Trump and MAGA’s War on California

Posted on Saturday 14 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • News today: Trump’s parade, No Kings demonstrations, and a dress-up cop shoots Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota;
  • Charlie Warzel on the surfeit of information and how the right can invent via AI narratives to its advantage;
  • Similar gaslighting about Alex Padilla;
  • Sensing the deportation targets are absurd, Trump changes the targets (TACO!);
  • David Barton lies again; Shane Vaughn celebrates an imminent arrival of the end times; and a new entry in “If the US press covered the US the way it covers other countries.”
– – –

Today is Trump’s parade; today hundreds, maybe thousands, of No Kings demonstrations are being held in cities across the nation; and today we woke to learn that two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses had been shot overnight by someone dressed as a policeman, killing one couple, with a list of other planned targets, include abortion providers and other Democrats.

One way of looking at this is that Trump is an egomaniac, Trump and MAGA have declared war on the blue states and Trump has had the US military invade California with the intent of displacing its elected leaders. Californians are protesting. Of course. And — I’m speculating here — elements of MAGA are taking to violence against those who oppose their king.

The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 13 Jun 2025: I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again), subtitled “The L.A. distortion effect”

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil (“I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,” The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. “One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,” my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote.

There’s an essential truth here. While hundreds of years ago, people had little notion of what was happening in the world beyond the next town, now there is so much information online that people can pick and choose whatever narrative they like to make sense of things.

What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.

Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.

Choose-your-own-adventure. But the playing field is not level.

The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone.

He goes on about how X and Truth Social depict these events.

On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I’ve seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers’ market—and lots of pictures of the city’s unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it’s hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it’s unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters “to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.”

If the evidence doesn’t suit the right-wing agenda, they resort to lying via AI. After a few more paragraphs, Warzel concludes:

The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.

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Similar right-wing distortions of the Alex Padilla event.

LA Times, Anita Chabria, 13 Jun 2025: The gaslighting of Alex Padilla is already in full swing on the right

The writer gives examples of emails she gets, about how she should have described the event.

But the larger issue is the alternate reality the Trump administration is building to cultivate fear and build support for a military crackdown. The ask isn’t that we believe Padilla was a threat, but that we believe that America has devolved into an immigrant-induced chaos that only the military can quell, and that Trump needs the powers of a king to lead the military to our salvation.

And so on.

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Short items.

Slate, Shirin Ali, 14 Jun 2025: Even Donald Trump Is Starting to See the Absurdity of Stephen Miller’s Deportation Targets

I’ll key this to my observation that conservatives — because they align with base human nature, and not any kind of learning — are not good at proportions, or planning. They set arbitrary goals without any basis in past performance. (As my company was obliged to do to meet process maturity goals in the 2000s.)

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And so, Trump has changed his mind, again!

NY Times, 13 Jun 2025: Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries, subtitled “The abrupt pivot on an issue at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency suggested his broad immigration crackdown was hurting industries and constituencies he does not want to lose.” (via)

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Two more, from the religious fringe.

Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 13 Jun 2025: David Barton’s Defense of ICE Actions in LA is as Wrong as His History Lessons

Of course, Barton defends this stuff! By claiming ICE targets only criminals. Which is demonstrably untrue.

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Another item about why the Christian extremists are dangerous people. They are caught up in a Revelation fantasy of imminent end-times, and so they *welcome* chaos and war — as long as Israel is on their side.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 13 Jun 2025: Shane Vaughn Sings In Celebration That Israel’s Attack On Iran Is A Sign Of The End Times

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One more item, on the theme of “what if the press covered the US the way it covers other countries.” All I have is this image, from Fb.


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It’s Not Even About Deportation

Posted on Friday 13 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Alex Padilla incident, and the threat to “liberate” Los Angeles from its lawfully-elected leaders;
  • Trump always thinks protestors are paid demonstrators; why cannot he conceive that people disagree with him on principle?
  • And bonus items!
– – –

Because deportation is a legal process, which Trump and ICE are ignoring. It’s actually a racist, xenophobic drive about routing the nation of non-Whites, by any means. They don’t do “due process.” They just *know* that non-Whites are bad and must be expelled from the country. Or removed from the room.

You can get away with a lot when your fans apparently don’t realize what they’re seeing, even when it’s right in front of them. This has happened before in history; why aren’t more Americans alarmed by this??

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Now a US senator — who happens to be brown-skinned — was forcibly removed from a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (she of brown hair carefully arranged over her shoulders for every photo op) and handcuffed.

LA Times, Gustavo Arellano, 13 Jun 2025: Sen. Alex Padilla’s crime? Being Mexican in MAGA America

When U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a news conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, it was almost as if Donald Trump’s most well-worn talking point came to life:

A bad hombre tried to go after a white American.

All Padilla did was identify himself and try to question Noem about the immigration raids across Southern California that have led to protests and terror. Instead, federal agents pushed the senator into a hallway, forced him to the ground and handcuffed him before he was released. He and Noem talked privately afterward, yet she claimed to reporters that Padilla “lung[ed]” at her despite them being far apart and video showing no evidence to back up her laughable assertion.

I watched a clip of the incident, and at worst Padilla took a step forward as he asked his question.

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An initial report, from Thursday.

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 12 Jun 2025: U.S. Senator Thrown Down, Handcuffed as DHS Secretary Announces “Liberation” of California, subtitled “We are entering uncharted territory, folks.”

This includes the video.

And this:

Kristi Noem: We Are Staying in L.A. to ‘Liberate the City from the Socialist and the Burdensome Leadership’ of Mayor Bass and Gov. Newsom

*Excuse me*?? Who are they to think that — on the basis of a few hundred people protesting ICE tactics of kidnapping people off the street and disappearing them — think that California needs “liberating”? This sounds a lot like failed attempts by the US in past decades of thinking various people’s need “liberating” from their governments — and like Putin’s claim that Ukraine needs “liberating” from their supposed Nazi leaders.

Naturally, right-wingers, including Fox News (and Jon Voigt), create their own spins on these events. I do see some of these on Facebook. Once again, I think reactions like these, which typically align with conservatives, result from the inability to sense proportion, and the inability to understand nuance. The three burning Waymo cars, shown over and over in photos on TV from different angles, do not mean the entire city of LA is burning down, or that Trump and his thugs are entitled to “liberate” the state from its lawfully elected leaders.

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Two more items about this.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 13 Jun 2025: Fox parroted DHS claim Padilla “lunged toward” Noem. Video debunks it.

and

Boing Boing, Carla Sinclair, 12 Jun 2025: Sen. Alex Padilla handcuffed while talking to Kristi Noem — L.A. will be purged of its “burdensome leaders” she says (video)

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Stepping out toward the bigger issue.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 11 Jun 2025: “Who is funding these protestors?”: Gabbard, Trump spread conspiracy theory about paid demonstrators, subtitled: “The director of national intelligence pushed the idea that Los Angeles demonstrators were paid to protest”

At this point I think we can assume that if Trump accuses someone of something, it’s because he himself has done it. Let that sit for a moment. Then: What is also revealed here? Setting crude cynicism aside (i.e. they don’t believe what they’re saying but are only playing to the crowd). Can Trump and Gabbard honestly not conceive that some people honestly disagree with what they’re doing? (Because honest disagreements come from principles, and Trump thinks only in terms of power.)

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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 13 Jun 2025: Worse than Orbán: Trump is trying to bring his opposition to heel, subtitled “In Orbán’s Hungary, it’s “respectable fascism.” Here in the U.S., it’s something else”

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And a bigger picture in another dimension.

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Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 12 Jun 2025: Non-Christians Will Be Second-Class Citizens In Douglas Wilson’s ‘American Ethnos’

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Right Wing Watch, unsigned commentary, 11 Jun 2025: Trump’s Moves Toward Martial Law Fulfill MAGA Insiders’ Desire for American Caesar

Conservatives just want someone to tell them what to do.

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Dr. Christopher Evans, CULTS OF UNREASON

Posted on Thursday 12 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

No subtitle (they didn’t do them so often fifty years ago).

(UK, 1973; US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, 258pp, including 5pp index.)

Like Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH, discussed a couple weeks ago, this is a book I read decades ago, soon after it came out, and revisited recently to see how what it says fits into my current schema. Since the book came out in 1974, I also have to wonder, at this remove, what prompted me to buy and read it back then? I was a year into college, and had sufficient pocket money to buy books, even a hardcover now and then, but why did I spend $7.95 on *this* book?

I can sort of retrace the trajectory of my thinking and reading experiences. Through book services at school, I had discovered writers like Isaac Asimov (ENVIRONMENTS OUT THERE) and Martin Gardner (SCIENCE PUZZLERS, about experiments you could do at home), and also Frank Edwards (FLYING SAUCERS–SERIOUS BUSINESS and later STRANGER THAN SCIENCE). The Edwards books triggered a brief flirtation with UFO mania, as I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. At my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, IL, I would step outside his house, looking across the road over the pastures and up into the sky, thinking, *I could see a flying saucer at any moment*! After all, they were so common, according to these books. Of course I never did see one.

Then I discovered other books by Asimov (the pertinent one was IS ANYONE THERE?, a collection of essays) and Gardner (FAD AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE), that pointed out how easily people are snookered and how mundane explanations exist for all the supposedly miraculous sightings in books by Edwards and others.

So this Evans book, which I bought only a couple months after Gardner’s FADS, was out of extension of that interest, I suppose. Especially since it implicated science fiction! Nearly half the book is a series of chapters under the heading “The Science Fiction Religion.” What could this be about?

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I will not outline the book in detail, as I’ve for others. Its main topics:

  • The first part, almost half the book, is about L. Ron Hubbard, at one time a pulp science fiction writer , and his invention of “Dianetics” and later “Scientology.” He got his start in pulp science fiction magazines, and his early Dianetics essays were published in the leading science fiction magazine of the early 1950s, Astounding, by the editor John W. Campbell, who throughout his career was a tad credulous about revolutionary discoveries that would overturn convention wisdom. (He was a frustrated scientist/inventor himself, according to Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which I read a few years ago but never wrote up here.)
  • The second part is about flying saucers, recounting much of the history that we’ve read about in other books. The comment I wrote while reading: it’s about crazies who invent stuff out of thin air, like flat-earthers and the religious folks who are always worried about demons, and wars between good and evil. These topics attract similar personalities.
  • The third part is about “black boxes,” which were a thing in those days. They were devices with inputs and outputs and nothing in between, and so of course were rife for fraud. Claims they could detect “vibrations” to detect various ailments. Again as in Evans, there’s the idea of discrediting science: their ideas “are united in showing a preoccupation with the notion of fundamental forces, undiscovered or ignored by science, and closely tied to the psychic powers of human beings.” And their purveyors made lots of money. But claims involving such gadgets have disappeared. Perhaps because modern “gadgets” are far too complex for anyone to mimic.
  • The fourth part is about “The Mystic East,” i.e. the attraction in the 1970s to yoga, karma, mystical powers, reincarnation. Ouspensky; Gurdjieff and his seven evolutionary levels of man. And so on. The continued Western interest in oriental religions seems driven by a hope for some great truth waiting to be found.

What’s notable about this book is that Evans finds some amount of sympathy for each group. He understands their motives. Are the bases for our modern religions, simply because they’re endured for a couple thousand years, any sillier than the basis of Scientology?

And my takeaway, after reading this book again, is that cultish ideas appear and disappear over time. Scientology is still around, but black boxes? No. UFOs? Not so much. (And as David Brin keeps pointing out, supposed photos of UFOs, in this day and age when virtually everyone has phone with a camera in their pockets, are no better now than they were 50 years ago. They’re still fuzzy.) Mystic East? Practices have been absorbed into Western culture.

Bottom line: human psychology is forever open to subjective interpretations of things it does not understand objectively. The focus of such interpretations changes over time. Thus the topics in this book, the topics in Gardner’s FADS AND FALLACIES, and the topics of the ur-text on this subject, Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published way back in 1841. (I have a copy of that, too.) The topics change. The gullibility of human nature does not. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “gullibility.” Human nature did not evolve to accurately perceive the world; it evolved to survive. The stories that humans assign to things they don’t understand gradually give way to objective understanding of reality, via science. But it takes a while.

Posted in Book Notes, Science, science fiction, Supernatural | Leave a comment

It’s Not About Law and Order

Posted on Wednesday 11 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jim Newell and Amanda Marcotte on Stephen Miller’s drive to “grab as many people as possible, regardless of innocence.”; and how he grew up in Santa Monica;
  • Fox News, of course, spreads a fantasy depiction of what’s going on in LA;
  • A GOP senator faults California for not thriving, apparently unaware that the state is now the fourth-largest economy in the world;
  • There is the usual misinformation online about the extent of the protests in LA, and AI is part of the problem;
  • Catherine Rampell at WaPo about forces descending on Small Town, U.S.A., clarifying that they’re after “brown-looking people”;
  • The New Yorker puts it gently: Trump’s assertions “did not appear to reflect reality.”;
  • And two comments by Robert Reich, about law and order, and about how we are almost all descendants of immigrants.
– – –

This isn’t about law and order. It’s about this guy’s racism.

Slate, Jim Newell, 11 Jun 2025: The “Big, Beautiful Bill” Hands Stephen Miller the Policy of His Dreams…

Stephen Miller is living his dream. The Santa Monica High School graduate who, 20 years ago, rebelled against the prevailing liberalism and celebrated multiculturalism of his classmates now runs policy for the president of the United States. And he’s convinced his boss, at last, to send in troops to quell all that he hates about Los Angeles County.

Santa Monica, though technically not part of the city of LA, is surrounded by it, and is relatively white and upscale compared to much of LA.

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Salon Amanda Marcotte, 11 Jun 2025: Stephen Miller can’t make America white. LA is paying for his impotent rage, subtitled “Mass deportations were never going to work, so Trump and Miller resort to authoritarian theater”

Remember, he’s set this target of 3000 deportations a day.

In their desperation to keep Miller happy, ICE has already been targeting legal immigrants for deportation, mostly because they’re easy to find, due to having registered with the government. ICE agents stake out immigration hearings for people with refugee status and round up people here with work or student visas for minor offenses like speeding tickets, all to get the numbers up. But these actions were not enough for Miller.

“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” he reportedly screamed at ICE officials. One ICE leader protested that the agency’s lead, Tom Homan, said they’re supposed to be going after criminals, not people who are just working everyday jobs. Miller reportedly hit the ceiling, furious that arrests aren’t widespread and indiscriminate. Trump has repeatedly implied he was only targeting criminals, but as Charles Davis reported at Salon, that conflicts with his promise of “mass deportations.” Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born Americans. The expansive efforts to find and arrest immigrants in California, which kicked off the protests, appear to be a direct reaction to Miller’s orders to grab as many people as possible, regardless of innocence.

The gist:

But Miller doesn’t seem to care about crime. Or, perhaps he thinks having darker skin should be a crime. For Miller, the goal of “mass deportations” has never been about law and order, but about the fantasy of a white America.

It would be easy to speculate about how this guy grew up in relatively privileged circumstances, and then became shocked that people unlike him existed in the world, even in Los Angeles!

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Nonsense.

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 10 Jun 2025: Fox’s LA fantasy is setting the stage for an authoritarian federal response

Fox News’ depiction of the protests that began in and around Los Angeles over the weekend is a grim fantasy — but one that encourages President Donald Trump to realize his vision of U.S. troops crushing left-wing dissent.

Prime-time host Jesse Watters laid out his network’s dominant narrative in a Monday night monologue.

“Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,” Watters alleged. “They’re burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they’re fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.”

None of this is true.

Fans of winning, and losing, sports games cause as much damage.

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Nonsense.

JMG, 11 Jun 2025: GOP Senator: “Newsom Sucks At Being A Terrible Gov”

(Isn’t that quote a double negative? Does he mean that Newsom is trying to be a terrible Gov and is failing at it?)

“The guy absolutely should be thanking President Trump right now for trying to restore order because the only thing Governor Newsom is good at right now is sucking at being number one at being a terrible governor. I mean, that is it. Why isn’t California thriving like the rest of the country? Well, because they have a blue state ran by a woke DEI agenda that doesn’t support law and order.”

Hasn’t he heard? Just this year: BBC: California passes Japan as fourth largest economy. The three biggest: The US as a whole, then Germany, then China. Japan has slipped to 5th.

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Trump and his minions depend on misinformation.

NY Times, 10 Jun 2025: Fake Images and Conspiracy Theories Swirl Around L.A. Protests, subtitled “Disinformation spreading on social media platforms has stoked an already tense situation.”

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And AI is part of the problem.

PolitiFact, 10 Jun 2025: How AI chatbots falsely described photos Gavin Newsom shared of sleeping troops

  • Photos posted June 9 on X by California Gov. Gavin Newsom had been published by the San Francisco Chronicle the same day.
  • Generative artificial intelligence chatbots ChatGPT and Grok mistakenly claimed the photos were from the 2021 U.S. military evacuation from Afghanistan.

Rating: Pants on Fire.

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They’re coming for you, too.

Washington Post, Catherine Rampell opinion, 11 Jun 2025: The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A., subtitled “Masked immigration officials are storming towns and arresting people.”

Maybe they really were immigration officers, just as they claimed. Or maybe they were a ragtag vigilante group, arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street.

“It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something,” said Linda Shafiroff, recounting the agents who showed up outside her office in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.

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The New Yorker puts it gently.

Looking for the National Guard in Los Angeles, subtitled “President Trump’s assertions that federal troops have saved the city from destruction did not appear to reflect reality.”

Long essay.

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Two posts on Facebook today from Robert Reich, which echo things I’ve said.

Robert Reich, Facebook, today:

And

Robert Reich, Facebook, today

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

Knowing vs. Believing

Posted on Tuesday 10 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • RFK “retires” his vaccine advisory committee (because he knows better);
  • Robert Reich on how the MAGA Inquisition will destroy American science, and Reich tries to understand why;
  • Robert Reich on Trump’s war against California, and the central struggle of civilization;
  • And some movie score music by Carter Burwell.
– – –

 

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” – Friedrich Nietzsche.

– – –

CNN, 9 Jun 2025: RFK Jr. removes all current members of CDC vaccine advisory committee

And

CNBC, 9 Jun 2025: RFK Jr. removes all members of CDC panel advising U.S. on vaccines

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Robert Reich, 9 Jun 2025: Nobody Expected the MAGA Inquisition, subtitled “But it’s here, and will destroy American science”

It was obvious, if you thought about it, that the second Trump administration would be hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general.

After all, look at some key elements of the MAGA coalition. Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine. (And partisan orientation became a key factor determining whether people were willing to be vaccinated against Covid.) Practitioners of voodoo economics don’t want anyone looking into the actual results of cutting taxes on the rich. Nativists proclaiming an immigrant crime wave don’t want anyone examining who commits violent crimes. And so on.

Even so, the extreme nature of the assault has caught almost everyone by surprise. American scientific leadership and the prestige of our research universities are key pillars of U.S. power and prosperity. Corporate America certainly understands that our scientific and educational institutions contribute to its bottom line. So you might have expected even MAGA enthusiasts to be a bit cautious about killing this particular golden-egg-laying goose.

You would have been wrong. Everything points to an effort to effectively destroy U.S. science — not gradually as part of a long-term plan, but over the next year or two.

Why??

One answer is that key MAGA figures really don’t believe that we need foreigners. Steve Bannon has suggested that Asian immigrants working in Silicon Valley constitute “unfair competition,” that they’re taking the “high-valuated tech jobs” that should be going to people born in America. Trump has complained that international students at Harvard are harmful because “we have Americans who want to go there.” I would say that neither Silicon Valley nor Harvard would be what they are without being able to attract the world’s best talent, but they clearly don’t agree.

Even if they were right (they aren’t), however, science can’t flourish without government support. Research is the classic example of a “public good” that won’t be undertaken by private firms seeking profit. And if you combine huge funding cuts with an environment in which scientists are essentially told what conclusions to reach, that’s pretty much the end of science in America.

And maybe MAGA is OK with that. Science has this awkward tendency to tell you things you didn’t want to know and give you answers you didn’t want. The Trump administration may pretend to want better science, but at a fundamental level MAGA dislikes and distrusts the very idea of science.

And sooner than many imagine, there won’t be much science in America for them to complain about.

MAGA can settle back and read their Bibles, while the rest of the world moves on.

Despite the American Bible-thumpers, America has succeeded *because* of immigration. Except for the Native-Americans, we all immigrated from somewhere (or our ancestors did).

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Robert Reich, 10 Jun 2025: The Coward Goes to War Against America, subtitled “Trump wants Americans to turn violent. We will be steadfast.”

The man who launched an attempted coup on the United States in 2020 and instigated an insurrection at the Capitol that resulted in five deaths now claims that people in Los Angeles are launching an insurrection. They’re not.

Yesterday, the Pentagon activated 700 Marines out of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, to join the 4,000 federalized National Guard’s military occupation of parts of Los Angeles.

I think it was Scott McGrew, the political and tech reporter for the early morning local NBC news (otherwise consisting of traffic reports, weather reports, and traffic accidents, mostly) who clarified that these National Guards were not “sent in” by Trump to California; they were people who were already here. They live here.

Back to Reich:

Trump doesn’t give a damn whether the troops are necessary. Nor does he care how many people are injured or even killed in his raid on Los Angeles. The show of military force is the point. It gives him the appearance of power.

Like any bully, Trump is fundamentally a coward. Humiliated by China, Harvard, the Supreme Court, Elon Musk, and the federal courts, Trump has launched a war inside America on vulnerable people inside America, in a place — California — most of whose inhabitants loathe him.

All of this was manufactured by Trump. It was and is his creation. …

I’m always trying to put current events in larger contexts, larger perspectives. Thus the historical parallels and comparisons, even with, yes, Hitler. (Another Fb post I saw today: some MAGA person is trying to rehabilitate Hitler’s image.) Reich does some of this:

The central struggle of civilization has always been to stop brutality. Unless we prevent the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe.

A civil society is the opposite of what Trump seeks. A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It moves as far as possible away from brutality.

OK, sure. In my terms I see the struggle of civilization as the effort to overcome base human nature, refined for tribal life over hundreds of thousands of years, in order for humans to function in a global world. And yes, in basic terms, that means that, yeah yeah, everyone should live in peace and the strong shouldn’t brutalize the weak. Of course it will never happen. Human nature is inescapable. Except perhaps in pockets, with values driven through education. For a while the US was a pocket of civility. But apparently it’s falling apart, and base human nature is reasserting itself.

Every time the stronger brutalize the weaker — whether it’s Trump and his flunkies bullying immigrants and the state of California, white supremacists bullying Black and Latino people, giant corporations bullying customers with high prices, the wealthy bullying the public to get giant tax cuts, Elon Musk bullying poor people by cutting programs they depend on, police bullying poor Black people, powerful men bullying women through sexual harassment, politicians building their power by bullying racial or ethnic minorities, Netanyahu wiping out Palestinians in Gaza, Putin trying to take over Ukraine — it’s fundamentally the same playbook: Stoke fear. Exploit desperation. Suspend the rule of law. Fan brutality.

Unless the bullies are stopped, an entire society — even the world — can descend into chaos.

Our duty is to stop brutality. Our responsibility is to hold the powerful accountable. Our challenge is to stand up to abuses of power. Our moral obligation is to protect the vulnerable.

This week and through Saturday, protest but please do it peacefully. Do not be provoked into violence. Take videos of any brutality Trump’s agents are wreaking, to show the rest of America and the world. Be smart. Be careful.

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Soundtrack music. Carter Burwell. (Unfortunately broken up into tracks with commercials in between.) The full theme comes in about 1:40.

Posted in Human Nature, Lunacy, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

The Insurrectionists Within

Posted on Monday 9 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No, Los Angeles is not burning down. Trump and his minions are lying. And whatever is happening recently, they started it. And apparently they have motives to start it.
  • Also, Los Angeles is huge;
  • David A. Graham in The Atlantic: Trump is like a bad parent, “never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to”;
  • Philip Bump on Trump’s incessant need to quash critics;
  • Trump’s view of law and order: “Can’t you just shoot them?”;
  • David French on how America is no longer a stable country.
– – –

To hear Trump and his minions like Hegseth and Bondi (children playing at being adults) you’d think California was as devastated as the Gaza Strip, and Californians should all be grateful to Fearless Leader for trying to save us from our criminal governor.

It’s nonsense of course. Here are James Woods (the actor) and Ted Cruz spreading a photo of a car in flames that is actually from the 2020 George Floyd protests. Here’s Trump saying LA “would have been completely obliterated” were it not for the National Guard he sent it. Tommy Tuberville calls LA “a third world county” with “anarchists” in charge, and Gavin Newsom reminds him that Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California. ICE agents hide behind masks. Biden deported more people than Trump has, proportionately, and didn’t need troops in the streets to do so. (The cruelty is the point, for Trumpists.) And never mind all the civilians who attacked police on Jan. 6th who were *pardoned* by Trump.

Also this. The red circle in this map is downtown LA, where a few streets have been blocked off. (All the colored areas are the city of Los Angeles, which doesn’t include Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Long Beach, etc.) The Home Depot incidents on Saturday were in the small city of Paramount, at the right edge of the lower part of this map (also not part of LA).

The entire city is not in flames. Those who imply it is are lying (and/or geographically illiterate). And it’s not just that Trump lies incessantly — it’s that he’s deliberately trying to incite violence in states he doesn’t like and wants to subdue.

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This is echoes something I just said.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 9 Jun 2025: Trump vs. California, subtitled “The president is bullying states when it suits him and ignoring them when it doesn’t.”

Namely, the first line here:

Under Donald Trump, the federal government is like a bad parent: never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to.

The relationship between Trump and California has always been bad, but the past few days represent a new low. On Friday, CNN reported that the White House was seeking to cut off as much federal funding to the Golden State as possible, especially to state universities. That afternoon, protests broke out in Los Angeles as ICE agents sought to make arrests. By Saturday, Trump had announced that he was federalizing members of the National Guard and deploying them to L.A., over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

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Trump desperately needs to be worshiped. He gains worship from his fans by being mean to the people his fans hate. Serving the nation, or the better good, or the United States’ position in the world, has nothing to do with it, and is of no interest to him.

Washington Post, Philip Bump, 9 Jun 2025: Donald Trump vs. California (and everywhere else), subtitled “What happened in California this weekend was another facet of the president’s effort to quash critics.”

What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. His team, The Post reported, was “asking federal employees to develop rationales for the funding cuts” — perhaps looking at conflicts with his executive orders about cutting costs or ending diversity initiatives.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded by noting that the state contributes far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. But the point wasn’t really the money. The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel, precisely as it had sought to bring elite universities to heel, similarly by contriving reasons the government might strip funding. The methodology was the same because the intent was the same: inflict pain on an entity that Trump viewed as hostile to his presidency.

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Trump’s view of law and order.

AlterNet/The Conversation, 9 Jun 2025: ‘Can’t you just shoot them?’ Inside Trump’s threat to deal with ‘radical left thugs’ in America

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A rehash, with perspective.

NY Times, David French, 8 Jun 2025: America Is No Longer a Stable Country

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight on America’s streets. On Saturday, after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence, the administration reacted as if the country were on the brink of war.

The violence was unacceptable. Civil disobedience is honorable; violence is beyond the pale. But so far, thankfully, the violence has been localized and, crucially, well within the capacity of state and city officials to manage.

But don’t tell that to the Trump administration. Its language was out of control.

Then follow examples from Stephen Miller (“Insurrection”), JD Vance (“invasion”), Pete Hegseth (call in the Marines!), and Trump (“the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”).

Of course it’s Trump and ICE who caused the problem in the first place. They claim they’re enforcing the law, but it’s obvious to everyone who are not MAGAites that they’re enforcing the law very selectively, against black and brown people they don’t think belong in the United States. (And along other fronts, intellectuals they don’t like.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

Clooney’s Murrow; Trump Calls Out the National Guard

Posted on Sunday 8 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck;
  • Trump calls out the National Guard (what’s next? Martial Law?);
  • Louisiana bans chemtrails;
  • Trump’s big bill prioritizes the religious right (of course)
– – –

First of all. We watched the live stream of George Clooney’s Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck” yesterday afternoon (it began at 4pm West Coast time), on CNN. We’d seen the 2005 film starring David Strathairn. The Broadway version stars George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. I think Strathairn might have been the better impersonation, but Clooney is the more powerful actor. I was impressed by the stage settings: the multiple sets on one stage that the lighting kept redirecting among; the occasional overlapping scenes in different places. But I’ve seen a couple Broadway shows ever; perhaps such stage-work legerdemain is routine. Clooney is very good, though he couldn’t keep his own self from sometimes seeping through — there’s a line half way through about Americans leaving for Europe, and Clooney couldn’t help a self-deprecating smirk.

But most important is the play’s theme of course, and how it’s become even more relevant to current events even since work on this play began a year or two ago. Conservatives in the early 1950s were frightened by Communists and demonized anyone suspected, ruining their careers; today conservatives are frightened by non-whites and ‘woke’ people and cut legal corners to expel them from the country, or at least ruin their lives, as Trump has done by firing so many non-whites from careers they achieved through merit. A concept Trump does not actually understand. He values only loyalty. The play ends with a montage of film clips about history since the 1950s, ending with Musk’s Nazi salute, as Clooney stands in front, ending with a final speech. And a range of emotions on his face.

Clooney’s final speech is worth quoting, but I couldn’t find a source to quote from; the several sources I found quote something slightly different. I liked the passage with four i-words: ignorance, indifference, etc., but I don’t remember it exactly, nor can I find it online. Clooney co-wrote the 2005 film, so of course he’s entitled to tweak his wording onstage… perhaps every single time.

(Most of this posted on Facebook, last night.)

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So this is the weekend that Trump has called out the National Guard against people in Los Angeles protesting the administration’s Gestapo ICE agents from rounding up brown people at a Home Depot. (Remember ICE has targets to hit –3000 arrests *a day* — and aren’t too careful about due process. If they’re brown, assume guilt and fix later if exposed by the media.)

With an unfolding story like this, newspaper and CNN headlines are changing regularly. Here’s an overview from a magazine that doesn’t update quite so frequently.

The Atlantic, David Frum, 8 Jun 2025: For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal, subtitled “Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened.”

Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.

If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.

Note how when California needs help, Trump plays politics. When it doesn’t need help but Trump wants to make a point, he imposes ‘help’ upon them. This is likely to escalate.

But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:

Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.

Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.

Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.

They’ve been contemplating these tactics for some time.

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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 8 Jul 2025: Trump Is Using the National Guard as Bait, subtitled “Don’t give him the pretext he wants.”

President Donald Trump is about to launch yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations, this time in Los Angeles. Under a dubious legal rationale, he is activating 2,000 members of the National Guard to confront protests against actions by ICE, the immigration police who have used thuggish tactics against citizens and foreigners alike in the United States.

By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.

The president and the men and women around him are acting with great ambition in this moment, and they are likely hoping to achieve three goals in one dramatic action.

First, they will turn America’s attention away from Trump’s many failures and inane feuds, and reestablish his campaign persona as a strongman who will brush aside the law if that’s what it takes to keep order in the streets. Perhaps nothing would please Trump more than to replace weird stories about Elon Musk with video of masked protesters burning cars as lines of helmeted police and soldiers march over them and impose draconian silence in one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities.

Second, as my colleague David Frum warned this morning, Trump is establishing that he is willing to use the military any way he pleases, perhaps as a proof of concept for suppressing free elections in 2026 or 2028. Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle. Those are his toy soldiers, and he’s going to get a show from his honor guard in a birthday parade next weekend. In the meantime, he’s going to flex that muscle, and prove that the officers and service members who will do whatever he orders are the real military. The rest are suckers and losers.

…

Third, Trump may be hoping to radicalize the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard. (Seizing the California Guard is also a convenient way to humiliate California Governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, with the president’s often-used narrative that liberals can’t control their own cities.) Trump has the right to “federalize” Guard forces, which is how they were deployed overseas in America’s various conflicts. He has never respected the traditions of American civil-military relations, which regard the domestic deployment of the military as an extreme measure to be avoided whenever possible. Using the Guard could be a devious tactic: He may be hoping to set neighbor against neighbor, so that the people called to duty return to their home and workplace with stories of violence and injuries.

And so on. Nichols ends:

So far, even the Los Angeles Police Department—not exactly a bastion of squishy suburban book-club liberals—has emphasized that the protests have been mostly peaceful. Trump is apparently trying to change that. Sending in the National Guard is meant to provoke, not pacify, and his power will only grow if he succeeds in tempting Americans to intemperate reactions that give him the authoritarian opening he’s seeking.

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Short items.

NOLA.com, 2 Jun 2025: Louisiana Republicans pass bill ‘banning’ chemtrails, which are not a real thing (via)

The Louisiana Legislature has passed a new bill to outlaw “chemtrails,” a made-up and very fake thing that conspiracy theorists and other assorted fringe people believe in.

Because of course.

(What could be next? GOP votes to prohibit alien spacecraft from landing on the White House lawn?)

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Of course it is.

Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 6 Jun 2025: Trump’s Big Bill Packed With Religious-Right Priorities

It wasn’t long ago that congressional Republicans railed against voting for “omnibus” budget legislation, but that was before President Donald Trump demanded support for what he calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” As Trump rants about judges upholding the law and interfering with his efforts to rule like a king, the Republicans’ bill would even limit judges’ ability to enforce their orders.

Republican leaders have stuffed the legislation—passed by the House and now before the Senate—with provisions to please Trump and every corner of the right-wing base. Trump’s Christian nationalist allies are portraying support for the package as a way to push their anti-abortion and anti-equality social agenda under cover of the budget process, along with Trump’s priority tax cuts for billionaires and cuts to social safety net programs.

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Listening to movie score music by Carter Burwell, and Michael Danna, recently…

Posted in authoritarianism, Lunacy, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

Meltdown; Reign of Errors; People Trump doesn’t want to exist; Harari on humans in 1000 years

Posted on Friday 6 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Details of the Trump/Musk meltdown;
  • The Trump administration’s reign of errors;
  • Such as DOGE firing people and quickly hiring them back;
  • The people Trump doesn’t want to exist;
  • Yuval Noah Harari on how humans won’t exist in 1000 years, perhaps not even 100.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson, June 5, 2025, summarizes the Trump Musk public fight. Selection:

Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”

…

Economist Robert Reich had perhaps the best summary of the fight today when he noted, “That any of us have to care about the messy breakup of these two massive narcissists—and that they both individually wield such massive power—is an indictment of our political system and further proves the poisonous influence of Big Money on our democracy.”

And then, as Richardson does, she segues to history: to FDR’s fireside chat on June 5 1944, discussing the progress of the war. Rome had fallen to Allied troops.

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Familiar themes, today.

Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 6 Jun 2025: They are not good at this, subtitled “Nearly five months into Trump’s new reign of error, his administration’s mistakes are multiplying.”

Most recently a list released by Kristi Noem about sanctuary cities.

But it immediately became clear that the list of more than 500 states, counties and cities was riddled with errors: misspellings, cities and counties mistaken for each other, and places that don’t exist. Cincinnati became “Cincinnatti,” Campbell County (Kentucky) became “Cambell” County, Greeley County (Nebraska) became “Greenley” County, Takoma Park (Maryland) became “Tacoma” Park, while “Martinsville County” (Virginia) was invented. And so on.

Worse, scores of the “sanctuary politicians” she called out turned out to be leaders of MAGA counties and towns with no sanctuary policies on their books. Complaints poured in from Trump allies across the country. “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document,” said Pat Burns, the Trump-backing mayor of the right-wing stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, mislabeled as a sanctuary city. He told the Associated Press that “somebody’s got to answer” for this “negligent” behavior.

Good luck with that. The only answer was to disappear the list this week, leaving behind a “Page Not Found” error.

Remember, Trump hires only the best people!

The article goes on with more and more examples. RFK Jr’s report with citations that were AI hallucinations. Trump’s list of tariff nations that included an island occupied only by penguins. The Education Secretary who didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Karoline Leavitt unaware of the results of the South Korean election. Noem again and again. She’s the one who wears a cowboy hat indoors and who famously shot her dog. What has American government come to?

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And a big example in particular.

Washington Post, 6 Jun 2025: Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people, subtitled “Across the government, officials are rehiring federal workers who were forced out or encouraged to resign.”

Early this spring, the Food and Drug Administration fired nearly 50 workers in the Office of Regulatory Policy — only to turn around and order them back to the office with one day’s notice.

After dismissing thousands of probationary employees for fabricated “performance” issues, the IRS reversed course and told them to show up to work in late May.

And some staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, dismantled in the first days of the Trump administration by a gleeful Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the U.S. DOGE Service, checked their inboxes this month to find an unexpected offer: Would you consider returning — to work for the State Department?

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

Apparently this is happening so often that most examples don’t make the news.

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Who are the people who support Trump and what his team are doing? Are they unaware of their incompetence? What is it that’s more important to them than competence? They prefer incompetence as long as Trump and his team hate the same people they do?

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For example. This is the essence of fascism, and white supremacy. Why doesn’t this bother more people??

Washington Post, Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell, 6 Jun 2025: Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist, subtitled “Women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community are main targets”

When the Trump administration encounters a group it doesn’t respect or care for, oftentimes it just deletes them — specifically, the very record of their existence.

For example, when the Defense Department was asked to cull all DEI-related content from its websites, it removed approximately 26,000 images. A list of the deleted photos was given to the Associated Press. About 19,000 of them included descriptions, and our analysis found that 4 out of 5 depicted women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities. We recovered a handful of the photos so you can see what’s missing.

The bulk of the piece is an interactive set of photos with captions. Ending:

This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American “golden age.” Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s “missing persons.”

Of course, other categories of people Trump wants to disappear cannot be easily photographed. The scientists. The smart people.

As a gay and as an educated relatively smart person, I would be cancelled twice by the Trump administration, if they got around to finding me.

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Finally for today, a video on Facebook from Yuval Noah Harari, who takes the big picture.

Facebook: What Will Humans Be Like in a Thousand Years?

I’ll copy the description; I don’t have time to transcribe everything Harari says.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari said he believes humans in their current form won’t exist in 1,000 years.

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Beat” with MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, the intellectual discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and how humans will adapt to new technologies. Harari said that humans “absolutely won’t be around” in 1,000 years in their current form.

“If we survive for 1,000 years, we will change ourselves so radically that we will no longer be Homo sapiens, we’ll be something else,” he said.

He said due to climate change, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, future human beings will be of a different species similar to how today’s humans are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees.

This is the perspective that the best of science fiction tries to achieve. And what I’m trying to capture…

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Meltdown; Reign of Errors; People Trump doesn’t want to exist; Harari on humans in 1000 years

They Said It Wouldn’t Last, and It Hasn’t

Posted on Thursday 5 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Trump/Musk bromance implodes;
  • Hannity lies about the impact of the “big beautiful bill”;
  • Republicans try to discredit experts warning about the cost of tax cuts;
  • David French on Joni Ernst, and how Christianity has become a vertical, not horizontal, faith;
  • David Brooks on world-shifting political movements and how it’s somehow the Democrats’ fault for not properly responding to the current populist movement here and around the world; with my comments.
– – –

And, Jeffrey Epstein!

ABC News, 5 Jun 2025: Trump Musk feud explodes with claim president is in Epstein files, subtitled “Trump has not responded to Musk’s attack regarding the alleged sex trafficker.”

CNN, 5 Jun 2025: Trump and Musk escalate public feud over agenda bill

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Perhaps trivial by comparison. But again: Hannity, on behalf of Trump, just lies. And knows his viewers won’t know any better.

Media Matters, 5 Jun 2025: Sean Hannity grossly misrepresents CBO report about Trump’s “big beautiful bill.” Even Fox’s own website got it right., subtitled “The Congressional Budget Office report said that the “big beautiful bill” would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, but Hannity falsely claimed the report projected it would actually reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion.”

No, *everyone* out of the Trump cult bubble is reporting how the BBB will *increase* the debt. This is what led Elon Musk to condemn the bill — because it completely overwhelms the claimed savings he accomplished with DOGE. Claimed to be some $165 billion, without evidence, so probably much less.

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Trump’s fans will believe anything Trump tells them, apparently. If meteorologists say it’s raining and Trump wants it to be sunny, he will claim the meteorologists are Democrats, or woke, and can’t be trusted. Looking at actual evidence is not an option.

NY Times, Tony Romm, 4 Jun 2025: Republicans Try to Discredit Experts Warning About the Cost of Tax Cuts, subtitled “President Trump and his allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of Republicans’ tax ambitions.”

Listen to this guy, Mr. Smith.

Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday, one of the bill’s chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate.

“I’m skeptical,” Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation’s cost. “Unless I like the number, I’m against the number.”

If he doesn’t “like” the number, it can’t be right.

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One more about Joni Ernst.

NY Times, David French, 5 Jun 2025: Selfishness Is Not a Virtue

French begins by recounting Ernst’s comments, all the way up to her follow-up video extolling Jesus Christ as the solution to Medicaid cuts. Then, here’s the core of French’s essay:

The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.

Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.

But why bring Jesus into it?

America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.

I like that distinction between vertical and horizontal faith. Yet the horizontal faith is usually just tribal.

Then French recalls Wendell Berry reflecting on Christianity in the slave-owning South. The essay concludes:

Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.

But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.

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Is the reactionary response of conservatives to the modern era really the Democrats’ fault? A longish piece by David Brooks, that puts current issues in a larger perspective.

NY Times, David Brooks, 5 Jun 2025: The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think

First, the historical overview:

There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the L.G.B.T.Q. movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.

And then he claims that

The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party.

Which elites? The billionaires that the GOP embraces (for a while at least)? Or the residents of blue states? To think the latter is paranoia. Further, I would say, because it’s easy to invoke simple solutions from simpler times, rather than to wait for the general population to catch up to modern times in an increasingly complex world. Many of us catch up easily and adjust, and marvel at how different things are now than when we were children. Many others, to the extent they notice, resent it.

And so what are Democrats supposed to do?

If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.

…

My second notion is this: Pay attention to Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a Republican president in the middle of the welfare state era. He basically said: I’m going to endorse the basic shape of the New Deal, but I’m going to achieve those ends more sensibly. You can trust me.

And concluding:

For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.

To show that, you have to be willing to take on your activist groups: We’re going to reform schools in ways the unions don’t like. We’re going to reform zoning in a way the NIMBY brigades don’t like. We’re going to reform Congress in ways the incumbents don’t like. We’re going to talk about patriotism and immigration in ways the groups don’t like. We’re going to fix how blue cities are governed in a way the groups don’t like.

Do you really think professional politicians are going to lead the tectonic shifts that are required? That takes intellectuals, organizers, a new generation, all of us. It’s the work of decades, not election cycles. Clear your mind. Think anew.

Or, perhaps, the problem is that actual change is outpacing the rate that many people can adjust to change. But not all. It will happen, eventually. It may take a couple generations.

Also: history, it seems to me, is about progress and regression. Would Brooks have given similar advice in an era of slavery?

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on They Said It Wouldn’t Last, and It Hasn’t

Harvey Milk, DEI, Lysenko, Jesus

Posted on Wednesday 4 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Pete Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from an oil tanker as part of reestablishing “the warrior culture”;
  • Trump fires head of the National Portrait Gallery, because ridding the government of DEI is about “the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.”
  • The administration now wants to regulate science, with Heather Cox Richardson recalling how that worked out for the Soviets with Lysenko;
  • And how Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” is grounded in religion fatalism, and a reliance on belief in Jesus Christ.
– – –

The Trump administration is upfront with its bigotry.

Salon, Blaise Malley, 3 Jun 2025: “Shameful, vindictive erasure”: Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from Navy ship, subtitled “One defense official told reporters that announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to remove the name of gay rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk from one of its ships.

Per a report from Military.com, the order was passed down in a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan. The memo said that the redesignation of the oil tanker USNS Harvey Milk was an attempt to get into “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.”

Because it’s important that a oil tanker have a name that represents warrior culture? (Warrior culture??) And that’s not the only name:

On Tuesday, CBS News reported that the Navy was looking into changing the names of other ships named after prominent civil rights leaders and icons, including Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriett Tubman, Cesar Chavez and Medgar Evers.

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Which dovetails with this.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 4 Jun 2025: Now the President Is an Art Critic

Last week, President Trump announced that he had fired the head of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

“Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am herby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of D.E.I., which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”

Key line is this characterization of DEI:

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Trump’s disdain for Sajet, given his aggressive effort to rid the federal government of “D.E.I.,” which has turned out to mean the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.

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Now the administration thinks it knows better about how to do science. (Because it has in mind conclusions it wants, presumably.)

NY Times, Somini Sengupta, 3 Jun 2025: The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to ‘Correct’ Research., subtitled “Thousands of scientists, academics, physicians and researchers have responded to the administration’s executive order about ‘restoring a gold standard for science.'”

[T]he May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.

Of course it does!

Since Mr. Trump returned to the presidency in January, his executive actions have not expressed robust support for science, nor even an understanding of how scientists work.

Among other things, the administration has eviscerated National Science Foundation research funding and fired staff scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, which is responsible for forecasting weather hazards. A government report on child health cited research papers that did not exist.

The article goes on to mention routine scientific standards, like reproducibility and peer review, as if these were things scientists were not already doing. The greatest implied threat:

“As scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing,” the letter reads. “Instead this administration mandates a centralized system serving the political beliefs of the President and the whims of those in power.”

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Heather Cox Richardson discusses this in her column of a couple days ago — June 2, 2025 — and cites the most famous, and tragic, example of government control of science. Referring to an article in The Guardian.

The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.

As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century [[ the science was natural selection and Darwinism ]] in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.

In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.

“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”

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The story still playing out from a few days ago is about Sen. Joni Ernst’s defense of Medicaid cuts. Most of the reports I saw, maybe all, were too polite to mention her closing comments.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 4 Jun 2025: Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” pushes MAGA’s toxic Christian compassion on us all, subtitled “Evangelicals in the MAGA era call empathy a ‘sin'”

“We’re all going to die” she said. Sure. True enough.

Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren’t asking to live forever. They just don’t want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. “But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she smugly declared.

What do we take from this? This is toxic Christianity; fatalism. “She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes.”

This strikes me as a contemptible religion. (And it surely doesn’t align with what Jesus says in the NT, as far as I know.)

Elsewhere I read today: God has a plan, the future is fixed, there’s no point in trying to change your destiny.

But it’s curious how these rationalizations seem to justify those who would cut benefits for the poor, in favor of giving tax cuts to the rich. It always seems to work out that way.

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One more. There is a deep, unpleasant, truth here.

Slate, Susan Matthews, 4 Jun 2025: Finally, a Republican Just Admits It, subtitled “Maybe Joni Ernst is onto something.”

The article discusses Ernst’s apology.

All of that was incredible enough. How interesting to witness this precise breakdown, in real time, of how exhausting it seems to pretend to care about people when you do not (not caring is the entire premise of this second Trump administration). But what was even more remarkable than this video was what came next. Unfortunately, this part was obscene but very not relatable. In response to the backlash she was receiving for her town hall empathy break, Ernst posted an apology that turned out to be a sarcastic nonapology. It is set in a cemetery. Again, it’s worth watching!

Here’s the video URL

The deep, unpleasant truth is how these religious people think everything is fixed by God and so there no point in helping people who are doomed to die no matter what we do. And, again, how this policy happens to benefit themselves.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Harvey Milk, DEI, Lysenko, Jesus