Society

Remember when Donald Trump’s administration courted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? What about when the American right was still enamored with Big Tech? That seems a long time ago now. On Friday President Donald Trump tweeted: ‘I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!’ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1124447302544965634?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1124447302544965634 Conservatives increasingly accept that Big Tech is a problem, something that stifles creativity and ideas. But will anyone in power ever do anything about it? Sen.

The eccentric debut of Raheem Kassam and financier-attorney Will Chamberlain’s new Human Events is here. Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine is now Raheem’s roundhouse. So how does it look? Not the worst. Eager to solidify the bridge between the Trumpzine of today and the conservative periodical of old, the site is highlighting a forty-something Trump shaking hands with the Gipper. ‘This is no time for “peacetime” Republicans,’ say the editors, dissolving any pretense of partisan non-affiliation. ‘This is a time for brawlers. And we are here to brawl.’ On tap for week one: Donald Trump Jr., Chamberlain’s legal analysis of the Mueller exoneration, the popular populist Italian writer Alessandra Bocchi and Conservative Inc. grandee Dennis Prager, among others.

With the mosque shooting in New Zealand, the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka and the attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, each of the major monotheistic religions have had places of worship attacked by terrorists almost within a month. Houses of worship are a common target for racial and religious supremacists. In the United States, there have been, within the last decade, neo-Nazi shootings at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These events have kept alive a grim tradition, going back to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, where Ku Klux Klansmen attacked a church with dynamite and killed four little girls.

During the Passover Seder, Jewish families sing a poignant, and sadly, all too true song: וְהִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה לַאֲבוֹתֵיֽנוּ וְלָנֽוּ. שֶׁלֹא אֶחָד בִּלְבָד, עָמַד עָלֵיֽנוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנֽוּ.

Easter worshippers who opened Thursday’s copy of the International Edition of the New York Times were treated to a cartoon to warm the cockles of white supremacists, Islamists and lovers of ‘Edelweiss’ everywhere. The cartoon, apparently by a Portuguese artist named Antonio Antunes Moreira of Espresso, depicted a blind Donald Trump, resplendent in the kippah he wears at all times except when the cameras are near, being led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the form of a sausage dog, wearing the Star of David dog collar that all sausage dogs wear. Some people published something, and now all those over-sensitive Jews are blaming the entire New York Times for it. How thin-skinned they are.

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

One heartening if dimly consoling result of the disastrous fires that swept through Notre-Dame cathedral has been the willingness of politicians and philanthropists to pledge their financial and institutional support towards its reconstruction. Yes, some of them might have an eye on acquiring good PR. Yes, believers might question the nature of their attachment. Still, it good to know that people will not watch the decline of beauty and tradition with absolute indifference. The reconstruction, though, will be fiercely contested. Already, modernists are sidling into the conversation with progressive platitudes and philistinic schemes. You might think the widespread shock and sadness that the fire caused represented love and admiration for Notre-Dame as it was.

Google co-founder Larry Page popularized the term ‘moonshots.’ But venture capitalists, apparently, are looking to the stars. An app called Co-Star, which provides slick digital versions of horoscopes and astrological birth charts, has raised $5 million in funding. An investor who put money into an ‘Uber for astrological readings’ company expresses excitement about the $2.1 billion market for ‘mystical services.’ Erin Griffith, the author of a recent New York Times feature on the subject, took a lighthearted angle toward the subject while nevertheless acknowledging that there really is business potential. Millennial women, she writes, have ‘traded [astrology’s] psychedelic new-wave stigma for modern Instagrammy witch vibes.

Notre-Dame is the symbolic heart of Paris and France, and a symbol of European Christianity second only to the Vatican in Rome. The apocalyptic destruction of a monument of such beauty and significance would be a sign of the times at any time. In our time, however, no one seems sure of what the sign means. I doubt I was alone in my first response. When I saw footage of the falling, burning spire, I assumed that this was an act of terrorism rather than, as seems most likely, an accident caused by renovation work. This is a sign of the times, even though it would be incautious to admit it in polite society.

In August 2018, The Atlantic said that he was an ‘inevitable’ presidential candidate. Last April, Bill Maher declared him a ‘folk hero': ‘we’re in love with you,’ he said. But yesterday, the final nail was jackhammered into the political coffin of Michael Avenatti, known the world over, thanks to Tucker Carlson, as the ‘creepy porn lawyer.’ Avenatti was arrested and charged with embezzlement and extortion in March. That was just a warm-up act, however.

Religious faith may be declining in America but it is still a cultural force to be reckoned with, looming large in any general election cycle. Courting religious voters remains a factor in the calculus of any prospective presidential candidate, especially as neither party seems a natural home for many of them. Americans are actually losing their religion rather faster than their faith. A recent poll showed that ‘nones’ – those without a religious affiliation –  are now the country’s largest group for the first time: Americans are increasingly defining their own faith, and not asking a church to do it for them. In this landscape, what a ‘Christian’ believes as a core value is suddenly malleable and open to influences from all sides.

If you want to know why American foreign policy has repeatedly failed to achieve its goals since the end of the Cold War, consider the wisdom of Thomas L. Friedman. His column at the New York Times is a weathervane of expense-account groupthink as it charges in the wrong direction.When American jobs were outsourced in the Nineties, Friedman cheered for globalization. When the George W. Bush administration pushed for invading Iraq, Friedman promoted the mad and dangerous idea that post-Saddam Iraq would become a liberal democracy. And you just knew that Obama’s Middle East policies were going to be a disaster when the Times boasted that the bumbling ringmaster had ‘sounded out’ Friedman as his chief clown.

The reaction of New Zealand’s vast non-Muslim majority to the terrorist attack at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch is both inspiring and alarming. Inspiring because, faced with a group of mostly recent arrivals who constitute a mere 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, the other 99 percent have chosen not to ignore their loss and distress, but to commiserate and console at a time when liberal democracies are beset by factional resentments. What is alarming is the form the reaction has taken. When New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern observed Friday prayers in the park outside the mosque, she and many other non-Muslim women wore a hijab.

Over the course of tonight and tomorrow, Jews around the world will eat a lot of hamentaschen, dress up in costumes, listen to the megillah, and give charity and gifts of food and drink to their friends. Some of us will also get quite drunk; partly because it’s fun, and partly because the Talmud says that on Purim, a person should be so drunk that they cannot distinguish between Haman (villain of the Purim story) and Mordecai (one of the heroes of the Purim story). As far as Jewish holidays go, Purim is a fun one which means that many of its crucial lessons often go unappreciated. Americans tend to know that on Passover, we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, and that on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we atone and hope to be inscribed in the book of life.

‘Pay-to-play is not OK; we want a public hearing today.’ That was the chant heard at HQ2-Apalooza, a recent event held by Amazon in Arlington, Va., the Washington, DC suburb that will host the Seattle-based internet giant’s second headquarters. The scene might have conjured some unpleasant and recent memories for Amazon. The firm’s search for a place to build its ‘HQ2’, a year-long, highly publicized sweepstakes that received entries from over 200 localities across North America, concluded with the decision to split the headquarters between New York and Arlington, only to see public opposition force Amazon to scuttle its New York plans. Now, the backlash has spread to Virginia.

What’s worse to lose – your keys or your wallet? That’s the question more than 100,000 angry investors who used the QuadrigaCX exchange to purchase cryptocurrency now contemplate. The apparent sudden death in December of Canadian Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s 30-year-old founder, has without warning left them in a $250 million-shaped hole. Mr Cotten, who had Crohn’s disease, is said to have died while on honeymoon in India after his bowel became perforated during what is reported to have looked at first like a bad case of Delhi belly. With him, we are led to believe, went the only crypto key to the place in which QuadrigaCX investor money is stored – repositories known as offline ‘wallets’.