What Were The Watergate Burglars Looking For?

I was always fascinated by everything connected to the Watergate scandal, and I eagerly read books about it for decades afterward. One, Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (1991), raised a question nobody else I'm aware of ever bothered to ask: what were the Watergate burglars looking for? The book itself was wildly speculative and flat-out wrong in several areas, but the question it posed is still intriguing. According to Wikipedia,

Colodny and Gettlin contend that former White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary. His motive was argued to have been to protect his future wife Maureen Biner by removing information linking her to a call-girl ring that worked for the DNC.

A big problem is that they go on to argue that Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, when former FBI deputy director Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat in 2005, and beyond that,

In 1992 John and Maureen Dean sued Nixon "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy for libel, after Liddy sought to support the core claims in Silent Coup. Liddy's testimony was the first time he spoke publicly in detail about the Watergate break-in, as he had refused to cooperate with investigators during the Watergate scandal.

A series of lawsuits stemming from the case were eventually settled. Regardless of the truth or falsity of the original claim, the key question remains unanswered, why the burglars went in to start with. Oddly, this question is beginning to come up over the Mar-a-Lago raid. As of Wednesday,

According to a report from The Washington Post, citing information leaked to them by the government (which says a lot on its own), the boxes taken were full of what would mostly be considered personal effects and mundane presidential records. . . . There were rumors many months ago that this is all that the National Archives was after. Not really important things related to national security or some such, which even still wouldn’t justify the raid, but scribblings on napkins and letters from heads of state. If this report is correct, that’s what the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid on a president for.

But by Friday, the story had evolved, just as what once had been a water buffalo evolved into a whale. According to the same Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation. Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

So at least some people are starting off asking the right questions, but the answers keep wiggling away. As of yesterday,

[I]t just makes no sense that the government was so super-concerned about Trump having classified documents that they waited 18 months to go get them. Instead, it sure looks like the floundering January 6th committee has found nothing (as I’ve said many times) and is now using the DOJ to try to fish for more “evidence” of an organized coup.

Well, it's early days, but the puzzling thing is that the Watergate burglars were basically a bunch of marginal guys who'd been tested and found wanting in professional espionage and law enforcement and had been enlisted by overzealous lower-level Nixonistas in a comic-opera spy operation basically because they were available. On the other hand, the whole Mar-a-Lago episode seems to have been executed by experienced, full-time law enforcement and national security professionals who'd spent years rising within the world's premier law enforcement organization.

Only to come up with the same result. Or so it would seem. Anyhow, it's early days.

Nobody Noticed

Poor Dr Fauci. He's overstayed his 15 minutes of fame by a considerable margin, but now, even if he's booed, nobody notices. Not only that, but on Thursday,

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the nation should move away from restrictive measures such as quarantines and social distancing and focus on reducing severe disease from Covid-19.

In new guidelines released Thursday, the agency no longer recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people to reduce the risk of exposure -- a shift from guidance that had been in place since the early days of the pandemic.

These developments come on the heels of the LA County health department deciding that, on second thought, we should just never mind about a renewed indoor masking mandate, even though the link to the CDC announcement says this actually isn't the CDC's position: "It also continues to recommend that people wear masks indoors in about half the country." That would actually include LA, as a matter of fact. The problem is that nobody cares any more. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, the LA County health department disabled comments on its social media sites:

The statement from LA Public Health claims their decision to block the department’s over 350,000 social media followers was made because of “threats, bullying, or harassment on public platforms.” Note that older comments from the LACDH are still up on social media, and the overwhelming number of comments may mock or deride, or question, but mostly they’re not threatening.

Well, the public, even in deep-blue LA, is done with COVID. After two and a half years, the scary expanding red circles based on the Imperial College London hoax have lost their effect. The moral panic is over.

But all of a sudden, something has replaced it, and I think this is especially interesting, because this looks like an actual replacement, not just one additional item on a list worthy of public attention. I mentioned Watergate yesterday, but I missed the fact that the media has been trying to gin up a new Watergate since the 2016 election with the Russian pee tapes, the Ukraine phone call, Stormy Daniels, Impeachments 1.0 and 2.0, and the January 6 committee, and not one of those has caught on: Biden's standing in the polls is no better than Trump's at his worst, and two years after his defeat, Trump continues to be the favorite for 2024 notwithstanding everything, the Mar-a-Lago raid included.

So silly me, I asked yesterday why nobody's brought up Watergate without realizing that Watergate has been the subtext of everything for six years, except Trump was supposed to be the Nixon but nobody was buying it. And not buying it through two impeachments, congressional investigations, and rinky-dinky scandal piled on rinky-dinky scandal. At this point, the get-Trump agenda has the public yawning about as much as they yawned at Dr Ferrer threatening the return of indoor masks. That stuff is over. Liz Cheney is a bore; her landslide loss in next Tuesday's primary is a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, let's face it, all the never-Trumpers at this point are bores, has-beens, and never-wases. David French? Bill Kristol? George Conway? Why, on the other hand, is Trump still fascinating?

There are no coincidences, though. The Mar-a-Lago raid is delicious in a way that Stormy Daniels and Ukraine phone calls never were. I think that's because all the get-Trump pseudo-issues were phony from the start, and the public knew it. They couldn't catch on in the way Watergate itself did. Even if you grant that Watergate was a story that was primed and managed by anti-Nixon national media, there was enough genuine mystery there that the public bought papers, listened to the broadcasts, watched the hearings, bought book after book, and saw the movie.

Mar-a-Lago looks from the start like it's going to do this in a way that the January 6, Ukraine phone call, or Stormy Daniels blah-blah never did. I can tell this, because the interest in Watergate started the morning the burglary hit the news. I remember that. It started then, and it never stopped. I have the same sense of things now. As one commentator put it,

One thing is certain. This has become way too big a story for anyone to just drop it now. There are going to be more leaks from both sides until it does make sense.

But let's also keep in mind that the COVID moral panic was about Trump, not a virus, just as the 1980s satanic day care panic was about the family, not satanism. The public has at least dropped the virus and is now working its way through Trump. I wonder, in fact, if the Depp-Heard trial was just a warmup for the real show.

Yeah, We're Settling Into A Watergate Pattern

What intrigues me is how little anyone is bringing Watergate up at all in the Mar-a-Lago contoversy. It occurred to me just yesterday how much Watergate added to our daily vocabulary, from the suffix -gate to characterize any scandal (like Irangate, Travelgate, Troopergate and Whitewatergate) to expressions like "stonewalling", "modified limited hangout", "deep throat", "[expletive deleted]", "what did he know and when did he know it", and more.

I'm sure part of it is this only got into motion 50 years ago as we speak, and most of the first-hand participants are long departed, while even reporters and commentators who might have covered it early in their careers are retired. Nor does it help that something like Mar-a-Lagogate doesn't trip off the tongue. On the other hand, I lived through it as a full adult while my intellectual faculties were still being formed in graduate school, and in fact as I followed it closely, it fed my already contrarian nature.

So I'm starting to see real parallels even if they don't seem to be occurring to anyone else. The big one today is how quickly spokespeople (often "anonymous sources") present a quasi-official version only to have new surprises explode it in a matter of days or hours. Take the pronouncement in Newsweek from Deep Throat A or Deep Throat B, whichever it was, that Attorney General Garland did not approve the raid, which Garland himself refuted in yesterday's press conference. I went back to the Newsweek piece only to find they'd already scrubbed that part of it:

6:30 p.m.: A quote about Garland's role was deleted after the attorney general himself addressed the issue.

So much for credibility.

This brings up a second parallel, how much the media is shaping the story in its coverage. The difference is that in the 1970s, there were three networks and the big-city papers that could project a unified line that was anti-Nixon. Now the legacy successors to those outlets are pro-Biden and anti-Trump, while the new conservative press is divided into pro-Trump and never-Trump -- but the range of opinion and the Overton window are at least somewhat wider.

As of this morning, here's the range of reaction to Attorney General Garland's press conference. At Slate:

This puts the onus on Trump and his lawyers—who for the past three days have unleashed fury against the FBI and gone so far as to suggest the bureau was “planting” evidence—to object in court to unsealing the documents in order to keep them secret. This immediately flips the script away from the saturation of “what is the DOJ hiding” media coverage of the past few days and raises the obvious question: If Trump objects to unsealing these documents, what is he hiding?

But Trump immediately responded,

“Not only will I not oppose the release of documents related to the unAmerican, unwarranted, and unnecessary raid and break-in of my home in Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago, I am going a step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents,” Trump wrote on social media Friday night.

Just as in Watergate, versions are put out, but they collapse within hours. It's hard to avoid thinking the Justice Department's ostentatious show of consideration to Trump, offering him the chance to object to releasing the documents, was a desperate move that might justify slow-walking the process, but it looks as though Trump feels he has nothing to lose by letting things out.

Actually, I think this points to a little-mentioned question that arises from Eric Trump's account of the raid: his version on Sean Hannity's show was that the FBI opened a safe in search of stolen documents only to find it empty. Why would this be important?

One potential explanation is in a comment on a right-wing discussion site, that the Trump organization knew it had a mole and used the same strategy it had used to expose a mole in the White House: plant false information to see who passes it on. Thus someone tells the mole there are secret documents in the safe, the mole enthusiastically relays this to the FBI, the FBI goes in balls-to-the-wall only to be embarrassed. Whether or not this was the specific strategy, it's starting to look like the outcome of the raid will only make the administration look inept.

In fact, it looks like Attorney General Garland and the Justice Department have a dilemma. Several news organizations, as well as Judicial Watch, had already filed motions to unseal the warrant and supporting documents on Tuesday, and I would imagine that the Justice Department recognized that these would almost certainly be successful. Thus Garland's announcement that Justice would also file such a motion (although apparently asking for a more limited unsealing) is superfluous, but potentially also a move to slow-walk or limit that process.

This continues to convince me that making the basis for the warrant public can only damage the administration, while Trump has nothing to lose from it and everything to gain. On the other hand, the establishment media is using whatever interval remains between now and the unsealing of the documents to stir up suspicion that Trump is still a spy:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

. . . The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search.

Sounds like we've gone beyond Deep Throats A and B to a whole new choir of them. All this is going to do beyond the weekend will be to bolster Trump's credibility. Just unseal the documents, that'll prove their point if this stuff is true.

Mar-a-Lago: The Plot Doesn't Thicken, It Congeals

By the way, the Watergate burglary took place 50 years ago this past June. I was studying Milton's prose in graduate school at the time, and I never believed anyone could get hooked on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. How wrong I was. Now I'm starting to get a real sense of deja vu.

Sorting through this morning's news and commentary, I think there are three important items. The first, and likely most consequential, is Judicial Watch's motion to unseal the Mar-a-Lago search warrant:

The public has an urgent and substantial interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president and likely future political opponent. . . . [N]o official explanation or information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly outweighs any interest the government may have in keeping the materials under seal.

. . . Given the political context, and the highly unusual action of executing a search warrant at the residence of a former President and likely future political opponent, it is essential that the public understands as soon as possible the basis for the government’s action. Any government interest in securing the identities of witnesses and confidential sources, if any, may be addressed by appropriate redactions from the search warrant affidavit.

Judge Rinehart has given the Justice Department until close of business Monday to reply.

The second item from yesterday is a Newsweek story that relies on two anonymous Deep State sources:

FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. "What a spectacular backfire," says the Justice official.

"I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action," the official says. "They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite."

Even if the story is woven from the self-serving accounts of two different Deep Throats, it's remarkably self-contradictory. The tone is basically, "Heh-heh, what did you expect from a bunch of bureaucrats? Don't make too much of it!" but it suddenly pivots to firestorms:

"They were seeking to avoid any media circus," says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. "So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout."

Throughout the account, it's worthwhile to keep in mind that the two sources are speaking to a sympathetic outlet, and they're doing what they think they must to further their own personal interests and the interests of their agencies. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant, plus all the supporting material, continues to be under seal until the courts rule otherwise. According to Trump's lawyers, they were eventually allowed to glimpse the warrant, but were not given a copy. It sounds to me as though the Newsweek Deep Throats, on the other hand, have a pretty good idea of what's in it but are doing what they can to spin things:

According to the Justice Department source, the [National] Archives [believed] that the former White House was stonewalling and continued to possess unauthorized material. Earlier this year, they asked the Justice Department to investigate.

In late April, the source says, a federal grand jury began deliberating whether there was a violation of the Presidential Records Act or whether President Trump unlawfully possessed national security information. Through the grand jury process, the National Archives provided federal prosecutors with copies of the documents received from former President Trump in January 2022. The grand jury concluded that there had been a violation of the law, according to the Justice Department source.

In the past week, the prosecutor in the case and local Assistant U.S. Attorney went to Florida magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in West Palm Beach to seek approval for the search of Donald Trump's private residence. The affidavit to obtain the search warrant, the intelligence source says, contained abundant and persuasive detail that Trump continued to possess the relevant records in violation of federal law, and that investigators had sufficient information to prove that those records were located at Mar-a-Lago—including the detail that they were contained in a specific safe in a specific room.

But again, all that abundant and persuasive detail is under seal. Trust us! But the next item suggests there's reason to doubt this quasi-official spin. It's a story at Just the News, Questions grow about Trump raid after revelation of grand jury subpoena, extensive cooperation

Two months before his Florida home was raided by the FBI, former President Donald Trump secretly received a grand jury subpoena for classified documents belonging to the National Archives, and voluntarily cooperated by turning over responsive evidence, surrendering security surveillance footage and allowing federal agents and a senior Justice Department lawyer to tour his private storage locker, according to a half dozen people familiar with the incident.

. . . The subpoena requested any remaining documents Trump possessed with any classification markings, even if they involved photos of foreign leaders, correspondence or mementos from his presidency.

. . . [T]he president's lawyers complied and allowed the search by the FBI before the entourage left cordially. Five days later, DOJ officials sent a letter to Trump's lawyers asking them to secure the storage locker with more than the lock they had seen. The Secret Service installed a more robust security lock to comply.

. . . The disclosure Wednesday to Just the News raised immediate new questions in legal and congressional circles about the necessity for the subsequent raid, including whether the judge who approved the warrant new [sic] of the earlier cooperation.

“The more we learn, the more confusing this gets,” George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News program Hannity. “….Did they relay this history to the magistrate? That, according to these sources, that the president had cooperated.

”I mean, the idea that he was subject to a subpoena, complied with a subpoena, didn't challenge it, voluntarily showed the storage room to the agents, followed their advice, secured it to meet their demands. All of that is hardly a basis for saying now we need to send in 40 FBI agents on a on a raid,” he added. “I mean, if the subpoena worked the first time, then presumably a second subpoena would work the second time if there were remaining documents.”

So at the moment we're looking at two starkly conflicting narratives, one from anonymous sources within the Deep State that Trump was stonewalling attempts to identify and retrieve important classified documents that he'd removed from the White House without authority, the other that these were routine and largely personal materials that had been hastily packed into boxes willy-nilly by the Government Services Administration in the process of moving the former president out -- and given his understanding of the circumstances, Trump and his attorneys had been fully cooperating with efforts to sort through these items.

If the Trump version is true, there would have been no reason for a search warrant. The idea that secrecy would be needed to keep Trump from destroying evidence is absurd: Trump wasn't living at Mar-a-Lago, as he was in Bedminster, NJ for the summer, which the Deep State sources say the gvernment knew -- their intent was to do the raid quietly with Trump out of the way. Indeed, if the evidence would be scattered among 15 boxes of random mementos, in a locked facility covered by surveillance video, it's hard to imagine a scenario where a secret frenzied last-minute document shred could even be possible.

I don't think this can be a simple bureaucratic snafu any more than Watergate was a third-rate burglary attempt. But as with Watergate, the tidbits will keep coming.

So, Did The Big Guy Order The Raid?

The official White House position on the Mar-a-Lago raid is this:

“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”

Members of the public who haven't just fallen off the turnip truck will nevertheless say it depends on what the meaning of "definitively and for sure" is, and indeed, those who follow true crime will add that the more redundancies people pile onto their denials, the greater the likelihood that they're false. Others have certainly said that if the above is in fact true, it's proof that someone else is running the show -- but of course, neither assertion necessarily contradicts the other.

It's time to update my estimate of what's going on in the First Fuddy-Duddy's head. My view all along has been that his problem isn't medical, and a medical diagnosis from a distance is meaningless in any case. At the same time, I was an English major, have lived my whole life without a course in psychology, and I am not a mental health professional. Even if I were, the same applies to any such diagnosis made from a distance. Nevertheless, there are plenty of evaluative tools available, even for use from a distance, that can shed insight into character without wandering into quasi-diagnostic jargon.

Let's start with one of the most traditional, the concept refined by St Thomas Aquinas of the seven deadly sins, pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice, and sloth. As far as I can see, just about the only one of which the big guy appears to be innocent is gluttony; he's pretty skinny, and his only weakness in that department seems to be ice cream cones.

On the other hand, pride, which might also translate into a lack of insight or self-awareness, has pretty clearly got to be close to the top of the list. The guy is one of the shallowest people in public life. Pride would also be reflected in a sense of entitlement, in particular the expectation that his entourage of yes-men and enablers will always clean up after his bumbling misspeaks and explain his lacunae of judgment. It's possible, as I've sometimes speculated, that alcohol could be feeding this, but like Speaker Pelosi, Biden claims not to drink. But then, his staff claims on his behalf that he knew nothing of the raid. None of these denials rings tue.

Anyhow, if he isn't drinking, the side effects of prescription drugs might also account for the haze, or simple habit borne of laziness or sloth. Clear expression in speech or writing takes a certain level of discipline, and indeed self-awareness. The need to proofread and edit one's own writing is a habit that comes from self-awareness, as is the need for prudence, clarity, and reserve in speech. I doubt if he ever acquired either, and neither was ever required of him.

Certainly sloth is a clear factor in his wish to escape from the White House at every opportunity.

I think, though, that we're getting closer to the issue of the raid when we get to anger and envy. At least some observers have pointed out that pretty much throughout his presidency to date, Trump has beaten Biden in prospective 2024 matchups. If we assume Biden has no situational awareness, this wouldn't be a factor, but my guess is that the laziness and entitlement that drive his public persona are masquerading as senility. Under the fuddy-duddy mask is an angry, petty, and vindictive guy.

I think we can also bring the Aristotelian virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude into play. All of these contribute to what more recent analysis of character would characterize as impulse control. At this point I'm starting to see parallels to Nixon's character flaws that led to the Watergate scandal -- people who knew him during that period indicate that when he grew tired, he would drink too much, which led to cascading bouts of anger and vindictiveness.

Thus in Nixon's case we had the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973, which led directly to the Watergate committee and his resignation less than a year later under the threat of impeachment. I think the Saturday Night Massacre and the Mar-a-Lago raid, which have at this point both been characterized as overreaches, have similar roots in simmering anger, and in Biden's case jealousy of Trump, who even as a lower-key figure in the period of more than a year afer leaving office remains a formidable electoral threat.

The overriding question for both Nixon and Biden is whether their weaknesses in character led to self-destructive errors in judgment. My estimate in Biden's case is that while Nixon was likely not specifically aware of the initial Watergate burglary and didn't order it (although lower level staff like Colson did), Biden probably initiated, approved, and ordered the Mar-a-Lago raid or something essentially like it. That will make it a potentially much more serious matter.

The Empty Safe Search Warrant

On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted a hugely-publicized, hugely-rated live syndicated event entitled The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults.

Rivera and a crew of workers broke into a secret vault underneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, where the famous gangster used to run his criminal organization, in hopes of finding a stash of his ill-gotten gains or maybe even dead bodies. Famously, the two-hour special wound up uncovering virtually nothing.

The big news last night was that the FBI executed a search warrant on Donald Trump's office in his home at Mar-a-Lago.

Eric Trump said his father, Donald Trump, had nothing in a safe they claim the FBI breached as part of a raid of the former president's Mar-a-Largo resort on Monday.

The second son of the 45th president said he was with his father in New York City when they found out about the search, and he indicated that it was indeed related to records that Donald Trump brought back with him to his resort in Florida after leaving office.

Now, I don't know any more about how this will all play out than anyone else, but my Spidey Sense is telling me that this empty safe is going to be a much bigger deal than Geraldo's 1986 letdown. The other thing that got my Spidey Sense going, for whatever reason, is the immediate flashback I had to Nixon's October 20, 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. It says a great deal about me that on that particular Saturday night, I had nothing better to do than watch the news. I got the story as it broke, and I followed every twist and turn of the subsequent drama until Nixon's resignation the following August 9.

I got the same sense from the news of the raid this morning that I got that Saturday night almost 50 years ago, that this was something serious, and there would be ramifications. On one hand, for the sake of Attorney General Garland and Director Wray at minimum, there had better be more in those boxes the FBI agents carried out of the office than what was in the empty safe.

Their problem is I don't think there will be, if only because Trump throughout his career, at least up to now, has observed minimal standards of prudence and legality in matters of paying his taxes, records retention, financial reporting, personnel actions, and the like, and so far, attempts to nail him on any number of previous potential scandals have come up short -- if indeed they didn't backfire at Wile E Coyote levels on figures like Michael Avenatti. The man is mortal, but he's at least smart, and if as Aquinas says sin dulls the intellect, it doesn't seem to have dumbed him down as much as it's dumbed down his adversaries.

On the other hand, what strikes me is that even if we leave potential blowback against Wray, Garland, or higher levels in the organization completely aside, this raid strikes me as an awfully dumb move in and of itself. The political campaign season traditionally begins after Labor Day, only weeks away, while it gives Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms plenty of opportinity to plan their campaigns around the raid and gin up outrage among the electorate. It also unifies the Republicans around opposition to Democrats, with Trump on no ballot anywhere to serve as a distraction.

In fact, with the 2024 election more than two years away, the Biden camp is clearly operating on the assumption that Trump is the one to beat, and the earlier they can knock him out, the better. I've been getting a sense that Trump has beeen making some bad policy calls of his own, especially over Ukraine, while DeSantis looks like he's become more in tune with good issues each passing day. As the conventional wisdom goes, a week is a long time in politics, while the administration seems to be trying to game things out two years in advance.

I don't think this is a good plan.

Prosperity Vs Population

On Saturday, I talked about a loose constellation of Great Reset beliefs that some combination of human population growth and increased human prosperity threatens the climate. As I've looked futher into this, I've come to see that there are two schools of thought on overpopulation among radical environmentalists, the "hards" and the "softs". However, I don't trust the "softs" a bit.

The "hards" are best represented by Paul R Ehrlich, the grand old man of population control. In a Stanford University press release from the 1990s, he and two co-authors announce:

Until cultures change radically, the optimum number of people to exist on the planet at any one time lies in the vicinity of 1.5 billion to 2 billion people, about a third of the present number, three California ecologists estimated in an article published in the journal Population and Environment.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University and Gretchen Daily of the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California-Berkeley said that figure, "if achieved reasonably soon, would also likely permit the maximum number of Homo sapiens to live a good life over the long run."

"Determination of an 'optimum' world population size involves social decisions about the lifestyles to be lived and the distribution of those lifestyles among individuals in the population," the scientists wrote.

However, three decades later, the current world population is headed toward 8 billion, and assuming the optimum number remains at 1.5 to 2 billion, that means it's more like a quarter of the present number, and that proportion is shrinking. Ehrlich is still around at age 90, and I don't know if he's updated his estimate, but even if these numbers seem wackily apocalyptic, we need to recognize that this is still the current state of the Overton window; this sort of theorizing is well within the acceptable range of opinion.

I think there are two perfectly reasonable questions that can be posed here. The first is, "How urgent is this problem?" We're currently talking about goals like 30% reduction of X (choose your stuff) by 2030 or 50% reduction of Y by 2050. Most discussion of climate goals envisions the end of the current century, or 2100, as an outer limit beyond which any potential remedies will be moot, and the world as we know it will end.

The second question is, "If the environmental crisis is so urgent that we must reduce the world population by up to now unthinkable amount Z in a matter of decades, how do you propose we get there?" As I said Saturday, the Black Death is thought to have reduced the European population by maybe 30%. Now we're talking about reducing world population by maybe 75% in a matter of decades. The expression "nuke 'em all and let God sort 'em out" comes to mind.

It was a technological stretch and a strain on the German war effort to conduct systematic extermination of only 6 million Jews and 6 million others. Now we're talking about eliminating 6 billion -- and the ecological "hards" are thinking rainbows and unicorns will be the result? Someone needs to make these people articulate their position clearly. What do Ehrlich and his coauthors mean by the "social decisons" that need to be made, for instance? Drag queen story hour ain't gonna reduce births enough to get us there.

But they were writing in the 1990s. Here's a 2020 review of a recent book, A Planet of 3 Billion by Christopher Tucker:

In chapter 8 Tucker discusses Earth’s maximum carrying capacity. He relates to the world in 1950, with about 3 billion people, and refers to markedly increasing ecological debt since then. Comparing 2010 with 2030, a projection (see Figure below) suggests the rich and middle class will have grown by 1.7 billion people, and the poor and vulnerable will decrease by 1.05 billion. Such growth will likely increase current ecological debts considerably. But will the projection come true? Tucker concludes, “I have no doubt that capitalism could generate enough food and water to keep 9 billion or 11 billion people served well above their minimum… requirements”. But the dramatic negative consequences of this scenario are clearly presented in his book.

Farther down, the review presents this graph from the book:

The implication here for anyone not among the "hards" is remarkably optimistic, and it bears out common-sense observation: since the 1970s, the world middle class, especially in places like India and China, has grown astonishingly. According to the graph, since 2010 alone, the numbers of the poor and vulnerable will have shrunk by over a billion as world population increases, while the world middle class will have grown by 1.7 billion in just those two decades.

If nothing else, this is an empirical refutation of Malthusianism, the view that population growth is exponential, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. Malthusians, or their successors the radical environmentalists, can insist that the problem isn't the food supply -- if anything, the current war on agriculture argues there's now too much food, contra Malthus -- but it's that very surplus of food that's generating too many nitrates, and that's what will cause the planetary crisis.

The problem for the revisionist Malthusians in the environmental movement is that Malthus himself and his moderate successors promoted only abstinence or birth control as a means of reducing population growth, while the environmental "hards" now advocate radical population reduction by unspecified means -- and clearly in any transparent debate, they must avoid any clear proposal of what means they have in mind. Thus the "softs". Their basic argument is we don't need to think about this stuff too hard. At the same site as the book review linked above, we have this analysis:

We are currently 7.8 billion people and the United Nations predicts an increase of almost 3.5 billion by 2100 if current trends continue. Our overpopulation is obvious if we compare the population in 1960 (3 billion) to today’s and ask questions such as: “How serious a problem would climate change be if we had kept our population at 3 billion?” “How many fewer people would have died due to famine, conflict and war?” “How much less pollution and plastic garbage would there have been?” and “How much less food would have been needed and how many millions of acres of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems would have been spared conversion to agricultural use?”

The problem for the Paul Ehrlch school of overpopulation is precisely that since the 1960s, Ehrlich's predictions that "in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate" simply didn't come to pass, so enviornmentalists have had to fantasize a world that would somehow have been even better than the improved one we have now if Ehrlich's prescriptions had been followed.

The "softs" nevertheless want now to downplay the population issue and stress the problem of prosperity. From the link quoted above:

It is important to realize that overpopulation exists in many rich countries with too high rates of consumption as well as in many poor countries with too high fertility rates. Every effort should be made reduce consumption rates as well as high birth rates; in combination, these two measures would create a much better future for people on the planet. . . .

The word ‘overpopulation’ is rarely used by political leaders, the news media, or even many environmentalists. . . . The good news is that it is possible to end global population growth, fairly and without coercion.

Note that "coercion" is still in the picture -- as indeed is the "problem" of overpopulation. The solution for the "softs" seems to be that we can maybe avoid, or at least delay, the coercion part if we cut way down on farming -- but wasn't the original Malthusian argument that no matter how hard we tried, agriculture could never keep up with population? So now the solution these neo-Malthusians have in mind is to limit the food supply to Malthusian levels while artifically reducing the population to what the neo-Malthusians think will correspond to pre-Malthusian levels.

In other words, they want to create an artificial Malthusian crisis that they will manage to suit themselves. This is strange stuff. I don't trust these people a bit.