I Am Definitely Not Telling You X, Because X Is Crimethink

but here is the information about the thing i am not telling you about

Near the end of 2019, the author Peter Bergen sat down with NPR interviewer Terry Gross to discuss his new book about what a moron Donald Trump is. Predictably, the discussion was formed around a long series of questions about the moron Trump’s pathetic worthless idiocy, and wouldn’t you agree, Peter, that Orange Man Bad?

Bergen played along, cheerfully agreeing to the whole thing: Trump is reckless, Trump has no core beliefs, Trump is an empty demagogue who doesn’t understand anything, Trump lashes out in random directions because he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to do. Bergen waved the Orange Man Bad flag every time he was invited to wave it, proving himself a Correct Thinker. And then he said this:

But, you know, to his defense, Trump hasn't made any major unforced errors. And he didn't order an invasion of a Middle Eastern country under circumstances which turn out to be false, which is George W. Bush. I don't think he's had any major foreign policy triumphs. I think that he has - on China, I think he's kind of got to a good place on that. You can disagree with the tactics on the trade, but the point is that identifying China as a major strategic competitor, as Jim Mattis did in his defense strategy, as H.R. McMaster did in his national security strategy, that's a change because previously we thought that, you know, if China liberalizes and kind of becomes more capitalistic, somehow they'll change, when in fact, the - actually, the opposite has happened; they've actually become more repressive as they become more economically successful.

So I think when historians write the history of this, they'll say that Trump kind of got China mostly right.

Bergen did that several times: Trump is obviously a dimwitted gibbering toddler — but, you know, um, somehow he’s accidentally gotten a whole bunch of policy, um, you know, uh, he’s…gotten it right. By accident. He kind of got to a good place on that.

I thought, listening to that interview in real time, that Bergen was conceding premises he didn’t believe so he could evade a narrative filter and say what he meant. I thought, in other words, that he was doing what writers do in repressive societies: conceding the apparent framing so he could quietly get in the facts that undermined it, telling the real story under the one he was compelled to tell so he could be allowed to have an audience. This is the way Soviet citizens used to read Pravda: between the lines, picking up the hidden story from a long-developed feel for shading, context, and deliberate omission. The headline says GLORIOUS VICTORY FOR SOVIET ECONOMIC PLANNING; the 27th paragraph quietly drops the data that reveals the depth of the economic failure, framing the facts as further evidence of success but knowing that readers will see what the numbers actually show.

So take a moment to read this new NPR story — highlighted today by el gato malo, who is a very bad kitty who engages in crimethink — which tells us that emergency rooms all over the country are experiencing a large and sudden spike in weirdly severe illness, and especially a weird spike in, ohhhhh, I don’t know, blood clots? Heart attacks and strokes?

Anyway, NPR says, it’s a total mystery why, and we’re not even mentioning accines-vay, nope, we didn’t say that.

Watch for this. There will be more of it.