Innehållsförteckning för December 2/9, 2019 från The Nation

The Truth About Lies In his Oct. 28/Nov. 4 column, “Cruel and Unusual,” Eric Alterman falters when condemning the August 6 New York Times headline “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.” Echoing widespread denunciations from progressives, Alterman suggests that “the paper was deceiving its readers on Trump’s behalf”—even though the headline was “literally true” as a description of Trump’s speech after the El Paso massacre. Alterman bizarrely adds that the Times, “like nearly all news organizations,” has been “hesitant about calling Trump a liar.” In the summer of 2017, however, the Times published a massive article titled “Trump’s Lies”; the words “lies” and “lying” appear regularly in its coverage of him; and The Washington Post’s lie tally has topped 13,000. According to a tweet from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the August 6…

Dear Liza, I have a childhood friend whom I see about once a year. Her husband has joined racist Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and is running for Parliament in the UK. When I heard the news, I was aghast. A few weeks later, my friend wrote to ask if I was dropping her and to find out why I hadn’t written. In her note she let me know that she is “fine” with her husband’s move into politics. Now I am at a loss. Does etiquette dictate that we send reassuring notes to old friends whose husbands join far-right political groups? —Awkwardly Antifascist Dear Awkwardly Antifascist, Normally, this column advises protecting our personal relationships despite political differences. If her husband were just some ineffectual loser posting Farage memes on his Instagram…

As Americans, our collective desire to maintain a veneer of nationalistic piety tends to supersede our desire to tell the truth—and if the past is prologue, President Donald Trump will face no historical reckoning for his sprawling malfeasance. Over time and despite his gropes, tweets, and slurs, his lies, tantrums, and betrayals, his government shutdowns and immigrant cages, Trump will likely be remembered not as he was but as the dutiful head of state the nation needs him to be. We’ve laundered the reputations of worse men. After slavery’s fall, Americans feverishly recast the image of those responsible for chattel subjugation. During secession, Jefferson Davis, who would become president of the Confederacy, initially condemned restrictions on slavery as a catastrophe “worth thousands of millions of dollars.” After defeat, he downplayed…

WHEN NADIA MET RANA AT A 7-ELEVEN IN JAKARTA, THE CAPITAL OF Indonesia, it was love at first sight. Nadia, who is now 23, had moved to the city from her hometown a couple of hours away to study at an Islamic university. She had recently broken up with a high school boyfriend, Imam, turned off by his abusive behavior. She had also started to act on her growing attraction to women, spending hours on the Internet conversing with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities that, while suppressed in real life, could flourish on social media. One day in the spring of 2015, Nadia (a pseudonym used to protect her identity) started chatting online with Rana, now 25, who asked her to meet. The rest is history. “She is precious,”…

ACROSS 1 Transportation cost is reasonable, we hear (4) 3 Irreverent person mixed maple and herbs (10) 10 Brown wood with the top cut off (5) 11 Utter the following last words: “Three stars!” (said with an accent, maybe) (9) 12 Move the camera about king beginning to eat something for breakfast (7) 13 Two converts, breaking lease, make a possibly illegal start (3-4) 14 Superhero’s turn to have bad dream (6-3) 17 Grant involves no sword swallower, for example (5) 18 Crumpled sheet for the ones nearby (5) 20 “There’s plenty between cold and its opposite”—that’s a low blow (5,4) 23 Made arrangements for surgery and quietly returned Johnny to the emergency room (7) 24 Any rude punk is caught napping (7) 26 Smell of newspaper in European nation…

It may seem anomalous to invoke Barry Goldwater in the context of a discussion on progressive politics. But progressives could do worse than embrace the sentiment of his famous dictum that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” To borrow from the late senator, progressives should be mindful that deficit spending in the pursuit of a prosperous economy that works for all is no vice, and fiscal moderation in the pursuit of social justice is clearly no virtue. Unfortunately, over the last few decades, the only extremism Democrats have embraced is a perverse adherence to fiscal moderation, specifically a self-defeating fetishization of public debts and budget deficits. While the GOP has long since abandoned any inhibitions about government spending—especially…

The most striking moment so far in Andrew Yang’s unlikely yet resilient presidential bid came in the fourth Democratic debate, when someone else was asked about Yang’s signature issue. Addressing Elizabeth Warren, moderator Erin Burnett said, “You wrote that blaming job loss on automation is ‘a good story, except it’s not really true.’ So should workers here in Ohio not be worried about losing their jobs to automation?” The candidate’s response was a slurry of “by golly,” “gee,” and “I have a plan to fix that” sloganeering that focused on legitimate concerns about trade policy as it has affected industrial workers but never got around to answering the question. Warren wasn’t wrong to criticize the “giant multinational corporations who’ve been calling the shots on trade.” It’s just that she seemed…

Once the new class of legislators is sworn in to the Virginia General Assembly in January, Democrats will control both its chambers for the first time in almost 25 years. The change may herald a national progressive victory: the passage, at long last, of the Equal Rights Amendment. Conceived nearly a century ago to end legal distinctions based on sex, the ERA was first sent to state legislatures for ratification in 1972. Within five years, it was ratified by 35 of the 38 states required to adopt it as part of the US Constitution. But then the ERA entered a limbo that it has not been able to escape. In 1979 a congressionally determined deadline came and went; President Jimmy Carter signed a joint resolution extending it to 1982, though…

There’s a scene in Succession’s second season in which Logan Roy, the patriarch and CEO of the family-owned media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar Royco, sits with his sons, his great-nephew, and a longtime colleague to watch a former employee reveal a number of the company’s sordid secrets on a television. The men slouch on bisque sofas, drink beer, and collectively heckle the screen as the whistle-blower, James Weisel, details decades of sexual abuse on the company’s cruise lines. When a journalist asks him the meaning of the phrase “incident NRPI,” which appears frequently in a set of confidential corporate documents, Weisel responds, “No real person involved. That means it’s a sex worker or a migrant worker at a foreign port, not involving a guest or a permanent member of staff.”…

37K Daily number of people forced to flee their homes because of persecution and violence 70.8M Number of forcibly displaced people worldwide, according to the United Nations 26M Number of refugees worldwide, according to the UN 0.4% Percentage of refugees resettled by the UN 36% Percentage registered by the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees who come from Syria or Afghanistan 207K Number of refugees settled in the United States in 1980 0 Number settled in the US in October—the first time the country hasn’t taken in a single refugee since monthly records were started nearly 30 years ago…

Even as President Donald Trump faces almost certain impeachment, he continues to send unqualified, far-right judicial nominees to the Senate, and majority leader Mitch McConnell continues to fast-track their confirmation hearings. Take Steven Menashi, a White House legal aide (and former counsel to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) who is now up for a lifetime seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Despite his extremist views on race, gender equality, and gay rights, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on November 7 to move forward with a confirmation vote. Menashi will likely soon be deciding crucial cases in New York—some concerning Trump. So far, 158 federal judges have been confirmed during this presidency. On November 6, the White House crowed that this represents “a historic transformation.” The briefing’s…

IS AMERICA’S POLITICAL DISCOURSE ON INEQUALITY FINALLY GETTING REAL? In the early going of the 2020 presidential campaign, this has become a question worth asking. White House hopefuls have been condemning the maldistribution of America’s income and wealth with an intensity—and a specificity—that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. And the rich are squirming. They see candidates proposing unprecedented taxes on their assets and even questioning their right to exist. Perhaps most worrying, this time moderates aren’t exactly rushing to their defense. At the October Democratic primary debate, for instance, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered one of his trademark blasts against the billionaire class. “Senator Sanders is right!” responded the wealthiest candidate in the Democratic field, Tom Steyer. That gave Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a self-styled champion of…

I grew drunk on the dragonflies’ ultraThree times I asked our misogynistic uncle, thefamily patriarch, for money for books for the girlsto which he then scoffed drunkenly throwing coins ontoour heads onto the floor chuckling amused at his own godlike generosityI learned to read via occupational hazard manualsI woke up from a coma believing that I was a witch with polioI needed you so badly I thought I would dieI told mama about cousin wincing while he peed outsideAll of my curiosities ceased breaking down to theone sum the one test whether I could keep calm while I wasdrummed I was ripped off again and again and again I wasfeatured in revenge porn after revenge porn after revengeporn I was deciding whether to reconcile with his enablerbecause in that moment…