Tag: in-the-news

‘Pro-Democracy’ Journalism’s Problem With the Facts


Margaret Sullivan

Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life, by Margaret Sullivan, St. Martin’s, 288 pages, $28.99

It takes all of two paragraphs in her memoir-cum-polemic Newsroom Confidential for press critic Margaret Sullivan to unwittingly undermine her thesis that journalism in the age of Donald Trump needs to “shout…from the rooftops” that the fate of democracy itself hinges on the victory of truth over (mostly right-wing) lies.

“By the spring” of 2021, Sullivan writes, in a passage deploring conservative “denialism” about the January 6th Capitol riot, “a Republican congressman would describe the violent attack as something that looked like ‘a normal tourist visit.'”

Sullivan, the recently retired Washington Post media columnist best known for her 2012–2016 stint as New York Times public editor, does not name the allegedly denialist congressman, so I did a quick search to double-check the quote and context. It was Rep. Andrew Clyde (R–Ga.), at a May 2021 House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing titled “The Capitol Insurrection: Unexplained Delays and Unanswered Questions,” at which he began his remarks like this:

This hearing is called “The Capitol Insurrection.” Let’s be honest with the American people: It was not an insurrection, and we cannot call it that and be truthful.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines insurrection as, and I quote, “an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence.” And then, from The Century Dictionary, “the act of rising against civil authority or governmental restraint, specifically the armed resistance of a number of persons to the power of the state.”

As one of the members who stayed in the Capitol and on the House floor, who with other Republican colleagues helped barricade the door until almost 3 p.m. that day from the mob who tried to enter, I can tell you: The House floor was never breached, and it was not an insurrection.

This is the truth: There was an undisciplined mob, there were some rioters, and some who committed acts of vandalism. But let me be clear: There was no insurrection, and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie. Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

There were no firearms confiscated from anyone breaching the Capitol. Also, the only shot fired on January the 6th was from a Capitol Police officer who killed an unarmed protester, Ashli Babbitt.

We can argue over the word “insurrection” and its applicability to January 6. (Sullivan for one uses it as her default descriptor.) We can definitely criticize Clyde for expending his valuable time during an important hearing about an appalling event policing language instead of pointing fingers at his own political party. But what we cannot do, if we are serious about journalistic truth, is assert that the congressman was “describ[ing] the violent attack as something that looked like ‘a normal tourist visit.'”

Clyde plainly described the attackers as “an undisciplined mob” that included “some rioters, and some who committed acts of vandalism.” A normal tourist visit that is not. The congressman’s controversy-generating formulation was applied to a discrete piece of TV footage and a specific viewing condition: If someone did not know about the January 6 connection, and happened to watch the clip “of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall…in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures,” that viewer would not have found it particularly unusual. An actual insurrection, he was positing (somewhat hyperbolically, given the number of flagpoles and trespassers who ventured outside the roped-off path), would not include violence-free scenes like that; ergo, he concluded, the hearing’s very name was an improper exaggeration.

These distinctions were of little interest to a press corps that has increasingly taken the advice of Sullivan and her generation of media critics in preferencing “moral clarity” over traditional “objectivity,” and in rejecting “false equivalence” and “bothsidesism” in the face of asymmetrical lying by authoritarian conservatives. Sensitively attuned for signs of GOP truth-washing, journalists plucked Clyde’s quote out of context to bolster a larger and more important narrative than any piddling linguistic difference between “riot” and “insurrection.”

“A GOP congressman compared Capitol rioters to tourists. Photos show him barricading a door,” The Washington Post breathlessly reported six days later. NBC, leaning into the Trump-era journalistic fad of naming and shaming Republican falsehoods, invented a falsehood of its own in its lead paragraph:

Multiple Republican members of Congress on Wednesday offered a false retelling of the devastating events that occurred during the Capitol riot, with one calling the entire event a “bold faced lie” that more closely resembled a “normal tourist visit” than a deadly attack.

Clyde did not call “the entire event” a “bold faced lie” (whatever that might mean); he said that describing it as an “insurrection” was.

Scores of news organizations, and Sullivan herself, could have prevented botching a serious accusation by conducting 90 seconds of research. The fact that they did not contributes to one of the very trends they abhor—the collapse of public trust in journalism, particularly among conservatives.

“I left conversations like this feeling almost sickened,” Sullivan recounts in her book, after receiving anti-media earfuls during a post-2016-election listening tour of Republican districts. “I couldn’t help but recognize that when it came to acknowledging basic truths, huge swaths of America were very far gone.” Unfortunately for her professional cohort, that feeling is often mutual.

How can journalists (and news consumers) break the self-reinforcing doom-loop between media and citizen? It’s a damnably hard and important question. Sullivan articulated one sound approach back in September 2012: “The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them,” she wrote in one of her first pieces as New York Times public editor, “the better off the readership—and the democracy—will be.”

Ten years on, Sullivan emphasizes more the confidence of asserting truths rather than the meticulousness of marshaling the supporting evidence. Her writing vibrates with pleasure when recounting such favorite zingers as “Fox News has become an American plague,” and it boils to a righteous fury when regarding Trump: “I continually felt that irrational anger like an unending blast of liquid poison from an industrial-strength hose.” But the prose plods to a crawl when detailing the meat-and-potatoes journalism of being editor of the Buffalo News. Arguing vituperatively about national politics at the top of the media pyramid is pretty fun, turns out!

Readers of Newsroom Confidential are well advised to keep a search tab open to check Sullivan’s claims. Among them: that Russia “interfere[d] with the [2016] election, and did so very effectively,” that Facebook (“one of the chief enemies of democracy”) “became a pawn in Russia’s disinformation campaign in the United States,” and that the social media company’s “endless misdeeds” included “the ones that spread lies and helped Trump get elected.” Such statements may be articles of faith among many Democrats and journalists, but some of us attend different churches, and require more verification.

In the book’s second paragraph about January 6 “denialism,” Sullivan also accuses Mike Pence of “trying to sow doubt” about the event during an October 2021 Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, stating that “the vice president downplayed the insurrection as merely ‘one day in January.'”

What did Pence actually say? “January 6 was a tragic day in the history of our Capitol building. But thanks to the efforts of Capitol Hill police, federal officials, the Capitol was secured. We finished our work.” Then the ex-veep tried gamely (and lamely) to change the subject in a way more palatable to Fox viewers: “I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January. They want to use that one day to try and demean the…character and intentions of 74 million Americans.”

Minimization? Maybe. Diversion? Absolutely. Sowing doubt? Two Pinocchios.

The strangest part about Sullivan’s hyperbole in the cause of greater truth is that the biggest victim here is her target demographic: journalists. Despite flattering them with the cringe-inducing moniker of “reality-based press,” she repeatedly caricaturizes their allegedly stubborn professional resistance to jumping off the objectivity fence.

“Should they call out the lies?” Sullivan writes, imagining the Hamlet-like internal deliberations of Trump-era news organizations. “Should they bend over backward to normalize political behavior that was blasting through every guardrail of democracy? Should they try to look even-handed and neutral at any cost, giving equal treatment of both sides of a political conflict, even if the two sides aren’t equally valid? They didn’t seem to know. And too often, they seemed to be in a defensive crouch, while right-wing commentators branded them as left-wing activists.”

News consumers who aren’t partisan Democrats will have a hard time recognizing the newsrooms Sullivan portrays. And those familiar with the media controversies she zips through will be downright baffled by how someone so pious about calling out Republican falsehoods can in the next breath minimize the journalistic transgressions of people she finds more sympathetic.

“I admire Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for her bravery and vision in writing about the influence on American history of enslaved people’s arrival in the English colonies in 1619,” Sullivan writes. Er, OK, but what about the 1619 Project’s well-documented historical flaws and Hannah-Jones’s unprofessional response to criticism? “Her introductory essay won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and it kicked off an incredible furor among those who refused to make room for what it had to say. Despite the pushback (a tiny portion of which was grounded in objections by a few historians to some of the project’s assertions), it accomplished its goals.” So: scoreboard.

Sullivan expresses genuine anguish about having had to criticize the deeply flawed New York Times nail-salons exposé by Sarah Maslin Nir, calling it “one of the most stressful episodes” of her public-editorship. “I had the feeling of betraying the young sisterhood who had reached out to me,” she writes, while repeatedly stressing the “virtues” of Nir’s investigation. (To see Reason‘s more direct critique, which Sullivan does not mention in the book but addressed in 2015, start here.)

During and after the media’s nervous breakdown over race in the summer of 2020, Sullivan tried to ride the tiger of the young newsroom staffs busy defenestrating their elders. “It’s the kind of mess that American journalists could come out of stronger and better if they—and the American people they serve—grapple with some difficult questions,” she wrote in June 2020.

In Newsroom Confidential she marches through a series of firings, resignations and lawsuits (Donald McNeil, Jr., James Bennet, Felicia Somnez, etc.), and regards the conflicts more as overdue correctives than panicky personnel decisions. “Often, I was [on] the side of what was disparagingly and falsely called the ‘woke mob’—the younger, more diverse staffers who were supposedly running roughshod through Big Journalism’s newsrooms,” she writes, again making bold assertions without supporting evidence. “If ‘mob,’ a misnomer, meant that staff finally had enough strength in numbers to force long-delayed change at hidebound institutions, I could get behind that.”

That cavalier approach to due process foreshadows what is the worst part of most nonfiction books, but this one especially—the inevitable what is to be done chapter near the end.

Sounding a lot like someone cramming for a last-minute pop quiz on policy, Sullivan rat-a-tats a bunch of ideas guaranteed to make civil libertarians squirm. “Those who care about truth must do everything in their power to minimize the harm caused by those media outlets and platforms that traffic in lies and conspiracy theories,” she begins, unpromisingly. “Responsible lawsuits…will be a necessary part of this. Advertising boycotts can help. So will efforts to reduce the revenue of news organizations that spread misinformation—Fox News, in particular—by limiting the amount of money they make from lucrative cable transmission fees.”

The suggestions get worse with social media. There’s the “meaningful regulation to counter the excesses of the social media platforms,” amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (albeit “cautiously”), and “changing laws that shield digital platforms, like Facebook, from being held legally responsible for the content they magnify and amplify via their algorithms.” What could go wrong?

“All of this,” Sullivan graciously concedes, “has to be carefully balanced with preserving free speech, but First Amendment concerns shouldn’t be used as an all-powerful shield against regulation.” Thank God there are people besides journalists out there interested in protecting the First Amendment.

With increasingly open attacks on liberalism coming from both major parties, the problems of journalism—in both production and consumption—are real and pressing, if melodramatically stated by Sullivan. (“Above all, the reality-based press should rededicate itself to being pro-democracy,” she writes. “Then, I think, America gets a fighting chance.”)

There’s another new book that tackles largely the same set of issues, sharing many of Sullivan’s underlying concerns, yet comes out with diametrically opposed recommendations. Broken News—by former Fox News reporter Chris Stirewalt, who was booted from the network after his Decision Desk called the 2020 presidential race early for Joe Biden in Arizona—complains that, “Just at the exact moment where it would have been most important for journalists to maintain the highest possible standards for objectivity, big-time news dove in the mud with Trump, where he had home field advantage.”

Stirewalt, who shares Sullivan’s alarm at “the growing appetite for demagoguery among Republicans and Americans in general,” sees a trap in news organizations spending “so much time dumping on the coverage of competitors”—consumers’ national political hatreds are being profitably organized on the cheap, without much in the way of relevant factual nutrients.

“Media criticism,” Stirewalt charges, “has become its own rancid subculture inside the already rotten media business….[It’s] a great way to keep addicted consumers from straying. The message is obvious: Aren’t you glad you’re not like them, and are here with the other smart, virtuous people?”

With the recent cancellation of CNN’s long-running journalism-analysis show Reliable Sources, and with the ongoing struggles of properties such as The Washington Post to maintain audience with Trump out of office, we could be entering in a new era for media criticism and elite self-examination. Margaret Sullivan dominated that field over the past decade; here’s hoping that whoever takes her place resists taking the partisan bait.

The post 'Pro-Democracy' Journalism's Problem With the Facts appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tiananmen Square: An enduring symbol of the Chinese Communist Party’s illegitimacy


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This week the Communist Chinese Party is holding a congress at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The purpose of the congress is cement Xi Jinping’s genocidal, imperialist autocracy. This post explains the centrality of Tiananmen Square to the Chinese dictatorship, and to the Chinese people victimized by the dictatorship.

In brief, ever since the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949, Tiananmen Square has symbolized the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The proclamation of communist rule was issued from Tiananmen, which the Party intended to transform into an icon and an instrument of its absolute power. That power reached a zenith in 1966, when millions thronged to hear Chairman Mao incite the Cultural Revolution. Yet a decade later, Tiananmen Square became the site of mass protest against Mao’s tyranny. Then in 1989,  1989 the Square was occupied by students demonstrating for democracy; the students were guarded by workers throughout the city who set up barricades to attempt to stop a military invasion. The military’s brutal assault demonstrated to the world that the Chinese Communist Party rules by violence and not by consent—as in 1949 and 1989, and so too today. As Mao and his party intended, Tiananmen Square does perfectly exemplify the “New China” they created: a totalitarian kleptocracy who power is maintained by force against the democratic will of the people.

This post is adapted from David B. Kopel, “The Party Commands the Gun: Mao Zedong’s Arms Policies and Mass Killings,” pages 1864-1964 in online chapter 19 of Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (3d ed.), by Nicholas J. Johnson, David B. Kopel, George A. Mocsary, and E. Gregory Wallace. Complete citations to Chinese history may be found therein.

Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949, while standing at a rostrum on Tiananmen (Heavenly Peace) Gate–the northern entrance to the old imperial government complexes in Beijing. The Tiananmen area was large enough for a crowd of tens of thousands. Earlier in the century the Square had been a site of several historic protests, such as against the Versailles Treaty’s shabby treatment of China.

The symbolism of Tiananmen was so powerful that on September 30, 1949, the day before the proclamation of the new government, the CCP leadership spent its time giving final approval to major renovation of the Tiananmen area. Buildings around the gate would be razed, so that much larger crowds could gather to hear speeches by the CCP leadership. In an open area, at the opposite side from Tiananmen gate, there would be a huge obelisk monument of China’s revolutionary martyrs. Tiananmen Gate and Mao became the leading symbols of the “New China.”

The national socialist rallies of 1966

By the early 1960s, Mao’s power was weakening, even within the apex of the CCP. The agricultural collectivization of the “Great Leap Forward” had caused the worst famine in history, killing tens of millions. Mao’s racist aggression against Tibet had caused a huge armed revolt; although the revolt had mostly been suppressed by the early 1960s, China’s international standing had been seriously damaged. Moreover, Mao had realized that killing small farmers, small business owners, and the like had not killed bourgeois thought. Even within the high levels of the CCP, many people preferred rational thinking rather than Mao’s cult of personality. So Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

On August 18, 1966, a million youths were assembled in Tiananmen Square, where defense minister Lin Biao exhorted them to “Smash the Four Olds”: “all old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.” Two weeks earlier, the first murder in the Cultural Revolution had taken place. The victim was Bian Zhongyun, an assistant headmistress at the Girls’ Middle School (a secondary school) attached to Beijing Normal University. She was tortured to death for hours by a mob of students. At the Tiananmen rally, one of the murderous student leaders—a daughter of one of the top generals of the revolution—was given the honor of putting a Red Guard armband on Chairman Mao’s sleeve. Mao changed her given name from Binbin (suave or refined) to Yaowu (be martial). Song Yaowu became an instant national celebrity. The school where the murder took place changed its name to “the Red Martial School.”

At Beijing’s Foreign Languages Institute, Wang Rongfen was studying German. She observed the similarities between Lin Biao’s speech and Hitler’s speeches at his Nuremberg rallies.  She sent Chairman Mao a letter: “the Cultural Revolution is not a mass movement. It is one man with a gun manipulating the people.” He sent her to prison for life. In prison, her manacles bore points to dig into her flesh. She had to roll on the floor to eat. She was released in 1979, three years after Mao’s death, with her spirit unbroken.

Even at elementary schools, which were for students up to age 13, student mobs were encouraged by the Cultural Revolution to attack teachers. The Minister of Public Security instructed the police to support the mobs: “Don’t say that it is wrong for them to beat up bad people. If in anger they beat someone to death, then so be it.” The violent students called themselves “Red Guards,” since they were guarding Chairman’s Mao and his totalitarian program. When Red Guards assaulted the police, the police were forbidden to fight back.

While murders by students had initially been only in the Beijing area, the lethal mobs spread nationwide as students returned home from the Tiananmen rally. The Red Guards were declared to be reserve forces of the Chinese military, and so the military was ordered to assist their travel. For the rest of the year they were given free rail and bus transport plus free accommodations and food. Quite a change from the usual CCP rules against leaving one’s registered city or village.

Twelve million Red Guards traveled to Beijing over the next several months, to wait weeks until Mao would appear on a balcony and acknowledge them, in seven more rallies from August 31 to November 26. The trains and buses were hideously overcrowded and filthy, and so were conditions in Beijing. The result was a meningitis epidemic that killed 160,000. There was no money for antidotes because government spending was oriented to the Cultural Revolution. European governments eventually donated vaccines.

Although some students just took advantage of the opportunity for free travel and left Beijing to visit scenic or historical places, many others came home empowered. Under state direction, rage mobs roamed the streets, attacking women for bourgeois behavior such as wearing dresses or having long hair. They ransacked homes of suspected anti-communists and of loyal communists. Poor street peddlers, barbers, tailors, and anyone else participating in the non-state economy were attacked and destroyed. Many of them were ruined and became destitute. Street names that referenced the past were replaced with communist names. Historic artifacts, public monuments, non-communist historic sites, religious buildings, tombs, and non-communist art were destroyed.

It was all great fun for the Red Guards. But Mao could not contain the violence and disorder he had unleashed. By 1968, he had to cede control of most of the government to the military. Any young person who had participated in one of the 1966 Tiananmen rallies was shipped off to the countryside for forced labor. About 3.5 million people who had joined the Cultural Revolution were affected.

The 1976 mourning of Zhoe Enlai

In January 1976, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai died. All over the nation, huge, spontaneous, and unauthorized crowds assembled to mourn him. The crowds considered him relatively less totalitarian and oppressive than Mao. Unlike the Tiananmen rallies of the early Cultural Revolution, which originated from the top down, the crowds that gathered to mourn Zhou expressed people power. “The country had not witnessed such an outpouring of popular sentiment since before the communists came to power in 1949,” observed Mao’s personal doctor, Li Zhisui.

While there were demonstrations at over 200 locations throughout the country, the flashpoint was in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which saw the largest spontaneous demonstration ever in China. On April 4, Tomb-Sweeping Day, a traditional day for honoring one’s ancestors, an immense crowd gathered at the Monument to the People’s Martyrs in Tiananmen Square. Erected in 1959, the monument honored Chinese revolutionary martyrs from 1840 onward.

At the monument, poems were read aloud, then transmitted throughout entire square by relay teams shouting each line, as the people wrote them down. One poet said:

In our grief we hear the devils shrieking;

We weep while wolves and jackals laugh.

Shedding tears, we come to mourn our hero,

Heads raised we unsheathe our swords.

The masses denounced Chairman and Madame Mao, indirectly: “Down with Franco!” (recently deceased Spanish fascist dictator), “Down with Indira Gandhi!” (Indian Prime Minister who had recently overturned democracy and was ruling by decree), “Down with the Empress Dowager!” (Manchu Dynasty ruler of China 1861-1908).

That night, the government dispatched fire engines and cranes to remove the tens of thousands of wreaths deposited in honor of Zhou. The next day, a worker’s militia was sent to disperse the crowd, but it was hesitant to act, for many members themselves had laid wreaths for Zhou.  Police and more militia surrounded the square. People could leave but not enter. Some protesters broke into government buildings, destroyed propaganda vans, toppled and burned cars, or attacked security guards and militia.

As dusk neared, a final poem was pasted on the monument. Three lines brought the crowd to silence. As they were relayed, no one else spoke. The listeners quickly scribbled the words onto paper.

China is no longer the China of yore

Its people are no longer wrapped in ignorance

Gone for good is the feudal society of Qin Shi Huang.

Mao had long compared himself to China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Both had imposed totalitarian rule, murdered millions, and enslaved the nation. Everyone understood that denouncing the first emperor was the same as denouncing Mao.

That night, the Tiananmen revolutionaries were attacked by the Capital Militia Command Post (a/k/a the “Cudgel Corps”). In Beijing as in Shanghai, the militia were under the command of the Gang of Four, a group of extreme leftists led by Madame Mao.

China’s then-minister of defense estimated that over ten thousand people in the crowd of a hundred thousand might have been killed. Another official said there were only a hundred deaths. Newer scholarship argues that the violence lasted only 10-15 minutes; people were beaten bloody but no one was killed.

The next evening, and two succeeding evenings, the government ordered in large crowds to express their loyalty to Mao. Together they yelled, “Resolutely carry the struggle against the right deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts through to the end.”

Hundreds of workers had tried to scrub off all the blood in Tiananmen. But as Anne Thurston writes in Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution, the cleanup was incomplete. On the Martyrs Monument, “gleaming like a red neon light, was one stain of blood that somehow had been missed.”

Not that it mattered. As Lady Macbeth had said, “Out, damned spot! … What need fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”

The 1989 democracy protests

Mao died several months later, and was eventually replaced by Communist leadership that, while totalitarian, was more pragmatic than Mao. But like Mao, they would never allow the people to challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute power.

In 1989, democracy demonstrators did start to threaten the one-party state. Beginning in mid-April, they demonstrated and camped in Tiananmen Square. Against the armed force of the Chinese military, they knew their only hope was the moral force of nonviolence.

The government declared martial law on May 20. The evening before, the army had been sent in to clear the protesters. But as soon as army forces were spotted moving into Beijing, huge crowds assembled to block them. The army had not been given orders to shoot if necessary, and so the military halted.

The people of Beijing had come out en masse, and they stayed out en masse, fortifying their city against invasion by the army. Street barricades were constructed with overturned buses, bicycles, cement blocks, or whatever else was at hand. A spontaneous network spread the word on how to immobilize a vehicle column: use gravel to stop the lead vehicle, let the air of its tires, and then remove or cut the ignition wires.

A few days later, the army pulled its forces back outside Beijing, leaving many stranded vehicles behind. The army began preparing for a second assault. Inside Beijing, tactical knowledge continued to disseminate. For example, if a whole armored column cannot be stopped, surround and stop the final third of the column. Then as the reduced vanguard moves forward, isolate and halt its rear third, and so on.

While the students were concentrated in Tiananmen Square, the city itself was defended by people of all backgrounds and classes. New citizen militia self-defense forces, with names such as “Dare-to-Die-Corps,” vowed to defend the students at all costs. The people desperately hoped that the army would never obey orders to fire on the people. With many military personnel stuck in immobilized caravans, there were plenty of opportunities for friendly conversations, and some soldiers vowed never to harm the people. But most of the soldiers who would soon attack Beijing never had an opportunity to interact with the people. They were told by their officers that the protesters were just bunch of hooligans who were endangering public safety.

The possibility that some military units might actually fight for the people was apparently considered a serious risk by the regime. The military deployment aimed at Beijing included anti-aircraft rockets—of no use against land-based protesters, but handy in case some of the air force switched sides.

On May 30 the democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, now numbering over a million, raised a statue of the Goddess of Liberty. She directly faced and confronted Mao’s giant cult portrait hanging in the square. Around the city the masses were singing with new meaning the global communist anthem, The Internationale:

For reason in revolt now thunders and at last ends the age of cant.

Now away with all your superstitions.

Servile masses arise, arise!

We’ll change forthwith the old conditions and spurn the dust to win the prize….

On our flesh too long has fed the raven.

We’ve too long been the vultures’ prey.

But now farewell to spirit craven.

The dawn brings in a brighter day …

No savior from on high delivers.

No trust have we in prince or peer.

Our own right hand the chains must sever,

Chains of hatred, greed and fear …

Each at his forge must do his duty

And strike the iron while hot.

The military’s senior officer corps was not sympathetic to the protesters. They were veterans of the 1949 revolution and owed their power to the Communist Party.

On June 3-4, the army followed orders from the CCP leadership.  This time, use of deadly force was authorized. Soldiers attacked the people with AK-47 automatic rifles and machine guns, plus clubs and garottes. The army had infiltrated plainclothes soldiers, posing as civilians, into the Tiananmen area. They were on standby waiting for delivery of firearms. The street barricades did stop some movement by army forces, but many of the barricades were knocked away by armored personnel carriers running at full speed. As the noose tightened around Tiananmen, the students decided to surrender. Most were allowed to leave peacefully through one exit.

Most fatalities were not in Tiananmen Square, but in the city, as the PLA shot and rammed its way through the people. The highest estimate of city-wide fatalities of the PLA attack is ten thousand, according to a secret British diplomatic cable sent the next day. The Chinese government claims only a few hundred. Preliminary estimates by the Red Cross and the Swiss Ambassador suggested about 2,600 or 2,700.

Conclusion

The events of June 3-4, 1989, confirmed was had been true ever since the first minutes of the People’s Republic of China, starting October 1, 1949. The Chinese Communist Party rules by military force and not be consent of the people. Despite the official name, the form of government is monarchy or oligarchy, not a republic. The people do not rule China.

So too in 2022. In reality, although not officially, the Monument to the People’s Martyrs is understood to honor not only the Chinese who fought foreign colonialism in the 19th century, or the Japanese imperialists in the 20th–but also the Chinese who bravely stood against domestic tyranny in 1976 and 1989. More broadly, the Tiananmen and the Martyr’s Monument stands for the Chinese who today bravely resist the governing kleptocracy, and for their predecessors, such as Wang Rongfen.

One day, Tiananmen’s giant cult picture of Mao the mass murderer will lie on the ash heap of history. One day, China will have government that acknowledges the truth: the Chinese Communist Party has never been the legitimate ruler of China. Its self-aggrandizing attempt to refashion Tiananmen have backfired. Tiananmen Square does demonstrate the CCP’s power—to assemble millions of brainwashed violent youths, to enslave them a few years later, and to annihilate popular assemblies that demand the People’s Republic of China live up to its name. Yet as Tiananmen Square also shows, powerful as the Chinese Communist Party may be, it can never eradicate the natural human desire for liberty.

The post Tiananmen Square: An enduring symbol of the Chinese Communist Party's illegitimacy appeared first on Reason.com.

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Using Today’s Economic Woes To Teach Teens Finance


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There may be no better education about the uses and abuses of money than simply being alive right now. Inflation? Recession? Investment risks and opportunities? Supply chain disruptions? Regulatory distortions? We’re all soaking in an intense economics immersion class, not that any of us ever intended to register for these lessons. I’m treating it as an opportunity to enhance my son’s education.

Employment plays a major role in these lessons, since the shrinking labor participation rate has revived opportunities for teenagers willing to work. My son, Anthony, landed a job at the local supermarket and now fields frequent offers of more hours as his short-staffed managers try to fill the schedule.

At the supermarket, Anthony sees empty shelves alternating with unexpected gluts of some items. Inventory has become unpredictable because of lingering disruptions from pandemic lockdowns and the ongoing fracturing of the world into economic blocs.

“They’re completely out of paper towels,” Anthony told me one day, soon after the store was on the receiving end of a seeming peach avalanche. “You’d think they’d be able to plan this better.”

“They used to,” I told him. “But you can’t just turn economies on and off without causing big trouble.” That turned into a discussion about the lockdowns of the last couple of years and their effect on labor, production, and supply.

Conversations like that can lead to larger lessons. Fortunately, Milton Friedman’s 1980 Free to Choose miniseries, which explains how people are enriched by markets and impoverished by government intervention, is available on Amazon Prime. So are free market videos by Swedish historian Johan Norberg, including a 2011 update on Friedman’s series. Norberg’s recent work on YouTube displays a broad appreciation for innovation and classical liberal ideas.

But to dive deep into money-related issues, you must turn to the written word. So Anthony’s homeschooling curriculum included a thorough reading of Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson, which has sold more than 1 million copies. First published in 1946, the book was last updated by the author in 1978, during a period of high inflation resulting from fiscal and monetary extravagance of the sort Hazlitt had long criticized. “So far as the politicians are concerned,” he complained, “the lesson that this book tried to instill more than thirty years ago does not seem to have been learned anywhere.”

Hazlitt probably would be banging his head on his desk if he were still with us, since government officials have yet to learn their lesson. As inflation again soars and wages fail to keep up, my son is getting a practical education in the erosion of purchasing power with each paycheck he brings home. To shield him from the worst, we had him put his money in a youth brokerage account linked to a debit card instead of a savings account. But stock market returns right now are not much better than the paltry interest rates offered by banks.

The brokerage app helpfully color-codes gains and losses. “It’s nerve-wracking to see the day end in red print,” Anthony told me.

“Yes, it is, buddy,” I replied. “Now, imagine that happening to pretty much the entire planet.”

Of course, we hope for better in the future. With that in mind, we opened a Roth IRA in Anthony’s name, where he can drop those paychecks to fund his old age. If investing for the long term turns out to be pointless, the kid will have more to worry about than stock market returns. But if that’s the case, we’ve made sure he also has bullets to trade for beans. Call it a diversified portfolio.

We can’t control the world around us or prevent the powers that be from throwing monkey wrenches into the works of the global economy. But at least we can treat the results of bad policy as case studies for what might otherwise have been dry lessons in economics and finance. It’s fun to study money in boom times, but it’s absolutely vital that we learn from busts.

The post Using Today's Economic Woes To Teach Teens Finance appeared first on Reason.com.

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Chip Wars

David Kris opens this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast by laying out some of the massive disruption that the Biden Administration has kicked off in China’s semiconductor industry – and among its Western suppliers. The reverberations of the administration’s new measures will be felt for years, and the Chinese government’s response, not to mention the ultimate consequences, remains uncertain.

Richard Stiennon, our industry analyst, gives us an overview of the cybersecurity market, where tech and cyber companies have taken a beating but cybersecurity startups continue to gain funding.

Mark MacCarthy reviews the industry from the viewpoint of the trustbusters. Google is facing what looks like a serious adtech platform challenge from many directions – the EU, the Justice Department, and several states. Facebook, meanwhile, is lucky to be a target of the Federal Trade Commission, which rather embarrassingly had to withdraw claims that Facebook’s acquisition of Within would remove an actual (as opposed to a hypothetical) competitor from the market. No one seems to have challenged Google’s acquisition of Mandiant, meanwhile. Richard suspects that is because Google is not likely to do anything much with the company.

David walks us through the new White House national security strategy – and puts it in historical context.

Mark and I cross swords over PayPal’s determination to take my money for saying things Paypal doesn’t like. Visa and Mastercard are less upfront about their willingness to boycott businesses they consider beyond the pale, but all money transfer companies have rules of this kind, he says. We end up agreeing that transparency, the measure usually recommended for platform speech suppression, makes sense for Paypal and its ilk, especially since they’re already subject to extensive government regulation.

Richard and I dive into the market for identity security. It’s hot, thanks to zero trust computing. Thoma Bravo is leading a rollup of identity companies. I predict security troubles ahead for the merged portfolio.

In updates and quick hits:

Download the 426th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets

 

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Don’t Blame Migrants and ‘Open Borders’ for Fentanyl Entering the Country


Blue fentanyl pills over an image of the U.S.-Mexico border

When politicians and pundits on the right call for the U.S.-Mexico border to be secured, they often point to rising fentanyl overdose deaths among Americans as justification.

“The cartels are exploiting President Biden’s open borders,” charged Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), sharing an article about fentanyl at the southern border. “Open borders…are slowly but surely poisoning our country,” said former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R–Ga.) of parents who “now must worry” about Halloween candy laced with fentanyl. “There have been over 100k fentanyl deaths” since Joe Biden became president, tweeted the conservative Heritage Foundation. “OPEN BORDERS ARE INHUMANE.”

That line of reasoning has also caught on with the general public, judging by an August NPR/Ipsos poll. When presented with the statement, “Most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. is smuggled in by unauthorized migrants crossing the border illegally,” 39 percent of respondents said it was true. Twenty-three percent of Democrats called it true, while 60 percent of Republicans did.

Despite the idea’s sticking power in certain circles, it’s inaccurate to say that undocumented immigrants crossing an open border are chiefly responsible for fentanyl arriving at the country’s doors. In reality, U.S. citizens carrying the drug through legal ports of entry are primarily to blame.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported an upward trend in fentanyl seizures over the past few years. From 2,800 pounds seized in FY 2019, CBP seized 11,200 pounds of fentanyl in FY 2021 and 12,900 pounds in FY 2022 through the end of August.

Seizures conducted by two distinct bodies within CBP combine to yield those numbers. The first, the Office of Field Operations (OFO), enforces immigration and customs laws at ports of entry—points where someone may lawfully enter the United States. The second is U.S. Border Patrol, which intercepts undocumented individuals and illegally imported goods between those ports of entry.

The vast majority of fentanyl seized in recent years has been obtained by the OFO, not Border Patrol. The drug was mainly seized from smugglers at legal ports of entry, not illegal border crossings. OFO seizures amounted to 2,600 pounds in 2019 (93 percent of the total fentanyl seized by CBP), 4,000 pounds in 2020 (83 percent), 10,200 pounds in 2021 (91 percent), and 10,900 pounds so far in 2022 (84 percent). The Drug Enforcement Agency confirms the port trend, saying that “the most common method employed [by Mexican cartels] involves smuggling illicit drugs through U.S. [ports of entry] in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor-trailers.”

Per David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, some people might wrongly think that “less fentanyl is interdicted between ports of entry because it is more difficult to detect there.” But Bier notes that it’s far easier for smugglers to conceal drugs while entering the U.S. at legal crossings (i.e., in vehicles) than it is for someone to cross the border undetected. “We’ve seen some instances perhaps of migrants and drugs as a mixed event,” said Brian Sulc, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Transnational Organized Crime Mission Center, in congressional testimony in May. “But they’re still rare.”

The fact that so much fentanyl smuggling takes place at legal border crossings helps explain why U.S. citizens are the main traffickers there. “In order to smuggle fentanyl through a port of entry, cartels hire primarily U.S. citizens, who are the least likely to attract heightened scrutiny when crossing into the United States,” writes Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. Reichlin-Melnick analyzed every CBP press release and official Twitter post mentioning fentanyl seizures from December 2021 to May 2022. Only two involved people crossing between ports of entry, and of the 42 incidents where CBP mentioned a smuggler’s nationality, 33—or 79 percent—involved U.S. citizens.

Data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) highlight a similar national trend. From FY 2015 through FY 2021, the USSC reported 4,459 people charged with federal fentanyl trafficking; just 659 of them were noncitizens. Most Border Patrol drug seizures at checkpoints from FY 2016 through FY 2020 involved only U.S. citizens carrying marijuana, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in June. Of all drug seizures during that period, 91 percent involved just U.S. citizens, while 4 percent involved “potentially removable people.”

In reality, Border Patrol apprehends an exceedingly small number of people carrying fentanyl. “Just 279 of 1.8 million arrests by Border Patrol of illegal border crossers resulted in a fentanyl seizure—too small of a percentage (0.02 percent) to appear on a graph,” writes Bier, “and many of these seizures occurred at vehicle checkpoints of legal travelers in the interior of the United States.” Though it’s obviously difficult to predict how much fentanyl could be carried by migrants who go unapprehended by Border Patrol, the tiny share of apprehended migrants who are found carrying fentanyl suggests that amount could be quite small.

Discussions of border enforcement often mash together fentanyl overdose deaths and unauthorized border crossings with little eye to how they actually relate. That’s bad enough, since it often leads politicians to condemn migrants for an issue they have little to do with. Even worse is the fact that scapegoating foreigners only helps to obscure the factors that are truly driving overdose deaths in the United States.

The post Don't Blame Migrants and 'Open Borders' for Fentanyl Entering the Country appeared first on Reason.com.

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Did the Free Market Ruin Our Economy? A Soho Forum Debate


A debate between Binyamin Appelbaum and Gene Epstein

“Free market ideology is largely responsible for the dismal performance of the U.S. economy over the past few decades.” That is the resolution for a live debate taking place on Monday, October 15, 2022, at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan. The debate is also being livestreamed on YouTube.

Defending the resolution is Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on business and economics for the New York Times editorial board. He previously worked as a Washington correspondent for the Times. He is the author of The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019).

Arguing for the negative is Gene Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum and former economics and books editor of Barron’s. His last published book was Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers. Epstein has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John’s University, and he has worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange. He has defended the negative at six Soho Forum debates. His November 2019 debate on socialism with University of Massachusetts professor Richard Wolff has gained more than 5 million views on Youtube.

The post Did the Free Market Ruin Our Economy? A Soho Forum Debate appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Press Idolizes Politicians. Instead, It Needs To Hold Them Accountable.


newspapers on sale in New York City

“The present state,” the editors wrote, “seemed to require some extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom.”

The writers linked what they described as the sorry state of the world to the deteriorated state of the press. “There have been times when such a condition of affairs would not have occurred, and in which, if it had occurred, it would not have been long endured.” In those earlier days, “an unpurchased, unshackled press existed,” and editors “breathed the spirit of freedom.”

Among the problems requiring the editors’ effort were runaway taxing and spending, creating a drag on the economy. “The weight of taxation, and an obstinate adherence on the part of Ministers to the same profligate waste of the national resources…precludes all hope of returning prosperity,” the editors wrote.

They saw an opening “for a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom.” They “resolved to exert ourselves to answer that call, and to execute to the best of our zeal and talents, a task more requisite to the liberation and happiness of mankind, than any other.”

The quotes are from a “To Our Readers” message on the front page of the Sunday, October 20, 1822, of The Sunday Times of London. They were republished Sunday, October 16, 2022, for the 200th anniversary edition of that newspaper.

The message is striking for being applicable today just as it was two centuries ago. Beyond that, what’s lovely is the understanding is that asserting the freedom necessary for the “liberation and happiness of mankind” is the responsibility of the newspaper. The editors aren’t waiting on the sidelines wishing to be rescued by some brave politician. They understand that it is their own job to lead the way.

The illustration elsewhere in Sunday’s Times makes the same point. It does not feature a collection of Times reporters chasing the news, nor does it portray the editors serving as dutiful stenographers to powerful newsmakers. Rather, it pictures a crowd of caricatures of British Prime Ministers all gathered together reading the paper.

The image was a reminder of the ups and downs of that cause of freedom over the past two centuries, and of the important role that Great Britain has played. There is Winston Churchill, whose courage and determination helped to defeat Adolf Hitler in World War II. There is Margaret Thatcher, who helped to rebuild the British economy from the socialist slump by transforming it in the direction of freer markets. There is Boris Johnson, the champion of Brexit, who helped to liberate the United Kingdom from the oppression of Brussels-based European Union bureaucrats.

Newspapers surely deserve some of the credit for the considerable expansion of freedom over the past 200 years—from Frederick Douglass’s North Star in the fight against slavery, to the role of The Wall Street Journal editorial page under Robert L. Bartley in winning the Cold War, to the journalistic work of Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky that paved the way for a Jewish state in the land of Israel, to Milton Friedman’s 121 Journal opinion pieces and 300 columns in Newsweek that helped make the case for economic freedom.

The corollary to that, however, is that when freedom has been in retreat worldwide over the past decade or more—as the watchdog group Freedom House says it has been—then part of the blame belongs, also, to a press that has lost its credibility. Some press outlets have sold out, chasing declining revenues or idolizing partisan political figures instead of breathing the spirit of freedom.

The Sunday Times itself, like so many legacy newspapers, is in a diminished state. Its print circulation is far below its historic peak, and its journalistic reputation, in a crowded market, is less than what it was in its glory days from 1967 to 1981 under editor Harold Evans. The media mogul who controls it, Rupert Murdoch, is considering consolidating it and his other newspapers, including the Journal, now housed within News Corp., with Fox, the company that includes Fox News and Fox Sports.

If the current conditions are to improve, it will, today too, require “extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom” from a range of news organizations—200-year-old ones, younger publications, and new ones yet to be founded. The technology has changed, but two centuries later, the “liberation and happiness” of humankind depends as surely as it ever has on “a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom.”

The post The Press Idolizes Politicians. Instead, It Needs To Hold Them Accountable. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Midterm Polling, PayPal, and Patellas


Trump rally endorse arizona midterms candidate

In this week’s The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie unpack results from a recent Harvard-Harris poll that highlight the mismatch between voter concerns and party interests ahead of the midterm elections.

4:20: Harvard-Harris poll results ahead of midterm elections

20:14: PayPal’s fines for “misinformation”

33:25: Weekly Listener Question:

Noah Smith makes an interesting case (below) that the TARP bailouts avoided a second Great Depression. What say you, Roundtable?

“An Econ Nobel for research that saved the world,” by Noah Smith

45:30: The 20th anniversary of Authorized Use for Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq

46:52: This week’s cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

“What the 1970s Can Teach Us About Today’s Inflationary Politics,” by Peter Suderman

“Inflation Hits 8.2 Percent After Another Month of Sharply Rising Prices,” by Eric Boehm

“Should Anyone Be Offended by Ye? Live with Eli Lake,” by Nick Gillespie and Natalie Dowzicky

“Social Media Interaction Does Not Improve Political Knowledge, but It Does Polarize Us,” by Ronald Bailey

“Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era,” by Bonnie Kristian

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser

Assistant production by Hunt Beaty

Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve

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