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Do you think Trace would have published if the attempt to scam LoTT had failed? Or perhaps chosen a progressive target if the conservative ones proved less gullible than he hoped?
If a test is only allowed one result, it's not exactly a good example of truthfulness or nonpartisanship.
In the end this is the same issue LoTT has. Nutpicking is extraordinarily powerful--anyone can find thousands of terrible examples of people in the outgroup doing despicable things. Whether you're finding these examples, or creating them yourself, if you only target one side you're going to create a slanted, biased perspective of that side for anyone who follows you.
Trace's journalism since then has been significantly better, and he's also criticized his own side somewhat. While I have serious complaints about how this was handled it was still in the end a criticism of extreme leftists, meaning that while his most dedicated attempts at criticism may still be reserved for the right, there is still at least some degree of evenhandedness, more than I have come to expect from virtually any journalist.
Taking a look at LoTT's current front page (1, 2, 3, 4) I see a lot of partisanship, but much less nutpicking--most of the things being highlighted are more "look at large ongoing events progressives explicitly say they support" than "look at random isolated events which I claim are the inevitable result of progressive policies."
As I've said before, I don't mind the LoTT takedown. But, looking at the two accounts nowadays, it's unclear which is actually the better source of truth. Trace seems to be extremely honest about the facts of the case, really digging into the details, but will spin the broader picture/takeaway to such an extent that I have a hard time believing anything he says without verifying it myself. I've seen him say things that to me are nearly "the sky is never blue" level. LoTT seems broadly more interested in partisanship and less interested in the truth, but I have never seen it tell such whoppers as "[The FAA case] is not a fundamentally partisan issue".
I follow Trace, and don't follow LoTT, but they're really not so different as you make them out to be.
Well, given that Trace has spent a ton of time documenting the FAA hiring scandal which made the progressives look terrible, I conclude that he is actually interested in the truth rather than a partisan for a side in the culture war.
I concur with you sentiment that the FAA thing is fundamentally partisan. The 'equality of outcomes' demand which set the bad incentives which resulted in officials doing what they did was very much a demand of the progressive side, not bipartisan.
Personally, I think the test cheating is a direct consequence of the law making unrealistic, contradictory demands. "You have to hire based on merit, but you also have to hire enough black people, otherwise you are a dirty racist" is not a consistent goal in a world where black people are on average less qualified for whatever reasons -- something has got to give. So yes, I fully blame the progressive 'equality of outcome' laws for that.
The left-wing media shares my sentiment, because they elected mostly not to cover that story at all for what I assume are partisan reasons.
Suppose party X got rid of all restrictions on gun ownership and all public funding for mental health. Then some psychotic person buys an auto rifle and shoots up some mall. For some weird reason, Trace is the only one to report on it. He also says something like (changed words in italic):
We should give Trace 100 truth points for covering the issue. We can debate if we should deduct a point for also calling it "not a fundamentally partisan issue" or if that was taken out of context, but either way, his credentials as someone who is willing to hurt progressive causes in the name of the truth are established.
Why not both? The way I see it, partisanship and truth-seeking are only somewhat contradictory. A pure truth-seeker is probably a mathematician or philosopher, and a pure partisan will lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want, but there are infinite combinations of the two qualities between those extremes.
The average reasonable person is aware of status games and plays them to at least some extent. Being a truth-seeker will earn you status in most circles. Being left-liberal will earn you status in most circles. When choosing what to cover there are tradeoffs between the two. I see the FAA scandal as such a good scoop that it was worth being somewhat critical of far-left extremists, and losing Progressive Points, because in this case the exchange rate for Truth Points is very good. The LoTT piece was pretty much the same but in reverse, losing some Truth Points in exchange for plenty of Progressive Points.
A rational person will pursue all such opportunities and gradually gain status in their circles in both respects. A partisan will perhaps ignore Truth Points entirely. I don't think Trace is a partisan, and I think he's chosen a reasonably Truth-slanted exchange rate between the two currencies, though of course I wish he were more on my side.
I strongly disagree with this. If the motivation for the FAA's actions was solely to obey seemingly contradictory laws, it would have followed the lead of all the other departments that are not in trouble. Or just done what it has always done, which didn't get it in trouble.
You're telling me that an organization which was not breaking any laws, in a time where its actions weren't being litigated anywhere, went way out of its way to secretly adopt new questionably legal policies, out of a desire to obey the law? Do you really think, if they thought their actions were legal, they would have hid them as they did? Surely if their motivation was to obey the law better, and they thought their policies were less likely to be litigated than the previous ones, they would trumpet the policy from every rooftop in order to ensure everyone knew about the new, safer, more legal policy.
No, that's just ridiculous. Equality of outcome laws had virtually nothing to do with these policies. The leaders wanted a racial spoils system, knew it probably wouldn't be legal, and implemented it anyways, out of pure ideological fervor.
This would hit a lot harder if there were prominent Republicans directly advocating for school/mall shootings, the way there are prominent Democrats directly advocating for reparations and other similar programs.
A better example would be abortion. Let's say X gets raped and tries to get an abortion but can't, because in her state abortion is banned even in cases of rape and incest. There are (a few, I think) prominent Republicans who advocate for these sorts of laws. In this case if Trace had said
then I would say the same thing--no! Obviously not! Plenty of people do want to defend that situation, but are smart enough not to do so in public, knowing it's outside of the current Overton window. And it's extremely partisan, because the people who made those laws are still in power and haven't apologized or otherwise expressed any regret at all, nor have any of their supporters condemned them for this. It's not a policy failure, it's a policy success, and the partisans whose policies worked as intended are still writing up new similar policies. (To bring the analogy full circle, Pete Buttigieg and co. are still appointing similar people to positions of power).
As far as I'm concerned Trace is better than any other journalist that I can think of, and deserves praise for that, but it's an amazingly low bar. I often visit the Fox News website rather than CNN's, not because I like it more or because it's more honest (CNN wins on both counts for me) but because its lies are far clumsier and more transparent. Trace takes this a step further, keeping every detail honest, but skillfully crafting the narrative such that if you're not paying attention you'll be led to the exact opposite of the correct conclusion, even with all of the relevant facts in hand. In the FAA case, one might conclude that the whole mess was just a bunch of innocent nonpartisan officials struggling to fulfill the law, rather than hyperpartisan officials fighting to secretly ignore the will of the people and enact their preferred agendas instead.
I don't think this is fair to me at all. This is the final paragraph of my article.
That's not a claim of struggling to fulfill the law--it's a claim that people did terrible things, got exposed as being terrible things, and have left a black eye on institutions that people have failed to pay attention to for partisan reasons.
I said, and will continue to say, that it is not fundamentally partisan. When I speak with partisans involved in it about the specific details, including ones with ties to the institutions in question, people are outraged. People certainly respond to it in partisan ways, but inflaming it as an issue where the people whose laps it got dumped in have no way to save face, where they're either conquered or they stick to their guns and win, does not actually help the issue get solved.
I will absolutely own up to framing my articles in ways that make people more likely to listen to them, but I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.
My central claim is that the lawsuit was not built on bad decisions. Every decision taken was calculated and intentional, and if they hadn't been caught it would have provided precisely the outcome they were aiming for. It's clear from the context that you meant "bad" as in "misguided but with good intentions" when the reality is the exact opposite. The proper functioning of the FAA wasn't "broken", it was purposefully subverted. Much of your language throughout the piece aims to paint the actions taken by the FAA as a series of mistakes rather than what they actually were, a series of hyperpartisan stratagems driven by extremists.
The people who did this were not making mistakes. They were rationally pursuing their goals, which I happen to vehemently disagree with. The only "mistake" they made was getting caught. They weren't pressured into it either, they actively pursued these policies, doing their best to hide them from the public eye. Keep in mind that the FAA funded the studies whose proposals it adopted.
Or, let me be more clear here. The FAA is clearly, obviously, subject to more pressure from the voters and the pilot schools than from random black pilot organizations. If they were under pressure from the NBCFAE, they must have been under at least a hundred times that much from other organizations, yet it was the former they "caved" to. Is it really so surprising to you that leftist officials, put in place by higher-up leftists, under a leftist administration, would prefer "caving" to extreme leftist policies than to what you describe as "nonpartisan" ones? No, they were obviously actively pursuing the agenda they loudly claimed to be pursuing, even if it took a bit of agency laundering to nominally place the blame on an external activist organization.
When I mentioned that, I was responding to this:
from @quiet_NaN. That said, when you describe predecessors' behavior as happening because they were "between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards", I think that's pretty straightforwardly a claim that they were struggling to fulfill the law, yeah.
I know plenty of partisans who would fully support the FAA's actions here. I know of partisans too--namely the ones who perpetrated the whole thing. Now that the jig is up the smart ones obviously won't defend it, but they will deny and deflect, arguing that nobody in the FAA knew it was happening, or that only a few people knew but were rogue elements, or maybe the whole FAA knew but not Pete, or maybe Pete knew too but now he has to defend his predecessors' actions or he gets, as you put it, "conquered."
You don't strike me as partisan but your framing of this situation certainly makes me doubt that judgement. If rogue elements in the FAA did this (as has been established), that's evidence that higher-ups supported it or were at least fine with it. This has been established too--the internal review decided that the "rogue elements" had done nothing wrong. If the higher-ups supported it, that's evidence that the FAA as a whole, and people such as the secretary of transportation, were also fine with this behavior and/or actively supported it. Your behavior seems to be to report the facts accurately, then fight viciously to deny any possibility that higher-ups actually knew what was going on or had any role in it. Whether they did or not, they appointed the people who did this. That alone merits an enormous reckoning, and in my opinion straight-up disqualifies such people from serving at any position in the government, let alone such a high one.
Honestly I don't even know what you mean by "fundamentally partisan." The definition of the word is "prejudiced in favor of a particular cause." Do you really think the people that did this weren't partisan? Do you think sufficiently partisan people wouldn't support this? "Nonpartisan" generally indicates something everyone can agree on, but if everyone could agree that this was bad then it wouldn't have happened in the first place.
I think this is our main disagreement. You seem to genuinely believe the higher-ups at the FAA weren't in on this. I think it's obvious they were, and this whole scheme was intentional. If the law hadn't been passed they'd still be doing it today, if they hadn't graduated to a more subtle method of accomplishing the same thing.
As I said in my original comment:
I don't think you're actively trying to mislead people, but in this case you seem to have been so charitable to the entire edifice, denying agency at every possible step, that whatever your intentions, people have been misled. You saw (I hope) the comment I was responding to chalking the whole thing up to tension between laws. If an intelligent, conservative guy walks away from your article with that takeaway, I don't understand how you can claim with a straight face that you were clearly calling it a "blatantly corrupt institutional failure."
They were pressured! Objectively, straightforwardly, unambiguously, they were pressured! It was the result of a multi-year lobbying effort from the NBCFAE, going all the way up to the Congressional Black Caucus! I spend four paragraphs detailing the contours of that pressure in excruciating detail.
You say they were under much more pressure than other directions--really? Why would you think that? Race is a uniquely hot-button issue in America, and left-leaning people in particular are very, very bad at facing down race-based pressure. That doesn't make it a willful pursuit of exactly what they want to do at every step. Massively changing a hiring process is an incredibly obnoxious thing to have to do. It's not the sort of thing that happens without pressure. Yes, they're more ideologically amenable to that pressure than you would be, but no, that doesn't make it not pressure.
The FAA is not at all clearly, not at all obviously, subject to more pressure from the voters and the pilot schools than a random black activist group. Did voters and pilot schools stage meetings with Congress? Did voters and pilot schools pursue a multi-year campaign to change things?
(The answer is: Yes, after the scandal. And they changed things! That pressure worked too!)
Look, dude, I get that you sincerely think this is a major blind spot of mine and I'm trying to obfuscate responsibility for the figures involved, but that is simply not the case. I presented the full truth in a way designed to leave not past administrators--who were already fired, demoted, and otherwise disgraced over it--but present ones, who had a mess dumped in their lap, a way to save face by acknowledging and correcting the harm.
Nothing in my presentation stopped millions of conservatives from concluding that the whole of it was a horribly corrupt mess. A great deal in my presentation convinced both people directly involved in the fight for justice in the wake of the scandal and other well-meaning liberals that I wasn't just another far-right figure with an axe to grind, and as a result the people involved were grateful and willing to go on record with further details (which I hope to get into a mainstream publication), and those liberals learned about a scandal that had previously been kicking around only places like Steve Sailer's blog.
It's fine to be irritated that I bend over to be charitable and to make people comfortable and to appeal to their better nature, but you don't have an accurate model of the people involved or of me, and it's leading you astray.
This is the crux of my argument, which I'm beginning to suspect you simply don't understand. At the limits there is no difference between an organization being "amenable to pressure" and the organization simply wanting to do something whether or not it's getting pressured into it. If it takes suspiciously little pressure to get an org to do something, you can be sure they already wanted to do it. That doesn't mean your pressure is super effective, it just means the org was already sympathetic, or perhaps even already on your side and just waiting for a catalyst.
You're basically trying to say, "Obviously they were pressured more by the NBCFAE than any other organization, because the NBCFAE is who they ended up listening to." Whereas my point is, "Obviously they were already highly sympathetic to the NBCFAE, because despite not being pressured very much by them, they made drastic changes to comply with the NBCFAE's demands."
If it were actually pressure that got the FAA to change their hiring process (the implication being, against their will) then surely more influential organizations such as the pilot schools would have been able to get it changed back internally, via pressure, rather than needing to go through Congress and written law.
This conflates the soft pressure the NBCFAE was applying with the hard pressure the court is capable of applying. There was no amount of soft pressure sufficient to make the FAA roll back their hiring changes--they literally had to be forced into it by Congress. Aside from explicit written confirmation from FAA leaders, this is the strongest possible evidence we could have that the changes were not actually made due to pressure.
Yeah, I'd believe you if you had actually blamed the past admins, rather than saying they were simply stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to fulfill an impossible mandate. I'll acknowledge you later somewhat contradicted this by highlighting how their internal investigation found no wrongdoing, but that's not in your main post.
Extending endless charity to the people who orchestrated this mess (or, like Pete, inherited it) is useful up to a point, but it misses the broader, more important picture. Whether you think the spark came from within the FAA or from an external activist organization, it's clear that leftist institutions are highly susceptible to hyperpartisan, extreme-left ideological takeovers, to the point where rank-and-file government employees are enlisted to conduct illegal activities and hide the evidence. The only two possibilities are to either say,
I think #1 is probably better for dealing with this specific situation. It's essentially begging the overlords to be merciful, and I suppose they may comply just this once. But #2 is the better conclusion, both more accurate and more forward-thinking. Do you disagree?
I understand and have understood what you’re saying, but I just don’t think “suspiciously little pressure” is a good descriptor here. The schools weren’t influential after the change! They were shoved to the side altogether and granted only the slightest bit of attention. Pressure had to come from outside the org, because that’s where the injured parties were.
I extended, and extend, little charity to those who made the mess. As for extending charity to people who inherited it, since nothing happened about it in the Trump admin, I’m disinclined to blame the Biden admin for nothing continuing to happen.
I do think the circumstances were not particularly unusual; I don’t think we have an alternative that would properly right the ship.
I don’t think it was a fluke and didn’t convey that it was a fluke—I just highlighted and emphasized the incident.
Anyway, all of this is stemming from you coming one step away from calling me a liar for a framing you would have presented differently. I am not persuaded, and given the amount of time I spend criticizing progressives and trying to build alternatives, it takes an incredibly strained reading of my position to treat me as fundamentally aligned with them.
Thanks for the chat, at any rate. This will be my last response on this topic, since I’m headed away from the forum now-ish. All the best.
Let me quote the places where I think you extend far too much charity to the people who made this mess.
In this one sentence alone, you:
The next paragraph does basically the same thing.
As you said:
Reading the above excerpts, do you really still stand by this? You called this everything but corruption. You directly stated in multiple places that it was not corruption that caused this. You literally said the predecessors "caved to pressure" which is emphatically not corruption.
I've come one step away from calling you a liar for your framing, because your framing is one step away from a lie. Specifically, the part I most take issue with is your assertion that the leaders were pressured into this rather than doing it of their own free will. I think you're still using "pressure" in a very nonstandard way, so let me be more clear about what I mean here.
I draw this distinction between pressure and influence because it is the whole crux of the issue. You cannot fairly characterize the ringleaders of this situation as being "pressured" into doing this if the only "pressure" applied is a couple toothless letters from a small activist organization. If their decision is based on what I call influence, not pressure, then it is still in the end their responsibility, whereas if it's caused by what I call pressure then it's somewhat understandable.
The pilots and pilot schools had to exert a literally unstoppable amount of pressure on the FAA, going all the way to Congress, just to reverse a policy instigated by a single letter from the NBCFAE. They weren't pressured into it.
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Your theatrical slamming of the door is so protracted that my ban has expired before you left. Don't let that door hit you on the way out.
Then since you didn't get the point the first time, take another three days off.
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