Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The Warning

Sorry, I’ve seen and heard and read too much from a wide swath of Zionist Israelis that supports my statement.

Learn this from the Rochdale debacle: society faces peril when smart people believe dumb things
Gaby Hinsliff

Azhar Ali’s parroting of anti-Israel conspiracy theories is not a warning just for Labour – there’s a lesson in it for everyone

hat kind of idiot falls for a conspiracy theory? Somebody gullible, you might imagine: at best someone vulnerable or mentally unwell, and at worst someone actively malicious. But mostly, to be blunt, not perfectly normal people like you and me. We are too rational, we tell ourselves smugly, to fall for some old guff about lizard people running the world, or Bill Gates wanting to microchip everyone, or the royal family secretly bumping off Diana, Princess of Wales. We go where the evidence takes us, follow the news closely, exercise our own judgment.

The bad news for those of us who like to think we’re immune, however, is that, according to the kind of research we probably pride ourselves on reading, intelligent people who consider themselves open-minded and curious enough to work things out for themselves can be surprisingly vulnerable to some strains of conspiracist thinking – at least where these tap into existing fears or prejudices. Which brings us to the festering mess of the Rochdale byelection, and its broader implications for British political parties.

Only Azhar Ali really knows why at a meeting of Labour councillors threatening to quit over Gaza he presented himself as a kind of 7 October truther, suggesting the Israeli government had been warned of what Hamas was planning but “deliberately took the security off” and allowed hundreds of its own people to be slaughtered just so they had an excuse to “do whatever they bloody want” in Gaza.

Only those in the room at the time, meanwhile, can explain why neither this bizarre outburst nor comments blaming “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” for fuelling criticism of the pro-Palestine MP Andy McDonald (who has been suspended from Labour) were seemingly flagged up to party headquarters. But what I’ve learned from several maddening hours of arguing online with otherwise perfectly nice-sounding people who still can’t really see the problem with what Ali said is that a frightening number of people still don’t understand what a conspiracy theory actually is.

For a Labour party desperate to rid itself of cranks, in a climate where complaints of antisemitism expressed via conspiracy theories have almost doubled in a year, according to the Community Security Trust, that represents a pressing problem.

The chaos of the last few days suggests Starmer certainly has lessons to learn about handling complex cases like Ali’s, where Labour Jewish opinion was initially divided on how to respond amid fears of gifting George Galloway the seat. But even a leadership with its act thoroughly together can’t be everywhere at once, which means any party’s first line of defence is ordinary members challenging dangerous junk when they hear it and thus setting the social norm.

But doing that means recognising that the most insidious conspiracy theories don’t revolve around fake moon landings and tinfoil hats. They’re more likely to start from a kernel of fact that makes them sound plausible – in this case reports that the Israeli government fatally overlooked early warnings of something brewing in Gaza, much as the US government in the run-up to 9/11 tragically overlooked clues that Bin Laden was planning something big – before taking a quantum leap into the wild.

The hallmark of conspiratorial thinking is a quasi-religious conviction that nothing ever happens by accident, only by grand design, and that only people too naive to know how the world really works could think otherwise. When challenged, believers revert indignantly to that one original fact, before insisting they are entitled loudly to draw whatever conclusions they like from it. Don’t all those horrific images of mutilated Palestinian children suggest the Netanyahu government might be capable of anything?

The true conspiracy theorist doesn’t need evidence, just the boundless confidence – or arrogance – to conclude that their judgment is as good as any so-called expert’s now that they’ve done the hard Googling. And in their wake trails a small but vocal crowd of highly ideologically motivated followers arguing that you can’t prove it didn’t happen, so they don’t really see a problem with casually speculating that it might have. Even if that means embracing false flag theories claiming that Jews essentially brought their tragedy upon themselves, which have a very long and dark antisemitic history.

Some readers may be frustrated that a row about a Rochdale councillor seemingly consumes more airtime than the deaths of more than 28,000 Palestinians to date in this war, or worldwide alarm at the prospect of a full-blown Israeli assault on Rafah. Some activists will meanwhile complain, as they invariably do, that charges of antisemitism are being used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. But anyone who thinks that being forced to stick to the facts somehow stops them talking about the horrors being livestreamed out of Gaza is nowhere near as good an activist as they fondly imagine themselves to be. The broader battle against conspiracy theories of all kinds seeping into public life matters, meanwhile, because these are not victimless beliefs.

Anti-vaxxer nonsense of the kind Ofcom inexplicably let the GB News presenter Neil Oliver get away with has the potential to cost lives in an outbreak. In the US, ridiculous smears about a political paedophile ring operating via a Washington DC pizza parlour ended in a man firing an assault rifle inside the restaurant. The risks of elected politicians amplifying and encouraging this stuff – whether cynically, for their own political gain, or because they actually believe it – couldn’t be more painfully obvious, yet are seemingly no longer much of a deterrent.

In Australia, rightwingers have used the Great Reset conspiracy – which holds that a mild-mannered World Economic Forum initiative to build back sustainably post-Covid actually masks a sinister plot to install a socialist world order – to attack their Labor opponents. Donald Trump openly embraces symbols of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement at his rallies. Even the British transport secretary, Mark Harper, last autumn called 15-minute city strategies to keep cars out of congested neighbourhoods a “sinister” development. The advent of AI-generated, highly realistic “deepfake” audio and video means that conspiracy theories are likely only to become more slick and convincing, capable of fooling even the most sophisticated.

It has never mattered more that those in public life stick religiously to the facts; that anyone active in grassroots politics challenges conspiratorial thinking when they hear it; and that all of us learn to think twice when stumbling across something that looks too juicy not to share. Especially, perhaps, those who consider themselves far too smart to fall for anything so dumb.

But doing that means recognising that the most insidious conspiracy theories don’t revolve around fake moon landings and tinfoil hats. They’re more likely to start from a kernel of fact that makes them sound plausible – in this case reports that the Israeli government fatally overlooked early warnings of something brewing in Gaza, much as the US government in the run-up to 9/11 tragically overlooked clues that Bin Laden was planning something big – before taking a quantum leap into the wild.

Atlanta is the reality-TV capital of the South, and the Fani Willis hearing Thursday in the courthouse here fit perfectly into the genre. It was fiery, salacious and ultimately corrosive.

The purpose of the hearing was to determine whether there was impropriety in the personal relationship between Willis, who is the Fulton County district attorney leading the prosecution of the Donald Trump election interference case, and one of the prosecutors she hired to help on that case, Nathan Wade.

But whether or not Willis and Wade are allowed to stay on the case, the first day of the hearing was a political disaster. The greater damage is not to the prosecution of Trump but to the national Democratic Party’s inroads in Georgia.

There were fireworks galore and uncomfortable lines of questions about when Willis and Wade began sleeping together and when they stopped, as well as legitimate questions about money and payments.

At one point Wade testified that their relationship wasn’t a secret but that it was private. What, effectively, is the difference? That’s the kind of thing Bill Clinton would say.

And then Willis dramatically took the stand, saying, “I’m ready.” It was clear that she was ready for a chance to fight back and defend herself from being dragged through the mud. But there is only so much good that aggression can do when you’re under oath and on a witness stand. There you are not in control. There you are the passive subject of inquiry, not the one conducting the assault.

In the end, it all felt like a circus in which not everything quite added up. And that is all that Republicans in Georgia need, a crack in the wall of righteousness, just the appearance of wrongdoing in Fulton County, which could be enough to flip a delicately balanced state from blue to red.

Attaching that taint to Willis is a perfect Republican scenario, making a target of a woman who symbolically assumed the apex of Black and Democratic power in the state when she brought her sweeping racketeering case against Trump.

She was the state prosecutor with the strongest criminal case against Trump and his allies, and it held the potential to not only bring him down but also send him to prison. That case may survive this hearing, but Willis’s standing won’t, and neither will the Democratic Party’s.

This sordid affair, I believe, is a turnoff for middle-of-the-road voters and an accelerant for Republican lawmakers in the state looking for any reason and opportunity to attack the liberal areas in and around Atlanta.

Not only did Trump’s attorneys draw blood during the hearing; they put blood in the water.

Today House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled tomorrow’s votes and sent the House of Representatives into recess until February 28.

Before recessing, Johnson refused to take up the national security supplemental bill the Senate passed early Tuesday morning, providing aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Johnson said the House must “work its own will” rather than vote on the bill at hand because the measure did not include border security measures.

Yesterday, Johnson told House Republicans that the House will not be “rushed” into passing foreign aid, despite the fact that Ukraine’s desperate need for ammunition is enabling Russia to regain some of the territory Ukraine’s troops reclaimed over the past year.

But is it a rush? President Biden asked for additional national security funding in October 2023. A majority of lawmakers in the Senate and the House support such a measure, but Johnson bowed to the demands of MAGA Republicans and said he would not bring such a bill up for a vote unless it contained border security measures to address what they insisted was a crisis at the southern border of the U.S., apparently banking on the idea that such a compromise was impossible.

But Democrats were so desperate to pass the Ukraine funding they see as crucial to our national security that they agreed to give up their demand for a path to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, those brought to the United States as children and reared here but now stuck in citizenship limbo. So, after four months of work, Senate negotiators produced a bill that offered much of what Republicans demanded.

Once it was clear a deal was going to materialize, Trump demanded it be shut down, likely because he has promised his base that on his first day back in office, he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” and a new border measure would both undermine his campaign message and stymie his plans. Although the border patrol officers union endorsed the Senate national security measure that included border security provisions, Republicans killed it.

Senators immediately went to work on a national security supplemental without the border measure, passing it with 70 votes on Tuesday morning. Johnson indicated he would not take it up, right about the same time that Trump renewed his attack on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that underpins U.S. and global security.

“House Republicans are…siding with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Tehran against our defense industrial base, against NATO, against Ukraine, against our interests in the Indo-Pacific,” the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday, and President Joe Biden has repeatedly warned that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.” But Republicans, too—including Trump’s vice president Mike Pence—are begging House Republicans to pass a version of the measure.

Perhaps to pressure Johnson, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH), who is a strong supporter of aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russia, yesterday released information about “a serious national security threat,” urged all members of Congress to view the intelligence, and called on Biden to declassify all information relating to it. That threat appears to be antisatellite weapons Russia is developing, but they are not yet operational. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) of the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed concern that the disclosure might have revealed intelligence sources and methods.

And now, rather than taking up the national security measure, the House has recessed.

National security and border measures are not the only things the House is ignoring. Since this is a leap year, putting February 29 on the calendar, the recess will give the House just three working days to pass appropriations measures for the 2024 budget before the stopgap continuing resolution to fund the government expires on March 1.

The appropriations process is so far overdue that it threatens to become tangled in that for 2025, which is set to begin March 11, when the White House is expected to release its budget proposal for the year.

While they have been unable to make headway on these measures, on Tuesday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, blaming him for an increase in migrants at the border. Johnson has named as impeachment managers a number of Republican extremists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Clay Higgins (R-LA), and Harriet Hageman (R-WY).

As Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News reported: “This is the most chaotic, inefficient and ineffective majority we’ve seen in decades covering Congress. It started this way under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and has gotten worse under Johnson.”

Trump and his MAGA supporters are demonstrating their power over the Republican Party. Trump is trying to install hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, at the head of the Republican National Committee, where she vows that “[e]very single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC—that is electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.”

When Trump was in office, his team installed loyalists at the head of state parties, where they have worked to purge all but Trump loyalists. MAGA Republicans are continuing that process. After Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a reliable conservative tapped by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to negotiate a border measure, produced one that favored Republican positions, right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson called those like Lankford “traitors…spineless scum” who must “be criminally prosecuted.”

That demand for purity appears to be radicalizing the House as Republicans inclined to get things done, including five committee chairs, have announced they will not run for reelection. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday said that British foreign secretary David Cameron, who is urging Congress to pass Ukraine aid, “can kiss my ass.”

But the MAGA agenda is falling apart in the courts. True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules.

Today a grand jury convened by Special Counsel David Weiss, whom Trump appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, indicted former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov for making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record about Hunter Biden. Smirnov has been a key witness for Republican allegations about Biden’s “corruption” since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released Smirnov’s unverified claims about a year ago and other MAGA figures spread them. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters noted that Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show highlighted these allegations in at least 85 separate segments last year, including 28 monologues. Now a grand jury has grounds to think Smirnov lied.

Trump’s personal problems also continue to mount.

Today Judge Juan Merchan confirmed that Trump is going to trial on his criminal election interference case, with jury selection beginning on March 25. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felonies for falsifying business records in order to hide critical information from voters before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say that Trump defrauded voters by illegally hiding payments he made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their affair before the election. As Andrew Warren put it in The Daily Beast, the case “is about a plot to deprive voters of information about a candidate for president—information that Trump and his allies believed to be damaging enough to hide.”

And yet Trump’s MAGA Republicans are calling the shots in the House, and their refusal to support Ukraine threatens to empower Russian president Vladimir Putin and thus to lay waste to the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent world war since 1945. Conservative pundit Bill Kristol noted earlier this month that “politics is often a stage on which people act in bad faith. Still, the demagogic opposition of House Republicans to the border/Ukraine bill, when they've all said the border is an emergency and that Putin should be stopped, is just about the baddest bad faith ever.”

The implications of that bad faith for the country—and the world—are huge.

Labour may be ripe to win a general election but is it ready to govern?

I just couldn't believe he was allowed to go to Germany to begin with.

After 24-hours of wrangling and a personal petition to President Putin from Navalny's wife, Yulia, the Russian medical team relented and agreed to let Navalny travel to Berlin after the German medical team said he was fit to fly.