The Forking Path to Where We Are

Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" centers around a novel in which, unlike traditional fiction where a character's decision at one point in time forecloses other choices, instead all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously.

Corporate strategist Eric Garland's recent epic twitter thread on the intertwining geopolitical and national events that have led us to the current political crisis has something of a Borgesian quality.

Garland’s long narrative had the effect of a Rorschach test when it was posted on December 11. A representative positive reaction came from Washington Post investigative reporter David Farenthold, who has reported extensively on Trump foundation misdeeds. Farenthold tweeted "Damn, man, this is great writing, using a form that does not lend itself to greatness." Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who has chronicled Trump’s history of business failures, lies, and possible cognitive disorder called Garland’s thread a "MUST read." On the other end of the spectrum, London writer and self-described "PhD candidate in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge," writing in Slate called it, with apparently no ironic intent, the "worst piece of political writing in human history."  Garland’s tweetstorm even roused the ire of Gizmodo editor Alana Hope Levinson, although not for its content, but for its format, which she seemed to argue suited a blog better than Twitter. Tellingly, Levinson designated Garland’s content, which was arguably something like "the geopolitical origins of the Trump phenomenon" as "not important." (We should perhaps note that Levinson has fewer than 10% the Twitter followers Garland has.)

One thread through Garland's labyrinth is Russia's long term interest in "subversion of Western institutions, principally NATO...." Objectives include creating conflict in intelligence agency cooperation among the US, UK, and European Community, driving wedges between NATO members, and generally creating chaos.

Another thread is the “evil media,” whose origin Garland locates in the Nixon era. Garland mentions conflict between CBS’s Dan Rather and Nixon. Nixon’s profound animosity toward the press was undoubtedly influenced by the daily news summary prepared for him by special assistant and former editor for the conservative St. Louis GlobeDemocrat, Pat Buchanan. An investigation by the NY Times in 1973 found that the summary "was full of inaccuracies about what the news media actually said," and "systematically omitted public condemnations of the President…."

In Garland’s telling, the conservative response to the perceived role of the media in Nixon’s impeachment was to establish an essentially partisan constellation of think tanks and media institutions starting in the 80s. These included the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. Obamacare, Garland notes, was basically invented by the Heritage Foundation. (To the consternation of many conservatives, the Heritage Foundation promoted a health care plan that included the idea of an individual mandate, and state-operated exchanges for purchasing health insurance.)

Fox News emerged from this process, along with what Garland labels "an attractive well-produced alternate universe."

Bush v Gore followed, and, in Garland's words "the stage is set for a metastasis of batshit nuttery, jingoism, and irrational autocratic fervor. A party becomes a cult."

The September 11 attacks occurred, and despite the fact that the attackers were from Saudia Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon, and likely funded from Saudi Arabia, Bush and Cheney publicly misrepresented intelligence about the presence of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) in Iraq, and launched the Iraq war. Cheney, of course, retained his ties to his former employer, Halliburton, whose Kellog, Brown, and Root subsidiary received one of the largest government contracts awarded during the war. The "right wing think tank and media machine" played a significant role in drowning out skepticism regarding the Iraq adventure. Conservative commentators like Ann Coulter appeared frequently on right wing broadcast media helpfully labeling file footage of weapons the US sold to Iraq's Saddam Hussein as evidence of WMDs.

US intelligence services were criticized in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, although later analysis found that Bush and his top advisers ignored many caveats and qualifiers in the October 2002 report on Iraqi weapons.

A recession had begun in March 2001, and the September 11 attacks deepened it. While that recession officially ended that November, stock values continued to decline for another two years, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching a relative low on March 11, 2003. In the period from May 2000 to December 2001, the Federal Reserve Bank lowered interest rates eleven times, from 6.5% to 1.75%. Cheap loans and eager lenders led to a large volume of home loans to so-called subprime borrowers — people without jobs, or adequate incomes, or assets. This exposure was compounded as banks repackaged the consumer loans into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and a change in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations allowed the major investment banks to increase their own borrowing.

By 2004 home sales peaked. At the same time the Fed started raising rates, which reached a relative peak of 5.25% in June 2006. Home prices began to fall at the end of 2005. As the interest rates on variable rate mortgages keyed to rates set by the Fed rose, many subprime borrowers could no longer afford their payments and began to default on their loans. This in turn affected the subprime lenders who began to declare bankruptcy, and eventually reached major banks who held the CDOs backed by these defaulting mortgages.

A coordinated effort by the central banks of England, China, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the European Central Bank, and the US Federal Reserve Bank including initially rate cuts and "liquidity support," (e.g. lowering or eliminating the need for pledging collateral when borrowing) eventually proved inadequate in stemming the global financial crisis. At that point a number of governments, including the U.S., implemented bailout plans, or, in some cases, nationalized financial institutions to prevent them from defaulting. 

In this tumultuous environment the US elected its first black  president. Predictably, at least in retrospect, the right wing went insane. Although the bank bailout in the U.S. was enacted and signed into law during the George W. Bush administration, the right wing  media-think-tank nexus quickly identified it with Barack Obama. On February 19, 2009, speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli referred to the mortgage relief program as federal intervention in the housing market, and proposed a Boston Tea Party-like response. Championed by new right-wing media pundits such as Fox News's Glenn Beck, and aided by social media organizing, Tea Party chapters sprang up around the country. Their ranks were filled with Republicans alienated from their leadership, joined by paramilitary extremists, and "birthers," who claimed Obama had been born outside the US — the same birthers whose credo would preoccupy president-elect Donald Trump for six weeks two years later.

Garland implies that Russian intelligence may have played a role in the leaking of Iraq war documents to Wikileaks. While there's evidence that Russian military intelligence assisted the regime of Saddam Hussein, former Toronto Sun contributing editor Eric Margolis observed that Wikileaks materials about the Iraq war published by US media outlets aligned with Israel's policies toward Iran.

The private intelligence firm Stratfor noted that the Wikileaks Iraq war documents (1) "contained raw information and not vetted, processed intelligence," and (2) "did not contain information that was the result of intelligence-collection operations, and therefore did not reveal sensitive intelligence sources and methods." Stratfor characterized the materials in general as "low-level battlefield reports." As raw material, the information can be misleading in the same way that a witness may "miss or misinterpret important factual details."

But while, in Stratfor's view, the released documents contained little information that would "shed new light on the actions of U.S. troops in Iraq or their allies or damage U.S. national security," they did cast doubt on the procedures and competence of U.S. intelligence agencies.

In particular the leaked documents exposed a mania for classification, or "the propensity of the U.S. government culture to classify documents at the highest possible classification rather than at the lowest level really required to protect that information." The tendency to over-classify creates "so much classified material that stays classified for so long that it becomes very difficult for government employees and security managers to determine what is really sensitive and what truly needs to be protected." In Stratfor's view this culture compounds any personnel security issues by overloading systems with "vast quantities of information that simply does not need to be protected at the secret level. And, ironically, overloading the system in such a way actually weakens the information-protection process by making it difficult to determine which information truly needs to be protected."

Stratfor's analysis of the Wikileaks Iraq war document release dovetails with Garland's implication that the episode aided Russia's campaign to promote distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies among members of the political left. Garland characterizes the political environment after the election of Barack Obama as "nihilistic." "The Left is out of love with American business and military-industrial, the Right foams at the mouth against legitimate government," he writes. Into this environment the pro-Russian media outlet Russia Today increasingly injected so-called "news" that tended to exacerbate political divisions in the U.S., promote conspiracy theories, and lend apparent legitimacy to fringe political views. For instance, in 2010, Russia Today broadcast a program that attempted to perpetuate the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. And, apropos the current discussion, Russia Today was a major booster of the bogus claim that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S., featuring leading "birther" Orly Taitz on multiple occasions.

Russia Today also provided a platform for radio host Alex Jones, who the Southern Poverty Law Center has called "the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America." Jones' reputation apparently derives primarily from regular assertions that national tragedies such as the 9/11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, and the Boston marathon bombing were all carried out by the federal government (often with the goal of seizing guns). Jones also operates the website Infowars.

On the morning of the San Bernardino mass shooting Jones' guest on his radio show was then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Jones later boasted that he was advising Trump, particularly about how to spread fear of election fraud. During the campaign Trump justified several of his outrageous claims by reference to the Infowars site, including the assertion that there is no drought in California, and that thousands of Muslims were dancing in the streets in New Jersey following the 9/11 attacks.

With Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate, Garland writes "the target for electoral mischief is enormous," especially given Clinton's history in the public eye. "Creating a conspiracy narrative around the Clintons is like creating a 'southern' narrative around NASCAR and grits."

Post-election reporting has documented a "sophisticated Russian propaganda" operation during the presidential campaign, "that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump, and undermining faith in American democracy." Using botnets, paid "trolls," and networks of websites and social media accounts, the Russian propaganda effort promoted the image of Clinton as a "criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers." Interviewed by the Washington Post for its investigation into the Russian propaganda campaign, researcher Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) suggested that the goal was to "erode faith in the U.S. government," adding that this was Russia's standard mode of operation during the Cold War, but had been made easier by social media. "It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign," the executive director of anti-propaganda website PropOrNot told the Post. ". . . It worked.”

On December 29 the Obama administration announced its response to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. 35 Russian intelligence operatives were ejected from the U.S., and sanctions were imposed on Russian intelligence services including "four top officers of the military intelligence unit" believed to have ordered cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and other organizations.

While in some ways separate from the disinformation campaign, email from the Clinton campaign and chairman John Podesta provided a stream of tabloid-style detail that preoccupied the media from the start of the Democratic National Convention until the election itself and beyond.

To be clear, although several states reported "scanning" of their voter databases, there is no evidence "that Russia sought to directly manipulate vote tallies or voter rolls" on Election Day. Misogyny and racism appear to have taken care of that for them.