Dark Free Speech and the Media’s Burden

NBC's Meet the Press broadcast a 13-minute segment yesterday about the burden on the professional media to try to call out the tidal wave of dark free speech in politics. The transcript of the broadcast is here.




A couple of key points are worth mentioning.

1. The rise of fact checkers in the professional media reflects the rise of extremely aggressive dark free speech tactics in politics. Often social media amplifies its power to deceive, distract and divide. In response, newsrooms are reorganized to do aggressive fact checking and to be more assertive about calling out lies and deceit in real time. The media knows it has lost much public trust, much of which is undeserved. Media distrust is significantly based on dark free speech intended to undermine facts and truths that for-profit propagandists, tyrant wannabes, ideologues and kleptocrats want to suppress. Intense fact checking is the media's attempt to regain some public trust and to try to show the public that finding and defending fact and truth is a critically important service to the public interest.

The point is this: US professional media has flaws and weaknesses, e.g., corporate ownership and a for-profit morality. Despite that, flawed media is better than either no media or propaganda sources like Breitbart, Fox News or the president himself.

2. The burden on the media is enormous. The public has lost, or never had, a good grasp of how to defend itself against the dark arts of sophisticated deceit, lies and unwarranted, intense emotional manipulation that divides, distracts and foments bigotry and distrust. All of those emotional responses play into the hands of liars, ideologues, authoritarians and kleptocrats. Dark free speech-driven benefits to them usually come at the expense of the public interest.

Martin Baron, executive editor at the Washington Post reflected on the burden and complexity of trying to defend a significantly defenseless society from relentless attacks:

“How do you address beliefs, when they're not rooted in reality? How do you tell someone, ‘I'm trying to treat your fears seriously. But your facts don't exist?’ How, as individuals, and how, as a country? Like, this is a challenge. Like, this reminded me of Sharia law, right? There would be all these, ‘Sharia law's coming.’ And you're like, ‘It's not.’ And you would try to reassure -- there's nothing like that. And yet, you're like, ‘There's no facts here to support it.’ .... We live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies. And that's made possible by the internet and social, social media. And people are drawn to sources of information, so-called information, that confirms their preexisting points of view. And you know, that's what's contributing to this environment that we have today. .... But we still have the responsibility for, for determining what's, what’s true and what's false and, in particular, holding our government officials accountable for what they say and telling people whether they're telling the truth, or they're not telling the truth. That's fundamental to the responsibilities that we have as a journalistic institution.”

3. Although the president has made over 15,000 false or misleading statements since coming to office, an astounding 91% of Trump supporters said he is the source they rely on for accurate information. Fact checks are irrelevant. This is what the president wants and reinforces it by calling the press the enemy of the people and urging the public to reject everything the press (and courts, historians and scientists) asserts as fact with the exception of facts that are favorable to the president and his agenda. In history, this is what it looks like when a tyrant-kleptocrat wannabe makes a run at power and attempts to destroy a democracy in the process. Our president is no different than past tyrant-kleptocrats making a run for power.

4. The press is waking up to the fact that it needs to be much more aggressive about defending truth and democratic institutions, which includes being more transparent and showing as much raw information as possible in an attempt to win some public trust in the face of the tyrant wannabe’s vicious attacks on the press, facts and the truth.


Thanks to Susan for bringing this to my attention. 😊

Pragmatic Rationalism: A Short, Simple Explanation

Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. . . . We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us. Master propagandist Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923

We found ourselves at the end of chapter 3 with a dystopian assessment of democracy, an apparent ill-suited match between the mental apparatus of the public and the high-minded requirements of democracy: People should be well informed about politically important matters, but they are not. People should think rationally, but they most often do not. Political psychologist George Marcus, Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics, 2013


On various occasions, I've tried to explain that pragmatic rationalism operates as an anti-ideology ideology by focusing on four core moral values that are intended to help reduce partisan distortion, bias and irrationality in how people perceive facts and truths and how they think about what they think they see. It's not clear that prior explanations have been particularly successful. This is another try. Hope springs eternal.

Context

Pragmatic Rationalism[1] is an anti-bias political ideology based on four core moral values instead of core political, economic, philosophical or religious beliefs that characterize standard pro-bias ideologies, which can be overlapping to some variable extent, e.g., capitalism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, globalism or Christianity. Three of the four morals (1, 2 and 4 in the list below) are chosen because they are more objective than most concepts in politics.

Most concepts in politics are not universally definable and people bicker endlessly over what a concept means and how it applies to the real world. Undefinable concepts like that are called essentially contested concepts. They include fairness, the rule of law, sovereignty, privacy, constitutionality, etc. In modern American politics, endless disagreements over what is fair or unfair, or what is constitutional or unconstitutional are unresolvable except by compromise. Minds will not agree willingly.

Pragmatic Rationalism -- what it is 

Pragmatic rationalism is an ideology that holds that the four most important political moral values are: 

1. fidelity to trying to see facts and truths with less bias, especially inconvenient facts and truths that undermine or contradict personal beliefs;

2. fidelity to trying to apply unbiased or less biased conscious reasoning or logic to the facts and truths we think we see, especially inconvenient reasoning that undermines or contradicts personal beliefs;

3. applying 1 and 2 in service to the public interest[2]; and 

4. reasonable compromise.

That's the whole ideology.

Morals 1 and 2 are at the heart of the modern scientific mindset or ideology, but in pragmatic rationalism they are just applied to the definitely unscientific, messy endeavor called politics.

Very brief explanation

1. Each moral value serves as a bulwark against (1) authoritarianism, (2) kleptocracy, (3) dark free speech (lies, propaganda, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.), and (4) ideological partisan bias and politics based on false or unreasonably distorted facts, false or distorted truths and abuse of power by the majority or minority in democracy.

2. Regarding moral 4 or compromise, in authoritarian regimes the person or people in power don't have to compromise with anyone they have the power to ignore, or even abuse if they are so inclined. Compromise also fights against the kleptocracy that usually accompanies highly concentrated power.

3. Fidelity to less biased facts, truths and reason fights directly and powerfully against dark free speech or propaganda.

4. Most everyone doing politics firmly but falsely believes they do politics based on unbiased facts, truths and logic. Most also believe their beliefs best serve the public interest.

5.  If one tosses any of one of the four morals out, you have dictatorship or oligarchy, not democracy.


Footnotes:
1. Political ideology is hard or impossible to authoritatively define, just like most other politics-related concepts. I define pragmatic politics as a way of thinking within a framework of a cluster of concepts that are grounded in the real world. In essence, it is pragmatic politics, which is non-ideological. Pragmatic rationalism is anti-ideological because it is explicitly intended to try to keep perceptions of reality and reasoning strongly tethered to objective facts and truths and sound logic or reasoning. Pro-bias ideologies tend to lead to distortions of inconvenient fact and truth and flawed reasoning. The distortions and flaws include outright denying of objectively true facts and reasoning that is objectively flawed or incorrect.

2. Service to the public interest is an essentially contested concept and as I articulate it, it is larded full of additional essentially contested concepts. That is unavoidable because multiple concepts reveal the contours of politics in a democracy, but not the details. In essence service to the public interest outlines the contours of what is basically a food fight among competing interests over policy and everything else. But unlike most unresolvable partisan ideological disagreements, it is constrained by the other three core moral values, i.e., less biased facts, less biased reasoning and compromise.

For those interested, here's my current, but revisable, articulation of the food fight (service to the public interest):

The conduct of politics and governance based on identifying a rational, optimum balance between serving public, individual and commercial interests based on a transparent fact- and logic-based analysis of competing policy choices (evidence- and reason-based politics), while (1) being reasonably responsive to public opinion, (2) protecting and growing the American economy, (3) fostering individual economic and personal growth opportunity, (4) defending constitutional personal freedoms, (5) fostering improvement in the American standard of living, (6) protecting national security, (7) protecting the environment, (8) increasing transparency, competition and efficiency in government and commerce when possible, (9) fostering global peace, stability and prosperity whenever reasonably possible, including maintaining and growing alliances with non-authoritarian democratic nations, and (10) defending American liberal democracy and democratic norms, by replacing federal norms with laws, and (a) requiring states to maximize voter participation, making voting as easy as reasonably possible, (b) elevating opinions of ethics officials in the federal government to the status of laws or requirements that bind all members of all branches of the federal government, particularly including the President and all Executive Branch employees, (c) incentivizing voter participation by conferring a tax break on voters and a reasonable tax penalty on qualified citizens who do not vote, (d) prevent or limit corruption, unwarranted opacity, and anti-democratic actions such as gerrymandering voting districts to minimize competition or limiting voter participation, and (e) requiring allowing high level federal politicians and bureaucrats, federal judges and members of congress to show their tax returns for at least the six tax years before they take office or starting federal employment or service, all of which is constrained by (i) honest, reality-based fiscal sustainability that limits the scope and size of government and regulation to no more or no less than what is deemed needed and (ii) genuine respect for the U.S. constitution and the rule of law with a particular concern for limiting unwarranted legal complexity and ambiguity to limit opportunities to subvert the constitution and the law.

 

Hope springing eternal, again

HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH YOUR LIBERAL RELATIVES

https://www.snowflakevictory.com/

Conservative Anti-Government Deregulation Marches On: Bird Deaths Increase

A sad story from the New York Times reports that a regulatory change, a “regulation reinterpretation”, guts reporting requirements and penalties for bird kills arising from various development and business activities. The new rule eliminate criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths from normal business. Mandatory reporting of bird deaths is now “purely voluntary” and fines for bird kills are eliminated.

Under the Trump administration’s 2017 reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, companies are not subject to prosecution or fines, even after a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed or injured about one million birds. BP paid $100 million in fines for that avoidable but catastrophic company mistake. Similarly, the state of Virginia was going to build an artificial island for birds to nest on to compensate for loss of nesting habitat from a bridge and tunnel expansion in Chesapeake Bay tidewaters. After learning of the new interpretation of the law, Virginia abandoned the island and the habitat loss will not be compensated.

What an oil spill does to birds

The Virginia island story is just one of dozens of bird-preservation projects that are terminated after the 2017 policy change. In its standard public deceit mode, the Trump administration lied by called the change in the century-old law protecting migratory birds a technical clarification.

But, the situation is worse than even that. The NYT writes:

Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. In one instance, a Wyoming-based oil company wanted to clarify that it no longer had to report bird deaths to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “You are correct,” the agency replied. (emphasis added)

That is the face of deceitful conservative-populist anti-government, anti-environment ideology and rule. Trump ideology isn’t just neutral to the environment, it is actively hostile.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service claims that the Trump administration will “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.” Unfortunately, documents the NYT reviewed contradict that. A review of over 20 incidents found that short of literally going out to illegally shoot birds, activities where birds die merit no action. This is yet another of the endless Trump and his administration’s lies that they insult the American people with on a now daily basis.

For context, this summarizes the Trump administration’s work to deal with the environment as of June 2019.

The new interpretation is being challenged in court. If the case winds up before a Trump judge, it will probably be upheld. Otherwise, it is reasonable to think the new ‘interpretation’ will be overturned because it sounds more like the law is being illegally rewritten than merely reinterpreted. Time will tell how this plays out.

In the meantime, thousands or millions of birds will be mindlessly displaced or slaughtered in the name of Trump and his rigid ideological hate of environmental concerns. The companies and states that go along with this indefensible immorality reveal how their moral mindsets, or more accurately, lack thereof, work day-to-day.

If you like this, vote for Trump and republicans in 2020 or just stay home and don't vote at all. If you do not like this, vote for democrats in 2020. It’s your choice.

Chapter Review: Equality or Oligarchy (2016)

“Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. .... The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.” Timothy Snyder,  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, Chapter 6, 2018

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffett, 2006



This is a review of Chapter 6, Equality or Oligarchy (2016), of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall while tyrannies rise (my review is here). My review of the prologue of this book is here and a review of Chapter 1 is here.

The nonsense of inevitability politics vs. eternity politics

The politics of inevitability and eternity are described in detail in the book’s prologue as discussed here. Briefly, the politics of inevitability posits that over time political ideologies such as communism and capitalism will deliver social improvement and good things to societies and people. In that view, progress is inevitable and politically there is not much to be done other than defend the status quo and tweak things now and then while waiting for utopia to arrive on its own.

By contrast, the politics of eternity basically holds that social and individual progress are impossible and history repeats in cycles of threat to the nation followed by a period of relief. This view sees progress for society and people as a mirage and only a powerful leader (dictator) can save the nation from foreign enemies and evil forces such as globalism and international comity. Eternity regimes see concepts such as democracy, elections, objective facts and logic, and individualism as something that ranges from mere ritual (elections) to actual evil (individualism, facts and logic) working in opposition to the needs of the sacred, innocent nation. As described in chapter 1, that is the ideology and politics of Vladimir Putin, the Russian government and Russian kleptocratic oligarchs.

The sacred nation narrative is that the poor innocent state is only trying to defend itself from both internal and external threats that are always present. It needs to be stressed that objective facts and logic are bluntly denied to be real because the only things that are real in eternal politics is what the supreme dictator says is real and logical, even when that is clearly false or objectively flawed.

From an objective point of view, both inevitability and eternity politics are obvious nonsense. Those fictions work to serve narrow interests at the expense of the public interest por common good. History makes that crystal clear. Both tend to denigrate inconvenient facts and logic, with eternity politics being radically extreme in this regard. What Snyder does not describe is an alternative, maybe because he sees none or more likely because that wasn’t the point of his book. Regardless, the anti-ideology ideology advocated here, pragmatic rationalism, offers an anti-biasing, anti-authoritarian, pro-fact, -logic, -democracy and -rule of law alternative. But that’s a topic for a separate discussion.

Chapter 6

Snyder’s Chapter 6 is stuffed to the gills with facts and details that are heavily sourced. That allows for fact checking for whatever facts Snyder asserts but one wants to question or reject as lies. The chapter focuses on the rise of Donald Trump and how he relied on extensive Russian efforts to help him win the Electoral College in 2016.

The view from team Trump about Russia’s role is exemplified by comments that K. T. MacFarland, aide to Trump made after the election: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown [the] U.S.A. election to him.” Clearly, at least some Trump aides believed Russia was the cause for Trump’s electoral college win. Not only did MacFarland believe Russia led Trump to win, she also resented, and saw as partisan political, Obama’s efforts to punish the Russians for attacking the US election, commenting that “Russia is [the] key that unlocks [the] door.”

Because there is far too much content in Chapter 6 to review in detail, the following will mention some of the more important context, facts and beliefs that Snyder articulates based on the evidence available to the public and his inferences therefrom. The value of this partial list of events is that it reminds us of who did what and why.

• Russian support for Trump, coerced or genuine, was widespread if not universal in the Russian government, among ruling elites and among Russian journalists. Dimitry Kiselev, a major Russian media influencer and Trump supporter asserted that “a new star is rising -- Trump!” In addition, Kiselev was happy that “the words ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are in in the vocabulary of Trump.” Alexander Dugin, author of The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, a geopolitics book that has major influence on the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites, posted a video entitled “In Trump We Trust” where he urged Americans to “vote for Trump!” Alexi Pushkov, Chair of the foreign relations committee of the Russian Parliament’s lower house expressed the hope that “Trump can lead the Western locomotive right off the rails.” Russian journalists were “given very clear instructions: to show Donald Trump in a positive way, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in a negative way.” There was no ambiguity about who the Russian government and elites supported and what they expected him to try to do to America if he gained power.

• In cyberwar, ‘attack surfaces’ are points in a computer program an attacker can access, allowing the attacker to come in contact with human minds. In 2105 and 2016, Russia used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Instagram and other social media as places where high priority attack surfaces could be found. Such attacks do not necessarily rely on hacking, but instead can simply use and misuse social platforms as they wish. For example, just before the election, Facebook shut down 5.8 million fake political messaging accounts. Six of 470 known Russian fake Facebook accounts had accumulated billions of shares.

• Russian social media propaganda advertising was targeted, not random. In crucial states including Michigan and Wisconsin, Russian ads were targeted at people who would respond to anti-Muslim attacks, e.g., Muslims are terrorists, based on data showing that most members of target audience probably hated or feared Muslims. Regarding immigrants, Russian pro-Trump propaganda associated refugees with rapists. After the 2016 election, Twitter research found that about 50,000 Russian bots were active on its platform. Russian trolls who posed as black activists who portrayed Clinton as a racist reached hundreds of thousands of minds.

• On July, 22, 2016, which was just before the democratic convention, the Russians released about 22,000 stolen emails via Wikileaks. The emails were chosen to increase conflict and distrust between Clinton and Sanders supporters. The strategy worked. Trump supported and encouraged Russian hacking, e.g., by publicly asking the Russian government on June 17 to find and release emails related to Clinton. (My comment: A few hours after that June 17 public request, the Russian government started to hack the DNC and Clinton as Trump explicitly asked)

• On October 7, 2016 about 30 minutes after a Tape of Trump admitting his sexual assaults became public, the Russians released emails by Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. That release significantly blunted public discussion of Trump’s history of sexual predation. Shortly after this episode, Russian trolls and bots began spreading false stories about democratic Satanic practices and a pedophile child trafficking ring run by Clinton that operated out of the basement of a pizza parlor, i.e., the Pizzagate fabrication. (My comments: To a large extent, the press was fooled and unduly distracted by the timing of the Podesta email release. That failure gave many sympathetic people a basis in Russian fiction to see Trump as innocent instead of the sexual predator that he in fact really is.) 

•  The American people shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Many Americans responded with anger, incivility and sometimes actual threats of violence. Russians also exploited the gullibility of many Americans. Snyder wrote: “Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism. .... Americans trusted Russians and robots who told them what they wanted to hear.” For example, the vulgar Russian Facebook page ‘Heart of Texas’ was clearly written by non-native English speakers and advocated Texas secession. Separatism was and still is in line with standard Russian foreign policy to advocate separatism and the break up of all countries except Russia itself. Russian separatism policy supported and propagandized for Brexit, Catalonian independence, succession of the entire US South and Alaska from the Union, and the Donbas from Ukraine. Heart of Texas had more followers than the Texas democratic and republican parties combined. (My comment: Successful Russian manipulation of the American people included fomenting unwarranted anger, fear, bigotry, outrage, and distrust in democracy, the press, truth, elections and fellow citizens.)

• Professional American media and press and economic conditions shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Economic factors seriously weakened the media and press. In 2009, about 70 jobs per day were lost at newspapers and magazines, leading to the near total collapse of the local press. The rise of infotainment (and, IMHO, its attendant capitalist immorality) in place of news in the public interest led the press-media to give Trump far more air time and ink than Clinton or other candidates got. Trump’s antics and divisive, deceitful rhetoric were far too entertaining to pass up. That amounted to the professional US press-media giving Trump massive amounts of free advertising. The CEO of CBS commented that the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” (My comments: Corporate ownership of media also significantly weakens press and media independence. Propaganda outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News continued their years-long propaganda efforts, enthusiastically adopting Russian lies and spreading them, thereby laundering anti-democratic propaganda into something legitimate in susceptible minds.)

• The republican party shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Snyder writes: “As republicans realized that Russia was attacking the UNited States, the fury of partisanship became the desperation of denial and then the complicity of inaction. .... McConnell let it be known that republicans would treat the defense of the United States from Russian cyberwar as an effort to help Hillary Clinton. .... After categorized the Russian attack as politics, its scope expanded. .... Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. .... That is how wars are lost.” (My comments: McConnell earned the moniker Moscow Mitch. Putin could not have asked for much more than to have the US Senate majority leader completely mischaracterize Russian attacks as mere politics. In addition to his self described role as the ‘Grim Reaper’ , he deserves the title Moscow Mitch for that bit of deeply damaging disinformation in the name immoral republican partisanship. McConnell’s treasonous action here arguably transcended mere constitutional rot and constituted an actual constitutional crisis.)

• Although Trump said his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was as ‘dumb as a rock’, Tillerson did a valuable service for the Russians. Before he left office, conducted a purge of a large group of diplomats that Putin considered to be enemies. By throwing the State Department into chaos, Tillerson significantly crippled American ability to project influence or moral values. Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, illegally took money from foreign governments by not reporting it. Later, he lied to the FBI, falsely claiming he had no conversations with Russia’s ambassador. He was eventually convicted of a felony for that. Flynn’s other escapades included (i) anti-Semitic Tweets at Jews, “Not Anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” for claiming that the Russians had hacked emails of democratic activists, and (ii) followed and shared content from at least five fake Russian social media accounts. (My comment: If Flynn’s contacts with Russians were innocent, why lie about it? One logical answer is that the conversations were not innocent. Another is that Flynn was an incompetent idiot. Another is that he was both.)

• Steve Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign chairman. While at Breitbart, Bannon was instrumental in bringing white supremacists into mainstream political discourse. Bannon’s radial propaganda effort was funded by the billionaire Robert Mercer and members of his family. Bannon used some of that resource to experiment with mass public manipulation techniques, e.g., by testing audience responses to certain propaganda about Putin. In 2016, Mercer and Bannon’s company stole the Facebook data of about 50 million Americans and that was used to create tools to either increase or suppress voting by targeted audiences. A major goal was to suppress the African-American vote. Like most Russian practitioners of the politics of eternity, Bannon was hostile toward facts and he liked referring to the press as the “opposition party.” (My comment: The Mercer-Bannon effort to suppress Black voter turnout may have had a significant impact.)

• Unlike Paul Manafort and Steven Bannon who were linked to Russia by corrupt, authoritarian anti-democratic ideology, Jared Kushner was linked to Russia by ambition and  money. Kushner's links were best seen by situations where Kushner was silent. Like Trump himself, banks refused to loan money to Kushner’s father. The exception was the Russian money laundering machine, Deutsche Bank, which laundered billions for Russian oligarchs. A few weeks before the 2016 election, Deutsche Bank gave Kushner a $285 million loan. Although Kushner met with Russian officials, including the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Kushner's escapades included smuggling Kislyak into Trump Tower for the purpose of talks to set up a secret communications channel between Trump and Putin. (My comment: If Kushner’s meetings with Russians were innocent, why go up the freight elevator? One logical answer is that the meetings were not innocent. Another is that Kushner was an incompetent idiot. Another is that he was both.)

Chapter 6 goes on at length in this vein. That brief summary should convey a flavor of what the Russians, Trump, his campaign and the felons, liars and crooks he surrounded himself with were up to. What they were up to wasn’t anything good for the American people, democracy, the rule of law, or other decent moral values. It was all corrupt bad faith based on lies, deceit and emotional manipulation. Snyder constantly points out that even the character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” was a fiction that no one of any significance in Russia believed. The Russians knew full well that Trump was a failed businessman who was saved only by Russian money: “From a Russian perspective, Trump was a failure who was rescued and an asset to be used to wreak havoc in American reality.” Well, American reality really has been blown to smithereens. Snyder’s narrative indicates that the Russians got stupendous value for their stolen money.

Legitimate or not?

Being a data, evidence, truth and logic-driven beast, Snyder’s book raised my personal estimate of confidence that Russian attacks on the 2016 election were a necessary factor, but alone not sufficient, in Trump’s electoral college win. Before Snyder, my confidence level that Russia was necessary was about 80%. Now, it's about 95%. The reality can never be known with certainty, but the evidence supports a belief that Trump is truly an illegitimate president. Or, maybe fake president is a better label.

Chapter Review: Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011)

With law our land shall rise, but it will perish with lawlessness. Author unknown, Njáls Saga, a story of a ~60-year Icelandic blood feud, ~1280 AD

Freedom is fragile, and when demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention. Jeffrey C. Isaac, professor of political science, Indiana University Bloomington, 2016

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. .... But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social & Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, 1957

The basis of almost every honest political disagreement is mostly or completely grounded in one or both of two essential ingredients, differences in perception of facts and differences in application of reasoning or logic to the facts. The basis of almost every dishonest political disagreement is at least significantly, probably usually mostly, grounded in assertions of dark free speech by at least one side among parties in disagreement. One major problem is that it is often hard or impossible to know when a person is being honest with themself and when they aren't. Unconscious biases and flawed logic are unconscious and so are the distortions and flaws they routinely inject into reality and reason. Dishonest disagreements can be either knowingly or unknowingly dishonest. The former are usually immoral and usually damaging to society, democracy and/or the rule of law. The latter are regrettable, but still damaging. Germaine, today



This is a review of Chapter 1 of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall and tyrannies rise (my review is here). My review of the prologue of this book is here.

Chapter 1, Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011), is a detailed description of one of the major influences on the political-spiritual ideology that Vladimir Putin claims to rely on to describe Russia and the world. He justifies the things he does in the name of an ideology that Snyder calls Russian Christian fascism. According to Snyder, the source of Putin’s ideology is the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954). Until Putin latched onto his mystical religious-political ideology, Ilyin had been relegated to historically insignificant obscurity. Now, Ilyin’s writings are mandatory reading for all major Russian politicians, oligarchs and military leaders.

Ilyin was a Russian political and religious philosopher and a hard core ideologue. European fascism of the 1920s and 1930s shaped his thinking. The fascist mindset of the day was based on three core beliefs, violence should dominate facts, reason and laws, the nation's leader has a vital, deep mystical-religious connection to the nation and its people, and globalization is a dangerous conspiracy against the sacred nation, and not a mundane reality that needs to be rationally managed via international cooperation.

Ilyn started out as a bitter opponent of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was a counterrevolutionary who advocated violence against the revolution. He later formulated a Christian fascism ideology intended to defeat Bolshevism. Snyder writes of Ilyin’s rise to prominence and his role in modern events:

“After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. .... By [2006] Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly to the Russian parliament. .... In the 2010s, Putin relied on Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine. .... The Russian political class followed Putin’s example. His master propagandist Vladislav Surkov adapted Ilyin’s ideas to the world of modern media. 

Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin’s influence peaked. The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin ignored or despised: individualism, [democratic political] succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.”

Ilyin’s ideology believes that individualism is evil and must be swallowed and subjugated in service to the mystical sanctity of the innocent but always besieged Russian nation. He also believed that God erred in creating a world of human with their facts, knowledge and passions, calling God's act “frenetic, committing error upon error,” and evidence that God had lost “his harmonious unity, logical reason, and organizational purpose.” For Ilyin, human facts and passions are senseless and impediments to attaining the ultimate goal. Snyder describes this as totalitarian, anti-individualism thinking:

“The vision was a totalitarian one. We should long for a condition in which we think and feel as one, which means not to think and feel at all. We must cease to exist as individual human beings. ‘Evil begins’, Ilyin wrote, ‘where the person begins. .... the empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.’ .... To belong to a layer of society that offered to individuals social advancement was to be the worst kind of human being: ‘this estate constitutes the very lowest level of social existence.’”

That is at the core of Putin’s professed ideology. What that means for average Russians is not anything good. They are mere things to be used to serve the defense and goals of the sacred and innocent but besieged Russian nation, which just happens to include Ukraine. The siege of Russia includes siege by social progress and belief in individualism. What the sacred defense and goals demand of people is whatever Putin says is demanded. Chapter 1 continues in this incoherent, metaphysical vein.

In his thinking, Ilyin saw Russian people as obliged to be happy with a totalitarian political arrangement: “We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.” By ‘our freedom’, Ilyin refers to the freedom of the Russian people to serve the Russian patriot-savior, not to exercise their individual choice. The freedom is a mirage.

Ilyin’s ideology puts the middle class at the bottom of society in support of the righteousness of his fascist ideal of inequality. This bit of  ideology fits perfectly with Putin's kleptocracy mindset. It both precludes upward social and justifies oligarchy or rule according to what wealthy people want and Putin as Oligarch-in Chief allows. In this regard, Putin might be seen as not quite totalitarian, but that is negated by Putin’s willingness to strip wealth from any oligarch who crosses him or irritated him too much. In practice, Russia is a totalitarian police state, with oligarchs ruling only at the pleasure of the tyrant at the top.

What is going on here??

If one accepts Snyder’s vision of history and recent events as basically correct, Putin appears to be a brutal but modern totalitarian akin to a Hitler or a Stalin. In essence, Putin’s ideology has an obvious, venal goal. He is simply protecting his power and the kleptocracy he has built. He relentlessly uses his power to oppress the Russian people and to steal the nation’s wealth from them. It is hard to imagine Putin giving a fig about God’s alleged mistake in creating humans, knowledge or the human urge to procreate. When Putin oppresses his people and murders political opponents, he can cite Ilyin and claim he is Russia’s redeemer who is only asking the Russian people to make the “chivalrous sacrifice” of killing others in the name of the sacred nation.

The anti-fact, anti-rule of law aspects of Ilyin’s (and Putin’s) rancid ideology are important to keep in mind. When facts and laws do not matter or even exist in any meaningful sense, as Ilyin’s Russian Christian fascism posits, Russia’s leader incurs no moral or legal responsibility for whatever he does or doesn't do. Ilyin was clear about democracy and voting in secret. That allowed Russians to think of themselves as individuals with individual choice, which proves the evil character of a depraved world. Political parties and elections should only be rituals with no significant political importance.

Chapter Review: Prologue (2010)

This is a review of the prologue (13 pages) of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall and tyrannies rise (my review is here). He is a highly regarded historian.

In essence, Snyder’s book is an urgent warning about the power of dark free speech[1] or propaganda and the terrible corrosive power that undermining trust and institutions, e.g., the rule of law and a free press-media, can have on democracies and the rule of law. In a broader context, what is described is an ongoing, deadly serious global war between democracy, truth and the rule of law vs. tyranny, dark free speech and corruption. Snyder makes it crystal clear where our president stands in this war.

Inevitability vs eternity political ideologies

A theme that runs through Snyder’s book is two different conceptions of how politics plays out over time. He calls them inevitability and eternity. The inevitability politics mindset holds that society is moving toward a fixed, stable end situation. For Marxists, the final state of social evolution is a classless, governmentless communist utopia. For capitalists it is the final triumph of a free market utopia. From a point of view grounded in history, philosophy and cognitive and social science, the Marxist and capitalist ideals are unattainable nonsense. Utopias are not possible, only aspirational ideals. They are rigid ideological mirages that wind up serving narrow interests, not the public or human interests.

On the other hand, the eternity politics mindset posits that history progresses in more or less static cycles of threat, conflict and rebirth of the nation followed by a temporary calm before the next spasm of violence and rebirth. The eternity mindset creates foreign enemies when domestic threats have been subdued. Technology advances, but society is stuck in the hate, violence, destruction and rebirth cycle inherent in the human condition. This vision of reality is more plausible than the inevitability ideology, but not necessarily true. Human societies have advanced over the millennia. They are not static, at least not yet. What isn’t knowable now is just how far human society as a whole can advance. Also unknowable is, if there is a social plateau and stasis, what that world would look like.

Inevitability politics promises a better future for everyone, while eternity politics promises endless cycles of conflict. Snyder argues that inevitability tends to collapse into eternity politics, which envisions an innocent, righteous nation at the center of endless cycles of victimhood.

Snyder takes a very dim view of both ideological mindsets based on history, including events as recent as 2018. Both narratives foment and lead to intolerance of enemies, real or fake. They also tend to rely on religious religious iconography to help draw the true believers in. These narratives create out-groups or enemies from people who questioning the narrative’s supposed truth. People who dissent from the narratives are generally not tolerated. Snyder comments on eternity:

“Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom. In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. .... Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

In essence, eternity drowns the future in cycles of present emotional whiplash grounded in fear, intolerance and outrage, followed by elation. Inevitability doesn't fare any better:

“[Inevitability politics is based on] a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. .... Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. .... American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts.”[2]

Snyder makes a prediction and gives his basis in facts and logic for it:

“What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift of politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood European and American weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home. .... Concepts moved from East to West. An example is the word ‘fake’ as in ‘fake news’. This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed itv as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real. .... The techniques were everywhere the same, although they became more sophisticated over time. .... Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the politics of eternity: to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States.” (emphasis added)

Footnotes:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally legal and protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

2. If my recollection of American history from public education and my observations of American conservative and populist political rhetoric is any indicator, the facts that American capitalist politics resists or denies include those chronicled in the 10-hour documentary Plutocracy, which is discussed here.

Massive Propaganda Attacks on the US

In recent days, descriptions of current Russian propaganda attacks on US society and politics have appeared. The scope and sophistication of foreign attacks on truth and civil comity are increasing. Yesterday, Rachael Maddow discussed how the attacks are being carried out. The propaganda includes a bizarre assertion that the US is prone to break into separate countries within 20 years as states simply secede from the union. A segment with democratic representative Sean Patrick Maloney, member of the House Intelligence Committee, discussed the reluctance of American social media companies to try to combat Russian lies and social attacks. Maloney commented that he has no confidence in Facebook's "moral compass."

Maddow's broadcast segments referred to an article by Lawfare that found a massive Russian internet propaganda campaign now underway. The Lawfare article describes huge Russian online propaganda operations run by an outfit called TheSoul Publishing (TSP). It turns out that TSP is the third largest presence on YouTube in terms of views and subscribers. Only Disney and WarnerMedia are bigger.  TSP operates at least 140 YouTube channels and 70 Facebook pages, including the YouTube channels 5-Minute Crafts, Bright Side, 5-Minute Crafts Kids, 5-Minute Crafts Girly, 7-Second Riddles and 5-Minute Magic. The point of that was to build a massive audience and people's trust. Lawfare researchers found that As of December 16, 2019, 5-Minute Crafts had more than 62.8 million subscribers, and about 16.6 billion views, while the Bright Side channel had over 32.3 million subscribers and about 6.3 billion views. All of TSP's channels YouTube were apparently created in 2016 or later.

TSP also operates on Facebook. Bright Side on Facebook claims to have begun in June 2004, but Facebook’s transparency measures show a start date of July 2, 2015. Bright Side has more than 44 million followers, as compared to the New York Times which has a Facebook following of 16 million. Lawfare comments on TSP:

It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles. 

Indeed, TheSoul Publishing does create nonpolitical (and apparently lucrative) craft videos, reaching worldwide audiences. But it also creates political content, including pro-Russian versions of histories that contain inaccurate information. The social media platforms, which I made aware of TheSoul’s activities, have not taken action against the company—apparently having concluded that its activities do not violate their policies.

TSP history videos are posted on the Smart Banana YouTube channel. They are are pro-Russian propaganda. A fake history post from February of 2019 falsely asserts that Ukraine is part of Russia, and even weirder, it claims that Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev gave Alaska to the US in 1957. Real history is that the Ukraine is not part of Russia and the US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.

In related news, a recent article by Wired magazine points to the rise of deepfake photos of fake people generated by artificial intelligence to set up fake social media accounts. Wired writes:

Facebook on Friday removed what it called a global network of more than 900 accounts, pages, and groups from its platform and Instagram that allegedly used deceptive practices to push pro-Trump narratives to about 55 million users. The network used fake accounts, artificial amplification, and, notably, profile photos of fake faces generated using artificial intelligence to spread polarizing, predominantly right-wing content around the web, including on Twitter and YouTube. 

It represents an alarming new development in the information wars, as it appears to be the first large-scale deployment of AI-generated images in a social network. In a report on the influence operation, researchers from disinformation groups Graphika and DFRLab noted that this was the first time they had seen the technology used to support an inauthentic social media campaign.

We are under attack

I have heard some people argue that the influence of Russia on America and its politics is low to non-existent. Evidence keeps piling up that Russian influence is large and growing in both size and sophistication. Russia has all the time and money it needs to keep finding ways to foment distrust in democracy, government institutions and each other.

For context, it is very well worth knowing that a spy who defected from the Soviet Union in 1970 asserted that most of the KGB's budget (about 85%) was for disinformation and social disruption campaigns against Western democracies and the rest was for spies and their activities. Other defectors have said the same thing. One source comments:

Later high-profile Russian intelligence defectors, such as Yuri Bezmenov, confirmed that the targeting of community groups and the subversion of western societies was a primary objective of the Kremlin. Bezmenov was granted asylum in Canada in 1970 and later worked for the CBC. In a 1984 video, Bezmenov describes the goals and tactics of KGB active measures: 

The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’ – in the language of the KGB – or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. (Bezmenov 1984) 

Historically, Russian disinformation and active measures have targeted democratic systems by attempting to undermine the society and institutions of the West through proxy organizations, distortion of narratives and the media, compromised individuals, agents of influence, and the manipulation of elections. The Kremlin’s tactics and objectives remain fundamentally the same today as they were in the 1940s. The main difference is, as former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovksy, who once worked on Putin’s election campaign, has said: “[I]n Soviet times the concept of truth was important. Even if they were lying they took care to prove what they were doing was ‘the truth.’ Now no one even tries proving the ‘truth.’ You can just say anything. Create realities” (Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014, 9).

Defense of Russia as a poor, threatened innocent nation is as much nonsense now as it was under Stalin. America is under a serious, sustained Russian attack and it has been for decades. Unfortunately, our president is working for the Russian government, via bribery and/or via blackmail. Americans cannot look to either the president or GOP members of congress to stand up for American democracy or the rule of law. Defense of nation will have to come from the people and the democrats.

What Worries Evangelical Christians

The key fears that American Evangelical Christians often voice is fear about attacks on their freedom of religion and religious speech, and the existence of abortion rights. The fear of abortion is in the context of existing law that forces no woman to have an abortion, while increasingly draconian abortion restriction laws now prevent abortions for some women who want them. Regarding religious practice and speech, they feel besieged by what the see as relentless anti-Christian attacks. This is never said as far as I can recall, but presumably they believe that attacks on religion are leading to a society where religious practice will come to be banned and punished, or relegated to some sort of persecuted underground existence.

If that accurately describes fears for religion, it has never made any sense to me.

All US presidents have been or at least claim to be Christian. That includes the current president. Congress, state governors and state legislatures are all dominated by Christians and that has always been the case. The US military and civilian police forces are dominated by Christians and that has always been the case. Most federal and state judges are Christian and always have been. Republican presidents appoint radical conservative Christian justices to the Supreme Court and other federal courts. The dominant religion among the American people is Christianity. On top of that massive solid wall of overwhelming pro-Christian political, social, law enforcement and judicial power and dominance, US law forces Americans to subsidize religion with tax breaks worth over $80 billion/year.

Under those circumstances, Evangelical Christian fear of persecution is baffling to say the least. What is there to fear? The list above doesn't even cover all the power and rights that Christians have but take for granted or ignore, e.g., private and state employers in states that don't ban discrimination  against non-heterosexual people can and do fire employees simply for being non-heterosexual.

Exactly what dire threats do Evangelical Christians see that terrifies them so much that about 70% of them support a corrupt, deeply immoral president? They often point to same-sex marriage as a massive threat to religious practice and speech. They cite the example of a few businesses in some states that have been sanctioned for discriminating against same-sex couples in commerce. (Only 22 states and D.C. have anti-discrimination laws and in the other states, discrimination against non-heterosexual people is completely legal and Christians can discriminate all they want in the name of their heavily protected personal religious freedom; federal law does not explicitly ban discrimination against LGBT Americans) Some Christians claim they fear perverts in public and gender-neutral public bathrooms. Despite their massive privilege, power and majority status, they fear non-heterosexual people and want unfettered freedom to discriminate against them in commerce in defense of religious freedom.

Employers and governments in states in gray can discriminate 

against non-heterosexual people in commerce and employment

The Christianity Today editorial

Against that context, the Evangelical publication Christianity Today (CT) published an editorial yesterday asserting that the president should be removed from office on constitutional and moral grounds. Despite that conclusion, the editorial firmly asserts that in this impeachment, democratic motives have always been bad and partisan, the facts are questionable because of partisan animus and the president has been treated unfairly by being unable to defend himself. Despite that logically incoherent defense of Trump,[1] CT concludes the president should be removed from office. CT writes:

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral. 

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

The CT editorial points out that in the Clinton impeachment in 1998, CT argued this in favor of impeaching Clinton and removing him from office:

The President's failure to tell the truth—even when cornered—rips at the fabric of the nation. This is not a private affair. For above all, social intercourse is built on a presumption of trust: .... And while politicians are notorious for breaking campaign promises, while in office they have a fundamental obligation to uphold our trust in them and to live by the law. .... Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.

What is surprising is the emphasis on morality as a basis to assess political behavior. Some evidence indicates that for Evangelical Christians, personal morals changed to accommodate the president's immoral character and behavior. Before Trump, they believed that morality in a president was important more than other groups, but by June of 2017, Evangelical Christians was the least likely group to say that morality in a president was important. Does the CT editorial reflect a swing of the moral pendulum back to pre-Trump days? That's not yet clear.[2]

Footnote:
1. Regarding CT's flawed logic: If Trump was unable to defend himself and the facts are in question as CT asserts, then there is no objective basis to call for Trump's removal from office. The CT assertion that democratic motives are bad is irrelevant if facts count in deciding what the president did or did not do. Neither partisanship nor bad faith changes objectively true facts to false facts. The CT editorial seems to reflect a lack of understanding on that point.

2. Not surprisingly, the president has incoherently attacked CT as a far left organization that wants to take religion and guns away: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1207997316424187905

My Jewish Students’ Reactions To Trump’s Executive Order: ‘Confusing,’ ‘Unclear’ And ‘Really Scary’

by Alex Green: a writer and researcher.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/12/13/trump-jews-national-origin-antisemitism-executive-order-alex-green

For the last four months, my 11th grade students and I have tried to make a study not only of American history, but also our public history. From Charlottesville to Emmett Till, Boston’s Faneuil Hall to Utah’s Promontory Point, how do our fellow citizens confront, hide, re-tell and wield history in the present day?

Nothing prepared us for the conversation we’ve had to take up this week, about whether we are equal citizens in the United States.

My students and I are Jews at a Jewish academy. This week, at the request of a student, I gave over a class to discussing and understanding President Trump’s new executive order, which reclassifies being Jewish as one of three things — "a race, color, or national origin”-- under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

According to the White House, the purpose of this order is to put an end to debates about Israel on college campuses that the administration sees as anti-Semitic. If found to be anti-Semitic, schools’ federal funding will be in jeopardy. To define anti-Semitism, the order uses a debated definition issued in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The order was first announced in a New York Times piece that quickly became the subject of debate because of its focus on the national origin component of the order. Responses from President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and many Jewish groups have made the argument that this reporting ignores the Obama administration’s consideration of a similar action, while also arguing that detractors of the order are being simplistic. The issue, they say, is more nuanced and related specifically to speech on campuses.

However, all of this dances around the key problem raised by the president’s order. American Jews are not, and have never been, a nation unto ourselves. We are an ethnic group within this republic. But make no mistake, our nationality is American. We do not come from the country of Jew.

Now we are encircled by arguments claiming that this issue is more nuanced and complex than we think, that the order doesn’t really classify us incorrectly, and that this is nothing to be worried about. Those kinds of arguments rarely work with teenagers. They are a red flag that typically indicate that adults are telling them the opposite of what is true.

In our class, we looked at the language of the Civil Rights Act and quickly dispatched with the idea that we fit the definition of a race or a color. As Jews we are neither, and the racial classification of Jews has a horrible history of being wielded against us. Instead, we focused on the pros and cons of this order, and the question of whether Jews can be classified by national origin.

Right away — even among students who may support aspects of this order — the idea of classifying us according to national origin stood out as “confusing” “unclear” and potentially “really scary.” Why scary? Some argued that it’s perhaps because the president himself appears to have little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism.

This is the very problem that the president is trying to address with college campuses, and it is certainly true that discourse at universities on the issue of Israel today — especially by critics — ranges from imperfect to coarse and sloppy. If changing this rhetoric is the goal, then threatening funding at universities may be a potent way get people’s attention. But doing it this way could also backfire terribly, leading to old anti-Semitic tropes about Jews secretly influencing people in power in order to get what we want. This is no abstract argument given the violent attacks against Jews in New Jersey just this week.

Of course it is true that the president says he is issuing this order to help us, so, his imperfections aside, why be concerned? The reasons are many.

It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel, including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions we need in order to foster productive discourse. The approach attacks symptoms, not causes. Nowhere does this enhance the quality of debate. It threatens those who dare to do it. Colleges that do continue to have these conversations are likely destined to have one-sided pro-Israel conversations.

It is also possible to envision Israelis being concerned about Trump’s methods. The Israeli government may want American Jews to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality in our own nation doesn’t help that cause.

This is perhaps the most concerning point. Grouping us as no other religious group has been in this country, and making us clearly “dual citizens,” raises the trope of dual loyalty that has been a source of segregating, ghettoizing, and murdering Jews for centuries.

Why does the president have the right to do this? Does he plan to furnish us with passports in our own nation? Do the Jews who purportedly urged him to do this get to decide for us, their fellow Americans, what our status in this nation is? Perhaps this is an overreaction and the scope of this order is as limited as its supporters say, but given the history of persecution against Jews, we are well-founded in being suspicious of actions that start small and get big, and don’t do so in our favor.

That is the context in which our discussion will continue on in our classroom. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. The very man who issued this order makes such comments all the time. Just this week he told the American Israeli Council:

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me — you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!

We need to fight this hate in all its forms, wherever it appears, even if in the guise that it is here to help us. But all of that rests on the answer to a crucial question raised by one of my students in the midst of our discussion. Are we still Americans?

Fact Checking The President's Letter to Pelosi

Earlier today, the president sent a scathing letter to House majority leader Nancy Pelosi attacking the impeachment process. The letter contains false, misleading or exaggerated statements. The New York Times fact checked the 5-page latter and found 19 such statements. The NYT did not comment on many other statements such as "Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt" on page 4 of the letter. Both assertions in that statement are false: If the House votes to impeach, it will be legal, and solid evidence shows that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections. Such deceitful comments directly undermine democracy and the rule of law, which is the president's obvious intent.

NYT fact check of page 1

NYT fact check of page 2

NYT fact check of page 3

NYT fact check of part of page 4

NYT fact check of part of page 5

The president's unhinged, deceitful letter is likely to further divide and inflame American politics. Few or no minds will change based in this, but attitudes of some are likely to harden more. The letter further undermines democratic institutions, and respect for the constitution and the rule of law.

Ideological Susceptibility to Pseudo-Profound Bullshit

Researchers in Sweden have looked at susceptibility of liberal and conservative people to pseudo-profound bullshit, which are statements and arguments that seem to be insightful or meaningful but are meaningless. An example is the statement “we are in the midst of a high-frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.” That's definitely meaningless.

The researchers write for the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin journal: “This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit—that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters. Most of the results held up when we controlled for the perceived profundity of genuine aphorisms, cognitive reflection, numeracy, information processing bias, gender, age, education, religiosity, and spirituality. The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right- and left-wingers.”

A prior discussion here pointed out that political ideology tends to lead people to false beliefs and unsound reasoning or logic. The cause and effect relationship isn't clear, but there is a correlation between strong ideological beliefs and a tendency to read into rhetoric, facts and truths realities that accord with the ideology even if that leads to distortion and false beliefs.

One of the authors of the research commented: “I think that the notion of pseudo-profound bullshit specifically caught my attention because I have a background in philosophy and an aversion to unclear statements. Understanding how bullshit operates also struck me as particularly urgent in our current digital age, in which fake news, conspiracy theories, and ‘alternative facts’ may have greater destructive potential than ever — although people have probably engaged in bullshitting for thousands of years.” The researcher also commented that “on the left, it may stem from an uncritical openness to ideas that sound ideologically appealing or familiar; on the right, it may stem from a disinclination to critically engage with information and its sources.”

It is probably true that people have engaged in BSing for thousands of years. The historical record and modern times are full of examples. The researcher noted that his interest was in trying to promote scientific thinking regardless of differences in worldview. The research was conducted among Swedes, but presumably the data can be extrapolated at least to Westerners, if not everyone. Follow-up studies will be needed to confirm these findings and further explain the situation.

Forced Confidentiality Agreements Hide Immorality

One powerful tool that hides illegal, embarrassing and immoral acts by companies and wealthy people from public knowledge is the confidentiality agreement (CDA) or non-disclosure agreement (NDA). CDAs are used to prevent a company or person from suffering losses or damages from disclosing sensitive information and trade secrets to prevent the receiving party from profiting from it. Those are legitimate concerns.

However, CDAs usually impose a requirement on employees and contractors to keep all kinds of activities confidential and when disputes arise, CDAs require secret arbitration to resolve the dispute. Activities and disputes that CDAs hide include various illegal tax evasion schemes (discussed here previously), illegal pollution activities, sexual assault and harassment and settlements when consumers are harmed or cheated.

Disputes and settlements arising from a large swath of commercial and private activity are completely shielded from any public scrutiny. In essence, CDAs constitute a vast body of law that is completely private. As usual, the balance of power strongly favors commercial entities and wealthy people who rely heavily on CDAs to hide how they do business and conduct themselves, legal or not.

An article in Vox describes how former Fox News personality Gretchen Carlson came to realize how powerful the CDA shield was in terms of protecting bad acts by companies and individuals from disclosure of sexual harassment. Vox wrote:

Mandatory arbitration clauses mean that many — if not most — cases of sexual harassment are dealt with behind closed doors. Instead of making their way to court, they are settled by arbitrators, independent professionals who are selected to resolve disputes. It’s estimated that more than 60 million Americans have signed such arbitration clauses. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that it’s legal for companies to require employees to sign arbitration clauses in their employment contracts, making it impossible for these workers to bring class action lawsuits against employers over labor disputes. 

In July 2016, Gretchen Carlson sued Fox News chair and CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, a move that eventually won her $20 million and encouraged dozens of other Fox employees to come forward. In the end, Ailes was forced to step down. Now Carlson is focusing her efforts on ending forced arbitration, which she signed in her own contract with Fox News, and helping women speak publicly about harassment. She’s not allowed to explain how her lawyers managed to get around the clause, and says that kind of secrecy is part of the problem. 

“Very early on, I realized that it was a pervasive epidemic,” Carlson says of mandatory arbitration. “When I filed my suit, I had no idea how pervasive it was across every socioeconomic line and every profession, from Smalltown, USA, all the way to Washington, DC.”

Let’s say you’re being harassed. You go to complain to HR. The company wipes their forehead with their hand and goes, “Phew, nobody will ever know about this,” because of these clauses. Then you get thrown into forced arbitration where, oftentimes, the company picks your arbitrator for you. You don’t get the same number of witnesses and depositions [as you would in court]. Rarely does the employee win — only 20 percent of the time. And there are no appeals.

Then you could get fired because once you bring a harassment or discrimination claim, companies rarely keep you on. So now you’re out of a job and can’t ever tell anyone why you had to leave. Also, with arbitration, because it’s secret, the perpetrator oftentimes gets to stay on the job — again, because no one knows the person has been accused — to harass again.

The system is heavily rigged in favor of the business entity and wealthy persons who draft the agreements to favor themselves. In theory, a court or government agency acting can require shielded information to be disclosed, but that is rare. CDAs are not supposed to be used to shield illegal activity, but in practice that is what they often do, either directly or indirectly.

Carlson recently published an opinion piece for the New York Times. She wrote:

When my retaliation and sexual harassment complaint against Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chairman and C.E.O., went public in 2016, there were no #MeToo or Times Up movements to help rally support for my cause. .... When I sued, I could have never known that my story and the stories of other women at Fox would turn into both a television mini-series and a film, and, more important, that I would be prohibited from speaking about these projects. 

“Winning” my complaint with a settlement and a nondisclosure agreement meant I was, essentially, forced into silence. .... Although NDAs usually prohibit employers from disparaging victims, whisper campaigns often follow women for years. As I documented in my book “Be Fierce,” the vast majority of survivors never work in their chosen professions again. American industry has lost many talented women to harassment, while allowing predators to continue climbing the professional ladder (where they have the potential to victimize even more women). 

There are those who say to victims, “You took money in exchange for staying quiet, so what’s the problem?” and “If you want to talk, give your settlement money back.” These sentiments miss the point and perpetuate the lie that victims benefit from being sexually harassed. First of all, buying silence instead of stopping harassment is immoral and unjust. Next, the settlements are made not just in exchange for secrecy, but to make up for lost wages, because once you find the courage to come forward, your “reward” is often that you’ve lost your job (and potentially your career). And lastly, NDAs foster a culture that gives predators cover to commit the same crimes again. (emphasis added)

One can argue that far too much commerce in America is conducted in unwarranted secrecy. The secrecy shields far too much illegal and immoral activity. The public is unaware of how rigged the arbitration system is and they have no way to opt out. Credit card companies all require forced arbitration and secrecy about settlements. Arbitration settlements from harmed consumers are kept secret so that people cannot know what the relative value of their case may be when they are injured. The secrecy system to hide immoral and illegal acts is itself both unfair and immoral.