Thoughts on reparations

Allen Guelzo

C-Span 2 Book TV aired a 2 hour discussion by American historian Allen Guelzo (Princeton). He specializes in the American intellectual history and the US Civil War. At 1:33:47 to 1:44:51 (~11 minutes), Gelzo answered a caller question about payment of reparations to Black Americans for past injustices. His take on the issue is interesting. A short summary is below.

Start with the definition of the kind of reparations to be paid

There are two distinct kinds of reparations, (i) for slavery, and (ii) for discrimination and injustices what came thereafter. Most people focus on reparations for slavery. These are the key questions that need to be answered as best they can be answered. 

Reparations for slavery - it's complicated

1. Who will pay

Fed gov was not a slave owner

Slavery was up to the states and state laws

White descendants of slave owners are usually not capable of paying much in reparations

Pennsylvania was a slave state far longer (> 200 years) than Alabama (~60 years), therefore PA has much more responsibility than AL

But, for example, PA moved to abolish slavery and AL did not 

The Civil War took ~750,000 total lives (average estimate); ~340,000 lives were lost on the Union side → all the lost lives were part of the cost of the war to end slavery (Lincoln: Every drop of blood drawn by the lash is being paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword)

How does one value those lost lives, including Lincoln's life, and reckon that against the reparations to be paid? And, if one omits this reckoning and reparations is just about getting a check, then one ignores the Civil War itself in the calculation.

2. Who gets paid

Many modern blacks Americans are descendants of slave owners → On average, black Americans are 20-25% white by descent due to sexual slavery and widespread rape under slavery  

Blacks who are not slave descendants would get nothing

If a person today is a descendant of a slave and a slave holder, to whom does that person pay and how much do they pay?

What the Republican rank and file think about the 2020 election

This is from a Jan. 7, 2022 article in the Washington Post:

All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. 

Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. This is nearly identical to what we found in our April poll, in which just 19 percent of Republicans said Biden was legitimately elected. Other universities, media outlets and polling firms have found nearly identical results.

How could the “big lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of expressive responding, a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief. In this case, it would mean that these Republicans, upset about Biden winning, say his victory was not legitimate even though they know deep down that it was.

While it is difficult to firmly establish what respondents truly believe, clues suggest this is a genuine belief. One piece of evidence is that the result is nearly identical in phone surveys and online surveys. When people respond to phone surveys, those responses are often biased by what social scientists call “social desirability,” in which respondents say what they think makes them look good — even if that is not what they actually believe. Web-based surveys are known to reduce social desirability bias.

Other survey responses appear consistent with a true belief that the election was stolen. In our December UMass Poll, we asked those who said Biden’s presidential victory was illegitimate to select all the reasons they believed so from a list of conspiracy theories floated by those pushing the “big lie.” As you can see below, fully 83 percent say that “fraudulent ballots supporting Joe Biden were counted by election officials”; 81 percent that officials counted “absentee ballots from deceased people”; 76 percent tell us that “non-citizens and other ineligible voters were allowed to vote for Joe Biden”; 69 percent that the victory was illegitimate because “some states changed election rules in ways they should not have”; and 65 percent that election officials destroyed ballots supporting Trump.

In other words, not only do they say that Biden’s victory was not legitimate, but they endorse several (though not all) specific theories about how fraud was perpetrated.

 

Further, Republicans in our UMass Poll say they would be more likely to vote for 2022 GOP congressional candidates who questioned Biden’s victory and less likely to vote for those who concede that Biden won. Using a conjoint experiment, an approach likely to reduce social desirability bias and expressive response, political scientists Vin Arceneaux and Rory Truex found that Republicans do indeed reward and punish candidates in this way. 

Republican respondents consistently tell pollsters that they doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Apparently, that’s a genuinely held belief. (emphasis added)

The WaPo article described another polling technique to get at what Republicans really think without major distortion by cognitive or social bias. That experiment was a list experiment, which is a way to reduce social desirability bias and expressive responding. Here, people pick an item without having to directly tell pollster what they think. That avoids people telling about something embarrassing or feeling rewarded by telling a pollster a feeling rather than a true belief. 

Concerns about getting accurate data reflects how cognitive biology and social influences affect behavior in mostly subtle, unconscious but powerful ways. This is a big part of what makes polling so tricky and easy to get wrong. 

Note the emphasized paragraph. Republican candidates will be rewarded for questioning Biden’s win in 2020 and punished for not doing so. People, including candidates for office, do respond to incentives. Thus, we can reasonably expect continuous questioning of the 2020 election from radical right GOP candidates in 2022 and for as long as it remains an actual incentive. This big lie is probably not going to go away any time soon.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to salitcid for mentioning this article. 

Another description of neo-fascist propaganda surrounding the Dunham investigation

The American radical right, i.e., most of the GOP, its financial backers and rank and file, most Christian nationalists and all of the neo-fascist propaganda Leviathan (Fox News, etc.) is going berserk. John Dunham’s multi-year investigation of Democratic deep state treachery and pedophilia or whatever is a lightening rod for radical right authoritarian propaganda. A Washington Post opinion piece nicely lays out the Republican lies, hyperbole, faux moral outrage, rabid slanders, crackpot reasoning, etc.:

Those of us in the media who worry about misinformation regularly face a dilemma: When some appalling new story emerges of political actors lying to the public, should you confront it? Or will the attempt to debunk the story only draw more attention to it, spreading the lies further?

There’s no perfect answer that fits every situation. But at the very least, it’s important to understand how systems of propaganda operate, so we can try to minimize the damage they do. And never in our history has there been a propaganda system that operates with the skill, enthusiasm and outright shamelessness of the one conservatives have working for them right now.

That’s depressingly evident in the latest “blockbuster” story gripping the right, a story built on a grab bag of misleading assertions, misinterpretations and outright lies. It forces us to ask yet again: Is it possible to have a healthy democracy when so much of it is soaking in misinformation?

The current story concerns John Durham, the special counsel who has spent almost three years investigating the investigation into Russia’s attempts to subvert the 2016 election. You can read a comprehensive rundown of the facts here or here.

Durham has indicted Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI, which Sussmann denies. In 2016, Sussmann, whose firm was doing legal work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, gave the FBI a tip involving supposedly suspicious internet traffic between servers in Trump buildings and a Russian bank; it turned out to be nothing nefarious.

Sussman got the information through another client of his, Rodney Joffe, a technology executive with government cybersecurity contracts, including one that involved protecting the White House from cyber attacks.

In a court filing last week, Durham alleged that Joffe “exploited” his arrangement with the White House to obtain the data in question “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump."

Joffe vigorously denies this. His spokesperson says examining such data was par for the course, as he was doing cybersecurity work for the government, and in late 2016, everyone was appropriately concerned about Russian hacking. Durham has not indicted Joffe for anything.

But this is where the propaganda machine goes nuclear.

Fox News is treating this like a stunning revelation (“Worse than Watergate” trumpeted Sean Hannity), dramatically amping up the story with each retelling. After all, it isn’t good enough to say a lawyer with a second-order connection to the Clinton campaign got information from another client with legitimate access to White House internet traffic data; that’s not nearly scandalous enough.

So Fox published a headline reading “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds.” The Washington Examiner claimed Sussmann “spied on Trump’s White House office” — even though the internet data came from 2016, when Barack Obama was president.

“Hillary broke into a presidential candidate’s computer server and a sitting president’s computer server,” claimed Fox host Jesse Watters ludicrously. “There, her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia.”

Tucker Carlson added that Clinton’s campaign stole “presumably text messages,” which not even Durham alleges.

These are all lies. This is not about “hacking,” no evidence was planted and the data on White House traffic came from when Obama was president. You can argue that Durham’s filing was itself misleading and tendentious, but even if every word of it was true, what they were saying on Fox was outrageously false.

But the propaganda machine doesn’t stop there. Republican politicians — even those who know better — see their constituents being fed this line, so they rush to get in on the act:

If a Special Counsel discovers that a Republican infiltrated the private server of the democrat Presidential nominee & then the White House it would on the news 24/7

But since it was a Democrat who did this they ignore, deflect & downplay

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 15, 2022

Democrats got caught spying, first on candidate Trump and then when he was President IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

The Russia hoax was a lie from day one—manufactured by his political enemies—and every person involved with this un-American activity must be brought to justice.

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) February 13, 2022

Hillary Clinton must immediately be held accountable for her involvement in the biggest criminal political corruption story of our lifetime. #TrumpWasRight https://t.co/CkHszhZmpk

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) February 14, 2022

The coverage has gone meta; Fox is now angrily asking why other news outlets are not matching their breathless coverage of this nothingburger, feeding their viewers’ paranoid fantasies about cover-ups and conspiracies.

So in no time, we move from questionable claims to obviously false allegations to demands for legal retaliation against political opponents to whining about their own victimhood, with the enthusiastic participation of GOP officeholders, none of whom has the courage to say, “Hey guys, I hate Hillary as much as anyone, but it seems like we’re running out ahead of the facts here.”

That’s because every Republican relies on the propaganda machine. It helps their own campaigns. It keeps the base in a state of perpetual anger. And if you question it, you will become its enemy.



This is happening while there’s an entire trial going on in New York about a single inaccurate word in a New York Times editorial about Sarah Palin — an editorial that was quickly corrected. The Times is falling all over itself to explain how it got something wrong, and no one on the left is defending the paper. Meanwhile, Fox programming contains extraordinary amounts of factual errors, misleading assertions and outright lies, almost none of which ever get corrected.

So where does that leave us? The unfortunate answer is that when a propaganda apparatus such as this one is so deeply embedded within one of our parties, it becomes almost impossible to puncture. Fantasies are accepted as fact, lies become immune to refutation and anyone who displays even a modicum of honesty is denounced as a traitor.

There may be a solution out there, a strategy to pull our politics back to reality. But if there is, we haven’t found it yet. (emphasis added)

Question: Is there a solution or strategy out there to pull our politics back to reality, or are we and democracy probably hosed? 

Republican Party propaganda tactics

In complexity lies opportunity for liars, slanderers and betrayers

This story is complicated, but it exemplifies the propaganda techniques that radical right sources routinely employ to deceive, polarize, enrage and foment distrust, among other bad, immoral things. In this instance, Fox News is the major lying propagandist source in this pack of lies about the horrors of Democrats. The New York Times writes:

WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency. 

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats. 

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

There you have it. Republican propagandists including Fox News and the ex-president, do not hesitate to make up lies and stories to smear and slander Democrats. Evidence and truth are irrelevant. There is not one shred of moral qualm in Republican Party neo-fascist, anti-democratic propaganda. 

Shift the burden to the listener, then trap them 

in a web of lies and crackpottery

A key point here is that when propaganda like this is grounded in complexity and detail, the effort the public needs to distinguish truth from lies is high. How many people who take the ex-president and/or Fox news seriously, will even consider the fact that they have been subtly lied to, emotionally manipulated and betrayed? 

That number must be pretty close to ~0.1%., or about 1 in 1,000. By now, everyone inclined to seriously question Fox, T**** and other radical right propaganda and lies sources concluded long ago that they are chronic liars and walked away. What is left is a hard core of believers who will never question or walk away. In more ways than one, that cadre of blind believers is a necessary and core part of the radical right threat to American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties.

The ex-president, Fox, and the Republican Party and its core financial backers (corrupt mendacious capitalists) and influencers (rabid mendacious Christian fundamentalist extremists) love complexity and piles of hard to fact check detail. It works for them and against us. The liars and manipulators love it.

So, for neo-fascist Republican liars and falsehood-based manipulators, lies and slanders grounded in complexity with lots of details is their best friend. Complexity and details constitute a great ecosystem to make lies feel like truth, irrational emotional manipulation feel warranted, and crackpot partisan motivated reasoning feel rational. The cognitive and social burden and costs are too high for believers to question, so they don’t.

A last thought, Mr. Durham should be fired for refusal to answer questions. His refusal to talk looks a lot like a radical right, neo-fascist deep state operative tactic. And, while we're firing Durham, let’s also fire our grossly incompetent Attorney General Merrick Garland. At this point, neither firing would hurt and maybe one or both would help a little.