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Now, the news.
❧ Deep Dive: Why is everyone so obsessed with Hasan Piker? ❧
The Hasan Piker discourse reached a fever pitch last week, becoming so loud and unbearable that Ezra Klein was all but forced to publish an op-ed, a.k.a the ultimate pacifier for centrists. The internet started to overheat on March 19 after The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed calling Piker a “Jew-hater,”written by the co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way, Johnathan Cowen, and its press advisor, Lily Cohen.Then came the hubbub of Democratic politicians having to declare if they would or would not go on Piker’s stream if invited. (Sen. Cory Booker wouldn’t; Gov. Gavin Newsom would, etc.) Online chatter only intensified as Piker prepared to make a campaign appearance with friend of Current AffairsAbdul El-Sayed, a senate candidate in Michigan and, back in 2018, the recipient of this magazine first-ever political endorsement. (Note: Current Affairs has since become a 501c3 organization and no longer endorses specific candidates.) Social media flooded with posts debating whether or not Piker was the Democrat’s own bigoted Nick Fuentes, or whether he represents a legitimate politics that the Democratic establishment should, at the very least, not try to relentlessly cancel. In other words, people were talking about antisemitism, what actually constitutes prejudice against Jewish people, and how all of it squares with Americans’ evolving feelings on Israel.
Clearly, critiquing Israel is not the same thing as loving Hitler, but as you know, Americans have been confused by a generational propaganda campaign falsely and dangerously conflating the ancient Jewish religion with the modern nation state of Israel (shoutout: the Anti-Defamation League). Now, too many Americans cannot tell the difference between Piker’s anti-genocide, pro-Palestine beliefs and those of Fuentes, who is a Holocaust denier and does not think Jewish people should be a part of Western civilization. It’s ludicrous—and also a gross mischaracterization of Piker, who has made a point of combating antisemitism he encounters generally and within his left-leaning audience. (This fact makes Piker’s presence all the more important as right-wing influencers, who really are antisemitic, have begun “capturing the conversation on Palestine.”) Piker feels strongly enough on this matter that he has taken the time to go point-by-point with New Republic contributing editor Aaron Regunberg and address every comment that's been called antisemitic. Give it a read here, but I can also save you the time and tell you that this guy is no Jew-hater.
Art by Susannah Lohr from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 5
Piker is, though, emblematic of a new vanguard on the American left, one which shirks blind support for Israel (or any state, for that matter) and replaces it with a dedication to human rights and collective flourishing. The fractious obsession with Hasan Piker may be one of the more annoying symptoms of this broader ideological restructuring, a kind of growing pain. Consider that Ezra Klein actually agrees that Piker is not an obvious antisemite, writing in the New York Times “If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.” And consider that Bari Weiss’s Free Press, an even more moderate/conservative publication which produced a terrible, racist write up of Piker’s appearance with El-Sayed, just declared that “Israel has an Extremism Problem.” Oh, really? What’s more, J Street, a prominent pro-Israel group, just announced it thinks the U.S. should stop footing the bill for Israel’s Iron Dome, following the lead of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Ro Khanna. New York City Congressional candidate Brad Lander has called for an end to aid to Israel. Voters on both sides of the aisle now view accepting funding from AIPAC as a demerit. The idea that Israel should be held accountable for its abuses is approaching escape velocity in the United States. Democrats now have to decide if they’ll let Candance Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes pilot the plane, or if they’ll give Piker and the gang a turn at the wheel.
BONUS: Any national discussion of antisemitism in the U.S. is not complete if we don’t also talk about Islamophobia. Ryan Suto and Heba Mohammad write on the state of Islamophobia in the U.S. today in their recent Current Affairs piece “America Has Long Targeted Muslims, But Today’s Hatred is Different.”
❧The News❧
❧ TODAY IS THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF THE CRISIS IN SUDAN. For three years, the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been at war, instigating a tragedy that has been criminally underreported in the West. As News Briefing readers will know, in February, the United Nations declared they found hallmarks of genocide in the RSF’s actions, targeting non-Arab groups with starvation, mass killings, rape, and torture. 14 million people have been displaced, making this among the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and leaving Sudanese refugees particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in aid. They have felt the sting of USAID cuts, in addition to other western donors shifting funds to “defense,” Reuters reports. Writing a guest op-ed in the New York Times, journalist Ann Curry describes the fallout: “The crisis receives only a small fraction of the humanitarian aid that’s needed, in large part because of deep cuts in U.S. aid. Survivors of the war whom I saw in another town, Renk, arrived at a U.N.-run center there exhausted, devastated and hungry. They weren’t offered a warm meal, but a small biscuit. Sometimes there weren’t even biscuits, workers told me. … Is it too much for us to care about the world’s largest humanitarian disaster?” No, it’s not. Donate to the UN Refugee Agency here.
Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 5
❧ THERE’S BEEN STRING OF ATTACKS ON WAREHOUSES, DATA CENTERS, AND SAM ALTMAN’S HOUSE. The attacks are unrelated, but taken together, they are evidence of discontent that demands it not be ignored. Last week, 29-year-old Chamel Abdulkarim, a worker at Kimberly-Clark paper products, burned down a company warehouse in Ontario, Calif., and posted a video of himself lighting toilet paper on fire on social media. “All you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live,” he says on camera. He texted a coworker comparing himself to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In Indianapolis, the home of city-county councilmember Ron Gibson was shot 13 times after he vocally supported construction of a data center in his district, a note reading “No Data Center” left at his door. (Gibson is still standing by his decision.) Over Friday, Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old man from Spring, Texas who deeply opposes AI, allegedly attacked the home of Open AI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco. Quickly after, Altman authored a blog post with a photo of his husband and son “in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house.” On Sunday, two more people fired on Altman’s home.
Art by Ellen Burch from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 5
❧ THE PHILIPPINES OPEN MAJOR COAST GUARD BASE IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA.The base, on the tiny, tiny Thitu Island, is a clear statement to Beijing. China claims the island, as it does the entirety of the South China Sea, even though the Philippines has occupied it since the 1970s. According to the Taipei Times, a marker inside the base reads that it was “established as the vanguard and steadfast sentinel of our sovereignty, sovereign rights and maritime jurisdiction.” Chinese vessels have a history ofharassing the 400 or so people who live on and use the waters around Thitu. The island’s vice mayor MP Albayda said the new base will be a “big morale booster.” The South China Morning Postcalled the base “a flashpoint in the disputed South China Sea that has been the site of repeated confrontations with Chinese vessels.” In another move that will displease Beijing, theJapan Times reported that Australia, the Philippines, and the U.S. also conducted a joint military exercise in the South China Sea last week.
“I am the subject of my own thesis research,” writes Justin Adekanbi-Coger for Current Affairs. “This realization dawned on me last year, in the gap between defending my PhD thesis on the economics of education under inequality and intersectional discrimination conditions and navigating the historically hampered academic job market. More specifically, it came to me in the aisles of a grocery store at 9 p.m., having spent several hours triple-checking proofs and running simulations, as I held a package of dried pasta in one hand and a jar of alfredo sauce in the other. I knew I could only afford to pick one.” As much as his scholarly work, Adekanbi-Coger uses his lived experience to debunk some of the basic economic assumptions that drive policy making, starting with the idea that poverty is any kind of a choice. His piece combines memoir and his expert explanation of theory to make the realities of U.S. economics all the more clear. Read it here.
❧ In More News ❧
❧ DATA CENTERS GET THEIR FIRST LEGAL LIMITS. Just yesterday, Maine passed the country’s first statewide moratorium on large data centers. Until the fall of 2027, no data centers using 20 megawatts of power or more will be built in the state. All Gov. Janet Mills has to sign the legislation. Maine’s bill is the biggest pop in what is local pushback to data centers on a national level: people across the country really, really don’t want to live next to these power-guzzling eyesores. We’ve covered successful protests against data centers in this News Briefing before, and the fallout is getting increasingly political. For example, after the city council of Festus, Mo. voted to approve a data center, residents voted half of the city council out of office. Incumbents lost by as much as 40 points, and there is a petition to oust the mayor, too. And last week, a Wisconsin city passed the first ever referendum limiting constructionof data centers. Because of grassroots organizing, city officials in Port Washington, Wis. looking to give data centers those big cushy tax breaks will now have to win voter approval in order to do so. At the much slower moving, Congressional level, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last month to impose a moratoriumon data center construction.
❧ VIKTOR ORBÁN LOSES ELECTION IN HUNGARY. Spiritually, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wore the orange toupee first. Considered by many on the American right a proto-Trump, the strongman has been talking about George Soros since 2013. As Prime Minister, he has taken the anti-immigrant, conservative culture war line, warning about the corruption of western civilization all while bringing the media and the judiciary to heel. Orbán even had JD Vance at his side last week during a campaign rally, who called Trump and put him on speaker phone so he could talk to the crowd. It was to no avail: Orbán lost to Péter Magyar, once a member of the party Orbán founded. Magyar is conservative, too, but pro-European, anti-corruption and pro-democracy, ascending in the midst of a sluggish economy. The right has taken Orbán’s loss as a bad omen, and the left, as a sign of brighter days ahead. If one Trump can fall, so can another. Democracy Docket, however, points out one crucial difference between Orbán and Trump. Orbán conceded the election, something Trump has never done. To the contrary, ProPublica has a new report detailing how Trump has dismantled the guardrails that kept him from stealing the election in 2020.
Art by Tom Kilian from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 5
❧ ANOTHER FLOTILLA HAS SET SAIL TO GAZA. The second Global Resilience Flotilla will be bigger than its predecessor with 70 vessels carrying 1,000 volunteers, all who hope this time they will be able to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and deliver aid to Gazans suffering under Israeli violence. Ships set sail on Sunday from Barcelona, but had to return to port after hitting rough waters. The Flotilla is expected to enter international waters next week. Israel stopped last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, but Current Affairs holds the same hope: “The Blockade can be Broken.” Read interviews with previous Flotilla members hereand here, as well as a firsthand accountof Kieran Andrieu, who abducted by the IDF while aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla.
❧ Crooks vs. Sickos ❧
Or, what our politicians and oligarchs are up to
❧ Trump is crashing out, big time. Our sincere apologies if the following makes you nauseous: While the President and Secretary of State Marco Rubio watched a UFC fight, JD Vance failed to negotiate an end to the war with Iran. (Iran said the U.S. sabotaged the deal in the eleventh hour.) The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and Trump decided he could re-open it by adding his own American blockade. A double blockade to end the blockade. Makes perfect sense. (It isn’t working.) NATO, however, will not join in its enforcement. First Lady Melania Trump held a bizarre, unprompted press conference declaring that she did not know Jeffery Epstein, which seemed to only make Trump more agitated. After celebrating U.S. attacks in Iran as part of a holy war and claiming God is on his side, Trump has gotten into a fight with His Holiness, the Pope, who has understandably disagreed with such claims. Trump called the first American Pope “weak on crime,” then posted a probably AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus on Truth Social. Trump later said he thought the picture was of himself as a doctor, not the messiah. Such an easy mistake to make, right?
❧ In light of the previous paragraph, some Congressional Democrats began rumbling about impeachment or invoking the 25th amendment. That chatter was shutdown, but there is also talk of requiring Trump to take a cognitive test.
❧ Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell will resign from Congress and dropped out of the California governor's race after multiple women accused him of sexual assault. Lesser known alleged sexual harasser, Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas, will also resign after resisting resignation for weeks. He had an affair with a staffer who died by suicide last year.
Art by Ellen Burch from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 5
❧ The Trump administration sent an email to staff asking them not to insider trade, particularly in oil and predication markets. Sure looks like people have been insider trading, though, as accounts make hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on the U.S.-Iran war.
❧ The Trump administration fired two immigration judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, who refused to deport international students who had taken part in pro-Palestine campus protests.
❧ The United States Postal Service “has suspended payments to its employees’ pension program, amid a mounting liquidity crisis,” the World Socialist Website reports.
❧ The Brightside ❧
❧The crew on Artemis II asked to name moon crater Carroll, after the late wife of their colleague, astronaut Reid Wiseman. “It’s a bright spot on the moon,” the crew said of the crater. You can watch a video of them naming the crater here, but don’t get mad at us if you cry.
❧ Here is a version of Google search that is completely AI-free, brought to you by the folks at Tedium.
RAT FACT OF THE WEEK
A landmine-sniffing rat gets his own statue in Cambodia!
Magawa’s nose accomplished in five years what some of us hope to accomplish in our entire lifetime. The African giant pouched rat sniffed 1.5 million square feet of land in Cambodia, sniffing out 100 mines left in the ground after many wars. Magawa was the best bomb sniffer Cambodia has ever had, and after his passing, the country has thanked him by erecting a seven-foot statue in his honor. You deserve it, little guy. Rest easy.
Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Alex Skopic, Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. 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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