President Joe Biden is scheduled to speak at a union hall in northern Virginia Thursday afternoon, attempting to cast himself as a defender of the middle class by leaning into his economic accomplishments and contrasting them with the Republican proposals he says would be catastrophic for Americans' pocketbooks.

The National Hockey League showed recently that there’s a big difference between wanting inclusiveness and being willing to fight for it.

Earlier this month, the NHL began promoting its Pathway to Hockey Summit, a job fair in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on February 2 in advance of the NHL All-Star weekend. The point of the career fair was to broaden the hiring pool for staff positions in professional hockey. On LinkedIn, the NHL posted, “Participants must be 18 years of age or older, based in the U.S., and identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability. Veterans are also welcome and encouraged to attend.”

Directly targeting diverse job candidates was a sound strategy. The NHL’s own demographic study last year revealed that 83.6 percent of its workforce is white. Men hold nearly 62 percent of the league’s jobs.

But Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, saw an opportunity to create another senseless battle in the culture war. After finding out about the NHL’s nefarious plan to attract historically marginalized groups, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, released this statement:

Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic. We are fighting all discrimination in our schools and our workplaces, and we will fight it in publicly accessible places of meeting or activity. We call upon the National Hockey League to immediately remove and denounce the discriminatory prohibitions it has imposed on attendance to the 2023 “Pathway to Hockey” summit.

Rather than take a bold stand against DeSantis—who’s vying to be the GOP’s most prominent anti-“woke” warrior—the NHL buckled. The post was removed from LinkedIn, and an NHL spokesperson claimed in a statement to Fox News that the original wording “was not accurate.” The league’s intent was to “encourage all individuals to consider a career in our game.”

[Read: Want to understand the red-state onslaught? Look at Florida.]

The embarrassing incident wasn’t the only time this month that the NHL retreated from its efforts to make hockey more inclusive.

Last week, the Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov didn’t participate in his team’s pregame skate, because he refused to wear an LGBTQ Pride Night warm-up jersey or use a rainbow-taped hockey stick. The event was part of the league’s Hockey Is for Everyone campaign, whose mission statement reads: “We believe all hockey programs—from professionals to youth organizations—should provide a safe, positive and inclusive environment for players and families regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, disability, sexual orientation and socio-economic status.” Explaining his decision to not take part, Provorov said he wanted to be “true to myself” and to his Russian Orthodox faith.

NHL teams have hosted Pride nights for years, and nothing should be controversial about a team wanting all of its fans to feel welcome, or wanting to acknowledge its LGBTQ fan base.

Provorov is entitled to his beliefs, and I’m not going to pretend that his absence from a warm-up skate is an unforgivable offense. But the indulgent reaction to his decision is noteworthy. The NHL released a toothless statement declaring that players can decide for themselves which league diversity initiatives to support. Provorov’s coach defended him even more emphatically. “Provy did nothing wrong,” the Flyers coach John Tortorella said last week. “Just because you don’t agree with his decision doesn’t mean he did anything wrong.”

Tortorella’s response sounds extremely hypocritical in light of what he said when, in 2016, the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people. Tortorella, one of the NHL’s most outspoken personalities, said then that he’d bench any player who decided to sit for the national anthem. In his mind, standing up against oppression and injustice is not worthwhile, but spurning an anti-bigotry event is entirely legitimate. (Full disclosure: I am a producer of the ESPN documentary series that Kaepernick and the director Spike Lee are making about the former quarterback’s banishment from pro football.)

The dustups over the job fair and Provorov were crucial tests for the NHL, and the league failed in both cases. It’s simply not ready to deal with the discomfort that unfortunately comes with welcoming underrepresented groups.

Inclusiveness has never been an easy fight. Three years have not yet passed since the murder of George Floyd, which prompted a number of companies to publicly pledge to be better allies to marginalized people. Where has that 2020 energy gone?

[Jemele Hill: Athletes will never be quiet again]

The NHL and every other high-profile organization that vows to promote more inclusion should be prepared to withstand a backlash led by political opportunists. DeSantis, in particular, has used his political position to bully corporations and amplify white conservatives’ grievances. Last year, DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which, in addition to restricting how race and gender issues are taught in Florida schools, bars state businesses from using any diversity and equity training that could make their employees feel uncomfortable.

DeSantis has also picked a major fight with Disney, one of Florida’s largest employers. He has been beefing with the company over the state’s Parental Rights and Education legislation, which opponents have called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Under this law, “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Disney paused its political donations in Florida over the bill, and then-CEO Bob Chapek apologized to his employees for initially staying silent. “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down,” Chapek wrote in a statement to colleagues. “I am sorry.”

To retaliate against what DeSantis called “woke Disney,” the governor is seeking to terminate the company’s 50-year control over the 40 square miles that holds its theme parks and attractions. DeSantis seems to think that these cultural fights will propel him all the way to the White House, but they only make him look small.

Unfortunately, this approach is not completely misguided. The NHL has certainly given DeSantis reason to believe that his kind of browbeating can succeed. However, what professional-hockey officials should be concerned about is how their actions (or inaction) will be absorbed by the women, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people whom the league is supposedly trying to reach. Tortorella not only defended Provorov but said he never considered benching him for skipping the warm-ups. (Kaepernick’s protest, meanwhile, didn’t keep him from attending practices or other team activities.)

Ultimately, in the past week or so, the NHL has proved it isn’t a true ally of communities that deserve protection. If you can so easily abandon your good intentions, others can fairly question how committed you were to them in the first place.

Efforts are underway in Florida counties to comply with a law championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that requires the approval of books in classroom libraries leaving some teachers feeling fearful and confused.

This afternoon, Meta announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump’s account after a two-year suspension from Facebook and Instagram. The former president was deplatformed after his posts were deemed to have incited, or at the very least encouraged, the January 6 insurrection. But according to Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, the public-safety risk that triggered the punishment “has sufficiently receded.” The poster in chief can post once again.

Any story that involves Facebook, Donald Trump, and the context of a failed coup attempt is, by nature, controversial. Giving Trump this megaphone back for his 2024 campaign is particularly thorny: The former president has offered zero evidence that he changed during his social-media exile. He may still use Facebook and Instagram to lie for reasons big and small, as well as to whip up partisan resentment and even violence, should it suit his needs. If anything, his posts on his own network, Truth Social, seem to suggest a man whose online engagement has become more erratic, angry, and conspiratorial; one report shows that he has amplified QAnon-promoting accounts more than 400 times since launching the platform.

And yet there is something underwhelming—stale, even—about the news. The story of Trump’s deplatforming feels cryogenically frozen, a 2020 narrative that seems to have lost part of its relevance now that it’s thawed out. This is partly because close observers of the story anticipated today’s development: In 2021, after a ruling from its independent Oversight Board, Facebook announced that Trump’s suspension would be lifted after two years, “external factors” permitting. (The company said at the time that it would assess “instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest.”)  And some of the thunder was stolen by Twitter, which reinstated his account late last year, although Trump hasn’t resumed posting there.

[Read: The Meta Oversight Board has some genuinely smart suggestions]

There is also the mutual decay of both Trump and Facebook. Each thrives by hijacking attention and monetizing outrage, and they’ve benefited each other: The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on more than 289,000 Facebook ads over the span of just a few months in 2020, according to an analysis by The Markup. But lately, both appear to have lost the juice. Many people still support Trump, and many people still use Facebook products, but the shine is gone—and that matters.

Facebook’s ad business was kneecapped last year by changes Apple made to limit tracking on its devices. It faces steep competition from insurgent apps such as TikTok. And there is a sense, looking at the company’s transparency reports, which detail the most popular content on its platform, that Facebook has become a vast wasteland of recycled memes and scammy, spammy clickbait.

Meanwhile, Trump’s 2024 campaign has been, to date, almost nonexistent. His kickoff announcement was roundly mocked as “low energy,” and some cable news networks didn’t bother to air it in full. Trump and his team have been sloppy and clearly grasping for relevance. And although I wouldn’t downplay the former president’s chances in the 2024 contest, he certainly doesn’t appear as invincible in primary politics as he once did. In December, ​​Florida Governor Ron DeSantis beat Trump 52 to 38 percent in a hypothetical matchup among likely Republican voters. Electoral uncertainties aside, there’s the plain fact that some around Trump have suggested the man is diminished. “He has retreated to the golf course and to Mar-a-Lago … His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small,” one Trump adviser told New York magazine in December.

None of this negates the possibility that Trump could return to Facebook and Instagram and abuse his power by posting QAnon conspiracy theories and attempting to sow chaos. Trump’s unpredictability has always been part of his power, and the wild swings of the tech industry over the past several months mean everyone should brace for the unexpected. Far-right extremism is still a threat across the internet. But it’s not clear that this reinstatement will matter much: In his announcement, Clegg argued that the risk to public safety has changed in recent years. He’s right, but not just because Trump doesn’t have executive power anymore. What Clegg can’t admit is that there is a second reason the risk profile has changed: Facebook's own influence and reputation have receded as well.

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Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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The Ringmaster

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named “George Santos.”

In the enduring words of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. “You fucked me,” he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. “I know it was you, you whipped against me.” Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. (McCarthy’s office denies that this happened.)

It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.

Let us leave aside the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. The republic will not rise or fall based on such things, and if McCarthy wants to engage in snippy stoogery to ingratiate himself with the MAGA caucus and soothe Donald Trump’s hurt feelings, it is within his power to do so. In his letter to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker claimed his decision was all about “integrity.” This is not just the death of irony; it is a North Korean–style, firing-squad-by-anti-aircraft-gun execution of irony. Worse, McCarthy even has the right to channel, as he did, Joseph McCarthy, and smear Swalwell by alluding to derogatory information that the FBI supposedly has about him. It might not be honorable or professional, but he can do it.

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government—law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies—has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

Jordan and his posse are styling themselves as a new Church Committee, the 1975 investigation into the Cold War misdeeds of American intelligence organizations headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. This dishonors Church, whose committee uncovered genuinely shocking abuses by agencies that had for too long escaped oversight during the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Church himself was a patriot, unlike some of the charlatans on this new committee, but even Church’s investigation did at least some damage with its revelations, and some of the reforms (especially the move away from relying on human intelligence) undertaken later based in part on its findings were unwise. In any case, his fame was short-lived: He was defeated for reelection in 1980 and died in 1984. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a conference held in Church’s honor many years ago and met with his widow.)

The Church Committee was, in its day, a necessary walk across the hot coals for Americans who had invested too much power and trust in the executive branch. I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

Related:

Speaker in name only Why Kevin McCarthy can’t lose George Santos

Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and Germany announced that it would send an initial shipment of 14 Leopard 2 tanks. The arraignment of the suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was postponed until Feb. 16. School officials were warned on three separate occasions that a 6-year-old who later shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia had a gun or had made threats, according to an attorney for the teacher.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Public outrage hasn’t improved policing, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

“Retirement before arthritis” read one handwritten sign. “Leave us time to live before we die” said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

The Church Committee revealed outrages (including assassination plots) that today might seem like they were taken from bad spy-movie scripts. But such things were deadly serious business, as the United States moved from World War II into the Cold War determined to do whatever it took to defeat Soviet communism. For decades, Americans romanticized spies and spying as glamorous and exciting, but in reality, espionage was a nasty business. Our British cousins knew this better than we did, which is why British spy fiction was always grittier than its American counterpart. (The James Bond novels are pretty dour, sometimes even sadistic; Hollywood cleaned them up.)

But just because we lost our innocence about spying doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the culture it produced back in the day. In that spirit, let me recommend to you Secret Agent, an offering on a wonderful, listener-supported San Francisco–based internet radio station called SomaFM. There are plenty of great channels on SomaFM—I especially like Left Coast 70s, which is just what it sounds like—but Secret Agent is a lot of fun, a mixture of 1960s lounge and light jazz, soundtracks, and other tidbits, with the occasional line from 007 and other spies spliced in here and there. It’s a nice throwback to the days when espionage was cool, and it’s great music for working or a get-together over martinis, which should be shaken and … well, you know.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.