Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Commentator’ posts. These are riffs on news stories of the week - and, really, a conscientious, self-directed effort to think through ‘how the world works.’ Please also consider reading the latest on
- an essay by on Coke Stevenson, the last stalwart of a certain type of ‘honest politics.’Best,
Sam
RECKONING WITH LAB LEAK
There are two bombshell stories at the moment. One is the report that the Department of Energy — which has a division dedicated to biological weapons including viruses — has endorsed, with ‘low confidence,’ the lab-leak theory, becoming, along with the FBI, the first federal agency to do so. The other is the exposé — little-reported in the U.S. — on ‘Team Jorge’ and its election interference business.
In a sense, the federal agencies’ endorsement of lab-leak is no big deal — the DOE offered no evidence of why it had reached the conclusion it had. Mainstream journalists were quick to disregard it. “It’s one additional data point floating alongside many others.” wrote David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. “The American intelligence community has reached a judgment that falls somewhere between not sure and who knows,” wrote Dhruv Kullar in The New Yorker. All in all, the attention given to the finding is a recapitulation of the tendency that has bedeviled us all through the pandemic — our superstitious deference to any sort of institutional authority.
But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that this is the moment when the reckoning finally comes about how badly we mishandled the pandemic — and how we allowed our wish to be virtuous and compliant to interfere with our common sense. This was the case for lab-leak and it was the case for masks — and there’s a new study out from Cochrane contending that, as the study’s lead author put it in an interview, “There is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference. Full stop.”
If you’d gone back in time to early 2020 and asked people to exercise their common sense about pivotal pandemic questions, what would have come back probably was something along the lines of: masks don’t make very much sense (you still are breathing air even if you’re wearing a mask); society-wide shutdowns don’t make very much sense given that healthy young people aren’t particularly at risk and children virtually not at all; and it does seem an awfully big coincidence that a coronavirus outbreak emerged in the same city as one of the handful of sites in the world where gain-of-function coronavirus research was being conducted. But soon after that, authority intervened — in the form of a stirring ‘scientific consensus’; in hyper-vigilant governments deferring to ‘science’; and in media that worked assiduously to limit all discussion of pandemic to a few prescribed channels of inquiry.
Three years later, the ‘scientific consensus’ of that time has almost perfectly unraveled — and to such an extent that some reminders are needed of how pervasive it really was. Lab-leak now seems like such a commonsensical position that some of the legacy journalists are at pains to understand why it might have been marginalized in the first place. “There was never a good reason for suppressing the idea that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab,” writes David French in The New York Times. “There was never a good reason for presuming such speculation was inherently racist.” And, yet, suppressed that idea was. A highly-influential Nature paper on the presumed zoonotic origins of the virus contended, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” — and neglected to mention that only weeks before members of the study’s team had privately viewed themselves as being ‘50-50’ or maybe even as much as ‘70-30’ in favor of lab-leak. The prestigious Lancet published, ridiculously early, published an open letter signed by 27 scientists, saying, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Facebook, for a period of time, stripped down any posts related to lab-leak. In a tweet, New York Times science writer Apoorva Mandavilli, conveyed the mainstream’s view of lab-leak: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,” she wrote.
The current backtracking on the part of mainstream media, while welcome, undersells a bit what’s really at stake. The line at the moment is that it’s a China problem — one of these things that we may just never know because of obfuscation on the part of China’s government. “No genuine proof seems to have arrived, one way or the other, three years on, in part because investigations have been largely stonewalled by China,” writes Wallace-Wells. But that’s not quite the whole truth. Katherine Eban, who has just been a staggeringly good reporter on Covid-19, pretty much has the story in her June 2021 piece. “In the fall of 2020, the State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.” she writes. As it turns out, branches of the United States government had every indication that lab-leak was a perfectly valid theory and stonewalled investigations by other agencies. The real bombshell, as uncovered by the State Department in 2020, was that three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalized in November, 2019 with mysterious Covid-like symptoms — over a month before the first ‘official’ cases were reported connected to the market. This is consistent with the timeline, teased out by Toy Reid from WIV documents and reported on in another Eban piece, that strongly points to a crisis occurring at the plant at this time. But inquires pursued at the agency level repeatedly encountered roadblocks. Thomas DiNanno of the State Department wrote that staff from his bureau were “warned not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.” And David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, said, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.” All through this, the very people who were most involved in the gain-of-function research at Wuhan were the ones who were most vigorously pursuing the zoonotic explanation — with the Lancet open letter drafted and facilitated by EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak who had won the initial gain-of-function grant for Wuhan.
Maybe this is all a ‘low confidence’ conclusion, but the data points are all there — epidemiologists overly proactive in tracking down pathogens and in performing dangerous gain-of-function research (which was not just China’s problem but was done internationally, with heavy U.S. involvement); and the research conducted at profoundly unsafe facilities with a leak all-but-inevitable. How else to put it? That seems to be what happened. That’s why millions of people died and why the world was shut down for, essentially, a full year. And, meanwhile, there has yet to be any compelling evidence for the zoonotic theory — a pathogen at work in an animal population or a documented crossover point to human beings.
As Wallace-Wells puts it, the preponderance of evidence is such that it’s now time to have “a global reckoning over lab safety procedures.” Well, yeah, but that’s not the only conversation we should be having. There are questions of government accountability, but we sort of expect governments to be involved in shady operations and to lie about them. What’s tougher to take is scientists deferring to received wisdom and journalists being willfully incurious. As Robert Redfield, a former CDC director and early proponent of lab-leak, said to Eban, “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed [lab-leak]. I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
That’s the real reckoning here — how we fell for a very old trick, and allowed the presumption of ‘emergency’ to undo a wide variety of civil liberties. As Tara Henley puts it on her Substack, “When I speak to people in the public about declining trust in media, one story that’s frequently cited as a turning point is the lab leak theory.” And, as Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask study, says, “Governments completely failed to do the right thing and demand better evidence. A lot of it had to do with appearing as if they were ‘doing something.’”
Simply put, it’s very soothing to believe in a consensus. That’s what we felt when well-tailored Anthony Fauci was on television; when Andrew Cuomo was giving his pronouncements with ‘the experts’ at his back. But real science and real journalism are never about unanimity and never about easy answers. The lessons for the next ‘emergency’ are in this sphere, not in, like, better safety protocols for bio labs. It’s about keeping the civic discourse open; never rushing to conclusions, however soothing they may be; and never subverting one’s own common sense and critical reasoning to the pressures — however overwhelming — of ‘authority.’
RECKONING WITH ELECTION INTERFERENCE
The other bombshell story is a joint report by a “consortium of reporters” on Team Jorge — an Israel-based outfit of election mercenaries who claim to have manipulated something on the order of thirty elections around the world.
Team Jorge appeared in the margins of the Cambridge Analytica case with whistleblower Brittany Kaiser describing an Israeli group that worked “separately but in parallel” to Cambridge Analytica in manipulating elections. Kaiser claimed that she couldn’t remember the names of the operatives — although it subsequently became clear that she knew them well. Dogged, cloak-and-dagger reporting finally led to unmasking this parallel organization, with reporters posing as a group attempting to postpone an election in Chad and finally securing face-to-face meetings with the group’s head, Tal Hanan, who delivered hours-long presentations detailing ‘Team Jorge’s’ services.
As Haaretz wrote, “He revealed the array of tools at his disposal to achieve the ends for which the clients had approached him: cyberattacks; transnational disinformation campaigns; forged documents; incrimination of political adversaries; dissemination of fake reports; theft of bank documents.” His bots in particular were impressive — “the likes of which had never been seen before,” as Haaretz wrote: an army of around 40,000 avatars, strikingly life-like, with corroborative identities across a variety of social media platforms, and, with the help of AI, “able to sing together in a choir,” organizing a wide-ranging political disinformation campaign. (As a test, the journalists asked Hanan to spread a viral story about the death of ‘Emmanuel the Emu,’ a TikTok celebrity, which, within a day, garnered over 7 million views before Emmanuel’s owner managed to dispel the rumor.)
Reporters were able to verify 19 campaigns in which Team Jorge took part. These involved a delegitimization campaign in Kenya; a hacking of opposition leaders’ phones in Nigeria; a cyberattack on Indonesia’s election committee; and a cyberattack on the entirety of Catalonia’s internet on the morning of a referendum. “How hard is it to rig a presidential election? Not very, said Hanan,” according to Der Spiegel’s report — and he cited ‘voter suppression’ and ‘blame game disruption’ as fail-safe methods for election interference. There were suggestions in the meetings that more extreme approaches were on the table as well, with Hanan’s colleague Mashy Meidan telling the undercover reporters that “The best for your client is to create more of a mess, more fear, more problems in the streets now.”
The conclusion of the reportage is that there is a new game in town — ‘the disinformation industry,’ and that it is more widespread than has been appreciated. “The project's research has revealed that Team Jorge may be the most dangerous mercenary force in an opaque world that has long operated under the radar,” writes Der Spiegel. “But it is by no means the only one. In recent years, a rapidly growing disinformation industry has emerged, with dozens of companies around the globe working specifically to bend the truth to suit their clients.”
Taking a broader view, there are two ways to think about the Team Jorge revelations. One is that it exposes the anachronism of national, or local, elections in a globalized, cyber era. Simply put, it’s unrealistic to believe that there would be no outside actors in any national election. This seems to be the perspective of the Team Jorge operatives themselves, who as much as they have any scruples — they clearly have very few — believe themselves simply to be reifying the existing state of things. “Time spent listening to Hanan and his truth killers can lead to the realization that true democracy is, in their world, nothing but an illusion,” writes Der Spiegel. “And that they consider elections to be a rigged game anyway — one in which those who deploy the most tricks generally emerge victorious.” The takeaway is that it’s clearly of importance to keep elections as low-tech as possible — paper ballots, hand-counting, etc. The more with-it the election technology becomes, the more vulnerable it is to Team Jorge’s style of attack. But that’s clearly only scratching the surface of the problem — that social media is inherently susceptible to manipulation; and that high bidders practicing the dark arts can profoundly distort an election campaign.
The other way of thinking about the Team Jorge revelations is a bit more nuanced. I’m reading the Team Jorge reportage alongside Matt Taibbi’s breathtaking indictment of the Global Engagement Center. In Taibbi’s writing, the GEC, an Obama-era creation, set in motion a new era in which the campaign against ‘disinformation’ is itself the disinformation. The GEC helped to generate a “sprawling infrastructure of ‘disinformation labs,’” which were mostly dedicated to discrediting perfectly valid dissenting opinions as being somehow the product of a foreign power’s ‘disinformation’ campaign. Taibbi writes, “The tale of how America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against ‘threats’ in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over ‘disinfo’ defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.”
The Cambridge Analytica story in 2018 helped to launch a regime of radical censorship within social media, with government agencies and the tech companies working in concert to stamp out legitimate stories ranging from pandemic debates to Hunter Biden exposés as ‘Russian disinformation.’ The Team Jorge story fits that pattern: talk too much about the ‘disinformation industry’ and you start to shift into a fortress-mentality, seeing ‘disinformation’ everywhere. Haaretz, which has the most thorough story on Team Jorge, also has the most misgivings about it. Haaretz’s reporters note that Hanan, in his sales pitch, seems, in some cases, to have inflated his capabilities. A supposedly hacked, ‘internal presentation’ from the rivals of his clients in a ‘Latin American country’ turned out to be an open-source, easily googleable document. Meanwhile, alleged financial documents procured by Team Jorge and sold to intelligence agencies in the past proved to have been forgeries. “The information was checked and most of it turned out to be complete nonsense,” said a source in Israeli intelligence who was privy to one of Team Jorge’s deals. None of that exactly invalidates the underlying story — one would expect Team Jorge to inflate its capabilities in a meeting with a new client; and the ‘reporter consortium’ certainly appears to have done due diligence in verifying a large number of Hanan’s claims — but it makes one slightly suspicious of the claim of a pervasive, all-powerful ‘disinformation industry’ fixing elections at will.
My guess, though, is that — confusingly enough — both stories are true. There really are actors like Team Jorge, state and non-state, that fix elections for a variety of reasons; and there really are orchestrated governmental campaigns, like the GEC, that use the charges of disinformation and foreign interference to quash legitimate dissent.
So what’s the conclusion? Well, that politics is a really dirty business. That election interference has been going on for a long time (check out, among many other examples, the CIA’s involvement in Italian elections from 1948-1972). But also that national politics and the internet age are a poor fit — the result is manipulation everywhere, and often in ways that are difficult to immediately comprehend. All we can do is to be suspicious of everything; trust our critical reasoning; trust our spidey sense.
NO WAY OUT OF THE LONG GRINDING WAR IN UKRAINE
In that spirit of skepticism, it is worth, as always, questioning what really is happening with the proxy war in Ukraine and the sabre-rattling with China. Andrew Bacevich, former Army colonel and vigorous critic of the U.S. military establishment, has a ringing piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that a particularly hawkish mindset is now ascendant in Washington and likely spells long-term disaster. “The U.S. foreign policy establishment clings to the myth that what the world needs is more American military power,” he writes. Bacevich’s critique is mirrored by Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept who, in an article on “the disturbing groupthink over the war in Ukraine,” writes, “We are in the midst of a perilous moment in world history, one that demands a robust debate about the motives and actions of powerful nation states. There should be more debate not less.” At Tom Dispatch, Alfred McCoy criticizes Biden for breaking with precedent by saying that “Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence” — which are fighting words for the Chinese — and bringing America and China to the precipice.
People like Bacevich and Scahill were so right about Iraq and America’s ‘dirty wars’ that they are entitled to a hearing, really, for the rest of their lives, but both very much acknowledge that they are trying to thread a needle on Ukraine. Bacevich finds himself writing that “So far, U.S. policy on Ukraine has been pragmatic and arguably restrained.” Scahill has to keep hedging his argument by conceding that the Ukraine War overwhelmingly is the responsibility of Putin, not of the U.S. “Russia is hardly a victim here. Vladimir Putin seems comfortable abetting a new cold war, and his unjustified attack against Ukraine has offered the U.S. and NATO a golden ticket to ratchet up militarism,” he writes.
The needle being threaded has to do with maintaining a defense-first foreign policy, as opposed to seeking complete global hegemony. Scahill is concerned about the “prominent sectors of the U.S. security state who want this war to bleed Russia.” Bacevich sees the current debates over Ukraine in establishment circles as an almost perfect mirror to debates in the late 1940s between the hawkish party led by Paul Nitze which was focused on hegemony; and the George Kennan wing aiming more realistically at ‘containment.’ Bacevich perceives the Nitze view as becoming once again ascendant in “Biden’s frequent insistence that the fate of humankind hinges on the outcome of a cosmic struggle between democracy and autocracy.” For Bacevich, the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have gone almost perfectly unnoticed, and Washington continues to “insist that the United States must sustain the now hallowed model of militarized global leadership even as the relevance of that model diminishes.”
I have to say that I’m not exactly convinced that the ‘relevance of that model has diminished.’ The war in Ukraine suggests that the American hegemonic model — the ability to protect far-flung allies — is, precisely, exactly what’s needed to maintain some kind of order against imperial actors even more pernicious than we are. And Bacevich gives the game away a bit by writing, “Unless Putin opts to use nuclear weapons, an unlikely scenario, Russia poses a negligible threat to the security and well-being of the United States.”
The problem with the sort of Road-to-Damascus moment advocated for by Bacevich and Scahill is that, while it sounds nice to return to a foundational vision of the American republic, it leaves our allies in the lurch — and we have seen from the sheer brutality of Putin’s war in Ukraine what that can mean. So, yes, there is much to be on guard against — the “bonanza for the war industry,” the “world-domination” inherent in Nitze’s outlook, the unrealistic vision of “bleeding Russia” — but I really don’t see what the alternative is. There is a bracing interview in Meduza with the Russian sociologist Grigory Yudin, who, more than just about anybody I’ve come across, seems to have taken the measure of what Putin represents. “Putin thinks of his rule as constant war,” says Yudin. “War itself is normal, in [his circle’s] worldview. Stop thinking that peace is the natural state, and you’ll see the situation through their eyes. As the governor of Khanty-Mansi said, ‘War is a friend.’”
Yudin offers a summary of the lead-up to the war from the Russian perspective. There are familiar moments — NATO’s expansion eastwards in the 1990s; Putin’s stated belief, as articulated in 2014, that “America wants to destroy Russia,” but, interestingly, the emphasis is on a long-standing sense of cultural belittling. “There are some grounds for resentment [in Russian society]. It’s related to the instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on in the 1990s,” Yudin says. “Generally speaking, no one likes to be lectured. Especially a big country that has its own imperial past….And that instructive tone was the result of a profound ideological mistake: the famous ‘end of history.’”
In other words — and this jibes with an understanding that I’ve had for a while —Putin’s anger is to be understood in philosophical and cultural, as much as political terms. He is mentally locked in the disgrace of the 1990s — and his resentment is, more than anything, directed at the sunny American optimism and infantile philosophizing of that time. “Putin connects with Russian society over resentment — monstrous, endless resentment,” says Yudin. “Nothing can mollify this resentment. It’s impossible to imagine what could compensate for it.”
Faced with that, there is very little that the United States can do differently. Ukraine cannot fall, but, meanwhile, of course, the United States’ support of Ukraine fuels Putin’s sense of resentment even more. “The whole year showed Putin that, since the West has seized onto Ukraine, it clearly indicates that it’s a key region and that the West was planning an attack on him precisely from there,” Yudin says. Putin’s strategy at this point is, evidently, a long and grinding war — and horrible as it is, the West has no choice really except to join with him in it.
Alfred McCoy in his piece on Taiwan compares this period to the military brinkmanship that occurred before the outbreak of World War I — a system of alliances bringing major states onto a collision course. “Beijing and Washington have been making military, diplomatic, and semi-secretive moves that could drag us into a calamitous conflict that, once again, nobody wants,” he writes. And, again, I don’t think he’s exactly wrong, but I don’t know what can really be done differently. It is, as Scahill puts it, “a perilous moment in world history,” and the truth is that, as often as not, periods like this require simple toughness as much as an appeal to democratic virtue. Taiwan is a line in the sand; so is Ukraine. Russia and China have both made enough noise about state sovereignty in the past. Their smaller neighbors have, as sovereign nations, made it overwhelmingly clear that they prefer the American mode of exercising power. Having once embarked on those compacts, America has no choice except to abide by them.
WAGNER IN THE PRISONS; WAGNER IN CHAD
Meanwhile, on the Russian modes of exercising power, convict warfare comes ever more into focus. The Wall Street Journal has a punishing piece from the frontlines around Bakhmut. Ukrainian soldiers describe coming under attack from 18 human-wave attacks in a 24-hour period — all from Wagner convict soldiers.
“A Wagner fighter doesn’t have an option to pull back. Their only chance of survival is to keep moving ahead,” a Ukrainian officer told The Wall Street Journal. “And this tactic works. It’s a zombie war. They are throwing cannon fodder at us, aiming to cause maximum damage. We obviously can’t respond the same way because we don’t have as much personnel and we are sensitive to losses.”
A convict soldier, captured by the Ukrainians, said, “Two machine guns were blazing at us, people were being torn to bits, but they kept telling us: keep crawling ahead and dig in. It was just plain dumb.”
This assessment of the fighting has been confirmed as well by Prighozin, Wagner’s commander, who, in an angry social media post, declared, “My people are dying in heaps” and accused Russia’s senior military brass of “treason” in withholding ammunition and supplies from Wagner.
Wagner surfaces elsewhere in the world — in a purported attempt, as disseminated by U.S. intelligence, to foment a coup against Chad’s government. As The Wall Street Journal writes, “Supporting a plot against a sitting president would add a new page to Wagner’s known playbook in Africa.” Michelle Gavin, in a piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, has a smart take on what’s involved here in the intricate power play between the U.S. and Russia. “During the Cold War, the United States played this game with a logic that led to support for abusive, corrupt, but anti-Communist governments everywhere from Liberia to Zaire to apartheid South Africa,” she writes.
In other words, nothing has changed really. The United States and Russia find themselves competing for influence in Africa — with the United States, in Chad, allying itself with a president of, as Gavin writes, “highly questionable legitimacy,” and Russia fomenting destabilization. So, what to do with this information? Well, for now, not much. Just don’t be naive; know that this is what great power politics looks like; and that more and more of the world is turning into a battlefield between the U.S and Russia — exactly as it was during the Cold War.