 |
|
|
|||||
Its amazing how far a firebrand politician has to step over the line of decency in 2025 to prove that such a line even exists anymore. By any metric, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah sprinted past that line over the weekend, with a deeply distasteful, macabre string of tweets about a political assassination in Minnesota. Now, hes experiencing something vanishingly rare in modern American politics: sustained, real-world blowback for something he wrote online. The day after a gunman shot and killed former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband at homeand also shot and injured Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife at their homethe shooters motives remained in question. That didnt stop Sen. Lee, however, from going all in on the Elon Musk-approved assumption that the shooter was acting on behalf of the far left. On Sunday, June 15, Lee posted a pair of tweets on his personal account that betrayed a distinct lack of sympathy for the victims, let alone any sense of tact or decorum. Both included a police-released image of the shooter, with one assigning blame to the far left (This is what happens [w]hen Marxists dont get their way) and the other absurdly implying that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz bore a share of the blame (Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street.) Soon enough, the facts collided with Lees interpretation. Although alleged shooter Vance Boelter served on a civilian economic board under Gov. Walz, all current evidence indicates that he is a deeply religious, conservative anti-abortion advocate and a vocal Trump supporter. He is also said to have had a hit list of 45 elected officials, all Democrats. Lee has long had a reputation for out-of-pocket tweets. The third-term senator and January 6 enthusiast changed his personal X account handle to @BasedMikeLee in 2022, after MAGA influencers like Benny Johnson urged him to go harder on social media. (In MAGA parlance, based essentially means being unapologetically conservative or anti-woke.) Since the change, he has repeatedly caused a stir with his frequent, provocative tweets, most recently for pushing a false claim about Prince Harry and suggesting the royal redhead be deported. None of Lees previous tweets, though, have provoked a backlash like the one currently unfolding. The first wave of condemnation arrived online, with scathing tweets from a wide range of high-profile X users, including actress Sophia Bush, former Obama staffer and Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. Next came the responses on TV. The cohosts of The View took Lee to task for his callous tweets on Mondays episode. In any other job, you would be fired instantly, cohost Sara Haines declared during the broadcast. On Monday night, the backlash continued on TV, with Jon Stewart excoriating Lee on The Daily Show. The host began by relaying an anecdote of his own previous encounter with Lee. While Stewart had been working to extend the 9/11 victim compensation fund in 2019, he facilitated a series of meetings between various senators and a group of first respondersand apparently found Lee uniquely unmoved by the cause. I say this for context, Stewart added, for why I use Senator Lee as the avatar for the insanity of this moment. He then played a clip of Lee from 2024, talking through tears about Laken Riley, a young nursing student who was notoriously murdered by an undocumented immigrantciting it as proof that Lee is indeed capable of being moved by senseless murder, but seemingly only when doing so is politically useful. ‘He seemed kind of surprised to be confronted’ Perhaps the most profound response to Lees tweets came not on X or on TV, but in person. On Monday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesotaa friend and colleague of the shooting victims, and someone who was also allegedly on the killers hit listtracked Lee down and pulled him out of a meeting to confront him over his rhetoric. (One of her aides also reportedly sent Lees office a furious letter about the additional pain youve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend.) Although only a photograph exists to document the exchange, Smith later revealed to reporters that she told Lee his tweets were brutal and cruel, and that he should address the millions of viewers on X more responsibly. As for how Lee responded to the in-person confrontationwell, apparently he hardly did. “He certainly didn’t promise to take it down or say anything publicly about it, Smith told one reporter. He seemed kind of surprised to be confronted.” Lees reticence continued later on Monday, when he refused to speak with reporters asking for comment about his tweets and the ensuing confrontation. (During the writing of this article, Lee took down the tweets.) A brief history of senators behaving badly Lee obviously knows what he wrote about the shooting on his personal account was inappropriate. Anyone needing proof need merely look at the corresponding tweet from Lees official account, which reads like boilerplate mainstream politician-speak after a senseless tragedy. The reason he may have felt comfortable posting something so beyond the pale on his other account is because senators so rarely face consequencs outside of electoral defeat for words or actions that are legal, no matter how deplorable, and Lee isnt up for reelection until 2028. Apart from Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who resigned last year following a bribery conviction, the last senator to resign in disgrace was Al Franken of Minnesota, who stepped down in 2017, when sexual misbehavior allegations emerged at the peak of the #MeToo movement. The difficulty and rarity of imposing any punitive action on a sitting senator was underscored a few years ago with similarly unfortunate commentary that passed without repercussions. In October 2022, an intruder broke into then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosis home in a targeted attack and brutally assaulted her husband. While Paul Pelosi recovered from his skull fracture in the hospital, high-profile right-wing personalities such as Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk jokingly riffed on the conspiracy theory that Pelosi had injured himself in some sort of illicit tryst. Before the facts came in, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas joined in on the fantasizingrather than condemning the violent attackwhile his fellow Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tried to spin the assault into an indictment of President Biden. Though Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin apologized for his own insensitive remarks, neither senator did so, and neither faced any consequences, and the world moved on. The situation with Lee is different, however, in a way that makes it harder to move on so quickly. Given that one of the political targets in this instance died of her injuriesalong with her husbandthe cold, stark, factually challenged, instant politicization of their murders comes across as frankly sociopathic. If the lack of contrition around Cruz’s and Cornyns tweets should have been a warning about where the culture was heading in 2022, Lees tweets are a sign that weve arrived therein a place where a successful political assassination can seemingly be shrugged or even laughed off if the target plays for the opposite team. Judging from Lees reaction to Smiths confrontation, though, all that keyboard bravado seems to fall away when a representative of the real world comes knocking in person. Its hard to remain so based while looking someone right in the eye. Whether Lee eventually apologizes or not, the photo of Smith confronting him about his tweets has the potential to travel even further than the tweets themselves. This image is a reminder that U.S. politicians who have forgotten or lost their decency online should relentlessly be made to answer for it offline.
Category:
E-Commerce
Amid global conflict, domestic unrest, and AIs surging impact in all corners of business, its getting harder than ever to decipher noise from substance. To help navigate this challenge, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman shares valuable insights about Trumps public spat with Elon Musk, the crisis in the Middle East, and whether AI is realistically poised to spark a white-collar bloodbath. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. There is so much going on in the economy and in tech right now. It’s hard to know where to focus. How would you describe this moment with so much change on so many fronts? Do you compartmentalize topics? Do you say: In this bucket is what’s going on in AI, and over here is what’s going on with U.S. trade? Or is it all interconnected for you? So obviously, AI plays across everything. Like what does it mean not just for, obviously, work, and what does it mean for geopolitics, and what does it mean for invention and science, and what does it mean for medicine? But also, even when you see, let’s send in the National Guard and the Marines to L.A.; that doesn’t necessarily generate the question of AI, but it does generate the thought “we live in chaotic times.” There’s a couple of questions that go across all of them. And when something happens like Israel starts bombing Iran, is that its own bucket, or does it get you to start rethinking other things that are around it also? It’s mostly its own bucket, but it does go. And there’s this general [sense of] the world is descending into chaos. We’ve self-ended the post-World War II American world order, and I think that there will be thousands of lives and lots of suffering that will come from that, because I think the post-World War II American world order has been one of the most golden times in human history. And the fact that we have deliberately self-destroyed that will have a bunch of different costs, and I think the costs include increasing conflict and chaos everywhere in the world. So that has its macro theme, which the Israeli bombing of the Iranians is in. Now, I also think, of course, the Iranian nuclear program is a problem. In Trump, one, I actually thought his ending the treaty deal was a mistake. But the Iranians are a force for engaging in global terrorism and global conflict. So the fact that there’s something being done to try to contain nuclear ambitions is not in itself a bad thing. It’s probably unfortunate that the way that that’s happening is bombing, but I would’ve preferred the treaty, negotiationwords are always better than physical violence. Yeah. I have to ask you about the public split between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Maybe it’s a truce now; it’s hard to say. Regardless, Silicon Valley must be buzzing. I’m curious what the reactions are. Are there any lessons that leaders are drawing from it in dealing with the president? In dealing with Elon? Well, I think there’s a whole stack of things. I think one is that there were a bunch of Silicon Valley leaders who deluded themselves that Trump was the sensible businessman and the Dems were antibusiness, and it was that straightforward. And they went . . . look, part of the reason why entrepreneurial people like Elon were getting in the business is because they felt that, for example, one of the biggest expense lines in the federal government is the deficit, is just the interest payments. It’s like we as a country have over decades borrowed money on credit cards to finance our operations. And just like anyone knows, when they borrow money on credit cards, it puts a huge dent in their operating income and what to do. And that’s what we’ve been doing as a country. I think part of what Elon’s learning from the “Big Beautiful Bill” that’s being proposed is we’re actually not being business-sensible here. And so Elon sparked in the way he normally sparks, which is to make a whole bunch of, frankly, massively inflammatory tweets. And that caused a general reaction on both sides, which informed everyone. It was like, one, this Big Beautiful Bill is not a pro-future of American business because it’s going to increase our debt line a whole lot. That issue got drowned in various power politicking. In terms of being business-sensible, do people look at the time and effort that Musk has put into politics and spending his time in Washington? Was that time well spent in a business-sensible way? I think most people think it’s probably been a pretty bad net negative. What are the actual things that DOGE has really accomplished? It started with these big claims about shaving off fraudulent expenses to help rightsize the deficit. And there were a lot of claims about reducing fraud, and literally zero substantiation about the reductions being particularly fraud-oriented or anything else. So I think that’s not been successful. And then obviously Elon’s engagement with this has caused . . . I mean, I see, call it, three times as many Teslas with anti-Elon bumper stickers in the neighborhoods I drive around in than there are Teslas without anti-Elon bumper stickers. Most purchasers of Teslas believe in such things as climate change and think that we have to be rational on these topics. And the fact that Elon is staying silent on an administration that’s claiming that climate change is a complete fiction, I think that’s been . . . not just has DOGE been a big problem, but I think the Tesla customer base is in clear revolt on this stuff. And so I think all of those things have been real challenges. I saw that the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, told Axios recently that there was a white-collar bloodbath coming, that people are dramatically underestimating AI’s impact on jobs. Do you agree with that? Do we know what the impact will be? Well, frankly, no one knows. Anyone who claims that they know exactly what the impact is is either self-deluding or other-deluding. Dario is right that over, call it, a decade or three, that it will do a massive set of job transformation. And some of that job transformation will be replacement issues. Just like, for example, when computer programs, Excel and other things, started happening, the people whose job it was to write in the ledger, the accounting ledger . . . that job went away. But on the other hand, the accountant job didn’t go away. The accountant job, if anything, everyone was predicting that the accountant job would go away. And actually, in fact, the accountant job got broader, richer, et cetera. It’s like scenario planning, financial analysis. Just because a function’s coming that has a replacement area on a certain set of tasks doesn’t mean all of this job’s going to get replaced. It does mean there’s going to be a lot of transformation, and that some specifc things that used to be described by job description will be completely gone. But that doesn’t even necessarily mean that a function is going to go way down. So I think there is a massive tsunami of transformation coming. And I called Dario to talk to him, because I deeply respect his point of view on lots and lots of topics, about the bloodbath thing. And we see the world in different variables here because bloodbath just implies everything going away, versus where I tend to think all, having published Superagency. is that we at least have many years, if not a long time of person plus AI doing things. Could I just replace, for example, my accountants with GPT-4? The answer is absolutely not. That would be a disastrous mistake. And it’s just simply like saying, also, let’s replace my marketing department or my sales department with GPT-4. Absolutely not. Now, should each of these departments be using GPT-4 and Copilot and Claude and everything else in order to operate? Yes, they should be starting to experiment with that. There’s various ways in each of these departments you can be amplified with this work, but that’s nowhere close to a bloodbath. The bloodbath is a very good way to grab internet headlines, media headlines. What jobs are most likely to be replaced? They’re the ones where we’re trying to program human beings to act like robots, like a customer service script, et cetera, in terms of the way you’re operating, and that’s the most natural replacement. But even then, it’s unclear that that will be a bloodbath, because of the question of what the adoption of companies looks likehow it’s refined in even with massive transformation, that will happen in a relatively short time frame. So yes, I think people are underestimating AI’s impact on jobs, but I think inducing panic as a response is serving media announcement purposes and not actually, in fact, intelligent industry and economic and career path planning.
Category:
E-Commerce
Just in time for the start of this summer’s busy travel season, Skytrax has named Qatar Airways the worlds best airline at its 2025 World Airline Awards at the Paris Air Show on Tuesday. This is the Middle Eastern carrier’s ninth win at what has been dubbed “the Oscars of the aviation industry. “To retain this title in a highly competitive and ever-evolving global industry reflects [our] relentless efforts across every part of the business . . . [as we] continue to set new standards in aviation . . . and is a clear validation of our vision to shape the future of air travel,” Qatar Airways Group CEO Badr Mohammed Al-Meer said in a statement. The top spots were dominated by Middle Eastern and Asian airlines known for their exceptional service, luxury cabins, and state-of-the-art in-flight products, as airlines increasingly compete for the lucrative luxury market post-pandemic. Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways, Emirates, and All Nippon Airways rounded out the top five placings after Qatar Airways. In all, 325 airlines were surveyed by Skytrax. In addition to its No. 2 overall ranking, Singapore Airlines was recognized for having the “worlds best cabin crew” and “worlds best first class service.” Cathay Pacific Airways moved up to third place this year and was also honored for “worlds best in-flight entertainment.” Emirates ranked No. 4, and All Nippon Airways came in fifth place, winning for “world’s best airport service.” Here’s a look at Skytrax’s Top 20 list. The World Top 20 Airlines In 2025 1. Qatar Airways 2. Singapore Airlines 3. Cathay Pacific Airways 4. Emirates 5. All Nippon Airways 6. Turkish Airlines 7. Korean Air 8. Air France 9. Japan Airlines 10. Hainan Airlines 11. Swiss International Air Lines 12. EVA Air 13. British Airways 14. Qantas Airways 15. Lufthansa 16. Virgin Atlantic 17. Saudi Arabian Airlines 18. Starlux Airlines 19. Air Canada 20. Iberia One glaring omission: U.S. carriers. In fact, domestic airlines like Delta, American, United, and JetBlue didn’t even crack the top 20, much less the top 10. A look at the world’s top 100 airlines shows Delta Air Lines ranked at No. 22, trailed by United Airlines at No. 51, JetBlue at No. 52, Alaska Airlines at No. 69, Southwest Airlines at No. 76, American Airlines at No. 83, and Hawaiian Airlines at No. 100. For North America, specifically, Air Canada won “best regional airline,” while Delta Air Lines received the award for the “best airline staff service in North America.” The rankings come amid growing concerns about aviation safety in the United States after a number of staffing cuts at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) by the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Some critics wonder whether the cuts are causing current airport delays and possibly contributing to safety issues, in the wake of an alarming incident in April involving a 90-second outage in radar and communication systems at Newark Liberty International Airport that left controllers unable to communicate with aircraft. The episode prompted one anonymous air traffic controller to later call the airport “not safe.” A full list of winners across all categories is on view at the Skytrax website.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||