monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I’ll take the bait, because the underlying issue here is important to understanding politics in 2018. We’re in a period of massive demographic and social change, and all that change is creating a powerful backlash. The coalition being built by that backlash, the coalition Rubin is a part of, is best understood as a reactionary movement because, well, that’s what it is — a movement united by opposition to changes it loathes.

Reactionary, in this context, isn’t a slur; it’s a lineage, and it has a specific meaning that’s useful in understanding this group. And whether you support legal pot has nothing to do with it.

If someone wrote a report trying to map the modern left, you’d quickly come up with a list that connects me to people I like but disagree with on some issues, people I dislike, people who dislike me, and people whom I don’t even think of as in my universe.

Which is all to say that mapping broad ideologies is an odd and imprecise business, and it’s particularly odd to the people caught up in it, who experience the fractiousness of their side at least as much as they experience its cohesion.

Lewis’s report is trying to map the emergence of a new coalition on the right, one driven by a reactionary impulse and centered on YouTube. If you’re over 30 and don’t use YouTube much, it’s almost impossible to convey how central the platform is to young people. But spend much time talking to college students about where they get their political information and you’ll find YouTube is dominant; what’s happening on the platform is important to our political future, and badly undercovered.

Lewis is interested in how this ecosystem is being shaped by both social and algorithmic dynamics. The social side is familiar: Hosts appears on each other’s shows, do events together, and cross-pollinate their audiences. The algorithmic side is less familiar: YouTube’s powerful recommendation engine learns who’s connected to whom, adds in a preference for extreme and outlandish content, and thus pushes the entire ecosystem in a more radical direction. (Controversially, Lewis suggests YouTube should cut the most extreme of these shows off from monetization channels; this part of the report is the least detailed and, in my view, the least convincing, so I’m not going to spend time on it here.)

Mapping this network carries the consequence of connecting people to voices they’d rather not be connected to — Ben Shapiro, a mainstream conservative, is angry at his inclusion. The shows he regularly appears on also host much more fringe figures, and this puts him a couple degrees out from white supremacists on Lewis’s map. But this is part of Lewis’s point: This world, in a way that’s unusual, has extremely porous borders between the mainstream and the extreme, and that’s a consequence of both ideological intention and algorithmic design.

One way to understand the Data & Society report is to see it as another cut at what Bari Weiss described in the New York Times (again naming Rubin and Shapiro, though omitting a lot of the more extreme figures identified by Lewis) as the “intellectual dark web.” Weiss’s piece described something real and important, but it had trouble defining their ideology, in large part because it was overly credulous. Here, for instance, is her explanation of what unites this community:

They all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

This is definitely what the members of this community say about themselves. But spend some time listening to Rubin call progressivism “a mental disorder,” or emailing with Sam Harris — a New Atheist author and podcaster in this community — and you find the commitment to civility or even debate is pretty thin. Similarly, this movement’s vaunted commitment to free speech looks a bit shallow after you receive a letter from Jordan Peterson threatening a lawsuit because you ran an interview with a scholar who criticized him. And, of course, every community believes they’re the ones who prize facts over feelings.

This is Lewis’s key paragraph, emphasis mine:

The boundaries between different political groups of influencers and the ideological positions they promote are often slippery. Many identify themselves primarily as libertarians or conservatives. Others self-advertise as white nationalists. Simultaneously, these influencers often connect with one another across ideological lines. At times, influencers collaborate to the point that ideological differences become impossible to take at face value. For example, self-identified conservatives may disavow far-right extremism while also hosting explicit white nationalists on their channels. Within the [network], this collaboration generates a cross-promotion of ideas that forms a broader, intertextual common ground. Many of these YouTubers are less defined by any single ideology than they are by a “reactionary” position: a general opposition to feminism, social justice, or left-wing politics.

Lewis’s argument, which I agree with, is that the core, unshakable agreement uniting the reactionary right is their intense loathing of “the social justice left,” of political correctness, of threats to free speech as they define it.

Trump is also a manifestation of this shift. In 2012, the Republican Party wanted to compromise on culture and immigration to win on economics; Trump dominated the primary by insisting on the opposite formulation. He cares little about entitlement spending but deeply about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.

Back in April, I interviewed Lilliana Mason, a political scientist who specializes in identity formation. “Our party divisions have always been moving,” she said. “Sometimes we fight over economics, sometimes we fight over culture, but the line is always moving.” And right now, she continued, “there could be a real new partisan cleavage we are trying to organize around.” Perhaps, she suggested, the next political cleavage “is a social justice cleavage.”

I think she’s right, and one place you see it is on YouTube, where tomorrow’s politics are emerging today.

Peterson fears that gender and racial equity movements will go too far in challenging the natural order of things and destroy what made Western civilization great. What the world needs is intellectual rebels willing to shatter the social justice consensus, stare down the PC police, and say what no one else will

What is it reacting to?

My long answer to this question is to go read “White threat in a browning America.” The short version is we’re in a period of massive demographic and social change. The power structures really are in flux. We just had a black president and now we have a white backlash president, the #MeToo movement is transforming workplaces, college campuses are majority female, and most infants under 3 are nonwhite, to name just a few of the ongoing revolutions. This is a lot of change, all at once.


The PC wars are downstream from these upheavals. As marginalized groups gain power, they make claims. They want resources they were denied, positions they’ve been excluded from, social mores that make them comfortable, a discourse that represents them, a recognition of the ways in which society has been built atop an unjust foundation. Some of this is easy enough for society to grant, but much of it threatens the majority’s status, power, resources, or simply its sense of security. Action like this creates, well, reaction — and reactionary movements.

The digital scholar Zeynep Tufekci has written about YouTube’s role as an engine of radicalization. She retells watching Donald Trump videos and then being pointed toward “white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” Watching Hillary Clinton rallies led her to “arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11.” Even nonpolitical topics followed the pattern: “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.”

Extremism is interesting. That’s part of the YouTube right’s programming strategy and it’s part of YouTube’s algorithmic strategy. But whether anyone intends it to or not, this mixture of social, political, and algorithmic preferences for extremism means that a 17-year-old kid who begins watching videos on the YouTube right can get drawn into very dark places very fast.

Ideological coalitions are strange things, and all the more so when they’re young and untested. They’re not really under anyone’s control. They often end up grouping together people who don’t much like each other. The boundaries of a movement aren’t just defined by who leads it, but who its followers believe belongs in it, and who they’re guided towards once they make contact with it. Making it yet more complex, this is arguably the first time we’ve seen a distinctive ideological coalition emerging atop social media platforms and under the influence of social media algorithms.

My guess is that there are dynamics on the reactionary right that will crack under different political structures. A normal Republican in the White House would likely split off some of the more mainstream conservatives from some of the more anti-establishment nodes, while a mainstream Democrat might strengthen these ties. But the new reactionary right is bigger than people realize and is only going to become more important in the future. Efforts to map it, and understand it — in terms of both how it understands itself and what it prefers not to understand about itself — are necessary, even if they’re imperfect.

White threat in a browning America
How demographic change is fracturing our politics.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Jul 30, 2018, 6:00am EDT
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In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope. An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different from our past.

In 2016, Donald Trump wielded that same sense of change as a threat; he was the revanchist voice of those who yearned to make America the way it was before, to make it great again. That was the impulse that connected the wall to keep Mexicans out, the ban to keep Muslims away, the birtherism meant to prove Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president. An America that would elect Donald Trump president was an America in which a future was being written that could read thrillingly similar to our past.

This is the core cleavage of our politics, and it reflects the fundamental reality of our era: America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of 1 were nonwhite. The announcement, made during the second term of the nation’s first African-American president, was not a surprise. Demographers had been predicting such a tipping point for years, and they foresaw more to come.

The experience of losing status — and being told that loss of status is part of society’s march to justice — is itself radicalizing. In 2006, Nyla Branscombe, Michael Schmitt, and Kristin Schiffhauer published a fascinating paper called “Racial attitudes in response to thoughts of White privilege.” They found that priming white college students to think about the concept of white privilege led them to express more racial resentment in subsequent surveys. The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it, to tell them they don’t truly deserve what they have, to make them consider that it might be taken away.

Recently, I was in Los Angeles, interviewing Mayor Eric Garcetti. I asked him how, in a diverse polity, he dealt with the tensions of what some call identity politics and what some just call politics. His answer? Talk less, act more.

“I came in here as mayor,” he replied, “and I looked at the boards and commissions that I appointed about 300 people to oversee our departments. And within six months, I made them, for the first time, over 50 percent women. I think it was 53 or 54 percent women. And then we could get back to business.”

Perhaps that’s the answer. But imagine that at the national level, attempted by the first female president, with a polarized media looking for conflict. Many would celebrate it. Others would see discrimination, threat, loss. Think back to Limbaugh saying, “How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people.” Think of Jordan Peterson labeling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to promote gender equality a “murderous equity doctrine.”

The world is not zero-sum, but it is sometimes zero-sum. A world in which 50 percent of government appointees are female is a world in which fewer are male. Those losses will be felt, and fought. Powerful social movements will arise to protect what is being taken, to justify the way things were before. The quickest path toward social calm would be to leave these inequities untouched, but even if that were desirable — and it’s not — it will be impossible as historically marginalized groups gain the power to demand their share of the American dream.

As we navigate these sensitivities, we can do so with more or less care. Richeson believes it would be wise for demographers to stop using terms like “majority-minority America” — after all, whites will still be a plurality, and what good can come of framing America’s trajectory in a way that leaves the single largest group feeling maximally threatened? It sounds like “a force of nonwhite people who are coming and they are working as a coalition to overturn white people and whiteness,” Richeson said, laughing. “That’s a problem!”

Richeson’s research shows that if you can add reassurance to discussions of demographic change — telling people, for instance, that the shifts are unlikely to upend existing power or economic arrangements — the sense of threat, and the tilt toward racial and political conservatism, vanishes. The problem, she admits, is, “we can’t say, ‘Don’t worry, white people, you’ll be okay and you’ll get to run everything forever!’”

The other problem is that the conversation about, and the experience of, a browning America will not be driven by demographers and social psychologists; it will be driven by ambitious politicians looking for an edge, by political pundits looking for ratings, by outrageous stories going viral on social media, by cultural controversies like Gamergate and Roseanne Barr getting fired.

To say American politics is in for turbulence is not to say we are in for dissolution. A majority of Americans — though not of Republicans — believe the browning of America is a good thing for the country. And we have watched states like California and Texas transition into majority-minority status without falling to pieces. Politicians able to articulate a vision of this future that is inclusive, inspiring, and nonthreatening — the mixture Obama sought in 2008 — will reap massive rewards.

But as Obama found after he was elected, leadership in this era requires delivering for diverse coalitions, and taking sides in charged cultural battles, and thus becoming part of the very conflict you’re trying to calm. The cycle of unity giving way to conflict, of hope about the future activating fear about the present, is likely to continue. And as long as much of the country feels threatened by the changes they see, there will be a continuing, and perhaps growing, market for politicians like Trump.

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This may be the strangest day yet at the Trump White House. Rod Rosenstein was summoned to the WH to meet with John Kelly this morning. He expected to be fired. He wasn't. And now Rosenstein is attending a previously scheduled cabinet-level meeting (filling in for Sessions)

Russia is to send new anti-aircraft missiles to Syria, a week after Syrian forces accidentally shot down a Russian aircraft during an Israeli air strike.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system would be delivered within two weeks.

The reconnaissance plane was downed on 17 September after Israeli jets attacked targets in Latakia province.

Israel denies failing to give Russia adequate notice of the air strike.

All 14 Russian military personnel aboard the plane died.

Mr Shoigu said the delivery of the S-300 system had been suspended in 2013 following a request from Israel but added: "Now, the situation has changed. And it's not our fault."

"In parts of the Mediterranean adjacent to Syria, there will be radio-electronic jamming of satellite navigation, onboard radars and communications systems used by military aircraft attacking targets in Syrian territory," he said.

The systems will also be able to track and identify Russian aircraft.

Russia has an air base in Syria from which it carries out missions in support of President Bashar al-Assad in the country's civil war.

The Ilyushin Il-20 is reported to have been downed about 35km (22 miles) from the Syrian coast as it was returning to Russia's Hmeimim airbase near the north-western city of Latakia.

Russia's Tass news agency said at the time that the plane had "disappeared during an attack by four Israeli F-16 jets on Syrian facilities in Latakia province".

Reports on Syrian state media spoke of an attack in the area shortly before the plane disappeared. According to Sana news agency, the military said it had intercepted "enemy missiles coming from the open sea towards the city of Latakia".

Syrian television also reported explosions over the sky in Latakia just before 22:00 local time. Thirty minutes later, the Sana Facebook page reported that Syrian air defences had responded to enemy missiles.

On Sunday, Russia reiterated its stance that Israeli jets had used its reconnaissance plane as cover while carrying out strikes in Syria.

The country's defence ministry said Israel had failed to give it adequate notice of the attack, putting the Russian aircraft in the path of Syrian air defence systems.

"The actions of the Israeli fighter pilots, which resulted in the loss of life of 15 Russian servicemen, either lacked professionalism or were an act of criminal negligence, to say the least," a ministry spokesman said.

Israel maintains that indiscriminate fire from Syrian forces was to blame for the incident.

It said its aircraft were targeting Syrian military facilities "from which systems to manufacture accurate and lethal weapons were about to be transferred on behalf of Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon".

The Lebanese Shia Muslim militant group and Iran are both allies of the Syrian government.

In a statement on Sunday evening, the Israel Defense Forces said that figures in the Russian military had been clear "that the deconfliction mechanism worked and did so in a timely manner".

In striking at targets close to the Russian air base near Latakia, the Israeli Air Force appears to have crossed a Russian red line. Furthermore the loss of its aircraft has compelled Moscow to act. But its intentions remain unclear.

Israel insists that interrupting weapons supplies to Hezbollah and constraining Iran's growing influence in Syria are vital strategic goals.

But Russia seems to be saying it is no longer willing to turn a blind eye to such operations, which it believes are weakening the Syrian leader, President Assad.

If this really is Moscow's intention then the Israelis are going to have to tread carefully. There could be some very tense and bumpy moments in the coming weeks and months.

Fox's Andrew Napolitano: A Republican senator "needs to demolish" Christine Blasey Ford to secure Kavanaugh confirmation
Stuart Varney: "Well, that would be a sight for sore eyes"

I want to see Mr. Rosenstein's diary for today

so I should stop picking on old white men?

unlikely even if it would make life for my friends in the US easier

But that isn't a claim I or anyone else has ever made.

With a mug like this

TODAY'S QUIZ: Apart from people kicked in the head by a horse, name one human, ever, from the dawn of time, dumber than Sen. Mazie Hirono.

Well, today Mazie Hirono herself provided Ann with the answer.

No. There is nobody dumber than Senator Mazie Hirono.

Christine Blasey Ford BEWARE: Woman Sentenced to Prison for False Rape Charges

Quote:

I want to see Mr. Rosenstein's diary for today

Why? His diary would not be the truth anyway