Member Newsletter
I want to start this week with a comment about the meta-news environment. It’s a point that may not surprise you. But it shapes everything we’re seeing today and does so with an uncanny silence. Quite simply, lots and lots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this. But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because there’s not a clear empirical basis for it. What’s your basis for noting, at a society-wide level, what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say, illustrate — that reality? And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place.
Over the last four months I’ve done my most focused reporting on the nexus between federal grantmaking agencies and research universities, as well as other functionally similar scientific research organizations. When you step back, it is remarkable how many big things are happening which we hear little or nothing about because people are being quiet. As I said above, “fear” is a complicated word. The basic mechanism is this: The White House does X. In the world we knew before January, that would spur a reaction. Maybe that reaction would be successful in beating back the original action, and maybe not. But people would talk about it. The affected group would complain, put out press releases. Maybe that would generate news articles. Maybe that wouldn’t matter, or maybe it would; it would depend on the various mechanisms through which public opinion and political power work. But now the progress of those steps gets disrupted early on because people worry that, if they complain, the White House will do more of X. The possibility and reliability of retaliation casts a vast penumbra on the spectrum between fear and simple silence.
Take another example. Maybe you’re a third-party expert. When a reporter comes to you for a comment, you may not want to comment. Because why would you risk getting on the White House’s shit list? Why would you risk getting your organization on the White House’s shit list?
Obviously there are many exceptions to this pattern. And lots of people choose to talk off the record. Journalism is important since, among other things, journalism is the means by which people speak anonymously to avoid retaliation. I got to thinking about the journalism part of this a few days ago when I saw the report that that PBS had excised part of an Art Spiegelman documentary that featured a comic critical of Donald Trump. Something seemed particularly striking to me about this because Spiegelman is a critical, avant-garde, political comic artist. If you have to pretend Art Spiegelman is not critical of Trump, things have gone pretty far. If you have to operate within those bounds, what’s even the point of doing a Spiegelman documentary?
Things get weirder when journalism itself gets afraid to talk.
A couple weeks ago, I published a piece on how the Trump administration had frozen all grant payments to Northwestern University. I was among the first to report this. A reporter named Max Kozlov at Nature may have reported this first. He’s been one of the lead reporters on this whole issue since January. My point isn’t to claim credit for an exclusive. It’s to note that a lot of people at Northwestern, even people in the sciences, first found out about this from my report. That’s an astonishing fact. This kind of cut-off of grant payments is totally unprecedented in the roughly 80 years of the relationship between the U.S. government and research universities. And that cut-off is existential for the research components of these universities if not the universities themselves. And yet a significant number of people didn’t even know it was happening at their own university, let alone in the broader research community or the public at large.
As I’ve written, a part of this equation is how structurally and experientially ill-equipped the universities are for this kind of attack. Institutionally, for weeks and to a degree still, they’re stuck thinking it’s maybe all a misunderstanding and one that can be resolved by working through the standard bureaucratic channels or that perhaps there’s a list of targeted universities and … well, sucks to be them. Maybe their universities got put on the target list by mistake? But, mostly, it’s this pattern of people hesitating to talk. Because what’s that going to accomplish besides making it worse? Can the White House do more? Well, of course it can. Maybe a judge tells it to stop. But how long will that be? Months? Years?
Yet another permutation of this pattern is that maybe people at Northwestern or Cornell will know what’s happening with their grants or their university but think it’s just them because there’s no news reporting that it’s actually happening at a bunch of universities or every university at once. When the ecosystem of information is disrupted or slowed down it becomes much more difficult to put those pieces together.
Many of you will be familiar with the concept of “imagined communities” developed by the late Benedict Anderson. It is an idea closely bound up with the origins of print and, later, what we now call “news.” The idea is that via print and the various cultural and societal changes which print culture created, communities of people become aware of themselves as communities. Anderson was focused on the origins of nationalism and how people come to believe they belong to larger communities of people, the overwhelming majority of whom they will never meet or know. But news in the broadest sense — really, all public mass communication — plays a similar role in the creation of politics. So it’s not just me. I’m part of a larger group with the same experience, suffering the same wrong, and I begin expressing that discontent with the validation of that common experience and a vicarious perception of that shared power. We become aware that things we experience individually are shared or not shared by many other people. News in the broadest sense is how possible political communities become aware of themselves as communities of interest and experience. I become empowered and more active because I believe there are others with common experiences and goals who validate my own experience and hopes. Because of this, even this subtle quieting of the flow of information has big consequences, both for political action and for our understanding of reality. The Trump White House derives a huge benefit from sending the message again and again that if you’re close to their levers of power and critical, you’ll get hurt.
The final point I want to make about this is that this dynamic doesn’t only keep opposition at bay — potentially — by preventing opposition from becoming aware of itself. It also makes political power and public opinion more brittle. We’re all aware of how highly repressive regimes can seem stable and unmovable until suddenly they’re not. Some of this is because force and violence is critical to the regime’s survival. So the first hint that opponents may have more force and violence at their disposal can make things move very fast. But it’s also because repression makes it much harder for opposition to become aware of itself. Once it does, thing can change fast.
One consistent pattern I’ve seen in recent months is that this repressive dynamic has much more impact on elites. Here I mean this in a very specific and technical sense. The partners at big, corporate-focused national law firms, as we’ve seen, are very vulnerable to arbitrary White House actions. The same goes for university presidents and the top leaders of major corporations. The folks at the top of the heap are visible and vulnerable. So they tend to be responsive to this climate of retaliation.
The average individual person of no particular rank or standing, on the other hand, doesn’t feel that vulnerable and on their own is kind of anonymous. If the White House wanted to it could probably make the lives of a lot of individual people hell. But there are almost 350 million people in the U.S. There’s just too many people to do that at scale. Those people show up at town halls. Some attend public protests. Their opinions show up in polls or other aggregate measures. The point is that the White House’s climate of reprisal gains a lot by keeping a lot of elites compliant or at least relatively quiet. And that plays a big role shaping public opinion generally. But it also makes it harder to know what political opinion actually is or what it could quickly turn into.
It’s a pretty straightforward dynamic we’re probably all familiar with. In any social context, if you make it hard to express criticism or anything but approved opinions, you quickly have very little idea what people actually think. Because you’ve made it impossible for them to tell you. At the government level, that’s very helpful for the people in power. But it also gives them less visibility into what people think, where public opinion actually is.
I’ve seen this most up close in the scientific research world. But logic and my limited reporting in other realms makes clear this is happening across the board. In most cases it’s not yet “fear” in the sense people experience in deeply repressive regimes. It’s the simple reality that the White House has a lot of power and is willing to use it. So even if the administration is already harming you, it could and likely will harm you even more if you make trouble or speak out. At scale that’s a transformative reality.
[Ed.Note: I noted in the anecdote above about Northwestern that I wasn’t sure who reported it first, that it may have been Nature’s Max Kozlov and that who reported it first didn’t really matter anyway. That all still applies. I went back and reread the piece ‘Conspiracy of Silence: How Trump is Covertly Strangling Billions in Disease Cure Research’ and realized I’d significantly garbled who reported what. (Only about three weeks but a long three weeks!) As I said, it’s not relevant to the points above. But credit is important. So let me add a few more details. The focus of the piece was the White House practice of cutting off funds without ever canceling the grants – what I called ‘funds-ghosting‘. I reported this about Northwestern on May 6th based on my own reporting. But as I noted in that piece, Jerry Wu, the managing editor of the Daily Northwestern had published the outlines of the story at Northwestern the day before. Kozlow meanwhile had three weeks earlier published an internal NIH email which instructed NIH grant managers to stop paying grants and refuse to discuss what was happening when grants recipients reached out to find out what was going on. To the extent my piece was new it was that it showed that this was happening at each of the elite ‘target’ universities at once but each in its own way was remaining largely or entirely silent about it and mostly didn’t know that it was happening to everyone else at the same time (thus, ‘conspiracy of silence’.) As I said, these details are neither here nor there in terms of the arguments above. A number of people at Northwestern (and other target universities) found out first from my piece what was happening in their own universities or even departments from reading my piece. But credit is important, especially when it comes to a student journalist. If anything the fact the a student journalist had to ‘break’ a story you’d imagine the university would be shouting from the rooftops is an apt illustration of the ‘quieting’ described in this article.]