Operation: Pancake

Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 09, 2021

Politicians and journalists are inferior to dachshunds in many important ways, beginning with the fact that a dachshund will never lie to you. Politicians and journalists, unhappily, are a different story.

 

I recommend to you this Twitter thread from Thom Lambert, a Missouri law professor, about his former colleague, Senator Josh Hawley. Senator Hawley, who is looking to take over the conspiracy-kook caucus from Donald Trump before Marjorie Taylor Greene can get full control of it, is none too careful with the truth. Senator Hawley, in fact, “is lying,” Professor Lambert writes. “I hate to say that of a friend, but it’s true. He’s saying things he knows are false.”

 

The specific issue here is Senator Hawley’s false claim of a conspiracy by stock-trading platforms to protect hedge funds in the GameStop matter. But it could have been anything — and it could have been all too many politicians. Senator Hawley’s lies, Professor Lambert writes, are part of his “campaign to rail against the sort of coastal elites that, like him, went to schools such as Stanford and Yale and now, like him, have amassed power. This campaign, he hopes, will endear him to regular folks.” Perhaps Ted Cruz of Princeton and Harvard Law could give him some tips on how “regular folks” do things.

 

Professor Lambert’s basic criticism is all true enough, and the professor might have stopped there. But there’s more:

 

It’s an “end justifies the means” thing. The problem is that the end doesn’t justify the means, at least not for Christians. Jesus clearly taught that his followers are to be certain sorts of people, not to achieve certain ends. And a smart person who misleads others to gain power isn’t who we’re to be.

 

Which brings me to [First Things magazine]. The name “First Things” refers to a C.S. Lewis essay emphasizing the importance of keeping matters in their proper place, of not overvaluing (admittedly good) things that are of secondary importance to other things. Doing so, Lewis warned, may ironically destroy the value of the second thing that was improperly elevated above the first thing.

 

As Lewis elsewhere put it, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.”

 

For the Christian politician, electoral success and advancement is a second thing. Christian virtue—truthfulness, kindness, humility, peacemaking—must come first. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

 

This new breed of Christian nationalist may retort, “Yeah, that’s a recipe for continued electoral defeat and ultimately anti-Christian policies.” To which Jesus responds, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?”

 

[First Things] used to understand this. Its founder, Richard John Neuhaus, famously said that “culture is the root of politics and religion is the root of culture.” Get that? Religion (Christian virtue) is the first thing. Culture, and ultimately politics, follow.

 

The sort of “muscular” Christian who views political success as paramount for protecting religion, and thus as an objective to be achieved however necessary, puts second things first. As Lewis warned, we’re likely to lose both first things (virtue) and second (elections).

 

Some Trump-aligned Republicans have turned Cicero’s advice — Esse quam videri, “Be, rather than seem” — on its head. It’s an old con-artist strategy, a variation on the theme of “Fake it ’til you make it.” Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, the defunct medical-technology company, seems to have believed that she could lie a successful company into existence: The lies would attract capital and influential friends, and these would enable her to actually build the company she pretended to have built. She wasn’t entirely wrong: The money came, and so did influential advocates and board members, including the late George Schultz. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was the Theranos of presidential runs, attracting money and influential friends — friends who would, out of shame at being conned or perverted loyalty, fight on the lie even when they knew it was a lie, knowing that the promises that were being made were based on nothing. Trump is a strong believer in his own ability to lie facts into existence: He describes the New York Times as “the failing New York Times” not because it is failing — far from it — but because he believes that creating the perception of failure at the New York Times may create the reality of failure, too.

 

Trumpists have been doing the same thing with National Review for years, albeit weirdly incompetently: Most of them seem to think that Bill Kristol is the founder/editor of NR (he ran the late lamented Weekly Standard), and they often advise your obedient correspondent to spend some time “outside of the Beltway.” The Beltway is a loop road in Washington, D.C. National Review is based in New York City. I live in Texas. (I think there must be a few NR writers who do in fact live inside the Beltway, but I can’t think of any offhand.) The Federalist reported that House Republicans were ready to oust Representative Liz Cheney from leadership and that she was trying to prevent such a vote. Federalist publisher Ben Domenech sneered: “If National Review wants to die on the 197-10 hill with douchebro Adam Kinzinger, be my guest.” But Representative Cheney did not lose in a 197–10 vote. She did not, in fact, lose at all, but won easily — and, in spite of the entirely fictious claims published in The Federalist and circulated by the likes of Representative Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon, Representative Cheney was agitating for having a vote, rather than against it. Matt Gaetz would like to have Representative Cheney’s leadership position, and The Federalist would rather be something other than third-rate, and they believe that they can advance their interests by convincing others that their rivals are losers.

 

This sort of thing happens in matters great and small. Lou Dobbs has just entered a sudden retirement, and Fox News corporately and several of its current and suddenly former hosts are facing the potential of paying a very large settlement to Smartmatic, a company Dobbs and other Fox News conspiracy kooks plainly and unquestionably libeled, repeatedly. “Libel” generally is understood in U.S. law as statements that are (1) false (2) defamatory and (3) published with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. Reckless disregard for the truth may as well have been Fox News’s corporate motto during the Trump years. Fox News claims that Dobb’s cancellation was part of a series of long-planned changes at the network — which is transparent corporate bullsh** on top of Dobbs’s transparent bullsh**. I used to appear on Dobbs’s show regularly, and he never has been anything but gracious to me, personally, but there’s no pretending that this bullsh** isn’t bullsh**. These lawsuits will, I hope, provide a welcome reminder that bullsh** can be expensive. It should be.

 

As I said, great and small. I still hear pretty frequently about a supposed episode in which I went on Morning Joe and delivered an unhinged rant about executing women who have abortions. It never happened (I’ve been on the show a few times, and abortion never has come up) but NARAL claimed it happened, and some people want to believe such things. Great and small: There is a puzzling legend among certain social-media-centered progressives that I am in the habit of wearing capes. I have no idea where this comes from and assume that it is the usual middle-school taunt so readily resorted to by our intellectually sophisticated friends on the left. But it has been repeated far and wide, most recently by Elizabeth Bruenig of the New York Times. This is, for the Bruenigs, a kind of bizarre family tradition: Elizabeth’s husband, Matt Bruenig, himself an occasional New York Times contributor, once manufactured a quote that had me defending the racist antics of Donald Sterling, of whom I had never heard and about whom I’d never written a word. This wasn’t something “taken out of context” or misconstrued — it was simply made up, a pure fabrication. Why? Because he can. That’s not the sort of thing that keeps a writer out of the pages of the New York Times. Nobody who matters very much cares.

 

These are little things, but, of course, it does matter that people who write for the New York Times make things up and publish them. Taylor Lorenz of the Times recently smeared the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, accusing him of having used the word “retard” as a pejorative in a conversation. This never happened. Andreessen never said any such thing in the conversation in question, and the only use of the word “retard” was from Felicia Horowitz, in the context of describing a group of stock-market enthusiasts who call themselves the “retard revolution,” ironically embracing the term of abuse Wall Street types have thrown at nobody investors on the Internet. How can you have a conversation about a group of people who call themselves x without mentioning x? This is what commands the attention of the New York Times.

 

Lies don’t matter, but the truth can get you fired.

 

Lorenz knows what she is doing: The Times recently fired a reporter for speaking aloud a racial slur in a conversation about a controversy involving the use of the same racial slur by a child. Lorenz perceives Andreessen to be a cultural and political enemy, because he has an independent streak, and so she sought to subject him to the form of ritual humiliation that currently masquerades as journalism at the New York Times and elsewhere, and perhaps try to ruin him financially. (Good luck with that.) It is a cult of conformism, and it is purely vindictive.

 

It matters that New York Times writers publish lies. It also matters why they publish lies. It matters that First Things publishes lies. It even matters, a little bit, that The Federalist publishes lies, if only because some people might be under the misapprehension that it has something to do with the real Federalist. As a matter of intellectual honesty, there’s no difference between what Elizabeth Bruenig does and what Donald Trump does: It is the same dishonest strategy pursued to the same end.