What Happened: July 7, 2021

The Big Story

Donald Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as each tech giant’s respective CEO: Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai—“three real nice guys,” according to a statement made Wednesday by the former president announcing the class action lawsuits. All three tech giants, along with numerous other internet companies, banned Trump from using their platforms earlier this year following comments he made while still serving as president. The current lawsuit, filed in conjunction with a Trump-aligned nonprofit called the America First Policy Institute, claims that the social-media and information-sharing platforms are effectively state actors and violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens when they censor public discourse. “We’re asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to order an immediate halt to stop social media companies’ illegal and shameful censorship of the American people. That’s exactly what they’re doing,” Trump said in his statement Wednesday. “We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well.” The lawsuit calls for the courts to void the section 230 provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which absolves tech companies of legal liability for content they host.

Read it here:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/07/world/jovenel-moise-assassinated-killed

Today’s Back Pages: A Much Simpler Theory of Wokeness

The Rest

Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home in the capital of Port-au-Prince overnight Tuesday. In a targeted attack caught on video, Moïse’s wife is seen being shot as well; she is in a local hospital and, according to reports, is expected to recover. Calls for Moïse to resign had grown in recent months amid increasing unrest in the country. The 53-year-old was due to be replaced this week by a new prime minister, but interim Premier Claude Joseph announced Wednesday in a television appearance that he was in charge of the country. Joseph, along with other government ministers, also declared Haiti under a state of siege. There is no confirmation yet on who is responsible for Moïse’s killing but the Miami Herald reports that the attackers claimed to be DEA agents, with one audible on video saying in an American accent: “DEA operation! Everybody stand down!”

The Pentagon has canceled—for now—the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing contract that would further integrate the U.S. military’s most sensitive secrets into the backend hardware of private tech corporations. The contract was originally awarded to Microsoft but got held up by legal challenges from Amazon, which alleged that Donald Trump’s animus toward then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos led the Department of Defense to discriminate against the company. A new version of the deal is expected in which both Microsoft and Amazon—the two top companies competing for the cloud-service market—will get lucrative work from the Pentagon.

That was great news for Amazon, whose stock rose 4.7% after the announcement, pumping the net worth of its founder and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, up to $211 billion. And speaking of Bezos—who, in case you forgot, once used his ownership of The Washington Post and his government contacts to sabotage a story about an extramarital affair he was having by concocting a connection between his romantic liaison, Saudi intelligence, and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO this week after building the company and running it for 27 years.
Read it here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-hits-wealth-record-210825846.html

After some confusion over vote-counting by the board of elections, it’s looking like Eric Adams will become the next mayor of New York City. The ex-cop clinched a win in the city’s Democratic Party primaries with 50.5% of the vote, compared to 49.5% for Kathryn Garcia, the low-key liberal technocrat and former head of the city’s sanitation department. Adams never managed to win over New York’s media and activist establishments, which preferred more progressive candidates such as the third-place Maya Wiley, but he connected with a broad, multi-borough cross section of the city’s voters.

Multiple coordinated attacks carried out on Wednesday struck U.S. military forces on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border. This reportedly makes five such attacks in the past 72 hours and marks the third straight day of attacks on U.S. troops in the region. Also on Wednesday, U.S. forces and their Syrian allies were targeted by a drone attack in the eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour but say they managed to thwart the attack. On Sunday U.S. officials denied local reports that U.S. positions in Syria had come under fire.

FIVE attacks on US forces in #Iraq & Syria in < 72 hrs:

• Mon, July 5: Ain Al Assad, Iraq
• Tue, July 6: Union III, Iraq
• Tue, July 6: Erbil Airport, Iraq
• Wed, July 7: Ain Al Assad, Iraq
• Wed, July 7: Deir Zour, Syria

Drone & rockets, suspects are pro-Iran militias

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) July 7, 2021

A disturbing video shows famed Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries bleeding in the street Tuesday after being shot five times in the head in Amsterdam. An investigative reporter known for his work on the Dutch criminal underworld, De Vries survived the shooting but is now reportedly fighting for his life. Police arrested two suspects, who are expected to be arraigned Friday. De Vries’s work had led to his receiving threats in the past, but no motive has yet been established in the shooting.

Documents obtained by City Journal’s Christopher Rufo show that Raytheon, the second-largest defense contractor in the world, has instituted anti-racism training for its employees that encourages white workers to recognize their own bias and offers resources encouraging them to “defund the police,” “participate in reparations,” “decolonize your bookshelf,” and “join a local ‘white space,’” among other prescriptions. The supposedly anti-racist training materials implemented by the global arms dealer, which has a market cap estimated at $129.86 billion, include some suspiciously old-fashioned teachings, such as this highly racialized account of how human beings experience emotion differently based on their race: “Whites should acknowledge that their own discomfort is only “a fraction” of the emotional distress of black employees, who are “exhausted, mentally drained, frustrated, stressed, barely sleeping, scared, and overwhelmed.”
Read it here: https://www.city-journal.org/raytheon-adopts-critical-race-theory

Iran has begun producing enriched uranium to fuel a nuclear reactor, Iranian officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency. Tehran says that the enrichment is meant to produce fuel for a research reactor, but the same materials could be used to form the explosive core of a nuclear bomb.

Rappers Meek Mill and Travis Scott got into a scuffle—sort of—at an extravagant “white party” in the Hamptons on July Fourth. With Jay-Z, Alex Rodriguez, and Jon Bon Jovi in attendance, the two rappers started beefing outside the party, disturbing the costumed revelers, but were separated before it got to fisticuffs. Our money’s on the Philly-born Meek Mill if they ever shoot the fair one. 

The Back Pages

A Much Simpler Theory of Wokeness

In Christopher Rufo’s damning report on the racial indoctrination at Raytheon, he leaves out a critical point: how close the defense contractor is to the White House administration. U.S. Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin sits on Raytheon’s board of directors—still! Today! You read that right: He serves on the board of Raytheon while also serving as the leader of the United States’ armed forces—a conflict that required him to pledge that he would recuse himself from policy decisions involving the company when he was still up for Senate confirmation. Austin is estimated to make up to $1.7 million when he cashes out from his position at Raytheon, according to financial disclosure forms. Mark Esper, the previous Trump-appointed secretary of defense whom Austin replaced, also had ties to Raytheon.

Now look at this cartoon contained within the training materials used by Raytheon, which instructs employers to dismiss the old-fashioned notion of “equality.”

And compare that to this tweet from Vice President Kamala Harris.

They are virtually identical. In other words, the ideas promoted in Raytheon’s anti-racism training, controversial as they may be to most Americans, are not some fringe ideology but the official doctrine of the administration.

In an appearance Wednesday on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Rufo offered that the way to make sense of this spectacle is to see it as a protection racket. I get what he means, but I think this analogy, which suggests that a social media mob could plausibly “cancel” a multibillion dollar defense contractor such as Raytheon, is off. Maybe Raytheon is signaling its loyalty to the culture of the U.S. ruling class—both its elected leaders in the White House and the semipermanent bureaucracy—not primarily because it fears digital mobs but as part of the sales strategy it uses to woo its biggest customer.