It’s okay, just for today, to call Coleman Hughes a coon. He’s arguing against reparations on Juneteenth. He’s Cooneman Hughes til midnight Pacific Standard time
— Rae Sanni (@raesanni) June 19, 2019
HAPPY FRIDAY EVE!!! #GoodDayDC on in T-Minus 10 minutes....
— Cori Coffin (@CoriC_FOX5DC) June 20, 2019
Who’s going to Germantown tomorrow for the #Fox5ZipTrip?! Supposed to be a gorgeous day ☀️ Weekend plans?? pic.twitter.com/U4XOLNGi0f
#sleep #SummerSolstice @CBSThisMorning @CBSNews https://t.co/QSQMiKdvqr pic.twitter.com/t4X3Jh5qGK
— Tara Narula M.D. (@drtaranarula) June 20, 2019
Here's a portion of the speech Biden gave about Strom Thurmond, in May 1997https://t.co/b8B2Gei7FE pic.twitter.com/UY79DJ7jvn
— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) June 20, 2019
Biden’s seeming nostalgia for his past relationships with segregationist senators draws sharp rebukes from @KamalaHarris @CoryBooker and others. https://t.co/rafyzY3IBS
— David Lauter (@DavidLauter) June 19, 2019
With a tone-deaf bit of nostalgia Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden ignited a fire around his presidential campaign, speaking wistfully of a time in Washington when he could work civilly with conservatives, including arch-segregationist Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.Yeah, let's nominate Cory Booker or Kamala Harris. That'll show those cracker old guard troglodyte Democrats!
“He never called me boy, he always called me son,” Biden, speaking at a fundraiser in New York said, referring to Eastland.
And while Talmadge was “mean,” he said, “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore.”
The response from many Democrats was quick and angry, with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a black rival for Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination, and others accusing Biden of racial insensitivity. By Wednesday afternoon, the fight had become one of the most heated intra-party disputes of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign.
The controversy goes beyond Biden’s well-known penchant for verbal gaffes because it directly involves one of the central tenets of his campaign — his call for a return to the bipartisan style of governing that prevailed in the Senate in the past.
The timing increases the likelihood that Biden’s embrace of that approach to governing will become a focal point of next week’s first presidential primary debate.
That theme has appeal for voters who long for an end to Washington’s gridlock, but for many Democrats, especially on the party’s left, it underscores Biden’s image as a figure of the past, out of touch with today’s hyper-partisan realities and unwilling to challenge entrenched interests to achieve the party’s objectives.
“Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone,” said Booker. “I’m disappointed that he hasn’t issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans. He should.”
Biden, bridling at the suggestion that he sympathized with racists, responded to the controversy late Wednesday by describing his record of pushing for civil rights and voting rights legislation.
“I could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more,” he said, speaking to reporters outside a fundraiser in the Washington suburbs.
Asked whether he would apologize for his comments, as Booker was requesting, Biden said, “Why should I? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career.”
Others who criticized Biden included Sen. Kamala Harris of California, the other black candidate in the 2020 field, who told reporters on a Senate elevator Wednesday that Biden's remark about segregationists “concerns me deeply.”
“If those men had their way, I wouldn’t be in the United States Senate and on this elevator right now,” she said.
Some critics even suggested the remark should disqualify Biden for the party’s nomination.
China's government has wiped the events of June 4, 1989, from the memories of most of its people, but they are still living in the aftermath. Andrew J. Nathan discusses newly leaked documents that reveal how the lessons of 1989 shape China’s leaders today:https://t.co/zcHWXc8mvl
— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) June 12, 2019
On April 15, 1989, the popular Chinese leader Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack in Beijing. Two years earlier, Hu had been cashiered from his post as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party for being too liberal. Now, in the days after his death, thousands of students from Beijing campuses gathered in Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, to demand that the party give him a proper sendoff. By honoring Hu, the students expressed their dissatisfaction with the corruption and inflation that had developed during the ten years of “reform and opening” under the country’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, and their disappointment with the absence of political liberalization. Over the next seven weeks, the party leaders debated among themselves how to respond to the protests, and they issued mixed signals to the public. In the meantime, the number of demonstrators increased to perhaps as many as a million, including citizens from many walks of life. The students occupying the square declared a hunger strike, their demands grew more radical, and demonstrations spread to hundreds of other cities around the country. Deng decided to declare martial law, to take effect on May 20.Keep reading.
But the demonstrators dug in, and Deng ordered the use of force to commence on the night of June 3. Over the next 24 hours, hundreds were killed, if not more; the precise death toll is still unknown. The violence provoked widespread revulsion throughout Chinese society and led to international condemnation, as the G-7 democracies imposed economic sanctions on China. Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had advocated a conciliatory approach and had refused to accept the decision to use force. Deng ousted him from his position, and Zhao was placed under house arrest—an imprisonment that ended only when he died, in 2005.
A little over two weeks later, on June 19–21, the party’s top decision-making body, the Politburo, convened what it termed an “enlarged” meeting, one that included the regime’s most influential retired elders. The purpose of the gathering was to unify the divided party elite around Deng’s decisions to use force and to remove Zhao from office. The party’s response to the 1989 crisis has shaped the course of Chinese history for three decades, and the Politburo’s enlarged meeting shaped that response. But what was said during the meeting has never been revealed—until now.
On the 30th anniversary of the violent June 4 crackdown, New Century Press, a Hong Kong–based publisher, will publish Zuihou de mimi: Zhonggong shisanjie sizhong quanhui “liusi” jielun wengao (The Last Secret: The Final Documents From the June Fourth Crackdown), a group of speeches that top officials delivered at the gathering. New Century obtained the transcripts (and two sets of written remarks) from a party official who managed to make copies at the time. In 2001, this magazine published excerpts from The Tiananmen Papers, a series of official reports and meeting minutes that had been secretly spirited out of China and that documented the fierce debates and contentious decision-making that unfolded as the party reacted to the protests in the spring of 1989. Now, these newly leaked speeches shed light on what happened after the crackdown, making clear the lessons party leaders drew from the Tiananmen crisis: first, that the Chinese Communist Party is under permanent siege from enemies at home colluding with enemies abroad; second, that economic reform must take a back seat to ideological discipline and social control; and third, that the party will fall to its enemies if it allows itself to be internally divided.
The speeches offer a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at authoritarian political culture in action—and a sign of what was to come in China as, in later decades, the party resorted to ever more sophisticated and intrusive forms of control to combat the forces of liberalization. Reading the transcripts, one can see serving officials closing ranks with the elderly retired officials who still held great sway in the early post-Mao period. Those who had long feared that Deng’s reforms were too liberal welcomed the crackdown, and those who had long favored liberal reforms fell into line.
The speeches also make clear how the lessons taken from Tiananmen continue to guide Chinese leadership today: one can draw a direct line connecting the ideas and sentiments expressed at the June 1989 Politburo meeting to the hard-line approach to reform and dissent that President Xi Jinping is following today. The rest of the world may be marking the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen crisis as a crucial episode in China’s recent past. For the Chinese government, however, Tiananmen remains a frightening portent. Even though the regime has wiped the events of June 4 from the memories of most of China’s people, they are still living in the aftermath.
THE PARTY LINE
Participants in the enlarged Politburo meeting were not convened to debate the wisdom of Deng’s decisions. Rather, they were summoned to perform a loyalty ritual, in which each speaker affirmed his support by endorsing two documents: a speech that Deng gave on June 9 to express gratitude to the troops who had carried out the crackdown and a report prepared by Zhao’s hard-line rival, Premier Li Peng, detailing Zhao’s errors in handling the crisis. (Those two documents have long been publicly available.)
It is not clear who, exactly, attended the Politburo meeting. But at least 17 people spoke, and each began his remarks with the words “I completely agree with” or “I completely support,” referring to Deng’s speech and Li’s report. All agreed that the student demonstrations had started as a “disturbance” (often translated as “turmoil”). They agreed that only when the demonstrators resisted the entry of troops into Beijing on June 2 did the situation turn into a “counterrevolutionary riot” that had to be put down by force. Each speech added personal insights, which served to demonstrate the sincerity of the speaker’s support for Deng’s line. Through this ceremony of affirmation, a divided party sought to turn the page and reassert control over a sullen society.
In analyzing why a “disturbance” had occurred in the first place, and why it evolved into a riot, the speakers revealed a profound paranoia about domestic and foreign enemies. Xu Xiangqian, a retired marshal in the People’s Liberation Army, stated:
The facts prove that the turmoil of the past month and more, which finally developed into a counterrevolutionary riot, was the result of the linkup of domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces, the result of the long-term flourishing of bourgeois liberalization. . . . Their goal was a wild plan to overturn the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, to topple the socialist People’s Republic of China, and to establish a bourgeois republic that would be anticommunist, antisocialist, and in complete vassalage to the Western powers.Peng Zhen, the former chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, echoed those sentiments:
For some time, an extremely small group of people who stubbornly promoted bourgeois liberalization cooperated with foreign hostile forces to call for revising our constitution, schemed to destroy [Deng’s] Four Cardinal Principles [for upholding socialism and Communist Party rule] and to tear down the cornerstones of our country; they schemed to change . . . our country’s basic political system and to promote in its place an American-style separation of three powers; they schemed to change our People’s Republic of democratic centralism led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance into a totally westernized state of capitalist dictatorship.Others put an even finer point on this theme, evoking the early days of the Cold War to warn of American subversion. “Forty years ago, [U.S. Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles said that the hope for the restoration [of capitalism] in China rested on the third or fourth [postcommunist] generation,” railed Song Renqiong, the vice chair of the party’s Central Advisory Commission. “Now, the state of political ideology among a portion of the youth is worrisome. We must not let Dulles’ prediction come true.”
Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history.Keep reading.
But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election.
With Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency stirring such strong emotions among both supporters and opponents, strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.”
In a recent paper, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, an enormous increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, recently forecast that the 2020 contest could produce a massive turnout that is also unprecedentedly diverse.
“I think we are heading for a record presidential turnout at least in the modern era, and by that I mean since the franchise went to 18-year-olds,” in 1972, says Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “And I mean not only in total numbers [but also] in terms of the percentage of eligible voters [who turn out]. The emotion behind politics … is sky-high, and I don’t think it’s just on one side. I think it’s on both sides.”
McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated.
Experts on both sides point to an array of indicators that signal turnout may reach new heights next year. Signs of political interest, from the number of small-donor contributions made to presidential candidates to the viewership for cable news, are all spiking. In polls, very high shares of Americans already say they are paying a lot of attention to the 2020 presidential race.
But the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.
Yet one of the key questions for 2020 is whether Democrats will benefit as much from the likely expansion of the electorate...
Rita Ora sends temperatures soaring in skimpy red bikini on post-tour getaway https://t.co/FK0ofILm2c
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 8, 2019
There are some parts of “1984” whose relevance seems never to fade. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state. Another is Newspeak, the abuse of language for political purposes. https://t.co/Pv4RdQ74eG
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 9, 2019
George Orwell’s “1984,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” (1940). “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?Keep reading.
Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84—four million copies were sold that year—because, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump.
The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature—outmoded almost from the start. This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism. Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” (1941).
It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates—not three, but two—and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that.
There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state—Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes.
But “1984” is a novel, not a work of political theory, and, in the end, it’s probably as literature that people keep reading it. The overt political material—such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the (very long) book that the commissar O’Brien gives to Winston and Julia as he lures them into the trap—is likely now skipped by many readers. (The book’s analogue is “The Revolution Betrayed,” Leon Trotsky’s attack on Stalinism, published in 1937, but it is also a parody of “The Managerial Revolution.”)
O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. (Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 1936 and 1938, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured. So Orwell was right about that.)
But who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with.
Almost every time voters who lean toward President Trump visit Facebook, they get deluged with invitations to his rallies or pleas to support his immigration policies: That’s no surprise — the platform was central to his victorious 2016 campaign.
What they probably don’t expect is that the Trump campaign also follows them to more distant corners of the internet — placing ads that supporters see on YouTube channels like Epic Wildlife, Physiques of Greatness and BroScienceLife, even the liberal site Daily Kos. The campaign’s willingness to spend money on such sites may or may not pay political dividends, but its willingness to gamble points to something bigger that unnerves the Democratic Party’s top digital thinkers.
“His campaign is testing everything,” said Shomik Dutta, a veteran of Barack Obama’s two campaigns and partner at Higher Ground Labs, an incubator for progressive political tech. “No one on the Democratic side is even coming close yet. It should be gravely concerning.”
Trump is using the advantage of incumbency, a huge pile of campaign cash and a clear path to his party’s nomination to build a digital operation unmatched by anything Democrats have. His campaign is testing all manner of iterations, algorithms and data-mining techniques — from the color of the buttons it uses on fundraising pitches to the audiences it targets with short videos of his speeches.
By the time Democrats pick a nominee, some of the party’s top digital strategists warn, Trump will have built a self-feeding machine that grows smarter by the day. His campaign has run thousands of iterations of Facebook ads — tens of thousands by some counts — sending data on response rates and other metrics gleaned from the platform to software that perpetually fine-tunes the campaign messages.
As with most campaign tactics, no one knows for sure how much difference the flood of money and advertising on Facebook might make. Despite all the testing of how people respond to specific messages, even the richest political campaigns don’t spend much money on rigorously researching the ultimate question of what, if anything, sways voters, especially with an incumbent who inspires such strong feelings — positive and negative — as Trump.
Still, the central fact of the 2016 election likely will remain true for 2020: Trump’s victory margin in key states was so slim that just a handful of voters staying home or showing up could make the difference...
What does it take to make a BIG muscle car like the '70 Dodge Charger handle? Try dropping around 900lbs. Getting that much weight loss ain't easy without ending up looking like ShartKart... so Speedkore turned to Boeing-levels of weight loss tech, by going all carbon on the body. Wild.
Farewell ❤️— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) June 3, 2019
I've enjoyed this all greatly but it's time to start a new chapter of my life. Thank you to all my incredible colleagues who I'll be cheering on in their fight for truth - and my wonderful supporters who made all I've done possible.https://t.co/iK4tu4gGw0
