Tag Archives: conway

Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump began the week with a barrage of early-morning tweets blasting the courts for blocking his travel ban executive order. But in doing so, he may have just made it more likely that the courts will keep blocking the ban.

These tweets followed upon several from over the weekend about the ban and the terrorist attack in London, including this one from Saturday evening:

In January, Trump signed an executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, as well as halting the refugee resettlement program for 120 days (and indefinitely for Syrian refugees). When the courts blocked it, rather than appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump signed a modified version of the order. The new ban repealed the old one, reduced the number of banned countries from seven to six, and added exceptions and waivers. Still, federal courts in Maryland and Hawaii blocked it, and now the Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court to have this second version of the ban reinstated.

The biggest question in the litigation over the ban is whether the courts should focus solely on the text of the order or also consider Trump’s comments from the campaign trail, and even during his presidency, to determine whether the order uses national security as a pretext for banning Muslims from the country. The president’s lawyers argue that the courts should focus on the text of the order and defer to the president’s authority over national security. Trump’s tweets Monday morning and over the weekend make it harder for the courts to justify doing that.

The travel ban is supposed to be a temporary remedy until the government can review its vetting procedures. But Trump’s tweets make it appear that the ban itself is his goal. Trump repeatedly and defiantly uses the word “ban” when his administration has instead sought to call it a pause.

The tweets “undermine the government’s best argument—that courts ought not look beyond the four corners of the Executive Order itself,” Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security and constitutional law at the University of Texas School of Law, says via email. “Whether or not then-Candidate Trump’s statements should matter (a point on which reasonable folks will likely continue to disagree), the more President Trump says while the litigation is ongoing tending to suggest that the Order is pretextual, the harder it is to convince even sympathetic judges and justices that only the text of the Order matters.” And once the courts start looking at the president’s statements, it’s not hard to find ones that raise questions about anti-Muslim motivations.

Even the president’s allies acknowledge his tweets are a problem. George Conway, the husband of top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, responded to Trump on Twitter by pointing out that the work of the Office of the Solicitor General—which is defending the travel ban in court—just got harder.

Conway, who recently withdrew his name from consideration for a post at the Justice Department, then followed up to clarify his position.

Trump may soon see his tweets used against him in court. Omar Jadwat, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, told the Washington Post this morning that the ACLU’s legal team is considering adding Trump’s tweets to its arguments before the Supreme Court. “The tweets really undermine the factual narrative that the president’s lawyers have been trying to put forth, which is that regardless of what the president has actually said in the past, the second ban is kosher if you look at it entirely on its own terms,” Jadwat told the Post.

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Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

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Government Ethics Watchdog Urges Trump to Investigate Conway and Consider Disciplining Her

Mother Jones

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The government’s top ethics watchdog sent a letter to the White House on Tuesday stating that Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, almost certainly broke ethics rules by promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line and that the administration should investigate her and consider disciplinary action.

Conway appeared on Fox & Friends last week to discuss the decision by the retail chain Nordstrom to drop Ivanka Trump’s clothing line from its stores. Standing in the White House briefing room in front of a presidential seal, Conway bragged that she owns Ivanka Trump clothing and urged viewers to purchase items from the president’s daughter’s line.

In the letter to Stefan Passantino, deputy counsel to the president and the White House’s designated ethics officer, Office of Government Ethics executive director Walter Shaub cited a rule forbidding executive branch employees from endorsing commercial products and pointed to a hypothetical example written into the regulation that’s nearly identical to Conway’s behavior.

“I note the OGE’s regulation on misuse of position offers as an example the hypothetical case of a Presidential appointee appearing in a television commercial to promote a product,” Shaub wrote. “Ms. Conway’s actions track that example almost exactly.”

While Democrats in Washington have criticized the Trump administration for a string of potential ethical lapses, Republicans have generally kept quiet. Conway’s comments, however, led to quick criticism from congressional Republicans, including House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, who together with the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, sent a letter to Shaub recommending that he review the incident.

Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Conway had been “counseled” on the incident, but he did not elaborate on what that meant. Shaub, in his letter, said he has not been notified by the White House of any disciplinary action against Conway.

“Under the present circumstances, there is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted,” Shaub wrote.

The decision on whether to discipline Conway rests with the White House. Shaub requested notification by February 28 of any disciplinary action. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Government Ethics Watchdog Urges Trump to Investigate Conway and Consider Disciplining Her

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Did Kellyanne Conway Lie on Hardball?

Mother Jones

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In a post today about Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” lie, Bob Somerby asks an excellent question:

What have they done with the real Kevin Drum?

That’s easy: he died on November 8th. Continuing directly:

In his own furious, snark-heavy post, Drum asserts that Conway didn’t make an honest mistake in her error-strewn recitation. “Do not for a second think that this wasn’t deliberate,” Drum says.

….It’s plain that Conway made several misstatements on Hardball. Is it possible that her misstatements were made in some type of good faith? That she actually bungled the giant pile of index cards which are constantly fluttering around inside her grievance-fueled head? In our view, she may have known that she was misstating; it’s possible that she didn’t.

Somerby thinks we should be careful about using the word lie. I agree. Generally speaking, it’s always difficult to know if a falsehood is deliberate. That said, let’s review the evidence:

Contra Somerby, Conway is not some fluttery airhead. She is very smart and she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She had obviously prepped for her appearance on Hardball. The Bowling Green incident is not something she would have known about otherwise.
Here is Conway’s quote: “Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green ______.” Watch the video. She didn’t stumble or search for words. She said “they were the masterminds behind….” The only type of word that fits at the end is massacre or incident or plot or something similar. Instead, she later claimed that she meant to say terrorists. That’s plainly nonsensical.
The idea that you’d accidentally use the word massacre in this context is laughable. That’s a million miles away from any normal description of what happened. However, it is very handy for scaring the hell out of people about the danger of Muslim refugees.
The Trump administration, and Conway in particular, have been spewing falsehoods at firehose volume ever since Election Day. (And before that, of course.) Surely there’s a point at which they forfeit the assumption of good faith? Lying is clearly a deliberate strategy on their part.

This is not 1999. Or 2000. Or 2008. Or even 2016. As the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson said in a piece about Trump’s claim that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast last year—a piece that Somerby praised—”The voter fraud canard was just one in a rush of falsehoods that poured from Trump and his advisers during his first 10 days in office.” The Toronto Star counts 33 Trump falsehoods in his first 14 days. Even if you’re a little more forgiving than the Star, that’s a whole lot of falsehoods. And that’s just Trump. It doesn’t include Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway or anyone else in the White House. If you do include them, here is Politifact’s scorecard:

Kellyanne Conway doesn’t have the deep track record that her boss has amassed with Politifact, but what she lacks in quantity she’s making up for in quality. Of the statements of hers that Politifact has checked, not a single one was true. Not. A. Single. One.

So: did Conway lie about Bowling Green? I’d say the evidence is overwhelming that she did. Now, under normal circumstances maybe even overwhelming wouldn’t be quite enough. You’d need a smoking gun. But that standard doesn’t work for the Trump administration. They don’t just lie constantly, they repeat lies even after they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re lies. They lie to your face in the most insulting possible way, as Spicer did in his infamous performance on January 21 about the crowds at Trump’s inauguration. At some point, the falsehoods come so thick and fast that you have to conclude they’re deliberate.

We’ve easily reached that point. You simply can’t cover the Trump administration accurately unless you assume that most of their falsehoods are intentional. How much evidence do you need, after all? It’s a new era, folks.

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Did Kellyanne Conway Lie on Hardball?

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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

Mother Jones

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In February, Corey Lewandowksi, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was interviewed by Trump’s future campaign chairman (and now senior White House adviser) Stephen Bannon about the role lobbyists play in Washington. Lewandowski’s response was unambiguous and venomous. Trump’s election, he declared, would mark the end of influence-peddling by political insiders. Here’s how he put it:

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, DC—the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything. They will spend whatever it takes because they know that if Donald Trump becomes the nominee and ultimately the president of the United States, the days of backroom deals are over. He will only be responsible to the American people. And so what you have is a series of people who’ve made a very, very good living by controlling politicians through their donations and making sure they get the legislation done—or not done—in Washington, DC to best benefit their clients. And those days are coming to an end.

But maybe not just yet.

On Wednesday morning, Lewandowski announced that he and another former Trump campaign veteran, Barry Bennett, are opening up a lobbying and political consulting firm in the swamp their ex-boss vowed to drain.

Without a hint of irony, the first sentence of Lewandowski’s press release points out that his offices will be just one block from the White House. He didn’t note that this is also one block from K Street, the ground zero of Washington influence-peddling, or Swamp Central. The next sentence touts Lewandowski’s close relationship with Trump. As in, we’re going to cash in on my insider connection to the guy in the White House.

For Lewandowski, this is actually a return to lobbying. As Mother Jones reported in March, Lewandowski was a registered lobbyist in the mid-2000s. In fact, Lewandowski lobbied for green energy subsidies. (One of his former clients told Mother Jones that Lewandowski was helpful to the funding of a publicly owned solar project in Massachusetts.) And he did this, as he headed up the New Hampshire chapter of government-bashing Americans for Prosperity.

It’s not clear if Lewandowski will once again register as a lobbyist. The firm’s announcement describes it as a full-service government relations and political consulting firm. But even if he sticks to the “consulting” side of things, his new gig might still make Trump campaign reunions awkward. On Tuesday, Kellyanne Conway, who led the Trump campaign in its final months, lashed out at Washington culture and “political consultants” in particular.

“Draining the swamp is not just about lobbying and politicians, it’s also about consultants,” Conway told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, adding that she viewed political consultants as a “staff infection.” By the way, Conway has long been a political consultant.

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, D.C. – the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything.
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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

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Trump’s Inner Circle Really, Really Doesn’t Like Mitt Romney

Mother Jones

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Here is what the chattering classes are chattering about today:

Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump escalated their attacks on Mitt Romney on Sunday, catapulting their long-simmering frustrations onto cable news in an extraordinary public airing of grievances.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, argued firmly against tapping Romney for secretary of state…“I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position,” Conway said in an interview with CNN. “We don’t even know if Mitt Romney voted for Donald Trump.”

….Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich…“I think there’s nothing that Mitt Romney can say that doesn’t sound phony and frankly pathetic…I think we would be enormously disappointed if he brought Mitt Romney into any position of authority.”

This is pretty remarkable. Presidential staffs always have plenty of infighting, and often that infighting becomes public via anonymous leaks. But I can’t recall a transition team that literally went public in its bashing of a potential cabinet pick. So what’s going on?

  1. Conway and Gingrich want to influence Trump, and they know the only real way to get his attention is via TV.
  2. This whole thing has been orchestrated by Trump as a way of publicly humiliating Romney.
  3. The Trump inner circle is truly an out-of-control freak show.

I dunno. In the meantime, Trump’s cabinet-level appointees so far include a guy who created a platform for the alt-right; an ex-general with delusions of persecution; a deputy who thinks Hillary Clinton sent black helicopters after her; an attorney general who’s basically opposed to all laws protecting minorities; a governor with no background for her job; a CIA director who supports more torture and more black sites; a billionaire who wants to destroy public education; and Reince Priebus.

Priebus is probably unqualified to be White House chief of staff, but that’s about it. In Trump’s world, that makes him a superstar.

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Trump’s Inner Circle Really, Really Doesn’t Like Mitt Romney

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

Mother Jones

Was the presidential election this year a close call? Of course not!

Kellyanne Conway, a key adviser to Donald Trump’s transistion team, says the general election “was not close” and the president-elect has a “mandate” to carry out the will of the people on issues ranging from Obamacare to national security. “This election was not close. It was not a squeaker,” Mrs. Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well.”

Really? It sure seemed close to me. So close, in fact, that Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote. Let’s google “2016 popular vote” to find out:

It looks like Facebook isn’t the only one with a fake news problem. Surely one of the top three results on Google News shouldn’t be a nutbar blog dedicated to spreading false information about Hillary Clinton? How about giving a little higher weighting to actual news sources so this kind of stuff doesn’t happen?

Trump’s team is dedicated to telling us that the election was a landslide, and there are plenty of doofus sites out there who are happy to spread whatever lies will help that along. Nothing can stop this from happening, but at least big players like Facebook and Google should try not to help them along.

UPDATE: There’s also the problem of deliberately fake news sources. Mike Caulfield has more on that here.

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

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Paul Manafort Is the Latest Casualty on Team Trump

Mother Jones

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Paul Manafort has resigned as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Is this because of his shady Ukraine dealings? Because Trump brought on Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to run the campaign? Because he didn’t want to be associated with an epic loss in November? Because he wanted to spend more time with his family?

There’s no telling. But here’s the good news: He’s now free to sign up with CNN as an election analyst! I can’t wait.

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Paul Manafort Is the Latest Casualty on Team Trump

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Donald Trump Overhauls His Campaign Team. Again.

Mother Jones

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As Donald Trump loses ground in the polls to Hillary Clinton and his campaign continues to falter, he is once more shaking up his political operation. Declaring “I want to win” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published early Wednesday morning, Trump announced that he is bringing on veteran Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manger and Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart, as chief executive officer of the Trump Team.

Paul Manafort, who has been running the Trump campaign since the ouster of Corey Lewandowski, will continue in his role as campaign chairman, but the reshuffle signals that his authority will be significantly curtailed, if he has not been altogether sidelined. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that a “secret ledger” listed $12.7 million in cash payments to Manafort from Ukraine’s pro-Russian ruling party, which he advised up until recently. Manafort denied receiving the payments, but his controversial background as a lobbyist who has specialized in representing some of the world’s most notorious strongmen and dictators has dogged him ever since he signed on with Trump. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Manafort and another Trump aide, Rick Gates, had failed to disclose their efforts to influence US policy on behalf of the Ukrainian governing party of Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s ousted leader, possibly circumventing rules requiring “foreign agents” to register with the US government. But it may have been Manafort’s inability to rein in Trump, as much as his past clientele, that led to his de facto demotion.

Conway—whose roster of clients has included Newt Gingrich and Trump’s running mate Mike Pence—has been advising the Trump campaign since at least July. Prior to signing on with Trump, Conway backed his rival Ted Cruz. She served as a strategist for Keep the Promise I, a pro-Cruz super-PAC bankrolled by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that ran attack ads against Trump during the primary campaign, including one blasting the real estate mogul for supposedly supporting government-run healthcare.

Along with Conway, Bannon also has close ties to Mercer, who Politico has reported is a top investor in Breitbart. A Navy veteran and former Goldman Sachs banker, Bannon has no political experience to speak of, though his news outlet has been one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders throughout the campaign. This has led to some uncomfortable moments for the conservative news outlet, including this spring when Corey Lewandowski roughly yanked then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields away from Trump at a campaign rally as she tried to ask the candidate a question. Breitbart went out of its way to bolster the Trump campaign’s version of events, at the expense of its own reporter. Fields ended up resigning and is now a reporter at the Huffington Post.

According to Politico, Bannon has been “quietly advising people around the Trump campaign for months,” an unusual move for a top executive at a news organization covering the presidential campaign. Bannon’s outlet didn’t even get the scoop of his new role with Trump. After the news broke, it ran the AP’s version of the story.

* This is a developing story.

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Donald Trump Overhauls His Campaign Team. Again.

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How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014

Mother Jones

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You don’t know it yet. There’s no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you’re now living is the “Penumbral Age” of human history—meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all. You’re living at the start of a new dark age, a new counter-Enlightenment. Why? Because too many of us living today, in the years just after the turn of the millennium, deny the science of climate change.

Such is the premise of a thought-provoking new work of “science-based fiction” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, two historians of science (Oreskes at Harvard, Conway at Caltech) best known for their classic 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. In a surprising move, they have now followed up that expose of the roots of modern science denialism with a work of “cli-fi,” or climate science fiction, entitled The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. SPOILER ALERT: Much of the plot of this book will be revealed below! In it, Oreskes and Conway write from the perspective of a historian, living in China (the country that fared the best in facing the ravages of climate change) in the year 2393. The historian seeks to analyze the biggest paradox imaginable: Why humans who saw the climate disaster coming, who were thoroughly and repeatedly warned, did nothing about it.

So why did two historians turn to sci-fi? On the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Oreskes explained that after the extensive research that went into Merchants of Doubt, she and Conway “felt like we really understood the science, but we also felt that the scientific community had really not explained why any of this mattered. And we just kept coming back to this idea of, how do we really talk about why this matters, and not just for polar bears, and not just for people living in far flung places or far into the future, but what’s really at stake.”

The resulting book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, diverges in many respects from other cli-fi works, such as the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson (who clearly influenced Oreskes and Conway, and who blurbed their new book). Collapse is quite short, and hardly a study in character or plot. It has one narrator, and that narrator is a “scholar,” approaching the topic analytically. The force of the story, then, comes not so much from dramatic elements, but rather, from its simple conceit: How would a fair-minded thinker, living 400 years from now, evaluate us?

The answer couldn’t be more depressing: We got it all wrong. We sacrificed our birthright. We unleashed ravaging heat waves, destabilized ice sheets, shot chemicals into the skies in a failed attempt to fix our mess, then halted that intervention and made everything still worse. (All of these things unfold in the story.)

Columbia University Press.

The consequences were toppled governments, mass migrations, and unimaginable human tragedy from starvation, dehydration, and disease. Finally came the “collapse” itself, not of Western Civilization at first, but of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which in the late 21st century rapidly disintegrated, driving up sea levels some 5 meters. Much of Greenland soon followed.

“We were trying to sort of play on this two different senses of ‘collapse,'” explained Oreskes on Inquiring Minds. Summarizing the plot of the book, she elaborated as follows: “The West Antarctic Ice Sheet does collapse, causing massive rapid sea level rise, which then puts into effect a kind of chain of events, which ultimately leads to the collapse of political and cultural institutions as well.”

This is a worst-case scenario, but it is far from crazy in light of our current trajectory. And we are on this trajectory because we’re ignoring the evidence all around us. “A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment,” writes Oreskes’ and Conway’s historian, explaining why our present era will later be called the “Period of the Penumbra.”

So why are we currently on course to be remembered for causing humanity’s greatest failure? The historian singles out two causes in particular, the first of which may be surprising.

First off, the historian argues that our scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the “95 percent confidence limit” (the requirement to statistically establish that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that a given scientific result is due to chance—or, a 19 in 20 chance that it is real—before it can be accepted) is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, led scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening.

“We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity,” writes the historian. “Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.” The historian even cites the currently live issue of the relationship between hurricanes and global warming: It is very likely that global warming is changing these storms in some way, but showing that in a way that satisfies all of the relevant experts has proven very difficult.

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would too, says Oreskes. “If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it’s always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed,” she says. “So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.”

Naomi Oreskes. Andy Tankersley.

And then, there are the ideologues. They are, of course, vastly more culpable than the scientists. Here, The Collapse of Western Civilization picks up a theme from Merchants of Doubt: Free market ideologues, trained on the idea that the Soviet Union was the root of all evil, converted to an economic religion of their own dubbed “neoliberalism,” defined as “the idea that free market systems were the only economic systems that did not threaten individual liberty.” Unfortunately for this worldview, market failures do exist, and climate change is the granddaddy of them all. But too many neoliberal ideologues couldn’t accept that, so they doubled down on fantasy. (These are the climate change denying libertarians that we all know so well.)

In The Collapse of Western Civilization, neoliberals receive a comeuppance for this that is appropriate in its dramatic irony. The book ends by noting that China, a country not exactly wedded to freedom of thought or free markets, nevertheless survived climate calamity the best, thanks to its ability to exercise the centralized power of the state to force rapid climate adaptation. Eighty percent of Chinese thus survived the climate cataclysm. Other nations soon followed suit, also growing more autocratic.

Oreskes is not applauding this, of course; rather, she’s suggesting that it could be a very, very painful irony resulting from the behavior of neoliberals. “It could well be the case that the authoritarian nations are actually better situated to deal with climate disruption than the liberal democracies,” says Oreskes. “And we want to suggest that that’s a very worrisome thought.”

So can we still prevent ourselves from writing the story of The Collapse of Western Civilization—a story in which the historian narrator repeatedly points out missed opportunities, when something could have been done to prevent the disaster that followed? Oreskes thinks the answer is yes.

“It’s not too late. We do still have opportunities,” she says. “But if we continue the way we’ve been going, and we continue to miss these opportunities, there is going to become a point of no return.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of questionable claims about “drinkable” sunscreen, and a new study finding that less than 1 percent of scientists are responsible for a huge bulk of the most influential research.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014

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