This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Tuesday, February 27, 2024.
Former president Donald Trump won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday, tallying up just shy of sixty percent of the vote while former governor of the state, Nikki Haley, wound up with about forty percent. Trump will receive nearly all of the state’s 50 delegates to the Republican National Convention in July—Haley earned just three delegates after securing a majority of the vote in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. South Carolina’s GOP awards 29 delegates to the overall winner of the state and then three more for each of the state’s seven congressional districts. Americans for Prosperity, the libertarian-leaning political organization founded by the Koch brothers, which had endorsed Haley at the end of last November, will stop spending money in support of her campaign and instead shift its focus to competitive congressional races. Haley has vowed to stay in the race until she is mathematically eliminated, with the next contest slated for today in Michigan—though, oddly, only 16 of the state’s 55 delegates will be awarded following Tuesday’s primary vote, with the remaining 39 up for grabs this Saturday, when the state party convention will gather GOP representatives from each congressional district in order to make their preferences known. Michigan is one of a number of states where Republicans have clashed with lawmakers seeking to run the primary process, and the dueling primary/convention caucus setup was a compromise. This is all further complicated by the fact that leadership of the state party is currently in dispute, with two different people claiming to be the rightful GOP party chair in Michigan, each of whom are ardent supporters of Trump, and each of whom is planning on running their own convention on Saturday.
A brief editorial aside: The takeaway from the South Carolina primary is more of the same: There is no path to the Republican nomination for anyone besides Donald Trump, and it is difficult to imagine how Donald Trump could possibly win the presidency in November with more than a third of Republican voters willing to vote against him in the primary. This is a question of some unknowable psychology, of course, and plenty can and will change between now and the election. But! Even if one assumes that most Republicans will come around and vote for their party’s nominee come November, if forty percent of Republican South Carolinians will vote against Trump, what do you imagine that says about the independent vote? For years, the Republican party has simply been smaller than the Democratic party, and in order to win the presidency, a Republican must win a large share of independent votes. The latest party affiliation poll from Gallup shows Democratic party affiliation falling to an all-time low, at 27 percent, but this just drops them into a tie with Republicans. 43 percent of Americans now call themselves independent, tying the all-time polling high. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 with a four percent advantage among independents, but Biden won independents in 2020 by thirteen points. In short, Trump has a lower, harder ceiling than he ever has, and Haley’s even fairly distant second place is indicative of limited enthusiasm for Trump, which almost certainly translates to problems among independents. All of this points to two very good reasons for Haley to stay in the race for as long as possible. One, Trump is old and could die. At this point, Haley would have the most plausible claim to the Republican nomination should that happen. Two, if Trump is the nominee and fails to win in November, Haley will be well-positioned to play the “told-you-so” card, giving her a headstart on campaigning for 2028 against a Democratic party that will eventually have to forge an identity more inspiring than “at least we’re not Trump.” If Trump somehow wins, on the other hand, she won’t be well-positioned to become his successor, anyway, because the voters, by electing Trump again, will have utterly rejected her stated worldview. Whatever pressure that exists for Haley to do “what is right for the party” and unify behind Trump—which she will eventually do, of course, unless he dies—is mitigated by the actual fact that plenty of Republicans are in fact tired of Trump. The winner-take-virtually-all set-up of so many of the Republican nomination contests is going to make it mathematically impossible for Haley to win, even as her consistently strong-enough showings suggest that the same is true of Trump in the general. “Yes, but Biden is a terrible candidate” is the true-enough rejoinder, but for all Biden’s problems, almost all of which are just that he’s very obviously old, he’s not facing anywhere near the opposition within his own party that Trump is. I said back at the beginning of 2023 that a Republican nomination contest that featured just one Trump opponent, instead of a half dozen or more, would result in Trump’s defeat. I was wrong, because I assumed that his ceiling was closer to what it looked like in 2021, before the indictments started coming down at the beginning of last year and helped him consolidate support. But the anti-MAGA Republican primary vote was about 40 percent in Iowa, 40 percent in New Hampshire, 30 percent in Nevada, and now 40 percent in South Carolina. It’s not quite enough to deny him the nomination, but it makes the path to victory in the general incredibly narrow.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on whether states—in these specific cases, Texas and Florida—have the constitutional authority to ban social media companies from limiting what can be posted to their platforms. Florida’s law prevents companies from banning political candidates from platforms, while Texas’s law prohibits the platforms from engaging in so-called viewpoint discrimination—that is, removing content based on the user’s expressed point of view. The Court seemed largely skeptical of the states’ claims, with Chief Justice John Roberts pointing out that the First Amendment prevents government censorship, not editorial decisions made by private companies. The Court’s decision is expected in June, and one imagines it will be written narrowly, as whatever they say will inevitably have an impact on the understanding of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has to this point prevented social media companies from being held liable for content posted to their platforms, and allowed them the editorial freedom to decide what is and is not acceptable. A ruling in favor of Texas and Florida would seem to need to reclassify social media companies as extensions of the government; as some sort of public utility in charge of the modern public square.
A brief editorial aside: I am mystified by conservatives’ insistence that everyone should be permitted to publish whatever they want on the platforms provided by private companies. If a company wants to be a 100% Free Speech Zone, they are welcome to market themselves as such and see their market share reflected by just how intolerable a place it devolves into. Twitter/X is an increasingly unpleasant place in this regard, filled as it is with conspiracy nuts and bots and outright lies about the world. What was once a platform I could rely on to deliver smart people sharing interesting journalism and breaking news has become basically worthless on that front, and is now overwhelmingly just culture war nonsense and ads for things and services I will never use. And they still have to do content moderation, because otherwise it would be overrun with all manner of awful and outright illegal content. I no longer post much of anything to any social media network, largely because it feels like I’ve been chasing diminishing returns in terms of useful and entertaining engagement for years now. The idea that the government must step in and demand that every platform be content-neutral is an obvious affront to the First Amendment rights of private companies, though I must say that I don’t much care about that, either, because it’s not clear to me that companies are the party of relevant concern. Rather, it is the First Amendment rights of individual end-users that are at issue, and an individual should be free to associate with a group of people who have determined that they do not want to see or hear some speech or another. Turning social media platforms into government-enforced neutral “free-speech zones” is a violation of the individual’s right to not be bombarded with the speech of people they don’t want to hear. It would create a sort of “compelled listening” addendum to the speech clause, which I think would obviously violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment, and further run afoul of whatever right to privacy is believed to still exist implicit in the other amendments. The right to speak does not extend to the right to be heard, because you are not the only person with rights.
Berkshire Hathaway, the multinational conglomerate run by Warren Buffett which owns major companies in nearly every conceivable sector of the market along with an investment portfolio of some $370 billion, reported a profit of $97 billion for 2023, a new record for the company. The company closed the year with more than $160 billion of cash on hand, but in his annual letter to shareholders, Chairman and CEO Buffett intimated that he sees few opportunities at the moment to put that cash to work, instead believing it better to keep it handy for potential financial disasters in the future. The company’s railroad and energy holdings disappointed in 2023, but a surging stock market and huge profits from their insurance and reinsurance businesses led to the record year.
A brief editorial aside: The Morning Press is generally in favor of capitalism, but this story about Berkshire Hathaway’s very good year reminds me of a take I haven’t dusted off in a while—that insurance companies should be completely non-profit entities. Berkshire owns Geico, among a number of other insurance products, and that company produced after-tax earnings of more than $5 billion last year. There is only one reason for this—Geico’s customers paid far more in premiums than Geico was required to pay out in labor and claims. Rates go up, claims go down, company profits handsomely. I’m in favor of market solutions to most problems, but there exists an unresolvable conflict of interest between an insurance company’s fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders and the best interests of their customers, the policyholders. We are required by law to carry health insurance, required by law to carry car insurance if you want to drive a car, often required to carry homeowner’s or renter’s insurance or mortgage insurance—and these are some of the most reliably profitable companies in the world, all of their money earned by socializing risk and privatizing profit. It should be understood as a moral infamy, to earn money in this way, rather than pay it back into the pockets of the people whose risk you, as a company, overestimated, and have essentially robbed. The industry is highly regulated, of course, and the infrequency of insurance companies to completely fail is a credit to our regulatory framework as much as it is a result of the profit incentive—but it also speaks to the fact that the government simply mostly won’t let an insurance company fail. They are bailed out, as AIG was after 2008, and as Executive Life was in 1992—or, when they aren’t bailed out, like Penn Treaty in 2017, individual policyholders are left to absorb punishing losses while the company that spent years earning profits under a mistaken understanding of its risk portfolio simply goes away. Insurance is a necessary and useful way to socialize risk across a wide pool of individuals, but it should not be a transfer of wealth from the many to some smaller few. At a minimum, all insurance that is required to be carried in order to participate in modern society should be not-for-profit, with some capital requirements in place for particularly rainy years, and all other overages returned to policyholders in the forms of rebates or lower rates. In other words, all insurance companies should be, by law, policyholder owned mutual insurance companies that compete for customer/owners by lowering bureaucratic overhead and keeping executive pay reasonable, and not beholden to private or public shareholders. Let Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway earn their profits through Coca-Cola and Fruit of the Loom and Apple and Amazon stocks, and socialize the insurance companies. Insurance is inherently socialist, anyway—just go the rest of the way.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
I have written before about how what John Oliver does on his HBO program is bad. I don’t want to dwell on it too frequently, because who cares, really, and nothing I say is going to change the model, and people are going to watch what they find enjoyable and no amount of hectoring by me is going to accomplish anything besides getting whoever is listening to this to go listen to something else instead when they start to feel hectored. But! The episode that aired on Sunday night was a particularly egregious example of what I don’t like about his show, and so I cannot help myself. The episode opens with a one-clause claim that the United States “vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza” before transitioning into ten minutes or so about a West Virginia bill recently passed out of the state House that, if made into law, would make it illegal for schools and public libraries to display or provide so-called obscene materials to minors. The law is short and vague and poorly written and, to be clear, it would be to my preference that such a law does not come into effect in West Virginia or anywhere else. Oliver plays a clip from a public hearing in West Virginia last month in which a middle-aged woman in a blue sweater reads from the book Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, to much laughter from his studio audience. They are laughing because she is a fuddy-duddy old lady reading a sexually explicit dialogue in a formal, public setting, and because they regard her as ridiculous. Her objections and the objections of other so-called “concerned citizens” to this and other sexually explicit material being available in school libraries are not responded to, they are deigned unworthy of engagement. Instead, Oliver pivots to other examples of conservatives pushing book bans in other places, and ends up in Alabama, where he excoriates the recent ruling by the state supreme court that granted personhood to frozen embryos in a wrongful death case. He explains that “freezing an embryo is fine, but if you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do.” In just three minutes, Oliver has made three glib claims of total moral certitude without so much as an acknowledgement that those who disagree with his stated position might well be doing so in good faith. That reasonable people can come to different conclusions about the world, and how they hope it to be. I agree, I think, with the statement “freezing embryos is fine,” but how much thought have I really given it, in my life? And the moment I do, I realize that the topic is incredibly philosophically weighty and morally fraught, and that’s on top of more practical concerns that arise after reading about how children born after IVF are more likely to be born with a low birthweight, and that studies have shown that frozen vs fresh embryos are more likely to result in low birthweight, as well, and that being born with low birthweight puts babies at risk of all manner of immediate and chronic and lifelong developmental and health problems. Even if I don’t think that frozen embryos in a laboratory are people, in any legal or even ethical sense, I do think it is a question of some philosophical and moral import about which reasonable people can have productive and meaningful discussions and disagreements. But for Oliver, “freezing embryos is fine” is the long and the short of it. Just like laughing at a middle-aged lady reading sexually explicit dialogue on the floor of the state legislature in West Virginia is all the discussion that needs to be had about whether or not children should have access to such material in their school. Just like all you need to know about the war in Gaza is that “the US vetoed a ceasefire,” as if that tells the whole moral and legal and practical story. No complications here. No reason to imagine, with an empathetic muscle, the inner lives or motivations or deeply-felt convictions of those with whom you disagree. Better instead to laugh derisively at their inherent absurdity, as they speak inappropriate language that is only funny because of how shocking it is—that is funny precisely because you wouldn’t want to read it to your twelve-year-old or your grandmother.
This is all in stark contrast with what follows, in which Oliver explains how the so-called “pig butchering” scam works. In short, a person gets a text message from what seems to be a wrong number, responds to it, and within a few days is ensnared in a made-up personal drama or relationship with someone who is playing a long game to relieve them of their property. People get taken for hundreds of thousands of dollars, financially and emotionally devastated, and the audience is of course meant to feel sorry for them, and angry at those who have perpetrated the scam. But the turn Oliver executes, what really makes it a “Last Week Tonight” segment, is when he reveals that the scammer on the other end of the text message on the other side of the world is just as worthy of the viewer’s empathy—that the scammer is possibly only committing this awful crime because he is the victim of human trafficking or otherwise trapped in this job against his will. This person, who has stolen your aunt’s life savings while working off some bogus debt to his employer, is the more perfect victim, here, worthy not of your hatred but your understanding. This is Oliver’s bread and butter, the big reveal that is meant to refocus your anger on the more deserving target—not the jerk who catfished grandma into investing everything she owned in a crypto scam, but the anonymous criminal ring he works for. Crucially, there is nothing to really be done about this, besides raising awareness. We are all of us in this transaction victims or potential victims of an unaccountable power that cannot be stopped, that is to be regarded as an opaque unconquerable evil. We are expected to have more empathy for the scammer, who is just a wage slave, than we are the concerned citizens of West Virginia from just a few minutes earlier. Oliver acknowledges that not every scammer is trapped or coerced into doing this work, but says that the mere possibility means that we should proceed in our interactions with them with careful empathy. The ridiculous book banners are no more scrutable than the evil criminal gang running the pig-butchering scam, and the only way to fight them both is to raise awareness.
Oliver wants to flatter your sense of moral superiority, to make you feel better about yourself for being on the right side of important moral questions not because of anything you thought through, or did, but because you belong to the correct tribe. He does this in the first ten minutes by showing that the people with whom he disagrees are purely absurd and ridiculous, undeserving of the audience’s consideration or respect, human, perhaps, but thoroughly contemptible. But this isn’t enough. In the next twenty minutes, he presents you with another target for your justifiable outrage, and then with a quick tug at the curtain, reveals the final boss upon whom all of your hatred can be foisted. This flatters not just your moral sensibility but your intellectual one—you are not some base idiot, content to blame the poor schlub doing the bad thing. Instead, you are wise beyond your instincts, lamenting a larger system that compels evil acts in others. And though he doesn’t make the leap to blaming US hegemony and late-capitalism for creating the conditions in Asia that make this sort of work somehow perversely necessary for the criminal gangs, he does take a moment to demand that the messaging platforms over which these scams take place should be doing more to prevent them, so we should be angry with the inscrutable tech overlords, too.
He wraps up the piece by asking his audience to flex their empathy muscle for the people who have been wronged by the pig-butchering scam, because anybody can feel lonely and be victimized by a compelling sob story from someone who makes them feel heard. This is the easiest imaginable ask of an audience that has spent the last thirty minutes being told who to hate. Oh, we should treat people who have had their lives ruined by scammers with some kindness, John? Thanks for the reminder, but of course as a good person, you’re just preaching to the converted, here! This once again flatters the audience’s ego without challenging anything about the way they see the world, because Oliver and his writers believe the audience shows up not to be challenged, but to be reassured. It’s a thirty minute exercise in self-affirmation and comfort, a whisper in the audience’s ear that they were right all along, a soothing lullaby to the incurious and cosseted mind. Why risk bringing light, when we are all already so very enlightened?
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Tuesday, February 27, 2024