Dear Friends,
Thank you all for the good wishes on the ‘Anniversary’ post. That means a lot. For people who are new, this is my regular ‘Commentator’ post, which is riffs on the news. At the partner site Inner Life , the marvelous Mary Tabor "Only connect ..." writes on Ulysses. I have a piece up at Persuasion on Elizabeth Gilbert and the fraught topic of ‘canceling’ Russian culture.
Best,
Sam
PRIGOZHIN’S MUTINY
I have a slightly different take on Prigozhin’s mutiny from most of what I’m reading. This thing has been a slow-motion disaster for Putin and his war effort for months and, in a way, setting aside the high drama of the weekend (the march to Rostov and then towards Moscow) it ended about as well as Putin could have hoped. Prigozhin overplayed his hand. He’s neutralized as a potential rival. And there’s room to try to reintegrate Wagner into the regular armed forces.
The coverage in Ukraine and in the West has been gleeful. Foreign Policy, for instance, declares in a headline that “Prigozhin’s Mutiny Is The Beginning of Putin’s End.” In the piece, Lucian Kim writes definitively, “What is certain is that it is the final chapter of his rule.” But he qualifies that by saying “It is unclear if we are witnessing the beginning, middle, or end of Putin’s end,” and the qualification is more telling — there is a big difference (potentially a difference of many years and many lives) between ‘the beginning of the end,’ whatever that may mean, and ‘the end of the end.’
And it is not really true, as Anne Applebaum writes in a similarly optimistic piece in The Atlantic, that “The security services melted away….Hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow.” Prigozhin himself, in a statement, claimed that he stopped his advance because regime troops were dug in and motivated and “It was evident that a lot of blood would be shed if we continued.”
The Prigozhin mutiny does nothing to change my general sense of the Ukraine War heading to a stalemate — a ‘Korean solution.’ The abrupt defection of Prigozhin and of a substantial portion of Wagner, though, must mean a significant reduction in Putin’s ability to mount any kind of an offensive. Wagner had been his most effective shock troops. In an interesting team-written piece on evolving Russian tactics, The New York Times reports that Wagner’s methods in Bakhmut weren’t limited to suicidal waves of convict soldiers, that, by the end of the fighting there, “Wagner’s professional fighters coordinated ground and artillery fire on Ukrainian positions, then quickly outflanked them using small teams.” With Wagner’s role diminished after the mutiny, one would expect Russia to switch over increasingly to a defensive posture. And, as The Times writes, defensive fighting “plays to Russia’s battlefield strengths.”
From a political perspective, I would imagine that that suits Putin just as well — a state of perpetual war without the same risks as from the offensive portion of the conflict.
Most of the analysis on Prigozhin’s mutiny centers on his rationale for striking at Moscow and the assumption that he was looking to rule. In an intelligent front-page piece, The New York Times depicts Prigozhin as having been outmaneuvered in bureaucratic in-fighting by his rivals within the armed forces and launching his attack into Russia as “the desperate act of someone who was cornered.” But media coverage of the mutiny generally misses what I would take to be its defining factor: that Prigozhin was shell-shocked, in over his head, and wanted out from what he had been doing.
Prigozhin is, fundamentally, an opportunist, not a professional soldier. He had gotten surprisingly close to the “meat-grinder” fighting in Bakhmut and seems, actually, to have been horrified by what he saw (and what he instigated). In a video from May 4th, he is clearly shaken by the bloodshed in Bakhmut — by a field full of the corpses of Wagner fighters and by the cost of war. “These are someone’s fucking fathers and someone’s sons. Shoigu! Gerasimov! Look at them, bitches,” he says.
There is a sense in which he had identified strongly with his fighters, believed that they were the only ones fighting and contributing anything to the Russian war effort — and one can only imagine the pressure that he was getting from the Wagner rank-and-file to improve its position within the Russian military hierarchy.
The haphazard course of the weekend reveals a figure who is far from being in control of his own emotions and who had more modest aims than much of the rest of the world ascribed to him. As one of Meduza’s Kremlin sources tells them, “Prigozhin’s demands were vague and strange. He wanted Shoigu gone, autonomy over Wagner’s affairs, and more funding.” Meduza reports also that Prigozhin, during the match, attempted to call Putin, but Putin refused to take the call.
That’s the general takeaway of the mutiny — that it’s Bowe Bergdahl writ large, essentially a case of employee dissatisfaction, with Prigozhin trying to get a meeting with Putin and trying to improve his working conditions, but, more than anything, trying to quit before he got fired. As he said of the “decision to turn back,” “we marched to demonstrate our opposition, not to overthrow the government.” I imagine that he is arriving in Belarus with a tremendous sense of relief.
The lesson that one would draw from this whole episode is the unwisdom of decentralizing the armed forces — of investing too much responsibility in a private army. Experienced writers on Russia, like Applebaum and The New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa, view the mutiny as karmic justice for Putin’s curiously hands-off style of leadership. With outfits like Wagner, the state begins to duplicate itself — with the dirty work outsourced to a professional bandit like Prigozhin and with Putin, as Yaffa writes, “welcoming internecine rivalries among various power centers….and in this way remaining the system’s only credible arbiter.” That whole system — most Kremlinologists would say — came back around to bite Putin. As it turns out, private mercenary armies run by mercurial warlords are hard to control — and sooner or later a power clash is inevitable, with Putin in this case (his flight from Moscow; his shaky video denouncing Prigozhin) coming across as in less than total control.
But Putin, I would imagine, won’t draw the same conclusions. From his perspective, his system has worked for a long time. It’s worth understanding that it’s not autocracy in the traditional top-down Fascistic model. It’s more a prince-among-thieves system, in which various potentates steal what they can steal but are expected to pay appropriate fealty and tribute to Putin, who is then able to adjudicate amongst them. (In particular, Alexei Navalny’s documentary videos have been searing on how this system works.) Even in his shellshocked state, Prigozhin never fully departed from an implied acceptance of that model — he really just wanted Putin to step in more forcefully in his disputes with Shoigu and Gerasimov — and now Prigozhin is gone and Putin has one less headache.
The weekend was not a good look for him, but nothing about it particularly shakes the foundations of his rule. As Timothy Snyder puts it, his legitimacy doesn’t, at the end of the day, rest on popularity. “The apathy [demonstrated through the mutiny] indicates that most Russians at this point just take for granted that they will be ruled by the gangster with the most guns, and will just go on with their daily lives regardless of who that gangster happens to be,” Snyder writes.
For now and for the foreseeable future, that gangster continues to be Putin. If this is the end, as Lucian Kim optimistically believes, I would imagine, sad to say, that it’s more the “beginning of the end,” or maybe the introduction to the beginning of the end, as opposed to “the end of the end.”
ALIENS AGAIN
There is so much going on right now that it really is very hard to keep up.
And I’m sorry to say that, in the middle of it, the David Grusch whistleblower story seems to have fallen by the media wayside. The way it looks now, the story is getting treated the way all UFO stories have been treated for the last three-quarters of a century. Somebody comes forward with some startling claim. There’s a brief flurry of coverage. A few detractors rush in with questions about the account. And then the media throws up its hands, decides that it’s one of these things ‘we may never know’ and moves on, and the story heads back to the fringe until the next irruption.
That’s too bad because it is the story that matters more than anything else. And if it’s difficult to grapple with or talk about it openly — I’m very shy writing about it now — there is enough evidence that all curious-minded people should want to engage with it.
Since Grusch has come out with his claims of the existence of a government crash-retrieval program, I haven’t seen anything that really refutes his basic case. The legacy media has, for the most part, steered clear of the story, but Ezra Klein, to his credit, had journalist Leslie Kean on his New York Times podcast, and, there, Kean pretty thoroughly took care of the sort of low-hanging objections to the story. Klein, declaring himself skeptical, engaged in a bit of Poirotian analysis, arguing, first, that if the Pentagon cleared Grusch to make his statements discussing alien craft, then the information must not really have been classified, which, QED, proved that the programs he was describing must never have existed; and, secondly, that the government can’t keep a secret, so that if Grusch is only coming forward with this now then it must never have existed before. But Kean, who co-wrote The Debrief article featuring Grusch’s claims, points out that the Pentagon’s clearance was quickly issued, may just have been routine, and that there is no real inference to be drawn from it — a later query by Howard Altman indicated that the Pentagon reviewed statements only for anything damaging to active military operations. And, more trenchantly, Kean points out that, actually, lots of people have over the decades talked about being part of the government’s crash-retrieval program, have made “deathbed confessions” about it, etc, but that they tend to be willfully disregarded.
Even lazier forms of “debunking” are found, for instance, on Erik Hoel’s Substack, in which Hoel, writing “from his boxers” claims to have refuted The New York Times’ seminal 2017 story on the existence of the Pentagon’s UAP program. Hoel decides, based on a conflated timeline in The Times’ reporting, that the program was just one guy working “in his free time” and that The New York Times ran the piece shamelessly “playing for clicks.”
At the moment the story is quieting down. Media is moving away from it. And Grusch and his cohort are telling their story in closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill. It’s easy to get into a narrative of believing that the whistleblowers and the debunkers have reached a standoff and to be done with it. Bu it’s not as easy as that. The disclosures are not just some nut working on his own in the Pentagon — there are a large number of people in government who are making the same claims and, in the case of the UAPs, have provided supporting video material, which has been corroborated in copious oral testimony by the pilots who saw the objects; and, just as it’s ludicrous to suggest that The New York Times would risk destroying its credibility for a “click-bait” UFO story, so it’s very irresponsible to decide that the reporting must be flawed or dishonest just because its conclusions are so startling.
The leading piece of evidence at the moment is that Grusch and a number of other people have come forward saying that they have encountered credible reports of the crash-retrieval program. Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Select Committee of Intelligence, which is hearing the testimony, says, “Most of these people have held high positions, you start asking yourself what incentive would so many people with these qualifications — these are serious people — to come forward and make something up.”
That’s the stance that lawmakers have settled on — that it’s important to keep an open mind, that the people coming forward are highly-credentialed and deserve a hearing, and that all of them are doing so at risk to their careers and reputations — and it’s sort of surprising when the public-at-large proves itself more squeamish and needlessly skeptical than its elected officials.
Again, Grusch doesn’t know everything — and nor would he be expected to. The alleged program he’s describing is highly compartmentalized. But it’s worth realizing that he’s far from alone in coming forward. In The Debrief piece, Karl Nell and an intelligence officer referred to as Jonathan Gray go on the record. Lue Elizondo, Christopher Mellon, and Garry Nolan, who claim varying degrees of knowledge of the program, have also gone on the record. And there are the multiple whistleblowers whom members of Congress say have come forward. And their account is of a piece with the claims of Bob Lazar, Philip Corso, and many others.
It always seemed necessary to set those to one side — they were such outliers and there was insufficient corroboration — but, as far as I’ve been able to see, no one has ever really blown apart Corso and Lazar’s essential stories, and they line up together with the claims of Grusch and co as yet another series of data points. The skeptics have always claimed to have reason and common sense on their side, but, really, they’re starting from an a priori conclusion — that of course this isn’t real — and then work backwards from there. Actual reason and common sense would involve following a different course: digging into the evidence as it’s presented and trying to really weigh it and think it through. There is room to challenge any one of these stories, but I have to say that the evidence is stacking up and many of the people coming forward appear to be more credible than not.
LAB LEAK AGAIN
Like I said, there’s so much going on right now that it really is difficult to keep track of it all.
There have been a string of stories on the lab leak hypothesis. Nearly simultaneously, Public, Racket, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times of London got ahold of State Department sources giving the identities of three different researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who were admitted to hospitals with symptoms constant with SARS-CoV-2 in November, 2019.
As one of the State Department investigators told The Times of London, “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi [Zhengli]. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The sources told Public that they were “100% confident” of the identities of the three scientists — and that all had been working on gain-of-function research at the lab.
The reporters working on these stories and several government agencies — most prominently, the FBI and the State Department investigators — have pretty much moved to a ‘case closed’ mindset on lab leak. The Times of London lays out a long and detailed hypothesis of how it believes new types of coronavirus were discovered in a mineshaft in Mojiang in 2016; that gain-of-function research was done on those strands at WIV at the behest of the Chinese military and with U.S. partners cut out; and that the virus leaked in November, 2019, when the three researchers were hospitalized.
A long-awaited report from the Directorate of National Intelligence, though, reached a very different conclusion. “This information [on the researchers’ illnesses] neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins,” the report found.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of my nation’s own Directorate of National Intelligence, but this does seem awfully restrained. As the DNI report notes, the three scientists could just as easily have all been hospitalized with a seasonal cold or with allergies — just as it’s important, solomonically, to note that any number of things can make a smoking gun smoke apart from shooting off a bullet.
At this point, it’s all getting pretty funny. As Anthony Fauci said in February, “We may never know [the pandemic’s origin]” and that seems to be the line that everyone’s sticking to. The DNI begs off its assignment. Researchers continues to nominate more animals for a zoonotic spillover at the Wuhan market (the raccoon dog as the most recent) although without any evidence of a spillover event or of a pandemic among that population. And, meanwhile, as Jon Stewart put it, if there’s “an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania,” it might be worth checking out the Hershey chocolate factory.
But what’s on my mind with this story isn’t so much the origins of the pandemic — it’s important and worth digging to the bottom of, but you do find yourself getting into some very esoteric information to try to understand it — but the story about the story. Let’s not forget that the reaction for years to any attempt to look at the Wuhan Virological Institute was to decry it as racist. Slate attributed the theory to “good old-fashioned racism.” The New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli wrote that the lab leak theory “has racist roots.” As early as February, 2020, The Washington Post referred to the theory as “already debunked.” PolitiFact fact-checked it as a “pants-on-fire lie.”
I almost can’t even wrap my mind around what a dereliction of responsibilities this was by a free press. Given the most significant event of my lifetime — the deaths of millions, the shutdown of civil society for the better part of a year — you’re not allowed to ask about the pandemic’s origins for fear of being inflammatory (which, in this case, mostly means offending or stoking sentiment against the Chinese Communist Party). And, meanwhile, the people most closely involved with WIV were organizing open letters calling inquiries into a non-natural origin a “conspiracy theory.”
This was a shameful episode. There are all sorts of questions about gain-of-function research and more broadly about ‘biopower,’ but there are even more uncomfortable questions about the willingness of the press and of ‘polite society’ to deal honestly with evidence about the biggest issues in our lives.
RFK: TO DEBATE OR NOT TO DEBATE
The general lack of trust in institutions — which is the prevailing issue of the pandemic — explains the surprising trenchancy of the RFK campaign.
At the moment the mainstream media is having a real existential crisis about how to deal with him. The immediate issue is that Kennedy appeared on Joe Rogan’s show and talked about his skepticism towards childhood vaccines. Rogan invited prominent virologist Peter Hotez to debate Kennedy, and offered a charitable contribution of $100,000 to do so, and Hotez declined. This led to dueling op-eds in The New York Times, with Farhad Manjoo arguing that there is no talking sense to maniacs — “when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost,” Manjoo writes — while Ross Douthat counters that “in a free society there is no substitute for trying to win arguments with influential figures, no matter the risks of defeat or embarrassment you run along the way.”
I’m really not that interested in the mechanics of this particular controversy — and, by the way, Hotez v. Kennedy on childhood vaccinations, even for a now-reported $2 million pot wouldn’t be particularly entertaining or efficacious — but it’s just sort of worth noting what a truly strange place we’ve gotten to in the life of the democracy and taking in some of the features of our wacky era.
Strangest of all is the concerted attempt to ignore a presidential candidate with a viable base of support. This sidelining has always been part of the two-party system — a willful ignoring of candidates from Eugene Debs to Lawrence Lessing — but what’s different with Kennedy is seeing it play out in the open. Someone like Manjoo clearly believes that it’s not only expedient but morally right to stifle debate — in this case, to deem Kennedy a crackpot, for the media as a whole to refuse to deal with him given how extreme some of his positions are, and in effect for Biden to win the primary unopposed.
I’ve written elsewhere — and I stand by this — that the Kennedy candidacy is a self-inflicted wound by Biden and the Democratic establishment. Biden stepped hard on the mainstream candidates lining up to oppose him — most directly on Gavin Newsom. Biden thought he was clearing the field for a coronation of a campaign. But, instead, all the nice kids got out of the race, opening the way for a crank like Kennedy. The media can’t not cover him — he’s polling at 20% and is clearly ‘a story’ — so has to do this whole dance, as with the Kennedy-Hotez bout, about whether to acknowledge him or not. And the whole thing ends up being deeply embarrassing for Biden and for the Democratic establishment: instead of talking about Biden’s record, we’re talking about childhood vaccines.
The mainstream hopes that Kennedy will simply fade away, but in the 2020s it’s not so simple to just excise a presidential candidate. As Kennedy intriguingly says in a profile for The Atlantic, “2024 will be decided by podcasts.” His idea is classic guerrilla war — basically to hit up the vast archipelago of independent podcasts and to goad Biden into fighting with him. The truth is that, if the MSM got over its scruples about the DTAP vaccine and tried to deal directly with Kennedy, he would stop being so scary. Personally, I was thinking about voting for him until I heard him open his mouth — and then, like any stereotypical swing voter, I realized that I didn’t want him to be the person taking the red-line call at 3 in the morning. Meanwhile, avoiding him only makes him more intriguing.
Douthat has a really great op-ed on this topic and argues:
If you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas. The main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop. It depends on the very thing whose evaporation has made vaccine skepticism more popular — a basic trust in institutions, a deference to credentials, a willingness to accept judgments from on high. That evaporation hasn’t happened because of bad actors on the internet. It’s happened because institutions and experts have so often proved themselves to be untrustworthy and incompetent of late.
Which is a more cogent idea than Manjoo’s belief that Hotez has “courageously refused to take the bait” — secure behind his fortress of peer-reviewed literature, which would be tainted by even deigning to speak in the language of the common plebeian.
The whole 2024 election — much like 2016 — is shaping up to be a case study in Martin Gurri’s thesis of how the contemporary world works. In The Revolt of the Public, his seminal 2014 work, Gurri writes of an existential, all-encompassing struggle:
Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old scheme, the public for the new dispensation struggling to become manifest. The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides to actually engage but they do engage and the battlefield is everywhere.
His point is that the internet — i.e. diffuse, two-way communication — has so fundamentally altered the public sphere that electoral politics is unrecognizable to what it was a few years ago. Candidates position themselves along a new axis — insider-outsider — which is far more trenchant than any of the old ‘left-right’ categories. In its profile, The Atlantic tries to portray Kennedy as “the first MAGA Democrat,” but, of all people, Steve Bannon has a more nuanced understanding of what that really means. “I think Tucker’s seeing it, Rogan’s seeing it, other people —the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right, obviously some of us are farther right than others — I think are seeing it. It’s a new nomenclature in politics,” Bannon said in the profile. “And obviously the Democrats are scared to death of it, so they don’t even want to touch it. They want to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
In a really scintillating interview for Persuasion, Michael Lind claims that the U.S. has “effectively been post-democratic since the 1970s” and is now perennially subject to “this kind of back and forth between populist demagogy and technocracy.” The Democratic Party, more through inertia than anything, has found itself completely backfooted by these developments — has allowed itself to be branded as the party of technocracy, censorship, institutional authority. There’s a completely separate order of debate — the Greeks and Romans discussed this vigorously — about whether that sort of elitist sensibility is right for maintaining a healthy body politic. But, insofar as the Democrats are at least playing the charade of electoral politics, they need to grapple with the seismic changes that are happening. Simply put, if the narrative is insider vs. outsider, they are going to lose. If they want to win long-term they are going to have to fish in the troubled waters of populism.
Oh, man, I'd forgotten about Bowe Bergdahl... Wow. Took me back.