What Happened Today: July 14, 2022
Economy top concern amongst voters; showdown on ghost gun restrictions in Texas court; Is Social Media a Force For Good?
The Big Story
The U.S. Labor Department reported Wednesday that inflation hit a 40-year high of 9.1%, stoking fears that the country has entered a deep recession. Concerns about the economy and household expenses are top of mind and likely to drive how people vote in the upcoming midterm elections.
Prices for new and used cars, apparel, and home goods all rose last month, while the national average gas price topped $5 for the first time today. According to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy, “There is a high probability that prices could go even higher in the weeks ahead,” putting more pressure on those who commute. Compared to last year, Americans on average are spending 35% more on their commute, an annual bump of $750 just as more workers are being called to come back into the office. In a rare interview, Costco CEO Craig Jelinek said that he believes “things aren’t so bad” because “unemployment is down significantly” and job seekers can find work if they want it. Jamie Dimon, head of the biggest U.S. bank, J.P. Morgan, shared Jelinek’s optimism about consumer spending, saying on a quarterly report call Thursday that “if we go into any recession, consumers are in good shape,” yet the bank was suspending share buybacks as its year-over-year profits fell 28%, and Dimon warned that rising interest rates “will go up more than people think.”
Regardless of where the economy might go, right now inflation is melting the value of household incomes, and widespread concern about personal finances is poised to become the definitive issue for the midterm elections. A New York Times/Siena survey out this week found that voters by a wide margin saw the biggest problem in the United States as the economy and cost of living, an opinion shared by 67% of Republicans but only 25% of Democrats. Indeed, Democrats are being cleaved by a class divide, with the hot-button cultural issues of guns and abortion galvanizing a shrinking activist base as a diverse coalition of working-class voters more concerned about the economy is peeling off to support Republicans. But while such political volatility could tip the midterms significantly for Republicans if inflation worsens, it spells trouble for leaders of both parties come 2024: 94% of Democrats under 30 said they’d rather support a candidate besides President Biden, while almost 50% of Republicans said they’d rather vote for someone other than Donald Trump.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/upshot/poll-2022-midterms-congress.html
In the Back Pages: Moderator: Is Social Media A Force For Good?
The Rest
→ A new RealClearInvestigations analysis found 1.3 million reports of “adverse events” and 29,000 deaths in a Federal Drug Administration database that tracks incidents related to COVID-19 vaccinations. While some public health officials have identified the number of adverse events submitted by anyone who’s had a bad reaction to the vaccine as a result of the intense and sustained publicity surrounding the vaccines in the media, others in the medical community have raised red flags about the pattern of the reactions. “The number and strong indications in certain symptom categories” like cardiovascular issues, writes Clayton Fox, the article’s author, “paint a bleaker picture of the vaccines’ safety.”
→ Even with the best health insurance on the market, having a baby in the United States will cost you an out-of-pocket payment of almost $3,000, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, making this country among the most expensive in the world for new parents. Following the cost of childcare, the average American will then spend $233,610 on their children from birth to the age of 17, at which point kids can finally leave the house for college (where the average cost of tuition is $10,000 per year to attend a public university and almost $40,000 per year for a private college).
→ Joshua Schulte, a former CIA agent who provided WikiLeaks with the largest trove of classified CIA documents ever disclosed, was convicted in New York City on Wednesday. Schulte’s 2017 leak made public numerous covert CIA programs, including a tool called “Weeping Angel,” which allowed the agency to hack into smart televisions and turn them into surveillance systems. He also disclosed documents detailing dozens of other agency tools—all posted to WikiLeaks under the name Vault 7—that enabled the CIA to compromise smartphones, cars, and web browsers. Known among CIA colleagues as “Voldemort” and “The Nuclear Option,” Schulte now faces further charges for the possession of child pornography, which he denies having.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Was your hand over my heart when we were hiding because you would stop the bullet from killing me?”
A mother describing her 6-year-old daughter’s questions in the wake of the July 4 shooting in Chicago, which left seven dead and dozens injured. She spoke at an emotional rally in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where the families of victims from some of the United States’ recent episodes of gun violence, including the attacks at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, came together to call upon Congress to ban assault weapons. In Philadelphia, a recent curfew for those under 18 was enacted to try to protect children from the city’s unrelenting gun violence that’s largely been perpetrated by hand guns. But Wednesday night saw five children wounded in two separate quadruple shootings, including a two-year-old boy.
→ A federal judge in Texas ruling on a challenge to a Biden administration effort to restrict ghost guns—which usually lack serial numbers and can be made with at-home kits, leaving them untraceable by law enforcement—has received a new amicus brief from 20 state attorneys general supporting the new laws slated to take effect in August. “With these new federal regulations, we are making it harder for gun kits to end up in the hands of criminals and easier for law enforcement to track crime guns in their investigations,” attorney general of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, said this week. Buyers of ghost guns would have to submit to a background check under the new federal restrictions, and weapons kits would be required to include serial numbers. Since 2016, ghost guns seized by police have jumped by a factor of 10, as they have become increasingly popular weapons in criminal incidents of gun violence.
→ Michael Cox, a Boston police officer who, while working undercover in 1995, was beaten and left bloodied on the street by fellow officers who mistook him for a suspect, was named the city’s next commissioner of police. In the aftermath of that assault, which the officers had sought to cover up, Cox redoubled his commitment to the force, choosing to remain a cop and improve the department instead of walking away. “Since then, in 1995, I have dedicated my life to making sure that both the Boston police department and policing […] have structures and mechanisms in place to make sure that we never repeat that kind of incident against anyone,” Cox told reporters. Cox will be taking over for Dennis White, who was placed on leave last year, just two days after starting as the city’s commissioner, when domestic abuse allegations against White from 1999 came to light.
→ Two-time Olympic gold medalist and star of the U.S. Women’s National Basketball Association Brittney Griner was in a Russian court for the third time Thursday after she was detained in February at a Moscow airport for hash oil vape cartridges found in her luggage. Following a guilty plea last week, Griner faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in a Russian penal colony, and some court watchers expect she’ll likely receive at least half if not more of the full sentence. Appearing in court with Griner on Thursday, Maxim Ryabkov, the director of a prominent Russian basketball club, testified to Griner’s good character in an effort to reduce the sentence. U.S. officials have deemed Griner a “wrongful detainee,” and diplomats have attempted to negotiate for her release, albeit without success yet. Rumors of a possible prisoner exchange for a Russian captive held by the United States were quelled by a Russian foreign minister last week when he said the possible exchange was just “hype.”
→ MAP OF THE DAY:
From HowMuch.net, a financial literacy website, today’s map offers a detailed look at how the housing affordability crisis impacts residents of each U.S. state. The map shows the median home price overlaid with the percentage of the state’s inhabitants who can afford to purchase a home at that price. Vermont fares the worst, with only 16% of the state’s residents able to afford a home at median cost, which is $476,000. In Maryland, on the other hand, 57% of the state’s residents can afford to buy a home at median cost, which is $324,000.
→ For those ambitious young writers out there hungry for a chance at literary greatness, and for those who bemoan the decline of our culture into an image-saturated, TV-addled wasteland, we bring you America’s Next Great Author! The brainchild of Newbery Award-winning author Kwame Alexander as well as Arielle Eckstut and David Sterry, authors and co-founders of Pitchapalooza, the show will send six contestants on a “writers retreat,” where they will have 30 days to start and finish a novel. There will be Big Brother-style challenges along the way, until the field is winnowed down to one young scribe: America’s Next Great Author. And who said that literary culture is dead in America?
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Zohar Atkins, The Scroll’s favorite poet, rabbi, and philosopher of technology, has begun a new series in which he enlists notable minds from beyond the grave to provide their commentary on the most difficult of our contemporary problems. In this episode, Atkins assembles a panel consisting of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojeve, and Carl Schmitt to answer this question: Is social media a force for good? To read more of Atkins’ work, sign up for his Substack, “What Is Called Thinking.”
Moderator: Is Social Media a Force for Good?
Schmitt: The good life is one in which people risk their lives for what they believe in. Social media rewards those who agitate, but it also sublimates the basic instinct for war into “dunking.” Social media is a liberal institution that simulates the political but remains apolitical. Political opining is subordinated to the attention economy and reduced to fuel for advertising, which ultimately rewards purchasing and producing, not taking up arms. Social media gives the appearance of hyper-politicization, but it’s actually depoliticization, the reduction of a viewpoint into a brand. The pundit class loves to spew on about polarization, but it’s theatrics. Consumerism is a stronger force in the digital age than genuine conviction. Liberalism has turned the noble fight into just another slogan to put on one’s coffee mug: politics as “merch.”
Kojève: The world will not be a rational and good place until everyone follows as many people as they are followed by. Alternatively, social media is a site where we see the master-slave dialectic play out. Masters have no need for social media; slaves, who lack recognition IRL, turn to social media to have their persona affirmed. But even when they succeed in racking up millions of followers, they remain depressed, because the recognition they receive is 1) contingent on their alienation and 2) given to them by masses of people they resent and disdain.
Strauss: Social media is a vulgar place that most philosophers should avoid, except to understand human nature. Socrates was known to hang out in the marketplace and question people, so in theory, Twitter might be a contemporary agora. But just as Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, any genuine philosopher would today be condemned by a Twitter mob simply for asking the wrong questions. As for virality, it is anathema to truth, which seeks to protect itself from the tyranny and idiocy of the many.
Heidegger: Social media simply expedites and externalizes a basic feature of language and human exchange: gerede, “idle chatter.” The reason we post random thoughts or read the random thoughts of others is because we are fundamentally anxious about our finitude. Memes are a degraded form of Mitsein, “being-with,” that reveal, at the same time, how we are always “with” others even in their absence.
Benjamin: In the TikTok videos of teenagers goofing off, I recognize the spirit of the German Mourning Play, in which freedom and captivity are indistinguishable. New media offers us an image of hope only to the extent that we can spot in it the stories of old, repurposed. With each new post, adding to the vertiginous pile of data which only a Potemkin could decipher (were he so motivated), language moves closer to pure language, the word moves closer to pure translation, and our earthly condition becomes ever more suffused with the light of redemption.
Arendt: The rise of the social sphere has done more to destroy both the personal and the political. Modern people have traded in both the intimacy of private life and the grandeur of public life for a life that is neither intimate nor grand. The ease with which people can “drag” their friends, students, teachers, and family members on social media all for the sake of likes reveals a sickness at the heart of modernity. They think they are liberal, enlightened, do-gooders, but they are depraved. If totalitarianism is “organized loneliness,” social media has both capitalized on and effected it. The only bulwark against organized loneliness is to kindle friendships, as Lessing did, that are oriented toward the search for truth rather than the search for status or self-righteousness. This said, I prefer American shallowness to European dandyism. For at least the crass Americans make obvious the void at the heart of modern culture. The Europeans remain in denial, turning the classics into props, like so many leather-bound collections that have never been opened.
I wish people would stop abusing the vaccine adverse effects database, VAERS. All it records is unverified bad things that have happened to people who've had some vaccination or another. There's no proof of any causal connection, just one giant "post hoc, proper hoc" fallacy. The whole database is of low quality, having no checks on data sources or accuracy. The 1 million+ number strains belief. I personally know a few hundred people who've been vaccinated with the COVID vaccines, including my and other kids, and have seen no serious adverse reactions at all. I know there have been some adverse reactions among younger males with the Pfizer.
How effective these vaccines are is another matter. They probably shouldn't be recommended for younger people, under say 30, because the benefit is so marginal, especially vis-a-vis natural immunity (recognized by virtually every other country). What's needed is another round of vaccine development, with something more effective against broader variants. No really effective vaccination has taken less than about 15 years to develop, and COVID mutates enough that a different approach is called for.
As for social media: no, it's not a force for good. I'm still on it for strictly personal use for family, friends, and work. No politics. Without some serious reforms, social media and the Big Tech companies behind it will soon destroy what's left of American institutions, effectively handing over control of them to a small number of aggressively authoritarian personalities, mainly on the left.