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Making Orwell Blush: An Exclusive Q & A with Virginia Senator Mark Warner

Landon Shroder | August 19, 2020

Topics: Big Tech, china, Honest Ads Act, Intelligence, Justice In Policing Act, Mark Warner, national security, protests, Senator Mark Warner, Tech and Innovation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security

With continued political turbulence in Virginia and throughout the US, RVA Mag reached out to Virginia Senator Mark Warner to catch the vibe in Congress on police violence, tech threats, and our role on the world stage.

Everyone should talk to Senator Mark Warner about something at least once. Because that something is going to branch into something else, and before long you will have covered everything from police violence in America to the global expansion of Chinese tech markets. With a casual demeanor and a conversationalist’s gift of persuasiveness, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is not only pragmatic about our current predicaments, but forward focused and at ease articulating the future challenges we will face at home and abroad.  

And in our age of perpetual political anxiety, this kind of clarity is needed now more than ever. 

Given ongoing political turbulence, RVA Mag wanted to catch up with Warner to chat about the state of play throughout the US. Over the course of two interviews, what soon became apparent is that the state of play for Warner is a vast interconnected system, which, with the right motivation, can be re-imagined into a new social contract: one that speaks to the challenges facing a new generation in political and economic transformation. Far from observing politics as a series of disparate events, Warner sees the modern policy landscape as a vehicle to develop new innovation and alliances, which can not only strengthen our individual rights, but bolster democracy globally.  

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

RVA Mag: I think we can start at the place that is most relevant right now — police violence. As a Senator that focuses on national security and intelligence, what’s it like to look around — not just in Virginia, but America, and see militarized police forces engaging civil society the way they have?

Warner: It is a little bit surreal. Especially when you see unmarked, unidentified federal officers in a city like Portland sweeping people into vans and having them disappear. When I was a kid, I was an exchange student in Argentina in the 1970s. The military there tried these same tactics. There was a group of grandmothers of these lost people who would show up every week in Buenos Aires to protest, and now, to have these pictures of moms linking arms in Portland with bicycle helmets trying to defend their children in the United States of America was maybe the most poignant thing of this. Obviously Black Lives Matter is an important movement, and the systemic racism that we’re seeing is why I am proud to be the original co-sponsor of the Justice In Policing Act. 

The notion that there are people in America who can be subject to that kind of unidentified policing is why Jeff Merkley’s proposed the legislation he has, which I and others support. If a governor, mayor, or local police chief needs federal assistance, let them ask for it, but let’s not impose this external activity when your local elected officials don’t want it — and in Portland, it has exacerbated the violence. 

RVA Mag: You cosigned a letter from “Intel Dems” demanding the answers to 26 questions from the Department of Homeland Security about the deployment of these federal officers. When you read the questions, it sounds like a list of requirements you would ask a CIA Station Chief. Are we at the point in this situation where this level of granularity is required?

Warner: That’s a great question. I hope we’re not at that point. But as we know in the intelligence world, there are protections put in place. We need to have those protections, god forbid, if we see these kinds of activities and use of these kinds of forces in the United States. I have been a little disappointed there has not been broader bipartisan support, because my Republican colleagues, for years, have been saying state and local government should have control and not be subjected to Washington over-reach. 

RVA Mag: One of the analogies which has been used is the idea of a “secret police.” Not actually secret, but a police force only accountable to the President. This does seem reminiscent of intelligence services from authoritarian countries. Is there precedent for this kind of police deployment? 

Warner: No, I don’t think there is. We had Director Wray from the FBI in the other day and we asked him if there was any FBI involvement. And he said no. So the idea that there are these federal protective services and other entities, who rightfully protect our federal buildings, but are not used in this kind of this context, is one more unprecedented area where this President knows no restrictions. 

RVA Mag: Where would the checks and balances against that level of authority and power come from?

Warner: The checks and balances usually come from career professionals at the Justice Department. They say no, but as we’ve seen, you’ve had 2,500 current and former justice department officials asking Bill Barr to resign. You have a president that has very little regard for rule of law, and unfortunately, an Attorney General who views his client not as the people of the United States but Donald Trump, so you’ve got a recipe for this kind of activity. Unless we can get the Majority Leader to let us vote on this bill — there are a number of more classically Libertarian Republican Senators: Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and the others; I would love to hear their reason for not voting for Merkley’s bill — I don’t know where they stand, but the chances are we’d get well over 51 votes. 

RVA Mag: When you listen to the concerns of younger people, myself included, there seems to be a growing fear that not only is our democracy under assault, but that the foundational core of the social contract is also at-risk. You don’t really have to look further than the president’s tweets about postponing the election or trying to invalidate mail-in ballots to see this. 

Warner: Luckily, you saw many Republicans push back when the president of the United States, in an effort to take people’s attention off of the fact that our economy contracted 36 percent, started saying he might try and delay the election. I think we have seen this president show a willingness use any tactic at all, which he thinks might deflect or remove people’s attention — so I was happy to see so many of my Republican colleagues step up after one of the great abuses of recent time, when military force cleared protestors out of Lafayette Square so that Trump could go hold a bible. That made me particularly angry, because I got married in that church 31 years ago! You saw [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Mark] Milley being manipulated, but you saw very quickly Milley and [Secretary of Defense Mark] Esper very much pull back. Because this is not the way we operate in this country. 

I don’t want to give you my full spiel of the future of capitalism, but I would argue this concern about democracy and the breakdown of the social contract precedes Donald Trump. 

RVA Mag: That’s interesting.

Warner: We had a social contract that existed since the 1930s to roughly around the year 2000. It wasn’t perfect, a lot of women and people of color didn’t do well. But generally if you worked hard, paid your taxes, you got a chance to move up in our society. And for 50 years, post-WW2 capitalism created more wealth than any system in the world. But starting in the late 90s, short-term profits became the overriding principle of everything, and where that was demonstrated most was the break down of the social contract. One of the structural changes that has come out of COVID is the idea that we can finally cover gig workers, independent contractors, sole proprietors with unemployment. 

Before, only about 50 percent of workers were covered by unemployment. So this whole notion of the social contract has to be redone. If you have the social contract fraying on one end and then your institutions of democracy fraying on the other, that combination comes together and that’s an explosive mixture — Americans by nature are always a little leery of power. 

RVA Mag: Do you think the American economy is still accessible? Especially for young people who are invested in a particular kind of economy that didn’t exist even five years ago?

Warner: I’m a classic born-in-the-50s baby boomer. But I also failed a number of times in business. However, had I not been a white guy with the right education, I’m not sure I would have gotten the chances I had. But it is stunning to me that in the UK and Canada, your ability to move from one economic status to another is easier there — the UK used to be the epitome of class structure. 

I was an entrepreneur and then a venture capitalist. 50 percent of all new jobs in the last 30 years were from start-up companies. Yet angel and venture capital deals are down 40 percent since 2016. Because if you are talking especially about tech — if your only options are to sell to Google and Facebook, then you can’t get to scale. This is hard. When I hear people say “Oh, Facebook and Google are great and free,” I remind them that they’re not free at all. They’re giant suckers of information. 

RVA Mag: Can America compete with countries like China nowadays? They are leading in green energy hardware, advancements in biomedical technologies, and artificial intelligence. Those are the economics of the future — not, as Republicans like to flaunt, coal. 

Warner: What the Chinese have done is what America did from around 1920 -1980. But they have done it in a way that was even more slightly sophisticated than we did. I have changed my view completely on China. Ten years ago, I was part of the school that wanted to bring them into the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization — the more you bring them in, the closer they’ll be. I think we were wrong. That was mostly revealed in the changes in the Communist Party under President Xi Jinping. My concern with China is not with the Chinese people; I stand with Hong Kong, and Chinese Americans. One of the things that Trump does is play on racial prejudice — so let me speak about the Chinese economic model, which is pretty wild. 

The Chinese allow massive competition in their domestic market for technology until a national champion emerges. And once that national champion emerges, they will end up getting about 70 percent of the Chinese market, which usually equates to about 25 percent of the world market. What we need is alliances that are technology-based, and I think we need a coalition of the willing. In the end, people still trust us to be the good guys, and what we’ve seen over the last three-and-a-half years is what happens when America exits the world stage. 

RVA Mag: I want to pick your brain about the place where tech, intelligence, and national security intersect, since this is something you have been super-focused on. How far along are we in our understanding of this intersection, given that bad actors both foreign and domestic are using media platforms to shape their own goals and objectives? 

Warner: In some sense, we have come a long way since 2016, when the Russians caught our intelligence community off guard. They generally caught the social media platforms off guard. They showed how vulnerable our whole society was to manipulation. The social media companies recognize this now. I don’t think they’ve gone far enough, but they recognize it. Our intelligence community literally has hundreds of professionals working to monitor this. So we are better aware. But on the other hand, Congress has made absolutely no progress. 

RVA Mag: Ah, there it is. Ok. 

Warner: We still have not passed basic privacy legislation. We have not done something when in any other time would have been a complete no-brainer — the Honest Ads Act, which had John McCain and Lindsay Graham on it. It’s basically saying, if there is a political ad on Facebook and YouTube, there would be the same disclosure requirements as an ad on TV or radio. I put out a white paper that had the theories of ideas on how we put guardrails around big-tech, and that legislation has basically gone nowhere. Almost all of this is bipartisan, so it is not broken down along those lines. It is almost to the point where big tech at first knee jerked reacted against any regulatory oversight, but now they realize this is in a global context. Even big tech realizes that having some national standards, rather than a patchwork of standards around the country and around the world, makes sense. 

We are seeing the big tech security issues moving from manipulation with social media to more nefarious contexts. When we look at the Chinese government combining facial recognition with their big tech companies to create a surveillance state, that might allow them to curtail COVID, but it allows them to spy on people [in ways] that would make Orwell blush. So there is the manipulation of social media, which has morphed into how big tech can be used as an agent of a surveillance state. 

RVA Mag: As the Vice-Chair of the Intelligence Committee, what do the threats look like in 2020? Have they evolved in the age of COVID?

Warner: I think technology is a positive force, but can be used as a mechanism of societal control. It goes back to the idea of alliances; what are the alliances of the future going to be? Post WW2, they were all military alliances, with a few economic trading blocs. But I think we are going to need these technology alliances amongst nations who have a basic fundamental belief in individual rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The asymmetric power that comes from technology with a ruthless CEO or ruthless government is daunting. Something that sneaks up on you can overcome your claims of investment in traditional defense technology. 

RVA Mag: Well, those are my questions Senator. Thank you for that great conversation.  

Warner: Thanks for letting me go on for so long! 

*Illustration by R. Anthony Harris

Post-Rock As A Second Language

Jonah Schuhart | March 2, 2020

Topics: china, Colin Phils, e r som sa, events in richmond va, events near me this weekend, events richmond va, gallery 5, music, post-rock, Post.Recordings, richmond events, richmond va, richmond va bands, Right At Home, RVA, South Korea, things to do in richmond va, things to do richmond va, Trust Fall

Colin Phils formed in South Korea and released an album while living in China, but over the past four years, they’ve made Richmond their home. Now they’re releasing Trust/Fall, their first full album as an RVA band.

Richmond rockers Colin Phils, who will release their new album, Trust/Fall, later this month, have been performing and releasing music in Richmond for the past four years. But, their origins actually reach back a long time ago, to a country far, far away.

The band had its humble beginnings in 2013, when all three members of the band were working in South Korea, teaching English as a second language. While the group was initially formed by guitarist and vocalist Ben Tiner and two others, over time Tiner replaced them with the band’s current lineup: married couple Ben and Karyn Mauch (on drums and synth/vocals, respectively). Oddly enough, while all three worked teaching English, Karyn was the only one who majored in the language during college.

“All you really need to teach English in a foreign country is you need to get a certificate. We all got that in the first month,” said Tiner. “It’s easy money, they pay for housing. It’s kind of an ideal job to get after college.”

The band stayed in Korea until 2015. During that time, they made their first album Right at Home. However, they all quickly found that Korea offered no room for personal or professional growth. At that point, they moved to China, where they crafted their second album, e,r,som,sa. Eventually, in 2016, they moved to Richmond, and have been making music in the river city ever since.

Since they’ve been here, they’ve had firsthand experience with the differences between making music in Asia and in America.

“The biggest difference [between East and West] is that far less people come to our shows in America,” said Tiner.

“Yeah, but in America there are so many more bands and musicians, and the China scene is still young,” Karyn added. “When we play here, even though there’s fewer people, we’ll be playing with four bands every night who are all REALLY good… Whereas in China, it’ll be just two bands a night. And you may enjoy it, you may not.”

The band’s sounds have progressed over the years, moving from an early sound that they described as being much closer to folk, with a much more devil-may-care approach to writing and recording. 

“The first album was recorded in one weekend,” said Tiner. “We got in a studio…and just recorded the whole thing at once. Which would be a crazy thing to do now.”

Since then, the band has moved towards a post-rock sound, utilizing loops and odd time signatures to construct their songs. They take no breaks from touring to write new music, instead sprinkling new tracks into their sets over time, until they’ve come up with enough to fashion into an album. Their recording style has also evolved; now their approach is much more traditional, recording and rerecording specific parts over a long period of time until they’ve refined the whole song as much as they can.

“I don’t think we’re very rigid,” said Karyn. “I think if we feel like something needs to be changed, we’ll change it. We’ll add something, we’ll take away something.”

This process has been helped along for their newest album by Mitch Clem, an Engineer at Go West Recording Studio.

“We’ve definitely altered stuff in the studio based off of his recommendations,” said Tiner. “And that’s the benefit of having somebody you trust in the studio to offer advice.”

Though the band has released a split LP, Star Charts, with fellow Richmond band Houdan The Mystic, Trust/Fall will be their first full album since they arrived in RVA. The album will be released on March 20 by Post.Recordings, and the band will celebrate its release with a performance at Gallery 5 on Saturday, March 21. The event begins at 7 PM and will also feature performances by Night Idea, Dumb Waiter, and Calvin Presents. Tickets can be purchased through Eventbrite for $7 in advance — or, for $12, you can get both a ticket and a copy of Trust/Fall on CD. For more info, click here.

Coronavirus: What It Is And How To Avoid It

Zach Armstrong | February 4, 2020

Topics: Carilion Clinic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, china, coronavirus, MERS, SARS, VCU Health, Virginia Department of Health, World Health Organization, Wuhan

Fortunately, the case at George Mason turned out to be a false alarm. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to be careful and protect your health.

After the U.S. had its first person-to-person transmission of coronavirus, the World Health Organization has declared the current state of the disease a “global health emergency.”

There have been six confirmed cases within the U.S., while more than 300 have already died due to the virus in China. On Wednesday, 195 passengers on board a flight returning from Wuhan, China were ordered into a 14-day quarantine at March Air Reserve Base by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

Residents of Virginia raised concerns when a student at George Mason University was being tested for coronavirus symptoms (test results for the student were declared negative on Friday). For those anxious about the spread of the disease, here’s what you need to know and what precautions to take. 

By CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM – This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Image Library (PHIL), Public Domain, via Wikimedia

What It Is

Coronaviruses are a group of viruses typically found in animals, which resemble the common cold because of their similar symptoms. However, coronaviruses are much more severe and have longer durations. Other examples of coronaviruses include Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The new coronavirus (nCoV) that originated in Wuhan, which has now reached the U.S. and Europe, is a respiratory illness that has never been seen before in humans. 

“It’s believed it was initially transmitted from animals to human beings probably from food markets or animal markets in Wuhan, China,” said Gonzalo M. Bearman, M.D., M.P.H., in a video released by VCU Health. 

Coronaviruses can be transmitted between animals and people with numerous versions found in animals that haven’t affected humans. There have been other cases of the virus transmitting from animals to people, including SARS-CoV from civet cats to humans, and MERS-CoV from dromedary camels to humans. 

Symptoms

Signs that one might have the virus are similar to signs of the flu; they include shortness of breath, respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, and difficulties with breathing. The new coronavirus also includes more severe symptoms, such as pneumonia, worsening cough, sore muscles, and joint pain.

The risk of someone in the commonwealth receiving the virus is currently low, so someone who is showing these signs may simply have the flu. For doctors to be concerned, someone would have had to recently visited an area with epidemic activity or have been in contact with someone else with a confirmed case of the virus within the past 14 days. 

Officials from the Virginia Department of Health have been informing citizens that they should be more concerned about the flu. Roanoke’s Carilion Clinic has reported three patients dying from influenza, while no one in Virginia has a confirmed case of coronavirus. 

Map of the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak as of 4 February 2020. Region of origin (mainland China) in brown. Confirmed cases reported in red. Suspected cases reported in blue. By Pharexia. Map derived from BlankMap-World-Microstates.svg. Data derived from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New York Times, CNBC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

Precautions

Health officials are advising people to take routine steps to prevent further spread of the disease and to protect themselves from it. 

Recommended precautions include:

  • wash hands with soap and water regularly
  • cover mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing
  • don’t share drinks or food
  • use alcohol-based hand sanitizer
  • don’t make contact with people showing symptoms of the infection.

If someone is experiencing symptoms of the infection, has been in contact with someone known to have the infection (or currently being tested for it), or has recently traveled to Wuhan, China, they are advised to seek medical attention immediately. Those in the Richmond area can visit the VCU Health emergency room at 1213 E. Clay St.

“VCU Health is aggressively monitoring the situation, so that we’re aware of all the latest updates and recommendations coming from the CDC to have the appropriate teams to respond to changes in the situation,” said Bearman. 

More information about the new coronavirus can be found at the World Health Organization or VCU Health webpages.

Top Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

How To Race Your Dragon: Celebrating Chinese Culture in Richmond

Jimmy O'Keefe | August 15, 2019

Topics: altria, boat races, canoes, carmax, china, Chinese culture, corporations, cultural dances, dragon boat, events, festival, performances, richmond dragon boat festival, richmond events

Despite its corporate influences, Richmond’s Dragon Boat Festival was an entertaining spectacle of Chinese culture by the James.

A little piece of China came to Richmond earlier this month, when the Richmond International Dragon Boat Festival hit Rocketts Landing on August 3. The festival, which has run annually for the past 11 years, featured 41 teams competing on the James alongside a variety of Chinese cultural performances. 

Dragon boat festivals originated in China, and are usually held as a cultural festival around the summer solstice. The tradition of racing dragon boats dates back to the 5th or 6th century, and today the International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF) helps to organize rowing teams and races throughout the world. Every other year, the IDBF hosts a world championship in different cities around the globe. 

The journey to my first-ever dragon boat festival began on the GRTC Pulse. With the final eastbound stop being Rocketts Landing, the Pulse was the obvious choice for anyone seeking a quick way to the festival without hopping in a car or sweating on a bike. But for some unexplained reason, my bus stopped at the Shockoe Bottom station; passengers were informed that the bus would not be traveling any further. This was unexpected, but turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the Virginia Capital Trail was just two blocks away. The 10 minute walk to the festival along the river came complete with cool breezes and nice views of Richmond’s skyline. 

Photo by Jimmy O’Keefe

The trail took me right to the middle of the festival, which was in full swing when I arrived. A voice over the PA system narrated a race in real time as teams cheered on from tents along the river. Meandering lines of attendees led to a handful of food trucks, which provided festival-goers with all of the essentials, from funnel cakes to beer. 

Farther down the trail, crowds gathered to watch Chinese traditional dances. Conveniently, the performances largely took place between dragon boat races, so there was no need to pick between one or the other. An announcer — who couldn’t have been over the age of 10 — expertly described what was happening in each dance, and what it meant within the context of Chinese culture. Elegant and informative, the Chinese cultural performances were a definite highlight of the festival. 

Photo by Jimmy O’Keefe

In the river, long canoe-like boats containing 22 rowers plus a drummer sped through the water. While it was a little difficult to get a great view of the boats because of our distance from shore, it was clear where each of the boats stood in the race. The speed at which the boats traveled was truly impressive; none of the races I witnessed lasted much more than a minute and a half. 

Seeing nearly two dozen people working together to propel a massive boat forward is quite a spectacle. This, in combination with the cultural performances, made the festival well worth attending. But throughout my time at the festival, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that things were a little off — in the most corporate way possible. It seems as though many of the teams participating in the races were representatives from big businesses, participating in the festival for team-building exercises. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but in many ways, the Dragon Boat Festival resembled an employee playground for major corporations, who drank beer and took cool photos while superficially signaling support for the community at hand. 

Photo by Jimmy O’Keefe

Perhaps the festival would have felt less corporate if the teams had come up with names a bit more creative than “Team CarMax” or “Altria East/Spring.” I will admit, though, that “Bankers Aweigh” perfectly captured the corporate/boating feeling of the festival while making me smile. 

All in all, the Dragon Boat Festival was a fun way to spend a Saturday. While there are definitely ways the festival could feature better, more in-depth discussions of Chinese culture in the future, watching almost unbelievably long boats race down the James was definitely worth the trip to Rocketts Landing.

Top Photo by Jimmy O’Keefe

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