F**king Mondays: ISIS in Syria, Killing CEOs vs Jews, and What Trump Interview?
An action packed start to the week!
Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays”, your favorite roundup to start the week!:
Assad goes down, but what’s next?
Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria after rebels took Damascus in a stunning coup this past weekend. Assad, an ally of Vladimir Putin, has reportedly claimed asylum in Russia in an undisclosed location.
The coup took roughly a week and started with rebel forces capturing Aleppo, then Hama and Homs, before entering Damascus on Sunday morning and forcing the Assad regime to leave. Here’s what we know about the rebel group (from the NYTimes):
The main rebel group behind Assad’s ouster is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant. It began to come together at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, when jihadists formed the Nusra Front to fight pro-Assad forces with hundreds of insurgent and suicide attacks.
The group had early links to the Islamic State, and then to Al Qaeda. But by mid-2016, the Nusra Front was trying to shed its extremist roots, banding together with several other factions to establish Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The United States and other Western countries still consider it a terrorist group.
There are extremely complicated and serious geopolitical ramifications for the stunning collapse of Assad’s government. Assad’s fall shows Russia has been badly weakened by its war with Ukraine, and that Iran and Hezbollah are no longer capable of exerting much influence in the region. While this could be an enormous positive for the Middle East, it remains to be seen what kind of government Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will create under leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani. Al-Golani has shed his extremist image over the years, but he will preside over a country with deep ethnic divisions that could begin warring if not managed carefully.
ISIS is also a major concern in the region, and the US is on high alert for a potential resurgence. Heather Cox Richardson writes:
After Assad’s regime fell, the U.S. Air Force struck more than 75 ISIS-related targets in Syria. “ISIS has been trying to reconstitute in this broad area known as the Badiya desert,” a White House senior official told reporters. “We have worked to make sure they cannot do that. So when they try to camp there, when they try to train… we take them out.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that the U.S. will work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. It will also make sure “that our friends in the region, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, others who border Syria, or who would potentially face spillover effects from Syria, are strong and secure.” Finally, he said, the U.S. wants to make sure “that this does not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.”
It is an exciting time for the people of Syria who have lived under brutal Assad family rule for decades. Al-Golani appears to be making the right noises about building a pluralist government, and the international community has pledged to support Syria as it transitions government. But it is also an extremely dangerous time that could have far worse consequences for the Syrian people if Al-Glolani fails to keep the peace and unify his country. Power vacuums always attract extremists, so Syrians must do everything they can avoid one.
Killing CEOs and Killing Jews
I posted this on Substack Notes over the weekend and thought I would take the opportunity to respond to some of the comments I’ve received:
One reader wrote:
Comparing a soulless, profits-uber-alles insurance company CEO whose decisions have killed hundreds of thousands of people needlessly, to Jews being targeted by terrorists is about as abhorrent as false equivalence gets.
And another:
“So you empathize with a man who has directly had a hand in the death of 68,000 Americans? A man who was at the helm of a company that denied coverage to the ten of 32% which included kids, the disabled and the elderly. You seriously don’t understand why people are sick and tired of being oppressed and want to finally fight back or lack empathy for the institutions that cause their suffering? Do you seriously think it is okay for man to kill because he does it from behind a desk??? Look, I am not saying it is okay to murder but when you keep dunking a man’s under water to drown him as some point the drowning man fight’s back—HARD!”
In response to the first comment, I wasn’t comparing Brian Thompson to Jews being targeted by terrorists. I was comparing the glee with which left wing ideologues reacted to their deaths.
But let’s say I did compare a “soulless, profits-uber-alles insurance company CEO” to Jews targeted by terrorists. Would it be that far-fetched? Because this is exactly how Jews have been demonized and turned into legitimate targets for murder. In Nazi Germany, Jews became the “soulless, profits-uber-alles” destroyers of Europe. Nazi’s alleged they controlled banks, manipulated financial systems, and orchestrated wars for their own benefit. This meant they could be murdered with impunity.
While Communist regimes in Russia and China didn’t specifically target Jews for their alleged wealth and power, they did lead brutal campaigns against the “elites” and “class enemies”. Bolsheviks viewed bankers as part of the bourgeoisie and enemies of the proletariat and were routinely imprisoned and executed.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the leftists unconcerned about Thompson’s death are Nazis or Communists. I’m just pointing out that the dehumanizing aspect of their language.
I am vehemently opposed to the health insurance industry in America. It is a grotesquely dysfunctional, inefficient system that screws millions of people out of health care each year. Americans pay more for their healthcare that almost anywhere else in the world, and get far less value. Similarly, I despise big oil companies that knowingly pump CO2 into the atmosphere and destroy the earth’s forests.
The problem is that the insurance industry in America has, it least in my case, paid for a lot of my health care. I also drive a car and have bought gasoline for many years. It is the system we live in, and almost everyone is complicit in it in some way.
Brian Thompson worked in a shitty but necessary industry, as do millions of other Americans. He wasn’t spending his days plotting to kill Americans by denying them access to care, he was running a business that conformed to general industry standards. Personally, I think those standards are horrendous and the entire health care industry needs to be abolished and started over from scratch. But that still doesn’t mean you can go around killing people because they were part of a horrible industry. It is easy to label Thompson a murderer, and a soulless ghoul who profited off of the deaths of his customers, but the reality is — as always — far more complex.
In 2013, a British Army soldier, Lee Rigby, was brutally murdered in London by two Islamic extremists who ran him over then tried to decapitate him in broad daylight. Their excuse? “The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day,” one of the killers Michael Adebolajo told a passerby. “This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
The British military, like almost every other military on earth, has a long track record of doing horrible things, particularly in the Middle East. But that doesn’t mean random British soldiers should be targeted and slaughtered in public.
I understand the deep felt anger at the health insurance industry, and why people don’t have much sympathy for Brian Thompson. But Brian Thompson had a wife and two children, and he was well loved in his community. He was a human being and did not deserve to be brutally murdered.
It is one thing to oppose the injustice of the health insurance industry. But if we dismiss the humanity of people who work in it or celebrate their deaths, we risk becoming the monsters we claim to oppose.
What Trump interview?
Donald Trump gave a major interview over the weekend on NBC's Meet the Press….. and ….. I didn’t watch a single second of it.
Why? Because I genuinely no longer see the point in paying attention to anything he says. Donald Trump is not capable of having a conversation without lying. His lies are so egregious that it is impossible to glean anything of use. As Sam Harris recently said: “He [Trump] is one of the most prolific liars our species has produced. The man lies about everything, great and small. He lies compulsively, incoherently, pointlessly, impossibly”.
The networks know this, and every journalist in Washington DC knows this. But still they wheel him on to do “hard hitting” interviews where they pretend he is a Very Serious Person. But he isn’t, and the facade is getting harder and harder to take seriously.
While I won’t be paying much attention to what Trump says, I will be paying attention to what he does — like nominating a rogues gallery of MAGA crazies to run the government. Handing Trump free airtime to propagandize isn’t journalism, and I wish the media would stop pretending otherwise.
Have a great week!
Listen to the latest episode of The Banter Roundtable Podcast:
Saturday Roundup: Circular Firing Squads, Trump's "Mandate", Erasing History, and Crazy Kash Patel
For Banter Members:
Is Shooting Health Insurance Executives Ever Justified?
America’s healthcare system is broken beyond repair, and with the public execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson this week, it is now clear the public has had enough. But are insurance executives the real enemy, or just part of a broken system? Can we take our anger out on rando…
"It is one thing to oppose the injustice of the health insurance industry. But if we dismiss the humanity of people who work in it or celebrate their deaths, we risk becoming the monsters we claim to oppose."
Honest question, Ben. Very interested in your reply.
If "health insurance industry" were replaced with "the Hamas attackers of Oct 7" or "Nazis" or "KKK", would you advocate we focus on the humanity with which they caused so many to die?
"I am vehemently opposed to the health insurance industry in America. It is a grotesquely dysfunctional, inefficient system that screws millions of people out of health care each year."
Ben, the part you keep leaving out is that it's dysfunctional *by design*.
Saying it's dysfunctional and inefficient makes it sound like it's just incompetently run. That the bad outcomes are an unfortunate result of the people running the industry not being good at their jobs. When the truth is they're quite good at their jobs which are to maximize shareholder profits by any means possible including denying claims that rightly should be paid.
In your recent Emergency Meeting podcast and here you're avoiding holding CEOs and other insurance executives responsible at all for their actions and decisions.
"[Brian Thompson] wasn’t spending his days plotting to kill Americans by denying them access to care, he was running a business that conformed to general industry standards."
First, the "spending his days plotting" is a cartoonish straw man. Nobody has said he sat at his desk, cackling over his latest plan to harm people and you shouldn't conjure up an image designed to make it sound like they had. He wasn't gleefully plotting to kill but the deaths he caused harm was the very foreseeable consequence of the policies and systems he put in place.
If the industry standard is "treat Jews like vermin" would that excuse the people who did? Hyperbolic example but the point remains. You're excusing someone who was instrumental in perpetuating horrible things because "that's the way things are done."
There is *nothing* preventing Thompson or any other CEO from saying "The standards for our industry, putting profit over lives, are abhorrent and immoral. We won't follow them. We'll do better." But they CHOOSE not to. They MAKE THE CHOICE to cause suffering and death. And you should at least acknowledge that rather than continue to make excuses for them.