On Thursday’s edition of The Rachel Maddow Show, Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University claimed that he reintroduced the concept of the “Big Lie” into public discussion in 2019. But that itself is a big lie.
Snyder is arguably the heir apparent to Noam Chomsky as America’s bestselling (academic) author. In fact, his book On Tyranny has become to anyone interested in preserving the values of liberal democracies what Mao’s Little Red Book was to anyone interested in adhering to the dictates of Chinese communism.
But he appeared on this show to promote the republication last week of another “international bestseller,” namely Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Reviewers would have you believe his updated afterword justifies buying it.
Except that listening to Maddow read an excerpt made me channel Ronald Reagan. Specifically, I exclaimed at the TV screen,
Well I’ll be damned! There he goes again.
Here is a screen grab of what she read:
Now I readily concede that I’m no Ivy-league professor; and that Snyder probably has more people paying to read his hardcover books than I have reading my blog commentaries for free. Nonetheless, famous authors like him are not entitled to plagiarize the intellectual property of unknown authors like me.. Rock band Oasis learned this the hard way when it had to pay big time for riding its song “Shakemaker” (1994) to the top of the charts based on sampling too much from The New Seekers’s song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (1971).
But, apropos of sampling, below is just a little of the evidence I can present to prove Snyder’s guilt. And bear in mind that he claims he reintroduced the concept of the big lie in 2019.
That said, here is how I “reintroduced” this concept in 2016, mere days after Donald Trump’s black-swan election, in “‘UnLike’ Facebook for Facilitating Trump’s ‘Post-Truth’ Run to the White House,” November 18, 2016:
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I spent much of the US presidential election bemoaning the willingness of so many people to believe a “big lie.” “Trump’s ‘Law and Order’ Doublespeak Has RNC Raving and Roiling,” July 20, 2016, highlights this. I found it particularly dismaying that their willingness often meant rejecting the plain truth … with Trumpian arrogance. …
The prophetic world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) is frightening. But that has nothing on Trump and the triumph of big lies, which prevail because purveyors so brazenly dismiss any truth about them as fake news. But the danger his presidency portends is as serious as a … Holocaust.
In fairness to Trump, though, he has nothing on Vladimir Putin. Not least because unchecked despots propagate big lies on a far greater scale and benefit from them to a far greater degree.
Of course, the “big lie” is just another name for propaganda — the lifeblood of totalitarian regimes like Putin’s. And they use absolute control of the media at home to feed it to their people like manna from Heaven, and press freedoms abroad to poison democratic processes like the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election.
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Clearly, I not only preempted Snyder’s reintroduction of the concept of the big lie, but presaged how both Trump and Putin would use it to cause the dystopian nightmare we’re living today.
In fact, long before Snyder’s purported reintroduction in 2019, my commentaries were already replete with warnings about the dangers this concept portended. For example, here is the direct analogy I drew between Hitler’s original big lie and Trump’s version in “Trumpasites Gagging on the Lies and Promises They Swallowed,” January 30, 2017:
Erstwhile sensible and principled Republicans like Speaker Paul Ryan … decried all of the big lies and outrageous pledges Trump blurted out during his campaign. Yet they are now blithely endorsing and rationalizing his implementation of policies based on those lies and pledges.
If you’ve ever wondered how so many German politicians became Hitler-saluting fascists, you need only look at how so many Republicans are taking pride in presenting themselves as Trump-saluting bigots.
And here is the clarion call I sounded to prevent history repeating itself in “Trump’s First 100 Days,” May 1, 2017:
It is mainly the feat of an idiot, full of lies and hypocrisy, accomplishing nothing. In fact, Donald Trump became a billionaire and the most powerful man in the world by telling big lies and being brazenly hypocritical. In truth, this nouveau fascist figured out long ago that the bigger the (repeated) lie, the more likely people are to believe it; and the more brazen the hypocrisy, the more likely they are to accept it. …
But it behooves those of us who know better to resist the cognitive dissonance afoot. This is especially incumbent upon those in the mainstream media – who are now blithely reporting and commenting on his big lies without even bothering to mention the most salient point, namely, that they are big lies.
Now, if the above does not constitute a reintroduction of the concept of the big lie, then the concept of a reintroduction itself is a big lie. But wait, there’s more. Because here is how I literally called this spade a spade in “Trump Affirms His American Dystopia with Orwellian Newspeak,” July 29, 2018:
Not since Adolf Hitler has a leader used Big-Brother rhetoric as reflexively and effectively as Trump does.
With that, I could rest my case, knowing that I had presented more than enough evidence to find Professor Snyder guilty of plagiarism in any court of law.
Yet the pièce de résistance is the indictment I laid out against him in my podcast episode “Online Comments Section and the Fate of Democracy,” June 12, 2021. Given the date, his plagiarism that incited my wrath on that occasion clearly had nothing to do with the excerpt Maddow read on Thursday night. In other words, Snyder is a serial plagiarizer of my work.
Instead, it stemmed from suspicious similarities between what Snyder wrote in his essay “9/11 and 1/6 – How an American nightmare becomes real,” which he published on June 4, 2021, and the comment I made in the online section of The New York Times to a report headlined “Trump telling people he expects to be ‘reinstated’ as president by August,” which it published on June 1, 2021.
Alas, in order to make clear his offense, and show why justice is so warranted, I must share this extensive excerpt from that June 2021 podcast episode:
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I feel obliged to do something I have never done before and will probably never do again. I am going to read an excerpt from someone else’s commentary. Because it’s really the only way to help you appreciate why so many inquired the way they did [about the suspicious similarities]. And so from Professor Snyder’s “9/11 and 1/6 – How an American nightmare becomes real”:
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I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. … The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have ‘democratically elected government.’ And people are angry.
No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one. Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed. This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021. It will be worse in January 2025.
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Again, that, in relevant part, is what professor Snyder published on June 4, 2021, on the Thinking About website. Now here is how I commented several days earlier, on June 1, 2021, on that Times report on Trump telling people he expects to be reinstated as president by August:
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Trump’s supporters have shown time and again that no lie is too big or too farfetched for them to buy hook, line, and sinker. And they’ll probably donate hundreds of millions more for this fake inauguration … too.
But the ultimate showdown will come when Congress convenes in January 2025 – to count the electoral votes and certify the presidential election of 2024. What do his voter-suppressing MAGA pawns – who are now passing laws to rig elections in red states across America – think is going to happen when they attempt to present their trumped-up electors? Do they think bona-fide electors from blue states are just going to roll out the red carpet for their two-legged orange calf to return as president?
Civil War II: Red States vs. Blue States! And, trust me, just as Trump himself dodged the fight on January 6, no Trump will be among the idiots fighting this war for his cause either. Oh, and Biden, not Trump, will be Commander in Chief. So, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: ‘Prepare to die, suckers!’
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But even if you do not find that a sufficiently prescient prelude to what Professor Snyder wrote, perhaps you’ll find what I said way back on May 15 more so. Because in another podcast episode, here is how I had cause to quote no less a person than the hero of America’s first civil war, former President Ulysses S. Grant:
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.
So, given all that, you might think the p-word at issue here for Snyder is not prescience, but the one that is the bane of reputations for all professors. You might very well think that. But I couldn’t possibly comment.
But seriously, I have written prefiguring this second civil war, or contest as Grant called it when chivalry was still a thing, in many other commentaries, including “Republican and Democrats Began Governing Like Sunnis and Shias. Now Washington Is Looking Like Baghdad” January 17, 2021, “Tribalism and Dysfunction in American Politics,” June 24, 2018, and “Trump’s Insulting Tweet about Doug Jones, the Alabama Democratic Nominee, Reveals More about Trump,” November 26, 2017, which includes this prophecy:
Political tribalism is tearing America apart. And Trump’s presidency smacks of a demonic force designed to have Republicans and Democrats ape the Sunnis and Shias who have been fighting for the soul of Islam for over 1000 years.
So you see, if Professor Snyder is feeling like a mythical Cassandra, I must be feeling like the real Nostradamus, no?
But it is a curious thing that he takes credit for predicting unfolding events that, in his own words, are so obvious for all to see. One notable exception is the pride he takes in pointing out how he stood out among his peers in predicting that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2014. Of course, I’m no professor, and I don’t play one online. Even my blogging and podcasting are just hobbies. Therefore I share the following advisedly.
Because it just so happens that in my blog commentary “Ukraine’s Never-Ending Europe Spring,” December 3, 2013, I wrote
It would not surprise me in the least if Putin does to Ukraine what he did to Georgia; namely, deploy troops to cut off the pro-Russian parts of the country.
Three months later Putin invaded and annexed the Crimea part of Ukraine for his Mother Russia.
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And the rest, with respect to the concept of the big lie and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is history … repeating itself, which I clearly demonstrated was all too predictable – Snyder’s self-professed prescience notwithstanding.
Plagiarism is rightfully a mortal sin in academic settings, where original expression is paramount.
(Schatz and McGrath “Beg, Borrow, Steal: Plagiarism vs. Copying in Legal Writing,” 26 California Litigation 3 (2013))
I rest my case.
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