High Energy

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

 

Today marks one week since … the incident, making this an opportune moment to take stock. How has Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign fared in its first seven days?

 

Was “the DeSaster” a sign of things to come or a DeParture from what will be seen in time as a smart and effective effort?

 

More likely the latter than the former, I think. That’s not to say the governor will win, which remains improbable. It is to say that he’s running the sort of campaign so far that seems to have the best chance of overtaking Donald Trump.

 

In 2016 Trump dubbed another (former) governor of Florida “low energy.” That was unfair to Jeb Bush, who was enviably audacious while in office at dragging policy in his home state toward conservative priorities. But the term did efficiently capture certain uncomfortable truths about Bush’s presidential candidacy.

 

One: Trump’s campaign events were orders of magnitude more exciting than Bush’s. Whether Trump or Bush actually held more events, I don’t know, but it felt like the difference was enormous. The charisma gap between them, the saturation media coverage for Trump’s rallies, and the endless suspense about what outlandish thing he might say next combined to create the impression that he was vastly outworking the former governor on the trail.

 

Two: Trump was more aggressive in attacking his opponents and more effective in doing so. Bush’s campaign infamously wasted much of its time and money tearing down Marco Rubio, believing that was a necessary predicate to consolidating establishment support. Bush himself tended to dismiss Trump as a “chaos candidate,” not realizing until too late that chaos was a feature for Republican primary voters rather than a bug. Jeb plainly lacked Trump’s reptilian talent for insult-comic nastiness aimed at demonstrating dominance. It cost him.

 

Three: Trump’s candidacy had a raison d’etre while Bush’s did not. Say what you want about the tenets of “Make America Great Again” but at least it’s an ethos: Trump wanted to build the wall, ban Muslims from entering the country, reduce America’s commitments abroad, and start trade wars various and sundry. Jeb Bush wanted to do … what? Bring conservative government back to Washington, sure—another desire he misjudged about Republican primary voters—but for most Americans his family pedigree reduced his argument for being president to, “It’s my turn.”

 

Low energy. In hindsight, he didn’t stand a chance.

 

The interesting thing about DeSantis’ first week as a candidate is that he looks to be addressing all three of Bush’s deficiencies.

 

***

 

It should go without saying that Ron DeSantis won’t close the “charisma gap” with Donald Trump.

 

I’m tempted, in fact, to say that the gap between the two is as wide as it was between Trump and Bush, but it’s not quite true. The current governor of Florida has an ardent populist following thanks to his policies whereas the former governor of Florida did not. Still, in measures of raw retail dynamism, they’re not vastly far apart.

 

Where DeSantis can draw a favorable contrast with Trump is by outworking the older man on the trail and trusting that Republican voters will come to view him as the “high energy” candidate of this cycle.

 

His first week was auspicious in that regard. He’s been all over populist media, granting interviews to influencers like Ben Shapiro. He’s scheduled to hold four events in Iowa today alone, including one that’s ongoing as I write this. He’ll be in New Hampshire on Thursday, then South Carolina on Friday. Every time I look up, it seems, there’s a new clip of remarks he’s made on the trail circulating on Twitter or airing on Fox News.

 

His opponent hasn’t been as vigorous.

 

As of Wednesday afternoon, the “Events” page on Trump’s campaign website has nothing scheduled. He’ll be in Iowa this week for a radio interview and a town hall hosted by Sean Hannity for Fox News but no barnstorming plans have been announced. Recent clips and photos of him on social media tend to be of three varieties—golfing, posing for thumbs-up photos with guests in the Mar-a-Lago dining room, or delivering direct-to-camera policy statements with no one else around, a la Joe Biden’s “basement campaign” of 2020.

 

“The plan at this point is to hang out in Mar-a-Largo, golf, rage ‘Truth,’ golf, hope the lead holds, and golf,” tweeted Jay Cost of Trump’s “strategy.” That scans like a joke, but where’s the exaggeration?

 

Last Saturday Trump hosted a Saudi-funded golf tournament at one of his properties. DeSantis shrewdly exploited the occasion by holding a meeting the same day with families of 9/11 victims who have lobbied Trump to cut ties with the kingdom. Next Saturday the governor will be back in Iowa to attend Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” fundraiser at the Iowa State Fairgrounds with some other Republican presidential hopefuls. Trump won’t be there.

 

Who’s the “high energy” candidate between the two?

 

If Trump follows through on his plan to skip the first few primary debates while DeSantis shows up to take on all comers, which approach will seem “higher energy” to voters?

 

Eventually some candidate in the field will remind Republican voters that Trump will be the same age in 2025 as Joe Biden was in 2021. DeSantis will need to tread lightly on that, not wanting to alienate the party’s many older voters, but he might be able to make the point effectively without needing to make it explicitly. The more ubiquitous he seems in right-wing media because of his campaign schedule, the more Trump will seem to have “lost a step” by comparison. The thought of nominating someone in their mid-40s rather than their late 70s to face 82-year-old Joe Biden will grow more appealing.

 

Even the charisma gap between the candidates seems less stark lately thanks to the presence of Casey DeSantis on the trail. One thing Trump had in spades in 2016 relative to the rest of the field was glamour; sad-sack political nerds like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz somehow found themselves competing for attention with a well-bronzed household-name TV celebrity. Ron DeSantis is nominally in the same position, but his young, glamorous, and self-consciously Kennedyesque wife being front and center might make it easier for casual voters to imagine him as president. 

 

On Tuesday she introduced herself slyly to a crowd in Iowa by explaining that she’d spent most of the day making sure their 3-year-old didn’t color on the dining room tabletop. It takes high energy to supervise a very young child. The youthful DeSantises have it. Does Trump?

 

***

 

The governor is demonstrating high energy in another way. Unlike Jeb Bush and the sad sacks, he spent his first week as an official candidate training his rhetorical fire on the frontrunner.

 

Partly that’s a luxury of his standing in the polls. In 2016 the sad sacks spent most of the race competing with one another to break from the pack of non-Trump candidates, believing that once they did the non-Trump vote would consolidate behind them. But DeSantis had already separated from the pack by the time he formally announced his candidacy. He’s been polling at least 10 points better than his nearest competition throughout the race. He can afford to focus on the top dog.

 

Even so, after watching him take Trump’s jabs in stride for months with no response, it was heartening to see him begin to make the case against the incumbent forthrightly.

 

He hasn’t accused Trump of being unfit for office, and won’t. You know why. Attacking him as morally or intellectually deficient “codes” as left-wing among Republican voters. The governor would hurt himself more than he’d hurt Trump if he went that route.

 

Attacking Trump for having betrayed MAGA populism is different. Maybe not different enough to launch DeSantis to the nomination, but different enough that the average MAGA cultist might pause to reflect on the substance of the critique before deciding whether it amounts to treason against the American right.

 

A taste from DeSantis’ tour of conservative media last week:

 

“I don’t know what happened to Donald Trump; this is a different guy today than when he was running in 2015 and 2016 and I think the direction that he’s going with his campaign is the wrong direction,” DeSantis said.

 

…

 

“At the end of the day… he is going left on a lot of the fiscal, he’s going left on culture, he’s even sided with Disney against me,” DeSantis said.

 

…

 

“When he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020 that destroyed millions of people’s lives,” DeSantis said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who played a key role in the pandemic response and has since become widely reviled by many conservatives.

 

When radio host Dana Loesch brought up Trump’s comments in 2018 about taking guns under red-flag laws and worrying about due process later, DeSantis was ready. “That’s unconstitutional,” he said. “It violates the Second Amendment, but I think even more important it violates the Fifth Amendment because they can’t take anything from you without due process. It’s not just firearms.”

 

Recently he described the criminal justice reform legislation signed into law by Trump as a “jailbreak bill” that undermines his opponent’s law-and-order credentials.

 

On Tuesday in Iowa he complained about federal spending during the Trump administration and wondered pointedly whether his opponent is too cowed by polls to speak out against Kevin McCarthy’s underwhelming debt-ceiling deal.

 

He also accused Trump of not remaining “true to America First principles” when he considered an amnesty for Dreamers while he was president. After Trump published a video yesterday calling for an end to birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants, Team DeSantis reminded the world on social media that Trump spent his entire term talking about doing that but never actually doing it.

 

The governor didn’t get really excited, though, until a reporter brought up the fact that Trump last week compared DeSantis’ record on COVID in Florida unfavorably to Andrew Cuomo’s in New York. There’s no greater heresy against right-wing orthodoxy about the pandemic than to suggest that Cuomo’s crooked, inept, strict-lockdown COVID regime was superior to DeSantis’ laissez-faire approach. And DeSantis knew it.

That’s not all. DeSantis also took barely veiled shots at his opponent when he complained of “entertainment” in lieu of leadership, touted the fact that he was born into a working-class family in which he was “given nothing,” and joked about Trump’s dubious decision to cancel a rally in Iowa a few weeks ago due to bad weather that turned out to be not so bad. 

 

We all wanted a Republican candidate who’d go at the caudillo directly. Now we have one. 

 

This, too, is a high-energy strategy. It requires DeSantis to stay on offense, something no Trump opponent has managed to do. And it rushes headlong at the sinister fetishization of loyalty to the leader that defines the modern right. The governor is betting his career that he can convince millions of populist Republicans that Trump has “changed” so meaningfully since 2016 that he’s no longer the best person to lead his own movement. He intends to have an argument with Donald Trump himself over what “making America great again” entails, specifically, and to win it.

 

I wouldn’t bet my own money on him. But if DeSantis continues to demonstrate high energy and Trump the opposite, that argument could get … interesting.

 

***

 

There’s one more difference between his energy level and Jeb Bush’s. DeSantis’ campaign has an actual raison d’etre.

 

Listen to the man himself: “I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history.” He’s going to win the presidency, which Trump can’t do, then use the power it grants him to wage culture war ruthlessly. It may not be your cup of tea (it isn’t mine) but it is an ethos.

 

What’s the Trump campaign’s raison d’etre?

 

Right, I know—“something something retribution.” The Republican base being what it is, that might be enough to lock down 65 percent of the vote. But in their eagerness to attack DeSantis and his supporters lately, Team Trump has developed a curious habit of throwing roundhouses so wild that they end up punching themselves in the face, leaving some populists to wonder “Wait, whose side are they on?”

 

Take Trump’s criticism of DeSantis for how he’s handled Disney. At first he complained that the governor risked alienating the company and damaging Florida’s economy. Enough right-wingers complained about that, it seems, that Trump has now changed his stance. Evidently DeSantis’ big mistake with Disney was failing to alienate the company sooner.

Whose side is Trump on? Does he even know?

 

On Tuesday night the “Trump War Room” Twitter account zinged DeSantis for having voted to confirm the hated Christopher Wray as FBI director in 2017. But DeSantis wasn’t a senator, so he couldn’t have cast that vote. And while he did praise Wray at the time, that was probably because Wray was the handpicked choice of … President Donald Trump. 

 

Trump, not DeSantis, appointed the great “deep state” saboteur. Whose side is he on?

 

Praising Cuomo in hopes of damaging DeSantis was another “Whose side is he on?” moment, one amplified by the fact that Andrew Cuomo himself noticed and touted it on social media. So was his bizarre attack on Tuesday night on Kayleigh McEnany, a Trump shill so blindly loyal during her appearances on cable news in 2016 that he eventually made her his White House press secretary. McEnany’s sin was being occasionally complimentary of DeSantis; that was enough for Trump to dismiss her as “milktoast”—his spelling, not mine—and to wash his hands of her: “The RINOS & Globalists can have her. FoxNews should only use REAL Stars!!!”

 

Conservative reaction online ranged from befuddled to angry. Her colleagues at Fox and her competitors at Newsmax felt wounded on her behalf. Even Kayleigh McEnany hadn’t amassed enough goodwill from eight years of preaching the MAGA gospel to spare her from being excommunicated after saying a few kind words about Trump’s opponent?

 

What’s the raison d’etre of a campaign in which someone trusted enough to serve as Trump’s mouthpiece to the planet becomes an enemy simply because she holds the same opinion of Ron DeSantis that Trump himself would hold had DeSantis opted against running?

 

Whose side is Trump on?

 

You, the reader, might digest all of that and nonetheless feel skeptical that anyone will manage to convince a cult that its own leader isn’t on its “side.” I share your skepticism.

 

Trump’s approach to political warfare, especially against other Republicans, depends on the fact that a critical mass of right-wingers trust him over all other sources, even if what he says is self-contradictory. If DeSantis handled Disney badly by scaring off business and also handled it badly by not scaring off business sooner, the takeaway for primary voters—or so Trump hopes, and expects—will be that “DeSantis handled Disney badly,” not “Trump is a confused old man who’ll say anything to win.”

 

The governor will need to puncture that unreality forcefield somehow, which may be the hardest task in politics. So far Trump has managed to convince Republicans that he’s electable because he didn’t actually lose in 2020 and that he’s a talented and competent executive because all of his failures were the fault of establishment saboteurs. Good luck under those circumstances getting them to grasp that it’s DeSantis, not Trump, who has a clear policy vision that he wants to implement if he’s rewarded with a turn in the White House.

 

But DeSantis is going to try. He might not be the only candidate willing to execute a confrontational, high-energy strategy to that end but he’s the only one with a remotely plausible chance of winning. How’s that for a bit of uncharacteristic optimism for you after one week?

Manufacturing Dissent

By George Case

Monday, May 29, 2023

 

Everyone hates the media, and everyone sounds like a talking head.

~George Packer, “The Hardest Vote”

 

It’s all Noam Chomsky's fault. Well, it’s not directly his fault, but Chomsky’s influence on generations of pundits, political junkies, and ordinary people has been wider than anyone 40 years ago might have hoped or feared. A scholar of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky gained international renown with his trenchant criticisms of American foreign policy from the 1960s onward. He also issued warnings about the power and influence of propaganda and mass manipulation in open societies that reached an even greater public, including many who had never read his books or checked his research. Today, a sampling of his observations, once eagerly endorsed by intellectuals and alt-rock fans, sounds like the staple complaints of MAGA Republicans and truck blockaders:

 

But apart from educated elites, much of the population appears to regard the government as an instrument of power beyond their influence and control. (From Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies)

 

See, in most parts of the society, you’re encouraged to defer to experts - we all do it more than we should. (From Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)

 

The dominant class recognized that they had to shift their tactics to control of attitudes and beliefs instead of just the cudgel. They didn’t throw away the cudgel, but it can’t do what it used to do. You have to control attitudes and beliefs. (From Occupy)

 

[The state has] to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions. Various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion. (From Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media)

 

It is also important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors in society have never liked democracy, for good reasons. Democracy places power in the hands of the population and takes it away from them. In fact, the privileged and powerful classes of this country have always sought to find ways to limit power from being placed in the hands of the general population. (From Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change)

 

[I]f a political leader says that “I’m doing this in the national interest,” you’re supposed to feel good because that’s for me. However, if you look closely, it turns out that the national interest is not defined as what’s in the interest of the entire population; it’s what’s in the interests of small, dominant elites who happen to be able to command the resources that enable them to control the state. (From Language and Politics)

 

[T]hose who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. (From Necessary Illusions)

 

Though these pronouncements sprang from their author’s political leftism, they have been echoed in tracts from the political Right, including Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Bernard Goldberg’s Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite (2003), Gregg Jackson’s Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies (2006), Tim Groseclose’s Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (2011), Derek Hunter’s Outrage, Inc: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood (2018), Jeanine Pirro’s Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2018), L. Brent Bozell’s Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump (2019), Mark Dice’s The Liberal Media Industrial Complex (2019), and Amber Athey’s The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media (2023).

 

Along with the unironic “Fair and Balanced” branding of Fox News, and the late radio host Rush Limbaugh’s routine denunciations of a vague, sinister force identified only as “The Media,” these polemics seem to derive from Chomsky’s fearful suspicions about the control and indoctrination exercised by news, education, and entertainment. Ann Coulter and the producers of Fox News didn’t need to quote Noam Chomsky directly in support of their own positions—indeed, they may never have read him at all. But somewhere along the line, they and their peers—and their audiences—absorbed Chomsky’s message.

 

Not that the message was new exactly. Criticism of mass media’s undue effects on entire populations is almost as old as the mass media itself. The classic dystopias of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) imagined, respectively, the enervating distractions offered by “feelies” and the Ministry of Truth, while Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno examined the deceptive fantasies purveyed by Hollywood and popular music in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) alleged that businesses were inserting subliminal imagery into cigarette and alcohol ads to trick consumers into spending against their rational judgment. Further toward the fringe, antisemites like Father Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford condemned the supposed Jewish domination of the movie and publishing industries, and therefore of public opinion generally. But it was Chomsky, with his academic background and prolific output as an author and lecturer, who brought the appearance of scientific rigor to claims that others had floated out of abstract social theorizing or sheer bigotry. His ability to advance his arguments with clear and unequivocal matter-of-factness won over flocks of new believers.

 

Most of Chomsky’s political books take on globalization, neoliberalism, and US involvement in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or Central America. His two key texts devoted to media analysis were 1988’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (co-authored with Edward S. Herman) and a compendium of his talks aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1989’s Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. In 1992, Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick adapted the former volume into a three-hour documentary titled Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. This film delivered Chomsky’s arguments to ordinary people well outside his usual cohort of students and activists. It was initially screened in metropolitan theaters, but it soon became available everywhere in the new medium of home video. “The film, like its subject, is challenging without being wild-eyed, controversial without stooping to aphorism,” ran a review in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “At the very least,” the Chicago Sun-Times conceded, “Wintonick, Achbar and Chomsky encourage viewers to scrutinize what they read, see, and hear.” Did they ever.

 

Since then, Chomsky has become a cult figure for progressives, with major rock acts including Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine promoting his works. A second biographical documentary, 2003’s Rebel Without a Pause, took its title from a compliment paid to Chomsky by U2’s Bono (lifted, in turn, from the title of a Public Enemy track). During those years, there was no shortage of other writers elaborating on—or simplifying—Chomsky’s basic premise: Norman Solomon’s The Habits of Mainstream Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News (1999) and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (2003), Lewis Lapham’s Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (2004), Elliot D. Cohen’s anthology News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (2005), John Nichols’s Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy (2005), and Amy and David Goodman’s Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006). There was also the pop paranoia of the Disinformation Company, publishers of You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths (2001), Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies (2002), 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know (2003), and Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies (2003), as well as the annual Project Censored yearbooks.

 

According to each of these, the ultimate source of the spin, suppression, and static is the US-based capitalist economic order. Chomsky and his disciples weren’t simply advising people to delve past the headlines and soundbites for a sharper understanding of current affairs, which would have been good counsel. They were also warning that campaigns of omission and deception are deliberately orchestrated to prevent any such understanding. This was the “propaganda model” described by Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent. “The media,” Chomsky explains in Necessary Illusions, “serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.” Or as Carl Jensen of Project Censored put it in 1996: “[T]he bottom line explanation for much of the censorship that occurs in America’s mainstream media is the media’s own bottom line.”

 

Funny thing, though—by this point, the notion that the journalistic establishment was a tool of powerful elites had already been embraced by a separate constituency of readers and listeners, except the elites they detected were not those identified by Carl Jensen, Amy Goodman, and Noam Chomsky. The process of manipulation was not in dispute—all seemed to agree that popular consent is manufactured and illusions are necessary to keep us in line. That left the questions of exactly what we are consenting to and through which illusions. The Right, no less than the Left, found plenty of evidence to back its theory that almost everything dispensed by big newspapers, networks, and studios could be construed as lies, disinformation, and propaganda. Conservative pundits identified the spread of R- or X-rated cinema and television, the investigative reporting that focused relentlessly on Republican political scandals, the constant attention given to the grievances of this or that new class of victims, the commonplace portrayals of military or business leaders as dangerous villains, and the steady debunking of historic heroes as racist white males. Sometimes, the same outlets excoriated by one side were targeted by their opponents for different reasons. While Chomsky attacks the New York Times as a mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex, for instance, Ann Coulter and Fox News’s Sean Hannity described the paper as a shill for liberal relativism. They all agreed that the media was intentionally misleading the people to fulfill a larger, secret agenda—they just disagreed about what the agenda really was.

 

And here we arrive at Chomsky’s legacy of bipartisan paranoid grievance. In 2023, nearly every platform of information and opinion is characterized as either Ours or Theirs, depending on who’s assessing it, and commentators with millions of followers complain that they’ve been shut out of the public conversation. With the emergence of the Internet and social networking, even those who can’t tell Karl Marx from Mark Zuckerberg routinely insist that a concerted system of some kind or another is inculcating mindless obedience in a gullible public. The reliability of coverage varies and some sources strive a lot harder for neutrality than others. But try telling that to your neighbor or relative who’s lost down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and QAnon posts. Today, it’s dissent that’s mass-produced, and useful consensus on any big topic is a distant ideal. Chomsky may not have invented this suspicion, but he did more than most to create the intellectual climate for its popularization. It was Chomsky who made it fashionable to discredit the official accounts of any event. It was Chomsky who formulated the paradoxical logic of decrying media bias through the media.

 

“There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently,” he said, independently and unfiltered, in 1997. In Necessary Illusions, he set out the unfalsifiable parameters of his reasoning, which so many others would adopt: “The propaganda model does not assert that the media parrot the line of the current state managers in the manner of a totalitarian regime; rather, that the media reflect the consensus of powerful elites of the state-corporate nexus generally, including those who object to some aspect of government policy, typically on tactical grounds.” That is, even dissent isn’t really dissent, since it merely shows that authorities are fooling us into a false sense of autonomy. This insidious scheme may be why the Canadian edition of his book features the cover blurb, “National Bestseller—More than 50 000 Copies Sold,” and why Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson, fronting their own published blasts against the mainstream media, are likewise advertised as “New York Times Bestselling Authors.”

 

In fairness, Noam Chomsky has never advocated physical violence against individual reporters, and nor has he quite pronounced, as President Donald Trump did in 2018, that the press is “the enemy of the people.” Yet in a subtle and sophisticated way, he helped to make such threats attractive. Activists and opinion-formers on the Left and Right have been persuaded that living under anything besides the kind of governance they want means they have been cheated—any statement I disagree with is purposefully fraudulent; anybody who doesn’t see things my way has been brainwashed; democracy is only working when my team wins. Far lesser minds than his parrot those ideas today, for which Chomsky, now in his 95th year, shouldn’t be blamed. But he deserves some measure of culpability for our contemporary crises over objective knowledge, expertise, and authority. Over a long and prominent career, he made it seem rational—and even admirable—to reject them.

Setting the DeSantis Covid Record Straight

National Review Online

Thursday, June 01, 2023

 

‘Donald Trump tells the truth, finally,” exclaimed one of the former president’s most unlikely supporters, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. The disgraced author of New York’s draconian Covid-mitigation policies, who resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment and corruption investigations that were bearing fruit, has to take the defenders he can find. Trump has become one in the course of his frenetic efforts to bludgeon Ron DeSantis with any weapon at hand. This arsenal includes unfavorably contrasting the Florida governor’s approach to Covid with Cuomo’s and, of course, Trump’s preferences. Anyone who wishes to ensure that America’s mistakes during the pandemic never happen again should emphatically reject Trump’s revisionism.

 

Trump claims that Florida is “Third Worst in the Nation for COVID-19 Deaths (losing 86,294 People)” and “Third Worst for Total Number of Cases, at 7,516,906.” So, “why do they say that DeSanctus [sic] did a good job?” the former president asked. In response to this rhetorical question, the mainstream press’s hyperactive fact-checking apparatus has gone quiet, a silence rendered more conspicuous by the sheer audacity of Trump’s conclusions.

 

That Florida had more cases and deaths than New York tells us little, given that the former has 2 million more residents than the latter. What’s more relevant: Florida has a larger elderly population, and so its age-adjusted mortality rate from Covid was 8 percent lower than even the median state, to say nothing of New York, which is surpassed in this gruesome metric only by New Jersey and the two Dakotas. Florida’s better policies surely played a role in its better outcome. As journalistic outlets revealed and New York State attorney general Letitia James’s office confirmed, the Cuomo administration’s policy of warehousing Covid-exposed seniors in long-term-care facilities contributed to excess deaths among the elderly — a fact Cuomo’s administration tried to cover up. Florida’s government resisted public pressure to adopt New York’s model even as other states succumbed to that pressure (to tragic results).

 

Trump also attacks DeSantis’s Covid record by claiming that Florida had “radical lockdowns” that the former president opposed. If that doesn’t comport with your recollection of the pandemic, don’t worry about your memory. DeSantis reluctantly consented to a partial shutdown of brick-and-mortar establishments and beaches on March 20, 2020. That was, according to DeSantis’s critics, a belated response to Donald Trump’s March 16 federal guidelines urging Americans “to engage in schooling from home when possible, avoid gathering in groups of more than ten people, avoid discretionary travel and avoid eating and drinking in bars, restaurants, and public food courts.” Florida’s restrictions lasted for all of 29 days before DeSantis gave the go-ahead to begin reopening public and private facilities. That was a bold move at the time — DeSantis didn’t wait for public opinion or the Trump White House to catch up with his instincts.

 

Just days after DeSantis green-lit the reopening of outdoor venues, Donald Trump went after Georgia governor Brian Kemp for similar policies. “I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities,” Trump told reporters.

 

Both DeSantis and Kemp were accused in the press of laying the groundwork for an orgy of death, but the media derangement never matched reality. The governors showed wisdom in ignoring the professional hysterics who populate public life.

 

Trump has been all over the map on his administration’s own Covid policies, at times endorsing them, at times distancing himself from them (even when he was president and everyone designing and implementing the policies was working for him). He’s now also turned on what was one of the most significant developments of his presidency — encouraging the development and distribution of effective Covid vaccines in a radically short period.

 

“So much for Ron and anti-vax,” the president said of a post that attacked DeSantis for, of all things, clearing the line so an elderly World War II veteran could receive an early vaccination. This isn’t a spontaneous attack. It was forecast as early as January. One “Trump ally” told the Times that they were stockpiling “news B-roll of DeSantis presiding over vaccinations of elderly people,” which Trump’s allies believe will turn off Republican voters. But DeSantis was in line with Trump administration policies.

 

“The ultimate goal here,” said Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar, “is to make getting a Covid-19 vaccine as convenient as getting a flu shot.” He was talking of a policy expediting vaccinations among seniors by administering them in long-term-care facilities — a program Trump himself touted in a speech. “The plan we put forward prioritizes the elderly and patients with underlying conditions,” Trump said of the “miracle” that was his vaccine-promotion policies. “We urge the governors to put America’s seniors first.” In addition, Trump mobilized the U.S. military to deliver as many shots into as many arms as possible.

 

In the intervening years, Republicans have grown more suspicious of the promotion of Covid vaccines, partly because they became entangled with overzealous vaccination mandates that made even less sense as it became clear that the vaccines did not prevent transmission. But by November 2021, the DeSantis administration sought and signed legislation prohibiting the imposition of vaccination mandates on private businesses without requisite opt-outs, and he has proposed a permanent ban on such extraordinary measures.

 

DeSantis has called all this historical revisionism precisely what it is: “bizarre.” The governor has proposed several rebuttals to Trump’s reconceptualization of reality, but the most effective is how Trump’s behavior runs counter to his attacks. “Hell, his whole family moved to Florida under my governorship,” DeSantis exclaimed. Of course, so did hundreds of thousands of other Americans.

 

It’s understandable that Trump would seek to massage his record on the pandemic. With enough table-pounding, maybe voters will forget the degree to which he outsourced the presidency to admittedly manipulative social engineers like Dr. Anthony Fauci, his effusive praise for the Chinese Communist Party, and his chaotic conduct throughout the pandemic.

 

Trump appears to wish that he had governed differently during the Covid crisis and erred on the side of liberty. If he had, his record would look a lot more like that of Ron DeSantis.

Get Ready for More ‘Bud Lighting’

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

 

A lot of conservatives are very excited about “Bud Lighting”—a freshly minted term for boycotting companies that cater to various “woke” causes, particularly transgender issues. 

 

The term derives from the spectacular implosion of Bud Light in the wake of their decision in March to enlist transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand. Bud Light’s sales have plummeted, averaging weekly declines of about 25 percent. Parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev has lost more than $15 billion in value. Sales of rival brands have soared, even as many retailers have slashed prices for Bud Light. Some stores are even giving Bud Light away for free—or trying to.

 

I am very skeptical that the Bud Light example can be replicated over the long haul, but I’m convinced that we are entering a new era of Bud Lighting on the right and left. 

 

First, some background. The most remarkable thing about the Bud Light boycott is that it worked, because boycotts usually don’t—if your definition of success is actually affecting sales and stock price in a significant way. PETA’s been boycotting KFC for 20 years to little or no effect. KFC’s biggest challenge hasn’t been from boycotters, but from rivals like Chick-fil-A, which has been going gangbusters despite facing plenty of boycotts of its own. 

 

Why are there boycotts if they don’t work? Because the definition has changed. The goal is rarely to affect the bottom line but to hurt the reputation of the company and create headaches for management. 

 

But even that is secondary. Most boycotts are what historian Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-events,” also known as media events, which are, in Boorstin’s words, “produced by a communicator with the sole purpose of generating media attention and publicity.” A successful boycott is one that raises awareness or donations for the organizers. As Northwestern University professor Brayden King told the website Tasting Table, “The no. 1 predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it creates, not how many people sign onto a petition or how many consumers it mobilizes.”

 

In other words, boycotts work for the boycotters even if they don’t work against their targets. Activist groups, on the left and right, have known this for years. The media attention provides fundraisers some evidence to donors that the group is doing something tangible. 

 

My skepticism that the Bud Light example can be replicated stems from the particulars of the product and its market. Generic, cheap, low-calorie beer is a commodity easily replaced by competitors. What Bud Light sells is the brand. Whether you care about trans issues or not, if you’re even moderately concerned about getting grief from friends at a party, all you need to do is buy essentially the same product that’s social-statement free and available right next to Bud Light at the store. 

 

Moreover, unlike many other products, you display the brand when you consume it, it’s a visible choice. If you bought your shirt at Target, a recent target of Bud Lighting for selling trans-friendly products, no one will be able to tell at the tailgate party. Replacing a Target shirt involves a lot more hassle and cost than replacing Bud Light.

 

Still, I think we’re going to see a lot more of this. In the short term, the Bud Light example is too exciting for “anti-woke” crusaders who have become rabidly anti-corporate. Once you develop a taste for scalps, only more scalps can satisfy. More broadly, the rise of the attention economy makes the incentives for these pseudo-events too attractive to ignore. 

 

Besides, in a culture where everything is politicized, Bud Lighting is here to stay because boycotting has become a kind of reverse Veblen good. In economics, Veblen goods are things you buy not for their intrinsic worth but to display how much disposable income you have. A Marxist might call that “vice signaling.” Bud Lighting is a way to telegraph to the world the kind of person you are by what you won’t spend money on. 

 

The lesson for corporations should be to become more conservative, not ideologically but fiduciarily. Although I don’t like some of the excesses already on display in the era of Bud Lighting, if it results in corporations retreating from politics in favor of their core mission—shareholder value—America will be better for it.

The Rank Bigotry of ‘Karen’-Shaming

By Wilfred Reilly

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

 

Earlier this month, we citizens saw another seemingly irrelevant story of local racial conflict trend nationwide.

 

A Caucasian New York City nurse/physician’s assistant, Sarah Comrie, found herself dubbed “Citi Bike Karen,” after a young black man alleged that she had tried to take one of the big-city rental bikes from him during a brief street scuffle. From what I can piece together of the teenager’s story, he claimed that he had paid for the bike and that an angry and exhausted Comrie — who was six months pregnant and had just completed a twelve-hour shift — attempted to jack it from him and a group of several of his friends.

 

This claim appears to have been simply believed verbatim, at face value. Following the release of a cellphone video depicting a heated confrontation between her and the group of teens — which included the use of epithets like “retarded” for Comrie, contact with her distended stomach, and her screaming for help — the PA was temporarily put on leave from her job at Bellevue Hospital, and pilloried in the press.

 

There’s a lot here. First and unsurprisingly, the initial narrative turned out to be complete BS. Within days of the conflict, Comrie and the lawyer she was forced to hire provided the New York Post and other Big Apple outlets with formal receipts showing, as the Post paraphrased, that “she was the one who purchased the [bicycle] at the center of the viral incident . . . [and] rented the bike first.” Possibly, the group of young men attempted to steal the thing from her, before passersby intervened, and the machine was locked back up. Or, as Bike Bro No. 1’s sister has passionately argued, there may simply have been a good-faith dispute here: A young rider who had just used one particular Citi Bike wanted to call “dibs” on it so that he could enjoy 45 more minutes of ride-time at a reduced rate. Arguments, I suspect, have broken out over far less than that in New York City — a town where a cab driver once screamed “Chicago sucks!!!” at me and dropped me off early after I told him where I was from. (He wouldn’t have dared tried pulling that in the Windy City.) In any case, if this even needs to be said, one pregnant lady did not strong-arm five young men.

 

Second, at a deeper level, it was an absurd act of sensationalism and narrative compliance for Gotham and even national media to pretend that this almost certainly had happened. Has there been one case in recent memory of a heavily pregnant yuppie white woman robbing a bunch of streetwise young men, of any ethnicity? (I eagerly await your submissions to Wilfred.reilly@kysu.edu.) And, more troublingly, the decision to run hard with this story did not exactly stand alone.

 

By this point, we must all have noticed that the usual hunger of the press for edgy man-bites-dog stories is amplified 100x in cases of racial and ethnic conflict — especially when these can be presented in terms of “white” abuse of blacks. Take race as a catalytic element away from the Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely, “Central Park Dog Gate,” and even George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin cases, and we can say with near-certainty that none of them would have been more than local items in the police blotter. With no sarcasm: How much better would American race relations be today had that remained the case — across the matters just cited and so many others?

 

The plain reality that the mass media regularly construct martyrs out of people involved in day-to-day scuffles (if they have the right demographic profile) highlights yet another key fact about the Citi Bike case: The nurse and expecting mother in fact did nothing wrong here at all — and the attacks leveled at her reflect some distinctly sexist ideas we need to put to bed. The main criticisms of Sarah Comrie from “pro-black” outlets such as the Grio, which is still attacking her while claiming that it was “not about the bike,” are that she acted as a “Karen” and weaponized her “white woman tears.”

 

It’s worth breaking down exactly what this means. What Comrie’s critics are objecting to is the fact that she did not immediately submit to her opponents. Being a “Karen,” in this context, meant not giving up the bike that she paid for, and engaging in “call the manager”–style behavior by pulling in male citizens to help her out. Her “white lady tears” literally just refer to the fact that she was weeping, as an exhausted woman involved in an ugly argument.

 

Why, exactly, would someone have even a theoretical ethical problem with a fellow human being doing either of those things? With no humor intended: because Emmett Till was once lynched. Basically, the “woke” claim is that white women should control their behavior even during male-initiated conflicts — because crying white women have caused harm to men and especially to black men in the past. The Grio piece says this very explicitly: “This was a dispute over a rental bike . . . but she escalated it in a way that could have caused harm to these young Black men, and we cannot lose sight of that.”

 

The same argument has been made over and over in the recent past. Despite his own insanely creepy behavior (“Then I’ll do what I want . . . and you won’t like it . . .”), bird-watcher Christian Cooper famously described his sparring partner Amy Cooper’s threat to call the cops on a black man as well over the line following their own New York City tête-à-tête.

 

The electronic streets apparently agreed: Female Cooper was fired and even had her dog repossessed following the viral argument, while male Cooper went on to significant success and now hosts the National Geographic show Extraordinary Birder.

 

“Trans women” now often make similar claims — violently shutting down events for female speakers such as Britain’s Posie Parker while simultaneously declaring that women’s beloved voices have been weaponized against a still more vulnerable minority: themselves. Enough: This is all absurd. Mark me down as a Karen Respecter.

 

Obviously, the era of lynching was a shameful and ugly one. But there has not been a recorded lynching in the United States since 1964 (according to the archives of the historically black Tuskegee Institute). Today, black Americans commit crimes against white Americans significantly more often than the reverse; men offend against women something like ten times more than vice versa.

 

In this real world, it is insanely unrealistic to say that members of some groups are not merely forbidden to use a few Magic Words, but also to engage in specific common behaviors . . . while everyone else can do these things at will. It is hilariously archetypal prejudice to say that only women — or, yes, only white ladies — become villains when they stand up for themselves and ask to talk to a boss, or get upset and yell during an argument.

 

Some of the “Karen” noise strikes me as sexism — today, I notice that you can say almost any damned thing about women if you add a short modifier like “white” or “cis” — and some of it as racism, but none of it as good. Only a truly broken society would look at a weeping pregnant woman arguing with five laughing men and think: “Why is she attacking them?” We have our flaws, in the U.S.A. of 2023, but let’s not go there.