The Harvard Institute of Politics invited a number of people to be Fellows. It was the usual Wingnut Welfare event, where a collection of unqualified nincompoops who’s only reason for existence is to promote far right inanity were invited. Sean Spicer will be there. As will Joe Scarborough. And…
The roster of IOP fellows in 2017 includes Benghazi faker Jason Chaffetz, professional political thug Corey Lewandowski, professional bad liar Sean Spicer, and run-of-the-mill wingnuts Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson. (You should keep all these names in mind the next time you read conservative whinging about how oppressed they are. This is a nice gig here.) And, while I was contemplating what Lewandowski could possibly “impact” on students other than a seminar on how to go goon on female reporters, the really heavy shoe dropped.
The surprise was that they also invited…Chelsea Manning.
Which immediately prompted screeching from the conservatives.
Which was — unsurprisingly — effective.
“We are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow — and the perceived honor that it implies to some people — while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.
“I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation.”
Cowardly fuckers.
So…everyone, even the right wing, alt-right, Nazi centrist atheists, are all going to complain and denounce this decision?
Just remember, an invitation from the Kennedy School, which thinks Spicer, Lewandowski, and Chaffetz are worthy recipients of the ‘honor’, isn’t really an honor.
Of course not. It’s only deplatforming if it happens to fuckbags who get to spout their bullshit wherever they want, not when it concerns the oppressed and disenfranchised.
Mary Katherine Ham is a porker!
Wow, just wow. These people are scum, actually beyond scum.
But, free speeech!!!!!
Most of the people whose comments show up on my facebook feed are computer security people; it’s been tremendously disappointing to see that a lot of them think Manning did something wrong.
If I am not invited to Harvard right this second I am being censored.
They’re too busy denouncing the White House for demanding that ESPN fire Jamele Hill for exercising her free speech, but they’ll get onto this any day now…
I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation.
She has spent quite some time in a military prison and so would be used to interacting with a better class of people?
@ 7 Tabby Lavalamp
Well, it took a bit of go-ogling to find out who Jamele Hill is and what she said but ESPN should not have said “…do not represent the position of ESPN”.
I would have thought something along the lines of “Damn right we support her, she is totally correct” would have been appropriate.
The right wing fuckwits shouldn’t have been invited either, but had there not been a Chelsea Manning there probably would not be a President Trump. That’s because Wikileaks used the information they got from Manning to inflict massive damage on the Clinton campaign. So I’m not nearly as huge a Manning fan as some here.
I know it’s tempting to have the knee jerk reaction that if something hurts the US military it’s a good thing, but unless you can predict the unintended consequences, including the election of Donald Trump as president, that type of thing is a huge risk.
@10
I’m not sure if I’m really okay with the idea that revealing war crimes is only a good thing when its politically expedient for your politician of choice.
I also think it’s rather ludicrous to blame a whistleblower that revealed literal war crimes for the information harming Clinton, rather than blaming Clinton for being involved in war crimes.
Yeah, no, Manning is ethically and morally in the right for what she did. That it was used to further misinform low information voters who already were predisposed to not vote for Clinton does not make her actions wrong.
She exposed war crimes.
She was punished more for war crimes than the people who comitted them.
Now you’re blaming her for the election of a fascist? Kindly fuck off with that.
@10
The fuck? Did Manning lie? Die she fake a single document? If not, than ANY damage she did to Clinton is on Clinton’s head, not hers. You are killing the messenger here.
I also do not remember that ANY leaks from Manning had an impact on the elections. Why would the right wing care about war crimes when there are emails and Bengazi to discuss? The last two items do not attack the oh so loved military. Much safer ground, even if made up.
@10: I don’t recall any of Manning’s information being brought up during the election. A lot more was said about the non-scandal of Benghazi than the real scandal of Honduras. What specifically are you talking about?
It may be true that Manning’s documents elevated WikiLeak’s profile enough that it became a useful tool for publishing real and fake leaks about Clinton during the election, but that’s a pretty thin reason for blaming Manning.
Nos. 11-14, I am a cold, hard political realist. The cold, hard political reality is that the only two candidates who could win the presidency were Clinton and Trump, and for all Clinton’s many faults, she at least would not be the catastrophe Trump is. So, if you believe, as I do, in doing things that produce good results (or at least non-catastrophic results), the strategy to follow was to do everything possible to elect Clinton, even if you had to hold your nose while you did so. Manning’s actions helped elect Trump. Period, end of discussion.
That Clinton was also culpable is irrelevant since we are talking about Manning. Yes, it would have been nice if she hadn’t done a lot of the stupid things she did along the way, but her misdeeds pale in comparison to anything we’re going to get from the Trump administration. The sole relevant goal was keeping Trump out of the White House, and Manning posed a major hurdle to doing so.
Manning is the functional equivalent of these PETA idiots who “rescue” laboratory and farm animals; their hearts are in the right place, but they are bulls in a china shop and they do massive damage along the way. In fact, there’s a lot that happens on the left that fits under that category.
@16
How the fuck does your logic work
“Yeah Clinton did something horrendously evil but Manning let people knew that Clinton was culpable for war crimes, therefore it’s Manning’s fault for being a whistleblower rather than Clinton’s fault for being involved in war crimes”
Like, if we’re looking back with hindsight, why is your focus on condemning Manning for whistleblowing rather than on Clinton for being an inherently flawed candidate?
Uh…no? Not end of discussion. You didn’t demonstrate how, if at all, Manning meaningfully affected the election. You just asserted it, which isn’t the same thing. Maybe if you could show in what meaningful way her actions altered the results, you might have a leg to stand on (I say might because you’d still have to deal with the fact that it was simply exposing wrongdoing in the government, which isn’t Manning’s fault).
One could argue that it was ultimately Hillary Clinton’s fault for running when she was a divisive candidate, or for working to try and get Trump nominated because she thought he’d be a pushover as an opponent. One could argue that it was the American public’s fault (at least in certain districts), as ultimately they were the ones that voted. One could argue that it was the media’s fault for not taking Trump seriously, or Trump’s fault for running when he didn’t actually plan on winning, or both the major parties’ fault for not being able to read the room as far as public perceptions were going. With all that going on it’s patently ridiculous to lay the blame for Trump at the feet of one whistleblower without some serious evidence to back it up.
So Chelsea Manning was supposed to know that by leaking all those files in 2010 she would help Trump beat Clinton in 2016?
“Harvard”, the CIA spy station, so infuriated Ms Manning she hung up on the kowtower-in-chief, Chelsea Manning hung up phone on Harvard dean who delivered fellowship snub:
No silly, she used the Soros time machine, the same one use to plant false Hawai’i birth certificates & birth announcements.
Should’ve known that Soros was involved.
@20
No, you’re supposed to stand in line and bow your head, and never do anything that might incriminate or hurt an establishment Democrat, period.
1) I have no problem with Harvard no platforming Manning. Their school. Their selection of speaker. I do have problem with right wing hypocrisy on this.
2) any moral calculation that doesn’t place the bulk of the blame for Trump on Trump voters themselves is intellectually stunted and bankrupt. I don’t care how much of a realist you are under no circumstances should anyone* voted for that fucker. He’s manifestly unfit for any public duty along any number of aspects you care to name. That he was elected should be seen as the death rattle of democracy itself. It’s unworkable system
*I’m even including Les deplorables in this group as you can’t trust a word the guys says. It’s why it looks like he is thankfully gonna flip on DACA.
Good luck on trying to find a candidate who isn’t inherently flawed.
Maroon, No. 20, she was supposed to know that there are potentially massive unintended consequences for doing what she did, and that she probably wasn’t smart enough to anticipate them.
Vivec, you’re a textbook case of why the left consistently loses elections it ought to win: You don’t realize that we live in the world we live in rather than the one you think we should live in. Like in 2000 when the Nader voters helped elect George W. Bush. You can talk all you want about how Hillary was a flawed candidate (she was), and about how the US committed war crimes (it did), but all that being said, the two real choices were still Trump and Clinton. And Matrim, no, Manning wasn’t the only contributing factor to his election, but in an election this close, Wikileaks might very well have been the factor that pushed him over the top. So congratulate Manning for being a whistleblower all you like, his actions still helped put Trump in the White House. And I don’t think all the whistleblowing in the world makes up for that.
@26
Fair enough, feel free to replace that with “Directly complicit in war crimes due to her role in the Obama administration.”
Sorry, typo, *her* actions still helped put Trump in the WH.
@27
…What.
You’re looking back with hindsight just as fucking much as I am.
If you’re capable of saying “Manning shouldn’t have blown the whistle on US war crimes”, I’m capable of saying “Clinton shouldn’t have been complicit in US war crimes”
Yeah, that was never under debate. That doesn’t change that the culpability lies with Clinton for being complicit in war crimes, not with Manning for revealing those war crimes.
@ #16
“Period, end of discussion.”
I love it when people say “end of discussion.” That’s such a compelling argument. I wonder why it never works?
That’s outrageous, and doesn’t even square with his previous statements. Obviously, he’s not going to admit that Harvard stands to lose the government contracts and relationships with the intelligence agencies from which it profits if she’s a fellow, but at least have the decency to put the responsibility on the institution rather than suggesting, absurdly, that she has nothing worthwhile to offer the students. Her talk is gonna be lit.
thirdmill wrote:
“I am a cold, hard political realist.”
No, you’re not. You’re a wildly speculative grasper of straws. If you want to cling to the idea that Manning had any significant impact on the election, you may as well include virtually everything that’s happened in the last twenty years as having led us to Trump as president. Heck, let’s blame Obama for even running, since an unintended consequence was the racist reaction to his presidency that motivated Trump voters. Pick out anything you want and claim that put Trump over the top.
thirdmill #27:
‽
What utter, utter rot. “Do nothing about anything unless you can work out every single possible consequence, no matter how unforeseeable”? Really?
thirdmill,
That dump you had on October 17, 2007? If only you had held it in, Joe Biden would be president today.
Shockingly, the NYTimes has a pretty good opinion piece on this from Trevor Timm, the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/chelsea-manning-harvard-michael-morell.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
——————————
Something to keep in mind is that Harvard has always been a whore to power. Their theme is that they “train future world leaders” so the children of dictators and hedge fund scammers have always been shoe-ins since they own your future. Even this year, a third of the entering class is children of previous Harvard graduates helping to make sure that those in power stay there. Morality and ethics are not part of the equation that keeps the cash rolling in.
thirdmill@#27:
I love silly causality games. Tell me, did Osama Bin Laden have a bigger impact on Hillary losing (or Trump winning) than Manning? Or what about the Wall St bankers? Or maybe it was Bernie’s fault?
No wait it was all Comey!
It was the butterfly.
Marcus Ranum wrote:
I dunno. It might actually be possible in this case. Practically no one mentioned Chelsea Manning or the Wikileaks documents during the campaign. A hell of a lot more people discussed Clinton’s pneumonia during the campaign than Manning’s leaks. And let’s not forget that Trump promised to commit war crimes like torture and killing of families of suspected terrorists.
Wikileaks was in the news during the campaign for the DNC email leaks and Julian Assange’s public support for Trump rather than Chelsea Manning. Nearly the only time her name came up was to complain about Obama pardoning a so-called .
That is pretty good. Thanks for the link.
@ #36
“Shockingly, the NYTimes has a pretty good opinion piece on this from Trevor Timm”
I agree, it is a good piece, but it’s not shocking. The Times’ op-ed page has always been about a variety of views, from both right and left. The page began in 1970, and an early list proposed soliciting articles from John Bircher Robert Welch, Communist Party USA head Gus Hall, labor leader Harry Bridges, oil man H.L. Hunt, and Angela Davis (youngsters can look her up – I remember her well) among others. Anyway, the whole purpose of the op-ed page has always been to provide views (sometimes extreme views) that you won’t find on the editorial page or in the news pages, so seeing this opinion there is not shocking, but to be expected.
As opposed to you know , actual Bush voters ?
I like logic that says N1 votes (For trump or Bush) where N1 is a large number,
N2 votes for Clinton or Gore where N2 is a large number,
N3 votes for Nader or Stein or Johnson where N3 is a minuscule number
And the problem are those N3 votes.
She spoke at the Women’s March!
chigau@#39:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: The Big Bang
@ #44
I didn’t know that – amazing. We’re the exact same age, but she sure looks a lot better.
She looks great. She’s been an activist longer than I’ve been alive. Incredible.
thirdmill,
I am completely confused by your statements. You are just not making sense. Is it possible you are confusing Chelsea Manning with Ed Snowden? You could conceivably make a possible case that the Snowden dump to Wikileaks reverberated through the 2016 election. I can’t think of any way to argue that Manning’s leaks affected the 2016 election, particularly after they were eclipsed by the Snowden documents.
It just doesn’t correspond to reality — Clinton’s culpability or lack thereof in anything whatever notwithstanding.
Marcus Ranum #45
We’ve got lumps of it round the back.
If he is making that confusion, then he’s seriously deluded: Mr Snowden did not whistle-blow to Wikileaks, but to Glenn Greenwald, et al., at the Grauniad. That is, if he is making that confusion, then he not only has the wrong person, but the wrong publisher. And he still hasn’t provided any sort of evidence or citation of his assertion, regardless of which individual(s) and publisher(s) he meant.
Assuming he isn’t using this arse as the source, then my guess is he is confusing Julian Assange — who was noticeably pro-hair furor — and the stolen DNC e-mails (published by Assange’s Wikileaks) with Manning’s whistle-blowing. Those DNC e-mails are widely though to have been stolen with Russian involvement (and (from memory) contain altered content). Those stolen e-mails, published by pro-hair furor site, apparently provided to that site from Russia-connected cyber-burglars, arguably did help poison the soil against Secretary Clinton. (As noted previously, initially, at that time, Wikileaks was thought to be reliable, in part due to Ms Manning’s whistle-blowing — which is only way anyone has been able to connect, however loosely, Manning to Clinton’s defeat.)
Finally, there’s the timing: Manning’s whistle-blew up until 2010, Ms Clinton only started as Secretary of State in 2009. So there is some overlap, but perhaps the bulk of the documents Ms Manning released is unlikely to have had much of anything to do then-Senator Clinton. (Not impossible, but seems a bit of a stretch?)
@50: the Manning leaks made it clear that Clinton (as SoS) wanted to support the military coup in Honduras. Otherwise I agree with you and I don’t recall anything about Honduras coming up in the election.
specialffrog@51, Thanks for the correction. I also do not recall anything directly connected to Honduras being mentioned in the election.
(Also, apologies for all the Typos offerings in @50.)
I mentioned it. :) (There’s a lot more to the story, including the extreme pressure from the execrable Jim DeMint and the Right generally, but that in no way excuses Obama’s or Clinton’s actions or their failure since then to confront the terrible consequences of what they did. This applies to Democrats generally when it comes to Latin America.)
Another deplatforming – “Popular priest disinvited from Catholic University’s seminary after protests over his LGBT book”: “Rev. James Martin, a popular priest who published a book earlier this year encouraging a bridge between the LGBT community and the Catholic Church, has been disinvited from giving an address at Catholic University’s seminary. Martin, who was planning to speak about Jesus and not about LGBT-related issues, has become the target of attacks from right-wing sites since his book ‘Building a Bridge’ was published in June….” (One of the rightwing sites, to which I won’t link, is gloating: “Fr. James Martin Dumped Again.”)
Heh.
Harvard IOP presents a conversation with…
Thanks for the correction, blf. I need to be more careful. This stuff has become so damned confusing — no wonder people can be manipulated.
The point, as you say, is that there is really no plausible connection from Manning to the 2016 election. And, while the Snowden/Greenwald/Guardian stuff was very hot and embarrassing, I doubt there were many Trumpies who were all pushed out of shape because Angela Merkel’s cellphone was monitored.
I’ll go along with seriously deluded. thirdmill is probably not alone, unfortunately.
At the point where Chelsea Manning leaked the documents she leaked to Wikileaks, the 2016 election wasn’t even a gleam in the eyes of the not-yet-extant Trump campaign. How the hells was Chelsea Manning supposed to know, back in 2010, that six years later Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump would be facing off in an election campaign? Comes to that, how the hells was anyone supposed to have guessed, back in 2010, that come 2016 the Republican party would be so devoid of genuine electable talent they’d get behind a multiply-bankrupt narcissistic con-artist reality-TV “star” like Trump? Prior to approximately 2012, Donald Trump wasn’t even a “name” in US Federal politics, much less the Republican party. His main “name” status came from being (apparently) rich, being flamboyant, and being able to somehow lose money owning casinos, which takes a bit of doing. I think you’re drawing a very long bow indeed in blaming Chelsea Manning for the election of Donald Trump – and if we’re going to be blaming her, how about we also blame Julian Assagne, for starting Wikileaks in the first place (and also for oh, I don’t know, actually supporting Trump during the election campaign as well).