How Covid-19 resurrected Steve Bannon

Plus: Did the World Health Organization fail us?

This is the second all-coronavirus edition of NZN, and I’m hopeful that it will be the last. I share the widespread expectation that the “peak of the curve”—the curve we’re trying to “flatten”—will be reached within the next week or two in the United States, which now leads the world in coronavirus deaths. The peak already seems to have been reached in Italy and Spain, which have suffered more deaths on a per capita basis than the US. Of course, passing the peak is a long way from escaping the crisis and all the fallout it’s created. But I hope Covid-19’s grip on our collective psyche will at least weaken a bit before long, even as we remain appropriately mindful of the challenges it poses. 

In any event: this week I continue to examine the danger that the pandemic will fracture the world at a time when it needs to come together—a prospect crystallized, I contend, by Steve Bannon’s impressive use of the pandemic to elevate his platform. Then I take a fairly deep dive into the question of whether the World Health Organization’s response to the pandemic has been sufficiently deficient to warrant an investigation. (My Slatepitchy answer: Yes!) Then I steer you to readings on such things as: using smartphones to stamp out Covid-19 without sacrificing our privacy; using smartphones to illuminate how Americans are spending their time during the shutdown; the pandemic’s very different treatment of rich and poor; and the pandemic’s impact on Yemen and other troubled parts of the world. Plus: a chat with Narayan Helen Liebenson, who was one of the two meditation teachers on my first week-long retreat, 17 years ago.  

Steve Bannon and the struggle for America’s post-pandemic soul

When Steve Bannon got his White House pink slip in 2017, there seemed to be at least two lessons for anyone who aspires to stay in Trump’s inner circle for long. First, avoid being depicted on Time Magazine’s cover as the “great manipulator”—the true power behind Trump’s throne. Second, avoid being quoted in a bestselling book as calling Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick.” 

But, however grave Bannon’s crimes, to write him off back then—to assume he would never again be a significant force within Trumpism—would have been to underestimate his resourcefulness and determination. A pandemic is a time of opportunity as well as tragedy, and Bannon is seizing the moment. And the way he’s seizing it drives home what a pivotal moment it is—how much will hinge on the way voters and politicians respond to the coronavirus contagion. 

Bannon, like many nationalists, is highly sensitive to threats from abroad, and he was sounding alarms about Covid-19 before most Americans got the picture. In late January his “War Room: Impeachment” podcast morphed into “War Room: Pandemic.” In March it started getting airtime on WABC, New York’s right-wing talk-radio powerhouse, and it’s also featured on various other talk stations across the country. A video version of the show airs nightly on the Newsmax cable TV network.  

Broadcasting from “Fort Defiance” in Washington, Bannon and his crew lay out a vision of how Trump should wage the war against Covid-19 (fiercely), how Trump should talk about the war (clearly and dramatically), and how amenable the post-pandemic landscape can be to the triumph of Trumpism. That triumph, Bannon seems to believe, will be easier if Trump and other prominent Trumpists follow his rhetorical lead. And Bannon’s stream of Trump-friendly guests, from Rudy Giuliani to Nigel Farage, probably increase the chances of that happening. 

Meanwhile, Bannon is getting attention beyond his base. He’s the star of the Errol Morris documentary “American Dharma,” released five months ago, and this month he created a stir on Twitter by getting respectful treatment as a guest on the well-known leftish podcast “Red Scare.”

“Red Scare,” actually, could be the name of his own podcast. If that podcast is, as Bannon clearly hopes, a bellwether of future Republican messaging, then at least half of future Republican messaging can be summed up in ten words: China is bad, China is bad, and China is bad. 

China, says Bannon, is run by “a criminal enterprise,” a “group of gangsters” who see the United States as “a tributary state to the Chinese Communist Party.” American champions of robust engagement with China—and he calls them out by name—are “collaborators.” 

Bannon says the CCP is guilty of the “pre-meditated murder” (and “I do not say that lightly”) of “every doctor and nurse that dies in Europe” and the United States and “throughout the rest of the world” for lack of adequate protective equipment. The reason is that in late January and early February, when Covid-19 was ravaging China, its government bought this equipment on the international market, thus reducing supplies abroad.

All told, Bannon explained to the hosts of Red Scare, the Chinese government is “in the process of destroying its own people and destroying the world as we know it.” He has vowed repeatedly that Chinese leaders will eventually be called to account at “a Nuremberg-type trial.” The trial will “take place in Wuhan. The Chinese Communist Party leaders are going to be in the docket.” 

One person who would love to see that happen is Bannon’s friend Guo Wengui, a billionaire Chinese expatriate who has been charged by the Chinese government with fraud, bribery, and money-laundering and is a vocal CCP critic. In late 2018 Guo and Bannon announced the creation of a $100 million fund for investigating corruption among Chinese officials, offering aid to their victims, and exposing Wall Street firms that Bannon considers complicit in China’s crimes. Bannon said he would serve as chairman of the fund pro bono, though Axios later reported that he was getting $1 million per year, for “strategic consulting,” from an obscure Guo-connected company. 

Months after announcing the $100 million Rule of Law Fund, Bannon helped revive the Committee for the Present Danger, a Cold War–era group devoted to fighting the Soviet Union—now retooled to focus on China and staffed with such imaginative thinkers as Frank Gaffney, who once warned that a newly unveiled logo for a Pentagon agency “appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.” 

Some people attribute Bannon’s intensified focus on China to Guo’s patronage. But even if he’d never met Guo, the strategic potential of the pandemic would still have fixed his gaze eastward. Covid-19 is a ready-made publicity vehicle for a populist nationalist who has long decried globalization’s dark side and has long considered China Exhibit A.

Among the Bannon-friendly morals of the Covid story: the more porous your borders, and the more profuse your connections to the world, the easier it is for deadly germs to enter your country; and if you let American capital roam the globe in search of cheap production, you not only hurt American workers but also build global supply chains that are vulnerable to disruption during a crisis. 

And then there’s the fact that China wasn’t fully transparent about the contagion during its early days. In Bannon’s telling, this can seem deeply sinister (even if, viewed with dispassion, it looks like the kind of bungled crisis-management that is pretty routine in human affairs and is exacerbated by an authoritarian system). The day before Easter, Bannon told his listeners that this early suppression of information was the reason they wouldn’t be able to congregate in church on Sunday. “When you’re not in church, remember: This is not a pandemic that did this to you, not a virus that did it to you. It’s the Chinese Communist Party.”

How fully Trump will adopt Bannon’s recommended messaging is unclear. For now, at least, he’s quit calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and this week the World Health Organization seemed to eclipse China as his chief scapegoat. Eli Clifton of The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft thinks Trump’s seeming vacillation on the China issue may reflect the fact that, though some of his donors (such as Robert Mercer of Cambridge Analytica fame) are China hawks, some emphatically aren’t. Mega-donor Sheldon Adelson’s gambling interests in Macao benefit from the support of Beijing political elites. 

But Bannon can point to other Republican candidates who are singing his tune full throatedly. On his podcast he played a campaign ad for Texas congressional candidate Kathaleen Wall, featuring a deep-voiced narrator who says that “China poisoned our people” and promises that Wall, if elected, will “cut off trade, aid and support to China, fight to replace Made in China with Made in America, and stand with President Trump to face down the Chinese threat. China is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a sovereign nation. It’s time to fight back.” 

After the ad, Bannon co-host Jason Miller intoned, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the future of campaigning in 2020.” In furtherance of that goal, Bannon likes to refer to “Beijing Biden, who’s bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Bannon is using the pandemic opportunistically, but—to give him his due—he’s not just another partisan opportunist. He’s a true ideologue with a truly Manichaean vision of the world. And the more I listen to him, the more I realize that there’s a case for viewing the world this way, as a struggle between the forces of darkness and light. Bannon and I just disagree about who is on which team. 

Here’s my approach to thinking about the question:   

A pandemic is one of many modern threats that don’t respect national borders. As regular readers of this newsletter will not be surprised to hear, such threats make international cooperation valuable and so make international antagonism costly. (Which is to say, the dynamics are non-zero-sum.) Climate change, the overfishing of the seas, the arms race in space, cybercrime, the proliferation of biological weapons that could make this pandemic seem like a day at the beach…and on and on: the world seems to feature more and more challenges that can be met only if nations, critically including the great powers, reach agreements involving mutual restraint or mutual sacrifice. 

Pretty much all of these threats can, like a pandemic, be exploited by fearmongering nationalists. (For example: Wouldn’t effective international agreements in most of these areas erode our sovereignty and enslave us to faceless global governance bureaucrats?)

So this pandemic crystallizes a challenge that may arise again and again: When transnational threats that call for international cooperation surface, they energize populist nationalist movements that can doom that cooperation. This point is so important that I want to emphasize it by quoting the tweet, from China scholar Ali Wyne, where I first saw it expressed crisply: “transnational threats will increase the urgency of global cooperation as well as the power of those forces that inhibit its mobilization.” Ironic—and not in an amusing way.

If this kind of nationalist backlash does become common, and the Steve Bannons of the world carry the day repeatedly, the collective consequences could be literally catastrophic on a global scale. I don’t want to call Bannon evil—I’m not that Manichaean. But if this is indeed a battle between the forces of light and darkness, I can’t say he’s on Team Light.

But I will say this for him: He’s right to consider the stakes very high, so high that to think of this the way he thinks of so many things—as a war—isn’t unjustifiably dramatic. And I’m not sure how many of the people who are on Team Light, including its potential leaders, really understand that.

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Did the World Health Organization fail us?

This week President Trump expanded his arsenal for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. He went from a blame-China-not-me strategy to a blame-China-and-the-World-Health-Organization-not-me strategy. 

Officials at WHO, Trump said at a press conference, are “very biased toward China”—just look at how, in the early weeks of the outbreak, they “said there’s no big deal, there’s no big problem, there’s nothing.” So Trump will be “looking into” whether to freeze US funding for WHO.

Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida is on board. A week before Trump’s press conference, he called for hearings into WHO’s performance. The World Health Organization, Scott says, “lied to us. It was intentional. People are dying because of it.” So, “as soon as Congress is back in session, there should be a hearing, along with a full investigation, to review whether American taxpayers should continue to spend millions of dollars every year to fund an organization that willfully parroted propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party.”

This is a familiar right-wing move: subject international institutions to scrutiny that, if all goes according to plan, can be used to justify cutting their funding. Then, as the script typically unfolds, global governance fans like me spring to the defense of these institutions.

In this case, though, I’m partly in sync with the right-wing move. I don’t agree with Scott that we should do the investigation ASAP (since at the moment both we and the World Health Organization are kind of, um, busy). And I’m not in favor of cutting WHO funding. I’m also not nearly as sure as Scott that WHO is guilty as charged. But the organization could have performed better in the early stages of the contagion, and there’s at least some reason to suspect that people at WHO knowingly and consequentially misled us.

Before I get into the consequential misleading, let me lay out a larger reason that I think fellow global governance fans should consider getting on the investigate-WHO bandwagon.

Institutions of international governance, like institutions of national governance, are prone to a particular form of corruption: they’re inclined to serve powerful interests at the expense of their mission.

For example: Back in 2002, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons—the international body that monitors compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention—was doing something that John Bolton, then in George W. Bush’s State Department, found annoying. OPCW’s director, Jose Bustani, was trying to get Iraq to join the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would have subjected the country to immediate OPCW inspections. As Bustani noted years later, these inspections might have made it “obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”

The Bush Administration used its clout to force Bustani out of office. He was replaced by an OPCW director less inclined to disobey America. Problem solved: Aversion of disastrous war averted.

I suspect that if Rick Scott had been a senator back then, and had been apprised of the Bush administration’s intervention, he would have been less outraged than he is now by the thought of an international institution betraying its mission under pressure from a powerful nation. But if you’re someone who genuinely wants global governance to flourish, it shouldn’t matter which nation is exerting the pressure or what particular mission is being corrupted. You should want international institutions to function with integrity and efficiency and you should want to expose them when they fail. You should want to unearth problems at both OPCW and WHO.

Which brings us back to the question of misconduct by the World Health Organization. The basic allegation is that China tried to “cover up” the Covid-19 outbreak, and WHO helped it do that.

The most damning piece of evidence is a WHO tweet on Jan. 14 reporting that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” This came 18 days after a group of doctors notified Wuhan health officials of a disturbing cluster of illnesses, and 14 days after both China’s national government and WHO were officially notified. Is it really plausible that officials in Beijing or at WHO still doubted that the illness was moving from person to person?

If you wanted to make the case for plausibility, here’s what you would say:

You can read the rest of this piece at nonzero.org.

Apple and Google announced that they’re jointly developing smartphone software that will facilitate “contact tracing”—finding and notifying people who have been near someone who tests positive for Covid-19. Blogger Nicky Case offersa cartoon explanation of how smartphone contact tracing can work without sacrificing privacy—which is the way Google and Apple say their system will work. Russell Brandom of The Verge answers “the 12 biggest questions” about the approach Apple and Google are taking. Efficient contact tracing is considered critical if the US is to emerge from economic lockdown without rapid recurrence of contagion.

The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner reports that, in New York City, the five ZIP codes with the highest rates of positive Covid tests have per capita income of $27,000, while the five zip codes with the lowest rates have per capita income of $118,000. The New York Times displays data from many cities, gathered by tracking the smartphones of high-income and low-income people, to support the thesis that “staying home during coronavirus is a luxury.” In the Washington Post, Eugene Scott explains “four reasons the coronavirus is hitting black communities so hard.”

The good news from Yemen: Saudi Arabia, which in 2015 led a military intervention that has greatly worsened the conflict there, declared a coronavirus ceasefire. The bad news: the next day Yemen, a country whose health care infrastructure has been devastated by the war, reported its first coronavirus case. 

Google used (anonymized) location data from smartphones to see how much activity of various kinds—going to parks, shopping at grocery and drug stores, etc.—has changed during the Covid-19 epidemic. Its Community Mobility Reports website offers downloadable summaries of the activity for lots of nations, as well as individual American states and counties in those states. In my county—and I suspect in many others—the only category in which activity has grown is “residential.” 

The International Crisis Group looks at ways the pandemic could “give rise to new crises or exacerbate existing ones” (especially in areas featuring conflict, simmering tensions, or weak governance). One problem is a possible lack of global leadership; the US, which led the international response to the 2014 Ebola contagion, has “simultaneously mishandled its domestic response to Covid-19, failed to bring other nations together and stirred up international resentment.”

The New York Times takes a look at how Americans are spending their money amid the shutdown. TLDR: Charitable giving down, alcohol consumption up, and boom times for home improvement.

Wright Show roundup: A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a meditation teacher of mine, Narayan Helen Liebenson, about her book The Magnanimous Heart. (Afterwards I felt had been too self-indulgent, but judge for yourself.) More recently I talked about self-actualization with psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, whose new book Transcend is about exactly that. (Scott is one of many authors whose publicity tours were vaporized by the pandemic.) My chat with British author Ruth Whippman (America the Anxious) touched on the pandemic but focused mainly on Americans’ distinctive—and, to Whippman’s eyes, weird—approach to pursuing happiness. And last week I had a conversation with journalist and old friend Mickey Kaus about the politics of the pandemic. A new conversation with Kaus, on the same subject, will appear in the Wright Show podcast feed, and on the bloggingheads.tv site, within an hour of the publication of this newsletter. (Trigger warning: Even though we’re talking about life and death matters, our tone isn’t very somber.)

OK, that’s it! Hope you’re all bearing up well under the various kinds of stress these times are bringing. Send us any thoughts at nonzero.news@gmail.com. And you can follow us on Twitter at @NonzeroNews.

Illustration by Nikita Petrov.