Kamala Harris Is Surging and Birtherism Is Back

Kamala Harris Is Surging and Birtherism Is Back

The 2020 candidate is facing a play straight out of the racist birther playbook used against Barack Obama when he ran for president.

Kelly Weill Reporter Will Sommer  The Daily Beast

Kamala Harris broke out from the other nine Democrats onstage during the second Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday, calling on her personal experiences of racial injustice as a black woman. 

“As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Harris said. 

That’s when she was attacked on Twitter by a conservative provocateur for not being an “American black.” It’s a play straight out of the racist birther playbook used against Barack Obama when he ran for president a decade earlier. This time, though, those kinds of allegations don’t have to circulate for years on obscure right-wing forums before they reach a mainstream audience. On Thursday night, spammers and even one of President Trump’s sons spread the attack to millions of people within hours. 

Harris, 54, was born in Oakland, California to a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She spoke of her experience growing up black in the debate, recalling a story about neighbors who wouldn’t let their children play with Harris and her sister because of the color of their skin. 

The attacks on Harris’s background started Thursday when Ali Alexander tweeted she is not an “American black.” 

“She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” Alexander wrote. “I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.” Ali Alexander@ali

Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican. 

I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? 

These are my people not her people. 

Freaking disgusting. 

Alexander’s claim was picked up by Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted it to his nearly 3.6 million followers. 

“Is this true?” Trump Jr. wrote. “Wow.” 

Trump Jr., who later deleted his tweet, wasn’t the only one using Alexander’s tweet to question Harris’s ethnicity. 

Harris’s team denounced the comment as racist. “This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now,” a Harris spokesperson told The Daily Beast. 

More Twitter users copied and pasted Alexander’s message verbatim and tweeted it as their own, according to screenshots posted by writer Caroline Orr. Some of those accounts, like “@prebs_73,” have copy-pasted other popular right-wing tweets verbatim. Other accounts with right-wing references in their usernames and biographies piled on, accusing Harris of not being black. 

“Ummmmm @KamalaHarris you are NOT BLACK. you are Indian and Jamaican,” wrote a Twitter user with a cross emoji, the word “CONSERVATIVE,” a red “X” emoji (a right-wing Twitter trope), and three stars (a QAnon symbol) in their username. 

At least one known network of bot accounts was found spreading Alexander’s original tweet, BuzzFeed reported. 

Shireen Mitchell, a technologist and founder of the group Stop Online Violence Against Women, said the accusation against Harris plays into a long-running debate that has been used to drive a white nationalist wedge through black communities. 

“We are and have always been, for centuries in this country, having this little fight about who gets opportunities as black people and who doesn’t,” Mitchell said. “That includes colorism; that includes distinctions of where the ship actually landed; it includes if you are (and I am) a descendant of a slave who was born here versus a descendant of slavery from another country. Those distinctions, from my perspective, make no sense ever. But what it does is allow for white nationalist and nativist conversations to be planted in my community.” 

A spokesman for Trump Jr. said Trump sent the tweet originally because he had not known that Harris’s mother was Indian. 

“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it’s true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before and once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet he quickly deleted it,” the spokesman said. 

Alexander, who describes himself as black and Arab, said that Harris has a “nasty, lying history with Black people.” 

“Me pointing out that Kamala Harris has a mother from India and a father from Jamaica went viral last night because many people assume she descends from Black American Slaves,” he said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “She does not. I corrected Kamala Harris last night because she stole debate time under the premise that she is an African-American when she is in fact a biracial Indian-Jamaican who is a first generation American.” 

This isn’t the first time pro-Trump activists have tried to undermine Harris and her authority to speak on issues of race based on her parents. 

In January, right-wing operative Jacob Wohl, an associate of Alexander, argued on Twitter that Harris was ineligible to be president because her parents weren’t from the United States, even though she was born in California. Wohl’s claims were circulated by other right-wing figures online, in an attempt to create a birther-style question about whether Harris could legally run for president. 

Mitchell, who has monitored harassment campaigns against black women since 2013, said Harris is facing a new, digital permutation of the birther conspiracy theory attacks President Trump levied against Obama. 

“It’s a different iteration of birtherism: ‘where were you born?’ She was born in Oakland!” Mitchell said, referring to the conspiracy theory that falsely accused Obama of being born outside the U.S. “The conversation is, no matter who we are, our blackness should be challenged because what we look like is not ‘American enough.’” 

Mitchell draws a distinction between two kinds of fraudulent accounts that try to discredit black people online. Botnets, an automated network of fake accounts, often tweet the same message. The technique allows a message to spread far and fast, with little effort. Some of the copy-paste accounts sharing Alexander’s message appear to be operated by real people. 

Mitchell also monitors a trend called “marionetting,” in which someone will falsely pose as a black person online to push ideas that many black people might otherwise find objectionable. 

Recent examples of marionetting include a troll who stole a black transgender activist’s picture to pose as a Trump supporter, and Russian-run accounts like “Blacktivist” that impersonated black Americans to sway black voters away from Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

“I actually thought the botnet was going to die, because I felt like more marionetting was happening ... After this debate, I saw more botnets responding again, versus just marionetting.” 

Fraudulent accounts often rely on stereotypes that trolls hope to apply to a collection of fake accounts, Mitchell said. 

“The ‘black enough’ line has been a stereotypical frame,” she said. 

“It has always been a systemic narrative. It’s just being expanded in this national debate”

From Audiea: The right wing will regret this abuse, most Americans are reasonable, be they liberal or conservative. This is not 2016. Just about everyone understands the game. Public revulsion will result in internet censorship and eventual laws to enforce it. Freedom of speech demands responsibility and the crazed right and left are going to get slapped back into the shadows.

American Concentration Camps

The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

By Masha Gessen The New Yorker

The debate over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camp” is not about language or facts. It is about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history.

Like many arguments, the fight over the term “concentration camp"

is mostly an argument about something entirely different. It is not about terminology. Almost refreshingly, it is not an argument about facts. This argument is about imagination, and it may be a deeper, more important conversation than it seems.

In a Monday-evening live stream, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,

of New York, called the U.S.’s detention facilities for migrants “concentration camps.” On Tuesday, she tweeted a link to an article in Esquire in which Andrea Pitzer, a historian of concentration camps, was quoted making the same assertion: that the United States has created a “concentration camp system.” Pitzer argued that “mass detention of civilians without a trial” was what made the camps concentration camps. The full text of Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet was “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. 

This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” Hackles were immediately raised, tweets fired, and, less than an hour and a half later, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming,tweeted  “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” A high-pitched battle of tweets and op-eds took off down the much travelled dead-end road of arguments about historical analogies. 

These almost never go well, and they always devolve into a virtual shouting match if the Holocaust, the Nazis, or Adolf Hitler is invoked. One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it; the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then.

But the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. I have had many conversations about this in Russia. People who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle have often told me that they are not the monsters that I and others have described. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, my interlocutors have claimed—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous.

Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing. Allow me to illustrate. My oldest son, who spent his early childhood in a Russian hospital, was for many years extremely small for his age. I spent useless hours upon hours in my study in Moscow, where we then lived, poring over C.D.C. growth charts. No matter how many times I looked, I couldn’t place him—he was literally off the chart. As far as the C.D.C. was concerned, my son, at his age, height, and weight, was unimaginable. When he was four, I took him to see a pediatrician in Boston. She entered his measurements into her computer, and a red dot appeared on the chart. I felt my body finally relax; my child was no longer impossible! He was on the chart. Then I realized that the pediatrician was working with an interactive chart. (This was in the early aughts, and there weren’t any available to me at home.) She had just put him in the system. His little red dot was still below the lowest, fifth-percentile curve. He was still the smallest child of his age. But a sort of cognitive trick had been performed. My son’s size had been documented, and this made him possible.

Donald Trump has played this trick

on Americans many times, beginning with his very election: first, he was impossible, and then he was President. Did that mean that the impossible had happened—an extremely hard concept to absorb—or did it mean that Trump was not the catastrophe so many of us had assumed he would be? A great many Americans chose to think that he had been secretly Presidential all along or was about to become Presidential; they chose to accept that, now that he was elected, his Presidency would become conceivable. 

The choice between these two positions is at the root of the argument between Ocasio-Cortez and the critics of her concentration-camp comment. It is not an argument about language. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. (For this reason, mounting a defense of Ocasio-Cortez’s position by explaining that not all concentration camps were death camps misses the point.) It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves—not just as Americans but as human beings—and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold—not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position.

Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of ten books, including, most recently, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The Evangelical, the Pool Boy and Michael Cohen

The Evangelical, the Pool Boy and Michael Cohen

By Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg The New York Times

MIAMI BEACH — Senator Ted Cruz was running neck and neck with Donald J. Trump in Iowa just before the caucuses in 2016, but his campaign was expecting a last-minute boost from a powerful endorser, Jerry Falwell Jr. 

Mr. Falwell was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and a son of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist and co-founder of the modern religious right. 

Months earlier, Mr. Falwell had provided Liberty’s basketball arena for Mr. Cruz’s formal presidential announcement and required that the student body attend, giving the Texas Republican a guaranteed audience of thousands of cheering young religious conservatives. 

With the caucuses now fast approaching, the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor who had taken the lead in wooing Mr. Falwell, alerted the campaign that Mr. Falwell had pledged to endorse his son. 

But when the time came for an announcement, Mr. Falwell rocked the Cruz campaign and grabbed the attention of the entire political world. He endorsed Mr. Trump instead, becoming one of the first major evangelical leaders to get behind the thrice-married, insult-hurling real estate mogul’s long-odds presidential bid. 

Mr. Falwell — who is not a minister and spent years as a lawyer and real estate developer — said his endorsement was based on Mr. Trump’s business experience and leadership qualities. A person close to Mr. Falwell said he made his decision after “consultation with other individuals whose opinions he respects.” But a far more complicated narrative is emerging about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the months before that important endorsement. 

That backstory, in true Trump-tabloid fashion, features the friendship between Mr. Falwell, his wife and a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach; the family’s investment in a gay-friendly youth hostel; purported sexually revealing photographs involving the Falwells; and an attempted hush-money arrangement engineered by the president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen. 

The revelations have arisen from a lawsuit filed against the Falwells in Florida; the investigation into Mr. Cohen by federal prosecutors in New York; and the gonzo-style tactics of the comedian and actor Tom Arnold. 

Over the last two years, Mr. Arnold has fashioned himself an anti-Trump sleuth and crusader, working to dig up evidence of past malfeasance on television and in social media. In that role, Mr. Arnold befriended Mr. Cohen — who had lately become a vivid, if not entirely reliable, narrator of the Trump phenomenon — and then surreptitiously recorded him describing his effort to buy and bury embarrassing photographs involving the Falwells. 

That attempt, Mr. Cohen says on the recording, came months before he brought Mr. Falwell “to the table” for Mr. Trump. Until then, he adds, “none of the evangelicals wanted to support Trump.” 

There is no evidence that Mr. Falwell’s endorsement was part of a quid pro quo arranged by Mr. Cohen. Indeed, the relationship, if any, between the endorsement and the photo episode remains unclear. But the new details — some of which have been reported by news outlets including BuzzFeed and Reuters over the last year — show how deeply Mr. Falwell was enmeshed in Mr. Cohen’s and Mr. Trump’s world. 

And they add another layer to one of the enduring curiosities of the Trump era: the support the president has received from evangelical Christians, who have traditionally demanded that their political leaders exhibit “family values” and moral “character.” Mr. Falwell’s father forged those words into weapons against the Democrats after he co-founded the Moral Majority political movement, which propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House and made religious conservatives a vital constituency for any Republican who would be president. 

By the time Republicans cast their first votes in 2016, Mr. Trump was starting to show surprising strength among some white evangelicals. But with Mr. Falwell serving as the torchbearer of his father’s legacy, his endorsement became a permission slip for deeply religious conservatives who were attracted by Mr. Trump’s promises to make America great again but wary of his well-known history of infidelity, his previous support of abortion rights and his admission that he had never asked for God’s forgiveness. 

“For those of the more fundamentalist variant of evangelicalism, the Falwell family, and the Falwell endorsements, are an important factor,” said Jim Guth, a political-science professor at Furman University who has long studied evangelical politics. Mr. Cruz still managed to win in Iowa. But Mr. Trump soon won South Carolina with strong evangelical support, sending him on a solid path toward the nomination. 

Three years later, Mr. Falwell remains an unwavering Trump supporter. Last month he went so far as to suggest that the president deserved an extended term as “reparations” for time lost to the Mueller investigation. In turn, he has had entree to the White 

The Falwells declined to comment for this article. Mr. Falwell has said there were no compromising photographs, and the person close to them, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said the Falwells “did not know anything about Mr. Cohen’s alleged efforts” on their behalf. Mr. Falwell’s endorsement of Mr. Trump, the person said, was made after careful consideration. Mr. Cohen, he said, “did not try to exert any inappropriate pressure.” 

New Friendships, New Opportunities 

Mr. Falwell began to grow close to Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen after Mr. Trump came to speak at Liberty, in Lynchburg, Va., in 2012. Mr. Cohen, who was working to connect his boss with important political constituencies and their leaders for a possible presidential run four years later, came along for the trip. 

Mr. Trump lacked the religious bona fides of those who typically filled the school’s speaker lineup. But he was the star of the top-rated “Apprentice” reality show, and Mr. Falwell admired his career in real estate. 

As it happened, the Falwell family was exploring a real estate venture of its own. 

Earlier that year, Mr. Falwell and his wife, Becki, had stayed at the Fontainebleau — the grande dame of the Miami Beach hotel scene and a somewhat unlikely vacation spot for the chancellor of a university whose student code prohibited short skirts, coed dorm visits and sex outside of “biblically ordained” marriage. 

Once a glamorous hangout for John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra and Elvis, the Fontainebleau was now the stomping grounds of the Kardashians, Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga, known for allowing topless sunbathing and for a cavernous nightclub that one travel guide described as “30,000 square feet of unadulterated fun.” Techno music was pumped out at its 11 pools, where waitresses in polka-dot swimsuits served drinks and white-uniformed male attendants brought fresh towels and positioned umbrellas for tips. 

The Falwells struck up a conversation with one of those pool attendants, Giancarlo Granda. Mr. Granda, then 21 and the son of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, was working at the hotel while studying finance at Florida International University. 

The Falwells, according to the person close to them, were impressed with Mr. Granda’s ambition. Soon he was hiking and water skiing with them in Virginia. Within months, they were offering to help him get started in business in Florida. 

Unsure how to capitalize on the offer, Mr. Granda consulted a close high school friend, Jesus Fernandez Jr., whose father, Jesus Fernandez Sr., had worked in Miami real estate for decades, the Fernandezes would later assert. Together, they directed Mr. Granda to a South Beach youth hostel that was for sale. The building also housed a restaurant and a liquor store. 

Mr. Falwell and his wife agreed to help finance the purchase after a meeting in Florida with Mr. Granda, the real estate agents, the younger Mr. Fernandez and his father — who was facing a $34 million bankruptcy. Negotiations were underway when Mr. Trump visited Liberty, and the Falwells invited Mr. Granda to fly up for the occasion. A photo taken on a private plane, reviewed by The New York Times, shows him holding a copy of “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” 

Mr. Falwell introduced Mr. Trump to Liberty’s students as “one of the greatest visionaries of our time,” who “single-handedly forced President Obama to release his birth certificate.” Mr. Trump shared his secrets to winning in business and life: “Get even” and “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” though he quickly added, “I won’t say it here, because you people don’t get divorced.” 

Mr. Granda, who traveled to Liberty to hear Mr. Trump speak in 2012, was photographed on a private plane with a copy of “Trump: The Art of The Deal.” 

No Politics or Religion 

In 2013, the Falwells completed the deal for the Miami Hostel, which rents beds for as little as $15 a night, bunking 12 people to a room. The hostel became known as one of South Beach’s best budget party hostels and is sometimes listed as gay-friendly. 

The Falwells’ involvement came to light in a 2017Politico article by Brandon Ambrosino, a Liberty graduate. He reported that the hostel featured a sign on its front gate declaring its house rules: “No Soliciting, Fundraising, Politics, Salesmen, Religion.” 

“Inside the Falwells’ hostel, the stench of general decay and cigarette smoke is overpowering,” Mr. Ambrosino wrote. Tourism pamphlets included one for Tootsie’s Cabaret, “74,000 square feet of adult entertainment and FULL NUDITY.” 

On a recent overnight visit, the sign forbidding politics and religion was gone, and there were no visible fliers for adult clubs. The hostel was tidy and relatively quiet — common for this time of year, Miami’s off-season. A warning was posted that the hostel was not responsible for accidents on the premises, “especially if you are drunk.” 

Real estate records show that an LLC called Alton Hostel bought the hostel and its building for $4.7 million in cash. Within weeks, Alton Hostel secured a $3.8 million mortgage from Carter Bank & Trust, the Virginia-based bank the Falwells had long used to finance and expand Liberty University. The source of Alton Hostel’s initial full-cash payment is not known. But Mr. Falwell would later say in a sworn affidavit that his family’s financial contribution to the deal amounted to a loan of $1.8 million, including $800,000 for renovations. The Falwells’ son Jerry Falwell III, who goes by “Trey” and was 23 at the time, was listed as manager of the LLC; Mr. Granda was added later as a co-manager. In his affidavit, Mr. Falwell said his wife was also a member of the LLC. 

Around South Beach, people involved in the deal regarded it as the sort of thing Miami’s young and good-looking could luck into when they encountered wealthy visitors. 

“Miami is a very touristy place,” one of the brokers, Roberto Bracho, said in an interview. “If you are in the right place at the right time, you can hit the jackpot.” 

The situation quickly deteriorated. The Fernandezes believed that they had been promised an ownership share. The Falwells denied making any such promise, and in his affidavit, Mr. Falwell sought to minimize his involvement, saying that, as an adviser on the deal, he could not have given them a stake. 

The Fernandezes threatened a lawsuit. 

Rigging Polls, Fixing Problems 

Mr. Cohen had kept in close touch with the Falwells after Mr. Trump’s 2012 visit. He would later say he viewed them as family. 

Mr. Cohen even turned to a Falwell lieutenant — Liberty’s deputy chief information officer at the time, John Gauger — as he worked to build Mr. Trump’s political profile. Mr. Gauger also ran his own consulting firm, RedFinch Solutions. 

Mr. Cohen hired RedFinch to manipulate two online polls in Mr. Trump’s favor — one in 2014 by CNBC, and another in early 2015 in the Drudge Report — Mr. Gauger told The Wall Street Journal in January. 

At around the same time, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump were arranging with The National Enquirer and its chief, the Trump ally David Pecker, to buy and bury stories about Mr. Trump and women that could harm his political prospects. Mr. Cohen’s confessed role in two such deals — one with The Enquirer to silence the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, the other with the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, whom he initially paid out of his own pocket — contributed to the three-year sentence he is now serving at the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y. 

By Mr. Cohen’s account, the Falwells appeared to be in need of just that sort of help. 

By late 2015, the lawsuit over ownership of the hostel had devolved into a fight over compromising photos, according to several people involved in the case. It was understood that between Mr. Granda, the Fernandezes and their lawyers, one or more people were in possession of photographs that could be used as leverage against the Falwells. 

And so Mr. Cohen tried to play the fixer for his friends. 

In a recent legal filing, Mr. Fernandez Jr. said he was forced to change his name because of the case. He became Gordon Bello. His father, Mr. Fernandez, Sr., became Jett Bello. Their name changes took place after Mr. Cohen intervened. 

Mr. Cohen described his involvement in his conversation with Mr. Arnold, which was first reported last month by Reuters. 

“There’s a bunch of photographs, personal photographs, that somehow the guy ended up getting — whether it was off of Jerry’s phone or somehow maybe it got AirDropped or whatever the hell the whole thing was,” Mr. Cohen told Mr. Arnold in the recording, which Mr. Arnold shared with The Times. Mr. Cohen never identified “the guy.” 

“These are photos between husband and wife,” Mr. Cohen added, joking that “the evangelicals are kinkier than Tom Arnold.” He explained, “I was going to pay him, and I was going to get the negatives and do an agreement where they turn over all the technology that has the photographs or anything like that, any copies.” 

But the payoff “never happened,” he said, “and the guy just either deleted them on his own or what have you.” 

The person close to the Falwells said that Mr. Cohen was neither their lawyer nor their fixer, and that they had not been aware of “his alleged actions regarding photographs” until parts of the recording were released. 

Mr. Cohen, who declined interview requests, told Mr. Arnold that he had been trying to protect Mrs. Falwell. “Even though she has a very nice figure,” he said on the recording, “nobody wants their private photos published.” In the process, he said, he had obtained one of the photos, of Mrs. Falwell, and still had it. 

Evangelicals for Trump 

With a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses kicked off the primary season on Feb. 1, 2016, Mr. Cruz was steadily racking up high-level endorsements. He was banking on strong evangelical support to push him past Mr. Trump in the state. 

In mid-January, Mr. Cruz’s father reported back to his staff that Mr. Falwell had committed to endorsing his son, according to two people involved in the campaign at the time. A news release was prepared, they said, while aides began vetting Mr. Falwell’s background, as is standard for presidential endorsers. 

Signs that something was amiss came shortly afterward, when Mr. Trump arrived at Liberty for another speech. Mr. Falwell introduced Mr. Trump as a man who “lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught.” Despite the generous introduction, the appearance seemed an unmitigated disaster for Mr. Trump. He betrayed his ignorance of the Bible by referring to a passage in “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians,” and loosely used the words “hell” and “damn.” Even so, rumors began to spread that Mr. Falwell was leaning toward Mr. Trump. 

Rick Tyler, a senior Cruz adviser, called Mr. Falwell to say that if there was ever a good time to make his support official, this was it. That was when Mr. Falwell told him he had learned that he could not make any endorsement in the primaries. “He said his board wouldn’t allow him to endorse,” Mr. Tyler said in an interview. 

Around that time, Mr. Falwell was coming under heavy pressure to get behind Mr. Trump, according to someone who spoke to Mr. Falwell then. A few days later, Mr. Falwell announced his endorsement of Mr. Trump, calling him “a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.” 

In an email, the person close to the Falwells said the Liberty chancellor had “never seriously considered endorsing Mr. Cruz,” and did not know how the campaign had gotten that impression. What’s more, he said, Mr. Cohen “did nothing more than ask” Mr. Falwell to endorse Mr. Trump. 

Though Mr. Falwell said he was making the endorsement as a private individual, not as the head of the university, the decision roiled the Liberty community. Some graduates and students expressed stunned disappointment. One of Liberty’s trustees, Mark DeMoss — an alumnus and a longtime confidant of Mr. Falwell’s father — told The Washington Post that Mr. Trump did not exhibit “Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.” (After clashing with Mr. Falwell and other board members, he resigned, he said in a statement at the time.) 

At the Cruz campaign headquarters, the reaction was “anger and shock,” Mr. Tyler said. “Something changed, obviously.” 

An Adviser and Defender 

The relationship between Mr. Falwell and Mr. Trump would prove mutually beneficial. 

Mr. Trump sought to make Mr. Falwell his secretary of education, Mr. Falwell has said. After he declined, he disclosed that he would serve as an outside adviser to the administration on education policy — a role in which, Mr. Falwell indicated, he would call for rollbacks of regulations governing accreditation, recruitment and student borrowing. (“A lot of what we sent them is actually what got implemented,” he told The New York Times Magazine last year.) 

Mr. Falwell, in turn, has remained one of the president’s most vocal defenders, even in the rare moments when other Republicans wouldn’t, as in August 2017, when Mr. Trump said there had been “very fine people on both sides” of the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that resulted in the murder of a young counter demonstrator. 

That month, with settlement talks involving the hostel at an impasse, the Fernandezes, now the Bellos, filed a written complaint. The complaint, first reported by BuzzFeed News several months after it was filed, asserted that “verbal offers were made to Granda to provide him with financial assistance.” Mr. Falwell, the complaint read, “indicated that he wanted to help Granda establish a new career and build a business” as the Falwells’ relationship with Mr. Granda “evolved.” 

In his sworn affidavit, Mr. Falwell said the family had made Mr. Granda a co-manager of the LLC in return for serving as its local representative. Mr. Falwell saw the hostel as a good opportunity to introduce his son and Mr. Granda to real estate investing, according to the person close to the family. Mr. Granda, he said, received only a “modest income,” and a financial stake that was of limited value because of the property’s heavy debt. 

The Comedian Gets His Tape 

Mr. Arnold’s anti-Trump antics have largely consisted of his public search for more recordings like the “Access Hollywood” outtake in which Mr. Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia. Last year, Mr. Arnold even got his own television show on the Viceland network, “The Hunt for The Trump Tapes.” It produced no new tapes during its eight-episode run. 

But it did help lead to the recording of Mr. Cohen discussing the Falwells. 

Mr. Arnold first met Mr. Cohen last June at the Loews Regency hotel in Manhattan, as Mr. Arnold was taping his show. Their meeting didn’t result in a Cohen appearance on the program, but Mr. Cohen agreed to a photo with Mr. Arnold, which went viral on Twitter, and the two stayed in touch. 

Early this year, after noticing the articles in The Journal and BuzzFeed about Liberty, Mr. Cohen and the Fernandez suit, Mr. Arnold began suggesting on Twitter, without presenting any evidence, that the Falwells had been in a sexual relationship with Mr. Granda. Those tweets led Mr. Cohen to call Mr. Arnold and deny any such relationship. He then described his efforts to help with the photos. 

That conversation, two months before Mr. Cohen went to prison, left more questions than answers. Mr. Cohen has publicly said nothing more. No photos have surfaced, and it is unclear how many there are. In all, three people said they had seen at least one photo, though their descriptions varied and could not be verified. 

Nor is it certain whom Mr. Cohen hoped to pay off. He never mentions the Bellos — formerly the Fernandezes — or their lawsuit on the tape, but makes reference to the “pool boy,” leaving open the possibility that the photos came from Mr. Granda, and that Mr. Granda then shared them with the Bellos. Then again, “the guy” to whom Mr. Cohen refers could be some other person entirely. 

Mr. Granda, now working toward a graduate degree in real estate at Georgetown University, referred questions to his lawyer. The lawyer, Aaron Resnick, said his client had never interacted with Mr. Cohen, whom he called “a convicted felon and admitted liar.” He said any suggestion that Mr. Granda was the person referred to on the tape would be false, and he bristled at what he called “tabloid fodder” directed at a first-generation Hispanic-American. 

In a statement to The Times, the senior Bello said he and his son had been respectful to the Falwells, “despite the sensitive details surrounding this case.” It was Mr. Cohen — acting as their lawyer, he said — who had revealed “his client’s indiscretions.” He said the pending lawsuit prohibited him from offering more details about the photographs or why he and his son had felt compelled to change their names. 

Mr. Falwell has granted only one interview about the Arnold recording, to Todd Starnes of Fox News Radio, telling him there were “no compromising or embarrassing photos,” and saying, “We never engaged or paid Cohen to represent us in any legal or other professional capacity.” 

The new details about the lead-up to his endorsement of Mr. Trump have not affected Mr. Falwell’s continued enthusiastic support. Earlier this month, Mr. Falwell chastised a pastor who was embroiled in a controversy over his decision to pray for Mr. Trump during the president’s surprise visit to his church in the Washington suburbs. 

Suggesting that the pastor was being too accommodating of critics, Mr. Falwell directed a tweet at him reading, “Grow a pair,” a crude reference to the pastor’s masculinity. After the post drew criticism on Twitter as being beneath a religious leader, Mr. Falwell responded that he did not need to adhere to strict religious standards. 

“I have never been a minister,” he tweeted, saying that it was up to the students and faculty of Liberty to keep the school “strong spiritually.’’ He added, “While I am proud to be a conservative Christian, my job is to keep LU successful academically, financially and in athletics.” 

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Trump vows mass immigration arrests

Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week

By Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti Washington Post

President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.

Trump and his senior immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year as part of a plan known as the “rocket docket.”

In April, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were ousted after they hesitated to go forward with the plan, expressing concerns about its preparation, effectiveness and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families.

Vitiello was replaced at ICE by former FBI and Border Patrol official Mark Morgan, who had impressed the president with statements on cable television in favor of harsh immigration enforcement measures.

In his first two weeks on the job at ICE, Morgan has said publicly that he plans to beef up interior enforcement and go after families with deportation orders, insisting that the rulings must be carried out to uphold the integrity of the country’s legal system.

“Our next challenge is going to be interior enforcement,” Morgan told reporters June 4 in Washington. “We will be going after individuals who have gone through due process and who have received final orders of deportation.

“That will include families,” he said, adding that ICE agents will treat the parents and children they arrest “with compassion and humanity.”

U.S. officials with knowledge of the preparations have said in recent days that the operation was not imminent, and ICE officials said late Monday night that they were not aware that the president planned to divulge their enforcement plans on Twitter.

Executing a large-scale operation of the type under discussion requires hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of U.S. agents and supporting law enforcement personnel, as well as weeks of intelligence gathering and planning to verify addresses and locations of individuals targeted for arrest.

The president’s claim that ICE would be deporting “millions” also was at odds with the reality of the agency’s staffing and budgetary challenges. ICE arrests in the U.S. interior have been declining in recent months because so many agents are busy managing the record surge of migrant families across the southern border with Mexico.

The family arrest plan has been considered even more sensitive than a typical operation because children are involved, and Homeland Security officials retain significant concerns that families will be inadvertently separated by the operation, especially because parents in some households have deportation orders but their children — some of whom are U.S. citizens — might not. Should adults be arrested without their children because they are at school, day care, summer camp or a friend’s house, it is possible parents could be deported while their children are left behind.

Supporters of the plan, including Miller, Morgan and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albence, have argued forcefully that a dramatic and highly publicized operation of this type will send a message to families that are in defiance of deportation orders and could act as a deterrent.

According to Homeland Security officials, nearly all unauthorized migrants who came to the United States in 2017 in family groups remain present in the country. Some of those families are awaiting adjudication of asylum claims, but administration officials say a growing number are skipping out on court hearings while hoping to live and work in the United States as long as possible.

Publicizing a future law enforcement operation is unheard of at ICE. Trump administration officials blasted Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf last year for warning immigrants about an impending raid, saying she endangered agents’ safety.

“The Oakland mayor’s decision to publicize her suspicions about ICE operations further increased that risk for my officers and alerted criminal aliens — making clear that this reckless decision was based on her political agenda with the very federal laws that ICE is sworn to uphold,” then-ICE Deputy Director Thomas D. Homan said at the time.

Homan later retired, but last week Trump said Homan would return to public service as his “border czar.” On Fox News, Homan later called that announcement “kind of premature” and said he had not decided whether to accept the job.

Schaaf responded late Monday to the president’s tweet teasing the looming ICE roundups.

“If you continue to threaten, target and terrorize families in my community . . . and if we receive credible information . . . you already know what our values are in Oakland — and we will unapologetically stand up for those values,” she wrote.

David A Fairbanks Comment:

The Trump administration acts on the premise that business will say nothing as they lose employees, that schools will fall silent as students are whisked away and that entire communities will be indifferent to such a spectacle? 

The other factor is, does the Trump Administration think Honduras Belize Mexico and Guatemala will accept millions of people flooding their countries putting a huge strain on housing, employment and medical care? Send a few hundred is reasonable and understandable. Loading up hundreds of buses in New York City or Chicago or Kansas City and expecting them to go unnoticed and then transverse Mexico without incident? Stephen Miller lives in fantasy and maybe this time he will create a genuine nightmare. Much of the detention camps are hidden. 

But grabbing a thousand illegals in any US city will create a TV spectacular and give Trumps enemies plenty of fuel. 

You'll see scenes of Jews in 1940's box cars and 2019 Illegals in trucks buses and being dumped at the borders of countries refusing entry. Everyone who hates Trump will have a field day. 

No one has a right to come here illegally and then stay. We All Agree on that. 

But the sight of "Millions" of people being in convoys heading south to be dumped where? Perhaps Mitch McConnell will call Trump and say "Too much Drama?" What is likely is thousands of families dumped in North Mexico just as Hungary did to Syrians in Poland in 2016. The visuals of such stupidity and callousness will destroy any chance at Trump being re-elected.

The L.G.B.T. Couples Who Stayed in Russia

The L.G.B.T. Couples Who Stayed in Russia

By Masha Gessen The New Yorker

In March, a member of the Russian senate asked the prosecutor general to look into the issue of yoga in pretrial detention. Yoga classes, organized on the recommendation of human-rights activists, had been offered to a limited number of inmates since September. But then Alexander Dvorkin, a man who is considered the country’s preëminent expert on cults, wrote a white paper warning that yoga can lead to sexual arousal, which in turn can lead to homosexual contact between inmates. Yelena Mizulina, a parliament member who has proposed a variety of antigay bills in the last seven years, immediately contacted the prosecutor general’s office, and this past month, yoga classes for detainees were suspended. 

I left Russia with my family five and a half years ago. The parliament had just voted unanimously to ban what it called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” directed at minors and, on a separate day, adoptions by L.G.B.T. people. Mizulina publicly pledged to create a mechanism for removing adopted and biological children from the homes of same-sex couples. The country was tumbling into some black hole of homosexual panic, and getting out seemed to be the only sane option. 

Even if the decision to leave seemed inevitable to me—even if, like many émigrés, I need to believe that I had no other option but to uproot my family and run—most of my queer friends have stayed. I know many people whose situations are substantially similar to mine but for whom the choice wasn’t nearly so clear-cut. These are people with the resources, financial and otherwise, to enter into the legally complicated and often expensive process of emigration—they would be able to move more easily and smoothly than many of the L.G.B.T. asylum seekers I know in the United States, who have had to start their lives anew with next to nothing. Their relative affluence and social connections both make it possible for them to carve a life for themselves in Moscow and make them feel like they have a lot to lose by leaving. 

The decision to emigrate is unlike other life decisions. It is a leap into the unknown; in this, it’s like having a first child, and it can be like marriage. But, with marriage or having children, one can witness the lives of loved ones who have already taken the leap. Even in the Internet era, people who emigrate disappear from the daily lives of their friends and families. They pursue lives in a new language, form connections in a new society, and shape careers in a new framework, and the more they do this—the more they master the art of immigration—the less intelligible their lives become to those left behind. As life’s passages go, in other words, emigration is a bit like death. 

Most of the people I interviewed for this article have been talking about emigrating for a long time. There was a point, in 2013–14—as Putin’s political crackdown intensified, the Kremlin’s antigay campaign revved up, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Russian economy crashed—when all of them were looking for ways to at least secure the option of moving abroad: a second passport, a residence permit in another country. But during the past five years or so, they have stayed in a state of fragile equilibrium, ready to leave but not leaving. One couple even returned after four years of living abroad. 

“There was one morning in 2014 when Israel announced that same-sex couples could now move there under the Law of Return,” Nina, who is thirty-eight, recalled. Earlier that year, Nina had got married to Katya, now thirty-five, in Argentina. “We called the Embassy that day. We were the first. We filed our application, I submitted proof that my father was Jewish, and we waited.” The wait lasted more than a year. By the time the Embassy called, Nina was seven months pregnant. “They said they had good news and bad news. The good news was, I was eligible under the Law of Return, and the bad news was, as a couple, we couldn’t apply through the Embassy. We had to enter the country and apply there and wait, and the wait could be anywhere from four months to five years.” During that period, Katya wouldn’t have been able to work. With Nina pregnant and planning to stay home with the baby while she breast-fed, the couple decided to stay in Moscow. 

Now Nina, Katya, and their three-year-old daughter live on the first floor of an old apartment building in central Moscow. It’s a funky, stylish space, with painted-brick walls, exposed ceiling beams, and rough wooden floors. I asked whether Nina and Katya had renovated the apartment themselves when they bought it, about three years ago. “It was all the old owner,” Nina said. “I just added the pull-up blinds on the windows. It was the first thing I did.” The significance of adding the blinds became clear later in our conversation. “We haven’t kissed in the street since 2013,” when the Duma criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” Nina said. “And we didn’t kiss in the apartment until I put up the blinds.” 

A particular source of concern is the head of the building owners’ association. He sounds like a quintessential Russian state-television viewer. When a new bookstore opened on the block, he hypothesized that it must be funded by George Soros (it wasn’t) and started organizing to have it shut down. For fear of having him find out that they are a couple, the women have hired a nanny from the Philippines. (There is a considerable number of Filipino migrants in Moscow, many of them engaged in domestic work.) “She doesn’t speak Russian,” Katya explained, “so she is not going to hang out and chat with other nannies on the block. For the same reason, we are not going to send our daughter to the state preschool on the block—we are going to a private preschool farther from the house.” 

Both women say that they assume that they will leave the country eventually. “But not until Putin barges into the apartment brandishing a Cossack whip,” Katya said. 

“But we have done everything to insure that, if he does, we can keep the door locked and, the next morning, board an airplane,” Nina added. 

By “Putin brandishing a whip” the women actually mean social services, which, in some cases, have attempted to remove children from same-sex households, argued in court that following a divorce children should not remain in the custody of an L.G.B.T. parent, and prohibited visitation for L.G.B.T. parents. At the same time, Mizulina’s plan for creating a legal mechanism for removing children from same-sex households has not come to pass. “I watch all cases of child removal very closely,” Katya said. “The most recent one involved a straight woman and her five kids, and I actually thought to myself, Heterosexuals get it, too. There aren’t that many cases where they’ve gone after gay parents. So our fears may be exaggerated. Still, we live in anticipation of the apocalypse.” 

That anticipation has pushed the couple back in the closet. This past year, after Katya read that vigilante gangs were tracking down gay people by following them on social media, Katya quit all of her accounts and, she said, “forbade Nina” to be out in publicly available posts. Nina is out at her job as a television executive, but Katya, who is a high-powered tax attorney in the Moscow office of a multinational company, is closeted at work. “The office is full of homophobes,” she said. “It’s like living in Channel One.” She was referring to one of the Russian state’s main propaganda channels, which constantly spews homophobic rhetoric. Being in the closet means, among other things, that no one at work knows that Katya has a child. A few months ago, when their daughter had a medical emergency and Katya had to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, she lied that something had happened to her mother. In her agitation, she forgot about the lie and was caught off-guard when, upon her return, colleagues asked after her mother’s health and which hospital she had been taken to. 

One gets used to self-enforced invisibility; it is jarring when the world shows a different side. This past summer, the family spent a month in a Western European country where Katya’s employer has a branch office. When Nina stopped by the office with their daughter, a local colleague of Katya’s asked, “Is this your daughter?” She was addressing both women as though two women raising a child together were the ordinary phenomenon it is in much of the world. “She had no idea what kind of gift she was giving us,” Katya said. “When we leave Russia, we relearn the habit of holding hands in public.” But fear is a habit that lodges itself in one’s brain. “I was watching ‘13 Reasons Why,’ ” Katya said, referring to a television series that features a couple of gay teen-age characters. “I keep thinking that they are about to get beaten up. But nothing happens.” 

The more we talked, the starker the women’s statements became. “All you want is for your kid to be able to run around in the courtyard and feel comfortable,” Katya said. “You just want to hold this person’s hand. You have the right to live and breathe. But you are told that you can breathe only through a straw.” 

Why haven’t they left yet, then? “It’s hard to be a refugee,” Nina said. “I say this as someone who has been working with refugees since the age of seventeen, as a volunteer.” (As a teen-ager, Nina founded a school for refugee children in Moscow.) 

“In my field, I’d have to descend three rungs down the career ladder,” Katya added. “And it’s scary to go into uncertainty. There is really only one reason: it’s scary.” 

Marina and Lyudmila (not their real names) are a couple in their early forties who are raising two children, a boy and a girl, on the same block where Nina and Katya live. Their children’s father, Peter (not his real name), a gay man, lives in the same apartment building as they do. Location is important: central Moscow is more cosmopolitan and more tolerant than the rest of the city, and the presence of another lesbian family nearby provides a sense of comfort. “We feel safe because we live in the [city] center, we have a supportive social circle, and we have money,” Marina said. “It’s hard for me to imagine what life is like for people who are missing at least one of these three components.” 

Location, connections, and wealth allow the family to live in what they themselves describe as a bubble. They are out at their son’s private preschool, and they seek health care only at private clinics. Still, because Lyudmila is the children’s birth mother, she has to be present anytime they are seen by a doctor, even though Marina is the one who keeps track of immunizations and other health issues. It’s Marina’s invisibility as a parent that weighs on the couple most heavily. 

“Everyone knows that Peter has children,” Marina said. “But I don’t have children. I don’t have children as far as my colleagues are concerned, and my extended family, and the playground. As soon as other parents hear the child address me by my name, they lose interest in talking to me because they assume that I’m the nanny.” 

“Peter gets compliments in the playground all the time,” Lyudmila added. “People say to him, ‘Your boy is so intellectually developed.’ This is mostly Marina’s doing—she is the one who reads to him—but she will never hear that kind of compliment. She believes that she doesn’t care what other people think. But that’s never true.” 

The couple have considered and rejected the idea of leaving the country. Simply moving, the way a lot of well-off Russians have, is not an option: Latvia, which grants E.U.-resident status to people who invest more than two hundred and fifty thousand euros in property there (and where a lot of Russians have established residency in the last five years), doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, so Marina and Lyudmila couldn’t move as a family; Spain, another popular destination, requires too large an investment. 

“Also, we don’t want to leave,” Lyudmila said. “We like it here. And we know how to live here. We know whom to call, we know where we have connections, we know whom to pay, if need be.” 

“We are just too comfortable living here,” Marina added. “Sure, outside reality is very unpleasant. But you don’t think about that every day—you think about it once a week, when you see your psychotherapist.” Marina started seeing a therapist a few months ago, as a last resort; she had had an incessant, sometimes debilitating cough for seven years, and no physician could diagnose her. It appears that her cough was a physical reaction to living in a bubble that’s also a closet: once she started talking about herself on a weekly basis, it went away. 

Yana Mandrykina, who is forty-one, has little patience for talk of how difficult it is to be queer in Russia. She came out publicly in a magazine interview, six years ago—this was her coming out to her family, the staff of her real-estate firm, and her clients. The interview appeared in a special issue of Afisha, a city magazine: twenty-seven L.G.B.T. people came out in that issue, in response to the “propaganda” law then pending in the Duma. Many of those people have since left the country, and, of those who stayed, few agreed to speak to a journalist when another publication, Wonderzine, ran an anniversary updatelate last year. Mandrykina agreed both to be interviewed and photographed for it. 

She is now raising an infant son with her partner, Maria Sokolova, who also has a six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage to a man. The father of the infant is a gay friend. Recently, when the baby had to be hospitalized, Mandrykina said, doctors and nurses were at first taken aback by the presence of three adults, but soon came to accept them as a family; when Mandrykina and Sokolova stayed with their son in shifts, they would say, “Here is the other mom.” 

Sokolova, who is thirty-two, had a different view of that experience. She resented being introduced to doctors as a friend while their friend was introduced as the father. 

“That’s because, in the eyes of the law, you are not my partner and you are not the other parent,” Mandrykina, who was educated as a lawyer, said. 

“That’s just my point,” Sokolova said. “That such is the law in this country.” 

Things got more heated after that. Mandrykina argued for realism. Sokolova argued for principles, and for emigrating. I worried that the interview was going to break the couple up, but they later reassured me that passionate argument was their normal mode of communication. 

When the women met, a little more than a year ago, Mandrykina cautioned her new girlfriend against telling her toddler daughter too much: “It has to be palatable in the outside world,” Mandrykina said. Sokolova finds such thinking abhorrent. “If this is a country where my ex-husband can take custody away from me because of my sexual orientation, then this probably isn’t a very good country for me to live in,” she said to me. “I’m lucky that he is more talk than action.” Not that he talks much, either: Sokolova said that her ex-husband temporarily cut off communication with their daughter because she is now being raised by two women. 

Mandrykina enjoys a peculiar perspective on emigration: she often sells the apartments of people who are leaving, but she also helps those who are staying invest in real estate. “In 2013–14, I was selling a lot of apartments of people who were leaving the country, mostly going to the West,” she said. “Three or four years ago, I was planning to leave myself, because so many people were leaving. I had the sense that everything was going to collapse. Now people are buying more, though I tell them, ‘Buy only if you really see your future here.’ ” Mandrykina and Sokolova live in a beautiful rental apartment in central Moscow; Mandrykina will not buy in Moscow because she is hardly committed to a future in Russia. Nor will she leave: the money is good, and she feels comfortable enough in the country. 

“If I don’t feel threatened, then why should I leave?” she said. “On the other hand, what is a threat? Is it when I’m arrested, or is it when I’m warned that I might be arrested? And will there be a warning? Recently, there has been a spate of arrests of entrepreneurs—was that a warning that I personally should heed?” 

Until, as Katya and Nina would say, Putin barges in brandishing a Cossack whip, all threats seem vague and remote. The losses that emigration would impose, on the other hand, are immediate and certain: an émigré sacrifices her social standing, financial well-being, and an all-important and impossible-to-define sense of being at home in the world. 

Polina and Kseniya found that they were just too miserable as émigrés. They left Moscow in 2014. At that point, they had known each other for more than ten years and, for most of that time, had had a tortured, undefined relationship: Kseniya identified as a lesbian and Polina didn’t. But when Polina, who worked at the independent television channel TV Rain, felt that she had to flee the country because of the broad political crackdown, Kseniya said that she would go with her. They chose to seek residency in France because Kseniya spoke French. They chose Provence because it was less expensive than Paris. They chose Marseilles because Polina’s teen-age children from her first, heterosexual marriage wanted to live in a city. They hated it. “We left our comfort zone and entered an entirely alien world,” Kseniya said. They didn’t have the right to seek employment in France, so they worked remotely for Russian companies. Their attempts to make friends fizzled out. They had the hardest time navigating the French bureaucracy, from sorting out child care and health care to their legal status. 

Last year, though, they got married. “I finally gave myself permission,” Polina said. Their parents, all four of whom live in St. Petersburg, have become close friends and travel buddies. Each of the women has given birth to a baby. This past October, they moved back to Moscow. 

Before they returned permanently, Polina flew back to Moscow to undergo a medical procedure. She put down Kseniya as her emergency contact, and the intake person asked her what their relationship was. 

“I say, ‘Wife.’ She says, ‘Who?’ I say, ‘Wife.’ She says, ‘I’ll just put down “friend.” ’ ” 

Polina laughed at the memory. It sounded like now that she had become comfortable with her own sexuality, other people’s discomfort with it rolled off her easily. 

Sometimes other people can even surprise you. In April, the prosecutor’s office reviewed the complaint about yoga in pretrial detention and concluded that it was baseless. Yoga classes were slated to resume. My queer Russian friends, reassured that the country was still circling the abyss rather than jumping in, could continue to live in their state of fragile equilibrium. Me, I could wake up in New York and breathe a sigh of relief at never again having to worry that someone saw me kissing a woman or that the state might not think my kids should have two mothers. Is that relief worth more than the sense of home? That’s an impossible question to answer, and an excruciating choice to make.

Masha Gessen,