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Today's News (2020/1/17)
Jan. 17th, 2020 08:57 pmTrump has drained away our ability to hold him accountable
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/16/trump-has-drained-away-our-ability-hold-him-accountable/
As Lev Parnas, the most colorful Trump scandal character since Michael Cohen, makes the media rounds, it’s hard to know how much credence to give what he says. Some things about him are beyond dispute, however, including the essential fact that he worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani over a long period of time on their project to coerce the Ukrainian government into aiding Trump’s reelection.
...
Grisham added that there’s no need to believe what Parnas has to say, because “this is a man who’s under indictment and who’s actually out on bail.”
That’s also true. But that’s like a mob boss saying, “How can you trust all these guys who have turned state’s evidence against me? They’re a bunch of gangsters!”
And it has become so familiar that we expect it: Whenever one of Trump’s goons gets arrested, Trump says he barely knows the guy. And if that person should start to talk about Trump, then it’s obvious the person is a liar.
...
But Trump does know Parnas, because of Parnas’s close relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his work on their Biden-Ukraine project. At one point, Trump personally consented to have his former lawyer John Dowd represent Parnas and Fruman. Dowd then told Congress that Parnas “assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump,” and therefore he could not answer questions because of attorney-client privilege.
And Parnas seems to know everyone around Trump. Here’s a pic of Lev with Vice President Pence and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Here’s a pic of Lev with Kellyanne Conway. Here’s a pic of Lev with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Here’s a pic of Lev with Donald Trump Jr.
...
And if you want one of Lev with President Trump, there are too many to choose from (among other things, Parnas and Fruman met with Trump at the White House).
And no, Parnas is not particularly trustworthy. Which makes him fit right in with Trump’s employees and associates. That’s the point.
Yet I can pretty much promise you that a week from now, Parnas will fade from our attention. Whenever you find yourself saying about the day’s news, “If this were any other president it would be a gigantic scandal in and of itself,” you probably then remember that you said the same thing the day before and the day before that. And that’s exactly what’s so demoralizing, so spiritually enervating, about this whole era.
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GOP senator’s vicious outburst shows the corruption of Trump’s defenders
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/16/gop-senators-nasty-meltdown-shows-corruption-trump-defenders/
If you were a United States senator who just snapped angrily at a reporter for politely asking whether compelling new information about a matter of great import to the nation was weighing on your understanding of that consequential matter, you probably wouldn’t see this as something to advertise.
But then again, you’re not Martha McSally of Arizona. McSally just did exactly this — yet she is now treating it as a badge of honor; as something to boast about.
In a perverse way, it’s fitting that this episode is going viral at exactly the moment when President Trump’s impeachment trial is getting underway — that is, when Trump’s defenders in the Senate are set to put on a great show of pretending to give serious consideration to the case against Trump, before voting to acquit him.
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Kudlow says Trump 'looking at' reforming law on bribing foreign officials
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/478846-kudlow-says-trump-looking-at-reforming-law-on-bribing-foreign
Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, said Friday the administration is exploring making changes to a global anti-bribery law.
“We are looking at it and we have heard some complaints from our companies,” Kudlow told reporters regarding the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars American companies from paying bribes to secure contracts abroad.
“I don’t want to say anything definitive policy-wise, but we are looking at it,” he added.
Kudlow avoided getting into specifics of what the changes could look like but indicated the administration is crafting a “package” of reforms.
“Let me wait until we get a better package,” he said.
Speculation over the FCPA has spiked after the release of an excerpt from an upcoming book reporting that Trump has bashed the law as an obstacle to U.S. companies’ ability to compete overseas.
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GOP threatens to weaponize impeachment witnesses amid standoff
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/478704-gop-threatens-to-weaponize-impeachment-witnesses-amid-standoff
Republicans are threatening to weaponize a fight on Senate impeachment witnesses amid growing concerns that moderates within their caucus could help Democrats call former national security adviser John Bolton to testify.
After weeks of pledging that they would hold a quick trial with no witnesses from either side, Republicans — from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on down — are sending public warning shots that if their GOP colleagues open the door to Democratic witnesses they’ll respond in kind, forcing votes on a slew of controversial individuals.
The pressure tactics are the latest shift in strategy as Republican leaders try to navigate the factions in their caucus, where moderates want to leave the potential for witnesses on the table and conservatives are anxious to quickly acquit President Trump.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said if GOP senators support calling people “who are unhappy about being fired," a reference to Bolton, "then I think the president should get to call his [witnesses] and we should have votes on those.”
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No free lunch, but almost:
What DoorDash actually pays, after expenses, and what’s happening with tips
https://payup.wtf/doordash/no-free-lunch-report
...
Our analysis of more than two hundred samples of pay data provided by DoorDash workers across the country finds that DoorDash pays the average worker an astonishingly low $1.45/hour, after accounting for the costs of mileage and additional payroll taxes borne by independent contractors. Nearly a third of jobs actually pay less than $0 after accounting for these basic expenses. Just 11% of jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, after expenses, and only 2% meet the standard of $15 + expenses. Further, jobs with higher tips still tend to include lower pay: the set of jobs with tips of less than $1 pay 1.8 times as much as those jobs with tips of more than $8, on a gross hourly pay basis.
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Major evangelical nonprofits are trying a new strategy with the IRS that allows them to hide their salaries
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/17/major-evangelical-nonprofits-are-trying-new-strategy-with-irs-that-allows-them-hide-their-salaries/
Several major evangelical organizations have in recent years moved to a new strategy where they shift from a nonprofit status to a “church” status with the IRS, allowing them to keep private exactly how their money is being spent and the salaries of their most highly paid employees.
That strategic shift was highlighted recently by MinistryWatch, an independent, donor-based group that monitors evangelical institutions. The IRS status change allows these groups, including Focus on the Family and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to avoid filing a form that makes details of their institution’s finances public.
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FBI arrests suspected neo-Nazis ahead of Virginia gun rally
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51142752]
The FBI has arrested three suspected members of a neo-Nazi hate group who planned to travel to a pro-gun rally in Virginia on Monday.
One was a Canadian army reservist who was fired in August over ties to hate groups and has been suspected missing since, Canadian police told the BBC.
Virginia governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency in the city of Richmond ahead of the rally.
He said law enforcement believed there was a threat of violence.
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Trump Screamed At Pentagon Leaders And Told Them They Were ‘Dopes’ And ‘Babies’
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-screamed-at-pentagon-leaders-and-told-them-they-were-dopes-and-babies
President Donald Trump repeatedly berated U.S. military leaders while throwing a massive fit during a Pentagon meeting in 2017, according to “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” a book penned by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
An excerpt from the book describes how Trump’s meeting with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. and flag officials on July 20, 2017 (arranged by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn) went completely off the rails.
The temper tantrum began when Trump started complaining about the “loser war” in Afghanistan and demanded to know “where is the fucking oil” that he felt the U.S. deserved for its military presence in the Persian Gulf.
“You’re all losers,” he told them. “You don’t know how to win anymore.”
It didn’t end there; According to Leonnig and Rucker, Trump became so angry that “he wasn’t taking many breaths” and bellowed to the commanders in a fit of rage, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people.”
“You’re a bunch of dopes and babies,” he shouted.
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Trumpism After Trump
Will the movement outlive the man?
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/
The city was not beautiful; no one made that claim for it. At the height of summer, people in suits, shellacked by the sun, moved like harassed insects to avoid the concentrated light. There was a civil war–like fracture in America—the president had said so—but little of it showed in the capital. Everyone was polite and smooth in their exchanges. The corridor between Dupont Circle and Georgetown was like the dream of Yugoslav planners: long blocks of uniform earth-toned buildings that made the classical edifices of the Hill seem the residue of ancestors straining for pedigree. Bunting, starched and perfectly ruffled in red-white-and-blue fans, hung everywhere—from air conditioners, from gutters, from statues of dead revolutionaries. Coming from Berlin, where the manual laborers are white, I felt as though I was entering the heart of a caste civilization. Untouchables in hard hats drilled into sidewalks, carried pylons, and ate lunch from metal boxes, while waiters in restaurants complimented old respectable bobbing heads on how well they were progressing with their rib eyes and iceberg wedges.
I had come to Washington to witness either the birth of an ideology or what may turn out to be the passing of a kidney stone through the Republican Party. There was a new movement afoot: National Conservatives, they called themselves, and they were gathering here, at the Ritz-Carlton, at 22nd Street and M. Disparate tribes had posted up for the potlatch: reformacons, blood-and-soilers, curious liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repentant neocons, evangelical Christians, corporate raiders, cattle ranchers, Silicon Valley dissidents, Buckleyites, Straussians, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Tories, dark-web spiders, tradcons, Lone Conservatives, Fed-Socs, Young Republicans, Reaganites in amber. Most straddled more than one category.
They were here because of one undeniable fact: Donald Trump was going to die. Trump might be ejected from office or lose the election or win the election—but he was, also, definitely going to die. And Trumpism needed to survive. It was just getting started. If Trumpism were snuffed out with Trump, Republicans would fall back into march with the party lemmings in hock to their donors (hardly any Republican voters agreed with the donors about anything, as Trump had intuited), who would connive with liberals to contaminate the country with more immigration, more Big Tech treason, more “free” trade, more endless wars, more slouching toward nihilism. The ancien régime was threatening to reconstitute itself.
...
The Australian was named Jack. He was there with the blessing of his MP boss to make contact with allies and convey the warmest greetings. “It’s exciting to be among so many intelligent people!” Jack was addressing a dour undergraduate from the University of Texas, who was scanning the crowd for luminaries and idly fielding Jack’s questions. “How did you get here?” “I was sort of sick of the libertarian choke hold on campus. I’ve read Carlyle and Evola. And Hazony, obviously. But the College Republicans are still pretty captured by libertarian dogma. Like, no interest in political economy, or a national industrial policy, or anything. I found these folks online. These guys, these are the guys I like.”
...
But money could not altogether be expelled from the temple. One of the conference’s backers was Colin Moran, a New York hedge funder, who got up and told the audience that he liked every damn thing about National Conservatism. He didn’t think it was antimarket at all—hell it would probably be better for the market, or at least his market. “It’s sometimes said that the new National Conservatism is hostile to capitalism,” DeMuth added. He smiled. “To rebut these scurrilous allegations, we will now hear from one of the titans of American finance. Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Thiel!”
...
“In their defense, they don’t actually believe it,” Thiel said. “And I would worry about them even more if they actually did.” Shortly after Obama’s remarks, her elder daughter went off to Harvard. Thiel would have been “very disturbed” if they’d sent her to the one-thousandth ranked school instead. This was genuinely funny. Rolling the Obamas over the coals of their own utterances never got old. But Thiel had done more than his duty to National Conservatism by intimating that a new elite could still come into being. It would be a techy elite, and a very small one, but one that served the homeland, whose normal citizens would graze among the infinite pleasures provided them. The coming elite would recognize the con of mass education and spare millions the dunce hat of the community college or the online university. Thiel himself had already tried to buy out promising young coders from going to college in the first place: the Thiel Fellowship accepted applications on a rolling basis and paid grantees six figures not to go to school. A picture of the Thielian version of the NatCon future was coming into focus: rooms of talented fifteen-year-olds finding new ways to drill into the earth’s core and lower temperatures through sublime acts of geologic engineering. Children were our future, if they could avoid college. Our savior was not the tech-abstinence-preaching Greta Thunberg, but some as yet unknown prodigy, funded by Thiel, who would figure out how to recode the physical processes of the planet.
...
As Thiel was escorted off the stage through a parted sea of fans, I moved to the center of the ballroom. Something curious was happening. There was a young man in a vintage tan Nehru jacket speaking to a group of a dozen younger people in suits and dresses. The subject appeared to be poetry. “And so Dickinson’s editor, this guy Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is actually in contact with John Brown.” It was too propitious—to have the chance this early in the conference to put in a word for John Brown. “What’s the problem with John Brown?” I asked him. The young man in the Nehru jacket blinked slowly, tortoiselike, and a knowing smile arrived. “Only that he was a terrorist, only that he’s the equivalent of a pro-life activist today who blows up abortion clinics because of the evil inside them.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what your cause is, though?”
“Are you a communist or something?” he asked, in a friendly, sparring way. “I mean, it’s okay if you are; I’m so far right that I’m in Maoist territory.” The speaker was Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley star of the neo-reactionary web, whose Thiel-backed technology, Urbit, was meant to reinvent computing (everyone would have access to their own fiercely sovereign servers and would not have to bow to Big Tech). Yarvin the Dark Knight had written a series of texts under the name Mencius Moldbug, making him a revered “alt-right” pamphleteer.
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For Reno, the particularities of the nation were not only reconcilable with Christianity, they furthered its cause. Scripture was unmistakable: “If anyone does not provide for his own people, and especially his own family, he has disowned his faith and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). The nation was no false idol for Reno. God in His benevolence had provided it “as a further remedy for our sinful self-regard.” Catholics could excuse passionate love of your mate if it brought you closer to God; the nation was a much higher version of that. It would be a twisted act to try to take patriotic love away from our fellow citizens. “Many of our fellow Americans have made a mess of their lives in various ways, and they haven’t accomplished very much—unlike many of us in the room—and for many of them their citizenship is their most precious possession, from which they draw the greatest honor. It’s not enough that we take away the functional family life—we even have to take away their own citizenship, or their love of their own citizenship.” Reno was proffering a peculiar notion of worldly success, and one could sense some self-flattery working within him. But elsewhere his speech took a wilder turn. “There is a potential for a great deal of mischief if we fuse church with nation,” he said. “There are bishops in the Catholic Church in the United States and Europe and Protestant pastors who judge prudent restrictions on immigration to be violations of biblical ideals of universal welcome and universal hospitality, but these ideals apply to the people of God, to the Church, not to the United States of America.”
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While it had fallen to Reno to square Christian universalism with nationalist particularism, Yoram Hazony made bolder claims for his faith. Launching out against a hundred years of historiography, Hazony claimed that, no, nationalism was not about forgetting things in common or sharing a mistaken view of the past; it was about keeping a covenant with God. For Hazony—founder of the Princeton Tory, onetime confidant of Netanyahu, and chief Talmudist of National Conservatism—nationalism began with the Hebrews. Donald Trump might speak in slogans, but he was also speaking the Torah. The Hebrew God “doesn’t say go out and conquer all the nations of the world. He says, You stay behind your border.” You can have this patch of land for your people, and it will become great; other peoples can do the same on their patches. And so, after a break of a few thousand years, the Dutch, the English, and finally the Americans all copied the original.
Hazony’s lecture stuck to the wagon ruts of traditional nationalist thought. There had been Jewish nationalists—Zionists after all—going back to the nineteenth century. Earlier, the American Founders and their English forerunners had borrowed the ideas of a chosen state from Jewish thinkers. The trouble was not merely that Hazony swept under the carpet all the difficulties of actually existing nationalism—Where does it begin? Where does it end? Who is in and who is out?—but that he was sacralizing a political compromise as a God-directed project. With the borders sacred, and the exact mixture of people within them sacred, considerable subterfuge and violence were now justifiable in defending the frozen state of this order.
...
Tucker had some tough news for the assembled faithful. “Big Business Hates Your Family” was the title of his talk. Monopoly capitalism was real. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government, but comes from the private sector,” Tucker said. “I was trained from the youngest age, from a pup, to believe that the threats to liberty came from government. . . . And so it really took a huge amount of evidence wagging right in my face—not being the brightest person in D.C.—to realize that in 2019 . . . the threats come primarily from companies, and not from the federal government.” He could give examples. “All new Oreos have the label ‘What’s your pronoun?’ A large American company is committing a pretty brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids, and the message is that the binary gender scheme which we were taught in biology class in seventh grade is no longer operative.” In fighting this, the libertarians would be worse than useless. Their response was, Yeah, well, if you don’t like it, start your own Oreo company. “But that’s not really an operative option in a world of monopoly power. . . . You can’t create your own Google. . . . You have more power vested in fewer hands than at any time in American history. And that itself is ominous and should make all of us cast aside any thread of ideology or theology or whatever, just look at that straight in the face. Are you comfortable with that? You shouldn’t be. Of course you’re not. . . . They can make whole ideas disappear. And there’s some evidence that they’re working to do that.”
...
Tucker riled his audience a bit when he exposed his knowledge of the American left. He found bits to admire in Warren’s “economic patriotism,” and as long as the left kept quiet about the minorities and the migrants, some of them were promising candidates for a left-right nationalist pact. For this was Tucker’s great insight: the social-democratic left was essentially right about economics. It would be good to nationalize social media; it would be good to boost American wages. The trouble with the left was that it wanted to do these things on behalf of an amorphous citizenry with no sense of boundaries for where American bounty should stop. We already knew who Americans were, Tucker implied; the definition was settled: Americans were people who watched and believed Tucker Carlson.
It did all raise a question. What if Trump had dialed down the white nationalism after taking the White House and, instead of betraying nearly every word of his campaign rhetoric of economic populism, had ruthlessly enacted populist policies, passing gargantuan infrastructure bills, shredding NAFTA instead of remodeling it, giving a tax cut to the lower middle class instead of the rich, and conspiring to raise the wages of American workers? It doesn’t take much to imagine how that would play against a Democratic challenger with mckinsey or harvard law school imprinted on his or her forehead. There seemed to be two futures for Trumpism as a distinctive strain of populism: one in which the last reserves of white identity politics were mined until the cave collapsed and one in which the coalition was expanded to include working Americans, enlisting blacks and Hispanics and Asians in the cause of conquering the condescending citadels of Wokistan. Was it predestined that Trump would choose the former? Steve Bannon was already audience-testing Trumpism 2.0, wrong-footing the crowd at the Oxford Union with complaints about the lack of black technicians in Silicon Valley. Why couldn’t Trumpism go in this direction in reality? The shrewdest move for the NatCons would surely have been to attract as many non-whites as possible to the Ritz and strike fear into the hearts of the globalists with a multiracial populist carnival—a new post-Trump pan-ethnic coalition that would someday consider it quaint that it had once needed to begin conferences with the profession: We are not actually racist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/16/trump-has-drained-away-our-ability-hold-him-accountable/
As Lev Parnas, the most colorful Trump scandal character since Michael Cohen, makes the media rounds, it’s hard to know how much credence to give what he says. Some things about him are beyond dispute, however, including the essential fact that he worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani over a long period of time on their project to coerce the Ukrainian government into aiding Trump’s reelection.
...
Grisham added that there’s no need to believe what Parnas has to say, because “this is a man who’s under indictment and who’s actually out on bail.”
That’s also true. But that’s like a mob boss saying, “How can you trust all these guys who have turned state’s evidence against me? They’re a bunch of gangsters!”
And it has become so familiar that we expect it: Whenever one of Trump’s goons gets arrested, Trump says he barely knows the guy. And if that person should start to talk about Trump, then it’s obvious the person is a liar.
...
But Trump does know Parnas, because of Parnas’s close relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his work on their Biden-Ukraine project. At one point, Trump personally consented to have his former lawyer John Dowd represent Parnas and Fruman. Dowd then told Congress that Parnas “assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump,” and therefore he could not answer questions because of attorney-client privilege.
And Parnas seems to know everyone around Trump. Here’s a pic of Lev with Vice President Pence and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Here’s a pic of Lev with Kellyanne Conway. Here’s a pic of Lev with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Here’s a pic of Lev with Donald Trump Jr.
...
And if you want one of Lev with President Trump, there are too many to choose from (among other things, Parnas and Fruman met with Trump at the White House).
And no, Parnas is not particularly trustworthy. Which makes him fit right in with Trump’s employees and associates. That’s the point.
Yet I can pretty much promise you that a week from now, Parnas will fade from our attention. Whenever you find yourself saying about the day’s news, “If this were any other president it would be a gigantic scandal in and of itself,” you probably then remember that you said the same thing the day before and the day before that. And that’s exactly what’s so demoralizing, so spiritually enervating, about this whole era.
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GOP senator’s vicious outburst shows the corruption of Trump’s defenders
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/16/gop-senators-nasty-meltdown-shows-corruption-trump-defenders/
If you were a United States senator who just snapped angrily at a reporter for politely asking whether compelling new information about a matter of great import to the nation was weighing on your understanding of that consequential matter, you probably wouldn’t see this as something to advertise.
But then again, you’re not Martha McSally of Arizona. McSally just did exactly this — yet she is now treating it as a badge of honor; as something to boast about.
In a perverse way, it’s fitting that this episode is going viral at exactly the moment when President Trump’s impeachment trial is getting underway — that is, when Trump’s defenders in the Senate are set to put on a great show of pretending to give serious consideration to the case against Trump, before voting to acquit him.
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Kudlow says Trump 'looking at' reforming law on bribing foreign officials
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/478846-kudlow-says-trump-looking-at-reforming-law-on-bribing-foreign
Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, said Friday the administration is exploring making changes to a global anti-bribery law.
“We are looking at it and we have heard some complaints from our companies,” Kudlow told reporters regarding the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars American companies from paying bribes to secure contracts abroad.
“I don’t want to say anything definitive policy-wise, but we are looking at it,” he added.
Kudlow avoided getting into specifics of what the changes could look like but indicated the administration is crafting a “package” of reforms.
“Let me wait until we get a better package,” he said.
Speculation over the FCPA has spiked after the release of an excerpt from an upcoming book reporting that Trump has bashed the law as an obstacle to U.S. companies’ ability to compete overseas.
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GOP threatens to weaponize impeachment witnesses amid standoff
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/478704-gop-threatens-to-weaponize-impeachment-witnesses-amid-standoff
Republicans are threatening to weaponize a fight on Senate impeachment witnesses amid growing concerns that moderates within their caucus could help Democrats call former national security adviser John Bolton to testify.
After weeks of pledging that they would hold a quick trial with no witnesses from either side, Republicans — from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on down — are sending public warning shots that if their GOP colleagues open the door to Democratic witnesses they’ll respond in kind, forcing votes on a slew of controversial individuals.
The pressure tactics are the latest shift in strategy as Republican leaders try to navigate the factions in their caucus, where moderates want to leave the potential for witnesses on the table and conservatives are anxious to quickly acquit President Trump.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said if GOP senators support calling people “who are unhappy about being fired," a reference to Bolton, "then I think the president should get to call his [witnesses] and we should have votes on those.”
-----
No free lunch, but almost:
What DoorDash actually pays, after expenses, and what’s happening with tips
https://payup.wtf/doordash/no-free-lunch-report
...
Our analysis of more than two hundred samples of pay data provided by DoorDash workers across the country finds that DoorDash pays the average worker an astonishingly low $1.45/hour, after accounting for the costs of mileage and additional payroll taxes borne by independent contractors. Nearly a third of jobs actually pay less than $0 after accounting for these basic expenses. Just 11% of jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, after expenses, and only 2% meet the standard of $15 + expenses. Further, jobs with higher tips still tend to include lower pay: the set of jobs with tips of less than $1 pay 1.8 times as much as those jobs with tips of more than $8, on a gross hourly pay basis.
----
Major evangelical nonprofits are trying a new strategy with the IRS that allows them to hide their salaries
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/17/major-evangelical-nonprofits-are-trying-new-strategy-with-irs-that-allows-them-hide-their-salaries/
Several major evangelical organizations have in recent years moved to a new strategy where they shift from a nonprofit status to a “church” status with the IRS, allowing them to keep private exactly how their money is being spent and the salaries of their most highly paid employees.
That strategic shift was highlighted recently by MinistryWatch, an independent, donor-based group that monitors evangelical institutions. The IRS status change allows these groups, including Focus on the Family and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to avoid filing a form that makes details of their institution’s finances public.
-----
FBI arrests suspected neo-Nazis ahead of Virginia gun rally
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51142752]
The FBI has arrested three suspected members of a neo-Nazi hate group who planned to travel to a pro-gun rally in Virginia on Monday.
One was a Canadian army reservist who was fired in August over ties to hate groups and has been suspected missing since, Canadian police told the BBC.
Virginia governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency in the city of Richmond ahead of the rally.
He said law enforcement believed there was a threat of violence.
-----
Trump Screamed At Pentagon Leaders And Told Them They Were ‘Dopes’ And ‘Babies’
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-screamed-at-pentagon-leaders-and-told-them-they-were-dopes-and-babies
President Donald Trump repeatedly berated U.S. military leaders while throwing a massive fit during a Pentagon meeting in 2017, according to “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” a book penned by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
An excerpt from the book describes how Trump’s meeting with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. and flag officials on July 20, 2017 (arranged by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn) went completely off the rails.
The temper tantrum began when Trump started complaining about the “loser war” in Afghanistan and demanded to know “where is the fucking oil” that he felt the U.S. deserved for its military presence in the Persian Gulf.
“You’re all losers,” he told them. “You don’t know how to win anymore.”
It didn’t end there; According to Leonnig and Rucker, Trump became so angry that “he wasn’t taking many breaths” and bellowed to the commanders in a fit of rage, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people.”
“You’re a bunch of dopes and babies,” he shouted.
-----
Trumpism After Trump
Will the movement outlive the man?
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/
The city was not beautiful; no one made that claim for it. At the height of summer, people in suits, shellacked by the sun, moved like harassed insects to avoid the concentrated light. There was a civil war–like fracture in America—the president had said so—but little of it showed in the capital. Everyone was polite and smooth in their exchanges. The corridor between Dupont Circle and Georgetown was like the dream of Yugoslav planners: long blocks of uniform earth-toned buildings that made the classical edifices of the Hill seem the residue of ancestors straining for pedigree. Bunting, starched and perfectly ruffled in red-white-and-blue fans, hung everywhere—from air conditioners, from gutters, from statues of dead revolutionaries. Coming from Berlin, where the manual laborers are white, I felt as though I was entering the heart of a caste civilization. Untouchables in hard hats drilled into sidewalks, carried pylons, and ate lunch from metal boxes, while waiters in restaurants complimented old respectable bobbing heads on how well they were progressing with their rib eyes and iceberg wedges.
I had come to Washington to witness either the birth of an ideology or what may turn out to be the passing of a kidney stone through the Republican Party. There was a new movement afoot: National Conservatives, they called themselves, and they were gathering here, at the Ritz-Carlton, at 22nd Street and M. Disparate tribes had posted up for the potlatch: reformacons, blood-and-soilers, curious liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repentant neocons, evangelical Christians, corporate raiders, cattle ranchers, Silicon Valley dissidents, Buckleyites, Straussians, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Tories, dark-web spiders, tradcons, Lone Conservatives, Fed-Socs, Young Republicans, Reaganites in amber. Most straddled more than one category.
They were here because of one undeniable fact: Donald Trump was going to die. Trump might be ejected from office or lose the election or win the election—but he was, also, definitely going to die. And Trumpism needed to survive. It was just getting started. If Trumpism were snuffed out with Trump, Republicans would fall back into march with the party lemmings in hock to their donors (hardly any Republican voters agreed with the donors about anything, as Trump had intuited), who would connive with liberals to contaminate the country with more immigration, more Big Tech treason, more “free” trade, more endless wars, more slouching toward nihilism. The ancien régime was threatening to reconstitute itself.
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The Australian was named Jack. He was there with the blessing of his MP boss to make contact with allies and convey the warmest greetings. “It’s exciting to be among so many intelligent people!” Jack was addressing a dour undergraduate from the University of Texas, who was scanning the crowd for luminaries and idly fielding Jack’s questions. “How did you get here?” “I was sort of sick of the libertarian choke hold on campus. I’ve read Carlyle and Evola. And Hazony, obviously. But the College Republicans are still pretty captured by libertarian dogma. Like, no interest in political economy, or a national industrial policy, or anything. I found these folks online. These guys, these are the guys I like.”
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But money could not altogether be expelled from the temple. One of the conference’s backers was Colin Moran, a New York hedge funder, who got up and told the audience that he liked every damn thing about National Conservatism. He didn’t think it was antimarket at all—hell it would probably be better for the market, or at least his market. “It’s sometimes said that the new National Conservatism is hostile to capitalism,” DeMuth added. He smiled. “To rebut these scurrilous allegations, we will now hear from one of the titans of American finance. Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Thiel!”
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“In their defense, they don’t actually believe it,” Thiel said. “And I would worry about them even more if they actually did.” Shortly after Obama’s remarks, her elder daughter went off to Harvard. Thiel would have been “very disturbed” if they’d sent her to the one-thousandth ranked school instead. This was genuinely funny. Rolling the Obamas over the coals of their own utterances never got old. But Thiel had done more than his duty to National Conservatism by intimating that a new elite could still come into being. It would be a techy elite, and a very small one, but one that served the homeland, whose normal citizens would graze among the infinite pleasures provided them. The coming elite would recognize the con of mass education and spare millions the dunce hat of the community college or the online university. Thiel himself had already tried to buy out promising young coders from going to college in the first place: the Thiel Fellowship accepted applications on a rolling basis and paid grantees six figures not to go to school. A picture of the Thielian version of the NatCon future was coming into focus: rooms of talented fifteen-year-olds finding new ways to drill into the earth’s core and lower temperatures through sublime acts of geologic engineering. Children were our future, if they could avoid college. Our savior was not the tech-abstinence-preaching Greta Thunberg, but some as yet unknown prodigy, funded by Thiel, who would figure out how to recode the physical processes of the planet.
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As Thiel was escorted off the stage through a parted sea of fans, I moved to the center of the ballroom. Something curious was happening. There was a young man in a vintage tan Nehru jacket speaking to a group of a dozen younger people in suits and dresses. The subject appeared to be poetry. “And so Dickinson’s editor, this guy Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is actually in contact with John Brown.” It was too propitious—to have the chance this early in the conference to put in a word for John Brown. “What’s the problem with John Brown?” I asked him. The young man in the Nehru jacket blinked slowly, tortoiselike, and a knowing smile arrived. “Only that he was a terrorist, only that he’s the equivalent of a pro-life activist today who blows up abortion clinics because of the evil inside them.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what your cause is, though?”
“Are you a communist or something?” he asked, in a friendly, sparring way. “I mean, it’s okay if you are; I’m so far right that I’m in Maoist territory.” The speaker was Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley star of the neo-reactionary web, whose Thiel-backed technology, Urbit, was meant to reinvent computing (everyone would have access to their own fiercely sovereign servers and would not have to bow to Big Tech). Yarvin the Dark Knight had written a series of texts under the name Mencius Moldbug, making him a revered “alt-right” pamphleteer.
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For Reno, the particularities of the nation were not only reconcilable with Christianity, they furthered its cause. Scripture was unmistakable: “If anyone does not provide for his own people, and especially his own family, he has disowned his faith and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). The nation was no false idol for Reno. God in His benevolence had provided it “as a further remedy for our sinful self-regard.” Catholics could excuse passionate love of your mate if it brought you closer to God; the nation was a much higher version of that. It would be a twisted act to try to take patriotic love away from our fellow citizens. “Many of our fellow Americans have made a mess of their lives in various ways, and they haven’t accomplished very much—unlike many of us in the room—and for many of them their citizenship is their most precious possession, from which they draw the greatest honor. It’s not enough that we take away the functional family life—we even have to take away their own citizenship, or their love of their own citizenship.” Reno was proffering a peculiar notion of worldly success, and one could sense some self-flattery working within him. But elsewhere his speech took a wilder turn. “There is a potential for a great deal of mischief if we fuse church with nation,” he said. “There are bishops in the Catholic Church in the United States and Europe and Protestant pastors who judge prudent restrictions on immigration to be violations of biblical ideals of universal welcome and universal hospitality, but these ideals apply to the people of God, to the Church, not to the United States of America.”
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While it had fallen to Reno to square Christian universalism with nationalist particularism, Yoram Hazony made bolder claims for his faith. Launching out against a hundred years of historiography, Hazony claimed that, no, nationalism was not about forgetting things in common or sharing a mistaken view of the past; it was about keeping a covenant with God. For Hazony—founder of the Princeton Tory, onetime confidant of Netanyahu, and chief Talmudist of National Conservatism—nationalism began with the Hebrews. Donald Trump might speak in slogans, but he was also speaking the Torah. The Hebrew God “doesn’t say go out and conquer all the nations of the world. He says, You stay behind your border.” You can have this patch of land for your people, and it will become great; other peoples can do the same on their patches. And so, after a break of a few thousand years, the Dutch, the English, and finally the Americans all copied the original.
Hazony’s lecture stuck to the wagon ruts of traditional nationalist thought. There had been Jewish nationalists—Zionists after all—going back to the nineteenth century. Earlier, the American Founders and their English forerunners had borrowed the ideas of a chosen state from Jewish thinkers. The trouble was not merely that Hazony swept under the carpet all the difficulties of actually existing nationalism—Where does it begin? Where does it end? Who is in and who is out?—but that he was sacralizing a political compromise as a God-directed project. With the borders sacred, and the exact mixture of people within them sacred, considerable subterfuge and violence were now justifiable in defending the frozen state of this order.
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Tucker had some tough news for the assembled faithful. “Big Business Hates Your Family” was the title of his talk. Monopoly capitalism was real. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government, but comes from the private sector,” Tucker said. “I was trained from the youngest age, from a pup, to believe that the threats to liberty came from government. . . . And so it really took a huge amount of evidence wagging right in my face—not being the brightest person in D.C.—to realize that in 2019 . . . the threats come primarily from companies, and not from the federal government.” He could give examples. “All new Oreos have the label ‘What’s your pronoun?’ A large American company is committing a pretty brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids, and the message is that the binary gender scheme which we were taught in biology class in seventh grade is no longer operative.” In fighting this, the libertarians would be worse than useless. Their response was, Yeah, well, if you don’t like it, start your own Oreo company. “But that’s not really an operative option in a world of monopoly power. . . . You can’t create your own Google. . . . You have more power vested in fewer hands than at any time in American history. And that itself is ominous and should make all of us cast aside any thread of ideology or theology or whatever, just look at that straight in the face. Are you comfortable with that? You shouldn’t be. Of course you’re not. . . . They can make whole ideas disappear. And there’s some evidence that they’re working to do that.”
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Tucker riled his audience a bit when he exposed his knowledge of the American left. He found bits to admire in Warren’s “economic patriotism,” and as long as the left kept quiet about the minorities and the migrants, some of them were promising candidates for a left-right nationalist pact. For this was Tucker’s great insight: the social-democratic left was essentially right about economics. It would be good to nationalize social media; it would be good to boost American wages. The trouble with the left was that it wanted to do these things on behalf of an amorphous citizenry with no sense of boundaries for where American bounty should stop. We already knew who Americans were, Tucker implied; the definition was settled: Americans were people who watched and believed Tucker Carlson.
It did all raise a question. What if Trump had dialed down the white nationalism after taking the White House and, instead of betraying nearly every word of his campaign rhetoric of economic populism, had ruthlessly enacted populist policies, passing gargantuan infrastructure bills, shredding NAFTA instead of remodeling it, giving a tax cut to the lower middle class instead of the rich, and conspiring to raise the wages of American workers? It doesn’t take much to imagine how that would play against a Democratic challenger with mckinsey or harvard law school imprinted on his or her forehead. There seemed to be two futures for Trumpism as a distinctive strain of populism: one in which the last reserves of white identity politics were mined until the cave collapsed and one in which the coalition was expanded to include working Americans, enlisting blacks and Hispanics and Asians in the cause of conquering the condescending citadels of Wokistan. Was it predestined that Trump would choose the former? Steve Bannon was already audience-testing Trumpism 2.0, wrong-footing the crowd at the Oxford Union with complaints about the lack of black technicians in Silicon Valley. Why couldn’t Trumpism go in this direction in reality? The shrewdest move for the NatCons would surely have been to attract as many non-whites as possible to the Ritz and strike fear into the hearts of the globalists with a multiracial populist carnival—a new post-Trump pan-ethnic coalition that would someday consider it quaint that it had once needed to begin conferences with the profession: We are not actually racist.
