Rael Jean Isaac, a wide-ranging polemicist who took on topics as diverse as global warming, radical left groups, Israel and its neighbors, and homelessness, passed away on June 25th. Apart from several books, her writings appeared in National Review, American Spectator, Commentary, and other journals of the time. Rather than summarize, I will list here some techniques those writings demonstrate about the fun side of investigative writing, which Isaac used to skewer left wing movements.
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Lesson 1: Show examples of an argument taken to absurd lengths.
In her book on the Global Warming movement “Roosters of the Apocalypse”, Rael can’t resist telling you this story:
The most far-out speculation of all comes from researchers at Pennsylvania State University, who suggest rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly growing threat to the universe and lead them to take drastic action against Earth before the threat escalates further.
Lesson 2: Provide historical context.
In the same book Isaac shows that environmentalist alarmism did not start with global warming:
Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was the date the panic burst upon the national scene. ‘We are already 5 years into the biosphere self-destruct era’ read a sign in the Berkeley, California office of Ecology Action, one of the two hundred environmental groups that mushroomed in the San Francisco area alone during the panic. “The generations now on earth may be the last” read the cover of The Dying Generations, a book of readings published in 1971.
Lesson 3: Point out hypocrisy.
Again, from Roosters:
Environmentalists have gone to great lengths to have certain eagles, hawks, and owls protected as endangered species, only to have wind turbines act as avian cuisinarts. In the Bay Area of California, pressure is building to shut down the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, which is in the flight path of protected species. It is estimated to kill up to 4,700 birds annually, including almost 1,200 raptors and upwards of 75 golden eagles.
The double standard here is that when the cause du jour conflicts with saving rare species, the cause wins.
Lesson 4: Find the quotes that reveal a true agenda.
Legal Services is a taxpayer funded program, supposedly to help the poor represent themselves in court. President Ronald Reagan tried to get rid of the program but failed. He tried to get rid of it because it did not stick to that core mission. In her book “Harvest of Injustice”, Rael includes some quotes revealing what truly caused stars in the eyes of Legal Service lawyers, such as this quote by one Legal Services employee:
Most of us agree that (1) America maintains a deeply stratified class system; changing that system…is a primary concern of most of us who do legal services work.
As presented to Congress, Legal Services was not meant to change “the system.” However, to take one example, Legal Services brought waves of lawsuits against small farms that used migrant labor (under official U.S. programs). One Michigan farmer described what Legal Services was doing as “guerilla warfare.” It’s a reminder that labels and names don’t always reflect the evolving purpose of an organization.
Lesson 5: Insiders are more convincing than outsiders.
A good example is from Rael and Erich Isaac’s book “The Coercive Utopians”. The book leads off with a quote by a member of the Methodist Church:
Most Methodist churchgoers would react with disbelief, even anger, to be told that a significant portion of their weekly offerings were being siphoned off to groups supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization, the governments of Cuba and Vietnam, the pro-Soviet totalitarian movements of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and several violence-prone fringe groups in this country….
That particular example ranges across many types of organization — churches, environmentalists, public interest groups, NGOs, think tanks, Pacifist groups, Government on various levels, and so forth. The same impulse to achieve social justice surfaces repeatedly.
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Lesson 6: Focus on the most important historical threads.
In the case of homelessness, Isaac spotted a thread that had been downplayed, the movement among lawyers to treat mental illness as a civil rights issue. “Madness in the Streets”, which she coauthored with Virginia Armat, was the book she was proudest of, because of her detective work in tracing the laws that now make it impossible to treat even people who hear voices and sleep on grates.
Lesson 7: Find anecdotes with a similar theme to make an ironic point.
In Commentary magazine of April 1994, Isaac reviews a book by one of the revered early leaders of Israel, Shimon Peres. Peres had a strong element of wishful thinking in his makeup, and she finds a good analogy to his thinking at the start of her review: She writes:
Elise Boulding, a mother-figure in the 1960’s peace movement in the United States, used to urge her followers to ‘Imagine Peace.’ The idea was that if you imagined hard enough, and in enough detail, the image would become reality. This book by Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister of Israel and chief architect of the peace agreement with Yasir Arafat, is based precisely on such an exercise; having ‘imagined’ a political paradise, Peres proceeds to confuse it with reality.
Lesson 8: Use counterexamples.
Also in Commentary, (December 1993) she writes of the cold peace between Israel and Egypt. She says:
Israel paid an extremely high price for the agreement with Egypt. It not only sacrificed strategically important territory, oil independence, and settlements, but paved the way for the rearming of Egypt by the United States. In return, once Israel had completed the Sinai withdrawal, it was left with little more than nonbelligerency from Egypt. But in assessing the value of this, it is worth stressing once again that, without such sacrifices by Israel, there has been no war on the Syrian front, either.
Here she is saying that when a causal argument — that the agreement with Egypt led to peace is made, you can find another instance in the same period when war did not occur, without any such agreement. If this were peace, judging from Egyptian media accusations toward Israel, it was a very hostile peace.
These examples naturally raise another question: If well-documented polemics are so carefully argued, do they change minds?
Despite the best efforts of Mrs. Isaac and many others, for example, coercive utopians are active, homelessness is worse than ever, and doomed peace agreements in the Middle East keep getting signed.
Rael Isaac did gain some traction with her exposes of the National Council of Churches, one of which became the second most requested reprint in the history of the Reader’s Digest.
Whether one agreed with her conclusions or not, Isaac demonstrated that effective polemics depend on evidence, careful research, memorable examples, and the willingness to challenge fashionable assumptions.
We should follow Abe Lincoln’s saying, “…with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” Rael Isaac certainly did.
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