AZspot

Exit Right

Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same.

www.dissentmagazine.org

The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case, sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out.

The best moment of the Harris campaign was the very beginning, when she got a chance to embody the collective sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s decision to bow out, and to offer something new. From there, it was all downhill. She and those around her seemed to think that purely superficial changes would prove sufficient. Harris pointedly refused to offer any criticism of the incumbent administration, or even suggest any way in which she differed from it. Whenever prompted on this score, she simply reiterated that she was not the same person as Joe Biden (or Donald Trump). Her surrogates and supporters often reacted with contempt, scorn, and even racism toward those who thought it fair to ask for something more. In this fashion, she squandered the wide lead she had opened in the summer. Although food insecurity and poverty—especially child poverty—had increased significantly after the expiration of pandemic relief measures, and inflation had outpaced earnings for tens of millions of Americans, Harris eventually settled into a campaign roadshow of billionaires, celebrities, and neocon Republican defectors, advocating for an ill-defined status quo. It was a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s “America is already great”: tone-deaf, incompetently targeted at a nonexistent moderate Republican voter, and often expressly hostile toward part of its own nominal base.

As of the present count, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, suggesting he was far from unbeatable. But Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent.

In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

Is Desalination Everywhere Realistic?

Which countries are doing it already? Are they happy? Is desalinated water safe to drink? Does it taste good? Does it pollute too much? Can we shrink its cost?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com|Tomas Pueyo

Today, Israeli households pay ~$30/month for their water. This is about half of what Angelenos pay.

More than half of Israel’s water—including that for industrial and even agricultural uses—comes from desalinated water! This is a country that is poorer than the US but in the same wealth ballpark as countries like France, South Korea, or Japan. If Israel can do it, so can they.

John Bolton urges FBI to probe Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz: "Serious threat"

Donald Trump's former national security advisor issued a damning assessment of the president-elect's top cabinet picks.

www.newsweek.com

Referring to Gabbard specifically Bolton added: "Given the Russian propaganda that she has espoused over the past period of time, I think she's a serious threat to our national security."

Bolton was asked what message he thought Trump was sending to Beijing with the appointments by anchor Blake Burman.

He replied: "With his announcement of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence, he's sending a signal that we have lost our mind when it comes to collecting intelligence.

"Up until a few hours ago, I would have said that was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history. Of course, since Matt Gaetz's nomination, he clearly has taken the lead on that score."

The Onion just bought Infowars

It plans to relaunch it with ‘humor for good.’

www.theverge.com|Emma Roth

The satirical news outlet The Onion has acquired Infowars, the conspiracy theory-riddled site run by Alex Jones, in a bankruptcy auction. In a press release posted to X Thursday, The Onion announced that it plans to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good” when it relaunches in January 2025.