Making News: New Article on Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Making News, Marco Rubio, police killings, regulation, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, The National Interest, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine, Wall Street, wokeness

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest journal has just published a modified version of my recent RealityChek post explaining my support for President Trump’s reelection. Here’s the link.

The main differences? The new item is somewhat shorter, it abandons the first-person voice and, perhaps most important, adds some points to the conclusion.

Of course, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Im-Politic: Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, free expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, impeachment, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, police killings, Populism, progressives, regulations, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine Scandal, Wall Street, wokeness

Given what 2020 has been like for most of the world (although I personally have little cause for complaint), and especially Washington Post coverage of endless early voting lines throughout the Maryland surburbs of the District of Columbia, I was expecting to wait for hours in bad weather to cast my ballot for President Trump. Still, I was certain that Election Day circumstances would be a complete mess, so hitting the polling place this week seemed the least bad option.

Hence my amazement that the worst case didn’t pan out – and that in fact, I was able to kill two birds with one stone. My plan was to check out the situation, including parking, at the University of Maryland site closest to my home on my way to the supermarket. But the scene was so quiet that I seized the day, masked up, and was able to feed my paper ballot into the recording machine within about ten minutes.

My Trump vote won’t be surprising to any RealityChek regulars or others who have been in touch with on or off social media in recent years. Still, it seems appropriate to explain why, especially since I haven’t yet spelled out some of the most important reasons.

Of course, the President’s positions on trade (including a China challenge that extends to technology and national security) and immigration have loomed large in my thinking, as has Mr. Trump’s America First-oriented (however unevenly) approach to foreign policy. (For newbies, see all the posts here under “[What’s Left of] Our Economy,” and “Our So-Called Foreign Policy,” and various freelance articles that are easily found on-line.). The Biden nomination has only strengthened my convictions on all these fronts, and not solely or mainly because of charges that the former Vice President has been on Beijing’s payroll, via his family, for years.

As I’ve reported, for decades he’s been a strong supporter of bipartisan policies that have greatly enriched and therefore strengthened this increasingly aggressive thug-ocracy. It’s true that he’s proposed to bring back stateside supply chains for critical products, like healthcare and defense-related goods, and has danced around the issue of lifting the Trump tariffs. But the Silicon Valley and Wall Street tycoons who have opened their wallets so wide for him are staunchly opposed to anything remotely resembling a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies and especially technology bases

Therefore, I can easily imagine Biden soon starting to ease up on sanctions against Chinese tech companies – largely in response to tech industry executives who are happy to clamor for subsidies to bolster national competitiveness, but who fear losing markets and the huge sunk costs of their investments in China. I can just as easily imagine a Biden administration freeing up bilateral trade again for numerous reasons: in exchange for an empty promise by Beijing to get serious about fighting climate change; for a deal that would help keep progressive Democrats in line; or for an equally empty pledge to dial back its aggression in East Asia; or as an incentive to China to launch a new round of comprehensive negotiations aimed at reductions or elimination of Chinese trade barriers that can’t possibly be adequately verified. And a major reversion to dangerous pre-Trump China-coddling can by no means be ruled out.

Today, however, I’d like to focus on three subjects I haven’t dealt with as much that have reinforced my political choice.

First, and related to my views on trade and immigration, it’s occurred to me for several years now that between the Trump measures in these fields, and his tax and regulatory cuts, that the President has hit upon a combination of policies that could both ensure improved national economic and technological competitiveness, and build the bipartisan political support needed to achieve these goals.

No one has been more surprised than me about this possibility – which may be why I’ve-hesitated to write about it. For years before the Trump Era, I viewed more realistic trade policies in particular as the key to ensuring that U.S.-based businesses – and manufacturers in particular – could contribute the needed growth and jobs to the economy overall even under stringent (but necessary) regulatory regimes for the environment, workplace safety, and the like by removing the need for these companies to compete with imports from countries that ignored all these concerns (including imports coming from U.S.-owned factories in cheap labor pollution havens like China and Mexico).

I still think that this approach would work. Moreover, it contains lots for folks on the Left to like. But the Trump administration has chosen a different economic policy mix – high tariffs, tax and regulatory relief for business, and immigration restrictions that have tightened the labor market. And the strength of the pre-CCP Virus economy – including low unemployment and wage growth for lower-income workers and minorities – attests to its success.

A Trump victory, as I see it, would result in a continuation of this approach. Even better, the President’s renewed political strength, buoyed by support from more economically forward-looking Republicans and conservatives like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri, could bring needed additions to this approach – notably, more family-friendly tax and regulatory policies (including childcare expense breaks and more generous mandatory family leave), and more ambitious industrial policies that would work in tandem with tariffs and sanctions to beat back the China technology and national security threat.

Moreover, a big obstacle to this type of right-of-center (or centrist) conservative populism and economic nationalism would be removed – the President’s need throughout the last four years to support the stances of the conventional conservatives that are still numerous in Congress in order to ensure their support against impeachment efforts.

My second generally undisclosed (here) reason for voting Trump has to do with Democrats and other Trump opponents (although I’ve made this point repeatedly on Facebook to Never Trumper friends and others). Since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy for the White House back in 2015, I’ve argued that Americans seeking to defeat him for whatever reason needed to come up with viable responses to the economic and social grievances that gave him a platform and a huge political base. Once he won the presidency, it became even more important for his adversaries to learn the right lessons.

Nothing could be clearer, however, than their refusal to get with a fundamentally new substantive program with nationally unifying appeal. As just indicated, conventional Republicans and conservatives capitalized on their role in impeachment politics to push their longstanding but ever more obsolete (given the President’s overwhelming popularity among Republican voters) quasi-libertarian agenda, at least on domestic policy.

As for Democrats and liberals, in conjunction with the outgoing Obama administration, the countless haters in the intelligence community and elsewhere in the permanent bureaucracy, and the establishment conservatives Mr. Trump needed to staff much of his administration, they concentrated on ousting an elected President they considered illegitimate, and wasted more than three precious years of the nation’s time. And when they weren’t pushing a series of charges that deserve the titles “Russia Hoax” and “Ukraine Hoax,” the Democrats and liberals were embracing ever more extreme Left stances as scornful of working class priorities as their defeated 2016 candidate’s description of many Trump voters as “deplorables.”

I see no reason to expect any of these factions to change if they defeat the President this time around. And this forecast leads me to my third and perhaps most important reason for voting Trump. As has been painfully obvious especially since George Floyd’s unacceptable death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the type of arrogance, sanctimony and – more crucially – intolerance that has come to permeate Democratic, liberal, and progressive ranks has now spread widely into Wall Street and the Big Business Sector.

To all Americans genuinely devoted to representative and accountable government, and to the individual liberties and vigorous competition of ideas and that’s their fundamental foundation, the results have been (or should be) nothing less than terrifying. Along with higher education, the Mainstream Media, Big Tech, and the entertainment and sports industries, the nation’s corporate establishment now lines up squarely behind the idea that pushing particular political, economic, social, and cultural ideas and suppressing others has become so paramount that schooling should turn into propaganda, that news reporting should abandon even the goal of objectivity, that companies should enforce party lines in the workplace and agitate for them in advertising and sponsorship practices, and that free expression itself needed a major rethink.

And oh yes: Bring on a government-run “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate – and maybe prosecute – crimes and other instances of “wrongdoing” by the President, by (any?) officials in his administration. For good measure, add every “politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled” the Trump “catastrophe,” as former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has demanded. Along with a Scarlet Letter, or worse, for everyone who’s expressed any contrary opinion in the conventional or new media? Or in conversation with vigilant friends or family?

That Truth Commission idea is still pretty fringe-y. So far. But not too long ago, many of the developments described above were, too. And my chief worry is that if Mr. Trump loses, there will be no major national institution with any inclination or power to resist this authoritarian tide.

It’s reasonable to suppose that more traditional beliefs about free expression are so deeply ingrained in the national character that eventually they’ll reassert themselves. Pure self-interest will probably help, too. In this vein, it was interesting to note that Walmart, which has not only proclaimed its belief that “Black Lives Matter,” but promised to spend $100 million on a “center for racial equality” just saw one of its Philadelphia stores ransacked by looters during the unrest that has followed a controversial police shooting.

But at best, tremendous damage can be done between now and “eventually.” At worst, the active backing of or acquiescence in this Woke agenda by America’s wealthiest, most influential forces for any significant timespan could produce lasting harm to the nation’s life.

As I’ve often said, if you asked me in 2015, “Of all the 300-plus million Americans, who would you like to become President?” my first answer wouldn’t have been “Donald J. Trump.” But no other national politician at that point displayed the gut-level awareness that nothing less than policy disruption was needed on many fronts, combined with the willingness to enter the arena and the ability to inspire mass support.

Nowadays, and possibly more important, he’s the only national leader willing and able to generate the kind of countervailing force needed not only to push back against Woke-ism, but to provide some semblance of the political pluralism – indeed, diversity – required by representative, accountable government. And so although much about the President’s personality led me to mentally held my nose at the polling place, I darkened the little circle next to his name on the ballot with no hesitation. And the case for Mr. Trump I just made of course means that I hope many of you either have done or will do the same.

Im-Politic: Why China’s U.S. Election Interference is a Very Big Deal

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battleground states, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, Chinese Americans, collusion, Democrats, election 2020, elections, entertainment, Freedom House, Hollywood, Hoover Institution, Im-Politic, Mike Pence, multinational companies, Nancy Pelosi, National Basketball Association, NBA, Robert Draper, Robert O'Brien, social media, The New York Times Magazine, think tanks, Trump, Trump-Russia, Wall Street

It’s baaaaaaack! The Russia collusion thing, I mean. Only this time, with an important difference.

On top of charges that Moscow is monkeying around with November’s U.S. elections to ensure a Trump victory, and that the President and his aides are doing nothing to fend of this threat to the integrity of the nation’s politics, Democrats and their supporters are now dismissing claims administration about Chinese meddling as alarmism at best and diversionary at worst.

In the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, commenting on recent testimony from U.S. intelligence officials spotlighting both countries’ efforts, to “give some equivalence” of China and Russia on interference efforts “doesn’t really tell the story. 

She continued, “The Chinese, they said, prefer [presumptive Democratic nominee Joe] Biden — we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election.” ,

The Mainstream Media, as is so often the case, echoed this Democratic talking point. According to The New York Times‘ Robert Draper (author most recently of a long piece in the paper’s magazine section on Mr. Trump’s supposed refusal to approve anti-Russia interference measures or take seriously such findings by the intelligence community ), China “is really not able to affect the integrity of our electoral system the way Russia can….”

And I use the term “Democratic talking point” for two main reasons. First, the Chinese unquestionably have recently gotten into the explicit election meddling game – though with some distinctive Chinese characteristics. Second, and much more important, China for decades has been massively influencing American politics more broadly in ways Russia can’t even dream about – mainly because so many major national American institutions have become so beholden to the Chinese government for so long thanks to the decades-long pre-Trump policy of promoting closer bilateral ties.

As for the narrower, more direct kind of election corrupting, you don’t need to take the word of President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien that “China, like Russia and Iran, have engaged in cyberattacks and fishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure and with respect to websites.”

Nor do you have to take the word of Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2018 cited a national intelligence assessment that found that China “ is targeting U.S. state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy. It’s using wedge issues, like trade tariffs, to advance Beijing’s political influence.”

You can ignore Pence’s contention that that same year, a document circulated by Beijing stated that China must [quoting directly] “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States.

You can even write off China’s decision at the height of that fall’s Congressional election campaigns to take out a “four-page supplement in the Sunday Des Moines [Iowa] Register” that clearly was “intended to undermine farm-country support for President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war….”

Much harder to ignore, though: the claim made last year by a major Hoover Institution study that

“In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections.”

Don’t forget, moreover, findings that Chinese trolls are increasingly active on major social media platforms. According to a report from the research institute Freedom House:

“[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are…apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google’s search engine Reddit,and YouTube.”

The Hoover report also came up with especially disturbing findings about Beijing’s efforts to influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:

“Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland.

In addition:

“In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chineselanguage outlets and established its own new outlets.”

Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American super-category thats been the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible voters in the country.

Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where the many of the 2016 presidential election margins were razor thin, of which look up for grabs this year, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

As for the second, broader and indirect, Chinese meddling in American politics, recall these developments, many of which have been documented on RealityChek:

>U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as long carried Beijing’s water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S. political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn’t sent many U.S. operations overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese market.

>These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks – which garb their special interest agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship. By the way, at least one of these think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has taken Chinese government money, too.

>Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown nose China in search of profits that it’s made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material deemed offensive to China. And in case you haven’t noticed, show biz figures haven’t exactly been reluctant to weigh in on U.S. political issues lately. And yes, that includes the stars of the National Basketball Association, who have taken a leading role in what’s become known as the Black Lives Matter movement, but who have remained conspicuously silent about the lives of inhabitants of the vast China market that’s one of their biggest and most promising cash cows.

However indirect this Chinese involvement in American politics is, its effects clearly dwarf total Russian efforts – and by orders of magnitude. Nor is there any reason to believe that Moscow is closing the gap. In fact, China’s advantage here is so great that it makes a case for a useful rule-of-thumb:  Whenever you find out about someone complaining about Russia’s election interference but brushing off China’s, you can be sure that they’re not really angry about interference as such. They’re just angry about interference they don’t like.`      

Making News: Manufacturing Views Quoted in the Washington Post…& More!

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American Greatness, China, Denver Post, Hollywood, Making News, manufacturing, Modern Machine Shop, recession, tariffs, Thaddeus McCotter, Trade, Trump, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that three recent news reports – two on the state of American manufacturing, and one on China’s growing influence over the American movie industry – have cited my views and analyses.

On July 25, this Washington Post article included my – cloudy- forecast about industry’s near future due to all the uncertainties created by President Trump’s tariff-centric trade policies.  It was also gratifying to see a Mainstream Media piece mention my observations about technical manufacturing recessions – I believe that’s a first.

For more on recent manufacturing recessions, including the one in which industry is still stuck, see this recent post of mine.

This Washington Post piece was also reprinted in several major dailies around the country, like the Denver Post.

The day before, this post on Modern Machine Shop‘s blog quoted from my recent offering on how U.S.-based companies have dealt with Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Finally, on July 19, former Michigan Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter’s essay for the American Greatness website on Hollywood’s latest kowtow to Chinese investors mentioned a tweet of mine on the subject.  Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming and recent media appearances, and other developments.

Following Up: More Evidence of Hollywood Immigration Hypocrisy

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2018 elections, Better Call Saul, celebrities, crime, entertainment industry, Following Up, Hollywood, illegal aliens, Immigration, Media & Society, midterms 2018, Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment, OMG WTF, television, Trump, University of Southern California

If America’s entertainment industry has made anything clear since President Trump’s run for the White House began in mid-2016, it’s that it detests the chief executive, and that his stance on illegal aliens and immigration more generally is one big reason why. .

That’s why I wrote with such astonishment last month about Hollywood’s failure to come down like a ton of bricks about the popular cable dramedy Better Call Saul – whose portrayal of Latinos in New Mexico seems taken straight out of Mr. Trump’s campaign launch speech describing many illegal aliens as criminals, rapists, and (especially relevant for Saul) drug dealers.

Yesterday, however, my jaw dropped further when I came across a report finding that Saul was anything but an anomaly. According to a study just put out by the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment, Media & Society (what a mouthful!) American television overall presents a significantly distorted and misleadingly negative picture of immigration and immigration issues.

And prominent among these alleged distortions: “Immigrants are disproportionately associated with crime and incarceration on TV.”

More specifically:

“On TV, one-third (34%) of immigrant characters were associated with a crime. This does not match reality. 2018 studies by the CATO Institute and the Marshall Project both reiterate what several other studies have found: both undocumented populations and immigrants as a whole commit less crime than native-born Americans.

“Eleven percent of TV immigrants are associated with incarceration. This means there was either a reference to a previous incarceration, they are currently incarcerated or there is a reference to a future incarceration. This is substantially higher than the less than 1% of foreign-born people incarcerated at the state and federal level in the U.S., excluding immigration offenses, according to the CATO Institute.”

In this post, I’m not going to get into the debate over whether legal immigrants or, more important, illegal aliens, commit crimes to a greater or lesser degree than native-born Americans. (Here’s my take on the subject.) Rather, the main point here is that, as actors and comedians and talk show hosts focus on demonizing President Trump for cruel, unfair, racist, fascistic, and xenophobic immigration policy priorities, they’ve apparently been working in an industry that’s vigorously propagated the very stereotypes they say they abhor (and not just on crime, but on immigrant education levels, poverty rates, and legal status).

Entertainment industry figures recently started a political action committee named OMG WTF to support Democratic political candidates in key states in next month’s midterm elections. As the Lear Center report reminds, that acronym obviously also applies to Hollywood’s hypocrisy about immigration.

Im-Politic: Better Call Saul, Trump, and Latino Stereotypes

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Albuquerque, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, drug cartels, drug trafficking, Hollywood, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, Mexican-Americans, Mexico, New Mexico

Tonight my wife and I will be watching the latest episode of Better Call Saul – and not just for some relief from the increasingly jaw-dropping Washington, D.C. Follies. We’re big fans of this precursor cable TV series to Breaking Bad (which I’ve had no interest in) and will be sorry to see it come to an end in a few weeks.

But as has been the case for the last year or so, one key feature of Saul, and what it seems to reveal about political correctness-spawned double standards in the entertainment industry, will simply astonish me: the viciously criminal nature of practically every significant Latino character.

There’s drug lord Hector Salamanca. There are his uber-surly and violent nephews. There’s drug lord Gus Fring. There’s Ignacio “Nacho” Varga – a drug gang henchman who soon after his debut was depicted as an example of, at best, the possibility of some honor existing among thieves. (He’s also, however, becoming increasingly sympathetic because of his growing qualms about involvement with the cartels – even though these doubts so far as we know sprung solely from concern for his honest, hard-working father, who has endangered himself and the rest of the family by refusing to pay the gangsters protection money.)

To continue with our list, there are numerous other terrifying-looking cartel thugs. And there are the Mexico-based cartel bosses of Hector and Gus.

In fact, the only decent, law-abiding continuing Latino character in the show aside from Nacho’s father has been Ernesto, a legal assistant. Like Varga Senior, however, he hasn’t exactly been showcased, and in fact may have made his last appearance many episodes ago.

Moreover, the series has been peppered with scenes of the evidently non-stop drug trade that originates in Mexico and services clients in the United States – including the construction of an enormous tunnel intended to greatly facilitate trafficking that’s been detailed in the last few episodes. And never in Saul is there any hint that U.S. demand for narcotics may be the ultimate driver of the drug trade, or that many Anglos are either helping to mastermind it or even profit from it significantly.

Why have I been nothing less than thunderstruck by all of this? Here’s a hint:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

The speaker? Then-Presidential hopeful Donald Trump. When did he say it? While announcing his candidacy in 2015. How did many Americans react, especially the kinds of progressives that pervade Hollywood? With outrage.

How have any of these folks reacted to the murderous psychopaths that comprise the vast majority of those Latino Saul characters with any significance? As far as I can tell, with completely indifference. In fact, here’s the only critical item I came up with after searching Google for twenty minutes (and I’m a really good searcher).

Saul’s creators could conceivably reply that they decided to focus the show on the Albuquerque, New Mexico underworld and how it can suck normal solid citizens (and non-citizens?) into its maw – and that Mexican- and Mexican-American-dominated drug cartels dominate this underworld. Fair enough. They can also point out that they conceived the series before Mr. Trump ignited the latest, especially angry phase of the national immigration debate (although Breaking Bad wasn’t exactly short of Latino villains, either). That, too, is worth bearing in mind.

Yet it’s still remarkable that, apparently at no time since the series’ debut, just before Mr. Trump’s “sending their best” remarks, have the creators or writers come under any notable pressure, or felt any need themselves, to introduce any prominent Latino good guys and gals. Unless they figured they’d benefit from yet another double standard in La-La-Land?

Im-Politic: How the Weinstein/Hollywood Scandals Look a Lot Like Policy Debates

Tags

Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood, Im-Politic, rhetoric, sex crimes, Woody Allen

One reason I’m so grateful for having edited magazines for so long was the chance I got to learn about so many of the intellectually dishonest ways in which even some of the world’s most eminent scholars and statesmen argue for or against certain propositions.

Some well known examples? Trying to end debate through stigmatization. (“My opponents are isolationists.”) Pretending that only black and white choices are available. (“It’s either capitalism or socialism.”) Defining a problem out of existence or assuming it away. (“Free trade always creates more winners than losers.”) Launching ad hominem attacks. (“He wants to limit immigration because he’s a bigot.”) And appealing to either anonymous authorities (“All the experts agree….”) or identified authorities (“As Henry Kissinger says….”).

In fact, these ruses were so common that I identified one of my own – a device so popular and sleazy, but so subtle and thus effective, that it’s well worth spotlighting. And finally, after struggling for years to come up with a catchy (or even comprehensible) name, the Harvey Weinstein/Hollywood sex crimes scandals have finally crystallized its essence for me. I call it “preemptive bogus alarmism.” It consists defending a prevailing, longstanding idea or opinion or policy by warning of terrible consequences if (for reasons never specified) change results in a wildly excessive overreaction that’s also thoroughly improbable precisely because the status quo is so well established.

If you think about it, it’s becoming almost de rigeur in defenses of establishment positions on foreign policy, trade, immigration, and many other issues. What after all, has become more routine on the op-ed pages and the like than the concern that “We wouldn’t want ignoring foreign crisis X to turn into ignoring all foreign crises”? Unless it’s “We wouldn’t want fighting foreign protectionist practice Y to produce a shutdown of all trade.” Or “We wouldn’t want more border security to bring on a ban on all immigration.” Or “In trying to prevent another financial crisis, we mustn’t outlaw all Wall Street risk-taking.”

The intents, of course, are to portray even modest new wrinkles in current approaches as dangerous gambits all too likely to trigger widely feared disasters; to deny the possibility of exercising any judgment or identifying any useful opportunities for discrimination; conversely, to pigeonhole all supporters of change as reckless hotheads; and to depict current conditions as indisputable but deceptively fragile bests of all possible worlds that are held together only through the expert, Herculean, and sadly under-appreciated exertions of their supporters.

Which brings us to the Harvey Weinstein angle – and an example of preemptive bogus alarmism that struck me as particularly disgraceful. I’m talking about Woody Allen’s statement in a BBC interview that “it was important to avoid ‘a witch hunt atmosphere’ where ‘every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself'”.

In other words, we’ve now had weeks of revelations leaving little doubt that various versions of what used to be winked at (by lots of us movie-goers and other non-entertainment industry types, too) as “the casting couch,” have been deeply embedded in Hollywood’s business model for decades, and have victimized even many genuine superstars. And Allen is warning that the nation at large should be at least just as worried that any crackdown not sweep up the innocent as well as the guilty. Even recognizing that law enforcement can be political, and overzealousness is certainly possible, in the “bend over backwards” sense, whenever long-term neglect or laxitude has been exposed, the suggestion that this hypothetical should be on or near center stage sets new standards for obtuseness, at very best.

In fact, Allen’s own dubious past in this regard is enough to break the chutzpah meter. Which suggests a new category of intellectually dishonest argumentation: “Preemptive self-serving bogus alarmism.” But whatever the form it takes, I hope you all agree that the practice needs to be called out – and to the greatest extent possible, stamped out. Moreover, I hope you’ll help me in this effort by sending examples to RealityChek‘s comment section. As soon as I get enough of them, I’ll post them – with full credit provided if that’s what you want. You’d certainly deserve it!

Following Up: Even Star Trek’s Now Partly Made in China

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Alibaba, China, FDI, Following Up, foreign direct investment, Gene Roddenberry, Hollywood, Huahua, movies, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, The Martian, transparency

What a drag to report that my enjoyment of a second feature film in less than a year has been marred by news that it’s been partly financed by China. Even worse – if this doesn’t yet qualify as a trend, it looks like that’s not far off, thanks both to abundant Chinese capital and official American indifference.

The news was especially distressing because the film was Star Trek Beyond, because I’m a Trekkie from back in the ’60s with the original TV series, and because this third installment was in my opinion the best in the current genuinely inspired “reboot” franchise.

So imagine how upsetting it was to see in the opening credits a reference to something called Huahua Media in some producer-type role. Since I wasn’t familiar with the company, I decided to suspend judgment and enjoy the film. But upon returning home, I learned not only that Huahua was indeed a Chinese company, but that it wasn’t even Beyond‘s first partner from the People’s Republic. On-line marketplace Alibaba had beaten Huahua to the punch.

Fortunately, this Chinese involvement in Beyond‘s production didn’t affect the content in any way I could see. In particular, there was no gratuitous plot alteration in order to portray China in a favorable light, as with last year’s The Martian. (Maybe because, by the time Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s idyllic 24^th century had rolled around, China and other nation-states had faded into history?)

Nevertheless, China’s role in Beyond, and its growing footprint in Hollywood in general, are troubling for any number of reasons. As with The Martian (and other movies), content can be altered. And because any Chinese company large enough to make such international investments unquestionably is acting as an agent of the Chinese government, it inevitably will reflect the priorities of a regime that is both dictatorial and an increasing threat to U.S. national security interests.

Yet even if the Chinese government was democratic and/or friendly, its presence in the American film industry clashes with free market norms. Won’t efficiency and quality suffer, almost by definition? And why should domestic capital – or private foreign capital – be forced to compete with a rival with practically bottomless pockets?

And of course for Trekkies, Chinese investment creates a tragic irony. The Star Trek universe is a monument to pluralism and freedom. (Even keeping in mind Mr. Spock’s arguably collectivist insistence that “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”) And Roddenberry himself was clearly one of the great political and social idealists of modern American popular culture. China’s rulers stand for diametrically opposite values. If I was the series’ late creator and guiding spirit, I’d been rolling over in my grave (or, more accurately, in the space-borne urn carrying my ashes).

Washington isn’t completely oblivious to the prospect of foreign control of American creative and media companies. But it does seem uninterested in the role of foreign governments, and even of unfriendly, dictatorial foreign governments. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the argument that free speech principles require admitting even these actors onto such corporate playing fields, at least to some extent. But if that’s the road the U.S. government continues down, how about a little transparency? In other words, if Americans are going to be consuming more and more entertainment and even news products that are subsidized by the Chinese or other foreign governments, don’t they at least have a right to know?

Following Up: The Martian is Hollywood’s Latest Pander to China

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China, entertainment, Following Up, Hollywood, movies, Nazi Germany, Washington Post

Talk about cosmic coincidences! Just yesterday, I blogged on a terrific Washington Post piece that detailed how the American movie industry has been including in feature films images and story lines that flatter China in order to persuade Beijing to give their products access to the potentially huge but tightly controlled Chinese market. And last night – quite unintentionally – I wound up seeing one of those very movies – The Martian!

In deference to those intending to see the film, I won’t spill the specifics. Let’s just say that the outcome would have been vastly different had the Chinese space program not decided to volunteer major assistance. Until that plot twist appeared, I was loving the movie. Afterwards, I was feeling so nauseated that I was relieved that I’d foregone popcorn. In fact, had I known about this detail, I would have never seen the film, and rewarded this pandering financially, in the first place.

There is admittedly one complicating wrinkle to this sad tale: The Martian is based on a novel. I haven’t read it, but it’s certainly possible that the favorable treatment of China wasn’t gratuitously injected by Hollywood moguls, but were part of the original story. At the same time, there are any number of great science fiction stories and novels that haven’t made it to the silver screen.

Even choosing this one, therefore, would represent an unmistakably political move, and an especially craven one given China’s recent expansionism in East Asian waters, its engagement in cyber-hacking American businesses, its recent crackdown on legitimate U.S. business activity in China, and its redoubled repression of domestic dissent, among other transgressions. (I have fewer objections to cyber-attacks on U.S. government sites, since however harmful to national security, they do seem to examples of the kinds of espionage every government has engaged in during recorded history.)

And here’s an important historical footnote: Friend Nevin Gussack yesterday called my attention to a recent book that describes a similar Hollywood cave-in to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Here’s a link to an article summarizing it. The American film industry obviously isn’t the sum total of American culture and society, let alone the U.S. economy. Yet its national and global footprints for the last century have been undeniably massive and influential.

As private companies, American entertainment firms have no legal responsibility to champion national interests, or any other value. By the same token, however, their customers have every right to reject their products if they view them as politically or morally objectionable. So I’d urge every one who’s concerned about the Chinese challenge to America’s security and prosperity, and about how Big Business and its government stooges, to boycott The Martian, and tell Hollywood to stop shilling for a dangerous foreign dictatorship.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Hollywood’s Been Brown-Nosing China

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censorship, China, entertainment, Hollywood, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Washington Post

One of my great fears about the breakneck, corporate-driven expansion and deepening of U.S.-China relations at all levels has always been that it would steadily infect American society with Beijing’s autocratic and corrupt official values. In fact, I’ve always considered this a far likelier to happen, and likelier to happen sooner, than the conventional wisdom (generated largely by this offshoring lobby and their witting and unwitting dupes in the political and media classes) that greater integration between the two economies and societies would foster greater freedom and implant similar Western values in China. Sadly, a new Washington Post report on China’s growing, dangerous, and hitherto neglected influence over Hollywood supports my pessimism.

Post reporter Ana Swanson tells a powerful and depressing story of how the lure of more access to China’s still strictly controlled market for foreign films has given “the Chinese government and its support of censorship” a “surprisingly big hand in shaping the movies that Americans make and watch.” As Swanson explains:

“For Hollywood movies trying to get on [the] select list [of movies approved for showing in the PRC], portraying China in a positive light is key. Any foreign film that is shown in theaters in China must be approved by the Film Bureau, part of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, which reports to the highest levels of the Chinese government.”

Swanson notes that some of the changes made to curry favor with Beijing seem harmless, and that others arguably provide “ helpful dose of cultural exposure for isolated American audiences.” But in their eagerness to expand the global box office for specific movies, and to cement their reputations as “friends of China,” Hollywood studios have also engaged in much more flagrant and troubling brown-nosing.

In my view, the worst example described by Swanson entails the 2012 remake of the 1984 Cold War action feature Red Dawn. The original depicted Chinese invaders as the villains. But three years ago, America was portrayed as being under attack by North Korea.

But this award might also be deserved by 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. Not only was the film made with an assist from Chinese media companies – which are all firmly under the government’s thumb. But it also contains what seems to be a completely gratuitous scene of a Chinese defense minister gallantly vowing to protect Hong Kong.

There’s not much the U.S. government can legally do to supply Hollywood with a backbone. And the American entertainment industry can’t reasonably be expected to ignore the potential of China revenues. So maybe the best U.S. response is one suggested by a China specialist Swanson interviewed: Require that all such films explicitly contain the notification, “This content has been modified by Beijing.” Such truth in labeling would underscore that, although Americans are confident enough in their own system’s openness to allow Beijing-influenced content into the U.S. market, they also take seriously another important value: the consumer’s right to know.