What Happened Today: July 29, 2022
Emails detail Big Tech/White House censor campaign; professional political candidate Andrew Yang’s new party; FDA’s warnings on hormone blockers
The Big Story
A new tranche of public documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a foundation led by former senior members of the Trump administration, details the scale to which the Biden administration worked closely with several Big Tech companies to censor COVID-19 information on their platforms. Last July, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that “we’re regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health, that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media.” The White House demurred when pressed on many of the specifics of the censorship collaboration, which led AFL to sue the Biden administration for the release of emails, published Wednesday, that document officials in the White House, CDC, and several other agencies coordinating with Facebook, Twitter, and Google officials to remove specific posts and links deemed misinformation while elevating content approved by the administration.
The First Amendment’s prohibition of government curtailment of freedom of speech does not generally apply to private corporations. But the lack of transparency about how, when, and why top federal officials censor what constitutes the online public square raises concerns about the extent to which big tech corporations are actually serving at the government’s behest. Equally concerning are the instances when federal officials argued for the censorship of “misinformation” during the pandemic on topics including the lab-leak origin of the novel coronavirus that were later declared credible. “Deputizing private corporations as federal censors to take down the information with which the government does not agree does not exempt the federal government from its constitutional and legal obligations,” AFL wrote in a statement earlier this year. “The American people also have a right to know which government officials are involved, what is being said, and why.”
In the Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ Earlier this month the Food and Drug Administration added warning labels to gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, commonly known as hormone blockers, noting that for youths who use them there is “a plausible association” with brain swelling that causes severe headaches, nausea, and vision loss. Hormone blockers have been at the center of a heated national debate about whether children questioning their gender identity should be prescribed such medications. The new warning from the FDA comes after the agency documented six cases of young women using the hormone blockers and reporting symptoms associated with brain swelling. “The agency considered the cases clinically serious and, based on these reviews, determined that pseudotumor cerebri (idiopathic intracranial hypertension) should be added as a warning and precaution in product labeling for all GnRH agonist formulations approved for use in pediatric patients,” an FDA spokesperson said. The new findings are at odds with claims that there is widespread medical consensus that such hormone blockers ought to be prescribed to youth, as Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine recently asserted.
→ Quote of the Day:
“Together, we are not left, not right, but Forward.”
Syntactically confusing, to be sure, but the sentiment is what counts: Professional political candidate Andrew Yang has announced that his “centrist” party, called Forward, will be joining a coalition of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to form the third-largest party in the United States—with a platform calling for ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan primaries, and independent redistricting commissions. Co-chaired by Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, the Forward Party hopes to run competitive races in every state by 2024. Unfortunately, it’s off to a bit of a rough start, with its first endorsement—a gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota—dropping out of the race before the filing deadline.
→ The Justice Department is looking into a 2020 data breach of the U.S. federal court system, after “three hostile foreign actors” attacked the court’s filing system and caused a “system security failure.” House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) spoke about the attack and its “startling breadth and scope” at a committee hearing on Thursday, in the first public disclosure of the breach. The court’s secured filing system contains troves of confidential and personal information, most of which is never meant to be viewed publicly; that foreign actors accessed this data has alarmed members of the Justice Department and Congress, who claim that U.S. court officials have not been forthcoming about the attack. “I write to express serious concerns that the federal judiciary has hidden from the American public and many members of Congress the serious national security consequences of the courts’ failure to protect sensitive data to which they have been entrusted,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
→ Here’s a public health campaign that even kids can get behind: A new California law pushes back high school start times to at least 8:30am and has inspired similar state laws moving through legislative pipelines in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Texas. With abundant research showing that middle and high school students suffer academically, graduate less frequently, and are more likely to abuse substances if they’re regularly sleeping less than 8.5 hours a night, a movement to push back early school-start times has swelled in recent years. Though facing opposition from teachers unions and some school administrators who say later school-start times put too much pressure on school staff and working parents who would struggle to adapt to the new schedules, the effort has gained a wide base of support since 2014, when the American Academy of Pediatrics identified poor sleep for students as a significant public health issue.
→ Yet another lawsuit alleging racial discrimination is being brought against Sesame Place in Philadelphia. The first, previously covered in The Scroll, came after a mother posted a video of her two daughters trying to high-five a furry Sesame Street friend—the friend said no. Now a second parent has come forward with footage claiming the same thing happened to his daughter. “The plaintiffs are seeking at least $25 million in damages from SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment—which owns Sesame Place—on behalf of all Black people who visited Sesame Place since July 27, 2018, and ‘suffered disparate treatment’ from SeaWorld employees who ignored Black children ‘while interacting with similarly situated white children.’” More than 150 parents, according to the lawyer of Sesame Place’s latest accusers, have reached out with similar stories.
→ Fritz Quattlebaum, the owner of the Black Cat jazz bar and supper club in San Francisco, is blasting the San Francisco Police Department and Fire Department, claiming they allowed thieves to rifle through his club for hours after he called 911 to report a break-in. Quattlebaum called the cops early on Tuesday morning when he learned that the glass window of his club had been busted open; the police and fire department came, fixed a plastic tarp over the shattered window, and left 20 minutes later, allowing vandals and thieves to return shortly after and have their run of the place. “The Police Department is one block away, and no one bothered to stop by and check,” Quattlebaum told reporters. “Most of the damage, most of the stuff [taken] happened after police got there.” This follows a similar incident from this past November, when San Francisco cops were caught on tape as they watched a trio of thieves rob a cannabis dispensary, stumble out of the store, execute a three-point turn in their getaway car, and drive off with their loot.
→ More than a year after Fritz Berggren wrote on his blog that “Jesus Christ came to save the whole world from the Jews—the founders of the original Anti-Christ religion, they who are the seed of the Serpent, that brood of vipers,” he is still employed by the U.S. State Department. Berggren’s antisemitic and racist blog, BloodandFaith.com, was first discovered by Politico in 2021, leading more than 70 Jewish employees of the State Department to write a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding Berggren’s dismissal. Asked about Berggren’s continued employment by Jewish Insider, a State Department official responded, “We cannot comment on individual personnel matters,” but “allegations that an employee has violated a law, regulation, or department policy are taken seriously.”
→ Stalking the quiet streets of the suburbs of New Jersey are Mercedes vans equipped with cutting-edge mobile kitchens, where chefs spread guac on toast or pull steaks from their sous vide water baths before plating the food prettily and bringing dinner to your door. Wonder, a meal-delivery startup valued at $3.5 billion, will send a chef and mobile kitchen to your house, cook you some dinner, and then leave without a trace—a better-than-average date. But in eco-conscious neighborhoods across New Jersey, the idling vans have become a menace. “I curse their trucks as I see them,” said one resident of South Orange, New Jersey. “Why do we need trucks burning diesel fuel running around to feed one family at a time and sitting idling in front of someone’s house in a supposedly liberal town?” The answer, of course, is sogginess—that threat to most delivery dinners and to all things decent. Wonder promises that your avo toast will be crunchy and fresh, made farm to diesel truck to table, and that your Thai noodles won’t have congealed on the way from the van parked in your driveway to your door. Despite the moral crusade of some Garden State residents, Wonder expects to expand its current fleet of trucks from 200 to several thousand in the coming years; soon, no town in America will be safe from the temptations of nachos that are still crunchy and French fries that are still crisp.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Hello, Hi: David Meir Grossman on the newest album from Ty Segall, who’s indie rock is as consistent and vital as ever, even in a music landscape that has radically changed
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hello-hi-ty-segall
Issue 27 of The Tab, Tablet magazine’s weekly printable digest:
Redefining the kibbutz, performative politics, American literature as 21st-century refuge, a belated Kaddish, and more.
Download it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-tab-printable-weekly
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.
Your Weekend Reads
Robert Kolker, the author of Hidden Valley Road, an excellent book about a family of 12 children in which 6 of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia, is in The New York Times Magazine this week with a profile of a man with schizophrenia named Joshua Spriestersbach. Spending more than a decade estranged from his family who could not find him, Spriestersbach cycled through jails, shelters, and state facilities as he became something of “a perfect public-policy problem: lucid enough to live on his own; independent-minded enough to refuse treatment; and, though not without his quirks, decidedly non-confrontational.” After getting arrested for sleeping on a sidewalk outside a food kitchen in Hawaii, Spriestersbach fell into a legal system nightmare: He spent more than two years in some form of confinement because the fake alias he sometimes gave police connected him to a series of crimes he didn’t commit. In documenting Spriestersbach’s struggles through state agencies and jails, the piece offers a withering critique of the broken U.S. mental health system that has relied too heavily on prescriptions as magic solutions and largely failed hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans who trudge through one ineffective facility after another:
The debate in America over how to best help homeless people with mental illness has been left largely unresolved for decades, ever since the closing and shrinking of the mid-20th-century’s massive state mental hospitals transformed jails and prisons into the nation’s largest de facto mental-health holding centers. … Deinstitutionalization is widely viewed as the great original sin of our current mental-health crisis—not because the institutions were the right idea, but because it was assumed that medications could replace them. In fact, medication, while a miracle for managing many mental-health conditions, has failed to change outcomes for people with severe mental illness (while the more drastic outward symptoms of schizophrenia, for instance, can be muffled with antipsychotic medication, many patients suffer from physical and cognitive side effects, and the root condition typically is not reversed). In retrospect, it seemed unrealistic to expect that prescriptions would solve the problem. Severe mental illness is the furthest thing from a cookie-cutter condition: A diagnosis of schizophrenia means different symptoms for different patients, and no patient responds to medication in quite the same way.
… Without a coherent system of mental-health care, homeless people with mental illness are swept out of view, either incarcerated, ignored or passed through the revolving door from social-service agency to jail to psychiatric hospital, then back to an agency again.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/magazine/joshua-spriestersbach-wrongful-incarceration.html
Piles of money get spent every year by Major League Baseball teams to ensure they’re using the latest and greatest data analytics technology to evaluate the endless number of variables on the field and among their players. Yet, as Dan Barry writes for The New York Times, despite all the big tech sloshing around the league, a key component of the game—the baseball itself—is largely reliant on the work of one obscure man in New Jersey and his proprietary mud sourced from a secret South Jersey riverbank.
Tubs of the substance are found at every major league ballpark. It is rubbed into every one of the 144 to 180 balls used in every one of the 2,430 major league games played in a season, as well as those played in the postseason. The mudding of a “pearl”—a pristine ball right out of the box—has been baseball custom for most of the last century, ever since a journeyman named Lena Blackburne presented the mud as an alternative to tobacco spit and infield dirt, which tended to turn the ball into an overripe plum.
Consider what this means: That Major League Baseball—a multibillion-dollar enterprise applying science and analytics to nearly every aspect of the game—ultimately depends on some geographically specific muck collected by a retiree with a gray ponytail, blurry arm tattoos, and a flat-edged shovel.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/sports/baseball/baseball-mud-supplier.html
What Happened Today: July 29, 2022
Sesame Street: a cesspool of racism -- who knew?
There's no consensus at all among doctors about prescribing hormone blockers to underage patients. In fact, among medical people I've talked to in the last 15 years, I've seen no evidence any of them support it. But unlike 15 years ago, they've now been intimidated into silence. We can see where this is headed in Europe: back to where it was before this destructive craze of quackery started. They'll do occasional sex-change operations on adults, after careful consideration and weighing of risks, if the adult (almost always male) really wants it and feels he can't live any other way. What they'll no longer do is inflict it on naive adolescents and their parents, if their parents even know.