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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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By David McCabe & Ben Sisario @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 18
The inquiry predates the botched presale of Taylor Swift tickets this week and is said to focus on whether Live Nation has abused its power in the live music industry.
Chris Magnus submitted his resignation “effective immediately” to President Joe Biden.
By Daniel Lippman @ Politico.com, Nov. 12
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus has resigned, according to a statement from the White House released Saturday evening.
Magnus had clashed with immigration officials over how to handle an influx of migrants at the southern border, lost the confidence of his bosses and been asked to resign or be fired, POLITICO reported Friday [....]
Magnus was told on Wednesday by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that he should either resign or be dismissed, according to three current and one former Department of Homeland Security officials [....]
By Brad Dress @ TheHill.com, Nov. 6
A record number of Republicans support the GOP over former President Trump, according to the latest NBC News poll.
About 62 percent of Republicans identify themselves more as supporters of the Republican party than as supporters of Trump, the poll shows, while 30 percent of Republicans identify as supporters of Trump over the Republican party.
About 4 percent of Republicans identify as equal supporters of both the Republican party and Trump [....]
By Sam Sabin @ Axios.com, Nov.4
[....] Graphika found Russia-linked actors are targeting the close Senate and gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New York and Ohio by disseminating a series of racist and inflammatory political cartoons [....]
Yes, but: Graphika said the most recent set of political cartoons has "received very low engagement and no organic spread to other platforms."
Catch up quick: The suspected Russia-linked disinformation campaign follows reports of increased pro-China disinformation targeting the U.S. elections as well.
Last week, researchers at Google-owned Mandiant said they had uncovered a pro-China disinformation campaign targeting U.S. voters across social media to dissuade voters from casting their ballots.
It's more common than you think.
By Katie Dowd @ SFGate.com, Nov. 1
[....] “It seems like it doesn't make any sense, that it’s not possible,” said Mike Rothschild, journalist and author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.” “One of the things that both far-left and far-right conspiracy theories have in common, and why they mesh so well together, is that they don’t trust experts. Everybody’s out to get you: Big Pharma, the deep state. ... They’re kind of all the same at some point.”
For many people who became radicalized over the past few years, the pandemic was a starting point, an accelerant or both.
“We’re only starting to get a real handle on how lockdown and how the COVID narrative radicalized people, many of whom were not conservative, were not MAGA people, would never have voted for Trump,” Rothschild said. “But they distrusted Bill Gates, 5G internet, vaccines.” [....]
The Ezra Klein show @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 1.
[....] Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read.
We discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more. [....]
Spying charge levelled at Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi carries death penalty as Tehran seeks to suppress running protests
By Deepa Parent @ TheGuardian.com, Oct. 29
Two female journalists who were instrumental in reporting the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police has sparked nationwide protests, have been labelled as CIA foreign agents by the Iranian regime.
Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, who were arrested shortly after news broke of Amini’s death and who are reportedly being held in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, were accused of being foreign agents in a joint statement released by Iran’s ministry of intelligence and the intelligence organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards last night.
The statement, which refers to the two women as NH and EM, also described the protests as a pre-planned operation launched by the CIA, Mossad and other western intelligence agencies.
The statement, which accused both women of being “primary sources of news for foreign media”, accused Hamedi of posing as a journalist and of compelling the family of Mahsa Amini to release information about their daughter’s death [....]