The Death of Evidence

and logic, and thought, and fairness, and a bunch of other stuff

A near-decade with a Great Orange Presumptive Devil has given writers an easy out. If you can work in a “Trump is very bad,” or a “something related to Trump is very bad,” you have publishable work. You can get into print, and you can get paid. Editors know that Orange Man Bad, and there are readers who like to read that Orange Man Bad, so if you arrive at the conclusion that Orange Man Bad, your evidence must be, like, I don’t know, whatever. What were we talking about?

And so the “news” is full of slop, inarticulate and empty lists of words that don’t actually mean anything. Remarkably few people writing in legacy media, the thing that calls itself “mainstream” media, know how to make an argument, a thing they mostly don’t attempt. They say that X is very bad, and Trump is very bad for doing or believing X, but they don’t define X, they don’t establish the presence of X, and they don’t provide evidence for the existence or relevance of X. The structure of contemporary mainstream argument is that Step One, assume the presence of X, and Step Two, see that X proves that Trump sucks.

Hear this: I argue that a great deal of contemporary journalism doesn’t ever begin to establish its premise, instead asserting things on the basis of unsupported assumptions. Trump is very bad because [this thing], says the op-ed essay, without ever trying to prove at all that [this thing] exists in the claimed form. It’s the old joke about the way an economist escapes after falling into a deep hole¹.

If you doubt any of that, take a deep breath and click here. I warn you that it hurts.

That subhed is miraculous.

Bottom line up front: The essay blasts “this macho nonsense Hegseth is peddling.” If you say the military exists for the purpose of being lethal, you’re indulging in empty machismo. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The author of this sack of crap is Thomas Ricks, one of our most distinguished military affairs writers, who has decades of experience and some well-regarded books under his belt. I read this one, and it didn’t suck. He should be able to…write? He’s been doing it for a while.

So let’s look at what Ricks is doing here:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is fond of talking about the need to focus on “warfighting.” He wants “lethality,” bigtime.

That sounds tough, so it plays well on Fox News.

But let me tell you why it is wrong.

The more you know about military operations, the more you understand that you don’t want to focus on fighting. That gets people killed — like your kids or grandkids.

I already want to sigh heavily and walk away, but give me a minute.

If you prepare the military for warfighting and lethality, that’s very bad, and people will die. The sophisticated view is “you don’t want to focus on fighting,” which represents a loss of focus for the armed forces. The core function of the thing itself destroys the thing: a cook doesn’t exist for the purpose of making food, and we don’t want our cooks focusing on that.

Setting up a bunch of fake sophistication in which military victory doesn’t come from the well-practiced delivery of decisive violence, Ricks sets up a bunch of supposed things opposite, things that are across the divide from what Hegseth says he wants:

Another Hegseth target is too many officers at big military commands. He wants to “downsize, consolidate, or close redundant headquarters.” It is easy to mock such staffs in peacetime. It plays well with the masses.

But when you get yourself into a real war, you know what is essential? Smart, well-trained staff officers who know how to write, calculate and plan on the fly.

So:

1. Hegseth wants to reorganize headquarters and seek structural efficiency

2. Which means he’s mocking the existence of staff officers and saying that military organizations shouldn’t do any planning

No. I mean, no. Hegseth has argued that the contemporary American armed forces are too heavy on flag officers, not on staff officers. He thinks we have more generals and admirals than we need. Hegseth says we have too many bosses; Ricks says that Hegseth says we have too many planners, and we shouldn’t do any planning. It’s just a straight up rhetorical switch, changing the argument it pretends to critique. Bob says we have too many tangerines, so Jim slams Bob for being opposed to shovels. Thomas Ricks has written a series of bizarre non-sequiturs.

None of what Hegseth says is a rejection of planning or strategy. Ricks actually links to the memorandum in which Hegseth supposedly mocks planning staff, which “plays well with the masses.” Here’s how it starts:

This is it: This is the memo Ricks links to in the paragraph about Hegseth’s supposed decision to “mock such staffs.” The Army must get rid of outdated and redundant programs, says the memo that somehow says the military shouldn’t ever have a strategy or do any planning. Can you find the mockery part?

1. Hegseth: We have improve long-range precision fires, air and missile defense including through the Golden Dome for America, cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-space capabilities.

2. Ricks: He’s mocking planning staff!

Scroll back up and look at the last block quote, the one in which Ricks say this: “But when you get yourself into a real war, you know what is essential? Smart, well-trained staff officers who know how to write, calculate and plan on the fly.”

He’s selling this as an attack on Pete Hegseth, who has never argued against having well-trained staff officers who can plan. It’s nothing. Thomas Ricks has written nothing, and Politico has published it.

Saying that it’s wrong for Pete Hegseth to mock military planning, without ever beginning to show that Hegseth has rejected or mocked military planning, Ricks also doesn’t ever begin to discuss the problem of the planning shops and strategic operations that Hegseth inherited from his predecessor. Hegseth is reorganizing, which proves he doesn’t believe in planning or strategy. But for crying out loud, can anyone think of any evidence that the DOD Pete Hegseth inherited as a leader wasn’t very good at planning?

Pete Hegseth isn’t good at planning, unlike…Lloyd Austin. If only we could go back to the status quo, which worked so well. How remarkably shameless.

We’re living through a decade of noise. “Total cognitive collapse.” A reader just asked me to take a look at something Heather Cox Richardson wrote, and the entire experience felt like this:

None of it means anything at all, while all of the things that have meaning and substance are erased or written over. Media product begins to look like a barrage of countermeasures, obscuring far more than it ever tries to explain or reveal.

1. “First, for the sake of our model, assume the presence of a ladder.”