The Elephant on the Escalator

On Being Angry for Nine Years

Nine years ago, a man rode down an escalator and announced that he was running for President of the United States. At the time, I thought it was mildly funny, but I have spent the last nine years learning the hard and painful lesson that it is not at all funny.

I began this newsletter with the intent that I would focus on more abstract concepts about how we think and avoid the kind of day-to-day commentary that most people seem to ignore. I specifically wanted to ignore the impulse to talk about the man on the escalator because the subject makes me angry - and when I express that anger in any way, the people who need to understand why I am angry (not to mention scared) use the fact of my anger to accuse me of the most horrible of intellectual crimes: Bias.

It doesn’t matter that they are wrong. Bias is forming an opinion or coming to a conclusion before assessing the available evidence. Bias is ignoring evidence that refutes your previous conclusions; bias is only accepting evidence that supports your conclusion as evidence.

But the fact that I’m scared and angry only gives them an excuse to ignore the evidence that refutes their previous conclusions.

Imagine you are a police officer, and you see a car weaving down the street, looking for all the world like the driver is intoxicated. But when you pull them over, they insist that you are biased against them. The results of the breathalyzer, the rank whiskey breath, the field sobriety test, the empty bottles on the floor of the car, the body camera footage of their uncontrolled behavior and slurred speech - all of that is just made up to support your biased conclusion that they are drunk. After all, you wouldn’t have known any of that before you pulled them over, so you didn’t pull them over for drunk driving. You pulled them over because you made an unfair snap judgment.

Do you think that would work? Do you think that should work to get them out of a DUI/DWI arrest?

The Escalator

The man who came down the escalator in 2015 was not new to me. I was a kid in the 1980s and knew who he was because he generated lots of headlines for his sleazy lifestyle, his tacky brand, and his gross behavior. He appeared as a target of scorn in the Doonesbury comic strip, often alongside other tacky grifters, like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

I laughed when he announced his candidacy because he was running against so many people who made better candidates. The serious candidates were running on policies that I personally opposed, but at least they had policies. Some of them had even put their policies into practice as governors (like Scott Walker) and while they faced an uphill battle to convince voters that those policies were any good (the data said they were not good policies), they could at least cling to principle and make the case that they could, and would, govern.

And the man on the escalator was nothing more than a clown with no policies whatsoever.

The problem that we - the media, and even our two parties themselves - have never been willing to discuss is that those policies were not popular with voters. I don’t just mean that they were Republicans and Democrats didn’t like their ideas - I mean that Republican voters who had lived under those economic policies did not like them, either. At that time, most of the candidates ran by attacking Obamacare, because Republican voters kept saying they hated it. Of course, when you didn’t call it “Obamacare” and you talked about repealing the Affordable Care Act, those same voters didn’t want their insurance taken away.

This conundrum did not affect the man on the escalator. All he had to do was be loud and make over-the-top comments that kept getting attention. What that did was draw attention to the fact that no one in the Republican party wanted to talk about: all of their ideas placed them in the minority when it came time for the general election.

Contributing to the problem is the false binary choice between the parties that has been shoved down our collective throats for half a century. We like to be told that our country is divided and polarized along conservative/liberal or left/right lines, even though most people identify as moderate/centrist/independent.

And stepping into the middle of all of this was a man who was gleefully pulling the other candidates’ pants down and laughing at them until they left the stage. He was a clown, but a lot of people wanted a chance to mock those who seek power - and that mockery is something he could deliver. Nobody really thought he could win - they just wanted to enjoy the show.

But the numbers kept moving, and somehow, the clown was the last one left standing. Somehow, the worst candidate in GOP history, a man with no platform, no policies, no solutions, and tons of baggage, was nominated to run against one of the most qualified candidates in history. Unfortunately, she had her own history, and had already been the focus of a 30-plus year campaign to discredit her.

And somebody spotted an opportunity.

The Elephant

I first became scared when Paul Manafort appeared on the scene. I knew his name because I have been studying Russia since 1994, and I was paying attention when Manafort showed up in Ukraine in 2005 to help give the Kremlin-backed presidential candidate an “extreme makeover.” I knew that Manafort was financially indebted to Oleg Deripaska, a man who frequently used his money and influence on behalf of Russian President Putin when Putin did not want to be seen to be using money and influence.

I had also been paying attention when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. They did so using mis- and dis-information campaigns to undermine the trust of the local Ukrainian population in their government and in journalists. I would urge you to listen to this 2017 podcast, Ukraine vs. Fake News, and see if the techniques they used on Ukraine sound at all familiar.

Because of all of these red flags, I was not only paying attention, but trying to get friends and family to pay attention to the danger. I was met with a casual dismissal, and each person in turn told me I was “just biased against” the man I don’t want to talk about.

I take that accusation seriously. I don’t ever want to be blinded by an overconfidence in myself. I question everything - but the evidence kept mounting. In August of 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the SSCI) released a bipartisan report - this link will open the 966-page PDF - detailing just how right I was. On page 943, for example:

(U) The Committee's bipartisan Report found that Paul Manafort, while he was Chairman of the Trump Campaign, was secretly communicating with a Russian intelligence officer with whom he discussed Campaign strategy and repeatedly shared internal Campaign polling data. This took place while the Russian intelligence operation to assist Trump was ongoing. Further, Manafort took steps to hide these communications and repeatedly lied to federal investigators, and his deputy on the Campaign destroyed evidence of communications with the Russian intelligence officer. The Committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the GRU's hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election. This is what collusion looks like.

So What? That’s the Past!

Last week, the FBI informant who had provided the testimony at the heart of the impeachment proceedings against President Biden, was indicted by the Department of Justice. He wasn’t just indicted - he was indicted by the Trump appointee who was named as the special counsel to run the investigation into what people like my dad refer to as “The Biden Crime Family.”

For nine years, I have watched a sustained campaign to undermine my country coming from Russia, and I have been told over and over again that I am imagining it because I’m biased against one man. But it’s not just the one man. And it’s not bias when the driver smells like a brewery and is slurring and stumbling around the car. The evidence is clear - but only if people who have invested in this idea that they’re good and right and noble are willing to question their biases and actually look at the evidence.

As I said on Facebook,

I have been stuck in a frustrated stew of terror and fury since 2015 - when Paul Manafort appeared on the Trump campaign - watching this unfold, and being told by all of my "conservative" friends (even the Never Trumpers) that I was a) biased against Trump and b) there was no collusion with Russian Intelligence. That I should calm down and let it go because there was "no proof."

Now, the guy TRUMP appointed has filed charges against a guy who has been injecting Russian disinformation directly into Congress and....what? What does this change?

I should be feeling vindicated for living through eight years of condescension from people who should have known better - and I want to rub a lot of Red noses in the mess they've made on our political carpet and scream at them "Look what you did!"

Instead, I will apparently sit here and keep quiet so I don't make any of the useful idiots uncomfortable and hope that there aren't enough of them to re-elect the criminal who benefits the most from the false equivalence and assistance from our enemies overseas and at home.

I just don’t know what to do. There isn’t anything I can say that seems to break through. And we’re entering an election as the Republican party seems hell-bent on doing Russia’s bidding while forcing domestic policies that most of their own voters don’t want on the country.

The most galling part is that so many of the people I’m frustrated with are people who should know better.

My veteran friends, colleagues who have mentored me during my career, fellow linguists - any number of decently educated professionals who have seen the same things I have seen still somehow made the choice to throw in with the fascist clown who rode down the escalator. I see them posting fact-free memes on their social media, and I ignore them rather than fruitlessly argue online. I hear them joking about whatever “woke” is and trying to play the victim if they get called out for bullying people.

The only plan I have is continue doing what I set out to do on this blog: try and tell my story, try and explain, and hope that it won’t be too late if I can get anyone to listen.