Attention to the Unseen

Adam Serwer writes: The horrors detailed in the press were hard to believe. Detainees described overcrowding so severe that “it was difficult to move in any direction without jostling and being jostled.” The water provided them was foul, “of a dark color, and an ordinary glass would collect a thick sediment.” The “authorities never removed any filth.” A detainee wrote that the “only shelter from the sun and rain and night dews, was what we could make by stretching over…

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: President Donald Trump is throwing himself a parade this week, complete with a flyover by the Navy’s Blue Angels and Air Force One, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines standing by his side, and tanks that the District of Columbia emphatically does not want, although recent reporting suggests they will be parked and stationary, in an attempt to not destroy the roadways, as was originally planned. While historically, any Fourth of July celebration…

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The New York Times reports: For years, Palestinians in the crowded East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan have complained that the walls of their homes were settling and cracking, disturbed by an underground archaeological dig led by a right-wing Jewish settler group. On Sunday, when that dig was officially unveiled, not with a ribbon-cutting but with the ceremonial smashing of a brick wall, it was President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, who swung the first sledgehammer. The reverberations were…

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Take Your Daughter To Work Day#UnwantedIvanka pic.twitter.com/nnTzm0Pu51 — Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) July 1, 2019 It’s hard to watch the Trump presidency — the definition of a kakistocracy (“government by the worst people”) — without anticipating its denouement, not so much as expectation but more so as wish. What end would be most fitting, even if it might be unlikely? Donald Trump’s message has been consistent: He can get away with anything. He gloats from the throne of his impunity. The…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee on Tuesday said they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, outraising President Barack Obama in the equivalent period during his re-election campaign in 2012 and signaling that Mr. Trump will have vastly more resources than he did in 2016. The campaign and the R.N.C. said they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more…

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These are concentration camps. According to concentration camp experts, people begin to die due to overcrowding, neglect, and shortage of resources. We saw all three of those signs on our trip yesterday. Another person died yesterday. And those are the deaths we know about. https://t.co/MhujNAYohJ — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 2, 2019 The New York Times reports: [Representative Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet that Customs and Border Protection “did a lot of ‘cleaning up’ before we arrived.” She said…

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Fred Kaplan writes: Hats off to whoever thought of sending John Bolton to Mongolia while President Donald Trump flew to the G-20 in Japan and met shortly after with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. If the dispatcher is as witty as I think he or she might be, it’s a clear sign that Bolton’s days as national security adviser are numbered. Surely Bolton, who knows history, gets the reference. He no doubt recalls that, in 1957, as part of his…

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The Washington Post reports: Shortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor. “I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.” Then Mifsud disappeared. The Maltese-born academic has not surfaced publicly since that October 2017 interview, days after…

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Michael Tomasky writes: A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose. The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes;…

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ProPublica reports: Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings. In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old…

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The New York Times reports: From a seemingly fanciful tweet to a historic step into North Korean territory, President Trump’s largely improvised third meeting on Sunday with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was a masterpiece of drama, the kind of made-for-TV spectacle that Mr. Trump treasures. But for weeks before the meeting, which started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been…

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Fred Kaplan writes: It is tempting to chortle over the string of inanities that President Donald Trump unfurled at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, this weekend. Asked about the status of “Western liberalism,” which Russian President Vladimir Putin had just pronounced dead in an interview with the Financial Times, Trump ranted about liberal Democrats in California, apparently thinking that’s what the term was referring to. Asked for his views about bussing, which had been a hot topic at the…

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David Rothkopf writes: As the first round of debates among Democratic candidates for president clearly showed, the intellectual vitality of the Democratic Party right now is coming from progressives. On issue after issue, the vast majority of the candidates embraced views that have been seen as progressive priorities for years—whether that may have been a pledge to provide healthcare for all or vows to repeal tax cuts benefiting the rich, whether it was prioritizing combating our climate crisis or seeking…

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Kenan Malik writes: The relationship between liberalism, radicalism and conservatism began to change in the last decades of the 20th century, largely as the left disintegrated. The idea of an alternative to capitalism seemed to many chimerical, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even before the Berlin Wall had come down, a new kind of economic liberalism, unstitched from the restraints of social need, had emerged – what many now call “neoliberalism”. At its core was a…

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