Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The most consequential foreign policy crisis of his young term has overwhelmed the president’s schedule, shoving everything — from the State of the Union to a Supreme Court pick — to the backburner. And while he leans on a trusted inner circle of advisers to decipher Putin’s moves, he has also relied on his own experience, having practiced diplomacy with European leaders for decades and having been able to size up Putin face-to-face a number of times.

Biden begins each day with the presidential daily briefing. On most days in recent weeks, the intelligence briefer has been joined by some of Biden’s top national security advisers: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and more.

Carrying over reading habits from his three-plus decades in the Senate, Biden dives into the briefing books and peppers his aides with questions, according to two senior White House aides. But the routine has gotten more time-consuming and frantic in recent weeks as the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine turned into a reality. Unlike his last foreign policy crisis — the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan — Biden has been forced to spend his time responding to the actions of a foreign nation rather than shaping U.S. policy there.

The inflating of the obvious into the awe-inspiring is part of why Peterson can operate so successfully in the “self-help” genre. He can give people the most elementary fatherly life advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom. — Nathan Robinson

Thankfully, since his meteoric rise to the public consciousness five-odd years ago, Jordan Peterson doesn’t get nearly as much mainstream media attention as he used to. The glowing write-ups and pieces touting him as “The West’s most important intellectual” and all the hype about the Intellectual Dark Web have faded into the collective memory and aged very poorly.

A search of his name — on Google in the EU — after his recent resignation shows only a few conservative outlets like the Federalist or the Washington Examiner covering the topic. His fanbase would — I assume — attribute this to some sort of censorship, wokeness, or silencing, but it is much more simple than that.

The more people have heard him speak, the more obvious it became that he wasn’t profound.

Whether he’s boring Charlie Kirk and Don Jr. to death at a TurningPoint USA conference or walking himself into a socialist argument with a few friendly questions from Joe Rogan — my personal favorite, it doesn’t take long for him to expose himself.

And after a few years of attention on his ramblings, a lot of the general public sees that he’s just the better-educated version of any right-wing reactionary. He tosses around the same tropes as all conservatives in that echo chamber; he just wraps his in seventy-eight layers of pseudo-academic jargon with a sprinkle of self-help.

His resignation letter shows, once again, the shallow ideologue that he’s always been.

Luckily, there aren’t nearly as many people paying attention.

Let us not forget how he became a name in the public discourse. It pays to be reminded that he was just another professor. He was a Canadian psychologist and working professor babbling to classrooms of students trying their best to hang on to the thread of what he was saying as he overwhelmed them with an avalanche of pointless, dense, and esoteric prose.

To his credit, he was consistently publishing pieces in scientific journals, as university professors with PHDs do, but he was by no means a phenomenon. He didn’t get worldwide recognition for his contributions to psychology, and he didn’t write a bestseller. He was just another professor uploading his lectures onto YouTube.

That is until Canada wanted to include trans people in an existing human rights law.

I don’t know if he knowingly lied, how calculated his moves were, or what the deal was, but he began to get a lot of attention for misrepresenting bill C-16. He equated extending basic human rights to the trans community — when it comes to things like hiring, firing, housing, and harassment — as mandatory speech, fear-mongering about a woke version of the East German Stasi coming to haul away anyone who accidentally used the wrong pronoun.

His obvious exaggerations never came to fruition, but conservatives and right-wing media loved it. Fans flocked in for his anti-trans takes, and many stayed for his version of self-help.

Back in 2018, Nathan Robinson penned the seminal take on the man and the phenomenon in Current Affairs entitled, The Intellectual We Deserve.

In that piece, he offers an extensive rebuke of the “intellectual” label given to Peterson and a very relevant critique of the society that would elevate such a figure. He says it all much better than I ever could.

Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision. — N.R.

There are many critiques to be made of the left, especially the corporate centrist version that refuses to address — and can’t due to corruption — the material needs of working-class people, and so instead, overcompensates with a hyper-focus on identity, language, and virtue signaling.

I see that as an economic problem of corporations owning government. It is precisely because politicians are purchased and can’t affect any real change that they focus so hard on “wokeness.”

Peterson takes a different approach and blames a secret cabal of Bolsheviks that are pulling the strings to bring on the downfall of “Western Civilization” and usher in a Marxist Utopia.

His resignation piece in the National Post reads exactly as one would expect. Groveling about how the “radical left” is ruining business and society, and how anyone who disagrees with him is only doing so because of political reasons — rather than the fact that much of what he says lacks evidence or is flat out wrong.

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). -J.P.

Putting aside the fact that they don’t ask about sexual orientation when offering research positions, I’d love to see evidence of this claim that white heterosexual males are being held back because of diversity and inclusion, both in the general population and his grad students.

There are truckloads of right-wing billionaire money flooding astroturfed organizations, funding conservative media outlets, and especially looking for any academic to add a sheen of credibility to their agenda. They’d write a blank check to a Jordan Peterson trained researcher or lay a red carpet at the Heritage Foundation for any one of them.

As far as university research positions, again, I’d like to see some evidence. It very well could be that being connected to a figure like JP isn’t a resume booster in some colleges, but that’s not because of diversity and inclusion; it’s because few outside the right-wing sphere take Jordan Peterson seriously.

But this gripe, in general, is not new. It is classic “reverse racism” that becomes prevalent during any struggle for equality, as was seen in 1960s America. Because of all that dangerous talk of civil rights, white people — in Jim Crow era 1960s America mind you — felt that reverse racism was a pressing issue.

Peterson is just making the contemporary argument. Minorities and the LGBTQ+ community are being more represented in our media, culture, and institutions? That can only mean there’s an excess of discrimination against heteronormative whites.

Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. — J.P.

Obviously, that passage could be read as racist — not saying he necessarily is but those sentences are brutal. If they graduate from the program, in what way would we “produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job?” Wouldn’t it be the same university program with the same standards and procedures? But just because they made the class diverse somehow the graduates wouldn’t be as good?

White men are being systematically held back, and minorities in any position above line cook must be there because of diversity and inclusion mandates. Yeah, of course, that’s what he’s harping on about in his resignation piece.

It’s long, so would take days to cover it all, but he hits those themes over and over and over again. Diversity, inclusion, and wokeness are destroying our society, everybody knows it, and they’re too afraid to say it.

I do, however, agree with this nugget: “Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training?”

Implicit bias can’t be transformed in a short corporate training program. This is true. It takes more than one training, some introspection, and we still all have biases. They don’t necessarily go away, we just become aware of them.

I also agree with Peterson that the Robin DeAngelos of the world can be super misguided — shoutout to Matt Taibbi’s work on that subject. Does cancel culture get out of hand? Of course, it does. Are there horrific stories of teachers, professors, or professionals being harassed by “social justice types” for an honest and minor mistake? Unfortunately, that does happen.

Is it the most important issue of our time? Please, dude.

But the right-wing billionaire-funded rage machine amplifies every one of these cases into a national emergency, creating the illusion that everyone everywhere is being dragged into the street and flogged for an accidental misgendering.

It’s part of a conservative media strategy to make the extreme examples seem like the norm. Social media business models and algorithms make stuff go viral, we watch it, get recommendations for more of the same, and end up with a wholly distorted view of the world. Again, the canceling, calling everyone racist, and demanding the perfect language do go off the rails, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the oft-cited examples make it seem.

And CEO virtue signaling isn’t a sign they’re beholden to the “social justice types.” They’re running a company. They’re reading the room, looking at polling, and seeing where the country is on social issues, and then they put a BLM banner on their website. It’s marketing, not a cultural revolution.

If it was the early 1960s, they’d be making George Wallace collab running shoes because the majority of the country was uber-racist and they’d sell like hotcakes. It is craven capitalist virtue signaling. It isn’t a harbinger of The Great Leap Forward.

In the words of my personal favorite Canadian psychologist Gabor Mate, “why are you so angry, Jordan?” Seriously, he just beat a health scare and knocked out another book — sure, it didn’t sell like the last one, but I’m sure he made off well and gets crazy bank per appearance. He should be riding high.

And now he’s no longer a tenured professor but professor emeritus. While he’s always been a right-wing reactionary, now he can fully dedicate himself to those Blaze Network interviews, chats with Ben Shapiro over coffee, and Turning Point USA appearances with Charlie Kirk.

His daughter is even cashing in on his gravitas and started her own right-wing media career, hosting a podcast that discusses her all-meat diet and interviewing Koch-backed Cato Institute alums about how climate change is an exaggerated hoax. Right-wing reactionary politics has become the family business!

So Jordan Peterson is no longer teaching at the University of Toronto, that doesn’t mean he’s going anywhere. In short order, he’ll drop another book entitled, Twelve Additional Rules for Life or Twelve More More Rules for Life or The Numerical Sum of the Latin ‘Senio’ Added Upon Itself and Distributed into Psychologically Guiding Frameworks for the Homosapien Cognitive Experience, subtitle: Finding Divine Masculine Order in a World of Shrill Feminine Chaos.

It will sell well, he’ll do a thousand right-wing media appearances, and then another world tour where he’ll be fawned over by gushing fans.

I’m just thankful not many outside that echo chamber are paying much attention anymore.

If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve. — Nathan Robinson

In Ukraine, Russian troops escalated their bombing of cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mariupol, in what Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky called a campaign of terror to break the will of the Ukrainians. Tonight (in U.S. time), airborne troops assaulted Kharviv, which is a city of about 1.5 million, and a forty-mile-long convoy of tanks and trucks is within 17 miles of Kyiv, although a shortage of gas means they’ll move very slowly.

About 660,000 refugees have fled the country.

But the war is not going well for Putin, either, as international sanctions are devastating the Russian economy and the invasion is going far more slowly than he had apparently hoped. The ruble has plummeted in value, and the Kremlin is trying to stave off a crisis in the stock market by refusing to open it. Both Exxon and the shipping giant Maersk have announced they are joining BP in cutting ties to Russia, Apple has announced it will not sell products in Russia, and the Swiss-based company building Nord Stream 2 today said it was considering filing for insolvency.

Ukraine’s military claimed it today destroyed a large Russian military convoy of up to 800 vehicles, and Ukrainian authorities claim to have stopped a plot to assassinate Zelensky and to have executed the assassins. The death toll for Russian troops will further undermine Putin’s military push. Russians are leaving dead soldiers where they lie, likely to avoid the spectacle of body bags coming home. It appears at least some of the invaders had no idea they were going to Ukraine, and some have allegedly been knocking holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks to enable them to stay out of the fight. Morale is low.

Associated Press correspondent Francesca Ebel reports from Russia: “Life in Russia is deteriorating extremely rapidly. So many of my friends are packing up & leaving the country. Their cards are blocking. Huge lines for ATMs etc. Rumours that borders will close soon. ‘What have we done? How did we not stop him earlier?’ said a friend to me y[ester]day.” The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, agreed. “Something has definitely shifted here in the last two days.”

According to the BBC, a local government body in Moscow's Gagarinsky District called the war a “disaster” that is impoverishing the country, and demanded the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine. Another, similar, body said the invasion was "insane" and "unjustified" and warned, "Our economy is going to hell."

Putin clearly did not expect the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the U.S. and other allies and partners around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and others, to work together to stand against his aggression. Even traditionally neutral Switzerland is on board. The insistence of the U.S. on exposing Putin’s moves ahead of time, building a united opposition, and warning of false flag operations to justify an invasion meant that the anti-authoritarian world is working together now to stop the Russian advance. Today, Taiwan announced it sent more than 27 tons of medical supplies to Ukraine, claiming its own membership in the "democratic camp" in the international community.

This extraordinary international cooperation is a tribute to President Joe Biden, who has made defense of democracy at home and abroad the centerpiece of his presidency. Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and State Department officials have been calling, meeting, listening, and building alliances with allies since they took office, and by last Thanksgiving they were making a concerted push to bring the world together in anticipation of Putin’s aggression.

Their early warnings have rehabilitated the image of U.S. intelligence, badly damaged during the Trump years, when the president and his loyalists attacked U.S. intelligence and accepted the word of autocrats, including Putin.

It has also been a diplomatic triumph, but in his State of the Union address tonight, Biden quite correctly put it second to the “fearlessness,…courage,…and determination” of the Ukrainians who are resisting the Russian troops.

The theme of Biden’s speech tonight was unity. He worked to bring Americans from all political persuasions into a vision of the country we could all share, focusing on the measures—lower prescription drug costs, background checks for gun ownership, access to abortion, voting rights, immigration, civil rights, corporate taxation—that polls show enjoy enormous popular support.

“Last year COVID-19 kept us apart,” he began, addressing a vaccinated, boosted, and audience that was largely maskless, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently eased mask recommendations according to risk level. “This year we are finally together again.”

Tonight, we meet as Democrats, Republicans and Independents. But most importantly as Americans. With a duty to one another, to the American people, to the Constitution. And with an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” He urged people to “stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.”

Biden outlined the ways in which his administration has “helped working people—and left no one behind.” The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan helped us to fight Covid-19 and rebuilt the economy after the devastation of the pandemic. It helped the nation gain more than 6.5 million new jobs last year, more jobs created in one year than in any other time in our history.

The economy grew at an astonishing rate in Biden’s first year: 5.7%, the strongest growth in 40 years. Forty years of tax cuts, initiated in the belief that freeing up private capital would enable the wealthy to invest efficiently in the economy, have led to “weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century,” Biden pointed out.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris believe instead that both the economy and the country do best when the government invests in ordinary people. The administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will rebuild America, creating well-paying jobs. The administration has also brought home military contracts, using tax dollars to provide Americans good jobs and to bring manufacturing back home. Biden called on Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act, which invests in innovation and will spark additional investment in new technologies like electric vehicles.

Biden not only outlined the ways in which he plans to nurture his vision of government, he took on Republican criticisms.

Biden said he plans to combat the inflation that has plagued the recovery by cutting the cost of prescription drugs and letting Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs the way the VA already does. He called for cutting energy and child care costs. He called for avoiding supply chain issues by strengthening domestic manufacturing. He spoke up against the price gouging that has characterized the pandemic years, and he called for corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes through a minimum 15% tax rate for corporations.

Biden also undercut Republican accusations that Democrats want to “defund” the police by countering that we need to fund the police at even higher rates, an idea he talked about on the campaign trail when he urged better funding for social services to relieve law enforcement from the community policing issues for which they are currently ill prepared. At the same time, he noted that his Department of Justice has “required body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers.”

To those complaining about the effect of this spending on the deficit—this has the name of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) all over it—Biden noted that by the end of the year, “the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.” He is, he said, “the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”

Biden offered a “Unity Agenda for the Nation.” He outlined “[f]our big things we can do together”: beat the opioid epidemic, make the way we address mental health equal to the way we address physical health, support our veterans, and end cancer as we know it.

Biden’s speech listed items that are very popular but that are nonetheless highly unlikely to pass the Senate, where Republicans use the filibuster to stop any programs that support Biden’s ideology of government. The speech subtly reminded listeners that it is Republican members of Congress who are standing between these popular programs and the American people.

Since the attack on Ukraine made the line between democracies and autocracies crystal clear, Republicans have tried desperately to backpedal their previous coziness with Putin (in 2018, eight Republican lawmakers spent July 4 in Moscow, for example) and to declare their solidarity with Ukraine. Whether that sudden shift toward democracy would affect their approach to U.S. politics has been unclear. Tonight’s speech had some clues: Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said they wouldn’t attend because they didn’t have time to waste getting covid tests, and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) actually turned their back on Biden’s cabinet members when they came in, then heckled the president as he spoke.

“In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” Biden said. And Americans “will meet the test. To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity. We will save democracy.”

78% of voters polled by CBS said they approved of Biden’s speech.

But the war is not going well for Putin, either, as international sanctions are devastating the Russian economy

Do you not fact check any of these western dribble posts?

It's only a war if you have protagonists in both nations.

And the rouble is doing very well, thank you.

The Russian ruble fell nearly 30% to a record high of 120 to the dollar earlier on Tuesday after sanctions were imposed on Russia. But the next action by the Russian central bank to raise interest rates and exercise capital controls, the Russian currency recouped most of those losses against the dollar. It was last trading at around 92 to the dollar.