Deliberate control of information and knowledge in Wikipedia's "Origins of Covid" page

Note: A revised version of this post along with discussion can be found here: 

I use Wikipedia with some regularity, and often include links to it when I leave comments on certain topics. However, I have noticed that the more politically significant and controversial the topic, the less likely it is that entries are fair, accurate and balanced. I first noticed this when reading biographies of contemporary politcians. I rarely edit Wiki, but one of the then-Dem candidates in a local primary had a bio that contained what I knew to be untruths. I was able to start a discussion page on this, and some of the untruths were removed after a I presented evidence. It wasn't as easy as I'd imagined, but far from impossible to edit as the open source model is intended to work. Since then, I've seen other cases like this in pages related not only to politicians, but also contemporary topics of political significance   One clear example of which I became aware recently is the origin of Covid 19. Type "wiki origin of covid" into your google search bar, and immediately you will see the following in enlarged print, with some clauses highlighted:

"Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history, the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans in a natural setting. Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed." (Google search result)

 

Below the authoritative quote is a link to the Wikipedia page, "Origin of Covid-19," from which it comes.  The concluding sentence  of the opening paragraph of that page reads thus:

"Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence. [followed by a supposedly corroborating footnote #15]"

A few questions:

1) Which scientists and politicians have "speculated" that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory?

2) What arguments and evidence did they adduce?

3) Are the arguments and evidence any less well supported than the Wuhan Meat Market/Natural Spillover explanation embraced in the article as *the* "scientific consensus?" 

Perhaps most importantly:

4) WHO are the sources for the conclusion that lab-leaks can be ruled out as "non-scientific" or "conspiracy theory?"

If we start with the last question, the WHO question, we will be led to discover the other answers.  So what is the source corresponding to footnote #15 which states "[lab-leak theory] is not supported by evidence."??

That footnote directs readers to a 2021 Cell article titled The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review. The lead author is Eddie Holmes, whose role in establishing the natural spillover as the "only" valid explanation has been discussed previously on this blog, including in an OP from earlier this week by Germaine which includes interview footage of Holmes interspersed with the contents of his own contradictory leaked Slack messages to the other scientists with whom he co-wrote the decisive article Proximate Origins of Covid 19 (PO)  that has come under fire by a rather large group of international scientists, several of whom have testified in Oversight Hearings on the topic. But it doesn't stop there. Having combed through many of the journal articles referenced by "the authorities" (gov't agencies like the NIH and MSM science journalists) the list of co-authors for A Critical Review (2021) includes a familiar cast of characters in the literature. 

All of the authors of the Proximate Origins paper are listed as co-authors in A Critical Review with the exception of Ian Lipkin who stopped claiming that lab leak scenarios were all but impossible in 2021. The PO co-author said in a statement to the Washington Post in 2021:

“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn’t in this lab? They wouldn’t.”

 Statements like that one by Lipkin provide on reason that his name is seldom invoked by his PO co-authors to debunk lab leak scenarios. Another, darker reason, is the fact that at Ian Lipkin failed to disclose the fact that he worked for the NIH-funded company, EcoHealth Alliance,  at the heart of the debate from 2012-2014, and co-authored at least 10 research paper with the group between 2011-2021. As US Right To Know journalist, Emily Kopp documented, at least one of these papers was on novel Coranaviruses that "EcoHealth and its partners sampled around the world." Between his distancing himself from conclusion of PO, and the fact that he failed to disclose conflict of interests, it's small wonder that his old establishment friends seldom bring him up. But, though PO is cited as evidence on the Wiki page, the ethical breach of Dr. Lipkin is not discussed, nor is the conflict of interest of lead-author K Andersen who was awaiting an $8 mil. grant from the NIH while writing PO. The grant came through a few months after the March PO publication in August, 2020.

 

 

At any rate, Lipkin's reservations about the mainstream theory he helped to establish are not mentioned in Wikipedia's page. They are also left out of the paper Wiki cites in para 1which is supposedly fair and balanced, i.e. "A Critical Review." So we have Kristian Andersen (lead author of PO who testified last month that he "changed his mind from lab leak theory to natural spillover" in days based on unspecified "new evidence." We have Robert Garry, another outspoken co-author whose Slack messages also reveal that in private he worried intensely about lab leak scenarios, like his colleague Kristian Andersen,  both before, during and after the Nature Medicine publishied PO.  The 2 scientists appeared together last month testifying before Congress. 

We NOW know (thanks to massive leaks of private messages discussed in several posts here) that Andersen and Garry (and the others)  bluntly contradict the conclusions of their own paper.. Both continue to claim that their beliefs changed rapidly due to "the scientific process," even within a few short days. In the past, both spoke of "new evidence" they had discovered; but the "evidence" falls far short of justifying the conclusion of the article. Robert Garry was interviewed 9 months ago (BEFORE we had all the hundreds of messages he refers to throughout the interview). One email he wrote, though, had already been leaked. Written 2 days prior to the article, the email  bluntly states,  "I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature" (referring to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 occurring without engineering). In the interview, he dances around questions asked, and among other things cites (dubious) evidence that was (mis)-used in 2020 to make the case. This "evidence" involved the hypothesis that Pangolins were the intermediate host of the virus that became SARS2-CoV-2 because they have a particular receptor cite that might have helped to explain the jump from bats to humans. Garry, in 2022, brings that "evidence" up, and correctly, the interviewer states, "that proves nothing." At the time, it would not have been possible to quote Kristian Andersen (Garry's senior colleague) saying in a private message of that time period leaked last month the same exacct thing:

"[T]he more sequences we see from Pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully), the less likely it seems that they're the intermediate hosts. Unfortunately, none of this helps refute a lab leak origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do), and not dismissed out of hand as another "conspiracy theory."

If that were not enough to make one skeptical of the claim that "pangolins were definitive evidence," there were biological and zoological reviews of such claims that pangolins concluding they were NOT  intermediate hosts. Here is one example from Oct., 2020-- 2 years prior to the interview with Garry below. Keep these things in mind as you watch Robert Garry talk about what was then a single leaked email in the following video interview. He says swings from one rebuttal to the next, citing"pangolins" as evidence, and even making the absurd claim (in light of all the other messages we now have) that he was "just playing devil's advocate" in that email. Since he and his colleagues from the PO paper, which was overseen by Fauci and Collins and Jeremy Ferrar in UK, are all listed as authors for the definitive paper cited in the opening paragraph of Wikipedia's article, it is more than fair to ask HOW these experts defend their own scientific authority on this topic. 

It is worth emphasizing that though Garry (above) says that Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Ferrar (all of whom were conferencing with the authors, providing feedback, advising revisions and word-choice substitutions as we now know from released texts) were "agnostic" and encouraged the writers to follow the evidence wherever it led. They were, in his words, completely
"hands off" on the writing of the exceedingly influential article. We now know this is tragically wrong. They are on the record in their own leaked private words,  and speak for themselves in the many transcripts. They also speak through Eddie Holmes who made final revisions to the paper without consulting "lead author" Kristian Anderssen. In order to explain such an unusual and anti-scientific maneuver, Holmes apologized in a message to Andersen adding, "pressure from the 'higher-ups.'

 

There is also damning circumstantial evidence of corruption and graft. Lead author, K Andersen, was -- at the time of writing PO-- applying for a grant from the NIH. Not only did he not announce a conflict of interests, but after the paper was published, his laboratory received an $8.9 million NIH grant in August of 2020.When Anthony Fauci cited the paper from  the podium of the White House, he claimed that the it showed that the data were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” all but completely ruling out lab origins. Kristian Andersen, in a euphoric mood, then tweeted, "We RUUUUUUUULE! That's tenure secured, right there." Remarkably, Andersen has only doubled down since, testifying under oath that his "change of mind" was "just a text book case of the scientific method." Garry was at his side concurring during that congressional hearing last month.

Investigative journalist, Emily Kopp of US Right To Know, and Biosafety Now!'s Dana Parrish both criticized Wikipedia for making the page all but impossible to edit even by credentialed scientists who do not agree with the unscientific conclusion. Parrish claims that Wikipedia has given authority to virologist, James Duehr (Mt. Sinai/Icahan ) to control edits on that page.  This is his user page on Wikipedia as "Shibbolethink:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shibbolethink  and this is his academic page: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Duehr  The Wiki discussion page is locked for most users, and those who make changes,  according to Parrish , can watch the text revert to its former condition "in minutes."(Dana Parish: Twitter, August 2).  Duehr also has also spent a lot of time on Reddit trying to establish natural spillover as the official account of Covid 19 origins: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95 /covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/    This is not open and transparent science, but evidence of a "mission" to cement into place an "official narrative" despite all the mounting counter-evidence. As Matt Ridley and Alina Chan write in the Wall St. Journal, Eddie Holmes-- who put the finishing touches on the paper without even consulting any other authors-- told the others how "happy" the "higher-ups" were with the results. They write:

"Shortly before their paper went public, evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes of Sydney University reported to his fellow authors that “Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins are very happy” with the final draft. Two of the authors wrote in private messages that they had rushed their paper out under pressure from unidentified “higher-ups.” The role of these senior scientists went unacknowledged in the paper."(WSJ: 7/26/23)

In my research of this manufactured consensus, I found a small and recurring list of named authors and co-authors whose papers more often cite their *other papers* than any new laboratory or forensic evidence. The circularity is dizzying. A short list of the VIPs on this list includes PO authors, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut (but not, as mentioned Lipkin who changed his mind). It also includes scientists with whom those authors were closely affiliated including EcoHealth president, Peter Daszak, Jeremy Farrar, Angela Rasmussen, Michael Worobey, Susan Weiss and several others who have written "dispassionately" and served as primary sources for the media since 2020.

Michael Worobey wrote a "definitive" (actually a flawed and debunked) article claiming the Wuhan Market was definitely the "epicenter" of the outbreak. In a separate post here recently, I showed that the cluster mapping he relied upon drew on ~6% of the early Wuhan cases. Unscientifically, Worobey stated, "we assumed that the locations of the others would be the same." The Washington Post issued an editorial which harshly criticized the study . Worobey told WaPo:

 

"There's probably at least 10 times more cases that we haven't sampled because only something like 6 percent end up in the hospital. We fully expect the cases that we don't sample to come from exactly the same geographic distribution as the ones we do sample." (WaPo: 11/27/23)

That is not logical or scientific. Why would one expect that? Further, a geo-scientist showed that the map had been badly interpreted in the study, and also by those who used it for further extrapolations. 

Peter Dasziak who is president of the group that did the NIH funded research, and principal investigator, went on to play a major role in the WHO's 2022 "investigation of origins in China," along with Jeremy Farrar (a "higher-up" on the conference call over the PO article, and later the WHO 's Chief Scientist  . From government (Fauci, Collins on the conference call) to WHO (Jeremy Ferrar) to NIH-funded Wuhan experiments researcher (Peter Daszak of EcoHealth) to ex-employees of EcoHealth (Ian Lipkin) to scientists like MichaelWorobey, who (after Biden called for a new investigation into origins) provided psuedoscientific "evidence" in favor of natural spillover, to scientists in the same circle such as Angela Rasmussen and Susan Weiss, whose names appear on several of the related journal articles in Science, as well as being heavily quoted by MSM articles.-- we have here a small, powerful special interest constellation which has taken advantage of its power to wall itself off from dissenting scientists and public health experts, establishing and (to this day)maintaining  the MSM "orthodox" narrative that consigns lab-based theories to the "fringe/conspiracy" category-- even when the national intelligence of this country is split on the question.  

Having explained the basis for the sourcing in the Wikipedia entry on Origins of Covid, we can see why editing privileges for this article would be heavily guarded and why attempts to insert countervailing evidence by scientists have failed. 

I can't conclude from this that all, many or most other articles in Wiki involving large vested interests and political/state interests are also subject to epistemic manipulation. But the manufacture of consensus in this case provides-- at the very least-- a good reason to further research the topic of Wikipedia's treatment of  topics which are both consequential and controversial in such areas as science, politics and biographies, among others. We have learned, through the Covid-related leaks, that MSM and our own gov't cannot necessarily be trusted in the vital area of Public Health and safety. Perhaps it is not shocking, then, to learn that the most widely used encyclopedia in the world has been equally partial in the Origins of Covid area. Though most academics do not use Wiki for citations, I've seen some that do. Certainly it is regarded as some kind of epistemic guardrail to settle disputes online everyday. It is, therefore, important to study the editorial process very carefully now, and with great attention to just who can and cannot open discussions and make substantive changes. How much deliberate knowledge-distortion does or does not occur on this cite? As a user and contributor to Wikipedia, and a concerned citizen, I would like to know the answer to that question.

Here is the Talk/Discussion page for the Origins article which establishes the page as a "Contentious Topic" subject to oversight and control  by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee

Do any readers here have experience with related issues on Wikipedia? What do you make of all this?

 

 

Constructive Ukraine/Russia Talks in April Were Scuttled by US/NATO Alliance

 

Ukraine and Russia stood prepared to reach a negotiated settlement in April--it appears-- before Boris Johnson, representing the "collective West," scuttled it.

Alex Jordan,  a policy analyst at the Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft, has alerted journalists on Twitter that consummate national security insider, Fiona Hill, accidentally let slip  in her latest article for Foreign Affairs, some important details about the aborted talks to reach a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia in April of 2022 in Turkey. She confirmed in a passing paragraph that  at that time (about 5 weeks into the war) Russia and Ukraine agreed on a tentative settlement, that-- had it been finalized-- would have stopped the war. Hill writes:

"According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries."  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/world-putin-wants-fiona-hill-angela-stent

 

Hill omits to mention the fact that then-PM Boris Johnson immediately flew to Kyiv to scuttle the negotiation that was in progress.  How do we know this? From Ukraine's own online newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda. An English-language summary of the article by Ukrainska Pravda in English states that the Russian side was ready to negotiate but "two things happened."

"The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, massacres, looting, indiscriminate bombings and hundreds and thousands of other war crimes committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories.

The second "obstacle"[sic] arrived in Kyiv on 9, April. [i.e. Boris Johnson]...According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. [emph. added]

Johnson’s position was that the collective West,  [i.e. the US led coalition of EU, Britain and the US]which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to 'press him.' 

Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end". " (Original article in Ukrainian here: https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/  U. Pravda's English condensed version here: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206/

In Hill's account, there is a temporal ellipsis. She goes directly from noting the Russians being prepared to negotiate as summarized above in April directly to words spoken months later in July by feisty Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an entirely different context. Hill writes:

But as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer an option. Even giving Russia all of the Donbas is not enough. “Now the geography is different,” Lavrov asserted, in describing Russia’s short-term military aims. “It’s also Kherson and the Zaporizhzhya regions and a number of other territories.” The goal is not negotiation, but Ukrainian capitulation. [ibid]

 What is left out, of course, is the fact reported by the Ukrainian press that Boris Johnson, representing the "collective West" on which Ukraine depends for weapons and economic support had given Zelensky an ultimatum--" even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the collective West] are not." By the time Lavrov made the statement quoted by Hill in July, Sec. of State Blinken and Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin had already elaborated on Johnson's hastily delivered message when they visited Kyiv in late April. They referenced Johnson's visit, and announced a "new strategy." The New York Times' lead article covering the visit on April 24 states:

WASHINGTON — When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III declared Monday at the end of a stealth visit to Ukraine that America’s goal is to see Russia so “weakened” that it would no longer have the power to invade a neighboring state, he was acknowledging a transformation of the conflict, from a battle over control of Ukraine to one that pits Washington more directly against Moscow. [emph. added]   https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/us/politics/ukraine-russia-us-dynamic.html

 

Even the generally supportive NYT, in the article noted that:

"Mr. Austin and others in the Biden administration are becoming more explicit about the future they see: years of continuous contest for power and influence with Moscow that in some ways resembles what President John F. Kennedy termed the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War." [emph. added]

Sec. of State Blinken announced, writes David Sanger of NYT, that Putin had "'“already lost' in the struggle over Ukraine, reflect[ing] a decision made by the Biden administration and its closest allies, several officials said on Monday, to talk more openly and optimistically about the possibility of Ukrainian victory... [ibid]

The issue here is how to square the scuttling of negotiations, and the high pressure exerted on Zelensky to stop negotiations with the Russians with the official position of the US/NATO that we do not tell Ukraine whether to fight or pursue diplomacy,  or how to fight the war. We are allies and not war planners. 

 

As for the optimistic statements made in April, things look a bit different now. About 20% of the total area of Ukraine is controlled by Russia according to Zelensky. Much of that territory is some of the most valuable geo-politically and in terms of resources. About 7 million refugees are scattered throughout Europe, and many more internally displace persons live in abject misery within Ukraine.The unprecedented sanctions regime designed mainly in Washington has hurt the West more than it has damaged the Russian War Machine. The Wall St. Journal reported this week that "Moscow is raking in more revenue than ever with the help of new buyers, new traders and the world's seemingly insatiable demand for crude."https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-confounds-the-west-by-recapturing-its-oil-riches-11661781928 Much of the world (including India, China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia et al.) are more than happy to buy Russian no matter what the "leaders of the free world" in Washington tell them to do. And this was predictable. Now it remains to be seen whether or not the citizens in European countries will continue to support a sanctions regime, and a protracted war against Russia,  if a cold winter and severe energy shortages cause immense suffering, stagflation and industrial shutdowns as many economists are predicting. In late July, the NYT reported that:

As Russia tightens its chokehold on supplies of natural gas, Europe is looking everywhere for energy to keep its economy running. Coal-fired power plants are being revived. Billions are being spent on terminals to bring in liquefied natural gas, much of it from shale fields in Texas. Officials and heads of state are flying to Qatar, Azerbaijan, Norway and Algeria to nail down energy deals.

Across Europe, fears are growing that a cutoff of Russian gas will force governments to ration fuel and businesses to close factories, moves that could put thousands of jobs at risk. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/business/europe-natural-gas.html

 

Somewhat awkwardly, Biden-- who called the Saudis "butchers" and "pariahs" during his campaign-- was photographed fist-bumping MBS-- a man with American blood on his hands-- during a visit during which he pleaded with the Saudis to ramp up production. They have. But according to this week's WSJ article (cited above), they also buy Russian crude and mix it with other oil to conceal its Russian source-- an increasingly common workaround seen in several countries. Biden who had condemned Venezuela's Pres. Maduro, eased restrictions on Venezuelan oil due to the emergency caused by the sanctions regime intended to paralyze Russia. All of this is exacerbating inflation in Europe, the US to say nothing of the global south which has suffered severe food shortages, in no small measure because of the conflict (both the Russian Black Sea Embargo and the sanctions regime as discussed in a previous post here). 

For all of this we are told that "Ukraine is winning." We are told that Europe will achieve energy independence and put the Russian energy dependency problem behind them. We are told all of this is not bringing us into an escalated conflict, perhaps involving nuclear nightmares. This even as UN Inspectors/IAEA try to delicately work their way into the the nuclear facility in Zaporizhzhia  after it explosions there, with Ukrainians operating the plant at gun point. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-n-inspectors-head-to-ukraine-nuclear-plant-as-safety-fears-grow-11661764952

 

The consequences and costs of this war for Ukrainians, and also its global effects have been far more troubling than experts in Washington have maintained, and continue to maintain. It is probably too late for the negotiated settlement I once argued for in a post here. But it is troubling indeed to see evidence that the US/NATO powers gave Zelensky an ultimatum to stop talking to the Russians in April when there was still one last window of opportunity. We'll never know if it would have gone anywhere or not. But that's not the point here. It was never-- or so we were told-- up to the "Collective West," as Boris Johnson dubbed the US/NATO alliance.

Hannah Arendt on Truths, Facts and Lying in Politics

Note: This OP was posted on Dissident Politics, where it can be read along with responses and comments of readers: https://dispol.blogspot.com/2022/06/hannah-arendt-truth-facts-and-lying-in.html

 

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay entitled Truth and Politics in The New Yorker (it later appeared with revisions in the book, Between The Past and The Future). Though originally written as a response to critics she felt had lied about her coverage of the Eichmann trials,  the thinking  catalyzed by these concerns led to ideas and insights of much more general import, and well worth evaluating today in an age where distinctions between facts, conspiracy theories and lies seem to swirl around us in a miasma of misinformation, shaping everything from policy and elections in gov't to media/social media to everyday interactions in our dangerously conflicted society. As we try to understand a world in which lies and truths appear to be interchangeable  categories ("alternative facts"), and where the most egregious lying imaginable in the public realm has the potential to wreck our system of government, possibly once and for all, the topic of the essay could not be more important. It is among Arendt's most thought-provoking essays from her late period, whether one agrees or takes exception to the conclusions she reaches. Here I summarize some of the main theses in the piece concisely and in the context of our own political situation in the US.

Arendt begins by stating that not all truths are alike in their nature and status. We may speak of scientific truths, moral truths,  religious truths, historical truths, psychological truths, and-- most importantly for this essay-- factual truths. She divides these various types of truth up into 2 categories: "factual truths" and "rational truths." The definitions are useful descriptions or heuristics rather than epistemic claims. AS Arendt puts it, "I shall use this distinction for the sake of convenience [emph added] without discussing its intrinsic legitimacy."(Truth and Politics: p. 2) The purpose of this convenient distinction is to compare and contrast the outcomes when rational truths vs. factual truths come into conflict with political authorities and power structures.

Rational truths include the accepted truths of mathematics, science, philosophy and religion, among others.. Factual truths are derived from observation and experience (e.g. historical records, eyewitness accounts,  etc.). The first claim she makes is that while rational truths and factual truths can both be lost or wiped out when they bump up against political powers, factual truths (i.e. knowledge of actual events, people, and actions such as those journalists cover) are far more vulnerable to erasure at the hands of political authorities than rational truths.

One can imagine, for example,  knowledge of basic arithmetic being lost, or for some reason  banned by fanatical anti-mathematical clerics or something. All the text books would be burned, like in Bradburry's  Farenheit 451. Yet it is certainly not impossible that later generations would devise systems like addition and subtraction for themselves based on their own rational capacities.  At more abstract levels the likelihood or reestablishing rational truths gets slimmer but is still possible. Imagine General Relativity, Copernican Heliocentrism, or Euclidean geometry being banned for whatever reason (as the Church banned Heliocentrism in the 17th C). Perhaps such knowledge would eventually perish like so many books reduced to dust. And yet, Arendt claims, it is at least imaginable that some of these truths would emerge from later inquiries because they are based on reasoning and ideas rather than fleeting and unique events in history that must be witnessed and recorded to exist at all.  Factual Truths (e.g. Stalin and Hitler made a pact in 1939; Nixon bombed Cambodia illegally during Vietnam; Trump lost the 2020 election and no investigation has since uncovered "fraud" as he and others claim occurred) are MUCH easier to stamp out, to obliterate from public discourse when they inconvenience those in power. They are based on records rather than reasoning. The question that arises here is "How are factual truths obliterated in modern societies?" According to Arendt, it happens by means of what she calls *organized lying.* The facts are "lied away," as she puts it. 

We are often prone to thinking that the biggest threat to facts is false belief/crackpot theory/bullshit and the like. But the biggest threat comes not from merely false belief but deliberate falsehood/lying.While the opposite of a true mathematical result is an "error," and the opposite of a presumed scientific truth is a "falsehood," the opposite of factual truths on the public record  is a "lie." This doesn't mean there are no innocent mistakes in the recording of facts, by, for example, journalists. But these failed efforts to record actualities accurately--errata-- are not fundamentally *opposed* to factual truths. Indeed they are accidents that occur while acting as a "truth-teller" or chronicler of facts. So unlike other domains of truth, the opposite of factual truth is the lie, and in particular "organized lying." What, then,  is the main danger of lying in politics?

 

 Often we fear that the danger of lies is that they can come to replace factual truth, or provide a substitute for the public record, which serves as an orienting consensus in an otherwise diverse society. The fear, these days, is expressed in terms of some "alternative facts" coming to replace actualities. This is not the ultimate threat, thinks Arendt.  There is a point beyond which lying becomes incompatible with social stability and common understandings necessary for survival and shared life. You can only get so far in establishing "alternate accounts" of the facts without utterly destabilizing the fabric of reality itself. Taken far enough, the content of lies (be it conspiracy theories or arbitrary misstatements that attack facts) result not in a substitute for the shared public realm of acknowledged facts, but in confusion, disorientation and conflict over what is real-- and over what is really happening. Thus the ultimate threat isn't the content of the lying itself (though this obviously has proximate importance) but rather it is the coordinated and concerted effort to undermine or obliterate facts that threaten those in power for one reason or another. Publicly acknowledged and shared factual truth constitutes a minimal basis for any overlapping consensus within which we can communicate at all. It is one of the main ingredients in the very fabric of social existence, and it can't be replaced by lies. The fantasies of organized lying  and factual truths can't function in equivalent ways. One reflects a reasonably accurate grasp of realities we cannot escape--i.e. the social, historical realities within which we must exist and act-- while the fantastic lies have no ground at all. Once the ground of truth is lost, just about anything goes. As Arendt puts it famously elsewhere, the result is that "Nothing is true and everything is possible." In Truth and Politics, she writes that, "[truth] is limited to those things that men cannot change at will...[adding] Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground we walk on and the sky that stretches above us."(T&P:p. 19)

Factual truths, then, function to check arbitrary power from destroying our access to shared reality. This leads to a discussion of the importance of those public institutions "established and supported by the powers that be, in which contrary to all political rules, truth and truthfulness have always constituted the highest criterion of speech and endeavor."(T&P:17) In this connection, she mentions the importance in modern open societies of the independent judiciary, research centers and universities, government archives, et al. What all such domains share is a commitment to impartiality.  "Whether these places of higher learning are in private or public hands"  she writes,  "is of no great importance; not only their integrity but their very existence depends on the good will of the government anyway...Very unwelcome truths have emerged from the universities, and very unwelcome judgments have been handed down from the bench time and time again." (T&P: p. 17). But we must not take these "refuges of truth" for granted, as they are, along with the free press, vulnerable to the whims of political power-- even in "open societies" ruled by constitutions. Without real journalism, as opposed to what we call "fake news,"  she remarks, "we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, we would never know where we are." This is the desired outcome of organized lying. So political lying typically targets not just recorded truths in the public realm, but the institutions in which disinterested studies and impartial determinations are made. Universities, the free press and independent judiciaries are often the first casualties of organized political lying campaigns. Over the past decade, we've seen a disturbing trend along just such lines in Hungary, Poland and a few other countries in Europe. Trump's effort to "drain the swamp" is largely tantamount to erasing the institutional memory-system of our "bloated government departments." Attempts to neutralize agencies like the EPA by staffing it with opponents of environmentalism also belie the desire to "lie away" even important scientific truths we face in the age of global warming. The list goes on and on. Organized lying depends on the dismantling of as many centers of relatively impartial inquiry as possible, and again this reveals the true goal not as one of "replacing" a world anchored by generally accurate public understandings, but destroying that world in service to the caprice of the will to domination, and not the will to truth.  The manipulation of social reality allows those in power to get away with almost anything, and then make up rationalizations as they go along.

Take the example of "memory laws" in which history is turned into official doctrine. In Turkey, one can't say there was an Armenian Genocide. In Poland, one can't say there were collaborators in WW2. In China, Tiananmen Square never happened, and surviving witnesses are carefully monitored to this day. (Louissa Lim's book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,  describes that sad affair). Thus, lying in politics relies heavily on creating "public enemies." Recall Trump said the NY Times is "an enemy of the people"-- and though many laughed at the time, he soon stopped taking any questions he didn't like in press conferences, saying only  three words instead, "That's fake news." Perhaps the most concise statement he made along these Arendtian lines is when he told an audience, "What you're seeing is not what's  happening." https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/07/24/donald-trump-what-youre-seeing-not-whats-happening-tapper-sot-vpx.cnn  So we see in modern authoritarian politics, as with the totalitarian states of the 20th century, an attempt not to replace truth with some other stable "alternate reality" as some fear, but to make it seem that factual truths are really just so many "opinions." You think Trump lost, but I have a "different opinion"--  an "alternative account." That's the sort of attitude toward facts operative in the domain of organized lying.. Of course, there are areas in which citizens disagree because they hold different opinions-- a hallmark of free society. But these are opinions ABOUT agreed facts, not just opinions about other  opinions of opinions, ad infinitum with no bottom line or basis for mediation. If the distinction between these is lost or blurred, the results are disastrous. We already see a world in which people who live in the same cities seem to be denizens of utterly different universes as far as their basic beliefs about the world and reality are concerned. Some of us are able to remember that not so long ago this was simply not the case.

Once factual truths are leveled out and treated like mere opinions, there is no longer a possibility for shared understandings of reality to serve as a legitimate basis for debating and discussing policies as responses to situations and problems that are agreed upon on the basis of public records, journalism, social science etc. Suppose we are debating responses to urban crime or unemployment. We can only disagree meaningfully and offer our opinions on the topic if we at least agree on statements of crime rates or unemployment. In some political speeches these are almost completely fudged in order to achieve some political goal which treats such facts as mere obstacles to power.  Then the description of society and its problems and needed policies no longer rests on shared knowledge but becomes malleable in the hands of those who fabricate and deceive in order to impose their will on society with impunity. This , for Arendt,  is the heart of the fascist project. She writes:

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that lies will now be accepted as truths, and truths defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world-- and the categories of truth vs. falsehoods is among the mental means to this end-- is being destroyed." (TP: p. 16)

So the goal is to render populations susceptible to the arbitrary refashioning of the public stock of knowledge on which political acts and decisions are based. Power determines alleged facticity, and the possibility of critique, dissent or simply holding authorities to accounts based on accurate knowledge is short-circuited. Facts then become radically free . That is, the usual constraints of accuracy are entirely loosened so that authorities can say things one day and contradict them, or say they never said them at all the next day. They can rewrite history to subserve their own ends. They can categorize whole groups as "criminals," "traitors," or "public enemies" with no burden of objective evidence at all.

An example of this from the 1/6 hearings is found in an interview with former AG Barr. He recalls conversations with Trump in which the latter would say things like, "I have evidence from Pennsylvania, you have to do something about that." Barr would say, "We investigated that claim, Sir, it doesn't check, it's simply not true." Barr recalls that Trump seemed "totally unconcerned with the facts" as he would effortlessly switch to some other allegation as if he had not registered the FACT that the first claim was being dismissed as false. He would say something like "Well what about the evidence I gave you from Georgia?" Barr went on to say, "I thought, 'boy, he's really detached from reality if he believes this stuff.'" I'm not sure Barr understood that what he was so surprised to see was no different from the way Trump had dismissed photographic evidence regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration in 2017, when he insisted it was "the biggest crowd ever...bigger than Obama's inaugural" etc. The press treated that like it was merely some character flaw, a narcissistic personality disorder, etc. Even if that part is true, it is less important for Arendt than the real goal of such unremitting lying on all matters great and small. The real aim is to eradicate the distinction between facts and lies. After a while, GOP stalwarts asked about Trump's endless stream of obvious lies just submitted to their validity. They accepted the lies by adopting a blase attitude towards them, thus according the fact/lie distinction little importance. In such a blase mode it was no longer difficult let the lies stand simply by NOT refuting or denying them. I remember Pence being asked about some obvious lies and accusatory statements made by Trump in a speech in an interview. Asked if he agreed with the content of the lies, Pence simply said, "I think it's just Trump being Trump." This elides the entire fact/lie distinction by stating a banal truism, a tautology to be precise. Soon enough, "It's just Trump being Trump" or similar stock phrases became the common currency of his enablers. Barr was surely among them. Did none of these people realize that they too had become "detached from reality" (as Barr put it recently)  simply by accepting this discourse of lies as legitimate? 

Arendt thinks that to some extent, those implicated in organized lying like this are self-deceived. This is not to say they deeply and sincerely believe any of these things. No, these aren't held as deep convictions. Rather, the perpetrators don't really care about the truth/lie distinction except in cases where they must cover their asses. (And if they take all of this a bridge to far, they may well fail even to do that and be caught off guard). As long as  they can get away with it, they focus not on the true/false distinction but the distinction between gaining and losing power and the ability to dominate others. To a large extent, they stop questioning themselves about what is true and false, except in cases where their own power hangs in the balance. Otherwise, while delivering a speech or message, they likely do not notice that they are lying. It has become a default mode of operating in most situations. Arendt likens this mentality to "Madison Avenue Advertising" culture. Here we can think of politicians who "believe their own propaganda" or "get high on their own supply." Apparently, for example, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush Administration really believed US invaders and occupiers would be "greeted as liberators." The poor planning that resulted landed them in a quagmire. They bought their own lies. It seems Putin similarly somehow believed his own propaganda about Ukranians embracing Russian invaders as liberators-- and planned a victory statement for Feb. 28, a mere 4 days after "special military operations" began. This self-deception-- which can be ones' undoing-- is an occupational hazard faced by the authoritarian or fascist leader accustomed to the flattery of yes-men rather than quality information.

Here I have only summarized a few of the arguments advanced by Arendt because they are especially relevant to our situation today. But for the sake of clarity, Arendt does recognize that the truth is much more than just a collection of recorded facts. The latter are the indispensable basis for other forms such as scientific and philosophical truths. When organized lying becomes pervasive,  telling the truth or reporting facts becomes a form of political action, says Arendt. The journalist who digs for truth in Russia or China may well end up on a hit-list and become a dissident or honored hero, where in a society that takes free press for granted, it seems that simply reporting facts is apolitical. But Arendt is also aware that the truths we live by also include principles, values, norms and stories that lend meaning to these facts. Storytellers, historians, philosophers, religious figures and others have always played an important role in establishing moral, social and political understandings such as those encoded in laws and principles undergirding society, culture, law and the political domain. The values, for example, of liberty and equality, are not recorded facts. But they have been part of the commonly understood "World" inhabited by those of us who live in liberal or social democracies. I did not think it was as important to discuss her thoughts on how such "rational truths"  function, since the prerequisite for them is still, as she said, the kind of knowledge we need simply to "literally know where we are." And it appears such knowledge is now endangered here.

References/related reading:

 

 -Hannah Arendt:  Truth and Politics  (Between The Past and The Future: Penguin press  1977 Ch.7 Truth and Politcs pp. 223-260 or available as free stand-alone essay online)

-Frederica Merenda:  Reading Arendt to Rethink Truth  ( Democracy and Fake News Routledge, 2021 article by Frederica  Merenda page 19-30)

Possible Questions:

-Do you agree with Arendt's claim that the ultimate goal of political lying is NOT to replace one stable truth with some alternative to it, but rather to destroy the distinction between factual truths and mere opinions so that those in power can stipulate what counts as true with no regard to consistency or stability at all? 

-If Arendt's account is correct, it would seem to follow that the relatively accountable and honest institutions she mentions  (free press, universities, various governmental departments that collect and disseminate information etc.) are of vital importance. But she doesn't not make any suggestions in this essay regarding how to safeguard the integrity of such institutions. Do you have any ideas about how to do that in the face of a politically motivated all-out assault on factual truth?

Critical Race Theory And Terry Mc Auliffe Postmortem

(Cross-published here with comments section:https://dispol.blogspot.com/2021/11/critical-race-theory-and-terry-mc.html#comment-5607133553  )

 

 Critical Race Theory (CRT) is, among other things, a label. Labels matter. When Terry McAuliffe brushed off complaints about the Dept. of Ed. in his state teaching CRT, he did so with unequivocal statements like, "It [CRT] is not taught in Va. and never has been taught in Va.," adding, "“And as I’ve said this a lot, it’s a dog whistle. It’s racial, it’s division and it’s used by Glenn Youngkin and others, it’s the same thing with Trump and the border wall, to divide people. We should not be dividing people in school.” Based on this one would not expect the label CRT to be recommended in Dept. of Ed. memorandums, lesson plans, reading lists, etc. So when a single-minded conservative activist, Chris Rufo,  with investigative skills took the time and trouble to unearth evidence contradicting McAuliffe, he was stupidly ignored. I won't profile Rufo here, though he's been profiled by New Yorker and WaPo, and though they judged him to be only partly reliable and plenty ideological, Dems should have been much more prepared to deal with the allegations and evidence this man marshaled in making the case against CRT in our schools in various states, not least Va. 

 

According to exit polls, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/politics/virginia-exit-polls/index.html    ~25% of voters considered education to be the number 1 issue. For most it was among the top issues, coming after the economy which another 33% pegged as the top issue. Now, if you only read the NYT, WaPo and watch only MSNBC and CNN; and if you systematically avoid Fox News, conservative radio, and local newspapers (e.g. in my city the NY Post which covered this election and the CRT issue), you will hear only McAuliffe's line that this is race-baiting based on fake information. I've seen it on this blog, "CRT is only taught in grad schools," and so on. Paul Krugman, an economist and opinion columnist I happen to like, seems to have assumed this talking point is correct as he dismissed the CRT issue as "bogus" and "a lie wrapped in a scam." But how many of us broadly left-leaning folk get out of the echo-chamber and do what even a good opposition researcher in a campaign does, viz., assess the evidence the other side has amassed?  Well, here are a few inconvenient facts for team McAuliffe (in retrospect) and a warning to all of us determined to defeat the GOP who plan to make this a major wedge issue next year and beyond..

Three days before the people of Va. voted, Fox News ran this story (reiterating other stories and claims they had made previously). 

 

Published October 30

Virginia Dept. of Education website promotes CRT despite McAuliffe claims it's 'never been taught' there

Virginia voters will decide their next governor in three days

 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-dept-of-education-website-promotes-crt-despite-mcauliffe-claims-its-never-been-taught-there

 

Is it bullshit?  A lie within a scam? No. It is embarrassingly true. The article states, 

"On the Virginia Department of Education website, several examples of the department promoting Critical Race Theory can be found, including a presentation from 2015, when Terry McAullife was governor,  that encourages teachers to "embrace Critical Race Theory" in "order to re-engineer attitudes and belief systems."

 

Click on presentation, and you'll be brought to a 30 page memo from the Commonwealth of Virginia Dept. of Ed. (DoE).  https://www.doe.virginia.gov/support/virginia_tiered_system_supports/resources/2015_fall_institute/Legal_implications_of_discipline.pdf  After several pages identifying problems regarding race relations and inequities targeted for rectification, there is a section on "Culturally Responsive Alternatives" to the status quo  approaches to school discipline (suspensions, expulsions, penalizing various behaviors-- all of which are described in terms of institutional racism). Starting on p. 22 we read the following:

_

Culturally-Responsive
Alternatives (Continued)
 

 Incorporate Critical Race Theory (CRT) Lens
 

 Critical Race Theory
Townsend Walker, 2015

 

Culturally Responsive Teaching
(CRT)
 

Teaching practices that use:
cultural knowledge
prior experiences
performance styles
 

CRT makes learning more appropriate and effective for students
from diverse backgrounds
(Gay 2000).
 

Townsend Walker, 2015 Culturally responsive
strategies
 

 Engage in self and institutional critiques

  Reconstruct imagery of African American males
Re-engineer attitudes and belief systems [emph. added, as Fox quoted this]
 

Adopt ethics of care and respect
Raise expectations and motivation
Use strength-based teaching and
communication techniques
Townsend Walker, 2015

 

Now, Fox shows like Tucker, and their regular news shows, as well as local newspapers, radio et al., point out, this memo a) comes from the Superintendent Virginia's DoE, and b) was written and circulated to K-12 educators throughout the state while McAuliffe was Governor. When parents who know that their kids are being taught about white privilege, internalized racism, and the need to "do the work" to become anti-racists hear these denials, and when there is objective evidence that CRT IS an element in K-12 education in the state, how should they feel towards the candidate making flat-out denials, despite archival evidence contradicting his claims? And then when that candidate goes on to say "I don't think parents should be telling schools what to teach," at a time when school-boards have become loci of parental activism, what might be an expected outcome at the polls? It's a gaffe. He was clearly unprepared to answer these questions, even though Rufo's campaign against CRT (which is what got Trump's attention when he wrote an executive order "banning CRT," had been identified months earlier (he advises multiple members of congress, and is the "point man" on the issue.

I know, I know. The GOP takes this information, and then on that basis starts to ban books by Toni Morrison. Yes. That's why I despise today's GOP (never liked it that much to be honest, but esp. now it's the political dregs). But there is something going on in the schools that is upsetting a lot of parents, and it does have something to do with contemporary applied CRT which overlaps with the so-called "Anti-Racist Movement" speer-headed by Ibram X. Kendi, among others. But this is not really a piece on what CRT today looks like, and its relation to Antiracism (that would require a whole separate piece). Even assuming it is all great stuff, the question is WHY DENY THE LABEL IS BEING USED IN K-12 PEDAGOGY MEMOS??? A few more examples (from Va., as there are plenty of other examples from other states too) just so you don't think this one memo is a fluke.

 

In 2019, the State Superintendent, James Lane,  sent a memo to all school districts in Va.,   promoting critical race theory, and describing it as  “an important analytic tool” for addressing “power and privilege” in schools. See https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21084733-resources-to-support-student-and-community-dialogues-on-racism

 The document ends with Lane's Recommended readings, including his blurbs endorsing 5 or 6 of the books he considers most important for people in the DoE to read. The first entry is Beverly D'Angelo's controversial, and largely hated book, White Fragility (plenty of liberals have criticized that book. A WaPo book critic complained about the concept itself writing, 

"As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point." https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/18/white-fragility-is-real-white-fragility-is-flawed/

This is a very common criticism of the book. Nevertheless, this book which asks students and employees in Diversity and Equity workshops to face and admit to their internalized racism, a sort of ongoing "soul-search" according to DiAngelo, heads the list of readings in the document. Even more troubling, in terms of McAuliffe's denial of CRT having no place in Va. public schools, is  the inclusion of the title, Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, by Edward Taylor, et al. 

"Dr. Lane’s February Reading List:I have received several inquiries and requests for the latest literature that examines the issues associated with racial inequities in education. Below are several pieces that I and other members of the VDOE staff are reading this month based on recommendations that we have received. 

-White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo. Antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively....

 

Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, by Edward Taylor, David Gillborn, and Gloria Ladson-Billings The emergence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) marked an important point in the history of racial politics in the legal academy and the broader conversation about race and racism in the United States. More recently, CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling. This groundbreaking anthology is the first to pull together both the foundational writings in the field and more recent scholarship on the cultural and racial politics of schooling. A comprehensive introduction provides an overview of the history and tenets of CRT in education. Each section then seeks to explicate ideological contestation of race in education and to create new, alternative accounts. In so doing, this landmark publication not only documents the progress to date of the CRT movement, it acts to further spur developments in education."  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21084733-resources-to-support-student-and-community-dialogues-on-racism

 As I said at the outset, labels matter. If a politician says unequivocally "CRT has never been taught in Va." and documents like these surface predictably (as Rufo's research is well known among political strategists right now), you better have your defense well-prepared or it may cost you. The issue in this piece is not the value or lack of value attached to CRT, but rather the fact that in Va. (and also several other states including my own) CRT pedagogy and antiracist offshoots of it are fairly pervasive. One of the more controversial practices of Diversity/Equity training for classrooms today includes "affinity groups." This involves getting whites to discuss their internalized racism only amongst themselves, while blacks discuss the trauma of living in a racist society in a separate, all-black group, often in a separate room. These "safe spaces" for "doing the work" have offended many teachers and others who then contact Rufo with leaked documents. I'm not sure that came up in Va.,  but I can promise you it WILL be coming up in the 2022 elections, and we better be prepared. Perhaps in another post I can (if anyone is interested) discuss the actual content of earlier and contemporary CRT, related antiracism and Diversity/Equity/Inclusion models of social justice, as I believe the general public have been misled by the media on this. These are not simply accurate historical descriptions of racist practices in the past (i.e. history), but very much on the ground, and ongoing forms of racial justice activism, the contents of which are controversial and deserve to be aired out in public. But for now, I'm pointing out what happens when you tell voters that there's nothing to see or know; and that anyway, it's not your place to question curriculum, as McAuliffe ineptly said in a debate. Evasion and denial of facts in the face of contradicting evidence is always a losing strategy.

 

 

Is Liberal Hypocrisy Fueling American Inequality?

The following NYT video asks why Democrats who argue for increased equality consistently fail to make the kinds of changes in local laws and regulations that are necessary to rectify the very inequalities they oppose. For example, zoning laws would have to change to build affordable housing. Education laws would have to change to allow the less privileged to enjoy equal opportunities and life chances, etc... The video shows that such bottom-line changes are resisted when democrats discuss the laws and regulations governing their own backyards. Is it unfair to call these local politicians and board members "hypocrites?" Are there good reasons for their reluctance to act in these areas that the video journalist neglects to mention? What do you think?

(Also, for those interested in this topic, I recommend the slim paperback, Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves (2017), which claims that we should think of the main divide in this country not as the 99% vs. the top 1%, but the top income quintile (top 20%) vs. the rest. The reasons have much to do with the facts in the above video, which show these 6-digit earning households protecting their privileges relative to the rest of society, thus effectively stifling upward mobility in less affluent groups.You can read more about Dream Hoarders here, if interested: https://www.brookings.edu/experts/richard-v-reeves/  Reeves also heads up the Brookings Inst. Future of the Middle Class Initiative, which  deals with the issue of inequality and obstacles to upward mobility: https://www.brookings.edu/project/future-of-the-middle-class-initiative/  )

Democrats and Republicans for a Pro-Democracy Coalition?

The NY Times published an op-ed piece by former Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman and Miles Taylor (a former Trump employee who published an anonymous critical article about Trump while working for him). They suggest a strategy that may sound familiar to those who remember the Lincoln Project and similar groups of Never-Trump Repubs that threw their lot in with the Dems to elect Biden last year. Their idea is simple: the best we to make sure the House does not end up in the hands of Trump loyalists next year is for moderate, center-right Repubs to become part of a pro-democracy coalition  with the singular goal of s defeatingTrump-loyalists who have made embracing The Big Lie  about Trump's "stolen election" a litmus test for GOP races. In the abstract, the idea sounds promising as a strategy to minimize chances of a pro-Trump GOP ascendancy. But we've seen this movie before in the form of the Lincoln Project and other similar ones that spent millions on ads, but didn't seem to have much of an effect on Republicans. As a matter of fact, 92% of them voted Trump, an increase from the 2016 election. The Lincoln Project says that it had more impact on undecided independents, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. Meanwhile, the fragile Dem coalition is already having a hard time maintaining unity among moderates conservatives (e.g. blue dog types) and progressives like "the squad."

The article generated close to 3,000 comments at the NYT, an unusually high number there. Readers' responses range from enthusiastic support to firm rejections of such a coalition. Some think we should throw out all purity tests and build bridges wherever we can to contain and ultimately defeat the pro-Trump GOP. Others point out how much trouble we already have on our hands trying to deal with the so-called "moderate" dems, esp. Manchin and Sinema on the one hand, and the no-compromise Justice Democrats https://justicedemocrats.com/  like AOC and "the squad"  on the other. I tilt towards being a single-issue voter right now, because the issue is, I believe, defeating Trumpism, which amounts to rejecting an autocrat with a tight grip on a party willing to abandon constitutional principles in order to win elections. In other words, as many, including Whitman and Taylor have warned, we stand to lose democratic governance with free and fair elections if we can't defeat the Trumpists. This does seem like a once in a lifetime emergency, and if it were possible to unite people around this idea I would support it. But unfortunately, many people do not share this fear, or at least not enough so to overlook intra-party differences within the Dem party, as made evident by the disputes between Dems who have failed to pass Biden's signature bill in any form thus far. Such a failure, if not remedied, could result in losses in 2022.

I'm posting the article here, and hope it will stimulate thoughtful debate on the idea of a broad anti-Trumpist (or put positively, pro-democracy) coalition. Also, here's a link to the NYT article for those interested in the many and diverse opinions expressed in their comments section today: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html

 

Guest Essay

We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.

Oct. 11, 2021

 

By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman

Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.

 

After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the party would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take it back. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national and state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.

Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.

This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.

It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.

Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.

But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.

To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.

And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.

For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.

 

In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.

These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.

For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong Republicans to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.

One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the departing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist who is running for the seat

 

For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.

Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.

We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe” seats in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.

More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.

To work, it will require trust building between both camps, especially while they are fighting side by side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.

A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.

A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected to.