Never say die:

Never say die: Trump-Russia collusion theorists strike again

 Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent, Washington Examiner 

Call it the scandal that will not die. Or, more accurately, the scandalmongering that will not die. In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of new assertions that presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Trump campaign did, in fact, collude with Russia to fix the 2016 election. No matter that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors, an aggressive bunch with a big budget and all the powers of U.S. law enforcement, investigated the collusion allegation for years and failed to establish that it ever happened.

Now, there are more and more references to something called the "Russia hoax hoax." Anti-Trump types are unhappy that Trump, and some Trump defenders, and even some who aren't Trump defenders, now talk about the Russia investigation as a "hoax." Calling the Trump-Russia investigation a hoax, they argue, is a hoax in itself — thus the "Russia hoax hoax."

"The Real Hoax" is the title of a web piece by the Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch. "It Wasn't a Hoax" is the title of an article by the Atlantic's David Frum. "The End of the Great Russia Hoax Hoax" is the title of a Deep State Radio podcast featuring prominent Trump-Russia promoters Natasha Bertrand of Politico, Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast, Josh Campbell of CNN, and Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institution's Lawfare website. Lawfare also produced a podcast featuring Rauch and Frum, as well as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, moderated by Brookings's Benjamin Wittes.

Why all the new activity? The Trump-Russia true believers are deeply concerned about the fallout from special counsel John Durham's investigation of the investigation. In particular, Durham's indictments have demolished any possibility of believing in the Steele dossier, which played a big role in the Trump-Russia investigation.

It really did, no matter who tries to deny it. Remember, top FBI officials hired former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate Trump for the bureau. (It didn't work out because Steele couldn't stop talking to the press.) FBI leaders also wanted to include Steele's unverified allegations, later shown to be ridiculously thinly sourced, in the Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. In January 2017, the nation's top intelligence chiefs briefed outgoing President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump on Steele's tales. Then, when that briefing was leaked, the dossier became huge news when CNN reported it. Hours later, BuzzFeed published the whole thing. Ever since, it has been a near-sacred document for the truest of the true collusion believers.

But now, Durham has shown that some of the dossier's allegations, which we already knew were financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, were not only laughably sourced but also the work of a Clinton-connected politico who fed gossip to Steele's hired dirt-gatherer. The Steele dossier looks more and more like an elaborate and sadly effective political dirty trick.

It's not that the Russia hoax hoax crowd wants to defend the dossier. Rather, they are concerned that some will look at Durham's dismantling of the dossier and conclude that the entire Russia investigation was a hoax. Indeed, in that Brookings podcast, Rauch said he was concerned that some writers he respects — Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Eli Lake, and Peter Berkowitz among them — have dismissed the entire investigation. So, the anti-Trumpers have invented the Russia hoax hoax, the idea that anyone who, relying on Durham's findings, pronounces the whole Russia investigation a hoax is himself perpetrating a hoax. And doing Donald Trump's bidding, too. And that must be stopped.

The basic argument of the anti-Trump writers is that there really was Trump-Russia collusion. They didn't make it up! They go through the known events of the Trump-Russia timeline — Trump's famous "Russia, if you're listening" statement, the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting, the "contacts" between Trump campaign figures and various Russians, the polling that then-Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort provided to a Russian who was a longtime business associate and also, perhaps, an intelligence agent, and the various actions of Michael Cohen and Roger Stone — and argue that it all adds up to an indisputable case of collusion, no matter what special counsel Mueller could or could not find.

This is not the place to answer each of the points in detail. Suffice it to say some of them are just plain wrong, while others are just plain weak. For example, when discussing the "Russia, if you're listening" line on the Brookings podcast, Rauch said that "Trump publicly ... asked the Russians to illegally ... steal and dump Clinton campaign documents." But in his July 27, 2016, news conference, Trump was not referring to Clinton campaign documents. When he mentioned "30,000 emails that are missing," he was clearly referring to emails from a personal account that Clinton, when secretary of state, deleted on her own, allowing her lawyers to stonewall a House investigating committee. Trump said so specifically: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." No one would expect Rauch to have done reporting deep inside the Trump campaign, but if he had, he would have known that the 30,000 missing Clinton emails, emails from her secretary of state days, had long been a topic of extensive discussion and speculation at senior levels of the campaign.

On the other end of the scale, the Trump Tower meeting is the best single exhibit for the collusion theory. But even it falls short. Promising negative information on Hillary Clinton, some Russians teased top Trump officials into a meeting. Then, they bored the Trump team with an adoption-based pitch to repeal the Magnitsky Act. The meeting ended pretty quickly with the Trumpers hurrying for the door. Nothing ever happened.

Other instances of alleged "collusion," such as the random set of contacts between Trump figures and Russians — any Russians qualified, apparently — don't tell us anything. The Manafort polling matter boiled down to a classic Manafort operation — the polling, according to close associate Richard Gates, was not secret, and Manafort was using it to show that he was a big deal in hopes of getting money to pay for his profligate personal spending, which is what Manafort was always trying to do. (For a deeper look at each of the collusion charges, please see my 2020 book OBSESSION.)

Perhaps Rauch's strongest point is his claim that the Russia investigation could not have been a hoax because the Justice Department inspector general found that the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane was sufficiently predicated, although the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, noted that the FBI had to meet a "low standard" to start the investigation. But here's the problem: What if an investigation is sufficiently predicated and then cannot establish that a crime has been committed, much less who might have committed it? And what if investigators knew that early on yet kept the investigation going and going and going?

That's what happened in the Trump-Russia investigation. Mueller was appointed in May 2017. By Christmas, after a period of extraordinary cooperation from the Trump defense team, the Mueller prosecutors knew they could not establish that conspiracy or coordination, the terms they employed in the investigation, ever took place. (See OBSESSION again.) And they didn't play word games; Mueller wrote that "even as defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute." So, whatever you want to call it — conspiracy, coordination, or collusion — Mueller did not find it.

The bottom line is, the Russia hoax hoax effort is pretty weak tea. Plus, the part coming from the Brookings Institution group looks a little strange, given that a number of figures at the liberal think tank had a part in handling the dossier as it made its way, unknown to the public, through the Obama administration and the media.

But there is another angle to the Russia hoax hoax story that is more interesting than the conventional analysis from Rauch, et al. Going through court papers in the Capitol riot prosecutions, the writer Marcy Wheeler, who posts as emptywheel, has noticed that not only do the riot defendants believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, many also believe that Democrats, through the "Russia hoax," tried to steal the 2016 election from Trump. When they are accused of spreading the "Big Lie" — their 2020 stop-the-steal narrative — they counter by saying, in effect: "You call stop-the-steal the Big Lie? What about your claim that Russia rigged the 2016 election for Trump? That's the real Big Lie, and it was everywhere in the media for years after the election."

Wheeler noted the recent MSNBC appearance of Jan. 6 rally organizers Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. (The two are not accused of any crimes.) Host Chris Hayes went through some of the wildest 2020 stolen-election theories and said, "You do get that it wasn't stolen, right? ... that all of those claims were not true, right?" In response, Stockton turned the question around on Hayes, pointing to the media's yearslong Russia frenzy. "Do you now admit," Stockton said to Hayes, "that the Russia memes that you guys ran 24 hours a day in the early days of Trump ... [were] undermining democracy? ... There were dozens of ridiculous claims. ... There were tons of ridiculous clips."

Wheeler wrote: "A key purveyor of the Big Lie [Stockton] excuses his actions because MSNBC reported on a Russia investigation that was based off real facts." She continued: "This is just one example where Trumpsters excuse their own participation in the Big Lie by turning a bunch of different prongs of reporting on Russia in 2017 — some undoubtedly overblown but much based on real facts about real actions that Trump and his aides really took — into the equivalent of wild hoaxes about efforts to steal the 2020 election."

What is going on here? First of all, the Russia hoax hoax arguments are coming from writers and commentators who believed deeply in collusion, so deeply that even when an extensive investigation failed to establish that collusion took place, some of them faulted the investigator and kept on believing. Now, in Trump's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, the stop-the-steal movement, and the Capitol riot, they see election-denial efforts that uncomfortably echo their own but turned up to 11 and, ultimately, into a riot and physical violence.

What if Trump had handled the post-election period differently? What if he had accepted the verdict of the election and had not accused Democrats of cheating, not launched court challenges, and not called for protests? What if, instead, Trump had followed the 2016 model and surreptitiously used the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and a willing media, to slander and undermine Biden and his administration in hopes of driving them from office? That would have been following a now-established Democratic/media precedent.

But Trump did what he did. And the Trump-Russia believers did what they did. And now, those believers see Trump followers such as Stockton, defending his denial of the 2020 election results, throwing their old, unproven Russia allegations back at them. So now, they have come up with the idea of a "Russia hoax hoax" — a new way to claim that it is the other guy who is making up false charges.

BIDEN IN BRIEF

 

A dangerous cartoon...

BIDEN IN BRIEF

Scott Johnson, Powerline

By contrast with Peggy Noonan, to take a prominent example, Gerard Baker provides an unillusioned assessment of President Biden and Vice President Harris in his Wall Street Journal column “Biden Emerges as Progressive Government’s Mr. Bad Example.” There is no false hope, no sentimentality, no uplift, no gush or mush in his evaluation:

It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that this is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.

Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.

That is a bullseye.

Zombie Marxism.

 Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist theoretician and politician,

member of the Communist International. 

Zombie Marxism

Mike Gonzalez, Law Liberty

Many Americans have begun to grasp the Marxist nature of CRT.

This December we celebrate the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the communist superpower Ronald Reagan rightly named the “Evil Empire.” Yet everywhere today, Marxism still stalks humanity. Indeed, today we can paraphrase Karl Marx and write that its specter haunts not just Europe, but the entire world.

We must understand this as a global threat. Since its birth in the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx and Friedrich Engels, communism has been a call to arms that knows no borders. But we must also understand—as the Kremlin in its time certainly did—that the big fight is over the United States. Once Marxists seize that most elusive jewel in the crown, they have the world. That’s why this essay will focus mostly on the U.S.

Before we catalog the dangerous state of play with communism, we should remember the good news. Marxism may be resurgent, but it is being vigorously confronted by the same force that defeated the Soviet Union: the American people. They have joined what some may dismiss as “culture wars,” but is really a consequential battle of ideas. Surveys show Americans, writ large, reject these ideas, and are starting to discern the stakes.

We need discernment because Marxism’s breakthroughs today are the result of different strategies and tactics. Gone are frontal military threats, such as along the Fulda Gap in Germany, or in the actual wars in the fields of Central America in the 1980s. Just as we face constant mutations of the Coronavirus, today we face a different, mutant form of Marxism.

Yes, today’s ascendant American Marxists have their supporters in the halls of power in Beijing and Caracas. But it would be a mistake to see them as Chinese or Venezuelan agents, as some of their predecessors were Soviet stooges in the 20th century. The leaders of Black Lives Matter groups, the creators of the 1619 Project, and the architects of Critical Race Theory may be internationalists who believe in the Manifesto’s call for world revolution. But they are a very American phenomenon. We must understand and confront them in those terms.

Much is different today from the last time America faced a concerted communist threat. Communists now realize that domestic revolutions to overthrow the bourgeoisie are not viable in every place, if they are possible in any place. Today, revolution comes at the end, not the beginning. It must be preceded, or replaced, by the arduous work of 1) organizing people, 2) indoctrinating them, and 3) convincing them to become domestic agents of cultural replacement. That’s the mutation we confront.

The current efforts to besmirch the American story—indeed to change its origin story itself, as we see with the New York Times’ 1619 Project—amount to a campaign to transform America’s societal structure that has been underway for at least three decades. It rapidly accelerated after BLM was founded in 2013, and then it exploded into society after the George Floyd riots of 2020. The result? The Critical Race Theory indoctrination that has so angered parents.

The architects of the 1619 Project and the academics who created CRT are equally part of the effort to replace America’s narrative. (The term “white supremacy,” which is meant to replace such ideas as “Land of the Free,” appears no fewer than 38 times in the foundational text of CRT). It was BLM, however, that created the propitious environment to replace America’s narrative, and it is on these organizations that we must focus.

Once we do, we discover that the founders of the Black Lives Matter organizations are at the center of the destructive unrest that led to the hacking of our cultural software. They are not just “trained Marxists,” as BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors labeled herself and another co-founder, Alicia Garza (in a video that has now disappeared from public view). But they were recruited and trained by Marxists steeped in this new view of how to build revolutionary consciousness through recruitment, organizing, and indoctrination.

The Gramscian Moment

Today’s Marxism can be tailor-made to each circumstance. This adaptability has replaced the rigid ideas expressed in the Communist Manifesto. Today’s successful Marxists understand that, no, the economy does not determine all of man’s actions, as Marx once wrote, and, no, the internal contradictions of capitalism will not constantly produce revolutions.

These are Marxists who have boned up on the lessons of the 1920s Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, or the theoretical works of his German contemporaries at the so-called Frankfurt School, which produced Critical Theory (of which Critical Race Theory is an American offshoot). It was these Europeans who incubated the mutant strains.

Gramsci’s basic theory was simple, even if the ramifications were complex. Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, after the failure by Italy’s workers to set up a communist state in 1918, Gramsci said the proletariat was consenting to his own enslavement. How so? He buys into the cultural trappings of his bourgeois oppressor—the church, the family, the nation-state, etc. As a result, in countries with rich civil societies, such as those in Western Europe and the United States, communists needed to undertake a “war of position.” This involved a long-term effort to organize the masses and indoctrinate them into Marxist ideas.

The German Critical Theorists, for similar reasons, came up with a similar explanation: the worker had bought into a consumerist conceptual superstructure and was unaware of his own crushing oppression. Both concluded that intellectuals had to give the workers revolutionary consciousness.

Gramsci and the Critical Theorists did not repudiate Marx and Lenin so much as expanded on their beliefs. Marx may have written that revolutions would inevitably come when “the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” But to Gramsci, “‘popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.”

Applied Gramsci

According to Harmony Goldberg, a Gramscian cultural anthropologist, Gramsci merely made “several important innovations” on the ideas of Marx and Lenin. As Goldberg put it in her 2015 “brief introduction” to Gramsci’s ideas:

Gramsci upheld the assertion that a successful revolution would ultimately require the overthrow of the bourgeois state…However, because the capitalist hegemony does not function through state violence alone but that it also mobilizes civil society in order to promote oppressed peoples consent to and participation in the system, a successful revolutionary movement would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent.

Goldberg is not just any Gramscian anthropologist. In 1996 she founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training.

To Goldberg, the efforts to undermine the American worker’s endorsement of the American way of life today “must go beyond participation in trade union struggles reform; revolutionaries must root their struggles in all arenas of social life and—centrally—must engage in the battle for ideas.” The ruling bourgeois will always be trying to convince workers that they have a stake in preserving capitalism. This is why “Revolutionaries would themselves have to engage in the long-term battle of ideas in order to clarify the need for revolutionary transformation.” All-out ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first.

A multi-class alliance, which Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” would be needed, in Goldberg’s words, “to move history forward” by indoctrinating society into the new “national-popular collective will”—the cultural counter-hegemony. But it is important to bear in mind that “in every historic bloc there is a single class that plays a leading role and serves as a cohering force,” according to Goldberg’s interpretation of Gramsci. The job of the cohering force was to organize other classes and instruct them on the need to replace the existing order with a socialist one.

Garza learned these lessons a full decade before a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013—the event that supposedly launched Black Lives Matter. It was at SOUL, Garza has said, that she first learned that “social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”

As SFWeekly wrote in a long profile, “Garza’s summer with SOUL wasn’t just about getting a political education in a leftist ‘analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity,’ as she describes it, but a crash course in grassroots community organizing.” Garza found an early opportunity to turn minds when she began “organizing low-income tenants in East and West Oakland” against gentrification. “I spent my summer getting my ass kicked, knocking on doors 10 hours a day. It was really good training. Really, really, really good training.”

Garza thus learned from master theoreticians how to apply the Gramscian rules. We can also now fully grasp what Garza meant when she told Maine liberals in 2019, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country….I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone, even white people.” What she was trained to seek was a total transformation. The ultimate object, of course, is getting rid of capitalism, since Garza says that “it’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism.”

Garza’s connections to Goldberg’s creations have endured. Today Garza is on SOUL’s board. In 2012, a year before Garza co-founded BLM, Goldberg was publishing Garza on the web platform she founded, Organizing Upgrade, as we can see with Garza’s reporting on Brazil’s Marxist landless movement. The two have also crossed paths over the past two decades in such Marxist groups as the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. That group sent Garza to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, after the killing by police of Michael Brown. There, she helped create the nationwide coalition of the hard left that has been key to BLM’s success. The two also work with LeftRoots, whose activists “challenge capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy.” All these groups provide access to different constituencies whom they can first organize and then indoctrinate.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation.

Patrisse Cullors is at least as important as Garza in building the main organization, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. She underwent similar training at the hands of a similarly committed communist visionary. In her case, the ideological mentor was Eric Mann. He is a former member of the Weather Underground who founded the Labor-Community Strategy Center in LA (which Mann jokingly calls “the University of Caracas Revolutionary Graduate School”).

Mann devotes detailed attention to the hard work of creating a multi-class alliance. This will instill Marxist revolutionary consciousness into the population, to overthrow what he calls the “imperialist, settler” state that is America. He narrows Gramsci’s cultural focus to racial issues. Within the cultural sphere, it’s race-related matters that Mann sees as “the material forces” that create the fault line to be exploited.

In a 1996 essay that was later revised, he wrote:

Given the social formation of the U.S. as a settler state based on virulent white supremacy, the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself—shaping and infecting every aspect of the political process. Thus, any effective Left movement must confront the major fault lines of the society…In a racist, imperialist society, the only viable strategy for the left is to build a movement against racism and imperialism.

His version of the historic bloc is black and Latin American. But he calls for  “an agreed-upon Black priority” with African Americans as the “cohering force” in the struggle against capitalism. In the key area of fighting law and order measures—so central to his, and BLM GNF’s, revolutionary strategy—“the leadership clearly came out of the black community,” he notes. Blacks, to people like Mann and Goldberg, will be the revolutionary agents, and the struggle to make the U.S. a socialist state will be fought in the name of black justice.

Early on, Mann settled on Los Angeles bus riders as more easily organizable and indoctrinated than factory workers. They were more destitute, more black, Latino, and Asian, and more female, than the average worker. “At a time when many workplaces have 25 to 50 employees, an overcrowded bus has 43 people sitting and from 25 to 43 people standing,” he wrote. “Ten organizers on ten different buses can reach 1,000 or more people in a single afternoon,” That’s why his Center pioneered the creation of a Bus Riders Union.

It was precisely at the BRU that Cullors was trained after Mann’s Strategy Center recruited her, and where she combined organizing training with ideological instruction. “I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx, and Lenin to my knowledge of [bell] hooks, [Audre] Lorde and [Rebecca] Walker,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist. The organizers were trained, according to Mann, to “go beyond narrow ‘trade union’ or ‘bus’ consciousness to build a movement based on a more transformative, internationalist consciousness” and create a “united front against U.S. imperialism—rooted in the strategic alliance of the multi-racial, multi-national working class.” This is what he called “the explosive combination of deep ideological framing and grassroots organizing.”

In his 2011 “organizing manifesto,” Playbook for Progressives—written two years before Cullors reached fame by helping to found BLM—Mann already identifies her as “gifted.” In 2006, Cullors helped found the Center’s Summer Youth Organizing Academy “to recruit and train a new generation of high school youth.” At the time of the book’s writing, adds Mann, Cullors “teaches classes on political theory and organizing.” She was at the Center for over a decade, as other sources have confirmed.

To be sure, a much bigger revolutionary payoff for all training by Mann would come when Cullors founded first BLM, and then BLM GNF, and began in earnest the work of dismantling the American cultural narrative (or hegemony in their language) by getting many Americans, especially the young, to believe that they should destroy their country and culture because it is white supremacist at its core. Not for nothing does Cullors tell us herself that she is a “trained Marxist” and that the only reason she does not use the term communist is that it’s gotten a bad rap.

Other important battles in the war to dismantle America have been won because of Mann’s training of BLM leaders. For instance, Black Lives Matter succeeded in pressuring the Los Angeles School Board to cut the LA Schools Police Department’s $70 million budget by 35 percent on June 30, 2020, after a full month of riots and destruction following Floyd’s death. Afterwards, Mann took a victory lap. Writing on August 21, 2020, Mann cast the victory in Gramscian terms:

We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough…Our campaign was also a major ideological victory. It delegitimized the very existence of police in the public schools and affirmed the experience and demands of the most militant and conscious Black students.…Dozens of angry, articulate, and organized Black students—many from Students Deserve—testified that the very presence of police in the schools was a racist and anti-Black attack on their racial identity, self-worth, self-confidence, and academic performance. Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-chair of Black Lives Matter L.A., testified that all three of her children suffered police abuse in the schools while her son’s first experience of anti-Black police brutality was at the age of six. She described in painful detail how every aspect of a Black child’s life is criminalized and why the demand for No Police in the Schools was a life and death issue for the Black community. (Italics in the original)

That this Marxist-inspired effort to reduce police forces, which followed the determined indoctrination of people, has succeeded to such an extent is bad enough. Without law enforcement, a future crisis like the one precipitated by the killing of Floyd could lead to even greater violence and destruction than we experienced in 2020. Even with police, it was the costliest civil unrest in U.S. history, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and we experienced a 30 percent spike in homicides in 2020, according to the FBI.

“A successful revolutionary movement,” Goldberg explained, “would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent” Americans have given to their system. And this campaign to present the counter-narrative to America’s story began very quickly after BLM was launched by Garza, Cullors, Abdullah, and others. This is what BLM and the 1619 Project do today through the curricula they send to the nation’s 14,000 school districts. It’s also what CRT “anti-racism” trainers do in all aspects of our lives.

Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State, detailed in the Tablet in August 2020 how much the media began to sell after the BLM GNF narrative following Zimmerman’s acquittal in July 2013. Prior to 2013, the terms “white,” ”racial privilege(s),” ”of color,” and ”racial equity,” were hardly ever used, wrote Goldberg. Things began to radically change that year, however.

By 2019, on the eve of the George Floyd riots, the frequency with which The New York Times and The Washington Post used these terms had exploded. More importantly, the terms that deprecate America and its founding principles became generalized. “From 1970 until 2014, the combined usage frequency of the three ‘macro-level’ racism terms—systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism—never exceeded 0.00006% of all words in any of the four newspapers,” Goldberg writes. “By 2014, however, this ceiling was shattered, particularly in the Times and Post. In the final year of the series (2019), the Times (0.0004% of all words) and Post (0.00056%) were using these terms roughly 10 times more frequently than they were in 2013 (0.00004%, 0.00005%).” The media, in other words, had taken an active hand in inculcating the counter-hegemony, whose acceptance is needed before communists can topple a country.

The Need for a New Grand Strategy

Why expose all this? My hope is to make it plain why schools are teaching children these new ideologies, and why workers are being subjected to what can only be described as Gramscian, consciousness-raising struggle sessions at their places of work, and why even the military and the churches are following suit. Revolutionary theoreticians recruited and trained the founders of the BLM organizations. After eight years of existence, they have brought America to the brink of societal change. Once we understand this, we can start to envision a grand strategy that will defeat their efforts.

What that strategy will look like is the subject of an entirely different essay—or hopefully many essays. The purpose of this one is to say, on this 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Evil Empire, that we have a new problem.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation. It would need to grasp the fact that the new threat relies on organizing people in different environments and then indoctrinating them. It takes place on buses, domestic work, schools, or neighborhoods about to be gentrified. A grand strategy must grasp what is at stake. It’s nothing less than the replacement of the key American idea that “All Men Are Created Equal” with the lie of white supremacy. Such a strategy would have to reckon with what is happening in our schools. It would need to understand that violence will remain central to Marxist success. Dismantling police forces, the prisons, and the court system itself (which Patrisse Cullors calls for in this video) is part of an effort to leave society defenseless. Once enough people are converted, then the revolutionaries need only wait for a moment of crisis.

We will need to understand what people like Goldberg have in store:

In societies that have a vibrant civil society, revolutionary strategy cannot be based on a pre-given Marxist formula in which a moment of crisis makes the oppressive nature of the capitalist system clear and sparks an insurrectionary struggle that smashes the capitalist state and establishes socialism. Gramsci argued that crises are important, but that they do not ensure that oppressed people will believe in the need for a new economy or that they will have the power to wage a successful revolutionary struggle. To Gramsci, an insurrectionary moment will only succeed if it follows a long-term effort to win oppressed people over to a transformative vision and if it builds working class power over time.

Many Americans have begun to grasp all of this intuitively and have begun to rise up and oppose CRT. To succeed, however, they will need our support.

Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.

“To Encourage the Others”

 

Hillary Clinton and her mentor Saul Alinsky

“To Encourage the Others”: Making an Example of the NBSA

Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. (But in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.) —Voltaire, in Candide

Michael Watson, Capital Research

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) messed up big time. It sent a letter to the Biden administration calling on the Justice Department to investigate protesting parents under the PATRIOT Act, among other federal anti-terrorism laws.

In so doing, the erstwhile representative national association of school board officials exacerbated existing internal disputes over its internal governance, some of which we discussed with the Ohio School Boards Association on the InfluenceWatch Podcast. At the same time, it drew unprecedented scrutiny from opponents of totalitarian COVID restrictions on low-risk children, opponents of left-progressive gender ideology, and opponents of ideologically charged teaching inspired by critical race theory.

That pushback has had consequences. As of writing, activist Corey DeAngelis tallies 18 state associations (including Ohio) that have disaffiliated or ceased paying dues to NSBA, with an additional nine having informally distanced themselves from the national group’s actions.

Cry More, Libs

The decline in revenue has other consequences, as Axios reports:

The controversy “has weakened a national voice for public education,” wrote Steve Gallon III, a Miami-Dade County school board member and chair of NSBA’s Council of Urban Boards of Education, in an email to NSBA leadership last month.

It “has caused further devastation to the already dangerously fragile financial position of NSBA in the loss of revenue in the millions” and “abated coordinated, national efforts around issues of educational equity,” Gallon wrote.

Translated from Left-wing bureaucratese, the mass exodos from the group has holed a teachers union–funded advocacy group below the waterline and has stalled a national push for critical race theory and similar left-wing ideologies. (Using “equity,” as opposed to “equality” or “equal opportunity,” is a tell that the speaker is influenced by or espousing critical race theory.)

To Kill an Admiral

That takes one back to the famous line from Candide, in which the horrified Voltaire satirizes the execution of the British Admiral John Byng for “failure to do his utmost” at the Battle of Minorca in the Seven Years’ War. While it cannot be proven that Byng was shot as a warning to his colleagues as Voltaire’s character suggests, if that were King George II’s goal in denying the clemency Byng’s court-martial recommended, one would find it hard to deny that the strategy worked. The British prevailed in the Seven Years’ War, and the Royal Navy, with the fortunate interlude of the American War of Independence, would rule the waves until the middle of the Second World War in no small thanks to the aggression and ruthlessness it inculcated in commanders like Lord Horatio Nelson.

Whether or not the king and Royal Navy brass meant to send Voltaire’s message, it was received. (Historians, who largely believe Byng was unjustly punished, have speculated that political pressures from the king, disputes between the king and prime minister, and public dismay with the war’s progress drove the decision.)

And there is a lesson here for those who see the threat of “woke” politicization in institutions. One must kill the occasional admiral—in this case, defund the National School Boards Association enough to cripple it—to encourage the others.

Making an Example

The Left learned this lesson long ago. Saul Alinsky’s Rule 13 (“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”) operates on the pour encourager les autres principle. In short, unless the target wants the Alinsky playbook run against it, it must concede; many do.

What the National School Boards Association fracas shows that others, not just the Left, can wield this weapon. When the conservative movement mobilized in force, it ran Rule 13 on the National School Boards Association and exploited the weaknesses already within the institution. Those who want to resist institutional capture must learn how to exploit the power of pain. Crippling NSBA’s advocacy should be only the beginning.

Michael Watson

Michael is Research Director for Capital Research Center and serves as the managing editor for InfluenceWatch.

Progressive Crime Centers

 Progressive Crime Centers

How America’s progressive citadels became crime centers

Joel Kotkin, Unherd 

Left-wing policies have been a disaster in the US's most liberal cities

We usually associate violent crime and disorder with America’s impoverished inner cities — places like New Orleans, the south and west sides of Chicago, or long distressed counties like the Bronx. But today the centre of American crime is increasingly to be found on the West Coast, within some of the country’s wealthiest and most celebrated cities.

The explanation is new, too: instead of the traditional link between poverty and crime, this crime wave has more to do with policy. Virtually all the cities with the most notable crime outbreaks — San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles — are places with progressive prosecutors working to limit punishments for looters, organised thieves and the unruly, occasionally violent, homeless. The cities, with the exception of Los Angeles, are also among the whitest in the U.S., with a large population of educated people.

The lax legal environment has made west coast cities the happy hunting ground for “smash and grab” thieves on a hitherto unprecedented scale. These cities have also seen rapid growth in violent crime, which is never far behind disorder on the streets. Once these places, notably Portland, were seen as urban exemplars, but few would choose a city whose downtown has collapsed under months of pressure from radical demonstrators and suffers from record homicides.

California’s deliberate reduction in the punishment for minor property damage under $1000 has been linked to a spike in shoplifting, particularly in San Francisco. Mike Shellenberger, author of the recently published San Fransicko, suggests criminals and the homeless go to cities where they face the least chance of prosecution; the homeless tend to migrate where they are free to camp and avoid prosecution for property crimes. They are even given hotel rooms as well as free drugs and alcohol.

California is one of just a handful of states to see dramatic increases in its homeless population. According to Shellenberger, between 2015-2020, San Francisco’s homeless grew by 32%, despite tripling its funds to address homelessness. In contrast to the rest of America, California is one of just a handful of states to see dramatic increases in its homeless population.

Los Angeles, too, has taken an increasingly violent turn. Just this week, 81-year-old philanthropist Jacqueline Avant was shot dead during a burglary of her Beverley Hills home.

The images of destitution in the city are displacing the glamour of Hollywood. In parts of Los Angeles, the growing homeless encampments have spawned medieval diseases such as typhus. Companies, particularly outside tech and entertainment, are beginning to move out of LA and the other blue cities in unprecedented numbers as outmigration soars.

Many progressives understandably don’t want to admit this reality. The omni-present Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez simply denies the facts of the recent “smash and grab” incidents in various cities across the country. San Francisco’s mainstream media and political elite have tried to downplay such incidents to the outrage of many residents by ascribing political motives to the Right. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle seems more worried about the impact on the city’s image than the dire reality on the street.

Now Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s ultra-woke District Attorney, is facing a recall from enraged citizens. Another effort, this one against the equally woke LA district attorney George Gascon, has floundered but is being renewed. In increasingly crime-ridden Seattle, the hard Left DA, a police “abolitionist,” was soundly beaten by a moderate Democrat turned Republican. Even in Portland, voters chose to avoid further radicalisation and defeated a Mayoral candidate who identified with the Leftist Antifa progressive militia.

The crime surge in these deeply blue cities may also have impact nationally as well. These are key bastions of the progressive Left, and their continued distress makes a powerful political point for Republicans hunting for votes in suburbs, exurbs, and smaller towns. When it comes to election season, tolerance of crime doesn’t pay.

Hillary Clinton’s Foundation Collapsed

Influence Peddling... sounds familiar!

Hillary Clinton’s Foundation Collapsed

Why Absolutely No One Is Surprised Hillary Clinton’s Influence-Peddling Foundation Collapsed

Tom Fitton, Daily Caller

When one of the most recognizable nonprofits in the world loses 75% of its contributions over a four-year period, there are typically investigatory reports written into what has gone wrong. That isn’t the case with the Clinton Foundation. The Foundation received $62.9 million in 2016 but only $16.3 million in 2020, and very few people seem to have noticed.

That is because most Beltway insiders know the Clinton Foundation’s primary purpose: to serve as a platform for Hillary Clinton’s political operation while lining the Clintons’ pockets by trading influence for money. That is why donations spiked when Hillary was secretary of state and most of the world thought she was destined to become president — and why they cratered after she lost.

Kevin Thurm, the CEO of the Clinton Foundation, tried to play off the 2020 decline off as pandemic-related. In a letter, he wrote that 2020 “was a difficult year for philanthropy. Across the sector, resources were stretched thinly and fundraising activities were impacted.” This argument doesn’t explain the tens of millions the Foundation lost between 2016 and 2019 and ignores that charitable giving was up by 5.1% in America last year.

Of course, an objective observer easily understands the real reason the Clinton Foundation experienced such a sharp decline in contributions since 2016. The Foundation is an influence-peddling scheme, and the Clintons’ influence has waned. Even Obama understood the scheme. When President Obama nominated Hillary Clinton in 2009 to serve as secretary of state, she agreed to a strict memorandum of understanding to wall off the Foundation from conflicts of interest with the State Department. As Judicial Watch uncovered, the Clinton team immediately violated this agreement by using the Clinton State Department to help Clinton Foundation donors.

The Clintons also agreed that the State Department would approve Bill Clinton’s speeches. Judicial Watch investigations (in partnership with the Daily Caller) uncovered that this agreement translated into the Clinton State Department rubber-stamping virtually all of Bill Clinton’s 215 speeches, which raked in $48 million in speaking fees while his wife was secretary of state. These speeches included government-controlled entities in China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. State Department memos approving his speeches were routinely sent to Cheryl Mills, who was Hillary Clinton’s senior counsel and chief of staff – and a former Foundation board member!

The former president blurred ethical lines, routinely mixing diplomacy and Clinton Foundation fundraising. He praised Colombian president Manuel Santos’s efforts to reach out to terrorist group FARC shortly after playing golf with the president as part of a fundraising effort. In another email exchange, a Clinton Foundation official briefed the State Department on Clinton’s trip to Myanmar and his efforts to promote the Clinton Foundation.

If this wasn’t sleazy enough, emails reveal that the Clinton Foundation was influencing State Department decisions. Records show that Huma Abedin, Secretary Clinton’s close friend and State Department official, often served as a conduit between Secretary Clinton and top donors. In one case, Clinton declined to meet with Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain, but after Doug Band from the Clinton Foundation emailed Abedin, the Crown Prince ended up on Clinton’s schedule. Band also attempted to get a visa for an English soccer player with a criminal charge because Casey Wasserman, a major Foundation donor, wanted the visa approved. Similarly, Band pushed Foggy Bottom to help Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury, because Chagoury, who had donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, was “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us.”

In another instance, Band pushed Abedin to make a particular hire, arguing that it was “important to take care of [Redacted].” Abedin assured Band that “Personnel has been sending him options.” This revelation of an outside donor pushing for a political appointment through a nonprofit might seem shocking, but the Justice Department had little interest in this influence peddling scheme.

Maybe the most egregious instance of Clinton corruption is the Uranium One deal. Bill Clinton reportedly helped his billionaire pal Frank Giustra acquire uranium mining rights from the Kazakhstani dictator in the mid-2000s. Giustra then gave tens of millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009, when it appeared the Kazakhstani government might seize the uranium, Secretary Clinton helped approve a deal that allowed a Russian state-owned company to take over part of the company, even though she had previously opposed foreign companies controlling vital U.S. resources. Unsurprisingly, those involved in this deal donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, which tried to hide the donations.

The collapse of the Clinton Foundation might shock outsiders, but it is no surprise to those who have watched the Clintons’ machinations for years. The Foundation existed as a way for the Clintons to peddle their connections and power in exchange for money. When it became clear they’d never hold power again, donors predictably turned off the cash spigot.

But the grift game never stops, as the Obama Foundation is now on the scene. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos just gave the Obama Foundation a $100 million gift. As the Clinton money machine declines, the Obama machine rises!

Tom Fitton is president of Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog.

Third Worldizing America

 

California Dreaming....

Third Worldizing America

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents were stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a "3rd-world s-hole of a city."

The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.

Rogen claimed that a car's contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times, but thought little of it.

Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder — the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.

Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.

After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.

Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted.

In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.

Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America's new criminality.

One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the merchandise without worry of arrest.

Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system. So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the riotous destruction of property during the summer of 2020: "Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence."

Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.

There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church.

And there was also a frightening riot on January 6, when a mob entered Washington D.C.'s Capitol and damaged federal property. Of those arrested during the violence, many have been held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation.

Some of those arrested are still — 10 months later — awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.

In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.

A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification — after demonizing their targets as "treasonous," "domestic terrorists," "white supremacists," or "racists."

In the Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation, and water are characteristically unreliable: in other words, much like a frequent California brownout.

I've been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination. The plane was required either to turn around or land somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.

One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.

But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.

In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas. But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages, often a few blocks from tony Atherton.

On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.

Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.

But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring — and navigating around — the misery of others in their midst.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Oh Bernie....

 

Bernie, Bernie, Bernie...

Taking a Big Stick to Big Tech

 Taking a Big Stick to Big Tech

Big Tech's suppression and manipulation of news undermine an informed citizenry.

Jean M. Yarbrough, Claremont Review of Books

Although the title of senator Josh Hawley’s (R., Missouri) new book gives no hint of this, The Tyranny of Big Tech packs three stories into one slim volume. First, briefly sketched, is the ugly backstory. Following President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat, Hawley announced he would challenge the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes on January 6, the day Congress was to meet to ratify the results. But after demonstrators rioted in the Capitol, Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled his contract—according to the New York Times, because Hawley was illegally attempting to overthrow the election results. Not long after, the conservative Regnery Publishing announced it would bring out Hawley’s book. News of the cancellation did nothing to harm sales, and The Tyranny of Big Tech rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists when it appeared earlier this year.

The second and main story details the various ways in which Big Tech harms America. It steals our private data, surveils our every move, addicts our children, and suppresses dissenting opinions, all of which endanger the bedrock principle of our republic: the capacity of citizens to govern themselves. Hawley’s own experience bears this out. For a time, Amazon made it difficult to purchase his book, a tactic marginally better than simply refusing to sell the book, as Amazon had done with other authors. And it is not only Amazon. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all suppressed information that does not align with their politics; they continue to do so with the encouragement of the Biden Administration. This underscores the urgency of Hawley’s warning about the dangers of Big Tech. Though it won’t come as news to anyone who is even half-paying attention, it is good to have these charges spelled out in one place, along with suggestions about what we as citizens, as well as our government, can do about them.

Finally, and regrettably, there is Hawley’s attempt to place the tyranny of Big Tech in historical context, arguing that Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, along with their affiliates Instagram, YouTube, and others, are heirs of the 19th-century robber barons. In his opening chapters, and sprinkled throughout the book, Hawley casts these tech giants as the foes of a republican political tradition stretching back to Rome and to the letters of Saint Paul, and realized most fully by the American Founders, whose last great champion was—Theodore Roosevelt! Hawley, who wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at Stanford on Roosevelt (published as Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness while Hawley was clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts; see my review “Progressive Conservative?,” CRB, Fall 2008), insists that T.R. stood for a kind of republican politics that “we might call to our aid in the modern fight against monopoly.” In Hawley’s telling, Roosevelt exemplified the founders’ distrust “of concentration, of bigness” (emphasis in the original). His antitrust policies, Hawley believes, were “distinctly populist and republican.”

* * *

In thinking about Hawley’s claim, a well-known line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance comes to mind: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So, too, with T.R. His face is etched in heroic proportions on Mount Rushmore; Americans to this day know more about the legend of “Teddy” (a name he never used) than they do the actual man.

Hawley could be given a pass for not knowing much about American political thought, or political philosophy more generally when he published his first book. He was, after all, a history major, and many of our leading American historians in the last decades of the 20th century were in thrall to “classical republicanism” as a way of understanding the founding. Much like the young T.R., Hawley was a well-educated political star with a bright future before him. But 15 years later, there is no excuse for repeating these discarded theories. Hawley is to be commended for his efforts to rein in Big Tech, but he is mistaken in his discussion of the founders’ republicanism and wrong to suggest that Theodore Roosevelt can provide a useful model for how to deal with the tyranny Americans currently face.

Hawley grounds his overview of the founders’ republicanism in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson and, to a lesser extent, James Madison. He is especially drawn to Jefferson’s paeon to the yeoman farmer. Hawley extends it to the common man generally—which may be good politics but is bad history. Jefferson was committed to agrarian life because he thought it promoted the independence necessary for republican self-government. Those who labored for others could be too easily bossed around; only the man who derived a living from his own land could be truly independent. Factory workers and day laborers—especially city-dwellers—are also “common men,” but they were not what Jefferson envisioned for republican America. Hawley’s description more accurately applies to Jacksonian Democrats. For obvious reasons, the Republican senator does not want to go there.

Hawley is not only mistaken about American history, he seems unfamiliar with how the “classical republicans” analyzed regimes. He repeatedly assails “aristocracy,” at one point calling it “unnatural” without explaining why. (One surmises it has something to do with his understanding of Saint Paul, who proclaimed the dignity of all human beings in the eyes of God, though the political implications for the apostle were nil.) Yet both Greeks and Romans distinguished between aristocracy—the rule of the wise and virtuous for the common advantage—and its corrupt form, oligarchy—the rule of the few wealthy for their own selfish good. By contrast, Hawley uses these terms interchangeably, often describing Tech barons as “aristocrats,” which they clearly are not. This gets especially awkward when we consider the founders Hawley most admires. How can Hawley rail against aristocracy when Jefferson insisted that “natural aristocracy” is the best form of government?

As for Madison, Hawley briefly notes his discussion of faction but glides over his confident assurance that minority faction presents no real danger in a democratic republic. Yet this is precisely the threat posed by Big Tech. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are a decided minority faction that deploys their enormous power (technological, financial, and political) for their own selfish ends, endangering both individual rights and the public good. They are oligarchs, pure and simple.

* * *

More to the point, Jeffersonian republicanism has nothing to do with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt belonged to that small group of educated postbellum Americans who admired Alexander Hamilton—whom Hawley mentions only once. As Roosevelt himself put it, he “cordially despised” Jefferson, mostly for the latter’s opposition to the energetic government, especially on matters of national defense, but also because of his hypocrisy on slavery. Roosevelt’s founding heroes were George Washington, Hamilton, and John Marshall, all of whom opposed the Jeffersonian Democrats. Yet, somehow, Hawley finds in Jefferson’s opposition to concentration and bigness the germs of Roosevelt’s antitrust policies.

There are several problems with this. First, Hawley lumps Roosevelt in with earlier populist discontent against the railroads. Chronology aside, early on Roosevelt can best be described as a Republican reformer, who battled the corrupt machine in New York politics. He was never a populist, though it is easy to see why Hawley uses this term rather than locate Roosevelt within the progressive movement in which he later played a leading role. Second, pace Hawley, Roosevelt was not, like Jefferson, an opponent of “bigness” per se. Although Hawley concedes that Roosevelt accepted the growth of large corporations as a natural stage of economic development, he does so with misgivings because he rightly understands that this implies the need for an expanded regulatory regime. Third, Hawley plays on Roosevelt’s popular reputation as a trust-buster, but this, too, is more the stuff of legend than fact. Although as president Roosevelt initiated a few high-profile antitrust suits, he came to have serious reservations about breaking up these large combinations. Antitrust litigation took years to work its way through the courts, and its outcome depended upon how the justices understood the meaning of the Sherman Antitrust Act (see Daniel Oliver’s “From Big Tech to Big Brother,” CRB, Spring 2021).

Accordingly, after his landslide re-election in 1904, T.R. focused instead on regulating these behemoths, pressing Congress to expand the powers of his Bureau of Corporations. This would shift power away from the courts and back to the executive branch, where Roosevelt could exercise greater control. Only after Roosevelt’s departure from the White House were antitrust suits revived as the weapon of choice to combat powerful combinations. William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, initiated more antitrust suits in his one term than Roosevelt did in his nearly two. Come to think of it, Taft, who would later go on to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, offers a better model for Hawley than the flashy T.R.

* * *

Hawley’s account of regulations and “corporate liberalism” more generally relies heavily on the work of the late economic historian Martin J. Sklar, a principled man of the Left. In The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988), Sklar considers the various policies proposed by Roosevelt, Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to rein in the trusts. He analyzes the legislation Roosevelt backed in the waning days of his administration (but failed to get enacted) that would have significantly strengthened the regulatory regime. Had Roosevelt’s proposals succeeded, Sklar maintains that the Bureau of Corporations would have become “a vast centralized planning and administering agency” that would have paved the way for “state-directed corporate capitalism.” In his view, Roosevelt’s proposals were more top-down and statist than those of Wilson and Taft, a telling point Hawley fails to mention. At most, Hawley concedes that some of Roosevelt’s later proposals, such as the federal power to set prices and issue stocks, were “perhaps more dubious.” This is surprisingly mild for a sitting Republican senator, who rightly fears the expanded reach of the federal government. Indeed, Sklar himself concludes that Wilson’s proposals triumphed precisely because they were more aligned with an anti-statist—that is, Jeffersonian—American political culture.

To be fair, Hawley is more interested in Sklar’s discussion of how the rise of corporate capitalism transformed the American understanding of liberty. According to the older republican tradition, liberty meant independence and the right to self-government. Hawley has a point, but he goes too far, attributing to ordinary citizens a greater role in the formation of national policies than the framers intended. It was Madison, after all, who insisted in The Federalist that the principal difference between ancient republics and America lies in “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity from any share” in governing the latter (emphasis in the original). The people do participate at the local level, and they continue to deliberate about national policies, but mostly in their choice of representatives who give voice to their opinions and safeguard their interests. With the coming of the new corporate order, however, liberty was privatized; it came to mean the right of self-development and individuality. The older public dimension of liberty was consigned to a bygone age. “Control of the common man over his government,” argues Hawley, was replaced by the rule of unelected experts, who would determine public policy for the good of the ordinary citizen. In his account, this new corporate liberal order—the administrative state—is essentially the Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s doing, allowing Hawley to conclude by asking whether this new “aristocratic” regime is worth preserving.

* * *

Hawley is wrong, however, to lay the blame for “corporate liberalism” solely at Wilson’s feet. In 1909, Herbert Croly—a Republican—published The Promise of American Life, which surveyed the American political tradition from a Progressive perspective. Although Croly found both Jefferson and Hamilton wanting, he criticized the former’s influence as by far the more pernicious. Jefferson’s vaunted principle of equality encouraged mediocrity; the right of the common man to govern himself boiled down to promoting the “barren and insipid” aims of average individuals, without regard for the national good. Americans had moved beyond the time of the rural farmer as a jack-of-all-trades; the day of the specialist had arrived. What was needed were experts who would use their scientific knowledge to elevate and improve the material and spiritual lives of Americans. Croly’s book ends with a sketch of a new industrial policy for the country, one that would “transform” human nature by encouraging Americans to shed their selfish individualism for a new and higher form of individuality. Theodore Roosevelt loved the book and wrote to Croly to tell him he would incorporate its ideas in upcoming speeches.

Roosevelt was true to his word. In his “New Nationalism” speech delivered a month later (August 1910), the former president argued it was no longer enough for wealth to be amassed honestly. Now, it must be shown to “benefit” the nation. Hawley cites this remark approvingly, without considering what Roosevelt had in mind. T.R. did not mean philanthropy, such as endowing private charitable organizations, or the establishment of cultural, educational, and scientific institutions. Nor did he mean improvements in the standard of living, lower prices for the consumer, greater efficiencies, or protection of small businesses, all of which have been invoked in support of antitrust suits. No, benefit meant primarily wealth redistribution, with the government deciding how much was too much and how much was too little. Roosevelt candidly admitted this would mean “a policy of far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had,” but he trusted that idealistic experts would set the tone for the moral and spiritual crusade he sought. To that end, Roosevelt (like Croly) looked forward to a time when businessmen would free themselves from “the taint of selfishness” and work disinterestedly for the good of the whole. Finally, like Croly, T.R. did not reject socialism. Indeed, while still in the White House, he made clear that there was much about socialism he admired. In his mind, socialism was merely an advanced form of liberalism. Croly’s book reinforced that view.

* * *

Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech was just his opening salvo. At the beginning of 1911, the ex-president was cautiously endorsing Western progressives’ calls for direct democracy by means of the initiative, referendum, and recall. By the end of the year, he was fully on board with these reforms. In this sense, Hawley is correct that Roosevelt wanted to return power to the common man—but T.R. did so in the belief that ordinary citizens agreed with him that the constitutional design of the framers no longer served their needs. Direct democracy would provide citizens with the tools to override elected officials and advance the Progressive agenda.

From there, Roosevelt moved on to the judiciary. Announcing his candidacy against Taft in the sitting president’s home state, Roosevelt levied his most public criticism of the courts to date. His speech before the Ohio Constitutional Convention early in 1912 urged Ohioans to include a provision for the recall of “outworn” judicial decisions and possibly even of judges themselves. Although Roosevelt insisted that these reforms were only intended to apply to the states, his private correspondence suggested that the federal judiciary was also in his sights for standing in the way of the regulatory state. This was too much for Roosevelt’s staunchest allies, Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, who saw this attack as a threat to the constitutionalism of the framers and refused to support his presidential bid.

Roosevelt’s leftward lurch, begun during his second term as president and accelerating after he left the White House, is reason enough for Republicans to steer clear of him as a useful model for our present-day problems. But if more proof were necessary, it is worth remembering that the last great champion of a Roosevelt revival on the Republican side was John McCain, led by his cheerleaders William Kristol and David Brooks. How did that work out for the republic, or even for the Republican Party?

* * *

Leaving aside this misguided attempt to hitch our current political situation to the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt, Hawley’s book proceeds in its second half to lay out the very real dangers posed by Big Tech and sketches what both citizens and government can do. Big Tech clings to a misguided, almost childlike belief in an open, connected global community. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, Facebook was conceived as a social mission to transform society by reaching beyond local associations and even national boundaries. Of course, it is also a business that seeks to penetrate markets worldwide. What it sells is personal information, some of it supplied freely by individuals who want to link up with friends and acquaintances with common interests, but much of it extracted without their knowledge or consent. Users of social media seldom read the fine print or understand what they are allowing when they “agree” to the terms of service.

Even more ominous, Big Tech deceives its users about how much personal information it is acquiring and selling to advertisers. The key to Big Tech’s profitability is its proprietary algorithms, which enable businesses to target potential customers based upon Big Tech’s surveillance of their every online movement. If, say, an individual searches on the web for information about a subject, clicks on an ad for a product, reads an online news source, asks Siri or Alexa to find something, or even privately messages someone, that information is captured, sorted, and sold. That’s why ads pop up on our screens that seem to read our minds. In some sense, they have. This goes way beyond psychological manipulation, which the advertising business has long been engaged in, because it is targeted to our individual and private (or so we thought) search histories. And the more these ads appeal to our unique interests and wishes, the more time we spend online, clicking on ads or stories (which in turn leads to more clicks and more ads). It’s addictive, and that’s the point—to get us to spend as much time as possible glued to our “devices” in the hopes that we’ll buy something we didn’t know we wanted.

* * *

It comes as no surprise that spending large chunks of the day online is not good for our mental and civic health. Our powers of concentration decline, our social skills deteriorate. We’re not summoned to make rational arguments or try to persuade. All we have to do is click “like,” or choose from an ever-expanding world of skin-toned emojis, many designed to express anger. Outrage rules. As bad as this is for adults, it is even worse for children, especially vulnerable adolescent girls. The COVID crisis, which forced most students into remote learning for more than a year, exacerbated these problems. During the last year, cases of teenage anomie and depression skyrocketed. Parents, naturally, are the first line of defense against such abuses, but too many parents are themselves glued to their devices. (The one bright spot in this year-long experiment in “virtual” learning is that parents got to see what their children were studying and began to organize against it.) Hawley proposes raising the age that a child can open a social media account from 13 to 16. That’s a good idea, but it won’t by itself prevent older teens from becoming addicted to the internet.

Big Tech’s efforts to penetrate international markets, especially in China, have also come with serious downsides. Far from creating an open, connected, global community, Silicon Valley has helped shore up China’s oppressive regime. To mention two of the most egregious examples, Google created a new search engine that enabled the Chinese Communist Party to watch its people and suppress the free flow of information more effectively (it was discontinued after public outcry), and Apple has moved parts of its production chain to China and turned a blind eye to allegations of slave labor.

As dangerous as these developments are, the greatest threat Americans face from Big Tech is the suppression and manipulation of news that is essential to an informed citizenry. One of Hawley’s longest and best chapters is devoted to the problem of censorship. Hawley deserves credit for compelling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Senate testimony to admit that its “moderation teams”—some of which include Chinese nationals—inordinately target conservative and right-leaning groups. The liberal psychologist Robert Epstein has testified to the power of Facebook to tilt elections in favor of Democrats. Although the number of votes Facebook can shift is open to debate, it seems likely that its one-sided maneuvers have some effect. (After all, the whole point of its surveillance is manipulation of our behavior.)

Nor is this all. In the month before the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook refused to allow news of Hunter Biden’s laptop (with information harmful to the Biden campaign) to be retweeted, posted, or even messaged privately. And after the election, Twitter brazenly shut down the president of the United States, while Apple removed start-up social networking service Parler from its app store, effectively shutting it down and preventing conservative challenges to the liberal narrative from being transmitted over the internet.

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One would think Republicans would be outraged—but that would be naïve. Some Republicans object to interfering with Big Tech on libertarian grounds. Others take campaign contributions from them or give in to the pressure of lobbyists, think tanks, and academics, many of whom are lavishly funded by the wealthiest interests on the planet. How then can the tyranny of Big Tech be overthrown? First, Hawley notes, we must explode the myth that Big Tech achieved its dominance through the free market. Big Tech benefitted massively from special privileges awarded to it by government. For years, Amazon avoided collecting state sales taxes if a merchant had no brick-and-mortar stores in that state. It also enjoyed subsidized shipping rates, compliments of the U.S. Postal Service. Hawley suggests something like an internet Glass-Steagall Act (which erected a wall between investment and commercial banking) to force Big Tech to choose between being either consumer-facing digital platforms or producers of goods and services—not both, as they currently are.

Most of all, the Tech monopolies enjoy the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Under this provision, they are granted immunities from lawsuits afforded to no other publishers of news. Although Congress originally intended to protect the social media sites from penalties for their users’ posting of obscenity and the like, court decisions gradually allowed them to expand their “content moderation” of news without fear of being sued or paying any price at all for their blatant partisanship. This is where we are today—and with Democrats benefitting from this arrangement it is not going to be overturned until Republicans are back in power. Hawley’s proposed legislation—which would remove Section 230 immunity unless companies submit to an external audit to prove their political neutrality—is a useful start, but right now it’s dead on arrival.

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Still, as soon as feasible, the Big Tech monopolies must be broken up. Before that can be done, Congress must revisit its antitrust policy, since it is unlikely to accomplish much with the law as it currently stands and is interpreted. Under the old dispensation, monopolies need not be broken up if they provide a benefit to the public, understood as lower prices for the consumer and greater efficiencies. But as both Hawley and Daniel Oliver—the former head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—argue, these monopolies cause harm in other ways, both to the individual and to the public. Lower prices, greater efficiencies, and ease of use do not outweigh the manipulative, addictive, and highly partisan sins of Big Tech.

What’s more, enforcement of antitrust policy is currently divided between the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FTC, with the FTC taking the lead. Hawley argues that the DoJ should be in charge because the FTC has often had too cozy a relationship with Big Tech and because the DoJ is—at least in theory—accountable to the people. But is that true? Although the attorney general and other top officials are politically appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, recent experience has made all too clear that permanent civil service appointees can obstruct and impede the policies of the administration, especially if a Republican is in office. It is no secret that the permanent bureaucracy skews heavily Democratic.

Some of the harms Hawley discusses could be remedied by relatively straightforward fixes, which Big Tech can nevertheless be counted on to oppose. For example, Congress could require tech giants to offer customers a “do not track” option and make them live up to these new, more stringent terms of service. And customers could be empowered to sue tech companies themselves, instead of depending on the government to do it. Hawley’s brief discussion of the monetary fines for such infractions, however, considers penalties that are a drop in the ocean as far as Big Tech goes. They could be much higher.

Still, the gravest problem Big Tech poses is the suppression and manipulation of news stories and views it doesn’t like. In a free society, citizens must have access to a wide range of political opinions. The last election made plain that the tech monopolies acted in concert to shut down news that threatened their desired outcome, putting a lid on legitimate debate both before and after November 3. This is the problem we need to solve.

Senator Hawley deserves to be commended for his courage and for grappling with the threat Big Tech poses to America. Rather than trying to resurrect the fighting spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, however—whose top-down statist policies are no help to Republicans today—he would benefit from a closer look at the antitrust policies of William Howard Taft. Up to a point, Jefferson and Madison can also serve as useful allies, especially in defending the free flow of ideas so vital to republican self-government. But Hawley should also consider the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, who showed how government might judiciously intervene in markets to advance the genuinely liberal goals of a prosperous and free America.

Jean M. Yarbrough is a professor of government and Gary M. Pendy, Sr., Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College.