newrepublic--2020-08-18--Newsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine

Writing in The Columbia Journalism Review last year , Daniel Tovrov depicted Newsweek , once one of America ’ s most distinguished magazines , as a shell of its former self .
All that was left was clickbait , op-eds from the likes of Nigel Farage and Newt Gingrich , and a general sense of drift .
“ Nobody I spoke to for this article had a sense of why Newsweek exists , ” Tovrov wrote .
“ While the name Newsweek still carries a certain authority—remnants of its status as a legacy outlet—and the magazine can still bag an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serves an opaque purpose in the media landscape.
” Last week , Newsweek suggested one possible purpose : The legitimization of narratives straight out of the right-wing fever swamps .
An op-ed written by John Eastman , a conservative lawyer and founding director of the Claremont Institute ’ s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence , coyly suggested that Kamala Harris , who was born in California , may not be eligible to serve as vice president because her parents were immigrants .
It was , as many pointed out , a racist attack with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the birther conspiracy theory that claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya .
Within a few hours , Eastman ’ s op-ed was being brandished by President Trump , who told reporters he had “ heard ” Harris may not be eligible to serve .
Three days after the op-ed was published , Newsweek apologized , sort of .
In an editor ’ s note signed by global Editor-in-Chief Nancy Cooper and opinion editor Josh Hammer , the magazine acknowledged , “ We entirely failed to anticipate the ways in which the essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weaponized ... .
This op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia .
We apologize.
” Still , the magazine refused to recognize what was obvious—that the op-ed was intended to spark questions about the eligibility of a Black woman running for high office .
Newsweek ’ s editors merely feigned horror that the op-ed was taken in the only possible way it could have been taken .
The publication of Eastman ’ s op-ed says a great deal about the state of Newsweek ’ s opinion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for right-wing nonsense .
But it also points to a larger crisis in journalism itself : The rise of the zombie publication , whose former legitimacy is used to launder extreme and conspiratorial ideas .
Even by the volatile standards of journalism in the twenty-first century , Newsweek ’ s recent problems are extraordinary .
There are the usual issues : a sharp decline in print subscribers , Google and Facebook , the difficulty of running a mass-market general interest news magazine in an age of hyperpartisanship .
But Newsweek has also been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s office ( a former owner and chief executive pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in February ) and has been accused of deep ties to a shadowy Christian cult , amid many other scandals .

These controversies hollowed out Newsweek’s staff and its brand. Its clickbait-heavy approach, aimed at gaming search engines, has declined since it was spun off from parent company IBT Media in 2018. But it remains a publication that privileges the interests of Google over those of its hypothetical readers. While other publications are abandoning the “scale” model pioneered by BuzzFeed and others in favor of building a loyal audience and raking in subscriptions, Newsweek is something of a throwback. It has attempted to rebuild some of its credibility post-IBT by partnering with the Poynter Institute, but it still has a distinctly seamy vibe. Earlier this month, the magazine’s cover story was a glowing profile of Jared Kushner of all people, which dropped right before a raft of more critical coverage, including the revelation that the president’s son-in-law had secretly met with potential spoiler candidate Kanye West.
Meanwhile, the opinion section is brimming with right-wing columnists, who range from the barely credible to the foaming at the mouth. Farage and Gingrich are regulars, as is Alan Dershowitz. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf took to Newsweek to attack the American Civil Liberties Union for standing up for peaceful protesters. Hammer, the op-ed editor, has a resume that is littered with stints in right-wing politics and advocacy organizations: He has worked for Ted Cruz, the Federalist Society, and the Claremont Institute as well as Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. (Shapiro, last seen humiliating himself and his wife on Twitter, regularly contributed op-eds to Newsweek until February of last year.)
Amid a larger reckoning about the role of journalism in legitimizing anti-democratic ideas, Newsweek had largely stayed out of notice until Eastman’s op-ed. Newsweek claims that it is just asking questions, but its faux innocence is undercut by Hammer’s credentials and the ideological tilt of most of its contributors. Newsweek, the magazine you once read at the dentist, is like a batshit crazy version of the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal.


newrepublic--2020-08-18--Sanders Has Become Biden’s Happy Warrior

The first night of the Democratic National PowerPoint Presentation went off without a major technical hitch .
But partly owing to the uncanny nature of this virtual non-event , much of it had a very strange energy .
It was highly reminiscent of the “ Welcome to America ” videos that play at customs when you return to the United States from abroad and steel yourself for interrogation by a border patrol agent : Overly saccharine , riven with a hollow and superficial sort of patriotism , simultaneously overproduced and deeply unimpressive .
But it was an optimistic tone that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden ’ s rhetoric during the primary campaign , which have persisted even into the terror of the pandemic .
For the showrunners behind this Zoom Convention , it is a tricky line to walk : Address the pandemic , the 170,000 dead and the chaos unfolding , without undercutting Biden ’ s Good Vibes Only approach .
It felt as if the party wanted the viewer to be mad , but not too mad .
This led to some occasions of tonal whiplash .
An hour in , there was a segment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Covid-19 .
Such remembrances have been conspicuously absent from our civic life ; it was the first moment of the proceedings that truly nailed the gravity of what has happened .
But this only made the strained optimism of the rest of the evening all the more jarring .
Where was the anger for these dead an hour before ?
Why wasn ’ t anyone shouting ?
Even the man we ’ ve come to rely on to yell about the state of things was somewhat subdued .
After an array of Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ address—there ’ s that whiplash again—from his home in Vermont .
Earlier in the day , The New York Times previewed Sanders ’ moment in the spotlight as a kind of “ victory speech , ” since “ so many within the party have embraced at least the spirit of his ideas.
” The speech certainly could have been read as a kind of victory lap , a reminder of the policy areas in which his campaign and movement has pushed the Democratic Party to the left ; it ’ s doubtful that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minimum wage if Sanders hadn ’ t run on it in 2016 , for example .
Sanders was also the first speaker of the night to mention the $ 600 in extra unemployment benefits that Democrats fought to win in the CARES Act , and which expired at the end of July .
You could see what the Times meant about the moment being a “ victory speech ” in the methodical way Sanders outlined some of the bolder ideas that Biden has promised to embrace .
This was the responsibility that was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the other speakers who offered their testimonials in the hundred or so minutes that preceded his appearance offered platitudes and attitude , Sanders wove a dense discussion of policy into his critique of the Trump presidency .
It was the necessary bridge between the last two contenders standing at the end of the primary .
Voters who picked Biden didn ’ t do so because they liked his policies better than everyone else ’ s ; they did so because they believed him to be the safe choice .
Sanders supporters , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up for a movement with an intuitive , broad message ; it was a diagnosis of a deep rot in American society and , at last , the promise of an adequate cure .
This was a moment that made sense , politically : To reconcile the two camps , Sanders needed to offer a convincing case that Biden understood the stakes and the scope of what needs to be done to bring America back from this horrific crisis .
But even in Sanders ’ s short speech , you could also see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mentioned that Biden would lower the Medicare age from 65 to 60 , but omitted mention of Biden ’ s ramshackle public option plan .
He talked about Biden ’ s promise to tackle climate change—but not to pass a Green New Deal .
More to the point , however , the promise of a just recovery is meaningless without an understanding that the backslapping , across-the-aisle dealmaking these two senators are so familiar with will not be sufficient to the task of extricating the country from this dreadful situation , a fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not to grasp .
The fact that the restoration of the $ 600 unemployment benefit that ’ s such an urgent need in this crisis was only mentioned in passing by Sanders , on a night in which Democrats very consciously attempted to put ordinary Americans at the center of the convention , speaks to the lack of urgency the rest of the party feels about preserving one of the biggest policy wins the party has had in years .

You could see what the Times meant about the moment being a “victory speech” in the methodical way Sanders outlined some of the bolder ideas that Biden has promised to embrace. This was the responsibility that was entrusted to Sanders alone. Where most of the other speakers who offered their testimonials in the hundred or so minutes that preceded his appearance offered platitudes and attitude, Sanders wove a dense discussion of policy into his critique of the Trump presidency. It was the necessary bridge between the last two contenders standing at the end of the primary. Voters who picked Biden didn’t do so because they liked his policies better than everyone else’s; they did so because they believed him to be the safe choice. Sanders supporters, on the other hand, were signed up for a movement with an intuitive, broad message; it was a diagnosis of a deep rot in American society and, at last, the promise of an adequate cure. This was a moment that made sense, politically: To reconcile the two camps, Sanders needed to offer a convincing case that Biden understood the stakes and the scope of what needs to be done to bring America back from this horrific crisis.
But even in Sanders’s short speech, you could also see the limits of this strategy. Sanders mentioned that Biden would lower the Medicare age from 65 to 60, but omitted mention of Biden’s ramshackle public option plan. He talked about Biden’s promise to tackle climate change—but not to pass a Green New Deal. More to the point, however, the promise of a just recovery is meaningless without an understanding that the backslapping, across-the-aisle dealmaking these two senators are so familiar with will not be sufficient to the task of extricating the country from this dreadful situation, a fact that Biden and his advisers often seem not to grasp. The fact that the restoration of the $600 unemployment benefit that’s such an urgent need in this crisis was only mentioned in passing by Sanders, on a night in which Democrats very consciously attempted to put ordinary Americans at the center of the convention, speaks to the lack of urgency the rest of the party feels about preserving one of the biggest policy wins the party has had in years.


newrepublic--2020-08-19--Madison Cawthorn Is the Future of the Republican Party

In a June primary , a photogenic Zoomer Republican named Madison Cawthorn beat a candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump to fill the North Carolina House formerly occupied by seat of his chief of staff , Mark Meadows .
In the breathless aftermath , CNN ran a story introducing the “ political newcomer ” as “ a staunch conservative ” who was “ partially paralyzed in a 2014 car accident ” and who “ is an owner of a real estate investment company and a motivational speaker.
” NPR described his profession , succinctly , as “ real estate investor.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ pro-Trump , pro-life and pro-Second Amendment ’ and emphasized his family ’ s deep roots in the state.
” None of that is particularly notable ; the same could be said of any “ normal ” Republican .
The unusual , and hence newsworthy , thing about Cawthorn was his youth : If elected ( the seat is Republican-leaning ) , he will be the youngest member of Congress by some years .
Without rendering judgment on his politics—which may have been considered extreme in another era , but are now coded as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the politics of the current regime—outlets like CNN and NPR treated the novelty of his youth as an interesting and laudatory thing .
He was one of the political media ’ s favorite animals : a Rising Star .
Of course , to be a 24-year-old fervid Donald Trump supporter , as Cawthorn proudly claims to be , is itself highly unusual .
( “ I support our great president , ” he said in a statement clarifying that he didn ’ t believe his upset victory was a repudiation of Trump .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters between the ages of 18 and 29 plan to vote for Donald Trump in November , according to Pew .
Even that number overstates his true support among young people : A mere 14 percent of Americans between the ages 18 and 29 “ very strongly approve ” of his performance as president ; 59 percent “ very strongly disapprove.
” And yet , until recently , no one had bothered to ask how Cawthorn came to love Donald Trump , the president so many of his peers and contemporaries despise .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ days after he won his primary , Cawthorn just seemed to love tradition , the Second Amendment , and the armed forces , which he nearly joined before his car accident .

In 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which James Alex Fields Jr., a young neo-Nazi, killed a left-wing anti-racism activist, Heather Heyer, I wrote that the rally amounted to a “preview of the future of the Republican Party.”
I argued, based in part on the number of (identified) College Republicans in attendance at the rally, that the near complete collapse of support for conservatism and the Republican Party among younger generations would have the perverse effect of making the future leadership of the conservative movement even more extreme.
Even if the Republican Party loses seats in the coming years, it will still win plenty of elections, locally and often nationally. As Adam Kotsko once wrote, the United States is in many respects “a variant on the party-state form” but with “two parties instead of just one.” It is not simply that our political, legal, and constitutional institutions inexorably gave rise to a two-party system while multiparty democracy flourished elsewhere; due to how ballot access is controlled, the rules essentially require that these two specific parties run everything. We are stuck with a Republican Party for the foreseeable future. And the Republican Party, right now, is recruiting its future leaders from a pool of people attracted to the furthest fringes of far-right thought simply because those are the only young people currently interested in being associated with organized Republican Party politics under Donald Trump.


newrepublic--2020-08-19--The Everyday Inspiration for Anna Karenina

At the start of 1873 , Leo Tolstoy was fresh from the success of War and Peace and aware that the world was expecting an equally monumental work of art , something that would match that book ( he refused to call it a novel ) in historical scope and philosophic profundity .
As such , he was consumed with writing a primer to teach Russian children the alphabet .
He was sure it would be his legacy .
“ My proud hopes are these , ” he wrote to a friend , “ that two generations of all Russian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to those of the peasants , will learn using only this primer , and they will get their first poetic impressions from it , and that , having written this primer , it will be possible for me to die peacefully.
” Perhaps it was this obsession with letters , the beauty of their shape and the world of possibilities encoded in each one , that can explain the curious second proposal scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina ( she rejected his first ) in which the two communicate using just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to say .
“ He wrote the initial letters , w , y , a , m , t , c , b , d , t , m , n , o , t , ” and Kitty understands intuitively that Levin is asking her .
“ When you answered me , ‘ that can not be , ’ did you mean never or then ?
” Only t , only “ then ” it turns out , to Levin ’ s great happiness .
In Creating Anna Karenina , Robert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tolstoy ’ s work on the alphabet book and this scene from the novel , but it is the type of parallelism between the great Russian author ’ s life and art that interests him .
A professor of English at the City University of New York ( Kingsborough ) , Blaisdell learned Russian in order to read the Anna Karenina novel in the original ( after having first reread the novel in the English translation upwards of 20 times ) .
The work of a Tolstoy superfan rather than a Tolstoy scholar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an informal and chatty effort to understand what Tolstoy was up to in the four years he spent composing the novel .
As it turns out , Blaisdell tells us , he was drinking copious amounts of “ koumiss ” ( fermented mare ’ s milk ) to stave off tuberculosis , penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform , learning Ancient Greek with the help of a priest , and trying to find a governess to tend to his growing family .
The latter situation had gotten particularly desperate ; Tolstoy wrote to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nationality is of no matter : German , French , English , Russian—as long as it ’ s European and Christian .
Salary—everything I can give.
” Blaisdell wonders if Tolstoy had this stress in mind when he decided to open Anna Karenina with the story of a house torn to pieces by a governess ’ s dismissal ( though of course in the novel it happens under more adulterous circumstances ) .
It is a big stretch , and Blaisdell knows as much , but his book is more of a playful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at the time of the novel ’ s composition , Creating Anna Karenina asks if one of the world ’ s greatest novels was in fact just as much a product of everyday minutia—like who stops by for a visit with what kind of gossip to tell—as it was the culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire .
The result is a work in many ways more instructive about the creative process than about Anna Karenina specifically , a consideration of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ side projects resulted in Tolstoy writing one of the world ’ s greatest novels .
The inspiration behind the character of Anna Karenina is widely considered to be a 37-year-old woman named Anna Stepanova , who worked as a housekeeper for one of Tolstoy ’ s neighbors .
She and her husband regularly argued about his flirtations with governesses .
Finally , she became so consumed with jealousy that she threw herself under a train but not before sending off a letter addressed to her husband , which reportedly read , “ You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happy with her if murderers can be happy .
If you want to see me , you can view my body on the rails of Yasenki.
” As the family knew the woman well , Tolstoy personally went to observe the autopsy ; his wife wrote to a friend that he “ was terribly shaken .
He had known Anna Stepanovna as a tall , stout woman , Russian in face and character , a brunette with grey eyes , not beautiful but attractive.
” The episode happened in 1872 , just a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ character of Anna Karenina , who likewise had gray eyes .

In March of 1873, Tolstoy told his wife, Sophia, that he had written a page-and-a-half and was “pleased with it.” She assumed he was referring to the major book he had been planning to write about Peter the Great, a fitting historical epic to follow War and Peace. Before this revelation, Tolstoy had been struggling greatly to write. “My work is not moving” he wrote his friend, the poet Afanasy Fet. To another, he complained, “Everything has been arranged so as to distract me: acquaintances, hunting, a court session in October with me as a juryman, and then the painter,” the latter referring to the portrait artist who had been sent to Tolstoy’s estate to paint him on behalf of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
There was a larger epidemic of suicides sweeping the country, a symptom of a deeper, collective depression rather than just the result of a single love affair gone awry.
The artist, Blaisdell writes, did however prove useful in offering some gossip from the capital. Anna Suvorina, the wife of a prominent publicist, was shot to death in a hotel in Saint Petersburg by a young man who had been in love with her. After killing Suvorina, the young man took his own life. The press was transfixed by the story as it combined society gossip with a crime of passion, and it all unfolded in one of the capital’s glitziest hotels. Tolstoy, too, was fascinated when he heard about it from the portraitist and asked a friend to send him “any details of the murder.” Blaisdell sees the episode as an example of Tolstoy’s growing fascination with suicide: Tolstoy’s editor, Mikhail Katkov, soon afterward lost a brother to suicide, and in his conversion memoir, A Confession (1881), Tolstoy admitted that he too had contemplated ending his own life around this time. Linking these stories with Anna’s suicide (and her lover Vronsky’s attempt to do so), Blaisdell identifies a larger epidemic of suicides that was sweeping the country, a symptom of a deeper, collective depression rather than just the result of a single love affair gone awry. Indeed, the failures of Tsar Alexander II’s reforms to lead to meaningful change had blanketed Russian society of the 1870s with a sense of disorientation and dread. In the next decade, Alexander II would die at the hands of a suicide bomber.
Blaisdell threads these biographical resonances throughout Creating Anna Karenina, presenting a view of Tolstoy’s life that makes the writing of Anna Karenina feel almost inevitable. As well as the crimes of passion that seem to abound in Tolstoy’s social circle, there is also the summer he spends on the Russian steppe witnessing firsthand the poor implementation of the government’s agrarian reforms. Such experiences, scholars agree, no doubt played a role in his fashioning of the character of Konstantin Levin, who functions in the novel as a kind of mirror of Tolstoy, a wealthy landowner who tries to settle his crisis of faith by laboring alongside peasants in the fields.


newrepublic--2020-08-19--The Obvious Futility of One-Time “Stimulus” Checks

Back in March , or many lifetimes ago , Congress passed the Cares Act , which included a provision to send out one-time direct payments to people making less than $ 99,000 a year .
This week , a team of university economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research , or NBER , published a working paper on how they spent it .
According to the NBER , 15 percent of the polled stimulus recipients said that they had spent , or planned to spend , the entirety of the funds ; 33 percent responded that they put the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said they used the money to pay off debts .
The $ 1,200 checks went out in full to people making up to $ 75,000 if they were eligible for the program .
( Undocumented immigrants were locked out of the stimulus , as one example . )
That amount was reduced by $ 5 for every $ 100 an individual made above that threshold , ultimately capping at people earning $ 99,000 .
The income gradations here were meaningful : Researchers found that lower-income households were “ significantly more likely to spend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same went for households facing “ liquidity constraints.
” In essence , people who went into the pandemic with very little didn ’ t need the stimulus checks to become responsible consumers again ; they needed them to live .
Others saved or paid down debts .
But the idea behind the checks was to stimulate , right ?
That as the pandemic stalled economic activity , the one-time issuance of funds was meant to go into the pockets of working- and middle-class people so that they could then turn around and spend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But that ’ s a lot of responsibility to put on someone ordering to-go from Applebee ’ s .
The missing piece in this equation was clear from the start : With the economy effectively shut down , state and local governments would suffer massive budget shortfalls without immediate intervention by the federal government , which , unlike those governments , has the power to literally print money and take on debt .
( Many states have constitutions or state laws that explicitly prohibit their legislatures from passing an imbalanced budget .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ The American Prospect in July , the $ 150 billion in Cares Act funding earmarked for tribal and state governments was designated to only be spent on coronavirus-related efforts , prompting many cash-strapped states to prematurely lift pandemic restrictions .
“ While most developed countries waited until their average case counts were quite low before letting people back into the world , states were pressured into salvaging their economies and bringing in some semblance of revenue by throwing open the doors , ” Dayen wrote .
This backfired horrendously .
Not only were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but cities and towns , deprived of crucial tax dollars that keep public services up and running , were also soon up their neck in positive cases .

The federal government still has yet to correct this oversight, so the situation remains dire. Without the federal government’s assistance, many localities will soon be forced to slash their budgets, focusing most of their cuts on vital public services. (State and city leadership have a choice in how they distribute this kind of economic pain but routinely opt to leave their police budgets untouched as they cut or defund more crucial programs.) In New Orleans, the library system’s funding is reportedly set to be cut in half come 2021. New York City is likely going to lay off close to 22,000 city government employees. (Meanwhile, calls to equitably tax the rich continue to be stiff-armed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who’s refocused his efforts on inking a book deal.) The NBER report took time to address the local government underfunding issue in its conclusion, noting that one of the available and potentially necessary strategies will be for Congress to repeat the actions undertaken by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in which the federal government transferred cash to local and state governments to help them avoid “cutting the services that they provide in the midst of crisis.”
The only discernible explanation for why America is destined for its second major economic stall-out in 12 years is the same one that could be used for the 2008 financial crisis: federal incompetence and outright apathy. Being a worker in America means constantly balancing on a tightrope above economic doom, just waiting for a gust to send you into the abyss. Entering the pandemic, millions of Americans were already teetering. Student debt was a massive, trillion-dollar weight pressing against the chests of tens of millions of people. Rising rental and homeownership costs were fueling housing insecurity. Medical bankruptcy was so common that a cottage industry of crowdsourcing companies quickly became just another normal part of life. The ability to simply be had already been whittled down after years of austerity politics and stagnant wages bled workers dry; the coronavirus simply served as the last swing of the ax. Is it any wonder that the stimulus money failed to stimulate anything?


newrepublic--2020-08-19--The Lazy Liberalism of Instagram Slideshows

If you logged onto Instagram in the days that immediately followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin , you might have found the platform to be unrecognizable .
Rather than the typical array of photos , you likely encountered an eruption of highly stylized content that didn ’ t and still doesn ’ t have a name but which we shall term “ Instagraphics ” —slideshow-style infographics with titles such as “ Transformative Justice 101 , ” “ How to Talk to Your Racist Family Member Right Now , ” and “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use Instagram , you likely saw a similar phenomenon in the weeks that followed Floyd ’ s death as millions took to the streets in every city nationwide .
Months later , we are now on the other side of that moment of eruption , and while a Black Lives Matter protest of some sort still happens in most major cities every weekend , a point of somewhat altered homeostasis in our daily lives has been reached .
So too has Instagram settled back into familiar patterns ; your favorite celebrities , influencers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family are posting “ regular ” photos again—at least , as regular as they ever got during the pandemic .
But the Instagraphics haven ’ t gone away .
Rather , they ’ ve stuck around , and in doing so , they have diversified from posts specifically related to policing and systemic racism to posts touching on every social justice-related topic imaginable .
We are living , it seems , in the era of the Instagraphic .
But who is the Instagraphic for ?
From style alone , one might infer that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these graphics is white liberals who can be counted on to react positively to social justice-oriented content so long as it is presented in an anodyne , non-threatening way .
The content itself tends to make this explicit ; posts are often addressed directly to white audiences in their titles .
It seems that the imagined audience for Instagraphics is somewhat similar to that of the anti-racist reading list : sympathetic but overwhelmed white people who would like to be told , in the most seamlessly optimized way , how to properly process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ especially troubling potential at a moment when liberal co-option of the newly mainstreamed abolitionist discourse is in full force .
As the public focus on police brutality has shifted into a focus on racism more generally , the ideological range of the discourse has broadened : liberals , for the most part , are unwilling to countenance literal police abolition , so their focus is drawn instead to concepts like intersectionality and implicit bias , which , while intellectually stimulating , are less radical from a political standpoint .
Instagraphics provide an endless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on these subjects while rarely pushing beyond the political boundaries of the liberal worldview .
Posting large blocks of text in slideshow format is pretty antithetical to the way that Instagram has been popularly used up to this point .
When first released for the iPhone in 2010 , Instagram was specifically intended for photos taken on cellphone cameras .
The app ’ s intuitive photo editing capabilities and ready-to-go filters were novel for a mobile app at the time , and they elevated the quality of early iPhone camera photos with some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Instagram ’ s inception , steered users toward curating a grid of artsy slices of life—kind of like the very first image posted to the platform in 2010 .

If you logged onto Instagram in the days that immediately followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, you might have found the platform to be unrecognizable. Rather than the typical array of photos, you likely encountered an eruption of highly stylized content that didn’t and still doesn’t have a name but which we shall term “Instagraphics”—slideshow-style infographics with titles such as “Transformative Justice 101,” “How to Talk to Your Racist Family Member Right Now,” and “What is Abolition?” If you use Instagram, you likely saw a similar phenomenon in the weeks that followed Floyd’s death as millions took to the streets in every city nationwide.
Months later, we are now on the other side of that moment of eruption, and while a Black Lives Matter protest of some sort still happens in most major cities every weekend, a point of somewhat altered homeostasis in our daily lives has been reached. So too has Instagram settled back into familiar patterns; your favorite celebrities, influencers, brands, and perhaps friends and family are posting “regular” photos again—at least, as regular as they ever got during the pandemic. But the Instagraphics haven’t gone away. Rather, they’ve stuck around, and in doing so, they have diversified from posts specifically related to policing and systemic racism to posts touching on every social justice-related topic imaginable. We are living, it seems, in the era of the Instagraphic.


newrepublic--2020-08-19--The Country’s Most Important Climate Election Is Happening in Texas

You probably haven ’ t heard of this year ’ s most important election for American climate policy .
If you have , you probably didn ’ t realize what it was about .
The Texas Railroad Commission , which will replace one of its three commissioners this year , has nothing to do with railroads .
The 130-year-old regulatory body once worked with other countries to control the world ’ s oil markets .
While it retains legal jurisdiction today over the shale boom that has seen record amounts of oil gush from West Texas , the commission has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades and let oil companies self-regulate .
Amid pandemic-induced turmoil in the industry , a Democratic candidate for the body hopes to reclaim that authority , slowing the bleed both of drillers ’ fortunes and the methane they ’ re pouring into the atmosphere .
If 30-year energy industry veteran Chrysta Castañeda wins a seat on the Commission in November , it ’ ll mark the first time a Democrat has won statewide elected office in Texas since 1994 and the first time a Democrat has served on the Texas Railroad Commission ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ * Her opponent , Jim Wright , won an upset victory in the Republican primary against sitting commissioner Ryan Sitton , who currently serves alongside fellow Republicans Christi Craddick and Wayne Christian .
But recent weeks haven ’ t been kind to Wright , who found himself at the center of a scandal when the Houston Chronicle reported he violated Railroad Commission rules more than 200 times as the owner of Dewitt Recyclable Products .
Castañeda , who lives in Dallas and formerly worked as the lawyer for the oil and gas magnate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign on the issue of natural gas flaring .
The practice—of burning off unwanted natural gas at the site where it ’ s extracted—is happening more now than at any point since the 1950s , releasing enormous amounts of methane , a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide and responsible for a quarter of all human-caused warming since 2000 .
The Trump administration ’ s rollback of Obama-era methane rules last week could release 850,000 tonnes of it into the atmosphere by 2030 , according to the Environmental Protection Agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could be two to three times that .
While drillers are forbidden from flaring after their first 10 days of operations , a report last year found that the sitting commissioners issued exemptions for drillers that allowed $ 750 million worth of natural gas to be burned off through flaring in a single year .
While flaring decreased amid Covid-19 production slowdowns , Rystad Energy found that flaring in the Permian Basin reached a high of nearly 900 million cubic feet of natural gas per day in the third quarter of 2019 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ both the extraordinary environmental cost and the waste .
“ Texans deserve someone who will enforce the law and work for all of us , ” she said in a video announcing her candidacy last October .
“ Let ’ s stop wasting energy.
” It ’ s a throwback to the Commission ’ s earlier days .
The RRC all but ended the practice of flaring when it became a major problem after World War II .
The RRC ’ s most powerful tool for regulation , flaring included , is known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oil can be produced at individual wellheads .
First developed in 1919 , the Commission ’ s prorating system wasn ’ t unlike New Deal-era agricultural reforms intended to conserve natural resources—be that soil or oil—to keep them economically productive for years to come .
After the discovery of the East Texas Oilfield in 1930 , landowners eager to turn a profit began a drilling frenzy , flooding an already oversupplied market at the depths of the Great Depression .
When landowners ignored a proration order in April 1931 , the governor of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pry them from the wells and raise fuel prices .
As Texas moved to regulate its own oil , it not only stabilized production in the Lone Star State but worked with the British and U.S.-owned Seven Sisters oil companies to create a global cartel system for coordinating oil production , which would serve as a model for OPEC ’ s formation in 1960 .

Castañeda disagrees. “You need the CDC when you have a pandemic, you need to know how to do proration controls when you have this incredible oversupply of oil,” she told me, calling Christian’s position on the matter “egregious.” The RRC, she said, stopped doing regular exercises gaming out scenarios for handling oversupply crises over a decade ago. “You ought to at least know how to do it and be running the planning exercises. About half the industry asked for proration controls,” she estimated, “and had everybody produced a little less perhaps we would not have the significant job losses we’re looking at now.”
Energy is a touchy subject in Texas, particularly for a Democrat looking to win statewide office at a time when debate over rising temperatures and fuel production has turned into a culture war. “Climate change is real and the industry acknowledges it’s real, and it is contributed to by the production of fossil fuels,” Castañeda said. “Even in the Permian they know that’s true. The real challenge in Texas is the fact that twenty percent of our state budget is funded by oil and gas extraction taxes and royalties, and a huge segment of our economy and the jobs associated with it are attached to this particular industry.”
Accordingly, Castañeda thinks oil and gas has a big role to play in the nation’s energy mix for years to come—a view out of step with many progressive members of her party. She sees the need for a transition off of fossil fuels in the coming decades, “but it also needs to be a thoughtful transition. People in the industry have got to have a place to go, and we have got to remediate the infrastructure as we transition from fossil fuels to cleaner greener energy.”


newrepublic--2020-08-19--QAnon Is Using the Anti-Trafficking Movement’s Conspiracy Playbook

Operation Underground Railroad ( OUR ) , a hard-charging sex trafficking “ rescue ” group with conservative roots , doesn ’ t just accept donations to fund its multimillion-dollar mission ; it also lets donors in on the action .
OUR is fueled by a hybrid fundraising and branding model that has—through six years of YouTube videos , hidden cameras rolling—promised results .
“ These young victims are preparing to be sold for sex , ” an early video claims .
We see them in a living room as men with long guns and body armor flood in , forcing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ operations ” became more elaborate looking over time as the group gained prominence and funding : More “ girls ” are “ freed ” by more “ strike teams ” with more gear and weapons .
It ’ s never clear what happens to the girls or what crimes are committed .
“ I believe OUR exists to show that there is a fight against evil , ” an “ ops training ” video begins .
Close to one million accounts follow OUR as well as its founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these videos alongside smiling photos of his large Mormon family , his famous friends Glenn Beck and Tony Robbins , and fundraising appeals .
The message OUR sends about itself is clear : Other organizations may be content with advocacy , but they go to where the children are .
“ It is time for private citizens and organizations to rise up and help , ” the website says .
“ It is our duty as a free and blessed people.
” After sifting through the internet for evidence of child sex trafficking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take his hunt offline .
So he drove several hours to a restaurant in Washington , D.C. , recording a video along the way .
He believed he was on his way to rescue children from sex traffickers , but when he entered the establishment , carrying a rifle , he found none of the abuse he ’ d been promised .
The video would be played in court at his sentencing—the first criminal conviction connected to Pizzagate .
Along with its later incarnation QAnon , these multi-layered conspiracy theories are informed by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the right of shadowy networks of pedophiles , protected by the corrupt , which only the righteous can root out .
That ’ s well-accepted and , at least outside the White House , commonly derided for the terrifying , occult fantasy that it is .
But less acknowledged is how these moral panics helped just as much to drive groups like OUR when they take up guns as vigilantes to take down traffickers while documenting their exploits for an online audience invited to participate by sharing and donating .
QAnon has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Facebook counts more than 3 million members and followers of QAnon groups , and reporting by The Guardian suggests that number is growing .
As they have grown in both number and clout , I have found myself asking : Who is influencing who ?
These two groups are barely comparable—one a registered charity with a staff and an IRS paper trail , one an ever-shifting collection of people drawn to the postings of an anonymous message board user .
Yet both now operate in the same chaotic space , swimming in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which for two decades have imagined sex trafficking as an omnipresent danger that no one can see and no one is talking about—except for them .
Seven years ago , as OUR tells its origins story , Tim Ballard left his job as an agent in the Department of Homeland Security to launch a group where he could do the same work , unbound by the government .
When I met him at a junket in lower Manhattan five years ago , he implored us assembled members of the media to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” telling the stories of the children Ballard and his undercover operatives say they liberated from child sex trafficking .
It is very modern : the abolitionists he styles himself after didn ’ t have 501c3s .
In 2019 , “ Operation Underground Railroad Inc. ” brought in more than $ 22 million , and he served as a White House anti-trafficking advisor appointed by President Trump .
Flourishing as they are in the Trump era , it is hard to say if OUR has gained respectability despite their vigilantism or because of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contrast , is bound together by a conspiracy theory involving shadowy networks of child sex traffickers from the Democratic Party to Hollywood .
They believe a violent crackdown is coming , and they will play some role .
QAnon Facebook groups , compared to even Ballard and OUR ’ s significant online audience , churn an incredible volume of child sex trafficking content .
Their reach is such that when the president announces an otherwise not newsworthy human trafficking policy , QAnon Facebook groups help propel the news into three of the top @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Media Matters researcher Alex Kaplan , Trump himself has amplified QAnon accounts from his Twitter account at least 200 times .
That has certainly raised their profile .
But QAnon has grown so much of late through successfully seeding their messages out in otherwise basic-seeming anti-child sex trafficking “ awareness ” raising .

Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a hard-charging sex trafficking “rescue” group with conservative roots, doesn’t just accept donations to fund its multimillion-dollar mission; it also lets donors in on the action. OUR is fueled by a hybrid fundraising and branding model that has—through six years of YouTube videos, hidden cameras rolling—promised results. “These young victims are preparing to be sold for sex,” an early video claims. We see them in a living room as men with long guns and body armor flood in, forcing everyone to the floor. These “operations” became more elaborate looking over time as the group gained prominence and funding: More “girls” are “freed” by more “strike teams” with more gear and weapons. It’s never clear what happens to the girls or what crimes are committed. “I believe OUR exists to show that there is a fight against evil,” an “ops training” video begins. Close to one million accounts follow OUR as well as its founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Ballard on Facebook, where he shares these videos alongside smiling photos of his large Mormon family, his famous friends Glenn Beck and Tony Robbins, and fundraising appeals. The message OUR sends about itself is clear: Other organizations may be content with advocacy, but they go to where the children are. “It is time for private citizens and organizations to rise up and help,” the website says. “It is our duty as a free and blessed people.”
After sifting through the internet for evidence of child sex trafficking, another man in 2016 decided to take his hunt offline. So he drove several hours to a restaurant in Washington, D.C., recording a video along the way. He believed he was on his way to rescue children from sex traffickers, but when he entered the establishment, carrying a rifle, he found none of the abuse he’d been promised. The video would be played in court at his sentencing—the first criminal conviction connected to Pizzagate. Along with its later incarnation QAnon, these multi-layered conspiracy theories are informed by age-old fever dreams that tend to coalesce on the right of shadowy networks of pedophiles, protected by the corrupt, which only the righteous can root out. That’s well-accepted and, at least outside the White House, commonly derided for the terrifying, occult fantasy that it is. But less acknowledged is how these moral panics helped just as much to drive groups like OUR when they take up guns as vigilantes to take down traffickers while documenting their exploits for an online audience invited to participate by sharing and donating. QAnon has surpassed OUR’s online following now; Facebook counts more than 3 million members and followers of QAnon groups, and reporting by The Guardian suggests that number is growing. As they have grown in both number and clout, I have found myself asking: Who is influencing who?


newrepublic--2020-08-20--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right to Warn of “Fascism in the United States”

On Tuesday , after television coverage of the Democratic National Convention drew to a close , Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expanded on her 97-second recorded convention message by taking to Instagram .
The firebrand progressive , a favorite target of Republicans and an occasional thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment , had a message to deliver about party unity .
“ Let ’ s keep it real , ” she said : “ We need to win in November.
” Then she dropped an f-bomb : The election , she said , was about “ stopping fascism in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump represents.
” Fascism : Ocasio-Cortez had used a word that other DNC luminaries had avoided during the first two days of the convention .
Is its avoidance justified , or is Ocasio-Cortez right to use this term ?
One reason it remains taboo in the mainstream to label Donald Trump a fascist is that Trump is uniquely American .
It ’ s hard to imagine another culture that could produce the brash New York City mafia don/reality TV celebrity .
Rapper Tupac Shakur famously pointed out Trump ’ s iconic and long-standing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1992 : “ You ’ re taught that in school and in big business if you want to be successful , if you want to be like Trump , it ’ s ‘ Gim me , gim me , gim me , ’ ” Shakur told MTV .
It ’ s therefore quite understandable when some intellectuals push back on the narrative that Trumpism should be viewed in relation to global movements and ideologies like fascism .
We , however , see the idea that Trumpism is uniquely American as another version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trumpism in a global context of far right ethnonationalism—indeed , we would say , in the context of the long history of fascism—is a failure to understand that the United States is not special , not immune from global intellectual currents that affect countries from India to Brazil .
Samuel Moyn , perhaps the most formidable European historian to challenge the term “ fascism ” in the present context , has warned that broader applicability of the concept of fascism—broader , say , than just early to mid-century Europe—entails the “ disquieting possibility @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politics.
” If this line of reasoning is right , Moyn cautions , “ most of modern political history is fascist , latently or openly.
” This is , in fact , our position .
It is rooted in the history of global fascism and its aftermath .

American exceptionalism comes in varieties. On the one hand, there is the view, present across the political spectrum, that our institutions will endure—as Moyn and David Priestland put it in The New York Times in 2017, “There is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.” On this view, America’s institutions are uniquely resilient to the fascist threat. There is also another tendency, often latent, to think that fascism is a grand revolutionary ideology local to European intellectuals capable of such thinking. The U.S., on this account, is almost uniquely incapable of being gripped by anything like it. America’s histories of militarism, imperialism, and racism are rather the result of its unthinking ways, its improvisational pragmatism, and not of any underlying global ideological currents. On the former account, Americans are too good for fascism. On the latter, they are too dumb.
Another error is the wide assumption that some kind of brilliance is required to be a fascist leader. Some historians emphasize the intellectual prowess of fascist dictators to imply that Trump is a simpleton or a moron. In short, this view does not take Trump seriously, especially in terms of the real and present danger his regime poses to democracy and human rights. The fact that federal immigration agents and contractors in unmarked cars are kidnapping activists on the streets or that the November election’s integrity is being openly targeted is not a result of Trump’s idiocy but rather an outcome of fascist tendencies, which his administration’s policies and rhetoric are optimized to reinforce. Whether brilliance or just a capacity to be a skilled mob boss is required to master these tendencies is a matter of debate even in the historical literature on European fascism.
Others argue that Trump is just interested in personal power. This reveals a failure to ask whether it is necessary to personalize fascism in order to adequately describe movements like Trumpism or Bolsonarismo. Such a view unknowingly reproduces the fascist propaganda of the cult of the leader. As every historian of fascism knows, fascism could not have existed without the leader, but the converse is also true: Hitler and Nazism were tied together, and the same applies to Trump and Trumpism.


newrepublic--2020-08-20--A Constitutional Weapon for Biden to Vanquish Trump’s Army of Judges

We are now less than 90 days away from an election that President Donald Trump is openly attempting to steal .
From that vantage , it may seem premature—bordering on presumptuous—for Democrats to start worrying now about what will happen if Joe Biden wins .
But Democrats should worry : Even if voters give Democrats control of Congress and the White House and even if Joe Biden manages to enact the deep reforms needed to stave off economic catastrophe , come to grips with a public health emergency , and begin to root out the rot and corruption in our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ naught .
A conservative federal judiciary , freshly stocked with over 200 right-wing activist Trump judges , lies in wait .
Biden has offered ambitious plans to pursue a Second New Deal if elected .
If he ’ s serious , he needs to plan for the near certainty that John Roberts ’ s Supreme Court will resist in much the same way that a conservative Court undermined Franklin Roosevelt ’ s original version .
Some have recommended court-packing , but there ’ s a better and perfectly constitutional solution that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congress can strip federal courts of their broad power .
The Roberts Court could—and , if left to their own devices , likely will—gin up conservative interpretations of the Constitution for the purpose of killing off as much of the Democratic reform agenda as possible .
There are a number of plausible scenarios .
Imagine first that Democrats respond to America ’ s insane levels of inequality with a wealth tax .
That move might be very popular , considering that millions of Americans have been thrown out of work since March while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 400 billion in wealth .
But the Supreme Court would likely strike this down on the grounds that it fails to satisfy the Constitution ’ s requirement in Article I , section 9 , clause 4 that so-called “ direct ” taxes must be apportioned among the states by population—a standard basically impossible for a wealth tax to meet , as there are so many more rich people per capita in New York than in Mississippi .
Next , imagine that Democrats try to address corporate influence-peddling in our government by enacting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Supreme Court would almost certainly eviscerate that law as well , holding that it violates the risible interpretation of the First Amendment in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in which a conservative 5-4 majority held that corporations ’ campaign expenditures were as fully protected as any other form of political speech .

Republicans have built their recent political strategy around stocking the federal bench with right-wing judges for a reason.
Republicans have built their recent political strategy around stocking the federal bench with right-wing judges for a reason: Through these means, the party can effectively stay in power even if it can’t win elections. And on that last point, the GOP knows that their time is running out, that demographics are inexorably reducing the voting power of the GOP’s coalition of older, less-educated rural and exurban whites. The furious energy with which Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Federalist Society have worked to elevate partisan conservatives to the federal bench—by far the most consequential achievement of Trump’s presidency—is all about frustrating the ability of the Democrats to do much with power once they win it back.
This is why the Democrats need to be thinking ahead about how to tame the conservative Supreme Court. Recent proposals have focused mostly on shifting the Court’s composition through court-packing and the introduction of judicial term limits. But both of those strategies raise concerns. Court-packing—that is, creating more seats on the Supreme Court and filling them with liberal jurists—is unabashedly partisan and certain to spark enormous opposition. But even if Democrats manage to create new seats and fill them, court-packing would only reinforce the Court’s role as a political actor, which is not what anyone should want.
Limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices might be the ideal solution. It would, however, require a constitutional amendment, though there have been creative efforts to work around that by suggesting that justices get rotated off the Supreme Court after a term of years and onto one of the lower federal courts. But there is a more serious problem with term limits: They may, counterintuitively, deepen courts’ politicization by casting even more explicitly the right to make Supreme Court appointments as a prize awarded for electoral success.


newrepublic--2020-08-20--“This Is a Paradise, but a Temporary One”

Hurricane Dorian slammed into Grand Bahama island on September 1 , 2019 .
The storm ’ s 200 mph winds and torrential rains stalled over the island for more than 40 hours as water levels rose 18 to 23 feet above normal .
70 people lost their lives , and property damages were estimated at about $ 8.28 billion .
As the president and visual producer of an online news site , Dave Mackey recorded the Category 5 hurricane as it pounded his home on Grand Bahama , battering trees and houses and tossing shipping containers as though they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house was raging like an ocean , ” he said .
He wasn ’ t sure he and his wife would make it out alive .
Mackey had experienced and survived two hurricanes before—Jeanne , which hit the island in 1998 , and Frances , which hit in 2004 .
“ At that time , I lived in a beachside community , and left my house to stay with friends , ” Mackey said .
This time , “ I chose to stay .
I videotaped the hurricane and posted updates online and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home to withstand extreme weather conditions with hurricane-resistant windows and doors .
“ The house is 20 feet up from the water level and it is built on 41 special pilings—heavy stakes to support the foundation instead of a concrete foundation that can crack during the flooding , ” he said .
Across the canal , Mackey ’ s neighbors weren ’ t as lucky .
They lived in a one-story house , which stood only five feet above water level—a new minimum standard set by the government to protect buildings from the @ @ @ @

“We had agreed to use walkie-talkies to communicate during the storm,” Mackey said. Eventually, the devices failed. “Last time I talked to them—the parents, their daughter, and five dogs had climbed onto their kitchen counter to escape the rising waters inside their house.”
Mackey saw the waters pull away his neighbors’ wall. Part of their roof ripped off, too. “In my panic, I thought they were gone, too,” he said. He didn’t know it, but the neighbors had managed to get out. “This happened just before the stormwater rose up to 20 feet and isolated our area from the bridge, which is the only way to get out from here.”
Once the waters swamped the bridge, Mackey was stranded in his house as the storm hovered over the island for three more days. “At one point, I saw the water only two steps away from our front door,” he said. “I knew that the high tide would come around 11 p.m. I kept paying attention to the water. Hours went by, the waves kept coming in, and finally, they started to recede. Only then I felt comfortable enough to go to bed.”


newrepublic--2020-08-20--A Night of Magical Thinking at the Democratic Convention

Joe Biden ’ s case for the presidency is not hard to understand—it may very well be the least complicated in modern American political history .
He is not Donald Trump .
He is , by contrast , a thinking , feeling person who engages with and cares very deeply about people who are not Joe Biden .
A vote for Biden is a vote to stop a blood tide of madness and pandemic .
As slogans go , “ Build Back Better ” is wanting , even by the abysmal standards of presidential politics , but here ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
What really matters is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump .
That ’ s a taut summary of the foundational ideas upon which the Democratic National Convention has been built .
Biden , by virtue of not being Donald Trump , can get us out of the myriad crises that have enveloped the country over the past four years .
Biden is the proud leader of a big tent party , so big that it contains many people with whom Trump would not associate , or would actively demonize .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidential candidate with a long career in the Senate finds that those decades of experience are a weakness , a litany of choices and compromises ably weaponized against the would-be president .
But for a not-Trump , like Biden , it ’ s a strength .
Ol ’ Joe !
He knows how to grease the wheels of government to get things done .
And hey , Republicans like him !
John McCain was his friend .
The first two nights of the DNC were aimed , more often than not , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Donald Trump in order to convince them that Biden was a safe choice , a throwback to an earlier kind of Democratic Party , and that there was even a place in his big tent for them .
Republicans John Kasich , Colin Powell , Christine Todd Whitman , Cindy McCain , Meg Whitman launched a full court press aimed at pushing those dozens of Republican fence-sitters out there in America toward Biden .
“ I ’ m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn ’ t imagine crossing over to support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn sharp left and leave them behind , ” Kasich said , channeling Ralph Macchio by standing at a literal crossroads .
“ I don ’ t believe that , because I know the measure of the man.
” Kasich was vouching for Biden : He ’ s not like other Democrats .
On the third night of the DNC , the party finally turned toward those other Democrats .
Its opening segments focused on issues that trouble the heart of the Democratic base , such as gun violence , climate change , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be melodramatic and emotionally searing .
The underlying message of these segments and speeches blended with the ideas of the first two nights : Biden can hold this coalition together while delivering big , necessary change and solving the problems that have burned into our collective memory , and which Congress has failed to adequately address for decades .
Despite how it ’ s often been characterized during the DNC , however , success is hardly a fait accompli .
Mitch McConnell and congressional Republicans will assuredly work to stymie any and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration ; it is almost certain that the federal bench Trump has assembled will work to thwart a Democratic president ’ s efforts .
In a convention organized around the dangers of re-electing Donald Trump , there was little mention of the radicalism of the Republican Party or the impeachment of their standard-bearer .
These are glaring omissions .

And this magical thinking has crept into Biden’s pitch to voters. It is, to some extent, hard-wired into the back-slapping dealmaker’s DNA. Last year, Biden proclaimed that the world would “see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends” if he were elected president, that they’d be transformed into felicitous partners in a stately debate. It was a shocking notion coming from someone who had served as Barack Obama’s vice president, where he witnessed the extraordinary obstinacy of Republicans firsthand.
Biden and his fellow Democrats are, to their credit, clear-eyed about the challenges they would inherit at the end of a Trump presidency. The candidate has recently been invoking the idea of a “Second New Deal” response to Covid-19 and its concomitant economic collapse. But Biden’s campaign is rooted in the idea that he is a kind of political cheat code. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews found while interviewing Biden staffers, the Democratic candidate remains committed to the filibuster, a decision that will make any ambitious Democratic policy effort impossible. The idea that Biden might rely on parliamentary strategies, like budget reconciliation, to move big agenda items was pooh-poohed by his longtime economic advisor. Instead, Biden, we are told, will “leverage his relationships in the Senate to pass his agenda with bipartisan support.” With a raft of amenable Republicans behind him, the theory goes that he’ll bring about those changes that the modern Republican Party had hitherto done everything in its power, including shutting down the government on multiple occasions, to prevent.
But while it’s one thing for Biden to have supreme confidence in his Senate Cloakroom Backslap Game, it’s entirely different when other Democrats with more familiarity with the Republican truculence of the past few years, or a higher exposure to their more recent radical strain, indulges the same ideas. On the second night of the convention, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer presented a sixty-second laundry list of everything a Biden presidency was going to bring about.* To hear Schumer tell it, almost no problem would go unsolved: “With President Biden, Vice President Harris, and a Democratic Senate majority, we will make health care affordable for all; we’ll undo the vicious inequality of income and wealth that has plagued America for too long, and we’ll take strong decisive action to combat climate change and save the planet.”


newrepublic--2020-08-20--The Republican National Convention’s Carnival of White Grievance

The Republican National Convention ’ s speaker lineup is the sign of a party that knows itself well : First there ’ s Abby Johnson , the former Planned Parenthood clinic director who had a very lucrative anti-abortion epiphany and has since created an entire persona and career as a repentant abortion convert .
Then there ’ s Patricia and Mark McCloskey , the gun-toting couple from Missouri who were charged for threatening peaceful police brutality protestors with their firearms .
There ’ s also Nick Sandmann , the teen from the 2019 viral video in which he and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ High School stood smirking in front of Omaha elder Nathan Phillips as one of his classmates opined , “ Land gets stolen ; that ’ s how it works.
” It ’ s the modern Republican Party , preserved in amber : Wealthy grievance warriors living the double mandate around top-down class war and white identity politics .
As it has since its national rise in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement , the Republican Party recognizes that the most effective and efficient way to galvanize its base is to consistently cast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put-upon , mostly white citizens .
Sandmann , Johnson , and the McCloskeys—each the self-described victims of the out-of-control Communists running roughshod in our streets and in the halls of power–are the same basic blueprint .
Republicans , a collective in desperate need of proving that its bedrock of imagined white grievance will be maintained and emboldened by a dwindling number of young conservatives , know what it has been , what it is , and what it needs to be to survive enough to keep those tax cuts and corporate giveaways flowing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pareene , writing on the rise of Madison Cawthorn ’ s brand of Nazi-cozy conservatives , made the assessment that “ the Republican Party , right now , is recruiting its future leaders from a pool of people attracted to the furthest fringes of far-right thought simply because those are the only young people currently interested in being associated with organized Republican Party politics under Donald Trump.
” The party has chosen this tactic because it recognizes that it is standing on wet sand , ideologically speaking .
A quarter of the conservative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health care , with roughly 63 percent of all voters leaning toward universal health care .
A majority of all registered voters approve of the statewide mask mandates that just a few months ago were the target of the right ’ s inane , self-defeating culture wars .
On police reform , the country is in wide agreement that chokeholds , no-knock warrants , qualified immunity , local police militarization , and inaction by police witnessing abuse by fellow officers all need to go .
Two-thirds of the country ’ s voters believe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too little to combat climate change .
This isn ’ t a country of radicals .
Many of these changes are the lowest possible bars of a democratic society and , at least on climate change , one that wants to stave off mass extinction .
There is no unwinding any of this , not by the current champions the Republican Party has dealt itself .
So instead , it dedicated the last decade to perfecting minority rule .
Right-leaning state legislatures—voted in by a wave of reactionary racism responding to the election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ badly that , until the courts finally stepped in , winning was their only option .
From there , they took on the Democratic Party ’ s social agenda on a state level , enacting bans on abortion and gay marriage , drafting a political agenda of overt discrimination against transgender people , and stripping away any rights and protections that non-citizens previously held .
Few of these measures were particularly popular on a statewide level and , in cases like that of North Carolina ’ s anti-trans legislation , actually led to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years under the Trump administration took this approach and applied it nationally , redirecting every major federal agency to work with only obedient political allies and industry cronies .
Little of the subsequent horrors pursued and enacted by this administration has proven to be popular in a democratic sense .
Then again , enacting the will of the people was never the end goal ; it was power , by any and all means necessary .

But as Pareene argued, democracy does not seem to be the goal of America’s two-party system, either. If one swiveled his or her head from the RNC to the Democratic National Convention—with the caveat that they had no prior information about what shape the modern Democratic Party has actually taken—it would not be outrageous to expect to see explicit, concrete goals to not just return to the pre-Trump status quo but to progress well beyond the deeply fractured legacy of the Obama administration.
Instead, what they would find is a convention dedicated to simply not being its heinous opposition. The Democratic Party is still confused about who it wants to be, oftentimes devoting its energy to beating back a left flank with the same rigor the Republican Party is using to maintain its grip on power. A party in which John Kasich is not just somehow allowed through the doors but is given a primetime slot to lecture America on the road not taken. A party in which basic plans, like eschewing future fossil fuel subsidies, are quietly abandoned overnight.
Republicans, then, at least seem at peace with the forces bringing new energy to the party. They happen to be young Nazis and Youtube conspiracy heads, but they are a life force. They’re the party content to watch the world melt if it means being able to pass one last tax cut for their Big Oil buddies. That’s where a party in pursuit of power will inevitably end up because once common decency and the ideals of representative governance are abandoned, there’s no reason to believe in anything save for that power. Those that tune into the RNC to listen to Sandmann droning on about cancel culture or the McCloskeys shouting about the Second Amendment will hear precisely what they want to hear because, at the very least, the Republican Party knows who the hell it’s talking to: White people who love nothing more than to complain about being in control.


newrepublic--2020-08-20--The Israel-U.A.E. Deal Puts the “Forever” in “Forever War”

It is by now almost a formality : In the Middle East , nothing either good or bad can transpire without Washington pointing to Tehran ’ s alleged hegemonic designs as the force behind it .
So it was with the so-called peace deal announced last week between Israel and the United Arab Emirates ; two countries who were never at war declared peace , and the Trump administration—along with much of Washington—quickly deemed it historic .
Though the two states have intimately ( but quietly ) collaborated on security matters for years , the announcement of their security alliance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a groundbreaking move that was only made possible due to their shared sense of threat from Iran .
Much of Washington agrees with this .
“ The Iranian regime ’ s regional aggression has brought the Arab nations and Israel closer together , ” Trump ’ s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt quipped last year , echoing one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’ s favorite talking points .
The 2015 nuclear deal had empowered Iran , Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly in 2018 , and “ brought Israel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever before , in an intimacy and friendship that I have not seen in my lifetime and would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
” These “ enemy of my enemy ” truisms may make for a compelling narrative , but they do not hold up to scrutiny .
Certainly , tensions between Iran and some Arab states—primarily Saudi Arabia—have risen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq .
But if Iran is such a monumental threat that it would force the U.A.E .
to do the “ unimaginable , ” then one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy to be laser-focused on Tehran while avoiding getting distracted by lesser rivalries .
That ’ s not the case .
Abu Dhabi has gotten itself entangled in several unwise and unnecessary military interventions far from the 65 miles of water that separate it from Iran .
Almost all of those adversarial entanglements are with Turkey and Qatar—not Iran .
In Libya , U.A.E.-aligned forces are in direct combat with Turkish-backed troops as Abu Dhabi fights for control in what remains of that country .
Iran has no meaningful involvement in Libya .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ moved closer to the Assad regime ( which is supported by Iran ) as Syrian troops fight Turkish-backed fighters in the north .
Ideologically , the U.A.E .
views the Muslim Brotherhood as its main rival , and the Brotherhood ’ s principal backers are—again—Turkey and Qatar , not Iran .
When Riyadh and Abu Dhabi imposed a blockade on Qatar in the summer of 2017 , it was reportedly just a prelude to a Saudi-U.A.E .
plan to invade the small kingdom and replace its government .
The plan was averted in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Qatar as a deterrent .
Two years earlier , Abu Dhabi had played an important role in a failed attempt to overthrow Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan .
Needless to say , that episode further deepened the animosity between Ankara and the Emiratis .

What binds Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE together is not so much the threat from Iran but the threat of the United States military leaving the Middle East. These three states have been the foremost benefactors of America’s military domination in the region, gifting them a beneficial power balance that they could not have achieved on their own. The fallout from the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a major blow to this balance, overextending the U.S. and fueling calls for America to end its endless wars and to bring the troops home. America’s deteriorating Iraqi fiasco was a terrifying development for Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE.
Ever since, these states have made the recommitment of the United States to the region the overarching goal of their foreign policy. They consistently and vehemently oppose any measure that would allow the U.S. to reduce its military commitments, and its presence, in the region. Those commitments are reinforced by reports that the U.S. conditioned sales of F-35 jets and drones to the UAE on Abu Dhabi normalizing relations with Israel. Arab states in the Gulf Cooperation Council tend to view such massive purchases of American weaponry as informal defense pacts that oblige the U.S. to protect them militarily.
Keeping the U.S. stuck in the Middle East for the benefit of these states is not a popular or effective talking point in Washington. Exaggerating the threat of Iran is.


newrepublic--2020-08-20--The Puzzlingly Substanceless Democratic Convention

Obama ’ s speech did more than criticize Trump and warble about the virtues Joe Biden would bring to the White House , though .
It also marked the return of traditional oratory to the Democratic Convention .
Before Wednesday night , this convention has been strong on feelings and light on substance .
Again and again , we have been reminded that Joe Biden is a good man who has endured deep suffering without losing his humanity .
But rarely have we been given more than the barest hints of what he would do in office—other than , mercifully @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the pandemic improvisations over the course of the first two nights were memorable—particularly the panoramic floating roll-call vote nominating Biden .
But Tuesday night , no one other than Jill Biden spoke for more than five minutes .
Had Obama been asked to keep his 2004 keynote address to five minutes , it is hard to imagine the speech being a launching pad for much of anything , let alone the presidency .
Having covered presidential conventions in person since the 1980s , I have a nostalgic streak when it comes to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ excesses leave you slack-jawed , as Newt Gingrich did in 1996 when he included an ode to beach volleyball ( “ no bureaucrat would have invented it ” ) in a speech about the glories of American freedom .
But traditional convention speeches also help provide a governing agenda for the out-of-power party .
And it took the planners of this convention three days to inject a little substance into the proceedings .
Hillary Clinton displayed the family gift , dating back to the 1992 campaign , of being able to succinctly conjure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paid family leave and health care for everyone , for Social Security , Medicare and Planned Parenthood .
Vote for dreamers and their families.
” Clinton also adroitly framed the issue of justice in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in a way that could appeal to wavering suburban voters : “ Vote for law enforcement purged of racial bias that keeps all our streets safe .
”

Harry Truman was another former president who failed to get the memo about having only nice things to say. Speaking to the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Truman warned that if Dwight Eisenhower were reelected, “the agricultural depression will have spread from the farms to the towns and cities, just as it did under Republican rule in the 1920s.”
Obama’s speech did more than criticize Trump and warble about the virtues Joe Biden would bring to the White House, though. It also marked the return of traditional oratory to the Democratic Convention.
Before Wednesday night, this convention has been strong on feelings and light on substance. Again and again, we have been reminded that Joe Biden is a good man who has endured deep suffering without losing his humanity. But rarely have we been given more than the barest hints of what he would do in office—other than, mercifully, not be Donald Trump. Many of the pandemic improvisations over the course of the first two nights were memorable—particularly the panoramic floating roll-call vote nominating Biden. But Tuesday night, no one other than Jill Biden spoke for more than five minutes. Had Obama been asked to keep his 2004 keynote address to five minutes, it is hard to imagine the speech being a launching pad for much of anything, let alone the presidency.


newrepublic--2020-08-20--The Stories Kamala Harris Won’t Tell Anymore

The third night of the Democratic National Convention was memorably described by one late-night C-SPAN caller from California as “ spooky … like a drive-in with no cars.
” Still , the producers were doing their best to make what ’ s usually a corny spectacle look appealing in a pandemic .
And it was a historic shame : The first Black woman and Indian American woman to be nominated vice president by a major party in the United States received the honor in an empty room .
With the exception of her husband and Joe and Jill Biden , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beamed in by video .
I was not expecting Harris to directly address what she had once regarded as her chief accomplishments .
Instead , Harris presented herself as the culmination of generations of women who fought for justice , including her own mother , an immigrant to California from India who raised Harris and her sister “ to be proud , strong Black women.
” She named the elected offices she held in law enforcement as evidence of the kinds of accomplishments that are possible in the world her mother fought for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all can see ourselves.
” It ’ s a vision she and Joe Biden share , she said .
While Harris has served as California ’ s junior senator for nearly four years , the core of her political experience is as a prosecutor , a job many more people in this country now understand as political .
It explains why anyone outside of San Francisco now might know that in 2003 , Harris unseated an incumbent district attorney in the city in a campaign characterizing him as “ soft on crime.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state ’ s attorney general .
“ She was A.G. when Black Lives Matter was taking hold , ” Alameda County public defender Brendon Woods told The New Yorker in a 2019 profile of the then presidential candidate .
“ We were focusing on state brutality and state-sanctioned murder .
She gave us silence.
” Harris has since cannily recast herself as a “ progressive prosecutor , ” responding to how the justice system winds have shifted toward systemic reform .
As the public defender recalled from experience , “ It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s choice last night to simply elide this fundamental part of her political life—to give it barely more time than it took to say the words “ district attorney ” and “ attorney general ” —again fits this pattern .
What did she say she did as attorney general ?
She took on “ transnational gangs ” and “ for-profit colleges.
” During the financial meltdown of the late-aughts , she said she called her friend Beau Biden , then Delaware attorney general , to talk about going after “ the big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ homes ” and his father , the vice president .
In this , her most significant address to date , the former prosecutor who now shows up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations mentioned the police exactly once .
“ It is not progressive to be soft on crime , ” Harris told a prospective voter in 2003 in her winning campaign for San Francisco district attorney .
She was referring to the incumbent ’ s decision to drop charges against 400 anti-Iraq War protestors .
On the same campaign trail , after speaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they were planning a demonstration after the city ’ s transportation agency failed to deliver on a promise to hire Black youth from the neighborhood as part of a light rail project , she replied , “ You should ask a police captain to conduct a protest training .
That way you can protest safely .
For example , people need to know not to run !
” Harris , the reporter following her observed , understood that her “ progressive ” supporters included her wealthy donors , who “ want to maintain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Francisco-style noblesse oblige .
”

Harris still walks that line. The only concrete criminal justice policy offered up at any length happened to coincide with the evening’s other theme: women. Harris praised Biden for his signature role in the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. A segment earlier in the evening had included some b-roll of Biden in the ’90s, a time presented to the audience as one when women escaping violence had virtually no one to turn to. In all the praise of Biden’s tenacity for getting the act through Congress, left out is that he was successful largely because VAWA was attached to the sweeping 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. When it was enacted, federal funds poured into states to expand prisons and police forces. The crime bill today is more toxic to bring up, certainly in a space where the names of people killed by police—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor—are made mantras, as if to distance from the killers and the justice system that protects them. But VAWA, by comparison, is a twofold win: The candidates get to combine women in need of protection and the hero cops, who we’re to assume will provide it.
It’s not that many people will just forget Harris’s long career in law enforcement. In pursuit of the nomination, Bloomberg News described the potentially advantageous shifts in her public persona in the wake of national uprisings against police killings. “The reform debate burnishes the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general as a social-justice activist. It also protects the Biden campaign from potential criticism of her efforts while in those jobs to slow innocence bids and punish parents whose children were truants, among other contentious actions.”
Maybe that’s the Harris she meant to evoke in her acceptance speech. “We’ve gotta do the work to fulfill that promise of equal justice under law,” she said, “because none of us are free … until all of us are free.” While she spoke, her home state was burning—more than 300 fires reported in 72 hours, Governor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. Yet the state still faces a critical shortage of firefighters, The Sacramento Bee was reporting. People incarcerated in California’s prisons are the state’s primary “hand crews,” sent out to cut firelines with hand tools and chainsaws in locations where bulldozers can’t reach. (They are paid a pittance—$1.45 an hour, according to the ACLU.) Now, as prisons allowed Covid-19 to spread unchecked, some prisoners are too sick for wildfire duty and others have been released to help slow transmission. The shortage was something Harris had seen coming as attorney general. In 2014, facing a court order to release prisoners from conditions ruled unconstitutional, the state fought back. Lawyers representing her office argued that if prisoners were to be released early to comply with the order, the available prison labor pool would dwindle.


newrepublic--2020-08-21--Biden’s Setting Himself Up to Get Blamed for Lost Blue-Collar Jobs

The Democratic Party sure knows how to piss off climate advocates .
Tuesday , party leaders cut a promise to end fossil fuel subsidies from their 2020 platform , telling The Huffington Post that the pledge shouldn ’ t have been in the final draft to begin with .
It was an odd moment in a generally odd convention .
But it was also consistent with the week ’ s heavy nostalgia for the Obama era .
Despite sporting climate plans vastly more ambitious than they had four years ago , Democrats have mostly been tiptoeing around the flailing fossil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at this point—had been one of the few moves establishment politicians were willing to make against oil and gas profits .
As climate advocates this week pointed out , that ’ s a huge liability for the planet .
But it could also cost the party critical and easily winnable votes , sinking a potential Biden presidency before it ’ s even left the port .
Democrats have avoided earnest conversations about what to do with the bankruptcy-ridden fossil fuel industry .
They ’ ve focused instead on the positive side of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ building electric cars , and scaling up clean energy deployment .
Limiting fossil fuel production at its source ( so-called “ supply-side ” policy ) has long been a third rail for politicians on both sides of the aisle , and presidential candidate Joe Biden ’ s plans barely gesture at it : banning new permits on federal land , stopping extraction in previously protected areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge , and canceling the Trump administration ’ s blank check on pollution .
That leaves the door open for domestic producers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abroad , as they did in great quantity under the Obama administration when Biden was vice president .
Democrats ’ ambivalence toward the industry , in addition to being fatal to serious climate efforts , sidesteps a conversation that ’ s now unavoidable in parts of the country they should be trying to win .
Texas alone lost 39,000 direct oil and gas jobs in the first half of 2020 .
Oilfield services companies—having laid off some 100,000 people amid the pandemic downturn—are now employing fewer people than they have since before the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ local and state tax revenues .
Appalachian shale bankruptcies were climbing even before the pandemic , to say nothing of the region ’ s decade-long nosedive in coal .
And now Louisiana , Oklahoma , Colorado , and New Mexico are all facing major fossil fuel job losses .
Industry experts don ’ t predict an easy recovery , a view bolstered by major multinational oil companies selling off their investments in the unconventional high-cost drilling that fueled the last decade ’ s boom .
Establishment Democrats , but also relative progressives championing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ treat the fossil fuel industry as a reliable source of well-paid union work instead of a rapidly sinking ship .
As a result , they ’ re mostly unprepared to rescue its passengers .
The Biden climate platform allows for decades of continued fossil fuel extraction ; it doesn ’ t seem to have a plan for supporting the millions of people whose livelihoods are threatened by the industry ’ s collapse—a phenomenon only tangentially related to climate measures .

The clean energy jobs touted by the climate edge of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda won’t necessarily help areas hit by the downturn in fossil fuels, and there’s ample cause for skepticism about his promises for a clean and revitalized manufacturing sector; replacing rig work with solar panel manufacturing is a lot harder than it sounds. Today’s plans are an improvement on the old trope of teaching miners to code but still aren’t facing the devastating collapse of the fossil fuel industry head-on.
This could be easy fodder for the presumptive Democratic nominee: Republicans are bailing out fossil fuel executives who are using bankruptcy to sew themselves Golden Parachutes, leaving roughnecks and miners at the mercy of private equity vultures scrapping their medical coverage and stripping companies for parts. A Biden administration could pledge support for the people and places left behind by the GOP, promising jobs and healthcare, even taking a cue from Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Marshall Plan for Coal Country.
During the primary, now vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s “Climate for the People” platform proposed convening major emitters in 2021 for the “first-ever global negotiation of the cooperative managed decline of fossil fuel production.” Such an effort could go a long way toward addressing the concerns of fossil fuel-dependent communities both in the U.S. and around the world. But voters have heard little about that plan since she joined the Democratic ticket.


newrepublic--2020-08-21--Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America

“ So , I just heard that , ” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday .
The conference , like the rest of Trump ’ s regular press briefings , was ostensibly about the federal government ’ s slow and lazy response to a pandemic that is still spreading uncontrolled throughout the United States .
But because that response can no longer really be said to exist as such , and because he ’ s never much cared , and mostly because there is a presidential election coming up , President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more interesting instead .
In this case , it was a toweringly specious column that ran on Newsweek under the headline “ Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility.
” The story sought to undermine the natural-born citizenship of Joe Biden ’ s new running mate by Raising Some Questions while carefully stopping short of answering them .
As is the case with this greasy genre , this was all barely argued on the merits .
Harris , of course , was born in San Diego , and based on the Fourteenth Amendment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up for debate .
But as is the case with this greasy genre , the idea was never to provide an argument on the merits or properly furnish definitive answers but , rather , to ask them in a coyly , sneering manner .
Trump seemed to find all of this interesting in a very specific way .
“ I heard it today that she doesn ’ t meet the requirements , ” the President said .
“ And , by the way , the lawyer that wrote that piece ” —John Eastman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence— “ is a very highly qualified , very talented lawyer.
” Trump hastened to add that where Eastman ’ s charges were concerned , “ I have no idea if that ’ s right.
” It quickly became clear that Trump hadn ’ t so much read the story as Noticed It , first asserting that the story claimed Harris hadn ’ t been born in the United States , which it didn ’ t , and then being informed by another reporter that the story actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her parents ’ legal status .
“ Yeah , ” Trump replied , “ I don ’ t know about it .
I just heard about it .
I ’ ll take a look.
” With the exception of Trump ’ s “ I ’ ll take a look ” tic , which in its various syntactic guises always means “ I ’ m going to go watch some more TV now , ” all of the above is intentionally hard to know—and this is due far more to deceptive aspirational branding than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claim is easily dismissed , but it ’ s unhelpfully surrounded by signifiers that have slipped wildly out of joint .
The Claremont Institute has suitably fancified intellectual production values and a serious reputation‚ which helps make it seem as though its chief jurisprudential expert would indeed be a very qualified and very talented lawyer .
But while Claremont “ masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right , ” Slate ’ s Mark Joseph Stern writes , “ it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stamping its imprimatur on whatever incoherent Trumpist revanchism needs a co-sign .
And while Newsweek is a name brand that would undoubtedly impress a brain that , like Trump ’ s , entered energy-saver mode in 1987 , it was purchased in 2013 by a shadowy group aligned with a Christian sect called The Community and shed its most qualified staffers in 2018 .
When company executives and a former chief executive officer pled guilty to federal money-laundering charges in February , the Southern District of New York described its ownership as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group of sophisticated criminals illegally moved tens of millions through our Manhattan marketplace by brazenly overstating the financial health of their companies.
” ( Newsweek ’ s opinion editor Joshua Hammer is a former Claremont Institute fellow . )
How the blaringly worthless claim in Eastman ’ s column came to be discussed at all matters , too , if not quite as much as how it was discussed .
The two are related : A reporter at the press conference framed the question of Harris ’ s citizenship status as centering around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For a number of immediately obvious reasons , this does not suggest careful empirical review of the historical record—or remotely sufficient merit for such a baldly racist fabrication to be raised in this setting .
No matter , though ; the query was lofted in the familiar chiding way that the White House press corps uses in its periodic attempts to get Trump on the record disavowing whatever titillating or toxic falsehood he ’ s taken to claiming .
The I Just Heard/They Say formulation is a Trump tic designed to give the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Of The News and someone who is constantly being talked about by others .
( He goes to it whenever the subject of conversation seems to be slipping too far from him ; “ He was my friend , ” Trump told Fox & Friends on Monday morning in reference to his brother Robert , who died last weekend .
“ And I guess they say ‘ best friend.
’ And that ’ s true .
” )

It’s only when we ponder the totality of it, the fullness of the dishonesty and strange faith and general unfalsifiable rudderlessness of this as a way of being in the world, that we begin to see the direst features of all this noisemaking. Trump was a casualty of conservative media long before he became its hero and main character; as a bigoted dunce who is both deeply cynical and bottomlessly credulous, he’s branded his ascent to power as the apex of, and grim reckoning for, conservative media’s rancid generation-spanning grift. Now, as he shitposts through his fourth year in office, Trump has achieved another apotheosis—the president whom conservative media made is governing with all the poise, foresight, and judgment of an extravagantly online relative muted long ago for crimes against the timeline. Neither abject ignorance nor personal judgment can prevent Trump from weighing in; his inability to sit any topic out is total and helpless. “Thought this was interesting,” Trump idly tells the country he governs a dozen or so times per day before forwarding along a preposterous chain email or sharing a link to some gaudily fraudulent tidbit. It is worrying enough that the president communicates with the urgency and discretion of an elderly relative who signs their text messages. It is more worrying that he is not alone.
“Some people claimed a missile hit the Pentagon,” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted last week. “I now know that is not correct. The problem is our government lies to us so much to protect the Deep State, it’s hard sometimes to know what is real and what is not.” Taylor Greene was, as it happened, one of those people who claimed that thing; the debunked conspiracy that the Pentagon was struck by a missile on September 11, 2001, is one of the (very) many conspiracies that she espoused for fun and profit over many years on every available platform before she perhaps inevitably cinched the Republican nomination in Georgia’s ultra-red 14th District this month.
Greene is a familiar and unbearable type of online busybody—a busted firehose that blasts piping-hot reactionary bullshit 20 hours a day. But in the way that she communicates—“some people claimed”—she is clearly both akin to, and a product of, her president. (Laura Loomer, the oafish alt-right remora who won a Republican primary in Florida’s heavily Democratic 21st this week, is an even more ridiculous case; banned from various social media platforms for her ultra-grating reactionary provocateur shtick, she seems to be running in large part to get her Twitter account back.) This same manic passivity is equally easy to find down the discourse. Francine Fosdick, an online evangelical and figure in the QAnon community, recently described her experience at a big box retail store. “They were actually taking temperatures,” she said, swiping her finger across her forehead. “Now I just heard that that is just another form of mind control in regards to what are they hitting? Right here, okay, your mind, the pineal gland, or whatever.” No one tapping out or taping their delusionary accounts of the way things really are behind the Deep State curtain is working too hard; no one feels compelled to.