January 3, 2024

Wednesday, January 3, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Will further exposing National Rifle Association corruption end the reign of the NRA President?

Could it happen in 2024?

LaPierre, Longtime N.R.A. Leader, Faces Trial That Could End His Reign.

For decades, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, has been a survivor. He has endured waves of palace intrigue, corruption scandals and embarrassing revelations, including leaked video that captured his inability to shoot an elephant at point-blank range while on a safari.

But now, Mr. LaPierre, 74, faces his gravest challenge, as a legal showdown with New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, goes to trial in a Manhattan courtroom. Ms. James, in a lawsuit filed amid an abrupt effort by the N.R.A. to clean up its practices, seeks to oust him from the group after reports of corruption and mismanagement.

Much has changed since Ms. James began investigatingthe N.R.A. four years ago. The organization, long a lobbying juggernaut, is a kind of ghost ship. After closing its media arm, NRATV, in 2019, it has largely lost its voice, and Mr. LaPierre rarely makes public pronouncements. Membership has plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million five years ago. Revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to its internal audits, and legal costs have soared to tens of millions a year.

When the N.R.A. filed for bankruptcy in Texas nearly three years ago, the step was part of a strategy to move to the state amid the New York investigation. But a Texas judge dismissed the case, saying the N.R.A. was using the filing “to address a regulatory enforcement problem, not a financial one.” Now, longtime insiders say, the organization may be reaching a point where a legitimate bankruptcy filing is necessary.

Even with the N.R.A. moribund, Mr. LaPierre’s legacy as a lobbyist, if not as a marksman, remains intact. The gun rights movement has become a bulwark of red state politics during his more than three decades at the group’s helm. In recent years, significant federal gun control measures have been a nonstarter for Republicans despite a proliferation of mass shootings.

Mr. LaPierre is among four defendants in the suit brought by Ms. James in 2020. Others include John Frazer, the N.R.A.’s general counsel, and Wilson Phillips, a former finance chief. The fourth defendant, Joshua Powell, was the organization’s second-in-command for a time, but later turned against it and even called for universal background checks for those buying guns and so-called red flag laws that allow the police to seize firearms from people deemed dangerous.

The attorney general’s office has had settlement talks with Mr. Powell, a person with knowledge of the case said, but no deal has been announced.

New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The N.R.A. was founded in New York State in 1871 by Civil War veterans who wanted an organization that would help gun owners improve their marksmanship, but in the modern era it has been the face of resistance to efforts to regulate weapons.

Ms. James seeks to use her regulatory authority over nonprofit groups to impose a range of financial penalties against the defendants and to remove Mr. LaPierre; any money recovered would flow back to the N.R.A. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday before State Supreme Court Justice Joel M. Cohen. The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.

A parade of revelations from recent years will be front and center. Mr. LaPierre, for instance, was a regular for more than a decade at a Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills, where he spent nearly $40,000 of N.R.A. money in a single May 2004 outing. He also billed more than $250,000 for travel to, among other places, Palm Beach, Fla., Reno, Nev., the Bahamas and Italy’s Lake Como. He has argued that these were legitimate business expenses.

During his testimony in the 2021 bankruptcy case, Mr. LaPierre said he did not know Mr. Phillips had received a $360,000-a-year consulting contract after being pushed out of the N.R.A. He also said he was unaware that his personal travel agent, hired by the N.R.A., was charging a 10 percent booking fee for charter flights on top of a retainer of up to $26,000 a month. Mr. LaPierre’s close aide, Millie Hallow, was even kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in N.R.A. funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.

The N.R.A. has said it is being persecuted by New York regulators. The group recently enlisted the support of the American Civil Liberties Union in a federal lawsuit that accuses former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration of misusing their authority by dissuading banks and insurers from doing business with the N.R.A. Ms. James, the group has pointed out repeatedly, vowed to investigate the N.R.A. even before she was elected.

“It’s a matter of faith among members, based on credible external evidence, that the N.R.A. was facing these adverse actions by government officials if not entirely, then in large part, because of their antipathy toward the N.R.A. and its Second Amendment advocacy,” the gun organization’s lead lawyer, William A. Brewer III, said in an interview.

He added that the organization had taken numerous steps to address its corporate practices and that the attorney general’s case relied largely on witnesses who were no longer affiliated with the N.R.A.

“This phase of the case is about tales from the crypt,” Mr. Brewer said, adding that the organization’s mentality today was that “if you made a mistake, you’re going to pay it back with interest, and if you do it again, you’re gone.”

Mr. Brewer, a Democrat, emerged as the N.R.A.’s top lawyer in 2018 after being enlisted by Mr. LaPierre to ward off New York regulators. He is viewed with extreme suspicion by the longtime N.R.A. lawyers that he supplanted, including one, J. Steven Hart, who once asked a colleague in an email: “Is Brewer a moron or a Manchurian candidate?”

Beyond Ms. James, the N.R.A.’s most formidable adversaries these days are not gun control groups, but former insiders who have been cast out of the kingdom.

Oliver North, the organization’s former president, is scheduled to be a witness. He has said Mr. Brewer’s legal bills, which exceeded $70 million over three years, “are shocking to me and many others.” Mr. North was forced out in 2020 amid a power struggle between Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Brewer on one side and the N.R.A.’s longtime advertising and public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, which employed Mr. North, on the other.

Another former insider, Willes Lee, departed abruptly as first vice president of the N.R.A.’s board in April and was a vocal critic of the group for a time. In a Facebook post, he summed up the N.R.A.’s legal strategy as “Keep old folks who were in charge during the heinous NYAG allegations & admitted abuse. Eliminate leaders who weren’t here during the gross abuse & outrageous allegations. To the Judge, plead ‘We’ve changed’.”

With the trial approaching, tumult has continued within the organization’s leadership. Joe DeBergalis, Mr. LaPierre’s top deputy, left and was replaced by Mr. LaPierre’s longtime spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam. Phillip Journey, a former N.R.A. director turned critic who is also among the scheduled witnesses, was critical of the move.

“He’s putting malleables — what did Lenin call them, useful idiots? — in all the important spots,” he said in an interview.

Ms. James originally sought to shut the N.R.A. down entirely, as one of her predecessors succeeded in doingwith the Trump Foundation, a scandal-plagued offshoot of former President Donald J. Trump’s financial empire.

That step was rejected in 2022 by Judge Cohen. More recently, the judge appears to have lost patience with the N.R.A., writing on Dec. 28 that its latest motion to dismiss the case was “belated and procedurally questionable” and expressing concern that it could interfere with the trial schedule.

Legal observers think Mr. LaPierre will be hard pressed to convince the judge that he should keep his job, given the revelations that have surfaced.

“He won’t go down without a fight,” said Nick Suplina, a former senior adviser and special counsel at the attorney general’s office who works for the gun control advocacy group Everytown.

“Given the pervasive problems at the N.R.A.,” he added, “it is hard to imagine a judge not finding fault with the head of the organization.” (New York Times)

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Who won when Claudine Gay resigned from Harvard?

How culture warriors weaponized Jewish grief and forced Harvard’s president to resign, by Rabbi Jay Michaelson.

Claudine Gay’s enemies are not our friends.

In a few years, no one will remember ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism kerfuffle. 

All we’ll remember is that that she angered some rich pro-Israel donors, as well as opportunistic activists and politicians, and they got her fired.

That should be chilling.

Gay, who resigned Tuesday after just a six-month tenure, has faced calls for her resignation since October, when a consortium of Harvard student organizations issued a statement blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. Instead of condemning that position, Harvard’s response merely stated that Gay and senior administrators were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas.” 

Calls for Gay’s resignation increased after her much-scrutinized testimony in front of Congress on the question of whether “calls for genocide against Jews” would violate Harvard’s anti-harassment policies. She correctly noted that the answer depended on context, but did not condemn such statements — which she was not asked to do.

The criticism was particularly vehement and sustained from conservatives. The same conservatives who, until about five minutes ago, professed deep fears that ideologically motivated actors were “canceling” academics they disagreed with. 

But times have changed.

There are two motives in the coalition that forced this surrender: the pro-Israel politics of extremely wealthy (mostly Jewish) donors like Bill Ackman, and the war on “woke” higher education by social conservatives like Rep. Elise Stefanik and the same cadre of activists, like Christopher Rufo, who call gay people “groomers” and fight to ban books. Both are troubling.

Yes, the immediate pretext for Gay’s resignation was a plagiarism controversy. I can say — as someone who holds a doctorate and has written a handful of academic articles as well as a book based on my doctoral dissertation — that Gay’s use of “paraphrases” that are really unattributed quotations with one or two words changed around is a significant offense. Everyone in the academic world knows this kind of non-citation is an ethical violation, and Gay did it in at least five of her 11 scholarly articles.

Of course, scholars can quote, but they have to cite as well. That’s how it works.

Then again, it’s also true that Gay, whose research focuses on government and African-American studies, is primarily a quantitative scholar, not a literary one. She didn’t steal anyone’s research, and she didn’t take credit for anyone’s ideas beyond a few phrases here and there. This was an infraction, but it’s more like a speeding ticket than a criminal offense.

In context, the plagiarism issue is clearly a pretext to pressure Gay and Harvard Corporation, and to invite a time-consuming and distracting congressional inquiry. The whole campaign, particularly the government action, is the political equivalent of a SLAPP suit — a threat of legal action made with the intention of making its target’s life so miserable that they just give up.

Which Harvard now has done.

Ackman’s role in the fracas is particularly troubling — in part because no one would give a fig about his ill-informed and inflammatory views were he not a billionaire. (Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.) His Dec. 10 letter to the Harvard Governing Boards demanding Gay’s removal misstated her positions and hyperbolically inflated their impact. 

Gay did not “support … rather than condemn” the organizations who signed the offensive and preposterous statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the Oct. 7 attacks. She simply, and I think ineptly, repeated the free-speech mantra that student organizations speak for themselves and not for Harvard.

And is it really plausible that “President Gay’s mishandling of Oct. 7th and its aftermath on campus have led to the metastasis of antisemitism to other universities and institutions around the world”? Really? The statement of a Harvard University president — rather than, say, misguided horror over the bombardment of Gaza — is what inspired the bigots in Ventura County or France? 

I share what seems to be Ackman’s pained, anguished, and arguably traumatizedresponse to Oct. 7. It still keeps me awake at night. But that doesn’t mean the response is right.

Because it isn’t about principle; it’s about power.

And, yes, that exercise of power obviously reinforces antisemitic conspiracy theories of how rich, powerful Jews squelch criticism of Israel. Somehow, the same people hyperconcerned with the optics of Gay’s actions can seem willfully oblivious to their own.

As to the culture warriors who joined with Ackman in efforts to displace Gay, they are part of a nationalistic campaign opposed to small-l liberalism. It’s not about free speech or the toleration of multiple viewpoints. It is simply a campaign of power: right against left, our side against theirs, MAGA versus “woke,” conservatism versus progress. 

When “our side” is being censored, we are for free speech. When “our side” is being attacked by speech, we are against free speech. 

The agenda of people like Stefanik and Rufo, here, is entirely clear. They have long fought against any form of education that they deem insufficiently patriotic; that dares to question conservative narratives of America’s greatness; that points out the enduring power of systemic racism; that diverges from religious traditions regarding sexuality and gender. In the hubbub over campus conflict over the war, they have found a new inroad for their fight.

These same folks are attacking school boards, liberal arts curricula, diversity programs and identity-based affinity groups. They wink at antisemitic statements and symbols when they’re made by people on the right, then profess outrage when they’re made, or allegedly made, by people on the left.

And now, as American Jews are reeling from Oct. 7, from the very real increases in antisemitism around the world, and from the horrors of the war in Gaza (whether we support or oppose it); at this moment when we are, frankly, vulnerable and raw — this is the moment at which our greatest fears are weaponized against the American liberalism that has welcomed Jews for a hundred years. For entirely understandable reasons, we have been swept up in a moral panic.

The last word here goes to a Harvard junior by the name of Tommy Barone. Interviewed by The New York Times last month, Barone said he did not believe Gay should step down. “Her resigning would be dangerous and set a precedent for higher education that would signal that with enough resources and commitment, powerful people can cow universities into making fundamental decisions about their structure.”

That precedent is now set. (The Forward).

The campaign that removed the President of Harvard was about DEI, not plagiarism.

Here is what happened. Elise Stefanik, a member of Congress who has trafficked in Great Replacement white nationalist theory, called three female leaders of universities to Congress alleging they were enabling anti-semitism. She called for all of them to resign. The President of Penn did. Two universities stood by their leaders. Other far-right figures pursued Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, accusing her of plagiarism. But really the goal is to remove her as a symbol of diversity, equity and inclusion. And too many in the media have been active participants in this campaign. On January 2, Gay resigned.

What does plagiarism have to do with anti-semitism? Nothing. But the goal was to remove Gay, the first Black president of Harvard. The campaign was open. To understand this, it makes sense to start with Christopher Rufo. Rufo is the most effective culture war strategist in attacking public education generally, and what he argues is the excessively liberal nature of higher education, in particular. His main tactic, repeated again and again, is to come up with a negative brand, and then demand that powerful actors denounce that negative brand, and do something about it that erases a broader set of liberal values. He has done this with discussions of race (labeling it Critical Race Theory) and gender (accusing those allowing discussion of gender in schools to be “groomers”) in classrooms. He saw the opportunity to leverage anti-semitic student protests as part of his broader attack on higher education.

This succeeded up to a point. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alum who was removed from the advisory board of Harvard’s Institute of Politics for lying about and voting against the outcome of the 2020 election, held a hearing with the leaders of MIT, Harvard and Penn, following Rufo’s strategy. The leaders performed dismally (and Gay subsequently apologized), but I’ve not seen anyone offer a persuasive claim that the statements they gave, under oath, were inaccurate. On many campuses, what might be considered hate speech is allowed. Indeed, what the right has told campuses over the last decade is that such speech is necessary. If you opine, for example, that some racial groups are genetically or culturally inferior and have a lower IQ, you must be heard. If you claim that people’s beliefs about their gender identity is a form of mental illness that must be eradicated, you can rely on campuses to provide space and security for your campus tour. Maybe this should be different, but again, the dominant message from the right and mainstream media has consistently been that universities were too quick to regulate speech on campus.

Stefanik’s hearing saw the leader of Penn, after the urging of some donors, resign. But Harvard announced its support for Gay. Then Rufo took a different tack, which was to push a campaign against Claudine Gay for instances of plagiarism.

The campaign relied on analyses by Christopher Brunet, a blogger who lost his job from the conservative Daily Caller after he previously made false accusations of another Harvard professor of fabricating data in his research about race. He specializes in targeting academics who work on topics related to race and gender. He therefore is neither a neutral nor especially reliable source, but he served Rufo’s purpose, and they jointly published the plagiarism accusations.(1).

For this campaign to work, they needed mainstream media to support them. And the media obliged. All in all, it has been a very successful couple of weeks for bad-faith attacks on higher education. In just 10 days, the New York Times published 13 pieces about the President of one university in the aftermath of both the hearings and the plagiarism allegations.

Is that a lot? To provide a comparison, we would need a benchmark of a university president accused of academic misconduct at a very prestigious institution. As it turns out, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne faced more serious accusations of academic misconduct involving data manipulation. A formal investigation was announced in November of 2022, and he was forced to resign in July of 2023. So, how many articles did the Times write about the topic prior to his resignation? Zero. And zero is probably the right number, because this is not national news until an actual resignation. But that is not the standard being applied to Gay, because the campaign is not about academic misconduct.

I focus on the Times not because it is unusual, but because it is the standard bearer for the news. It wasn’t just the Times. Other national media treated the topic as national news. Something more important than almost everything else. Something that deserves your attention.

In doing so, the media fed Rufo’s feeding frenzy. The story was newsworthy because they said it was newsworthy. It justifies the dubious idea that Congress, which has another government shutdown pending, should spend its time investigating the research record of one university leader. Which will then generate another round of stories.

Rufo’s campaign worked. He announced it publicly, explained its motivations, the media played their assigned role, and Rufo took the credit. You might ask how this can happen, but the better question is why it keeps happening.

Gay was permanently damaged as a leader. What happens when the most powerful media outlets in the world, ask, day in and day out, if you should be removed from your job? At some point key stakeholders, even supportive ones, start asking the same question. You have become a distraction. Time to move on for the good of the institution. We need a less contentious leader. The controversy becomes sufficient reason for the leader to go, even if the underlying causes are trivial.

As for the accusations of plagiarism: There are degrees of wrongdoing here. At its core, policies against plagiarism are intended to prevent against academic fraud, that someone is stealing the analytical work or core ideas of another scholar, and passing them off as their own. That is not the accusation against Gay. Instead, there are instances where she took a sentence or even multiple sentences and only slightly paraphrased the words and did not include a citation, or sometimes included a citation but not quotation marks. Here is one of the examples that critics have highlighted.

This is not good. It shows, at best, sloppiness, and at worst, a willingness an indifference to giving credit to other authors. But it is also very different from the claim that Dr. Gay’s work is really the work of others. The passages are not central to the intellectual contribution of her work. It is certainly newsworthy, but is it really national news demanding story after story? But let’s be honest, the campaign is not really about her academic record. Folks who participate in Prager U videos are not stickers for academic integrity.

There is a difference between covering and participating in a culture war story

Gay was attacked because she is seen by the right as undeserving of the job. A diversity hire. Too woke. Taking the university in the wrong direction. In particular, Gay is under attack because she has been perceived as too supportive of DEI as a university Dean.

Gays removal is as much a victory for the New York Times, Jake Tapper and others in the media as it will be to Chris Rufo. A testimony to their power, but also to their incredulity and willingness to serve the goals of others.

The background here is that there is a campaign to remove both the formal offices and vestiges of diversity, equity and inclusion on American campuses. It is led by Rufo at the Manhattan Institute, who has produced model legislation for states to adopt. (The Manhattan Institute also employs John McWhorter, the New York Times columnist who is calling for Gay’s resignation). The Times even gave Rufo a column calling for the removal of DEI. Such offices existed before the murder of George Floyd, but in its aftermath, have been attacked for being too powerful. Firing Gay will be the biggest scalp yet for the anti-DEI forces, the clearest warning signal to universities to stop pushing such goals.

If you think I am exaggerating about the role DEI plays here, let’s consult Rufo again. He is explicit that DEI is a reason for targeting Gay (and not the white President of MIT, for example), in conflating DEI and anti-semitism, and claiming credit for the success of his anti-DEI mission.

He even wrote an article about this!

I would argue that the concerted attack of DEI on campuses is perhaps a more newsworthy story than Gay’s plagiarism. For example, in the same time frame that the Times wrote a dozen stories about Gay, the Assembly Leader in Wisconsin, Robin Vos, stepped in to prevent pay raises for all employees at the University of Wisconsin system unless DEI offices were cut. And the Governor of Oklahoma signed an executive order removing funding from DEI offices in the university system. Neither event was covered in the Times. Legislation banning DEI has become law in other states, including Florida, Texas, North Dakota, Tennessee, and North Carolina. To the degree they are covered, such events are not treated as a critical story demanding your attention in the same way that Gay’s leadership at Harvard has been. Actual policy changes related to race on larger campuses matter less than whatever is happening at Harvard.

It is entirely feasible to not treat the bad-faith framings of events by the far right as legitimate news. It’s a choice. If you are concerned about the integrity of higher ed, there are more pressing examples. A recent AAUP report on censorship and the imposition of political control in Florida, for example, is vastly more important and deserves more attention. As Paul Krugman points out, in the only piece in the Times that covered the report as best as I can tell, 430,000 students are in higher education in Florida, compared to 7,000 undergrads in Harvard. In New College, where the experiment has gone furthest, Chris Rufo and other political appointees have overseen a pattern of cronyism, censorship and incompetence. This is how they want to transform higher education. (Don Moynihan, Professor, Georgetown University, Substack).

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Zabar’s - diversity in action on the Upper Westside of New York City.

How Legendary NYC Deli and Grocery Store Zabar’s Sells 4,000 Pounds of Fish Per Week

Zabar’s is a beloved local destination for just about everything.

Open since 1934, New York grocery landmark Zabar’s sells over 4,000 pounds of smoked fish and 8,000 pounds of coffee a week. “That’s a lot of fucking coffee to sell for one store,” says general manager Scott Goldshine, who has been in charge of operations at Zabar’s for over 30 years. “Not a chain — this is just one location, one store.”

One secret to Zabar’s popularity: consistency. Every Tuesday, floor manager Ken Hom and Annie Zabar cup, smell, and taste all of the coffee that is delivered to Zabar’s. It’s become a ritual every week, one they never skip. “One of the reasons people keep coming back for everything is they know it’s going to taste the same every week,” explains Goldshine.

Zabar’s, an icon of the Upper West Side, is not just known for its coffee — in fact, it’s probably best known for smoked fish. And the buying of the fish is a task taken very, very seriously. Saul Zabar, now 95 years old, used to be the fish buyer; now Tomas Rodriguez, who trained for years under Zabar, is in charge of acquiring the goods.

“He’s Dominican, but he’s buying the smoked fish for the greatest Jewish smoked fish store in the world,” quips Goldshine.

Once the fish is hand-selected by Rodriguez and delivered to Zabar’s, it’s sold and served in various ways. The fish counter pros hand-cutting lox into paper-thin slices inspire devotion from locals; then there are the fish salads, made from recipes passed down through generations. Yuri Khanis, appetizer department cook, has been with Zabar’s for 34 years and knows all of Saul Zabar’s fish salad recipes. “These recipes are 50 years old,” says Goldshine. “Saul still comes back here most days [and] he tastes.”

Watch the full video to see the ins and outs of the Zabar’s operations and meet the individuals who make the store what it is.

https://youtu.be/o3p81V6IuWk (Eater).

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