Bob Woodward is the most conventional of conventional reporters. He is very good at gaining access and gathering facts, but like most members of the Washington press corps, he nearly always avoids thinking through the ramifications of what he’s found, even if the evidence, which he reliably piles high, demands that he think it through.

The legendary reporter was on “60 Minutes” Sunday to talk about his new book, Rage. It reveals for the first time that the president knew in February how deadly the new coronavirus was going to be — that it’s airborne and worse than the flu — but did everything in his power to prevent the public from understanding it fully.

That would have been enough to warrant an interview with Scott Pelley. Then Woodward did something to my knowledge he’s never done, nor have too many in Washington.

He came to a moral conclusion.

 

Pelley: You’re known as the reporter who doesn’t put his thumb on the scale. And yet, at the end of this book, you do just that.

Woodward: It’s a conclusion based on evidence, overwhelming evidence, that he could not rise to the occasion with the virus and tell the truth. And one of the things that President Trump told me, ‘In the presidency, there’s always dynamite behind the door.’ The real dynamite is President Trump. He is the dynamite.

Remember that coming to a conclusion is taboo among orthodox journalists like Woodward. (And the older the reporter, generally the more orthodox they are.) Coming to a conclusion violates the news tradition of neutrality and letting readers decide.

The reporter’s job is reporting facts. Moral conclusions are for editorial writers. That Woodward of all people is breaking this rule should be seen as a reckoning of sorts for a press corps complicit in the creation of a “post-truth” authoritarian presidency.

When Donald Trump speaks, every third word is a lie. Reporters keep giving him the benefit of the doubt, though. They report what he says unfiltered or weakly qualified.

After more than 20,000 falsehoods (as of July), you’d think empirically-minded people like members of the press corps would by now have come to the conclusion that Trump is a liar. Don’t believe him. Verify everything.

They haven’t. They seem to have an almost religious belief that democracy will endure no matter how many lies poison it — that the status quo is strong and sustainable, and will outlive Trump.

The press corps isn’t alone. Many Americans, even now, tend to take democracy for granted.

For granted? That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, doesn’t it? We’re told that Donald Trump’s election and that of authoritarians in Hungary, Brazil, Turkey and the Philippines are proof that people have lost faith amid a conspiracy of international crises — climate change and globalization being chief among them.

Instead of reforming institutions or reviving political participation, they are turning to would-be strongmen to save them. People have too little faith in democracy, not too much.

The whole truth in this country is there are plenty of voters (most of them white, most of them affluent) who do not believe the president is dangerous to the republic. They believe it will carry on, so much so they can grind as many axes as they please.

Sure, he says things no president should say, but he doesn’t believe half of them. He doesn’t believe, as he said in Nevada over the weekend, that after winning a second term, he’s going to “negotiate” a third, maybe even a fourth. He doesn’t believe these things that these voters believe, because he knows a president can’t do that, even if he wanted to.

This is an “unthinking faith,” according to David Runciman, allowing people to believe democracy can withstand anything. “Far from making democracy invincible, this sort of blithe confidence makes it vulnerable,” the Cambridge scholar told The Economist in 2018. “It gives us license to indulge our grievances regardless of the consequences.”

You see where I’m going. There are plenty of voters in this country who don’t mind the president’s effort to ban Muslims, deport “illegals,” police Black people and otherwise punch down on the margins of society if they can get another tax break.

They don’t mind his corruption, dereliction of duty and erosion of the rule of law. They think his critics are partisans only, or complaining for the sake of complaining. Importantly, they don’t or won’t believe their support is fueling democracy’s decline. These mostly white and mostly affluent Americans believe they are serious, respectable, reasonable and patriotic citizens.

They know the president is lying but won’t act. They know he’s lying but don’t care. Both are the result of too much faith in democracy, not too little. Like the press corps, they suspend their disbelief and refuse to come to a moral conclusion.

Let’s hope Woodward’s taboo-shattering goes some way toward changing that.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 814

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The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can’t afford to feed them enough food.

In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s top contractor, reported that, compared to 2019, its earnings are actually up — yes, up! The company’s success led the financial magazine Barron’s to call it a “pandemic star.” And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Trump administration’s recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.

And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, “It’s becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better” than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.

The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it’s also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities of Washington have been all these years. Americans — the Trump administration aside — are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to safely reopen schools. It’s none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost. In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls — and count on it, they will come — to “rebuild” the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, leaving this country in a distinctly weakened state.

A new budget debate? For the past decade, the budget “debate” in this country has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted “war spending” that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account. While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the Pentagon’s ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.

In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means a Biden or Trump administration will have an enormous opportunity to significantly reshape federal spending. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there’s more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the still-raging pandemic is creating.

In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country’s major engine for creating jobs. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenth of those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that’s “well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.”

As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, this country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy. And such investments would pay additional dividends by making our communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient.

Defense contractors campaigning for bailouts At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what’s still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) “national security” and the foreign policy that goes with it, including this country’s forever wars. That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program. My colleagues and I are also continually tracking the many officials who leave the Pentagon to go to work on the boards of or to lobby for arms makers or leave those companies and end up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security state. That’s known, of course, as the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door.” And as President Trump recently noted, it helps ensure that those endless wars never end, while stoking an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. While his actions on behalf of the arms industry don’t back up his rhetoric, his diagnosis of the problem is largely on target. 

And yet, as familiar as I am with the damage that the weapons industry has done to our country, I still find myself shocked at how a number of those companies have responded to the current crisis. Almost immediately, they began lobbying the Department of Defense to make their employees part of this country’s “essential critical infrastructure,” so that they could force them to return to work, pandemic or not. That decision drew a rare rebuke from the unions representing those workers, many of whom feared for their lives.

And mind you, only then did things become truly perverse. In the initial Covid-19 relief bill, Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to help respond to the pandemic. Such aid, as congressional representatives imagined it, would be used to purchase personal protective equipment for employees who still had to show up at work, especially since the Department of Defense’s own initial estimate was that the country would need to produce as many as 3.3 billion N95 masks in six months. The Pentagon, however, promptly gave those funds to defense contractors, including paying for such diverse “needs” as golf-course staffing, hypersonic missile development, and microelectronics, a Washington Post investigation found. House appropriators responded that money for defense contractors “was not the original intent of the funds.”

And now those defense contractors are asking for yet more bailouts. Earlier this summer, they successfully convinced the Senate to put $30 billion for the arms industry in its next coronavirus relief bill. As CQ Roll Call reported, the top beneficiaries of that spending spree would be the Pentagon’s two largest contractors: Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The pandemic has certainly resulted in some delays and unexpected expenses for such companies, but the costs borne by the weapons industry pale compared to the devastation caused to so many businesses that have had to close permanently. Every sector of the economy is undoubtedly facing unexpected costs due to the pandemic, but apparently the Department of Defense, despite being by far the best-funded military on the planet, and its major contractors, among the richest and most successful corporations in America, have essentially claimed that they will be unable to respond to the crisis without further taxpayer help. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the lead Democrat for the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee recently pointed out that, even though contractors across the federal government are facing pandemic challenges, no other agency has asked for additional funds to cover the costs of the crisis. Instead, they have worked on drawing from their existing resources.

It’s laughable to suggest that the very department that already has by far the most resources on hand and is, of course, charged with leading the country’s response to unexpected threats can’t figure out how to adjust without further funding. But most defense contractors see no reason to adapt since they know that they can continue to count on Washington to bail them out.

Still, the defense industry has become impatient that Congress hasn’t already acquiesced to their demands. In July, executives at most of the major contractors sent a letter to the White House demanding more money. In it, they included a not-so-subtle threat of electoral consequences for the president and Senate Republicans in close races if such funds weren’t provided. Only one major contractor, Northrop Grumman, has stayed away from such highly public lobbying efforts because its CEO apparently had the common sense to recognize that her company was doing too well to demand more when so many others are desperate for money, particularly minority-owned businesses, many of which are likely to never come back.

On a glide path to disaster? There are signs, however, that someday such eternal winners in the congressional financial sweepstakes may finally be made accountable thanks to the pandemic. This summer, both the House and the Senate for the first time each considered an amendment to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. Such efforts even received support from at least some moderates, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), although it went down to defeat in both houses of Congress. Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) refused to support the specifics of the amendment, she did at least express her agreement with the principle of needing to curtail the Pentagon’s spending spree during this crisis. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, I’m keenly aware of the global threats facing our country,” she said in a statement she released after the vote. “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”

The first real test of whether this country will learn any of the right lessons about national security from this ongoing pandemic moment will undoubtedly come in next year’s budget debate when the question will be: Is everything finally going to be on the table? As I previously wrote at TomDispatch, giving the Pentagon trillions of dollars in these years in no way prepared this country for the actual national security crisis of our lives. In fact, even considering the Pentagon’s ridiculously outsized budget, prioritizing funding for unaffordable and unproven weapons systems over healthcare hurt its ability to keep the military and its labor force safe. No less significantly, continuing to prioritize the Pentagon over the needs of every other agency and Americans more generally keeps us on a glidepath to disaster.

A genuinely new discussion of budget priorities would mean, as a start, changing the very definition of “security” to include responding to the many risks we actually face when it comes to our safety: not just pandemics, but the already increasing toll of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, and a government that continues to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected over everyone else.

At the simplest level, the “defense” side of the budget ledger should be made to reflect what we’re really spending now on what passes for national security. That means counting homeland security and veterans’ benefits, along with many other expenses that often get left out of the budget equation. When such expenses are indeed included, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project has discovered, the real price tag for America’s wars in the Greater Middle East alone came to more than $6.4 trillion by 2020. In other words, even to begin to have an honest debate about how America’s other needs are funded, there would have to be a far more accurate accounting of what actually has been spent in these years on “national security.”

Surprisingly enough, unlike Congress (or the Pentagon), the voting public already seems to grasp the need for change. The nonprofit think tank Data for Progress found that more than half of likely voters support cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10% to pay for domestic priorities like fighting the coronavirus. A University of Maryland poll found bipartisan majorities opposed to cutting funding generally with two notable exceptions: Pentagon spending and agricultural subsidies.

Unfortunately, those in the national security establishment are generally not listening to what the American people want. Instead, they’re the captives of a defense industry that eternally hypes new Cold War-style competition with China and Russia, both through donations to Washington think tanks and politicians and that infamous revolving door.

In fact, the Trump administration is a military-industrial nightmare when it comes to that endlessly spinning entrance and exit. Both of his confirmed secretaries of defense and one acting secretary of defense came directly from major defense contractors, including the current one, former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper — and the Biden administration seems unlikely to be all that different. As the American Prospect reported recently, several members of his foreign policy team have already circumvented ethics rules that would restrict lobbying activities by becoming “strategic consultants” to the very defense firms aiming to win more Pentagon contracts. For example, Biden’s most likely secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, became a senior adviser to Boston Consulting Group and the first three years she was with that company, it increased its Pentagon contract earnings by a factor of 20.

So whoever wins in 2020, increased spending for the Pentagon, rather than real national security, lies in store. The people, it seems, have spoken. The question remains: will anyone in Washington listen to them?

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2020 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 September 2020

Word Count: 2,332

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The headlines over the last seven days have been terrible for the president. It was reported first that he said dead Americans Marines were “losers” and that volunteers for military service were “suckers.” Last came Bob Woodward’s bombshell.

Turns out Donald Trump knew the new coronavirus was deadlier than the flu. Turns out he consciously chose to minimize its anticipated impact as early as February. His abject dereliction of duty produced a death toll 66 times that of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

That’s a lot of bad press, so I suppose we’re due for a change of pace from members of the Washington press corps. If they’re going to spend time and energy producing bad headlines for the president, journalistic “balance” demands they produce at least one bad headline for Joe Biden — even if they must look under rocks and bushes to find it.

NBC News’ Sahil Kapur and Jonathan Allen, right on cue, made it happen with “Democrats are nervous about Trump’s persisting edge over Biden on the economy.”

This is not to say Kapur and Allen are wrong. They are quite right in reporting that polls suggest “Americans in battleground states still trust Trump over Biden on the economy, which often tops the list of decisive issues for voters.” I’m not here to quibble with their interpretation of the data. I’m not here to say the economy is an increasingly unreliable metric of voter behavior.

The only points I want to make are simple ones. First, Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, are always nervous, not because of polling or Trump’s swing-state resilience, but because they’re liberals. Second, and more importantly, Democrats should be nervous. The stakes can’t be higher. Defeat will surely mean the advance of the GOP’s politics of annihilation.

Liberals doubt themselves habitually in ways experienced rarely by Republicans, especially the White House’s current occupant. Trump believes he’s always right about what’s going to work for him politically, and after every instance in which he expresses superlative confidence in himself, he’s shown to be wrong. (When I say “every instance,” I mean every single one. Being impervious to shame means being impervious to humiliation wrought by troglodyte political judgment.)

Liberals just don’t work that way. Doubt is part of the mindset that makes them liberal. This is important to point out as it pertains to journalistic “balance.” Worried Democrats will always appear newsworthy compared to Republicans who are never worried, even if they should be.

Having doubts, moreover, is a good thing compared to the alternative. Here, I’m thinking of an essay written by Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe. Published 16 years ago, it examines movements within the Republican Party at the time. It finds elements of thinking originated by fascist philosopher Carl Schmitt. In the process, Wolfe outlines the philosophical underpinnings that distinguish liberals from “conservatives” (his word).

I think of the differences reading reports treating Republicans and Democrats as if they were two sides of the same coin. The parties are different and dialectical in the ways they position themselves in the world. One has grave reservations about the moral use of political power. The other has none at all.

Wolfe writes that the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not restricted to policy but include the very “meaning of politics itself.” Residues of Schmitt’s German version of conservatism, he said, “which shared so much with Nazism,” can be “detected in the ways in which conservatives today fight for their objectives.”

Writing in 2004, he went on to say:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water’s edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

When journalists equate the unequal, they not only obscure what’s bad about the Republicans — making them seem confident and strong, when they might in fact be overconfident and weak — they obscure what’s good about the Democrats, and in turn, veil the authoritarian creep over an American liberal tradition for which there’s always something more important than winning, whether that’s “procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations,” Wolfe said.

Democrats doubt themselves when it comes to attaining power. Once they have it, they doubt again.

That’s good. That’s worth voting for.

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: 11 September 2020

Word Count: 833

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As I write, I’m sitting with my daughter while she zooms into fourth grade. We’re about 40 minutes into class time. It’s taken this long to take attendance amid the sounds of dogs barking, ambulances blaring and infants crying. It’s taken this long, because every detail of teaching more than thirty 9-year-olds is magnified many times over. (If you’ve never had to navigate Google Classroom, consider yourself lucky.) It’s a microcosm of the maddening complexity of life in the time of the novel coronavirus.

This isn’t the half of it. The pandemic hasn’t hit my family nearly as hard as others, but we’re feeling pain. Universities and arts nonprofits, which had been the spheres of our employment, were not designed to weather a once-in-a-century virus. (Thanks to you, our largest source of income is now the Editorial Board!) Universities are grasping wildly in the dark. Arts nonprofits are the walking dead. We’re not among the 22 million filing jobless claims (yet) — and we’re not among the 6.5 million suffering from Covid-19 (yet) — but this pain is the norm now. It will be for the foreseeable future.

I’m not the kind of person who blames presidents for everything. I’m the kind of person who thinks presidents don’t have as much power as we tend to think they have. I didn’t blame George W. Bush for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance. I didn’t blame Barack Obama, furthermore, for the desiccation of the Democratic Party during his tenure. Sure, he played a role, but other factors played greater roles (the white supremacist backlash against the first Black president being first and foremost). Nor did I credit him solely for the longest economic expansion in American history. I subscribe to the Lars-Erik Nelson school of thought in that presidents have a lot of power, but let’s not fool ourselves with “illusions of presidential omnipotence.”

And I didn’t blame the pandemic entirely on the current president. To be sure, I have accused Donald Trump of greed, cowardice, narrow-mindedness, and breathtaking irresponsibility. I have asked why the pundit corps is not talking more about negligent homicide. But these accusations were based on effects, not intent. A part of me has wondered whether he truly understood how deadly this thing is, even though he’s surrounded by people explaining how deadly this thing is. The Washington press corps, moreover, cites unnamed current and former White House officials claiming he just doesn’t get it, and that he probably never will get it. That seemed to jive with comments by former administration officials who claimed that he’s an idiot’s imbecile, that he’s got a gnat’s knack for focus, and that his ego is a clown car bursting with bile.

I blame him now. Thanks for Bob Woodward’s reporting, published Wednesday in the Washington Post, there is no more ambiguity. In an audio recording, the president told Woodward he knew how deadly the pandemic was going to be. He knew it was going to kill more people than the flu kills. He knew, and yet he failed to take appropriate action to warn and prepare the country for a death toll exceeding that of all foreign wars since 1950.

Not only did he fail to take appropriate action, the action he did take was “almost criminal,” as Joe Biden put last night in an interview with CNN. More than 200,000 will be dead by Election Day (or sooner). Two hundred and fifty thousand will be dead by Inauguration Day. Half a million may be dead by mid-2021. Normal, ordinary life meanwhile is upside down, backward and prolapsed. There’s just no end in sight.

He knew, and because he knew, my mind is reeling with questions. How many times has he put his own supporters in danger, as they gathered by the thousands without protection, while knowing he was putting them in danger? How many times has he golfed while knowing the pandemic was killing so many people city officials had to dig mass graves? How many times has he ridiculed people for wearing masks, thereby insulting the memory of the dead, while knowing the virus was airborne. How many times has he attacked public officials, whose job is serving the public’s interest, while knowing their service prevented the death toll from being even bigger?

Most important of all, how many Republicans understood that a man who commits treason is the kind of man who stands by while Americans die in droves — if that’s what it takes to win? The answer is all of them.

On Feb. 3, 2020, the Senate Republicans acquitted Trump of an attempt to extort a foreign official into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. That’s a long-winded way of saying acquitted of treason.

On Feb. 7, after having gotten away with betraying his country once, the president laid the groundwork for betraying his country twice. He told Woodward in exacting detail how much deadlier the new coronavirus is compared to influenza. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu. This is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent. You know? So, this is deadly stuff.”

For months after, Trump in his own words “played down” the pandemic, saying that warmer weather would drive it away, that flu season is worse, that the Democrats and the “fake news” press corps were making a big deal out of it for political reasons, and that governors trying to save lives by shutting down their states were tanking the economy on purpose to sink his chances of getting reelected. (He’s now saying he played the pandemic down to avoid inciting a panic, which is so ludicrous as to be insulting.) And for the last eight months, every Republican in the US Congress took his side.

If he didn’t know better (being an idiot’s imbecile, after all), they knew better, surely. But now we know he knew better, too, making their complicity more disgusting. They, too, were willing to stand by while Americans died en masse, all in order to win. And now, as they did at Trump’s impeachment trial, they have the gall to defend the indefensible. First, they sent people to their graves. Now, they’re pissing on them.

I don’t normally blame presidents for everything. This time is different, though. We now know the president’s goal was deception with deadly consequences. This is more than negligent homicide. This is criminal intent. And yesterday, he confessed to the crime.

Where can normal Americans turn for justice? I wish I knew the answer.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 1,116

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Most of us are familiar with the genre of political reporting in which a journalist from the New York Times parachutes into Ohio or Arizona (or wherever) to talk to Donald Trump’s supporters while they’re eating. Most don’t know, or have forgotten, this genre is a result of regime change.

After the liberal order established under Roosevelt in the 1930s gave way to the conservative order established under Reagan in the 1980s, a regime in which we are living still, the press corps got into the habit of explaining, after a Republican wins the White House, why Republican voters think a Republican president is super-duper, even now when he’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist.

Implied in explanations ad nauseam is a specific audience: people residing on the coasts, and in and around major cities throughout the country. Also implied, but more subliminal, is a conclusion: that people residing on the coasts, and in and around major cities, don’t understand people who don’t do the same.

Another implication, far more cartoonish, is that everyone on the coasts, and in and around major cities, is a Democrat, while everyone who does not live in those areas is a Republican. This is often called the urban-rural divide. It’s so symmetrical as to be almost entirely fictional.

To be sure, country folk really do not, and will not, try to understand city-dwellers above and beyond what they see on television. The reverse, however, is mostly false. A minority percentage of city residents understand country folk intimately, because they left country living for jobs, excitement, love — everything cities can offer. And they have done so in a historic wave.

When FDR’s regime changed into Reagan’s regime, cities really were terrible places. But “by the turn of the third millennium, cities had turned around, not just in the United States but also all over the world,” Alex Marshall wrote today in Governing magazine.

They had gotten safer, cleaner, richer and more populous. Characters in countless TV shows and movies led fulfilling lives in urban environments, with ‘urban’ now meaning cool, interesting and less car-oriented.

Beneath the urge to find jobs and excitement lies something else, though — a desire to get the hell away from the country people. While a small minority of rural residents care about democracy, individual liberty, the common good and the rule of law, a large majority does not. It is indeed hostile toward small-r republican values.

Rural culture, while it goes by a variety of abstractions, is first and foremost top-down, rigid and intolerant of novelty, innovation and fair play (rules-based competition). Many young people leave because they can’t find work. However, many young people who possess creativity, sensitivity and intelligence must leave if they value their freedom and sanity.

In a very real sense, they didn’t leave as much as they were driven out. Creativity, sensitivity and intelligence are rewarded in the city. They are punished in the country. (I’m speaking in generalities, but simply ask anyone who has fled their roots for details.)

The Times almost never hires the people I’m talking about. The Times, like all elite institutions, hires its own, which is to say other elites. A reporter who spent her life in college prep schools and the Ivy League before moving to Manhattan to work at the Times is vulnerable to media representations of rural life, because they are media representations created by and for other elites.

Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that.

The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources are not delusional. She can’t know they are not crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics is.

She ends up reporting some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.)

What she should be reporting is some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action — violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing.

The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.

Reporters dashing off to heartland diners to interview Republicans was an indicator that the old liberal order had given way to a new conservative order. My hope is that reporters will soon figure out they’re being played. Once they do, perhaps that will be an indication the conservative order we’re all still living in has finally given 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: 09 September 2020

Word Count: 884

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On July 27, a dozen physicians posed in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., dressed in white lab coats with “America’s Frontline Doctors” stitched over the pocket. The group’s chief spokesperson was Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency physician from Los Angeles. They were introduced by Jenny Beth Martin, the founding CEO of Tea Party Patriots, as participants in the “White Coat Summit.” The doctors made spirited arguments for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for Covid-19 and against wearing masks and imposing lockdowns — all running counter to the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although the event was billed as a “press conference,” few journalists attended. A video posted by a bystander showed only a handful of attendees, most of them dressed in tourists’ shorts and T-shirts. But the event was livestreamed by Breitbart News and quickly went (so to speak) viral.

There was a rapid backlash. Much of the media attention focused on Dr. Stella Immanuel, one of Gold’s cohort. Following the press conference, the Daily Beast posted a video of Immanuel, who is also a Pentecostal preacher, delivering a sermon claiming that various female ailments were caused by sexual visitations from “demons.”

Immanuel has since disappeared from the America’s Frontline Doctors online roster, but the group has continued to get traction. On August 10, Pat Robertson’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network carried an interview with Simone Gold and an endorsement of her hydroxychloroquine cure. On August 21, Alex Jones’s NewsWars carried an interview with another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Mark McDonald. McDonald — a child psychiatrist — maintained, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.”

Science has shown otherwise. Despite early hopes last spring, there is mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is a problematic — and even dangerous — treatment for Covid-19. One expert with firsthand knowledge is Nick Sawyer, an academic emergency physician in Sacramento, Calif. In July he wrote an article for Lifeline, the publication of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, describing his harrowing two weeks of service in the Covid wards of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Sawyer was part of a team of California doctors dispatched by Governor Gavin Newsome to offer emergency assistance at the epicenter of the epidemic, at the height of the New York City outbreak.

Sawyer is now dealing with the spike in cases in California, this time with the benefit of four months of additional Covid research. “The science on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 is settled — multiple high-quality studies have shown that it shows no benefit,” he notes. Far more concerning, Sawyer says, is its potential harm: “Hydroxychloroquine can cause unstable cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.” Over recent months, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and other organizations have issued warnings that the drug should be withdrawn as a Covid-19 treatment. “It’s irresponsible for America’s Frontline Doctors to continue to push this medication on the unwitting American population,” Sawyer states.

Why, then, would Gold’s band of physicians continue its campaign to pitch the treatment to the public? Simone Gold has repeatedly described her group as a “grassroots organization” acting in the service of its patients. In fact, it has been a highly orchestrated effort, months in the making, assembled by conservative Washington insiders in direct consultation with the White House, with the goal of reopening the economy in time to benefit Trump’s reelection prospects — regardless of the toll in human lives.

The first public mention of the initiative may have been a Washington Post story on April 13, as the virus raged across New York City and Covid-19 deaths passed the 20,000 mark. The Post reported the creation of a new conservative coalition “pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.” The leadership was listed as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council. A fourth individual, Jenny Beth Martin, is the founding director of the Tea Party Patriots. She would play a key role in organizing the events to come, including the doctors’ Washington “summit” in July.

Brandon, Nelson, and Martin are all prominent members of a secretive organization called the Council for National Policy, a shadowy coalition that coordinates initiatives among conservative megadonors, political operatives, and media owners, many of them Christian fundamentalists.

The Post story quoted an interview with Richard Viguerie, a co-founder of the CNP, on the mission of the initiative: “The sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year…. Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”

The new coalition, called Save Our Country, officially debuted on April 27, as U.S. Covid deaths approached 55,000. Headed by economist Art Laffer, its maiden press release featured quotes from Brandon, Nelson, and Martin. “The long-term consequences of a prolonged societal shutdown outweigh the damage done by the virus itself,” Martin stated. “We must immediately reopen the economy.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the Save Our Country coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns: “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about protests across the country.”

But the state-level protests turned out to be of limited utility, and the group began to look for new avenues. In April, CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the CNP, began a series of weekly conference calls to discuss Covid strategy. On May 11 — as U.S. Covid deaths reached 74,270 — one of the calls was intercepted and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Associated Press.

Among the participants were CNP President William Walton, CNP member Nancy Schulze, and Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. Schulze, the wife of former nine-term Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Dick Schulze, opened the call with a warning that two-thirds of the American people were wary of reopening the economy. But, she added, “Doctors are seen by the American people — they have a 92 percent trust rate with the American people according to polling…. There is a coalition of doctors, doctors’ coalition, who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care, and these doctors could be activated for this conversation now for reopening.

“The one thing the left does give credence to, in that they tend to be motivated by a secular worldview, the one thing that they do appreciate and listen to is science, and we have doctors that have the facts, that lived this themselves, that are in the trenches, that are saying it’s time to reopen,” Schulze continued. “I’ve been working with them for three years. There’s a coalition of doctors…. including the most respected doctors in this country, that are ready to speak if somebody will just call on them.”

Walton told her, “We need to not just make the economic argument, we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us. And so that would be great if you, if we could tee that up.”

Schulze said she’d be happy to put him in touch “with any and all of these doctors, and I have submitted 27 of these doctors’ names to the campaign for the doctors’ coalition that they’re in the process of building.”

Mercedes Schlapp asked Schulze if she had spoken with Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign. “I know they’ve been working on building that coalition. I know they’re going through the vetting process right now. As long as you have the names, that would be helpful. . . . Those are the type of guys we want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message.”

Schulze replied, “I’ve been working with Hannah for over six weeks now, so they already have been vetted. But they need to be put on the screen.”

Dr. Simone Gold, a 54-year-old emergency physician from Los Angeles, was ready for her close-up. On April 22, Gold had tweeted a stand-up of herself wearing a white “Emergency Dept.” coat, in front of Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital emergency room, suggesting that concerns over the virus were inflated. She pointed out that the hospital “parking lots are empty, the emergency department volume is down, the patient census is down, and that’s really in most of the areas I’ve been to.”

On May 7, she brought a more explicit anti-lockdown message to a program on the Whiskey Politics show on Salem Radio, part of the massive Salem Media conglomerate owned by two leading members of the Council for National Policy. It was headlined “DR. SIMONE GOLD GOES PUBLIC! What the Government WON’T Tell Us About COVID-19.”

“It’s not at all clear that overall, that social distancing is going to make a huge impact,” Gold said. “We’re all acting like as though there’s a huge medical crisis. There’s a medical issue, we should handle it responsibly, but what’s going on in our country now is a terrible legal crisis. Our constitutional rights are being trampled on right and left.” Gold later added, “There’s always viruses . . . but I’m not sure that it’s front-page news.”

The Guardian reported that over the same period, the Save Our Country coalition spent $50,000 on videos on social media platforms “targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.”

On May 19 — as U.S. Covid deaths reached 84,640 — the CNP’s doctors coalition (billed as “A Doctor A Day”) made its debut with an open letter to Donald Trump signed by “500+ doctors” (a number that was later revised to over 800). “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” it stated. “It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold.

On June 16 — with U.S. Covid deaths approaching 110,000 and the U.S. economy in freefall — the Save Our Country coalition published an open letter to President Trump and Leader McConnell, urging “that the multi-trillions of dollars of federal government debt spending in the wake of the Coronavirus come to a stop.” Twelve of the 20 signatories (among them Brandon, Nelson, and Martin) were members of the CNP, including CNP President William Walton and Executive Director Bob McEwen.

The push to reopen the schools became a full-court press. On July 7, Trump assembled a White House meeting on the subject. Jenny Beth Martin spoke as both the CEO of Tea Party Patriots and “as a mom.”

“Mr. President, you were right, and I hope you will trust your instincts,” she told Trump. “America is not meant to be shut down. And we have to reopen schools this fall. I’ve been in touch with almost a thousand doctors from around the country. I helped Dr. Simone Gold spearhead a letter to you signed by 800 physicians and surgeons who talked about the side effects of the lockdowns. I’ve done a second letter with over 150 doctors, 240 nurses, 330 educators, 70 national groups, and thousands of parents and concerned Americans who want to see schools reopened.”

A video of Martin’s statement appeared, billed as “Mom Gives Unexpected Speech Directly to Trump” without naming her or her affiliation. It was posted on various social media platforms, including Glenn Beck’s YouTube channel, The Blaze (where it clocked over 400,000 views as of August 4).

Dr. Simone Gold was now preparing to join Jenny Beth Martin on center stage. On July 22, Gold warmed up for her appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, with over 157,000 YouTube subscribers. Kirk, a member of the Council for National Policy, heads a group called Turning Point USA, which recruits right-wing campus activists. (Donald Trump addressed its Youth Action Summit last December, and Donald Trump Jr. is quoted on its website stating, “I’m convinced that the work by Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk will win back the future of America.”)

The introduction for Kirk’s show summed up the case Gold and her colleagues would make over the coming weeks: “Charlie is joined in studio by board-certified emergency physician Dr. Simon [sic] Gold, who says nearly everything we’ve been told about the Chinese Coronavirus is a lie. She and Charlie take a deep dive into the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and why the U.S. government is barring physicians from prescribing the drug — endangering potentially 100,000 lives, at least. Charlie also takes on Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, asking if Dr. Gold challenges the effectiveness of wearing masks. Dr. Gold makes a stunning and factual assertion about the death rates and who exactly is to blame for what she believes is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the American people.”

Gold’s “stunning assertion” was the often-repeated claim that doctors were falsifying death certificates, speculating without foundation that they were inflating Covid-19 cases by “20 to 30 percent.” Gold also asserted, “Masks are really foolish, they don’t do anything. . . . There’s zero scientific justification for the mask.”

Jenny Beth Martin emphasized a social media campaign from the start. Her Tea Party Patriots website posted the program of the White Coat Summit, offering the participating doctors a two-hour session devoted to expanding their social media reach: “YouTube and other social media vastly exceed television news as the information source for most Americans. Interviews and Q/A with social media personalities with large followers is the best way to talk to Americans. Doctors who want to answer questions from these modern journalists will have the opportunity.”

By the time Jenny Beth Martin hosted Gold’s White Coat Summit on July 27, U.S. Covid-19 deaths had skyrocketed to over 136,000. The physicians’ presentation carried a lethal stew of misinformation. Dr. Bob Hamilton, a pediatrician from Santa Monica, assured viewers, “Children are not passing [the virus] on to their parents or their teachers.” (A few days later, the CDC released a report on a massive transmission event in June at a Georgia summer camp, with a median age of 12.)

Dr. Richard Urso — an ophthalmologist — praised hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the virus, but it was not clear that Urso had ever had any significant experience treating Covid-19 patients. Another speaker was Dr. Daniel Erickson, a Bakersfield physician who co-owns an urgent care facility. In April he had been censured by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine for his “reckless and untested musings” opposing stay-at-home orders and promoting the conspiracy theory about doctors misattributing deaths to Covid-19.

The social media strategy paid off. Gold and her colleagues’ video, livestreamed on Breitbart News, reportedly reached 185,000 concurrent users. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose reported that over its six hours on Facebook, it was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views. (The audiences for network news broadcasts, by comparison, range from 9 to 12 million.) A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted the video to his 84.5 million followers. Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million Twitter followers, “This video is a much [sic] watch!!! So different from the narrative everyone is running with.” Trump redoubled his support at his press conference the following day, stating “I think they’re very respected doctors.”

But major social media platforms reacted with relative speed. Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies. Twitter took the unusual step of suspending Trump Jr.’s account for 12 hours.

Gold had built the original America’s Frontline Doctors website on a SquareSpace platform, but SquareSpace took it down. Gold rebuilt the website (omitting Stella Immanuel of “demon sperm” renown) and started raising money through PayPal and fundly.com. The doctors’ program also remained on the Tea Party Patriots site.

There was an additional reaction to the doctors’ “frontline” Covid credentials. MedPageToday, a peer-reviewed medical news site, was unable to find evidence that any of America’s Frontline Doctors in Washington had served in “frontline” emergency rooms during the Covid epidemic. Simone Gold came under additional scrutiny. Her initial Whiskey Politics introduction described her as a “frontline doctor” in an “inner-city emergency room” that treated “150 patients a day,” but neither her LinkedIn profile nor other available sources listed the emergency room in question. Her personal website (taken down amid the controversy but archived) described her as a “Concierge Immediate Needs Physician” working in “C-Suite Medicine.”

On July 29, Cedars-Sinai, the backdrop for Gold’s Twitter video, issued a disavowal stating, “Simone Gold, MD, has not worked with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center or any of its offices or affiliates since 2015. For three weeks in late 2015, Dr. Gold was employed on a per diem basis by Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, a component of Cedars-Sinai. She worked during this brief time in a network urgent care clinic. Dr. Gold is not authorized to represent or speak about any information on behalf of Cedars-Sinai.”

The sharecare.com “Find a Doctor” site stated that “Dr. Simone Gold, MD, is a[n] emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, CA. and is affiliated with Centinela Hospital Medical Center.” But on July 31, Centinela Hospital posted a statement reading: “Simone Gold, MD, is not credentialed as part of the Centinela Medical Staff, as she resigned her position here a number of years ago. Dr. Gold was never employed here as we don’t employ our physicians.”

Also troubling was American Frontline Doctors’ repeated suggestion that patients should demand hydroxychloroquine from their doctors for Covid-19. The medication has been an important treatment for lupus and other autoimmune diseases, but the publicity around its application to Covid has created an ongoing shortage with devastating consequences.

Much of the mainstream coverage of America’s Frontline Doctors was devoted to Stella Immanuel’s “demon sperm” sermon, but alternative platforms were another story.

Simone Gold was reaching a vast new public and was now celebrated as a victim. On July 30, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson interviewed her on his nightly program. The crawl stated, “Doctor Censored by Big Tech Has Now Lost Her Job” (though that job was never specified) — echoing Trump’s executive order on Big Tech censorship released the previous day. (Carlson’s show is currently the highest-rated program on cable television, with an audience of over 4.3 million.)

Glenn Beck’s multi-platform media operation, The Blaze, covered the story on his radio program and posted the Tucker Carlson video on its website on July 31, with a companion piece repeating her case for hydroxychloroquine. A similar report was posted the same day on CNS News, founded by Council for National Policy Executive Committee member L. Brent Bozell III. (MediaPost recently named CNS News as the country’s fastest-growing conservative website, with more than 8.3 million unique visitors in June and over 1,000 percent gain in year-over-year unique visitors.) Pat Robertson’s CBN.com averages over four million unique visitors each month. Add these to Alex Jones’s August 21 coverage — as well as legions of subsidiary platforms — and you have a deadly misinformation campaign that’s reaching tens of millions of voters, most of them off the radar of the national news media.

Emergency physician Nick Sawyer is disturbed by the implications for medical practitioners. The America’s Frontline Doctors campaign, he says, “violates two of the primary principles of medical ethics. Medical ethics has four major principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. As hydroxychloroquine offers no clinical benefit and may be harmful, it violates the first two tenets. Further, their statements place actual frontline physicians treating patients with Covid-19 in conflict with patients’ right to autonomy.

“Patients have the right to make decisions regarding their medical care, but as more and more patients are asking — if not outright demanding — that physicians prescribe hydroxychloroquine to them, it places these physicians in a position where they are faced with an ethical dilemma. We respect patients’ right to autonomy, but we are not willing to allow them to demand a treatment that is not helpful and may be harmful. In sum, America’s Frontline Doctors are introducing additional havoc into the already complex Covid-19 pandemic.”

As of the publication deadline for this article, neither Jenny Beth Martin or Simone Gold had responded to requests for comment.

The day after Gold’s Washington presentation, U.S. Covid-19 deaths stood at 140,309; they swelled to 147,653 only a week later. Less than a month later, on August 21, Donald Trump addressed the Council for National Policy at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, his last major address before the Republican convention. In his opening remarks, he thanked several figures from the CNP, including Jenny Beth Martin, “for your tremendous leadership of the CNP. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

As of that Friday, over 174,000 Americans had died of Covid-19. That number continues to climb.

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She is the recipient of the Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2020

Word Count: 3,532

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Ezra Klein, a prominent white liberal, is the top editor of Vox. During last month’s Republican National Convention, he tweeted something I think we should address head on. It’s a claim white liberals tend to accept at face value, but if they thought about it, they’d realize two things. First, it’s false. Second, believing it’s true enables the real problem.

“This isn’t a political party,” Klein said. “It’s a personality cult.”

Before I go on, there are good reasons for making such a claim. The president’s most ardent supporters exhibit traits in keeping with adherents of religious cults. Dear Leader is always right even when he’s always wrong. His word carries more authority than observable empirical reality. (The sky isn’t blue. It’s green, because he said it is.)

Fidelity to the leader, and subsequently the sacred group, is more important than personal liberty and well-being. If he says people wearing masks in the middle of a pandemic are the enemy, well, that’s what they are. They deserve the sacred group’s wrath, even as the new coronavirus eats away at one’s own family and livelihood.

Be that as it may, white liberals are making a grave error. The Republican Party isn’t a personality cult as much as it is a collection of authoritarian personalities.

Individuals, taking pleasure in belonging to a “sacred group” (which revels in the new vitality and promised glory under Dear Leader), are submissive to authority, punitive toward minorities and “difference,” and adhere to “tradition,” wrote political psychologist Fathali Moghaddam in Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty.

Importantly, authoritarian personalities believe morality is obedience. They cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity and precarity. Their worldview is black and white. Their “anti-scientific attitude,” Moghaddam wrote, dismisses fact if it doesn’t “correspond to what the potential or actual dictator presents as the truth.”

White liberals are seeing a deranged cult. What they are missing is a dangerous politics.

On the one hand, white liberals buy into the idea, proffered by prominent “Never Trump” conservative pundits, that the Republican Party isn’t what it used to be: a party of individual freedom. It no longer stands for much of anything, wrote the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, though. The present is a product of a past in which “conservatism,” as political scientist Frank Wilhoit famously said, stood for the idea that “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

“Conservatives” have desired the installation of a president-king for at least 40 years. That they now have one has been occasion for non-stop celebration for the last four. (They are growing tired of him, however. Eventually, they’ll glom onto someone else.)

On the other hand, white liberals buy into respectable but uncritical explanations of Republican behavior under Donald Trump. The Brookings Institution, for instance, released a report trying to understand why some Americans refuse to wear masks. “We find that the number one reason given by Americans who are not wearing a mask is that it is their right as an American to not have to do so,” said co-authors Edward D. Vargas and Gabriel R. Sanchez.

“This is an important finding that suggests the core principal of individualism in American culture is leading to significant health consequences across the country” (my italics). This conclusion, while in good faith, is as wrong as it is empowering of the dangerous politics that’s powering such dangerous behavior.

People refusing to wear masks are not practicing individualism. We know this from the way they police people who do wear masks. We know this from the way they attempt to punish mask-wearers, either with physical harm, which is rare, fortunately, or with social sanction and emotional harm, which is common unfortunately.

Recall that obedience is morality. Recall that fidelity to the sacred group trumps rational choice. These are not rugged individualists. These are craven collectivists. Some white liberals are stuck in the habit of thinking of conservatives as anti-Communists. They forget that conservatives merely wanted to swap one kind of collectivism for another.

This is hard to hear, but I suspect that some white liberals want to believe the GOP has been reduced to a personality cult. They want to believe our age is the exception, not the rule; a bug, not a feature. They want to believe it’s just a matter of time before Donald Trump is gone and things can return to normal. This is a powerful desire on the part of white liberals, so powerful, I suspect, that they are willing, even eager, to ignore the real political problem.

There is no return if normal means the absence of authoritarian politics. It has been with us. It will be with us. White liberals must face that truth.

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: 08 September 2020

Word Count: 808

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The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.

Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order — until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington’s leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.

Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it, too, would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.

It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president George H.W. Bush in the White House and his son, George W., waiting in the wings of history (while Iraqi autocrat and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad, Iraq), the United States was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America. No, he didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist “John Miller” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again… well, who coulda dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.

Welcome to American carnage Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.

So much, I’m afraid, for such Auld Lang Syne moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as “the end of history”) to Donald Trump’s America-not-First-but-Last world — to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the almost 190,000 Americans who have already died from Covid-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.

And don’t think Donald Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage (particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure) had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.

Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

Of course, more than 3½ years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal — whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit. In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.

A simple math problem When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican rapists!). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.

As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.

In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate of that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.

Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).

And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the first world (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the second world, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the third world, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.

So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So how about fourth world? After all, the U.S. remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (first world!), but is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military, and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.

So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s 1 plus 3? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official fourth-world country in history. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.

A hell on earth? Humanity has so far (and I use that phrase advisedly) managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Donald Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.

The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)

In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.

And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.

While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought — I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.

In that second category when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.

And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again. After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for Covid-19, and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.

Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: “Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!”

It was the worst of times, it was… no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 September 2020

Word Count: 2,227

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speed-toured the Middle East last month hoping to prod other Arab governments to follow the United Arab Emirates in unilaterally normalising diplomatic relations with Israel — while Israel nevertheless continues to colonise, occupy, effectively annex, and broadly brutalize Palestinians and their lands.

His efforts have come up empty for now, as Sudan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain said they remained committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. At least five different factors explain why this happened and what it means for the months ahead.

They relate to the heavy-handed US diplomatic style; the particularly aggressive UAE foreign policy being implemented across the region; the continuing impact of Arab public opinion on Arab leaders; the underlying Arab willingness to live peacefully with Israel when Palestine achieves its rights; and, the reality that more Arab states will normalise soon but probably more elegantly than the UAE did.

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API) that Sudan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain all adhere to offers to normalise ties with Israel after it withdraws from the lands it occupied in 1967, and allows the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yet several Arab countries that say they will not follow the UAE example — Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco — nevertheless meet regularly and quietly with assorted Israeli security, technology, or commercial interests in a low-intensity, quiet proto-normalisation.

So how should we interpret this apparent contradiction in stated positions and actual policies vis-a-vis ties with Israel?

The short answer is that those few Arab governments that normalise ties with Israel soon will avoid the US-Israel-UAE approach, which Arab public opinion widely opposes on several counts. These have to do with the wide resonance justice for Palestinians still has among Arab public opinion, and the refusal of both Arab citizens and leaders to be humiliated by the combination of heavy-handed colonial-minded leaders in Israel and the United States.

Emirati, Israeli, and American leaders share a lack of concern for public opinion in their lands or others. Their focus on achieving their own national and personal goals far outweighs any other factors, including international law, political solidarity, or how their actions ravage other societies and people. We saw this in action last month, and it was ugly.

The Emiratis under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed are well into their unilateral, aggressive, and often militaristic path to assert what they see as their leading role in the region, which they feel will be bolstered by their ties with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to expand Israel’s colonial territorial dominance and subjugation of Palestinians, while exploring new Arab terrain for more of the same — such as his having to approve sales of advanced US military items to the UAE. And American President Donald Trump unilaterally and serially upends international treaties and agreements as he applies his “America-first” policy in a way that has tended to make the Middle East more dangerous and unstable during his term.

When these three leaders combined to normalise UAE-Israel ties, many Arabs quietly feared they would be pressured next to follow suit. But those same Arabs to date have not normalised, because submitting to this American-Israeli-Emirati trio would be widely seen as a humiliating bow to the rule of the jungle, as well as obsequiously feeding urgent American and Israeli domestic electoral needs, rather than the wellbeing of their own Arab citizens.

The lack of new normalisation announcements, though, should not be misinterpreted. The Arabs who refused to normalise ties with Israel simply repeated their support for the API, which a majority of Arab citizens still supports because it offers a peaceful route to achieving Palestinian national rights and ending the wasteful wars with Israel.

Some new and insightful analysis by James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute clarifies Arab attitudes to Israel and Palestine by analysing the results of his recent regional public opinion poll.

He found in 2019 that the traditional centrality of Palestine to Arab citizens across the region had declined sharply in every country. Arabs who widely support the API also “said that Arab states should be doing more to advance this initiative,” with significant majorities in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE feeling it would be desirable for some Arab states to pursue normalisation even without peace.

Many reasons explain this dual view, which included majorities in these four countries supporting the UAE’s overtures to Israel while also opposing Israeli annexation plans.

A majority of Arab citizens supports a negotiated peace with Israel that leads to a Palestinian state — but it does not see the unilateral UAE move as promoting this goal.

Perhaps the key takeaway from Pompeo’s visit is that Arab public opinion still counts to a meaningful extent, even among autocratic Arab governments that gave Pompeo a thumbs down. These leaders probably appreciated that they could not totally ignore their citizens’ century of support of Palestinian rights. When some of them explore normalising ties with Israel they will do so by trying to extract more tangible gains for the Palestinians from Israel than the Emiratis did.

The 2002 API remains the only route to a just peace in the eyes of most Arab and foreign countries. The exception is the three in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi that just showed us how not to move ahead towards a credible regional peace.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 September 2020

Word Count: 895

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The percentage of the electorate that approves of the president’s performance has barely budged since he took office. How can that be? That’s one of the thorny and infuriating questions of his presidency. It doesn’t matter what he does. It doesn’t matter what he does not do. Donald Trump’s job approval has remained steady, around 40 percent, give or take a few points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator.

It might not be as thorny and infuriating, however, once you give it some thought. The reason nothing changes is because nothing else about Trump has changed either.

I’ll explain.

The most cynical explanation has the most common currency unfortunately. The president dominates every news cycle with lies, scandal and disinformation. The electorate has become both immune to controversy and inured to outrage.

This is the most frequent view among members of the press corps, whose job it is to pay attention to all things Trump, which is the reason why many of them are so cynical. This is why Politico’s Jake Sherman wondered if anyone outside Washington cared about the Republican National Convention’s nationally televised violation of the Hatch Act.

Citizens do care. Sherman got shellacked for being such a nihilist. But Sherman had a point if the president’s job approval is any indication. Every government bureaucrat involved in staging a political convention on the White House lawn broke federal law many times over. Yet Trump’s job approval is steady. According to FiveThirtyEight (as of this writing), it’s 43.5 percent. A crime-staged-in-real-time didn’t change a thing.

Same goes for the pandemic. More than 193,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 as of this writing, per Worldometer. That’s about 64 times the death toll of Sept. 11, 2001. That’s about 48,250 times the death toll of Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. In fact, more Americans have died from the new coronavirus than from fighting in all foreign wars since the Korean War. We will probably reach 200,000 by Election Day, 250,000 by Inauguration Day, half a million by 2021’s midpoint. If the Trump administration had done a mediocre job, not a great job, of handling the pandemic, about 145,000 fewer Americans would be dead, according to analysis today by the New York Times’ David Leonhardt. Yet here we are. Negligent homicide isn’t enough to sink Trump below 40 percent.

Some have noted Trump is impervious to economics, too. They point to George W. Bush’s second term when his approval slid as the economy slid into a financial panic sparking the near decade-long Great Recession. Last week was the first time in 23 weeks in which weekly unemployment claims dropped below 1 million. About 22 million jobs were lost between February and April. Half haven’t come back, according to the Post.

The pandemic is now spreading rapidly into 22 rural states in the south and midwest, places where Trump’s support is strongest. (Cases rose by 126 percent in South Dakota over two weeks, according to Reuters.) Meanwhile, parents are jammed between the need to send kids to school and the need to earn a living. Trump seems to be the exception to economic forces that didn’t spare the last Republican president.

Given the simplest explanations are usually the best, I offer two.

One, Trump isn’t feeling what Bush felt, because he’s running for reelection. Many GOP partisans are willing to eat pretty much any outrage to prevent a Democrat from winning the White House. These voters, I contend, constitute the president’s floor. His approval rating won’t go any lower than it has been until he’s reelected. By then, perhaps we’ll know what Trump supporters really think of death-by-Covid. Until then, they’ll fake it.

The second explanation is simpler. It may be that most of the electorate made up its mind some time ago, perhaps as far back as Trump’s Inaugural Address, during which he made clear that he’d be a Republican, not an American, president. I’m guessing these voters decided who they’d vote for in 2020 by February 1, 2017, or soon afterward. These voters, I contend, constitute the president’s ceiling. It doesn’t matter what he does. It doesn’t matter what he does not do. He will never attain majority approval.

It could be we’re all desensitized and nothing matters, or it could be that most of us have made up our minds, and little or nothing is going to change it. Indeed, as things get worse, our mindsets are only deepened. The more the president talks about “law and order,” the most we’re reminded of his lawlessness. The more he talks about violence, the more we’re reminded he’s inciting it. The more he brags about the economy, the more we’re reminded that he’s ruined pretty much everything. Time will tell if I’m wrong, but this is better than the most complex, most nihilist perspectives.

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: 07 September 2020

Word Count: 801

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