What Happened Today: August 22, 2022
$1.6 billion gift shakes up dark-money political funding; India’s wheat shortage; The Clairvoyance of TikTok
The Big Story
Marble Freedom Trust, a budding conservative nonprofit organization, became the recipient of what is likely the largest-ever single political donation last year when it received a $1.6 billion gift in corporate stock from Chicago manufacturing mogul Barre Seid. For the past two decades, Seid has maintained a modest political profile, but his unprecedented gift, first reported by The New York Times, will have tremendous impact on the dark-money political groups and their financiers engaged in what has become a fierce arms race to exert more leverage than their opponents over elections and government institutions.
In an analysis last year, the Times found that, despite “years [of] Democrats [who] attacked Republicans for spending huge sums on politics through secretive nonprofit groups that don’t reveal their donors,” it was the 15 largest dark-money groups affiliated with Democrats that spent $1.5 billion on the 2020 elections, significantly more than the $900 million donated by the 15 corresponding largest conservative groups. Seid’s single gift surpasses the entire pool of large 2020 Democratic donors, with the “primary authority” of how to spend the money vested in Marble chairman Leonard Leo. A former executive at The Federalist Society, Leo led the conservative organization as it wielded increased influence on Republican presidents and the judges they nominated to the Supreme Court and across the federal judiciary. “It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors, and other left-wing philanthropists,” Leo said about the massive infusion of cash he will now manage at Marble Freedom.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html
In the Back Pages: The Clairvoyance of TikTok
The Rest
→ Mexico has weathered another weekend of unchecked violence, after rival gangs set cars ablaze in the streets of Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego, and engaged in shootouts in Ciudad Juárez, not far from El Paso, killing eight civilians. All of this comes as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador seeks to reduce gang violence—which is largely responsible for the tripling in Mexico’s homicide rate in the past 15 years, from 10,000 homicides per year in 2006 to roughly 30,000 now—by focusing on the economic causes of the crisis. López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” strategy, as he called it, was fiercely criticized, especially as the homicide rate in Mexico continued to climb. He then deployed far more soldiers and police to combat the gangs, but this policy too was met with more violence.
→ Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his country could “feed the world.” Now, however, India is struggling to feed its own citizens, as the country faces a wheat shortage amid a monthslong heat wave and a poor growing season. The second largest wheat producer and wheat consumer in the world, India has largely been self-sufficient in the wheat market, neither exporting nor importing very much of the staple. Now officials are considering doing away with the 40% import tax levied against foreign wheat, according to Reuters, though India’s Department of Food and Public Distribution took to Twitter to deny such claims.
→ Quote of the Day:
The district has not evaluated the child for special education services, which could offer an exemption from a mask mandate. The father said that school officials told him his son could not be evaluated without a mask.
A Catch-22 reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, describing a child with sensory issues who has “long had significant trouble wearing a mask” being kicked out of kindergarten for not wearing one. To get an exemption from the school from wearing a mask, however, requires, alas, wearing a mask. Now the child’s father is threatening to sue the Mountain View Whisman School District, which is one of few in California mandating masks after the state made masks optional. The school, meanwhile, has noted that kindergarten is not compulsory, and so this child has the option of not attending school altogether.
→ Check in on the dystopian landscape of viral social media at your own peril. Over the weekend, twentysomething New York Times film critic Lena Wilson publicized the private Instagram message she received from film star Amandla Stenberg in which the actor poked fun at a line about gratuitous cleavage in Wilson’s Times pan of Stenberg’s newest film, Bodies Bodies Bodies. Wilson and Stenberg are both gay, and Wilson perceived the message from Sternberg—“ur review was great, maybe if you had gotten ur eyes off my tits you could’ve watched the movie!”—as an attack on her own sexuality, writing that the “homophobia is coming from inside the house.”
Wilson felt the discrimination was compounded by what she described as Stenberg’s abuse of her “social power.”
With all of us now living on the other side of the looking glass, the social power over what constitutes acceptable behavior in the public square tips ever further away from people of traditional influence, like film stars, and toward post-collegiate New York Times art critics.
But Wilson squandered her chance to score precious Good Virtue points for calling out the alleged homophobia when Stenberg went on Instagram and said in a video what was already obvious to everyone, apparently, other than Wilson: that the private message, while probably an ill-advised reaction to a critic’s bad review, was not slanderous.
After Sternberg clarified her intent, Wilson’s attempt to leverage the exchange became a costly mistake of sorts, as she gained more detractors for publicizing the private message.
Soon, clips of Wilson’s cringey TikToks videos went viral, including one where Wilson declared the “most crucial thing” that accounts for her success “is that I am a very talented writer and I’m skilled in the art of cultural criticism … a particular form that I seem to just be naturally good at.” She neglected to mention the part of her identity that is the daughter of an editor at the Times, who might have been an excellent reference for the extremely young writer during the interview process.
→ Almost five years after Hurricane Maria killed more than 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and flooded the territory’s aged energy infrastructure, leaving people without power for more than a year, Puerto Rico is still struggling to provide its inhabitants with reliable energy—and especially so now, in the midst of hurricane season. “Sometimes when it rains a little bit, the power goes out,” one resident said. The country’s energy grid was built in the 1960s and has now survived decades of mismanagement and underinvestment. At this point, however, it’s only mismanagement that’s to blame, as there is currently some $11 billion dog-eared for finally fixing the country’s energy infrastructure—a project that FEMA estimates will take eight years. Those funds, though, have yet to be used.
Read More: https://prospect.org/environment/puerto-ricos-electric-grid-is-on-again-off-again/
→ While attending a conference about religious tolerance in Rimini, Italy, Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League, said the recent failed assassination attempt against author Salman Rushdie was “a crime that Islam does not accept.” The comments from Al-Issa, a prominent face for moderate Islam who often speaks out against extreme ideology, were a direct rebuke to Iran’s foreign minister spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, who blamed the attack on Rushdie himself, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Iran’s leader at the time to issue a fatwa that Iran hasn’t lifted since. “We believe that the insults made and the support he received was an insult against followers of all religions,” Kanaani said, adding “we don’t consider anyone deserving reproach, blame, or even condemnation, except for (Rushdie) himself and his supporters.” That stance, according to Al-Issa, runs in direct contradiction to the teaching of Islam, where texts are explicitly “opposed to violence,” noting that a believer in religion “must love all others even if he does not agree with them.”
→ The Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab terrorist group laid siege to the Hayat Hotel in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu on Friday, killing more than 20 people. Popular among Somalia’s politicians and professionals, the Hayat Hotel is located within the country’s heavily fortified green zone, making the attack especially discomfiting to Somalia’s political establishment. In recent years, Somalia has been at the center of unstable U.S. policies and its own destabilizing economic crisis: President Trump withdrew almost all U.S. troops from the country in his final days as president before President Biden sent troops back to Somalia to help train the country’s army in counterterrorism measures. And with heat waves and droughts causing crop failures, half the country is now suffering serious hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Program, driving people away from the government and toward Al-Shabaab, which currently controls a large portion of the country and collects more tax revenue than the legitimate Somalia state.
→ Number of the Day: $1
The daily wage of immigrants detained at the Golden State Annex U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility near Bakersfield, California, where inmates work eight-hour shifts and get paid $1 per day. Inmates can then use these meager funds on overpriced items from the facility’s commissary: video calls to family cost $2.50 for 15 minutes; a bag of beans costs $2. “The $1-a-day pay isn’t enough to eat,” one inmate said. Since June 6, however, 50 inmates have been on strike, following the example of workers at another ICE facility, Mesa Verde, who have been on strike since April 28 to demand better wages (the hourly average wage for inmate labor, according to the ACLU, is 13 to 52 cents per hour). The inmates are also demanding safer and more sanitary living conditions—California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health is currently investigating reports of black mold and black dust being commonplace at the facility.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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The Clairvoyance of TikTok
When Big Brother has the power to tell us things about ourselves that we hadn’t noticed
By Katherine Dee
Last week, the founder of Fastlane and a software researcher, Felix Krause, published a report that showed that when you open a link within TikTok’s in-app browser, it activates a sequence of code that allows the app to monitor taps and keystrokes on the page. The implications of this type of surveillance are difficult to overstate—as Forbes suggested, the code would “alert TikTok to what people are doing on those websites,” meaning TikTok would collect any usernames, passwords, and account numbers entered while using the browser. TikTok quickly responded to the discovery, saying that it “strongly pushed back on the idea that it’s tracking its users in its in-app browser,” but this isn’t the first major security concern about TikTok as a surveillance apparatus or its relationship to Beijing and to what extent those issues pose a threat to national security.
Despite what has now become a regular occurrence of revelations about lapses in platform security, it doesn’t seem to make a huge dent in the number of Americans who continue to use these apps. Among millennial and Zoomer power users, there might be recognition that TikTok is spying on them, but the overwhelming attitude is that they’ve been spied on our whole lives. Why draw the line at TikTok, when Meta and Alphabet could probably re-create our consciousness at this point? To some, there’s a darkly beautiful, even spiritual, element to the TikTok panopticon. Maybe there’s a way to harness it.
For the true TikTok enthusiasts, it’s not just that they’re powerless in the face of Big Brother—it’s that Big Brother can become something transcendent. I can’t think of a better expression of this than a weird folk belief that’s developed around TikTok’s algorithm: It’s so personalized that some people believe it can be used as a tool for clairvoyance. Sometimes, this manifests in noticing signs and omens within the app: e.g., you see four videos about breast cancer, you book a mammogram. But creators also became wise to this tendency and used it to their advantage. Spend any amount of time on TikTok, and eventually you’ll see a video of a psychic, astrologer, or tarot card reader on your For You page (the main feed when you open the app, separate from the people you’re following), claiming to have special insight into your life.
“This video has no hashtags,” many of them will proclaim. This video found you because it was meant to find you. The psychic or tarot card reader will go on to share something about your future—usually that your divine masculine/feminine or twin flame is “coming back,” whatever that means. Enough people have become wise to this engagement hack that it’s spawned an ancillary genre of videos of real psychics discrediting the “clickbait” videos, but it’s significant that they ever became a trend at all. (They’re also not the only type of video that brings an expression of “techno-spirituality” to TikTok.) There’s some recognition, even subconsciously, that we’re not fully separate from TikTok. It’s like an astral plane that we can carry around with us in our pockets. Or maybe, put another way, it’s a part of us. There ceases to be a clear boundary between us and the machine: TikTok is just another expression of our consciousness, just one we can swipe up and down on. Big Brother has the power to tell us things about ourselves that we hadn’t noticed.
Read the rest here.