The Greatness of Daniel Ellsberg, From Heroic Vietnam War Whistleblower to Fearless Free Press Activist. Plus: Activists Force a Science Journal to Retract a Trans Study | SYSTEM UPDATE #101
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Tonight...
Daniel Ellsberg, who made history by leaking the Pentagon Papers, died today of pancreatic cancer at the age of 92.
The 1971 leak, for which Ellsberg was responsible, was likely to send him to prison for decades, if not life, as he well knew when he did it.
And yet, At the age of 40, with some of the most impressive establishment credentials anyone could compile, he knowingly sacrificed his liberty because he believed it was so imperative that Americans know the truth about the Vietnam War.
Namely, that while top officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations were continuously promising Americans that they were months away from victory, in private, They were saying exactly the opposite, and were doing so from the very start of the war.
Namely, they knew that victory was not only impossible, but that the best case scenario was a stalemate with the North Vietnamese.
Ellsberg is most famous for the Pentagon Papers case, which fostered, as well, one of the most important press freedom rulings in the history of the Supreme Court.
But his significance was not confined to that controversy.
It extended well beyond that.
Indeed, the same values and causes that led him to that extraordinary act of self-sacrifice were the same that motivated his work until the last month of his life as he battled a very malignant form of cancer that took his life relatively quickly.
One of the great honors of my life is that I was able to meet and then work with and develop a friendship with Ellsberg, someone who was really a childhood hero to me.
And so I want to take the time tonight to examine his life, not just as a matter of historical significance, and not just to honor someone who is heroic in the best senses of the word, and not just someone who's Fame has probably eroded with the passage of time but also because the controversies that drove him and the decisions that he made have so much relevance to today's politics and our debates in particular over foreign policy, transparency, press freedom, and war.
Then, a new study about gender dysphoria published in the journal The Archives of Sexual Behavior, which is published by Springer Nature, was just retracted after pro-trans activists pressured and badgered the journal to withdraw it.
This is far from the first time that political agendas have limited the range of what is permissible when it comes to scholarship and study.
particularly on the issue of transgender rights.
And we'll speak with the author of this now-retracted study, Northwestern professor of psychology, Michael Bailey, about the latest pressure campaign and what it means for academic freedom.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
System Update.
One of the most significant figures of the 20th century in American politics and probably the pioneer of modern day whistleblowing, Daniel Ellsberg, died today at the age of 92.
There you see the New York Times headline that reads, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, is dead at 92.
The New York Times has a particular relationship With Ellsberg, because it was that paper that he chose to leak those documents to back in 1971, and it was that paper that then began publishing them and reporting on them, even risked prosecution on the part of their editors to do so, and then fought the Nixon administration all the way to the Supreme Court, where they secured one of the most important press freedom victories in the history of the Supreme Court.
And I want to take some time to walk through what it is exactly that Daniel Ellsberg did both in the Pentagon Papers case but also for decades after that and the work that he did because he is not only such a important figure in terms of modern American political history but because the values he exemplifies are very much worth taking note of, in part because of how rare they are,
but also the causes that led him to take this extraordinary decision to risk life in prison in order to make his fellow citizens aware about the systemic lying the but also the causes that led him to take this extraordinary decision In order to make his fellow citizens aware about the systemic lying the U.S.
government was doing to them about a war in Vietnam that was not fought with a volunteer army, but with a conscript army.
Americans were being drafted by the tens of thousands.
Young men were being sent off to the jungles of Vietnam to fight and die in a war, the purpose of which became increasingly unclear as each and every year went by.
And yet Ellsberg had in his hands the truth about what the government was saying and doing, and the only way he could make that truth known is by undertaking a decision that far more likely than not would have sent him to prison for decades, if not life, and he chose to take that decision, to undertake that act of self-sacrifice purely as an act of conscience.
And again, that act by itself merits some reflection upon his death, but it's also the case that within that controversy, one finds many lessons that have direct application to our political controversies of today.
Now, about two or three weeks ago, when it became clear that Ellsberg's cancer was growing and that he had a matter of weeks and not even months left to live, I was approached by the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, who asked me if I would write, not necessarily an obituary, but a kind of reflection on what Ellsberg meant to me as a journalist and as a citizen, as a defender of press freedom.
As someone who was fortunate enough to be able to get to know Ellsberg and work alongside him.
And I said that I would.
And that article was published earlier this afternoon, which I encourage you to read.
The title of it is, We're told never to meet our childhood heroes.
Knowing Daniel Ellsberg proved that wrong.
And essentially, it describes the fact that there's that old aphorism, that kind of cliche, the attribution of which is impossible to trace.
That says, essentially, never meet your childhood heroes because they are sure to disappoint you.
And it's advice that makes intuitive sense because usually when someone is turned into an icon or a hero, the way Daniel Alsberg was, human beings are far too complex and saddled with too many flaws in order to make that hero image sustained through interpersonal scrutiny and interaction.
It usually Results in great amounts of disappointment and yet I wrote about the fact and it really is true That the more I got to know Danny Osberg the more that I worked with him.
I My respect for him only grew It was just one of those amazing episodes where somebody about whom you have all kinds of positive perceptions because you studied them in childhood.
They were this kind of imposing figure for me.
He was when I was 11 and 12 and 13 and started becoming obsessed With the Pentagon Papers case and Watergate, years after it happened, I was too young when it happened to really pay attention to it, but it was years later when I did, it's very rare that somebody that you meet actually ends up not only fulfilling your expectations and hopes for who they are, but expanding it and having respect for that person grow, and that's exactly what happened.
I was able to meet Danny Ellsberg in 2008 for the first time in Washington, and I remember being very nervous when I met him, kind of almost like a teenager meeting their pop idol.
And I remember so vividly as though it were yesterday that when I kept telling him that I regarded him as heroic, he not only was embarrassed by it, he didn't use this kind of costume of false humility, but he insisted that he wasn't a hero and that the reason for his view that he wasn't a hero was the fact that he regretted deeply what he did.
And he didn't regret the fact at all.
That he leaked documents that had been designated top secret and almost went to prison for it.
He regarded that as the most important decision of the part of his life that was public about his work.
The thing he regretted was that he didn't do it earlier.
That it took him some time to find the courage and that as he was searching for that courage, Americans were being sent off to the war in Vietnam to fight and die in a war that was based on lies from the very beginning.
But also that there were Vietnamese that were being killed.
The exact number of Vietnamese civilians who were killed in that war is difficult to know, but it's certainly in the millions.
And while you can quibble with this death or that as to whether it was the fault of the North Vietnamese or whomever, we were the invading country.
Just like we were in Iraq.
And we had no business having our military in Vietnam.
I interviewed RFK Jr.
a few days ago, whose uncle was president at the time when advisers were first sent.
And if you listened to that interview, heard him describe that he sent advisers under a lot of pressure.
There were 16,000 advisers that ended up being sent during the term of his presidency.
But according to RFK Jr., and there are reports to confirm this, John Kennedy, his uncle, the president at the time, started to become extremely disenchanted, felt that he had been lied to by the CIA and about the U.S.
security state and by the Pentagon, that far more Americans were being killed as a result of the deployment of those advisors, and he therefore ordered all American personnel to be withdrawn by the end of 1965.
A month after he issued that order, he was assassinated.
His Vice President Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated.
Lyndon Johnson immediately ordered or shortly thereafter ordered troops to be deployed to Vietnam, combat troops, and from there the war rapidly escalated and didn't end for a decade or so later after many, many deaths.
Now, what is so interesting to me about Daniel Osberg, and I talked a little bit about this when I interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, the former World Bank economist who had been at the center of a lot of institutions of American power and now has become an outspoken dissident of the American consensus and American pieties on foreign policy and economic policy, because usually dissidents
Are people who start off outside of the circles of establishment power and therefore begin as critics of it and they fight against it and they fight against it and they live their lives as dissidents.
It's very rare for someone who is completely embedded within establishment power to purposely remove themselves from it and make themselves an enemy of it.
And that's true for a lot of reasons.
To begin with, there are a lot of benefits to being an insider of establishment power.
You have access to all kinds of secrets.
You become very influential.
The esteem that is derived from that, when you are someone who's very well regarded in establishment circles, translates into all sorts of societal approval and material success.
So somebody who makes it into establishment circles rarely removes themselves deliberately.
Sometimes they're expelled, but they rarely make themselves an enemy.
And the other reason for that is the converse, which is while there are a lot of benefits to being an establishment insider, there are all kinds of costs to making yourself an enemy of the establishment.
And people who end up inside the establishment know that better than anybody because they understand how the game is played.
They realize the power wielded by the establishment.
I always go back to that remarkable moment of unintended candor when Chuck Schumer, who has been around Washington forever as a member of the House and then the Senate, Went on to Rachel Maddow's program days before Donald Trump was inaugurated and said how stupid Donald Trump was for criticizing the CIA and going to war with the CIA because as Schumer put it, everybody in Washington knows you don't make yourself an enemy of establishment power because they have six different ways to Sunday to get back at you.
And you look at Donald Trump's presidency and his post-presidency and it's nothing but vindication of the warning that Schumer issued.
And so people who are inside establishment halls of power, embedded within it, rising within it, know better than anybody what they're capable of doing to their enemies.
And so to purposely remove yourself from it and make yourself an enemy, as Danielsberg did, is extremely rare.
It cuts against normal human instinct and self-preservation and self-interest.
But he did it with his eyes wide open.
Now let me just walk you through very quickly what those establishment credentials were.
Ellsberg went to Harvard.
He graduated from Harvard.
He was always regarded as somebody who was extremely intelligent, who was constantly told that.
He succeeded easily in academic institutions.
In the mid-1950s, he enlisted in the Marines.
He spent several years in the Marines.
He rose up the ranks quickly, and he left the Marines as a commissioned officer and a first lieutenant.
He then went back to Harvard and got his PhD and he studied nuclear policy and economics and his ability to master the complexities and intricacies of nuclear theory and how the management of nuclear weapons made him one of the most sought after Policy advisors in the middle of the Cold War, this is the late 1950s, the early 1960s, when nuclear war, unlike now, was on everybody's mind.
People, kids were being routinely taught how to hide in bomb shelters.
The United States and the USSR came very close to ending the war through an exchange of nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And so people who were experts In the complexities of nuclear weapons doctrine as Ellsberg was as a result of the PhD he got at Harvard and the connections that he made were people who were very much in demand.
And so by the time he was 35 years old, in the mid 1960s, he had gone to work for the RAND Corporation, which is a nonprofit think tank that has long been, especially during the Cold War, the closest advisor to the Department of Defense.
He obtained a very high position within the RAND Corporation that required him to have access to the nation's most sensitive secrets.
I remember him many times talking about how everybody hears the word top secret and thinks it's these incredibly sensitive documents.
We're hearing that now.
For example, in the case of the Trump indictment, we've heard that in the case of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and Daniel Osberg.
But he talked often about how many different levels of secrecy there are that are above the level of top secret.
Things that are categories and classifications we don't even know about.
And he had access to all of those.
And as a member of the Rand Corporation, advising the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration on nuclear policy, he was an advocate early on in the Vietnam War.
He believed in its just nature.
In fact, he was not only an advocate of it, but a planner of it.
He helped to execute its policies.
And it was through that top secret access and beyond that he began to see the truth about the war in Vietnam.
He saw it from the inside.
Every incentive put upon him was to be an advocate of the Vietnam War.
The path that was open to him at such a young age to obtain real power in the United States, I mean, really unlimited power, was wide open.
And yet, the more he saw The more cynical and skeptical he became, he began having access to and even participating in the preparation of reports in which top Pentagon officials, top CIA officials, top White House officials talking about the war in Vietnam were saying the exact opposite of what they were telling the American public in order to convince Americans to support that war.
The studies in which he participated and to which he had access, many of which became part of the Pentagon Papers that he leaked, said from the very first moment of the war that there was no way to win the war in Vietnam.
There was no way to defeat Ho Chi Minh and to vanquish North Vietnamese communists because the jungles of Vietnam made it that the people who live in that country and who know that country would always be able to fight an insurgency that no B-52 planes or Agent Orange weapons could possibly end up defeating.
That all we could do is hope to drag the war out long enough to have it be a stalemate.
Sacrificing our own citizens as cannon fodder and destroying that country in the name of saving it.
And you heard RFK Jr.
when I asked him whether he views the Vietnam War similar to the war in Iraq in the sense that it was an attempt, essentially, to spread democracy at the point of a rifle, as he described the war in Iraq.
And he said, no, I don't.
I actually see it as the opposite.
The people of Vietnam supported Ho Chi Minh.
They didn't support the South Vietnamese leader that we installed.
He was viewed as an American puppet, as a French puppet, as a puppet of the West, which is exactly what he was.
They had very little organic support, just like the people we wanted to install in Iraq after we removed Saddam Hussein, or the people we envisioned running Syria or Libya, who have no organic support in those countries.
They were very happy with the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, whether you agree with it or not.
And the Pentagon planners knew that and talked about it constantly and yet lied directly to the faces of the American people constantly and Daniel Ellsberg knew it because he had the access to this secret information.
Just like Edward Snowden knew that James Clapper was lying when he went before the Senate in 2013 and denied that the NSA was collecting huge amounts of spying data on American citizens because Edward Snowden threw his access to classified documents held in his hands the proof that he was lying.
And Snowden too, knew he was risking life in prison to reveal this information, but following in the footsteps of Danny Alsberg, decided that he believed that the only ethical choice that he had, the only way he could live the rest of his life in peace, Was to know that at the moment of truth, he wasn't intimidated and didn't back down from doing the thing that he knew was right, but instead revealed the secrets, the truth to his fellow citizens in the United States.
And that's exactly what Ellsberg did.
No, it's really worth remembering that we of course, most people know, that the War in Iraq was launched based on completely false pretenses, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and neocons like Bill Kristol, and the current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who back then was a war correspondent from The New Yorker, also purposely deceived Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks, and that he was in an alliance with
Al-Qaeda because after 9-11 all Americans wanted was vengeance for the 9-11 attack and they needed to be convinced that Saddam Hussein was allies with those who perpetuated it and they were told that that was 9-11 and Saddam was an ally of Al-Qaeda, could risk giving his nuclear weapons.
Those were the lies that led to the Iraq War.
The war in Vietnam was launched on exactly the same kind of false claims, namely a completely fabricated tale about alleged aggression by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 that turned out to be a total fabrication.
And even the Naval Institute and other arms of the U.S.
government now having reviewed mountains of classified information Have concluded that the claims that originally led to the war in Vietnam that convinced the U.S.
Senate to vote almost unanimously for authorization of military force to allow Lyndon Johnson to send combat troops to Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was a complete fabrication every bit as much as the lies that led to the war in Iraq.
Ellsberg started realizing that.
And started realizing that the entire premise of the war in Vietnam, that they kept saying, we're just months away from winning.
The next six months are crucial.
All we need are more weapons, more budgetary authority, a few more thousand lives to sacrifice.
At the altar of this war, 58,000 American soldiers ended up being killed along with the millions of Vietnamese civilians.
Just keep giving us a little bit more and within six months we're going to win when inside they knew that was a lie.
They weren't wrong in their predictions or in their assessments.
It wasn't a misjudgment.
It was a lie.
And Ellsberg, in his hands, had the proof that this war that was being prosecuted was being fueled.
Every night he would turn on the news and hear on Walter Cronkite or the nightly news Or in the New York Times or the Washington Post, American officials blatantly lying to the public.
He had that in his hands.
Imagine that you're in that position where you're reading the leaders of the United States tell your fellow citizens about the most important policy possible, the war in Vietnam.
Things that you know are not only lies, but are things they know are lies.
What do you do in that situation?
Because on the one hand, you have the evidence in your hands that you can show the public to reveal the truth.
But on the other hand, those documents have been designated top secret and therefore making it a crime to reveal them, a felony, precisely because American leaders wanted not to protect the national security of the United States or to protect American citizens, but protect themselves.
And the only way you could bring the truth to the attention of the public is by committing felonies that you know will make yourself an enemy of the establishment of which you're now a crucial part, deeply embedded within it, and likely to send you to prison for the rest of your life.
You can say that's an easy decision, but for nobody it is, and for Ellsberg it wasn't.
Now, Ellsberg tried to find a third way of having this information disclosed without having to go to prison for the rest of his life at the age of 35 or 40 in order to do it.
First, he tried to convince senators to read the Pentagon Papers into the record on the Senate floor because members of the Senate or of Congress under the Constitution have full-scale immunity for any speeches they give on the floor of the Senate.
So they could go to the floor of the Senate, read top secret material, and be comfortable and secure in the fact that they could not be prosecuted for it.
Edward Snowden wanted that to happen as well.
Before he leaked those documents that have now caused him to be in exile for nine years, and that would cause him to be in prison for ten years rather, and that would cause him to be in prison for life if he left Russia.
There were members of the Senate, like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who kept hinting at the fact that they knew that the NSA was spying on Americans indiscriminately in ways that were illegal, but they lacked the courage to disclose it.
Even though they could have gone to the floor of the Senate and done so and been guaranteed they wouldn't be prosecuted, they left it to Edward Snowden to do and risk prison.
That's exactly the same thing that happened to Danielsberg.
He tried to get senators to do it instead, knowing they had the protections that he lacked and they refused.
And then he knew that the only way he could possibly get this into the hands of the public was to go to the media and give it to the media and in all likelihood end up exposed as the source of this material and be prosecuted.
And that's exactly what happened.
He provided it to the New York Times.
In fact, what actually happened, and the New York Times admits this in their obituary today, was he originally told a reporter from the New York Times, Neil Sheehan, that he could come to Ellsberg's apartment and read those documents, but he was barred from copying them.
That was the deal he struck with the New York Times reporter.
And the New York Times reporter went to Ellsberg's apartment and broke that agreement.
He made copies, started making copies, without Ellsberg's knowledge or consent.
He stole the documents from Ellsberg, basically, and then took it to the New York Times to be published, risking Ellsberg's liberty before he was willing to do it.
But eventually, Ellsberg decided that it should be published, and he authorized the New York Times to start publishing it.
And when they did, the Nixon administration immediately came in, threatened New York Times editors and journalists with prosecution, not just Ellsberg, demanded that they stop, and then went to a federal court and got a order of prior restraint The first ever issued in history against an American newspaper ordering the New York Times to cease publication of the Pentagon Papers.
But Ellsberg was so determined to get this into the hands of the American public that even seeing how extreme the government was being, how extreme the courts were being, he then started making another copy, sent it to the Washington Post, and they started publishing it even though the New York Times had been enjoined.
And when the next administration then went to court to try and join the Washington Post, the Washington Post won.
So you had one judge imposing a prior restraint order on the New York Times, another judge rejecting it.
So you had a conflict.
The Supreme Court took it up.
And in a 6-3 ruling in the United States v. Sullivan, the Pentagon Papers case, they ruled that it was a violation of the First Amendment to impose an order of prior restraint on a newspaper, except in the most extreme circumstances which were not present in that case.
And that allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to get on with the business of reporting these secrets.
rights.
Now, the Supreme Court, when they did that, went out of their way to say, it's possible that the New York Times and the Washington Post and their editors are committing crimes By publishing these documents, we're not commenting on that.
That's for another day.
All we're saying is they cannot be censored in advance.
It was a very important victory for press freedom because it essentially made prior restraint in the United States inherently unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
That was something that was won as a result of Daniel Ellsberg's actions.
Now, once Ellsberg leaked those papers, it was a gigantic scandal.
The Nixon administration began panicking because obviously the war in Vietnam was extremely important to them and they were desperately scared that the public would abandon their support for it once they saw the truth that they had been lied to.
Obviously Ellsberg was prosecuted and I will get to that in a second but the attacks on him went far beyond legal process.
Almost immediately Top-level Nixon administration officials like Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman started publicly accusing Ellsberg of being a Kremlin agent.
This is back in 1971.
So we're talking about 50 years ago, 52 years ago.
And back then, the go-to tactic of the U.S.
security state for all dissidents whose reputations they wanted to destroy was to accuse them of being agents of Moscow.
Does that sound familiar?
Of course it should because that is still the go-to tactic for any dissidence of American foreign policy.
Every day you get accused of being a Kremlin agent.
That was the tactic used against Donald Trump.
That is the tactic used against every skeptic of Russiagate and that lie that emanated from the U.S.
security state.
And of course it's now the tactic used against anyone who opposes the U.S.
proxy war in Ukraine.
That was what was done to Danielsberg.
He was an agent of the Soviet Union, a covert communist, because he wanted to show the truth to the American people about the U.S.
government.
But that's not all they did.
This is incredible when you think about it.
The Nixon administration at the highest levels authorized a break-in to the psychiatrist's office of Daniel Ellsberg in order to try and discover psychosexual secrets that would shame Ellsberg and Undermine his reputation and credibility in the eyes of the American people.
And I remember when I was starting first to think about the Pentagon Papers report, when I was a pre-adolescent and then a young teenager, I couldn't for the life of me understand why they thought that would work.
Ellsberg comes forward and says, here are documents, tens of thousands of them, proving that the government is lying to you about the war in Vietnam and has been from the start.
And the solution to the U.S.
government, to the CIA, is to say, Daniel Ellsberg is a pervert.
Here's what you learn from a psychiatrist officer, but obviously link it through more covert means than that.
It seemed like an ultimate, the ultimate non sequitur to me.
But of course I was naive then, and These people had been around Washington for decades.
They knew very well how the game was played and they know that if you can attach to your enemy any kind of sexual scandal, nothing is more effective at making people not want to hear anything about that person than that.
Immediately when Julian Assange needed to be destroyed and they couldn't prosecute him, suddenly rape allegations materialized, sexual assault allegations materialized, the details of it were leaked about how these two women with whom he was having a consensual relationship asked him to use a condom and he refused.
Just the details of the person's life In a sexual way is one of the most effective means of destroying their reputation.
That was what they tried to do to Daniel Ellsberg.
They broke into his psychiatrist's office and obtained his files.
And they didn't find much dirt, and then they thought for sure it was at the home of the psychiatrist's office.
And John Dean, the then White House counsel, who is now turned into a liberal commentator, always going on TV and saying, this is worse than Watergate.
At the time, he was Nixon's White House counsel.
He had approved that first break-in, or the Nixon White House did.
And then he refused to approve the second one into the home of the psychiatrist's office.
But that was the nature of the attacks Ellsberg was facing.
And of course, he then ended up getting prosecuted.
He was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, which is a statute we've covered many times.
It's the one that they're using to try and prosecute Julian Assange.
It's the one that they use to prosecute Edward Snowden.
It was originally implemented under the Woodrow Wilson administration to criminalize dissent for those who oppose the involvement of the U.S.
into the war in Europe, into World War I.
And in fact, there were opponents of that war, mostly socialists, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for doing nothing else than opposing the war in Europe, World War I, and they were accused of being agents of a foreign power.
And that statute largely lay dormant until the Justice Department used it to prosecute Ellsberg.
But Ellsberg had admitted he was the Pentagon Papers leaker.
He didn't want to hide.
What he wanted to do was to use the time before the trial to give interviews and go on a campaign and convince Americans that what he did was just because they were being lied to about the war in Vietnam.
And he really wanted to go on the stand and say to the jury of his peers, yes, I leaked these documents, but I didn't have criminal intent when I did so.
I wasn't acting As a spy or for espionage, I was doing it because it was just, because these documents never should have been classified in the first place.
And the minute he tried to do that, the minute he went on the stand and raised that defense, the judge intervened and shut him up multiple times and ruled that under the Espionage Act, it doesn't matter what your motive is.
It's a strict liability criminal law, one of the few on the books.
As long as the government can prove that you leak classified information, you are guilty under the Espionage Act.
That's what makes it such a powerful weapon in the hands of the government.
It basically assures, makes conviction inevitable.
And one of the things I recounted in that Rolling Stone article was that Edwin Edward Snowden identified himself.
He came forward.
He never wanted to hide behind anonymity.
He came forward in an interview I did with him in The Guardian in the first week in video that Laura Poitras directed and filmed and said, yes, I'm the leaker.
Here's why I did it.
People like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton kept saying, oh, well, if Snowden really believes what he did was justified, he should, quote, man up.
That was the words John Kerry used.
And come back home and tell a jury of his peers, make the case to them that what he did was correct.
But they were lying.
They knew that under the Espionage Act, as a result of the ruling in Ellsberg's case, you are not permitted, once you're charged with the Espionage Act, to go on the stand and make that case.
That's why Julian Assange is so desperately fighting extradition to the United States, because he knows under the Espionage Act, his conviction is almost guaranteed.
And it was Daniel Ellsberg's case that created that precedent.
That's what he wanted to do.
He wanted to stand up and say, I did this.
I'm proud of it.
And I should be acquitted because I didn't have criminal motives.
The real criminals were the people who tried to abuse the secrecy powers of the government to conceal their lives and their crimes.
When Ellsberg turned himself in at the Boston Federal Courthouse in 1971, he gave a press conference, and we're going to show you just a small part of it.
Actually, I think we need to pull this up.
We're going to pull this up and listen to the questions that he was asked and the answers he gave.
It's a pretty short clip, but it's very illuminating.
You've had charges now hanging over your head, so to speak, for some months, and now more serious charges.
As time goes on and as you become more deeply entwined in this matter, have your feelings changed or are they changing toward the entire case?
Toward the case?
Toward the entire matter.
I can't regret having done what I knew at the time to be what I ought to do.
My duty as a citizen.
I have no way that I can regret that.
You're not having any second thoughts about your action there, is that right?
Oh, certainly not.
Dr. Ellsberg, at a recent press conference, you said you were willing to accept any responsibility or anything that came to your part in the Pentagon Papers.
The latest indictment says 115-year prison term and $120,000 fine for maximum.
Are your thoughts still the same, that you're willing to accept any consequences?
I have two thoughts about that.
I go back to my earlier answer.
How can you measure the jeopardy that I'm in, whether it's 10 years, 20 years, 115 years, or other ludicrous amounts like that, to the penalty that has been paid already by 50,000 American families here, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families?
It would be absolutely presumptuous of me to pity myself in that context, and I certainly don't, and I'd be ashamed of myself.
You know, those are incredible words to hear, but his actions back that up.
Now, I said at the start that he was most known for the Pentagon Papers case, understandably so.
It was an amazing act of courage and conscience in which he engaged, but it was by far, far from the only actions he took that were significant.
In fact, when I interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, About a wide range of issues, he on several occasions mentioned the work of Daniel Ellsberg that had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers case.
Ellsberg wrote a book about the secrets of the American nuclear program and he revealed the fact that the United States had all but decided when China in the late 1950s invaded and took hold of some small islands near the Chinese mainland.
That the response of the United States government was going to be first strike nuclear attack on China.
We're going to just nuke them.
And only because they withdrew from those islands beforehand was the world saved from nuclear apocalypse.
At the time that Ellsberg leaked this, this was in the late 2018, 2019, that those secrets were technically still top secret and he dared the government to come and arrest him.
He said, I just did what Julian Assange did.
Why don't you come and arrest me?
He also the way I got to really work with him was we co-created the Freedom of the Press Foundation along with Laura Poitras and other privacy activists that at the time was designed to break a extraditional blockade on WikiLeaks.
And other high-level officials inside the U.S.
government had pressured and threatened financial services companies like Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, the Bank of America, to cut off WikiLeaks, to not let them raise funds anymore, even though they had never been charged with, let alone convicted of a crime.
And so we formed the Freedom of the Press Foundation in order to circumvent that blockade.
We said, if you want to donate to WikiLeaks, donate to us, and we will give them the money.
We raised funds for them.
As a way of essentially trying to say the government is never going to be able to get away with destroying media outlets by putting pressure on large financial services companies to break the blockade.
Ellsberg was the spirit and inspiration behind that group.
He was the one who constantly urged us and encouraged us to confront any risks that came from that work, which were significant.
And everything that he did as part of that group, we eventually became a much broader press freedom group.
Defending journalist who did real journalism under attack was always motivated by that same spirit that led him to the Pentagon Papers case.
Now, again, the full story that, as I see it, is that article I wrote in Rolling Stone.
I hope you'll read it.
But just to conclude, before we talk to our guest, I wanted to show you Some last words that Danielsberg purposely wanted the public to hear and he gave an interview to Politico on June 4th so less than two weeks ago as he knew he was dying and the headline was Danielsberg is dying and he has some final things to say.
The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps.
Now one of the things that was so Inspiring about Ellsberg was he always used his status and platform because even though he was very controversial at the beginning the war in Vietnam has become to be seen by most Americans as a huge mistake as something immoral and so his reputation got vindicated and improved over the years and he used it to become the most
outspoken defender of people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and others, saying that these people were heroes, he had waited decades for people like this to emerge, that they acted in the same exact spirit and with the same heroism that drove him, and he used his fame and his popularity and his establishment credentials to defend new whistleblowers who followed in his footsteps, even knowing that they were also hated by the establishment.
So here from the Politico article, quote, during the course of our hour and 20 minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a, quote, covert empire around the world embodied in the US domination of NATO.
He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia's borders, that the mainstream media is, quote, complicit in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold, and that any notion Americans are, quote, ever the good guys abroad, quote, has always been false.
Quote, I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial, Ellsberg said.
King Charles III of Britain is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes, Joe Biden is.
Here's a point I haven't made to anyone, but would like to make in my last few days here.
Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?
Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953 and then Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominica Republic, Brazil and Chile.
I responded by saying those were all Cold War policies, if covert ones, and ask him whether he thinks anything has changed since and announcing the complete U.S. war.
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example, as the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of the country, Biden declared that the United States was, quote, ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.
Ellsberg doesn't believe it.
Quote, Democrats in this area are as shameless as Republicans, he said.
Our elections in the realm of foreign policy and defense policy and arms sales, I have come to understand, are essentially between people vying to be manager of the empire.
He was particularly concerned about the proxy war in Ukraine, having spent so much of his adult life studying the dangers of nuclear weapons, and was adamant that that war was an extremely dangerous and foolish endeavor, where we're risking nuclear annihilation over something that is simply not in the interest of the American people.
He chose to spend the last days of his life trying to sound these warnings About the same dangers, the same concerns, the same corruption that he spent his entire adult life combating to the point of being willing to go to prison for life.
In order to back up not just those words, but with actions.
And for that reason and so many others, I regard Daniel Ellsberg as one of the real heroes of recent American history, an absolutely extraordinary figure from which I have learned so much.
And I believe everyone can learn so much by thinking about and studying and reviewing not just the actions he took, but the reasons that he took them. but the reasons that he took them.
Michael Bailey's scholarly career took flight when he joined the faculty at Northwestern University where he currently serves as a professor in the Department of Psychology.
Throughout his tenure, he has delved into various aspects of human sexuality, particularly focusing on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Bailey's research has been characterized as a bold and uncompromising exploration of unconventional hypotheses, sometimes challenging mainstream narratives.
One of Professor Bailey's notable contributions is his work on the nature of sexual orientation, where he examined the role of genetics, hormones, and other biological factors in shaping individual sexual preference.
His book, quote, The Man Who Would Be Queen, The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism, stirred significant controversy upon its release in 2003.
In this book, Bailey explored the concept of autogenophilia, proposing that some transgender women experience sexual arousal from the idea of themselves as women.
While generating intense debate and criticism, the book also sparked conversations and encouraged further research into gender identity.
In recent years, his research and viewpoints on gender identity have faced increasing scrutiny and public backlash.
A new study recently published by Professor Bailey and an anonymous colleague entitled, quote, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, Parent Reports on 1,655 Possible Cases, was just formally retracted After pro-trans activists launched a sustained pressure campaign against the journal that published it demanding that it be withdrawn.
This is not the first time something like this happened.
A 2017 article by Rhodes Professor of Philosophy, Rebecca Tuval, entitled In Defense of Transracialism, which explored the differences between transgender identity and transracial identity, meaning why are transgender people to be celebrated and accepted immediately upon declaration that they're transgender, while people like Rachel Doziol or others who identify as a different race are to be destroyed.
That article was apologized for by the academic journal Hypatia after a similar pressure campaign.
Its editors were fired, and the journal essentially distanced itself from that scholarly report that did what philosophers are supposed to do simply because the political pressure became too significant.
We'll talk now to Professor Bailey about the retraction of his study and what it says about academic freedom and the right of free inquiry.
Professor Bailey, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about the most recent controversy in your controversial career.
It's good to be with you.
Thanks, Ben.
I'm honored to be here.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
So let's just begin at the beginning.
Academic journals, academic studies are sometimes kind of obscure for people.
So just kind of in the most layman terms as you can, describe what it is that this most recent study was intended to describe and reveal.
There has been an explosion of cases of gender dysphoria during the past decade, especially among adolescent girls.
Furthermore, these girls do not have a profile that is like what we are used to, what we have been used to, where as children, for example, they may have been Quite tomboyish and so on.
The present cohort does not have that picture.
So what to make of them?
A theory that was proposed by Lisa Littman in 2018 is that they have the syndrome called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
Henceforth, I will call that ROGD.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, ROGD, is a hypothetical, it's a theory, in which vulnerable adolescent girls, mainly, who have emotional problems, come to believe falsely that they are transgender.
They transmit this belief among themselves.
Pure contagion is thought to be the vehicle.
And sometimes this leads to serious consequences.
Some of these individuals seek medical transition.
They may get mastectomy, testosterone, and so on.
They often will social transition, they will cut their hair short, change their pronouns, and worry their families a great deal.
Our paper is the second study of this phenomenon after Lisa Lippman's, and it was a very large study.
My co-author, Susana Diaz, and that's a pseudonym, collected these data.
She is not an academic.
She's the mother of a child she believes has ROGD.
The data consists of survey questions and I'll just quickly review several of the findings.
First, As we would expect, most of the youth that the parents reported on were female, 75%.
Second, the youth had an abundance of preexisting emotional problems.
About half of them had a formal diagnosis, typically anxiety or depression.
Third, The youth with the most problems were the most likely to have either socially or medically transitioned, which is disturbing.
Fourth, the best predictor of transition steps was that the family had been given a referral to a gender specialist.
Furthermore, parents who did consult gender specialists felt that they were pressured to transition their children.
That's a good summary of some of the findings that disturbed the activists who immediately set upon the paper.
And when you're ready, I can tell you a bit about the controversy.
Sure, yeah, I definitely want to get into that, but before I do, this debate over transgender rights is sometimes amazing to me, given the amount of time that it consumes and the intensity of emotion it provokes.
If you go back and look at polling data from 2015, after the Supreme Court, Ruled that same-sex marriages are a constitutional right if people want to enter into them.
Polling data was overwhelmingly in support of the idea that adults who identify as transgender should enjoy basic legal rights.
They ought to be protected against discrimination.
It was part of this kind of culture war consensus that essentially said adults who want to live their lives in a certain way that they regard as Self-fulfilling and self-actualizing should have the right to do so without the interference by the state or anybody else.
That has obviously unraveled this consensus and I'm just wondering from your perspective as an academic who has the freedom to focus on any number of controversies that you want, knowing how kind of intense this particular question is and how much tension and conflict it produces.
Why is this a topic that has interested you so much that you are publishing several studies on it and are willing to kind of take these bullets that are flying toward your head?
Well, first of all, I find these related issues just intellectually interesting.
Second, I think my personality rebels against being fed falsehoods that are supposed to make us feel better than the truth. I think my personality rebels against being fed falsehoods that And And a lot of that is going on.
Third, you know, I've been attacked for what I do.
That's not a way to make me go away.
That's a way to make me stay.
This particular paper that has been retracted isn't about adults, it's about youth.
Adolescent girls are the primary group and it's not so much about their rights, it's about what's best for them.
And their families are quite worried, a lot of them.
Some of their families go along with it.
But we need more data.
We need to know what's true.
I do not claim that we have nailed shut the case for ROGD.
We sure need better data and it would be better if instead of trying to silence our article by getting it retracted, if everybody cooperated to that end.
Let me just kind of delve a little bit more, before we get into the controversy itself and how it unfolded, about the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Is the idea here that there are certain people, and always have been, who genuinely have gender dysphoria, who legitimately identify as transgender, but that at least part of the explosion
In the number of people now identifying as being transgender or having gender dysphoria is due not to an actual mental struggle that they were born with or that they have but instead due to influences that society is imposing that are encouraging them to identify that way?
That's exactly right.
There are a couple of There are two types of gender dysphoria that we have had around as long as we've known about gender dysphoria.
One of them is autogynephilic gender dysphoria, which you mentioned, which occurs only in natal males, and it is caused by autogynephilia, which is sexual arousal by the idea of being women, and a subset of Males with autogynephilia will become gender dysphoric and want to be women.
The other type is basically it's an extremely feminine kind of gay man or an extremely masculine kind of lesbian who have gender dysphoria.
And that is pretty rare among homosexual people.
But it has always existed, as far as we know.
This new kind, ROGD, it's new.
It did not exist 20 years ago.
And it appears to be the most common that people at gender clinics are seeing now.
One of the things that struck me in your first answer was when I asked you why this is an issue on which you want to focus, was you said, well, I find it intellectually interesting.
I was a philosophy major.
Part of the appeal of going to academia, which I didn't end up doing, was exactly that, that you don't need to have a utility to the things you're working on or studying.
You can study things just because we don't know the answers to things, and it's interesting to find out the truth.
And that was what made it so offensive to me that that philosophy professor, Rebecca Tuval, was the target of such a vicious campaign for doing something that is exactly what philosophy professors should do, which is examine Non-obvious questions, like why are we so celebratory of transgender identity and so contemptuous of transracial identity?
Maybe there are obvious differences, but our paper did nothing but seek to ask that question, similar to what you're doing, which is trying to get to the bottom of what is actually the cause of this explosion in the number of girls now identifying as transgender, which is exactly what we want Academia to before, I would think, and what we want academics and scholars to do.
So in this case, there seems to be a lot of hostility to that idea because there was an immediate attack on your paper as soon as it was published that has now resulted in what they wanted, which was a retraction of the paper based on a very kind of technical, non-substantive ground that seems to me a lot like a pretext.
So why don't you just go ahead and give me the summary version of how this pressure campaign began and then how it evolved?
It began by transgender activists and their supporters who made a big stink on a couple of grounds.
First, they complained about our method, which wasn't perfect.
We had a biased sample because Susanna recruited Parents through the website Parents of ROGD Kids.
So, of course, only parents who believe their children have ROGD are going to participate.
But, you know, we were quite upfront with that and that's common.
There are very few, if any, perfect studies.
The other thing that they complained about was the lack of ethical review Let me just ask you, what is that review?
board review is required of academics.
However, Susanna is not an academic, and she is not required to get IRB review, and so she didn't.
And the journal set it out for review.
Let me just ask you, what is that review?
What exactly would be required, according to this theory, that you didn't have?
Yeah, IRB review was initially justified, and perhaps well justified, after World War II, and atrocities by Nazi doctors and some of the Japanese doctors in POW and atrocities by Nazi doctors and some of the Japanese doctors in POW camps who were conducting experiments on involuntary subjects They were awful.
Joseph Mengele, for example.
And so people wanted to come up with an ethical guideline by which people could conduct ethical research.
And one of the key ingredients is informed consent, where people are supposed to be told what they're going to do, and they get to decide whether to do it.
And it has evolved to be pretty legalistic.
People often can't even understand the informed consent that they're supposed to read.
I would say generally people don't bother to read it.
They know what they're doing and they just say, yeah, I'll do it.
In our case, these were parents who came to a site And clicked on, yeah, I want to participate in a survey about ROG.
And it was very clear what the survey was about.
And that the last line of the survey, it said, when we get enough data, we're going to publish this on our website.
But the publisher, which is the Springer Nature Group, which is a huge conglomerate that publishes Many, a couple of hundred journals, including some of the most prestigious journals, they decided to retract the article.
I think that they were, they wanted this to go away.
I think, you know, academia has become different than it was when you were a student.
And when I was a student, academia is much less concerned with truth-seeking, bold truth-seeking.
And it's much more ideological now.
And activists can be successful in suppressing research as they Tried to be here.
Now, were they successful?
Well, they got the article retracted, but what does that even mean?
What it means is that Springer changed the downloadable copy on their website so it now has the words retracted article on every single page.
I plan to wear that as a badge of honor.
And I hope that everybody will download our article and read it because it is as true as it ever was and it's true.
We're proud of the article.
We continue to be proud.
Retraction is, I suppose, It's a way to cancel articles, but I really don't think they succeeded.
I think there was a huge uproar on Twitter and elsewhere, and I feel pretty supported by the kinds of people that I would seek support from.
Yeah, I think it's very noteworthy that I wasn't aware of your study.
Until the retraction happened.
You're now on my show talking about it because of the retraction.
I'm not, I don't cover trans issues very often.
I only cover them from the perspective of censorship, free speech and academic freedom typically.
And so obviously it has brought your study to my audience and I'm sure to other people's.
There was an excellent article in the City Journal by, I should, we should get the name of the reporter.
Do you know?
What's that?
Colin Wright.
Colin Wright, exactly, who wrote a great article, very comprehensive on what it is that happened here.
One of the things I'm interested in and it's really struck me is there's a lot of talk all the time about who's the marginalized, powerful, powerless, vulnerable group and who the powerful factions are.
I can't help but note that the co-author of your study felt compelled to use a pseudonym Because he or she obviously, I guess she, concluded that their reputation would be endangered, perhaps their job prospects threatened as a result of being the author of this study.
We see who won.
Yet again, the article that ended up being retracted was not one that took a pro-trans position, but one that questioned the dogma of the trans movement, especially when it comes to children or adolescents.
And so you can see very clearly who the group is with the power behind it and the establishment support and who the actual marginalized and powerless people are.
I'm just kind of interested though in asking you as somebody who lives in academia, who works in academia.
What kind of signal does this send, right?
I mean, you don't mind because you've been at this for a long time and you feel secure in your job, but I assume young scholars, PhD students, academics look at this and they realize there are just certain views and positions you cannot go near, including to explore unless it's to affirm mindlessly the dogma that you're supposed to affirm without having your reputation ruined and your career destroyed.
Are you seeing that kind of chilling effect from Episodes like this in academia?
Absolutely.
Furthermore, I could never be hired today, or my younger version could never be hired.
One really needs to have politically correct views in order to have a good chance of being hired.
The pursuit of knowledge is no longer even ostensibly what most universities lead with in explaining their existence.
It's more, you know, it's frankly, diversity, equity, inclusion is what most universities lead with.
I should say my university has been supportive of me through this Northwestern University Has not been a problem, but I think many universities would be.
Lisa Littman was at Brown University when she published the first paper on ROGD in 2018 and her university abandoned her and cut ties with her, which is common.
Did she have tenure?
No, she was not a tenure track faculty member.
But she was an affiliated faculty member and she had contracts with Brown University.
And one would think that universities would protect People discussing controversial ideas responsibly, as Lisa Littman was.
However, that is not what is happening anywhere.
You know, one of the, just kind of to ask one of the last questions, you know, there's a long time there's been a debate or people questioning the origins of homosexuality, whether it's genetic, whether it's the byproduct of social influence or parenting or some combination thereof.
As a gay man, I've always wanted to know the answer to that.
I always find that to be an interesting question.
My own experience, you know, of myself and people I know well, And I've never been scared of the question because I don't think legal rights depend on it.
I don't think that gay people should have the right to live freely as gay people only if they can prove that it's genetic and there's no social influence component involved.
And yet there's the same kind of taboo against even asking that question, where there's zero interest in having the truth be explored, only the political agenda served.
And I just want to kind of get your sense, and you did allude to this earlier, that the younger you couldn't be You know, I remember when I was back in college, there was a lot of debate about political correctness and whether it was limiting academic freedom.
But just kind of try and describe as best you can for people who aren't in academia, the extent to which it's gotten worse and what the climate is like around these issues.
Well, when I was a graduate student in the mid-1980s, it was a golden age.
We would discuss anything and everything of interest and freely.
And I felt that, more or less, up until about a decade ago, and then things started to change, and especially with respect to issues regarding race, which I think is the most fraught,
Because I am an expert on sexual orientation and transgender, and because I've been through the ringer already, and thus steeled a little, I feel less intimidated to go there, I feel less intimidated to go there, but I think a lot of people are.
I think that my colleagues, who Who are open minded, feel quite hesitant to speak out.
That is, I can have one on one conversations in a closed office about just about anything.
But what they will say in a meeting, in front of other people, is much, much less and that is different than it used to be.
Furthermore, It seems to me a university should seek out controversy.
That is, we have these important unresolved controversial issues.
We're better to vet them than at a university.
We should be holding meetings where we have experts on different sides But that is the last thing on university administrators' minds.
It's a shame.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's not that many places in society reserved for that kind of truth-seeking exercise that are not supposed to have any limits.
If there's any place where that should be protected, it's academia and it's amazing to watch.
Just the most basic foundations of intellectual curiosity and truth-seeking eroded so aggressively and deliberately.
Actually glad, though, that there are people like you willing to kind of be the target of this.
And as you say, even kind of wearing it as a badge of honor, that's the thing I think ultimately that will give us a chance to safeguard these values.
So I'm appreciative of the fact that you're doing that and of your time.
Talk to me about it tonight.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
And have a great evening.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Bye bye.
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