displayed as he stared adoringly at the president for four-plus years. His eyes have twinkled ever so slightly in the church’s studio-quality lighting. But after the January 6 question Pence squints and nods in thought. He inhales deeply.
Mike Pence hasn’t shied away from talking about January 6, 2021, the day an angry mob erected gallows and ran through the halls of the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Others in the Trump orbit have tried to minimize or completely recast what happened that day, but Pence hasn’t. He’s written about it, spoken about it, answered questions about it in interviews. The title of his book, “So Help Me God,” is a reference to his oath of office — an oath he feels he was honoring that day, when he split with then-President Trump and presided over a joint session of Congress that officially counted the electoral college votes, formalizing the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“What saw us through that day,” Pence says, noting that his wife and daughter were with him at the Capitol, “was God’s grace.”
Pence reiterates that he’s “incredibly proud” of the record of the Trump-Pence administration. He mentions the border, Israel, energy and the three Supreme Court justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade — which gets a larger applause.
“Obviously the administration did not end well,” Pence says. “January 6 was a tragic day.”
Pence hasn’t said he’s running for president in 2024 — at least not officially. But in
PRO-TRUMP RIOTERS
HUNG GALLOWS AND CHANTED “HANG
MIKE PENCE” AT THE U.S. CAPITOL ON JANUARY 6, 2021.
an interview with me, and interviews with other reporters, he certainly sounds like he’s launching a presidential campaign. His book feels a lot like a traditional campaign book. He’s also been quietly flying around the country, speaking to churches and business groups about his own story and everything he thinks is wrong with the Biden administration. These talks seem remarkably similar to stump speeches. And yes, at some point in nearly all of these places, someone mentions that day. And soon that day may loom even larger for him: In late April, he testified under oath about the conversations he had with Trump involving Trump’s quest to overturn the 2020 election.
What Pence did — or rather what he didn’t do — on January 6 has created an amazingly peculiar political dilemma. Half the country has heard for two years that Pence had the ability to stop a rigged election but chose not to. The other half of the country, the half that’s grateful Pence didn’t try to halt democracy that day, isn’t likely to forget that Pence partnered with and enabled Trump for the four years leading up to January 6.
But Pence has something that no other potential Republican presidential candidates have. Pence has spent his entire career making his devout religious beliefs the center of his identity. The man absolutely can’t be out-churched. And until relatively recently, that approach has had quite a bit of success in American politics.
IF EVANGELICAL VOTERS could go into a lab and create a political candidate, that candidate would probably come out looking and sounding like Mike Pence. For years he’s introduced himself to crowds by explaining that he’s “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” always adding, “in that order.”
By all accounts, Pence is a genuine believer, a veteran trooper in America’s perpetual culture war, inspired by his evangelical faith and the business-friendly, nationalistic stylings of Ronald Reagan.
Pence grew up in small-town Indiana, one of six kids in a devoutly Irish-Catholic home. His mother, “a precocious redhead,”
he tells people, was a homemaker. His father — “a combat veteran who raised my brothers and me like it was his last platoon,” Pence calls him — ran a chain of gas stations and voted Democrat.
After attending a music festival in Kentucky billed as the Christian Woodstock, Pence was born again. As he tells it, on a rainy spring night in 1978, he felt called to stand up, find a pastor, and bow his head and accept Jesus Christ as his savior. A few years later, Pence went from a Jimmy Carter-supporting Democrat to a devoted Reagan acolyte.
While attending law school in Bloomington, Pence met his future wife, Karen, in church. They’ve been married for almost four decades and have three children and three young grandchildren. And nary an untoward personal scandal. In fact, he’s been known to refer to his wife as “Mother,” though in the time I’m around him I hear him talk about Karen often and he doesn’t once call her that.
Pence first ran for office in 1988, when he was 29. His congressional campaign consisted of him bicycling around his district in athletic shorts and tennis shoes, chatting with anyone receptive to a conversation. He
got the Republican nomination but lost in the general. Two years later he ran again, went shockingly negative in his ads and was caught using campaign funds to pay his mortgage and grocery bills — which wasn’t illegal at the time but is now. Pence lost that election by 19 points.
Still fighting the conservative culture war fight, he launched a talk-radio show, what he called “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” He also started a political newsletter and regularly wrote op-eds that ran in newspapers across Indiana. His style was hokey and his arguments seem dated now. He opened each show with “Greetings across the amber waves of grain.” His hot takes at the time included a defense of the tobacco industry (“smoking doesn’t kill”), arguments against early climate change agreements, and a demand that President Bill Clinton resign amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But Pence used this time to build a statewide audience and sharpen his religiously framed stances. When he ran for Congress again in 2000, he won easily.
On Capitol Hill, he championed defense spending, deregulation and traditional evangelical social values. He repeatedly voted to restrict abortion, to defund Planned
IF PENCE IS TO SECURE THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION, HE’LL HAVE TO OVERCOME ONE OF THE MOST PECULIAR DILEMMAS IN MODERN GOP ELECTORAL HISTORY.
Pence has spent his entire career making his devout religious beliefs the center of his identity. And until relatively recently, that approach has had quite a bit of success in American politics.
Parenthood, and in strong support of Israel. He started rising in the ranks of party leadership and attracted the attention of Republican megadonors, including the Koch brothers. By 2012 he was contemplating a run for president but was reportedly convinced to run for governor of Indiana instead.
He campaigned as a business-friendly conservative, with a tone lifted directly from Reagan. Pence’s term as governor is remembered for signing his religious freedom legislation in 2015, just prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, that would have allowed business owners, like florists or cakebakers, to refuse services for gay customers. After businesses across the state objected, and Pence fumbled through an appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” he eventually compromised, signing a watered-down version of the bill. By the early stages of the 2016
election cycle, Pence’s statewide approval rating was under 40 percent, and it looked like his political career might be over.
Then came Donald Trump.
Pence’s religious-right bona fides made him the perfect running mate to shore up conservative voters concerned about Trump’s probity. And it didn’t take long for Pence to become Trump’s most proficient advocate, the heavy hitter Trump’s team unholstered for choice Sunday shows and heartland events. With his three decades of gladhanding and public piety, Pence could reassure supporters who were queasy over Trump’s many scandals.
After the “Access Hollywood” tape became public, Pence said he was “offended” and “cannot defend” Trump’s remarks. But in the same statement, Pence pointed out that the video was 11 years old and that Trump had “expressed remorse and apologized to the American people.” Pence also said he looked forward to Trump showing the nation “what is in his heart.” (Pence’s camp has also denied reports that he volunteered to step in at the top of the ticket if the party decided to dump Trump at the last second.)
After porn star Stormy Daniels alleged that Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in hush money before the election, Pence called the accusations “baseless.” When Trump alleged “large-scale voter fraud happening on and before election day” in 2016, Pence echoed the sentiments with the couching of a clever attorney, saying, “Voter fraud cannot be tolerated by anyone in this nation.” After Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly clash at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Pence told reporters that Trump had “made it very clear” that he condemns “all forms of hate and violence.”
Pence added, unsolicited, “I truly believe
that under President Trump’s leadership, we’re gonna continue to see more unity in America.”
But of course, Pence never really needed to say much. Just standing behind Trump, flashing that smile, Pence was implicitly telling millions of Americans that all of this — all of the scandals and the shattering of norms and the crazy tweets — it was all fine, actually.
Pence even joked about that earlier this year, at the white-tie Gridiron dinner in D.C. At his weekly lunches with the president, Pence told the crowd, Trump liked when Pence would sing him “Wind Beneath My Wings” — specifically the phrase, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero?”
Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. Mike Pence is actually kind of funny. He might not write all of his own material, and his sense of humor is completely dad-joke-tastic, but Pence gets laughs. At that same Gridiron dinner, he quipped about his own piousness.
“I’m really not as uptight as many people think,” he told the crowd. “There’s this idea that I’m some kind of religious nut. I’m really not. Just ask my sons, Jedediah, Obadiah or Zechariah.” His preferred pronouns, he added, are “thou and thine.”
And yet, despite the polished Republican resume, the culture-warrior cred, the charisma and that strong handsome-grandpa energy that’s done so well in conservative circles for decades, at the moment Pence is a long shot to win the presidency. In early Republican primary polling, Pence is usually around 6-7 percent. When Atlantic writer McKay Coppins sat in on Republican focus groups earlier this year, he found that the participants almost universally disdained Pence.
“He’s only gonna get the vote from his family,” one participant said. “And I’m not even sure if they like him.”
PENCE WAS CHAIR OF THE HOUSE REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE DURING THE GOP FIGHT AGAINST OBAMACARE.
Another participant said that Pence “just needs to go away.”
Meanwhile, Trump is still at the top of those same polls, even after his arrest in April for alleged involvement in the Stormy Daniels hush-money scandal and after a jury found him liable for sexual assault and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case in May.
So, I ask Pence how he plans to get Trump supporters — some of whom were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — to now cast a ballot for him.
“Look,” he says, “I think the failed policies of the Biden administration at home and abroad, and the radical left wing policies of the Democratic Party today, are going to be a great unifying factor for the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.”
Pence tells me that one of the enduring lessons from the 2022 midterms, where Republicans underperformed expectations, comes down to focusing on the future.
“Candidates that were focused on the future did well,” he says. “Candidates that were focused on the past or relitigating the past did not fare as well.”
I ask him how he addresses the people who’ve been told over and over for two years that Pence had the ability to stop a rigged election but chose not to.
“With the truth,” Pence says. “The facts. That’s why I speak as openly as I do about it.”
MOST AMERICANS DON’T understand how close to a possible coup this country might have come. But Mike Pence knows.
For weeks, Trump had been telling anyone who would listen that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Pence had the power to overturn the results by refusing to certify the count. Trump told Pence himself this on Christmas Day, when Pence made his annual call to wish the president and first lady a Merry Christmas.
During his rally on January 6, 2021, Trump addressed Pence directly, though the vice president was already at the Capitol.
“Mike Pence, I hope you’re gonna stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country,” Trump told his supporters. “And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now.”
When rioters broke into the Capitol an hour or so later, Pence’s security detail moved him out of the Senate chamber and into a small, seldom-used ceremonial office reserved for the vice president. It’s the room where Vice President Henry Wilson died.
Eleven minutes after Pence was evacuated from the Senate floor, Trump tweeted about Pence:
PENCE HOPES TO CONVINCE GOP VOTERS THAT HIS COURAGE AND RESOLVE ON JANUARY 6, 2021 EARNED HIM A SHOT AT THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN THE LAND.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
A White House security official later told Congress that at one point members of the vice president’s detail felt so endangered that they were screaming over the radio and that “there were calls to say goodbye to family members.”
Amid all that, Pence and his family were moved from the ceremonial office to a subterranean loading dock beneath the Capitol. Pence’s Secret Service team told him to get into the armored limousine waiting there. That’s when Pence uttered six words that very well may have changed the course of history.
“I’m not getting in that car.”
Whether you admired the way Pence stood by Trump through all manner of controversy or you thought Pence was a compliant captive, smiling with adoration, January 6, 2021, was the day Mike Pence broke free. And the entire day is encapsulated by this incredibly dramatic moment standing next to that car.
I wanted to know what that moment felt like.
He’s said repeatedly that he wasn’t afraid. In his book, he says he was angry and indignant about the way the invaders “desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters.” But I still wanted to know what it felt like to stand next to that armored vehicle and refuse to enter. I wanted to know what he thought might happen if he had gotten in.
It’s the first thing I ask about when Pence and I sit down for an interview in an office at the back of a church in rural, Central Louisiana. It’s late March and still chilly in
the piney woods just west of the Mississippi River. Pence is wearing another dark blue suit, an impeccably starched white shirt and a sleek silver tie perfectly tied. He’s 63, 13 years younger than Trump, and with that helmet of closely cropped platinum hair, Pence could pass for early 50s. In person, he’s also warmer, more congenial than he can come across on TV.
In our time together, I’ll ask him if he thinks he enabled Trump, and if he thinks that led to what happened on January 6. And because I can’t help myself, I’ll ask about the fly that landed on his head during the vice presidential debate in 2020 — and became perhaps the most ubiquitous meme in an administration full of them.
But first I ask Pence what he thinks would’ve happened if he’d gotten into that car.
He nods slightly, staying silent for nearly 10 seconds before answering.
“I leave that to others,” he tells me. “Secret Service, understandably, wanted to get me out of the building. … The doors in the car were open, and they told me they wanted me to hold in the car, and I told them I wasn’t getting in the car.”
Pence says he explained to his detail: “You close that 200-pound door and somebody back from headquarters tells them, ‘Get the vice president out of the building —’”
Pence cuts himself off before he finishes that thought.
“I’ve had a detail since I was governor of Indiana,” he tells me. “Their job is to protect you. My job was to support and defend the Constitution, which I was determined to do by staying at my post in the building.”
I ask him how often he thinks about that day. He laughs a little.
“Not as often as some people do,” he says. “I’m an out-the-windshield guy, not a rear-view mirror guy.”
BEFORE INTRODUCING PENCE to the congregation at Philadelphia Baptist Church in Deville, Louisiana, senior pastor Philip Robertson jokes about what a special occasion it is to have him.
“There are those who never thought it possible that a former vice president of the United States would ever visit Deville, Louisiana,” the pastor says. “Some might have even said that hell would freeze over before that happened. Well guess what? It’s
going to be 26 degrees tonight in Central, Louisiana.”
As the audience snickers, Robertson adds an “amen.” Then he welcomes Pence to the pulpit, calling him “a brother in Christ.”
It’s a Sunday in mid-March. This place is much smaller and more casual than the church in Dallas. There are plenty of jeans and caps and the sanctuary is a little dated. Pence takes the stage and thanks Robertson, calling him “Brother Philip.” Then Pence venerates the church’s 150-year ministry.
“I’m a little bit humbled to stand at a podium that is so well-served,” Pence says. “But I’ll do my best.” He adds, “I am consoled by the fact that I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
Pence tells the audience about his life since leaving office, painting a portrait of an idyllic existence back in Indiana. He makes a few references to the Trump-Pence administration — and like always gets big cheers when he mentions the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade — but Pence mostly uses the time to share his testimony: his decision to dedicate his life to Christ and how it’s shaped his public service.
“My heart was broken by what had been done for me on the cross,” he says as applause builds.
In all, Pence talks for about 20 minutes. He’s a compelling storyteller, but he also knows the cadences, the verbiage of this world. He effortlessly weaves Old and New testaments references throughout the talk. At the end of his testimony, he gets a roaring ovation. He nods, squinting and flashing that smile.
After the service, the line to get a book signed stretches out of the back of the hall and across the chilly parking lot. The crowd has been told not to hold the line up for photos, but plenty of people ask anyway and Pence obliges every time. He also makes a few seconds of small talk with each person as they come by his table. He shakes hands. He asks about kids. He thanks veterans and first responders for their service.
When a little girl tells Pence that today is her 10th birthday, he quickly takes out a small piece of stationary with “The Vice
PENCE REMAINED LOYAL TO THE 45TH PRESIDENT ALMOST TO THE VERY END OF THE ADMINISTRATION.
Half the country has heard for two years that Pence had the ability to stop a rigged election but chose not to. The other half isn’t likely to forget that Pence enabled Trump for the four years leading up to January 6.
President” printed across the top and draws a simple cartoon of himself — the smile, the tie, the pensive brow — and a speech bubble that reads “HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY RYLEE!”
This is how Pence hopes to convince people of all stripes to vote for him. Events like this, in big cities and small towns across America, changing minds one room at a time. Maybe enough people will see him in person and hear the earnestness in his voice. Maybe they’ll conclude that Pence has been a remarkably savvy politician, willing to endure humiliation in order to enact the type of conservative agenda the right has been dreaming of since Pence was in college. Maybe some of the people he encounters as he tours the country will wonder if God put Mike Pence in the White House to steer Donald Trump in the right direction — then put him in the Capitol that day to protect our nation.
On the other hand, many argue that Pence enabled Trump for years before finally splitting with him ahead of January 6, that he used his religious credentials as cover for his running mate. Pence supported Trump despite multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Despite Trump repeatedly questioning the legitimacy of elections for years.
I ask Pence if he thinks that standing by Trump through all of that and more might have actually led to January 6, 2021 — and if that makes him culpable or responsible at all for what happened that day.
“I’m incredibly proud of the record of the Trump-Pence administration,” he tells me. “Prior to the disagreement that came to a head in the days leading up to January 6, the president and I had a close working relationship. And despite our differences in personal style, we were both working on the
same agenda.”
Pence reiterates that he’s proud of his partnership with Trump.
“At the end of the day, it did not end well,” he says. “But I believe that we made our stand clear and we saw our way through to do our duty that day. And I trust those days to the judgment of history for me and all those involved.”
BEFORE WE PART that day at the church in Deville, there’s something else I have to know. It’s a question I’ve thought about asking since I learned I was going to meet with him.
The fly.
During the vice presidential debate in 2020, as Pence sat across the table from then-Sen. Kamala Harris, a massive fly landed on his head. And stayed there. For what felt to viewers like hours. (It was actually about two minutes.) And Pence never swatted at it once.
The fly became an instant and enduring meme, easily the standout moment from all of the 2020 debates. The fly also became a Rorschach test. Some people saw Pence as stalwart, unflappable, focused. Other people saw Pence as a robot, so dedicated to his political mission that he’d somehow resist one of the most basic human reactions.
So, I ask the former vice president of the United States about the fly.
“How did you not swipe the fly?”
Throughout our interview, Pence has spoken slowly, parsing his answers carefully. But suddenly he’s talking a little faster, a little more animated.
“Didn’t know he was there,” he says.
“You couldn’t feel it?” I ask, probably sounding more surprised than I mean to.
“I saw him fly by,” Pence tells me. “And I thought that’s a fairly large fly on a television show.”
He tells me that as soon as he came off the stage that night, his family was waiting there for him. A few people congratulated him on a good debate.
“Then my daughter-in-law, who I adore, looked at me and said, ‘Did you know a fly landed on your head?’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she said, ‘It landed on your head.’ And I go, ‘Well, how did you know?’ She said, ‘Because he was there for a while.’ And they all are nodding. And I said, ‘Oh, OK.’”
We’re both laughing as he’s telling me this.
“So that’s why I’ve said I’ve been incredibly blessed in my life, far beyond anything I deserve. But when I get to glory, I’m probably going to ask the Lord.”
Pence pauses as he acts out his conversation with God.
“The fly,” he says. “Was that really necessary?”
Then our time together is over. He’s heading to the airport, off to continue his quiet tour. He shakes my hand and thanks me for the questions.
“Especially the one about the fly.”
It’s not clear what kind of chance Pence has in 2024. His testimony before a grand jury investigating January 6 could further alienate him from Trump’s base. Or maybe it could start shifting opinions. No matter what, it seems like a long, uphill battle, but the primaries are still a ways out. A lot of things can happen.
There could be more arrests, more criminal cases, more lawsuits, some surprise scandals. Political winds can change directions quickly. One thing is clear, though. If the winds turn toward him, Mike Pence will be waiting there with open arms and that trademark smile, ready to continue his faith-filled journey as president of the United States.
KINGDOM
HERE IS ITS KINGDOM
KINGDOM
A PORTRAIT OF THE COLORADO RIVER AND THE WEST IT MADE POSSIBLE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SPENSER HEAPS
AS THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLORADO RIVER FLOW OUT OF THE NEVER SUMMER MOUNTAINS, THE HIGH MEADOWS AND ALPINE FORESTS OF THE REGION ARE BATHED IN VERDANT NEW LIFE. BUT HERE, HUMAN INFERENCE BEGINS WITH THE GRAND DITCH, A 14-MILE DIVERSION THAT DIRECTS BETWEEN 20 AND 40 PERCENT OF THE RANGE’S ANNUAL SNOWPACK OUT OF THE COLORADO RIVER AND INTO EASTERN COLORADO.
THE MASKS OF THE COLORADO RIVER ARE MANY.
IT’S THE ORIGIN story and home of the prehistoric Patayan people. It’s the deliverance of 40 million Americans and Mexicans in need of water. A time capsule of Earth’s heaving layers — a place to touch the rock of a billion years before. It’s a collection of campsites and rapids that draw folks out of the humdrum of their lives into its canyons. It’s the child of the Never Summer mountains and an elder of the Sea of Cortés. A political beast caught between red tape and time. A thing to be tamed. A thing to be freed.
But the multitudes of the mighty
Colorado River run like tributaries toward the one thing that it has always been: the hardest working river in the West.
IN 1901, A man from Michigan — who was said to be able to crush an apple in the palm of his hand — set his strength on what would be the first attempt of wrangling the Colorado River into modern industrialization. According to Kevin Fedarko’s reporting in “The Emerald Mile,” Charles Rockwood, an engineer, cleaved a new channel into a dried arroyo system on the Western banks of the river in California and pointed the water
toward the Salton Sink. The water flowed, the people flocked and the crops thrived in what was once desert, but was now called the Imperial Valley.
“Water Is King,” the local paper heralded. “Here Is Its Kingdom.”
And so it ruled. Just five years later, the largest flood in the history of the Southwest on record erased the fields, the farms, and the fervor. Four-fifths of Mexicali and a downright fortune for the times were washed away and reclaimed by the Salton Sea.
Just as it gives, it takes away. Today, the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley are resigned to the dusty commandments of the worst drought the Colorado River Basin has seen in over 1,200 years.
OVER THE PAST 120 years, the Colorado River has been yoked and subdued, often with results similar to the Imperial Valley floods. It seems to hold a power over us that we’ll never be able to reach; that we’ll never be able to harness. There have been catastrophic floods — like those of 1983 — and droughts that provoke calls to prayer and threaten power pool levels at Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. In every season, every year, the river tasks itself to run as it always has. And although people (with their mettle, and money) constructed the modern-day Colorado River Basin as we know it, people are still at its mercy. But more so, these days we are at the mercy of our own history of abuse. —Lauren Steele
AS THE RIVER FLOWS WEST, THE WELL-DOCUMENTED LABYRINTHS AND WILDLIFE OF GLEN CANYON EMERGE FROM THE WATERS OF LAKE POWELL IN UTAH — A BITTERSWEET TOKEN OF CHRONIC DROUGHT. LITTLE FLOWERS AND FROGS OFFER A GLIMPSE INTO WHAT THIS CANYON LOOKED LIKE BEFORE GLEN CANYON DAM WAS BUILT.
THE COLORADO RIVER AS IT FLOWS THROUGH CATARACT CANYON IN SOUTHERN
UTAH.
ACROSS THE ARID STRETCHES OF UTAH — FROM DUCHESNE IN THE NORTH (WHERE FARMER DAVE EVANS, PICTURED LEFT, LIVES) TO HURRICANE IN THE SOUTH — AGRICULTURE TAPS INTO THE DWINDLING RESOURCES OF THE COLORADO RIVER AND ITS TRIBUTARIES. CURRENTLY, AGRICULTURE ACCOUNTS FOR 85 PERCENT OF UTAH’S WATER USE. THE STATE HAS THE HIGHEST WATER USE PER CAPITA RATE IN THE COLORADO RIVER BASIN.
IVERSON, A FARMER IN HURRICANE, UTAH, FARMS ALFALFA AND RAISES BEEF CATTLE TO SUPPORT HIS FAMILY OF EIGHT. SINCE THEY FIRST STARTED IRRIGATING LAND IN SOUTHWEST UTAH MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO, HIS FAMILY HAS ENJOYED SOME OF THE OLDEST WATER RIGHTS, WHICH IVERSON WANTS TO SAFEGUARD.
KELBY
THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION RECEIVED DECADES OF FUNDING FOR COLORADO RIVER DEVELOPMENT, BUT THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR TRIBAL WATER INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS, “WAS NEVER FUNDED TO THE POINT WHERE IT WOULD ACTUALLY BE SUCCESSFUL,” SAYS DAN MCCOOL, AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, WHO RESEARCHES TRIBAL WATER RIGHTS. TODAY, 1 OUT OF 3 NAVAJO NATION RESIDENTS STILL DON’T HAVE SAFE DRINKING WATER.
FREDA CASTILLO WAITS FOR THE WATER SHE HAULED FROM KAYENTA, ARIZONA, TO FILL THE UNDERGROUND CISTERN THAT SUPPLIES HER MOTHER’S HOME 35 MILES AWAY ON THE NAVAJO NATION.
LEFT: ERIC BALKEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF GLEN CANYON INSTITUTE, IS ACCOMPANIED BY DIMITRI LITTIG ON A HIKE IN LAKE CANYON, A SIDE CANYON OFF OF LAKE POWELL NEAR BULLFROG, UTAH. LAST SUMMER, THE INSTITUTE AND A COALITION OF GROUPS RELEASED A REPORT ON WHAT THEY’VE CALLED “GLEN CANYON DAM’S BIG PLUMBING PROBLEM.” THE REPORT FOUND THAT THE DAM CAN’T PHYSICALLY RELEASE ENOUGH WATER TO MEET DOWNSTREAM DELIVERY OBLIGATIONS AT THE ELEVATION 3,440 FEET, A FUNDAMENTAL FLAW FOR DAM USE AT LOWER WATER LEVELS.
AS THE LEVELS OF LAKE POWELL
CONTINUE TO RECEDE, GLEN CANYON DAM BECOMES LESS AND LESS CAPABLE OF OPERATING — A PROBLEM FOR WATER USERS AND FOR THE ELECTRICAL GRID OF THE COLORADO BASIN WRIT LARGE.
AFTER DECADES OF DRY RIVERBEDS BEING THE NORM IN MEXICO, A SERIES OF TREATIES HAS RESULTED IN WATER RETURNING TO THE COLORADO RIVER DELTA IN MEXICO FOR ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION. BUT FOR CITIES LIKE TIJUANA (BELOW) AND FARMERS IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, LIKE MANUEL MACHADO GERARDO (RIGHT), 78, THE RETURNS DON’T AMOUNT TO MUCH. “IT’S SAD. AND IT’S PEOPLE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LACK OF CONSERVATION. MOSTLY THE GOVERNMENT.”
A COALITION OF NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS INCLUDING THE NATURE CONSERVANCY AND THE SONORAN INSTITUTE HAVE PUT THAT WATER TO USE REPLANTING NATIVE FLORA AND TRYING TO RESTORE STRETCHES OF THE RIVER TO ITS FORMER GLORY. TOMÁS ENRIQUE RIVAS SALCEDO, (ABOVE) A RESTORATION SPECIALIST FOR THE SONORAN INSTITUTE, SAYS THAT WATER RETURNS HAVE BROUGHT HOPE. “NATURE IS WORKING,” HE SAYS.
ABOVE: AT ITS TERMINUS IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO, THE COLORADO RIVER, NOW STRETCHED BEYOND ITS LIMITS, REACHES FOR THE SEA. BUT LIKE MOTHER NATURE’S VERSION OF MICHELANGELO’S “THE CREATION OF ADAM,” THEIR REACH ISN’T ENOUGH. THE LAST TIME THE COLORADO MET THE SEA OF CORTÈS WAS MARCH 2014.
LEFT: JOSE LOPEZ SHOWS THE SLIGHT WATER FLOW HE RECEIVES AT HIS HOME IN THE LOS LAURELES NEIGHBORHOOD OF TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO.
BY Natalia Galicza
ILLUSTRATION BY Darya Shnykina
A LONG HISTORY OF ABUSE BEHIND BARS IS BEGINNING TO UNRAVEL
INSIDE THE COURTHOUSE
at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland, California, a lawyer with a shock of white hair peers from behind his thick, black-rimmed glasses. The room is quiet; the rustling of his suit a reminder that it is just a little too big for his frame. James Reilly prepares to deliver his opening statement. He’s speaking on behalf of Ray Garcia, the former warden of FCI Dublin, a women’s prison in California. Garcia faces seven charges for sexual abuse of prison ward and abusive sexual conduct of inmates in his care and one charge for lying to federal investigators. And despite two of his former colleagues — including the prison chaplain — pleading guilty to similar crimes and two others facing charges, Reilly maintains Garcia’s innocence. Or something like it. “The evidence is … going to show that Melissa is a convicted felon, that Maria is a convicted felon, that Rachel is a convicted felon, and that the other witnesses who are going to testify who were inmates at the time obviously are all convicted felons,” he says. What he doesn’t say is, “in a game of ‘he-said, she-said,’ he wins,” but the overtone is heard.
In July 2021, an inmate named Melissa approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation with a complaint against Garcia and FCI Dublin. She claimed that she’d been sexually abused by the warden — and that she wasn’t the only one. What began as a complaint soon turned into a shakedown
of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and its rampant mismanagement (a spokesperson for FCI Dublin declined a request for comment for this story).
The West has fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s federal prisons, yet the region accounts for a quarter of the institutions where bureau staff have been found to abuse incarcerated women. Melissa’s report and the several others to follow became the first rays of light publicly shed on a history of abuse at Dublin. In turn, it shed light on institutions across the West and throughout the Federal Bureau of Prisons that have been held in the dark for decades.
A bipartisan investigation published by the U.S. Senate last December found that sexual abuse has grown rampant within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It took only the better part of one year for the investigation to discover that bureau employees have sexually abused incarcerated women in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons over the last decade, an egregious violation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a nearly 20-year-old law meant to prevent and address sexual abuse in American prisons. An FBI investigation launched in July 2021 has led to more than 100 federal employees within the Federal Bureau of Prisons being charged with assault in a matter of a year. Also exposed was the Bureau’s Office of Internal Affairs’ backlog of 8,000 cases — at least hundreds of which are cases of sexual
The West has fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s federal prisons, yet the region accounts for a quarter of the institutions where bureau staff have been found to abuse incarcerated women.
abuse. Misconduct occurs at all ranks. Perpetrators range from correctional officers and counselors to chaplains and wardens. These realizations arrive more than five years after the first wave of the #MeToo movement, which empowers women to share their stories of abuse and hold perpetrators accountable. But that movement has also largely excluded the voices of the roughly 11,000 women incarcerated in federal prisons. Where most of the women who came forward posted their stories online, incarcerated women were left unheard. Many of those who reported their experiences merely had their case overlooked, stuck in a backlog of allegations awaiting investigation. Many others didn’t report out of fear, intimidation, a lack of consequence to perpetrators, or punishment of those who came forward. All were possible for the women who spoke
out, who felt unprotected. A look into the history of these prisons suggests they’ve never been protected at all.
WHEN FCI DUBLIN opened in California in 1974, it housed both male and female inmates. Of the few federal prisons that existed in the American West, Dublin became the first to open its doors to women. The institution arrived four decades after President Herbert Hoover signed the Federal Bureau of Prisons into law, which centralized all federal prisons under the government. There would decidedly be no variance in their protocol, no discrepancies in work culture. And even though the thought of incarcerated women had started to grow less and less taboo for a century by Dublin’s inception, it’d take another two decades for the bureau to create its first policy on the “management of female offenders.” In
2012, Dublin became an all women’s prison, but it had already faced lawsuits from former inmates accusing staff of abuse.
Valerie Mercadel filed one of those lawsuits in 1996. At Dublin, she said correctional officers allowed incarcerated men to enter her cell at night and sexually assault her. Mercadel recalls how prison officers attempted to coerce her into undressing for them in exchange for a prison-issued T-shirt. She said she not only refused those advances, she reported them. But in response to her report, she said she was told her allegations were “dangerous.” Officers placed her in solitary confinement. What she’d disclosed in confidential interviews later became public knowledge among Dublin prison staff. In her testimony, she said officers threatened to pit other incarcerated people against her and close her investigation.
Two years after her lawsuit, she reached a settlement with the bureau. It included a promise to “reduce the risk to female prisoners of sexual assaults and harassment by correctional staff and male prisoners” and to “provide appropriate programming, counseling and services to female prisoners who are victims of sexual assault.” That promise, however, was not legally binding. It was merely made in “good faith.” The same intimidation and abuse that drove Mercadel’s lawsuit persists almost three decades later.
Seldom is much attention paid to the stories of the incarcerated, let alone stories of incarcerated women like Mercadel’s. But Dublin has drawn scrutiny the past few years. Garcia, the former warden, is the highest-ranking federal prison official to be arrested in over a decade. Evidence — from photos of his genitals to those of naked inmates — was found on a phone and
More than five years after the first wave of the #MeToo movement, the voices of the roughly 11,000 women incarcerated in federal prisons have been excluded.
laptop issued to him by the government. It presented a rare opportunity for litigation; someone in the highest position of power possible in a prison had left behind breadcrumbs for federal investigators to find. That investigation led to three women testifying against Garcia before a grand jury. Melissa was the first. She arrived at the federal courthouse in Oakland armed with half her name and a story. On a Monday morning in late November, the court omitted her last name from the record for fear of her safety, with Melissa bringing forth information she feared powerful enough to get herself killed. She had already been transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution in Victorville, California, about 400 miles south of Dublin as a safety precaution. Even there, Garcia’s actions followed her. She testified that she had threatening notes slipped under her cell door. Officers approached her at Victorville to ask about Garcia; people told her all the abuse that took place at Dublin was her fault. “It’s been the scariest thing that I’ve ever done,” she said on the witness stand. “And living inside of those prisons, not anybody in this room can understand, nobody. Unless you are in these clothes and is behind a fence. They play God with your life.”
A CONSPIRACY TO murder charge is what brought Melissa to Dublin. Back in 1998, she helped orchestrate the murders of two men with her brother, who belonged to a local rival gang. She testified eight years ago that her brother — who had been part of white-power skinhead groups since she was just 12 years old — pressured her to act as the bait. She lured the two anti-racists deep into the Nevada desert with a promise of partying. The two men were met with gunfire instead. And since nothing in prison is
private, staff had access to that backstory. It made her an unsympathetic character. That’s where Garcia stepped in. “You know, I had a lot of issues with staff making comments to me about why I was in prison, so (Garcia) made it where I could always go to him if I needed anything,” she said. “He always took care of everything for me.”
It started sweet. He would ask Melissa about her son. He gave her information about how to apply for furlough when her mother passed away in 2019 so she could try to attend the funeral. He told her she didn’t belong at Dublin since her crime was nonviolent. He gave her candy, told her they’d drink wine together at his timeshare in Napa Valley when her sentence ended and made her feel like she could trust him. Melissa enjoyed the thought of having an ally. “He made me feel special,” she said. “You know, he would tell me that he was there to make my time easier and that he was always, you know, going to protect me and make sure nothing happened to me.”
Things took a turn toward the graphic soon after. Melissa said Garcia became “very pornographic, very vulgar.” He’d ask her to pose naked for photos — photos the Federal Bureau of Investigation later uncovered on his government-issued phone. He began to grow physically rough with her. The progression follows a pattern present in most cases of grooming, which the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network defines as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” Abusers attempt to earn the trust of vulnerable victims and coerce them into keeping their relationship secret.
“The research on grooming in the community of girls and women is very clear. It’s a phenomenon,” says Alyssa Benedict,
co-founder of the Women’s Justice Institute and partner with the National Resource Center for Justice Involved Women. “It has a psychological impact, and it’s doubled down in a prison context.” Benedict has found that grooming can become especially prevalent in prison due to the fact that many women are already victims of trauma and have fewer modes of accessing support. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report in 2020 that found that anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of incarcerated women have experienced some form of sexual or interpersonal trauma before beginning their sentences. And as the #MeToo movement has demonstrated, countless women may wait years to report abuse, if they do at all. Fear of retaliation, self-blame and encountering stigma drives the reluctance to come forward. The only difference is that incarcerated women are trapped in contained environments surrounded by those fears and their abusers. Eventually, Melissa reached a tipping point. “He told me that he likes convicts, and he told me that, you know, a convict is somebody in prison that keeps their mouth shut, that turns their head to anything,” she said. She noticed that what Garcia claimed to like in her, he also liked in other inmates. Melissa caught Garcia courting another incarcerated woman. The notion that her experiences were no longer just her own, that they were indicative of something much larger and more sinister, became her final motivation to come forward. “He did the same thing to me that he did to her,” she said. Later, she added, “And I felt sorry for her. I did.”
That same woman, Maria, later spoke in court. She, like Melissa, withheld her last name for fear of safety — even though she’d already been released from prison by the
Many of those who reported their experiences merely had their case overlooked, stuck in a backlog of allegations awaiting investigation. Many others didn’t report out of fear.
time she testified. She shared her story with the help of a Spanish-speaking translator, beginning with the memory of how she first met Garcia. Maria had worked in the prison kitchen as part of her work detail. Every morning, she’d prepare coffee and milk for peers and staff. She said Garcia would arrive early to greet her there. He’d tell her she’s beautiful, compliment her hair. He made an effort to act romantic toward her by writing letters and giving her a rose. “And one day he told me, ‘Do not forget that we are in a relationship.’”
Maria believed him. He’d given her a false sense of security and even encouraged her to apply for compassionate release with the promise that he’d approve her paperwork. “And he said that he wanted to get to know me better when I was out, that we will get to know each other better.” So she applied. And she waited. Garcia had become more sexual. He showed her naked pictures of himself, and told her to wait undressed in her cell so he could watch her nude on his rounds. He helped her switch her work detail from kitchen to laundry room duty so he could see her more easily. Then in June, two months after Garcia suggested Maria applied for compassionate release, she learned that he denied her request. She’d been used.
Garcia’s abuse of the women of Dublin spanned from 2019 to 2021; for half that time he had served as associate warden, and the other half as warden. One of his duties as associate warden was to train prison employees and supervisors on the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s policies and procedures. He knew what was and was not permitted behavior. There is never any case where sexual relations between an incarcerated person and a bureau employee are considered consensual. The bureau
advertises a zero-tolerance policy for any commingling. And even if he feigned forgetfulness, he got a refresher each year with staff training and every three years with a regular audit of the institution. He knew, no matter the response he received from the people he pursued, that he was committing a criminal act. So did the other four FCI Dublin employees — John Bellhouse, Enrique Chavez, Ross Klinger and James Highhouse — who have all been charged with sexual abuse of incarcerated women since the FBI investigation began in 2021.
“There’s no such thing as mutual consent, even if there is a relationship in that staff member’s mind between him and a female inmate, there is no such thing as mutual consent,” says Maureen Baird, a former warden of three different prisons within the bureau. That lack of gray area stems from the power dynamics at play. A bureau employee has power over any incarcerated person. Oftentimes, that power can place someone in solitary confinement, whittle away opportunities for good behavior and early release, or prevent visitation. And while abuse of power also impacts incarcerated men, the abuses come down hardest on women. “You have just a handful of female institutions, but you’ve got 100 and something federal prisons for men. So there are a lot more federal prisons for a man, but certainly a higher rate (of abuse) at a small number of female facilities.”
FIVE DAYS BEFORE the Senate released the results of its investigation, a grand jury convicted Garcia at the U.S. District Court in Oakland. The former warden was found guilty of all charges: three counts of sexual abuse, four counts of abusive sexual contact against three incarcerated women, and one count of lying to federal agencies. The
abuse at Dublin has spurred so much outrage that it even helped prompt a Bureau of Prisons director’s resignation.
The scandal at Dublin is symptomatic of a larger institutional problem. Annual Prison Rape Elimination Act audits over the past five years show that an average of more than 400 allegations of staff sexual abuse are logged across all federal prisons. In January, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported more than 2,000 substantiated cases of inmate harassment or sexual misconduct instigated by prison staff from 2016 to 2018. Less than half of those instances resulted in legal action, termination or discipline. And that number — meant to account for abuse across all federal and state prison systems — is likely a gross understatement. Cases go unreported. Even of the allegations made, not all are investigated. A look into the last PREA audit Dublin faced before the federal investigation began shows how off the mark supervision can be: The prison passed with the audit stating that all standards were being met.
Abuse of power so pervasive can often only sustain itself through generations. After Garcia was removed, the Bureau of Prisons had Thomas Ray Hinkle step in as acting warden of Dublin. An investigation conducted by The Associated Press later found that Hinkle had an even longer history of abuse than his predecessor. He had bragged about being part of “The Cowboys” — a ring of correctional officers at a federal prison in Colorado who had brutally beaten Black inmates in the 1990s. Among the violent accusations against him include one by a former inmate who said Hinkle slapped and held him down while another officer sexually assaulted him, according to AP. Rather than reprimand Hinkle, the bureau promoted him. He’s now the bureau’s
Melissa’s story shed light on institutions across the West and throughout the Federal Bureau of Prisons that have been held in the dark for decades.
deputy director for the Western region. He helps oversee 20 federal institutions across a region encompassing Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, California, Hawaii, Washington and Alaska. One of them is Dublin.
With Hinkle now acting in a higher position within the bureau, the current warden at Dublin is Thahesha Jusino. She’s tasked with the lofty responsibility of overseeing the prison at a time it’s most in need of monumental repair. In D.C., bipartisan bills like the Federal Prisons Accountability Act and the Federal Prison Oversight Act have been introduced in the House and Senate. They stand to offer more checks and balances in the hiring process for the director of the bureau, regular inspections of all bureau facilities and the appointment of an ombudsman to follow through on investigations into incarcerated individuals’ well-being. Although these plans have been presented, they have yet to gain traction. Neither have small changes like the installation of new security cameras. Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, said before the Senate in December that he’d been requesting more security cameras in bureau prisons for the better part of a decade. As of November, the project is still “ongoing” at Dublin. When and whether the bureau will complete it is uncertain.
SOLVING AN AGE-OLD systemic issue is as difficult as it sounds. Legislation and safety measures are merely pieces of a larger puzzle that includes a shift in work culture and follow through on accountability. Even when the Prison Rape Elimination Act became law in 2003 with the massive goal of eradicating rape for all incarcerated
people across all correctional facilities, it proved unsound. Abusers found ways to circumvent it. They still do. But change is always worth striving for, especially with 1.68 million incarcerated people living in prisons across the country. And change, however incremental in the long run, can look like Garcia standing before 12 jurors in an Oakland courtroom. It can also look like bringing other offenders to justice. In May, another former FCI Dublin correctional officer, Darrell Wayne Smith, was arrested for the sexual abuse of three female inmates between 2019 and 2021.
On the final day of his trial, Garcia (who did not respond to requests for comment for this story) braced for the verdict that would change everything. He and Reilly maintain that Garcia was not guilty for any of the eight counts against him. He claimed the nude photos investigators found on his government-issued phone were taken as proof of
Melissa trying to hide illicit activity in the facility; that he had come upon her naked in a cell, trying to cover up drugs, and he took a picture as evidence. That was the truth, he said. Garcia and Reilly felt confident about the trial. At that point, there had been no other bureau official in as high of a rank as Garcia convicted of sex crimes — no precedent suggested any action would be taken against him.
But the jurors felt differently. Garcia was guilty, on all counts. As soon as it sunk in, the former warden let out an audible sigh in defeat. He fired Reilly and hired another lawyer four days later, perhaps in an attempt to soften the blow of his impending sentence. That sentence has since been determined to be 70 months in prison, 15 years of supervised release and $15,000 in restitution paid to his victims. Garcia is back in the prison system, with a cell of his own this time.
FCI DUBLIN'S FORMER WARDEN WAS ONE OF MANY GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES CHARGED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT AND HARASSMENT.
LIBERALISM IN FREEFALL
POPULISM
IS RISING AROUND THE WORLD.
DID LIBERALISM FAIL? AND IF SO, WHAT’S NEXT?
BY PATRICK J. DENEEN
Liberalism has generated its own undoing. As a philosophy and practical political project, one of its main aims was to overthrow the old aristocracy, in which one’s social station and political position was secured by birthright. No matter how much one strived — or how dissolute one became — one’s social and political rank could not be changed. This immutability was true not only in regard to one’s political position, but as a consequence that much of one’s identity was the consequence of birth.
The ruling class of this tradition, designated by inheritance, eventually lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the people it governed. Today’s liberal ruling class, which arose to replace the old aristocracy, faces a similar challenge from below. Liberalism proposed to overthrow this ancien régime and put in its place an order in which people, through their striving, ability and hard work, could create an identity and future from the sum of their own choices.
Several hundred years into this experiment, we have witnessed at firsthand the rise of a new ruling class, a “meritocracy” that has thrived under the conditions established and advanced by liberalism. Liberalism is today in crisis, not just because of the bad behavior of the new elite, but
because its rise has corresponded with the attrition of institutions that benefited the lower classes while restraining the ambitious who wished to escape its restraints. The weakening of the family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community, and other associations has resulted in the degradation of the social and economic conditions of “the many,” even as “the few” have garnered a monopoly both on economic and social advantages.
LIBERALISM HAS UNMASKED ITSELF AS AN IDEOLOGY THAT WILL FORCE THOSE WHO OPPOSE IT INTO SUBMISSION.
In the advanced liberal democracies across the world, working-class voters have risen up to reject the leaders who have regarded those who have been “left behind” with disdain and contempt. In response, liberalism has unmasked itself, revealing itself as an ideology that is willing to force those who oppose it into submission, and advancing an increasingly “illiberal” liberalism. Efforts to limit the political power of
the culturally dispossessed and economically disadvantaged — frequently by accusing majorities of being “anti-democratic” — increasingly reveal liberalism not to be a mutually shared comprehensive system that allows self-determination, but rather a particular partisan set of commitments. Once an unassailable public philosophy, liberalism has been delegitimized. The surge of a largely unorganized “populism” has arisen because of the degraded conditions that liberalism has created among the masses. Both social and economic conditions are measurably worse among the working classes across the western world, even as life has gotten better for the liberal ruling class. What is often called “progress” — globalized economic expansion and the dismantling of traditional social mores — has largely benefited only a small liberal elite. Like the revolutions against the ancien regime, the current order has lost support of the demos. These degraded conditions have arisen not because liberalism has failed, but because it has succeeded. Titanic economic inequality and a fraying social fabric are the results of realizing liberalism’s conception of liberty. Ancient ideals of liberty as self-rule, requiring duty and self-sacrifice, were replaced with the liberal understanding of
freedom: doing as one likes. Realization of liberal freedom has led to a hyper-individualistic order that weakens national economic solidarity and tends toward the dismantling of social institutions.
The institutions of family, religion and government raised guardrails on the otherwise natural appetites and desires that, when succumbed to, resulted in what the classical and Biblical tradition regarded as a condition of servitude or slavery. The person who succumbed to lower nature not only had the soul of a slave, but also had the soul of a tyrant — a gluttony for power that would allow the enslaved tyrant to commit any act, any crime, any awful deed. All of the citizenry, including the powerful, needed to be habituated to the virtue that accorded with this classical ideal of freedom, and the guardrails helped with that education for liberty.
Under the new definition of liberty, what had previously been considered as guardrails came instead to be regarded as oppressions and unjust limitations on individual liberty. As a result, the advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefinition or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts and even the churches. In their place, a flattened world invites: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation.
Today, the story of liberalism’s tearing down of guardrails is often told as a progress from heroic overcoming of past injustices to a present moment of enlightenment, justice, liberty and equality. Oppressed people are liberated from the unjust constraints of an earlier age. Anyone questioning the story is accused of defending privilege and nostalgically craving to reinstitute the injustices of a benighted past.
This “Whig history,” a tale invented by the progressive liberals whose ideas won out, gets history wrong. The progressive
narrative is self-serving, ignoring lessons from the past about “limiting” institutions that actually serve freedom.
A characteristic self-congratulatory story of liberal progress is told by one of liberalism’s heroes, John Stuart Mill. In his classic text “On Liberty,” Mill denounced the constraining role of tradition in favor of an open, liberal society that advantages those who seek to disrupt these kinds of formative institutions. In Mill’s parlance, custom is a “despot” over the lives of those who wish to instead engage in “experiments in living.” While it’s doubtless the case that custom appears to be a “despot” to those who seek to disrupt and overthrow long-standing traditions and customs of society, from another perspective, custom and
LONG-STANDING CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND PRACTICES SHOULD BE GIVEN THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY LARGELY DEVELOP FROM THE “BOTTOM UP.”
the associated array of institutions that support and perpetuate ongoing cultural practices exist not merely to prevent the liberty of self-inventions, but to protect ordinary people from the potential rapaciousness of the ambitious. Viewed in such a light, these informal but pervasive cultural forms not only prevent efforts of a revolutionary character from reordering society around the imperative of individual liberty, but they protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people, people who are not well-served by instability, generational discontinuity, institutionalized disorder — in short, what Mill calls “progress.”
Mill’s contemporary across the English Channel, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the threats of liberation from ambient culture in precisely this light. Observing the likely rise of a more “revolutionary” class
in a liberalizing America, Tocqueville wrote admiringly especially of the constraining power of religion:
“The revolutionaries of America are obliged ostensibly to profess openly a certain respect for the morality and equity of Christianity, which does not allow them to violate the laws easily when those are opposed to the execution of their designs. ... Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim — one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to come.”
Understood in light of Tocqueville’s argument, the guardrails that limited those of a revolutionary temperament — limits that might be understood as a benign form of “tyranny of the majority” — can be properly understood as deeply democratic. They are democratic first because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears who contributed to their creation, won through hard experience, and assembled and bolstered them through institutions in order to protect the prospects of life flourishing no matter the economic or social position of the person. Those likely to defend a preeminent role of cultural institutions implicitly recognize that there is inevitable inequality in the world, in any number of forms — whether the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction — and, rather than falsely claiming that all inequalities can ultimately and someday be overcome, instead insist that the governing cultural forms and norms are the best means of securing the prospects for flourishing, especially of the weaker and disadvantaged. They were democratic, secondly, because the accumulation of customs and practices embedded in social structures acted as a break, especially upon those of distinct ambition and even tyrannical impulse, those who would benefit especially from conditions of instability and disorder. It was for this reason that G.K.
Chesterton stated his belief that “tradition is only democracy extended through time. … Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
Contra Mill, long-standing cultural institutions and practices should be given the benefit of the doubt, precisely because they largely develop from the “bottom up” in order to achieve two simultaneous ends: foster conditions of flourishing for ordinary people, while restraining the tyrannical impulses of the powerful to be free of the moderating and restraining strictures of custom, tradition and culture. But, for such cultural forms to exercise widespread influence, the customs and norms must not merely be superficially and grudgingly accepted, but widely shared and generally embraced.
In effect, those who ascend to positions of power, influence and wealth are “controlled” and limited by such forms — not merely by passage of positive law or separation of powers, but by the governance of the “democracy of the dead.”
Today, the essence of elite formation consists in two main objects, irrespective of major or course of study: first, taking part in the disassembling of traditional guardrails through a self-serving redefinition of those remnants as systems of oppression; and second, learning the skills to navigate a world without any guardrails. College — especially at selective institutions — is a place and time in which one experiments in a safe atmosphere where guardrails have been removed, but safety nets have been installed. One learns how to engage in “safe sex,” recreational alcohol and drug use, transgressive identities, how to ostensibly flaunt traditional institutions without bucking the system — all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the “culture” comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods, and not the shaping environment that governs the ambitious and settled alike. Those outside these institutions also have had the
guardrails removed — all are to be equally “free” — but without safety nets in sight. Elite opinion thus officially condemns the older cultural institutions and forms while learning a new kind of internalization of norms that function as a kind of privatized guardrail, not unlike the secured spaces of those gated communities in which many in the ruling class will eventually live. Cultures rich with norms that applied to high and low alike had been a kind of “public utility,” serving everyone in society equally, but the official messaging of elite-driven society comes to attack and dismiss many of the long-standing ideals that were encouraged by older cultural forms. Thus, for instance, media, popular culture and the education industry come
“MERITOCRATS MORALIZE SUCCESS AND FAILURE AND UNWITTINGLY PROMOTE CREDENTIALISM — AN INSIDIOUS PREJUDICE AGAINST THOSE WHO HAVE NOT BEEN TO COLLEGE.”
increasingly to express disapproval of the ideal of family or marriage by redescribing it as “the traditional family” or “traditional marriage.” By adding the designation “traditional,” disrepute and disapproval are signaled by the elite of the liberal order, in which the merely “traditional” is most often associated with arbitrary impositions of the past that are irrational, oppressive and constraining. Yet — as social scientists such as Charles Murray and Bradford Wilcox note — those who enjoy the benefits of advanced university education implicitly learn how to form families in an anti-culture without guardrails, depending especially on the benefits of privatized norms as well as greater wealth and opportunity. Meanwhile, the demolition of the cultural norm and ideals — both through economic and social destruction — results in the growing dissolution of family formation among the
less advantaged.
A further lesson follows: those who succeed deserve their status; those who have been left behind have only themselves to blame. As Michael Sandel has recently argued, educational “credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice.” In a world increasingly arranged to guarantee financial and social success for those who have been formed by the “sacred project” of modern liberalism, those who fail to rise from the curse of being rooted “somewhere” come to be viewed as deserving their fate. The only obstacle to rising comes to be seen as a moral failure of sorts, particularly perceived as the “clinging” to outmoded beliefs and practices that those of superior pedigree had the courage and discernment to overcome. Sandel concludes that “meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who have not been to college.” The system that had come into existence to replace the arbitrary rule of aristocrats, he notes, “can become a kind of tyranny.”
Michael Lind has aptly described this new divide as “the new class war.” The division between “elite” and “working class” rests less on differentiation of wealth than credentials and access to a foothold and success in the managerial economy. Lind rightly notes that the working class is divided — arguably not only with the blessing, but active encouragement of the managerial elite — between “old stock natives” and “recent immigrants and their descendants.” Without denying the reality or seriousness of racism as a scourge in Western nations and particularly the United States, comprehensive and effective proposals to redress historic injustices would have to include considering how the demise of formative social institutions and family life have harmed the working classes, regardless of race. Such considerations are studiously avoided as part of the progressive effort to redescribe all of Western history as structurally racist, rather than structurally liberal — and, hence, damaging to the
life prospects of ordinary people regardless of their race and ethnic background. Arguments that give exclusive focus upon a racial basis of the Western political divide thus end up reinforcing the advantages of the managerial classes, forestalling recognition among a multiracial working class of common interest against the managerial class, which in turn benefits from the political impotence of this divided underclass. Yet, as recent American elections have shown, a growing awareness of this common interest is leading to the gradual development of a multiracial, multiethnic working class that has potential to become a powerful counterforce to the gentry liberals who govern them from their new medieval citadels.
WHAT CAN REPLACE the disintegrating logic of liberalism? The ultimate aspiration of liberal “globalism” seeks to erect a universal umbrella over the ethos of effectual indifference. Its underlying assumption is that there is no objective “good” to which humans can agree in any time and in any place, so the only defensible political form is one in which every individual pursues his, her or xir’s idea of individual good, and the global, cosmopolitan order ensures the backdrop of sufficient peace and prosperity leaving everyone largely undisturbed. In theory, most elites today regard this vision as both potentially imminent and truly utopian. In practice, the result is a deeply destabilizing outcome of winners and losers in which our purported “nonjudgmentalism” — our indifference — becomes a subtle justification to blame the unsuccessful.
The only genuine alternative to liberalism’s commitment to a world of globalized indifference is one of common good that is secured with the assistance and support of our shared common order — the political order.
Of course, the first response of the liberal is to claim there is no such thing as the common good, since the liberal assumption is that any public good is merely whatever
consensual agreement arises from autonomous individuals. There can be no determining in advance what constitutes “the common good,” since public opinion on this question changes. Liberalism is a denial that there can be any objective good for humans that is not simply the aggregation of individual opinion. Liberalism claims that any justification based upon “the common good” is ultimately nothing more than a preference disguised as a universal ideal. However, what we instead see arise is not a regime of toleration, nonjudgment and “agreement to disagree,” but the inevitable appearance of a new ordering principle that takes on all the features of a religion. What is often called the rise of “woke-ism,” or “il-
PROPOSALS TO REDRESS HISTORIC INJUSTICES WOULD HAVE TO INCLUDE CONSIDERING HOW THE DEMISE OF FORMATIVE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND FAMILY LIFE HAVE HARMED THE WORKING CLASSES.
liberal liberalism,” is, unavoidably, the result of the elimination of considerations of an objective “good” from political life. What takes the place of a public order toward the good becomes the concerted effort to eliminate every last vestige of any claim to an objective good. Instead, the political order becomes devoted — with white-hot fervor — to the eradication of any law, custom or tradition that has as its premise that there are objective conditions of good that require public support. The whole of the social, economic, political and even metaphysical order must be refounded on the basis that individual preference must always prevail. Anyone who resists this commitment must eventually be forced to conform, whether through the force of opinion, “private”
power of employment and other regulations, and ultimately, the force of law.
Ironically, this totalitarian undertaking that we witness unfolding daily and even constantly accelerating is the consequence of the most fateful and fundamental “separation”: the so-called “separation of church and state.” As countless studies of this claim underscore, this “separation” was never complete, and can never be complete, since every political order rests on certain theological assumptions. The unseen theological foundations of liberalism were originally Christian: the dignity of every human life; the supreme value of a liberty as a choice for what is good; a constitution of limited government that prevents both tyranny and anarchy but establishes and protects a society in good order, peace and abundance.
Liberalism’s logic, premised on the complete liberation of the individual from any limiting claims of an objective good, eventually turns on these inherited commitments, and in their name becomes the opposite of what liberalism claims to be. The “dignity” of every life is sacrificed on the altar of the rule of the strong (economically or socially) over the weak; liberty is defined not as self-government, but a liberation from constraint to do as I wish; and in the name of tearing down every vestige of an antecedent order, the liberal state and social order becomes totalitarian.
Many today believe that liberalism can be restored to its “better” form simply by recombining certain preliberal, often religious commitments in the form of leavening private and civil institutions. “Right” liberals wish to (as they say) retain the classical liberal “baby” while tossing out the illiberal “bathwater,” urging a renewal of liberal nations by means of strengthening civic and private institutions while leaving intact the basic principle that the good must be a matter of private or sub political civic concern. The very liberal indifferentism that led to the evisceration of the institutions that are supposed to save us — whether by the
forces of the market, its absorption through a pervasive anti-culture, or enforcement through the power of law — are to be retained, while claiming that by restraining the worst effects of our public indifference, all will be well. In other words, they propose to retain the basic liberal principle that has led to the baby being submerged in a corrosive bath of acid, and then suggest that the baby will be fine if we dump out the acid just before all its life functions have ceased.
There is no avoiding questions of the good. Common-good conservatism is not an effort to preserve a now-superceded version of liberalism that is based in a self-deceptive nostalgia for a largely theoretical, not-yet achieved form of liberalism. It is instead an aspiration to move beyond the failed project of liberalism as it now exists on the ground, and must unavoidably embrace a new effort to articulate and foster a common good. But rather than beginning with high-level debates over the nature of the good — ones attractive to academic philosophers who largely enjoy conditions of private flourishing — it instead begins with inquiring about, and properly understanding, what is common.
The word “common” has two equally dominant meanings, and that the two meanings contained in the same word are not merely coincidental. To be “common” means that which is shared and that which is ordinary.
Combined with the word “good,” we can see that a common good consists in those needs and concerns that are identified in the ordinary requirements of ordinary people. The common good is discernible in the needs that arise from the bottom up, and which can be more or less supplied, encouraged and fortified from the top-down. In a good society, the goods that are “common” are daily reinforced by the habits and practices of ordinary people. Those habits and practices form the common culture, such as through the virtues of thrift, honesty and long memory, which in turn foster gratitude and a widespread sense of mutual
obligation. However, once such a common culture is weakened or destroyed, the only hope is a renewal and reinvigoration by a responsible governing class. A politics of the common good makes a good life more likely, even the default, for commoners.
Thus, the common good is always either served or undermined by a political order — there is no neutrality on the matter. Emphasizing this point in his indispensable book “Prayer as a Political Problem,” Jean Daniélou, S. J., wrote: “Politics ought to have care of the common good, that is to say, the duty of creating an order in which personal fulfillment is possible, where man might be able to completely fulfill his destiny.”
LIBERTY IS DEFINED NOT AS SELFGOVERNMENT, BUT A LIBERATION FROM CONSTRAINT; AND IN THE NAME OF TEARING DOWN EVERY VESTIGE OF AN ANTECEDENT ORDER, THE SOCIAL ORDER BECOMES TOTALITARIAN.
Daniélou pointed to the duty of those charged with leading the political order not to deprive ordinary people of the ability both to participate in and realize the essential goods of human life. It is not enough to ensure their freedom to pursue such goods; rather, it is the duty of the political order to positively guide them and provide the conditions for the enjoyment of the goods of human life. “Religious liberty,” “academic freedom,” “free markets” and “checks and balances,” etc., are no substitutes for piety, truth, equitable prosperity and just government. The liberal order in its foundational form maintains that the absence of constraint in these and all other domains is the sufficient condition for people to attain fulfillment. The liberal sovereign treats all people equally, assuming that radically
free human beings are equally capable of achieving the goods of human life. It is the liberal equivalent of the old Anatole France quip, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
What we should notice is that it is ordinary people — the “working class,” citizens in “flyover country,” “essential workers” — who are increasingly those who enjoy theoretical liberty but few of the substantive goods that are supposed to flow from their individual choices. As a political order, we have provided them “the pursuit of happiness,” but deprived them of happiness. Indeed, a main feature of the working classes are rising levels of “deaths of despair.” Those who seek to advance the common good should attend especially to the profound ordinariness of the concept — how it can be tested especially by reference to an answer to the question, “how are ‘commoners’ doing today?” The answer is: not good.
EVEN BEFORE THE onset of coronavirus, reams of data attested to the economic and social devastation upon less-educated, less upwardly mobile, working-class people. Economic globalization had deprived many in these communities of the sources of prosperity and stability that made flourishing lives possible. Attacks on social norms of family, faith and tradition, in addition to these economic challenges, have contributed to the breakdown of family and communal supports, leading in turn to broken lives of crime, unemployment and deaths of despair. Elite responses to the pandemic only increased the advantages of the laptop class and the worsening conditions of the tactile class.
These breakdowns have led to the growing illegitimacy of liberalism itself. A globalized liberalism has generated a global revolution from below. As a result, western politics is increasingly divided between leftand right-liberals on one side (or, in the U.S., “progressives” and “Never-Trumpers”), and
PRAYER IS A CENTRAL PRACTICE OF A FLOURISHING HUMAN LIFE, ONE IN WHICH WE ARE COGNIZANT OF A HORIZON BEYOND OUR TIME AND PLACE.
“populists,” on the other. A new class divide defines western politics — posing a progressive class of liberal elites against anti-liberal populists who demand a more stable society. Marx was wrong: the proletariat is not revolutionary; they are demanding less revolution and more conservatism.
Those in positions of power and influence have vilified and demonized these fellow citizens as backwards, racist, recidivist, even too lazy to get up and move. This has been the consistent message of an elite class that transcends political categories, and it is today the hallmark of the liberal gentry that runs the major institutions of modern liberal democracies.
What elites call “populism” is a reaction of the immune system of the body politic, but it is not the cure for our political disease. The cure lies in the development of a new elite who are forthright in defending not merely the freedom to pursue the good — and who then shrug their shoulders when ordinary people drown amid a world without guardrails or life vests — but instead is dedicated to the promotion and construction of a society that assists ordinary fellow citizens in achieving lives of flourishing.
Daniélou provides a helpful starting point. His question was, in the pursuit of the common good — the good life that is not “extraordinary,” but common, generalizable, widely achievable by most humans in a generally decent society — how do we order a society that protects and supports the life of prayer among ordinary people?
Daniélou posited that prayer is a central practice of a flourishing human life, one in which we are cognizant of a horizon beyond our time and place, aware of our neediness, humbled by our dependence and called to think and pray for others. Yet, he noted that so many aspects of the modern age increasingly make a genuine life of prayer — and these attendant virtues — exceedingly difficult. Daniélou understood that encouragement to personal piety in a world of constant distraction, technological acceleration and consumerism was not
sufficient to the task. The “freedom to pray” in a world inimical to the habit of prayer was functionally equivalent to its outright deprivation.
A recent reprint of Daniélou’s classic book wisely chose for its cover the painting “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet. The painting portrays what appear to be a husband and wife reciting the Angelus prayer (Annunciation), likely around dusk at 6 p.m. They seem to be simple farmers, but at this moment all the farming implements and potatoes have been dropped and lie scattered at their feet as they pray together. Rising above the horizon in the distance we can discern a church tower, far off but presumably near enough that the couple can hear its bells. It is a picture of simple but profound piety, and it captures a culture that points us beyond commerce and individual desire toward a wider and transcendent horizon.
Speaking of his most well-known and popular painting, Millet would later relate: “The idea for ‘The Angelus’ came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed, very religiously and with cap in hand.”
“We shall be speaking then of the prayer of man involved in social life,” Daniélou wrote. “It is in this sense that prayer belongs not to the strictly interior life of man — with which politics has nothing to do — but to the political sphere.” Protecting and supporting a life of prayer, recognizing the transcendent, acknowledging the frailty and temptations of lives threatened by a madding world — all point not just to “prayer as a political problem,” but politics as a place for prayer, since politics is how we together we seek to realize the good that is common.
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BABY BOOM OR BUST
AN AMERICA WITH LESS RELIGION IS AN AMERICA THAT MAKES PARENTING HARDER
BY
TIMOTHY P. CARNEY
Salt Lake City’s lower Avenues neighborhood is a lovely change of pace after a morning walking through the central part of the city. Everything is on a more human scale up here. The streets are easier to cross, the blocks are shorter. As I study the homes and take in the neighborhood, I start to imagine my wife and I raising our own family here. That’s when I realize what I haven’t seen in my entire circuit through the neighborhood on this beautiful fall day: a baby, or any child at all.
I’ve just spoken with Natalie Gochnour, the demographics expert and director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. When I brought up the United States’ low and plummeting birthrate — down to 1.7 babies per woman by that point — she gave me a shocking detail: even Utah’s birthrate had fallen below the 2.1 babies per woman needed to maintain a stable population in the long run.
So here in perhaps the hippest and most college-educated neighborhood of Salt Lake City, the numbers are becoming a reality. I run into a young couple, Isaac and Nicole. I introduce myself and mention I’m writing a book on parenting in America, and our increasing aversion to it.
Nicole nods and says “We don’t want kids.”
I ask if she means they don’t want kids right now, or they don’t ever want kids.
“Probably ever,” Isaac says. I ask why not.
“We can’t afford it,” Nicole replies. What costs in particular do they have in mind?
“Everything,” Isaac begins. “Health care. … But honestly, it’s just selfishness.”
I look at Nicole’s face, but she gives little reaction. Isaac continues: “I joke with Nicole, ‘some people are watching Teletubbies and cleaning up vomit, and we’re going to be drinking margaritas in Paris.’”
Moments later, as if I was in an overly
THE SINGLE GREATEST PREDICTOR OF A PLACE’S BIRTHRATE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD IS PROBABLY THE RELIGIOSITY OF THAT PLACE.
scripted scene from a movie, a woman comes walking down the sidewalk pushing a double stroller. The two passengers are both chihuahuas. Nicole and Isaac greet their neighbor and start fawning over two furry bundles of joy.
The encounter is both exceptional and typical. It’s typical because Americans, including Utahns, are having fewer babies every year. Americans feel that parenthood is
too hard, and millennials don’t seem up to it at all — and “too expensive” and “selfish” are the two explanations I hear the most from millennials or their frustrated elders.
The encounter is odd because Utah, despite its current trend, is still probably the most pro-baby and pro-family state in America. Studies regularly show Utah as one of the best states to raise a family, and every year, Utah shows up in the top five of states for birthrates.
So there’s a bigger story to tell from this encounter in the lower Avenues. And we can start that story by analyzing Isaac and Nicole’s answers, and the reason they don’t sit right with me.
Of course raising children is very expensive. Of course selfishness deters some people from becoming parents. But neither of these factors can explain the change in the birthrate and the perception that parenting is just less doable than in the past.
If the cost of raising kids was the real obstacle, people with more money would have more kids, but that’s not the reality. Americans are richer than we used to be and yet we have fewer children. The birthrate was far lower in 2019 than it was during the great recession. The wealthiest countries have low birthrates and the poorest countries have high birthrates. Americans in the top income quintile generally have fewer children than those in the bottom four.
And blaming “selfishness” for a falling birthrate makes no more sense than blaming gravity for an increase in plane crashes. If we are to explain America’s shift away from family formation, we need to ask what has changed over the past 10, 20 or 30 years. And here in the Avenues, two of my interlocutors give me a clue that points toward a more likely culprit in the Baby Bust.
“Super-LDS” is how Isaac describes his Latter-day Saint upbringing. Nicole was raised by Polish immigrants whose Catholic faith was central to their lives. Neither is religious at all now, they tell me, and this is key: Gochnour explains Salt Lake’s falling birthrate by pointing to Salt Lake’s increasing secularism. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer make up a majority of the city’s residents, and that’s why the state is no longer reproducing at replacement level. Yet, Utah is nevertheless the most religious state in the country, and that explains why Utah is still arguably the most pro-family state in the country.
The single greatest predictor of a place’s birthrate is probably the religiosity of that place. (The best measure of religiosity for all sociological purposes is not professed belief or frequency of prayer, but religious attendance.) This correlation is true on the individual level, too. Americans who attend church, synagogue or mosque services at least once a week have birthrates well above 2.1. The nonreligious have birthrates well below 1.5 and falling fast. The moderately religious are in the middle.
There’s corroborating evidence on the global level. Israel has by far the highest birthrate among wealthy countries, averaging nearly 3 babies per woman. A Jerusalem shopkeeper named Oren with four kids gave me a simple explanation: “Mitzvah!” which translates as “commandment.” God’s first commandment in Genesis was “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Likewise, at the Church of Jesus Christ’s seminary for high school students in Farmington, Utah, a teacher named Jake tells me, “In our religion we’re encouraged to have as many kids you can provide for.” It’s easy to
conclude that Israelis have more kids than Europeans do because Israelis obey the mitzvah, and that Church of Jesus Christ teachings on marriage and family are the reasons for Utahns’ devotion to family.
But the real story is probably a lot more complicated. The interaction between religion and baby-making is not as simple as mitzvahs, dogmas or church teachings. And you can tell because secular Jews in Israel have more babies than do the average European, and, as Gochnour tells me, the Catholics in America who have the most children are the Catholics in Utah. “It’s in the air,” she says.
It’s not quite in the air, though. It’s in the culture.
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN RELIGION AND BABY-MAKING IS NOT AS SIMPLE AS MITZVAHS, DOGMAS OR CHURCH TEACHINGS. IT’S IN THE CULTURE OF A PLACE.
IT’S A GORGEOUS sunny day in Woodland Park in Farmington when I run into Ellen, Shea and Stephanie, three Latter-day Saint home-schooling moms. The women have in the past pursued careers or owned businesses, and now they describe their full-time occupation as helping their children become well-rounded, fully-functioning, happy adults.
On this score, Ellen says, “I’m grateful for the values of the church.”
Values are a great place to start when asking why Utah and Israel might be more family-friendly than other places in the U.S. and the wealthy world. But “values” is a bit of a slippery concept. The moms in Woodland Park — and Woodland Park itself — offer some more concrete explanations. Ellen, Shea and Stephanie go on about this park, other nearby parks, and how
many amazing outdoor activities there are in the area. This isn’t a mere nicety. The parks, trails and mountains materially make parents’ lives better, in part because of policies and institutions that help parents utilize them.
The women enroll their children in My Tech High, a sort of remote home-school institution that operates only in a few states. My Tech High provides resources for home-schooling parents, plus around a $1,000 reimbursement per student. Shea mentions that she’s planning on using some of that money to cover snowboard lessons. To my Mid-Atlantic big-city ears that at first sounds laughably stereotypical of the Mountain West. Snowboarding as part of high school?! We played real sports, which had balls, teammates and scoreboards.
But as our conversation continues and we talk about how easy it is for a big family (my wife and I have six children) to lose control of our calendar, the snowboarding lessons become more appealing. Middle-class and upper-middle-class parents in the Washington, D.C., region where I live and the New York City region where I grew up easily fall into the Travel Team Trap. Suddenly your child is 12 years old and playing lacrosse year-round, including winter workouts in some expensive gym that’s 45 miles away. If you have more than one kid, say goodbye to family dinners or even summer vacations. Your kids’ activity schedule determines the family schedule, which reflects a value that no parent wants to communicate to their children: That family is what you do when you have nothing else going on.
If I could affordably teach all my kids (and myself) to snowboard, and we could hit the mountains easily, that would be a much more family-friendly way to give my children the benefits of youth sports. It takes not only mountains to make this possible, but also the sort of physical and cultural infrastructure that Davis County has.
That’s one simple example of the norms, physical environment and institutions Utah has that can make parenting easier.
Public schools provide something else of
immeasurable value: a school system that doesn’t actively work to undermine parents’ values.
Students at Farmington High School, typical of many Utah high schools, can take a break during the school day to attend religious education classes, which include seminary for the Latter-day Saint students. These students do not even have to cross a street to get to the class, as the Farmington seminary building is on a lot adjacent to the high school. The seminaries are fully funded by church tithing, which means a Latter-day Saint couple in Farmington — as in many places around Utah — can easily give their children a well-rounded education, including religious education, without paying for it besides through their taxes and their tithing.
Many parents in America who would love big families opt for smaller families because they cannot afford a half-dozen K-12 tuitions.
“JEWISH SCHOOL TUITION is a contraceptive,” is how multiple parents in Kemp Mill — a modern Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Maryland — described their plight. The community is so Jewish that worshippers at Kemp Mill Synagogue and the nearby Young Israel Shomrai Emunah synagogue observe the prohibition on driving on the Sabbath. That means the members all live within walking distance.
In this tight-knit community, many of these Orthodox families are put off by the left-wing political agenda and antipathy toward traditional values that characterizes Montgomery County Public Schools, and so if they are not up for home-schooling, a smaller-than-desired family is the only option.
Despite the downward force exerted by the costs of Jewish education, large families are much more common in Kemp Mill than in any other similar D.C. suburb. While we simply just trace this to the first mitzvah in the Garden of Eden, there’s a lot more going on here than religious teaching.
“There is an element of contagiousness,” Yair, a Kemp Mill dad of five, explains. “We
live in these tight-knit communities where your neighbors are all having them.” Yair is echoing Gochnour’s explanation: fecundity is just in the air.
Home-schooling is more common in Kemp Mill than in other suburbs, and so forming a co-op — formal or informal — is much easier here. Simply the presence of stay-at-home mothers is massively pro-family. Stay-at-home parents make life easier for other stay-at-home parents in a hundred ways. Your two-year-old will have more playmates during the day, your local businesses will cater to parents and tots in the daytime hours.
In all these ways, religious teachings filter down to build infrastructure that supports family formation. But maybe the biggest factor is just what seems normal.
“Most people that I know in our age group have three or four,” one mother named Ava tells me. “And then there’s another group, and they all have five, and they’re all friends with each other, and five is a great number. Five is just what they do.”
The most interesting thing about big religious broods of four and five kids is that they seem to foster moderate-sized secular broods of two and three kids. That is, the religious families seem to infect the less religious families with the germ of fecundity. The most striking example of this is probably the secular Jews in Israel.
“GOD HAS NOTHING to do with our children-making decisions,” a secular dad named Tsachi tells me while pushing two children in a stroller around Tel Aviv. His third child is home with his wife.
Tsachi points to Jewish history and current geopolitics as to why secular Jews in Israel average two children each, more than Catholics in Europe do. A more generalizable explanation is that religion helped create an ecosystem that is fertile for families. Picture a garden at the center of which is a large tree called religion. That tree not only feeds those who eat its fruit, but it also creates shade and habitat for small animals. The soil is altered by the effects of this tree and other plants spring up,
which brings in more animals in the air, on the ground, and beneath the soil.
Eventually, you have a lush garden, and even those who never touch the tree of religion, or who eat the fruit of a different tree benefit from the ecosystem created by that first tree.
This is how we can think of religion’s effects on families and babies. Some of its effects are direct, but many are indirect, acting through culture.
You can see that culture in Rexburg, Idaho, home to BYU-Idaho. Near College Avenue and Main Street in Rexburg you’ll find two baby stores, a diamond shop and two bridal shops. More importantly, on campus you’ll find “mothers lounges” (nursing rooms), junior men handing their baby off to a buddy at the student union, teachers granting extensions to students with a sick child, and the social acceptability of getting married as an undergraduate.
Again, religion is the first seed that creates this ecosystem, but all of these cultural institutions do at least as much as church teaching to promote family and make it easier.
So what’s the real reason? Why do so many millennials feel like parenting is not for them? Why are Americans having fewer babies every year? And why is Utah still resisting this rush towards childlessness?
The story seems to be this: America is becoming less religious. Religion is pro-family not simply because it preaches family and parenthood, but because it fosters norms, infrastructure and culture that makes parenting easier. An America with less religion is an America where those norms, infrastructure and culture are crumbling, and so parenting becomes harder and raising big families seems weirder.
If we are to reverse this slide, we need that pro-family culture back. We’re never going to make family “affordable” and we’re never going to eliminate selfishness. What we can do is build a culture that makes the sacrifice required by parents a bit smaller, and make the idea of sacrifice seem a bit less foreign.
TIMOTHY
P. CARNEY
GO FISH
IS THE SECRET TO A HAPPY MARRIAGE LEARNING TO BE ALONE?
BY STEPHEN FRIED
During the early years of marriage, my primary leisure activity was being married. It was all so new and different. I was still astonished at always having a date.
My wife, Diane, was perfectly happy to have an attentive husband but eventually she started to wonder what was wrong with me — especially when the weather would get warm, and regular guys were out doing regular guy things.
Of course, I took this to mean that I should find something new for us to do together: tennis, yoga classes, chess. We did play tennis once (at one of those embarrassing love-nest hotels with the heart-shaped tubs and the his-and-her snorkels). We did try yoga,briefly (I was the only guy in the class, and the only student who had to sit down to bend at the waist). And we did play some chess, until I realized she was just toying with me to teach me how to be more Machiavellian in a particular work situation (since I later learned she could kick my butt in three moves whenever she wanted).
Eventually, Diane admitted that she
actually didn’t want to find a new activity for us to do together. She wanted me to find a new activity for us to do — not together.
“You know, you need a hobby,” she said, laughing at the sound of the word. It seemed
I WANTED TO LET HER KNOW THAT I UNDERSTOOD. I UNDERSTOOD THAT SHE WASN’T JUST TRYING TO GET ME AWAY FROM HER SO SHE COULD WRITE. SHE WAS TRYING TO HELP ME GET AWAY FROM MYSELF—WHICH IS MUCH HARDER.
like an artifact from our childhoods, when boys were encouraged to play with model trains so they wouldn’t discover sex.
“Something to get you out of the house. Go … fish!”
While I liked the concept of fishing, I did find it a little odd that it was her idea, not
mine. After all, don’t regular guys fish to get away from their wives? If your wife tells you to go fish, isn’t that somehow defeating the whole purpose?
At the time, though, I was mostly really glad she hadn’t tried to make me golf, because there are basically two kinds of men: golfers and fishermen. Golf is clubby, social, competitive, classist. Fishing is more solitary and egalitarian (although fly-fishing can be a tad golfy) and is competitive only when my brothers and I do it. Golf is for strivers and fishing is for yearners, but each activity is profound and pointless in its own way.
I grew up in a divided family. My grandfather was an avid golfer, while his brother — my father’s favorite uncle — was a 12-month-a-year fisherman. This explains why one of Dad’s favorite places to fish was the pond at the local country club.
I inherited the lunker gene and, as a kid, loved fishing with my father. My dad fished rivers and old abandoned canals, but mostly he had a knack for convincing people with lakes on their property to let him help unstock them. It was his quiet time, his
THE TRUTH IS THAT I WASN’T SURE WHERE, OR EVEN HOW, TO FISH ON MY OWN, WITHOUT MY FATHER. AND I FELT A LITTLE UNMANLY ADMITTING THAT, EVEN TO MYSELF.
inner time, the time when he didn’t have to sell anybody anything. He used lures, not flies or live bait, so fishing required more than just patience: casting, he taught us, is a skill. And we had adventures, some manly, some comical. He never let me forget the day when he asked me to grab a stringer-full of fish because we were going to change locations, and it slipped out of my hands, so I watched a half-dozen beautiful bass, still strung together, swim away in unison.
AFTER I MOVED away from home for college, I stopped fishing. Diane would see my old fishing stuff jammed into a corner of our car trunk and wonder why I never touched it. The truth is that I wasn’t sure where, or even how, to fish on my own, without my father. And I felt a little unmanly admitting that, even to myself.
So, on that warm summer day when Diane told me to go fish, I was reduced to looking in the yellow pages for a bait shop. I drove to Bob’s Bait and Tackle and bought a license, a rod and reel, and enough lures so I could lose the first 20 and still have something to fish with. And then I sheepishly asked Bob where I should go fishing.
He sent me to a place a half hour away from our home in Philadelphia, reachable by a dirt road behind some railroad tracks, where the Schuylkill River roars across a 30-foot waterfall. When I got there it was early evening and the mayflies were hatching. They hovered in the air like tiny alien spacecraft, their pale-green wings fluttering against the rosy sunset sky. As I sat tying my line, on a rock just above the falls, fish were lunging out of the water at the mayflies and all manner of birds were swooping in for them. It was fishing heaven.
I fished until it was so dark that I couldn’t even see the bass I was reeling in. (Taking hooks out using the “touch system” is not the smartest idea). And then I did something my dad never would have done — even if the technology had been available. I called Diane on my cellphone.
She was incredulous: Why would I violate the blissful peace of my riverside solitude by making a phone call? Because I wanted to let her know that I understood. I understood that she wasn’t just trying to get me away from her so she could write. She was trying to help me get away from myself — which is much harder. Figuring out how to be alone was an important step forward in our being together.
LATER ON, AFTER I had started fishing more regularly, we talked about the phenomenon of the fishing or golf “widow.” This fear of being “widowed” in your marriage, or being in competition with your spouse’s avocation, is complex. I can only imagine what it’s like when couples have the same hobby. I don’t mean the situations where one spouse gets involved with something and the other decides to get involved as well, as a preventive measure (to make sure the husband isn’t meeting any hot babes at the model railroad show, or the wife newly addicted to bike riding isn’t succumbing to the loneliness of the long-distance pedaler.) I mean couples who are, say, both good tennis players or golfers, so they play against each other — those “till sudden death do us part” marriages.
While I’m sure there are some joys attached to such situations, I’d imagine the worst part is that you have no one to come home to and exaggerate about how well or how badly you played.
There was a moment, when I first started fishing again, that I thought Diane might want to join me. We were in our favorite place in the world, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, where a good friend had a cabin. It was in an old private hunting compound with man made lakes and Pecos River frontage so abundantly stocked with trout that they were almost too easy to catch. (Almost.) Instead of having to drive or hike miles away to fish, I only had to walk about a hundred yards from the cabin to access all the trout I could possibly catch. I actually once caught a big rainbow there and, while I was netting it, a second
one jumped into the net, too. Without a moment’s hesitation, I did what I always do, my own high-res version of catch and release: net the fish, take their pictures with my cellphone, and then let them go.
After days of watching from the cabin window as I fished while she wrote, Diane came out to join me. I gave her a lesson and she quickly caught a fish. But, while she occasionally talked about trying it again, what I think she really got hooked on was the idea of watching me fish, enjoying the intense satisfaction of being alone with myself.
It is a powerful feeling to know someone wants you to have that kind of contentment. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite of widowhood.
SO, I STARTED fishing more alone. I had hopes of trying to fish more with my dad again, but I didn’t get home as much as I had hoped, so it didn’t happen.
Then, when he was about to turn 60, my two younger brothers and I decided we would take him on the kind of fishing trip he always said he wanted to take us on. We booked a fishing lodge in Northern Ontario, we hired a guide who said “eh” a lot — “Rick, eh” — and we spent four glorious days together on the Bad River and in Georgian Bay. We caught big, mean fish — muskies and pike so muscular that when we got them into the boat, they tried to throw us overboard. And after lunch of fried-up walleye, potatoes and onions topped with an egg and sopped up with soft, nutrition-free white bread, we lay on our backs on the sun-warm curved rocks on Blueberry Island and dreamed about how this trip could be the first of many.
My middle brother’s wife was pregnant with the family’s first grandchild: we figured he would come with us, too. The first time his grandson over-casted and got his line caught in branches on shore, Dad would say he had caught a “tree fish,” just as he had when we first did it.
We thought we had a lot of time, and a lot of fishing ahead of us. Instead, within a
year, our father was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. He got a little bit of time with his grandson, Jake, but nowhere near enough.
In the fall, as he was about to celebrate his last birthday — 62 — he and I went fishing one last time. We went to a lake on the farm property of a friend of his, and there was a little metal fishing boat we rowed out into the middle. The lily pads were yellow and uncharacteristically full-looking for that time of year, as pregnant as the moment, like they were going to burst into bloom again six months too late. When we arrived, the boat had a little bit of water in it, which we figured was from rain and we dumped out. But the longer we fished, the more it was clear there was a leak. Water steadily seeped in, until we had to put our feet on the rails to keep above it. We laughed about what it would be like if we actually got stuck out there. Then my dad took one of the oars out of its gunnel and pushed it into the water — but didn’t get very far. He said the lake was like too many people he knew, a mile wide and an inch deep.
The sinking ship seemed like a cheap metaphor for his body’s battle with cancer, but still apt. We fished through it as long as we could, wondering if we were just about to reach the point where the boat had taken on enough water that we wouldn’t be able to row it back to shore and would have to wade back. Dad said maybe to sink while fishing with your son wasn’t such a bad way to go. You’re with family, doing what you love until you can’t anymore. And we still hadn’t caught anything. So, how about one more cast. And then one more, one-more-cast. And another.
Finally, we gave up and rowed in, the now-heavy boat occasionally scraping the bottom. I was disappointed that we hadn’t caught anything on what would likely be his last time with rod and reel. But he seemed fine with it. And he offered the same advice he had been giving us our whole lives, from the first time he ever took us out.
It doesn’t matter what you catch; it just matters that you fish.
DAD
SAID MAYBE TO SINK WHILE FISHING WITH YOUR SON WASN’T SUCH A BAD WAY TO GO. YOU’RE WITH FAMILY, DOING WHAT YOU LOVE UNTIL YOU CAN’T ANYMORE.
IMMIGRANTS ARRIVE AT ELLIS ISLAND FROM POSTWAR EUROPE, 1951.
Ahoj! Jmenuji se Angelika or
Hi, my name is Angelika with a “k” in the space people believe a “c” belongs. One foreign letter and my family members were slaughtered by the tongue of America’s elders. “Angeleeka?”
“Can I just call you Angie?”
Being compliant to mispronunciation is ingrained in my DNA Immigration officers filled out my great great grandmother’s paperwork for her, writing down what they heard, instead of what she said.
“My name is Anna Hurnyi Tarras.” “Please repeat.”
“Anna Hurnyi Tarras.”
The accent marks were scraped from a 42 letter alphabet, making it only 26 and easier to chew up and digest.
They write “Anna Hurni Tarris” and in a single ink spill, her parents become a figment of the imagination, her homeland exists only in memories and the lines of her hands. She and her husband sent west to stop speaking in mother tongue and be killed in a mining accident. Her daughter becomes an English teacher,
SOFTER BONES
BY ANGELIKA BREWER
trying to erase the obvious alien from her teeth.
Eduarta Theresa Tarras becomes Irma Normington and tries to teach her children how to sound less foreign. All I have left of my family is that “k” in a c’s space.
That “k” is my grandmother’s babushka wrapped around braided hair and the way she couldn’t remember the word for “bellybutton” even when her mom begged.
It is fresh cooked pierogie for dinner and fried cherigi for dessert. That “k” is every misspelled tombstone in a now ghost-town cemetery in Wyoming.
Dobre den! Jmenuji se, Angelika.
It was not a quirky addition thought up by my bleeding mother. It was the last puff of smoke from the train across a new country, the remnants of the old country split in two. It wasn’t a mistake.
For every time I responded to the wrong name, there was a day on Ellis Island to match. For every shortened variation of my too many letters, there is one of my family member’s untraceable boarding pass. For every syllable in Angelika, there is one of my grandparent’s obituaries with the names updated to be more palatable.
Moje krásná dcera, Anastasia: Or
My beautiful daughter, Anastasia: It was not a mistake. When they call you Anastasia, correct them.
When they laugh, “I’ll never be able to say that right.” Tell them, “I’ll repeat it until you can.”
When they ask “Why is it pronounced that way?” say, “Because that is my name. Moje matka” or “My mother gifted it to me that way on purpose.”
Say, “I honor Anna Hurnyi Tarras and Eduarta Theresa Tarras and Maria Dlugos and the bones of names that never needed to be softer and when they ask if they can call you “Anna” instead, say
“If I wanted you to change my name, I would have asked.”
COLUMBIA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HISPANIC JOURNALISTS AND NBC UNIVERSAL HOSTED AN ALL-DAY TRAINING SESSION.
In February, Deseret Magazine Editor Jesse Hyde spoke on a panel at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism about improving the media’s coverage of faith-related issues. The panel was part of an all-day training at the school sponsored by NBC Universal and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Hyde encouraged journalists to be open, fair and curious, especially when covering minority faith groups. The panel was one of three sponsored by the Faith & Media Initiative and Deseret Management Corporation in February. The others were hosted by the National Press Club and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
MODERATOR WESLEY PARNELL, A REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, ASKED HOW THE MEDIA CAN AVOID STEREOTYPES ABOUT RELIGION.
ABOVE: AARON SHERINIAN, CEO OF RADIANT FOUNDATION AND FOUNDER OF THE FAITH & MEDIA INITIATIVE.
RIGHT: JESSE HYDE, EDITOR OF DESERET MAGAZINE WITH PANELIST MARA S. CAMPO (LEFT) AND MODERATOR WESLEY PARNELL (RIGHT).
STUDENTS AT THE COLUMBIA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM (BELOW) PARTICIPATE IN THE DAY-LONG EVENT.
IS
NEWS ANCHOR AND MANAGING EDITOR OF REVOLT BLACK NEWS AND REVOLT TV. SHE IS A FOUR-TIME EMMY AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST.
PAIGE PEREZ, A STUDENT AT THE NEWMARK J-SCHOOL IN NEW YORK, ASKED HOW TO BE CULTURALLY SENSITIVE WHILE REPORTING ON DIVERSE FAITH GROUPS.
MARA S. CAMPO
GLOBAL
Copeland
CAN BUSINESS REINVENT ITSELF?
MEET THE FUTURIST AND THOUGHT LEADER WHO’S OPTIMISTIC ABOUT WHAT’S TO COME
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
In a world facing many struggles, companies need to find a larger purpose than whatever product they make or service they sell, says “branding futurist” Simon Mainwaring (pronounced like “mannering”). A bestselling author, columnist, podcaster and international speaker, the 56-year old Australian business consultant has made it his life’s work to help companies figure out their bigger roles and propel them forward in the service of humanity. But “in terms of magnitude,” he’s a father first, driven to build a better future for his adult daughters and his wife of 30 years.
His work starts with storytelling. “I have a profound belief in the power of language to help us think and behave in new ways,” he says. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s spent the last two decades living in Los Angeles, home of the movie industry, where imagining the future is built into the city’s DNA. Through We First, his strategic consulting company, he helps brands to see upcoming opportunities, foresee pitfalls and visualize the good they can accomplish in the world.
In conversation, he often refers to his
books, “Lead with We” and “We First,” both business world bestsellers. He writes a column on business and social responsibility for Forbes and hosts the “Lead with We” podcast. In 2022, he made the “Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Climate Change” list.
WE’RE STARTING TO SEE SOME VERY DEEP AND CASCADING PROBLEMS THAT ARE ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. A SELFSERVING MENTALITY COMES AT THE COST OF THINGS THAT ARE FAR MORE VALUABLE THAN MONEY.
A partial list of his passions and causes include animal welfare, arts and culture, children, civil rights, humanitarian relief, economic empowerment, education, environment, health, human rights, politics and ending poverty.
Deseret asked Mainwaring why businesses should tackle big issues.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY “LEAD WITH WE”?
We’re in a difficult situation because of the way all of us have been behaving for the last century at the very least. I wrote “We First” shortly after the global economic meltdown of 2007-08. The root problem was a me-first mentality. It felt unfair that a very small number of people did disproportionately well, while a growing number were suffering, losing their homes, hopes, health care, and so on. It was not just unconscionable, it was unsustainable. All of us need to see ourselves as co-creators in a new practice of business, which better serves all stakeholders and our future — grounded in a deep and pervasive belief in the power of capitalism, when we bring our best selves and highest purpose to it — because brands can’t survive in societies that fail. Whether we’re talking about climate, extreme weather, biodiversity loss, homelessness or anxiety and depression in younger generations, we’ve got a lot of challenges we’ve got to solve.
SIMON MAINWARING
NO ONE IS GOING TO ESCAPE THE FUTURE WE’VE CREATED FOR OURSELVES. THE ONLY WAY OUT IS IF WE WORK TOGETHER IN NEW WAYS.
WHAT ARE BUSINESSES GETTING WRONG?
If we’re honest with ourselves, most businesses — whether they choose to or have to — are just looking at their bottom line: how to make the most money as quickly as possible with the least expense to themselves. But that’s coming at the cost of our future now and it has nothing to do with politics. We’re starting to see symptoms of some very deep and cascading problems that are only going to get worse. So this self-serving mentality comes at the cost of things that are far more valuable than money. That is one thing they’re getting wrong. Many companies do cause marketing in ways that are disingenuous, just managing optics, or they’re one-off ad hoc tactics, not something that’s foundational and sustained inside their company. Even when they’re doing this work genuinely, they often talk about it in a self-directed way. “Look at what our company did.” It falls on deaf ears, because you’re just talking about yourself.
YOU TALK A LOT ABOUT CHANGING OUR ACTIONS. WHY?
No one is going to escape the future we’ve created for ourselves. The only way out is if we work together in new ways. The good news is, people want to work for, buy from or invest in companies that are doing good. Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies being asked their opinion on COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, politics. These different issues are front and center for business now. Consumers want to see you playing a positive role in the world, because they’re worried about the future.
DOES POLITICAL STRIFE IMPACT BUSINESS?
It’s paralyzing for some leaders in the age of social media. When do we put our hand up? What do we say on a certain issue? Will our employees like it? Will our customers buy our product? Or will they protest against us? There’s nowhere to hide anymore. If you stay silent on an issue, you will be called out by investors, by employees, by consumers, because of your absence. If you are going to have a point of view, it needs to be authentic and grounded in your values as a company. Walk the talk. If people don’t agree, they can choose not to buy your product. They can argue with you. But you’re better off doing that than trying to play both sides or stay silent.
ARE THERE ISSUES THAT BUSINESSES SHARE?
The three issues that every company needs to speak to: a fair living wage, which is the most important issue to Americans, according to research by Just Capital; diversity and inclusion; and, finally, some sort of sustainability profile in terms of your impact on the environment. Business is on the hook to do less harm and more good. These issues are not sitting out there statically in the future, waiting for us to arrive. They’re growing and compounding and hurtling back towards us in the present. If you want to be on the right side of history, to be relevant and resonating, you’ve got to recognize that the world we live in has changed.
HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO DRAG PEOPLE INTO A NEW CORPORATE CULTURE?
It’s very hard, but getting easier. I think COVID accelerated this process. Suddenly,
in a way we could never have imagined, we saw businesses all around the world send their employees home, reengineer their supply chains to make face masks and ventilators, prepare meals for medical practitioners and first responders, and take care of their communities. We can’t unsee it.
HOW DOES A BUSINESS CHANGE TO HAVE THAT IMPACT?
First, define the purpose of your company in a simple, emotional and differentiated way. Second, share that with all of your employees in a way that makes them feel like they’re a part of it, and they’re going to play a role in making that purpose a reality. Third, accelerate and expand the positive impact you’re having that is meaningful to your brand. Build brand movements — get all stakeholders to work together with you to achieve that result.
ANY LAST WORD?
This is not the end of something. It may be tempting to feel pessimistic about the future, but this is a necessarily painful rebirth, the most extraordinary ushering in of a business renaissance we can ever imagine. We’re going to start working together with each other in new ways. We’re going to start working with nature, rather than against it. We will serve nature rather than steal from it. We will remember we are one human family, made up of communities who care about each other. And we actually have a deep and enduring respect and love for the natural world that we enjoy every day. I’m very optimistic about the future.
A CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPH USING A VINTAGE CAMERA AND PROCESSING TECHNIQUE.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL ADAMS
GRAND CANYON TINTYPE
Samoa has the highest rate of rheumatic fever in the world. Our students and faculty partner with local health teams to screen thousands of children each year—saving lives in the spirit of love and service.
Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.
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