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      ‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knows

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      Interview‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knowsDavid Smith in Washington In her newly published memoir, Growing Up Biden, the president’s sister pays tribute in a moving portrait of sibling loveWho wouldn’t want Valerie Biden Owens in their corner? The first sister of the United States gives no inch in defending her big brother. Asked about Joe Biden’s notorious gaffes, for example, she simply rejects the premise.Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow Read more“He doesn’t have gaffes,” she insists. “He speaks the truth. Like, hello, surprise, I just said what was true!”At the end of a carefully crafted speech last month in Warsaw, Poland, the president ad libbed that Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, “cannot remain in power”. To the world’s media it was a howler implying regime change that upended weeks of diplomacy and sent aides scrambling.To Biden Owens, however, it was truth-telling after meeting refugee mothers and children.“This is a man, you see what you get,” she says, with recognisable flintiness. “His wife died. Two of his children died, one by a long death and one by a sudden death. And one almost from addiction. He was speaking from his heart. What kind of man [Putin] does this? That’s the real Joe Biden. That was not a gaffe.”Biden Owens, 76, is talking about her newly published memoir. Growing Up Biden is a lucid account of a middle-class childhood remarkable only for its ordinariness, becoming the first woman in US history to run a presidential campaign, and helping “Joey” emerge from personal and political disasters to reach his own mountaintop.It is also a moving portrait of sibling love. Joe is the oldest of four Biden children. Valerie was born three years later, followed by Jimmy and Frank.“At an age when a lot of other older brothers pretended they didn’t even know their sister, Joey took me everywhere with him,” she writes. “When his friends would ask, ‘Why did you bring a girl?’ he answered, ‘She’s not a girl. She’s my sister. If you want me around, she’s going to be around, too.’”Family life began in Scranton, Pennsylvania but work dried up for Joe Biden Sr, who found opportunities in Delaware, cleaning boilers and selling cars. The Bidens moved to a two-bedroom apartment there when Joe was 10.Valerie’s book does not dwell long on her brother’s childhood stutter but, via Zoom from her home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, she elaborates.“I don’t remember as a little girl that he stuttered; he was just my big brother. But as I got older then I saw that he was a stutterer. I could hear it and I was aware that he was made fun of and that he was made to feel less and put in a corner.“When you’ve been bullied, you have two ways to go: you can become a bully yourself or you can realise that we’re all in this together and there’s more to life than kicking somebody who’s down. So my brother, layer by thin layer, developed a backbone of steel and determined that he was not going to be defined by a bully.”How did their parents react to it?“Contrary to what he had incoming – because he stuttered, he was stupid – my mother said, ‘Oh no, Joey, it’s because you are so smart, you can’t get the words out fast enough’. So my mother gave him confidence. When a person stutters the natural inclination is to jump in and say the word for them but we didn’t do that.”Joe spent hours alone in front of a mirror, reciting Irish poetry. “He spit the stutter out. He worked at it. In the end, adversity builds character. My brother turned out to be the man that he is with such great empathy because he was a stutterer, so that turned out to be one of his best gifts in hindsight.”Joe worked as a lawyer, joined the county council and became known in Democratic politics in Delaware. Fifty years ago last month, he announced that he would challenge a popular incumbent for a US Senate seat. Valerie, a 26-year-old high school teacher, ran his long-shot election bid.It must have been hard going, in a year that would produce campaign accounts with titles such as The Boys on the Bus?She reflects: “Politics was a boys’ club. Women in in the 1970s and through that period only opened and closed headquarters and got coffee and ordered the paper.“There were few women candidates. There were no women consultants or women campaign managers or even women journalists with rare exceptions. It was a brand new world for a woman but I had it a lot easier than a lot of women because my brother pulled up a chair for me at the table of all men and said, ‘This is my sister. She speaks for me. She’s the boss. What she says goes, nothing passes through or gets out of here unless she approves.’“It wasn’t because I was such a brilliant campaign strategist because I had never met a campaign manager before – nor had Joe and I really ever met a United States senator before. It was because I had a PhD in my brother. I knew Delaware, I knew my brother, I knew what the issues were and I knew how we wanted to present what we stood for and I knew how to listen to the people in Delaware who told us what they needed.“I had it easier until Joe left the room and then there were always doubters who looked at me as either the token relative or the token sister. But I was raised with a wonderful, decent man who was my father and three brothers, so I was not intimidated by men. I enjoyed them and I realised we’ve got to work together.”Biden won that first election by 3,163 votes, or less than 1.5%. Six weeks later, his wife Neilia and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed when their car collided with a tractor trailer. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured but survived.His sister’s most vivid memory of that day is the clack, clack, clack sound of hers and Joe’s heels as they hurried through the marble hallway of the US Capitol minutes after getting the call from their brother Jimmy. She writes: “Joe turned to me, eyes stricken, voice choked. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I remember his eyes. I wish I didn’t. Staring into them at that moment was like staring straight into hell.”She adds now: “My mom always said the eyes are the windows of the soul and I was looking into two dark, dark spaces, because he knew. It was horrible.“On 7 November, my brother was the too-young-to-serve newly elected senator from Delaware, 29 years old, the hope of the future of the Democratic party, had a beautiful wife, three magnificent children, and six weeks later the whole world turned on its axis. He was a young man whose heart had been ripped out. A young widower.“Life has a way of interrupting. You think you’re in control and then, bam. My dad said that’s when you’ve got to get up and keep moving. Joe had to get up because he had Beau and Hunter, his two sons, who were just ready to turn three and four years old, so he had a purpose.”Valerie moved in and helped raise the boys. She also guided Joe – who married Jill Jacobs in 1977 – to six more Senate terms, although they fared less well running for the White House. In the 1987 presidential campaign, he was accused of plagiarism after quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock but forgetting to credit him.Biden Owens recalls: “The whole incident of Neil Kinnock hurt me a lot personally because it went after my brother’s character and it was a slip of the tongue of omission. Joe should have said it and he didn’t and so he took the hit for it.”Joe ran a short campaign for the 2008 nomination but after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president he opted not to run in 2016. His sister suggests this had more to do with another tragedy, the death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer than discouragement from Obama.“We wanted to run for president but my brother hadn’t had time to heal and the way that we heal is as a family. What choice is there: to be with your son who you know has been given a death sentence or be out talking to the primary voters in New Hampshire? Just no choice. You have to go through a period of grief and mourning. Every person does it differently but the presidency was not on the cards for us.”‘Swings and misses’Joe wears Beau’s rosary on his left wrist every day. His sister insists that loss upon loss has not shaken their faith in God’s existence.“For me, being a Catholic is a package and, if you believe in the afterlife, it still is pretty hard. Particularly when Beau died, I remember yelling, ‘Why God, what possible good could come from this?’ It was a heart wrenching cry.“A friend of mine said to me maybe it’s because where he is now, he’ll be able to do even more good than were he with you on Earth. It gave me pause because it’s part of the story of the resurrection and life after death. I didn’t lose my faith because I, Valerie Biden Owens, need something bigger to hold on to than herself.”It looked like the end of the road for Joe’s political ambitions. But then, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump and the sight of white nationalists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, galvanised Biden for one more bid. Yet again, there was a rocky start.At a Democratic debate in Miami in June 2019, the California senator Kamala Harris challenged Biden’s opposition to mandatory desegregation busing in the 1970s, telling the story of a girl who was part of schools’ racial integration and ending with dramatic effect: “That little girl was me.”Biden Owens was not impressed. “Being a campaign manager, I know sometimes your candidate swings and misses. That was a swing and a miss and certainly it was not an accurate representation but it was a campaign. Immediately in the fallout, it was clear that was not a smack to Joe.”Biden went on to win the primary with significant support from Black voters. Bearing no grudge, he picked Harris as his running mate. His sister adds: “Look, my brother’s a smart man. He had been vice-president and he knew what it took and what he needed as his partner, and he chose her. So it all was OK.”This time the campaign was managed by Greg Schultz and then Jen O’Malley Dillon, with Valerie as adviser. She admits she had been hesitant about her brother running because Trump was sure to launch vulgar and dishonest attacks on the family.Sure enough, Republicans obsessed over Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, which included high-paid consultancies and gifts, alleging without evidence that Joe abused the vice-presidency to enrich his son. There is still a frenzy over emails and photos found on a laptop abandoned by Hunter at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. Hunter did confirm that he was under federal investigation over a tax matter. He also wrote a memoir of his struggles with addiction.His aunt does not watch the rightwing media onslaught. “It’s been the same story for four years,” she says. “There’s nothing new. It’s the same one, same one, same one, same one. And by the way, the president has never been accused of any indication that he’s done anything wrong.“It’s the same accusations they’re dishing out. If that’s how they hope to win as opposed to anything that’s positive, what the hell difference does that make to the ordinary American who’s worried about food or medicine and education for their child? Who cares? Talk about something that matters, Republican party. Step up to the plate. Help middle-class America.”Perhaps voters agree. The attacks on Hunter never quite stuck like the “Lock her up!” attacks on Clinton. Biden won the White House, promising to heal “the soul of America” after four years of American carnage.There have been accomplishments for sure – a coronavirus relief package, a record 7.9m jobs created, a $1tn infrastructure law and a reassertion of America on the global stage – but disappointments persist on the climate crisis, police reform and voting rights in a Congress where Democrats’ majority is wafer-thin.Biden Owens reflects: “What I think was mom’s most profound statement was ‘beware the righteous’ and we’ve got them on the right and we have them on the left equally now. I don’t know how these men and women in Congress are married, how they stay married. Compromise is not a dirty word. It doesn’t mean giving up your principles; it means rubbing off those rough edges.“It’s been a very difficult time and we’re all just trying to keep our head above water. But when you look at what Joe’s done – more jobs, more judges, more diversity, first woman vice-president, first African American woman on the [supreme court] bench – Joe remembers his roots. He’s a middle-class, ordinary American who had opportunities to do an extraordinary thing, becoming president. He’s got his eye on the ball, which is middle class America.”‘All Republicans aren’t bad guys’The president has been criticised, however, for relying on an old operating system in which compromise was possible and failing to recognise that today’s Republican party has embraced Trump’s authoritarianism and lies.“What puzzles me is this: what happened to Lindsey Graham?” Biden Owens writes, referring to the Republican senator for South Carolina. “After John McCain died, perhaps a part of Senator Graham’s soul died as well. The man is unrecognisable to me.”She elaborates via Zoom: “I don’t know Lindsey Graham well but, to me, the good guy, the decent person, a large portion of that left him. The Republican party has become a party of a personality cult.‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House runRead more“All Republicans aren’t bad guys and there are good men and women who are Republicans and God bless them because that’s what we got to do to keep our democracy working. But the kissing the ring of the former president, I don’t understand it. It’s there and it’s something to be dealt with. But I have hope that the good men and women will stop this slide.”Valerie, who is married to Jack Owens, a lawyer and businessman, and has three children, says her brother will run again in 2024 and the question of his age – he turns 80 this year – is for the voters to decide. Early in her book, she reflects matter-of-factly that she lived the first 40 years of her public adult life in his shadow.Does she have any regrets – and wonder, perhaps, if she could have been President Biden? She quotes the novelist Edith Wharton: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”She explains: “That’s me and Joe. Sometimes he was the candle, sometimes I was the mirror, but it also flipped. My light was never snuffed out. My life was doing what I wanted to do and what I could do best. I could talk about Joe Biden much better than Joe Biden could talk about Joe Biden.“People could take the measure of the man or not and he got to do what he did best, which was go out, listen to the voters, tell what he was about and be the best Joe Biden that he could be. So no, it was a wonderful partnership and I wouldn’t have changed it.”
      Growing Up Biden is published in the US by Celadon
      TopicsBooksJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsPolitics booksinterviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow

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      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow The depth of Trump’s corruption is familiar but still astonishing when presented in the whole. Alas, his party shares itThe great abuses of power by Richard Nixon’s administration which are remembered collectively as Watergate had one tremendous benefit: they inspired a raft of legislation which significantly strengthened American democracy.The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of historyRead moreThis new book from the Brookings Institution, subtitled How to Restore Ethics, The Rule of Law and Democracy, recalls those far-away days of a functioning legislative process.The response to Watergate gave us real limits on individual contributions to candidates and political action committees (Federal Election Campaign Act); a truly independent Office of Special Counsel (Ethics in Government Act); inspector generals in every major agency (Inspector General Act); a vastly more effective freedom of information process; and a Sunshine Law which enshrined the novel notion that the government should be “the servant of the people” and “fully accountable to them”.Since then, a steadily more conservative supreme court has eviscerated all the most important campaign finance reforms, most disastrously in 2010 with Citizens United, and in 2013 destroyed the most effective parts of the Voting Rights Act. Congress let the special counsel law lapse, partly because of how Ken Starr abused it when he investigated Bill Clinton.The unraveling of Watergate reforms was one of many factors that set the stage for the most corrupt US government of modern times, that of Donald Trump.Even someone as inured as I am to Trump’s crimes can still be astonished when all the known abuses are catalogued in one volume. What the authors of this book identify as “The Seven Deadly Sins of Trumpery” include “Disdain for Ethics, Assault on the rule of law, Incessant lying and disinformation, Shamelessness” and, of course, “Pursuit of personal and political interest”.The book identifies Trump’s original sin as his refusal to put his businesses in a blind trust, which led to no less than 3,400 conflicts of interest. It didn’t help that the federal conflict of interests statute specifically exempts the president. Under the first president of modern times with no interest in “the legitimacy” or “the appearance of legitimacy of the presidency”, this left practically nothing off limits.The emoluments clause of the constitution forbids every government official accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” but lacks any enforcement mechanism. So a shameless president could be paid off through his hotels by everyone from the Philippines to Kuwait while the Bank of China paid one Trump company an estimated $5.4m. (As a fig leaf, Trump gave the treasury $448,000 from profits made from foreign governments during two years of his presidency, but without any accounting.)Trump even got the federal government to pay him directly, by charging the secret service $32,400 for guest rooms for a visit to Mar-a-Lago plus $17,000 a month for a cottage at his New Jersey golf club.The US Office of Special Counsel catalogued dozens of violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by federal officials. Miscreants included Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino, Nikki Haley and most persistently Kellyanne Conway. The OSC referred its findings to Trump, who of course did nothing. Conway was gleeful.“Let me know when the jail sentence starts,” she said.There was also the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, addressing the Republican convention from a bluff overlooking Jerusalem during a mission to Israel. In a different category of corruption were the $43,000 soundproof phone booth the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt installed and the $1m the health secretary Tom Price spent on luxury travel. Those two actually resigned.The book is mostly focused on the four-year Trump crimewave. But it is bipartisan enough to spread the blame to Democrats for creating a climate in which no crime seemed too big to go un-prosecuted.Barack Obama’s strict ethics rules enforced by executive orders produced a nearly scandal-free administration. But Claire O Finkelstein and Richard W Painter argue that there was one scandal that established a terrible precedent: the decision not to prosecute anyone at the CIA for illegal torture carried out under George W Bush.This “failure of accountability” was “profoundly corrosive. The decision to ‘look forward, not back’ on torture … damaged the country’s ability to hold government officials to the constraints of the law”.However, the authors are probably a little too optimistic when they argue that a more vigorous stance might have made the Trump administration more eager to prosecute its own law breakers.The authors point out there are two things in the federal government which are even worse than the wholesale violation of ethical codes within the executive branch: the almost total absence of ethical codes within the congressional and judicial branches.The ethics manual for the House says it is “fundamental that a member … may not use his or her official position for personal gain”. But that is “virtually meaningless” became members can take actions on “industries in which they hold company stock”.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreThe Senate exempts itself from ethical concerns with two brilliant words: no member can promote a piece of legislation whose “principal purpose” is “to further only his pecuniary interest”. So as long as legislation also has other purposes, personal profit is no impediment to passage.The authors argue that since the crimes of Watergate pale in comparison to the corruption of Trump, this should be the greatest opportunity for profound reform since the 1970s. But of course there is no chance of any such reform getting through this Congress, because Republicans have no interest in making government honest.Nothing tells us more about the collapse of our democracy than the primary concern of the House and Senate minority leaders, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Their only goal is to avoid any action that would offend the perpetrator or instigator of all these crimes. Instead of forcing him to resign the way Nixon did, these quivering men still pretend Donald Trump is the only man qualified to lead them.
      Overcoming Trumpery is published in the US by Brookings Institution Press
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS political financingUS voting rightsUS constitution and civil libertiesreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House run

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      ‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House runFirst lady tells authors of new biography she cut off push to recruit her husband to challenge George W Bush in 2004 Feeling “burned” by her husband’s first run for the presidency, Jill Biden resisted advisers including Ron Klain, now White House chief of staff, who pushed him to mount another campaign in 2004.Trump ‘very intent on bringing my brother down’, Joe Biden’s sister saysRead more“All these men – and they were mostly men – coming to our home,” she said. “You know, ‘You’ve got to run, you’ve got to run.’ I wanted no part of it.”The first lady was speaking to Julie Pace and Darlene Superville, co-authors of Jill: A Biography of the First Lady, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.“I didn’t even know whether I wanted Joe to ever do it again,” Jill Biden said. “I mean, I had been so burned.”Joe Biden first ran for president in 1987, withdrawing amid allegations that he plagiarised the leader of the British Labour party, Neil Kinnock, in campaign remarks.Jill Biden was describing a meeting at the Bidens’ house in Delaware more than 15 years later, when Joe Biden met Mark Gitenstein, a long-term adviser, and Klain joined on speakerphone.John Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator, was favourite for the Democratic nomination to challenge George W Bush. But, the authors write, “some party leaders thought Joe could go head-to-head with [the] president … in the general election”.“There were always so many people trying to get Joe to run,” Jill Biden said. “You’ve got to run again. You’ve got to try again. Always. It was constant.“He knew that I wasn’t in favour of his running.”The authors cite Jill Biden’s autobiography, Where the Light Enters, published in 2019, in which she describes “‘fuming’ out by the pool” while the meeting with Klain and Gitenstein went on.Jill Biden writes that she eventually cut the meeting off by drawing “NO” on her stomach with a Sharpie pen and “march[ing] through the room in my bikini.“Needless to say, they got the message.”“Joe and Gitenstein did, at any rate,” Pace and Superville write. “Klain, still eagerly engaged on speakerphone and unaware of what had just transpired in the room, kept brainstorming away.“‘I don’t understand it,’ a bewildered Klain said later when Gitenstein called to explain. ‘The conversation was going so great and all of a sudden, it just stopped.’”Joe Biden did mount a second run for the White House in 2008, with Jill’s support, but dropped out early, unable to compete with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.Neil Kinnock on Biden’s plagiarism ‘scandal’ and why he deserves to win: ‘Joe’s an honest guy’Read moreHe was Obama’s vice-president for eight years, spent four years in apparent retirement, then beat Donald Trump in 2020 to become, at 78, the oldest president inaugurated for the first time. Pace and Superville describe how Jill Biden supported her husband’s second and third White House runs.Klain was appointed to oversee the effort against Ebola in 2014 and remains one of Joe Biden’s closest and most powerful advisers. Last year, the New York Times reported that “Republicans have taken to calling him Prime Minister Klain”, a characterisation Klain has disputed.Gitenstein, a lawyer who worked for the Senate judiciary committee when Biden chaired it, was ambassador to Romania under Obama. He advised Biden in 2020 and is now US ambassador to the European Union.Jill Biden’s most senior male aide is Anthony Bernal. He has been described, by Politico, as both “an influential figure” and “one of the most polarising people” in the Biden White House.TopicsBooksPolitics booksJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratsUS elections 2004US elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Much ado about Doug: second gentleman takes spotlight at Shakespeare debate

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      Much ado about Doug: second gentleman takes spotlight at Shakespeare debate Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, argues in a mock trial hosted by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and presided over by Stephen Breyer“I haven’t been in court for a few years, so excuse me if I’m a bit rusty,” said Doug Emhoff. “You know, not too much has changed in my life – except for the Secret Service, Air Force Two, the selfies, the cameras following me everywhere, and oh: my wife is the vice-president of the United States.”Mood as light as spring air as Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers words to rememberRead moreThe theatre erupted in whoops and clapping. Kamala Harris, sitting in the fifth row with her sister Maya, blew kisses through a black face mask and applauded her husband.It was one of those only-in-Washington moments. On Monday, the Shakespeare Theatre Company hosted a “mock trial” inspired by William Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing and presided over by retiring supreme court justice and good sport Stephen Breyer.Much Ado is best known for Beatrice and Benedick, two proud intellects who only fall in love after others play Cupid. That seemed fitting for Harris and Emhoff, who were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend and married just shy of their 50th birthdays.But the question before the not-so-serious court was: should Margaret be held liable for Don John’s defamation of Hero? Emhoff, who was a prominent entertainment lawyer for nearly 30 years, was lead advocate on Margaret’s behalf.The event, full of inside-the-Beltway topical gags, had been due to take place last month but was postponed after the second gentleman came down with coronavirus.“I thank your honours for granting my motion for a continuance due to plague,” began Emhoff, wearing a dark suit, blue shirt and blue tie, and standing at a lectern under bright stage lights. “The White House apothecary told me my symptoms would be wild but – whew!”The mock trial is a longstanding Shakespeare Theatre Company tradition but had gone virtual for the past couple of years, due to the pandemic. Monday marked a return to an in-person audience at the Sidney Harman Hall but it was also livestreamed.Emhoff, an amiable and slightly goofy presence, remarked: “My parents tonight are watching the livestream but I might have told them that I was arguing in front of the United States supreme court so, cameraperson, can you just keep a very tight shot … ?”The second gentleman faced quick-fire questioning from Breyer and four leading judges from the District of Columbia and Virginia.“How do you define woman?” asked one, a nod to the recent esoteric questioning of the supreme court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by Republican senators.Tongue firmly in cheek, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she was interested in Beatrice and Benedick.“He says he doesn’t want to marry anyone but I think it’s clear from the text that his real concern is that if he marries somebody who’s really pretty and is really smart and witty, she could turn out to be the one who is better known and more prominent than he is.”There was laughter from the audience. There was more when Emhoff responded dryly: “As I say, your honour, I used to be somebody.”The judges – relishing a chance to let their hair down – also made references to Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, Downton Abbey, Republicans Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.Emhoff was careful not get too political. One judge asked: “So when Beatrice tore up her love letters, making them unavailable to investigators, was that a violation of the imperial records act? If so, is Merrick Garland going to get around to that?”The second gentleman demurred: “There’s certain things I’m not allowed to talk about.”Simon Godwin: how the British director is taking on US theatreRead moreBut he did take a deft swipe at Donald Trump’s oldest son, during his defence of Margaret.“She was just an unwitting pawn in the scheme of the real villain here, the self-described villain: Don Jr – I mean, Don John.”The case against Margaret was put by Debra Katz, a DC litigator and founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks. The judges and the theatre audience ruled in her favour, whereas the audience watching via livestream sided with Emhoff.Harris then took to the stage, gave Emhoff a hug, posed for photos and and spoke with those assembled including Britain’s Simon Godwin, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company.Someone managed to get a selfie with Emhoff before the Secret Service trod the boards and encouraged Harris to exit, stage right.TopicsUS politicsThe US politics sketchKamala HarrisDemocratsWilliam ShakespeareTheatrenewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historians

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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historiansThe ex-president also said that Iran, China and South Korea were happy Biden won, adding that ‘the election was rigged and lost’

      Review: The Presidency of Donald Trump
      Donald Trump has admitted he did not win the 2020 election.Capitol attack panel scores two big wins as it inches closer to Trump’s inner circleRead more“I didn’t win the election,” he said.The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.Describing his attempts to make South Korea pay more for US military assistance, Trump said Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, was among the “happiest” world leaders after the 2020 US election put Joe Biden in the White House.“By not winning the election,” Trump said, “he was the happiest man – I would say, in order, China was – no, Iran was the happiest.“[Moon] was going to pay $5bn, $5bn a year. But when I didn’t win the election, he had to be the happiest – I would rate, probably, South Korea third- or fourth-happiest.”Trump also said “the election was rigged and lost”.Trump’s refusal to accept defeat by Biden provoked attempts to overturn results in key states in court – the vast majority of such cases ending in defeat – and the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, and acquitted a second time after enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal.Trump thus remains free to run for the White House again in 2024, which he has repeatedly hinted he will do.Writing for the Atlantic, Zelizer said Trump “was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced ‘an accurate book’”.The former president called the historians assembled by Zelizer “a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I’d like to have you hear me out, which is what we’re doing now, and I appreciate it”.Trump, Zelizer wrote, “seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments”.Zelizer also pointed out that shortly after the session with the historians, Trump announced he would give no more interviews for books about his time in office.“It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful administration, or me, is a total waste of time,” Trump said in a statement, in July 2021.“These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.”TopicsBooksHistory booksPolitics booksDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Philosophers Weigh in on the Use and Abuse of Power

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      Wars are nasty affairs that destroy people, property and, so long as they last, any hope of perceiving even minimal truth in the news. That is why, after an urgent appeal initiated by the United Nations following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of philosophers from the world’s most prestigious universities came together last week to pool their thoughts on how political power might be redesigned to carry out policies aimed at improving rather than degrading the world. They also addressed the essential question of whom the people should entrust with political power in democracies where they have the right to do so.

      One participant referred to the conference as the “Davos of Metaphysicians.” More than 40 philosophers hailing from top universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Columbia, Sciences Po, Australian National University, Delhi University, Peking University,  the Universities of Bologna, Salamanca and Mexico City, agreed to meet after receiving strict instructions not to let the media even suspect the existence of the event before the publication of the final report. Moreover, to ensure a minimum of contamination, the organizers excluded from the debate any philosopher who had even dabbled in political thought or geopolitical matters in any publication at any point in their career. It was feared that anyone with such a profile might be compromised and be tempted to avert the press.

      Philosophers Refute Plato

      After four days of deliberations, which some privately called excruciatingly frustrating and unproductive, the council of philosophers emerged from a state of secrecy worthy of a papal conclave to issue a statement that began by countering Plato’s ancient recommendation that a good republic should be governed by philosophers. The council had the humility to cite its own chaotic deliberations as an illustration of why philosophers could not be trusted to govern effectively or even run any significant political entity.

      The council then began by listing other profiles that should equally be excluded from any role in governing. Inspired by the ancient Athenian example, a significant majority agreed that it would always be dangerous to attribute power to any professional politician, a status they defined as anyone who has served in an office of public service for more than a fixed number of months or years. The council failed to agree on a specific number but settled on an outside limit of not more than three years.

      The most radical philosophers proposed a term of three months for any political office. Their proposal is worth citing because it stipulated that after three months of service, the outgoing political representatives would assist and advise their incoming counterparts with full decision making authority to ensure continuity in government. This innovative idea was rejected by the majority of philosophers.

      Philosophers found it hard to reach agreement on numerous other issues. In their defense, they had only four days of deliberations. One of them complained afterwards that they failed to agree upon the mode of selection of public officials. Some wanted a lottery à la ancient Athens. Others wanted a good old fashioned election. Yet others such as the Indians and the Chinese suggested tough entrance examinations. A few wanted a combination of all three models. This matter could not be resolved for lack of time.

      The Smoke Signal

      On the afternoon of the fourth day, the council of philosophers broke its seal of secrecy and notified what they considered the most reputable media organization in the Western world to unveil the outcome of their deliberations. Fair Observer has seen the final report and finds the council’s work insightful. Other media organizations do not share this sentiment. They complained that the philosophers had failed to notify the media in advance. Besides, with Ukraine going on, who had time to pay attention to egg-headed philosophers?

      With few exceptions, the media appeared to refuse to publish the results of the conference or even acknowledge its existence. The philosophers took umbrage and declared that philosophers should not be the only group not allowed to govern. Anyone who had ever worked with the media in any capacity should be excluded from governing. They also made a unanimous recommendation that anyone trusted with governing should be prohibited from accepting any remunerated activity with the media after stepping down from office.

      The council of philosophers also excluded several  other professions from governing, including lawyers, financial professionals, C-level executives, military officers, entertainment and sports professionals. The council could come to no definitive agreement about shopkeepers and published an inconclusive statement about them. The council nearly degenerated into a riot when the question of teachers came up. The debate was so acrimonious that at one point the chairman of the session, a distinguished female philosopher at Cambridge, barely escaped injury from a cell phone tossed at her head. Numerous chairs and tables were damaged, some beyond repair.

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      Because of deep disagreement on the question of trusting teachers to govern, the philosophers decided that a new conference would be required in 2023 just to deal with that issue. One anonymous philosopher remarked that this was largely because nearly every philosopher is either currently teaching or has done so in the past. Several participants mentioned that the one thing the majority of philosophers could agree on is that self-interest is a significant variable capable of perverting any governance decision, whatever the form of government. The full report of the council is available at this link, which we urge all readers to consult.

      Most commentators in the media deny that such a conference of philosophers even took place. Assuming that no such conference assembled, a reasonable case can still be made that, given the flagrant failure of our political institutions to avoid not just war, but also the destruction of the environment, pandemics, imminent famine in many parts of the world and ever-growing economic injustice, the insight of a council of philosophers sincerely attempting to answer the question of how political power is structured and what it accomplishes could be deemed desirable.

      But the philosophers cited above, whether or not they actually exist, were probably right. The philosophers themselves cannot be counted on to lead, and those who hold power cannot be counted on to follow whatever authentic wisdom philosophers might produce.

      The views expressed  in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Radicalization and the Role of Video Games

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      The audience for video games is massive. According to Nielsen, 82% of global consumers either played video games or watched content related to them in 2020 — a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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      In 2019, the anti-hate organization ADL published survey data of US gamers, revealing that 23% of respondents had been exposed to white supremacist ideology in online games. Given recent surges in right-wing extremism and violence, including concerning trends in youth radicalization, understanding the extent to which this hugely popular medium offers a potential vector for radicalization is important.

      Gaming and Right-Wing Extremism

      There is a growing corpus of literature exploring the intersection between gaming and right-wing extremism. This includes work that focuses on the cultural overlap between online extremism and gaming communities; potential vulnerabilities that might mean gamers are more susceptible to radicalization; the gamification of extremist activity; and discussion of the “gamergate” controversy that saw a number of gamers involved in coordinated online trolling help drive online extremism.

      However, there is a limited body of work exploring the use of gaming platforms for recruitment by extremists, with much of the content exploring this phenomenon being largely anecdotal, such as a report in November 2020 by Sky News on the radicalization of a 14-year-old boy in the United Kingdom which suggested that the boy had been shown “extreme neo-Nazi video games” by his older brother.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Understanding whether there are concerted radicalization efforts that seek to leverage online gaming to reach new audiences has implications for regulatory discussions, interventions and prevention efforts.

      Our Findings

      To help fill this dearth in knowledge, the digital analysis unit at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) engaged in a piece of scoping research across four platforms associated with online gaming. This included two live-streaming services — Twitch and DLive, which both host individuals who broadcast online gaming to digital audiences, and which have both been used to stream extremist activity.

      Additionally, we explored Steam, the PC game digital distribution service that also provides a platform for gamers to build community groups, and Discord, a chat application originally designed for gamers that has been notably used by right-wing extremists.

      To better understand the potential for overlap between extremism and gaming, we used digital ethnography to scope these platforms, searching for users and communities promoting extremist content. In total, we identified 45 public groups associated with the extreme right on Steam, 24 extreme right chat servers on Discord, 100 extreme right channels on DLive and 91 channels on Twitch.

      These communities and individuals commonly promoted racist, exclusionary and supremacist material associated with the extreme right, including the sharing of material from proscribed terrorist organizations on Discord.

      We then qualitatively analyzed the content shared by these extremist channels and publicly accessible discussion threads to explore the extent that gaming was being used to radicalize or recruit individuals.

      Here we identified several ways in which extremists use gaming. In some instances, extremists would use politically aligned games, such as “Feminazi: The Triggering” as a means to signify their ideology to their peers. Additionally, we found evidence that extremists used historical strategy games to role-play extremist fantasies, such as winning the Second World War for Nazi Germany or killing Muslims in the Crusades. However, although we found ample evidence that extremists are using gaming platforms, we found limited evidence to suggest they are using them to radicalize or recruit new members.

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      Instead, extremists primarily seemed to use gaming as a means of building bonds and community with their peers, as well as more broadly to blow off steam. Whilst there has been a focus in preexisting literature on extremist-created games, we found that a majority of extremist gamers preferred popular mainstream titles such as “Call of Duty” or “Counter-Strike.” Additionally, although anecdotal evidence suggests that young people are being groomed over online games, we didn’t find content that corroborated this.

      Future Research

      Although there were gaps in our methodology — in particular, we didn’t seek to play online games with extremists — these preliminary findings suggest that gamers seem to primarily use gaming in the same way that non-extremists do: as a hobby and past time. These findings have implications for policy responses to online radicalization as well as for future research. In particular, they highlight how extremist users have been able to find a home on gaming platforms online.

      Our project was designed as scoping research to pick up on key trends and didn’t attempt to gauge the scale and reach of these communities, but it is important that future digital research tracks the size of extremist communities so that proportional policy responses can be proposed.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Are Tamil Brahmins Finally Shifting Their Outlook on Caste?

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      Seeing Devi, our servant maid, brew a cup of hot filter coffee for my mother, thoroughly shook me up. Devi? Enjoying free access to that sacrosanct location in a Tamil Brahmin home, its kitchen? Free to light the stove, boil the milk, prepare a south Indian decoction, make a steaming hot cup of filter coffee? That too, for my nonagenarian mother?

      Evidently, Devi has free access to every part of the house, including the kitchen, once considered inviolable by Brahmins. Four or five decades ago, an act like this would have been utterly inconceivable. Growing up, I remember servant maids barely had permission to walk inside our home, let alone enjoy unfettered access to the kitchen. When they did come inside, it was only to sweep and mop the floor, spending the minimal amount of time necessary to accomplish those chores.

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      The rest of their tasks, such as cleaning the vessels, washing the clothes and drying them on a clothesline, would be done in the backyard. Taking their sense of cleanliness to a new height, vessels cleaned by the servant maid would be rinsed once again with water untouched by the servant before they eventually found their way into the kitchen.

      I couldn’t help but reflect on the dramatic shift in attitude I observed in my family, belonging to the elite Tamil Brahmin upper caste, toward Devi, belonging to one of the lower castes. Is this experience unique to me and my family? Or is it something that is a reflection of the changing times in the traditionally conservative Tamil Brahmin community?

      I knew scientific evidence based on facts regarding the social change I was ruminating on would be hard to come by. But I was convinced that if I tried, I would find anecdotal evidence of this shift toward a more liberal way of life among other Tamil Brahmin — or colloquially, Tam Brahm — families.

      A Liberal Infusion

      Every parent desires upward mobility and better quality of life for their offspring. Not surprisingly, Tam Brahms also subscribed to the same sentiment. This quest for upward mobility among Tam Brahms resulted in a generational shift in the type of career they aimed for. Gone was their desire to secure a steady job in a bank, central government organization or, as a distant consolation prize, in a state government organization. Instead, they set their eyes on professional careers, armed with degrees in engineering or medicine. Some sought to become entrepreneurs, a rarity in the past.

      Securing professional degrees did not come easy for Tam Brahm youngsters. The Tamil Nadu state’s 69% caste-based reservation system in higher educational institutions meant many had to leave the comfort of their home and their home state in pursuit of those credentials. They may have left with apprehension, but that provided them an exposure to the outside world that was erstwhile impossible in the cocooned Tam Brahm way of life.

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      At a recent high school reunion, I had the opportunity to meet several of my childhood friends after a gap of more than 30 years. While many had spread their wings and flown far and wide, there were few who had stayed their entire life in Madurai, the town where I spent the bulk of my childhood. Conversations rarely went beyond the friendly banter befitting a reunion among childhood friends, but there were clear indications on where one stood on the conservative-liberal divide.

       A scientific survey, had one been done, would have corroborated the following hypothesis: Those who had the opportunity to explore the outside world, especially at the defining moment immediately following high school, typically subscribed to more liberal views.

      Aging and Necessity

      Decades ago, living in the rural towns of Tamil Nadu, my parents were steeped in caste-based hierarchical distinctions. Being young, they had little reason to question their belief system or modify their core values. Surely, views and beliefs passed down through generations wouldn’t crumble with the nascent liberal perceptions of their youngest children? They did not.

      During the phase when they were still strong and able, and I was behaving like an insufferable know-it-all, there were many occasions we simply had to agree to disagree. The shift I allude to started happening only as my parents started aging and developing a dependency on others. That shift accelerated when their primary caregivers, my older brother and sister-in-law, also entered the post-retirement phase of their life.

      Most interestingly, the interactions I shared with my parents played out in a slightly modified form among my brother’s own family. Dispelling my doubts that this could be unique to my immediate circle, Purushothaman and Sathesh, two Tam Brahm friends of mine, corroborated very similar developments in their respective families.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Sathesh remarked that his mom started yielding gracefully once she realized that resistance was futile. Puru concurred, albeit, in a less colorful, non-Star Trek language, saying that his mom is not where he is (on the conservative-liberal social spectrum), but that she is far more tolerant compared to her past self.

      As my mother entered her 90s, the demands on the care she needed increased. This set the perfect scenario for Devi to start playing an increasingly prominent role in the household work in order to ease the pressure on my brother and sister-in-law. It was not before the sexagenarian couple started embracing the help from their servant maid from an entirely different angle, while the nonagenarian matriarch was forced to let go of her deeply entrenched hierarchical distinctions.

      Far from reluctant tolerance, Devi’s presence has found grateful acceptance among my family members.

      Altruism?

      In the past, Brahmins asserted their superiority by employing a variety of oppressive techniques. While many of them involved dehumanizing and stripping away the agency of those beneath them, withholding knowledge was by far the most effective technique they employed to stay on top of the caste totem pole. It is no surprise that the caste-based reservation system targets this very aspect in higher educational institutions, offering preferential treatment to a staggering number of non-Brahmin caste and communities.

      This is not an article on the caste system in India, but I would unequivocally recommend “Annihilation of Caste,” a speech Dr. B. R. Ambedkar wrote in 1936, as a must-read for anyone interested in understanding this woeful practice.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In a dramatic U-turn from the behavior of withholding knowledge, it is now commonplace to see Tam Brahm households sponsoring the education of their servant maid’s children. Not only does this act guarantee upward mobility for those kids, but it also effectively reduces the supply of future maids.

      I asked Puru if this isn’t akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Puru, who had sponsored the school education not just of his servant maid’s children but also that of his neighborhood vegetable vendor’s son, commented succinctly, “It is the right thing to do.”

      A Glimpse Into the Future?

      If I thought I am liberal in my outlook, my children effortlessly put me to shame. The extent to which their ideas challenge the social status quo is more than evolutionary. They are downright revolutionary. But that is a topic for another article.

      What is important here is the concept of identity. While I still acknowledge and accept my Tam Brahm identity, to my children, it would hardly be a matter of significance. Sathesh wholeheartedly agreed, remarking that, while growing up, and even now, he was proud of his Tamil Brahmin heritage, but he sees that it makes absolutely no difference to his kids. Thinking about his older son who is a trained classical Carnatic musician, Puru chimed in, saying that despite the rigorous traditional gurukul education, his son espouses far more liberal views than him.

      The reshaping of this identity has many ramifications, the most prominent one being the number of inter-cultural and inter-caste marriages involving Tam Brahms. In the last decade, we have welcomed Gujarati, Malayalam and Punjabi grooms into our family. What was once unthinkable is now so commonplace that it has found broad social acceptance.

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      Tamil Brahmins, who account for less than 3% of the state’s population, may already be an endangered species as the pendulum of poetic justice swings hard to the other side. The threat to their identity from within and without causes many to lament about the future of Tam Brahms as a community. Particularly concerning is the plight of the learned priests, whose profession it is to administer and uphold the rituals and practices in Tamil Brahmin homes, temples and elsewhere.

      Me? I am simply glad that my family has embraced humanity over conservative traditionalism — and hope that the anecdotal evidence I have observed in my small circle of friends and family is a harbinger of things to come.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More