Has Spencer Klavan Ceased Suppressing?
A Difficult but Necessary Post to Write
If Aristotle could teach spiritedness…to be skeptical of reason’s “command,” specifically, to examine whether what seems like an insult comes not from an enemy but from a benefactor, or even a friend, a spirited individual might heed reason as if it were a father or a friend.
Mary Nichols, Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human, p. 216
God knows, I don’t even know if my own spiritedness can handle the writing of this post. I’m praying as I type this for forbearance and wisdom.
That’s how hard I find it to take Spencer Klavan’s latest.
Don’t understand? Prickly already because Klavan’s a good guy in your book? Because you—naturally—have little desire to dive into what sounds like it will be a personal spat?
Well, I can only ask you to “put yourself in my shoes,” as Golden-Rule-channeling Harper Lee once recommended, in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Ask yourself: “How would I feel if someone bright, popular, connected, and successful, who loves the same philosophic studies as I do, who embraces the same religion—and often preaches it more effectively—repeatedly refused to discuss or heed sincere warnings from me, delivered over several years, that he was committing a grave mistake in his public life, and then one fine day, seemed to begin trying to correct that error, but without admitting he had ever committed it, or that anyone had tried to warn him of it?”
Your answer? “I suppose I’d be angry, and exasperated.”
And I’ll add this: “And worried that he might set a how-to-get-away-with-it example for the many others guilty of the same sin.”
(Yes, I know, I should be less fearful of that. Fears contribute to my anger issues.)
Recently, Spencer Klavan published this, first on The New Jerusalem substack he does with his father Andrew Klavan, there as “Letter #246,” and then on the web-magazine he is an editor of, The American Mind. It’s in a casual letter format b/t son and dad, and the topic is the hypocrisy of all those Democrat media operatives who now rail against the suppression of the story about Biden’s mental and health status, a suppression they were all involved in. But it also contains, seemingly in passing, a reference to the very same news that I noticed that both the The Blaze and The Daily Wire were reporting on, about the hearing which revealed that the government knew in early ‘21 about the exponentially increased risk for myocarditis from the Covid-vax, and said nothing.
Here’s how that larger topic and that specific piece of Covid-vax news are put together by Spencer:
…Joe Biden himself has suffered more than enough and is accountable, now, only to a justice beyond my scope or virtue. What’s done is done. What’s left is the rotted scaffolding of the system that propped him up for so long, and the shabby clowns who still can’t seem to see their own red noses despite looking relentlessly down them at the rest of us.
It’s things like the report that came out recently, which alleges that the previous administration took steps to prevent critical information from reaching people who needed it to decide about taking the COVID vaccine. That’s the unique mixture of absurdity and low villainy we call corruption. And yes it’s hilarious. And yes it’s maddening. And yes, it’s all hideously sad.
The absurdity and hilarity comes across more in the Andrew Klavan piece he is responding to, “Letter #245,” and centers on the idea of people rushing out to buy Jake Tapper’s new book, which is “a book lamenting…a deception he helped perpetrate,” an event whose proper headline would, courtesy of The Babylon Bee, be this: “Jake Tapper Uncovers Startling Evidence That Biden’s Decline Was Covered Up By Jake Tapper.”
But Spencer chooses to connect that to the Covid-vax report, and thus to stress the sad side of all of this, setting things up for a Christian sermon-ette:
In other words, it’s the world. Not that it lets any of these cretins off the hook—scandal will come, but woe to him through whom it comes. Still, it seems to me one major selling point of Christianity is its teaching that this is pretty much the state of things. If it weren’t the Democrats it’d be some other gang of chuckleheads we had to contend with. Given time and opportunity, I imagine the Republicans will turn out to be just as bad. But take heart! This is the world, and no other, that Christ has overcome.
I’ll say a word on this below, but first, let me first confess how difficult it has been these last couple of weeks to hear the conservative talking heads rail on about the Hypocrisy! of all these Dems who now decry the cover-up of Biden’s health. I agree with their words against that hypocrisy and that suppression, but given another suppression, the ongoing one of the Covid-vax-harms story committed by these very same “conservative” talkers, I can only wince at who is saying them.
The Klavans, for example, are aghast that a story of great public import was being suppressed, when they have been players, and Spencer, as an editor at The American Mind and at The Claremont Review of Books, a rather strategically-placed player, in the bipartisan suppression of a story the public had an even greater and more urgent right to be told about.
As far as I am aware, this is the very first time Spencer has mentioned any aspect of the Covid-vax harms story in a non-dismissive way.1
Now it could be a good sign overall, a sign that conservative insiders like Spencer, or like the folks who run The Blaze and The Daily Wire, are hearing top-level chatter that Trump and Kennedy are going to blow the lid off the covid-vax story. So perhaps we are seeing conservative media figures who have long-suppressed it make some moves of preparation.
For many of them will want to make it seem that they’ve been discussing it for years now, when in fact, their squelching of the story made them second-rank participants in the silencing of the brave covid-vax victims we meet in the recent documentary Follow the Silenced.
All of those victims, sometimes told that they would be aiding an evil conspiracy theory hatched by conservatives if they made their baffling injuries known to the public, or even that such a theory was having a psychosomatic effect sufficient to explain their symptoms, would have felt immense gratitude in ‘21, ‘22, ‘23, and ‘24 if there had been actual conservative leaders, pundits, and journalists, not bogeyman ones, interviewing them, and publicly expressing openness to the possibility of widespread harms coming from these novel medicines.
But outside Senator Ron Johnson—whose first four or so roundtables and hearings on this topic Klavan’s The American Mind did not see fit to call any attention to2—there were no national-level politicians who did so. And as for the pundits and journalists, all the ones who did report on the victims’ claims were never linked to in, nor invited to write pieces for, the more prestigious outlets like The American Mind. They were sent a clear signal that this was not a topic to be discussed. In other words, when dealing with people like the Covid-vax-injured, that “mind” put its fingers into its ears, or to use a better metaphor, it sought to put them into the ears of all conservatives.
So, yeah, Spencer, this is the “world,” and this is modern society—modern society as we’ve been forced to see it shorn of its veils, post-2020.
But you have been one of the maintainers of it! And you have been near the heart of one its greatest corruptions.
You know what preceded my publication of my “Adjunct Suppressors” piece at PostModernConservative, namely, how I tried in emails passed along by conservatives we both knew, to initiate dialogue with the Claremont editors, including yourself. Tried to get you guys to do the right thing.
You know how in 2024, nearly a year after that broadside, I sent each of you an olive-branch type email urging us to talk about our differences.
How do you think I felt, by the way, about receiving no responses?
Or how do you think the many conservatives who think as I do on the Covid-vax issue feel about their “leaders” having ignored and dismissed their concerns for years?
If you want to ditch the Suppression, that is, the only suppression so serious and audacious as merit a capital-S, and your mention of this bit of the Covid-vax story is a sign of that, well, good. But know that what I said in my last piece, to the editors of The Blaze and The Daily Wire, applies even more so to you and the others at Claremont:
…if you’ve really made a turn here, you need to say that, and to formally apologize to your readership, subscribers, and donors. This apology can contain some guilt-mitigating explanations for why you waited so long to cover the story, but it must contain some kind of serious admission of the serious wrongs you’ve committed. It must also contain an explicit statement about whether you were or were not pressured by top figures in donor-world, in Pharma, in government, in GOP leadership, or in the Trump camp. If the sin was all your own, own up to it, and clear-away the fogs of suspicion. But if you were nudged or pushed into it by other powerful persons or institutions, you owe it to us to name those names. Real repentance requires actions; requires making amends.
Reading your latest posts, it seems you’ve grown weary of things political. I can understand, for as indicated, you’ve been involved in at least one rather ugly political calculation, the one regarding Covid-vax coverage, and the classics are just too beautiful—as you’ve genuinely shown on your Young Heretics podcast—, and the Gospel just too compelling and necessary, to not talk more about them.
Maybe that’s just a deceptive impression I’ve drawn, and you’re still ready and willing to serve the Claremont line, a line which on most issues has long been a most noble one. But if it’s not, and you do begin to move away from politics, understand that you have unfinished business in that realm. Decisions you were a part of had a major role in keeping three-fourths of the citizenry from discussing, or even knowing about, a story which historians will regard as one of the greatest criminal-negligence disasters ever, a unique kind of Crime against Humanity, but nonetheless, one of the greatest of these. I stress the importance of those decisions, because there are good reasons to think that had Claremont made a move in ‘22 or ‘23 to force discussion of the claimed Covid-vax harms, it would have soon become significantly harder for Fox News, GOP politicians, and other top Suppressors to have maintained their vile silence about them.
So no, you are in no position to be speaking against a set of “clown-elite” Democrats and the evil of their suppressing the Biden-story, or to be musing about the “laughable/sad” hypocrisy of their denouncing that evil with zero admission of their own role in it.
For with the hundred-times more important Covid-vax Catastrophe story, you are in the exact same position as they.
Except, that the suppression you’re involved in continues.
Sure, maybe your involvement is nearly over, with this mention of this hearing’s report being the beginning of the end, but what you cannot deny is that for three and half years, you’ve helped shield from scrutiny one of the major societal corruptions specific to the 2020s. I worry that you tend in this little letter towards blaming that corruption on the general character of “the world.” Thankfully, you also convey the truth that God notes and judges who it is that brings each “scandal” characteristic of the world into it. You would thus agree with me that the New Testament’s “world” passages, and its “All have sinned, and fallen short of the Glory of God” passage, must not be twisted into supporting anything like the “collective responsibility” idea which Hannah Arendt had to endlessly fight against:
…I do know that in postwar Germany, where…problems arose with respect to what had been done to the Jews, the cry “We are all guilty” that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were guilty. When all are guilty, nobody is. Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal.
Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 147
Well, my dear readers, let me shift back to talking to you.
Do you see how difficult, in emotional terms, it can be for folks like me to deal with little moves like this one by Spencer Klavan? I’ve been calling for years now, in both political and religious terms, for people like him to “Repent Bigly,” to be straight with us, and instead, I see that things like this is what we’re more usually going to get. This is a move designed, I suspect, to cover tracks, to come up alongside the ever-growing ranks of anti-Covid-vax Americans, and to pretend to have been right there with ‘em. Similarly, it is designed to be a piece of a passably anti-Covid-vax record, belatedly thrown together now, given the increasingly likely possibility that Kennedy will do something big to force attention onto the Catastrophe. Or, this is a more confused move, stemming from denial, in which the deceptive moves are mainly there for the sake of fooling oneself, and there is an inchoate desire to get beyond questions of personal guilt, connected to a broader weariness with politics; one facet of this confusion could be a turn to a more politics-demoting understanding of Christianity.
I don’t know. We’ll see what he does. Maybe he really is about to end his part in the Suppression, and maybe he’ll even agree with my democracy-healing (and Christian) demand that he makes of that a clean break.
Maybe he’ll even offer to talk with me.
Or more likely, it will take him most of his remaining years to realize the evil he facilitated over these last few. And he will thus remain an obstacle, a maddeningly sincere one, in the way of the conservative movement’s undergoing a moral Reckoning on this.
Quite sad, that possibility. Sobering. Nearly impossible to make comedy of.
But even if that’s what happens, we and he may “take heart,” for in Christ, it is never too late—in this life—for any of us to Repent. And we should pray, with audacious faith, that the day will come sooner for Spencer than our now rather sobered reason would lead us to expect.
This piece is not a Suppressor Report, so I have not done a systematic count of mentions in his writings and podcasts of the Covid-vax Catastrophe, though I did do such a count of The American Mind’s and the CRB’s mentions from 2022 through May of 2023, and have never since noticed a departure from the Suppressing pattern I found when I did that—you can find the count in the “Adjunct Suppressors” piece highlighted above.
And notice that this mention simply speaks of a “report,” couched in the careful framing of what it “alleges,” and doesn’t provide readers with the names of anyone involved, such as Senator Ron Johnson or Dr. Peter McCullough.