Vox Sentences: Black Lives Matter is the biggest grassroots force in the 2016 Dem primary

Hillary Clinton vs. Black Lives Matter; Straight Outta Compton is the #1 movie in America; and Scott Walker and Marco Rubio tell us what they'll replace Obamacare with.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Black Lives Matter 2016

GOOD

• A video of Hillary Clinton holding a tense, closed-door meeting with activists from Black Lives Matter last week was just released to the public, posted by GOOD Magazine.

  [GOOD / Gabriel Reilich]

• The meeting took place after activists tried to get into a Clinton rally, only to be stopped by Secret Service agents.

  [New Republic / Jamil Smith]

• Black Lives Matter protesters have become the most vocal grassroots group in the 2016 Democratic primary. They already confronted both Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley in July, and took the stage at a Sanders rally in August.

  [Blue Nation Review / Jimmy Williams]

• Those confrontations have resulted in both Sanders and O'Malley releasing platforms for "racial justice" — which, taken together, start to articulate what a uniquely Democratic agenda for criminal justice reform would look like.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• With Clinton, however, activists have an additional concern: She's still associated with the 1994 crime bill signed by Bill Clinton, which fueled mass incarceration and helped immiserate a lot of black people.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• That created tension in the meeting with Clinton. Activists wanted to focus on her culpability in 1994, and hear her acknowledge a connection between mass incarceration and structural racism. Clinton was much more interested in tough pragmatism.

  [Mother Jones / Inae Oh]

• This is consistent with Hillary Clinton's theory of how change happens. Just think about her attacks on Obama: She's not interested in feelings or rhetoric, she is interested in actions.

  [CNN / Alexander Mooney]

• The activists don't feel they should be the ones to come up with policy platforms. The story of mass incarceration has been a story of unintended policy consequences, and they feel policymakers need to understand what went wrong if they're going to fix it.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• In case this all strikes you as meaningless campaign foofaraw, here's a reminder from political science that campaign promises matter.

  [Washington Monthly / Jonathan Bernstein]

The box office assesses the strength of street knowledge at $60 million

(Universal and Legendary Pictures)

• The most popular movie in America is a biopic of the seminal rap group N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton earned $60 million in its opening weekend, which, for context, is the fifth-biggest opening for any movie in the month of August.

  [Variety / Brent Lang]

• Note for the youngs: If you need a crash course in why N.W.A. is such a BFD, read this history of "Fuck tha Police." It isn't a comprehensive look at the group, but it gets at why they were so threatening and so liberating at the time, and why they've continued to matter.

  [Daily Beast / Asawin Suebsaeng]

• And police are still threatened by N.W.A.The LAPD stepped up patrols last weekend for the opening, including heightened security within movie theaters, out of supposed concern for gang violence.

  [Perez Hilton]

• In fact, CNN found the absence of violence newsworthy enough to devote an entire segment headline to it.

  [Robbie Couch via Twitter]

• (Let's take a minute to remember that rap lyrics are still used in criminal trials as evidence of violent intent.)

  [Vox / Michael Render & Erik Nielson ]

• Meanwhile, there's criticism of how the movie deals — or rather, doesn't deal — with the misogyny of N.W.A.'s lyrics and of its members. One target is the movie's biggest joke: a scene that sets up the meme "Bye, Felicia!" which N.W.A. member Ice Cube inaugurated in the movie Friday after his time in the group.

  [The Cut / Allison Davis]

• Journalist Dee Barnes, whom Dr. Dre seriously assaulted in 1991 — which is totally skipped over in the movie — wrote a pretty damning essay for Gawker calling out the film's director, F. Gary Gray, for ignoring Dre's and the group's misogyny.

  [Gawker / Dee Barnes]

• For what it's worth, Dre has apologized for his attack on Barnes, most recently in a Rolling Stone interview promoting the movie; Cube, on the other hand, continues to unapologetically refer to bitches and hoes.

  [Rolling Stone]

• So how's the movie itself? Wesley Morris finds it more than a little gauzy (the phrase "Melrose Place" comes up).

  [Grantland / Wesley Morris]

• But Selma director Ava DuVernay, who grew up in N.W.A.'s Los Angeles, gave an enthusiastic and emotional review on Twitter (compiled here by Vulture).

  [Ava DuVernay via Vulture / Dee Lockett]

• Postscript: Compton, California, which is still struggling, does not yet have a movie theater in which you can see Straight Outta Compton.

  [CBS Los Angeles ]

Happy Repeal and Replace Day!

(Scott Olson and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

• Scott Walker and Marco Rubio attempted to rescue political journalists from the news cycle hegemony of Donald Trump by releasing health-care proposals today.

• Walker's is the most detailed plan any Republican candidate has put forward so far. Vox's Sarah Kliff explains it here.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Conservative health wonk Yuval Levin traces the genealogy of the ideas in Walker's plan to some proposals from Congressional Republicans, and from there to a 2012 Heritage paper.

  [National Review Online / Yuval Levin]

• Here's how Levin describes Walker's plan, which he generally approves of: "This would in essence put a floor of catastrophic coverage, rather than no coverage, beneath the health insurance system and then allow that system to function as a robust, competitive market."

• Mother Jones's Kevin Drum, who (unsurprisingly) disagrees about the merits of the plan, points out that Walker and other Republicans are flailing to figure out how to keep forcing insurers to cover preexisting conditions.

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• Marco Rubio's plan has some of the same elements as Walker's — both would block-grant Medicare, for example — but the centerpiece is an individual tax credit that would replace the incentive for employers to buy insurance for their employees. Economists love ideas like this. Voters hate them.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• The Rubio plan is generally vague, which Jonathan Chait argues is a feature, not a bug.

  [New York / Jonathan Chait]

• In other Marco Rubio news, he hit a small child in the face with a football today. There is a GIF.

  [Deadspin / Samer Kalaf]

MISCELLANEOUS

50 psychology terms you should just stop using. [Frontiers in Psychology / Robert O. Lilienfeld et al.]

• Twelve years ago, gun superfan John Lott was caught posing as a woman named "Mary Rosh" in comments to defend his dubious research on guns and crime. Now he's been caught using a second female persona — and the real woman whose name he used is objecting.

  [Mother Jones / Julia Lurie]

• Remembering Dangerous Minds, perhaps the worst "inspirational teacher saves wayward youths" movie ever.

  [Slate / Aisha Harris]

• A police lieutenant at the National Institute of Science and Technology has been charged with using the NIST building as a meth lab, and causing a meth lab explosion there last month.

  [Washington Post / Dan Morse]

• There are birthers who think Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum might all be ineligible to become president.

  [Talking Points Memo / Catherine Thompson]

VERBATIM

"George Zimmerman is now selling prints of his Confederate flag painting at a gun store that made headlines earlier this year for deeming itself a 'Muslim-free' zone." [Chicago Tribune / Adrienne Cutway]

• "In 2013, Karachi recorded nearly 3,000 murders, more than any other city in the world. It hadn’t always been that way — in 2003, the official number of homicides was seventy-six."

  [Harpers / Matthieu Aikins]

• "You can get lip service from as many as white people as you can pack into Yankee stadium and a million more like it, who are going to say, 'Oh, we get it, we get it. We're going to be nicer.' That's not enough — at least in my book. That's not how I see politics."

  [Hillary Clinton via Vox / German Lopez]

• "Lena Dunham, a woman who by most accounts has never had to worry a day in her life about paying rent and putting food on the table, put her name on a petition aimed at stopping women around the world from doing what she does on television in front of millions of people on a regular basis: acting like she’s enjoying sex for money."

  [Now Toronto / Fleur de Lit]

• "Karl, you have one friend and his name is Friedrich. He has a patchy beard and he drinks all our milk every time he comes over and he never offers to buy any more."

  [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joseph Stromberg

• This new type of 3D printing was inspired by Terminator 2

  [YouTube / Joseph Stromberg]

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