The FBI and Rauchian reality

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Eli Lake writes,

The most blatant example of Rauch’s failure to grapple with elite epistemic failure is his treatment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, former FBI Director James Comey is one of the people who blurbs his book. Rauch’s brief mention of the 2019 Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page says it “found procedural errors but no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign.”

This is a complete misreading of the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

I think that in general Rauch has a blind spot with respect to the political biases of the FBI.

19 thoughts on “The FBI and Rauchian reality”

  1. I applied for an FBI position and passed the interview process back in 2004. They loved CPAs, at least back then.

    But, I pulled out prematurely from the process. (Wait what?)

    Didn’t feel like fighting terrorism or the drug war.

    However, had no clue back then how politicized the organization would become.

    • The FBI, NSA, etc are going to spend the next couple of decades making sure broke people in Appalachia don’t use the n-word at home, because it would be an act of domestic terrorism.

      Those NOVA mortgages don’t pay themselves!

    • how politicized it *would* become? FBI was politicized from inception. J. Edgar understood the power he had.

      I think James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid” should be required reading in every introductory civics class.

  2. The whole Wuhan lab leak story left mainstream media, and many public institutions, in a discredited shambles.

    So what is a “debunked conspiracy theory” and what is not?

    The Brian Sicknick story, the Hunter Biden story, the Russiagate follies.

    The problem is not “left wing media.”

    The problem is major media has merged into the Democratic Party-DC-globalist-think tank-academia-blob.

    The Donks actually represent multinationals, Wall Street, national security and media interests, and put on the PC face.

    • To your list of Hunter, Sicknick etc., let’s add that of N. Sandmann, a *16* year-old, who was spun by the WaPo, NYT, Nat. Review etc. as having been “spitting on the cross”.
      Is that sort of treatment of 16 year-olds in accord, with the tradition of being “grounded in conventional journalistic norms”?

  3. Just ridiculous. The question is what part of Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge did Rauch fail so badly to implement that Rauch not only gave Comey’s lies a pass, but reached out to ask him – of all people – for a blurb on a book about the importance of the process of filtering out politically manipulative lies in part by holding those liars accountable!

    If Rauch can’t accurately discern transgressions to follow the guidance of his own book, as regards the publication of *that very book*, what reason does anyone have to trust Rauch in his claim that anyone else can be trusted to do so?

  4. But he [Rauch] nonetheless presents the elite press, the intelligence community, and the public health bureaucracy (to name three examples) as noble victims of the Morlocks who aim to discredit them. His problem is that he never gets around to the myriad ways these institutions have abandoned the epistemology that he ascribes to them, and in doing so have discredited themselves.

    Rauch writes for example that in the Trump era “mainstream media, whatever its ideological priors, was in the bias-disconfirming business. It remained grounded in conventional journalistic norms.” It was? To pick one of many examples, consider Michael Avenatti…

    Eli Lake is accurately quoting + characterizing Rauch’s book and EconTalk interview.

    Would Kling defend the elite press, the FBI/CIA intelligence community, and the public health bureaucracy as noble victims basically pursuing truth? That strikes me as wrong, but not just wrong, but absurdly wrong.

    • See my reply to Ben Cole above, on
      N. Sandmann and Rauch’s pals being “grounded in conventional journalistic norms”.
      This all is not just absurdly wrong, but spectacularly degenerate, at least as much so as were the Bourbons, with their e.g. “let ’em eat cake” attitude.
      How much more of this crap should we put up with, before we start to wonder about those, incl. Arnold, who take Rauch seriously?

      • I should had a comma between
        “N. Sandmann” and “Rauch’s pals”, to make clear that Sandmann is not al all associated with Rauch’s pals.

        As for “too many people have given up altogether on trying to ascertain objective truth…. ‘troll epistemology,’ which produces a firehose of falsehood”, are Greenwald, Taibbi, Maté, Tracey, etc. inflicting ‘troll epistemology’ upon the oh-so victimized Establishment, when these guys expose the deceit of Comey etc., as documented in Horowitz’s report?
        Is it possible for *anyone* to defy the MSM, without their shills like Rauch whining about ‘troll epistemology'”
        What if it is Rauch himself who is feeding us ‘troll epistemology’?

        • Did Rauch etc. whine about ‘troll epistemology’, when his Elite colleagues were teeing off, vs. Sandmann, Page, Flynn, etc.?

  5. Listening to Rauch on EconTalk, it was very obvious that he had zero idea how science or any other sort of “group knowledge production” works. I loved the part where Russ said his description was a nice metaphor, and Rauch corrected him that it was how it literally worked. I think the most important part of Rauch’s work is that it spells out the way moderns, especially on the left but in general, think the world works, which is…. whew… not at all accurate.

  6. There ought to be a monument to all the heroes of the reality based community, from Jim Comey to Jim Clapper to Jussie Smollett.

    You’d climb the steps into the great hall and look up at marble busts of Michael Avenatti and Brian Williams and Susan Rice and Andrew Cuomo.

    You could pay homage to the whole pantheon. Lois Lerner, Tawana Brawley, Peter Daszak, Rebekkah Jones, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Michael Bellesiles, Nancy Maclean, Dan Rather, Adam Schiff.

    Al Gore’s immortal words would be carved in marble: “The language the IPCC used in presenting it is torqued up a little bit, appropriately. How do they get the attention of policy-makers around the world?”

  8. America is in a truth crisis. Its citizens have divided into tribes that believe radically different realities. Institutions devoted to finding the truth and creating knowledge have been corrupted by censors and bullies. The digital platforms that host our national discourse are designed to keep us outraged.

    Eli starts his fine post with this “truth crisis” note from Rauch.
    Rauch describes the problem well, but totally fails to understand that he, too, has become a corrupt partisan. It’s not just the FBI.

    These flaws in Rauch’s book are a pity. Much of it is superb.

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