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A landmark US supreme court ruling expected before the end of June could shutter most of Louisianas abortion clinics and precipitate clinic closures in more than a dozen other states.

The case, June Medical Services v Russo, is one of the most high-profile supreme court cases of the year, after Donald Trump appointed two justices who tipped the balance of the court to a conservative majority. And it might never have reached the supreme court without the aid of another Trump-appointed judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan.

The Louisiana case centers on law that would force abortion doctors to gain permission to admit and treat patients at nearby hospitals, known as admitting privileges a bureaucratic hurdle that has been shown to shut down a large swath of abortion clinics.

The supreme court ruled an almost identical Texas law unconstitutional in 2016, but Louisiana is arguing that what is unconstitutional in Texas can still be constitutional across the state border.

Duncan fought the Louisiana case while in private practice until the spring of 2018, when he was confirmed as one of Trumps five lifetime appointments to the fifth circuit court of appeals.

This year, several states have sought to severely restrict a womans right to abortion by designating it an elective treatment that is not necessary during the coronavirus pandemic. Though appeals courts largely refused to uphold these bans, Duncan was one of two judges on the fifth circuit court who repeatedly upheld Texass ban in a series of rulings that threw abortion access into weeks of disarray.

In just three years, the Trump administration has stacked federal courts with an army of conservative judges: 143 district court judges, 51 appeals court judges and two supreme court justices. Trumps lasting legacy may be stuffing Americas most important courts with largely white, male, conservative justices who will rule over important social and cultural issues such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues and immigration for the next three or four decades.

One-fifth of the federal trial judges now owe their seat to Trump, as do one-fourth of appellate judges. According to the progressive research group Data for Progress, Trumps cohort are also ideologically to the right of previously appointed Republican judges.

With the election looming in November, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, vowed to push ahead with nomination hearings and leave no vacancy behind.

And nowhere will Trumps impact be felt greater than in the states that lie under the jurisdiction of the nations most conservative appeals courts. The fifth circuit, for example, covers the Republican strongholds of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, making it the likely final arbiter on the constitutionality of a slew of conservative laws.

For the overwhelming number of cases, the constitutional rights of the people in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi will be made by Kyle Duncan and the other ultra-conservatives on the fifth circuit, said Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the progressive judicial non-profit the Alliance for Justice.

Five of the 17 active judges on the fifth circuit are Trump appointees, making an already right-leaning appeals court arguably one of the most, probably the most, conservative in the nation, Goldberg added.

The mantle is significant. While most attention tends to fall on the supreme court, that court hears only about 100 cases in a year. Appeals courts collectively handle in the range of 50,000. The nations 94 district courts are geographically organized into 12 circuits, which hear the bulk of appeals, and from those cases, the US supreme court chooses just a fraction.

It was a fifth circuit panel that ruled to uphold Louisianas admitting privileges law in 2018, despite the fact the Texas law had been struck down two years prior. In early 2019, the full bench of the fifth circuit voted to refuse to rehear the case, forcing the supreme courts hand and setting the stage for this summers looming decision. Since he had represented Louisiana, Duncan abstained from the courts decision.

But Trumps other four appointees were among the nine judges that upheld Louisianas law. One, James Ho, has since made headlines for decrying the the moral tragedy of abortion in an opinion. Others have criticized the Voting Rights Act a civil-rights era law that forced states with histories of violent voter suppression to obtain approval from the justice department over changes to elections, a law that conservatives on the supreme court gutted in 2013.

Duncan is a lawyer with proven culture wars credentials, said Amanda Bursky-Hollis, author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

The vote to confirm his appointment to the fifth circuit bench split along party lines, 50-47, and his bid was aided by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network an ally of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that has aided Trump by selecting judges for him to nominate. The Judicial Crisis Network spent tens of thousands of dollars on TV ads in Louisiana praising Duncan after Senator John Kennedy expressed skepticism at giving a seat conventionally held for a Louisianian to a Washington lawyer. By the time of Duncans nomination hearing, Kennedy hailed Duncan as staunchly and vociferously pro-life and pro-religious liberty.

Duncan, a married father of five, was born in Baton Rouge in 1972.

Religious liberty is Duncans specialty, going back to his time in the mid-2000s as a professor of law at the University of Mississippi, where his scholarship centered on the separation of church and state. Duncan has argued alongside the religious liberty powerhouse the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and taught at its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a kind of career boot camp for elite Christian lawyers that the ADF calls a ministry.

Duncan made his name in 2014 at the boutique religious rights firm the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, when he was the lead counsel on the victorious supreme court contraception case Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores. That pivotal decision laid the groundwork for corporations to opt out of providing birth control for employees based on religious objections, and it preceded another major contraception case the court heard this spring, one that could further favor the religious and moral objections of employers over the rights of their employees to access healthcare.

Duncan is a devout Catholic. Before his appointment to the fifth circuit, on mornings before he was scheduled to argue before the supreme court, he would recite the rosary to calm himself.

A large part of his career as an appellate court specialist was spent defending Republican state laws popular with the religious right and social conservatives. He fought to keep Louisianas same-sex marriage ban: the matter belongs in the states, would have unforeseen consequences, and LGBTQ rights have nothing (his empasis) to do with civil rights cases, he argued. He defended a North Carolina anti-trans bathroom law and a similar Virginia school board policy. And he argued in favor of a North Carolina voter ID regulation that the fourth circuit found targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.

Paul Baier, a law professor at LSU who never taught Duncan, supported his nomination despite having argued against him in the same-sex marriage case at the Louisiana supreme court. Duncan is a superb advocate and a very careful, painstaking judge, he said. He described Duncans reasoning in his opinion to uphold Texass coronavirus-related abortion ban as an exemplar of the studious judge judging.

The Federalist Society acts as an alternative to the American Bar Association with a monopoly on Republican nominees, Hollis-Brusky said, strategically placing people like Duncan who cant be dismissed as a crazy Christian or Bible-thumper.

Over the course of his nomination process in 2017, the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein questioned him about some of the arguments he had made in past controversial cases. Duncan responded by stating that in representing clients I do not advance my personal views, but the interests of my clients.

During his nomination hearing, Duncan presented himself as fair-minded and reasonable. He strove especially to reassure the Democratic Senator Dick Durbin over his record of advancing religious rights above all others.

Where do we draw the line with your right as an individual, asked Durbin, as opposed to my right to assert religious liberty?

Its a balance, its gotta be a balance, Duncan replied.

He referenced the Hobby Lobby case, describing it as a close case because women would be deprived of contraception.

Three years earlier, Duncan had used opposite terms. We find ourselves in the midst of what we see, and what we see correctly, as one of the most flagrant attacks on religious liberty that that weve ever seen in this country, Duncan told a panel in 2014.

And most importantly, from our point of view, its not about striking the appropriate balance, he went on. The first amendment has struck the balance for us, and that balance is in favor of religious liberty.

Few Trump appointees have survived the nomination process without outrage from progressive groups. Duncan is no exception.

The specific judges the Federalist Society supported are selected by the president to implement his agenda of dismantling health care, eliminating civil, women and workers rights and shielding his wealth and actions from public scrutiny, said Nan Aron, the founder of the Alliance for Justice.

Duncan summed up his lifes work in 2014, in an article for the Ivy League Christian Observer. All I really want to do, he said, is what God wants me to do with the talents he gave me.

Originally posted here:
Stuart Kyle Duncan: the Trump-appointed judge working to ban Louisiana abortions - The Guardian

We cannot allow science and public health to become just another part of the culture wars. Wearing a mask in public as COVID-19 continues to kill thousands of Americans is about helping to protect our friends, family and neighbors. Its not virtue signally, and its not the same as wearing a Planned Parenthood t-shirt or a MAGA red hat.

We cannot allow science and public health to become just another part of the culture wars.

Wearing a mask in public as COVID-19 continues to kill thousands of Americans is about helping to protect our friends, family and neighbors. Its not virtue signally, and its not the same as wearing a Planned Parenthood t-shirt or a MAGA red hat.

Its a scientifically sound way to help slow the spread of coronavirus and help our communities and our business to re-open.

Last week, President Donald Trump visited Maine and toured a Guilford company, Puritan Medical Products, that makes cotton swabs that are critical to testing for COVID-19. Theres no question that the visit was good for Puritan and exciting for many of the people who work there and for those who live in Guilford.

But during the visit to the company which makes medical supplies that are in high demand and short supply the president refused to wear a mask. Hes refused to wear one all along, even as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended it.

As USA Today and the Bangor Daily News reported, all the swabs made the day of the presidents visit and those that were used as a prop for his remarks had to be thrown away.

The presidents photo op, and his ongoing refusal to listen to what doctors and scientists have to say, put the country just a little bit farther behind in the fight against COVID-19.

The president could have easily worn a mask for the tour or delivered his remarks away from the actual facility, but alas he was more dedicated to the politics of the moment than the science.

Masks not only will control the pandemic, but its also a matter of personal responsibility. You shouldnt be spreading it yourself. Thats the danger. Youre endangering other people, US Sen. Angus King told USA Today. Referring to a video taken of Trumps tour, King added, You see the shots: everybody else has a mask on. Its a terrible disservice to the country to have made wearing a mask some kind of a political statement.

From denying climate change to hocking questionable treatment for COVID-19 to rolling back protections of an ocean national monument, Trump ignores science and instead tries to create an alternate reality of his own making with help from a chorus of right-wing co-conspirators from talk radio and Fox News.

When politicians turn their back on science because they believe it will help them in the next election, they are undermining our countrys history of innovation and the scientific exploration that has led to incredible medical discovers.

As Time magazine points out, there are a lot of similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the polio epidemic of 1916.

A little more than 100 years ago, families were terrified of the disease and its rampage. They took precautions, like physical distancing, and they fell for snake oil salesmen trying to make a buck with mystery cures that werent.

It took 39 years, but it was science and Dr. Jonas Salk that ultimately delivered a vaccine for polio.

As Jeffrey Kluger, the author of the Times story, closed his article: But science science presses ahead, and in our impatient 21st century, thats something for which we should be deeply grateful.

We dont know how long it will take to develop an effective vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, but the only way its going to happen is if politicians end this dangerous practice of making science partisan.

As we head into a July 14 primary and then later this year the November general election, its critical that voters take a look at the candidates and only support those who are willing and able to put petty politics aside particularly when it comes to public health, science and innovation.

David Farmer is a public affairs, political and media consultant in Portland, where he lives with his wife and two children. He was senior adviser to Democrat Mike Michauds 2014 campaign for governor.

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For the sake of public health, keep the politics out of science - observer-me.com

I May Destroy You (BBC One) | iPlayerSitting in Limbo (BBC One) | iPlayerJeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich NetflixMcMillions Sky DocumentariesStaged (BBC One) | iPlayerDas Boot Sky Atlantic

Michaela Coels new 12-part drama I May Destroy You (BBC One) has already been described as the one thing you have to watch this year. I would find it hard to disagree. Mid-2020, mid-Covid-19, anti-racism protests lacing our news, a temptation might be to retreat from culture wars and goodness knows, thats the kind and gentle option but the first stage of survival generally means opening ones eyes.

Its not an easy watch. Its not a joyous watch. It features rape, heaving, bare-bottomed sex, anger, slums, counselling, slang, mad wigs. It also features humour and says quite everything about Coel, who also stars, that she has managed, somehow, to combine the tale of a grim personal experience with such a valuable exploration of what consent means, and make the whole eventually warm.

It is often infuriating. But Coel has tackled so many subjects around which our generalised prejudices congregate, from recreational drugginess to bloodied tampon-sex to blackness, via the blitherings of mindfulness, the joys of sex and the horrors of sudden distrust, and done it with wit and several nods to the power of friendship. Goodness, but what a rethink to have come out of one drama.

One of the strengths of Sitting in Limbo (also BBC One), which certainly didnt lack for strengths, was the fact that we the audience were never vouchsafed any more information than the real Anthony Bryan (played with just-so weary dignity by Patrick Robinson), whose life was just one of many upended in the Windrush scandal exposed by Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian. We never found out why Anthony, in his dealings with authorities, had to provide his mothers passport details from 1950 or whenever, nor why authorities had quietly destroyed all landing cards, nor how he had found himself in this MC Escher stairway: we were equally confused. (Turned out it had all been a brilliant lash-up by politicians keen on self-promotion. Hurrah! Such fun!) And such a grand story for all those who thought themselves to be British over 50 long, hardworking years until imagine their surprise! An absorbing, rewatchable drama that quietly told loud truths, and wore its anger remarkably lightly.

There is one moment towards the middle of the third of four instalments of Netflixs Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, between the searing testimonies of Sarah Ransome and Chauntae Davies, when you see a brief snapshot of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein together, swanking and preening. There have been more beautiful pictorial encapsulations of the male persona. No one can have been left in any doubt whatsoever as to Epsteins guilt: and yet even incels, the involuntarily celibate of the far right, can not have been left in much doubt as to the nature of the dog turd which was the sum total of Epsteins moral balance. Nor the wit and gumption and, yes, beauty, of all those who came together, hand in hand, to have their final say in court, 18 years on: I almost understand now the concept of closure.

McMillions, the documentary which has been running on Sky Documentaries, came with sprightly fun at a far less brittle tale, that of the Monopoly scam that dogged the burger giant around the turn of the millennium, in which hundreds of millions of fast-food customers peeled back tiny tokens unaware that the only winning tokens had been snaffled by one security chief over the course of a decade. Much more focused and enjoyable than Tiger King, which just went sad and loopy by the end, it was executive produced by Mark Wahlberg and thus had a gleeful sheen of vintage heist to it all.

Arguably about one episode too long, it nonetheless drilled down with panache into the semi-fascinating lives of a staple of American fiction (and presumably life), which might best be termed likable scumbags: the borderline and the barfly, the dandy and the dude, the mobsters molls and the rueful Mormons. None of whom you could truly bring yourself to loathe or even dislike, despite the fact that theirs washardly a victimless crime: the many lost jobs of blameless blue-collar printers and such, the huge knock-on effects ofthe scam on, as ever, the patsies who were least able to afford the fallout from the eventual sting. Never mind the damage to McDonalds reputation. Seriously, do not give a spat rat to that.

For two such seemingly unrelated subjects, these lengthy televisual explorations had a couple of things in common: first, the doggedly stoic work undertaken by a couple of unremarked south-eastern law enforcement agencies Palm Beach police department, and the teensy Jacksonville FBI. And weirdly, the scam posted up on that Jacksonville wall had precisely the same pyramid-scheme-style structure mild culpability ensuring the secrecy of those recruited on a couple of levels, who then recruited more below them, and so on down the pyramid it spreads and infects as that employed by Epstein with his pyramid of girls. He got them from the less serene side of Palm Beach, poor and thin and young and lucky only in their prettiness, and then they recruited again below until a report happened to chance across the desk of an individual whose duty to self happened to outweigh their duty to greed or self-aggrandisement.

Staged (BBC One) is the latest lockdown drama lockdown dramas being an entire new genre, which Wikipedia will define as a needs-must 2020 phenomenon in which, under the strictures of coronavirus, a rich person is seen questioning their values, a poor person is seen struggling yet being gamely cheeky, and core workers are celebrated. The genre must feature a Zoom-glitch or similar technological embarrassment. And yet Staged was a hugely refreshing addition to the genre, featuring simply a couple of immensely personable actors playing heightened versions of themselves. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, aided hugely by wives Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, are lockdown-rehearsing an unpalatable, 100-year-old absurdist Italian drama, urged and egged on by Simon Evans, who wrote and directed Staged, and gave himself, in fairness, the very worst lines, the lines which those aged eight to 80 will lift eyebrows to and wonder Did he really say that? What a dick.

It is grand fun, even if slight, although I suspect that the good friends Sheen and Tennant are, no matter how inadvertently, auditioning even in lockdown for the next series of The Trip.

For those who underwent series one of Das Boot, das Sky Atlantic reboot of the classic 1981 Wolfgang Petersen film, youll have known what to expect from series two, which launched this week. Far from a faithful, tense, bitterly claustrophobic paean to bravery and sacrifice in a submarine, we got a wider, bowdlerised tale of mutinous good crews with bad beards and bad crews with good beards, and stirring yearnings to have been part of the resistance in La Rochelle in 1942.

And so it goes on. The handsome-but-evil SS is man is still hunting down local Jews, the decent, sad, bespectacled German is still trying to stay his hand, the French are either gorgeous and incompetently brave or possessed of ferret-faced cunning and playing both sides and deserve to die with bats gnawing their cheesy innards, and the one complexity we are permitted a good-guy U-boat boss with, confusingly, a good beard is trying to deliver his tin-can to the Americans, along with the Enigma machine.

If Covid-19 gets us all, I would shudder to think burgeoning 26th-century civilisations might find this under a scrimshawed rune-rock and consider it a documentary of life as lived 1930-2030. Mind you, could say the same about McMillions or Epstein.

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The week in TV: I May Destroy You; Sitting in Limbo; Staged; McMillions; Das Boot - review - The Guardian

In an absurd reaction to the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list earlier this week, New York writer Andrew Sullivan tweeted "We. All. Live. On Campus. Now." The problem, Sullivan said, was that the list had numerous "radical critical theory books, written by people deeply opposed to the foundations of liberal democracy that were now required reading for employees.

The following day, a thread of tweets arguing that doxxing racist students helped to stop them from attending a university that will allow them to become a racist healthcare worker, teacher, lawyer, real estate developer, politicians, etc. received a similar reaction from Sullivan. This is beyond chilling, he tweeted. Its the logic of purges and cultural revolution and mob justice. It has over 400K likes. Liberal democracy is extinct.

Sullivan and other contrarian thinkers with large salaries and gigantic platforms have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last decade obsessing over what teenagers at collegesBerkeley and Harvard are favoritesare doing on campus, whether thats getting racists disinvited from cushy speaking gigs or caring about intersectionality and social justice more generally speaking. The broad strokes of their argument are that one day the people pushing for their universities to be more inclusive and to not give platforms to racists will graduate from those universities and will become leaders in America and bring their ideologies with them. Sullivan and others say that this will be badbad for free speech, bad for liberal democracy, bad for America, and, most of all, bad for well-paid pundits. America as we know it will be consumed by campus. And that moment, where We. All. Live. On. Campus., is now, when hundreds of thousands of people are protesting Black people being killed by the police (or perhaps it was 2018).

Alone, this sort of hysteria is insignificant and also expected of Sullivan, who has spent years promoting and trying to legitimize racial science and declaring war on those who arent interested. It's part, though, of a larger wave of right-wing liberal and conservative writers warning that the American public is undergoing an authoritarian turn. State forces violently suppressing protests sparked by state violence isn't the concern here, nor is the president attempting to designate antifascists as terrorists. No, it's the specter of the campusan imagined site of oppression in the reactionary mind where free speech goes to die.

Never mind that its students who are bravely in the streets fighting against actual state authoritarianismmarching in the hundreds of thousands nationwide, storming and burning down Minneapolis 3rd Precinct (which one survey shows the majority of Americans think was justified), and creating an autonomous zone in Seattle spanning six city blocks that features an occupied Seattle police precinct along with vehicle barricades and armed protesters standing guard. Never mind, for that matter, that what's happening isn't the result of people avoiding uncomfortable ideas but of engaging with them and taking them seriously enough to take action in the name of a better and more just societyprecisely what liberal education and liberal democracy hold as an ideal. What matters is that the "campus" has taken over, and that this is bad.

If this campus is now everywhere, its worth taking stock of who seems terrified of it, and why. So far, it appears to be no one facing any type of oppression.

Take the staff revolt sparked by Tom Cottons New York Times op-ed "Send in the Troops" among staff over whether the fascist screed shouldve been published. Times op-ed editor and columnist Baris Weiss warned of a "civil war" between "the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals that resembled the "campus culture wars." Many have mocked her, Sullivan and other conservative thinkers for obsessively writing about campus, but this uprising at the Times, she said, proved her right all along. "This was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them." Weiss casts radical studentsor former onesas the real authoritarians for engaging in the marketplace of ideas by debating the merits of an article written by a sitting United States senator advocating for the actual deployment of the military against Americans exercising Enlightenment-era rights. (The original position that led to the Times soliciting this op-ed was that the troops should kill them.)

In Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book The Coddling of the American Mind, the fear that grips the reactionary mind is described as safetyism"a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns." For some, safetyism is an ever pervasive threat; for others, coronavirus ended this Age of Coddling, for some reason.

Clearly the young people in the streets facing down violent cops are not overly concerned with their safety. Nor are journalists risking their jobs to protest against their employers publishing government propaganda.The people who seem most obsessively concerned with being protected from ideas that challenge their worldview, in fact, seem to be coddled writers and thinkers who are worried about the safety of their social status as protests and calls for systemic upheaval and justice echo across the land.

As Moira Weigel wrote in her review of Haidt and Lukianoffs book, their arguments are obsessed with balancing acts that do little other than "signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly." They profess to be concerned with an ideological climate that stifles free expression, but in practice express concern over little other than the rules of the discourse. They want an atmosphere in which ideas can be freely debated; if anyone takes an idea seriously, though, it is held as evidence that no such atmosphere exists. The argument is an endlessly recursive argument about what it means to argue, the cri de coeur of a message-board user endlessly crying out for moderators to enforce the First Amendment written across the pages of America's best-paying and most influential publications.

Take Sullivans comparison of doxxing to the Cultural Revolution; the same comparison is made by Lukianoff and Haidt, who compared "witch-hunts" on college campuses to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but are more honest about their argument. "As historical events, the two movements are radically different, they wrote, most notably in that the Red Guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator, who encouraged them to use violence, while the American college students have been self-organised and almost entirely nonviolent." And yet they shared some similarities, the author maintain, in that "both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students." What does this mean, ultimately? Nothing!

This whiny preeningironically, it's exactly what the campus is accused ofcharacterizes the overall line of argument. Sullivan is a prominent member of a group of scientific racists who regularly bemoan the natural social consequences of airing racist drivel publicly. Weisss warnings were publicly revealed to be fabricated by numerous colleagues who disputed her narrative, calling it "brazenly careerist and self-serving" and a "willful misrepresentation" of largely unified internal opposition to publishing Cottons op-ed. There is reportedly a Bret Stephens policy at the New York Times, a double standard which allows Stephens to drone about the virtues of free speech (and join Sullivan in advancing race science nonsense) but while constantly whining or complaining to higher-ups about any writer or editor that voices criticism of his ideas.

When Stephens, another campus culture hand-wringer, failed to get a professor at George Washington University fired for insulting him, he wrote an embarassing column trying to paint the joke as anti-Semitic. When the professor invited Stephens to a debate at GWU, Stephens canceled because the debate wouldn't be closed to the public. All of this looks much more like safetyism than reading critical theory books or fighting an authoritarian police force.

In a convincing case as to why safetyism doesnt even exist, Inside Higher Ed's John Warner wrote that "if you examine those who wield the charge of safetyism against others, they are always in positions of superior power accusing those without power of disrupting some important principle, a principle that protects the status quo." His critique also lines up with Weigels, which points out that these people enjoy the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination and insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.

It's hard to take seriously powerful, privileged people who insist that the marketplace of ideas can solve racism and sexism. It's even harder to do so when they insist that participants in the marketplace of ideas who follow the power of ideas they find convincing are behaving illegitimately. It's still harder when those whose entire project is pushing the idea that debateendless, endless debateis the way to improve the country rule out protests and uprisings as effective forms of debate. That protests inspired by and enacting ideas and ideals have been successful now and in the past (e.g. the 1960s protests and riots) does not hinder these people from making their arguments. Instead, thought leaders like Jonathan Chait use phrases like politics is a matter of life and death to make the case that nobody is entirely right, and that nothing should be done.

These thinkers are correctly labeled by Weigel as "right liberals" who, from "their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and thinkpieces" create cultures and belief systems where the safety of valuing ideas you disagree with becomes a sacred value in theory, and where in practice disagreement is taken as a sort of violence, undermining the entire project of disagreement and debate which is held to be so sacred. Their position is exactly what they accuse their critics of, and as a result, their hysteria is founded in something real: They actually are being left behind by a society and by generations that are taking seriously the ideas they pay lip service to.

The campus, as envisioned by the reactionary mind doesnt exist. But the protests do. The uprisings do. The CHAZ in Seattle does. As right liberals and conservatives are forced to watch more protests and occupations grow and succeed, theyll slink back into their safe spaces. Theyll insist that their opinions be respected. Theyll demand that we engage in balancing acts to save liberalism"acts calibrated to preserve power, privilege, bigotry, and ignorance, and even liberalism itself.

We should see this for what it is: the coddling of the American pundit. And we should reject it.

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The Coddling of the American Pundit - VICE

A new chapter in the online culture wars has been opened as Gen Z, fed up with Boomers conflating them with their apparently loathsome forebears, the Millennials, have risen up with some truly savage memes.

It was only a matter of time, and now the uprising has begun after Millennials appear to have made the critical mistake of picking a fight on two fronts, managing to simultaneously piss off both Boomers and Zoomers with their avocado toast, Harry Potter obsession, and general whining.

Several Zoomers, those born in the late 90s and early 2000s, hit out at people who think that Harry Potter movies are a personality trait and unironically utter cringeworthy phrases like, ugh I hate adulting.

All they do is drink wine, post cringy 90s kid meme, talk about tech start-up and lie, said one TikToker, not pulling any punches.

Millennials were apparently caught unawares, almost choking on their kombucha, by the blistering broadside from their plucky TikToking, Fortnite-loving descendants.

Though others just took it in stride, having grown accustomed to being the internets favourite punching bag.

Some took matters into their own hands, returning fire over criticism of living conditions in their one bedroom apartments, warning Zoomers that the horror of the housing market, which could get a lot worse in a post-coronavirus depression, still awaits them.

Alliances apparently formed naturally, as the meme offensive raged across Twitter.

Some peaceniks called for unity against a common foe, but for now it appears their cries fell on deaf ears, ruined by listening to mumble rap or whatever.

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Every generation can agree, Millennials were a mistake: Shots fired as Gen Z rips 90s kids on TikTok - RT