November 8, 2024 ❧ Trump’s first staff picks, Israel admits ethnic cleansing, and an app for boycotts

Plus: Bernie blasts the Dems, Nigeria frees protesters, more ballot measures, and monkeys on the loose!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the reading of the news

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

• We already have a few names that will fill the incoming Trump administration. For his chief of staff, Trump has anointed a longtime corporate lobbyist, Susie Wiles, who cut her teeth as a strategist for Mitt Romney and Rick Scott. And for his first foreign policy appointment, Drop Site News reports that he is considering Brian Hook, a notorious Iran hawk who served during the Bush administration and later advised Trump to assassinate General Qassam Soleimani, to staff the State Department for him. Hook also spearheaded an initiative that specifically “sought to counter alleged ‘isolationist’ trends in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.” So, congratulations to everyone gullible or cynical enough to call Trump an economic populist or a peace candidate!
  
  
• Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested that Trump should appoint Dr. Joseph Ladapo—who’s currently his state’s Surgeon General, and a notable anti-vaxxer—as Surgeon General for the whole country. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has recommended Ladapo to run the Department of Health and Human Services instead. 

AH, SO THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED

This is actually more coherent than the Democratic theory of “America just wasn’t ready for Kamala’s flawless campaign.” (Headline: Christian Broadcasting Network)

• Now that Trump is set to be inaugurated in January, there are renewed calls for 70-year-old liberal Supreme Court justice Sonya Sotomayor—who has type-1 diabetes—to retire so she can be replaced by a Joe Biden appointee. Until Jan. 3, there will be a narrow majority of Democratic senators, so it would be theoretically possible to replace Sotomayor with another liberal. But all it would take are two defections (perhaps as a final twist of the knife from career saboteurs Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin on their way out the door) to hold up the nomination. This would ensure that Trump gets to name someone like Christopher Rufo or Jeanine Pirro to the court instead, and guarantee a 7-2 conservative majority. In reality, Sotomayor should have retired months, if not years ago, and her refusal to do so is a spectacular act of hubris on par with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Washington Post)
  
  
• Senator Bernie Sanders offered a searing critique of Democrats after their drubbing on Tuesday: 

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

This is spot on—as exit polls have shown, this election was the worst Democrats have performed with low-income voters since 1960 and Harris failed to articulate a clear economic vision that would benefit them. However, it would have been nice if Bernie spent any time raising alarms about this during the campaign rather than dutifully campaigning for a politician who he apparently recognized to be failing.

He would have won, you know. Have we mentioned that lately?

(Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

• While refusing to look inward or at their leadership to explain their loss, some Democrats are pointing the finger at one of their favorite scapegoats: transgender people. Two Democratic members of Congress, Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) have suggested that the party’s failure is because they were too tolerant of trans individuals, specifically athletes. Republicans certainly seized on anti-trans bigotry in their messaging. (One of their most used slogans was “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.”) But according to one exit poll conducted by the Human Rights Campaign, trans issues were literally the least salient issue for voters in this election. (Pink News)
  
  
• In a predictable fashion, companies are already making plans to pass Trump's tariffs onto their customers in the form of increased prices. Sadly, it is too late for the many Americans who are, for the first time, learning that a tariff is not a tax on other countries, as Trump claims, but a tax on them. (CBS)

Web searches for the word “tariff” have nearly tripled since election day. Would have been nice if Harris made any effort to explain how awful this policy would be before it was too late. 

(Screenshot: Google Trends)

• Democratic governors, including Gavin Newsom in California and J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, are scrambling to come up with countermeasures to protect their states and constituents from Trump’s policies. Pritzker sounds fired up, but don’t expect too much from Newsom, who agrees with Trump on things like rounding up homeless people and harsh penalties for petty crime.

Oh great, Gruesome Newsom is the line of defense. That'll go well.

• Most major labor unions endorsed Kamala Harris, but their membership was decisively split despite her obviously better record on labor issues. In Fast Company, A.J. Hess profiles how the labor movement is reacting to the victory of Trump, who has openly endorsed firing striking workers.
  
  
• Just two days after it became clear that Trump won, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams ended a program that gave immigrant families with young children pre-loaded debit cards to buy food. What a piece of work that guy is. (New York Times)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

On Wednesday, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson joined the Unfucking the Republic podcast for a post-election livestream covering Trump, the Democrats, and everything we can expect in the next four years. Check it out below: 

AROUND THE WORLD

• As the world was distracted by the U.S. election, Israel made its policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza official. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Force, Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, stated that the army was getting closer to “the complete evacuation” of civilians from Northern Gaza, adding that “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.” This confirms what senior Israeli officials told Ha’aretz last month— that Israel’s leaders had dropped any pretense about rescuing hostages in favor of annexing large parts of the Gaza Strip (Many in the Netanyahu government make no secret of their goal to re-settle this emptied land). And it also confirms what most honest observers should have seen from the start, which is that this was never a “defensive” war, but one intended to permanently displace the Palestinians from Gaza in order to colonize it.
  
  
• There’s a new app called “Boycat” that helps people know what products to boycott for various causes, including human rights in Palestine and the Congo. It was created by Adil Abbuthalha, a Yemeni-Sri Lankan data scientist who said he “had to do something” after seeing the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, and has reportedly “contributed to a financial shift of over $87 million” with “nearly a million users.” Its logo is also very cute. (Middle East Monitor)

Just look at this little guy. (Image: Boycat.io)

• After air pollution forced Pakistan to shut down work and school in the major city of Lahore, some officials began to call for reprisals against its rival India, who it claims is responsible for pollution that wafted across the border. However, others have called for “smog diplomacy,” under which the two nations would work together to develop anti-pollution policies that would benefit them both. (Semafor)
  
  
• Just weeks after suffering a major outage, Cuba is suffering yet another nationwide blackout after its power grid was battered by the Category-3 storm, Hurricane Rafael. As we discussed last time, America’s decades old trade embargo on Cuba has made it vastly harder for the island to upgrade its power system. And with Trump coming to power, it’s likely that sanctions on Cuba will get even more repressive and stunt its development further. (The Guardian)
  
  
• India was just forced to lift a ban on Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. The novel, which was inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad, was infamously banned in 1988 due to outrage among Muslims who considered it blasphemous. However, after a legal challenge from a bookseller, the Indian government was not able to locate the actual customs order that banned Rushdie’s book. As a result, they were left with “no other option except to presume that no such notification exists,” and the book is now legal to import and possess. (Times of India)

• Australia is moving to ban children under 16 from accessing social media. It’s understandable why they may want to do this, since social media is definitely chipping away at kids’ attention spans, threatening their privacy, and exposing them to disturbing content. But an outright ban is a simplistic fix that lets tech companies off the hook for the addictive algorithms and will just delay kids’ ability to learn how to navigate the internet wisely. (Associated Press)
  
  
• Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has released 30 minors who were arrested and jailed on treason charges during the cost-of-living protests that shook the country in August. However, 46 adults remain behind bars, and Tinubu insists he will still pursue the economic policies that led to the protests in the first place. (Al Jazeera)

AROUND THE STATES

• Rising sea levels are endangering a species of tiny deer native to the Florida Keys. According to the Associated Press:

These charismatic diminutive deer have been listed as endangered for almost 60 years after their numbers dipped to about 50 from hunting and poaching long ago. Yet they’ve made a tremendous comeback, with a peak population of about 1,000 in the mid-2010s before a deadly parasite and Hurricane Irma took a heavy toll… However, experts and wildlife advocates say this conservation success story today is at risk of being undone by climate change. Sea level rise is already altering the landscape of Big Pine Key and at least 20 smaller islands the deer call home.

The Key Deer (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

• There’s an “unprecedented” new anti-homeless policy in Arizona, where voters approved a ballot measure to incentivize rounding up homeless people by giving a tax refund to property owners in any locality that doesn’t do it. The campaign for the policy was spearheaded by the ultra-conservative Goldwater Institute, because of course it was. (Vice)
  
  
• In happier news, another ballot measure gave Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts the right to unionize! (New York Times)
  
  
• Two counties in Oregon have announced that they will continue to hold thrice-yearly meetings about seceding from Oregon (too woke) and joining Idaho, thus creating a “Greater Idaho.” The meetings are reportedly “sparsely attended.” (Central Oregon Daily News)

This is basically Manifest Destiny for potatoes. (Image: Greater Idaho)

• In an amusing snafu, the city of Colorado Springs has approved both a ballot measure that legalizes selling recreational marijuana, and one that prohibits it. Unfortunately the ban is written into the city charter while the legalization is merely an ordinance, so the anti-weed conservatives have won for now. (KRDO)
  
  
• After voters in Missouri approved a minimum wage increase (from $12.30 to $13.75) and guaranteed sick leave, business groups are contemplating their legal options to stop both policies, showing that they really don’t care for this whole “democracy” business. (Missouri Independent)

MONKEY NEWS OF THE WEEK

43 monkeys have escaped a South Carolina medical lab!

Back in April, we told you about a charming historical incident where eleven monkeys escaped from a zoo and lived in the woods of Rhode Island, where they spent years startling passersby and perching on bird houses. Now, history has repeated itself. There’s been another ape escape—or, uh, monkey breakaway.

On Thursday, 43 female rhesus macaques got loose from the Alpha Genesis medical lab in Yemassee, South Carolina after a worker didn’t quite close a cage door. Police say they’re “harmless and a little skittish,” but are urging people to “shut their windows and doors so the monkeys can’t find a place to hide inside” and call 911 if they’re spotted. However, given that the monkeys were slated for experiments relating to brain disorders, we can’t recommend snitching on them and getting them recaptured. In fact, this would be a good moment to consider the ethics of experimenting on animals of any kind. Why are we doing that? Can it be justified? 

At the time of writing, the monkeys are still at large. 

Right now, this could be happening on a South Carolina lawn. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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