Have a subscrip. to the Chronicle Review? I need to know about Peter Navarro's imaginary friend!

[EleanorR]

Hit a paywall.

Link to tweet

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. I can't help, but here's another link.

David Fahrenthold Retweeted

WHAT

Link to tweet

Peter Navarro, Trump's trade adviser and chief cheerleader of his China policy, has apparently been quoting staunch China hawk "Ron Vara" in his books for years. But:

1. Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro.
2. Ron Vara doesn't exist.

@tebartl digs in:

Link to tweet

[regnaD kciN]

4. But...but...but...

...John Barron vouched for his existence!

[Mike 03]

2. A different article

Can't get the article you want, but this is some hilarious stuff from another article in Raw Story:

A shocking expose in The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Peter Navarro invented the name “Ron Vara,” an anagram for Navarro, to justify his own opinions in his books.

The so-called Ron Vara has strong opinions, fortune-cookie-style quotes and an elaborate back story as “a military veteran and Harvard-trained economist who made seven figures in the stock market by investing in companies that do well during international crises,” the report said.

SKIP

“China scholars and fellow economists tend to be less enthused. Navarro doesn’t have a background in Chinese studies, doesn’t speak the language, and reportedly made his first trip to the country only last year,” The Chronicle reported. “Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, once wrote that Navarro ‘stands so far outside the mainstream that he endorses few of the key tenets of the profession.'”

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an emeritus professor of Japanese and Korean history at the Australian National University, was looking into Navarro’s “heated language,” saying that is remarkably similar to the “yellow peril” language used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The racist philosophy encouraged Europe to invade and take over China.

But when she was working on her research, she kept seeing the name Ron Vara, with Navarro specifically citing Vara dozens of times in six books. Outside of Navarro, however, Ron Vara didn’t seem to exist. He’s not quoted in any other books, in fact, he never seemed to exist until Navarro’s 2001 book If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks. Navarro invented the backstory that Vara was a doctoral student at Harvard working on a thesis on utilities regulation.

So, she called colleagues at Harvard to ask if they’d heard of him. No one had. But Navarro they did know. Interestingly enough, he was working on a doctoral thesis about utilities regulation around the same time as Ron Vara.

More at link: https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/trump-trade-adviser-busted-for-making-up-whimsical-pen-name-to-quote-himself-in-his-books-for-years/

This is really quite amusing.

[EleanorR]

3. Thank you!

Omg

[mercuryblues]

5. Amazon has everything

At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign’s only economic adviser.)


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/jared-kushner-steve-bannon-white-house-civil-war

[NewJeffCT]

6. gives new meaning to

"all the best people"