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1----------------------------------------------------------‘1 Million Americans Will Be Shot in the Next Decade’
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3Dr. Mallory Williams, chief of the Division of Trauma and Critical Care at Howard University Hospital
4“I see more gunshot wounds as a trauma surgeon here in the United States per week than I did when I was serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan. There’s no question about it.”
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6In a new Atlantic short documentary, "American Trauma: How the NRA Sparked a Medical Rebellion," Dr. Williams and other esteemed trauma surgeons explain how the severity—and, frequently, fatality—of gunshot-related injuries has galvanized the medical community to take action against gun violence.
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8However, in many ways, their hands are tied: In 1996, Congress passed an amendment—lobbied for by the National Rifle Association—that prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” This includes conducting government-sponsored research on the effects of gun violence.
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10In the film, Dr. Joseph Sakran, director of emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, laments the fact that the NRA has effectively succeeded in enforcing its “stay in your lane” position on doctors and gun policy.
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12Per Dr. Sakran
13“Trying to provide the care that those patients need after they've been shot is not enough. There are some injuries that we see that despite the best medical technology, we're not able to save those patients. So the way you save those patients is to prevent [the injuries] from ever happening in the first place … We have to do more.”
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15The doctors interviewed in the film emphasize what they perceive to be the nonpartisan nature of the gun-violence epidemic, which they often refer to as a public-health crisis. Dr. Williams likens the responsibility he feels to take action to the role the medical community played in affecting policy decisions about tobacco regulation and drinking and driving.
16he says
17“I find this to be a logical continuum that the gun discussion would include a medical voice,”.
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19Dr. Sakran concludes
20“This is not a Democratic issue. It's not a Republican issue. This is an American issue. And it’s a uniquely American problem.”FEDERATION (“BASTILLE”) DAY WEEK’SEND TRANSMISSIONIt’s fireworks and military parading today as France celebrates Bastille Day, marking the opening salvo in 1789 of the French Revolution.HAPPY BELATED B—DAY UNTO THE MADEMOISELLE MICHAELA NASTASIA----------------------------------------------------------MASS PRAYER(S) REQUESTFRI 5:23 PM
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22Maria
23Hello, I apologize for having missed this message from last Sunday. My mind is not all there lately as my mom had another stroke and I am on a little less also. Have a wonderful weekend.NORM A DILLON<www.facebook.com/norm.norm.986>----------------------------------------------------------HAPPY 36th SOBRIETY JUDITH EGGERTTONIGHT’S TRANSMISSION BEDEDICATED UNTO OUR VOLCANO-CROWNED PRINCESS ‘O’ THE PACIFIC : THE GRAND MA DAME JUDITH EGGERT (Pay Respect[s] @ <www.facebook.com/judith.eggert>), IN-CÉLÉBRATION ‘O’ HER THIRTY-SIXTH DIES RENASCENTIA (“REBIRTHDAY”) IN-SOBRIETY AS SÓLAR RETURNED SIMULTANEOUS FÊTE DE LA FÉDÉRATION (“FEDERATION DAY”) And INBEST WISHESFOR HER SPIRITUAL ANNUS NOVUS (“NEW YEAR”) – EXPERIENCED DAY-BY-DAY IN-GRATITUDE And MUTUAL AID BY-WAY-‘O’ FELLOWSHIP IN AA (Alcoholics Anonymous [Condīta est 1935—]) ....SALMAN SHEIKHSTEPHEN MYERS (“CHIGRO”)----------------------------------------------------------
24George KnightListening now Douglas! So glad to hear you're safe and well. News got to me about the earthquake. Glad to hear you're safe. Much love and appreciation for all you do!??❤️
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28Om Blissomon border trauma and child parenting: i have had two friends who were in that position of being the care person at young ages.both were due to sick mothers. both were doing cooking, cleaning, baby helping,sibling helping, mother helping, and more at age 2! i would not have believed itif i had not seen it. it is so amazing to hear ddd speakabout this. thank you, ddd, for explaining so many things i wantedexplained.
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31Sarah ShieldsI appreciated it as well, and he does it in depth and empatheticaly .DEBORAH STARBORN HEWINS----------------------------------------------------------OVER THE WEEK’SENDThe US began nationwide raids on undocumented families. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was scheduled to begin the multi-day operation across 10 major cities on Sunday, targeting at least 2,000 immigrants who have been ordered to be deported. The operation, which had been postponed last month, has drawn criticism from local officials and lawmakers.President Donald Trump had postponed the operation so Congress could hash out immigration policy, but he repeatedly tweeted about the raids as part of his illegal immigration crackdown.
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33Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to arrest thousands of migrant families that have removal orders were set to start Today. Mayors of the cities where the raids were due to take place have complained that ICE has left them in the dark.So This Morning ICE raids and dangerous rain ushered in a new week – Some people woke up to rivers on their front doors after Tropical Storm Barry swept ashore in Louisiana while ICE raids began across the USA :
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35US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was due today to arrest thousands of migrant families with court orders to be removed from the country when Police shot dead a man who tossed an incendiary device at an ICE center in Washington.---— After a storm swamped New Orleans, there were aready concerns that even worse weather wast on the way: a possible hurricane that would raise the Mississippi River to the brim of protective levees.Barry may or may not have been a hurricane when it made landfall early Saturday in Louisiana. Either way, this was a dangerous storm that people needed to take seriously. The first tropical system to threaten the US this year posed a triple flooding threat to Louisiana via storm surge, high rivers and rain.
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37The storm presented New Orleans with an unprecedented problem: The Mississippi River is usually at 6 to 8 feet this time of year there, but it's at 16 feet now, and Barry threatened a storm surge of 2 to 3 feet. That meant the river crested over the weekend at 19 feet, a level not seen in almost 70 years.
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39Barry also dumped as much as 10 inches of rain before it moved on. Some Louisiana parishes have instituted mandatory evacuations for low-lying areas.
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41Meantime in the Northeast, a separate, drenching storm system has killed two people in Pennsylvania.In about three decades, London's climate will feel a lot like Barcelona's. This prediction, coming from a new study from a Swiss university, doesn't mean London will start enjoying Mediterranean breezes. It means the city could be facing severe droughts, like Barcelona did a decade ago when it almost ran out of drinking water and reservoirs nearly ran dry. The study predicted the future climate conditions of 520 major cities worldwide, pairing those predictions with the conditions of cities today. the study warns that By 2050, Madrid will feel more like Marrakesh, Morocco; Seattle will feel like San Francisco; and New York will feel like Virginia Beach, Virginia, according to the report. An estimated 77% of cities around the world will see their climate conditions change drastically.ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIMS SCRUTINIZED Trump gave a speech on the environment this week. Most of his claims don’t stand up.President Trump delivered remarks Monday from the White House, calling his administration an environmental leader.
42Few of Trump’s environmental claims stand up to scrutiny.
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44President Trump on Monday held himself out as a leader in the fight to protect America’s air and water, despite two years of policies that have weakened environmental regulations.
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46In a speech at the White House, Trump said his administration was working “harder than many previous administrations, maybe almost all of them” to protect the environment. During his campaign, and since taking office, however, Trump has allied himself with coal, oil and gas industry groups, nominated a former energy lobbyist to run the Environmental Protection Agency and vowed to pull out of the Paris climate accord. He’s also pushed for the repeal of regulations that would have cracked down on coal-burning power plants.
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48This last move led the American Lung Assn. to announce on Monday that it plans to sue the administration for violating the Clean Air Act — highlighting the contrast between the president’s desire to be seen as an environmental leader and widespread criticism of his policies by public health advocates and environmentalists.
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50What Trump said: “From day one, my administration has made it a top priority to ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.”
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52The record: Air quality has improved in the United States since the 1970s. The passage of the Clean Air Act forced emissions reductions across the country, and that led to less smog. But it would be incorrect to say, as Trump has before, that the U.S. has the cleanest air.
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54According to the latest Environmental Performance Index, compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers, America ranks 10th for air quality. Australia, Canada, Denmark and Finland have cleaner air.
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56There are signs that U.S. air quality is deteriorating. EPA data show that there were more days of polluted air during each of Trump’s first two years in office than during any of the four years before. When scientists at New York University and the American Thoracic Society studied air pollution between 2008 and 2017, they found that in many U.S. cities, more people are being exposed to unhealthy levels of ozone, the key pollutant in smog that is linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
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58The problem is especially severe in Southern California, where the Trump administration’s plans to freeze tailpipe emissions at 2020 levels threaten the state’s air pollution and greenhouse gas-reduction goals.
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60Stan Meiburg, a former EPA deputy administrator who left the agency in 2017
61“If you’re looking at how the U.S. is doing as compared to 1970, there is a tremendous amount of progress, and no one would deny that. The irony is that progress was made because of actions taken by previous administrations, which he has strenuously objected to.”
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63What Trump said: “Today the United States is ranked — listen to this — No. 1 in the world for access to clean drinking water.”
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65The record: The U.S. has safe drinking water, earning the highest ranking, according to the Environmental Performance Index. However, that distinction is shared by nine other countries, including Canada, England and Spain.
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67The fact remains that many Americans in rural and impoverished parts of the country lack safe drinking water. In California, for example, some estimates suggest that more than a million people don’t have access to clean water.
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69Under Trump, the EPA has been criticized for not doing enough to make drinking water safer in the U.S.
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71One often-cited example is the agency’s approach to setting safety limits for a class of toxic chemicals that have been found in public water systems and private wells. Used for decades in furniture, clothing, Teflon-coated cookware and firefighting foam, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, have been linked to cancer and other health problems. Though some states have increased regulation of the chemicals, environmentalists and some members of Congress have accused the EPA of stalling. Agency officials have said they will begin work on an “action plan” by the end of this year.
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73The administration is also planning to roll back Clean Water Act protections on millions of acres of waterways and wetlands, including up to two-thirds of California’s inland streams. The EPA’s plans call for stripping federal protections from many of the nation’s wetlands and streams.
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75What Trump said: “Since 2000, our nation’s energy-related carbon emissions have declined more than any other country on Earth. Emissions are projected to drop in 2019 and 2020.”
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77The record: This is misleading. U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide were decreasing before Trump took office. In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, a shrinking economy meant less demand for energy, which translated to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
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79But after three years of decline, emissions increased in 2018, according to a report by the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm that tracks CO2 emissions. That occurred even as more coal-burning power plants in the U.S. were retired and replaced primarily with natural gas and renewable energy from solar and wind.
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81Trump is correct that the latest projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that show that emissions could fall in the next two years. But this is because of forecasts predicting milder winters and summers, resulting in lower energy usage.
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83What Trump said: “Thousands and thousands of tons of this debris float onto our shores after it’s dumped into the oceans by other countries.”
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85The record: When talking about pollution from plastics in the ocean, Trump often places the blame on Asian countries. In fact, the U.S. is a leading exporter of plastic waste.
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87The Trump administration repeatedly has said that ridding the world’s oceans of plastic debris is a priority, but it’s difficult to find evidence of that. Last spring, when more than 180 countries agreed to tighten regulations on the global trade in plastic waste, the U.S. opposed the deal. In their statement to the U.N. Environment Assembly, U.S. officials acknowledged that dumping millions of tons of plastic debris into the ocean “required urgent action.” Yet they opposed what they called a “prescriptive approach,” drawing criticism from environmentalists who accused the administration of being beholden to plastics producers.The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency
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89The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters—such as the freak storm in late June that buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail—are happening at the rate of one per week.
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91On Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders announced their proposal for a resolution declaring a national climate emergency. The timing was appropriate. Ten years ago, President Obama travelled to Denmark to pledge to the world that by 2020, through the Copenhagen Accord, the United States would reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions seventeen per cent below its 2005 levels. The pledge was on shaky ground, with no binding terms, but it was a start. Six years later, in 2015, Obama travelled to France to negotiate the Paris climate accord, joined by every country in the world but two (Syria and Nicaragua, who have both since signed), and promised that by 2025 the U.S. would reduce its emissions twenty-six to twenty-eight per cent.
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93Although the U.S. target was modest, considering the urgency of the crisis and the U.S.’s historic contributions to climate change (the U.S. has, from 1750 until the beginning of this year, emitted vastly more carbon than any other country on the planet), it was an important step and presented a goal that would be tough but not impossible to meet. The agreement also included a stipulation that the world’s countries would come together every five years to commit to higher targets.
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95Unfortunately, according to yet another grim new report, published on Monday by Rhodium Group, a private climate-research firm, the U.S. is not going to meet either its Copenhagen or Paris targets. By next year, given current policies and potential future energy-market dynamics, the U.S. will have reduced national greenhouse-gas emissions thirteen to sixteen per cent below 2005 levels—not the seventeen per cent that seemed modest back in 2009. Much more concerning is the fact that, in what the report regarded as the best possible scenario, in 2025, the U.S. will have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions only nineteen per cent below 2005 levels, which would leave us terrifyingly far from the Paris goal. Given that the fate of millions of species, the future livelihoods of current high schoolers, and the stability of modern civilization rests in the balance, the only word to describe the situation is: emergency.
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97President Trump, in his surreal and brazen speech on the U.S. environment on Monday, failed to mention climate change but boasted that, “since 2000, our nation’s energy-related carbon emissions have declined more than any other country on earth.” This may be true, but none of those reductions have anything to do with the Trump Administration. Energy-related emissions went up last year, not down, and emission reductions are nowhere near the level they need to be. The resolution that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and the Oregon representative Earl Blumenauer introduced to Congress on Tuesday (which was co-sponsored by more than two dozen other lawmakers), echoed the Green New Deal in calling for “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive scale to halt, reverse, mitigate, and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency.” It’s a symbolic resolution in Congress for now, given the Senate’s resistance to any climate-change policy, but it at least puts pressure on the 2020 Presidential candidates to keep discussing the issue as an emergency and debating climate solutions. It also reflects the reality of what’s needed, in the face of current facts.
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99For example, the authors of the Rhodium Group report found that the biggest reductions in emissions will occur in the power sector, where the coal fleet will shrink to a third of its current size by 2025, due to the continually falling costs of natural gas and renewables. But this country’s natural-gas boom (proudly touted on Monday by Energy Secretary Rick Perry) presents its own threat. Although the spread of renewable-power plants will continue to increase—thanks to steady declines in costs, tax incentives, and the increasing number of states with ambitious renewable-power requirements—they will still not spread fast enough if natural gas is as cheap as it is today. In the best-case scenario, by 2025, if natural-gas prices were a dollar and thirty-five cents higher (per one million British thermal units) than they are now, and if that were coupled with further steep price declines in renewables, solar deployment would quadruple and wind capacity would increase by half. But, in a troubling, business-as-usual scenario, with gas prices persisting at current levels over the next six years, solar is likely to grow much more slowly and wind is anticipated to only rise by twenty per cent. Nuclear would also quickly disappear in that scenario; forty-five per cent of the current nuclear fleet, representing twelve per cent of the power grid’s current zero-carbon capacity, could be retired.
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101Outside the power sector, things don’t look much better.
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103Industrial emissions—from steel and cement production, chemicals, and refineries—which have proved the hardest to reduce, generally increase with low natural-gas prices, meaning that, under current federal policy and at today’s prices, they could rise seven per cent from 2018 levels in the next six years.
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105In the world of transportation, low oil prices likewise point to disaster. Even if electric-vehicle prices fell dramatically, the report’s authors wrote, “consumers continue to favor larger, higher-emitting vehicles.” This is unlikely to change if oil prices fail to rise from their current levels. (Although oil-price fluctuation is largely determined by the global market and opec controls, among other things, U.S. shale-oil production also has an impact on the price.) Even if electric-vehicle-battery costs came way down, such cars are likely to represent no more than sixteen per cent of sales by 2025. Trump’s rollback of Obama’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, a rollback that automakers themselves are protesting, is—go figure—not helping.
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107The problem is not only carbon emissions. If all of Trump’s climate-policy rollbacks succeed, helping natural-gas prices stay very low, methane emissions could increase over the next six years by thirty per cent. Though methane does not last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (which lasts hundreds to thousands of years), it produces a planet-warming effect dozens of times more powerful. Two other greenhouse-gas-related decisions, both of which regard policies introduced by Obama and which could have a major impact on immediate emissions reduction, also remain in limbo. One concerns ways to control methane leaks from oil-and-gas production; the other concerns plans to decrease hydrofluorocarbon emissions, through both federal standards and participation in an international agreement known as the Kigali Amendment. Without these policies, over all U.S. emissions in 2025 would be eighty-nine million metric tons higher than they are today (or about 1.4 per cent of total annual emissions for that year), unless additional states, beyond those that already do, take steps to fill the federal void. I guess that’s why they call it an emergency.
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109While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s calls for a climate-emergency declaration are not solving any problems, they are providing the language that needs to dominate the national conversation. And that matters. The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters are happening at the rate of one per week. This past June was the hottest on record. At the end of the month, a freak storm buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail, and on Thursday morning news outlets reported that freak hailstorms in Greece killed seven people. A month’s worth of rain fell on Washington, D.C., in an hour on Monday (while Trump completely ignored the climate crisis in his speech on the environment), then more flash floods drowned New Orleans, which is now preparing for a tropical storm that could dump another twenty inches of rain and test the city’s levees. The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world’s coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off the sorts of tipping points that most concern scientists—specifically, the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet, where, in June, a heatwave set off melting across half of its surface. More than seven hundred and forty governments in sixteen countries have now declared some form of climate emergency, according to activists from the Climate Mobilization, who have been helping lead the campaign. The city government of Darebin, Australia, was the first, in December, 2016. Fierce little Hoboken, New Jersey, was the first in the United States, in November, 2017, and the third in the world.
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111New York City declared a climate emergency on June 26th this year. That month, in interviews with the New York Times and in Presidential debates, several of the Democratic candidates used the phrase “climate emergency,” and others referred to the “climate crisis,” “climate ruin,” and “climate chaos.” (On Thursday, Columbia University, The New Republic, Gizmodo, and a group of environmental organizations announced that they, too, would be hosting a climate summit, in September, for all of the Democratic candidates.)
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113The alarm bells are working, the wheels are turning. State and city policies won’t get us where we need to be by 2025, but they—along with a new President—could get us closer to where we need to be by 2030. It’s just going to keep getting harder.---Friends in arms.
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115Despite strong objections from Communist China, Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen visited these U.S. this week, stopping in New York for two days on her way to visit Taiwan’s political allies in the Caribbean.Tsai’s jaunt in the U.S., which comes a week after Washington approved a $2 billion arms sales to the self-governed island, is not an official visit. Tsai made a similar transit through California last year.Trump Is Poised to Sign a Radical Agreement to Send Future Asylum Seekers to Guatemala
116The US might be a step closer to a breakthrough with Guatemala. Multiple sources say the US is close to reaching a "safe third country" agreement with the Central American nation.
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118It would mean migrants who pass through Guatemala would apply for asylum there, rather than continuing on to the US, and it would likely prevent some migrants from applying for asylum in the US. An official said The US is working to make sure there would be sufficient protections in place for people who'd claim asylum in Guatemala.
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120A safe-third-party agreement between the U.S. and Guatemala would mean that most asylum seekers won’t even have a chance to make their claim in these U.S.
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122Early next week, according to a D.H.S. official, the Trump Administration is expected to announce a major immigration deal, known as a safe-third-country agreement, with Guatemala.
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124For weeks, there have been reports that negotiations were under way between the two countries, but, until now, none of the details were official. According to a draft of the agreement obtained by The New Yorker, asylum seekers from any country who either show up at U.S. ports of entry or are apprehended while crossing between ports of entry could be sent to seek asylum in Guatemala instead. During the past year, tens of thousands of migrants, the vast majority of them from Central America, have arrived at the U.S. border seeking asylum each month. By law, the U.S. must give them a chance to bring their claims before authorities, even though there’s currently a backlog in the immigration courts of roughly a million cases. The Trump Administration has tried a number of measures to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country—from “metering” at ports of entry to forcing people to wait in Mexico—but, in every case, international obligations held that the U.S. would eventually have to hear their asylum claims. Under this new arrangement, most of these migrants will no longer have a chance to make an asylum claim in the U.S. at all.
125My Neighbor
126“We’re talking about something much bigger than what the term ‘safe third country’ implies. We’re talking about a kind of transfer agreement where the U.S. can send any asylum seekers, not just Central Americans, to Guatemala.”
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128From the start of the Trump Presidency, Administration officials have been fixated on a safe-third-country policy with Mexico—a similar accord already exists with Canada—since it would allow the U.S. government to shift the burden of handling asylum claims farther south. The principle was that migrants wouldn’t have to apply for asylum in the U.S. because they could do so elsewhere along the way. But immigrants-rights advocates and policy experts pointed out that Mexico’s legal system could not credibly take on that responsibility. Per Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service“If you’re going to pursue a safe-third-country agreement, you have to be able to say ‘safe’ with a straight face,”. Until very recently, the prospect of such an agreement—not just with Mexico but with any other country in Central America—seemed far-fetched. Yet last month, under the threat of steep tariffs on Mexican goods, Trump strong-armed the Mexican government into considering it. Even so, according to a former Mexican official, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is stalling. the former official said“They are trying to fight this,”.
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130What’s so striking about the agreement with Guatemala, however, is that it goes even further than the terms the U.S. sought in its dealings with Mexico. My Neighbor“This is a whole new level. In my read, it looks like even those who have never set foot in Guatemala can potentially be sent there.”
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132At this point, there are still more questions than answers about what the agreement with Guatemala will mean in practice. A lot will still have to happen before it goes into force, and the terms aren’t final. The draft of the agreement doesn’t provide much clarity on how it will be implemented—another person with knowledge of the agreement said, “This reads like it was drafted by someone’s intern”—but it does offer an exemption for Guatemalan migrants, which might be why the government of Jimmy Morales, a U.S. ally, seems willing to sign on. Guatemala is currently in the midst of Presidential elections; next month, the country will hold a runoff between two candidates, and the current front-runner has been opposed to this type of deal. The Morales government, however, still has six months left in office.
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134A U.N.-backed anti-corruption body called the cicig, which for years was funded by the U.S. and admired throughout the region, is being dismantled by Morales, whose own family has fallen under investigation for graft and financial improprieties.
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136Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, concludes thatSigning an immigration deal “would get the Guatemalan government in the U.S.’s good graces. The question is, what would they intend to use that status for?” Earlier this week, after Morales announced that he would be meeting with Trump in Washington on Monday, three former foreign ministers of Guatemala petitioned the country’s Constitutional Court to block him from signing the agreement. Doing so, they said, “would allow the current president of the republic to leave the future of our country mortgaged, without any responsibility.”
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138The biggest, and most unsettling, question raised by the agreement is how Guatemala could possibly cope with such enormous demands. More people are leaving Guatemala now than any other country in the northern triangle of Central America. Rampant poverty, entrenched political corruption, urban crime, and the effects of climate change have made large swaths of the country virtually uninhabitable.McFarland said “This is already a country in which the political and economic system can’t provide jobs for all its people. There are all these people, their own citizens, that the government and the political and economic system are not taking care of. To get thousands of citizens from other countries to come in there, and to take care of them for an indefinite period of time, would be very difficult.”
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140Although the U.S. would provide additional aid to help the Guatemalan government address the influx of asylum seekers, it isn’t clear whether the country has the administrative capacity to take on the job. According to the person familiar with the safe-third-country agreement, “U.N.H.C.R. [the U.N.’s refugee agency] has not been involved” in the current negotiations. And, for Central Americans transferred to Guatemala under the terms of the deal, there’s an added security risk: many of the gangs Salvadorans and Hondurans are fleeing also operate in Guatemala.
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142In recent months, the squalid conditions at borderland detention centers have provoked a broad political outcry in the U.S. At the same time, a worsening asylum crisis has been playing out south of the U.S. border, beyond the immediate notice of concerned Americans. There, the Trump Administration is quietly delivering on its promise to redraw American asylum practice.
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144Since January, under a policy called the Migration Protection Protocols (M.P.P.), the U.S. government has sent more than fifteen thousand asylum seekers to Mexico, where they now must wait indefinitely as their cases inch through the backlogged American immigration courts. Cities in northern Mexico, such as Tijuana and Juarez, are filling up with desperate migrants who are exposed to violent crime, extortion, and kidnappings, all of which are on the rise.This week, as part of the M.P.P., the U.S. began sending migrants to Tamaulipas, one of Mexico’s most violent states and a stronghold for drug cartels that, for years, have brutalized migrants for money and for sport.
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146Safe-third-country agreements are notoriously difficult to enforce. The logistics are complex, and the outcomes tend not to change the harried calculations of asylum seekers as they flee their homes. These agreements, according to a recent study by the Migration Policy Institute, are “unlikely to hold the key to solving the crisis unfolding at the U.S. southern border.” The Trump Administration has already cut aid to Central America, and the U.S. asylum system remains in dire need of improvement. But there’s also little question that the agreement with Guatemala will reduce the number of people who reach, and remain in, the U.S. If the President has made the asylum crisis worse, he’ll also be able to say he’s improving it—just as he can claim credit for the decline in the number of apprehensions at the U.S. border last month. That was the result of increased enforcement efforts by the Mexican government acting under U.S. pressure.
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148There’s also no reason to expect that the Trump Administration will abandon its efforts to force the Mexicans into a safe-third-country agreement as well. the former Mexican official told me (Anon)“The Mexican government thought that the possibility of a safe-third-country agreement with Guatemala had fallen apart because of the elections there. The recent news caught top Mexican officials by surprise.” In the next month, the two countries will continue immigration talks, and, again, Mexico will face mounting pressure to accede to American demands. “The U.S. has used the agreement with Guatemala to convince the Mexicans to sign their own safe-third-country agreement. Its argument is that the number of migrants Mexico will receive will be lower now.”---Who gets to launch trade wars? Earlier this year Trump threatened to impose a 5% tariff on all goods entering the US from Mexico. The move was too much even for many Republicans, and it raises the question: Why does he have all that power regarding tariffs in the first place? In the Conversation, William Hauk recalls a time when Congress, not the president, decided how the US conducted trade.How Congress lost power over trade deals – and why some lawmakers want it back
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150Some in Congress want to wrest control of trade policy back from the president. It might surprise you to learn that lawmakers ever had it.
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152Until the 1930s, it was Congress that set the terms of U.S. trade negotiations with other countries and raised and lowered tariffs as it saw fit, while the president did little but sign his name. Over the ensuing decades, however, the legislative branch began to cede more and more power to the executive after a trade war sparked by protectionist tariffs worsened the Great Depression.
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154As a result, President Donald Trump today has been able to unilaterally raise tariffs and launch trade wars with several countries – including allies – without a word from Congress. For some lawmakers, his recent threat, since aborted, to impose a 5% tariff on everything that crosses the border from Mexico was the last straw.
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156I’m a former DOD ___ who has destroyed doc___ the political economy of U.S. trade policy. To provide context on what’s happening today, I thought it was worth revisiting the history of how lawmakers lost their trade powers.
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158The Constitution and trade
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160Until the 20th century, the president had little say in how the U.S. conducted trade.
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162Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to raise taxes. And since tariffs are by definition a type of tax paid on goods and services imported from overseas, Congress carefully guarded its authority in this area, particularly since they were the largest source of revenue for the federal government until the creation of the income tax in 1913.
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164As a result, debates over tariffs made up the biggest economic fights of the 19th century and were often used to embarrass political rivals.
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166This is not to say that the president had no influence over trade policy. But all changes in tariffs necessarily started as legislation in the House of Representatives since they were, after all, revenue bills. Therefore, before the bill got to the president’s desk, it would go through a full congressional debate with committee reports, amendments, filibusters and the like.
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168Smoot-Hawley prompts FDR to seize control
169
170The Great Depression marked a sharp turning point in U.S. trade policy.
171
172Just as the Depression began, Congress passed what has become known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It raised prices on imported commodities like wool rags, which were necessary in the clothing industry. It also harmed the economies of U.S. trading partners – which in turn hurt America. For example, Germany, still recovering from World War I and subsequent reparations payments, saw its exports to the U.S. fall by $181 million. As a result, German consumers had fewer U.S. dollars to spend, and U.S. exports to Germany fell by $277 million.
173
174And that’s the problem when hundreds of lawmakers with scores of often narrow interests are in charge of trade policy. As I noted in a 2011 paper, tariffs imposed during this era weren’t designed to maximize national welfare; they instead represented the wishes of interest groups and institutions of the legislative branch.
175
176While this misbegotten legislation did not cause the Great Depression, it almost certainly hindered the recovery. And as a result, the Roosevelt administration worked to seize control of trade policy from Congress. This effort led to the the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934, which provided the president with the authority to negotiate tariff agreements with foreign governments as long as both sides mutually lowered their trade barriers.
177
178Congress’ role was reduced to primarily ratifying those agreements – or not – with a simple majority vote.
179
180Raising tariffs, however, still required an act of Congress.
181
182Freer trade and ‘fast track’
183
184Several scholars have argued that this legislation, by removing power over tariffs from Congress and linking trade policy to agreements negotiated by the president, was key to winning political support for freer trade across the world, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization.
185
186Average U.S. tariffs fell from nearly 60% in 1934 to about 12% in 1954. This increase in free trade was one of the institutional underpinnings of the postwar economic miracle in several Western countries, including the U.S.
187
188More authority shifted to the president with the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gave him the authority to unilaterally raise tariffs on national security grounds. Trump used this provision, known as Section 232, as justification for the steel and aluminum tariffs that he imposed on most U.S. trading partners in the spring of 2018.
189
190The Trade Act of 1974 established for the first time what is known as trade promotion authority. Also called “fast track,” this let the president negotiate comprehensive trade deals that included a broad array of non-tariff issues such as quotas and intellectual property protections. Congress could only approve with an up-or-down vote within 90 days – no amendments or filibusters allowed.
191
192That authority expired in 1980, and Congress has reauthorized it six times since, most recently in 2015.
193
194Proponents of fast track argue that it is necessary to give the president credibility when negotiating agreements. If foreign counterparts believe that an agreement is likely to become bottled up in or amended by Congress, they may be reluctant to make concessions.
195
196Opponents argue that it delegates too much authority to the executive branch and unduly limits the ability of Congress to debate whether a particular agreement is in the national interest.
197
198Will Congress reassert its power?
199
200While the tariffs Trump has imposed on China and allies like Canada have alarmed lawmakers, the threat to place duties on all imports from Mexico went too far for some, including Republicans.
201
202Trump’s claim that emergency powers gave him authority to impose the tariffs, as well as the severe economic costs expected to result, galvanized Senate Republicans to threaten to pass legislation blocking the tariffs with a veto-proof majority.
203
204The pushback from Congress may point to a broader reassertion of its role in tariff policy. Even as far back as 2015, when the Obama administration sought reauthorization of fast track, lawmakers in the House barely passed the bill, with most Democrats in opposition.
205
206While Democrats and Republicans are largely coming at this issue from different directions, both have found reason in recent years to question the decades-old consensus that has made trade policy the prerogative of the executive branch.
207
208And Trump’s trade policies have put him on a collision course with the pro-business wing of the Republican Party.Trade on the line.
209
210Trade talks resumed between Washington and Beijing as the two sides connected by phone this week. The dial-in was the first contact the opposing deal makers have had since President Trump and President Xi called a truce in the trade after meeting during the G20, on June 29. However, a new face has joined China’s trade team: Commerce Minister Zhong Shan, who is seen as a Party hardliner and is feared to have a tougher stance on trade.
211
212Relations still frosty.
213
214Days after the ice-breaking phone call, President Trump took to Twitter to accuse China of “letting [the U.S.] down” by not purchasing enough agricultural products. “Hopefully they will start soon!” Trump tweeted, but reportedly the Chinese side don’t believe they’ve made any commitments to buying more agricultural goods.Reprieve or no reprieve?
215
216After Trump told Xi at the G20 he would allow U.S. companies to sell to Huawei, reports claimed that the Chinese telecom maker had been issued a “reprieve,” but “reprieve” is not quite right.
217
218According to comments made by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the situation is largely unchanged. Huawei remains on the dreaded “entity list” and U.S. companies will have to request permission before engaging in business with Huawei. These are the same conditions as before.-------------------------------------------------------------DANIEL AROLA, 6:33 AM
219Will you bring up Rudy Giuliani if you talk about the Epstein case again? Because that shit he did about West Point where he was lead investigator can use more attention since no one else is bringing it up.TRACY TWYMAN ***ROB JARRETT, JASON-MICHAEL MALDONADO, & JAMES DARTANIAN MAJESTIC = FOR ALL “LIKE” My PCF as ESTABLISHED By JOSEPH BOYER
220FRI 1:24 AM
221
222Developments in the truth movement are making me think Douglas was right about some of the names he mentions. Recently I heard Tracey Twyman had died and released a deadmans switch in the form of a precrecorded statement about gang stalking. More research links her to the likes of Clyde Lewis and Steve Outrim. Interested to know your thoughts. I got into TT's stuff many years ago around the Drakenberg Dynasties and Order of the Dragon Court but her latest stuff has had a much darker tone. Check this link or do a search if you have any interest.
223----------------------------------------------------------On Thursday This Week as Dated The 11th Day-in-July, Donald Trump hosted a Social Media Summit. Facebook, Twitter, and Google were not even invited to the meeting at the White House, while various conservative groups and fringe figures have confirmed their attendance as our standing US president has accused large tech companies of an antireactionary bias. SoPresident Trump held a closed-door summit, in the East Room, where most of the seats were filled by stalwart maga memesmiths.Trump’s Very Big, Very Important White House Social-Media Summit
224
225Our country has never been perfect, but most of us can remember a simpler time, just a few years ago, when we more or less knew how to talk to each other, how to convey basic information, how to acquire simple facts about the world. Then came social media. Now every video might be a deep fake; every headline might be a Macedonian scam; screen addiction and fomo have made bowling, even alone, seem like the height of civic engagement; and my poor phone has had to memorize such words as “rekt” and “Kekistan” and “bugman.” What is going on? Is this just the messy forward march of democracy, or evidence of a malign techno-oligarchy? Do Facebook and Alphabet and Amazon need to be broken up, or more effectively regulated, or just better understood? Where is the boundary between misinformation and disinformation, and how can we prevent both from swaying the upcoming election? We need a robust debate about all this—not just via trending hashtags but I.R.L., face to face. A social-media summit, if you will.
226
227The President, as always, has his finger on the pulse. Thursday morning, he tweeted“The White House will be hosting a very big and very important Social Media Summit today,”. The guests were to include C.E.O.s of the major social-media companies, various lawmakers with the power to regulate said companies, constitutional-law scholars, and an array of community activists, religious leaders, and pillars of civil society.
228
229Just kidding! Civil society is boring, and community activists have pathetic follower counts.
230Trump did convene a social-media summit at the White House, on Thursday afternoon, but no representatives from any social-media companies were invited. Only two members of Congress were in attendance: Senator Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, who once complained that “too many Senate Republicans act like Democrats, or worse,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida, who once appeared on Infowars to opine about ostensible Democrat-F.B.I. collusion (“we’re called conspiracy theorists because we see this cabal right in front of us”).
231
232When the closed-door summit met, in the East Room, most of the seats were filled by such stalwart maga memesmiths as Bill Mitchell, whose indefatigable pro-Trump cheerleading has made him a target of mockery even on the far-right; James O’Keefe, who styles himself as an investigative journalist but acts more like an opposition researcher; Charlie Kirk, whose organization, Turning Point USA, keeps finding itself mired in racism scandals; and a stay-at-home dad from Kansas City who goes by Carpe Donktum. This was not Mr. Donktum’s first invitation to the White House. Last week, while some of the country’s top legal minds scrambled to justify the President’s mercurial and self-contradictory desires related to a citizenship question on the census, the President himself spent twenty minutes relaxing in the Oval Office with Donktum, whose job, according to his Twitter bio, is “the creation of memes to support President Donald J. Trump.” as Donktum entered the inner sanctum of American power, the President asked“Where is the genius?. I want to meet the genius.”
233
234It should surprise no one that Trump’s ideal White House gathering looks a lot like his ideal morning show. In both cases, the goal is to radically constrain the terms of the debate: Is Trump awesomely amazing, or amazingly awesome? The discussion in the East Room surely revolved around a set of questions—obsessions, really—familiar to anyone who has spent more than five minutes lurking on maga Twitter. Are right-wing activists the greatest free-speech martyrs society has ever known? Will the liberal thought-police of Silicon Valley stop at nothing to silence conservative voices? Is “free speech” dead?
235
236Despite how oft the claim be repeated, therebe no evidence whatsoever that social-media companies are capriciously censoring reactionary extremists, and all evidence to suggest that they are bending over backward to avoid doing so. And yet the cries of the “free-speech” martyrs will continue to ring out—on Twitter, on Infowars, in the Rose Garden—because they have the desired effect. The more the maga meme army complains about antireactionary bias, the harder the social-media companies will work to counteract the impression of bias (this impression be not based in reality at”tall, o-course, but representing reality has never been social media’s forte).
237
238In other words : Donald Trump’s social-media summit twast destined—again, and entirely unsurprisingly—to devolve into gripes about the treatment, on social media, of Donald Trump. In Thursday morning’s tweet, he continued, with his usual Emily Dickinsonesque punctuation, “Would I have become President without Social Media? Yes (probably)!” Not everyone shares this opinion, of course. Skeptics include the forty-fifth President of the United States himself.
239
240On Tuesday, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled unanimously that the President cannot block followers on Twitter simply because he dislikes their views. the judges wrote“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less.” Thursday afternoon, in the East Room, there was more speech, although journalists—that is, traditional journalists, of the non-memesmith variety—were not allowed to record it for posterity. on his way to the summit, a social-media pundit going by the name o Will Chamberlain had a few quibbles about the guest list, but he was glad to have himself made the cut. He tweeted :“Whatever comes out of this, I think the most important thing is that it’s happening at all. The Trump campaign, and then the Administration, has had this army of Internet volunteers working for them for years, and they’ve often kept them at arm’s length. Now at least they’re getting us together to talk, to strengthen those bonds.
241“I saw someone on Twitter recently making fun of the idea that the President would invite a meme-maker to the Oval Office. The joke was something along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. British Ambassador, the President can’t speak to you now, he’s busy with Carpe Donktum.’ Well, sorry, but the fact is that Carpe Donktum is more relevant to American politics right now than the British ambassador could ever hope to be. That’s just reality at this point.”If you’ve paid any attention at all to politics in recent years, you’ve probably heard this expression at least once or twice: “We’ve always had differences of opinions, but back in the old days, at least we all operated off the same set of facts.”“You are entitled to your own opinion,
242but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
243
244— Daniel Patrick Moynihan
245
246In case you were wondering why this isn’t the case anymore — and why this lament for the bygone days of a unified information ecosystem is a frequent refrain for scholars, pols and pundits — look no further than the (not so) curious death of a junior Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich in 2016. The Seth Rich conspiracy theory, a low point from the same right-wing conspiracy-industrial complex that gave us "the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag," is back in the news. On July 10, 2016, young DNC staffer Seth Rich was beaten up and shot while walking home in Washington, D.C. His death immediately became fodder for conspiracy theorists, who had been running a tally of the so-called “Clinton Body Count” since 2008.At a moment when linking 2016 election events to malign Russian intelligence officers has seemingly gone out of style, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff has a spectacular new addition to the genre.
247
248In a report published Tuesday in connection with a new podcast, Isikoff alleges that conspiracy theories involving a slain Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich can be traced back to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR.
249
250A Yahoo! News expose by Michael Isikoff traces the Russian origins of the claims that Rich — a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered in a likely botched robbery in Washington in July 2016 — was actually offed by Hillary Clinton because he was about to blow the whistle on her supposed corruption.
251
252This repugnant conspiracy theory, which has created untold amounts of grief for Rich's family, has been exploited by all manner of bad actors working to help Donald Trump, including Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, former White House and adviser and Trump campaign head Steve Bannon and pundits at Fox News, most prominently close Trump friend Sean Hannity.Courtesy of a blockbuster Yahoo News investigation — and corresponding podcast series, Conspiracyland — the details about how Rich’s slaying gave birth to a lunatic yet consequential right-wing conspiracy theory are now out in the open, and would make for a rich chapter in a textbook about fake news economics.
253
254As it turns out, the dark theorizing about Rich’s death, which became a favorite topic among reactionary influencers and Fox News hosts, has roots in Russian troll farms. Yes, Rich’s tragic death first got spun by foreign fabricators.
255
256But it’s hard to believe our domestic fake news ecosystem wouldn’t have spawned the same chatter on its own.
257
258Some context: Back in July 2016, in the heat of election season, the 27-year-old Rich was shot to death while heading back to his home in Washington, D.C. Police reported the killing as the result of a botched robbery. Seems straightforward enough, right?
259
260Wrong.
261
262All it takes is the donning of a tinfoil MAGA hat and barely a squint to see what really happened here. I mean, just connect the dots! Rich worked for the DNC. The DNC was about a week away from officially handing Hillary Clinton the party’s nomination, itself the result of a conspiracy against Bernie Sanders. Clinton is well known to be a creature of pure wretchedness and evil, consumed by all kinds of vile secrets, harebrained schemes and diabolical plans. Therefore, if it can safely be assumed Rich was a whistleblower — likely the source of those soon to be Wikileaked DNC emails — gunned down in the streets by a Clinton-sanctioned hit squad. Case closed.
263
264Didn’t even need to break out the old pin board and yarn to piece this one together. Nope, it’s a clean shave without even the slightest hint of Occam’s razor burn.
265
266On the sliding salaciousness scale of “Hillary has seizures” (remember that one?) to the infamous pizzagate conspiracy, this one falls squarely in the sweet spot: not too wild for any two-decade resident of Camp ABC (Anyone But Clinton) and just ridiculous enough to seem truly sinister.
267
268You would know this all, of course, if you’d spent a little time splashing around the super clean waters of fringe-conservative Twitter. Or maybe you’re a vigilant citizen staying properly informed via the extremely well-sourced diatribes of Alex Jones of Infowars. Of course, all you really would have had to do is visit Fox News in the summer of 2016 to catch Sean Hannity drop this atomic truth bomb on Killary Clintonites.
269
270Not fringe anymore, unfortunately. Exempli gratia :2:08 PM - Jul 12, 2016
271America First MAGA
272@LynnKuennen
273Beloved DNC Staffer Seth Rich Shot Dead in the Back in DC - Where were the Clintons? http://heat.st/29BcQku via @heatstreet
274
27510:56 AM - Jul 12, 2016
276@Billy27817117
277DNC STAFFER, SETH CONRAD RICH. SHOT TO DEATH. HE MUST HAVE FOUND SOMETHING INVOLVING THE CLINTON'S.
278
279So it be taken as Gospel now, at least to those willing connecting these dots: Rich died because Clinton wanted him dead. What this Yahoo News report presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?
280
281Using evidence gathered by Deborah Sine, a former assistant U.S. attorney who served as the chief investigator on the Rich case until her retirement a year ago, the report alleges Rich’s slaying almost certainly came at the hands of one of two known drug dealers in the area. And the narrative — read: crazy conspiracy theory — that Clinton or the DNC was involved? Yeah, that first hit the internet via a story planted by Russians on the conspiracy website WhatDoesItMean.com.
282
283There’s been a lot of pointing and laughing at Hannity and Fox News in the past week. And it’s all deserved. Hannity peddled this conspiracy for almost a year after Rich’s death, though eventually retired the gimmick — reluctantly — some time after Fox News retracted a story on the theory after sourcing fell apart.More specifically : It had always been all too evident all along thatRussia Launched the Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory.
284Michael R. Isikoff is an American investigative journalist who is currently the Chief Investigative Correspondent at Yahoo! News. He is the co-author with David Corn of the book entitled “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” published on March 13, 2018.
285On Tuesday this last week as dated the 9th day in July, Michael Isikoff published the results of his investigation into the origins of that particular conspiracy theory.Michael Isikoff: The Seth Rich conspiracy theory that made "its way straight to Fox News and Sean Hannity ... started as a Russian intelligence plant"
286
287From the July 9 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe:
288JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST):
289That was a mother of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, whose murder in 2016 continues to fuel conspiracy theories. It's sick, and it is despicable, and sadly, it's something I know a little too much about. Totally sick and despicable, the pain and anguish that is heaped upon parents and loved ones who have already lost their child once, but have to endure it again for cheap political purposes. Let's bring in right now the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo!, Michael Isikoff. Michael's just launched a new podcast called Conspiracyland, which he dives into the details surrounding Seth Rich's tragic death. Also with us, columnist and deputy editorial page editor at The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus. And Michael, I'll just say it right here, I know too much, unfortunately, about these sort of conspiracy theories and the anguish that it causes family members and loved ones who have already lost somebody, but conspiracy theories are dredged up for cheap political purposes. Talk about what you found.
290
291MICHAEL ISIKOFF (YAHOO! NEWS CHIEF INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT) :
292Right. Look, this was one of the more insidious conspiracy theories that arose out of the 2016 election. It had so much traction. It was promoted on alt-right websites, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, all the usual crowd, and, you know, eventually makes its way straight to Fox News and Sean Hannity. But what we found, and it was really kind of shocking, is this started as a Russian intelligence plant. Within three days of Seth Rich's murder, when it really was a local crime story -- it had gotten no traction nationally, nobody was paying any attention -- the Russian SVR, which is their version of the CIA, circulates a intelligence bulletin claiming that Seth Rich was on his way to talk to the FBI at 4 in the morning on July 10, 2016, when he was gunned down by a squad of assassins for Hillary Clinton.
293
294SCARBOROUGH:
295So Michael, you're telling me this conspiracy theory picked up by Trumpists and Sean Hannity actually began as a Russian misinformation campaign?
296
297ISIKOFF:
298Exactly. It was classic Russian active measures, what the Soviets did during the Cold War, planting conspiracy theories in various newspapers around the world. In this case, they picked an obscure website that's a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda and it just grew from there. And we traced it all the way directly to the Trump White House, where Steve Bannon is texting to a CBS journalist in 2017, calling, saying huge story, he was a Bernie guy -- about Seth Rich which is not true -- it was a contract kill, obviously. So you go from the Kremlin straight through the alt-right websites, to the Trump White House.
299
300...
301
302ISIKOFF:
303The timing is so interesting here. The week that this breaks on Fox News, in a story they later had to retract and acknowledge was -- didn't meet their editorial standards, Sean Hannity is shouting it from the rooftops. What's going on that week? It's the week that Mueller is appointed. It's the week Comey is fired. It's when the Russia story is blowing up. What better way to deflect from the Russia story than to point the finger at this, you know, this guy in Washington who was shot in an armed robbery. It wasn't the Russians, it was Seth Rich. That's what -- you know, that was the whole subtext of what Sean Hannity was pushing that week. And who does he have on? Jay Sekulow. Didn't say it at the time, Sekulow had just been named as Trump's lawyer in the Russia investigation. And he's saying -- what is he saying on Fox News? This undercuts the whole Russia narrative. That was the message they were pushing with this.
304
305Michael Isikoff’s primary source, Deborah Sines, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich case, pointed to a “bulletin” dated July 13, 2016, which was planted by Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR).
306
307The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.
308
309The conspiracy theories took a different turn on August 9th when Julian Assange implied that Seth Rich was the source for the DNC emails released by Wikileaks on July 22nd. Assange knew that Russia was Wikileaks’ source for the hacked emails, so he was simply once again doing their bidding to deflect blame.Over the next two years, the lies were not only peddled by Russian-controlled media outlets like RT and Sputnik, they became fodder for the entire right-wing media apparatus, including Alex Jones and Fox News.
310
311Isikoff also points out that people more directly in Trump’s orbit were peddling this particular conspiracy theory.
312
313The same day Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, [Roger] Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”
314
315Seven months later, the calls were also coming from inside the White House.
316according to some of Bannon’s text messages that were reviewed by Yahoo News, on March 17, 2017, then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon texted to a CBS “60 Minutes” producer about Rich, insisting
317“Huge story … he was a Bernie guy … it was a contract kill, obviously,”.
318
319That text from Bannon underlines that it was politically useful for a number of people to hype the allegations at the expense of Rich’s reputation. It was two months later that a story by Malia Zimmerman ran on Fox News (which was later retracted) and Sean Hannity went all-in on the conspiracy theory. Everyone involved had something to gain by spreading it.
320
321It was useful for Bannon in aiding Trump. It was useful for Hannity to aid Trump and entice viewers. It was useful for Jones because it fed into his long-standing conspiracy narrative. It was useful for Assange to deflect blame.
322
323Hannity and Jones never met an anti-liberal conspiracy theory that they didn’t like. But obviously they weren’t the ones who seeded this one. Bannon chimed in almost a year later in an attempt to take the heat off of Trump for Russiagate.
324Each of these people used the Seth Rich conspiracy theory for their own purposes, but by the time they did so, it was circulating like wildfire through the fetid cybersewers of Trumpspace. But Russia be the initiator of this conspiracy theory and they obviously did everything they could to promote it. The lesson we can take from all of this is that it is that Vladimir Putin and his cohort are behind nigh-all of the garbage that floats around in the cybersewers of American social media, working its way up through right-wing news outlets, and eventually being parroted by the White House.
325
326Though it always pays to be discerning, we can expect a lot more of this kind of thing over the next year and a half as we head into the 2020 election. It is going to get VERY ugly out there.People who are willing to exploit the death of an idealistic young man for their own purposes place no limits on the depths they are willing to go in order to spread fear and paranoia.
327
328It is at times like these that I think about a line from the character Lily, played by Lily Tomlin, in Jane Wagner’s play The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”The Seth Rich conspiracy theory put Trump in the White House.
329With Russian help, the far right used a murder to split and suppress the Democratic vote. Today We see the consequences.
330
331As soon as Isikoff's report — which details how Russian propagandists first floated the conspiracy theory just three days after Rich's death and continued to work steadily to promote it — was released, a rowdy debate erupted over whether or not it was fair to blame the Russians. Philip Bump of the Washington Post argued that it wasn't, since American sources also circulated this baseless hypothesis and it was mostly American reactionaries — (with Assange's assistance) who promoted it most heavily.
332
333This debate, however, misses the bigger picture. It's clear that both Russian propagandists and pro-Trump (or anti-Clinton) forces are to blame for this rancid but distressingly popular work of fiction. Even more importantly, this ad hoc grassroots conspiracy to frame Clinton for Rich's murder worked exactly as intended, and was instrumental in Trump's shocking electoral victory in 2016. There's every reason to believe that similar alliances between Russian propagandists and anti-democratic forces in the United States will try to pull similar stunts in 2020.
334
335While the Seth Rich conspiracy theory was mostly promoted by American right-wingers, it's critical to understand that the most important audience for it, perhaps surprisingly, was on the left. It was part of a larger operation, managed in large part by Russian intelligence services, to convince some supporters of Bernie Sanders, who lost the 2016 Democratic primary to Clinton, not to vote for Clinton in the general election, thereby giving a crucial edge to Trump. That propaganda campaign, without a doubt, was a smashing success for the Russia-Trump alliance.
336
337Most the campaign to sway Sanders supporters was centered around the Russian hacking of emails from DNC officials and the Clinton campaign, and their strategic release through WikiLeaks.
338
339The idea was to stoke the impression that Sanders would or should have have won the Democratic nomination, if only the DNC hadn't "rigged" the race or sabotaged his campaign. What the hackers found was thin gruel — mostly a bunch of emails from DNC officials griping about the way Sanders and his campaign publicly disparaged them — and there was no evidence of substantive efforts to hinder Sanders or help Clinton in any way.
340
341But it didn't really matter what the truth was, as good propagandists know. What matters is what people want to believe, and many devoted Sanders supporters desperately wanted to believe his loss was the result of cheating. So when the hacked emails were released, right at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, conspiracy theories claiming that the primary campaign was "rigged" spread rapidly, unchecked by debunking from the handful of people who actually bothered to read the alleged evidence.
342
343For those who were at the DNC, what happened next was unforgettable. Hundreds, likely thousands, of Sanders delegates booed everyone who stepped on stage for the first day of the convention, drowning them out and creating an unnerving spectacle of disarray for the televised broadcast. They even booed Bernie Sanders himself, when he tried to discourage the conspiracy theories. While the convention eventually recovered and Clinton gave her acceptance speech the final night in an atmosphere of relative unity, it was clear that for some small percentage of Sanders voters, the belief that they had been robbed was precious.
344
345That's where the Seth Rich conspiracy theory came in. It wasn't just that it helped create an atmosphere of suspicion around Clinton. It also helped to bolster and protect the conspiracy theory that the primary was "rigged," by giving true believers someone other than the Russians to credit for the anti-DNC conspiracy theories.
346
347It's critical to understand that by the time WikiLeaks released the hacked emails, it was already clear that the likely source was Russian intelligence services. Trump himself acknowledged this by publicly calling on the Russians to hack Clinton personally in the month before the big pre-DNC leak. (They tried, but were ultimately unsuccessful.)
348
349But as Assange, right-wing propagandists and by-all-evidence Russian agitation propagandists themselves understood, it would be easier for Sanders supporters to accept Russian propaganda if they believed it was coming from some other source. For example, from a DNC staff member who was dead and therefore couldn't defend himself.
350
351The idea that Rich, and not the Russians, was the source of the hacked DNC emails spread rapidly. As Isikoff notes, it was heavily promoted by Sputnik and RT, which are English-language Russian propaganda networks. Assange himself, who actually got the emails from Russian sources, hyped this lie about Rich in August of 2016. Even though the biggest proponents were right-wing sources, the most important audience for this claim, arguably, was Sanders supporters who were angry about his defeat and looking for reasons not to vote for Clinton in November.
352
353Most Sanders primary voters did end up voting for Clinton in the general election, but, due to the spite sowed by these Russian-stoked conspiracy theories, a significant portion did not. A 2017 study showed that a full 12% of Sanders primary voters voted for Trump in the general election, while another significant chunk of Sanders voters threw their support behind Green Party huckster Jill Stein, who got just over 1% of the total vote.
354
355These numbers may seem small, but they were significant in an election where Clinton easily won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College on a total margin of fewer than 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The number of people who voted for Stein in those three states was significantly larger than Trump's margin of victory. If the Sanders supporters who voted for Trump had stuck with Clinton instead, she almost certainly would have won all three states.
356
357Now, here's an important caveat: Without the conspiracy theory surrounding Rich's death, would Clinton have been able to get all those Sanders supporters to back her? Probably not. They were susceptible to conspiracy theory in the first place because they were angry their beloved candidate lost, and were casting about for a reason to deny that the primary had been a fair fight.
358
359But it be all-too-certain that the size of the sore-loser contingent was greatly amplified by the conspiracy theories. Without that aspect — say, if half the Sanders-to-Trump voters had voted for Clinton (and if others had simply stayed home) — it be undeniable that Hillary Clinton would be president today.
360
361The Seth Rich conspiracy theory took on a new life after the election. As more solid evidence emerged to prove that the DNC hack was the result of a Russian conspiracy, both right-wing agitators like Hannity and left-leaning Clinton-haters felt a need to deny that they'd either been duped or been complicit with a Moscow-hatched conspiracy. Eventually the theory has faded out with time, especially as special counsel Robert Mueller's report conclusively stated that Rich had nothing to do with the DNC email hacks.
362
363But what this new story shows is that it's imperative that journalists and progressives not forget what happened in 2016. It is an absolute certainty that Trump and his supporters — both here at home and in secret facilities in St. Petersburg — will try to pull similar kinds of tricks in 2020. Whoever the Democratic nominee is — yes, even if it's Bernie Sanders — that person will be subject to conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns aimed at likely Democratic voters, with the goal of discouraging turnout or encouraging spite-voting for third parties or even Trump himself.
364
365Trump is a repulsive candidate who has no reach outside his rabidly loyal base. So his only way to win in 2020 is to divide the left, as he did — with the help of outsiders — in 2016. If people don't learn the lessons from the DNC hack and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, it will work all over again.This era breeds a certain kind of conspiracy theorist — If Russia didn’t generate the Seth Rich conspiracy, our fake news economy would have.Don’t blame the Seth Rich conspiracy on Russians. Blame Americans.
366The Russian Intelligence agencies “first circulated a phony ‘bulletin’ — disguised to read as a real intelligence report — about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016,”. That was three days after Rich was killed in Washington, a crime that police have said was probably a botched robbery attempt. The Russian report, though, alleged Rich was killed by people working for Hillary Clinton — “slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.”
367
368Isikoff’s source for this link be Deborah Sines, a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the Rich investigation. In the podcast, “Conspiracyland,” Isikoff proves that The Russian rumor be “the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.”
369
370But that’s not entirely accurate. Unfounded links between Clinton and the Rich killing predate the July 13, 2016, “bulletin” and coverage of it by a sketchy site called WhatDoesItMean.com. What’s more, the “hit team” story, which Sines says was repeated several weeks later, wasn’t the primary Rich-related conspiracy that gained traction.
371
372As Isikoff’s own reporting makes quite obvious, it be in fact much more accurate to pin the broad embrace of Seth Rich conspiracies on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — and on U.S. actors like Infowars’ Alex Jones and Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
373
374Let’s first address the SVR Operation. As Exposed by Isikoff, it was Activated July 13. But it was planted in fertile soil; since Bill Clinton’s administration, there had been unfounded rumors about the Clintons being involved in various alleged murders. As early as 2008, Jones’s site, Infowars, had a tally of the so-called Clinton Body Count. It was a concept familiar enough to political observers that New York magazine included it in a conspiracy-theory roundup in 2013.
375
376In the hours after Rich’s slaying, his death was linked to Clinton by a number of people on social media. Therebe at least six examples I myself be aware of that Source from July 2016. One of those tweets links to an article at the defunct site Heat Street which is already referring to rampant conspiracy theories.
377
378Particularly at a heated moment in the Democratic presidential nominating contest — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed Clinton on July 12 — Rich’s death was embraced as a way to cast aspersions on Clinton. (Some Twitter users, for example, alleged Rich was going to blow the whistle on vote fraud in California that gave Clinton a victory. This was, of course, not true in any way.)
379
380The “hit team” narrative from WhatDoesItMean ended up having relatively little traction. From July 13 to the election, there were only 33 tweets talking about Clinton, Rich and a “hit team.”
381
382All of the aforementioned tweets still be active, suggesting they haven’t been identified as being linked to Russian intelligence by Twitter as such tweets have been removed and archived. Isikoff’s report notes that one prominent Twitter account from that set, TEN_GOP, promoted the Rich conspiracy theory as articulated by Infowars. There were, he says, some 2000 tweets focused on promoting Seth Rich conspiracies from accounts linked to Russian actors.
383
384This fits with our understanding of Russia’s efforts in 2016: to highlight and exacerbate existing divides in American politics. An expert on Russia’s efforts made that point in the “Conspiracyland” podcast, observing
385
386“They’re looking for ways that we’re attacking each other inside the country and again exploiting that. So the Seth Rich conspiracy is a perfect thing for the Russians to attack onto.”
387
388But it’s worth digging into this social media activity a bit. First, Isikoff’s report notes the Infowars report shared by TEN_GOP was about Rich having allegedly disappeared for several hours before his killing. (This, too, is apparently unfounded.) That report came out Aug. 18 and shares none of the unique details from the SVR “bulletin” that purportedly originated these conspiracy theories.
389
390A search of the Russian tweets conducted by The Washington Post finds only 640 tweets mentioning “Seth Rich.” Most of those tweets came well after the election.
391
392The TEN_GOP tweet was also more than a week after WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange implied in an interview on Dutch television both that Rich’s killing was suspect and that he might be the source of the material stolen from the DNC that WikiLeaks had published the prior month. This was obviously not the case, since WikiLeaks didn’t begin receiving that stolen information until days after Rich’s death, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report details. But it was a particularly potent strain of the Rich conspiracies, and one that has survived since.
393
394Mueller’s report suggests Assange hoped to “obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing” by blaming Rich.
395
396Isikoff’s report highlights the knowingly treasonous Russian Assets in the Seth Rich Operation. It points to Alex Jones and Infowars as a vector for misinformation; the site was later forced to retract and apologize for some of its Rich stories. Isikoff also highlights the role played by Fox News and its prime-time host, Sean Hannity.
397
398In May 2017, Fox News ran a story alleging that Rich had contact with WikiLeaks. Hannity spent a week hyping the purported link — but Fox eventually was forced to retract the story in its entirety.
399
400Why? According to an individual quoted in “Conspiracyland,” “Fox executives grew frustrated they were unable to determine the identity of the other, and more important, source for the story: an anonymous ‘federal investigator’ whose agency was never revealed. The Fox editors came to have doubts that the person was in fact who he claimed to be or whether the person actually existed, said the source.”
401
402Hannity, too, was eventually forced to drop the line of argument, one that he’d been effectively using as counterprogramming to Mueller’s appointment at that same time.
403
404Isikoff’s report also Exposes that sources within Trump’s White House were pushing the Rich conspiracy. Like Assange, it was beneficial to Trump’s version of the Russian interference question to have people believe Russia wasn’t involved in the DNC hack. In March 2017, then-senior White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon texted a producer at CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”
405referring to Rich, Bannon wrote
406“Huge story … he was a Bernie guy … it was a contract kill, obviously,” his allegation as well being completely unfounded.
407
408Out-there ideas like the Rich conspiracy be but a function of nefarious external actors -- as ever be the case in this New Dark Age : Russian intelligence officials doing what they now do best. That text from Bannon, though, underlines the more anodyne fact : It was politically useful for a number of people to hype the allegations at the expense of Rich’s reputation.
409
410It was useful for Bannon in aiding Trump. It was useful for Hannity to aid Trump and entice viewers. It was useful for Jones because it fed into his long-standing conspiracy narrative. It was useful for Assange to deflect blame.
411
412This was the Domestic Russocollaborationist conspiracy of knowingly Treasonous American Operatives. And it was effective.
413
414So to say Fox News got “tricked” by Russian trolls, like the GQ headline serves up, is just wrong. Or, at least, it misses the point. Hannity didn’t have the rug pulled out from under him by some foreign trickster hiding behind a screen in a Moscow. He openly peddled a conspiracy without anything to base it on, and does so regularly. This is the world he lives in and the language he speaks.
415
416Look no further than the recently released text exchanges between Hannity and Paul Manafort, which were made public by a federal court during the trial of Trump’s former campaign chairman (of which I read all 56 pages, because I’m a masochist with too much time on his hands).
417
418Here’s one literal word salad the Fox News host threw Manafort’s way: “HRC, E-mails, Obstruction, Destroying emails, bleach bit, devices no sim cards, Uranium one, Ukraine interference… Intel Leaks Unmasking Potus conversations leaked. My God.”
419
420(If you want a real laugh, read all 56 pages. Hannity and Manafort play a cuter game of digital footsie than anything I’ve ever witnessed unfolding on a dating app.)
421
422Make no mistake. Hannity didn’t need the subtle incepting of information by Russian trolls. This Rich conspiracy would’ve made its way onto his show regardless of where it came from.
423
424Because, as this Yahoo News story neatly lays out, that’s how this stuff works. It starts on some weird website somewhere.
425
426Then come the Reddit memes and jokes, and soon extremely popular Twitter trolls — oops, I mean “conservative thinkers” — like Mike Cernovich and Bill Mitchell are pumping it into the public discourse. Alex Jones will certainly pick it up. Sooner or later, a guest panelist will bring it up on Fox News. And Hannity will repeat. So will those close to or even in the White House, as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone did with the Rich fantasy.
427
428Before you know it, the conspiracy becomes reactionary canon. This is the fake news economy, where the lifespan of fact and fiction are one and the same.
429
430And if you find that distressing, consider that Hannity is known to have frequent conversations with the president. And, all those weirdly popular Twitter personalities like Bill Mitchell, pro-Trump memeologist Carpe Donktum (online pseudonym) and “investigative” outlet Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe?
431
432Trump invited them all to the White House for Last Thursday's “Social Media Summit.”AndThis be how the conspiracy canard about the American elite collapses.With Jeffrey Epstein’s Arrest, the Darkest Days of the Long Trump Night May Be Falling Upon Us All.
433
434The 17th-Century English theologian Thomas Fuller said it is always darkest before the dawn, which I suppose he intended as encouragement, but in the Trump Era I take it as more of a warning. When we look back after this is all over, we’ll probably be more apt to quote The Stranger in The Big Lebowski: “Darkness warshed over the Dude—darker’n a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. There was no bottom.”
435
436The latest indication is this whole smut business with Jeffrey Epstein involving human trafficking of underage girls and some of the most rich, powerful, and famous men on the planet.
437
438Jeffrey Epstein spent a second night in a New York jail cell through Today, with a federal indictment expected to be unsealed Monday, charging him with sex offenses involving underage girls he and others allegedly trafficked in New York and Florida.
439
440The sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein’s exposed abuses themselves read as if they were forged directly from the online conspiracy fever swamp. “From the creepily decorated mansion to the flights on ‘the Lolita Express’ to the stays on ‘Orgy Island’”—these nightmarish details have “some of America’s most outspoken conspiracists ... taking victory laps,”.
441
442Underground child abuse has long been a popular theme of conspiracies, and allegations of pedophilia proliferate online among today’s tinfoil-hat crew. While typically the party out of power is more prone to conspiratorial thinking, that pattern seems to have been disrupted a bit in the Trump era.THE ANATOMY ‘O’ A CONSPIRACY How the Epstein Case Explains the Rise of Conspiracy Theorists.
443Nightmarish allegations against the well-connected financier show why so many Americans let their imagination run wild when it comes to elite corruption.
444
445The more we learn about the allegations against the reclusive billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the more he seems like a figment of the online fever swamps. The wealthy financier arrested last week for underage sex trafficking is accused of operating an international sex ring that could implicate high-powered men across business, politics, and Hollywood. Every nightmarish detail of his story—from the creepily decorated mansion to the flights on “the Lolita Express” to the stays on “Orgy Island”—sounds like it was conjured by conspiracy theorists.
446And NOW ANOTHER CABINET OFFICIAL BEGONE
447
448Right at the heart of this case already be the Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, who handled Epstein’s case in the aughts while serving as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Mr. Acosta arranged the sweetheart deal for Epstein that involved him copping a plea to two prostitution charges and registering as a sex offender but doing very little jail time. The arrangement has since been deemed illegal since it was done in a way that impermissibly kept the victims in the dark.
449
450In a normal world, Acosta would have resigned in disgrace months agone, but we live in depraved facsimile of normal.No til Friday morning this last week as dated the 12th day in this month-o-July did President Donald Trump told reporters that Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta was stepping down as Secretary of Labor amid mounting outrage over the sweetheart deal he gave Epstein years ago as a federal prosecutor.This same Friday morning, Alex Acosta appeared alongside Donald Trump at the White House, to announce that he was stepping downfrom his postas Labor Secretary.
451
452As I myself articulated in-depth via my latest transmission : Acosta’s problem was a lenient plea deal he negotiated with Jeffrey Epstein when Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami during the George W. Bush administration.
453
454The plea deal allowed Epstein, the wealthy money manager, to avoid federal prosecution on sex trafficking charges. Now that he’s facing similar charges in New York, attention has focused on the earlier case.
455
456Acosta’s departure is the latest case in which the Trump administration ran into trouble from failing to adequately vet a nominee before Trump named him.And the Acosta resignation will surely draw more attention to what Epstein got away with over the years—and who helped him. Because The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Goes Well and Far Beyond Alex Acosta.
457
458The issues raised by this saga go to the heart of the American class system, in which people of great wealth and social standing are able to buy their own brand of justice. Because Jeffrey Epstein will now go home.
459
460Epstein faces two sex-trafficking charges and has pleaded not guilty. The millionaire is behind bars leading up to a bail hearing Monday. His lawyers are expected to ask a federal judge to let him prepare for trial under home detention at his $77 million New York mansion.Alex Acosta Had to Go, But the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Is Really About Money and Privilege
461
462The only surprise about the resignation of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is that it took so long—four days after the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York arrested the financier Jeffrey Epstein on federal charges of sex trafficking. The moment the Southern District unveiled its indictment, which alleged that “between 2002 through 2005, Epstein sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money,” it was clear that Acosta’s position as a Cabinet secretary was untenable.
463
464Of course, he should never have been nominated or confirmed to begin with. As the U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida a decade ago, it was Acosta who approved the now-notorious deal that allowed Epstein to escape federal prosecution and plead guilty to two state charges of soliciting. At the time, investigators working for Acosta had identified thirty-six victims of Epstein, according to the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, whose dogged investigative reporting effectively reopened the case.
465
466As a federal official, Acosta wasn’t responsible for the lenient treatment that Epstein received at the hands of the Florida state justice system. Sentenced to eighteen months, Epstein served thirteen, in a private wing at the Palm Beach County Jail, where he was granted “work release” that allowed him to spend up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his office in the rich beachfront town. Nor was Acosta responsible for the inexplicable 2011 effort by the office of Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan attorney, to reduce Epstein’s sex-offender status to the lowest possible classification, which an incredulous New York State Supreme Court Justice dismissed, saying that she had never seen anything like it before.
467
468There is blame aplenty to go around. Indeed, Epstein’s story is a searing indictment of the entire criminal-justice system, and the special treatment it grants to people of great wealth who can afford to hire high-priced legal mercenaries like Roy Black, Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz, and Kenneth Starr—the latter two being attached to the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest law firm. (All four of these luminaries served on Epstein’s defense team during the Florida prosecution.)
469
470As the Washington Post’s Helaine Olen pointed out in a blistering column, “The Epstein scandal blows holes through the foundational myths of our time, revealing them for the empty and sickening bromides used to justify obscene wealth and power and privilege that they really are.”
471
472Even if it is the American class system that has been exposed, Acosta was the individual prosecutor who, in October, 2007, met with Lefkowitz—not in his Miami office but seventy miles north, at a Marriott in West Palm Beach—and struck the Epstein plea agreement, which, among other things, prevented the financier’s victims from learning about the deal and challenging it in court.
473
474Once the new indictment exposed these sorts of details to renewed scrutiny, the jig was up for Acosta, especially as his boss was also desperately trying to distance himself from Epstein, having once described him as “a terrific guy” who “is a lot of fun to be with.”
475
476Acosta’s press conference on Wednesday only delayed the inevitable. Addressing the 2008 plea deal, he tried to shift the blame to state prosecutors, saying, “The Palm Beach state attorney’s office was ready to let Epstein walk free, no jail time.”
477
478Hours later, Barry Krischer, who was the state’s attorney for Palm Beach County at the time, responded, “I can emphatically state that Mr. Acosta’s recollection of this matter is completely wrong. Federal prosecutors do not take a back seat to state prosecutors. That’s not how the system works in the real world.”
479
480Krischer added, “If Mr. Acosta was truly concerned with the State’s case and felt he had to rescue the matter, he would have moved forward with the fifty-three-page indictment that his own office drafted.”
481
482On Friday morning, Acosta appeared alongside Trump at the White House to make the announcement that he was stepping down. TQ Trump verbatim“I just want to let you know, this was him, not me, because I am with him. He’s a tremendous talent. He’s a Hispanic man. He went to Harvard, a great student. And in so many ways I just hate what he is saying now, because we are going to miss him.” Acosta said, “I do not think it is right and fair for this Administration’s Labor Department to have Epstein as the focus, rather than the incredible economy we have today. . . . It would be selfish for me to stay in this position and continue talking about a case that is twelve years old.”
483
484During the next few days, we may learn more about whether Acosta jumped or was pushed. Evidently, Trump was initially unwilling to give in to Democratic demands for the Labor Secretary to resign. On Wednesday, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported, on Twitter, “A source close to President Trump tells me there is ‘zero’ chance he fires Labor Secretary Alex Acosta over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “ ‘Zero,’ they repeated.” However, Politico reported that Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, was quietly urging Trump to dismiss Acosta, and it seemed inconceivable that the Administration would keep the Labor Secretary in place as the case in the Southern District proceeded and more of Epstein’s victims emerged, creating more questions about the 2008 plea deal.
485
486In any event, Trump did NOT fire Acosta. Acosta merely resigned as Trump took the opportunity to distance himself again from Epstein, saying that he banned him from his Mar-a-Lago resort and adding, “I haven’t spoken to him in probably fifteen years or more.” With Acosta’s departure, Trump’s political allies, including some of the online incendiaries who were invited to the White House for Thursday’s “social-media summit,” were most certainly Personally Ordered by their Exec-CINC to seek to shift the focus to Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats, including the former President Bill Clinton.
487
488That is how political warfare goest these days, but the key point bears repeating. The issues raised by the Epstein saga and the plea bargain that Acosta agreed to are systemic, rather than partisan. They go to the heart of the American class system and the manner in which people of great wealth and high social standing are often able to buy their own brand of justice, regardless of how flagrant or hideous their crimes may be.
489
490Acosta didn’t invent this corrupted system: he may even have felt bullied and threatened by it when he was prosecuting Epstein. In a 2011 letter to the Daily Beast, Acosta described how Epstein’s legal team subjected him and his colleagues to “a year long assault,” which included investigating “individual prosecutors and their families, looking for personal peccadilloes that may provide a basis for disqualification.” To be sure, that was reprehensible behavior on the part of Epstein’s lawyers, but the fact is that Acosta was a U.S. Attorney, an agent of the highest power in the land, and many of Epstein’s victims, who tended to come from poor or modest backgrounds, ended up believing, with good reason, that the system had failed them.
491
492Let the last words on this class-aspect o the all-too-interminably developing situation goest to Julie K. Brown, an American investigative journalist with the Miami Herald best known for pursuing the sex-ring story surrounding financier Jeffrey Epstein. after Acosta’s press conference on Wednesday, The Grand Ma Dame Brown commented on Twitter :“Sexual assault involving CHILDREN is NOT a Democratic or Republican issue. This horrific crime doesn’t discriminate based on political party. EVERYONE should be asking hard questions about this decisions made in this case … Not just why the deal was made—but because these decisions were made in secret, without telling the victims; by misleading the victims AND likely led to more victims being harmed. That’s not ‘stringing’ a public servant up—it’s called holding him accountable.”
493
494The Miami Herald has done much of the most important investigative work on this story and they’re warning us that some very well-known personages may soon be exposed as fellow-travelers in Epstein’s debauchery and perversions. It’s not clear who socialized with Epstein because he was offering underage entertainment versus who was doing it simply because he is a rich man known for his generous philanthropy.
495
496Although details of the case remain undisclosed, there are indications that others involved in his crimes could be charged or named as cooperating witnesses.
497
498Among those on the list : Ghislaine Maxwell, a 57-year-old British socialite and publishing heir who has been accused of working as Epstein’s madam; and Jean-Luc Brunel, who, according to court records, was partners with Epstein in an international modeling company…
499
500…Lawyers for Epstein’s victims, in court filings, have often likened Epstein’s sex operation to an organized crime family, with Epstein and Maxwell at the top, and below them, others who worked as schedulers, recruiters, pilots and bookkeepers.
501
502For her part, Maxwell, whose social circle included such friends as Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of the British Royal family, has been described as using recruiters positioned throughout the world to lure women by promising them modeling assignments, educational opportunities and fashion careers. The pitch was really a ruse to groom them into sex trafficking, it is alleged in court records.
503
504Back in 2002, Donald Trump agreed to speak about Epstein for a feature article reporter Landon Thomas Jr. was doing for New York magazine:
505
506“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
507
508It be quite clear that Trump understood all-too-well just how much on the younger side Epstein liked his beautiful women, and I bet he regrets making that remark now. It betrays his knowing complicity in an underage sex ring. I suspect his 2016 opponents, Hillary and Bill Clinton, are wishing they never socialized with Ghislaine Maxwell and Bill wishes he never flew on Epstein’s private jet. This is indeed “a dark prairie night,” and no one yet knows who all will wind up being tarnished or even arrested.
509
510A lot will depend on what federal agents found in Epstein’s Manhattan home. They seem to have had reason to focus on that residence above all others:
511
512Federal agents also executed search warrants for Epstein’s Manhattan home early Saturday evening, breaking down the door of his Upper East Side townhouse, according to witnesses.
513
514Federal agents do not appear to have raided Epstein’s other three homes, however, and it’s not clear why.
515
516In 2015, the now-defunct Gawker got its hands on Epstein’s Little Black Book which contained the contact information for a Who’s Who of politicians and celebrities. While the vast majority of those people are undoubtedly wholly innocent, the book almost certainly contains the identities of many of the people who utilized his services.
517
518Therebe a lot of folks who should get right with God and make a proactive call to the prosecutors before they wind up on the other side of that call. In fact, it looks’t like this has already happened to a significant degree.
519
520In the era of Trump, nothing ever gets better. Things always get worse. And therebe no bottom. You see, Donald Trump now claims he “wasn’t a fan” o the gross-assed skeev-monster Jeffey Epstein, but history tells a different story. 28 women were flown to Mar-a-Lago for 'VIP party'; only Trump and Epstein were there.
521
522Courtesy o The New York Times, here’s another anecdote that will leave you regretting that you no longer have ears to tear off after hearing the latest Trump-Epstein story :
523
524—
525
526The year was 1992 and the event was a “calendar girl” competition, something that George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman who ran American Dream Enterprise, had organized at Mr. Trump’s request.
527
528“I arranged to have some contestants fly in,” Mr. Houraney recalled in an interview on Monday. “At the very first party, I said, ‘Who’s coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming.’ It was him and Epstein.”
529
530—
531
532Mr. Houraney, who had just partnered with Mr. Trump to host events at his casinos, said he was surprised. “I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”
533
534The story also notes that Trump and Epstein were fast friends for years, but the relationship reportedly soured in the wake of a failed business arrangement. You mean, Trump turned on Epstein over a business deal and not because he’s such an upstanding pillar of the community? You don’t say!
535
536Say, remember when Republican political operative Lee Atwater said he’d make Willie Horton Michael Dukakis’ running mate? Trump-Epstein 2020 has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?
537
538SO : It should not come as a surprise that some of America’s most outspoken conspiracists have spent the days since Epstein’s arrest taking victory laps.Why Q-Anon Is Celebrating the Arrest of Jeffrey Epstein
539
540As I broke back in March-o-Yesteryear, the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein could portend trouble for a lot of powerful people, inclusive Donald Trump. But for a group of the president’s strongest supporters, it is being seen as a day to celebrate the beginning of the end of the evil Judeonazi cabal that has been running their world.
541
542You might remember that the whole Pizzagate conspiracy theory began in November 2016 because one of John Podesta’s hacked emails referenced a possible fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor owned by James Alefantis. Users on the website 4Chan began speculating about the pizzeria being the headquarters of a child sex trafficking ring led by Clinton and Podesta. That eventually turned into a full-blown conspiracy theory that most of us thought ended when 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong and started shooting an assault rifle. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
543
544The conspiracy theory lived on, however, and grew among the group known as Q-Anon into the idea that the same cabal that ruled the world also ran a massive sex trafficking enterprise where powerful people not only abused children, but engaged in satanic rituals. According to this group, Trump is secretly working behind the scenes to bring down the cabal, and every time someone is charged with sexually abusing a child, they see it as another metaphorical notch on his bedpost.
545
546That makes the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein a sure sign that Trump’s plan is beginning to unfold.
547
548One Q-Anon follower on Twitter listed the 17 “Q posts” on Jeffrey Epstein. They’ve been talking about this guy for years now. In that world, a rumor about a pizza shop blowing up on the same day he’s arrested is proof of what they’ve been saying all along.
549
550That is because, apparently, “pizza and [hot-]dogs are alleged pedophile codes for “young girls” and “young boys.” I kid you not.
551
552Of course, to these folks, the arrest of Epstein will be followed by proof that it wasn’t just the Clintons who were involved in pedophilia and child sex trafficking. The Obamas were in on it as well. But just to prove that none of this is partisan, so was George H.W. Bush.
553
554Demonstrating that these people don’t think small, there’s a piece floating around the internet titled, “Bush, Clinton, C.I.A, Cocaine, Crack and U.S. governmental drug dealing” which purports to link all of this to child abuse in the Catholic Church, Jerry Sandusky, the CIA’s global sex slave industry, Clinton Mena airport drug trafficking, Vince Foster’s murder, and the CIA’s global drug connection. In other words, it is almost every conspiracy theory dreamed up by these crackpots rolled into one.
555
556While it is true that most of this stuff is limited to members of Q-Anon posting on social media and fake news sites, it represents the ugly underbelly of Trump’s supporters who are willing to go to these lengths to defend him and attack anyone who poses a threat. It should be lost on no one that these people (mostly men) are completely obsessed with pedophilia.
557
558It all be but projection per their own proclivities, as it represents the ultimate form of domination and abuse.
559TQ David Seaman, a chief proponent of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory :
560“I definitely see it as a moment of vindication. I think this is a turning point.”
561in a video posted to YouTube, Liz Crokin, a prominent QAnon devotee, crowed
562“This is just the beginning. The storm is officially here.”
563
564Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social-media personality who has claimed that every A-list actor in Hollywood is a pedophile, bloviates “I think I’ve been unnecessarily maligned. This shows I’m doing real things, man.” (Cernovich was, in fact, among those who successfully sued to unseal court documents related to Epstein.)
565
566Of course, the notion that the Epstein case somehow validates every outlandish assertion uttered by the rightwing tinfoil-hat brigade be absurd. But squint at the recent headlines and you’ll see a story—about abuse of power, and elite impunity, and moral rot in the ruling class—that helps explain why a certain breed of conspiracy theorist has gained so much traction in this political moment.
567
568Fears of systematic, underground child abuse have run through popular conspiracy theories for centuries. One of the oldest anti-Semitic canards held that Jews were murdering Christian children and using their blood to bake matzo.The 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut—which depicts a fictional secret society conducting a cultlike sexual ceremony—spawned fevered speculation about the real-world predation that the director Stanley Kubrick was supposedly trying to expose.
569
570Anna Merlan, the author of the work entitled “Republic of Lies,” observest that allegations of pedophilia be central to all of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories on the internet today. She attributes this in part to the simple horror of the crime, herself Noting that “If someone is abusing children, there is no worse thing to be.” Conspiracists tend to weave their narratives in ways that conveniently implicate their political enemies while sparing their allies.
571
572But, Merlan added, “conspiracy theories aren’t based on nothing”—and with every new #MeToo allegation, convictions deepen among the true believers. The Ma Dame Merlan so-writ“Any sort of sexual-abuse scandal that involves powerful people is taken as proof of their basic thesis. It’s sort of a sad reality that the world is so full of rape and sexual abuse and predation of women and children that it’s possible to do this.”
573
574For those quasi-professional conspiracy-mongers pushing some version of the “underground pedophile ring” story, the charges against Epstein could prove especially helpful. Seaman, for example, has been reupping requests for Patreon donations in recent days. When asked how the fundraising was going, he sounded optimistic, BQAS“The Patreon has languished for some time because people were starting to not believe me. They were not seeing any forward movement.” Now? “A lot of people have been Googling us.”
575
576And he’s not alone, o-course. Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida who has studied the history of conspiracy theories, told me the current prevalence of paranoid thinking across the political spectrum makes this period unusual. Typically, he said, the party that’s out of power is more prone to conspiracy theories. But in the Trump era, everyone—right, left, and center—seems to suspect corrupt machinations at the highest levels of society. And, really, can they be blamed?
577
578As Matthew Walther recently wrote at The Week, the Epstein story doesn’t fit neatly into any of the dominant partisan-media narratives. The bad guys belong to both parties. Trump is linked to Epstein, but so is former President Bill Clinton. The case has less to do with any political tribe and more to do with class and status. The story, as it’s been alleged, is one of rich, powerful men careening through the world with complete impunity, treating the young and the vulnerable as props, and protecting one another from accountability.
579
580You don’t have to believe in lizard people or baby-eating politicians to understand why so many are looking at our leaders and letting their imagination run wild.TRACY TWYMAN & STEVE OUTTRIM FLIPPING THE GUILTOUTTRIM OBSESSION With MY SEXUALITYThe End of the Gay-Panic Legal Defense
581
582This week New York joined other state legislatures in passing bills banning defendants from blaming their actions on a sudden emotional response to an unwanted advance.
583
584In 1944, in New York, a decade before Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs would publish their countercultural works, there was a killer in their midst. Lucien Carr was a brilliant Columbia University student from a prominent Midwestern family. He had introduced the three men to one another and was at the center of the circle of friends that defined what was later known as the Beat Generation. The nineteen-year-old Carr stabbed another member of the group, David Kammerer, in Riverside Park, with a Boy Scout knife, and dumped his body in the Hudson River. Carr claimed that Kammerer, his former scoutmaster, who was thirty-three, had followed him for years, from city to city, and made “indecent” advances. The New York press, defending Carr, portrayed the killing as an “honor slaying.” Although he was charged with murder, prosecutors allowed Carr to plead guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter. He served two years in a reformatory and then lived out his life as a respected news-agency editor.
585
586The case was one of the first high-profile instances of a “gay panic” defense, in which a person claims that his violent act was a sudden emotional response to an unwanted advance from a person of the same sex. If believed, a defendant’s crime may be reduced, from murder to manslaughter, or from attempted murder to assault. A defendant might even raise it as a full-fledged defense to try to avoid liability altogether, but judges and juries have been much less amenable to it in recent years. Since the nineteen-sixties, the gay-panic defense has been used in half the states, but in relatively few reported cases, numbering in the dozens.
587
588The case that brought the defense renewed attention was the killing, in 1998, of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, who was robbed, beaten, and set on fire by two men. At one of the defendants’ murder trials, the defense provided evidence—later admitted to be false—that Shepard had been sexually aggressive. The defendant claimed that his own childhood history of being sexually bullied by another boy caused him to lose control of himself after Shepard’s alleged unwanted advance. (Later reporting suggested that the accused had had a prior sexual relationship with Shepard.) The jury ultimately convicted the defendant of felony murder, which was less serious than the first-degree-murder conviction sought by the prosecution, but more serious than manslaughter, which had been sought by the defense. He was sentenced to two life sentences in prison.
589
590In June, the New York State Assembly joined six other state legislatures that have passed bills banning gay-panic and trans-panic defenses. The New York bill provides that a “non-violent sexual advance” or “the discovery of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity” cannot serve as the “reasonable explanation or excuse” needed to reduce charges from murder to manslaughter. (Another half-dozen states have introduced similar bills.) Also in June, Senator Edward Markey and Representative Joe Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, introduced federal bills to ban gay- and trans-panic defenses for federal crimes. These moves arise from recognition of the high rates of homicide and other violence perpetrated against L.G.B.T.Q. people, and concern that defenses implicitly blame gay and trans people for violence against them or imply that their lives are worth less than others. What the bills leave in place, however, is a defendant’s ability to claim that his own past trauma can explain the extreme reaction to a victim’s conduct.
591
592The gay-panic defense grows out of the traditional legal doctrine known as “provocation,” which dates to sixteenth-century England and remains in use in American courts. The doctrine allows a defendant to claim that another person’s inflammatory conduct caused a sudden departure from rational judgment, and so an act of killing by that person was done in the “heat of passion.” The traditional paradigm for the defense was a man killing his wife’s paramour upon unexpectedly discovering them in flagrante delicto—a reaction that was then considered reasonable. In addition to a spouse’s adultery, classic provocations included combat, a serious assault, an illegal arrest, or the injury or abuse of a close relative. For centuries, courts limited provocation to these specific categories and inquired whether the situation was sufficiently provoking to cause a blood-boiling homicidal response in a reasonable person. But its use inevitably implied that the victim-provocateur was at least partially to blame. The notion of a “true man” lashing out at another male who purportedly offended his masculinity with sexual overtures fit the male honor norms that informed criminal regulation of violence in the nineteenth century. But the homosexual-panic defense did not formally appear in legal opinions until the nineteen-sixties.
593
594In the middle of the twentieth century, progressive criminal-law thinkers called for the expansion of the provocation concept to accommodate defendants whose situations didn’t fit the narrow categories that courts had developed. Their intent was to make the criminal code more forgiving of human fallibility. Following the standard proposed by the American Law Institute’s influential Model Penal Code of 1962, New York liberalized its provocation doctrine, in 1967, to allow reduction of murder charges to manslaughter when a defendant killed while “under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there is reasonable explanation or excuse.” This shifted the focus toward a defendant’s troubled internal emotional state, rather than demanding that the external circumstances display certain established types of facts. By 1976, New York’s highest court noted that advances in psychology had made the public willing to reduce responsibility for “those whose capacity has been diminished by mental trauma.” What could explain a defendant’s “extreme emotional disturbance” and excuse the violence was a trauma that developed “for a substantial period of time, simmering in the unknowing subconscious and then inexplicably coming to the fore.” If a defendant’s trauma was the key to his defense, his own past was prologue.
595
596Current efforts to ban gay- and trans-panic defenses are uncontroversial in jurisdictions that embrace gay and transgender rights. But doing so may have unintended legal implications. Women who have killed abusive men have sometimes claimed that their charges should be reduced, even when they were not fighting off imminent death or serious injury, which would be valid self-defense. For decades, courts have allowed battered women to argue that their homicidal response was reasonably induced by a male victim’s past abusive conduct. In fact, according to the legal scholar Aya Gruber, women have been more successful than men in using the provocation defense. This is likely because female defendants have more readily proved that they suffered prior trauma. That raises the question of what should be the range of a woman’s reasonable response to a man’s unwelcome sexual advances. If she panics and kills in a social context that makes women’s fear of male sexual violence widespread and ordinary, should her response be considered reasonable and her responsibility mitigated?
597
598The new bills bar both women and men from making a “gender panic” defense. They refuse to excuse, for example, a woman who kills a person who is sexually aggressive but not violent. But they would allow a woman to claim that a reasonable explanation for her homicidal reaction to a nonviolent sexual advance was the trauma caused by a past sexual assault. That defense would be possible regardless of the deceased person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
599
600The new legislation’s implications also reverberate in the realm of racial bias. The myriad killings of black males based on racially biased perceptions of danger immediately come to mind.
601
602The role of bigotry has been debated in the police killings of unarmed black men that the legal system has deemed justified, as well as in the case of George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teen-ager, for which a Florida jury acquitted him.
603
604A successful self-defense claim convinces a prosecutor or jury that the defendant reasonably feared for his life, and thus the killing was not a crime. The notorious trial of Bernhard Goetz, who shot four black teen-agers who approached him in the New York City subway, in 1984, resulted in his acquittal on attempted-murder and assault charges, presumably because the jury believed that his perception of danger was reasonable—a perception that was widely understood to be linked to the victims’ race.
605
606But black defendants have also claimed that they reasonably perceived danger from the white victims they have killed. In 2006, John White, a black man, shot and killed one of the five white teen-agers who appeared outside his Long Island home shouting racial epithets and accusing his son of wanting to rape a white girl. As Calvin Trillin reported in this magazine, the trial defense brought up White’s grandfather’s history of fleeing Alabama after a deadly attack by the Ku Klux Klan to explain that the defendant’s perception of the white teen-agers as a lynch mob made his fear of death reasonable. The intergenerational family trauma was a way of claiming “race panic.” The prosecution sought a murder charge, but the grand jury indicted White of manslaughter—effectively mitigating the crime due to the claim of provocation. He was convicted but pardoned by Governor David Paterson after serving just five months in prison.
607
608In a related vein, ethnic-minority defendants have claimed that their crimes should be reduced to less than murder. For example, in 2003, in California, a Japanese-American man who killed a woman who allegedly exploited him financially and threatened to kill his elderly parents argued that his Asian upbringing explained his violent reaction to humiliation at being taken advantage of, because, “in Japanese culture, intense shame attaches to males who lack emotional control, who are unable to meet the expectations of others, and who violate their personal standards.” The court excluded his sociological expert’s testimony and found that the connection between the defendant’s cultural background and state of mind was too general. He was convicted of murder. But in other cases courts have sometimes admitted arguments based on cultural background, allowing juries to credit what is effectively a “cultural panic” defense.
609
610Despite the new bills’ claim to eliminate the gay- and trans-panic defenses, they still allow defendants to put on such a defense if they can tie their extreme emotional reactions to personal traumas. The federal bills explicitly state that a court may still admit evidence of a defendant’s “past trauma” to excuse, justify, or mitigate an offense. That loophole limits the potential effects of the new rule, rendering the ban more of an expressive symbol than a concrete protection of L.G.B.T.Q. people.
611
612What we used to call “heat of passion” we now call “trauma,” which allows us to be more understanding of people who have had psychologically damaging experiences. But the fact that both victims and perpetrators may claim to have suffered trauma complicates our efforts to determine who is a perpetrator and who is a victim—that is, who is responsible and who is harmed.
613
614As the legal scholar Janet Halley has noted, a gay-panic reaction may lead people who identify as heterosexual to falsely perceive sexual minorities with whom they have engaged in sexual conduct as having committed sexual harassment or assault against them. The gay-panic debate, then, goes beyond excuses for murder. It reminds us more basically that biases can frame—and flip—perceptions of guilt.BACK TO TRACY TWYMANTHOMAS SHERIDANSTEVEN OUTTRIM OUT TO KILL YOUHEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENTA US judge ruled in favor of big pharma. A new rule proposed by the Trump administration that would require drug companies to list wholesale prices in TV ads was struck down yesterday ahead of its implementation on Wednesday midweek last week. The measure aimed to embarrass firms like Merck and Eli Lilly into reducing their drug costs.Doomed to Repeat?
615
616Less than five years ago, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people. When it was over, world leaders took a solemn vow: Never again. Now, in Congo, it is beginning to happen again — with an outbreak that has sickened thousands and killed more than 1500. The response from the international community, including the U.S.? Epidemiologists and aid groups say it’s not nearly enough.It hasn't dominated the headlines, but there's a major Ebola outbreak going on right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the World Health Organization, it's killed 1630 people So far, making it the second-biggest Ebola outbreak in history. But there is some good news in the fight against the deadly disease. Two experimental drugs have been found effective in treating the strain of the virus in this particular outbreak, according to new research published yesterday. The drugs are now being tested in clinical trials. Officials hope viable treatments come from the research soon. Therebe reports that Ebola in this current outbreak has already jumped the border into neighboring Uganda.— The latest data show doctors have granted medical exemptions from vaccines to 4812 kindergartners in California, a 70% increase from two years ago.A Salton Sea man has died from West Nile virus. He was the first person to die of West Nile virus in California this year.MEASLES AS METAPHOR
617
618What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America
619The return of a vanquished disease reflects historical amnesia, declining faith in institutions, and a troubling lack of concern for the public good.
620
621In two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can serve as a metaphor—a reflection of the society through which it travels. In other words, the way certain illnesses spread reveals something not just about a nation’s physiological health but also about its cultural and political health. For instance, AIDS would not have ravaged America as fully as it did without institutionalized homophobia, which inclined many Americans to see the disease as retribution for gay sex.
622
623Now another virus is offering insights into the country’s psychic and civic condition. Two decades ago, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. Yet in the first five months of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 1,000 cases—more than occurred from 2000 to 2010.
624
625The straightforward explanation for measles’ return is that fewer Americans are receiving vaccines. Since the turn of the century, the share of American children under the age of 2 who go unvaccinated has quadrupled. But why are a growing number of American parents refusing vaccines—in the process welcoming back a disease that decades ago killed hundreds of people a year and hospitalized close to 50,000?
626
627One answer is that contemporary America suffers from a dangerous lack of historical memory. Most of the parents who are today skipping or delaying their children’s combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine don’t remember life with measles, much less that it used to kill more children than drowning does today. Nor do they recall how other diseases stamped out by vaccines—most prominently smallpox and polio—took lives and disfigured bodies.
628
629Our amnesia about vaccines is part of a broader forgetting. Prior generations of Americans understood the danger of zero-sum economic nationalism, for instance, because its results remained visible in their lifetimes. When Al Gore debated Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993, he reminded the Texan businessman of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on 20,000 foreign products—prompting other countries to retaliate, deepening the Great Depression, and helping to elect Adolf Hitler. But fewer and fewer people remember the last global trade war. Similarly, as memories of Nazism fade across Europe and the United States, anti-Semitism is rising. Technology may improve; science may advance. But the fading of lessons that once seemed obvious should give pause to those who believe history naturally bends toward progress.
630
631Declining vaccination rates not only reflect a great forgetting; they also reveal a population that suffers from overconfidence in its own amateur knowledge. In her book entitled “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines,” the University of Colorado at Denver’s Jennifer Reich notes that starting in the 1970s, alternative-health movements “repositioned expertise as residing within the individual.” This ethos has grown dramatically in the internet age, so much so that “in arenas as diverse as medicine, mental health, law, education, business, and food, self-help or do-it-yourself movements encourage individuals to reject expert advice or follow it selectively.” Autodidacticism can be valuable.
632
633But it’s one thing to Google a food to see whether it’s healthy. It’s quite another to dismiss decades of studies on the benefits of vaccines because you’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos.
634
635In an interview, Reich so-Noted that all anti-vaccine activists describe themselves as “researchers,” thus equating their scouring of the internet on behalf of their families with the work of scientists who publish in peer-reviewed journals.
636
637In many ways, the post-1960s emphasis on autonomy and personal choice has been liberating. But it can threaten public health. Considered solely in terms of the benefits to one’s own child, the case for vaccinating against measles may not be obvious. Yes, the vaccine poses little risk to healthy children, but measles isn’t necessarily that dangerous to them either. The problem is that for others in society—such as children with a compromised immune system—measles may be deadly. By vaccinating their own children, and thus ensuring that they don’t spread the disease, parents contribute to the “herd immunity” that protects the vulnerable. But this requires thinking more about the collective and less about one’s own child. And this mentality is growing rarer in an era of what Reich calls “individualist parenting,” in which well-off parents spend “immense time and energy strategizing how to keep their children healthy while often ignoring the larger, harder-to-solve questions around them.”
638
639Historical amnesia and individualism have contributed to a third cultural condition, one that is more obvious but also, perhaps, more central to measles’ return and at least as worrying for society overall: diminished trust in government. For earlier generations of Americans, faith in mass vaccines derived in large part from the campaign to eradicate polio, in the 1950s—a time when the country’s victory in World War II and the subsequent postwar boom had boosted the public’s belief in its leaders. This faith made it easy to convince Americans to accept the polio vaccine, and the vaccine’s success in turn boosted confidence in the officials who protected public health. So popular was the vaccine’s inventor, Jonas Salk, that in 1955 officials in New York offered to throw him a ticker-tape parade.
640
641In the 1960s, the Johnson administration made mass inoculation one component of the ambitious assault on poverty, ignorance, and disease known as the Great Society. In 1964—a year in which 77 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted government to do the right thing most or all of the time—the surgeon general established a committee to determine how states should administer vaccines. There was little public resistance. By 1968, half the states required children to be vaccinated to attend school, and the rest soon followed.
642
643As Reich details, today’s skepticism of vaccines has its roots in the alternative-medicine and self-help movements of the 1970s, which encouraged people to question established medical authority. This questioning coincided with a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam disillusionment with government that Ronald Reagan exploited when he declared in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
644
645As distrust of government has grown, so too has distrust of vaccines. The anti-vaccination movement’s Rosetta stone is a 1998 paper in the British medical journal The Lancet that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. As is well established, the paper was a fraud. Its lead author, the physician Andrew Wakefield, falsified data and received money from lawyers who were suing vaccine makers. The Lancet later retracted the study, and Wakefield lost his medical license. Twenty-one subsequent studies—including a Danish one involving more than 650,000 children—have found no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
646
647But with autism rates rising in the United States, Wakefield found followers on the Republican Party’s anti-government fringe. In 2002, Representative Dan Burton, who in the 1990s had repeatedly implied that the Clintons were involved in the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, invited the disgraced doctor to testify before his committee. Burton—whose grandson has autism—went on to hold at least 20 hearings, suggesting that government scientists were covering up a link between vaccines and autism.
648
649Burton was a harbinger. After a Republican presidential debate in 2011, one of the candidates, Michele Bachmann, claimed that the HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, causes mental retardation. While running for president in 2015, Senator Rand Paul—a physician—argued against mandatory vaccinations by asserting that there are “many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” And from 2012 to 2014, while Donald Trump was claiming that President Barack Obama hadn’t been born in the United States, he also tweeted more than 30 times about the supposed dangers of vaccines.
650
651Yet it’s not only conservatives who translate their suspicion of government into suspicion of vaccines. Many liberals distrust the large drug companies that both produce vaccines and help fund the Food and Drug Administration, which is supposed to regulate them. The former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has suggested that “widespread distrust” of what she describes as the medical-industrial complex is understandable because “regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs.” The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims that thimerosal, a preservative formerly used in some vaccines, harms children. Bright-blue counties in Northern California, Washington State, and Oregon have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.
652
653Although polls suggest that conservatives are slightly less accepting of vaccines than liberals are, a 2014 study found that distrust of government was correlated with distrust of vaccines among both Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, the best predictor of someone’s view of vaccines is not their political ideology, but their trust in government and their openness to conspiracy theories.
654
655It’s not surprising, therefore, that a plunge in the percentage of Americans who trust Washington to do the right thing most or all of the time—which hovered around 40 percent at the turn of the century and since the 2008 financial crisis has regularly dipped below 20 percent—has coincided with a decline in vaccination rates. In 2001, 0.3 percent of American toddlers had received no vaccinations. By 2017, that figure had jumped more than fourfold. Studies also show a marked uptick in families requesting philosophical exemptions from vaccines, which are permitted in 16 states.
656
657This surge reflects the ease with which conspiracy theories can spread, and not only via social media. Anti-vaccination activists have enjoyed particular success in communities whose cultural isolation makes them easy prey for misinformation. In 2010 and 2011, Wakefield—who now lives in the U.S.—reportedly visited the Somali community in Minnesota three times, and his supporters distributed pamphlets at community events. As of 2014, the local childhood MMR vaccination rate—which had been 92 percent in 2004—had fallen to 42 percent. By 2017, children of Somali descent accounted for a majority of America’s measles cases.
658
659The epicenter of this year’s outbreak has been the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in and around New York City.
660
661Here too, anti-vaccine activists have run laps around government and media gatekeepers, who have struggled to keep pace with anti-vaccination misinformation. In May, Wakefield addressed an anti-vaccination rally in New York’s heavily ultra-Orthodox Rockland County, and anti-vaccination messages produced by a supporter have been featured on an influential ultra-Orthodox parenting hotline.
662
663This year’s measles outbreak appears to have started with people who traveled to Ukraine, where infection rates are high.
664
665Which points to a broader problem: Unvaccinated Americans face a growing risk of infection because vaccination rates are declining in Europe too, for largely the same reasons. Many of Europe’s political insurgents—including the German Green Party on the left, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Italy’s Northern League on the right—oppose mandatory vaccinations. And a 2019 study of western-European voting patterns in the European Journal of Public Health found “a highly significant positive association between the percentage of people in a country who voted for populist parties and [the percentage] who believe that vaccines are not important.”
666
667Of course, some skepticism toward official information—including information from the intermeshed corporate, scientific, and governmental establishments that regulate public health—is worthwhile. Neither the drug companies that produce vaccines nor the public-health officials who regulate them are infallible.
668
669Even during the campaign against polio, one of America’s great public-health triumphs, a laboratory in California manufactured defective batches of the vaccine, which ended up paralyzing 164 people and killing 10. And some Americans have legitimate concerns about the influence that drug companies wield today over the regulators who are tasked with keeping their vaccines safe. But there’s a crucial difference between wanting to insulate America’s regulators from corporate influence and believing that the CDC, the FDA, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are perpetrating a massive conspiracy to maim children.
670
671Given America’s crises of memory, expertise, and institutional trust, one might despairingly conclude that, just as America will never restore its now battered political norms, it will never restore the norm of near-universal vaccination that existed in the late 20th century. But there’s nothing inevitable about this trend.
672
673If vaccination rates can fall, they can also rise. The key is determined, deliberate action to turn the tide.
674
675Since conspiracy theorists thrive when government is corrupt and opaque, Americans can rebuild faith in vaccines by making their approval process more independent and transparent.
676
677Congress should provide the FDA with enough funding to review vaccines and other drugs in a timely manner without taking Big Pharma’s money. And it should prevent former bureaucrats from going to work for the drug companies they used to regulate.
678
679Stopping measles also requires empowering doctors. A 2011 Washington State law that required parents to talk with a doctor before getting a vaccine exemption reduced exemptions by 40 percent. And a 2012 study by researchers at Emory and Johns Hopkins found that parents who viewed their doctors as reliable sources of information were less likely to search for material about vaccines online. The problem, as Reich told me, is that pediatricians spend less time with patients than they did decades ago. Changing insurance companies’ reimbursement practices to reward doctors for taking the time to reassure patients that vaccines are safe could push vaccination rates back up.
680
681The implications of all of this go far beyond one disease.
682
683Although measles may be the most vivid medical manifestation of America’s political and cultural ailments, it won’t be the last. If Americans won’t take expert advice about something as scientifically proven as the benefits of vaccinating their children, what other life-and-death advice will they ignore?-------------------------------------------------------------xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWhen did america become untethered from reality?How America Lost Its Mind
684Our nation’s current post-truth darkness be the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America aberrant throughout its history.
685
686I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community.
687he told a reporter,
688People in “the reality-based community, believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”
689
690Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.
691
692Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories.
693
694What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.
695
696From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.
697
698Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.
699
700We believe that the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous and shocking truths from us, concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of aids, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.
701
702And this was all true before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality.
703
704We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.
705
706How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based be but a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.
707
708Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.
709
710Almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016. According to a survey by Public Policy Polling, 15 percent believe that the “media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals,” and another 15 percent think that’s possible. A quarter of Americans believest that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables.
711
712When I say that a third believe X and a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the population. Of course, various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed one another—for instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon.
713
714Why are we like this?
715
716The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.
717
718The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.
719
720A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes “miracle cures” on his daily TV show. When a political-science professor attacks the idea “that there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,” colleagues just nod and grant tenure. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable.
721
722Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. Therebe many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.
723
724American moxie has always come in two types. We have our wilder, faster, looser side: We’re overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. But we also have the virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. A propensity to dream impossible dreams is like other powerful tendencies—okay when kept in check. For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.
725
726The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.
727
728The second change was the onset of the new era of information.
729
730Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them. Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.
731
732Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.
733
734Treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously, is not unique to Americans. But we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people. This is American exceptionalism in the 21st century. The country has always been a one-of-a-kind place. But our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.
735
736People see our shocking Trump moment—this post-truth, “alternative facts” moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.
737
738America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.
739
740The 1960s and the Beginning of the End of Reason
741
742i don’t regret or disapprove of many of the ways the ’60s permanently reordered American society and culture. It’s just that along with the familiar benefits, there have been unreckoned costs.
743
744In 1962, people started referring to “hippies,” the Beatles had their first hit, Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary was handing out psilocybin and LSD to grad students. And three hours south of San Francisco, on the heavenly stretch of coastal cliffs known as Big Sur, a pair of young Stanford psychology graduates founded a school and think tank they named after a small American Indian tribe that had lived on the grounds long before. “In 1968,” one of its founding figures recalled four decades later,
745
746Esalen was the center of the cyclone of the youth rebellion. It was one of the central places, like Mecca for the Islamic culture.
747
748Esalen was a pilgrimage center for hundreds and thousands of youth interested in some sense of transcendence, breakthrough consciousness, LSD, the sexual revolution, encounter, being sensitive, finding your body, yoga—all of these things were at first filtered into the culture through Esalen. By 1966, ’67, and ’68, Esalen was making a world impact.
749
750This is not overstatement. Essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking (also: massage, hot baths, sex, and sex in hot baths). It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.
751
752Not long before Esalen was founded, one of its co-founders, Dick Price, had suffered a mental breakdown and been involuntarily committed to a private psychiatric hospital for a year. His new institute embraced the radical notion that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primarily tools of coercion and control. This was the big idea behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of course. And within the psychiatric profession itself this idea had two influential proponents, who each published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decade—R. D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness). “Madness,” Laing wrote when Esalen was new, “is potentially liberation and renewal.” Esalen’s founders were big Laing fans, and the institute became a hotbed for the idea that insanity was just an alternative way of perceiving reality.
753
754These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.” This is now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone—from creationists to climate-change deniers to anti-vaccine hysterics—who prefers to disregard science in favor of his own beliefs.
755
756You know how young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it? And how before their frontal lobes, the neural seat of reason and rationality, are fully wired, they can be especially prone to fantasy? In the ’60s, the universe cooperated: It did seem to revolve around young people, affirming their adolescent self-regard, making their fantasies of importance feel real and their fantasies of instant transformation and revolution feel plausible.
757
758Practically overnight, America turned its full attention to the young and everything they believed and imagined and wished.
759
760If 1962 was when the decade really got going, 1969 was the year the new doctrines and their gravity were definitively cataloged by the grown-ups. Reason and rationality were over.
761
762The countercultural effusions were freaking out the old guard, including religious people who couldn’t quite see that yet another Great Awakening was under way in America, heaving up a new religion of believers who “have no option but to follow the road until they reach the Holy City … that lies beyond the technocracy … the New Jerusalem.” That line is from The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, published three weeks after Woodstock, in the summer of 1969. Its author was Theodore Roszak, age 35, a Bay Area professor who thereby coined the word counterculture.
763
764Roszak spends 270 pages glorying in the younger generation’s “brave” rejection of expertise and “all that our culture values as ‘reason’ and ‘reality.’ ” (Note the scare quotes.) So-called experts, after all, are “on the payroll of the state and/or corporate structure.” A chapter called “The Myth of Objective Consciousness” argues that science is really just a state religion.
765
766To create “a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities … become the arbiters of the good [and] the true,” he writes, “nothing less is required than the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness.” He welcomes the “radical rejection of science and technological values.”
767
768Earlier that summer, a University of Chicago sociologist (and Catholic priest) named Andrew Greeley had alerted readers of The New York Times Magazine that beyond the familiar signifiers of youthful rebellion (long hair, sex, drugs, music, protests), the truly shocking change on campuses was the rise of anti-rationalism and a return of the sacred—“mysticism and magic,” the occult, séances, cults based on the book of Revelation. When he’d chalked a statistical table on a classroom blackboard, one of his students had reacted with horror: “Mr. Greeley, I think you’re an empiricist.”
769
770As 1969 turned to 1970, a 41-year-old Yale Law School professor was finishing his book about the new youth counterculture. Charles Reich was a former Supreme Court clerk now tenured at one of ultra-rationalism’s American headquarters. But hanging with the young people had led him to a midlife epiphany and apostasy. In 1966, he had started teaching an undergraduate seminar called “The Individual in America,” for which he assigned fiction by Kesey and Norman Mailer. He decided to spend the next summer, the Summer of Love, in Berkeley. On the road back to New Haven, he had his Pauline conversion to the kids’ values. His class at Yale became hugely popular; at its peak, 600 students were enrolled. In 1970, The Greening of America became The New York Times’ best-selling book (as well as a much-read 70-page New Yorker excerpt), and remained on the list for most of a year.
771
772At 16, I bought and read one of the 2 million copies sold.
773
774Rereading it today and recalling how much I loved it was a stark reminder of the follies of youth. Reich was shamelessly, uncritically swooning for kids like me. The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth.
775
776Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.”
777
778Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.
779
780And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.
781
782Reich praises the “gaiety and humor” of the new Consciousness III wardrobe, but his book is absolutely humorless—because it’s a response to “this moment of utmost sterility, darkest night and most extreme peril.” Conspiracism was flourishing, and Reich bought in. Now that “the Corporate State has added depersonalization and repression” to its other injustices, “it has threatened to destroy all meaning and suck all joy from life.”
783
784Reich’s magical thinking mainly concerned how the revolution would turn out. “The American Corporate State,” having produced this new generation of longhaired hyperindividualists who insist on trusting their gut and finding their own truth, “is now accomplishing what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves. The machine has begun to destroy itself.” Once everyone wears Levi’s and gets high, the old ways “will simply be swept away in the flood.”
785
786The inevitable/imminent happy-cataclysm part of the dream didn’t happen, of course. The machine did not destroy itself. But Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.”
787
788His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami. Reich’s faith was the converse of the Enlightenment rationalists’ hopeful fallacy 200 years earlier. Granted complete freedom of thought, Thomas Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the path of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so.
789
790I remember when fantastical beliefs went fully mainstream, in the 1970s. My irreligious mother bought and read The Secret Life of Plants, a big best seller arguing that plants were sentient and would “be the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics.” The amazing truth about plants, the book claimed, had been suppressed by the FDA and agribusiness. My mom didn’t believe in the conspiracy, but she did start talking to her ficuses as if they were pets. In a review, The New York Times registered the book as another data point in how “the incredible is losing its pariah status.” Indeed, mainstream publishers and media organizations were falling over themselves to promote and sell fantasies as nonfiction. In 1975 came a sensational autobiography by the young spoon bender and mind reader Uri Geller as well as Life After Life, by Raymond Moody, a philosophy Ph.D. who presented the anecdotes of several dozen people who’d nearly died as evidence of an afterlife. The book sold many millions of copies; before long the International Association for Near Death Studies formed and held its first conference, at Yale.
791
792During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.
793
794These ideas percolated across multiple academic fields. In 1965, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization in America, echoing Laing’s skepticism of the concept of mental illness; by the 1970s, he was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of truth”—oppression by other means. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia.
795
796Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”
797
798When I first read that, at age 18, I loved the quotation marks. If reality is simply the result of rules written by the powers that be, then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.
799
800A more extreme academic evangelist for the idea of all truths being equal was a UC Berkeley philosophy professor named Paul Feyerabend. His best-known book, published in 1975, was Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge.
801
802“Rationalism,” it declared, “is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God,” and science a “particular superstition.” In a later edition of the book, published when creationists were passing laws to teach Genesis in public-school biology classes, Feyerabend came out in favor of the practice, comparing creationists to Galileo. Science, he insisted, is just another form of belief. “Only one principle,” he wrote, “can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”
803
804Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger. This was understandable, given the times: colonialism ending, genocide of American Indians confessed, U.S. wars in the developing world. Who were we to roll our eyes or deny what these people believed? In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.
805
806In 1968, a UC Davis psychologist named Charles Tart conducted an experiment in which, he wrote, “a young woman who frequently had spontaneous out-of-body experiences”—didn’t “claim to have” them but “had” them—spent four nights sleeping in a lab, hooked up to an EEG machine. Her assigned task was to send her mind or soul out of her body while she was asleep and read a five-digit number Tart had written on a piece of paper placed on a shelf above the bed. He reported that she succeeded. Other scientists considered the experiments and the results bogus, but Tart proceeded to devote his academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and magic is real. In an extraordinary paper published in 1972 in Science, he complained about the scientific establishment’s “almost total rejection of the knowledge gained” while high or tripping. He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method had to be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new era, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional “at the time of data collection” or during “data reduction and theorizing.”
807
808Tart’s new mode of research, he admitted, posed problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with one another.” Tart popularized the term consensus reality for what you or I would simply call reality, and around 1970 that became a permanent interdisciplinary term of art in academia. Later he abandoned the pretense of neutrality and started calling it the consensus trance—people committed to reason and rationality were the deluded dupes, not he and his tribe.
809
810Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969.
811
812he so-wrote
813“There was no knowledge, only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
814
815Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty. Yet once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all American barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—post-positivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team.
816
817Conspiracy and Paranoia in the 1970s
818
819as the vietnam war escalated and careened, antirationalism flowered. In his book about the remarkable protests in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1967, The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer describes chants (“Out demons, out—back to darkness, ye servants of Satan!”) and a circle of hundreds of protesters intending “to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet.” They were hoping the building would “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.”
820
821By the end of the ’60s, plenty of zealots on the left were engaged in extreme magical thinking. They hadn’t started the decade that way. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society adopted its founding document, drafted by 22-year-old Tom Hayden. The manifesto is sweet and reasonable: decrying inequality and poverty and “the pervasiveness of racism in American life,” seeing the potential benefits as well as the downsides of industrial automation, declaring the group “in basic opposition to the communist system.”
822
823Then, kaboom, the big bang. Anything and everything became believable. Reason was chucked. Dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible. In 1969, the SDS’s most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. Its members believed that they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war. They issued statements about “the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution” and how “dope is one of our weapons … Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.” And then factions of the new left went to work making and setting off thousands of bombs in the early 1970s.
824
825Left-wingers weren’t the only ones who became unhinged.
826
827Officials at the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence agencies, as well as in urban police departments, convinced themselves that peaceful antiwar protesters and campus lefties in general were dangerous militants, and expanded secret programs to spy on, infiltrate, and besmirch their organizations. Which thereby validated the preexisting paranoia on the new left and encouraged its wing nuts’ revolutionary delusions. In the ’70s, the CIA and Army intelligence set up their infamous Project Star Gate to see whether they could conduct espionage by means of ESP.
828
829The far right had its own glorious ’60s moment, in the form of the new John Birch Society, whose founders believed that both Republican and Democratic presidential Cabinets included “conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent[s] of the Soviet conspiracy” determined to create “a world-wide police state, absolutely and brutally governed from the Kremlin,” as the society’s founder, Robert Welch, put it in a letter to friends.
830
831This furiously, elaborately suspicious way of understanding the world started spreading across the political spectrum after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Dallas couldn’t have been the work of just one nutty loser with a mail-order rifle, could it have? Surely the Communists or the CIA or the Birchers or the Mafia or some conspiratorial combination must have arranged it all, right? The shift in thinking didn’t register immediately. In his influential book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published two years after the president’s murder, Richard Hofstadter devoted only two sentences and a footnote to it, observing that “conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy’s assassination” don’t have much “currency … in the United States.”
832
833Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies. One of them, Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane, a lawyer on the left, was a New York Times best seller for six months. Then, in 1967, New Orleans’s district attorney, Jim Garrison, indicted a local businessman for being part of a conspiracy of gay right-wingers to assassinate Kennedy—“a Nazi operation, whose sponsors include some of the oil-rich millionaires in Texas,” according to Garrison, with the CIA, FBI, and Robert F. Kennedy complicit in the cover-up. After NBC News broadcast an investigation discrediting the theory, Garrison said the TV segment was a piece of “thought control,” obviously commissioned by NBC’s parent company RCA, “one of the top 10 defense contractors” and thus “desperate because we are in the process of uncovering their hoax.”
834
835The notion of an immense and awful JFK-assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America. As a result, more Americans than ever became reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and stoners, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award. Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream. Delusional conspiracism wouldn’t spread quite as widely or as deeply on the left, but more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.
836
837Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.
838
839Americans felt newly entitled to believe absolutely anything. I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did. What made the UFO mania historically significant rather than just amusing, however, was the web of elaborate stories that were now being spun: not just of sightings but of landings and abductions—and of government cover-ups and secret alliances with interplanetary beings. Those earnest beliefs planted more seeds for the extravagant American conspiracy thinking that by the turn of the century would be rampant and seriously toxic.
840
841A single idée fixe like this often appears in both frightened and hopeful versions. That was true of the suddenly booming belief in alien visitors, which tended toward the sanguine as the ’60s turned into the ’70s, even in fictional depictions. Consider the extraterrestrials that Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider earnestly describes as he’s getting high for the first time, and those at the center of Close Encounters of the Third Kind eight years later. One evening in southern Georgia in 1969, the year Easy Rider came out, a failed gubernatorial candidate named Jimmy Carter saw a moving moon-size white light in the sky that “didn’t have any solid substance to it” and “got closer and closer,” stopped, turned blue, then red and back to white, and then zoomed away.
842
843The first big nonfiction abduction tale appeared around the same time, in a best-selling book about a married couple in New Hampshire who believed that while driving their Chevy sedan late one night, they saw a bright object in the sky that the wife, a UFO buff already, figured might be a spacecraft. She began having nightmares about being abducted by aliens, and both of them underwent hypnosis. The details of the abducting aliens and their spacecraft that each described were different, and changed over time. The man’s hypnotized description of the aliens bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones in an episode of The Outer Limits broadcast on ABC just before his hypnosis session. Thereafter, hypnosis became the standard way for people who believed that they had been abducted (or that they had past lives, or that they were the victims of satanic abuse) to recall the supposed experience. And the couple’s story established the standard abduction-tale format: Humanoid creatures take you aboard a spacecraft, communicate telepathically or in spoken English, medically examine you by inserting long needles into you, then let you go.
844
845The husband and wife were undoubtedly sincere believers. The sincerely credulous are perfect suckers, and in the late ’60s, a convicted thief and embezzler named Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods?, positing that extraterrestrials helped build the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the giant stone heads on Easter Island. That book and its many sequels sold tens of millions of copies, and the documentary based on it had a huge box-office take in 1970. Americans were ready to believe von Däniken’s fantasy to a degree they simply wouldn’t have been a decade earlier, before the ’60s sea change. Certainly a decade earlier NBC wouldn’t have aired an hour-long version of the documentary in prime time. And while I’m at it: Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.
846
847The 1980s and the Smog of Subjectivity
848
849by the 1980s, things appeared to have returned more or less to normal. Civil rights seemed like a done deal, the war in Vietnam was over, young people were no longer telling grown-ups they were worthless because they were grown-ups. Revolution did not loom. Sex and drugs and rock and roll were regular parts of life. Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.
850
851The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.
852
853Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.
854
855Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say. Michel Foucault’s rival Jean Baudrillard became a celebrity among American intellectuals by declaring that rationalism was a tool of oppressors that no longer worked as a way of understanding the world, pointless and doomed. In other words, as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”
856
857This kind of thinking was by no means limited to the ivory tower.
858
859The intellectuals’ new outlook was as much a product as a cause of the smog of subjectivity that now hung thick over the whole American mindscape. After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.
860
861Belief in gigantic secret conspiracies thrived, ranging from the highly improbable to the impossible, and moved from the crackpot periphery to the mainstream.
862
863Many Americans announced that they’d experienced fantastic horrors and adventures, abuse by Satanists, and abduction by extraterrestrials, and their claims began to be taken seriously.
864
865Parts of the establishment—psychology and psychiatry, academia, religion, law enforcement—encouraged people to believe that all sorts of imaginary traumas were real.
866
867America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970.
868
869But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.
870
871Troll Nation : How the Right Became More Unhinged Than the Left, or How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.
872
873the reagan presidency was famously a triumph of truthiness and entertainment, and in the 1990s, as problematically batty beliefs kept going mainstream, presidential politics continued merging with the fantasy-industrial complex.
874
875In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment. American politics happened on television; it was a TV series, a reality show just before TV became glutted with reality shows. A titillating new story line that goosed the ratings of an existing series was an established scripted-TV gimmick.
876
877The audience had started getting bored with The Clinton Administration, but the Monica Lewinsky subplot got people interested again.
878
879Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.
880
881For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.
882
883Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience.
884
885Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day. As Limbaugh’s show took off, in 1992 the producer Roger Ailes created a syndicated TV show around him. Four years later, when NBC hired someone else to launch a cable news channel, Ailes, who had been working at NBC, quit and created one with Rupert Murdoch.
886
887Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.
888
889For Americans, this was a new condition. Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.
890
891And there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown. After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.
892
893Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more. False beliefs were rendered both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam.
894
895Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say. Our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true.
896
897Thomas Jefferson said that he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—because in the new United States, “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.”
898
899However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.
900
901The way internet search was designed to operate in the ’90s—that is, the way information and beliefs now flow, rise, and fall—is democratic in the extreme. Internet search algorithms are an example of Gresham’s law, whereby the bad drives out—or at least overruns—the good. On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.
902
903Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results. For instance, beginning in the ’90s, conspiracists decided that contrails, the skinny clouds of water vapor that form around jet-engine exhaust, were composed of exotic chemicals, part of a secret government scheme to test weapons or poison citizens or mitigate climate change—and renamed them chemtrails. When I Googled chemtrails proof, the first seven results offered so-called evidence of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for government extraterrestrial cover-up, only one result in the first three pages didn’t link to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory.
904
905Before the web, it really wasn’t easy to stumble across false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.
906Today, however, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but rather theybe interconnected.
907Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.
908
909The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.
910
911Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.” Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies. In a recent paper called “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion,” based on years of survey research, two University of Chicago political scientists, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, confirmed this special American connection. “The likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted,” they found, by “a propensity to attribute the source of unexplained or extraordinary events to unseen, intentional forces” and a weakness for “melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events, particularly those that interpret history relative to universal struggles between good and evil.” Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.
912
913The Triumph of the Fantasy-Industrial Complex
914
915as a 13-year-old, I watched William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line with my conservative dad, attended Teen Age Republicans summer camp, and, at the behest of a Nixon-campaign advance man in Omaha, ripped down Rockefeller and Reagan signs during the 1968 Nebraska primary campaign. A few years later, I was a McGovern-campaign volunteer, but I still watched and admired Buckley on PBS. Over the years, I’ve voted for a few Republicans for state and local office. Today I disagree about political issues with friends and relatives to my right, but we agree on the essential contours of reality.
916
917People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable.
918
919Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical.
920
921Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.
922
923Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?
924
925One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian. The party is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents ever. If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?
926
927I doubt the GOP elite deliberately engineered the synergies between the economic and religious sides of their contemporary coalition. But as the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity. Economic insecurity correlates with greater religiosity, and among white Americans, greater religiosity correlates with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
928
929Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades. As the pioneer vehicle, the John Birch Society zoomed along and then sputtered out, but its fantastical paradigm and belligerent temperament has endured in other forms and under other brand names. When Barry Goldwater was the right-wing Republican presidential nominee in 1964, he had to play down any streaks of Bircher madness, but by 1979, in his memoir With No Apologies, he felt free to rave on about the globalist conspiracy and its “pursuit of a new world order” and impending “period of slavery”; the Council on Foreign Relations’ secret agenda for “one-world rule”; and the Trilateral Commission’s plan for “seizing control of the political government of the United States.” The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.
930
931In the late 1960s and ’70s, the reality-based left more or less won: retreat from Vietnam, civil-rights and environmental-protection laws, increasing legal and cultural equality for women, legal abortion, Keynesian economics triumphant.
932
933But then the right wanted its turn to win. It pretty much accepted racial and gender equality and had to live with social welfare and regulation and bigger government, but it insisted on slowing things down. The political center moved right—but in the ’70s and ’80s not yet unreasonably. Most of America decided that we were all free marketeers now, that business wasn’t necessarily bad, and that government couldn’t solve all problems. We still seemed to be in the midst of the normal cyclical seesawing of American politics. In the ’90s, the right achieved two of its wildest dreams: The Soviet Union and international communism collapsed; and, as violent crime radically declined, law and order was restored.
934
935But also starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.
936
937After Reagan, his hopped-up true-believer faction began insisting on total victory. But in a democracy, of course, total victory by any faction is a dangerous fantasy.
938
939Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism.
940
941I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction.
942
943“I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.
944
945For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans. Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.
946
947But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The party’s ideological center of gravity swerved way to the right of Rove and all the Bushes, finally knocking them and their clubmates aside. What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
948
949When i was growing up in Nebraska, my Republican parents loathed all Kennedys, distrusted unions, and complained about “confiscatory” federal income-tax rates of 91 percent. But conservatism to them also meant conserving the natural environment and allowing people to make their own choices, including about abortion. They were emphatically reasonable, disinclined to believe in secret Communist/Washington/elite plots to destroy America, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads about far-right acquaintances—such as our neighbors, the parents of the future Mrs. Clarence Thomas, who considered Richard Nixon suspiciously leftish. My parents never belonged to a church. They were godless Midwestern Republicans, born and raised—which wasn’t so odd 40 years ago. Until about 1980, the Christian right was not a phrase in American politics. In 2000, my widowed mom, having voted for 14 Republican presidential nominees in a row, quit a party that had become too Christian for her.
950
951The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say that evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and that if it is, it could be accompanied by creationist teaching. A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.
952
953Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians. Only four presidents have lacked a Christian denominational affiliation, the most recent one in the 1880s.
954
955According to Pew, two-thirds of Republicans admit that they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate who doesn’t believe in God.
956
957As a matter of fact, one of the Constitution’s key clauses—“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust”—is kind of a theoretical freedom. Not only have we never had an openly unbelieving president, but of the 535 members of the current Congress, exactly one, Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, lists her religion as “none.” Among all 7,383 state legislators, there are evidently about a dozen avowed atheists.*
958
959I’m reminded of one of H. L. Mencken’s dispatches from the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925. “Civilized” Tennesseans, he wrote, “had known for years what was going on in the hills. They knew what the country preachers were preaching—what degraded nonsense was being rammed and hammered into yokel skulls. But they were afraid to go out against the imposture while it was in the making.” What the contemporary right has done is worse, because it was deliberate and national, and it has had more-profound consequences.
960
961The Rise of Donald Trump
962
963i have been paying close attention to Donald Trump for a long time. Spy magazine, which I co-founded in 1986 and edited until 1993, published three cover stories about him—and dozens of pages exposing and ridiculing his lies, brutishness, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew. Donald Trump is a grifter driven by resentment of the establishment. He doesn’t like experts, because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to feel the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploited the myths of white racial victimhood. His case of what I call Kids R Us syndrome—spoiled, impulsive, moody, a 71-year-old brat—is acute.
964
965He is, first and last, a creature of the fantasy-industrial complex.
966
967“He is P. T. Barnum,” his sister, a federal judge, told his biographer Timothy O’Brien in 2005. Although the fantasy-industrial complex had been annexing presidential politics for more than half a century, from JFK through Reagan and beyond, Trump’s campaign and presidency are its ultimate expression.
968
969From 1967 through 2011, California was governed by former movie actors more than a third of the time, and one of them became president. But Trump’s need for any and all public attention always seemed to me more ravenous and insatiable than any other public figure’s, akin to an addict’s for drugs.
970
971Unlike Reagan, Trump was always an impresario as well as a performer. Before the emergence of Fantasyland, Trump’s various enterprises would have seemed a ludicrous, embarrassing, incoherent jumble for a businessman, let alone a serious candidate for president. What connects an Islamic-mausoleum-themed casino to a short-lived, shoddy professional football league to an autobiography he didn’t write to buildings he didn’t build to a mail-order meat business to beauty pageants to an airline that lasted three years to a sham “university” to a fragrance called Success to a vodka and a board game named after himself to a reality-TV show about pretending to fire people?
972
973What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed. When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier. He used the new and remade pieces of the fantasy-industrial complex as nobody had before. He hired actors to play enthusiastic supporters at his campaign kickoff. Twitter became his unmediated personal channel for entertaining outrage and untruth. And he was a star, so news shows wanted him on the air as much as possible—people at TV outlets told me during the campaign that they were expected to be careful not to make the candidate so unhappy that he might not return.
974
975Before Trump won their nomination and the presidency, when he was still “a cancer on conservatism” that must be “discarded” (former Governor Rick Perry) and an “utterly amoral” “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen” (Senator Ted Cruz), Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.
976
977During the campaign, Trump repeated the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. And instead of undergoing a normal medical exam from a normal doctor and making the results public, like nominees had before, Trump went on The Dr. Oz Show and handed the host test results from his wacky doctor.
978
979Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid; or the way today we immerse in the real-life fictions of Disney World. Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.
980
981Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.
982
983If he were just a truth-telling wise guy, however, he wouldn’t have won. Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.
984
985“I will give you everything,” Trump actually promised during the campaign. Yes: “Every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country” will come true.
986
987Just as the internet enabled full Fantasyland, it made possible Trump as candidate and president, feeding him pseudo-news on his phone and letting him feed those untruths directly to his Twitter followers. He is the poster boy for the downside of digital life. “Forget the press,” he advised supporters—just “read the internet.” After he wrongly declared on Twitter that one anti-Trump protester “has ties to isis,” he was asked whether he regretted tweeting that falsehood. “What do I know about it?” he replied. “All I know is what’s on the internet.”
988
989Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites. In 2011, he became the chief promoter of the fantasy that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a fringe idea that he brought into the mainstream. Only in the fall of 2016 did he grudgingly admit that the president was indeed a native-born American—at the same moment a YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely had been born in Kenya.
990Conspiracies, conspiracies, still more conspiracies. On Fox & Friends Trump discussed, as if it were fact, the National Enquirer’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to JFK’s assassination: “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.” The Fox News anchors interviewing him didn’t challenge him or follow up. He revived the 1993 fantasy about the Clintons’ friend Vince Foster—his death, Trump said, was “very fishy,” because Foster “had intimate knowledge of what was going on. He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide … I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.” He has also promised to make sure that “you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center.” And it has all worked for him, because so many Americans are eager to believe almost any conspiracy theory, no matter how implausible, as long as it jibes with their opinions and feelings.
991
992Not all lies are fantasies and not all fantasies are lies; people who believe untrue things can pass lie-detector tests. For instance, Trump probably really believed that “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years,” the total falsehood he told leaders of the National Sheriffs’ Association at the White House in early February. The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.
993
994He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.” When his approval rating began declining, Trump simply refused to believe it: “Any negative polls” that may appear, the president tweeted at dawn one morning from Mar-a-Lago, “are fake news.”
995
996The people who speak on Trump’s behalf to journalists and the rest of the reality-based world struggle to defend or explain his assertions. Asked about “the president’s statements that are … demonstrably not true,” the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway asked CNN’s Jake Tapper to please remember “the many things that he says that are true.”
997
998According to The New York Times, the people around Trump say his baseless certainty “that he was bugged in some way” by Obama in Trump Tower is driven by “a sense of persecution bordering on faith.” And indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”
999
1000Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.
1001
1002“Do you think that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?,” David Muir, the anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, asked Trump in January.
1003
1004“No,” he replied. “Not at all! Not at all—because many people feel the same way that I do.”
1005
1006The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies. It reflects our blithe conviction that America’s visions of freedom and democracy and justice and prosperity must prevail in the end. I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine, and Canada and Denmark and Japan and China and all the rest will eventually follow us down our tunnel. Why should modern civilization’s great principles—democracy, freedom, tolerance—guarantee great outcomes?
1007
1008Yet because I’m an American, a fortunate American who has lived in a fortunate American century, I remain (barely) more of an optimist than a pessimist. Even as we’ve entered this long winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well. During these same past few decades, Americans reduced the rates of murder and violent crime by more than half. We decoded the human genome, elected an African American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding 1 billion years ago, and created Beloved, The Simpsons, Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wire, The Colbert Report, Transparent, Hamilton. Since 1981, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty around the globe has plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent. I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.
1009
1010What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness.
1011
1012But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations. We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.
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1014It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again.
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1016Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.
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1018We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene.
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1020Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym?
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1022And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.
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