1/ Miles Taylor is no resistance hero. He was an active facilitator of the separations of thousands of boys and girls from their parents who is now whitewashing his own reputation. nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/…
2/ Miles Taylor propagated the myth that the moms and dads arriving at the border were not in fact parents.
Don't take my word for it. Here's the stories he solicited for Secretary Nielsen to use for this, and a link to his email soliciting them. documentcloud.org/documents/6881…
3/ When the full horror of family separations began to emerge, Miles Taylor did not denounce them. Instead, he sent Kirstjen Nielsen talking points to argue that the administration was actually *protecting* children.
Don't take my word for it. Here's the email.
4/ Despite his clear role in family separations, Miles Taylor parlayed his former DHS role into a plum position @Google. When Google staff protested, Google fired *them.*
6/ Miles Taylor is just the first in a wave of Trump officials who will soon tell us that they tried to stop it, they were the good guys on the inside.
Wait until you read their emails.
Meanwhile, everyone @Google + @CNN: You're working with an architect of family separation.
7/ Palantir, Rod Rosenstein, Miles Taylor: If you see a pattern, I do too:
- Evidence emerges that a person or company was complicit in family separations
Your company cannot claim to support civil rights in technology if it continues to employ someone who was demonstrably complicit in the worst human rights abuse against Latinx people since Operation Wetback.
You are better than this.
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2/ Here in April 2018 is Miles Taylor asking Katie Waldman (now Miller) for cases to help Secretary Nielsen propagate the fiction that the families showing up at the border were actually fake.
3/ Here’s her reply. Note the language around “family units” and “Honduran male adults.”
The Feldman op-ed reminds me of a warning I give my law students.
I start by admitting that I hated law school. If the student is struggling, I’ll add that I once told a friend that if I ever try to teach law school, “please shoot me in the head.” There was an extra word there.
I tell them that I hated law school because it rewards, hand over fist, a very specific kind of intelligence: The ability to answer, on-the-fly and on-the-spot, to an abstract hypothetical that’s divorced from reality — without reference to notes or the ability to reflect.
This isn’t just cold-calling or Socratic method. It is also exams. The highest compliment you can pay someone in law schools is “Oh my God, they are so smart” — with the “smart” referring to that intelligence.
You cannot use the sentence “elections have consequences” in a post-2016 op-ed supporting a SCOTUS nominee and spend all of one sentence discussing Merrick Garland.
For a constitutional scholar to fail to appreciate that we’re in the middle of a republic-defining authoritarian power grab - Trump this very week said he would not accept the results of this election! - to blithely support your friend for the highest court in the land is bizarre
The essence of the op-ed is “my friend is very very smart, and therefore deserves to be on the court.”
As Bharat notes, this is endemic of a much broader problem in elite academia where raw intellect is more important than any other attribute.
For most module, I try to cite first-person accounts on the lived impact of surveillance. For the slavery module, for example, we open with Frederick Douglass' first autobiography.
(Also, you can't teach Foucault in 2020 and not read @wewatchwatchers.)
3/ I also try to use poetry. Why? Mooostly because I love poetry. But also, a well-chosen poem or song or Dr. Seuss excerpt may help frame the material better than a scholar writing for an academic audience.
Hence, Claudia Rankine and @Danez_Smif opening the next module.