Politics

Obama sets his sights on ‘disinformation’ When Obama was elected president in 2008, his campaign’s innovative use of social media to organize and fundraise was seen as central to his success. In 2012, Obama’s successful re-election campaign was heralded as an even more sophisticated technological triumph. Dozens of fawning profiles of the campaign team praised the genius deployment of “big data” and “microtargeting” to deliver victory. Fast forward a decade and the first internet president has decided to make online disinformation the subject of a series of public appearances.

For a brief moment, America was the cheering mission control room in every action movie. You know the one: the flight controllers stand there nervously, waiting to hear from the wayward rocket. Then, suddenly, the radio crackles: “Houston,” says a voice, “this is Gemini One...we did it. A federal judge in Florida just struck down the mask mandate.” And everyone goes wild. From out of claustrophobic plane cabins and sterile airports this week came unlikely scenes of jubilation as passengers tore off their masks and breathed freely once again.

To suggest that the American conservative philosophy of fusionism was a mistake is often to betray one’s confusion about the term. Misconceptions notwithstanding, “fusionism” was never meant to refer to an alliance of convenience between disparate groups (religious traditionalists and economic libertarians, say). Instead it was a nickname, bestowed by L. Brent Bozell, Jr., for the philosophical synthesis advanced by his friend and intellectual adversary Frank Meyer in the 1950s and 1960s. Meyer’s synthesis had a few parts. Normatively, he said that both Judeo-Christian virtue and freedom from coercion (whether carried out by a bandit or by an agent of the state) are goods to be cherished and protected.

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation. After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington.

The latest filing by Special Counsel John Durham, investigating Russiagate and the Hillary Clinton campaign, suggests the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper than we thought. One hates to sound like Rachel Maddow, but it is now much more likely that the walls are closing in. Durham filed a new 34-page motion on April 15 in answer to defendant Michael Sussman's request to dismiss the case against him. Durham accused Sussman of lying to the FBI about his working for the Clinton campaign while he was trying to sell the Bureau on an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia, focusing on alleged internet pings between a Trump server and the Russian Alfa Bank. Sussman's claims also included a number of pings against Trump Tower WiFi and later White House WiFi by a Russian-made Yota cellphone.

The city of Philadelphia appears to be following China, if only in small steps, toward the delusional goal of Zero Covid. A new indoor-mask order, announced last week by Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, takes effect today, April 18. It’s the first resumption of such a mandate by any large city in the United States. President Xi Jinping, the well-meaning Dr. Bettigole most definitely is not. Yet is Philly, like China, again being seduced by the notion that the virus can be made to go puff? In Shanghai, a brutal push for Zero Covid is imprisoning millions in their homes and tearing infected children from their parents for quarantine.

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large. Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly. Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!

Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.