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The smartest account of the past few bizarre, awful years in America is a movie you might not have heard of: Hello Dankness. Its brilliant, its funny, and its made by a two-person team known as Soda JerkAustralian-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro, who are now based in New York. Masters of sampling, theyve distilled our warped political and cultural realityand how its felt to live through itby seamlessly combining clips from movies, news, and memes into a feature-length creation. Film Forum in New York pounced on it for a theatrical run through September 28; The New York Times responded with a Critics Pick. Forget novelty mash-upsHello Dankness just might be a definitive summation of the 2016-2020 saga none of us has really processed.

It was really about how weird that all felt in 2016, the pair said about the rise of Trump. When we embarked on it, we didnt know the pandemic would happen, and we didnt anticipate the shitshow of events that unfolded afterward. They felt the need to set down a record of the eraa psychic ledger. In Hello Dankness, a first encounter with MAGA folk is hilariously portrayed with clips of Tom Hanks (from The Burbs) nervously checking out his new neighbors, an ominous house where a Hillary for Prison sign sits in the window (thanks to Soda Jerks clever digital alterations). Matching different clips, Reyn Doi from Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar pedals along on a bike, delivering newspapers, while Wayne and Garth wander the street, affiliation unknown.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk started in the music and activist worlds of Sydney, after growing up in the suburbs. Appropriation was the move: experimental hip-hop and noisecore, Napster music-sharing, artist squats, and seizing real estate were all fair game. Thats really where our practice emergedthe politics of sampling, they said, calling it a form of civil disobedience. The duo teamed up creatively to make an IP battle royale called Hollywood Burn (2002), then came to New York in 2012, where they found home in the film community. We joined Spectacle Theater collective, which runs a microcinema in Brooklyn, and met a community of cinephiles that have kept us there ever since.

Video installations in museums and galleries first showed Soda Jerks work, but the siblings fixated on feature-length filmmaking with Terror Nullius (2018)a wild anticolonial dismantling of Australian history and culture that one funder called un-Australian. The experience of sustaining a work and an audience at this length was a turning point. People will go to a cinema and watch it from beginning to endnone of this gallery bullshit where they walk in and walk out, they said. Hello Dankness followedincorporating and critiquing Internet influences while expanding to encompass the pandemics abyssand premiered at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, then New Yorks cutting-edge new fest Prismatic Ground, before the Film Forum run.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk spoke with me over video from a hotel in South Korea, where they were jurors at the Seoul International Womens Film Festival for its 25th edition. Audiences had questions about Hello Dankness, they said, but you realize these things are so collective for so many people. Thats precisely the genius behind Soda Jerks style of sampling: these arent disposable meme-style references, but a harnessing of the expressive power within the original movies to new purposes. In this way, Hello Dankness works on multiple levels. Hankss shuffling haplessness in The Burbs is the perfect look for a well-meaning voter overwhelmed by electoral forces that feel aggressive. The suburban setting bespeaks actual voter bases, according to each characters vibe and manner: Hanks is a Bernie voter, Annette Bening from American Beauty stumps for Hillary, while Wayne and Garth... maybe you dont want to know. Later, dazed daytime scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street capture the unreality of soldiering on in the face of the pandemic and, well, everything else.

Creating Hello Dankness was a constant process of clip-and-idea formation, with the timeline of current events providing a spine. We have these whiteboards in our studio, representing the different acts and chapters, and theyre constantly being reworked in terms of plotlines, Soda Jerk said. Genre films were effective for representing the complete rupture to the everyday. Stoner postapocalyptic comedy This Is the End, for example, gets new life by representing the shock of Trumps 2016 victory.

The artistic teamwork of Soda Jerk feels inspiredand inspiring. Were both in the studio every day. Cutting the edit, doing all of the sampling and generative stuff together. (I manage to coax out one difference: Dan rotoscopesthe act of digitally masking footage in a sample frame-by-frametill the cows come home, but hates doing emails.) Next up: a joyous Big gay film. They welcome the change of pace. Hello Dankness has a vexed relationship to hope, the pair said. We dont even know if hope is the thing we need right now. Hope doesnt kick your ass. Words to live by in these timesand with Hello Dankness, a visual vocabulary to make sense of it all.

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Meet the Filmmakers Reimagining Donald Trump's Presidency - W Magazine

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trumps tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the companys head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. Ive lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isnt a story I relish revisiting. But Ive learned that what happened to me wasnt an accident. It wasnt just personal vindictiveness or cancel culture. It was a strategy one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Private individuals from academic researchers to employees of tech companies are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trumps lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.

My story starts with that fact check. In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trumps that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be rigged. Get the facts about mail-in ballots, the label read.

On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitters site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a hater.

Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadnt heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)

I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this context collapse: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.

The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to work the refs: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.

It worked. As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safetys recommendation that Mr. Trumps account should be banned because of several tweets, including one that attacked Vice President Mike Pence. He was given a 12-hour timeout instead (before being banned on Jan. 8). Within the boundaries of the rules, staff members were encouraged to find solutions to help the company avoid the type of blowback that results in angry press cycles, hearings and employee harassment. The practical result was that Twitter gave offenders greater latitude: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was permitted to violate Twitters rules at least five times before one of her accounts was banned in 2022. Other prominent right-leaning figures, such as the culture war account Libs of TikTok, enjoyed similar deference.

Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employees home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.

And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.

In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.

In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing hostage-taking laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.

In the United States, weve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and in Twitters case by the companys new owner.

One of the most recent forces in this campaign is the Twitter Files, a large assortment of company documents many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter turned over at Mr. Musks direction to a handful of selected writers. The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitters coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.

What they delivered was something else entirely. As tech journalist Mike Masnick put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter Files, in the end there was absolutely nothing of interest in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors. Even Mr. Musk eventually lost patience with the effort. But, in the process, the effort marked a disturbing new escalation in the harassment of employees of tech firms.

Unlike the documents that would normally emanate from large companies, the earliest releases of the Twitter Files failed to redact the names of even rank-and-file employees. One Twitter employee based in the Philippines was doxxed and severely harassed. Others have become the subjects of conspiracies. Decisions made by teams of dozens in accordance with Twitters written policies were presented as having been made by the capricious whims of individuals, each pictured and called out by name. I was, by far, the most frequent target.

The first installment of the Twitter Files came a month after I left the company, and just days after I published a guest essay in The Times and spoke about my experience working for Mr. Musk. I couldnt help but feel that the companys actions were, on some level, retaliatory. The next week, Mr. Musk went further by taking a paragraph of my Ph.D. dissertation out of context to baselessly claim that I condoned pedophilia a conspiracy trope commonly used by far-right extremists and QAnon adherents to smear L.G.B.T.Q. people.

The response was even more extreme than I experienced after Mr. Trumps tweet about me. You need to swing from an old oak tree for the treason you have committed. Live in fear every day, said one of thousands of threatening tweets and emails. That post, and hundreds of others like it, were violations of the very policies Id worked to develop and enforce. Under new management, Twitter turned a blind eye, and the posts remain on the site today.

On Dec. 6, four days after the first Twitter Files release, I was asked to appear at a congressional hearing focused on the files and Twitters alleged censorship. In that hearing, members of Congress held up oversize posters of my years-old tweets and asked me under oath whether I still held those opinions. (To the extent the carelessly tweeted jokes could be taken as my actual opinions, I dont.) Ms. Greene said on Fox News that I had some very disturbing views about minors and child porn and that I allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter, warping Mr. Musks lies even further (and also extending their reach). Inundated with threats, and with no real options to push back or protect ourselves, my husband and I had to sell our home and move.

Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities theyre affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.

Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.

Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.

We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default. In early 2023, the Indian government asked Twitter to restrict posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In years past, the company had pushed back on such requests; this time, Twitter acquiesced. When a journalist noted that such cooperation only incentivizes further proliferation of draconian measures, Mr. Musk shrugged: If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.

Its hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitters employees in India in harms way. But we shouldnt forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musks actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the Anti-Defamation League has shown that he views personal retaliation as an appropriate consequence for any criticism of him or his business interests. And, as a practical matter, with hate speech on the rise and advertiser revenue in retreat, Mr. Musks efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitters bottom line.

What can be done to turn back this tide?

Making the coercive influences on platform decision making clearer is a critical first step. And regulation that requires companies to be transparent about the choices they make in these cases, and why they make them, could help.

In its absence, companies must push back against attempts to control their work. Some of these decisions are fundamental matters of long-term business strategy, like where to open (or not open) corporate offices. But companies have a duty to their staff, too: Employees shouldnt be left to figure out how to protect themselves after their lives have already been upended by these campaigns. Offering access to privacy-promoting services can help. Many institutions would do well to learn the lesson that few spheres of public life are immune to influence through intimidation.

If social media companies cannot safely operate in a country without exposing their staff to personal risk and company decisions to undue influence, perhaps they should not operate there at all. Like others, I worry that such pullouts would worsen the options left to people who have the greatest need for free and open online expression. But remaining in a compromised way could forestall necessary reckoning with censorial government policies. Refusing to comply with morally unjustifiable demands, and facing blockages as a result, may in the long run provoke the necessary public outrage that can help drive reform.

The broader challenge here and perhaps, the inescapable one is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isnt machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: its people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted. Standing up to injustice, authoritarianism and online harms requires employees who are willing to do that work.

Few people could be expected to take a job doing so if the cost is their life or liberty. We all need to recognize this new reality, and to plan accordingly.

Yoel Roth is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.

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Opinion | I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe ... - The New York Times

Kevin McCarthy has yet to make an official endorsement for the Republican presidential nominee, but judging by what he said on Fox News, the House speaker has at least made up his mind about whos strongest among the two front-runners.

During a lengthy one-on-one interview on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures, McCarthy was riffing on President Joe Bidens policies when host Maria Bartiromo suggested things like inflation and rising gas prices might be the reason Trump is leading in most current polls.

Whats your take on this, that as we see more indictments of Donald Trump, he seems to be gaining in terms of popularity with the public? Bartiromo asked. Will he be the nominee?

I think he will be the nominee, McCarthy was quick to respond. President Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016 or 2020, and theres a reason why: They saw the policies of what he was able to do with putting America first, making our economy stronger. We didnt have inflation. We didnt have these battles around the world. We didnt look weak around the world.

Bartiromo then suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, trailing Trump as a distant second in GOP primary polling, is working with your colleagues in trying to push for a government shutdown.

Yeah, but I dont think that would work anywhere, McCarthy said. A shutdown would only give strength to the Democrats. It would give the power to Biden. It wouldnt pay our troops, our border agents I actually want to achieve something, and this is why President Trump was so smart, he was successful in this.

Thats when Bartiromo brought up recent polls showing Trump beating Biden in a head-to-head match.

Hes stronger than he has ever been in this process, McCarthy said. And, look, I served with Ron DeSantis, hes not at the same level as President Trump, by any shape or form. He would not have gotten elected without President Trumps endorsement.

Watch McCarthys remarks around the 8-minute mark in the video above.

The post Kevin McCarthy Tells Fox News Donald Trump Is Stronger Than Ever, Ron DeSantis Not at the Same Level (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

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Kevin McCarthy Tells Fox News Donald Trump Is Stronger Than Ever, Ron DeSantis Not at the Same Level (Video) - Yahoo Entertainment

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BERLIN You know fears over immigration and the rise of the far-right are boiling over in Germany when even the Greens are calling for a crackdown on illegal asylum seekers.

In a remarkable intervention on Monday, Green co-chair Ricarda Lang whose party is usually known for advocating a moderate course on migration criticized key officials from her two coalition partners for not doing enough to ensure that asylum seekers without a valid reason to stay, such as fleeing a warzone, are being sent back to their home countries.

Theres no doubt the political temperature is rising fast in Germany. A poll published Tuesday showed that the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party has become the strongest political force in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, making it the fourth eastern German state after Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony in which the far-right is leading in polls. This is particularly spooking established parties as the latter three states are heading to the polls in September next year, raising the possibility that the AfD might, for the first time, win power at state level.

The Greens Lang lashed out at Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who is from Chancellor Olaf Scholzs Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Germanys special envoy for immigration, Joachim Stamp from the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), saying that they must finally make progress on repatriation agreements with non-EU countries to facilitate the deportations. The government must act to avoid more and more people arriving, Lang said.

These unusual remarks from a senior Green politician come as the FDP of Finance Minister Christian Lindner on Monday adopted a position paper vowing to cut social payments for asylum seekers. The FDP also wants to convince its coalition partners to declare Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria as safe countries of origin, which would make it easier to send asylum seekers from those countries back home.

These actions highlight the extent to which Germanys ruling coalition of the SPD, FDP and Greens is beginning to panic as migration numbers keep rising in August alone, about 15,100 illegal border crossings were registered, marking a 40 percent increase compared to July and an increasing number of Germans are turning toward the AfD.

German President Frank-Walter SteinmeierwarnedWednesday that Germany is at breaking point, as 162,000 people applied for asylum in the country within the first half of the year. Thats more than a third of all applications within the EU, Steinmeier added in an interview with Italys Corriere della Sera.

While the AfD has not made a breakthrough at a state level, it took power at smaller district levels for the first time when it won a council election in Thuringia in June and notched up a mayoral election win in Saxony-Anhalt in July.

Although the AfD is building support on the back of many factors inflation, high energy prices and the governments poor handling of a controversial heating law it is the growing influx of asylum seekers that is seen as its main catalyst.

Such a party is getting stronger when problems are not being solved, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germanys center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the main opposition party, said last week in reference to the immigration debate. He added cities and municipalities in Germany are hopelessly overwhelmed by the growing numbers of asylum seekers.

The AfD has also surged in national polls from just 14 percent at the beginning of the year to 22 percent now, according to an average of national polls compiled by POLITICOs Poll of Polls. That puts it as the countrys second-most popular party after the conservative alliance of the CDU with the Christian Social Union, which has 27 percent support. Scholzs SPD is trailing on 17 percent.

For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.

The AfD is also on the rise in the western German states of Hesse and Bavaria, which will head to the polls in less than three weeks, on October 8.

In Bavaria, the AfDs ascent is partly contained by the popular right-wing Free Voters party, which even managed to increase its standing in the influential southern state following a Nazi leaflet scandal involving its leading candidate Hubert Aiwanger.

In Hesse, however, the far-right party is making strong gains. Latest polls in the state, which is home to the banking hub of Frankfurt, indicate that the AfD is closing in on the SPD, which is particularly damning as the Social Democrats nominated Faeser, the interior minister, as their lead candidate in Hesse, hoping that her prominence would help the party to win the election against the incumbent CDU Premier Boris Rhein.

Instead, Faeser is getting hammered in the election campaign by the far-right, which accuses her of failing on the immigration front as interior minister a job that Faeser has kept while running in Hesse, and which she wants to keep in case she loses the state election.

It isnt helping Faeser that even the widely respected former German President Joachim Gauck criticized the government and called for more radical solutions.

The measures taken so far have not been sufficient to remedy the loss of control that has obviously occurred, the former president told public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday.

That means we have to discover margins [for maneuver] that are initially unappealing to us because they sound inhumane, added former Lutheran pastor Gauck, as he argued in favor of introducing a limitation strategy to curb the numbers of asylum seekers.

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Germany's Greens and Liberals call for action on immigration as far-right strengthens - POLITICO Europe

Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If you are a student of very recent legal history, you might have found yourself scratching your head in recent weeks, as some commentators on the left and the anti-Trump right have joined forced in a dubious, long-shot effort to argue that Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for reelection. They want to use lawsuits to disqualify Trump from state ballots before next years elections on a theory that centers on a largely forgotten section of the 14th Amendment to punish Trumps effort to overturn the 2020 election results. It sounds a lot like One Neat Trick that could get rid of Trump once and for all, but the boosterism has bordered on nave and at times disingenuous. The impulse reflects a familiar reflex among some of Trumps political opponents to root for a legal miracle some sort of deus ex machina that might rid them of Trump without doing the hard work of winning an election.

But reality requires us to acknowledge that this dispute, if it has any chance of success, will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court. And no one, least of all liberals, should assume that they will save the country from Trump.

The underlying legal question is whether the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, adopted in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War, disqualifies Trump from being president again. The relevant text precludes anyone who once served as an officer of the United States from holding any office in the government if they have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or have given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. Congress may remove such disability if two-thirds of each chamber agree to do so.

The public debate over the applicability of the amendment kicked into high gear following the release last month of a law-review article written by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two conservative constitutional law professors who argue that, under an originalist interpretation of the provision, Trump is barred from running for office. The notion picked up steam in some quarters of the press, as well as an endorsement from two prominent legal thinkers, but it has since drawn vocal objections from the right on legal, political, and policy grounds. Just this month, one early and prominent supporter of the effort a co-founder of the Federalist Society who had initially called the article a tour de force changed his mind.

The originalist framework can lead its adherents to some strange places, particularly if they have already made up their minds about what the result should be. Baude and Paulsen, for instance, breeze past two statutes from the late 1800s not that long after the 14th Amendment went into effect that complicate their analysis, but they produce no meaningful or contemporaneous historical evidence to support their conclusions.

Somewhat amusingly, the authors go to great lengths to shore up their position against the very unhelpful fact that it was rejected the year after the 14th Amendment was adopted. Chief Justice Salmon Chase issued a decision that dismissed the idea that the provision created a sweeping and self-executing prohibition on public office and concluded that Congress had to pass legislation to implement it. Chase wrote the opinion while riding circuit, so it is not the law of the Supreme Court, but under ordinary circumstances, this would seem to be pretty devastating for originalist legal scholars. After all, are they better positioned to conclude that Chases interpretation does not hold up as an original matter their words than a sitting Chief Justice who was alive at the time and explicitly contemplated the question? There are also plenty of legitimately unsettled questions concerning the application of the 14th Amendment to Trump, including whether the president is himself an officer of the United States or if instead that phrase applies only to subordinate officials in the government.

Baude and Paulsen argue that the 14th Amendment can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications, but that interpretation of the law is also running into some problems this time among government officials who are actually alive. Democratic secretaries of state are publicly disavowing the idea that they can keep Trump off the ballot unilaterally and instead want to kick the issue to the courts. Republican Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, perhaps the countrys most famous and well-regarded secretary of state thanks to Trump, has also come out against the idea.

As of now, there are two lawsuits that have been filed by liberal groups seeking to keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado and Minnesota. If one of these lawsuits or others that are likely to be filed actually results in Trump being removed from a states ballot, we can safely assume that the case will make its way to the Supreme Court for the final word.

If you hold the sitting Supreme Court in low regard as most of the country now does you have probably already stopped counting on them to do the right thing, whatever you may think it is. After all, until last year, the Courts decisions had established a right to abortion in this country, had repeatedly upheld the use of affirmative action in higher education, and had made clear that businesses open to the public cannot discriminate against members of protected classes, including same-sex couples. None of those things is true anymore thanks to the conservative supermajority on the Court that was installed by Trump.

Those decisions, which were all wrong on the merits, rightly infuriated many liberals, and calls for reform of the high court on the left are now commonplace (despite being ignored by the White House). Meanwhile, a series of ethics controversies in recent months concerning ultraconservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have generated more public criticism, with little evident concern on the part of Chief Justice John Roberts or his conservative colleagues.

All of this, as a practical matter, is highly relevant to the effort to remove Trump from the ballot.

For one thing, even assuming that there was an airtight case on originalist grounds, it would be unwise to assume that it will actually sway votes among the conservative justices. Whatever one makes of originalism as an academic pursuit, it is not practiced by conservative justices in anything resembling a legitimately principled or objective manner. All too often, originalism in the courts is little more than an outcome-driven interpretive method that somehow magically almost always aligns with the political and policy prerogatives of the Republican Party.

Then there are problems of math and individual psychology. Very crudely, let us assume for the sake of argument that the three liberal justices would support disqualifying Trump if not on strictly originalist grounds, then using contemporary methods of liberal constitutional interpretation that might lead to the same result following serious examination. At the same time, we can probably safely assume that Alito and Thomas, who seem to define their judicial outlooks in opposition to anything that liberals want, would oppose that result.

That would mean that liberals would need to attract two of the four remaining conservative justices in order to cobble together a majority. Three of those justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were appointed by Trump, but disqualifying him under the 14th Amendment would require them to directly confront the fact that their legacies are closely intertwined with his that they are on the Court issuing rulings for decades to come because a historically awful president put them there. Nothing I have seen from them suggests to me that they have the self-awareness, humility, or intellectual fortitude to do this.

Three justices in this group (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) also share the dubious distinction of having worked for Republicans on the litigation in Bush v. Gore, when conservatives on the Supreme Court used a deeply flawed and tendentious analysis to put George W. Bush in the White House. (It is no mere coincidence that they ended up on the Supreme Court: Working on that litigation was a major career boost for young Republican lawyers.) Perhaps some of these justices will turn out to surprise us if the question of Trumps eligibility reaches them, but my general operating assumption is that this is a group of people who are perfectly content to contort the legal system in service of the Republican Partys interests when the stakes are high, particularly if those interests align with their own.

It was one thing for them to have rejected Trumps various legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the courts after he lost, but it would be another thing entirely for them to prevent him from running altogether, particularly when most Republican politicians and Republican voters strongly support his candidacy. For this to work, at a bare minimum, a comprehensive and compelling legal argument with broad ideological appeal and robust bipartisan support would likely need to come together.

That may emerge as litigation proceeds, and as scholars and lawyers continue to debate and refine their ideas, but it is not here yet. For now, Trumps opponents need to focus on beating him the old-fashioned way at the ballot box.

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Do Liberals Think the Supreme Court Will Save Us From Trump? - New York Magazine