RUTHFULLY YOURS

Friday night, during her last show on Fox News, Megyn Kelly asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra whether he accepted the conclusion by 17 intelligence agencies in a recently released declassified report that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that this interference came at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hoekstra gave an answer Kelly did not anticipate. He noted that the declassified report represents the views of only three intelligence agencies, not seventeen. Hoekstra also questioned why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did not co-author or clear the report and why it lacked dissenting views.

The declassified report issued on January 6 is an abridged version of a longer report ordered by President Obama that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to undermine the 2016 president election, hurt Hillary’s candidacy and promote Donald Trump through cyber warfare, social media and the state-owned Russia cable channel RT. Although the report’s authors said they have high confidence in most of these conclusions, they were unable to include any evidence for classification reasons.

As someone who worked in the intelligence field for 25 years, I share Congressman Hoekstra’s concerns about Friday’s declassified Russia report and a similar Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and DHS on October 7, 2016.

I also suspect the entire purpose of this report and its timing was to provide President Obama with a supposedly objective intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that the president could release before he left office to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election.

I am concerned both intelligence assessments were rigged for political purposes.

You may remember when Hillary Clinton claimed during the final presidential debate on October 19 that based on the October 7 ODNI/DHS statement, all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had determined the WikiLeaks disclosures of Democratic emails were an effort by Russia to interfere with the election.

Clinton’s remark was not accurate. Although the October memo said “the U.S. Intelligence Community” was confident that the Russian government was behind the alleged hacking, the October memo was drafted by only two intelligence organizations – ODNI and DHS.

Since it came out only a month before the presidential election and was co-authored by only two intelligence agencies, the October memo looked like a clumsy attempt by the Obama White House to produce a document to boost Clinton’s reelection chances. Its argumentation was very weak since it said the alleged hacking of Democratic emails was “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts” but did not say there was any evidence of Russian involvement.

Fighting Islamophobia is trendy. But it also often becomes a means of enabling and expressing hatred toward others. Especially Jews. It doesn’t take much digging into campaigns against Islamophobia to find the anti-Semitism lurking underneath the bright lights and polished logos.

The Ford Foundation, which in its time had played a key role in the anti-Semitic Durban hatefest, hosted a forum titled, “Confronting Islamophobia in America Today.” Participants included Linda Sarsour, who had promoted the anti-Semitic Muslim practice of throwing rocks at Jews and appeared at a rally for a pro-Hezbollah organization, along with Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, who had defended Ahmadinejad’s call for destroying Israel and described such a proposed atrocity as a sentiment born of “legitimate anger.”

Why was the Ford Foundation privileging the persecution fantasies of Islamist bigots who believe that plotting the genocide of millions of Jews is somehow rooted in “legitimate anger”?

The loudest voices inveighing against Islamophobia often justify Islamic terrorism, explicitly or implicitly, even while they whine that being associated with Islamic terrorism is a form of Islamophobia. Indeed the campaign against Islamophobia has, among its agendas, the legitimization of Islamic terrorism.

If Islamic terrorism, and its underlying supremacist hatred of Jews, can’t be discussed, then it also can’t be condemned. And, in a perverse twist, Islamic terrorists then become the victims of Islamophobia.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has been fundraising aggressively for its “Islamophobia Project”. The FCIR is the work of Trevor Aaronson who had attempted to dismiss anti-Semitic Muslim terror plots against synagogues as an FBI conspiracy.

The FCIR’s Islamophobia Project is run by Trevor and Roqayah Chamseddine.

President Obama once said that as President he aspired to be the progressive Ronald Reagan, and as he prepares to leave office he has succeeded in fundamental if ironic ways.

While Reagan left behind a calmer, more optimistic country, Mr. Obama leaves a more divided and rancorous one. While the Gipper helped elect a successor to extend his legacy, Mr. Obama will be succeeded by a man who campaigned to repudiate the President’s agenda. Barack Obama has been a historic President but perhaps not a consequential one.
***

Mr. Obama was always going to be a historic President by dint of his election as the first African-American to hold the office. His victory affirmed the American ideal that anyone can aspire and win political power. This affirmation was all the better because Mr. Obama won in large part thanks to his cool temperament amid the financial crisis and his considerable personal talents.

Yet his Presidency has been a disappointment at home and abroad, a fact ironically underscored by Mr. Obama’s relentless insistence that he has been a success. In his many farewell interviews, he has laid out what he regards as his main achievements: reviving the economy after the Great Recession, a giant step toward national health care, new domestic regulations and a global pact to combat climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and a world where America is merely one nation among many others in settling global disputes rather than promoting its democratic values.

Even on their own terms those achievements look evanescent. Congress has teed up ObamaCare for repeal, and Donald Trump will erase the climate rules. The global climate pact is built on promises without enforcement, and Mr. Trump ran against and won in part on the slow economic recovery. Authoritarians are on the march around the world as they haven’t been since the 1970s, and perhaps the 1930s.

Driving back from New Orleans today, I caught the beginning of the Weekend All Things Considered’s newscast. Host Michel Martin said that the show was going to devote the entire program to “violence, especially gun violence.” The first story of the broadcast was a three-minute piece in which Martin interviewed Chicago-based NPR correspondent Cheryl Corley about the horrific racist attack on the mentally disabled young white man, who was kidnapped and tortured in racially abusive terms by four young black people, who broadcast the attack on Facebook. Here’s a link to the story:

“Is something different now? Is there a sense in Chicago that there is something unique happening?” Martin asked Corley, about the city’s violence. They quickly got into the Facebook attack, which Martin introduced with this line:

“Just this week, four young adults were charged with attacking an acquaintance in a vicious beating that they livestreamed on social media.”

She also described it like this, in a question to Corley:

“Four young adults allegedly abducted an acquaintance of theirs, abused him terribly, and broadcast this on Facebook live, what are people saying about this?”

Incredibly, in talking about it, including an update from the bond hearing, Corley not once mentioned the fact that anti-white hate, and anti-Trump hate, was a key part of the crime — so much so that the state has filed hate crime charges against the four. The only thing Corley said about race was that the four defendants are “all African-Americans” — leaving aside the fact that the victim was white, and that both race and politics were central to the torture and abuse. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on the bond hearing:

“The victim is tied up then gagged. A sock is placed in the victim’s mouth and then his mouth is taped shut. The victim is forced back in to a corner,” [Assistant State’s Attorney Erin] Antonietti said. “One of the male defendants in the background can be hear yelling “F— Donald Trump” and “f— white people.” Hill uses a knife to slice off a chunk of the victim’s hair, cutting his head, then slicing at the sleeves of the victim’s sweatshirt as the man stares, terrified, at Hill, as laughing is heard from behind the camera.

“A male voice is heard saying ‘I don’t give a f— if he’s schizophrenic,’” Antonietti said. “A male shoves the victim’s face into a toilet bowl and the victim is told to drink toilet water.”

At some point during the ordeal, Antonietti said, Hill demanded $300 from the victim’s mother for the victim’s safe return.

To be fair, in its report Friday on the bond hearing, NPR was upfront about the race-hate aspect of the crime. It was bizarre to listen to today’s report, though, and to see the race-hate angle not even mentioned in passing. It’s as if they wanted only to talk about violence outside of the racial and political context, which is simply impossible in this particular case.

Steve Sailer notes the shocking/not-shocking case of The New York Times, whose editors have found a way to frame the crime not as anti-white or anti-Trump, but an example of bigotry against the disabled. I could not bring myself to watch more than a few minutes of the video, but I am not aware that the alleged captors and torturers made mockery of the man’s schizophrenia part of their attack. The Times could have done a story on the phenomenon of violent attacks on Trump supporters — something that happened again and again during the campaign season. That would have been an obvious angle. Or the matter of black anti-white racism, which also exists. But no. Says Sailer, sardonically:

So, you have your marching orders, right? The video of blacks abusing a white kid has nothing to do with virulent prejudice against whites or Trump, it has to do with Society’s prejudice against the intellectually disabled minority.

Do you understand your mission?

As you know, it is a priori impossible for Victim-Americans to abuse American-Americans. So, the victim must have been a Victim-American.

Again, to be fair, the Times‘s report Thursday highlighted the racial and political angle. The Times today ran an AP story saying that anti-white hate crimes are a smaller percentage of overall hate crimes than anti-black hate crimes. Which I accept as true, but I am not aware that after alleged anti-black hate crimes, or even police shootings involving black victims, that the national media make a point of publishing stories downplaying the crime by pointing out their relative rarity among all violent crimes.

You expect lefty crackpot sites like Salon.com to come up with a ridiculous spin like this (that the Chicago crime was really about abuse against the disabled), but the Times?

(That’s a joke.)

Earlier today in New Orleans, I had been having lunch with some friends, both liberals and conservatives. The issue of how so many Americans now don’t have much interest in truth (as distinct from believing what they want to believe) came up. Of course there was the matter of Trump’s dishonesty, but also the matter of the media’s ethics. I said that I read and subscribe to the Times mostly for the same reason Soviets used to read Pravda back in the day: to know what the Official Story the ruling class wishes to tell itself is. That’s not to say that the Times doesn’t feature excellent reporting and good writing; it does. But I don’t trust it to tell me the truth. I trust it to reveal to me the narrative that the greater part of the ruling class (minus the Republican elites) tells itself. That’s a useful thing to know, as long as you know that you’re only getting a take.

What’s interesting is that elite journalists largely lack the epistemic humility to understand what they’re doing. Do you think Michel Martin, Cheryl Corly, or anybody in the NPR newsroom who worked on today’s Chicago report were genuinely aware how their report would sound to someone who was not liberal?

The alt-right movement promotes many ideas, some of them stupid (e.g., the idea that the Chicago Facebook torture was the fault of Black Lives Matter), many of them bad, some of them evil. But the most true and useful thing it (or, to be precise, neoreaction, which is not exactly the same thing as the alt-right) has come up with is the concept of the Cathedral, defined like this:

The Cathedral in a nutshell

The Cathedral (aka the Clerisy, the Megaphone) is basically the Western world’s intellectual fashion industry. It consists of almost all of the respectable or even semi-respectable parts of the news media, the entertainment industry, and the softer social science and humanities parts of the education industry.
Basic economic theory predicts that these industries should be diverse in their approaches to politically sensitive topics. Unlike the field of particle physics, political fashions are not significantly limited by reproducible scientific experiments. The market should be fragmented, and the various firms should specialize in appealing to different segments of the market.
But this does not seem to be the case. Instead, the Cathedral seems much more homogeneous in its coverage of politically sensitive topics than it is in coverage of food, art, sports, religion, etc.
The mechanism for this homogenization is not obvious. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathedral has no pope (although I read recently that Warren Buffet owns 71 newspapers, and the New York Times is owned in part by Carlos Slim, whose vast fortune has a lot to do with his special relationship with the Mexican government). One factor is that the credibility of a set of information sources depends on their being able to agree on a story (coordination games, the peloton effect, the parliament of clocks). Another factor is self-dealing: people with high verbal skills tend to support a system of government that is controlled by people with high verbal skills, and once they control it, they tend to want it to be unlimited in scope. Another factor is self-selection: once an institution becomes dominated by members of a political movement, it tends to become unpleasant and career-limiting for anyone else to work there. Another factor is that the easiest way to write a newspaper story is to copy it from a politician’s press handout. To a considerable extent, these institutions are deliberately manipulated by politicians (broadcast licensing, educational and research funding, journalistic access, selective leaking of secrets, etc., aka Gleichschaltung; in many cases, journalists are literally married to political operatives or are involved in “revolving door” relationships with the political institutions they write about, such as Jeff Immelt of GE, MSNBC and the Obama administration). But the two biggest factors are probably that (1) intellectuals are seduced by political power (the Boromir effect), and (2) these institutions are quasi-religious, and have taken on the peculiar characteristics of the dominant quasi-religion of the day.
Three things make an intellectual movement quasi-religious: (1) the outputs that they produce are credence goods, (2) they provide a framework for competition for social status, and (3) this basis is insecure. The fact that credence goods are involved means that conflict about them will tend to be irrational. The fact that social status is involved, and that the basis for social status is insecure, means that this conflict will be relatively vicious, and will carry a strong odor of a witch hunt.
The Cathedral is powerful partly because its relative homogeneity allows it to serve as a gatekeeper of politically relevant mass-market information and interpretation. But its real power comes from control of what ideas are associated with high status. Everyone thinks, “I’m my own man. I think for myself.” But unconsciously, people tend to copy the opinions of people who are one step above them on the social ladder. This was explained in the Cerulean Top scene in The Devil Wears Prada.

“Russian hacking” is the Left/Never-Trumpers’ explanation for Donald Trump’s election.

In their furrowed-brow-telling, they have recently discovered something called “Russian interference” and “Russian influence.” Don’t ask where so many of them have been all of our lives, because they’ve spent about the past century telling us there was no such thing.

That was then. Today, they insist that this newfound “Russian interference” and “Russian influence” secretly drove nearly 63 million American deplorables to reach for that GOP lever again and again to vote for Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton.

Let me squeeze in a little historical context. The late, great Sen. Joseph McCarthy himself was not wont to make such sweeping, conspiratorial charges without offering well-documented evidence, as we might see in his remarkable peroration on the still strange and perplexing career of George C. Marshall (pdf here; get over the Birch imprint; this is a reissue of the original 1952 Devin-Adair book publication).

Back to postmodern times.

Russia exerted this influence and interference, anonymous “officials” say — also political appointees James Clapper (he who prevented a mandatory damage assessment regarding national security breaches related to the Hillary Clinton server!), and alleged Muslim convert John Brennan (he who voted Communist before entering the CIA!) — by its alleged hacking of the email accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the DNC, and subsequent alleged passing of these tens of thousands of emails to Wikileaks. That would be Julian Assange’s “radical transparency group,” as the Washington Post calls the phenomenal, Internet-based publisher of government documents, which, hosannas to the gods, now performs a watchdog-role by default that most media, including the Post, have rejected, making themselves noxious and obsolete.

It is hard to imagine Jeff Bezos’ sheet today publishing that massive, pre-hacking-era document “theft,” the Pentagon Papers. Fie! That would be “stealing,” according to our brave, new, uniparty-state-submissive stenographers. Better for all good media to ensure that government “secret” documents never, ever get to those of us who just elect and employ the government.

Thus, due to Russia — and not due to the globe-spanning criminality and corruption (and the open borders, forked-tongue Alinskyism and co-dependend-sex-crimes) of Hillary Clinton; and not due to one bit of Donald Trump’s revolutionary America First political program — Trump won the presidency. Ergo, Trump = Putin puppet. That makes the Clinton crime syndicate, its degenerate Podestas, the Left, Never-Trumpers such Amnesty McCain (and that bizarre pop-up candidate, Evan McMullin) the Second Coming of … Joe McCarthy? (Now, just a minute, stop, we don’t mean to suggest anything like that, witch-hunt, witch-hunt, Red Scare, glug, glug….)

Oh, Meryl.

Not you, too?

Just when I thought we’d exhausted the reservoir of Trump-hating luvvies, up pops the biggest star in Hollywood to join the bandwagon and stick one more stiletto-heeled boot into the President-elect ten days before his inauguration.

Let me make one thing clear before I continue: I love Meryl Streep.

She’s the greatest actress in history (and not, as Trump disingenuously tweeted today, ‘one of the most overrated in Hollywood’!). She’s also, and I speak from personal experience, a delightful woman – incredibly smart, warm, funny and decent.

In fact, there’s no better role model for any budding actor, or finer example of true feminist power at its very best.

So when she speaks, the world listens.

Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump.

She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’.

At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.

She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.’

Wow.

I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’.

For your information, Ms Streep, tens of millions of ordinary Americans love football and the MMA and would be quite happy watching their favourite sports at the expense of the next Woody Allen film.

Her real target, though, was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do.

‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back.’

Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble.

‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’

Hmmm.

Really, Meryl?

For starters, the incident to which she referred didn’t happen last year, it happened in 2015. There’s even been another Golden Globes in between then and now, at which it was never mentioned.

Second, Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter – he was mocking the reporter’s disability and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them. (See here and decide for yourself)

Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.

One of the ways that scientists traditionally measure the well-being of a nation is to track the rate at which its citizens die, and how long they can be expected to live. So the news out of the National Center for Health Statistics earlier last month was disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, and that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993.

The finding is thought to be due to a confluence of issues, including more obesity in the population, increasing long-term unemployment, more patients with chronic diseases, and a lack of breakthrough innovations to reduce the costs of care while increasing the quality of life. But the new data certainly highlight the critical need to provide better life-saving and life-prolonging therapies for patients.

While policymakers and stakeholders continue to debate how to solve these problems, there are some things that we know Congress can do to address them: enact smart, evidence-based policies, invest in private-public partnerships that enhance innovation, and eliminate roadblocks to America’s innovators.

The 21st Century Cures Act is an example of smart policies spurring solutions to the nation’s problems. This commonsense legislation, signed into law last month, is the result of years of negotiations, compromises, and passionate advocacy among countless stakeholders, including patient groups, health-care providers, hospitals, the life-science community, regulators, and more. Although not perfect, the legislation will boost research into some of the most vexing medical challenges our health-care system faces, while making sure that there are expedited pathways coupled with new resources for medical innovators and regulators to get breakthrough therapies to patients without delay.

Many roadblocks limit our nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs, some of which could be removed rapidly by Congress, especially when there is already broad, bipartisan agreement to do so. Perhaps no better example of this would be the permanent repeal of the disastrous medical-device excise tax. This monstrosity, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, was a dark cloud over medical-technology innovation during the years it was in place and led to drastic cuts in R&D, job losses, and lost opportunities to improve patient care. Congress recognized how detrimental this policy was to innovation and suspended the tax for two years, but if nothing is done, it will resume in 2018. Fully repealing the medical-device tax once and for all — which has been spearheaded by Representative Erik Paulsen (R., Minn.) — is a commonsense approach that would remove a massive obstacle to improving patient outcomes and the creation of high-tech manufacturing jobs.

There is a word missing from the non-classified report issued Friday, in which three intelligence agencies assess “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.” The FBI, CIA, and NSA elide any mention of . . . “Podesta.”

Seems like a pretty significant omission — not just because of how the 2016 campaign played out but also in light of the intelligence community’s recent history of politicizing its analyses.

The report is replete with references to Russian “cyber espionage,” “covert intelligence,” “false-flag,” “propaganda,” and “influence” operations by which Vladimir Putin is alleged to have tried to put his thumb on the electoral scale. Very sinister stuff, to be sure. But when the public hears these terms, it thinks of spies, misdirection, disinformation campaigns — i.e., schemes intended to deceive the target audience. People don’t instantly think, “Oh, you mean an effort to publicize true but embarrassing information”; they don’t read “covert operation” and say to themselves, “That must mean they subjected only one side of a political contest to a high level of scrutiny.” That’s the kind of behavior people associate with the American media, not the Kremlin.

The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such “high confidence” that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources.

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that if you’re essentially going to say, “Trust us,” you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time.

Here, we are talking about a community whose own analysts have complained that their superiors distort their reports for political purposes. In just the past few years, they have told us that they had “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003; that the NSA was not collecting metadata on millions of Americans; and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, “largely secular” organization. We have learned that the Obama administration intentionally perpetrated a disinformation campaign — complete with a compliant media “echo chamber” — to sell the public on the Iran nuclear deal (and the fiction that Iran’s regime was moderating). We have seen U.S. intelligence and law enforcement complicit in the Obama administration’s schemes to convince the public that “violent extremism,” not radical Islam, is the explanation for terrorist attacks; that a jihadist mass-murder attack targeting soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan was “workplace violence”; that al-Qaeda had been “decimated”; that the threat of the ISIS “jayvee” team was exaggerated; and that the Benghazi massacre was not really a terrorist attack but a “protest” gone awry over an anti-Muslim video.

I can attest that the intelligence agencies overflow with patriotic Americans who do the quiet, perilous, thankless work that saves American lives. We can acknowledge this incontestable fact and still observe that, on this record, the intelligence community as an institution cannot very well expect that “Trust us” is going to get them very far.

Which brings us back to what the new report studiously avoids mentioning.