Sep. 19, 2024: The ‘Iran, Iran, Iran’ Scandal

DHS hid arrests for migrants tied to terrorism; GOP gov. candidate: "I'm a black Nazi"; Dearborn mosque holds memorial service for Hezbollah fighter

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The Big Story

Iranian “malicious cyber actors” hacked information from the Trump campaign and sent it to Biden campaign staffers prior to Biden dropping out of the presidential race, according to a Wednesday joint statement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The announcement comes a little over a month after federal law enforcement exposed another Iranian hack-and-leak operation targeting the Trump campaign, in which Iranian hackers stole nonpublic information from a Trump campaign staffer and emailed it to journalists at Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. 

According to the joint statement, the emails to the Biden staffers were “unsolicited,” and “there is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.” Fair enough, although the Associated Press reports that the emails contained “stolen, nonpublic material from President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” so whether the staffers replied is somewhat immaterial to the question of whether they benefited from the information. We are also skeptical, to say the least, of the agencies’ claim that the hacks were intended to “undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord,” in the AP’s paraphrase. No doubt Iran is interested in sowing discord, but it is also quite obviously interested in preventing Trump from returning to the White House. The Biden-Harris administration has funneled billions of dollars to the Iranian regime via both official sanctions relief and sanctions nonenforcement, boosted U.S. trade with Iran, and sought to protect Iran and its proxies from Israeli retaliation following the Iran-backed Oct. 7 attack. Trump, on the other hand, nearly bankrupted Iran and assassinated its top warlord in a drone strike. You don’t need to be a genius to understand what’s going on here. 

Indeed, the Biden-Harris administration elevated to the highest levels of foreign policymaking an individual who might well have been an Iranian asset. Robert Malley, the lead negotiator on the Iran deal under Obama, served as the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran from 2021 until Spring 2023, when he first had his security clearance revoked and then was placed on unpaid leave from the State Department—and under investigation by the FBI—in circumstances that still have not been adequately explained. Three Iran experts who worked closely with Malley—including one he hired into the U.S. government, Ariane Tabatabai, and one he attempted to hire but who was denied a security clearance—were later revealed to be participants in an Iranian influence operation called the Iran Experts Initiative, run out of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Malley’s personal emails have mysteriously appeared in the Iranian press. And Kamala Harris’ top foreign-policy adviser, Phil Gordon, is a close associate of both Malley and Tabatabai, co-authoring pro-Iran op-eds with both of them. 

Malley was the subject of an Office of the Inspector General report earlier this week, which found numerous irregularities in how the State Department handled the suspension of his security clearance. After his security clearance was revoked, OIG found, Malley was allowed to continue working, participate in classified calls, and receive classified information—in part due to confusion within the administration over who Malley reported to. The OIG, however, did not provide any information about the cause of Malley’s suspension, and the State Department continues to say nothing. As Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said of the State Department’s handling of Malley, “If the Trump administration had done anything like this, this story would be leading the news on a daily basis.” 

Indeed, there is a stark difference in the amount of media attention paid to the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, on the one hand, and what Trump called in a Thursday Truth Social post the “Iran, Iran, Iran” scandal. The former is fake and the latter is real, but the first serves the party while the latter embarrasses it. Again, you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out.

IN THE BACK PAGES: David P. Goldman on the left-wing and right-wing distortions of Hegel

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The Rest

→Cross-border skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah continued to escalate on Thursday, with Israel announcing that two IDF troops had been killed in Hezbollah rocket and drone attacks on northern Israel and Lebanese media reporting large Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon. In a Thursday speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said that Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks “could be seen as [a] war declaration,” though we’d caution against overinterpreting that remark. The real news was that Nasrallah pledged to continue attacking northern Israel until a cease-fire in Gaza is achieved, thereby repudiating what the Israelis told Axios on Wednesday was one of the goals of the Tuesday and Wednesday attacks: unlinking the northern front from Gaza. Why is Nasrallah so defiant, despite seemingly being punched in the nose this week? Because he has the United States on his side. On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged against “escalatory actions by any party” in Lebanon that would “make [a cease-fire in Gaza] more difficult.” In other words, Blinken is backing the Nasrallah formula: no peace in northern Israel without peace in Gaza.

→The Department of Homeland Security ordered Border Patrol agents to conceal rising numbers of illegal immigrants with “significant ties to terrorism,” as retired Customs and Border Protection Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke explains in our Quote of the Day:

We had an exponential increase in significant interest aliens (SIA). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism. Prior to this administration, San Diego Sector averaged 10-15 SIA arrests per year. Once word was out that the border was far easier to cross, San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, well over that in 2023, and even more than that registered this year. These are only the ones we caught. I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border. 

The quote comes from Heitke’s Wednesday testimony at a hearing on the Biden administration’s border policies for the House Homeland Security Committee. Heitke describes the administrations steadily removing Border Patrol’s ability to deter illegal border crossings, including by vastly reducing the number of countries that migrants could be returned to and significantly decreasing the amount of available detention space, which left agents with no option other than releasing the migrants they apprehended. Heitke acknowledged that over the past several months, the administration has reduced the flow across the southern border by securing cooperation from Mexico, but he said he was “concerned that this will not be maintained” after the election. In response to a question from Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), Heitke testified that he believed the administration’s efforts to incentivize illegal immigration were “purposeful.” 

→And if “solving” problems by pretending they don’t exist is good enough for DHS, then it’s good enough for public school teachers. WGN News reports that Chicago public school teachers say they were told by administrators to give migrant students a “70 percent in every subject and pass them on to the next grade,” even if the students did not complete their schoolwork or displayed “severe academic deficiencies.” Most of the migrant students, WGN reports, were placed in predominantly Black schools in the South and West Sides of Chicago with limited or nonexistent resources for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. Indeed, the teachers who spoke to WGN said that they spoke “no Spanish,” while the migrant students spoke “no English,” making “communication virtually impossible.” 

→Say what you will about the journalistic ethics of right-wing undercover hidden-camera sting operations, but don’t say they never get the goods. Their latest victim is Dr. Jay Varma, the architect of New York City’s COVID-19 response, who told an undercover journalist for Steven Crowder’s MugClub that he attended drug-fueled orgies and raves—and blew off steam with “deviant sexual stuff”—while serving as senior public health adviser to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio from 2020 to 2021. Varma admitted that his behavior was “not COVID-friendly” and that he worried New Yorkers would be “pissed” if they recognized him dancing at an illegal club while high on ecstasy, but argued that “the only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then.” (Other tactics for blowing off steam apparently included taking MDMA and attending hotel-room sex parties with his wife and six to eight friends.) Varma also described the logic of the private-sector and school vaccine mandates he pushed in New York City: “I don’t expect your education to change your behavior, I’m just going to make it really fucking hard for you to do your job. You can’t get a job, you can’t go to a restaurant, your kid can’t go to school, it’s like, fuck it, I’m just going to get vaccinated.” 

Watch it here: https://x.com/scrowder/status/1836748691480158637 

→A CNN investigation found that the Republican gubernatorial nominee in North Carolina, Mark Robinson, has a history of making bizarre and offensive statements on a pornography forum, including that he was a “black NAZI!” Robinson, a Black social conservative, made the posts on the “Nude Africa” forum under the username “minisoldr,” which he also used on Twitter, Pinterest, and other platforms. In addition to declaring himself a “black Nazi,” Robinson expounded on his love of transgender porn, expressed a desire for the return of slavery (so that he could buy slaves), and admitted to sneaking into a vent so that he could “peep” on women showering when he was 14 years old. Robinson also made several antisemitic comments, writing in 2012 that he would prefer Hitler over “any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” and describing the 1970s sitcom Good Times as “a bunch of heb[e] written liberal bullshit!” 

→Shot:

That’s the allegedly former U.S. President Barack Obama meeting with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

→Chaser: 

Opposition leader Yair Lapid slams efforts to oust Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in favor of New Hope chief Gideon Sa’ar, calling out the leaders of the Knesset for their “moral bankruptcy.”

That’s from a Thursday report in The Times of Israel on Lapid’s remarks today at the Social Justice for the Rehabilitation of Israel conference, in which he accused ultra-Orthodox leaders of attempting to oust Gallant in order to avoid ultra-Orthodox conscription. Multiple media reports from earlier this week suggested that the dispute between Netanyahu and Gallant centered on the latter’s opposition to a war with Hezbollah, motivated in part by his fear of upsetting the Americans. 

→Ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’ Thursday visit to Michigan, the Uncommitted National Movement, which organized the anti-Biden vote in this year’s Democratic primary to protest U.S. support for Israel, announced that it would not endorse Harris for president. In what we’re sure is completely unrelated news, a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, the Islamic Institute of Knowledge, announced a memorial service for “the Martyr Fadel Abbas Bazzi,” a Hezbollah member who was killed this week in Lebanon, some of whose family members apparently attend the mosque. Earlier this year, the Middle East Media Research Institute reported on an April 12 sermon by the same mosque’s imam, in which he declared that “if you want a real democratic country, you need to reeducate the Jews.” A separate Dearborn mosque, the Islamic Center of America, will be holding a candlelight vigil and medical fundraiser for Lebanon on Friday. 

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Right-Hegel Meets Left-Hegel

The misreading of Hegel that Alexandre Kojève shared with Leo Strauss

By David P. Goldman

No idea has fallen flatter than the "end of history," popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his eponymous 1993 book. Few still believe that all human beings will accept liberal democracy and free market capitalism as the final forms of society and are uninterested in any alternative. But like many truly awful ideas, the end of history had its 15 minutes, or in this case 15 years, of fame, as a catchall motivation for America’s misguided attempt to export democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.

This perverse episode of intellectual history had an even stranger provenance. The end of history began as a Marxist conceit invented by a Jewish émigré to France, Alexander Kojève, whose farrago of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger taught a generation of French existentialists—the identity-obsessed grandparents, so to speak, of today’s woke ideology. An apologist for Stalin, Kojève went on to a high position in the French civil service. But how did he become the ideological godfather of the "global war on terror" and the Bush "freedom agenda"?

Fukuyama explained later:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Fukuyama conceded that his idea came from Kojève more than Hegel: “There is, of course, a legitimate question as to whether Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, presented here, is really Hegel as he understood himself, or whether it contains an admixture of ideas that are properly ‘Kojèvian’ … In subsequent references to Hegel, we will actually be referring to Hegel-Kojève, and we will be more interested in the ideas themselves than in the philosophers who originally articulated them”

Stranger than fiction is the backstory to Fukuyama’s thesis: He was a doctoral student of University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, author of the 1988 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, who in turn was an acolyte of America’s most influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. It was Strauss who sent Bloom to Paris to learn Hegel from his friend Kojève.

At the same time as he invented the “end of history” meme that so influenced the neoconservative right, Kojève also contributed mightily to the triumph of critical theory in European and later American academia. As the late Sir Roger Scruton reported:

The dialectic of Self and Other is the great gift of German idealist philosophy to modern European culture … that we come to freedom and self-consciousness only by the path of alienation, and that the self is born from the confrontation with the other, in whose refusal to succumb and to be absorbed we recognize the truth of our own condition—the truth that we too are other, and limited by others like us. Now this story, told many times, entered the culture of France through a peculiar route—namely the public lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology given between 1933 and 1939 in the École Pratique des Hautes Études by an émigré Russian, Alexandre Kojève … The lectures were attended by almost everyone of that generation who was to make a contribution, after the war, to the emerging literary culture of a guilt-ridden France. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Lacan, Bachelard, Levinas, Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty—and many more—all attended. Each came away from the lectures with his own version of the 'Other'."

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The notion that history has an end begins with Isaiah’s prophecy of a messianic era in which the lion will lie down with the lamb (although the lamb won’t get much sleep, in Woody Allen’s qualification). Belief in the coming of the Messiah is a fundamental principle of Jewish faith in the list of 13 formulated by Maimonides, who added, “though he tarry.” Jewish heresies frequently take the form of “forcing the Messiah,” that is, claiming that human action rather than unknowable divine will can bring about the end of history. Forcing the Messiah pops up in Jewish history in countless guises, from Karl Marx’s proletarian revolution to the belief of some ultra-Orthodox Jews that a certain density of Torah study will persuade God to send the Messiah. The German émigré philosopher Eric Voegelin derided political messianism as “immanentizing the Eschaton,” or asserting this-worldly control of matters reserved for Providence.

America’s neoconservatives evinced a quasi-religious belief in the propagation of democracy, and some critics accused them of harboring the messianic illusions of their youthful dalliance with left-wing organizations. As Germany’s ex-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once told me: “It was a matter of great good fortune that I started my career on the extreme left of politics. When I came to Washington as foreign minister during the [George W. Bush] administration and met the neoconservatives, I instantly recognized them as the old comrades! I got the book by Richard Perle and David Frum, An End to Evil, and took Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution from my bookshelf, and compared them page by page. Except for some changes in terminology, they were the same book.”

The neoconservatives’ juvenile Trotskyism bore no relation to the unrepentant Stalinism of Kojève. On the contrary, Allan Bloom and his co-thinkers found their way to Kojève through their teacher Leo Strauss, who was never a left-winger.

Strauss and Kojève were the Odd Couple of political theory. Their friendship began in Paris in 1932, where Strauss worked on a fellowship, and continued through the mid-1960s. Their correspondence was published and read to tatters by two generations of Straussians.

Their professional as well as personal friendship reflected an overlap in their thinking—at least as some of their disciples interpreted it long after their deaths. If we know (thanks to Hegel as twisted by Marx) what the outcome of history should be, then we can save time and trouble by taking shortcuts that get us to that end state faster. And if we identify the natural rights that should apply to all peoples at all times and in all places, we simply need to put regimes in place that promote these natural rights. Presto-change-o, there’s nothing more to do in politics except bicker over the government budget. History comes to an end.

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What brought Strauss and Kojève together was a shared misreading of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Strauss had one big idea, namely that ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had conceived of a timeless notion of natural right, while the moderns, starting with Machiavelli and Hobbes, worshipped power and pragmatism. After the First World War, a generation of scholars blamed Hegel for the failures of the German Empire, casting him as a toady to reactionary monarchists. Scholarship has long since buried this "black legend," notably in Klaus Vieweg’s magisterial Hegel biography, The Philosopher of Freedom, released this year in English translation. In the 1930s, though, Kojève provided Strauss with the straw man that Strauss required to discredit the most prominent modern philosopher as a "historicist," that is, a pragmatist like Machiavelli or Hobbes who excused tyrants on the grounds that they suited their historical circumstances.

Hegel did no such thing, but he did something far more damaging to the program of Leo Strauss: He argued that reason could not flourish except in a free society. For “reason,” Hegel used the term Vernunft, which has the same root as vernehmen, to interrogate, as in a police investigation. Hegel argued for a state based on Vernunft, which in turn required the interchange of ideas among free citizens. To exercise Vernunft means to step outside one’s own premises and investigate how our minds frame ideas in order to elicit better ones.

The nub of Hegel’s celebrated chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in the Phenomenology of Mind is an idea inimical to Strauss’ power-oriented elite politics, namely that the exercise of power in slave societies corrupts the thinking of the elite. In Hegel’s telling, the master who enslaves other human beings becomes a slave himself through his dependency on the labor of others, and the slave who does the actual work becomes a master by virtue of his labor. Just as the slave defines himself by the master, the master defines himself by the slave. Therefore, no one is free unless all are free.

Hegel’s argument takes a form similar to the familiar joke about the am ha’aretz who asks a rabbi for Talmud lessons. The rabbi asks: "Two burglars go into a house, one through the door and the other down the chimney. Which one washes his face afterward?" The man replies: "The one that went down the chimney." "Wrong!" instructs the rabbi. "The one that went down the chimney sees his accomplice's clean face and assumes that his face is also clean, and the one that went in the door sees the other burglar’s face and assumes that it is also dirty—so the one who went through the door washes his face.”

Hegel is making a deeper point about the nature of freedom. If you can choose anything you want, then all choices are equally meaningless, not to say unsatisfying; think of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Absolute, arbitrary freedom is no different from slavery. Hegel was no relativist in the sense of Karl Savigny’s German historical school, which he abhorred. He does not believe that all ideas have equal validity in their time. On the contrary, he tries to demonstrate that only a free society can bring forth a fully developed concept of freedom itself.

Hegel proposes to solve the antinomy of freedom and necessity by cultivating a critical reason that freely chooses what is necessary. His Vernunft is self-critical and therefore has a social dimension, unlike Aristotle’s passive contemplation of the world. Franz Rosenzweig, who wrote his dissertation on Hegel, expressed the same critique of antiquity more colorfully, by reference to Aesop’s fable of the fox who observes that many tracks lead into the lion’s cave but none lead out:

People, State, and whatever else the societies of antiquity may have been, are lion’s caves before which one sees the tracks of the Individual entering, but not leaving. In fact, the individual human stands before society as a whole: he knows that he is only a part … The State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State … The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arises from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts. [ Franz Rosenzweig, Stern der Erloesung (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt 1988), pp 59-60, author’s translation].

“We see real freedom blossoming in Greece,” Hegel wrote, “but still in a certain form, caught in a specific constraint, because there still were slaves, and because the states were conditioned by slavery. Superficially we can make a first attempt to characterize freedom in the Orient, in Greece, and among the Germanic [Hegel means European] peoples in the following abstraction: In the East only one (namely the despot) is free; in Greece a few are free; in European life, the dictum holds that all are free, that is, the human person qua person is free. But in this case, the lone individual in the East cannot be free, because a precondition for this is that the others also were free. Thus we encounter in the East only desire, arbitrariness, that is, formal freedom, the abstract identity of self-consciousness, or 'I = I.' By contrast, in Greece, the particular statement is at hand; thus the Athenians and the Spartans are free, but not the Messenians or the Helots."

Strauss insisted that reason could derive natural right at any time and place that philosophers might discover it. The fact that most cultures at most times in history do not recognize natural right is irrelevant, Strauss wrote in Natural Right and History. Yet it is hard to pin down a definition of Straussian natural right. Infanticide was commonplace in classical Greece, and unambiguously defended by Aristotle for children born with eight months or less of gestation. A quarter of Athens’ fifth-century population were slaves. Athens killed the men of Melos and enslaved its women and children in 416 BCE Greek society not only tolerated but in some cases promoted homosexuality. So where do we stop relativizing?

Kojéve validated Strauss’ claim that Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” chapter is a normative portrait of the relation between ruler and subject, which is in turn crucial to Strauss’ assertion that both his political theory and Hegel’s begin with Thomas Hobbes, the apologist for absolute monarchy. In November 1936, Kojéve wrote to Strauss: “Everything you write is correct. Hegel undoubtedly takes Hobbes as his point of departure. A comparison is surely worthwhile, and I would have liked to make it with you.” Strauss exulted in response: “I know only one truly intelligent man in Paris, and that is—Kochevnikoff (Kojéve’s original Russian name before he Gallicized it).”

This is provably tendentious. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel states plainly that Hobbes advocates the opposite of Vernunft: “Hobbes insisted on passive obedience and the absolute arbitrariness of royal power … Hobbes' law is to subject the private will to the general will." As the late political theorist Patrick Riley observed, Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” critiques slave societies one step removed from the state of nature. By no means it is a rationalization for Hobbes’ absolutism. Riley’s 1981 dissection of Kojéve’s misrepresentation of Hegel predated Fukuyama’s book, and should have discouraged its publication. The Strauss-Kojéve thesis about Hegel and Hobbes has been discredited by more recent scholarship, notably by Ludwig Siep.

It is revealing that neither Strauss nor Kojève addressed Hegel’s mature political treatise, The Philosophy of Right, as Patrick Riley has noted. The debate between tradition and reason—between Russell Kirk, among others, and the Straussians—appears as an either/or in American discourse. Meanwhile, Hegel’s view is and/both. That is not a compromise between values inculcated by experience and ratiocination, for Hegel associates these factors with different functions of the mind. We imbibe our being, that is, our ethics and identity, from the family, over which we have no choice. Civil society, including the marketplace and the professions, is the realm of free individual choice, but the market draws on the calculating and sorting faculty of mind, or the understanding. Vernunft, self-critical reason, is what we might refer to as the vision thing. We cannot extricate ourselves from tradition, but we do not have to receive it uncritically; and we cannot have a free society without a free market, with the proviso that the market cannot regulate itself.

It is a chilling thought that Kojeve’s distortion of Hegel’s ideas is so virulent that it became the ideology of default of Western academia on both sides of the political aisle, dictating the failed politics of empire at the same time as it dictates the politics of woke street protesters who claim to welcome the empire’s fall—an irony that Hegel would likely have appreciated and cited as proof of his understanding for how history moves. Perhaps the best cure for left Hegelianism in both its woke and neocon forms is Hegel himself.

Hegel is the great refuter of the notion that philosophy can yield absolute truth. The recurring antinomies of philosophy—dogmatism vs. skepticism, nominalism vs. realism, the one and the many, finitude vs. infinity—all reflect the way we formulate problems. Philosophy gives us tools to critique the way we think, but it cannot tell us what to think. No philosophy can demonstrate that every human being is a living image of God. Only God can.