What Happened Today: September 5, 2023
Musk v. ADL; Novo Nordisk is most valuable European company; Zverev says "no" to "über alles"
The Big Story
The ongoing feud between Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League over hate speech moderation on Musk’s Twitter/X platform took a turn this holiday weekend when Musk said he was preparing to file a defamation lawsuit against the ADL for “trying to kill” X by “falsely accusing” him and his platform of antisemitism. The ADL, which has taken on an increasingly partisan role as an enforcer of Democratic Party policy goals under its director, Jonathan Greenblatt—himself a former Democratic operative—has accused Musk of allowing antisemitism and other forms of hate speech to flourish on the platform since Musk took it over in 2022. Critics of the ADL say the group is inflating social media threats while cozying up to partners like Al Sharpton, who has a history of fermenting real-world antisemitism.
Musk, straining credulity, now blames the ADL for his company’s revenue woes, alleging that advertising sales—which comprised 90% of Twitter’s revenue prior to his acquisition of the platform—had fallen 60% because of an ADL’s pressure campaign. “Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk said.
The Labor Day dustup follows a meeting last Wednesday between Musk’s recently hired CEO Linda Yaccarino, a veteran TV advertising executive, and Greenblatt. News of the meeting led to right-wing Twitter provocateur Eva Vlaardingerbroek to instigate a #BantheADL campaign, which Musk then elevated by suggesting in a post that he would run a poll to see whether he should ban the progressive political group from the platform. “To be super clear, I’m pro free speech, but against antisemitism of any kind,” Musk said later of what he meant by banning ADL from the platform.
Analysts note that advertising tends to slow down in a volatile economy, and cautious global brands like Audi and Pfizer had paused ad campaigns from the beginning of Musk’s ownership over concerns of how the platform would handle its content. The recent change of the name from Twitter to X didn’t seem to help the company’s bottom line either, at least for now, as Bloomberg reported in July that stepping away from the iconic bird logo and name recognition of Twitter cost the company anywhere from $4 to $20 billion in value.
In The Back Pages: Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Bio-Totalitarianism
The Rest
→ The summer of strikes and organized labor actions across Hollywood, hospitals, and auto plants could roll into the fall and winter as the Transportation Workers Union of America, representing 155,000 workers, has launched an attack campaign against the New York Metro Transportation Authority for lowballing the union on wages. TWU leader John Samuelsen said the MTA could not be trusted during contract negotiations, calling the agency “institutionally depraved.” Work stoppage laws means the strike along commuter lines wouldn’t happen until the 2024 election season is in full swing, which could see President Joe Biden backing the unions as he courts the support of labor for his reelection bid.
→ The U.S. National Guard hosted Taiwanese military troops for training in Michigan last month, according to a new report from Japan outlet Sankei Shimbun. With several countries sending troops to train in the U.S. state, it wasn’t clear how many of the 7,000 soldiers were from Taiwan, but according to the report, the cohort was larger than previous groups sent to train with Americans. The report added that the training took place under the auspices of the National Guard, which is largely organized by state governments rather than U.S. armed forces so as not to unnecessarily provoke China.
→ Following the debut of its weight-loss drug Wegovy in the United Kingdom on Monday, Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk saw its market share swell to become the most valuable company in Europe. In fact, its $428 billion valuation means it’s worth more than the entire Danish economy, which had the staff of the Scandinavian company throwing a wild office party. Sharing the same active ingredient with Ozempic, Wegovy is selling for about $300 in the United Kingdom, while Americans are forking over upwards of $1,300 for a month’s supply. Novo Nordisk and American-based Eli Lilly are expected to maintain a duopoly over the weight-loss drug market for three years or more while other companies race to catch up in a marketplace some expect to be worth $1 trillion.
→ United Airlines saw its stock drop at least 4% after it asked federal regulators to ground all American flights while it worked through what it described in a social media post as a “systemwide technology issue.” Flights already in the air were told to continue to their destination before the airline lifted the ground stoppage shortly after.
→ A dispute between an American traveler and German police at Frankfurt International Airport has landed the American in legal hot water as law enforcement accuse the woman of calling them Nazis. The police say the 49-year-old became “unreasonable and irritated” when they told her she had to remove liquids from her luggage, including what she said was a solid deodorant. Police say the woman called the airport security “f--ing German Nazi police,” though she says they misinterpreted her for asking why the “Nazi-looking dude” with a “Hitler’s Youth haircut” in line behind her wasn’t getting the same treatment as her. In any case, the Nazi epithet isn’t taken lightly in Germany, and the slander case will now likely put to the test Germany’s appetite for free speech.
→ While we’re on the subject of hurling Nazi epithets in polite company, Monday night’s crackling marathon match between Italy’s Jannik Sinner and Germany’s Alexander Zverev was halted when Zverev told the umpire “it’s not acceptable” that a rowdy fan was shouting “the most famous Hitler phrase there is in the world.” The umpire quickly had the fan identified and booted from the stands for what Zverev, speaking to the press after his five-set victory, said was singing “the anthem of Hitler … Deutschland über alles,” he said. “So if I just don’t react, I think it’s bad from my side.” Zverev will now have to recover quickly from the almost-five-hour baseline battle with Sinner as he faces a relatively untested defending champion, Carlos Alcaraz, in the quarterfinals.
→ Two school districts in the Philadelphia suburbs have closed down while neighborhoods remain on high alert as the manhunt for escaped murderer Danelo Cavalcante stretches into its fifth day. Since escaping Chester County Prison on Thursday, Cavalcante has been seen on camera or by witnesses at least five times, including on security cameras that picked him up on the trails of the popular Longwood Gardens. Police have expanded the search radius to several miles while urging locals in and around Chester County, about 30 miles west of Philadelphia, to lock their doors and remain on alert. Homeowner Ryan Drummond says he realized Cavalcante was in his home on Friday night, rummaging for food and stealing a hat that he’s since been seen wearing on camera.
→ Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz found rare common ground last week after both lawmakers came out in support of the Department of Health and Human Services’ recommendation that the Drug Enforcement Administration bump marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug classification. With Gaetz describing the step to loosen cannabis regulation as “historic” and Schumer saying it was “the right thing” for the government to do, the unwinding of federal prohibition on cannabis will begin to align federal agencies with state policies as more than 160 million Americans now live in states where both recreational and medical access to the drug is allowed for adults. The deregulation, which could be wrapped up in about a year, will reduce the tax burden for the cannabis industry while making it easier for medical patients to seek marijuana treatment as an alternative to opioid prescriptions.
→ The Massachusetts National Guard was called in to help state officials relocate the latest surge of migrants seeking asylum on Thursday as aid agencies struggle to find housing and provide resources that some protest groups say should go to U.S. residents first. With shelters overflowing with the influx of migrants who’ve landed in Massachusetts from various locales, including many Haitian immigrants fleeing their country after a series of natural disasters, protest groups say the state has overextended itself to the migrants while homeless residents, including U.S. veterans, are unable to get the same help. Over the weekend at Yarmouth Resort motel, where 100 units are allocated for asylum seekers, protestors waved signs that said “Vets and Cape Homeless First!!” Officials estimate that a mix of some 20,000 migrants and locals currently reside in state shelters.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Embracing My Whole Self, Through Food by Jamie Betesh Carter
I struggled with my identity as not-quite-American, not-quite-Israeli, until I learned a lesson from cookbook author Adeena Sussman
Schools Should Not Be Factories by Tamara Mann Tweel
And Mayor Eric Adams is following the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s model in making that distinction clear
Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Bio-Totalitarianism
Societies based on shared trust have been replaced by behavioral management regimes that demand constant censorship
Today we must concede that the long era of liberal capitalism, spanning close to three centuries, is over. What is left is merely its economic form, the profit drive, while its political form – liberal democracy – is in its last gasps. We are not seeing a return of true “feudalism” either, because personal forms of social domination no longer have any political basis. Impersonal social relations are here to stay, not least in the transhumanist agendas that first abolished the idea of the “person” as an autonomous human individual possessing physical and psychological unity before going full horror show with subcutaneously implanted public transport tickets borrowed from a David Cronenberg movie.
To understand what is being lost, it is first important to grasp what the era of liberal capitalism was based on: a normative assumption of trust and civility between strangers, which had come to seem like the natural state of society but was in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. In pre-modern history, tribalism, zero-sum competition, and clan feuds were the norm.
We are again seeing a return to tribalist mistrust centered around the fight for economic resources today. The neoliberal era (1979-2020) established a new consensus on the sectarian ideology of “identity,” i.e. with obligations for employees to partake in various “bias” trainings and for employers to introduce DEI standards, which has been further consolidated by the more radical biopolitical totalitarianism of the Covid regime that has replaced it (2020- ). The idea that we were defined by this or that identitarian marker rather than in our relation to power and capital proved very useful in a landscape of diminished returns, downsizing, decreasing wages for the working class, and recurring economic crises caused by decades of offshoring, automatization, and incipient digitalization. Amid a new struggle for economic resources touched off by the neoliberal era, the preoccupation with personal identity provides an effective diversion. As the philosopher Robert Pfaller noted in 2016, identity politics become especially useful “when people are simultaneously being stripped of things that will no longer be available to them in the future, such as democratic participation, work and income, education, infrastructure, social security, pensions, or even dignity and elegance.”
The new primacy of identity in a society that seeks to strip individuals of assets in the name of making them happier marks the culmination of a process that began with the Industrial Revolution. Following industrialization, hierarchical feudal arrangements disappeared as the relation between capitalists and workers was regulated by mere monetary exchange – in both the work contract and the capitalist’s own profit interests. No longer a personal King or feudal Lord, but impersonal money became the social glue that held everyone together. The setting free of labor obliterated aristocratic rule while generating a new understanding of civil liberties that was unthinkable under the old order: formal equality before the law, a general right to property, democratic participation, the right to assemble, the beginnings of the freedom of speech and of the press.
The “woke” social consensus of the neoliberal era was not powerful enough on its own to fully divide and depoliticize the entire democratic space. For that to occur required the “state of emergency” introduced by the Covid regime, which successfully built on an elite bias against the masses. Identitarian neoliberals first developed the power of the “implicit bias” theory, which posited that people’s internal attitudes made them dangerous and in need of anti-racism training or some other form of therapeutic-managerial intervention. But this framework was subsequently radicalized by the new bio-surveillance state that arose around Covid into the idea that even my next of kin is a dangerous “virus spreader.” While the regulators pushed for more lockdowns, only heretics dared ask whether the Covid regime’s social distancing, masking, hand disinfection, arm’s length-rules in schools, and new guidelines for how people should have sex, were effective in combating this particular virus. And it did not matter, because it was immensely effective in a different way: forcing compliance. For with these meaningless rules emerged a new virological imperative: “Treat every other person as though they had a contagious and fatal disease.”
Against the background of continuous economic crises, and the emergence of a technocratic algorithm-driven state that has eclipsed the former separation of powers, has emerged a new era of social mistrust. Instead of holding debates in parliaments or public spaces to forge a new social consensus, we are told by experts that viruses, abstractions (“the climate”), wars, domestic terrorism, institutional racism, transphobia, and the ubiquitous “threat from the far right” constitute immediate, life-threatening, no-alternative emergencies that leave no time for disagreement, but demand urgent top-down action by the “experts.” In an environment of constant emergencies that fosters mutual mistrust – everybody can after all be a transphobe, a Covid denier, a Nazi behind their human mask – censorship is bound to thrive almost organically.
When tribalism returns, so does mistrust. Political elites know this and exploit it. Their most powerful tool is censorship, now rebranded in Orwellian Newspeak as an effort to fight disinformation. It is no accident that the punishment for an offense against particular identity groups is persecuted in the harshest way – see Meghan Murphy’s “lifetime” Twitter ban under the site’s former owners for referring to a trans woman as “him.” This is not because tech company CEOs and the FBI are genuinely concerned for the safety of trans people. The point of “being woke” is not caring about “disadvantaged groups,” whom the successive abolition of democratic rights precisely hurts the most. Rather, the aim of the new regime is to regulate every minutia of normal life down to our deepest private behaviors to enforce adherence to social norms which the “experts” alone dictate and control. Like all modes of totalitarian power, it begins with an attack on reason: “We need to abolish free speech in order to save it.”
The nexus between the censoring of (online) speech and institutional regulations of individual behavior is indicative of a larger social transformation: “The question of identity,” according to Pfaller, “arises in all those contexts where the previous distinction between public role and private person, between public and private space, has been liquidated.” This collapse of the distance between “matters of the public” and “private matters” is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. The very concept of totality demands that formerly private spaces be opened up to external managerial regulation. No more “my body my choice.” That was a liberal slogan that upheld a principle of bodily autonomy that is now obsolete. Nothing and no one can remain autonomous under the new system.
Examples of the reach of this new regime abound. Take, for instance, a Code of Conduct sheet recently circulated by a Digital Rights NGO. The intention was noble: to set a precedent with a distinctly “non-woke” set of guidelines that avoided references to race, sex, or gender. Yet the final product, while superficially anti-woke, still reproduces the larger and even more dystopian system of power relations of which wokeness is only a symptom.
We as members and contributors, pledge to make the participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of any personal characteristic dimension that essentially amplifies differences among people instead of embracing their similarities.
By participating in this activity, we pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, and healthy community.
There is obviously nothing to see here if you are already used to soft-nudging social engineering terms such as “healthy community” or “harassment-free experience” – as though what we should normally expect, absent regulation, is a closed and unwholesome community and continuous harassment. But in fact we should pay particular attention to how widely internalized such newspeak already is. In a perhaps even more disturbing list, the company holds the employees to the following standards.
Act rationally
Demonstrate empathy and kindness towards other people
Be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints and experiences
Give and gracefully accept constructive feedback
Accept responsibility and apologize to those affected by our mistakes and learn from the experience.
Refuse to weaponize others' mistakes
Focus on what is best, not just for us as individuals but for the overall community and project.
The danger of this list lies precisely in its innocuousness. “Demonstrating empathy” and “being respectful of different opinions” are no longer the self-evident basis for reasonably well socialized individuals to go about their everyday encounters. Instead, social behavior has become a regulatory task for external management. The message is clear: no, we cannot trust people to behave in a civilized way. We also want you to think you cannot be safe from irrational behavior. Most of all, we cannot trust that the civilizational project has been a historically organic process of trial-and-error, in which we have found that the best way to live and organize a self-determined life is through mutual trust—by realizing that, as humans, we best survive by trusting one another. The very thing that built civilization in the first place gets undermined by regulating conduct in this way. Distrust becomes institutionalized.
In this sense identitarian politics has no substance at all. It merely has a function: the consolidation of power. By liquidating the necessary distance between the public and the private that allows individuals to develop an autonomous personality independent of institutional requirements or managerial control – and to diminish our expectations of others while doing so – produces conformity. Woke slogans and diversity training do not protect “vulnerable groups,” nor is that what they were designed to do. To the contrary: compliance is so centrally built into its practicality – think of the ritualized obsession with pronouns – that any wrongdoing in the minefield of misgendering will lead to guilt. This is why, in reaching compliance, the reference to “vulnerable groups” is so effective. The authorities reprogramming behavior and language are not to be blamed, but rather your reckless usage of the common idiom.
The new totalitarianism is the result of eroded trust in our fellow humans after decades of social division and the emergence of the depoliticization of public spaces, where debates are replaced with the fetishistic belief in “objective constraints” (the virus, Climate, war). This is fertile ground for divisions between friend and enemy, and between the good, the bad, and the ugly, which gives authoritarian practices such as censorship – the first symptom of a dying civilization – such a good name.
Today, most of us may still implicitly assume that fellow passengers on the bus are not out to kill us. But with the experience of identitarian divisions and new virological imperative, our civilization’s main currency – trust – has suffered. It would be good to remember that without trust – the faith that the other person is just as human as yourself – civilization becomes impossible.
Dr. Elena Louisa Lange is a philosopher based in Switzerland. Her last book is The Conformist Rebellion. Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). She writes on Substack at Lawyer's Fees, Beetroot, and Music.
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Re: “ Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Bio-Totalitarianism”
Profound article!
Reminded me of a world like that portrayed in the 1978 movie, “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers”, where you no longer knew who you could trust and who’d been “taken over” by the aliens. Good flick!
But Scary times we live in.
Elena Louisa Lange killin it!