Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s guide to the big newsmakin’ names of the week in the political sphere. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell. Did you guys see that the new season of Fargo is out? Love that show. Didn’t mind the last season of Ted Lasso as much as everyone else, either, if we’re being frank. Doesn’t it seem like people have gotten quicker to turn against things like TV shows these days? What ever happened to having a little loyalty? Anyhoo, this week we’ve got hedge-fund alpha men, mystery airline passengers, and secret swingers. But first, more on the signature issue of the past two years.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Cox is a 31-year-old Texas woman who was pregnant with a fetus that had a genetic condition that gave it very little chance of survival. She suffered cramping and other complications that forced her to seek emergency treatment multiple times, and continuing the pregnancy could have damaged her ability to give birth in the future. Cox’s doctor and a district court judge both attested that her condition met Texas’ standards for an exemption to its abortion ban. Texas’ Republican attorney general, though, appealed the decision to the Texas Supreme Court, which rejected Cox’s argument. Though she was ultimately able to obtain a (legal) abortion out of state, the attention on her case has been inconvenient for the Republican Party’s efforts to escape the electoral gravity of 2022’s Supreme Court Dobbs decision, which legalized bans like the one in Texas. (Said efforts, spearheaded by prominent Republican women, have included strategically vague but inclusive rhetoric and stabs at changing the subject to contraception.) But with cases like Cox’s likely to continue getting coverage—especially because creating cases like Cox’s was in some sense the entire point of trying to overturn Roe v. Wade—the issue is probably not going to be one that the GOP can outrun.
Last week we wrote about Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and the campus antisemitism news cycle she created by grilling the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Penn about how they’d punish a hypothetical student who called for genocide against Jews. The presidents’ primary antagonist in the aftermath of the hearing, though, has been a hedge-fund billionaire named Bill Ackman, who pressed (unsuccessfully) this week for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth. (Penn’s Liz Magill resigned last Saturday.) Who is this Ackman fellow? Well, he went to Harvard and has been angry at the school for years, a Tuesday report in the New York Times said, because of a dispute over how it used some stock he donated. He also got upset with MIT in 2019 because it wasn’t doing enough, in his mind, to downplay the connections between his wife (a professor at MIT’s Media Lab) and MIT donor Jeffrey Epstein. More broadly, as Slate’s Nitish Pahwa wrote Thursday, Ackman seems to have come to believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and “wokeness” are undermining the American meritocratic tradition and threatening the state of Israel. In mounting a counteroffensive, he’s formed an alliance with MAGA figures like Stefanik and former Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller—who, for their part, have helped promote a number of antisemitic tropes that originated in America’s burgeoning (and notably Nazism-friendly) white nationalist community. Is Ackman, at present, really working in the best interests of Jewish Americans in the long run? The Surge cannot answer that question but does know that “strange bedfellows” politics stories are usually a little more whimsical and uplifting than this one.
The House voted this week to “formalize” its impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, who is, we guess, suspected of aiding and abetting his son Hunter’s foreign business and “lobbying” endeavors. (Even many Republicans remain unconvinced that there’s going to be any meat on the bone when it comes to tying the Biden in the White House to his son’s sleazy affairs.) The member most responsible for this exercise in partisanship is Kentucky Rep. and Oversight Committee chair James Comer, whom the Associated Press did some digging into this week. It turns out that Comer, who has justified his investigation into the Bidens by citing principles of public integrity and transparency, has what you might call a mixed record of fidelity to those ideals himself. For one, he and one of his donors co-own property together that’s not disclosed on Comer’s financial disclosure forms because his stake is held in a shell company; the property, the AP notes, has recently appreciated in value because it’s adjacent to a newly built state highway bypass. (Comer denies that there’s anything inappropriate about the venture and says that only someone who is “dumb” would find it suspicious.) Another of Comer’s other longtime allies and donors, the wire service reports, was sentenced to prison in 1996 for tax-related fraud, while a third prominent local supporter of his was convicted in 2011 in a voter fraud case. Fraud and sweetheart deals: Are they bad or not? Make up your mind, James Comer!
One of the primary forces behind recent efforts to remove books about race and sexuality from school libraries is a Florida-based group called Moms for Liberty. One of the group’s co-founders is a woman named Bridget Ziegler who, as a member herself of a school board in Sarasota County, has also supported Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to crack down on discussions of sexuality in public schools. Her husband, Christian Ziegler, is the chair of Florida’s Republican Party. And according to police records made public earlier this month, Christian Ziegler has been accused of sexual assault by a woman who says that he and Bridget arranged to meet her for a so-called three-way sexual encounter—but that Christian Ziegler subsequently arrived without his wife and forced himself on her anyway. He denies the allegation, and has not been charged with a crime, but both Zieglers told police that they’d had a consensual group-sex encounter with the woman more than a year ago. Such a ménage would be a decidedly nontraditional activity to partake in, of course, for a couple whose professional work demonizes such activities; the story has accordingly angered members of both political parties for opposite reasons. As of this week, though, both Zieglers are refusing to resign their formal roles.
Now that George Santos has been expelled from Congress to pursue a career of recording funny videos and being prosecuted for federal crimes, New York state has to find someone from the 3rd Congressional District to replace him. A special election is scheduled for February, and both parties seem to be approaching the race, in the culturally red environs of Long Island, by trying to find the least woke and most pro-Israel candidate imaginable. Democrats have nominated Tom Suozzi, a longtime enemy of the progressive left who launched his campaign in the front yard of a former NYPD officer. Republicans countered with Mazi Melesa Pilip, a 44-year-old mother of seven (!) who was born in Ethiopia and “has said she was among thousands of Jews from that country resettled in Israel in 1991.” There, Pilip says, she served in the Israel Defense Forces as a paratrooper before moving to the U.S. with her Ukrainian American husband. Concerningly, perhaps, for the GOP, Pilip is also a registered Democrat who wouldn’t say in a Thursday interview with the New York Times whether she will switch party affiliations or whether she thinks abortion should be legal. Politico, meanwhile, reports that the medical practice belonging to Pilip’s husband was sued in 2020 for failing to pay $70,000 in rent. Is there any force in the world stronger than the New York Republican Party’s insistence on nominating a candidate with unusual red flags in their background for Congress in the 3rd District?
The past few months of the Republican primary have belonged to Nikki Haley, at least from a standpoint of media oxygen. All that coverage, though, was premised on the idea that Haley might be able to translate her fundraising coups and well-received debate performances into strong second-place showings in the early nominating contests. With less than a month to go until the Iowa caucuses, that’s starting to look like it might not happen. A Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll released this week found that Haley hasn’t gained any ground at all in the Hawkeye State since October; she’s not that much closer to Trump in New Hampshire and South Carolina, which are ostensibly more friendly to her. As we wrote Friday, Haley isn’t projecting much urgency, either, having done little to build an anti-Trump alliance within the GOP or persuade potentially wobbly Trump voters that she’s a superior candidate. It raises the possibility that she’s fine with finishing a distant second in order to set herself up for another run down the line, which, in addition to being disappointing from the perspective of small-d democracy, is pretty boring. C’mon, Nikki Haley!
Your substitute Surge author likes to fill the last spot on the weekly list with a character who’s involved in some sort of quirky or colorful situation, and this week that individual is definitely Sergey Ochigava—if, as they say, that’s actually his real name. In a bizarre incident uncovered by 404 Media, Ochigava arrived in the U.S. last month via a flight from Copenhagen to Los Angeles, then presented himself for entry at a customs station, whereupon it was discovered that he did not have a passport or visa, had not held a ticket for the flight, and did not know how he’d gotten to Copenhagen in the first place. All that Ochigava remembered, apparently, is that he is a “Russian economist” and hadn’t slept for three days; ID cards from Israel and Russia were found in his bag. Members of the flight crew said they noticed him moving between seats and that he tried to eat some chocolate that was in their personal area, but that he was not otherwise disruptive. He’s in custody and scheduled for a Dec. 26 hearing in L.A. on charges of, we guess, having too good a time in Copenhagen. (And, really, who among us could blame him for that?)
The Issue That Republicans Cannot Simply Outrun
10
0
16.12.2023
Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s guide to the big newsmakin’ names of the week in the political sphere. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell. Did you guys see that the new season of Fargo is out? Love that show. Didn’t mind the last season of Ted Lasso as much as everyone else, either, if we’re being frank. Doesn’t it seem like people have gotten quicker to turn against things like TV shows these days? What ever happened to having a little loyalty? Anyhoo, this week we’ve got hedge-fund alpha men, mystery airline passengers, and secret swingers. But first, more on the signature issue of the past two years.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
Cox is a 31-year-old Texas woman who was pregnant with a fetus that had a genetic condition that gave it very little chance of survival. She suffered cramping and other complications that forced her to seek emergency treatment multiple times, and continuing the pregnancy could have damaged her ability to give birth in the future. Cox’s doctor and a district court judge both attested that her condition met Texas’ standards for an exemption to its abortion ban. Texas’ Republican attorney general, though, appealed the decision to the Texas Supreme Court, which rejected Cox’s argument. Though she was ultimately able to obtain a (legal) abortion out of state, the attention on her case has been inconvenient for the Republican Party’s efforts to escape the electoral gravity of 2022’s Supreme Court Dobbs decision, which legalized bans like the one in Texas. (Said efforts, spearheaded by prominent Republican women, have included strategically vague but inclusive rhetoric and stabs at changing the subject to contraception.) But with cases like Cox’s likely to continue getting coverage—especially because creating cases like Cox’s was in some sense the entire point of trying to overturn Roe v. Wade—the issue is probably not going to be one that the GOP can outrun.
Last week we wrote about Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and the campus antisemitism news cycle she created by grilling the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Penn about how they’d punish a hypothetical student who called for genocide against Jews. The presidents’ primary antagonist in the aftermath of the hearing, though, has been a hedge-fund billionaire named Bill Ackman, who pressed (unsuccessfully) this week for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth. (Penn’s Liz Magill resigned last Saturday.) Who is this Ackman fellow? Well, he........
© Slate
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
