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Joe Biden Has Questions About Medicare For All. We Answered Them. Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48414"><span class="small">Tara Golshan, Vox</span></a>   
Monday, 29 July 2019 08:28

Golshan writes: "Former Vice President Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn't believe Medicare-for-all would work, a policy stance that sets him apart from much of the 2020 field."

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at the first Democratic presidential debates. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at the first Democratic presidential debates. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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Joe Biden Has Questions About Medicare For All. We Answered Them.

By Tara Golshan, Vox

29 July 19


“What happens in the meantime?” and other questions Joe Biden asked, answered.

ormer Vice President Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn’t believe Medicare-for-all would work, a policy stance that sets him apart from much of the 2020 field.

From recent comments, however, it’s not entirely clear he knows what the legislation to enact Medicare-for-all — a proposal popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that’s been co-sponsored by several 2020 presidential candidates including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — would actually do while moving Americans from private to government health insurance.

“What happens to Obamacare?” Biden asked reporters in Detroit earlier this week. “Maybe they have a plan. I haven’t seen it.”

He also asked a series of leading questions about Medicare-for-all. Here are his comments in full, as transcribed by the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel:

But you know let’s not play a game. You cannot keep Obamacare. And by the way, don’t you find it interesting — that’s a rhetorical question — don’t you think it’s interesting, the idea that everybody acknowledges it’s going to take a while to pass this? Number one. And number two, once it’s passed they’re saying it’s four years implementation. Now, that kind of in and of itself says this could be kind of hard to do. What happens in the meantime? What happens to Obamacare? What happens to those people, one hundred million people covered by it? Maybe they have a plan. I haven’t seen it. How are they going to fund that? What are they going to do? What are they going to do for the situation that you have people with preexisting conditions and 20 million people who got coverage?

There are a few misleading things here: People with preexisting conditions would not lose coverage under Medicare-for-all, and the Affordable Care Act has covered closer to 20 million people, not 100 million. Nearly 8.5 million people enrolled in a health plan on the Obamacare marketplace for 2019, and roughly 13 million have gained coverage through Medicaid expansion. Biden’s campaign clarified that he was referring to 100 million people with pre-existing conditions who might have struggled to get insurance before Obamacare. Medicare-for-all would not exclude anyone based on preexisting conditions.

Biden has his own health care plan to build a public option into Obamacare. This would still be a significant leftward shift in the American health care system, but it wouldn’t guarantee coverage to everyone.

His comments, though, nod to a major obstacle for Medicare-for-all advocates: There’s a lot of confusion around what a single-payer health care system actually means and how the United States would get there. Even Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) got single-payer health care confused with the fully socialized system veterans currently use.

The health care debate around the brand of Medicare-for-all has become divorced from the actual policy proposal. That said, there is actual legislation out there, proposed by Sanders, that answers some of the questions Biden has posed.

Joe Biden’s Medicare-for-all questions, answered

The thrust of Biden’s comments is that Medicare-for-all would be hard to achieve. That’s absolutely true. Any leftward shift on health care — including Biden’s proposal — would likely require Democrats to wield big majorities the House, the Senate, and the White House to reach consensus. Enacting single-payer would require broad Democratic consensus, which doesn’t exist right now. That doesn’t make it impossible, as Sarah Kliff wrote for Vox; in 1962, Canada overcame thousands of doctors going on strike to come to love its single-payer program.

But in making that argument, Biden seems to be raising other leading questions — many of which have answers.

“What happens in the meantime?”

The current Medicare-for-all proposal, as introduced by Sanders, eliminates insurance through employers or bought individually and moves all Americans to Medicare, which would cover their health care costs with no premiums, no copay, and no deductible.

That’s a major change to the health care system, and it has a four-year transition period — a part of the proposal written by Gillibrand that gradually expands Medicare to Americans by age, starting with children and adults between 55 and 65 and making Medicare available to everyone in the fourth year.

In the first year, the plan would establish a public option — called the Medicare Transition Plan — equivalent to the best insurance option on the Obamacare exchanges, which covers about 90 percent of medical costs. It would also lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 55, from the current 65. The following year, that age eligibility would be lowered to 45, then to 35, and then, in year four, everyone would be transitioned over.

“What happens to Obamacare? What happens to those people, 100 million people covered by it?”

If Medicare-for-all were to be enacted, it would replace Obamacare, which expanded coverage through private insurance (which the proposal would eliminate) and Medicaid (which would be replaced with Medicare).

Obamacare has been successful in getting millions of people health insurance — roughly 20 million people have been covered by the program, a combination of those enrolled in the exchanges and those covered by expanded Medicaid. Single-payer would cover everyone, including the roughly 100 million people with preexisting conditions.

In Sanders’s Medicare-for-all, those people covered by the exchanges and Medicaid during the transition would retain coverage through the Medicare Transition Plan.

“How are they going to fund that?”

The biggest criticism of Medicare-for-all is its cost — and Biden isn’t the only one with this question, which hasn’t been thoroughly answered by the existing plans.

Federal spending would have to increase $32 trillion over 10 years to support Medicare-for-all, the latest price figure from libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University (the left-leaning Urban Institute came up with that same figure in 2016). As Vox’s Dylan Scott pointed out, that’s actually a reduction in the total amount spent on health care in America. Some features, including the lack of cost sharing, might encourage Americans to use health services more than they already do.

Sanders’s office released a list of possible ways to cover the program, including taxes targeting the wealthiest Americans and Wall Street. But those measures on their own would not raise enough. This means taxes would go up for individuals. Sanders argues that individuals would likely be paying less on net because they would not have premiums, deductibles, or copays with their health services, and prescription drug costs would be capped at $200 annually.

Biden’s plan would cost the federal government significantly less and mean smaller tax increases, but would leave more to the enrollees — like premiums, copays, and the like. And it’s true that Sanders’s plan hasn’t gotten specific about how, exactly, it would pay for the costs, though they have proposals.

“What are they going to do for the situation that you have people with preexisting conditions?”

Medicare-for-all covers everyone, with or without preexisting conditions. Medicare-for-all would expand Medicare coverage to also include dental, vision, hearing, and some prescription medication.

The difference between Biden’s and Sanders’s health care plans comes down to private insurance

As I explained after Sanders’s major 2020 campaign speech about Medicare-for-all, fundamentally, Sanders wants to challenge the leading technocratic approach to health care by posing a basic question about a moral problem: Can a health care system in which private insurance plays a significant role incentivize giving sick people care? Sanders says no.

Biden disagrees. His proposal would still significantly push the current health care system to the left by establishing a public option and aggressively tackling drug prices. Biden’s plan said this public option will reduce costs by “negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers” — essentially using the same bargaining power that Medicare currently has.

As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained, that would make the public option look very attractive to a lot of people compared to the private plans. Biden’s plan would also make the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits more generous and introduce measures to reduce drug prices — like allowing the government to negotiate prices and allowing people to buy FDA-approved drugs from overseas.

But it would retain private insurance, avoiding a consistent attack on the Senate single-payer plan: the fact that all Americans with private insurance would have to switch to the public program.

Biden’s plan could be seen as a significant stepping stone toward single-payer. Sanders says that’s not enough.

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Better to Have a Few Rats Than to Be One Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51262"><span class="small">Editorial Board, The Baltimore Sun</span></a>   
Monday, 29 July 2019 08:26

Excerpt: "In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland's 7th congressional district on Saturday morning."

Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings, the House Reform and Oversight Committee Chairman. (photo: Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)
Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings, the House Reform and Oversight Committee Chairman. (photo: Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun)

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Better to Have a Few Rats Than to Be One

By Editorial Board, The Baltimore Sun

29 July 19

 

n case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run," which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb."

In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.

This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.

As heartening as it has been to witness public figures rise to Charm City’s defense on Saturday, from native daughter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the 7th District, Baltimore included, is part of the United States that he is supposedly governing. The White House has far more power to effect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings. If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

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Why White Working-Class Women Are Starting to Turn on Trump Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51076"><span class="small">Molly Jong-Fast, The Daily Beast</span></a>   
Monday, 29 July 2019 08:25

Jong-Fast writes: "It could be the 17 sexual assault allegations. Maybe it's the open racism. Whatever the case, the women of the white working class are starting to change the channel."

A Trump rally. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)
A Trump rally. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)

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Why White Working-Class Women Are Starting to Turn on Trump

By Molly Jong-Fast, The Daily Beast

29 July 19


It could be the 17 sexual assault allegations. Maybe it’s the open racism. Whatever the case, the women of the white working class are starting to change the channel.

he president of the United States has a well-deserved problem with women voters but it may not be for the reasons you’d suspect. It turns out the racism may actually be more distasteful to working class white women than the numerous sexual assault allegations.

Team Trump seems to be aware of the problem. In June, only a month from his most recent sexual assault (and in this case rape) allegation by writer E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign decided it was time to focus on the president’s woman problem, with its inadvertently hilarious “Women for Trump” organization.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that the president might have some issues attracting women voters he wasn’t related to. After all, Carroll’s is not the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth allegation against Trump. It’s the 17th.

But I have long postulated that Trump’s base isn’t bothered by his many sexual assault allegations. Even his daughter, who is usually the one person in Trumpworld to ever dare to express the slightest displeasure about her father’s most horrendous acts, merely replied, “I think it’s a pretty inappropriate question to ask a daughter, if she believes the accusers of her father.”

If the token fake feminist isn’t even a little bothered by her father’s numerous sexual assault accusations, then who is? Turns out Ivanka’s lack of interest is largely the sentiment in the White House, too. The Atlantic’s Elaina Plottinterviewed a former White House official who said, “What was she (E. Jean Carroll), like, the 28th or something?” A current White House official told her that “Literally nobody—zero people—have approached me to say that this is an issue.”

One might assume that the Trump campaign feels pretty good about their latest escape from yet another potentially career-killing fiasco. So the re-election campaign decided it was time to collect the women who are “for Trump” and set them to work on the women of Pennsylvania with a 2020 kickoff event at the Valley Forge Casino Resort in King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia. Many of the core members of “Women for Trump” either work for the Trump campaign (Katrina Pierson) or have some kind of vested interest in the Trump family.

But Lara Trump, wife of son Eric, is “the campaign’s Ivanka. She’s the statuesque loyal surrogate who works the trail,” and she’s also the president’s only remaining daughter-in-law since Don Jr traded the mother of his five children in for the rare species known as the Fox News brunette.

Lara is well preserved but not all that old, and she does a kind of faux cable news pundit thing, like a sort of super-Trumpy Ainsley Earhardt without the intellect. At the Pennsylvania event, Lara did manage to continue the family’s “own the libs” theme when she asked the crowd of election night 2016: “Remember everybody crying, over at the Javits Center? The media, like some people, was on TV, literally crying announcing Donald Trump was president? Think about how much more their heads are going to explode in 2020.”

But on Thursday, Democratic pollster and political strategist Stan Greenberg released a set of focus groups he conducted in white working-class neighborhoods, and the results should worry the organizers of Women for Trump. “The white working-class men look like they are approaching the 2016 margins for Trump, but not the women,” said Greenberg in The Atlantic. And Ronald Brownstein wrote that these focus groups “offer fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.”

Greenberg is not alone. In January 2019, Democracy Corps found that “49 percent of white working-class women said they would support the Democratic candidate in 2020, while 46 percent said they would support Trump in his reelection bid.”

It turns out that white working-class women do not enjoy the president’s “turn toward more overt racism.” A woman from Clark County, Nevada said of Trump during one of the focus groups, “He totally divides this country, like no one has ever done in history.” Another woman from the focus groups said, “I feel like whenever he starts hating on Democrats, because he does this often, it really does make him sound ignorant.”

It’s hard to know why the racism of a racist president who rose to political prominence on the back of a racist lie, birtherism, is suddenly bothering white working-class women. Perhaps the overtness of his targeting of the Squad is finally a bridge too far. It’s possible that the act of watching the president target women who are just trying to do their jobs is viscerally more upsetting to these women than the many allegations of sexual assault that they did not actually see with their own eyes.

The Squad is also made of young women who were targeted by Trump because of their age, their skin color, and their willingness to speak their minds. Perhaps even more jarring to some of these women, Trump’s attacks on the Squad lead to the mainstream media actually calling Trump out on his racism for the first time—even Fox News’ Chris Wallace said the president was "playing the race card."

Or maybe these focus groups are a blip and white working-class women will be charmed by Lara Trump’s hostility towards democrats and her “drink liberal tears” rhetoric. Or maybe the president’s racism, the thing he’s been using to juice his white working class base, will boomerang on him and alienate white working class women. Wouldn’t it be delicious if the racism was the thing that brought down the racist?

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We Are African Americans, We Are Patriots, and We Refuse to Sit Idly By Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51259"><span class="small">Clarence J. Fluker, C. Kinder, Jesse Moore and Khalilah M. Harris, The Washington Post</span></a>   
Sunday, 28 July 2019 14:02

Excerpt: "We've heard this before. Go back where you came from. Go back to Africa. And now, 'send her back.' Black and brown people in America don't hear these chants in a vacuum; for many of us, we've felt their full force being shouted in our faces, whispered behind our backs, scrawled across lockers, or hurled at us online. They are part of a pattern in our country designed to denigrate us as well as keep us separate and afraid."

President Barack Obama walks out to the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2015. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
President Barack Obama walks out to the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2015. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

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ALSO SEE: Barack Obama Shares Op-Ed Criticizing
President Trump's 'Poisoning of Our Democracy'

We Are African Americans, We Are Patriots, and We Refuse to Sit Idly By

By Clarence J. Fluker, C. Kinder, Jesse Moore and Khalilah M. Harris, The Washington Post

28 July 19


This op-ed is co-signed by 149 African Americans who served in the Obama administration.

e’ve heard this before. Go back where you came from. Go back to Africa. And now, “send her back.” Black and brown people in America don’t hear these chants in a vacuum; for many of us, we’ve felt their full force being shouted in our faces, whispered behind our backs, scrawled across lockers, or hurled at us online. They are part of a pattern in our country designed to denigrate us as well as keep us separate and afraid.

As 149 African Americans who served in the last administration, we witnessed firsthand the relentless attacks on the legitimacy of President Barack Obama and his family from our front-row seats to America’s first black presidency. Witnessing racism surge in our country, both during and after Obama’s service and ours, has been a shattering reality, to say the least. But it has also provided jet-fuel for our activism, especially in moments such as these.

We stand with congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, as well as all those currently under attack by President Trump, along with his supporters and his enablers, who feel deputized to decide who belongs here — and who does not. There is truly nothing more un-American than calling on fellow citizens to leave our country — by citing their immigrant roots, or ancestry, or their unwillingness to sit in quiet obedience while democracy is being undermined.

We are proud descendants of immigrants, refugees and the enslaved Africans who built this country while enduring the horrors of its original sin. We stand on the soil they tilled, and march in the streets they helped to pave. We are red-blooded Americans, we are patriots, and we have plenty to say about the direction this country is headed. We decry voter suppression. We demand equitable access to health care, housing, quality schools and employment. We welcome new Americans with dignity and open arms. And we will never stop fighting for the overhaul of a criminal-justice system with racist foundations.

We come from Minnesota and Michigan. The Bronx and Baton Rouge. Florida and Philadelphia. Cleveland and the Carolinas. Atlanta and Nevada. Oak-town and the Chi. We understand our role in this democracy, and respect the promise of a nation built by, for and of immigrants. We are part of that tradition, and have the strength to both respect our ancestors from faraway lands and the country we all call home.

Our love of country lives in these demands, and our commitment to use our voices and our energy to build a more perfect union. We refuse to sit idly by as racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are wielded by the president and any elected official complicit in the poisoning of our democracy. We call on local, state and congressional officials, as well as presidential candidates to articulate their policies and strategies for moving us forward as a strong democracy, through a racial-equity lens that prioritizes people over profit. We will continue to support candidates for local, state and federal office who add more diverse representation to the dialogue and those who understand the importance of such diversity when policymaking here in our country and around the world. We ask all Americans to be a good neighbor by demonstrating anti-racist, environmentally friendly, and inclusive behavior toward everyone in your everyday interactions.

The statesman Frederick Douglass warned, “The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.” This nation has neither grappled with nor healed from the horrors of its origins. It is time to advance that healing process now through our justice, economic, health and political systems.

Expect to hear more from us. We plan to leave this country better than we found it. This is our home.

Saba Abebe, former special assistant, Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, Energy Department

Tsehaynesh Abebe, former adviser, U.S. Agency for International Development

David Adeleye, former policy specialist, White House

Bunmi Akinnusotu, former special assistant, Office of Land and Emergency Management, Environmental Protection Agency

Trista Allen, former senior adviser to the regional administrator, General Services Administration

Maria Anderson, former operations assistant, White House

Karen Andre, former White House liaison, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Caya Lewis Atkins, former counselor for science and public health, Department of Health and Human Services

Roy L. Austin Jr., former deputy assistant to the president, White House Domestic Policy Council

Kevin Bailey, former special assistant, White House; senior policy adviser, Treasury Department

Jumoke Balogun, former adviser to the secretary, Labor Department

Diana Banks, former deputy assistant secretary, Defense Department

Desiree N. Barnes, former adviser to the press secretary, White House

Kevin F. Beckford, former special adviser, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Alaina Beverly, former associate director, Office of Urban Affairs, White House

Saba Bireda, former senior counsel, Office for Civil Rights, Education Department

Vincent H. Bish Jr., former special assistant to the assistant secretary of strategic program management, Department of Health and Human Services

Michael Blake, former director for African American, minority and women business enterprises and county and statewide elected officials, White House

Tenicka Boyd, former special assistant, Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Education Department

Tanya Bradsher, former assistant secretary for public affairs, Department of Homeland Security

Stacey Brayboy, former chief of staff, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Agriculture Department

Allyn Brooks-LaSure, former deputy associate administrator for external affairs, Environmental Protection Agency

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, former director of coverage policy, Office of Health Reform, Department of Health and Human Services

Quincy K. Brown, former senior policy adviser, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House

Taylor Campbell, former director of correspondence systems innovation, White House

Crystal Carson, former chief of staff to the director of communications, White House

Genger Charles, former general deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Housing, Federal Housing Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Glorie Chiza, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House

Sarah Haile Coombs, special assistant, Department of Health and Human Services

Michael Cox, former special assistant to the assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs, Commerce Department

Adria Crutchfield, former director of external affairs, Federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Joiselle Cunningham, former special adviser, Office of the Secretary, Education Department

Charlotte Flemmings Curtis, former special adviser for White House initiatives, Corporation for National and Community Service

Kareem Dale, former special assistant to the president for disability policy, White House

Ashlee Davis, former White House liaison, Agriculture Department

Marco A. Davis, former deputy director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics

Russella L. Davis-Rogers, former chief of staff, Office of Strategic Partnerships, Department of Education

Tequia Hicks Delgado, former senior adviser for congressional engagement and legislative relations, Office of Legislative Affairs, White House

Kalisha Dessources Figures, former policy adviser, White House Council on Women and Girls

Leek Deng, former special assistant, Bureau for Global Health, U.S. Agency for International Development

Tene Dolphin, former chief of staff, Economic Development Administration, Commerce Department

Monique Dorsainvil, former deputy chief of staff, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House

Joshua DuBois, former executive director, Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships; former special assistant to the president, White House

Dru Ealons, former director, Office of Public Engagement, Environmental Protection Agency

Rosemary Enobakhare, former deputy associate administrator for public engagement and environmental education, Environmental Protection Agency

Karen Evans, former assistant director and policy adviser, Office of Cabinet Affairs, White House

Clarence J. Fluker, former deputy associate director for national parks and youth engagement, White House Council on Environmental Quality

Heather Foster, former public engagement adviser and director of African American affairs, White House

Kalina Francis, former special adviser, Office of Public Affairs, Treasury Department

Matthew “Van” Buren Freeman, former senior adviser, Minority Business Development Agency, Commerce Department

Cameron French, former deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Jocelyn Frye, former deputy assistant to the president and director of policy and special projects for the first lady, White House

Bernard Fulton, former deputy assistant secretary for congressional relations, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Stephanie Gaither, former confidential assistant to the deputy director, Office of Management and Budget, White House

Demetria A. Gallagher, former senior adviser for policy and inclusive innovation, Commerce Department

Lateisha Garrett, former White House liaison, National Endowment for the Humanities

W. Cyrus Garrett, former special adviser to the director of counternarcotics enforcement, Department of Homeland Security

Bishop M. Garrison, former science and technology directorate adviser, Department of Homeland Security

Lisa Gelobter, former chief digital service officer, Education Department

A’shanti F. Gholar, former special assistant to the secretary, Labor Department

Jay R. Gilliam, former special assistant, U.S. Agency for International Development

Artealia Gilliard, former deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy, Transportation Department

Brenda Girton-Mitchell, former director, Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Education Department

Jason Green, former associate counsel and special assistant to the president, White House

Corey Arnez Griffin, former associate director, Peace Corps

Kyla F. Griffith, former special adviser to the secretary, Commerce Department

Simone L. Hardeman-Jones, former deputy assistant secretary, Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs, Education Department

Thamar Harrigan, former senior intergovernmental relations adviser, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Dalen Harris, former director, Office of Intergovernmental and Public Liaison, Office of National Drug Control Policy, White House

Khalilah M. Harris, former deputy director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans; former senior adviser, Office of Personnel Management

Adam Hodge, former deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, Treasury Department

Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser, White House

Will Yemi Jawando, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House

Karine Jean-Pierre, former northeast political director, Office of Political Affairs, White House

A. Jenkins, former director, Center for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Commerce Department

Adora Jenkins, former press secretary, Justice Department; former deputy associate administrator for external affairs, Environmental Protection Agency

W. Nate Jenkins, former chief of staff and senior adviser to the budget director, Office of Management and Budget, White House

David J. Johns, former executive director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans

Brent Johnson, former special adviser to the secretary, Commerce Department

Broderick Johnson, former White House assistant to the president and Cabinet secretary for My Brother’s Keeper Task Force

Carmen Daniels Jones, former director, Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, Agriculture Department

Gregory K. Joseph II, former special assistant, Office of the Executive Secretariat, Energy Department

Jamia Jowers, former special assistant, National Security Council

Charmion N. Kinder, former associate, Press Office of the First Lady, White House; former assistant press secretary, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Elise Nelson Leary, former international affairs adviser, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Kimberlyn Leary, former adviser, White House Council on Women and Girls

Daniella Gibbs Léger, former special assistant to the president and director of message events, White House

Georgette Lewis, former policy adviser, Department of Health and Human Services

Kevin Lewis, former director of African American media, White House; former principal deputy director of public affairs, Justice Department

Catherine E. Lhamon, former assistant secretary for civil rights, Education Department

Tiffani Long, former special adviser, Economic Development Administration

Latifa Lyles, former director, Women’s Bureau, Labor Department

Brenda Mallory, former general counsel, White House Council on Environmental Quality

Dominique Mann, former media affairs manager, White House

Shelly Marc, former policy adviser, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House

Tyra A. Mariani, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary, Education Department

Lawrence Mason III, former domestic policy analyst, Office of Presidential Correspondence, White House

Dexter L. McCoy, former special assistant, Office of the Secretary, Education Department

Matthew McGuire, former U.S. executive director, The World Bank Group

Tyrik McKeiver, former senior adviser, State Department

Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, former assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development

Solianna Meaza, former special assistant to associate administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development

Mahlet Mesfin, former assistant director for international science and technology, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House

Ricardo Michel, former director, Center for Transformational Partnerships, U.S. Agency for International Development Global Development Lab

Paul Monteiro, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House

Jesse Moore, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House

Shannon Myricks, former specialist, Office of Management and Administration Information Services, White House

Melanie Newman, former director of public affairs, Justice Department

Fatima Noor, former policy assistant, Domestic Policy Council

Bianca Oden, former deputy chief of staff, Agriculture Department

Funmi Olorunnipa, former ethics counsel, White House Counsel’s Office

Elizabeth Ogunwo, former White House liaison, Peace Corps

Stephanie Sprow Owens, former deputy director, Reach Higher, Education Department

Denise L. Pease, former regional administrator of the northeast and Caribbean region, General Services Administration

Danielle Perry, former special adviser to the assistant secretary, Agriculture Department

Allison C. Pulliam, former special assistant, Office of Presidential Personnel, White House

Colby Redmond, former advance specialist, Office of the Secretary, Commerce Department

Derrick Robinson, former researcher, Office of Communications, White House

Lynn M. Ross, former deputy assistant secretary for policy development, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Sarah Rutherford, former press and media operations assistant, White House

Alexander Sewell, former special assistant, Export-Import Bank

Michael Smith, former special assistant to the president and senior director of Cabinet affairs for My Brother’s Keeper, White House

Russell F. Smith, former deputy assistant secretary for international fisheries, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Commerce Department

Jackeline Stewart, former press secretary, General Services Administration

Angela Tennison, former leadership development director, Education Department

Kenny Thompson Jr., former special assistant to the president and director of message events to the vice president, White House

Ivory A. Toldson, former executive director, White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Fred Tombar, former senior adviser to the secretary for disaster recovery, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Christopher R. Upperman, former assistant administrator for public engagement, Small Business Administration

Malik Walker, former senior adviser for congressional and legislative affairs, Office of Personnel Management

Jason R.L. Wallace, former director of scheduling and advance, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Myesha Ward, former assistant U.S. trade representative for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement

Clarence Wardell III, former presidential innovation fellow

Benjamin E. Webb, former executive director of policy and planning, Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security

C’Reda J. Weeden, former executive secretary, Department of Health and Human Services

Tonia Wellons, former associate director, Office of Strategic Partnerships, Peace Corps

Antonio White, former senior adviser, Treasury Department

Monae White, former special projects manager, Education Department

Aketa Marie Williams, former director of strategic communications, Office of the Undersecretary, Education Department

Jonta Williams, former adviser to the assistant administrator for Africa, U.S. Agency for International Development

Jessica Wilson, former special assistant, Office of Policy, Department of Homeland Security

Taj Wilson, former deputy associate counsel, White House

Candace Wint, former director of advance, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Brent C. Woolfork, former managing director, Overseas Private Investment Corporation

Tarrah Cooper Wright, former special assistant to the secretary, Department of Homeland Security

Ursula Wright, former associate assistant deputy secretary, Education Department

Carl Young, former adviser and assistant, Office of Management and Budget, White House

Stephanie Young, former senior adviser, Office of Public Engagement, White House

David N. Zikusoka, former senior adviser for weapons of mass destruction and nonproliferation, Office of the Vice President, White House

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How Jerry Falwell Jr. Silences Students and Professors Who Reject His Pro-Trump Politics Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51254"><span class="small">Will E. Young, The Washington Post</span></a>   
Sunday, 28 July 2019 08:34

Young writes: "What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life."

The Jerry Falwell Memorial at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell founded Liberty University in 1971. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr., is now the school's president. (photo: Marlena Sloss/AP)
The Jerry Falwell Memorial at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell founded Liberty University in 1971. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr., is now the school's president. (photo: Marlena Sloss/AP)

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How Jerry Falwell Jr. Silences Students and Professors Who Reject His Pro-Trump Politics

By Will E. Young, The Washington Post

28 July 19


How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics.

n my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces do, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper’s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley — for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn’t happen again, because she’d keep a better eye on me.

This wasn’t exactly a rude awakening. I’d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories. Still, I stuck around. I thought that if I wrote with discretion and kept my head down, I could one day win enough trust from the university to protect the integrity of our journalism. I even dreamed we could eventually persuade the administration to let the Champion go independent from its supervision. I was naive.

Instead, when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.

What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leaders, who mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from the school). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously, to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

By 2016, Liberty’s efforts to limit free expression were already well-established. (“The big victory was finding a way to tame the faculty,” Falwell told the New York Times last year for a story about privileging Liberty’s financial growth over its academics.) But the school’s methods became even more aggressive after Falwell endorsed Donald Trump early that year, according to multiple current and former faculty members. “The closer you get to the president’s office,” says former history professor Brian Melton, discussing a chilling effect on campus, “the worse it becomes.” Falwell’s staff now operates masterfully to squash challenges to his views and his rise in national political influence.

The dissent that did exist — from off-message campus speakers, insufficiently sycophantic board members, student activists and our newspaper staff — was ruthlessly neutralized. Liberty, founded on principles of fundamental Christianity, is now a place that has zero tolerance for new questions and ideas. Those who harbor them must remain silent, or leave.

***

Falwell, 57, possesses a certain Orwellian gift for painting Liberty as a bastion of tolerance where alternate viewpoints are not just permitted but encouraged. In March, he attended the signing of Trump’s executive order on college free speech and later claimed on “PBS NewsHour” that Liberty was inclusive of all ideas because it had invited Jimmy Carter to deliver its 2018 commencement address and Bernie Sanders to speak in 2015 at the assembly that students are required to attend twice a week. After Falwell learned last month that I was writing this essay, he posted a column on Liberty’s site disputing “sensational stories . . . that we do not allow opposing views.” He wrote, “If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that there will be a strong and critical response to this article by a few former students and a handful of national media determined to paint Liberty in a completely different light on these issues.”

His Twitter account is a much better reflection of his approach to dissent. Falwell’s profile announces that “Haters will be blocked,” and several students who have disagreed or argued with him on Twitter have met this fate. Falwell outright lied on the platform to Sojourners Web editor Sandi Villarreal — who is now my colleague — when he said he’d removed a Champion op-ed criticizing Trump’s “locker room talk” defense because there was simply not enough room on the page. (The piece was already laid out on the page when he pulled it.) In fact, much of Falwell’s message control has to do with safeguarding Trump.

Mark DeMoss was something like Liberty royalty. His late father, Arthur S. DeMoss, gave $20 million to build DeMoss Hall, the school’s main academic building. Mark was also an alumnus, a former chief of staff to university founder Jerry Falwell Sr. and eventually a public relations executive who counted Liberty among his clients. He won a seat on the school’s board of trustees in 1991 after serving as Liberty’s spokesman and became the board’s executive committee chairman in 2008.

In January 2016, days before Trump was scheduled to speak at Liberty, Falwell emailed DeMoss asking whether he should endorse Trump for president. DeMoss says he recommended against endorsing anyone, and Falwell thanked him for the “great advice.” Falwell, at the speech, held back his imprimatur. But a week later, he anointed the billionaire with his support. DeMoss was horrified. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ,” he told The Washington Post at the time. Falwell seemed to take the rebuke in stride, saying he was “disappointed” in DeMoss but understood “that all the administrators and faculty have their own personal political views.”

Within a few months, though, DeMoss would be gone. The night before a Liberty board meeting that April, the executive committee, including Falwell, convened without DeMoss to vote on a motion to oust him from his role as chairman. DeMoss says that his criticism of the endorsement was the cause. (Before the meeting, Falwell had called him a pawn of rival campaigns.) DeMoss resigned as a trustee days later, on April 25, 2016, citing “a lack of trust.”

A week after that, Liberty changed the sign on DeMoss Hall to “Arthur S. DeMoss Hall,” making clear that the structure honored the father and not the wayward son. The message to faculty and students was clear: If you challenge Falwell, you will be not only removed but erased.

The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote .?.?. free market processes” and “affirm .?.?. that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and .?.?. they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

Late-notice faculty removals have also become more commonplace, according to Melton, stemming in part from Falwell’s stated desire to tame the teaching corps. “He considers the faculty to be disposable beasts of burden,” Melton says. Last summer, 14 professors at Liberty’s School of Education were suddenly told that their contracts would not be renewed as part of what former Liberty spokesman Len Stevens called a “reorganization.” This June, a dozen faculty members at Liberty’s School of Divinity were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. By that late in the year, it is too late to find another job in higher education for the fall.

For former faculty members, Liberty’s culture of fear can live on. The school often requires terminated professors to sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want their severance packages, several told me — a practice that is extremely uncommon in higher education, according to Robert Bezemek, a California lawyer who represents labor unions at universities. (As Melton puts it, “They force this NDA on you by leveraging the ability to feed your family against you.”) Even former teachers who hadn’t signed NDAs told me they feared that talking to me on the record would somehow get them blacklisted from jobs elsewhere or imperil their friends who still work at Liberty. One thought my request to speak with him was a trap, calling my previous connection with the school “fishy.” When I contacted another for an interview, she warned me, “The university is on to you.” I confess I harbor a certain paranoia, too, from years of being watched at the Champion. Melton and several other current and former members of the faculty told me that they believe the administration surveils everything they do on Liberty’s server, tracking when instructors complete a task late and searching for evidence of “disloyalty,” as a former professor put it. Another onetime instructor declined to use his university-issued laptop because he thought Liberty had equipped it with spyware.

One cause for alarm came just before Trump’s inauguration, when then-Provost Ronald Hawkins ordered all campus faculty members to fill out an anonymous survey rating how politically and socially liberal they were on a scale of 1 to 5. “We are interested in how we compare with other institutions on political and social views,” Hawkins’s office said in a follow-up email to faculty members. But, according to a former professor who talked with others in her department, many initially refused to take the survey out of fear that if a department had too many left-leaning professors, the administration might target it for more oversight or even firings. There is no evidence of Liberty firing a faculty member explicitly for his or her political beliefs, but everyone I spoke to believed that the school could easily manufacture some other pretense. “There is zero trust between the administration and faculty,” Melton says. FIRE, a nonprofit that fights for free speech on campus, put Liberty on its 2019 list of the 10 worst colleges for freedom of speech.

***

Things aren’t much better for the 15,000 students on campus. In 2009, Liberty withdrew funding and recognition for its College Democrats chapter because, as Mark Hine, the senior vice president of student affairs, put it, the national party defends abortion, opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, supported “the ‘LGBT’ agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.” A.J. Strom, who graduated in May, tells me that several students wanted to revive the College Democrats but no faculty members were willing to advise them, without which Liberty will not recognize a student club. “They said they would love to sign on but that if Jerry saw their name on the club application, they would be fired,” Strom says.

Student leaders have consistently helped administrators enforce the culture. After the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, members of Liberty’s Student Government Association drafted a statement expressing solidarity with Heather Heyer, the protester murdered by a neo-Nazi, and all people demonstrating against white nationalism. Then-SGA President Caleb Johnson refused to release the message and send it to university administrators for fear of what Falwell might think. (Johnson said in an email this past week that the statement’s author was “a self-described ‘Never-Trumper’?” and that “we would not allow the platform of Liberty Student Government to be improperly used by a political activist with obvious ulterior motives.”) “There’s 100 percent an atmosphere of fear at Liberty,” says Caleb Fitzpatrick, who was then the student government’s speaker of the House and helped draft the statement. “There was a need to avoid being seen as a liberal or progressive, or even being different.”

In September 2018, nearly a year into the #MeToo movement, Liberty invited conservative provocateur Candace Owens to speak at an assembly. A few days before her visit, Owens tweeted that the women accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault were “making it up.” In response, Addyson Garner, then president of a libertarian club on campus, organized a rally to support victims of sexual assault, called #LUforMeToo, which would occur right after the Owens speech. The day before, Jacob Page, then the student body president, summoned her to his office, where he and Vice President Derek Rockey pressured her to cancel the event, Garner says. She left the office in tears, but she and her fellow organizers decided to protest anyway. About 25 students attended, a rare show of defiance on a campus that discourages political dissent. (In an email this past week, Rockey said he thought students should attend a public dialogue on these topics rather than stage a protest. Page said he and Rockey “support bringing awareness to victims of sexual assault” but “felt it was unproductive to engage in partisan protests.”)

Guests at the school who deviate from the prescribed philosophy can be targeted, too. In October 2017, the anti-Trump pastor and writer Jonathan Martin arrived at the invitation of the Christian musical duo Johnnyswim, who were performing on campus that night; Martin also announced on Twitter that he would lead a prayer meeting with students the next morning. Falwell took it as an unauthorized protest, and the LUPD sent three armed officers to remove Martin from campus, telling him he’d be arrested if he returned. Martin tweeted that it was “evidently in response to my strong criticism of @JerryFallwellJr’s alignment not only with the darkest contours of Trumpism, but expressly with Steve Bannon & the alt-right he represents.” Falwell told the Champion that Martin’s forcible removal was “a matter of safety.”

A similar episode unfolded in 2015 when Jonathan Merritt, a Liberty alumnus and Christian writer, was disinvited to speak on campus after authoring an article critical of Hobby Lobby, the company permitted by the Supreme Court in 2014 to deny its employees contraceptive health-care coverage. The Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is close with Falwell. “You don’t seem to remember who your friends are,” Merritt remembers Falwell saying over the phone.

***

One afternoon in April 2016, when I was still a cub reporter in my sophomore year, I received a one-sentence email from Deborah Huff, our adviser: “need to talk to you about SG,” the subject line read; I should call her that night. She copied the editor in chief, a senior. I was clearly in trouble.

“SG” stood for Scott Garrett, a traditionalist conservative who represents Lynchburg in the state legislature. According to records I had found through the Virginia Public Access Project, he owned millions of dollars in stock, some from companies that lobby lawmakers in Richmond. A few days earlier, I interviewed him for the Champion about possible conflicts of interest stemming from his assets.

After dinner, I called Huff. She sounded annoyed. When I described my reporting to her, she told me the Champion would not run my story, because Garrett was afraid that the article would hurt his reputation. The message was clear: I had no business heckling Liberty’s friends and allies. (“I don’t remember the incident in question,” Garrett emailed me this week when I asked him for a comment. “And I don’t understand why I would say the article would hurt my reputation because there was no conflict of interest.”)

Out of fear that arguing with her would end my career at the paper — she selected which students would advance to editorships — I apologized for looking into Garrett’s finances and assured her that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again. I understood that her job, and by extension mine, was to protect our righteous, evangelical university. Before becoming a Liberty teacher and then supervisor of the Champion, Huff worked for the Fundamentalist Journal, a now-defunct Falwell-owned periodical. I didn’t see defending the faith or protecting Liberty as the main purpose of journalism. But in the face of a mentor I trusted, I believed I must have been in the wrong.

Looking back on the emails from that episode three years later, I’m embarrassed by my naivete — and my willingness to abandon a scoop with obvious journalistic merit. The scales began to fall from my eyes as, over the next 18 months, I saw how in every issue of the Champion the administration strategically manipulated or erased stories. Huff discouraged us from following leads that might disrupt the image of Liberty as a prestigious, respectable evangelical institution. In pitch meetings, she made it clear that the Champion would not cover Liberty scandals, even those that appeared in mainstream news outlets (such as the Falwells’ secret business relationships or the wave of Liberty alumni who sent back their diplomas after Falwell defended Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the white-nationalist Charlottesville rally).

By the time I became the Champion’s editor, the censorship I hoped to stop was already shameless. In February 2017, I wrote an article on a higher-education task force that Trump had asked Falwell to lead. Falwell emailed me his personal edits, removing every quote from an expert concerning possible conflicts of interest that Falwell created by accepting the position (in the end, the task force was never formed). Months later, Huff ordered that my story about Martin’s expulsion from campus include lines about how Liberty is inclusive of different political beliefs, in the face of obvious counterevidence. An administrator spiked a news report about an on-campus swing dancing club that was temporarily banned. When film students drafted a petition in early 2018 objecting to “The Trump Prophecy” — a hagiographic tale about a firefighter who said he had prophesized Trump’s election, which Liberty students were compelled to produce in order to receive their degrees — faculty at the film school crafted our coverage into a fluffy bit of PR highlighting students who looked forward to working on set. Champion reporter Jack Panyard was so disgusted, he removed his byline from the piece. Then there was sports editor Joel Schmieg’s column about “locker room talk” after the “Access Hollywood” video came out; Falwell blocked it from publication.

This interference frequently caused shouting matches with, and passive aggressive emails from, administrators. “Too bad the editor and chief of The Champion penned this editorial for the homecoming edition without any effort to learn all that is being done at Liberty to prevent and react appropriately to sexual assault,” Liberty General Counsel David Corry wrote to Falwell and Huff about my column on campus sexual assault. Instead of sticking up for the journalists she supervised, Huff emailed me to complain that I did not “make sure Liberty was separated from the conversation or address what Liberty does that is different than other schools.” Later that day, the piece was removed from the website without my consent. (In his preemptive statement last month, Falwell seemed to address these episodes. “In the past few years, some students screamed ‘censorship’ when they didn’t get their every word published in our campus newspaper,” he wrote. “But that standard isn’t even attained within the newsroom of commercial newspapers.”)

In the wake of these run-ins, members of our staff often gathered in my office to daydream about taking the paper independent or grouse about Huff, whom we felt was gaslighting us. What kind of newspaper adviser would denounce our attempts to keep Liberty accountable and make us repeatedly apologize to administrators for trying? By this point, it was clear that the principles of investigative journalism I was learning in class were verboten when it came to Liberty itself. The Champion could never be an avatar of press freedom or truth-telling.

I grew up in a politically conservative household and was active in my denomination; my values changed at Liberty as I embraced a more inclusive and open vision of the church. My views of Liberty, and of the values I saw Falwell profess on a daily basis, changed as well. I considered transferring schools or resigning from the paper. The weekly fight for the right to publish was exhausting. Still, I decided to stay because I saw that, on the occasions we won — when we either persuaded administrators to leave an article alone or worked around their objections — we sparked dialogue among students on Twitter and in classrooms that challenged Liberty’s status quo. But ultimately, our fraught relationship with our overlords was untenable, and something had to give.

The end finally came for the Champion when a left-leaning faith group, the Red Letter Christians, organized a “Lynchburg Revival” in April 2018 to protest Falwell’s support of Trump and what the group called “toxic evangelicalism.” Two days beforehand, Liberty’s police department notified RLC leader Shane Claiborne that he would be arrested if he set foot on campus. The Champion had already decided to cover the event, but the stakes were higher now. Huff told us it would be too controversial for print, but the other editors and I didn’t think we could ignore it.

The day before the gathering, Falwell sent an email to Erin Covey, our assistant news editor: “Let’s not run any articles about the event. That’s all these folks are here for — publicity. Best to ignore them.” When we explained our dilemma to RLC organizers, they tipped off a reporter at the Religion News Service, which ran a piece detailing Falwell’s censorship. Covey gave on-the-record quotes. Panyard, who was set to succeed me as editor in chief in a few weeks, briefed the reporter on background, as did I. (Vox also picked up the story and amplified it, and I imagine it galled Falwell to be depicted as an insecure tyrant in a liberal publication.)

The school’s response was swift. Falwell convened a tele-meeting with Bruce Kirk, who was then dean of the School of Communication, and our entire staff. They reprimanded us for talking to the press, and Falwell justified his censorship by arguing that the Red Letter Christians were “not keeping with the values of the university.” Then he spoke candidly for the first time about, as he saw it, the virtues of censoring us: “That’s what you kids are going to run into when you get into the real world and start working for for-profit newspapers. That’s what they’re going to expect of you, and I want you to learn that while you’re here.” Kirk, who was sitting with us for the meeting, chimed in, agreeing with Falwell. Being censored by a higher-up in the media industry is “just a part of life,” he said. (Before he began at Liberty, he worked for a local news station operated by Sinclair Broadcasting.)

After the meeting, I felt sick. I hadn’t said a word while Falwell flayed us for trying to practice basic journalism and act with integrity. I went into my office, closed the door and waited until most of the staff had left the newsroom. Then I sat down at my desk and wept.

A week and a half later, Kirk called Panyard and Covey into his office and told them they were being let go as part of a “reorganization.” Nobody else was affected; they’d been fired. It was the most aggressive and direct action the administration had ever taken to silence the Champion. I was not fired — I was a lame duck anyway — but I resigned and refused to take part in the production of the year’s final edition. I cleaned out my office that same day. Soon after, I learned I would be the last student editor in chief of the Champion and that from now on the paper would be run directly by the school. (Kirk did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.)

***

Even at Liberty, there are still those who publicly reject Falwell’s diktats. A petition supporting Mark DeMoss won more than 70 student signatures when Falwell ousted him in 2016. During the presidential election, free speech lived a little when Liberty United Against Trump, a student group, scored national media attention for its stance that the school did not uniformly approve of Falwell’s endorsement. It said it accumulated more than 2,000 student signatures for its statement.

Panyard, the deposed editor, launched a new independent newspaper, the Lynchburg Torch, with the help of other refugees from the campus weekly. In the past year, it has published stories that the Champion’s overseers would have blocked, such as a report on LGBTQ students who oppose Liberty’s position on same-sex relationships. Addyson Garner put on another rally this year to support queer Liberty students after transphobic comments from Falwell and his wife, Becki. (“We’re raising her as a girl,” Becki Falwell said of their granddaughter Reagan, as her husband looked on. “We’re not letting her have a choice.”) Dozens of students participated, according to Garner and posts on social media. It was the first time I had ever seen the rainbow pride flag flown openly on Liberty’s campus. The school is changing.

But in significant ways, it is not more tolerant, and it certainly does not celebrate “the open exchange of competing ideas” that Falwell described in his column. In a discussion with the incoming Champion staffers after I left, Kirk said, “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is.” The students who recall a more open time at Liberty, before Trump, have now graduated. All those who remain chose to go to Falwell’s school after he endorsed Trump, forming a much more compliant student body that generally accepts and even supports Falwell’s crackdown culture.

I graduated last year. Since then, I’ve tried to put Liberty — and the stress and self-doubt that officials there saddled me with — behind me. But I still fume when Falwell spews dumbfounding conspiracies online or retweets a bigoted rant from Trump, and I still become uneasy when I see my diploma, which is sitting in a cluttered drawer at my parents’ house. I made amazing friends and memories on campus, but I’m realizing the extent to which I internalized the fear tactics; I still sometimes self-censor my thoughts and writing. How can a college education stifle your freedom of thought? When people ask me if I regret going to Liberty, as many do, I usually pause. I don’t know.

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