Truthsmack #22: What’s Peter Navarro Selling Now?

PLUS: SCOTUS on disinformation, Ukraine on oil

When I knew Peter Navarro, he lived in Del Mar Heights, just a stone’s throw inside the city limits of San Diego, California. He was running for mayor on a platform of Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN). He looked like Robert Redford’s shorter brother and convinced a Sierra Club-led coalition of environmentalists that he could deliver our city from the clutches of greedy, short-sighted land developers.

Although he placed first in the city’s 1992 primary election, he lost to developer-backed Susan Golding in the November general. Hanging ten on the wave of 205,000 votes cast his way countywide, Navarro turned around and launched a campaign for San Diego City Council District 1 in 1993. He lost by less than 1,000 votes. Three years later, Navarro ran as a Democrat for Congress as a “strong environmentalist and a progressive on social issues,” telling delegates at the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, “I'm proud to be carrying the Clinton-Gore banner.”

Those days of plotting to overthrow developers are long ago and far away. Twenty years later, Navarro rose to national prominence as the White House trade advisor for developer-turned-president Donald Trump. He reported to the minimum-security federal Bureau of Prisons satellite camp in Miami this week – he’ll be serving four months there for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas in the House’s investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Why didn’t Navarro just show up to Congress and plead the fifth? Maybe, like his brother-in-arms Steve Bannon, he felt the optics wouldn’t be the best marketing plan.

“While I’m in prison, my new book, The New MAGA Deal, will head off to the printer and be ready for release at the start of the Republican National Convention,” Navarro wrote in a Substack post the day he headed for jail – complete with a link to buy an advance copy. Now, I don’t claim to know Peter Navarro anymore, but my impression of him is that he’s a pretty smart guy who’s always got something to sell. Positioning himself as the super-patriot right-hand man of the former president he still calls “The Boss,” Navarro is not only hawking books, but his legal defense fund. So far he’s raised more than $1.2 million.

SCOTUS mulls government editing social media

Four years ago on March 12, New Rochelle, New York, became the first COVID-19 “containment area” in the U.S. A week later, the state of California issued a “stay-at-home order,” essentially launching the experience we refer to as “the pandemic.” For the rest of 2020, scientists and medical professionals across the globe scrambled to re-purpose existing treatments and solutions – while pharmaceutical companies raced to develop new vaccines. New York nurse Sandra Lindsay was the first American to get the FDA-authorized COVID-19 jab on Dec. 14.

For most of 2020, two tracks of COVID response emerged: the pharmaceutical-based government response led by Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and independent medical experts testing established antiviral medications and ways to boost immunity against the virus and its variants. The divide became a volcanic political chasm with the government leaning on social media platforms to censor (or at least, edit) whatever it deemed was disinformation.

Aspects of information management were argued before the Supreme Court this month in a case called Murthy v. Missouri. Two years ago, the states of Missouri and Louisiana sued President Biden and his administration for “working with social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combating ‘misinformation.’” As the case wound through the system, individual plaintiffs were added, including Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, academics who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October, 2020. Bhattacharya argued that early data showed COVID to be less deadly than the Fauci was saying and lockdowns were unlikely to be effective. Twitter secretly placed Bhattacharya on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

The Supreme Court now gets to decide if the White House violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media platforms to suppress or delete posts that federal officials found objectionable.

Nord Stream trail leading to Ukraine

Two of the three countries investigating the 2022 sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines called it quits in February. Danish and Swedish police deemed their investigations inconclusive and are leaving it up to Germany to figure out who destroyed the natural gas highway running beneath the Baltic Sea from Vyborg, Russia to Greifswald, Germany.

The short list of suspects has included Britain, the U.S., Ukraine and Russia itself. The Washington Post reported in November that a colonel in Ukraine’s special operations forces, Roman Chervinsky, coordinated the attacks and that the Biden administration was aware of the plot. The anonymous sources claim the plan was authorized by Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer. Chervinsky – currently charged by Ukraine in a botched attempt to recruit a Russian pilot to defect – denies any involvement.

In the past month, dozens of Ukrainian drones reportedly attacked oil refineries in at least nine regions inside Russia, knocking out about 600,000 barrels of Russia's daily oil-refining capacity.