January 16, 2024 Why Is The Right So Dumb? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Why Is The Right So Dumb?

Posted on January 16, 2024 by Luke Ford

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 25 are in blue states. The three in red states are Duke University (ranked 22nd in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All three of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities (Durham, Austin, and Dallas), and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?
The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.
Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.
Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.

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All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Journalism is judgment about what matters. It is the primary thing we use to see the world beyond our experience.

This judgment springs from the particular hero system that made Russiagate the most important news story in America from 2016 to 2019 and George Floyd’s death the most important story for the summer months of 2020 (along with Covid).

Here are some excerpts from this 2021 book:

* …journalists… “occupy jobs centered on the construction and dissemination of what might be called interpretive information or knowledge” rather than aesthetic or artistic products. Whereas individual creativity and self-expression are idealized in artistic fields, journalism’s occupational ideology prizes considered judgment—the ability to quickly absorb, adjudicate between, and publicly communicate complex and conflicting sources of information. Furthermore, journalism is an anomalous case of cultural production in that its practitioners operate according to a set of normative, rather than artistic, commitments. As media scholar Mike Ananny puts it, “Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests.”
Therefore, while artistic workers seek aesthetic autonomy, journalists primarily seek professional autonomy—the ability to practice newswork according to a set of collective normative values and with relative insulation from political actors and the market.40 Yet because the U.S. press is heavily commercialized, many of the management tensions and challenges are the same as those found in other forms of industrial cultural production. If aesthetic cultural work is defined by the art-commerce
relation, we might say that journalism is characterized by the democracy-commerce relation.
* It is difficult to publicly measure something or someone without changing it or them in some way. Thus a second thing that evaluative numbers do in the social world is elicit a response from the people and organizations they measure. Scholars call this phenomenon reactivity.
* All mediated forms of culture—from music to television to books—are “carriers of meaning” that influence how we understand the social world.1 Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”2 It is mainly through news consumption that many of us encounter political leaders and other powerful figures, cultivate a sense of empathy (or antipathy) toward people in different life circumstances, learn about and contextualize contemporary events that are outside our immediate, observable environs, and develop a sense of the crucial issues animating public life.
* Much of journalism history in the United States can be understood as the profession’s ongoing efforts to establish independence from the state and the market, both of which are generally viewed as corrupting influences on editorial freedom and journalistic integrity.6 A range of established journalistic norms and practices, such as refusing gifts, denying sources quote approval, and establishing a “wall” between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, stem from efforts to maintain autonomy.
* As journalism scholar Michael Schudson puts it in an essay pointedly titled “Autonomy from What?”: “What keeps journalism alive, changing, and growing is the public nature of journalists’ work, the nonautonomous environment of their work, the fact that they are daily or weekly exposed to the disappointment and criticism of their sources (in the political field) and their public (whose disapproval may be demonstrated economically as readers cancel their subscriptions or viewers change channels).”
* As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in an oft-quoted passage from his classic newsroom ethnography Deciding What’s News, journalists “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming . . . that what interested them would interest the audience.”
* print-era journalists rejected audience research because doing so was one of the only means to protect their always-tenuous professional status. Sociologist Andrew Abbott has characterized professions as “somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases.”
* The accessibility of journalistic language is helpful for informing the public, but it also renders journalists’ claims to specialized expertise potentially suspect. In the absence of a structural closure mechanism that limits entry into the profession or a repertoire of abstract knowledge, journalists create and maintain boundaries
around their profession by “doing things a certain way and privileging certain rationales for those actions.”
* the opinions and assessments of other journalists—rather than outsiders—typically hold the most weight when considering whether the job has been done well or not.
* editors also often perceive metrics as a threat to their own managerial authority and their privileged position atop the newsroom hierarchy.
* In Deciding What’s News, Gans presciently noted that the indifference to audience research that he observed among journalists might well change “should commercial considerations become more urgent” within news organizations.
* There is arguably no other publication in the United States—possibly the world—with
its [New York Times] symbolic significance and level of reputational capital.
* To excel at the traffic game, journalists needed a mixture of luck and skill that was elusive and difficult to reliably reproduce. Journalists spoke regularly of being surprised by traffic. Pieces they expected to be “hits” often drew a smaller-than-
anticipated audience, while articles that seemed “niche” could unexpectedly become popular.
* Grinding in the blogging world had an additional element of intrigue: there was always the tantalizing possibility that any ground-out post could become a surprise viral hit.
* Gawker Media staffers told me their moods rose and fell with the traffic numbers reported in the dashboard, sometimes to a degree that alarmed them.
* “Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without . . . that a semblance of order is created.” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger)
* Journalists at the Times, for example, frequently drew positive contrasts between the Times’s approach to metrics and that of other publications… When I prefaced a question to Cynthia, a Times reporter, by mentioning that the Washington Post had a real-time display of the paper’s top-ranked stories on its newsroom wall, she was incredulous: “They have that at the Washington Post? . . . Oh god, this is so depressing to me.”
* Given the Times’s long-held organizational self-perception as the apex of journalistic professionalism in the United States…
* Although Gawker staffers like Felix and Alison saw BuzzFeed’s editorial approach as synonymous with clickbait and “cheap viral crap,” BuzzFeed itself emphatically rejected this characterization, going so far as to publish a post in 2014 headlined “Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait.” Ben Smith, who was BuzzFeed editor in chief at the time, argued that those who associate BuzzFeed with clickbait “confuse what we do with true clickbait,” which was, in his view, a headline that baits the reader into clicking by overpromising on what the story, once clicked on, actually delivers. By contrast, Smith wrote, BuzzFeed’s headlines tend to be “extremely direct”: for example, “ ‘31 Genius Hacks for Your Elementary School Art Class’ is just that.”
* Metrics confront journalists with a powerful mixed message. If they ignore the data altogether, they risk being seen as foolishly obstinate, patronizing toward their audience, and behind the digital times—in effect guaranteeing their professional obsolescence and possibly facing managerial censure or even job loss. But if they rely on metrics too much, they risk corrupting their sense of professional integrity and autonomy, and potentially sullying their reputation. To make matters more challenging, there is no widely agreed-upon normative standard within the profession for how to navigate between these two extremes.
* In the common spaces of the New York Times headquarters in midtown Manhattan,
displays of any kind of metrics data were conspicuously absent. Unlike at Gawker, where vast swaths of wall were occupied by large flat screens displaying various
real-time traffic rankings of stories and writers, some of the Times’s prominent wall space was covered with framed reprints of each of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
stories, of which it has published more than any other news organization. The Times’s Pulitzer Wall, as it is known, was a point of pride for staffers, symbolizing the organization’s formidable prestige.
* Editors’ sense of “news judgment” is intuitive and inscrutable (and thus difficult for reporters to argue with). By contrast, metrics had the potential to be equally visible and accessible to all staffers in a newsroom. And because of metrics’ interpretive ambiguity, a reporter could look at the same data as her editor and draw her own—possibly contradictory—conclusions.
As such, Times editors restricted reporters’ access to metrics because they perceived the data as a potential threat, not only to the quality of the paper’s journalism but also to their own managerial authority.
“If you think about an editor, really the only thing an editor has—like their full job is based on their judgment. Because that’s really what they do, is they just sit and use their judgment to edit stories and decide how important they are and where they should go on the site. And so replacing that with metrics of some sort is a massive threat to their livelihood and kind of value in the job.”
* Although they withheld systematic access to metrics, Times editors would strategically disclose particular data points to reporters when they wanted to accomplish a specific managerial purpose or elicit a desired reaction.

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Did Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin Sleep With Her Subject LBJ?

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Slate: “The best example is Doris Kearns (now Kearns Goodwin), who spent many hours interviewing Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. The author probably didn’t help matters by admitting that LBJ liked to climb into her bed for interviews. But she insists that she never joined the former president in bed, and there is no evidence that a romance occurred.”

Report:

Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was having an affair with Lyndon Johnson

LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!

Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a well known JFK assassination researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s relationship with LBJ in those “final years.” Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:

Goodwin’s first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president’s dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: “How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968.”

Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a “psychobiography” that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they’d had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.

Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work–intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University–break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.

Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post’s Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn’s love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:

” Kearns has always gotten what she wanted–and made it look as if she didn’t even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them.”

At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: ” I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love with me and things like that. Partly that’s true. But it was much more serious than that.”

Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article

“Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson’s death.”

One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ’s mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:

“So I’ll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we’ll have you back here and we won’t look back in pride or shame. We’ll just start from here and we’ll go on with your book without Parade. We’re both still alive and that’s what counts.”

Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on….

As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson’s ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old…. He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]

Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:

“They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.

“She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, that he ‘pressed me very hard sexually the first year,’ that he courted her aggressively, that he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life.”

[Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 “A Tale of Hearts and Minds”]

My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don’t just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.

I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is an old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.

Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum and a nationally known author:

“Robert,
I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”

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Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this 2023 book by the late Edward Jay Epstein:

* Indeed, it was from [Gerald Ford] that I first heard the term “political truth,” a concept in which facts may be tempered to fit political realities.

* John J. McCloy: “J. Edgar Hoover likes to close doors. I told Warren we had to reopen them.”

Had the [Warren] commission’s investigation faced limits in what it could report? I asked.
He answered by describing Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which an investigation uncovered a series of unrelated sexual liaisons. He compared the book to the investigation, saying, “We had uncovered a lot of minor scandals, but they were not relevant to our investigation. We decided not to publish them in the report.”
When I pressed him on what these scandals involved, he replied, “It was as if someone picked up a rock and the light caused all sorts of bugs to run for cover.” He said the Secret Service needed to obscure the indiscretions of its agents the night before the assassination, the FBI had to expunge embarrassing incidents from its reports, and the CIA had to hide its unauthorized domestic activities. He added that even Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, had put his own man, Howard Willens, on the staff to deal with “inappropriate revelations.”

* He said that while no one on the commission had any doubts that Oswald was the shooter in the sniper’s nest, the real mystery for him was “why Oswald was there with a rifle.” He believed there was persuasive evidence that Oswald had been trained in espionage in Russia and that Oswald might have been “a sleeper agent who went haywire.” Warren did not buy his theory, and he lost the argument because “Warren was, you need to understand, stubborn as a mule.”

* [Attorney Wesley J.] Liebeler gave me his own account of the investigation. He ridiculed the seven commissioners, saying the staff called them the Seven Dwarfs because they refused to question the claims of Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina (who was Snow White). He said Dopey was Chief Justice Warren, who dismissed any testimony that impugned Marina’s credibility.
I asked him, “Who was Sleepy?”
He said Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence. Dulles received this appellation because he often fell asleep during the testimony of witnesses and, when awakened, asked inappropriate questions. For example, an FBI fiber expert was describing the bullet holes in the front of Kennedy’s shirt when Dulles woke up, looked at the blowup of the bloody shirt, and said, “He wears ready – made shirts, huh?” At another point, he spilled a wad of tobacco on a photograph of three bullet fragments and said, as if he had discovered new evidence, that he saw four fragments.
McCloy was Grumpy. According to Liebeler, he became angry when staff lawyers did not pay sufficient attention to his theories about possible foreign involvement.
Liebeler was also scathing about the initial FBI investigation, which he called “a joke.” As for the CIA, he said one of its theories was that Oswald might have been “brainwashed” into serving as a “Manchurian Candidate” assassin. He noted the agency had no basis for this “ridiculous theory” other than a decade – old study it had conducted on brainwashing techniques.

* Arlen Specter: “I showed them the Zapruder film frame by frame and explained that they could either accept the single – bullet theory or begin looking for a second assassin.”

* “Did you examine the color autopsy photos?”
“No,” he answered. “I never saw the autopsy photos.”
“Did anyone else on the commission or staff see them?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Obviously they were missing. Looking him straight in the eyes, I asked, “Why not?”
Specter shook his head. “You need to ask Rankin.”

* This crucial omission showed that the Warren Commission, no matter how decent and virtuous its seven members, did not conduct an exhaustive investigation. Indeed, it did not even examine the basic autopsy evidence of how the president was killed.

* Numerous fireflies were blinking in the distance. Calling my attention to them, Angleton said the female firefly uses a sort of Morse code of flashes to signal her availability to males. He added, lest I assume it was a chance observation, “Of course, one can’t be sure it’s a firefly.” He explained that the assassination beetle, which was the firefly’s natural predator, had learned over time to replicate this code of flashes. “The firefly responds to this mating call, and instead of finding a mate … is devoured by a beetle.” In this case, the assassination beetle provoked the firefly into flying into the fatal trap.

* [Edward Banfield’s] idea of an intellectual was someone who could see controversial issues in shades of gray, as opposed to a man of action, which included a politician, who saw them in black and white.

* I had learned that projects such as moviemaking, which required the cooperation of many other people, were not for me. My moviemaking ambitions were an ego – driven mistake. I needed to find something less entangling. I decided to move forward with my writing career, a career in which I could be the sole author.

* [Graham Allison] introduced me to Diplomacy, a board game in which seven players are assigned seven countries in pre – World War I Europe and make their strategic decisions. Since there could be only one winner and alliances were necessary to win, the rules permitted players to lie, cheat, and deceive each other.

* As a teacher, I found a marked difference between my Harvard and MIT students. The former were socially transactional. Those in my seminar did not hesitate to attempt to negotiate a better grade on their papers. As I enjoy verbal argument, I usually acquiesced in the negotiations to reward their efforts. One student, Tom Werner, even broadened the negotiations to include an idea to collaborate on a TV series based on a Robert Ludlum thriller. (He went on to produce The Bill Cosby Show. ) On the other hand, MIT students tended to accept their grades as the fate they deserved. They evidenced little interest in engaging in social interaction or negotiations. I did learn from them, however. Unlike their social science counterparts at Harvard, they were the future electrical engineers and computer scientists who would usher in the age of internet.

* I had lunch with Pat [Moynihan] every day while awaiting Kate’s arrival. He was furious at the “minions” in the Nixon administration who were telling him to work to shut down the production of opium in India. “It’s idiotic,” he said. Although India was the world’s largest producer of opium, much of it went to pharmaceutical companies to manufacture codeine, an antitussive. “If they shut down Indian opium, they are going to cause a global coughing crisis.”
It was a role reversal for Pat. When he served in the Nixon White House two years earlier, he had advocated overriding ambassadors and using the threat of military action to suppress opium. I realized that Pat, a chameleon, adapted his views to coincide with his position. In other words, he was a political animal.

He explained that when he joined the Nixon administration, there was a concern that drugs and street crime were linked. He suggested to Nixon that the link theory could be tested by temporarily disrupting the supply of foreign drugs into the United States. What he had not foreseen is that “the Mormons” would expand his idea into policy. “I was as surprised as anyone when they turned my suggestion into the war on heroin.”

* [Tom Wolfe said] that a memoir to be true would have to describe the writer’s most painful humiliations, as Jean – Jacques Rosseau did in his Confessions. He said that would not be easy because a human brain is not wired to relive painful moments. To test Wolfe’s proposition, I later tried to recount one but, as he predicted, it was too traumatic.

* Some five years later, in 2008, the day after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, I received an email from Katie Rosman, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, asking about an exchange I had with her and Obama in 2003 when he was serving in the Illinois Senate… Katie said Obama was standing with Vernon Jordan, whom I also did not know and did not recall ever meeting. She went on to say that she was so impressed with our conversation with Obama that immediately after Tina’s party, she pitched the idea of doing a piece on him to an editor at the New York Times Magazine, but it was rejected on the grounds that a story about an unknown Chicago politician did not belong in the New York Times.

* network television news is a product manufactured by an organization, not by individuals… And while at one level a newsperson chose and prepared individual stories, at another level the organization chose the newsperson. Those who were able to adapt to the networks’ values were retained and promoted. Those who were not able to accept those values were weeded out and shunted aside. From this perspective, it was the organization, not the individuals, that determined the pictures of society represented on national television.

* [New Yorker’s William] Shawn offered me the opportunity to do so by assigning me to investigate the allegations of a conspiracy by the Nixon administration to murder the entire leadership of the Black Panthers, a group of militants opposing the government oppression of Blacks. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers had reported as fact that the police had killed 28 Panthers. Shawn told me to find out whether the murder of 28 Panthers by the police was, as he put it, “part of a pattern of genocide.”

…That left four questionable deaths in shoot – outs, and all of them were with local, not federal, police.
While “four deaths, two deaths, even a single death must be the subject of the most serious concern,” I wrote, I concluded that false numbers bandied about in the press had only confused the issue of police violence with a conspiracy theory about government genocide.

Afterward, to their credit, many newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, who had lazily repeated the false numbers of Black Panther deaths, printed editorial apologies to their readers.

* I had learned in my work on the Warren Commission that contemporaneous memoranda were far more valuable to understanding a complex issue than the retrospective memories expressed in even the most candid interviews with people involved in the issue.

* Times had changed from the mid – 1960s, when I could get access, unimpeded by a communications officer, to the members of the Warren Commission and its staff. By 1980, all government agencies employed press communications officers, whose job it was to prevent outsiders from getting anything but approved sound bites.

* After the Miami Herald published an exposé of his exploitation of women in November 2018, Epstein sought help, as I learned from one of his close friends, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic advisor. Epstein befriended Bannon after Trump fired him in 2017 and even planned a trip with him on his plane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now he sought Bannon’s help restoring his public image. Bannon suggested Epstein should go public by giving an exclusive interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes or another high – profile TV show. Bannon then became his media coach and schooled him on how to take control of a television interview. To this end, in March 2019, Bannon prepared him through a sham 60 Minutes interview in the living room of Epstein’s mansion with a TV camera crew and indoor lighting. Playing the role of a 60 Minutes interviewer, Bannon fired questions at Epstein about the source of his money, his guilty plea, and his relations with women. Although Epstein thought he did well in this trial run, according to a person who attended this mock interview, he decided against having Bannon try to arrange a real 60 Minutes interview.

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What Distinguishes Winners From Losers?

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Around 2015, my therapist said to me, “I wonder if you are so radical in your politics because you are so passive in your life.”

It was a great point. Since then, I’ve noticed that as I become more successful, I’m less interested in radical causes. As I thrive within the system, I’m less interested in overthrowing the system.

When I look at radical movements, I notice that they rarely contain happy successful people. Rather, marginalized movements attract marginalized people. Crazy conspiracy theories, for example, are most attractive to people who are losing at life, while those who are winning (meaning that they are thriving in their work and family lives) rarely believe in things like QAnon.

If you know somebody is into Glenn Beck or Alex Jones or Fox News, you can be sure you’re not talking to a winner.

According to the 2014 book (by two academics) American Conspiracy Theories:

* …conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity. But nothing fails like success, and ascending groups trigger dynamics that check and eventually reverse the advance of conspiracy theories. In short, because defeat and exclusion are their biggest inducements, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” though sooner or later everyone must play the loser. In short, successful conspiracy theories conform to a strategic logic based on threat perception.
* Talk show host Glenn Beck routinely traffics in conspiratorial rhetoric, divining who is secretly working with whom (usually communists) and why (usually to spread communism). Beck realizes that repetitively linking actors and events to pinkish puppet masters might strike some in his audience as obsessive-compulsive conspiracy mongering. To ward off the hurtful slur of conspiracy theorist, Beck invokes yet another conspiracy theory. “Why is it a concentrated effort now to label me a conspiracy theorist?” he inquired of himself on his radio show. His answer: “[Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein] said the government should call anyone who stands against them a conspiracy theorist. . . . This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is what he wrote about. This was his way for the government—and he said, ‘Even if it turns out to be true, you have to label people a conspiracy theorist because it isolates them.’”
* “There seems to be a curious American tendency to search, at all times, for a single external center of evil to which all our troubles can be attributed, rather than to recognize that there might be multiple sources of resistance to our purposes and undertakings, and that these sources might be relatively independent of each other.”
—George F. Kennan
* Sharing conspiracy theories provides a way for groups falling in the pecking order to revamp and recoup from losses, close ranks, staunch losses, overcome collective action problems, and sensitize minds to vulnerabilities. Emerging groups, minor groups, and social movements will turn to conspiracy talk for similar reasons.
* Conspiracy talk provides a unifying narrative of a terrifying enemy. Communicating conspiracy theories heightens alertness to avert tragedy. The tendency of conspiracy theorists to scapegoat, however reprehensible, channels anger, avoids internecine recriminations, and aims at redemption.
* Victory being a lax disciplinarian, large winning groups feel less anxiety, more in control, and less need for conspiracy theories. But losses may be cumulative, and conspiracy talk is most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives, or resources.
* Americans find living with power asymmetry more uncomfortable as time goes on. Anecdotally, 9/11 Truther theories began to strongly resonate not immediately after 9/11/2001, but in the beginning of Bush’s second term.
* What is curious about radical conspiratorial writings is that they are only
a more intense version of mundane political discourse. Where regular politicians highlight problems, advocate solutions, and call for concerted action soon, conspiracy theorists highlight an abysmal state of affairs, advocate titanic policies, and call for concerted action right now.
* …third parties and political movements have more need for conspiratorial rhetoric than do major parties because they are consummate losers—they never win. Those groups that achieve goals and overcome rivals, regardless of their size, may have less need for conspiracy theories. The more losses one suffers, the more tempting conspiracy theories become…

So how do you spot winners and losers? I did a Google search and here are some things I found that resonated with me:

From Weidel on Winning:

You Have to be Fussy to be Excellent
We spend most of our time with people who are slow to learn, and we wind up having to repeat ourselves and explain things over and over again just so they will get it…
A winner is somebody who comes in bright-eyed, full of energy, and asks a lot of questions. You give them a few answers and off to the races they go…
Good Employees Learn Fast
They can’t even imagine doing something in a half-hearted, haphazard way.

Jeff Boss writes:

Winning is focusing on what’s important, such as leaving work early to take care of family issues to take and not worrying what your coworkers think.
More than anything winning is about the people with whom you surround yourself.

Trump’s description of Jeb Bush as “low energy” was devastating. A large part of Trump’s success stems from the energy and excitement he creates.

Here are traits I associate with losers:

* Passive
* Listless
* Bored
* Cultivate victimhood and conspiracy theories
* Isolated. Robin Dunbar writes in his 2021 book Friends: “Loneliness is… an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system, as well as your psychological wellbeing, that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death.”
* I feel bad when I’m around them
* Frantic
* Vague
* Idea deflection
* Create drama
* Compulsive need to prove
* Cling to useless possessions
* Give away their time
* Fixate on their hurts.
* Discordant
* Takers
* Take long hits of Copium
* Say “please clap.”
* Wear medals to work.

Here are traits I associate with winners:

* Energy
* Drive
* Passion
* Positive
* Good friends
* Busy
* I feel good when I’m around them
* Calm
* Admirable lifestyle
* Tracking. Winners track their time and finances, and if necessary, their food.
* Open to new ideas
* Purpose
* Clear priorities
* Quickly separate themselves from those who are bad for them
* Welcome feedback and quickly discard that which is not helpful.
* Congruent
* Winners rarely need to announce their boundaries. They’re so formidable, you’d never even consider abusing them.
* Givers

My favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, was destroyed by the Green Bay Packers yesterday 48-32. Once my team went down 27-0, I started laughing about it to my friends. When you can be amused by the life outside of your control rather than devastated, that’s a winning approach.

Nicolas Cole writes: “A winner only spends time with other winners.”

From MindGym:

People feel most engaged when performing tasks that stretch them to the limits of their ability…
Energy is infectious…

Cedric Webb writes:

Winners don’t look for excuses…
The priority must always be the priority. If something is important enough to you, it will take precedence. If it is not important enough, it will take a back seat.
When a winner finds another winner, they want to be around them more… The old proverb goes, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
Wasting time means wasting energy. Knowing what to invest your time in is key to maximizing time. As Stephen Covey said, “The key is not spending time, but investing in it.” Invest your time in the right people, processes, and purposes.
Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Kevin Daum writes:

1. Winners get in the game.
2. Winners boldly ask for what they want.
3. Winners understand their sphere of influence.
4. Winners gratefully leverage the strengths of others.
Winners invest their time and energy in the things that excite them.

Bedros Keuilian writes:

#1: They show up even when they don’t feel like it.
#6: They keep their actions congruent with their goals.

Giovanni Azael writes: “There is no man, except that who is unwise, who starts a building project, for instance, without counting the project’s cost to the last penny. Winning in life is the cumulative series of successive wins, and for every win, there are distinctive prices to be paid.”

A friend says: “The single biggest thing is if a person is forward thinking and planning and action toward some future goal, or living in the past.”

I’ve long defined happiness as looking forward to the day ahead.

As people get older, they might naturally spend less time planning and more time reminiscing. If you can look back with ease and joy and gratitude, that strikes me as winning. If you look back with bitterness and rage, that strikes me as losing.

We all lose (jobs, friendships, communities, status, opportunities). We all will go through bitterness and anger and depression after a significant loss. Winners get through this phase more adaptively than losers. Adaptive depression is grieving what you lost, noticing where you might have gone wrong, considering plans for the future, working out various scenarios for going forward in your life, and then after an appropriate time retreating from life, you then push forward with plans that will likely advance your interests. Maladaptive depression means getting stuck in depression. Denial means denying the significance of your loss and just pushing forward with gritted teeth.

Depression and anger are adaptive responses at times. We never graduate from being human, we never stop cycling through feelings of competence, dependence, loneliness, grandiosity, and humiliation.

Winners build healthy connections while losers try to manipulate their way through life. For example, a winning employee makes his employer’s priorities his priorities while a losing employee ignores his employer’s mission in favor of his own proclivities. A winning friend is open to assisting his friends achieve their healthy goals while a loser doesn’t want his friends to excel him. Winners get good things done while losers complain and blame.

Posted in Conspiracy, Success | Comments Off

Are you feeling demoralized by the psy-ops? (1-14-24)

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153926
05:00 Richard Spencer Space on anonymity and dissident politics, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1746318372705648953
28:00 NYT: How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/politics/trump-college-educated-voters.html
38:00 Building the greatest stereo and destroying your family in the process, https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/
50:00 Elites and democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153860
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/mideast-war-israel-yemen.html
1:04:00 Genocide in Gaza: Dimensions of an Unfolding Catastrophe, Featuring John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxeqfgPzVc&t=2726s
1:11:30 Not a war crime, but GENOCIDE: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1CvtfbXPLE
1:20:00 NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153948
1:38:30 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
1:45:00 Richard Spencer has been neutered
2:23:00 Tunneling for meaning under 770 (Chabad headquarters)
2:35:00 I am the biggest cause of my own misery due to my lack of consideration for others
2:46:00 My Dennis Prager story, https://lukeford.net/blog/?page_id=31620
3:15:00 The Investigator in the Enneagram, https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-5
3:29:50 Patrick Casey
3:33:45 Elliott Blatt joins
4:20:20 Middle East war escalates, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlL9uHaeNqo

Posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, America | Comments Off

NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

This New York Times headline is false. Plenty of people want a wider war in the Middle East. Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attacks to encourage a wider war. Parts of Hezbollah, and parts the governments of Iran and Israel want a wider war. Hezbollah has the capacity to devastate Israel, to level its cities, and to kill thousands of Israelis in hours. Why would they not feel tempted to do that? Iran wants to dominate the Middle East, destroy the Zionist state and drive out America? A massive war with Israel could topple the Iranian regime but it also could topple the Zionist state and make America’s presence in the Middle East more precarious. Many Israeli leaders would welcome a wider war because that would enable them to drive out the Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and possibly even Israel proper and create a stronger, more cohesive greater Israel.

I expect Israel to invade southern Lebanon in the next few months to take out Hezbollah.

There are two philosophical reasons why I think this New York Times headline is dumb. One, people don’t always say what they mean. Just because many leaders in the Middle East said they don’t want a regional war doesn’t mean that is what they all truly believe in all circumstances. Right now, I believe the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah do not want a wider war, but plenty of their compatriots do. Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership depends upon an ongoing war. Once there’s peace, he’s likely out of office and on trial. But he can’t say this publicly. He has to placate the United States in his public pronouncements while placating coalition members to his right in private.

Individual incentives are often different from national incentives and Bibi’s incentives are not necessarily Israel’s incentives.

Two. Liberals believe that people are basically good and that peace is our default state. Trads and people on the right do not believe that people are basically good and do not believe that peace is our default state. They understand that sometimes wars have to be fought to a conclusion to allow a lasting peace.

On the liberal-left side of the political spectrum, there’s an individualist worldview, and more confidence in the power of buffered human reason and agency to manage things (think about LBJ micro-managing the bombing of North Vietnam), while on the right, people believe that we are tribal and driven by many forces more powerful than conscious cognition, and therefore we suspect that life and war are inherently wild and less containable.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Last week, Stephen Walt told Robert Wright: “The Biden administration is the revenge of the blob. After the Trumpian interlude, you brought back the professionals. The Obama team back in action and taking it on the road.”

The Biden foreign policy team has great confidence in its abilities to manage the world and has created greater disasters than any American administration since WWII.

Posted in Iran, Israel, Lebanon | Comments Off

The Prager Christmas Dinner

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Luke Ford

Dec. 25, 2023, Julie Hartman asked Dennis: “What do you do to celebrate Christmas?”

Dennis: “On Christmas day, I don’t listen to classical music. I listen to Christmas music. I revel in the ambience of the day. My wife converted to Judaism. She is as Jewish as I am from the perspective of Judaism, but she comes from a Christian home and we have all of her family over and we have a big Christmas dinner, which I love. I even wear my kipa at the dinner. It’s my way of both reminding everyone that it is the Jew in your family who's enjoying this with you, and while it is not my holy day, it is their holy day. I open up with a prayer.”

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Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes:

Works from Harvard in political theory have a special sociological interest because they come from a center of power and indicate the probable rationale for where the elite are next taking the government. The last 50 years have been dominated by Rawlsian redistributionism. Danielle Allen’s new book proposes a radicalization, correcting the flaws of Rawls. But it retains the basic animus of Rawlsianism, which is that justice is fundamentally about equality. The book is deeply indebted to the Harvard milieu and to a large group of interlocutors…
The focus of much of this work has been on diversity, meaning racial difference should be taken into account in normative democratic theorizing under the slogan “difference without domination” — the title of her co-edited collection with Rohini Somanathan. “Domination” is a term taken from a non-Harvard source, Phillip Pettit, who made the interesting move to replace the liberal notion of freedom as “non-interference” by the state (i.e., “negative freedom”) with the idea of non-domination. The point of the replacement was to relativize the goal of limiting power to the common knowledge of the people in the society in question about what was and was not legitimate interference in people’s lives. This meant that state intervention had no absolute limits. Some forms of power which rested on absolute rights of a negative kind, for example, socially disapproved cruelties, could be legitimately limited by the state. But, it also opened the door to “positive” interventions for the good of the recipient, however unwelcome…
…the majority may want coercive acts by the state that the minority regards as unjust and oppressive. And the minority may be oppressed by what is allowed, either by the state or by negative liberties. As Lawrence Bobo puts it, “modern racial inequality relies upon the market and informal racial bias to recreate, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.” Hence, the phrase “Laissez Faire Racism.” These are hierarchies of domination, which unjustly restrict opportunity, power, and influence. Rawlsian notions of justice, which preserve negative freedoms and prioritize redistribution with a market economy, do not touch, and indeed can exacerbate racial injustice, and assume homogeneity. Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, oriented to achieving a transformative consensus, fail to respect differences that should be preserved. Justice requires something else…
Democracy requires loss: people can vote, but they must “sacrifice” to the majority, which frequently(?) disempowers them. As a result, “democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”9 This turns to the emotional matters. To make these sacrifices acceptable, they should be honored as such, and grievances should be open to redress. And this can happen only if there is a basis in “friendship,” in which we are not strangers but are vulnerable to one another.
“Difference” is a challenge to this: it estranges and allows us to evade the mutual vulnerability necessary for friendship and trust. We need, she concludes, new habits for dealing with one another in spite of difference. Friendship answers this need: “friendship’s basic habits for establishing equality of material benefit, recognition, and agency do the same work as justice….the core practices that are necessary for a relationship to count as friendship are practices to equalize benefits and burdens and power sharing.” There is a further complication, addressed in Allen and Light’s volume: immigration. Can these arguments apply to immigration? To the digital sphere?
So who rules in this new order? On the one hand, she claims to support egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and self-transformative political liberty. On the other, she concedes that participation will not appeal to everyone. Similarly, the activity of political friendship and the making of bridging ties between quasi-representative group members with parallel figures from other groups, which is at the core of her model, will be for the very few. One gets the uncomfortable sense that she is describing a form of rule in which justice-enlightened multi-tasking people with good connections across groups, like herself, use state power to “steer,” one of her favorite terms, the rest of us.”

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Barack Obama is likely the next president of Harvard

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Luke Ford

Helen Andrews writes:

Barack Obama…doesn’t need to be paranoid about shoring up his internal power base. His power base is external and untouchable. He doesn’t need to protect an army of loyalists; everyone at Harvard is an Obama loyalist by default…
He is, in his own way, aristocratic. He has the effortless ease of a person to whom everything in life has come easily. He has had a charmed career dating back to his time at Harvard Law when his peers already assumed he would be president of the United States someday. He does not have to worry about what he will be doing for his next job.
The advantage of aristocrats is that they can say no to people. They can be relaxed. They don’t have the anxiety that characterizes everyone in a meritocratic system, the winners as much as the losers. In that sense, appointing Barack Obama president of Harvard would be a return to the institution’s ancient roots.

Posted in Barack Obama, Harvard | Comments Off