Sunday, September 29, 2024

The Republican freak show. The Atlantic - Politics / by Peter Wehner

The Republican Freak Show
 / Sep 28, 2024 at 11:21 PM
The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.

Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.” But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago, he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an anti-transgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. Robinson wrote in response, “And the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!” Politico reports that Robinson’s email address was also registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking affairs. (Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has denied all of the claims.)

These allegations aren’t entirely shocking, because Robinson—a self-described “MAGA Republican”—has shown signs in the past of being a deeply troubled person. (My Atlantic colleague David Graham wrote a superb profile of Robinson in May.)

[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]

Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, Robinson wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” During the Obama presidency, Robinson wrote, “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” He promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi. He is also an election denier, claiming that Joe Biden “stole the election.”

In 2017, Robinson wrote, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”). And he supported a total ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he admitted that he’d paid for an abortion in the past.

Much of this was known before he ran for governor. No matter. Republicans in North Carolina nominated him anyway, and Donald Trump has lavished praise on the man he calls his “friend,” offering Robinson his “full and total endorsement” and dubbing him “one of the hottest politicians” in the country.

SOME REPUBLICANS ARE distancing themselves from Robinson partly because they are worried he’ll be defeated, but also because they’re even more concerned that he will drag down other Republicans, including Trump. But the truth is that Robinson is a perfect addition to the Republican ensemble.

The GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has been relentlessly promoting the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has promoted fluoride conspiracy theories and posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden. Yet another Republican member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, was ejected from a family-friendly musical for vaping, being disruptive, and groping her date (and vice versa). She also falsely claimed that school authorities “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats.”

The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who is under House investigation for having sex with an underage girl, “used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” according to a source Godfrey spoke with.  

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

This is not normal.

The GOP is home to a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who describes in her book shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, as well as killing an unnamed goat. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson, claimed that COVID was “pre-planned” by a secret group of “elites” even while he promoted disinformation claiming that Ivermectin, which is commonly used to deworm livestock, was an effective treatment for COVID. (Because people were hospitalized for taking the drug, the FDA tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.”)

Earlier this month, Trump attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City. He took as his guest a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who has claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, referred to Kamala Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” and said that Democrats should be tried for treason and executed. (Trump has called Loomer a “woman with courage” and a “free spirit.”)

Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, floated the idea of having Trump declare martial law so that he could “rerun” the 2020 election. He suggested that the president should seize voting machines. He predicted that a governor will soon declare war. He has also warned about the dangers of a “new world order” in which people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab “have an intent to track every single one of us, and they use it under the skin. They use a means by which it’s under the skin.”

Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and an unofficial Trump adviser, recently hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. He praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as having been “vindicated on everything” and described Jones as “the most extraordinary person” he has ever met. (Two years ago, Sandy Hook families won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional-distress lawsuits against Jones for his repeatedly calling the 2012 school shooting, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to get more gun-control legislation passed. As The New York Times reports, “The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.”)

Carlson, one of the most influential figures on the American right, has also peddled the claim that the violence on January 6, 2021, was a “false flag” operation involving the FBI and used to discredit Trump supporters; alleged that former Attorney General Bill Barr covered up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein; and promoted testicle tanning.

Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat who recently endorsed Trump. The former president has asked Kennedy to be on his transition team should Trump win the election and “help pick the people who will be running the government and I am looking forward to that.” Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes, “I like him, and I respect him. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy.”

Sara Dorn of Forbes listed some of the conspiracy theories that Kennedy has promoted—vaccines can cause autism; COVID was genetically engineered and is targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people (and Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are mostly immune); mass shootings are linked to Prozac; the 2004 presidential election was stolen from John Kerry; the CIA was involved in the death of his uncle John F. Kennedy; and Sirhan Sirhan was wrongly convicted of murdering his father.

In addition, Kennedy, who has revealed that he had a parasitic brain worm, told the podcaster Joe Rogan that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.” He believes that chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender. He claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance. He’s said that Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of NPR, is a CIA agent. “Even journals like Smithsonian and National Geographic … appear to be compromised by the CIA,” according to Kennedy.

[Read: Why RFK Jr. endorsed Trump]

According to Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy, her father chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, bungee-corded it to the roof of their car, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, New York. (The severed head streamed “whale juice” down the side of the family minivan on the trip home. “It was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country magazine in 2012. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”) Kennedy has also recently admitted to leaving the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, as a joke.

Donald Trump Jr. has said that he could see Kennedy being given some sort of oversight role in any number of government agencies if his father is reelected, including the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can see a dozen roles I’d love to see him in.”

Like Mark Robinson, RFK Jr. fits right in.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an essay titled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” warned that no one who “voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood” will be able to justify himself to the living, or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children. Don’t surrender to corruption, the great Russian writer and dissident said; strive for the liberation of our souls by not participating in the lie. Don’t consent to the lies. The challenges facing Solzhenitsyn were quite different, and certainly far more difficult, than anything we face, but his fundamental point still holds.

The Trump movement is built on layers of lies. It’s late, but it’s never too late to liberate yourself from them. One word of truth outweighs the world.


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Friday, September 27, 2024

The Problems with Polls | Samuel Earle | The New York Review of Books


archive.md
The Problems with Polls | Samuel Earle | The New York Review of Books
October 17, 2024, issue.
30 - 39 minutes

https://archive.md/Y7AmQ



The twenty-first century was supposed to be a new golden age for political polling. In 2008 Nate Silver, a thirty-year-old sports journalist, became an overnight celebrity after predicting Barack Obama’s election victory with uncanny accuracy, calling forty-nine of fifty states correctly on his personal website, FiveThirtyEight. His method was to aggregate multiple polls, weight them based on various factors, and then subject them to the kind of forensic statistical analysis used to evaluate the performance of baseball players.

In the 2012 presidential election, Silver went from celebrity to sage. He picked the winner in all fifty states while traditional pollsters delivered mixed results. “You know who won the election tonight?” asked Rachel Maddow. “Nate Silver.” According to Marie Davidian, the president of the American Statistical Association, the reason Silver “could predict the election perfectly” was simple: “dispassionate use of the data.” The New Republic declared that it was “1936 all over again”—a reference to the year that launched modern polling, when pollsters like George Gallup and Elmo Roper predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory, upstaging more old-fashioned election forecasts that he would lose to Alfred Landon. Their innovation was the sample survey—gathering responses from a group of people deemed representative of the entire population, according to characteristics such as age, gender, and race, rather than gathering as many responses as possible through much larger but untargeted opt-in surveys or straw polls. Silver’s innovation was to bring the sample survey into the age of big data.

The excitement of 2012 proved short-lived. In the 2016 election, polls were ubiquitous—by one count, television networks discussed election forecasts around sixteen times a day—but Donald Trump defied almost all their predictions and won the presidency. Worse than that, the polls were accused of enabling his victory by creating a fog of complacency that inadvertently sank Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. In his book A Higher Loyalty (2018), for example, former FBI director James Comey expressed regret for publicizing the bureau’s resumed investigation into her e-mails mere days before the election. “I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win,” he wrote.

After Trump won, the polling industry joined journalists—many of whom were lulled into similar complacency by misleading polling numbers—in a period of soul-searching. How had their supposedly objective methods underestimated Trump’s support so starkly? Their British colleagues’ failure to foresee the Brexit vote months earlier enhanced the mood of doubt and introspection. Then, in 2020, after concerted efforts by polling companies and their aggregators to correct previous mistakes, the polls ended up being more inaccurate than at any time since 1980. The polling industry plunged into a reputational crisis from which it has yet to recover fully.

In Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, the journalist and data scientist G. Elliott Morris sets out to defend the polling industry against its detractors and restore some self-confidence to his peers. “The rush to declare polling dead is misguided,” he writes. Morris understands the challenges polls face today: plummeting response rates, rising costs, erratic voting behavior, and public suspicion of pollsters (particularly among Republicans). But he argues that the real problem is not so much the polls as the public’s and the press’s misunderstandings of how they work. For Morris, the answer is not fewer polls but more of them, with audiences better educated to interpret and—most importantly—appreciate them. After all, he asks, “would we want to go back to sending out newspaper reporters to trawl the streets for enough willing participants to release straw polls before voting day?”

Morris’s bullishness is typical of the polling industry, a reflex that shields it from facing knottier questions about polling’s political and social usefulness. To many, the point of it seems self-evident: political polls measure public opinion, and every democracy should want its leaders to know more about what the public thinks than the broad results that elections can provide. “Good polls can reveal the will of the people,” Morris writes. “Condemning them as worthless is dangerous to this cause.” But that obscures their greatest achievement and larger influence, which lies not in any particular prediction or service to democracy but in the industry’s complete co-option of our understanding of public opinion, a concept that predates polling but that we can no longer imagine without it. The nature of this conquest now seems so natural, so self-evident, that it passes without remark—even in a book on the achievements of polling.

Public opinion has always been an elusive concept. “How does this vague, fluctuating complex thing we call public opinion—omnipotent yet indeterminate—a sovereign to whose voice everyone listens, yet whose words, because he speaks with as many tongues as the waves of a boisterous sea, it is so hard to catch—how does public opinion express itself in America?” the British jurist, historian, and Liberal politician James Bryce asked in The American Commonwealth (1888). A half-century later Gallup invoked Bryce and announced that he had found the answer: polling with sample surveys. It was as if polls would do for public opinion in the twentieth century what Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs had done for animal motion in the nineteenth century: reveal to a wide audience what was previously imperceptible to the naked eye. But like those of photography, polling’s claims of accuracy—one early pollster called the sample survey a “psychological X-Ray”—veiled an intrinsic deception: it was all too easy to forget how reality is framed and flattened by the medium’s design. (Pollsters have cultivated comparisons with photography, describing their polls as “snapshots”—ironically as a way to prove both their accuracy and their partialness.)

Following their success in 1936, Gallup and his fellow pollsters—the term was coined in 1939—promised that polling would revolutionize not only our understanding of public opinion but democracy itself. No longer would voters need to rely on elections to make their voices heard. No longer would politicians need to gauge public opinion by the size and volume of the crowds that cheered or jeered them or by the ventriloquism of journalists. Thanks to their “new instrument,” Gallup wrote, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times,” realizing a “truer democracy” and ensuring—“with little probability of error”—that dictatorships will “become mere bogey stories to frighten our great-grandchildren.” Such optimism was shared by Roper, who claimed that the public opinion survey represented “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.”

Gallup and Roper did not invent the sample survey. They imported it from the increasingly professionalized field of market research, where both their careers began. It is hard to determine whether advancing democracy was an honest goal or simply part of their marketing spiel. But it’s clear they thought that political polling would make them rich. “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” Gallup reasoned. “I saw [it] as a veritable gold mine if we could learn fast enough how to use it in all of its ramifications,” Roper said.

These early pollsters preferred to ground the industry’s origin story in the scientific method rather than the profit motive. To this end, journals, institutions, and complex terminology proliferated in the field’s first decades, giving polling the aura of scientific inquiry. Gallup played the role of scientist, comparing his craft to that of a meteorologist. He made sure his name was always prefixed by “Dr.”—he had received his Ph.D. in applied psychology in 1928—and he made a great performance of not voting in elections, which supposedly proved that he was separate from “the new science of public opinion” he studied. “We have not the slightest interest in who wins an election,” Gallup said. “All we want to do is be right.” Roper agreed, describing the field as an “infant science.”

Some of polling’s problems in measuring public opinion are indeed typical of the natural sciences: supposedly “objective” methods were, and still are, suffused with the prejudices of their day, creating blind spots and distortions that only become clear in hindsight. In the early decades of polling, for instance, college-educated white men were widely assumed to be more interested in politics than anyone else, and so survey research drastically underrepresented black people, women, and low-income households in pursuit of accuracy. (Surveyors also preferred spending time in more affluent areas and households, while poorer neighborhoods were sometimes avoided out of fear.) Such problems persist: one explanation for polling’s failure to predict Trump’s win in 2016 is that college graduates, who were more likely to favor Clinton, were overrepresented among respondents.

Other problems with polling are typical of the social sciences: every attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. The effects are unpredictable: some social scientists record a bandwagon effect, when people rally behind a candidate who is ahead in the polls, while other studies point to an underdog effect, when the opposite happens. Add to this respondents’ hypersensitivity toward the wording and ordering of questions—Roper once quipped that “you can ask a question in such a way as to get any answer you want”—and any analogy between opinion polls and “a weather forecast,” which Morris makes at least twice, collapses. (Like “snapshot,” the weather forecast analogy suggests both accuracy and unreliability.)

But the most fundamental problem with polling is that the phenomenon it claims to record—public opinion—has no coherent meaning or existence. The polling industry resolves this conundrum by simply making “public opinion” synonymous with its methods: polls record public opinion; public opinion is what polls record. Skeptics could see this sleight of hand from the start. “Dr. Gallup does not make the public more articulate,” Lindsay Rogers, a political scientist at Columbia University, wrote in an early polemic against polling in 1949. “He only estimates how in replying to certain questions, it would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘don’t know.’ Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy, Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”

Polling, in this analysis, was not so much an infant science as an infantilizing one: political matters were reduced to facile either/or stances, with little concern for how lightly or intensely one held an opinion or whether the opinion even existed before the survey. One of the oldest and most ambiguous concepts in the social sciences—a survey of the literature in 1965 quoted almost fifty conflicting attempts at a definition of “public opinion”—was reduced to a simple percentage: “60% think this, 40% think that.”

The conceits of such a percentage—its mirage of an equally informed, equally engaged citizenry, its impression of a country that has spoken—have been criticized by figures as varied as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pierre Bourdieu, for whom public opinion was too amorphous and impressionable to be fixed in the form of a number. Those conceits have also been exposed by many researchers. In an experiment conducted in 1980, people were asked whether they thought “the 1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed: a third gave an opinion, even though the act does not exist. In 1995 The Washington Post replicated the study with similar results, but found that another tenth could be goaded into an opinion with a follow-up question. (“Which [stance] comes closest to the way you feel?”) When people were told that either President Clinton or the Republicans wanted to repeal the act, more than half of respondents had a view. More recently, a UK poll found that nearly half of respondents claimed an opinion on a nonexistent politician, who actually proved relatively popular. (Anyone who has knowingly nodded along to a name they’ve never heard, hoping to avoid embarrassment, can relate to this.)

No poll can ever be sure what portion of answers are similarly offered off the cuff or to what extent respondents hold their positions outside the survey setting. The sociologist Leo Bogart said in 1972, “The first question a pollster should ask is: ‘Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?’” But usually polling companies don’t want to know: adding questions costs time and money, and ideally they want everyone to have an opinion on everything.

Morris has strong opinions about polling and a wealth of experience beyond his years. Born in 1996, he rose to prominence while still an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin by accurately predicting that the Democrats would regain the House in the 2018 midterms. After graduating he joined The Economist as a data analyst and journalist. He published Strength in Numbers in July 2022. In May 2023 he was announced as Nate Silver’s successor at FiveThirtyEight. (Silver left amid a round of job cuts at FiveThirtyEight, now under the stewardship of Disney, with about two thirds of its staff reportedly laid off.)

Morris’s book is filled with fighting talk: whatever the doubters say, polls remain “one of the most democratizing forces in American political history”; they can “reveal the will of the people”; they serve “as a pipeline from the governed to the government and as a bulwark against despots”; they are “the key to social knowledge”; they “hand a megaphone to the voice of the people, causing it to reverberate through the halls of government.” In one of his most strident moments, Morris even suggests that critics of polling are enemies of democracy: “In many cases, the denigration of polls is made by elites, elected officials, and ideological activists who have a stake in the public’s voice not being heard”—a claim that would be easier to take seriously if he engaged with the critical scholarship on the polling industry. Rogers’s 1949 polemic and Gallup’s combative response receive a few paragraphs. Susan Herbst and Sarah Igo are referenced in the acknowledgements, but any influence of their important work on how polling hollows out understanding of political participation and on the foundational ties between the polling industry and market research is hard to find in the main text of Morris’s book.

The reasons Morris gives for his fervent faith in polling are underwhelming and overwrought. In the introduction he celebrates how Republicans and Democrats now use polling to determine which presidential primary candidates participate in debates, hailing this as proof that “you don’t have to look far to find concrete examples of polls serving meaningful functions in our electoral, judicial, and governing systems.” He omits the fact that even major polling companies have criticized this use of their findings. (“I just don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate,” Scott Keeter, then Pew’s director of survey research, said in 2016.) Later we learn how in 1960 John F. Kennedy’s pioneering pollsters “advised…a strategy for his upcoming debate [with Richard Nixon], telling him to come off strong, competent and understandable to the average American”—leaving us to wonder how any candidate could ever have fared without such scintillating guidance.

But Morris also knows that polls are not the “crystal balls” that their most avid cheerleaders sometimes claim them to be, and he vacillates between championing their indispensable place in democracy and admitting their fallibility. Morris the populist revels in nebulous expressions like “the will of the people,” “the power of the people,” and “the voice of the people.” Morris the scientist takes every opportunity to plead for caution and emphasize plurality. Morris the populist prevails: by the book’s conclusion, he is still insisting that “the will of the people is now quantified and easily accessible by any reformer, legislator or interested citizen”—despite beginning the same paragraph with a nod to “what we have learned about the uncertainty in polling and the varying quality of public opinion across issues.”

Caught between the seriousness of its science and the need to market its product, the entire polling industry is trapped in a version of this double act. Gallup was no different. As Igo noted in The Averaged American (2007), he wrote that “the American people are as various as their land” and in the same article repeatedly invoked the mythical “average man” discovered by polls.

Morris concedes that, overall, polling has yet to live up to its lofty promises. But his reasons for why polls don’t work are even less convincing than his reasons for why they do. His main targets for blame are not pollsters or their methods but the public and, above all, the press. As I read his defense of polling, the words of Oscar Wilde came repeatedly to mind: “The play was a great success. The audience was a failure.”

According to Morris, the public has failed to appreciate that every poll comes with a margin of error, so really no poll can be wrong: “Consumers of polling and election models should not trick themselves into mistaking polls and projections for a science they’re not—and will likely never be.” While more polls—particularly in the very close 2024 presidential election—have started to include the margin of error in their results, Morris’s mixed messages will hardly help confused consumers: he advises resisting total faith in polls but also says that “they are scientific” and that “informed readers” should turn to “RealClearPolitics and Pollster to know who’s ahead, and to FiveThirtyEight to know whether they’ll win.”

But Morris saves his harshest words for the media, decrying “the damage done to the polling industry by an overconfident and naïve press.” The polling industry and the media have always had a difficult, if also mutually dependent, relationship. While many journalists initially resisted polls as an encroachment on their craft and authority—“Today, unless you can say ‘According to the Poop-A-Doop survey, Umpty-ump percent of the people chew gum while they read Hot Shot News!’ you fail to make an impression,” one journalist lamented in 1950—it’s also true that from the start, the pollsters’ most important client was the press, and the two quickly established symbiotic ties. The press commissioned polls to generate news stories and bolstered its reporting with persuasive statistics, while polls relied on the press for funding and, crucially, publicity. By the end of the century, most major news organizations had their own in-house polling operations or formal partnerships with polling companies.

This partnership inevitably affected the nature and purpose of polls: newspapers didn’t want to pay for boring findings; they wanted engaging, dramatic stories, tales of conflict and controversy. The polling industry obliged, with varying degrees of reluctance and enthusiasm, and received not just money and publicity but an alibi: the media could now be blamed for its worst traits—exaggerating social conflict, simplifying issues, overstating accuracy.

In the same vein, Morris insists that whereas the media “want attention-grabbing, confident predictions,” pollsters understand “all the nuance and uncertainty that are inherent in their data.” Elsewhere, Morris concedes that “pollsters systematically overestimate their own accuracy,” but the nature and gravity of this contradiction—that pollsters understand and systematically ignore inconvenient truths—elude him.

The fact is that polling companies need engaging, dramatic results, not only because such results keep their patrons in the press happy but also because interesting poll results travel further and faster, spreading the name of the company and thus attracting more clients. While Morris laments how the pollsters and the press both do a “poor job” conveying polling’s limitations, with no account—no mention—of the business side of polling and no sense of how polls need publicity, he misses how pollsters can become invested in their own simplifications and misinterpretations. In pursuit of both accuracy and profit, compromises are made.

It’s hard to believe, given the number of polls being conducted in 2024, but Gallup and Roper were always skeptical of election forecasts. “All of us in the field of public opinion research regard election forecasting as one of our least important contributions,” Gallup said; Roper thought they were “socially useless” and might “do very much more harm than good.” But election forecasts are the only verifiable “theory” that this “science” puts forward: their accuracy is fact-checked by the final ballot in a way that other opinion polls never can be. For polling companies, election campaigns are thus marketing campaigns. The results are twofold: an inordinate number of polling companies participating in the game of predicting elections, on the one hand (in 2020, there were at least 1,572 state-level preelection polls, including 438 in the final two weeks alone, by over 200 different polling companies—all eager, in Morris’s telling, to strengthen American democracy); and on the other, a huge investment in election-forecasting over opinion-measuring methods.

Polls may have once promised to make politics about more than elections, but in practice they have surely done the opposite, with each vote presaged by months, sometimes years, of obsessively dissected forecasts and horse-race coverage. No one embodies this trend more than the politically indifferent, election-obsessed Nate Silver. “With the politics stuff, I just like the elections part,” he told The New Yorker as he was leaving FiveThirtyEight.

Perhaps the polling industry’s standing in society today is most analogous to that of the advertising industry that spawned it: polling organizations are similarly ubiquitous, profitable, and treated cynically by members of the public, who suspect an ulterior motive. Like advertising, political polls are increasingly associated with attempts to manipulate public opinion, tailor messaging in superficial ways, and inform public relations strategies. Politicians of all stripes denigrate polls in public and obsess over them in private. “I don’t have a pollster,” Trump declared on the campaign trail in 2015, before soon hiring one. “No one tells me what to say.” In the months before Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw his candidacy, his advisers frequently attacked the polls in the press for underestimating his support. Despite polls that increasingly indicated he was unlikely to defeat Trump, Biden refused to leave the race until the political fallout from his disastrous debate performance forced his hand.

In the 1990s a new technology replaced polling as the tool destined to transform democracy: the Internet. In a fuller realization of polling’s potential, people would be able to speak up and share their opinions at all times, leading to a better-informed public, more responsive governments, and a truer version of democracy for all. Just as Gallup promised to bring the “town meeting” ideal into the twentieth century—“This time, the whole nation is within the doors,” he wrote—the Internet promised to bring it into the twenty-first. “The function of the Net, in this conception, is to facilitate a running national poll of public opinion, with immediate electronic feedback from citizens to government and vice-versa,” the political scientist Bruce Bimber explained in 1998.

Soon a specific kind of website became the medium for these hopes and dreams: the social media platform, Facebook and Twitter in particular, which launched in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Twitter pitched itself, in a way reminiscent of Gallup’s early polls, as “The Town Hall Meeting… In Your Pocket” and a “real-time measure of public opinion.” It also seems relevant that as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg first made a name for himself by designing an online poll: FaceMash had users choose the more attractive of two female students from their photos from the Internet and built a university-wide ranking. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,” the young Zuck wrote on his blog before launching the short-lived site. Facebook followed a year later, and soon he was celebrated as a champion of democracy.

Like the polling industry, social media platforms’ ties to the advertising industry were either downplayed or ignored: the aim was to give people a voice to enrich democracy (and then use what they said and did to sell them stuff in increasingly sophisticated ways). Social media platforms arrived at the same convenient conclusion as the polling industry: healthy markets and healthy democracies needed the same thing—to know what the public thinks. But surveys were no longer necessary: through social media, users’ thoughts and actions could be tracked at all times. By 2008, advertising gurus excitedly announced, the Internet had already overtaken all other market research methods—“postal, face-to-face and telephone”—to become “the leading global modality for quantitative data collection.” “No longer is recruitment an issue; no longer is the phrasing of the question an issue; no longer is the duration of the interview an issue; and no longer is respondent fatigue an issue,” Finn Raben, director general of ESOMAR, one of Europe’s largest conglomerates of market researchers, enthused in 2010. “If the topic is of interest, then the material is already there…thus is born the ‘Age of Listening’ as opposed to the ‘Age of Questioning.’”

What the advertising industry celebrated as “listening,” however, others saw as something more sinister. The digital economy, premised on the invasion of privacy, was soon denounced as “surveillance capitalism.” Information became its lifeblood, and digital companies developed insatiable appetites for more and more information on users, however trivial. This created a double dynamic: a desire not just to record information but to generate more information.

This is one of social media’s most significant resonances with the polling industry. Just as polls want respondents to have an opinion on everything, cuing views through specific questions and portraying an opinionated public while claiming a neutral detachment, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now X, repeat the same trick on an even greater scale. “You don’t have to have an opinion on everything” has become a refrain online, reflecting how much pressure is applied in the opposite direction. Facebook asks its users, “What’s on your mind?” X prompts its users, “What is happening!?” (The panicked exclamation mark is a new addition, neatly symbolizing both the platform’s neediness toward its users’ information and our disorienting present moment.) Shortly after purchasing the platform in October 2022 for $44 billion, Elon Musk implored users, “If I may beg your indulgence, please add your voice to the public dialogue!”

Social media companies assure the public that their ravenous hunger for opinions simply stems from their deeply felt desire to give people “a voice.” (Speaking at Georgetown University in 2019, Zuckerberg used the word “voice” over thirty times in his thirty-five-minute address.) But what they really want is a reaction: a “like,” a “share,” an emoji, a short comment, or some other form of quantifiable communication that, following Lindsay Rogers, we might call twenty-first-century “baby-talk”—information that can then be packaged, analyzed, and sold. In this monetized vision of the “town square,” more talk means more profit, and users are ideally both perpetual pollsters—always courting reactions to their thoughts and experiences—and obsessive respondents, offering simplified views on a huge number of issues, from politics to brands of toothpaste.

The affinity between social media and polling is perfectly captured by the polling function on many social media sites, which brings the straw poll into the age of big data. Twitter launched one in 2015, and Facebook followed two years later. As Twitter’s new CEO, Musk was initially fond of using the feature. In November 2022 he announced that his decision to reinstate Trump—who was banned from the platform after the storming of the Capitol on January 6—would be determined by a Twitter poll. More than 15 million users voted, and 51.8 percent voted “yes.” “The people have spoken,” Musk tweeted. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” (Trump’s account was restored, but it wasn’t until August of this year that he added his voice to the platform’s public dialogue once again.) In December 2022, facing mounting criticism over his leadership of Twitter, Musk held another Twitter poll on whether he should continue as CEO. The online survey lasted twelve hours and 17.5 million users responded, with 57.5 percent wanting him out. Musk remains in his post—and his penchant for hosting polls seems to have passed. But he continues to defend their integrity. In March, spreading the conspiracy theory that the polling industry uses fake interviews, he posted: “The vast majority of polls are bs. Polls on this platform at least reach some real users.”

In 1921, as the editor of the student newspaper at the University of Iowa, the nineteen-year-old George Gallup wanted to attract new readers. He published a notorious article titled “The Unattractive Women,” which took the form of an ostensibly overheard conversation between two male students and declared that it was women’s “duty to…make themselves as attractive as they can”—a duty that, like Zuckerberg some eight decades later, Gallup seemed to think many women on his campus were failing at. The article led to a spike in circulation and on-campus misogyny. “All of the girls were angry,” Gallup later recalled, but “from that day on, the newspaper was eagerly read.”

Gallup’s interest in getting attention and his desire to discover “what the public wants” were two sides of the same coin. His Ph.D. dissertation sought to pioneer an “objective” way of measuring what parts of a newspaper readers spent time on. Gallup found that they really enjoyed looking at comic strips and pictures, not the hard news they liked to claim in surveys, and he called on “the modern newspaper” to offer more of both “to get itself read” and become more appealing “from an advertising point of view.” In Gallup’s crowd-pleasing quest, polls were doubly useful: they were both a means to discover what people wanted (respondents’ dishonesty notwithstanding) and a product that people wanted—a form of journalism that, like cartoons and pictures, could make politics light and accessible.  

Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn’t to say that polls don’t have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense—a vague and sometimes misleading sense—of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn’t faring quite so well.

Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact—all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.

—September 18, 2024

THE RIGHT-WING POLITBURO HASN'T SETTLED ON A PARTY LINE REGARDING ERIC ADAMS, BUT IT'S CLEAR WHAT CORRECT THINKING WILL BE

No More Mister Nice Blog / by Steve M. / Sep 26, 2024 at 11:45 PM
The commissars who tell the Republican rank-and-file what to believe about everything don't seem quite sure what to say about the indictment of New York mayor Eric Adams. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News is going with "he's a corrupt Democrat":
"Another NY Democrat clouded in scandal. Time and again, they have proved they only care about their personal power and scoring political points, not what’s best for New York’s taxpayers. It’s time for people to send a message that they aren’t going to take it anymore," said New York Congressman Nick Langworthy.

"We can add another name to the list of high-ranking Democrats in Albany and New York City tarnished by scandal, including Governors Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer, who both resigned in disgrace," said New York GOP Chair Ed Cox. "One-party Democrat rule in New York City and New York State is not serving the best interests of our citizens, who continue to flee New York for states with lower taxes, more freedom and less corruption. It is highly likely that Mayor Adams will have to resign following the revelation of the specific charges against him."
But Murdoch's New York Post is going with a different approach:



In a statement, Adams implied exactly what's in this headline -- that the feds indicted him because he angered the Biden administration:
If I'm charged, I know I am innocent. I will request immediate trials so the New Yorkers can hear the truth. New Yorkers know my story. They know where I come from. I have been fighting injustice my entire life. That fight has continued as your mayor. Despite our pleas when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics.
The Post approach to this story is clearly the one that's preferred by right-wing base. From the comments to a Breitbart story about the indictment:
Many understood that corruption charges, sexual harassment allegations or child porn found on his computer would be levelled against Adams when he kept saying illegals will "destroy" the city. He got rid of NYC's right to shelter which caused some illegals to move on to other US cities offering free beds. He made democrat Biden/Harris look bad and hurt their plans for NYC and thats something democrats dont forget.

****

When he started tellin the truth about all the illegals and how the city couldnt handle it he was doomed. When you join up with them to get you installed you had better do what they tell you or stuff like this happens.

****

He also told to the potato to not send more illegals to NYC!!

****

The entire DOJ is now a political instrument. They destroy enemies of the regime. This is the same BS that Trump faces
And at Fox:
Funny how all this started after he criticized Biden for immigration policies. Is it real, or lawfare. The sad part is that the question has to be asked.

****

He was "falling out of line" with Biden and Kamalas rules of survival. To many questions about border security and breaking points for NY citizens. I'm not fan of Adams, but this was a clear mow down.
Adams is an ex-Republican and has frequently consorted with Trump supporters:



That's not why he's been indicted, but it's why I'm not surprised that he's feeding the Murdoch media a storyline. (Catsimatidis is a billionaire Trump donor, though he's also given to Democrats, and Dietl is a former New York City police detective and former Fox on-air personality who says he was once hired by Fox to spy on women who said they'd been victims of sexual harassment at the channel.)

At this point, I assume the Murdoch press and the rest of the right-wing media will drop the corrupt-Democrat approach to this story and go all in on the narrative that Eric Adams is being persecuted by the Democratic Deep State. And, like Chris Hayes, I also assume that Adams will successfully appeal his likely guilty verdict:


THe Supreme Court will be Republican even if Kamala Harris wins. Adams is corrupt and can't win on the merits, so he might as well lay the groundwork for a successful appeal to the Court's ideologues by positioning himself as an enemy of Democrats.

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Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Originalism Was Impossible - The Atlantic. By Eric L. Muller

Read time: 8 minutes

Whatever its merits, the methodology could not have existed until modern times.

September 24, 2024, 11:01 AM ET


Many scholars and judges today argue that the right way to ascertain the correct meaning of the Constitution’s text is through a search for its “original” meaning. They say it’s not just the right way as a matter of accuracy and respect for democracy’s rules, but it’s also the method that the Constitution itself requires.


In all of this is one practical problem: Originalism was impossible—at least until modern times.


For just about the first third of the Constitution’s lifetime, virtually no lawyer in the United States had any way to investigate the text’s original meaning. The resources to do it either didn’t exist or were completely out of reach. Originalism, whatever its merits, simply couldn’t have been done.


I’ll make the point with Hill v. Kessler, a case litigated in the courts of North Carolina in the late 1860s. In 1866, a woman named Sarah Hill filed a lawsuit against a man named Tobias Kessler in the superior court of Rowan County, in Salisbury, a town of about 2,500 people. Salisbury was home to 10 lawyers at that time; Hill’s attorney, William Bailey, and Kesler’s attorney, James McCorkle, were among them.


The federal constitutional issue in the case arose not from the subject matter of the complaint but from a procedural turn the case took. The rules required a plaintiff to post a bond when filing suit, to cover the defendant’s costs in case the plaintiff lost. Hill did this in 1866, naming someone by the last name of Hodge as her surety to guarantee payment.


In 1868, North Carolina adopted a new constitution that included a so-called homestead law. The provision was an effort to insulate North Carolinians from the worst economic pain of the immediate post–Civil War years. It shielded up to $1,500 in real and personal property from the reach of anyone trying to collect on a debt.


The homestead law got the defendant, Kessler, nervous. Hodge didn’t have $1,500 in assets to his name, so all of his property now appeared to be out of reach. Hill’s bond looked worthless. So Kessler’s lawyers asked the court to require Hill to produce some new security.


Hill said there was no need. Her surety contract with Hodge preceded the 1868 homestead exemption by two years. If the 1868 homestead law protected property retroactively, she argued, it would violate Article I of the United States Constitution, which said no state could enact a law “impairing the obligation of Contracts.”


The trial court agreed with Hill, concluding that the homestead law could not apply to the surety agreement she’d made with Hodge before the homestead law existed. Hodge’s property wasn’t out of reach. Kessler, unconvinced, appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court.


What did the word impairing in the contracts clause mean in this context? That was the issue over which the Salisbury lawyers Bailey and McCorkle squared off.


Let’s suppose the lawyers had wanted to take an originalist approach. They would have had to build arguments about what the word impairing had meant in 1789. They would have immediately faced a challenge: finding sources to construct those arguments.


Originalists today can look to a couple of different places to uncover the meaning of constitutional text. They can try to understand what the Framers themselves intended their language to mean; they can try to determine what the participants in the various states’ ratifying conventions understood the language to mean; and they can try instead to ascertain what a reasonable member of the public in 1789 would have understood the language to mean. For these inquiries, practitioners of originalism can turn to, and accord varying weights to, the delegates’ comments at the Constitutional Convention, the notes the delegates took there, their private correspondence and published writings, the comments and notes of the delegates to the various state ratification conventions, the published arguments of contemporaneous advocates for and opponents of ratification, and period dictionaries, pamphlets, and newspapers.


Would Bailey and McCorkle have had such material at hand in their Salisbury offices? It seems highly unlikely. Surviving collections suggest that mid-19th-century lawyers—if they acquired significant numbers of books at all—collected practical volumes to support their day-to-day practice. Lawyers had neither the need nor the resources for costly compendia of ratification debates and works of Enlightenment-era political philosophy.


Consider, as one particularly rich example, the remarkable Smith Nicholas collection housed at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky. It preserves the law library of three lawyers who practiced during the 19th century—lawyers, it should be noted, a good deal more prominent than the North Carolina attorneys handling Hill v. Kessler. Most of the collection’s 112 legal titles are works on English law. Included, in the words of an expert on the collection, are “texts and reports in equity, common law, criminal law, family law, mercantile and international law, real and personal property, conveyancing, contracts and obligations, trial practice and pleading, evidence, appellate practice, tax law, and chancery practice.” Only one book in the collection would have had any value for a constitutional originalist: the first volume of the Federalist Papers.


Another example of an extant 19th-century-law-office library is the Colcock-Hutson collection held at the University of South Carolina Law Library. It represents the acquisitions of five generations of attorneys in South Carolina’s Beaufort, Jasper, and Hampton Counties, stretching from 1744 to 1939. The collection consists of 419 donated physical volumes and an inventory of an additional 285 books that were not donated. Among the 704 items, only two touch on American constitutional law: the fifth edition of Thomas Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations, published in 1883, and William Rawle’s A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, first published in 1825. Neither of these offer much, if anything, in the way of contemporaneous evidence of constitutional meaning in 1789. The rest of the collection consists mostly of English and American case reports and treatises on English and American common law and court practice.


So Bailey and McCorkle would have had to leave their offices if they were to develop arguments about the original meaning of “impairing” a contractual obligation. Where could they have gone?


They could not have looked to their local public library, because there wasn’t one. A public library wouldn’t open in Salisbury until 1921. Charlotte, some 40 miles away, had almost twice Salisbury’s population, but it, too, had no library; that town’s Literary and Library Association first opened its subscription service in rooms above a bookstore in 1891.


The lawyers might have been tempted to schedule a trip to Chapel Hill, to visit the University of North Carolina (where, in the present day, I teach law). There they could have perused the holdings of the state’s largest library—a collection whose size a librarian of the time estimated as “not far from seven thousand” volumes. It is unknown whether those included any sources useful to a lawyer trying to determine the original meaning of the verb impairing as written in the Constitution. But even if the lawyers could have hoped that that collection might contain something helpful—say, James Madison’s Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention or Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States—a trip to Chapel Hill would likely have been a lengthy and expensive fool’s errand: The university was in free fall after the Civil War ended, its functions largely suspended in 1868 and 1869 on the way to a complete shutdown in 1871. Getting to the university would have meant taking a full day’s train trip from Salisbury along about 100 miles of track and bridges still recovering from Civil War damage as far east as Hillsborough, and then switching to horse or carriage for the 12 miles south to Chapel Hill.


If the lawyers were really intrepid, their best chance of finding a helpful source would have been to ride the eastbound train another 40 miles past Hillsborough to Raleigh, the state’s capital. There they could have sought permission to access materials from the North Carolina Law Library on the first floor of the capitol building. Those materials are listed in a catalog prepared in 1866 by the state librarian Oliver Hazard Perry, so we know exactly what attorneys Bailey and McCorkle would have found at the end of their journey to help them make their case about the original meaning of impairing: Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary, and Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution. That’s all.


Not Madison’s Notes. Not the Journal, Acts and Proceedings of the Convention, Assembled at Philadelphia, Monday, May 14, and Dissolved Monday, September 17, 1787, Which Formed the Constitution of the United States, edited by John Quincy Adams and issued as a government publication in 1819. Not Jonathan Elliot’s The Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings, in Convention, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, published in 1830. Not even the Federalist Papers. The lawyers litigating Hill v. Kessler would have had essentially nothing on which to ground an originalist argument about what “impairing” a contract meant in 1789.


This is not to say that the lawyers couldn’t have developed any rival arguments about the meaning of the words in the contracts clause. The North Carolina Law Library held a complete set of the United States Reports, for example, so they could have mined the Supreme Court’s relevant precedents for possible arguments. (And as the proceedings played out, it was through analyzing precedents, not searching for original meaning, that the Supreme Court actually resolved the case in Kessler’s favor.)


What they couldn’t have done was litigate distinctively as originalists. Whatever they might have wanted to tell the North Carolina Supreme Court about the original meaning of impairment, they would’ve been stymied by a judge simply asking, “How do you know?”


Nothing about the constitutional issue in Hill v. Kessler or the Salisbury lawyers William Bailey and James McCorkle is unusual. The same resource problem would have hamstrung lawyers in Dover, Maine, or Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or Hopkinsville, Kentucky, or Jackson, Mississippi, litigating any question of constitutional meaning.


“To figure out what the law is, we go to the source.” So said Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett (then a U.S. circuit judge) at a 2019 Federalist Society panel on originalism. Going to the source today is a real option—easy, in fact. Anyone with an internet connection can do it. Going to the source in the early and mid-19th century was practically impossible. Originalism today is an available strategy for ordinary lawyers only because of modern technology and resources.


Does this mean that originalism is the wrong way to interpret the Constitution? No. Lawyers have windows on meaning today that can reveal all sorts of things about what its text may have connoted. They’d be foolish not to look through them.


But can we insist, as so many do, that originalism must be the right way—the single one?


Only if we believe that lawyers throughout the 19th century practiced law inaccurately, ignorant of the truth. And that would be a strange thing for anyone to think—especially someone committed to looking for the truth in the past.

Political Violence Feeds on Itself. The Atlantic - Politics by Juliette Kayyem

Sep 25, 2024 at 12:54 AM//keep unread//hide

Before supporters of Donald Trump tried to overturn his election loss in an insurrection on January 6, 2021, American presidential politics had gone largely undisturbed by violence for decades. The Secret Service and other law-enforcement agencies had been able to protect presidents and major-party nominees from physical harm. Transfers of power had been peaceful after even close, bitter elections. But the country has clearly entered a grim new cycle. In July, a bullet fired by a would-be assassin struck Trump’s ear at a rally in Pennsylvania. This month, authorities thwarted another gunman, who had been hiding in the bushes near one of Trump’s golf courses in Florida as the former president and current Republican presidential nominee played an unscheduled round a few hundred yards away.


Throughout history, political violence has tended to feed upon itself; groups that believe their opponents are seeking power by extralegal means have been more likely to turn to violence themselves. Some aspects of modern life exacerbate the risks. Social media allows extremists to summon like-minded people; the ready availability of dangerous guns increases the ability of individual bad actors to do serious harm. Unfortunately, law enforcement can prepare only so much for the varied threats that the nation may face from the right, the left, and people with idiosyncratic or even incoherent ideologies.  


Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would designate the January 6, 2025, electoral-vote certification at the Capitol as a “national special security event,” or NSSE—a classification that typically calls for extensive planning of security measures that usually include heavy police and National Guard presence, extensive surveillance, street closures, and other measures. This decision went largely unnoticed, but in the past, no one had thought precautions of that magnitude necessary. No losing presidential candidate before Trump had ever riled up a mob to interfere with a proceeding that had previously been viewed as a mere formality.


The NSSE designation is a sign of how limited the options are, and it carries some costs. The presidential inauguration on January 20 is always treated as an NSSE. In effect, the federal government and the District of Columbia will be on high alert for a month—with no guarantee that the precautions taken will be adequate to thwart the unpredictable plans of opportunistic assailants.


In security planning, American experts and public officials use a war-gaming technique often called red teaming to assess how to deal with adversaries with a known intent. If the expected enemy is, say, a Chinese spy or Russian ransomware hacker, some Americans—the red team—are assigned to emulate how the attacker would behave. A second group, the blue team, then has to come up with defensive measures. But this is a far harder task when the threat could come from any number of directions.


At the center of the recent trend toward political violence is Trump. Although he has in recent months become the most vulnerable target of political violence, he has been its most prolific instigator for the past several years, as I and others have previously argued. Those concerns are still valid. He promotes chaos and confusion. He tells religious allies that if he wins this year, they will never have to vote again. He floats the possibility of imprisoning his political enemies. He threatens mass deportations of undocumented immigrants using military force. He dehumanizes immigrants who have come here legally by falsely claiming that they are stealing and eating pets, leading to unrest and threats against them.


In short, Trump has helped normalize the idea that some political differences are too large to be settled by democratic means. Surviving an assassination attempt hasn’t convinced him of the need to de-escalate. Indeed, he’s doing the opposite. Trump claimed in his debate with Kamala Harris that “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me”—an apparent reference to the vice president and her supporters. If Harris wins, Trump will almost certainly not concede; he will claim it was rigged and seek to confuse certification by supporting state election boards who refuse to follow the law, creating chaos at the January certification, as he did in 2021.


But if Trump wins a close election by pressuring state and local election boards—or indeed if he wins unambiguously—many Americans who supported Harris will surely rally to oppose his return to power. Even if the overwhelming number of them intend to do so peacefully, people with violent intentions may slip into their midst, perhaps at the behest of foreign or domestic forces eager to sow disruption. One survey conducted this summer by the University of Chicago researcher Robert Pape indicated that—contrary to past findings—the percentage of people supporting violence against Trump was larger than the percentage of people supporting pro-Trump violence.


In practice, though, some perpetrators of political violence lack a clear worldview. Trump’s first would-be assassin, FBI officials have indicated, had previously shown an interest in public violence and may have settled upon the former president because he was a geographically convenient target. The suspect in the second attempt, who lived a life very much on social media, once supported Trump and then didn’t. His most dominant ideological commitment was to the Ukrainian war effort.


The United States has experienced—and escaped—cycles of political violence within living memory. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated amid the upheavals of the late 1960s; in the mid-’70s, President Gerald Ford survived two attempts on his life. America’s democracy proved resilient because enough people ultimately came to understand that the price of violence for everyone would be far greater than the political benefits for anyone.


Fortunately, the Democratic Party has no leader equivalent to Trump who embraces threats as a political strategy. Yet the former president has poisoned the atmosphere so much that even a sound electoral defeat for him would not immediately reduce the danger of violence.

The Woo-Woo Caucus Meets. The Atlantic - Politics by Elaine Godfrey

Sep 25, 2024 at 6:36 AM//keep unread//hide


If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were president, this is the kind of Cabinet he might appoint: Vani Hari, a.k.a. the “Food Babe” influencer; The Biggest Loser’s Jillian Michaels; the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, the raw-meat enthusiast Mikhaila Peterson Fuller; and 18-year-old Grace Price, a self-identified citizen scientist.


The former Democrat turned spoiler presidential candidate served as a headliner for a four-hour roundtable presentation yesterday on Capitol Hill. Moderated by Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right Republican from Wisconsin, the event was titled American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion—an apt name, given that the whole thing had a very do-your-own-research vibe.


When Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, the two forged an alliance that Kennedy has begun referring to as MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). The partnership has produced a super PAC; also, hats. The alliance was the natural culmination of a broader trend in American politics that has seen the Trumpian right meld with the vax-skeptical, anti-establishment left: Woo-woo meets MAGA, you could call it, or, perhaps, the crunch-ificiation of conservatism. Since dropping out of the presidential race, Kennedy has been angling for a role in Trump’s orbit, because he—like others in the room yesterday—is desperate for any vehicle toward relevance. And so far, allegiance to Trump has offered more of a spotlight than anything that came before.


“The U.S. health-care system is an existential threat to our country,” Kennedy told the crowd in the standing-room-only caucus room named for his uncle President John F. Kennedy. “If America fails, the chief reason will be because we let our country get sicker, more depressed, fatter, and more infertile, at an increasing rate.” Kennedy had gotten to know Johnson during the pandemic, when Johnson was undermining public confidence in vaccines and touting unproven treatments for COVID-19. “He was the only member of this body for some time who was willing to challenge the orthodoxy,” Kennedy said, describing Johnson as a “close personal friend.”


And so it went on, and on. From my seat in the audience, I listened to statement after statement decrying pharmaceutical firms, seed oils, and the lies of the food pyramid. Speakers cited the rates of obesity, cancer, and diabetes, and blamed them on “metabolic dysfunction.” They warned of the presence of microplastics in food and in the air, which can end up settling in the human brain. “The brain is about 0.5 percent microplastics,” Kennedy said, which a few recent studies have found; in Kennedy’s case, it also contains a percentage of worm. Four hours was a very long time.


The event felt intended to be subversive, as though the panelists were providing the truth that the media will never tell you—because, of course, Big Media is in cahoots with Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech, Big Everything. But the truth, you could say, is already out there. An entire media ecosystem of podcasts is devoted to telling you the sort of stuff laid out by the panel. Many of yesterday’s panelists have their own shows, and several of them have made an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, which is consistently the world’s most popular podcast.


Fuller, one such podcast host and the CEO of her father’s online education site, the Peterson Academy, explained that she had fixed her autoimmune and mood disorders by eating only meat. She now promotes the “Lion Diet,” which involves consuming nothing but ruminant meats, salt, and water. “I’m not suggesting the average person does this,” she said, but, she insisted, the government should definitely study the diet’s therapeutic effects.


Next went Peterson the elder. Prone to long diatribes delivered with the cadence of a congregational preacher, he offered a lesson about the scientific process and ketogenesis. Frankly, I had trouble following his point, and apparently I wasn’t the only one: Onstage next to Peterson, Kennedy was staring off into the middle distance, his mind somewhere else.


For her presentation, the Food Babe held up placards with ingredient lists for Gatorade and Doritos in America versus in Europe, calling for limits on additives and dyes in children’s cereal (Make Froot Loops Boring Again). Hari has built up a following of people, parents especially, who are legitimately concerned about what goes into highly processed foods, but she has also faced criticism for fearmongering with unfounded claims. Alex Clark, a commentator for the conservative group Turning Point USA and the host of the conservative Culture Apothecary podcast, railed against the vaccine schedule for children: Parents “did not sign up to co-parent with the government. We want a divorce!”


Somewhere during hour three, Kennedy advised against eating any food that comes in a package. Starving and bored, I unwrapped and scarfed down my chocolate-chip Kind bar. A few rows in front of me, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz’s wife, Ginger Luckey Gaetz, was posting happily: “Truth bombs being dropped,” she wrote on X.


Why is America’s list of accepted chemicals so much longer than Europe’s, and why are the Europeans so much better at this than we are? Speaker after speaker wanted to know. The answer, of course, is that the regulations followed in the European Union are more stringent than ours. And some of the panelists demanding change have allied themselves with a party that—like Clark—does not exactly share their regulatory goals.


Which brings us to the strangeness of the alliance between Kennedy and Trump. Their partnership can be explained by their shared distrust in institutions. Their respective movements have bonded over a sneaking suspicion that the liberal elite is conspiring against them. But that may be where the similarities end. For all of his populist campaign bluster, during his first term, Trump was an ally to Big Business, appointing what ProPublica called a “staggering” number of lobbyists to positions of power, unraveling nutritional standards for school meals, and reversing bans on chemical and pesticide use in agriculture. If tougher, European-style regulation is desired by some of the panelists, he is the arch-deregulator. What’s more, Trump has demonstrated next to zero interest in seed oils and neurotoxins and metabolic ketosis. He has only “concepts” of a health-care plan for America. He is a big fan of the Big Mac—he is Mr. Filet-O-Fish.


Kennedy surely knows this. Only months ago, Trump called him a “Radical Left Lunatic” and the “dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan.” Yet Kennedy now bends the knee. But from Trump’s point of view at least, the MAGA-MAHA congruence seems tactical and temporary. If he becomes president again, Trump seems sure to disappoint the woo-woo caucus.

The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race. The Atlantic - Politics by Adam Serwer

Sep 25, 2024 at 4:18 AM//keep unread//hide


Earlier this month, the self-identified “white nationalist” Donald Trump adviser Laura Loomer said that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”


Asked what he thought of Loomer’s remarks, the GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, said he didn’t “like” them, but then continued, “Whether you’re eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken, things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’s] policies.” The line about inflation would have worked without the mention of fried chicken and curry, but then it would not have included a belittling reminder that Harris is of Black and Indian descent.


Now, the notable thing is not the void where Vance’s sense of humor should be—that’s an old story. What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp. The racism rope-a-dope is one of Trump advisers’ favorite moves—say something to provoke accusations of racism, then ride the wave of outrage over your critics’ perceived oversensitivity.


The theory is that by supercharging the salience of race—a reliable winner with huge swaths of the electorate—they can compensate for the unpopularity of the Trump campaign’s actual policy agenda: its plans to ban abortion, repeal protections for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act, deregulate Big Business, and cut taxes on the wealthy while raising them on everyone else. The campaign wants people—white people in particular—thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole. As Molly Ball reported in 2017, based on polling from the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump stalwart, Steve Bannon, developed a plan to galvanize white voters with race-baiting on immigration.


The belief that demagoguery on immigration is politically potent is why conservative media erupt with saturation coverage of the perennial migrant caravans every election season. The right sees as its most effective message the argument that immigrants, particularly nonwhite immigrants, are going to come to America and take or be given that which belongs to you. Encounters at the southern border have dropped precipitously in recent months, however, owing to a crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in the absence of that reliable scapegoat, the Trump campaign found a new one, spreading lies about hardworking Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.


“What it is is: Imagine if this explosion of migrants or illegals happened on your block, in your neighborhood? You don’t have a clearer real-world example of the consequences of these Biden-Harris immigration policies, and most voters do not want that to happen where they live and send their kids to school,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng. He added that the Trump campaign believes “this is a surefire political winner for them.”


As soon as Harris became the nominee, Republicans began goading her. Republican elected officials immediately attacked Harris as a “DEI hire,” accusing the former district attorney, attorney general, and senator, who has spent more time in elected office than either member of the GOP ticket, as unqualified. Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists convention and falsely accused Harris of recently “becoming” Black. The Trump campaign has charged Harris with wanting to “import the third world,” a framing that implicitly suggests that Americans of non-European descent don’t belong here. In August, Trump shared an image of dark-skinned people with the caption, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.” Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” predates Harris’s entrance into the contest, but the Trump campaign’s focus shifted once the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants took center stage.


“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world—Asia,” Trump told supporters last week. “What’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country … We’re not going to take it any longer. You got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.” Trump makes no distinction between illegal and legal immigration here, and Vance has already announced that the distinction doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that people who are not white do not belong here, unless they happen to be married or related to Vance; then he’s willing to make an exception.


This is a racist politics straight out of the 19th century. Even as it foments racist fears about nonwhite people, the Trump campaign draws accusations of racism—which makes race more salient to white people who will feel defensive and rally around the campaign.


In her book, White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina distinguishes between a politics of racism and white identity—one that is useful for understanding what the Trump campaign is doing. Some white voters who are not ideologically opposed to stronger social-welfare policies in general can be manipulated by appeals to the sense that white people as a group are threatened.


“White identity is sometimes latent, but it is also reactive—made salient by threats to the dominance of whites as a group,” Jardina writes. Politicians seeking to activate that sentiment “can make racial appeals that not only take advantage of the hostilities whites feel toward racial and ethnic minorities, but also ones that appeal to whites’ desire to protect and preserve their group’s power.”


The Trump campaign’s more overtly racist rhetoric is meant to capture the support of the former group, while its race-baiting is intended to provoke attacks that will activate a sense of white solidarity. “I want them to talk about racism every day,” Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. Vance was so desperate to bait Democrats into such accusations that, in July, he awkwardly suggested to a confused audience of supporters that liberals would accuse him of racism for drinking Diet Mountain Dew. Sadly for him, they waited until Vance went all in on repeating baseless lies about Black immigrants.


“For Trump, this kind of explicit race baiting has been effective,” Jardina, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, told me. But, she added, “I think that it’s still somewhat of a risky strategy for Trump. It activates his core group of real MAGA conservatives, who have rallied around white identity. But I think there’s a segment of the white population who finds this at least distasteful, if not appalling.”


Harris’s campaign, by contrast, is avoiding talk of race, especially when it comes to the candidate herself. Barack Obama warned Americans not to support his candidacy as a means of “racial reconciliation on the cheap,” but his candidacy was nonetheless seen as a fulfillment of the civil-rights movement’s aspirations. His success led to the rise of Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton, whose campaign aspired to break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”


Harris uses none of the soaring rhetoric of the Obama campaign or the overt feminist appeals of the Clinton campaign. The Harris camp's stated policy goals are relatively modest, with none of the revolutionary tone of the Bernie Sanders campaign or the wonky radicalism of Elizabeth Warren. To look at the Harris campaign is to observe a Democratic Party chastened by backlash.


Harris is running, as best she can, as a generic Democrat—the kind who polled so well against Trump in the past. There is scant use of the more radical language used to discuss systemic racial or gender inequalities, and relatively little about the ongoing scourge of discrimination. Her campaign’s Issues page does not mention racial inequality directly. Harris has moved to the right on crime and immigration, matching a public that has also shifted in Trump’s direction. The Harris campaign is behaving as though it understands exactly what Trump is trying to do, and is attempting to neutralize that despite having a Black woman at the top of the ticket.


You can see the campaign’s approach in how Harris responds to the Trump campaign’s overt, incessant, and often personal race-baiting. After Trump’s remarks about her at the NABJ convention, Harris merely dismissed the comments as “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.” At the debate, Harris responded with similar framing—as though Americans were the target of Trump’s racist remarks, and not her. “Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said. In this way, she can condemn Trump’s remarks without making it seem like she is, in right-wing parlance, “playing the race card.” Whether consciously or not, Harris’s recent remarks about gun ownership—she told Oprah that anyone breaking into her home is “getting shot”—tell conservative-leaning white people that she shares their fears about crime, another point of emphasis for Trump that involves lurid descriptions and exaggerations.


It is not a coincidence that Harris’s harshest condemnations of Trump have come in response to remarks he’s made about other people—namely the falsehoods he has spread about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. But even then, although Harris criticized Trump for “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old,” her focus was on Trump’s dishonesty, not his racism, insisting that Trump “cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America.”


Harris’s delicate responses to Trump’s overtly racist remarks and race-baiting are indicative of the tightrope the Harris campaign has to walk, and explain the unrelenting racist bombast of the Trump campaign. Trump needs to turn Harris into a threatening figure, and Harris has to defuse those appeals with all the caution of a bomb squad trying to disarm an explosive.

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Nate Silver's "On the Edge" Is Wrong About Gambling and Risk. By Dave Karpf

Read time: 9 minutes

Nate Silver offers a disjointed paean to gambling and venture capitalists.

September 20, 2024, 3:00 PM

By Dave Karpf, an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.



Nate Silver’s first book, The Signal and the Noise, was published in 2012, at the peak of his career as America’s favorite election forecaster. The book was a 534-page bestseller. It set out to answer a perfectly Nate Silver-shaped question: What makes some people better than others at predicting future events? It provided a wide-ranging, deeply engaging introduction to concepts like Bayes’s Theorem, Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, and Philip Tetlock’s work on superforecasting.


Twelve years later, Silver is back with a second book. It is titled On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. It is longer than the first one—576 pages, cover-to-cover. And yet it manages to be a much smaller book.


Silver is still in the business of prediction. But where the Silver of 2012 was contributing to the world of public intellectuals, journalists, academics, and policymakers —what he now terms “the Village”—the Silver of 2024 makes his home among the risk-takers and hustlers in Vegas, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. On the Edge is an ode to the expected-value-maximizing gamblers’ mindset. He calls this the world of “the River.” These “Riverians” are his people. And, he tells us, they’re winning. He sets out to give his readers a tour of the River and distill some lessons that we ought to take from its inhabitants.


The “river” is a term borrowed from poker itself, a game defined by two forms of incomplete information: You don’t know the cards your opponent has been dealt, and you don’t know the cards that are yet to come. In Texas Hold ’em, the final round of betting is called the “river.” It is the moment when the information at your disposal is as complete as it will ever be


Among poker players, this makes the river a rich metaphor. It’s Election Night, waiting for the votes to be tallied, as opposed to a convention or presidential debate, when the shape of the electorate is still undetermined. The best laid plans can be undone by an improbable river card. It’s the final score. The moment of truth. But when Silver talks about “Riverian” culture, he is not drawing upon or referring to any of this established imagery. Instead he deploys it as a catch-all term for embracing risk, identifying profitable edges, and wagering on your beliefs. It’s an odd and awkward writing choice.


The book starts out with a tour of the sheer scale of the literal gambling economy. In 2022 alone, Americans lost $130 billion in casinos, lotteries, and other gambling operations. That’s the amount lost, mind you. The amount wagered was approximately tenfold larger. Gambling in the United States is a $1.3 trillion dollar industry, and still growing.


Elsewhere in the book, he explains how casinos have developed rewards programs and programmed slot machines to keep people hooked. He also lays out the cat-and-mouse game between the online sportsbooks and profitable sports bettors. Much like with casinos and blackjack, if you are good enough at sports betting to reliably turn a profit, then the sportsbooks will stop accepting your bets. The house does not offer games that the house doesn’t win. And, in the United States today, it is very good to be the house.


People gather around a craps table at a casino. Slot machines are seen behind the table on a crowded casino floor.


People gather around a craps table at a casino. Slot machines are seen behind the table on a crowded casino floor.

Guests play craps at a casino in the southwestern Las Vegas valley on Dec. 5, 2023.Travis P Ball/Sipa USA via Reuters


In Chapter 6, Silver writes, “Here’s something I learned when writing this book: if you have a gambling problem, then somebody is going to come up with some product that touches your probabilistic funny bones. … And whichever product most appeals to your inner degen will be algorithmically tailored to reduce friction and get you to gamble even more.”


Most of us would think this is a bad thing. But Silver stubbornly refuses to reflect on whether the unchecked growth of the gambling economy has any negative externalities. Chapter 3, on the casino industry, reads like a book on the opioid industry lauding the Sacklers for really figuring out how to develop product-market fit.


Structurally, the book is a bit disjointed. It is broken into two parts, with an interlude listing the “thirteen habits of highly successful risk-takers” in between. Part 1 glorifies the gambling industry. The interlude reads like a self-help book: “Successful risk-takers are cool under pressure … have courage … take shots  … are prepared.” Part 2 meanders through Silicon Valley, discussing everything from the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried to Adam Neumann’s latest real estate start-up, along with an entire chapter explaining artificial intelligence through poker analogies. Silver clearly has a lot to say, but it doesn’t entirely hold together. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Silver thanks ChatGPT, describing it as his “creative muse.” I’m not convinced the contribution was a positive one.


Missing from the book is any notion of systemic risk. Silver explains the growth of the gambling economy as evidence of a demand-side increase in risk-taking behavior among the post-pandemic public. But this seems more likely to be a supply-side story. The Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018. DraftKings and FanDuel wasted no time in flooding the airwaves with enticing advertisements and can’t-lose introductory offers. Casinos—which used to be constrained to Las Vegas and Atlantic City—are now available in nearly every state.


Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based online prediction marketplace that will let people place bets on essentially anything, went ahead and hired Silver to help promote the product. We legalized vice and removed most of the friction from the system. What’s good for the casinos and the sportsbooks is not necessarily good for society at large.


An increase in gambling addiction is a society-level problem, foisted on the very public officials that Silver derides as residents of “The Village.” Gambling, like cigarettes, should probably face more institutional friction, not less: If you want to waste your money betting on sports or gambling on cards, it ought to at least be moderately difficult to do so.


There’s an unintentionally revealing passage in Chapter 4. Silver devotes nearly four pages to Billy Walters, regaling us with stories of “the best sports bettor of all time.” And in the final paragraph of the section, he lets slip that Walters was sentenced to five years in prison for insider stock trading in 2018. In a footnote, we learn that Walters’s sentence was commuted by Donald Trump on his last day in office. Walters stubbornly maintains his innocence, while Silver notes that “sports bettors often take a cavalier attitude toward inside information in sports. … The Securities and Exchange Commission is much less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you’re betting on stocks.”


It’s a crucial passage for two reasons: First, because much of what gives profitable sports bettors an “edge” is materially significant, non-public information. If you can develop sources that will inform you whether the star quarterback is returning from injury, you can use that information to beat the betting lines. The sportsbooks might eventually stop taking your bets if you win too much, but you won’t go to jail for it.


That edge rarely exists in finance, because of systemic risk. The United States has constructed a whole set of regulations and investor protections to mitigate the downside risk of all this “Riverian” gambling, and guard against crime. Poker players, sports bettors, and venture capitalists flourish in regulatory gray zones, where the rules are less well-defined and the edges are available if you’re smart and you’re willing to hustle.


But the second reason is that it invites us to ponder whether there’s any societal value to all this gambling. The stock market may essentially be gambling, but it is a type of gambling that produces valuable byproduct information. Through the activity of the stock market, we are able to gauge aggregate investor opinion on the state and worth of publicly traded companies. What is the social benefit of building an equivalent marketplace for establishing the betting line on NBA games? Sophisticated sports bettors may have a better read than DraftKings on whether the Washington Wizards should be 7.5- or 8-point underdogs in their season opener. But what value does that add to the quality of play, or the fan experience, or anything at all? Why incur and encourage all the systemic risk, when the societal value is effectively nil?


Sam Bankman-Fried wearing a suit and tie walks behind a window.


Sam Bankman-Fried wearing a suit and tie walks behind a window.

Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at the U.S. federal courthouse in New York City on March 30, 2023. Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images


Silver asks and answers none of these questions himself. In the rare passages of the book where he offers some critique of Riverian excess, he makes sure to reassure the reader that he is “not a prude.” In Chapter 8, after mentioning that the sheer, absurd concentration of wealth among Silicon Valley figures like Sam Bankman-Fried might, just maybe, be a bad thing, Silver immediately backpedals, reminding his readers that he plays “poker with venture capitalists and hedge fund guys. I’m a capitalist.”


I suspect this would be a better book if he had less to lose. I myself have been a “+EV” poker player for over 20 years, meaning I win quite a bit more than I lose. I don’t play for the same stakes as Silver, but my poker bankroll includes seven different currencies from four continents. And I can tell you that I would strongly consider committing a few misdemeanors to land a seat in one of those VC/hedge fund games. Silver doesn’t boast about his win rate, but he does let slip that the first time he was invited to play cards with Jason Calacanis and the other hosts of the All-In podcast, he “won enough money to buy a Tesla.”


If I was in Silver’s shoes, I would be wary of writing a book that could get me uninvited from those pillow-soft high-stakes poker games. He can make more money, and have more fun, by offering a gentle exploration, critique, and defense of “the River” than he would by raising questions that would make the notoriously thin-skinned VC crowd uncomfortable. Silver manages to interview a lot of powerful people who rarely speak to journalists, but when they talk to him, they tell him nothing of note.


Nate Silver in a suit jacket and button-up shirt sits on stairs surrounded by gold railing holding a cell phone.


Nate Silver in a suit jacket and button-up shirt sits on stairs surrounded by gold railing holding a cell phone.

A portrait of Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, in Nov. 9, 2012. Nam Y. Huh/AP


It also is not clear whether most of the “Riverian” character traits are actually so unique. In the book’s later chapters, Silver rails against “The Village’s” public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Riverians, he tells us, would’ve handled the pandemic differently, because Riverians are expected-value maximizers who understand the fundamental importance of cost-benefit analysis. Hindsight does a lot of heavy lifting for him here, and the notion that public health officials are unfamiliar with cost-benefit analysis is painfully ridiculous. Cost-benefit analysis is not some arcane Riverian wisdom. It is intro-level textbook material.


Silver’s experience in the poker world has convinced him that the world should be more like poker. My own experience with poker has convinced me of the opposite. It is because I am skilled at the game that I think people ought to know what they’re getting into before sitting down at the table with me.


He’s right about one thing, though: The Riverians are indeed winning. The Wynn Casino, DraftKings.com, and Andreessen Horowitz are indeed all phenomenally profitable. The part that eludes him is the reason why. They are winning because we have constructed a system that they are well-positioned to exploit. There is a good book waiting to be written about how they have gamed the system, what it all adds up to, and what it costs the rest of us. But this book’s ambitions are much smaller than that.