The Axios Survey, For What It's Worth

Once upon a time, Curmie was something of a math whiz-kid; he’s really good at easy math.  We don’t talk about analytic geometry or natural logarithms in polite company, but various applications of algebra, from grading spread-sheets to strategies for investing the retirement nest egg, have been very much a part of Curmie’s world for a long time. 

Even keeping in mind Mark Twain’s observation that there are three kinds of lies—regular lies, damned lies, and statistics—Curmie has been fascinated by statistics since he was a little boy.  Of course, knowing the numbers is only part of the story; it’s the conclusions we draw from that raw material that matter.

First, we need to consider the possibility that the facts are not only misinterpreted, but actually wrong.  Ask anyone who paid even a little attention in high school English who the groundlings were at the premiere performance of Hamlet, and you’ll get a variation on “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.”  The evidence is two-fold: it cost only a penny to attend, and there are dirty jokes.

But the fact is that we don’t know how much it cost to attend.  We have a grand total of two contemporary sources that state what the standard admission fee was at the Globe.  It’s a reasonable surmise, but still not a certainty, that Hamlet cost the same as other plays.  But whereas we assume that a penny was an insignificant amount of money, it turns out that as a percentage of the disposable income of a journeyman laborer, the price of admission to the Globe was almost identical to a cost of a ticket to the National Theatre today.

Curmie also has it on good authority that, notwithstanding Victorian era claims to the contrary, well-educated and even wealthy people think dirty jokes are funny at least some of the time.  That whole “my head in your lap… country matters” business?  [Note: in Elizabethan England, the “t” in “country” would have been part of the first syllable.]  Oh, Will, you naughty rascal!

One more thing: the Globe was an outdoor theatre, dependent on daylight for spectators’ ability to see the stage action.  The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker were butchering, baking, and candlestick making at that hour.  Hamlet’s audience would likely have looked like that of a Broadway matinee today: people who don’t need to work or are visiting the city, or those who worked different hours (the Inns of Court often did business at night, for example).

Curmie was thinking about all these things when he read the Generation Lab poll commissioned by Axios about the concerns of today’s undergraduates.  Titled “Exclusive poll: Most college students shrug at nationwide protests,” the article suggests, among other things, that perhaps the protests on American campuses won’t hurt President Biden’s re-election chances as much as might have previously been believed.  Students don’t blame him for the situation in the Middle East as much as they do Hamas, you see. 

Curmie apologizes for bluntness, but the idea that literally anyone would suggest that Biden was more responsible than the actual combatants has crossed the line into full-blown lunacy.  If you want to say he hasn’t handled the situation as well as he might have, you’ll get no argument from Curmie.  But to say that he’s more culpable than Hamas (or Likud, for that matter) is begging for a nice padded cell.

Curmie does stop short of declaring the entire poll and its interpretation redolent of bovine fecal matter, but that one eyebrow did indeed shoot upward and the opposite eye did close to a squint.  Believing that it definitely cost exactly a penny to attend Hamlet or indeed that the groundlings were who your high school English teacher said they were requires considerably less of a leap of faith than trusting these poll results.

For one thing, the questions are incompetent.  Notice that neither antisemitism nor freedom of speech and assembly is an option.  Of course “the conflict in the Middle East” didn’t generate as many responses as issues that affect students directly: healthcare, education funding, etc.  

The Vietnam War, the source of student protests in Curmie’s youth, was a different matter: college-aged young American men were being drafted and used as cannon fodder for a war many of them thought was unjust.  It’s hardly surprising that there were a lot of protests on university campuses.  What’s happening now in Gaza has little direct relevance except to those with relatives in either Israel or Gaza.

More to the point, given that there are an estimated 15.8 million undergraduates in the country, that “small minority (8%)” of students who have taken part in a demonstration on one side or the other represents over one and a quarter million students.  That’s a lot of folks in Curmie’s neighborhood.  There are multiple unknowns here: the percentage of demonstrators on each side of the dispute, for example.  It’s evident that a significant majority support the Palestinian (not to say Hamas) position: we’ve certainly heard more about them, and one doesn’t often stage a demonstration in favor of the status quo.  “Don’t divest” comes up rather short as a rallying cry.

We also don’t know why those students were involved in protests.  For some, no doubt, the demonstrations were more social than political.  For others, they were an excuse to skip class.  And to suggest that there was a fair amount of naïveté in evidence is only to state the obvious.

But even granting that the Venn diagram of those who see the conflict as a major concern and those who have actively taken part in protests isn’t exactly concentric circles, there is a good deal of overlap.  The statistic that jumped off the charts to Curmie but apparently not to Axios’s Sareen Habeshian was this: the number of students saying they’d demonstrated about the situation in Gaza and Israel was over 60% as high as the number who consider the Middle East a “most important” topic. 

That’s an extraordinarily high number.  Even if half of the demonstrators weren’t true believers, that leaves a third or so of those who regard the conflict as of high importance willing to demonstrate on behalf of their beliefs.  When was the last time, Gentle Reader, that you saw a demonstration about those issues more students allegedly care more about: better healthcare, education funding, or gun control? 

Even demonstrations about abortion access (speaking of an absurd omission in a poll about what matters to college students!) have faded as the Dodds decision moves further into the past.  (Perhaps abortion issues may have been folded into the umbrella of “healthcare,” explaining why it was the number one response to the survey?  If so, why?)

One of Curmie’s professor friends suggests that today’s college students, a group we might call the post-COVID generation, are angry at the world at large, and the conflict in Gaza and Israel is as good a flashpoint as anything else.  Perhaps.  But Curmie, old fart that he is, revisits Buffalo Springfield’s biggest hit, linked above, which is chillingly relevant 57 years after it was recorded.  It’s difficult to decide what the most telling line is.  “There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”?  “Young people speaking their minds / Getting so much resistance from behind”?  Or maybe the opening line, “There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”?

The one thing that is clear is that this survey tells us more about Generation Lab and Axios than it does about what today’s undergrads are thinking.

Selective Outrage or Biased (Non-)Reporting? Hint: Both.

Eric Swalwell and “Christine” Fang in 2012

Somewhat by chance, Curmie happened upon an article bemoaning the lack of New York Times coverage of a potential scandal involving Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and an alleged Chinese spy named Fang Fang (a.k.a. Christine Fang). 

This essay is going to take the form of “on the one hand, but on the other hand.” Let’s start with what could be construed as the right wing position. Yes, it’s troubling that Curmie is only now learning about this story, which was broken by Axios nearly a fortnight ago. This speaks to Curmie’s apparent insularity, which he vows to address, to the fact that the story broke during finals week, and to the decision on the part of the Times and other left-leaning news agencies not to cover the story. 

This last part is indeed problematic. Even if the story is the legendary tempest in a teapot, it does seem to be worthy of at least a modicum of coverage: an alleged (and likely more than merely “alleged”) Chinese operative who gained enough access to a Congresscritter that she could apparently get an intern hired, who worked as a bundler for that politician, who clearly was a close affiliate, and who may indeed have had a romantic/sexual relationship with him. 

There is no accusation of this last from a credible source (Tucker Carlson hardly counts), and Swalwell declines to comment. That said, if Curmie may adapt Bill Maher’s apt observation on the Anthony Weiner case from nine years ago (damn, was it that long ago?) to the present circumstances: if somebody asks you if you schtupped a Chinese spy and your answer is anything but “no,” you schtupped a Chinese spy. And it’s a stretch to say that either confirming or denying the allegation could be construed as spreading “classified” information. 

Moreover, the implications of case go beyond Rep. Swalwell’s being a member of Congress. He’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee, in which position he has access to sensitive information. Following a closed-door briefing by the FBI after the Axios story broke, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proclaimed that “The one answer that I got out of that briefing was there is no way Eric Swalwell should continue to serve on the Intel committee,” adding that “I just think there are definitely 200 other Democrats that I know could fill that place.” And it’s certainly plausible that the FBI would reveal information to Reps. McCarthy and Pelosi that they wouldn’t discuss even off the record with reporters: they want to avoid letting the Chinese know what information they have and don’t have, lest China refine their espionage activities to more successfully avoid detection. 

Finally, quoting the Axios article here:

Private but unclassified information about government officials—such as their habits, preferences, schedules, social networks, and even rumors about them—is a form of political intelligence. Collecting such information is a key part of what foreign intelligence agencies do…. 

Close relationships between a U.S. elected official and a covert Chinese intelligence operative can provide the Chinese government with opportunities to sway the opinion of key decision-makers….

China’s spy services want to influence [Chinese diaspora] communities to become more predisposed to the regime, as well as surveil and stamp out potential organized opposition to the Communist Party….

Access to local political offices can give Beijing’s intelligence operatives opportunities to collect information on communities of Chinese descent in the United States.

Meanwhile, other than a brief denial of wrongdoing—to a friendly interviewer—Swalwell has declined to comment… except for righteous dudgeon that the story had been leaked. Of course, he blames the Trump administration. Sigh. 

Oh, and the UK’s Daily Mail (a less than unimpeachable source, but still…) reports that Fang has a “lingering presence in [Swalwell’s] family’s Facebook friendship circuit,” whatever that may mean. 

So much for that point of view. On to what we’ll call the left wing perspective. Let’s start by quoting the Axios article that started this whole business. Remember, this is the result of over a year of investigative journalism:

U.S. officials do not believe Fang received or passed on classified information….

[A] Bay Area political operative and a current U.S. intelligence official… who witnessed Fang fundraising on Swalwell's behalf, found no evidence of illegal contributions…. 

Amid a widening counterintelligence probe, federal investigators…alerted Swalwell to their concerns—giving him what is known as a defensive briefing. Swalwell immediately cut off all ties to Fang, according to a current U.S. intelligence official, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

[In 2015] U.S. intelligence officials also provided multiple briefings to White House officials and members of Congress on the case, a current senior official said.

So, let’s review the bidding: there is no evidence that Fang got any information of significance from Swalwell or anyone else; that Swalwell knew about Fang’s connections to the Chinese government prior to receiving the defensive briefing, after which he immediately cut ties with her; that, despite the snark a few paragraphs earlier in this blogpost, there was anything illicit about the relationship between Swalwell and Fang. True, if there were an affair, that wouldn’t be something to brag about on Swalwell’s résumé, but he was single at the time, so the prospects for extortion are pretty feeble. And Fang is not accused of doing anything illegal in her work with Swalwell’s political campaigns. 

It’s also worthy of mention that among the Congresscritters briefed about the situation by federal investigators five years ago was… drumroll, please… Kevin McCarthy. But now, like Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” McCarthy is shocked, shocked! that Swalwell would be allowed to serve on the Intel Committee. Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow at the idea that McCarthy seems to have allowed this untrustworthy character to serve on that Committee for five years without complaint, but now, when Swalwell has become a particular thorn in the side of the Trump administration and has thereby achieved a degree of notoriety as one of the few significant Democrats under the age of 50, Swalwell is somehow unfit. 

We can readily imagine the tears McCarthy and his cohorts would shed if unsubstantiated rumors and scurrilous innuendo were to derail the political career of a rising star in the opposition party. Curiously, there are no calls for Swalwell to be arrested for treason or anything of the sort, only to remove him from an important committee. Curmie is trying to wrap his head around this part. The best I can do is to suggest that any kind of legal action would require proof, whereas wounding an adversary can be accomplished with scuttlebutt and innuendo, and demanding Swalwell be removed from Intel is sufficient to rally the base, which is the whole point of this exercise. 

Don’t get me wrong: consorting with a foreign spy is not an activity to be encouraged in anyone, let alone in a sitting Congresscritter. Still, assuming Fang was a spy, she appears to have been very good at her job. That she fooled Swalwell, and there is literally nothing to suggest anything worse than that on Swalwell’s part, means only that he didn’t detect her deception better than, apparently, a lot of other politicians, lobbyists, and the like. 

In short, show Curmie evidence—real evidence—that Rep. Swalwell did anything morally, ethically, or legally wrong. Perhaps that evidence exists, and perhaps the FBI presented it to McCarthy and Pelosi at their meeting. Perhaps David Koresh really was a prophet. Perhaps the moon is made of green cheese. 

But back to the initial question: should the Times be covering this story? Absolutely, because one of two things must be true: either there’s substantial and credible evidence that a member of the House Intel Committee has been compromised, or the House Minority leader is willing to impugn the integrity of a fellow Congresscritter without that evidence, whether to score some cheap political points or to engage in a little wagging of the dog to distract attention from Dear Leader Trump’s latest escapades or the GOP’s love affair with QAnon wackadoodles. Either way, there’s an influential Member of Congress who shouldn’t be allowed to serve.