I Am John Galt

by Donald Luskin

  My first post about Krugman was on the eighth day of the blog’s life, and several days after the 2002 midterm elections in which the Republicans consolidated their control of Congress.46 I was commenting on a Krugman Times column in which he blames the GOP’s victory on “the real conservative bias of the media.” Yes, believe it or not, that’s what he said—and in a blatant display of his own partisan bias, he went on in the course of the column to gradually morph the editorial we from “us” to “some of my friends” to “Democrats” and finally, simply “the party.”47

  I started blogging more and more about Krugman because I was fascinated by his deepening descent into a very public paranoia about the Bush administration and the Republican party—and as an economist myself, I resented the way he was using the imprimatur of the profession to enhance his credibility. He was also using the imprimatur of the New York Times, pushing the envelope of how aggressive one could be on its editorial pages. His attacks on the Bush administration became increasingly aggressive, strident, and bizarre: comparing him to the emperor Caligula, gratuitously evoking his youthful alcohol abuse, accusing him of outright corruption, and—in a book of collected Times columns—likening the Bush administration to the Third Reich.48 These utterances were unseemly, nasty, vindictive, personal, and hate-filled—the stuff of tabloids or ranting blogs, not journalism’s “Gray Lady.”

  Maybe Krugman’s hateful attitude was just a way of getting rich and famous. As N. Gregory Mankiw, the respected Harvard economist, said of Krugman, “I guess if you’re a columnist, you want to be widely talked about and be the most e-mailed. It’s the same thing that drives talk show hosts to become Jerry Springer.”49

  Whatever his motive, I was intrigued by the vicious cycle he was stoking. The Times let Krugman get away with his spew of hate, and in doing so, this standard setter for American journalism redefined what is considered acceptable within mainstream political commentary. As the boundaries of discourse loosened and coarsened, Krugman would just keep throwing dirt at them; they’d then loosen and coarsen some more. The same thing happened in The Fountainhead with Ellsworth Toohey and the Banner—and it ended up destroying the Banner as it may yet destroy the Times.

  At issue was not just the tone that the Times permitted Krugman to take. At the same time, Krugman’s columns became increasingly filled with distortions, exaggerations, contradictions, out-of-context quotations, and misquotations. On the pages of what is widely regarded as America’s “newspaper of record,” these distortions had the power of truth and entered the history books as facts.

  I set out to expose those distortions, and to force the New York Times to correct them. If the Times would correct them, then we could excuse them as mere rhetoric, or perhaps errors. But if no corrections were made, then the very failure to correct would make them willful lies.

  I started first on my blog, and soon afterward in a series of columns for National Review Online—the web site of the venerable conservative magazine—called “The Krugman Truth Squad” (KTS).

  The inaugural KTS column appeared on March 20, 2003.50 The series of columns was structured as what is now called “crowdsourcing”—within several hours of a Krugman column appearing on the Times web site, I and a network of fellow bloggers would put it under a microscope and discover all the filthy microbes hiding in every crack. We’d fact-check every claim, confirm every quotation, run down every source, and compare every statement for consistency with statements made in the past. The KTS called Krugman “America’s most dangerous liberal pundit,” and our promise to readers was: “We’ll read Paul Krugman so you don’t have to.”

  I won’t cite here very many of the dozens upon dozens of prevarications that my Krugman Truth Squad exposed in 94 columns over five years. If you are interested, look up my name in the author archives of National Review Online, where most of the KTS columns can still be seen.

  In most cases, any given one of Krugman’s prevarications—if uncorrected, his lies—will seem trivial, as though I were nit-picking to focus on it. But the cumulative effect of them all—every exaggerated statistic designed to bolster some economic argument, every out-of-context quotation designed to make some conservative politician look venal or conservative economist look stupid, every inaccurate historical citation designed to make conservatives into crooks and liberals into heroes—is to shape Krugman’s narrative with a persuasive power it would never achieve if it were confined to the truth. In the same sense, the cumulative effect of my persistent blogging, and of the Krugman Truth Squad columns, has been to gradually erode that persuasive power.

  My Truth Squad got Krugman’s attention right away. After just a month, in an April 2003 KTS column, I took Krugman to task for a whopper he’d told the day before in his Times column.51 Concerning claims by the Bush administration for job creation as a result of its proposed tax cuts, Krugman wrote,

  [L]et’s pretend that the Bush administration really thinks that its $726 billion tax-cut plan will create 1.4 million jobs. At what price would those jobs be created? . . . The average American worker earns only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on its own estimates, need to offer $500,000 in tax cuts for each job created?52

  Sounds sensible if you read it fast—and pretty damning of Bush’s plan—especially you assume you don’t have to question Krugman’s claims, since these words were written by a Princeton economist on the pages of the New York Times. But now: stop, think, and question.

  That $726 billion number came from a report prepared by Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (yes, the same White House office for whom Krugman had written that foolish report about the “Inflation Time Bomb” two decades earlier). The estimate of 1.4 million jobs created was just for the first single year of the tax cuts, 2004. Yet the $726 price tag was for 10 years. In other words, Krugman was pushing the entire 10-year cost of the tax cut onto a single year of jobs creation.

  It was a remarkably arrogant and sloppy thing for Krugman to put in writing. Especially considering that a couple of months earlier he’d made a similar claim in a television interview, and without missing a beat the interviewer had caught the distortion—and forced Krugman to backtrack. PBS’s Geoff Colvin asked Krugman, “Well, but it’s going to go for longer than just this one year, right?” And all Krugman could say was “Well, yeah. . . .”53

  But then he repeated the distortion, and having already acknowledged it to Colvin, the second time around it wasn’t just a distortion—it was a lie. And it was in writing, in the pages of the New York Times. There was no backtracking—and for Krugman, certainly no confession. All Krugman could do was try to justify it retroactively, which he did in a lengthy series of posts and updates on his Princeton web site. Emitting increasingly alarming screeches of desperation, he cited abstruse charts and graphs based on Keynesian macroeconomic theory to justify his erroneous claim—which for all the highfalutin econobabble was self-evidently simply the result of his having failed to divide by 10.54 Keynes would be rolling in his grave, only he’s too busy laughing. Perhaps that’s why Krugman’s last gasp on the subject was a link on his web site pointing to a scene from Monty Python.55

  After that my KTS dogged Krugman relentlessly, catching dozens upon dozens of errors, distortions, and misquotations in his columns, which when left uncorrected became lies.

  Krugman couldn’t help but take notice. In a May 2003 blog posting as part of the divide-by-10 fiasco, he called me “my stalker-in-chief.”56 Four months later, when Tim Russert on his CNBC television show confronted Krugman with one of the embarrassing self-contradictions pointed out in my Krugman Truth Squad columns, Krugman said he’d been “so far just stalked, uh, intellectually.”

  Okay, it was funny. But then things got very nasty.

  Ordeal by Slander

  In October 2003 I attended a lecture by Krugman in an auditorium on the campus of the University of California at San Diego.57 It was part of a tour to promote his new book, a collection of Times col
umns called The Great Unraveling.

  The experience was very much like living out the scene in The Fountainhead in which the character of Ellsworth Toohey is first introduced. Toohey is giving a lecture in a crowded auditorium, exhorting the audience to support a striking union, concluding with a call to collectivism: “Let us organize, my brothers. Let us organize. Let us organize. Let us organize.” While Toohey is described by Rand as “puny,” when he speaks before an audience his voice “unrolled as a velvet banner. . . . It was the voice of a giant.” We witness the scene from the viewpoint of two members of the audience, who for reasons they don’t understand are gripped with horror when they hear Toohey, and flee the auditorium.

  Krugman was introduced by a University potentate saying, “God bless Paul Krugman,”58 and the audience erupted in cheering and applause. Krugman gave an intense, commanding speech, and the audience hung on every word. On television, Krugman’s voice is high-pitched with a crude New York accent, and he stammers and stutters and pauses and repeats himself—but that night it was Toohey’s velvet banner.

  I was gripped with horror. I’d spent months debunking and defanging Krugman; but until I saw that cheering audience, I’d never really grasped the vastness of the force I was dealing with. It wasn’t just Krugman; it was the millions of people who adore him, who already believe the kinds of things to which he merely gives voice, and who made him possible in the first place. I just wanted to get out and go back to my hotel and take a shower.

  But I was with a friend, and we’d agreed that when it was over we’d get him to sign copies of his book for us. I waited in line for a few minutes while he banged out scrawled signatures by the dozen, and when he was done with mine, I asked, “Would you inscribe it to me personally?” He said, “Yeah, all right—what’s your name?” I said, “Don . . .” and he wrote Don. Then I said, “Luskin: L-U-S-K-I-N,” and by the time he got halfway through, he realized. His eyes started shifting, like Richard Nixon, but he said nothing. I said, “Now you keep up the good work, Paul.” He muttered, “Yeah, yeah, fine.”59

  I went back to my hotel and wrote a blog post about the experience.60 Within hours, a link to my post had been put up on the blog called Eschaton, posted by the pseudonymous Atrios (who turned out later to be the leftist economist Duncan Black). The entire text of Atrios’s post consisted of the words: “Diary of a Stalker By Donald Luskin.”61

  Ten days later, on October 17, Krugman went on national television, on the Fox News show Hannity & Colmes, and said of me, “That’s a guy, that’s a guy who actually stalks me on the Web, and once stalked me personally.”62

  Let me be clear about what happened here. Krugman wasn’t speaking metaphorically or jocularly, as he had been months earlier when he called me his “stalker-in-chief.” This was an accusation of actual stalking—“personally,” as Krugman put it. Stalking is a felony, one with a connotation of particular malice, if not perversion, and I had just been accused of it.

  And let me say to anyone who thinks I am exaggerating when I refer to Krugman as a liar, this proves that he is. I did not stalk Paul Krugman. Meeting him at a public book-signing is not stalking. For him to say that I stalked him is an attack, a character assassination, and a bald-faced lie.

  What did it feel like? Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame. You tell yourself that any publicity is good publicity in our celebrity-driven culture. But no one wants what my family and I went through: week after week in which I was accused, over and over again on the Internet by the hate-filled leftist blogging community, of having committed the kind of felony associated with psychopaths. By November, the affair had become such a cause célèbre it had even been chronicled in the New Yorker.63 The worst parts were the death threats aimed at my wife and daughter.

  Here again I felt I was living out scenes from The Fountainhead. Ellsworth Toohey deliberately used his position in the media to ruin the reputation of Howard Roark, who represented in Toohey’s mind the primal spirit of individualism to which his own philosophy of collectivism was fundamentally opposed. I wish I could say anything so cosmic was at work in Krugman’s attempt to destroy me. Sure, a clash of philosophies was involved. But for Krugman I doubt that had much to do with it; I was marked for destruction simply because I’d gotten in his way, and from his narcissistic point of view as a wannabe “psychohistorian” whose “secret fantasy” was to control the galaxy, that was enough.

  However, unlike what happened to Howard Roark after one of Toohey’s smear campaigns, I didn’t have to go work in a granite quarry. My career survived Krugman’s attack. And my Krugman Truth Squad stayed on the job, and moved on to achieve several decisive victories against Krugman.

  The Errors of His Ways

  In addition to exposing Krugman’s lies on my blog and in the Krugman Truth Squad column, I pelted the New York Times with requests for formal corrections—and was consistently rebuffed or ignored. That was to change dramatically. But at first I was surprised, since the Times has a reputation for absurd punctiliousness when it comes to corrections—setting the record straight concerning the slightest details, sometimes months or years after the error was originally run.

  But I learned that the Times editorial page is managed entirely separately from the rest of the paper. It reports to the publisher, not to the executive editor. At that time it had no formal corrections policy whatsoever, except that corrections were at the discretion of the opinion writer; so human nature being what it is, there were hardly ever any corrections at all. I set about to change that—and I did.

  Again, this isn’t the way Ayn Rand’s heroes dealt with her villains; they mostly ignored them. But if it’s a value to you to take on the villains in the real world, and you’re willing to pay the price, then this story proves you can do it.

  I got my break when the Jayson Blair scandal erupted. Blair was a young Times reporter who resigned after he was caught fabricating stories and plagiarizing from other newspapers. To help rehabilitate its damaged reputation, the Times created the post of “Public Editor”—what other newspapers call an ombudsman—to act as an independent watchdog to assure the paper’s integrity and serve as a disinterested conduit for reader concerns. The man they hired was Daniel Okrent, and I made it my mission to recruit him to the Krugman Truth Squad.

  We struck up an ongoing e-mail correspondence. When I met with him personally, his first words to me were: “You’re much better looking than Paul Krugman.” He told me that the Times didn’t deserve to be called the “newspaper of record” and vowed, “When I’m done with this assignment, I want everyone to know that.”64

  I raised with him how strange it was that the editorial page had no corrections policy. I shared with him various errors and misquotations in Krugman columns that I felt were simple and objective enough to merit formal correction. Over time, in a number of cases he agreed with me about the errors, and went to Krugman and to Krugman’s editor, Gail Collins, to get corrections with or without a formal policy.

  But Okrent got stonewalled, just as I had. He wrote,

  I learned early on in this job that Prof. Krugman would likely be more willing to contribute to the [GOP Senator] Frist for President campaign than to acknowledge the possibility of error. When he says he agreed “reluctantly” to one correction, he gives new meaning to the word “reluctantly”; I can’t come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass his general attitude toward substantive criticism.65

  Frustrated that working behind the scenes was not producing results, Okrent threatened to use his Public Editor’s column to expose Krugman’s and Collins’s intransigence. As a result, in March 2004 the Times put in place for the first time a columnist corrections policy. Okrent described the policy this way, quoting in part a memo from Collins:

  [C]olumnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but . . . they “are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column.” Corrections, under this
new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, “to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere.”66

  It was a victory, but a partial one to be sure. The corrections are to be worked into subsequent columns, not flagged in the paper’s separate corrections department, nor are the columns in which the errors were originally made to be flagged in the archives as having been subsequently corrected. With all those loopholes remaining, Krugman must have breathed a sigh of relief. But how his blood must have boiled when he read Okrent saying in the same column,

  Paul Krugman, writes Donald Luskin of Palo Alto, Calif., has committed “dozens of substantive factual errors, distortions, misquotations and false quotations—all pronounced in a voice of authoritativeness that most columnists would not presume to permit themselves.”

  For a wider audience, Luskin serves as Javert to Krugman’s Jean Valjean. From a perch on National Review Online, he regularly assaults Krugman’s logic, his politics, his economic theories, his character and his accuracy.67

  A year and a half later, Okrent moved on. In his final column as Public Editor, he took a parting shot at Krugman, listing among the things he regrets he didn’t write more about that “Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”68