Section: New Republic (USA)
Facebook and Twitter Have Made a Mess of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Story
Twitter and Facebook knew this was coming. For the last four years, they have ostensibly been preparing for foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. Pressed by lawmakers, executives from both companies insisted that they had learned their lesson. “In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now...
Hunter Biden and the Hunt for a New “Hillary’s Emails”
With less than three weeks to go until the election, The New York Post published what it apparently thought would be a bombshell report. The tabloid newspaper claims it obtained a cache of emails by Hunter Biden, the Democratic nominee’s controversial son, including one that suggests the younger Biden arranged a meeting between his father...
My Life as an Anti-Fascist Catfisher
The following is adapted from Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin.It’s nearly 3 a.m. in Ukraine, but my interlocutor hasn’t gone to sleep yet. His name is David, he lives in Kiev, and he’s sending me videos about how to make a gun out of pipes. He’s trying to flirt with me....
A Simple Way for Congress to Hold ICE Accountable
It is hard to choose the worst story of the Trump era, but a whistleblower complaint filed on Monday with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is surely among them. The complaint, which was brought by a coalition of legal-advocacy and human-rights groups in the South, focuses on alleged medical misconduct at the Irwin...
A Simple Way for Congress To Hold ICE Accountable
It is hard to choose the worst story of the Trump era, but a whistleblower complaint filed on Monday with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is surely among them. The complaint, which was brought by a coalition of legal-advocacy and human-rights groups in the South, focuses on alleged medical misconduct at the Irwin...
Donald Trump Is the Military-Industrial Complex
Everybody knows Donald Trump is an opportunistic, lying asshole. Hell, that was his defenders’ main point this weekend, when they tried vainly to save the president from Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 3 article in The Atlantic, in which multiple former U.S. officials and senior military officers revealed—anonymously—that Trump in...
The Republicans’ Absurd Quest to Turn Biden Into Trump
Earlier this week, Joe Biden spoke about the recent protests and violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The crux of his remarks—and an emerging theme of his campaign—was a simple question: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” he asked. Conservative commentators leapt into action.“The ‘blackmail...
Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarusian Dictatorship Is Going Down in Flames
For the so-called “last dictator in Europe,” August may mark the last month of his reign. On Sunday, Belarus–overseen for over a quarter-century by a brutal imbecile named Alexander Lukashenko–hosted its latest version of could loosely be called an “election.” These ersatz plebiscites have long been perfunctory functions which typically end in...
The Problem With Putinology
By most accounts, the Cold War came to end in 1991. Soviet defeat equaled the victory of the West. The Washington consensus set the economic terms. Democracies were proliferating after 1991, and on the horizon a rules-based liberal international order was more and more clearly emerging, a global analogue to the ascendant European Union with...
John Bolton’s Accidentally Unflattering Self-Portrait
It is a remarkable thing that in our sharply divided political environment, John Bolton has emerged as a rare unifying figure: Almost no one approves of him. Bolton’s saga and that of his book, The Room Where It Happened, has now churned through several news cycles. The notoriously hawkish Bolton served as Trump’s National Security...
