Send in the Clowns
Send in the Clowns
The lying about Tom Cotton's "Black Lives Matter" op-ed continues: Jonathan Chait enters the chat
Before we get into it, here’s a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy about what’s behind the calls for U.S. or U.S.-backed military intervention in Haiti. (Spoiler: I think it’s a bad idea.)
Also, I’m pleased to report that I’m going back on the road with more events related to my latest book in the coming months. Next up is the Miami Book Fair, which if you’ve never been is a hell of a festival. (My talk is over the weekend.) Sign up for this newsletter to keep tabs on all the goings on:
So, seems my post on Friday struck a nerve. As did Tom Scocca’s, which was excellent and which you should also read. I haven’t heard a peep from James Bennet or Erik Wemple, the author of the column that got us all talking about Senator Tom Cotton’s militarist op-ed from two years ago. But other representatives of the (self-admittedly!) cowardly center jumped in on their behalf to a) defend their chastened buddy and b) call Tom and me horrible liars and threats to a free society and whatnot. Which is cute, because they have to just straight-up lie in order to get to that conclusion.
The post I’m going to focus on here is an entry by Jonathan Chait, the liberal blogger of the old school with a well-known love of vigorous debate. The SEO title of Chait’s post is “James Bennet’s Firing Was Just One of Many Illiberal Errors.” But either Chait or his editors at New York magazine gave it a more provocative title on the site itself: “Progressive America Needs a Glasnost.”
I can only guess what anyone meant by that; Chait’s text offers no direct clues. Glasnost, for those too young or who have forgotten, was part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program in the 1980s. Literally meaning “publicity,” it had first been used politically by Lenin, in the sense of making the functions of the state open for examination and thus criticism. Gorbachev, the devout Leninist that he was, took the idea and ran with it. Because his policy loosened restrictions on public and media criticism of Soviet governments past and present, glasnost is widely seen as having helped bring about the collapse of the USSR.
OK, great, so what does any of that that have to do with James Bennet — who, as one of the most powerful editors at the most powerful media property in the country, authorized (and then, in his grossest act of professional incompetence, failed to so much as read) a deeply illiberal opinion piece by a powerful official of the state. Not to mention an official who was, in turn, trying to strengthen the position of the sitting president: that the military should be loosed on people participating in a popular uprising (which people, we’ll get to, once again, in a second).
Glasnost was all about being allowed to criticize, and ultimately hold accountable, people with the power status of Bennet, Cotton, and Trump. And, to an extent, Chait. But of course, that can’t be what he meant at all, is it? I assume he thinks he — and Bennet, and maybe even Senator Cotton — are the dissenting voices; and that they need a “glasnost,” some cracks in the stifling regime of censorship being imposed on him by — whom? “Progressives?” Tom? Me? Who, precisely, is the modern-day Stalin keeping Jonathan Chait from writing a column that, at last check, was the most viewed article at one of the most prominent magazine websites in the country? Or was this just a fun, historically illiterate way of redbaiting everyone to his left that he disagrees with?
OK, so what about the column itself? Chait opens it like this:
Last week, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote a column revisiting the New York Times’ sacking of its opinion editor James Bennet in 2020. Bennet had made some mistakes during his tenure, but he was fired in response to demands by Times staffers angry that his page had published an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton advocating for the National Guard to be used to prevent rioting and looting.
Impressively, Chait offers no fewer than three “factually untrue” statements — to use a phrase he employs later — right off the bat. The first is his assertion that Bennet was fired (forced to resign, actually, but same difference) “in response to demands by Times staffers.” This is just false. The statement by the Times’ union, the NewsGuild of New York, makes no mention of Bennet at all. You can also read the letter, signed by over 1,000 Times employees, complaining about the Cotton op-ed here. Nowhere in it do the staffers call for Bennet to be fired or even disciplined. Their four requests are: the appending of an editor’s note; “the thorough vetting, fact-checking, and real-time rebuttal of Opinion pieces”; the hiring of more staff to facilitate in the posting of reader comments; and “a commitment that Cotton’s Op-Ed not appear in any future print edition.” No show trial demanded. (Hat tip to Mr. Scocca for reminding me to look at these.)
Next, Chait asserts that Bennet’s firing ultimately came as a result of staffers being “angry that his page has published” the op-ed. As Ben Smith — the ex-Times media writer-turned-newsletter-impresario whose interview with Bennet set off this latest “revisiting” — reported at the time, Bennet “had repeatedly stumbled in ways that infuriated the newsroom” and that “Mr. Bennet acknowledged that he had not read the Op-Ed before it was published, which people at all levels of the Times saw as a damning admission.” (My emphases.) Wemple glosses over that “damning admission” in his column as the most probable last straw in Bennet’s case from the point of view of the paper’s senior management (who, as Cotton later admitted in an interview with Stanford’s Hoover Center, had defended the decision to print the op-ed until then). Chait ignores it completely.
Still not out of the first paragraph, we come to Chait’s summary of Cotton’s argument: that he was “advocating for the National Guard to be used to prevent rioting and looting.” Nope! That might indeed have been a more reasonable stance to take, the sort of thing that Chait could fairly deem the source of an “irrational,” “internal social panic.”
But it isn’t what Cotton was saying, at all. Here’s what the senator wrote in “Send in the Troops” (again, my emphasis):
Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
In other words, Cotton believed the police and National Guard had failed, and that some greater part of the larger military should be called in. And we in fact know which parts he was thinking of because he specified them in the tweet that earned him the op-ed:
So, no, Other Jonathan, he very explicitly did not mean the National Guard.
Why does that particular falsehood matter? Because a powerful member of the Senate intelligence and armed services committees calling on the air assault division of the United States Army (one designed to “execute any combat or contingency mission anywhere in the world”) to launch an “overwhelming show of force” against American civilians — civilians who were in the process of being shot, indiscriminately arrested, and wantonly abused by law enforcement, who made no functional distinctions between “rioters” and “peaceful protesters,” or even whether someone was actually participating in any kind of protest at all — does not merely violate what Chait called “transparently absurd left-wing pieties.”
It is, in fact, exactly the sort of incendiary argument from power that should, as the Times staffers argued, be “subject to rigorous questioning and rebuttal of its shaky facts and gross assumptions,” and not — as it was — dumped into the paper without so much as a backread from an editor who couldn't be bothered to do his job.
Speaking of “shaky facts and gross assumptions,” I’d be failing as a blogger if I didn’t address what Chait said directly about, you know, me. Other Jonathan attempts a rhetorical windmill dunk on my Friday post, claiming that it is I, ironically, who tried to rewrite history by saying that Cotton’s op-ed called “for the U.S. military to crush the nationwide protests that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd.” He calls this “factually untrue” on the basis that Cotton was differentiating between good protesters (who I presume he thinks should be tolerated) and bad rioters (who, according to that line of thinking, and as Trump said at the time, should be shot).
Chait cites as proof Cotton’s protestation that, “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants” and that “the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned the violence.” (Chait does, generously, allow that “one could argue that Cotton’s position would have inadvertently resulted in troops suppressing peaceful protesters” — my emphasis added, and barely suppressed laughter implied.)
That made me wonder if Chait even bothered to read my piece. I included both of those quotations from Cotton’s op-ed in my newsletter -- as evidence of the gross incompetence that Bennet oversaw. Why? Well first, as I said on Friday, because a non-comatose editor would have immediately spotted the contradiction in Cotton's argument: Namely, how would one expect a combat brigade executing "an overwhelming show of force" to differentiate between “peaceful protesters” and “bands of miscreants” when Cotton himself is alleging (falsely, as it turns out
) that these organized rioters have infiltrated and were posing as part of the larger demonstration? Especially given, again, that police were making no such distinctions themselves?More than that, at a minimum, a fact-checker should have noted (and perhaps did note) that a mere two days earlier, the senator had made it clear that it was not — as Chait insists — just “rioters and looters” he was demanding to be shown “no quarter,” but also those the senator deemed “insurrectionists” and “anarchists.” This is key. Rioting is a behavior, if a subjectively defined one. Anarchism on the other hand is a political philosophy, or, when alluded to by a Republican senator, an epithet to be wielded against any left-wing protester he doesn’t like. (Cotton also referred to unspecified Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “terrorists” — a, let’s say, evocative term in the midst of a call to deploy Army divisions with literal counter-terrorism ribbons from lethal deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.)
Maybe he was just exaggerating for the Twitter crowd, you say? Not really. In the Times op-ed itself, Cotton accuses “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa” of “infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” Pair that with Cotton’s inveighing against the “Marxists” of Black Lives Matter and his direct equation of BLM with Antifa, and the question is obvious: which Black Lives Matter protest would not be targets of the senator’s “overwhelming show of force” (i.e., crushed), on the grounds that they bore traces of anarchism or “mob rule”? Did Bennet or his lieutenants ask him that question? Could Chait even answer that one?
Indeed, when asked about the episode at Stanford’s Hoover Institution a month later, Senator Cotton repeatedly referred to the Times staffers who had criticized his op-ed as a “mob.” (That was the interview where the senator called Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger “a woke child”; his interviewer referred to the Timesians as Jacobins, as if it was the journalists and not the senator who was trying to head up a one-man Committee of Public Safety.)
Now, maybe Cotton meant “mob” metaphorically, in the same way he tried to backtrack and claim that, by “no quarter,” he did not mean literal summary executions of protesters — just, you know, that anyone who gets out of line should be treated “unkindly” by an Army brigade combat team. Or maybe the senator, like so many cops, does believe that journalists are literally part of the anarchist mob that must be violently cowed into submission. If ostensibly liberal pundits keep wasting time policing everyone who criticizes them for coddling authoritarians, maybe we’ll all get to find out what the right intends for the rest of us, all together.
For instance, in the emplyee letter, the Times staffers noted that Cotton’s claim that Antifa has “infiltrated protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes” had already been debunked by the paper’s own reporting. Further — just this week, in fact — an unredacted report requested by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, revealed the comedic levels Trump administration officials had gone to prove the unfounded conspiracy theory Cotton repeated. A senior DHS official named Brian Murphy ordered his analysts to find which protesters were “Violent Antifa Anarchists Inspired,” and traceable back to a “[U.S. person] funding the violence in Portland” (almost certainly George Soros, the usual target of antisemitic calumny about “infiltration”). In short, none of it was true. The report said: “In many conversations, Mr. Murphy stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by ANTIFA. This may have made sense to Mr. Murphy based on his own beliefs, but [the Office of Intelligence & Analysis] did not have collections (evidence) to show it and absent reporting or some other evidence on motivation, I&A analysts could not ascribe motivation to the violent actors as Mr. Murphy expected.”
See Footnote 1