What Happened Today: July 22, 2022
Trump’s purge plan; Man attempts to stab Republican nominee; Who’s afraid of Alex Jones?
The Big Story
Committed to not repeating the mistakes they believed doomed the first Trump presidency, top aides to Donald Trump are planning to immediately purge the civil service if they win the White House in 2024, and replace current federal employees with pre-screened Trump loyalists. The centerpiece of the plan, as detailed by Axios’ Jonathan Swann, who broke the story on Friday, is an executive order called “Schedule F,” that was conceived in secret during the second half of Trump’s term and went into effect less than two weeks before the 2020 election. The order was quickly rescinded by President Biden after he took office but people in Trump’s inner circle tell Swann that it would be immediately reinstituted in the event that Trump is elected president again. The order would allow the president to reclassify the employment status of tens of thousands of government workers with influence over policy, nullifying their employment protections and making it possible to summarily fire whole departments en masse.
For Trump supporters, the Schedule F purges offer the best, and perhaps only, means of fighting back against the administrative state made up of unelected bureaucrats who they believe colluded to sabotage the president and his policies during the first Trump term. That is not simply a MAGA conspiracy: A number of federal administrators in ostensibly nonpolitical positions bragged about their efforts to thwart Trump’s presidency. In one notorious example, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who helped lead the since-debunked investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian government, texted his girlfriend, who was also involved in the investigation, that he would prevent Trump from becoming president. But the Trumpist plan to clean house would also engender new problems. It’s far from clear that the Trump team would be able to find enough competent loyalists to fill all the positions they would like to vacate and still make it possible to execute governing functions. Moreover, purges would likely further escalate America’s volatile partisan conflict, encouraging the Democrats to respond in kind and for both parties to view the other side as an existential threat.
Read it here: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term
In the Back Pages: Who’s Afraid of the Alex Jones Documentary?
The Rest
→ A man wielding a pointed self-defense weapon jumped on a stage near Rochester, New York, Thursday night and thrust it at Lee Zeldin, the Jewish Republican congressman running for governor of the state, who was in the middle of giving a campaign speech. Zeldin managed to control the man’s arm before the assailant was subdued by others including his running mate, former New York Police Department Deputy Inspector Alison Esposito. “The attacker will likely be instantly released under NY’s laws,” Zeldin tweeted after the incident referring to the state’s new bail laws that took effect in January 2020. And, indeed, the suspect in the attack, David G. Jakubonis, was released without bail hours after the incident, highlighting the public safety issues that have become a central plank of Zeldin’s campaign. No motive has yet been identified in the incident.
→ Given that Zeldin is a Republican, the attempted attack on him may not fit neatly into the current discourse about a rising threat of political violence in the U.S. In fact, it may not fit at all.
→ The patient who came down with the first reported case of polio in the United States in a decade is an Orthodox Jewish man from Rockland County, north of New York City. Health officials believe that the man, who is now suffering from partial paralysis, acquired the disease by coming into contact with someone who had received an oral vaccine containing a live strain of the poliovirus. Once a highly contagious disease, polio killed 3,100 people in the U.S., mostly children, in a 1952 outbreak that left more than 21,000 paralyzed. The disease was effectively eliminated in developed countries by the widespread adoption of the polio vaccine, which is now part of the CDC's standard immunization schedule that children are required to get before attending school. But while 92% of children across the country are vaccinated by the age of 2, the rate is only 60% in Rockland County according to state data, a discrepancy that local officials say is driven by widespread “vaccine hesitancy” in Rockland’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
→ Years of Alzheimer's research detailing the causes of the disease and its possible cures might have been based on fabrications and deceptions, a new article in Science magazine alleges. The problems started in 2006 when Nature, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, published research that seemed to conclusively prove the “dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which holds that Aβ clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness.” Investigators, researchers, and scientists now reviewing that data believe that the authors of that 2006 article “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and forensic image consultant, told Science. If these images prove to be fabrications, it will have enormous consequences for the field of Alzheimer’s research. “The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field,” said Thomas Südhof, a Stanford University neuroscientist and Nobel laureate, as millions of dollars and thousands of research hours will have been based on a falsehood.
→ Ukraine and Russia reached a deal on Friday to allow millions of tons of Ukrainian grain to move through Russian-controlled Black Sea ports that are currently blockaded. The agreement—a first since the start of the war—also contains provisions to secure safe passage for Russian fertilizer products that are much needed at the moment as the world moves closer to an acute food shortage that has caused prices to spike around the globe. The deal, which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, will last for 120 days before being up for potential renewal. With grain shipment expected to begin moving again on Saturday, U.N. officials project that it could be only a few weeks before Ukraine is back to its prewar level, shipping roughly five million tons of grain per month.
→ BlackRock, the largest investment management company in the world, with nearly $10 trillion in assets under its control, now manages a good deal less after the company lost $1.7 trillion in the past six months—the largest loss ever for a single firm in so short a period. “2022 ranks as the worst start in 50 years for both stocks and bonds,” Larry Fink, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, explained on a recent earnings call, trying to calm his customers shaken by the 11% decrease in the value of the company’s assets portfolio compared to last year. And for now Fink’s framing seems to be working: Despite its dismal performance, BlackRock has still been able to bring in $89.6 billion in new client investments so far this year.
→ The New Yorker, a magazine so “deeply committed to accuracy” that it fact-checks its fiction, finds itself embroiled in a classic whodunnit: Was it the “insubordinate” archives editor who introduced two factual errors into the magazine, or the magazine’s crafty editor-in-chief? The story begins with Erin Overbey, the archives editor, publicly accusing the magazine of putting her under a “performance review” after she tweeted about gender inequities at the publication. That review found two errors in her work—some factual mistakes in her writing that made it past the fact-checkers and copy editors—but Overbey now asserts that these errors were actually inserted into her work by none other than David Remnick, the magazine’s editor-in-chief of 24 years. Overbey says she has emails that support this accusation—“I don’t pretend to understand why [Remnick] did this,” she wrote—and is hoping for an apology from the magazine, perhaps to be followed by a ritualized defenestration.
→ HSBC, the British bank that makes almost all of its money in China, will be the first foreign lender to install officials from the Chinese Communist Party in its Chinese office, bowing to the CCP’s demands that it do so. While it is a long-standing law in China that international companies must have such CCP officials in their offices, the rule has not been enforced for foreign financial firms—that is, until now. HSBC’s decision to bring Chinese officials into the bank will likely force other banks to follow suit, several senior bankers based in China told the Financial Times. This decision “is significant in the sense of where [HSBC] is allocating its future. It is increasing its ties with an autocracy that clearly has views on how far it wants to reach into private companies,” a source familiar with the move told the Financial Times. It’s worth noting that earlier this month, HSBC’s global head of responsible investments resigned after he faced backlash for saying that the financial risks from climate change were overstated. In the wake of those comments, the company suspended him, and his position became “unsustainable,” as he put it.
→ In its failing effort to build more submarines, the U.S. is encountering cost increases, supply shortages, maintenance delays, and concerns about the capability of national shipyards to manage the vessels. All of this amounts not only to a capability gap for America’s navy but also to the likelihood that the U.S. won’t make good on its Aukus pact with Australia and the U.K., signed earlier this year despite protests from the French, who had inked a previous submarine deal with Australia that the Aukus pact canceled out. A recent report to Congress suggested that while the U.S. is trying to build 60 nuclear-powered boats for its own aging fleet, it won’t reach that milestone until 2052. For now, the Australians have stopped holding their breath for a new American vessel anytime soon. “All the publicly available material points to the U.S. not providing us with a submarine,” one official said.
→ Map of the Day
As we head into what’s slated to be a blistering hot weekend, with heat waves and droughts covering much of the globe, our thoughts turn toward cold brews. Today’s map lists the beer of choice in every country in the world, and hopefully sends you off in the right direction. In Israel, you’ll be surprised to learn, Sapporo is the drink of choice—l’chaim and kanpai!
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
THE BACK PAGES:
Today’s Back Pages comes from The Scroll’s newest contributor, Katherine Dee, better known online as Default Friend, with a column on a new documentary about Alex Jones, and the efforts to prevent it from reaching the public.
Alex’s War, a new documentary about Alex Jones that attempts to penetrate the mystique of the polarizing founder of Infowars, faces an additional challenge. The film, which chronicles Jones’ involvement in the Stop the Steal movement and how his paranoid populism and manic charisma influenced American political culture, is running into some of the same restrictions that have confronted its subject, albeit on a smaller scale.
Rather than just being panned by critics or rejected by the public, the film’s producers and director say that they are facing something more like a coordinated blackout. Reviewers and distributors are scared to take on the documentary, they claim, fearful of the potential backlash, while online platforms are using their opaque rules for content regulation to prevent the film from reaching an audience. Of course, there have always been challenges in making difficult art that challenges viewers—that, in itself, is nothing new. But the reception of the documentary, which attempts to be a balanced portrait, not a celebration of Jones, suggests that even journalistic efforts to depict controversial subjects now face soft censorship pressures.
Presales for Alex’s War were trending in the top three slots on the iTunes Store this week, competing with (and in some cases beating) blockbuster films like Top Gun and Green Lantern. This happened without, as Hadrian Belove of Play Nice Ltd., the production company behind the film, shared, “Any editorial attention from the iTunes store.”
But that’s not to say that there’s no enthusiasm for the film. When it was announced that Glenn Greenwald would be interviewing both Jones and the film’s director, Alex Lee Moyer, at the premiere on Saturday, tweets about it went viral not once, not twice, but multiple times. Before it even came out, the film was nothing if not an attention-generator. But according to Moyer and Belove, they’ve experienced several attempts to sabotage Alex’s War’s release.
Before shooting had started, the documentary was already hitting snags in production. When I spoke to Moyer about her experience hiring a crew, she said that it had been “really hard to find people.” Potential hires had to be put through extensive vetting to weed out people with political, as opposed to artistic, motivations, including those who might want to sabotage the film.
Nothing about this film has been straightforward, according to Belove. There have been issues with distribution—par for the course for movies that a theatrical distribution company hasn’t acquired—so Belove has been booking theaters himself with the help of an independent booker. He shared some of the responses he received from venues, many of them to the tune of this one, which read: “Alex Jones is not someone we would want our organization associated with in any capacity whatsoever.”
“Almost no one in Austin would rent us a theater for the premiere,” Belove said of the film’s reception in Jones’ hometown of Austin, Texas, a city once known for its tolerance of eccentricity and “live weird or die” ethos. “We were turned down by the Austin Film Society after telling them what it was, and Alamo Drafthouse stopped answering inquiries. We experienced the same nationwide.”
The Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, one of the theaters Belove did find willing to screen Alex’s War, briefly pranked them, switching out the trailer on the preview page with a link to the January 6th hearings. The video has since been replaced with the trailer.
Despite the film’s topicality and the fact that Jones has been a media fixture, Belove alleges that “much press has refused to review,” the documentary. Belove claimed that The New York Times and Deadline said they wouldn’t cover the film because of the “subject matter and approach.” It’s certainly plausible that reviewers would be reluctant to write about the documentary, lest they be seen as “platforming” a film about Jones, let alone betraying any sympathy for its subject. But there are also plenty of nonpolitical reasons an independent feature seeking distribution might get overlooked. As a freelance journalist, I receive dozens of weekly requests to review books and movies—staff writers often receive many more. Competition for these types of placements can be fierce.
The clearest case for the documentary being censored is taking place on content streaming sites and social media platforms …
The leftist media also ignored Bernard Henri Levy's latest doc The Will to See. No reviews no publicity. I saw it - it's great - and believe that because it does not follow the left's narrative it has to be ignored. Mr. Levy returns to many places from which he has reported during the last 50 years to see if there have been changes. One prominent fact which need not be emphasized is that Muslims are involved in every conflict. Either against each other or as one side against non-Muslims the Muslims are there yet if you read the NY Times one would never know this.