What Happened Today: December 20, 2022
FBI paid Twitter; vaccine injures Aussie medical leader; Hanukkah in Odessa
The Big Story
The Big Story
Weeks before the 2020 election, at the same time that the FBI was pressuring social media companies to censor reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptops, the federal agency was paying Twitter millions of dollars. That’s one of the revelations to come out Monday night, when independent journalist Michael Shellenberger dropped Part Seven of the “Twitter files.”
By 2020, Shellenberger showed, there were so many ex-FBI agents working at the company that they started their own internal Slack communication channel and made a welcome sheet to ingratiate new employees coming from the agency. The FBI also paid Twitter millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to reimburse the company for its Safety, Content & Law Enforcement (SCALE) division’s work “processing requests from the FBI.” “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” a Twitter official wrote to the company’s then deputy general counsel, Jim Baker, in a February 2021 email. Baker was a top lawyer at the FBI before taking his job at Twitter.
The night before the New York Post published its article about Hunter Biden’s laptop—which has since been verified by multiple outlets, including The New York Times and Politico, and which revealed, among other things, that President Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings—Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, received an email from the FBI point person for Twitter, Elvis Chan, with 10 unspecified documents apparently related to the laptop story. Twitter went on to censor the Biden article the following day. The new files also reveal that Twitter’s own investigations repeatedly found very minimal evidence of foreign bots on the site trying to exert political influence. The ones they did find were more supportive of candidate Biden than Trump.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had no comment on the revelations in her press briefing on Monday.
In The Back Pages: The Second Night
The Rest
→ One of Australia’s most esteemed doctors, who is also a former member of parliament, has come forward about injuries suffered by her and her wife that she says were caused by COVID-19 vaccines. In testimony to Australia’s parliament related to “Long COVID,” Dr. Kerryn Phelps—a working clinician, former federal MP, and former president of the Australian Medical Association—emphasized that she takes COVID-19 very seriously and has been vocal about the dangers of the illness. But she has also testified that COVID-19 vaccines are causing injury and must be evaluated with the same seriousness as the underlying disease. Phelps wrote to parliament that her wife suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer shot within minutes of administration, and that she herself suffered cardiovascular injury after her second. She says that while she’s heard from many other doctors who have seen similar injuries, they have been afraid to speak out due to threats made by regulators. She estimates that for people who have had three shots, the risk of serious adverse events could be at least 1 in 1,000, though that may be low due to underreporting.
→ Stanford University, the No. 3 ranked university in the United States, according to U.S. News and World Report, has created an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. Apparently, IT professionals at the school, specifically members of the affinity group People of Color in Technology, wrote a list of “harmful” words to be purged from Stanford web pages. These include, American, peanut gallery, blackballed, and convict. The list was released in May but only recently picked up and publicized in social media. As it gathered momentum, Stanford placed the site behind a password, but The Wall Street Journal kept a copy. The list not only compiles words we mustn’t use but also suggests how we might substitute them. For example, in the place of hillbilly, they suggest saying “person from the Appalachian or Ozark regions of the U.S.” In place of she, use the person’s name, or they. And in place of Jewed, use haggled down. We at The Scroll recommend that if someone says “Jewed down” in your presence, well, use your imagination. We also note that the list is missing some key substitutions: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.”
→ The Cincinnati Reds’ new assistant pitching coach is a kibbutznik named Alon Leichman. Leichman grew up in Israel with a father who was such a big fan of the sport that he built Israel’s first baseball field on their kibbutz in 1983. To fund his baseball habit as a kid, Leichman picked olives and milked cows—above and beyond the work he was already required to do—to get the community to pay for his trips playing abroad. After his army service, Leichman went to play college ball in the States but unfortunately ended up blowing out his elbow, twice. That’s when he decided to coach, and started moving his way up through the minors. His teammate Alex Katz told JTA, “He’s just one of the most intelligent baseball minds I’ve ever been around.”
→ The Air Force’s entire fleet of B-2 stealth bombers has been grounded after one of the planes was forced to make an emergency landing, at which point it caught fire. The timing couldn’t be worse for those concerned with the United States’ nuclear deterrence, as there are only 20 of the B-2s to begin with, and they comprise a significant part of the United States nuclear triad. And it may be a while before they’re back in business. “At this time, there is no speculated end date for the safety pause. Every incident is unique and we are currently evaluating what went wrong and how we can mitigate future risk,” Master Sgt. Beth Del Vecchio of Bomb Wing Public Affairs told Defense One. Luckily, the Air Force has recently revealed its long-awaited upgrade to the B-2, the new B-21 from Northrop Grumman, which is calling it the first “sixth-generation” aircraft.
→ Video of the Day:
Sen. Frank Church predicted in 1975 what Ed Snowden confirmed in 2013 and what the Twitter files reaffirms—namely, that the U.S. intelligence community not only has the technological capacity to intercept virtually all civilian communications but also routinely uses it to spy on American citizens. In ’75, during an appearance on Meet the Press, Church acknowledged that technology was helping the U.S. strategically vis-à-vis our adversaries but issued the following warning:
At the same time that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such as the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government, could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back.
Funnily enough, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said something very similar in January at the Defeat the Mandates Rally in Washington, D.C., he was destroyed in the media because he used the too-obvious example of Anne Frank as someone who was, for a time, able to hide from government, before surveillance technology was inescapable. It was a poor analogy, but Kennedy’s warning, like Church’s before it, stands.
→ VICE should have sold five years ago when the site was valued at $5.7 billion. Now the once-hip media company might not even fetch a fifth of that. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the company missed its revenue projections by $100 million this past year. The company also owes $250 million in debt raised in 2019, is behind on paying contractors, and has been laying off staffers in recent weeks. It’s just not enough anymore to promote “edgy” content, parrot left-wing agitprop, and slander Israel on a consistent basis; if VICE wants to regain its gonzo reputation and make some actual money, it’s going to have to actually break some news!
→ Emails reveal the depth of collusion between Big Crypto and the regulators who are supposed to provide oversight on the growing industry. Newly released documents show Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and his top lieutenants had dinner with the then commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Dan Berkowitz, last October. According to correspondence obtained by the Washington Examiner, via watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, the group dined at an upscale Indian restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s West End, where the Examiner speculates that SBF was trying to lobby Berkowitz to make the CFTC the “umpires of the crypto industry,” as Bankman-Fried phrased it in an email to Berkowitz around the same time. Ultimately, his ploy didn’t work out so well, as the CFTC is the entity that charged Bankman-Fried and his companies with fraud. That’s one spicy burn.
→ Hot Dish of the Day: Kellyanne Conway and Andrew Cuomo were photographed leaving a late dinner together at Il Postino on the Upper East Side last night. What did they discuss? Why were they together? Conway denied any romantic angle and said the two were there to talk non-partisan issues. Oh, well—for a minute it looked like something wild and crazy was going to shake up the world of political hacks desperately clawing for renewed relevance.
→ Quote of the Day:
Using incoherent or decontextualized arguments and perspectives to add perceived legitimacy to a position or oneself. For example, using the term “intersectionality” to, let’s say, defend edits to a press statement. Or employing the Audre Lorde quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence …,” to give gravitas to a desire to stay home from an action or take off time that you’ve earned and deserve as a worker.
That’s progressive leader Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party, in a manifesto to his comrades, urging them to stop “cherry-picking” arguments and virtue-signaling at the expense of actual organizational work. Mitchell’s piece was promoted by The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg in an article published last Friday titled “The Left’s Fever Is Breaking.” Mitchell lays out the various ways that his fellow leftists, especially the younger ones, have turned the well-intentioned nonprofit sphere into a hyper-ideological, self-eating mess. He blames social media for a lot of the problems, saying it creates “self-aggrandizement, competition, and conflict.” In other words, the young Jacobins are so narcissistic and detached from the demands of actual organizing and philanthropy work, they’re squandering all the political capital they gained in 2020 and inadvertently destroying the institutions they hope will bring about their beautiful utopia.
→ Feel Good Story of the Day:
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Festival of Light for Dark Times by Stuart Halpern
A Hanukkah message from Theodor Herzl, 125 years ago
Fables of Assimilation by Marco Roth
‘Leopoldstadt’ and ‘The Fabelmans’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Second Night
Celebrating the festival of lights in a darkened Odessa
By Edward Serotta
The Migdal Jewish Community Center in Odessa is eight decades old, with cracks in the floor and a sturdy old staircase that creaks with each step. At the entrance, a coat rack can handle only a fraction of the puffers thrown across it, making it look to all the world like a Jeff Koons sculpture.
Whereas the Beit Grand, where I lit a Hanukkah candle on the first night of the holiday, prides itself on its cultural programs and its entire wing dedicated to the Hesed Center that cares for the elderly and poor, the Migdal is all about families. This was the first building restituted by Odessa’s Jewish community after the Cold War, and entire generations have grown up inside its mustard- and pink-colored walls and at its summer camp.
A huge generator in the courtyard kept the building warm and brightly lit. In one classroom I found a dozen children on the floor playing games; in another, long-limbed teenagers were sprawled across well-worn sofas as they discussed books; in a third, seniors were drawing and painting.
The largest room was filled with two dozen parents who were preparing an old winter favorite: hrustiki. They were rolling out dough, cutting it into strips, and twisting them, then taking plates to the other side of the room where the frying brigade would drop them into hot oil, spoon them out, and slather them with powdered sugar.
Marianna was one of those parents. She said she was from Mariupol, that port city on the Sea of Azov that the Russian army surrounded and bombed relentlessly until it conquered the city, house by house, slaughtering civilians as it went.
Marianna found herself trapped when the fighting started, and her son and husband, who both were working in Odessa, couldn’t get to her. “They thought I was dead,” she said. “I was hiding in one basement after another from the 3rd of March until the 20th. That’s when some friends got a message to me, and they made room for me in their car.”
“My mother-in-law, Raisa Gorlichova, had been living on the eighth floor of an apartment house. She was burned alive on 17 March. 80 years old.”
As for her life now, Marianna said, “I’ve been looking for work. I’m still looking. And we live almost entirely from what we receive from Hesed. I’m just so glad we have this place.” She looked around the room, smiled, and went back to the table to cut up more dough.
Being a teenager isn’t easy in the best of times, and these are the worst of times if you live in Ukraine. Fifteen-year-old Mita told me that “the beginning of the war was horrible. Now it’s even worse. That’s because at the beginning I thought it would end soon. But my father is serving on the front lines, so there’s just my mother, my little brother, and me. And I am so afraid of the cold and being in the dark. That’s why it’s so nice to be here at this place.”
“More than anything,” she went on, “I want my mom to leave the country and take my brother with her. Honestly, I don’t care about my own life, but I worry about my mom constantly. And now I worry about my boyfriend. He’s up in Kharkiv, he just turned 18, and maybe they’ll take him into the army.”
Suddenly, Mita couldn’t catch her breath. My translator and I apologized for upsetting her and told her we would stop. She shook her head vigorously, waited a minute, composed herself, and continued. “I am studying online at my school, but I hope I can transfer to a school that actually meets next month. I need that. Otherwise, I am on Telegram just about all the time with my boyfriend.
“But the best thing is that three weeks ago, my dad came home, and we got to spend two days with him. Now he’s back on the front.”
The traffic lights in Odessa were working as I left Migdal, but there were still no streetlights. A few hours later, my taxi delivered me to the front of the cavernous Stalin-era train station, which had only a few tiny lights flickering inside. Out on the tracks, it was completely dark, and only a single pixelated sign glowed 21:32, signaling the night train to Kyiv.
The train itself had every shade pulled down tight, and all the windows on the inside were covered with thick plastic, just in case.
Edward Serotta is the director of Centropa, a Vienna-based Jewish historical institute, and the producer of the podcast series, “A Ukrainian Jewish Century.” You can read about his first night celebrating Hannukah in Odessa here.