Eugenics, Environmental Ruin, and Surveillance: The Story of Silicon Valley. By Edward Ongweso Jr.

www.thenation.com

Eugenics, Environmental Ruin, and Surveillance: The Story of Silicon Valley

Edward Ongweso Jr.

12 - 15 minutes

    June 23, 2023

Eugenics, Environmental Ruin, and Surveillance: The Story of Silicon Valley

California’s tech industry cannot escape its original sins.

June 23, 2023

In the opening pages of his magisterial Bay Area history, Imperial San Francisco, historian Gray Brechin presents his book as an attempt “to answer the question raised by the kind of cities we build today: Are they worth it?” It’s a deceptively simple question, and it reemerges when we discuss San Francisco and its discontents.

From the city’s earliest days, visionaries looked at San Francisco and saw an heir to Rome. Brechin points to Army scout John C. Frémont, who said he named the bay’s mouth “Chrysopylae (Golden gate) on “the same principle that the harbor of Byzantium (Constantinople afterwards) was called Chrysoceras (Golden horn).”

Brechin also discusses Emanuel Leutze, who painted a mural on a wall in the House wing of the Capitol called Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which depicts settlers seeing California for the first time. “To Leutze’s cultivated sensibility, these were more than settlers entering California,” Brechin writes, “they were both the Israelites entering Canaan and the holy family of the New World.” Brechin describes a party attended by Leutze where the painter concedes that the mural’s historical references might be lost on some and that its Catholic symbols could offend others, but he contends all the attendees grasped his intention.

“All could understand the divine justification for empire’s expansion,” Brenchin writes. “As if to emphasize that this was a literal shrine to the religion of territorial conquest, the artist included a long panel at the bottom of the mural resembling the predella of a Renaissance altarpiece.” Rifles, axes, plows, powder horns, Native American trophies, crossed shovels, pickaxes, revolvers, and gold littered the mural as well. “No pent up Utica contracts our Powers, but the whole boundless Continent is ours,” reads the inscription by the mural’s weapons.

In Imperial San Francisco, the land outside of America’s Rome is reframed as a contado—an Italian word (and another nod to Rome) for a land that “contains other cities and villages that owe tribute to the dominant city.” To Brechin, imperial cities, like San Francisco or the District of Columbia, command contadi that stretch much further; they demand tribute from nations, continents, or even the entire planet. “The difference is one of size as well as consequence,” Brechin writes, “just as the mighty Maelstrom differs from a mere eddy.”

The book does not call on us to abandon cities. It does not wave away the pleasures and benefits of living close to others, but it refuses to pretend that the costs are small matters. We must grapple with the history of urbanization, especially when we are tracing forces that exterminated natives, reshaped the land and waters, drove people together, and then repeated that process for lands further and further away.

Brechin invokes Lewis Mumford’s “Pyramid of Mining,” a concept that imagines a “megamachine” consisting of a city’s core activities, that subordinate nature and consolidate elite control. Mumford argued that we suffered authoritarian forms of technology in part because of warfare and mining. Organized warfare demanded an inexhaustible supply of metals for weapons, and mines demanded certain types of technologies and activities to sustain them, and so hierarchies and social organizations emerged to preserve these efforts.

In Mumford’s megamachine and in Brechin’s case study of San Francisco, mining was at the foundation of everything. Mines were the source of minerals and metals needed to build and rule the city and its hinterlands. Mines brought workers to the city and the nearby pits. Mines provided the wealth to fund cities and sustain them. Mines shaped the development of technologies, giving operations more power to spoil the land in pursuit of greater bounties.

The bounties of farmlands and the underworld mines grew and grew. The sciences that developed both helped those industries metastasize larger swaths of the land. A few individuals generated dynastic fortunes that helped build newspaper empires, propaganda campaigns, monuments and memorials, all aimed at inspiring and sustaining the waves of bodies feeding into the megamachine. More fortunes still were used to fund efforts to develop the knowledge, tools, and techniques to better dominate nature. Universities, laboratories, and corporations innovated tools of remote control to administer California’s depleted ecology and corral the populace. These forces shaped San Francisco’s development, and they never completely vanished.

The problem is that San Francisco’s contado is now the world—there are always more mines, more bodies, more forests, and more wealth to be extracted; and there will always be a need for tools and techniques to subordinate everything outside the city for some Great Work.

For all its ambition and insight, Brechin’s case study is limited. It begins in the late 1800s as mining operations render the California countryside unrecognizable and ends in the 1950s, reflecting on the region’s scientific contribution to the creation of atomic weaponry. San Francisco has roots and tendrils that escape these bounds—specifically to Silicon Valley.

It is Malcolm Harris’s equally magisterial Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World that drives Brechin’s inquiry to its logical conclusion. Harris’s text stretches further back to the scouting, conquest, and colonization of the region and then stretches even further forward to the present as it sits atop a worldwide megamachine that has, as the subtitle suggests, shaped California, capitalism, and the world itself.

Silicon Valley may not have been born with the same imperial ambitions of San Francisco, but eugenic forms of it were present from the beginning. Harris teases that Silicon Valley’s first tech giant was a horse-stock farm developed by Leland Stanford. Here the visionary capitalist innovated the “Palo Alto System,” which combined “capitalist rationality and the exclusive focus on potential and speculative value.” Applied to horses, it would breed champion horses at record pace (never mind the busted limbs and corpses). Applied to humans, it would generate inordinate wealth (and consume everyone and everything it could in pursuit).

The horse-breeding system and its eugenic taint were soon exported to everything Stanford and his cohort touched. At Stanford University, which bears Leland’s name, professors of bionomics (the study of how biological beings respond to artificial environments) worked on the theory, and eugenicists like Ellwood Patterson Cubberly worked on the practice. “Assimilation, he believed,” Harris writes of Cubberly, “is best performed by the schools, which must prepare foreign-born to blend into the American race.” Thus came intelligence quotient (Stanford-Binet) tests promulgating the myth of “unitary general intelligence” along with tests straight from the horse-breeding system testing how fast children could run.

“Budding geniuses needed to be identified and elevated, while young degenerates needed to be corralled where they couldn’t dilute the national race or turn their underachievement into social problems,” Harris writes. “Stanford made large contributions to both strategies, promoting inequality as the only policy compatible with nature.”

Bionomics and eugenics faded but did not disappear. Breeding experiments and racist school policies became US apartheid and racist social policy. As Kim-Mai Cutler reported for TechCrunch, just east of Palo Alto’s Edenic paradise lies a stretch of land painted both as “a haven of affordability” for poor Black and brown people and “a stubbornly intractable core of poverty and violence amid Silicon Valley’s glittering wealth.” Years of segregation funneled non-whites into the neighborhood, while a nearby facility processing chemicals from semiconductor and hardware production poisoned the water and air. Superfund sites litter Santa Clara County—home to Palo Alto and East Palo Alto—and most are concentrated in predominantly Black and brown communities like Sunnyvale. The Palo Alto System pays them little mind as capital sloshes around them trying to find the greatest return at the lowest cost—or perhaps, the least noticeable cost.

There’s a dark side to nearly every tech venture. Amazon giveth same-day delivery; Amazon taketh the physical and mental health of workers hidden away in its sprawling logistics empire. Apple divines that we need $3,500 goggles, and overlooks the sacrifice zones around the mines for precious metals powering its products and the suicides at factories assembling them. Microsoft agrees to labor neutrality against efforts to unionize its various subsidiaries, and joins the other tech giants in becoming a military contractor while helping police departments across the world find sleeker tools to terrorize their communities. Google/Alphabet promises to revitalize its ailing search engine operations with generative AI, while pursuing military cloud-computing contracts. Facebook/Meta may flail around legless in a $100 billion metaverse prison while its social media platforms stumble along, but just out of view lie an army of exploited and tortured content moderators beside an ever-growing pile of corpses from the mob violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide its products incite.

As Silicon Valley metamorphosed from stolen land to a pioneer backwater to an imagined new Rome, as mines and oil wells puncturing the earth were connected by railroads, as the Stanford colony evolved into the American empire’s armament and laboratory during the Cold War, as one tech startup bubble deflated then gave way to an even hardier one, the Palo Alto System keeps living on like a hydra sprouting newer, hungrier heads from decapitated stumps.

Brechin’s polemic history was published back in 1999, but he updated it with an even bleaker preface in 2007 in which he doubted the possibility of resisting urban imperialism. Targets for the historian’s contempt included Thomas Friedman’s columns, interviews, and bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree that insisted that American empire could bring peace and wealth through awesome technology and unfettered trade; the decision by California universities to run Los Alamos Laboratories to “more like a business whose product is nuclear weapons”; and an obsequious media that all but chanted Friedman’s mantra “Give war a chance” and cultivated the profit-seeking and bloodlust necessary to deploy the US war machine in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friedman had invoked the line told to Tacitus by a chieftain crushed by the Romans—“They make a desolation and call it peace”—but Brechin doubted that he understood it:

    Friedman had mangled his quip, for the taxpayer-financed fist that, he asserted, kept the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology was as much that technology itself as the military that used it. But even that parsing missed the mark, for safety proved elusive for all concerned. Full-spectrum dominance—whether expressed in Friedman’s sound bites or in the Department of Defense’s Joint Vision 2020—was sure to provoke resistance from those meant to submit to such wonders of remote control, as well as from the wounded earth itself.

In between Brechin and Harris’s histories, did anything change? Sam Harnett’s 2020 literature review of tech journalism covering the gig economy offered a clear answer: no. Sycophantic coverage continued as non-labor reporters and commentators passed off Silicon Valley PR copy as journalism and helped will into existence an untenable business model that sought to undermine labor laws worldwide, re-legalize piece work, codify a new racial wage code, and proliferate workplace structures mediated by algorithmic overseers. The greed and bloodlust remained. Countless firms pushed this regulatory arbitrage scheme, and countless public officials cashed in (namely, those from the Obama administration) while the system subjected workers to poverty, wage theft, murder, and health problems. A religious fervor took hold—this time thanks to the ecstasy of innovation and digital disruption promised by Silicon Valley.

Not a single major firm in the so-called gig economy has reported a profit despite hundreds of billions of dollars’ having been poured into the industry. App-based ride-hail has helped degrade the quality of urban life, contributing to increases in pollution and traffic. The champions of the gig economy are fighting to self-exempt themselves from US labor law while pursuing partnerships with US cities to cobble together a regulatory template for the coming years. As the corporations of the gig economy consume industry after industry, pushing larger swaths of the population into undignified working conditions and starvation wages, the question reemerges: Are they worth it?

Christians Believe in White Christian Privilege. By Noah Berlatsky

www.everythingishorrible.net

Christians Believe in White Christian Privilege

Noah Berlatsky

7 - 9 minutes

For a non-Christian, Khyati Y. Joshi's White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America is a relief not only because of what it talks about, but because of what it doesn't. The book is a straightforward discussion of the way that Christians benefit from an American culture that sees them and their priorities as a default. Its analysis, though, is almost entirely material, cultural, and logistical—there's little to nothing about Christian doctrine or ethics. It's in sharp, and welcome, contrast to a popular discourse that tends to frame Christian supremacy as either an outgrowth of or in contrast to a Christian essence.

Christian Privilege, Christian Power

Joshi argues that Christians in the US enjoy numerous structural advantages and privileges that are all the more powerful because they generally aren't acknowledged, or even thought about. "Christian beliefs, norms, and practices, and indeed, a Christian way of looking at the world, infuse our society, enjoying countless legal, structural, and cultural supports whose roots reach back to the arrival of Europeans and the founding of the country," she writes.

The work calendar is built around Christian holidays. Public and professional meals cater to Protestant Christians—one of the few religious groups globally who have no dietary restrictions as part of their faith. Norms of dress and appearance in public are aligned with Christian norms that mandate lack of adornment—unless the adornment is a crucifix. And so forth.

All of these subtle and not so subtle cues enforce, and build upon, an assumption that Christianity is part and parcel of US national identity. In theory, Joshi says, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion to all, and proscribes state interference in religious practice. In fact, for the entirety of US history, religious minorities have been denied equal standing, and often have been denied citizenship itself.

Most enslaved people were Black non-Christians, and their status as "heathens" was used to justify their disenfranchisement and subjugation. Similarly, indigenous peoples in the Americas were not Christians, and that was explicitly used as the grounds for viewing their land as open for "discovery" and dispossession. The Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically limited immigrants from countries like China, was intended to maintain Christian numerical and cultural superiority.

Christians often see their hegemony as righteous and natural. If it is challenged, they believe they are being discriminated against. They become suspicious and enraged at marginal gains by religious minorities into public space they consider "theirs"—as evidenced for example by the outrage and bigotry that often greets the construction of mosques. Courts also favor Christians, in part by embracing Christian visions of what does and does not count as sacred. The courts have been reluctant to acknowledge the way that Native American religion is connected to sacred places rather than to doctrinal books or beliefs; despite the First Amendment, the government often attempts to build roads or pipelines through native land.

Christianity and Whiteness, the Privilege Twins

Much of this analysis of Christian supremacy will sound familiar; it almost exactly parallels many scholarly studies of white supremacy. You could replace "Christian" and "Christianity" in the last section with "white" and "whiteness" and it would all still scan, whether talking about slavery, indigenous genocide, or immigration restrictions.

Joshi isn't suggesting that Christian privilege should be used as a lens instead of race. Rather, she's arguing that religion and race intertwine—or as she puts it, "Christian privilege in the United States has always been entangled with notions of White supremacy."

People who are not (Protestant) Christian are discriminated against in part because they are perceived as less, or not exactly, white and as not exactly (or not at all) American. By the same token, people who are Black—like, say, Barack Obama—may be seen as foreign and non Christian, even when they are, in plain fact, Christian.

Whiteness and Christianity and national identity are not absolutes, determined by science and/or doctrine. Rather, they're mutually reinforcing and interlocking cultural constructs, which the white Christian majority uses to evaluate, interrogate, and police those it decides are different and/or a potential threat to its power. And the blurring of the whiteness, Christianity, and national identity enables each to be used as an excuse for the others—as with Trump's "Muslim ban" which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional as a ban on Muslims because of the First Amendment, but allowed as a ban on foreign nationals from particular (overwhelmingly Muslim) countries.

Faith in Christian Supremacy

Again, Joshi's discussion of Christian privilege discusses how Christians dominate public space and how they work to perpetuate that domination. She has little to say about the content of the Christian faith. She doesn't talk about Jesus' support for the marginalized, for example, or argue about whether Christian doctrine includes censure of LGBT people. None of that is really relevant. The issue isn't what Christians do or do not believe; the issue is what Christians—as a dominant class—do or don't do.

Reading White Christian Privilege made me realize just how rare it is to see discussions of Christianity that don't assume a predominantly Christian audience—or that don't assume the naturalness and rightness of a predominantly Christian audience. Joshi doesn't even bother to argue about whether Christianity is in essence liberatory or not, which is often a focus of atheist critiques from ex-Christians. The issue doesn't come up, because why would it? Whether Christianity is true is only really of relevance to Christians or people who feel implicated in or determined by Christian truth. For the rest of us, the question isn't what Jesus said about turning the other cheek or smiting. The question is whether his disciples are going to leave us alone or whether they're going to keep thumping us.

Which is to say, discussions of Christianity's social and hegemonic role in the public sphere are themselves very much determined by white Christian privilege—by the assumption that Christian truth claims should be taken seriously, and that Christian self-estimations of themselves should be the predominant frame for any analysis of Christian action and ethics. Christian evangelical support of Trump, for example, is almost always framed as a contradiction or a surprise. Same for Christian antipathy to immigration, or Christian opposition to programs that lift children out of poverty. Public discourse assumes that the Christian thing to do is the moral thing to do, which means that when Christians do bad things, there's a disjunction that needs to be reconciled.

Joshi, though, doesn't try to reconcile, because she doesn't assume Christianity is some sort of default good. Instead, she talks about Christians as a social/cultural group defined, not by belief or ethics or virtue, but by power. The core truth of Christianity (and especially of white Christianity) is not the word of Jesus, or the crucifixion, or the resurrection. The core truth of Christianity is that Christians historically, and still, are in a position to elevate themselves and marginalize everyone else. Whatever else they may believe, if you're not a Christian it's perfectly clear that many White Christians believe first and foremost that they should rule.  

David Zaslav kills everything he touches, including GQ. By Drew Magary

David Zaslav kills everything he touches, including GQ. By Drew Magary — Read time: 6 minutes

I should not know who David Zaslav is. I didn’t know who any of the big media CEOs were back when I was a happy little child, and I shouldn’t have to know who any of them are now. I should be able to fire up HBO Max, see that it’s still called HBO Max, treat myself to two horrible, horrible hours of a “Batgirl” movie, and then read a satisfyingly catty review of it in GQ.

Alas, I’m not that lucky. Because Zaslav is the man in charge of frankencorp Warner Bros. Discovery and, in an impressively short period of time, has managed to f—k up nearly everything within its considerable portfolio. Freelance writer Jason Bailey attempted to note all of those f—k-ups for posterity just this week, when he wrote an article for GQ excoriating Zaslav for his pathetic stewardship of WBD. It noted all of Zaslav’s lowlights, which I will repeat here for reasons that will soon become evident. 

Zaslav wrote off that “Batgirl” movie rather than formally release it. He did NOT write off and bury “The Flash,” even though its titular star was an allegedly choke-happy asshole and the movie itself was something that even McG wouldn’t have put his name on (it tanked). He hired a clearly in-over-his-head Chris Licht to oversee CNN, only for Licht to destroy morale within that company even faster than Zaslav could have on his own (Licht has since been fired). And it’s not like CNN was my favorite news source in the universe prior to this. You have to really try to make CNN more inane than it already was. Zaslav did.

Somehow, it gets worse. Zaslav reduced HBO, the most valuable brand name in television, to a “brand hub” on a rebranded Max streaming service. He memory-holed a great many other films and shows that were released — HBO’s “Westworld” series being the most visible of them — from that same service to avoid paying residuals. He changed all of the specified film credits on Max to “creator,” changing them back only after his people said that it was the result of a technical oversight, which no one believes. And he gutted an already highly profitable and artistically priceless TCM, seemingly more for fun than for anything else.

FILE: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav visits “Mornings With Maria” at Fox Business Network studios on April 10, 2019, in New York City.

FILE: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav visits “Mornings With Maria” at Fox Business Network studios on April 10, 2019, in New York City. 

Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

All of these changes were not only unwelcome but also NOTICEABLE. Same as if Dan Snyder owned your favorite NFL team. That’s why Zaslav got booed by students at Boston University while trying to give a commencement speech. It’s why striking Writers Guild of America writers, myself included, have made him the face of studio bosses who want to reduce TV and film writing jobs to gig work. It’s why Zaslav’s crimes against both art and basic consumer preferences need to be put on the record. It’s why Bailey wrote what he wrote, and why he was right to do so: posterity, so that we all know who’s to blame for this f—kery and why they deserve to be remanded to a space prison.

This was a damning blog post but also still just a blog post. All damning stuff but all easily ignored if you’re a captain of industry. Lord knows such men have capably ignored similar attempts to own them online.

Zaslav didn’t ignore it. Quite the contrary. According to Will Sommer in the Washington Post, a Zaslav spokesperson called GQ to complain about Bailey’s post, after which an unidentified GQ editor dumbed it down (see the changes on Archive.today; Bailey refused to put his byline on them). Then GQ deleted the post entirely and told WaPo that the piece “was not properly edited before going live,” which I don’t believe because I worked at GQ from 2012 to 2019 and never had anything run that hadn’t gone through at least one round of proper and occasionally painful edits, if not many more. Keep in mind that the New York Times has already reported that GQ assigned Bailey this piece, with the explicit pitch that Zaslav was the “most hated man in Hollywood.” GQ knew what it was doing, and it knew what kind of paper-skinned loser it would piss off when it did it.

FILE: David Zaslav attends the 2022 Time 100 Gala on June 8, 2022, in New York City.

FILE: David Zaslav attends the 2022 Time 100 Gala on June 8, 2022, in New York City.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for TIME

Knowing this, GQ could have, should have, stood by its reporter, especially given that he was a freelancer just trying to earn a living. Maybe if former Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson was still in charge of the place, it would have. That GQ was both thorough and undaunted. But Variety just reported that current Editor-in-Chief Will Welch is attached as a producer on an upcoming Warner Brothers film that’s based on a GQ story and that he was one of the editors Zaslav’s stooges complained to. So it’s not hard to connect the dots as to why his GQ would abandon its journalistic principles just to please Zaslav. (Multiple sources within GQ told SFGATE they weren't even aware of the controversy until it became public; Bailey politely declined to talk to me for this piece.)

As someone who adored working at GQ, I cannot begin to tell you how much all of this disappoints me. I worked for Nelson. I also worked for the people who annihilated Deadspin and just published their first post written by a bot instead of an actual person. I know the difference between these two leadership styles, and it is stark. You can see it right in the product, and you can see it everywhere in Zaslav’s leadership. Not only is this man a terrible CEO, but he’s also an imperious coward who’s more than willing to swat down anyone who dares question his authority. Our worst kind of rich person.

Maybe Zaslav was able to get Welch to back down from public criticism, but my bosses here at SFGATE won’t be similarly cowed. So, for the permanent record, let me state all of this again flatly: David Zaslav is an eel who sucks at his job. He’s destroying HBO. He’s destroyed what bare credibility the DC Universe had left with moviegoers. He’s forced GQ to willingly debase itself. He’s destroyed TCM. And while he couldn’t get Licht to destroy CNN, he’ll find some other pair of docksiders to finish the job. 

It’s a fact that, in an age of mass consolidation, no one person could possibly run all of a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate effectively. But David Zaslav has distinguished himself not only by being unable to run ANY part of one but also by being such a brazen coward about that fact. I shouldn’t know who this man is. But here he is, and now he should deal, in full, with what he’s wrought. He’s a parasite: a terrible CEO, an enemy to artists, and a lousy, horrible graduation speaker to boot. I hope he’s strapped to a chair and forced to watch “The Flash” on repeat for the rest of his pathetic little existence. And no, I’m not deleting this.

Unofficial meetings with Russian officials isn't diplomacy—it's a trap. Matt Tait

www.pwnallthethings.com

Unofficial meetings with Russian officials isn't diplomacy—it's a trap

Matt Tait

12 - 16 minutes

A destroyed Russian tank on display next to Ukrainian flags

NBC news has a new story: “Former U.S. officials have held secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians”, including Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.

The lede reads as follows:

    A group of former senior U.S. national security officials have held secret talks with prominent Russians believed to be close to the Kremlin — and, in at least one case, with the country’s top diplomat — with the aim of laying the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, half a dozen people briefed on the discussions told NBC News.

    In a high-level example of the back-channel diplomacy taking place behind the scenes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with members of the group for several hours in April in New York, four former officials and two current officials told NBC News.

    On the agenda of the April meeting were some of the thorniest issues in the war in Ukraine, like the fate of Russian-held territory that Ukraine may never be able to liberate, and the search for an elusive diplomatic off-ramp that could be tolerable to both sides.

    Sitting down with Lavrov were Richard Haass, a former diplomat and the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, current and former officials said. The group was joined by Europe expert Charles Kupchan and Russia expert Thomas Graham, both former White House and State Department officials who are Council on Foreign Relations fellows. 

The story is getting a lot of traction online, but it’s mostly getting traction for the wrong reasons.

First things first, this is not real backchannel diplomacy. As Dan Drezner notes in his excellent post “Please Stop Breathlessly Reporting Every Unofficial U.S. Interaction with Russia, Please”, the former U.S. officials here are not particularly close to the current U.S. administration. As Drezner writes: “Graham, Long, and Haass are Republicans who have served in GOP administrations; Kupchan is an academic”.

Second, although the participants apparently briefed the White House National Security Council after the talks, the NSC has explicitly disavowed the talks:

    The discussions have taken place with the knowledge of the Biden administration, but not at its direction, with the former officials involved in the Lavrov meeting briefing the White House National Security Council afterward about what transpired, two of the sources said.

At best, the White House seems pretty annoyed at the whole thing. The U.S. can’t stop U.S. citizens talking with foreign governments, but that doesn’t mean they like or endorse those interactions either.

Drezner is right: the talks are not backchannel diplomacy, and folks should, for the most part, calm down about it.

But if the talks are not backchannel diplomacy, why did Lavrov agree to it? And this, to me, is the much bigger story here, and one that everyone seems to be missing: This isn’t diplomacy. It’s Haass and his colleagues being played by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a game they don’t seem to fully understand.

First things first, these talks have directly caused headaches for the U.S. in two separate directions. For people reading the story who (wrongly) read it as Haass et al speaking for the U.S. administration, this leads to the mistaken impression that the U.S. is quietly abandoning its loud commitment to not hold “talks about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Several Ukrainians have clearly have read the story this way, and are now (wrongly) upset at the U.S. administration for holding talks about their future behind their backs.

Correctly reading the story as Haass et al speaking despite the U.S. administration also invites two different cognitive traps. It encourages the (misleading) impression that a diplomatic solution to the conflict is just around the corner, if only the Biden administration would permit it—after all, here are some other prominent Americans able to “negotiate”. And it gives the mistaken impression that the Biden administration is not talking to Russia, thereby encouraging the Russian-sponsored narrative that the U.S. is belligerently opposed to peace when Russia is amenable to it; a bizarre inversion of the reality. On that second point specifically, the U.S. maintains regular open communications with its counterparts in Moscow. Politico recently reported, for example, that “[a]n administration official confirmed the backchanneling with Moscow to West Wing Playbook, emphasizing that such open channels are routinely used when officials on either side have important messages to convey” (emphasis added).

But there’s a deeper reason why Lavrov was so willing to take this meeting, and it’s a risk inherent to “Track 1.5” meetings between official delegations and unofficial ones. It’s that fake negotiations operate in a framework that is deceptively unrepresentative of real negotiations, and which consistently lead to the official side steamrolling the non-governmental side, and the non-governmental side going home and immediately laundering an unusually friendly paper or article under their supposedly neutral and well-credentialed titles.

And that’s exactly what’s happened here. Shortly after their meeting with Lavrov, Haass and Kupchan cowrote an article for Foreign Affairs, titled “The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine: A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table”. The article did not mention their meeting with Lavrov, and despite a brief overture in support of increased equipment transfers to Ukraine at the start, the article lays out a “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia that is (unwittingly) heavily distorted towards Russian talking points and dismissive of Ukrainian redlines.

It’s a bit complicated to parse out exactly why that is, so let’s unpack it a bit.

Ceasefire agreements are always rough. Except in the vanishingly rare cases of unconditional surrender and total defeat of one side, ceasefires always strike a difficult bargain where all parties to the conflict are unhappy but can ultimately live with the result. Both sides have to make tough decisions about previously-unacceptable terms to trade in exchange for peace, and both sides have to weigh the emotional, political, and actual costs of the aggregate concessions on their side versus the other. That’s heavily shaped both by battlefield realities and by political priors brought into the negotiating room.

When Ukraine, supported by the United States and its other allies, eventually sues for peace against Russia, the Russian delegation will try to minimize its own concessions and extract maximal concessions in response. The Ukrainian delegation will do the reverse. The negotiations will iterate over several rounds towards a middle-ground, trading terms until all sides are able to stomach the result. This is hopefully not a controversial observation: It’s true of all ceasefires, regardless of the participants.

That eventual agreement will be emotionally, politically, and actually costly for Russia. It will also be costly for Ukraine. Ukraine will propose one settlement. Russia will propose another. Ukraine will counteroffer; Russia will counter-counter offer, and so on, iterating inwards. If a middle ground is reachable, it will be signed. If it is not, the war will continue until a later date when the process can continue with the benefit of updated battlefield- and political-realities in the next iteration.

I cannot stress this enough: It’s very easy to get to a ceasefire if you don’t care about the terms, or are unwilling or unable to accurately weigh them for both sides. The terms of the eventual ceasefire are the whole enchilada. Gaming your way to a peace deal is not impressive or useful absent a robust analysis of whether the terms are actually acceptable to the actual parties to the conflict in the real world. To belabor this point, here’s a dumb peace deal that would end the war tomorrow with obviously unacceptable terms: Ukraine surrenders unconditionally, and while we’re at it, so does every other country in Europe, all agreeing to replace their governments with ministers appointed in Moscow. And for good measure the United States gives them Alaska and hands over 80% of its GDP for the next decade too, why not. See? Super easy. War over in an afternoon. But obviously also very stupid. It’s easy to come up with terms acceptable to one side and declare the project for peace a big success. It’s far harder to come up with terms that hold weight in the real world, especially without the state apparatus to fire-test them accurately.

And this leads us to the problem here. Haass et al are not actually negotiating with Russia. They are negotiating against themselves. They do not speak for Ukraine or for the United States. Lavrov has no incentive to moderate any of his country’s terms in response to their hypothetical concessions, and every incentive to talk up their own advantages and the non-negotiability of their own terms. Lavrov knows this fake negotiation isn’t going to lead to an actual peace deal, so playing a maximalist hardball game is free and easy. Moreover, fake-negotiating in good faith yields a later advantage against Moscow in the real negotiation by revealing their hand too early. So of course he will fake-negotiate in bad faith. It’s the only sensible thing to do in that situation.

For the non-governmental delegation the opposite incentive plays out. To be seen as master diplomats, the non-governmental delegation needs to get a deal! Outsiders will be very impressed at their diplomatic skills of scoring a fake ceasefire, and most observers won’t pay too much attention to the proposed terms. After all: the resulting agreement will always be couched as what’s acceptable for Russia, so readers will look less closely at whether the proposed terms are actually acceptable for Ukraine. So where the governmental delegation has incentives to concede nothing, the non-governmental delegation has incentives to over-concede.

But wait, it gets worse: Not only do fake diplomats come to the fake negotiation against an opponent six-feet taller than reality, they also come into the fake negotiation with one arm tied behind their back. Real diplomats benefit from extensive prior knowledge about the flexibility of the terms on their own side, and national support to help shape those negotiations. Terms made in a hypothetical are easier to concede than equivalent terms in a real negotiation. Fake diplomats don’t have to actually pay the terms they hypothetically concede, nor do they have to deal with the messy realities of real politics, real victims, or real territory. This effect is further pronounced when the fake diplomat has little direct emotional attachment to the conflict. As a concrete example, Ukrainian diplomats will have a very different emotional and practical problem trading real Ukrainian territory for concessions to end a very real war than a fake American diplomat would have trading imaginary Ukrainian territory as part of a game.

All of which is to say, “Track 1.5” negotiations might be superficially similar to real negotiations, but they are structurally imbalanced towards the governmental participant in a way that is non-obvious to the non-governmental delegation. They will often end up with an outline for a fake deal, but that fake deal will skew wildly in favor of the governmental delegation—in this case, to Russia’s advantage.

But Lavrov didn’t meet Haass and his friends just to win in a fake game of diplomacy. He met them because of what comes next.

Newly armed with a hard-won “plan for peace”, the academics go home with seemingly-sensible terms that everyone could just about agree to: A brilliant show of diplomacy by a truly esteemed diplomat! The war is solved! Hooray! All that’s left is to publicly write up their ingenious plan under their own names and be celebrated for their hard-nosed diplomatic prowess. Other people—including current officials—who take those former officials seriously then read their article. It reads like a serious and sober analysis of the war as a whole, and provides a seemingly-workable plan to peace. And that shifts the perception of the relative value of the concessions Ukraine is advised to make, as well as inflating the relative value of concessions that Russia might have to make and advising the later real delegations away from requesting them, or at least expecting them to come at a far higher price.

That’s the game Lavrov is playing here.

Fake diplomacy isn’t real diplomacy. It’s a game of influence, and of laundering talking points through the academics who play it. It’s a simple trade: the academics get to meet some important people, get treated like very important diplomats, and get to be celebrated by influential people back home for their amazing diplomatic skills once they publish their negotiated “deal”. And in response, Russia gets to launder its talking points and throw Ukraine under the bus, all hidden under the credentials of those academics.

That’s the game Lavrov played. Haass and his colleagues should have known better than to play it.

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Kuttner on TAP: Will DeSantis’s Culture War Backfire?

JULY 5, 2023

Kuttner on TAP: Will DeSantis’s Culture War Backfire?

Increasing cancellations of convention plans and business investments are starting to damage Florida’s economy.

Thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s war on LGBTQ people, public schools, and educational curricula, Florida stands to lose massive amounts of convention business. Much of that lost business, ironically, is concentrated in places like Miami and Orlando, which don’t share DeSantis’s views. The latest to pull out is the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, which had planned a fall convention for Miami, and has now moved it to Chicago, incurring a stiff penalty from the hotels.

Planners tend to be liberals, but lots of groups far removed from politics want to disassociate themselves from DeSantis’s crusade. The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) has moved its planned 2027 Global Surgical Conference & Expo from Orlando to Philadelphia. Around 7,000 nurses and exhibitors will no longer be helping the local economy. The organizers of Con of Thrones, a convention for fans of the HBO fantasy epic, canceled their Orlando convention, planned for the Hyatt Regency Orlando in August. The National Society of Black Engineers will also not be coming to Orlando in 2024, for a convention that would have brought 15,000 to the Sunshine State.

Ironically, Orlando is the home of Disney, whose defense of LGBTQ rights prompted DeSantis to escalate his war. But conventions seem to be boycotting the state of Florida rather than moving to Disney properties. Disney itself has canceled a billion-dollar investment planned for an Orlando office park, which would have relocated or created some 2,000 jobs with an average salary of $120,000.

Fort Lauderdale has lately received at least eight convention cancellations. The American Specialty Toy Retailing Association (ASTRA) canceled its 2026 meeting, which represented 4,500 hotel room nights, or an estimated $3.25 million in lost revenue and a total economic loss of approximately $8.1 million.

Will this kind of business and consumer pressure make any difference? The closest analogy is North Carolina’s now-repealed bathroom law. A tally by the Associated Press in 2017, a year after the “Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act” was enacted, calculated that the direct cost to the state’s economy was $3.76 billion and growing.

The cancellations included a Ringo Starr concert, a boycott by the NCAA, and several business decisions to abort plans for expansions in North Carolina, including PayPal, Adidas, Deutsche Bank, VoxPro, Time Warner, and CoStar. Bank of America, one of North Carolina’s top employers, also quietly worked to kill the law.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, a major proponent of the law, talked a good game, arguing that these losses were a fraction of the state’s economy. But McCrory lost his 2016 re-election bid to Democrat Roy Cooper.

The bathroom provisions were repealed by the North Carolina legislature in 2017, and the remainder of the law, prohibiting localities from enacting anti-discrimination ordinances, was repealed in 2020, thanks to a sunset provision included in the 2017 law. Several cities, led by Charlotte, quickly passed anti-bias laws.

Will Florida follow North Carolina’s lead? There is one huge difference. In North Carolina, support for the bathroom bill was mainly ideological. When it started costing the state’s economy serious money and alienating businesses that are ordinarily aligned with Republicans, the legislature turned pragmatic. McCrory’s re-election loss added to that shift.

But in Florida, the culture war against LGBTQ people is purely a stunt by DeSantis, as the centerpiece of his national presidential campaign. It is hard to see how he might backtrack or compromise without looking even more like a lame opportunist. He doesn’t much care about the economic fallout in his state—at least not so far.

The punchline is that the launch of DeSantis’s bid for the presidency has underperformed expectations, to put it mildly. His cynical crusade, which has led him to attack Donald Trump, of all people, as a too-woke lover of alternative lifestyles, has achieved him precisely nothing. We’re witnessing a campaign flop for the ages and a self-inflicted wound to the governor’s home state, all at once.

Another difference that helped kill the North Carolina law was the presence of an effective Democratic Party and a leader in Roy Cooper, whose victory in 2016 signaled defeat for the bathroom bill. Florida’s Democratic Party is far weaker.

For the moment, DeSantis, who has been a popular governor, has kept the support of his legislature. But as more cancellations are announced and the economic damage deepens, he could find himself locked into a strategy that could further undo his faltering national campaign by undermining his credibility and base at home. Whatever the result, the damage to Florida’s economy will linger long after the 2024 campaign is over—and cause other Republicans to resist making culture wars the centerpiece of their campaigns.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Four Theories of What the Hell Happened At Twitter. By Jeremiah Johnson

Four Theories of What the Hell Happened At Twitter. By Jeremiah Johnson — Read time: 9 minutes

Four Theories of What the Hell Happened to Twitter

How Dennis Nedry explains your rate limit

On Saturday, Twitter went haywire.

Elon Musk tweeted out that every account on the site was now rate-limited in how many tweets they could view. People immediately began to see ‘Rate Limit Exceeded’ when trying to access the site in addition to more generalized errors. The level of limitations or outages was also unclear - some accounts appeared to be far more thoroughly stymied than others.

To state the obvious: this is an insane thing to do. Twitter is a business that relies on advertising for revenue. Advertising dollars scale linearly with “How many tweets are viewed”. This is cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. To my knowledge there’s never been a successful social media site that ever attempted anything like this. Getting users to use the site *more often* is the entire point of running Twitter. Predictably, the collective crowd at Twitter went berserk and reactions, jokes, and discussions of the outage dominated trending topics.

As happens in the wake of any dramatic event, people immediately started theorizing why this was happening. I want to summarize the main theories here, and try to make a contribution of my own to think about how Twitter operates today.

Elon publicly and repeatedly blamed data-scraping bots for the issues Twitter was having. He’s been doing this almost continuously since he first planned to purchase the site, using bots as a scapegoat for every perceived ill Twitter runs into. He tweeted that the rate-limits were “the only way to stop scraping”.

Under this theory, the story is simple. Twitter was under massive pressure from a horde of bots. These bots were scraping data, likely as input for giant AI models. These attacks were so detrimental in terms of downgrading user experience and cost to Twitter that there was no choice but to implement the drastic step of rate-limiting every account on the site to try to stop the bots. Elon told a similar story about the move one day earlier to stop users without accounts from seeing any tweets.

It’s a clean, neat story. The problem is that it’s almost certainly bullshit.

The first thing to note about Elon’s bot theory is that it makes no sense. Here’s a graph of Twitter outages on June 30th and July 1st, when the rate limit happened.

Elon’s theory is that the site was under so much continuous strain that rate limits were necessary to save it. Factually, that’s not true. The site was operating mostly normally until about 9AM on Saturday morning, when everything went to shit. There was a single, specific event around 9AM that kicked everything off. It makes no sense to blame that on a nebulous army of bots, which would look more like continuous strain.

Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth posted on BlueSky that “It just doesn’t pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems”. Virtually everyone with knowledge of the data-scraping industry seemed to agree. Data scraping happens and it’s annoying for many sites. But it’s also been a constant factor for years, and it isn’t something that would or could have increased dramatically in a short time span.

And even if the site were under pressure, it would make no sense whatsoever to rate-limit users. If users are having minor to moderate difficulty loading the site the solution should be to fix your back end systems, not to rate-limit them and guarantee that they’ll have severe difficulty loading the site. The proposed solution is like cutting off one’s foot in response to breaking a toe.

Some Twitter users began to build a different theory: Twitter had stopped paying their Google Cloud bill, and Google was yanking Twitter’s servers offline.

After all, wasn’t it an odd coincidence that Twitter’s contract with Google was set to expire on June 30th, and there had been very public disputes about the Twitter/Google relationship? Elon is famous for stiffing folks - he’s refused to pay former workers, to pay former executives, to pay the rent on his offices, etc. And the outage suspiciously started right around 9AM on July 1st! Very, very odd indeed. Users from all corners began speculating wildly about this theory. The rate limit was a cover for Google cutting off Twitter from a giant chunk of their servers.

This theory is also a clean, neat story. The problem is that the Google Cloud theory also has gaping holes in it.

It’s absolutely true that Twitter stopped paying its Google Cloud bill once Elon took control of the company. But it’s equally true (although less noticed) that once Linda Yaccarino came on board as CEO, she quickly repaired the relationship with Google and began paying the bills again. This was reported in Bloomberg, the NYTimes, and ArsTechnica, among other sites. There’s no longer any reason for Google to have cut Twitter off.

There’s also the fact that Twitter does not use Google Cloud to serve web pages to viewers. According to reporting from Ars Technica and others, Twitter mostly uses Google servers for back end functions like spam prevention and analytics. Losing Google wouldn’t necessarily interrupt the basic user experience.

And frankly, if the site’s outages were due to an external villain I think Elon would be quick to point the finger. He’s never been shy about starting fights. If this was really Google’s fault, I’d expect him to say so loudly and repeatedly. What would he have to lose?

As the outage continued, some internet detectives weren’t content to trust Elon’s word or to examine business relationships. These sleuths decided to be more direct: why not just directly examine the details of what was happening on Twitter’s site? There were plenty of odd clues laying around in the open, and sometimes the rate limits didn’t even seem to be working. Users reported being able to get around the rate limits by utilizing third party apps, by switching browsers, and with other interesting tactics. Sheldon Chang on Mastodon was the first to put together an alternative theory - Twitter was DDOSing itself.

According to the most popular form of this theory, the site is experiencing downtime because of a bug in how Twitter decided to restrict logged-out viewing. On Friday Twitter began requiring users to login in with an account in order to see any Tweets. If you tried to view a tweet without logging in, you’d be prompted with a mandatory log-in screen. This was widely seen as an anti-data-scraping move.

But it appears that the code for was poorly written, and when users hit this log-in screen it began sending tens of requests per second to load the page to Twitter servers. Multiply tens of messages per second with millions of users facing this new log-in screen, and you get a site that is suddenly facing critical outages from too much traffic.

Sheldon’s post gets into the technical details. I’m not a network engineer, but this story seems by far the most plausible to me thus far. It may even be the case that Elon didn’t realize the site was effectively attacking itself! He could have blamed data scraping bots because in his anti-scraping zeal, he sincerely thought that at first. It may also be the case that something else inside Twitter broke other than the self-DDOS as detailed in this expert’s excellent thread. When it comes to Elon, it’s truly impossible to know.

I think Self DDOS is the most plausible theory yet - it has some degree of evidence, no outright conflicting facts, and relies on technical argument rather than high level hand-waving theory. But I think it would be a mistake to stop here, so I want to indulge in a little bit of hand-waving theory myself to explain why this sort of thing happened in the first place.

One of my favorite books as a teen was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. It had dinosaurs eating people and that’s obviously awesome, but it also had scientific discussions that go much deeper than what the movie shows. I remember specifically being entranced by the idea of chaos theory, which was presented with far more depth in the book than in the film.

A very quick background: Chaos theory in mathematics deals with unpredictable, non-linear systems. The best way to think of linear vs non-linear system is how systems respond to incremental change. Say you throw a ball with X units of force, and it lands 50 feet away. If you throw with X+ 0.01 units of force, it will land 50.01 feet away. Small changes in starting conditions lead to small changes in output, predictably. That’s linear. In non-linear systems, that doesn’t happen. Small changes at the start can cause unpredictability and chaos later on. Weather is a non-linear system - small changes in the atmosphere can lead to wild, unpredictable variations just a few days later. That’s why it’s so hard to predict the weather more than a few days in advance.

Jurassic Park takes the strictly mathematical version of chaos theory and creates a more human version that governs people and systems. The core lesson of Jurassic Park is that complex human systems are chaotic. If you attempt to direct them according to basic rules and with minimal levels of control, you’re inviting disaster. Chaotic systems will always behave in ways you don’t expect, and if you don’t plan for that you’re going to fail.

This man explains why you couldn’t read your favorite dril tweets

In Jurassic Park, an arrogant businessman entered a new venture he didn’t really understand. He attempted to run his new business with a minimal level of staffing and with a focus on cutting costs. Because he didn’t truly understand the business and because complex systems are inherently chaotic, things went wrong in ways nobody anticipated. And because he didn’t hire redundant staff or build any additional resiliency into the system, these things caused the whole system to crash to the ground in catastrophic ways that involved dinosaurs eating people. That’s not mathematical chaos theory, but it’s a sort of ‘Generalized Chaos Theory’.

At Twitter, the same thing happened. Elon Musk entered a new field of business he didn’t really understand. He attempted to run his new business with a minimal level of staffing and with a focus on cutting costs. Because he didn’t truly understand social media and because complex systems are inherently chaotic, things at Twitter went wrong in ways nobody anticipated. And because he didn’t hire redundant staff or build any additional resiliency into the system, these things caused the whole system to crash to the ground in catastrophic ways that involved dinosaurs eating people Twitter failing worldwide.

It’s interesting to try to find the specific technical cause of Twitter’s giant crash. But if you buy into Generalize Chaos Theory, something like this was inevitable. If it wasn’t the log-in prompt, it would eventually be something else. If you attempt to run complex, chaotic systems with minimal staffing, you should expect to see errors and failures cascade in unexpected ways. If you attempt to make frequent and sudden changes to chaotic systems, those failures will get bigger and more frequent.

A final piece of evidence in favor of Generalized Chaos Theory: This post on Blind from a current Twitter employee, begging for former employees to help him debug issues that are currently spiraling out of control.

Image

Change a few words and this could easily be a Jurassic Park employee begging for help to get the dinosaurs back in their cages. Unless Elon stops re-inventing the site every week and starts hiring more engineering support staff, I expect this will not be the last major outage Twitter suffers.

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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.