Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken with Chen Jining, the Communist Party secretary for Shanghai, on Thursday.
Israeli soldiers near a rocket-intercepting Iron Dome battery near the Gaza border this month. New American aid for Israel includes more than $5 billion to replenish defense systems.
A photo of Hersh Goldberg-Polin held by his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, in their home in Jerusalem.
Tents in Deir Al Balah, where many displaced Gazans have been suffering under rising temperatures.
The rubble of a building this month after Israeli strikes in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where more than a million displaced people have fled.
Displaced Palestinians cooking as they shelter in a UNRWA-affiliated school in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, on Tuesday.
Avani Dias produced a television segment about accusations that India was responsible for the death of a Sikh separatist in Canada last year.
The Palestinian Civil Defense recovering bodies on Sunday from what it is calling a mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
A street scene in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, where a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering and which Israel still said it is planning to invade.
A report published from watchdog group 38 North suggests U.S. animation companies may have unwittingly used work from North Korea.
The post Report: North Korean Animators May Have Worked on Amazon, HBO Shows appeared first on Breitbart.
A Palestinian baby girl was born 10 weeks premature and weighed three pounds after her mother was killed in Rafah on Sunday.
Employees of the main U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees distributing aid in Khan Younis last year.
Two buildings in the city of Hualien partially toppled in the quakes that hit Taiwan on Monday and early Tuesday.
Waiting for donated food in Rafah, Gaza, last month.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews burn leavened items in preparation for the Passover holiday in Jerusalem on Monday.
Will Keen as Vladimir Putin in “Patriots,” Peter Morgan’s wild story of makers switching places with the made, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.
Six months into the conflict in Gaza, the question of what Israel has achieved is creating ever more intense global strains.
Mourners gathered Sunday for the funeral for Palestinians killed the day before during an Israeli raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp in the northern part of the West Bank.
Despite shows of support, like this anti-Israel rally, many in Iran are deeply concerned about all-out war with Israel.
Mourning relatives in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Saturday.
An anti-Israeli gathering in Tehran on Friday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson took an extraordinary political risk to defy the anti-interventionist wing of his party and push through the foreign aid package.
An S-300 air defense system displayed in Tehran in 2017. Iranian officials said Israel had struck an S-300 antiaircraft system at a military base on Friday.
People mourning relatives in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, this week.
The tech-fueled political polarization of our current moment began over 10 years ago.
The idea that 2013 was more than ten years ago baffles me, but while dwelling on how much time has passed, I was thinking about how that singular year redefined the current state of affairs in America. Since 1968 or even 1945, has a single year seen so much change?
When we look at the landscape of existential crisis facing the American public, a few things stand out: loneliness, mental illness among the young, the Great Awokening, and political polarization. Obviously, these aren’t the only political issues facing the United States. We have a broken border and out-of-control spending, but these issues are at the root of many of our social conditions.
2013 wasn’t the year these problems started, but it was the point of no return, at least no return that I can see. Although many of these issues are political, politicians aren’t responsible for this turning point – so much to some people’s chagrin, this won’t be a tirade on Obama.
Why was 2013 so important? It was the first time a majority of Americans had a smartphone, and the first time the iPhone became available on all cell phone providers’ plans. It was the first time a supermajority of Americans were on social media. And it was the year that the media began their Great Awokening, whereby all news centered around race and racism. All these technological and social advances fed into one another to further drive Americans apart.
There’s now a wide body of scientific literature showing that smartphones, combined with social media, are linked to anxiety, depression, and social contagions among teenagers, especially teen girls.
From 2010 to 2019, as smartphones and social media became more commonly used, rates of depression in adolescents rose more than 50 percent. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
Jonathan Haidt noted in the Atlantic how the extreme pivot in most measures of teens’ mental health (which he says began in 2012 instead of 2013) occurred with easy access to social media and the smartphone.
Social isolation wasn’t limited to teenagers; adults became more transfixed in their own worlds. Why hear from your liberal cousin or your conservative uncle when your social media feed could narrowly focus on the politics or worldview you already believe in?
By 2013, 30 percent of Americans, about half of all users nationwide, got their news from social media outlets. This was especially true of Millennials and Gen-Xers, nearly 40 percent of whom received their information from Facebook. Democrats were also much more likely to get their news from social media than Republicans.
This concentration of influence in a tightly controlled algorithm where nearly everything and everyone echoed your political persuasions was just the start of our current era of division, with Americans passing each other like ships in the night. It was the start of a world where we not only come to different conclusions, but live in different realities selected for us by tech overlords who insist we never stop doom-scrolling.
Political polarization obviously didn’t start in 2013; it had been going on for decades, but never has true isolation been available as it was in the hyper-individualistic digital society. Even a viewer watching MSNBC at that time would have to see Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter make a guest appearance, and a Fox News viewer would see Patrick Caddell or Alan Colmes. Now, not only could you avoid political commentary you didn’t enjoy, but you could also build up your own political sources that were free from the constraints of the cable news industry.
The creation of political social media influencers started around this time, and while they haven’t all been grifters, many have an open relationship with the truth. A business model that only works if people rage-post demands that viewers spend their day in a constant state of disbelief that everyone is corrupt and nothing is working as it once was. Some of that sentiment is true, but a lot isn’t.
The conditions also create a demand for political purity. Had the Salem witch trials occurred in the era of anonymous social media posts, there would have been so many women burned that the state of Massachusetts would have entered a demographic winter.
Accounts, writers, influencers, and journalists who build themselves up by going after the correct enemy—real, overblown, or imaginary—are richly rewarded with thousands or sometimes millions of followers. All of a sudden, people who decided to become journalists weren’t tied to mediocre salaries and small bylines in dying newspapers. You could become a pseudocelebrity, able to warrant book deals, television appearances, and hefty speaking fees if your following became large enough.
It was the ideal moment for the start of the Great Awokening.
Journalists from even reputable outlets started to increase their focus that all inequalities in human life were related to overt racism or unconscious racial bias.
(Source: Zach Goldberg)
Way before Donald Trump allegedly ignited the flames of racial tension with his 2016 presidential campaign, the media was already turning the heat up on the subject.
The media became a powderkeg of racial tension stoked by white liberals, where they were gleefully willing and waiting to declare every institution an irredeemably racist institution in need of being torn down. Liberal readers of these outlets and journalists began seeing the racism they were reading about everywhere.
According to Zach Goldberg, “In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was ‘a big problem,’ according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.”
White liberals weren’t the only ones affected by this constant news coverage of racism. The percentage of black Americans who believed they were treated the same as whites fell from 40 percent in the early 2000s to just 18 percent in 2018, lower than it was the year before the Civil Rights Act.
When Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, the fire was lit; a wave of violence in our cities primarily from young black men followed. White liberals said it would decline if only we defunded our police. The result was devastating: National homicides increased from 14,196 in 2013 to 15,696 in 2015.
The internet may have created a larger world with easier access to more information, but 2013 was the year our world started getting smaller. Living more life online than in person, our politics became more rage-induced, and left-wing obsession over race ultimately created the political and social conditions for defunding the police, wiping away merit, and promoting critical race theory, all in the name of equity.
For the last decade, we have lived in a world created in 2013—as monumental a change as any other year in the last century.
The post Sad Digital World: How it All Started in 2013 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Iranians at an anti-Israel rally in Tehran after Friday Prayer. An Israeli strike on Iran appeared limited, and the reaction from both Israel and Iran was muted.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, center, and Evan Ryan, his wife, at the Group of 7 meeting on Capri in Italy. The group has grown more active and ambitious in recent years
Mourners in Tehran carried the coffin of Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who was killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria in 2023.
A poster depicting missiles in Tehran on Thursday.
A new trial aims to seek accountability for the deadly collapse of Renaissance Residence, near the Turkish city of Antakya, during an earthquake last year.
A makeshift memorial to victims of the stabbing attack in a Sydney shopping mall.
The United Nations Security Council met in New York on Thursday to address issues in the Middle East, including the Palestinian bid for statehood.
Iranian medium-range missiles during the annual Army Day celebration at a military base in Tehran on Wednesday. The United States imposed sanctions on Iranian armed forces and weapon makers.
A rally in Jerusalem this month calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Iranians on Monday expressing support for their government’s missile and drone attack on Israel over the weekend.
The Qatari prime minister, right, with the foreign minister of Turkey, at a news conference in Doha, Qatar, this week.
The ByteDance offices in Shanghai last year.
Members of the Israeli military showing the remnants of an Iranian ballistic missile that fell on Israel over the weekend.
From left, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister; Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president; and David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, at a hotel in Jerusalem on Wednesday.
The Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, a day after an airstrike by Israel.
An Israeli soldier near Arab al-Aramashe in northern Israel after a strike by Hezbollah on Wednesday.
Buildings destroyed in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Tuesday.
Israeli soldiers with Palestinian detainees in Gaza in December. The Israeli military reviewed this image as part of the conditions of allowing the photographer to accompany soldiers.
An Israeli tank on the Gaza border.
Burned vehicles in the Palestinian village of Al Mughayir, in the West Bank, on Saturday.
Navi Pillay, right, who leads a U.N. commission created to look into possible human rights violations by Israel, with the Egyptian ambassador to the U.N., Ahmed Ihab Abdelahad Gamaleldin, in Geneva on Tuesday.
Pro-Palestinian protesters shutting down traffic on I-880 in Oakland, Calif., on Monday.
Lebanon’s interior minister, Bassam Mawlawi, said initial findings suggested that the killing of a money changer “was carried out by intelligence services.”
A rocket booster that fell near Arad, Israel, after Iran launched drones and missiles over the weekend.