Lawmakers in 32 states across the US have introduced or pre-filed at least 150 bills aimed at making it harder to vote, according to a new analysis from the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school.

For the first time, the Supreme Court is considering its opinion on the brief but powerful “26 words that created the internet.”

Enacted in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from liability for anything that is posted on their site by a third party—a protection that allowed the web to bloom by encouraging experimentation and interactivity in its early years. More recently, Section 230 has been the subject of scrutiny as bipartisan critics argue that it provides powerful tech companies with too much cover and too little accountability.

The Supreme Court’s perspective on the issue was a mystery until this week, when justices heard oral arguments for two cases involving 230. On Tuesday, the Court was asked to consider whether Google is liable for YouTube-recommendation algorithms showing Islamic State videos to users. Wednesday’s case was similar but dealt with Twitter’s alleged responsibility for ISIS members using its platform to recruit and fundraise. Whatever the justices decide, it will be a major moment in web history: Affirming 230 would put greater pressure on Congress or regulatory agencies to come up with their own ideas for modernizing the legal guardrails of the internet, and reinterpreting it would force tech companies of all sizes to mutate in order to avoid liability.

The direction and tone of the questioning suggest that the justices lean more toward the former, though the Court’s opinions aren’t likely to be published for at least a few months. “There doesn’t seem to be any appetite on the Supreme Court’s part to deliberately open the floodgates for lawsuits against tech companies,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told me. This is notable in part because the Court has not said much of anything about platforms before, he observed: “We haven’t known anything for years. We’ve finally found out something about where their thoughts are.” It looks, maybe, like they lean toward leaving the internet alone.

[Read: The battle for the soul of the web]

The Court briefly discussed whether algorithms may lose Section 230 immunity if they’re intentionally discriminatory—the example they entertained was a dating-app algorithm written to prohibit interracial matches. They seemed to be thinking through the role of intentionality: Would it matter if YouTube had written an algorithm that favored ISIS or other extremists over more benign material, or would any algorithm still be protected by 230? But these questions weren’t resolved; justices hinted that they would like to see Congress be the ones to finesse Section 230 if it needs finessing, and were sometimes self-deprecating about their own ability to understand the issues. “We really don’t know much about these things,” Justice Elena Kagan joked on Tuesday. “You know, these are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet.”

They mostly came off as understanding the internet pretty well, though. During the oral arguments against Google, Eric Schnapper, representing the family of the ISIS victim Nohemi Gonzalez, spoke extensively about YouTube’s choice to display video suggestions using thumbnail imagery, saying that this constitutes the creation of new content by the platform. “Is there any other way they could organize themselves without using thumbnails?” Justice Samuel Alito asked, apparently rhetorically. (He then joked that he supposed the site could go with “ISIS video one, ISIS video two, and so forth.”) Justice Clarence Thomas asked Schnapper whether YouTube’s recommendation algorithm works differently for videos about, say, rice pilaf than it does for videos from ISIS. Schnapper said he didn’t think so, and Justice Kagan interjected, “I think what was lying underneath Justice Thomas’s question was a suggestion that algorithms are endemic to the internet, that every time anybody looks at anything on the internet, there is an algorithm involved.” She wondered whether this algorithm-centered approach would send the Court “down the road such that 230 really can’t mean anything at all.”

None of the justices appeared satisfied with Schnapper’s reasoning. Justice Brett Kavanaugh summed it up as paradoxical, pointing out that an “interactive computer service,” as referred to in Section 230, has been understood to mean a service “that filters, screens, picks, chooses, organizes content.” If algorithms aren’t subject to Section 230 immunity, then that “would mean that the very thing that makes the website an interactive computer service also means that it loses the protection of 230. And just as a textual and structural matter, we don’t usually read a statute to, in essence, defeat itself.”

On the second day of arguments, the Court barely discussed Section 230, focusing instead almost entirely on the merits of the case against Twitter under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. This amounted to a lengthy discussion of what may or may not constitute “aiding and abetting.” Would a platform be liable, for example, if it failed to enforce its own policies prohibiting terrorists from using its services? Edwin Kneedler, arguing on behalf of the Department of Justice, took Twitter’s side in the case, saying that the law “requires more than allegations that a terrorist organization availed itself of interactive computer services that were remote from the act of terrorism; were widely and routinely available to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of persons through the automatic features of those services; and did not single out ISIS for favorable treatment.”

The Court then walked through a series of hypotheticals involving pager sales, gun sales, the notion of Osama bin Laden using personalized-banking services, and the imagined scenario of J. Edgar Hoover telling Bell Telephone that Dutch Schultz was a gangster and was using his phone to carry out mob activities. “The discussion this morning has really taken on a very academic tone,” Chief Justice John Roberts observed.

In fact, both mornings were heavy on abstract arguments. The Court has to deal with the larger issues before anybody gets into whether, as reported in the case documents, 1,348 ISIS videos receiving a total of 163,391 views on YouTube—for an average of 121 views per video—constitutes algorithmic amplification of terrorist content. A few weeks ago, I argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling on these two cases could change the web as we know it—particularly if it decides that algorithms of all sorts are not subject to Section 230 immunity. This would make search engines unworkable and cause a flood of lawsuits against any companies that organize content through any kind of automated process.

In taking these cases, the Court was obviously curious about whether singling out algorithmic recommendations could be a good opportunity to reinterpret and thereby modernize Section 230. “I can see why it looked appealing,” Grimmelmann said. “But what happened when the cases actually got to oral argument is the justices saw how complex it actually is, and why that line’s not a very good one to draw.”

In Louisiana, it takes $1,485 and roughly 2,190 days to become an interior designer. In Washington, it takes $319 and 373 days to become a cosmetologist. The District of Columbia requires $740 to become an auctioneer, and a college degree to watch children for someone else. (Having and watching your own children continues to be an unlicensed affair.) In Kansas, you have to cough up $200 to work as a funeral attendant. And Maine requires $235 and 1,095 days to become a travel guide. Want to move states? That could mean you have to relicense, as if, say, cutting hair is materially different in Massachusetts than it is in New York.

This is absurd, and not just to me. Last week, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced that he would seek to “fully remove 34 different outdated licenses from state government” and eliminate “14 underutilized regulatory boards.” He also said that he would seek to make New Hampshire the next state to adopt universal recognition: “If you have a substantially similar license and are in good standing in another state, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a license on Day One in New Hampshire.” He joins a number of governors in embracing universal recognition but is going one step further by pushing to fully delicense certain professions.

The usual argument in favor of strict and pervasive licensing is that the system helps ensure high standards for consumer welfare. Of course we can all think of several professions where some form of licensing makes sense: doctors and nurses, operators of dangerous machinery, handlers of hazardous materials. But the assumption that barriers to entry, no matter their form, will necessarily increase the quality of services provided is flawed.

[Read: The disappearing right to earn a living]

The Institute for Justice looked at state licensing requirements for 102 low-income occupations across the country and found that 88 percent of those professions were unlicensed in at least one state, suggesting that the system is fairly arbitrary. It also found that a high licensing burden does not mean a high-risk occupation: “Workers in 71 occupations, including all the barbering and beauty occupations we study, face greater average burdens than entry-level emergency medical technicians.”  

Nor does licensing necessarily translate to high standards for health and safety. A report by the Obama White House in 2015 concluded that “most research does not find that licensing improves quality or public health and safety” and that “stricter licensing was associated with quality improvements in only 2 out of the 12 studies reviewed.”

So the benefits of excessive licensing are unsubstantiated, theoretical, or minimal. But the drawbacks? Those are very real for workers and consumers alike.

Certifications and educational requirements come at a literal cost, both in the form of direct payments for the license or test fees and in the foregone wages during years of college or training. These costs shape the demographics of professional life. The composition of licensed occupations is significantly weighted toward those with a college degree. Many people are not fighting their way through a torrent of regulations; they’re simply giving up. One study of immigrant workers found that additional training significantly reduces the number of Vietnamese manicurists. (An average county could expect a 17.6 percent decline in Vietnamese manicurists per capita for every 100 extra hours of required training).

Onerous licensing costs don’t fall just on the workers who have to deal with the requirements but on us all in the form of higher prices and declining interstate migration. When people realize that moving states, even for a better job, means recertifying themselves for a profession they’ve already been practicing for years, they may decide to stay put in a suboptimal location. The 2015 White House analysis found that interstate-migration rates for workers in the most licensed occupations are significantly lower than those in the least licensed occupations. For within-state moves, the difference between licensed and non-licensed professions was much smaller.

Another study, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, indicated that licensing does raise wages but reduces employment. Important to note is that—at least in the model proposed by the economists—the increased wages don’t fully compensate workers for licensing costs.

So why are licensing rules so pervasive? A recent American Economic Association working paper looked at what caused states to implement such requirements from 1870 to 2020 and found that trade associations played a key role: “We find that the formation of [state-level professional associations], which facilitate political organization, increases the probability of regulation by approximately 15 percentage points within the first five years after their establishment.”

Once these regulations are put in place, trade associations for the professionals who already paid the cover charge want to keep them in place. They want to keep the bar to entry high, because fewer newcomers means less competition means higher wages for their members. Even when some kind of bar makes sense—as with medicine—professional associations may shape requirements around benefits for their members rather than the public interest. The American Medical Association has lobbied against allowing nurse practitioners to expand their duties, and the Niskanen Center’s Robert Orr told me that “whenever states consider legislation to recognize residency training completed in other countries with comparably advanced medical systems, groups lobbying on behalf of physicians come out in force to ensure that this legislation never makes it into law.”

Or take a look at the American Society of Landscape Architects’ website, which implores members to fight against attacks on licensing. It argues that these rules are necessary to prevent “physical injury; property damage; and financial ruin.” The organization does not cite any research in support of this claim or at any point explain why in New Hampshire, for instance, a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, geography, engineering, architecture, or garden design, among others, qualifies you for a career in landscape architecture. These degrees are not interchangeable. If a four-year degree is more than a barrier to entry, one would expect significant overlap in the required coursework.

Occupational licensing springs from a permission-slip mentality that has infected American political institutions of all sorts. Permission slips to braid hair, permission slips to build affordable housing, permission slips to put solar panels on your roof … a country full of adults raising our hands waiting for someone to let us use the bathroom!

[Read: The onerous, arbitrary, unaccountable world of occupational licensing]

Although pro-licensing forces would have you believe that we must choose between permission-slip governance and peril, this is a false choice. The question is not whether a particular industry poses risks but what kind and how they can best be reduced. Our current licensing regime has not rid American society of risk; heavily licensed industries continue to present safety issues. Instead it has exacerbated labor shortages in crucial industries, encouraged artificially high prices, and created unreasonable barriers to employment and mobility.

I don’t need government workers to ensure that a restaurant is aesthetically pleasing by licensing interior designers; I need them to certify that the food is safe by regularly inspecting establishments. I don’t need the government to decide who’s qualified to work as a locksmith; I can ask my neighbors or check Yelp for advice. And although a test may be appropriate to guarantee that someone can operate a forklift, a college degree most certainly isn’t.

None of this amounts to an argument against government. Permission-slip governance reflects not the government’s strength but its weakness. A strong government well staffed with experts would write clear regulations and enforce them. The government we actually have imposes permission-slip requirements pushed by interest groups and industry, then relies on consumers to pursue private legal remedies if anything goes wrong. This is a legacy of Republican attacks on Big Government, which not only constrained the size of the state but diminished its efficacy. Those attacks did not really limit government intrusion, however, because people still want protection against health and safety risks. When the government can’t provide that well and quickly, it provides that poorly and slowly. Rethinking occupational licensing is a start, but the project of building effective government requires more than deregulation.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Young women are struggling. “Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago—according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” The Washington Post reports. Drawing on the same study, Axios notes, “About 30 percent of teen girls said they had seriously considered attempting suicide, up from 19 percent in 2011.” What is going on? Whether you have young women in your life who have shaped your perspective or other experiences with this topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

When Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed in 2015, I hoped his numerous illustrations of online mobs meting out cruelty in the guise of holding others accountable would persuade the masses that joining digital pile-ons does more harm than not––both because the facts of various matters so often prove different, or more complicated, than they at first seemed and because even in cases where an individual deserves some punishment or sanction, zealous hordes are incapable of proportion. The hate of uncoordinated vigilantes who purport to hold others accountable can add up to so much punishment that their targets wind up pondering suicide.

For individuals, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” is an undervalued rule. For media institutions, who purport to act in the public interest and rightly consider accountability in their ambit, I‘d posit a special responsibility to refrain from initiating or amplifying false or misleading stories––and where coverage is later proved to be misleading, to revise unjustly unflattering portraits of individuals as prominently as they published them.

Alas, even in cases where targets of public opprobrium are especially rich and famous––which is to say, possessed of more ability than most of us to counter false or misleadingly one-sided information––coverage that seems likely to tarnish a person’s reputation is too often far more prominent than coverage that seems likely to burnish or revive it.

For example, in “Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence,” the journalist James Kirchick revisits the case of an actor whose career was destroyed when he faced accusations of extreme sexual misconduct. Although Kirchick’s reporting doesn’t resolve anything definitively, it includes significant facts that readers of the original coverage ought to know as updates, as they give very different impressions of what might have happened. As yet, however, publishers of bygone coverage have not updated their articles. (Kirchick has expounded on his reporting process for Meghan Daum and The Fifth Column.)

And at The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper is launching a series, “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” that will probe the vilification of the famous author of the Harry Potter books. Rowling is portrayed by some as a transphobic bigot whose views are egregiously beyond the pale––and were that true, opprobrium would be appropriate. Bigotry against trans people is indeed odious. But do Rowling’s actual words validate the ways that she has been characterized? Cathy Young, Kat Rosenfield, Brendan Morrow, and the Blocked and Reported podcast have all found significant evidence of dubious attacks––and at least one Rowling attacker retracted his claims rather than defend them in court.

Less famous subjects of vilification are far less likely to have anyone following up to vindicate them (commentators on the populist right are throwing around accusations of “grooming” children as widely and frivolously as any character assassins in American life). However, Nicole Carr of ProPublica proved an exception to that rule last year, telling the story of Cecelia Lewis, an educator wrongly hounded out of a job and followed to another during a moral panic about what participants erroneously thought of as critical race theory.

Whether a person is famous or obscure, blameworthy or blameless, they deserve, at the very least, scrupulous accuracy when their behavior is described to mass audiences. Folks on the right and left who fall short of that mark are more alike than they think. As long as their carelessness is so frequent, the case against pile-ons is airtight.

Joe Biden’s Criminal-Justice-Reform Failures

At The Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey argues that the administration has failed to clear a low bar that it set:

Last May, President Joe Biden sat with family members of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the White House as he signed an executive order he called the “most significant police reform in decades.”

One of the more notable promises in the order was setting up a “National Law Enforcement Accountability Database,” that would collect detailed information about officers who committed misconduct. The deadline to launch it was Jan. 20, the same day that five Memphis police officers were fired for the beating death of Tyre Nichols—a killing that has once more ignited national debate about policing. The Department of Justice has yet to announce the database, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its status.

Deadlines for other initiatives in Biden’s order, like new standards for credentialing police departments, appear to have also come and gone without acknowledgement or public results.

On Art and Supposed Harm

In a New York Times column about the censorship of art and “the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety,” Michelle Goldberg writes:

I’m not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work.

A Business Contagion

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey argues that layoffs at one company tend to spur layoffs at other companies for various reasons that may have nothing to do with a financial imperative to carry them out:

When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so.

Shedding employees when everybody else is doing it avoids drawing public scrutiny to or creating reputational damage for a given firm, for one. A lone business announcing that it is downsizing is likely to be described as mismanaged or troubled, and may well be mismanaged or troubled. However merited, that kind of reputation tends to hinder a company from attracting investment, workers, and customers. But if a firm downsizes when everyone else is doing it, the public seldom notices and investors seldom care.

Copycat layoffs also let executives cite challenging business conditions as a justification for cuts, rather than their own boneheaded strategic decisions. In this scenario, the problem isn’t that corporate leadership poured billions of dollars into a quixotic new venture or hired hundreds of what ended up being redundant employees. It’s not that the C-suite misunderstood the competitive environment, necessitating a costly and painful readjustment. It’s Jay Powell! It’s a COVID-related reversion to the mean! Who could have known?

In addition to being simpler for executives to explain to their shareholders or the board, large-scale copycat layoffs are easier to carry out and better received by employees than selective or strategic layoffs. Managers let staffers go instead of firing them, blaming economic conditions rather than detailing their direct reports’ shortcomings. Morale might take less of a hit if the remaining workers fault the broader business environment instead of their bosses.

Another possible reason layoffs are contagious is that executives might take other firms’ hiring and firing decisions as a kind of market intelligence. Even when a company’s own financials appear sound, it may interpret a competitor’s layoff announcement as a sign of worsening conditions.

Provocation of the Week

In Unherd, Thomas Fazi explains why he is worried about World War III:

By providing increasingly powerful military equipment as well as financial, technical, logistical and training support to one of the warring factions, including for offensive operations (even within Russian territory), the West is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with Russia, regardless of what our leaders may claim.

Western citizens deserve to be told what is going on in Ukraine—and what the stakes are. Perhaps the wildest claim being made is that “if we deliver all the weapons Ukraine needs, they can win,” as former Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently asserted. For Rasmussen, and other Western hawks, this includes retaking Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 and which it considers of the utmost strategic importance. Many Western allies still consider this an uncrossable red line. But for how long? Just last month, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is warming up to the idea of backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea.

This strategy is based on the assumption that Russia will accept a military defeat and the loss of the territories it controls without resorting to the unthinkable—the use of nuclear weapons. But this is a massive assumption on which to gamble the future of humanity, especially coming from the very Western strategists who disastrously botched every major military forecast over the past 20 years, from Iraq to Afghanistan. The truth is that, from Russia’s perspective, it is fighting against what it perceives to be an existential threat in Ukraine, and there is no reason to believe that, with its back against the wall, it won’t go to extreme measures to guarantee its survival. As Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, put it: “The loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war. Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

During the Cold War, this was widely understood by Western leaders. But today, by constantly escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the United States and Nato appear to have forgotten it, and are instead inching closer to a catastrophic scenario.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Earthquakes serve as turning points in Turkish history, a shattering of silence in mere seconds. In 1999, an earthquake struck near Istanbul, my hometown. More than 17,000 people were killed and many more injured. I had always known that earthquakes were something to be wary of, that they are expected in a country that sits on the Anatolian Plate bordering two major fault lines. But I had never lived through a quake before, or seen its aftermath. For weeks people slept outdoors—in parks, on the waterfront, in streets and stadiums—unable to go back to homes that had been destroyed, or afraid to return to homes still standing.

That disaster and the slow rescue operations that followed brought the AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, to power. It promised modern, transparent governance, and has led our country ever since. And yet it went on to waste decades protecting its own rule, luxuriating in its own ideological priorities, and failing to prepare for this catastrophe.

On Monday, two major earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria, leaving more than 11,000 people dead, four times that number injured, and many still missing. The World Health Organization has said that the death toll could rise to more than 20,000. In Turkey, close to 6,000 residential and commercial buildings collapsed.

The first earthquake, at magnitude 7.8, hit the city of Gaziantep, bordering Syria, soon after 4 a.m. as people slept. Approximately half a million refugees from the Syrian war are living there, refugees who must once again feel a horrific sense of displacement. Nine hours later, a 7.5-magnitude quake hit Kahramanmaraş province, about 60 miles to the north. Several Turkish cities were severely rocked. Aftershocks were felt in Greece, Cyprus, and Lebanon; they are still being felt.

About 380,000 people have taken refuge in hotels, dormitories, community centers, and other facilities. The pain is not over. Many people are still trapped under the rubble, and others are working to rescue them, in the freezing cold—the rain and snow alternating. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has declared a three-month state of emergency in the provinces hit hardest by the catastrophe, and declared seven days of national mourning. Because in Turkey, that’s what we do: Today we mourn, and tomorrow we forget, until the next tragedy.

But the Turkish people have questions: Where did the billions of dollars they paid in “earthquake taxes” since the 1999 catastrophe go? Why were the construction codes aimed at making structures more quake-resistant not followed? Why, despite experts’ warnings and politicians’ promises, was more not done to prevent all this death?

When the AKP came to power, in the early 2000s, it was little known. Voters embraced it because they were fed up with the old system of governance and its party coalitions, lack of transparency, police violence, and financial inequality. That paved the way for AKP’s messianic promise to create what it came to call a “New Turkey.”

But instead of focusing on shoring up the country, the government has spent the past several years on nationalist campaigns—attacking Kurds in Turkey (nearly 20 percent of the country is of Kurdish origin) and in Syria, and by threatening its neighbor Greece. It has focused on ideology—exhorting women to bear “at least three children” and creating a “pious generation” by opening up many religious schools. It has oppressed dissent by sacking officials who do not align with the party’s conservative views.

In short, it has worked to crush secularism and democracy and turn everything into a symbol of its own rule. It has done this by cultivating, in a largely uneducated and easily manipulated population, nationalism, fear of the other, financial dependence, and unquestioning confidence in a heroic father figure.

This “New Turkey” used infrastructure projects to highlight its break with the past. The more the government built, the more powerful and modern it seemed. It looked toward the skyscrapers of Qatar and Saudi Arabia as models, instead of toward Europe. Favors and contracts and permits were granted to construction companies and businesses close to the party, in exchange for kickbacks and votes. In 2021, in a speech celebrating the completion of a new bridge, Erdoğan said, “Foreigners now view our roads, bridges, and airports with envy when they come to Turkey.” If that was ever true, it isn’t anymore.

Shortly after Monday’s earthquakes, Turkish citizens called out on social media to wealthy real-estate and construction-company owners to bring their earthmovers and other heavy machinery to the wreckage sites while lives could still be saved. After all, aren’t they the ones who ignored building codes to maximize their revenues? Aren’t the roads they made and the houses they built with cheap materials nothing but debris and dust today?

I have often heard, in the aftermath of corruption scandals, some Turkish people say things like Okay, yes, they steal. So what? Every government has stolen from us; at least they give to the people by building bridges, airports, and roads. Now the bridges have broken, the airports are closed, and roads have cracked open as if meteors had fallen on them, preventing emergency help from reaching desperate areas.

In the affected region, a shopping mall is reported to have collapsed, along with a historic mosque, and hospitals were destroyed, forcing patients and caregivers out in the cold. Electricity, fuel, gas, and running water are scarce. Gaziantep Castle, a landmark that stood strong from the Hittite to Roman and Byzantine periods, has been severely damaged. There are reports of mangled Orthodox and Armenian churches, as well as synagogues—sites of worship that were some of the few reminders of a multiethnic history that the government has tried to stamp out.

But it’s difficult to know what exactly has fallen, and what still stands, because in the past few years, the government has shut down many independent media outlets. This morning, Twitter—which people had been using to share information about survivors and their needs—was running slowly in the country, probably because the government had restricted it.

My mother was born in Erzincan, in eastern Turkey, more than a decade after the earthquake of 1939, which killed 30,000 people and remains the most destructive in the nation’s history. In 2017, I went to visit her remote village in the beautiful high mountains; people there still tell stories about the trauma of that earthquake, a trauma carried in every corner of my homeland. What happened this week will be remembered at least as long.

Our republic will turn 100 this year, in October. Presidential and parliamentary elections are to be held in May. Of course, the government did not cause this earthquake; fault lines deep in the earth did that. But on election day, we should stop giving our power to a party that has abused it, that cares more for its own survival than the people’s well-being, and remember the bare hands of rescue workers and residents digging people out from under our cities. Turkey was a construction site. It has become a cemetery. It deserves better.

It’s begun to dawn on Republicans that they face a potentially catastrophic political problem: Donald Trump may lose the GOP presidential primary and, out of spite, wreck Republican prospects in 2024.

That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week. The survey found that a large majority of Republicans is ready to move on from Trump—but at the same time, more than a quarter of likely Republican voters is ready to follow Trump to a third-party bid. Two days after the poll results were released, Trump was asked in an interview whether, if he lost the nomination, he would support the GOP nominee. Trump answered, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.” Translation: no.

In such a closely divided nation, a third-party campaign by Trump would cripple the GOP in 2024, because almost all of Trump’s votes would come from people who would otherwise vote Republican. In some key states—Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan—that could make all the difference. (In a handful of other states, “sore-loser laws” might bar Trump from the ballot.)

But even if Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate, he could ensure that Republican presidential and congressional candidates lose simply by criticizing them during the campaign, accusing the Republican Party of disloyalty, and signaling to his supporters that they should sit out the election. That course of action is more straightforward, and perhaps even likelier, than a third-party bid, but it would be just as devastating to Republican prospects.

If Trump does decide to sabotage his party’s chances in 2024, no one should be surprised. After all, Trump has flirted with third-party runs before, including in 2000, and he refused to rule out a third-party run in 2015. “In 2015, Donald wasn’t initially being taken seriously by the GOP as a potential candidate,” Michael Cohen, who was an attorney for Trump before turning on him, told Semafor. “His threat to run as a third party candidate was to ensure people knew of his intent and that he would have no problem with destroying the party if they stood in his way.”

Trump has no attachment to the Republican Party or, as best as one can tell, to anything or anyone else. His malignant narcissism prevents that. Trump is an institutional arsonist, peddling conspiracy theories, spreading lies, sowing distrust. That’s his skill, and he’s quite good at it. But Trump is now causing growing unease among his past supporters and the GOP establishment by signaling that he may very well turn that skill against their party. Trump, as a former president who won almost 75 million votes in 2020, could inflict tremendous harm on the GOP if he turns against it.

Earlier this week, an individual in the radio-talk-show world, who requested anonymity so he could speak candidly, told me, “Many listeners are starting to call and email with dread over the prospect of him running third-party. There is absolutely a growing chorus of opposition to Trump—coming from former Trump supporters. It’s unmistakable.” As Trump dials up his threat to break with the Republican Party, the anger is sure to rise. So, too, is the fear that, in the words of Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr, “Unless the rest of the party goes along with [Trump], he will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.”

When Trump was torching other institutions—America’s intelligence agencies, the FBI and the Department of Justice, the military, scientific agencies, the courts, Congress, media, those charged with overseeing our elections—Republicans cheered him on. They relished his attacks on the “deep state,” and they embraced his nihilistic ethic. That, in turn, gave rise to other public figures who share his tactics, and his ethic.

One example: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—who at various points in her career has embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, insisted that 9/11 was an inside job and that the mass killings at Sandy Hook and Parkland were staged, voiced support for executing prominent Democrats, attended white-nationalist rallies, and blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser—has been elevated and showcased by House Republicans. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who made it a top priority to defeat the estimable Liz Cheney, has developed a close bond with Greene, a strong advocate for McCarthy in his fight to win the speakership.

“I will never leave that woman,” The New York Times reported he told a friend. “I will always take care of her.”

A party with so many layers of rot won’t abandon Trump because he is a moral wreck and a constitutional threat; it will abandon him only when he’s deemed to be a surefire political loser. Which he almost certainly is. But in many ways, Trump has the whip hand. If Republicans turn on him, he is likely to turn on them, filled with the burning rage of a thousand suns. As MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough put it, “He was willing to take down American democracy when he lost. Why wouldn’t he be willing to take down [Glenn] Youngkin or [Ron] DeSantis or any other Republican that won the nomination over him?”  

In the movie The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne struggles to understand why the Joker does the things he does. Alfred, Wayne’s trusted butler, describes a bandit in Burma who couldn’t be negotiated with. He destroyed for the sake of destroying. In Alfred’s words, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Donald Trump delights in watching the world burn. And now Republicans are belatedly discovering that their party, too, is part of that world.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday subpoenaed the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Education for documents as part of its investigation into whether a Justice Department strategy to address threats against teachers and school officials was abused to target conservative parents.

No equivalence exists in the ways that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have respectively handled the classified documents found in their possession. Yet panicky Democrats—ruled either by a thirst for TV airtime or by a knee-jerk defensive reflex—are suggesting that one does.

Biden’s enemies might be expected to use an argument of false equivalence to attack him, but surely not people who are supposed to be his allies. I’m talking to you, Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jim Himes.

Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation,” Durbin told CNN, adding that the president had “lost the high ground on this notion of classified information being where it shouldn’t be.”

“Anytime there are classified documents outside of a secure space, I am profoundly troubled, whether that space is owned by a Republican president or a Democratic president,” Himes said, also to CNN. “It’s a big problem.”

If anything should embarrass or trouble these Democrats, it is their failure to examine the facts and grasp the utter difference in the Biden and Trump cases. What in tarnation are they doing?

In their flap, they have forgotten the first principle of politics: What matters above all is public opinion and preventing a distorted narrative from becoming entrenched.

[David Axelrod: Yes, Mr. President, there is some there there]

According to a recent NBC poll, about two-thirds of Americans are now as concerned about Biden’s handling of classified documents as they are about Trump’s, despite the gulf of difference between the president’s actions and those of the habitual scofflaw Trump. What’s most worrying is Biden’s standing among Democratic voters: A majority of Democrats surveyed, 52 percent, said they’re concerned about Biden’s documents, just one point less than the percentage of Republicans who are concerned about Trump’s.

In other words, these Democratic chin-scratchers on TV are giving license to Trump and smearing Biden. Halt! If not in the name of the law, then of common sense.

The law is actually on their side, if they bothered to find out about it. In recent weeks, I have spoken with a number of highly regarded attorneys on the issue, and begged them, please, to find me a non-laughable defense of Trump’s handling of the Mar-a-Lago documents. They simply could not.

So the false equivalence that these Democrats are promoting is this: On the one hand, Biden made an error about which he was apparently unaware and that he promptly sought to correct, acting properly in tandem with the authorities in every respect; on the other hand, Trump as usual used the law as a roll of heavy-duty Charmin, repeatedly obstructing the National Archives, the FBI, and the Department of Justice, and persisting in the concealment of secret documents in his possession. It shouldn’t need saying, but apparently it does for some Democrats: These are not the same.

Telling the truth about the differences is not only the right thing to do; it’s the politically smart thing to do. In politics, offense is the best defense.

[Donald Ayer], Mark S. Zaid, and Dennis Aftergut: Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy

Democrats are coming off the most impressive midterm cycle led by a Democratic president in generations. In large part because of the president’s historic accomplishments during his first term, voters turned back the Republican fear campaign.

So Democrats are on a roll. And if Trump is the GOP’s nominee in 2024, they have every opportunity to run up the score on a wounded candidate who has led his party to nothing but losses since his election in 2016. Even if Trump does not win the Republican nomination, his base will continue to be a liability for the GOP: A Bulwark poll this week found that a full 28 percent of Republican voters would support Trump if he stood for a third party.

Yet all of this can be drowned out by just one narrative. Republicans love nothing better than to turn something baseless into something pervasive. And Democrats too often act as mindless accomplices, giving credence to the false equivalences that bubble up when the media cover Trump-related partisan issues. A recent report from Media Matters outlines the underlying pathology: Although Biden freely handed over the few documents in his possession to the Department of Justice and opened up his home to searches, parts of the news media are now discounting the significance of Trump’s document mishandling.

The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel prepared the way. Trump “clearly wanted to keep those things as souvenirs or for whatever and fought giving them back,” said Gangel on CNN, but the Biden documents story “may help him legally.” Legally? Let’s just say that I would have flunked my first year of law school if I’d said that.

Through this sort of speculation, some pundits are suggesting that the special prosecutors appointed in each case, Jack Smith and Robert Hur, will somehow end up paying more attention to each other than to the facts of the matter before them. I doubt that Smith or Hur needs CNN to explain the centrality of intent in criminal law. But the CNN analyst Margaret Talev recently said, “I think, Pence revelations aside, the drip, drip of the Biden discoveries does defuse this issue, takes it off the table as a real weapon to use against Trump.”

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

In the absence of robust counterarguments from Democratic leaders, such statements are being served up to a nightly audience that largely comprises Democratic voters. And by going along with the false premise, Democrats are filling their own supporters with despair.

Let’s revisit the nightmare of 2016 to understand what could lie ahead. Thanks to a similar dynamic of media herd mentality and Democratic defensiveness over Hillary Clinton’s emails, a 2016 poll found that nearly half of Americans saw the issue as “very concerning.” The narrative about Biden’s documents is in danger of taking root in much the same way—that’s what the polling today is showing. All these years later, does anyone know that Clinton mishandled zero classified documents among her emails? I’ll say it again: zero.

If the DOJ-appointed Hur goes about his business like a straight shooter, Biden will be exonerated. But if the media smear continues, it will be with the unbidden assistance of pearl-clutching Democrats. Next year could be the same as 2016, if they don’t correct the course now.

Most Americans want to see the police reformed. A Gallup poll conducted in May, two years after the murder of George Floyd, found that 50 percent of adults favored “major changes” to policing, 39 percent wanted “minor changes,” and only 11 percent thought no changes were required. Despite this general consensus and a patchwork of recent policy shifts in communities across the country, injustices continue to accumulate, and it would be easy to see the problems with policing as intractable.

Three high-profile deaths just since the start of this year would seem to confirm this feeling. On January 3, Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old Black high-school teacher (and cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter), died after Los Angeles police shocked him repeatedly with a Taser. The next day, cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shot and killed Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi American college student who allegedly approached them with a knife. And less than a week after that, another Black man, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, died following a beating by Memphis police officers. Video footage of the incident, released this past Friday, led to mass protest in many cities and an anguished response to yet another senseless death. Nothing we’re doing to fix policing seems to be working—or so it might appear.

Against this backdrop, two new books chronicle horrific incidents of police abuse, cover-ups, and intransigence. But they also offer something else: light pouring through the cracks, concrete evidence that police departments can change for the better.

In The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland, the journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham tell the story of Oakland, California’s police department. The title refers to a small group of officers who allegedly brutalized residents of impoverished, high-crime, largely Black West Oakland starting in the late 1990s. The actions of these cops became known only because a rookie named Keith Batt was assigned to train with one of them. Batt was deeply troubled by what he observed—behavior that Batt said included kidnapping, assault, and filing false police reports. He contacted internal-affairs investigators and became the main witness in a criminal case against the officers (three of whom stood trial; none was convicted).

[Read: No such thing as a bad apple]

In harrowing detail, Winston and BondGraham describe the terror that Batt said Oaklanders endured at the hands of the Riders, as well as the ostracism Batt faced when he refused to honor the “blue wall of silence” that has long characterized cop culture.

While the Riders’ actions may have been extreme, Winston and BondGraham view them as symptomatic of larger issues. As Oakland underwent deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s, poverty and crime rose. Turning away from local jobs initiatives, city leaders embraced ill-fated redevelopment efforts and pressed their often-racist police department to “clean up the streets.” When rogue cops took things too far, their supervisors looked the other way, knowing perfectly well what their marching orders were.

The Riders were significant in another respect: A lawsuit brought by the group’s alleged victims became the catalyst for a consent decree, a potentially powerful weapon for effecting change within police departments. Consent decrees are legally binding settlement agreements. In the usual course of affairs, after the Department of Justice has investigated a police agency and found that it has systematically violated people’s rights, the feds spell out changes in policy and procedure that the agency must undertake, changes that would bring it into line with established best practices. An independent monitor reports periodically to a judge on whether the department is meeting its marks.

Although the DOJ never investigated Oakland, the consent-decree model appealed to the civil-rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin. In 2003, representing victims in the Riders case, they were able to maneuver the city into an unusual “negotiated” consent decree, which committed Oakland PD to a range of tasks, from better documenting the use of force to enhanced field training for young officers.

Consent decrees have been used to improve policing in cities such as Detroit and New Orleans, but they are expensive to administer and don’t always work. Winston and BondGraham show how the Oakland police resisted the required reforms at every turn. Top brass, middle management, frontline officers, and the police union displayed an “obstructionist mindset.” Oakland cops continued to shoot people at a furious pace. A poster in the department’s firing range was captioned You shut the fuck up. We’ll protect America. Keep out of our fucking way, liberal pussies.

The Riders Come Out at Night is a longish book, and its story is largely a condemnation of the Oakland police. But readers who stick with it to the end will discover something surprising. Although change was slow to come to Oakland, it did come. The turning point was the ascension of a reform-oriented police chief. Under Sean Whent, a longtime Oakland cop who led the department from 2013 to 2016, internal-affairs complaints dropped dramatically, the police did a better job protecting protesters’ rights, and the agency tackled racial bias.

Winston and BondGraham don’t put it in these terms, but Whent was arguably able to make progress because he helped shift the department’s culture. My own research on other cities suggests that the key to successful police reform is to pair sensible legal and policy restrictions on police behavior with new models of what it means to be a good cop, so that the hyperaggressive, “us versus them” culture of the profession bends in a different direction.

Whent believed not only that Oakland residents had a right to respectful policing, but that such policing would help the department control crime; the resulting trust would lubricate the all-important flow of information between cops and the community. Unlike his predecessors, he leaned into the consent decree (there was also intense legal pressure on him to do so), and enough of his cops followed suit that on the streets, things began to change.  

“The reforms that began in 2003 … have profoundly changed the Oakland police, and the city, for the better,” Winston and BondGraham conclude. “Today OPD officers are involved in far fewer deadly use-of-force incidents.” What’s more, where “Oakland cops were once known for abusive, explicit language,” now “audits of police body camera footage rarely flag instances in which officers curse or show impatience or anger.” The police have also “been able to steadily dial back their most problematic enforcement activities,” so that “Oakland is one of the only law enforcement agencies in America that could actually show (before the George Floyd protests) that it took action to reduce racial profiling.”

A similarly hopeful lesson might be drawn from Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, by the UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz. Many cops perform their difficult job admirably, but part of the problem with reforming the police is that when this isn’t the case, officers aren’t always held to account for their misdeeds. Schwartz’s focus is on understanding why this should be, and she lands on 11 areas where law, policy, and politics have converged to make it hard for victims of police abuse to get justice.

Among Schwartz’s insights: There aren’t enough lawyers with the expertise to file federal civil-rights cases against police, especially outside large urban centers. This is partially a function of the fee structure allowed by the courts; only rarely can plaintiffs’ attorneys recoup their full costs, so relatively few lawyers find this kind of work financially viable.  

Schwartz’s special expertise is qualified immunity. This arcane legal doctrine dictates that a public official can’t be held responsible for violating someone’s rights unless the courts have already established that the particular circumstances do in fact constitute a violation. Although that sounds reasonable—you shouldn’t hold an official liable unless they knew that what they were doing was wrong—judges have interpreted this in a bizarro fashion.

Schwartz describes a case from Hawaii. A woman in an argument with her husband asked her daughter to call the cops and was Tasered when she accidentally bumped one of them. The Taser was used in so-called dart mode, where the weapon shoots out electrified probes. Her case against the officer ended up getting dismissed because, according to the appellate court, there had never before been a relevant ruling concerning Tasers, much less Tasers in dart mode, and therefore the officer couldn’t be held liable. Dart mode or not, the officer should have known not to do it.

Schwartz’s research shows that qualified-immunity defenses are raised in about 37 percent of lawsuits against the police. Although they’re successful only about 9 percent of the time, they gum up the litigation process because each qualified-immunity claim must be resolved before a case can proceed. The doctrine is a farce in any event, because police officers aren’t regularly updated on the intricacies of federal case law. Schwartz favors ending qualified immunity and argues that this won’t open the door to endless litigation.

Far more common than plaintiffs winning cases in court is cities settling with the victims of police abuse. (Settlements and legal awards cost Chicago nearly half a billion dollars from 2010 to 2020.) Usually cities pay these settlements out of their general funds. Police-department budgets don’t take the hit, so departments have little reason to retrain their officers and improve operating procedures. Schwartz urges cities to change this budgeting practice, giving police departments a financial incentive to learn from their mistakes.

Where’s the cause for hope? Schwartz observes that several of the changes she favors around qualified immunity were enshrined in state law in Colorado in 2020. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the Colorado law will be, but in theory, greater legal liability should deter police abuse. Other states may soon follow Colorado’s lead.

[Read: The state where protests have already forced major police reforms]

Many more levers need to be pulled to get police accountability to where it should be, but we are seeing progress. Even Schwartz, a fierce critic of law enforcement, acknowledges that over the past half century, “departments as a whole have become more professional and have improved their policies and trainings,” if only “to a degree,” in part because civil-rights attorneys and others in the community have kept the pressure on. The cops who were seen beating Tyre Nichols last month in Memphis? They were promptly fired by Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis. They’ve now been arrested and charged with second-degree murder. There was a time not long ago when neither of those things would have happened so quickly.

The narrative that nothing ever gets better in policing isn’t just wrong; it’s an abdication of responsibility. It’s easier to lose oneself in resignation and despair than to bear down—motivated by a belief in the possibility of change—and put in the hard work of reforming a flawed but essential institution.