Busy, busy week. I tried keeping my head down to plow through the next installment of the Palestine series, but the news is giving me whiplash. First off, who had fucking Mike Johnson on the bingo card? White nationalist supporting, anti-abortion voting, LGBTQ hating, election denying Mike Johnson gets to determine which bills come to the floor. Cool. I’m sure this will be a balanced term. Johnson has one of the most conservative voting records…when he shows up. According to GovTrack, Johnson has missed 4.3% of House votes in his (really short) tenure, which is much higher than average. Maybe that’s why no one knows who he is.
Our buddy Newt Gingrich was on Hannity the other night explaining how we have to arm and train our citizens to carry weapons. And that we have to arm Israeli citizens as well. That was his response to the mass shooting in Maine. Having already thrown up in my mouth writing about him a couple weeks ago, it’s hard to see his giant balloon head on TV. Especially knowing that he’s responsible for dividing the House and delivering us Mike Johnson.
Meanwhile, as pretend journalists like Sean Hannity jerks himself and his guests off, 27 journalists have already died in Gaza. TWENTY SEVEN! SO FAR! How any self-respecting journalist cannot be calling for a ceasefire (at a minimum) is simply beyond me.
Another pretty bad look for journalists is the recent video from Hasan Minhaj, who brings receipts to dispute The New Yorker’s awful takedown of his standup. Minhaj acknowledges at the outset that there are far more important things to focus on, but his story reveals the deep seated distrust of Black and Brown people in American media. It’s worth a watch, especially if you read the original piece.
In other news, apparently Taylor Swift is a billionaire.
“During the day on October 7, other Palestinian networks saw less traffic than usual. JETNET (AS199046) had around half of the usual traffic after 08:00 UTC, similar to SpeedClick (AS57704), which had around 60% less traffic. After 14:15 on October 9, traffic to those networks dropped sharply (a 95% decrease compared with the previous week), showing only residual traffic.”
One of our headlines is an article by Sam Biddle in The Intercept, where he reports that residents of Gaza were notified via Facebook to evacuate certain neighborhoods before Israel bombed them. The Cloudflare data above confirms the precipitous drop in internet activity in the days following the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. (Traffic in Israel spiked during the same period.)
Headlines
Is Internet Access a Human Right?
During a war, when access to the internet could save lives, Palestinians are struggling to reach the outside world and each other.
We cross-reference the internet data usage from Cloudflare in our Chart of the Week to affirm what Sam Biddle writes about in this piece. It raises the same question, albeit with lower stakes, that we tackled in our two-part series on the FCC (Part One & Part Two). Internet access should be considered a fundamental human right at this point in history. From an economic perspective, it’s as necessary as shelter and electricity. But when you’re using social media to warn of impending bombings and destruction, it elevates to something entirely different.
From the article:
“In addition to methodological differences and the fog of war, however, is an added wrinkle: Like almost everything else in Gaza, ISPs connect to the broader internet through Israeli infrastructure. ‘By law, Gaza internet connectivity must go through Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world, so there is a possibility that the Israelis could leave it up because they are able to intercept communications,’ said Madory of Kentik.”
We’ve made the case over and over on the pod that the alt-right movement in the U.S. is light years ahead of the left in planning for the demise of our democracy. Proof of this can be found at the state level where conservative activists are running the Federalist Society playbook that radicalized the Supreme Court. While chaos ensues in foreign policy, gun violence continues to grip the nation, immigrants are being bused to cities and the House Republicans are staging the worst show on earth, the activists work diligently behind the scenes. One state at a time.
From the article:
“Take North Carolina, for example. There, a majority of liberal justices invalidated the state’s legislative maps as an inappropriate partisan gerrymander that, they claimed, violated the state’s constitution. But after that decision, an election occurred, and the ideological makeup of the court changed. The newly constituted, more conservative court, withdrew its previous opinion and held that the North Carolina constitution does not prohibit partisan gerrymandering. This was likely the correct result but a complete 180 from the previous opinion. None of it would have happened, however, without the shift of power on the state Supreme Court.”
Briahna Joy Gray invites journalist Marc Lamont Hill on Bad Faith and the two have a riveting discussion about the war in Palestine. Hill has one of the most informed takes on the conflict and is one of the few journalists who has pressed leaders of both the Israeli government and Hamas. Watching him will make you yearn for more coverage like this and weep at the state of the mainstream media.
Isaacson is on tour promoting his new book on Musk, so there’s no shortage of places to find him. This is as close as I’ll get to reading this book because… fuck Elon…BUT, I listened to this episode because I adore Alan Alda. So, if you’re going to listen to an interview with Isaacson, then make it this one and support AA. If nothing else, you’ll love Isaacson’s Nawlin’s drawl.
“The Missing Peace, published to great acclaim last year, is the most candid inside account of the Middle East peace process ever written. Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is that rare figure who is respected by all parties: Democrats and Republicans, Palestinians and Israelis, presidents and people on the street in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington, D.C. Ross recounts the peace process in detail from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in early 2001 that prompted the so-called second Intifada-and takes account of recent developments in a new afterword written for this edition.”
You've heard him on the pod. You know the magic of his sound design. But do you really know "Manny Faces?" Long-time, award winning Hip-Hop journalist and activist Manny Faces joins Max in studio to talk about Hip-Hop culture and its underreported influence on education, the criminal justice system and activism. If you listen/watch you’ll also be introduced to the coining of the phrase, “pimping off the Old Testament.” (Patent pending.)
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
MANNY: “What I find is that some people at that show, because they're really smart, happen to be teachers. Or they're working in a juvenile detention center and they go in and on the weekends, they have workshops, poetry or rap writing with the young people...and having these workshops: self-esteem, self-confidence, storytelling, you know, expression, verbalization, like all these side benefits that you get from rapping, which people don't give a lot of credit to.”