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Javier E

Accused document leaker Jack Teixeira fixated on guns and envisioned 'race war' - The W... - 0 views

  • “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump.”Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets.
  • Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded.
  • For Teixeira, firearms practice seemed to be more than a hobby. “He used the term ‘race war’ quite a few times,” said a close friend who spent time with Teixeira in an online community on Discord, a platform popular with video game players, and had lengthy private phone and video calls with him over the course of several years.“He did call himself racist, multiple times,” the friend said in an interview. “I would say he was proud of it.”
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  • In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense
  • Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”
  • Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.
  • Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.
  • In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.
  • The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.
  • The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”
  • After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.
  • But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.
  • Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.
  • “He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”
  • “To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.
  • The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.
  • Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”
  • The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.
  • Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.
  • “He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”
  • In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”
anonymous

Britain Vows Retaliation if Russia Poisoned Former Spy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Britain Vows Retaliation if Russia Poisoned Former Spy
  • Calling Russia “a malign force around the world,” Britain’s foreign secretary on Tuesday vowed retaliation if investigators find that Moscow is behind the apparent poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter in southern England.
  • speaking in the House of Commons, he noted the widespread speculation that Russia was to blame and “the echoes of the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.” Mr. Litvinenko, another former Russian agent, was fatally poisoned in London, and a British investigation concluded that he had been killed on orders from the Kremlin.
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  • With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed part of Ukraine and propped up the Assad government in Syria and that stands accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within democracies.
Javier E

Trump's decision to sow discord among G-7 allies is a more than a childish tantrum - Th... - 0 views

  • In the post-Cold War world, the G-7 morphed into an institution expressive of the West’s determination to perpetuate the values — free markets, representative government, the rule of law — that its members considered to have been vindicated by the Soviet empire’s collapse.
  • It follows that Mr. Trump’s decision to sow ferment within the G-7 — to antagonize America’s closest allies — is more than a childish tantrum or a play for attention. It is an undermining of those values that the G-7 was meant to safeguard
  • Not only the allies but Americans, too, must come to grips with the fact that the ostensible leader of the free world may not really believe either in the free world or in leading it.
Javier E

We're at cyberwar. And the enemy is us. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The United States and its allies are under attack. The cyberwar we’ve feared for a generation is well underway, and we are losing. This is the forest, and the stuff about Russian election meddling, contacts with the Trump campaign, phony Twitter accounts, fake news on Facebook — those things are trees.
  • we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership, free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us. The attack is ongoing.
  • With each passing week, we learn more. Russia and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore themselves to pieces.
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  • They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.
  • They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
  • The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms
  • Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.
  • The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
  • What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.
  • Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.
  • His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary
  • Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.
  • We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.
Javier E

It's Not Misinformation. It's Amplified Propaganda. - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions.
  • Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.
  • In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda.
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  • That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening.
  • Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda
  • This amplification chain is incredibly powerful; it surfaces civil-rights violations, protest movements, and breaking events, whether traditional media choose to cover those events or not.
  • it’s also how quack medical claims and a daily parade of conspiracy theories are made to trend—#Ivermectin, #SaveTheChildren, #StopTheSteal.
  • Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic: Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause.
  • Most Twitter users never knew that #PelosiMustGo began because someone gave marching orders in a private Discord channel. They saw only the hashtag. They likely assumed that somewhere, some sizable portion of Americans were spontaneously tweeting against the speaker of the House.
  • The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade,” Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas Prendergast write in the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. The term referred less to what Church representatives said than what they did; propaganda described their fervid mission to disseminate the Church’s view far and wide.
  • Over the subsequent centuries, propaganda gradually acquired a secular meaning—information with an agenda, deliberately created to shape the audience’s perception of reality.
  • social media has ended the monopoly of mass-media propaganda. But it has also ushered in a new competitor: ampliganda—the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects of personal or ideological identity that their audiences hold most dear.
  • Of all the changes wrought by social networks, this ability of online crowds to influence one another is among the most important and underappreciated.
  • Harvard’s Yochai Benkler described a “propaganda pipeline” whereby marginal actors on such social-media sites as Reddit and 4chan pass stories to online influencers, who in turn draw the attention of traditional media. Another scholar, Alicia Wanless, applied the term participatory propaganda, and Jennifer Mercieca, a rhetoric professor at Texas A&M, recently insisted, “We are all propagandists now.”
Javier E

What Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg says about the Discord leak - The Washingto... - 0 views

  • While many of the documents themselves are dull, Aftergood argued that a key part of the Pentagon Papers history was the example Ellsberg set. He was charged with crimes by the Justice Department and put on trial, but the case was ultimately thrown out when the extent of government wrongdoing against him was exposed.
  • “His personal courage is astounding. He took real risks, including the risk of long-term imprisonment. But he also took responsibility, and did not try to evade the consequences of his decisions.” And that, Aftergood said, “won the respect even of his adversaries and critics.”
  • “I’m not going to be looking down on all this,” he said. “I have no concerns about how I’m remembered, or whether I’m remembered at all.”
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  • Facing death in a matter of months, Ellsberg is loquacious but low-key about his legacy. He said he is still trying to decide whether to be buried or cremated. “If I had a tombstone, I’ve always thought what it would say is: ‘He became a member of the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements,’” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
  • “He actually read and understood all of the material he released. He knew what he was doing. And he acted with thoughtful discrimination by withholding four volumes of material on diplomatic negotiations that he considered particularly sensitive,” Aftergood said.
  • “Government officials had told the public lies before, but rarely had they been exposed with such merciless clarity as they were in the Pentagon Papers.”
cjlee29

Bernie Sanders Wins Oregon; Hillary Clinton Declares Victory in Kentucky - The New York... - 0 views

  • Senator Bernie Sanders prevailed over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday in the Oregon primary
  • a state that she won easily in 2008
  • 1,900 votes
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  • less than half a percentage point
  • The close result meant that she and Mr. Sanders would effectively split the state’s delegates.
  • With a lead in delegates that is almost impossible for Mr. Sanders to overcome, Mrs. Clinton is moving closer each week to claiming the Democratic nomination.
  • Last weekend, bitter feelings from Mr. Sanders’s supporters spilled into view at Nevada’s state convention, which descended into chaos, prompted death threats against Nevada’s Democratic chairwoman and raised the prospect of discord at the national convention in July in Philadelphia.
  • With Mr. Sanders pressing on with his campaign and Mr. Trump now the presumptive Republican nominee, Mrs. Clinton has been campaigning against two opponents at once, trying to defeat Mr. Sanders in state after state while also building an argument against Mr. Trump.
  • where she warned about Mr. Trump while urging voters to support her on Tuesday.
  • she faulted Mr. Sanders for voting against the auto industry bailout, a claim that is not as clear-cut as she suggested it was.
  • He, too, looked toward the general election, arguing that he, not Mrs. Clinton, was the more formidable candidate to take on Mr. Trump, citing polls of hypothetical matchups.
  • “There are a lot of people out there, many of the pundits and politicians, they say, ‘Bernie Sanders should drop out. The people of California should not have the right to determine who the next president will be.’”
  • “We are in till the last ballot is cast.”
  • With her overwhelming support from superdelegates, the party leaders who can vote as they wish, Mrs. Clinton could clinch the nomination by June 7, when six states
  • California and New Jersey
  • based on his strength against Mr. Trump.
  • In this year’s campaign, Mr. Sanders has been embraced by white working-class voters and young people in many places
  • Kentucky is one of the nation’s biggest coal-mining states, and Mrs. Clinton stressed her commitment to coal miners.
Javier E

Firings and Discord Put Trump Transition Team in a State of Disarray - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For advice on building Mr. Trump’s national security team, his inner circle has been relying on three hawkish current and former American officials: Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; Peter Hoekstra, a former Republican congressman and former chairman of the Intelligence Committee;
  • Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration and a founder of the Center for Security Policy.
  • Mr. Gaffney has long advanced baseless conspiracy theories, including that President Obama might be a closet Muslim. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”
Javier E

Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought -... - 0 views

  • At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
  • an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies.
  • Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.
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  • In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself.
  • All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.
  • Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.
  • What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.
  • In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”
  • On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.
  • “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting. “Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.
  • “Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said. “Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
  • Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.
  • “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”
  • In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
  • In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”
  • John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign.
  • In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.
  • Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party;
  • Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.
  • Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.
  • They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.
  • On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.)
  • A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.
  • In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”
  • “I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.
  • On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”
  • The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.
  • In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”
  • Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.
  • Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
  • On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup. “We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.” “How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.
  • “I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied. “And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”
  • Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.
  • Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.
  • In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.
  • Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered.
  • By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said. On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House. How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked. “I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”
  • In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?” The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”
  • Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.
  • By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.
  • “Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.
jlessner

Marco Rubio Struggles With Question on Iraq War - First Draft. Political News, Now. - N... - 0 views

  • Senator Marco Rubio of Florida struggled on Sunday to give clear answers about whether it was a mistake for the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003, becoming the latest Republican presidential candidate to trip on the wisdom of the military invasion.
  • Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time.
  • Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.
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  • At one point Mr. Rubio, in discussing the importance of hindsight on the Iraq war, raised a recent boxing fight to make a point. “Based on what we know, a lot of things — based on what we know now, I wouldn’t have thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat, uh, in that fight a couple weeks ago — — ” Mr. Rubio said before Mr. Wallace interrupted.
  • Mr. Rubio’s readiness for the presidency has been questioned among some Republican voters, given than he is a 43-year-old first-term senator, and moments like the boxing reference seemed discordant on a subject like the Iraq war.
  • Last week, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was the one in the hot seat, giving four different answers to whether he thought President Bush, his brother, made a mistake going to war in Iraq. The former governor ultimately said he would not have ordered the invasion in hindsight given that intelligence about Iraq’s chemical weapons turned out to wrong. Mr. Rubio, in his interview on Sunday, chose not to pile on Mr. Bush.
  • “I think any president, regardless of party, probably would have made a similar decision to what President Bush did at the time with the information he had available,” Mr. Walker said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That said, Mr. Walker added that knowing now that the 2003 weapons intelligence was flawed, “we probably wouldn’t have taken that tack” in invading Iraq.
  • “You can’t be on the fence on this one: You’re either for it or against it,” Mr. Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Sanders opposed the trade authority and has drawn support from liberals for his stances to the left of Mrs. Clinton. “No fence-sitting on this one,” he added.
Javier E

America's True History of Religious Tolerance | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Mag... - 0 views

  • In Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, anti-Catholic sentiment, combined with the country’s anti-immigrant mood, fueled the Bible Riots of 1844, in which houses were torched, two Catholic churches were destroyed and at least 20 people were killed.
  • recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

  • “The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.
  • The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics
  • Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas
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  • we miss the real question of why there is a systemic, historical difference in the way police treat blacks versus whites.
  • he came to see black respectability—the idea that, to succeed, African-Americans must stoically prevail against the odds and be “twice as good” as white people to get the same rights—as deeply immoral.
  • For Coates, true equality means “black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people,” he says. “Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.”
  • he cites research that in 1860 slaves were the largest asset in the US economy. “It is almost impossible to think of democracy, as it was formed in America, without the enslavement of African-Americans,” he says. “Not that these things were bumps in the road along the way, but that they were the road.”
  • Another term for that road is “white supremacy.” This refers not so much to hate groups, but, as Coates defines it, a system of policies and beliefs that aims to keep African-Americans as “a peon class.”
  • To be “white” in this sense does not refer merely to skin color but to the degree that someone qualifies as “normal,” and thus worthy of the same rights as all Americans
  • The pool where all these ideas eventually arrive is a question: “How big-hearted can democracy be?” he says. “How many people can it actually include and sustain itself? That is the question I’m asking over and over again.”
  • it is a question of empathy. Are humans capable of forming a society where everyone can flourish?
  • there was the coverage of Michael Brown (or Jordan Davis, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner): unarmed African-Americans killed by police or others under controversial circumstances. In each case, the storyline was that these horrific encounters were caused either by genuine provocation, or by race-fueled fear or hatred. Either way, they were stories of personal failings.
  • When an event becomes news, there is often an implication that it is an exception—that the world is mostly working as it should and this event is newsworthy because it’s an aberration. If the race-related stories we see most often in the media are about personal bigotry, then our conception of racism is limited to the bigoted remarks or actions—racism becomes little more than uttering the n-word.
  • He is no soothsayer, telling people what to think from on high, but rather is refreshingly open about what he doesn’t know, inviting readers to learn with him. Coates is not merely an ivory-tower pontificator or a shiny Web 2.0 brand. He is a public intellectual for the digital age.
  • a lack of historical perspective in the media’s approach to race. “Journalism privileges what’s happening now over the long reasons for things happening,” he says. “And for African-Americans, that has a particular effect.”
  • Even the very existence of racism is questioned: A recent study published by the Association of Psychological Science has shown that whites think they are discriminated against due to race as much if not more than blacks.
  • “So when you’re talking about something like institutional racism and prejudice, how do you talk about that as an objective reality?”
  • Coates’ strength is in connecting contemporary problems to historical scholarship. “I think if I bring anything to the table it’s the ability to synthesize all of that into something that people find emotionally moving,” he says. The irony of the reparations piece, as unoriginal as it may have been to scholars, is that it was news to many people.
  • Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president
  • Progress is key to the myth of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that America is built on slavery and on freedom are discordant ideas that threaten any simple storyline. Coates, together with others who join him, is trying to claim the frontier of a new narrative.
  • reading Coates is like building a worldview, piece by piece, on an area of contemporary life that’s otherwise difficult to grasp.
  • “To come and tell someone may not be as effective in convincing them as allowing them to learn on their own. If you believe you come to a conclusion on your own, you’re more likely to agree.”
  • It’s brave to bare yourself intellectually on the Web, and to acknowledge mistakes, especially when the capital that public intellectuals appear to have is their ability to be “right.”
  • Coates is equally demanding of his followers. Online he is blunt, and willing to call people out. He cares enough to be rigorous
  • despite being a master of online engagement, Coates insists he does not write for others, an idea he explained in a recent post: “I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand.”
  • To him, it’s an open question whether or not America will ever be capable of fostering true equality. “How big-hearted can democracy be? It points to a very ugly answer: maybe not that big-hearted at all. That in fact America is not exceptional. That it’s just like every other country. That it passes its democracy and it passes all these allegedly big-hearted programs [the New Deal, the G.I. Bill] but still excludes other people,
  • In a 2010 post about antebellum America, Coates mentioned feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke. “Suffice to say that much like Abe Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, Angelina Grimke was a Walker,” he wrote. “What was the Walker reference?” Rosemartian asked in the comments section. “Just someone who spends their life evolving, or, walking,” Coates replied. “Grant and Lincoln fit in there for me. Malcolm X was another Walker. Walkers tend to be sometimes—even often—wrong. But they are rarely bigots, in the sense of nakedly clinging to ignorance.”
Javier E

Goodbye, trolley problem. This is Silicon Valley's new ethics test. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In the 1980s, when finance fell off the moral bandwagon, business schools reacted by requiring students to take courses on Kant and other philosophers that had little to do with daily management worries. The field is becoming irrelevant now, when the dominant industry — technology — is decentralized and able to grow $40 billion companies in just 18 months.
  • Marijuana and other legal cannibinoids have sucked up nearly $1 billion in private investment dollars since 2012, raising the question: What kind of dopamine hits aren’t we comfortable with?
  • Addiction has become another ethical landmine where dopamine hits — and how one administers them — are the key to a company’s growth. E-cigarette maker Juul Labs, founded in 2017 and now the fastest growing start-up in history, with a valuation of $38 billion, is largely responsible for a grave new statistic: about 20 percent of teens have admitted to vaping in school.
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  • Juul is the logical extension of the Silicon Valley growth-hacking playbook: Design a flawless product, add a dopamine response, stir in some influencers and watch your product, game or app go viral.
  • Consider the outcry last week when TechCrunch reported that Facebook had been paying people (including teens) $20 a month to download an app that monitors a user’s mobile and web activity. Apple, long a privacy advocate and favored troll of Facebook, reacted swiftly by cutting off “Facebook Research” and the company’s internal apps. Tech Twitter, however, seemed largely perplexed: In the future, won’t we all sell our data rather than give it away for free?
  • If Silicon Valley was once converging on a moral cohesion of sorts — where progressive values and wokemanship acted as a loose ethical framework — it’s now becoming harder to avoid the varying ethical debates concerning privacy, addiction and growing geopolitical discord.
  • For the virtuous founders avoiding addictive products and invasive data-gathering, even they have to worry about who’s getting on their equity ownership table.
  • founders have to wonder whether that seemingly diverse venture capital fund is backed by regimes where women, minorities and dissidents are killed for expressing themselves.
  • of course, the morality of a company often depends on the morality of the people in charge
malonema1

Full Transcript: Jeff Flake's Speech on the Senate Floor - The New York Times - 0 views

  • JEFF FLAKE, Senator from Arizona: At a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than by our own values and principles, let me begin by noting the somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion. Regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal.
  • “Ambition counteracts ambition,” he wrote. But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, we Republicans — would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats?
  • When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country, and instead of addressing it, goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.
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  • We resisted those impulses. Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years.
anonymous

Full Transcript: Jeff Flake's Speech on the Senate Floor - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Full Transcript: Jeff Flake’s Speech on the Senate Floor
  • At a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than by our own values and principles, let me begin by noting the somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours indefinitely.
  • Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal.
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  • None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that that is just the way things are now.
  • It is also clear to me for the moment that we have given in or given up on the core principles in favor of a more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment.
  • Mr. President, I rise today to say: enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.
  • Now the efficacy of American leadership around the globe has come into question.
  • And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.
  • we must be unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it, because it does.
Javier E

Americans Remain Deeply Ambivalent About Diversity - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • These survey results suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about the role of diversity in their families, friendships, and civic communities. Some people, it seems, prefer to stay in their bubble.
  • just under a quarter of Americans say they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their partisan affiliation. Black and Hispanic people were more likely than whites to describe their lives this way, although education made a big difference among whites: 27 percent of non-college-educated whites said they seldom or never encounter people from a different political party, compared with just 6 percent of college-educated whites.
  • Less than half of respondents said they encounter political differences among their friends. Only 39 percent said they see political diversity within their families, and vanishingly few people said they encounter ideological diversity at religious services or community meetings.
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  • The PRRI/Atlantic findings add to growing evidence that these institutions are becoming weaker—or, at the very least, more segregated by identity
  • Almost one in five of the survey respondents said their interactions with people of a different political party are negative
  • “As these other social identities have moved into alignment with partisanship, we’re seeing more animosity across partisan lines—not necessarily because we’re disagreeing about things, but because we believe the [person from the] other party is an outsider, socially and culturally, from us,”
  • “It also becomes really easy to dehumanize people who we don’t have identities in common with.” In recent decades, social scientists have seen increased use of the language of dehumanization, Mason said: people calling their political opponents monsters, animals, or demons, for example.
  • When asked how they would feel about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, 45 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.
  • Perhaps more than any other, this was the fracture line that animated the 2016 election. Even the iconography, from the Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” trucker hats to the Clinton campaign’s forward-pointing “H” and “Stronger Together” slogan reflected this divide
  • Roughly one out of five survey respondents reported that they seldom or never encounter people who don’t share their religion, and a similar proportion said the same for race.
  • Certain subgroups were more cloistered than others: 21 percent of Republicans said they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their race, versus 13 percent of Democrats
  • Similarly, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said they rarely encounter people of a different race, slightly more than any other major religious group included in the survey.
  • among white people, education level made a huge difference: Those without a college degree were more than twice as likely as their college-educated peers to say they rarely encounter people of a different race, and more than four times as likely to say they seldom or never encounter people from a different religion or political party.
  • Many respondents pointed to political parties and the media as two major causes of all this discord, with stark differences along partisan lines: 85 percent of Republicans said the media is pulling the country apart, versus 54 percent of Democrats.
  • Americans today are sharply divided over the value of multiculturalism: In the survey, 54 percent of Democrats said they prefer the United States to be made up of people from a wide variety of religions, compared with 12 percent of Republicans. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer a nation mostly made up of Christians, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.
  • a far greater number of Americans may have only cursory interactions with people unlike themselves.
  • “As certain groups reach a critical mass, I think it throws Americans as a whole back into a conversation about affirming these principles [of pluralism] or not,” he said. “If you think culture war today, it’s less about gay marriage and abortion than it is about American identity.”
  • When people largely surround themselves with sameness, they may find themselves left shouting across perceived divides, unable to see their reflection in anyone who stands on the other side.
malonema1

Trump: 'They are laughing their asses off in Moscow' over Russia investigations - CNNPo... - 0 views

  • Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump says Russians are "laughing their asses off in Moscow" for the way Washington has handled the Russia investigations, following the Department of Justice's charges against Russian nationals last week for allegedly interfering in the 2016 election."If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!" Trump tweeted Sunday morning.
  • On Sunday, Trump also praised Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, for placing some blame for Russian interference into the election onto the Obama administration.
  • "I've said all along that I thought the Obama administration should have done more ... They were very wary of appearing to be putting their hand on the scale of the election," Schiff said, referencing the Obama administration's initial failure to implement Russian sanctions. Schiff added that "none of that is an excuse for this President to sit on his hands" regarding recent Russian sanctions set in place by Congress.
knudsenlu

If the case against Russia is proved, charge Putin with the attempted murder of Sergei ... - 0 views

  • he attempted murder of Sergei Skripal has shed uncomfortable light on Britain’s vulnerability to foreign threats, some potentially emanating from foreign governments, against its sovereignty, security, citizens’ safety and laws.
  • was the plot intended, at least in part, to deliberately discredit and humiliate the British government? A handful of countries might have cause to do that. But only one or two possess the rare nerve agent, the sheer malice and the ruthless audacity evident in this case.
  • Past British bluster and prevarication weaken this country’s hand. After Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector, was murdered in London in 2006, politicians such as Theresa May, then home secretary, failed forcefully to pursue the state-sponsored Russian perpetrators, even after their identity was known.
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  • Targeting financial dealings, including alleged money laundering, might be a more promising avenue. But if the Kremlin really is to blame for this latest outrage, the best response is also the simplest: charge Putin with attempted murder.
oliviaodon

What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Much of 2017 was consumed with untangling the political mess that was 2016 and Russia’s role in it. Much of what we learned came from  American journalists, who brought us revelation after revelation about how the Kremlin meddled in the presidential election. Through these reporters’ domestic sources—in the White House, Congress, and the intelligence community—we learned how Russians bought Facebook ads aimed at sowing division; how Russian government agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee and congressional races; how Russians loosely affiliated with the Kremlin reached out to the Trump campaign; and how the Kremlin turned the popular Kaspersky Labs anti-virus software into a spying tool.
  • Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:
  • revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election.
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  • Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.
  • An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.
  • That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race.
  • ozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)
  • This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack.
  • Why has there been so little reporting on Russian election interference coming out of the place that perpetrated it? For one thing, the Russian security services and the Kremlin do not leak, at least not nearly as much as their American counterparts, and they are suspicious of Western journalists, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days. Russian government officials also “don’t like talking to independent journalists, but they’re still better to talk to than to American journalists,” said Liza Osetinskaya, a legendary Russian editor who now runs The Bell.
  • The problem is that independent journalism in Russia has been decimated.
  • Facing this kind of political and economic pressure, many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether.* What we are witnessing “is the last phase of the death of independent Russian media,” Galina Timchenko said at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She is another well-known Russian editor forced out under Kremlin pressure. She now runs the independent Meduza from Latvia. It has a fraction of the reach of the outlet she ran for a decade, Lenta.ru.The squelching of press freedom and the shuttering of independent media abroad is, in other words, not an academic matter. As 2017 has shown, when these voices are silenced, we know far less than we need about vital national security interests. If the violation of an abstract principle doesn’t bother you, its very concrete repercussions should.
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