What Happened Today: November 16, 2022
Early headwinds for 2024 Trump campaign; NATO sighs relief over Poland missile strike; Twitter goes hardcore
The Big Story
Donald Trump announced his third consecutive campaign for president at an hour-long speech at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night. According to a Trump adviser speaking to Axios, the former president anticipated a stronger showing for Republicans during last week’s midterm elections and had teased a “very big announcement” coming on Nov. 15 the night before the midterms, with the hope of boosting his chances to take the credit he believed he deserved for the red wave. The wave never materialized, and Trump was blamed after 2020 election-denial candidates lost all of the battleground contests for secretary of state and Trump-endorsed candidates failed to win any of the House toss-up races. Despite advisers encouraging him to wait to announce his campaign after the Georgia Senate runoff, Trump became the first major candidate to enter into the 2024 race, with a tightly scripted and at times languid Greatest Hits speech vowing to execute drug dealers and build the Southern Border wall “in order to make America great again.”
Speaking at a Bloomberg conference in Singapore on Tuesday, Citadel hedge fund founder and Republican mega donor Ken Griffin said, “I’d like to think that the Republican Party is ready to move on,” adding that he hoped the former president could see “the writing on the wall.” Similarly influential donor Stephen Schwarzman said in a statement this week that he wouldn’t back Trump, writing, “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” a nod, it would seem, to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The headwinds are against the former president. Not only are establishment donors leaving and poll results showing Republicans more aligned with the party than with Trump, but also other prominent figures within the MAGA realm are defecting: Winsome Sears, the Virginian lieutenant governor, and conservative media personality Candace Owens, are only two of the more recent ones. Though DeSantis has yet to enter the contest, a steady drip of state polls have shown him increasingly competitive in a primary contest with Trump, as did a YouGov poll after the midterms, which showed DeSantis narrowly beating Trump in a head-to-head race, 41% to 39%. Of course, a significant proportion of establishment Republicans have always resented Trump, and the last time they aligned behind a bookish governor from Florida, Trump still won.
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-2024-updates-cd5339d48064a149527e8f9a1aa7614e
In the Back Pages: The Gender Apartheid State of Iran
The Rest
→ The missile strike that killed two farmers in the Polish village of Przewodów near the eastern border with Ukraine had not been a Russian attack but rather an “unfortunate accident,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Wednesday. The explosion, which had been caused by a Russian-made weapon, was likely the result of Ukrainian air defenses firing the weapon that ultimately landed in Polish territory. The incident instigated some alarm for NATO members at the prospect of a Russian strike on NATO territory and prompted an emergency meeting with President Joe Biden and the leaders of eight allied nations who were already gathered at the G20 summit in Indonesia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg echoed Duda, adding that “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”
→ The nosedive in the price of Bitcoin has been painful for El Salvador after it became the first nation in the world to deem cryptocurrency legal tender. Driven in part by the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto marketplace, the Bitcoin token is down 70% since El Salvador plowed $100 million into it to accelerate its country’s crypto adoption. Now Nayib Bukele, EL Salvador’s president and crypto booster, is turning to China for some financial help. Shortly after FTX declared bankruptcy, Bukele announced a new trade agreement with Beijing that includes China buying up $21 billion of the Central American nation’s foreign debt, which could help stall what some analysts say were inevitable debt defaults. “If Bukele dreamed that he could create a different and innovative political economy, against the advice of the IMF, that dream has failed,” said Luis Membreño, a Salvadoran economist. “There are no easy alternatives, no shortcuts.”
→ A unanimous bloc of 50 Democratic senators were joined by 12 Republicans to pass a law granting federal protections for same-sex marriages on Wednesday. With public support for same-sex marriage at an all-time high, Republicans who once opposed the legislation by default have shifted their stance in recent years. Moving over to the House, where it’s expected to pass without issue, the new law would be a notable bipartisan effort before what will likely be a gridlocked Congressional session mired by political division. Codifying some of the rights established in a landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling, the Respect for Marriage Act would overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits.
→ Number of the Day: 11 billion
That’s how much money New York forked over in fraudulent unemployment claims because of poor oversight by New York’s Labor Department. On Tuesday, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli published the findings of an investigation into the Labor Department’s unemployment payment activity between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, finding almost 9,000 people who received what appeared to be more unemployment benefits than state policy allows. The 3,000% jump in unemployment payments came at a tough time for New Yorkers, who struggled to navigate the state’s archaic unemployment website portal as the Labor Department was stretched thin by the COVID-19 pandemic and a historic number of residents seeking unemployment aid. Susan Filburn, a deputy commissioner at the Labor Department, said the comptroller was right to critique the system’s lax oversight, but noted unemployment help lines saw a 13,480% increase in call volume during the pandemic. “We cannot conceive a single example where any form of public—or even private—infrastructure was capable of scaling up so quickly such that supply could meet demand,” she said.
→ Are you hardcore? If not, you’re not going to last that long at Twitter 2.0. In a midnight email sent to those staff who hadn’t been a part of the recent wave of layoffs nixing half the company, new owner Elon Musk said employees would now “need to be extremely hardcore” and ready to work “long hours at high intensity,” adding that “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” Twitter workers had roughly 36 hours to “click yes on the link below” to become “part of the new Twitter.” Those who said no were offered three months of severance. The ride-or-die ultimatum comes after Musk fired several employees who were criticizing their new boss in the company’s Slack channels.
→ New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, made its first-ever call to a foreign nation for help in a rescue flood operation when it rang up New Zealand asking for backup as scores of residents were stranded on farm rooftops amid rising waters. Now into its fifth week, the Australian flood crisis saw raging waters overtake the Hay Plains near the flooding Murrumbidgee River, which sent farmers scrambling for higher ground until they could be rescued. With Australia’s East pummeled by rain for so long, the sodden ground can no longer absorb the water, which has led to the unprecedented flooding. As of October, some parts of Australia had already seen more rain in 2022 than in any previous year on record.
→ The wheels came off an ambitious drug smuggling operation last week after Customs officials realized a woman arriving in a wheelchair at New York’s Kennedy International Airport was struggling to roll forward. Arriving on a flight from the Dominican Republic, the woman was held by authorities as they x-rayed her chair and discovered 28 pounds of cocaine worth $450,000 stuffed into the wheels. The woman was arrested on smuggling charges and turned over to Homeland Security.
→ Newly minted British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the post-Brexit trade deal with the United States coveted by his predecessor, Boris Johnson, was not even on the table for discussion when he met with President Joe Biden at the Bali G20 summit on Wednesday. Though London would surely welcome a free trade agreement with Washington, D.C., the White House has not made international trade deals a high priority during the Biden administration, with no formal negotiations taking place in more than a year with any nation. “Both of us acknowledged the fact that actually the United States is our single largest trading partner,” Sunak said, adding that he was “filled with optimism” about later trade opportunities with the United States. At the moment Sunak faces more pressing issues on multiple fronts, including the post-Brexit protocol for Northern Ireland and how to simmer tensions between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
→ Chinese residents took to the streets of Guangzhou to protest the state’s draconian zero-Covid policies this week, tearing down metal barriers as they revolted against food shortages and price spikes that have occurred while they’ve been unable to work because of the restrictions. Riot police used water cannons to subdue the protestors, who returned the favor by throwing plastic boxes at the authorities in social media videos that went viral on Chinese social media before being taken down by censors. Pushback against China’s lockdown regime has grown just as COVID-19 test providers recently reported a deluge of unpaid debts from local governments who haven’t had the money on hand to finance the mass testing program demanded by Beijing. A recent review of public records by the Financial Times showed that China’s largest PCR testing companies’ accounts receivable totals were up 90% in September 2022 compared to the year prior. “There is no way the government could keep paying for mass testing,” said Huang Yanzhong, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is not a sustainable operation.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Writing the War by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Elliot Ackerman’s latest novel about the fall of Kabul establishes him as a master of his genre
Bubby and Birnbaum by Marla Brown Fogelman
A once-acclaimed author of essential prayer books—and my grandmother’s friend—belatedly gets the gravestone he deserves
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.
Thanks for reading The Scroll! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
The Gender Apartheid State of Iran
Why does Joe Biden seek to align America with a violent ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ regime that beats women to death for exposing their hair?
By Mariam Memarsadeghi
Mahsa (Jeena) Amini died in a coma on Sept. 16 after repeated blows to her head by Islamist regime thugs enforcing mandatory Islamist hijab. She could have been any 22-year-old Iranian girl, killed because strands of her hair were showing from beneath her headscarf. We know her story only because her brave Kurdish family refused to cower, despite being surrounded by regime agents and threatened to be silent. Mahsa’s family has been bravely telling reporters their girl was healthy, that the regime’s fabricated video purportedly showing her collapsing from a heart condition is a lie. Her father, as well as girls who were arrested with her, testify that they saw bruises on her head, a fact confirmed by a leaked photograph of the bruised, unconscious girl in a hospital bed.
Officials from the hospital where Mahsa died have also spoken out, another courageous act, telling reporters Mahsa had 10 or 11 blows to her head, likely from it being bashed into a wall. The other women and girls who were arrested with Mahsa for violating the hijab have stated that Mahsa’s beatings began in the police van where they were all held.
Most striking is testimony via Twitter and submitted to regime officials from Hasan Shirazi, a first lieutenant in the “morality” police station to which Mahsa was brought. Mahsa was holding her head and screaming loudly when she was taken out of the police van, says Shirazi. A female guard told her she would be released soon, but Mahsa would not stop screaming.
Hearing her screams, a senior officer, Colonel Seyyed Abbas Hosseini, reportedly became very angry and approached the women. According to Shirazi’s testimony, Hosseini told Mahsa to shut up and punched her so hard that she fell to the ground, unconscious. Everyone at the station was apparently silent as Colonel Hosseini then began to kick Mahsa and ask that she be taken to basement level 2, the “darkest unit” of the detention center. The women guards could not lift Mahsa and one cried out in panic that her ear was bleeding. It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to come take Mahsa to the hospital.
Since the imposition of Sharia law in the 1979 revolution, there have been countless girls and women like Mahsa. Today the reality of this nightmare is being disseminated across the world because Iranians are rising up against the totalitarian evil of the regime and speaking out about the lashings, torture, rape, and killings. The actress Banafsheh Taherian is a striking example, showing her solidarity with Mahsa’s family by going public about receiving 60 lashes from regime police when she was 19-years-old. Her Twitter thread about this trauma is excruciating to read, in part because every Iranian has a loved one who has been on the receiving end of these blows and the verbal abuse and humiliation that accompanies them. These are very rare public admissions. Iranians have in large part stayed silent, particularly about torture and sexual abuse in prisons.
This week, all of Iran is aflame in protests sparked by the knowledge of Mahsa’s gruesome murder. Her eyes were hauntingly innocent, her smile gentle and kind in a land of horrors. The protests span the entire nation, all major cities and smaller towns. Online, too, the mobilization is as never before, a unity in discourse with film stars, athletes, and other celebrities breaking their silence and joining the people in their public revulsion against the barbaric cruelty and violence with which the regime treats the people of Iran in the name of Allah. On the streets, girls and women are burning their headscarves, dancing—acts punishable by lengthy prison sentences and even execution—as men young and old honor them, chanting for equality and promising vengeance for the killing of their sister Mahsa. These are scenes Iranians have seen in their dreams, a revolution of love for their true selves and hate for the armor-clad forces of darkness they surround and capture. It is the power of political action as Hannah Arendt described it, tethered to life by fear but also by transformative hope.
That Iranians are willing to brave the Islamic Republic’s repressive apparatus yet again is remarkable considering the massacre of over 1,500 protesters in 2019, the torture of many thousands more, and the execution of others including the champion wrestler from Shiraz, Navid Afkari, who was and is beloved for his honesty and passion for his people.
Yet this is a regime utterly committed to its brutality. Its current president, Ebrahim Raisi, protected by U.S. authorities and greeted at the United Nations with smiles and handshakes by French President Emmanuel Macron just as Iranians protest for their freedom—is among the most experienced killers of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s inner circle, personally culpable for the execution of thousands in a prison massacre in 1988. Raisi is a hardline ideologue who is barely intelligible, with no university education. Even now, Raisi is proud of his role as one of four members of a death committee, sending political prisoners to be hanged after “trials” lasting a few minutes. He has called his massacre “divine punishment” and a “proud achievement” for the revolutionary regime. For him, mass killing is an act of God. Days ago, he denied the Holocaust in a 60 Minutes interview. Why does the United States insist on embracing this killer, and the regime he fronts, as the Iranian people risk their lives in the streets protesting for freedom?
When President Barack Obama promoted the original Iran deal, his pitch was that the normalization of ties with the Islamic Republic would improve the welfare and freedoms of ordinary Iranians. The exact opposite happened. Even with injections of billions in cash into the regime’s coffers, the people grew poorer and the state more repressive. The so-called “moderate” former President Hassan Rouhani presided over the killing of over 1,500 protesters. That President Joe Biden wants to obtain a watered-down version of that deal with Raisi in Rouhani’s office, and with the supreme leader still in power, shows the moral vacuity of a foreign policy that aligns itself with the most repressive tyrants on the planet, even as they murder women, gay people, political liberals, journalists, and anyone else who dares to assert the most basic claims to their own humanity.
Biden has been willing to stick Americans with extortionate gas prices in order to fight for Ukraine and trash our alliance with India by sticking up for “human rights” in the subcontinent. But when it comes to Iran, the president of the United States and leading officials in his administration have been eager to abandon young Iranians, women especially, who have been fighting courageously for freedom since 2009. The greatest asset America has for a peaceful Middle East is the Iranian people, and yet the Obama-Biden playbook is predicated on their permanent oppression under the heel of a brutal regime of America-hating, Holocaust-denying, theocratic misogynists who beat women to death for exposing their hair.
There is no telling whether this time the Iranian people will finally win. What is certain is that the Handmaid’s Tale regime that hates women and hates America is still being courted by the Biden administration, which is a failure not just of our morality but of our national interest. When you look at the photographs of beautiful young Mahsa Amini tortured to death, and when you watch videos of the same thugs who killed her attempting to beat her young compatriots for protesting for her life, remember that these are the thugs the United States is attempting to equip with more power, more cash, and more prestige, at the expense of people who desperately want to be free of their tyranny.
This piece originally appeared in The Scroll in September