What Happened Today: July 19, 2022
Sesame Place’s PR nightmare; Afghanistan report stalled by Defense officials; Before We Mistook Our Bitterness for Righteousness
The Big Story
A nine-second viral video filmed at Sesame Place in Philadelphia has become a public relations nightmare for the theme park, and grounds for a potential lawsuit. But while outrage online suggests the video shows a random incident of racism, the video was initially promoted by a digital strategy consultant and anti-racism activist who sells T-shirts with the logo “raise better white people” on her website—and the theme park says the incident was a misunderstanding. The original clip was posted on Twitter by a mother of one of the two young Black girls in the video and by their aunt, the digital consultant Leslie Mac. In the clip, the girls, who were there for a birthday celebration, wave toward a performer in a Rosita costume walking in a parade. It appears that Rosita high-fives a person in the crowd and then shakes her hand no to someone off camera before shaking her head no to the young girls, who reach out their arms for an embrace. The refusal to high-five—which the park claimed was in keeping with its policy and Mac and others said was a racist rebuff targeting the girls for being Black—led to the clip going viral. It has accumulated more than 9 million views on various social media platforms.
“The performer portraying the Rosita character has confirmed that the ‘no’ hand gesture seen several times in the video was not directed to any specific person, rather it was a response to multiple requests from someone in the crowd who asked Rosita to hold their child for a photo, which is not permitted,” Sesame Place said in a statement on Sunday. Despite not being able to hear anything off camera, thousands of online commentators rejected the theme park’s response as inadequate and maintained that the behavior in the video was clearly an act of racism. Additional social media posts by the family of the girls, including from Mac, led to increased backlash against the park and national media attention. That prompted a more contrite statement from Sesame Workshop, the parent company of the show Sesame Street who oversees the park, which said it “sincerely apologize(s) to the family for their experience,” adding that the park management “assured us that they will conduct bias training and a thorough review of the ways in which they engage with families and guests.” Mac, who also “conducts anti-racism audits” for clients, including Google, Amazon, and Justice League, according to her website, gave several interviews to media outlets covering the episode and updated her social media profiles Tuesday with a video saying “our family has retained a lawyer and we will be pursuing things that way.”
Read More: https://ew.com/tv/viral-sesame-place-rosita-video-family-hires-lawyer/
In the Back Pages: Before We Mistook Our Bitterness for Righteousness
The Rest
→ An internal report on the calamitous withdrawal of U.S. military from Afghanistan last August is being held up by top Department of Defense officials, raising concerns that the delay is driven by fear of political blowback for the Biden administration. Already bracing for a potentially disastrous midterm election for Democrats, the White House could face renewed criticism of a report that dissects the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces after a two-decade occupation of Afghanistan. It was then that thousands of Afghanistans who’d worked closely with U.S. military and contractors were unable to flee on crowded flights out of the airport in Kabul, with videos showing some Afghans clinging to departing planes and falling from midair. In March, a draft of the internal report was first submitted to Pentagon officials, which was “critical of some of the Pentagon’s own leadership,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “Top officials then asked for the report to be revised … to expand the scope of the report beyond the initial assessment.” That new draft was recently submitted but now remains in limbo with no clear timeline for release. “If the government takes stuff out because it’s politically damaging, that would be a big problem,” said Seth Jones, a vice president of the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/report-on-pentagon-role-in-afghanistan-nears-completion-11658149201
→ A mortgage boycott is mounting in China, with middle-class homeowners refusing to pay for apartments that developers promised but have not yet built.
Boycotts have already spread across at least 91 Chinese cities, where buyers purchased properties in under-construction developments that have since stalled; those buyers are now refusing to pay monthly mortgages for homes that don’t exist.
China’s housing market experienced its worst downturn on record in the last year, in part because of President Xi Jinping’s efforts to limit developers’ access to capital in the hopes of calming the bubbly real estate sector. Xi’s policies reining in real estate led to $80 billion in losses for the country and are expected to reduce China’s GDP for 2022 by 1.4%.
While Xi has held firm to his policy to slow down the real estate market, these middle-class boycotts pose more of a PR problem for his administration—especially with the Communist Party meeting, held once every five years, coming up in the fall. At this year’s meeting, Xi intends to seek a norm-breaking third term and to lead the Chinese Communist Party for the rest of his life, just as Mao Zedong did from 1949 until his death in 1976.
→ A Super PAC funded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has slowed fundraising for Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance as his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, has rapidly accelerated his campaign, courting conservative voters in what could be a decisive race for who controls the chamber after the midterm elections. Since its first $10 million donation and active high-profile backing of Vance to help him win the Republican primary, Thiel’s fundraising vehicle has only contributed $675,800 of the $2.3 million Vance raised for the most recent quarter, which is three times less than Ryan’s $9.1 million haul. Revealing the vulnerability of relying on a single patron, Vance has failed to lure other major donors, partly, it seems, because they believe they won’t be able to influence Vance’s policies in light of “the record sum that Thiel has spent,” according to a new Bloomberg report. Ryan, meanwhile, is now roughly tied in recent polls with Vance and has used his war chest on massive TV ad campaigns that smear Vance as a socialite who’s a “hit at Washington cocktail parties” while painting himself as a conservative populist. According to an Axios report on Sunday, Thiel will resume his support for Vance’s campaign in the fall, once another Senate candidate with his backing, Blake Masters, wraps up his attempt to win the Arizona primary in August.
→ While making a pizza delivery in Lafayette, Indiana, on Monday night, Nicholas Bostic spotted a house engulfed in flames. He quickly ran to the rear of the house, entered through the back door, and began shouting to the family sleeping upstairs, waking four children who were sleeping inside, ages 1 through 18. He helped the children out before learning that a 6-year-old was still upstairs. Bostic ran back into the burning house, wrapping his mouth and nose in his T-shirt so he could breathe through the thick smoke, and searched the rooms until he heard a cry coming from the lower level. He found the child downstairs, but he couldn’t find an exit, so he returned to the top floor, punched through a window, and jumped out with the child cradled in his arms. On a video, he can be heard asking the medics treating his wounds, “Is the baby okay? Please tell me that baby’s okay.” Officials told him that the baby was fine. “You did good, dude.”
You can watch footage from the scene here.
→ VIDEO OF THE DAY
Another rainstorm and another viral clip of New York City subways flooded by gushing street water. This clip of the Dyckman Street subway station led Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine to complain on Twitter that “we need a subway system that doesn’t produce tropical waterfalls every time there’s a heavy rain,” though it might take a little while for a full system overhaul. A recent audit of New York infrastructure gave the state’s transit system a D+ grade, in large part because of the New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $62 billion backlog of service work.
→ Nancy Pelosi will be leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan next month in a show of solidarity for the country against China’s claims that Taiwan is Chinese territory; China, meanwhile, has said that such a trip from the Speaker of the House would constitute a “malicious provocation.” Pelosi was scheduled to travel to Taiwan in April—and would have been the highest-level U.S. official to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House himself, traveled to Taiwan in 1997—but she contracted COVID-19 and was forced to cancel the trip. With the trip now rescheduled for August, China has doubled down on its displeasure, demanding that the United States “adhere to the One China principle,” which asserts that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China.
→ Sen. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri who has become a frequent target for politicians and pundits across the aisle, is earning rare bipartisan support for his new bill that bans consultants from working for both the U.S. government and the Chinese government at the same time. “The fact that these consultants are awarded huge contracts by our Defense Department and other federal agencies, while they are simultaneously working to advance China’s efforts to coerce the United States is appalling and completely unacceptable,” Hawley said in a statement about the new legislation, called The Time to Choose Act. One shining example of this practice is McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm that pulls in almost a billion dollars in revenue from federal contracts while also consulting firms linked to the Chinese government on how to advance efforts that are in direct opposition to U.S. foreign policy. McKinsey plays for both sides domestically as well; the company recently settled a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars when it was discovered that it advised Purdue on how to boost opioid sales while advising the FDA on how to manage the opioid epidemic.
→ Baruch Lanner, the former Orthodox rabbi who was the principal of Hillel Yeshiva High School in New Jersey until an investigation by The Jewish Week found that he had been physically and sexually abusing students in the school for decades, will not be granted Israeli citizenship, Israel’s interior minister announced on Monday. This came after the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), one of the most important rabbinical organizations in the country, lobbied the Israeli government directly, requesting that it deny Lanner’s application for citizenship. On Monday, the RCA’s president, Rabbi Binyamin Blau, and executive vice president, Rabbi Mark Dratch, wrote to Israel’s Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked to “express [their] concern that convicted serial sex offender Baruch Lanner was granted temporary residency status in Israel and that his request for citizenship is under consideration by your ministry.” In response, Shaked’s office offered a clarifying statement “that in light of Lanner’s serious actions, [Shaked] does not intend to approve his application for citizenship at the end of the temporary visa in his possession.”
→ In response to this summer’s steady drumbeat of somber news, from mass shootings to the war in Ukraine to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Americans say they are tuning out and avoiding their news sources at unprecedented levels. “Americans have grown exhausted from the constant barrage of bad headlines that have replaced Trump-era crises, scandals, and tweets,” Axios found, noting a 50% decrease in social media interactions with news articles in 2022, and 16%-19% decreases in cable news, news app use, and news websites visits compared to the same period last year. Some news networks, however, fared far worse than others: While CNN’s viewership has plummeted 47% and MSNBC’s 33%, Fox News has seen a 12% increase so far this year.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Today’s Back Pages comes from Brittany Talissa King, a freelance writer, and an editor for a publication based in Nashville.
Before We Mistook Our Bitterness for Righteousness
The legacy of John Lewis and the civil rights movement’s lost discipline of love
This past Sunday marked two years since the passing of American hero and Congressman John Lewis. Before he held office in D.C., Lewis was the budding chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee turned central leader in the civil rights movement. And as I parse through articles, photographs, and interviews commemorating him and his civil rights legacy, I cannot help but notice the drastic difference between the humility that he and other activists of his ilk have embodied, and our egocentric culture.
Something is happening in our country that I cannot quite explain.
It seems as if our nation is desperate for our constant chaos to stop spinning. We appear to be collectively fatigued by our division, yet we continuously devour one another online and off the web. Why?
Many times, the answers to our pressing questions are already recorded in history. As a millennial who knows only a post-segregated America, I’ve always been fascinated with the activists of the civil rights movement—not only because of their astonishing accomplishments but also that they achieved them nonviolently.
“Long before any sit-ins, any marches to Selma or Montgomery, any Freedom Rides—we studied civil disobedience,” Lewis explained in an interview with On Being in 2013. The nonviolent philosophy that he and others put into practice wasn’t just a moral stance but a discipline. The activists took courses every Tuesday night in a Methodist church near Fisk University. There they would train and participate in intense workshops, role-playing violent scenarios they’d face during boycotts, protests, and demonstrations. “You’d trained through the motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you off your seat, someone kicking you, someone pretending to spit on you. We needed to feel like we were in the actual situation,” said Lewis. “When the time came, we were prepared.”
The intense preparation was necessary because peaceful disobedience defies human nature; for most people, our instinctual response would be to physically defend ourselves against violence. “You have to be taught the way of peace. You have to be taught the way of love,” Lewis said before detailing mental tactics employed to curb the instinct to strike back. “When someone was hitting us, you have to remember they were once an innocent baby. And you must think, ‘What happened to them along the way?’ In the religious sense, we all have a spark of a divine. We tried to appeal to the goodness of every human.”
Now, this is usually where the nonviolent conversation gets boxed. Many people classify this philosophy as either having historical superpowers, meaning we could not possibly practice it in our own time, or being hopelessly antiquated, meaning we shouldn’t practice it any longer. But Lewis challenged that notion in the interview, insisting the execution of nonviolence was not a gift or a superpower, but a rigorous practice. A primary tactic taught during the civil workshops was to always keep eye contact with one’s attacker. “If someone kicked us, spit on us, or pulled us off a lunch-counter stool—we were trained to make eye contact with them. We needed to make the impression, ‘Yes, you hit me. But I’m still human.’”
In the same interview, Lewis recalls a humorous moment with his friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “He told me just to love the hell out of them.” Even though King was being lighthearted, Lewis knew he was not spouting a cliché, but a biblical teaching: “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44-46).
Restraint was activists’ most effective weapon, targeting their attacker’s conscience. Not only did their nonviolence refocus the public’s attention on the unjustifiable wrath of their attackers, but also nonviolence accompanied by human eye contact held the perpetrators accountable for their unwarranted war on innocent persons.
Perhaps the absence of eye contact is why it’s so easy for us to fight online. If we had to face a person and look into their eyes before tweeting, would we?
Read more here.
Beautiful piece by Brittany Talissa King
Josh Hawley is a Republican Senator from Missouri.