Month: March 2022

I don’t even want to talk about this latest so-called “revelation” by the NY Times that the Hunter Biden laptop is real (which we already knew, fergawdsakes) because it’s such a classic right wing smear job: incomprehensible, irrelevant and dumb. Those of you who remember Whitewater know what I’m talking about. This one featured lewd pictures of Hunter Biden during his drug using years which was what they really wanted to get out in order to make Joe cry like Edmund Muskie.

Anyway, I think Adam Davidson of the New Yorker, who did stellar work on the Trump Organization’s ccriminal behavior, says it all:

In 2018, I went pretty deep into the Burisma hole.

I felt that, since I was reporting so much on Trump’s international corruption, I should give serious look into Hunter Biden.

But the story just wasn’t there.

Wapo's @pbump review of all the dodgy aspects of The Laptop that have not been addressed is really good.

But if you're going to call out John Solomon's role in it, you also need to call out @kenvogel's–not least bc he's on this week's NYT story. https://t.co/H6vfWPX0lZ pic.twitter.com/UNLJtHxA6b

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 19, 2022

It’s definitely lame that the children of politicians can get lucrative gigs off their last names.

I wish that didn’t happen.

But it was absurd to compare Hunter/Burisma to any one of the Trump deals I covered.

Now, I think I–and my editors–would have written as much as we could if we found that Hunter Biden did something illegal, bad, etc.

But we didn’t.

So, we used our news judgment to not write about this nothing issue.

To be clear: I hate the way politicians use their positions to make money. I think it’s really bad that Obama and Clinton became wildly rich after leaving office.

And I really hate the nepotistic aspect.

BUT, there is no comparison to the Trump Org.

I don’t care what the Manhattan DA says, the Trump Org’s core business model since 2009 has been working closely with money-laundering oligarchs to facilitate their money-laundering.

There is zero comparison between that activity, which actively undermines the US …

and hurts the victims of corruption in other countries.

On a scale of 1 to 100, Hunter Biden is, I dunno, a 20? It’s pretty lame to get sweetheart deals on your dad’s name, but also very, very common.

The Trump Org is a profound outlier among US companies.

I’d say a 95 on that 1 to 100 scale.

They KNOWINGLY participated in and helped a money laundering operation that was almost-certainly for Iran’s National Guard’s WMD efforts.

Alright, I’m bumping that 95 up to a full 100.

Hunter Biden’s laptop has gotten, roughly, infinitely more coverage than Trump’s actual work for an actual enemy power of the US.

What the fucking fuck?

Originally tweeted by Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) on March 19, 2022.

I am publishing the story by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump that Emptywheel references in the tweet above in case you want to know the whole story:

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

-How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?

-Was that information legitimate?

-Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?

-Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.Advertisement

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.Advertisement

The 2019 impeachment. The other overlapping factor coloring the release of the Post story was the investigation into Trump’s effort to leverage Ukrainian aid to damage Biden the previous year.

Giuliani was central to that effort. In late 2018, he began exploring the idea that Biden, as vice president several years before, had improperly tried to influence Ukraine to block an investigation of Burisma, a company for which Hunter Biden served as a board member. This story, promoted by an investigator targeted for termination by the U.S. government, was later debunked, but it seemed a promising line of attack. On April 1, 2019, a writer linked to Giuliani named John Solomon wrote the first of several stories about the allegations.

On April 12, the laptops were dropped off at Mac Isaac’s repair shop. Mac Isaac is legally blind and was not able to identify Hunter Biden by sight. One of the laptops, though, bore a sticker for the Beau Biden Foundation, an organization dedicated to Hunter’s late brother.Advertisement

At some point in the middle of this month, Hunter Biden left Burisma’s board. Presumably he was by that point aware that questions were being asked about his role. If not, it became very clear on May 1, when the Times elevated the Burisma question in its coverage.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky had been elected president of Ukraine, and efforts to pressure him to announce an investigation into Biden began. In early May 2019, Giuliani planned a trip to Ukraine to dig up information that might damage Biden — a plan that was covered in the press. After broad outcry, he scrapped the trip. But the signal was sent: Giuliani was seeking information deleterious to Biden.

Later that month, someone in Kyiv was approached about buying Hunter Biden’s emails. This was not reported until Oct. 21, 2020, a week after the Post’s story about the laptop.

“The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real and they declined to identify who was behind the offers,” Time’s Simon Shuster wrote. “ … The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.” At least one, though, said the material in the Post was “familiar-looking.”

It’s not clear what this was or what the source was. It could have been from Biden’s business partners in Ukraine. It could have been from a hack of Biden’s account; his primary email address was an Apple iCloud account, meaning that emails and photos probably sat online where hackers might be able to access them. In mid-September 2019, the other person who spoke with Shuster was offered similar material.

When the Post first reported on its possession of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, it shared a PDF of an email included in that material. That PDF carried metadata indicating that it was created on Oct. 10, 2019, meaning that either it was created on a machine that had the wrong date set or that it was created after the laptop came into Mac Isaac’s possession.Advertisement

It’s possible that Mac Isaac himself created the PDF, as the beginning of the impeachment investigation into Trump for his interactions with Ukraine had begun the previous month. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender reported in his book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” that Mac Isaac, hearing Hunter Biden come up as part of the impeachment investigation, asked his father for advice on the laptop. Eventually, a connection was made to the FBI and, on Dec. 9, the FBI appeared with a subpoena for the laptop and for a hard drive. It’s not clear what was on that hard drive, though it may have been a backup made by Mac Isaac.

At the time, incidentally, Giuliani was in Ukraine looking to dig up dirt disparaging Joe Biden. That included meeting with a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was later sanctioned by the Treasury Department as a Russian agent.

In spring 2020, Joe Biden secured the Democratic presidential nomination.Advertisement

At some point, Giuliani came into possession of the material from the laptop. The Daily Mail reported in December 2020 that the material was turned over to Giuliani’s lawyer no later than May of that year. According to Bender’s conversation with the lawyer, Robert Costello, that didn’t happen until August — purely by chance.

“In August 2020 — on a whim, as Costello described it to me — he asked Giuliani’s assistant to keep an eye out for any strange political tips coming into the email boxes for Giuliani’s various companies. Costello had a couple of dozen emails within a few days, including one from J.P. Mac Isaac,” Bender wrote.

We do know that by September 2020, Stephen K. Bannon, another ally of Trump’s, was bragging about having it. On Sept. 28, he gave an interview with a Dutch television network hyping his possession of the laptop.

There were already strange rumblings about Hunter Biden at the time. Earlier that same month, someone was passing around a lengthy dossier of allegations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China, created by a nonexistent entity. That document was shared, among others, by an employee of the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.Advertisement

Guo is also the owner of the boat on which Bannon had been arrested for fraud in August 2020. After the Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Daily Beast uncovered claims promoted by outlets linked to Guo focused on a Hunter Biden laptop.

“3 hard disk drives of videos and dossiers of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ,” one tweet read. “Big money and sex scandal!” That was published Sept. 28, the same day as Bannon’s interview with Dutch TV. Similar allegations had been made days before.

The first time the Post saw the material was on Oct. 4. By Oct. 11, Giuliani had handed over the entire duplicated contents of the hard drive and the newspaper began debating how to handle it.

The Times would later report that this was contentious even at the conservative publication. Fox News had already passed on it, apparently in part because of the questions about provenance. A number of Post employees questioned whether the paper had done enough to vet the material. Speaking to the Times, Giuliani insisted that this was exactly why the Post was given all of it: “either nobody else would take it,” he said, “or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

After the story came out, the Post didn’t share the material with other outlets for them to do their own investigations. In other words, coverage necessarily depended on taking the Post’s word for things, which is by itself a disincentive for other outlets.

After the story published Oct. 14, media outlets tried to assess its credibility, without luck. Mac Isaac gave a lengthy, odd interview to reporters that same afternoon in which he repeatedly gave evasive answers and appeared to change his explanations for how he knew whose laptop it was and how it got to the FBI. In the days that followed, the Time and Daily Beast reports reinforced questions about how the material was obtained and how it was being used explicitly to aid Trump’s campaign.

Even today, the full story isn’t clear. Is the story straightforward — Mac Isaac obtained a laptop, thought it might be relevant to national politics and then found only one taker, Giuliani, for the material? Was the material reportedly circulating in Ukraine the same stuff? Nonexistent? Obtained from an iCloud hack independently? Did Guo learn about the laptop from Bannon, with mentions of the material in September following from there? It is of course always easy to ask infinite questions when you’re skeptical, but that the answers to this aren’t known now reinforces the reasons for skepticism 18 months ago.

The reticence to aid possible Russian interference probably had one unintended effect: It made the contents of the drive itself as reported by the Post seem more important than it would likely have been considered otherwise. But that is a subject for a different article.

It’s such a classic ratfuck. And the echoes of the whole Anthony Weiner laptop brouhaha in the last weeks of the 2016 election were just too good to be true.

I agree with Davidson that the trading on the family name aspect of this business is gross. But there is zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward — in fact, the administration took actions that would have hurt Hunter’s business, which Biden expressed publicly. But that never matters in these stories. It’s just about smears and lewd innuendo.

The chutzpah of these right wing asshole pushing this (and the press now running with it) in light of the criminal Donald Trump and his disgusting spawn running all over the world literally selling access to the US president for money — in broad daylight for 4 long years! — is just too much. They need to stop.

America stands united with the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom and against oppression. pic.twitter.com/O7INc9S1tq

— Bill Clinton (@BillClinton) March 18, 2022

Yes, yes I know they are both deeply compromised people. But I just can’t be cynical about this. They are acting like statesmen in this moment and that’s much more than I can say about another ex-president.

Boaty McBoatface clearly was more amusing. When a year go the container ship Ever Given went sideways and blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, there was more than red on the faces of its owners. Their balance sheet and others’ across the planet were bleeding. For each day Ever Given plugged the canal, “an estimated $9.6 billion-worth of cargo between Asia and Europe” was delayed. The Suez Canal Authority assessed nearly a billion dollars in damage. Egypt lost “between $12 and $15 million in revenues for each day the waterway was closed.”

Well. April Fools Day came two weeks early this year. A sister ship to the Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp., Ever Given, is aground in the Chesapeake Bay.

Slate tells the tale:

Since Sunday night, a 1,095-foot-long cargo ship has been stuck in the mud off the Maryland coast of the Chesapeake Bay.

For reasons that remain unknown, the ship—which is fate-temptingly named the Ever Forward—missed a turn while traveling from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, and veered out of a 50-foot-deep channel that runs down the middle of the bay to accommodate such large cargo ships. Ship tracking data shows that the Ever Forward overshot the edge of the channel into waters much too shallow for it to traverse.

Whoops. Except where this ship is stuck, writes Christina Cauterucci, is “no big whoop.” It’s not blocking other vessels. The bigger whoops is that the Ever Forward  is “stucker” than the Ever Given ever was.

Perhaps Vladimir Putin can spare a tactical nuke.

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The New York Times editorial Friday on so-called cancel culture drew a flood of criticism. “America Has a Free Speech Problem” opens like this:

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

The Net exploded with a collective WTF!? Adam Davidson launched a short thread:

https://twitter.com/adamdavidson/status/1504837764411498497?s=20&t=_IW2Q6Sp-h1nucIKZDvsHA

I’ve wondered, my own self, why this NYT editorial promoting the false “cancel culture” panic has upset me so much. I think part of it is this: I have fucking LOVED the NYT. Worked there. When it’s great, nothing comes close. But it has fundamentally misread this moment.

As the right has become more explicitly an anti-Democratic ethnonationalist movement, the NYT (unlike, say, WaPo) has seen its fundamental duty to be a paper for “both sides.” It sees its fundamental flaw in 2016 as not grokking the Trump fan.

Its coverage of the Trump WH was too often a version of “that naked Emperor show has a beautiful suit. ” In short, the NYT went deep into its instincts: both-sidism; respect for authority; a view that Trump-is-normal; that their job is not to call strikes as strikes.

I saw this as, mostly, a Dean Baquet problem. And I was hopeful (though wary) that his replacement will right the ship. But this editorial–approved, I have to assume, by AG Suzlberger, the publisher–suggests the problem is deep in the org.

I personally really like AG. He’s a lovely guy and smart. But I think he is running a paper adrift and in crisis. And this editorial was like them screaming out: Yeah, mother fuckers, we’re quadrupling down on our both-sidist views.

It breaks my heart. There is so much great work there. Right now, heroic NYT journalists are on the frontlines in Ukraine. But cover America like you cover Ukraine! It’s OK. It’s good to report the truth.

The Times did not simply highlight the term now picked up by Vladimir Putin to justify his invasion. Davidson added, “They claimed that we have a constitutional right to freedom from shame.”

That is how the editorial reads. Almost is if subconsciously the Times is begging for readers to stop critiquing how it covers the news even when it distorts it. It is a bizarre argument. Formulations are many, but speech that does not offend anyone requires no protection. When those who take offense express their outrage, that’s protected speech too, so long as it is expressed nonviolently. If you can’t take the heat, etc.

But the never-shunned Donald Trump and his supporters, unconstrained by shame or the 9th Commandment, abused their 1st Amendment right to spread lies that inspired an attempted coup a year ago. Mr. Shameless and his anti-Democratic ethnonationalist foot soldiers almost cancelled the country that invented the Bill of Rights. The Times treats condemnation of that as a threat to free speech. SMH.

“When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence,” the Times complains.

When in the Trump era have conservative white men in rural diners or Trump fans parading about in flag-draped boats and pickups and semis been shut out of public discourse, had their speech stifled? Least of all by the New York Times?

The political violence came anyway. Perpetrated by the shameless.

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Stepan’s mom started posting photos and videos of him on Instagram and TikTok in 2020, and since then, he’s absolutely taken the internet by storm. He now has over a million followers on both platforms, and people come to his pages knowing without a doubt that he’s going to make them smile and bring a little joy to their lives.

Stepan is goofy and curious and loves posing for adorable and silly photos. Recently, though, Stepan’s life and routine had to change because he and his family live in Ukraine.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, everyone was worried for Stepan and his family’s safety. They left comments on his posts and someone even started a Twitter account for him, to post updates and try to spread awareness. Stepan and his family weren’t posting much, and everyone just hoped that they were OK.

Finally, Stepan’s family was able to post an update and let everyone know that they were able to make it out of Ukraine safely — with Stepan in tow.

“We spent two nights in the basement and without electricity for a week,” Stepan’s family wrote on Instagram. “We had to go to the nearby basement to charge the phone. Then we managed to leave the city. Kharkiv volunteers helped by taking us to the railway station. We got on the train Kharkiv to Lviv (in 20 hours, we got to Lviv). Then we followed to the border with Poland. At the border, we stood in a line in a pedestrian crossing. There were a lot of people (4 to 5 thousand). After 9 hours, we crossed the border.”

“When we reached Poland, we were offered help from the World Influencers and Bloggers Association from Monaco,” the family wrote. “They helped us get to France to wait for the very day when we could return home. We’re [alright] now. We worry very much about our relatives in Ukraine and will do the very best we can to help our country.”

Stepan has brought so much joy to so many people, and everyone is so relieved to hear that he and his family are safe.

He really is cute:

Amidst the horror, these people try to save the animals:

You can see a list of verified groups assisting in the care for animals in Ukraine and elsewhere if you care to donate.

Yes, of course, all efforts must be made to help the people first and foremost. But there is enough money to help the animals too. They are innocent creatures just like those little kids and they deserve some help too.

Oops:

It seems J.D. Vance’s “No BS Tour” is skipping a stop in Minnesota. The Ohio Senate hopeful, currently polling in third place, was slated to speak at the Minnesota GOP’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner fundraising event. Then, without explanation, he was pulled.

Scheduled on April Fool’s Day with no apparent sense of irony, the invite went out in late February and almost immediately, Minnesota Republicans pushed back against Vance’s selection. Brian McClung, former spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty tweeted:

Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican party, observed that “numerous Republican operatives” were “fuming” about the selection of Vance as the keynote speaker, highlighting Vance’s ill-informed and callous (not to mention electorally stupid) comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a primary reason for their ire. Though maybe the objection is really about Vance being Vance.

For those who may have forgotten: Vance went on Steve Bannon’s War Room and said “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” during a clumsy attempt to show that his real priority is the U.S.-Mexico border and stopping shipments of fentanyl.

He then kind of, sort of, walked back his statements a few days later.

But then he cashed in one of infinite invitations to go on Tucker Carlson’s show to un-walk back the walk-back. The banner on his campaign webpage features the following fundraising appeal: “Secure our Southern Border and NOT Ukraine’s Border! Stand with Tucker Carlson and JD Vance.”

In other words: J.D. Vance is gonna J.D. Vance. It’s what he does.

But he has other problems, too. Vance is also under fire for investing in the platform Rumble with his political sugar daddy, Peter Thiel. Rumble, if you’re not familiar, is YouTube for those who have been “canceled” by Big Tech.

Mostly that means your garden-variety far-right, white-nationalist types. But Rumble is also the new home to RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel.

Poor guy can’t catch a break.

Apparently, Vance didn’t know that there is a very large Ukrainian American community in Ohio either which was a very stupid mistake. He clearly didn’t read the electorate properly .

He’s not doing well in his race, despite all the money in the world. And it’s not because he’s too MAGA crazy. Josh Mandel who is running against him grovels before Dear Leader even more obsequiously and he’s way ahead. I think he’s just creepy. I didn’t think any level of creepiness was too much for GOP voters but apparently even they have their limits.

This WSJ story about the Russian Orthodox church’s alliance with Putin’s expansionism explains a lot. At some point we really need to grapple with the fact that our wars of the last 50 years have tended to be the result of religious rationalizations rather than ideology. There’s always more to it, whether money or power, but after centuries of wars being waged for other reasons, religion has made a big comeback as the righteous motivation for terrorism and war in the 21st century:

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently described the war in Ukraine as nothing less than an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. Its outcome, he said, will determine “where humanity will end up, on which side of God the Savior.”

Some Ukrainians—those whom President Vladimir Putin claims Russia is liberating with its invasion—have rejected “the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power,” the patriarch explained. Those values are exemplified by gay pride parades, he said, which serve as admissions tests “to enter the club of those countries,” by implication the European Union and more broadly the West.

The Russian Orthodox Church has taken an active role in forging the ideology that undergirds Mr. Putin’s geopolitical ambitions. It is a worldview that holds the Kremlin to be the defender of Russia’s Christian civilization, and therefore justified in seeking to dominate the countries of the former Soviet Union and Russian empire. According to the Rev. Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian-born theologian and former adviser to Patriarch Kirill, these ideas emerged in the aftermath of communism’s collapse, when the Russian state sought to fill an ideological void at the same time that the long-persecuted Russian Orthodox Church asserted itself in a newly open public square.

Mr. Putin invoked ‘Russkiy mir’ in 2014 to justify the annexation of Crimea, which he said reflected the ‘aspiration of the Russian world, of historical Russia, to re-establish unity.’

That confluence of interests inspired what Sergei Chapnin, a former official of the Moscow Patriarchate, calls the “post-Soviet civil religion”: the concept of Russkiy mir (“Russian world”). The term dates back to the 11th century, referring to the East Slavic lands that included much of today’s Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. According to a 2015 article by Marlene Laruelle, a political scientist at George Washington University, the modern usage of Russkiy mir was introduced in 1999 by writers at a Kremlin-associated think tank to mean the whole Russian-speaking world, including Russians living abroad. Mr. Putin, who became president the next year, invoked the term in 2014 to justify the annexation of Crimea, which he said reflected the “aspiration of the Russian world, of historical Russia, to re-establish unity.”

For Mr. Putin, Russkiy mir refers to Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence, which includes the territories of the former Soviet Union and the Russian empire before it. “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 21, three days before Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church embraced the term and lent it a religious character, within which Ukraine also played a special role. The Russian Orthodox Church traces its origins to the 10th-century mass conversion in Kyiv known as the Baptism of Rus’.

In Ukraine, however, the religious conception of Russkiy mir, like the political one, has encountered resistance. Many of the country’s Orthodox believers belong to a Russian-led Orthodox Church, but the country is also home to a sizable Catholic community as well as a Ukrainian Orthodox Church that has sought autonomy from Moscow. In 2019, the global Eastern Orthodox Church’s spiritual leader, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, granted that autonomy.

The decision led to a serious schism within the Eastern Orthodox world. Different national churches have taken sides with Moscow or Constantinople. Patriarch Kirill has suspended communion with Patriarch Bartholomew and lamented that the latter is now helping to “mentally remake Ukrainians and Russians living in Ukraine into enemies of Russia.” Mr. Putin accused Patriarch Bartholomew of doing the bidding of Washington.

Inside Russia, Russkiy mir has found deep religious resonance, especially in the military. According to Dmitry Adamsky, an expert on the Russian military and professor at Reichman University in Israel, Orthodox clergy build troop morale and encourage patriotism. Each of the three parts of Russia’s nuclear force structure—land, sea and air—has received a patron saint. The church has also enthusiastically promoted Russia’s role in Syria’s civil war as a crusade to protect Christian minorities, Mr. Adamsky said.

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed forces near Moscow, consecrated in 2020, furnishes a spectacular display of the fusion of the military and the religious. The cathedral commemorates Russian military action, above all in World War II—its floors are paved with metal from melted-down German weapons and tanks—but also in more recent conflicts in Georgia, Crimea and Syria.

Russia’s official National Security Strategy, approved by Mr. Putin last year, devotes several pages to “the defense of traditional Russian spiritual-moral values, culture and historical memory.” According to a study for NATO Defense College by Julian Cooper, a British scholar, the values in question are a mostly generic list including life, dignity, patriotism and strong families, but they are framed in contrast to those of the West, which encroach on Russia’s “cultural sovereignty.”

In a speech last fall, Mr. Putin deplored what he identified as prevalent cultural trends in Western Europe and the U.S., including transgenderism and “cancel culture.” “We have a different viewpoint,” Mr. Putin said. “We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”

The Kremlin and the patriarchate have framed Ukraine’s western ties and aspirations for membership in the EU and NATO not only as a geopolitical concern but as a threat to the spiritual integrity of Russkiy mir, according to Regina Elsner, a theologian and researcher at Berlin’s Center for East European and International Studies. A video posted last month on the website of the World Russian People’s Council, a Moscow think tank headed by Patriarch Kirill, makes the connection explicit: “If the actions of our president to recognize [separatist regions in the Donbas] relate to the political, military sovereignty of Russia—that is, we are trying to stop the advancement of NATO, missiles on our borders—then the moral problems associated with the protection of traditional values are aligned, and they are no less important than political and military aspects.”

Spiritual integrity … right.

Our culture war has been right in there too, there’s no getting around it. From the endless paeans to “Judeo-Christian values” to the recent legal assaults on secularism, we’re definitely rowing in the same boat.

Remember this disgusting quote right after 9/11?

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Today, it’s all about “religious freedom” (for bigots.) But really, is it that different?

I know you’ll be shocked to learn that the largest Ivermectin trial done so far was a disappointment:

Researchers testing repurposed drugs against Covid-19 found that ivermectin didn’t reduce hospital admissions, in the largest trial yet of the effect of the antiparasitic on the disease driving the pandemic.

Ivermectin has received a lot of attention as a potential treatment for Covid-19 including from celebrities such as podcast host Joe Rogan. Most evidence has shown it to be ineffective against Covid-19 or has relied on data of poor quality, infectious-disease researchers said. Public-health authorities and researchers have for months said the drug hasn’t shown any benefit in treating the disease. Taking large doses of the drug is dangerous, the Food and Drug Administration has said.

The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo.

“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful,” said Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Dr. Mills on Friday plans to present the findings, which have been accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal, at a public forum sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

I suspect that many of the wingnuts who got COVID took Ivermectin and when they got better they attributed it to that instead of the fact that they simply recovered on their own. The ones that died, well … dead men tell no tales.

It’s one thing to try these snake oil cures like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin if there’s nothing else out there and someone is very ill as long as it isn’t going to make them worse. But there’s been no excuse for this nonsense for the last year and a half as the vaccines and treatments came on line. It killed a whole lot of people.

This piece by Dorian Lynskey discusses a phenomenon that’s depressing but not surprising:

Last week, Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote a column about Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and referred, in passing and without elaboration, to “Right-wing pundit Glenn Greenwald”. The results were predictable. Greenwald’s defenders protested that he had previously supported the likes of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, doggedly opposed the last Bush administration, and used to write for the Guardian and the Intercept, which he co-founded.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

[…]

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Agreed. It’s just not a useful way to think about politics anymore.

It’s not hard to have principles about these matters of life and death or to use a phrase that was bastardized during the grim Bush years: moral clarity. And I don ‘t think there’s ever been such a perfect example of how that works than now. If you were against the invasion of Iraq then the parallel with what Putin has done now couldn’t be more clear. This is not a tough call.

The need to put the US at the center of all world events, much less as the evilest-of-the-evil is just simplistic, reflexive positioning. The line between good and evil exists in every nation, every people, every human being.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Russia's invasion:

"What we are seeing in Ukraine today is a horror that almost embarrasses all of us as being a part of the human race. To see a large country just simply systemically destroy the people of a small democratic nation." pic.twitter.com/EOmi6IMKtR

— The Recount (@therecount) March 18, 2022

If you feel a little bit disoriented right now, it’s understandable. We have been through several major emergencies these last few years and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. In fact, the last two decades have been tough, what with 9/11, the Iraq war and the financial crisis. But more recently our crises have been coming one right after the other, starting with the traumatic election of Donald Trump in 2016 and culminating in a deadly global pandemic, an attempted coup and now a major war in Europe that could explode into a nuclear conflagration with one small misstep.

The war in Ukraine is the most acutely dangerous problem at the moment and I think we are all shaken by what we’re seeing on TV, and trying not to think about how much worse this could get. Right now all we can do is pray that this ends as soon as possible and be grateful that Donald Trump and his minions aren’t in office at this moment.

That brings us to the other two still-unfolding crises which have become entwined in a bizarre and unprecedented way. The anti-democratic movement in the GOP has been percolating for years but it accelerated during Trump’s term and then launched into warp speed after the 2020 election, culminating in the coup attempt and insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. It is the natural consequence of the ongoing radicalization of the GOP and the mainstreaming of revanchist right-wing extremism.

That extremism has infiltrated our culture in ways that have tragically impacted the other major crisis we are dealing with: the COVID-19 pandemic. Going into its third year, we are enjoying a welcome lull in the crisis. Spring is here, the weather is warming up, public health requirements have lifted and people are feeling a bit more free:

NEW: Updated COVID-19 Community Levels as of March 17, 2022.

More than 99% of the U.S. population is in a location with a low or medium COVID-19 Community Level.

Find your COVID-19 Community Level: https://t.co/JwJHyNdn4T pic.twitter.com/9xLlSMPtla

— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) March 17, 2022

That is a remarkable change from just last month when the omicron variant was still raging. Enjoy it — because it’s not going to last.

Congress cut billions in COVID funding this week and it couldn’t happen at a worse time. The new variant known as omicron BA-2, aka “stealth omicron,” is on the march. Europe and Asia are already seeing spikes in cases and it’s rapidly becoming the dominant strain in the U.S. as well. As Dr. Rochelle Walensky notes in the tweet cited above, the U.S. mostly has a low or medium virus level but we are seeing it turn up in wastewater all over the country, so it’s only a matter of time before we see the next surge. That pattern has been the same from the beginning.

China has locked down 52 million people to try to hold back the tide of this new variant, which some say is 50% more infectious than the previous omicron variant we just got done with. And because China had a substandard vaccine and kept earlier iterations of the virus out through lockdowns and other “zero-COVID” policies, there is little immunity in their population. The same thing is happening in Hong Kong.

In Europe, their case rate is skyrocketing as well:

Note for the BA.2 new wave, the countries graphed below all have considerably higher vaxx and booster rates in the US, and particularly for people age 60+ https://t.co/aRRb4Z0nR3

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) March 17, 2022

With our lower rate of vaccination in the U.S., when the new sub-variant really hits here we will likely cross the threshold of 1 million deaths, which is mind-boggling.

Here is the Atlantic’s Ed Yong on our decision to “move on”:

When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over.

Congress refused to approve billions in needed funds just as a new wave is about to come crashing down. Unfortunately, it appears that we will just have to ride out all the variants to come. We must hope that the waning efficacy of the vaccines will not result in an explosion of new cases, and that new and future variants will be mild for most people. That still leaves the medically vulnerable and those who cannot get vaccinated out in the cold, as well as the scary possibility of long COVID for anyone who even gets a mild case. I guess those are the breaks.

There’s a strain of this thinking in Europe as well, with widening protests against masks and vaccine mandates. But here in America we have spawned a full-fledged resistance movement to public health that has resulted in a much lower vaccination rate and violent hostility to innocuous measures like masks and social distancing in restaurants. Public health officials are enduring nonstop harassment. And most of this is driven by right-wing politics.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released a study this week that looked at the disparities in outcomes among U.S. states and it’s not pretty. The authors note that these disparities have been growing for the past three decades, with more conservative states refusing to provide health care or enact measures like “workplace and product safety, the environment, tobacco control, food labeling, gun ownership, and needle exchange programs.” This has has had predictable results: a lot more suffering and premature death. The centrist think tank Third Way reported this week that “in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden,” and that eight of the 10 states with the highest current murder rates have “voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”

They call that freedom. I think nihilism is closer to the truth.

Nothing illustrates this phenomenon like the response to COVID-19. The JAMA study reported this:

States that rushed to curtail lockdowns in the spring of 2020 experienced more protracted surges in infections and disruptions to their economies. In 2021, excess deaths were disproportionately concentrated in states where resistance to COVID-19 vaccination was prevalent. For example, excess death rates in Florida and Georgia (more than 200 deaths per 100 000) were much higher than in states with largely vaccinated populations such as New York (112 per 100 000), New Jersey (73 deaths per 100 000), and Massachusetts (50 per 100 000). States that resisted public health protections experienced higher numbers of excess deaths during the Delta variant surge in the fall of 2021 (Figure). Between August and December 2021, Florida experienced more than triple the number of excess deaths (29 252) as New York (8786), despite both states having similar population counts (21.7 million and 19.3 million, respectively).

 

The numbers don’t lie. In 2021, excess deaths were concentrated in states where people were hostile to mitigation efforts, and whose governors preened and strutted around, bragging about their COVID response as if there was a contest over how many of their own citizens they could ritually sacrifice to the MAGA gods. They took a whole lot of innocent people down with them. And it’s not over yet. 

Salon