Happy Thursday! Twenty years ago today, the New England Patriots won their first Super Bowl. 

Fun fact: Tom Brady played in 10 Super Bowls during his 22 seasons in the league, meaning he was more likely to reach the Super Bowl in a given year than Steph Curry is to make a three-point shot.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Pentagon announced last night that U.S. Special Operations forces had conducted a “successful” counterterrorism mission in northwest Syria, and there were no U.S. casualties. He did not specify who the target was, but Reuters reported a raid targeted a “house in the Atmeh area near the Turkish border.” Syrian aid workers said at least 13 people—including six children and four women—were killed in clashes after the raid began.

• The Biden administration will deploy approximately 3,000 U.S. service members to Romania, Poland, and Germany in the coming days, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters yesterday. “The current situation demands that we reinforce the deterrent and defensive posture on NATO’s eastern flank,” he said, but added the troops will not fight in Ukraine.

• White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday the Biden administration is no longer using the word “imminent” to describe a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. “It sent a message we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision,” she said, adding that it’s “still true” Putin “could invade at any time.”

• The Eurozone’s annual rate of consumer-price inflation reached a record 5.1 percent in January, the European Central Bank reported Wednesday. Economists generally believed year-over-year inflation had peaked in December, and were expecting the figure to fall back down to 4.3 percent.

• Shares in Meta (Facebook) tumbled more than 20 percent yesterday after executives revealed in Wednesday’s earnings report the platform’s daily active user base declined quarter-over-quarter for the first time in company history. The platform blamed missed expectations, in part, on Apple’s privacy changes that allow iPhone and iPad users to block apps from tracking their online activity.

• The corruption scandals and lawsuits that have rocked the National Rifle Association since 2019 have taken a financial toll on the group, according to a Thursday report in The Reload. Revenue has fallen to nearly half what it was in 2018, while legal fees have expanded to about 20 percent of the group’s expenses.

• Members of Canada’s Conservative Party voted 73-45 on Wednesday to oust Erin O’Toole as their leader several months after he failed to unseat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in last September’s election. He is likely to be replaced by the more hard-right Pierre Poilievre.

• CNN President Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday after announcing he had failed to disclose a romantic relationship with Allison Gollust, another top CNN executive. The relationship came to light as part of an outside law firm’s investigation into former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s time at the network.

NFL Head Coach Alleges Widespread Racial Discrimination

A little more than a week out from Super Bowl 56, football’s high holy day, the NFL would like nothing more than to be showcasing the dynamic talents that propelled the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals to the game’s biggest stage. Matthew Stafford and Joe Burrow, gunslinging quarterbacks taken first overall in the draft 11 years apart. Ja’Marr Chase and Aaron Donald, arguably the most dominant offensive and defensive players in the playoffs thus far, respectively. But those conversations will have to wait.

On Tuesday afternoon, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a remarkable, 58-page class-action lawsuit in federal court accusing the Dolphins, New York Giants, Denver Broncos, and NFL as a whole of discriminatory conduct in the hiring and retention of black head coaches, coordinators, and general managers.

Looking strictly at the numbers, it’s not difficult to see where Flores—who was born in Brooklyn to two Honduran immigrants—is coming from. Estimates vary year to year, but black players account for somewhere between 58 percent and 70 percent of the league’s 32 rosters. After Flores and David Culley of the Houston Texans were fired last month, however, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers stands alone as the NFL’s only black head coach, with four vacancies yet to be filled. Nineteen percent of NFL general managers—the people generally tasked with hiring head coaches—are black, as are fewer than a quarter of NFL offensive and defensive coordinators, roles considered stepping stones to a head coaching position. There are no black team owners.

“That’s a huge disparity, one that is not likely to be attributable to chance,” said Vicki Schultz, a Yale Law School professor and former trial attorney at the Department of Justice who focused on employment litigation.

Worth Your Time

• In early January—days before Flores was even fired—Kalyn Kahler wrote a piece for Defector exploring how big a role nepotism plays in NFL coaching. “After looking through every team’s coaching staff as of March 2021, I found that Adam and Mike [Zimmer] and Nate and Pete [Carroll] are among 111 NFL coaches who are related biologically or through marriage to current or former NFL coaches, out of a total of 792 coaches employed by NFL teams. That’s 14 percent of all coaches,” she writes. “Overall, the league averages 3.4 coaches per team who are related to a current or former NFL coach, and the percentage of coaches at the supervisory levels—the ones with hiring power—is even higher. Eleven of 32 head coaches are related to a current or former NFL coach. There are 24 coordinators who are related to current or former coaches, almost a full quarter of them.”

• The United States’ national debt surpassing $30 trillion this week should be a major wake up call, Eric Boehm writes for Reason. “Even if the growing debt doesn’t trigger a default or other crisis, it will have a material impact on Americans’ futures,” he argues. “Higher levels of debt are correlated with lower levels of future economic growth in no small part because the amount of money that must be siphoned out of the economy to pay the interest on the debt will keep getting larger. Every dollar used to service the debt is a dollar that can’t be used to invest in new technology, pay workers, or save for the next rainy day. Higher levels of debt also make it more difficult for policy makers to combat inflation, which is eroding away at Americans’ paychecks and savings faster than at any point in the past 40 years.”

• In a piece for The American Conservative, Micah Meadowcroft makes what may seem at first blush to be a counterintuitive argument about social media and political polarization. “Social media do not contribute to political extremism by letting us sort into ideological silos; instead, they constantly expose us to people with beliefs and ways of life that appear to us as a threat,” he argues. “We have not been siloed by 24 hour news and digital infotainment, but rather exposed incessantly to the reality of different types of people and alternative ways of living. Our communities and the social order we take for granted become at risk as, thanks to technology, we find ourselves unable to simply live apart from the other. For the other is now here, in our home, in our face, on our screen, all the time.”

Presented Without Comment

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

This from @IsaacDovere & @mkraju is really something. I would simply not withhold critically important information from other major actors. cnn.com/2022/02/02/pol…

February 2nd 2022

86 Retweets525 Likes

Also Presented Without Comment

The Daily Beast @thedailybeast

Rudy Giuliani was unmasked as a contestant during a taping last week of 'The Masked Singer.' His presence on the stage upset two of the show’s judges, Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke, so much that they left the set with cameras still rolling, Deadline reports. trib.al/DqXXceV

February 3rd 2022

1,206 Retweets5,927 Likes

Toeing the Company Line

• On the site today, Andrew has a piece about the cagey way the National Park Service has handled the task of clearing homeless encampments on federal land in D.C., Danielle Pletka decries the world’s indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs in advance of the Beijing Olympics, and Christian Schneider offers one cheer for gerrymandering.

• On Wednesday’s Dispatch Podcast, Sarah, Steve, David, and Jonah discuss the latest January 6 revelations, how partisans on both sides of the political aisle are approaching  the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation process, and how to think about the Winter Olympics in light of the Chinese Communist Party’s horrific treatment of the Uyghurs.

• Holy croakano! Chris Stirewalt is back on The Remnant, talking to Jonah about party alignment in America, Congressional kookery left and right, and Joe Biden’s biggest weakness. The punditry is rank with this one.

• In this week’s Capitolism (🔒), Scott Lincicome dives into House Democrats’ COMPETES Act. The legislation, he argues, “provides us with a teachable moment about how not to legislate economic policy in the United States and, quite frankly, about much of what’s wrong with congressional policymaking in general these days.”

• Jonah’s Wednesday G-File (🔒) focuses on Whoopi Goldberg (no relation), and her comments about the Holocaust that got her suspended from The View. “Goldberg didn’t bring the most basic facts to bear on the conversation. If you want to suspend her for that, fine,” he writes. “But from what I can tell, by that standard the show should have been pulled off the air years ago.”

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).