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Javier E

The ugly face of ethno-nationalists - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gly-face-of-ethno-nationalists

gop conservatism nativism populism racism white supremacy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it’s time to acknowledge that many Republicans view his appeals to white grievance as a positive feature. It’s behind their obsession with “Telling it like it is” — code for expressing base prejudices. The rejection of Hispanics as real Americans has become a given among state-TV hosts like Tucker Carlson.
  • When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) takes to the floor to claim Democrats care more about illegal immigrants than sick kids or the military, you see how vital the race/immigrant card has become to the GOP’s unity.
  • In many ways, antagonism toward immigrants is the glue that binds Trump to his followers and Republicans to one another.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Trump proved in the 2016 election that immigration unified the GOP much more effectively than did its traditional focus on reducing entitlement spending, free trade and low deficits. Among the GOP base, the populist issues of trade and immigration are now far more animating than even abortion or taxes.
  • I never understood why a movement would take pride in rejecting modernism (rather than shaping it, conserving what is good and discarding what is not), but on top of that, stopping a huge demographic shift — the largest, most diverse generation in history (millennials) supplanting aging baby boomers — seems futile and irrational.
  • The retreat into ethno-nationalism is no small matter but rather goes to the very definition of America and the core questions the Civil War, the civil rights movement and every wave of anti-immigration sentiment have presented: Who is an American? Does America need immigrants to prosper and to renew its creed in each generation?
  • Trump and this iteration of the Republican party have made aversion to diversity such a vital principle, it cannot be considered trivial. This is how Republicans have chosen to define themselves these days — and why many of us can no longer call themselves Republicans.
Javier E

Trump blew it - not the WHO, Fauci or the Jews - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-blew-it-not-who-fauci-or-jews

trump jews WHO response blame pandemic alt-right

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.”
  • this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.
  • blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • if the WHO had harshly attacked the Chinese response, we would have gotten even less cooperation and information out of China.
  • The WHO began working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 1 — a day after China disclosed the virus — and sent out advisories to worldwide public-health leaders beginning Jan. 5. Its scientists first got into Wuhan on Jan. 20, and on Jan. 23 it warned of a 4 percent death rate, human-to-human transmission and potential exporting of the virus to “any country.”
  • The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visited Beijing and secured permission for a dozen scientists, including from the CDC, to tour the affected areas from Feb. 16 to Feb. 24.
  • The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.
  • And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28.
Javier E

Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump's COVID-19 Response - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/ne-of-trumps-covid-19-response

timeline trump response pandemic history policy politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.
  • it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.
  • Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.
  • ...57 more annotations...
  • what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.
  • She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational
  • The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.
  • What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.
  • The Early Years: Warnings Ignored
  • 2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic
  • February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”
  • May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
  • One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded
  • Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not
  • January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:
  • A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
  • Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
  • September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.
  • 2020: COVID-19 Arrives
  • anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China
  • January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus
  • Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.
  • January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”
  • January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 
  • January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”
  • January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
  • January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:
  • (1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.
  • (3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.
  • January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
  • January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”
  • January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.
  • Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
  • Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.
  • January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.
  • February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.
  • Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.
  • February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.
  • February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”
  • February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
  • February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.
  • the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.
  • February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”
  • February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.
  • February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance
  • February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.
  • Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”
  • February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.
  • February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
  • March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”
  • March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”
  • March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis
  • March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.
  • Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.
  • March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment
  • March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it
  • At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.
  • March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th
  • March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”
  • March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)
  • As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.
mimiterranova

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ams-ahead-of-expected-2022-run

Politics Georgia targets

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field
  • publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.
  • "We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the two years since Abram's first run, her group Fair Fight has registered tens of thousands of voters in the Peach State and raised $100 million.
Javier E

Opinion | The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right's 'replacement' game - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lson-replacement-rhetoric-scam

replacement scam racism gop immigration

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • a key fact about this narrative: It gets an important truth exactly backward.
  • The aging Whites this story targets will be relying on social insurance programs whose durability will heavily depend on immigrant taxpayers to sustain it, meaning they have a great deal to lose from decreased immigration.
  • With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees.And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments.
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  • The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.
  • But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.
  • That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.
  • To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.
  • The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.
  • Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”
  • What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination
  • There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”
  • As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”
Javier E

Denial and Defiance: Trump and His Base Downplay the Virus Ahead of the Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-base-virus.html

pandemic trump crisis politics policy denial election

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • From resistance to face masks and scorn for the science of the coronavirus to predicting the imminent arrival of a vaccine while downplaying the death count, President Trump and a sizable number of his supporters have aligned emphatically behind an alternate reality minimizing a tragedy that has killed an overwhelming number of Americans and gutted the economy.
  • it is also a direct result of the look-the-other-way message that the Trump administration has sent with increasing urgency, pollsters and strategists say, as the president faces a strong challenge to re-election
  • Mr. Trump has called on Twitter for people to “LIBERATE” states that have imposed stay-at-home orders, threatened to withhold aid from Democratic governors and undercut medical professionals who have cautioned against the use of unproven medical treatments and premature school reopenings.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Polls show that Republicans approve of how he has handled the response to the virus by overwhelming margins and — unlike much of the country — think the United States has moved too slowly to reopen.
  • “President Trump was a terrible role model,” said former Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who has said he will vote for Mr. Biden.
  • Tucker Carlson told his viewers on Fox News the other night that Covid-19 was “not dangerous to the overwhelming number of people who are destroyed by the Covid restrictions.”
  • The message has been reinforced by figures on Fox News and elsewhere in the pro-Trump news media.
  • These disagreements reflect old and conflicting beliefs about the role of government in America. Leave-me-alone libertarianism and deep suspicion of an overly intrusive federal government have long animated conservatives and taken root in the frontier West. Now those resentments, fanned by Mr. Trump, are colliding with a contagious disease and the most contentious election in recent memory.
  • “I don’t believe that the federal government could have done much more,” said Linda Jackson, 60, a Trump supporter who lives in North Cornwall Township, in Lebanon County, Pa. “The president, in my opinion, thinks outside the box, and he enlisted public-private partnerships to get the equipment, the ventilators, the P.P.E., all the things that we needed on the local level to combat the virus. And he’s really ramped up this testing for a vaccine.
  • “I think he’s done a really good job,” she said.
  • The president has tried to present himself as someone who has aggressively sought to confront the virus from the start. For any shortcomings or failures, he and his allies have tried to shift blame to others: China, the states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the World Health Organization. And he continues to provide projections that experts warn are overly optimistic or misguided. Last week he said that a vaccine could be ready “very, very soon,” and insisted that the virus would simply vanish. “It’s going to disappear,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Tucker Carlson and Trump can't win with empty patriotism - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...cant-win-with-empty-patriotism

patriotism trump gop veteran politics history

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • It seems like a long time ago now, but it’s important to recall how intensely toxic the political atmosphere was for the few years after the 9/11 attacks, because the Republican Party made a collective decision to weaponize patriotism against any and all Democrats.
  • In 2004, Democrats nominated John F. Kerry for president in large part because they believed that President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney — two men who, like President Trump, managed to avoid going to Vietnam — could never attack the patriotism of someone who had volunteered to serve and returned home with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.
  • Kerry was targeted for one of the most repugnant campaigns of slander in the history of presidential politics, which buried him in a mountain of lies about his service.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The “You’re on the side of terrorists!” and “You don’t love America!” attacks were extremely potent, not least because Democrats became so terrified of the accusation. It’s why so many Democrats with national ambitions — including Kerry, Biden and Hillary Clinton — voted for the Iraq War, despite how obvious it was that it was a terrible idea and just about everything Bush said about it was a lie.
  • in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, when the idea of America as vulnerable to outside military threats seems almost absurdly remote, the right’s brand of patriotism just isn’t the weapon it once was.
  • Patriotism can mean a faith in our country’s founding ideals, a belief in service and sacrifice, a commitment to the well-being of one’s fellow Americans. But there’s also a more crude and harsh version, the one Trump carries, which defines itself only in relation to outsiders.
  • Trump’s patriotism is about fear and hatred, about “winning” over other countries in an imagined contest in which we are either triumphant or humiliated
  • In his intensely tribal patriotism, ideas of freedom and equality and sacrifice are simply irrelevant.
Javier E

Opinion | Me, Tucker Carlson and the danger to democracy posed by false allegations - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...acy-posed-by-false-allegations

'false accusation' democracy sycophant

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Mutual toleration involves accepting the legitimacy of one’s opponents, as long as they play by the constitutional rules
  • Institutional forbearance means refusing to exercise the full extent of a legal right if it’s the morally wrong thing to do or violates the spirit of the law.
  • leading figures on the right have openly abandoned the obvious standard that those who bring allegations should also bring evidence. This is not a recent development.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But Ziblatt and Levitsky missed another important norm: Don’t make unsubstantiated allegations or false accusations.
  • rtunately.In ancient Greece, Athenian democrats understood that establishing social sanctions against false accusations — and avoiding situations in which people are being asked to prove a negative — was one of the most important pillars of maintaining a healthy democratic culture.
  • For this reason, they reserved one of their most bitter epithets for people who trafficked in false accusations. They were “sycophants,”
  • Sycophants were the lowest of the low because they took the best of democracy — the rule of law, process and procedure — and sought to turn it against itself in order to incapacitate opponents and secure power.
Javier E

No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas Grossman - Nicholas Grossman - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a

Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
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  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • Two things jump out here:
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
Javier E

On the Enduring Power of Malevolent Leaders - 0 views

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power evil authoritarian leaders culture politics history bible

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • this week, let’s talk about his enemy, Vladimir Putin: why he’s a common villain, and why men like him are ubiquitous in human history. They rise and fall with almost metronomic regularity, not just because there are always men who are drawn to absolute power and military glory, but because these men connect with specific human needs and unlock the darkness in human hearts. 
  • as recently as ten days ago significant figures in the United States and the west obviously and openly admired Putin, including Donald Trump, the former president and frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Days before the Russian Army launched its unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable news host in America, was so pro-Putin that his remarks were rebroadcast on Russian state media. 
  • In 2017 Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered an address to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, entitled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” Hillsdale, for those who don’t know, is arguably the premier conservative college in America.
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  • Caldwell’s words are worth remembering because they describe—perhaps more eloquently than anyone else in the west—not just why Putin built a following abroad, but also how he became (at least for a time) popular at home
  • He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.
  • if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.
  • I’ve long thought about an argument in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
  • the available evidence indicates he’s been broadly popular in Russia for two decades. One wonders how long this popularity can hold as Russian forces struggle on the battlefield, but the bottom line is still clear—tens of millions of people (including some of the most influential people in the west) have admired an objectively evil man. Why? 
  • he did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system
  • One of the most fateful passages of scripture is found in 1 Samuel 8, the moment the people of Israel demand a king. Dissatisfied with the leadership of Samuel’s dissolute sons, they demanded a king “to judge us like all the nations.” 
  • “There shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
  • Throughout history we see familiar patterns, in times of stress and confusion, people cry out for salvation and strength. Success—including military success—builds a bond with the people. The victorious ruler connects not just with human pride, but also with profound human longings for protection, purpose, and identity.
  • Marius’s case for Napoleon feels relevant as Vladimir Putin longs for the glories of the Russian imperial past:
  • Putin inherited the husk of an empire, and in war after war, for year after year, he triumphed. He expanded the zone of Russian control. He replaced the lost Soviet identity with a renewed commitment to Russian greatness. While Putin’s victories weren’t as dramatic as Napoleon’s—Georgia and Crimea can’t compare to Jena and Austerlitz—war provides a terrible purpose, and victory creates remarkable pride. 
  • The sobering reality is that we cannot look at Russia and simply shake our heads at “those people,” secure in the knowledge that we’re fundamentally different
  • we’re still not far removed from a violent attempt to overturn an American election, led by a mob waving blue flags stamped with their leader’s name. 
  • There are those who see the ways in which human beings abuse liberty, or squander it in disorder and decadence, and are drawn to the order and direction of authoritarianism. In this formulation, freedom itself is the problem. It doesn’t provide purpose. 
ecfruchtman

After Bannon: the new faces of the hard right | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ve-bannon-new-faces-hard-right

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser for policy
  • Miller has been pushing to stop any deal with advocates of immigration reform and shares Bannon’s advocacy of “economic nationalism”.
  • Matt Boyle, Washington editor, Breitbart News
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In a reference to the NFL, he has described himself as Tom Brady to Bannon’s Bill Belichick.
  • Raheem Kassam, London editor, Breitbart News
  • Kassam has also taken the opportunity to throw bombs on the other side of the Atlantic, defending Trump’s “shithole” comment by telling Sky News that London had become “a shithole” under Sadiq Khan.
  • Tucker Carlson, Fox News host
  • Carlson, the well groomed son of a former US ambassador, represents economic nationalism with a preppy face. He has long gleefully engaged in the culture wars that animated Bannon, targeting campus leftists and establishment Republicans with glee.
  • Benny Johnson, reporter-at-large, Daily Caller
  • Johnson, who has served stints at BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review, has long crafted a reputation for driving conservatives to click on his stories and pushing them to go viral with headlines such as: “Sarah Sanders Just Burned CNN So Bad The Briefing Room Let Out An Audible Gasp.”
Javier E

The Fox News whipsaw on coronavirus: In another swerve, hosts push Trump to abandon shutdown - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html

trump response pandemic fox news culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In the first stage, Ingraham, Hannity, Lou Dobbs and weekend pundit Jeanine Pirro cast criticism of Trump’s handling of the virus’ outbreak as a conspiracy by Democratic officials and members of the news media to undermine his reelection chances. They called critics “panic pushers” who were inciting “mass hysteria.”
  • They also minimized the impact of the virus, which could have a potentially disastrous effect on higher-risk groups such as older people — coincidentally, the most loyal cohort of Fox viewers
  • To date, neither Fox nor any of the network’s hosts have apologized for, clarified or retracted any of their earlier statements. (Fox’s media representatives offered no comment Tuesday).
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  • But, in the second stage, Fox’s most prominent figures had a quick change of heart after Trump declared a state of emergency on March 13, acknowledging that the pandemic could have devastating health and economic consequences.
  • A third message seems to have germinated on Sunday with Hilton’s monologue.
  • On his program Monday, Tucker Carlson, who previously had warned of the virus’s severity, agreed with Trump’s new, less-restrictive view. “You can’t just let epidemiologists run a country of more than 320 million people,” Carlson said, arguing that it was important to find a balance between fighting the virus and keeping the economy going.
  • The message was reinforced Tuesday morning on “F0x & Friends,” during which Fox medical correspondent Marc Siegel, a medical doctor, suggested there were “moderate” ways of handling the crisis.
  • “What if there are no cases in certain states?” he asked, although every state is now handling infections. “What if it’s very low? Maybe there is a way to test, to target, to isolate and then to have more-moderate ways of approaching it in areas that aren’t yet affected. And then, of course, restrict travel from one area that has a lot of it to one that doesn’t. I think that’s a more practical approach, because otherwise the economy gets in worse and worse shape.”
  • Co-host Brian Kilmeade replied that the issue had divided experts. “You have economists on one side, health officials on the other,” he said. “Maybe the right thing is in the middle.”
Javier E

Republican men are a central part of coronavirus vaccine resistance - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...coronavirus-vaccine-resistance

vaccine resistance gop demagogue fox news

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The group most dependent on Fox News as a source of information is Republican men. Pew Research Center measured America’s media consumption habits last year and found that a third of Republican men cited Fox News as a major source of post-election news, with another 40 percent identifying the network as a minor source of information. That 72 percent was higher than other sources of information like CNN (37 percent), network television (62 percent, mostly as a minor source)
  • Why is Tucker Carlson so hostile to a plan to distribute a vaccine that, on Friday morning, his colleagues on “Fox & Friends” were complaining that Biden didn’t sufficiently credit to Donald Trump? Why are so many Republicans similarly skeptical?
  • It seems hard to extricate those views from Carlson’s obvious hostility to the idea that something presented as important by the government should therefore necessarily be treated as dubious.
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  • That sentiment is hardly new on the political right, and it’s one that Biden specifically tried to undercut in his speech. But on this issue, it’s also a sentiment that Fox News, Carlson and Trump all amplified repeatedly over the past 12 months. With the coronavirus pandemic raging and Trump seeking reelection, he and his allies sought to cast the spread of the virus and the burdensome efforts to contain it as the fault of other people, including Fauci.
Javier E

Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...minion-conservative-media.html

fox news conservative media response lies fraud viewers

shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox’s rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.
  • Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox’s shows.
  • On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16
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  • “Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,”
  • Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
  • The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff.
  • The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”
  • Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”
  • “The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”
  • There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Mr. Rosenstiel pointed to a long history of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered
  • Fox’s lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial
  • “From an ethical perspective, I’d say it’s a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.
  • Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by The Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’s hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News
  • The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Mr. Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump
  • One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.
  • When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.
anonymous

Will Russia connection become the Trump administration's Watergate? | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...russia-trump-watergate-kislyak

russia connection trump administration politics us

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Will Russia connection become the Trump administration's Watergate?
  • As more details emerge of meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and TV hosts have a field day, the scandal seems unlikely to disappear soon
  • Donald Trump flew out of Washington on Friday but was unable to leave a gathering storm of allegations, intrigue and unanswered questions about his ties to Russia behind him.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The US president’s joint address to Congress this week was well received but was rapidly overshadowed by revelations that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had twice spoken with the Russian ambassador during last year’s presidential election.
  • The congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, has called for Sessions to quit, saying he “clearly misled” the Senate about contacts with Russian officials, and demanded that a special prosecutor be appointed.
  • Despite the conclusions of US intelligence agencies, Sessions refused to say whether Putin favoured Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. “I have never been told that,” he told the host, Tucker Carlson. “I don’t have any idea, Tucker – you’d have to ask them.
  • Last month Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign amid controversy over his discussions with Kislyak in late December. On Thursday, it emerged that Kushner joined Flynn at a private meeting with the ambassador at Trump Tower in New York. Another campaign aide, Carter Page, did not deny meeting Kislyak during the Republican national convention. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s son, Donald Jr, was probably paid at least $50,000 for an appearance late last year at a French thinktank whose founder and wife have strong ties to Russia.
  • Trump, meanwhile, said that Sessions was the target of a “witch-hunt” and declared his “total” confidence in him.
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