What Happened Today: August 09, 2022
FBI sweeps Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence; Serena to step away from tennis; forever chemicals taint rain water worldwide
The Big Story
Dozens of FBI agents carried out a court-authorized search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday, an unprecedented legal action against a former president and a major escalation in the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of Trump’s final weeks in the White House. The search was ostensibly linked to a separate Justice Department probe involving boxes of classified documents that Trump was legally obligated to turn over to the National Archives at the end of his administration but that he instead took to his Florida residence and private club. With a warrant the Miami Herald says was signed by one of three federal judges in West Palm Beach, the FBI agents searched Trump’s office, closest, and locked safe. Given the involvement of a former president, it’s unlikely that the daylong hunt for evidence didn’t move ahead without the consent, if not at the directive, of the most senior members of the Justice Department.
As Trump faces headwinds within his own party ahead of his anticipated bid for the White House in 2024, the extraordinary search of his residence rallied Republican lawmakers who joined him in criticizing the investigation as politically motivated. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, a potential primary challenger to Trump, said the search was “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents.”
Semi-professional political candidate Andrew Yang, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, observed that “mishandling documents doesn’t seem like raid material. It does, however, seem like excellent campaign material for Trump.” Indeed, the search for illegally held archival material is unlikely to trigger any prosecution against a former president—and will greatly bolster Trump’s campaign trail critique of the lawmakers and media organizations that have collaborated on several failed attempts to remove him from power, including the Russia investigation. Some analysts and many of Trump’s opponents have pointed to a federal statute on tampering with official documents that would disqualify the convicted party from holding federal office, but it’s questionable that the statute would supersede the qualifications of the presidency laid out in the Constitution. More probable, the FBI search for evidence would serve the ongoing Justice Department investigation and House special committee probe into Trump’s ties to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, coming as it has on the heels of grand-jury subpoenas issued by the Justice Department to two of Trump’s White House attorneys.
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-fbi-search-99097089194e736315c366a0e8fbafee
In the Back Pages: Chris Chan and the Theater of Suffering
The Rest
→ Chinese state censors were told they had to close the gap between official media outlets’ criticism of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last week and the much more bellicose animus flourishing on Chinese social media. Citing a Beijing media executive familiar with Chinese policymakers’ thinking, the Financial Times reported that Chinese censors were racing to delete social media posts that called for Chinese jets to prevent or even shoot down Pelosi’s plane before arriving in Taipei. Likewise, censors had to scrub social media posts that criticized the Chinese government for being too weak and not backing up its party-line attacks on Pelosi’s visit to the self-governed island that China claims as its own territory. “The Chinese government will be a lot more cautious in dealing with Taiwan-related messaging,” the source told the Financial Times. “There will be less tolerance of hawkish expressions that are not in line with the official tone.”
→ Amazon’s plan to purchase iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robotic vacuum that maps and then cleans your home, might get jammed up by critics decrying the possibility of Amazon hoovering up yet another company in its efforts to dominate the “smart home” market. The $1.7 billion purchase is still pending a green light from the FTC; if approved, Amazon’s spending on acquisitions this year would reach an all-time high, after the company purchased MGM for $8.45 billion and One Medical for $3.9 billion—the first boosting Amazon’s position in the streaming war with Hulu and Disney+, and the second marking Amazon’s growing strength in the healthcare sector. With the iRobot acquisition now under regulatory review, Amazon is surely eyeing the FTC warily—especially after Meta’s planned purchase of a VR aerobics company was scuttled by the regulators last month in a broadside attack on Big Tech’s anti-competitive practices.
→ Graph of the Day:
San Francisco: the “lone loser” in the country, as home prices ticked up in every major urban market except for Big Tech’s backyard. The city is feeling the effects of Silicon Valley’s layoffs and the deepening Crypto Winter. Now some high-end listings in the city are dropping their asking price by more than 50%. “Even big buyers who’d pay cash for a $10 million home are thinking twice,” one realtor said. “It’s the economy, interest rates, the stock market, inflation.” Employers are cutting back on office space—largely a result of new remote-work policies—and the city’s crime and quality-of-life issues are not making those million-dollar homes look terribly appealing. “A lot of people who didn’t sell last year at the peak are regretting it,” said one San Francisco resident, the chief growth officer of a wealth management firm with some $3 billion under management. “And we don’t see people asking for crypto.”
→ With ongoing supply chain issues and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) going into effect in June, U.S. importers of solar panels say it could be several months or more before solar supplies resume normal levels. The UFLPA is part of the Biden administration’s response to the Chinese crimes against humanity: the forced internment of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region. The trade law says all goods from Xinjiang are made with illegal labor in the internment camps, unless manufacturers can prove their products are made otherwise, a ban that has significantly impacted cotton exports as well as a key ingredient in solar panels, polysilicon, with some 41% of the world’s supply sourced from Xinjiang. Philip Shen, an investment bank manager, told The Wall Street Journal that the delays relating to UFLPA could affect as much as 10 gigawatts’ worth of solar supplies, which is roughly half of the total solar capacity installed in the United States in 2021.
→ Xi Jinping’s efforts at consolidating China’s power in Asia—including his country’s current military maneuvers in Taiwan’s territorial waters—have run in tandem with his effort to consolidate his power at home. During his first term, Xi did this by restructuring the military and press; now he has taken control of China’s internal security apparatus through the recent appointment of Wang Xiaohong, a close ally and confidante of Xi’s since the mid-1990s, as the chief of police. Xi has cracked down on the internal security apparatus in recent years, even purging some senior officials for “overweening political ambitions” and “arbitrarily disagreeing with central policy guidelines,” as the party’s disciplinary committee put it. With Wang now installed, Xi has successfully tightened his grip on all of his country’s central organs of power: the military, the press, and now the police.
→ Number of the Day: $45,000
The difference in median income between men and women graduating from the University of Michigan’s Law School—one example of many from a new report from The Wall Street Journal documenting the enormous pay gap between men and women with the exact same degrees from the exact same schools. Culled from the records of “about 1.7 million graduates,” the data “showed that median pay for men exceeded that for women three years after graduation in nearly 75% of roughly 11,300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs at some 2,000 universities. In almost half of the programs, male graduates’ median earnings topped women’s by 10% or more.” Male accountants graduating from Georgetown earn 55% more than women; male dentists from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio make $37,000 more than their female colleagues with the same degree. While it has long been known that women earn less than men—an average of 82.3 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the Labor Department—this data is eye-opening in revealing how early those disparities emerge.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-pay-gap-college
→ Map of the Day:
“Forever chemicals,” or man-made per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that don’t occur in nature and don’t break down through natural processes, can now be found in rainwater just about everywhere on earth, including in Antarctica, according to a new study from researchers at the Universities of Stockholm and Zurich. The interactive map above details where those PFAS can be found across the United States, including areas with very high levels of PFAS pollution, which includes cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). “Based on the latest U.S. guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink,” said Ian Cousins, the director of the study. “Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink, and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.”
→ Featured on the latest cover of Vogue, Serena Williams announced her imminent retirement from professional tennis in a new personal essay written for the issue. But the 41-year-old doyen of the pro tour said she’d keep playing if she didn’t have to choose between tennis and growing her family. “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity,” she wrote. Williams competed while pregnant—even winning the Australian Open—before she stepped away from the game following the birth of her first child in 2017. Her comeback to the game has included four Grand Slam finals appearances, but a Slam title has remained elusive. Williams plans to play next month at the U.S. Open, which will likely be her last time at the New York City major.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Ailing Human Rights Industry Tablet Senior Writer ARMIN ROSEN dropped in to this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, and found that even the most sanguine activists struggled to overcome a sense of drift and impotence.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ailing-human-rights-industry-oslo-freedom-forum
War Crimes and Fashion Shoots Vladislav Davidzon on bearing witness to an increasingly brutal and surreal war in Odessa and Mykolayiv.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/war-crimes-and-fashion-shoots-ukraine
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Chris Chan and the Theater of Suffering
The internet’s most famous character stands accused of an unspeakable crime
By Katherine Dee
When I began this post, I was surprised to learn how little attention the mainstream media has paid to Christine Weston Chandler, the living legend of internet lore better known as Chris Chan, who is now accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable: a few breaking news reports last year; an article from Input; a 2016 mention in New York magazine; a handful of throwaway Insider pieces, but nothing more significant. No sprawling 8,000-word article in The New York Times, no melancholic profile in The New Yorker. No best-selling book or award-winning indie documentary by a digital ethnographer. No viral op-ed. Nothing.
Chandler was scheduled for a grand jury hearing in Virginia yesterday on charges of incest that stem from leaked phone calls in which he described regularly having sex with his elderly mother while she was suffering from dementia. Though Chandler changed his name to Christine and has used female pronouns online in the past, he was booked in court as a male, so we will refer to him using “he/him” throughout this article.
The assaults allegedly took place at the behest of Isabella Janke, a Texas college student Chandler had met online. As macabre as the alleged crime is, it was not exactly unforeseeable in the context of Chandler’s life. For more than a decade, “The Chris Chan Show” has been the center of an obsessive fandom online that was drawn to its tragic and freakish aspects and treated it as a form of interactive reality entertainment—like The Truman Show, but much darker and more dystopian. The Chris Chan backstory is so sprawling and central to the formation of the internet as we understand it, I’m not sure I can do it justice in just one short article. This is, at least, a start.
When the accusations against Chandler first made the news last year, most headlines described him as “some” YouTuber or “some” internet personality. But Chandler isn’t famous only because of his involvement in a horrific crime, with an unimpressive YouTube career as a footnote. Chris Chan is one of the most significant characters in the history of the internet. The story about his mother was disturbing on its face, but also disturbing in how inevitable it felt. Chandler has been the main character of a perverse Greek tragedy since at least 2007: Of course, the third act would include a psychopathic troll manipulating him into rape. It couldn’t have ended any other way.
Chandler is known for being an autistic, tenuously transgender internet personality and creator of the webcomic Sonichu (a portmanteau of Sonic and Pikachu) who became an internet celebrity after being posted to the website SomethingAwful.
Initially, Chandler and his childlike Sonic/Pikachu crossover fan art was just a sideshow attraction. As was his “Love Quest,” wherein he hung up a series of bizarre posters around his community college in search of a boyfriend-free girl. But as interest grew in the human freakshow aspects of Chandler’s life, he became more than just a curio.
A feedback loop was born. As more and more of the faceless horde appeared in front of Chandler to ogle at his life, he offered more of himself in exchange. Not everyone was a mere voyeur, though, or just a passive commenter. Chandler also attracted countless trolls who delighted in prodding and tormenting him to get a reaction. Thus, the obviously damaged person craving attention became the target of countless trolling campaigns, often ones that goaded him into increasingly self-destructive episodes.
Not only did Chandler share grotesque details of his life with reckless abandon—e.g., his attempts to perform at-home gender reassignment surgery or his decision to drink a cup of Fanta spiked with his own semen—but also thousands of people have endeavored to record these details for the past 15-odd years. These people are known as Christorians. All the attention generated by the feedback loop turned Chandler into perhaps the most documented person online.
The efforts of Christorians have not been trivial. They’ve spawned tens of thousands of hours of videos and audio; the forum Kiwi Farms, which has evolved into something of a catchall encyclopedia of unstable internet personalities; several wikis; and a multitude of YouTube channels, including Chris Chan: A Comprehensive History, a 65-episode documentary series, to name a few. I cannot overstate the amount of content out there that’s devoted to turning the actual person Christine Weston Chandler into the digital folklore of Chris Chan.
Read the rest here.
Why is Tablet associated with this type of reporting in Scroll that can only pass as voyeuristic drivel?
I should rethink my reading of Tablet.