I built versions of this in the cable years — the roundup where you thread three loose stories onto one spine and deliver the editorial-page destination before the reader has a reason to question the connective tissue. James Freeman’s September 4 Best of the Web, “Maybe Not the Moment for a Millionaires’ Tax,” runs the operation across two states: a Washington ballot measure aimed at the state’s highest-wealth households, a Seattle housing-market snapshot, and a Los Angeles mayoral race, all stitched together until the word that rings in the reader’s ear — “homeowners’ rebellion” — is the conclusion the column never had to state. Five moves in five hundred words, all wired to the same destination: the protection of concentrated wealth and fossil-fuel interests. This column walks through them as they appear. The work is in the order.
The first move opens exactly the way the manual specifies. “There’s never a good time for a state to punish success and encourage residents to flee. Washington state homeowners may decide in November that this is an especially bad time to test how much pain taxpayers will endure before exiting.” Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ §4.1 in the catalogue; the 2003 Luntz environmental memo; Lakoff, Moral Politics — operates here by substituting “punish[ing] success,” “encourag[ing] residents to flee,” and “pain taxpayers will endure before exiting” for “marginal tax on income above a million dollars a year.” The technician’s name for this is the brochure — you write the cover copy so the reader flinches before he ever meets the payer. The reader the column wants to flinch is the median homeowner, who will never owe a dollar of the levy. The column wants that homeowner to feel the sting on the millionaire’s behalf. What the levy actually buys is left entirely offstage — no schools, no healthcare, no housing assistance — because the operator’s job is to keep the brochure free of any figure that would let the homeowner weigh the measure on its own merits. That silence is the wall the brochure leans against: leave the revenue offstage so the homeowner has nothing to balance the sting against, and the sting becomes the whole story. The page ran the move in 2009 on the estate tax, in 2012 on the Buffett Rule, in 2017 on the high-end benefits of the Trump tax cut. Same operation, different referent.
The second move is the housing-market fallback. “It’s expected to be a buyer-friendly September in Seattle. One can only imagine what will happen to home values in November if voters don’t fix the mistake made by the Democrats who run the state government.” This is the “study shows” ledger — WSJ §4.5 — doing its heaviest lift. The column borrows the authority of a Shaina Mishkin housing-market summary in Barron’s and the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller index (a national composite, not a Washington forecast) to attach a softening-market story to a state-level tax on households above one million. None of the cited data touches the measure at issue. The two-step is the operation: quote the real number, collect the conclusion the number never made. “One can only imagine” is the load-bearing instrument. The column asks the reader to imagine a home-value collapse the data does not predict, and lets the imagination stand in for evidence. The “Democrats who run the state government” is a small precise move — name the political coalition when the policy is contested, and let the coalition carry the blame. When the same coalition passes a policy the page approves, the policy is bipartisan or “what works.”
The third move is the legitimacy withdrawal. “Uncomfortable homeowners may not be thrilled with the way Gov. Bob Ferguson and his fellow Democrats ran roughshod over a longstanding interpretation of state law to enact the new tax and are now relying on deceptive ballot language to defend it.” The column does not engage whether the legislature’s reading of the statute survives review. It asserts the ballot summary is “deceptive” and moves on. The document is filed with the secretary of state; the reader can read it; the column does not ask the reader to. Pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal — the Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog — withdraws the institution’s standing on identity grounds, then any subsequent engagement with the law is treated as defense of an illegitimate act. The page ran the same move on the 2020 election-litigation cases and on the Trump prosecutions. The substantive question — the statute, the ballot language’s accuracy — does not get a hearing.
The fourth move closes the Washington half. “Now comes a test of how popular it is to create a huge new disincentive to locating in Washington at the same time the state’s largest housing market is softening. If this deceitfully manufactured and marketed tax hike fails in November, it may be due to a homeowners’ rebellion.” The accusation of deceit is the giveaway because it is the one rhetorical charge in the column that is literally true — applied to the wrong document. The measure is called “deceitfully manufactured and marketed”; the ballot language is “deceptive”; and in the same column the piece manufactures a “homeowners’ rebellion” of Washingtonians rising against a tax only the state’s wealthiest will pay. This is projected deceit, tu quoque by other means: accuse the opponent of the trick you are running, so the reader’s outrage spends itself on your behalf. And the “rebellion” is the astroturf frame — a donor-class campaign dressed as the spontaneous rising of the many, the way the cable years used to stand up a “groundswell” with one phone call and a schedule of paid callers. Who benefits if this fails? A tiny, concentrated cohort of very wealthy residents — and the editorial apparatus that speaks for its patrons. Calling your own con “deceptive” does not cleanse the con. It describes it.
The seam is the move.
The fifth move opens Los Angeles the way the blue-state-failure frame — WSJ §4.9 — prescribes. “Meanwhile on Planet Los Angeles, the two leftist candidates who emerged from the open mayoral primary are now competing to see who can promise the most ambitious plan to make daily life unaffordable.” “Planet Los Angeles” is the mockery reflex — treat the governed city as an alien world so its choices need not be engaged. “Climate absolutism” is frame-engineered relabeling, WSJ §4.1 again, this time hiding the work behind the surface phrase. The substance the label hides is candidates proposing the actual work of decarbonizing buildings, electricity, and transit — investments that bear on the affordability crisis the column invokes and never measures. “Competing to see who can promise the most ambitious plan to make daily life unaffordable” is the whole argument wearing no evidence at all. No cost figure. No comparison. The insufferable label is the argument, and the receipts are optional.
Then the survey. “The environment remains a low priority on the list of quality-of-life issues facing L.A. County residents, according to a March survey from UCLA.” A priority list is not a verdict on transit or housing policy. A respondent ranking environment as low is not a respondent voting to abandon decarbonization. This is the “study shows” ledger applied to a political-economy claim — a descriptive finding (“environment ranks low”) converted into a normative license (“climate policy is elite imposition”). The captured-audience instrument does the column’s work for it. The column doesn’t have to argue decarbonization is unpopular — it only has to wave the survey and let the reader’s priors do the rest.
Then the closing intervention. “This disconnect between what voters want and what L.A. elected officials seek to impose on them is enabled by an open primary system, which prevents a healthy competition of ideas in the general-election campaign.” That is pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal applied to the electoral mechanism itself — the design of Los Angeles’s primary reframed as a pathology, the legitimacy of the next mayoral election withdrawn in advance. The voters of Los Angeles, who actually chose these candidates from a crowded and contested open field, are now characterized as the captive audience of a process the editorial page would rather not have produced this result. The disconnect Freeman describes is the gap between what Freeman wants and what L.A. voters decided they wanted. It is not a failure of the voters’ system. It is a disagreement wearing a structural diagnosis.
Now read the stitching.
The column does not connect the Washington wealth tax and the Los Angeles climate contest because the news required the connection. It connects them because the operator needs the homeowner-reader to carry the same grievance posture across two states and arrive at the editorial-page destination without ever having to argue for it. A reader who closes the column carrying resentment toward Seattle Democrats and Los Angeles climate absolutists has done the connective-tissue work himself — the column supplied three news pegs and let him run the cable between them. The destination the braid was built to deliver the reader to is “rebellion.” The homeowner-reader believes, all the way to the closing line, that he walked there on his own.
It is two coordinated operations run as one. Operation one is the millionaires’-tax smear. The concentrated beneficiary is the >$1M-income household, told the tax is a war on people like them, told fleeing is reasonable, with exit dignified by the column’s vocabulary. The diffuse cost-bearer is the public service the tax would fund — schools, healthcare, housing assistance — and the prospective homeowner whose interest in stable revenue the column subordinates to the existing homeowner’s interest in property-value inflation. Operation two is the climate-policy hoax. The concentrated beneficiary is the fossil-fuel-extraction interest and the homeowner who opposes density and transit. The diffuse cost-bearer is everyone whose long-term interest in a livable climate the column subordinates to the present homeowner’s interest in present property values. Both operations run on the same muscle: a populist-base reader who is told the column is exposing the elites, and who does not notice that the column is constructing what the populist reader wants so that the elites the column serves can sell it to him.
I drafted variations of this kind of seam for eight years on the editorial page. The seam was the work. The seam was the line the page got the most credit for in the room where the page was built. The seam was what the page’s management was paying us to produce, and we knew what we were producing. The reader who consumes the column does not. He names the con, and then he supplies it.
It is a scare built by and for the people who would pay the tax, marched in the uniforms of the people who never will. The “homeowners’ rebellion” is the finest costume in the piece — a rising of the many, in the service of the few, dressed in the language of grievance while guarding the exemption the few actually want. The column tells the reader the millionaire is being punished. The column does not mention that the millionaire will not be punished — because the reader who will not be punished is being addressed as though he were. The column tells the reader the homeowner is being punished. The column does not mention that the homeowner will not be punished, either. The reader walks away angry at the people the column was written to protect. That gap is the operation — the marks marching for the millionaires, and the column calling the marching democracy. That is not journalism. That is the editorial-page job.
— Phukher Tarlson