George Packer's Blog, page 130

What Taiwan’s Leader Sees in Donald Trump

Last week, Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of Taiwan, a self-ruling island of twenty-three million people off China’s southeast coast, called President-elect Donald Trump, who by taking the call shattered a decades-long Washington taboo. The news thrilled millions of Taiwanese citizens, who have long complained that the United States has neglected the world’s only Chinese-speaking democracy in order to please authorities in Beijing. China, which has claimed Taiwan as an unrecovered province since Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party government fled into exile on the island, in 1949, relentlessly uses its global clout, and its United Nations Security Council veto, to keep Taiwan diplomatically invisible, and Chinese officials protest noisily against any foreign government whose actions might confer on Taiwan even a whiff of statehood. Fewer than two dozen countries, most of them tiny, officially recognize Taiwan. The United States is not among them. For Tsai, getting Trump on the phone was a major coup, the first known top-level contact of its kind since the severing of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Taipei, in 1979.

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Related:
Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Industry Pick for the E.P.A.
A Federal Judge Has a Message for Naturalized Citizens (and Trump)

The Walter Scott Case Mistrial and the Crisis of Facts

Liberals have of late devoted a great number of pages to describing, analyzing, and lamenting the declining faith in American institutions, and its role in the election of Donald Trump. But, as the hung jury in the murder trial of Michael Slager—the police officer who, in April, 2015, shot an unarmed fifty-year-old black man, Walter Scott—makes clear, the resounding faith in particular institutions can be just as corrosive to democracy.

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What Hurricane Matthew Left Behind in the Carolinas
The Desegregation and Resegregation of Charlotte’s Schools
The Limits of Protest in Charlotte

Obama Leaves Trump a Mixed Legacy on Whistle-Blowers

Back in 2008, Senator Barack Obama promised that, if elected, he would run the most transparent Administration in history and would champion the cause of whistle-blowers. “Such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled,” Obama said of whistle-blowers during his campaign.

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Related:
Will the Victory at Standing Rock Outlast Obama?
The Top Legal Stories of 2017: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest, Bill Cosby’s Assault Charge, and More
The Teen-Agers Suing Over Climate Change

What Europe Needs: Hope

On the eve of the weekend’s referendum in Italy and Presidential election in Austria, The Economist’s Bagehot column warned against interpreting everything that happens around the world in terms of Donald Trump’s triumph on November 8th. “Barely a day goes by without politics somewhere being related to the president elect’s shock victory” and the rise of right-wing populism, the pseudonymous columnist wrote.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Italy Approaches Its Own Choice Between Liberalism and Populism
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau
Why Trump TV Probably Won’t Happen

Will the Victory at Standing Rock Outlast Obama?

Late Sunday afternoon, protesters at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, in North Dakota, received unexpected and welcome news. Jo-Ellen Darcy, the U.S. Army’s assistant secretary for civil works, had announced that her department would not be approving the easement required for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue. The pipeline, which has been the cause of a months-long standoff involving the Standing Rock Sioux, their allies, the state government, and Energy Transfer Partners, Dakota Access’s parent company, was slated to carry crude oil beneath Lake Oahe, the reservation’s main source of drinking water. Instead, according to Darcy, the Army Corps of Engineers will now conduct a thorough environmental assessment and work with E.T.P. to “explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.” The decision came just in time: after weeks of confrontation between law enforcement and protesters, tensions had been expected to rise on Monday, when two thousand military veterans were to join the demonstrations, and when a mandatory evacuation order, issued by Governor Jack Dalrymple, was to take effect. When I spoke with Dave Archambault II, the tribe’s chairman, on Tuesday morning, the previous day’s revelry had given way to relief. “We told congressmen, senators, the company, everybody, that it infringes on our rights, but it seemed like no one heard us,” he said, referring to the pipeline. “I never believed the easement would be stopped.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama Leaves Trump a Mixed Legacy on Whistle-Blowers
The Top Legal Stories of 2017: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest, Bill Cosby’s Assault Charge, and More
The Teen-Agers Suing Over Climate Change

The Top Legal Stories of 2017: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest, Bill Cosby’s Assault Charge, and More

It’s time for my semi-accurate, semi-serious (but always annual) list of predictions of the big legal stories for the coming year. In keeping with the iron law of cable news, there is no accountability for being wrong!

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Related:
Obama Leaves Trump a Mixed Legacy on Whistle-Blowers
Will the Victory at Standing Rock Outlast Obama?
The Teen-Agers Suing Over Climate Change

Bana Alabed, Twitter’s Child Witness to the Battle for Aleppo

Bana Alabed is a seven-year-old Syrian girl with outsized optimism and lustrous brown hair that tumbles past her waist. She enjoys reading about dinosaurs, practicing English with her mom, and playing with her two little brothers, Mohamed and Noor. She recently lost a tooth, but the tooth fairy never came, because she lives under siege, in eastern Aleppo. “The tooth fairy is afraid of the bombing here,” she said. “It run away to its hole. When the war finishes, it will come.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Hand of ISIS at Ohio State
The Recount Road to Nowhere
What Snapchat Might Learn from Facebook

Gavin Grimm’s Transgender-Rights Case and the Problem with Informal Executive Action

President Obama’s mantra for the past year has been that Congress is broken, so the executive will act. And now, as the stage is set for the new executive, it is dawning on Democrats that living by that sword may mean dying by it. A President can unilaterally revoke prior Presidents’ unilateral actions, and we may soon see just that, in response to Obama’s moves on immigration, climate change, and gun control.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama Leaves Trump a Mixed Legacy on Whistle-Blowers
Will the Victory at Standing Rock Outlast Obama?
The Top Legal Stories of 2017: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest, Bill Cosby’s Assault Charge, and More

The Age of Donald Trump and Pizzagate

When trying to understand what has befallen Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., over the past few weeks, should one start with the gun or with the lies? Both are durable; both are dangerous. The gun is an AR-15-style assault rifle that a man, reportedly a twenty-eight-year-old named Edgar Maddison Welch, carried into the restaurant on Sunday. According to press accounts, Welch waved the gun, pointed it at an employee, and then fired, thankfully not hitting anyone. Customers ran out; nearby businesses, including a bookstore, went into lockdown. The police managed to arrest Welch. He had another gun in his car, and he had a motive. He told the police that he had come to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory, or set of theories, known as Pizzagate. These theories, which, most broadly put, place Hillary Clinton at the center of an international child-sex-trafficking ring, are the lies, and they are almost incomprehensible. The mystery within the mystery is how anybody with a shred of good will would even try to connect point A to point B. Foremost among those nonetheless doing so are Donald Trump-supporting social-media figures, including the son of retired General Michael Flynn, the President-elect’s choice for national-security adviser. (General Flynn himself hasn’t tweeted Pizzagate allegations, but he has tweeted stories about different pedophilia-related conspiracy theories, also supposedly entangling Clinton.)

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Ben Carson Warns That Bible Makes No Mention of Housing or Urban Development
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 5th

The Audacious Funeral and Quiet Afterlife of Fidel Castro

The burial of Fidel Castro’s remains this morning, in Cuba’s second city of Santiago, at the far end of the island from Havana, is a symbolic homecoming for the late revolutionary leader.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Choice on Cuba
Postscript: Fidel Castro, 1926-2016
Donald Trump’s Cuba Hypocrisy