The Senator Has Fought to Go Mainstream with the Ideology That He Shares with His Father
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For Immediate Release: September 29, 2014 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Ariel Levin, (212) 286-5996 The Senator Has Fought to Go Mainstream with the Ideology That He Shares with His Father. How Far Can That Strategy Take Him? In the October 6, 2014, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Revenge of Rand Paul” (p. 44), Ryan Lizza, through a series of four interviews with Rand Paul, traces the senator’s efforts to woo the Republican establishment and investigates his shot at the Presidency in 2016. “In some respects, Paul is to Republicans in 2014 what Barack Obama was to Democrats in 2006: the Party’s most prized fund-raiser and its most dis- cussed senator, willing to express opinions unpopular within his party, and capable of energizing younger voters,” Lizza writes. “Yet, also like Obama at a similar stage in his career, Paul could be hobbled by past associations and statements, especially on race and foreign policy.” This summer, Steve Munisteri, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, told Lizza that “[Paul] is objectively one of the three most likely people to get the nomination.” Later, following the evolution of Paul’s position on military action in the Middle East, Munisteri re- canted this statement, saying that his earlier prediction was unlikely, because “the foreign-policy situation is such a wild card.” John Mc- Cain, one of Paul’s longtime critics, told Lizza in August that, if Paul is the Republican nominee for President in 2016, he will support him. However, Lizza talked to John McCain again recently, after Paul publicly referenced a widely discredited Internet conspiracy theory that McCain had met with ISIS. McCain “was in a less generous mood,” Lizza writes. “It is disappointing that he would pick up and le- gitimatize what was clearly information that was being pushed by people who are enemies of the United States,” McCain tells Lizza. In the piece, Lizza looks at Paul’s political rise, including his early-childhood interest in his father’s campaigns, and his creation of the antitax organization Kentucky Taxpayers United. Lizza also details Paul’s friendship with George Paul, a Baylor University classmate and fellow-member of the NoZe Brotherhood secret society. Kristy Ditzler, who was on the swim team with Paul and George, tells Lizza that the three of them once got high on laughing gas, which George had procured from a friend studying dentistry. “We attached a scuba mask directly to it,” George tells Lizza. “We knew it was dangerous, but we also knew how to adjust the air mixture to keep it just right.” In a statement, Paul says, “College was a long time ago.” He continues: “The hijinks reported by others makes my college experience sound way more adventuresome than it actually was.” Lizza discovered that Ditzler was the anonymous female source in the so-called Aqua Buddha scandal of 2010, which alleged that Paul and an- other NoZe brother had taken her from her apartment, encouraged her to smoke pot, and asked her to pray to something called Aqua Buddha. The NoZe brother who accompanied Paul in the prank, Lizza reveals, was George Paul. He speaks to both on the record, for the first time, about the controversy. Ditzler, who is a Democrat, tells Lizza that she was appalled by how Rand’s political opponents mischaracterized the interview. “I would not use that as a specific reason not to vote for him,” she says. “The only reason I felt like speaking up was that I was a little bit irked by him making himself out to be all about God and country and all about conservative values, because he was clearly not promoting that when I knew him.” She continues, “I mean, we all change, we all have a past. If he’s changed, why can’t he just say that he’s changed?” A Boy Was Accused of Taking a Backpack. The Courts Took the Next Three Years of His Life In “Before the Law” (p. 26), Jennifer Gonnerman investigates the case of Kalief Browder, who spent three years in Rikers Island’s Robert N. Davoren Center—more than a year and a half of that time in solitary confinement—without ever standing trial, and offers a rare account of life inside the notorious jail for adolescents. In 2010, Browder, then sixteen years old, arrived at R.N.D.C. He had been charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault, after he was accused of stealing a backpack. Browder was held on bail set at three thousand dollars, a sum that was out of reach for his family. New York State’s “ready rule” stipulates that all felony cases, except homicides, must be ready for trial within six months of charges being filed, or else the charges can be dismissed. In practice, however, this time limit is subject to technicalities. Over the course of the next three years, Browder—who maintained his innocence, and therefore refused several plea deals—had roughly thirty court dates. Repeatedly, his trial was delayed, typically for weeks or months at a time. On May 29, 2013, Browder, who had missed his junior and senior years of high school, as well as graduation, was released; his case was dismissed. CHRISTOPH NIEMANN The attorney Paul V. Prestia has filed a suit on Browder’s behalf against the city, the N.Y.P.D., the Bronx District Attorney, and the De- partment of Correction. Prestia tells Gonnerman that even by the standards of justice in the Bronx, Browder’s case was extreme. “It’s some- thing that could’ve been tried in a court in a matter of days,” Prestia says. “I don’t know how each and every prosecutor who looked at this case continued to let this happen. It’s like Kalief Browder didn’t even exist.” Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx District Attorney, will not an- swer questions about Browder’s case, stating that the court records are sealed. Speaking generally, he tells Gonnerman, “These long delays—two, three years—they’re horrendous, but the D.A. is not really accountable for that kind of delay.” Browder has struggled to adapt following his release. “People tell me because I have this case against the city I’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messed up,” he says. “I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. There are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back.” Chris Ofili Returns to New York with a Major Retrospective In “Into the Unknown” (p. 60), Calvin Tomkins profiles the artist Chris Ofili, whose first major New York retrospective opens at the New Museum this month. Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998—at age thirty, he was the first black artist to do so—and gained notoriety the next year, when Mayor Giuliani became publicly outraged by his use of elephant dung in a painting of the Virgin Mary, which was on dis- play at the Brooklyn Museum. He “has been reluctant to exhibit his work in New York since then, but he has gone right on producing startlingly original paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures,” Tomkins writes, noting that Ofili’s art has changed profoundly since he moved from his native London to Trinidad, in 2005. “It’s hard to go away from something that’s very enjoyable, and a domain where I felt supremely confident,” Ofili—whose large paintings often sell for roughly half a million dollars each—tells Tomkins about the evolution of his work. “Before, I was focussing on high impact, and what I wanted to find was a way of working that was less complex and maybe less visible.” He became fascinated by Trinidad’s haunted landscape and mysterious light—especially the slow transition from day into night, an extended period when forms are still visible but their shapes become indistinct. Trying to capture that experience in paint opened up a whole new way of working, and he began experimenting with blue—a color he had always shied away from because of its tendency to dominate other colors. A series of his blue paintings, only a few of which have been exhibited in this country, will be on display at “Night and Day,” his forthcoming exhibit at the New Museum. Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director and chief curator, tells Tomkins, “The blue paintings will challenge your expectations about Ofili.” He continues: “There’s no trace of the carnivalesque element that’s so strong in his nineties work. You can really get lost in them.” One of Russia’s Most Famous Writers Confronts the State In “The Weight of Words” (p. 34), Masha Gessen profiles the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, whose literary works and outspoken opposition to the war in Ukraine has made her a voice of moral authority for some progressive Russians. In the twenty years since her first book was published, Ulitskaya, who is seventy-one years old, has become one of Russia’s most famous writers, the author of best-selling novels tackling topics that make many Russians uncomfortable. “As Russia has grown politically repressive and culturally conservative, Ulitskaya’s fiction, which addresses both religion and politics, has moved in for a confrontation,” Gessen writes. The daughter of two highly educated ethnic Jews, Ulitskaya’s career began in a genetics laboratory, where she and the other young scientists were avid consumers and occasional distributors of censored Soviet literature. She published her first piece of short fiction in 1990—years after the K.G.B.