Browsed by
Category: Politics

The mantra of white supremacy

The mantra of white supremacy

Ibram X. Kendi writes: Below a Democratic donkey, the Fox News graphic read ANTI-WHITE MANIA. It flanked Tucker Carlson’s face and overtook it in size. It was unmistakable. Which was the point. The segment aired on June 25—the height of the manic attack on, and redefinition of, critical race theory, which Carlson has repeatedly cast as “anti-white.” It was one of his most incendiary segments of the year. “The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating…

Read More Read More

Raid the Republican Party to save the party

Raid the Republican Party to save the party

Martin Skladany wrote in March (and his argument is just as strong now): Democrats’ instinct after winning the White House and Congress in 2020 might be to stand back and let the Republican Party slowly self-destruct. Such inaction would not necessarily preserve democracy. A Trumpist GOP would continue to win elections, maintain power over certain states, and could regain control of the Senate or House in 2022. The responsibility of saving the Republican Party — and the rule of law…

Read More Read More

Why the discredited dossier does not undercut the Russia investigation

Why the discredited dossier does not undercut the Russia investigation

Charlie Savage writes: Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources. Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of…

Read More Read More

Trump’s Iran policy has become a disaster for the U.S. and Israel

Trump’s Iran policy has become a disaster for the U.S. and Israel

Tom Friedman writes: The judges have voted and the results are in: President Donald Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 — a decision urged on by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — was one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War era. But don’t just take my word for it. Moshe Ya’alon was the Israeli defense minister when…

Read More Read More

What shape society must take in a post-pandemic world

What shape society must take in a post-pandemic world

Jill Lepore writes: In March 2020, Boris Johnson, pale and exhausted, self-isolating in his flat on Downing Street, released a video of himself – that he had taken himself – reassuring Britons that they would get through the pandemic, together. “One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society,” the prime minister announced, confirming the existence of society while talking to his phone, alone in a room. All this…

Read More Read More

At COP26, a consensus that developing nations need far more help countering climate change

At COP26, a consensus that developing nations need far more help countering climate change

Inside Climate News reports: When the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference ended in overtime two weeks ago, there was recognition that developing nations—which have contributed least but suffer most from climate change—need far greater funding to adapt. At COP15, held in 2009 in Copenhagen, the world’s wealthiest countries pledged to give poorer nations yearly climate funding, to reach an amount of at least $100 billion a year from 2020 through 2025. The $100 billion figure was a nice, round…

Read More Read More

How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

The Wall Street Journal reports: Over coffee at his office on Tuesday, Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, let a colleague in on a secret. “There’s something going on,” he told Alex Sigal, a virologist growing coronaviruses at a South African laboratory. “They’ve found a variant they’ve never seen before.” For days, case numbers in the nation had been rising rapidly. Puzzled lab technicians had been getting back Covid-19 tests that were positive,…

Read More Read More

WHO chief: Omicron backlash against Africa shows why world needs pandemic treaty

WHO chief: Omicron backlash against Africa shows why world needs pandemic treaty

Politico reports: It’s time for a new pandemic treaty, the chief of the World Health Organization said on Monday. The emergence of the new Omicron coronavirus variant amid vaccine inequity and the rapid imposition of travel bans on southern African nations “demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics,” said WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a special session of the World Health Assembly. Countries are gathering at the session where they will agree to start negotiations…

Read More Read More

Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts, spurring fears about future vote challenges

Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts, spurring fears about future vote challenges

The Washington Post reports: In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged. In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors. And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices. A year after…

Read More Read More

Brainwashing has a grim history that we shouldn’t dismiss

Brainwashing has a grim history that we shouldn’t dismiss

Joel E Dimsdale writes: In 1937, the longtime Bolshevik leader Georgy Pyatakov was tried in Moscow for treason, sabotage and other alleged crimes against the Soviet Union. He gave a false confession, declaring: ‘Here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.’ He was executed for his alleged…

Read More Read More

Ten million deaths a year

Ten million deaths a year

David Wallace-Wells writes: Not​ all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot. At the start of the pandemic, it was considered unseemly to make comparisons like these. But comparing the value of human lives is one thing the machine of…

Read More Read More

How Norilsk, Siberia, became one of the most polluted places on Earth

How Norilsk, Siberia, became one of the most polluted places on Earth

Marianne Lavelle reports: It was 2 a.m. and the sun was shining, as it does day and night in mid-July in Norilsk, a Siberian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Igor Klyushin went to the bank of the river where he used to fish with his father for grayling, a sleek and dorsal-finned beauty known for its graceful leaps above the water surface. “A very merry fish,” Klyushin recalled. “It enjoys cold and clean, clean water.” He doubted…

Read More Read More

Israel and Iran broaden ongoing cyberwar to attack civilian targets

Israel and Iran broaden ongoing cyberwar to attack civilian targets

The New York Times reports: Millions of ordinary people in Iran and Israel recently found themselves caught in the crossfire of a cyberwar between their countries. In Tehran, a dentist drove around for hours in search of gasoline, waiting in long lines at four gas stations only to come away empty. In Tel Aviv, a well-known broadcaster panicked as the intimate details of his sex life, and those of hundreds of thousands of others stolen from an L.G.B.T.Q. dating site,…

Read More Read More

Taliban covert operatives seized Kabul and other Afghan cities from within

Taliban covert operatives seized Kabul and other Afghan cities from within

The Wall Street Journal reports: Undercover Taliban agents—often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses—spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations. Then, as U.S. forces were completing their withdrawal in August, these operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, surprising their neighbors and colleagues. Pulling their weapons from hiding, they helped the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside. The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming…

Read More Read More

QAnon supporter, Michael Flynn, reveals in private he thinks QAnon is a CIA creation and ‘total nonsense’

QAnon supporter, Michael Flynn, reveals in private he thinks QAnon is a CIA creation and ‘total nonsense’

vIdEo pRoDuCtIoN iS mY pAsSiOn pic.twitter.com/7ErBpus3kn — Jan Bobrowicz (@janbobrowicz) November 28, 2021 The Daily Beast reports: Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has embraced his position as a hero to QAnon conspiracy theorists. He took the QAnon oath, sold QAnon T-shirts, and even auctioned off a QAnon quilt. He appeared at a QAnon convention and signed books with a QAnon slogan. Some QAnon followers even believe that Flynn is “Q,” the mysterious figure behind QAnon. But a recording…

Read More Read More

Moderate House Republican warns McCarthy over embracing far-right members

Moderate House Republican warns McCarthy over embracing far-right members

CNN reports: A moderate House Republican is firing off a warning shot at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as he caters to his right flank in a quest for the speaker’s gavel. “He’s taking the middle of the conference for granted,” the GOP lawmaker told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal conference dynamics. “McCarthy could have a bigger math problem with the moderates.” Specifically, the lawmaker said a number of moderates are upset with how McCarthy, of…

Read More Read More