For two years, a prisoner in the German concentration camp kept a journal that would later be used to convict those who had persecuted him and killed his fellow prisoners.
“I often believed that I couldn’t go on,” Edgar confessed once. “It was agony, a double one, mental as well as physical.” There were times, in fact, that he thought of destroying his diary, so that he could finally stop worrying about it, stop giving up his precious sleep for it.
Does anything matter anymore in American politics? In the week since Donald Trump’s Convention ended with a personality-cult party on the White House lawn, the President has completely refocussed his campaign on threats to law and order from “Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters.” He has suggested there will be a “Rigged Election”; urged supporters in North Carolina to commit election fraud, by voting twice; and likened protesters demanding racial justice to “Domestic Terrorists.” The President personally ordered a review of federal aid, with the goal of withholding funds from “anarchist” Democratic-run cities that have allowed “themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.” And he has baselessly alleged that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is taking some sort of “enhancement” drug, and claimed that Biden is the pawn of shadowy “dark forces.”
During the meeting, James reportedly focussed on pressuring the owners to do far more than they have. All thirty teams have committed three hundred million dollars across the next ten years toward a foundation empowering the Black community—small change, considering that twenty-two of the league’s owners are billionaires. A million dollars a year is a rounding error for the Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, one of the richest men in the world. The DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic, has spent millions of dollars promoting right-wing causes and candidates; Betsy DeVos is a member of Trump’s Cabinet. Quicken Loans, the company run by Dan Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration fund, and, shortly afterward, benefitted from a tax break originally intended to help the poor. Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, is a Trump supporter who furloughed roughly forty thousand employees from his casino-and-restaurant empire during the shutdown. Tom Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, has made billions in private equity, and frequently donates to Democratic candidates; his firm owns companies that contract with law-enforcement agencies and Border Patrol, including one that makes its money by charging incarcerated people exorbitant rates and fees to make phone calls.
Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.
It helps explain why he and his political allies have spent nearly $60 million of donor money on legal and compliance bills since 2015, far more than any other president.
The likelihood of political violence was also apparent from the start. Trump’s 2016 rallies tipped over into displays of aggression directed at the media and at those who opposed him. Such is the chaos of today that we’ve nearly forgotten that, two years ago, Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Clinton, and fourteen others he believed had treated Trump unfairly. Sayoc pleaded guilty; his lawyers described him as “a Donald Trump super-fan” who suffered from mental illness, leaving him vulnerable to the antagonisms of the political climate. The twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius was charged with fatally shooting twenty-three people in El Paso last year. The language of an anti-immigrant manifesto he allegedly posted before the shooting was noted for its echoes of Trump’s rationalizations for building his border wall. (Crusius pleaded not guilty.) This May, the Michigan legislature temporarily shut down, after armed militia members entered the capitol to protest the state’s stay-at-home order. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
The U.S. President and the bureaucracy reacted slowly to the arrest of Paul Whelan, who was declared a spy and sentenced to sixteen years in a Russian prison colony.
For all their uncertainty about the exact origins of the case, U.S. officials understood perfectly how the Kremlin wanted it resolved. Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was “unbelievably explicit” in meetings with White House officials, according to the former U.S. official. Initially, Antonov proposed trading Whelan for three Russians in U.S. prisons: Maria Butina, a woman who had grown close to Republican operatives and National Rifle Association officials, and was convicted of acting as an unregistered Russian agent, in April, 2019; Viktor Bout, a notoriously prolific arms trader who was apprehended in a sting operation in Thailand, in 2008, and convicted by a U.S. court three years later; and Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot serving a twenty-year federal sentence for a drug-smuggling plot.
Lewis Raven Wallace, the author of a provocative new case against detached, “objective,” journalism called The View From Somewhere, takes it further, arguing that reporters should get out of the White House briefing room entirely. “If they are serious about safeguarding democracy, they need to be building collective power around not even being in that room anymore” Mr. Wallace said in an interview.
The forced departures highlight souring relations between the two countries and Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed tactics to limit independent journalism.
The Australian Financial Review reported that Chinese investigators sought to question Mr. Birtles and Mr. Smith about Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian business news anchor for China’s CGTN television service who was detained in August.
Of all the president’s children, he has the strongest connection to the politics, voters and online disinformation ecosystem that put his father in the White House. What will he do with it?
The two men had for years had a difficult relationship. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana recounts in her 2017 book, “Raising Trump,” that when she suggested naming their newly born first child Donald Jr., Trump protested: “You can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?”
Whether from the onward march of Western-style secularism and global consumer culture or from public revulsion at the kinds of corruption that social media helps reveal, monarchy seems under increasing threat of extinction.
Even after his abdication, however, Juan Carlos—who had retained the title of “Rey Emérito”—continued to live large, jetting around the world to posh resorts owned by ultra-rich friends, and he was often spotted in the company of one or another of his known lovers. (He and Queen Sofía, who is a princess in the unseated Greek royal family, have, by all accounts, been estranged for many years due to Juan Carlos’s chronic infidelities.) There were additional contretemps along the way: In 2017, his son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin, a former sports star married to his daughter, Princess Cristina, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison after he was found guilty of using a charitable fund as a private slush fund. More recently, it emerged that Juan Carlos had accepted a previously undeclared “gift” of a hundred million dollars from Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah—allegedly a bribe in return for his help in arranging a lucrative fast-rail-construction contract.
Peter Wehner There are three notable themes that emerged. One is that on the first day of the R.N.C. we witnessed a cult of personality that at times rivaled Jonestown, minus (thankfully) the mass suicide. The second was how fully the R.N.C. has embraced Trump’s inversion of reality. The bolder the deception, the better. Third, a relentless effort to portray Democrats not just as radical but malevolent, committed to destroying America and to relish doing so. The G.O.P. came across as one pissed-off party.
Under a new national security law, the police are targeting the social media accounts of executives, politicians and activists. American internet giants are struggling to respond.
When officers swarmed him at a Hong Kong shopping mall last month, they pulled him into a stairwell and pinned his head in front of his phone — an attempt to trigger the facial recognition system. Later, at his home, officers forced his finger onto a separate phone. Then they demanded passwords.
In true gamesmanship fashion, the guns-only BFM engagement was the setting for the AlphaDogfight contest. So what jumped out at me about the engagements? Three main points. First was the aggressive use of accurate forward quarter gun employment. Second, was the AI’s efficient use of energy. Lastly was the AI’s ability to maintain high-performance turns.
Tech oracle Jaron Lanier saw the evils of social media platforms before anyone else. Now he talks about whether Twitter activism really works, how to fix Facebook, and why he won’t be joining Silicon Valley’s overlords in New Zealand.
Every day Google and Facebook and other tech companies become more powerful and sophisticated by analyzing you and your choices—what you click on, how long you pause to watch an ad or a YouTube video—and the stories you write and the songs you record, and they charge advertisers money to access this information, and grow their own companies with it, but they don’t pay you for your contribution. They don’t even really acknowledge that you are contributing, as if artificial intelligence came from nowhere, instead of from data derived from you and me. “In the information age,” Lanier said, “we’re all workers and consumers and entrepreneurs at the same time.” What if, Lanier suggested, we got paid for our labor in this system? By recognizing the roles we play in building the future, Lanier said, we might give ourselves a chance to be meaningful participants in it. “When a person is empowered to make a difference, they become more of a full person,” he said. “They awaken spiritually.”
was sitting next to a Coca-Cola sales exec on the flight to Ashgabat. ‘I hope you’ve got the right-sized photo,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t …’ He gave a short, sharp whistle through his teeth and jerked his thumb backwards: ‘Home you will go.’ Arrivals in Turkmenistan can only get visas at the airport and it is a notoriously hit and miss affair. I showed the man my photo. I would have to present it to the immigration officials, along with my letter of invitation and my official fee in cash. He produced his noticeably larger photo. ‘Or maybe you could pay a little extra.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and laughed. I laughed with him.
In the Stauffers’ case, most of the vitriol was aimed at Myka. One Instagram account, Cancel Myka Stauffer, which goes by the handle @mykastauffer.liar, has more than 11,000 followers. An online petition with more than 154,000 supporters demanded that Myka’s monetized videos with Huxley be removed from YouTube. Followers appeared angry not only on behalf of Huxley but also because Myka had committed the ultimate influencer sin: ghosting on those who’d become invested in her story right when the plot twisted.
Héctor Tobar Trump’s signing a pardon and staging a naturalization ceremony, with grateful people of color. These prime-time acts of White House theater were a cynical attempt to erase years of race-baiting and anti-immigrant rhetoric. We haven’t forgotten, Mr. President: You’re still the same man who questioned Barack Obama’s citizenship, praised white supremacists and caged thousands of immigrant children.
As Trump seeks reëlection, some of the toughest criticism on his foreign policy is from other Republicans, including a scathing joint condemnation last week by seventy-five senior Republican officials from four Administrations. “Without question, Trump has denigrated our standing with friends and with foes. They all think less of us,” Richard Armitage, one of the signatories, and the Deputy Secretary of State during the George W. Bush Administration and Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration, told me. “Our standing globally has not been this low since the end of the Cold War and probably not since before World War Two. . . . People don’t really care about us. They’re so over us because of this guy.”
Matt Labash Like most Americans, I lost sleep, staying up all night waiting to receive the words of the electrifying Mike Pence. (JK! I’d rather watch fingernails grow.) I wouldn’t buy a used Hyundai from this guy, let alone buy what he tells me about Donald Trump. He is the perfect embodiment of insincere sincerity. He doesn’t believe a word he says, and I don’t either. The only thing he believes in any longer is how high D.J.T. tells him to jump — over the shark, over the chasm of respectability, etc. The greatest gift Donald Trump has given us, is making Mike Pence completely unviable to be a future president of the United States. For that, we owe him.
