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We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the United States of America, said rally speaker Sean Blackmon, member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation

What would George Washington think if you told him that a university bearing his name would one day be inculcating protesters who sought the demise of the United States?

That reality was on full display Thursday night on the campus of George Washington University, located in Washington, D.C.

In a continuation of the encampments popping up on universities across the United States, leftists supporting Palestine gathered on George Washington Universitys University Yard to share their views.

Although the rally was flooded with the anti-Israel rhetoric and chants Americans have become accustomed to hearing, speakers at this rallyalso used language connected with Marxism, focusing on oppression and oppressors.

Based on what Id heard, Id say these protesters ultimate intentions go beyond the nation of Israel and extend to the goal of destroying the United States in particular and Western civilization generally.

A recurring theme was that the United States, like Israel, is the oppressor. As a settler colony, it must be brought to its knees.

Harkening back to the riots of 2020, protesters vilified law enforcement as oppressors for being protectors of the rich and the capitalist ruling class.

At one point, a speaker blasphemously compared the deaths of Palestinians to the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, the protesters made clear what their goals are here in the United States: to smash the whole thing.

What does Americas future look like if her universities, the grounds of education for so many young Americans, host protesters who champion her demise?

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The Marxists Come Out at George Washington University - Daily Signal

Android 15 looks set to bring in the ability to control your phone's media output with Wear OS smartwatches.

In a code deep-dive of the Wear OS companion app function (which grants Wear OS app a host of phone data access, such as access to contacts and calendars) in the Android 15 beta by Android Authoritys Mishaal Rahman, a mention of "MEDIA_ROUTING_CONTROL". This new permission reportedly grants the companion app access a list of available devices and control which one streams or casts audio or video from other apps.

A somewhat vague description, Android Authority noted one such privileged control permissions are granted to the companion app, they also apply to the connected smartwatch. This basically means the smartwatch would have access to a list of available connected devices (presumably ones paired with a companion smartphone) in order to route audio to video through them.

So that reportedly means you could, for example, start playing music on your phone through a pair of connected headphones, and then use a Wear OS smartwatch to switch playback to a paired smart speaker without needing to use the phone.

This would be handy if you wanted to change the device your audio was playing from (for example, switching from your earbuds to a Bluetooth speaker) but had left your phone in another room, in a bag, or just wanted to perform a few quick on-wrist gestures instead of opening your phone.

As it stands, Wear OS provides some control over media playback directly from a smartwatch and within watch-based apps, but for greater control over audio from services such as Spotify, one needs to use the connected phone.

But adding more direct control over media feedback via a Wear OS smartwatch could allow for a lot more to be done from a wrist-worn wearable device, bypassing the need for one to dip into a pocket or purse to pluck out a connected Android phone. By building out Wear OS functionality and interconnectivity, Google could help bolster its device ecosystem and the interplay between such devices to provide an experience that's closer to Apple's product and software ecosystem.

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It's not clear if such functionality will come to all Wear OS devices, or be reserved for select Google devices like the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2, or even if it'll make it to the full release on Android. We're likely to find out at Google I/O 2024 on on May 14, where we expect a good look at what's next for Android, Wear OS, and other Google software.

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This secret Android 15 feature could finally give you more media control with a Wear OS smartwatch - TechRadar

Microsoft Edge wants to enhance your playback experience with taskbar upgrades.

Many users believe Microsoft isn't doing everything right with the Edge browser to win critics over. However, on the bright side of things, Microsoft doesn't forget to introduce new features and enhancements to what's already available. In addition to making Copilot in Edge more potent for effective settings management, two interesting improvements the software giant is currently working on for Edge are all about making you want to use Windows taskbar media controls more often.

Microsoft Edge currently doesn't have media control options on the Windows taskbar. That means you can't quickly pause or resume a YouTube video playing in the browser from the thumbnail preview in the taskbar. Some streaming apps like Spotify offer this feature for Windows users, and sometime in the future, Edge will also introduce something similar, or maybe better.

As first spotted by famed leaker @Leopeva64, Microsoft has been working on adding media controls to Edge's Windows taskbar for the past few months. During the initial days of development, only play/pause and forward and backward track options were available. But now, on top of those, Microsoft has added three more buttons in the thumbnail preview of Edge on the Windows taskbar: one for mute/unmute, and the other two for seeking forward and backward.

These are useful media control options on your Windows taskbar because you can effectively customize the playback experience as per your preferences with a click of a button, all while browser windows stay minimized.

Microsoft was spotted working on media controls on the Windows taskbar for Edge Canary, and it looks like those features are still being tested internally. In other words, you won't see those playback control options in thumbnail previews even after installing Edge Canary. But in all likelihood, they will be rolled out to all Edge Canary users when ready.

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New features in Microsoft Edge want to make you use the taskbar media controls more often - XDA Developers

Americans of all stripes across the political spectrum have been understandably transfixed by the wave of student protests against the Gaza war that has spread from elite Ivy League campuses to numerous other schools, some more surprising than others. Police have been called in to break up student encampments not just at Columbia Universitys iconic Manhattan campus, which was both ground zero and a natural media target, but at USC in Los Angeles (once upon a time a famously white-bread conservative school), Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State, Indiana University and Cal Poly Humboldt in rural Northern California, among other places.

I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didnt save her job anyway.

First of all, its more accurate to say that the media-consuming public is riveted by the contentious political drama surrounding those scenes of campus discord than by the protests themselves, which are a striking sign of the times but hardly a brand new phenomenon. My own college graduation, in the mid-1980s, was disrupted by a student walkout over the universitys involvement in nuclear weapons research and its non-divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Strident moral positions and overheated rhetoric are features of student activism, which is sometimes effective and at other times purely symbolic; every generation, its fair to say, inherits or creates its own iteration.

Its also worth noting that Americas extraordinary narcissism another quality shared across the political spectrum creates a global distortion effect whereby the deaths of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world are transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. Nobody actually dies in this domestic crisis, but everyone feels injured: Public discourse is boiled down to idiotic clichs and identity politics is reduced to its dumbest possible self-caricature. When the apparent issues are about who has said the most hateful things, who feels more unsafe and in what context, and which political party can get away with twisting events to suit its preferred narrative, then were stuck in the TikTok reboot of Platos cave, staring at flickering shadows long since severed from reality.

None of that is the student protesters fault, exactly, although they have played an instrumental role in reprocessing the Gaza war launched, of course, in response to the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel last October as a theatrical spectacle or simulation, full of signs and symbols whose meanings are subject to endless debate. Most of them are expressing genuine (if histrionic) outrage that the U.S. government, self-appointed avatar of democracy and defender of the rules-based order, is funding and supporting Israels campaign of mass killing, wanton destruction and systematic deprivation against a virtually imprisoned civilian population.

Exactly how much this student movement has been contaminated by intemperate, hotheaded or outright antisemitic rhetoric is, shall we say, a question of interpretation but not one that can be credibly answered by Bibi Netanyahu, Elise Stefanik or Mike Johnson. As for those who seek to what-about the current wave of protests by observing that worse things have happened in recent history without driving the students of Emerson College to risk mass arrest in the Boston streets, they are correct while deliberately missing the point.

Whatever world-historical culpability the U.S. may have had for the genocidal conflicts in Darfur or Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, for Russias massively destructive war in Chechnya or Chinas brutal oppression of the Uyghurs or whatever atrocity youd like to name, those events were not the direct results of U.S. policy and did not carry the White House seal of approval. The Gaza war is, and does.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a longtime friend and admirer of Joe Biden, wrote last week, Gaza has become the albatross around Bidens neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahus. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign, in much the same way as the Vietnam War permanently stained the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was undermined by the massive antiwar demonstrations of 1968 including the student rebellion at Columbia, exactly 56 years ago this week, as it happens.

Americas extraordinary narcissism creates a global distortion effect whereby the massacre of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world is transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis.

Biden made a series of catastrophic miscalculations in the wake of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, Kristof argues, and the net effect has been to make the U.S. look weak, hypocritical and profoundly cynical. Longtime British politician and diplomat Chris Patten, a pillar of center-right establishment thinking, told Kristof that Biden had made a terrible, terrible error that fed into Chinese and Russian narratives that the West employs double standards and doesnt really care about principles.

I would describe Bidens predicament as a symptom of the moral and political failures of liberalism, as well as the peculiar status of the United States, a still-dominant global superpower now in irreversible decline. The president did not or could not grasp how rapidly and decisively world opinion would turn against Israel and the U.S., or how little the world trusts American foreign policy after the last six decades or so of misbegotten wars and disastrous blunders.

Furthermore, and this one is amazing too: Neither Biden nor anyone in his inner circle seemed aware that core Democratic constituencies Black voters, younger people, progressives already sympathized with the Palestinian cause and viewed the current Israeli government as a criminal rogue state (or worse). Or perhaps they didn't care: Mainstream Democrats tend to dismiss the significance of the youth vote, assume that Black voters will stick with them no matter what, and are eager to purge or bulldoze the activist left on any available pretext.

But those failures, all damaging enough on their own terms, were amplified and undergirded by Bidens inexplicable faith that Bibi Netanyahu would somehow turn out to be a responsible leader and partner in a time of crisis, rather than a power-mad racist zealot with years of experience at manipulating American presidents. This miscalculation may seem mystifying when you consider Bidens long years of public service and his vaunted expertise in foreign policy; Kristof certainly finds it so.

It makes more sense if we understand liberalism, of the 21st-century Biden variety, as faith in the power of human reason, and specifically in its power to bridge differences between competing interests and establish common ground for civil discourse and political compromise. If we lived in a world of rational, self-interested beings willing to acknowledge the perspectives of others a world of liberals, in other words that might work out. But we dont, and in the real world Bidens miscalculation regarding Netanyahu was a potentially fatal mistake fatal for Bidens presidency, fatal for Israel, fatal for the future of the Middle East.

That brings us back at last to Dr. Renat Shafik, who prefers the nickname Minouche, and whose full title in the British House of Lords is the Right Honorable Baroness Shafik DBE. She arrived at Columbia last July, with no experience in American academic life, touted as a champion of diversity and inclusion. (By birth and parentage, she is both Arab and Muslim.) Less than a year later, she summoned the NYPD to the Morningside Heights campus for the first time since the legendary student takeover of 1968. If Joe Biden represents the tragedy of liberalism in its pathetic form no reasonable person can doubt his good intentions Shafik represents something darker, and almost farcical.

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If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of neoliberalism for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a rsum of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door.

If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of neoliberalism for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse than Minouche Shafik.

After the Gaza protests erupted at Columbia, Shafik evidently surrounded herself with high-priced lawyers and consultants drawn from the orbit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who persuaded her that she could save her job by abasing herself before the Republican witch-hunters in Congress and giving them everything they wanted, up to and including confidential university documents they had no right to see.

This spectacular abdication of any pretense of academic integrity made her look like a liberal of the most craven and spineless kind, the kind who would rather surrender to a police state than stand up for the frequently uncomfortable principles of free speech. To the surprise of absolutely no one, or at least no one outside Shafiks neoliberal policy bubble, that did nothing to placate Stefanik and Johnson and the rest of the House Republicans, who did not want to be placated and had no interest in reasonable dialogue.

They wanted to watch Shafik squirm and grovel and then they wanted her head on a spike, while amplifying a largely invented crisis that delights their base and divides core liberal constituencies against each other. They have already achieved two of those three goals, and after alienating nearly everyone on the Columbia campus through her appalling cowardice, Shafik is surely numbering the days.

Given her record, no one could have expected her to behave differently than she did. The real question is what we might learn from Shafiks failure, and from the larger set of cultural and political failures it represents. After this disastrous week, one might be tempted to conclude that the slow, agonizing decline of American higher education has finally reached its nadir, and that American liberals will finally be forced to recognize that reason is useless against the enemies of reason. Im not holding my breath.

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from Andrew O'Hehir

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Columbia crisis: Another massive failure of liberalism - Salon

Brussels and Western college campuses overreach enough to give Orban and his ilk the ammunition to paint liberal democracy as woke authoritarianism being thrust upon them, which they use to conceal their dismantling of independent institutions

By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion

Why are former US president Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans so fascinated by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of a small, landlocked central European nation that many of them likely could not find on a map? Because, as he said in 2022 when he addressed a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, Hungarys leader just keeps winning and winning and winning.

Orban has created a model MAGA country. In a speech to the conferences only European franchise in Budapest on Thursday, he offered himself up as living proof that conservatives can survive in an ocean of liberal pretense, to make Europe great again.

Others due to speak included US Republicans such as Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, and US representatives Andy Harris of Maryland and Keith Self of Texas, as well as former presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Rick Santorum.

Illustration: Mountain People

After a recent visit to Hungarys capital, still elegant and redolent of the days when it ran a small empire, I think liberals have even more to learn.

Orban wants to change the world in his image. That is not a metaphor or hyperbole. You do not have to like him or his goals, but do not discount the 60-year-olds voracious ambition, political talent and sheer chutzpah.

Hungarys experience under Orban offers at least two takeaways for liberals: First, build a united opposition and do not wait to fight back. Second, focus that fight tightly around the rule of law and democratic institutions. Mix it up with the culture wars and you will play into populists hands.

Orbans a lot smarter than his clownish British counterparts. He does not want to leave the EU, which would only make his country poorer and him less influential, but to occupy it. He wants to stoke a revolution of like-minded populists across the bloc that would capture EU institutions, including the European Parliament, which opinion polls suggest would have an expanded far-right contingent after elections this summer.

He is also openly rooting for a Trump victory in November and makes no secret of his preference for the political systems of countries such as Singapore, Turkey, India or Russia, over so-called liberal democracies.

At the beginning of the year we were alone. By the end of the year, we will be the majority in the Western world, Orban told supporters in a March address to mark Hungarys heroic, but ultimately failed, 1848 revolt against the Habsburg Empire.

Everyone would be welcome in his new world of nationalisms, Orban said except for traitors who worked with the EU institutions in Brussels (in his eyes, a new incarnation of the Habsburgs), and those who want to open the floodgates to migrants, or hand our children over to unhinged gender activists.

You know you are in Orbans new order from the moment you get off a plane. Ads promoting Hungary as family friendly line the walls of the jet bridges. The borders are proudly resistant to (non-European) refugees and migrants.

The government has forced out academically free universities, or simply starved them of funding. Meanwhile, the prime ministers chief ideologue, Balazs Orban (no relation), took charge of a private academy called the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and supersized it, endowing it with US$1 billion and an overtly Orbanist agenda.

He can do that, because Viktor Orbans friends and loyalists control much of the economy, including advertising and media, where they bought up 500 outlets and bundled them into a single government-friendly entity. In the deepest of ironies, the whole project has been funded with the help of EU aid that at times accounted for close to 5 percent of GDP.

Driving into the city, billboards show Viktor Orbans main political opponents daubed with dollar signs as if it were graffiti, to portray them as the unpatriotic, paid lackeys of the US. Previously, the same billboards had attacked European Commission President Ursula Van der Leyen. Before her it was George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist whom Viktor Orban has sold to his voters as a Bond villain. Keeping voters mobilized against enemies, real and imagined, has been critical to Viktor Orbans success.

US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, who is gay, is also on the hit list. In a remarkable speech last month, Pressman warned against Viktor Orbans backsliding on democracy under cover of rhetorical shell games that tell you to look anywhere other than where the actual ball is hidden. That was typical of Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War, and in Russia still, he said. But this is not something we expect from allies.

Other populists cannot copy Viktor Orbans playbook wholesale, because it has depended on a unique weakness in Hungarys electoral system that easily grants a supermajority of parliamentary seats. That gave Viktor Orban a free hand to legislate and change the constitution from the day he took office. He used the power to create a de facto one-party state he has called it illiberal democracy without having to jail opponents, as in Turkey, or kill them, as in Russia.

What matters is whether Hungary is still a democracy, 10 years into this illiberal project, said Agoston Samuel Mraz, chief executive of the government-friendly Nezopont Intezet think tank and polling agency. Clearly it is, because the most important question is whether the opposition has a possibility to win the election.

It does, Mraz said. It is just that Viktor Orbans opposition is divided and not very good.

Maybe. Technically, Mraz is right. Most Hungarians can watch TV commentators criticizing the government if they try. They could also vote for opposition parties if they wanted to. It is just that the field is so sharply tilted in favor of Viktor Orban in terms of money, media coverage and gerrymandered electoral districting that it would take a minor miracle to unseat him. (The next elections are scheduled for 2026).

There are signs of fatigue with Viktor Orbans Fidesz party, which for the first time since 2010 is overseeing a declining economy that is not easily explained away, with growth negative and inflation at 17 percent last year. The open question is whether it is too late to unravel Orbanism, because a lot of damage has been done.

Take the rule of law, a sine qua non for any genuine democracy. Viktor Orban brought the prosecutors office, constitutional court and ombudsman under his control early, before moving on to the Supreme Court and making a new position, filled by the wife of a Fidesz lawmaker, to take charge of all judicial appointments and training budgets for the lower courts.

Tamas Matusik was among those elected in 2018 to the judiciarys existing governing body, the Hungarian National Council of Judges, who first took a stand for its independence.

We were hunted down, he said.

Some members resigned under pressure. Others were subjected to public smear campaigns. Matusik personally was the object of more than 400 negative TV and press items in a single month, as he went to seek European support.

I told colleagues there, this can happen to you, he said. Some laughed at the idea, said Matusik, who eventually became president of the council and whose term has since ended. They arent laughing anymore.

In the end, it worked and Viktor Orban backed down. His appointee resigned and, under intense pressure from the EU, which withheld more than 10 billion euros (US$10.71 billion) of funding to press for the reversal, powers were restored to the council to run the lower court system. That secured release of the EU funds, but Hungarys highest courts remain captured.

The original sin of our judiciary was that no one stood up and protested when it all began, Matusik said.

That is one key Viktor Orban lesson for liberals: To push back early where it really counts. Another is to define much more tightly where that is, focusing exclusively on what is required for membership in the club of Western democracies, including the EU and NATO, and is therefore open to legitimate international pressure.

It is vital to resist the overreach that has helped Viktor Orban sell his shell game to voters by eliding issues of democracy with identity politics. After all, if illiberalism just means having a democracy stripped of woke diktat, what is not to like for a conservative?

The EU, for example, is still withholding 20 billion euros of funding for Hungary, with the bulk of criteria for the moneys release focused on measures to prevent fraud and corruption. When he attacks these conditions, the prime minister invariably talks about demands to repeal a law banning the exposure of minors to material that refers to homosexuality, and a requirement for asylum seekers only to apply from outside the country.

His complaint resonates. I disagree with these laws, as does the European Commission, but many Hungarians do not.

The EUs attempt to police the area has proved a political gift to Viktor Orban, diverting attention from his erosion of the rule of law, and from the losses to Hungary including tens of billions of euros in EU aid that are being caused by corruption among his business allies. It also raises reasonable questions about whether policies on LGBTQ+ rights and immigration should be decided in Brussels or national parliaments.

Viktor Orban and his like succeed in part because there is enough overreach in Brussels, Western college campuses and elsewhere that he can use it to paint liberal democracy as a woke authoritarianism that is being thrust down Hungarian throats, concealing his destruction of independent institutions. So let us stop talking about liberal and illiberal democracy altogether. It is just democracy, it is under severe threat in Hungary and that is nothing to admire or emulate.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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