What Happened Today: Feb 8, 2022
The New Sino-Russian order; Thiel departs Meta; Austin in decline
The Big Story
Over the weekend, a new era of geopolitics was all but solidified in a statement shared by Russian President Vladimir Putin following his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing just before the start of the Olympic Winter Games. Endorsed by both countries as a joint declaration posted on the Kremlin’s website, the nations said their “friendship … has no limits. There are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” and the strong bilateral alliance is not “aimed against third countries,” though of course that is exactly what it is doing. As an unsubtle rebuke to the United States, the partner nations write that “a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world.” There’s much for the authoritarian leaders to gain by increasing their collaboration on economic development projects that enhance China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union, as evidenced by the announcement on Friday of a major $117 billion oil-and-gas deal. With a growing political dissident movement in Russia and intensifying scrutiny of China’s genocide of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region, the Sino-Russian alliance unites the two nations together against the “advocacy of democracy and human rights [that] must not be used to put pressure on other countries.” Indeed, when China sent Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a skier with family ties to the oppressed Xinjiang region, to light the torch at the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday night, but did not allow her to be interviewed later by the press, it was an example of China’s symbolic rebuke against Western nations critique of the genocide, which China repeatedly denies and calls “the lie of the century.” As Darren Byler, a researcher on the genocide, told the Associated Press of the opening ceremony move, “I think it should be read as China saying we are not backing away from our stance on what we’re doing in Xinjiang, and we don’t really care what the world thinks about it.”
And Read: Darren Byler’s interview from last November in The Scroll
Back Pages: A Dispatch on Austin, Texas—A City in Decline
The Rest
→ A new report by the Service de Protection de la Communaute Juive (SPCJ) in France found the country’s total number of antisemitic incidents was up nearly 75% last year compared to the year prior. Along with a sharp uptick in total incidents, reports of antisemitic violence were up 36%, with “two disturbing phenomena [that] deserve particular attention,” the SPCJ noted in its report: 1) 25% of all incidents occurred in the immediate vicinity of a victim’s home, perpetrated by neighbors; and 2) weapons were used in 1 in 5 of the violent attacks, with knives and guns the most frequent weapon of choice.
Read more: https://www.spcj.org/communique-spcj-raa-2021
→ A new analysis from the medical journal The Lancet looks at the relationship between social conditions in a given country and COVID-19 infection rates. Pulling data from more than 177 countries and comparing the infection rates with social and political factors in each, the study found that “higher levels of trust [in government and between citizens] had large statistical associations with fewer infections.” The researchers observed that where citizens had more trust in the government and in each other, vaccination rates were higher, and compliance with social distancing rules more widespread, resulting in better COVID-19 outcomes. The authors estimate that if all countries possessed the same trust levels as Denmark (which ranks in the 75th percentile on such metrics), 12.9% fewer global infections would have occurred.
→ The EARN IT Act, a bill aimed at curbing the distribution of child pornography, is back in front of Congress. Originally introduced in 2020 by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the bill met strong opposition from civil liberties groups and advocates, who raised alarms that the bill would all but eliminate end-to-end encryption, or digital methods that prevent data and communications from being accessed by outside parties. The legislation’s previous version would have required internet and social media companies to provide backdoor access to all encrypted communications. The revised bill offers more protections for encrypted data but threatens Section 230, which some see as the foundation of free speech on the internet. Users can say what they like on a social media site, and the social media company is not responsible—or legally liable—for that speech. The amended EARN IT Act allows private lawsuits against platforms for material that is published or exchanged on their sites, which would lead platforms to regulate speech to shield themselves from liability.
→ The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. capitol is adopting aggressive tactics more characteristic of prosecutors than congressional investigators. Chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chaired by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee has issued more than 100 subpoenas and appointed several former federal prosecutors to assist and even run the investigation. The committee has no authority to pursue criminal charges but has leveraged the power it does have in unusual ways to apply pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to file charges through the Justice Department. According to The New York Times, the committee continues to issue “broad [subpoenas] to telecommunications and social media companies” and gather “reams of telephone records and metadata,” raising concerns about the further weaponization and politicization of Congress’ oversight function.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/us/politics/january-6-committee.html
→ The war for political power and influence continues between various dark money groups—just don’t call them that in public. The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a conservative advocacy outfit, spent $2.5 million on a new television ad campaign to point out how much money Arabella Advisors, a progressive umbrella advocacy organization, has spent backing “the president and the Senate … so they’ll put up an Arabella judge.” The television spot noted that Arabella had dropped more than $1 billion, citing a recent New York Times investigation that had found Arabella groups made up the bulk of the “15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party” and that have “spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020—compared to roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the G.O.P.” Lawyers for both the JCN and Arabella quibbled with legal threats over the ad language, which JCN softened in a new version. The mud-slinging aside, the more than $2 billion coming in from both sides casts a dark shadow on Washington.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/us/politics/democrats-dark-money-donors.html
→ Over the weekend, Naomi Perlman, the 91-year-old survivor of the Holocaust who was struck in her home by a Hamas rocket in May, succumbed to her injuries. Perlman had lost both of her legs in the attack and passed away after nine months of struggle in the hospital. A few weeks prior she’d been shown a photo of her just-born great-grandchild by her son, Shuki Perlman. “If there’s anyone who deserves to be called the ultimate survivor, it’s her,” Perlman said of his mother, who left behind two children, eight grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren. As one of the first immigrants to Ashkelon in southern Israel, “she built a family during an era of austerity and want when they came as refugees,” her son said.
→ Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is stepping down from his longtime perch on the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which will free him up to put his money and influence behind candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump during the upcoming midterm elections, according to an unnamed New York Times source. In a note announcing his decision, Thiel was complimentary of both Mark Zuckerberg and Meta (a company that counted Thiel as one of its first investors and contributed significantly to his estimated $2.6 billion fortune), but as an increasingly active political operator and high-profile supporter of President Trump, Thiel has clashed with Facebook over its censorship policies that many conservatives identify as unfairly targeted against them. The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation also began a new campaign yesterday “against Big Tech,” outlining in a series of social media posts by Heritage policy team member Kara Frederick several recent examples of “Big Tech’s toxic practices,” including the recent advocacy by President Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, for Spotify to take more aggressive action against podcaster Joe Rogan. It was an instance, Frederick said, of private “companies working hand in glove with the government to police speech.”
→ Amazon is moving into the public education system, funding an “Amazon Logistics and Business Management Pathway” program at Cajon High School in San Bernardino, California. The company donated $50,000 to the school to finance the courses, which is aimed at introducing students to logistics and preparing them for careers in the field. In a classroom redecorated by Amazon, with the company’s slogans (“Frugality,” “Bias for Action,” and “Customer Obsession”) and signature yellow covering the walls, students learn about “Worker Motivation” and “Managing Human Resources and Labor Relations” from a company widely criticized for immiserating workers and blocking unionization efforts. The pathway program, which includes a “work-based” internship, is rolling out in San Bernardino first; the company is the largest employer in the region, with more than 40,000 people on the payroll in 14 fulfillment centers and two air hubs.
Austin, Texas—A City in Decline
A dispatch from a Tablet correspondent
As your correspondent writes these words, the city of Austin, Texas, is under its third boiled-water notice in four years, following power outages during a natural disaster—by which I mean temperatures in the twenties, with flurries of snow that quickly melted.
The water contamination resulted from human error, which is a synonym for Austin’s governance. Austin is experiencing the highest homicide rate in two decades, but its liberal voters shot down a proposal to expand the police force, after the city slashed its police budget in 2020 during the moral panic on the political left inspired by the tragic death of a petty criminal in police custody in Minneapolis. The city has announced that many property crimes will no longer be investigated, and only the intervention of the state legislature prevented Austin’s far-left city council from declaring Austin a “sanctuary city” dedicated to subverting the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, because, like, you know, the border line is the new color line.
After Houston and Dallas, Austin is the third favorite destination for people abandoning the state of California, including one of Austin’s newest residents, Elon Musk. Instead of preserving the very features that made Austin attractive to refugees from the West Coast, like single-family homes in shady neighborhoods, Austin’s urban planners are doing their best to turn the city into a clone of the dystopian hellscapes that expats from the Bay Area and Los Angeles are escaping. Formerly green open spaces and defunct shopping malls are giving way to sterile mixed-use developments, in which Five Guys hamburger shops and Lila & Beth boutiques are cheek by jowl with shoddily built “five over two” mid-rise apartment blocks where a studio apartment with walls so thin you can hear the neighbors can start at $2,000 a month.
While cramming more and more newcomers into less and less space, Austin planners, to promote the progressive crusade against sinful fossil fuels and the evil automobiles powered by them, have put the city on a “road diet,” turning what were among the nicest features of the city—tree-lined, four-lane boulevards—into two-lane streets with a dedicated bike lane on each side, protected by so many bollards and barriers that once-pleasant avenues like Shoal Creek Boulevard in West Central Austin now resemble the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. This is supposed to be for the benefit of local residents who bike to work, a group that made up a whopping 1.53% of Austin commuters before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Except during a few hours on sunny weekends, sightings of actual bikers in the barricaded bike lanes are as rare as sightings of the Lesser Yellowlegs and the Brown Booby in Central Texas. Most of the few bikers your correspondent has been lucky enough to spot now and then have been members of the new Austin ruling class: elite white professional men from their forties to their sixties whose middle-aged torsos are squeezed into expensive Rapha racing jerseys and bibs like potatoes into nylon stockings, zooming past the working-class black, Hispanic, and white drivers who are stuck in traffic in the vans and trucks they use in their jobs.
As in every blue Democratic city, the municipal government hopes to force residents out of their cars into mass transit like buses and the light rail, but it isn’t working. Before the pandemic, only 16% of Austinites commuted to work using mass transit, which took twice as long as using a car.
Instead of forcing them out of their cars, the city government, with its road diets and densification policies, is forcing Austinites out of Austin and into suburbs and exurbs to the north, east and south, where people with modest incomes can still afford single-family homes.
Many of the working-class refugees fleeing Austin for San Marcos, Kyle, or places further out are African American and Hispanic. To atone for the whitening of the city by gentrification, Austin’s woke city government, following other Democratic one-party cities, is renaming schools and streets to erase the city’s past. Not content to limit the Year Zero abolition of history to obvious embarrassments like Robert E. Lee and Confederate streets, the city changed the name of Lanier High School because Sidney Lanier, a major 19th-century American poet, served as a private in the Confederate Army.
In 2018 the city’s newly created Office of Equity won national publicity by suggesting that the city consider changing its name because Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texan Independence, was a slave owner. This inspired informal suggestions for what the new name for the city formerly known as Austin should be. The best suggestion? New California.