What Happened Today: February 6, 2023
The Great Balloon Caper; Iowa's deadly sedation; San Francisco synagogue terrorized
The Big Story
After the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, former president Donald Trump and more than a half dozen top officials from his administration pushed back on assertions made by unnamed senior Biden administration officials who told both The Wall Street Journal and Fox News that on three separate occasions during Trump’s presidency, Chinese surveillance balloons had crossed into American territory. “I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” said former Trump national security advisor John Bolton.
According to the anonymous official speaking to the WSJ, “This information was discovered after the prior administration left.” If true, the statement raises security concerns that U.S. military officials had not detected foreign surveillance aircrafts intrusion into American airspace until long after the fact, or that military leaders knew of the balloons traveling over U.S. territory and kept it a secret from the president and his cabinet. Additional questions have been raised as to why the balloon wasn’t taken down upon being detected over a sparsely populated island in Alaska on Jan. 28 rather than allowing it to traverse over ballistic missile sites in Montana, particularly if the Biden administration was aware of previous balloon intrusions.
Chinese government officials have claimed the balloon was a climate research vehicle that had accidentally drifted into U.S. airspace.
In the Back Pages: Camp Crowder vs ‘Big Con’
The Rest
→ At least 2,500 dead along with thousands injured after a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and parts of northern Syria on Monday, before a second 7.7 magnitude quake struck again later in the afternoon. Tremors were felt in Israel, Jordan, and other countries in the region. “We were shaken like a cradle. There were nine of us at home. Two sons of mine are still in the rubble, I'm waiting for them,” a Turkish woman told Reuters. Rescue efforts were slowed by shoddy local internet connections and roads that were seriously damaged by the quakes. The death toll thus far is the highest from a natural disaster in Turkey since a 1999 earthquake claimed the lives of at least 17,000; rescuers feared Monday’s death toll would climb significantly as efforts would be hampered by temperatures expected to drop to near freezing overnight.
→ Adding another feather in the cap of elder-care facilities nationwide, an Iowa Alzheimer’s care center declared a 66-year-old woman dead and brought her to a funeral home only to find her gasping for air and very much alive when staff unzipped the body bag. Nurses had declared her dead, which might have had something to do with the larger cocktail of morphine and lorazepam doctors administered to her after noting her “active decline.” The state’s health department hit the facility with a $10,000 fine for the mistaken declaration of death.
→ Tens of thousands of British nurses and medical workers walked off the job on Monday in the largest health workers strike since the founding of the state’s National Health Service 75 years ago. Citing salaries that have not kept up with the worst inflation in 40 years, the workers promised more walkouts over what appears to be a turbulent week as millions of patients are already on extended waiting lists for surgeries and emergency rooms that are struggling to handle their caseloads. The unions representing the workers have called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to intervene, but so far he’s left the dispute over a 5% pay raise above inflation to the unions and the NHS. “A lot of people have left the profession already because they’re so disillusioned,” Rebecca Cosgrave, a nurse striking at St. Thomas’ Hospital, told Reuters on Monday.
→ Number of the Day: 50%
That’s the percentage of salaried workers in the United States who are making at least six figures a year and now living paycheck to paycheck, according to CNBC. As Twitter account Unusual Whales points out, it was only two years prior that 42% of Americans earning $100,000 a year were struggling to add to their savings. The percentage could continue to go up, with the total number of credit cards in circulation in the United States now at 518 million, an all-time record.
→ Residents around the suburbs of Atlanta have been calling the police with reports of finding antisemitic flyers around their homes over the weekend that used the same language and phrases found on posters, banners, and illuminated displays seen in recent months in southern Florida and Los Angeles. “Welcome to being a Jew in Georgia,” Georgia Rep. Esther Panitch wrote on Twitter, with an image of the flier tucked inside a bag with corn kernels. The flyers were found by a number of residents in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, cities with known Jewish communities.
→ A Russian-speaking San Francisco synagogue was terrorized last Wednesday when a man entered the sanctuary and fired blanks from a handgun before fleeing the scene. The 51-year-old suspect was arrested by authorities on Saturday for brandishing a firearm and disturbing a religious assembly. The synagogue caters to a small, typically older Jewish population that doesn’t speak English well, and it lacks the security that’s now common at larger congregations. The San Francisco Standard reported that social media accounts linked to the suspect were rife with antisemitism and featured a video of an object burning on the sidewalk outside the synagogue before the attack.
→ Newark, New Jersey, will pay tribute to its late native son, Philip Roth, on the 90th anniversary of his birth with Philip Roth Unbound, a three-day festival hosted by the Newark Public Library. The festival will celebrate the author, who passed away in 2018 and who had learned early on that “literature isn’t a moral beauty contest,” a truism that animated his restless examination of life through fiction and imparted on his characters an intellect, humor, and insufferableness that shaped postwar American identity (Jewish or otherwise) as much as the work of any other author of Roth’s generation. Though bus tours of Roth’s childhood will be available, guests will do better to catch the panel discussion on “the cathartic power of discomfort” and the stage adaptation of Sabbath’s Theater starring John Turturro.
→ Who is Paolo Dimitrio? For many years, he appeared to be the 63-year-old pizza chef serving up pies to regulars in France’s Saint-Etienne’s Caffe Rossini restaurant while posting pics of his expat life in France to social media. It turns out, however, that the pizza gig was just a decades-long cover for Edgardo Greco, the most recent super boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mob family apprehended by Italian authorities in recent weeks as they’ve accelerated the pursuit of at least four other major mafiosi still on the lamb. Greco was convicted in absentia in 1991 for a double homicide of suspects he had allegedly murdered with iron bars before disposing of their bodies in baths of acid. Authorities discovered Greco’s location after a French newspaper featured his photo in an article touting his dishes with authentic Sicilian flavor. “I only want to offer regional and homemade recipes,” said Dimitrio.
→ Tweet of the Day:
Here the cultural critic Wesley Yang observes the mandatory political celebration of ever smaller and more niche sexual-identity categories codified in official calendar events—such as pansexual pride day—blurring the line between religious cultic rituals and bureaucratic power politics.
The term DEIfication is a portmanteau referring to the diversity, equity, and inclusion boards now ubiquitous in corporations and universities, and to the process of turning something into a God-like object of worship beyond reproach.
Referring to the “established religion of the successor regime,” Yang’s metaphor identifies the newly dominant Progressive-administrative political ideology as a secularized religious dogma.
The “successor” regime has succeeded liberalism from within by posing as its natural heir while undermining its foundational principles—in this instance, by replacing broad tolerance for private sexual differences with ceremonies of compulsory public observance in which an individual’s ideological loyalty can be tested by their willingness to “affirm” novel sexual identity groups. —JS
TODAY IN TABLET:
Jew People by Malina Saval
Jonah Hill’s latest is a parade of mindless, self-denigrating tropes—and Hollywood Jews are angry
The Crease in My Kippah by Hayim Leiter
How a truly terrible Hebrew school student grew up to become an Orthodox rabbi
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.
Camp Crowder vs ‘Big Con’
What the rumors about a conservative star reveal about the new media empires of the online right
If you have a taste for schadenfreude and intramedia blood sport, the recent cat fight between Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire and right-wing YouTube star Steven Crowder has been a delight to behold. It’s an absurd yet revealing spectacle, with both sides claiming to act on high principle while slinging mud and chasing profits, even at the cost of selling out friends and cozying up to the supposed enemies in Big Tech.
It began with a tweet from Crowder announcing that he was “done being quiet,” followed by a video detailing a contract spat with an unnamed potential employer. That potential employer turned out to be The Daily Wire, which clapped back in kind. Then on Jan. 23, the timbre of the back-and-forth changed when The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens made a thinly veiled threat to out Crowder as gay.
Though it’s easy to view Crowder, Owens, and Shapiro as little more than YouTubers, they are in fact billionaire-funded millionaires within an oligarch-funded media landscape. The evangelical fracking billionaire Farris Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed funding for The Daily Wire, and remains one of the media company’s four owners. Just as on the left, whose media is underwritten by the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Pierre Omidyar, the right’s new media celebrities are not examples of free-market, competitive capitalism as much as beneficiaries of billionaire largesse.
The latest episode in this particular soap opera of conservative celebrity swirls around Crowder, one of the most popular political pundits on YouTube and a star within the growing media ecosystem of the online right. Producing brash culture-war humor and commentary for a largely young male audience, he has almost 6 million subscribers, several hundred thousand more than MSNBC’s YouTube channel. A big part of Crowder’s appeal is his campy macho persona, a blend of frat-guy energy and Rush Limbaugh-brand right-wing radio politics. With scruffy beard, signature gun holsters, and muscles showing beneath his too-tight sweaters, he angrily stands up for “traditional masculinity” and mockingly impersonates gay stereotypes. Confusingly for some, Crowder also has repeatedly dressed in drag—seemingly for “comic” effect—and throws the epithet “fag” around with the casual frequency I’ve only seen among virulent homophobes and the gayest twinks on Earth. The combination has made him a target of gay-rights activists as well as anti-gay bigots, who allege that he might be in the closet himself.
Until recently, Crowder’s juvenile but wildly popular show was distributed by The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s online network. But at the end of last year, with that arrangement coming to a close, Crowder went looking for a new home. On Jan. 17, he released “It’s time to stop …” in which he indignantly blasted the “slave contract” offered to him by an anonymous conservative platform, which would have saddled him with financial penalties if any of his content lost the company sponsors or was demonetized by tech platforms like YouTube. Though Crowder demurely refused to name the company he accused of kowtowing to Big Tech and described as “Big Con,” the obvious target of his ire was The Daily Wire, the right-wing goliath co-founded by Ben Shapiro.
Two days later, The Daily Wire’s CEO, Jeremy Boreing—Crowder’s former friend—released a 53-minute video addressing the claims point by point. Boreing politely implied that Crowder was being idiotic, and included a couple of extra points Crowder had failed to mention: that this opening term sheet was for $50 million over four years, with weekends off, four weeks holiday, full editorial control, and an option to renew the contract for another two years. Boreing also noted that Crowder’s agent had countered that offer with a $120 million ask.
In response to Boreing’s post, Crowder released audio that he had secretly recorded of one of his last conversations with Boreing. Crowder was using this audio in the interest of promoting his new venture at StopBigCon.com, where Crowder fans were encouraged to do their part in defending freedom and fighting Big Tech tyranny by becoming paid subscribers.
Boreing and Shapiro mostly kept things clean in their rebuttals, portraying the whole spat as a kind of guerrilla marketing campaign, with Crowder making war on his former allies to gin up publicity for his new subscription service. But that changed when Boreing’s and Shapiro’s underlings decided to go dirty. On Jan. 23, Candace Owens—the Kanye-praising, Hitler-defending, self-appointed “Red Pill Black”—called Crowder everything from a “bitch” to a “socialist” before abruptly changing tack and releasing a somber segment labeled “Pray for Steven Crowder,” in which she said:
Over the weekend I was given a lot more information regarding Steven Crowder … Steven has a lot going on, I guess that’s the best way to say it … Rather than being angry, I would like to implore my audience … not to condemn him, but to pray for him. Sometimes people need a prayer. Sometimes people need a scripture. You know, Steven purports to be a Christian, and I believe that he needs to lean into his faith, and I am certain that, in the near future, more information will come out. … I am unsure at this moment if it is my place to say more than that. You know, maybe if I feel in further defense, something should be said or maybe if I feel the public has a right to understand certain circumstances, but at this moment I think I would just like to carefully back out. I am genuinely praying for Steven Crowder. I am praying that he is reminded that there is always help in the form of the Lord.
If Owens thought she was being subtle, listeners quickly caught thedrift, concluding that her point here was that Crowder is a closeted gay man. It’s an old form of homophobic blackmail: to destroy one’s credibility, reputation, and career through the accusation that they are secretly a queer. What makes it interesting in this case is that the people driving it otherwise delight in depicting those on the left as our culture’s most egregious busybodies and scolds.
In Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, Tablet Magazine columnist Jamie Kirchick writes about how the accusation of being gay was once perceived as so grievous that gay government employees came to be considered a threat to national security—it was falsely assumed that they could easily be blackmailed, and that they would sooner betray their own country than be outed. As Kirchick documents, the supposed gay traitor held up as an example of this, Alfred Redl, was driven to betray his country by financial recklessness, not because of his sex life. However, threats to expose one’s homosexuality were no fiction. Britain’s criminalization of homosexuality created a thriving industry of blackmail, forcing gay men to pay up—or else be exposed and pay the price.
“The insinuation of homosexuality was once the most dangerous weapon in American politics—more likely to destroy a reputation or a career than the accusation that one was a communist,” Kirchick told Tablet. “Thankfully, that’s no longer the case, which is why Owens’ veiled threat against Crowder seems impotent in addition to being craven.”
In fact for years, the talking heads at The Daily Wire have insisted that they are no longer interested in prosecuting people’s private desires and that their real objection is to the state intervening in the public square to promote ideas about sex or gender ideology. They’ve marketed themselves as principled truth-tellers, preaching about the values of conservatism and trying to inoculate a growing online audience against the ugliness and immorality of the “radical” left. But that whole argument crumbles—even if Shapiro himself stays out of the fray—when his Daily Wire underlings turn gay rumors into a cudgel.
Thanks for nothing despicable Jonah Hill
Count me as one who read the comments as referring to something still awful in this day and age of almost no awfulness: child molester? murderer? Was it really clear that what was referred to was the possibility that the guy liked guys?