Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s guide to the biggest political newsmakers of the week. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, and—hey, have you guys seen The Holdovers yet? It’s great! Can you believe that Paul Giamatti has never won an Oscar? Yeah, I couldn’t either. The guy is basically everyone’s favorite actor! But it’s true. Can we get Paul a statue? Let’s get Paul a freakin’ statue!
This week we’ve got a Cuban spying scandal, a (different) New York state congressional delegation OnlyFans scandal, and more Hunter Biden. But first: A MAGA leader and Trump supporter in the House comes out against antisemitism … on the left.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has created conflict on American college campuses, where some Jewish students believe that certain anti-war protest tactics and slogans amount to antisemitic harassment. The House Committee on Education held a hearing on the subject Wednesday with the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a hearing which yielded explosive headlines thanks largely to Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s questioning of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Stefanik repeatedly asked them whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would constitute a violation of their campus codes of conduct, to which they replied that it would if it were “directed” toward certain individuals, but not necessarily in the abstract. Some observers, including many liberals, felt these answers were too legalistic and did not sufficiently condemn the real threat of rising antisemitism; others defended the presidents’ remarks on free-speech grounds. Either way it was a win for Stefanik, who was able to highlight a type of leftism that is generally perceived as a drag on Democrats in a way that will exacerbate intraparty tensions during an election year. Stefanik is also one of Congress’ most vocal supporters of Donald Trump, who has pursued the support of wildly antisemitic white supremacists for years and geared up for his current campaign by meeting with a right-wing media personality named Nick Fuentes who is well known for touting his admiration of Adolf Hitler. Big Stefanik hearing on the troubling Trump-Fuentes alliance coming soon, we assume.
Joe Biden’s 53-year-old son Hunter was indicted on Thursday, which is bad news for him—especially because this indictment is not related to the accusations of possessing a firearm while using illegal drugs that were in the news over the summer. He still faces those charges too, but has now been hit with nine additional counts of tax evasion. He’s accused, in federal court in Los Angeles, of failing to pay $1.4 million to the IRS over a five-year period. The prosecution is being spearheaded by special counsel David Weiss, the same person who is pursuing the gun/drug charges in Delaware, and the younger Biden’s attorneys say that Weiss is chasing small-time letter-of-the-law charges that wouldn’t be filed against a regular private citizen. (Hunter has, for instance, already paid back the $1.4 million he owed.) Neither case has had a noticeable effect on the older Biden’s popularity as president, or chances of being reelected. But that’s probably not much solace to Hunter given that he faces 17 years in jail on the tax accusations alone.
When Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson was selected as the new speaker of the House, it definitely seemed like the moderates who’d scuttled MAGA Rep. Jim Jordan’s nomination were blowing past equally concerning aspects of Johnson’s profile for no other reason than being tired of the chaos in their party and chamber. Johnson, for instance, voted to reject the results of the 2020 election and helped organize support for the Texas state lawsuit seeking to overturn its outcome; he also once compared supporters of abortion rights to Nazis. Since then, it’s come out that he wrote the foreword for a real wacky-sounding book that, among other things, circulated the QAnon “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. And this week, Johnson said at a press conference that House Republicans are preparing to release Jan. 6 security footage by blurring the faces of individuals who were involved in the riot because “we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” i.e., the Department of Justice. This raised a lot of eyebrows, given that Johnson is … that the speaker should … well, that the person in charge of the House of Representatives shouldn’t want rioters to get away with assaulting police officers and smashing down doors and through windows in order to shut down the House of Representatives and possibly kill the vice president? Shouldn’t that be a kind of “goes without saying” part of the job? A Johnson spokesman subsequently said that the blurring was only meant to prevent the identification of rioters by “nongovernmental actors.” OK, nothing to worry about, we guess.
The non–Donald Trump Republican presidential field is getting thinned out, and at Wednesday night’s debate there were only four candidates: Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy. DeSantis and Haley have raised a lot of money and are polling respectably. Christie has been the governor of a large state and has taken a clearly staked-out position on Trump’s fitness for office that gives him a logical reason to stay in the race. And then there’s Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old onetime pharma-industry hustler who is pretty clearly in this thing in order to promote his personal future in right-wing media. On Wednesday, he turned the shock-jock tactics up to 11, claiming at one point that Jan. 6 was an “inside job,” holding up a notepad on which he’d written “NIKKI = CORRUPT” in order to annoy Nikki Haley, suggesting that the Democratic Party supports a so-called Great Replacement plan to dilute the white race in America through immigration, and mocking Christie for his weight. Your Surge author has been watching presidential debates for more or less professional purposes for two decades, and in that time has seen a lot of smarmy and cynical performances by candidates in both parties—but none that quite combined personal nastiness and “not having any chance whatsoever to become president” to this extent. Get this guy outta here!
Syracuse-area Republican Brandon Williams is a first-term representative who, until recently, was probably best known for having been part of the group of New York Republicans who called on George Santos to resign in January of this year after the New York Times exposed the various lies he’d told about his background. But last week, a Syracuse student journalist posted video of Williams shouting and pointing at his former chief of staff at a crowded Washington party, telling the former staffer, quote, “you fuck with my family, I’ll end every relationship you have.” This Friday, Williams went public with an explosive explanation for his behavior, telling Politico that the ex–chief of staff, Michael Gordon, had threatened to retaliate against Williams for firing him by publicizing the fact that Williams’ daughter has an account on the platform OnlyFans, which allows performers to charge for access to adult content. (Santos, coincidentally, was accused of spending campaign funds on OnlyFans content in a House Ethics Committee report.) Politico spoke to a Republican consultant who confirmed Williams’ account, telling the publication that Gordon had asked him to convey the threat to the congressman. (The idea, to be clear, is that by telling Politico about the threat himself, and stating the existence of his daughter’s account as fact, Williams is preventing the situation from being used against him as blackmail.) Gordon, for the record, says the accusations against him are “categorically false.”
This week, the Department of Justice announced it has arrested a longtime State Department and national security official named Victor Manuel Rocha on charges of acting, for more than 40 years, as an agent of the Cuban government. According to the DOJ, Rocha had already pledged loyalty to Fidel Castro’s regime when he entered the U.S. foreign service in 1981, and he’s alleged to have spent his entire subsequent career—during which he was, at one point, the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia—seeking to obtain classified and sensitive information that could be used for Cuba’s benefit. And according to a criminal complaint and grand jury indictment, the American government knows all this because Rocha told an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative about his work at length. In a series of conversations with the undercover agent, Rocha referred to the U.S. as “the enemy,” called Castro “the comandante,” and boasted of having “strengthened the Revolution” and hit “a grand slam” for Cuban interests. Whoops (allegedly)!
Why is Sean McDermott, the coach of the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills, being mentioned in this political newsletter? The answer is in this dispatch, by football writer Tyler Dunne, about why McDermott rubs some of his players the wrong way. According to Dunne, McDermott once started a team meeting by asking players to discuss the subject of group cohesion and how it was achieved, to such a remarkable degree, by (you are really not prepared for the way this sentence is going to end if you haven’t seen this story yet) the members of al-Qaida who carried out 9/11. To repeat: McDermott asked Buffalo Bills players how the Sept. 11 terrorists were able to act effectively as a team and encouraged them to draw lessons from the attack’s success. We will not divulge further details because the story is paywalled and your substitute Surge scribe of all people knows that writers need to eat, but we can say that the non-paywalled part of the story mentions an entirely different time in which McDermott tried to motivate (?) his team by telling them the story of a woman who died by suicide by driving her car into Niagara Falls. Our point here? Honestly, it’s mostly just to say “Wow, that’s the craziest response to a news event I think I’ve ever heard.” See you next week!
Elise Stefanik’s Selective Antisemitism Radar
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09.12.2023
Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s guide to the biggest political newsmakers of the week. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, and—hey, have you guys seen The Holdovers yet? It’s great! Can you believe that Paul Giamatti has never won an Oscar? Yeah, I couldn’t either. The guy is basically everyone’s favorite actor! But it’s true. Can we get Paul a statue? Let’s get Paul a freakin’ statue!
This week we’ve got a Cuban spying scandal, a (different) New York state congressional delegation OnlyFans scandal, and more Hunter Biden. But first: A MAGA leader and Trump supporter in the House comes out against antisemitism … on the left.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has created conflict on American college campuses, where some Jewish students believe that certain anti-war protest tactics and slogans amount to antisemitic harassment. The House Committee on Education held a hearing on the subject Wednesday with the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a hearing which yielded explosive headlines thanks largely to Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s questioning of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Stefanik repeatedly asked them whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would constitute a violation of their campus codes of conduct, to which they replied that it would if it were “directed” toward certain individuals, but not necessarily in the abstract. Some observers, including many liberals, felt these answers were too legalistic and did not sufficiently condemn the real threat of rising antisemitism; others defended the presidents’ remarks on free-speech grounds. Either way it was a win for Stefanik, who was able to highlight a type of leftism that is generally perceived as a drag on Democrats in a way that will exacerbate intraparty tensions during an election year. Stefanik is also one of Congress’ most vocal supporters of Donald Trump, who has pursued the support of wildly antisemitic white supremacists for years and geared up for his current campaign by meeting with a right-wing media personality named Nick Fuentes who is well known for touting his admiration of Adolf Hitler. Big Stefanik hearing on the troubling Trump-Fuentes alliance coming soon, we assume.
Joe Biden’s 53-year-old son Hunter was indicted on Thursday, which is bad news for him—especially because this indictment is not related to the accusations of........
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