Joe Biden, Desperate To Stop His Skid, Agrees to Debate

The Commission on Presidential Debates is officially dead

May 15, 2024

Thank the gods, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the zombie priests who run it (it has no Millennials, the largest voting bloc, on its board) is finally dead, dead as a doornail, dead as the Night King, dead as disco. The Commission is a horrendous invention that has created some of the worst anti-democratic moments in political history, including Candy Crowley fact-checking Mitt Romney with falsehoods, Chris Wallace losing his shit because Donald Trump was loud and rude, and defending the honesty and honor of Steve Scully because he was definitely hacked and not just lying about his inability to use Twitter. The Commission is horrible, and even Bob Dole said they are biased as hell. Good freaking riddance.

So now we’ve got debates! Real debates, negotiated between the campaigns. Now, the motivation here is underhanded — Joe Biden and Donald Trump both are interested in keeping RFK Jr. off the stage, and the Commission might have been required by their own random-ass rules to include him. But having a debate as soon as June is fantastic, given that it will set the stage for the conventions and the fall and force a number of policy issues to the fore in the moments when they matter. Whoever CNN chooses as a moderator, they’ve got a lot of work to do.

Team Biden agreeing to do this is a sign of weakness. They know how bad things are trending for them and they need to right the ship. The State of the Union speech that had Joe Scarborough needing a change of underoos didn’t may a dint in the public mindset, and Biden + Blinken’s mismanagement of Israel’s situation has only made things worse. They need to take a chunk out of Trump’s momentum and this is the only way they know how. Well, strap on that electrolytes IV, make sure you’ve got a fresh Depends, and away we go.

Why is Greta Wearing a Keffiyeh?

Mary Harrington.

Why is Greta Thunberg wearing a keffiyeh? The Swedish activist is the poster-girl for climate change. The keffiyeh, though, symbolises a wholly different cause: solidarity with Palestinians in the current conflict with Israel. What does that have to do with global warming?
It’s not just Greta who sees a link. When the current conflict in Gaza began, the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, known for polarising, clickbait-friendly protests, such as blockading the M25 or throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings, promptly organised a sit-in at London’s Waterloo Station.
This sort of campaign creep is far wider than just climate and Palestine: all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.
But what is it trying to achieve? Right or Right-adjacent figures as ideologically disparate as James Lindsay and Bronze Age Pervert have suggested it is the destruction of America. Or, perhaps, of “Western Civilisation”. And there may be something in that, at least if you conflate “Western Civilisation” with the American empire. After all, a great many ethnic-cleansing events are casually ignored, even as the state whose existence is explicitly underwritten by American hard power gets taken to court over such allegations.
Given this, one might be forgiven for suspecting that Gaza’s absorption into the Omnicause really is due to its role as a proxy for hostility to the American project: a suspicion unlikely to be allayed by the sound of Palestine supporters from Yemen to Harvard Yard chanting “Death to America”. And yet, the fact that this chant is heard not just in overseas territories hostile to the American project, but also (and perhaps even more vociferously) within Ivy League campuses, suggests something more ambivalent at work.
It might seem bewildering to hear young scions of the empire calling for the destruction of the very order that nourishes them. But that’s not what’s happening here; not really. Rather, in calling for “Death to America” they’re breathing new life into the idea they claim to deplore, and expressing a modern version of the same impulse that drove America’s original founders to leave the Old World behind, with its weight of authority and tradition, and seek to begin again in a purer, higher register.
It’s hardly original to notice the Puritan streak in modern progressivism. During the BLM riots in 2020, numerous commentators made that connection. The critic Alan Jacobs characterises this form of progressivism — the moral matrix that now marches as the Omnicause — as religious in this sense: less a precise set of doctrines than a style of believing. A “mythical experience”.
Further out on the neoreactionary fringes, the writer Curtis Yarvin argues that this “nontheistic Christian tradition”, which he calls “Universalism”, has become “the dominant modern branch of Christianity”. And the philosopher Nick Land maps this secularised-but-triumphant Puritan-heritage Christian sensibility squarely onto the American empire:
“After its military victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English dissenters.”
The secularisation of this tradition began in earnest after the Second World War, along with its embrace by the engines of commerce. That was the point where American marketers coined the term “teenager” — and created modern “youth culture” with it. For, strange as it may seem, after nearly a century of American cultural hegemony, the notion of adolescents challenging their forebears is not universal. Rather, it propagates in tandem with American culture: for example the Inuit community on Victoria Island, Canada, experienced no youthful delinquency until television was introduced in 1980. In the context of the American paradigm, by contrast, rebellion is not just normal but natural, whether presented “compelled” by culture or an inevitable consequence of brain development.