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The American Multimillionaire Marxists Funding Pro-Palestinian Rage Oliver Wiseman
In our main story today, Free Press reporter Francesca Block digs into the American-born Marxist who has spent more than $20 million fomenting hate in his homeland. Neville Roy Singham made a fortune in tech and now funds a group behind some of the ugly protests sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel. What’s more, he and his hard-left wife Jodie Evans are unabashed propagandists for China, even though the chic headquarters of their pro-Communist group are based smack-dab in Midtown Manhattan.
Read on to find out why one senior congressman has called out Singham for activities that “divide and weaken America”:
Our second story today comes from Michael Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2009 to 2013. Michael details the missteps in America’s Iran policy that, he argues, have destabilized the region.
His piece is important especially in the wake of yesterday’s news that the Biden administration waived sanctions that gives Iran access to $10 billion in previously frozen assets.
Given that Tehran is already behind attacks on U.S. troops in the region, Oren wonders if anything can force the Biden administration to reconsider their disastrous Middle East strategy.
Today’s Biden-Xi summit has already achieved the seemingly impossible: forcing San Francisco leaders to clean up the city’s streets. (California governor Gavin Newsom put it succinctly: “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s true, because it’s true.”) But beyond the shining sidewalks of the city by the bay, what is at stake at today’s powwow between the two most powerful leaders in the world?
To help us better understand the summit’s significance, I spoke to Elbridge Colby. Elbridge served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development in the Trump administration. Since leaving the government he has been ringing the alarm about what he sees as America’s dangerous underestimation of the China threat. In his influential 2021 book The Strategy of Denial, he makes the case for a U.S. foreign policy laser-focused on China. Below is an edited transcript of my conversation with Elbridge.
Why are Biden and Xi meeting tomorrow?
Well, that’s a good question. It’s a little bit confusing because it’s simultaneously being sold as a very big deal, but at the same time, administration spokesmen and reporters will say that it’s not really likely to change much of anything at all. I think the most charitable explanation is that the administration is seeking to communicate directly to Xi Jinping that we are not looking to strangle them or suppress them. What Xi Jinping presumably wants to achieve in his visit is not actually speaking to Biden, but speaking to American businessmen. There’s a big gala. And so the administration’s view seems to be: let’s leverage this downturn in China’s economic fortunes to see if we can get things on a better track. It’s very clear the administration is trying to downplay the threat of a conflict over Taiwan. So I do fear that in pursuing this strategy, they don’t have their foot on the accelerator, and they’re removing it even more.
What do you mean by that? What should the administration be doing?
It’s obvious at this point that we’re not in good shape and the Chinese are actively preparing for a conflict over Taiwan. That’s what the administration should be focusing on. There’s also an argument that they should be putting more economic sanctions on China.
In any case, there are real questions about what the administration is doing more generally. They are desperate to avoid a confrontation in the Pacific because they’re overwhelmed with what’s going on in Europe and the Middle East. The fact that Biden didn’t mention China in his recent Oval Office address was extremely telling. I mean, China is supposed to be the priority. This administration said in their national security strategy that this is the only power that could have a really fundamental impact on the world order and America’s place in it. But the vast majority of spending is going to Ukraine and then some to Israel, with very little for Taiwan.
Xi Jinping does not strike me as the kind of guy who’s like, Oh, they need a favor, I’m gonna give them a favor. We know that they haven’t stopped their military buildup; they haven’t stopped their aggressive activities against Taiwan or the Philippines or anything like that. Nothing fundamental has changed. That’s the basic context.
Earlier you said the administration wants to get US-China relations on a better track. What would that look like?
A lot of the things that get attention aren’t particularly meaningful. For instance, there’s a focus on military-to-military communication, which officials have talked up as something that may be reinstated after this summit. But the problem is not that Chinese military officers don’t pick up the phone. The problem is a political decision in Beijing to build a huge military that can challenge the United States and to use that military to aggressively challenge the United States. That’s the issue.
What diplomatic tools does the U.S. have that might deter Xi in Taiwan?
At the end of the day, I think the only thing that is really going to deter Xi Jinping from moving into Taiwan as part of a larger effort to eject the United States from the western Pacific is military force.
And we don’t currently have the necessary force. Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force—a Democratic appointee—is saying that we’re not ready for a war with China. The point here is that deterrence is the basis for peace. If we want to have peace, first we have to persuade a fundamentally revisionist, expansive power that it will not benefit from the employment of military force. There’s a cart and horse problem here with the administration. They want to get back to good feelings that will get things “back on track” and foster greater trust. But the problem is not a lack of trust. It’s a matter of fundamentally conflicting interests: they want to have a hegemonic role, at least in their area, and we don’t want them to have that role—neither does Japan or India. And you can’t massage that out of existence.
In the meantime, the administration has dumped all its credibility into Europe at this point, and now it’s enmeshed in the Middle East as well and it’s like, Jeez, the last thing we need is a conflict in Asia. Well, if you’re Xi Jinping, that’s a pretty attractive time to drive a hard bargain at a minimum.
On our radar. . .
→ Americans stand with Israel: Tens of thousands of Americans rallying for Israel on the Mall in Washington yesterday served as a peaceful, heartening rejoinder to the anti-Israel protests of recent weeks.
Free Press contributor James Kirchick was at the rally and texted me his impression of the gathering:
In contrast to the disgusting displays of hate that have desecrated great cities around the world in the weeks after 10/7, the march in Washington today was rife with American flags. It was a bold reminder that the US-Israel relationship—so often spoken of conspiratorially in terms of money, lobbying, and undue influence—is ultimately about shared values and aspirations. It was a somber yet also joyous occasion, and a reminder that siding with the enemies of the Jews is a very bad bet.
Another attendee, Jack Elbaum, 22, an international affairs and economics major at George Washington University and president of GW for Israel, told The Free Press that “being at the rally allowed me to internalize a simple truth”:
Most Americans stand with Israel in its fight against Hamas. It is an easy thing to forget when on a campus like George Washington’s, where, day in and day out, student groups chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and project “Glory to our martyrs” on the school library. . . . To stand alongside fellow Americans and supporters of Israel in a staggeringly large crowd and listen to officials at the highest level of government say we stand against terror and for bringing the hostages home has given me the strength, motivation, and confidence to continue to bring this message to George Washington. It reminded me that not only the Jewish people, but the American people, are behind me.
Recommended viewing: watch the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky speak at two rallies 36 years apart.
→ Senate scuffle: We go live to the greatest deliberative body in the world, the U.S. Senate, where Oklahoma senator (and absolutely jacked wrestling enthusiast) Markwayne Mullin challenged a union leader to a physical fight during a hearing on corporate greed. After a long-standing Twitter beef, Mullin asked Teamster honcho Sean O’Brien to “stand your butt up” and settle it right there and then. The real hero of the near scuffle? Senator Bernie Sanders, a.k.a. America’s crotchety grandpa, who gave everyone involved the old-fashioned telling off they deserved.
→ Flowers for Emilio: For Veterans Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera penned a powerful Free Press essay about Emilio Barbosa, a teenager from New York who served on the Normandy beaches and died in the Pacific theater when a kamikaze pilot dived into his ship.
After he discovered a small plaque in Manhattan’s Bennett Park honoring Barbosa, Joe set out to learn everything he could about the 19-year-old WWII veteran for his piece, “The Tribute to a Little-Known Soldier.”
When Joe went back to the park Monday, he found a couple of small bouquets lying next to Barbosa’s plaque. We at Free Press HQ like to think they were laid by readers moved by Joe’s extraordinary essay.
Become a Free Press subscriber today:
The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.
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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors
The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.
In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.
The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.
But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —The Editors
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November 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
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November 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.
I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.
If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives.
Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national.
America would become a slaveholding nation.
Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal.
South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.
But that’s not how it played out.
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.
The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans.
But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”
By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.
The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.
In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.
By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.
In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.
In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.
Now it is our turn.
In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power.
And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.
As always, the outcome is in our hands.
“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
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Notes:
James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126.
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
New York Tribune, March 7, 1857, p. 4.
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