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Stories About ‘Waking Up from Woke’ Oliver Wiseman

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Seneca Scott with goats in West Oakland, CA, September 16, 2023. (Jason Henry for The Free Press)

A black activist fights the progressivism he says is destroying his city. Left-wing Jews say “screw the allyship” after seeing fellow progressives cheer Hamas’s pogrom. Immigrant New Yorkers oppose the new migrants coming to New York “with the expectation they’re going to be taken care of.”

Today in The Free Press, three stories paint a picture of a larger political shift happening in America.

It is sometimes said of the pandemic that it accelerated preexisting trends: we were already living online more and more, reinventing the traditional 9 to 5, automating ever larger parts of the economy, and abandoning shopping malls. And the lockdowns simply turbocharged it all.

Might recent weeks be having a similar effect on our politics? Could outrage at the horrifying events in Israel, the global explosion of antisemitism, and the Hamas apologism on campuses and in newsrooms, crystallize into a big political upheaval? 

Yesterday, Elon Musk, responding to a Free Press story on X, said that “people are waking up from woke.” Last week, a similar argument was made by Konstantin Kisin in our pages with his essay “The Day the Delusions Died.” He wrote that “many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.” 

One person who has felt disenfranchised from the left for years is Seneca Scott, a black Oakland activist fighting for the future of his city. Scott is a former progressive who used to support defunding the police. But then he changed his mind. In 2020, “I realized how deep the damage was,” Scott tells David Josef Volodzko in a profile for The Free Press. Oakland’s leaders, “the people we had put in place . . . were just complete frauds.” Now Scott says he’s aiming to start a revolution in his city that will spread across the country.

Read the full story of his political conversion here: 

Next up, Free Press writers Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block speak to progressive Jews shocked by people who, until a few weeks ago, they considered ideological teammates. One says he is now “politically homeless.” Another expresses his dismay at the “cloaked antisemitism” he sees whenever he opens social media. 

Read the full story here: 

Finally, Free Press writer Olivia Reingold meets Hispanics in New York exasperated by the city’s handling of the migrant crisis—to the point that some in this traditionally deep-blue metropolis are considering voting Republican. 

Here’s what Marcos Marte, a 62-year-old who arrived in America from the Dominican Republic 30 years ago, told Olivia he thinks of the city giving shelter and expensive services to the migrants: “It’s the mindset of the piñata—somebody’s going to hit it, and everybody’s going to pick from it. And before, it was like, work, save, and enjoy your retirement with dignity. Not anymore. . . . It’s not fair.”

Read Olivia’s rich report in full: 

In other news. . .  

→ Haley on the up, Pence out: A poll published Monday showed Haley tied for second place with Ron DeSantis in Iowa, with 16 percent. Haley is the only Trump challenger to have shown any sign of momentum in recent months. She is steadily gaining on DeSantis in the polling averages—even if Trump remains the comfortable front-runner. 

If anyone is to catch Trump, then surely the field needs to consolidate soon. Mike Pence seems to recognize that truth—and the fact that he has run out of cash. He suspended his campaign on Saturday. 

→ Netanyahu says cease-fire would be ‘surrender’: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a rebuttal to calls for a cease-fire in an address to the international press yesterday. “Just as the United States would not agree to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or after the terrorist attack of 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas,” he said

→ Jewish students targeted at Cornell: Jewish students at Cornell are living under the threat of violence on campus. In a statement Sunday, college president Martha E. Pollack reported “a series of horrendous, antisemitic messages threatening violence to our Jewish community.” She said that the messages named the building that houses the school’s kosher dining hall. Antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed—in the U.S. and around the world—in the days and weeks since the October 7 attack.

→ Biden fumes about NYT Gaza coverage: Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Max Tani report that Joe Biden “raged against The New York Times in a private White House meeting early last week, after the Times amplified a Hamas claim that an Israeli air strike was behind the Oct. 17 bombing of a Gaza hospital.” Maybe he is a Free Press reader. 

→ Star-mangled banner: Don’t listen to the declinists. America is still capable of greatness—like getting Flavor Flav to sing the national anthem at an NBA game. Okay, maybe things have gone downhill a little.

ICYMI: “Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.

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November 11, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. 

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. 

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. 

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. 

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. 

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. 

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? 

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

Notes:

https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/

https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/11/kremlin-denies-reports-of-trump-putin-call-about-ukraine-invasion

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration

https://www.politico.com/playbook

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/

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The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One Santi Ruiz

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Hire the right bureaucrats, set concrete, ambitious goals, and experiment, experiment, experiment. Santi Ruiz for The Free Press.

Michael Collins checks on technical material while in the Apollo Mission Simulator. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

In a few short weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president. His transition team will be in charge of a federal government that, in many rudimentary ways, doesn’t work. 

Let’s leave aside partisan gridlock in Congress and turmoil in the judicial branch, and just focus on the executive branch: National Public Data, which aggregates personal information for background checks, was hacked this year, meaning your Social Security number is now floating around on the internet. The IRS is built on mainframes from 1965 and relies on code from JFK’s administration that no one’s learning anymore. The pandemic highlighted our broken systems: In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned private companies from rolling out their own Covid tests because the CDC was developing their own. But the CDC tests turned out to be defective, leaving the U.S. flying blind until private companies could rush in and pick up the slack.

For the past year, I’ve run an interview series called Statecraft where I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made. These men and women serve in a variety of roles, such as running a CIA base in Afghanistan, investigating Soviet anthrax leaks, and redesigning Department of Labor job centers. The best of them have managed to deliver good outcomes for the American people by working around the worst ingrained practices of the federal bureaucracy, and they have lessons for reformers eager to make the federal government go. 

But changing the culture of a machine this size takes time. Despite the fact he will have a Republican House and Senate, and the allyship of Elon Musk, who seems eager to head his own Department of Government Efficiency, Trump faces the same broken federal machinery—and will face many of the same problems, and the shot clock to solve them—that Biden did. 

To help make the government more efficient and effective instantly, the Trump team should prioritize the following:

Hire Bureaucrats, Just Make Them the Right Ones 

Progressives fear Trump’s vision for civil service reform, Schedule F, which would reclassify many civil servants to make them easier to fire. They worry Schedule F would gut executive branch agencies—which includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, State, Justice, et al.—of their talent, and consolidate power in the White House. 

But even liberals like Jen Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer of America under President Obama, have pointed out that “managing out” a poor performer can be a full-time job for political appointees. Firing an executive branch civil servant requires extensive documentation. Additionally, many employees are unionized, and all can appeal their firings internally. Partially as a result, the government cans bad employees about four times less often than the private sector does. It takes a lot more than saying “you’re fired” to get people out the door. 

It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in. Or take the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been screening prospective air traffic controllers for how many sports they played in high school in an effort to meet its racial quotas.

A strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. It could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows academics to contribute part-time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management can and should encourage more aggressive use of Direct Hire Authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process.


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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion? Frannie Block

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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion?

Columbia University. (Raymond Boyd via Getty Images)

A group of alumni and former professors of Columbia University warn in a new report that the university could stand to lose up to $3.5 billion a year—or up to 55 percent of the university’s annual operating budget—if Columbia doesn’t start enforcing its rules and cracking down on campus rule-breaking. 

The report, published by Stand Columbia Society, a “politically neutral” collective working to restore Columbia’s “rightful pre-eminence in American—and global—higher education,” states the potential financial risks to the university are rooted in Trump and other Republican officials’ “enmity for elite institutions in general, and our alma mater in particular.” 

Alexandra Zubko, a 1999 graduate of Columbia and member of Stand Columbia, told The Free Press that the group published the Institutional Risk Exposure report because “we don’t want Columbia to be made an example of.” 

The report estimates what might happen if the incoming Trump administration were to accuse universities like Columbia of violating Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of “race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” which would allow the administration to withhold federal funding.

At present, Columbia has at least three active Title VI investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. Since October 7, 2023, Columbia’s campus has been embroiled in chaotic demonstrations against the State of Israel, prompting the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to conclude in a recent report that the university was “the site of some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country.” 

Put another way, Stand Columbia Society predicts that Republicans may force “an uncomfortable reckoning that we can no longer wish away.” That reckoning—which Stand Columbia believes is possible, if not probable—could potentially cost the university up to $1.33 billion in government grants and contracts that it currently receives, including around $800 million dedicated solely for research.

And it’s not only federal grants that the university could lose if it is found in violation of Title VI. 


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