goal was to satirize Facebook’s cryptic regulations, which have made the company a target of vehement public criticism in a society historically suspicious of censorship in all forms.
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Can Germany Fix Facebook? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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To say Facebook has an image problem in Germany, where it has 28 million users, is a staggering understatement. Germans tend to view it as a phenomenon that drives people apart instead of bringing them “closer together,” as Facebook’s mission statement suggests, by facilitating the spread of hate speech, misinformation, and fake news in the process.
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Facebook played a role in delivering the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) to the best performance of a far-right nationalist party since the Third Reich.
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“Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany—a club that includes giants like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit—up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups, and more.
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Instead, Article One of Germany’s postwar constitution instructs, “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” This notion “means you are not allowed to claim false things about me, because it hurts my dignity,” Beckedahl said. “You are not allowed to tell anyone in public lies about me, or I can take you to court.”
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The invocation of human dignity carries immense moral force, and parallels the language of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
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Like Künast, Jun has been assiduously collecting and reporting instances of pro-Nazi language and other forms of hate speech on Facebook since 2015, logging them methodically in a Dropbox folder and Excel spreadsheet that he’s eager to share with inquiring journalists. Images from the internet of beheadings, murders, Nazi salutes, and racist slurs abound. His aim in collecting this wealth of abhorrent material is simple: to underscore the chasm separating Germany’s constitution, which bans the dissemination of material documenting “cruel or otherwise inhuman acts of violence” and incitement to hatred, and the permissive culture of the internet. The result, Jun said, is that Germans—and most Facebook users around the world—are living a kind of double life, subject to two very different legal and moral codes.
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In response to what he saw as Facebook’s negligence on this score, Jun took a different approach, targeting individual managers at the company for perpetuating, or even encouraging, hateful behavior. “If a manager of a company has positive knowledge about a concrete crime, and he doesn’t do anything about it, then he will have personal liability for that crime,” he explained. In other words: If he could prove that Facebook employees were aware of hate speech on the network and did not take the posts down, they could be found guilty of a crime in a German court. (The law is usually applied to copyright infringements, and whether it will work in a criminal case against a social-media platform remains an open question.)
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Pope says rescinding DACA is not 'pro-life' - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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As the papal plane prepared to cross over Hurricane Irma's path on its way back to Rome from Cartagena, Francis issued a stern warning to climate change deniers.
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Whoever denies it has to go to the scientists and ask them," he said. "They speak very clearly, scientists are precise."
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It is a hard message for many Colombians, who still have the trauma of kidnappings and killings fresh in their minds, but one which seems to have already had an important effect.
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Election Lawsuits Are A New Tactic To Fight Disinformation : NPR - 0 views
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The victims of some of the most pernicious conspiracy theories of 2020 are fighting back in court. Voting equipment companies have filed a series of massive defamation lawsuits against allies of former President Trump in an effort to exert accountability over falsehoods about the companies' role in the election and repair damage to their brands.
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On Friday, Fox News became the latest target and was served with a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems after several of the network's hosts entertained on air conspiracy theories pushed by former President Trump that the company had rigged the results of the November election against him in key states.
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Dominion has also sued Trump associates Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell for billions in damages. The company is one of the top providers of voting equipment to states and counties around the country and typically relies on procurement decisions made by elected officials from both political parties.
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Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in one Ohio county sought to block the county election board's purchase of new Dominion equipment. A Dominion employee who was forced into hiding due to death threats has sued Giuliani, Powell and the Trump campaign. Another voting systems company, Smartmatic, has also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
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Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that's already starting to show some results although some journalists are uneasy that a news organization could be targeted.
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Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning.
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The number of defamation lawsuits and the large damage claims associated with them is novel, said journalism and public policy professor Bill Adair, head of the journalism program at Duke University.
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He does worry that using defamation suits to combat untruths spread by media outlets could become a weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. "As a journalist, I'm a little bit nervous. The idea of using defamation lawsuits makes us a little bit concerned."But even with that discomfort, Adair has come to believe the lawsuits do have a role to play.
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The defamation suits already do appear to be having an effect. An anchor for Newsmax walked out on a live interview with My Pillow CEO Lindell when he started making unsubstantiated claims about Dominion voting machines. Fox News, the Fox Business Network and Newsmax also aired segments that contradicted the disinformation their own hosts had amplified.
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Last month, Fox Business also cancelled a show hosted by Trump ally Lou Dobbs, who had amplified the conspiracy theories and interviewed Powell and Giuliani about them.
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One challenge for the plaintiffs is that defamation lawsuits are difficult to win. They need to show the person they're suing knew a statement was false when she made it, or had serious doubts about its truthfulness.
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Media organizations have a First Amendment right to report the news, and that includes repeating what important people say, even if those statements are false, said George Freeman, the former in-house counsel for The New York Times, who now heads the Medial Law Resource Center.
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Pro-Trump outlets are likely to claim that constitutional protection for their defense but Freeman believes they may have crossed a legal line in their presentation of election fraud claims and in some instances applauding obvious falsehoods.
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Still Freeman said he thinks the strongest defamation cases aren't against the media companies, but against one of the people they gave a lot of airtime to, Rudy Giuliani.
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In a January call announcing the lawsuit against Giuliani, Dominion's attorney, Tom Clare, said that the court can consider circumstantial evidence too. The complaint includes a detailed timeline that shows Giuliani continued to make his claims in the face of public assurances from election security experts, hand recounts, and numerous court rulings rejecting fraud cases.
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While the current lawsuits could have an impact in this instance, experts on misinformation say there are several reasons why defamation cases aren't a central tool in the fight against falsehoods.
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Many conspiracy theories don't target a specific person or company, so there's no one to file a lawsuit against. Legal action is also expensive. Coomer's legal team expects his bills will exceed $2 million. And when a victim does sue, a case can take years.
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The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones of the conspiracy site, InfoWars. But after numerous challenges and delays, the cases are all still in the pre-trial phase. With Dominion and Smartmatic vowing not to settle before they get their day in court, this approach to fighting election misinformation may still be grinding forward even as the country enters the next presidential election. But for Adair and others, any effort to discourage future misinformation campaigns is worth pursuing.
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Church And COVID-19: Bishops Express Moral Concerns Over Johnson & Johnson Shot : NPR - 0 views
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The new Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine may offer the best prospect for protecting as many Americans as possible, as quickly as possible, but some U.S. faith leaders say they have moral concerns about its development.
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Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was produced in part through the use of cell lines derived from an aborted human fetus. In a statement released this week, leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that this feature of the vaccine raises questions about its permissibility.
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"That does not mean, though," Moore tells NPR, "that people must shun medical treatments that can save lives because they were discovered through means of which we would not necessarily approve."
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"It is a safe vaccine," says the Rev. Kirtley Yearwood, the hospital's chief mission officer. "It has a wonderful record as far as being able to prevent serious illness and hospitalization. Those are very remote cell lines. It's not a primary concern when you have the greater issue of saving lives."
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Undocumented Venezuelans Given Protected Status In United States : NPR - 0 views
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The Biden administration said Monday that it will allow many Venezuelans who are already in the country illegally to remain because of the humanitarian and economic crisis in the socialist South American nation that is an adversary of the U.S.
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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans.
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Venezuela has fallen into a life-threatening economic and humanitarian crises that have caused more than 5 million Venezuelans to flee in search of food, medicine and shelter.
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The decision represents a dramatic shift in policy from the previous administration, which withstood bipartisan calls to grant the protections to Venezuelans.
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Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic political strategist and pollster, said granting TPS to Venezuelans could open up a new relationship for Biden with an electorate that largely supported Trump in 2020.
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Temporary Protected Status is granted to those from countries ravaged by natural disasters or war, allowing them to live and work in the United States until conditions improve back home.
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"Venezuela is a failed state in every single measure," he said. "There's simply not enough food to go around. Hospitals had collapsed before the pandemic. You have a repressive dictatorship and extraordinary levels of violence in the street. You have pro-government militias attacking protesters. It's just inhumane to send people back into those conditions."
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Matt Gaetz is denied a meeting with Donald Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Rep. Matt Gaetz, who's facing a federal investigation into sex trafficking allegations, was recently denied a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate as the ex-President and his allies continue to distance themselves from the Florida congressman.
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Gaetz tried to schedule a visit with Trump after it was first revealed that he was being investigated, but the request was rejected by aides close to the former President,
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Rep. Gaetz was welcomed to Trump Doral this week and has not sought to meet with President Trump himself,"
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The interference by Trump's aides signals that Gaetz finds himself increasingly isolated as he weathers a potentially career-ending scandal just months after he offered to leave his plum job in Congress to join the 45th President's impeachment defense team.
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Trump denied ever receiving a blanket pardon request from the 38-year-old congressman and noted Gaetz's denial of the allegations against him.
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Trump spokesman Jason Miller wrote in a tweet on Sunday evening that Gaetz did not request a meeting "and therefore, it could never have been denied."Read More
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Federal investigators are examining allegations that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl who was 17 at the time and with other women who were provided drugs and money in violation of sex trafficking and prostitution laws.
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Trump omitted Gaetz as he name-checked many of his top Republican defenders -- from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, according to two people familiar with his remarks.
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Trump's failure to mention Gaetz was viewed as conspicuous to some in the crowd, given the congressman's outsized loyalty to the former President and the litany of other Republicans Trump called out during his speech.
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Gaetz's appearance on Friday at a conference for pro-Trump women raised eyebrows inside the former President's orbit
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Gaetz, who was announced as a "special guest" only days before the summit began, used his time on stage to denounce "wild conspiracy theories" about his personal life, and to reaffirm his plans to remain on Capitol Hill.
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Gaetz has already faced calls from one Republican colleague, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, to resign his congressional seat and has received virtually no support from within Trump's orbit
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Hong Kong Activists Detained on Speedboat Are Tried in China - WSJ - 0 views
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The families of a group of Hong Kong activists who were detained fleeing the city in a speedboat in August called on Chinese authorities to issue verdicts soon after they were tried in a mainland court.
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Shenzhen said the trials of 10 of the activists had ended and the verdicts would be announced at another time.
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has drawn international attention and become a central issue for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.
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The 10 charged are accused of illegal border crossing, which carries a one-year sentence. Two of the 10 are also accused of organizing the attempted escape and are potentially facing longer prison terms.
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he U.S. State Department called on China to release them immediately and allow them to leave the country. “Their so-called crime was to flee tyranny,” the State Department said.
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they haven’t been allowed to meet with the attorneys hired by their families. The families say they haven’t been able to meet with their relatives since they were taken from the boat
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“The officially assigned lawyers dodged my questions,” said Chan Lok-yin, mother of another defendant, Li Tsz-yin. “How much longer do I need to wait until I could see him?”
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some of the detained activists sent handwritten letters to their families saying they had been treated well.
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The Hong Kong police said the 12 activists each paid tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars to be smuggled out.
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Families said they were notified about the trial three days ago, making it impossible for them to attend under the current coronavirus restrictions, which would require them to be quarantined for two weeks after entering the mainland.
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Trump's actions in last days as President increase his legal jeopardy - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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President Donald Trump's actions during his final days in office have significantly increased his exposure to potential criminal prosecution, lawyers say, complicating his life after the White House.
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Over five days last week -- beginning with a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State directing him to "find" votes to overturn the election to encouraging the pro-Trump crowd to "show strength" in their march to the Capitol -- lawyers say the President has put himself under the microscope of state and federal prosecutors.
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The Manhattan district attorney's office has a broad criminal investigation looking into allegations of insurance fraud and tax fraud. The New York attorney general has a civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated the value of its assets.
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The new possible criminal exposure comes on top of ongoing New York state investigations into the President's finances and multiple defamation lawsuits related to Trump denying sexual assault accusations by women.
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The New York criminal investigation has been slowed by a fight over the President's tax records, a scrum that is again before the Supreme Court.
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Sandick and other lawyers, however, say that as alarming as Trump's recent statements have been, there are multiple hurdles for prosecutors to prove that the President violated election laws or those relating to incitement or sedition.
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He is also facing a civil investigation from the New York attorney general's office, which is looking at whether the President improperly inflated the value of his assets to obtain loans or favorable tax benefits
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Prosecutors have also not been in contact with Rosemary Vrablic, Trump's private banker at Deutsche Bank, which has loaned the President more than $300 million dollars, people familiar with the investigation said.
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The President's actions this past week have already cost him financially -- the PGA of America said on Sunday night it would not hold its championship in 2022 at the Trump golf course in New Jersey and Deutsche Bank said it would not do business with him -- and the specter of ongoing criminal investigations may have a longer-term impact on his business prospects. New York City announced Wednesday that it is taking steps to cancel contracts with Trump Org for the Ferry Point golf course and carousel and ice skating rink in Central Park.
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Trump's recent statements will present the Biden administration, which has made calls for unity, and his Justice Department with the dilemma of potentially prosecuting a former president.
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"There's a long precedent of not prosecuting former presidents over policy differences," said Elliot Williams, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor. "The difference is we're not talking about policy difference here, and this is perhaps the most egregious conduct we've ever seen from a president while in office
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Some former prosecutors say that a lot of the conduct is morally reprehensible, but it isn't clear if it will cross the line into violating the law. Investigators will need to prove the President intended to commit crimes, a high bar in criminal cases, not that he was encouraging lawful protests or truly believed that he won the election.
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Like the riot, the legal liability for Trump's call to Georgia election officials will turn on his statements. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, imploring him to "find" 11,780 votes to give him the edge to overturn the election. It followed a call in December in which Trump told a Georgia elections investigator he would be a "national hero" if he would "find the fraud," a source told CNN.
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As the end of Trump's presidency nears, sources tell CNN Trump has considered pardoning himself, his family members and other allies from federal charges. Lawyers say it is not clear whether a self-pardon would hold up in court, but a presidential pardon has no bearing on state investigations.
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Chinese youth - Young Chinese are both patriotic and socially progressive | Special rep... - 0 views
www.economist.com/...iotic-and-socially-progressive
youth progressive china history politics Culture pandemic
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More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party
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How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.
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Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.
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Without siblings, they shoulder alone the full weight of their parents’ (and grandparents’) expectations: to excel at school, secure a stable job, marry and have children, all before the age of 30.
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Newlyweds hit a ten-year low in 2019. Women in Shanghai marry on average at 29, later than Americans and a jump of six years in a decade
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The jiulinghou are China’s best-educated cohort yet. Last year the country churned out a record 9m graduates.
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A pay cheque is no longer enough; young people want a sense of purpose. As labour-intensive manufacturing winds down, young migrants from the countryside are taking up gigs that give them more freedom in the booming informal sector.
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In China this cohort has a generational identity: the jiulinghou, or “post-90s”, a shorthand term for those born between 1990 and 1999. They number 188m—more than the combined populations of Australia, Britain and Germany.
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The jiulinghou are seen as apolitical, except in their naive and brash patriotism; concerned with getting ahead, but only to buy the latest iPhone. Many see them as materialistic and entitled, a generation of “little emperors” doted on by their parents.
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When they feel insulted by foreign entities, be they K-pop bands or America’s National Basketball Association, millions clamour online for consumer boycotts that cow even mighty multinationals. Patriotic sentiment has long been strong. But increasingly youths do not question the regime’s claim that loving country and party are one and the same.
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Despite pervasive censorship, they use China’s online networks to promote such causes as feminism, environmentalism and nationalism.
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Students take obligatory courses on Marxism, nationalism and the doctrines of Mao; last year “Xi Jinping Thought” was added. This affects how they see the world. A survey in 2019 by China Youth Daily, a state organ, found that three in four of those born after 1995 think China is “not perfect, but always improving”.
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“We are the jiulinghou,” the message read. “We are certainly not brain-dead!...In fact, we are passionate, we are rising and we are ready to take on responsibility.”
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young people speak out for social causes. Many join volunteer groups or donate to charity. No generation has been more vocal in its support of LGBT and women’s rights. Students have backed factory workers trying to unionise, and staged silent street protests about climate change.
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Young people do not intend to challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Their social liberalism has grown even as support for the party rises
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The jiulinghou are comfortable with a rising, assertive China. The party knows how to play on this. It has hammered home that China stopped the spread of covid-19 within its borders as the West bungled its response. Spin doctors have not had to exert themselves on the calamitous failings of Donald Trump’s presidency. More overseas Chinese students are returning home, disillusioned with the West. Young pride feeds off a new worldly confidence.
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China divides its generations by decades. The qilinghou (post-70s) are defined by childhoods after Mao’s death in 1976. The balinghou (post-80s) grew up as China reformed and opened to the world under Deng Xiaoping. It is often now argued that generations change every five years, or even every three—the talk is already of the linglinghou, most of whom are still in school. To speak of millennials, whose definition in the West is those born between 1981 and 1996, is to shoehorn four Chinese generations into one.
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The gap is easy to grasp if you ask parents to recall their 20s. They mention jobs allocated by the party through their danwei, a government-controlled work unit.
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The lives of jiulinghou share two features. One is that they began after the pro-democracy protests of 1989. The state relentlessly scrubs from the internet any reference to the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests.
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The second feature is that those born since 1991 spent their late teens with Mr Xi in power. They might be called Generation Xi
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Yet not every young Chinese holds rosy views of the party. In Hong Kong, young protesters fighting for Western freedoms have made clear their fury at their erosion by the Beijing government. Tibetan and Uyghur youths seethe in silence as brutal state-led campaigns erase their cultures and languages
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In Poland, Protests As Near-Total Ban On Abortions Goes Into Effect : NPR - 0 views
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Protesters gathered in the streets of Warsaw and other cities on Wednesday night after Poland's government announced a near-total ban on abortion had suddenly gone into effect.
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The country's Constitutional Court had ruled in October to ban terminations of pregnancies with fetal defects – nearly the only abortions that occur in Poland, which already had strict limits on the procedure. Abortion will now only be permitted in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother's health or life is in danger.
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"This idiotic ruling will not prevent abortions," Cezary Jasinski, a 23-year-old student, told Reuters in central Warsaw. "But for every woman who will experience pain because of this ruling, or will be forced to give birth to a child with Down syndrome, they (court judges) will be to blame."
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There were 1,100 abortions performed last year in Poland; of those, 1,074 were due to fetal abnormalities, The New York Times reports.
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"In cases when the fetus doesn't have a skull or has no chance to live outside the womb, there should be a choice. We will work on this," Suski told Polish public radio, according to Reuters.
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Clement Beaune, France's European Affairs minister, wrote on Twitter: "A sad day that reminds us that rights can recede if they are not defended. The fight goes on."
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The months-long delay between the ruling and its implementation appears to be a result of the large protests that ensued. Last October, a planned "women's strike" drew more than 400,000 protesters across more than 400 Polish cities and towns.
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Democrats take control of Virginia and claim win in Kentucky governor's race | US news ... - 0 views
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In Kentucky, which Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2016 election, Andy Beshear – the Democratic challenger to unpopular incumbent governor Matt Bevin – declared victory as he was narrowly ahead of the Republican
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Tonight voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear. It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong,
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Voters in suburban swaths of Kentucky and Virginia sided with Democrats, a trend that would complicate Trump’s path to re-election in 2020 if it holds. And the Democrats who made gains in Tuesday’s election did so by largely avoiding positions such as the government-run healthcare plan “Medicare for All” that have animated the party’s left flank in the Democratic presidential primary race.
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Bevin was elected in 2015 and had portrayed this election as a referendum on Trump, who stumped for the governor at a rally in Kentucky on Monday night and called Beshear “too liberal, too extreme and too dangerous”
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A bullish Bevin had told the New York Times last month that he anticipated winning the election by between six and 10 points.
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But while Trump won Kentucky with more than 60% of the vote in 2016 and remains popular in the state, with Republicans in other races there doing well on Tuesday, Bevin – who polls as one of America’s most unpopular governors – could not ride that popularity to victory.
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Beshear, the state’s attorney general and the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, made public education the cornerstone of his campaign, choosing a public high school assistant principal as his running mate and accusing Bevin of bullying schoolteachers who protested against proposed pension reforms.
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Bevin, meanwhile, fought on broader, national and cultural issues, highlighting his relationship with Trump and his support for the second amendment, while touting himself as the “most pro-life” governor in America.
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Kentucky’s race was one of several closely watched elections in states across the US on Tuesday. Republican Daniel Cameron made history in a resounding win in Kentucky’s election for attorney general, becoming the first African American to win the office.
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Democrats have pledged that when they take power, they will pass an agenda that Republicans have blocked for years, including stricter gun laws, a higher minimum wage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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The Young Left Is a Third Party - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...603232
politics culture progressive young leftist age generation Generation Z
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Americans 55 and up account for less than one-third of the population, but they own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s the highest level of elderly wealth concentration on record. The reason is simple: To an unprecedented degree, older Americans own the most valuable real estate and investment portfolios. They’ve captured more than 80 percent of stock-market growth since the end of the Great Recession.
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under the age of 40, for their part, are historically well educated, historically peaceful, and historically law-abiding
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“In the U.S, as in the U.K. and in much of Europe, 2008 was the end of the end of history,” says Keir Milburn, the author of Generation Left, a book on young left-wing movements. “The last decade in the U.K. has been the worst decade for wage growth for 220 years. In the U.S., this generation is the first in a century that expects to have lower lifetime earnings than their parents. It has created an epochal shift.”
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Young Americans demanding more power, control, and justice have veered sharply to the left. This lurch was first evident in the two elections of Barack Obama, when he won the youth vote by huge margins
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Obama won about 60 percent of voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primary. Bernie Sanders won more than 70 percent of under-30 voters in the 2016 primary, which pushed Hillary Clinton to the left and dragged issues like Medicare for All and free college from the fringe to the mainstream of political debate.
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Joe Biden polled at 2 percent among voters under 30, within the margin of error of zero. Nationally, he is in single digits among Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Yet Biden is the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, thanks to his huge advantage among old voters and black voters, who are considerably more moderate than younger Democrats.
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Bernie Sanders, by contrast, leads all candidates among voters under 30 and polls just 5 percent among voters over 65
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age divides young leftists from both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party’s front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation.
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age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party. 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c
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It might be most useful to think about 2cyoung progressives as a third party trapped in a two-party system.
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they are a powerful movement politically domiciled within a larger coalition of moderate older minorities and educated suburbanites, who don’t always know what to do with their rambunctious bunkmates.
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justice: Social justice, sought through a reappraisal of power relationships in social and corporate life, and economic justice, sought through the redistribution of income from the rich to the less fortunate.
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This group’s support for Medicare for All, free college, and student-debt relief is sometimes likened to a “give me free stuff” movement.
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every movement wants free stuff, if by free stuff one means “stuff given preferential treatment in the tax code.” By this definition, Medicare is free stuff, and investment income is free stuff, and suburban home values propped up by the mortgage-interest deduction are free stuff. The free stuff in the tax code today benefits Americans with income and wealth—a population that is disproportionately old.
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Medicare for All might be politically infeasible, but it is, taken literally, a request that the federal government extend to the entire population the insurance benefits now exclusively reserved for the elderly. That’s not hatred or resentment; it sounds more like justice.
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across ethnicities, many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that can be characterized as “political correctness” or “socialism.”
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While Medicare for All often polls well, its public support is exquisitely sensitive to framing. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the net favorability of eliminating private insurance or requiring most Americans to pay more in taxes—both part of the Sanders plan—is negative-23 points.
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Gen X is firmly pro-capitalist and Baby Boomers, who came of age during the Cold War, prefer capitalism over socialism by a two-to-one margin.
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Social Security and Medicare are, essentially, socialism for the old, but that’s not the same as converting them into Berniecrats.)
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“This is only the halfway point of an epochal change in Western politics following the Great Recession,” Keir Milburn says. The far right has responded with calls for xenophobic nationalism to preserve national identity, while the left has responded with calls for social democracy to restore socioeconomic justice
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the far right is ascendant, but they have no answer to the future because they’ve given up on the future. The young left has identified that the future of adulthood no longer feels viable to many people, and it’s putting together a different vision.”
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Grooming Young Conservatives in the Trump Era - The Atlantic - 0 views
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At Princeton, however, conservative-leaning students and professors are mostly insulated from the day-to-day tumult. They’re more interested in a bigger question: What should conservatism—and America—look like moving forward?
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Elite conservative circles at these universities tend to focus on great books and big ideas, on statesmanship and lofty principles. Nothing could be further from the culture of American politics at the national level today, driven as it is by tribalism and thirst for the blood of political enemies.
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Even something so basic as collegiality can seem quaint these days. Although American politics have always been ugly and divisive, elite manners and sensibilities at least superficially governed how political life was conducted. The art of persuasion was at the very least afforded lip service. Not so much anymore.
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the leaders of this microcosm are doubling down on one of the oldest theories of politics: that ideas have the power to shape the direction of the country.
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At least at Princeton, students and their mentors are betting that romantic ideals such as collegiality and intellectual rigor have not totally lost their relevance in the Trump era
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The campus is largely apolitical or vaguely liberal, students told me, but George has carved out a mini-kingdom for right-leaning academics and students, who have gone on to hold all sorts of influential positions.
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The students and professors who move in Princeton’s conservative worlds have a diverse range of political views: They are pro-Trump and anti-Trump, stalwart supporters of the Republican Party and politically homeless wanderers with conservative leanings. I talked with students who like some of what Trump is doing, but for the most part, they were hesitant to go full MAGA.
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they seem to share a vision of how politics should be done, prizing respectful debate, principled arguments, and guidance from thinkers such as John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s an ethos focused, above all, on civility and erudition.
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issues such as impeachment have gone all but unmentioned among his friends and peers. “We are just debating the way we see the world and how it should be,” Rajasekar said. Conversations about politics at restaurants and bars are always cordial and respectful, he added. “We place a high premium on that kind of collegiality.”
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students at Princeton who lean to the right have helped build a robust suite of conservative groups, most prominently the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, an expansive academic center overseen by the prominent scholar Robert P. George.
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“We have a motto for students in the Madison Program—it’s on some of the swag we hand out,” he said. “It’s ‘Think deeply, think critically, and think for yourself.’
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George, a long-respected figure in the conservative political world, has been a vocal critic of Trump since before the 2016 election. As a result, unlike in prior Republican administrations, he has largely remained on the sidelines of polic
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he’s committed to his vision of what the conservative movement, and American politics, can look like. “I have a kind of faith in the power of clear, coherent, deep thinking to produce good citizens and good people,” he said.
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Idealism is dead at Princeton,” Christian Schmidt, a senior who has been involved in nearly every conservative organization on campus, told me over apple cider at a local coffee shop. “The primary emotion, I think, on Princeton’s campus is apathy. Or apathy fused with resignation
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Other students said they don’t see a clear place for themselves in conservative politics, no matter how engaged they might be in the world of conservative ideas.
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Most of the people I spoke with described feeling welcome to share their ideas on Princeton’s campus—a number of students and faculty specifically mentioned that the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has made a point of creating space for diverse viewpoints
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At least at Princeton, there seems to be hope. “We have gotten over these moments, these eruptions of no confidence,” said Allen Guelzo, a historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, during the conversation with George and other professors. “And I think we will get over this as well.”
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In this cloistered bastion, the work of grooming conservative elites will continue. “If I were the last man on Earth to believe this stuff,” George said, “I would still believe I’ve got the best product to sell.”
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Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people | Simon Tisd... - 0 views
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News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies.
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Russia under Putin’s grim tutelage has grown notorious for cronyism and corruption on a vast scale, repression of domestic opponents and free speech, and military aggression and disruption abroad.
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Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
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Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.
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The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.
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Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.
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Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.
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The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.
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Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.
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And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?
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The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.
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More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
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None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
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Jan. 6 Was 9 Weeks - And 4 Years - in the Making - POLITICO - 0 views
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the evening of November 5, the president of the United States addressed the American people from the White House and disgorged a breathtaking litany of lies about the 2020 election. He concluded that the presidency was being stolen from him, warning his supporters, “They’re trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen.” Feeling a pit in my stomach, I tweeted, “November 5, 2020. A dark day in American history.”
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From scrolling my social media feed and listening to the cable news punditry buzzing in the background, it seemed my fear was a minority sentiment. If anything, much of the commentary that night was flippant, sardonic, sometimes lighthearted, with many smart people alternately making fun of Trump’s speech and brushing it aside
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I tweeted again: “I mean, if you spend all your time around people who won't believe a word of what Trump just said, good for you. But that’s not the real world. 70 million people just voted for a man who insists that our elections are rigged. Many of those people will believe him. It’s harrowing.”
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Nobody knew exactly how that belief would manifest itself; I certainly never expected to see platoons of insurrectionists scaling the walls of the U.S. Capitol and sacking the place in broad daylight. Still, shocking as this was, it wasn’t a bit surprising. The attempted coup d'état had been unfolding in slow motion over the previous nine weeks. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming chose not to see it coming. And that goes for much of the Republican Party.
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there’s one conclusion of which I’m certain: The “fringe” of our politics no longer exists. Between the democratization of information and the diminished confidence in establishment politicians and institutions ranging from the media to corporate America, particularly on the right, there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.
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The first time I heard someone casually suggest an “imminent civil war,” on a reporting trip in January 2020, I shrugged it off. But then I heard it again. And again. Before long, it was perfectly routine. Everywhere I went, I heard people talk about stocking up on artillery. I heard people talk about hunting down cabals of politically connected pedophiles. I heard people talk about the irreconcilable differences that now divide this country. I heard people talk about the president, their president, being sabotaged by a “deep state” of evil Beltway bureaucrats who want to end their way of life. I heard people talk about a time approaching when they would need to take matters into their own hands.
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More than a few told me I was being “hysterical,” at which point things got heated, as I would plead with them to consider the consequences if even a fractional number of the president’s most fervent supporters took his allegations, and his calls to action, at face value. When I submitted that violence was a real possibility, they would snicker. Riots? Looting? That’s what Democrats do!
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So convinced were the president’s allies that his rhetoric was harmless that many not only rationalized it, but actually dialed it up. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.
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Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. One conservative group paid a former police captain a quarter-million dollars to investigate voter fraud; he performed an armed hijacking of an air-conditioning repair truck, only to discover there were no fake ballots inside.
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As the Electoral College meeting drew closer, hundreds of Republican members of Congress signed on to a publicity-stunt lawsuit aimed at invalidating tens of millions of votes for Biden. When it failed, the legislatures in several states closed public proceedings in response to actionable threats
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The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law. The Texas Republican Party suggested seceding from the union. The Arizona Republican Party endorsed martyrdom. Eric Metaxas, the pseudo-evangelical leader with a devoted following on the right, followed suit. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told the president during a radio interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”
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Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington come January 6, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in recent weeks sounded anxious
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The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.
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it has long been canon on the right that leftists — and only leftists — cause mayhem and destruction. Democrats are the party of charred cities and Defund the Police; Republicans are the party of law and order and Back the Blue. As Republicans have reminded us a million times, the Tea Party never held a rally without picking up its trash and leaving the area cleaner than they found it.
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And yet, the right has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has radicalized from the ground up, in substance and in style. It has grown noticeably militant.
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Trump once told me, “The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.” But that’s not quite accurate. The core of the Tea Party was senior citizens in lawn chairs waving miniature flags and handing out literature; the only people in costumes wore ruffled shirts and tri-corner hats. The core of the MAGA movement is edgier, more aggressive and less friendly; its adherents would rather cosplay the Sons of Anarchy than the Sons of Liberty.
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Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare
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Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure
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The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.
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Make no mistake: Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history
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the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.
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For the past nine weeks, I’ve had a lot of highly unusual conversations with administration officials, Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures.
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Based on my reporting, it seemed obvious the president was leading the country down a dangerous and uncharted road. I hoped they could see that. I hoped they would do something — anything.
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From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide
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Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier,
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Why China Turned Against Alibaba's Jack Ma - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...china-jack-ma-alibaba.html
china stalinism entrepreneur economy politics history crisis culture policy
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A look beneath the surface shows a deeper and more troubling trend for both the Chinese government and the entrepreneurs who powered the country out of its economic dark ages over the past four decades.
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While China has more billionaires than the United States and India combined, about 600 million of its people earn $150 a month or less. While consumption in the first 11 months of this year fell about 5 percent nationally, China’s luxury consumption is expected to grow nearly 50 percent this year compared with 2019.
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Young college graduates, even those with degrees from the United States, face limited white-collar job prospects and low wages.
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Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Mr. Ma’s Ant Group, have debts they increasingly resent.
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For all of China’s economic success, a long-running resentment of the rich, sometimes called the wealthy-hating complex, has long bubbled below the surface. With Mr. Ma, it has emerged with a vengeance.
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“An outstanding people’s billionaire like Jack Ma will definitely be hanged on top of the lamppost,”
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The Communist Party seems more than willing to tap into that resentment. This could mean trouble ahead for entrepreneurs and private businesses
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Some businesspeople say that the hostility toward Ant and Mr. Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country.
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Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa.
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He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.
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He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.
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He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too
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. “Given what has happened, eventually Ant will have to be controlled or even majority owned by the state,” said Zhiwu Chen, an economist at the University of Hong Kong’s business school.
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Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States.
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Instead of disrupting the state system, the companies have cozied up to it. Sometimes they even help the authorities track people. Still, the government has increasingly seen their size and influence as a threat.
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some pro-market people in China worry that the country is drifting toward the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capital class, using language that compared capitalist leanings to impurities, flaws and weaknesses.
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To these people, some of the language recently used by Eric Jing, Ant’s chairman, evoked the era. At a conference on Dec. 15, he said the company was “looking into the mirror, finding out our shortcomings and conducting a bodily checkup.”
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shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 20
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The 2020 Elections Have Made the Fringes Fringy Again - Noah Rothman, Commentary Magazine - 0 views
www.commentarymagazine.com/...-made-the-fringes-fringy-again
2020 conservatism politics history Trump election outcome
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Pro-Democrat (or anti-Republican) partisans are already convincing themselves that the party’s stumbles on Tuesday are attributable to “whiteness”—even when the voters they lost weren’t white.
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Architect of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones immediately went about explaining away Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in places like Miami-Dade County by attributing the victory to “white Cubans,” who are “Hispanic” only insofar as that is a “contrived ethnic category.” Influential former ESPN host Jemele Hill insisted that it is “on white people” and “no one else” if Trump had won. “I don’t trust the White vote,” former RNC Chair Michael Steele told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. “And I don’t trust it because, at the end of the day, it is very self-serving.”
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This is rapidly becoming enforced dogma on the left. When elected Democrats depart from this line of thinking, they are berated and harangued until they retreat.
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No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites.
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Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.
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where is the good news in all this, you ask? These voices have once again been relegated to the fringes of their respective parties. It’s the quisling moderates and dealmakers they so hate who will soon find themselves in the driver’s seat.
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Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.”
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because the consequences of Democratic weakness at the polls on Tuesday fell disproportionately on the party’s moderates in purple districts, there will be fewer voices around in 2021 to push back against what is essentially a tantalizing conspiracy theory.
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It is unlikely that we will see much productivity under divided government, but that is not the same thing as dysfunctional government—precisely the opposite,
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If we’re entering into a period defined by equilibrium in which the federal government is all but paralyzed in the absence of some bipartisan consensus, that would at least be predictable. And predictability has been in short supply these last four years.
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Much to the chagrin of the American system’s would-be demolishers, no one assuming the reins of power in Washington seems to have much interest in blowing anything up.
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The Worst Part of the Woodward Tapes Isn't COVID. - 0 views
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You have this incredible rise in interest in technology and excitement about technology and the beat itself really took off while I was there. But then at the same time, you have this massive new centralization of government control over technology and the use of technology to control people and along with that rising nationalism.
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Paul Mozur, who covers China and tech for the New York Times and is currently living in Taiwain, after the Chinese expelled all foreign journalists.
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That was more apparent, I think, over the past five years or so after Xi Jinping really consolidated power, but the amount of cameras that went up on street corners, the degree to which you used to be able to — there’s a moment maybe seven or eight years ago — where Jack Ma talked about the Tiananmen Square crackdowns on Chinese social media and now that’s just so utterly unthinkable. The degree to which the censorship has increased now to the level where if you say certain things on WeChat, it’s very possible the police will show up at your door where you actually have a truly fully formed Internet Police. . .
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I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .
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The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.
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The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas
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And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been
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So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .
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WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.
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It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.
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It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.
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Opinion | Where Liberal Power Lies - The New York Times - 0 views
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“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote in response: “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”
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In his new book “Live Not By Lies,” for instance, Rod Dreher warns against the rise of a “soft totalitarianism,” distinguished not by formal police-state tactics but by pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system, which are forging “powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse.”
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what we call the American “right” increasingly just consists of anyone, whether traditionalist or secularist or somewhere in between, who feels alarmed by growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments.
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finally, Trump’s mendacious presidency and the spread of online conspiracy theories has encouraged liberals in a belief that the only way to safeguard democracy is for this consolidated establishment to become more aggressive in its attempts at cultural control — which is how you get the strange phenomenon of some journalists fretting about the perils of the First Amendment and demanding that the big social-media enterprises exert a kind of prior restraint over the American conversation.
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Over the same period, in reaction to social atomization, economic disappointment and conspicuous elite failure, the younger members of the liberal upper class have become radicalized, embracing a new progressive orthodoxy that’s hard to distill but easy to recognize and that really is deployed to threaten careers when the unconvinced step out of line.
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Let me try to elaborate on what this right is seeing. The initial promise of the internet era was radical decentralization, but instead over the last 20 years, America’s major cultural institutions have become consolidated, with more influence in the hands of fewer institutions. The decline of newsprint has made a few national newspapers ever more influential, the most-trafficked portions of the internet have fallen under the effective control of a small group of giant tech companies, and the patterns of meritocracy have ensured that the people staffing these institutions are drawn from the same self-reproducing professional class.
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he right fears that what starts with bans on QAnon and Alex Jones will end with social-media censorship of everything from pro-life content to critiques of critical race theory to coverage of the not-so-peaceful style in left-wing protest.
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writers anxious about soft totalitarianism on the left tend (not always, but too often) to underestimate how much of a gift the presidency of Donald Trump has been to exactly the tendencies they fear. Trump’s own authoritarian impulses and conspiratorial style are so naked, so alienating and frightening, that many people who might otherwise unite with conservatives against the new progressive establishment end up as its reluctant fellow travelers instead.
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having offered these doubts about the diagnosis, let me stress that the mix of elite consolidation and radicalization that conservatives fear is entirely real
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Power lies in many places in America, but it lies deeply, maybe ineradicably for the time being, in culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions that conservatives have little hope of bringing under their control.