Read it.

On April 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that provides a path to Russian citizenship for people living in the parts of Ukraine which are under Moscow’s control. Those who opt out face the prospect of losing their property rights, and risk being displaced from their homes.

The decree covers four Ukrainian regions that Russia has occupied: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Individuals holding ‘passports’ issued by the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic will be considered foreign nationals if they fail to obtain Russian passports by July 1, 2024. Oleksandr Pavlichenko, the executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights, claims that those who fail to register will be removed, resulting in the loss of property ownership: “This property ownership right can be declared invalid. It can be revoked, meaning they will lose their rights to that real estate.” Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war has had a massive impact on civilian property and energy infrastructure, to say nothing of other human rights concerns in the country.

Read it.

Everybody remembers the crazy storyline from January 2019: In the wee hours of a Tuesday morning in Chicago, actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was returning from a trip to a Subway sandwich shop when he was attacked by two white men wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, who shouted racist and homophobic slurs, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and exclaimed: “This is MAGA country!” As fake hate-crime hoaxes go, this was one of the least plausible narratives ever. Republican terrorists in Chicago? At 2 a.m.? In below-zero weather? Targeting an actor who most people never heard of?

Smollett’s tale was quickly exposed as a lie, but his hoax expressed a common belief among liberals, that “hate” is a widespread menace in America, and that Republican voters are all guilty of “hate.” It was therefore not really surprising that the mayor of Chicago — Joe Biden got 74% of the vote in Cook County — would invoke this belief when discussing his city’s illegal immigrant problem.

ZMan wanders abroad.

The subtext to the improbable election of Javier Milei revolves around a question that has haunted Argentina for generations. Why is this country such a mess? For as long as anyone can recall, Argentina has been synonymous with South American disfunction, to the point where the name of the country is often used as an epithet to criticize first world countries. There was even a Broadway play based on the life of a famous Argentine lunatic named Eva Perón.

The first place to start is the ruling elite. If you do an image search of “Argentine leaders” you get a collection of images that would answers the same question if you replaced Argentina with Italy or Spain. Like most South American countries, the ruling elite looks like the colonial elite that founded these countries. In some of these countries, they have been ruled by a small set of families since the 16th century when their ancestors arrived from Spain.

In other words, you do not see the Venezuela problem. In some of the more dysfunctional countries in the region, you have indigenous leaders rising up to claim some power, which always ends in disaster. They tend to be Marxists, but the illiterate sort that just understand the theft and violence parts. Venezuela is a rich country in terms of natural resources and location, but the smart fraction was chased off long ago by indigenous lunatics, so it is a basket case.

Gates of Vienna.

One of the conclusions emerging from the International Crisis Summit 4 in Bucharest is that the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus actually increased the incidence of mortality due to COVID-19.

Read it.

Why does a country once regarded as a model of moderation and progressiveness now have the highest level of gun violence in Europe?

Can you say ‘immigration from the Turd World’? I’m sure you can.

The Spectator.

I’m a student in one of Britain’s largest high schools and know no one who supports Israel over Palestine. Some readers might find that shocking. Consider, though, how my generation gets its news. TikTok is today by far the preferred source of news for teenagers; YouTube is next, Instagram third. Studies show the average teen spends two hours every day glued to their screens. Few my age buy or read a newspaper, or would ever think of doing so. Even the idea of sitting down to watch TV news seems alien to us. We view the world through smartphones; we understand current affairs through video snippets.

In theory, the videos TikTok shows you relate to what you have previously watched: if the algorithm sees that you like something, it gives you more. It’s designed to be addictive. One survey found that just over half of teenagers who go on TikTok use it for news. There are almost no checks and balances to make sure that what TikTokkers see is fair, balanced or accurate.

I have come across many videos about the war on my TikTok “for you” page and I can confidently say that I’ve only seen pro-Palestinian ones. If such material were all assembled in a newspaper or a TV channel, it would look like pretty hardcore propaganda.

Scott Adams emphasizes that the danger of TikTok is not in how it handles users’ data privacy but in the influence it has over it users and the subordination of the influence to the Chinese Communist Party.

Read it.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I plopped on the couch for a quiet evening in and turned on the new Netflix comedy special Natural Selection by Matt Rife. We were both vaguely aware of Rife because he’s posted some videos of his crowd work that have gone viral on social media. Young women in particular seem to like him because he can be quite charming on stage and will openly flirt with female audience members (Gen Z would describe Rife’s charisma as “rizz,” I think).

The set was fine but not super memorable, so I was caught by surprise when I recently saw an article on BuzzFeed explaining that Rife’s fans were furious with him over a joke he made regarding domestic violence. In the special’s opening, Rife recalls visiting a restaurant in Baltimore where the hostess had a very obvious black eye. His friend mused that they should probably reassign the woman to the kitchen so that she wasn’t greeting diners. Rife replied, “Yeah, but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.”

Now, that’s obviously low-hanging fruit and maybe a bit groan-worthy, but Rife’s critics are now trying to full-on cancel this man over this joke! Social media mobsters have accused him of betraying his female fan base and, as they often do during these cancelation campaigns, are “resurfacing” old videos of Rife that they also find objectionable and believe justify their hate. The mainstream media has also, of course, picked up on the controversy and are dutifully publishing story after story egging on the cancellation campaign. Rife has responded exactly how you should in the face of the “woke” mob, which is to tell them to go pound sand. He posted a link to an “apology” for the domestic violence joke, which actually redirected followers to a page where they could purchase a special needs helmet. Funnier than the original joke, if you ask me.

The universe has been ghosting me for about forty years now….

Read it.

You’re not paranoid. The global ruling class really does want to stop you from eating beef. And pork. And chicken.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

The first question for every human organization is “Who are we?” This is the most basic and if not the most important question. The answer could be something mundane and temporary like a sporting event, but this is an answer that assumes the gathering of people is intended to be for the mundane and temporary. A more lasting answer is one that provides the members with a reason to continue working together. A fraternal organization, for example, has an answer that is timeless.

That answer will then be linked to the second question, “To what end?” The people at a ball game come together to see the game and to cheer on the team. Since the founding answer is expected to be short-lived, the second answer is as well. The group that assembles near the old railway station with the password “sic semper tyrannis” for the purpose of organizing a rebellion has a longer-term point of their organizations, so the answers to these two big questions have a longer view.

The final and most important question that all human organizations must answer is the one of authority, “Who says?” The answer to this question is usually assumed, but rarely considered in the open. The people at the ball game do not talk about who says it is a good idea for them to come together and cheer for the team. Similarly, when the civil authority banned public gatherings during Covid, everyone just accepted that they had the authority to do so. The state is usually the answer here.

Read it.

The trial for six teenagers linked to the Islamist murder and beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020 began this week at a juvenile court in Paris.

The teens, who were aged between 13 and 15 at the time of Paty’s murder, are accused of various charges, including identifying the teacher to Chechen Abdoullakh Anzorov, who went on to behead Paty in the Paris suburb of Yvelines before being shot and killed by French police.

The youngest, who was just 13 at the time of the murder, is reported by the BBC as being the daughter of Brahim Chnina, who was the main driver of a social media campaign against Paty after the 13-year-old alleged that Paty had shown depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to the class as part of a lesson on free expression.

Freeberg nails it.

When the communists switched from hot wars to propaganda as their tools of trade, Americans, who thought they’d defeated the scourge for good, were swamped with TogetherWeCanDoThis agitprop. Being a proud people with good hearts, they generally took this as benign advice on how to be good stewards of the earth. There arose a common theme: If you change your household management and consumer behavior, it may seem like a negligible effect, but imagine the cumulative result of all of us doing it. We can save the planet! So recycle!

And…get you some new light bulbs with mercury powder on the inside, that create a hazardous spill site if they ever shatter. Multi-use heavy plastic grocery bags. Paper straws. Electric cars. If you want to keep your gas-powered car, all sorts of new gizmos and doodads under the hood for “environmental regulations” that wear out & kick on your check-engine light…just when you thought you were about to have all your bills paid.

TogetherWeCanDoThis!! Toad tunnels under the freeway so the frogs don’t get run over by the cars when they cross. Little tiny trampolines under the trees so the squirrels don’t hurt themselves when they fall. It’s the only planet we have!

Surcharges built into everything. Sweet, sweet surcharges. Upon your power bill, your gas bill, your water bill, your sewage bill, your cable television bill…America has become the perfect mixing pot for communism and capitalism. We promote the communism, being very careful to never use the actual word, and then we use it to rake in the moolah making just a few people fabulously wealthy, at the expense of everyone else. Interesting. It’s exactly the opposite result from what communism is supposed to achieve. With capitalism as the tool. But it isn’t really capitalism if we didn’t order it; we’re just repeatedly falling for it.

I don’t want to save this planet anymore.

Read it.

Honestly–what did anyone expect? Hamas has never told the truth or kept to any agreement in my lifetime.

Read it.

Three lawsuits attempting to bankrupt a constitutional scholar for giving the prior Republican president legal advice will cost him $3 to $3.5 million, John Eastman said Friday. Eastman was a target of Democrats’ illegal Jan. 6 Committee and has been harassed by the FBI and courts since assisting Donald Trump in 2020 constitutional litigation.

“This is what I call the authoritarian moment in our history,” Eastman told reporter Julie Kelly and podcast cohost Liz Sheld. “The whole premise here is: ‘The government has spoken and you continue to say otherwise. Therefore you must be lying.’”

Eastman’s legal defense fund has raised more than half a million dollars so far, “less than a third of what we’ve already incurred and less than about a sixth or seventh of what we’re likely to incur before we’re done,” Eastman said. To defend himself legally in a Georgia prosecutor’s case against Trump and dozens of his associates, Eastman needs to raise $1 million by February, he said: “I’m trying very hard not to completely deplete my wife’s retirement fund.”

Read it.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona hosted a meeting this month with an anti-Israel activist who has praised Hamas and Hezbollah and called for violence against Israel.

Cardona on Nov. 15 met with 13 activists—including Palestine Legal advocacy manager Lina Assi—to address the “extremely disturbing pattern of hate and threats of violence in schools and college campuses” following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Assi has called Iran and its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, “crucial and important” in “resisting imperialism” in the Middle East. As a student activist, she led a crowd in a chant of “Viva, viva Intifada,” a call for violent uprising against the Jewish state.

Assi’s organization represents Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Israel student group that projected the pro-Hamas statement “Glory to our martyrs” on buildings at George Washington University. Palestine Legal is representing the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Florida, which was kicked off campus for expressing solidarity with Hamas in its “Day of Resistance Toolkit.”

Read it.

The National Health Service in the UK has come under increased scrutiny after it rolled out a new £450 million IT system that only allows midwives to register the ‘gender identity’ of newborn babies, rather than their biological sex.

Read it.

The Iranian public prosecutor’s office has slapped a prominent newspaper with charges over the publication of a top-secret government document outlining the country’s volunteer morality guards – guys who go around whacking women for not wearing hijabs and other violations of Sharia law, who are separate from (but similar to) the country’s official morality police.

According to DW, citing the judiciary’s Mizan news, a reformist daily newspaper, Etmad, published the “highly confidential” document – an instruction from the Interior Ministry regarding the deployment of thousands of morality guards to enforce the country’s Hijab dress code for women.

While the Iranian government has sought to portray the morality guards as nothing more than civilian volunteers who aren’t part of the ministry, or the official morality police. But the leaked documents shows deep links between the group and the ministry.

Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

The Foundry.

A new report is documenting a drastic rise in anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe. The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe published its annual report last week, detailing a 44% increase over the course of 2022 in social hostility toward and violent attacks against Christians as well as acts of vandalism and desecration against churches.

According to the report, 748 anti-Christian hate crimes were committed in Europe last year, 38 of which were violent physical attacks and three of which were murders. Arson attacks were also more common than in years past, and churches were targeted for firebombings and vandalism, especially in France and Germany. In fact, arson attacks nearly doubled over the course of one year, rising from 60 attacks in 2021 to 106 in 2022.

The report noted that “there had been a surge of clear extremism-motivated attacks.” The majority of these attacks were committed by groups with far-left, satanic, Islamic, feminist, or LGBT affiliations.

Doctor’s appointments.
Hours and hours and hours waiting for government employees.
Medical tests.
Waiting all day for a plumber or electrician to show up.

Read it.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said in a statement early Monday that its forces and allies, including the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Mason, responded to the seizure and demanded the armed assailants release the tanker.

“Subsequently, five armed individuals debarked the ship and attempted to flee via their small boat,” Central Command said. “The Mason pursued the attackers resulting in their eventual surrender.”

The Central Command did not identify the attackers, but said a missile launch from Houthi-controlled Yemen followed early Monday morning.

Read it.

A demonstration for the International Day of Violence Against Women in Rome over the weekend turned violent itself when the feminist protesters vandalized and threw Molotov cocktails at the national headquarters of the pro-life group Pro Vita & Famiglia.

“The mask has fallen, showing the true face of transfeminism: an aggressive, violent, dangerous and ideological movement that does not tolerate those who think differently than them and that does not care about poor women who are victims of femicide,” Pro Vita & Famiglia said in a statement.

Organizers of Saturday’s march and local politicians responsible for allowing the demonstration have failed to commend the violence of this group of participants, the Italian newspaper Il Giornali noted.

Zman points out some inconvenient truth.

If you want to destroy a people, put their women to work.

…

This is where things get tricky again. Males should still want to find wives and have children, so what happened there? Clearly, the collapse in family formation and fertility is more than just a female problem. While women have been trained to be boys while gobbling down birth control to keep from getting pregnant, men have lost interest in doing what men have always done, which is find a mate. Simple observation says that men have become vastly less masculine over the generations.

In other words, both buyers and sellers in the sexual marketplace have changed in ways that discourage fertility. The females seek to be anything but wives and mothers, while males look for females that have no interest in motherhood. Of course, females reward this disinterest with casual, noncommittal sex. Even if a male wants children he enters a sexual marketplace as baren as the wombs of the women. The same is true of females who want to live the traditional female role.

Unlike the female problem, this is not easily explained by pointing to social conditioning or the introduction of birth control. One answer is that as society has made women less interested in being women, this has reduced the supply of females that males imagine as a potential mate. Men look for certain qualities in females that indicate they will be sexually loyal and committed mothers. Raise up a generation of wine guzzling whores and males will simply stop looking mates in that group.

Read it.

A transgender TikToker gushed about studying the Quran, claiming that Allah was “beyond gender”.

The clip, which went viral on X, features an effeminate biological male wearing make-up and sporting a thin mustache talking about how excited he is having “just started reading the Quran.”

The they/them explains how he started studying the book after seeing posts about it on social media and teaching materials for both Muslims and non-Muslims.

This will end very badly.

The Register.

China is offering foreign influencers access to its vast market in return for content that sings its praises and helps to spreads Beijing’s desired narratives more widely around the world, according to think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

In a policy brief [PDF] published today titled “Singing from the CCP’s songsheet,” ASPI analysts Fergus Ryan and Daria Impiombato – along with independent contractor on contemporary Chinese politics and media Matt Knight – analyzed the output of over 120 foreign influencers who operate active accounts on Chinese video-streaming platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, Xigua, and Toutiao.

Some, the report observes, have tens of millions of followers on Chinese social media, after discovering that “appealing to Chinese audiences’ sense of nationalism can provide a fast track to gain popularity, increase their online presence and, ultimately, generate more revenue.”

“Indeed, China’s internet regulations encourage users to actively promote party propaganda – so many influencers have adapted to thrive in that system,” the policy brief adds.

So far, so entrepreneurial.

But also not possible – unless influencers are enthusiastically pro-Beijing.

Read it.

Part of the Great Circle of Life in American schools is that the smart teachers and administrators who like smart students devise tracking systems so the smart kids can have their own classes where they are taught at a quick, less boring rate and get into more advanced materials. Eventually, the dumb teachers and administrators who dislike smart kids cotton on to what the clever ones are doing and shut down tracking in the name of equity. But then the smart grown-ups figure out a new euphemism for tracking that fools the anti-smart forces for awhile. And so the Great Circle grinds on.

Read it.

School districts across the country, primarily in major, Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, have been offering segregated classes in the hopes of battling a decades-long, race-based achievement gap.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Evanston Township, a suburb of Chicago, is the latest to introduce the controversial strategy designed to enhance the education experience of students of color – particularly in advanced placement courses. The local school’s 3,600-student high school is 44% white, 24% black, 20% hispanic and 5% asian in a mix of wealthy families and lower income families.

Some have suggested that the voluntary segregation of black, latino, and white students raises crucial questions about the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement. “Our black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” said Monique Parsons, Evanston school board vice president, adding “It’s not good.”

Read it.

For the woke, the more you help people, the more you are hurting them (unless you hold a high place on the victimhood totem pole). But this juxtaposition is only part of the reason why they seem to loath YouTuber MrBeast so much.

MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) has made a successful career out of engaging in philanthropy and he gets results; helping people to gain back their eyesight, saving orphanages overseas or giving poverty stricken children shoes. All of these efforts have for years garnered accusations from the political left and their organizations of “white savior” activities.

They argue that the white savior trope seen in Hollywood movies (where a white man travels to desperate countries and helps non-white people get back on their feet) is an unacceptable image in our modern era of “equity and inclusion.” They claim that MrBeast is exploiting the white savior symbol as a way to elevate himself instead of simply helping others.

Check it out.

I haven’t looked at it enough to tell whether this is actually a ‘periodic table’, i.e. stuff organized by resemblances, but just seeing all of these tools in one place is gratifying.

Read it.

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

Larry Correia is pretty hardcore.

Read it.

The year was 1992. The Clinton administration was trying to get Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat to sign on the dotted line of the Oslo Accords to create a terror state inside Israel. In the name of peace. Unfortunately Hamas kept killing Israelis.

15-year-old Helena Rapp had been stabbed to death at a bus stop on the way to school. A few days later, Rabbi Shimon Biran, a father of four, was similarly murdered by an Islamic terrorist.

Fed up with the latest killings, Prime Minister Rabin put 417 Islamists terrorists on buses and dumped them in Lebanon. The monsters he deported included top Hamas terror leaders.

Gates of Vienna.

Finally, after more than fifteen years, a leader of the Sweden Democrats is saying in public what needs to be said about the Islamization of Sweden.

I think it’s too late — the process is already too far advanced. When I first met with the Sweden Democrats back in 2007, a reversal of the trend was still barely possible. But not any longer.

Or maybe I’m being too pessimistic. Maybe, despite the fact that young Mohammeds now outnumber young Svens and Olafs in Modern Multicultural Sweden, the situation can somehow be salvaged…

Read it.

Alphabetization is dying, I suspect. AI searches obviate the need for human skill in alphabets, and designers seem not to want it. Another way of saying I have been unable to sustain it in etymonline; the app technology keeps undercutting it.

AI expects you to seek one thing, and it is eager to hand you that one thing in under .0005 seconds. Yet I need to see the site alphabetically in order to edit it. Or to understand English.

You miss a little when you can’t see the forest. Maybe everything. Now, on your devices, you have a nice stack of dispensable planks; it’s convenient as all. But you lost the forest.

Check it out.

Allegedly….

Judging by the URL this is hosted in Switzerland, so, there it is.

Read it.

It truly is a foreign country.

Read it.

Hundreds of students rioted at Hillcrest High School in Queens on Monday, trying to assault a teacher who posted a photo on Facebook of herself with an “I Stand With Israel” sign.

Who hasn’t wanted to have a catnip gazelle available every now and again?

Read it.

In Dublin on Thursday, a middle-aged man, a naturalized citizen said to be from an Islamic country, went on a stabbing spree outside an elementary school. Before passersby brought him down, three small children and two adults lay bleeding from their wounds. Within hours, parts of Dublin were burning. Why? “The far right,” said an Irish police official—a claim dutifully magnified by the nation’s woke media.

Don’t you believe it. Brian Kaller, a Dublin friend and independent journalist who went onto the streets to see what the ruckus was about, wrote me to say the people he interviewed leaving the riot area said the initial protest had been peaceful, but it turned violent when the police tried to break it up. The looters, the people told Kaller, didn’t look Irish. Kaller added that Ireland, which doesn’t even have a conservative political party, has no ‘far right’ to his knowledge, “but this is the way to create one.”

Read it.

A newly released study shows, for the first time in French history, that the second most widely spoken language in the country is dialectal Arabic, with an estimated population of between three and four million speakers. The resulting population ratio in favour of people mainly of North African origin is fraught with consequences.

Read it. And for God’s sake watch the video.

Apparently there is some comedy retrovirus that still survives in the Saturday Night Live genome, resisting all attempt to swamp it with Wokeness.

Read it.

More than 70,000 people are expected to show up to COP28, about 25,000 more people than last year’s summit, COP27.

Read it.

Dublin just erupted in rioting, looting, and arson after three children and two adults were stabbed outside a school. The Guardian, Al Jazeera, AP, and the BBC ran almost identical stories that left the reader baffled as to why a “right-wing” mob would spontaneously riot.

It takes some digging to discover what went unmentioned in the MSM: the unnamed, undescribed stabber with unclear motives is reportedly an older Algerian immigrant. The riot involved an attack and arson directed at a Holiday Inn the Irish government turned into immigrant housing near the stabbing site.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In years past, whenever I have put out the call for questions, there would be questions about specific people in politics and questions about a particular question. This time there were no such questions. The former questions have gone away along with the drama, which was a defining feature of outsider politics. The days of various e-celebs warring with one another seem to have passed.

The other question has also changed. You see it with the reaction to the Israel – Gaza cheerleading from conservatives. Ten years ago, the only negative responses to Shapiro or Pollack would have been the old school JQ stuff. These days it is much more nuanced and matter of fact. A large swath of people seem to have internalized many of these arguments into a casual acceptance of ethnic reality.

I did not get a single Ukraine question. A good question is how the general public will respond when the inevitable happens in Ukraine in 2024. The war is not on anyone’s list of concerns at the moment, not even for those on this side of the divide. Will that change when things fall apart next year? Team Biden never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle, even though it had been off the radar for years.

Read it.

Sixty years ago this week, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, but the family’s political odyssey did not end there. JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, who had served as attorney general, made a run for the White House but on June 5, 1968, but Jordanian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK dead. That raised expectations for Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy.

In July of 1969, the “boiler room girls,” who had worked for Bobby Kennedy, gathered at Chappaquiddick Island for a drunken bash with Ted and his handlers. Ted took Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, for a ride in his cavernous 1967 Oldsmobile, but not to talk campaign strategy. The Massachusetts Democrat drove off a bridge, escaped the sunken vehicle, and abandoned Kopechne, who died by drowning.

Quilette.

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” This observation, which seems to have already receded over history’s lost horizon, came courtesy of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan barely one week before Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel. Speaking at the Atlantic Festival at the end of September, Sullivan described a new Middle East in the making. In recent years, he explained, a burst of diplomacy had established the political and economic conditions for a new equilibrium from the Persian Gulf to Gaza. The implications for the de-escalation of old conflicts were profound. A truce in Yemen, Iranian attacks against US forces down, American involvement in Iraq “stable.” Although regional problems remained, the diminished chaos of the Middle East was allowing the Biden administration to turn its attention to more pressing concerns in other parts of the world.

Read it.

Intersectionality red in tooth and claw.