newrepublic--2020-11-23--The Dangerous Inversions of the Debate Around Trans “Censorship”

That ’ s what Shrier says to promote her ideas , ideas that just happen to fit the policy agenda of the trans rights counter-movement and its considerable allies in government .
The book has become almost secondary to the campaign around the book , one waged by Shrier on the grounds that her ideas are being silenced .
It is a very loud silence .
If Shrier ’ s intent with the book was to further inflame a debate about trans youth , she has succeeded .
It has already contributed to an anti-trans backlash : Over the last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Daily Caller , The Federalist , and The Blaze have all ( predictably ) run pieces in defense of Shrier against those who called her book transphobic , after Target briefly stopped selling it on its website .
But Shrier has ( also predictably ) garnered some influential defenders , too , like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald , who have positioned their outrage at the alleged censorship as a defense of free speech .
Ultimately , these claims of fighting censorship and protecting children serve the same purpose : the further @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that has already embedded such repression—dangerously and often fatally—into routine policy and daily life .
This is a debate over “ free speech ” nearly completely loosed from the realities of the majority of trans people ’ s lives .
That is not remarkable .
But as it attempts to pass as a debate over free speech , it has revealed something else , driving it on : the benefits accrued to those who claim to be on its controversial or even censored side .
This is not something Shrier started .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is routine in our politics , whether that ’ s around gender , sex , or “ socialism.
” Having the power of the state behind him has not prevented the president from adopting the same pose of the maligned and censored martyr .
Inside a debate carried on in such flawed and dubious terms , there is no engagement with how people speak and live their daily lives .
There are also real costs from turning away entirely from this kind of debate .
As constrained as it can feel , ignoring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it .
A few days after the Target dustup , the former Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald wrote a post on his new Substack publication .
“ The Ongoing Death of Free Speech : Prominent ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book ” framed the story of Shrier ’ s alleged censorship around a critique of the American Civil Liberties Union , making an example of Chase Strangio , deputy director for Transgender Justice for the ACLU ’ s LGBT Project .
Greenwald wrote approvingly about the attorney , who has been part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trans people ’ s rights ( like Bostock ) , but he presented this as something of a cruel irony , since Strangio had tweeted ( and deleted ) his opinion that Shrier ’ s book should not be in circulation .
“ [ W ] hy would someone with such censorious attitudes , with a goal of suppressing ideas with which they disagree , choose to go to work for the ACLU of all places ?
” Greenwald asked .
Strangio told Greenwald that he had “ never advocated with an entity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the book , he also said , “ and the arguments contained within it are fueling a wave of bills in state legislatures to criminalize health care , including through … forced outing of trans youth by school officials ( an actual serious First Amendment concern ) .
”

This is a debate over “free speech” nearly completely loosed from the realities of the majority of trans people’s lives. That is not remarkable. But as it attempts to pass as a debate over free speech, it has revealed something else, driving it on: the benefits accrued to those who claim to be on its controversial or even censored side. This is not something Shrier started. To claim victimhood while espousing the status quo is routine in our politics, whether that’s around gender, sex, or “socialism.” Having the power of the state behind him has not prevented the president from adopting the same pose of the maligned and censored martyr. Inside a debate carried on in such flawed and dubious terms, there is no engagement with how people speak and live their daily lives. There are also real costs from turning away entirely from this kind of debate. As constrained as it can feel, ignoring it can further shrink possibilities outside of it.
A few days after the Target dustup, the former Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald wrote a post on his new Substack publication. “The Ongoing Death of Free Speech: Prominent ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book” framed the story of Shrier’s alleged censorship around a critique of the American Civil Liberties Union, making an example of Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice for the ACLU’s LGBT Project. Greenwald wrote approvingly about the attorney, who has been part of successful ACLU legal challenges to protect trans people’s rights (like Bostock), but he presented this as something of a cruel irony, since Strangio had tweeted (and deleted) his opinion that Shrier’s book should not be in circulation. “[W]hy would someone with such censorious attitudes, with a goal of suppressing ideas with which they disagree, choose to go to work for the ACLU of all places?” Greenwald asked. Strangio told Greenwald that he had “never advocated with an entity to ban a book.” He read the book, he also said, “and the arguments contained within it are fueling a wave of bills in state legislatures to criminalize health care, including through … forced outing of trans youth by school officials (an actual serious First Amendment concern).”
It should be noted that books about trans people are among the most censored books in the U.S. Of the books the American Library Association identified as the top 10 most challenged in 2019, the majority either explored trans issues, featured trans characters, or were written by trans people—titles like Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out and the picture book about a trans girl, I Am Jazz. Trans writers and trans organizers alike have been censored in the ways Shrier believes she is being censored, though those stories rarely attract the level of attention from the same writers now defending her.


newrepublic--2020-11-23--Fox News Prepares to Wage a Culture War on Joe Biden

On November 6 , as Joe Biden widened his lead in Pennsylvania and inched toward the presidency , Fox News host Laura Ingraham urged the president to accept the results with “ grace and composure.
” To outside observers , this white flag might have come as a surprise : Fox has been derided as “ state TV , ” and given the composition of its viewership , the network would seem to have little to gain from cutting Trump loose .
But one look at MSNBC ’ s ratings over the past four years tells a different story .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ on both ends of the political spectrum tune in to hear not just their own side championed but the other maligned .
Thus Fox has every reason to think the next four years will be as lucrative as the last four , and its pundits are already preparing to take up the mantle of the opposition once more—and with it the tactical advantage in America ’ s war of ideas .
A few hours before Ingraham tried to talk the president down , the network had debuted its game plan for the Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show that night by declaring that the liberal conformity of Biden ’ s administration would be like “ drink [ ing ] Starbucks every day from now until forever.
” After four years of stoking the anger of the president ’ s base , he was signaling a shift in the network ’ s focus : Fox would no longer serve as Trump ’ s mouthpiece , but instead would work to poison the well of public opinion in the same way it did under Barack Obama .

Twelve years ago, the dawn of the Obama era vaulted Fox to a new level of dominance at the top of the cable hierarchy. After years of steady ratings, the network reoriented around the triumvirate of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, all of whom thrived as critics of the new administration. Following the example set by Rush Limbaugh, these three men assailed Obama for gaffes that today would barely register on Twitter, such as when he ordered Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger and called Austrian a language. By October 2009, the hosts had succeeded in getting under his skin. Obama skipped the network during press conferences, and his communications director, Anita Dunn, referred to it as “an opponent.” That proved to be a fatal mistake. As Obama rolled out his health care plan, the Fox triad transformed from gadflies into hyenas, denouncing the plan as “the end of America as you know it.” The list of comparisons Beck alone marshaled against the new administration included Nazi Germany, Marxist Russia, and Orwell’s 1984. These attacks helped weigh down the proposal as it moved toward becoming law. The proposal’s net favorability dropped 27 points during Obama’s first year in office.
Of all the stars on the current Fox lineup, Carlson is by far the best positioned to do to Biden what Beck did to Obama. Hosts like Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs worship Trump, often beseeching him in plaintive direct-to-camera appeals. Steve Doocy and Fox & Friends, meanwhile, juiced their ratings by patching Trump in for fawning phone interviews. Carlson, on the other hand, has established himself as a man with no gods and no masters, unleashing his vituperative zeal not just against the Democrats but also the GOP and sometimes Trump himself, honing his rhetorical weapons for an era of opposition. Now his signature cold-open monologues, delivered with a hostage-negotiator cadence and a staring-contest gaze, will become the tip of the spear of Fox’s assault on Biden.


newrepublic--2020-11-23--The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel

It ’ s lucky that votes usually don ’ t get counted till late at night .
Victorious presidential candidates have two audiences to speak to .
Their zealous volunteers generally get little reward other than the sense , inculcated over months of battle , that they are fighting to vanquish the forces of evil .
On election night , they expect someone to extol their bravery and ruthlessness , and to hold aloft the head of the vanquished foe .
It ’ s preferable if this can be done while the rest of the country is either sleeping or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When , days later , the president-elect pivots to flatter the whole country and extend an olive branch to his rivals , his loyal followers can feel jilted .
Because of late arriving mail-in votes , huge turnout , and the sheer closeness of November ’ s election in swing states , Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to rile up supporters and reassure neutrals at the same prime-time event .
It was four days after the election , at one of those outdoor parking-lot rallies that became a staple of Biden ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ Our very democracy was on the ballot in this election , with the very soul of America at stake , ” she said .
“ You chose hope and unity , decency , science , and yes , truth.
” Biden was conciliatory , quoting the Bible and promising to “ work as hard for those who didn ’ t vote for me as those who did.
” Perhaps that will be a viable division of labor for the indefinite future .
But Biden and Harris have a problem .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wildly attractive , drawing 79 million votes , more Americans than ever voted for anything .
As Michelle Obama put it , they voted against “ lies , hate , chaos , and division.
” If by this she means Trump , then lies , hate , chaos , and division turn out to have quite a constituency themselves , commanding 73 million votes , more than her husband won in either of his races .
Trump ’ s House delegation has been bolstered by the elections—and radicalized , to judge by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado gun enthusiast Lauren Boebert .
His Senate majority has held , barring a Democratic sweep of January ’ s pair of run-off Senate contests in Georgia .
As long as the Trump coalition remains the central force in American politics , reconciling the country to a Biden presidency will be difficult .
But reorienting the Democratic Party may be harder .
With Trump himself gone , Biden ’ s historic purpose is achieved .
His work is done .
If he doesn ’ t secure a base within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Democrats alike .

Biden belonged to this group as well, with some pluses and minuses: He was minus any “glass ceiling” narrative. And he was plus three or four decades in age. His rhetoric was pitched to the hard-hats who had dominated his party when he arrived in Washington during the Nixon administration but who were now either dead or Republican. Biden’s attempt to pour WPA wine into BLM wineskins would culminate late in the campaign with his claim to have seen two men hugging and kissing in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, during the Eisenhower administration, after which his Mass-going, high-school-educated father explained to his teenage son, “It’s simple. They love each other”—one of the least likely tales ever told from an American political podium. Primary voters consigned him to fourth place in Iowa, fifth place in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada. Sanders topped all three.
South Carolina saved Biden. Democrats’ constituencies tend to be metropolitan and complex. South Carolina is not. It has neither Pride parades long enough, nor software IPOs numerous enough, to ever put the state in the Democratic column in a presidential election. The party there is almost 60 percent Black and subject to influence by its senior figures. When Biden got the endorsement of 79-year-old House Majority Whip James Clyburn, reportedly after promising to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, the state fell into line.
This presented Democrats with perhaps their only chance to solve a serious structural problem. In 2016, half a dozen Republican egomaniacs vying for the nomination had stayed in the race too long. By allowing the establishment vote to splinter into fifths and sixths, they delivered the party up to an interloper. In a similar way, donors and consultants warned, Democrats were on the verge of nominating an unelectable socialist. In the three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, party leaders prevailed on establishment candidates Buttigieg and Klobuchar to fold, and suddenly it was the socialists who had the problem of an overcrowded field. Biden won 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday. In only five of them did his newly consolidated establishment candidacy outpoll the combined progressive vote of Sanders and Warren. It appeared the primary campaign might be over. A week later, there was no longer any “might” about it. By then, the U.S. had 1,000 coronavirus cases, and the dispute about the ideological direction of the party was buried. Until now.


newrepublic--2020-11-23--Bush Doesn’t Look Better in Hindsight. He Looks Worse.

DiIulio wasn ’ t the only academic in the Bush White House who was appalled by the lack of interest by the president—and by extension , the rest of the White House staff—in the basics of policymaking .
Suskind described another example of this grim dynamic in a revealing anecdote , the truth of which I can confirm because I heard it from a source at the Council of Economic Advisers the day it occurred .
It happened early in the administration , when the White House was promoting a tax rebate to stimulate the economy .
As Suskind tells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of President Bush ’ s most senior economic advisers walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president .
The day before , the adviser had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy .
Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates , he had called the president ’ s chief of staff , Andy Card , to ask for the audience , and the meeting had been set .
As the man took his seat in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s desk , he began to explain his problem with the president ’ s decision .
The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy , this adviser was one of the experts , really top-drawer , and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts .
He was convinced , he told Bush , that the president ’ s position would soon enough be seen as “ bad policy.
” This , it seems , was the wrong thing to say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened , President Bush looked at the man .
“ I don ’ t ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again , ” he said .
“ Bad policy , ” President Bush said .
“ If I decide to do it , by definition it ’ s good policy .
I thought you got that.
” The adviser was dismissed .
The meeting was over .
The adviser was Glenn Hubbard , chairman of the CEA , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Columbia University .
He and I worked together at the Treasury Department during Bush ’ s father ’ s administration , so I am very familiar with Glenn ’ s scholarly research .
What he told Bush wasn ’ t remotely controversial as a matter of mainstream or even conservative economic opinion .
But Bush knew better—on what basis , who knows ?
—and didn ’ t appreciate being contradicted by a mere staff person , even if that staffer was a top expert in his field .
As many books have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expert opinion was at the core of the Iraq imbroglio .
This fact was brought home to me a year or so after Bush left office when I ran into a woman I knew from graduate school .
She had spent decades working in the government on arms control and was a strong Republican .
She confided to me that her office had sent many reports to the Oval Office explaining that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq , all of which were ignored .
She was incredulous , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affected her party loyalty .
My frustrations at Bush ’ s apostacy—from a conservative point of view—led me to write a book on the subject , Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy , published in 2006 .
A key theme of the book was that Bush didn ’ t seem to understand what he was doing or why—and this was well before his incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina undoubtedly raised its death toll .

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, nonstop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.
DiIulio went on to say, “This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”
DiIulio wasn’t the only academic in the Bush White House who was appalled by the lack of interest by the president—and by extension, the rest of the White House staff—in the basics of policymaking. Suskind described another example of this grim dynamic in a revealing anecdote, the truth of which I can confirm because I heard it from a source at the Council of Economic Advisers the day it occurred. It happened early in the administration, when the White House was promoting a tax rebate to stimulate the economy. As Suskind tells it:
One morning in 2001, one of President Bush’s most senior economic advisers walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the adviser had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates, he had called the president’s chief of staff, Andy Card, to ask for the audience, and the meeting had been set. As the man took his seat in the wing chair next to the president’s desk, he began to explain his problem with the president’s decision. The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy, this adviser was one of the experts, really top-drawer, and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts. He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president’s position would soon enough be seen as “bad policy.” This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president. According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. “I don’t ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again,” he said. “What words, Mr. President?” “Bad policy,” President Bush said. “If I decide to do it, by definition it’s good policy. I thought you got that.” The adviser was dismissed. The meeting was over.
The adviser was Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the CEA, on leave as a professor of economics at Columbia University. He and I worked together at the Treasury Department during Bush’s father’s administration, so I am very familiar with Glenn’s scholarly research. What he told Bush wasn’t remotely controversial as a matter of mainstream or even conservative economic opinion. But Bush knew better—on what basis, who knows?—and didn’t appreciate being contradicted by a mere staff person, even if that staffer was a top expert in his field.


newrepublic--2020-11-24--Here Come the Adults

Here Come the Adults

No one who studied Biden closely over the years should be surprised by the ideological tenor of his initial appointments .
Biden is a centrist Democrat with a finely developed political antenna that permits him to move to the left when public opinion shifts .
It is why Biden was faster than Obama and many other Democrats to support gay marriage .
The Kerry appointment appears to indicate that Biden is serious about his commitment to battling climate change , since it is unlikely that the former senator would have been lured back to the government to serve in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is , any moment in American history that does not involve Trump—presidential transitions have been fraught with controversy .
George H.W .
Bush , the consummate Washington insider , failed to get John Tower , his choice for defense secretary , through the Senate .
Bill Clinton , devoid of Washington experience , had two picks for attorney general implode before he turned to Janet Reno .
And George W. Bush ’ s ill-fated 2004 nomination of Bernie Kerik ( a Rudy Giuliani crony and former New York police commissioner ) for secretary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud and lying to government officials .
Earlier this year , the president—showing Trumpian mercy—pardoned Kerik .
Given this bipartisan history of confirmation problems , Biden may not be able to staff the Cabinet and the rest of the administration without some unexpected scandal or setback .
And there is no way of telling how McConnell would react if Biden makes a pick heavy with irony and comeuppance , such as Merrick Garland for attorney general .
But so far , Biden has played @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It is not every president who can lure both a former Fed chair and former secretary of state back to government .
Biden , in the favored cliché about presidential transitions , has hit the ground running .
The stakes are too high—for American democracy , indeed the world—for him to stumble .

While Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continue to threaten military action against Iran, Biden and his appointees are committed to negotiations to restore a version of the agreement. Asked about Iran at the Aspen Security Forum in August, Blinken replied, “If Joe Biden’s elected president ... he would seek to build on the nuclear deal to make it longer and stronger if Iran returns to strict compliance.”
No one who studied Biden closely over the years should be surprised by the ideological tenor of his initial appointments. Biden is a centrist Democrat with a finely developed political antenna that permits him to move to the left when public opinion shifts. It is why Biden was faster than Obama and many other Democrats to support gay marriage. The Kerry appointment appears to indicate that Biden is serious about his commitment to battling climate change, since it is unlikely that the former senator would have been lured back to the government to serve in a fig-leaf role.
Even in normal times—that is, any moment in American history that does not involve Trump—presidential transitions have been fraught with controversy. George H.W. Bush, the consummate Washington insider, failed to get John Tower, his choice for defense secretary, through the Senate. Bill Clinton, devoid of Washington experience, had two picks for attorney general implode before he turned to Janet Reno. And George W. Bush’s ill-fated 2004 nomination of Bernie Kerik (a Rudy Giuliani crony and former New York police commissioner) for secretary of Homeland Security eventually led to Kerik being sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud and lying to government officials. Earlier this year, the president—showing Trumpian mercy—pardoned Kerik.


newrepublic--2020-11-23--The Obama Reunion Isn’t Nearly Enough to Stave Off Catastrophe

Joe Biden ’ s picks for top national security appointments , reported by multiple outlets Sunday and Monday , are about what you ’ d expect : Longtime allies to the president-elect are getting another crack at the White House , many taking a pay cut after having spent years in the private sector .
Former Undersecretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to become secretary of state ; former Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan will be national security adviser ; and Avril Haines is slated to serve as director of national intelligence .
Most novel is the announcement that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take on a new post , serving as a high-profile climate envoy housed within the National Security Council .
Progressives—while pleased to see the creation of Kerry ’ s new post—couldn ’ t help but observe a theme among these appointments : lucrative sabbaticals in the private sector .
Blinken , Haines and other less well known Biden National Security insiders in line for big posts , The American Prospect and others have noted , spent the Trump years cashing in on their Obama-era connections through consulting gigs .
Less discussed , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in office .
When it comes to climate policy , that part of their record deserves just as much scrutiny as their employment during the off-years .
The Obama administration by and large did not see a contradiction between continued fossil fuel development and curbing emissions , adopting an “ all of the above ” approach to climate and energy that included supporting both renewables and incumbent fuels—especially shale gas .
Just days after the Paris Agreement was brokered in 2015 , for instance , Obama signed a bill repealing the crude oil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of fossil fuels being produced here to flow freely out of U.S. ports .

With this returning cast, it’s entirely possible that a Biden administration could continue with the Obama era’s Janus-faced climate policy agenda: investing in clean energy domestically while doing little to curtail domestic fossil fuel production. That could be a disaster for global warming. Even if solar, wind, and electric car incentives do manage to seriously cut into domestic fossil fuel demand, that wouldn’t necessarily stop oil and gas companies from sending their products abroad—potentially with diplomatic support from a State Department eager to use fossil fuels as geopolitical leverage. Exports could continue apace even as the administration formally strives for net-zero by 2050 and rejoins the Paris Agreement.
That scenario is hardly set in stone, though. To a certain extent, each of these men was only following reigning consensus, although climate campaigners long questioned the viability of treating gas as a bridge fuel. Green-tinted gas boosterism was par for the course during the Obama administration, and times have changed. Whatever plausible deniability may have existed for seeing expanding fossil fuel development as the best path toward a low-carbon future has melted away; alarming new reports about methane leakage and flaring in the last few years have shown that it may not offer the greenhouse gas savings over coal that energy wonks once hoped. Continuing to build new gas infrastructure, moreover—whether in the form of new gas-fired power plants or export facilities—threatens to lock in polluting infrastructure that should be wound down as soon as possible. Climate science has only gotten more dire since Obama left office, and studies like the U.N. Production Gap Report show the need to start winding down drilling on a rapid timeline.
Biden’s foreign policy insiders may well have adapted with the times. But as the pandemic-stricken and rapidly warming world careens towards January 20, it’s worth finding out for sure. The Obama administration conceived of climate policy as an issue that floated above supposedly meatier concerns like jobs and the economy. Airy talk of a clean energy future at home and the Paris Agreement abroad went hand in hand with trade agreements and investment treaties that enshrined polluters’ rights to keep fueling the climate crisis. If the Biden administration wants to make any progress, it’ll have to break down that carbon-intensive division of labor.


newrepublic--2020-11-23--The Trump Doctrine Is Whatever Mike Pompeo Wants It to Be

Donald Trump has been largely absent from his public duties , and his White House is stymying any attempts at a formal transition process as Trump ’ s legal team and various local allies try to steal the election , but his administration has still been quite busy .
Trumpworld has devoted quite a bit of attention , in particular , to the Defense Department—where several top officials have been pushed out—and foreign policy in general .
The administration is both rushing ( at least by Washington standards ) a large U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The administration has also banned U.S. investment in 89 Chinese companies and engaged in a frenzy of diplomatic activity in the Middle East .
CNN ’ s experts and analysts did their best to fit the administration ’ s chaotic and contradictory moves into their usual framework for understanding why administrations do things .
Trump is fulfilling campaign promises by bringing troops home , perhaps , or doing so to prepare for another run in 2024 .
He is heightening tensions with Iran to make it more difficult for Biden to rejoin the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump is thus attempting to “ box in ” Biden , forcing the incoming president to continue to pursue some of Trump ’ s own geopolitical goals .
A source within the administration reportedly told CNN “ their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.
” All this assumes that Donald Trump , the guy we all know from TV , has “ geopolitical goals , ” in the sense that foreign policy think tank experts conceive of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is rushing the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq because , as the New York Times reported , he has wanted to do so since he met Billy Graham ’ s grandson , and now he is doing what he wants .
His reported desire for provoking war with Iran does not really contradict the impulse that led to the withdrawals .
It is not difficult to simultaneously like the idea of bringing our boys home and knocking the hell out of Iran , especially if you have some difficulty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a war with Iran .

Donald Trump has been largely absent from his public duties, and his White House is stymying any attempts at a formal transition process as Trump’s legal team and various local allies try to steal the election, but his administration has still been quite busy. Trumpworld has devoted quite a bit of attention, in particular, to the Defense Department—where several top officials have been pushed out—and foreign policy in general. The administration is both rushing (at least by Washington standards) a large U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously mulling a new war with Iran. The administration has also banned U.S. investment in 89 Chinese companies and engaged in a frenzy of diplomatic activity in the Middle East.
CNN’s experts and analysts did their best to fit the administration’s chaotic and contradictory moves into their usual framework for understanding why administrations do things. Trump is fulfilling campaign promises by bringing troops home, perhaps, or doing so to prepare for another run in 2024. He is heightening tensions with Iran to make it more difficult for Biden to rejoin the nuclear pact Trump left in 2018. Trump is thus attempting to “box in” Biden, forcing the incoming president to continue to pursue some of Trump’s own geopolitical goals. A source within the administration reportedly told CNN “their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.”


newrepublic--2020-11-23--The Desperate Year of the Digital Media Titans

Six years ago , The New York Times surveyed the media landscape and found that the paper of record was lagging behind .
Digital upstarts like BuzzFeed , HuffPost , and Vox Media were not only setting the pace , they were dictating the terms of the future .
“ They are ahead of us in building impressive support systems for digital journalists , and that gap will grow unless we quickly improve our capabilities , ” a committee studying the paper ’ s digital output wrote .
“ Meanwhile , our journalism advantage is shrinking as more of these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that report feels like a high-water mark for all those digital media upstarts .
While it was undoubtedly a wake-up call for The New York Times , the widely-trafficked report also seems like it arrived to spark a resurgence of legacy outlets more broadly .
Whether history will credit it for precipitating a change , that change is nevertheless apparent .
Aided by a new focus on digital journalism and products and the 2016 election ( and , in The Washington Post ’ s case , a new owner , world ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traditional heavyweights have dominated the media industry in the Trump era .
Digital outlets , meanwhile , have not only lost their head start , they face exceptional headwinds .
Revenues have fallen steeply , thanks in large part to Google and Facebook ’ s advertising duopoly .
The Post and the Times are once again treating them as feeders , hoovering up top talent at will .
Waves of consolidation , job cuts , and closures have defined the last half-decade in digital media , with no clear sign that the bottom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one of the online behemoths over which the Times once fretted , BuzzFeed , purchased another of the same , HuffPost , in an all stock deal ; HuffPost ’ s parent company , Verizon , also announced it would be taking a minority ownership stake in BuzzFeed and making a cash investment .
It ’ s interesting to remember how HuffPost ’ s first big move—it ’ s merger with AOL , was an event that sent shockwaves through the industry .
That acquisition was announced not long after the conclusion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the media industry instantly changed the conversation from the Green Bay Packers win .
In 2020 , there ’ s none of that hoopla : It ’ s just the latest dust-up in a bleak digital media landscape dominated by concentration and contraction .

BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost is arguably a bigger deal than all of those, bringing two of the most important web publishers under one umbrella. For the moment, BuzzFeed and HuffPost are expected to continue operating separate, competing newsrooms, though both will be overseen by current BuzzFeed News Editor Mark Schoofs. Peretti has pledged that BuzzFeed, which had significant layoffs last year but has been profitable for the last two quarters, will not face any staffing cuts but has refrained from making the same pledge to HuffPost employees.
With high overhead expenses, layoffs at HuffPost have been anticipated ever since the company was first rumored to be up for sale earlier this year. Indeed, the speculation at the time suggested that Verizon was looking for a buyer precisely because the company wanted someone else to do the dirty work of firing people; the cash investment Verizon made as part of the deal with BuzzFeed is understood to help cover severance packages.
Current and former newsroom employees from both companies are hopeful the merger might help protect the jobs of HuffPost’s journalists, which might not have been the case had another suitor ended up with the media property. For a digital media deal cut in 2020, there is a surprising amount of optimism being expressed by both companies: BuzzFeed believes that it will get more scale, which it can turn into revenue and, hopefully, reinvest in meaningful journalism. The merger is, in some ways, reminiscent of Random House’s 2013 acquisition of Penguin, which created a publishing juggernaut that is better positioned to deal with Amazon than smaller competitors; a BuzzFeed-HuffPost union won’t take on Facebook and Google but will be in a better position to survive the scorched earth advertising world these two dominant Silicon Valley firms have wrought.


newrepublic--2020-11-24--The Damage Is The Point

The Damage Is The Point

President Donald Trump ’ s efforts to block or overturn the election results have failed at every turn .
His lawsuits are being dismissed by incredulous judges ; his personal campaign to short-circuit the Electoral College is going nowhere fast .
The list of Republican senators who have implicitly urged Trump to accept his loss is only growing : Pennsylvania ’ s Pat Toomey , Ohio ’ s Rob Portman , West Virginia ’ s Shelley Moore Capito .
“ When you are in public life , people remember the last thing you do , ” Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Some will remember Trump ’ s last acts in office because they ’ ll have to endure the aftermath .
Since the election , Trump has done incalculable damage to public confidence in the American democratic process .
He hasn ’ t persuaded the courts or the state legislatures that he was denied re-election by a massive ( and fictitious ) conspiracy of voter fraud and electoral manipulation .
But he has apparently convinced a broad swath of his followers that Biden ’ s victory is corrupt and illegitimate .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supporters say they think the November elections were run and administered well , and only 35 percent said they were “ very confident ” their vote was counted .
There is still no pathway for Trump to remain president after January 20 , 2021 .
But his ill-fated attempts to dispute the election serve another purpose .
The Republican Party , at an institutional level , wants voters ’ faith in American elections to be conditional .
GOP lawmakers have spent the last twenty years raising and amplifying fears about voter fraud , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American elections .
The chaos Trump has wrought from the 2020 election , has handed them a ready-made pretext to go further next time .

These efforts reflect a broader Republican project that prioritized securing their own electoral power over reflecting the popular will. In 2019, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts can’t overturn partisan gerrymanders, effectively giving Republican-led state legislatures free rein to entrench themselves in office. The Trump administration also spent most of the last four years trying to structurally tilt the 2020 Census in its favor, first by adding a citizenship question that would reduce participation rates and then by trying to produce a count that excluded undocumented immigrants for reapportionment. The Supreme Court narrowly rejected the former in 2018; it will consider the latter in December.
The conservative legal movement has also produced judges who often resist efforts to make it easier for voters to cast a ballot and side with those who made it more difficult. While the federal district courts often ruled against Trump in election-related cases before November, for example, Republican nominees on the federal appellate courts turned them into far more favorable terrain for his litigation. And in the Supreme Court, it was the court’s conservative bloc that most often voted to block lower-court rulings that relaxed barriers to voting. Some of them, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even advanced radical legal theories to support their positions.
In a sense, Trump and his allies are following these trends to their logical conclusion. His lawyers asked judges to throw out or block statewide election results in multiple states, including Nevada and Pennsylvania. But Trumpworld’s ire all too often fell on major cities with large concentrations of Black voters, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, which they baselessly described as hotbeds of corruption and electoral fraud. At one point, local GOP officials in Wayne County, Michigan, even suggested certifying the results in the mostly white suburbs but not Detroit itself. It was not quite a call for the return of Jim Crow, but it strayed uncomfortably close to a case for Black voters’ ballots not to be counted outright.


newrepublic--2020-11-24--How WeWork Got Away With Spectacular Failure

Just as WeWork successfully milked a stable of venture capitalists drunk on a tech-fueled bull market , Neumann ’ s terrible treatment of his employees was likewise enabled by the postrecession environment .
When I first read accounts of the company ’ s office culture , I wondered why some of WeWork ’ s employees had stayed so long .
( Were a few days of letting loose at the company ’ s notoriously hedonistic summer retreat really enough to make up for the punishingly long hours , below-market pay , and sexual harassment they endured during the rest of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remembered that , just as WeWork was getting off the ground in 2010 , I myself was working for free as an unpaid intern at a small feminist book publisher ( while , on my days off from there , paying bills by helping a rich Upper East Sider organize his office ) .
WeWork , like so many other companies , benefited from an exploitable white-collar workforce made up of a cohort that had graduated into the height of a recession and was subsequently eager to prove themselves and find any kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hire a bunch of young people and pay them nothing , ” Neumann once bragged .
But not even the expendable labor pool and near-unfettered access to venture capital would save WeWork from the lethal combination of the company ’ s inability to turn a profit and the Neumanns ’ personal style of derangement .
In the summer of 2019 , after nearly 10 years of doing business , WeWork filed for an initial public offering and released “ Wingspan , ” an accompanying financial document that swiftly revealed the start-up ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ numbers , provided little actual information on WeWork ’ s business strategy , and was styled , at Rebekah ’ s direction , with superfluous glossy photos and inspirational quotes .
The public , Wiedeman writes , “ seemed to instantly recognize what Adam ’ s charisma had persuaded investors to look past : the chasm between how the company presented itself and what it actually did.
” Hard-pressed to explain what , beyond extreme puffery , made WeWork different from its competitors , Neumann found himself the subject of a flurry of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the company eventually pulled the IPO .
That fall , SoftBank would pay through the nose to bail out the floundering company and oust Adam Neumann .
WeWork ’ s is a story of start-up hubris inflated to nauseating extremes , but , even beyond that , it ’ s a stark example of how profoundly disconnected the fates of the rich and the rest became in the aftermath of the Great Recession .
WeWork ’ s investors—and SoftBank in particular—lost billions on their ill-advised bets on Neumann , but in the grand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are worth and what they spend regularly , the money they burned on WeWork is the equivalent of a regrettable night at a casino for you or me—an embarrassing and humbling loss , but a risk that comes with the territory .
Neumann himself escaped with a handsome payout and moved his family to Tel Aviv , where he was born .
“ Nearly two decades after arriving in New York with a dream of getting rich and then going back home , ” Wiedeman writes , “ Adam was doing just that.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and 15,000 employees later—was in the end a ruling-class parlor game gone awry , with no significant consequences for any of the people who rolled the dice , only for the employees who got caught up in their hijinks .
If the steel magnates , railroad robber barons , and other monsters of the first Gilded Age seemed to understand on some level that their profits would wither without their workers , the newer breed of financial capitalists that engineered the WeWork scandal made their fortunes in perhaps an even more antisocial way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speculating on a stock market that ’ s long ceased to benefit the majority of people in the United States .

It’s little wonder, then, that Son and other investors had ignored how disastrous WeWork’s business strategy and internal operations were—none of them had bothered to plumb past Neumann’s bloviating assurances. Meanwhile, even as money was rolling in, Neumann clung to a bizarre and unsustainable business model in which he penny-pinched on certain expenses (he directed staff to “Manage the Nickel,” or find small ways to save the company money, like turning off lights at night) while bleeding money elsewhere (buying, for instance, a $60 million private jet). The cumulative effect was, unsurprisingly, wide-scale burnout among employees and high turnover, to which Neumann was largely unsympathetic. When a group of employees asked for raises, Wiedeman writes, “Adam complained that he didn’t think he was getting what he paid for as it stood. He told one employee he could save money by getting a roommate.” Neumann thwarted a group of WeWork janitors’ efforts to unionize, and when one pointed out that he was a billionaire, he replied, “That has nothing to do with this.”
Just as WeWork successfully milked a stable of venture capitalists drunk on a tech-fueled bull market, Neumann’s terrible treatment of his employees was likewise enabled by the postrecession environment. When I first read accounts of the company’s office culture, I wondered why some of WeWork’s employees had stayed so long. (Were a few days of letting loose at the company’s notoriously hedonistic summer retreat really enough to make up for the punishingly long hours, below-market pay, and sexual harassment they endured during the rest of the year?) But then I remembered that, just as WeWork was getting off the ground in 2010, I myself was working for free as an unpaid intern at a small feminist book publisher (while, on my days off from there, paying bills by helping a rich Upper East Sider organize his office). WeWork, like so many other companies, benefited from an exploitable white-collar workforce made up of a cohort that had graduated into the height of a recession and was subsequently eager to prove themselves and find any kind of upward mobility. “I can hire a bunch of young people and pay them nothing,” Neumann once bragged.
The whole WeWork experiment was in the end a ruling-class parlor game gone awry, with no significant consequences for any of the people who rolled the dice.
But not even the expendable labor pool and near-unfettered access to venture capital would save WeWork from the lethal combination of the company’s inability to turn a profit and the Neumanns’ personal style of derangement. In the summer of 2019, after nearly 10 years of doing business, WeWork filed for an initial public offering and released “Wingspan,” an accompanying financial document that swiftly revealed the start-up’s deepest flaws. The report showed disturbing numbers, provided little actual information on WeWork’s business strategy, and was styled, at Rebekah’s direction, with superfluous glossy photos and inspirational quotes. The public, Wiedeman writes, “seemed to instantly recognize what Adam’s charisma had persuaded investors to look past: the chasm between how the company presented itself and what it actually did.” Hard-pressed to explain what, beyond extreme puffery, made WeWork different from its competitors, Neumann found himself the subject of a flurry of unflattering press and investor scrutiny, and the company eventually pulled the IPO. That fall, SoftBank would pay through the nose to bail out the floundering company and oust Adam Neumann.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score?

These metrics are then weighted alongside what Microsoft calls “ technology experiences ” —the quality of network connectivity , for example—in order to produce the Productivity Score , which is a single number , from 0 to 800 , representing the employee ’ s or organization ’ s effectiveness .
Scores can be measured across a company or compared to those of competing organizations .
“ Recommended actions ” offer suggestions for how an employee or organization might improve performance .
Whether any of this tracking and scoring actually offers real insight—rather than obscure metrics that don ’ t actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact that it ’ s now embedded in the tools used by millions of people every day .
Its presence , and potential profitability as a bountiful source of granular personal data , means that Microsoft is incentivized to sell Workplace Analytics as a work-from-home solution .
Whether Microsoft can hone a people-centered , scientific , analytical platform here—or whether it ’ s so much apophenia , finding patterns and meaning where there may be none—is mostly a matter of salesmanship .
If managers see the magical numbers on the dashboard going up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) , who ’ s to say that Workplace Analytics doesn ’ t work , much less that it violates worker privacy , autonomy , and trust ?
The platform ’ s ultimate efficacy depends partly on how workers will respond to knowing that they ’ re constantly being monitored and assessed .
Will they endeavor to “ hack ” their productivity scores , perhaps by repeating behaviors that they know are favored by the system measuring them ?
Will employees , when granted permission to check their own scores , compete with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if they find out they have a low score ?
And what does it mean for the future of worker autonomy to know that every action feeds into an all-seeing system over which workers have no control ?
( For those few white-collar workers in unions , questions of surveillance should be front and center in future collective bargaining discussions . )

These metrics are then weighted alongside what Microsoft calls “technology experiences”—the quality of network connectivity, for example—in order to produce the Productivity Score, which is a single number, from 0 to 800, representing the employee’s or organization’s effectiveness. Scores can be measured across a company or compared to those of competing organizations. “Recommended actions” offer suggestions for how an employee or organization might improve performance.
Whether any of this tracking and scoring actually offers real insight—rather than obscure metrics that don’t actually measure real-world productivity—is almost secondary to the fact that it’s now embedded in the tools used by millions of people every day. Its presence, and potential profitability as a bountiful source of granular personal data, means that Microsoft is incentivized to sell Workplace Analytics as a work-from-home solution. Whether Microsoft can hone a people-centered, scientific, analytical platform here—or whether it’s so much apophenia, finding patterns and meaning where there may be none—is mostly a matter of salesmanship. If managers see the magical numbers on the dashboard going up (and can tell their managers that), who’s to say that Workplace Analytics doesn’t work, much less that it violates worker privacy, autonomy, and trust?
The platform’s ultimate efficacy depends partly on how workers will respond to knowing that they’re constantly being monitored and assessed. Will they endeavor to “hack” their productivity scores, perhaps by repeating behaviors that they know are favored by the system measuring them? Will employees, when granted permission to check their own scores, compete with one another or experience declines in morale if they find out they have a low score? And what does it mean for the future of worker autonomy to know that every action feeds into an all-seeing system over which workers have no control? (For those few white-collar workers in unions, questions of surveillance should be front and center in future collective bargaining discussions.)


newrepublic--2020-11-25--Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left

America ’ s biggest , most powerful book publisher is about to get even bigger and more powerful .
On Wednesday , a number of outlets reported that Penguin Random House had reached an agreement with ViacomCBS to purchase Simon & Schuster , the nation ’ s third-largest publisher , for $ 2 billion .
The resulting conglomerate would publish at least a third of all books sold in the United States , and transform Penguin Random House , already a superpower , into an industry-dominating behemoth , with potentially serious consequences for authors , publishing employees , and diversity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concentration will dramatically lower competition in the publishing industry , likely leading to job cuts , lower advances for authors , and fewer non-blockbuster books being published by commercial publishers .
The sale of Simon & Schuster comes near the end of a strange year for the company .
Carolyn Reidy , an industry stalwart and the company ’ s longtime CEO , died in the spring and was replaced by Jonathan Karp .
During that time , S & S became the defining publisher of the Trump era , with a keen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which both formed a large chunk of its revenue and resulted in serious and costly legal challenges from the Trump administration .
Though major releases by John Bolton and Mary Trump helped make it profitable , Simon & Schuster was put up for sale because ViacomCBS is reorienting its business to focus on streaming and needed funds to pay down debt .
In a somewhat surprising twist , many in the industry were rooting for the other known bidder for Simon & Schuster—the Rupert Murdoch–owned HarperCollins—to acquire the publisher , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Penguin Random House .
That Murdoch is seen as something of a savior says a great deal about the widespread fear of Penguin Random House .
Not only will the acquisition expand the number of titles PRH puts out , it will expand its already extremely powerful distribution network .
( Simon & Schuster serves as a distributor for a number of outside publishers , most notably Skyhorse . )

But this deal isn’t about average authors, it’s about the blockbusters. In our current Amazon-dominated sales landscape, mega-bestsellers are more valuable to publishers than ever before. By acquiring arguably the best blockbuster publisher of the last few years and adding it to a company increasingly built around acquiring, marketing, and selling big books, Penguin Random House is setting itself up to be a historically dominant force. This deal would unite the publishers of the biggest-selling books of the last two years: Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened.
“There are projects that would have sold for $150,000 years ago that might not sell at all now to the big five, whereas the book that would have sold for $500,000 might go for a million,” the literary agent David Kuhn told The New York Times. “They would rather go in bigger for the thing that they have the most consensus on.” Those trends will only accelerate in the coming years. Even if Penguin Random House continues its policy of allowing its imprints to bid against one another for books (with some limitations), adding several more imprints into the fold will inevitably constrain competition and have a negative effect on advances.
Some in the industry have suggested a potential silver lining: A Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster megapublisher will be better positioned to take on the most dangerous force in the industry, Amazon. It could, in this thinking, use its might to garner better terms or to fight back against its steep discounting, which has had a deleterious effect on physical bookstores. But PRH has never used its gargantuan scope to challenge Amazon. There is little reason to believe that acquiring an extra 10 percent of market share will make it suddenly comfortable going to the mattresses to extract more favorable terms, let alone to break the retailer’s hold on the industry. (Amazon’s 2019 revenue was more than 50 times larger than PRH’s.)


newrepublic--2020-11-25--God Save America From “Checks and Balances”

“ Ticket splitting ” has declined enough , over the decades , that some were ready to declare it dead just one election cycle ago , but it demonstrated enough of a revival in the 2020 elections to save the careers of Republican senators like Susan Collins and sustain their hopes of retaining Senate control .
Messaging on the need to “ check the Democrats ” could both juice conservative turnout—Lindsey Graham recently used the term “ trifecta from hell ” to describe a scenario in which the person who won the presidential election is allowed to enact his policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Biden-voting electorate that sincerely believes in the principle of “ checks and balances.
” I would imagine that many in that slice of the electorate are fairly engaged and high-information voters , because the fetish for divided government is almost a purely elite phenomenon , more common in op-ed sections than ballot boxes .
Even back when ticket splitting was more common , it was driven not by a desire for divided government , to force moderation , but by boring yet understandable things like incumbency bias and the lack of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As the parties have polarized , so has the electorate—meaning that whoever is still voting this way is probably in thrall to the stupid idea that the founders meant it all to work this way .
They have been told that a divided government will force two sides to come together , rather than having it explained that all the nasty partisan bickering they ’ re sick of is the direct result of divided government .
There certainly are circumstances where preferring divided government is perfectly logical .
I have no doubt plenty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Republican governors out of a genuine desire to have them check any efforts by Democratic legislatures to redistribute any resources downward .
Some Democratic politicians themselves prefer to share power with Republicans , as a sort of check on the ambitions of their own support bases .
But most people who voted for Joe Biden to be the president probably don ’ t also want Mitch McConnell to have the power to , for example , prevent Biden from mailing everyone stimulus checks .

“Ticket splitting” has declined enough, over the decades, that some were ready to declare it dead just one election cycle ago, but it demonstrated enough of a revival in the 2020 elections to save the careers of Republican senators like Susan Collins and sustain their hopes of retaining Senate control. Messaging on the need to “check the Democrats” could both juice conservative turnout—Lindsey Graham recently used the term “trifecta from hell” to describe a scenario in which the person who won the presidential election is allowed to enact his policy agenda—and maybe pull off that slim slice of the Biden-voting electorate that sincerely believes in the principle of “checks and balances.”
I would imagine that many in that slice of the electorate are fairly engaged and high-information voters, because the fetish for divided government is almost a purely elite phenomenon, more common in op-ed sections than ballot boxes. Even back when ticket splitting was more common, it was driven not by a desire for divided government, to force moderation, but by boring yet understandable things like incumbency bias and the lack of clear ideological differences between the parties. As the parties have polarized, so has the electorate—meaning that whoever is still voting this way is probably in thrall to the stupid idea that the founders meant it all to work this way. They have been told that a divided government will force two sides to come together, rather than having it explained that all the nasty partisan bickering they’re sick of is the direct result of divided government.
There certainly are circumstances where preferring divided government is perfectly logical. I have no doubt plenty of well-off New England liberals keep voting for Republican governors out of a genuine desire to have them check any efforts by Democratic legislatures to redistribute any resources downward. Some Democratic politicians themselves prefer to share power with Republicans, as a sort of check on the ambitions of their own support bases. But most people who voted for Joe Biden to be the president probably don’t also want Mitch McConnell to have the power to, for example, prevent Biden from mailing everyone stimulus checks.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--The Democrats’ Maddening Cowardice Is Carrying Over into the Biden Era

None of this should come as any surprise .
Democrats also intentionally dragged their heels on Trump ’ s impeachment for as long as they could , even after the long-awaited and vaunted Mueller investigation produced evidence of obstruction of justice , on precisely the same grounds : Wait for Republicans to jump in , and the party will come off looking better for its patience , for avoiding legal messiness , and for establishing a bipartisan front .
“ Impeachment is so divisive to the country , ” Pelosi told The Washington Post in March 2019 , “ that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and overwhelming and bipartisan , I don ’ t think we should go down that path because it divides the country.
” Months later , her hand was forced by the revelation Trump had tried to coerce Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden .
There ’ s nothing Democrats can do—or avoid doing—to bridge the partisan divide .
Our very situation now is proof of this .
Nothing about Biden ’ s pitch for unity and bipartisanship has discouraged the right from believing or pretending to believe that he , and maybe the Venezuelans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the American people .
But the dream of comity lives on : Polls have shown that the public and Democrats especially are still invested in bipartisanship as a political value , and revulsion for Trump hasn ’ t quite rubbed off on the Republican Party as a whole , particularly among the moderate suburbanites who swung so dramatically for Biden in the election .
With Trump gone , these voters could swing back toward a more ordinary Republican just as dramatically—a possibility foreshadowed not only by Republicans ’ surprisingly good performance down-ballot this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blue-state Republican moderates like Massachusetts ’ s Charlie Baker and Maryland ’ s Larry Hogan .
And the erosion in Democratic support among Hispanic and Black voters will obviously remain cause for concern .
If notable shares of each were willing to back Trump despite his overt bigotry , how might more subdued conservatives perform in the years ahead ?
The opposition party will end its term out of the White House without having done much to engender sustained opposition to the GOP .
Now that task will fall to activists on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ played out in the background of the month ’ s events should be instructive for them .
The legal profession has been roiled since the election by a movement against the firms Porter Wright and Jones Day , which have been representing the Trump campaign in its frivolous lawsuits .
Lawyers were subjected to pressure campaigns , law students pledged not to work at either firm , and the specter was raised of a boycott against Jones Day ’ s other major clients , including General Motors .
There were even pickets outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this has seemingly yielded results .
Earlier this month , Porter Wright abandoned one of Trump ’ s lawsuits , and Jones Day has reportedly decided not to take on any more election cases .

None of this should come as any surprise. Democrats also intentionally dragged their heels on Trump’s impeachment for as long as they could, even after the long-awaited and vaunted Mueller investigation produced evidence of obstruction of justice, on precisely the same grounds: Wait for Republicans to jump in, and the party will come off looking better for its patience, for avoiding legal messiness, and for establishing a bipartisan front. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country,” Pelosi told The Washington Post in March 2019, “that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country.” Months later, her hand was forced by the revelation Trump had tried to coerce Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden.
There’s nothing Democrats can do—or avoid doing—to bridge the partisan divide. Our very situation now is proof of this. Nothing about Biden’s pitch for unity and bipartisanship has discouraged the right from believing or pretending to believe that he, and maybe the Venezuelans, have perpetrated a massive fraud against the American people. But the dream of comity lives on: Polls have shown that the public and Democrats especially are still invested in bipartisanship as a political value, and revulsion for Trump hasn’t quite rubbed off on the Republican Party as a whole, particularly among the moderate suburbanites who swung so dramatically for Biden in the election. With Trump gone, these voters could swing back toward a more ordinary Republican just as dramatically—a possibility foreshadowed not only by Republicans’ surprisingly good performance down-ballot this year but in the sky-high popularity of blue-state Republican moderates like Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Maryland’s Larry Hogan. And the erosion in Democratic support among Hispanic and Black voters will obviously remain cause for concern. If notable shares of each were willing to back Trump despite his overt bigotry, how might more subdued conservatives perform in the years ahead?
The opposition party will end its term out of the White House without having done much to engender sustained opposition to the GOP. Now that task will fall to activists on the outside. One drama that’s played out in the background of the month’s events should be instructive for them. The legal profession has been roiled since the election by a movement against the firms Porter Wright and Jones Day, which have been representing the Trump campaign in its frivolous lawsuits. Lawyers were subjected to pressure campaigns, law students pledged not to work at either firm, and the specter was raised of a boycott against Jones Day’s other major clients, including General Motors. There were even pickets outside both firms’ offices. And all of this has seemingly yielded results. Earlier this month, Porter Wright abandoned one of Trump’s lawsuits, and Jones Day has reportedly decided not to take on any more election cases.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--America Is Run by Geezers

America Is Run by Geezers

But 52–55 percent turnout is still peanuts compared to this year ’ s 65 percent turnout among the population at large , driven at least in part by even higher turnout among elderly voters .
The true age-demographic story of 2020 wasn ’ t that young people flocked to the polls in higher proportions than ever before .
It was that this youthquake had no discernible impact on the makeup of the American electorate , according to Edison Research ’ s exit polls , because there were so goddamned many old people .
According to Edison Research Executive Vice President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2020 most increased its share of votes cast was the elderly ( 65 and older ) , which expanded from a 20 percent share in 2016 to a 22 percent share in 2020 .
Those two percentage points represent an increase in relative voter strength of 10 percent .
By contrast , 18-24-year-olds had the same 9 percent share of votes cast as in 2016 , and 25-29 year-olds the same 7 percent .
* ( All other groups either kept the same share or lost one or two percentage points , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which rose from 15 to 16 percent . )
The elderly ’ s 22 percent of votes cast—assuming that this figure holds up in future data—represents a historic jump in gerontological clout .
For the past quarter-century , Edison Research ’ s exit polls put the 65-and-over cohort pretty consistently at 16 percent of all votes cast in presidential elections ( excepting 2000 , when it dipped to 14 percent ) .
Indeed , Edison Research initially assigned the elderly 16 percent of all votes cast in 2016 , before it corrected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has not similarly massaged its data prior to 2016 , and it has no plans to do so , according to Farbman .
That leaves us in the dark about exactly how and when the elderly experienced their Great Leap Forward in the voting pool .
As I ’ ve taken care to note , more reliable age-demographic percentages based on actual votes cast are not yet available for 2020 .
But the historic data suggests that , prior to 2020 , there was no Great Leap Forward but rather the gradual rise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ started trading their coonskin Davy Crockett caps for adult Depends diapers .
The data based on actual votes cast also suggests that the elderly share of votes cast this year probably exceeded 25 percent ( because it was already 24.9 percent in 2016 ) .

More reliable information based on actual votes cast will be available next year, and very possibly it will make gibberish of the analysis that follows. For the moment, though, Edison Research’s exit polls constitute the best available data set to assess the American gerontocracy’s growth over time. With that in mind, let’s proceed.
Nobody can dispute that an awful lot of people—about 65 percent of all eligible voters—cast ballots on November 3. Officially, it was the biggest turnout since the turn of the twentieth century. Unofficially, it was bigger even than that. Michael Podhorzer, assistant to the president for strategic research at the AFL-CIO, points out that the pool of eligible voters in 1900 was disgracefully small, excluding half the U.S. population (women) plus most people of color. Factor in these disenfranchised groups, Podhorzer says, and 2020 boasted “the highest turnout EVER, 10 points higher than the average presidential turnout since the Voting Rights Act.” This election was a national emergency, and turnout demonstrated citizens understood that.
Still, the results were a bit of a disappointment. Many people expected that high turnout, and especially high turnout among young voters, would favor the Democrats, and, of course, it did, in the sense that Biden won. But Biden didn’t win by as large a margin as Democrats hoped, and ballooning turnout didn’t win Democrats back the Senate. That’s because turnout for Republican constituencies, including the elderly, was really high, too. The elderly’s proportion of votes cast was higher than ever before, simply because the Baby Boom is entering old age.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--Pharma Executives Are Profiting From Covid Vaccine Press Releases

Who would have thought , a year ago , that at Thanksgiving 2020 the nation would be waiting with bated breath for pharmaceutical press releases ?
But as companies have released increasingly positive news about their vaccine trials , public interest in these interim results has soared .
So have financial markets , hoping for an end to the pandemic .
News alerts may update the public , but they ’ re primarily used to update investors .
In the past few weeks , there has been a glut of them .
And the particular way news releases are now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experts worried .
In part , they ’ re concerned that executives may be engaging in trading practices that , thanks to current law , may be just on the right side of legal .
But they ’ re also worried that such profiteering in the present moment could signal issues with the companies or their products—and could lead to public mistrust in the vaccines themselves .
“ Science by press release , ” as the release of preliminary drug results is sometimes called , has pitfalls : Press releases only include the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Pfizer/BioNTech press release on November 9 , for instance , said their vaccine was 90 percent effective at preventing the disease caused by the virus but didn ’ t offer a demographic breakdown of those results .
The press release also didn ’ t say whether it reduced the severity of the illness in the 10 percent who did get it , nor did it say whether some participants may have caught asymptomatic Covid-19 that could be passed on to others .
AstraZeneca ’ s announcement on Monday that its vaccine is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It didn ’ t say how many of the 131 Covid-19 cases among trial participants developed among people taking the placebo , versus how many developed among people who had received a half-dose of the vaccine or a full dose—important information for evaluating the early results .

“I have never seen anything like Moderna in my career,” said Daniel Taylor, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “In the current environment that we are in, where any data release can send the stock price flying or plummeting, it is very, very important that they are careful with how they trade. And I would definitely say that Moderna is not practicing, what you would say, good corporate governance. Whether that crosses the line to illegal or not is another question. But … there’s definitely a lot of smoke.”
According to Taylor’s examinations of key investment documents, both Moderna and Pfizer executives scheduled sell-offs with 10b5-1 plans. These 10b5-1 plans are a tool used by people who may count as “insiders” to avoid insider trading; the plans pre-schedule stock sales with specific attention to relevant securities law. But in both cases, Taylor found, these schedules were put in place or modified soon before the companies announced positive results.
On the same day that Pfizer announced that its vaccine with BioNTech was 90 percent effective, for instance, CEO Albert Bourla sold $5.6 million worth of stock in the company. His 10b5-1 plan to sell stock was put in place back in August, the day before Pfizer announced positive results with its phase 1 trial, Taylor said. That means Bourla didn’t plan the sell-off right before the November announcement—but he already knew the sell-off was scheduled when the company chose to announce the good news on November 9, and that sell-off was planned right before the first positive results were released months ago. Similarly, in March, three Moderna executives created new 10b5-1 plans before an announcement the next business day that phase 1 trials had begun, which made stock prices surge by 24 percent.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--A Vacation Enclave in the Hamptons, Two 61-Foot Billboards, and an Endless Fight for Tribal Sovereig

A Vacation Enclave in the Hamptons, Two 61-Foot Billboards, and an Endless Fight for Tribal Sovereignty

Before one can really grasp the state ’ s claims and its insistence on using tax dollars to fight the Shinnecock , it ’ s important to understand that there is no way to view the legal fight over this monument in a vacuum .
This struggle against New York and Southampton for Shinnecock economic independence is not separate from those that preceded it , nor will it be unique from the ones that inevitably follow .
The monument fight is the latest iteration of Shinnecock people having to spend crucial funds and hours defending their basic sovereignty and economic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lines , issuing that full-throated reminder to accompany the monument , are the Warriors of the Sunrise .
The Warriors are a group of Shinnecock women , among them Margo Thunderbird , Tela Troge , Becky Genia , and Jennifer E. Cuffee-Wilson , all of whom helped establish Sovereignty Camp 2020 , an encampment on the northern side of Sunrise Highway , across from the constructed monument .
With the aid of groups like the Long Island Progressive Coalition and the Red Nation , the camp was established on October 31 by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York ’ s purported claim to the Westwoods , the land that the camp and the monument rest on .
The camp entrance is marked by an R.V .
with a Warriors flag hanging from its side .
Signs at the edge of the woods offer stern reminders that those without a negative Covid-19 test are barred from entering .
A white supplies tent is situated at the northern end of camp , outfitted with a small library of Indigenous literature and enough food to get the group through the end of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are spread throughout the leaf-covered ground .
And at the heart of it all is the Sovereignty Camp fire .
It was lit on Halloween and hasn ’ t died yet .
Every person at the camp takes turns splitting logs , poking the kindling with a well-worn rake , and adding pieces as needed .
Some nights , they take shifts keeping it alive ; on others , a Shinnecock citizen from the rez will drive over between midnight and 6 a.m. to relieve the group .
While the state may continue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there is little room for doubt when it comes to who watches over this land .

Before one can really grasp the state’s claims and its insistence on using tax dollars to fight the Shinnecock, it’s important to understand that there is no way to view the legal fight over this monument in a vacuum. This struggle against New York and Southampton for Shinnecock economic independence is not separate from those that preceded it, nor will it be unique from the ones that inevitably follow. The monument fight is the latest iteration of Shinnecock people having to spend crucial funds and hours defending their basic sovereignty and economic autonomy. And standing on the front lines, issuing that full-throated reminder to accompany the monument, are the Warriors of the Sunrise.
The Warriors are a group of Shinnecock women, among them Margo Thunderbird, Tela Troge, Becky Genia, and Jennifer E. Cuffee-Wilson, all of whom helped establish Sovereignty Camp 2020, an encampment on the northern side of Sunrise Highway, across from the constructed monument. With the aid of groups like the Long Island Progressive Coalition and the Red Nation, the camp was established on October 31 by the Warriors as a physical rejection of New York’s purported claim to the Westwoods, the land that the camp and the monument rest on.
The camp entrance is marked by an R.V. with a Warriors flag hanging from its side. Signs at the edge of the woods offer stern reminders that those without a negative Covid-19 test are barred from entering. A white supplies tent is situated at the northern end of camp, outfitted with a small library of Indigenous literature and enough food to get the group through the end of the month. A dozen or so tents are spread throughout the leaf-covered ground. And at the heart of it all is the Sovereignty Camp fire. It was lit on Halloween and hasn’t died yet. Every person at the camp takes turns splitting logs, poking the kindling with a well-worn rake, and adding pieces as needed. Some nights, they take shifts keeping it alive; on others, a Shinnecock citizen from the rez will drive over between midnight and 6 a.m. to relieve the group. While the state may continue to argue it on legal terms, there is little room for doubt when it comes to who watches over this land.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--Is America Trapped in a Caste System?

Is America Trapped in a Caste System?

Hindu temples continue to be taboo territory for Dalits , as Mormon churches were for African Americans , who were also restricted to back pews in many other Christian churches .
The source of the unequal treatment in nearly every sphere was , as Wilkerson argues , traced to scripture in both oppressive systems .
According to the origin story in the Hindu holy book The Laws of Manu , the creator god Brahma fashioned the five main castes from different parts of his body , the highest caste of priestly Brahmins from his head , Dalits from below his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their mastery by citing the biblical story of Ham , whose descendants were cursed to eternal bondage after he saw his father naked , and whose dark skin was emphasized in exegeses dating from the Middle Ages .
In the brutality of Nazi Germany , Wilkerson also finds shocking similarities with American racism .
The techniques and tools of torture in concentration camps echoed those found on American plantations , where the attics of the pens that housed the enslaved were outfitted with whips of cowhide , iron clamps , rotating stakes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other elaborate instruments of pain .
Jewish prisoners were strapped to wooden boards to be publicly flogged , made to count their own lashes , and sadistically told that they had miscounted .
At the same moment in history , both regimes—Jim Crow and the Third Reich—conducted hangings as spectacle .
Wilkerson discerns the true purpose of these staged punishments : sowing terror , to keep those who defy their assigned roles in inferior places .
Nazi Germany , the modern epitome of evil , and the United States , widely cast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victory against that evil , are usually paired in antithesis .
Revealing a relationship of resemblance instead , Wilkerson offers a breathtaking riposte to America ’ s image of itself as a moral beacon to the world .
In one particularly compelling chapter , Wilkerson shows that the Nazis in fact took American laws restricting immigration and banning intermarriage as their model for the infamous Blood Laws announced at Nuremberg in 1935 .
She details a meeting in Berlin a year earlier , during which 17 Nazi legal scholars and government officials debated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ better know whom to exterminate and whom to disenfranchise in multiple ways , including by making it illegal for them to have sex with and marry “ Aryans.
” One man at the table , who had studied law in Arkansas and would soon publish the influential book Race Law in the United States , informed the group that intermarriage was a crime punishable with a 10-year prison sentence in many U.S. jurisdictions .
Another had come armed with a table of American segregationist laws .
Still another , taken with how fractions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on discounting anyone one-sixteenth Jewish as Aryan because he didn ’ t , in the words of a historian cited by Wilkerson , “ wish to be less rigorous than the Americans.
” One moderate expressed concern that the Americans had gone too far with their “ one drop ” rule .
In the end , the architects of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor used the “ association clauses ” in anti-miscegenation laws in Texas and North Carolina to determine who would be classified as Jewish : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with two Jewish grandparents who also “ associated ” further with their Jewishness by practicing Judaism or marrying within that faith .
The link is direct : Jim Crow jurisprudence contributed to the antisemitic project in Germany ; Hitler took the legal mechanics of “ caste ” from America .

The story she tells foregrounds upwardly mobile figures, whose abraded psyches and encumbered potential indicate the unseen boundaries of a caste society. She calls these men and women “shock troops at the front lines of hierarchy.” Like Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former national correspondent for The New York Times, they are “people who appear in places or positions where they are not expected,” people who “can become foot soldiers in an ongoing quest for respect and legitimacy in a fight they had hoped was long over.” The story of the steamboat passengers launches a chapter that catalogs indignities meted out in the present, to Wilkerson and others who are mobile in more than one sense. They’re each literally in motion, on trains and planes, and each is stopped by a hostile encounter: members of a Black women’s book club insulted on a Napa Valley wine tour in 2015; Wilkerson herself subjected to a flight attendant’s disbelief that she was flying first class; a Black baby slapped in 2013 by a white passenger, a stranger irritated by the infant’s cries with a change in altitude.
For Wilkerson, such incidents suggest that race is a form of caste because they’re anchored in attitudes that Black people are less worthy and can therefore be mistreated with impunity. She identifies a stubborn belief in the inherent inferiority of those at the bottom (and, conversely, the inherent superiority of those at the top) as one pillar of any caste system. In all, she enumerates eight pillars of caste and links them to the way that race has been lived in the United States. Caste is etched in Scripture and therefore justified as divinely ordained. It is inherited. Terror is used to enforce it. Endogamy, or restricting marriage within the group, preserves it. An obsession with the polluting touch of the other characterizes caste consciousness, leading to elaborate and often absurd regulations to maintain purity. Occupational hierarchy also marks caste, and it operates through the dehumanization of those deemed lowest.
The concept of race, used to rationalize slavery and segregation, has outlived its exploitative purposes in the United States. It’s vestigial, like an appendix ever on the verge of rupturing. Our hard-wrested understanding that, biologically, race is a fiction calls for another analytical frame. Viewing race as a form of caste provides a way for Wilkerson to explain how and why race still traumatizes American society. The comparison comes perhaps from the need to reckon with persistent injustice.


newrepublic--2020-11-25--The Government’s Human Cruelty Will Outlive Trump

“ Our long nightmare will soon be over ” is a phrase that one wouldn ’ t have been shocked to hear issued from the lips of liberal pundits or Joe Biden supporters as it slowly became apparent , in the days following the election , that the Trump presidency ’ s days were numbered .
It was perhaps more surprising to learn that those same words were uttered by an unnamed official from the Department of Homeland Security in a BuzzFeed article published on November 7 , in the last paragraph of a piece that interviewed some 20 officials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the election results .
Employees from a variety of agencies , including the U.S .
Citizenship and Immigration Services , Immigration and Customs Enforcement , and Customs and Border Protection , anonymously and nearly unanimously expressed their relief that with the end of the Trump administration , “ the chaos may end , ” and they could finally “ work with confidence ” to “ carry out our mission for the American people again.
” This message from DHS sharply abuts the reality of the last four years , particularly of ICE @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in some cases , enthusiastically carried out the most heinous of Trump ’ s “ zero tolerance ” immigration policies , which have in many cases blatantly disregarded international law .
This has included the forceful separation of families at the border ; the enforcement of the “ Remain in Mexico ” program ; and the indefinite detention of refugees and migrants , including small children , in disturbing jail-like conditions .
While some of these officials now cite their “ relief ” at being able to return to a more orderly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compromise ” their “ morals or ideals , ” as one DHS employee put it in the article , it bears remembering that ICE ’ s union endorsed President Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections—a point that has somehow gone unnoted .
The uncritical tone of Buzzfeed ’ s article perhaps marks the beginning of a new and disturbing period for the media , one that features the sanitization of the reputation of ICE and other DHS bodies , as well as a willingness to paint over the atrocities committed by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them .
Influential administration figures might pursue this path , as well .
Last week , members of Joe Biden ’ s transition team seemed to advocate such a response , demurring on whether the incoming administration should investigate the atrocities of the Trump era in the name of not wanting to stoke divisions .
Biden has promised to unravel some of the most horrific components of Trump ’ s immigration policies , but he has not yet committed to a broader rethinking of those policies or to a much-needed reckoning with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place during the Trump era .

“Our long nightmare will soon be over” is a phrase that one wouldn’t have been shocked to hear issued from the lips of liberal pundits or Joe Biden supporters as it slowly became apparent, in the days following the election, that the Trump presidency’s days were numbered. It was perhaps more surprising to learn that those same words were uttered by an unnamed official from the Department of Homeland Security in a BuzzFeed article published on November 7, in the last paragraph of a piece that interviewed some 20 officials from the department to gauge their reaction to the election results. Employees from a variety of agencies, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection, anonymously and nearly unanimously expressed their relief that with the end of the Trump administration, “the chaos may end,” and they could finally “work with confidence” to “carry out our mission for the American people again.”
This message from DHS sharply abuts the reality of the last four years, particularly of ICE and CBP, agencies that willingly and, in some cases, enthusiastically carried out the most heinous of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies, which have in many cases blatantly disregarded international law. This has included the forceful separation of families at the border; the enforcement of the “Remain in Mexico” program; and the indefinite detention of refugees and migrants, including small children, in disturbing jail-like conditions. While some of these officials now cite their “relief” at being able to return to a more orderly state of affairs without having to “compromise” their “morals or ideals,” as one DHS employee put it in the article, it bears remembering that ICE’s union endorsed President Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections—a point that has somehow gone unnoted.


newrepublic--2020-11-24--How Newsmax Became Trump TV

How Newsmax Became Trump TV

Last week , Tucker Carlson did something remarkable : He acknowledged , albeit with no small number of caveats , that the Trump campaign had provided zero evidence to support its most recent round of baseless allegations that millions of votes had been switched in the 2020 election .
Sidney Powell , the conspiracy theorist who was then serving on the Trump campaign ’ s legal team and hoping that Carlson would accept the recent contraptions of her fevered imagination as real news , had run afoul of the Fox News host , who had to explain to his audience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any evidence , despite a lot of requests , polite requests—not a page.
” Carlson elaborated : “ When we kept pressing , she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.
” The moment was trumpeted by liberals wherever viral clips are shared online : Even Tucker Carlson knows Trump is full of shit .
The good feelings would not last .
By Monday , Carlson was singing a different tune .
“ No honest person could claim [ the election ] was fair , ” he said , while suggesting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ echo of the conspiracy theory he had rejected less than a week earlier .
“ On many levels , the system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another , and it was rigged in ways that were not hidden from view.
” What changed ?
Carlson ’ s gentle critique of the Trump legal team ’ s insane conspiracy theories had generated an audience backlash , with many viewers and right-wing influencers pledging a boycott .
In previous years , Fox might have ignored the disruption and ridden out its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Fox News ’ s devotees have options .
And while One America News Network has garnered the most attention recently from the way its own take on state television both aesthetically and substantively resembles something out of Pyongyang , the fact is that it ’ s a more familiar incumbent that ’ s making big inroads : Newsmax .
The company has long trodden the media terrain , quietly building an audience , and has used the last four years to close in on a Trumpian identity .

Newsmax might be the perfect home for disaffected Fox News viewers and, perhaps, the president himself. The right’s biggest objection to Fox News, the fact that the channel has attempted to maintain a straight-news division that occasionally has to play it straight (and call Arizona on election night when its team of pollsters sees no good reason not to), predates Trump, though the president has endeavored to amplify it. By contrast, Fox’s opinion side, with the exception of occasional apostasy, largely earns high marks. But Trump’s most loyal fans chafe at the fact that there are some at Fox News who do something approximating real journalism, albeit with a slant that usually suits the right-wing narratives that its opinion-mongers prefer. At the moment, the fact that Fox News employs any journalist willing to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election is seen as a cardinal sin.
Newsmax, meanwhile, does not have that problem: It does little that masquerades as reporting or, for that matter, journalism. The network has instead built itself up as an island of misfit toys. It employs former Fox anchors Kelly and Trish Regan, who was let go from Fox Business Network after she referred to the coronavirus as “yet another attempt to impeach the president” by Democrats. Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump sisters and YouTube stars, have their own show. Uncommonly pathetic White House press secretary Sean Spicer also plies his trade at the company; the disgraced pundit Mark Halperin has also recently washed up on Newsmax’s shores.
Newsmax has none of Fox News’s polish, but it also makes no attempt at maintaining its fig leaf of journalistic credibility. It can go wherever Trump leads it. Ruddy has made it clear that his company will follow the president wherever he might go without the need to penned in by anything so inconvenient as scruples or journalistic ethics. It is janky and often seemingly improvised; a network flying by the seat of its pants. But those qualities have made it the ideal network to cover the unraveling of the Trump era for a right-wing audience and perfectly situate it for the presumably chaotic, grievance-filled postpresidency.


newrepublic--2020-11-24--Mike Pompeo Is a Global Arsonist. Can Biden Put Out His Fires?

What is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doing , and how bad will it get ?
America ’ s top diplomat recently concluded a 10-day , seven-country overseas trip that seemed designed to cause as much damage as possible ( and perhaps firm up his own dubious reputation with an eye toward a possible 2024 presidential run ) .
The reviews were disastrous : Bloomberg described the trip as a “ troll , ” in which Pompeo “ angered Turkey ’ s leaders , infuriated the Palestinians and befuddled the French.
” The incoming Biden administration will be left to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Blinken , Pompeo ’ s presumed replacement , has received support from liberal politicians and advocacy groups , some are asking what kind of world he will inherit .
Determined to cause headaches for a President Biden , Pompeo is extending Trump ’ s nihilistic , burn-everything attitude to America ’ s foreign policy .
That ’ s caused Democratic officials like Senator Tom Udall , who sits on the foreign affairs committee , to speak out .
“ The President and Secretary Pompeo have squandered American credibility and weakened our national security @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and political theater , ” Udall said in an email .
“ I am confident that the recent announcements from President-elect Biden show that real leadership is coming back to the State Department so we can return to the smart diplomacy that the vast majority of Americans support .
”

By forcing the incoming Biden administration to confront issues ranging from settlements to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and to a possible open conflict with Iran, Pompeo, blessed by Trump’s typical indifference, is placing “a series of political impediments” for his successor, said Susskind. Some of them may prove thorny down the road; others will demand his attention on day one. (Representative Rashida Tlaib has already asked Blinken to address Pompeo’s attempted suppression of the BDS movement, a protected First Amendment activity that conservatives have nonetheless sought to limit.)
Pompeo’s most important stop on his recent diplomatic tour was in Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he drank wine made in a settlement, offered succor to Israel’s right wing, and issued proclamations muddling the definitions of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, called it a “grotesque farewell party.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to issue a statement imploring the United States not to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear agreement, from which Trump withdrew and which Biden seems likely to attempt to rejoin.
Not long after his Israel visit, Pompeo reportedly met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Netanyahu, and the head of Israel’s Mossad spy service, in Noem, a futuristic planned city being built in the Saudi desert. The principal subject was almost certainly Iran and how far the not-so-secret allies could go in their clandestine campaign of industrial sabotage and cyberattacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities before crossing some unstated Biden red line.