The Big Story
For the second time in his presidency, Joe Biden ordered airstrikes targeting Iranian-backed paramilitary groups in retaliation for attacks on U.S. military personnel. The strikes carried out over the weekend by Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighter planes hit a number of facilities on the Iraq-Syria border that Biden administration officials said were used by militia groups including Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada. Top U.S. security officials described the strikes as a “limited” and “defensive” response to recent drone attacks against U.S. military forces—the implication being that the U.S. counterstrikes are not leading to a broader escalation or shift in U.S. policy in the region. At least seven Iraqi militiamen were killed in the attack, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a nongovernmental group based in London that monitors casualties in the Syrian conflict. Iraq’s prime minister condemned the U.S. airstrikes, as did Iraqi lawmakers aligned with Iran. While still described as militias, the groups targeted by the United States and others like them have been fully absorbed into Iraq’s official security services, where they formed a critical component of the country’s military operations against the Islamic State (ISIS). Prior to the defeat of ISIS, this often put the United States in the position of tacitly cooperating with the same Iranian militia groups now targeting U.S. forces, as part of a joint U.S.-Iraqi anti-ISIS campaign.
Read more here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-backed-militias-threaten-revenge-after-u-s-airstrikes-in-iraq-syria-11624877977
In today’s Back Pages: The Anti-Racism Two-Step
The Rest
In France’s regional elections Sunday, both the hard-right National Rally—a party formed as the successor to the even further right National Front—and the party of French President Emmanuel Macron failed to win a single victory. France’s center-right parties came out as the winners in races marked by unusually low turnout, at roughly 33%, and a focus on domestic security and cultural integration issues in the aftermath of recent Islamist attacks in the country. France’s presidential election takes place in 10 months.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-macron-under-pressure-as-recent-terrorist-attacks-weigh-on-regional-elections-11624791927
It’s hotter than hell in the Pacific Northwest, with record-breaking temperatures reaching 112°F in Portland on Sunday and expected to hit 114°F today. Temperatures in Washington State and Western Canada are also hitting new highs. Officials in affected areas, unaccustomed and ill-equipped to deal with extreme temperatures, are scrambling to respond.
Rescue teams have continued searching through the rubble in Surfside, Florida, near Miami Beach, where a condo building partially collapsed last Thursday, but they have not found more survivors. Ten people have now been confirmed dead in the disaster, while more than 150 people remain unaccounted for. New reports show that the building was only days away from beginning major repairs costing some $9 million that had been identified as necessary in 2018.
Read it here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article252401308.html
E-cigarette and vaping giant Juul was ordered to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit with the State of North Carolina after the company was sued for illegally marketing its products to minors. Juul’s products, despite being ‘smokeless,’ often have high levels of nicotine. With the North Carolina case settled, Juul still faces lawsuits from a number of other states.
In other drug company settlement news, Johnson & Johnson will pay $230 million to the State of New York to settle a lawsuit related to its role in the opioid crisis. The settlement announced Saturday by state Attorney General Letitia James prohibits Johnson & Johnson from making or selling opioids in New York.
Donald Trump held his first rally since leaving the White House on Saturday, drawing several thousand supporters to an event in Wellington, Ohio. The former president focused on border issues and energized the crowd by attacking political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and President Biden, as part of what he called “the very first rally of the 2022 election.” Trump has made no official announcements about running for office again, but he remains the single most powerful figure in the Republican Party.
As the White House and Democratic Party officials push to revive the war on terror with a new focus on “domestic extremism,” the House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is moving forward with a select committee investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case involving a transgender student’s dispute with the Virginia school board over the student’s professed right to use the boy’s bathroom. Without commenting on why it chose not to hear the case, the High Court has effectively handed a victory to the student, Gavin Grimm. Last August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld Grimm’s case against the school board on the grounds that the Title IX equal protection clause protects an individual’s “gender affirming” right to choose which bathroom they will use.
The Back Pages
A story in The New York Times over the weekend titled “Biden’s Push for Equity in Government Hits Legal and Political Roadblocks” highlights just how far-reaching the White House’s racial policies are:
No part of Mr. Biden’s agenda has been as ambitious as his attempt to embrace racial considerations when making decisions. It pushes against limits set by the Supreme Court, which say programs based on race must be “narrowly tailored” to accomplish a “compelling governmental interest.” And it ignites passions at a time when Democrats hold the narrowest majority in Congress and the country is already seething with disagreements about race, power and fairness.
Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone argue that the concerns over these new government-backed doctrines of anti-racism are only the right-wing hyperventilating over what amounts to nothing more than efforts to extend established liberal policy aims. In fact, as the Times acknowledges in an article that is implicitly sympathetic to the White House aims, these policies are incredibly far-reaching and directly challenge legal and constitutional limits—to say nothing of traditional liberal beliefs such as judging people as individuals rather than as carriers of group sin or privilege. Yet in the artificial debates about race that routinely take place in U.S. politics, the scope of the new anti-racism bureaucracy is routinely defended in contradictory terms: celebrated as a radical approach to finally solving racial inequity at one moment and, at the next, treated as a moderate, common-sense approach to curing the legacies of racism that only racists could oppose.
The overt racializing of U.S. politics is obvious to most observers—and why wouldn’t it be, since the elevation of race as a primary category of social and legal identity is now an explicit goal of Progressive politics and the White House itself. And yet, because many Americans are still uncomfortable with naked racial appeals, the defenders of such policies—who play up their ambitions to the activist base—have to minimize their aims to the general public.
Just look at the Congressional testimony last week from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Milley was in Congress answering questions related to the embrace of “anti-racism” and critical race theory in military service academies. He defended assigning texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist—a book that asserts, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”—as merely a mark of intellectual curiosity and critical inquiry”:
I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding? Having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military—our general officers, our commissioned and noncommissioned officers—of being ‘woke’ because we’re studying some theories that are out there.
Milley continues:
I want to understand white rage—and I’m white … What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here. And I do want to understand that. It’s important that leaders now and in the future do understand it.
In his equivocating bureaucratic language, the general perfectly illustrates the larger contradiction of the “racial justice” discourse that now animates the Democratic Party’s leadership, and through it the major institutions of American life.
He claims to be merely reading and assigning the texts to examine their concepts at a critical distance and yet regurgitates their highly debatable premises as dogma. He wants to maintain an open mind but is convinced that white rage is the key to understanding American politics.
Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/biden-racial-equity.html?referringSource=articleShare
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Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.