Selling the high-brow fallacy

The counterfactuals fail. We don't have to speculate. It happened.

The low-brow argument for Donald Trump is that Kamala Harris is a communist. I mean, there’s much lower brows than that, but I want to stay a little bit civilized here. If you follow Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, you’ll see a steady diet of this kind of stuff, most of it disguised as wrapping the First Amendment in the American flag. They make it as if somehow the Supreme Court will pack up and head for Brasília, leaving us at the mercy of White House censors.

The truth is the American media self-censors. Willingly. With pride, and a tip of the hat. American media outlets are as divided as the rest of the country, because they depend on eyeballs and clicks to draw advertisers, which means they pander to the portion of the public that brings them treasure and tribute. So when Republicans are in office, many of the bureaucrats who run things are questioned mercilessly; leakers are lionized; spokespeople are grilled—if it’s MSNBC doing the grilling. Fox News does the same thing when Democrats are in power—except many of the bureaucrats they grill are transfers from the left-leaning media who flip effortlessly between being television mouthpieces to policy makers.

The same media that excoriates Musk, who is merely a deity-level troll and an expert manipulator, eagerly swallows heaping spoonfuls of pure propaganda like Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, when it comes from like-minded political allies in government or private practice.

You don’t have to be G.K. Chesterton or even Noam Chomsky to believe that whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump inhabit the White House, the First Amendment, which protects us from the government’s egregious infringement on our own self-censorship, will remain pretty much what it is today. Meaning: a dysfunctional media and social media hellscape, with everything from race-baiting activist journalism to yellow pro-Putin pabulum. It won’t stop the government from trying, though. There will always be thumbs and whole hands vying for first position on the scale of truth.

The counterfactual argument that somehow reinstalling Donald Trump as president will supercharge free speech is hilarious. On Day One of his first term, Trump had Sean Spicer wearing a suit an intern fetched from Goodwill during the move-in, to promote the lie that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest in history. I was at the inauguration. I mean there was a crowd, I guess. But it wasn’t the heavenly host on Christmas night, either. If free speech means that the official White House version of events is a continuous stream of preposterous lies (not just straining belief, but wholesale Cosmopolitan or the erstwhile—magazine that I won’t mention by name—forum variety), then sure, Trump will make that, uh, great, again.

And that’s the low-brow stuff. There’s a high-brow version of it running around a particular class of punditry, that has brought with it a more refined audience.

Some of it goes like this: during Trump’s term, Russia did not attack Ukraine. See, but that’s not really true. In 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson charged Ambassador Kurt Volker as a special envoy to deal with the “Ukraine crisis,” and the “frozen conflicts” in Abkhazia, South Ossetia. Volker told POLITICO: “This is a Russian invasion, a Russian occupation of territory. In the case of Crimea, they have also claimed to annex it, and in either case we don’t recognize it. It’s not legitimate.”

The Russians fought in the Donbas, in Transnistria, and held on to Crimea, and the Trump administration did little but talk in very friendly terms. Did Putin wait until Trump was out of office before attacking Kyiv? The counterfactual is yes, begging the question that Putin would not have done it anyway if Trump had won in 2020. I’m convinced (and I think most experts agree) the real answer is that Putin attacked when it was best for him, and it just happened that Trump wasn’t in the White House when that time occurred.

Based on what happened at the time, I don’t see any difference in Russian goals or Putin’s strategy depending on whether he was dealing with Trump or Joe Biden. Then again, Volker spoke of the need for NATO to act as a deterrent to Russian aggression. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that Trump, in his quest to have NATO countries pay more of their share, would weaken or fracture the alliance to the point where it ceased to be what it was designed to be.

The counterfactual here is that somehow Trump’s presence in the White House is a deterrent all its own. If only there was some believable evidence of this that doesn’t require a low-brow response.

Even more popular and compelling than the Russia counterfactual is the Gaza counterfactual. First, let me say that it’s terrible what happened on October 7th, and I believe there’s no wide agreement even in Israel how to bring this war to an acceptable end. The longer the war continues, the closer to collapse Hamas gets; but—and this is by the terrorists’ own design—the harsher the punishment and suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza gets, too. How long will it take to make Hamas completely disintegrated? I don’t know, but the law of diminishing returns does apply. And that means a lot of dead hostages. This is Israel’s doing, its prime minister’s burden, and its people’s problem to solve.

However, Americans are involved here. Among the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th, at least 30 Americans were believed to be taken. Two have been returned, and at least three are known dead. One of the dead Americans was recently executed by Hamas in the tunnels as IDF troops approached.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin was celebrating his 23rd birthday at the Nova music festival when Hamas attacked. He lost his arm defending against multiple grenade attacks on the shelter where he and others fled as the rockets flew. Goldberg-Polin, who was born in Oakland, California, was murdered in cold blood along with five Israelis. Many Americans aligned with Hamas as an “oppressed class” blame Israel for the murders. While the Biden-Harris administration pushes for a “deal,” they speak from the other side of their mouths of Israel’s right to self-defense. Yet all the carrots and sticks are squarely aimed at Israel, not Hamas.

Finally, the Justice Department has decided to charge Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, and several other top-ranking members, with federal terrorism crimes. This would be much more serious if there was even a scintilla of a chance of these evil people being hauled into court for their trial. The only way Sinwar will be found is by Israeli forces operating in Gaza, and the only way he’ll be taken is as a corpse. Yet, the Biden administration, and Kamala Harris, reserve their criticism, and their threats of withholding weapons, for Israel.

The counterfactual here is that while Trump was president, no foreign power would dare take Americans hostage, or kill hostages. They claim that during Trump’s term, Hamas was scared to even blink, and Iran was terrified. This is just not true. Hamas was busy all right—building their tunnel network, smuggling arms, manufacturing rockets, and planning October 7th’s bloody carnage. Hamas was lulling Israel, and the U.S., into a deep sleep. And they had no fear of taking Americans hostage then, or now.

We don’t have to speculate on how Donald Trump would react to the taking of American twenty-somethings, and the murder of our citizens. Remember Otto Warmbier? He was 22 years old, and visiting North Korea in December 2015. In January 2016, Warmbier was arrested, and in March he was tried and found guilty of stealing a propaganda poster; he was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor.

Shortly after his trial, it is believed that Warmbier fell into a coma, and by June 2017, the North Koreans let Americans know the young man’s condition. On June 13, Warmbier was repatriated to America, and on June 19th, he died.

Trump’s statement said that Warmbier's death had deepened his administration's resolve “to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency.” Trump went on to “condemn the brutality of the North Korean regime…”

Here is how Trump recognized the anniversary of that regime’s murder of an American hostage.

During a June 2018 summit in Singapore, Trump returned a salute to a North Korean general—a military faux pas and a humiliating gesture for the leader of the free world. In June 2019, Trump became the first (only) U.S. president to visit North Korea, to tread on its soil, and to shake Kim Jong-un’s hand, with a smile and a pat on the back.

Three months before the historic trip to Panmunjom, at another summit, this time in Hanoi, Trump met with Kim, and said of Warmbier: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” He took the murderous dictator at his word, but admitted Kim “felt badly about it. He felt very badly.”

In September 2019, three months after his jaunt to North Korea, Trump planned to have a tête-à-tête with the Taliban. The place chosen for the meeting was Camp David, the presidential retreat. The date was to be just days before the anniversary of September 11th. Then a suicide car bomb killed an American soldier and 11 others; Trump said “we can’t do this.” Finally, there was a line so bright even Trump would not cross.

The counterfactual is that Trump would deal with terrorists, tyrants and enemies of America with an iron fist. If Trump had won in 2020, the bungled exit from Afghanistan would never have occurred, they say. Americans would never be taken hostage, and if anyone dared touch Israel, eagle-emblazoned hell would rain down from the stars and stripes to annihilate the perpetrators. It’s fan-fiction, at best. At worst, it’s self-delusional high-brow salve for the conscience.

The truth is that Trump would have re-engaged with the Taliban, and probably given them more than Biden did. Perhaps the exit would not have been as chaotic, but it would have been just as humiliating, if not more.

For Hamas and Israel, the truth is that Trump would not want America involved in a shooting war with Iran any more than Israel would want to be caught in the middle of that. Remember it was the U.S. under Trump who killed Qasem Soleimani, and it was the U.S. under Trump that allowed Iran to get its tit-for-tat response by attacking one of our Iraqi outposts. We did the same thing Israel did to defuse and deescalate the situation.

In reaction to October 7th, Trump, in power, would have loved to be the broker for a “deal” to end the war. I can see him inserting himself into the negotiations in Doha, and in the process angering the Israelis, and Qataris, the Egyptians, not to mention Hamas. Who knows? Trump might have gotten a selfie with Ismail Haniyeh, the late political leader of Hamas, with himself giving a “thumbs-up.” It would have been a lot harder for Israel to assassinate Haniyeh after that.

Sure, there would have been plenty of rhetoric about supporting Israel, but behind the scenes, if Trump could not take credit for the win, he’d be a force for chaos. Hamas would be able to manipulate the liberal media even more than it does now, with Trump becoming the lightning rod for left wing criticism.

Anyone who tells you things would end better under Trump is selling you a high-brow fallacy. The counterfactual doesn’t hold up. Perhaps Trump would be more pro-Israel in his stance, but who says that would help Israel with its allies, never mind help it defeat its enemies?

I realize that Kamala Harris and the Democrats pay Israel lip service. I think much of this is animus against PM Netanyahu, not necessarily some deeply rooted anti-semitism. Jew-hatred can be found on both the extreme left and the extreme right. I think if Harris wins, Israel can expect to be held to a fairly high standard for compliance and humanitarian aid. I think the Hamas-lovers in the Democratic Party are a problem, and if Harris caves to them, it will be bad—for her.

I can’t accept the counterfactual that Trump would have the courage to stand against the Jew-haters on the far right, without dog-whistling his tacit approval of their blood libels. You know, there’s lot of liberal Jews, and they do make convenient targets for Trump, who cares not about your religious or ethnic background if he can use you to make himself look better in the eyes of his adoring crowds. Trump panders to the low-brow—the lower the better for him.

Ukraine, North Korea, Hamas, hostages, or dealing with Russia, it’s the same story. The Trump counterfactual against Harris is not a daring, or a good, or a strong argument. It’s just wishcasting for the well-educated.

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