ReportWire

Tag: Reason Roundup

  • A breakable regime

    Iran’s death toll: Hundreds of protesters have been killed in Iran, as the government tries to crack down on what look like some of the country’s largest protests since 1979.

    “The Center for Human Rights in Iran, based in New York, said it had received eyewitness accounts and credible reports that hundreds of protesters have been killed since the government shut down access to the internet Thursday night,” reports The Washington Post. “The Human Rights Activists News Agency, also based in the United States, said 490 protesters have been killed since the protests began.” The regime has attempted internet and cell service blackouts to try to suppress the spread of information, but the West has still managed to see videos of full body bags spread out, on hospital grounds, substantiating reports of a significant (yet still unknown) death toll.

    The protests started over economic grievances, but they have snowballed into more generalized anger with the repressive regime. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to insert the U.S. into the conflict. “Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf warned Sunday against such strikes,” reports the Post. “If the country were attacked, he said, it could target the United States, Israel and international shipping lanes.”

    “Iran’s 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June broke the regime’s carefully nurtured image of invincibility, many ordinary Iranians say,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran’s nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland.”

    A regime that once looked unbreakable has cracks forming everywhere.

    Iran is not merely a theocracy, Tahmineh Dehbozorgi points outs on X: “It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.”

    Wealth tax barely understood by normies: “California helped make them among the richest people in the world. Now they’re fleeing because California wants a little something back,” writes Lorraine Ali in an unintentionally hilarious Los Angeles Times article about a proposed “billionaire tax.”

    “The proposed California Billionaire Tax Act has plutocrats saying they are considering deserting the Golden State for fear they’ll have to pay a one-time, 5% tax, on top of the other taxes they barely pay in comparison to the rest of us,” continues Ali. “Think of it as the Dust Bowl migration in reverse, with The Monied headed East to grow their fortunes.” Those who’ve already left the state “include In-n-Out Burger owner and heiress Lynsi Snyder, PayPal co-founder and conservative donor Peter Thiel, Venture Capitalist David Sacks, co-founder of Craft Ventures, and Google co-founder Larry Page, who recently purchased $173 million worth of waterfront property in Miami’s Coconut Grove. Thank goodness he landed on his feet in these tough times.”

    About that last one: Ali doesn’t seem to understand the mechanics of how the tax would be applied. But the affected people sure do.

    “Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares,” writes Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan on X. “Each own ~3% of Alphabet’s stock, worth about $120 billion each at today’s ~$4 trillion market cap. But because their shares have 10x voting power, the…billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder’s taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion. A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each. That’s 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a ‘5%’ tax.”

    Consider the way the law is written: “For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer’s percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights.” This is probably to ensure rich people can’t use complex share structures to make it seem like they have lower ownership (and thus a lower tax burden).

    This law is being pitches as a means of making up for the $100 billion state budget shortfall, including $19 billion in federal cuts to Medi-Cal, $7 billion to $9 billion in state cuts to the same program, and possible cuts to the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And the line that keeps being repeated—that these billionaires couldn’t have done it without the state of California, or without being in their specific location—is kind of a strange one. Sure, Silicon Valley agglomeration effects are great, but it’s not like they were bilking the state in some way.

    “Billionaires have built their extraordinary fortunes with the help of California resources and were the largest beneficiaries of the federal legislation that contributed to the current state budget crisis,” write the drafters of the law. “It therefore is both necessary and equitable to ask those who have benefitted most from California’s resources to contribute proportionately to support health care, education, and nutrition in California through a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth.”

    Scenes from New York: “The group Palestinian Assembly for Liberation organized a rally outside Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills yeshiva in protest of an event promoting real estate investments in Jerusalem,” reports CBS. “Protesters gathered on the sidewalk behind barricades across the street from the yeshiva at the corner of 150th Street and 70th Road, some carrying Palestinian flags. In at least one video posted to social media, the demonstrators appear to be chanting, ‘We support Hamas here.’…’Showing support for terrorist organizations outside of the synagogue is a horrific act,’ said Scott Richman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League New York and New Jersey.”

    QUICK HITS

    • “The U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether Mr. Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project, according to officials briefed on the situation,” reports The New York Times.
    • “Venezuela’s current political moment is a paradox of tutelage: a partial rupture with authoritarian rule that has not translated into democratic control,” writes Juan Miguel Matheus in the Journal of Democracy. “The removal of Nicolás Maduro marks the end of a long and suffocating autocratic cycle centered on a single ruler. Yet, the way in which that rupture has occurred—through external intervention and in coordination with remnants of the old regime—has produced a political landscape that is at once post-Maduro and still undemocratic. Liberation has begun, but it remains partial, contested, and insufficient to restore Venezuelan self-government….Venezuela’s present moment does not fit the model of democratic transition made familiar by the third wave. It is neither a negotiated pact between authoritarian incumbents and democratic challengers, nor a clean electoral alternation, nor a revolutionary rupture. It is instead a unique conjuncture produced by the intersection of extreme autocratic entrenchment, external intervention, institutional collapse, and the displacement—rather than the empowerment—of democratic initiative. What Venezuela is experiencing is not a postliberation order, but a partial liberation. Maduro has been removed, but the regime has not been defeated.”
    • “I went sober to prioritize my health,” writes Dean Stattmann for GQ. “But then slowly but surely I realized the best parts of life were passing me by.” (This is why I’m long booze.)
    • “Nearly 16,000 nurses at three major hospitals in New York City are expected to strike amid a severe flu season, the last group of New York Nurses Association practitioners who have not settled their contracts,” reports Bloomberg. “A strike would come three years after a similar labor dispute ended in a historic contract. Operations at hospitals including Mount Sinai Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian in Manhattan as well as Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx are expected to be affected.”
    • Pivot to manufacturing isn’t going so well:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Is the poverty line really $100,000?

    Total falsehoods: “I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down,” said President Donald Trump on Monday. (The White House released a semi-propagandistic fact sheet that same day to bolster the president’s talking points, as all White Houses do at one time or another.)

    “We are doing better than we’ve ever done as a country. Prices are coming down and all of that stuff,” he said the week before. “And you know, they talk about different terms for that, but I will tell you that nobody has done what we’ve done in terms of pricing.”

    “Walmart just announced that the cost of their standard Thanksgiving meal is reduced by 25 percent this year from last year,” Trump said recently, failing to account for the fact that the price change is due to Walmart…changing the goods offered via their Thanksgiving meal bundle (and drastically shrinking its size) to get prices lower for cost-burdened consumers.

    “Since January 2025, the Consumer Price Index has ranged between 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent,” writes National Review‘s Jim Geraghty. “That’s much better than the worst days of the Biden administration in 2022, but that’s also roughly where it was for Biden’s final year in office.”

    But Trump, ever a salesman, recognizes which messages are winning for other politicians: It’s affordability season, and you’ve gotta appeal to people’s bottom lines if you want to be taken seriously right now.

    The Free Press‘ related entry into this discourse is rather interesting, albeit wrong: “The poverty line, a six-decade-old benchmark, claims to define the threshold to the middle class,” writes Michael W. Green. “The number is a lie.”

    Green goes on to promote the idea that a household income of $100,000 is “the new poverty”; that the reason the affordability messaging is so salient is because even households that look well-off on paper are actually struggling to make ends meet; that the ways we measure poverty and economic struggle are way outdated.

    “In 1963, Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries,” writes Green. “Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items (e.g., housing), if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line. Orshansky presented her findings in 1965. She was drawing a floor, a line below which families were clearly in crisis.” (This is not totally correct; the actual story of how the poverty line was calculated is a bit more complex.)

    “For that time, that floor made sense,” continues Green. “Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage cost in the range of $10 per month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each others’ kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. College tuition could be covered with a summer job.” Today, argues Green, the labor market has transformed, requiring two earners, not one—and thus childcare expenses (for families that end up having kids, which is to say: not everyone). Housing is a larger share of the monthly household budget. Ditto for healthcare. “If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three,” argues Green. “It becomes 16. Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four—the official poverty line in 2024—wouldn’t be $31,200. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at close to $140,000.”

    “The idea that over time we should dynamically multiply a food budget by the inverse of food’s share of the budget to get the poverty line is laughable,” argues American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Winship. “Engel’s law says that as societies grow richer, the food share of the budget falls. But by Green’s logic, the richest possible society is really the poorest. If we got the food share down to 1% of household budgets, we’d need to multiply the food budget by 99 instead of Green’s 16. This multiplier is actually a measure of a society’s affluence!”

    I’m persuaded by Winship’s argument that this model is bad and I think Green’s argument sells short the massive quality-of-life gains we’ve had since the ’60s. Success and stability, to my mind, are not defined solely by material objects. But at the same time, the fact that pretty much all of us have little tiny supercomputers in our pockets that connect us to infinite reserves of knowledge (and to each other) is a vast improvement. The fact that household goods are cheap and easy to come by is no small thing (even though we sometimes trick ourselves into believing durability is suffering, when nowadays, a lot of the time, the cost of repair is higher than the cost of replacing). Sure, a lot of people are wasting $150,000 (or more) on educations that, well, maybe they could’ve gotten for “$1.50 in late fees at the public library“—but isn’t it a huge boon to self-starters everywhere that you don’t even need to go to the public library anymore to access that type of knowledge? The worldwide web is a gift to us all (if only we’d stop mainlining 60-second vertical videos).

    At the same time, despite his bad model and questionable portrayal of history, Green is correct to identify housing, childcare, healthcare, and education costs as areas that have not gotten better over time to the degree that many of us had hoped. These are extreme pain points for many Americans, particularly for those who find themselves too rich for welfare, but too poor to be able to have much margin. (“Our entire safety net is designed to catch people at the very bottom,” writes Green, accurately, “but it sets a trap for anyone trying to climb out.”)

    It’s easy to say issues like housing are only bad in large metro areas, not the rest of the country, but roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in a large metro area (20 million in New York, 13 million in L.A., 9 million in Chicago, 8 million apiece in Dallas and Houston). Six percent of the U.S. population lives within the New York metro area alone. And it is a good thing for people to care about agglomeration effects and to want to go where the jobs are, to be upwardly mobile and thus geographically mobile; if the price to doing so is incurring massive housing costs, one response is that those tradeoffs are natural and part of life. Another response is that we’re disincentivizing people who would otherwise be highly productive workers, that we’re making it costlier for them to pursue the most productive use of their time and talent.

    It’s the same story with childcare expenses. There’s no way around the fact that childcare requires lots of human labor. But most localities have heaped on burdensome regulations and degree requirements that make it even harder and more expensive to hire competent workers and maintain licensed facilities. One answer to this is for families to have only one earner during the young-kid years, not two; but this comes at great cost to future earnings, and it can be easier to enter and exit at will in some industries than in others. The young-kid years are relatively short (especially as family sizes shrink), but it’s not crazy for families in larger metro areas to feel hit rather hard by the dual needs of childcare and housing.

    Perhaps the greatest issue with Green’s writing is that he confuses “poverty” and “economic strain.” It is very possible that dual-earner households making six figures feel economic strain from high childcare, housing, and healthcare costs. But feeling encumbered by tradeoffs is rather different than being poor. We should allow these words to retain their meanings. Affordability discourse is useless if it’s not accurate, and every politician and pundit should strive to accurately describe Americans’ financial realities, not inflate or exaggerate hardship to serve a particular political agenda.

    Most of the time, politicians will offer one solution and one solution only: the warm embrace of the state to alleviate people’s financial woes. In reality, getting the state the hell out of the way would help bring down prices in most of the categories people cite as the ones giving them the most trouble.

    Scenes from New York: Incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani has asked 179 Eric Adams staffers to resign from their City Hall posts. Mamdani “has already named Dean Fuleihan, a longtime government hand, as his first deputy mayor and has retained the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch,” reports The New York Times. His longtime top aide, Elle Bisgaard-Church, will serve as his chief of staff. (“Ursulina Ramirez, who helped lead Bill de Blasio’s transition in 2013, said Mr. Mamdani’s housecleaning was reminiscent of Mr. de Blasio’s after he succeeded Michael R. Bloomberg,” per the Times.)

    QUICK HITS

    • Happy Thanksgiving! Look, I like politics, but what I really like is PIE. DM me/email me/sound off in the comments section about the most important issue of all: Which pies are you baking/eating tomorrow? I always make the GoHo, a recipe I adapted from Martha Stewart and have made dozens of times over the years, with elements of pecan but a little more sophistication than your standard pecan-and-corn-syrup getup. This year I am also experimenting with a cranberry curd tart (think tarte au citron but a little tangier, with a delicate hazelnut crust) and a maple chess pie with coffee whipped cream. And, in the spirit of the holiday, let me also mention: I am so deeply grateful for each person who takes time out of their busy day to read this newsletter. I hope it leaves you better informed and even makes you chuckle every once in a while. Cheers to freedom and to pie!
    • “My therapist always asks me to transcribe my dreams and the recurring dream I’ve had is standing up in a cafeteria full of women and saying ‘I don’t want children. I want power!’” said Tennessee state representative Aftyn Behn on a recent podcast. And indeed, power she seeks: Behn is running to represent Tennessee’s 7th congressional district and replace U.S. Rep. Mark Green, a Republican, in a special election that will be held on December 2. Maybe it’s just me, but any politician who is so blatant about wanting power immediately rubs me the wrong way. Behn should want to improve the lives of her constituents. It is uncouth to say the quiet part out loud!
    • This Jonathan Haidt piece is actually just a rehashing of The Screwtape Letters.
    • Black Friday purchases as a recession indicator?
    • Gavin Newsom better become a bit more pro-tech mighty fast:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Trouble in paradise

    Trumpworld schism: On Friday night, MAGA Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives, which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington, D.C. and just never fit in. Americans are used by the political industrial complex of both political parties, election cycle after election cycle, in order to elect whichever side can convince Americans to hate the other side more,” the Georgia Republican said in her resignation video:

    Greene struck predictably populist America First notes (“Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars always fund foreign wars, foreign aid, and foreign interests”) and mapped her disagreements with the president (“H1Bs replacing American jobs, AI state moratoriums, debt for life 50 year mortgage scams, standing strongly against all involvement in foreign wars, and demanding the release of the Epstein files”) while touting her loyalty. Read her full statement here.

    Until recently, Greene and President Donald Trump seemed to be thick as thieves. But the Epstein files tore them asunder, with Greene positioning herself as an ardent advocate for full transparency while Trump (until recently) refused to go along. The president, pissed off by Greene’s adamance, disavowed her and started publicly musing about how someone should mount a primary challenge, calling his once-loyal acolyte a “ranting lunatic.”

    The Epstein issue wedged the door open for Greene to raise more grievances with Trump, especially the idea that he’s been getting distracted from his domestic agenda and hasn’t delivered much financial relief to the American people. The conflict came to a head during the recent government shutdown. “I don’t see political party lines,” said Greene, discussing health care and the many Americans who could soon see premiums spiking. Greene criticized her own side for having no workable plan in place to prevent these higher costs.

    “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” said Trump recently. “Nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”

    Many of her constituents are still behind her. “I feel like she has stood her ground,” Meredith Rosson, a 43-year-old paralegal and the chairwoman of the Republican Party in Chattooga County, told The New York Times. The Republican Party in Floyd County, also in Greene’s district, issued a statement of “unwavering support” for Greene as soon as she announced her resignation. “She’s realized, ‘I need to do what’s right for my community and for people who are mostly in the middle ground,’” cocktail bar/gun store owner Brandon Pledger told the Times.

    Scenes from New York: “Violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders—that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again,” argues Tal Fortgang in City Journal. “In 2022, the New York Times reported that ‘nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City…involved just 327 people,’ or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been ‘arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.’”

    QUICK HITS

    • “We had some interesting conversation, and some of his ideas really are the same ideas I have,” President Donald Trump said of his Friday meeting with incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “The new word is affordability.” They appeared to be rather fond of each other, and Trump was in peak form:
    • “It’s not as though [Tucker] Carlson’s decision to platform [Nick] Fuentes—a Gen Z livestreamer with a history of making Holocaust jokes, who predictably used his appearance on Carlson’s show to rail against ‘organized Jewry in America’—came out of nowhere. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the former Fox News star left the world of responsible politics behind long ago,” writes Reason‘s Stephanie Slade. “Not that [Heritage President Kevin] Roberts seemed to care….Once you crawl into bed with the likes of Tucker Carlson, you’re stuck. What you told yourself was a strategic play for relevance can turn out to be a deal with the devil instead.”
    • “Exchange-traded funds investing in Bitcoin are heading for their worst month of outflows since launching nearly two years ago, piling yet more pressure on a jaded crypto market,” reports Bloomberg. “Investors have pulled $3.5 billion from the US-listed Bitcoin ETFs so far in November, almost equaling the previous monthly record for outflows of $3.6 billion set in February, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BlackRock Inc.’s Bitcoin fund IBIT, which accounts for about 60% of the cohort’s assets, has registered $2.2 billion in redemptions in November, meaning it will slump to its worst month barring a sharp reversal.”
    • North Carolina’s Republicans aren’t so sure about the federal immigration raids in their districts.
    • I’m getting some crazy hate mail for defending the tradwives:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Dick Cheney dies

    Rest in peace: Dick Cheney, vice president to George W. Bush, neocon extraordinaire, and rather poor marksman, died this morning at 84 due to complications of pneumonia, as well as cardiac and vascular disease.

    Cheney “consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response” to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, writes the Associated Press. He took the role of veep and transformed it into something much more muscular and assertive, shaping the Bush administration’s approach to the war in Iraq. He was no fan of transparency in government and he was a huge proponent of expanding executive power.

    “In 34 years,” Cheney said in January 2002 on ABC’s This Week, “I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job….One of the things that I feel an obligation [to do], and I know the president does too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”

    “As chief of staff under President Gerald Ford in 1975, [Cheney] saw the power of the presidency diminished on his watch,” wrote Financial Times’ Caroline Daniel back in 2006. “By 1989, he had forged his own critique of Congressional overreach in foreign policy. ‘When Congress steps beyond its capacities, it takes traits that can be helpful to collective deliberation and turns them into a harmful blend of vacillation, credit claiming, blame avoidance and indecision,’ he warned. ‘The presidency, in contrast, was designed as a one-person office to ensure it would be ready for action,’ capable of ‘decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch.’”

    Look at all he sowed…

    Tariffs up for consideration: Tomorrow, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case that will decide whether President Donald Trump overstepped his powers when he used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to unilaterally levy tariffs on a whole host of nations.

    “This is all about foreign policy. This isn’t 1789 where you can clearly delineate between trade policy, economic policy, national security policy and defense policy. These things are all completely interconnected,” a first-term Trump adviser told Politico, articulating the MAGA-world vision of why the usage of IEEPA is defensible. “To diminish the tools he has to do that is really dangerous.”

    The justices may well disagree. But if they don’t, and Chief Justice John Roberts rules in Trump’s favor, he will incur a huge loss of credibility that will say a lot about the Court’s posture toward Trump and his second term.

    “Just two years ago, Roberts led the Supreme Court in rejecting a similar claim of unilateral executive power by then-President Joe Biden,” writes Reason‘s Damon Root. “If Roberts now allows Trump to get away with the same kind of executive overreach that Roberts previously stopped Biden from getting away with, Roberts’ credibility as a principled judicial arbiter will be sullied forever.”

    Credibility hit aside, there are other reasons why the Court should reject the arguments put forward by the administration. “The constitutional authority ‘to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises’ as well as the authority ‘to regulate Commerce with Foreign nations,’ are assigned exclusively to Congress, which means that Trump is wielding power that the Constitution did not grant to him,” argues Root. “His tariffs thus deserve to be struck down for violating both the constitutional separation of powers and the nondelegation doctrine.” They also “violate the major questions doctrine, which says that before the president may wield significant regulatory power, the president must first point to a clear and unambiguous delegation of such power to him by Congress”—but tariffs appear nowhere in the IEEPA, so the administration will have a very hard time making that case.

    If the justices don’t rule in Trump’s favor, it seems likely that his people will come up with alternate routes to do pretty much the exact same thing: “The White House has already laid some of the policy groundwork under those authorities, such as the 1970s-vintage Section 301, which the U.S. used against China in Trump’s first term,” per Politico, “or the Cold War-era Section 232, which allows tariffs on national-security grounds.” They might spend more time investigating other countries’ trade practices in an effort to gain leverage and secure more favorable deals. There’s also Section 338, “a rarely used provision that’s been on the books for nearly a century” that could let the president “impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on any country, if he can explain how they are engaging in ‘unreasonable’ or ‘discriminatory’ actions that hurt U.S. commerce.” Such things would also probably be challenged in court, but Trump could run his way through all these different approaches, test them out, impose trading havoc in the meantime, and possibly find some means of imposing his desired protectionist agenda.

    Where there’s a will, there may unfortunately be a way.

    Scenes from New York: Yep. Zohran Mamdani appearing on the ballot twice is predictable: He is the candidate both for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. I am curious about what effect Cuomo being in the second row will have, to the extent that such a thing can be studied. (And I’ve never been asked for ID when I’ve voted in New York, which always rubs me the wrong way.)

    QUICK HITS

    • Is a Seattle mayoral candidate trying out the Mamdani playbook?
    • “The Trump administration said Monday that it will release enough funds to pay for a half-month’s worth of food assistance benefits in November, days after two courts ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release the money to avoid forcing nearly 42 million Americans into food insecurity,” reports The Washington Post.
    • California’s apparently spending a ton of money…guarding its vacant houses (that the state owns, due to a planned freeway expansion) from vandal-protesters, per Politico.
    • Swiss taxpayers are being forced to shoulder massive rebuilding costs for villages demolished by melting glaciers.
    • “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,” President Donald Trump wrote of the NYC mayoral candidates on Truth Social. “You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, [Zohran] Mamdani is not!”
    • The Rockbridge Network “aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump,” per The Washington Post. The group of right-wing donors formed five or six years ago “is gearing up to deploy its arsenal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 presidential contest” with Vance as the favorite to succeed Trump.
    • Free-range kids just can’t win:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • A divided Fed

    Dissent at the Fed meeting: For the second time this year, the Federal Reserve Board cut interest rates by a quarter point—the lowest level in three years. “This remains a very divided Fed, as evidenced by the fact that two officials cast dissenting votes in opposite directions,” reports The New York Times. “One wanted a bigger, half-point cut; another wanted no cut at all. The split stems not only from divergent forecasts about the economy but also risk tolerances around allowing the labor market to weaken or inflation to stay elevated.”

    This is consistent with the previous meetings: Back at July’s meeting, two board members disagreed with the final decision to hold rates steady. At September’s meeting, President Donald Trump appointee Stephen Miran—who had just been appointed—called for a half-point cut instead of a more cautious quarter-point cut (like the rest of the board agreed to). Then in this meeting, Miran said much the same, but was opposed by Jeffrey Schmid, who advocated no decrease at all.

    “The decision to lower interest rates by 25bps in October was never in doubt, but the unexpected hawkish dissent from a regional Fed president highlights that future moves are becoming more contentious,” Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC. “We expect the Fed to slow the pace of cuts from here.”

    “A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion—far from it,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in a post-meeting press conference.

    Powell noted that, though the economy looks strong in the aggregate, things look rather bifurcated right now: Spending by high-income households is possibly obscuring some of the pain and pressure felt by low-income households. He signaled that poor Americans are feeling greater financial pressure than before, citing the growing number of defaults on subprime auto loans. (“The percentage of subprime borrowers—those with credit scores below 670—who are at least 60 days late on their car loans has doubled since 2021 to 6.43%, according to Fitch Ratings,” reports CNN.)

    He also conveyed concerns about tariffs raising inflation (the effects of which still have not fully been felt, due to stockpiling by large retailers, which is due to run out soon) and a weakening labor market.

    Ceasefire updates: In yesterday’s Roundup, I was insufficiently careful in my reporting of the Gazan death toll—the 100 allegedly killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is, after all, reported by the health ministry there, which is controlled by Hamas, so it is very hard to tell whether such numbers are reliable.

    Since then, the death toll reported by the ministry of health has risen to 104, with 66 of those alleged to be women and children, and Israeli government sources say “dozens” of top Hamas commanders were taken out, naming 26 militants specifically.

    It is very hard to tell whether the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers are accurate, and Hamas has repeatedly used human shields in an attempt to protect its combatants from Israeli strikes. Now, amid the renewed fighting, both sides are becoming further entrenched: Though Israel says it remains committed to maintaining (resuming?) the truce, Hamas has said, per Associated Press reporting, that “it would delay handing over the body of another hostage to Israel because of the strikes.” This most recent round of fighting was allegedly sparked by Hamas forces violating the U.S.-brokered ceasefire by attacking IDF soldiers, killing a reservist (Master Sgt. Yona Efraim Feldbaum) on Tuesday. The Qatari prime minister said, following this incident, that mediators are renewing their push to “get [Hamas] to a point where they acknowledge that they need to disarm.”

    Trump, fresh off his victorious Knesset speech just two weeks ago, doesn’t seem all too concerned: “They killed an Israeli soldier. So the Israelis hit back. And they should hit back,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One yesterday. “Nothing is going to jeopardize” the ceasefire, he added, with characteristic overconfidence.

    “We actually met with people [who] were leading [Hamas], and… I think they’re unhappy when they see some people being killed,” he added, rather confusingly (given that he’s referencing…a terrorist group).

    “The ceasefire is holding. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there,” Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters.

    Scenes from New York: 

    Related: “The socialist housing plan for New York City“

    QUICK HITS

    • “Transit is one of the very few things that makes New York affordable,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority head Janno Lieber tells a group of independent New York journalists, critiquing Zohran Mamdani’s free-buses plan. “It’s not an affordability problem, compared to the whole country, people spend a lot less on transportation as part of their budgets. It’s an affordability solution, but we want to make it more so. And the Fair Fares program has been successful with targeting affordability. But what’s good about Fair Fares is you can use that discount if you’re low-income for the subway or the bus. So one of the first things I want to get into is, why would we say the bus is free, but [not] the subway—what does that mean? Are people going to ride the bus instead of the subway?…Why is the bus the whole focus? Let’s talk about how to make transit—it’s affordable, it’s a good thing it is, but let’s talk about how to make it more affordable. And we do have tools like the Fair Fares program, where we could raise the eligibility threshold.” (Also, interestingly, future bus revenues are pledged to the bondholders who finance the whole Metropolitan Transportation Authority system; bondholder approval—which they’re not going to give—would be necessary before changing the bus fares in the manner Mamdani proposes.)
    • Things appear to be heating up near Venezuela:
    • A predictable consequence of ratcheting up tariffs: Canada is now shoring up trade ties with Asia. Bloomberg has more.
    • This strikes me as such a misleading headline from Politico, designed to elicit rage: “RFK Jr.’s top vaccine adviser says he answers to no one.” But the actual interview, which is with Martin Kulldorff (former Just Asking Questions guest), is full of very wise chunks, in which Kulldorff talks about how the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has asked him to try to just…impartially follow the science and sift through the available evidence, how Kulldorff is attempting to maintain a posture of humility regarding what we know and what we don’t (including on topics like adverse vaccine reactions), and how he thinks COVID-19 vaccine mandates really damaged public trust in the health authorities.
    • “In long-awaited cuts just months after completing its $8 billion merger with Skydance, Paramount has begun layoffs set to impact about 2,000 employees,” reports the Associated Press. This amounts to about 10 percent of Paramount’s workforce. Roughly half of those will be carried out immediately, while the rest will be done more steadily over the coming weeks and months. More here:
    • More of a conservative take than an explicitly libertarian one, but there’s certainly something interesting in here about changing norms and the declining stigma of welfare, which is probably a bad social indicator:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • The Gaza Split

    Ceasefire or not? Yesterday, Israeli strikes killed 100 people in Gaza, claiming that the ceasefire had been violated, since Hamas has not yet returned the bodies of all the dead hostages taken on October 7, 2023, and attacked Israeli soldiers in the southern part of the territory, near Rafah.

    News broke last week that two IDF soldiers were killed in Jenina, which is located on the eastern side of the Yellow Line that indicates the military pullback. Though Jenina is under IDF control, there are apparently Hamas cells that still operate in some capacity there. “As troops have worked to clear the neighborhood of Hamas infrastructure—including a tunnel network—operatives have emerged from underground and attempted attacks,” reports The Times of Israel. 

    “There is and will be no immunity for anyone in the leadership of the Hamas terror organization, neither for those wearing suits nor for those hiding in tunnels. Anyone who raises a hand against IDF soldiers, his hand will be severed,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz.

    “The Israeli military is digging in along the cease-fire line inside Gaza, strengthening fortifications and establishing infrastructure that further divides the territory into two,” reports The Wall Street Journal. For the first time, journalists were allowed access to that zone, which “divides Gaza roughly in half” with the IDF “manning existing outposts and erecting new ones.” Yellow concrete blocks are being laid, and it sure looks like the idea is for an Israeli military presence to continue there for a long time.

    Per the truce brokered by President Donald Trump, “Israel is supposed to pull back farther toward Gaza’s borders once an international security force is on the ground and Hamas has been disarmed,” reports the Journal. “Hamas, however, has refused to give up its weapons and is cementing its control over Gaza.” It’s a truce that doesn’t look all that much like a truce; instead, Israel controls about 53 percent of the Strip, with Hamas forces still operating in some capacity in the remaining 47 percent. It’s very possible that rebuilding will look rather bifurcated, with the Israel-controlled zones subjecting Palestinians to some amount of surveillance but being free of terrorist control, while the remaining chunks of the Strip remain fairly leveled, with no foreign investment and very little rebuilding. Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff are widely seen as the architects behind the split-rebuilding plan, which is controversial among the other stakeholders trying to broker peace.

    “Arab mediators are alarmed by the plan which, they said, the U.S. and Israel have brought up in peace talks,” reports the Journal. “Arab governments strongly oppose the idea of dividing Gaza, arguing it could lead to a zone of permanent Israeli control inside the enclave. They are unlikely to commit troops to police the enclave on those terms.” But what exactly is the solution if Hamas won’t surrender arms?

    Venezuela update: When The Wall Street Journal asked prominent Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado earlier this week what she thinks about Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive provocations toward the Maduro regime, she responded: “President Trump pledged to dismantle the drug cartels poisoning American families, and he is fulfilling that promise.”

    Trafficking is “a national security crisis for the United States, and for Venezuela as well. The money generated from those criminal activities does not build schools or hospitals. It finances repression, torture, and the machinery of terror that keeps a criminal regime in power.” Trump made an “accurate diagnosis of Venezuela’s reality, and acted accordingly.” And the Venezuelan people had long “asked the world to understand that Maduro is not a conventional dictator but the head of a transnational criminal organization. The Trump Administration recognized that fact and treated it as such.”

    When asked explicitly about foreign military intervention to end the Maduro regime, Machado responded that Venezuela has been “under foreign intervention for decades, by Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, drug cartels, and terrorist organizations” and that “democratic allies” can help the Venezuelan people “recover the sovereignty that belongs to them.”

    It’s hard to tell how authentic she’s being. She has a vested interest in maintaining and strengthening an alliance with Trump. If Trump really is interested in regime change—and if he can do so in a way that doesn’t simply lead to another Maduro operative gaining power—Machado stands to gain; she won the opposition primary back in 2023 and was the rightful challenger to Maduro in 2024, before being barred from running by the government. From her perspective, this must look like a huge opportunity to secure the liberation of the Venezuelan people—liberation she’s been fighting for. She has real reasons to back Trump, who is possibly preparing to take military action to try to unseat Nicolas Maduro. (It’s worth noting that Trump has not sought congressional approval for this, and has been conducting extralegal boat strikes on suspected narcotraffickers, supplying no evidence to the American people or to legislators that the people he’s killing are legitimate criminals. Also: We don’t tend to blow people into smithereens when they’ve committed crimes, so even if evidence were provided, Trump is not comporting with U.S. law.)

    But it’s also possible that Machado’s being way too hopeful here; U.S.-led regime change in Latin America has not historically panned out so well.

    She also made an even more explicit pitch to Trump sympathizers, noting that Maduro-unseating could lead to fewer migrants flooding across U.S. borders: “The vast majority of Venezuelans are desperate to return home. They didn’t leave by choice. The longing for family and national reunification is immense. The moment Maduro leaves power, hundreds of thousands will begin to return. And soon after, it will be millions coming back to rebuild the nation they were forced to abandon.”

    Scenes from New York: 

    If you want to hear all about the threat posed by Mamdani, I highly recommend this Weissmueller joint.

    QUICK HITS

    • “The White House on Tuesday fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that had expected to review some of President Donald Trump’s construction projects, including his planned triumphal arch and White House ballroom,” reports The Washington Post. “The commission, which was established by Congress more than a century ago and traditionally includes a mix of architects and urban planners, is charged with providing advice to the president, Congress and local government officials on design matters related to construction projects in the capital region. Its focus includes government buildings, monuments and memorials. White House officials have traditionally sought the agency’s approval.” (Interestingly, though Trump gets all the credit for being a norms-disrespecter, Joe Biden did it first: “Biden in 2021 fired Trump appointees from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, with Biden administration officials at the time defending the moves as an effort to diversify the panels.” But that “was the first time in the commissions’ history that a president had forced out sitting members, drawing some criticism from art and architecture experts that Biden was politicizing its work.”)
    • “The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years,” reports The Wall Street Journal, having analyzed FBI data. “Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.”
    • Tariffs make prices rise, whowouldathought?

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • How to fix college

    Trump asks colleges to get serious: Yesterday, the White House sent 10-page compacts to nine of colleges and universities—Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia—asking them to assent to certain commitments in order to receive access to a wider array of federal funding.

    Called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” most of the asks are eminently reasonable, and would make it so colleges now conform with the law instead of flouting it outright.

    “The memo demands that schools ban the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions,” reports The Wall Street Journal. It also calls for schools to “freeze tuition for five years; cap international undergrad enrollment at 15%; require that applicants take the SAT or a similar test; and quell grade inflation.”

    But the memo also asks that universities abolish any departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” and strengthen policies meant to deter such ideological conformity. Of course, “institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” reads the document.

    “The first round of schools received the compact along with a letter that frames the pledge as an opportunity to proactively partner with the administration and its effort to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system,” per The New York Times. Interestingly, “the demands in the compact also include providing free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate.”

    In a sense, this is federal government intrusion into the affairs of universities. Who is a federal bureaucrat to decide how many international students a college ought to admit, when the college should be able to decide what’s in their best interest and what’s not? It’s not like a system of arbitrary nationality limits is especially meritocratic. But the case made by Trump administration officials like May Mailman is that we don’t get to pour tons of American taxpayer dollars into the higher education system and then routinely educate the world’s students; that’s not a good return on investment or aligned with what’s in the nation’s best interest.

    The solution Mailman and the Trump administration more broadly offer is, I think, sound: If you’re a university that doesn’t want to sign onto these demands, you may forego federal funding and retain full independence. But if you’d like to dip into federal coffers, you must agree to certain standards and maintain environments that foster more intellectual diversity. We’ll see whether this holds up whenever it’s challenged in court.

    Also, I think it’s interesting—and a welcome development—that the administration also snuck in some lines about tuition-freezing. Ballooning cost of attendance has been a huge problem for years, and shedding light on administrative bloat and wasteful spending is surely in the American public’s best interest.

    Scenes from New York: Last night, I hosted a book party for Leah Libresco Sargeant at my home in Brooklyn, alongside my dear friend Nicole Ruiz. We had in attendance homemakers, journalists from The Dispatch and The Atlantic, a pastor’s wife and mother of five, and a woman who detransitioned (and wrote about it), among many others. An eclectic bunch for sure.

    Liz Wolfe

    Leah’s book, The Dignity of Dependence, is premised on two claims: The first, that “women’s equality with men is not premised on our interchangeability with men”; the second, that “dependence on others is not a temporary embarrassment at the beginning (and end) (and much of the middle) of our lives but the pattern for how we live together.” I highly recommend it.

    QUICK HITS

    • If you enjoy this newsletter, would you do me the extraordinary favor of forwarding it to a friend? (Ideally with accompanying text like “I think you’d enjoy this newsletter that keeps me informed in a crowded and ever-stupider news environment” not “this libertarian chick belongs in the loony bin.”)
    • “They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment,” writes Freya India at Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel. “But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.…Someday this generation, these influencers, will discover with dread what every celebrity and contestant and cast member has realized before them. That after offering everything up, every inch of their lives, every finite moment on this Earth, it does not matter how much they stage, how much they rehearse, how much they trade, how long they leave the cameras rolling, we will always wonder, eventually, what else is on?“
    • “The White House is halting $18 billion in New York infrastructure funding due to concerns over diversity and inclusion practices and as the first day of a federal shutdown grinds government work to a halt,” reports Bloomberg. Honestly, fair. Why should the rest of the country subsidize my state and city? And why should the city let so many residents off scot-free—i.e. rampant fare evaders—instead of choosing to enforce laws and improve the city’s fiscal situation?
    • “The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook can remain in her job for now and announced it will hear a case in January over President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove her,” reports The Washington Post. “The temporary ruling lasts until the justices hear the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s decision to allow Cook to remain on the job. The Trump administration had asked the high court to remove Cook immediately.”
    • Speaking of the Post:
    • “More than two years into a conservative takeover of New College of Florida, spending has soared and rankings have plummeted, raising questions about the efficacy of the overhaul,” notes Inside Higher Ed. “While state officials, including Republican governor Ron DeSantis, have celebrated the death of what they have described as ‘woke indoctrination’ at the small liberal arts college, student outcomes are trending downward across the board: Both graduation and retention rates have fallen since the takeover in 2023. Those metrics are down even as New College spends more than 10 times per student what the other 11 members of the State University System spend, on average. While one estimate last year put the annual cost per student at about $10,000 per member institution, New College is an outlier, with a head count under 900 and a $118.5 million budget, which adds up to roughly $134,000 per student.”
    • Yep:
    • I mostly agree with Aella, but grad school? Let’s maintain some standards.

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Trump’s Ukraine reversal

    What just happened? President Donald Trump’s greatest bug—or feature—might be his flightiness, coupled with a certain showmanship, a bit of flair. What holds one day may not hold the next. This results in chaotic whiplash, like with tariffs and “Liberation Day” rates that, in many cases, did not end up holding. It results in executive orders that make news cycles but don’t actually change all that much, like this week’s executive order classifying antifa a domestic terrorist group. It makes it hard for firms and individuals to plan ahead, to know what type of workers they’ll be hiring and how expensive materials will be and what the law permits.

    In foreign policy, it means a longstanding approach might not in fact be so. Like Trump’s reversal, yesterday afternoon, on Ukraine, following a meeting with that country’s president:

    “After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” wrote the president on Truth Social:

    “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like ‘a paper tiger.’ When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has Great Spirit, and only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”

    (Does Trump mean the February 2022 borders, before the current iteration of the war, or does he also mean the return of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014? It’s not totally clear.)

    It’s possible this is a tactic to try to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to the negotiating table. It’s possible it’s a tactic to get NATO to step up its commitments—the timing of which would make sense, as NATO has been issuing forceful rebukes to Putin following Russian drones entering Polish airspace (and being shot down) and Russian fighter jets entering Estonian airspace two weeks ago and now drones over Copenhagen Airport yesterday that might be linked to Russia—and to take Article 5 more seriously. It’s also possible, since it’s Trump, that it’s a genuine reversal of his own beliefs and his administration’s approach, which would be quite a shift given Vice President J.D. Vance’s aggressive tack taken with Volodymyr Zelenskyy back in February (described by Politico as “the stunning humiliation of Zelenskyy”).

    Then again, is it a true reversal? Trump said, back in March following the spat, that he’s “not aligned with anybody.” “I’m aligned with the United States of America,” he added. The only commitment Trump is making now is the continuation of U.S. weapons support for NATO. It’s possible Trump is trying to exert more influence over how NATO handles territorial incursions. It’s possible Trump learned new information over the course of his meeting with Zelenskyy. But this might also be a somewhat toothless pronouncement from Trump, or, possibly, some sort of foreign-policy 4D chess move that will reveal itself prudent in time. With Trump, it’s very hard to say.

    Scenes from New York: “The Secret Service found and seized an illicit network of sophisticated equipment in the New York region that was capable of shutting down the cellular network as foreign leaders prepared to gather nearby for the annual U.N. General Assembly, the agency announced on Tuesday,” reports The New York Times. “Officials said the anonymous communications network, which included more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers, could interfere with emergency response services and could be used to conduct encrypted communication. One official said the network was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute, anonymously. The official said the agency had never before seen such an extensive operation.” The Secret Service is in charge of security for U.N. meetings held in New York. There’s not yet information on a specific plot that had been planned to put these devices to use, but “initial analysis of the data on some of the SIM cards has identified ties to at least one foreign nation, as well as links to criminals already known to U.S. law enforcement officials, including cartel members.” President Donald Trump has taken this and run with it, naturally. But there’s also some early indicators coming out that the Secret Service is not being totally truthful here, so take it all with grains of salt.

    QUICK HITS

    • “Three people were shot at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Dallas on Wednesday morning, ICE officials said,” per The New York Times. “Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said there were ‘multiple injuries and fatalities’ and the shooter was found dead of a ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.’”
    • “If over time, desistance becomes more common, ‘that might be a good argument for why social transition at a young age should be done cautiously,’ said Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, a psychologist who also worked at the Boston clinic and who has become a critic of what she sees as reckless approaches to youth transition,” writes Jesse Singal, covering the findings of The TransYouth Project, the longitudinal effort to track children who transition genders very early in life. Singal reports that the study found that 18.4 percent of the early-transitioning children had not stuck to their new identity, either reverting to their birth sex or coming out as a category that’s neither cisgender nor transgender. “Edwards-Leeper also noted that a nonbinary gender identity might just be a way station, of sorts, on the way toward some of these kids reidentifying with their birth sex. ‘It might be easier for them to admit to themselves and everyone in their lives that they are JUST shifting to nonbinary, rather than back to cis—as a first step,’ she said. ‘This is definitely the way it often goes with transitioning from cis to trans—it feels safer to try out nonbinary first. I would suspect that some of those nonbinary kids will shift to cis as they get a bit older.’” Singal also grapples with social contagion as a very plausible explanation for why we’ve seen an explosion in youth transgender identification over the last decade, and critiques some researchers’ inability to make sense of this.
    • In case you’re interested in why there’s lotsa GOD in this newsletter these days.
    • Inside Los Angeles’ Tesla Diner: “Early visitors to the diner were greeted by robots, but on the day I came, none was to be found, disappointing the many, many people I heard ask about them. No roller skates, either. And although it is ostensibly a diner, it has no table service; this is more like a fast-food joint with higher prices and extra seating. The menu has also shrunk considerably since opening day: When I visited, the only options were a burger, a grilled-cheese sandwich, a tuna melt, a fried-chicken sandwich, a hot dog, chili, fries, and apple pie. Most of these dishes were served in a cute cardboard container made to look like a Cybertruck, and had been made fancier in ways nobody asked for,” writes Ellen Cushing for The Atlantic.
    • “Trads believe women shouldn’t work” is pretty much entirely made up by the haters, not endorsed by traditionalists themselves, points out New Hampshire woodsman/thinker Simon Sarris:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Did you ask the FCC if you can make that joke?

    Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air: Yesterday evening, ABC News (a subsidiary of Disney) announced it was suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely” following factually inaccurate comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

    Of course, comedians have no obligation to be factually correct. Kimmel’s show is intended as a hybrid between comedy and news, though, so it’s fair to wonder whether he does. “The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” said Kimmel during his Monday night monologue. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.” A montage of President Donald Trump followed, making fun of how, though people have claimed Kirk was like a son to the president, he’s moved on rather quickly.

    It wasn’t especially good or funny. It also was somewhat anodyne. To overly psychologize for a moment, I wonder whether Trump pivoted to talking about construction at the White House when reporters asked him about Kirk’s death because he is, in fact, distraught about it but didn’t feel up to going there. We can’t know. Kimmel’s shot felt cheap. But Kimmel is allowed to be bad—he’s been bad for a while.

    The issue is that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr suggested the agency might punish ABC, pulling its broadcast license in retribution. On conservative Benny Johnson’s podcast, Carr suggested Kimmel’s comments were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

    “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Carr, ominously. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”

    “Just before ABC’s announcement, Nexstar Media Group said that its stations that are affiliated with ABC would pre-empt Kimmel’s show ‘for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show,’” reports CNBC. Nexstar, which owns 10 percent of ABC’s affiliate stations, is in the process of securing FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, which owns roughly 5 percent of the affiliate stations.

    “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” wrote the president on Truth Social. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

    Courage sure is an interesting word choice, given that Trump’s own agency threatened them with consequences (though he’s not wrong if we’re solely judging him as a media critic).

    “I don’t think this is a legal issue,” said former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno on CNN. “I don’t think this can be pointed to the FCC or the Trump administration and say, well, this is about them going after Kimmel because of what he said. Personally, I think it’s more of a cultural issue. And I got to tell you. I’m about as moderate a Republican as you can get. I’m from New York. I have not been comfortable watching late-night television for 15 years because when you have conservative leanings and you’re constantly mocked and you’re constantly feel like you’re doing something wrong, you shut it off. You don’t watch it anymore.”

    Some people have made the point that the FCC might have given Disney/ABC cover to do something they already wanted to do, and do it in a way that makes the Trump administration look like the bad guys:

    I also think this point is very fair, which is that this didn’t start yesterday. If you haven’t noticed the extraordinary media jawboning—indirect censorial pressure directed at private companies from the federal government—over the last few years, you haven’t been paying much attention:

    “The government pressured ABC—and ABC caved,” wrote Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to ‘do this the easy way or the hard way,’ tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it. We cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

    Cohn makes a good point, both that this is the direct result of government coercion that is wrong and disturbing, and that these institutions should not be in the business of caving. It’s disturbing to see massive law firms, media outlets, and organizations that should have some amount of fuck-you money choose the path of cowardice. But given that Disney has been interested in fighting the government before (albeit in a different context), the fact that they weren’t willing to do so this time makes me think maybe Kimmel was already a goner.

    Jawboning done so explicitly, so publicly, serves to intimidate other networks and generate compliance. But jawboning done by the Biden administration, during the COVID-19 pandemic (both to suppress public health information and to promote Democratic candidates and bury scandals), possibly disturbs me more, because it was covert, hard to uncover and to see the full extent of. I can’t decide; both are horrible. No matter which party’s in power, you get government coercion—you just get the privilege of deciding which flavor.

    Scenes from New York: “A Long Island cop swindled a sick fellow officer out of $200,000 with claims of business investment—but instead blew the cash on OnlyFans, gambling and luxury living like a new car, prosecutors said,” reports The New York Post. “Nassau County police officer Leonard Cagno, 39, allegedly duped his colleague out of the cash as he recovered from an unnamed serious illness then blew it all within two months, cops said Wednesday as he was slapped with a grand larceny charge.”

    QUICK HITS

    • For a contrast in how comedy can be dealt with, consider Charlie Kirk’s reaction to being parodied on South Park.
    • The right-wing take on all this, from Lomez, which I don’t agree is aspirational but I think identifies the problem and describes the MAGA mindset quite well:

    “We are finally seeing the first real consequences of major institutions having spent the last decade undermining the facade of liberal neutrality they at least used to claim as an ideal. This facade actually mattered quite a lot, and even though it was obviously never entirely sincere and even though conservatives were always out numbered and often poorly represented, they at least felt like participants and stakeholders in these institutions. During the Trump years this all went away. Conservatives were aggressively ousted, even as token voices, and the facade came down to reveal a perverse and illiberal set of political and cultural directives underneath it that were explicitly antagonistic to more than half of the country and denied them as legitimate participants in public life. Despite this, MAGA won (again), and, surprise, surprise, do not intend on preserving the institutions that declared them illegitimate political actors. This is, in fact, MAGA’s core promise.”

    • “An immigration judge in Louisiana has ordered pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S., deported to Syria or Algeria for failing to disclose certain information on his green card application, according to documents filed in federal court Wednesday by his lawyers,” reports Politico. “Khalil’s lawyers suggested in a filing that they intend to appeal the deportation order, but expressed concern that the appeal process will likely be swift and unfavorable.”
    • “America loves cocaine again,” by The Wall Street Journal. “Cocaine sold in the U.S. is cheaper and as pure as ever for retail buyers. Consumption in the western U.S. has increased 154% since 2019 and is up 19% during the same period in the eastern part of the country, according to the drug-testing company Millennium Health. In contrast, fentanyl use in the U.S. began to drop in mid-2023 and has been declining since, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • A taboo worth keeping

    Call their employer? “If we want to stop political violence like what happened to Charlie Kirk, we have to be honest about the people who are celebrating it and the people who are financing it,” wrote Vice President J.D. Vance on X, promoting his guest hosting of Kirk’s show, following Kirk’s killing. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” he said on the program.

    “I’m desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend,” Vance added. “I want it so badly that I will tell you a difficult truth. We can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.”

    At East Tennessee State University, two faculty members were placed on administrative leave, allegedly due to comments such as “you reap what you sow” and “[Kirk’s killing] isn’t a tragedy. It’s a victory.” Oklahoma’s state superintendent is investigating at least one middle school teacher for her posts (calling Kirk a “racist, misogynist piece of shit,” which seems nasty, but not actually advocating political violence). The Texas Education Agency is reviewing 180 complaints filed against teachers for comments related to Kirk; some of those are surely murder cheerleading, while others are scathing criticism that should probably be tolerated. Four different high school teachers were placed on leave in Massachusetts for their commentary. One elementary school teacher in that same state has been placed on leave for her TikTok video mocking Kirk’s death. Both Delta and American Airlines have axed a few employees each for social media posts on Kirk. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the University of Miami’s health care system fired one worker each. An Office Depot worker at a store in Michigan was fired after allegedly refusing to print flyers about a Kirk vigil for a paying customer—which makes an awful lot of sense, given that printing flyers is literally their job. These cases are all different, and some seem like they do actually call for or celebrate political violence, whereas others are just tasteless expressions of hatred for Kirk that don’t violate that norm.

    So let’s back up for a moment. Why did cancel culture of the 2010s strike so many of us as so bad and wrong?

    Some of it surely had to do with proportionality: The punishment rarely fit the “crime” (which was almost always debatable).

    Some of it surely had to do with changing sensibilities and sensitivities, and a sense that the orthodoxy being enforced was invented yesterday, not a reflection of prevailing sentiments. Thus it was unpredictable: You couldn’t really be sure you weren’t running afoul of the new tyrannical enforcers, because the shift in pieties (or language) had happened practically overnight.

    But there was something undergirding it that felt especially stupid: The kids were the enforcers, overthrowing the adults. Not because the adults had exercised bad judgment or shown themselves to be incapable of faithfully executing the roles they’d been given. In some cases, they were canceled as they exercised good judgment: Consider the case of Mike Pesca, a Slate journalist (and, disclosure: my friend) who had been discussing how the publication ought to cover the firing of New York Times writer Donald McNeil, who referred to a racial slur in context on a trip to Peru with high schoolers; could a white person ever write or say nigger in context? Don’t we make a use/mention distinction? Some vocal portion of his workplace apparently disagreed, and he was dismissed after he’d worked there for seven years. It was never about morals, it was never about quality of product being produced; it was about power in the workplace, wrapped up in something that, to the young, resembled morals enough to give them plausible deniability.

    Now, something a little different is happening, for which people are using the same name. Professors, teachers, nurses, and doctors who have celebrated the assassination of Kirk are being purged from their workplaces. It’s conservatives swarming this time, phoning employers, making them aware of the misdeeds, asking for their scalps.

    Most of me thinks it’s wrong and bad on principle—since I don’t ever want to be fired for my own speech (and thus want to maintain a very wide sense of what we societally tolerate)—but also as a strategy, since I don’t believe conservatives gain very much by weeding out the people with dumb beliefs who are in positions of relatively little power and importance. People have little impulse control and use social media like a diary; I’ll never understand the crying-in-a-car TikTok woman genre, but I’m fine living in a society with people who get off on that. (Also: What even is a position of relatively little power and importance? Teachers and professors are entrusted with impressionable minds. Isn’t this extreme power?)

    But a not-that-tiny piece of me sees this as substantively different: Cancel culture grievances were mostly petty and minor, issues that could have been resolved if participants were willing to be 10 percent more charitable toward their perceived opponents, and if bosses were willing to instruct their inferiors to get over themselves. James Damore’s Google memo about heritability of certain traits and brain differences between genders and how to reduce the gender gap among engineers is a good example; anyone who claims to have felt threatened was being an opportunist, looking to amass power and get the hit of collective effervescence that comes from vanquishing an opponent.

    Of course, there were also the “offensive” acts that were not really relevant to the workplace, but that the 2010s cancelers implied indicated something about the tainted souls of the powerful: Adam Rapoport, the Bon Appetit editor in chief, who in 2020 handed in his resignation after colleagues dug up a boricua (Puerto Rican)/durag Halloween costume from 2013. Rapoport’s photo was “just a symptom of the systematic racism that runs rampant within Conde Nast as a whole,” said one chef/editor who worked at the magazine, while others alleged black women had been systemically mistreated under Rapoport’s leadership.

    With Kirk’s killing, the posters who lose their jobs are saying something actually bad, something that society has long seen as beyond a crossed line; we don’t cheer the killing of people with whom we disagree. This isn’t the Cultural Revolution. We don’t flog people. We don’t put them in stocks in the town square. And we don’t get titillated when a bullet flies into their neck and they spurt out blood and crumple to the ground; it’s gruesome and awful and it happened as a thousand impressionable young people looked on. Looked at one way, this was an insane person committing an extrajudicial act of violence. Looked at another, this was a public execution for the crime of being conservative—which is, apparently, judging by their reactions, what a lot of people had been wanting.

    When a working professional can’t manage to exercise self-control and refrain from posting in public about how grateful they are that the assassin had the balls to shoot their shot, you have to wonder about their judgment. It’s perhaps especially odd for professors to say as much. (Don’t they spend their time…speaking their mind…in public?) And is there perhaps some value in maintaining or enforcing a consensus of what types of things lie beyond the pale? I don’t want pedophilia apologists as kindergarten teachers, to use an extreme example; I also probably don’t want a doctor treating me who cheers on the murder of people who think like Kirk.

    In general, I trust that reputable employers have done some amount of quality/maturity/professionalism/judgment vetting. Surely celebrating political violence runs afoul of these basic expectations, and that’s what they’re responding to when they fire someone who posted gleefully about Kirk, which is materially different than the made-up social justice dogma that was being enforced before. (It would be better if employers self-policed rather than succumbing to the demands of angry mobs.) We’ve always had taboos, and the taboo against political violence is a strong one worth keeping, not one we should constantly have to renegotiate.

    Scenes from New York: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a sort of forgettable, generically bad Democrat who inherited the spot when Andrew Cuomo left in a hurry, endorsed Zohran Mamdani; nobody followed her lead. lol.

    QUICK HITS

    • Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi is saying utterly wrong things about hate speech. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Does Bondi need a reminder?
    • “President Donald Trump approved a National Guard deployment to Memphis, expanding the federal government’s efforts to crack down on what he has cast as out-of-control crime in Democratic-run cities,” reports Bloomberg. And Chicago will probably be next after Memphis, signaled the president.
    • The U.S. military struck a second boat carrying Venezuelan narcotraffickers, killing at least three. The first strike of this variety was ordered and carried out earlier this month, killing 11. More strikes are planned; congressional approval has not yet been sought.
    • Inside the deal reached between the U.S. and China for the sale of TikTok, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
    • “Israel unleashed a long-threatened ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday, declaring ‘Gaza is burning’ as Palestinians there described the most intense bombardment they had faced in two years of war,” reports Reuters. “An Israel Defence Forces official said ground troops were moving deeper into the enclave’s main city, and that the number of soldiers would rise in coming days to confront up to 3,000 Hamas combatants the IDF believes are still in the city.”
    • The Washington Post fired journalist Karen Attiah; Attiah claims it was for her social media posts on Kirk, including one in which she says Kirk once said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” This was a botched quote. From Reason‘s Robby Soave: “What he said was that the achievements of four specific black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, former MSNBC host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas)—were suspect because of affirmative action; the existence of racial preferences casts a pall over their selections for various positions. One can certainly criticize the point or disagree with how he worded it (Michelle Obama, diversity hire?), but he did not say the words attributed to him by Attiah. And she put it in quotes, which is journalistic malpractice.”

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Huge immigration bust

    Bust at an E.V. battery plant: “Immigration officials arrested nearly 500 workers, most of them South Korean citizens, at the construction site of an electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia on Thursday,” reports The New York Times. The Hyundai plant raid was the largest single-site immigration bust in recent history. The people arrested were accused of belonging to one of three categories: They’d illegally crossed in the first place, or they’d received a visa waiver that prohibited working, or they’d overstayed a visa. Most of them were classified as subcontractors, and some of them were working to complete construction of the plant.

    “The unfinished battery plant represented the kind of strategic investment the United States has welcomed from South Korea in recent years—one that promised to create manufacturing jobs and build up a growing industry,” adds the Times. Georgia’s governor, who has visited South Korea twice, has spent a lot of time courting investment, luring semiconductor material, solar panel, and battery manufacturers to his state.

    “Seoul-based Hyundai, whose U.S. sales have hit record monthly highs for nearly a year straight, has pledged $26 billion in fresh American investments since Trump took office earlier this year—including $5 billion after South Korea’s leader visited the White House early last week,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

    Given Trump’s purported manufacturing revitalization agenda, it will be interesting to see whether this plant gets completed, and on what timeline, following these busts.

    Killing of woman on light rail in Charlotte: The common refrain on the right goes something like this: The left-leaning mainstream media fails to sufficiently cover crimes in which the victim is sympathetic and the perpetrator has a mile-long rap sheet. The killing of Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska provides a perfect example.

    Zarutska, a 23-year-old blonde woman who fled her native Ukraine due to the war, was riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, minding her own business late last month. Decarlos Williams, a 35-year-old black man with many arrests under his belt and schizophrenia, unprompted and seemingly out of nowhere, stabbed her.

    Elon Musk has signal-boosted this:

    “This is a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society safety nets related to mental healthcare and the systems that should be in place,” said the city’s mayor in a statement released after the killing. “As we come to understand what happened and why, we must look at the entire situation. While I do not know the specifics of the man’s medical record, what I have come to understand is that he has long struggled with mental health and appears to have suffered a crisis.”

    The kicker: “I am not villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that – a disease like any other than needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease. Our community must work to address the underlying issue of access to mental healthcare. Also, those who are unhoused are more frequently the victim of crimes and not the perpetrators. Too many people who are on the street need a safe place to sleep and wrap around services to lift them up.”

    Looked at one way, it’s a local crime story, and not every local crime story rises to the news of mainstream media coverage. Looked at another, it’s a pattern: Someone who is a repeat offender, who should probably have been locked up, is able to kill an innocent person, and the Democratic mayor gives an awful lot of airtime to the plight of the perpetrator. We’ve seen this one play out again and again in blue cities over the last few years.

    Now it’s becoming a “Republicans pounce” story—thus warranting coverage:

    Scenes from New York: “Lawmakers made two pledges in advocating for a law to enforce the city’s longstanding prohibition on short-term rentals, which finally went into effect in 2023,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The first was that a crackdown would remove noisy, disruptive tourists from residential buildings that had turned into de facto hotels. The second was that curtailing Airbnb and other short-term rental companies’ operations would protect the city’s tight housing supply.” But that second one never came to fruition: “Apartment rents are at all-time highs, while the vacancy rate is next to nothing. The new legislation removed tens of thousands of short-term rentals from New York City apartment buildings, but it is unclear how many of those units are now occupied by year-round tenants.”

    QUICK HITS

    • French Prime Minister François Bayrou has put forward an “austerity budget proposal, designed to confront a severe deficit and a worsening national debt, in part by freezing welfare payments at their current levels,” per The New York Times. His reward? Most likely: a vote of no confidence that gives him the boot.
    • “Partial results of the Buenos Aires legislative elections: Fuerza Patria with 46.93% of the votes, while La Libertad Avanza achieved 33.85%,” reports La Nación (translated from Spanish). For those keeping track: That’s a victory for Perónism and a huge defeat for President Javier Milei’s party (La Libertad). And if Milei can’t get more supporters into the legislature, he’s going to be severely hamstrung in what he can do.
    • Florida’s New College has been the target of an ideological takeover by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis (and henchmen like Chris Rufo). Now some disgruntled former administration insiders there are trying to privatize the school, which sounds like a win for the taxpayers of Florida.
    • Niiiice:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • A bad jobs report

    Employers added 22,000 new jobs in August. For those paying attention, this is substantially below what had been forecast.

    The jobs report was released early Friday morning, and it indicated a rising unemployment rate, plus job numbers adjustments for June and July. TLDR: things don’t look great.

    Some silver linings: Though job growth was low, layoffs were also relatively low. That said, people who have been fired or laid off have struggled to get back on their feet: “The number of people with continued unemployment claims has been elevated since April,” reports The New York Times.

    It is very likely now that the Federal Reserve Board will drop interest rates, something they’ve hesitated to do for about the last nine months. But with a struggling labor market, it might be time. (The stock market is reacting fine to all this news; though a bad jobs report isn’t great, an interest rate cut could be good.)

    “Although there’s no evidence of rapidly mounting layoffs, in July the number of unemployed people surpassed the number of available jobs for the first time since the spring of 2021. Job openings have fallen sharply for two months in health care, which has been the main industry driving growth over the past year,” reports The New York Times. “Also in the labor market weakness column: data from the payroll provider ADP, which showed just 54,000 private-sector jobs were added in August. Since the public sector most likely shed jobs last month as the Trump administration continues to fire people, the total number could be lower.”

    One interesting nugget: This month’s report showed 12,000 lost manufacturing jobs, which makes a total of 78,000 lost over the course of this year. If one goal of President Donald Trump’s tariffs was to revitalize domestic manufacturing, it sure doesn’t look like things are going according to plan.

    Scenes from New York: Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking reelection in a race against Democratic nominee/frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, hardcore law-and-order Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has reportedly confided to trusted advisers that he might drop out, having been in talks with the Trump administration recently in Florida.

    It’s also rumored that the administration reached out to Sliwa, in hopes of slimming the race down to just Mamdani vs. Cuomo; Sliwa does not appear interested in taking any Trump offers.

    “I don’t think you can win, unless you have one on one,” said Trump when asked about the mayoral race. “I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one on one. And I think that’s a race.”

    (“Is there any scenario, any, where Curtis Sliwa drops out of this race?” asked radio host Sid Rosenberg of Sliwa yesterday morning. “Yeah, if somebody puts a bullet in the back of my head, and I’m in a casket,” replied Sliwa, who survived a shooting back in ’92.)

    QUICK HITS

    • The Justice Department has opened up a criminal investigation—related to her purported mortgage fraud, as in: declaring two residences to be her primary—into Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board. “The move…was instigated by Ed Martin, a hyperpartisan Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience,” reports The New York Times. “He has said that it is legitimate for federal officials to publicly air criminal investigations into people targeted by the president, even if an investigation does not result in a conviction or even an indictment….Martin, who has been given few staff but broad latitude to team up with U.S. attorney’s offices around the country, flouted the department’s procedural norms last month by suggesting to the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, that Ms. Cook step aside.” “At this time, I encourage you to remove Ms. Cook from your board,” Martin wrote in a letter to Powell last month. “Do it today before it is too late! After all, no American thinks it is appropriate that she serve during this time with a cloud hanging over her.”
    • Inside the tech CEO dinner at the White House (for which Elon Musk was notably absent).
    • Sometime today, the president will sign an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War. At least it’s honest!
    • “Since the election, Bluesky has lost ground,” writes Nate Silver at his Substack. “More precise data based on the number of unique ‘likers’, ‘posters’ and ‘followers’ at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.” Silver details what a bubble Bluesky is, disproportionately used by people in D.C. and folks in “crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon” (lol). But “demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.”
    • Yep:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Trump changes his mind

    A president who changes his mind: “It’s very insulting to say students can’t come here,” said President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House yesterday. “I like that their students come here. I like that other countries’ students come here.”

    “And you know what would happen if they didn’t?” asked Trump. “Our college system would go to hell very quickly.” Full video below.

    It’s a little hilarious for Trump to say it’s insulting to deny students the ability to come here when that’s exactly what he did a few months ago. Besides, it might be a little too late for this change of heart; visa applications for international students are predicted to be down by 30 percent to 40 percent this fall, down from the roughly one million international students in the country about a year ago (with almost 300,000 of those students coming from China) in part due to the tightened vetting mandated by this administration. Chinese students have been targeted in particular as national security threats. Either we’re worried about espionage or we’re not; it’s just not clear where Trump actually stands on this one.

    “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has long warned that foreign adversaries and competitors take advantage of easy access to American higher education to, among other things, steal technical information and products, exploit expensive research and development to advance their own ambitions, and spread false information for political or other reasons. Our adversaries, including the People’s Republic of China, try to take advantage of American higher education by exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes and by using visiting students to collect information at elite universities in the United States,” he said via proclamation in June.

    “In my judgment, it presents an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security for an academic institution to refuse to provide sufficient information, when asked, about known instances of misconduct and criminality committed by its foreign students,” the proclamation continued. “This principle is one reason why…regulations require foreign students to obey Federal and State criminal laws and require universities to keep records about foreign students’ studies in the United States—including records relating to criminal activity by foreign students and resulting disciplinary proceedings—and furnish them to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on request.”

    To strain a bit, it’s possible that the underlying concerns have in fact been addressed: Trump made a lot of noise about how American universities welcoming foreign students should be seen as a privilege, not a right, and it’s possible he just wanted acquiescence on that front and a shift in university administrators’ attitudes and cooperation with DHS. Or it’s possible he just changed his mind or was never that committed to the initial viewpoint. Depending on your perspective, Trump’s ability to quickly change his mind is either a feature or a bug. But for proponents of brain drain, the decision to let 600,000 new Chinese students in is undoubtedly a good thing.

    Scenes from New York: 

    QUICK HITS

    • More on this from this week’s Just Asking Questions:
    • “So, Intel has raised some money from the US government, in exchange for equity, and discovered that previous money sent to them by the government should have been reciprocated with equity all along,” writes Byrne Hobart at The Diff. “It’s actually an incredibly tempting approach to couple corporate subsidies with equity ownership. If the government is making a company better-off, it seems only fair to give the government a stake in the upside, perhaps at a valuation that still makes it an obviously good deal for the company. The problem is that the long-term incentive is for the company to arrange itself around needing constant infusions of capital. The more Intel raises this way, the more attractive further subsidies are, since they help bail out the previous investment. If the government is going to take an equity stake in a previously-private company, but not take it over completely, the only structure that aligns incentives correctly is for them to be straitjacketed into only making the investment one time, and committing to sell it down in the future.”
    • Women want one thing: To watch the financial collapse of Rent the Runway and take advantage of designer clearance sales whenever bankruptcy is declared. “Rent the Runway Inc. will hand over a controlling stake in the company as part of a plan to cut debt and grow, after residual effects of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the firm to the brink of bankruptcy,” reports Bloomberg. “The deal, with lender Aranda Principal Strategies and other partners, will wipe more than $240 million of debt from Rent the Runway’s balance sheet, according to a statement. The company, which allows subscribers to rent clothing for the office and events, will have several more years to repay $120 million in remaining borrowings.”
    • Calling the Department of Defense the “War Department” (as the president intends to do) strikes me as a lot more honest. I appreciate bluntness and don’t understand the hand-wringing.
    • Food for thought from Katherine Dee: “The latest suite of ‘think of the children’ [age-verification and phone-banning] policies create the infrastructure for much broader censorship. The problem isn’t the phone bans themselves—it’s how they’re being used as part of a larger authoritarian project that most people can’t see coming.”
    • Cleaning up the city!

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • The craziest deportation goals

    Trump’s campaign promises, coming to fruition: “Until June, deportations had lagged behind immigration arrests and detentions,” reports The New York Times. “By the first week of August, deportations reached nearly 1,500 people per day, according to the latest data, a pace not seen since the Obama administration.”

    So far during President Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported 180,000 people. The administration aims for 1 million this year, but if current numbers hold, it’ll be closer to 400,000. Stephen Miller, the ardent immigration restrictionist who has Trump’s ear, said on Fox News in late May that ICE would set a goal of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day—far more than what it’s currently logging. But that’s beside the point: The administration seems interested in aggressive benchmarks and willing to use whatever tactics to get there, including compromising on apprehending the largest threats and instead going after people who’ve simply overstayed (a civil offense, not a criminal one).

    In fact, it’s looking very possible that the numbers will be juiced in order for these goals to be met, since the Trump administration enjoys its bragging rights. “The Department of Homeland Security says the total number of deportations so far under Mr. Trump is much higher—at 332,000. That figure includes people who are turned around or quickly deported at U.S. borders by Customs and Border Protection,” per the Times. There’s a fair bit of space between 180,000 and 332,000; expect more creative accounting as enforcement actions heat up further.

    Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for ICE to simply buy its own planes. “ICE uses charter planes to deport immigrants and has done so for years. The agency has typically chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, according to Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff from 2022 to 2023. He said that allowed the Biden administration to deport roughly 15,000 immigrants per month on charter flights,” reports NBC News. To double these numbers, Houser says, you’d need to purchase about 30 planes, at $80–400 million a pop; so purchasing 30 passenger planes could cost anywhere from $2.4 billion to $12 billion. It’s estimated that ICE had chartered a little more than 1,000 flights by the end of July, at $100,000 to $200,000 per flight.

    Case in point: Angel Rodrigo Minguela Palacios, a strawberry delivery guy who had overstayed a tourist visa to escape his native Coahuila, a state in northern Mexico where he’d been the victim of stabbings and kidnappings, had been working for the same company for eight years and raising three kids with his girlfriend of eight years when Border Patrol nabbed him, reports The Los Angeles Times. He had been dropping off strawberries in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, outside of where California Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding an event—and where Border Patrol has lately taken to assembling.

    Border Patrol detained him and threw him in the “B-18” federal detention center in downtown L.A., where he’s been since.

    “When asked last week whether the person arrested outside the news conference had a criminal record, a Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency would share a criminal rap sheet when it was available,” reports the L.A. Times. “After four follow-up emails from a reporter, [Spokeswoman Tricia] McLaughlin on Saturday said agents had arrested ‘two illegal aliens’ in the vicinity of Newsom’s news conference—including ‘an alleged Tren de Aragua gang member and narcotics trafficker.’” Reporters asked for clarification as to whether that describes one person or two; then, “when presented with Minguela’s biographical information Monday, the department said he had been arrested because he overstayed his visa—a civil, not criminal, offense.”

    It appears Minguela has no criminal record, and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The kicker: When Minguela handed one of the agents arresting him a “Know Your Rights” card he keeps in his wallet, the agent reportedly said, “This is of no use to me.”

    Scenes from New York: Wild. But I do believe it.

    QUICK HITS

    • “SpaceX’s impressive track record, including the construction of the Starlink satellite-internet network and its innovation on reusable rocket technology, has had a deep impact on the space industry and US space policy. It has also made SpaceX among the most highly valued private companies in the world,” reports Bloomberg. But now, Starship—the first fully reusable orbital rocket, which Elon Musk says will be able to bring humans to Mars—is plagued by issues, which Musk is attempting to solve by shuffling around engineering talent internally. “To make Starship work, SpaceX is betting that it can draw resources away from its core rocket program at a time when the company faces weak competition. Some planned launches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rockets would potentially be pushed from the end of this year to early 2026 because of the surge of Falcon engineers working on Starship, the people familiar with the company’s planning said.”
    • “Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began a fresh strike Tuesday against national security officials whom President Donald Trump deems political enemies, announcing she had revoked the clearances of 37 people, including several currently serving U.S. intelligence officials,” reports The Washington Post. Many of the officials who had their clearances revoked were involved in the 2016 Russian interference investigations and the Trump impeachment.
    • Really useful chart to help you make sense of how tariffs will raise prices:
    • Relatedly: “Automakers can’t eat the cost of tariffs forever, and September is a convenient time to adjust prices, as the 2026 models begin arriving in showrooms,” reports Axios. Interestingly, “if companies try to offset tariffs on imported cars with higher prices, they’ll need to make adjustments across their portfolio to maintain reasonable gaps between vehicle segments. [General Motors’] entry-level Chevrolet Trax, for example, is imported from South Korea, now subject to a 15% tariff. But if it raised the price of the Trax, it might end up costing about the same as a Chevy Equinox, currently made in Mexico but moving to the U.S. in 2027.” Industrywide, forecasters predict a roughly 6 percent increase in prices next year, best-case scenario.
    • Breaking the law:
    • “A former top City Hall advisor and current campaign confidante to Mayor Eric Adams attempted to give money to a reporter from THE CITY following a campaign event in Harlem Wednesday,” reports The City. “The failed payoff—a wad of cash in a red envelope stuffed inside an opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion ripple potato chips—was made by Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams ally who resigned last year from her position as the mayor’s liaison to the Asian community after she was targeted in multiple investigations.”
    • Why elites still worship socialism:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Brené Brown vs. Joe Rogan

    Brené Brown vs. Joe Rogan

    Pick your poison: Over the weekend, depending on your political flavor, you could have chosen between listening to a comedian hurl insults on stage at Madison Square Garden as part of a campaign rally; watching a sitting U.S. representative and a vice-presidential contender play video games and talk about scrapping the filibuster via Twitch; hearing a presidential candidate’s thoughts on whale psychology; or listening to a vulnerability researcher (?) and a presidential candidate gab about birth order.

    Our sharpest political minds these are not.

    It’s almost like everyone is avoiding talking about the actual issues—things like how to reduce inflation, how to bring government spending under control, how to make Social Security solvent, how to create an orderly and just immigration process, or how to improve the quality of our schools. The podcasting industry has, between the last election cycle and now, taken a glorious wrecking ball to cable news, creating a whole bunch of scrappy independent upstarts that presidential candidates (and their political consultants) finally understand to be an important way voters are receiving news and commentary. Unfortunately, the candidates themselves appear to have their heads filled with little more than fluff.

    First, a predictable scandal: Tony Hinchcliffe, an insult comedian known for his off-color jokes, took to the stage to open for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden yesterday. He made jokes about the Clintons, Diddy, and Latinos “making babies” and how they love to “come inside“—”just like they did to our country!”

    He also said, “I don’t know if you guys know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” This became a political scandal, possibly jeopardizing Trump’s ability to win Puerto Rico’s electoral college votes. (Oh, wait…)

    “When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico ‘floating garbage,’ know that that’s what they think about you….It’s what they think about anyone who makes less money than them,” said New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a response livestream with the Democrsats’ vice-presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. (They’re apparently quite chummy now, or so they want voters to believe.)

    “Can’t get over this dude telling someone else to change tampons when he’s the one shitting bricks in his Depends after realizing opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico.’ You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference.”

    Were Puerto Ricans in attendance at the rally offended by this? Not really, or so it seems. But this whole saga is actually pretty emblematic of how this whole election has gone: We’ve almost entirely neglected to talk about actual issues. The Trump campaign keeps courting controversy, again and again and again, while the Harris/Walz campaign frequently defines itself in opposition to the Trumpists, reactive and apoplectic but rarely proactively defining what it is they would actually do.

    Trump did Rogan: The most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining presidential candidate met his match in the most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining podcaster, and it was wild. Donald Trump and Joe Rogan talked about whale psychology. They talked about how Trump staffed his administration. They talked about the CHIPS and Science Act—which aimed to reduce reliance on Asia-manufactured chips, handing out subsidies for companies to produce semiconductor parts here at home—which Trump called “put[ting] up billions of dollars for rich companies,” saying he instead favored slapping large tariffs on the companies to try to boost growth of American manufacturing capacity. He explained his comments about the “enemy from within” and how he takes it to mean that there are “people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful.” He, at times, got quite catty toward the ladies on The View.

    Meanwhile, you have J.D. Vance—ostensibly the policy guy of the Trump campaign—talking about globalization on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast. Vance said “London doesn’t feel fully English anymore,” while “New York of course is the classic American city. Over time, I think New York will start to feel less American.” (Is he saying that large cosmopolitan cities are adopting a certain sameness over time? What exactly is he predicting or talking about?)

    Between Trump’s protectionism, Hinchcliffe’s off-color jokes, and Vance’s unclear issues with globalization, it all comes together to paint a portrait of a campaign with very different values and priorities than, say, what I have.

    Then there’s Kamala: The Democratic presidential candidate went on vulnerability/empathy/shame researcher Brené Brown’s podcast and it was…kind of full of nothing. Brown asked Harris plenty of questions about her background—birth order! Harris’ nickname given to her by her sorority!—but never did they ever get to anything serious. They talked about the core values of “daring leaders.” If you had been playing a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says “lived experience” or “Venn diagrams,” you would be face down on the rug.

    Maybe we don’t deserve better from our leaders. Maybe our politics were always fated to be ground down to this. But boy is it depressing to see it all laid out before you, via hours and hours of longform content on different podcasts, consumed by polar-opposite portions of America who increasingly seem to believe they have very little in common with one another.

    Scenes from Miami: I’m in Miami for an event run by Founders Fund, and I went to a Catholic Church yesterday that is coming out in full force against Florida Amendment 4, which would add abortion protections to the state constitution, including the text: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” (More on Amendment 4 here.)

    Currently, Florida outlaws abortion after 6 weeks, and doctors and activists have been engaged in a campaign to draw attention to edge-case stories where women have been forced into medically difficult situations because the law purportedly does not make it clear that doctors are allowed to abort in life- and health-threatening circumstances. Proponents claim Amendment 4 will clarify this. The bishops of Florida, on the other hand, write: “We urge all Floridians of goodwill to stand against the legalization of late-term abortion and oppose the abortion amendment. In doing so, we will not only protect the weakest, most innocent, and defenseless of human life among us but also countless women throughout the state from the harms of abortion.”

    QUICK HITS

    • On Saturday, Israeli fighter jets hit multiple “air-defense systems, missile-making facilities and launchers” in Iran, reports Bloomberg, in response to Iran’s attack on Israel earlier this month. The attack was not extremely damaging in terms of lives lost—four Iranian soldiers have been reported killed—but it showed critical vulnerabilities in Iran’s weapons and nuclear-development infrastructure. An American military official, “speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said President Joe Biden’s administration had worked with Israel to come up with a ‘proportional’ response and urged Iran not to retaliate again,” per Bloomberg.
    • On a campaign stop in West Philadelphia, Kamala Harris “announced a plan to boost Puerto Rico’s economy and power grid,” again per Bloomberg.
    • “Egypt has proposed an initial two-day ceasefire in Gaza to exchange four Israeli hostages of Hamas for some Palestinian prisoners, Egypt’s president said on Sunday as Israeli military strikes killed 45 Palestinians across the enclave,” reports Reuters.
    • Interesting trend piece on how younger women are eschewing wearing their engagement rings and wedding bands daily; as a surfer, I am precluded from wearing mine for much of the summer, but I didn’t realize all the others were copying me.
    • This “coach in chief” New York Times article is the most cringe thing I’ve read in a long while. Consume with caution.

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Kamala’s fabricated Gen Z appeal

    Kamala’s fabricated Gen Z appeal

    “kamala IS brat,” tweeted singer Charli XCX on Sunday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the presidential nominee slot left vacant by President Joe Biden. Despite Charli XCX’s own advanced age of 31, she was speaking in slang immediately obvious to anyone under 30, especially the girls and the gays: brat is the album of the summer, with a distinctive neon green cover, full of references to Dimes Square podcaster-provocateurs, Julia Fox, party-girling hard, and—somehow, simultaneously—the lady anxiety that sets in when you’re on the wrong side of your twenties and have not yet had a child.

    Harris’ team eagerly turned what they believed to be a pop star endorsement into a branding strategy; the X account “Kamala HQ” (1.1 million followers) adopted the distinctive color, font, and lowercase style Charli XCX’s brat to craft their own banner image, reading “kamala hq.“ Meanwhile, the gay guys of New York City, who received the news of Biden pulling out whilst in their natural habit (Fire Island), quickly made crop tops in the exact same style of brat. A mashup cut of one of Harris’ cringiest lines—some anecdote about coconut trees—was set to Charli XCX’s song “Von dutch.” It has received over 4 million views.

    “The internet is going crazy for Harris’ campaign,” declares The 19th, a gender and politics website. Harris’ “meme stock is bullish,” adds CNN, which devoted a panel to the topic, in which a suit-wearing boomer tried, inartfully, to explain the craze to the rest. “Is Kamala Harris ‘brat’?” asks The Economist, calling 2024 “America’s TikTok election.” “Younger celebs are aiming to help Harris by tying her to their viral and loyal social media brands,” explains the Associated Press rather clinically.

    “A brat should exude the je ne sais quoi of the famous-but-not-A-list women,” writes Shirley Li, giving the phenomenon an overly intellectualized treatment typical of The Atlantic. “The brat is a classic feminine archetype, right up there with the jezebel, the crone, the bimbo, the career girl,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “Brats are Cinderella’s stepsisters, lacking both social graces and appropriate gratitude for the privileges they enjoy.”

    But what the hungry internet, full of writers looking for takes, and the Harris campaign miss is that being “brat” is not really a compliment.

    “Brat” is someone who, per Charli XCX’s own description, walks around with a “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra.” A girl “who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things.”

    For the media to run with the idea that Harris has the youth vote locked down, because Charli XCX fired off a tweet (that may have been trolling) that took approximately 30 seconds to craft, betrays a certain thirst from all parties for an Obama 2.0-type campaign or for Harris to become a galvanizing Bernie Sanders-like figure. Perhaps more importantly, it contradicts the polling.

    Harris is overall “doing much worse against Trump than Biden did in 2020” among youth voters, notes CNN polling analyst Harry Enten, which is backed up by Quinnipiac University polling conducted between July 19 and 21. “Moreover, young Democrats are NOT disproportionately more motivated to vote than other Democrats because of Biden’s exit,” notes Enten. A more recent New York Times/Siena College polling data complicates this narrative a bit, finding that “Harris fares better among young (18 to 29) and Hispanic voters than Mr. Biden did in any survey this year,” which may not really be saying much. Biden performed notoriously poorly among these groups, so an improvement at the margins is good for Democrats, but possibly not a game changer. (“Conversely, [Harris] fares worse among white working-class voters and voters over 65 than Mr. Biden did in all but one prior Times/Siena poll,” notes the same writeup.)

    Perhaps more importantly, it’s just really not the youth vote that actually matters this time around. It’s nice to have, yes, but Harris needs to win Pennsylvania. Harris needs to win Arizona. Harris needs to win Michigan. Harris needs to win Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. If she can gain traction with younger voters in those states, and/or meaningfully affect youth voter turnout, then that’s helpful. Otherwise, the “Von dutch” memes don’t mean squat.

    “Young voters continue to feel largely negative about politics and voting, but hopefulness has increased since June,” finds Change Research in a report released Wednesday that finds young people are in fact excited about Harris and more likely to turn out as a result. But still, “the top emotions associated with voting are all negative: in a select-all question, 53% chose ‘anxious,’ 43% ‘fearful,’ 38% ‘overwhelmed,’ and 37% ‘angry.’ But hopefulness has risen from 23% to 30%” following Biden’s exit and Harris’ entry into the race.

    Kamala isn’t brat. Kamala is a mediocre candidate, perceived as a kooky wine aunt who says outlandish things, capitalizing on a moment of virality amid an otherwise bleak political landscape in which young voters realize that politicians rarely deliver on their promises.

    Scenes from New York: The Department of Sanitation is trying to get New Yorkers to become snitches.

    QUICK HITS

    • “California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Thursday to direct state agencies on how to remove homeless encampments, a month after a Supreme Court ruling allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces,” reports the Associated Press.
    • Sinaloa Cartel leaders have been arrested by U.S. authorities.
    • Both Barack and Michelle Obama endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a slightly cringe call that the Harris campaign released as a campaign video.
    • The French train system has been hit by arsonists merely hours before the Olympics is scheduled to start.
    • Boy, Kamala Harris sure knows how to appeal to Rust Belt normies:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Try, try again

    Try, try again

    Handouts to voters: Though his first attempt at student loan forgiveness was struck down by the Supreme Court in June of last year (Biden v. Nebraska), President Joe Biden apparently feels called to try again. If this attempt went through, it would—to his mind—not only lift the shackles of decades of debt from a chunk of the voting public, but also possibly compel people, filled with newly grateful spirits, to vote for him. So you can understand why he’d be so persistent.

    That doesn’t make it good policy. The new plan, which would affect roughly 30 million, uses a different mechanism than last time—it expands programs that already exist, and targets those who have high loan balances due to interest—but it would still be to our collective detriment.

    “First, the plan takes aim at borrowers who have seen their balances climb due to unpaid interest, seeking to cancel up to $20,000 of accrued interest for all borrowers,” reports Reason‘s Emma Camp. “For borrowers enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan (IDR) making up to $120,000 a year, or $240,000 a year for couples, the Education Department plans to forgive all accrued interest.”

    “Biden’s plan would also automatically cancel debt held by people who are eligible for loan forgiveness under an existing plan but haven’t yet enrolled,” adds Camp. “Considering that all borrowers are eligible to enroll in Saving on a Valuable Education plan (SAVE), an IDR plan that provides forgiveness after 10 years for those with balances under $12,000, this new change could effectively create automatic forgiveness after 10 years for those with small balances.” For those who started paying their undergraduate loans off 20 years ago (and 25 years for graduate loans), the Department of Education plans to wipe the slate clean.

    It’s clear that Biden either doesn’t understand how incentives work or doesn’t care: Colleges and universities have no reason to lower their prices if this becomes the law of the land. So tuition will become more bloated, and the vicious cycle will repeat all over again—only with taxpayers on the hook to a greater degree than before.

    Trump’s abortion quagmire: “On abortion, Trump chose politics over principles,” reads a New York Times headline from today, referring to the presidential contender’s comments yesterday saying that he’s in favor of states setting their own abortion policies, but that he broadly supports exceptions being made when the mother’s life is endangered or in cases of rape or incest. He also expressed support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. “You must follow your heart, or in many cases, your religion or your faith,” said Trump. “Do what’s right for your family and do what’s right for yourself.”

    But it’s a little funny that much of the mainstream media—which tends to be awfully supportive of legal abortion, with newsrooms comprised mostly of Democratic voters—is still managing to find a way to ding Trump over this. His comments probably represent the majority of voters, who are uneasy with abortion but believe, broadly, that it ought to be permitted during the first trimester and made illegal during the second. The vast majority of voters are in favor of life/health/rape/incest exceptions. And, contra the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision, the vast majority of voters (even the highly religious) are in favor of keeping IVF legal.

    So, though The New York Times is trotting out Trump’s 1999 proclamation that he’s pro-choice, and comparing it with what he said when running for president in 2016, it’s worth noting that Trump has pretty much never been a devoutly Christian, principled pro-lifer. That’s former Vice President Mike Pence they’re thinking of. Trump has always managed to pay enough lip service to evangelical beliefs to (somehow) get elected, but these comments shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone, nor are they egregious to the majority of Americans.

    Scenes from New York: Though Curb Your Enthusiasm—which ended its 12-season run on Sunday—was set mostly in Los Angeles, it feels like a New York show, mostly because Larry David is essentially the most New Yorkery New Yorker that ever was. Grant me my artistic license and enjoy this piece dissecting the show’s bland, “new money” interiors. Or this one, on how Curb “synthesized the comedy pedigree of HBO’s ’90s with the ambition and unbounded creative freedom of HBO’s aughts.” Or this one, that’s about the jury nullification plot line in the finale.

    God bless Larry David, that wonderful “idiot from Brooklyn.”

    QUICK HITS

    • JPMorgan Chase & Co. head Jamie Dimon “said US delays of liquefied natural gas projects were done for ‘political reasons’ to pacify those who believe oil and gas projects should be stopped—a position he calls ‘wrong’ and ‘enormously naïve,’” per Bloomberg.
    • Dave Smith critiques Coleman Hughes’ Israel-Palestine arguments Hughes made on Joe Rogan’s show.
    • “Chuck Searcy has spent decades of his life redressing a deadly legacy of America’s war in Vietnam: unexploded ordnance,” reports The New York Times. 
    • Surely this will work and have no unintended consequences whatsoever:
    • Authorities in Chechnya have banned music they deem too fast, as well as music they deem too slow.
    • Insanity:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • A form of Navalny

    A form of Navalny

    Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually “a form of Navalny” and “a form of communism or fascism.”

    When asked about the Russian state’s imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: “It’s happening here.” The indictments are “all because of the fact that I’m in politics,” in his telling.

    He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, “the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country.”

    Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.

    Running for office, and cutting through the state’s propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. “In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” said his widow, Yulia, “but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”

    Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). “Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size,” writes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. “He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded.” But “[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers,” writes Sullum, and “the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump’s reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta.”

    Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he’s a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how “justice” gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.

    Scenes from New York: Nobody asked for this.

    QUICK HITS

    • “Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women’s medical spaces within the VA,” reports National Review.
    • RFK Jr.’s “origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment,” said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If you say so, Bret.
    • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso’s Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.” But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
    • I do not think this is true or that there’s much evidence for it:
    • “The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin’s regime will remain,” writes The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum. “Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.”
    • Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.
    • We live in the stupidest simulation:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Hell hath no fury

    Hell hath no fury

    Hell hath no fury like a Bill Ackman scorned: For those just tuning in, let me catch you up on the Harvard/antisemitism/plagiarism scandal that just won’t end.

    Back in December, three elite university presidents—including Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth—were trotted before Congress to give testimonies related to their handling of antisemitic speech and pro-Palestine activism on campus. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) raked them all over the coals, declaring their answers unsatisfactory and insensitive and full of legalese, and Magill soon resigned.

    Harvard initially stood by Gay, but then a mostly conservative collection of journalists and activists—as well as some big donors, like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman—publicized her extensive track record of plagiarism. Gay resigned, but not before calling everyone racist. (She is a black woman, and she claims that that’s the real reason people tried to take her down.)

    Now Business Insider has accused Ackman’s wife—Neri Oxman, an entrepreneur and former MIT professor—of plagiarism herself. Oxman, they say, “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.” (As an aside: Oxman’s work is interesting. “Her team at the MIT Media Lab coaxed silkworms to build sculptures,” notes the article. Oxman “also made undulating structures out of natural materials like cellulose and chitin, the material found in shrimp cells.”)

    Now, Ackman has basically sworn revenge: “There has been no due process,” wrote Ackman this morning on X. “Neri Oxman was given 90 minutes to respond to a 7,000-word plagiarism allegation before Business Insider published a piece saying she was a plagiarist.” For the record, it’s good to give sources sufficient time to respond, but that’s not quite a due process issue.

    “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” he declared, vowing to helpfully review the work of all Business Insider reporters and MIT faculty, after claiming that Insider‘s source is most likely inside MIT. (Side-by-side reviews for plagiarism are getting easier and faster to do in the era of artificial intelligence.)

    Now Ackman’s allegiance to his wife is being alternately memed and criticized:

    On one hand, it’s fair to collectively groan Why do we have another goddamn Harvard-related news cycle? On the other, we’re in a weird moment for plagiarism and the related subject of intellectual property. If ChatGPT is the death knell for plenty of academic writing, maybe it’s replacing something that had already mostly withered and died.

    The focus of the Harvard kerfuffle could have been the initial congressional testimony, and the speech double standards present on college campuses. Or it could’ve been the intellectual bankruptcy of DEI bureaucracy. Instead, it is becoming trench warfare over plagiarism, which seems like the dumbest possible way for this to all go.

    Israel pummels Hezbollah: Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have struck Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon in retaliatory fire, killing at least seven fighters. The IDF claims that Hezbollah struck an Israeli military base on Saturday, most likely due to Israel’s killing of a senior Hamas leader inside Lebanon last week.

    Though war has been raging between Israel and Hamas since October 7, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing 1,200 civilians—in some cases brutally raping and beheading the victims—many had hoped that other factions in the Middle East, particularly those backed by Iran, would not be drawn into the conflict. With the increased Israel-Hezbollah conflict, as well as Houthi activity snarling global shipping and provoking some U.S. military action, that’s not looking likely.

    Scenes from New York:

    Surfer politics, spotted in Rockaway.

    (Liz Wolfe)

    QUICK HITS

    • The Supreme Court will decide whether former President Donald Trump can be kept off ballots via the 14th Amendment, which includes a section barring officials who have “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office. Oral arguments will be held on February 8.
    • Congress returns this week and is supposed to pass some funding bills, as another shutdown deadline looms on January 19.
    • A story about a salon upcharge for clients with autism is making the rounds, but the actual underlying facts seem…mostly fine, like a hairstylist is catering to an underserved market.
    • The National Park Service apparently has nothing better to do with its time than tear down statues of old white men.
    • Please enjoy the absolute worst segment on the Claudine Gay scandal, involving the most Hilaria Baldwin–esque overpronunciation of the word Latino you could possibly imagine.
    • “Often, when an issue becomes polarized, you’ll see thermostatic effects in public opinion, as when Democrats became more liberal on immigration in response to Donald Trump’s histrionic attacks on immigrants,” writes Josh Barro on Very Serious. “But while liberal figures on campus like to talk about themselves as a vanguard in a fight against conservative know-nothings who would take down knowledge and expertise, there is no pro-college backlash among liberals that is apparent in the polls.”
    • Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 had an accident while up in the air, and part of the plane flew off. A few injuries were sustained, but all passengers survived following an emergency landing.
    • Tell me you don’t know what unrealized gains are without telling me you don’t know what unrealized gains are:

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link

  • Texas’ abortion law test

    Texas’ abortion law test

    Texas’ medical exemption law gets tested: Kate Cox is a 31-year-old mother of two who is 20 weeks pregnant with her third child and seeking an abortion.

    The baby has trisomy 18, which means it will most likely either be stillborn or die early in infancy. Cox has been to the emergency room several times during this pregnancy, and is arguing in court that continuing the pregnancy will risk her health, thus falling under the exception to the Texas abortion law, which does not generally permit abortions but allows them if the mother’s life is in danger or if an abortion would prevent the “substantial impairment of major bodily function.”

    Last week, a trial judge ruled that Cox could receive an abortion in the state, but Texas’ Supreme Court put a hold on the trial judge’s ruling this past Friday.

    Then yesterday, the state Supreme Court ruled that Damla Karsan, Cox’s doctor, hadn’t sufficiently made the case that the medical exemption applied to her patient.

    “Our ruling today does not block a life-saving abortion in this very case if a physician determines that one is needed under the appropriate legal standard, using reasonable medical judgment,” wrote the high court. “But when she sued seeking a court’s pre-authorization, Dr. Karsan did not assert that Ms. Cox has a ‘life-threatening physical condition’ or that, in Dr. Karsan’s reasonable medical judgment, an abortion is necessary because Ms. Cox has the type of condition the exception requires.”

    “Some difficulties in pregnancy, however, even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses,” continued the ruling. Now, Cox says she will go out of state to get the abortion immediately.

    Cox is one of the first who has sought a court-ordered exception since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade and allows states to dictate their own abortion laws. Her case is unique, too, because she is doing so in advance of getting the abortion. Another suit, which attempts to clarify the legal limits surrounding what qualifies as a medical exemption, is being brought before the state of Texas right now as well. And, in three other states, abortion is coming before Supreme Courts this week, as plaintiffs continue to challenge laws to suss out what each state’s new abortion regime permits.

    Prior to abortion being made illegal in Texas, there were roughly 50,000 performed annually, down from an almost 80,000 high in 2006. In 2023, there have been 34. University of Texas at Austin researchers note that the vast majority of Texas abortion-seekers choose to get abortions out-of-state (or via securing pills from Mexico), but that Texas’ restrictive laws are associated with a roughly 10 percent reduction in the number of abortions performed.

    Zelenskyy’s fundraising drive: Today, President Joe Biden will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has traveled to the U.S. to hold out his hands for some funds for his country’s war against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. “A bipartisan group of senators is struggling to finalize an agreement to tighten border security in exchange for more Ukraine funding,” reports Politico, “and the chamber is scheduled to go into recess at the end of this week.” It’s likely that, if such a bill is drafted up at all, Biden will have to acquiesce to restrictions on asylum seekers as a condition for doling out more aid to Ukraine.

    The New York Times characterizes Zelenskyy’s visit as a “last-ditch pitch,” which seems about right. A CNN poll from August shows how Americans have soured on supporting funding Ukraine’s war effort, with roughly 55 percent saying that Congress should not authorize any additional spending and 51 percent saying the U.S. has done enough as-is. Contrast this with the 62 percent, right after Putin’s invasion, who supported the U.S. doing more to help Zelenskyy.

    “We refuse to allow our tuition dollars to fund apartheid.” Columbia students are holding a tuition strike for the spring 2024 semester in an attempt to get their school to “refuse to invest in ethnic cleansing and genocide abroad” and for “divestment from companies profiting from or otherwise supporting Israeli apartheid and Columbia’s academic ties to Israel.”

    They also want the school to “immediately remove Board of Trustees members whose personal investments, financial commitments, employment, or other forms of business involvement entail profit from or support for Israeli apartheid” and changes to campus policing.

    They say “it’s highly unlikely that students participating in the tuition strike would face disciplinary action of any kind,” and that “it would be absurd for the university to suspend, expel, or punish a student for this lateness.” Therein lies the problem: Students at elite universities seem to think they’re untouchable, and administrators have set a mighty dangerous precedent by spending the last decade communicating to students that their every need for psychological safety from political beliefs with which they disagree can be accommodated. (More from Reason‘s Jacob Sullum.)

    Scenes from New York: This past Friday, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of New York’s restrictive gun law, which denies people the right to carry in certain public places (like parks) and allows local authorities broad discretion in denying gun rights to people they deem dangerous, only permitting licenses to people “of good moral character.” What this actually does is create hoops for law-abiding gun owners to jump through, while doing very little to prevent violence from criminals who own and use guns. (I wrote about Times Square’s silly gun-free zone last year.) 

    QUICK HITS

    • Harvard President Claudine Gay has come under fire for repeatedly plagiarizing and improperly attributing written passages over the course of her academic career.
    • The Biden administration’s “latest salvo” in the war against pro-lifers, writes Mike Pence at National Review, “is a proposed rule that would cut off Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds to pro-life pregnancy resource centers.” Cutting government funding for organizations that can surely operate privately is fine, but doing so in a way that attempts to punish politically disfavored groups is not.
    • Every member of the K-pop band BTS is now doing mandatory military service.
    • Inside NASA’s wormy font choices.
    • Google loses its antitrust battle against Epic Games.
    • The government could have simply not cracked down on single room occupancy units in the first place, instead of now coughing up a bunch of money to try to incentivize landlords to fix ’em up.
    • To be fair, stoned boomers would pose a threat to the economics of the all-you-can-eat buffets on cruise ships, so I can see why cruise lines are cracking down on pot.
    • Lawyers for Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny say he has disappeared from prison and cannot be found.
    • Ugh, no:
    • Just say no (to price controls):

    Liz Wolfe

    Source link