Suchergebnisse

Accusing competitors of being "super PAC puppets," just asking questions about conspiracies, and lying about the media is all of the same successful populist piece.

Marketing itself as a corrective to the monopoly of mainstream media, YouTube has reduced the barriers of access for people to create and star in their own content regardless of their economic and cultural cachet. Among those taking advantage are "political influencers" or "ideological entrepreneurs" – creators who disseminate and monetise politics as content using the techniques of brand influencers to grow audiences. In part shaped by the platform they are on, creators selling politics suffuse their discourse and performance with an anti-elite and transgressive messaging. Ultimately, this has implications for the legitimisation of conspiracies and the mainstreaming of the far right. As with any type of influencing, the creator is the central figure, performing a relatable and authentic identity ...

 A few days ago, the Washington Post had a story titled "Survey finds 'classical fascist' antisemitic views widespread in U.S."  Moreover, it suggested that anti-semitic views were becoming more common, although it cautioned:  "It is difficult to assess whether antisemitic views have increased over time, given changes in the survey's response options as well as how respondents were sampled."  I looked at the report on the survey, which was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and carried out by NORC, and found that it was more confident in claiming an increase in anti-semitic views--specifically an increase between 2019 and 2022.  The key figure:The survey was the fifth in a series going back to 1964, and its measure of antisemitism was based on questions that had been included in all five surveys.  The figure suggests that anti-semitic views generally declined from 1964 to 2019, and then rose sharply between 2019 and 2022.  There have been other stories on the survey in the last few days, and many of them emphasize this  apparent change:  for example, Reuters has a story called "Americans' belief in antisemitic conspiracies, tropes doubles since 2019, ADL survey shows."  The "doubled" is based on a comparison of the number who believe six or more of the anti-semitic opinions:  11% in 2019 and 20% in 2022.   Of course, that's an arbitrary cutoff, but no matter how you look at it, there seems to be a large increase:  average agreement with the statements shown in the figure was 17% in 2019 and 29% in 2022.A large change in the last three years seemed unlikely to me--opinions on this sort of thing don't usually change rapidly.   However, NORC is a well-regarded survey organization, so you can't just dismiss the survey.  After looking at the report, I have a hypothesis.  The 1964, 1981, and 1992 surveys were conducted in person or over the phone; the 2019 and 2022 surveys were online.  But there was a change between 2019 and 2022:  "for the current survey, researchers opted to remove the 'Unsure/Don't Know' option for anti-Jewish tropes..."  The figure shows the percent agreeing out off all respondents, not just those who had an opinion.  For example, in 1964, 48% agreed that "Jews in business to out of their way to hire other Jews," 33% disagreed, and 19% had no opinion.  I couldn't find the "no opinion" rate for the 2019 survey--it doesn't seem to be archived--but my guess is that it was higher than in previous surveys.  With an interviewer, you are asked whether you agree or disagree--you have to volunteer a "no opinion."  Most people probably also want to cooperate with the interviewer and don't want to seem ignorant, so overall there is some push towards giving an answer.  In contrast, with an online survey that includes a no opinion box, it's on the same footing as any other answer.  So my hypothesis is that they had a large number of "don't knows" in 2019 and that a lot (maybe all) of the apparent increase in anti-semitic sentiments between 2019 and 2022 was a result of the elimination of that option.  I looked for other survey questions that could shed light on changes in anti-semitism.  There weren't many, but since 1964, the ANES has sometimes included a "feeling thermometer" for Jews, and the GSS has also included it a number of times.  The mean scores (on a 0-100 scale, with higher meaning more favorable):  There was no clear trend between 1964 and 2008, but the 2016 score was the highest ever, and 2020 set a new record.  So this question suggests a decline in antisemitism in recent years.  Despite the difficulty of interpretation resulting from the change in response options, the 2019 and 2022 data provide valuable information--the ADL ought to deposit them in one of the data archives.  [Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 Enter the DragonWhen I first read that Naomi Klein wrote a book about being confused for her doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, I was initially amused. I had written earlier about the doppelgänger as the monster of our times, and it seemed that Klein was confirming that thesis. Klein dealing with Wolf seemed like it might be a fun distraction, but as I read the book, I was immediately struck with the fact that Klein is taking on more than a particular case of mistaken identity. Her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is in some sense an attempt to make sense of the world we are living in a world dominated by social media doppelgangers in which the work of political and social criticism has its own dark doppelganger in the world of conspiracy theories. It is not just that Naomi Wolf gets confused with Naomi Klein, both are women who wrote mainstream "big idea" books, The Beauty Myth and No Logo, have similar physical appearances, and their husbands are even both named Avi, but that this confusion reveals another doppelgänger, another double, our online or virtual self. As Klein writes, we live in "a culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgängers--virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelgänger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy." Klein's struggle with being confused with Wolf is also a recognition, that Klein, the author of No Logo, has another double, her "brand." This is what most people know her as, the author of critical books on the culture, politics, and economy of capitalism. Klein is aware that it is ironic to point out that the author of No Logo has a brand, but such a brand, an identity, are increasingly indispensable factors of living and working as a writer. As she puts it, the idea of a personal brand seemed like a dystopian future when it was proposed in the late nineties, but now it is a dystopian reality, anyone with a social media account has a double, a brand, that they can manage, and some need this brand to survive. The Lady From Shanghai Klein's book is not just about Wolf usurping her digital identity, but about Wolf's own descent into what Klein calls the "mirror world." the world of conspiracy theories, especially those that have metastasized in American culture since Trump and Covid. Wolf's descent into this world is very much a dive of the deep end. Wolf has tweeted about vaccinated people losing their smell, they no longer smell human, about the risk of the feces of the vaccinated contaminating drinking water, and most famously about vaccine passports and contact tracing being the end of human freedom. It is easy to mock all of this, but Klein does not play this for the laughs, she tries to understand the causes and crises underlying the paranoid fantasies. One common retort to the paranoid fears of contact tracing, vaccine passports, and even microchips hidden in vaccines is to simply say, "wait until they hear about cellphones," to point out that the surveillance that is feared is already here and for the most part broadly accepted. Klein supposes instead that they, those who spread such theories, already know about cellphones, already know about surveillance and the loss of a certain kind of anonymity and freedom. It is this awareness that appears backwards and distorted in the fears of vaccines laden with nanotechnology to monitor and control us. Their fears about vaccines, about being tracked and monitored, is in some sense a fantasy that they can do something about this increase of surveillance. They can refuse the vaccine, and thus opt out of what many of us find it impossible to opt out of, a world where our every motion, every transaction, is monitored. Klein's concept of a mirror world is both a reflection and refraction of our existing world. In some sense it reflects our world, but through a kind of distortion, shaped by our illusions and fantasies. Conspiracy theories are right to point to the control of a powerful elite, but wrong in thinking that this elite is secret, or that its motives are anything other than daily life under capitalism.  As Klein writes, "There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing "apartheid" when there was a real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries, no need to cook up fantasies about Covid "internment camps" when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people's lives inside had no value at all."The fears of the Covid alarmists of a dark future to come are the reality of existing life under Covid. What Klein proposes is in some sense a symptomatic reading of conspiracy theories, finding their points of reflection and refraction of the existing world. The Man With the Golden Gun(In case it is not clear I am illustrating this with Hall of Mirrors scenes from films)With respect to the latter, the refractions and distortions, reading Doppelganger  it is possible to find three causes or conditions underlying the distortions of the mirror world. Three aspects of existing ideology that distort and warp the way that this world responds to actual crises and problems. First, is idea of the individual, of the autonomous individual. This belief in autonomy and self reliance is the common core that connects the "wellness industry," yoga instructors, gym gurus, etc., who deny the need for vaccines and even masks for healthy people, with survivalists, who see them as an imposition by the state. Both insist on a purely individual response to a collective condition. Of course in doing so they are only acting on the basic premise of a capitalist society, which privatizes every social problem into a commodity.  During Covid many doubled down on this, insisting that one could get through the pandemic with everything from Vitamin D supplements and essential oils to horse medicine. Yoga instructors, vegans, and Fox News audiences might seem to be politically opposed, but they all are different expressions of what Klein calls hyper-individualism, responding to social collapse with individual responses of wellness and self-protection. As absurd as all of these homegrown cures and remedies were they were perhaps not as absurd as the notion that the US as a society could shift its entire economy and ethics, transforming all of those people we do not think about, the people who grow, ship, make, and deliver our food into essential workers. As Klein writes, "With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes change diametrically. It turned out that we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we should all applaud and thank the very people--many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries--whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted and demeaned before the pandemic."Many embraced conspiracies rather than adjust to this new concern for essential workers, the elderly, and the sick, but in doing so they followed to the letter the dominant image of our society, a society founded on isolation, self-interest, and competition. As Klein details, often suspicion of things like free vaccines stemmed from a deeper internalization of the fundamental idea of capitalism. Why would a society that charges for a visit to the emergency room give away a life saving vaccine?This idea of the individual has its own little doppelgänger, the child. A great deal of the opposition to vaccines, mask mandates, and shutdowns was framed as protecting children from the supposed threats these things supposedly represent, spectres like "learning loss" rather than the reality of a pandemic. These threats all stem from a particular idea of a child, a child as extension of the self, and possession of their parents. "So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World--the "anti-woke" laws, the "don't say gay" bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks--come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist eductions as the injection of foreign ideas into their minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as "grooming")."If the focus on individual health and the wellbeing of one's offspring sounds like eugenics, that is not accidental. This brings us to the third condition for distortion, race. As Klein argues Naomi Wolf, like many of the anti-vaccination movement,  regularly invoke the holocaust or the civil rights struggle in their rhetoric. Wolf has even had her own sit-ins opposing vaccine mandates at lunch counters, her term, even as she singles out Black owned businesses for her protests. Throughout the mirror world there is a desire to appropriate the signs and images of ethnic exclusion, (remember the store that sold yellow stars that said "Not Vaccinated?" ) and racial justice, from sitting in at lunch counters to using Eric Garner's famous cry "I can't breathe" to protest mask mandates. In the mirror world it is white people who are both the true victims of discrimination and the real protagonists of social justice.Us This appropriation of the terms and history of racial justice is coupled with an absolute indifference to its current status. The year of shutdowns and mandates was also the summer of some of the largest protests of the "Black Lives Matter" movement. "If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly and dissent. Come to think of it, if you were a person concerned with tyrannical state actions, you would also be concerned about the murders and mass denials of freedom to incarcerated people that drove the uprising. Yet in all the videos Wolf has put out issuing her dire warnings about how the United States was turning into a nation of sheeple, I have seen her acknowledge neither the existence of this racial justice reckoning nor the reality that if a Black person had pulled the same stunt that she did at the Blue Bottle or Grand Central Station, they very likely would have ended up face down in cuffs--not because vaccine rules were tyrannical, but because of systemic anti-Black racism in policing, the issue that sparked the protests she has so studiously ignored. I would argue that while Naomi Wolf might not have mentioned Black Lives Matter, she definitely noticed it. Her "lunch counter sit in" at a Blue Bottle Cafe would seem to reveal that. It was definitely noticed by the larger mirror world for which the site of millions of people in the streets protesting racism  when they could not go to the gym or to a restaurant was a wrong, a violation of the order of the world, that they could not tolerate. As Klein argues much Mirror World thinking is an attempt for white people to rewrite the history of the present--making them the true victims of repression and the true heroes. The real struggle was not in the streets fighting against police repression but screaming at the hostess at the restaurant asking for proof of vaccination. As much as Klein draws the lines of demarcation between "mirror world" thinking, between conspiracies and critical thought, any such division is going to be an unstable one. In the end it is not just that Naomi Wolf is confused for Naomi Klein but that theories about microchips in vaccines or vaccines rewriting our DNA are confused for criticisms of contemporary surveillance and the pharmaceutical industry. Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine has been appropriated and reappropriated by everyone from Second Amendment activists arguing about "false flags" to those that argue that global warming will produce a new global surveillance state. Klein's book ultimately is not just about her own struggle with a doppelgänger, but how any critical thinker, anyone on "the left," for lack of a better word, will always confront a doppelgänger. Every critic of the invasion of Iraq has to deal with "truthers" who claim that 9/11 was an inside job, every critic of the failure of the US to respond to the pandemic will ultimately have to deal with claims of microchips and genetic engineering. What starts out as one persons struggle with a very singular condition of mistaken identity ultimately is a story about all of us. We are all in the hall of mirrors now. Klein has also charted something of a path out, by showing the ideologies of individualism, the family, and the race, that distort any awareness of our conditions into its mirror world opposite. Lastly, Klein like Bruce Lee before her knew that you have to smash a few mirrors to escape a hall of mirrors, and this includes, for Klein, giving up on one's own image, one's brand, learning to think and act collectively rather than individually. 

Walter Olson


Does this prosecution seek to criminalize speech and advocacy?
Nothing in the charges filed Wednesday seeks to punish the former president for speech or advocacy as such. While the indictment does recite many things Trump said and calls them false, it identifies each such statement as being part of an overall course of conduct satisfying the elements of a crime under one of four federal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the United States, 18 U.S.C. section 371; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, 18 U.S.C. section 1512(k); obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, 18 U.S.C. section 1512(c); and conspiracy to deprive persons of protected rights, 18 U.S.C. section 241.
It is long established and ordinarily uncontroversial that speech can lose the protection of the First Amendment if, for example, it seeks to intimidate a public official into shirking a legal duty, or if it consists of the submission of forged documents to a government agency, or if it solicits or facilitates crime generally (this past term's Supreme Court decision in United States v. Hansen, criticized by colleague Thomas Berry on a different issue, reiterated that last simple truism). Speech that is part of a conspiracy to accomplish those things may be unprotected as well.
One popular commentator published a full column decrying the new prosecution as an assault on speech but never got around to naming the four statutes Trump is actually charged with violating, instead making it sound as if the charges were somehow based on the speech as such.
But I keep hearing this case could be a step toward making "disinformation," specifically untruthful denial of election results, a crime. Isn't that dangerous?
Yes, it would be highly dangerous were it true. I've written at length about why a general ban on the telling of falsehoods about elections would violate the First Amendment, and why even relatively small steps in that direction "can curtail legitimate speech and give the government power it's likely to misuse."
Fortunately, this indictment doesn't do that. One reason there's a lot of dust in the air is that two seemingly opposite factions unite in promoting the notion that convicting Trump would penalize "disinformation"—Trump advocates, who aim to ring civil liberties alarm bells, and also various commentators on the left who would like to push the law into criminalizing more election denial than it does now. This piece by the New York Times's Thomas Edsall generously conveys the views of left‐​leaning commentators who want to crack down on some currently lawful election speech, while also quoting some other voices on the left who (to their credit, in my view) resist that idea.
What matters in this case is not what outside experts might wish, but whether Jack Smith and his colleagues are in fact asking the courts to alter First Amendment law to make it less friendly toward election‐​related speech. Across the 45‐​page indictment, it's hard for me to see where they argue for any such alteration. They appear to believe Trump can be squarely convicted on the current state of First Amendment law.
The right‐​to‐​vote charge is based on an 1870 law enacted in response to the outrages committed by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. But there is no claim of racial intimidation here, is there?
The conspiracy against rights provision, which you can read here, never mentions race and by its terms forbids conspiracy to prevent "any person" from exercising civil rights such as the right to vote. Courts have long ruled that conspiracies to overturn legitimate election outcomes by fraud can violate section 241 by impairing the rights of persons who voted for the side that the conspiracy aims at defeating. Check out, for example, the 1984 case of United States v. Olinger, in which a Seventh Circuit panel found that a vote‐​stealing scheme by Chicago Democrats violated the 1870 civil rights law. Race was not an issue in the case.
So the legal side of the new Trump case, as distinct from the proving of disputed facts to a jury's satisfaction, is clear sailing for the prosecutors, then?
No, it isn't. As I suggested in my last post, Trump is likely to have at his disposal non‐​frivolous arguments that if successful might narrow if not quash the charges. For example, he could contest whether the electoral vote count before Congress is a "proceeding" covered by section 1512, or challenge whether the prosecutors have sufficiently proved the elements of coordination toward a common purpose needed to prove each alleged conspiracy, or obtain favorable rulings on whether and how the actions of the pretend electors were illegal. This is not a slam‐​dunk case.
What about the Kelly case, in which the Supreme Court threw out the conviction of New Jersey officials for closing a bridge exit for improper motives, or the McDonnell case, in which the Supreme Court threw out a Virginia governor's "honest services" conviction? Don't those help Trump?
Not in the way he might like. Both cases were unanimous at the high court. The Kelly case confirmed that the federal wire fraud law does not reach misconduct by state officials that does not involve money or property, and stands as part of a series of cases declining to interpret a variety of federal fraud statutes to reach deprivation of "honest services" at the state government level. But 18 U.S.C. 371, which bans conspiracy to defraud the federal government, is worded quite differently from the federal laws overseeing private and state‐​level misconduct, and has accordingly been interpreted by courts quite differently. To begin with, its terms are sweeping, banning conspiracy "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose." And unlike garden‐​variety federal fraud statutes, it lacks language referring to property gain or enrichment. Courts have accordingly long interpreted it to reach much conspiracy that is aimed at securing improper government action by deceit whether or not it is meant to accomplish a transfer of money or property. The most that can be said is that some legal thinkers would like the Supreme Court to read an implicit property requirement into the 371 statute as well. Doing so would require the Court to overturn a long list of old precedents.
In the McDonnell case the Court took a narrow view of what "official act" means for state‐​level bribery purposes. It is not clear that this issue will be important in the Trump prosecution.
I've heard that many key issues in the case depend on whether Trump held certain beliefs in good faith. How could your right to speak or advocate for your own interests ever depend on whether you are doing so in good faith?
Legal outcomes regularly hinge on good faith belief versus deceit — whether you genuinely believed a bicycle you rode off with was yours, for instance. Judges and juries regularly determine this question.
I'm indebted to a colleague for the following analogy: you have a constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances, yet you may not file a bogus claim for veteran's benefits. In the "stolen valor" case of United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court controversially took the view that you might even have a constitutional right to lie about your war record to gain undeserved social status. Yet lying about that same war record to obtain government benefits can be made a crime without controversy. And in both instances the law might reasonably distinguish criminal from merely mistaken untruth by reference to whether you held a reasonable good‐​faith belief in the truth of your speech or petition.
There are dangers in prosecuting ex‐​Presidents, though, aren't there?
Yes, there undoubtedly are. Exactly one year ago I published a piece in The UnPopulist outlining my concerns about these dangers, and explained why I had concluded that in some circumstances the dangers of not prosecuting genuine and serious crime by the nation's chief executive can be even greater.