What Happened Today: June 26, 2023
A quick coup ends; DeSantis talks big game on immigration; Pablo Escobar missed his moment
The Big Story
Russian state media said on Monday that the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, remained under criminal investigation after he abruptly aborted his attempt to overtake the Russian defense ministry this weekend. The ongoing criminal case against the leader of the first coup attempt in Russia in three decades seems to contradict Russian officials who earlier told reporters that the investigation had ended after a truce of sorts was brokered on Saturday between Prigozhin and the Kremlin with an assist from Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The terms of that deal remain uncertain, as does the whereabouts of Prigozhin and the fate of Wagner’s 25,000 armed troops, though Russian state media outlets said Wagner fighters would receive amnesty. U.S. intelligence officials first became aware of the possible coup attempt led by Prigozhin last week and notified senior members of the White House and congressional officials, according to a report published by The New York Times over the weekend.
With no mention of his location, Prigozhin said on Monday that marching his troops on Moscow was not an attempt to overthrow the government but rather an act of political protest against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Prigozhin previously said he wanted removed from his post. “We didn’t have the goal of toppling the existing regime, which is lawfully elected, as we have said many times,” Prigozhin said in a recording posted on Telegram. “Our decision to turn around came from two important factors. … The first was that we did not want to spill Russian blood. The second, we were marching to demonstrate our protest, not to unseat the government.”
In Kyiv, “The Wagner coup was watched with tremendous interest and excitement,” said Tablet’s Ukraine correspondent Vladislav Davidzon. “There was so much glee and schadenfreude—but also a great deal of expectation of some sort of miracle.”
In the Back Pages: The Human Rights Campaign Invents an Emergency
The Rest
→ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he can solve America’s immigration problems. Announcing the first major policy push in what’s been a muddled, uneven presidential campaign so far, DeSantis says he would solve the crisis at the U.S. southern border by declaring a national emergency, sending troops to the border, building a wall, and enacting a mass detention and deportation of undocumented people. If that sounds familiar, the DeSantis campaign acknowledged as much this weekend, posting online that “Trump ran on this same promise in 2016, but ended up deporting fewer illegals than Barack Obama.” Assuring prospective voters that he has the magic touch his opponent lacks, DeSantis also said he would tackle the nation’s drug overdose crisis by sending some of the troops currently working the immigration beat “across the border to secure our territory from Mexican cartel activities.”
→ New York City pizzerias that cook with coal or wood in their ovens—as all the best old-school pizzerias do—could soon be forced to install expensive emission-control filtration systems, as the city’s Department of Environmental Protection seeks new regulations that would force pizza shops to cut carbon emissions by 75%. Upwards of 100 pizza joints could fall under the new regulations that, according to one restaurant owner speaking anonymously to the New York Post, could undermine the quality of their product. “This is an unfunded mandate, and it’s going to cost us a fortune, not to mention ruining the taste of the pizza—totally destroying the product.”
1) After trailing the European Union’s economy as recently as 2008, the U.S. economy is now almost one-third larger, at $25 trillion.
2) Discounting the United Kingdom’s, the U.S. economy is 50% larger than the European Union’s.
3) Valued at $3 billion, Michael Jordan’s recent sale of his majority stake in NBA team the Hornets netted him more than a 10x return on his original $275 million investment.
4) Jordan’s lifetime Nike earnings: $1 billion
5) Jordan’s total salary as a player: $94 million
6) More than 40% of California residents said they’re considering leaving the state, largely because of the high cost of living.
7) The median American household needs to spend 40% of its income to afford today’s median home price, up 28% from 2020.
8) More than 20% of young adults in China are unemployed.
9) New York City has spent $1.2 billion since last year caring for the influx of new immigrants.
10) NYC expects to spend $4.3 billion on services for new immigrant arrivals over the next 12 months.
11) New Yorkers take in 2.3 million delivered packages every day, 500,000 more than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
12) Hoka sneakers sales hit $1.4 billion in 2023, up from $3 million in 2012.
13) Traffic fatalities in Washington, D.C., are up 50% this year.
→ Germany’s largest bank can’t find some of its Russian stocks, Reuters reported on Monday, after viewing a note Deutsche Bank sent to investors earlier in June. The stock shortfall that the bank uses to hold up deposits was traced back to shares held in Russia by another bank that Moscow had allowed investors to convert into local stock. “The conversion was carried out without the German bank’s ‘involvement or oversight,’ and Deutsche was unable to reconcile the company shares with the depositary receipts,” Reuters said. While some investors with significant holdings of deposit receipts in Russian banks have held out hope for recovering some of their funds, many have marked down their assets to zero. “Literally everything in Russia has been vulnerable,” said Irina Tsukerman, president at geopolitical risk consultancy Scarab Rising.
→ Americans across the Northeast and Ohio Valley are scratching at an unprecedented number of bug bites, according to a new Climate Central analysis that found a surge in the number of days with humidity and temperatures conducive to mosquitoes. Looking at data taken from 242 locations nationwide between 1979 and 2022, the study found an average increase of 16 so-called mosquito days in 173 places, with parts of the South struggling with flies at least half of the year and Northeast and Ohio Valley residents seeing the biggest region-wide surge over the evaluated timeline. Some areas in the deeper South, however, saw the number of mosquito days go down, but only because of an uptick in days exceeding 95 degrees, which is hot enough to be unsuitable to the buzzing insects.
→ Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison abruptly resigned from his post two weeks ago, yet the details of his separation and why he remains on the city payroll remain unclear, reports The Baltimore Banner. Harrison stepped down after four years as the city’s top cop on June 8, following days of rumors that he was seeking the same job in Washington, D.C. Fueling speculation, Harrison’s wife posted a bizarre illustration of her husband’s face above some chess pieces on Instagram, writing “no caption needed.” Currently, Harrison is collecting on his $275,000 salary while the mayor’s appointed replacement, Deputy Commissioner Richard Worley, ostensibly has taken over the position.
→ The ongoing rise of e-commerce has pushed rental rates at warehouses up 21% in the first quarter of this year compared to last year, a rare sign of optimism in the commercial real estate sector and one that Prologis cited in its Monday announcement of its $3.1 billion deal to buy a slate of warehouses in Atlanta and California from Blackstone. While industrial property prices fell 9% over the past 12 months through May, that’s still significantly better than property prices for offices, which saw a drop of 26% over the same period.
→ The United Nations annual World Drug Report says cocaine manufacturing has hit an all-time high, with growing markets in Asia and Africa starting to close the gap on the leading customer markets in Europe and the United States. Counting an estimated total of 22 million cocaine users worldwide, the report says illegal drug makers are shifting resources to produce higher volumes of meth, though it remains to be seen if the two markets “will develop in parallel or whether one will substitute the other.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Ukraine Needs to Win Faster by Mark Galeotti
Kyiv is fighting three wars, not one—and time likely favors Moscow
Finding a New Spiritual Home by Erica Silverman
Reform rabbis see an increase in conversion—much of it coming from the LGBTQ+ community
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 Human Rights Campaign Invents an Emergency
And develops a new strategy for making minority groups permanent wards of the Democratic Party
The fomenting of hysteria has become such a predictable feature of American public life that it’s hard to retain the capacity for shock. Seemingly not a day goes by without political outrage entrepreneurs warning us that some nefarious group or concept — drag queens, “white supremacy,” Antifa, “disinformation,” immigrant rapists, Russian bots — constitutes an existential threat to the nation. And yet even by the already debased standards of our discourse, the declaration earlier this month of a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization in the United States, constitutes a new low.
HRC issued this alert “for the first time ever” since its founding in 1980. Gay and lesbian Americans have endured a lot since that year — a deadly epidemic, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and a proposed Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, to name just a few setbacks. But apparently none of these compare with what HRC calls the “unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses.”
HRC’s characterization of the over 75 “anti-LGBTQ+” bills signed into law this past year obscures how most of them relate not to gay issues but to transgender ones. Some of these laws — like a Florida provision mandating people use bathrooms that correspond with their natal sex and a Tennessee act limiting drag performances — could indeed be described as authoritarian, and the latter has already been blocked by a conservative federal judge. But many of the rest pertain to subjects about which reasonable people can, and do, disagree.
According to an extensive poll conducted earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post, Americans overwhelmingly oppose the foundational precepts of contemporary transgender activism. 57% of American adults believe gender is determined at birth, 69% say transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender, nearly 70% oppose the provision of puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children, 58% oppose hormone therapy for minors, and a majority believe it is inappropriate for teachers to discuss transgender identity from kindergarten through eighth grade. These are the suite of views that HRC and its sympathizers in the media would have us believe comprise a “hate” so vile as to justify a State Department-style travel warning for red states.
“Many Americans hold complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the subject” of transgender identity, the Post observed after its survey. “While a majority of Americans oppose access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children and teenagers, for instance, clear majorities also support laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people, including in K-12 schools.” Only in the mind of those deep within the progressive bubble would there be anything “contradictory” in opposing sex changes for children and discrimination against transgender individuals.
Viewed from Europe, the state-level measures in the U.S. hardly seem like the stuff of creeping fascism. Three days after HRC pronounced whole swathes of the United States unsafe for LGBTQ+ Americans due to bills regulating the provision of puberty blockers to children, England’s National Health Service announced that it would ban the use of such medications outside clinical trials as “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.” Official health bodies in Finland, Sweden, Norway and France have undertaken similar efforts. Will HRC censure all these liberal democracies as well?
It's tempting to write off HRC’s “national state of emergency” as a publicity stunt, a lame attempt at one-upping the “travel advisory” put out by the NAACP just two weeks earlier warning Black Americans to avoid entering Florida over Gov. Ron De Santis’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.” But HRC’s pronouncement is more than just a cynical fundraising ploy, and its release so soon after a similar scare-tactic directed at African-Americans is no coincidence. Both are attempts at making minority groups permanent wards of the Democratic Party. Telling people that they risk mortal danger unless Democrats are in power is a means, however shrill and uninspired, of corralling them within the party’s virtuous coalition of the oppressed.
When homosexuality started becoming a partisan political issue in the late 1970s, it made sense that most gay people would identify as left of center. Gays faced widespread discrimination, much of it fomented by a rising evangelical Christian right, and the few allies they could find were on the left. But over the next four decades, American public opinion underwent a profound shift, and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the legalization of gay marriage, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County extending the non-discrimination protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to gays (and transgender people), reduced homosexuality’s political saliency. The nomination by the GOP of the Elton John-loving, YMCA-dancing Donald Trump, and the advent of majority Republican support for same-sex marriage in 2021, reinforced this trend.
In an increasingly post-gay country, a new rationale would have to be devised for keeping gays and lesbians in line. Having won their own battle for equality, they would now have to swear fealty to a newfangled “queer” movement devoted to novel and abstruse concepts concerning gender. And so it was that basic civil rights for gay people have come to be conflated with a radical transgender ideology that in many ways erases gay people.
Implicating gays and lesbians in the queer political project requires replacing the words “gay” and “lesbian” with the ever-expanding “LGBTQIA+” acronym (the last letter of which, standing for “asexual,” epitomizes the farce). It requires distorting the history of the Stonewall Uprising, falsely claiming—as the Anti-Defamation League recently did in a tweet celebrating Pride Month—that it was actually “trans women” who “led resistance against police harassment” on that fateful final weekend of June 1969. And it requires emotionally blackmailing gay people, deceiving them that their personal safety is somehow threatened by bills limiting the provision of puberty blockers to gender nonconforming children, most of whom would grow up to be gay.
Recognizing just how out of favor their ideas are with the public, the queer movement is exploiting the goodwill most Americans now feel towards gay people to advance its cause. Ergo, the attempt to make “opposing sex changes for children and biological men competing in women’s sports” concomitant with “opposing Adam and Steve’s marriage.” The risk with implicating gay men and lesbians in a deeply unpopular agenda having nothing to do with them, alas, is that they will suffer the inevitable backlash. There are already worrisome signs that this is happening. Earlier this month, Gallup reported that the percentage of Americans who believe same-sex relations to be morally acceptable dropped from an all-time high of 71% last year to 64% this year, the largest decline ever recorded. After decades of steadily growing acceptance, what could possibly explain this sudden and precipitous drop other than the excesses of transgender activism, and the dangerous impression that gay people are partly responsible for them?