George Packer's Blog, page 96

The Ripple Effects of the Travel Ban on High-School Basketball

John Dhoul and Mabeny Naam started playing basketball in 2013, just two years after South Sudan, where they were born, gained its independence. Gifted athletes, the boys, who are sixteen and fifteen, respectively, were among twenty-five students selected last fall to attend the Athlete Institute, an élite training center based in Mono, Ontario, that plucks promising young players from Canada and around the world to train and then funnels them into top collegiate programs and, ultimately, the N.B.A. (Jamal Murray, of the Denver Nuggets, and Thon Maker, of the Milwaukee Bucks, are alumni.) It’s a sort of hoops-centric boarding school with over sixty thousand square feet of basketball courts, residence halls, gymnasiums, and workout space. For both Dhoul and Naam, the flight to Canada was the first time they’d ever been on a plane.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Finally Pays a Price for His False and Reckless Words
The Courts and President Trump’s Words
Trump, Defeated Again on the Travel Ban, Is Still Trapped in His Campaign

Donald Trump Finally Pays a Price for His False and Reckless Words

As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump led a charmed existence. Whatever he said, no matter how outrageous, it didn’t seem to hurt him. He could insult his Republican opponents, make misogynistic comments about female journalists, call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, describe Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, trot out blatant falsehoods by the dozen, encourage the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mail account—none of it proved damaging to his candidacy. As he famously remarked, it was as if he could go out and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue “and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Courts and President Trump’s Words
Trump’s N.E.A. Budget Cut Would Put America First, Art Last
Can Steve Bannon Save Trumpcare?

The Courts and President Trump’s Words

Two federal judges just invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, and both for the same reasons. In highly similar opinions—each one is forty-three pages long—federal district judges in Hawaii and Maryland used statements Donald Trump made as a candidate for President to conclude that his revised travel ban on people from six majority-Muslim nations represented unconstitutional religious discrimination.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Finally Pays a Price for His False and Reckless Words
Trump’s N.E.A. Budget Cut Would Put America First, Art Last
Can Steve Bannon Save Trumpcare?

Can Steve Bannon Save Trumpcare?

In the White House, Steve Bannon’s office, on the first floor of the West Wing, is called the war room. Bannon, the Administration’s chief strategist, has cleared out much of the furniture, and on one wall has hung an enormous whiteboard on which he has scrawled every promise that Donald Trump made during the campaign. Bannon and the war room are the heart of the effort to turn Trump’s populist campaign into a policy agenda that can pass Congress or be implemented through executive actions.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Finally Pays a Price for His False and Reckless Words
The Courts and President Trump’s Words
Trump’s N.E.A. Budget Cut Would Put America First, Art Last

Donald Trump’s Voldemort Budget

Strictly speaking, the “skinny budget” that the White House published on Thursday isn’t a budget at all. It says nothing about roughly three-quarters of over-all federal spending, which goes to mandatory outlays such as Social Security, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. It doesn’t include any projections for the deficit. And a Presidential budget isn’t binding. Ultimately, Congress sets spending levels. As Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, said on Thursday morning, “this is just the very start” of the budget process.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Mike Flynn Did for Turkey
Trump, Defeated Again on the Travel Ban, Is Still Trapped in His Campaign
My Long, Unfinished Path to Becoming an American Citizen

What Mike Flynn Did for Turkey

One Friday last July, as members of the Turkish military were staging a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general who went on to become Donald Trump’s first national-security adviser, gave a speech in Cleveland. The event was organized by a local chapter of ACT for America, a self-described “grassroots national security organization” that regards Muslims with considerable suspicion. “There’s an ongoing coup going on in Turkey right now,” Flynn said in his remarks. “Right now!” The country, Flynn said, was heading “towards Islamism” under Erdoğan, and the military was trying to preserve Turkey’s secular identity. The audience applauded the putschists.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s Voldemort Budget
Trump, Defeated Again on the Travel Ban, Is Still Trapped in His Campaign
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, March 16th

Children’s Books and China’s Crackdown on Western Ideology

Earlier this month, my nine-year-old son came home from his bilingual school in Shanghai having vandalized his Mandarin textbook. Under the title of a lesson called “The Bountiful Xisha Islands,” he had scribbled, in pencil, “不好,” or “not good.” The Xisha, or “Western Sands,” are islands in the South China Sea that are known in English as the Paracels. The textbook described the islands, which are located in waters between China and Vietnam, as “cute,” with multicolored coral and plentiful turtles that could be hunted for their valuable shells. The lesson, however, neglected to mention that ownership of the Paracels, like that of many islands in the South China Sea, is in dispute. In 1974, China seized complete control of the Paracel island chain from an overextended South Vietnam. Since then, the Chinese have managed to effectively take control of other shoals and maritime features that are claimed by other countries, like the Philippines. In the past couple of years, Chinese dredgers have transformed contested rocks and reefs into military bases, complete with structures that can house surface-to-air-missile batteries. China’s ambitions in the South China Sea do not revolve around turtles.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Making of a Quiet Children’s Classic
Alexander and the V Bad, FML Day
How Educational Children’s Books Are Explaining President Trump

The Steve King Style of American Politics

In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter delivered a landmark address at Oxford University, titled “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” Writing against the backdrop of the Cold War and the recent memory of McCarthyism, Hofstadter argued that the hypertensive zeal and conspiracy-mongering that attended McCarthy’s anti-Communism was not a departure from the tradition of American liberalism but a regular feature embedded within it. At various points, movements bearing a familial resemblance to McCarthyism have assailed the hallucinatory menace of anarchists, Catholics, Freemasons, and, at the outset of the Republic, clandestine British loyalists. As Hoftstadter wrote:

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Related:
Twansient Thought
Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History
Three Genre-Expanding Documentaries About Racist Crimes of the Past

Trump, Defeated Again on the Travel Ban, Is Still Trapped in His Campaign

President Trump’s first travel ban was worded vaguely and took effect suddenly, and so the legal responses to it—the public-interest attorneys hurrying to airports, and huddling with family members and laptops in food courts—were a remarkable improvisation. The second ban, against which a federal judge in Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order, on Wednesday night, was announced in advance, and the Administration’s opponents were prepared. The Hawaii case was argued by Neal Katyal, perhaps the most famed progressive litigator of his generation, who was both a principal Deputy Solicitor General under President Obama and the lead attorney in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, which dismantled the military commissions that had governed Guantánamo Bay. The plaintiff was handpicked, too: Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, whose Syrian mother-in-law was subject to the ban. Elshikh wrote in his pleading that his children are “deeply affected by the knowledge that the United States—their own country—would discriminate against individuals who are of the same ethnicity as them, including members of their own family.” In the precision of this testimony, you could sense that the rushed and panicked responders to the first ban had developed a structure, and refined their arguments.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s Voldemort Budget
What Mike Flynn Did for Turkey
My Long, Unfinished Path to Becoming an American Citizen

A Mathematician Confronts March Madness

Come the middle of March, a remotely curious college-hoops observer, innocently typing “March Madness” into Google, encounters a swarm of numbers related to the N.C.A.A.’s annual basketball tournament. Just a few days ago, ESPN.com published an eight-thousand-word story titled “Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 15th
The N.B.A.’s Great Impersonator
A New Orleans N.B.A All-Star Game Diary