The case for Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

The case for Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. By Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

There’s a deep connection between conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and the Russian government that goes back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and reverberates to the present day.

It’s an interesting nexus, because while there are many strands of ethnic hatred in the world, there’s something distinctive about the tendency of antisemitism to take on a conspiratorial form. Recently, for example, Stew Peters claimed that the OceanGate submarine was deliberately sunk in order to prevent people from visiting the wreck of the Titanic. Peters was expanding on an older conspiracy (which went viral on Facebook back in 2021) that John Pierpont Morgan didn’t sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic despite owning the ship because he deliberately sank it in order to murder several prominent businessmen who, allegedly, would have stopped the creation of the Federal Reserve (which he favored). Peters and his guest, Zach Vorhies, updated the theory by arguing that there’s a Rothschild connection to the sub.

I think of this whole genre of conspiracy theory as kind of like a slime mold. It starts with something that catches people’s interest and spreads tendrils until it can “connect the dots” to some cabal of Jewish bankers — classically the Rothschilds, more recently George Soros — manipulating events behind the scenes.

What we have here, fundamentally, is antisemitism as the socialism of fools, a way to try to convince people that their discontents with actually existing market capitalism are due to the manipulations of bad actors. That’s why even though Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any personal problem with Jewish people, his movement is shot-through with antisemites — when you try to square the circle of populist politics with an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, something needs to provide the connective tissue. Charles Maurras, the founder of the far-right Action Française, said that antisemitism “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.”

That’s one reason I’m sincerely sad to see Robert Kennedy Jr. and his circle showing up more frequently on these shows and associating with QAnon types. It’s easy to see, biographically, how a guy who starts out interested in conspiracies about the assassinations of his father and uncle could end up adjacent to all kinds of other conspiracies. But I’ve always had a warm place in my heart for Kennedy conspiracy theories, precisely because they don’t typically take on an antisemitic form and instead have an almost constructive, pro-social aspect to them.

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” is probably the most well-known Kennedy conspiracy text in the contemporary United States. It was a hit movie and remains well-regarded — they featured it on The Rewatchables with Brian Koppelman as a special guest. The movie has the thesis, more or less, that a nefarious military-industrial cabal assassinated Kennedy in order to prevent the removal of American troops from Vietnam.

I am sincerely not read up on the literature regarding the Warren Commission or other related matters, but I think the political project here is really easy to understand. Lyndon Johnson is one of the giants of American political history — he signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and created Medicare and Medicaid. He’s second only to Lincoln in his record on racial justice, arguably outdoes even FDR in terms of the development of the welfare state, and almost as an afterthought, he laid the groundwork for the entire modern edifice of gender discrimination law. But he also largely oversaw America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Kennedy’s enduring popularity with people of a certain age is just impossible to process on the basis of his actual meager accomplishments in office. But if you dissect the history of 1961–1968 and attribute the good parts to the martyred Kennedy and the bad parts to LBJ, then you can tell a nice, clean story. Positing that Kennedy had a plan to end the war that was deliberately sabotaged by a conspiracy “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.” And it’s not even an antisemitic conspiracy theory! On the contrary, the canonical paranoid view of the CIA posits the conspirators — as in this clip from “The Good Shepard” — as the pinnacle of WASP-dom looking down on the midcentury liberal coalition of Jews, Catholics, and African Americans.

In the lesser-known sequel “Nixon,” Stone extends the story. His version of Nixon is haunted by the suspicion that a special group he set up to take down Fidel Castro while serving as vice president is behind a lot of bad stuff. He thinks they killed JFK, and Bobby, too. He thinks they killed Martin Luther King, Jr, and probably other people as well. He thinks they might even kill him.

I doubt that this is true, but it’s a way of making sense of a big question for Boomer liberals — what went wrong in the 1970s? — that delivers a satisfying answer.

A non-trivial number of older liberals I’ve known in my life have genuinely believed that American history would have played out very differently had RFK and MLK survived 1968. They believe that Kennedy would have secured the Democratic Party nomination, defeated Nixon, ended the Vietnam War, and leveraged the booming economy into re-election. That would have had ramifications for the Supreme Court and the ongoing expansion of the welfare state. But it also would have meant the “Southern Strategy” didn’t triumph and racial backlash politics didn’t set in.

Which relates, of course, to the MLK strand of this theory. Without King’s assassination, the 1968 riots don’t happen, which further lessens the backlash.

Indeed, Omar Wasow’s research — which is not a conspiracy theory — does say that King’s assassination, which was followed by riots and then an anti-riot backlash, was responsible for Nixon’s electoral victory. On this view, if King survives then so does the Great Society political coalition, whether headed by Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey. But more broadly, with King alive, the civil rights movement retains his late-in-life strong focus on class issues, which, in conjunction with Kennedy’s presence in the White House, makes concrete progress on specific legislation possible. It’s not like Republicans never win an election again in this world, but you probably avoid the turn we saw in the real world, where the left spent the ’70s and ’80s largely detached from electoral politics and instead focused on winning on-campus cultural struggles.

If you go back to the 1990s and read thinkers like Richard Rorty (“Achieving Our Country”) or Michael Tomasky (“Left for Dead”), there was this conviction that the whole progressive movement went astray somehow after ’68, losing its focus on concrete questions of justice in favor of academic squabbling. Academics themselves, of course, strongly favor structural explanations for big turns of events, but among people more inclined to see contingency in the world, it’s just tragic that several key charismatic leaders were murdered. Among people inclined to see human agency in the world, though, it looks awfully convenient that murdering these guys helped entrench the forces of conservatism. Maybe a little too convenient. Is it really credible that so much of consequence swung on a handful of lone gunmen?

Rorty and his works are pretty well known today, but because Tomasky was my first boss and I have a lot of affection for his book, I’m going to quote its 1997 jacket copy to give you a view of history that’s fallen out of fashion:

    There was once a familiar American left. Progressive unions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, campaigns against poverty, war and other ills - all were recently a part of our national scene. Today all are faded or gone. Now, from Michael Tomasky, one of the most intelligent voices to emerge from the American left in years, comes a stirring challenge to our nation's progressive tradition. Left for Dead examines the troubling recent history and tenuous future of our nations' once-significant progressive movements, and makes an uncompromising study of how the left has been destroyed by its own contradictions and ills - and what must be done if there are any hopes for revival. With penetrating insight Tomasky uses revealing "case studies" to explore how today's left lost control of crucial issues such as welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care. It would be all too easy to blame the forces of the right for the left's slippage; but Tomasky explores how today's left has found its own way of “making enemies of everyone” — narrowly representing eccentrics, academic specialists and malcontents above the vast expanse of working-class Americans, whom it has come to regard with near-contempt. 

Something Michael Hobbes and others to my left like to say is that contemporary disputes about “wokeness” just recapitulate 1990s arguments about “political correctness,” which I don’t think is totally true. But as you can see from the Tomasky text, it’s not totally false either. The difference between me and Hobbes is that I think Tomasky’s diagnosis in the 1990s was basically correct, not an overhyped moral panic. And if you read the book, you’ll see many tropes that I echo today — including the emphasis on King’s economic vision, the view of affirmative action as politically toxic, self-serving academic politics, and the critique of insider jargon as a language of politics.

And while he’s not super-explicit about it, I think the book argues that the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and especially King had a substantive (and bad) causal impact on the trajectory of American politics.

As it happens, I think that’s true. I do not think it’s true that the death of John Kennedy had an important causal impact on the course of the war in Vietnam. But you can easily see why a person would want to believe that. In essence, you can construct a counterfactual history in which, absent the deaths of martyred leaders, we avoid the disaster of Vietnam, avoid the riots of 1968, avoid Nixon’s backlash politics, avoid the Watergate-induced collapse of faith in the American state, avoid the turn toward identity politics and academic obscurantism, and see a triumph of American social democracy.

This is where I think it’s useful to distinguish between the literal claims of a conspiracy theory and its larger meaning.

I don’t think it’s true that J.P. Morgan deliberately killed anyone over the creation of the Federal Reserve. But beyond that, the meaning of this conspiracy theory is that creating a central bank was a bad idea undertaken for nefarious reasons. And I don’t believe that at all. Even if convincing evidence emerged that the Titanic really was sunk to create the Fed, I wouldn’t change my mind about the idea of a central bank. Which is to say, I reject the conspiracy theory root and branch. By contrast, the larger meaning of the assassination conspiracies — that the Vietnam War was a mistake and that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had an approach to politics that was far superior to that of their successors — is something that I agree with, so I’m almost always in sympathy with their proponents.

Independence mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

Independence mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 18 minutes

Independence mailbag

Western water, my fake college class, and revisiting Al Gore

I think the optimal timing for July 4 is always a Tuesday. You obviously can’t just observe Independence Day as “the first Tuesday in July,” though, so instead we need to rely on dumb luck. But good for us, it’s a Tuesday July 4 kind of year!

This account of Justin Trudeau’s aggressive immigration expansion is pretty inspiring, as was this upbeat account of Venezuelans thriving on Martha’s Vineyard. The discovery of what seems like a 2,000-year-old depiction of pizza is mostly funny but I am always on board for all pizza-related news. More substantively, the United States is a really popular global hegemon, which is important to understanding our power and strength. Simone Biles is coming back. Buffets are coming back. Norovirus on cruise ships is coming back. Okay, the last one is maybe not so good, but it’s a sign of broad economic normalization, which is good. California strip malls are getting upzoned to allow for housing.

Now let’s answer some questions.

Lost Future: Didn't the opioid crisis kind of disprove widespread libertarian & leftist beliefs about the War on Drugs?

[Editor’s note: this was a very long question, but I think the first sentence captured it well.]

I never believed the libertarian line on the War on Drugs so I can’t really say whether it’s been debunked by the opioid crisis. As I’ve said before, while I am in many ways a libertarianism-appreciator, I have always thought that hard-core anti-paternalism does not make sense practically or philosophically. But if you’re in the market for an “I changed my mind about drug legalization because of the opioid crisis” take, German Lopez wrote a great one five years ago.

One thing I will say about this, though, is that the problem with legalizing things is in part downstream of the Supreme Court’s first amendment jurisprudence.

If I say “it’s illegal to sell cocaine,” then you can’t run a Facebook ad campaign for your cocaine business because your ads would be confessing to a crime. But the Court has sharply constrained Congress’ ability to regulate commercial speech relative to older jurisprudence. So if cocaine were legal, there would be tons and tons of cocaine advertising and cocaine marketing all trying to get as large a swathe of people to try cocaine. Companies would do whatever they could to push people over the ledge into addiction.

To me, it does not make a ton of sense to say “the only way you can curtail sports gambling marketing is to make it illegal to bet on sports.” Sending someone to prison for betting on sports seems crazy. But the idea that the huge proliferation of sports gambling ads and growing entwinement of sports gambling with professional leagues is good also seems crazy to me. I’ve been sort of reluctantly backed into the corner of “gambling should be illegal so that we can cut down on advertising,” which seems like a silly thing to say, but I think is correct relative to the existing set of precedents. But the fact that we’ve gotten into this space, precedent-wise, is to me an example of the downsides of having this super-empowered Supreme Court that’s now composed entirely of academics with really high LSAT scores rather than the more traditional court lineups that used to have lots of politicians and policymakers.

TheElasticStranger: Do you have a take on the water issues facing the American west (e.g. the vanishing Great Salt Lake, depletion of the Colorado River etc.). I would love to read some techno-optimism on a water abundance agenda via desalinization, infrastructure, policy, or whatever else.

It’s good to grow crops in the desert because it’s quite sunny and the sun is good for crops. The problem is that crops need water, and water is normally scarce in the desert. Every once in a while you luck into something like the Nile River, and it becomes the foundation for a great civilization and later the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Thousands of years later, Egypt’s productivity per acre is still off-the-charts.

We don’t have the Nile, but we do have the diversion of the Colorado River for agricultural purposes in California and Arizona.

Policymakers in both of those states, though, insist on treating the water scarcity issue as primarily a residential issue, even though in both cases agriculture dominates water use and gets preferential access to water. The solution to resource scarcity is to charge for access on equal terms for everyone, which would probably mean net reallocation of water away from agriculture and, in turn, net reallocation of agriculture toward rainier parts of the country.

Desalination works great, though. It’s just energy-intensive and costs money.

Eli Youngs: If you were going to teach a college course, what would the subject be and which books would you assign?

Susanna Siegel, an epistemologist at Harvard, taught a class in fall 2021 on “the philosophy of journalism” which is a topic that I’m very interested in. I actually pitched a senior thesis on this subject that I was discouraged from pursuing, so my dream is to return to campus teach Version 2.0 of the Philosophy of Journalism seminar, and have my vengeance on the whole department.

What would we read? Compared to Siegel, I am a little less interested in the question of objectivity and more interested in questions of normative ethics and how the concept of “journalistic ethics” does and does not correspond with general ethics. I think I would assign a lot of ethics content from working journalism institutions and from journalism school classes, and then try to interrogate what’s going on with them. It often seems to me that what’s called “ethics” in journalism is actually something else. Like is it actually unethical to disclose a source under any circumstances? I’m skeptical. But if journalists promote a norm whereby journalists who reveal sources will be shunned and ostracized from the field, that lends a ton of credibility to journalistic promises of anonymity that would otherwise be very challenging to enforce.

It absolutely benefits me, as a working journalist, that lots of people believe they can tell me things off the record and I will keep their confidence. They do that in part because they think of me as trustworthy. But they also do it because they know that other journalists would punish me for violating anonymity, so even though there’s no law against it, the norm is strong and my promises are credible. But is this what ethics is? Don’t we see a lot of individual cases of sources being granted anonymity that actually seem pretty inappropriate?

Mike: You posted about how VCs are lying about the economy for political reasons. I think there's an element of that, but I also think that the tech industry is in a massive slump right now — capital has dried up, revenue is down, profits are down, startup equity is worthless, everyone's doing layoffs, recruiters aren't blowing up everyone’s inbox anymore, etc. My coworkers, generally liberal with no political agenda here, routinely say things like “when the recession is over,” and wouldn't believe it if you told them there is no recession.

And obviously software people don't write the news, and the press is extremely unsympathetic to the woes of the tech industry, so this background vibe doesn't just make it straight to everyone's news feed. But journalists do, and the last decade has famously been a tumultuous one for the industry. How do you think journalists have misreported the news based on over-extrapolating their personal circumstances?

Internet-era journalism very badly overweights the life experience of college graduates living in New York City.

And I think that’s a big part of the tech/media antagonism. If you look at the years 2009-2019, it was a time when the living standards of software engineers improved much faster than the national average but the living standards of young journalists improved much slower than the national average (or in many cases, actually declined). So we had a ton of gloom and doom narratives out of the media about how “capitalism” (i.e., constrained housing supply in Greater New York) was failing and a lot of triumphant narratives out of Silicon Valley about how the internet was creating all this unmeasured value (really just tech people were getting rich) and then a lot of egomaniacal fighting between these perspectives.

Stuart: Are big traffic roundabouts like Dupont Circle bad? They seem unappealing from a motorist, pedestrian, cyclist, and transit perspective. The green space in the middle seems less enjoyable with cars constantly circling it.

Roundabouts, as I understand them, are supposed to be an alternative to traffic lights as a way of managing intersections. But the big traffic circles in D.C. like Dupont and Logan Circles aren’t like that — they are circular parks that require traffic lights so pedestrians can get to them and the whole thing ends up being a big mess. I think it was a bad idea and the city would have been better off with a more regular grid and some more conventional parks.

Evan Bear: Was Al Gore a good candidate in 2000? Did he run ahead of the fundamentals or behind them? In hindsight should he have done more to embrace and highlight the Naderites' critiques, so as to make himself more appealing to swing voters?

Gore did okay, in my view, when you consider how many different directions he got screwed from — the timing of the Elián González situation, the Palm Beach County ballot design, the dumb Electoral College, Ralph Nader specifically targeting swing states late in the campaign.

That said, in retrospect, I think Democrats would have been better served by a nominee who was ideologically unremarkable but a change of pace from the Clinton administration. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber or Vermont Governor Howard Dean or Maryland Governor Parris Glendening or someone like that. It would have been hard for Gore to appeal more to voters on the Gore-Nader margin without alienating voters on the Gore-Bush margin. But a governor would have answered general “time for a change” vibes in a non-specific way that could have helped on both fronts.

Alec Arellano: Last week’s “Community Meetings Aren’t Democracy” made me curious what you think of the various proposals from activists and scholars to have everyday citizens more directly involved in the actual policymaking and agenda-setting process. I’m thinking of things like participatory budgeting and Hélène Landemore’s idea of “open democracy.” To me it seems like these sorts of things would possibly not be as liable to the vetocratic pathologies of community meetings that rightfully concern you and other supply-side progressives. At the same time, though, at least in my reading, you’ve written a lot about politics and governance as a task for professionals, which would seem to cut against transferring substantial decision-making or agenda-setting power to ordinary citizens. I ask this question as someone who is interested in these sorts of citizen involvement proposals but is not necessarily a partisan of them.

I think deliberately constructed citizen panels could have a very interesting role to play in a different version of democracy. Like suppose you convened a group of 27 randomly selected Americans — like jury duty — and told them they had three months to come up with a long-term deficit reduction plan.

Obviously, 27 random people aren’t qualified to do that. But at the same time, the question of “what kind of retirement security do we want senior citizens to enjoy?” is not a technical economic question at all. The current structure of ping pong between professional politicians of rival parties generates a lot of denialism about the real tradeoffs and actively promotes public confusion about the possibilities such that the public — infamously — say they want less spending in general and then favor more spending on every particular item.

So the Group of 27 would have time to deliberate with each other. And they’d have access to CBO experts, and I’m sure every think tanker and policy expert in America would be happy to talk to them. They’d be forced to actually choose, in a way that random people answering telephone polls are not. But they would also presumably be motivated to come up with something they sincerely think is a good idea, rather than do the politician game of angling for the next election. I’d be interested to see what they come up with. Is there a good path to institutionalizing this? How do you make sure they’re not just bribed? I have a lot of questions and I keep meaning to read Landemore’s book but I haven’t yet.

Bennie: Is the commentary about a weakened Putin so much wishful thinking? Prigozhin blinked and went into exile. Putin won.

Erica de Bruin, my go-to source on coups, seems to think Putin is genuinely weakened by this.

Stepping back, authoritarian leaders face a tradeoff between military efficacy and coup-proofing their security services. This has probably helped promote peace in the modern world because most dictators know their security forces are really tools for domestic repression, not for winning wars. But Putin decided to conquer Ukraine and then ended up in a surprising and costly standoff. Defeat is a risk to his regime, so on the margin he should probably invest less in coup-proofing and more in military effectiveness. But mutiny is a threat to the efficacy of his military, so he needs to invest less in promoting effective officers and more in promoting loyalty.

It’s lose-lose, and the best way for him to get out of the dilemma is to find some way to “declare victory and go home” from Ukraine.

Luke Christofferson: Let's say that you magically learned that you would be voting for a Republican in the 2036 general election. What's the most plausible series of events that you can imagine leading you there?

Say Biden gets re-elected in 2024, and then the Democratic nominee wins in 2028 — mildly unlikely, but not some kind of outlandish scenario. I think in response to that three-peat, Republicans become open to genuinely moderating, the way Democrats did in 1992. So in the 2032 race they give us the 2032 version of a Larry Hogan or Charlie Baker type. I probably still don’t vote for that guy, but he wins.

Parties usually respond to their first defeat by shifting left (even a moderate Dem like Biden ran on a 2020 platform that was way to the left of Barack Obama), so 2036 probably gives us a moderate Republican running for re-election against a very left-wing Democrat. If there’s a recession, Democrats have a decent shot. But if things are going fine in the country then the moderate Republican has a great shot at winning in a landslide with the votes of people like me.

This is probably not going to happen, but I think it’s perfectly plausible — it’s like a coin flip coming up tails four times in a row or rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice or something. You’d bet against it, but if it happened you wouldn’t be like, “wow, I have to rethink everything now!”

Jasper in Beijing: Do you have any thoughts on liquor licensing for bars and restaurants? The issue has been getting a lot of coverage lately in Boston, where they apparently now fetch over $600K. This seems bound to hurt the restaurant sector, by making it incredibly expensive to open a new establishment. What would an optimal policy look like in your view?

Quantity restrictions on liquor licenses are dumb; what we should have are higher taxes on booze.

Dave: Current SCOTUS justices receiving gifts and favors from people who have business before the court seems clearly corrupt but, at the same time, it does seem hard to draw a clear line between that and regular friendship. Since you have noted that the Supreme Court has created an absurdly narrow definition of “corruption,” I wonder if you have a workable definition that covers more ambiguous influence?

My inclination is to say it would make sense to hold Supreme Court justices to an incredibly high standard of ethical conduct, if only because I don’t really worry about “attracting competent candidates” to the federal appellate judiciary in the way I do for mayors and members of Congress and middle managers at obscure bureaucracies.

It seems like a lot of people want these Supreme Court jobs and that if guys like Thomas and Alito (and Ruth Bader Ginsburg!) were inclined to retire a bit earlier and enjoy less scrutiny on their vacation travel and so forth, that would be good for the country.

Alex: It's Canada day this weekend, and the 4th of July early next week. In honour of our respective national holidays, what's something our counties should learn from each other? Boring answers like healthcare not welcome.

Americans should learn from Canada about the merits of separate federal, provincial, and local party systems.

Alberta, the most right-wing province, just had a competitive election between the United Conservative Party (which is more right-wing than the Conservative Party of Canada) and the Alberta New Democratic Party, a kind of labor-populist party that has a different identity from both the federal Liberals and the federal NDP. The Quebec National Assembly has three parties in it that have basically nothing to do with federal politics. Vancouver has parties in city elections with nonsense names like ABC Vancouver and OneCity.

In America, by contrast, people just kind of robotically vote for the state legislative candidate who has a D or R next to their name based on how they feel about the incumbent president. This doesn’t make any sense in terms of democratic accountability and gives no consideration to the fact that the actual issues at stake in different elections are different.

In terms of what Canada could learn from the U.S., it’s been a long time now since I was really up to speed on Canadian issues, but I’ve read that “there are too many regulatory barriers to interprovincial trade” in Canada, which inhibits domestic competition. A big point of emphasis in the United States, from Hamilton on forward, has been to try to have federalism but also an absence of internal trade barriers. And I think it works pretty well.

Jacob Fridman: You've written a lot about your fears of the GOP's attacks on Medicaid, so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru's Washington Post op-ed where he talks about making Social Security and Medicaid both “progressive and conservative?”

Ramesh and I just straight-up agree about Social Security at this point and believe that the program should be made much flatter. A lot of people talk about how it’s good that Social Security is “universal” and not “means tested,” and I agree. But the actual structure of Social Security is that it gives more generous benefits to richer people over and above the fact that richer people live longer. Increasing the minimum benefit while cutting the higher-end benefits would save money, reduce poverty, and fight inflation.

There’s plenty of room to quibble about the particulars, but he’s right. That is broadly the direction of the Obama administration’s proposals in the grand bargain era, though more timidly than what Ponnuru suggests in his column. The time wasn’t right circa 2013, but it’s a good idea.

On Medicaid, I dunno. I think we are overdue for a conversation about fiscal federalism in general, since right now there are about eighty bajillion joint state-federal programs that all work slightly differently with very little rhyme or reason. But these programs are also very complicated, and I’d want to talk this over with some more people.

AW: Joe Rogan's proposal that Peter Hotez debate RFK Jr. on his podcast is obviously ridiculous from a format perspective (assuming the goal is to determine whose position is more factually correct). If you were going to design a structure for that debate, what would it be?

I think the further you get from the idea of, like, “The Big Debate That Will Settle Vaccines,” the closer you get to some ideas that might deliver enlightenment.

If Rogan, a very talented public communicator but obviously not a specialist, wants to “just ask questions” about vaccines, then I think he should interview someone like Emily Oster — a person who’s adept at public communication, who’s not a medical doctor who’d be “debating science,” but who’s known specifically for kicking the tires on studies and telling people what she found.

If we want to see RFK Jr. participate in a political debate about Covid vaccines, I’d like to see him go up against Alex Azar or someone else from the Trump administration who was involved with Operation Warp Speed.

If we want to see a medical scientist like Hotez really get into it with credentialed skeptics, then a written exchange between him and a more vaccine-skeptical doctor could be very interesting.

The point, though, with all of this is that you have to ask what you’re trying to accomplish. My personal view, which I freely admit I cannot prove, is that something like 80% of vaccine skepticism is motivated reasoning driven by a dislike of needles. The solution to the problem is to create oral or nasal vaccines, at which point people will suddenly find the pro-vaccines studies much more persuasive.

Douglas Thornurg: Should the democrats rethink their “not really a primary” primary with Joe Biden as Trump begins to sink? Trump is still riding high but his trend is slightly negative and based on episodes like his Fox interview you can see peak Trump has passed. Biden can beat Trump but he likely loses to most other GOP candidates. If the democrats don’t have any alternative in play during the primary season they’ll be stuck with Biden.

I personally like the man and think that the secret to his 2020 win is his own line “don’t compare me to the Almighty compare me to the alternative.” He’s an easy pick over Trump but not so easy versus other GOP alternatives.

I think the presidential nominating system is pretty bad. My guess is that if you had a secret ballot among Democratic Party members of Congress on the question “should Joe Biden step aside in favor of Gretchen Whitmer as 2024 nominee,” Whitmer would win easily. But that’s not how the system works. If Biden did step aside, the presumptive nominee would be Kamala Harris. She’s weak enough that she would draw challengers, but she might be able to scare off the best mainstream options and recreate something like the 2016 dynamic where she’d be facing off against a leftist and someone who’s fine but has zero shot.

I do wonder sometimes if it wouldn’t be better for, I dunno, Josh Shapiro to throw his hat in the ring and say explicitly “I have basically no policy disagreements with Joe Biden, I just think we should have a younger nominee.”

Would anyone vote for him? I feel like it would be a total flop, even though the pitch makes sense logically. But maybe it would work! The line he’d have to walk, though, is that if you suggest Biden is too old in the sense of “it would be better to have a Republican,” then rank-and-file Democrats would immediately hate you. You’d have to make a really super-duper narrow critique that’s like “literally just for the sake of atmospherics and maximizing the number of campaign events per day, it would be better to nominate me.” Which, again, I think is true. But it seems like a weak argument.

Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine. By David Wallace-Wells

www.nytimes.com

Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine

David Wallace-Wells

8 - 10 minutes

We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation — the limits of which aren’t even clear yet.

Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”

A Nobel laureate, Doudna is known primarily for Crispr, the gene-editing Swiss Army knife that has been called “a word processor” for the human genome and that she herself describes as “a technology that literally enables the rewriting of the code of life.” The work for which Doudna shared the Nobel Prize was published more than a decade ago, in 2012, opening up what seemed like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures. But surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”

The pandemic has exhausted many Americans of medicine, and it has become common to process the last few years as a saga of defeat and failure. And yet these brutal years — which brought more than a million American deaths and probably 20 million deaths worldwide, and seemed to return even the hypermodern citadels of the wealthy West to something like the experience of premodern plague — might also represent an unprecedented watershed of medical innovation. Beyond Crispr and Covid vaccines, there are countless potential applications of mRNA tools for other diseases; a new frontier for immunotherapy and next-generation cancer treatment; a whole new world of weight-loss drugs; new insights and drug-development pathways to chase with the help of machine learning; and vaccines heralded as game-changing for some of the world’s most intractable infectious diseases.

“It’s stunning,” says the immunologist Barney Graham, the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and a central figure in the development of mRNA vaccines, who has lately been writing about a “new era for vaccinology.” “You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

‘World-changing’ innovations

It is sometimes hard to see the silver lining for the cloud, particularly when it’s as dark as the last three years have been. But at the very center of the American Covid experience, amid all the death and suffering and despite the dysfunction that midwifed it into being, sits what would have stood out, in any previous era, as an astonishing biomedical miracle: the coronavirus vaccines. Drug-development timelines in previous history had swallowed whole decades; experts warned not to expect a resolution for years. But the mRNA sequence of the first shot was designed in a weekend, and the finished vaccines arrived within months, an accelerated timeline that saved perhaps several million American lives and tens of millions worldwide — numbers that are probably larger than the cumulative global death toll of the disease.

The miracle of the vaccines wasn’t just about lives saved from Covid. As the first of their kind to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, they brought with them a very long list of potential future mRNA applications: H.I.V., tuberculosis, Zika, respiratory syncytial virus (R.S.V.), cancers of various and brutal kinds. And the vaccine innovations stretch beyond mRNA: A “world-changing” vaccine for malaria, which kills 600,000 globally each year, is being rolled out in Ghana and Nigeria, and early trials for next-generation dengue vaccines suggest they may reduce symptomatic infection by 80 percent or more.

Not every innovation arriving now or soon to market comes from U.S. research or shares the same saga of development. But many of their back stories do rhyme, often stretching back several decades through the time of the Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2003, and the near-concurrent near-doubling of the National Institutes of Health’s budget, which helped unleash what Donna Shalala, President Bill Clinton’s secretary for health and human services, last year called “a golden age of biomedical research.”

Ozempic and Wegovy have already changed the landscape for obesity in America — a breakthrough that has been described and debated so much in terms of cosmetic benefits and medical moral hazard that it can be easy to forget that obesity is among the largest risk factors for preventable death in the United States. Next-generation alternatives may prove even more effective, and there are signs of huge off-label implications: At least anecdotally, in some patients the drugs appear to curb compulsive behavior across a range of hard-to-treat addictions.

And although the very first person to receive Crispr gene therapy in the United States received it just four years ago, for sickle-cell disease, it has since been rolled out for testing on congenital blindness, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and H.I.V. So far only two applications for such treatments have been submitted to the F.D.A., but all told, some 400 million people worldwide are afflicted by one or more diseases arising from single-gene mutations that would be theoretically simple for Crispr to fix. And when Doudna allows herself to imagine applications a decade or two down the line, the possibilities sound almost intoxicating: offering single-gene protection against high cholesterol and therefore coronary artery disease, for instance, or, in theory, inserting a kind of genetic prophylaxis against Alzheimer’s or dementia.

‘Can we actually do it?'

In January, a much-talked-about paper in Nature suggested that the rate of what the authors called disruptive scientific breakthroughs was steadily declining over time — that, partly as a result of dysfunctional academic pressures, researchers are more narrowly specialized than in the past and often tinkering around the margins of well-understood science.

But when it comes to the arrival of new vaccines and treatments, the opposite story seems more true: whole branches of research, cultivated across decades, finally bearing real fruit. Does this mean we are riding an exponential curve upward toward radical life extension and the total elimination of cancer? No. The advances are more piecemeal and scattered than that, and indeed there are those who believe that progress should be moving faster still.

In the midst of the pandemic, a number of calls for greater acceleration have been issued, some emphasizing the need to reduce costs for drug development, which have doubled every decade since the 1970s, perhaps by redesigning clinical trials or employing what are called human-challenge trials, or by streamlining the drug-approval process. Graham, who is now a senior adviser for global health equity at the Morehouse School of Medicine, emphasizes questions of global distribution and access: Will the new technologies actually get where they are needed most? “The biology and the science that we need is already in place,” he says. “The question now to me is: Can we actually do it?”

In 1987, the economist Robert Solow commented that you could see the computer revolution everywhere but the productivity statistics — that despite intuitions about how fully information technology had transformed all forms of work in America, the step-change hadn’t really made a mark on the country’s economy in any obvious statistical way.

Until a few years ago, perhaps, you might have said the same about billions of dollars spent researching potential H.I.V. vaccines or the decoding of the human genome, which unleashed a venture-capital-like boom-and-bust biotech hype cycle that sputtered out before most Americans had seen any real gains from it. Sometimes these things just take a little time.

David Wallace-Wells is a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.”

Sign up for the David Wallace-Wells newsletter, for Times subscribers only. The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2023, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Trudeau Diversified Canada’s Economy Like No One Before. By Matthew A. Winkler

Trudeau Diversified Canada’s Economy Like No One Before. By Matthew A. Winkler

Unlike any of his peers in the developed world, the prime minister has managed to show his fellow citizens the benefits of immigration.

Justin Trudeau has Canada’s economy humming. 

Justin Trudeau has Canada’s economy humming. Photographer: Rodrigo Reyes Marin — Pool/Getty Images 

ByMatthew A. Winkler+Follow

22 June 2023 at 19:00 GMT+9

It seems like Canada has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. The Bank of Canada was blamed for tanking global bond markets earlier this month when it unexpectedly raised benchmark interest rates to the highest in 22 years. Then there’s the toxic, Martian-like haze from wildfires raging in British Columbia to Nova Scotia. 

And yet, these events obscure a more relevant reality, which is that Canada is booming like it never has before. Unprecedented population growth, record-low unemployment, the most diversified economy in its 156-year history and a world-beating stock market since 2021 are contributing to what nine out of 10 economists say will be the best performer among the Group of Seven developed countries by 2025. 

Source: Bloomberg

Canada already is the fastest-growing economy after the US in the G7 this year and will probably repeat that performance in 2024, according to economist forecasts compiled by Bloomberg. It will be No. 1 in 2025 with gross domestic product expanding 2.3%. Technology is driving much of the growth. Shopify Inc., the Ottawa-based commerce platform provider, is the country's third most valuable company and the No. 5 application software company in the world after more than doubling in value from its 2015 initial public offering. None of Shopify's peers will come close to matching its 22% sales growth this year, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Nuvei Corp., the Montreal-based payment processing company that went public in 2020 and receives 60% of its revenue from outside North America, will appreciate 90% over the next 12 months on sales growth of 47%, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Bombardier Inc., the Montreal-based manufacturer of private jets, appreciated 171% during the past 12 months after reporting eight consecutive quarters of positive earnings surprises -- a net-income superlative unmatched by any of Bombardier's global peers. 

crash_course_tout

That's a far cry from Canada during the first six years of the new century when Canadian shares showed greater price fluctuations and a total return (income plus appreciation) that was 64% less than the Bloomberg World Large & Mid Cap Index. Not only are Canadian shares less volatile than they've ever been, they're beating the benchmark by 13 percentage points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Unlike any of his peers in the developed world, Trudeau managed to show 40 million fellow citizens the benefits of immigration, evidenced by the economy's performance, which is another way of saying investing in Canada turned out to be the best bet yet.

Defending Academic Freedom Requires Standing Up For Open Inquiry: A Conversation with Jonathan Marks

www.theunpopulist.net

Defending Academic Freedom Requires Standing Up For Open Inquiry: A Conversation with Jonathan Marks

Aaron Ross Powell

30 - 38 minutes

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Academic freedom is under assault, but who is mounting that assault depends on who you ask. The right has long argued that universities are controlled by the left with free inquiry as the victim. The liberal right, it turns out, doesn't much care for liberal education. The result is a wave of right-populist assaults on the very academic freedom they've historically claimed to support. To explore these issues, I'm joined by Jonathan Marks. He's a professor of politics at Ursinus College and author of Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education. ­­­­­­­

A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Aaron Ross Powell: The right has long claimed that leftist control of our universities results not just in indoctrination, but in a climate that pushes back on the free inquiry that is central to the university project, that the left opposes free speech and doesn't want professors to explore ideas that it doesn't like. At the same time, though, we have seen an increasing turn on the right against academic freedom. The most recent and prominent example is probably the New College of Florida, where the right has taken over the college board and is instituting a narrow conception of what a university ought to be and the kinds of ideas it ought to explore.

Yet many on the right seem far less concerned suddenly about academic freedom when it's their guys limiting it or when its limitations are being used to promote right-wing causes. Why is there that disconnect? Why do we see people on the right much more concerned about assaults on academic freedom when they come from the left, but then suddenly becoming very quiet when it is the right and conservatives apparently doing it?

Jonathan Marks: I have a couple of ideas about that, and maybe just a little bit of background about the New College situation, that began in January 2023, so that's just this year, when Ron DeSantis appointed six new trustees, which together with some others already appointed to constitute a majority of the New College board. They are, with the support of the state legislature, busy attempting, in the words of the Lieutenant Governor of Florida, to “transform” New College, which is a small public honors college, more or less, into the “Hillsdale of the South,” meaning to transform it into a conservative college. Certainly, although Hillsdale also happens to be a religious college, that doesn't seem to be part of it. Directly speaking, it's an interesting language to use.

In the course of that, they appointed a new president, they've at least put into the future, various folks who had cleared every other hurdle to tenure, all with a view to putting their stamp on the college. That's a violation of academic freedom for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons has to do with the principle of shared governance, whereby trustees show a certain restraint, even with respect to or especially with respect to matters of the curriculum, where faculty are thought to have the expertise and the purview to make most of the determinations about what's going to taught.

What explains support for these actions among people who have been screaming and complaining about academic freedom and free speech on campus for many years? I think there are two answers to that question. The first one is despair. That is the sense that free speech really can't be preserved on universities by traditional means. Colleges will not transform themselves, they're too dominated by left progressives. The only thing you can do is try to place enormous pressure on them to reform.

Some folks who favor free speech and academic freedom may not even love what's going on in New College, but they consider it a great warning signal that will maybe spur some colleges and universities to reform themselves, by caring more about free speech, intellectual diversity, that kind of thing. There's a second issue, which I think is important, which is that there are some folks behind this reform, like Chris Rufo, who's one of the trustees at New College who have said quite openly that they're not in favor of academic freedom. They are motivated by what I'd call spirit of “illiberal populism.”

They think that ostensibly, neutral-sounding things like academic freedom where it sounds like every idea it's going to have its day, or freedom of speech where it sounds like every idea is going to have its day, or even free markets where it sounds like everybody gets to do what they want, the argument is a Trojan Horse in a way for the dominance of a left progressive elite. You can't honor academic freedom, you have to crush the left progressives in the university, you have to crush the left progressives over at Disney, you have to crush the left progressives in the civil service and so on.

“They [rightwingers] think that ostensibly, neutral-sounding things like academic freedom where it sounds like every idea it's going to have its day, or freedom of speech where it sounds like every idea is going to have its day, or even free markets where it sounds like everybody gets to do what they want, the argument is a Trojan Horse in a way for the dominance of a left progressive elite. You can't honor academic freedom, you have to crush the left progressives.”

Aaron: I think there's a lot of very interesting ways we can carve those attitudes at the joints to try to get at what's going on and why we should be concerned about it, because on the one hand, just the idea that there's a small university that is used to be fairly progressive in its academic outlook and is now being shifted.

There are plenty of conservative universities out there. You mentioned Hillsdale, but there are also more evangelical religious ones. There's Bob Jones University and Liberty University, and there are universities that just have more of a conservative bent. That's not necessarily troubling to us. Is there anything wrong with saying “our university is going to advance a particular perspective?”

Jonathan: Certainly, there's nothing wrong with it vis-à-vis our laws, but there's a long tradition to which academic freedom is connected, whereby universities ought not to be founded to advance particular agenda. If you look at the early history of academic freedom in 1915 when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issues a statement that came in a lot of ways to define academic freedom with adjustments down to the present day, they said that you've got proprietary institutions. Those institutions are looking to advance particular vision. Could be religious, might not be religious. We're looking to advance some set of values of some kind.

Then there's the new research university, and they're devoted to inquiry into matters of human concern. They really want to distinguish themselves from those proprietary institutions. In their view, those proprietary institutions can continue to exist. Nothing wrong with that, but the claim of the university for public support rests on the role it plays in the advancement of inquiry and knowledge, which is in some ways at odds with the notion that what we're about is promoting some vision of social justice or another.

Aaron: When we're talking about free inquiry and advancing knowledge, though, so newspapers have a split between editorial and their news reporting side, and there's a recognized—the journalists are doing something fundamentally different than the columnists are. At the university, as far as what kinds of inquiry we ought to protect or ought to see as constitutive of this flourishing academic freedom, it seems like, could there be a difference between these, say, hard science researchers are exploring every question no matter where it might lead, which might be different from the professor who is using their position and their research to engage in say, very direct political action or persuasion.

We might want them to access their ideas freely, but I can imagine someone saying that's a different thing. It's a different thing from the sociologist trying to figure out why gun violence happens versus the sociologist who is spending his or her classroom hours telling the students that they should go out and advocate for gun control.

Jonathan: A couple of things to that. Every answer is a couple of things. The first thing is to say that there is a wing of the university that really has its origin in the 1960s. These are programs and things like ethnic studies, African American studies, Chicano studies, that kind of thing. Those disciplines or really, interdisciplinary programs, understood themselves really quite self-consciously as looking to enact some political objectives. In so doing, I think they did think of themselves as changing the character of the university.

That's a problem. Let me explain why it's a problem. I said that our claim to academic freedom as professors, and I'm a professor, has historically rested on the idea that we are, as you say, pursuing inquiry, arguments, and evidence where they lead rather than trying to advance a partisan agenda. How can we say states or trustees don't intervene if we ourselves are pursuing a partisan agenda? What's our justification for asking not to intervene? I think a trustee or a state might quite sensibly say to themselves, something to the effect of, "Well, if there's going to be a political agenda at the university, may as well be mine, right?"

Now that doesn't mean that you can't pursue interested lines of inquiry. For example, you don't even have to go outside the realm of scientific research. I might be really attached to some ideas about how to cure cancer. I may have gone into academics not to inquire into the truth, but because I want to change the world by curing cancer. You can imagine the economist entering into study for similar reasons. They want to change the world in some manner or another and they think that economics is a useful tool.

I think that, at least on a traditional understanding of academic freedom, all one asks is that those researchers pursue that line in a certain matter, such that they enter into a community of inquiry with certain standards, sometimes broad, sometimes within their specific discipline. And when the evidence contradicts their cherished views, they honor the evidence rather than their cherished views.

“On a traditional understanding of academic freedom, all one asks is that those researchers pursue that line in a certain matter, such that they enter into a community of inquiry with certain standards, sometimes broad, sometimes within their specific discipline. And when the evidence contradicts their cherished views, they honor the evidence rather than their cherished views.”

There's nothing wrong, I don't think, in going into academics with something other than a motive to eat at the “tree of pure theory” or something like that. Nonetheless, and I keep saying traditional understanding of academic freedom, but I think that understanding, again, makes sense with respect to fending off intervention in the universities. That's the understanding of how to pursue something that you really cherish in a manner that's consistent with the way in which we justify academic freedom and justify the genuinely very special privileges that academics have.

Aaron: This seems like part of the challenge then is that one way to look at the critique from both the left of academic activities and the critique from the right in terms of viewing academic activity as indoctrination and the left trying to control the commanding heights of culture and education and so on, is that both of them, to some extent, are rejecting the possibility of what you just described, in the sense that what they are saying is every method of inquiry, every area of inquiry brings with it either a desire for certain normative outcomes or has baked in certain normative assumptions that are then themselves political.

The right is saying, "Look, it's not—" This is I think why you don't see them say, "Look, we don't like what the CRT people are teaching. Therefore, the solution is to have courses on other ways of looking at race." Rather, they say like, "We need to stop the teaching of CRT just because the very fact of teaching it or of teaching just America's racial history is itself a politicized act that is selling a certain progressive worldview."

The left says, "Look, the sciences that you just described have all of these internalized, normative assumptions that are political about what counts as evidence, what counts as proper kinds of inquiry, what counts as the kinds of questions one should be—or are worthy of exploration and so on." To some extent, it seems like what you're saying is we should—that's not true, and that instead, there is a non-political way to approach the pursuit of knowledge in this intellectually honest way that you have described. Is that a fair representation of distinguishing the sides versus your position?

Jonathan: Yes. It used to be, I think, a pretty common position on the left. I've been in higher education for about 25 years and it used to be pretty common when you said, "I really think that we ought to be looking at the arguments and the evidence rather than coming in with our pre-date ideological agenda," for somebody on the left or the influence the left to say, "Well, everything is political." Almost wearily, everybody knows that “everything is political.” Under the guise of neutral academic standards, in fact, the universities are in the control of the capitalists and the Zionists and all that kind of thing.

I guess there's always been something of that on the right too, but I think that at least in terms of it being a popular way of talking about higher education, even among right-wing academics, that seems at least relatively new with respect to the time I've been involved. They say, "Well, no, obviously, universities aren't controlled by the Zionists and the capitalists, they're controlled by the progressive elite, and everything is political." Both sides say that standards, purportedly neutral, are instruments of power.

Now, why might the right be saying that now? I think part of the reason is that they hit upon the strategy in red states of noticing that boards of trustees have almost unlimited power if they choose not to observe the norms that have for a long time governed the way in which we manage higher education institutions. It's an academic freedom version of “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

On the left, they feel like they've got controls within the institutions. They dismiss concerns about neutrality and free speech because they've got the power to work their will. To exaggerate, and I'll take back part of that exaggeration, and it's on the outside, in red states and they hope soon at the federal level as well. Conservatives think, "Well, we've got the power, and so we don't have to respect these norms." You're inclined to appeal to the norms loudly and desperately when you don't have power. When you do have power—"What norms?”

“Conservatives think, ‘Well, we've got the power, and so we don't have to respect these norms.’ You're inclined to appeal to the norms loudly and desperately when you don't have power. When you do have power—’what norms?’”

Now, there is an intellectually serious argument, of course, and that's where I take part of this back, that says, "Well, there is no point outside of our subjectivity where you can occupy and look down on things and say, "Well, I've got the object of truth of the matter." I think that's right, but at the same time, that point doesn't really mean—none of these players really think it means in other contexts that you can't distinguish between partisan and more or less nonpartisan interventions in research.

In a lot of ways, academic practices are not designed to end subjectivity, which is impossible, but to enable us to get at or move in the direction of confidently thinking we've got a truth, we can communicate with others who, operating under the same standard, are willing to acknowledge it. These are ways of trying to—despite our subjectivity—make our way in the world.

“Academic practices are not designed to end subjectivity, which is impossible, but to enable us to get at or move in the direction of confidently thinking we've got a truth, we can communicate with others who operating under the same standard are willing to acknowledge it. These are ways of trying to—despite our subjectivity—make our way in the world.”

In real life, outside of a context in which people are trying to make a theoretical or a highly politically useful point, I don't know anybody who really thinks that there's no way of distinguishing between looking at the world through a really partisan lens and looking at the world through a lens that accounts for some of the fallacies that we're prone to fall into because of our prejudices.

Aaron: Early discussions of what now we call “cancel culture” and the worries about free speech, at least in this latest iteration, I'm old enough to remember the 1990s, they arose in the university context. The early stories were about students protesting speakers and so on, and universities have stayed at the center of this conversation about free speech and free inquiry and worries about this degradation and on through to the conversation we're having now.

I guess the question I want to ask is, why universities? Why are universities so much at the center of these fights about politics and indoctrination given that several years ago, I decided to look at the research and it turns out that as wonderful as professors are, they don't have that much of an impact on their students' political views.

At colleges—universities, as a general rule, don't tend to change their students' views much. What change you see tends to be more peer effects that you move out of your small rural red town, you go to a university town or a more cosmopolitan urban place, people tend to be more left, your friends tend to be more left, you adjust your views, but it's not sticky. When you leave, they tend to drift back to what they were before.

It's like, all of this is about something that doesn't actually seem to have as much effect as people think it does. The conservative is not going to win back American culture by taking over universities. The left is not dragging us into communism because there's a lot of left-wing professors. What is it about universities that makes them such a flashpoint for fights over basically who gets to control the direction of discourse and culture?

Jonathan: First of all, I've seen some of that research as well. I think that we really don't know that much about the effect college has on students with respect to what they think. It's not that easy to distinguish between peer effects and effects in the classroom or effects due to the broader atmosphere at colleges and university. There's no question that both the left and the right, whatever the merit to that research, think that universities are a way, just as you say, of exerting some control over the discourse of what kinds of things people talk about, of what kinds of things get published.

“We really don't know that much about the effect college has on students with respect to what they think. It's not that easy to distinguish between peer effects and effects in the classroom or effects due to the broader atmosphere at colleges and university. There's no question that both the left and the right, whatever the merit to that research, think that universities are a way, just as you say, of exerting some control over the discourse.”

Way back, long before the '90s, in 1962, there was this document issued by Students for a Democratic Society, which came to be known as the Port Huron Statement, in which they say quite explicitly, what we really need to do is to ally ourselves with left-wing actors outside of the university and the labor movement and elsewhere and transform universities into bases for an assault on the loci of power, something like that. Parts of the left have seen universities in that way.

More recently, I was reading a scholar who's involved in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement concerning Israel. She argues that the movement to boycott Israel within universities is part of a broader movement to transform universities into sites of struggle against US imperialism and the imperialism of smaller cousins like Israel. I agree with you that hasn’t been terribly effective. I've written a lot about that.

If that were true, if that had been terribly effective, hotel management majors wouldn't outnumber those who show any interest in politics or humanities subjects on campus. Clearly, there are limits to how far that kind of thing goes. I think on the right, the interest of the universities, in part the perception, which I think is largely correct, that universities on average are left progressive in bent, and they do occupy, like the media, like arts institutions, they occupy a certain place in the culture. I also think that people are misled about the extent to which there's indoctrination going on at colleges and universities. That's a very powerful talking point. That could get a lot of people quite interested in that.

There's a big industry going on for some time now among conservative journals, which will just pitch five stories into a Twitter feed per day about the depredations of college administrations and college students and so on and so forth. I could do the same thing with respect to medical malpractice lawsuits and make you very afraid to enter a hospital and make you think that it's essential that we take over hospitals and reform them. I think there is also a misperception out there.

“There's a big industry going on for some time now among conservative journals, which will just pitch five stories into a Twitter feed per day about the depredations of college administrations and college students and so on and so forth. I could do the same thing with respect to medical malpractice lawsuits and make you very afraid to enter a hospital and make you think that it's essential that we take over hospitals and reform them.”

I would say that despite what you say about the research showing, I think what it mostly shows is that peers at colleges are more important in the way in which students move than faculty members are, and that tracks with my own experience. Nobody listens to me, so I get that. Despite that, at the very least, one could argue that there's a missed opportunity there.

Let's say that the overwhelming majority of faculty are left-progressive and that they vastly outnumber conservatives, which is true nationally. We do know this based on self-reported data, big studies from the Higher Education Research Institute. Well, your ideological bent, despite all of our training and all of our efforts, our ideological bent affects what questions we think it's important to look into, what studies we're going to view with great skepticism, and which ones we're just going to add to our arsenal, which students we find irritating, which ones we view as heroes and so on.

I said before, there's some truth to the notion that we are subjective. Professors are subjective too despite their training, and so when you look at an institution that not only is dominated, again, faculty-wise, and also student-facing administrator-wise by left progressive, you should start to notice, well, they're telling everybody else to look into their prejudices, but they don't seem particularly to care about their own. When confronted with the idea that there aren't that many conservatives at universities, are inclined to say, “Well, that's because conservatives are stupid money grubbers, so of course, they don't feel at home at universities.”

“Professors are subjective too despite their training, and so when you look at an institution that not only is dominated, again, faculty-wise, and also student-facing administrator-wise by left progressive, you should start to notice, well, they're telling everybody else to look into their prejudices, but they don't seem particularly to care about their own.”

Aaron: Yes, I think that's an important point. There's a professor that I know who came from a working-class British background, like fairly poor, and she's very, very progressive. I think she describes herself as a socialist but complains frequently about how her colleagues are really obsessed with notions of privilege when it comes to gender and race and ethnicity, but they just have no idea about the privilege that comes from—most of her colleagues came from well-to-do, highly educated backgrounds and are not interested in the working class as like a category that they should extend concern to, not because they don't feel it, but they don't know it because so few professors came from a really impoverished working-class background.

Jonathan: Yes. There is that subjective consideration too. Richard Rorty wrote a book probably a couple of decades ago now. Richard Rorty, both a known engaged person of the left and also a well-known philosopher, and he argued that there had been a real change in the character of the left which was most evident at universities but not limited to universities. He called that left the “cultural left” to distinguish it from a left that was more concerned with class and economics.

As you say, you can get that critique of universities from left-liberals too, except they'll say, "Well, parts of the university are too dominated by this piece of the left, and I prefer they be dominated by this other piece of the left."

Aaron: If you care about not just academic freedom, but the proper academic inquiry which depends upon academic freedom, and we want to encourage that, what do we do in the current environment? Because we seem to be in a situation where the left does have overwhelming control. The surveys of how many people in a given department are registered Democrats versus independents versus Republicans—depending on the department, there can be basically zero Republicans, and everyone is Democrats and so on. It is overwhelmingly left.

The right is increasingly turning against, as you described, academic freedom in an attempt to take over and move things, not towards free inquiry, but just in an unfree inquiry way that's producing the kinds of stuff that they like. How do we start to fix that? Because you're asking sides to give up their arms to some extent. Well, the other guys seem to be arming up as much as they can.

Jonathan: Yes. The short answer is, I sure don't know, but I'll give you a couple of ideas. One is, I think it really is partly a fight among conservatives. There are in a way two fights, one's inside the university and one's outside the university. University reform nowadays, as I said at the top of this, seems to be motivated by illiberal populism. The argument is something to the effect of, "Well, these ostensibly neutral institutions are dominated by a sick-minded elite and, by God, we're paying for it. Waitresses and truck drivers shouldn't have to subsidize people who hate them."

This is pretty straightforward populism and it worships at the altar of Viktor Orbán in Hungary who was quite explicit in thinking that we need to move toward illiberal democracy. Historically, of course, there has been a healthy chunk of the right that thought that what conservatives need to preserve was precisely liberalism. Part of it now is trying to defeat the illiberal right. Conservatives can’t do it alone but they can be part of it.

Then within the universities, on the other hand, I think that—I think this really goes on from campus to campus. It's not some big nationwide thing that can happen, but from classroom to department to college to become the model for other colleges and so on. Colleges need to concede. As I think you can find, again, a lot of non-conservatives conceding that conservatives have a legitimate gripe with colleges and universities.

And while it shouldn't be remedied by allowing conservatives to take over some of them or something like that, colleges, and universities need to show in different ways, as to some extent that they do already. In other words, a lot of the university still very much consist of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Just because a lot of faculty members are liberals doesn't mean that they'll never tell you about the existence of Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek or people like that. They need to demonstrate in a variety of ways that they take this problem seriously as, by and large, they haven't been, it seems to me.

In a way, it's quite convenient to have an illiberal populist assault in the university because then you can stave off any kind of criticism by saying, "Well, that's the illiberal right who's saying that." Even if there were a glimmer of truth, you wouldn't want to encourage the illiberal right. I think that inside the university, people who are devoted to academic freedom, which I think is most faculty members, most faculty members need to actually find their voices where issues arise that can really attract justified criticism.

For example, should we as a job requirement have candidates write essays about what anti-racism is and how they've demonstrated being anti-racist in their lives? I think faculty dedicated to academic freedom need to raise questions about that kind of thing. They need to raise questions about intellectual diversity on campus. They need to be more engaged than, I think, faculty traditionally are in this kind of thing.

“Should we as a job requirement have candidates write essays about what anti-racism is and how they've demonstrated being anti-racist in their lives? I think faculty dedicated to academic freedom need to raise questions about that kind of thing. They need to raise questions about intellectual diversity on campus. They need to be more engaged than, I think, faculty traditionally are.”

Most of us didn't go into academics to be engaged in a battle to save universities. We want to go study something in our lab. It takes a certain amount of energy to notice that there is a problem and then actually confront some really spirited people who are actually in academics for the activism. Those who know each other, are better organized and so on, it takes a kind of courage and maybe even more than courage. It takes a lot of retail politics and legwork, which faculty members often aren't inclined to do.

In a way, I think the reason that the left has so much influence at colleges, universities, and some neighborhoods—not in all—is that in a way, they wear the other side out. It's not that folks necessarily agree with, let's call them the “far left,” of the university who probably represent maybe 12% of faculty nationwide. They can have an outside influence because this is mostly what they wish to do and other people get tired in a way of fighting against them and figure, "Well, this isn't affecting what's going on in my lab, so that's okay," but multiplied over a lot of instances, that can discredit universities.

It's not that conservatives wouldn't attack universities if universities were pristine places where research was pursued, they still would. But how much purchase of that attack has something to do with what's really going on at colleges and universities.

Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to rate and review it on Apple podcast and also check out our sister podcast, ReImagining Liberty, where I explore the radical emancipatory potential of liberty. You can also join our Discord listener community and book club by following the link in the show notes. Zooming is a project for The UnPopulist and is produced by Landry Ayres.

The UnPopulist invites interesting thinkers from across the political spectrum to foster a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation to advance liberal values, including thinkers it may—or may not—agree with.

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You Can Lie, But Only A Little. By Jeremiah Johnson

You Can Lie, But Only A Little

Jeremiah Johnson — Read time: 6 minutes

You Can Lie, But Only A Little

How sweatshop retailer Shein misjudged the online influence game

Imagine that you’re a well-known influencer. Your main source of income comes from sponsorships and product endorsements. You’re able to sell those endorsements and sponsorships because you have an audience that is both large and trusting of your recommendations. And so you make your content (YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagram posts, etc) and most of that content is Brought to you by HelloFresh or perhaps Sponsored by SquareSpace. It’s a cash for influence business.

Things normally go like this: You read some gushing, flattering copy about the quality of HelloFresh’s food and how wonderful and easy they are. HelloFresh gives you money for doing this. Some fraction of your audience will click the link, purchase HelloFresh meals, and make the whole enterprise worth it.

Mandy Moore on Instagram: “Love coming home to @HelloFresh after busy days at work. I always find gluten free options and adore that the menu changes each week. I’ve partnered with @HelloFresh to share with you all a special savings of $120 at hellofresh.com/mandy using my code MM25 #hellofreshpartner”

When you say “This is the easiest it’s ever been for me to make fresh meals at home! I’m a satisfied customer myself! I weep uncontrolled tears of ecstatic joy every time the package comes!” does your audience believe that’s literally true? Does it even matter if it’s literally true? Probably not. Your audience has seen you read or write ad copy for dozens of sponsors. They’re aware that you probably don’t actually cook HelloFresh every night and that you are not actually filled with ecstasy every time the HelloFresh delivery arrives. What they do probably expect is that you won’t endorse something that’s genuinely terrible - that HelloFresh won’t taste extremely bad, poison them, or scam them out of money. And since HelloFresh easily passes this standard, life for you as the influencer is good. Your standard is this: You can lie, but only a little.

Shein is a Chinese ‘fast fashion’ retailer. If you’re not familiar with the concept of fast fashion, it’s essentially mass-produced clothing from the developing world using cheap materials at cheap prices. There’s a focus on trends and ultra-fast iteration periods. The clothing is intended to be worn for a few months and then discarded, rather than made to last.

Fast fashion as an industry has come under a huge amount of scrutiny for sweatshop labor practices, environmentally unsustainable practices, and rampant intellectual theft. Shein is the ultra-hyper-mega version of fast fashion. Competitors like Zara or H&M might be cycling through tens of thousands of unique products, but Shein is cycling through hundreds of thousands, or even millions. By reputation Shein is the cheapest, makes by far the most unique items, and turns them around the fastest.

They also have a super-sized amount of controversy. Rather than list it all out, I’ll just link to their Wikipedia controversy section, which includes fun sections like ‘Xinjiang Controversy’, ‘Lead Toxicity’, ‘Rampant IP Theft’ and ‘Human Rights Violations involving Slave Labor’. You can easily lose several hours investigating it all.

So what’s a brand to do with so much controversy? Well, Shein is already popular among a certain set of online influencers. Shein hauls have been a well-worn video archetype for years. Why not have all these influencers endorse you and say nice things? Even better - why not bring them to a carefully controlled Chinese factory and have them directly rebuke all those supposed controversies?

That’s exactly what Shein did, and that’s where Shein misunderstood the relationship between influencers and their audiences.

Shein arranged a tour for several influencers to come to China and see Shein’s factories. Well… one very carefully stage-managed factory, the Potemkin village of factories. The influencers ate it up, proclaimed everything was wonderful, and said that people should reject the ‘narrative fed to the US’ about how Shein is bad. The internet predictably dragged these influencers mercilessly. The influencers were forced into video deletions and backtracking and defensive non-apologies.

As is usually the case here, I believe the least interesting part of this story is the ‘Is Shein Evil?’ component. I’m sure Shein has done a lot of unsavory stuff en route to fast fashion dominance, but plenty of people are already writing about that. More interesting is why the internet exploded with anger at this particular moment. After all, Shein has a been a prominent retailer among influencers for years!

As an influencer, you’re not expected to be 100% honest with every endorsement you give. If you’re a personal finance influencer and you are sponsored by Charles Schwab retirement accounts, it’s understood that you may not literally have a Charles Schwab account yourself. It might not be literally the best retirement account ever as you’re describing it. But that’s ok as long as Charles Schwab is trustworthy enough. On the other hand, if you’re a mainstream personal finance influencer and you begin touting memecoins and sketchy crypto sites, your audience will be extremely angry. You can bend the truth, but not break it. You can lie, but only a little.

Fashion influencers doing simple Shein haul videos are on the correct side of that line. Even if Shein is evil, your audience will forgive you for being a little ignorant of that. They’ll let you ignore the horrible practices, to some extent. What they won’t let you do is actively participate in hiding the horrible things, or in making the propaganda yourself. In terms of Shein’s perceived problematic behavior, these influencers moved from ignorant to complicit. Never cross the line from ignorant to complicit.

There’s also an interesting interplay here between fans and influencers that doesn’t exist in traditional marketing. If Burger King or Shein or Home Depot engages in deceptive marketing, people will be mad. But they won’t usually feel outraged or betrayed, because it’s expected that brand marketing is essentially propaganda. On the other hand, if an influencer personally engages in propaganda on behalf of one of those brands, they risk a much more severe backlash.

DALL-E, AI-generated tarot card of an influencer

Every influencer is a business, an operation that trades audience size and influence and reputation for cash. But they’re also a person, and their power is built on a parasocial connection with their audience. That’s the duality of life as an influencer. If the audience feels an influencer is lying to them or engaging in unethical behavior, they’re going to feel personally betrayed. There’s a form of trust that is now gone. That parasocial relationship can be ruined in a way that a relationship with Home Depot can’t be.

Ultimately that’s the lesson I take from this entire outrage cycle - if you’re an influencer you need to hoard your credibility like gold. When you’re trading your influence for money, you can lie a little bit. You can fudge the truth, exaggerate about your sponsors. Sure, you ‘use NordVPN everyday’, wink wink. You can even sometimes ignore problematic aspects of the companies giving you money. But there is a line. Endorse especially horrible things, or actively participate in the deception, and you’re not just risking your own audience turning on you. You’ll potentially face the wrath of the wider internet as well.

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By Jeremiah Johnson · Launched 2 months ago

American business magnate Warren Buffett

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The Japan Times

BY ELIZABETH BEATTIE

STAFF WRITER

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Jun 30, 2023

In recent months, American business magnate Warren Buffett has made his case for Japan clear as he boosts investment in the market, with the 92-year-old Coca-Cola-drinking Berkshire Hathaway chairman buying into a number of Japanese trading houses. The play, which has coincided with a series of stock market reforms, has drawn global attention to the sometimes overlooked market.

American investment firms such as Bain Capital have also expanded their footprints in Japan since late last year, while hedge fund managers like Ken Griffin are looking to deepen their positions, but Buffett’s stature in the business world and emphatic comments mean his investments have carried extra weight.

“Warren Buffett is looking for investments globally, and he’s decided that Japan is the place to be,” said Graeme Knowd, president of consulting firm Knowd Advisory. “I think it reminds people that they should take another look at Japan and see if he’s seeing something that they’re missing.”

But there are deeper trends at play than prominent investors looking for opportunities, with the weak yen and geopolitical tensions looming large.

“Japan itself is trying to change some of the things that’s been sending foreign investors away from the country in the past,” said Takeshi Kitaura, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, noting “the foreign investment crowd is seeing a dynamic change.”

Part of that is reforms to the Tokyo Stock Exchange that were implemented last year. Despite being criticized for not addressing fundamental issues, they are nonetheless part of a drive by the TSE to have companies improve their value. To that end, the bourse is pushing companies to improve their price-to-book ratio — a measure investors use to see if their stock prices are over- or undervalued.

In recent months, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has made clear his case for Japan as he boosts investment in the market. | REUTERS

In recent months, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has made clear his case for Japan as he boosts investment in the market. | REUTERS

But an even larger factor is likely to be the weakening of the yen, with some drawing parallels to the start of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s signature economic policies in around 2012 and 2013, which triggered a depreciation of the yen and consequently ignited overseas interest in Japan.

“On the surface, it’s very similar at the moment — the interest in the equity market, the Nikkei, the Topix 33 year high, the yen weakening,” said Masamichi Adachi, chief Japan economist at UBS, who notes that this time the situation is different, with a raft of other factors at play — including companies taking a more active role in tackling matters like wage increases, positively affecting Japan’s macroeconomic health.

On Friday, the yen dropped as much as 0.2% to its lowest point since November.

Market players unconvinced that Japan’s moment has come think active government policy is required to sustain interest: Bank of America analysts have said the “buy Japan” call may be “premature,” instead suggesting 2024 might be Japan’s year, but with that being contingent on “confirmation of a virtuous inflation cycle in Japan and the government’s policy to promote domestic (capital expenditure) and inward (foreign direct investment).”

Still, wider geopolitical trends are also contributing to the case for investment in Japan.

At the same time as Buffett has sung the praises of Japan, he has expressed growing wariness around Taiwan’s situation, minimizing his stake in leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

“I feel better about the capital that we’ve got deployed in Japan than in Taiwan,” he said in response to questions during an earnings call in May, the same month he said the decision to invest in Japan was “simple.”

Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be brought back into the fold — by force, if necessary. In April this year and August 2022, China staged massive military drills around the island.

Electronic quotation boards display the rate of the yen versus the U.S. dollar at a foreign exchange brokerage in Tokyo on Friday. | AFP-JIJI 

Electronic quotation boards display the rate of the yen versus the U.S. dollar at a foreign exchange brokerage in Tokyo on Friday. | AFP-JIJI

Buffett is not alone, with other investors growing wary of political risk in China. The country’s bond market has suffered from a dip in foreign capital, and meanwhile opportunities in other Asian markets are being examined more closely.

“The perception of China has deteriorated significantly from the short-term, medium-term and long-term (outlook),” Adachi said, noting that the country’s emergence from 2022’s stringent COVID-19 restrictions disappointed in the second quarter of this year.

While geopolitical tensions between China and the West have caused people to look for other investment destinations, some are also concerned about China’s economic situation, which they see as resembling Japan’s 1990s property market collapse, Adachi said.

In any case, Knowd says that concerns over regional tensions have shone a spotlight on Japan.

“If you’re reducing exposure to China, but still want exposure to a big market in Asia, Japan is where you’re going to be,” he said.