Brane Space: WSJ's Barton Swaim Attacks The "Expert Class" - But Only Reveals His Abject Trump Obeisance

Barton Swaim - Proud White Nationalist & Trump Apologist

Let us acknowledge here, maybe for the fifth time, Barton Swaim is one of the most peevish nabobs in the WSJ's pro -Trump stable. Swaim's serial polemics against liberals, intellectuals and democrats reached a new nadir with his recent op-ed 'Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class' (Jan. 23-24, p. A11) wherein he claims with zero evidence:

"The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America's expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, but didn't."

Written like a true Trump -loving knuckle dragger. How so? Because the "evidence" he goes on to cite borders on the laughable, if not the outright imbecilic. He begins, naturally enough, by taking the political class to task for predicting a major Hillary victory in 2016. Of course, that prediction was basically correct, as she netted nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. She was upended, however, by the archaic and quixotic Electoral College.

The same anti-democratic, anomalous system that - but for 44,000 odd votes in 6 swing states - would have seen Trump re-elected, despite Biden getting 7 million more votes nationwide.

Having punked out with that one, he then lays into Yale professor Timothy Snyder who - with many others - tried to warn of the fascist threat posed by Trump's candidacy. Writing (ibid.):

"Timothy Snyder was among the most strident of these prophets warning: 'When the terrorist attack comes, remember all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power'."

Well, that was exactly what happened with the Trump-incited insurrection for which the swine is now being tried again after a 2nd impeachment, and as I noted in a post following the January 6th atrocity:

"Even for the lowest I.Q. observer it was obvious that Trump's incessant 4 years of incitement had finally seen his cockroaches come to roost, and in our very Capitol. This after Trump egged on his zombies at a rally to march to Congress to protest its acceptance of the results of the election that he lost, blabbing:

"We will never concede! It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about.”

The Traitor even suggested that he would join them, although he did not. But given these zombies believe anything Trump farts out of his pie hole they marched on - full of grievance - and likely stoked on Ripple, year- old bennies and bad weed.

True, Trump did not explicitly urge them to force their way into the Capitol building but he tweeted enough incendiary words to drive them to rage. Including:

"These are the things that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long."

The experts Swaim castigates - including Timothy Snyder, Harvard Law Prof Lawrence Tribe, historian Michael Beschloss, Adam Schiff, former CIA chief John Brennan, and psychologist Bandy X. Lee - had warned of worst-case scenarios derived from Trump's upending of norms and disregard for the Constitution. Many, including former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, called repeatedly for his removal, by the 25th amendment, or any other means. But it was like they were shouting into the wind.

What was their error according to Swaim?

"These cultured authorities couldn't tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues"

Which he insisted would "go down as one of the great failures of American intellectual history."

In fact, it is Swaim's failure of intellect and critical thinking which is in play here. His inability to discern that the invasion and ravaging of the Capitol was not against "elite contempt" but against the nation's electoral system, the Constitution and democracy itself. For the intent was not simply to act out but to halt the certification of an election. Nor did this traitorous travesty need "powerful ideologues" or an especially savvy and diabolical leader. All it required was the incitement to fury of a gullible, brainwashed horde of misfits and their intention to kill congressional leaders - as well as the VP, Mike Pence ("Let's hang Mike Pence!") - with the insurrectionists even bringing a workable gallows to the scene, as well as pipe bombs, assault rifles and Molotov cocktails.

The declared claim of the seething pro-Trump rats included assassination (e.g. of AOC, Pence, Nancy Pelosi) and taking hostages using plastic zip ties. The final tally of the dead was 5 but it could have been vastly worse, which Swaim's blinkered idiocy takes no account of. Like the 45 Repuke Senate traitors who voted yesterday to dismiss a Senate trial as "unconstitutional" Swaim seeks to whitewash away the violent insurrection. Indeed, Swaim actually claimed that Trump "never praised Nazis", seeming to forget or dismiss the extremist protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” Thereby effectively praising the neo-Nazis on one side as he played down any danger posed by extremist groups. Basically, he employed false equivalence to try to escape blame for praising his beloved Nazis and White Nationalist scum.

So yes, this was an assault on democracy whether Swaim - or the 45 Repuke Senate seditionists - are too co-opted and cowardly to see it. That assault included Trump's efforts to shake down the Georgia Secretary of State to find him nearly 12,000 extra votes, as well as trying to recruit a lower level DOJ stooge to help him overturn the election i.e. by removing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replacing him with a Department of Justice lower lackey (Jeffrey Clark) who would use the power of the DOJ to force Georgia legislators to decertify the state's election results, preventing Congress from conducting the Electoral College vote count.

The most odious Swaim mental travesty - rivaling all the others - was when he writes (ibid.):

"Mr. Trump only assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, and only after the 2020 election. The effort was discreditable and disruptive but also delusional and ineffective. It was not what the president's expert class critics had foreseen. "

But there is no "ordinary sense" of assaulting our democracy: one either attempts to subvert it (using sedition) or doesn't. Whether one succeeds is also immaterial to the existence of a crime. After all attempted murder is still a felony! Trump used both sedition and incitement to insurrection to attempt to overturn an election and stay in power.

As to the experts on fascism keeping an eye on him, in fact they HAD foreseen his impending assault. Trump had gone on for months barking about mail ballots, how they were "fraudulent" and how 2020 would be a "rigged election". So while experts may not have seen the final form (insurrection, overrunning the Capitol) Trump's efforts would take, they did grasp it was likely to be extreme, after exhausting all legal (court) cases with frivolous challenges.

But then Swaim expels this brain fart:

"Perhaps critics failed to understand Trump's assault on democracy because they had carried out a similar assault in 2018-19 with the support of the federal bureaucracy ... I'm referring to the Russia scare. The belief Mr. Trump won only because his campaign colluded with agents of Moscow and therefore his election was illegitimate."

But, of course, the serious person with full mental capacity - not half like Swaim- knows there was no "Russia scare" but an actual usurpation of the 2016 election's integrity that no amount of spin can wipe away. We've known since Mueller's investigation that Trump came out of the gate illegitimate because he was. Catapulted into the presidency by barely 77,000 votes in 3 swing states thanks to Russian interference and the conspiracy of his own campaign honchos (like Mike Flynn) with Russian GRU agents. As former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah made clear on a segment of 'All In' a year ago:

"There's just so many facts in this indictment about the coordination of the Trump campaign with Wikileaks, through Roger Stone. Remember that GRU indictment - if you go back to that- one of the objects of the conspiracy is not just hacking but hacking and disseminating. You can't look at them alone, you have to go back to everything we know, the Trump Tower meeting, the calling out by Trump to Russia (to grab Hillary's emails)...there's just so many other things."

Rocah, in other words, had put her former federal prosecutor's finger on exactly why the reactionary Right media and Trump apologists were able to peddle this balderdash there's "nothing there". National Security specialist and counterinsurgency expert Malcolm Nance also reaffirmed at the same time how Roger Stone was the "bridge and link for that information" passed from the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence. Adding: "This is a critical, critical indictment. They're saying they've identified the link.", i.e. in showing the bridge and coordination between Stone, the Trump campaign, and the Russians.

Adding:

"This indictment is based not just on the hearsay or the testimony of others. Robert Mueller brings documentation to the table....And believe me there's also other information in the special counsel's office we don't know about especially from other members of the Trump team including Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and others."

Let's also recall here it was Trump's hired Toady Bill Barr who spewed out the claptrap that Mueller's report had basically exonerated Trump. But if one reads Volume 1, the evidence is clear this is total misdirection and propaganda.

Mueller not only defined a conspiracy in the case of his indictment filed against 12 GRU agents in 2018, but made it public, E.g.

[Read the indictment here.]

Mueller also - if you read part one of his report- makes it clear Trump was involved in this conspiracy. As Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe elegantly summed it up:

"What we have here is a situation where the Mueller report shows without any doubt that a hostile foreign power attacked the United States in this (2016) election. That Donald Trump welcomed that attack, benefited from it and then - the last couple of years - tried to cover it up every possible way. "

All of which was amply born out in the 966 -page Senate Intelligence Committee report, entitled : “Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,”

The report "leaves no doubt that an extensive network of Russian operatives with intelligence ties worked with Trump's operatives to torpedo Hillary Clinton's campaign four years ago."

Indeed since then the connections have been nailed:

The government finally connects the line from Trump’s campaign to Russian intelligence

So much for the 'Russia hoax' hoax.

So Swaim can bleat all he wants about Trump being "persecuted" through his 4 years, or employing dismissive dodges, e.g. "Mr. Trump's character deficiencies were always obvious, even to his supporters." But the fact his MAGA hordes were roped into believing his lies that the election was "stolen" - and violently acted on them- shows those deficiencies were nowhere near as "obvious" as Swaim portrays.

Thus the non-compromised media had a solemn obligation to report every vile aspect of the Trump-Russian conspiracy and its effects. Mueller, as special prosecutor, also had a duty to spell out the charges in public as opposed to punting and letting Barr put words in his mouth to twist the meaning of the investigation. (Which then led to a bogus investigation of the investigators.)

Those who still dispute there was such a conspiracy need to read the Mueller Report, Volume I, and ponder what it really says. Also, that a prime sewer rat that Trump pardoned - Michael Flynn - had openly attempted to do Putin's bidding by proposing a direct attack on our democratic system, e.g.

In the News

A Deadly Attack On Our Democracy

by Heather Cox Richardson | December 4, 2020 - 7:44am | permalink

The preceding, by itself, shows Swaim's brain has been colonized by Trump's absurd claims, QAnon codswallop and white nationalist baloney. Swaim's stream of lies and misinformation in his piece concerning the Trump Covid -19 response actually rivals the Russia "scare" claim. For example:

"No nation that values individual liberty and isn't an island managed to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder."

Totally disregarding the fact South Korea did just that, by dedicated testing, contact tracing and social distancing. But when a liar is hot on his beat, penning rubbish, why stop with that Swaim canard? And so, with the experts and intellectuals in his sights he goes on to spout:

"The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the early stages of the 2020 pandemic, although the president's chief failing was his lack of rhetorical clarity."

I guess Swaim means Trump suggesting the intake of disinfectant or bleach was a "lack of rhetorical clarity" i.e. see this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9kWsUwTcj8

Or maybe he means when Trump admitted on tape to Bob Woodward ('RAGE') that he deliberately downplayed the threat of the virus when he knew it was more deadly than the seasonal flu. Or when he continually isolated his Covid team from delivering the actual news to millions of Americans- choosing PR performances instead. Given Swaim clearly was more mesmerized by the optics and PR it's little wonder he dismisses the experts. But as journalist Laurie Garrett has shown, it is TRUMP and Trump alone who bears major responsibility for fucking up the national response:

Trump Has Sabotaged America's Coronavirus Response

Excerpt:

" In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion."

But no recounting of Swaim's bullshit about experts would be complete without noting this chestnut: "The outstanding failure of the 2020 pandemic was the experts' belief that the only sensible response involved sustained closures of businesses and schools."

But this bleating blockhead misses the memo -and point -that given the U.S. was so late in coming to the testing table, there was no other option but shelter-in-place lockdowns. In fact, had they begun even earlier instead of being delayed by Trump's downplaying (along with politicizing masks, social distancing)- it would have likely saved 100,000-200,000 more lives - of the 424,000 now dead from the virus. So his additional remark "the people paid to know what they were talking about, didn't" falls flat like his WSJ hit piece.

The truth is it is Barton Swaim who has no clue what he is talking or writing about, so no surprise all we behold is a stream of misinformed and deranged twaddle dressed up as an erudite critique of experts. But this is what one gets when one's intellect, common sense, and judgment have been sacrificed on the altar of Trump obeisance.