The Big Spin.
Major Garrett and David Becker's The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of THE BIG LIE pretty well tells readers what their message is and what their priors are. Let me open Book Review No. 3 by expressing general agreement with their central message, about the 2020 presidential election, which is that Donald Trump failed to turn out sufficient voters, while Democrats (and, I will argue, their media enablers) turned out enough voters to reverse the electoral votes of enough swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to secure the presidency for Joe Biden. Put simply, a few of the Hillary voters who sat 2016 out turned out for Dementia Joe while a few of the reluctant Trump voters of 2016 stayed home or thought the Democrats to offer the lesser evil.
That noted, why do I use such a provocative title to introduce the review?
Let's open with that jaundiced observation that you can count on a man to take a position if his salary depends on it. In the case of Big Truth, Major Garrett is Washington correspondent for CBS and David Becker is an election lawyer involved with the Center for Election Innovation and Research. The soft power of Social Approbation will encourage such people to hew to the Narrative. Otherwise what happens to the useful leaks or access to foundation money?
Let us then note the way the book opens, with a series of alternate histories. The worst case outcomes they envisioned for January 2022 and January 2023 did not come true, and the lurid scenario for November of 2016 to January of 2017, in which Team Hillary engages in a milder form of the combination of lawfare, wishful thinking, and riling up the electorate that is still "not just as bad" as what the remnants of Team Trump tried from November 2020 to January 2021 isn't convincing.
Why not? Team Hillary didn't have to engage in such antics, not with Jill Stein to pay for recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, not with Washington Post editorialists calling for Donald Trump to be impeached before he even took office, not with Chris Matthews and the amen corner at MSNBC devoting evening after evening to prospective investigations that would be sure to turn up something awful, not with angry voters marching in many cities and trashing businesses in a few. Yes, Barack Obama could call on Hillary Clinton to concede, and yes, she did, but none of that forestalled the not-so-loyal opposition and its "hashtag-resistance" presence on social media doing everything possible to keep the Trump administration from getting anything done.
It's true, Team Trump might have been as surprised as anyone else to having caught the brass ring, and thus they had no transition ready to go; and it's also possible that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate neither had any legislative plans, nor, in some cases, much regard for these outsiders showing up: that's not germane to the big spin.
Let us then note the ways in which the authors suggest, at page 17, foreign intelligence services injected themselves into the 2016 elections. "First, waves of disinformation on social media attempted to inflame anger and widen division between Americans. Leveraging attitudes about race, religion, and other issues, the Russians targeted us, to make us believe our neighbors and fellow citizens were our enemies, rather than the autocrats who sought to weaken America to consolidate power and line their own pockets." Do the authors not understand the purpose of intelligence services? That a few Russian intelligence officers cannot have the effect of prominent voices in both major political parties who hold the electorate in contempt? That Russian intelligence being caught nosing around, without changing any records, in Illinois voter registration records, signifies almost nothing?
To the authors' credit, they note that "Trump voters are pissed off." A passage starting at page 55 suggests it's more than a temper tantrum.
The sense of alienation and rage hardened in 2021 and early 2022 as revelations from two federal investigations - one into surveillance of Trump 2016 campaign associates the other into Hunter Biden - raised serious questions about unethical behavior and possible criminal violations. To Trump supporters one story, that of Democratic ties - up to and including Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign - to the inflammatory Steele Dossier was buried or minimized. Trump supporters believe the same about Hunter Biden's laptop, first dismissed as potential Russian disinformation in the fall of 2020, but in 2022 confirmed as evidence in a widening investigation into potential financial crimes.
Catch that Divine Passive? The authors released their book before the evidence that the "Russian disinformation" claim was an in-kind contribution from Official Washington to the Democrats. It's spin, dear reader. "Democratic conspiracy theories, such as those alleging Russian responsibility for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, often come with the imprimatur of prestigious media outlets." It was a setup, from the beginning. Power Line's John Hinderaker has reason to be, as Messrs. Garrett and Becker put it, "pissed."
We have known for a long time that the Steele “dossier” was created by and for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It was the most successful bit of disinformation of modern times. The second most successful, perhaps, was the absurd claim that the obviously-authentic Hunter Biden laptop somehow constituted “Russian disinformation.” How and why that could be true, no one ever explained. The provenance of the laptop has never been disputed, even by Hunter: he left it at a repair shop and didn’t pick it up.
We now know that the dismissal of the authenticity of the documents contained on Hunter’s computer was organized on behalf of, and likely at the instigation of, the Joe Biden presidential campaign. Emails have now come to light that show the organizers of the “Dirty 51” were, by their own description, creating “talking points” for Joe Biden to use in the upcoming presidential debate.
The main event the authors focus on is the futile and stupid gesture that occurred at the Federal Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote. By the standards they set in the preface, "Balance must be struck between undue alarm and ignorant indifference," they fail. Again with the Divine Passive: but when the authors rest their claim of a presidentially-inspired "insurrection" on evidence of an executive order Mr Trump drafted but never issued (did somebody have an attack of common sense?) along with claims that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were hatching something on social media. So they might have been, but they did not bring any firearms into the Capitol. A real insurrection might have involved arms brought into the Capitol, perhaps by dissident Members of Congress, as well as by friendly irregulars. I saw that movie, dear reader. Thirty years ago, Boris Yeltsin had to order loyal members of the Russian Army to root real insurrectionists out of the Russian Federation's parliament building, and the Moscow city hall.
Outside the Beltway's James Joyner does a better job breaking down the legalities that followed the protests in a short essay than Messrs. Garrett and Becker did in twelve score pages.
I have been making three, related arguments pretty consistently since the dust settled on the Capitol Riots.
First, it was multiple, overlapping things-everything from an attempt to steal an election to violent thugs using politics as an excuse for mayhem to Trump supporters whipped up into a mob by a speech to idiots joining in the aftermath to take pics for their social media-rather than one thing.
Second, that the justice system should treat these things differently. To my surprise, it by and large seems to be doing so. Those who were violent and/or participating in a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a democratic election are being punished severely while those who were simply in it for the luls are getting relatively light punishments.
Third, it was going to take a frustratingly long time for the Justice Department to build cases against and convict the worst of the worst. But, finally, more than two years after an event we saw unfold live and in color on our television sets, the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been brought to justice. We’ll see how sentencing goes but I suspect they will get long prison terms, commensurate with their crimes against the Republic.
The Big Truth, on the other hand, is about shoring up Official Washington in its prejudices. There's an instructive passage at page 210.
We are all too familiar with Republican whataboutism surrounding violence and looting during nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Initially, some protests were violent and accompanied by looting and property damage. At least nineteen people died. Damages easily exceeded $1 billion. For a time, neighborhoods in Seattle and Portland were, due to unrest, impassable or closed off. Other cities saw blocks of boarded up streets. Even so, with protests in more than 2,000 American cities, a report by the nonprofit Conflict Location Event Data Project found that 93 percent were peaceful and non-destructive. The 2020 death toll was far smaller than race riots in the 1960s.
That spin is so intense Tilt-a-Whirl ought sue for patent infringement. Many people who were dismayed with those arrests gone wrong called attention without destroying their neighborhoods; much as may people who dissented from the coronavirus tyranny of that summer did so without vandalizing their neighborhoods and vandalizing state capitols; and there are likely people, not all of them Trump voters, who were dismayed with the election "fortification" that appeared to favor turnout and voting opportunities in Democratic precincts, and yet, limited their discontent to calling talk radio, to writing legislators and Members of Congress, to venting on social media or their weblogs. In Big Truth, that "fortification" becomes "philanthropy's role in ensuring a safe election," and Mr Becker, whose organization benefitted from that philanthropy, decides that it's more dangerous for people to call attention to "Zuckerbucks" (or George Soros, or Merrick Garland) than to, oh, refute a claim that Mark and Mollie Hemingway recently repeated.
Just because some Democratic voter operations are technically legal, however, doesn’t mean strategists and lawmakers shouldn’t routinely point out that many of their schemes are genuinely sinister and should be immediately stopped. Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent in excess of $400 million on “COVID election grants.” Naturally, those grants were distributed in a highly disproportionate way such that a) the largest grants went to areas of swing states with a high concentration of Democratic voters and b) the money came with strings attached, such that Democratic Party activists were allowed to run “get out the vote” operations directly from ostensibly nonpartisan local election offices. The problem was so bad that a city clerk in Green Bay, Wisconsin quit because these outside activists had taken over her job.
Incredibly, letting outside activists pay to administer America’s election infrastructure was allowed, because it was such outrageous behavior that no one thought they would ever have to pass a law to stop it from happening. Since 2020, at least 17 states have passed laws making private funding of elections illegal. Naturally, the same groups involved in this scheme in the last presidential election have been brazenly trying to skirt those laws. These attempts to purchase electoral outcomes through giving “grants” to election offices also remain legal in much of the country, and despite some good work from GOP-led legislatures addressing the issue, much more needs to be done.
The big spin is that all those new laws are somehow a threat to democracy. Not so much, though, as the Democrat-Media Complex.
We’re currently fighting a proxy war with a nuclear power, and it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine America having the diplomatic credibility with Russia to either prevent the Ukraine War, or now to end it, when both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken were publicly claiming that news about Hunter Biden’s disgusting and illegal conduct was foreign election interference, in the closing days of a hotly contested presidential runoff. Both the President and America’s intelligence services, who’d been in possession of Hunter’s laptop for nearly a year before news of its existence was public, knew full well it was real. And yet, they relied on a suppliant press to spread a knowing lie to win an election. They stood back silently as this deliberate disinformation prompted an unprecedented domestic censorship campaign and further soured relations with a dangerous foreign leader. It is supremely dangerous to remain inured to this state of affairs.
It's domestic censorship with the connivance of Democrats. "In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war." To use Mr Obama's rhetoric, this is not who we are.
By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule.
Except it is, and Messrs. Garrett and Becker are complicit in that mobilization. We've noticed. "Half the country is being kept in deliberate darkness," according to Douglas Murray. John Hinderaker, only yesterday, continues to counsel mistrusting the spin. "Until they finally agree to ballot security, voters are going to suspect that fraud plays an important role in our elections, whether the Democrats like it or not."
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
That noted, why do I use such a provocative title to introduce the review?
Let's open with that jaundiced observation that you can count on a man to take a position if his salary depends on it. In the case of Big Truth, Major Garrett is Washington correspondent for CBS and David Becker is an election lawyer involved with the Center for Election Innovation and Research. The soft power of Social Approbation will encourage such people to hew to the Narrative. Otherwise what happens to the useful leaks or access to foundation money?
Let us then note the way the book opens, with a series of alternate histories. The worst case outcomes they envisioned for January 2022 and January 2023 did not come true, and the lurid scenario for November of 2016 to January of 2017, in which Team Hillary engages in a milder form of the combination of lawfare, wishful thinking, and riling up the electorate that is still "not just as bad" as what the remnants of Team Trump tried from November 2020 to January 2021 isn't convincing.
Why not? Team Hillary didn't have to engage in such antics, not with Jill Stein to pay for recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, not with Washington Post editorialists calling for Donald Trump to be impeached before he even took office, not with Chris Matthews and the amen corner at MSNBC devoting evening after evening to prospective investigations that would be sure to turn up something awful, not with angry voters marching in many cities and trashing businesses in a few. Yes, Barack Obama could call on Hillary Clinton to concede, and yes, she did, but none of that forestalled the not-so-loyal opposition and its "hashtag-resistance" presence on social media doing everything possible to keep the Trump administration from getting anything done.
It's true, Team Trump might have been as surprised as anyone else to having caught the brass ring, and thus they had no transition ready to go; and it's also possible that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate neither had any legislative plans, nor, in some cases, much regard for these outsiders showing up: that's not germane to the big spin.
Let us then note the ways in which the authors suggest, at page 17, foreign intelligence services injected themselves into the 2016 elections. "First, waves of disinformation on social media attempted to inflame anger and widen division between Americans. Leveraging attitudes about race, religion, and other issues, the Russians targeted us, to make us believe our neighbors and fellow citizens were our enemies, rather than the autocrats who sought to weaken America to consolidate power and line their own pockets." Do the authors not understand the purpose of intelligence services? That a few Russian intelligence officers cannot have the effect of prominent voices in both major political parties who hold the electorate in contempt? That Russian intelligence being caught nosing around, without changing any records, in Illinois voter registration records, signifies almost nothing?
To the authors' credit, they note that "Trump voters are pissed off." A passage starting at page 55 suggests it's more than a temper tantrum.
The sense of alienation and rage hardened in 2021 and early 2022 as revelations from two federal investigations - one into surveillance of Trump 2016 campaign associates the other into Hunter Biden - raised serious questions about unethical behavior and possible criminal violations. To Trump supporters one story, that of Democratic ties - up to and including Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign - to the inflammatory Steele Dossier was buried or minimized. Trump supporters believe the same about Hunter Biden's laptop, first dismissed as potential Russian disinformation in the fall of 2020, but in 2022 confirmed as evidence in a widening investigation into potential financial crimes.
Catch that Divine Passive? The authors released their book before the evidence that the "Russian disinformation" claim was an in-kind contribution from Official Washington to the Democrats. It's spin, dear reader. "Democratic conspiracy theories, such as those alleging Russian responsibility for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, often come with the imprimatur of prestigious media outlets." It was a setup, from the beginning. Power Line's John Hinderaker has reason to be, as Messrs. Garrett and Becker put it, "pissed."
We have known for a long time that the Steele “dossier” was created by and for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It was the most successful bit of disinformation of modern times. The second most successful, perhaps, was the absurd claim that the obviously-authentic Hunter Biden laptop somehow constituted “Russian disinformation.” How and why that could be true, no one ever explained. The provenance of the laptop has never been disputed, even by Hunter: he left it at a repair shop and didn’t pick it up.
We now know that the dismissal of the authenticity of the documents contained on Hunter’s computer was organized on behalf of, and likely at the instigation of, the Joe Biden presidential campaign. Emails have now come to light that show the organizers of the “Dirty 51” were, by their own description, creating “talking points” for Joe Biden to use in the upcoming presidential debate.
The main event the authors focus on is the futile and stupid gesture that occurred at the Federal Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote. By the standards they set in the preface, "Balance must be struck between undue alarm and ignorant indifference," they fail. Again with the Divine Passive: but when the authors rest their claim of a presidentially-inspired "insurrection" on evidence of an executive order Mr Trump drafted but never issued (did somebody have an attack of common sense?) along with claims that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were hatching something on social media. So they might have been, but they did not bring any firearms into the Capitol. A real insurrection might have involved arms brought into the Capitol, perhaps by dissident Members of Congress, as well as by friendly irregulars. I saw that movie, dear reader. Thirty years ago, Boris Yeltsin had to order loyal members of the Russian Army to root real insurrectionists out of the Russian Federation's parliament building, and the Moscow city hall.
Outside the Beltway's James Joyner does a better job breaking down the legalities that followed the protests in a short essay than Messrs. Garrett and Becker did in twelve score pages.
I have been making three, related arguments pretty consistently since the dust settled on the Capitol Riots.
First, it was multiple, overlapping things-everything from an attempt to steal an election to violent thugs using politics as an excuse for mayhem to Trump supporters whipped up into a mob by a speech to idiots joining in the aftermath to take pics for their social media-rather than one thing.
Second, that the justice system should treat these things differently. To my surprise, it by and large seems to be doing so. Those who were violent and/or participating in a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a democratic election are being punished severely while those who were simply in it for the luls are getting relatively light punishments.
Third, it was going to take a frustratingly long time for the Justice Department to build cases against and convict the worst of the worst. But, finally, more than two years after an event we saw unfold live and in color on our television sets, the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been brought to justice. We’ll see how sentencing goes but I suspect they will get long prison terms, commensurate with their crimes against the Republic.
The Big Truth, on the other hand, is about shoring up Official Washington in its prejudices. There's an instructive passage at page 210.
We are all too familiar with Republican whataboutism surrounding violence and looting during nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Initially, some protests were violent and accompanied by looting and property damage. At least nineteen people died. Damages easily exceeded $1 billion. For a time, neighborhoods in Seattle and Portland were, due to unrest, impassable or closed off. Other cities saw blocks of boarded up streets. Even so, with protests in more than 2,000 American cities, a report by the nonprofit Conflict Location Event Data Project found that 93 percent were peaceful and non-destructive. The 2020 death toll was far smaller than race riots in the 1960s.
That spin is so intense Tilt-a-Whirl ought sue for patent infringement. Many people who were dismayed with those arrests gone wrong called attention without destroying their neighborhoods; much as may people who dissented from the coronavirus tyranny of that summer did so without vandalizing their neighborhoods and vandalizing state capitols; and there are likely people, not all of them Trump voters, who were dismayed with the election "fortification" that appeared to favor turnout and voting opportunities in Democratic precincts, and yet, limited their discontent to calling talk radio, to writing legislators and Members of Congress, to venting on social media or their weblogs. In Big Truth, that "fortification" becomes "philanthropy's role in ensuring a safe election," and Mr Becker, whose organization benefitted from that philanthropy, decides that it's more dangerous for people to call attention to "Zuckerbucks" (or George Soros, or Merrick Garland) than to, oh, refute a claim that Mark and Mollie Hemingway recently repeated.
Just because some Democratic voter operations are technically legal, however, doesn’t mean strategists and lawmakers shouldn’t routinely point out that many of their schemes are genuinely sinister and should be immediately stopped. Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent in excess of $400 million on “COVID election grants.” Naturally, those grants were distributed in a highly disproportionate way such that a) the largest grants went to areas of swing states with a high concentration of Democratic voters and b) the money came with strings attached, such that Democratic Party activists were allowed to run “get out the vote” operations directly from ostensibly nonpartisan local election offices. The problem was so bad that a city clerk in Green Bay, Wisconsin quit because these outside activists had taken over her job.
Incredibly, letting outside activists pay to administer America’s election infrastructure was allowed, because it was such outrageous behavior that no one thought they would ever have to pass a law to stop it from happening. Since 2020, at least 17 states have passed laws making private funding of elections illegal. Naturally, the same groups involved in this scheme in the last presidential election have been brazenly trying to skirt those laws. These attempts to purchase electoral outcomes through giving “grants” to election offices also remain legal in much of the country, and despite some good work from GOP-led legislatures addressing the issue, much more needs to be done.
The big spin is that all those new laws are somehow a threat to democracy. Not so much, though, as the Democrat-Media Complex.
We’re currently fighting a proxy war with a nuclear power, and it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine America having the diplomatic credibility with Russia to either prevent the Ukraine War, or now to end it, when both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken were publicly claiming that news about Hunter Biden’s disgusting and illegal conduct was foreign election interference, in the closing days of a hotly contested presidential runoff. Both the President and America’s intelligence services, who’d been in possession of Hunter’s laptop for nearly a year before news of its existence was public, knew full well it was real. And yet, they relied on a suppliant press to spread a knowing lie to win an election. They stood back silently as this deliberate disinformation prompted an unprecedented domestic censorship campaign and further soured relations with a dangerous foreign leader. It is supremely dangerous to remain inured to this state of affairs.
It's domestic censorship with the connivance of Democrats. "In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war." To use Mr Obama's rhetoric, this is not who we are.
By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule.
Except it is, and Messrs. Garrett and Becker are complicit in that mobilization. We've noticed. "Half the country is being kept in deliberate darkness," according to Douglas Murray. John Hinderaker, only yesterday, continues to counsel mistrusting the spin. "Until they finally agree to ballot security, voters are going to suspect that fraud plays an important role in our elections, whether the Democrats like it or not."
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.