Regular readers of the Editorial Board are familiar with the layered complexity of our moment. The crisis we face isn’t only political. It isn’t just economic. It isn’t about public health alone. It’s also an information crisis. Too many people in too many places in this country believe fantastical lies as if they were true.

The Russians did a pretty good job, but 2016 was nothing compared to what Fox and others do to Americans every day. Victory for Joe Biden won’t change this. It will probably make matters worse. The key, I think, is raising awareness of what’s happening, how and why.

Alexander Nazaryan is a Yahoo News correspondent whom God has unfairly blessed with a scintillating combo of political shrewdness and literary sensitivity. On Tuesday, he described on Twitter the main method by which Fox and others bully their way into the American political consciousness:

Conservative media routinely manufactures scandals — John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton’s email server, Hunter Biden’s emails — then browbeats mainstream media into not covering those ‘scandals’ to [a] sufficient degree.

It’s bad-faith politics and huge disservice to voters.

That, however, is only half of it. With respect to Nazaryan (whose writing I encourage you to seek out and savor), we need to see the fullness of what Fox and others are doing to America. We need to see that it’s lying at a scale with the intent to injure. That it aims to poison the citizenry’s understanding of public affairs. That it creates conditions in which the truth itself is partisan. That it provides Americans with an escape from their civic and social responsibilities. That it fabricates the illusion of freedom when there’s really barbarism.

Most of all, we need to see when “mainstream media” play along, they are enabling the above. They are, in a very real sense, complicit in our betrayal.

The following are 5 Big Lies that members of the Washington press corps accept as true or habitually repeat uncritically in their reporting. In the process, they launder these lies, give them credibility and legitimacy, and mask their illicit and injurious origins. Fact-checking, while entirely admirable, is entirely insufficient to holding the powerful to account. To do that truly, the press corps must stop appeasing the bullshit.

1. Originalism

This is the idea that US Supreme Court justices should interpret federal law and the US Constitution “as written,” not as they might wish they were written. It’s a lie. First, “interpret” does not mean “see what you want to see.” It means “interpret” areas of law that, as written, are unclear. Second, and more importantly, the Constitution is not a simple document. It’s as full of contradictions as America is. It is also a document that’s been rewritten over the course of our history. When someone says “interpret as written,” does that mean in 1789, when slavery was OK, or 1865, when it was abolished? Once you see the lie, you wonder why the Republicans keep telling it.

2. Pro-gun

The Republicans are not “pro-gun.” They are pro-intimidation. They are pro-anarchy. They are pro-vigilante justice. While the Second Amendment is (arguably) about the right to self-defense — as written, it’s about militias and national defense — it does not in any way, shape or form empower one class of people over and at the expense of another class. As it is, Republican jurists have repeatedly seen what they want to see so that the desire for peace and security is second fiddle to the desire for unlimited firepower. It’s no coincidence the Republicans went gun-nuts after the election of the first Black president. Democracy is no longer a means to power. It is now an obstacle.

3. The sanctity of life

This is the idea that “life” is so precious abortion must be outlawed. In fact, “the sanctity of life” is conditional. It doesn’t apply to capital punishment. It doesn’t apply to the sick, hungry and poor. It doesn’t apply to the 550-some kids taken from their immigrant mothers. And, most importantly, it does not apply to “the unborn” when it’s politically inconvenient. Anti-abortionist get mad when “fetal tissue” — actually, stem cells — is used in science. But they were OK when “fetal tissue” saved Donald Trump. Set aside all these conditions, however, and “the sanctity of life” is totally meaningful.

4. States rights

This is another one of those principles that’s always true for Republicans except when it’s not. States have the right to control their destinies when the federal government is trying to force states to treat non-white human beings as human beings entitled to the blessings of citizenship. But those rights are conditional when it comes time to cut taxes for the obscenely rich and pay for it by stealing from states that did not support a Republican president. Republican justices, meanwhile, always stand for states rights — unless they dampen the fun of undercutting Democratic voters. In 2000, they ordered Florida to stop counting Florida’s votes. A recent ruling has the makings of a repeat.

5. Censorship

Specifically, I’m thinking of the idea that Twitter and other social media platforms censor “conservative” voices. First, Twitter is a private entity. It has the right to refuse to post whatever it does not want for whatever reason it wants. (It does owe anyone a reason, though.) Second, private entities do not “censor.” Only governments do that. Third, if I, as a private citizen, don’t like what you’re saying, I can tell you freely to shut the hell up. That’s a reaction to your free speech in the form of my free speech. Even if I use violence to silence you, that’s not censorship either. That’s a crime punishable by law. The Republicans do not stand for free speech. They stand against yours.

These are five examples. There are lies aplenty. Though varied, they share a common purpose: creating a system that’s separate but not equal, a lawful republic in which the very rich are free to choose while the rest of us are held responsible for their choices.

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: 28 October 2020

Word Count: 1,006

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I’m going to assume for a moment that Joe Biden wins the election in order to say something related to Amy Coney Barrett, the newest justice to sit on the US Supreme Court, giving the Republicans the 6-3 supermajority they have desired for decades.

I’m going to assume Biden wins in order to offer a prediction: that at some point in the future, we’ll look back to see what the biggest story of the 2020 election was. That story, I suggest, is the Republican Party, seizing a golden opportunity, trading short-term control of one branch of the federal government for long-term control of another.

That story is of a Republican Party buying power with the bodies of dead Americans.

The price came not only in the form of a sacrificial president who could not govern his way out of a brown paper bag. The price came in the form of blood and treasure. At the same time that the Republicans were high-fiving each other in the White House Rose Garden, more than 231,000 were dead from the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, as they profaned a solemn swearing-in, legislation that could have brought relief to millions sat in the US Senate. It was ignored. Meanwhile, 52 “constitutional conservatives” celebrated their dominion over the land over laughs and drinks.

The Senate Republicans, I hope it will be clear in the coming months, made a choice. They could help Donald Trump win reelection by passing a stimulus bill worth more than $2.2 trillion in order help Americans struggling in a time of the covid. Or they could sacrifice him to take control the high court while at the same time redigging ideological trenches.

Joe Biden, as they knew, would be asking for trillions. They were prepared to worry about the debt. Susan Demas, top editor of the Michigan Advance, said today: “Austerity during a pandemic is a death sentence for thousands.” Months from now, we might look back to see that Demas was understating things.

Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, said in his latest that voting for Trump this year was for conservative voters like raising a middle finger to democratic liberalism, or as he put it, “the whip hand in American culture.” He was wrong. Conservatives don’t need to vote for Trump to do that. The middle finger was raised on Monday, Oct. 26, 2020, when the Republican Party gave up all pretense to being committed to the republic, and put everything into domination by force of law.

Saying Lowry was wrong gives him too much credit, though. It’s been obvious for years that, in practice, “conservatism” never meant what people like Lowry said it meant. It has always been a middle finger to the slow, mixed up and complicated drift of modernity. “Conservatism” doesn’t stand for things. It stands against things, especially when those things threaten the old orders of power.

When Republicans say that Barrett interprets “the Constitution as written,” they’re saying she makes space for things American democracy has rejected. They’re saying long-term control of a minoritarian institution means a political minority can impose its political will on everyone else and, thanks to life-time appointments, never face consequences.

Liberals used to think of the Supreme Court as a friend. It was, after all, the court that decided Brown, Griswold, Roe, Obergefell, and other cases that stood against bigotry and discrimination and stood for democracy and freedom. That court, in the minds of liberals, stood on “the right side of history.” That court, liberals now understand, is gone.

Professor Garrett Epps, for the Washington Monthly, wrote this about Barrett’s confirmation:

As this vile mummery played out, I mourned — not for the first time — the idea of a Court that was property of the nation, not of party; that sought justice, not ideological advantage; that earned a nation’s respect, not its gaping horror.

We shall not look upon its like again.

Which brings me back to my thought experiment. Most people don’t know what to do about the court, whether to expand it, rotate justices, limit their terms, or strip its power. What people should know, when it’s made clear, is the choice the Republicans made to arrive at this point.

They didn’t choose the public, the common good, or even due process. They didn’t even choose, assuming Biden wins, to support their own president. They chose to smash and grab — smash all the rules and grab power, while hoping no one notices until months from now when it’s too late to do anything.

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: 27 October 2020

Word Count: 756

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I appreciate what Stuart Stevens did last week in a piece for The Bulwark. The former Republican strategist sensed dread among anti-Trump voters, especially dread of being blind-sided like last time. “We are right,” he wrote. “They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.”

I appreciate, too, the qualifications he put on that. “That sounds terribly overconfident and a lot of Democrats can’t shake the nagging sense that overconfidence was one of the horsemen of the Trump 2016 apocalypse. But this is actually a misreading of history. It wasn’t overconfidence that hurt Hillary Clinton. It was lack of urgency.”

Again, I appreciate the gesture. I do. We all need encouragement now and then. But the above, too, is a misreading. Apathy alone didn’t sink Clinton. So did cheating.

Candidate Donald Trump got a leg up from foreign espionage. President Donald Trump is getting the same. The Kremlin, via Facebook, moved just enough white people in just enough states to kneecap Clinton. Iran and probably China have joined the fun.

The GOP, meanwhile, acts as if treason is jake as long as it helps the party.

Even if Stevens is right in saying voter apathy lifted Trump, Joe Biden needs more than urgency. The former vice president needs every single one of us to shut up already about the polls and do what needs to be done — put together an overwhelming show of force by an overwhelming democratic majority. Urgency, in other words, isn’t action. Only action demonstrates the will to power. Biden is winning when he wins. Period.

Biden can’t simply win, though. He must win by a landslide. He must amass a super-majority on par with Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. If the result is close, apparent defeat won’t prevent Trump from throwing the election to the US Supreme Court. But every justice, even Amy Coney Barrett, will think twice if a super-majority makes itself clear.

A super-majority is, furthermore, the best way to flip the US Senate.

If the Republicans retain control, very little needing fixing is going to get fixed. There will be no reforming the court system, for one thing. There will be no reforming a political system currently rewarding GOP fascism.

More immediately important, there will be no combating the fallout from the covid pandemic. This crisis is so big, it’s going to take trillions in government spending.

The Senate Republicans, however, have already signaled readiness to sabotage the economy in order to sabotage a President Biden. Winning a super-majority is probably the best way of throwing the bums out.

It may sound like I’m giving voice to the skeptics of polling. They say opinion surveys were “wrong” last time, so why trust them this time? I’m not a skeptic, though. I trust polling quite a lot. What I am skeptical of is the principle hidden in the binary between voter apathy and voter urgency. That principle holds that voting is somehow optional.

That voting is optional is why cheating worked in 2016. That voting is optional is why authoritarians of the past and present find the legal and moral space to devise mechanisms to prevent voting. It would be hard to imagine either if people were as passionate about voting as they are about, say, bargain shopping or the Super Bowl. It would be hard to imagine if voting itself, not Trump, were the source of our urgency.

That we respect voting as optional is why we respect irresponsible voting behavior. There is no point in voting for a third-party candidate. There is no point in voting for a write-in candidate. Indeed, doing so can harm democracy, as it did in 2016. And yet we honor people like Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan who refuse to commit, as if they were acting bravely.

They were not. They were acting cowardly. They were presented with a choice and failed to make one. We should condemn that. Instead, we praise it. In doing so, we collectively encourage the citizenry to throw away its collective sovereignty.

Instead of voting for its own sake in 2016, we find ourselves four years later voting not so much out of a sense of urgency but sheer panic. While some, like Stuart Stevens, are patting themselves on the back for a premature job well done, I’m not. All of this could have been prevented if all of us sincerely believed in voting and acted accordingly.

As a consequence, Biden can’t merely beat Trump. To save democracy, he has to crush him.

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: 26 October 2020

Word Count: 762

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A typical thing to say about presidential debates is they don’t matter. That, however, was before the first between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That one, and I’m still not sure why, did matter. It clearly moved polling in the Democratic candidate’s direction.

So I’m a little hesitant to say the second debate won’t matter. I’m tempted to agree with the conventional wisdom. Trump didn’t piss himself. He started out composed! Biden was OK. He had a couple of great soundbites. Put it all together, see it from the perspective of the median white voter, and it’s probably true the whole thing was a wash. It won’t impact the election one way or another, which means, on balance, Biden won. (There really isn’t any such thing as winning or losing debates but stay with me.)

The pundit corps, which includes me, has a habit of generalizing the particular and particularizing the general in ways normal people don’t. While the pundits were busy lamenting the first debate as a “shitshow” and national disgrace, I kept seeing normal people bringing up one concrete detail that left a lasting impression on them. That was the president’s visible contempt for Hunter Biden’s history of substance abuse. It was coupled, moreover, with Joe Biden’s unconditional love for his troubled son.

Again, I don’t know exactly what about the first debate caused Biden’s margin over the president to grow. No one can really say for sure. Cause-and-effect is not possible to identify in public polling. But the margin did widen. That’s a fact.

Trump’s disdain for ordinary human frailty was a part of that. I can’t help thinking (hoping?) even hard-shelled Republican supporters were put off by the sight of such naked disgust for a problem lots and lots of people face, especially amid the scourge of opioid addiction.

The pundit corps was, last night, and is, this morning, noting the differences between the first and second debate, in particular the president did not beclown himself quite so heroically, which, by the magic of punditry, means he did just as well as Biden. Meanwhile, the concrete detail I’m seeing popping up is Trump’s indifference to the suffering of 500-some children in government custody after being taken from their immigrant parents as part of the administration’s sadistic policy of deterrence.

Such indifference is appalling — to liberals and others who have living, beating hearts. But I don’t think Trump’s remarks, however soulless they in fact are, are going to move public polling.

(Some apparently believe Trump said “good” in response to the fact that these children are still not reunited with their parents. He didn’t. He said “go ahead” to moderator Kristen Welker. Rendered in mush-mouth, it sounded like “good.”)

What about the second debate would move polling the way the first debate did? Again, contempt. Not for Trump’s enemies, though. When he said immigrants have low IQs, that was shocking, but not to his supporters. That might have been worth cheering. No, what’s going to shock Republican voters is when Trump expresses contempt for them. That’s what happened during the first debate.

Contempt for the former vice president’s son was contempt for anyone overcoming addiction, which includes lots and lots of Republicans. Last night, he did it again, coming off as scornful of people struggling financially. If I’m right, this detail, as small as it is, will have some effect.

Now, I’m guessing that wasn’t his intention. His intention was pointing out Biden’s “kitchen-table” trope in order to say he’s just another politician saying one thing, meaning another.

“It’s not about his family and my family,” Biden said,

It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly. If you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now. You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, ‘Well, we can’t get new tires. They’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so.’ Or, ‘Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?’ Or, ‘Who’s going to tell her she can’t go back to community college?’ They’re the decisions you’re making. We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.

To which, Trump said:

 That’s a typical political statement. Let’s get off this China thing, and then he [says], ‘The family around the table, everything.’ Just a typical politician when I see that. I’m not a typical politician. That’s why I got elected. Let’s get off the subject of China. Let’s talk about sitting around the table. Come on, Joe. You could do better.

Again, Trump’s target here is Biden’s rhetoric. Biden’s using “a typical political statement” to dodge facts (which aren’t fact; they’re lies, but go with it.) That alone might have scored points, but the way Trump did it, with a genuine feeling of sheer disgust that the transcript fails to capture, gave the impression that this might be the way the president really feels about real people really struggling to make ends meet.

Even if the trope isn’t real (it’s rhetorical), the hardship is! Yet hardship seems so beside the point to him it’s not worth validating, even with empty words.

I’m very trope-conscious. That’s part of my job. But Trump managed to shock me. Most normal people, including lots of Republicans, are not trope-conscious. How did they feel?

We’ll find out soon enough.

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: 23 October 2020

Word Count: 890

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I don’t get annoyed by politicians. Not usually. I understand they must say and do things normal people would never say and do. I don’t hold them to standards I’d normally hold normal people to. Dianne Feinstein, however, is an exception.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee used precious minutes of her closing remarks last week to thank Republican Chairman Lindsey Graham for his “professionalism” during hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s third life-time appointment to the US Supreme Court. That might not have been so bad if she had not also hugged him, giving the impression that comity, decorum and normalcy still prevail in an otherwise toxic environment in which the GOP has all but declared war on the Democrats.

To hug Graham is to be complicit in one’s assault and battery.

I wasn’t alone. Others were peeved aplenty with her playing along with a plan to enshrine minority rule in a democratic republic. Doubtless this is why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly gave her a talking to later. And this talking to is almost certainly why all the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, including Feinstein, boycotted this morning’s vote to advance Barrett to the full Senate.

I was annoyed but whatevs. The outcome is action by Senate Democrats that’s been absent. Barrett’s confirmation is illegitimate. Boycotting the vote makes that crystal clear.

To other Democrats. That’s important to understanding this properly. The Senate Democrats cannot stop their counterparts. (They don’t have the numbers.) All they can do is take the bully pulpit to warn of dangers posed to Obamacare, Social Security and other popular government programs by a 6-3 conservative super-majority on the high court.

Otherwise, a vociferous minority party can only make clear to other party members that what’s happening is so abnormal, no outside democratic boundaries, and so treacherous that it cannot be tolerated much less recognized. It cannot be allowed to be seen as legitimate.

The Senate Democrats can’t stop the Senate Republicans. They probably won’t convince Republican voters. But they can convince their own people.

This pulling back serves two purposes, one practical and one ideological.

First, denying Barrett legitimacy means the entire Supreme Court will function under a cloud of suspicion. (This is something many argued was the case from the beginning of Donald Trump’s term given the aid and comfort provided by enemies to the United States. A cheating president is an illegitimate president, as are his judicial appointees, but I digress.)

Refusing to recognize Barrett’s confirmation gives room to a President Biden, should that happen, to explore reforms to the court and the court system. The Republicans will oppose anything he proposes. That’s a given. What’s key is holding on to every single Democratic supporter.

Biden can’t let opposition to reform appear bipartisan. If it’s just the Republicans complaining, he’s free to move forward. (This scenario presumes, of course, that voters will flip control of the Senate; it also presumes that the Senate Democrats, once in control, will nix the filibuster.)

Second, pulling back and denying legitimacy to what are, arguably, treasonous acts indicate ideological and generational shifts going on generally. For all the Democratic praise given to Ronald Reagan, as an example of everything Donald Trump is not, that president’s “conservative consensus” is the one we still live in (and are moving out of, as I see it).

Liberals could quibble with conservatives but they could not quibble with Reagan’s titanic popularity, as evidenced by back-to-back landslide victories. It is no stretch to say that, since 1980, Democrats — who otherwise espoused liberal tendencies — recognized as valid, and therefore respected, their counterparts’ conservatism such that Republican demands were not the end of Democratic thinking but the beginning.

Nancy Pelosi illustrated what I see as the Democrats’ final departure from the Reagan regime during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The House Speaker told the news anchor something I don’t think any Democrat has said to someone of his stature.

He was trying to pin her down, using conventional Republican talking points connected to the stalled stimulus negotiations. Pelosi not only refused to play along; she refused to recognize the validity of the GOP’s perspective.

“With all due respect, and we’ve known each other a long time, you really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. The GOP has acted in bad faith for years. They prevailed over the Democrats by exploiting their liberal tendency to see good faith when there’s none. The first thing you do in an abusive relationship isn’t leaving. It’s denying the legitimacy of abuse.

In an upcoming segment of “60 Minutes,” Biden is reportedly going to propose “a national commission — a bipartisan commission.

I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system.

This worries liberals for good reason. They fear “bipartisan” will give Republicans room to sabotage him. I’d normally agree except for the changes I have outlined above. “Bipartisan” during Reagan’s conservative consensus over the last 40 years nearly always gave Republicans the advantage. That consensus, however, is crumbling, first slowly, then rapidly, then all at once.

Biden might mean “bipartisan” as we currently understand it. He might just as well mean “bipartisan” on his terms. Remember, he doesn’t need, nor is he going to get, Republican support. What he needs is the full backing of every member of his party.

Moreover, he didn’t say the commission would get back to him as to “whether” or “if” he should pursue court reforms. He said “how.” That indicates intention. That indicates major changes ahead beyond the election.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 938

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All presidents rankle when the Washington press corps pays attention to things the president and his administration would rather it did not pay attention to. What sets Donald Trump apart, it goes without saying, is his churlish tendency to feel like a victim, as if reporters reporting the news is some kind of conspiracy against him.

On Tuesday, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf accused the Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti of shilling for Joe Biden. In covering news of a new Center for Countering Human Trafficking, Wolf said, she “chose to ignore the human trafficking survivors who came to DC to tell their stories. Instead, she wrote on COVID, because it fits her media narrative. Anything it takes to bury the good news DHS is doing.”

Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor turning into a dutiful gatekeeper of the public square, defended Sacchetti and in the process all members of the press corps. Tapper said:

COVID is not a ‘narrative.’ It’s literally the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people right now, more than 220,000 of whom have died.

Tapper’s intentions, if I’m reading this right, were modest. He was merely defending his peers in the profession from partisan hacks like Wolf, and he was correct in doing so. But I think Tapper’s intentions — anyway, our intentions — should be broader.

If it’s true the covid is “the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people right now,” it should follow, given we all face the same threat, that it will take committed and collective action in the form of a government response to defeat it.

Conversely, anyone denying the reality of all of us being in this together, or anyone undermining the government’s response to the pandemic, should be seen, as is typical in times of war, as insufficiently committed to the cause of defeating a mortal enemy. Moreover, they might be — they should be — seen as disloyal, or perhaps even in league with the opposition.

Put another way, Chad Wolf, in drawing attention away from “the most tangible threat” to our safety and security, betrays the American people and creates conditions for a moment when treason is an option for those ideologically driven to sabotage.

Tapper defended a colleague. Good for him. What he should be doing, and we should all be doing, is seriously questioning Chad Wolf’s patriotism.

Questioning someone’s patriotism is tacky, to say the least, but remember: Some white people in this country believe deep down that they reside in a nation-within-a-nation where “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. This confederacy of the mind and spirit exists. (It has existed since the founding.) Its devotees are prepared to go to the wall to keep and tighten their grip on a government they believe belongs to them.

A massive government response to a virus affecting everyone is itself a declaration of war that must be faced with equal and opposite aggression. This is why a band of white domestic terrorists conspired recently to kidnap (and probably murder) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. That a similar plan to kidnap the mayor of Wichita, Kansas, was foiled is not a sign of copycatism. It’s a harbinger of things to come.

Violence is only the most obvious form of betrayal. Mitch McConnell has told White House negotiators to back off stimulus talks. The reason, according to a pundits corps bent on seeing good faith where there is none, is because some Republicans “simply don’t think government spending would help the economy” or they think they will be “vulnerable to attacks as insufficiently conservative.” (None of that applied when Senate Republicans OK’d $2.2 trillion in relief aid.)

No, McConnell is sandbagging stimulus now, because he thinks Trump won’t be reelected. With the backing of plutocrats already pushing policymakers to privilege the economy over “the sanctity of life,” the Republicans are preparing to sabotage Biden the way they did Barack Obama a decade ago, and in the process produce “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.”

The Republicans will pretend mass death and mass poverty are outcomes in keeping with republican democracy. That this is a transparent lie might be obvious if people like Jake Tapper allow it to be. My fear is they won’t. My fear is the press corps will balance Democratic loyalty with Republican disloyalty, thus making treason optional.

Tapper understands the covid is “the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people.” Let’s hope he also understands the virus isn’t the only one.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 761

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It’s understood the president has not done nearly enough to combat the spread of the new coronavirus. It’s understood he’s gotten in the way of states trying to protect residents.

What’s not understood, however, is the United States government, under Donald Trump’s leadership, seems to be conducting a science experiment on the American people without telling us — one informed by ideology, not medicine.

All things being equal, a second term for the president will not only coincide with a permanent pandemic; it will cause hundreds of thousands of more people to die.

On Monday, the Washington Post ran an investigation finding the administration surrendered to a disease that has killed so far more than 225,000 Americans and infected nearly 8.5 million more, according to Worldometer. Indeed, the White House has changed tracks under Scott Atlas, the radiologist turned White House pandemic advisor.

Appealing to Trump’s desire to look like he’s working without actually doing any work, Atlas has, according to the Post, “advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.”

After consolidating power with the help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence, Atlas has undermined the authority of Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (The president, subsequently, has been growing increasingly critical of Fauci.)

Masks and social distancing don’t work, Atlas said in public. All state and local restrictions should be lifted. Atlas has, moreover, blocked money appropriated by the US Congress for testing. He has sandbagged the government’s effort to monitor the disease’s spread. His goal appears to be quite clear: allowing about 60-70 percent of the population to be infected, resulting in, according to one expert, “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.” (The current percentage of recovered people with covid antibodies is around 10 percent.)

It happens this goal is shared by signatories of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, “a scientific treatise that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread naturally in order to achieve herd immunity,” according to the New York Times. The statement arose from a gathering held in Great Barrington, Mass., hosted “by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.”

Jay Bhattacharya is a signatory. He’s also Atlas’ colleague at Stanford. During the spring, they bonded over “shared concern that lockdowns were creating economic and societal devastation.” Atlas denied advocating the Great Barrington Declaration, but it nonetheless lines up with what he’s doing as the White House pandemic advisor.

He nonetheless arranged for a meeting with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. “On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas” to meet with Azar, according to the Times.

Azar later Tweeted: “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.” (The “declaration” calls for protections only for the sick and elderly.)

I say “it happens” these things line up, but it’s no accident. Two doctors — one now inside of the Trump administration who is echoing another on the outside — say they are deeply concerned about “economic and societal devastation” while at the same time being in league with Charles Koch and his political network, which birthed the so-called Tea Party.

A decade ago, they fought and nearly defeated expanded health coverage in the form of Obamacare on grounds that it threatened “economic freedom.” This time, they aren’t fighting public policy. They are fighting science itself. They are fighting in order to prove their belief that the absence of government is liberty, that the road to serfdom is paved with “big government” intentions.

They will prove they’re right even if that means duping the American people into being unknowing guinea pigs, even if that means the possibility of “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.”

Charles Koch is universally accepted among respectable white people as having views consistent with democratic politics. That was always dangerously wrong. I hope the pandemic makes clear the “economic freedom” of the kind Koch espouses — as do Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya, evidently — is inherently at odds with the diverse interests of a democratic community.

Democracy is not a goal. For Koch, it’s an obstacle to achieving one’s goal, which includes tightening one’s grip on the government while appearing to champion liberty. A pandemic of this size requires a massive government response, which requires a government on the side of normal people and the common good. The only way Charles Koch is going to give up that kind of power is over his dead body.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 836

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You could say conspiracy theories are like herpes. Akin to the sexually transmitted disease, belief in nefarious forces determining the fate of humanity has been around human beings as long as human beings have been around, and they will continue to be around long after the living are dead. There’s no cure. You can’t get rid of them once infected. The trick is making sure they don’t flare up, causing needless pain and injury to an open society. It’s pushing them back to the margins of life where they belong.

In a free republic, that trick is made trickier due to concerns for free speech. At what point do the protected rights of individuals to say whatever they want to say, even if it’s politically dangerous, conflict with the government’s interest in protecting the integrity of public discourse? That debate is ongoing.

For now, I want to point out the citizenry may be leaving the government behind, such that the government need never catch up. The Trump presidency, I contend, seems to have made two things clear. One, counter-speech is free speech. Two, free speech demands accountability. In other words, civil society seems to be exiling “irrationalism” to the political wilderness.

The president and his confederates are wrongly outraged by the general tendency in public discourse 15 days before Election Day to ignore or dismiss the “Hunter Biden email scandal.” Aided and abetted by the same Russian operatives who sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy, Trump seems as frustrated by the gambit’s ineffectiveness as he is by the reluctance of the campaign press corps to launder a slough of slander.

The more frustrated he gets, the more he flails, reaching for just about anything, even the QAnon conspiracy theory alleging that “Trump is a messianic figure battling devil-worshipping, child-molesting Democrats,” according to USA Today.

The more he reaches for piles of lies, the less the president is taken seriously.

Lies, you could say, are like herpes, too. They will always be with us in some form or another. Before pushing them back, however, we should examine the reason why Trump’s and Russia’s lies worked in the first place: they did not, for a lot of people, look like lies.

To the Washington press corps — specifically, to respectable white people — they looked as if they reflected just another stage in the evolution of “conservatism.” As long as radicals seemed legitimate in the eyes of reporters and editors, as long as fascists seemed only to pursue a purer form of “conservatism” (think: “alt-right”), they were free to smuggle lies into the public square where they hid them in plain sight.

I take umbrage with the conventional wisdom that Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller and other fascists “infiltrated” conservative circles in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Infiltrated” connotes naivete, as if “conservative” GOP actors were not already receptive to the dog-whistle rhetoric and reactionary fears that already constituted the gestalt of the Republican Party.

They did not take over the party. They were welcomed into it. They, like Trump, are and were not a bug. They are and were a feature. And now that the lies are known as lies — now that they’re no longer working; indeed, they’re backfiring — the “conservatives” must keep lying in order to save face.

US Sen. John Cornyn is up for reelection. He said over the weekend that he broke with Trump over the border wall, budgets and other issues but kept quiet. He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Editorial Board: “I think what we found is that we’re not going to change President Trump. He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between. What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

This is the same “conservative” senator who voted to acquit the president of spear-heading a real criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. Friends, you decide whether he’s telling the truth or lying in the hopes that respectable white people — that is, the Washington and Texas press corps — will keep giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Which brings me back to free speech. The more a free and open civil society tolerates lying at this scale — the more the press corps accepts the GOP’s bad faith as good faith — the less free and open civil society becomes. All things being equal, voters appear ready to correct their mistake four years ago.

We will have learned nothing, however, if we do not push lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories back to where they belong.

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: 19 October 2020

Word Count: 774

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Two things bear repeating before I get to the point. One, the president is not going to play fair. This election is not a contest in which we can honestly say, “May the best man win.” If there’s a way to cheat, Donald Trump will find it.

Two, the weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day are going to be scary. The president is already extorting the electorate into choosing him — or else. If he doesn’t win, we can expect white-power terrorists to react. What’s certain, unfortunately, is there will be blood.

That said, I want to take a moment to express hope. Polling is very encouraging. Joe Biden is leading the president nationally by double digits in some surveys. That’s where you want to be to avoid the effects of GOP voter suppression. That’s where you want to be to counteract the inequities of the Electoral College.

Also encouraging has been enthusiasm for early voting. In George and Texas, we’re seeing huge lines. Voters are waiting to cast ballots for up to 10 hours. While wait-times are a national disgrace, the fact that people are determined should be seen a source of national strength.

Truly, the people are the only way of getting rid of a tyrant. And the people are showing up.

To be honest, I had lost some faith. Not all, but some. Like others, 2016 gave me a lingering case of PTSD. The choice seemed so simple. I found myself reading a lot about propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theories and the like. I concluded some Americans were not only duped; they desired being lied to. It made them feel good.

“Democracies can accommodate quite a lot of irrationalism,” wrote David Runciman. “What is not clear is whether they can accommodate it when it emanates from the center.” Runciman went on to say that,

 

“There will always be fringe figures in any democratic society who believe the nonsense they read and decide to take matters into their own hands. It is shocking when it happens, but democracies can cope. Pedophilia and pizza parlors will be told apart eventually, and the contagion from that kind of paranoia can be contained. Much harder to know is what happens when the contagion of conspiracy theorizing spreads out from the heart of government” (my italics).

It was harder to know, in January 2017, what happens when “conspiracy theorizing spreads out from the heart of government.” (That’s when Runciman was writing for the special “post-truth” edition of The Chronicle Review.) In not knowing, in the early weeks of Trump’s presidency, there was opportunity aplenty for abject despair. But now, as a new Election Day approaches, and as polling indicates an electorate poised to correct its previous mistake, we see something like affirmation of Runciman’s claim.

The people understand Trump’s the-Deep-State’s-out-to-get-me shtick. His paranoia can be contained. Democracy can cope with irrationalism emanating from the center. It can cope not because the institutions are strong. It can cope because the people are.

Last night, during NBC’s live town hall, the president refused to disavow QAnon. (That’s the conspiracy theory holding that Democrats are satanist child sex predators; it’s a 21st-century update of the ancient “blood libel” slander against Jews.) Trump refused to disavow it the way he refused to disavow any number of horrible things over the course of his term.

But while in the past, this seemed like a source of strength (he can say anything and never face consequences!), this time it seemed like a source of weakness. Under Savannah Guthrie’s withering questioning, and set side-by-side with Biden’s calm, mild and policy-oriented town hall, the president seemed to unravel. He is the center of American power, as all presidents are. But his center did not hold.

Let’s hope the darkness is lifting. The popularity of conspiracy theories is cyclical in American history. It rises with rising tensions rooted in crisis. The influx of Catholic immigrants aroused the Know Nothings in the 1850s. The Cold War, and the fear of a nuclear Soviet Union, gave fruit to McCarthyism in the 1950s. Each period tapped into a “persistent psychic phenomenon,” wrote Richard Hofstadter in 1964, which is “more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.”

In each period this psychic phenomenon eventually burns itself out. Then it crawls underground. Fortunately for us, this paranoid style, like Trump’s style, seems to be going out of style.

Let’s hope that by 2021, conspiracy theories passing for credible become passé. Then we can, at last, get down to the business of solving our collective problems.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 761

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There’s something we would all agree on if we were honest with ourselves. The confirmation of Appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s third life-time appointment to the United States Supreme Court, is itself an act of betrayal. The Republicans played by one set of rules to block Barack Obama’s final nominee. They rewrote the rules for Donald Trump.

With Barrett, the Republicans will have a third branch of government with which to veto the people’s will. They will have enshrined autocratic rule over a system of republican government premised on democratic rule. You might cheer. You might say huzzah! You must concede, however. This is treason.

Treason, though subliminal throughout Senate confirmation hearings, was apparent once you saw the indicators. Chief among them was the nominee herself. Barrett made news this week in ways no past nominee made news. She refused to commit to moral, legal and constitutional positions every past nominee committed to or was presumed to be committed to — it went without saying in a free republic. Not Amy Coney Barrett, though.

Can the president pardon himself? She wouldn’t say. Can the president delay national elections? She wouldn’t say. Is voter intimidation illegal? She wouldn’t say. (Fact check: Yes, it is.) Would she recuse herself if the president threw the election to the Supreme Court? She wouldn’t say. Is Medicare constitutional? She wouldn’t say.

These were the softest of softball questions. In the context of the American tradition, in which powers are separated, and individuals protected from government power by way of guaranteed civil liberties, these were like asking if the sky were blue. But this nominee, knowing her chief obstacle to the court isn’t the Senate Democrats, who are outnumbered, but a president with an id of onion skin, dodged super-easy questions every predecessor would have answered freely.

In the process, she achieved two things. She raised doubts about her own commitment to a democratic political order. And she made negotiable something that should be the highest taboo: betrayal of the country.

Barrett isn’t alone. She operates within a GOP apparatus that is itself bent toward treason. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Senate Republicans are now preparing to sabotage the next administration.

Should he defeat Trump, Joe Biden has said he will ask the US Congress for trillions to combat the pandemic and revive an economy on the brink of collapse.

A GOP strategist said the Republicans are “carefully laying the groundwork to restrain a Biden administration on federal spending and the budget deficit by talking up concerns about the price tag for another round of virus relief. The thinking, the strategist said, is that it would be very hard politically to agree on spending trillions more now and then in January suddenly embrace fiscal restraint.”

Put another way, the Republicans are hoping they can do to Biden what they did to Barack Obama. When they took the House in 2010, they doubled down on austerity, claiming the country was too broke to counteract the fallout from the 2007-2008 financial and housing panic. The Republicans, in other words, hurt the economy in order to hurt Obama. It didn’t work. He was reelected in 2012. But Obama was one of the lucky ones.

Millions of Americans, including Republican voters aplenty, felt more economic pain than they might have had the GOP acted out of love for the whole country. Treason is what you do when democracy itself is an obstacle to winning.

While treason may yield short term gains, it can’t long term. Your sins will find you out. Rudy Giuliani supplied the New York Post this week with a hard drive containing apparently forged documents. The tabloid claimed they proved Joe Biden as vice president protected his son from prosecution by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor. The report repeated a widely debunked claim Biden pushed the prosecutor out.

Fact is, Biden was pushing the prosecutor to investigate the gas firm his son worked for, as part of a global anti-corruption effort. Meanwhile, the documents, according to the New York Times, might be traced back to the same Russians who hacked the DNC in 2016. If so, the president’s personal attorney and, therefore, the president himself, might be involved in yet another international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

Yet this time, it didn’t work. The New York Post’s report was widely panned, and even Facebook and Twitter, understanding the national security stakes, restricted its circulation. Meanwhile, early voting is shattering records, suggesting a landslide victory for Biden, even as the GOP Senate hurries up to confirm Amy Coney Barrett before it’s too late.

Nothing can be done for it. She will be confirmed. The court will be a 6-3 Republican supermajority. That’s what’s possible when treason is optional.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 790

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