Category: Politics

Conspiracy Theories Can Kill

There have always been conspiracy theories, with greater or lesser degrees of plausibility, that are believed by at least a substantial minority of the population. These are generally harmless except when someone with perceived authority gives sanction to such a theory, emboldening people to act upon them. This is exactly what happened on January 6.

The mob that stormed the Capitol consisted of diverse groups, including survivalists, QAnon conspiracy theorists, militias, white supremacists, and anti-Semites. Some of the better prepared groups had murderous or otherwise terroristic intentions, while others were violent only in their unlawful entry and destruction of property. Many more, unaffiliated with any group, were simple thrill-seekers caught up in crowd euphoria, entering the Capitol because everyone else was doing it. (See Elle Reeve’s immersion reporting, CNN, January 7, 2021, 1:00 ET) What they all had in common was anger at a perceived injustice, motivated by a strong belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.

It is not unprecedented for so many to believe a presidential election was stolen. Many still believe this was the case for the 2000 election, though Gore would have still lost under the recount rules its legal team accepted, if these had been implemented. (Chicago Tribune) Some historians hold that the 1960 election was swung to Kennedy by mob votes in Chicago and Texas, though this is unprovable. Nixon, believing this, nonetheless thought it prudent not to contest the election openly, both for his own political future and the good of the country, though he allowed his surrogates to pursue legal challenges that corrected the vote count slightly. There is nothing untoward about aggressive legal challenges to perceived electoral fraud or error. What is unprecedented is for the losing candidate to proclaim publicly that he was defrauded even after all legal challenges have failed.

Trump did not stop even there. He actually advocated blocking constitutional processes by extra-legal means. First, he encouraged state legislatures to refuse to certify the electors’ votes, or even to replace the electors outright. When that failed, he waged a weeks-long pressure campaign on Congress and his own vice president to contest or even reject the electoral votes received, remanding them to the states, that they might choose new electors. (Reportedly, he even considered invoking martial law, and he seems to still be getting advice on this as of yesterday.) Moreover, he urged his followers to rally at the Capitol that day to demand that this be carried out. When the vice president failed to “do the right thing,” many in the crowd naturally believed they had no recourse but storming the Capitol in order to reverse the “stolen” election.

Some of the better organized groups had come to this conclusion weeks earlier, as evidenced by their planning. This is why the role of Trump as an inciter was much more obvious in the preceding weeks than in the content of his January 6 speech. It was in the preceding weeks that he asserted unequivocally that the election was fraudulent, and that he would never concede. On January 4 in Georgia, he gave the most incendiary speech yet, calling the opposition Communists and Marxists who hate this country. By doing this, he was putting them beyond the pale, outside of the polity. This is the rhetoric that lays the groundwork for civil war. Between this and what was discussed on fora such as thedonald.win, it was obvious to me then that a civil war would be attempted. I believed it would fail immediately, based on the usual levels of security at the Capitol for such events.

What was shocking is not that the crowd attempted to storm the Capitol, but that they succeeded. Many past protesters would have loved to do the same if it were possible. Exactly how this security failure occurred remains to be fully investigated. Trump was unfortunate in this momentary success by the crowd, of which he was an avid spectator. By invading the Capitol and threatening the lives of the entire Congress and vice president, the riot rose to the level of insurrection. Trump did not denounce it until it was clear that it would end. Only in the aftermath did he acknowledge there would be a peaceful transition of power. The leader of a failed coup should not complain if the worst penalty he faces is being debarred from office.

If Trump did not exactly “lie” about the election being stolen, since he sincerely believes the falsehood, he is nonetheless guilty of a consistent disregard for truth, clinging to falsified claims that he wishes were true. An example is his repetition of the claim that 139% of people voted in Detroit, which is easily refuted by publicly available data. To believe the election fraudulent, we should have to believe that the notoriously mendacious Trump and his allies are the only truth-tellers, against a conspiracy including:

  • Judges in state and federal courts, including some Trump appointees
  • Election officials of both parties in various states
  • Most major news organizations
  • Numerous poll workers paid near minimum wage
  • Volunteer poll watchers
  • Federal intelligence agencies
  • The U.S. Postal Service

Anyone so conspiracy-minded is impervious to facts, since one can always add the source of any unfavorable facts to the list of conspirators. Such vast conspiracies are credible only to those lacking familiarity with how the election and result canvassing processes work.

All of Trump’s fraud claims are without factual foundation, which is why his lawyers had the good sense not to present most of them in court. There were some state practices that may have been erroneous in law, but misapplication of the law is not generally grounds for disenfranchising voters who followed the published rules. More importantly, no individual or state has standing to sue for such errors unless they can show actual, not speculative, harm.

The one Trump claim that had legal merit was the challenge of the Pennsylvania rule allowing late-arriving ballots, contrary to the legislative will. There were only 10,000 such ballots, not nearly enough to change the electoral outcome, nor did the late ballots break more favorably for Biden than the timely mail-in ballots. The conservative-leaning 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals correctly found the plaintiffs had no standing, and even if they did, they would not be granted relief, due to the lateness of the petition so close to the election. The late ballots were excluded anyway.

Since Trump’s strategy has simply been to conjecture that every conceivable mode of electoral fraud or error actually did occur, space does not permit the refutation of every single claim. That which is freely asserted may be freely denied with equal force. As for those claims which have at least some equivocal factual support, here are some fact checks:

In every election, there are minor instances of error and fraud, but quantity matters. There are no error-free elections, but the errors are generally much too small to affect the outcome with rare exceptions (e.g. Florida in 2000). Sometimes larger errors occur (in the thousands) on election night counts, but those are just first drafts for the purpose of notifying the public, not the official certified count. The initial count is followed by a thorough results canvassing process, during which the more substantive omissions can be identified. This happens in every election, and there was nothing unusual about this one. More importantly, the original records (ballots and machines) are kept available for inspection, so the data isn’t lost.

Enhanced voter ID and better signature verification would only guard against voter impersonation, which is known to be a statistically rare form of fraud. For fraud to occur on the scale Trump claims (hundreds of thousands of votes in a single state), there would need to be the complicity of election officials. Yet even states with Republican election officials have contradicted his claims.

Notably, Trump still repeated crackpot Dominion theories about removal or replacement of machines in his infamous call to the Georgia secretary of the state, along with other factless claims that had been already debunked publicly. In this call, Trump demonstrates himself to be an uninformed, uncritical thinker who only accepts “facts” in accordance with his preconceived conclusion that he could not have lost the election. Yet we are to accept his highly partial testimony over that of the election officials with access to primary data (all of which is monitored by observers of both parties).

More broadly, an examination of the county-by-county results in key areas is consistent with statewide and nationwide trends, adjusted for the known political demographics of each county. There are no stunning outliers in any major city. In fact, Trump did slightly better than expected in some cities, and fared better than expected with higher turnout, but had slightly weaker support than in 2016 in the suburbs, consistent with trends in recent years. That a president with approval ratings consistently below 50% should lose a tight election is hardly an indicator of fraud. Much less should we expect any Democratic conspirators to be kind enough to permit down-ballot Republicans to win their elections even in areas where Trump lost the presidential race.

Anyone still unpersuaded is likely impervious to argument, because they make the cognitive error of starting with a desired conclusion, and then accepting or rejecting data based on conformity with that conclusion. Such errors are common and generally harmless, except when they are actively and avidly reinforced by someone of the President’s stature and public influence. If a John Bircher or Lyndon LaRouche became President, the result would be comparably noxious to public discourse. The problem is more acute when the conspiracy in question is the purported crime of fraudulent government takeover. Thus we have the crazed spectacle of rioters engaging in an actual insurrection while believing themselves to be resisting an imagined one.

Our uncritical, deluded president undoubtedly provided much amusement at times, but foolishness stops being funny when people die, even if that consequence was not directly intended by the fool. There is something to be said for boring, policy wonky, slick-talking politicians. Perhaps the older, more genteel form of mendacity will have to suffice for now, if truth is too optimistic an ideal for democratic discourse. Ironically, the Trumpistas’ “attack on democracy” may itself have been symptomatic of a deep flaw in secular democracy itself, insofar as it makes the will of the people the arbiter of truth.

Overreaction vs. Sober Risk Assessment of COVID-19

COVID-19 was at first believed to be a public health threat on par with SARS, with a mortality rate around 10%. Since then, better data has shown that it has much lower case mortality, comparable to the case mortality of ordinary pneumonia (which is about 1.4%, see here and here). It is a threat only to the elderly and those with pre-existing health problems, again like ordinary pneumonia. Bizarrely, the world’s politicians, public health officials, journalists, and other opinion leaders have instead decided to escalate their reaction, as though unaware of the change in factual reality, or unwilling to admit error.

The most striking thing about the cycle of one-upmanship in overreaction is that the solution is always to curtail freedom. If people are willing to renounce their freedoms over small risks, how easily will governments be able to curtail freedom when there is a more serious threat. As with the exploitation of 9/11, this objective is attained by promoting excessive fear, which short-circuits reasoning even among the educated.

There are two types of factual distortions when making these faulty risk assessments. First, the risk of the new threat is overestimated. Second, already existing risks are underestimated or ignored altogether. These errors combined to create a gross overestimate of marginal risk.

According to a study of 1099 Chinese patients, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the mortality of COVID-19 is 1.4% of those who test positive. Since at least as many others are asymptomatic and never tested, true mortality is likely 0.5% to 0.8%.

The increased risk of death is mortality times prevalence. In China, prevalence is 1 in 15,000. In Italy it’s 1 in 5000. In the USA it’s 1 in 200,000. In all these nations, the risk of death is less than or equal to dying in a car accident. So driving a car instead of taking public transit to avoid COVID-19 may actually increase your risk of death. In any event the marginal risk, positive or negative, is miniscule. Someone genuinely worried about this level of risk should avoid driving or riding in an automobile.

Suppose that containment fails, as seems likely, and further that this new strain becomes as prevalent as other forms of flu, so that COVID-19 should have about 2% prevalence, i.e. 1/5 of flu cases (10% prevalence). The increased risk of death, compared with average flu mortality of 0.1%, would be 1/50 * 1/200 = 1/10,000. Here I assume mortality of 0.6% for COVID-19 vs 0.1% for average flu. This is to compare apples to apples, since the flu figures include (estimated) unreported cases. Most sites get this wrong, and compare the flu figures for all cases against the COVID-19 figures for positively-tested patients only.

This figure of 1 in 10,000 is likely overstated, since it excludes consideration that many of the “excess deaths” are in people with preexisting conditions who would have died of something else shortly. This pessimist scenario, in a nation of 300 million, would result in 30,000 excess deaths.

Preventing such a scenario is certainly worthy of strenuous measures, but not without limit. One must also consider the effectiveness of such measures, and the cost in terms of public health. Sinking the economy and depriving people of months of income may cause comparable excess deaths, especially if people are prevented from getting cancer screenings as some health systems are recommending. 30,000 excess deaths represents a 50%-60% increase in annual flu deaths, but there are other bigger killers, both those existing, and those we may create by excessive reaction to this new public health risk. A simplistic attitude that “no measure is too big” fails to be a rational form of risk management.

At some point, we may have to grapple with the possibility that containment does not work. The USA may not have the same legal means at its disposal to compel quarantine that may exist in the more centralized authority of Italy or China. Also working against containment is the low mortality rate, the possibility of carrying the virus in mildly symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, and the unusually long incubation period. Indeed, once the virus proliferates beyond a certain threshold, containment of COVID-19 would seem to be as impracticable as containing the common cold or the flu. While we may not have reached that point yet, we must recognize the possibility that at some point continued efforts at containment are not worth the cost, simply because of their low probability of success.

The reactions have been so rapid, and so outpace the actual facts on the ground, even when the number of cases is statistically negligible, that we cannot consider them to represent the result of careful deliberation. Rather, as in the closure of multiple universities on the same day, it is more like the imitative behavior of a panicked and stampeding herd. In such a climate, it may take more courage to do less than to do more. It is very easy to say that money is no object and leave the private sector to pay for government largesse. Those of us who have to make budgets and do not have the power to print money may have a different perspective. This is not a mere economic problem, for it can swiftly transform into a humanitarian catastrophe at least as great as the one ostensibly being prevented.

Update: 28 March 2020

Misinformation continues to spread. First, there is the oft-repeated claim that, absent our draconian containment measures, the virus would spread to 60% of the population, resulting in millions of deaths in the US. This is a cumulative figure over two or three seasons, ignoring the near-certain fact that pharmaceutical measures and natural antibodies will reduce the virulence of the disease by next season. It is effectively an impossible scenario, and again is not comparing apples to apples, as the seasonal flu death figure is annual.

Second, the mortality rate continues to be overstated. As testing becomes limited only to those who are hospitalized, the “mortality rate” of tested positives will increase, since you are actually measuring only the most severely affected subset of cases. Worse, in Italy, anyone who dies with coronavirus is counted as a death due to COVID-19, although 99% of fatal cases had comorbid conditions. The best data from South Korea, which has far more aggressive testing, currently points to a mortality rate of 0.7%. Using this figure as an upper bound and applying the more exact population of 327 million for the US yields a “pessimist” scenario of 39,000 excess deaths this season. We may get there anyway as outright containment has proven ineffective, and we are now hoping only for mitigation, i.e., slowing the spread.

The Collusion Delusion

Whether you are more concerned about the content of the Pentagon Papers or the fact that they were leaked illegally is determined by your stance on the Vietnam War. Likewise with the 2016 leaks of e-mails of the Democratic National Committee. Are you more concerned that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary Clinton and that her populist stances were just cynical hypocrisy, or more concerned that this was leaked illegally? Again, this depends entirely on your politics. Among the e-mails, we found evidence of a close relationship between the DNC and journalists, with the former asking the latter to run favorable stories when needed. We should not be surprised, then, that the media, having its last veneer of impartiality thoroughly shredded, should seek strident retribution against those who committed the leaks, and the Trump campaign which benefited from them. This has elided into a brazen attempt to delegitimize the outcome of the election, and reverse it if possible through impeachment.

This farce began with a joke made in response to another e-mail scandal, that of Hillary Clinton’s private server while she was Secretary of State. In response to a subpoena, she provided the e-mails on this server only after deleting tens of thousands of messages that were supposedly personal and unrelated to work. Candidate Trump called out this blatantly illegal non-compliance, humorously imploring anyone who had the e-mails, even Russia, to release them as a public service. Naturally, the media went ballistic, accusing Trump of encouraging espionage by a foreign power. They evidently could not keep their lies consistent, for there could be no damaging espionage if the e-mails merely pertained to wedding and yoga appointments, as the credulous press would have us believe.

In July 2016, the first set of DNC e-mails was released by Wikileaks. These revealed that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz was firmly behind the Clinton candidacy, long before the primaries had been decided. This surprised virtually no one, as bias against the Sanders campaign had long been evident, and the clearing of the field by other Democrats for Hillary to run virtually without opposition in her party was transparent to all but the willfully naive. Only specifics, such as the leaking of debate questions to the candidate, and the enlisting of DNC resources and press allies, added information about the depth of the establishment collusion to force Clinton upon the public, as later confirmed by Donna Brazile.

The second set of e-mails was leaked on the same weekend when Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was leaked as an October surprise to derail his candidacy. The press generally ignored the fact that the behind-the-scenes tape, being proprietary and confidential, must certainly have been stolen or leaked illegally at some point, no less than the DNC e-mails. Again, whether you care more about the content or the mode of release depends on your politics.

Democrats naturally railed against the “Russian hackers” committing espionage against our national institutions, ignoring that the DNC is a private, non-state institution, and that the e-mails were obtained by phishing, not hacking. That is, someone was dumb enough to give away their password to an e-mail scam. John Podesta did this twice (having been misled by his IT person who omitted the word “not”), and we were treated to a host of e-mails showing the cynicism of Democratic party strategy and Hillary’s two-facedness regarding Wall Street. This should have surprised absolutely no one, and indeed this second wave of e-mails made no measurable impact on the polls, having been drowned in the Access Hollywood scandal.

All of this would have come to little had not Donald Trump, ever so improbably, won the presidential election. Hillary Clinton soon had the consolation prize of “winning” the popular vote, though in fact she had less than 50%, so she would have lost in a House vote even had there been no electoral college. Ironically, before the election, the electoral college was thought to give Trump an impossibly narrow path to victory, allowing for no mistakes in major battleground states, and on top requiring him to flip some Democratic strongholds. He did precisely that, in part by keeping a grueling travel schedule to the Midwest in the final weeks. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, feared that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, and devoted resources to padding turnout in non-competitive states such as Illinois. Rather than come to terms with their candidate’s blunders, many Democrats soon took up the “blame Russia” angle.

This, of course, is historical revisionism of the first order. Neither of the Wikileaks releases decided the election in any measurable way. The second batch had no impact on polls, while the first only confirmed an already prevalent sense that the DNC favored Clinton over Sanders. The big needle mover in the final weeks was James Comey re-opening the e-mail server investigation, having found that Anthony Weiner (aka Carlos Danger) had been printing Hillary’s e-mails for her on behalf of his wife Huma Abedin, so his computer might have some of the undisclosed e-mails. This, like Hillary’s e-mail server itself, was simply a workaround for a technologically inept executive. Polls moved appreciably after this re-opening of the investigation, closing the gap between candidates to the margin of error.

Although Obama had known for over a year about the phishing of the DNC, he maintained public silence about possible Russian government involvement, to avoid appearing unduly partisan during the election. It was only after the election that he decided it was significant enough to disclose publicly. While disclosing only weak, equivocal evidence of Russian government involvement, he acted as if the fact were certain, and tried to make this opinion a reality by imposing punitive sanctions against Russian diplomats.

The Americans are shocked – shocked! – that a government should interfere in the political process of another country. Yes, this is the same U.S.A. that regularly bombs countries, foments coups, plots assassinations, and even bribes legislatures to change political outcomes. The U.S. is by far the biggest political meddler in the world, and the biggest practitioner of global espionage, even on allies and the UN. Most notably, it interfered in elections in Ukraine, favoring an anti-Russian party. As always, the U.S., without irony, fails to recognize blowback of its own imperialist actions.

Whether feigning outrage or genuinely shameless, Obama imposed sanctions as a lame duck president trying to force a major foreign policy stance on his successor. The center-left imperialist media did not remark on the inappropriateness of such action, but on the contrary acted as though the president-elect had no right to let other nations know what his intended policy toward them would be. If Trump failed to be duly hostile toward Russia, or even hinted that he intended to reverse Obama’s petty vindictiveness, he would be not so subtly accused of treason. This is an ironic charge from a gang of globalists who have consistently sold out their working class countrymen.

At any rate, the evidence of Russian conspiracy is astonishingly weak in proportion to the political mileage that’s been extracted from it. As Jeffrey Carr points out, it’s doubtful if the “hackers” even spoke Russian. Yes, the hackers were likely based in Russian time zones, but the vast majority of illegal Internet activity comes from Russia, as anyone who runs a website knows. This is hardly proof of Russian government involvement. More significantly, the data extraction tool is one used by a former group believed to have been with the Russian government, but this identifcation is not definitive. Even if the tool were a Russian government creation, that is not proof of involvement, since government hacking tools do get leaked. Such was the case with this year’s Wannacry ransomware attack, which used a leaked NSA exploit. There is nothing technologically sophisticated enough in the DNC spearphishing that could not be done by any reasonably computer savvy individual. Even a leaked NSA document acknowledged there was no direct evidence of Russian government connection, but this was only an inference made by analysts.

Once the “Russian hacking” is made a fact by Obama’s lame duck meddling, the accusation of collusion between the Trump administration and Russia can be made self-fulfilling. Any post-election attempts at detente are portrayed as evidence of such collusion. Most accusations are made only by innuendo. Ironically, Trump’s greatest error, from an optics standpoint, was his firing of James Comey, the same man who did more than any hacker, Russian or otherwise, to cost Hillary the election. We should not expect logical consistency, of course, in politically motivated accusations. Though their errors are comical, the leftist elites are not to be smiled at. They are making unfounded accusations for criminal offenses that can put people in prison. They have no compunction about ruining people’s lives, even non-politicians like the president’s son, in order to score points for the next election. This is, after all, an elite that can kill ten thousand Libyans for a marginal political advantage.