Weekly Grounding #60
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“FOIA Files: How Feds, Press, and Academia ‘Coordinate’ on Speech”
reports on the coordinated nature of “anti-disinformation” campaigns in the United States for . Racket obtained emails exchanged among journalists, Department of Homeland Security officials, and academics. One email in the exchange blatantly states: “Happy to talk regarding the work we (the feds) did in coordination with social media companies to anticipate and respond to efforts to undermine the election.”Rushmore writes that “These emails illustrate the synergies between the ‘anti-disinformation’ industry and the national security state. In theory, the two factions are supposed to be separate entities, but in practice, they represent the same interests. It’s not often that a single disclosure offers evidence of the alacrity with which outfits like the EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] did the bidding of federal law enforcement agencies. We should be grateful for their candor.”
These revelations about the coordination between security state operatives, journalists, and academics to help bring about their preferred outcome for the 2020 election should not come as a surprise. As Time Magazine reported back in early 2021 in an article entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”: The story of the 2020 election “sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
“This Is How They Lose”
explores the pitfalls of the Harris and Trump presidential campaign strategies at : Of the Harris campaign, he writes that “The media’s slavish devotion to the Democratic Party is by now obvious to almost everyone, including, and perhaps especially, swing voters. When reporters close ranks behind a candidate, there’s always a voter backlash — the question is how much of one. The bigger hazard, however, is that as the media gets carried away with their idolatry, so does the party. The higher Harris rises, the more the donations flow in and the bigger the crowds get. The campaign responds to these rewards by doing more of the same on an even bigger scale. But what looks from the flight path of Air Force Two like soaring success can look to voters on the ground in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin like some kind of celebrity reality TV show that has nothing to do with their lives. The more excited the blue state voters whose ballots don’t matter get, the more skeptical the swing state voters upon whom victory depends become.”Despite the Trump campaign’s opportunity defend a populist message that would easily win the election, Woodhouse notes that Trump has failed to do so: “He cannot see through the noise because the noise is all that matters to him. The short-term news cycle, the crowd sizes, the glitzy Hollywood endorsements — these are all he knows and values because he is every bit the vapid celebrity that Harris has become.”
In conclusion, Woodhouse writes that Trump won the 2016 election “because of a happy alignment between his personal vendetta against the American liberal elite and a broad, working-class rebellion against that same regime. But Kamala Harris is not Hillary Clinton. Independent voters do not see in her the barely hidden hand of a neoliberal cabal. They will not reflexively regard his disdain for her as an expression of their own contempt for an arrogant ruling class, rather than the petty jealousies of a small-minded and short-tempered man. Instead, they will see what is clearly before them: two soulless politicians performing their compassion and solidarity with ordinary voters to fulfill their personal strivings for power. In other words, a traditional American presidential election.”
“Why Trump Is Winning Outside of America”
While Trump has not been doing himself many favors at home recently,
writes that “Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places.” In this column for Unherd, she draws on examples from Nigeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Serbia, China, and Palestine to demonstrate Trump’s appeal outside of the West.Lynch argues that “a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of ‘democracy’ abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.”
“Biden Promised Peace, but Will Leave His Successor a Nation Entangled in War”
The New York times takes stock of the president’s foreign policy record: “It was clear that Mr. Biden’s campaign viewed his leadership during something resembling wartime as a political strength. ‘I’m running the world,’ he told the ABC News host George Stephanopoulos in July, as he fought to remain the Democratic presidential nominee. He noted that he had just been on the phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and that he was ‘taking on’ the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.”
Just last month, Biden stated in an Oval Office address that “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” Now permitted to note Biden’s lies since he is no longer the Democratic Party presidential candidate, the Times continues: “People who hear Mr. Biden speak about ending war — he also said, inaccurately, during his June debate with Mr. Trump that he was not presiding over ‘any troops dying anywhere in the world’ — are right to feel as though something does not add up…” One former National Security Council official states: “You might say, ‘Wait a second — this does not feel like the U.S. is out of war’…That’s because this is the most dangerous geostrategic moment since the early 1980s.’”
“Pro-Israel G7 Ambassadors Boycott Japan A-bomb Ceremony”
Scott Foster reports on the G7 nations’ boycott of Japan’s peace ceremony in Nagasaki because Israel was not invited. Ambassadors from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Italy did not attend the annual event, which honors the “More than 200,000 people, most of them civilians, [who] are believed to have been killed by the two atomic bombs, while many others were badly burned and suffered from radiation sickness for years after the attacks. According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there were 106,825 officially recognized survivors as of March 2024.”
In addition to discussing the G7’s gesture of support for Israel (despite its continued genocide in Gaza), Foster provides broader historical context on the use of nuclear weapons in Japan: “In the US, the commonly accepted justification for dropping the atomic bombs is that, by hastening the end of the war, they saved the lives of thousands of soldiers…Nevertheless, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that ‘…Japan was already defeated… dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.’ Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff, wrote in his memoirs that ‘…the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’”
“What Has Surprised Me About Childlessness”
On a lighter note, Janan Ganesh writes a perceptive (and funny) column at The Financial Times about the pro vs. antinatalist discourse that has caught on like wildfire in the Anglophone media: “One thing no one warns you about forgoing kids: it can induce a sort of premature old-fashionedness. Childless men are expected to be cool…but it is through children that people keep up with cultural change. I had never heard of Charli XCX until the recent meme that Kamala Harris decided to run with. Having investigated, I still don’t understand what is going on. What form a Snapchat message takes, or what the logo looks like, I can’t picture, and that app launched in 2011. TikTok? A closed book. Shein? Hadn’t heard of the brand until June.”
Interestingly, Ganesh notes how the pronatalist position often aligns with the interests of the childless professional-managerial class in global metropolitan centers: “I now accept that pronatalists had a point all along. No one can escape the second-order effects of an ageing population. This means, above all, the tax burden on workers to prop up the retired, but not that alone. The life which this column tends to exalt, the life of big cities, depends on the young, whether as service staff or as conceivers of new ideas or just as unconscious providers of ambient energy. As much as I might prefer their zero-to-18 phase to play out elsewhere — incubators on offshore sites, a terraformed Mars — I need them. The selfish case for pronatalism is the one that has hooked me.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.