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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">A Giant Blob of Floodwater From Harvey Is Still Moving Through the Gulf</h1>
            
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p dir="ltr">The rain began on August 25, and it would fall, remarkably, for four more days. We know now that Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/29/harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history/?utm_term=.afb418e9148a" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'543408'">60 inches of rain</a> over parts of Texas. Twenty trillion gallons in all. The equivalent of the entire Chesapeake Bay. Enough to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/hurricane-harvey-deformed-the-earths-crust-around-houston/538866/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'543408'">push the Earth’s crust down two centimeters</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">All of that water eventually had to go somewhere. It made its way to the Gulf of Mexico, and its volume was so massive that it did not immediately mix with the ocean. Nearly two months after the hurricane, a distinct blob of freshwater from Harvey is still moving through the Gulf. “We’ve literally never see that much freshwater added to the Gulf of Mexico at once,” says <a href="https://ocean.tamu.edu/people/faculty/shambergerkathryn.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'543408'">Kathryn Shamberger</a>, an oceanographer at Texas A&amp;M University.</p><p dir="ltr">Because it’s so unprecedented, scientists do not know exactly what effects the plume is having. Will it bring a path of destruction through marine ecosystems unused to freshwater? Will contaminants from land sweep through? Or will marine life quickly rebound? In the weeks after Harvey, scientists like Shamberger have mobilized to study the effects of this giant blob of freshwater. Shamberger and her colleagues transected the Gulf sampling water in late September, and they are embarking on a second research cruise this Friday to study the potential impacts on coral reefs.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore" dir="ltr">“It was just incredible how much water there was.”</aside><p dir="ltr">What oceanographers do know about the interface of freshwater and ocean comes from studying rivers that naturally empty into the sea. The key is density. Because freshwater lacks dissolved salt, it is less dense and floats atop seawater. It becomes a barrier between the air and the ocean water, which can have nasty consequences. “The freshwater sitting on the salty water cuts off the oxygen from the atmosphere getting into the ocean, and then you get the dead zone,” says <a href="https://ocean.tamu.edu/people/faculty/dimarcosteve.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'543408'">Steve DiMarco</a>, one of Shamberger’s colleagues at Texas A&amp;M.</p><p dir="ltr">Freshwater doesn’t move in one uniform blob, either. It can squirt and jet far away from the main body. Think of what happens when you add milk to your coffee, says DiMarco. In the first few seconds, the milk squirts through the coffee before fully mixing. Eventually, Harvey’s freshwater blob will mix into the ocean, too. DiMarco says he expects for it to take a few more weeks; the winter winds will stir it all up when they come in.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>Meanwhile, a number of scientists have received or are expecting Rapid Response Research grants from the National Science Foundation to study Harvey’s freshwater pulse. <a href="https://ocean.tamu.edu/people/faculty/campbelllisa?_ga=2.193418349.1338478913.1508508048-1410909895.1508260446" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'543408'">Lisa Campbell</a>, another oceanographer at Texas A&amp;M, has received one such grant to look at the effects of Harvey’s freshwater on phytoplankton. “Previously when we seen slugs of freshwater, it changes the type of phytoplankton that grow,” says Campbell. And since phytoplankton are at the bottom of the food chain, that can have knock-on effects up the food chain from the copepods to the coral to the fish.</p><figure style="max-width: 630.0px;"><picture style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:75.0793650794%;"><img alt="" data-srcset="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/10/harvey_tmo_2017243/694b80667.jpg" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="caption">Satellite image on August 31 showing muddy floodwater pouring out of Galveston Bay (NASA)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">Shamberger and DiMarco are going out to the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, a coral reef about 100 miles off the coast of Texas. Because winds have blown Harvey’s freshwater blob south and west, Shamberger says the corals have likely escaped the worst of it. But the reef may still be susceptible to the aforementioned squirts and jets of freshwater or more subtle changes in phytoplankton. In July 2016, recreational divers had noticed unusually hazy waters and dying corals in the Flower Garden Banks, which scientists suspect were the result of floodwaters that went through Houston during April. In the early days after Harvey, satellite pictures captured brown sediment-rich runoff pouring out of Galveston Bay. The team will also collect samples to test for contaminants.</p><aside class="callout" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'related',#data-omni-index,@data-article-id"><hr><h4>
        
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        <a href="/technology/archive/2017/09/hurricane-harvey-deformed-the-earths-crust-around-houston/538866/" data-omni-index="0" data-article-id="857853" data-omni-click="inherit">
            <img width="242" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/09/houston/thumb_wide_medium.jpg?1504640910" alt="A map of the vertical motion of the Earth's crust in Texas"></a>
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    <p><a href="/technology/archive/2017/09/hurricane-harvey-deformed-the-earths-crust-around-houston/538866/" data-omni-index="0" data-article-id="857853" data-omni-click="inherit">The Houston Flooding Pushed the Earth's Crust Down 2 Centimeters</a></p>
    

    <hr></aside><p dir="ltr">“Often when we think about hurricanes and their impact on a coral reef, we are thinking about wave energy and storm surge and physical breakage of the 3-D reef structure,” says <a href="http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ac53/index.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'543408'">Adrienne Correa</a>, a marine biologist at Rice University. But because Harvey dumped so much freshwater into the ocean, it might have this whole other set of effects, and this is a unique opportunity to study them. Correa is leaving on the cruise Friday as well, despite the fact that her home was flooded during Harvey and it’s still “pretty much a mess.”</p><p dir="ltr">DiMarco was actually on a research boat in the Gulf when Hurricane Harvey started threatening Texas. When the storm hit, they pulled into port west of Louisiana and started driving back to Texas through the rain. “It was just incredible how much water there was,” say DiMarco. “Every time we went over an overpass, the people in my car—and I was driving—were like, ‘I wonder if we’re going to come down in the middle of lake.’” That was when the planning of his post-Harvey research began. And now, nearly two months later, they’re still tracking the effects of that water through the Gulf.</p></section>
    
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Selfishness Is Killing Liberalism</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.</p>
        
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            <p>The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of <em>Why Liberalism Failed</em>, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (<em>The Retreat of Western Liberalism</em>), Mark Lilla (<em>The Once and Future Liberal</em>), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (<em>How Democracies Die</em>) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is <em>What Was Liberalism</em>.</p>

<p>But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Excesses of Call-Out Culture</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
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        <p class="dek">The outrage directed against the <em>New York Times</em> writer Bari Weiss is the latest illustration of a culture that undermines the causes it seeks to advance.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>One of America’s best attributes wasn’t fully real to me until I studied abroad in Seville, Spain, with Asian American classmates. Their answers to the question “Where are you from?” were often met with confusion by locals, who had trouble even conceiving of a nation without an ethnic conception of citizenship. As a Californian, I knew not only that people of Asian descent were as American as white people like me, but that many of their ancestors arrived before mine. And I saw why Americans who don’t grasp those truths offend.</p>

<p>Another of America’s best attributes concerns those who immigrate here. People who become U.S. citizens later in life—as did Albert Einstein, Desi Arnez, and Patrick Ewing—are no less American, no more “other,” than the native born. In fact, when my friend Andrew Sullivan was finally granted U.S. citizenship, as well as when efforts began to secure legal protections for undocumented immigrants brought here as children, I realized that my own conception about what it means to be an American is even broader than the legal definition: I’d long considered people like Andrew as well as those kids to be “one of us.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Burden of Trump's National-Security Staff</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/andrew-exum/" itemprop="url" title="Andrew Exum" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Andrew Exum</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Those toiling inside this administration are fooling themselves if they think they can somehow rise above the character and temperament of this president to shepherd this country through to a more normal time.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">What a contrast.</p>

<p>I woke up on Sunday morning and first read the news accounts of National-Security Adviser <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/mcmaster-says-evidence-of-russian-meddling-is-now-really-incontrovertible-as-he-woos-european-allies/2018/02/17/4a27f560-10e8-11e8-a68c-e9374188170e_story.html?utm_term=.1063880e7f2c">H.R. McMaster’s cogent speech</a> to the Munich Security Conference. I then read the president’s tweets. And some more tweets. And, just when I thought he was done, some more tweets.</p>

<p>As <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/trump-foreign-policy/549671/">I have written before</a>, you have to give this administration some credit for having assembled some pretty good foreign policy talent. The Republican Party arguably didn’t have the deepest bench on foreign policy in 2017, having been out of the executive branch for eight years, and some of the best talent available to the administration after Trump was elected was ineligible for having signed <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/">one of the infamous Never Trump letters</a> over the course of the 2016 campaign.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">America Is Under Attack and the President Doesn't Care</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-frum/" itemprop="url" title="David Frum" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David Frum</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Trump’s gravest responsibility is to defend the United States from foreign attack—and he’s done nothing to fulfill it.</p>
        
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            <p>As the rest of America mourns the victims of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, President Trump took to Twitter.</p>

<p>Not for him the rituals of grief. He is too consumed by rage and resentment. He interrupted his holidaying schedule at Mar-a-Lago only briefly, for a visit to a hospital where some of the shooting victims were treated. He posed afterward for a <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964724390637244417">grinning thumbs-up photo op</a>. Pain at another’s heartbreak—that emotion is for losers, apparently.</p>

<p>Having failed at one presidential duty, to speak for the nation at times of national tragedy, Trump resumed shirking an even more supreme task: defending the nation against foreign attack.</p>

<p>Last week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian persons and three entities that conspired to violate federal election law, to the benefit of Trump and Republican congressional candidates. This is not the whole of the story by any means. This Mueller indictment references only Russian operations on Facebook. It does not deal with the weaponization of hacked information via WikiLeaks. Or the reports that the Russians funneled millions of dollars of election spending through the NRA’s political action committees. But this indictment does show enough to answer some questions about the scale and methods of the Russian intervention—and pose a new question, the most important of them all.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/olga-khazan/" itemprop="url" title="Olga Khazan" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Olga Khazan</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-18T08:00:00" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Though their numbers are growing, only <a href="https://medium.com/@codeorg/girls-set-ap-computer-science-record-skyrocketing-growth-outpaces-boys-41b7c01373a5">27 percent of all students</a> taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just <a href="https://medium.com/anybody-can-learn/university-computer-science-finally-surpasses-its-2003-peak-ecefa4c8d77d">18 percent</a> of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “<span class="smallcaps">STEM</span>,” as its known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/algeria-police-tell-woman-go-back-abusive-husband-human-rights-watch-a7696221.html">often pressured </a>to make amends with their abusive husbands.</p>

<p>According to a report <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/there-are-only-3-countries-where-girls-feel-more-comfortable-with-math-than-boys/284272/">I covered a few years ago</a>, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly <i>less </i>likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Ban the Olympics</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/julia-ioffe/" itemprop="url" title="Julia Ioffe" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Julia Ioffe</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">They encourage profligate spending and help dictators burnish their prestige. Who needs them?</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Other than fuel corruption, make countries spend pointlessly and profligately, inflame nationalist sentiment, act as onanistic stand-ins for geopolitical tensions, and cloak authoritarian leaders in legitimacy, what have the Olympics ever done for us?</p>

<p>It is my real and very honest question every two years: What are the Olympics good for? Why do we continue to have them? Certainly for the athletes participating they can represent the pinnacle of a career worth of hard work; maybe even a life’s ambition realized. But for the rest of us, what is the point? Aside from the temporary flash of sumptuous spectacle, there’s little good that ever comes of the Games. If anything, they exacerbate some of the worst of human nature.</p>


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    <a href="/technology/archive/2018/02/the-russian-conspiracy-to-commit-audience-development/553685/" class="article-link" data-article-id="553685" data-omni-click="inherit" itemprop="mainEntityOfPage">
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Russia's Troll Operation Was Not That Sophisticated</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/alexis-madrigal/" itemprop="url" title="Alexis C. Madrigal" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Alexis C. Madrigal</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-19T11:27:17" />
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        <p class="dek">“If the Internet Research Agency were a startup media company, they probably would not be picking up a fresh round of venture capital.”</p>
        
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            <p>It might be nice for Democrats and #NeverTrumpers to believe that Russia’s troll factory brought Donald Trump the 2016 Presidential Election.</p>

<p>But no.</p>

<p>Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/rosenstein-mueller-indictment-russia/553601/">indictment of 13 Russians associated with the Internet Research Agency</a> definitively shows, given current evidence, that while a small team in St. Petersburg ran a successful audience development campaign mostly on behalf of Trump, that campaign was neither targeted nor sizable enough to change the election’s result.</p>

<p>Make no mistake: this was self-described and actual “information warfare.” The point was to sow discord and distrust in the American electorate. And with a few dozen people—around 80 at the peak—they managed to reach 150 million people through Facebook and Instagram. In September 2016, the indictment states that the monthly budget of the unit that contained the US election interference operation was $1.25 million. That’s pretty good bang for the buck.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Song of Killmonger</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/spencer-kornhaber/" itemprop="url" title="Spencer Kornhaber" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Spencer Kornhaber</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The ideological conflict in <em>Black Panther</em> animates not only Kendrick Lamar’s soundtrack for the movie, but also the artist’s whole ethos.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>During “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” the very first song on Kendrick Lamar’s very first album, a robotic voice beamed in with this: “Reporting live from Planet Terminator X, I am Martin Luther King with an AK-47.”</p>

<p>That moment feels prescient after the release of <em>Black Panther</em>, the Marvel superhero story soundtracked by Lamar. There’s the line’s sci-fi, futuristic concept. There’s the nod to black nationalism and hip-hop history with the mention of Public Enemy’s Terminator X. And there’s the twinning of symbols of violence with nonviolence, suggesting that even a champion of compassion might still sometimes have to pick up a weapon.</p>

<p>Ryan Coogler’s absorbing <em>Black Panther</em> uses the hidden high-tech African utopia of Wakanda as the setting to explore a question well familiar in the arc of history. What should people routinely exploited by racist systems do? Individually pursue their own success? Band together and fight back? Or find a third way? As my colleague Vann Newkirk <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/the-provocation-and-power-of-black-panther/553226/">writes</a><em>, Black Panther </em>fits into a long lineage as “a fantasy about black power”—and about how best to use that power.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Trump's Furious Tweetstorm Backfires</h3>
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The president tried to distance himself from the story of Russian interference—and in the process, thrust himself right back into the center of the narrative.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Donald Trump didn’t have any control over the decision by Russia’s Internet Research Agency  <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/mueller-roadmap/553604/">to mount</a> what it called “information warfare against the United States of America.” As the indictment released on Friday stated, the effort began in 2014, long before Trump was a declared candidate—much less a serious one—for office.</p>

<p>But by refusing to take information warfare seriously—in an attempt to distance himself from it and any questions it might raise about the legitimacy of his election—the president has paradoxically made the story about himself again and again.</p>

<p>This solipsism was on display Saturday and Sunday morning, as Trump, at Mar-a-Lago and far from the strictures and structures of the White House, unleashed his most aggressive and scattered tweetstorm in some time. In theory, the things he said were designed to push the story away from himself and downplay any connection. In practice, he forced himself into the middle of the story, inextricably linking himself to it.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">It's Not Illegal Immigration That Worries Republicans Anymore</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/peter-beinart/" itemprop="url" title="Peter Beinart" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Peter Beinart</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-18T06:00:00" />
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        <p class="dek">The Trump-era GOP cares more about the national origin and race of immigrants than the methods they used to enter the United States.</p>
        
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            <p>A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.</p>

<p>Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-calls-senate-support-grassley-bill-oppose-bills-fail-deliver-american-people/%20https:/www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-calls-senate-support-grassley-bill-oppose-bills-fail-deliver-american-people/">announced</a> on Wednesday that he would legalize the “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall <em>and</em>  ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.</p>

<p>There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio <a href="http://time.com/3820475/transcript-read-full-text-of-sen-marco-rubios-campaign-launch/">launched</a> his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/ted-cruz-turns-legal-immigration-n463226">declared</a> in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/2012/Mitt_Romney_Immigration.htm">promised</a> in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Problem With #MeToo’s Agenda</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Caitlin Flanagan argues that the #MeToo movement is becoming big enough to be rendered meaningless.</p>
        
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