What Happened Today: July 12, 2022
Musk v. Twitter; Southwest water wars; Bezos’ boat plan a bridge too far
The Big Story
After Elon Musk attempted on Friday to back out of a deal to buy Twitter, the social media platform’s attorneys called the move “invalid and wrongful,” setting up what will likely be a major legal battle. When the deal was first made in April, Twitter and Musk agreed the platform was worth $44 billion, but the stock has dropped precipitously since then. Musk’s representatives claimed in a letter sent to Twitter on Friday that they were justified to terminate the agreement because Twitter’s long-standing estimate that 5% of users on the site are spam bots is far too low. More spam bots, Musk’s lawyers said, reflects “a material adverse effect” that grossly misrepresents the business that Musk agreed to purchase, though they offered no evidence to support the claim beyond saying that “Mr. Musk has reason to believe” the total number of spam users is “substantially higher.”
Most likely the dispute will end up in the Delaware Court of Chancery, where a judge could force Musk to either buy the company at the original agreement price of $44 billion or pay damages upwards of tens of billions of dollars that roughly covers the difference between the deal’s $44 billion valuation and the current lower value. The court could also tell Musk to simply pay the agreed-upon breakup fee of $1 billion—a tax Musk may be willing to accept if it means he won’t have to spend even more on buying the company. Before the court ruling, Musk and Twitter might negotiate a settlement, with Musk buying Twitter at a slight discount. If that happens, it would go a long way to validating the theory that Musk’s seemingly erratic decision to pull out of buying Twitter was actually a negotiating tactic aimed at driving down the selling price. Selling the company cheaper will still satisfy Twitter executives’ obligation to earn the biggest payday for their shareholders, not to mention excellent cash settlements for themselves.
In the Back Pages: Is the Anti-Woke Alliance Already Dead?
The Rest
→ Of the 9.2 million calls made to the understaffed and overtaxed National Suicide Prevention Lifeline between 2016 and 2021, some 7.7 million of them were ended before counselors could make it to the line, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Callers often had their phone calls rerouted from local call centers, many of which were overwhelmed by the number of callers, to national call centers where they waited for hours to speak to someone—or, in some cases, were dropped altogether. “I followed all the steps,” one caller reported. “Nothing is working. So that must mean that I should die.” Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, suicides in the United States increased by 30%, according to the CDC, with an especially disconcerting spike in teenage and youth suicides; calls to the hotline, meanwhile, increased between 2016 and 2021 by 92%. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will now have its phone number changed from 10 digits to 3—988—and will see a cash infusion of $432 million from the federal government to help callers connect with counselors.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It’s going to turn into the Hunger Games. Like, a scrambling-for-your-toilet-water-every-month kind of thing.”
Leigh Harris, a resident of Scottsdale, Arizona, where the water wars have commenced. With the Southwest now facing its worst drought in 1,200 years, according to one recent study, and with the region’s reservoirs reaching historic lows, consumers are in bidding wars and building wars as they try to access water. Wells across the region are drying, and water delivery companies, which had filled customers’ cisterns each month, are closing up shop. “The moment of reckoning is near,” John Entsminger, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager told Congress earlier this year.
Read More: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-water-wars-come-to-the-suburbs
→ Disgruntled residents in the Netherlands’ Rotterdam were in an uproar in February when city officials said they would dismantle a section of the iconic Koningshaven Bridge to allow Jeff Bezos’ new super yacht to pass underneath after it was completed in a nearby shipyard. With locals promising to toss eggs at the passing yacht, which will be the largest sailing vessel in the world at 417 feet long, city officials have now walked back their original statement, and the Dutch builder of the boat has held off on trying to get the permit to temporarily dismantle the bridge. How exactly Bezos will receive his super yacht now remains an open question, though as one local resident suggested recently online, “Let him get that thing with his own rocket.”
→ Documents presented in a lawsuit between the National Labor Relations Board and Amazon over a warehouse employee’s wrongful termination have revealed the extraordinary methods the retailer has used to surveil employees’ performance and demand improvement by threatening dismissal. The case involves Gerald Bryson, 59, who was dismissed by Amazon from the Staten Island warehouse where he began working for $16.50 an hour. Managers informed Bryson that of the thousands of hand-counted items he’d inventoried, he’d miscounted 19 products in one particular bin that in fact held 20 items. That complaint, as well as Bryson’s counting rate of 295 per hour falling short of the required 478 items per hour, was one of several Amazon levied against Bryson before he was terminated, the NLRB claimed, for protesting against Amazon’s workplace conditions. An administrative law judge agreed with the labor board and ordered that Bryson be allowed to return to work in April, a decision Amazon is currently appealing. Such intense employee-performance demands were what drove a successful union drive at Bryson’s warehouse last year, where, according to court documents, more than 13,000 similar performance reprimands were doled out over a one-year period.
→ A May 5 mandate from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin that state employees must return to the office and can no longer work remotely has led to a mass exodus of more than 300 resignations, leaving many of the state’s offices and departments understaffed. The Virginia Department of Health, for instance, has lost 78 employees since the announcement, and the Virginia Employment Commission 37. “We had anticipated that the shift in policy would result in an exodus of workers,” a lobbyist for the Virginia Governmental Employees Association said. “Which is really concerning because of the state’s recruitment and retention issues.” While the governor’s office has argued that “an office-centric environment fosters collaboration and teamwork and provides an even greater level of service for all Virginians,” as one of Youngkin’s deputies put it, the state has not commented on the quality of service one can expect from severely understaffed offices.
→ NUMBERS OF THE DAY: One hundred thousand, one hundred million
The Biden administration expects to fall far short of its goal to resettle 125,000 refugees this year by a whopping 100,000, as funding shortfalls introduced during the Trump presidency and ongoing staffing shortages have hampered the White House’s execution. The expected 25,000 admitted refugees will have all arrived by October, with roughly 15,000 already resettled since the same time last year. Speeding up the process will require both rapidly upscaling offices at the State Department and Homeland Security and implementing online replacements for cumbersome paper processes. The low number of admitted refugees is especially noteworthy as, according to the United Nations, more than 100 million people globally are currently forcibly displaced from their homes, the highest number on record.
→ Say what you will about Starbucks, but its bathroom policy--which allows anyone, paying patron or otherwise, to avail themselves of the facilities--is one of the single greatest acts of corporate largesse in recent U.S. history. The company’s goodness has limits, though, (as its employees attempting to unionize can surely tell you) and now its bathroom policy is set to change. As Starbucks managers in Seattle have reported an alarming increase in drug use, vandalism, and violence in their stores and bathrooms, the company has decided to permanently shutter six locations in greater Seattle and change its bathroom policy so that it will henceforth be at the discretion of each store’s manager.
→ The Survivor—the HBO film, produced by friend-of-Tablet Matti Leshem, that chronicles the story of a man who survives Auschwitz by being forced to box his fellow prisoners—was nominated this morning for an Emmy. You can read Matti’s moving account here of making it: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/making-the-survivor
→
All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,
car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,
and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.
Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.
From Ada Limón’s “Notes on the Below,” a poem that links the earth, water, and sky as the speaker yearns for the luminous. Limón was named the United States’ new poet laureate today, with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden celebrating Limón as “a poet who connects. Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.” Her work also offers us glimpses of a world that always opens up to more. As she ends the poem quoted above: “I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.”
Read More: https://poets.org/poet/ada-limon?mbd=1
→ Lily Safra, the billionaire philanthropist and widow of banking magnate Edmond Safra, died on Saturday, July 9, in Geneva, according to an announcement published by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation. She was 87. Safra was born Lily Watkins in 1934 to a European Jewish family that had migrated to Brazil. She married her fourth husband, Edmund Safra, in 1976, entering into the powerful family of Lebanese Jews who had come to Brazil after World War II and made a fortune in the banking industry. Safra died in 1999 under mysterious circumstances when a fire broke out in his Monaco home, which was later determined to be arson. Lily Safra, also in the house at the time of the fire, escaped unscathed. Following her husband’s death, Safra moved to London where, having inherited his fortune, she became the fifth wealthiest woman in the United Kingdom and deepened her commitments to philanthropy. She founded the Centers for Bioinformatics and Ethics at Tel Aviv University in memory of her husband and built synagogues in her husband’s name in both New York and Israel.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Is the Anti-Woke Alliance Already Dead?
A war between ‘trads’ and ‘cads’ fractures the nascent new right
On June 24, with the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade with its decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy took to Twitter with an “emergency press conference” decrying the decision. Portnoy’s sports- and pop-culture-focused media company, not to mention his own Boston bro persona, is known for an adolescent male impatience with the social-justice-oriented sex and gender proprieties that have governed elite U.S. culture in the past decade. Portnoy’s raunchy anti-wokeness proved so popular and resonant that Matthew Walther, in a 2021 article in The Week, coined the term “Barstool Conservatives” to describe the unspoken-for contingent, presumably quite a large one, who shared this attitude.
A Barstool Conservative is not systematically political at all, according to Walther, but likely to be a youngish male with libertarian inclinations in both politics and economics. In Walther’s telling, this Barstool bro is aggrieved at woke culture for adultering his football games with Black Lives Matter displays and his superhero movies with queer representation or feminist heroism. This frustrated everyman will therefore be forced to become, whether he likes it or not, “the future of the conservative movement,” because this movement is all that can hold back the tide of elite progressivism. The Barstool libertines will be compelled to make common cause with religious conservatives since they share a common enemy, an alliance between what the writer Mary Harrington has called “cads” and “trads.”
Until, that is, Dobbs threw cold water on these strange bedfellows and forced Portnoy to leap out from under the covers. In his Twitter press conference, Portnoy denounced the Supreme Court decision, made a standard liberal plea for women’s rights, dismissed the Constitution in woke-activist style as an irrelevant document “written by people who had slaves,” and declared that “95% of the people in the country think like me: They’re socially liberal and they’re financially conservative.” Lamenting that the religious right was going to make him “vote for the morons like Biden,” Portnoy effectively scuttled the trad-cad alliance. In return, the Barstool editor was slammed by standard social conservatives like Fox News host Dan Bongino.
But Portnoy’s barroom brawl with the traditionalists is only the most visible foreshock of a deepening fissure in the so-called new right that has arisen in recent years to challenge woke hegemony. Only a few months after this bewilderingly heterogeneous political tendency made its debut with relatively neutral coverage in mainstream media organs like Vanity Fair and The New York Times, its internal contradictions threaten to cancel its potency from within.
Take, for example, the journal Compact, founded earlier this year by two Catholics and a Marxist on an ecumenical platform of “a strong social-democratic state that defends community … against a libertine left and a libertarian right”—the opposite of Portnoy’s Clinton-era social liberalism plus fiscal conservatism. And in keeping with its nonsectarianism, Compact has published an ideologically diverse company of writers encompassing not only Catholic traditionalists and Marxist populists but also transgressive artists, dissident feminists, and renegade novelists. Yet just a few months after the magazine’s founding, on June 30, the masthead’s founding Marxist, Edwin Aponte Jr., tweeted, “The Catholic integralists, with their legislating of morality, and the libertine, transgressive anti-wokes are not going to be able to hold it together.” Two days after that, the journal announced that he would be “depart[ing] to work on other projects,” replaced by British philosopher Nina Power, whose latest tweet, as of this writing, predicts, “Religions that strongly oppose liberal ‘values’ will only grow in strength.” So much for the libertines.
This conflict between the traditionalist and libertine is now everywhere in the nebulous network of podcasts, Substacks, and social media accounts comprising the new right. Jack Mason, the host of the celebrated podcast “Perfume Nationalist,” has decried as homophobic the populist right’s new focus on “groomers” who allegedly insert radical ideologies of sex and gender into early education. Mason contrasts the traditionalists, living in what he calls “a doomed political fantasy of the past” with his hope for “the psychedelic ’20s D. H. Lawrence gays, guys, and gals forging a future of creativity, freedom, and art.” Meanwhile, populist Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance has recently called for a ban on pornography. No love for D. H. Lawrence here—we could live to see Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned again.
The trad-cad conflict might be dismissed as mere subcultural dustups among shock jocks and obscure podcasters, but that could prove as big a mistake as when commenters a decade ago claimed that social-justice activism was just a few college kids who were acting up but would soon grow out of it …
thanks for the cad trad fade take which escaped my knowledge but seems entirely plausible….
maybe joint dislike of elite wokery is not a superglue but abortion is just one issue where they fragment. cads libertarians would find a home on the left for their other ‘ freedoms’.
Clearly, Bezos needs to get one of Musk's rockets to extract his yacht. Maybe they'll fight instead. Godzilla versus King Kong!