Blacklistin' Bret Vs. 'Unpatriotic Conservatives'

Unrepentant Iraq War backer Stephens slimes Ukraine critics

Blacklistin’ Bret, war publicist of The New York Times

I’ve already sent out a missive to paid subscribers today, but I’m sending out this lagniappe to everybody, because I think something kind of important happened today, something symbolic of our degraded public square. Some of this was in the previous newsletter; to be fair to my paid subscribers, I’m going to send out an extra post with original material.

The NYT neocon columnist Bret Stephens slammed me and other conservatives who have questioned US strategy on Ukraine as “objectively pro-Putin.”

He faults me for what he describes as a “manner of critique is ‘Russia is wrong, but .…’” — the implication being that one cannot both criticize Russia’s aggression, as I have always done, while at the same time believing that a) the West is partly at fault for baiting Russia, and b) that both sides need to come to the negotiating table and end this thing now before it spirals out of control. No, for Bret The Neocon, the only possible honest, respectable position is Forever War.

He goes on:

Is there a coherent philosophical grounding for these antiwar conservatives? On the surface, no.

Oh, bullshit. This popinjay gathers a nest of straw-man arguments, including

Some of the more dovish conservative voices on Ukraine, who fear that the war could set off a nuclear conflagration with Moscow, are uber-hawks when it comes to China: They argue that the resources we are pouring into Kyiv should be held in reserve for a looming battle with Beijing over Taiwan. They are also the same people who fault Biden’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan for making America seem weak, without appearing to be the least bit concerned about the signal that an American abandonment of Ukraine might also send.

It might be too complex for Stephens’s mind to grasp, but there are conservatives who believe that China is unquestionably our greatest adversary, and that by exhausting our war production capacity on this unwise proxy war with Russia, we are making it difficult and maybe, depending on the timing, impossible to mount a defense of the strategically important country of Taiwan. These conservatives might also reason that chancing nuclear war over Taiwan is a risk we ought to be prepared to take, but not over the strategically unimportant Ukraine. These conservatives might be wrong on one or both counts, but it’s a real issue. But not, I suppose, with warmongers like Bret Stephens, who seems to believe that America should fight all possible wars, and that even the ones that have proven immensely costly in retrospect were justified.

Stephens also says:

Some of the Tuckerite conservatives who accuse Zelensky of illiberal policies in Kyiv — such as banning pro-Russian political parties that could be expected to serve as Vladimir Putin’s puppets in the event of a Russian military victory — go out of their way to celebrate the illiberal policies of the government in Budapest.

I’m not going to fault Zelensky for banning pro-Russian political parties in a time of war with Russia, though it is certainly illiberal. Even liberal democracies do those things in times of war (e.g., wartime censorship), often with justification. But to compare banning political parties opposed to the government with what Viktor Orban does in Hungary is only plausible if you know nothing about Hungary — and that’s what Stephens is counting on. If you follow the link, it takes you to an AP story about the CPAC Hungary conference — the implication being that simply being an American conservative who favors Hungary is evidence of your malignity.

If you follow a link within that story to another one in which the AP describes what makes Hungary “illiberal,” you’ll see that it raises the canard that Orban, through his cronies, has gained control of “80 percent of the media.” Take a look at this explanation by the former Die Welt journalist (now media studies professor in Budapest) Boris Kalnoky:

In a nutshell, after the collapse of communism, the post-communist elites were able to hold on to their networks and influence in what had been up to then the media of the Communist Party. Fidesz later acted to counterbalance that disadvantage. However, even now, media opposed to the government of Viktor Orbán clearly dictate the themes of the national conversation. As for suppressing free media, that is impossible. The legal guarantees for press freedom and simple market dynamics ensure that that can never happen.

As I’ve repeatedly explained here, to say that Orban controls 80 percent of the media in Hungary, and therefore dominates the media landscape, is like saying that if Rupert Murdoch bought up a bunch of community newspapers in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, the Right would dominate the New York newspaper market — this, on the grounds that the Times and the Daily News are only two of many papers. The anti-Orban papers are the most influential here.

Kalnoky goes on to say that people in Hungary, in all political camps, do not share the Western view that journalism is meant to be a curb on power. It is rather seen as an instrument of power. The US model of independent, aspiring-to-neutrality journalism does not exist here.

I wonder if the illiberalism of the Zelensky government coming up with a blacklist of allegedly pro-Russian US intellectuals and writers troubles Stephens. What makes one “pro-Russian” in Kyiv’s eyes? Skepticism of NATO’s involvement in this war. Stephens is surely untroubled by it, because has done the same thing with this column. Glenn Greenwald:

If you worry about US weapons stockpiles being depleted so Ukraine can resist Russia — that is to say, if you care more about your own country than Zelensky’s — then you are a de facto Putinist, according to Bret Stephens of The New York Times.

He then reveals what he believes is the true reason conservatives question the war: because deep down, we’re fascists. I’m not kidding; he really goes there, the dirtbag.

I’m not losing sleep over what Bret Stephens thinks of me, but it infuriates me that this kind of argumentation still has cachet in the American mainstream. You will recall that Bret’s ideological confrère, David Frum, disgraced himself by sliming Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and others as “unpatriotic conservatives” for not supporting the Iraq War. Twenty years after that disaster, Frum is at it again (he similarly trashed US Sen. Mike Lee the other day), and now Stephens. Both men stand by their initial support of the Iraq War, which is the greatest US foreign policy disaster in history.

Among my conservative friends, I’d say about half, maybe slightly more than half, support the current US policy towards arming Ukraine. I think they’re wrong, but I don’t at all think that they are bad people for holding the views that they do. But then, I suppose to Stephens, this is evidence of my bad faith, because I would say “_____ is wrong about NATO and Ukraine, but she is my friend, and a smart and good person.” Can’t have that, can we?

In fact, Bret Stephens and his neocon warmonger buddies are doing the very same thing that the Woke do: make actual democratic debate impossible by smearing the motives of their opponents — that is, by making the political personal.

Today Fox News took another dirty shot at Tucker Carlson by leaking to The New York Times a private text he sent to his producer:

Tucker Carlson January 7, 2021 — 04:18:04 PM UTC

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

Fox lawyers, the Times, and others are freaking out over that mildly racial line about white men fighting. (Never mind that black people and their white allies often say the same or worse on TV, and nobody cares.) By far the most interesting thing about that message, though, was watching Tucker reason himself away from dehumanizing his political opponent, even someone as vile as an Antifa member. What you see there in that message is one of media’s most potent political pugilists realizing that it is possible to hate your opponent so much that you become a monster. Who will comment on that remarkable set of lines — made even more remarkable because it was a 2018 Antifa attack on his Washington home that drove him and his family out of DC? Almost nobody. Because that one unfortunate racial line, mild as it is, is all that matters to Tucker haters. It’s so predictable.

Now that Tucker Carlson is off the air — possibly because of phone calls the Murdochs had with Zelensky — there are, to my knowledge, no war critics on American national television. Not one. Given what we have learned about the lies and corruption tied to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given the recent revelation that former Acting CIA chief Mike Morell cooked up a phony letter, signed by 50 other top former US intel officials, dismissing Ukraine-connected rich guy Hunter Biden’s recently discovered laptop as “Russian disinformation,” isn’t it interesting that there is not a soul at any of the broadcast or cable networks, or writing a column at any of the major US daily papers, who questions the war?

There is more dissent from the government position on the war in the Hungarian media, the one allegedly controlled by war critic Viktor Orban, than in the American media. Seriously. Think about that.

RFK Talks To UnHerd

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not going to get very far in his Democratic presidential campaign, but he seems to be playing the Ralph Nader/Ron Paul gadfly role of saying things that need saying. From his interview with UnHerd:

Freddie Sayers: [Your opposition to vaccines is] not going to be easy to set aside, as every interview will mention it. What would be your message to mainstream Democrats who might be interested in some of the things you’re saying, but have made up their mind about you based on the vaccines issue?

RFK Jr: I’m talking about issues that I think most Americans and probably most Democrats are concerned about: the systematic gutting of the middle class; the elevation of corporations — particularly polluting corporations; and, from the financial industry to the military-industrial complex, the corrupt merger of state and corporate power. Through wars, bank bailouts and lockdowns, we’ve been systematically hollowing out the American middle class, and printing money to make billionaires richer. During the Covid lockdown, there was a $4.4 trillion shift in wealth from the American middle class to this new oligarchy that we created — 500 new billionaires with the lockdowns, and the billionaires that we already had increased their wealth by 30%.

That’s just one of the assaults, and then you go to the bailout of the Silicon Valley Bank, and the war in Ukraine, which is costing us $113 billion; the war in Iraq and the wars that followed that have cost us $8 trillion. The total cost of the lockdowns was $16 trillion, and we got nothing for any of it. Is it any wonder that we don’t have a middle class left in the United States of America? Unless we rebuild the middle class, and rebuild our economy, our national security is going to fail, and our democracy is going to fail. 

FS: You’ve been using the word “corporatism” a lot in interviews — what do you mean by it?

RFK: It’s the domination of government, and particularly democratic governments, by corporate power. I’ve spent 40 years litigating against the agencies, the regulatory agencies in the United States, so I can tell you that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is effectively run by the oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry. When I was on the trial team that brought the Monsanto cases, and we ended up with a $13 billion settlement after winning three trials, we uncovered that the head of the pesticide division at the EPA was secretly working for Monsanto, and was running that agency to promote the mercantile ambitions of that business rather than the public interest. He was killing studies, he was fixing studies, he was ghost-writing studies. And that’s true throughout the agencies.

If you look at the pharmaceutical industry in our country, it runs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA gets 50% of its budget from Big Pharma. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends half of its budget purchasing vaccines from Big Pharma, and then distributing it. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is just an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. It doesn’t do the basic research that we want them to be doing — about where all these diseases come from. The studies that do get done are studies that develop pharmaceutical products. And then the NIH collects royalties when the pharma company sells those products. The regulator is essentially a partner with the regulated industry. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is run by the railroads in our country and by the airlines; the banks have utterly corrupted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and the media has corrupted the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

FS: Are you alleging actual corruption within all these government agencies, or is it more of a general sense that there’s a revolving door between them and industry? 

RFK Jr: It’s both. There’s legalised bribery and illegal bribery. The rules governing conflicts of interest aren’t just ignored — they’re systematically ignored. And the rules started out not strong enough to really protect the public interest. You have both things going on — honest graft and dishonest graft.

More:

FS: This sounds like a traditional Left-of-centre critique, but you’re now being described as Right-wing. Do you think the old distinctions between Left and Right are breaking down? 

RFK Jr: I consider myself a traditional Kennedy liberal. I don’t know of any values that my uncle John Kennedy harboured, or my father shared, that I don’t share. They had antipathy and suspicion towards war and the military-industrial complex; they did not want corporations running the American government; they were completely against censorship. They were against the use of fear as a governing tool, and they spoke out about it often. If you go down the list of things that they believed in, I don’t think there’s really any daylight between me and what they believed. 

But I do think that there is a growing coalition in this country of populist forces, on the Left and Right, that are convening now and finding common ground. And I think that really is probably the only thing that is going to rescue American democracy.

And:

FS: One name you mentioned there is Tucker Carlson, who obviously lost his job last week. He is thought of as a Right-wing conservative, but seems to agree with you on a lot of things. What is your view of Tucker Carlson?

RFK Jr: There was nobody, during most of his career, who was more critical of Tucker Carlson than I was. But I think Tucker has evolved over the past three years into probably one of the leading populist voices in our country. He’s one of the only people on American television that’s talking about free speech. It’s extraordinary — when I was growing up, the people who were most militant, who were the First Amendment absolutists, were journalists. The average American journalist seems not the least bit concerned by government-orchestrated censorship. It’s very, very strange.

Or interested in principled opposition to America’s war policy regarding Ukraine and Russia. Read or listen to the whole thing — at least to the point where he starts talking about the Dutch farmers. RFK Jr. really is an old-fashioned left-wing populist. I would find it hard to vote for him, as a social conservative, but if I had to choose between him and Joe Biden, there’s no question that I’d be a Kennedy man.

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