What Happened Today: June 10, 2022
Jan. 6 committee extravaganza; Iran scraps nuclear inspection cameras; No Honor Among Thieves
The Big Story
Last night a nine-member House committee convened its first of five public hearings about the Jan. 6 siege on the capital, using a mix of video, witness testimony, and prepared remarks to argue that former president Donald Trump instigated the assault and did not intervene against rioters attempting to attack his vice president, Mike Pence. When told that rioters were intent on hanging Pence, according to testimony cited by Rep. Liz Cheney, Trump reportedly said, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” The series of events are being rolled out during prime time with the aid of a former ABC News television executive in the hopes of both galvanizing a lethargic Democratic base and establishing a more definitive public record of Trump’s involvement in the siege. “January 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat chairing the committee. “The world is watching what we do here.” To what extent the world, or even most Americans, are tuned into the hearings remains unclear. Now a year and a half after the fact, the committee has amassed a staff of 45 employees and spent millions of dollars to interview 1,000 witnesses and accumulate a trove of 140,000 documents, the details of which will be doled out until the final hearing on June 28. With no intention, it seems, to recommend criminal charges, the panel is largely a public messaging campaign. Meanwhile, the Justice Department—which has already brought charges against hundreds of defendants, mostly for misdemeanor charges such as “illegal parading”—is conducting its business without as much pomp or circumstance.
Most congressional committees feature opposing viewpoints on the subject at hand, but the hearing last night was notable for its lack of voices either sympathetic to the former president or merely critical of the notion that the riots at the Capitol constituted an organized insurrection. The panel includes seven Democrats and two Republicans chosen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who did not allow the Republicans Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to serve, a move that prompted Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to withdraw three of his own nominees. Trump, writing on his social media platform, Truth Social, called “January 6 … the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
In the Back Pages: No Honor Among Thieves: Selling out “family” for the sake of BDS
The Rest
→ Whistleblower documents released by Republican senators this week show that the recently shuttered Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board pursued a working relationship with social media platforms, contradicting the claims of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who had told lawmakers the board lacked “operational authority or capability.” According to the new documents, the panel had organized an April 28 meeting with Twitter executive Yoel Roth, with the agenda for the meeting describing it as “an opportunity to discuss operationalizing public-private partnerships between DHS and Twitter.” Media seeking comment from legislators and Twitter were unable to confirm if the meeting did in fact take place or if Homeland Security employees did provide the data that “would be useful for Twitter to receive,” per the leaked documents.
→ Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is “re-examining” its tens of millions of dollars’ worth of deals with major news outlets, according to The Wall Street Journal—which is one of the publications that would stand to lose millions if the social media platform decides to stop featuring news stories. The current setup sees Meta paying the WSJ more than $10 million, The New York Times more than $20 million, and The Washington Post more than $15 million per year for the right to publish stories from these periodicals without locking readers behind a paywall. Now Facebook is “looking to shift its investments away from news and toward products that attract creators such as short-form video producers to compete with ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok,” according to the Journal’s reporting. Meta’s potential divestment from news companies comes in the context of increasingly contentious relations with publishers—particularly in Australia, where Facebook recently initiated a news blackout, shutting down the pages of news sources. According to Meta whistleblowers, Facebook also shut down the pages of government, health, and emergency agencies, retaliating against the government for forcing the company to negotiate with legacy media outlets over how its content could be used.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “If you don’t have water, you don’t have industry, you don’t have agriculture, you don’t have life.”
Dr. Robert Gillies, professor at Utah State University and Utah’s state climatologist, speaking to The New York Times about the shrinking Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere. The lake has already shrunk by two-thirds and now threatens to become an “environmental nuclear bomb,” as Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker, put it, with poisons exposed by the retreating waters poised to drift from the drying lake bed across the streets of Salt Lake City. The lake now stands at its lowest recorded level, and the region is rapidly running out of an adequate water supply to sustain its ecology and economy.
→ Retailers like Walmart, CVS, and Amazon spent the early part of 2022 bulking up inventories to satisfy the massive demand for consumer goods that started building in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and didn’t stop until quite recently. Now that inflation is up and people are suddenly buying less, warehouses are overflowing with too many of some products—even as they continue to be short on others—which has retailers scrambling to offer major price markdowns to clear their shelves. Against a 4% increase in sales, Walmart’s inventory levels are up 32% compared to last year, while similarly Amazon increased its inventory 47% but has only seen an 8% increase in net sales compared to 2021. The intense ramping up of physical goods had been made possible by a surge of capacity from the transportation sector, which might end up being one of the biggest losers from the collapse of retail demand: The price of hauling a container from Asia to North America dropped 23% from the beginning of the year, and month-to-month prices for ships going from China to California are down 38%, an unprecedented bottoming out in transportation demand that’s also hitting truckers, who have seen rates fall as much as 31% for their services, just as surging diesel prices have squeezed their operational cost from the other end.
→ A senior executive from TikTok’s London office who oversaw an abusive and hostile work environment and recently told employees at a staff dinner that, “as a capitalist,” he did not believe in maternity leave has now stepped aside to “take some time off,” according to an investigation by the Financial Times. The executive, Joshua Ma, was in charge of TikTok’s European ecommerce team, whose employees were expected to work more than 12 hours per day and encouraged to report their colleagues’ misbehavior using an anonymous tip line. “As you may be aware, the Financial Times today published an article that had some disheartening allegations about our TikTok Shop Operations in the UK,” said an email sent to staff. “Hopefully, this painful experience will make us a stronger, closer and better team over the long term.” This comes as TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, a Chinese company that has recently added a shopping option to its platform, struggles to interest European TikTokers in the new feature. Pressure placed on the U.K. employees to push the new (and unpopular) feature had, according to the Financial Times, triggered an exodus from the company.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 27
In a move that Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, called a potential “fatal blow” to the negotiations with Iran to revive the 2015 nuclear accord, Iran has removed 27 cameras from its nuclear facilities. The cameras had been installed as part of that 2015 deal, which Trump pulled out of in 2018. Since then, Iran has been enriching uranium “at its highest-ever levels, and close to weapons-grade,” according to the Financial Times.
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/2a4112fb-e76a-480c-91c7-40974b6ec3f0
→ A series of 17 crashes involving Teslas running their autopilot software left 15 people injured and one person killed since 2018, prompting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to broaden the scope of an ongoing probe into the autopilot feature. The initial NHTSA investigation looked into multiple Teslas using autopilot that crashed into emergency vehicles stopped along the road, but more crashes since then have prompted investigators to test if the autopilot software, which the automaker insists makes driving their cars safer, lulls driver’s into a false confidence, preventing them from having enough time to take back control of the car for last-minute evasive maneuvers. As more car makers are implementing autopilot features, some analysts are speculating that the NHTSA might curb the use of a full autopilot system until automakers can ensure a higher safety standard.
→ Peace doesn’t always last, but the treaties can stick around for centuries—or at least some of them, including this one from 1258 B.C., inked, so to speak, between the Egyptians and Hittite Empire.
→ Three sisters were found dead in a well in a village outside of Jaipur, India. With them in the well, also deceased, were the two young children of one of the sisters; the other two sisters were pregnant. “We don’t wish to die,” they said in a suicide note left on WhatsApp, “but death is better than their abuse.” All three of the women had married into the same family and were the victims of constant physical and verbal abuse from their husbands and their husbands’ parents. They were also forced to continuously produce ever more dowry gifts, which ranged from television sets to refrigerators and beds. The three husbands have now been charged with abuse as well as “dowry harassment,” a law passed in 2005 as part of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act due to how common such abuses—or even “dowry homicides” and “dowry suicides”—are in India. According to data from the National Crime Investigation Bureau of India, 20 women die per day in India due to dowry abuse.
→ MAP OF THE DAY: With the ongoing baby-formula shortage not expected to improve in the near future, one woman from Texas taught herself to use Proxi, a digital cartographic software, and then produced a map where people can share information about formula and breast-milk supply and demand in real time. Marcela Young, the newly minted mapmaker, shared the resource with her friends; the map now has hundreds of entries and is being used by parents across the country.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
No Honor Among Thieves: Selling out “family” for the sake of BDS
By Armin Rosen
The folk-rock band Big Thief’s cancellation of two upcoming shows in Tel Aviv ranks as one of the more facially dishonest BDS-related episodes of recent years. The Brooklyn-based group was eager to play in Israel, where it had already performed in 2017, and had a well-developed rationale for doing so. Max Oleartchik, the band’s bassist, was “born, raised, and currently lives” in Tel Aviv. Just days earlier, Big Thief explained it was playing in Israel because “it is important for us to share our homes, families, and friends with each other … It is foundational.”
Barby, the Tel Aviv club where the four-piece band was due to play on July 6 and 7, noted in a scathing Instagram post that the band had directly reached out to the venue about performing there, which is the exact opposite of how things usually work in the live music industry. The concerts weren’t an easy payday brokered through a manager or a booking agent. Big Thief had an emotional investment in playing in Israel and then let itself get intimidated into pretending otherwise, making its submission to BDS dogma a simpering act of compliance with a mob the group had no practical obligation to satisfy. Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is one of the best-reviewed records of the year, and the group sells out almost every room it plays these days. Yet its announcement—glaringly wooden for a band that trades in earnest feeling—reads like a frenzied plea for mercy, written not by the sharpest songwriters of their generation but by people for whom fear has stymied any basic use of English. “As a band, we consider each other family, forever reaching to understand each other,” the statement says before continuing in equally incoherent fashion, “In your responses to our actions, you have helped us to realize that we were in avoidance of entering this discussion about Max’s home in a more thoughtful way.”
The incident suggests the incompatibility of BDS with even the most liberal-leaning edge of Israeli society. Max Oleartchik’s father is Alon Olearchick, a principal member of Kaveret, the 1970s power-pop group that competed in annual song competition Eurovision and that is by some accounts the most commercially successful Israeli band of all time; its song “Yo Ya,” a Jewish summer camp mainstay, is just as catchy today as it was 50 years ago. Alon’s father was a Polish composer of popular songs who weathered the entirety of World War II in the Soviet Union before becoming a dramatic director for the Polish army under the country’s new communist government. Perhaps recognizing what life as a propagandist under an antisemitic regime would be like, he moved to Israel in 1957 with his Catholic wife and Warsaw-born 7-year-old child, Alexi, the future Alon.
As a prominent artist with such a tangled and confessionally mixed background, it is perhaps unsurprising that Alon Oleartchik, who has had an illustrious post-Kaveret career as a songwriter and composer of Israeli film scores, became a plaintiff in an unsuccessful attempt to allow Israelis to opt out of the “Jewish” nationality category on personal documents issued by their government, including identity cards. The plaintiffs were suing for the right to list themselves simply as “Israeli”—a label that, interestingly enough, does not exist within the government’s classificatory systems. Whether this case was a challenge to the state’s Jewish character or a well-meaning bid to expand the scope of citizenship within an ever-fluid national project is an interesting and complicated question. Regardless, the point is that Alon certainly can’t be tagged as a mindless nationalist.
This is why it is notable that the elder Oleartchik apparently focused on the coercive tactics of the BDS campaign rather than its potential to achieve peace of justice when discussing Big Thief’s canceled shows with Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. “They received thousands of threats … The reaction they received for [announcing] a performance in Israel was awful and terrible,” Alon said, according to the Times of Israel. “They were crushed by it.” Max, meanwhile, “was also crushed by this. He really wanted it to happen.”
But Big Thief effectively sold out its Israeli member, condemning the country he lives in as simply too evil for the group to bless with its presence. If the band really had its newfound convictions, and the courage to back them up, it would eject Max Oeartchik entirely—or else it should clarify what makes him different from the rest of his fellow Tel Avivians, the Jews and Arabs whom the band has deemed to be so awful. Instead, the band has declared that Israelis are acceptable on an individual level—so long as they’re the right ones and in Big Thief—but loathsome in their collectivity.
Alon Oleartchik, despite or even because of his belief that Israel should move toward a more liberal sense of national identity, seems to have recognized the show cancellations as an act of cowardly exclusion. Big Thief’s announcement is yet another sign that many of today’s artists are conformists who fear and distrust even their deepest selves. In Big Thief’s case, its members are people who would rather satisfy a rabble of internet activists than behave decently toward a friend and colleague, a supposedly valued member of their “family” who happens to be a citizen and resident of the only majority-Jewish country in the entire world.