(cache) From Breitbart to Sputnik

What to Make of Bannon's Exit From the NSC

Rosie Gray

The Trump administration is saying it was long-planned.

This post was updated on April 5, 2017 at 2:56 p.m.

President Trump took office with an unconventional pick as National Security Adviser, and an unusual structure for his National Security Council. Now, both are gone.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s removal from the principals’ committee of the National Security Council on Wednesday may signal a shift towards normalcy for the NSC, which spent much of the last few months mired in controversy.

Bloomberg News first reported the changes on Wednesday. Per a regulatory filing announcing the changes, the reorganization also includes the restoration of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence as permanent members of the committee. Both permanent positions had been eliminated in January as part of a reorganization of the NSC shortly after Trump first took office.

Pepsi's New Ad Is a Total Success

Ian Bogost

Every feature of the “Jump In” ad benefits the company—even the act of pulling it from the airwaves.

Before it’s an ad for shampoo or cat food or cola, every advertisement is first an ad for capitalism.

Without a privately-controlled industry jockeying to compete with one another for consumer dollars, there’s no need for advertising. People would wash their hair with Shampoo, and feed their cats with Cat Food, and quench their thirst with Cola. Without competition, there would be no need to advertise in the first place. Especially when it comes to commodities. There are some differences between colas—the taste and the ingredients, for example. But the main difference is on the can rather than in it. The branding, and the sensibilities that branding conveys.

Yesterday, Pepsi released an ad that takes a strong, if bizarre, brand position on contemporary politics. In the spot, dubbed “Jump In,” Kendall Jenner abandons a photo shoot to join a passing march. To do so, she sheds a blonde wig and slips in among a diverse throng of variously-toned participants in a seemingly-innocuous protest. Eventually, Jenner meets an equally innocuous policeman keeping order. She hands him a cold Pepsi, and the crowd of protesters rejoices. “Live for Now,” the spot concludes, topped by the Pepsi brand mark.

From Breitbart to Sputnik

Rosie Gray

A former Breitbart reporter will host a radio show for the Russian government outlet.

A former Breitbart News writer is launching a radio show for Russian propaganda network Sputnik.

“I’m on the Russian payroll now, when you work at Sputnik you’re being paid by the Russians,” former Breitbart investigative reporter Lee Stranahan told me. “That’s what it is. I don’t have any qualms about it. Nothing about it really affects my position on stuff that I’ve had for years now.”

Stranahan’s new position is the latest twist in the increasingly atomized world of niche right-wing media, which has seen an increase in prominence and influence during the Trump era. It also reflects a realignment on the right towards Russia as the administration, led by an unusually Russia-receptive president, becomes increasingly entangled in a drip-drip of stories about Russian influence.

An Uncomfortably Familiar Problem for a Trump Nominee

Matt Ford

Reports in BuzzFeed and Politico suggest Judge Neil Gorsuch copied passages that appear in his book from another article, and may not have exercised care in attributing other material.

Federal judge Neil Gorsuch allegedly copied text and language from several sources without proper attribution in two of his written works, throwing an 11th-hour curveball into the Senate confirmation process for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

BuzzFeed first published excerpts of Gorsuch’s 2006 book on euthanasia Tuesday night that showed strong similarities between his writing and a 1984 Indiana Law Review article by Abigail Lawlis Kuzma. The book was an expanded version of the judge’s 2004 dissertation for his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University. Even in the dense, formulaic world of legal writing, the similarities are striking.

“Down’s syndrome is a chromosomal disorder that involves both a certain amount of physical deformity and some degree of mental retardation,” Gorsuch wrote in one notable example. “Esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula means that the esophageal passage from the mouth to the stomach ends in a pouch, with an abnormal connection between the trachea and the esophagus.”

Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South

Alana Semuels

In Charlotte and other Southern cities, poor children have the lowest odds of making it to the top income bracket of kids anywhere in the country. Why?

CHARLOTTE—Shamelle Jackson moved here from Philadelphia, hoping to find work opportunities and better schools for her four children, who range in age from two to 14. Instead, she found a city with expensive housing, few good jobs, and schools that can vary dramatically in quality. “I’ve never struggled as hard as I do here in Charlotte,” Jackson, 34, told me.

Jackson isn’t alone. Data suggests that Charlotte is a dead-end for people trying to escape poverty. That’s especially startling because the city is a leader in economic development in the South. Bank of America is headquartered here, and over the last two decades the city has become a hub for the financial services industry. In recent years, Charlotte and the surrounding area, Mecklenburg County, have ranked among the fastest-growing regions of the country. “Charlotte is a place of economic wonder in some ways, but it’s also a city that faces very stark disparities, and that increasingly includes worrisome pockets of real deprivation,” said Gene Nichol, a professor at the UNC School of Law who has completed an extensive report on local poverty. Some of these disparities bubbled to the surface in September, when protests erupted after a black man, Keith Lamont Scott, was shot and killed by police.

The Patriarchy Hates the Moon

Sam Kriss

They even tried to nuke it.

Like most unhappy young men, in my teenage years I went to war with the moon. Stumbling drunk out of boring parties late at night, I’d feel the thing glaring at me from its smug and lofty seat, indifferent and implacable, a faint sneer etched into its face. Looking into the moon means looking into the vertiginous hugeness of history: It’s the same lump of rock seen by kings and heroes for all those thousands of years; they all died, and you will too, but the moon carries on. Wolves howl; I ranted. Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me? The moon doesn’t care; it’s just a mirror, and in its surface we all look very small.

I wasn’t alone in my loathing of the moon. In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed secret plans for an unprovoked nuclear strike against it.

Why So Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Cities

Derek Thompson

What’s happening to New York City is a microcosm of what’s happening around the country—the hollowing out of the U.S. city.

It was an April 1st headline, but the statistics were no joke. "People are fleeing New York at an alarming rate," the New York Post announced. And indeed, they are—sort of.

For starters, a bit of terminology. The Census Bureau tracks two sorts of American movers. First, there are “domestic migrants,” who move from one U.S. county to another. Second, there are “international migrants,” who move from a foreign country to America. Somewhat confusingly, the latter definition does not mean “all immigrants.” A Guatemalan-born woman who lives in Houston for two years and then moves Dallas is considered a domestic migrant, since she’s moving between American cities.

That sounds like some methodological mumbo jumbo, but it’s critical for understanding what’s happening to New York and the rest of America’s largest cities.

Jeff Sessions's Blind Eye

Adam Serwer

The new attorney general makes it clear that when it comes to abuses in local policing, Americans are now on their own.

One of the effects of racial segregation is that it fractures reality, so that the daily occurrences of one world can be entirely invisible, even fantastic, to another. When the town of Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in protest during the summer of 2014, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, millions of Americans were shocked, both at the ferocity of the demonstrations, and the brutal, militaristic response of local police.

To many white Americans, the world Ferguson residents described to reporters must have seemed preposterous––a violent klepto-state where black residents were bled dry by the municipal government and frequently abused and treated with contempt by an unaccountable police force. In turn, Ferguson’s black residents radiated frustration with a country that seemed in disbelief about what they had seen, heard, felt, and very literally paid for in more ways than one.

Louis C.K.’s 2017 Is a Startling, Uncomfortable Return to Form

David Sims

The comedian’s new special for Netflix is his first in years to feel coherent and truly challenging.

Louis C.K.’s new special 2017 begins with the closest thing the stripped-down comedian can get to visual spectacle: the sight of him in a suit. Throughout his stratospheric rise as a stand-up, C.K. has always taken the stage in a black T-shirt and jeans, a workmanlike uniform for someone who thrives on a universal (if profane and often bleak) approach to his mostly observational comedy. In 2017, C.K. wants to make clear that he’s changed in some way. He takes the stage dressed formally, looking more like a funeral-home director than a blue-collar worker. Then, in another departure, he launches into some very prepared material.

C.K. has never been particularly interested in properly opening or closing his comedy sets. At the beginning of 2010’s Hilarious, arguably the apex of his stand-up career, he takes the stage unceremoniously and opens with, “hello, everybody,” then spends two minutes deconstructing the pointlessness of the term “everybody.” In 2011’s Live at the Beacon Theater, he demands that the cheering audience sit down and says, “There’s no opening act, fuck it. Let’s just start.” But in 2017, C.K. begins as uncomfortably as he possibly can. “So I think abortion is, um, here’s what I think,” he says to an awkward laugh from the audience. “I think you should not get an abortion unless you need one. In which case, you better get one!”

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson listen during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the Cabinet Room of the White House on April 3, 2017. — Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The Silence of Rex Tillerson

Eliot A. Cohen

Sooner or later, someone needs to explain what Trump’s foreign policy is. But the secretary of state does not seem to understand his job.

Updated on April 4 at 4:35 p.m. ET

One would not expect the secretary of defense routinely to inspect the sentries and walk point on patrols, but, in effect, that is what the secretary of state has to do. He is the chief executive of a department numbering in the tens of thousands, and a budget in the tens of billions; but he is also the country’s chief diplomat, charged with conducting negotiations and doing much of the detailed work of American foreign policy. Americans expect him as well to serve as the president’s senior constitutionally accountable adviser on such matters, and as the expositor of an administration’s foreign policy.

It is not unprecedented for a president to install a business executive as secretary of state. After all, George Shultz, one of the outstanding 20th-century occupants of that office, came to Foggy Bottom from Bechtel. But then again, Shultz had a rich array of experiences under his belt in addition to a successful business career—he had taught economics at MIT and the University of Chicago, and he had served as secretary of labor, the first director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the Treasury.