Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

You know what really troubles me – should the MAGA-right take control, they will continue the process of making it harder and harder for their opponents to win elections. And they will accomplish this by state legislatures passing really restrictive voting requirements and shameless racial gerrymandering will be struck down in the lower courts but, of course, upheld by the Supreme Court, 6-3. And once they taste this sort of power, there's little to stop them from doing the bidding of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Thomas has already blurted out his opposition the Brown vs Board of Education. I can see a lot of other moderately progressive laws we've come to depend on also getting the axe.

hightor wrote:

You know what really troubles me – should the MAGA-right take control, they will continue the process of making it harder and harder for their opponents to win elections. And they will accomplish this by state legislatures passing really restrictive voting requirements and shameless racial gerrymandering will be struck down in the lower courts but, of course, upheld by the Supreme Court, 6-3. And once they taste this sort of power, there's little to stop them from doing the bidding of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Thomas has already blurted out his opposition the Brown vs Board of Education. I can see a lot of other moderately progressive laws we've come to depend on also getting the axe.

Yup. We are headed for a seismic fall.


With this much of our population willing to support Trump...we deserve it.

Re: blatham (Post 7365739)
Rest assured, both Roger and I perceived your sarcasm.

Frank Apisa wrote:

hightor wrote:

You know what really troubles me – should the MAGA-right take control, they will continue the process of making it harder and harder for their opponents to win elections. And they will accomplish this by state legislatures passing really restrictive voting requirements and shameless racial gerrymandering will be struck down in the lower courts but, of course, upheld by the Supreme Court, 6-3. And once they taste this sort of power, there's little to stop them from doing the bidding of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Thomas has already blurted out his opposition the Brown vs Board of Education. I can see a lot of other moderately progressive laws we've come to depend on also getting the axe.

Yup. We are headed for a seismic fall.


With this much of our population willing to support Trump...we deserve it.

How do you figure that the rest of us are “deserving” of the blight that the depraved and insane Trump voters precipitate?

Why Biden’s Losing, or, the Chart That Shows Us Why Trump’s Winning

It’s not exactly a secret right about now that Biden’s losing, and he’s beginning to lose badly. Trump’s ahead in all the swing states—though the Democrats “don’t believe” the polls, which is hubris writ large—and so if the election were held today, it’d be a Trump…landslide. Go ahead and shudder if you like.

How did this happen? I predicted it, as you probably know by now, and the way I predicted it was…through looking at well-being. And now we’re beginning to have stark, vivid, brutal confirmation that my little prediction was…right on the money. Not just in its outcome, but more crucially, because I want you to understand this stuff at a deep level, in the “why.”

See that chart above? It shows us well-being. In this case, financial well-being, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. What do you see? It craters, and its shape more or less precisely matches Biden’s fortunes. So it’s pretty easy to see that here we have a powerful explanatory variable.

That chart should make the Democrats shudder—and then shudder again, because it should make them think twice. What’s their big mistake been? Leaving Gaza aside, it’s been going out there and proclaiming how “well” the economy’s doing. Only nobody really believes that. Outside say the liberal establishment of White Guys With Ivy League Degrees Named Matt—people think the economy’s doing really, really badly. Just somewhere between 20-30% of Americans rate the economy as good or excellent. Worse, the inverse, 70%, say the economy’s getting worse.

So the Dems are out there telling an entire country of people who think the economy’s in dire shape that…it’s not. Not exactly a recipe for credibility, is it?

Now let’s come back to the chart. What does it tell us? It tells us that people are hurting. You probably already know that, on an intuitive, maybe even a personal, level. Things are rough out there. What the chart tells us is that financial well-being is in pretty catastrophic shape.

It’s lower than before the pandemic.

Just a minority of people now say they feel financially well.

And that’s a recipe for disaster, when it comes to politics, society, and the future.

Well-Being 101, Or, Why We Need to Know When People’s Lives Begin to Crater

So Biden’s fortunes are in steep, sharp decline for an interlinked set of reasons. Let me summarize them here.

• The economy’s doing dismally, in real terms, in terms of well-being.
• People are hurting at a social scale, well-being plummeting, with just a minority of people say they’re financially well.
• Meanwhile, the Dems have made a catastrophic mistake, sort of denying this obvious reality, and thus blowing their credibility and legitimacy, even within their own constituencies (which of course again happened with Gaza.)

How do you even make that set of mistakes?

What is “financial well-being,” anyways? This is important for everyone to learn, so though you’ve heard me sort of teach you elements of this before, let me try to distill it as clearly as I can this time.

• In orthodox, old-school economics, we look at macro indicators, which usually include GDP and unemployment. If those are going in the right direction, we conclude all is well.
• But the new paradigm of economics and social science looks deeper, at this thing called well-being, which is…how people’s lives are actually doing.
• That’s because macro indicators more and more get it wrong—economies “grow,” but the growth is snatched by those at the top, or mega-corporations, or what have you, or unemployment can be “low,” but only because dead-end jobs abound, or people are working multiple jobs just to get by.

Now. This research was done by Bank of America’s Institute. And they didn’t really delve into well-being too deeply—it appears they just sort of asked people about their levels of financial wellness. And that’s fair enough, because we don’t have to treat this like physics—we’re just looking for signals about how people feel about their lives.

And so we could easily reality check this research with, for example, some done by the Fed. And that shows us exactly the same thing. People’s financial well-being has plummeted, and it’s lower than just before the pandemic. So the research checks out, and it’s sort of easy to replicate. But I don’t want you to get bogged down in the Matt level dorky details—they’re almost irrelevant. It’s the principle I want you to understand.

What's a really good definition of financial well-being? Retirement, savings, a stable income, etcetera—we could decompose this notion into three sort of components: financial stability, financial security, and the ability tor rise up the socioeconomic ladder. Pretty simple and powerful stuff, no?

That’s a great definition. And really good research would sort of go out there, and measure these various components, We don’t have such research yet—what we have is Bank of America’s, which is pretty good, and the Fed’s, which is sort of OK. But if we did have that research, we already know of know what it’d tell us—people are feeling seriously bad. Remember that statistic, for example, about 70% feeling “financially traumatized,” or money being a significant source of stress for the vast majority? On and on such statistics go, and they kind of tell us what a full-blown measure of financial well-being would probably say, which is that people’s has plummeted in recent years, thanks to inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, debt, and so on.

See how insightful this way of thinking can be? None of this says that financial well-being means something sophomoric, like getting rich, becoming a billionaire, or owning three mansions in every city. Rather, it means understanding that people just want the basics of a good life…

And if we don’t deliver those basics, things fall apart, fast.

How Societies Collapse, or the Power of Understanding Well-Being

In this respect, the parallels between Weimar Germany and modern-day America are sort of eerie. The garden-league pundit, the poor thinker, denies those parallels, because of course, America hasn’t had “hyperinflation.” But what they overlook is that hyperinflation is just a means to an end—the end is a catastrophic fall in well-being. And that’s happening before our eyes in America today, and it has been over the years. In that regard, the deeper one, an implosion in well-being is producing in America today what it has throughout history—destabilization and collapse.

Falling well-being is why Trump is winning.

Now, that’s all kind of boring. So let’s spice it up a little. Financial well-being, yawn, it’s the kind of thing that “wealth advisors” maybe talk about. So let’s expand that to the many other kinds of well-being.

Just imagine we did the same kind of thing for, say, emotional well-being. How are people feeling these days? Not good, and that’s an understatement. Levels of pessimism have soared off the charts, as have depression, rage, and anxiety.

What about social well-being? There, social bonds have sundered and ruptured, yielding everything from mass distrust in institutions, and among social groups, to a loneliness epidemic.

How about, say, civil well-being? That’s not exactly in good shape, either, with norms shattering, threats and intimidation becoming commonplace, and leaders generally regarded with contempt.

What about what we might call structural well-being, as in social structure? The middle class is dying, the Dream is dead, and the working class is barely getting by, if that.

I could go on—there are many, many dimensions of well-being, and I haven’t talked, say, about ecology and nature. But the point is that if we looked at them, they’d all probably be plummeting these days. I can’t think of a single dimension along which well-being is rising—can you?

And that, to underscore the point, is why Trump is winning.

I often say that well-being is the most powerful explanatory variable in social science. Now perhaps you see why. Why am I able to predict stuff months, years, even decades out, while garden-variety pundits and so forth are perpetually “shocked” and “surprised,” like the Dems not quite believing Trump’s winning again, to the point they “don’t believe” polls anymore? Because this is sort of my thing, I honed and pioneered aspects of understanding well-being.

And as I did so, I realized just how powerful a predictor it really is. Way back when I predicted Trump would rise the first time, it was through looking at well-being, like the health of the middle class, levels of pessimism, rising stats about despair, and so on. And when I made that prediction, I was sort of met with this thing that bewildered me—fury, rage, disbelief, and so on. But I was right, and they were wrong. Yet they haven’t learned much, despite it all, and that’s the worrying part.

If We Don’t Grasp Well-Being as a Paradigm for Transformation, the World Keeps On Burning

It’s not about me. It’s about understanding the world. You see, we need leaders, institutions, and organizations to get well-being. Why? What happens when they don’t? They’re left flat-footed like the Dems, and that’s after they make the mistake of talking down to people and denying their reality. Or they go out there and are just unable to connect in the same way that demagogues, like Trump do, who sort of intuitively emotionally understand people in this weird way.

If we don’t have institutions and leaders that can grasp well-being, what do we have? Not much. Because increasingly, those that don’t aren’t trusted, aren’t believed, and can’t forge coalitions anymore, and win power, which is exactly what’s happening to Biden and the Dems.

The same’s true in the corporate world, by the way—these days, corporations are doing two things, jacking up prices, and laying people off, all of which decimate well-being, and while they might be smiling about it now, that’s costing them dearly in brand equity, in terms of how much people trust and respect them, which is a more long-term asset, and almost impossible to rebuild. I’ll write about that more this week.

So. Now you know. Now we know. Why Biden’s losing. And Trump’s winning. It’s hardly a coincidence, after all, that falling well-being predicts, time and again, throughout history, the rise of tyranny, the loss of democracy, social instability and collapse. That’s been true from Rome to Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union…and now it’s true in America, too.

And the reason’s pretty easy to grasp, too. Leaders and institutions exist for a reason. To deliver gains in well-being. That is what the entire point of this thing called political economy is. If they can’t do that, pretty quickly, they earn distrust, scorn, and contempt. People call for sudden, dramatic change, even if they fail to grasp the long-term consequences, don’t gather that the price will be even higher than they’re paying now. They turn to demagogues, from Caesar to Hitler, who scapegoat innocents, or dream of building thousand-year empires and Reichs, and provide them a flimsy explanation for their shattered lives, woes, broken dreams.

This is what’s happening in America today. Trump will be a dictator, just as he promised. But Biden isn’t trusted, because he hasn’t not just delivered the goods—he doesn’t even appear to understand the goods he was supposed to deliver. Those goods aren’t metaphorical—they’re the most basic ones of all, good lives.

Whatever our differences, this is what we want from our leaders and institutions. And this desire can invert on itself, in the end, if people are pushed too hard, far, and fast, into penury and despair, as well-being implodes. They can fall for the demagogue’s line that stealing, destroying, annihilating their well-being—those people who aren’t people at all—will increase yours, the true of faith and pure of blood.

Alas, that’s not how it works. You can steal a lot of things—money, possessions, even time, in a way. But you can’t steal well-being. It’s something that’s created, and not just in an individualistic sense, but collectively, which is why when well-being plummets, it rarely just does so for you or me, but for the majority of a society, all together, all at once, save perhaps its elites.

Just the minority of Americans feel financially well now. Ignore the financially. I bet we’d see exactly the same results if we expanded that to any other dimension of well-being. If I had a kazillion-dollar research budget, I’d do it, but we don’t need to, because, well…

Trump wouldn’t be winning otherwise.

Spying, hacking and intimidation: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC exposed

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.

Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.

The defense and the prosecution today made their closing statements in the New York criminal case against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. The payment was intended to stop her account of her sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the days before the 2016 election, when the Trump campaign was already reeling from the Access Hollywood tape showing Trump boasting of sexual assault.

The Biden-Harris campaign showed up at the trial today with veteran actor Robert DeNiro and former police officers Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, who protected the U.S. Capitol and members of Congress from rioters on January 6, 2021. In words seemingly calculated to get under Trump’s skin, DeNiro said, “We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot,” and called him a coward.

When Robert Costa of CBS News asked campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler why they had shown up at the trial, Tyler answered: “Because you all are here. You’ve been incessantly covering this day in and day out, and we want to remind the American people ahead of the…first debate on June 27 of the unique, persistent, and growing threat that Donald Trump poses to the American people and to our democracy. So since you all are here, we’re here communicating that message.”

Yesterday, in remarks at Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day, President Joe Biden honored “the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who’ve given their lives for this nation. Each one…a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days. Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.”

“[F]reedom has never been guaranteed,” Biden said. “Every generation has to earn it; fight for it; defend it in battle between autocracy and democracy, between the greed of a few and the rights of many…. And just as our fallen heroes have kept the ultimate faith with our country and our democracy, we must keep faith with them,” he said.

His speech at Arlington echoed the message he delivered to this year’s graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he urged the graduates to hold fast to their oaths. “On your very first day at West Point, you raised your right hands and took an oath—not to a political party, not to a president, but to the Constitution of the United States of America—against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said to applause. Soldiers “have given their lives for that Constitution. They have fought to defend the freedoms that it protects: the right to vote, the right to worship, the right to raise your voice in protest. They have saved and sacrificed to ensure, as President Lincoln said, a ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’”

“[N]othing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn.” Biden spent more than an hour saluting and shaking the hand of each graduate.

In contrast, Trump ushered in Memorial Day with a post on his social media company, saying: “Happy Memorial Day to All , including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.”He then continued to attack E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, before turning to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil case of Trump and the Trump Organization falsifying documents, and Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the current criminal case in New York.

The message behind this extraordinary post was twofold: Trump can think of nothing but himself…and he appears to be terrified.

On Saturday, May 25, Trump had an experience quite different from his usual reception at rallies of hand-picked supporters. He was resoundingly booed at the national convention of the Libertarian Party in Washington, D.C., where Secret Service agents confiscated squeaky rubber chickens before his speech. Attendees jeered Trump’s order, “You have to combine with us,” even when he reminded them of his libertarian credentials—tax cuts and defunding of federal equality programs—and promised to pardon the January 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Trump also promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.

Libertarians want Ulbricht released because they support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices and they see Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach. Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug dealers, making his promise to pardon Ulbricht an illustration of just how badly he thinks he needs the support of Libertarian voters. But they refused to endorse him.

Trump appeared angry, and on Sunday, as Greg Sargent reported in The New Republic, he reposted a video of a man raging at MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. In it, the man says that when Trump is reelected: “He’ll get rid of all you f*cking liberals. You liberals are gone when he f*cking wins. You f*cking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you f*cking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the f*ck out of here, you scumbag.”

Trump’s elevation of this video, Sargent notes, is a dangerous escalation of his already violent rhetoric, and yet it has gotten very little media attention.

Last November, Matt Gertz of Media Matters reported that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News provided 18 times more coverage of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment at a fundraising event that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” than they provided of Trump’s November 2023 promise to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned the “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” language. The ratio for the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers was 29:1.

Clinton’s statement was consistent with polling, and she added that the rest of Trump’s supporters were “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” She said: “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Sargent noted that news stories require context and that Trump’s elevation of the violent video should be placed alongside his many threats to prosecute his enemies. While there is often concern over disrespect toward right-wing voters, Sargent writes, there has been very little attention to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s posting of “a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans ‘done’ and ‘gone’ if he is elected.”

Scott MacFarlane of CBS News reported yesterday that Republicans have ignored a law passed in March 2022 requiring the placement of a small plaque honoring police officers who protected the U.S. Capitol and the lawmakers and staffers there on January 6, 2021. It was supposed to be in place by March 2023 but has not gone up. A spokesperson for House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says his office is working on it. Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that three of the police officers at the Capitol that day—Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and Officer Harry Dunn, both retired, and Officer Daniel Hodges, who is still with the Washington, D.C., metropolitan police—will be traveling to swing states for the Biden campaign to tell voters that Trump threatens Americans’ fundamental rights.

Finally, today, Melinda French Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced $1 billion in new spending over the next two years “for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.” Only 2% of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to these organizations, she wrote the New York Times, and “[f]or too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They spoke at Girard College, a school where Black Americans make up most of the student body, where they emphasized the importance of Black voters to the Democratic coalition and the ways in which the administration’s actions have delivered on its promises to the Black community.

“Because Black Americans voted, Kamala and I are President and Vice President of the United States,” Biden said. “That’s not hyperbole. Because you voted, Donald Trump is a defeated former president.”

Harris noted that Black Americans are 60% more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with diabetes, and called out the administration’s capping of insulin at $35 a month, along with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that permit Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. She called out the administration’s relief of more than $165 billion in student loan debt for more than 5 million Americans, as well as the first major bipartisan gun safety law in 30 years.

What has guided them, Harris said to applause, is the “fundamental belief” that “[w]e work for you, the American people, not the special interests, not the billionaires or the big corporations, but the people.”

She contrasted their record with that of former president Trump, who tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act that puts healthcare within reach for millions of Black Americans, proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and handpicked Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. “And as he intended, they did,” she said. “[T]oday, one in three women and more than half of Black women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban.”

Then Biden took the stage to chants of “Four more years!” He added to Harris’s list of ways in which the administration has worked for racial equality: reconnecting the Black and brown and poor neighborhoods that were cut apart by highways in the 1960s and addressing the decades of disinvestment that happened as a consequence of the carving up of those neighborhoods (this cutting apart of neighborhoods is a really big deal in urban history, by the way); getting rid of the lead pipes that still contaminate water, especially in minority neighborhoods; making high-speed internet widely available and affordable; investing in historically Black colleges and universities; appointing more Black women to federal circuit courts than all other U.S. presidents combined.

Under the Biden administration, he noted, Black unemployment is at a record low and Black small businesses are starting at the fastest rate in 30 years. The wealth gap between Black Americans and white Americans is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. “We’re opening more doors for economic opportunity, including access to capital, entrepreneurship, workforce training so you can build a life of financial freedom and create generational wealth...all while being the providers and leaders of your families and community,” the president said.

Biden drew a contrast between his administration and Trump, saying, “I’ve shown you who I am, and Trump has shown you who he is. And today, Donald Trump is pandering and peddling lies and stereotypes for your votes so he can win for himself, not for you.” “[W]e’re not going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place that doesn’t believe in honesty, decency, and treating people with respect,” he said, “and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place filled with anger and resentment and hate.”

According to Myah Ward and Brakkton Booker of Politico, this was Biden’s fifth trip to the Philadelphia area and his seventh to Pennsylvania this year. As he tries to win the state in 2024, the campaign has opened 24 field offices and outspent Trump there by a ratio of more than 4 to 1.

Harris and Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia looked pretty much like a normal day in a normal presidential campaign season.

The same was not true of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who was in a courtroom in Manhattan as Judge Juan Merchan instructed the jury in the criminal case against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to stop her account of their sexual encounter from becoming public in the days before the 2016 election.

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that to find Trump guilty, “[t]he jury must find unanimously that Trump created fraudulent business records and that he did it with the intent to influence an election through unlawful means.”

Trump and his supporters immediately took to the media to misrepresent the court system. Trump appeared to sleep through the jury instructions but later posted on social media: “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE CHARGES ARE IN THIS RIGGED CASE…. THERE IS NO CRIME.” (He had told the judge on April 4, 2023, that he understood the charges against him.) Trump insisted that he had been railroaded by the fact that “a lot of key witnesses were not called,” although his own defense did not call them and he declined to testify himself. He called the judge “conflicted” and “corrupt,” and said “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges,” a reference to the Albanian-Indian Catholic nun canonized by the Catholic Church in 2016.

Fox News host John Roberts misrepresented the judge’s instructions, launching a wave of fury on right-wing media stations and prompting Florida senator Marco Rubio to write: “This is exactly the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union.” Utah senator Mike Lee chimed in with his own attacks on Judge Merchan. Roberts later corrected his tweet, but it was too late to change the narrative.

Tonight, those two themes reappeared again and again on social media in both Trump’s feed and those of his supporters. Their frenzy suggested they are concerned about the jury’s verdict. Newsmax host Todd Starnes tweeted: “President Trump needs to get out of New York City RIGHT NOW! Fly back to Mar-a-Lago or another state that will provide him safe harbor.”

Indeed, it seems we are seeing the fear of accountability that has been missing from the top levels of American politics since President Gerald Ford pardoned President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. While Ford believed Nixon’s accepting the pardon was an admission of guilt for his participation in the coverup of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election and anything else he might have done, Nixon never admitted such guilt.

In the fifty years since then, certain powerful people seem to have concluded that they cannot be held accountable to laws or rules. The MAGA Republicans are illustrating that disrespect for the rule of law on a daily basis as they work to undermine the courts and the Department of Justice.

Yesterday, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times reported that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s story that his wife flew the upside down flag of distress favored by the January 6th rioters as a response to a hostile neighbor did not line up with accounts given by neighbors and a police report.

Because of that distress flag, as well as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that flew over his beach house, Alito is under increasing pressure to recuse himself from considering cases related to the events of January 6, including whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his actions surrounding the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Today Alito refused to recuse himself, blaming his wife for flying the flags—“My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not,” he wrote—and suggesting that anyone who thinks he should recuse himself is “motivated by political or ideological considerations.”

And in what should almost certainly be read as trolling those who disagree with him, Alito, the author of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision taking away from American women the right to make their own decisions about their healthcare, wrote: “[M]y wife is an independently minded private citizen. She makes her own decisions, and I honor her right to do so.”

Trump promptly congratulated Alito “for showing the INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and ‘GUTS’ to refuse stepping aside from making a decision on anything January 6th related.”

MAGA attacks on the rule of law affect real people’s lives. Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today that after former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone called Trump “authoritarian” with a “violence fetish” in front of the Manhattan courthouse yesterday, Fanone’s 78-year-old mother was swatted, with officers showing up at her home after reports of a murder there. Fanone protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and went into cardiac arrest after a rioter assaulted him with a stun gun. “This is the reality of going up against or challenging Donald Trump…. These swatting calls are incredibly f---ing dangerous, especially when the target is somebody like my mom.”

Journalist threatened over reporting on spy chief and ICC, Israeli newspaper says

Haaretz says journalist warned of ‘consequences’ if he reported on attempts by head of the Mossad to intimidate ex-prosecutor of ICC


Journalist threatened over reporting on spy chief and ICC, Israeli newspaper says
Haaretz says journalist warned of ‘consequences’ if he reported on attempts by head of the Mossad to intimidate ex-prosecutor of ICC


Israel’s leading leftwing newspaper, Haaretz, has said unnamed senior security officials threatened one of its investigative reporters if he reported on attempts by the former head of the Mossad to intimidate the ex-prosecutor of the international criminal court.

Amid growing concern over Israel’s censorship regime, enforced by the military censor’s office and by gag orders issued by the courts, Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences to demonstrate the scale of redactions.

In an article published on Thursday, investigative reporter Gur Megiddo described how two years ago security officials blocked an attempt by the paper to report efforts by the former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen to threaten the then ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Details of the operation to influence Bensouda were revealed this week by the Guardian and Israeli media partners +972 magazine and Local Call.

Megiddo described how he had been summoned to meet two officials and threatened with serious consequences after they became aware that he had tried to telephone Bensouda to discuss Cohen’s efforts to influence her.

Megiddo had been investigating what the Mossad chief had been doing during three trips he made to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which he reportedly enlisted the help of the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to assist with efforts to pressure Bensouda.

“At the beginning of 2022, I attempted to contact the former prosecutor through a third party who knew her,” Megiddo wrote. “Bensouda never responded to the approach, but days after the attempt, when I wanted to publish the story, my phone rang and on the other end of the line was the voice of a senior security official. ‘Can you come to see me tomorrow?’ he asked.”

“At the entrance to the senior official’s office, I was asked to deposit my mobile phone to prevent me from recording the conversation. In the room, another senior official from a different security agency was waiting for me. The conversation began with the words, ‘We understand you know about the prosecutor.’”

It was “explained that if I published the story,” wrote Megiddo, “I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside.

“In the end, it was made clear to me that even sharing the information ‘with my friends abroad’, referring to foreign media outlets, would lead to the same results.”

Megiddo’s account corroborates key details of the allegations made public this week: that Cohen was tasked with attempting to intimidate and threaten Bensouda and that Cohen received support from Kabila. Cohen and Kabila have not responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

“I took the threats very seriously,” Megiddo told the Guardian on Thursday. “Sometimes officials can be quite heavy handed but as a rule there have been no consequences if you bypass these requests.

“In this case it was made clear they would enforce real penalties. It was highly unusual.”

Separately, Haaretz published an article subject to a court gag order, with large sections of the text blacked out, relating to the detention without trial of Bassem Tamimi, a well-known Palestinian activist in the West Bank.

Concern about press freedoms in Israel has been growing in recent weeks. On 5 May authorities shut down the local offices of Al Jazeera, hours after a government vote to use new laws to close the satellite news network’s operations in the country. Last week, equipment belonging to the Associated Press was briefly seized, prompting an intervention from the White House.

Anat Saragusti, press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel, told Canada’s CBC News this week: “The extreme rightwing government of Israel, from the beginning of its term … put the freedom of [the] press as a target.”

Under Israeli law, journalists working in Israel or for an Israeli publication are required to submit articles dealing with “security issues” to the military censor for review prior to publication, in line with “emergency regulations” enacted after Israel’s founding that have remained in place ever since. The regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact articles submitted to it.

According to figures acquired under a freedom of information request submitted by +972 magazine and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel, in 2023 the military censor barred the publication of 613 articles – a record amount for the period since +972 began collecting data in 2011.

The censor also redacted parts of a further 2,703 articles, representing the highest figure since 2014. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of nine times a day.

Haggai Matar, executive director of +972, said: “What we’ve seen, even before October 7 and the Gaza war began, is that this is an Israeli government that is hostile to journalism.

“The background is that we have a prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] who is indicted under several accusations, a number of which are about controlling the media [he denies wrongdoing in all the cases against him]. We have a minister of communications [Shlomo Karhi] who sees it as his role to fight the free press, and politicians trying to pass bills restricting the media encourage.

“Their main concern is to influence what the Israeli public sees.”

When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.

Google’s global datacentre and Meta’s ambitious plans for a new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) further underscore the industry’s energy-intensive nature, raising concerns that these facilities could significantly increase energy consumption. Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world. Before making big announcements, tech companies should be transparent about the resource use required for their expansion plans.

Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects. This will only get worse as households move away from using fossil fuels and rely more on electricity, putting even more pressure on the National Grid. In Bicester, for instance, plans to build 7,000 new homes were paused because the electricity network didn’t have enough capacity.

In an era where we expect businesses to do more than just make profits for their shareholders, governments need to evaluate the organisations they fund and partner with, based on whether their actions will result in concrete successes for people and the planet. In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability. Similar measures could promote corporate accountability in global mineral supply chains, enforcing greater human rights compliance.

In navigating the intersection of technological advancement and environmental sustainability, policymakers are facing the challenge of cultivating less extractive business models. This is not just about adopting a piecemeal approach; it’s about taking a comprehensive systematic view, empowering governments to build the needed planning and implementation capacity. Such an approach should eschew outdated top-down methods in favour of flexible strategies that integrate knowledge at all levels, from local to global. Only by adopting a holistic perspective can we effectively mitigate the significant environmental impacts of the tech industry.

Ultimately, despite the unprecedented wave of innovation since the 1990s, we have consistently overlooked the repercussions of these advances on the climate crisis. As climate scientists anticipate that global heating will exceed the 1.5C target, it’s time we approach today’s grand challenges systemically, so that the solution to one problem does not exacerbate another.