When We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Hey,

I often get asked, “Do you really want to eat that whole thing?” But that’s not important right now.

I also get asked why I haven’t written much about the Biden corruption allegations—or the debunking of the Biden allegations.

My short answer is, I don’t know who’s right—or whether anyone is. That’s the funny thing about partisan binaries. People think that if one side says X and the other side says not X, one of them has to be right. Very often both are wrong, or a little right, or entirely right based on bad facts, or, well you get the point. 

So I’m going to get to the Biden stuff. But first let me explain my attitude about these kinds of firestorms. 

Eternal Watergatism.

I have few personal memories of Watergate. I have a good excuse because the whole thing was over before my sixth birthday. I do remember that I was absolutely banned from making any noise or doing anything else that would distract my parents during the hearings. I think if I had cut off my thumb during the televised proceedings, my parents would have said, “Put it on ice and we’ll take care of it when this is over.”

But that was at the end of the story. Even for my parents, who were news addicts and knew people directly involved in Watergate, Watergate wasn’t a big thing until fairly late in the game. 

The country was riveted by Watergate only when the scandal was almost over. The break-in was on June 17, 1972. Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974. For most of the time in between, the story didn’t really go anywhere. Heck, Nixon was reelected in 1972 in a 49-state landslide. That wouldn’t have happened if many people cared about Watergate in November 1972.  

This is not a new observation. You actually hear it a lot from political obsessives whenever a story dies down. “Remember,” a Nicolle Wallace or Sean Hannity will say on a cable news show, “Watergate seemed like a dead end for a very long time.” This point is usually made to reassure news-addicted partisan viewers that they shouldn’t change the channel. The walls are still closing in! They’re just resting! 

Those with good memories can probably list a dozen such stories: Iran-Contra, BCCI, “Chinagate,” Monica Lewinsky, Valerie Plame, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Lois Lerner, etc.

Among the most enduring legacies of Watergate was the—often idiotic—attachment of the suffix “-gate” to pretty much any scandal with legs. The first U.S. scandal to get the “gate” treatment was “Koreagate” (kudos to any of you who don’t need to click the link to be reminded of the details). Not long after, there was “Billygate.” And lest you doubt America’s cultural influence, check out Wikipedia’s list of “gates.” Most of them weren’t even in America. From Canada’s “fartgate” to the Irish “garglegate” to the South African “LadyRussiagate,” India’s “Porngate,” or Britain’s oh-so-meta “Gategate.”

The first thing to note is that among these scores of gates, only one led to the downfall of an American president. The OG (Original Gate), Watergate.

Feeding the beast.

Now, I don’t bring this up to make the point that I mocked just a couple paragraphs ago. The brouhaha over Joe Biden might be a huge deal. It might even turn out to be a second Watergate. Or it might not. I don’t know. 

And neither does anyone else. 

For most of my professional career, there were few phrases that made me more inclined to roll my eyes than “media literacy.” (Indeed, one of the worst things about the current era—for me—is how I have to take ideas and arguments that I have long had instinctive scorn for more seriously. If you prattled at me about “democratic norms” 10 years ago, I would have figuratively smashed your guitar against the Delta House wall.) 

But I think media illiteracy is one of the biggest problems in our politics today. We all understand the problem when someone shops for a doctor who will give them the diagnosis—and prescription!—they want. But no one thinks it’s a problem when we channel surf for the sitcom or movie we want to watch. You’re under no obligation to be like Homer Simpson watching Garrison Keillor—“Stupid TV, be more funny.”

News shopping is more like doctor shopping than channel surfing. And the demand for “-gate” stuff exceeds the supply. Oh, there are plenty of newsworthy things. There may in fact be lots of -gate worthy things out there we don’t know about. Matt Lewis’ new book is instructive on this. But new, reliable facts to support the case do not arrive daily, never mind hourly, to fill the ravenous maw of cable news and social media. That requires investigation—by journalists, politicians, and law enforcement—and investigations take time. 

But the audience wants to be fed, or as Fox executives called it, “respected.” And part of that means telling people the walls are closing in when they’re not even budging. 

You know the argument against TikTok? It has an algorithm that can tell what you like and then feeds more of it to you. Some worry that, over time, it not only feeds you what you want, it makes you want and believe what it thinks you should (hence why it’s a bad idea for it to be run by the Chinese Communist Party). I don’t know what the current state of YouTube’s algorithm is, but there were credible reports a while back that YouTube helped radicalize some users by pushing ever more extreme content that, over time, changed the way users thought. It’s sort of like how addicts need ever larger doses, small amounts of crazy or outrage won’t do the trick anymore. Ya gotta up the dosage. 

Cable news can work the same way, even if the ratings-driven “algorithm” is more old-fashioned. And, as more and more performative politicians become dependent on the small donors who are addicted to perpetual outrage, they are incentivized to provide the outrage the viewers want (and those viewers are more likely to be primary voters, rounding out the cycle of asininity). 

And because they’re politicians, the journalists and viewers alike grant them more legitimacy and credibility than they deserve. Senator so-and-so alleges X is a news story, even if the senator offers no evidence to back it up (this, after all, was basically Fox’s defense in Dominion). 

It works the other way around, too. What is an 11-out-of-10 story on one network is a nothingburger a couple channels over. Just as there is a demand for huge scandals, there’s a demand for debunking what those idiots think is a huge scandal. The partisan mocking of the Benghazi story was often every bit as excessive as the partisan hyping. I think the hypers were closer to the truth than the mockers, but again, contra Kierkegaard, some things aren’t either/or.

The Biden fog.

For the last couple days, the folks at Morning Joe have been having a grand time making fun of Rep. James Comer’s Biden Family Investigation. And they have more than a little justification. According to unsealed DOJ indictments from last November, Gal Luft, a key accuser of Biden—who was “missing” until recently, according to Comer—was arrested in Cyprus last February. He’s accused of violating Iran sanctions, weapons trafficking, and working as an unregistered agent of China. We knew he’d been arrested. But Luft, and some Republicans, claimed that this was because the “weaponized” Justice Department was trying to “silence” an informant with damning information about Biden. The key new development is the change in the sequence of events. Luft was charged first and made the allegations afterward. In other words, it looks less like he spoke truth to power and was punished for it than he spoke truth to power—or made stuff up!—as a way to protect himself from prosecution. Though Luft denies this, claiming that this all began when he spoke with DOJ investigators of Hunter Biden in Belgium in 2019—when Trump was president.

Confused? Me too. It gets worse. 

For instance, remember the WhatsApp exchange between Hunter Biden and a Chinese official? This is the one where Hunter said, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me [his Dad] and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” This was a smoking gun for lots of folks, even though it doesn’t actually prove anything important we didn’t already know: Hunter Biden is a deeply corrupt—in every sense—hot mess. There was little to no evidence that Joe Biden was actually sitting next to Hunter or that he knew anything about the texted shakedown. But that’s not something you heard from the people who wanted it to be a smoking gun. 

Well, Hunter’s lawyer says that text is fake. 

For the people who want to dunk on Republicans, this was all they needed to hear. But it might not actually be fake. Republicans say the graphic used to show it was manufactured, but the content was real. 

Now, at various points in all of these and other unfolding events, you could be forgiven for yelling “Smoking gun!” or “nothingburger!” Heck, depending on what channel you were watching or Twitter handle you were following, you might think Republican partisan hacks were getting over their skis or that Democratic partisan hacks were dismissing obvious evidence of criminal misconduct. 

My objection isn’t that either side is wrong. Again, they both might be. My objection is to anybody being confident about any of this. I mean, yeah, I am confident that Hunter Biden is corrupt and did corrupt things. And I’m confident that President Biden has lied about a great many things relating to his knowledge of Hunter’s activities. I guess I’m also confident that the White House has been less than forthright on all of this, but that’s hardly a man-bites-dog story. But that’s about it. 

I’ve kept my powder dry—much as I did during all of the Mueller stuff—for the simple reason that I have no idea what the most relevant facts are. I’ve never liked the race to be wrong first, even though I’ve been sucked into it a few times myself. Indeed, one of the reasons why we take things slower at The Dispatch is to avoid getting sucked into what seems obvious in the moment but, as experience has taught us, may be wrong in a matter of days—or hours. 

Contrary to partisans on both sides, my stance on Joe Biden is basically superpositional. I think it’s entirely possible that he is a corrupt ward-heeling hack and that he’s a non-corrupt ward-heeling hack. It’s also possible he’s not personally corrupt but turned a blind eye, or was simply oblivious, to the corruption of one or more family members (all of those shell corporations are hard to explain after all). I just don’t know. I’m simultaneously glad that Republicans are looking into it and pissed off they’re doing it in such a hacktacular way. I’m also simultaneously glad that Democrats are pushing back on it, but also disgusted by the way many refuse to engage with the most inconvenient facts. Maybe I’m just rationalizing my laziness and disgust for the stupidity of our politics. But that’s my answer to the question we started with. 

Courts, what are they good for?

One last point. 

Amid the miasma of motivated reasoning and partisan overreach—by voters, politicians, and pundits—I’ve come to fall in love with the judiciary. Basically, my view about a vast number of allegations is: If you say it in court, I’ll take you seriously. Note, I didn’t say I’ll believe you. I’ll simply give you the benefit of the doubt that you believe what you’re saying.

Donald Trump and his praetorians said a lot of wild stuff about the supposedly obvious and clearcut evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. But they left that garbage outside the courtroom. And what meager B.S. they did offer in court got thrown out by scores of judges, including many appointed by Trump. Likewise, 90 percent of the B.S. Trump throws out there in the classified documents case will never be introduced in a court of law, because no decent lawyer is going to risk his career for Trump’s lies. And the indecent ones who might try will fail. 

That’s the great thing about courts. There are penalties for lying—and because lawyers have a vested interest in avoiding those penalties, they tend not to lie. But even when they bring in debatable testimony or evidence to support their case, the opposing side gets to push back. 

I’ve long argued that opinion journalism is often the best form of journalism, because in good opinion journalism, the authors are honest about their biases. They have to marshal facts and logic and contend with the facts and logic brought by the other side. I often compare it to the rules in a courtroom. Everyone has to tell the truth. If you don’t deal with the other side’s best arguments and most compelling facts, you’ll lose the argument.  

There’s still a good amount of that out there in magazines and editorial pages. But it gets drowned out by the cacophony of the confident. 

But courts still work that way, in part because they’re insulated from the most acidic and corrosive aspects of our political culture. Congressional hearings are supposed to work that way, too, but the second you put a camera on a bunch of congressmen, that goes out the window. Pandering to small donors and cable news audiences is more important than good faith fact-finding. 

The problem is that courts are slow—gathering and adjudicating the facts fairly is necessarily a slow process. 

I would love for the Biden stuff to make it to a courtroom. It may get there. It may not. If it doesn’t make it to court, you can be sure some people will confidently proclaim it’s because the Biden DOJ is corrupt (even though the Trump DOJ failed to prosecute many supposedly obvious crimes when it had the chance). But I’m entirely open to the idea that this stuff will never make it to a courtroom because the lawyers who looked at it didn’t think the facts were on their side. Perhaps because the Bidens covered their tracks well or because they’re innocent of wrongdoing. Again, I just don’t know. But barring proof of guilt, I’m not going to simply assume it. 

We may just have to wait for history, which is a shame. Because the wheels of history grind even more slowly than the wheels of justice.