What Happened Today: April 19, 2022

A new stage of Russia’s war; Libs of TikTok; The threat of Elon Musk The Big Story

Apr 19, 2022

The Big Story

Russia has initiated a new phase of its war in Ukraine, refocusing efforts on Donbas, the industrial region on the Ukrainian-Russian border, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, announced on Tuesday. Lavrov’s announcement reinforced statements made Monday by Ukrainian officials that Russia had launched an offensive in Donbas, a region that has been under the partial control of Russia separatists for years following earlier rounds of fighting dating back to 2014. Ukrainian officials are encouraging the remaining civilians in the east, who have already survived weeks of bombardment by artillery and rocket strikes, to flee while they still can. Russia has been massing tanks and infantry units in the region as it prepares for what may be a final combined arms assault to formally annex the separatist-controlled cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Those cities have been been key to Moscow’s war aims since it launched its invasion. Meanwhile, “on the western approach to the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, thumps of artillery continued through the morning,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The shelling provided the background score as “Ukrainian forces were digging trenches and tank obstacles in the rear, preparing layers of additional defensive lines” to prepare for the Russian attack. Arguably, Russia turning back to the east is proof that it has already suffered significant defeats in a war that was originally aimed at taking control of Kyiv and replacing Ukraine’s leadership. It is only because that plan was defeated by fierce resistance from Ukrainaians, which led to unexpectedly high Russian losses, that Moscow is piloting to a new phase of the war. But this account does not mean that Ukraine should expect to achieve comparable victories on the eastern front. While the fighting in crowded cities tends to favor a native defending force that can blend in and leverage the urban terrain for insurgent tactics, the relatively open terrain in eastern Ukraine, where Russia also enjoys more local support, will, on paper at least, enhance Moscow’s numerical and technological advantages.

In The Back Pages: Why Elon Musk Strikes Fear in the Progressive Heart

The Rest

→ An interesting media controversy surrounds an exposé published Tuesday in The Washington Post that reveals the identity of the woman behind the conservative Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which has acquired a large following by reposting TikTok videos of public school teachers bragging about indoctrinating young children in novel theories of gender and sexual identity. The controversy stems from the fact that the Post article’s author is none other than Taylor Lorenz. A former technology reporter for The New York Times, Lorenz, who was educated at a $90,000-a-year Swiss boarding school, is a divisive character and leading example of the new style of journalism that has replaced older standards of objectivity and reporting with a set of predictable Progressive ideological commitments. This approach has made Lorenz, who has a knack for personal branding, into a quasi celebrity. Earlier this month, Lorenz appeared as the main interview subject in an MSNBC segment about the online harassment of journalists, during which she burst into tears while discussing her own plight. Despite the segment’s fawning depiction of her as a heroic victim, Lorenz—after agreeing to sit down for the interview—later pressured the network into taking it off of YouTube because it apparently was not fawning enough. As recently as last week, Lorenz was condemning the injustice of doxxing, the term for revealing the real identity of an anonymous person online, which is exactly what she did to the person behind the Libs of TikTok account. That explains why many conservatives as well as some journalists who object to Lorenz’s hyper-partisan, narcissistic style of media are pointing out the hypocrisy of her latest effort.

Read it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/19/libs-of-tiktok-right-wing-media/

→ Part II of the saga: And yet … And yet! We cannot help but agree with Lorenz on this one. Simply put: The story was newsworthy because the Libs of TikTok account has become a flash point and influential organizing node in the larger Groomer vs. “Don’t Say Gay” battles being fought in Florida and other states over the teaching of gender ideology to children. Therefore the identity of the person behind the account, who recently appeared for an anonymous interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, is relevant to the public. That Lorenz is a hypocrite who, in other circumstances, has cried murder over similar treatment directed at her and her allies doesn’t change the fact that in this case her story was legitimate. Her article contains some interesting details about the Orthodox Jewish woman from Brooklyn who runs the Libs of TikTok account but is mostly a pastiche of clichés and alarmist hyperbole. Nevertheless, the subject was a legitimate target of journalistic inquiry because that is how journalism is supposed to work, regardless of whether Lorenz is indeed a “hired assassin on behalf of her class,” as Scroll critic John Pistelli memorably describes her on his blog, who “cries for the soul she’s not sure she has as she carries out her appalling duties.”

→ Prosecutors are saying that the $953 billion Paycheck Protection Program—a 2020 COVID-19 relief initiative passed by the Trump administration and aimed at supporting small businesses—was “an invitation” to criminals and led to the “biggest fraud in a generation,” with some $80 billion believed to be stolen from the government. This follows previous reports that $90 billion was stolen from the $900 billion COVID-19 unemployment relief program, with the majority of that money snatched up by international criminals—we can’t even keep the stolen taxpayer dollars in the country! Fraudsters inflated their employee rolls, created fake companies, or used stolen identities to claim jobless benefits, taking advantage of laws that were rushed to Trump’s desk in the midst of an economic emergency and that were known to be risky, even at the time of their passage. “The Small Business Administration, in sending that money out, basically said to people, ‘Apply and sign and tell us that you’re really entitled to the money,’” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said on NBC Nightly News in late March. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time.” Most of the roughly $170 billion of stolen taxpayer money, some of which was put toward luxury automobiles, mansions, and pricey vacations, is unrecoverable.

→ France’s incumbent president, the center-right establishment reformer Emmanuel Macron, is widening his lead over his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen in polls ahead of the runoff election this Sunday. “Three polls for the second-round runoff put Macron at the highest level since before the first round, with an average score of 55.83%, up more than a point from Friday and more than three points from an average of five polls before the first round,” Reuters reported Tuesday. If Macron manages to win with a wide margin after only narrowly beating Le Pen in the first round of voting, it would be a repeat of the results from the last French presidential elections in 2017.

→ Amazon, the second most valuable company in the world, is set to undergo a “racial equity audit” led by former Obama White House Attorney General Loretta Lynch on behalf of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where she is now a partner. The audit, which was initiated by Amazon shareholders led by the New York State Common Retirement Fund and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, is supposed to investigate potential discrimination impacts on the 1 million hourly employees who work for Amazon. The law firm leading the investigation, which has conducted past racial audits for other mega corporations, including the investment giant BlackRock, just recently went through its own racial scandal. A New York Times article chronicled the controversy that ensued in 2019 when the firm posted a picture of the 12 members of its new class of partners: “What followed, however, was nothing to smile about. In short order, people across the industry began to comment that all of the faces were white, and only one was a woman’s.”

→ Americans are suffering through a scourge of spam calls, text messages, and emails. Text messages in particular have become a popular new genre for scammers and schemers of all kinds, with the number of phishing or fake text messages that Americans receive rising twelvefold since last year, from roughly 1 billion in April of 2021 to 12 billion in March of 2022. The average American must suffer through 42 spurious calls or messages monthly, with spammers finding ever-new ways of interrupting our dinners. One contributing cause of this rise: The pandemic made Americans more reliant on their phones and computers—and apparently more likely to answer calls, texts, and emails from strangers. The surge of spam has led to a surge in fraud, with these tactics successfully bilking Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission, meanwhile, are working to put a stop to these practices. In 2019, the Trump administration signed legislation aimed at reducing “robocalls”; since that law was passed, the number of such calls has gone up by about a billion per year.

→ The drug dealer who sold fentanyl-laced oxycodone pills to Mac Miller—a much-loved rapper and record producer known for his soulful sound and who died of an accidental fentanyl drug overdose in 2018 at the age of 26—will face 11 years in prison, a Los Angeles judge announced on Monday. He is now the third dealer to be sentenced in relation to Miller’s death. Oxycodone and fentanyl addictions and overdoses have been at the center of the opioid epidemic; according to the Department of Justice, more than 13 million Americans abuse oxycodone, and the CDC recently reported that more than 100,000 people are now dying from fentanyl overdoses annually. In recent years, accidental fentanyl overdoses have claimed the lives of numerous musicians, including Prince in 2016 and Lil Peep and Tom Petty in 2017.

Scroll columnist James Kirchick explains why Elon Musk strikes fear in the hearts of professional-managerial class mandarins

Prompted by Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter, The New York Times has endeavored to discover “the elusive politics of Elon Musk.” The resulting investigation by Jeremy W. Peters is studiously fair-minded, but ultimately inconclusive. A survey of the serial entrepreneur’s political contributions yields little. Unlike fellow billionaires Charles Koch and George Soros, who have given hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates on the right and left, respectively, Musk’s giving has been “paltry” and dispersed among an ideologically diverse set of elected officials.

While Musk has loudly protested COVID-19 lockdowns, a position typically associated with libertarians and conservatives, he is also the founder of Tesla, a company beloved by crunchy liberals for being the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defended a controversial law restricting abortion access by citing Musk—“Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas”—Musk demurred, saying, “In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness.” He then offered a perspective that, considering the state of our discourse, most Americans could heartily endorse: “That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.”

All in all, Musk finds himself among the plurality of Americans who are neither right nor left, but politically homeless. From these facts and more, Peters reasonably concludes that Musk has a “nondenominational political philosophy.” As for what the implications of that philosophy might mean for Twitter should Musk acquire it, Peters cites a “person who has worked closely with Mr. Musk” who says it’s his “firmly held belief that in a functioning democracy, it is anyone’s right to say ‘whatever stupid thing you want.’”

Perish the thought. The mere prospect that someone harboring such a straightforward (if demotic) understanding of what the First Amendment entails might gain control over his favored social media platform naturally triggered an outburst of hysteria among progressive media elites. “Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an ‘uncontrolled’ internet,” former Clinton administration labor secretary Robert Reich warned darkly. “That’s also the dream of every dictator, strongman, and demagogue.” Indeed. What linked Idi Amin, Suharto, and Adolf Hitler was their belief in unfettered freedom of speech …

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James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.

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