What Happened Today: May 10, 2023
13 felony charges for Santos; record breaking surge at U.S. southern border; Tucker to Twitter, for now; space rock slams NJ roof; shots fired in Denver road rage incidents
The Big Story
New York Republican Rep. George Santos could face up to 20 years in prison after federal prosecutors hit him with a 13-count indictment alleging his involvement in three different criminal schemes. Santos turned himself over to the authorities before pleading not guilty at a preliminary hearing at a Long Island courthouse on Wednesday. Released on a $500,000 bond with the court restricting his travel to his district and Washington unless he receives special permission, Santos is expected to return to office despite the growing number of bipartisan calls for him to resign. “I have to keep fighting to defend my innocence,” Santos told reporters after the hearing, adding that he was the victim of a “witch hunt.”
Several of the charges against Santos say that he instructed a political operative to funnel tens of thousands of dollars worth of political contributions into a private fund that Santos then used on designer clothing, credit card bills, and other personal expenses. Prosecutors allege that Santos also intentionally falsified his financial disclosure records in 2020 and 2022. Finally, Santos stands accused of claiming at least $24,000 in unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as he was collecting a $120,000 salary from a financial firm in Florida.
Since last December, when news outlets first revealed several lies Santos made about his education and biography while on the campaign trail, the lawmaker has been subjected to intense scrutiny about his personal and campaign financial dealings. Already facing a House Ethics Committee investigation and an ongoing criminal case in Brazil over a 2008 check fraud incident, Santos has nonetheless received continued support from Republican leadership even after they’ve removed him from his committee assignments. “In America, there is a presumption of innocence,” said majority leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). “But they’re serious charges.”
In The Back Pages: How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity
The Rest
→ A record breaking 11,000 migrants were apprehended on Tuesday while attempting to cross the border, already surpassing the 10,000 daily surge that officials expected to arrive as the Title 42 border law expires on Thursday.
“We’re already breaking and we haven’t hit the starting line,” one DHS official told NBC News, which also reported the Biden administration is preparing a directive to Border Patrol “to begin releasing migrants into the United States without court dates or the ability to track them.”
That policy, an unnamed official said, will be applied “only to migrants who have been carefully vetted,” though it’s unclear yet what that vetting process will entail.
Currently, border processing centers equipped to only hold 18,500 people are beyond capacity, with an estimated 27,000 in the facilities. “It’s a public health danger. We will start having people die,” the official said.
Read More: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/biden-admin-plans-order-release-migrants-us-no-way-track-rcna83704
→ After months teasing the big reveal, House Oversight Chairman James Comer has unveiled the findings of his wide-ranging investigation into the Biden family’s business ties to foreign entities, though the Wednesday press conference and 30-page memo spearheaded by Comer lacked the smoking gun that directly implicated the president himself. Focusing on entities in Romania and China, the investigation cited no illegal activity while documenting some $10 million flowing to a network of businesses with ties to Biden family members and several associates with the memo asserting that “it is not credible” the president wasn’t at least aware of the deals. However, there was no evidence presented that substantiated the president’s involvement. “We believe that the president has been involved in this from the very beginning. Obviously, we’re going to continue to look,” Comer said, noting that this was still the “beginning stages” of the investigation. So far, the details released will likely add more woes for the president’s son, Hunter Biden, given new revelations of his business entanglement with a Romanian official who’s been accused of corruption.
Spotify adds the equivalent of 3 million albums worth of music annually to its platform
Millions of the more than 100 million songs on Spotify have never been played
In 2018, the average Hot 100 song was 20 seconds shorter compared to 2013
Roughly 82% of U.K. musicians make less than $300 annually from streaming revenue
Since 2021, 610,000 student loan borrowers have had their debt wiped clean
Roughly 54% of Twitter Blue’s debut subscribers have quit the service
The average price for a new car is currently $48,008
Paramount is expected to lose $2 billion this year on streaming
Paramount spends $500 million annually to make Yellowstone and other shows produced by Taylor Sheridan
By the age of 40 half of Chicago residents will have witnessed a shooting
At least 7% of Black Chicago residents are shot by the time they turn 40
So far in 2023, 11,348 people were injured in shootings in the United States
In that same time, 509 teenagers and 90 children were killed
508 of the year’s shooting incidents were accidents
365 of the year’s shootings were in self-defense
Gun lobby groups spent a record $15.8 million in 2021
→ Tucker Carlson, the biggest name in right-wing media, will move his show to Twitter, at least for now. Still negotiating the exit on his $20 million contract after being fired from Fox News last month, Carlson has not signed a formal deal with Twitter, owner Elon Musk wrote on the platform, leaving open the possibility that Carlson could soon be onto another network or his own operation once he settles with Fox. As Semafor noted on Wednesday, Musk’s courting of Carlson could possibly alienate some of Twitter’s mainstream advertisers, or signal Musk’s interest to pivot Twitter into a more conservative-leaning media operation. The one risk, however, with a focus on long-form video programming is that it cuts against the platform’s typical consumption pattern of scrolling quickly through a feed of short-form content.
→ A Jacksonville, Florida, solar panel production facility run by China-based Jinko Solar was raided on Monday by federal agents. Established in 2018 and currently employing 270 workers, the Jacksonville location recently announced a $52 million expansion program that would create 250 new jobs. Solar industry analysts suggest the expanding U.S. footprint potentially came under the scrutiny of Homeland Security as federal officials attempt to tighten enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the law that bans any goods made with materials by forced labor in the Xinjiang region. Other Chinese solar makers including LONGi and Trina Solar have had their solar panels recently confiscated for inspection.
→ The rock that smashed through the roof of a New Jersey family’s home this week might have been a rare meteorite, according to geologists at the College of New Jersey. The metallic object was about 4 inches by 6 inches in size, and didn’t cause any injuries after it smashed into an empty second floor bedroom. Rocks of this size rarely make it all the way through the atmosphere, though it’s possible the space stone was part of the weekslong meteor shower known as Eta Aquariids.
→ The number of times children were evaluated for eating disorders across 38 hospitals roughly doubled during the first year of the pandemic, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics. This can be added to the growing list of mental health struggles that intensified for student-age Americans who endured years of lockdowns and social isolation. “We now talk about a second pandemic of mental health particularly in children [and] adolescents, the effects of which are still lingering,” said one of the authors of the study, Carly Milliren. About a third of those treated were 14 to 15 years old, and more than two-thirds of all patients were being treated for anorexia.
→ A recent dispute between two Tesla drivers at a car charging station in Denver led to one fatally shooting the other. The shooter was apprehended but not charged, authorities said. On the same day across town, a road rage incident led to a man pulling a gun and firing a bullet that narrowly missed a toddler in a car seat. The shooter had mistakenly assumed the man driving his wife and young daughter had made an offensive gesture toward him when he was in fact indicating that he could go ahead of him first at an intersection. “I don’t understand why you could … [become] so angry in just a matter of a two-second interaction with somebody,” the mother said. Police are still looking for the road rage shooter.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Ancient Wonders of Fennel by Paola Gavin
The plant has been part of Jewish cooking since biblical times
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How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity
The pioneering gay writer and editor Michael Denneny, who died on April 12, learned from his teacher Arendt that an individual can be free only as part of a free community
By Blake Smith
Hannah Arendt left behind little in the way of an obvious institutional or intellectual legacy during her brief years at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought during the 1960s. The student who best understood her ideas—and the example of her life—as a summons to action in the world, was Michael Denneny, who died recently, shortly after the publication of a memoir-anthology, On Christopher Street. The book records how his teacher inspired him to abandon his Ph.D., follow her to New York, and found what would become America’s most important magazine for gay men—Christopher Street, along with its associated publishing line, Stonewall Inn Editions—in the late 1970s and 1980s, those pivotal years that saw first the emergence of a distinct gay male urban culture and then its near-annihilation from AIDS.
Arendt would not seem to be an obvious inspiration for a gay men’s magazine. Even if there is a certain chain-smoking archness in her 1964 interview for the German television show Zur Person, she is not among the straight women whom gay men single out for a typically ambivalent yet ardent brand of admiration, in what is usually a perverse sort of drag-performance-by-proxy. Arendt’s political philosophy, organized around claims about human nature supported by examples taken from ancient Athens (while engaged in a covert but insistent critique of her own former mentor, Martin Heidegger, who had awakened her to philosophy before covering himself with shame as a proud member of the Nazi Party), can seem both frustratingly distant from the historical present and icily indifferent to the problems of minorities. Denneny’s insight, however, is to have grasped how the apparently abstract universals of Arendt’s teaching grew out of her urgent engagement on behalf of the Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s.
Reading Arendt’s philosophical writing in light of her Zionist activism from that era, Denneny saw how central concepts of her later work made what can be easily dismissed as “lifestyle politics”—the publishing of magazines and novels; the demand for a space of cultural distinction—not a distraction from “real” politics, but an urgent task that makes politics, in Arendt’s special and widely misunderstood meaning, possible. Arendt, Denneny continually reminds readers in On Christopher Street, held that a person can be connected to humanity in general, to his own uniqueness, and indeed to the possibility of transforming himself, only insofar as he is a member of a free community—of a group that possesses the power to build and maintain what Arendt called a “world,” a domain in which members of a group can appear to each other, revealing, remaking, and remembering themselves.
Today, Arendt has many admirers in American academia, and a wide midwit readership that consults her writings for political and moral apothegems applicable to our ongoing crisis, whose origins they imagine as coming from the right and never from inside their own intellectual homes. Every university of any repute has on staff some left-liberal scholar who mistakenly sees in Arendt an ancestor of her own utterly conventional politics while doing her best to ignore the difficult, apparently reactionary positions Arendt took on everything from racial integration to immigration and the welfare state. If Arendt had been a man, she would have been, if not “cancelled,” then consigned by right-thinking scholars (and therefore cherished by right-wing cranks) among such other Teutonic anachronisms as Oswald Spenger and Eric Voegelin. Arendt is spared this fate at the price of being misunderstood.
She gets no better treatment from her centrist humanist admirers, who transform her into a defender of the warmed-over nineteenth-century liberalism that passes among them for “free thinking.” Her work—with its horror of cliché and mental conformity, its appreciation for the exchange of diverse perspectives, and its appeal to the fragile vitality of independent thought (its reminder, indeed, that these two words form a pleonasm) —is one of the fragments that hold-outs within the academy shore up against their ruin. To find a prestigious ally (a woman! a refugee!) in their resistance to the identitarian posturing that has become essential to elite self-performance, they make of Arendt a liberal individualist, an understanding to which Arendt would surely have responded with a Germanic feminine version of the genteel revulsion that Marshall McLuhan summons for the movie-goers in “Annie Hall.”
Arendt’s famous 1963 letter to Gershon Scholem, who had reproached his old friend in the aftermath of her reporting on the Eichmann trial for her apparent lack of love of the Jewish people, seems, but only seems, to confirm the cosmopolitan tote bag re-imagination of the philosopher. Her famous statement, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective… I indeed love ‘only’ my friends,” seems to find Arendt a kindred spirit of those who wish to thwart our hastening spiral of mutually antagonizing collective narcissisms by insisting—in an apparently more humane version of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum—that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. But, as Arendt continued in her letter, if she could not “love” the Jewish people it was because “I cannot love myself.” Her response should be read not as a declaration of independence from the demands of the collective, but as a political equivalent of Cordelia’s speech to Lear.
Arendt did not remind Scholem that from 1933 to 1949 she had abandoned scholarship for Zionist activism, sometimes at personal risk, engaging in everything from the practical organizing of relief efforts to writing essays for German and English-language magazines like Aufbau and Menorah Journal—in which she called, with urgent anger sharper and hotter than any merely speakable “love,” for a Jewish army and a new Jewish self-consciousness. Arendt’s life had for so many years been lived for the Jewish people, she implied, that she could not look on “them” as something separate from “herself.” She was not proclaiming the sovereignty of the individual, but rather the non-existence of the latter in isolation from the group that provides its stage of action and frame of meaning—what Arendt called its “world.”
Arendt’s Zionism was as idiosyncratic—and to many, as frustratingly perplexing—as her view of a person’s constitutive mix of personal uniqueness and un-withdrawable membership in a human community into which we find ourselves thrown. She called for Jewish unity while acerbically critiquing every Jewish political institution, tradition and perspective, from Europe to the United States to Palestine—advocating an implausible post-war order in which a Jewish homeland would be secured as part of a vast post-Ottoman federation of nationalities extending from Europe to the Middle East.
Her disappointed hopes, her years of struggle alongside and against other activists, and, as she reminded Scholem, her sense of propriety—her inner alertness that to speak of such things would be an obscene self-sundering, bringing to light feelings that have their authentic life only in intimate darkness—perhaps explain why in her later reflections on politics, such as The Human Condition (1958)and On Revolution (1963), Arendt wrote as if she had not spent a decade and a half as a Jewish activist. Some would say, hardly as if she were a Jew. But the political experience she did not acknowledge having was specifically Jewish, and the path to the rediscovery of what she often called the hidden treasures of ancient Greek thought went directly through Zionism.
Indeed, many of the claims Arendt makes in her work after the 1940s should be understood as translations into universalistic terms of lessons she derived from her reflections on the world-historical emergency of European Jewry. What she described in later years as the problems of modernity—the end of authoritative traditions for orienting moral and political thought and action, the dangerous seductions of Marxism and ethno-nationalist fascism, and the stupidity of self-satisfied liberal elites unable to recognize these desperate conditions—were a cosmopolitanized version of the story she had told in her Zionist writings about, and to, Jews. She saw the latter as unable to return to traditional religion (cut off from it forever by the failure of Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism and the transformations of the Jewish Enlightenment and Reform movement) and faced with the task—from which Communism and Revisionist Zionism threatened to divert it—of building a specifically secular Jewish “world” anchored by, although by no means taking place only in, its historic homeland.
So what about Arendt’s vision appealed to Michael Denneny, a young man from a working-class Irish Catholic background? In part, simply the brilliance of the teacher. As a friend of his told me after his death, Denneny had met Arendt while working as a busboy in the faculty dining room. He would talk with her as he cleaned tables; gradually, she began timing her meals to coincide with his shifts. Arendt convinced Denneny, then an undergraduate with dreams of serving in the newly founded Peace Corps, to stay on at the university for doctoral study under her supervision. When she left Chicago in 1967 for the New School in New York, he followed her, continuing to sit in on her seminars even as he left academia for publishing.
In an essay written during these years about her own teacher, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Arendt recalled that he had made her believe that “thinking can be learned.” That is—and rather contrary to the solitary vision of thinking Heidegger provides in much of his written work—thinking, however much it happens only within an isolated person, is a relation between people. Arendt, too, taught thinking; and, in a manner surpassing her teacher, taught how thinking is an uncanniness that connects and recombines us.
Arendt taught thinking—and she taught that thinking requires what she called a “world.” Just as the student needs a teacher, the thinker, in order to think at all, needs a community whose members she can address and argue with. It is not a question, of course, of creating a community out of thin air, or of taking an abstract, universal humanity as one’s audience. Rather the task, which is explicit in Arendt’s Zionist writing but only implicit in her later work, is one of more fully and expansively elaborating the world we already share with those with whom we are by virtue of historical circumstance, but perhaps not yet by virtue of our own conscious concern, in community.
Denneny saw Christopher Street magazine, which he helped found in 1976, and its associated publishing line Stonewall Inn Editions at St. Martin’s Press, as instruments for building a gay male world. In Arendt’s theory, a world is sustained by, and maintains the possibility of the exchange of, different perspectives on what interlocutors understand as being—albeit in a not yet fully agreed-upon way—the same object. In her later work, this is usually presented as a problem of “judgment” in which people have diverse points of view about some third thing—whether they are making aesthetic judgments about, say, a painting, or ethical judgments about an action. But in the case that most compelled her early thought, as in the case that preoccupied Denneny, the “object” at stake was the supposedly common identity that did not quite unite those who debated its meaning.
For it was not at all obvious how different sorts of Jewish people from across the globe constituted a single Jewish “world” as a stage for debate about so-called Jewish politics. Indeed, Arendt in her Zionist writing insisted that this world and this politics would have to be created through exchanges of judgments, and through appeals to a community that as yet existed more in the eyes of its enemies than in the hearts of potential future members.
Homosexuality is perhaps only a little less ancient than Adam and Eve, but, like Zionism, gaymale life is a much more recent creation, one elaborated by activists who tried to transform themselves into something like a people. In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.
Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny’s Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.
Christopher Street’s main rival for the minds of gay male intellectual readers was the Boston-based Fag Rag, a self-proclaimed “radical” left newspaper. Fag Rag’s writership did not see gay men as a distinct group that needed to build a world of their own. Rather, it saw them as one of a number of oppressed groups with a common interest in overthrowing heterosexual, patriarchal, white, Christian, etc., power. Its pages gave equal space to women and men (Christopher Street, after a few experimental power-sharing issues with lesbians, booted them from the magazine). It featured gay men who made feminist-inspired critiques of masculinity, pornography, and leather, while promoting a supposedly sex-positive, gender-bending neo-paganism. They were the eunuch vanguard of the post-male alphabet soup left.
In the years before the AIDS crisis (1976-1981) Christopher Street did not have an obvious line on “sexual liberation” countering that of Fag Rag. While some of its articles cheekily investigated the history of gloryholes where anonymous oral sex was on offer, many others lamented what was already seen by many gay intellectuals as the excessive hedonism of the era immediately before AIDS. One March 1980 essay critiqued the “Tyranny of the Penis”—a title that could have been taken from an issue of Fag Rag. But promiscuity tended to be seen as problematic because it might undermine the possibility of forming stable couples among gay men, rather than because it epitomized the patriarchal power of the phallus (Christopher Street’s contributors did not evince any great opposition to the latter). They tended to be sympathetic observers or active participants in the shift over the course of the late 70s towards a more masculine gay male style of dress and comportment, featuring denim, cowboy boots, and other items of masculine accessorizing.
The lack of agreement, however, was the point—Christopher Street was meant to be a space in which gay men could disagree with each other about what gay men should do (what they should wear, read, and suck), and even about what it meant to be a gay man, provided they agreed that there are, and should be, gay men. Christopher Street did grant occasional room for feminist perspectives, from an interview with Gloria Steinem to a short story by Andrea Dworkin, and to representatives of the Marxist left like Jean-Paul Sartre. But these were presented as glimpses on something of potential interest to an imagined gay community, not as voices that must be, as we say today, “centered”—as a moral-political teaching to which gay men should conform.
Michel Foucault—whose thinking in his last years was deeply informed by his encounter with the emerging American gay culture presented in its pages (and thus, in a strange roundabout way, to Hannah Arendt)—explained in an interview with Christopher Street that he was excited to see that gay men were, thanks to its efforts, at last able to imagine themselves as political agents in their own right without recourse to feminism, Marxism, and other rhetorics of the left. Foucault had perhaps read Denneny’s 1981 “manifesto,” published in Christopher Street, consisting of sixteen “propositions” for gay politics. The central proposition, number eight, began with a quote from Arendt, in which she claimed that “a man can live as a man,” that is as an individual (although perhaps with a special unintended resonance in its new context as a call for gay male specificity), only “within the framework of a people.” The word “framework” is deliberate and significant. “A people” is something made—to be sure, out of existing materials. Culture—the exchange of perspectives in philosophy, fiction, criticism—creates the framework within which we can act together. Denneny concludes, “a gay culture is a political necessity for our survival.” The point of gay politics, Denneny insisted, was not to make gay men’s discontent a kind of lever for the overthrow of our regime, but to build “power” so that gay men could invent forms of life together, creating the cultural resources by which they could pursue their necessarily mutual happiness.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hannah-arendt-zionism-gay-identity-michael-denneny