Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: “The most racist show in the history of cable news…” NYT

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We start today with Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times and his three-part profile of Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

…Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history. […]

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

One of the more interesting facts in this profile is how Carlson used to to have guests on his show with opposing viewpoints but it was discovered that Fox News viewers did not want to hear opposing viewpoints so the show did away with them.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is back. And we are still in the Age of COVID. I guess…

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that so much of the student debt burden felt by those seeking loan relief is because of false promises.

How much relief will he offer? I have no idea. How much relief should he offer? I’m for going as big as political realities allow, but I understand that too generous a debt write-off might produce a backlash. And I have no confidence that I know where the line should be drawn.

What I think I do know is that much of the backlash to proposals for student debt relief is based on a false premise: the belief that Americans who have gone to college are, in general, members of the economic elite.

The falsity of this proposition is obvious for those who were exploited by predatory for-profit institutions that encouraged them to go into debt to get more or less worthless credentials. The same applies to those who took on educational debt but never managed to get a degree — not a small group. In fact, around 40 percent of student loan borrowers never finish their education.

But even among those who make it through, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of economic success. And I’m not sure how widely that reality is understood.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe writes in a similar vein to Krugman about student debt but centers Black attendees and graduates.

Stay in school. It’s an American maxim, the path to the so-called American Dream. Or so we’re told.

“What is the master narrative that we tell ourselves over and over again, in policy conversations, in our national conversation? That master narrative is: If you go the college, and borrow student loans, you’re going to get a return on those student loans through your degree and the labor market,” says Jalil Bishop, co-author of the Education Trust’s report “Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans” and co-creator of the National Black Student Loan Debt Study. “Well, that’s not happening for a lot of students, and it’s really not happening for Black students.”

We know there’s a gaping wealth chasm between Black and White American households.

We also know a key factor driving the financial gap is the staggeringly high cost of college and post-graduate education. Unequally distributed by race, this cost is often paid through student loans that saddle graduates with crippling debt.

That debt often means Black Americans, who already begin with a fraction of the wealth of White Americans, start their working lives financially underwater. These factors harm their credit; their ability to gain assets, and start and grow businesses; save for retirement; or pass on generational wealth — ensuring that the racial wealth gap persists for generations.

Sigal Samuel of Vox looks at several different Guaranteed Income (GI) programs taking place across the nation.

The point of running pilots is to amass evidence that an intervention works so you can then make a convincing case that it should become policy. In a sense, GI pilots targeting parents are all tryouts for an idea that we’ve already implemented as federal policy: the expanded CTC.

The CTC proved extremely effective. In July 2021, when the first checks went out to parents, the child poverty rate dropped from 15.8 percent to 11.9 percent, the lowest rate on record. And yet, that evidence wasn’t enough to make the CTC permanent. Although polling found a bipartisan majority of voters wanted it to be permanent, Congress let it lapse — with Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition dealing the final blow.

So you might wonder whether there’s much point in continuing to run pilots aimed at amassing more evidence. Maybe a lack of evidence isn’t the constraining factor. Should the movement for GI focus its efforts on something else, like building political will?

Charles P. Pierce of Esquire writes that Republicans throwing around the name of George Orwell in protest of a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security are simply full of it.

Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security. Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption. And yes, for the record, I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee. (The Senate will have its turn at him next week.) And there had to be a better name for it than the Disinformation Governance Board, a monicker that sounds as though it were made of steel, concrete, and barbed-wire. Why are Democrats so bad at naming stuff? The Republicans are terrific at naming stuff, even though, most of the time, those names are perfect examples of…disinformation. We should all talk about this seriously at a later date.

But I am not going to listen to it at the moment from the party of insurrection, the party of book-banning and library-scouring, the party of dangerous myth-making bullshit about “grooming” and (eek!) “critical race theory,” the party full of people who still bend the knee to the Prince of 30,000 Lies down in Florida. Hell, this is a party that lies to itself. Isn’t that right, Never-To-Be-Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Regain your sanity, folks, before you start throwing around George Orwell’s name in defense of your absolute right to launder and launch all the fantastical tales spun by Macedonian teenagers. Orwell would eat you all on toast and still have room for bangers and mash.

Oliver Milman of the Guardian writes that climate change may become the catalyst of the most extreme extinction event for marine life in 250 million years.

The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater.

All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past”, states the new research, published in Science. The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying”, led to the demise of up to 96% of the planet’s marine animals.

“Even if the magnitude of species loss is not the same level as this, the mechanism of the species loss would be the same,” said Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research.

Dave Zirin of The Nation thinks that in light of the release of Trevor Reed from Russian custody, perhaps now is the time to make some noise about the detainment of WNBA star Brittney Griner.

The Trevor Reed story should focus our attention on another imprisoned US citizen in Russia, WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner, and indeed, judging by trending across social media, it has. Since mid-February, Griner has been detained in Russia awaiting a May 19 trial date where she faces 10 years behind bars—five years at hard labor—for the alleged crime of having hashish vape cartridges in her bag at the airport. With Reed’s release, Griner’s supporters want to know that she is next.

If you’ve been reading this space, you know that I believe we need to understand Griner as a political prisoner, partly because she has been paraded in front of Russian state media like some sort of six-foot-nine prize, partly because 10 years for allegedly having cannabis cartridges is obscene. Factor in that Griner is a Black queer woman in a country where national minorities and LGBTQ people have been victims of targeted harassment, and the urgency to secure her freedom only grows.

The State Department and the WNBA has preached silence in the hope that Griner would not become the kind of high-profile political prisoner Russia could use like a pawn on a chessboard. But that’s wishful thinking. Of course Griner was always going to become a political prisoner. This was easier to predict than the success of an attempted Griner slam dunk. It is past time that supporters shed their silence and spoke out for her return. They only need take a cursory look at Trevor Reed’s case and the activism of Reed’s parents—done with one-millionth of Griner’s cultural capital—to see that this could prove to be a positive approach—or at least more positive than doing nothing. The possibilities could be seen in how the release of Reed spurred a long-overdue public discussion about Griner. The State Department commented on the matter, with spokesperson Ned Price saying to CNN, “When it comes to Brittney Griner, we are working very closely with her team. Her case is a top priority for us. We’re in regular contact with her team.”

Timothy Snyder writes for The New Yorker about the long history of colonialism and Ukraine.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way, dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Catherine Belton and Greg Miller of The Washington Post write that a number of Russian oligarchs are getting fed up with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

At least four oligarchs who made it big in the more liberal era of Putin’s predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin, have left Russia. At least four senior officials have resigned their posts and departed the country, the highest ranking among them being Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin special envoy for sustainable development and Yeltsin-era privatization czar.

But those in top positions vital to the continued running of the country remain — some trapped, unable to leave even if they wanted to. Most notably, Russia’s mild-mannered and highly regarded central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, tendered her resignation after the imposition of Western sanctions, but Putin refused to let her step down, according to five people familiar with the situation.

In interviews, several Russian billionaires, senior bankers, a senior official and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, described how they and others had been blindsided by their increasingly isolated president and feel largely impotent to influence him because his inner circle is dominated by a handful of hard-line security officials.

“…his inner circle…of hard-line security officials,” the siloviki.

Finally today, Bobby Ghosh of Bloomberg writes that the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Africa may not be limited to food shortages.

The war has cut off Africa from two major sources of grain. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 14 African nations depend on Russia and Ukraine for half their wheat, with Eritrea (100%), Somalia (over 90%) and Egypt (nearly 75%) topping the list. Overall, wheat imports make up 90% of Africa’s $4 billion trade with Russia and almost 50% of its $4.5 billion trade with Ukraine, according to the African Development Bank. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the bank’s president, Akinwumi Adesina, warned of a growing food crisis that could “destabilize the continent.”

In addition to crimping wheat supplies, the war has caused a price surge in a wide range of commodities, sending inflation soaring even as nations struggle to recover from two years of economic suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This poses a threat to governments throughout the developing world, but especially in Africa, which is already experiencing a democratic retrenchment and a resurgence of military coups.

Everyone have a great day!