What Happened Today: June 7, 2023
Canada on fire; No more insurance for Californians; Disney goes full INGSOC on Gene Hackman
The Big Story
Cities across the nation saw their skylines vanish and their states issue air-quality warnings as smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires drifted south over the border on Wednesday. Officials along the entire East Coast and in several Midwestern states warned millions that the particles circulating in the thick, acrid air could be dangerous, prompting schools to cancel outdoor activities while stores struggled to keep masks and air purifiers on the shelves. The hazy skies were particularly thick in New York, which notched the unfortunate honor of the world’s second-worst air quality on Wednesday, falling just behind smog-ridden Delhi, India, according to air-quality index IQAir.
Forecasts showed that some eastern states could be shrouded in a haze all the way through Friday as the smoke continues to drift south from the hundreds of fires that have burned for weeks, largely in Quebec. Some 10,000 residents in and around Quebec have had to flee their homes while Canadian firefighters, aided by crews from France and the United States, fought the raging flames. Two storm systems, one near Nova Scotia and another swirling around New England, helped usher the smoke over the border, though they didn’t necessarily dissipate the haze in Canada, where high-risk warnings will likely remain in place through Thursday. “It is terrible. I have lived in Ottawa since 1996, and I have never seen a day like this,” Dr. Shawn Aaron, a pulmonologist, told Ottawa Citizen.
Read More: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/air-quality-toronto-fires-smoke-1.6868010
In the Back Pages: America’s Most Israeli Politician
The Rest
→ Antitrust regulators are already eyeing up the merger between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia-financed upstart LIV Golf that was announced on Tuesday, with Bloomberg citing unnamed sources close to U.S. antitrust enforcers who see the move “as a brazen play loaded with red flags, not the least of which is creating a giant monopoly in an industry that had only recently gained a competitor.”
At least for now the blockbuster deal has halted the contentious legal battle waged between the two rivals over the past year, though the announcement caught many in the sports world by surprise as top PGA Tour players and executives have regularly raked LIV as an attempt by Saudi officials to “sport wash” their shoddy human-rights record.
“Nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with,” golfer Mackenzie Hughes wrote online.
Acknowledging the whiplash felt by many of his players, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan didn’t have a great answer when reporters asked why he approved the deal after months of urging his golfers to remain loyal in the face of gigantic paychecks from LIV because of where that money was coming from. “Circumstances changed,” Monahan said. “I recognize people will call me a hypocrite.”
→ Some of California’s largest insurance companies said they will no longer take on new customers for business, personal property, or casualty insurance as the risks of extreme weather events have become too much of a burden on their bottom line. Citing “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation” along with the “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure,” State Farm, which holds 20% of the Golden State’s home insurance policies, will turn down new applicants going forward and might limit how many current customers it renews in the future. Last week, California’s fourth-largest insurance provider, Allstate, confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle that it would follow State Farm’s lead, with the cost to insure new homes “far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires,” said an Allstate representative.
→ Once all that Canadian wildfire smoke dissipates, a familiar if at times unwelcome odor of burning cannabis will likely return to many American cities. However, some are already pushing back against the olfactory intrusion, with one Washington, D.C., woman winning a lawsuit against a neighbor for the inescapable smell of his weed habits. While Judge Ebony Scott said in her ruling on Monday that the plaintiff, Josefa Ippolito-Shepherd, was not entitled to damages, the judge upheld that the neighbor’s medical marijuana card was not “a license to disrupt the full use and enjoyment of one’s land.” Barring the neighbor from smoking in his home or within 25 feet of Ippolito-Shepherd’s residence, the legal ruling is expected to open the door to similar legal action nationwide.
→ After purchasing the classic 1971 classic film The French Connection from original owner 20th Century Fox, Disney has quietly edited out a brief, first-act section of the movie where Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle utters a racial slur. Owners of old DVDs of the movie will be able to see the unadulterated version, while those who stream it in The Criterion Channel—or, as one viewer recently reported online, in theaters—will see an awkwardly cut version with no mention that they’re not getting the original. As Slate writer Sam Adams notes, “The uncensored French Connection should be the only one in circulation, whether on TV or in theaters. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that [director] Friedkin knew exactly what having his detective protagonist use [the slur] said about him.”
→ A Glendale, California, school board meeting over LGTBQ content in the classroom ended in violent clashes between Antifa members and parents from the Hispanic and Armenian communities in the district. Authorities arrested three people involved in the confrontations that followed growing concern among parents who had taken kids out of school after the district started integrating gender content across various class lessons and hosting an increasing number of Pride events and celebrations in June. Video coverage of the skirmishes showed parents trading blows with protestors waving rainbow flags before police could break up the fighting.
→ Quote of the Day:
Thanks Tim, quick question: can we use this to literally live inside our memories of the past as the present crumbles around us?
That’s writer David Polansky tweeting about the new promo video from Apple CEO Tim Cook as the company announced its $3,500 mixed-reality headset, the first major hardware product from Apple in almost a decade. Dubbed the Vision Pro, the product promises users to help them “remember how valuable every moment in life can be.”
→ At a celebration marking the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding held at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris waded into the contentious issue of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to revise the nation’s judicial system, saying that Israel requires “an independent judiciary.” The commentary from Harris managed to draw the ire of Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who told a reporter on Wednesday that Harris “would not be able to quote from a single clause from the judicial reform.”
→ In a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court on Tuesday, four plaintiffs say that board members of Maimonides Medical Center are mismanaging the facility’s funds at the expense of patient well-being. Alleging that Maimonides’ “cozy circle of managers and Trustees have focused too long on enriching themselves and their allies via a ‘pay-to-play’ system that rewards donors and insiders, depleting the Hospital of the funds necessary to staff and operate even a reasonably-adequate medical facility,” the plaintiffs say the court should intervene and force the hospital to run new elections for the board position.
TODAY IN TABLET:
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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.
America’s Most Israeli Politician
I like Ted Cruz. Why?
Earlier this year, department of homeland security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was called to testify before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. Ted Cruz, a member of the committee, was there to greet him.
Cruz: Good morning, Secretary Mayorkas.
Mayorkas: Good morning.
Cruz: Is there a crisis at our southern border?
Mayorkas: There’s a very significant challenge…
Cruz: That’s a yes or no question. Is there a crisis?
Mayorkas, looking a bit like a man who’d just returned home to find his significant other mid-tryst with a paramour, tilted his head and adjusted his microphone before responding.
Mayorkas: Senator, there’s a very significant, there is a very significant challenge that we are facing.
Cruz: Yes or no. Is there a crisis?
Mayorkas: I believe I’ve addressed that question.
Cruz: So you’re refusing to answer.
It was all downhill from there. Cruz, perched over his desk like a peregrine falcon, confronted Mayorkas with a large poster featuring the testimony of Raul Ortiz, President Biden’s Chief of Border Patrol, who, last summer, answered the very same question Cruz was posing in the affirmative. The senator pushed the secretary with more barbed inquiries. Sitting erect and visibly uncomfortable, the secretary dodged each one.
Cruz: How many migrants died in 2022?
Mayorkas: Approaching our southern border?
Cruz: Yes.
Mayorkas: Precisely why we are seeking to exclude the smuggling organizations.
Cruz: Do you know the answer? Do you know how many died?
Mayorkas: I do not.
Cruz: You do not? Of course you don’t. I know how many died. 853… You don’t even know how many have died! What do you say to the Texas farmers and ranchers who find pregnant ladies dead on their property, who find toddlers dead on their property? What do you say to them?
The secretary tried to respond, but the senator cut him off again and again. Cruz asked how many criminals were able to sneak through the porous border, and how many civilians, Mexican and American alike, were hurt by the gangs that have made the border their base of operations. It went on for more than ten minutes, and when time was up, Cruz didn’t bother masking his contempt.
Cruz: Mr. Secretary, I want to say to you right now your behavior is disgraceful. And the deaths, the children assaulted, the children raped, they are at your feet. And if you had integrity, you would resign. And I will tell you, the men and women of the Border Patrol, they’ve never had a political leader undermine them. They despise you, Mr. Secretary, because you’re willing to let children be raped to follow political orders. This is a crisis. It’s a disgrace. And you won’t even admit this human tragedy is a crisis.
The committee’s chairman offered Mayorkas one minute to respond, but the secretary refused.
Mayorkas: What the senator said was revolting. I’m not going to address it.
Cruz: Your refusal to do your job is revolting.
It was like a courtroom scene by Aaron Sorkin, but the media reporting on the incident left little room for doubt as to which of the two men was the nefarious Colonel Jessup and who the valiant Lieutenant Kaffee. “Ted Cruz erupts” reported Newsweek, while the senator’s own hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, accused him of shouting down the secretary and Salon alerted its readers that the senator was “slammed for ‘revolting’ hearing claim.”
Watching the exchange, I saw something different. Maybe it was the adversarial body language. Maybe it was the verbal throwdown, and the pleasure he seemed to take in sparring in front of the cameras. Maybe it was his anger, which felt real and profound. Whatever it was, at that moment Ted Cruz looked and sounded to me like America’s most Israeli politician.
There is, of course, the unmistakably Israeli bombast—which some find refreshing, but many others, including Republicans, find highly unlikeable, or even repellent. In 2016, when fellow Republican John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh,” a spokesman for The Satanic Temple quickly released a statement saying that the group wanted “nothing to do” with the senator. In 2018, Cruz defeated his opponent, Beto O’Rourke, by only about 215,000 votes, the narrowest margin Texas has seen in three decades. In 2021, a New York Times profile was titled “How Ted Cruz Became the Least Sympathetic Politician in America”—a headline that turned no heads because it simply stated what many people already thought.
With the 2024 election upon us, the MAGA crowd is cheering for the second coming of its demon emperor, the Marauder of Mar-a-lago. The “intellectual right” (increasingly conflated with the “very online right”) is hailing Ron DeSantis as Trump with a better brain. Team Hailey waxes poetic about civility and a return to basics. There is no competing choir of sycophants lamenting Cruz’s apparent decision to sit out presidential politics this time and focus instead on “keeping Texas red.”
But there is also a deeper level on which Cruz calls to mind political actors from the Jewish state, most recently but not only in that exchange with Mayorkas. When Trump talks about the border, his signature issue, it’s usually in hollow and inflamed propositions, saying things like Build the Wall or complaining that America is flooded by bad hombres. When DeSantis talks about the border, he sounds like he’s firing straight out of the think tank, issuing proposals like Florida’s Senate Bill 1718 that would require employers to use special software to verify the eligibility of employees and impose fines on those who fail to comply. You can argue about the efficacy of such proposals, but read it—or any other statement by DeSantis—and you won’t find much by way of moral outrage, because the Florida governor is an instrumentalist who sees nothing but problems calling out for solutions, which requires little more than his hand on the levers of power. Nor will you find much moral outrage in Trump, a man who strikes even his most ardent supporters as a cynical nihilist who may occasionally wage and win the right fights but rarely, if ever, for the right reasons.
Not so Cruz. Clashing with Mayorkas, he was not only tossing around facts and figures about the border with a debater’s—or a trial lawyer’s—command. He seemed genuinely incensed by what he viewed as a moral wrong: The laws being ignored, America’s sovereignty and security being compromised, and, most important, throngs of innocents suffering as a result of bad policies. His wasn’t the rage politicians manufacture when they’re mugging for the cameras. His was the sort of rage you see in church, or shul, or wherever good and evil are still earnestly discussed. Because Cruz’s vision of America’s future isn’t merely a set of arguments about policies and prescriptions. It’s rooted in a sense of calling from on high, the belief that the nation was divinely chosen to shine a light unto the nations, a singular and sacred mission that makes each failure feel that much more searing and urgent.
It’s easy to miss it, especially if you don’t have the benefit of being an immigrant and growing up with a radically different political framework, but Ted Cruz is practicing a different kind of politics, and—like it or hate it—it’s an interesting departure from the modus vivendi that got us into this gridlock. As you might’ve noticed, political assent in America no longer conforms to old ideas about political norms, personal likability, or partisan fealty. The Roman-like Caesar who can employ personal magnetism to seduce the masses and flights of intellectual oratory to impress the elites is extinct in America. There is more room now for an Old Testament figure—the castigated believer who lives alone with his vision for years in the wilderness before it’s his time. Perhaps there is space, in other words, for a kind of politician that still strikes many Americans as weird, even annoying, but which Israelis understand and sympathize with instinctively—the covenantal kind.
Try not to laugh—but that, my friends, is Ted Cruz. Cruz’s political faith was forged at the knee of his father, Rafael. The elder Cruz was born in Matanzas, a shore town about 50 miles east of Havana. The name means “massacre,” a testament to a 1510 rebellion involving local fishermen drowning Spanish conquistadors in the bay, and the spirit of uprising was alive and well in Cruz senior. As a teenaged boy in the late 1950s, he was militating against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was a follower of Fidel Castro along with Che Guevara— the future dorm room icon of the third worldist politics that Ted Cruz would spend his days skewering on Twitter, the elitist social media website to which the Senator is firmly addicted.
After a brief stint in jail, Rafael Cruz managed to obtain a student visa to study at the University of Texas. He came to America with $100 sewn into his underwear. He learned English from going to movies, which he could afford only by taking a string of dishwashing jobs. He also spoke passionately at every Rotary and Kiwanis club that would have him, convincing his new friends and neighbors to lend their ears and dollars to the Revolución. Later, he would make a point of revisiting all these same venues and apologizing, admitting that Castro’s regime was a hideous tyranny. The only way to oppose it, he now preached, was through faith and freedom, the twin pillars on which the United States of America was erected.
And not just the United States. Ted Cruz says he was kneeling in front of his TV set at the age of five when he saw the first reports of a daring raid halfway across the world: Israeli commandos had landed in Entebbe, Uganda, rescued 102 out of 106 civilians taken hostage by Palestinian and German terrorists, and eliminated all seven hijackers as well as more than 100 Ugandan soldiers assisting them before safely returning to Israel. The memory of the news bulletins he saw that day would stay with him for the rest of his life.
“To me, and this is a five-year-old looking at it, what the Entebbe raid told me about Israel was that you may take Israeli citizens hostage, and if you do, those Israelis may lose their lives, but you’re gonna die,” the senator told me as we rolled down the highway together in the back of a pick-up truck on a recent Sunday in his home state. “And to me, that was a very Texas foreign policy.”
As he grew up, Cruz maintained his passion for policy, conviction, and the ways they interact. He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School—both times Magna Cum Laude—and took off a few clerkship positions, including with Chief justice William Rehnquist. In private practice, he was involved in preparing the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and in the aftermath of the shambolic 2000 election, he helped assemble the Republican team to argue Bush v. Gore, for which he was rewarded with a handful of administration positions. In 2003, he became Texas’s Solicitor General, and made national headlines for appearing before the Supreme Court and successfully defending the constitutionality of a monument depicting the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol.
He had a similar high profile case in 2004, this time arguing against a challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, in 2012, after another stint in private practice, he ran as the Tea Party’s candidate in the Republican Party’s primaries, and won. The Washington Post called his accomplishment “the biggest upset of 2012,” and Cruz had no problem crushing his Democratic opponent in the general elections. His decade of service in the Senate won him no friends, with most of his party’s senior leaders repeatedly criticizing his language and legislative proposals alike as being beyond the pale of politics as usual, most notably his enthusiastic championing of the 2013 Federal government shutdown. He made a strong showing in his 2016 bid for president, but was bested by Trump and chose to cooperate with the president despite being the target of some of Trump’s most rank insults. In 2021, he was among the leaders of the effort to delay the electoral vote on January 6 to allow Republican lawmakers in six states more time to contest Biden’s election following allegations of voting fraud. When a pro-Trump gaggle stormed the Capitol, Cruz issued repeated condemnations, but has since emerged as a staunch voice for arguing that the FBI and the Department of Justice are applying what he called “wildly disparate standards” in handling the January 6 culprits as opposed to rioting members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
At some point in this long and storied career, Cruz became best-known, and derided by Congressional colleagues in both parties, as an obnoxious know-it-all who believes he was chosen by God for some mission—which isn’t wrong.
“There are two nations and only two nations on earth that were formed as havens for those fleeing persecution and seeking freedom,” Cruz told me. “America and Israel. Israel’s very existence, the modern state of Israel was formed so that Jews across the globe would have a place to which they could go, to flee if need be the horrific scourge of antisemitism that has cursed history for millennia, to flee the immediate atrocity of the Holocaust. And, like Israel, America was also founded by people fleeing religious oppression, fleeing those that would not allow them to live according to their faith, according to their conscience. And we came to a new land where our nation was founded on the proposition that Jefferson famously penned: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Those are extraordinary words. Those were revolutionary words, and only America and Israel embody that promise.”
When Cruz speaks like this, it is easy to hear his father talking. Speaking in Washington, D.C. in 2014 after being introduced by his famous son, Rafael Cruz thundered that America’s future is intertwined with its faith, and that, just like ancient Israel, it will rise or fall only if it is wise to tether its policies to its religious beliefs.
“When Judea had a righteous king or Israel had a righteous king, the whole country followed the Lord,” he said. “When Israel or Judea had a wicked king, the whole country went to idolatry. As the government went, so went the people… I think we cannot separate politics and religion; they are interrelated. They’ve always been interrelated.”
It’s a worldview that clarifies the bitter acrimony between Cruz, his colleagues, and his opponents. Instrumentalist conservative politicians who believe they can be crafty and cold-blooded enough to transform or outmaneuver Washington politics—a gelatinous blob where federal bureaucrats, tech companies, corporate and industry lobbies, and other interested parties melt into each other for the benefit of the few and the frustration of the many—usually don’t last for very long or make much of an impression. A Republican who wants not only to win elections but also to positively transform American politics, Cruz believes, needs to be covenantal—the way Reagan was.
Just what does Cruz mean by covenantal, a term that ordinarily has no concrete political meaning? The concept, like all deeply held beliefs, is intricate, but it comes back to the idea that a nation might--or could--or does--exist in a covenantal relationship with God, an idea that he also applies to the United States. If you believe, like woke progressives do, that America is steeped in the Original Sin of slavery and can only redeem itself by prostrating before the rest of the planet; or if you believe, like Curtis Yarvin, the influential blogger who is a Machiavelli for the MAGA crowd, that the only way to cure America of its ills is to erect a European-style monarchy stateside; or if the idea of a covenant between God and particular nations and peoples (and not others) strikes you as a thinly disguised form of murderous ethnic exceptionalism, you likely think of Cruz as either a hypocrite or a dangerous lunatic, and probably as some mixture of both.
But if, on the other hand, you’re not a political player but merely a normal American voter—like, say, the 4.2 million Texans who handed Cruz his reelection in 2018—Cruz’s covenantalism is a major draw, a foundational pillar of a belief system that reaffirms the Founding Fathers’ convictions and sees America as a special place. And covenants, unlike contracts, aren’t a one-and-done deal; they have to be reaffirmed every century or so, and no reaffirmation is like the other. Americans entered the covenant when they fought for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They renewed it again about 100 years later when they waged civil war so that all, and not some, may be free, and then again a century hence to finish the sacred work of civil rights. If you believe it’s time to step up and renew the covenant—not only assert a set of narrowly held ideological convictions, but once again charge America with the mighty spiritual current that shocked it into birth and kept the city on the hill illuminated, Ted Cruz promises something much more precious than winning at politics—he promises a very different politics.
Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Rechavam Ze’evi, Yitzchak Rabin—these men weren’t “politicians” in any way that corresponds with the contemporary American understanding of this term. They didn’t enter the public arena only because they were obsessed by power, nor did they have clear ideological convictions that mapped onto obvious partisan divides. These (largely secular) men had something else, though: an almost mystical belief in their country’s covenantal destiny, and an understanding of themselves as custodians of a special national mission handed down from history, or tradition, or God. Their job wasn’t just to win elections, as they saw it, but to implement a vision determined by a higher authority—meaning if they had to first spend decades as figures of ridicule and hatred before achieving their goal, that was just fine. Begin, leader of the hard-core Irgun and enemy of David Ben-Gurion, emerged after decades in opposition to lead the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt and Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. Rabin, forced to resign in disgrace in 1977 after he was implicated in a personal financial scandal, emerged 15 years later as the unlikely herald of talks with the Palestinians that came closer than any before or since to establishing peace. Sharon, also forced to resign in disgrace in 1983 after he was implicated in Begin’s disastrous Lebanon war, emerged 18 years later as the unlikely leader of the Israeli withdrawal and disengagement from Gaza.
These unlikely turns of history can easily strike an observer as the work of some higher power, which is precisely what Cruz believes about much of American history. “I do believe God’s providential hand has been on America from our founding,” he told me. “Just look at the extraordinary assemblage of geniuses who came together in America’s founding to author our Constitution and lead our government.”
This worldview, he told me as we were making our way to church on a Sunday morning, is why he views Israel as a religious question. And he believes, he added, that his Democratic opponents do, too.
“It’s a morality play,” he says, of the current Administration’s policy approaches to the Jewish State. “They live in the war of good guys and bad guys in their world. And its bizarro land. The good guys are the people who hate America. The bad guys are the people who like America. When the radical left looks at Israel, they see the Iranian as good guys and the Israelis as bad guys and all of their policy decisions flow from that worldview. What do they want to see? They want to see a Palestinian Jerusalem. What do they want to see? They want to see Israel cease to be a Jewish state because its existence as a Jewish state is noxious to them.”
Read the rest of Leibovitz’ profile of Cruz in tomorrow’s Tablet Magazine.
Cruz is indeed a great American Senator
I can’t trust him - sorry. Sure he talks a good game, but when push comes to shove he crumbles like a cheap suit. Does he know about the State Dept funding terrorism in Lebanon? You bet he does. What’s he done, much less even said about it.