What Happened Today: February 2, 2022
Zucker Resigns; Mass shooter manifesto; Whoopi and the ADL
The Big Story
CNN head Jeff Zucker resigned from his job running the cable news network Wednesday after it was revealed that he hid a relationship with CNN Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. The circumstances of Zucker’s departure reveal a great deal about the political connections and conflicts of interest that shaped CNN’s news coverage during his reign. The relationship between Zucker and Gollust—whom he called his “closest colleague”—which he says began only in “recent years,” came to light in the course of an investigation into CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who was accused of using his professional connections to help his brother, the ex-governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, combat allegations of sexual misconduct. Prior to joining CNN, Gollust worked as Cuomo’s communications director in 2012, when he was still the governor.
Let’s recap, so we can all follow this: CNN hired Gollust, who had formerly worked with then governor Andrew Cuomo, in 2013, the same year the network hired the governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, as one of its marquee news anchors. Throughout the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the network proceeded to lavish Andrew Cuomo with praise for his leadership while arranging interviews between him and his brother that brazenly violated the basic rules of journalistic ethics. The result of this fawning coverage was that Andrew Cuomo received an Emmy Award and a $5.1 million deal for a book offering “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic”—both of which he was later forced to return—while the network neglected to cover aspects of his response to the pandemic, like his nursing home policy, that reflected unfavorably on the brother of their star anchor.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/jeff-zucker-resigns-cnn-president-2022-02-02/
Back Pages: What Whoopi Learned from the ADL
The Rest
→ A former UCLA postdoctoral fellow and philosophy lecturer named Matthew Harris who threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the school and wrote an 803-page manifesto railing against Jews, Asians, White people, and women was arrested Monday in Colorado. “Violence against Jews should happen. Retaliation and retribution for what they have stolen is legitimate and a good thing,” Harris wrote in the manifesto, which The Jerusalem Post describes as espousing, “an erratic black supremacist ideology and claims of [Harris’] own messianic divinity.” Harris had attempted to buy a handgun in November but was denied, according to Colorado law enforcement.
→ The White House was caught so unprepared in Afghanistan that, as new leaked internal memos show, staffers were just starting to conduct the basic planning necessary to evacuate the country in the final hours before the Taliban takeover on Aug. 15, 2021. “While the word immediately peppers the document, it’s clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans—on the afternoon of Aug. 14,” Axios reports on the notes from a White House Situation Room meeting.
→ The United States is deploying more than 3,000 troops total to bolster the defense of NATO allies in Eastern Europe. The deployment entails moving roughly 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Germany and Poland and repositioning another 1,000 troops currently stationed in Germany to Romania as part of Washington’s preparation for a potential Russian attack on Ukraine. “These forces are not going to fight in Ukraine. They’re going to ensure the robust defense of our NATO allies,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
→ Media outlets that most of us rely on to inform us about the privacy violations and data tracking carried out by government agencies and tech companies have, in fact, made their own business models reliant on services that employ mass surveillance techniques. The practice was brought to light by a recent case in which the digital advertising company OpenX Technologies, which works with The New York Times, HuffPost, and Fox News, among others, was forced to pay $2 million in a settlement from last December for tracking the locations of children under 13 without their parents’ consent. Court filings connected to the settlement exposed just how common these practices have become, according to a report in The Intercept: “The growth of digital advertising has forced nearly every major for-profit news website to utilize the most intrusive forms of mass surveillance, including browsing history and location data—a dynamic highlighted by the OpenX fine.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2022/02/01/surveillance-data-collection-ads-news-media/
→ The media isn’t the only part of the knowledge and opinion industry subsidized by big tech’s surveillance capitalism. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have all increased funding to four of Washington, D.C.’s major foreign policy think tanks. “Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have become focused on influencing the U.S. foreign policy elite,” according to an investigation in the Financial Times that explains the move as part of an effort to deflect attention from regulating the tech industry in the United States by drawing policymakers’ focus to the threat from China.
→ The city of Reno, Nevada, is preparing to purchase closed motels and convert these into affordable housing units. The plan comes as rents and homelessness continue to rise across the region. The average cost of a rental in Reno has reached record-breaking highs, while the population of homeless people in Washoe County, where Reno is located, has risen 875% in the past five years. The conversion of shuttered motels into affordable housing is an attempt to model how municipalities can repurpose closed or blighted properties amid a dramatic rise in rates of homelessness across the country.
→ More than a hundred container ships are drifting along the coast of California, waiting to be unloaded. Container ships, essential to the global supply chain, are in an unprecedented traffic jam as boats wait months to berth, the result of a surge in demand for consumer goods and a shortage of skilled port workers, truck drivers, and rail crew. While the impacts of these backups on prices and distribution have been widely felt and discussed (inflation, cream cheese shortages, etc.), the human toll has been all but overlooked. Crew members are forced to stay aboard these container ships for months on end, waiting for a global logjam to resolve itself. Out at sea, workers report limited internet service and little hazard pay; they have no idea when they’ll be able to go home. Their employers, meanwhile, have seen profits grow more than tenfold in the past two years alone.
Read More: https://prospect.org/economy/hidden-costs-of-containerization/
→ Today marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist masterpiece chronicles a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, the son of an Irish Protestant mother and Hungarian Jewish father. In 1938, Joyce told the Swiss writer Jacques Mercanton about his decision to make the novel’s hero Jewish. “Only a foreigner would do,” Joyce explained. “The Jews were foreigners at that time in Dublin. There was no hostility toward them, but contempt, yes, the contempt people always show for the unknown.”
→ Facebook, now officially rechristened as Meta, will continue to allow people to use the platform for soliciting human smugglers, despite the practice being illegal, because to do otherwise would infringe on their human rights, the company decided Monday in an internal announcement that was leaked to The Free Beacon. Based on consultations with various nongovernmental organizations and unnamed “former border enforcement officials,” the company found “a slight majority of stakeholders favored allowing solicitations of smuggling services for reasons associated with asylum seekers … We decided that this was indeed the best option since the risks could be mitigated by sending resources, whereas the risks of removing such content could not be mitigated.”
Read more: https://freebeacon.com/media/meta-will-allow-solicitation-of-human-smuggling-on-its-platforms/
New Scroll Columnist James Kirchick on What Whoopi Learned from the ADL
According to Whoopi Goldberg, “The Holocaust isn’t about race.”
Goldberg, neé Caryn Johnson, shared her novel understanding of the Nazi genocide Monday during a conversation on ABC’s The View. The ladies were discussing a Tennessee school district’s decision to withdraw Maus, a graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, from its curriculum, an episode in the larger controversy over the way race and discrimination are taught in American schools. Challenged by her cohosts, who said that a genocide undertaken by a self-declared “master race” to eliminate what it deemed a subhuman “Jewish race” from the face of the earth had something to do with racial supremacy, Goldberg countered that this could not be true. The extermination of six million innocent Jewish souls by the Nazis and their allies was in fact a quarrel between “two groups of white people.” In case anyone failed to appreciate her disgusting moral equivalence, Goldberg emphasized, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves.” It was at this point that, like the interruption of an overlong Oscar acceptance speech, the music came on, mercifully leading into a commercial break.
In an appearance later that evening on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” Goldberg doubled down on her Holocaust revisionism. “Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” Colbert asked. “Because asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”
No sir, the new Oliver Stone Chair in Holocaust Studies replied, “The Nazis lied. It wasn’t. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So, to me, I’m thinking, ‘How can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?’”
That same day, Goldberg released a statement that appeared to settle the matter, clarifying that, while she had said the Holocaust “is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man,” she ought to “have said it is about both.” Goldberg then quoted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League: “The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people—who they deemed to be an inferior race.”
That Greenblatt would object to Goldberg’s ahistorical ramblings was strange, considering the definition of racism that his own organization was promoting less than 24 hours ago. As of Wednesday morning, racism, according to the ADL, was “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” This was a rather significant alteration of the group’s original definition (in place until July 2020), which designated racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.” With its narrower definition, the ADL endorsed the position, once relegated to university ethnic studies departments but now widely accepted by America’s leading liberal institutions, that nonwhite people are inherently incapable of espousing racism. By defining racism as something perpetrated solely by “white people” against “people of color,” the ADL had effectively committed itself to the new lexicon of racial taxonomies and hierarchies that makes it impossible for Jews to be victims of racism because they are “white.”
The ADL’s embrace of a definition of racism inspired by critical race theory was not widely noticed until last week, and in light of Goldberg’s comments essentially endorsing its false premises, the organization swiftly updated its definition once again. Citing Professor Robert Livingston of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, the ADL’s new new definition states that “racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.” Explaining the group’s decision to revert to a more traditional understanding of racism, the one still widely accepted by most Americans if not the elites who desire to rule them, Greenblatt acknowledged the criticism the ADL had received while defensively distinguishing between “allies operating in good faith who wanted us to do better” and “detractors who seized upon this issue as confirmation of a sinister plot to promote a political agenda or stop fighting antisemitism altogether.”
I suppose the ADL’s self-correction is to be welcomed. But that it took a dispute on a show where the level of intellectual discourse rarely rises above that of a South Florida mah-jongg table to pressure it into acknowledging the obvious fact that Jews can be victims of racism is a sorry commentary on the state of America’s Jewish institutional leadership.
The ADL is a woke organization that is staffed by many who hate Israel and is utterly useless and unwilling to investigate anti Semitism within the woke world.
Despite his weasily backtracking, Greenblatt has once again made the once laudable ADL a tool of our worst detractors. Why is he still there?