George Packer's Blog, page 80

The Far-Right American Nationalist Who Tweeted #MacronLeaks

Jack Posobiec is the bureau chief and sole employee of the Washington, D.C., office of the Rebel, a Canadian media outlet that specializes in far-right video commentary. Last weekend, I met him at a Peet’s Coffee a few blocks from the White House. He told me, “As a journalist, I use all the tools at my disposal”—mostly YouTube, Periscope, and Twitter—“to seek the truth and disseminate the truth. That’s the purpose of journalism, right? At the same time, I also do what I call 4-D journalism, meaning that I’m willing to break the fourth wall. I’m willing to walk into an anti-Trump march and start chanting anti-Clinton stuff—to make something happen, and then cover what happens. So, activism tactics mixed with traditional journalism tactics.”

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Emmanuel Macron and the Modern Family

The “lowest blow,” according to the French magazine Marianne, came somewhere around the twenty-minute mark of a psychologically violent debate that took place in Paris on Wednesday night between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, ahead of this Sunday’s second and final round of the French Presidential election. Unluckily for Le Pen, who is behind in the polls, the conversation was stalled on economic issues. After she confused two major companies—“One makes phones, the other makes turbines,” Macron offered—she appeared desperate to change the subject. The possibility of creating a sovereign investment fund for the French state came up, and, as Macron began to explain in goat-gettingly didactic tones why that probably wasn’t a good idea, Le Pen attacked. “I see you’re looking to play student and teacher with me, but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s not really my thing,” she said.

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Is Political Hubris an Illness?

In February, 2009, the British medical journal Brain published an article on the intersection of health and politics titled “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?” The authors were David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary, who is also a physician and neuroscientist, and Jonathan Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, who has studied the mental health of politicians. They proposed the creation of a psychiatric disorder for leaders who exhibited, among other qualities, “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate.”

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The House G.O.P.’s Shameful Health-Care Victory

When the House Republican Conference gathered in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning, it was greeted by a couple of motivational songs: “Eye of the Tiger” and “Taking Care of Business.” On Twitter, the A.P.’s Erica Werner also relayed the message that the Party’s leadership sent to the rank and file, which was equally lacking in subtlety: “It’s time to live or die by this day.”

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Remembering a Pioneer of Asian-American Studies

About a week before he died, in March, at the age of seventy-five, Peter Kwong sat with his old friend Wing Lam in the offices of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, in New York’s Chinatown. The two men had known each other for nearly half a century. Kwong, who in his productive and varied life was an activist, journalist, filmmaker, and professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was helping Lam, the executive director of the C.S.W.A., plan a new education center for immigrant workers.

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James Comey’s Two-Door Story Isn’t Convincing

When James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member of the committee, got right down to business—forcing Comey to explain his decision to insert himself into last November’s election. “Why was it necessary,” she asked him, “to announce, eleven days before a Presidential election, that you were opening an investigation on a new computer without any knowledge of what was in that computer? Why didn’t you just do the investigation as you would normally, with no public announcement?”

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Why J. Crew’s Vision of Preppy America Failed

In 2012, Meghan O’Neill, a writer and comedian, started an online video-collage series called “J. Crew Crew.” Each video was made entirely with images taken from the J. Crew catalogue and followed the J. Crew Crew as it voyaged into a world of surreal intrigue and mystery. In one episode, a willowy detective in a tweed jacket and Ray-Bans travelled to an island wedding, where she attempted to solve a murder with the help of two child ghosts (girls dressed in J. Crew’s kids line, Crewcuts); in another, a woman in a white linen shirt was abducted into a cult in which everyone wears jewel-toned special-occasion dresses. “J. Crew Crew” made fun of the bizarre alternative reality conjured by J. Crew’s catalogues, in which children and adults dressed exactly alike, Jackie O. and Helena Bonham Carter had combined their closets, and faux-quirky mean girls shared an unlikely, touchy-feely bonhomie. It was funny because it acknowledged how attractive that reality could be.

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The Brand-New Biggest Star in Boxing

A year and a half ago, the world got a new heavyweight boxing champion, when an unpredictable Englishman named Tyson Fury found a way to wrangle Wladimir Klitschko, the stalwart Ukrainian. Klitschko, along with his older brother, Vitali, had ruled the heavyweight division for over a decade—it was an impressive reign but not always an entertaining one, especially since the quality of their competition was widely judged to be poor. Fury’s victory was both a big upset and, for many boxing fans, a pleasant surprise. Finally, the sport had a new star: an outrageous and troubled giant who seemed to endorse the old-fashioned idea that the heavyweight champion of the world ought to be not just an athlete but a fighter and a character, too.

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The Enduring American Military Mission in Africa

Publicly, Africa may not be on the radar of the Trump Administration, but it is a priority for the U.S. military. At the moment, seventeen hundred members of the Special Forces and other military personnel are undertaking ninety-six missions in twenty-one countries, and the details of most are unknown to Americans. In charge of those missions is U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, which coördinates responses to what its head, Brigadier General Donald C. Bolduc, calls “the threat.” Recently, I spoke with Bolduc about what the U.S. military was doing on the continent. He said that the Pentagon’s biggest fear in Africa was the spread of ISIS—that the group would stake a hold in a remote or weakly governed area, and use that territory as a base from which to expand. ISIS is in northern Somalia, he went on, and in Nigeria, where an aligned faction of Boko Haram controls territory. It also influences and provides financial backing for Al Qaeda’s operations in Mali. Apart from the threat of ISIS, the command is also focussing on the dangers posed by dozens of other insurgent groups. Much of Africa is what Bolduc calls a “gray zone”: an environment that is volatile and uncertain because of problems arising from conflict, weather, and natural disasters, and endlessly complex—though “not so complex you can’t solve the problems inside it.” Several of the command’s deployments are civil-affairs teams, but the secrecy surrounding many missions has led observers to suspect that the U.S. government is more involved in nebulous warfare than it is letting on. This is particularly the case with regard to Somalia, where President Trump has allowed the United States Africa Command to conduct air strikes more quickly and frequently. “We are not at war in Africa,” Bolduc said. “But our partners are.”

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Joe Biden’s Sound Advice for Democrats

As the Trump Administration stumbles on, Democrats’ thoughts turn to the elections of 2018 and 2020. Despite Trump’s current troubles, many of them believe that the Party faces a painful dilemma: Should it champion progressive policies that will energize its liberal base, or should it focus on winning back some of the persuadable voters it lost to Trump this past November?

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