Weds: I Live in Texas, So I Am Running in Georgia

When Losing Is Considered Winning (This is Not About Previous Guy.)

Usually when a team gets knocked out of an international tournament like the soccer World Cup, the nation is united in grief, pride in their performance or a mixture of both. After Iran's loss to the United States on Tuesday, however, many Iranians cheered their players' failure, saying they represented the repressive theocratic regime rather than the people it violently oppresses.

On Tuesday, those criticizing the team made their voices heard: This was the Islamic Republic's loss, not Iran's. Horn-honking cars flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities, according to footage posted on social media.

In one of the videos, which was posted after the match, the man filming said those honking their horns on the capital’s Pirouzi Street were expressing "the joy of the people due to the loss."

Meanwhile, there were thousands of tweets in Persian, or in English from prominent Iranians, saying how happy they were their own team had fallen at the first hurdle of the competition.

"For 43 years the regime brainwashed Iranians to hate America," Masih Alinejad, a New York-based Iranian journalist and activist, tweeted . "But see how people across Iran are celebrating the victory of the U.S. soccer team against the Islamic Republic."

Dissident Iranian rapper Soroush Lashkari, better known by his stage name Hichkas (translation: nobody) wrote that “videos of Iranians celebrating the Islamic Republic team’s loss to the U.S. team are all over the internet.”

He said that real “Iranians don’t consider the terrorist regime” — meaning the country’s government — to be “Iranian.”

So Iran's short-lived stint at the World Cup was fraught with complex questions about loyalty and the national identity. Should the country’s 85 million people get behind a team bearing the name “Islamic Republic of Iran” — which is using brutal tactics to crush protests that have raged for more than two months?

The debate even played out inside Qatar's billion-dollar stadiums during Iran's three games, with fans backing the regime attempting to drown out supporters who criticized it.

Shortly after the U.S. match, scuffles erupted between Iranian protesters holding up portraits of outspoken former soccer player Ali Karimi, an icon of the protest movement, and a journalist from Iranian state-run media who was trying to film them, The Associated Press reported.

Musk Allows Free Speech for the Racists.  Liberals?  Not So Much

Among some of the bad actors who have come crawling back onto Twitter are an assortment of neofascists, creepy misogynists, and innately threatening accounts:

Neofascist Brett Stevens, who was cited as an ideological inspiration by Norwegian mass murderer/terrorist Anders Breivik in the manifesto he published prior to the rampage in which he murdered 77 people. Stevens’ response to this: “I am honored to be so mentioned by someone who is clearly far braver than I, no comment on his methods, but he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream.” Now back on Twitter, he's already advocating for genocidal policies and forced removal of ethnic groups.

Sargon of Akkad, aka the U.K.-based misogynist Carl Benjamin, who has argued that feminism was culpable for the rising tide of mass murders committed by men, because the movement had disenfranchised them, so the killers were “out of options.” He once retorted to a woman critic who described how she received rape threats, “I wouldn’t even rape you.” (He was banned from Twitter shortly thereafter.)

Tony Hovater, a longtime organizer and top lieutenant in the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party. Hovater was a prominent figure in the alt-right of 2016-17, but has become siloed at the chat platform Telegram, where he currently holds forth.

Accounts like “Day of the Rope,” with the anonymous username @trumpwon2020fr, have also popped up after it spent $8 on a verification badge. Its name, as the Anti-Defamation League explains, is a white supremacist concept taken from The Turner Diaries, the neo-Nazi “race war” blueprint, which describes the mass lynchings of purported “race traitors” such as journalists, politicians, and women in relationships with non-white men. However, Twitter appears to have promptly suspended the account.

More disturbingly, however, a number of prominent left-wing activist accounts have been suspended without explanation—but the reasons for the bans are more than apparent in Musk’s own exchanges with pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo, who essentially identified all of the accounts that were eventually suspended by name, as Robert Mackey and Micah Lee report at The Intercept:

Los Angeles activist Chad Loder, a cyber-security expert who identifies as an antifascist researcher, one whose work has led to the arrest of at least one of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists. At the time their account was suspended, Loder had been reporting on a data breach in Europe affecting millions of users that Twitter had been covering up.

Video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, a member of the Daily Kos community who has reported on far-right protests in Southern California at his VPS Reports channel. Singh, who survived violent attacks by far-right anti-vaccine protesters in 2021, was described as “Antifa” and falsely accused by Ngo of “calling for deadly violence again”—as he has done previously.

The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that made headlines recently by providing armed security for an LGBTQ+ event in North Texas, one that had been threatened by Proud Boys and self-described “Christian fascists.” The group’s alternative account, however, remains active.

CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that publishes “news, analysis, books, journals, posters, videos, podcasts, and a wide range of other resources — all copyright free,” as its website says. Its Twitter account has never in 14 years on the site violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. Ngo, however, urged Musk to suspend its account by lying: he falsely labeled Crimethinc an “Antifa collective,” saying the group had “claimed a number of attacks” (it has not). The account was suspended only hours later.

That's More than One Month Per Punch

ANew York man who was caught on video punching an elderly Asian woman 125 times earlier this year was sentenced to over 17 years in jail in connection with the hate crime attack, officials announced Tuesday.

In the brutal assault he called the woman of Filipino descent an “Asian b----” and she was left suffering bleeding on her brain and multiple facial fractures.

Recession or No Recession?

The U.S. economy rebounded more strongly than initially thought in the third quarter, the government confirmed on Wednesday, but higher interest rates as the Federal Reserve battles inflation have raised the risks of a recession next year.

Gross domestic product increased at a 2.9% annualized rate, the government said in its second estimate of third-quarter GDP. That was revised up from the 2.6% pace reported last month. The economy had contracted at a 0.6% rate in the second quarter.