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mariacallous · 5 months

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American politics is a circus. In the arena of Washington, DC, lawmaking and lawbreaking is a fanatical kind of entertainment, a warped experiment that, in recent years, has taken on the veneer of blind zealotry. Republicans, in particular, have thrived on a diet of chaos since the rise of former president Donald Trump, turning the performance of democracy into primetime viewing. “The reality of it is, it’s all theater,” Representative George Santos of New York said on Thursday during a press conference on the steps of the US Capitol as he faced expulsion from Congress.

Soaking in the carnival of media attention that has stalked him since he arrived in DC in 2022, Santos—taking one last stand as a solo act this week—was predictably unmuzzled in the hours leading up to the vote that would decide his political future. “It’s theater for the cameras, it’s theater for the microphones,” he said, referring to the playhouse of American bureaucracy and, ironically, himself. “It’s theater for the American people at the expense of the American people.”

In a short time, Santos had fashioned himself into one of the most fascinating carnival barkers of recent memory. By Friday he was out of a job.

As cameras rolled and online chatter swirled across social media about his alleged scams, there was nowhere for Santos to hide. Not that he wanted to, of course. In a Spaces conversation hosted on X, Santos was hellbent on exposing his congressional associates—“Felons galore,” he colored them—for their alleged crimes. “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re gonna screw, and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people,” he said. The spotlight was his alone, as was the intense scrutiny that came with it.

In October, a report filed by the House Ethics Committee claimed that Santos had overstepped his authority as a member of Congress, accusing him on multiple counts of financial fraud and criminal activity. The ethics report determined that Santos—among other misdeeds that already included charges of wire fraud and conspiracy—used campaign funds on Botox, the adult subscription site OnlyFans, and luxury Ferragamo shoes (select pairs sell for more than $2,000). True to form, and a true master of spin, Santos said the report was “littered in hyperbole.”

Equal parts enigma and attraction, Santos courted controversy from the beginning of his tenure as a US representative. There was an uncanny cadence to his personal testimony: Nothing was exactly as he told it. Even now, in the dim light of his scandalous incumbency, the question of “Who is George Santos?” remains unclear. The air of mystery surrounding Santos, and the public’s deep fascination with him, is owed to his own innate flair for invention, which both feeds into the eccentricity of American politics and mirrors the conceited, but no less savory, surrealism of reality TV that we obsess over. Who doesn’t love a surprising plot twist and a riveting character arc?

Even by Washington standards, where truth and fiction live side by side, Santos’ particular taste for fabrication was extraordinary. He said he received his MBA from New York University. He had not. He said he previously worked at investment firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He had not. He said his grandparents were Jewish and escaped the Holocaust. They had not. He alleged personal connections to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, where he said his mother worked in finance, and denied past criminality in Brazil. Those were also lies.

Hubris. Ego. Narcissism. These now seem to represent the defining traits of American lawmakers who swagger and shout with little concern for the dangerous consequences their actions set in motion. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that earlier this week, photographer Al Drago captured a 15-foot inflatable George Santos against a backdrop of blue sky outside the US Capitol building, as MoveOn, a progressive public policy and advocacy group, called attention to the 35-year-old New York congressperson’s indulgent falsehoods. “Full of Lies,” exclaimed the message on its red tie, the inflatable’s tiny gremlin feet dangling in the air. As metaphors go, this one was unmistakable in its framing: George Santos is all hot air.

Santos always seemed thirsty for the spotlight, and now he has it. He is the first US representative to be banished from the House, not convicted of treason or a federal crime. In a vote of 311–114, members of Congress found a resounding legitimacy in the ethics committee report.

Santos has vowed to wear his expulsion like “a badge of honor.” In doing so he joins a cohort of politicos—along with Trump, Rudy Guiliani, and other MAGA acolytes—who defy the gravity of democracy, smugly facing the cameras even as they face indictments. In their reality of government, theirs is the only truth worth subscribing to.

The loss of Santos’ congressional seat in New York could help give Democrats the momentum they need, as Joe Biden readies for a likely round-two matchup against Trump. A screening of potential candidates is already underway, and a special election will be held next year. For now, though, democracy breathes a little easier—purged, though not completely, of the lies politicians like Santos feed into the body of the imperfect republic.

Farewell, George Santos. It was fun until it wasn’t.

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transgenderer · 5 months

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James Anthony Traficant Jr. (May 8, 1941 – September 27, 2014) was an American politician and convicted felon who served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. A staunch economic populist known for his flamboyant personality,[1] he represented the 17th congressional district, which centered on his hometown of Youngstown and included parts of three counties in northeast Ohio's Mahoning Valley.

He was expelled from the House on July 24, 2002 after being convicted of ten felony counts, including taking bribes, filing false tax returns, racketeering, and forcing his congressional staff to perform chores at his farm in Ohio and houseboat in Washington, D.C.[2] He was sentenced to prison and released on September 2, 2009, after serving a seven-year sentence. Traficant died on September 27, 2014, following a tractor accident at his farm in Green Township, Ohio.

Traficant was infamous during his time in Congress for his short, rambling, and often crude rants on the House floor, often decrying his key issues such as his opposition to free trade and the IRS. He usually ended his speeches with the phrase "beam me up", a Star Trek reference. He also became known for his flamboyant fashion sense - including cowboy boots and polyester suits - and his toupee.[1][15]

After his expulsion, Traficant ran as an independent candidate for another term in the House while incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Allenwood.[30] He received 28,045 votes, or 15 percent, and became one of only a handful of individuals in the history of the United States to run for a federal office from prison. Tim Ryan, a former aide to Traficant, won the election.

In September 2010, Traficant was certified to run for the same seat he held before his expulsion, and said that his platform would be to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[39] (The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states on the basis of population)

Traficant was injured in an accident at his farm in Greenford, Ohio, on September 23, 2014. A tractor he was driving into a pole barn flipped over and trapped him underneath. A subsequent medical investigation determined that Traficant had not had a heart attack or seizure before the accident, and was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. In addition, he had not sustained any crushing injuries in the accident. The forensic pathologist who conducted the examination attributed Traficant's death to positional asphyxiation, stating that he had been unable to breathe because of the weight of the tractor on top of him.[50]

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posttexasstressdisorder · 5 months

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deadpresidents · 5 months

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Okay, I have to give it to them: Drudge totally wins the headline game.

#George Santos #Santos Expulsion #Congress #U.S. House of Representatives #Congressional Expulsion #History #Congressional History #Politics #Shitshow at the Fuckfactory #Drudge Report

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 26 days

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By: Tal Fortgang and Jonathan Deluty

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Not one week after the October 7 massacres, as America’s most prestigious institutions revealed themselves to be thoroughly embedded with pro-Hamas revolutionaries, we wrote: “Campus administrators should consider making significant changes before the American people realize what they are condoning.” Unfortunately, those administrators didn’t get the message.

On December 5, in what must surely rank among the most shameful moments in the history of academia, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testified before a Congressional committee at a hearing about the surge of antisemitism on their campuses and refused to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate institutional policies. They opted instead for consultant-style newspeak, a whiplash-inducing rediscovery of the value of free expression, and contemptuous smirks. Their tone and coordination indicated that they stood not just for themselves but for the academy—a rarefied, insular, self-important world of its own—and they jolted Americans from their state of benign neglect towards our universities. In doing so, they revealed the acute need for a wholesale renovation of American universities to restore them as institutions that serve a socially useful function. We have subsidized and excused universities’ descent into factories of anti-social people and ideas. A band-aid will not suffice.

Many have responded to this moral collapse by demanding scalps. As of this writing, two of the three presidents who testified have resigned. Firings and resignations of leaders (and expulsions of students who vandalize property or occupy buildings) are necessary proximate goals, but cannot be the ultimate goal of the backlash. Rather, we must address the deeper problem of institutional capture by an ideology hostile to its host nation. What do we do when our finest schools have been overrun by students eager to cheer genocidal antisemitism, faculty and administrators who broadly agree, and a culture that could produce credentialed people so smugly disdainful of the West?

Precisely diagnosing the disease is the first step towards offering effective prescriptions. The renovation of the American academy must be tailored to its problems, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

One threshold observation is that a focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways. For years, conventional wisdom held the opposite: young people always go through radical phases; they eventually grow out of it or leave it behind when they graduate; serious people could never take these ideas seriously enough for them to take hold. Both latter dismissals of the campus problem are wrong. They fail to account for the anti-civilizational turn campus radicalism has taken, and how liberals in the West are defenseless against its calls for “liberation” and “justice.”

This essay would hardly be the first to point out that young people immersed in the latest wave of leftist ideology wield their campus-cultivated ideas, intuitions, and jargon as weapons against well-meaning members of prior generations who hold the keys to leading corporate, media, government, and non-profit institutions. Anyone who has read James Bennet’s account of his ouster from the New York Times, the anti-Israel demands of anonymous low-level Biden administration staffers, or even progressive media coverage of the leftist non-profit landscape knows how many missionaries spread the Word about power differentials and liberation, and how they have pushed liberalism aside.

The mistaken belief that recent graduates are passionate advocates for civil rights and tolerance rather than adherents to a foreign and incompatible morality has allowed the gatekeepers to be bamboozled and bullied into handing over the keys, almost without resistance. Young ideologues now wear hollowed-out institutions—for-profit, non-profit, and government—as skinsuits. What happens on campus does not stay on campus, because universities currently function as seminaries of an aggressively proselytizing theology, the onward march of which is not easily resisted by complacent liberals and quickly becomes orthodoxy wherever it takes root.

In quantitative terms, this is a big deal—a major national problem that warrants aggressive countermeasures. Which brings us to an observation about the substance of the ideas that dominate campuses today, from presidents to pre-frosh. What makes them so viral, destructive, and difficult to resist? Understanding the nature of the disease depends on answering that question, which in turn requires a deep dive into the substance of the dominant form of campus leftism.

Since October 7, many analysts have noted that “decolonialism” (or “decolonization”), a sub-genre of antiracist progressive activism, now provides the ideological justification for students to say or do abhorrent things. To take one example: Before adherents of this movement decided that it would be politically convenient to claim that the rapes of October 7 never happened, they were fond of saying “this is what decolonization looks like.” Decolonialism gives progressives a lens through which to see complex geopolitical events as moral struggles, while upending traditional moral analysis.

Its analytical frame, borrowed from postmodernists and critical theorists, is seductively simple: the apparently powerful group is bad and its powerless opponent is good. One’s role is not to evaluate the moral worth of the conduct or aims of a given actor, but rather to engage in “solidarity” (or “allyship”) with those deemed weaker by some measure—often a superficial racialized measure, at that. And as always, the notion that a weaker party might be weaker precisely because of its conduct or aims is proscribed as bigoted.

In the context of warring ethno-religious groups in the Levant, this takes the form of believing that Israeli Jews are white outsiders who have stolen Arab land, though a moment’s critical thought would reveal that this has things all wrong. Israel is history’s greatest “decolonization” success story, featuring the return of an exiled people to sovereignty in its ancient homeland. But that conclusion requires actual historical analysis. Comparing the two sides’ skin color and relative success is much simpler, yields a reliably clear path for solidarity, and in the process appears to parallel salient American cultural conflicts. The Jewish state of Israel is liberal, rich, and free, which means it must have exploited someone, just as the West was built on the exploitation of natives and minorities. Between its tendency to simplify a complex world and the ease with which young people can join the good side, it’s easy to see why this worldview is so appealing to well-meaning young Americans.

But “decolonialism” emphasizes some unique principles. One is that land belongs to “indigenous” peoples, and anything such people do to liberate it from non-indigenous “colonizers” is justified. (Ideas, norms, and cultural touchstones enjoy the same status.) Hence the brazen campus celebrations of Hamas embodying “liberation by any means necessary” and the omnipresent claim that even Jewish children murdered or kidnapped in the kibbutzim near Gaza were colonizers who deserved their fate.

In short, on this worldview, liberating “indigenous” territory is such a high-order good that it outranks prohibitions against murder, rape, and every other atrocity that most Americans assume campus progressives must abhor. In this sense, accusations of left-wing hypocrisy miss the mark. A higher-order good like “liberating indigenous lands” can nullify lower-order evils like rape, torture, murder, and mutilation. Progressives celebrating Hamas’s atrocities are not being hypocrites, but consistent ideologues. If this ideology seems foreign and untenable, that may be because it cannot coherently coexist with the most basic elements of our civilization.

In accordance with the teachings of postcolonial authors like Frantz Fanon (whose earlier, more violent work is admired like scripture in viral anti-Israel materials), decolonial violence is worthy of celebration. Treating flesh-and-blood people as mere abstractions in a bloody fairy tale, today’s radicals—drawing on Sartre’s infamous preface to The Wretched of the Earth—imbue violence against ostensible colonizers with a redemptive quality. It eradicates not just colonizers’ bodies, literally, but the colonized’s own humiliating identity, spiritually.

Consider Professor Norman Finkelstein’s near-sociopathic reaction to the brutality of the October 7 massacres. In a (now-deleted) Substack post, he wrote: “I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza's smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.” Finkelstein often talks a good game about respect for international law, but the true moral force of his writing, and the source of his popularity, lies in his pathological embrace of Palestinian violence per se as spiritually redemptive (and embraced by a Jew, no less).

So, while civilized people around the world consider eliminating Israel’s sovereignty over its territory a non-starter because, in practice, it would mean the death and exile of millions of Jews, adherents to decolonialist radicalism are encouraged by that fact. In the meantime, they will continue to support, as a central part of their worldview, fanatical efforts to make Israel’s continued existence as painful as possible. While civilization depends on categorically rejecting lawless violence, decolonialism lionizes it with the claim that obedience to unjust laws allows the powerful to perpetuate their oppression of the powerless.

The activists may have trained their eyes on Israel for now, but in no way is this view limited to that conflict. To the contrary, anti-Israel activists frequently call for revolution in the West. Chants and activist materials call on the faithful to “globalize the intifada” and weave strings-on-corkboard conspiracy theories about the connections between capitalism, political liberalism, and Zionism. Witness, for example, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work admiringly quoting Mao at a Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine event after October 7: “[Hamas] showed us that with creativity, determination, and combined strength, the masses can accomplish great feats, a fact we have seen in every heroic struggle for liberation from Vietnam to Afghanistan. As Mao says, ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win.’”

In the Red Sea skirmish between several NATO countries and the Shia Houthis, demonstrators have taken the side of slaveholding pirates, chanting for the Iranian proxies to “make us proud/turn another ship around!” National Students for Justice in Palestine helpfully clarified that it has its sights set on “Occupied Turtle Island” (that is, North America) in its global quest for the “one solution” to all its problems: “intifada, revolution!” Anti-Israel activism is a test-run for wild ideas about “liberating” the world from Western civilization.

Why would liberation of indigenous territory rank so highly in these activists’ hierarchy of goals? Because returning every nation to its “rightful” original position in the world is central to their project. Contemporary progressives are animated by the conviction that history is most fundamentally characterized by one exploitation after another. This is a logical projection of their current view onto the past. Today, in the activist mind, every human interaction, no matter how mundane, is rife with oppression. The social interactions of the past—even the seemingly innocuous ones, like migration and commerce—all the more so. The only solution is a revolution returning humanity to its pre-exploration, pre-cooperative, pre-civilizational state.

This perspective helps explain not just why campus activists consistently take seemingly absurd positions (“Queers for Palestine”) but also why they behave in a manner best described as uncivilized (or anticivilized). Tearing down hostage posters, shouting obscenities, interrupting classes, vandalizing statues and storefronts—all these actions flout the norms of decency that make civilization possible. More so than even the unhinged radicals of the 20th century, the current crop of campus-trained die-hards are committed to the idea that civilization itself is a malicious fraud because it conceals and perpetuates artificial categories that necessarily result in exploitation. Freeing Palestine from Jewish control would show that the tide has turned in an unprecedented fashion towards undoing all the systems of oppression that apparently constitute Western civilization, and keep members of “marginalized” groups from true liberation.

As a proxy war in a civilizational struggle, the current unrest is not due to arguments within the regular bounds of socially beneficial give-and-take. Rather, it is at base an argument about whether there can be any rules at all, or whether justice demands that we return to some kind of state of nature. When today’s activists reject neutral rules that create disparities between groups, they condemn the very attempt to transcend our differences through a cooperative civilization. Attacking law enforcement, shutting down bridges and newspaper presses, vandalism, and chanting for the violent overthrow of the West are all pointed expressions of this condemnation, and would remain a celebrated part of the perpetual revolution machine that would emerge when the facade of civilization falls.

These revolutionaries refuse the possibility of a positive-sum alternative represented by a liberal and mutually beneficial society. Evidence that such a civilization might actually serve formerly oppressed groups well—such as Jewish national success in Israel and communal success in the West—is recast as evidence that the group is in on the game, having flipped from oppressed to oppressor in some nefarious way. The antisemitism of this worldview may be incidental. The barbarism, however, is the point. No self-respecting society should tolerate such a movement, much less pretend that the institutions cultivating it need only minor tweaks to correct course.

This monstrous ideology’s metastasis within academia is an iterative process. To call it a failure of leadership is insufficient. Precisely where it begins—the administration, the professors, the students—is hard to know. It certainly does not end with its leaders. Humanities and social-science departments are dominated by fringe ideologues. Administrators hire DEI professionals and other bureaucrats who believe the university’s highest aim is social justice. Universities seek out, both tacitly and in application prompts, student social-justice activists, lavishing scholarships upon applicants who know which shibboleths signal that they are in tune with the latest revolutionary fad.

Whether schools do all this because they sense that students, applicants, rankings-compilers, or potential employers find it appealing or because top administrators are themselves revolutionaries is not clear. But no single facet of the academy presents an obvious target for an effective countervailing policy response. Even rooting out the thousands of DEI apparatchiks would not stem the tide, because DEI principles are so deeply entrenched and institutionalized in all aspects of campus life, from hiring and admissions practices to course curricula. Rather, the academy as a whole must be treated as the arm of an anti-civilizational ratchet.

None of this analysis was inaccessible before the post-October 7 convulsions or the December 5 presidents’ debacle. It was only obscured somewhat by academics’ reliance on jargon in expressing simple but antisocial ideas. What has been revealed since then, most of all, is that the corruption of the university is not a joke. It is not a mere lack of seriousness in scholarship. It is the lack of even the possibility of seriousness in scholarship. The American academy has been turned against its host nation as never before, driven at every level by the conviction that the United States must be destroyed to achieve the higher-order good of undoing the evils of civilization, cultivated in laboratories of anti-Enlightenment morality and the contempt for the American nation its leaders displayed on Capitol Hill.

But with some understanding of the depth and character of this threat, the American people, through their elected representatives and other means, can mount a proportionate response that targets the disease itself, and conditions the academy’s future on its commitment to reversing course.

What would wholesale renovations look like? The scope of the problem and its target demand a multi-pronged campaign with contributions from policymakers and government officials, donors, employers, media, and regular American citizens. That campaign should be harsh and thorough, as universities have knowingly deranged our society for decades and gotten quite rich doing so through government subsidies, market-immune loans, and favorable tax status.

But a solution to this problem cannot be a “burn-it-all-down” pitchfork-led mob. It must still be guided by an alternative positive vision recognizing that universities, at their best, serve the public interest in advancing human understanding, wisdom, science, and gratitude for our inheritance. It is crucial to recognize that there is no other major institution currently doing this at scale in American society. This proposal is for a renovation—a major one, to be sure—not a demolition.

To the extent that the academy provides an opportunity for young people to spend their formative years becoming thoughtful people and critical but committed citizens, it has a strong claim to public largesse and the perception that its degrees mean something good. But the flipside is that states and the federal government should not treat universities as institutions that advance the public interest if they inculcate a theologically guided compulsion to derange and dismantle the West. Americans are under no obligation to subsidize thousands of active combatants in a war against themselves.

Some public policy responses to institutional capture are already underway. Multiple states have passed legislation dismantling DEI bureaucracies in state universities. Federal legislation has been introduced to tax university endowments above certain amounts. States can and should follow suit. Massive grant- and other tuition-assistance programs allow schools to charge exorbitant tuition fees. All levels of government can condition this assistance on administrations submitting to external audits to ensure that academic freedom is protected without bleeding into revolutionary and barbaric activism.

Lawsuits, both private and public, based on universities’ failure to protect Jews’ and Israeli-Americans’ civil rights may cost smaller universities non-trivial sums in settlement or damages. Information that comes out in discovery would also be useful in mounting a general-population campaign of shame and mockery that would help drain name-brand institutions of their residual prestige, making top high-schoolers think twice before applying there.

But perhaps the more interesting avenue would entail state attorneys general investigating university administrations for deliberately creating environments hostile to racial and national-origin groups deemed “oppressors.” One question these AGs might ask is why admissions departments have ushered in so many students susceptible to the temptations of an intellectually facile and barbaric ideology. What procedures are in place that resulted in an inordinate number of university students embracing an anti-civilized philosophy, and which personnel are responsible for executing it?

Even if all the current student radicals were expelled, leaving the gatekeepers who admitted them in power would simply allow universities to replicate the same patterns. The key is to investigate and identify what characteristics and behaviors admissions departments have selected for on a systemic basis, revealing how they have abandoned the pretense of rigor in order to populate their campuses with scores of true-believer barbarians and their enablers.

Of course, such drastic action must be handled with care. An easy but mistaken route during this warranted crackdown is finding professors and administrators who have said unsavory things and firing them. But not only is violating genuine free-speech rights not in the interests of those who wish to see a renovated academy, it also risks falling into the same trap of pinning systemic problems on individuals. The problem is not that influential people have said insane things. The problem is that every level of the university is currently geared towards perpetuating and mainstreaming those insanities. Tactically, critics should remain focused on reorienting the processes that led to hiring radical staff and admitting sympathetic students, rather than getting bogged down in energy-intensive campaigns targeting individuals, which are distracting and likely to draw legal and cultural backlash.

Another crucial strategy jumps right to advancing a positive vision of the university, aiming to pressure the old guard by subsidizing its competition. Some new and revitalized institutions have already begun drawing attention from donors who in the past would have given to traditionally prestigious institutions like Harvard and Penn. Donors and policymakers should feel a special solicitude towards those institutions that position themselves as explicitly pro-civilization, counterbalancing the very forces driving the traditionally prestigious schools mad.

The University of Austin, University of Florida, and Hillsdale College, to name just a few, deserve serious attention from donors and faculty who no longer wish to lend their support (and the prestige that comes with it) to experiments in anti-civilizational revolution. Organizations such as the Tikvah Fund, which has scaled up its pro-America, pro-Israel, and pro-Jewish educational programming for students of all ages, have risen to the moment by responding to the campus barbarians with a full-throated defense of Western civilization. (Full disclosure: both authors of this essay have held affiliations with Tikvah in the past.)

New and truly prestigious graduate programs in attitudinally friendly, high-paying sectors like law, engineering, and finance, would add heft to the effort. Ackman-Rowan University, sporting a beautiful $5 billion campus, would attract serious academic talent and send tomorrow’s leaders and political thinkers into the workforce with a Masters of Economics or Finance that would command immediate respect from top-tier employers.

Increasing higher-ed competition is a long-haul strategy but a crucial one. Harvard, MIT, and Penn, among many other elite schools, largely maintain their reputations by inertia. Having abandoned their short-lived 20th-century experiment in meritocracy, they no longer even pretend to select among applicants based on objective qualifications, preferring instead some proprietary blend of academic adequacy and social-justice commitment. They have returned to their pre-1960s roles as finishing schools for American elites, only now they select for elite beliefs more than elite heritage (though they do that, too). Ultimately, they do not enjoy their current status on account of current merit. They are coasting on residual prestige from a time when they could at least claim to be something more than glorified communist summer camps.

Eroding that prestige—which keeps employers coming back to campus job fairs and treating Harvard degrees as an application “plus,” and keeps talented high-schoolers dreaming of autumns in Cambridge—requires propping up competitors so they can compete for genuine teaching talent, build the amenities that will attract the best and brightest, and thus begin to drain the Ivys (and peers) of their mystique.

For years, wealth has been compounding at elite universities through the cycle of graduates obtaining high-paying jobs and repaying some of their income to their alma maters. But prestige, which is partly a function of wealth, is socially constructed. It can subsist on old gifts and accruing interest for a while, but not forever—especially if legislators work to prevent large gifts from adversaries like China and Qatar. And the best way to make pro-civilization campuses prestigious is simply to treat them—in our capacities as employers, parents, friends, consumers, and critics—as though they are.

The public shaming and mocking of university leadership should continue until the moral rot is gone. Most Americans are not donors, legislators, or potential litigants who can wield these weapons in this fight. But they can work within their local culture to bring universities down to size. To be blunt, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and most of their peers should be laughing stocks, whose names receive the same respect we give Trump University. They have lost sight of their mission, welcoming a takeover of their administrations, faculty, and student bodies by an analytically pathetic and morally perverted ideology.

We regular citizens need to treat them accordingly in our everyday lives, by encouraging bright youth to take their talents elsewhere and maintaining a healthy skepticism of the value of the degrees they confer. And until they begin dismantling their own systemic institutional radicalism, university leaders should have their feet held to the fire at every public appearance, where they should be held to account for continuing to provide succor to those who hate the West.

It bears repeating that universities need not draw this kind of scrutiny forever. A commitment to free expression and academic freedom can coexist with some minimal commitment to not use university resources to work towards the demise of the nation in which it exists. But as long as the academy is committed to forming young people who are not interested in being decent citizens—indeed, who are trained to be exactly the opposite—it should be treated as the locus of the civilizational crisis it is.

“To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” -- Aldous Huxley

#Tal Fortgang #Jonathan Deluty #western civilization #corruption of education #higher education #academic corruption #antisemitism #decolonialism #decolonization #hamas supporters #terrorism supporters #hamas terrorism #antifa are hamas #moral rot #moral confusion #religion is a mental illness

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american-politics-by-raz · 4 months

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George Santos is the best thing to come out of Washington this year

He’s gone. He wants to come back. He’s a scoundrel. He’s the “it girl.” He’s everything. He’s just Ken. He’s George Santos, and the question we’re asking is: what do we do now?

Love him or hate him, or lovingly hate him, as many do, it’s hard to know where to start with the former Congressman from New York’s 3rd district. Santos became only the 6th member of the House of Representatives to ever get thrown out by his peers. Currently facing a federal indictment on 13 criminal charges, Santos’ expulsion is unusual as in the other 5 cases, the Member of Congress had actually been convicted of a crime first.

This is not to say that Santos isn’t guilty. His various lies and fraudulent behavior are well documented. He lied about the schools he went to, the companies he worked for, the idea that he was Jewish and his family was in the Holocaust, the story that his mom died in 9/11, being a star volleyball player at a school he never attended, and being a model in Vogue, among many, many other things. Santos has been cheating people out of money for years and just viewed running for Congress as another grift. He stole money (lots of money) from his own campaign to pay his rent, spend on luxury brands, get Botox, and buy OnlyFans subscriptions. And that’s only the recent stuff!

Santos is also the most memeable thing to happen to Congress in an already memeable year. Every new wave of debunking that happened in the media was often followed by a flurry of Santos memes on social media. The ridiculousness of the subject material and the relative ease with which these memes could be digested by a low-political-information audience contributed to widespread mocking of the Congressman from New York.

Politics, for all the talk of the details of policy, is a narratives game. Santos easily fit the narrative of the corrupt politician, in it only for the prestige and the cash, and willing to say literally anything to further his own goals. He fit this narrative because it was, for once, the truth. For the low-information observer of politics, it just confirmed their suspicions.

Now this notion may be gloomy, but I’d like to offer a counterpoint. I think the whole George Santos debacle and the memes surrounding it are a net positive. Here’s why.

One, it attracted attention and interest from people, particularly the younger population, who may have otherwise overlooked the current political situation. In the era of the tired voter (shameless plug of my last post) and with the utter lack of satisfaction people have with both Biden and Trump, both Democrats and Republicans, having a ridiculous, comedic “hook” to get them to pay attention is not a bad thing.

Was it for a negative reason? Sure. Did it significantly move the needle towards a well-educated voter population? Maybe not. But it did get a few more people invested and got them thinking. The controversy around George Santos showed, in my opinion, the value of paying attention to local congressional races and the potential ramifications of ignoring them and the candidates running. If the Santos incident got at least a few more people, especially the younger people who are not as likely to vote in congressional primaries, to take a look at their local races and local Congresspeople, then that is a win. If it got voters asking the question, “if they could elect a guy like George Santos, who’s to say our district couldn’t too?”, well, then that is a step in the right direction.

Another important key point is the resurfacing of the ongoing battle local newsrooms have with funding, resources, and manpower. We’ve known for a long time that the state of local media is dire, and that many small newsrooms don’t have the ability to fact-check on the scale that large publications do. The North Shore Leader, a local paper in New York’s 3rd district, raised concerns, but largely they were too late or fell on deaf ears. Additionally, the war against the media has not spared even the smallest of publications. Our media silo and increasing tendency to ignore news we don’t like or don’t believe in is not just a national problem. We have to, crucially, learn to separate valid concerns raised by journalists from partisan rhetoric. This is clearly a larger issue that deserves more than the passing mention I’m giving it here. We have to learn to know when we’re being educated and when we’re being handled.

Additionally, Santos is a worthy reminder that as of late, there has been a bit of a quality control issue in candidates up and down the ballot. There are, despite beliefs to the contrary, still good people in politics. But the kind of candidates that attract attention in today’s environment are ones increasingly willing to make outlandish claims and parrot only national talking points that have little real relevancy to people in their communities. The nature of the game on the hyper-partisan and hyperbolic field which it’s played allows those good at both those factors to excel more easily than the “Mr. Smiths” of the world.

Candidates that spout well-worn lines from partisan news media may not actually know or care about the local issues that will impact constituents, especially when what they are spouting are debunked lies. Telling voters what they want to hear is a systemic problem in politics, despite how many claim to want people who “tell it like it is.” There is a burden on both the voter and the political system to hold each other accountable in pursuit of the common good, a burden which has seemingly fallen to the wayside. Santos is a cautionary tale for both voters and the political establishment of the perils of enabling falsehoods. Neither will really get what’s in their best interest.

Beyond that, there is a larger point to be made about corruption and politicking. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman exposed this in an excellent way when he used a Cameo video (the site for C-list celebrities to monetize themselves and Santos’ newest post-Congress grift) starring Santos to troll New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. Menendez has also been indicted. Corruption, as Fetterman implicitly points out, is not a single party issue.

The answer to the question “how come it took so long to get Santos out of office?” is related, and is two-pronged: deep party politics, and a double standard. The vote that expelled Santos from Congress was not the first he endured. In the previous two votes, there wasn’t enough support from the Republican majority to get rid of him. The House Ethics Committee’s report, following an 8-month investigation, seemed to be the push that many needed to finally hammer nails into Santos’ congressional coffin. But despite the damning report, 112 Republicans still refused to vote to expel him. This is a sign of the intense political calculation being made to value holding the majority over ethical concerns. Losing Santos makes the slim majority Republicans have even slimmer, especially if they lose the seat for good in the upcoming special election in the district.

There were also concerns among Members about precedent. Santos has only been indicted, not convicted, opening the door to the chance that the threat of expulsion could become a political weapon like impeachment has. There is certainly merit to these concerns. But more problematic in my mind in the double standard which has seemed to encompass all of American politics.

Simply put: truth or evidence of wrongdoing are no longer important to the calculation of whether to stand by or even believe a member of your party. Partisan affiliation has become the ultimate indicator of innocence or guilt. If he’s your guy, he’s innocent. If he’s the other guy, he must be guilty. The trouble to which many Republicans had disavowing Santos or the trouble to which many Democrats are having disavowing Bob Menendez is proof that this is an issue across the board.

George Santos’ greatest public service was bringing all these factors I’ve discussed out into the open. His often-comical crimes allowed an opening to not only educate people about the current partisan dynamic, but also to allow us to have a real, open conversation about the kinds of candidates we’re putting into office, and why. He’s the best thing to come out of Congress this year. And note that by “come out,” I also very much mean “to leave.”

#george santos #us politics #raz's analysis #long post

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beardedmrbean · 5 months

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WASHINGTON — The House voted on Friday to expel Republican Rep. George Santos of New York after a critical ethics report on his conduct that accused him of converting campaign donations for his own use. He was just the sixth member in the chamber's history to be ousted by colleagues.

The vote to expel was 311-114. Expulsion requires support from two-thirds of the House, a purposefully high bar, but a blistering House Ethics Committee report that accused Santos of breaking federal law proved decisive.

As it became clear that he would be expelled, Santos placed his overcoat over his shoulders, shook hands with conservative members who voted against his expulsion and departed the House chamber.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., soon took the gavel, quieted the chamber and solemnly instructed the House clerk to inform the governor of New York that Santos’ former House seat was now vacant.

Santos had fought the expulsion effort, leading his own defense during House floor debate and in conducting a news conference and interviews.

“I will not stand by quietly,” Santos declared as lawmakers on Thursday evening debated his removal. “The people of the Third District of New York sent me here. If they want me out, you’re going to have to go silence those people and go take the hard vote.”

Of the previous expulsions in the House, three were for disloyalty to the Union during the Civil War. The remaining two occurred after the lawmakers were convicted of crimes in federal court. Santos made his case for remaining in office by appealing directly to lawmakers who worry they are setting a new precedent that could make expulsions more common.

Johnson was among those who voiced concerns about removing Santos, though he has told members to vote their conscience. Others in leadership agreed with his reasoning and opposed expulsion. But some Republicans, including Santos' colleagues from New York, said voters would welcome lawmakers being held to a higher standard.

“I’m pretty confident the American people would applaud that. I’m pretty confident that the American people expect that," Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, whose district adjoins Santos', said before the vote.

Santos warned lawmakers they would regret removing a member before they have had their day in court.

“This will haunt them in the future where mere allegations are sufficient to have members removed from office when duly elected by their people in their respective states and districts,” Santos said.

The expulsion was the final congressional chapter in what was a spectacular fall from grace for Santos. The first-term lawmaker initially was celebrated as an up-and-comer after he flipped a district from Democrats last year and helped Republicans win control of the House. But soon after, troubles began. Reports began to emerge that Santos had lied about having Jewish ancestry, a career at top Wall Street firms and a college degree. His presence in the House quickly became a distraction and an embarrassment to the party.

In early March, the House Ethics Committee announced it was launching an investigation into Santos. Then in May, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York indicted Santos, accusing him of duping donors, stealing from his campaign and lying to Congress. Prosecutors would later add more charges in an updated 23-count indictment.

The indictment alleges he stole the identities of campaign donors and then used their credit cards to make tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges. Federal prosecutors say Santos, who has pleaded not guilty, wired some of the money to his personal bank account and used the rest to pad his campaign coffers.

Meanwhile, Ethics Committee investigators spent eight months investigating Santos and interviewing witnesses. When their work was complete, the panel said it had amassed “overwhelming evidence” of lawbreaking by Santos that it sent to the Justice Department.

Among other things, the committee said Santos knowingly caused his campaign committee to file false or incomplete reports with the Federal Election Commission, used campaign funds for personal purposes and violated the Ethics in Government Act with his financial disclosure statements.

Arguing against expulsion during debate on Thursday, Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., said that while he respected the committee, he had concerns about how the Santos case was handled. He said he was troubled that a Republican-led committee would submit a report that was so judgmental and publicized.

“The totality of circumstance appears biased," Higgins said. "It stinks of politics and I'll oppose this action in every way.”

While the committee does have a Republican chairman, its membership is evenly divided. Rep. Susan Wild, the top Democrat on the committee, reminded members that the decision approving the investigators' findings was unanimous.

“As the Ethics Committee's report lays out in thorough detail, Mr. Santos has repeatedly, egregiously and brazenly violated the public's trust,” Wild said. “Mr. Santos is not a victim. He is a perpetrator of a massive fraud on his constituents and the American people.”

#nunyas news

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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'AFTER THE UNITED STATES COMPLETED its first successful test of an atomic weapon on July 16, 1945, enabling, less than a month later, the expeditious slaughter of an estimated one hundred forty thousand Japanese people in Hiroshima and seventy thousand in Nagasaki, most of them civilians, recollections of those present at the test site on a remote desert plain in New Mexico suggest that Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic director of the secret laboratory responsible for designing the bomb, may have been at a loss for words. “It worked,” is all Oppenheimer’s brother Frank remembers the theoretical physicist mustered in the moments after the culmination of a four-years-long, $2.2 billion campaign involving the labor of some one hundred thirty thousand people to construct a weapon capable of killing just as many.

Later, in a 1948 cover story for Time magazine, Oppenheimer had the chance to insert something a bit more literary into the historical record, telling his interviewer that a line from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his consciousness at the moment of the blast: “Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds,” which he amended in a 1965 NBC television documentary, relying on his own translation of the Sanskrit text, to “destroyer of worlds,” which has a more apocalyptic ring to it.

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, our hero-physicist, played by Cillian Murphy, first utters the line while he’s balls-deep in a troubled communist named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It’s one of several instances of speculation, if not outright historical infidelity, in Nolan’s transfiguration of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin into an operatic tragedy-cum-thriller for the big screen. This is a summer blockbuster, after all, and if we’re going to have three hours of chalkboard equations and security clearance hearings, we’re going to need to see the father of the atomic bomb fuck.

To tell the story of “the most important person who ever lived,” Nolan, who must have fancied himself uniquely qualified for the job, concocts an elaborate structure, switching between a “subjective” color and an “objective” black and white as he pinballs across three decades of the twentieth century, introducing us along the way to a cast of physicists, communists, communist physicists, presidents, professors, bureaucrats, spies, lovers, generals, colonels, congressmen, and war planners, all of it framed by the 1954 security clearance hearing that resulted in Oppenheimer’s expulsion from the establishment on spurious charges, and the 1959 congressional confirmation hearing of the film’s villain, Lewis Strauss, played by a Robert Downey Jr. (clearly thrilled to have been cut loose from the Marvel Cinematic Universe), who orchestrated the campaign against Oppenheimer five years earlier, in part because Oppenheimer embarrassed him one time before Congress but also because Strauss had a propensity to conclude that anyone who repeatedly disagreed with him, as Oppenheimer did, was a traitor. It’s a lot.

Somehow it works, sustaining tension through what is, increasingly, a rarity: a movie that’s mostly people talking in rooms. But as the laws of physics and Hollywood require, the complexity of plot is met with an equal and opposite force: thematic simplicity. This is a tragedy, we are repeatedly told, that turns on a Great Man’s blindness, to the exclusion of much else. “How could a man who saw so much be so blind?” Strauss asks early on to drive home the point.

Our blue-eyed sad boy emerges into the atomic age, repentant, bent on preventing the annihilation of the human race.

To get at the answer, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And so, at a frenetic clip, we follow Oppenheimer through his school days at Cambridge (where he leaves a poisoned apple on the desk of his tutor, a worn-out bit of symbolism Nolan, thankfully, does little with) and later at the University of Göttingen (where a montage of Oppenheimer staring intently at a Picasso painting, reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and dropping the needle on Stravinsky helpfully telegraphs to the unconvinced that we’re dealing with a sensitive genius) before he’s appointed, at the age of twenty-five, to an assistant professor of physics post at Berkeley, a campus awash in gin and radicals. There, he meets and falls in love with Tatlock, who tries to dye his wool red but settles for pink while alternating between accepting and spurning his advances. Soon he meets Katherine “Kitty” Puening, a thrice-married booze hound and former communist played with wild-eyed mettle by Emily Blunt, with whom he has a child and marries but not before Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch split the atom offstage in Berlin, proving the feasibility of the atomic bomb, which becomes a real cause for concern when Hitler invades Poland the following year. Oppenheimer gets pulled into the top-secret Manhattan Project by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, less of a distended thumb than the real man but still well-played), who installs him as the director of what would become the Los Alamos laboratory over the protestations of numerous pinko-fearing officials.

By the late spring of 1945, Oppenheimer and a small town’s worth of physicists are nearing completion of their little “gadget,” which the United States, having missed the chance to nuke the Nazis, plans to use against Japan—but also to, as the real Groves put it as early as 1944, “subdue the Russians.” The Japanese government was grasping about for acceptable terms of surrender, which select portions of the U.S. military apparatus knew but ignored and later downplayed in favor of framing the matter as a choice between launching a protracted land invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and dropping two weapons of mass destruction. Nolan doesn’t wade too far into the nitty-gritty here, though we do get to watch the meeting in which Secretary of War Henry Stimson graciously strikes Kyoto off the list of possible targets because he had a great time there on his honeymoon.

To the consternation of those who perceive representation to be the chief measure of a film’s merit, Nolan pointedly declines to depict the actual bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; instead, we watch as Oppenheimer becomes so overwhelmed with guilt while giving a speech to a violently enthusiastic crowd at Los Alamos that he hallucinates stepping on the incinerated corpse of a Japanese civilian. (Nolan apparently penned the screenplay in the first-person, presumably because he feels a degree of affinity with his protagonist.)

And thus our blue-eyed sad boy emerges into the atomic age, repentant, bent on preventing the annihilation of the human race. The real Oppenheimer never publicly apologized for his role in the bombings, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, he did try—and fail—to make headway on the international regulation of atomic weapons while wringing his hands about how physicists had “known sin” and issuing warnings to the public about the dangers of a nuclear arms race. For the sake of time, Nolan emphasizes Oppenheimer’s role, as the chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, in formally advising the government against pursuing a crash program to develop a “super,” or hydrogen, bomb in 1949. At the time, the H-bomb was thought to be technically unfeasible, but even if it could be developed it might by dint of its awesome destructive power become “a weapon of genocide.” It seemed to make more sense to put American resources toward building conventional nuclear weapons, perhaps “tactical” nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield, as the real Oppenheimer advocated less than a year into the Korean War. This was a strategic pivot from his 1946 stance that nuclear bombs of any size were “a supreme expression of the concept of total war,” though perhaps not as extreme as his consideration of “preventive war” against the Soviet Union in 1952, an idea he had scorned a mere three years earlier. The evolution, which is to say general tack to the right, of Oppenheimer’s thinking didn’t much matter to those in power, who could not forgive him for declining to offer a full-throated endorsement of developing bombs hundreds of times more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan. In their view, this was evidence of communist sympathy, perhaps treason.

Oppenheimer’s contradictions and occasionally elastic thinking are downplayed; Nolan needs to keep his protagonist’s postwar moral compass obdurately fixed for dramatic import as we near the final showdown: the 1954 security clearance hearing, covertly orchestrated by Strauss, then chairman of the AEC, in the wake of a list of charges against Oppenheimer claiming that, in addition to obstructing the development of the hydrogen bomb, the erstwhile fellow traveler was “more probably than not . . . an agent of the Soviet Union,” as William L. Borden, the staff director for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, put it after poring over Oppenheimer’s FBI file, by then over seven thousand pages long. Oppenheimer’s numerous enemies wished to, as Edward Teller put it, see him “defrock[ed] in his own church,” and this was their chance. The hearing, convened in an anonymous D.C. conference room in April and calling numerous prominent physicists and officials as witnesses, would thus determine if a man prone to dissent ought to have his top-secret “Q” clearance renewed, even though Oppenheimer was, by that time, only acting as an occasional consultant to the GAC he once chaired. At the height of McCarthyism, dissent had become confused with disloyalty, and Oppenheimer would, after spending some twenty-seven hours in the witness chair, become its most prominent victim.

For a film to play in thirty-six thousand theaters opening weekend in this country, it needs more than Florence Pugh’s tits.

Oppenheimer was assured the transcript of the proceeding would never be made public, but Strauss (who got his comeuppance five years later when Congress declined to confirm his appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet) saw to it that the government printing office published it promptly, all three thousand typewritten pages of it. The media was quick to recognize that the father of the atomic bomb had been martyred in an “Aristotelian drama,” “Shakespearean in richness and variety,” with “Eric Ambler allusions to espionage,” a “plot more intricate than Gone With the Wind” with “half again as many characters as War and Peace,” much of which could also be said of Nolan’s film, which finds screen time for former Nickelodeon stars and also Rami Malek, who cannot act.

Nolan, too, recognizes the Shakespearean qualities of the hearing and quotes liberally from the best parts, already helpfully curated in American Prometheus. Though, again, we are not shown the points where Oppenheimer declines to adopt, unequivocally, the “moral” position Nolan wishes to ascribe to him—in fact, he preferred to “leave the word ‘moral’ out of” the discussion of the hydrogen bomb, though he nevertheless “had qualms about [it].” The hydrogen bomb was a “dreadful weapon,” but it was also “from a technical point of view . . . a sweet and lovely and beautiful job.” As for the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, he “set forth arguments against dropping it,” but “did not endorse them.” Which is not to say that Oppenheimer was a moral relativist, adopting and abandoning positions exclusively for the sake of personal advantage. He wasn’t and he didn’t, though he was certainly more complex, more frustratingly human, than his IMAX representation.

Don’t get me wrong; Oppenheimer is a superb achievement and will be appropriately showered with astronomical box office returns, critical praise, and awards (Oscars most likely for both Murphy and Downey Jr.), but despite Nolan’s nerdishly painstaking attention to detail (we learn, for instance, Oppenheimer sometimes dipped his martini glasses in lime juice and honey), he shows little interest in offering up anything that might complicate the audience’s notion of Oppenheimer as a Great Man of History guided by idealism, blinded by naivete, and doomed by his temerity to stand astride the arms race, yelling stop.

I’ve long thought the tragedy of Oppenheimer’s life would best be suited to the stage, and I’m not the first: in 1964, three years before Oppenheimer died of throat cancer, the German playwright and psychiatrist Heinar Kipphardt, blustering about Hegel’s advice to lay bare the “core and significance” of historical events by freeing them from “adventitious contingencies and irrelevant accessories,” adapted the 1954 hearing into a tediously didactic two-act play. At the start of each scene, various themes and guiding questions are projected onto a scrim: “IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HUNDRED-PER-CENT SECURITY?” “LOYALTY TO A GOVERNMENT. LOYALTY TO MANKIND.” At the end, characters approach the footlights to browbeat the audience with a pedantic soliloquy, including Roger Robb, the hearing’s prosecutor, who wonders, “Do we dissect the smile of a sphinx with butchers’ knives? When the security of the free world depends on it, we must.”

The worst comes from the Oppenheimer character himself, who, after being served the verdict that spelled the end of his formal access to the beltway barbarians, steps forward to bemoan that, “We have been doing the work of the Devil, and now we must return to our real tasks.” The real Oppenheimer—who later clarified that when he claimed physicists had “known sin,” he actually meant the sin of pride—never went this far. So it’s no surprise he hated the concluding monologue and the play’s general allergy to ambiguity so much that he threatened legal action against its author, though he eventually agreed to sit through a production in France, which he liked a bit because it relied more heavily on the official transcripts, though he still felt Kipphardt had “turned the whole damn farce into a tragedy.”

There can be few direct comparisons between a spartan stage play penned by a psychiatrist incapable of originality and a $100 million thriller written by an accomplished egomaniac, but they do share something in how they approach their protagonist, sanding off his ambiguities and contradictions so as to present a tragic figure haunted by what he’s wrought. Perhaps Nolan can’t be entirely blamed: for a film to play in thirty-six thousand theaters opening weekend in this country, it needs more than Florence Pugh’s tits; it must be obvious, possessed of a storybook sense of morality, expurgated of any evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer was, though certainly distressed by the implications of nuclear weapons, not above pragmatic concessions he thought might help him retain the beltway power and influence he won after snatching fire from the gods and handing it to man.

His was a strategic error not uncommon to well-intentioned Washington insiders: the naive belief that, through a careful balancing act of dissent, strategic ambivalence, and acquiescence, one can use power to enact more positive change from within than without—a form of blindness, surely. Oppenheimer was a man who appeared to want it both ways: to play the part of the somber public intellectual as well as the consummate insider. That was his undoing, the true crux of the man’s tragedy. There is not much room for such everyday failings here, even in 70mm.'

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