Friday, June 16, 2023
Boris goes down for Partygate, plans to attack Iran, a youth climate lawsuit, koalas, and more....
The typewriters in the Current Affairs newsroom thrum night and day, bashing out briefing notes. We’re pleased to present you with a third edition. Thank you to all those who have subscribed. The Briefing is well on its way to solvency! If you have news tips for us, email editor@currentaffairs.org. We welcome your suggestions on stories we ought to be covering. The purpose of this briefing is to provide a useful alternative to corporate news, and we want your feedback on what you’d like to be kept informed about! As with our print magazine, in this briefing we are constantly striving to improve what we bring you.
I. What Ought To Be Discussed
DO CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT?
Montana’s youth (and its constitution) say, “yes!” The state’s constitution, since 1972, has included a guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment… for present and future generations.”
In 2020, a group of climate activists from ages 5 (!) to 22 sued the state for enacting two energy policies that have contributed to climate change, which has exacerbated natural disasters in the state—including wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, and floods. One of the laws in question explicitly prevents legislators from considering climate impact when making energy policy, as if the goal of that energy policy is to be as reckless as possible. The activists hope that a successful case could set a precedent requiring state governments to protect their citizens from the effects of climate change. “I wish lawmakers understood that this is the only way I see a future where I want to be there,” said Grace Gibson-Snyder, one of the 19-year-old plaintiffs who recalled that a wildfire engulfed her town of Missoula in smoke.
“WAIT…DID YOU SAY PLANS TO ATTACK IRAN? WHAT’S THAT ABOUT?”
The media has spent the last week chortling at Trump’s stupidity and criminality (See section II of this very briefing). But in all the talk of documents in bathrooms and ballrooms, they have completely missed what is, in our view, the much more serious and scandalous aspect of the story, which is the disclosure that Trump nearly launched a war with Iran! The only coverage we could find which foregrounds this aspect in detail comes from Jacobin in a piece by Branko Marcetic, who writes:
“The issue stems from Trump’s apparent frustration with what he claimed was a false narrative being pushed by the press: that after losing the 2020 election, under the advice of then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu … and the coterie of Iran hawks he’d surrounded himself with, Trump was dangerously close to ordering strikes on Iran that could have triggered full-scale war and had to be talked down from it by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. … The former president maintained the reality of the situation was the exact opposite: that it was Milley and the Pentagon who were pushing for an attack on Iran on a reluctant Trump and that the classified documents he had kept were proof of this. Specifically, Trump showed them a “pages-long” set of plans for attacking Iran that he said were independently drawn up by the military and presented to him.”
There are a lot of conflicting reports surrounding what exactly happened, but Marcetic makes the point that we should not just dismiss this as a “break glass in case of emergency” scenario, as the U.S., urged on by the Israeli government, has been ratcheting up tensions with Iran for years:
“The existence of US war plans for Iran suggests it wouldn’t take much for Israeli attacks to draw the United States into yet another disastrous war, particularly if Iran retaliates, particularly if it winds up killing Americans in the process, whether intentionally or not.”
Perhaps just as scandalous is the question of why the media has ignored this aspect of the story and seems to have put next to no effort into piecing together exactly how close we got to a war with Iran. Middle East researcher Matthew Petti argues:
“The whole episode shows how twisted the American debate on Iran is. An invasion of Iran would be the largest U.S. war in decades. Yet the public is told very little about the deliberations under way in Washington, and has even less of a chance to participate. … While the media has portrayed Trump [as] a uniquely unhinged warmonger, war with Iran is a bipartisan political project. The Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all threatened to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities…The public threats are always vague, and the specifics only come through anonymous officials leaking to the press. Iran is supposed to receive the message that the United States is ready for war, while the public is not supposed to pay attention enough to actually debate the idea.”
INFLATION IS COOLING OFF WITHOUT 10 PERCENT UNEMPLOYMENT
Remember last summer, when former Treasury Secretary turned Biden economic advisor Larry Summers said that in order to get runaway inflation under control, we would need to sacrifice millions of workers to the economy gods? In case you don’t, here’s what he said to a crowd at the London School of Economics last June:
“We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment.”
Well, guess what? A year later, in spite of his doomsaying about Biden’s American Rescue Plan, inflation has drastically declined from where it was last summer. As Eric Levitz writes in New York Magazine:
“The core consumer price index (CPI)—a measure of inflation that strips out food and energy prices, which are unusually volatile—peaked in September 2022 at a 6.6 percent annualized rate. According to government data released Tuesday, that figure fell to 5.33 percent in May.”
Levitz goes on to explain that even that number is misleadingly high, because it factors in housing costs, which lag behind by a year because many renters are still paying year-long leases (and housing costs were much higher a year ago than they are now). The real number is closer to four-percent price growth, which is the lowest it’s been since March of 2021. Meanwhile, unemployment has remained around 3.7 percent for close to a year and a half. Turns out that Summers’ school of thought, that you need austerity to curb inflation, is a load of nonsense.
II. What is Actually Being Discussed?
A parliamentary committee has released a devastating report on former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s penchant for partying while the rest of Britain was locked in their houses to avoid catching COVID-19. The so-called “Partygate” scandal led Boris to resign as prime minister last summer. Boris resigned from the House of Commons last week after he was made aware of the report detailing just how audaciously he had lied before the Chamber about parties held at 10 Downing Street. The report concludes that Johnson “misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the public, and did so repeatedly.” Page 4 of the report contains a damning list of all the ways Johnson deceived the Commons. He did so…
“i) when he said that Guidance was followed completely in No. 10, that the Rules and Guidance were followed at all times…
ii) when he failed to tell the House about his own knowledge of the gatherings where rules or guidance had been broken
iii) when he said that he relied on repeated assurances that the rules had not been broken…
iv) when he gave the impression that there needed to be an investigation…before he could answer questions when he had personal knowledge that he did not reveal
v) when he purported to correct the record but instead continued to mislead the House and, by his continuing denials, this Committee”
Scandalous details are littered throughout the more than 100-page document, such as on Page 17, where Johnson is said to have called his birthday party “‘essential’ for work purposes…” saying, “‘it seemed to me […] perfectly proper’ for officials to be ‘asked to come and wish me a happy birthday.’” The report goes on, saying that “Boris was also unable to explain why he considered his wife and his interior designer absolutely necessary participants in a work-related meeting.”
Boris has called the report “a load of complete tripe” and the product of a “kangaroo court” seeking to oust him from Parliament. The scandal has further upended an already shambolic Conservative Party. Its prime minister Rishi Sunak has been the object of scorn from certain members who accuse him of having blocked Boris’ nominations of fellow party members for the House of Lords. This internal acrimony points to an atmosphere of supreme dysfunction amongst the Tory brass, who face a likely thrashing in the next election. According to The Economist, they are projected to finish 16 points behind Labour in 2024.
Johnson’s brazen disregard for the rules and barrage of ass-covering lies are, of course, strongly reminiscent of Donald Trump’s behavior. Comparisons between the two have long been made, from their comical hairdos to their vacuous pseudo-populism. But perhaps the strongest similarity is that they were both born into wealth and have spent their lives feeling entitled to break whatever rules they like, covering their misconduct with flimsy falsehoods, in the expectation that law and the truth can never catch up with them. Both may presently be receiving rude awakenings. Speaking of which…
TRUMP’S LAWYERS FLEE LIKE RATS ON A SINKING SHIP
Trump’s legal defense is…not going well. Shortly after the indictment dropped last week, his two lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, quit. For his arraignment on Tuesday, Trump was forced to bring in former federal prosecutor Todd Blanche (who is also representing him in the New York Stormy Daniels case) and the former Florida solicitor general Chris Kise, who are notably not specialists in the sort of national security crimes of which he is accused.
According to The Guardian, Trump’s team has been frantically interviewing lawyers to find someone—anyone—who can legally hold a security clearance to review the documents Trump possessed. One lawyer he interviewed was even indicted on money laundering charges in 2008 and currently faces disbarment for contempt of court.
“Part of the problem of recruiting new lawyers has been Trump’s reputation for being a notoriously difficult client who has a record of declining legal advice and seeking to have his lawyers act as attack dogs or political aides rather than attorneys bound by ethics rules, people close to the process said.”
It’s pretty astounding, really. Most lawyers, one might imagine, would jump at the opportunity to represent a former president. But Trump has shown himself to be such a petty and mercurial boss, who, as the indictment demonstrates, routinely asks his lawyers to serve as his bagmen. Add to that the absurdity of the things Trump appears to have done, including showing classified plans to invade Iran to a bunch of aides and biographers while acknowledging that he was totally not allowed to do that. The fact that nobody but the dregs of the Florida legal community wants to represent him shows just how royally fucked he is.
III. CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. THE OCCASIONAL DECENT PERSON
(or, “What’s going on with the election?”)
Trump casually suggested that the U.S. should engage in an open imperial conquest of Venezuela. He recently asserted in a speech that when his term ended “Venezuela was ready to collapse” (neglecting to mention that his administration’s sanctions played a major role in hastening that collapse) and added: "We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.” Admittedly, this is one of the refreshing things about Trump—he does not cloak his imperial ambitions in flowery language about human rights or democracy like Obama and Bush did. He just comes right out and says that we should conquer countries to take their natural resources. (Mike Pompeo has confirmed that the U.S. seriously considered invading Venezuela during Trump’s presidency.) It also demonstrates just how absurd it is to portray Trump as some principled “anti-imperialist,” as Christian Parenti in Compact Magazine did a few months ago.
Several figures in the GOP have accused President Biden of taking bribes from Ukrainian gas company Burisma while he was VP. Senator Chuck Grassley claimed that a confidential FBI source brought forward evidence of a deal for Joe Biden and his son Hunter (who sat on the board of the company) to receive $5 million apiece in exchange for getting a Ukrainian government investigator who was looking into Burisma fired. While the veracity of the source’s evidence remains unconfirmed (though that source claims to have 17 tapes), and the timing is obviously intended to distract from Trump’s indictments, this is extremely serious if proven true and warrants full investigation. Grassley and House Oversight Chair James Comer have subpoenaed the unredacted complaint, which could shed new light on what, if anything, exactly happened here. We are reserving judgment until all the facts come out. But as we said in our last briefing about politically-motivated investigations: sometimes your opponents do genuinely commit crimes, and it is, therefore, appropriate to investigate and prosecute them for it.
Cornel West has heeded our advice and dropped from the People’s Party ticket. He is now running with the much more well-established Green Party.
THIS WEEK IN INSIDIOUS BEHAVIOR
Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool has decided that all of the incriminating tapes the FBI used to indict Trump are actually fake.
“That audio of trump? [sic] Probably just AI generate [sic] voice deepfakes,” he tweeted out to an audience of more than 1.6 million people. Did he provide a shred of evidence that this was the case? Nope…he didn’t even try.
In Tuesday’s briefing, we discussed Ron DeSantis’ use of A.I. generated pictures of Trump smooching all over Dr. Anthony Fauci in a political ad. We pointed out that DeSantis’ DeCeption (something Pool, who supports Trump, was very upset about.) demonstrates how A.I. has opened dangerous new frontiers for fabricating propaganda against one’s political opponents. What we didn’t discuss is that this new reality can also generate a reaction that is just as harmful. As Pool demonstrates, the possibility that anything could be an A.I. deepfake invites anyone to dismiss any piece of evidence that does not jibe with their worldview as fraudulent even if there is a perfectly real-looking photo, video, or sound clip of that thing happening.
Pool is obviously doing this cynically: he provides no reason to doubt the veracity of the tapes demonstrating Trump’s criminality. The long and short of it is that he likes Trump and is willing to say anything to make other people like Trump, too. But the reality of A.I. means that genuinely curious and honest people will not only be fooled by deepfakes, but be fooled by people like Pool into believing that real things are deepfakes. Pool’s behavior is evil not just because he’s showing a nihilistic disregard for the concepts of truth and evidence, but because he’s contributing to a propaganda strategy that will inevitably help to sever the final remaining strands of consensus reality that our political culture has left. Soon, it may be very difficult to know for sure whether any piece of information is authentic, and shameless propagandists will take advantage of it.
IV. AROUND THE STATES
Evictions are soaring in Houston, which is experiencing one of the biggest eviction spikes nationwide: According to The Texas Tribune, the metro area “has seen 42% more eviction filings in the last year than a typical year before the pandemic—a historic high for the city—according to data compiled by researchers at Eviction Lab.” Its eviction courts have experienced an unprecedented churn of cases since the end of the National Eviction Moratorium in 2021, as evictions steadily climbed to an average of 1,627 per week in March. Since these are civil cases, none of the tenants, who tend to be poor, are entitled to lawyers—98 percent are forced to face the threat of losing their homes without legal representation.
Just as Florida teachers—and teachers in many other states—have been forced to avoid discussing the history of race relations in school, a similar situation has arisen in South Carolina, following its February ban of “critical race theory.” An English teacher was forced to shut down a planned conversation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which “recaps American racial history and its impact on his life growing up Black in inner-city Baltimore,” according to The State. Students were reportedly asked to write argumentative essays about whether or not systemic racism “is a pervasive problem in America” (i.e., think critically about the matter). But one unnamed student said the topic made them “uncomfortable,” leading the school board to shut the lesson down. “I am pretty sure a teacher talking about systemic racism is illegal in South Carolina,” the student wrote.
V. AROUND THE WORLD
The New York Times acknowledges the awkward frequency with which Ukrainian soldiers have been photographed with Nazi patches and flags. But does the NYT think this is bad? Who’s to say? The biggest issue with it, The Times says in its piece, “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History,” (boy, that’s one way to put it) is not that we might be, you know, accidentally arming some neo-Nazis, but that the acknowledgment of said Nazis “risks fueling Russian propaganda.” The Times has done tons of glowing interviews with various battalions that have proudly worn such heinous imagery. Concerningly, the Times says that some journalists have asked for soldiers to remove Nazi patches before having their photo taken, a serious journalistic ethics violation.
The U.S. is also giving Ukraine depleted uranium—to be used in American-provided Abrams tanks. Reports say the Biden administration weighed the health and environmental impacts of this decision but eventually said “screw all that” and approved the sale despite its potential to pollute local water and agriculture, and cause severe illness to people who touch or inhale it. Some will recall the horrors of depleted uranium from the U.S. bombardment of Fallujah in 2003, during the Iraq War, which caused a massive spike in birth defects, cancers, and other illnesses across the nation. We’d hope the country that’s been dealing with the fallout from Chernobyl for nearly 40 years would think hard before firing a bunch of uranium everywhere.
Sudan is embroiled in a civil war that has left more than 1.4 million people displaced. The Biden administration has attempted and failed to mediate peace talks between the two military leaders who have been driving the conflict since an internationally brokered power-sharing agreement broke down. Many on the ground have criticized this power sharing agreement, backed by the U.S. and many of its Persian Gulf allies, for legitimizing the coup leaders in the first place with little consultation with the Sudanese people or the old civilian leadership. After the coup, the military leaders cracked down on pro-democratic protesters with relatively little pushback from the U.S. (Shoutout to our reader, Muneeb Chaudhary, who suggested we cover the situation in Sudan. If there’s a story you want to see us cover, email editor@currentaffairs.org)
This is getting grim…has anything good happened this week?
Why yes! One of the richest people in Finland has been fined €121,000 ($129,544) for speeding. While this may sound ludicrously punitive, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. We basically take for granted in America that traffic violations are fined equally for all offenses regardless of the offender’s income. But in reality, this creates an extremely unequal system of justice. For someone barely scraping by, a $100 speeding ticket could totally screw their finances: it could cause them to miss rent payments or have to scrimp on food for their kids. But what deterrent is there to prevent a rich person who can sneeze and produce $100 from driving like a maniac? As usual with matters of wealth inequality, Finland seems to have the right idea.
VI. UNDER THE HOOD
The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, died by suicide last week at the age of 81. A cabin-dwelling loner (and math prodigy) who set out on a one-man crusade to destroy modern society—killing three innocent people and injuring 23 more in the process—Kaczynski leaves behind a surprising number of fans. They view his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, as a bracing diagnosis of how technology has brought about the decay of modern society. Earlier acolytes of his ran in a broad range of radical ideological circles, wrote John H. Richardson in New York Magazine:
“Books and webzines with names like Against Civilization, FeralCulture, Unsettling America, and the Ludd-Kaczynski Institute of Technology have been spreading versions of his message across social-media forums from Reddit to Facebook for at least a decade, some attracting more than 100,000 followers. They cluster around a youthful nickname, “anti-civ,” some drawing their ideas directly from Kaczynski, others from movements like deep ecology, anarchy, primitivism, and nihilism, mixing them into new strains. Although they all believe industrial civilization is in a death spiral, most aren’t trying to hurry it along. One exception is Deep Green Resistance, an activist network inspired by a 2011 book of the same name that includes contributions from one of Kaczynski’s frequent correspondents, Derrick Jensen.”
But in more recent years, the Unabomber has been claimed as a folk hero by cultural reactionaries, who see technology as leading to the decline of Western civilization. He has been praised as a visionary by figures as mainstream as Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. The socially conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New Statesman of “the rise of the Unabomber Right”:
“Once confined to an online fringe, this constellation of writers and online shit-posters is increasingly edging its way into the conservative mainstream. L0m3z has published in First Things, the intellectual organ of religious conservatism (where I’m also an occasional contributor). Upscale right-of-centre publications in Britain have likewise engaged them more in bemusement than the condemnation befitting a group that casually imagines a future in which ‘beige-type people’ serve whites, or who fantasise about race war. It’s a world-view that shares both Kaczynski’s yearning for a return to nature and his rejection of any effort to ameliorate industrialism’s baleful effects through economic reform. But where the Unabomber resorted to terrorism to disrupt what he called the “power process”, today’s rightists mostly dabble in edgy memes and lifestyle escapism: the dream that weightlifting, “clean eating” and the like are how you resist Davos Man.”
Incidentally, the FBI pulled a large number of books out of Kaczynski’s cabin when they arrested him, and the list of titles is publicly available. Check the Unabomber reading list to see how many are on your own shelf. If it’s more than a few, be concerned.
KOALA FACT OF THE DAY
(We know about more than just birds.)
The fingerprints of a koala are virtually indistinguishable from those of a human, which could allow them to get away with a number of terrible offenses for which innocent humans are imprisoned.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.