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<updated>2024-09-06T21:17:35Z</updated>
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<name>Alex Abad-Santos</name>
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<title type="html"><![CDATA[America’s love affair with the increasingly weird Kennedys]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/370504/kennedy-family-jack-schlossberg-rfk-jr-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370504</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T21:17:35Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-07T12:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Celebrity Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[In life, there are certain inevitabilities. In the United States, those inevitabilities include death, taxes, and hearing about the Kennedys. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making a splash in the 2024 presidential race (and now endorsing Trump), Caroline Kennedy’s son Jack Schlossberg covering said race for Vogue, and rumors of the post-J. Lo Ben Affleck […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Jack Schlossberg speaking onstage with an audience and empty seats visible beside him." data-caption="Former US President John F. Kennedy’s grandson and silly goose social media star Jack Schlossberg speaks on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2166920649.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Former US President John F. Kennedy’s grandson and silly goose social media star Jack Schlossberg speaks on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
In life, there are certain inevitabilities. In the United States, those inevitabilities include death, taxes, and hearing about the Kennedys. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making a splash in the 2024 presidential race (and now endorsing Trump), Caroline Kennedy’s son <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/jack-schlossberg-vogue-political-correspondent.html">Jack Schlossberg</a> covering said race for Vogue, and rumors of the post-J. Lo Ben Affleck dating <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ben-affleck-annoyed-kick-kennedy-200000357.html">Kick Kennedy,</a> it feels as though the media spotlight is circling back once again to America’s royal family.
For generations of Americans, especially those in the Northeast, a fascination with the Kennedys is nothing new. The ambition and glamour, public service and philanthropic triumphs, tragic deaths and scandals are all part of this family’s legacy, and so many people have watched and lived through each one with them. The American Kennedy obsession was a <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/24043045/politics-fandom-trump-fans-toxic-stan-culture-conspiracies">parasocial relationship</a> before we even had a name for it. What might be harder to explain is that even as younger generations of Americans are further and further removed from the most famous and politically significant Kennedys, there’s still a fascination.
Why are so many people invested in <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/jack-schlossberg-interview">Jack Schlossberg</a>, perhaps best known for making <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@jack.schlossberg/video/7389585125987650858?lang=en">goofy little lip-sync TikToks</a>, reasserting his family’s legacy? Why, in the case of Kick, are they still rubbing elbows with movie stars and entertainment moguls — or at least being rumored to? And what are we to make of the RFK Jr. of it all: the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/rfk-jr-brain-health-memory-loss.html">brain worm</a> and the separate <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5063939/rfk-jr-central-park-bear-bicycle">bear</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/us/politics/rfk-jr-whale-head.html">whale</a> carcasses? Is having a parasite in your cranium and playing around with animal bones somehow more or less embarrassing when you’re a Kennedy? What does the family name mean in 2024?
For a better understanding of the Kennedys and this current moment, we turned to <a href="https://millercenter.org/experts/barbara-perry">Barbara Perry</a>, a Kennedy expert and professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an organization that specializes in presidential scholarship. I got to speak with Perry about why the Kennedys occupy such a special place in the American psyche, what Camelot means to politics, why some people are so desperate to see Schlossberg shed his silly goose era and run for office, and why RFK Jr. is so weird. She had answers for most of these burning questions.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 
Barbara, I’m here to ask you about Kennedys in the news. RFK Jr. is a Kennedy. Jack Schlossberg is a Kennedy. Taylor Swift <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/relive-taylor-swift-conor-kennedys-whirlwind-romance/">dated a Kennedy</a>. Ben Affleck might be dating a Kennedy. The Kennedys are everywhere again.  
Well there’s just so many of them and there’s so many to date. Every American could probably date one, and maybe even marry one at this point! 
That’s the dream, isn’t it? We’re into something like the third generation of, or Kennedy family 3.0, at this point. 
Kennedy 3.0 is a really good way to describe it, but this goes all the way back probably to Jack Schlossberg’s third great-grandfather. President Kennedy’s grandfather, for whom he was named — John Fitzgerald — was the mayor of Boston and was in Congress in the 1890s. President Kennedy was only about three generations removed from abject poverty.
So that would actually put us somewhere at 5.0 or 6.0 today. This is also a family that, for generation after generation, has pursued or been involved in public service. And that’s why many people think of them as “America’s Royal family.”
Being in public service and being in the public eye go hand in hand. Generation after generation of people are drawn to this family. 
I personally know a thing or two about that magnetism — my mother took me to see John F. Kennedy. I was a little thing, a wee thing. My mother was a homemaker, very smart, voted, and kept up with the news, but she hated down-and-dirty politics. And the one and only campaign rally she ever went to was then-Senator John F. Kennedy, at a rally one month before he was elected. She piled my two older brothers and me into the car. She drove from the suburbs, and she didn’t particularly like driving downtown, but she did. We got there early so we could stand right in front of the podium. And I’d say that I can’t remember the speech, but I do remember the crowd and the excitement.
I believe my mother feels the same as yours. Regardless of her own individual politics or how she feels about the current state of politics in the US, she adores the Kennedys.  
I bring that up because that’s part and parcel of the broad reach of this family, and something I was thinking about before you even called. I can name all sorts of factors that I think draw people to them, but one is, they’re the first completely modern media political family. 
What do you mean? Is it that the Kennedys begin to understand the value of media or that the Kennedys are made for the media?
TV didn’t exist for any [previous] presidential families — the Roosevelts or the Adamses. But it comes on strong for President Kennedy, his young and beautiful wife, and their two beguiling children. 
I always cite <a href="https://time.com/4795637/jfk-television/">this [stat]</a>: When Eisenhower was elected, the first time in ’52, only 20 percent of American homes had television sets. By the time Kennedy was elected eight years later, 80 percent of American homes had a television set. And that’s how people came to know him as this very young, handsome, active president, again, along with his stylish and beautiful wife, who took Washington by storm and then took the world by storm.
And there’s the fact that his dad, Joe Senior, was a movie mogul. He was a producer of Hollywood movies in the ’20s, and that’s in part how they made their fortune. That’s another thing about this family. They’re a rags-to-riches story. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-515586136.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,16.976315497612,100,66.047369004777" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie. | Getty Images (archival)" data-portal-copyright="Getty Images (archival)" />
Life magazine had also just come on the scene. Teddy Kennedy used to say, “Oh yeah, Life magazine was kind of like our family photo album.” And people reading Life would say, “Oh my gosh, this family has nine children.” The women were beautiful and the boys were handsome, and they were active and sporting and witty and well-educated at Harvard. 
It sounds like a perfect storm: the rise of new media and a family so photogenically perfect and stylish to take advantage of it. It’s the combination of a made-for-television family and the rise of television itself.    
I have to add this as well, but it’s also the horrors of his assassination in 1963.  For this young man dead at 46, his wife 12 years younger becomes a widow, and then these two beautiful little children are now fatherless — I just don’t think anybody who lived through that [wouldn’t be sympathetic]. 
Obviously there were Republicans and people who hated the Kennedys, and still do and hate Jack Kennedy. I’m not saying 100 percent of Americans were upset and grief-struck, but interestingly enough, he had just barely slipped by Richard Nixon in 1960 and I’m not sure he even got 50 percent of the popular vote. But after he died, people were asked if they voted for him and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/to-tell-the-truth-to-pollsters/">well over 50 percent of Americans said yes</a>, which says to me that they were drawn to him even more in his death.
It seems like the Kennedys are equal parts a mixture of tragedy and aspiration. You mentioned your mother being drawn to JFK despite not particularly being fond of politics. I think, for a lot of people, the Kennedys made political ambition seem glamorous — which, like you said, is very closely tied to Hollywood. 
There’s this Hollywood theme that runs through the Kennedys, and if you sort of theoretically add that to a much better-looking royal family, it’s sort of like Diana — although she was attractive, most of the others are not. But if you add movies and beauty and charm and charisma and wit and athleticism to all of this, they just are very compelling. 
Plus, like Diana or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, these people flash across the sky like a shooting star and then are taken, usually with some kind of tragedy. It just somehow pulls people even closer to them, or they want to know even more about them, I think. And they’re frozen in time. 
It was Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, who named her husband’s presidency Camelot, and to this day it sticks. That’s got a Hollywood air to it and a Broadway air. If you go and look at the lyrics to the main song from musical Camelot, “Don’t let it be forgotten. Once there was a spot for one brief shining moment known as Camelot.” 
I think your mention of Marilyn, Diana, and James Dean is interesting in that they’re not political figures. Monroe and Dean are tragic Hollywood figures — that whole live fast, die young curse. Diana is and has become more of a pop culture icon than she was a monarch. And those three figures are continuously mythologized and eulogized. 
JFK Jr., I think, is often a part of that same conversation when it comes to American pop culture, since he never ran for office, but <a href="https://www.history.com/news/jfk-jr-plane-crash-carolyn-lauren-bessette">died in a plane crash</a> when he was only 38.  
He was going to be the one to restore Camelot. He got the best of the looks of his father and his mother, and he was a handsome devil. He married the Calvin Klein woman [Carolyn Bessette], and they were on their way to the White House. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-1453022170.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,10.721562822657,100,78.556874354687" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="JFK Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette. JFK Jr. was largely seen as the next Kennedy in line for political prominence after his father’s generation. | Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images" />
Well, that idea of promise seems to be the thing that keeps us all watching or keeps people interested. People are still curious if there’s a Kennedy who sort of absorbs the political fantasy that we project onto this family. I can’t help but think that’s sort of what’s happening with the media attention on Jack Schlossberg. Of course, he seems to play into the joke and sort of subvert his family name by being a silly goose. 
My question to you is, I think what I’m hearing is that you actually find that appealing, that he’s kind of a goofy comedian? 
I’m not sure! But I think it’s not that different from what you said about the Kennedys being the first family with television. He’s sort of the first Kennedy that’s become a social media star. 
I got to meet him two summers ago on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t want to say he was overly serious, but he was mature and kind.
And he seemed to get all the best characteristics of everybody in the family, physically, mentally, and in terms of his personality, he had a nice wit about him. He was charming, charismatic, cute, handsome, just lovely. And I thought, oh, and what a cute girlfriend. And I thought, oh, I hope they get married and they’ll have beautiful children.
Barbara, you are sounding like your mother at the rally!  
Or your mother too! I maintain that I didn’t do anything that would embarrass me or the Miller Center or the JFK Library. 
But I think that it’s probably good for him if he wants a public life because he clearly has been chosen by his mother. He goes on TV with her. They speak on video during the 2020 election — he’s clearly the designated son and restorer of Camelot because he’s the only male heir to John Kennedy. He’s the only grandson of John Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy. 
Plus, as you say, he’s smart, and I guess for a newer generation, he’s got the right stuff, as far as knowing how to use social media and being witty and funny and serious when he needs to be, but approachable when not. 
On the other side of that, can I ask you your thoughts on RFK Jr.? Do you think the obsession with him comes from him representing a weird and bizarre side of the Kennedys — like everything they’re not supposed to be? 
Yes, people are drawn to him I think in large part because he has the same exact name of his father and people still feel sad about that — maybe even more so in some way than Jack because with Bobby, he is, I think, more tied to our current politics and social policy of caring for the poor and minorities, and being anti-war. 
Going back to my mother — she and my grandmother talked about the President and the family as if they were our family, and my grandparents hung a picture from a magazine of President Kennedy in their living room when he died. So that’s all part and parcel of this, and I think that does still attach in part to Robert Kennedy Jr. 
Is he genuinely weird or just weird for a Kennedy? Like, his scandals aren’t that far removed from the usual scandals — drugs and women — that have followed the Kennedy men around?
I can remember seeing interviews of Robert Kennedy senior, where he’d say, “Oh, my son, Bobby loves animals, and he has falcons.” And that always seemed to me to be rather odd, unless you’re in the Middle Ages in England. Falconry was not a big thing here, and even in the ’60s. 
That home, Hickory Hill, where they lived out in northern Virginia, was a menagerie. They had a Newfoundland that would slobber all over everybody, and they had goats and rabbits and falcons and these raucous touch football games. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2167290858.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,10.735821710327,100,78.528356579346" alt="RFK Jr shaking hands with Donald Trump." title="RFK Jr shaking hands with Donald Trump." data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="After a campaign in which RFK Jr. said his brain was partially eaten by a worm and that he may or may not have put a bear corpse in Central Park, he ended his presidential bid and endorsed Donald Trump. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" />
This was written about, but <a href="https://time.com/archive/6832932/the-administration-big-splash-at-hickory-hill/">Bobby and Ethel had some big party</a> at their home with a pool, and they started pushing people, fully clothed people, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian who was the White House historian during Kennedy’s presidency. That made the news, and Rose Kennedy was embarrassed, being the Victorian, and she’s writing to the family members to say, please don’t do that, it doesn’t make our family look very good. Your brother is the president of the United States, but even the parents were wild.
So we shouldn’t be that surprised. 
If he weren’t crazy, people would still be interested in him, and maybe more so! And you can make all these alternative histories about him, but he made all the wrong decisions from the time he was a teenager and started doing <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-06-20/robert-kennedy-addict-reform-plans">heavy drugs</a>. Even with the crazy stuff, up until the bear story and up until Kamala Harris came on the scene as the nominee, he was polling 10 percent in some states.
The power of being a Kennedy!
They’ve had great, great joys and great ecstasies and great triumphs, and then they’ve had just the worst tragedies. It is fascinating, I must say. Since we don’t have a royal family to watch and follow, we have the Kennedys. And they do keep producing interesting if sometimes bizarre figures.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Kelsey Piper</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[There’s a fix for AI-generated essays. Why aren’t we using it?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370419/chatgpt-schools-ai-cheating-plagiarism-detection" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370419</id>
<updated>2024-09-05T22:52:26Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-07T11:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[It’s the start of the school year, and thus the start of a fresh round of discourse on generative AI’s new role in schools. In the space of about three years, essays have gone from a mainstay of classroom education everywhere to a much less useful tool, for one reason: ChatGPT. Estimates of how many […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A computer screen full of lines of code." data-caption="The language program developed by the US company OpenAI uses artificial intelligence to write a random binary code consisting of zeros and ones. | Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2165204307_8b9ee8.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>The language program developed by the US company OpenAI uses artificial intelligence to write a random binary code consisting of zeros and ones. | Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
It’s the start of the school year, and thus the start of a <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/study-shows-how-students-and-teachers-are-using-ai-for-college-essays/">fresh round</a> of <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/09/04/stanford-students-train-ai-help-college">discourse</a> on generative AI’s new role in schools. In the space of about three years, essays have gone from a mainstay of classroom education everywhere to a much less useful tool, for one reason: ChatGPT. Estimates of how many students use ChatGPT for essays <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/about-1-in-5-us-teens-whove-heard-of-chatgpt-have-used-it-for-schoolwork/">vary</a>, but it’s commonplace enough to <a href="https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/chatgpt-enters-classroom-teachers-weigh-pros-and-cons">force teachers to adapt</a>.
While generative AI has many limitations, student essays fall into the category of services that they’re very good at: There are lots of examples of essays on the assigned topics in their training data, there’s demand for an enormous volume of such essays, and the standards for prose quality and original research in student essays are not all that high.
<div class="wp-block-vox-media-highlight vox-media-highlight">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">This story was first featured in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">Future Perfect newsletter</a>.</h2>
Sign up <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">here</a> to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.
</div>
Right now, cheating on essays via the use of AI tools is hard to catch. A number of tools advertise they can verify that text is AI-generated, but they’re <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/07/1067928/why-detecting-ai-generated-text-is-so-difficult-and-what-to-do-about-it/">not very reliable</a>. Since <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/college/comments/17vy5tu/i_hate_ai_detection_software/">falsely accusing students of plagiarism</a> is a big deal, these tools would have to be extremely accurate to work at all — and they simply aren’t.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">AI fingerprinting with technology</h2>
But there is a technical solution here. Back in 2022, a team at OpenAI, led by quantum computing researcher <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823">Scott Aaronson</a>, developed a “watermarking” solution that makes AI text virtually unmistakable — even if the end user changes a few words here and there or rearranges text. The solution is a bit technically complicated, but bear with me, because it’s also very interesting. 
At its core, the way that AI text generation works is that the AI “guesses” a bunch of possible next tokens given what appears in a text so far. In order not to be overly predictable and produce the same repetitive output constantly, AI models don’t just guess the most probable token — instead, they include an element of randomization, favoring “more likely” completions but sometimes selecting a less likely one. 
The watermarking works at this stage. Instead of having the AI generate the next token according to random selection, it has the AI use a nonrandom process: favoring next tokens that get a high score in an internal “scoring” function OpenAI invented. It might, for example, favor words with the letter V just slightly, so that text generated with this scoring rule will have 20 percent more Vs than normal human text (though the actual scoring functions are more complicated than this). Readers wouldn’t normally notice this — in fact, I edited this newsletter to increase the number of Vs in it, and I doubt this variation in my normal writing stood out.
Similarly, the watermarked text will not, at a glance, be different from normal AI output. But it would be straightforward for OpenAI, which knows the secret scoring rule, to evaluate whether a given body of text gets a much higher score on that hidden scoring rule than human-generated text ever would. If, for example, the scoring rule were my above example about the letter V, you could run this newsletter through a verification program and see that it has about 90 Vs in 1,200 words, more than you’d expect based on how often V is used in English. It’s a clever, technically sophisticated solution to a hard problem, and OpenAI has had a working prototype for <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823">two years</a>.
So if we wanted to solve the problem of AI text masquerading as human-written text, it’s very much solvable. But OpenAI hasn’t released their watermarking system, nor has anyone else in the industry. Why not?
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">It’s all about competition</h2>
If OpenAI — and only OpenAI — released a watermarking system for ChatGPT, making it easy to tell when generative AI had produced a text, this wouldn’t affect student essay plagiarism in the slightest. Word would get out fast, and everyone would just switch over to one of the many AI options available today: Meta’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini. Plagiarism would continue unabated, and OpenAI would lose a lot of its user base. So it’s not shocking that they would keep their watermarking system under wraps.
In a situation like this, it might seem appropriate for regulators to step in. If every generative AI system is required to have watermarking, then it’s not a competitive disadvantage. This is the logic behind a bill introduced this year in the California state Assembly, known as the <a href="https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab3211">California Digital Content Provenance Standards</a>, which would require generative AI providers to make their AI-generated content detectable, along with requiring providers to label generative AI and remove deceptive content. OpenAI is <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-supports-california-ai-bill-requiring-watermarking-synthetic-content-2024-08-26/">in favor</a> of the bill — not surprisingly, as they’re the only generative AI provider known to have a system that does this. Their rivals are mostly opposed.
I’m broadly in favor of some kind of watermarking requirements for generative AI content. AI can be <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/369502/chatgpt-ai-image-generator-regulation-debate">incredibly useful</a>, but its productive uses don’t require it to pretend to be human-created. And while I don’t think it’s the place of government to ban newspapers from replacing us journalists with AI, I certainly don’t want outlets to misinform readers about whether the content they’re reading was <a href="https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content">created by real humans</a>.
Though I’d like some kind of watermarking obligation, I am not sure it’s possible to implement. The best of the “open” AI models that have been released (like the latest Llama), models that you can run yourself on your own computer, are very high quality — certainly good enough for student essays. They’re already out there, and there’s no way to go back and add watermarking to them because anyone can run the current versions, whatever updates are applied in future versions. (This is among the many ways I have complicated feelings about open models. They enable an enormous amount of creativity, research, and discovery — and they also make it impossible to do all kinds of common-sense anti-impersonation or <a href="https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/">anti-child sexual abuse material</a> measures that we otherwise might really like to have.)
So even though watermarking is possible, I don’t think we can count on it, which means we’ll have to figure out how to address the ubiquity of easy, AI-generated content as a society. Teachers are already switching to in-class essay requirements and other approaches to cut down on student cheating. We’re likely to see a switch away from college admissions essays as well — and, honestly, it’ll be good riddance, as those were probably <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/affirmative-action-supreme-court-college-admissions-essays-trauma/674314/">never a good way to select students</a>.
But while I won’t mourn much over the college admissions essay, and while I think teachers are very much capable of finding better ways to assess students, I do notice some troubling trends in the whole saga. There was a simple way to let us harness the benefits of AI without obvious downsides like impersonation and plagiarism, yet AI development happened so fast that society more or less just let the opportunity pass us by. Individual labs could do it, but they won’t because it’d put them at a competitive disadvantage — and there isn’t likely to be a good way to make everyone do it.
In the school plagiarism debate, the stakes are low. But the same dynamic reflected in the AI watermarking debate — where commercial incentives stop companies from self-regulating and the pace of change stops external regulators from stepping in until it’s too late — seems likely to remain as the stakes get higher.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Alex Abad-Santos</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Did Brittany Mahomes’s Donald Trump support put her on the outs with Taylor Swift?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/369543/brittany-mahomes-likes-trump-instagram" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=369543</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T20:15:24Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T20:15:07Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Celebrity Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[At any given second, millions of people are liking various things on Instagram. Pictures of sunsets and sunrises, recipes for keto brownies, videos of viral K-pop dances — there’s something for everyone. But right now there’s one specific semi-famous woman whose social media activity (liking, unliking, posting) has drawn widespread attention: Brittany Mahomes.  Best known […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Two women hugging and smiling from inside a suite at a football game." data-caption="Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes hanging out at a Chiefs game in 2023. | Stacy Revere/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Stacy Revere/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/gettyimages-1829598694_848f0a.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes hanging out at a Chiefs game in 2023. | Stacy Revere/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
At any given second, millions of people are liking various things on Instagram. Pictures of sunsets and sunrises, recipes for keto brownies, videos of viral K-pop dances — there’s something for everyone. But right now there’s one specific semi-famous woman whose social media activity (liking, unliking, posting) has drawn widespread attention: <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/08/29/sports/brittany-mahomes-is-brushing-off-haters-after-patrick-mahomes-advice/">Brittany Mahomes</a>.
Best known as the wife of Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Brittany Mahomes’s national profile has, for the moment, eclipsed her husband’s. That’s due to her perceived support for former President Donald Trump and his promised political policies. This all started when Mahomes liked and then unliked an Instagram post from the former president that <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2024/08/28/brittany-mahomes-trump-support/">outlined his 2024 platform</a>.
Under any normal circumstances, only <a href="https://www.instagram.com/brittanylynne/?hl=en">Brittany Mahomes’s biggest fans</a> would be deeply invested in whether she desires mass deportation and an Iron Dome missile defense system built over America. But Mahomes has connections to Taylor Swift, the most famous woman in the world. That very valuable association is why the social media likes and dislikes of an American football WAG (that’s “wives and girlfriends”) has become a pop culture saga.
We’re here to answer your most pressing questions.
Wait, what happened? 
Brittany Mahomes has become a moment in this news cycle because she has been liking and unliking social media posts supporting former President Donald Trump and his various policies. 
On <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C-m53xGu3MY/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=a69d4fdc-9933-4d07-904b-7e88d71753a8">August 13</a>, Trump’s Instagram account posted a platform promising to “Seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion,” “Keep men OUT of women’s sports,” and “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” He also plans to cut “federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, Radical Gender Ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
<a href="https://x.com/tiredasslesbian/status/1826972546052325629">Eagle-eyed internet sleuths</a> spotted that Mahomes “liked” and “unliked” the xenophobic and transphobic dog whistle salad last week. And though Mahomes doesn’t follow Trump on her account, it seems as though the narrative was already set: Mahomes supports some of Trump’s most pernicious and divisive politics. 
The news that people saw Mahomes’s social media activity eventually circled its way back to Mahomes, who was not pleased that people noticed her public actions. To that, she posted a message via <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/brittany-mahomes-message-haters-liking-pro-trump-instagram-post">Instagram Story</a> (Instagram Stories are temporary), denouncing her haters and telling them they were emotionally damaged adults: 
I mean honestly, to be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep rooted issues you refuse to heal from childhood. There’s no reason your brain is fully developed and you hate to see others doing well. 
<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/brittany-mahomes-slams-haters-instagram-015629071.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_GOLDLIST_TEST&ncid=crm_19908-1202929-20240825-0&bt_user_id=6JRyBTwoYQzmdnLH3pN2QzNZuI5lUW99eij89uny52Y9VmIpDsEpGGO5JWIe&bt_ts=1724580120381&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKBxQxF-fo9Px30l0B6tcZu6KwckIA3BbKQcCQTyBfmdE-eLjhpbxsDzUFDj5U0riA9M2Jsg-zMbF58SDN42jXuDiD764vw6o2Wv0F_tzmN_zscfp-UWDMzLVQM4dRmTihmI2MylQw9k_ZcZWJAySNmtqdVp7JDgb2AdfXCpwmLA">Mahomes seemed</a> to see the negativity surrounding her social media proclivities as a sign that people were mad that she was succeeding, rather than that people were disappointed in her presumed politics, that is to say, what appeared to be her beliefs about how the country should be run and how others should be treated. Mahomes also <a href="https://x.com/PopCrave/status/1828870083847884899">liked a pro-Trump comment</a> under a recent post, eliminating any ambiguity that her previous liking and unliking spree might be an accident.
On August 26, Mahomes doubled down and <a href="https://people.com/brittany-mahomes-doubles-down-calling-out-critics-after-backlash-8701908">shared a post</a> that read, “Contrary to the tone of the world today … You can disagree with someone, and still love them. You can have differing views, and still be kind.” She did not comment on or explain the relative kindness of the views she appeared to support. 
Then, on September 4, Trump apparently heard the news and was flattered, <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113080034075111751" rel="nofollow">posting a message</a> on his own social media platform, Truth Social. In the post, Trump called Mahomes “beautiful” and thanked her for “strongly defending” him, going on to decry “Crime and Illegal Immigration,” “INFLATION,” a “World that is laughing” at US leaders. 
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-truth-social wp-block-embed-truth-social"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div class="iframely-embed"><div class="iframely-responsive"><a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113080034075111751" data-iframely-url="//cdn.iframe.ly/api/iframe?maxheight=750&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftruthsocial.com%2F%40realDonaldTrump%2Fposts%2F113080034075111751&key=a95589c51263af39f0de8ef8737db4f3"></a></div></div>
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Mahomes has yet to comment on Trump’s thanks. During the Chiefs game on September 5, <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/brittany-mahomes-not-in-taylor-swift-chiefs-box.html">Mahomes and Swift</a>, who sat together during multiple games last year, enjoyed the game from separate suites. 
And sorry, who is Brittany Mahomes again? Do people regularly care about Brittany Mahomes in general?
Brittany Mahomes is primarily famous because she’s married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who was her high school sweetheart. She’s also the <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a45601704/who-is-patrick-mahomes-wife-brittany-mahomes/">co-owner</a> of the Kansas City Current, a team in the National Women’s Soccer League, which was the sport she excelled in through college, and she was a Sports Illustrated <a href="https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/brittany-mahomes-makes-her-sports-illustrated-swimsuit-debut-01hxt4v7tp05">swimsuit model</a> in May of this year. She and Patrick have two children and are currently expecting a third.
The <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/1724935800?hl=en-US&tz=300&geo=US&hl=en&q=brittany+mahomes,brittany+mahomes+trump&sni=3">biggest “Brittany Mahomes” search spike</a> of the past year was during the Super Bowl when people were ostensibly trying to figure out whether Patrick Mahomes had a wife and if she was hanging out with Taylor Swift (more on this in a bit). 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/gettyimages-2160725206.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,10.696771244586,100,78.606457510828" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="Patrick Mahomes and Brittany Mahomes at Wimbledon this year. | Karwai Tang/WireImage via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Karwai Tang/WireImage via Getty Images" />
For the most part, the name Brittany Mahomes is not one the average American gives a lot of thought to, and her political views would probably warrant even less consideration. She’s not a political scholar nor is she some kind of kingmaker. Prior to her online statements about “haters,” the <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/1724935800?hl=en-US&tz=300&geo=US&hl=en&q=brittany+mahomes,brittany+mahomes+trump&sni=3">American public wasn’t furiously Googling</a> “Brittany Mahomes loves Trump?” or “Brittany Mahomes Republican.” There’s a bit of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand effect</a> happening, where the more Mahomes doubles down, the more attention she draws to the kerfuffle. There’s possibly a timeline in which Mahomes lets the entire saga run its course and fade away as football season begins.
One thing to note is that her pro-Trump political stance appears to many to be at odds with her husband’s identity. Patrick is biracial, with a Black father and a white mother. And it would seem that Brittany’s liking that pro-Trump post, especially his bits about attacking critical race theory (an attack that would minimize the historical <a href="https://www.vox.com/22443822/critical-race-theory-controversy">Black American experience</a>) would be insensitive if not incongruent with her husband’s identity. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/364172/trump-nabj-black-voter-journalist-racist-kamala-harris-indian-american">Trump has recently attacked</a> Vice President Kamala Harris’s biracial ethnicity, claiming that she “turned” Black for political gain. Harris’s father is Jamaican.
Patrick hasn’t been open about who he’s voting for, but he has spoken up about police brutality and <a href="https://andscape.com/features/patrick-mahomes-saw-george-floyds-death-and-chiefs-quarterback-knew-he-couldnt-stay-on-the-sideline/">supported Black Lives Matter</a>. In 2020, he <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/watch-patrick-mahomes-and-other-nfl-stars-demand-the-nfl-condemn-racism-and-admit-wrong-in-silencing-players-from-peacefully-protesting-2020-06-05">urged the NFL</a> to denounce and separate itself from racism.
But more important than her husband and the reason everyone’s talking about Brittany at all is that she’s allegedly friends with Taylor Swift — the most famous person on the planet. 
So this is all because she’s friends with Taylor Swift? 
Pretty much! 
How long have they been friends? 
Swift and Mahomes seem to have formed their close bond after Swift started dating <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/9/25/23889682/taylor-swift-travis-kelces-date-nfl-chiefs-game">Travis Kelce</a>, a Chiefs tight end who plays with Patrick Mahomes. The two women likely cultivated their relationship during Chiefs games last year, when they <a href="https://www.today.com/popculture/taylor-swift-brittany-mahomes-rcna121662">were photographed</a> together multiple times at the VIP suites, even potentially wearing matching necklaces. It wasn’t long until they took their friendship on the road, with Taylor including Brittany on a <a href="https://www.eonline.com/photos/36639/taylor-swifts-nyc-night-out-with-selena-gomez-brittany-mahomes-more">girls’ night in NYC</a> with the rest of her squad.
Wait, what does Taylor have to say about Trump?
Swift has spoken up against Trump in the past, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2020/01/24/taylor-swift-politics-miss-americana-donald-trump">acknowledging in her 2020 documentary</a> Miss Americana that she regretted not speaking up about him and his policies during the 2016 election. Ahead of the 2020 election, <a href="https://x.com/taylorswift13/status/1266392274549776387">Swift tweeted</a> that Trump was cavorting with white supremacists and promised “we will vote you out in November.”
But ahead of the upcoming 2024 election, Swift has been less vocal about Trump and publicly more nonpartisan. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/taylor-swift-urges-282-million-instagram-followers-vote-super-tuesday-rcna141848">In March</a>, she urged her fans to vote for “the people who most represent YOU into power.” Kelce, her boyfriend, has appeared in Covid-19 vaccine and <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/restaurants/bud-light-boycott-movement-goes-after-taylor-swift-and-travis-kelce">Budweiser</a> commercials, <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/2023/4/12/23680135/bud-light-boycott-dylan-mulvaney-travis-tritt-trans">two targets</a> of right-wing protests.
At last year’s Super Bowl, Swift and Kelce found themselves in the middle of a kooky <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/politics/biden-tiktok-super-bowl.html">right-wing conspiracy theory</a> that President Joe Biden rigged the game in Kelce and Kansas City’s favor, all to get some of that sweet Swift attention. The gist: that Kelce and Swift were liberal, so Biden tilted the game in their favor. 
Yet, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/19/politics/donald-trump-taylor-swift-ai/index.html">Trump also recently posted an AI image</a> falsely suggesting he has the support of her fans. Swift has not <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/24/us/ai-content-laws-taylor-swift-trump/index.html">officially responded</a> to that “acceptance.” Still, Swift has yet to endorse a presidential candidate. In what’s likely to be a close election, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/swifties-kamala-harris-zoom/679637/">some of Swift’s biggest fans</a> are urging her to throw her support behind Harris.
Okay, so … Brittany Mahomes isn’t actually Taylor Swift, she’s just a friend. Why do her perceived politics matter?
Mahomes’s social media meltdown came at a peculiar time for megastar Swift. Mahomes and her husband spent the weekend with Taylor Swift at the singer’s Rhode Island estate on August 24. Swift was reportedly hosting a birthday party for pal Blake Lively that weekend. Lively has been having a difficult time in the press recently because of a <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/367451/blake-lively-it-ends-with-us-press-tour-controversy">feud with co-star Justin Baldoni</a> during the filming of their movie It Ends With Us.
Swift’s getaway weekends are famous for being luxurious and over the top, but also as invitations only her very best friends receive. Swift is known for picking and choosing her friends from the world of beautiful and notable people and then visibly hanging out with them. Ever since Swift’s 1989 tour, where her pals — ranging from Fifth Harmony to Gigi Hadid — joined her onstage, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/24134809/taylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-matty-healy-joe-alwyn">Swift’s friendships</a> with the hippest, smartest, kindest, and most beautiful women in pop culture have become a crucial part of her image. All these people who call Swift friends are culturally cool, which makes Swift culturally cool.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/gettyimages-1717057814.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,10.7460602225,100,78.507879555" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="Taylor Swift, Brittany Mahomes, and Blake Lively hanging out! One of these women may or may not be deeply into mass deportation! | Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images" />
At the same time, Swift’s friendships are the most human thing about her. They’re her way of signaling to the public that as different as she is from the rest of the population — a billionaire making hit music and selling all kinds of albums — she’s relatable as a good friend. Arguably, Swift’s friends have defined the singer almost as much as she’s defined herself. The Mahomes’ presence in Rhode Island would indicate that Brittany is indeed a bestie.
Now, not unlike how fans are trying to puzzle out the dynamic of Brittany’s relationship with her husband, Swifties are trying to figure out how Brittany’s politics figure into her friendship with Swift. Since the singer has been relatively quiet, they’re trying to get a read on Swift’s current feelings about Trump. Or, possibly, get a read on how much longer Brittany and Swift will remain friends. 
Swift’s friendships have always been a crucial and visible part of her image. And Brittany Mahomes may have just made a mark on that image that Taylor Swift didn’t agree to.
Update, September 6, 4:15 pm: This story, originally published August 29, has been updated multiple times, most recently with news that Mahomes and Swift sat separately at a Chiefs game on September 5. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Aja Romano</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The precedent-setting push to hold parents responsible for school shootings]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/policy/370539/apalachee-shooter-father-charged-crumbleys-colin-gray" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370539</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T19:52:49Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T20:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Criminal Justice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Gun Violence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[For a nation struggling to deal with an epidemic of mass shootings in a culture that seems dedicated to deprioritizing gun control, it was a hugely experimental case. But now, six months after the convictions in Michigan of first Jennifer and then James Crumbley, the parents of the Oxford High School shooter, it’s clear that […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A gray-haired man in prison stripes sits slumped at a table." data-caption="Colin Gray, 54, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, 14, sits in the Barrow County courthouse for his first appearance, on September 6, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. | Brynn Anderson/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Brynn Anderson/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2169789324.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Colin Gray, 54, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, 14, sits in the Barrow County courthouse for his first appearance, on September 6, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. | Brynn Anderson/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
For a nation struggling to deal with an epidemic of mass shootings in a culture that seems dedicated to deprioritizing gun control, it was a hugely experimental case.
But now, six months after the convictions in Michigan of first <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/verdict-in-for-jennifer-crumbley-mother-of-oxford-high-school-shooter/">Jennifer</a> and then <a href="https://apnews.com/article/oxford-high-school-shooting-james-crumbley-d13192e4057ec00836e4ce99c17bd375">James Crumbley</a>, the parents of the Oxford High School shooter, it’s clear that a precedent has been set for holding the parents of school shooters criminally responsible in extraordinary cases where negligence factors into gun violence.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation on Thursday <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-investigators-looking-answers-school-shooters-access-gun-motive-2024-09-05/">arrested Colin Gray</a>, the father of the alleged <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/370004/mass-shooting-prevention-behavioral-threat-assessment">Apalachee High School shooter</a>, on charges including two counts of second-degree murder. The move marks a continuation and arguable expansion of the movement begun in the Michigan case: an effort by law enforcement to hold parents responsible for gifting their child with a gun, especially those kids who have been experiencing violent urges and making online threats.
The September 4 shooting resulted in the deaths of two students and two teachers. At least nine other people were injured. Prior to the shooting, Gray’s son had reportedly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/05/suspected-shooter-georgia-school-shooting-apalachee-high/">struggled</a> with his mental health and had been “begging for help” for months, according to a statement his aunt gave the Washington Post. 
Gray’s son had been the subject of a 2023 tip to the FBI over shooting threats he allegedly made in a Discord server, using an account name that appeared to reference the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23310544/moms-demand-action-shannon-watts-gun-control-sandy-hook">Sandy Hook</a> school shooter. Police spoke to both father and son during the investigation. At the time, Gray had claimed his son, then 13, had no “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/apalachee-high-school-georgia-shooting.html">unfettered</a>” access to weapons; he seemed skeptical that his son was behind the threats despite police tracing the account that made them to an email his son allegedly owned. The allegation was eventually found to be unsubstantiated.
Despite this incident and despite having “knowledge he was a threat to himself and others,” just seven months after the FBI tip and investigation, Gray allegedly gave his son an AR-15-style rifle, according to Gray’s <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school-09-06-24#h_84015ae22e6921801926eda8a6f4678c">arrest warrant</a>. Sources close to the investigation told CNN Gray had <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school-09-06-24#h_adbca41ec4b74285deb938082540a669">admitted</a> to giving the gift as a holiday present. In Georgia, it’s <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-school-shooting-gun/">illegal</a> for a minor to buy a rifle but not illegal for them to possess one; had Gray not given his son a weapon, it likely would have impeded his son’s efforts to get one on his own.
Gray’s son was charged with four counts of felony murder and could receive additional charges. Gray faces <a href="https://apnews.com/article/georgia-high-school-shooting-c3c97267a4dfff64a59e1605e515c2f9">charges</a> of second-degree murder as well as involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. Father and son were arraigned in court together on Friday morning in Barrow County. Neither asked for bond.
If sentenced on the most serious charge of second-degree murder, Gray could be sentenced to between 10 and 30 years in prison; if convicted on every count, he could face up to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school-09-06-24#h_f7dd81373d23a1385b425ccec6e956e3">180 years</a> in prison. His son’s charges carry a mandatory sentence of life in prison, possibly without parole.
In both the Georgia and the Michigan cases, the alleged shooter’s parents ignored alarming warning signs and arguably enabled their son’s violence
In separate trials held earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley were each found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, after their son opened fire in the hallways of his school, Oxford High School, in Michigan on November 30, 2021 —  just hours after school administrators had summoned the Crumbleys to campus in order to alert them that their son seemed to be having violent fantasies. 
The similarities between the Grays and the Crumbleys are eerie. In both cases, the parents allegedly ignored their son’s deteriorating mental health as well as signs he was experiencing violent fantasies. In both cases, the parents gifted their son a gun despite clear warning signs, and despite it being illegal in both states for minors to purchase the kinds of weapons they received. In both cases, authorities found evidence after the shooting that the shooter had <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/oxford-shooter-ethan-crumbleys-chilling-journal-entries-texts-reveal-twisted-fantasies">kept writings</a> expressing <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school-09-06-24#h_f0a7f213fd18b1f19af90463a49c8047">violent ideation</a>.
Prosecutors had argued in the Michigan case that the Crumbleys, both gun enthusiasts, enabled their son to commit the shooting in three key ways: by ignoring what should have been warning signs regarding his mental health, by purchasing a firearm they intended for him to own even though possession of such a firearm by a minor is illegal in Michigan, and by failing to secure the gun away from him — even after school officials alerted them to the problem just hours before the shooting took place.
For <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/us/jennifer-crumbley-trial-oxford-shooting.html">months prior</a>, the Crumbleys’ son repeatedly asked his parents for help handling his mental health and showed signs of depression and mental illness. In texts sent to them, for example, he exhibited growing paranoia and complained multiple times of seeing ghosts or demons in their home when he was alone. The Crumbleys appeared to <a href="https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2024/01/30/jennifer-crumbley-ethan-text-messages-horror-movies/72409011007/">ignore</a> or dismiss his concerns.
Four days before the shooting, James Crumbley took his son with him to buy a gun that prosecutors argued they intended for their son’s personal use, despite his being under 18, the legal age for gun ownership in Michigan. 
Two days before the shooting, after their son was disciplined at school for looking up bullets, his mother <a href="https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/oxford-high-school-shooting-ethan-crumbleys-phone-records-show-mother-ignored-texts-about-demons-ghosts">joked</a> that he needed to “learn not.to.get caught.” The morning of the shooting, a teacher found disturbing violent gun fantasies the son had drawn, and the school summoned the parents for a conference to discuss their son’s concerning behavior.
Despite these indicators, neither James nor Jennifer alerted the school to the fact they had just purchased a gun similar to the one shown in the drawing. They left him at the school and went back to their jobs, without returning home to make sure the gun was still secured. School administrators neglected to search the son’s backpack, where the gun was still hidden. 
A few hours after this meeting, the Crumbleys received reports of the school shooting and immediately began frantically messaging him. “He must be the shooter,” Crumbley <a href="https://www.kcra.com/article/jennifer-crumbley-mom-michigan-school-shooting-suspect-boss-text-messages/39027441">texted</a> her boss. 
By then, however, it was too late to intervene. 
In April, the Crumbleys were each <a href="https://apnews.com/article/james-crumbley-jennifer-crumbley-oxford-school-shooting-e5888f615c76c3b26153c34dc36d5436">sentenced</a> to 10–15 years for their roles in the crime. Their son, who was 15 years old at the time of the shooting, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. 
At the time, the facts that led to the Crumbleys’ precedent-setting convictions seemed likely to limit that precedent’s reach. The case was so extraordinary that the possibility of it being repeated seemed rare. Another case, though, has emerged with the same hallmarks of parental negligence, arguable neglect, and a child whose alleged violent ideation went unchecked. There were additional stressors on Colin Gray’s son: The Grays were <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school-09-06-24#h_f0a7f213fd18b1f19af90463a49c8047">in contact</a> with local child protection services and had undergone a messy divorce prior to the shooting; his mother has an <a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/school-shooting-suspects-mother-has-criminal-record-going-back-17-years/VZT5EIUGRJFM5OUQTW65MLEFMA/">extensive criminal record</a> and, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/05/us/colt-gray-suspect-georgia-shooter/index.html">according to</a> relatives, his father may have been emotionally and verbally abusive.
The cases highlight the complex factors that lead to teen violence and the frustrating weaknesses of the systems that are meant to prevent it within a permissive gun culture. In the Crumbleys’ case, the school district failed to prevent the shooting, in part because they failed to search the shooter’s backpack to locate the gun he had with him the day of the shooting, but in large part due to his parents’ unconcern despite the school’s repeated attempts to alert them to their son’s escalating behavior. In the Grays’ case, law enforcement was unable to do anything about the online threats other than talking to Gray and his son — a conversation that apparently left no serious impression on the father, given his subsequent gun gift.
In sentencing the Crumbleys in April, Michigan Judge Cheryl Matthews <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/michigan-judge-hopes-sentences-for-james-and-jennifer-crumbley-parents-of-oxford-shooter-will-prevent-future-school-shootings/">stated</a> she hoped the lengthy sentences they were given would prove a deterrent to future school shootings. While it’s impossible to know how many families heeded this warning and stepped in before their child escalated to violence, we now have yet one more example of a worst-case scenario: A father who didn’t just dismiss but allegedly enabled his son’s gun fixation.
The decision to hold Gray responsible, not just for involuntary manslaughter but for second-degree murder, arguably reflects Georgia prosecutors’ belief that this shooting could have been prevented had the alleged shooter’s parents kept the weapon out of his hands. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been <a href="https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/">384 mass shootings</a> in the US so far in 2024, a total that seems unthinkable — but a number that highlights the urgent need for parents to pay attention to warning signs before they escalate. Hopefully, in the wake of Gray’s arrest, even more parents will take notice.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Zack Beauchamp</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Conservatives are shocked — shocked! — that Tucker Carlson is soft on Nazis]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/370519/tucker-carlson-holocaust-nazi-churchill-darryl-cooper-martyrmade" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370519</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T19:00:18Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T18:20:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[On Monday, Tucker Carlson hosted an amateur historian named Darryl Cooper on his show to discuss the history of World War II. The result was an extended exercise in Nazi sympathizing with little pushback from Carlson, who called Cooper (who tweets under the handle @martyrmade) “the most important popular historian working in the United States […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Tucker Carlson speaks on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2162600840.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Tucker Carlson speaks on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.</figcaption>
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On Monday, Tucker Carlson hosted an amateur historian named Darryl Cooper on his show to discuss the history of World War II. The result was <a href="https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1830652074746409246">an extended exercise in Nazi sympathizing</a> with little pushback from Carlson, who called Cooper (who tweets under the handle @martyrmade) “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
The interview poses a major test to the Republican Party. Though Carlson has been off of Fox News for over a year, broadcasting on Twitter/X instead, he remains influential in the party. He delivered <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-tucker-carlson-speaks-at-2024-republican-national-convention">a primetime speech at the 2024 RNC</a> and reportedly played <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/183888/tucker-carlson-elon-musk-secretly-lobbied-trump-jd-vance">a major role</a> in the JD Vance vice presidential pick. Now that he’s crossing the reddest of red lines — actively apologizing for Adolf Hitler — can the party cut ties?
The answer has been a resounding no. The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson.
Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/news/jd-vance-stands-by-tucker-carlson-amid-hitler-and-holocaust-whitewash/">refused to denounce Carlson</a> after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/politics/jd-vance-tucker-carlson-darryl-cooper.html">saying in a statement</a>  that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source <a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/p/jd-vance-has-become-trumps-human">told the Bulwark</a> that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.)
Nobody should be surprised the current GOP is failing this particular test. This is the party that renominated Trump after all that he’s done; if there are red lines left for them, it’s not obvious what they are.
What’s more interesting is the reaction among conservative-aligned commentators and intellectuals — many of whom are expressing shock at what Tucker had done.
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” radio host <a href="https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1830978780007145967">Erick Erickson wrote on X</a>. The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-courage-of-tucker-carlson/">wrote a tribute to his “friend” Carlson</a> after his April 2023 firing from Fox, tweeted <a href="https://x.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1831366109192450559">on Wednesday</a> that he “can’t get over … the fact that Tucker saw fit to lend [Cooper] an uncritical platform.” (Elon Musk tweeted the Carlson interview approvingly — only to delete the tweet later.)
Such expressions of shock feel absurd. For Carlson’s entire run on Fox News, liberals had been warning that his show had become a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html">vector for racist and neo-Nazi ideas</a> — while people on the right dismissed those concerns as the woke PC police trying to silence a prominent conservative voice. 
The liberal position has now been proven correct — yet again. The only question is whether conservatives will learn a broader lesson about how far-right ideas infiltrate their movement — with their own tacit support.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why liberals got Carlson right — and conservatives got him so wrong</h2>
When Tucker Carlson got a primetime spot on Fox News back in 2016, he immediately developed a fan base among the neo-Nazi right. They saw his bombastic style and his willingness to talk about race and immigration in ways many conservatives shied away from as a vehicle for bringing their own ideas into the mainstream.
“Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.” 
Carlson did quite a bit to merit this fan base. He worked assiduously to <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/white-supremacists-applaud-tucker-carlsons-promotion-replacement-theory">mainstream the idea of the “great replacement theory,</a>” the white supremacist idea that mass immigration is a secret elite plot to replace the native-born whites with minorities. He took white nationalists’ false ideas about a “white genocide” in South Africa and brought it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/23/white-farmers-trump-south-africa-tucker-carlson-far-right-influence">to then-President Donald Trump’s attention</a>. He claimed that immigrants were making America “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/18/tucker-carlson-immigrants-poorer-dirtier-advertisers-pull-out">dirtier</a>” and fearmongered about the alleged threat to America from “<a href="https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/887115275249885184?lang=en">gypsies</a>.”
The link between Carlson and the radical right was quite direct. In 2020, his head writer Blake Neff resigned after <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/media/tucker-carlson-writer-blake-neff/index.html">CNN reported</a> that he had made racist and sexist comments on an anonymous web forum. In 2022, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s segments were at times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html">directly inspired</a> by stories published by racist and neo-Nazi websites.
Carlson got away with all of this by employing <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/5/4/23709550/tucker-carlson-fox-news-white-men-text-racism">a very clever rhetorical trick</a>. He would recast white nationalist talking points in nominally colorblind terms — giving his audience permission to think racist thoughts while still thinking of themselves as not racist.
When he talked about the “great replacement,” for example, he would always shy away from saying the problem was the race of the immigrants. Rather, it was they were pliant voters for the Democratic Party who would undermine everything that “legacy Americans” held dear.
“Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the ‘white replacement theory’? No, no, this is a voting rights question,” <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carlson-laughs-at-hysterical-critics-of-his-replacement-comments-rails-against-demographic-change-on-his-show/">Carlson said</a> in a 2021 segment. “I have less political power because they’re importing a brand-new electorate.”
This move provided just enough plausible deniability that both Fox and the broader conservative movement could hail Carlson as one of their brightest stars: not merely one commentator, but the highest-rated host on cable news. It wasn’t until texts surfaced in 2023 showing Tucker himself engaging in naked racism — <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/5/4/23709550/tucker-carlson-fox-news-white-men-text-racism">praising the superior honor of “white men”</a> — that Fox finally felt the need to cut ties.
Liberals easily saw through the charade: They knew who Carlson was and what he was doing the whole time. But conservatives took Carlson’s professions of innocence seriously, at least in public. They said that he was merely skewering the pieties of the left, not engaging in thinly veiled white supremacist apologia.
There’s no better example of this than <a href="https://www.jns.org/tucker-carlson-and-the-turning-point-for-right-wing-antisemitism/">a recent column by Jonathan Tobin</a>, the former executive editor of Commentary magazine and current editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate. 
In the column, Tobin expresses horror with Carlson’s interview with Cooper — saying it is “now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure.”
Yet in the very same column, he praises Carlson’s show on Fox as emblematic of mainstream conservative opinion:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-none is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
During his seven-year run on Fox, Carlson built an enormous following. It might well be said that during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, he became the tribune of contemporary conservatism with his articulate critique of the moral panic that swept the nation in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the “mostly peaceful” riots that ensued. Though his soft spot for tinfoil-hat controversies was no secret, such as his fascination with UFO conspiracy theories, his main focus was on the issues that most conservatives and many centrists cared about, such as illegal immigration, critical race theory indoctrination, and corrupt liberal elites that seek to squelch opposition to their continued hold on power.
</blockquote>
Despite everything, Tobin is still completely blind to what Carlson was doing on Fox. 
He seems to believe that Fox was effectively concealing Tucker’s true views, when in actuality it was helping him broadcast them in a slightly coded manner. This was so obvious that Carlson’s neo-Nazi fans openly bragged about it, and had been doing so since 2016. And yet Tobin singles out Carlson’s treatment of race and immigration — of all subjects! — as the areas where his Fox show best represented mainstream conservatism.
This is the problem in a nutshell. On the right today, you can say something extremely racist and get away with it so long as you say “I’m not a racist!” in the following sentence. Liberals have long pointed out the problem with this maneuver; in response, conservatives have accused them of acting like woke scolds.
Carlson’s descent into Holocaust revisionism has proven the problem with this permission structure. The question is whether any others will learn their lessons — or whether, like Tobin, they will continue to engage in a form of thinking that allows their movement to be penetrated by bigots.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Constance Grady</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The hidden reason why Beetlejuice was a massive hit]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/370482/beetlejuice-tim-burton-winona-ryder-michael-keaton" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370482</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T21:06:11Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T16:30:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Movies" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[There’s a mad, intoxicating hope embedded in this weekend’s release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It sees the return of old stars Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara, along with the rising new talent Jenna Ortega. Will another old familiar face come along with them? Is it possible for us to finally get back to the […]]]></summary>
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<![CDATA[
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<img alt="" data-caption="Michael Keaton returns as the ghost with the most in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. | Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc." data-portal-copyright="Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc." data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/img2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Michael Keaton returns as the ghost with the most in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. | Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.</figcaption>
</figure>
There’s a mad, intoxicating hope embedded in this weekend’s release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It sees the return of old stars Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara, along with the rising new talent Jenna Ortega. Will another old familiar face come along with them? Is it possible for us to finally get back to the old Tim Burton? 
The Tim Burton who directed the first Beetlejuice back in 1988. The Tim Burton who made Edward Scissorhands in 1990 and Batman Returns in 1992 and dreamed up the characters of 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. 
Tim Burton before CGI. Tim Burton before all those half-hearted <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/28/18282877/dumbo-review-tim-burton-disney">Disney</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_(2010_film)">remakes</a>. Tim Burton before his movies all started to look and feel sort of the same. Tim Burton back when he was regularly delivering movies that didn’t look quite like anything you’d ever seen before. The impossible dream of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it can take us back to before the wild rise and meandering downturn of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/17/18285309/tim-burton-films-visual-style-aesthetic-disney-explained">one of Hollywood’s most visually distinctive directors</a>.
In part, that’s because the original Beetlejuice is such a perfect encapsulation of all the little grace notes that used to make Burton’s work so exceptional — and all the grace notes Burton began to abandon as his movies became ever more schticky and self-indulgent. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>What made the best Burton movies sing was the play between the normal and the paranormal, the grounding in the real as events got decidedly unreal</blockquote></figure>
I’m not talking here about the stuff that Burton built his name on. Burton is best known for his love of the macabre and the whimsical, the aesthetic he borrowed from <a href="https://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/">Edward Gorey</a> by way of the German expressionists. His characters are forever daubed in white pancake makeup and wearing black-and-white striped stockings while an eerie, twinkly Danny Elfman tune plinks away in the background. Frequently, his movies play with the tropes of familiar children’s stories gone ghoulishly awry.
He did all that while he was making Beetlejuice, and he did it afterward, and he’s still doing it now. Those are the features that make Burton films distinct, but they’re not the ones that used to make Burton films great.
What made the best Burton movies sing was the play between the normal and the paranormal, the grounding in the real as events got decidedly unreal. He used to play that game better than anyone else — and we can see his moves with exceptional clarity in the first Beetlejuice.
The 1988 Beetlejuice opens with a deceptively charming tracking shot and a clever visual trick. The camera pans over a panorama of a bucolic small New England town: a whitewashed church steeple, a village green, an idyllic Main Street — and then a monstrously huge spider, crawling across the frame.
When the camera draws back, it reveals that the spider wasn’t that big after all, but normal sized. It was always the village that was tiny. What we’ve been looking at is a fiendishly detailed tiny-scale model.
After that, whenever you see the little town, you can’t avoid the suspicion that what you’re seeing is still a model. Whenever you see the model, you can’t avoid recalling how clearly it resembles the real thing. The question of what’s real and what’s only pretend becomes blurry, impossible to resolve. All movie long, Burton tap-dances along the fuzzy line between the two and flourishes there.
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div><div><iframe title="Beetlejuice (4/9) Movie CLIP - We're Simpatico (1988) HD" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Io0PZTAcBes?rel=0" allowfullscreen allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share;"></iframe></div></div>
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In the film, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play Adam and Barbara, a nice, normal suburban couple who have had the misfortune to unexpectedly become ghosts. When the monstrously citified Deetzes move in (including Catherine O’Hara as the stepmother and a startlingly young Winona Ryder as goth teen Lydia), Adam and Barbara hire the devilish poltergeist Beetlejuice, played by a diabolical Michael Keaton, to drive the living from their old home. 
All these years later, what we mostly remember are the two central performances. Keaton, with his nervey stream of polyvocal patter, made for an iconic Beetlejuice, as he goes about trying to exorcise the Deetzes from Adam and Barbara’s house. Ryder launched her career with her turn as veil-draped and monocle-wearing Lydia, somberly intoning, “My whole life is one big dark room.” 
But part of what gives Beetlejuice and Lydia their spiky charisma is the way they play off Adam and Barbara, who are the straight men to Keaton’s and Ryder’s wild cards. They are restrained and commonsensical where Keaton and Ryder are exuberant and irrational. They make the undomesticated ferocity of Keaton and Ryder legible. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>You need both of them as your point of view to get the feel of the bonkers Burtonian land of the dead, where the kitchen door leads to a monster-infested desert</blockquote></figure>
You need Davis as Barbara saying, “I like that little girl,” to see that Lydia is a sweet and vulnerable teenager hiding under the spiky black bangs and swathes of black clothes. You need Baldwin as Adam blustering, “What are your qualifications?” at Beetlejuice to really feel Keaton’s mercurial aggression. You need both of them as your point of view to get the feel of the bonkers Burtonian land of the dead, where the kitchen door leads to a monster-infested desert and a green-skinned corpse serves as the receptionist and rolls her eyes when you ask a question.
Barbara and Adam are mundane ghosts. Lydia is a real girl as fantastically gothic as ghostly Beetlejuice. The question of which of them represents the real and which of them represents the unreal — which of them is the model village and which is the real thing — is one the movie never bothers to answer. The play between the two possibilities is the fun of the thing.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/wynona.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,11.145955232211,100,77.708089535577" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="Winona Ryder playing the fantastically gothic Lydia. | © Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection" data-portal-copyright="© Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection" />
Burton plays with a similar duality in most of his best films. Tortured Edward Scissorhands comes to life for us because of the regular suburban mom who decides to take him home. The sexiest scenes between Batman and Catwoman in Batman Returns come when they’re both disguised in their cover identities as civilians Selena and Bruce, making us wonder which identity is real. 
Yet Burton started turning his back on such play years ago. In the plentiful adaptations and remakes he’s made lately, you can see him regularly walking right by the possibility of setting his outré gothic monsters against characters who might bring a more everyday perspective into the film.
In 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (perhaps his first truly awful film), Burton left regular kid Charlie unexplored to zoom in on the mannered eccentricities of his Willy Wonka, played by Johnny Depp. In his 2007 adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (a decent enough outing for mid-career Burton), he chose to depart from the tradition that usually sees coarse and sunny Mrs. Lovett playing the yin to Sweeney Todd’s dour yang. Instead, in Burton’s version of the story, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd are two peas in a black-and-white-striped pod. If there’s any tension between the pair, it doesn’t come across in either their aesthetic or their performances.
Little by little, year after year, Burton’s stories seem to have floated away into a whimsical gothic fantasia, untethered to any sense of reality, where everything feels equally impossible and so its impossibility never becomes interesting. As his budgets have gotten bigger and CGI has grown ever-more ubiquitous, his aesthetic has made the same journey as his stories. 
Beetlejuice’s monsters are all puppets and practical effects from the cutting edge of 1988, with a tactile, familiar kitsch that adds to the cozy spookiness of the film. By 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, Burton was able to build entire worlds in CGI. It created the unsettling effect that his movies were populated by actors standing in complete isolation before green screens, struggling to emote a sense of wonder or terror in front of marvels that remained invisible to them.
Burton’s last feature film was the live-action remake of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/28/18282877/dumbo-review-tim-burton-disney">Dumbo</a> in 2019. Critics generally felt the movie was solid at best (<a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dumbo_2019">it’s got a 46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes</a>), but some of them also saw a bizarre sort of allegory in the film. The movie, which saw a circus of scrappy underdog freaks sell out to become a joyless sideshow at a slick amusement park, felt oddly like an apology for the last 15 years of Burton’s career.
“The drive to accumulate money, when it takes over the drive to make great art or entertainment, kills creativity and crowds out humanity and decency, Dumbo says,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/28/18282877/dumbo-review-tim-burton-disney">wrote Alissa Wilkinson in her review</a> for Vox. “Turning simple joy and wonder into pure eye-popping extravaganza can only end in emptiness, in people losing their jobs and being trapped in avarice.”
Tim Burton seems to know that his work has suffered for a while. The question proffered by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is whether he’s taken the opportunity to learn from what he used to do really, really well — and whether the old Tim Burton will, like Beetlejuice, rise triumphantly up from his grave once again.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Nicole Narea</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Sean Collins</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Will Harris’s massive fundraising spree actually help her?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/364964/harris-trump-fundraising-donations-campaign-2024" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=364964</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T15:35:22Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T15:35:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="2024 Elections" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Campaign Finance" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Kamala Harris" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[On Friday Vice President Kamala Harris announced a massive August fundraising haul of $361 million, one that is nearly three times the $130 million former President Donald Trump reported. August was the first full month that Harris was at the top of the ticket, and it marked a continuation of a dominant fundraising performance Harris […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Kamala Harris stands on a raised platform, wearing a powder-blue pantsuit and smiling. Behind her, a crowd of supporters in yellow shirts hold blue signs reading “KAMALA.”" data-caption="US Vice President Kamala Harris greets the crowd during her presidential campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 30, 2024. | Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/gettyimages-2163962508.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>US Vice President Kamala Harris greets the crowd during her presidential campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 30, 2024. | Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images</figcaption>
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On Friday Vice President Kamala Harris announced a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-has-404-million-spend-strong-august-fundraising-puts-her-ahead-trump-2024-09-06/">massive August fundraising haul</a> of $361 million, one that is nearly three times the $130 million former President Donald Trump reported. 
August was the first full month that Harris was at the top of the ticket, and it marked a continuation of a dominant fundraising performance Harris began immediately after <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/361827/biden-drops-out-2024-kamala-convention">President Joe Biden stepped aside</a> as Democrats’ presidential nominee. In the first two-and-a-half weeks of her campaign, she raised over <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/364964/harris-trump-fundraising-donations-campaign-2024">$310 million</a>.
Harris’s strong fundraising has completely reversed the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-fundraising-biden-second-quarter-ed2a070b3e513277dc9ab0f57d52b48a">fundraising advantage</a> Trump once had on Biden. Democrats say they now have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-has-404-million-spend-strong-august-fundraising-puts-her-ahead-trump-2024-09-06/">$404 million in the bank</a>, compared to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-has-404-million-spend-strong-august-fundraising-puts-her-ahead-trump-2024-09-06/">Republicans’ $295 million</a>, and they are using it to try to expand the number of states their party <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/369735/2024-election-biden-harris-forecast-approval-undecided-spending">is competitive in</a> at both the <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/03/harris-campaign-down-ballot-spending-00177075">presidential and congressional levels</a>.
Harris’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/364964/harris-trump-fundraising-donations-campaign-2024">fundraising</a> the previous month was notable for its mix of small and large dollar donations, and for how much she seemed to activate new donors: <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-first-week-of-campaigning-harris-raised-200m-and-signed-up-170000-volunteers">According to the campaign</a>, 66 percent of donations came from first-time contributors. The <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-first-week-of-campaigning-harris-raised-200m-and-signed-up-170000-volunteers">deadline for full financial filings</a> for August is September 20, and those will reveal whether Harris was able to maintain that breadth of giving.
All told, Harris and Trump are expected to have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-has-404-million-spend-strong-august-fundraising-puts-her-ahead-trump-2024-09-06/">spent more than $1 billion</a> by the time the election is over. It’s a lot of money — but how much will it actually affect results?
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It’s more expensive than ever to run for president</h2>
Presidential campaigns are raising ever greater amounts of money because the amount required to run a successful campaign ballooned following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in<a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained"> Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</a>. That decision allowed corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections, often via super PACs that operate independently of a campaign. 2020 marked the<a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/most-expensive-election-ever"> most expensive presidential election</a> in US history.
“Presidential elections are incredibly expensive — at this point, a billion-dollar enterprise,” said Dan Weiner, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “You need enough money to mount a viable campaign.”
That money goes toward supporting staffers and field offices across the country; ads across television, newspapers, radio, and social platforms; polling and research; as well as voter outreach through rallies, door-knocking, and more.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/TdS7m-presidential-campaigns-are-more-expensive-than-ever-2.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,17.668592645126,100,64.662814709747" alt="Chart showing a sharp increase in presidential campaign spending from 2016 to 2020." title="Chart showing a sharp increase in presidential campaign spending from 2016 to 2020." data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Nicole Narea/Vox" />
Both grassroots support and big donors are critical to funding a presidential campaign. Citizens United gave the wealthiest donors outsize influence. But grassroots donations are a sign of enthusiasm: They don’t necessarily translate 1-to-1 to votes, but they also function as a signal to big donors about which candidates are the most viable.
Both Harris and Trump will need to keep the money flowing as they enter the final stretch of campaign season, said Brendan Glavin, deputy director of research for OpenSecrets. Now is when candidates typically travel more often to battleground states, hold more rallies, fine-tune their strategies through more frequent polling, and ramp up advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts.
While Harris’s unusual rise, the parties’ conventions, and the announcements of vice presidential candidates may have helped gin up donations, previous campaigns suggest the most lucrative days might actually still be ahead. There are nine weeks until Election Day, and it was in the 10 weeks before the 2020 election that Biden brought in about 60 percent of his overall fundraising haul.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Big fundraising hauls are necessary — but not sufficient — to win</h2>
The issue with focusing too much on fundraising though, is that money isn’t everything. While the victor in presidential contests often has the fundraising edge, that isn’t always the case. Piles of cash ultimately can’t compensate for poor spending decisions or bad candidates.
Biden outspent Trump in 2020. But Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and Democratic nominee in 2016, far outspent Trump yet still lost the election. Her campaign spent heavily in states she didn’t need to win, including Arizona, but neglected Rust Belt states that ultimately cost her the election. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/Vox_Presidential_Campaign_FundraisingAdvantage_02.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,17.883846578459,100,64.232306843082" alt="A chart of the last 5 presidential races, showing the fundraising totals for each candidate. The successful presidential campaigns often had a fundraising advantage." title="A chart of the last 5 presidential races, showing the fundraising totals for each candidate. The successful presidential campaigns often had a fundraising advantage." data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" />
And then there are the well-funded campaigns that never really got off the ground because of a weak candidate.
“Put lipstick on a pig, it’s still not going to be a good candidate,” said Ray La Raja, associate director of the UMass poll and a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “No amount of money is going to make a bad candidate really good.”
Take former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s four-month Democratic primary campaign in 2020 that cost him <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-bloomberg-spent-billion-month-presidential-campaign-filing/story?id=70252435">$1 billion</a> of his own money. “In the end, primary voters did not respond to him,” Glavin said. “He had the money. He got his name out there. But he didn’t get the response.”
Campaigns like Clinton’s and Bloomberg’s show that money is only one piece of the puzzle. Research suggests that challengers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/upshot/a-campaign-dollars-power-is-more-valuable-to-a-challenger.html">benefit more from campaign spending</a> than incumbents, and that for any candidate, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/04/18/1245495936/do-early-campaign-ads-really-make-a-diffence-in-the-presidential-election">early spending is more effective than late spending</a>. Incumbents don’t benefit as much from campaign spending because voters often already know who they are and there isn’t as much room to change their minds about that. The research suggests that the more incumbents spend, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/upshot/a-campaign-dollars-power-is-more-valuable-to-a-challenger.html">more likely they are to lose</a> — the spending itself is usually a signal that they are in hot water.
Harris has some advantages of an incumbent in that she has Biden’s campaign apparatus behind her, but in other respects, she fits the profile of a challenger. 
“That marginal dollar is worth more to a challenger. And she’s more in that role, because let’s face it: Most people don’t know what the vice president does,” La Raja said.
Harris used <a href="https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/368489/kamala-harris-dnc-speech-takeaways-analysis">August’s Democratic National Convention</a> to introduce herself — and her running mate <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/368150/tim-walz-dnc-speech-accept-nomination">Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz</a> — to the American public. She is newly in the spotlight and as she’s traveled the US campaigning, has tried to use that fact to shape her image in a way that a typical candidate might not. Her campaign is spending heavily on ads right now, announcing plans to <a href="https://apnews.com/article/2024-presidential-election-ads-b878e812e683da6b341ecc11a4d8b8d1">spend $370 million</a> on paid media between Labor Day and Election Day. That follows the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/kamala-harris-ad-buy-2024-trump">$50 million</a> the campaign spent on ads in the lead up to the Democratic National Convention.
“It’s a well-known dynamic in presidential races that you try to define your opponent early,” Weiner said. “I have no doubt that what the Harris campaign wants to do — and also part of the reason why it was so critical that they raise so much money so quickly — is to define her before the Trump campaign can define her.”
Americans may have somewhat forgotten what the Trump presidency was like, but as a former president, Trump is already fairly well-defined to voters and fits the profile of an incumbent more readily than a challenger. As a result, his strategy has been to leverage established recognition — and go on offense against Harris with a <a href="https://punchbowl.news/article/election-2024/gop-kamala-harris-2024-ads/">slate of attack ads</a>.
But there are diminishing returns on ad spending, since the media gives presidential candidates so much free coverage. Trump may not have spent as much as Clinton in 2016, but he certainly benefited from the media limelight that year — and so did the media, which experienced a “<a href="https://www.axios.com/2020/11/24/washington-post-new-york-times-subscriptions">Trump bump</a>” in viewers and readers. This year, Trump has successfully fundraised off of big media events, like a conviction or the assassination attempt against him. So, too, has Harris after Biden dropped out.
Their fundraising — and electoral — success will likely depend on whether that momentum lasts. Also, at a certain point, “money has diminishing returns,” Weiner said. There are only so many ads a candidate can buy, doors they can knock on and rallies they can hold to make their best case to voters. Once a candidate and their positions are well-understood, they can only hope that voters prefer them. 
“If you’ve raised enough money, raising even more money doesn’t help you that much,” he said.
Update, September 6, 2024, 11:35 am: This piece was originally published on August 7 and has been updated to reflect Harris’s and Trump’s August fundraising totals.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Marin Cogan</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How to stop mass shootings before they start]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/370004/mass-shooting-prevention-behavioral-threat-assessment" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370004</id>
<updated>2024-09-06T19:17:41Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T13:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Criminal Justice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Gun Violence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[At least four people were killed, and nine were injured after a shooter opened fire at Apalachee High School in northern Georgia on Wednesday, the latest in more than 250 mass shootings that have taken place in the US in 2024. By Friday, law enforcement had charged both a 14-year-old boy and his father in […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="On a bright sunny day, cars and people mass outside a tan brick school building, with law enforcement vehicles and officers visible." data-caption="Students wait to be picked up by their parents after a shooting at Apalachee High School on September 4, 2024. | Megan Varner/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Megan Varner/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2169578122.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Students wait to be picked up by their parents after a shooting at Apalachee High School on September 4, 2024. | Megan Varner/Getty Images</figcaption>
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At least four people were killed, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/04/us/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school">nine were injured</a> after a shooter opened fire at Apalachee High School in northern Georgia on Wednesday, the latest in <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/us-mass-shooting-data-gun-violence-archive/">more than 250 mass shootings that have taken place</a> in the US in 2024. 
By Friday, law enforcement had charged both a 14-year-old boy <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/09/05/colin-gray-arrested-father-georgia-school-shooting-suspect/" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/09/05/colin-gray-arrested-father-georgia-school-shooting-suspect/">and his father</a> in connection with the shooting. The suspect, police say, used an “AR-platform-style weapon” similar to the types of guns commonly used by mass shooters. The FBI revealed that law enforcement had interviewed the suspect and his dad in 2023 over school shooting threats the boy had allegedly made on the social media platform Discord but were unable to substantiate them or take further action. Sometime after that, law enforcement sources say,<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-shooting-suspect-showed-interest-parkland-mass-shooting-offici-rcna169704" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-shooting-suspect-showed-interest-parkland-mass-shooting-offici-rcna169704"> the boy’s father gave him an AR-15 style rifle</a> as a gift. The boy’s extended family has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/05/suspected-shooter-georgia-school-shooting-apalachee-high/" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/05/suspected-shooter-georgia-school-shooting-apalachee-high/">since revealed</a> that the alleged shooter was experiencing family and mental health issues in the months leading up to the attack, and that they had tried to get him help, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the attack.
The details of the Barrow County shooting are familiar. The fact that law enforcement knew of alleged threats from the shooter over a year ago and was still unable to stop the shooting or prevent the suspect from getting a gun points to how difficult it is to prevent mass shootings. And while mass shootings make up <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000524/mass-shootings-rare">just a small percentage of the large number of gun deaths</a> that happen in the United States every year, they are the most attention-grabbing and obvious manifestation of the country’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/353878/new-guns-us-violence">unique problem of too many guns</a>.
The problem of mass shootings will likely be with us as long as we have more guns than people.
“There’s no easy solution,” says <a href="https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/faculty-research/profiles/nagin-daniel">Daniel Nagin</a>, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. 
The ubiquity of guns makes preventing a mass shooting extremely difficult. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to prevent mass shootings. “One of the big stereotypes, or myths we have about mass shootings in general, is that perpetrators who do this go crazy and just snap,” says Mark Follman, author of the book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/trigger-points-mark-follman?variant=39402950131746">Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America</a>, and <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/author/mark-follman/">an editor</a> at Mother Jones. “That’s not the reality at all of how this works.”
There are two broad approaches that can help mitigate the threat of mass shootings: proactive efforts to identify threats in advance, performed by behavioral threat assessment teams; and targeted gun regulations like red flag laws and bump stock bans.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP3351424055" width="100%"></iframe>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Identifying the threat</h2>
Mass shootings are almost never random, according to Follman. The vast majority of mass shooters don’t spontaneously decide to pull out a gun in public and start shooting. Learning to identify who’s most at risk for committing mass violence, identifying warning signs and finding ways to intervene, can save lives. 
That’s what <a href="https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-safety-and-crisis/systems-level-prevention/threat-assessment-at-school/behavior-threat-assessment-and-management-(btam)-best-practice-considerations-for-k%E2%80%9312-schools">behavioral threat assessment teams</a> do. The process and composition of a team can differ in various contexts, <a href="https://ready.uic.edu/btat/">including educational</a>, <a href="https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/threat-assessment-teams-workplace-and-school-violence-prevention">corporate, and law enforcement</a> settings, but the general idea is the same: the teams receive information from community members about behavior that is concerning. The teams <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/making-prevention-a-reality.pdf/view">investigate that behavior</a> to determine whether someone is at risk of committing mass violence. Then, depending on their conclusion, the team finds a way to reach out to the person and try to get them support before they commit an act of violence. That contact can happen at the person’s home, but it might also happen at work, school, or another community setting.
It’s difficult to prove the efficacy of these interventions, because there’s no way to quantify the number of mass shootings that didn’t happen because someone got help. But experts and mental health advocates say the work has prevented people from carrying out violence, and Follman <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/mass-shootings-threat-assessment-shooter-fbi-columbine/">has reported on cases</a> where law enforcement believes people were <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_stark_i_was_almost_a_school_shooter/transcript?subtitle=en">successfully diverted</a> from committing acts of mass violence.
“It’s very possible. There are many examples of successful threat cases where the case subjects have been diverted away from, in many cases, often very serious and developed plans for committing violence,” Follman says.
Researchers have identified <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/27/stopping-mass-shooters-q-a-00035762">several circumstances</a> shared by people who commit mass violence. They are almost (but not always) men, many of whom have suffered from some form of early childhood trauma or abuse. Most are suicidal. “The number of perpetrators who attempted suicide beforehand was astounding,” <a href="https://www.hamline.edu/faculty-staff/jillian-peterson">Jillian Peterson</a>, a professor at Hamline University and co-founder of The Violence Project, a database of every mass shooting in the US since 1966, <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/mass-shootings">has said</a>.
Peterson, who with her colleagues interviewed the small number of mass shooters who survived after committing violence, came to an important realization: that “nobody goes in planning to come out.” That insight is significant, she says, because it means that some of the same tools mental health professionals have to prevent suicides can help prevent mass shootings as well.
But while those are common factors among mass shooters, they aren’t the most helpful at determining risk — the vast majority of men, and people who are suicidal, don’t become mass shooters. Other behavioral indicators help investigators better identify who is most likely to commit mass violence. 
Among the most important is a history of domestic violence. In 2021, <a href="https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00330-0">researchers found</a> that a majority of mass shootings were domestic violence-related. “A substantial fraction of mass shootings are not these killings of strangers in public places, but they occur in ongoing domestic disputes,” says Nagin. 
<a href="https://health.ucdavis.edu/vprp/ourteam/index.html">Garen Wintemute</a>, the founding director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California Davis, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/369441/political-violence-2024-election">an expert in mass shootings and political violence</a>, says that “intervening on people involved in intimate partner violence at whatever level of severity likely has a role in preventing mass shootings and many other bad things down the road.”
Researchers have identified other behaviors common in mass shooters: a sudden increase in, interest in, or purchases of guns and ammunition, and increased interest in previous mass shooters. A would-be mass shooter also often makes bizarre <a href="https://drreidmeloy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-Studying-mass-shooters-words-Warning-behavior-prior-to-attacks.pdf">or threatening comments</a> in the lead-up to a shooting, indicating to those close to him, or to a community online, that he intends to do something violent — a phenomenon researchers <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/02/1210266306/a-former-fbi-profiler-explains-how-leakage-can-warn-of-a-mass-shooting">call leakage</a>.
The Georgia school shooter shared multiple characteristics with other mass shooters, including recent mental health issues and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/apalachee-high-school-georgia-shooting.html" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/apalachee-high-school-georgia-shooting.html">an apparent interest in the Parkland, Florida, school shooter</a>. Like others, he leaked his threats online. 
Investigators are still piecing together what attempts were made to get the alleged shooter help before the shooting. But generally, when a behavioral threat assessment team has identified someone at risk, the next step is to come up with a plan to help. It often involves the person’s family or friends, and can entail direct contact with the person of concern. “The ideal of this work is with both empathy and concern,” Follman says. “And then coming up with a plan to intervene and try to help, which is also based on specific information gathered about that person from the person themselves and the people around them. What does this person need? What can we do to help move them away from where they are now to a better place?”
The goal is to make the person less isolated and angry, and to attempt to ease the grievances that might be making them feel violent. Every treatment plan looks different.
“It’s not like there’s a simple menu and you pick one thing and then the switch flips and everything’s fine. That’s not how threat management works,” Follman says.
Currently, in-school threat assessment teams are required in <a href="https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/law/school-threat-assessment-teams/">nine states</a>, not including Georgia — but experts say that more states should require them, and make sure they have the <a href="https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/law/school-threat-assessment-teams/">resources they need to develop risk assessment strategies and track their results</a>. People who live in states without risk assessment teams can push their states to require them in schools and other government settings.
But the Apalachee school shooting makes clear that even when officials are aware of a potential threat, they sometimes lack the legal mechanisms to take action. That’s why they also need laws to help keep guns from getting into the hands of would-be mass shooters.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Finding gun regulations that help prevent mass shootings</h2>
One appealing thing about behavioral threat assessment work is that it’s an intervention that can be done without butting head-first into the brick wall that is America’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/360742/someone-tried-to-assassinate-the-former-president-and-the-gop-still-wont-talk-about-guns">intractable debate over gun control</a>. 
But make no mistake: a country <a href="https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/">with over 400 million guns in it</a>, and with gun regulation so lax that almost anyone can carry a gun in public whenever they want, makes the work of preventing mass shootings much more difficult.
Georgia <a href="https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/child-access-prevention-and-safe-storage-in-georgia/" data-type="link" data-id="https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/child-access-prevention-and-safe-storage-in-georgia/">doesn’t have safe storage laws</a>, which in other states require guns to be locked up and kept away from children. The shooter’s father, when questioned by police in 2023, said that his son didn’t have “<a href="https://krcgtv.com/news/nation-world/teen-accused-of-killing-4-at-georgia-apalachee-high-school-set-to-appear-in-court-winder-colt-colin-gray-semiautomtic-assault-style-rifle-felony-murder-charged-as-adult-gbi-fbi-involuntary-manslaughter-barrow-county-sheriffs-office" data-type="link" data-id="https://krcgtv.com/news/nation-world/teen-accused-of-killing-4-at-georgia-apalachee-high-school-set-to-appear-in-court-winder-colt-colin-gray-semiautomtic-assault-style-rifle-felony-murder-charged-as-adult-gbi-fbi-involuntary-manslaughter-barrow-county-sheriffs-office">unfettered</a>” access to his guns. A law requiring guns to be secured in the state might have made it harder for the shooter to have access to the weapon he used.
There are other specific gun policies that can help prevent mass shootings and might be more politically feasible. Lawmakers and voters who care about reducing mass shootings have already helped push for their passage in states like New York, Florida, and California. For advocates who care about reducing mass shooting, they are a good place to start. 
One of the most important legal tools available to prevent mass shootings is extreme risk laws, commonly referred to as red flag laws. The laws, <a href="https://www.everytown.org/solutions/extreme-risk-laws/">currently in place in 21 states</a>, including several <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/more-states-adopting-gun-seizure-laws-after-parkland-tragedy">after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018</a>, allow both family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily confiscate someone’s firearms if they believe the owner is at a risk of committing harm either to themselves or others. Red flag laws, Follman says, are “a relatively new gun policy that is very important and very useful to the field of threat assessment.”  Though critics have challenged the constitutionality of the laws, they have so far withstood <a href="https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2024/04/litigation-highlight-new-york-state-appellate-court-upholds-red-flag-law">legal challenges</a>.
Another common factor among mass shooters is their use of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-force-mass-shootings/">assault-style rifles</a>, known for their capacity to rapidly fire bullets and to kill or injure large numbers of people in a short amount of time. Though research has shown that assault weapons bans can <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2014.939367?scroll=top&needAccess=true">meaningfully reduce</a> mass shooting deaths when they’re in effect, Republicans <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4345455-senate-republicans-block-assault-weapons-ban/">blocked an assault weapons ban</a> when it came before Congress in December 2023, and polls show that while Americans <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/513623/majority-continues-favor-stricter-gun-laws.aspx">generally favor more strict gun regulation</a>, they are <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_042423/">more divided</a> on the question of whether to ban assault weapons outright.
In part because of Republican opposition to regulating assault rifles, <a href="https://www.bradyunited.org/about-us/press/more-than-one-year-after-las-vegas-massacre-trump-administration-bans-bump-stocks">gun safety advocates</a> have turned their focus to banning bump stocks as a more targeted and effective means of reducing mass shootings, and in 2018 the Trump administration took the rare step, for a GOP administration, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/18/politics/bump-stocks-ban/index.html">of banning bump stocks</a> following a Las Vegas mass shooting. But the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/355399/supreme-court-bump-stocks-machine-guns-garland-cargill">struck down the regulation</a> in June 2024.
What happens next is an open question, and Republicans have been relatively quiet about the Supreme Court’s decision. But congressional action could be an important next step. As Justice Samuel Alito noted in his concurring opinion, Congress <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/bump-stock-vegas-shooting-supreme-court.html">could pass a law banning bump stocks</a>, which would help limit the lethality of weapons used by mass shooters. 
Given that a Republican president was the first to ban bump stocks, and the regulation was relatively uncontroversial at the time, it’s not impossible to believe that Congress could make it happen. Similarly, Vice President Kamala Harris has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/us/politics/kamala-harris-parkland-guns.html">urged states to adopt red flag laws</a>, and former President Donald Trump also <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/09/trump-promises-nra-that-if-elected-no-one-will-lay-a-finger-on-your-firearms-00140818">previously expressed support for these laws</a>, despite the concern from gun rights advocates. Support from leaders of both major parties belies the notion that gun regulations that could counter mass shootings are completely off the table.
And though experts say passing those laws would have an impact, they are not the only thing that can be done. Family members and law enforcement in states that already have red flag laws <a href="https://foundation.gunresponsibility.org/faq-extreme-risk-protection-orders/">can try to get the courts to intervene</a> if they’re worried about someone with guns. Individual community members, especially in the workplace and at school, can pay attention when someone seems to be leaking intentions of a mass shooting <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/18/us/mass-shooting-tips-what-to-do/index.html">and report that behavior to the authorities</a>. The media can do their best <a href="https://niemanreports.org/articles/journalists-can-do-better-covering-mass-shootings/">not to elevate the profiles of mass shooters,</a> which has been shown to inspire a copycat effect.
Most of all, Follman says, it’s important not to treat the problem as hopeless. Sometimes, he says, that can even encourage would-be shooters. “We have this national narrative about how this is never going to end and nothing ever really changes, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.” But understanding that mass shootings aren’t random, that they can be predicted and prevented, can help people understand what warning signs to look out for.
“Despair and outrage,” he says, “is not a good way to think about the problem.”
Update, September 6, 9 am ET: This story was originally published on September 4, 2024, and has been updated with information about the Apalachee High School shooter. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Joshua Keating</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The guessing game over Kamala Harris’s foreign policy]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/370194/harris-foreign-policy-gaza-ukraine-china" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370194</id>
<updated>2024-09-05T17:15:59Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T11:15:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="2024 Elections" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="China" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Israel" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Kamala Harris" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Russia-Ukraine war" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="World Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Is Vice President Kamala Harris a “human rights hawk,” who would use American power to promote democracy and freedom abroad? Or is she a “pragmatic internationalist” who would back gingerly away from American hegemony? Is she poised to end an era of American hubris and restore humility to our foreign policy? Or does her forceful […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Zelenskyy and Harris shake hands in front of their countries’ flags. " data-caption="Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US Vice President Kamala Harris shake hands at the end of a press conference at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2024. | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2010307889.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US Vice President Kamala Harris shake hands at the end of a press conference at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2024. | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
Is Vice President Kamala Harris a “<a href="https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/kamala-harris-us-foreign-policy/?share-code=w6SlYLVZDwEv">human rights hawk</a>,” who would use American power to promote democracy and freedom abroad? Or is she a “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-harris-doctrine/">pragmatic internationalist</a>” who would back gingerly away from American hegemony? Is she poised to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-31/kamala-harris-could-end-the-era-of-us-foreign-policy-hubris?sref=C3P1bRLC">end an era of American hubris</a> and restore humility to our foreign policy? Or does her forceful rhetoric on America’s role in the world reveal an “<a href="https://x.com/deepstateradio/status/1828499103266865663">inner Reagan</a>”?
Two months out from the presidential election, there’s rampant speculation about what a “Harris doctrine” for foreign policy could look like, but it often seems to reveal more about what the person doing the speculating wants (or doesn’t want) in the next president than any particular worldview articulated by Harris. 
It’s not that the vice president doesn’t have a track record to examine. While some coverage has portrayed her as <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/02/white-house-harris-policy-decisions-00176918">something of a foreign-policy neophyte</a>, she would come into office with <a href="https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-is-not-a-foreign-policy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1010841&post_id=148421883&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2cv7r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email">more global experience</a> than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump had.
As vice president, she has <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-world-leaders-00170676">met with dozens of world leaders</a>, represented the US at global gatherings, and <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-2024-presidential-election.html">attended the president’s daily intelligence briefings</a>. In her Democratic National Convention address, she touted the fact that she had been the one to brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on US intelligence about the looming Russian invasion in Munich just days before it occurred in 2022.
The administration has also noted her role in the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/evan-gershkovich-free-russia-hostage-exchange/card/kamala-harris-played-role-in-prisoner-swap-GJOISZWY48oePDmuhvY6">recent prisoner swap </a>with Russia. She also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/12/kamala-harris-southeast-asia-china/">was involved</a> in US efforts to strengthen alliances in Southeast Asia, particularly with the Philippines. And though she was not the “<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/361635/kamala-harris-border-czar-immigration-mexico-guatemala-rnc">border czar</a>” she’s sometimes portrayed as in attack ads, she did lead the administration’s efforts to address the “<a href="https://www.as-coa.org/articles/kamala-harris-stance-latin-america-and-caribbean">root causes</a>” of migration through aid to Central America.
What’s harder to pin down is how she might differ from the Biden administration, which is what all the “Harris doctrine” speculation is trying to pin down. When it comes to that, the analysis often comes down to — to use the <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/369267/democrats-harris-vibes-energy-2024-presidential-race">buzzword</a> of the moment — vibes. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Same message, new tone</h2>
In a recent <a href="https://time.com/7005282/kamala-harris-ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-alliance/">Time feature</a> on Harris’s record on Ukraine, Ukrainian officials acknowledged she had been engaged on the issue and showed sympathy for the country’s plight, but one official described it as feeling like “formal sympathy, following protocol.”
In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, the host speculated that as the child of immigrants with a more global perspective, Harris “does not have that identification” with Israel that Americans of Joe Biden’s generation do. But that’s not quite how Harris has described her own upbringing. In a 2017 speech to the right-leaning American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) <a href="https://israeled.org/resources/documents/senator-kamala-harris-address-to-annual-aipac-conference-washington/">she reminisced</a> that as a child in the Bay Area, she collected donations for the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. In 2019, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency <a href="https://www.jta.org/2019/01/11/politics/5-jewish-things-to-know-about-kamala-harris">described her Senate record</a> as “more AIPAC than J Street,” referring to the more left-leaning “pro peace” lobbying group.
When it comes to how Harris might differ, even subtly, from Biden, perhaps no issue, foreign or domestic, has gotten more attention than the war in Gaza. 
Halie Soifer, who worked as national security adviser to Harris in the Senate and is now the director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Vox that when it comes to policy on Israel and Gaza, there is little daylight between the two. 
“I think the policy will not change,” she said. “What we have seen is some distinction when it comes to the way they speak about the conflict, with Vice President Harris not only reiterating her commitment to Israel and its security, but also expressing a larger degree of empathy with innocent Palestinian civilians.”
This was reflected in <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/03/03/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-commemorating-the-59th-anniversary-of-bloody-sunday-selma-al/#:~:text=What%20we%20are%20seeing%20every,innocent%20Palestinians%20have%20been%20killed.">pointed remarks</a> Harris made calling for a ceasefire at a civil rights commemoration in Selma, Alabama, in March (remarks that were <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/kamala-harris-gaza-speech-watered-down-cease-fire-rcna141750">reportedly watered down</a> by administration officials) as well as in her convention speech. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote, that speech did not differ particularly from Biden’s talking points but did, <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/368462/kamala-harris-israel-palestine-gaza-dnc-speech">rhetorically at least, present</a> “Palestinian aspirations for self-determination as the moral climax of her discussion of the issue.”
Slate’s <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-2024-presidential-election.html">Fred Kaplan reports</a> that sources close to Harris say she “privately disagrees with [Biden’s] formulation of world politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy … and sees that as oversimplifying and even misleading, given the kinds of allies that we’re sometimes forced to choose.” The Biden administration has been <a href="https://authory.com/JoshuaKeating/Advice-for-the-US-in-Africa-Stop-lecturing-about-China-and-Russia-Instead-offer-better-options-abb0cd5ea0b7949e8acff443030f51574">criticized by some observers</a> for paying attention to the “global south” mainly in the context of competition with Russia and China.
Perhaps reflecting some desire to move beyond this framing, Harris <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-2024-presidential-election.html">remarked at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year</a> that when visiting countries in Africa, she was constantly asked, “‘Are you here because of China?’ And my answer was, ‘No, we are here because of the people on the continent of Africa.’” 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Why campaign promises can’t tell us much about Harris’s real policies </h2>
It’s also quite possible that Harris’s worldview and foreign policy rhetoric are simply evolving. The senator <a href="https://justfacts.votesmart.org/public-statement/1456520/harris-statement-on-ndaa-amendment-votedefense%20budget">who, in 2020, said</a>, “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need” is now the vice president who vows to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Ultimately, campaign rhetoric will only tell you so much about how a president will conduct foreign policy. Some analysts have noted that, as a senator, Harris was in favor of cutting support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and called for “<a href="https://www.cfr.org/article/kamala-harris">fundamentally reevaluating</a>” the US-Saudi relationship as a candidate in 2020. But then again, Biden promised on the campaign trail to make Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman a “<a href="https://www.cfr.org/article/kamala-harris">pariah</a>” before putting <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/5/3/24148104/us-saudi-israel-normalization-defense-pact-gaza-two-state">cooperation with the country</a> at the center of his Middle East policy.
It’s not just that campaign talk is cheap, it’s that, as the noted international relations theorist Mike Tyson put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. 
George W. Bush came into office promising a “humble” foreign policy that eschewed nation-building crusades. 9/11 changed that. 
Obama first distinguished himself as an opponent of US militarism in the Middle East but will be remembered for expanding the US drone war, the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, and helping to overthrow the government of Libya. 
Biden’s foreign policy legacy will be determined in large part by his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7 attacks. 
“Foreign policy priorities, in every administration, are largely dictated by events,” Soifer said. 
If there is a “Harris doctrine,” we’ll learn what it is only if we see her as president. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Whizy Kim</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Is this algorithm driving your rent higher?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/money/370351/realpage-doj-lawsuit-rent-algorithm-pricing" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=370351</id>
<updated>2024-09-05T21:55:21Z</updated>
<published>2024-09-06T10:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Economy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Housing" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Today, algorithms rule everything around us. They serve us entertaining, or at least addictive, content on social media. They try to suss out which emails in our overstuffed inboxes might be most important, and which ones are spam. They act as matchmakers for our love lives. Increasingly, though, algorithms have also been deployed by companies, […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="RealPage, the software company being accused by the DOJ of antitrust violations, has rent data on some 16 million units in the US." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-1771879591.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>RealPage, the software company being accused by the DOJ of antitrust violations, has rent data on some 16 million units in the US.</figcaption>
</figure>
Today, algorithms rule everything around us. They serve us entertaining, or at least addictive, content on social media. They try to suss out which emails in our overstuffed inboxes might be most important, and which ones are spam. They act as matchmakers for our love lives. Increasingly, though, algorithms have also been deployed by companies, from <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/24105250/fast-food-restaurants-dynamic-pricing-algorithm-wendys">Amazon to Uber to Wendy’s</a>, to figure out optimal — often higher — prices that can shift automatically based on a firehose of fine-grained data.
Including, apparently, your rent.
Now, a software company called RealPage is being sued by the Department of Justice for using an algorithm that suggests rent prices to corporate landlords. The DOJ argues that its algorithm has driven rents higher, and constitutes an illegal information sharing scheme. That is, competitors (the landlords) who would otherwise be acting independently, have exchanged “nonpublic, competitively sensitive data” to the detriment of renters who don’t have access to such knowledge.
A <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent">2022 ProPublica investigation</a> quoted Andrew Bowen, then a RealPage executive, admitting that the software had probably driven up rental prices. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually,” he said. In the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline">DOJ’s complaint</a>, one unnamed landlord is quoted praising a RealPage product as “classic price fixing” saying, “I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term.” The complaint claims that RealPage has data on over 16 million units; the National Multifamily Housing Council estimates that there are around <a href="https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-apartment-stock/">23 million apartment units</a> in the US.
Vox spoke to <a href="https://www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/facultyprofiles/christopher-l-sagers">Christopher L. Sagers</a>, a law professor at Cleveland State University, on why pricing algorithms are under scrutiny now — and how likely it is for the DOJ to win this case. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What exactly is RealPage?
The company is a service provider that serves landlords. We’re basically talking very big landlords — corporate landlords that own many properties, generally speaking. The RealPage service is very expensive, so it’s for bigger entities, more or less, and they’re very sophisticated. Whether they use RealPage or not, they would be sophisticated data crunchers who are into using management expertise to maximize the money they can make. 
[RealPage] is really a software service provided to landlords, a management service that’s tech-based, and the business end of that service is: RealPage collects a very large amount of confidential, sensitive data that’s very useful to landlords in figuring out what their competition is doing, and therefore choosing how to set their own behavior to maximize their own profits.
The government alleges that there are 16 million individual rental units at stake here — in other words, RealPage is collecting lease terms, rent prices, occupancy rates, et cetera, for 16 million different apartment units. The data is very disaggregated — it’s very granular, very precise and detailed. Then [it] takes all that data, crunches it. RealPage, increasingly, is an artificial intelligence provider. It is now crunching [the data] with artificial intelligence; they’re presumably going to be getting more and more sophisticated about it, assuming that the government doesn’t force them to stop doing what they’re doing.
Landlords use this software, but they’re not the ones named in this suit, right?
That’s correct.
Is there a good case to be made that RealPage committed antitrust violations?
Yes.
I’ll just lay my cards on the table: I think the government’s case is very strong, and it’s unlikely that RealPage gets out of this without some kind of legal liability. 
What is the part of what RealPage and its software does that the DOJ is saying violates antitrust law?
I think the relatively simple answer is, they do a few things with this data that cause them to be doing more than just providing information or helping landlords make decisions. Most importantly, they are using confidential data not available to renters. They’re only available to one side of the market. They are then using that data to, as they would say, make mere recommendations. In other words, they’re making forward-looking future predictions of what the best price will be from the landlord’s perspective — meaning the most profitable.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>They’re making forward-looking future predictions of what the best price will be from the landlord’s perspective — meaning the most profitable. </blockquote></figure>
It’s very clear that, in the abstract, a couple of things that RealPage could be said to be doing are, in fact, legal. [But] according to the government’s allegations, RealPage is doing more than just those things that are legal. There is, first of all, this argument that RealPage is doing stuff that screws up the rental market — it increases rent prices for consumers. There’s the separate argument, though, that RealPage has monopolized the market for this software.
So it doesn’t sound like RealPage was just letting its software do its thing — the complaint mentions how it had “pricing advisors” who would basically escalate the matter if a landlord rejected their recommendation. Does that constitute an agreement of some kind?
Oh, yes. It feels like you read complaints all the time in which you’re like, “Wow, what were they thinking? Why did they think they were going to get away with this?” You’re selling a service in which you’re going to have an employee go complain to somebody’s competitors and say, “Hey, get your prices up.” Is it illegal just to have [a price advisor]? Is it illegal to sell a service in which you’re going to go nag people’s competitors to get their prices up? I think the short answer very well may be yes, that in and of itself is independently illegal.
Here’s why I think that’s so significant. You asked, “Are they suing the landlords too?” The answer is no — but there are pending private lawsuits, and I think if the government wins this case, which I think they will, there are going to be big lawsuits against the landlords. These private cases that are coming, I think, will be conspiracy cases. They’ll be what we call “hub and spoke conspiracy” theories. 
For a long time, antitrust has recognized that people might want to get their prices up with their horizontal competitors, but they find it difficult to make agreements with them — or they’re afraid of doing something illegal, so they don’t explicitly agree. But then some intermediary will come along who’s willing to do the work of getting the cartel together and enforcing the cartel agreements — that person is called the hub. Their relationship with each one of the competitors is like a spoke. Hub and spoke conspiracies, when they involve somebody just fixing explicit prices, are what we call per se illegal: they’re automatically illegal if it’s proven, there’s no defense.
[RealPage] is selling the thing that makes it so hard to get a price-fixing conspiracy together — it’s hard to get people to agree, and then enforce the agreement once it’s made. 
What do you think RealPage’s main defense will be?
Their main defense is going to be that they are simply helping landlords do something that landlords could have done themselves, and if the landlords did it, it would all have been legal. That’s a general point they will make.
A closely related point is, they’re going to say this isn’t price fixing; this is just sharing of information. And as everybody knows who’s taken freshman economics, information is good for markets, right? Competitive markets have to have good information or they don’t work well. So we’re really just doing this to have a vibrant, competitive marketplace.
Do you find that compelling? What’s the first rebuttal to that? 
No, everything about it is a lie. The first rebuttal to it is this: they’re not doing something that any landlord could do independently. For one thing, one landlord can’t get 16 million data points that are updated every night and crunch it through a big data algorithm. If a trade association of landlords did that on their own, without a third-party intermediary, it would very likely be illegal for the same reasons that this thing seems like it’s illegal.
So the scale of it is a big thing here.
Yes, the scale of it is a big thing. 
It isn’t just that it would be hard to get that much data, and it would be expensive to crunch it — there would also be a lot of difficulty in coordinating the agreement. Two competitors would share information if they really were comfortable that they could trust the other one to use it for evil. If I can trust my competitor to use this to get our prices up and keep them up, that’s great, but the truth is, they’re actually quite suspicious of each other. There’s a reason this information is confidential, because they ordinarily don’t want their competitors to have it.
Then point number two, that this is actually good for the economy — that’s not plausible because they’re not sharing it. They’re not going to make a public database where renters can go see who’s charging the lowest price. 
Based on what we know, based on the DOJ complaint and <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent">other reporting</a>, do you think it’s likely that RealPage helped drive up rents?
I think it’s very likely. This isn’t just a big conspiracy in that it involves a lot of units; they also have very substantial market penetration. Among landlords of a certain size, a very large percentage of them are using not just a product like this; they’re using RealPage. The complaint contains a bunch of evidence that the landlords know who else in their market is using RealPage, and they call each other and ask. The reason that’s so significant is, if you know that your three competitors are all using the same software that you use for any competitive purposes, then you know there’s no real risk to you in raising your prices, right?
So the idea that this isn’t raising prices in real markets seems very unlikely to me. 
If RealPage said that their algorithm doesn’t just recommend higher prices, but also lower ones sometimes, would that change the situation?
It might if they could prove it. It would still be a case that, I think, could go to a jury on liability — even if there were substantial evidence that sometimes they’re making prices go down — because there’s just a lot of anti-competitive evidence here. They have the price nudge officials, there’s evidence that all the users of it know when their competitors are using it. All of those things suggest this is anti-competitive. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“I have reason to believe that this particular technology has had a huge impact on consumer prices throughout the economy.”</blockquote></figure>
If the DOJ wins this case, what does that change for digital pricing tools in general? Because there are <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-ftc-surveillance-pricing-impact-consumers/">a lot of those</a> around now. Amazon famously <a href="https://apnews.com/article/amazon-ftc-lawsuit-antitrust-lina-khan-d40f5437bac57f7f4a3ab5a49650f98d">uses algorithms</a> in how it prices.
One thing we’re going to learn, I think, once this case starts chugging along, is just how common businesses like RealPage are. Using confidential information and big data technology to calculate the highest possible price — who knows, I’m not a macro economist, I don’t know what causes inflation — but I have reason to believe that this particular technology has had a huge impact on consumer prices throughout the economy. 
If RealPage is found to have violated the law, it will at least have repercussions throughout the tech sector. This is a big tech product category, right? It’s something antitrust watchers have been thinking about for a long time. When can an algorithm itself be illegal, and when is an algorithm effectively price fixing?
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