February 20, 2024: Is the NYT the Reason Voters Think Biden Is Old?

UNRWA = Hamas; Elon Musk and the deep state; Dead honkies at the IRS

Feb 20, 2024

The Big Story

If a president suffers from severe age-related physical and cognitive decline, and The New York Times doesn’t report on it, do voters notice?

That’s an animating question for much of the Democratic Party, especially since Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report earlier this month citing the president’s failing memory as a reason not to prosecute him for mishandling classified documents. Apparently, the answer from the Biden administration is a resounding no. In a Monday interview with the Reuters Institute, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger revealed that the White House was “extremely upset” with the paper over its coverage of Biden’s age and unpopularity in the polls. Here’s what Sulzberger had to say:

We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden. He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.

So, too, is much of the progressive media machine. Recent articles by former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan and Slate Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick have attacked what they regard as the media’s “destructive” and “misleading” focus on Biden’s age, which they blame for the fact that 86% of Americans believe Biden is too old to effectively serve in office. In their view, that perception of the president stems entirely from misinformation peddled by Hur, the Times, and other notoriously right-wing outlets such as CNN, rather than from voters—nearly all of whom have experience dealing with elderly relatives—watching press conference performances such as this one:

Indeed, as data journalist Nate Silver pointed out last week, there is no evidence that the Times and the media as a whole are disproportionately covering Biden’s age—or any other stories that could be potentially damaging to the administration. In a review of all the Times’ Tuesday page-A1 stories from 2022 and 2023, Silver found 27 stories on Ukraine, 15 on the Middle East (including Israel and Gaza), 8 stories on Trump’s legal troubles, and more than a dozen on Democratic-coded domestic stories, including mass shootings, abortion, climate change, voting rights, Tucker Carlson, and “threats to U.S. democracy.” By contrast, there were five A1 stories on the economy (four of which were negative), one on immigration, and zero on Biden’s age.

Voter concerns about Biden’s age, in other words, are despite—not because of—the coverage choices of media outlets like the Times. And they are leading to results such as the following, from a recent Siena poll of more than 800 voters in New York State:

Biden is still leading Trump in deep-blue New York, but what jumped out at us was that Jewish respondents preferred Trump to Biden by 9 percentage points. We don’t know how much, if any, of that result has to do with Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, since the poll didn’t ask. But the crosstabs are suggestive: Jewish respondents reported that they viewed Biden more favorably than Trump (+8 vs. -5), but they also took a dim view of the president’s mental fitness. Question 30 asked, “When it comes to the physical and mental fitness to serve a four-year term as the next President, which of the following options best describes how you feel?” Among Jewish respondents, the answers were:

Both Biden and Trump are fit to serve four years: 13%
Biden is fit but Trump is not: 29%
Trump is fit but Biden is not: 40%
Neither Trump nor Biden is fit to serve: 14%

That means that a majority, 54%, believe Biden is not physically or mentally fit to serve another term.

In other words, Jewish voters in New York seem a lot like voters across the country: They like Biden and dislike Trump, yet they’re skeptical of Biden’s mental acuity, believe the country is on the wrong track under his leadership, and suspect, based on the experience of the past seven and a half years, that Trump—despite his nearly endless scandals and controversies—might do a better job.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Vladislav Davidzon on the meaning of Alexei Navalny

The Rest

→The IDF has identified at least 440 UNRWA employees as terrorists in Hamas’ military wing and more than 2000 as active Hamas members, according to a Tuesday evening broadcast on Israel’s Kan News. The Biden administration restored hundreds of millions of dollars in annual U.S. funding to UNRWA in 2021, but paused that funding in January, after the Israeli government began revealing the extent of UNRWA employees’ participation in the Oct. 7 attack. The foreign aid bill currently being negotiated in Congress would bar U.S. funding to the agency altogether. If it passes, the administration has said, the United States will redirect humanitarian aid for Gaza to the UN World Food Program, UNICEF, and other international agencies.

→Elon Musk’s SpaceX is deepening its ties with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. In 2021, the Journal reports, SpaceX signed a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government, although the identity of the government customer has not been disclosed. And SpaceX’s Starshield unit, which provides secure-communications satellite technology for government customers, signed a $70 million agreement with the Pentagon in August 2023. As the Journal notes, SpaceX has been handling rocket and satellite launches for U.S. government clients since shortly after its inception in 2002, and the Pentagon contracts with SpaceX for its Starlink broadband service.

SpaceX is marketing its satellite services to the U.S. government as the United States’ main geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, are expanding their space capabilities. At the same time, however, Musk has become a political target of the Biden administration—in part, we suspect, because his purchase of Twitter (now X) exposed the vast regime of government-directed internet censorship that emerged after the 2016 election and accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Musk and his various companies are currently under investigation by the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s an odd way to treat the man responsible for launching our top-secret spy satellites.

→Yesterday we reported that the Biden administration had proposed a draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and opposing Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah, less than a week after the administration had floated unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state after the war. Leaving Rafah untouched would, of course, ensure the survival of perhaps half of Hamas’ fighters and much of its senior leadership in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, and therefore set the stage for the terrorist group to reconstitute itself after the war. In our Thread of the Day, Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen walks through some of the political realities standing in the way of what the Biden administration clearly believes is its brilliant strategy for the Middle East:

→Following yesterday’s leak about Washington’s draft UNSC proposal, the United States on Tuesday vetoed an Algeria-drafted UNSC resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza, claiming that the resolution would jeopardize hostage negotiations. While the veto is welcome, as far is it goes, it does not represent any change in the White House’s position: The draft proposal from yesterday is a U.S. alternative to the Algeria-drafted proposal, and National Security Council spokesman John Kirby reiterated in a Tuesday press conference that the United States believes an Israeli operation in Rafah “would be a disaster.”

→The Biden administration cited “Indigenous Knowledge” in its 2023 decision to cancel oil and gas leases in the Alaskan Arctic, The Washington Free Beacon’s Joseph Simonson reports. In September 2023, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that the U.S. Arctic Ocean was “off limits” to new oil and gas leasing, and canceled seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that had been granted by the Trump administration. In a statement, Haaland said the decision was “based on the best available science and in recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area.” In a November 2022 memo, the Biden administration, which campaigned on a promise to “follow the science,” directed all federal agencies to incorporate indigenous knowledge as an “aspect of the best available science.” The Free Beacon reported last week that a proposed revision of scientific integrity guidelines for the Department of Health and Human Services—which encompasses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health—directs HHS staff to “apply scientific integrity practices in ways that are inclusive of non-traditional modes of science,” including through the “inclusion of multiple forms of evidence, such as Indigenous Knowledge.”

Read it here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-cited-indigenous-knowledge-as-reason-to-block-oil-and-gas-leases/

→One of our running themes in this newsletter is the steady erosion of any boundary between “the adults in the room”—i.e., the real centers of power in this country—and the “woke” or “crazy” kids. Example #5854: The Daily Wire reports that a DEI training for criminal investigators at the Internal Revenue Service—which begins with a slide titled “Cultural Inclusion Is About Justice”—was authored by an academic at the University of Denver who has called on her colleagues to “commit to the death of whiteness.” The academic, professor D–L Stewart, made the call in an academic paper called “‘Dead Honky’ — Against the Technology of (White) Violence.”

→A U.S. diplomat privately criticized a 2022 State Department Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) of $1 million to groups investigating “human rights abuses” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, arguing that the purpose of the grant was to collect evidence of “atrocities” in an allied country and that the State Department issued similar NOFOs only for hostile authoritarian regimes such as Syria, Myanmar, and Libya. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo first reported on the NOFO in 2022, sparking intense criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other pro-Israel members of Congress; to this day, however, the State Department refuses to say whether it went through with the grant. The internal emails, published by Kredo on Tuesday, show that at least some State Department officials were aware at the time that the purpose of the grant was to delegitimize Israel.

TODAY IN TABLET:

Krugman vs. Krugman, by Michael Lind

New York Times columnist tries to memory-hole his prior views on immigration

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

Killing Navalny

The murder of his most popular political opponent is a sign of Putin’s confidence, not weakness

By Vladislav Davidzon

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s preeminent political prisoner and opposition leader, has been assassinated by Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. His death was announced on Friday by the Russian Penitentiary Service in the midst of the Munich Security Conference, marking the grim anniversary of the infamous policy-setting anti-Western speech that Putin had delivered at that same conference in 2007. This time, Putin’s message to the West was written in blood.

The charismatic anti-corruption activist’s killing took place in the infamous Polar Wolf Siberian penal colony to which he had been transferred in December ahead of next month’s presidential elections. Navalny had spent the last three years being shuffled around ever more brutal Russian penal colonies, in the process becoming the world’s most prominent political prisoner. According to reports in Russian outlets, his death was preceded by the arrival of Federal Security Service (FSB) personnel at Polar Wolf and the disconnecting of CCTV cameras at the facility. Navalny’s body, which reportedly bears marks of bruising in keeping with an attempt to resuscitate a victim of cardiac arrest, is currently unaccounted for, most likely to keep an autopsy from being performed.

Navalny is the latest in a series of high-profile opposition leaders and dissidents to be assassinated by the Russian state. Putin’s most visible and outspoken opponent had spent the last three years imprisoned under the most austere and barbarous conditions that Russia’s prison camp system offers. In fact, Putin had been so terrified of the challenge that Navalny posed to his system that he has spent years steadfastly refusing to utter his name. The murder of the Kremlin’s most audacious and charismatic political opponent—one who earned his political stature through his superhuman courage—a month before upcoming elections sends an unmistakable message to any other Russians countenancing opposition to Putin’s police state.

The son of a Soviet army officer, Navalny will be remembered by history as the opposition figure who constituted the most serious challenge to Putin’s quarter-century-long rule. Tough and physically imposing, Navalny was also a lawyer by training who brought idealism for a better and “more beautiful Russia” to Russians beaten down by the corruption and brutality of Putin’s rule. He made the dream of a normal Russia into a reasonable one. The Anti-Corruption Foundation that Navalny and his team created in 2011 found ways to cleverly circumnavigate the Kremlin’s de facto taboo on opposition politics through the deft exposure of the system’s immense inefficiency and corruption. The foundation was eventually declared an extremist organization a decade later and banned in Russia much like al-Qaida, the Taliban or Islamic Jihad, in part for documenting Putin’s network of lavish hideaways and special conveniences, including a “ghost train” equipped with a Turkish bath, a private operating room, and a cosmetology suite.

With his vital charisma, organizing skills, roguish impertinence and endless energy, the handsome Navalny seemed to represent the most viable successor to Putin. As a young political activist, Navalny took hard nationalist positions while competing for the nationalist vote and made ugly comments about Muslims and Georgians—and was kicked out of the opposition Yabloko party for doing so. This would presage his obstreperous relations with other Russian opposition movements and leaders.

Yet while most opposition leaders who had not fled or been killed wound up compromising in one way or another with the diktats of the system, Navalny was not the compromising kind. As I wrote in January 2022 in Tablet, where I profiled Leonid Volkov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation: “Navalny’s elevation suggested that the choosing of the leadership of the Russian opposition is mostly a process of natural selection, the law of survival of the fittest. The Kremlin has spent years systematically co-opting softer and more compromise-oriented opponents, removing them from the Russian political arena.”

Navalny and his team had at first been allowed to compete in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections. Yet the Kremlin quickly learned to cease underestimating him when that campaign came perilously close to succeeding (the Navalny camp’s claims that the mayoral election had been stolen remain entirely plausible). The next year would see Navalny placed under house arrest while his brother was sentenced—hostage-style—to a prison term on trumped-up financial charges. Navalny was not allowed to challenge Putin directly during the 2018 election cycle.

Soon enough, the paranoid Putin ordered Navalny’s preemptive murder. The FSB officers who were tasked with carrying out the assassination in August 2020 would deploy Novichok—a powerful military-grade synthetic nerve agent. Slipped into Navalny’s underwear, it was meant to vaporize a man’s nervous system and essentially melt his brain. A lesser man would not have survived the poisoning, but the intervention of German physicians in Berlin saved Navalny’s life. A lesser man would also not have made a full physical recovery from the nerve damage.

“Navalny’s body,” wrote the investigative journalist Christo Grozev in reference to the Russians' previous attempt to murder him, “is still being hidden from his family. Just a reminder that the previous time the FSB kidnapped his comatose body, they spent two days "cleaning up his body" and his clothes from traces of Novichok, before (thinking) they could safely hand him over.”

The injured Navalny slowly relearned how to write and speak. Courageous almost beyond all rational comprehension, he refused to stay abroad and to share the historical fate—oblivion, irreverence, and redundancy—of generations of exiled Russian opposition figures before him. Aided by the Bellingcat team of investigative researchers, Navalny called his would-be assassin posing as his purported superior—cavalierly recording the hapless thug’s confession.

In January 2021, Navalny returned to Moscow in a plane filled with international journalists who broadcast his detainment and arrest and his final kiss with his wife at the airport. It was the sort of full-frontal challenge to Putin’s system that the regime was clearly unwilling to tolerate. A quick show trial later, he would be banished to a penal colony outside of Moscow.

The techniques the Russian prison system used to brutalize Navalny—sleep and food deprivation, bullying by fellow inmates, stints of forced isolation, purposeful lack of medical care—would have annihilated a weaker and less vigorous man. These were methods and settings taken straight out of the Soviet Gulag playbook first described by Solzhenitsyn.

***

Navalny knew exactly what he was returning to. His was a courageous and humanistic gamble—that of placing his own body at the direct mercy of Putin’s apparatus of repression—in the quixotic hope of igniting a popular uprising. It was also a gamble that was always likely preordained to failure. Putin’s Russia had by that time already reverted to late-Soviet levels of state repression. Attempting to foment a revolution in the midst of a Russian winter was always a nonstarter.

The historical antecedent for Navalny’s fate is surely the failed Decembrist uprising: a noble revolt of liberal army officers and patriotic reformers in 1825 that followed in the wake of the death of Emperor Alexander I. Russian history is filled with remarkably brave and idealistic dissidents making heroic and quixotic stands against the autocratic state. History records the names and fates of the bravest among them. It is to this long list that Navalny has now added his name, with no sign that the rule of the czars and their modern-day successors will be ending anytime soon.

It remains uncertain which leaders will be able to pick up the mantle of the opposition in the wake of Navalny’s death. Many Russian intellectuals and commentators view Navalny’s murder as foreclosing any possibility of a nonviolent democratic movement against the regime. Navalny’s murder showcases the naked brutality of a system without an off-ramp from ever-escalating repression against its own population and the use of violence against internal political challengers. Which is not to say that Navalny’s murder was an admission of weakness or political anxiety. Rather, Putin killed Navalny and withheld his body in the run-up to an election because he was confident that he could get away with it.

It is perhaps also not coincidental that Navalny’s death comes a week after the release of broadcaster Tucker Carlson’s slavishly fawning Moscow interview with Putin, during which the Russian president rambled on about the history of Kyivan Rus for half an hour to the mesmerized American. Carlson is currently in the midst of organizing and facilitating a pro-Putin campaign on the American political right, which, in addition to the interview with the Russian dictator, included a social media propaganda tour of Putin’s Russia complete with gee-whiz marveling at the wonders of ersatz Russian McDonald’s meals and the glories of the Moscow subway system.

Despite the shopworn naiveté of Carlson’s observations, which echoed the claims made by generations of useful leftist idiots like Bernie Sanders, who similarly admired the Moscow subway system and other Soviet attainments on his honeymoon trip in 1988, only a year before the Berlin Wall came down, the broadcaster’s campaign has had success in decreasing support among conservatives for arming the Ukrainians. The current military aid package to Ukraine is now stuck without a vote in Congress: House Speaker Mike Johnson has not put the foreign aid bill up to a vote because of opposition from elements of his base. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have just pulled their forces out of the encircled eastern city of Avdiivka, and proclaimed to the world that their army is running out of ammunition, signaling the increasing likelihood of broader Russian conquests of Ukrainian territory in the spring.

The historian Sergey Radchenko’s conclusion was appropriately bleak: “With Navalny’s death, Russia has symbolically turned the corner. There is no more faith, nor any more hope, and no longer any prospect for that ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ that Navalny tried so hard to keep alive in our collective imagination.” The prominent Russian journalist Mihail Zygar wrote that “we dreamed of him being the President of Russia. He was our future for so long. Now we no longer have that future, and we will have another. Alexei will always be with us and will become much more than a President. He will be the messiah of the Russian future.”

However, idealistic hopes or fantasies of regime transition in Russia on the back of mass street protests seem far more distant now than they were before the attack on Ukraine and Navalny’s death. A political transition in Russia would now almost certainly take place at the level of a palace coup or following Putin’s own death. Much of the core constituency of potential pro-democracy protests have long since fled Russia, after the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine when Russia passed new conscription and mobilization laws. Russian men who take to the streets to protest now risk being detained and sent to fight in the front lines in Ukraine.

The stakes for protesting the regime are infinitely higher than they were when Navalny and his people had first called on Russians to engage in mass uprisings three years ago. Which is why the vigils and impromptu flower-laying ceremonies commemorating Navalny, which were disrupted by Russian riot police all across the nation this weekend, were predominantly made up of women.

On Friday afternoon, U.S. President Joe Biden proclaimed that “Putin is responsible” for the killing and that there was “no doubt” that President Vladimir Putin’s government bore responsibility. Three years after having threatened Putin’s Kremlin with “devastating consequences” if Navalny were to die in prison, those effects have so far been nil.

Perhaps most significantly from Putin’s point of view, the killing of a prominent opposition head sends a clear, direct message to other Russian opposition leaders who are currently in prison and may envisage themselves as symbols of a future democratic Russia. Here, the liberal West does have options. It can and should demand the facilitation of Red Cross visits for political prisoners such as the British Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, whom the Kremlin has already tried to kill twice. If there are no consequences for Navalny’s death, it seems likely that Putin’s hit list will only get longer.