What Happened: August 11, 2021

The Big Story

The most far-reaching campaign of censorship in modern U.S. history caught up to Sen. Rand Paul Tuesday when YouTube suspended his account after he posted a video questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks in preventing COVID-19. Paul blamed “left-wing cretins” at YouTube for suspending him over a video that he said “quotes two peer-reviewed articles saying cloth masks don’t work.” The Google-owned company’s COVID-19 misinformation policy prohibits content that “contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.” But that means that by YouTube’s own criteria, Paul could have been banned for endorsing masks last year when the WHO was still officially against them. 

Paul’s suspension comes as the federal government pressures digital information brokers such as Google and Twitter to go after supposed political extremists and spreaders of COVID-19-related “misinformation,” labeling them dangers to public health and national security and pushing them out of the public square. Last week Twitter banned the account of a popular right-wing character calling himself “Bronze Age Pervert,” whose persona mixing Nietzscheanism and reactionary prejudices with online meme culture had garnered him 70,000 followers. Aside from being controversial, there’s no evidence that BAP, as he was known, had endorsed violence or broken any laws. Twitter has not provided a reason why the account was banned. The bans are also targeting people with no public controversy around them, merely for expressing dissenting or unpopular views. Alex Gutentag, an Oakland public school teacher and left-wing writer who has contributed to Tablet, recently had her Twitter account suspended for 10 days for what Gutentag says was simply citing “publicly available data.”

Read it here: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/11/rand-paul-youtube-ban-face-masks-503742

Today’s Back Pages: In Praise of Biden’s Leadership on Afghanistan

The Rest

Just weeks after the Pentagon canceled a historic $10 billion secret cloud-computing contract that was originally awarded to Microsoft but challenged in court by Amazon, the National Security Agency awarded a contract worth as much as $10 billion to Amazon, which was then immediately challenged in court by Microsoft. Funny how that works. 
Read about it here: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2021/08/nsa-awards-secret-10-billion-contract-amazon/184390/

It’s always a good time to revisit former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in which the hero of the Second World War warned Americans about the creeping growth of a military-industrial complex led by their own government: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Read it here: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

Dennis Schroeder was coming off a hot season when the pro basketball player decided to gamble on his own value. Looking to test free agency, Schroeder turned down a reported $84 million offer to spend another four years with the Los Angeles Lakers—he wound up with a one-year, $5.9 million offer to join the Boston Celtics. 

The number of white Americans has declined for the first time in U.S. history, new census data out this Thursday is expected to reveal. While whites still make up more than half of the U.S. population, Americans under 18 are now majority non-white. Driving the demographic change is Hispanic and Asian immigration coupled with whites’ falling birth rates and rising drug overdoses.

In what may be the largest crypto heist ever, hackers stole an estimated $600 million in digital currency from a decentralized financial protocol called PolyNetwork.

A new Pentagon policy requiring members of the military to get vaccinated against COVID-19 starting next month is not as unprecedented as some critics suggest. Troops are routinely forced to receive vaccinations without their express consent. What’s unique about it is the possibility that, unlike the other vaccines in use, the COVID-19 jab could be authorized before it has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In a memo sent out to the entire armed forces this week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin informs them, “I will seek the President’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September, or immediately upon [approval by the Food and Drug Administration,] whichever comes first.”

GET THE SCROLL DELIVERED DAILY 

Jeopardy! is going to have two hosts now. Actress Mayim Bialik will co-host with the quiz show’s current executive producer, Mike Richards. Congratulations to both of them, but the decision feels sort of, I don’t know … desperate? It’s hard to imagine that they won’t just get in each other’s way.

At least 65 people have been killed in fires that have devastated Algeria’s Berber region. Authorities have blamed the disaster on arsonists, after multiple blazes began Monday in a forested region east of the capital, Algiers. At least 25 soldiers have died after being deployed to battle the fires.

Europe reached the highest temperature on record for the continent Wednesday when it hit 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit in Siracusa, Sicily.

The Back Pages:

In Praise of Biden’s Leadership on Afghanistan

Two things must be said as the Taliban rapidly moves to encircle Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and take effective control over the country before the United States even completes its withdrawal from the country.

First, despite the shock now being expressed by some U.S. officials and in the tone of news headlines, none of this is remotely surprising. The Afghan security forces that we spent close to $100 billion funding over the past 20 years are a paper army. That’s not to deny the bravery of individual Afghan soldiers, whose courage I have seen for myself, or the capabilities of particular units. But on a national level, no amount of U.S. training and money could ever make up for the qualities that cannot be bought: a belief in one’s own mission, and a will to fight. The Afghan forces lacked these for a simple reason: because the U.S. nation-building efforts made it so they were not fighting for themselves. They showed up in uniform to receive a paycheck—unless they didn’t. Many units had such high absentee and AWOL rates they existed only on paper. With a level of discernment lacking in the United States’ senior leadership, Afghans understood that the “Afghan security forces” were fraudulent.

In light of that, President Biden deserves immense credit and praise for following through on his commitment to end the war in Afghanistan. While top U.S. officials acknowledged the war’s futility in private, as The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” documented, in public, general after general insisted for years that the war was finally turning a corner and, if only the U.S. would throw more troops and money into the fire, it would all somehow be worth it. The war’s failure became the reason to stay the course: Given how bad things already were, this logic suggested, why leave and take the chance of things getting even worse? So the United States slowly gave up on the idea that wars are connected to vital national interests and thus must be won, and instead learned how to manage the costs of its entrenched failures. 

“I do not regret my decision,” Biden said Tuesday. “They’ve got to fight for themselves.”

The United States needs to start fighting for itself as well. That means finding ways to confront its enemies that don’t require remaking entire societies in our image.