Idiot America Indeed
2024's Flaming Feculence Awards go to Charles P. Pierce and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas.
Today’s post is not about politics but, rather, about contemporary journalism’s compulsion to besoil itself in the service of politics. The excess and carelessness engendered by political servility plopped squarely this week upon the heads of Charles P. Pierce (Esquire magazine) and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (ABC’s The View). Both sought to justify Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden by pointing to peculiar antecedents. Pierce cited George H. W. Bush’s pardon of his son Neil, and Navarro-Cárdenas cited Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. Their examples were peculiar because (1) Neil Bush was never convicted or even charged with any crimes, and (2) Hunter deButts never existed. Navarro-Cárdenas learned of Hunter deButts’s pardon from the often-hallucinatory ChatGPT. Pierce apparently bypassed electronic sources, plumbed purported facts from the depths of his own imagination, shunted them past whatever vestigial fact-checking routines exist at Esquire, and shot them out to gullible readers. Across the Internet some of those readers are yet spreading the Parables of Neil Bush and Hunter deButts.
WRITE, RETRENCH, RETRACT
There is a delicious compôte of irony and schadenfreude inherent in witnessing a staggeringly idiotic journalistic blunder coming from a writer whose most recent book was titled Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009). To understand Pierce, it is helpful to know that he previously wrote that:
“It is as clear as it ever was that the prion disease that has afflicted American conservatism since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkey-brains in the mid-1970s has reached an acute stage.
Pierce is so enraptured by his prion metaphor that he regurgitates it over and over, year after year, in situation after situation.
This week, Pierce wielded his literary sword in defense of Hunter Biden’s pardon. His original headline read:
“A President Shouldn't Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”
with the subhead:
“Nobody defines Poppy Bush's presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.”
In a few compact sentences, Pierce manages to be misleading, rude, petty, condescending, puerile, vulgar, and uncivil. Word soon reached Esquire’s editors, who quickly affixed a small Band-Aid to stanch the massive bleeding. As you can see in this archived version 2.0, the headline became:
“Hunter Biden Isn't the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”
and the subhead became:
“Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son's struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.”
An editor’s note mumbled:
“Editor’s Note: This story has been updated. An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.”
But this was not one itty-bitty error spoiling an otherwise informative piece. Rather, the entirety of original article rested upon Pierce’s hallucinatory fantasy, and its edited carcass became nothing more than a non sequitur. Instead of *It’s OK that Biden gave Hunter a breathtakingly broad pardon because Bush 41 also pardoned his troubled son,* the article’s thrust became *It’s OK that Biden gave Hunter a breathtakingly broad pardon because Bush 41 also issued some pardons and, oh, come to think of it, his son had some troubles, too.*
The Band-Aid failed to stanch the wound, and the article soon bled out. The link now leads to a forlorn statement that:
“This Column Is No Longer Available
Editor’s Note: This column has been removed due to an error. The original article stated incorrectly that President George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the mistake.”
Some X/Twitter wag parodied this finding with the following (fake) PolitiFact fact check:
As fits this era, however, the fever swamps of social media are still awash with Bush-pardoned-Neil-so-Joe-can-pardon-Hunter diatribes. Given that, it’s worth a glance back at Neil Bush’s troubles. He served on the board of directors of Silverado Savings and Loan in Denver from 1985 to 1988—while his father was vice president and preparing to run for president. When the S&L industry collapsed, Silverado failed—as did one-third of all S&Ls in the United States. The FDIC sued Silverado’s board, and Bush paid a $50,000 settlement. Some argue that Neil Bush was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time and that the lawsuit may have been an attempt to embarrass his father. I don’t recall enough about the case to agree or disagree, but I do know that the failure of over 1,000 S&Ls resulted primarily from terribly designed federal regulations. So far as I can tell, Neil Bush was never charged with any crimes. Ever the charmer, Pierce also slathers his article with sordid, irrelevant details of Neil Bush’s divorce.
As a homework exercise, I leave it to readers to compare Neil Bush’s troubles with Hunter Biden’s.
NO IFs, ANDs, OR deBUTTS
The day before Esquire’s humiliation, The View’s Ana Navarro-Cárdenas embarked on a journey nearly as idiotic as Charlie Pierce’s. On X/Twitter, she posted:
“Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts. … Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger. … Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charlie Kushner. And just appointed him Ambassador to France. … But tell me again how Joe Biden ‘is setting precedent’?”
Well, let’s start with Charles Kushner and Roger Clinton. I’m not defending their pardons, but in both cases, they were pardoned for specific years-ago crimes for which they had served their full measure of prison time. In contrast, Hunter Biden was pardoned for all federal crimes, known and unknown, over a period of eleven years—prior to sentencing and with zero prison time served. As for Hunter deButts, no such person ever existed. So, the Biden pardon would seem, by comparison, to be a bit of a precedent-setter.
And how did the Hunter deButts enter Navarro-Cárdenas’s scope of view? X readers soon posted Community Notes informing readers that Woodrow Wilson had no in-law by that name. Navarro-Cárdenas’s response was to return to X and ridicule those offering the correction:
“Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with ChatGPT. [3 laugh emojis]”
So, it seems, Navarro-Cárdenas had asked ChatGPT for historical antecedents, unaware that ChatGPT is infamous for “hallucinating”—making up facts, citations, whatever. When the AI told of “Hunter deButts”—which sounds like a Bart Simpson prank-call name—it didn’t occur to her to do a simple Google search to verify its authenticity. She went ahead and posted it as fact. When called to task for this misinformation, she sneered at those offering the corrections and provided a ChatGPT printout as proof text. Middle-schoolers have greater awareness of electronic sources than this nationally famous thought-leader.
On X, the National Review’s Jeff Blehar attributed to Internet sage iowahawkblog the possibility that AI platforms like ChatGPT are already self-aware and purposefully post falsehoods, just to embarrass idiots.
MODREN JOURNAMALISM
This whole sordid tale is not just about Pierce and Navarro-Cárdenas. Rather, it’s indicative of far larger problems that have engulfed journalism since I was a small-town newspaper reporter in the late 1970s. Journalists have abandoned objectivity and made themselves servants of political movements. To an alarming degree, they have also abandoned the care that once went into the editorial process. (And if you’re wondering, I did purposely misspell “modern” and “journalism”—just to mess with you.)
If Pierce was going to hallucinate a story about Neil Bush, sentient editors should have been there to offer him medication and counseling. Instead, their staff apparently just uploaded his feculent musings and hit “PUBLISH” without asking questions. When faced with the realization that the article was based entirely upon an easily disprovable falsehood, they tried desperately to reverse-engineer a narrative that would somehow use the remaining fragments of the George Bush/Neil Bush story to validate the Biden pardon. It took yet another round of humiliation to get the story withdrawn.
In the case of Navarro-Cárdenas, she is a media celebrity with a vast readership, and yet she obviously lacks the most basic understanding of online information sources. Either she manages her own X/Twitter account, or she has a social media team even less talented and knowledgeable than she herself. And when informed publicly of her ridiculous error, she chose to lambaste those in the right and double down on citing a useless and unreliable information source.
A friend offered what is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole, sordid drama:
“I have no doubt that Charles Pierce wasn’t lying when he wrote that recent piece—he really had ‘remembered’ the fiction that GHWB pardoned Neil for something-or-other. Which reveals all sorts of problematic things. One being that this influential opinion writer thinks in such stark, black-and-white terms about those who disagree that his memory simply transformed actual events into a fictitious set of specific actions by Bush 41, actions that he not only didn’t take but had no opportunity to take. Which means that Pierce is walking around living in an alternate reality of his own invention, at the same time that he is lecturing the rest of us on how ignorance has taken over America. … It wouldn’t have taken very long for him to look up the truth—but he couldn’t be bothered with that. He had his completely fictitious memory, he trusted it, and he relied upon it.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my meeting with Lieutenant Kijé.
MAJOR HUNTER deBUTTS
I asked Discord to produce a photograph of Major Hunter deButts in his World War I uniform and asked ChapGPT to provide some brief details of Major deButts’s court-martial. Perhaps this will be of interest to Ana Navarro-Cárdenas.
Googling reveals that Hunter deButts is a real name borne by real people, astonishing as that sounds. Moreover, one of them evidently served in the Great War (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts). He married a descendant of Robert E. Lee, but she was not Woodrow Wilson's sister.
Another fine, thought-provoking column. Journalism has a dozen ways to say "we stand by our reporter's story." Which is really just a way to say "our editors were asleep on this one, and we trusted the reputation of the writer. Oops!" There was a time when consumers of news stories trusted the stories because they trusted the editors and fact-checkers. Legacy media outlets insist we continue to trust their stories, but they are proving themselves to be ever less trustworthy. Esquire might be close to trustworthy, but The View not so much. In this case, both have failed the test. Thank you for nailing them, Prof. Graboyes.