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What Happened: November 30, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: Zemmour runs for president; Enes Kanter becomes a US citizen; giant asteroid will enter the Earth’s orbit on Monday.

by
The Scroll
November 30, 2021

The Big Story



Éric Zemmour, the French Jewish right-wing writer and media firebrand, announced Tuesday that he would run in France’s next presidential elections. Zemmour’s ability to scandalize the French media and political class with his brusque expressions of nationalism and anti-immigrant statements is only matched by his talent for appealing directly to French television audiences and media consumers. In recent polls, Zemmour ranked third among French voters, behind current President Emmanuel Macron and a fellow right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally party presents a more staid, institutionalized alternative to Zemmour. The 63-year-old Zemmour’s penchant for emotionally charged nationalist bombast was on full display in a 20-minute video scored with dramatic music that he released on social media to announce his candidacy. The purpose of his candidacy, Zemmour said, was to “to prevent our children and our grandchildren from experiencing barbarity, to prevent our daughters from being veiled and our sons from being subdued.” Toward the end of his recorded speech, according to a transcript published on Twitter by the French journalist Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Zemmour declared, “We will not let them replace us,” invoking the fear that French nationals are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants brought in from other countries. While Zemmour has frequently been compared to Trump for his combination of bluntness and anti-elite, nativist populism, the Frenchman displays an intellectualism and affinity for history that was lacking in the United States’ former president.

Read it here: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211130-far-right-pundit-eric-zemmour-announces-2022-bid-for-french-presidency

Today’s Back Pages: The Technocratic Biosecurity Surveillance Regime

The Rest

→ It took a whole day after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that he was stepping down as CEO for the social media platform to unveil a sweeping new rule banning users from sharing photos and videos of private individuals without their permission. Ostensibly, the policy is to curb “harassment.” But lest there be any doubt that Twitter’s interpretation of the rule will be informed by a political agenda, the company’s statement highlights certain groups—“women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities”—as the primary targets of harassment who the new rule is designed to protect. The private information policy appears to create an exception in cases where the images being shared are deemed newsworthy, but it’s so broad that it effectively gives the company carte blanche to interpret the rule however it sees fit.

→The information available so far on the new Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus suggests that people who have already received COVID-19 vaccines will continue to experience some protection against the mutation, which has until now been associated only with mild cases. “There’s reason to be optimistic current boosted vaccines will provide meaningful protection,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and current board member of Pfizer. A similar assessment came from the inventor of one of the first COVID-19 vaccines, Ugur Sahin of BioNTech SE, who, according to The Wall Street Journal, “assumed that immunized people would have a high level of protection against severe disease even if infected by the Omicron variant.” That’s good news, considering that a government survey shows that in September 2021, some 92% of adults in the United States had COVID-19 antibodies from vaccines or prior infection. 
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-unlikely-to-cause-severe-illness-in-vaccinated-people-biontech-founder-says-11638286176

→Israel is following the same “lockdown first, ask questions later” approach it’s practiced since the beginning of the pandemic, reintroducing spying measures typically reserved for counterterrorism operations to track people with reported cases of the Omicron strain of COVID-19 inside the country. On Sunday, Israel’s cabinet voted to grant a temporary authorization for the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, to track the cell phones of infected people. The current authorization, which expires this Thursday pending a vote to extend it, appears to contravene a ruling by the Supreme Court last March that limited the spy agency to tracking the cell phone data of only people who were violating the country’s testing and tracing rules. “We have indeed reached a point at which we do need a ‘Big Brother’ keeping track of where we go,” criminology professor Limor Yehuda wrote on Monday in the newspaper Maariv. As of Tuesday, there were four cases of the Omicron strain reported in Israel—two of them in doctors.

→CNN host Chris Cuomo used his media sources to help find information on the women accusing his brother, the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, of sexual misconduct and volunteered to coordinate the public relations strategy. The full extent of Cuomo’s role, far greater than what he had previously admitted to, came out Monday when the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James released a cache of documents related to the investigation into the former governor. CNN—which, let’s be serious, would have fired most people who didn’t have the Cuomo name long ago for doing one-tenth of what Chris is accused of—says that it’s reviewing the documents. In the younger Cuomo’s defense, he might have been confused by the fact that just last year his brother was being celebrated as America’s hero governor and being given Emmy awards and book contracts for his response to the pandemic, before political winds shifted and he became the villain of the week.
Good background on the irregularities in the investigation into Andrew Cuomo:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/cuomo-michael-tracey

→Born in Switzerland and raised in Turkey, Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter, 29, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen on Monday. To celebrate, Kanter changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom. An outspoken critic of both the Turkish and Chinese governments, and of the NBA’s capitulation to Chinese censorship, Kanter told CNN, “Freedom is the greatest thing a human being can have.” He’s expected to sport a new jersey with the name Freedom when the Celtics face off against the Philadelphia 76ers later this week.

I am proud to be an American.
Greatest nation in the world.

The Land of the free, and home of the brave. pic.twitter.com/8mbUX1dpWS

— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) November 29, 2021

→While people here on earth freak out about the latest COVID-19 mutation, the cool customers over at NASA have described the asteroid hurtling toward the earth as merely “concerning.” If the asteroid, anticipated to enter the orbit on Monday, were to hit Earth, its impact has been estimated at 77 megatons of TNT, roughly 1.5 times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. Last week NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, a spacecraft that’s aiming to collide with a different asteroid—turns out there’s a bunch of asteroids heading toward us at the moment—and deflect it off course as a test case for our asteroid defense capabilities.

→In a Manhattan court Tuesday, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplice, faced her first accuser, who said she was sexually abused by Epstein when she was 14, including once in Maxwell’s presence. Maxwell, 59, is facing sex-trafficking charges connected to her alleged role as Epstein’s procurer; she is purported to have lured underage girls for him and his wealthy and powerful associates to sexually abuse.

→In his final weeks in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio is making New York the first city in the country to open shooting galleries—otherwise known as supervised injection sites or overdose prevention centers where drug users will be able to get clean needles and access to medical care if they overdose. The policy, which is under consideration in other cities, is presented as a way to curb the rash of overdose deaths, many of them caused by the super potent synthetic opioid fentanyl. More than 2,000 New Yorkers died of drug overdoses in 2020, the highest since the city started tracking the figures in 2000, according to the New York Post. City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island) criticized the program in comments to the Post: “British Columbia has led North America in safe injection sites, all while crossing overdose death milestones every month. How anyone can see this as a solution to a serious problem is beyond me, never mind the concerns of the neighbors.”

The Back Pages

backpages The Technocratic Biosecurity Surveillance Regime

Vaccine passports are being adopted across the world. Israel is using its counterterror surveillance machinery to track people’s movements based on their health status. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul is determined to overrule religious exemptions to her vaccine mandates while the U.S. Labor Department—suddenly a public health body!—threatens to punish employers who can’t or won’t force their workers to get vaccinated.

These are not isolated instances of government overreaction, argues Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health. (Kheriaty was placed on paid “investigatory leave” by the school for defying its COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the grounds that he has already acquired natural immunity after recovering from the virus.)

In an article on Substack, Kheriaty argues that we’re witnessing the formation of a technocratic biosecurity surveillance regime. He’s aware that description comes across as “a mouthful of jargon” but provides a sober, straightforward explanation of exactly what it means. Pointing to Israel’s recent decision to authorize the Shin Bet to spy on people based on their health status, Kheriaty writes:

The Covid pandemic has proven a very useful opportunity for elites with global economic and political interests, in collaboration with the intelligence community, to accelerate the acceptance of a powerful and invasive digital infrastructure. This system is already used for tracking and “surveilling” ordinary citizens, with the eventual goal of more directly monitoring and controlling our behavior.

Public health and safety during a declared state of emergency has been the ideal opportunity to accelerate these rapid social changes. In the past two years we collectively enrolled as willing participants in massive social experiments—in the name of public health and safety—that we would never have accepted under ordinary conditions. Hence, “biosecurity.”

In this novel paradigm, the real sovereign or locus of political authority resides with the person authorized to declare the “state of exception,” i.e., the state of emergency. That person at the federal level is now Xavier Becerra, the secretary of HHS, a lawyer with no medical knowledge and zero public health experience. In the state of exception/emergency, which Becerra recently renewed again to almost no public notice or media attention, ordinary constitutional rules are suspended and emergency powers are delegated (e.g., to governors, public health officials, administrative state bureaucrats, committees, CEOs, etc.)

Rather than returning to normal as the pandemic eventually runs its course, Kheriaty thinks it will get worse as the tools and techniques initially justified on an emergency basis become normalized.

I predict that if the rising biosecurity surveillance regime does not meet more robust resistance in 2022, it will increasingly demand increasingly intrusive and burdensome interventions into the lives, and bodies, of individuals. On this social paradigm, citizens are no longer viewed as persons with inherent dignity, but as fungible elements of an undifferentiated “mass,” to be shaped by supposedly benevolent health and safety experts.

The marriage of global public health with novel digital technologies of surveillance, personal data extraction, information flow, and social control now makes possible novel forms of domination unimaginable in the totalitarian regimes of the past. Whether we agree or disagree with this or that public policy, this broader development should concern each of us.

Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to [email protected].

Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.