Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Battlegrounds

[Brexiter]

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Rex Huppke of USA Today asserting that the shoe salesman cares about nothing and no one but himself.

Let’s be clear about several things. Trump doesn’t care about the U.S.-Mexico border or immigrants in general. He doesn’t care about [murder victim Ruby] Garcia or her family in Michigan. And he definitely doesn’t care about you. (Yes, even you, MAGA fans. You're his marks, not his friends.)

Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and that is all. If claiming he had spoken with a grieving family helps Trump spook voters into thinking he alone can protect them from an imagined wave of criminal immigrants, then that’s good for Trump, and quite literally nothing else matters.

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I didn’t hear Trump, between his xenophobic rants, saying he would address the ease with which violent men can obtain firearms. I didn’t hear him mention how, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner each month. Trump was silent on the fact that, according to the Emory University School of Medicine, 5.3 million women are victims of intimate-partner violence each year.

He didn’t mention those things because he doesn’t care about them, and he doesn’t care about them because those issues don’t help him.

Khaya Himmelman of Talking Points Memo reports that a ballot initiative passed by Wisconsin voters may give election deniers and conspiracy theorists an oversized role in that state’s elections.

On Tuesday, Wisconsin voters approved two Republican-backed ballot measures that will ban the use of private money in elections, and a second, deliberately vague measure that will limit who can perform election-related tasks in the state.

The initiatives are both rooted in 2020 election conspiracy theories and election denialism, and designed to sow seeds of distrust in the swing state’s election system, election officials and experts told TPM.

Similar to actions made in several other states around the U.S., the private money measure was written as a response to the 2020-era “Zuckerbucks” conspiracy theory involving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan giving out millions of dollars in election administration grants to various election departments to help them run the election during a pandemic.

But the second referendum, which will amend the state constitution to specify that only designated election officials can administer elections, is particularly worrying, experts say. The change will likely exacerbate the ongoing election worker shortage in the state, and also intentionally muddy who is and isn’t allowed to run elections and help out at polling places. This is currently Wisconsin law, but now that voters have approved it as part of the constitution, it’ll be harder to repeal.

It was also written in response to a conspiracy theory.

Patrick Svitek and Michael Scherer of The Washington Post report that an effort to consolidate all of Nebraska’s electoral votes into a winner-take-all system has gone down to defeat. For now.

Nebraska is one of only two states that divide electoral votes among statewide and congressional district winners, which allowed Joe Biden to pick off an electoral vote in the red state in 2020 by carrying a swing district in the Omaha area. But Gov. Jim Pillen (R) and Trump on Tuesday endorsed a proposal to return the state to a winner-take-all system, possibly upending the final days of the state’s legislative session, which ends April 18.

The effort was put to an early test Wednesday night when Republican state Sen. Julie Slama tried to add the winner-take-all proposal to an unrelated bill as an amendment. The chair of the legislature ruled that the amendment was not germane to the underlying bill, prompting an effort to overrule the chair.
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The vote to override needed 23 yes votes to pass, given the attendance in the chamber at the time of the vote. Only eight voted yes.

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The sponsor of the winner-take-all proposal has said he does not have the votes to overcome a filibuster, but Trump’s intervention has raised speculation that Republicans could regroup.

Mark Joseph Stern of Slate writes that the Florida Supreme Court decision approving a six-week abortion ban and allowing an abortion access amendment onto the November ballot is more dangerous than it seems.

There’s no doubt that this court is supremely hostile to abortion. In its first decision on Monday, the conservative supermajority overturned decades of precedent protecting access to abortion under the Florida Constitution’s right to privacy. In 1980 voters enshrined this right, the cornerstone of Roe v. Wade, into the state’s founding charter, with an evident understanding that it would safeguard reproductive autonomy. Yet, by a 6–1 vote, the court gutted the amendment by ignoring historical evidence of its broad original meaning. At the same time, by a 4–3 vote, the court upheld a proposed amendment that would restore an expansive right to abortion access throughout the state. It will require 60 percent support to pass in November.

This second ruling might seem to temper the majority’s hostility toward reproductive freedom. Not quite: Piecing together the fractured opinions, it becomes clear that six justices stand ready to institute fetal personhood under existing state law. The disagreement among this far-right supermajority comes down to tactics, timing, and deference to democracy. Three are prepared to now wield fetal personhood as a sword against any expansion of abortion, even by constitutional amendment. Three are waiting to impose personhood if the upcoming amendment fails and will not weaponize the doctrine today to keep the initiative off the ballot. (All but one of these justices were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.) Just a single justice, Jorge Labarga—who dissented from the court’s first decision gutting the right to privacy—declined to board the personhood train.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic looks on as America’s churches continue to empty out and wonders if we are not paying a social price for it.

Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

Thompson’s essay is along the lines of Klinenburg’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic about the decline of American social infrastructures.

Ben Samuels of Haaretz writes that the inside-the-Beltway prominence of Chef José Andrés may be lending an urgency to seeking some sort of solution to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

"Everyone in foreign policy circles, at the White House and State Department have dined in José Andrés' restaurants," tweeted Dave Harden, who previously ran point for USAID in the West Bank and Gaza.

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Furthermore, Andrés' work with World Central Kitchen has transcended politics. His efforts to feed at-risk populations in conflict zones and those reeling from natural disasters have bridged the gap between humanitarian circles deep in the trenches, and elite philanthropists and celebrities who prefer to speak with their dollars.

The fact that humanitarian aid workers are paying the ultimate price for Israel's failure to establish deconfliction measures – and America's failure to better hold Israel accountable – is not new.
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The fact that a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen, Jacob Flickinger, was among the aid workers killed Monday only ups the ante. Since the Hamas attack of October 7, in which 32 American citizens were murdered and at least a dozen taken hostage, all of the 23 confirmed U.S. casualties to date during the Gaza war have been Israeli soldiers, save one member of the Israeli police force and one civilian in the West Bank. That could very well make Flickinger the first U.S. citizen confirmed killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, though U.S. officials have yet to confirm this.

BBC News reports on Ukraine’s controversial honoring of international hacker “vigilantes” with certificates for cyberattacks on Russian targets.

One Fist is made up of hackers from eight different countries including the UK, US and Poland. They have collectively launched dozens of cyber-attacks - celebrating each one on social media.

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Since the start of the conflict, Ukraine has controversially been encouraging volunteer hackers to attack Russian targets. But sending out official awards to foreign civilians is being seen as a controversial move and a sign of the times.

Although many nations, including the UK and the US, have official award systems for ethical hacking, this is thought to be the first time a country has awarded hackers for malicious and possibly criminal hacks.

In October, in response to the increase in vigilante hacking in Ukraine and in the Gaza conflict, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned against the use and encouragement of civilian hackers. It published guidelines to reinforce the ethos of the rules of war laid out in the existing Geneva Conventions.

Simon Book, Alexander Demling, Georg Fahrion, Christoph Giesen, Simon Hage, and Martin Hesse of Der Spiegel report that the German auto industry is nearing a “existential crisis” due to difficulty in transitioning to electric cars.

In Germany, the electric car is becoming a symbol of a shift to green technologies that has been botched by the state, just like the debate over the switch from gas heating to heat pumps that preceded it. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is waging a cultural war from the right against the electric car. Left-wing extremists, meanwhile, set fire on March 5 to an transmission tower just outside of Berlin, shutting down the Tesla plant there for several day. In a statement of responsibility, activists claimed the act was in protest against "techno-fascists" like Elon Musk.

At the same time, it is clear to almost every transport policymaker and auto industry executive in the world that the day of the electric car is coming – and fast. The question is whether Germany and its car manufacturers will be part of the transition and help shape it – or whether they will be bowled over by the change. No longer, it would seem, does Germany call the shots in the global automotive industry.

The pace and the technology are now determined by others. In China, the world's largest car market, almost a quarter of all new cars sold are all-electric vehicles. To survive in the country, you need competitive electric vehicles. The competition is no longer dominated by VW, BMW or Mercedes, but by Tesla from the United States and BYD from China. And the newcomers are no longer confining themselves to their home markets – they are also capturing market share in Germany and Europe.

Finally today, Diane Taylor of The Guardian reports about the Taliban’s destruction of the bookshop made famous by The Bookseller of Kabul—and its revival.

Shah Muhammad Rais first opened his bookshop in the Afghan capital in 1974. By 2003, when his story was made famous by the bestselling book The Bookseller of Kabul, the business had collected about 100,000 books, in different languages, about literature, history and politics. The collection included works of fiction and nonfiction, with everything from richly illustrated children’s tales to dense academic tomes.

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After the Taliban stormed Kabul in 2021, Rais fled to the UK, telling the Guardian last year that he feared the group would destroy his cherished business. His fears came true.

Last December, the Taliban turned up at the bookshop, locked the doors and ordered the employees to hand over all the passwords for Rais’s website and catalogue, before destroying the archive he had been building since he first opened the shop.
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“For two weeks after this happened I wanted to end my life. But suddenly I got my energy back,” he said. He resolved to rebuild his unique collection from scratch. Because his online business was global, he already had many contacts in countries such as Iran and Pakistan and across central Asia. Rais, who speaks six languages, signed a deal with an Indian IT company to create a new website – Indo Aryana Book Co.

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