There's an interesting ongoing conversation about neutrality and credibility I've been having, as I move further and further into economic and legal retaliation against Russia for 2016 via research.
Basically, the idea goes, if I want to be credible on foreign policy, I have to be neutral on domestic politics.
Case in point: this is me identifying money laundering and something I'm calling "currency exfiltration" for lack of a better term, happening in Russia's little lie-countries, the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics in Ukraine on whose behalf they're supposedly killing children and committing atrocities against women.
The argument goes like this:
If I want to be credible with the people who are presumably looking me up, after reading my work on the war - say, the people who are looking me up in Israel (היי, מה שלומך?), or someone from a partner-country intelligence service, or people inside our own government - then the idea is, I shouldn't have political content, or potentially misinformational anti-Trumper content, or jokes or whatever on my public presences when they look me up.
I've sat with this for a minute now; this is actually why I killed my old Twitter account with 1.3k followers. Thinking about it lately, though, at a practical and a somewhat philosophical level, I'm not sure that phenomenon is really true with the kind of audience I have or the research conclusions I'm drawing (publicly, at least).
There's a few reasons I disagree with this idea lately:
everything I'm showing is OSINT; it doesn't depend on my personal credibility to go look someone up in a sanctions database or on vKontakte and find them
everything that isn't OSINT that I'm working on, I'm not sharing publicly, and that doesn't depend on my credibility either, because believe it or not, I do work on things that I don't share publicly about; like, I'm not going to write a subStack with a bunch of people's addresses and phone numbers on it, that just doesn't make sense
the way that our foreign policy positioned right now, against extremists of various sorts and on the side of pluralistic democracy and international law, it actually makes sense to be on 'front street' as someone who isn't white - someone outside of default-white Beltway WASP-ish norm; like, it might be better if I was gay or something (unfortunately, I'm not), so I suppose you'll just have to settle for an Asian-American recovering-Marxist gun-violence survivor/competitive shooter and (unabashed) social justice "activist" as your diversity concession
clinicality and professionalism do not necessarily mean having to play along with default-white power structures that silence you and subject you to frankly emotionally abusive patterns of domination and hierarchy
The last most compelling reason, though, is that asking someone to be apolitical, with politics the way they are right now, is a very different thing than it is normally, if you are not a white person, especially if the status of your American-ness is at stake as a political question.
I find that Jennifer Rubin’s column in the Post, today, expresses this point fairly aptly:
The media blandly describes the GOP’s obsessions as “culture wars,” but that suggests there is another side seeking to impose its views on others. In reality, only one side is repudiating pluralistic democracy — White, Christian and mainly rural Americans who are becoming a minority group and want to maintain their political power.
The result is an alarming pattern: Any moment of social progress is soon followed by reactionary panic and claims of victimhood. It’s no mere coincidence that Donald Trump, the leader of the birther movement, succeeded the first African American president. Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently recalled the period of protest after Floyd’s murder in an engrossing podcast with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The movement, Ifill explained, was the first time many Americans collectively empathized with those who had experienced systemic injustice. But “those who are arrayed in opposition to justice and equality have not lost sight of it,” she said. “What they saw [in the protests] is part of what undergirds the current movement that you’re seeing around the country right now.”
Thus, Ifill argued, the MAGA crowd is frantically maneuvering to halt education “about the truth of the history of racism and white supremacy, of the struggle for justice in this country.” The goal is to stymie the development of children’s empathy and awareness of racial injustice.
In a real sense, the MAGA response is an effort to conserve power and to counteract the sense of a shared fate with Americans who historically have been marginalized. The right now defines itself not with policies but with its angry tone, its malicious labeling and insults (e.g., “groomer,” “woke”), and its targeting of LGBTQ youths and dehumanization of immigrants. Right-wingers’ attempt to cast their opponents as sick, dangerous and — above all — not “real Americans” is as critical to securing power as voter suppression.
I'm not a woman (again, unfortunately for diversity purposes) so I see reproductive-rights restrictions and the politics of bodily control as somewhat abstract, but I suspect it's even more dire for them, especially women who aren't white.
The thing is, if one of the two major political parties in a constrained bipartisan political system is predicated on, essentially, marginalizing you and your viewpoints and using that as fuel for a political machine based on nothing but oppositional critiques and hatred...
Not speaking your mind fully about it is basically playing along with respectability politics and the continual, cowardly deferral of white moderates that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to in 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail". It’s a different path than my white colleagues have to deal with; it’s a different set of choices, whether or not to play along with people’s stereotypes of you, or whether or not you speak up or just leave when they do something bad or stupid.
From my viewpoint, being apolitical in these circumstances is not only unnecessary and un-American, it's basically a choice to maintain silence in the face of a series of frankly bald-faced attempts to write injustices into law.
Increasingly, I'm not a fan of that.