The president’s secret police were at it again last night. Federal agents deployed to Portland — unidentified, unaccountable, and unwanted by local elected and law enforcement officials in Oregon — spent the night gassing, arresting and otherwise terrorizing demonstrators under the guise of “protecting facilities.” Protests began by demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd, but have since evolved into protests against a president sticking his nose in local affairs where it doesn’t belong.

While that was happening, Chad Wolf appeared on Fox. The acting secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security seemed to suggest during the segment that thought itself could be a potential crime. “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals, and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable,” Chad Wolf said.

Though the idea of the thought police is frightening enough, Wolf did do something useful with his remarks. He connected points of causation, obliquely but still clearly, between official acts of the past and official acts of the present, illustrating the creep of authoritarianism from the margins of our society to its center, and that without broader awareness — without public acts of witness — the end can come quickly.

Recall, first, that Donald Trump ran for president promising to purge “illegal” immigrants. (His real goal was all immigration, including legal, and according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, his efforts have been wildly successful; since 2017, legal immigration has fallen by almost 50 percent.) For this reason, so-called sanctuary cities were a target of his rhetoric and, later, his policies.

The thing about federal immigration law is that to enforce it, you need the help of local law enforcement, but local law enforcement is under no legal obligation to help, because immigration isn’t its job. Cities and states don’t need to help if they don’t want to, and given most major cities are run by Democrats, most of them don’t.

This is maddening for a president promising to purge “illegals.” One solution is to sue in a bid to force local cops to play along. The courts have been unfriendly, though, and they are certain to get more unfriendly. The US Supreme Court refused last month to hear a case seeking to overturn a California law transforming the state in a legal haven for immigrants. The high court had previously ruled that the president can’t target states and their cities for “defunding” on account of their being uncooperative with immigration authorities. That leaves the administration with a couple of options.

Option No. 1 came naturally to a demagogue like Trump. Demonize cities as cancers of crime, violence, filth, looting, rioting and other terrible social ills that justify any kind of federal intervention. Characterize them as corrupt, maladministered, and undeserving of tax dollars for being captive to special-interests (that is, public-sector unions and Black people). Characterize them as lawless for not cooperating with ICE and Border Patrol (even though municipalities are following the letter of the law). Give the impression that sanctuary cities are leaving you with no choice but to use force.

Remember what Chad Wolf said: “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals.” He won’t stop from happening what must happen because you forced it to happen.

Then, Option No. 2, use force. The Trump administration dispatched 100 Border Patrol officers in February to sanctuary cities around the country for the stated purpose of boosting deportations by 35 percent. I think it’s safe to say at this point the real goal was intimating not only local cops but residents, too — anyone merely thinking it’s OK to deny the president. According to a New York Times report, they came armed with “stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification.” The officers, moreover, “typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”

Meanwhile, DHS continued its policy of “family separation,” which means the confiscation of children, including babies, from parents seeking political asylum. The objective was deterrence, but the result was kids living in cages or in “internment camps” where they suffered from malnutrition, disease, death or even sexual crimes at the hands of Border Patrol agents. The explicit policy was making life so miserable no one would dare think of entering illegally. And such sadism was justified because the president said a misdemeanor (that’s what illegal entry is) menaced “our way of life.”

What we are seeing in Portland is part of an ongoing effort to push the envelope of acceptable behavior on the part of the Trump administration. At each stage, he has identified new enemies and found new means of crushing them. The process is ad hoc but inexorable — as long as most people, most white people, believe they are immune to an ever-expanding scope of conflict seeking to subordinate everything to a totalized state. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, first they came for the “illegals.” Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then they came for Americans who got in their way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2020

Word Count: 869

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Not long ago, heavily armed white men (and a handful of white women) stood on the steps of Michigan’s Capitol. They were protesting the governor’s lock down amid the spread of the new coronavirus. Gretchen Whitmer, they said, was infringing on their constitutional rights and liberties. They were showing they would not stand for it.

It was a nice bit of political theater that has since grown nationally into a battle over wearing masks. Refuse to wear one, and you support the president. Wear one, and you don’t. But beneath the protests was something members of the press corps believed they should take seriously: a conservative ideology ever watchful of corrupt power.

It should be clear to the press corps, and to a citizenry informed by the press corps, that those protests had nothing to do with the tyranny of government. It should be clear that when they said, “Don’t tread on me,” that didn’t include you. It should be clear, to everyone, that such protests weren’t principled. I’m not going to argue what they were really about. Maybe small men with small minds need to act up. What I do know: if there’s anything worthy of armed resistance, it’s the emergence of Donald Trump’s secret police force. Yet here we are. As far as I can tell, nothing but crickets.

The secret police are real. Groups of heavily armed and unidentified federal agents in military dress have been gassing peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, under the guise of protecting “federal facilities,” meaning monuments. We now know they are with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other agencies under the US Department of Homeland Security. These are the same agencies that gassed peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Square so the president could do a photo shoot with a Bible in front of a church. Videos online have shown officers in Portland taking protesters into custody without reading their rights, loading them into unmarked vans, and threatening to shoot anyone attempting to follow them.

Its activity goes beyond disappearing citizens amid social upheaval. The Oregonian, the state’s paper of record, reported Monday that “protecting” monuments from protesters seeking justice for the murder of George Floyd, in addition to greater racial equality over all, now includes spying on them as well as infiltrating their ranks. It reported:

The court records provide a window into the tactics of federal agencies based at the courthouse in downtown Portland at a time when local, state and congressional officials from Oregon have roundly criticized the national law enforcement presence.

Its authority is broadly drawn. According to a classified document obtained by Lawfare’s Steve Vladeck and Benjamin Wittes, DHS is not only “protecting” federal monuments but those not under its purview, and it has authorized domestic spying as a means of pursuing that end. “The memo makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity covers significantly more than just planned attacks on federal personnel or facilities. It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not” (my italics). Such an expansive view of federal police power is ripe for corruption, leading some of us (me!) to worry that a president in desperate need of winning a second term might use a secret police force to harass and intimidate Americans of color as they wait in line to vote, or even detain them under suspicion of attempting to commit voter fraud.

The question should not be whether to protect federal monuments (that’s for another time), but instead who’s doing the protecting? A conservative of a mind to protest a governor’s lock down should also be of a mind to tell the federal government to butt out of state and local affairs, whether the monuments are federally owned or not. The sovereignty of the states of the United States is the load-bearing wall of American conservatism. It is to be protected even if outcomes are harmful, as was the case when GOP attorneys general sued to overturn the Affordable Care Act. We don’t need the federal government to care for us, the thinking went. We can take care of ourselves.

At the time, that seemed principled, but the same people, as far as I can tell, now have little or nothing to say about expansive and potentially corrupt police power that blurs the line between state and national governments, undermining a principle they used to say was central to the American idea of freedom. When people walk all over values they once said were nonnegotiable, it’s time to stop taking them seriously.

Without principle, white men with long guns cannot protest legitimately, because without principle, they’re nothing but dangerous white men with long guns.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 July 2020

Word Count: 787

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Some time ago, Joe Biden said the president would try stealing the 2020 presidential election. He didn’t say Donald Trump would steal it. Biden didn’t say the election was rigged against him. He said Trump would try, one way or another, and Biden said this as a warning. If you do not want a stolen presidency, you need to vote, and you need to vote in such overwhelming numbers that the election’s outcome won’t be in doubt.

Biden’s statement was a reminder. Democracy is fragile, but it is also strong — when enough citizens take responsibility for it. Though we face threats domestically (the president and his GOP confederates), internationally (Russian and Chinese spies and saboteurs) and impersonally (a pandemic that has killed over 143,000 Americans), we can face them together, and overcome them together, when armed with the right knowledge. Just knowing it’s possible to steal an election might be enough to stop it.

Of course, political knowledge usually comes by way of a Washington press corps that has one indisputable bias encumbering our need for political knowledge. That bias is for the east coast. If it happens here (my beloved New Haven, in my humble opinion, is indeed the center of the universe), no matter how trivial or irrelevant it is to the rest of the country, it’s national news. If it happens in St. Louis, say, it might be. It depends.

The president ordered federal agents last month to gas peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, in Washington, for a photo op with a Holy Bible he didn’t own in front of a Episcopalian church he didn’t attend. That was national news automatically. The same agents later went to Portland, Oregon. Late last week and over the weekend, they again gassed peaceful protesters. That wasn’t national news. The result is that most people this Monday morning have no idea the president’s secret police are real.

“Secret police” is not hyperbole. They were dressed in fatigues and heavily armed. They did not bear identifying features, such as names, badge numbers or indicators of which law enforcement entity they represented. A video online showed two of them refusing to answer basic questions—“Who are you?” “Where are you taking her?” — as they marched up to a protester, seized her, then loaded her into an unmarked vehicle without informing her of her rights. When apparent agents of the state do not identify themselves and do not declare the authority by which they are acting — “This is the Portland police and you are under arrest” — they are, by definition, secret police.

In truth, they were connected to the US Department of Homeland Security, specifically Border Patrol, and they were acting, DHS officials later said, under a provision of law passed after Sept. 11, 2001, giving the department the authority to “send in federal agents to help the Federal Protective Service when federal property is threatened,” according to the New York Times. Portlanders have been demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd for the last 50-some days. A tiny fraction vandalized some national monuments. That appears to be the reason for deploying federal agents.

Journalist Lindsey Smith has been documenting Portland’s protests. A slice of federal land, Terry Schrunk Plaza, has never been a focus of demonstrations (the focus was on racial injustice), though people have been beaten and arrested for coming near it, she said. Last night, Smith reported scenes involving a group of mothers who confronted federal agents, shouting “Leave our kids alone.” CBS News covered it. After cameras went off, however, federal agents gassed the mothers, Smith said. The Times reported Sunday that local, state and federal elected officials representing Oregon have called for an investigation of DHS’s actions and for federal agents to get out of their state.

The Washington Monthly’s David Atkins was right, I suspect, to suggest that Portland is a preview of Election Day. If graffiti is a pretext for crushing dissent, Covid-19 is a pretext for intimidating voters as they stand in line to vote. “We could end up seeing armed private contractors hired by the RNC and affiliated conservative organizations to intimidate Democratic-leaning voters, bolstered by camouflage-wearing taxpayer-funded rifle-toting border patrol agents aggressively checking papers of every voter in line in the guise of ‘securing against voter fraud’ on the president’s orders,” he wrote.

What can we do? Among other things, do what Joe Biden did when he said the president is going to try stealing the election. Talk about the likely use of “gestapo tactics” to achieve that end, so the citizenry might prevent it from happening. Talk about it so much that the east coast-oriented press corps must give it full attention. Talk about it so much that the Democratic lawmakers in the House feel they must act now. The secret police can’t stay secret when they are the center of a national debate.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 July 2020

Word Count: 813

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At this point, it’s become conventional wisdom that the president is losing support among white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). The conventional wisdom is wrong, though. It’s based on polling by the Public Research Religion Institute showing Donald Trump with sky-high approval among WEPs in March, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, but a 10-point drop a month later. Cue predictions of doom.

The president’s approval was sky-high across all demographics in March, because he was at the time enjoying what’s called, among demographers, the “rally around the flag” effort. As the country faced an emergency, many people who would normally stand against Trump found themselves looking to him for leadership. That effect was short-lived, of course, because this president could not lead anyone out of a wet paper bag. Fact is, Trump’s approval among WEPs has returned to normal, and all things being equal, a return to normal means support among WEPs remains strong.

The thing about the debate over WEPs is that Trump can’t lose any of them. He has alienated too many other voters. He’s not right about much, but he was when he told an interviewer recently that if he loses just 1 percent of WEPs, he’ll lose. He’s so conscious of the need to hold on to WEPs he’s sounding apocalyptic, as if the “pro-life moment” will end in fire and fury, along with the rest of the world, if Joe Biden wins.

One percent is probably hyperbole, but it raises a couple of interesting questions: are WEPs gettable and if so, how many? Ronald Sider says yes, they’re gettable. In an op-ed for USA Today, the former head of Evangelicals for Social Action said progressive WEPs (yes, they exist) will vote for Biden no matter what, but if he wants more WEPs to support him, he should reach out with messages on abortion and religious freedom.

Meanwhile, Michael Wear, the faith outreach director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said recently that Hillary Clinton failed to reach out to any WEPs. The result was 16 percent voting for her. Biden, he said, could match Obama’s 26 percent. “Broad swaths of the faith community did not feel like the Democratic nominee was interested in their vote.” The result, he said, was Trump winning them by 81 percent.

I’m skeptical of the usefulness of outreach. Yes, Biden should do it for the sake of doing it, but are WEP voters going to vote for a Democrat based on whether or not he says the right things about abortion and religious liberty? Sider says Biden only has to say abortion should be rare, and that some religious institutions should be exempted from laws and court-rulings requiring equal treatment for the LGBTQ community. Call me crazy but that sounds a bit like gaslighting. Sider says these WEPs are not single-issue voters. If so, there are plenty of ways to rationalize voting for Biden.

If anything, it isn’t Biden who should compromise. It’s WEPs who should. Biden said last year that he supported repealing the 1976 Hyde Amendment, the provision of law barring federal funds from being used for abortions. Hyde is a traditional WEP threshold. Support it and you’re with us; oppose it and you’re against us. But that was before the new coronavirus pandemic turned everything about politics upside down. The most recent multibillion-dollar bailout aimed at shoring up the economy sent millions of dollars to tax-exempt churches and tax-exempt religious schools. If public money can float a religious institution’s payroll, it can be used to pay for abortions.

Biden won’t touch that, of course, nor should he. But the question remains: Will reaching out to WEPs, thus making them “feel like the Democratic nominee was interested in their vote,” as Wear said, result in an extra 10 points in support to match Obama’s performance in 2012? Again, I’m skeptical. Obama had to reach out, because he was the first Black man with a decent shot at winning the presidency. Clinton, for her part, was already so despised by WEPs, I don’t blame her for not bothering. Biden, however, is a totally different candidate for the plainest of reasons: he’s a white man.

No matter how “progressive” they might be, WEPs are still hidebound creatures. God’s law is the law of nature, and according to the WEP worldview, hierarchies of power are natural: God over man, white over black, men over women, parents over kids. Obama, as a Black man, put in extra hours to overcome that worldview. Clinton, as a woman, never had a chance, so didn’t bother. Biden, I suspect, can follow Clinton’s example, put in zero work, but still come out 10 points ahead just for being a white man.

So much of “political strategy” is merely finding new ways of talking about old things like prejudice and bigotry. It’s been a long time since they worked for Democrats.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 July 2020

Word Count: 813

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You have probably heard speculation that Joe Biden has a chance of winning Texas. The president won the Lone Star State by just nine points last time around. It’s highly suburban, giving the advantage to the Democrat. Moreover, the new coronavirus is rampaging through the state after its governor reopened recklessly to give Donald Trump a boost. One recent poll has Biden up by a point. Another has him up by five.

This has some Democratic partisans salivating. Texas has 36 electorate votes. If Biden wins them as well as those Hillary Clinton won, he wins the whole shebang by four electoral votes. Of course, if Biden wins Texas, he probably won’t lose Florida or Arizona. He probably won’t lose Michigan or Wisconsin for the same reason.

Texas, in other words, doesn’t matter in terms of exceeding 270 electoral votes. Winning it does matter, though, because it would snap a losing streak for the Democrats going back to 1964, and because winning Texas would signal a huge transformative political change.

That’s why I don’t like speculation about Texas. What we are speculating isn’t winning or losing the 2020 presidential election. It’s whether we have truly moved on from a conservative political regime rooted in the 1980s, and which we are all still living in, when the federal government flipped sides. From the 1930s until the the 1980s, it took the side, with a major qualification, of normal people.

After Ronald Reagan, though, it took the side of the elites. In that decade, we stopped talking about people as citizens and started talking about them as consumers. I yearn for that regime’s end as much as the next guy, but if we must speculate about Texas, let’s be clear what we are speculating.

I prefer participation to speculation, frankly. As a consequence, I think, of our ongoing occupation by a conservative political regime that defines people as consumers, not citizens, we just can’t get enough speculation. We appear to love speculating, as well as spectating, more than participating! And there’s so much data to do it with!

A new niche industry has emerged to meet, and manufacture, demand. All the elite news organizations have teams of data editors and journalists churning fascinating stories, truly fascinating stories, about this and that election, about this and that person’s chances of winning, all properly qualified, all nevertheless confident in the story that the data is telling. And the latest media narrative is that Joe Biden is going to win.

I want to believe that, but I can’t bring myself to, and I can’t bring myself to, because I also believe a media narrative in which Biden wins has the power to undo him and all of us. When enough people in the right places in a electoral college system believe something is going to happen with or without their participation, they could end up believing they don’t have to honor their civic obligations, due also to thinking of themselves as consumers, not citizens, and instead spectate. But rather than watching what they thought was going to happen, they instead watch the world going to hell.

Some say apathy won’t be an issue. The collective trauma since 2016 will prevent it. I hope so, but even if people think of themselves as citizens rather than consumers, their participation must presume the election will be fair. Do not presume fairness. Georgia and Florida have demonstrated the lengths Republican-controlled governments are willing to go to block people, especially people of color, from voting. Moreover, GOP resistance to mail-in balloting could prove decisive as the Covid-19 pandemic might keep people from showing up.

In 2016, less than 60 percent of Americans who could vote did vote. The only antidote to voter suppression is overwhelming numbers. But overwhelming numbers might not come from an electorate still living in a political regime defining people as consumers, not citizens. Democracy should be the incentive to participate. But the incentives to speculate, and spectate, might be greater still.

I like the horse race. (I wouldn’t be much of a polemicist if I didn’t!) I’m a fan of the data journalists tracking the polling and informing readers like me of the state of play. Furthermore, every one of them, without qualification, responsibly qualifies their arguments, leaving room for being wrong. But these are still human beings making judgments about what to pay attention to, and given the rapid pace of the emerging narrative of Joe Biden beating Donald Trump, there’s new incentive to pay attention to data suggesting that Joe Biden is going to beat Donald Trump, all of which can create a self-reinforcing media narrative, leading to a possible repeat of last time.

I could be wrong. Indeed, being wrong is the point of this column. If I’m wrong, perhaps we are indeed moving out of the old regime and into something unknowable and full of renewed hope. Perhaps a majority of voters really has decided that the government should be on the side of normal people, not the elites. What I do know is that if I’m wrong, you’re going to have to prove me wrong. That takes participation, not speculation. That takes the American people defining themselves as citizens.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2020

Word Count: 869

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The New York Times suffers from the same problem all elite institutions suffer from — its own elite status. I know that sounds silly, but remember that being elite comes with the immense burden, absurd as it is, of keeping up appearances. A consequence, when it comes to hiring op-ed contributors — to pick a totally random example — is not quite recognizing talent and intelligence that does not already fit into the elite view of what “talented” and “intelligent” mean. Being elite means excluding all but the “best.”

The result of this narrow-mindedness — an accurate word — is homogeneity of a kind. This is not to say bad or boring, but good and interesting are not enough for an institution keeping up appearances. Independent of attacks from partisans inside and outside the institution, the institution’s own elite status demands diversity of thought, especially when, as the Times does, it claims to be “the paper of record.” Being vulnerable to its own status, however, means being vulnerable to intellectual frauds.

Intellectual frauds, though commonplace, are identifiable when they are not obscured by an artificially constructed media apparatus in which intellectual dishonesty is not only tolerated and encouraged, but rewarded financially and handsomely. This is what happened, starting about half a century ago, when very “conservative” and very rich Americans looked at Republican Barry Goldwater’s extremist campaign for the White House and thought it made perfect sense. Moreover, they believed Goldwater failed to beat the Democratic incumbent, not because he was too extreme, but because the Washington press corps was too liberal. So they set out to manufacture an alternative.

The result of this investment, decades in the making, is a media climate in which people can commit their entire professional careers to telling very “conservative” and rich people what they want to hear while also appearing scholarly, detached and dispassionate for those whose interests are contrary to the interests of the very “conservative” and rich. An ambitious person fresh out of college can go straight to Breitbart or the Daily Caller before jumping to legacy outlets like Commentary or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, with speaking gigs over time at the American Enterprise Institute or the Manhattan Institute as well as chances to write books for Regnery and Center Street. You can live your whole life in this bubble and never face serious criticism, because free and responsible inquiry isn’t the point. The point is telling very “conservative” and rich people what they want to hear, and making their views respectable to people whose interests conflict with those of your bosses.

It’s worth repeating that this apparatus is not dedicated to determining facts, as the press corps is. It’s not committed to realizing profits, as the Times’ publisher is. Its reason for being is warping politics so that a tiny cohort of Americans — the very, very rich, who pay for the apparatus — have vastly more influence in a democratic republic than it would without it. And the general means for pulling that off is convincing as many people as possible that the profit-making mainstream media is either too liberal or not telling the truth. In other words, it’s conventional rightwing propaganda.

The power of this propaganda has grown over the decades so that one Republican president got caught stealing and spying (Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace) while another got away with treason (Donald Trump, as you know, is still president). Moreover, this media apparatus is where elite institutions turn when they are attacked for being too liberal while also being trapped by their own elite status. When the Times hired Bari Weiss, for instance, the paper thought it was diversifying its roster of opinion writers with a veteran of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. What it was really doing, however, was importing, and therefore laundering, intellectual fraud.

“Fraud” should have been the first word on people’s minds when news emerged that Weiss quit. In her letter of resignation, which she made public, she said that she experienced, as a consequence of her conservative views, “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge.”

If that were true, she should have filed a lawsuit. Instead, she posted her resignation letter to her personal website. (Moreover, she made it a section of her website, giving it prominent play.) In doing so, Weiss was creating the appearance of “evidence” that rightwing media had been right about the Times. It’s liberal, but also illiberal, intolerant of the ideological diversity it claims to value. And as if on cue, the president wrote this this morning on Twitter: “Wow. The @nytimes is under siege. The real reason is that it has become Fake News. They never covered me correctly — they blew it. People are fleeing, a total mess!”

Weiss can deny having set out to discredit a newspaper that daily makes the president look bad by telling the truth and making money doing it. She can deny enabling the president’s authoritarian attacks on the free press. She can deny giving the impression to white GOP voters that the Times, and by extension the Democratic Party, is just as bad as the president, so they may as well vote for a Republican. All she’s doing, after all, is fighting for free speech.

She’s not, though. Neither are her peers inside and outside the rightwing media apparatus. The point isn’t the free and responsible search for knowledge. It’s warping politics, making bad things look good, perverting public morality, and exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of elite institutions like the New York Times.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 July 2020

Word Count: 921

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The Washington press corps appears to accept that the president was “firing up his base” Friday when he commuted Roger Stone’s sentence of three-and-a-fourth years. That’s probably an assertion of opinion more than fact, though. While presidents do normally base actions on political considerations, Donald Trump is not normal.

It’s a stretch, to say the least, to assume that the president’s base of power likes it when he helps a goombah duly convicted by a jury of his peers. The more likely explanation is that Trump went easy on Stone to maintain his silence about their involvement in an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

That’s not to say Trump’s decision doesn’t appeal to someone. Believers in something called “QAnon” probably felt that in commuting Stone’s sentence, the president was striking a righteous blow against a nameless and faceless “deep state” that has been trying to bring Trump down since he decided to run for president. According to my friend Amee Vanderpool, “QAnon followers believe this current political struggle will culminate in a fantasy conclusion know as, ‘The Storm.’” Amee went on to say:

This phase involves the military rounding up, imprisoning and even executing anyone who dared to counter Trump or make any moves against him. It’s safe to say that the list includes Democratic politicians, ‘members of the ‘liberal’ media, Hollywood celebrities and other elites that are convenient for Trump supporters to target.

QAnon followers are too small in number to affect this year’s election, but they could have serious effect if Joe Biden is victorious. Amee says the conspiracy theory is making inroads in the Republican Party, because the Republicans are making room for it. Combined with the market incentives of the GOP’s rightwing media allies, QAnon could erode a Biden administration’s credibility among white suburban voters the way birtherism eroded the Obama administration’s credibility among the same. Put all this together to see that things are probably going to get worse before they get better.

Liberals and people deferential to the authority of facts and reason don’t really know what to do when faced with conspiracism, except laugh at it. That’s certainly what most of them did — what I did — during the Obama years. But liberals and others (me) should learn from our mistake, specifically that conspiracy theory isn’t just Living Life in Crazyville. It is the abandonment of the American social contract, a literal betrayal that’s rooted in political weakness.

If you can’t win by normal means, if you can’t win because the truth is against you, then what do you do? You invent a new set of “alternate facts.” Conspiracy theories are leading indicators that parts of a country have decoupled from the rest, and they are heading down the road to serfdom.

Something needs to be done. Victory isn’t enough. If Biden wins, we’re going to witness wholesale amnesia among Republicans, leading to a repeat of the post-2008 era. Not only will conspiricism come back to the fore, poisoning our discourse, and not only will right-wing media weaponize conspiricism against the new administration, poisoning our discourse even more. The GOP will pretend, en masse, as it did after Barack Obama became president, that all the things they did to wreck the economy, devastate public health and shred the moral fiber of our society were Biden’s fault.

For his part, Biden will have great incentive to repeat what Obama did post-2008 — just simply forget what the previous administration did to bring America to the brink of being a failed state. There’s one legitimate reason for this act of willful forgetting. You don’t want to establish a precedent in which politics becomes a crime. But politics can be criminal, as we learned when George W. Bush pushed us into invading a sovereign country that did us no harm after Sept. 11, 2001. Trump’s crimes, moreover, are relatively worse. The whole world changed after 3,000 Americans were murdered. Nothing has changed after Covid-19 killed enough people to equal forty-six 9/11s.

There’s actually another reason to forget. New presidents have their own agendas. They don’t want to get bogged down litigating old ones. Biden, however, isn’t Obama. His shtick is restoration, bringing America back to a state of normalcy and honor, putting the power of government on the side of normal people. If something isn’t done to counteract, or at least counterbalance, the Republican Party’s fascist incentives, Biden can forget about that, even if his party controls both chambers of the Congress. What’s needed is a rededication to the truth, and that requires a new special counsel to establish the whole truth of recent history, starting with Donald Trump’s victory.

Yes, I know Robert Mueller established many of the facts. And yes, the appointment of a new special counsel would be received among Republicans and their rightwing media allies as well as Mueller was. But truth and justice demand it. And anyway, like I said yesterday, the conspiracy that brought Trump to power did not stop. It has been ongoing. It’s most recent manifestation was commuting Roger Stone’s sentence, an act of literal bribery aimed at covering up the cover up of the crime of defrauding the American people of the right to know who they were voting for.

We didn’t know. We still don’t know. Until we do, we can expect more of the same from the Republicans.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 July 2020

Word Count: 894

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It’s hard to know where to begin discussing the president’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence. So let’s start with what it means. It’s not a pardon. Donald Trump’s goombah is still a felon convicted of witness tampering and lying to the US Congress. He plans to appeal the guilty verdict. “Commutation” merely means he won’t go to jail.

The move was widely expected in Washington. Only the timing was in doubt. The president had hoped to wait until after the election, according to Bloomberg News, but Stone appears to have forced his hand. He feared prison would expose him to the new coronavirus, which can be fatal to people his age (67). Stone told a journalist Thursday that he believed the president would commute his sentence because he stayed quiet while under pressure to cooperate. That statement, given the day before his 40-month sentence was to begin, was widely interpreted to mean: do it now or I start singing.

What tune? Well, probably that Stone was the intermediary between Trump — not his campaign staff, but Trump himself — and Wikileaks. Wikileaks, you’ll recall, is the anti-secrets organization that received tens of thousands of documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and associates of the Democratic nominee. They were released, most memorably, during the 2016 Democratic National Convention to sow chaos and, later that year, to distract from the grab-’em-by-the-pussy video. This tranche of emails was stolen by Russian intelligence officials working at the personal direction of Vladimir Putin, who was waging a one-sided war against Hillary Clinton.

The link between Trump and the Kremlin has been suggested since before Robert Mueller started investigating Russia’s violation of our national sovereignty. It was clearest after Buzzfeed sued for the release of unredacted portions of his report that involved Stone. “The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisers were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances,” Jason Leopold et al. reported June 19, “and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisers.”

An even stronger hint came from Robert Mueller himself. In reaction to Trump’s spectacularly corrupt decision to commute Stone’s sentence, the former special counsel wrote an op-ed Saturday for the Washington Post in which he explained why Stone was a “central figure” of his investigation: “He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those [same] Russian intelligence officers.”

In my view, Saturday’s op-ed was the closest Mueller has gotten to saying out loud for everyone to hear that the president was involved in an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people — collusion with the enemy, if you will — only he couldn’t quite prove it thanks partly to Stone’s silence. The closest Mueller got to Trump was citing him, unnamed, as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the successful prosecution of his attorney, Michael Cohen. Trump no doubt wants to stay unnamed. Rewarding Stone for his silence was probably the surest way of doing that.

We do not know with certainty whether Stone was the link between Trump and the Kremlin, but all evidence so far points strongly in that direction. (Not to mention the president’s extreme deference to Moscow, including his looking the other way while it pays Taliban militiamen to kill American troops.) Moreover, we do know that Roger Stone knows something the president does not want the American people to know. Otherwise, he would not have risked political fallout from commuting his sentence months before the election. That decision, furthermore, was careful and premeditated and timed. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that going easy on Stone might be part of a conspiracy to defraud the American people that has never actually ended. In this context, what “commutation” means is the covering up of the cover up of a crime.

It’s hard to say what the impact will be politically. It might be just one more insult to add to the pile of reasons to vote Trump out of office. It might be grounds for a second impeachment (though I doubt it). It might be license for the appointment of a new special counsel after the election.

What’s more certain, I think, is that Trump just took all the gas out of efforts to foment (at least the appearance of) a white backlash against Black Lives Matter and protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd. Trump himself often calls for “law and order” as if he were candidate Richard Nixon in the late 1960s. Most of his GOP confederates are following suit, accusing activists who are tearing down statues to confederate traitors of being “violent” and “lawless.” All of that is hard to square with a president who flouts conspicuously not only the consequences of the law (Stone’s jury-trial conviction) but the rule of law itself.

In a way, Trump has always been telling us the truth. He has often said his greatest fear is being seen as an illegitimate president. Well, there’s a good reason for that.

He is.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 July 2020

Word Count: 872

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Newt Gingrich is usually, and rightly, blamed for destroying American politics, even more than Donald Trump. The former House Speaker didn’t go to Washington in the 1970s to strike deals. He went there to wage soft civil war against the United States.

But if there’s a close second to the title of America’s Worst Person, it probably goes to someone you never heard of. He’s not a politician. He’s not a pundit or bureaucrat. When it comes to influencing the GOP’s attitude toward taxing, spending and budgets, however, it would be hard to find someone more influential than Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform. The name is a misnomer. It doesn’t want to “reform” taxes so much as get rid of taxes on the very, very rich. Norquist is probably most famous for saying, in 2001, that he doesn’t want to abolish government per se. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can … drown it in the bathtub.”

While Gingrich was on the front lines of the soft civil war, armed with lies, slander and disinformation as his weapons of choice, Norquist was in the backrooms, pulling strings, pressing Republicans to pledge to never ever — never ever ever — raise taxes or be punished. The last Republican to raise taxes for the purpose of balancing responsibly the federal budget was George H.W. Bush, the last one-term president.

At some point, it’s hard to say when, Gingrich’s focus on language and Norquist’s focus on policy merged so that the Republicans always sounded like they were being responsible when calling for balanced budgets, but they were in fact being reckless. Why? Responsible budgets consider expenses as well as revenues. You can’t just ignore one if you’re being serious or responsible. Thanks to pressure from Norquist, however, the Republicans pretended revenues didn’t exist. And, alas, the Democratic Party usually went along. The result has been that for years most debates over budgets turned on the question of how much to starve a government of, by and for the people.

To be sure, this pretending was collective. Norquist’s group doesn’t care about the size of government. What it cares about is shoving the tax burden off the shoulders of the very, very rich while at the same time enriching the rich with lucrative contracts. If that means huge deficits, so be it. Similarly, the Republicans don’t care about deficits when Republicans are president. (Yes, Ronald Reagan raised taxes but he left office with the books well in the red.) Deficits only matter when Democrats are in charge.

All of this was clear to anyone paying close attention. Even so, Norquist in particular had plausible deniability on his side. Though budgets were swollen to bursting on account of irresponsible Republican attitudes, he and others could always say, well, we’re spending too much on wasteful expenditures. If we didn’t spend so much of what people don’t need — or on what people have grown dependent on — budgets and the government would be smaller and better. Plausible deniability meant his group always seemed to be at least somewhat principled, even to people paying close attention.

It seems to me the age of plausible deniability is over. Americans for Tax Reform, which was at the center the tea party movement that took over the Republican Party, applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan as part of an effort to stimulate the economy as it reels from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The guy who wanted to drown the government in a bathtub cried for help while drowning.

You could say, well, that’s OK. Everyone’s facing hard times. But everyone faced hard times during the financial panic of 2007-2008, too. Indeed, Barack Obama, after winning reelection, wanted George W. Bush-era tax cuts on the rich to expire in order to fund a multi-billion dollar jobs program. After 2012, when the GOP lost seats in the Senate, some Republicans felt pressure to play along — until Norquist stepped in. “We’ve got some people,” he said, “discussing impure thoughts on national television.”

The jobs program was shelved, almost certainly prolonging the Great Recession. Yet amid another historic crisis, here we see Grover Norquist of all people with his hand out. It’s not a lot, just $350,000 in forgivable loans. It’s the principle of the thing in that there are not and never have been any principles guiding the fiscal conservative project. Only the idea that government is for the very, very rich, not of, by and for the people.

Norquist isn’t alone, of course. The Republicans were so hostile toward Obama’s economic agenda that they brought the country to the brink of insolvency by refusing to lift the debt limit. And yet Republican members of Congress and the president’s family business got access this month to $660 billion in forgivable PPP money, as did 90,000 well-connected businesses that promised to save zero jobs in the bargain.

Sabotage was good politics when Obama was in charge. With Trump, it’s belly up to the trough. This should matter to white swing voters after the election. The Republicans will try re-upping the con. They will say they fight for them. They don’t. They are waging soft civil war. While that was never obvious, it should be clear now.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 July 2020

Word Count: 883

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We all of us owe a great debt to Alexander Vindman. The former official at the White House National Security Council told the country that Donald Trump had asked the president of Ukraine for help in winning the 2020 presidential election, indeed, extorted him into a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. But more than that, he exposed what might have been the biggest lie of them all — that it wasn’t the Russians who attacked our sovereignty, it was the Ukrainians; and that it wasn’t Trump’s campaign that conspired with foreign saboteurs; it was Hillary Clinton’s.

That last bit was the “false narrative” that finally compelled the former Army colonel, who announced his retirement Wednesday, to testify before the US Congress during House impeachment hearings. He came forward because Trump contravened virtually everything the American intelligence community had concluded about the Kremlin’s “active measures,” conclusions that were enshrined by a Senate panel in a bipartisan report released months after his testimony. While on the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vindman caught Trump in the act of fabricating a monstrous lie, an effort to cast himself as the original victim of a witch hunt and ultimate hero in his vindication. It was a monumental effort to erase history.

It might have worked, too, if not for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. His patriotism, however, has been costly. According to his attorney, the president led a campaign of “bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” in a bid to force Vindman to choose “between adhering to the law or pleasing a president, between honoring his oath or protecting his career.” His attorney added: “LTC Vindman’s patriotism has cost him his career.”

In other words, he got canceled.

Cancel culture — no quotes — is real. Our history is larded with examples of people attempting to speak truth to power only later to get stomped. Out-groups fighting their way into the American franchise have used the blessings of citizenship — free speech, free assembly, free press, and so on — to argue for greater justice and greater equality. Those arguments were typically yoked to a set of values, such as loyalty and patriotism. It worked sometimes, more often it didn’t, and when it didn’t, it was because people in power found ways of using those same blessings against them.

Vindman is no social reformer, far from it, but he now has a place in the unofficial hall of American heroes driven by conscience to speak out when no one else had the guts to speak out. Yet Vindman is only a recent example. There are, right now, unsung heroes at work in this country speaking out against police officers breaking the law, administrators bending the rules, and corrupt officials seeking to hold power but escape accountability. And most of the time, these unsung heroes remain unsung.

They get canceled. They lose their jobs, they lose their reputations, or worse. You’d think critics of cancel culture, such as the scores of distinguished signatories of a recent letter condemning it, published by Harper’s magazine, would be all over cases like these. You’d be wrong, though. They are not attuned, as they might otherwise be, to the asymmetries of power, asymmetries of risk, characterizing true cancel culture.

Why? Probably because they have a lot of power. All of them are well-known, well-connected, influential. Many were born into affluence. All have places waiting for them in the highest platforms available. And like human beings do when they grow accustomed to the privileges of power, they feel threatened, often quite easily, and when they do, accuse critics of doing things they themselves are doing. Like in-groups have done to out-groups for the entirety of American history, they are gaslighting.

They accuse critics of being intolerant of liberal values like free speech, but what they refuse to recognize, probably due to their station in life, is that their critics are putting liberal values into action. Counter-speech, in other words, is free speech. This is the most important, and mostly unnoticed, aspect of the Harper’s letter. Signatories claim that they are standing against bullying, shaming and authoritarianism, and to a certain extent, I take them at their word. But what they are also doing, consciously or not, is standing against free speech itself, and in standing against free speech, they are in fact bullying, shaming and enabling authoritarianism. This is textbook gaslighting.

Alexander Vindman wasn’t gaslighting. He was gaslighted, though. He was loyal to the United States, the Constitution and the flag. For that, he was called disloyal. He was a true patriot. For that, he was called a traitor. He was hounded out of the White House, denied a deserved promotion, and driven out of a United States Army he dedicated his life to. When we talk about cancel culture, this is what we should be talking about.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 July 2020

Word Count: 804

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