thebulwark--2020-05-26--The Commander-in-Tweet Isn’t Just Disrespectful, He’s Dangerous

Three presidential administrations have had ownership of America ’ s longest war .
President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after the Taliban refused to oust al Qaeda , the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks , in a manner that suited him .
He then shifted the Pentagon ’ s focus two-and-a-half years later by ordering the invasion of Iraq , which allowed the Taliban to reverse the gains made by coalition forces during the first phase of the war .
President Obama—who ’ d campaigned on a plank that there was a “ bad ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. forces out of Iraq while surging the number in Afghanistan .
But by the end of his time in office , along with ordering the SEAL mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden , the head of al Qaeda , he ’ d lowered the troop level from a high-water mark of 140,000 to 9,000 , using the claim that the hard-won reduction in Taliban-led violence against the central government would now allow Afghan forces to oversee to Afghanistan ’ s security .
Then , in spite of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debates his fellow candidate Jeb Bush told him he couldn ’ t insult his way to the presidency , Donald J. Trump did just that .
Candidate Trump ’ s national defense message from the stump had basically been that “ we don ’ t know how to win anymore ” and he knew more about the threat than the generals did .
Once in office , his first acts as commander-in-chief were to take credit for a Pentagon multi-year airplane contract that had been finalized during the Obama administration and to publicly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ operations raid in Yemen .
The three-and-a-half years that followed have demonstrated that President Trump is out of his depth when trying to lead the U.S. military .
Instead of productively addressing NATO ’ s funding inequities , he tried to bully America ’ s treaty partners , most visibly at a summit in Brussels where the schoolyard dynamic was on full display , cliques and all .
This unprecedented tension with our allies was against a backdrop of equally unprecedented statements where the president of the United States told the world that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ North Korea ’ s brutal dictator and that he believed the Russian president ’ s claim that that country had nothing to do with American election interference in spite of the findings of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary .
Then , President Trump pushed for the creation of the Space Force , a redundant branch of the U.S. military that will do little more against actual threats to the homeland than create new budget pressures in what are bound to be fiscally challenging years ahead .
He spent $ 5.4 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the Fourth of July after being wowed by the Bastille Day celebration while on an official visit to France .
And more than once , the president has expressed a belief that the F-35 is invisible—not just stealthy but actually invisible .
On the military personnel front , “ all the best generals ” —as Trump labeled Mattis , McMaster , Kelly—have one by one left his administration , each in his own way frustrated by the president ’ s impulsiveness and inability to focus on details critical to national security .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ arguably the most literary take-this-job-and-shove-it statement in the history of American government .
Trump , never one to accept being bested in any way , told the White House Press Corps that he ’ d “ essentially fired [ Mattis ] ” and some months later called him “ the world ’ s most overrated general.
” Mattis responded by quipping at a formal dinner in New York that Trump had also called actress Meryl Streep overrated , so he was happy to be the “ Meryl Streep of generals ” because “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victories ” —a biting reference to Trump ’ s tweet about pulling troops out of Syria that caused Mattis to resign in the first place because he felt the move would hand the country over to ISIS .
Overall , Trump has shown through his speeches , press conferences , and tweets that his understanding of the military is not fully formed , as if he never gave the subject much thought in the sixty-some years since the Saturday mornings in the late 1950s when his parents dropped him off at the Lowes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That ’ s the only way to explain the president of the United States making a statement like this : “ When I took over , it was a mess .
.
.
.
One of our generals came in to see me and he said , ‘ Sir , we don ’ t have ammunition.
’ I said , ‘ That ’ s a terrible thing you just said.
’ He said , ‘ We don ’ t have ammunition.
’ Now we have more ammunition than we ’ ve ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Murphy in To Hell and Back and fatally simplistic in an era where the principal threats to our forces are things like hypersonic weapons .
( And any general who framed an actual inventory problem like that would be laughed out of the E-Ring by his fellow four-stars . )
Never mind the self-own of the president denying he ’ s impulsive by tweeting the claim he ’ s not , what he wrote here is both insulting to veterans of the war and should be concerning to Americans at large .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and supports the troops , the tacit statement he makes when he writes “ we never really fought to win , ” regardless if his intent is to simply slam previous administrations , is that those who gave their all in carrying out the missions they were assigned in Afghanistan wasted their time or gave their lives in vain .
That ’ s a reckless tone for a commander-in-chief , who could well need the best and brightest to answer his call to man the all-volunteer military without hesitation , to strike in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of American service members have served honorably in Afghanistan , and they deserve defter analysis from their president than what Trump offers here .
I saw the war firsthand as a journalist embedded with the U.S. Army ’ s Task Force Rakkasan in 2010 .
During that time , as I walked through the villages and rode along during air assaults and lived in the austere outposts in Paktika Province near the Pakistan border , I gained a full appreciation for the work American troops were doing there at that time .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from trade routes and other areas of commerce , they shaped the attitudes of the locals by fixing the cell phone towers and handing out prayer rugs to shepherds and facilitating meetings of the tribal elders ( known as shuras ) in order that they might discuss subjects like how to get their girls into school for the first time and where to establish polling stations for the national election .
Which leads to the second major problem with this tweet combo beyond disrespecting our military veterans : The current commander-in-chief apparently lacks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might be proportionally applied in certain situations .
When Trump makes the claim that we never fought to win in Afghanistan “ except at the beginning ” he ignores that the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom ( quickly changed at the outset from the religiously insensitive “ Operation Infinite Justice ” ) wasn ’ t a 21st-century version of D-Day .
The “ invasion ” was several dozen CIA caseworkers and Green Beret joining forces with Afghan warlords on horseback supported by a single carrier air wing based in the North Arabian Sea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same guy who , during a Department of Defense presentation about the need to recapitalize our aging nuclear weapons inventory , reportedly asked—in all seriousness—why we have nukes if we ’ re not going to use them , creating the impression on the briefers that the concept of deterrence was lost on him .
( Remember when he was stumped by then-critic Hugh Hewitt over the nuclear triad ?
Simpler times . )
So too , presumably , are surgical applications of our “ mighty military ” like counterinsurgency operations , no-fly zones @ @ @ @ @ @ @ navigation missions .
None of this is a categorical defense of how the war in Afghanistan has been conducted over the long haul .
As the Washington Post exposed in its “ Afghanistan Papers ” series last year , over the 19 years we ’ ve been there , a lot of the time our military leaders had little to no confidence that we ’ d be able to accomplish our national objectives in spite of their public testimony to the contrary .
So , if Trump had tweeted , “ Unlike my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forces overseas without a defined end state ” I ’ d find less to fault him over .
( While we are on the subject of definition , what are U.S. troops doing on our southern border again ?
And remind me what the Trump administration is negotiating as the terms for our exit from Afghanistan ?
So .
Much .
Winning . )
Trump ’ s defenders say that his tweets are aimed at his base , but , to our collective national embarrassment , the rest of the world reads them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overstate the threat to worry aloud that his intellectual sloth and lack of precision in the words he chooses while addressing defense matters emboldens our enemies , both nation-state and independent actors .
At first , they thought he was ballsy and crazy enough to act on his not-so-veiled threats about how big his button is and how he could end wars very quickly ( read “ nuclear option ” ) if he wanted to .
But now they see that he ’ s just a functional illiterate with a short attention span @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russia , China , Iran , and a resurgent Taliban are testing American resolve with greater frequency in places like the skies over the Baltic , the waters of the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz , and the streets of Kabul , even in the middle of a global pandemic .
With each ridiculous tweet they fear us less .

Three presidential administrations have had ownership of America’s longest war. President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after the Taliban refused to oust al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, in a manner that suited him. He then shifted the Pentagon’s focus two-and-a-half years later by ordering the invasion of Iraq, which allowed the Taliban to reverse the gains made by coalition forces during the first phase of the war. President Obama—who’d campaigned on a plank that there was a “bad” war and a “good” war—pulled U.S. forces out of Iraq while surging the number in Afghanistan. But by the end of his time in office, along with ordering the SEAL mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, he’d lowered the troop level from a high-water mark of 140,000 to 9,000, using the claim that the hard-won reduction in Taliban-led violence against the central government would now allow Afghan forces to oversee to Afghanistan’s security.
Then, in spite of the fact that during one of the Republican debates his fellow candidate Jeb Bush told him he couldn’t insult his way to the presidency, Donald J. Trump did just that. Candidate Trump’s national defense message from the stump had basically been that “we don’t know how to win anymore” and he knew more about the threat than the generals did. Once in office, his first acts as commander-in-chief were to take credit for a Pentagon multi-year airplane contract that had been finalized during the Obama administration and to publicly blame military leaders for an ill-fated special operations raid in Yemen.
The three-and-a-half years that followed have demonstrated that President Trump is out of his depth when trying to lead the U.S. military. Instead of productively addressing NATO’s funding inequities, he tried to bully America’s treaty partners, most visibly at a summit in Brussels where the schoolyard dynamic was on full display, cliques and all. This unprecedented tension with our allies was against a backdrop of equally unprecedented statements where the president of the United States told the world that he’d fallen in love with North Korea’s brutal dictator and that he believed the Russian president’s claim that that country had nothing to do with American election interference in spite of the findings of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Then, President Trump pushed for the creation of the Space Force, a redundant branch of the U.S. military that will do little more against actual threats to the homeland than create new budget pressures in what are bound to be fiscally challenging years ahead. He spent $5.4 million for a new and non-traditional military parade on the Fourth of July after being wowed by the Bastille Day celebration while on an official visit to France. And more than once, the president has expressed a belief that the F-35 is invisible—not just stealthy but actually invisible.
On the military personnel front, “all the best generals”—as Trump labeled Mattis, McMaster, Kelly—have one by one left his administration, each in his own way frustrated by the president’s impulsiveness and inability to focus on details critical to national security. Mattis resigned in a letter that is arguably the most literary take-this-job-and-shove-it statement in the history of American government. Trump, never one to accept being bested in any way, told the White House Press Corps that he’d “essentially fired [Mattis]” and some months later called him “the world’s most overrated general.” Mattis responded by quipping at a formal dinner in New York that Trump had also called actress Meryl Streep overrated, so he was happy to be the “Meryl Streep of generals” because “at least we’ve had some victories”—a biting reference to Trump’s tweet about pulling troops out of Syria that caused Mattis to resign in the first place because he felt the move would hand the country over to ISIS.
Overall, Trump has shown through his speeches, press conferences, and tweets that his understanding of the military is not fully formed, as if he never gave the subject much thought in the sixty-some years since the Saturday mornings in the late 1950s when his parents dropped him off at the Lowes Valencia in Queens for war movie matinees. That’s the only way to explain the president of the United States making a statement like this: “When I took over, it was a mess. . . . One of our generals came in to see me and he said, ‘Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘That’s a terrible thing you just said.’ He said, ‘We don’t have ammunition.’ Now we have more ammunition than we’ve ever had.” That line is pure Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back and fatally simplistic in an era where the principal threats to our forces are things like hypersonic weapons. (And any general who framed an actual inventory problem like that would be laughed out of the E-Ring by his fellow four-stars.)
Most recently, President Trump tweeted this:
Never mind the self-own of the president denying he’s impulsive by tweeting the claim he’s not, what he wrote here is both insulting to veterans of the war and should be concerning to Americans at large.
For a guy who brags how much loves and supports the troops, the tacit statement he makes when he writes “we never really fought to win,” regardless if his intent is to simply slam previous administrations, is that those who gave their all in carrying out the missions they were assigned in Afghanistan wasted their time or gave their lives in vain. That’s a reckless tone for a commander-in-chief, who could well need the best and brightest to answer his call to man the all-volunteer military without hesitation, to strike in a chaotic world.
Hundreds of thousands of American service members have served honorably in Afghanistan, and they deserve defter analysis from their president than what Trump offers here. I saw the war firsthand as a journalist embedded with the U.S. Army’s Task Force Rakkasan in 2010. During that time, as I walked through the villages and rode along during air assaults and lived in the austere outposts in Paktika Province near the Pakistan border, I gained a full appreciation for the work American troops were doing there at that time. As well as keeping insurgents neutralized and away from trade routes and other areas of commerce, they shaped the attitudes of the locals by fixing the cell phone towers and handing out prayer rugs to shepherds and facilitating meetings of the tribal elders (known as shuras) in order that they might discuss subjects like how to get their girls into school for the first time and where to establish polling stations for the national election.
Which leads to the second major problem with this tweet combo beyond disrespecting our military veterans: The current commander-in-chief apparently lacks a basic conception of how military power might be proportionally applied in certain situations. When Trump makes the claim that we never fought to win in Afghanistan “except at the beginning” he ignores that the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (quickly changed at the outset from the religiously insensitive “Operation Infinite Justice”) wasn’t a 21st-century version of D-Day. The “invasion” was several dozen CIA caseworkers and Green Beret joining forces with Afghan warlords on horseback supported by a single carrier air wing based in the North Arabian Sea.
Of course, Trump is the same guy who, during a Department of Defense presentation about the need to recapitalize our aging nuclear weapons inventory, reportedly asked—in all seriousness—why we have nukes if we’re not going to use them, creating the impression on the briefers that the concept of deterrence was lost on him. (Remember when he was stumped by then-critic Hugh Hewitt over the nuclear triad? Simpler times.) So too, presumably, are surgical applications of our “mighty military” like counterinsurgency operations, no-fly zones, tanker escorts, and freedom of navigation missions.
None of this is a categorical defense of how the war in Afghanistan has been conducted over the long haul. As the Washington Post exposed in its “Afghanistan Papers” series last year, over the 19 years we’ve been there, a lot of the time our military leaders had little to no confidence that we’d be able to accomplish our national objectives in spite of their public testimony to the contrary. So, if Trump had tweeted, “Unlike my predecessors, I will not commit American forces overseas without a defined end state” I’d find less to fault him over. (While we are on the subject of definition, what are U.S. troops doing on our southern border again? And remind me what the Trump administration is negotiating as the terms for our exit from Afghanistan? So. Much. Winning.)
Trump’s defenders say that his tweets are aimed at his base, but, to our collective national embarrassment, the rest of the world reads them too. And it doesn’t overstate the threat to worry aloud that his intellectual sloth and lack of precision in the words he chooses while addressing defense matters emboldens our enemies, both nation-state and independent actors. At first, they thought he was ballsy and crazy enough to act on his not-so-veiled threats about how big his button is and how he could end wars very quickly (read “nuclear option”) if he wanted to. But now they see that he’s just a functional illiterate with a short attention span.
That’s dangerous. Already Russia, China, Iran, and a resurgent Taliban are testing American resolve with greater frequency in places like the skies over the Baltic, the waters of the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, and the streets of Kabul, even in the middle of a global pandemic. With each ridiculous tweet they fear us less.


Break Up Facebook

Hungry for information and distraction , nearly 3 billion people a month use Facebook .
Audio and video calls on WhatsApp and Messenger have more than doubled in places hardest hit by the pandemic .
Facebook has developed a rival to the omnipresent Zoom .
While COVID-19 has temporarily reduced advertising revenue , with $ 60 billion on hand Facebook can outlast its rivals ; as the predominant social media platform , it will corner an even higher percentage of the digital advertising dollar .
Inevitably , Facebook will emerge from this pandemic more powerful than before .
But Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ principal sources of profit is hosting Donald Trump ’ s sociopathic advertising campaign for re-election , rooted in the mass proliferation of disinformation , dishonesty , and divisiveness .
When traditional news organizations refuted Trump ’ s dangerous suggestion that Americans inject themselves with household cleaners , his unimpeded quackery went viral on Facebook .
How did Facebook become the ubiquitous shaper of America ’ s political consciousness—free from the constraints of regulation , competition , and respect for truth ?
By relentlessly smothering would-be competitors who might have offered something better .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ majority of Americans , Facebook bought more than 80 companies that presumed to enter its digital space .
Sometimes it absorbed them ; frequently it simply shut them down .
Not once did the government intervene .
Two acquisitions stand out .
By combining a camera app with a social network , Instagram threatened to outstrip Facebook ’ s popularity .
Instead of competing with Instagram , in 2012 Facebook absorbed it .
A few years later Time assessed the impact : “ Buying Instagram conveyed to investors that the company was serious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neutralizing a nascent competitor.
” To protect its flagging Messenger , Facebook blocked other messaging services from appearing or advertising on its platform .
But having failed to obliterate its principal rival , WhatsApp , Facebook just bought it in 2014—the climax of its hydra-headed efforts to eliminate competition for Messenger .
Snapchat presented a different competitive threat .
As Chris Hughes—a Facebook cofounder who left the company in 2007 and has since grown disenchanted with it—wrote in the New York Times : “ Snapchat ’ s Stories and impermanent messaging options made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instagram .
And unlike Vine , Snapchat wasn ’ t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem ; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out .
So Facebook simply copied it.
” Here imitation transcends flattery .
As antitrust law expert Tim Wu observes in Wired : Facebook ’ s program of suppression , acquisition , and imitation closes the marketplace to new ideas and entrants .
As Hughes notes , “ would-be competitors can ’ t raise the money to take on Facebook.
” In short , Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being better , but by being ruthless .
This predation feeds itself : Users want the social network most likely to reach others ; advertisers crave the largest audience .
“ Because Facebook so dominates social networking , ” writes Hughes , “ it faces no market-based accountability .
This means that every time Facebook messes up , we repeat an exhausting pattern : first outrage , then disappointment and , finally , resignation.
” Inevitably , Facebook has become the catalyst in degrading a principal safeguard of democracy : American journalism .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ mid-2018 and weighted by demographics , 68 percent of the respondents reported using social media platforms for news , with 20 percent saying they “ often ” got their news that way .
An earlier Pew study , from 2016 , found that two-thirds of Facebook users say they get news on the site .
But as New York Times technology reporter Farhad Manjoo told NPR , “ there ’ s very little fact-checking that Facebook does , ” which has “ led to this proliferation of fake news.
” Worse , Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ministry of information for .
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every country in which it operates.
” On the latter point , a headline in Business Insider summarized the baneful findings of a three-year study by Oxford University : “ Facebook is the most popular social network for governments spreading fake news and propaganda.
” A 2017 report by the Columbia Journalism Review identifies the impact of standard-free social media on mainstream journalism : Diminishing ad revenue .
Shrinking readership .
An absence of editorial judgment .
The loss of transparency and accountability .
The elevation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is toxic to our civic and political health .
Warns Chris Hughes : While appropriating one editorial function—deciding what people will read—and discarding another—delivering quality and accuracy—Facebook turned millions of people into lab rats .
TechCrunch describes how : In one decade , Facebook hijacked our curiosity , shortened our attention spans , dulled our critical faculties , and sold our personal data to malign actors .
The paradigm case is Trump ’ s partnership with Facebook to undermine our 2016 presidential election .
The engine was Facebook ’ s commoditization of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of Facebook revenues come from advertising , the value of which depends on giving advertisers access to data so granular that they can micro-target what Facebook calls “ customized audiences.
” Using Facebook tools , a British political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica—started by the Breitbart-funding right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer—disseminated a “ survey ” to which roughly 300,000 Facebook users responded .
Using the respondents ’ data to penetrate the data of their “ friends , ” the company mined detailed private information on an estimated 87 million Facebook users .
Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a disinformation campaign that , at its height , spent $ 1 million a day on ads micro-targeting strategically located Facebook users in electorally decisive states—either by inflaming potential Trump supporters or dissuading possible Clinton voters .
Overall , Trump placed 5.9 million ads on Facebook .
In return for this largesse , Facebook assigned an employee to Trump ’ s digital team to maximize its effectiveness .
Together , they succeeded brilliantly .
Moreover , the Brennan Center reports , “ Facebook posts by agents of the Kremlin disguised to come across @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and shared by unsuspecting Americans , reached a total of 126 million Facebook users leading up to the 2016 election.
” To accomplish that goal , Russian operatives “ purchased ads that appeared to promote both sides of divisive social issues in the United States , including police brutality , race , and terrorism.
” After Trump ’ s efforts became public knowledge , Facebook asserted that Cambridge Analytica had violated its “ terms of service ” agreements with third parties .
Given the tactics employed by Trump and his shadowy Russian supporters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ draw a broader , and deeply sobering , lesson .
Instead , the lesson Facebook drew is this : Licensing Trump ’ s mass mendacity is a burgeoning source of revenue .
For 2020 , Trump ’ s campaign manager brags , “ we have turned the RNC into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history ” —thanks , he might have added , to Facebook .
With Facebook as its engine , the Trump campaign plans to spend $ 1 billion on what , McKay Coppins reports in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history.
” Because Facebook has lowered its advertising rates during the pandemic , Trump will get more deceit for his buck—and Facebook more advertisements .
In return , Facebook user data will enable Trump to target individual voters with insidious effectiveness .
Knowing all this , Facebook refuses to ban false deceptive political ads , or to limit Trump ’ s deployment of user data to reach the right groups with the right lies .
Piously , Mark Zuckerberg proclaims that “ in a democracy , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for themselves what politicians are saying , so they can make their own judgments.
” Based on what ?
As Zuckerberg well knows , digital media spreads falsehoods with a reach and celerity that defy correction .
That ’ s why Trump partners with Facebook .
By January , Trump ’ s campaign already had spent $ 27 million on Facebook—including a blatantly false advertisement about Joe Biden ’ s relationship with Ukraine that Facebook refused to take down .
In contrast , Twitter and Google have barred political advertising .
Turning down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey explained , “ Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse : machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting , unchecked misleading information , and deep fakes .
All at increasing velocity , sophistication , and overwhelming scale .
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Best to focus our efforts on the root problems , without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings.
” In a tweet that seems directly aimed at Facebook ’ s hypocrisy , Dorsey adds that it would not be “ credible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has— “ We ’ re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info , buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad .
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well .
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they can say whatever they want !
” It ’ s worth comparing the Facebook standard to that of another media giant , CNN .
A false ad on the cable network is easy for journalists and rival candidates to spot—and , besides , CNN won ’ t host blatant falsehoods .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported in December that , “ Just last month , CNN rejected two ads from President Trump ’ s re-election campaign because of inaccuracies .
These ads were eventually published on Facebook and other digital platforms as part of a multimillion-dollar ad buy.
” Previously , Brookings notes , Senator Mark Warner had vainly urged Zuckerberg to “ adhere to the same norms of other traditional media companies.
” By willfully abetting Trump in polluting another presidential election , Facebook may help tilt its outcome .
When Slate surveyed experts to name the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trailed only Amazon : “ Its refusal to meaningfully alter the political advertising system that both President Donald Trump and Russian trolls used to their advantage in 2016 suggests that once again one of the main arenas of an ugly election will be Facebook.
” For this continuing civic and political wreckage , only two answers present themselves : empowering government to curb false digital advertising , or using antitrust law to reduce Facebook ’ s size and sway .
The Honest Ads Act , sponsored by Senators Warner and Klobuchar , would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ television and radio .
By its terms , anyone who pays for political ads the must identify themselves ; platforms like Facebook must keep records of who purchases such ads ; and foreign nationals are barred from running them .
That would help .
But it doesn ’ t solve the problems of mendacious virality , phony accounts , or automated bots—or the anti-competitive practices that make Facebook so powerful , with such a deleterious impact on journalism .
The most efficacious remedy is to break up Facebook .
The antitrust laws were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ innovation , curb price-rigging , and prevent the power of mega-corporations from outstripping governance .
Facebook suppresses competition , discourages innovation , and defies regulation—effectively claiming the power to make its own rules .
But beginning in the 1980s , antitrust laws were constricted to a narrow goal—keeping monopolies from gouging consumers .
Facebook ’ s multiple malignancies demonstrate how myopic that is : The company doesn ’ t charge users ; it monetizes their attention , peddling their information .
It exemplifies why the law of antitrust exists .
Chris Hughes suggests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instagram and WhatsApp—creating three separate companies—and bar Facebook from further acquisitions for several years .
This should be accompanied by rigorous federal scrutiny of potentially anticompetitive practices .
Granted , this does not directly address Facebook ’ s role as the platform of choice for degrading democracy .
But re-energizing competition in social media may compel Facebook to offer consumers a more honest—and less manipulative—environment for fear of losing market share , while warning Facebook that its diminished role as purveyor of news and political advertising is no longer immune from scrupulous oversight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

COVID-19 has friended Facebook.
Hungry for information and distraction, nearly 3 billion people a month use Facebook. Audio and video calls on WhatsApp and Messenger have more than doubled in places hardest hit by the pandemic. Facebook has developed a rival to the omnipresent Zoom.
While COVID-19 has temporarily reduced advertising revenue, with $60 billion on hand Facebook can outlast its rivals; as the predominant social media platform, it will corner an even higher percentage of the digital advertising dollar. Inevitably, Facebook will emerge from this pandemic more powerful than before.
But Facebook is not our friend.
Among its principal sources of profit is hosting Donald Trump’s sociopathic advertising campaign for re-election, rooted in the mass proliferation of disinformation, dishonesty, and divisiveness. When traditional news organizations refuted Trump’s dangerous suggestion that Americans inject themselves with household cleaners, his unimpeded quackery went viral on Facebook.
How did Facebook become the ubiquitous shaper of America’s political consciousness—free from the constraints of regulation, competition, and respect for truth? By relentlessly smothering would-be competitors who might have offered something better.
As social networking spread to the great majority of Americans, Facebook bought more than 80 companies that presumed to enter its digital space. Sometimes it absorbed them; frequently it simply shut them down. Not once did the government intervene.
Two acquisitions stand out. By combining a camera app with a social network, Instagram threatened to outstrip Facebook’s popularity. Instead of competing with Instagram, in 2012 Facebook absorbed it. A few years later Time assessed the impact: “Buying Instagram conveyed to investors that the company was serious about dominating the mobile ecosystem while also neutralizing a nascent competitor.”
To protect its flagging Messenger, Facebook blocked other messaging services from appearing or advertising on its platform. But having failed to obliterate its principal rival, WhatsApp, Facebook just bought it in 2014—the climax of its hydra-headed efforts to eliminate competition for Messenger.
Snapchat presented a different competitive threat. As Chris Hughes—a Facebook cofounder who left the company in 2007 and has since grown disenchanted with it—wrote in the New York Times: “Snapchat’s Stories and impermanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it.”
Here imitation transcends flattery. As antitrust law expert Tim Wu observes in Wired:
To be sure, there is nothing wrong with firms learning from one another; that’s how innovation spreads. But there is a line where copying and exclusion become anticompetitive, where the goal becomes the maintenance of monopoly as opposed to real improvement. When Facebook spies on competitors or summons a firm to a meeting just to figure out how to copy it more accurately . . . a line is crossed.
Facebook’s program of suppression, acquisition, and imitation closes the marketplace to new ideas and entrants. As Hughes notes, “would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook.”
In short, Facebook came to monopolize our attention not by being better, but by being ruthless. This predation feeds itself: Users want the social network most likely to reach others; advertisers crave the largest audience. “Because Facebook so dominates social networking,” writes Hughes, “it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.”
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Inevitably, Facebook has become the catalyst in degrading a principal safeguard of democracy: American journalism.
In a Pew Research survey conducted in mid-2018 and weighted by demographics, 68 percent of the respondents reported using social media platforms for news, with 20 percent saying they “often” got their news that way. An earlier Pew study, from 2016, found that two-thirds of Facebook users say they get news on the site. But as New York Times technology reporter Farhad Manjoo told NPR, “there’s very little fact-checking that Facebook does,” which has “led to this proliferation of fake news.” Worse, Facebook is “acting as something like the ministry of information for . . . every country in which it operates.” On the latter point, a headline in Business Insider summarized the baneful findings of a three-year study by Oxford University: “Facebook is the most popular social network for governments spreading fake news and propaganda.”
A 2017 report by the Columbia Journalism Review identifies the impact of standard-free social media on mainstream journalism: Diminishing ad revenue. Shrinking readership. An absence of editorial judgment. The loss of transparency and accountability. The elevation of virality—regardless of accuracy—over journalistic quality.
The report elaborates:
Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates power, or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated against by a system that favors scale and shareability. . . . While news might reach more people than ever before, for the first time, the audience has no way of knowing how or why it reaches them, how data collected about them is used, or how their online behavior is being manipulated. And publishers are . . . at the mercy of the algorithm.
This is toxic to our civic and political health. Warns Chris Hughes:
Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them. In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.
While appropriating one editorial function—deciding what people will read—and discarding another—delivering quality and accuracy—Facebook turned millions of people into lab rats. TechCrunch describes how:
People seized upon Facebook’s single app that pulled together content from everywhere. Facebook began to train us to keep scrolling rather than struggle to bounce around [between news sites]. . . . Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb.
In one decade, Facebook hijacked our curiosity, shortened our attention spans, dulled our critical faculties, and sold our personal data to malign actors.
The paradigm case is Trump’s partnership with Facebook to undermine our 2016 presidential election.
The engine was Facebook’s commoditization of users’ personal data. Roughly 90 percent of Facebook revenues come from advertising, the value of which depends on giving advertisers access to data so granular that they can micro-target what Facebook calls “customized audiences.”
Using Facebook tools, a British political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica—started by the Breitbart-funding right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer—disseminated a “survey” to which roughly 300,000 Facebook users responded. Using the respondents’ data to penetrate the data of their “friends,” the company mined detailed private information on an estimated 87 million Facebook users.
Trump’s digital operation deployed this data in a disinformation campaign that, at its height, spent $1 million a day on ads micro-targeting strategically located Facebook users in electorally decisive states—either by inflaming potential Trump supporters or dissuading possible Clinton voters.
Overall, Trump placed 5.9 million ads on Facebook. In return for this largesse, Facebook assigned an employee to Trump’s digital team to maximize its effectiveness. Together, they succeeded brilliantly.
Moreover, the Brennan Center reports, “Facebook posts by agents of the Kremlin disguised to come across as Americans, promoted by paid advertising and shared by unsuspecting Americans, reached a total of 126 million Facebook users leading up to the 2016 election.” To accomplish that goal, Russian operatives “purchased ads that appeared to promote both sides of divisive social issues in the United States, including police brutality, race, and terrorism.”
After Trump’s efforts became public knowledge, Facebook asserted that Cambridge Analytica had violated its “terms of service” agreements with third parties. Given the tactics employed by Trump and his shadowy Russian supporters, one might think Facebook would instead draw a broader, and deeply sobering, lesson.
Instead, the lesson Facebook drew is this: Licensing Trump’s mass mendacity is a burgeoning source of revenue.
For 2020, Trump’s campaign manager brags, “we have turned the RNC into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history”—thanks, he might have added, to Facebook. With Facebook as its engine, the Trump campaign plans to spend $1 billion on what, McKay Coppins reports in the Atlantic, “could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history.”
Because Facebook has lowered its advertising rates during the pandemic, Trump will get more deceit for his buck—and Facebook more advertisements. In return, Facebook user data will enable Trump to target individual voters with insidious effectiveness.
Knowing all this, Facebook refuses to ban false deceptive political ads, or to limit Trump’s deployment of user data to reach the right groups with the right lies. Piously, Mark Zuckerberg proclaims that “in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments.”
Based on what? As Zuckerberg well knows, digital media spreads falsehoods with a reach and celerity that defy correction. That’s why Trump partners with Facebook. By January, Trump’s campaign already had spent $27 million on Facebook—including a blatantly false advertisement about Joe Biden’s relationship with Ukraine that Facebook refused to take down.
In contrast, Twitter and Google have barred political advertising. Turning down this advertising windfall was no doubt painful. But as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey explained, “Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale. . . . Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings.”
In a tweet that seems directly aimed at Facebook’s hypocrisy, Dorsey adds that it would not be “credible for us to say”—as Facebook has—“We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad . . . well . . . they can say whatever they want!”
It’s worth comparing the Facebook standard to that of another media giant, CNN. A false ad on the cable network is easy for journalists and rival candidates to spot—and, besides, CNN won’t host blatant falsehoods. Not so Facebook. The Brookings Institution reported in December that, “Just last month, CNN rejected two ads from President Trump’s re-election campaign because of inaccuracies. These ads were eventually published on Facebook and other digital platforms as part of a multimillion-dollar ad buy.” Previously, Brookings notes, Senator Mark Warner had vainly urged Zuckerberg to “adhere to the same norms of other traditional media companies.”
By willfully abetting Trump in polluting another presidential election, Facebook may help tilt its outcome. When Slate surveyed experts to name the 30 most dangerous tech companies, Facebook trailed only Amazon: “Its refusal to meaningfully alter the political advertising system that both President Donald Trump and Russian trolls used to their advantage in 2016 suggests that once again one of the main arenas of an ugly election will be Facebook.”
For this continuing civic and political wreckage, only two answers present themselves: empowering government to curb false digital advertising, or using antitrust law to reduce Facebook’s size and sway.
The Honest Ads Act, sponsored by Senators Warner and Klobuchar, would subject digital advertising to the standards for television and radio. By its terms, anyone who pays for political ads the must identify themselves; platforms like Facebook must keep records of who purchases such ads; and foreign nationals are barred from running them.
That would help. But it doesn’t solve the problems of mendacious virality, phony accounts, or automated bots—or the anti-competitive practices that make Facebook so powerful, with such a deleterious impact on journalism.
The most efficacious remedy is to break up Facebook.
The antitrust laws were written to ensure competitive markets, foster innovation, curb price-rigging, and prevent the power of mega-corporations from outstripping governance. Facebook suppresses competition, discourages innovation, and defies regulation—effectively claiming the power to make its own rules.
But beginning in the 1980s, antitrust laws were constricted to a narrow goal—keeping monopolies from gouging consumers. Facebook’s multiple malignancies demonstrate how myopic that is: The company doesn’t charge users; it monetizes their attention, peddling their information. It exemplifies why the law of antitrust exists.
Chris Hughes suggests a start: undo the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—creating three separate companies—and bar Facebook from further acquisitions for several years. This should be accompanied by rigorous federal scrutiny of potentially anticompetitive practices.
Granted, this does not directly address Facebook’s role as the platform of choice for degrading democracy. But re-energizing competition in social media may compel Facebook to offer consumers a more honest—and less manipulative—environment for fear of losing market share, while warning Facebook that its diminished role as purveyor of news and political advertising is no longer immune from scrupulous oversight.
From Zuckerberg and Facebook, enough.


thebulwark--2020-05-26--The Clash with China Is Coming

The Clash with China Is Coming

Public and elite opinion in the United States has turned heavily against the People ’ s Republic of China .
While some of this turn predates the present crisis ( spurred by Hong Kong crackdowns , Xinjiang concentration camps , and the like ) , it was ratified by the events surrounding COVID-19 , and in particular the revelations that the Chinese Communist Party leadership was less than transparent in its dealings with the rest of the world concerning the virus .
We have had other strategic challenges over the last 20 years , but what makes the China case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or Putin ’ s Russia , China is a major strategic peer competitor .
And it has received comparatively modest attention relative to its size , wealth , capabilities , and potential over the past two decades .
America seems ready to correct that mistake , partly thanks to a general outrage against the PRC .
But as Aristotle taught , it is only praiseworthy to get angry in the right way at the right time and for the right reasons .
By that measure , how are we doing so far ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is best addressed in terms of domestic policy .
While campaigning for office , Donald Trump signaled that he would pursue a shift in America ’ s posture toward China , ( though he did not explain clearly what this shift would look like ) .
After taking office , President Trump began a trade war with China as part of an attempt to negotiate a new trade regime .
The president ’ s focus on China has been almost purely commercial .
But other parts of his administration seem to be thinking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strongest ( and most negative ) statement was issued late last year by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a speech titled “ The China Challenge.
” The comparatively moderate title belied the tone and content of the speech , which located China not only as a geopolitical challenge but an ideological one as well .
Pompeo ’ s language was reminiscent of the Cold War .
The present crisis has provided new rhetorical ammunition for this position .
But most of this is bluster .
As yet there are no new policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And it is not even clear if the new rhetoric represents a serious re-thinking of the U.S.-Sino relationship , or is merely a convenient Republican electoral gambit .
But it ’ s worth noting that Joe Biden and the Democrats have been ratcheting up the rhetoric as well .
This is a rare instance where the party ’ s positions are not being driven by negative polarity , but rather by an urge to outbid one another along the same vector .
This spectacle may not be edifying , but it does create @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an anti-China posture and making real policy changes easier to achieve for whoever is president in 2021 .
As we move toward that date , the events of the past few months will recede , so it ’ s worth noting that the case against China goes beyond the present circumstances .
People seem to have forgotten the 2014 Office of Personnel Management hack—which remains the most significant cyberattack on the U.S. government ( of which we know ) .
It is still not widely known how many individuals have been permanently compromised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the role that China was allowed to play in our strategic supply chains , and the likelihood that they exploited this role in worrisome ways receives much less attention than it should .
But crafting an effective response means understanding the nature of your challenger .
For instance : 2019 was not the inflection point when China became a problem .
Already in 2009 , the Chinese Communist Party began a tightening of restrictions and control in their country—a trend which has escalated through Xi Jinping ’ s reign .
And beyond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done over the past few decades , from the use of protectionist economic strategies to widespread theft of intellectual properties to increasingly muscular defense of its regional territorial interests are simply par for the course for rising powers .
Meanwhile the discovery that all the manufactured goods we ’ ve bought from the Chinese and all the debt we ’ ve sold to them has not hastened the arrival of liberal democracy on their shores has triggered a petulance divorced from cold-eyed prudence .
The unpleasant truth is this : China has not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changed is our ability to recognize reality .
The United States was happy to see the Chinese as a trading partner when it was profitable to do so ( not just for the country as a whole , but for many , many individual financial and political elites ) .
And when it was profitable , we consoled ourselves with the belief that the same vague historical forces that had imploded the Soviet Union would somehow impel China to become a liberal state .
Which was the foreign policy equivalent of believing in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ourselves into believing that the course of action which was easiest and most profitable for us would also magically be the course that solved the most intractable problems of an authoritarian challenge .
That mistake was made at the level of government policy .
But today we see it being replicated at the level of individual businesses and institutions which , when confronted with a challenge from the Chinese , decide that it ’ s best to knuckle under .
Consider the NBA debacle with the Houston Rockets and Harvard ’ s cancelation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the CCP .
The salient feature in each case is less official Chinese disapproval or pressure than the acquiescence of major American institutions to Chinese preferences .
( Hollywood is already ahead of the game and now routinely tries to anticipate the preferences of the Chinese regime and shape its products accordingly . )
These incidents underscore how the government ’ s posture toward the PRC ultimately filtered down to shape the behavior of private companies and institutions ; even if public opinion coheres on changing America ’ s relationship with China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corporate and institutional interests .
Meaning that part of any real government response to China will entail bringing along not just public opinion but also harmonizing the interests of the private sector with those of the government .
Going forward , it will be useful to try and separate serious political discussion on China from the low-level trolling that is now second nature to much of our media , for example the useful idiots in the United States whose commitment to identity politics is so total that they think nothing of equating criticism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racism .
By the same token , it should be separated from desires to use China as a foil in thinking about policies at home .
The past month alone has seen articles from the mainstream press praising China ’ s approach to population surveillance and information control , even recommending elements of it as a model to the United States and other democracies in these troubled times .
The point is not that these are distasteful suggestions—though they are—but that they introduce China as an ideological symbol into an otherwise unrelated domestic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , the phenomenon is roughly the same : a desire to maintain or gain some advantage over domestic enemies , with the subject of “ China ” becoming just another front in our never-ending culture war .
This is not to say that we must resolve our domestic quarrels as a precondition to effectively grappling with China ; if anything , the reverse is more likely to be the case—that the necessity of dealing with a genuine strategic challenge might compel us to suspend the trivial cultural skirmishes that otherwise dominate our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , whether it ’ s ( depending who you ask ) 70 or 2,000 or 5,000 years old , China certainly isn ’ t going anywhere .

Public and elite opinion in the United States has turned heavily against the People’s Republic of China. While some of this turn predates the present crisis (spurred by Hong Kong crackdowns, Xinjiang concentration camps, and the like), it was ratified by the events surrounding COVID-19, and in particular the revelations that the Chinese Communist Party leadership was less than transparent in its dealings with the rest of the world concerning the virus.
We have had other strategic challenges over the last 20 years, but what makes the China case distinctive is that, unlike Islamic terrorists or Putin’s Russia, China is a major strategic peer competitor. And it has received comparatively modest attention relative to its size, wealth, capabilities, and potential over the past two decades.
America seems ready to correct that mistake, partly thanks to a general outrage against the PRC. But as Aristotle taught, it is only praiseworthy to get angry in the right way at the right time and for the right reasons.
By that measure, how are we doing so far?
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
For the time being, this question is best addressed in terms of domestic policy. While campaigning for office, Donald Trump signaled that he would pursue a shift in America’s posture toward China, (though he did not explain clearly what this shift would look like). After taking office, President Trump began a trade war with China as part of an attempt to negotiate a new trade regime. The president’s focus on China has been almost purely commercial.
But other parts of his administration seem to be thinking about a more global re-orientation. The strongest (and most negative) statement was issued late last year by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a speech titled “The China Challenge.” The comparatively moderate title belied the tone and content of the speech, which located China not only as a geopolitical challenge but an ideological one as well. Pompeo’s language was reminiscent of the Cold War.
The present crisis has provided new rhetorical ammunition for this position. But most of this is bluster. As yet there are no new policy proposals on how to confront China. And it is not even clear if the new rhetoric represents a serious re-thinking of the U.S.-Sino relationship, or is merely a convenient Republican electoral gambit.
But it’s worth noting that Joe Biden and the Democrats have been ratcheting up the rhetoric as well.
This is a rare instance where the parties’ positions are not being driven by negative polarity, but rather by an urge to outbid one another along the same vector.
This spectacle may not be edifying, but it does create the potential for unifying public opinion into an anti-China posture and making real policy changes easier to achieve for whoever is president in 2021.
As we move toward that date, the events of the past few months will recede, so it’s worth noting that the case against China goes beyond the present circumstances.
People seem to have forgotten the 2014 Office of Personnel Management hack—which remains the most significant cyberattack on the U.S. government (of which we know). It is still not widely known how many individuals have been permanently compromised on the subject of China. Similarly, the role that China was allowed to play in our strategic supply chains, and the likelihood that they exploited this role in worrisome ways receives much less attention than it should.
But crafting an effective response means understanding the nature of your challenger. For instance: 2019 was not the inflection point when China became a problem. Already in 2009, the Chinese Communist Party had begun a tightening of restrictions and control in their country—a trend that has escalated through Xi Jinping’s reign.
And beyond that, much of what China has done over the past few decades, from the use of protectionist economic strategies to widespread theft of intellectual properties to increasingly muscular defense of its regional territorial interests are simply par for the course for rising powers.
Meanwhile the discovery that all the manufactured goods we’ve bought from the Chinese and all the debt we’ve sold to them has not hastened the arrival of liberal democracy on their shores has triggered a petulance divorced from cold-eyed prudence.
The unpleasant truth is this: China has not changed. The only thing that has changed is our ability to recognize reality. The United States was happy to see China as a trading partner when it was profitable to do so (not just for the country as a whole, but for many, many individual financial and political elites). And when it was profitable, we consoled ourselves with the belief that the same vague historical forces that had imploded the Soviet Union would somehow impel China to become a liberal state.
Which was the foreign policy equivalent of believing in the economic free lunch. We deluded ourselves into believing that the course of action that was easiest and most profitable for us would also magically be the course that solved the most intractable problems of an authoritarian challenge.
That mistake was made at the level of government policy. But today we see it being replicated at the level of individual businesses and institutions which, when confronted with a challenge from the Chinese, decide that it’s best to knuckle under. Consider the NBA debacle with the Houston Rockets and Harvard’s cancellation of a talk by dissidents and critics of the CCP.
The salient feature in each case is less official Chinese disapproval or pressure than the acquiescence of major American institutions to Chinese preferences. (Hollywood is already ahead of the game and now routinely tries to anticipate the preferences of the Chinese regime and shape its products accordingly.)
These incidents underscore how the U.S. government’s posture toward the PRC ultimately filtered down to shape the behavior of private companies and institutions; even if public opinion coheres on changing America’s relationship with China, there may be resistance from various corporate and institutional interests.
Meaning that part of any real government response to China will entail bringing along not just public opinion but also harmonizing the interests of the private sector with those of the government.
Going forward, it will be useful to try and separate serious political discussion on China from the low-level trolling that is now second nature to much of our media, for example the useful idiots in the United States whose commitment to identity politics is so total that they think nothing of equating criticism of the Chinese Communist Party with anti-Chinese racism.
By the same token, it should be separated from desires to use China as a foil in thinking about policies at home. The past month alone has seen articles from the mainstream press praising China’s approach to population surveillance and information control, even recommending elements of it as a model to the United States and other democracies in these troubled times.
The point is not that these are distasteful suggestions—though they are—but that they introduce China as an ideological symbol into an otherwise unrelated domestic policy debate.
From either side, however, the phenomenon is roughly the same: a desire to maintain or gain some advantage over domestic enemies, with the subject of “China” becoming just another front in our never-ending culture war.
This is not to say that we must resolve our domestic quarrels as a precondition to effectively grappling with China; if anything, the reverse is more likely to be the case—that the necessity of dealing with a genuine strategic challenge might compel us to suspend the trivial cultural skirmishes that otherwise dominate our political life. Perhaps it is fortunate that, whether it’s (depending who you ask) 70 or 2,000 or 5,000 years old, China isn’t going anywhere.


thebulwark--2020-05-27--FAQ: Should Twitter Ban Donald Trump?

FAQ: Should Twitter Ban Donald Trump?

Donald Trump has been tweeting things !
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has slapped him with a fact check !
Many people are saying the president should be banned from the platform !
Herewith are some answers to your frequently asked questions about the possibility of Twitter banning Donald Trump .
Can Twitter ban Donald Trump as a user on its platform ?
Yes .
Twitter is a private company and private companies are legally allowed to make reasonable decisions about who they will and will not serve .
These decisions must not fall afoul of civil rights laws concerning discrimination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could not , say , kick all black people off of its platform .
That ’ s why Twitter—and most other platforms—have “ terms of service ” agreements that users assent to when they register .
The terms of service are basically rules of the road preemptively explaining cases in which the platform will kick you out .
Kind of like the “ No shirts , no shoes , no service ” signs at 7-Eleven .
As a private-sector company , Twitter has much more leeway than a public institution would in setting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and are decisive in who may or may not use it .
Just to pick an example at random : As a legal matter , a public institution such as a library would have a much harder time telling drag queens that they could not hold a story hour than Twitter would have telling Donald Trump that it was canceling his account .
But isn ’ t Twitter kind of like a public utility ?
No .
Twitter is one of a sizable number of social networks : LinkedIn , Nextdoor , Instagram @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Reddit ( sort of ) .
It ’ s not even close to being the biggest social network .
( That ’ s Facebook , obviously . )
To be akin to a public utility , an internet platform has to have no near-peers , meaning that anyone excluded from it could not easily find an equivalent service .
Google ’ s search function is close to being a public utility , for instance .
You could argue that if Google declined to return results for “ Donald Trump ” or put , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a do-not-crawl list , there would be no real alternative accommodation for Trump , since Google is used for close to 90 percent of all searches in the United States and there are only two real alternatives : Bing , which accounts for 6 percent and Yahoo which accounts for 3 percent .
Twitter is much more like a bakery .
If you want a cake and the Twitter bakery doesn ’ t want to make it for you because you want to put some sort of objectionable message on it , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Instagram bakery across the street and they ’ ll bake your cake .
Okay , so Twitter could kick Trump off .
Should they ?
Now we ’ re talking .
There is an argument to be made that the sitting president of the United States should always be allowed access to internet platforms because he is the most consequential public figure in the world and there is inherent value in all of his statements .
I do not buy this argument .
It ’ s hard to come up with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ban for any president not named “ Donald J. Trump.
” But it ’ s not all that hard to come up with one for him .
For example : If the president had tweeted out his speculative advice on injecting bleach into the human body to cure COVID-19 , a reasonable interpretation might have been that this was the public-health equivalent of shouting “ Fire !
” in a crowded theater .
Trump has recently taken to accusing a private citizen of murder .
A reasonable interpretation might be that this is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of defamation , there are legal remedies available to the aggrieved party .
So by the same token , a reasonable person could also conclude that while Trump ’ s tweets are creating private legal exposure for him , on balance banning him would cause more harm than good .
Wait—so now you say that Twitter shouldn ’ t ban Trump ?
The vast majority of the time , it is true that the remedy to bad speech is more speech , because in the marketplace of ideas , the good will tend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that isn ’ t always true .
There are moments when bad speech becomes especially dangerous and , because of temporal and logistical constraints , difficult to counter .
There are times when the immediate damage caused by bad speech is so great that we would rather not wait around for the good speech .
Imagine what would happen if , on November 4 , Joe Biden has won the election and President Trump tweets something like this : I think you will agree that this is not an entirely fanciful possibility .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ it—were to happen , President Trump would be triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis on a scale not seen since 1876 , one that endangers the peaceful transition of power .
There would be no legal reason for such a tweet—if the president were to suspect election irregularities , he would have a variety of legal remedies available to him .
Certainly the Republican National Committee would have conservative-lawyer tiger teams pushing every available legal button .
No , such a tweet would have one purpose and only one purpose : to destabilize the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the citizenry at a moment of flux .
Now maybe this imaginary scenario never comes to fruition .
Maybe Trump beats Joe Biden like a drum and wins re-election handily .
Or maybe Trump loses and is graceful and patriotic as he helps prepare the way for his successor .
But I wouldn ’ t , you know , want to bet the Republic on that .
And if I worked for Twitter , I would be gaming out this scenario right now and trying to figure out what to do should it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea of “ more speech beats bad speech ” is , Twitter is not a suicide pact .
Why is it Twitter ’ s job to decide whether or not the president should be banned ?
In a perfect world , it wouldn ’ t be .
Ideally , a president would have the decency and temperament , experience and prudence to keep from saying the kinds of things Trump routinely says on Twitter .
And if you wind back the clock to , say , 1970 , or 1990 , or 2015 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in place that would have stopped a Republican president from saying the things Donald Trump says .
His advisers would have told him to cut it out .
If they didn ’ t , then conservative intellectuals would have taken him to the woodshed .
If they didn ’ t , then congressional Republicans would have told him to lock it down .
And eventually , by hook or by crook , the president would have gotten the message .
Those guardrails are all gone .
Trump ’ s advisers are his family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump than any party has ever been to a president .
And Conservatism Inc. ?
So it falls to Twitter to police its own platform because the old norms of self-policing are gone .
Rick Santorum used to have a good riff about this idea , though in a slightly different context : Santorum was talking about how a democracy can only work if the people are virtuous , because the government can ’ t possibly legislate all aspects of good behavior .
You need people not to do some of the bad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s wrong .
Once the mores die , democracy becomes unworkable and people are no longer able to govern themselves , because our society is so complex and multileveled that you can not legislate every important idea .
Now that the world is what it is , Twitter has been placed in an unenviable position : The company can either be the arbiter of some basic shared liberal values .
Or it can be a tool used by a political figure who is authoritarian-curious .
Twitter might not have to make that choice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this score .
If Twitter is very lucky , they might not have to make it ever .
Hope for the best ; plan for the worst .

Donald Trump has been tweeting things! Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has slapped him with a fact check! Many people are saying the president should be banned from the platform!
Herewith are some answers to your frequently asked questions about the possibility of Twitter banning Donald Trump.
Can Twitter ban Donald Trump as a user on its platform?
Yes. Twitter is a private company and private companies are legally allowed to make reasonable decisions about who they will and will not serve. These decisions must not fall afoul of civil rights laws concerning discrimination of legally protected classes—for example, Twitter could not, say, kick all black people off of its platform.
That’s why Twitter—and most other platforms—have “terms of service” agreements that users assent to when they register. The terms of service are basically rules of the road preemptively explaining cases in which the platform will kick you out. Kind of like the “No shirts, no shoes, no service” signs at 7-Eleven.
As a private-sector company, Twitter has much more leeway than a public institution would in setting the terms of what behaviors it disfavors and are decisive in who may or may not use it. Just to pick an example at random: As a legal matter, a public institution such as a library would have a much harder time telling drag queens that they could not hold a story hour than Twitter would have telling Donald Trump that it was canceling his account.
But isn’t Twitter kind of like a public utility?
No. Twitter is one of a sizable number of social networks: LinkedIn, Nextdoor, Instagram, TikTok, Gab, Snapchat, Reddit (sort of). It’s not even close to being the biggest social network. (That’s Facebook, obviously.)
To be akin to a public utility, an internet platform has to have no near-peers, meaning that anyone excluded from it could not easily find an equivalent service.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Google’s search function is close to being a public utility, for instance. You could argue that if Google declined to return results for “Donald Trump” or put, say, the Trump campaign websites on a do-not-crawl list, there would be no real alternative accommodation for Trump, since Google is used for close to 90 percent of all searches in the United States and there are only two real alternatives: Bing, which accounts for 6 percent and Yahoo which accounts for 3 percent.
Twitter is much more like a bakery. If you want a cake and the Twitter bakery doesn’t want to make it for you because you want to put some sort of objectionable message on it, you can go to the Gab bakery or the Instagram bakery across the street and they’ll bake your cake.
Okay, so Twitter could kick Trump off. Should they?
Now we’re talking. There is an argument to be made that the sitting president of the United States should always be allowed access to internet platforms because he is the most consequential public figure in the world and there is inherent value in all of his statements.
I do not buy this argument.
It’s hard to come up with a use case that might justify a Twitter ban for any president not named “Donald J. Trump.” But it’s not all that hard to come up with one for him.
For example: If the president had tweeted out his speculative advice on injecting bleach into the human body to cure COVID-19, a reasonable interpretation might have been that this was the public-health equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Trump has recently taken to accusing a private citizen of murder. A reasonable interpretation might be that this is defamatory. Still, in the case of defamation, there are legal remedies available to the aggrieved party.
So by the same token, a reasonable person could also conclude that while Trump’s tweets are creating private legal exposure for him, on balance banning him would cause more harm than good.
Wait—so now you say that Twitter shouldn’t ban Trump?
The vast majority of the time, it is true that the remedy to bad speech is more speech, because in the marketplace of ideas, the good will tend to crowd out the bad.
But that isn’t always true.
There are moments when bad speech becomes especially dangerous and, because of temporal and logistical constraints, difficult to counter. There are times when the immediate damage caused by bad speech is so great that we would rather not wait around for the good speech.
Imagine what would happen if, on November 4, Joe Biden has won the election and President Trump tweets something like this:
Election was RIGGED. I beat Sleepy Joe and the Fake News media knows it. Looking at some very strong responses. Stay tuned!
I think you will agree that this is not an entirely fanciful possibility.
In the event that this—or something like it—were to happen, President Trump would be triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis on a scale not seen since 1876, one that endangers the peaceful transition of power. There would be no legal reason for such a tweet—if the president were to suspect election irregularities, he would have a variety of legal remedies available to him. Certainly the Republican National Committee would have conservative-lawyer tiger teams pushing every available legal button.
No, such a tweet would have one purpose and only one purpose: to destabilize the American government and incite a portion of the citizenry at a moment of flux.
Now maybe this imaginary scenario never comes to fruition.
Maybe Trump beats Joe Biden like a drum and wins re-election handily.
Or maybe Trump loses and is graceful and patriotic as he helps prepare the way for his successor.
But I wouldn’t, you know, want to bet the Republic on that.
And if I worked for Twitter, I would be gaming out this scenario right now and trying to figure out what to do should it materialize.
Because as nice as the idea of “more speech beats bad speech” is, Twitter is not a suicide pact.
Why is it Twitter’s job to decide whether or not the president should be banned?
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be.
Ideally, a president would have the decency and temperament, experience and prudence to keep from saying the kinds of things Trump routinely says on Twitter.
And if you wind back the clock to, say, 1970, or 1990, or 2015, there were all sorts of guardrails in place that would have stopped a Republican president from saying the things Donald Trump says.
His advisers would have told him to cut it out.
If they didn’t, then conservative intellectuals would have taken him to the woodshed.
If they didn’t, then congressional Republicans would have told him to lock it down.
And eventually, by hook or by crook, the president would have gotten the message.
Those guardrails are all gone. Trump’s advisers are his family. Congressional Republicans are more beholden to Trump than any party has ever been to a president. And Conservatism Inc.?
lol jk
So it falls to Twitter to police its own platform because the old norms of self-policing are gone.
Rick Santorum used to have a good riff about this idea, though in a slightly different context: Santorum was talking about how a democracy can only work if the people are virtuous, because the government can’t possibly legislate all aspects of good behavior. You need people not to do some of the bad stuff simply because they know it’s wrong.
Once the mores die, democracy becomes unworkable and people are no longer able to govern themselves, because our society is so complex and multileveled that you cannot legislate every important idea.
Now that the world is what it is, Twitter has been placed in an unenviable position:
The company can either be the arbiter of some basic shared liberal values. Or it can be a tool used by a political figure who is authoritarian-curious.
Twitter might not have to make that choice today. Reasonable people can disagree on this score.
If Twitter is very lucky, they might not have to make it ever.
Hope for the best; plan for the worst.


thebulwark--2020-05-27--SpaceX: Flying the American Way

SpaceX: Flying the American Way

Later today , weather permitting , a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Kennedy Space Center , sending a crew of two astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule .
This event has been widely hailed , because it is the first time in a decade that Americans have been able to travel into space aboard an American vehicle launched from U.S. soil .
Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011 , Americans have only been able to go reach orbit as passengers aboard Russian systems .
The Dragon ’ s ascent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ important .
But the flight will mark a far more significant milestone .
The space shuttle took a decade and tens of billions of dollars to develop , and , depending on the number of yearly missions , cost between $ 1 billion and $ 2 billion in today ’ s money per flight .
Its purported replacement , the Orion capsule , has been under development by NASA for the past 15 years at a cost so far of over $ 16 billion .
It has yet to fly .
But when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s still-under-development ( at a cost of over $ 15 billion so far ) expendable Space Launch System ( SLS ) , it will likely cost well over $ 2 billion per flight as well .
In contrast , the Falcon 9 was developed in four years at a cost of $ 300 million , and then incrementally improved over the following decade , to become a mostly reusable launcher costing $ 70 million per flight—one-fifth the cost of previous systems with comparable payload capability .
The Dragon was also introduced as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ million development program , and now—at a further cost to the taxpayers of about $ 3 billion—has been upgraded to human spaceflight standards as well .
The crew version seats seven—the same as a space shuttle—with a list price of $ 160 million per flight .
In short , what SpaceX has done in developing these systems is show that a well-led entrepreneurial team can achieve results that were previously thought to require the efforts of superpowers , and to do them in one-third the time at less than one-tenth the cost , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impossible altogether .
This is a revolution .
The Dragon is not just cheaper than Orion : It is much better .
The Dragon has a mass of 9.5 metric tons , compared to Orion ’ s 26.5 metric tons .
Orion could have been designed lighter—the Apollo capsule only had a mass of 8 metric tons—but NASA wanted to create a requirement for a more powerful launch vehicle than the Atlas V ( which could do about 18 metric tons to orbit—Falcons did not yet exist at that time ) .
Because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even using a powerful and very expensive SLS for launch , Orion can not be delivered to low lunar orbit with enough propellant to fly home .
So , NASA is proposing to build a space station in high lunar orbit , which it calls the Gateway , to provide Orion with a destination that it can reach .
This boondoggle will cost billions and add years to the schedule of the NASA Artemis program ’ s plans to return to the Moon .
But it gets worse , because making it necessary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mission capsule in high Gateway orbit rather than in an Apollo-like low orbit greatly increases the lander ’ s propulsion requirements , and thus its mass and launch cost as well .
Since the Dragon is so much lighter than Orion , however , it could make this immensely costly and time-consuming quagmire unnecessary .
Weighing only 20 percent more than the Apollo capsule , it is 50 percent more voluminous , making it more than adequate to use to send astronauts to the Moon .
Not only that , it wouldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an SLS to get it there .
SpaceX ’ s already-operational Falcon Heavy launcher ( $ 120 million per flight ) could send it to low lunar orbit with a fully fueled return stage , eliminating the necessity for both the Gateway station and the super lander .
The Trump administration says it is committed to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024 .
If it really wants to achieve that goal , it should grasp this opportunity with both hands .
The revolution does not stop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on its next technological generation , a fully reusable heavy lift launch vehicle dubbed “ Starship.
” From 1970 to 2010 , the cost of launch to orbit held steady at $ 10,000 per kilogram .
Since 2010 , with its mostly reusable Falcon line and much lower overhead way of doing business , SpaceX has cut that cost by a factor of five .
Starship promises to cut that cost fivefold once again .
Inspired by their example , other teams are gearing up to compete , forcing down costs still more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of opportunities for not only much more cost-effective lunar exploration plans , but human missions to Mars , and entrepreneurial ventures throughout the inner solar system .
At the dawn of the space age , John F. Kennedy said ; “ We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained , and new rights to be won , and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
” So we shall do .
Lux sit .

Later today, weather permitting, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Kennedy Space Center, sending a crew of two astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. This event has been widely hailed, because it is the first time in a decade that Americans have been able to travel into space aboard an American vehicle launched from U.S. soil. Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, Americans have only been able to go reach orbit as passengers aboard Russian systems. The Dragon’s ascent will end such dependency. That is important. But the flight will mark a far more significant milestone.
The space shuttle took a decade and tens of billions of dollars to develop, and, depending on the number of yearly missions, cost between $1 billion and $2 billion in today’s money per flight. Its purported replacement, the Orion capsule, has been under development by NASA for the past 15 years at a cost so far of over $16 billion. It has yet to fly. But when it does, atop the agency’s still-under-development (at a cost of over $15 billion so far) expendable Space Launch System (SLS), it will likely cost well over $2 billion per flight as well.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
In contrast, the Falcon 9 was developed in four years at a cost of $300 million, and then incrementally improved over the following decade, to become a mostly reusable launcher costing $70 million per flight—one-fifth the cost of previous systems with comparable payload capability. The Dragon was also introduced as a cargo carrier after a four-year $300 million development program, and now—at a further cost to the taxpayers of about $3 billion—has been upgraded to human spaceflight standards as well. The crew version seats seven—the same as a space shuttle—with a list price of $160 million per flight.
In short, what SpaceX has done in developing these systems is show that a well-led entrepreneurial team can achieve results that were previously thought to require the efforts of superpowers, and to do them in one-third the time at less than one-tenth the cost, and even do things they had deemed impossible altogether. This is a revolution.
The Dragon is not just cheaper than Orion: It is much better. The Dragon has a mass of 9.5 metric tons, compared to Orion’s 26.5 metric tons. Orion could have been designed lighter—the Apollo capsule only had a mass of 8 metric tons—but NASA wanted to create a requirement for a more powerful launch vehicle than the Atlas V (which could do about 18 metric tons to orbit—Falcons did not yet exist at that time). Because it is so heavy, however, even using a powerful and very expensive SLS for launch, Orion cannot be delivered to low lunar orbit with enough propellant to fly home. So, NASA is proposing to build a space station in high lunar orbit, which it calls the Gateway, to provide Orion with a destination that it can reach. This boondoggle will cost billions and add years to the schedule of the NASA Artemis program’s plans to return to the Moon. But it gets worse, because making it necessary for lunar landers to rendezvous with the mission capsule in high Gateway orbit rather than in an Apollo-like low orbit greatly increases the lander’s propulsion requirements, and thus its mass and launch cost as well.
Since the Dragon is so much lighter than Orion, however, it could make this immensely costly and time-consuming quagmire unnecessary. Weighing only 20 percent more than the Apollo capsule, it is 50 percent more voluminous, making it more than adequate to use to send astronauts to the Moon. Not only that, it wouldn’t need to wait or pay for an SLS to get it there. SpaceX’s already-operational Falcon Heavy launcher ($120 million per flight) could send it to low lunar orbit with a fully fueled return stage, eliminating the necessity for both the Gateway station and the super lander. The Trump administration says it is committed to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024. If it really wants to achieve that goal, it should grasp this opportunity with both hands.
The revolution does not stop there. SpaceX is now working hard on its next technological generation, a fully reusable heavy lift launch vehicle dubbed “Starship.” From 1970 to 2010, the cost of launch to orbit held steady at $10,000 per kilogram. Since 2010, with its mostly reusable Falcon line and much lower overhead way of doing business, SpaceX has cut that cost by a factor of five. Starship promises to cut that cost fivefold once again. Inspired by their example, other teams are gearing up to compete, forcing down costs still more. This will open up all sorts of opportunities for not only much more cost-effective lunar exploration plans, but human missions to Mars, and entrepreneurial ventures throughout the inner solar system.
At the dawn of the space age, John F. Kennedy said; “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” So we shall do. Lux sit.


Bird-Watching While Black

A lifelong bird-watcher ventured into a section of New York ’ s Central Park , the “ Ramble , ” at 7:30 a.m. on Monday hoping to catch a glimpse of waterfowl .
In previous days , he had spied scarlet tanagers , ovenbirds , and mourning warblers .
As he waited quietly , an unleashed spaniel scurried into the area , as happens frequently in the park during quarantine – though a posted sign notifies owners that all dogs must be leashed .
The bird watcher asked the owner to please leash her dog .
She was less than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Christian Cooper , the conversation went like this : ME : Ma ’ am , dogs in the Ramble have to be on the leash at all times .
The sign is right there .
HER : The dog runs are closed .
He needs his exercise .
ME : All you have to do is take him to the other side of the drive , outside the Ramble , and you can let him run off leash all you want .
ME : Look , if you ’ re going to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to do what I want , but you ’ re not going to like it .
ME ( to the dog ) : Come here , puppy !
HER : He won ’ t come to you .
ME : We ’ ll see about that… I pull out the dog treats I carry for just for such intransigence .
I didn ’ t even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog .
HER : DON ’ T YOU TOUCH MY DOG @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s when Mr. Cooper began to record the encounter .
The dog owner—whose name coincidentally , is Amy Cooper ( his reference to her as Karen was a meme about annoying women ) —demanded that he stop recording her , and when he refused , threatened to call the police .
“ Please call the police , ” Mr. Cooper responded .
Dialing her phone , she warned Cooper , saying “ I ’ m going to tell them there ’ s an African-American man threatening my life.
” Wait , it gets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ twice recounts that she is in the Ramble and that “ an African-American man ” is threatening her and her dog .
Apparently dissatisfied by the response this gets from the dispatcher , she ramps up the panic in her voice and cries “ I ’ m being threatened by a man in the Bramble [ sic ] .
Please send the cops immediately !
” The poor cocker spaniel , all this while , was struggling and twisting and being forced to rise to his hind legs as Ms. Cooper kept an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the release of the video , Amy Cooper has been fired by Franklin Templeton , where she had been an insurance-portfolio manager , lost her dog to the rescue group from which she adopted him , and become an overnight symbol of racism .
Frankly , I had heard about the consequences before I watched the video and my anti-vigilante antennae were quivering .
But the video is jaw-dropping .
It ’ s possible that Ms. Cooper was overwrought because she misinterpreted Mr. Cooper ’ s comment that “ you ’ re not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do next .
But he reached into his pocket and produced what ?
A gun ?
A knife ?
No .
Dog treats .
Maybe her imagination ran wild and she feared that he was planning to poison the pooch .
But even if that ’ s the case , she could have picked up her dog and gone home .
Instead , she played upon racial stereotypes of “ scary black men ” to make a false claim to police , and it ’ s safe to assume , to intimidate him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the park rules .
There was zero reason to call the police .
There was zero reason to tell the dispatcher that the man was African-American .
I have written in the past about false accusations of racism ( although I ’ ve never denied that racism is real ) .
But this and other recent cell phone videos are grim reminders that racism continues to have real , and sometimes deadly , consequences .
Eric Garner .
Ahmaud Arbery .
George Floyd , who died in Minneapolis this week after an officer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his neck .
They and others are evidence of what actor Will Smith said in 2016 : “ Racism isn ’ t getting worse .
It ’ s getting filmed.
” ( The four officers who were involved in Floyd ’ s case have been fired and the FBI is investigating . )
Amy Cooper told CNN that her “ entire life ” is being destroyed by this .
She has apologized and claimed not to be a racist .
Does anyone ever admit to racism ?
I think even David Duke claims @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for white people .
Still , Amy Cooper can salvage some grace from this awful fall from it .
She can start by confessing that , yes , she is a racist , and vowing to change .
She can volunteer for Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America or the Success Academy or some other organization that works to make life better for African-American kids .
She can study up on the history of slavery and Jim Crow .
And she can send a check to the ASPCA while she ’ s at it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is being “ destroyed , ” but if she handles this right , it could be vastly improved .
She could become a symbol of redemption instead of sin .

A lifelong bird-watcher ventured into a section of New York’s Central Park, the “Ramble,” at 7:30 a.m. on Monday hoping to catch a glimpse of waterfowl. In previous days, he had spied scarlet tanagers, ovenbirds, and mourning warblers. As he waited quietly, an unleashed spaniel scurried into the area, as happens frequently in the park during quarantine – though a posted sign notifies owners that all dogs must be leashed.
The bird watcher asked the owner to please leash her dog. She was less than cooperative. According to the bird-fancier, Christian Cooper, the conversation went like this:
ME: Ma’am, dogs in the Ramble have to be on the leash at all times. The sign is right there. HER: The dog runs are closed. He needs his exercise. ME: All you have to do is take him to the other side of the drive, outside the Ramble, and you can let him run off leash all you want. HER: It’s too dangerous. ME: Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it. HER: What’s that? ME (to the dog): Come here, puppy! HER: He won’t come to you. ME: We’ll see about that… I pull out the dog treats I carry for just for such intransigence. I didn’t even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog. HER: DON’T YOU TOUCH MY DOG!!!!!
That’s when Mr. Cooper began to record the encounter. The dog owner—whose name coincidentally, is Amy Cooper (his reference to her as Karen was a meme about annoying women)—demanded that he stop recording her, and when he refused, threatened to call the police. “Please call the police,” Mr. Cooper responded. Dialing her phone, she warned Cooper, saying “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”
Wait, it gets worse. She reaches the police and twice recounts that she is in the Ramble and that “an African-American man” is threatening her and her dog. Apparently dissatisfied by the response this gets from the dispatcher, she ramps up the panic in her voice and cries “I’m being threatened by a man in the Bramble [sic]. Please send the cops immediately!”
The poor cocker spaniel, all this while, was struggling and twisting and being forced to rise to his hind legs as Ms. Cooper kept an iron grip on his collar.
Since the release of the video, Amy Cooper has been fired by Franklin Templeton, where she had been an insurance-portfolio manager, lost her dog to the rescue group from which she adopted him, and become an overnight symbol of racism.
Frankly, I had heard about the consequences before I watched the video and my anti-vigilante antennae were quivering. But the video is jaw-dropping.
It’s possible that Ms. Cooper was overwrought because she misinterpreted Mr. Cooper’s comment that “you’re not going to like” what he would do next. But he reached into his pocket and produced what? A gun? A knife? No. Dog treats. Maybe her imagination ran wild and she feared that he was planning to poison the pooch. But even if that’s the case, she could have picked up her dog and gone home. Instead, she played upon racial stereotypes of “scary black men” to make a false claim to police, and it’s safe to assume, to intimidate him. He merely asked her to respect the park rules. There was zero reason to call the police. There was zero reason to tell the dispatcher that the man was African-American.
I have written in the past about false accusations of racism (although I’ve never denied that racism is real). But this and other recent cell phone videos are grim reminders that racism continues to have real, and sometimes deadly, consequences. Eric Garner. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis this week after an officer held him down with a knee on his neck. They and others are evidence of what actor Will Smith said in 2016: “Racism isn’t getting worse. It’s getting filmed.” (The four officers who were involved in Floyd’s case have been fired and the FBI is investigating.)
Amy Cooper told CNN that her “entire life” is being destroyed by this. She has apologized and claimed not to be a racist. Does anyone ever admit to racism? I think even David Duke claims that he’s merely standing up for white people.
Still, Amy Cooper can salvage some grace from this awful fall from it. She can start by confessing that, yes, she is a racist, and vowing to change. She can volunteer for Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America or the Success Academy or some other organization that works to make life better for African-American kids. She can study up on the history of slavery and Jim Crow. And she can send a check to the ASPCA while she’s at it. She understandably feels that her life is being “destroyed,” but if she handles this right, it could be vastly improved. She could become a symbol of redemption instead of sin.