Views from Crestmont Drive

Trump 100

Posted on Tuesday 29 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s 100 days, with charts;
Even the conservative Wall Street Journal considers Trump’s a “failed presidency”;
Now the administration is looking to jail journalists;
How MAGA loves public meltdowns;
How Hegseth boasts of axing a program as “woke” that was created during Trump’s first administration;
And how Trump believes taxing billionaires would hurt poor people’s feelings;
And my recollection of the reason poor people don’t want to tax the rich — because they secretly hope they too will become rich one day.

– – –

Many such pieces today.

Washington Post, 29 Apr 2025: Trump’s first 100 days, in 10 charts, subtitled “Executive orders are up, while the S&P 500 and Trump’s approval rating are down.”

As President Donald Trump passes his 100th day back in office, some key features of this presidency are already coming into focus: the colossal amount of money he raised to celebrate his inauguration; his historic use of executive orders from Day 1 to quickly reshape government; the market slump in reaction to his tariff policies; and his 100-day approval rating, lower than any seen in nearly a century.

The charts are about executive orders, how these are aimed at federal bureaucracy, how he’s historically unpopular at the 100-day mark, how the markets are reeling from his tariffs, how the Senate has moved quickly to confirm his nominees, his huge inauguration fund, how much Trump is posting on Truth Social, Trump’s ideas for an expanded US footprint, how international visits to the US are down, and how Trump has visited a golf club nearly every weekend.

I’ll copy and post a couple of them.

And

Of course the question would be, if Trump is so unpopular now, how did he get elected? Well, I would say, mostly by promising things he must have known he couldn’t deliver, ordinary issues like reducing the cost of eggs. And took his win (a “mandate” despite the slim margin of his win) as a license to do whatever he wanted to do, including his decades-long obsession with tariffs. And enable conservatives to tear down a government they don’t understand.

\\\

Remember, the Wall Street Journal — beholden of course to business interests — is the most conservative of the respectable national newspapers.

Wall Street Journal, editorial board, 29 Apr 2025 (via JMG and Mediaite): The Wall Street Journal Rings in Trump’s 100th Day in Office With Dire Warning of Failed Presidency

Presidential second terms are rarely successful, and on the evidence of his first 100 days Donald Trump’s won’t be different. The President needs a major reset if he wants to rescue his final years from the economic and foreign-policy shocks he has unleashed.

(I don’t subscribe and so can’t see the full WSJ piece.)

\\\

Yet again, here’s another item on the authoritarian checklist: put journalists in jail.

Salon, Austin Sarat, 29 Apr 2025: Looking to Trump’s next 100 days: DOJ tees up process for jailing journalists

While no journalists are presently in jail in this country for doing their jobs, prosecuting and punishing them is a regular part of the arsenal of repressive regimes around the world. And the atmosphere for the American press is by no means friendly.

April alone saw a dramatic escalation of threats.

With many examples.

Short items.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 28 Apr 2025: MAGA loves a tantrum: How public meltdowns became the preferred method of GOP communication, subtitled “Why Nancy Mace, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller keep throwing fits on camera”

The public meltdown, in which you declare yourself the world’s greatest victim, is the preferred GOP method of political communication these days.

It boils down to this:

All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they’re saying makes no sense.

…

It’s part of the overall too-muchness that is the signature of the MAGA aesthetic, which goes right back to Trump’s gold-plated tastelessness. We see it in the infamous “Mar-a-Lago” face, which uses plastic surgery and spackled-on make-up to turn women into terrifyingly exaggerated caricatures of femininity. Or the love of roided-out male bodies, which try to recreate the impossibly huge muscles of comic books on human bodies. It’s a maximalist aesthetic, minus all the playfulness of Las Vegas casinos or “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There’s a grim vibe to the undertaking, as if they’re trying to pound your head into the ground with the excess.

Recall the MAGA-glam item in Sunday’s post.

They can’t keep their story, their policies, straight.

JMG, from The Daily Beast, 29 Apr 2025: Hegseth Boasts Of Axing “Woke” Program Created During First Trump Administration By Noem And Rubio

To make the headline clear: Hegseth now thinks a program that was installed by Noem and Rubio during Trump’s first administration is now woke and must be cancelled. Do these people have any consistent values? Apparently not.

It’s hard to believe what rationale he could possibly have for this. While it’s easy to believe that as a Republican he’s always on the side of billionaires.

Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 25 Apr 2025: Trump claims taxing billionaires would hurt poor people’s feelings

Sleep tight, minimum wage workers! Your benevolent billionaire overlords are simply protecting you from the trauma of watching them pay their fair share. Truly, Dear Leader Trump’s generosity knows no bounds.

But here’s something else, I remember from reading somewhere, years ago. There’s something in the American psyche about unlimited potential. The Horatio Alger story. That anyone who works hard enough can succeed, and become a billionaire. In reality, that’s not how it works; all the current billionaires had advantages growing up, mostly inheritances. But the base idea is why the poor in America do not want to tax the very rich. Because they like to imagine that someday *they* might become rich. And wouldn’t want to be taxed.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

Chris Mooney, THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE

Posted on Tuesday 29 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Basic Books, 2005, 342pp, including 86pp of interview credits, other credits, notes, and index.)

This is journalist Mooney’s first book, from 20 years ago, and it’s especially apropos to look back at now given the hostility to and/or misunderstanding of science by the current administration. Back in 2015 — 10 years ago! — I read the author’s 2012 book, THE REPUBLICAN BRAIN, and reviewed it here. Very broadly, this first book documents the extent Republicans were hostile to science, from the 1960s through the early 2000s, while the second book sought to understand why. (And that entailed how variations in human personality traits have lead to different takes on the world, especially in a present society that is so different than the ancestral environment where our minds evolved.)

Gist

The 10,000 foot view: Republicans’ increased hostility toward science came, beginning in the late 1950s, from its incursions into religious and business interests. Thus the antipathy toward regulations. (In parallel, not discussed in the book, is the right’s antipathy toward civil rights and the 1960s “counter-culture.”)

Outline

So I won’t outline this one in great detail. It’s basically a litany of bad behavior, especially by the George W. Bush administration, which made news stories at the time without being drawn into a cohesive pattern. This book shows that pattern.

The keynote event, in chapter 1, was how in Summer 2001 Bush made an inaccurate claim about the number of existing stem-cell lines. The issue was whether stem cells could be used for scientific research. (Theoretically, stem-cells can mature into *any* kind of cell, thus suggesting the artificial growth of any kind of organ, e.g. for transplants.) Conservatives viewed the stem-cells as the moral equivalents of embryos (presumably with incipient souls) and opposed such research. So Bush argued that there enough existing stem cell lines in existence (some 60 or so) for scientific purposes, and so he could forbid the harvesting of any more without undermining the science. What Bush ignored was information about why most of those existing lines were *not* suitable for scientific research. By suppressing that information, Bush managed to appease the conservatives and *pretend* to support scientific research.

A couple quotes from this stage-setting, again with Mooney writing in 2004 or so. P4b:

…the modern Right has adopted a style of politics that puts its adherents in increasingly stark conflict with both scientific information and dispassionate, expert analysis in general.

P5.3:

At its most basic level, the modern Right’s tension with science springs from conservatism, a political philosophy that generally resists change. The dynamism of science — its constant onslaught on old orthodoxies, its rapid generation of new technological possibilities — presents an obvious challenge to more static worldviews.

M/w conservatives accuse their opponents of abuse of science, of ‘politicizing’ science. They claim theirs is “sound science” even as they defend “creation science” aka “intelligent design.” They’re driven by religion, and the bottom line. (We’ve just read about the right’s distortion techniques in a couple other books.)

Chapter 2 provides a skeleton for the rest of the book. The author defines science, and points out that it works. Even those who misuse science shroud themselves in scientific terms, as if understanding the authority implied by scientific thinking. How politicization works: undermining the science e.g. “just a theory”; suppression, e.g. reports about acid rain; targeting individual scientists, e.g. what Bush did to James Hansen on climate change; rigging the process, e.g. packing committees with idealogues. And how they deal with scientific results: errors and misrepresentations, e.g. Bush and embryonic stem cells; misrepresentations or distortions, e.g. climate change; magnifying uncertainty, e.g. “more research is needed”; relying on the fringe, e.g. handpicking “experts”; ginning up contrary “science”, e.g. the tobacco industry; and dressing up values in scientific clothing, e.g. refusing the approve the Plan B pill.

From here I’ll bullet points the main topics in the rest of the book.

Ch3. Science was very strong in the 1940s. What happened? Business interests and religious conservatives. Buckley, Goldwater; Roe v. Wade; Silent Spring, inspiring regulations that businesses resented. Industries founded their own organizations to promote their interests and undermine people like Rachel Carson. Nixon was uninterested in fact, and dissolved his science advisory committee.
Ch4. Reagan refused to acknowledge AIDS in the 1980s, and he claimed great flaws in evolution and endorsed creationism. Falwell and the Moral Majority. Creationists adopted scientific trappings rather than simply quoting scripture. Duane Gish, “flood geology” and the like, all easily refuted. Reagan’s EPA exploited “uncertainty” about acid rain to justify doing nothing. Yet he embraced the idea of “Star Wars,” despite lack of support by science. People like Dinesh D’Souza were Very Concerned about the health consequences of abortion. And EPA refused reports about CFCs and the Ozone layer. Bush I was better, but Gingrich far worse.
Ch5. Gingrich was a science fiction fan and technophile, whose foremost idea was that government should shrink and the private sector fill in the gap. That politicians should each do their own “research” by finding their favorite “experts” (to support whatever conclusion they wanted). They promoted the phrase “sound science”. That members of Congress should decide which scientific views were right, on matters like global warming and the greenhouse effect.
Ch6. They “manufactured uncertainty,” were against “regulatory overkill”; their hidden agenda was to require a higher burden of proof before taking action to protect health and the environment, accusing the other side of “junk science.”
[[ All of this fits Lakoff’s duality: the motives of liberals are to protect people (i.e. by regulating the extent business interests can pollute the environment), while the motives of conservatives are to make money. ]]
Four chapters cover themes of the George H. Bush administration. 1, James Inhofe and the idea that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. 2, Something called the Data Quality Act, supposedly to prevent “bad information” from “needlessly hurting companies’ profits”, in reality making it more onorous to release data to the public, and abusing the idea of “peer review.” 3, How US Sugar struck back against WHO advice to cut back on fats and sugars, by attacking the scientists. And 4, conservative attacks against the Endangered Species Act, by redefining science to exclude modeling and muddying data from different contexts.
A section about “scientific revelations” concerns the Republicans’ “paranoid distrust of the nation’s intellectuals” due to threats to the economic interests of private industry. One strand of this was “intelligent design” in which “controversy” in evolution was imagined as a “theory in crisis,” pretending to do science while advancing religious and moral goals, with a “Wedge Document” that made their guiding principles explicit: the Old and New Testaments. Philip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, Rick Santorum.
A second strand was that one about stem-cell research.
And a third was the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer, led by a one-time scientist, Joel Brind, who’d found Jesus. With similar issues of sex education and condom effectiveness, and Plan B, and how they claimed their science was validated by God.
[[ The big theme here is that conservatives pretend to do science while masking their religious motivations; they’re arguing in bad faith. If they were doing science, why do they keep coming to different conclusions than legitimate scientists? There aren’t two versions of reality. ]]
And the final section is about the “antiscience president” (at the time Mooney was writing) — George W. Bush. The Union of Concerned Scientists denounced him for his attitudes on embryonic stem cell research, climate change, and missile defense. His diminishment of scientific advisors, and assaults on committees. With that famous quote by an aide who said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” (p243)

Epilogue: What can be done?

We need scientific experts to make informed decisions to run our democracy. But the modern conservative movement has brought us to a divorce between democracy and technocratic expertise. This can lead to calamity. What to do? One, we could try to warn conservatives of this danger. Or, we push for safeguards to protect expertise from manipulation and abuse. Revises the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. OTA. Or something like it. Restore the science advisor to the president. Safeguard advisory committees from political manipulation.

Further, dismantle incursions of “sound science”, the Data Quality Act, the “peer review” linked to it. Oppose politicizing laws. Journalists should do their jobs better, pretending that controversy exists where none does. Resist attempts to spin reporters. Examples of articles in major papers that failed to reflect the consensus on climate change, in favor of ‘balanced’ accounts. This is what science abusers exploit. Beware industry promotion of scientific abuse. Fight science-abusing religious conservatives in the schools. Support defenders of Enlightenment values: the scientists themselves.

Finally there are political problems. Oppose the antiscience right wing of the Republican party. Oppose political gains by the modern Right. See last lines, p255:

But if we care about science and believe that it should play a crucial role in decisions about our future, we must steadfastly oppose further political gains by the modern Right. This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advance and sophisticated nation. Our future relies on our intelligence, but today’s Right — failing to grasp this fact in virtually every political situation in which is really matters, and nourishing disturbing anti-intellectual tendencies — cannot deliver us there successfully or safety. If it will not come to its senses, we must cast it aside.

Of course this problem is *much* worse now than it was 20 years ago.

Posted in Book Notes, conservatives, Science | Leave a comment

Who’s Happiest and Why?

Posted on Monday 28 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Phil Zuckerman on that World Happiness Report;
A NYT article about alternatives to religion;
Recalling mythos and logos;
Richard Dawkins on how reality is so much more interesting than religion,
And Vox on social trends that may affect religious affiliations.

– – –

I’ve seen cautionary notes about this World Happiness Report on the grounds that the results are self-reported and based on only a single question (how happy are you?) on a scale of 1 to 10. At the same time, the report (at the link) seems exhaustive, in that the results are correlated with variables about GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, generosity, and the absence of corruption. And there do seem to be strong correlations between happiness and lack of religious belief.

OnlySky, Phil Zuckerman, 18 Apr 2025: The happiest nations on Earth are strongly secular, subtitled “This correlation has staying power.”

Zuckerman is especially interested in this subject; he’s written books like Living the Secular Life (which I’ve read and reviewed here) and What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life (which I have but haven’t yet read).

He begins this article:

What happens when millions of people in a given society stop going to church and lose their faith in God? Does that society descend into despondency and despair?

Not according to the latest World Happiness Report, released last month.

Based on an analysis of a host of sociological, economic, and psychological factors, the nation that is currently the happiest on earth – for the eighth year in a row – is Finland. Following Finland, in the top five, are Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

And it just so happens that all of them are among the most secular/least religious nations on Earth. All of these top-five happiest nations have experienced dramatic degrees of secularization over the last century.

Zuckerman goes on to understand that correlation is not causation, etc., and concludes:

There are certainly many reasons that these nations experience such high degrees of happiness and well-being. In addition to their strong social welfare systems mentioned above, they enjoy economic prosperity, healthy democratic institutions, equal rights for women, highly educated populations, clean streets, well-manicured parks, thriving arts, low murder rates, and – at least in the Nordic world – copious amounts of herring. But whatever the various reasons are that produce such happy societies, they don’t seem to be religious or spiritual in nature. Bible study, church attendance, prayer, faith – clearly such things can decrease and diminish, without causing widespread anguish or depression. Indeed, it seems that just the opposite can be the surprising result.

The same day as Zuckerman’s piece was this:

NY Times, Lauren Jackson, 18 Apr 2025: Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion, subtitled “Is it any wonder the country is revisiting faith?”

On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.

I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony,” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “amen.”

In that small chapel by a freeway in Arkansas, I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure.

I had that, and I left it all.

The writer maps her experience to the broader trend in America away from religion and toward the “nones.”

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

And of course how under the current administration, Christianity is privileged and encouraged. And how she read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion — “It was an option not to believe.” — and later interviewed him by phone. And was dissatisfied with his answer to build community by playing golf.

In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

And concludes:

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

I am reminded of this distinction. From a Google AI Overview.

In the context of philosophical and cultural transitions, “mythos” refers to traditional stories, legends, and myths used to explain the world and human experiences, while “logos” represents rational thought, logical reasoning, and systematic inquiry. The shift from mythos to logos marked a transition from relying on mythical narratives to employing reason and logic to understand the world.

Our modern world came to be through logos. Conservatives cling to mythos.

One of my essential themes here is that logos, properly understood, is much more fulfilling than mythos. Because logos is about the real world, while there are many, many kinds of mythos, most of them inconsistent; mythos is an artifact of human society.

\\\

And so Richard Dawkins — who has his own Substack now — responded.

The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins, 23 Apr 2025: No Satisfying Alternative to Religion? Try Reality.

On April 18^th, the New York Times published an article by Lauren Jackson called “Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion”. It’s very long, but you can probably guess what she correctly lists as unsatisfying alternatives, failed attempts to fill the void of existential insecurity, the god-shaped hole: New Age “spirituality”, astrology, you know the kind of thing. She was kind enough to quote me, so I offer a brief response here.

I am sorry if there is, as she says, an “epidemic of loneliness”. But the remedy for loneliness is human fellowship, the warmth of real, live, flesh-and-blood companions and loved-ones; not prating in a vacuum to an imaginary friend for whose existence there is no vestige of serious evidence. Even an AI robot is better than that. At least ChatGPT exists, really talks back at you, will actually hold a friendly conversation. But talk to the imaginary friend which is God (Allah, Virgin Mary, Lord Krishna, Thor, Zeus, Mithras, name yours) and the only reply you’ll get is conjured within your own imagination. You’ll be talking to yourself, which is really rather sad, and hardly an antidote to loneliness.

The religious, I think, do not understand how many of us non-religious folks understand Dawkins’ perspective. They are alarmed about people who are not “loyal” to one religious tradition or another. Reality outside close human experience is irrelevant to them.

His themes in this piece echo those of his book THE MAGIC OF REALITY, from 2011, which I recently reviewed here.

There is joy in understanding, true joy, rising to little short of ecstasy. I suppose you could call it the poetry of reality. Peter Atkins concludes his lovely little book, The Creation, with a vision of the limitless future of science: “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

You tumble into existence, open your eyes, come to consciousness, find yourself on a spinning sphere orbiting a nuclear furnace in one arm of a barred spiral galaxy, hurtling through spacetime alongside 300 billion galaxies. The fact that you exist at all is a piece of shattering good fortune. Not only did your parents chance to meet, not only did one particular sperm outrun 100 million rivals. The same massive luck attended every generation of your ancestors, back to a single Devonian fish and a greater distance beyond. Any slight deviation in what happened, anywhere, anytime, would have sufficed to throw your future existence off the conveyor belt of lucky contingencies. You certainly owe your existence to Julius Caesar, Napoleon, even Hitler, but less obviously to a humble peasant who didn’t sneeze at a crucial moment in some forgotten marital bed. You owe your life to a particular dinosaur, on a particular Jurassic day, who stumbled and failed to catch the ancestor of all the mammals. You are prodigiously lucky to be alive. So please stifle your entitled moaning. Revel in your own existence.

And then Vox takes this subject on.

Vox, Christian Paz, 25 Apr 2025: Gen Z is finding religion. Why?, subtitled “3 theories for Gen Z’s return to God and faith.”

This concerns data trends that show the rise of the “nones” might be reversing

Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same time, those with no religious affiliation — nicknamed “nones” — began to spike.

Americans have been steadily losing their religion entirely. They haven’t been converting to other religions, or getting religion later in life.

That trend might be ending. Over the last five years, the share of Americans who are “nones” has stabilized at roughly 30 percent, across multiple tracking surveys — largely because of one group: zoomers.

Sometime around or after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, young Americans began to find, or at least retain, religious belief at higher rates than previous generations. The numbers tell this story quite cleanly. While the share of “nones” jumped by about 40 percent from 2008 to 2013, the rise began to slow between 2013 and 2018.

Then, in 2020, it stagnated.

The three theories: a loneliness epidemic; a loss of trust in the establishment; a response or cause of younger people’s rightward political and social shift.

The piece concludes:

Whether these trends continue doesn’t seem guaranteed. If anything the data suggests we may have reached a temporary equilibrium in religious affiliation and belief that might change as older, more religious Americans, continue to pass away. The strongest social research suggests that biggest driver and predictor of continued religious identification is how religious your parents were — so if a more religious and faithful Gen Z ends up keeping that faith, and raising their children with the same norms, what looked like an inevitable and endless decline in American religiosity may have been less drastic than it appeared.

As usual I am always trying to look at the bigger picture. If Americans’ religious beliefs can be affected by social trends, then religious beliefs aren’t about apprehending reality, are they? Reality is not affected by social trends. They’re about expressions of human nature, refined over millions of years for survival. Humans live in cocoons of shared beliefs, because that’s how we survive. Survival is distinct from understanding reality.

Posted in Human Nature, Religion, Science | Leave a comment

Tribal Warpaint

Posted on Sunday 27 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How Trump doesn’t want to govern, and rejects the idea of American government as a collaboration;
How the idea of consumer choice led to the idea of being gay;
Trump and covid.gov rewrite the history, as authoritarians do;
How Trump has severed America from the world in 100 days;
Another item about JFK Jr.’s upside-down understanding of science;
Guardian’s Simon Tisdall on how Trump will destroy himself;
How MAGA Glam is, it seems to me, tribal warpaint;
And how MAGA supporters claim divine intervention to save Trump from assassination;
And my take on such claims, and the idea of a father-figure god.

– – –

No doubt there’s a hierarchy of systems of government, that fairly obviously would align with the political spectrum in the US, with (as it seems) MAGA Republicans on one end, and Democracy at the other. For example.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 26 Apr 2025: Trump Doesn’t Want to Govern

I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.

But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.

The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.

Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.

Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.

Here’s a review of a book that I’m sure would be interesting on its own terms, but is noted here for a more abstract reason than the book’s primary subject.

Slate, Laura Miller, 27 Apr 2025: The Agony and the Ecstasy, subtitled “An endlessly fascinating new book shows just how intertwined sex and the church have been for 2,000 years.”

Who knew that agricultural advances in 18^th-century England and the Netherlands played a crucial role in creating homosexuality as we know it today? Diarmaid MacCulloch did, for one. Perhaps the foremost living historian of Christianity, MacCulloch writes in his new book, Lower Than the Angels, that while same-sex desires and acts have been around forever, the particular conditions of Northern European life in the 1700s fostered the notion that those desires could constitute a fundamental part of the self. For the first time there was “food to spare” for more than just the upper echelons of society, and therefore money to spend on non-necessities. Even quite poor people experienced what was once a luxury: consumer choice. While we in the 21^st century enjoy the even greater luxury of grousing about consumerism, for the people of that time, MacCulloch observes, this change “awakened a wider psychological awareness of making choices, ultimately about one’s own personal identity,” such as the identity we now call “gay.” As a result, “a much wider social range of individuals began to decide how to live and who they wanted to be,” and some of them included women as well as gay men; the 18^th century also saw the birth of modern feminism. This posed a problem for the religious authorities who were used to telling everyone what to do.

There’s a crucial insight here. It’s been noted many times that, until the past century or so, most people who ever lived never traveled more than a day’s walk from where they grew up. They had no direct experience of anything beyond their local circumstances; there were not even many books until the past couple hundred years, and most people didn’t read them. (And before books, history was passed down orally, suffering from “telephone game” distortions over generations and centuries. Thus religion.)

In the 21st century we suffer from an excess of “consumer choice,” and this applies even to choices people hadn’t realized they could make: the very idea of being “gay,” for example, though “same-sex desires and acts have been around forever.”

\\\

Rewriting history: this is what authoritarians do.

Washington Post, Monica Hesse, 23 Apr 2025: Scroll through Trump’s new covid website — and have your mind blown, subtitled “Scrolling through Trump’s latest foray into history-washing.”

Now visitors to covid.gov are properly oriented. We all understand that we have been hoodwinked by a massive government conspiracy, and only the 47th president — who had nothing to do with anything covid-related — can save us.

Scroll to: a Google Earth map of Wuhan, China, which has been doctored to have some kind of shaky, smoky effect, showing visitors that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is just 7.5 miles from the Huanan Seafood Market.

Has that sunk in yet? If so, get ready to have your mind further blown. The National Institutes of Health is about 7.5 miles from the Smithsonian National Zoo. My neighborhood is about 7.5 miles from the White House. The Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster, New Jersey, is about 7.5 miles from the Wendy’s in Branchburg, New Jersey. Do you see what we’re talking about here? (If you do, could you explain it to me?)

The revised site includes a predictable trashing of Anthony Fauci. The writer ends:

Like many of you, I have been watching with fear to see what the Trump administration might do to America’s future — the executive orders and court appointments and tariffs and division-sowing.

But all of that can be undone. What he does to our future can be undone. And so I worry more about what he is trying to do to our past. Via attempting to take over the way the Smithsonian tells the story of America. Via ordering that references to race and gender be removed from government websites depicting historic events and initiatives. Via taking a nationally traumatic event — one in which more than 1 million Americans died, and in which almost everyone was doing the best they could — and turning it into another plot at the hands of the evil liberals.

Taking over the past is a point of no return. It’s not that we can’t get back to who we once were. It’s that we won’t even remember it.

\\\

Once again: we’re living in history, and the historians will not be kind in assessing our era. Yet many are unaware, or even approving, of what is going on right now.

NY Times, guest essay by Ben Rhodes, 27 Apr 2025: 100 Days. That’s All It Took to Sever America From the World.

This recalls an earlier age of American isolationism, as many of us learned back in high school history classes — the American reluctance to support European allies in the two world wars.

In 1941, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt marshaled support for the fight against fascism, his chief antagonists were isolationists at home. “What I seek to convey,” he said at the beginning of an address to Congress, “is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.” Roosevelt prevailed, and that victory expanded America’s relationship with the world in ways that remade both.

Eighty-four years later, President Trump is systematically severing America from the globe. This is not simply a shift in foreign policy. It is a divorce so comprehensive that it makes Britain’s exit from the European Union look modest by comparison.

With examples at the links, for those not paying attention:

Consider the breadth of this effort. Allies have been treated like adversaries. The United States has withdrawn from international agreements on fundamental issues like health and climate change. A “nation of immigrants” now deports people without due process, bans refugees and is trying to end birthright citizenship. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have upended the system of international trade, throwing up new barriers to doing business with every country on Earth. Foreign assistance has largely been terminated. So has support for democracy abroad. Research cuts have rolled back global scientific research and cooperation. The State Department is downsizing. Exchange programs are on the chopping block. Global research institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center have been effectively shut down. And, of course, the United States is building a wall along its southern border.

The United States has become a frightened tribe closing itself off from the rest of the world. And retreating from the leadership role it once held.

\\\

One more time: this is not how science is done. This is not how the scientific discoveries that have enabled our modern world were found. The title here is the gist.

NY Times, opinion by Ross Douthat, Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells, 27 Apr 2025: ‘He’s Often Working Backward From a Conclusion’: Three Opinion Writers on Kennedy

\\\

How will Trump fall? My take would be: because conservative policies always run up against the reality of the world.

The Guardian, Simon Tisdall, 27 Apr 2025: Tyrants like Trump always fall – and we can already predict how he will be dethroned, subtitled “The US constitution protects incompetence. But don’t underestimate the self-destructive power of the president’s own hubris”

Tyrants come to a sticky end, or so history suggests. Richard III and Coriolanus made bloody exits. More recently, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, Slobodan Milosevic went to jail, Bashar al-Assad went into exile. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was run to ground in a sewer. Tyranny, from the Greek túrannos (“absolute ruler”), is typically fuelled by hubris and leads ineluctably to nemesis. Tyrants are for toppling. Their downfall is a saving grace.

Tyranny, in its many forms, is back in vogue, and everyone knows who’s to blame. To be fair, to suggest similarities between the aforementioned abominable individuals and Donald Trump would be utterly wrong. In key respects, he’s worse. Measured by willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation, Trump is uniquely dangerous – and ever more so by the day.

(Again, some of us have read about these previous tyrannies in the history books. Without realizing that one is happening to us right now. Which is how they happened before.)

Skip to the end: how will Trump fail? The writer reviews the record — many items from two posts above — and then concludes:

All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.

\\\

Short items.

Vox, Sean Collins, 27 Apr 2025: MAGA glam isn’t about beauty — it’s about politics, subtitled “Examining what’s underneath the ‘Republican makeup’ look.”

My take: this is about tribal warpaint. Analogous to uniforms in battle so that combatants can tell which side everyone is on.

JMG, from Fox News, 26 Apr 2025: Fox Poll: 70% Of MAGA Supporters Say They Believe God Intervened To Save Trump From Assassination

One-third believe divine intervention helped secure Trump’s return to the White House. Thirty-two percent feel he was saved from two assassination attempts because God wanted him to be president again, including majorities of White evangelical Christians (56%), Republicans (60%), 2024 Trump supporters (62%) and MAGA supporters (70%)

My take: base human nature interprets the world mystically, projecting human values onto an inanimate universe, thinking that everything must happen for a reason, and that the reason is connected to a father-figure god who picks and chooses which events to intervene in. That’s why you should pray. Yet the results look much like chance.

Look: if there’s a father-figure god running the universe, why aren’t his interventions consistent, rather than being so arbitrary they look like chance? If there’s a father-figure god running the universe, why is the vast, vast majority of the universe that humanity has been able to perceive so utterly uninhabitable? Not just the vast regions of space, but even most of the planet Earth? Think about this. OK, never mind, your tribe’s religion has the truth about the meaning of life and immorality. Good for you.

Posted in authoritarianism, Culture, History, Lunacy, Politics, Religion, Science | Leave a comment

History Rhymes? Will Humanity Ever Advance?

Posted on Saturday 26 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How history rhymes, about tariffs: Smoot-Hawley and Trump;
How Musk lives fantasies about expanding the population (of people like him) without a grasp on numbers;
How DOGE has cost taxpayers $135B, while claiming to have saved $160B — even that is far less than its goal.

– – –

The experts understand, and the science fiction writers imagine, realms beyond the conception of the vast majority of ordinary people. Science fiction, I think, is about speculating what lies beyond the most abstruse things the experts understand. That’s a core theme here. Will humanity ever advance? Or are we forever mired in primitive thinking?

LA Times, Veronique de Rugy, 24 Apr 2025: Economic nostalgia woos voters, but it leads to terrible policies

History may not perfectly repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Two protectionist episodes — the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the Trump-era tariffs of today — offer a striking example. Both emerged from economic nostalgia and fear of change. Both were politically attractive. And both were costly, backward-looking mistakes that undermined the economies they were meant to protect.

With details, concluding:

…Between 1929 and 1934, global trade collapsed by 65%.

Today, Smoot-Hawley is widely regarded as a catastrophic error.

Then how Trump is rhyming this history. Concluding…

The two blunders have one more thing in common: cronyism. According to economic historian Douglas A. Irwin, Smoot-Hawley was not primarily about ideology. It was about interest-group politics: an ad hoc scramble driven by constituent demands, sectoral lobbying and legislative bargaining.

In the same way, Trump’s tariffs have revived the lobbying for tariff exemptions we saw in his first term. Apple got an exemption for the iPhone and now, understandably, everyone else wants one. As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome commented on X, “The cronyism buffet line is now open.” National Review’s Dominic Pino calculated that tariff lobbying spending is up by 277%.

The lesson is clear: Economic nostalgia is a poor guide to sound policy. Smoot-Hawley and Trump’s tariffs represent attempts to re-create a romanticized past — one of small farms or bustling factories — rather than to embrace the reality of a changing world. But economies are dynamic. Trying to freeze them in place with trade barriers doesn’t stop change; it just makes the transition harder, costlier and more painful.

History judged Smoot-Hawley harshly. The final verdict on Trump’s tariffs is not yet written, but the early signs are familiar. If we want prosperity, we must look forward, not backward. The future belongs to those who embrace change and creative destruction, not those who resist it.

Thus the corollary to my opening statement: conservatives are virtually by definition almost always wrong. The things they want to conserve are the vestiges of the most primitive thinking from humanity’s tribal past. At best, give the conservatives their anodyne traditions. The rest of us will move on.

\\\

This is not surprising given that Musk, like many people, is driven by motivated thinking. He’s already decided what he wants to believe, never mind plausibility.

Washington Post, David Von Drehle, 24 Apr 2025: Elon Musk’s lack of math skills is making me nervous, subtitled “Surprisingly, for a high-tech multibillionaire, he appears to not have a solid grasp on numbers.”

The situation, refers to a Wall Street Journal article, which says that

…Musk has fathered at least 14 children with at least four women; that he has created a compound near Austin as a habitat for his progeny; that he hopes to sire many more children with women he finds through social media. And it added the detailed personal testimony of one of Musk’s partners, who shared not only the financial details of life inside Musk’s “harem drama,” but also his growing concern that only an army of paid surrogates can produce enough of his babies to populate the “legion” required to stave off the “apocalypse.”

What apocalypse? As near as I can tell, it’s the fear of whites that they will be diluted by non-whites; it’s not about the global population actually declining.

A person who understands numbers would appreciate that the world’s population is large and rapidly growing. Despite wars, famine, disease and birth control, more than 8 billion humans now occupy Earth on our way to an estimated 10 billion or so half a century from now.

…

In the same article, we learn that Musk operates under the daffy misconception that babies born by Caesarean section have larger brains, as if vaginal births squish the gray matter out of infants’ little ears. He also believes that larger brains mean higher intelligence, which makes you wonder: Why doesn’t he hire more humpback whales and walruses at SpaceX?

Like the cowboy myth (covered yesterday), there’s a myth that big things are accomplished by individual geniuses. This idea is partly due to sloppy history, that reduces complex events to simple stories about single persons. In fact, as you look at the backgrounds of the very wealthy, many of them, like Musk, inherited their wealth, or bought companies built by others. They’re savvy businessmen, perhaps, but not geniuses, or even particularly smart.

Case in point. Did Trump and Musk anticipate this? Of course not. Their thinking is simple-minded. Just fire people whose jobs you don’t understand, never mind the consequences, which other people will have to deal with.

CBS News, Aimee Picchi, 25 Apr 2025: DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says. (via)

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new analysis from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE’s actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.

PSP’s estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE’s actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn’t include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.

And so on. Reality is more complex than conservatives understand. Never mind that the claimed savings are far far less than the $2 billion target.

Posted in conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

The Cowboy Myth, Presidential Corruption, and Disingenuous Cuts to Science Research

Posted on Friday 25 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Heather Cox Richard on the “cowboy myth” that informs the Trump presidency;
How Trump et al are giving billionaires a bad name;
How Trump has done the most corrupt thing any president has ever done — getting rich from anonymous investors — and how barely anyone cares;
How the administration’s cuts to science research echo the disingenuous schemes of the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel companies.

– – –

Heather Cox Richardson: April 24, 2025

She writes about Trump and his scandalous administration, beginning with his “Vladimir, STOP!” entreaty on social media yesterday morning. But I’m noting this for her summary of the “cowboy myth” that still permeates some sectors of American political and cultural thought. I noted this in my summary of her book (beginning here).

Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.

Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

Part of the MAGA myth of a past golden age (which never actually existed). How this has played out:

Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.

They “knew that the world has never worked this way.” Especially not in a society that necessarily requires much global interaction. You can’t shut out the outside world.

As the middle class hollowed out, Republicans hammered on the idea that government action was socialism and the government was a swamp of waste and corruption. Donald Trump rode that rhetoric to the White House in 2016 but was still restrained by establishment Republicans who understood that the modern state underpinned America’s strength. President Joe Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ economic vision and reorientation of the economy around ordinary Americans made Republicans rally against another Democratic president. They turned back to Trump, backed as he was by the MAGA base marinated in the rhetoric that government is bad, even though their counties are more dependent than Democratic counties on government aid.

Now the dog has caught the car.

And here we are. Who is benefiting?

Conservative Intellectuals, and the Wrong Way to Do Science

Posted on Thursday 24 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert Reich collects comments from conservative intellectuals about the Trump administration;
Reich summarizes ten points that demonstrates Trump’s ineptitude and incompetence;
Similarly, Salon’s Brian Karem on how Trump has turned the White House into a joke;
How RFK Jr.’s approach is the opposite of how actual science works;

– – –

So of course there are *some* conservative intellectuals. Even if they’re to the ‘left’ of the MAGA base, if only because they think things through (rather than react simplistically) and they’re not driven by raw tribal hatred of The Other.

Robert Reich, 22 Apr 2025: The view from the right, subtitled “Conservative condemnation of the Trump regime is almost as vehement as is progressive condemnation. Will they give cover to business leaders who have so far remained silent?”

There is an unfortunate tendency for those of us on the so-called “left” to assume that thinkers and pundits on the “right” disagree with us about Trump.

But what is occurring these days transcends left or right. It is now a matter of democracy or tyranny. More and more of those on the so-called “right” are condemning the Trump regime with almost as much vehemence as you and I condemn it.

Will this give cover to business leaders who have so far remained silent?

A recent sample of condemnation of Trump from the “right.”

Reich then quotes a bunch of them. More important than what they say, in the context of this blog, is who they are. I’ll list them with links to the articles Reich is quoting. I’m cleaning up some of the link redirects and including the titles of their articles.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy: JD Vance Pretends Due Process Is Beside the Point;
Andrew Sullivan: “Two Perfect Months”, subtitled “That’s how Trump sees his opening act. Believe him — or your own lying eyes.” [Sullivan is a gay Catholic writer whom I’ve read a couple books by];
The New York Times’s Bret Stephens: Bret Stephens on What Trump Gets Right, Wrong and Really, Really Wrong
American Enterprise Institute’s Matthew Continetti: Think You Can Guess Trump’s Next Move? Think Again.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board: Trump, Abrego Garcia and the Courts, subtitled “The President may win this showdown, but by taunting the Supreme Court he is tempting fate later on cases of far greater consequence.
The New York Times‘s David Brooks: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.

Reich concludes:

I continue to disagree with much of what these people say and write and I suspect you do as well. But I also continue to be surprised by how much our views are converging when it comes to the Trump regime’s dangerous drive toward dictatorship.

We’re on the cusp of a national wave of outrage that transcends the old political labels. This hardly means that died-in-the-wool Trumpers will change their minds. But it does give America’s business leaders who have so far remained silent or even supported Trump — the CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, the captains of our largest financial institutions, the heads of media empires — enough cover to come out against this dangerous and despicable regime. Will they?

\\\

Today Reich has this:

Robert Reich, 24 Apr 2025: Ineptitude, incompetence, stupidity, and chaos, subtitled “Trump is fundamentally incapable of governing. That’s the theme that unites everything.”

I’ll summarize his ten points: The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disaster; The Harvard debacle; The tariff travesty; The attack on the Fed chair fiasco; The Kilmar Abrego Garcia calamity; ICE’s blunderbuss; Musk’s DOGE disaster; Measles mayhem; Student debt snafu; and Who’s in charge?

I can’t help but wonder if people who get their News from Fox have even heard of most of these stories.

Reich concludes:

All this ineptitude in just the last few weeks reveals that the Trump regime is coming apart. Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.

While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

\\\

Along the same lines.

Salon, Brian Karem, 24 Apr 2025: “Two beautiful poles”: President Trump turns the White House into a joke, subtitled “If you can’t use a hook to yank the bad comic off the stage, then there is only one way left to end the show”

At first I thought it was satire.

On Earth Day, the Trump administration published a press release with the headline, “On Earth Day, we finally have a president who follows science.”

I stifled a laugh.

And so on, and so on.

This the essence of conservative thinking, and why you can’t trust them when they claim to “follow science.” They already know what they want to conclude. That is not science; that’s ideology.

The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, 24 Apr 2025: ‘This Is Not How We Do Science, Ever’, subtitled “The Trump administration is manipulating government-sponsored research to get the answers it wants.”

One of the most notable things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency tasked with “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America”—is how confidently he distorts the basics of health, safety, and well-being.

In his short stint as health secretary, Kennedy has touted cod-liver oil as a valid measles treatment (it’s not), said that Americans are being “poisoned” by seed oils (they’re not), and claimed that “many” vaccines are not adequately safety-tested (they are). And he has readily cherry-picked and exaggerated findings to suit his own needs: “There’s a scientist at Harvard now who is curing schizophrenia with a carnivore diet,” he said at a press conference in March (it’s not a carnivore diet, and it’s not a cure).

The secretary also seems to think he knows what causes autism, a topic that scientists have been looking into for decades without producing a simple, clear-cut result, M. Daniele Fallin, a genetic epidemiologist at Emory University, told me. Kennedy, however, is adamant that a series of new investigations by his department will reveal at least “some of the answers” by September. “And we will be able to eliminate those exposures,” he said at a recent Cabinet meeting.

Once again, conservatives want clear, simple answers to everything, in a world that is apparently complex beyond their comprehension.

Among scientists who study and treat autism, the consensus has long been that “there is no ‘one cause’” of autism, Neelkamal Soares, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician in Michigan, told me. Genetics are likely to play a role; researchers have also explored the possible contributions of factors such as parental age; labor and delivery conditions; and exposures to certain chemicals, medications, or infections during pregnancy. Experts also generally agree that much of the growing prevalence of autism can be attributed to increased awareness and diagnosis—an explanation that the CDC, an agency Kennedy oversees, cited in its report.

And much more.

Quickly noted.

The Guardian, Melody Schreiber, 24 Apr 2025: Autistic people and experts voice alarm at RFK’s ‘terrible’ approach to condition, subtitled “Health secretary is planning wide-ranging monitoring of autistic people’s health record and cuts to disability services”

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Science | Leave a comment

The Latest Cultural War Conservatives are Losing

Posted on Wednesday 23 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How Conservatives keep badgering the law even as they lose the culture war;
Specifically, the Supreme Court case about banning books that Christians are uncomfortable with;
Related: HHS is proposing defunding the LGBTQ+ suicide hotline; and Sam Alito misreads a children’s book, exposing his animus toward gay marriage;
And noting how the White House bragging about following science means the opposite.

– – –

Last year I read and reviewed that book by Stephen Prothero called WHY LIBERALS WIN THE CULTURE WARS (EVEN WHEN THEY LOSE ELECTIONS), whose basic point was that as society changes (as it inevitably does) those uncomfortable with change, i.e. conservatives, complain only once such changes are well under way, by which time they’ve already lost the battle. (Save for once in a generation or two authoritarian crack-downs… which are part of this cycle too. And which most of us thought America was immune to.)

Here’s a perfect example from the Supreme Court this week.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Apr 2025: Too late to opt-out: Supreme Court ultimately can’t save the religious right’s futile book bans, subtitled “Even if SCOTUS allows LGBTQ books to get pushed out of classrooms, the right is still losing the larger culture war”

Marcotte begins by calling out the hypocrisy of Christian ideals.

Can you treat someone with “love, kindness, and respect” while simultaneously insisting their identity is so poisonous that it cannot be acknowledged?

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday for Mahmoud v. Taylor, which has become known as the “don’t say gay” case, because it’s over conservative objections to children’s books, taught in Maryland classrooms, that position queerness as a normal fact of life. The arguments involved a lot of legalese about “burden” versus “coercion,” or what constitutes a “sincerely held” religious belief. But at the heart of the battle was a more philosophical question, one with an answer that should be self-evident: Is it possible to “respect” someone while trying to erase their existence?

Naturally, the argument from relies on fatuous, long-discredited premises.

The right’s lawyer argued that censoring these books wasn’t about disrespecting queer people, but protecting “children’s innocence.” It’s a nonsense argument, however, as it assumes there’s a “respectful” way to erase people. But it was also quite silly, as if hiding these books would shield children from the knowledge that LGBTQ identities exist. (An unspoken corrollary is the false view they can prevent children from growing up queer.) The case illustrates the animating futility at the heart of the MAGA movement: they will never manifest their dream of a past “great” America, when “queer” wasn’t a thing. Such a period never existed, but especially not in an era when queer people are visible in pop culture, the internet, and the general community. The government can force teachers not to say “gay” in school, but kids are going to hear about it everywhere else.

Point: see Mark Lilla on the corrosive notion of childhood innocence. Point: see my point oft-repeated on this blog that animus toward gays is the existential worry by parents that if their kids are gay they will have no grandchildren (which, these days, is not necessarily true). Point: gay people have always existed, and there never was a “golden age” when they didn’t exist. (Most people just didn’t know about them, just as they didn’t know about autistic people.)

And point, extending the second one: this is all about tribal priorities to expand the tribe at all costs, from an age when infant mortality was high. This became part of base human nature; thus that existential dread. It’s never about individual choices or fulfillment. Times have changed but human nature hasn’t, and has come to conflict with the ideas to overcome the problematic aspects of human nature, as the Enlightenment thinkers, and the American founders who wrote the Constitution, sought to overcome.

Many people have thought this through, but not MAGA conservatives. If they can’t legally define gays and trans people out of existence, then at least they can demonize them, which is what this Supreme Court case is about. Marcotte concludes:

One thing censorship of queer books does accomplish is signaling to LGBTQ kids that there’s something shameful about who they are. “LGBTQ+ youth who attend schools with an inclusive sex education curriculum report lower levels of depression and suicidality,” explained the American Psychological Association in their amicus brief in support of the school district. Listening to the mean-spirited arguments from the right before the Supreme Court today, it’s hard to shake the sense that this shame is the desired outcome. Kids are going to learn what “gay” is one way or another, and at very young ages — and many of them will be queer. The only question is whether the authorities in their life tell them they’re bad people for it. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the GOP’s goals with the case are crystal clear. They can’t win the culture war, but they’re going to use these lawsuits to spit in the face of all the queer people who offend them just by existing.

Related: also in the news this week:

Axios, Avery Lotz, 23 Apr 2025: LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline among proposed HHS budget cuts

Let ’em kill themselves, seems to be HHS and RFK Jr.’s position.

One more on this topic.

Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 23 Apr 2025: How Sam Alito Inadvertently Revealed His Own Homophobia From the Bench

The book shown is one of those in question. It’s a picture book about two men getting married, in which a little girl has reservations about it. Alito interpreted to mean she had moral objections to the marriage. He was wrong.

A few minutes later, Sotomayor made this point to Rassbach. “The character, the child character, wasn’t objecting to same-sex marriage,” the justice said. “She was objecting to the fact that marriage would take her uncle away from spending more time with her, correct?”

And how Alito couldn’t let this go.

“No one in the book has any problem with same-sex marriage,” the author said. “Everyone in the story supports Bobby and Jamie’s decision to marry, including Chloe. She’s thrilled about the wedding after she gets to know Jamie better” and is “completely supportive.” Brannen said she was “dismayed” by the way Alito characterized the book; she first wondered if Alito hadn’t bothered to read it…

So Alito was reading into the story what he wanted to see.

The broader story here: change in society happens, but at a pace where not everyone can keep up. We have to give allowance to Alito, and many other older people, who are uncomfortable with the changes in society younger folks take for granted. This is a truism in science too, which after all is done by humans. Sometimes, for the evidence to prevail, you have to wait for old guys, driven by convention, to die off.

This has always been true.

\\\

Covered by many spots today. If they claim to be following science, you can be sure they are not. The Trump administration is an instantiation of Orwellian reality.

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Leave a comment

What Conservatives Mean by the Deep State

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Namely, anything that interferes with their agenda, in effect the entirety of Jonathan Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge,” since MAGA conservatives don’t truly believe in the Constitution or our system of government;
Robert Reich on the billionaire class, that doesn’t care about anyone else, and who are planning for an “event” to further isolate themselves from the real world;
Once again, Republican elites tolerate Trump because they want the tax cuts;
Checking in with Michael Hobbes, and his comments about how conservatives have turned against reality;
A new conspiracy theory: JD Vance killed the pope!; Numbers on autism, despite RFK Jr; and conservatives shielding their kids from the reality of the world through library boards.

– – –

To conservatives, anything that interferes with their agenda means they’re “being framed by the deep state.”

Or: what conservatives mean by the “deep state” is the entire set of government institutions that keep our society running — including the functions of law and order. (See Rauch.) They think it’s some kind of conspiracy, waiting to pounce when they try to take advantage of the system, or impose their worldview on others, since they don’t truly believe in the Constitution.

These thoughts triggered by this relatively incidental example in the news today:

JMG, 22 Apr 2025: Fired Hegseth Aide: I Was Framed By The Deep State

\\\

More about the notion that wealthy conservatives are happy to cut government services, and then cut taxes, because they themselves don’t need those government services, and don’t care about the many people who do.

Robert Reich, 22 Apr 2025: The secession of the billionaire class

Billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the drop in the stock market is nothing to be concerned about because Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.

Billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says we shouldn’t be concerned that mass layoffs in the Social Security Administration have caused delays because his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check.

The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, whose minions are busily slashing the Social Security Administration, calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

Billionaire Trump says he “couldn’t care less” if automakers raise their prices because of his tariffs.

On what planet do these people live? Surely not this one.

This is what you get when oligarchs are in charge of the nation.

To be fabulously wealthy today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. It therefore means having not a clue about how average working people live or what they worry about it.

The billionaire class doesn’t care if producers raise their prices, because prices mean almost nothing to them. They aren’t concerned about retirement savings, because they don’t have to prepare for retirement.

If anything, Reich goes on, the billionaire class is preparing for an “event” —

the thing that will cause them to secede even further from the rest of the world into isolated, sanitized survival chambers. The “event” could be massive social unrest, an unstoppable virus, a malicious computer hack that takes everything down, or environmental collapse.

You wonder how much of this, like Musk’s obsession with colonizing Mars to ensure the survival of the human race, comes from alarmist science fiction. Reich quotes a Guardian article by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, then concludes:

[Trump] and his billionaire appointees feel no connection to the rest of America. They want only to dismantle government and insulate themselves from the ensuing chaos.

As Klein and Taylor say, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

\\\

Once again.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 22 Apr 2025: The Force That Holds Trump’s Coalition Together, subtitled “Traditional Republican elites tolerate the authoritarianism because they want the tax cuts.”

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I pulled an extremely mean trick on my little brother. I told him that if he cleaned my room, I “might give him a dollar.” Once he had performed the chore, I told him I’d decided against paying him.

I thought of that shameful (and oddly Trumpian) moment a few weeks ago, when I began encountering news stories reporting that President Donald Trump was considering a plan to raise taxes on the rich. (Axios: “Scoop: Trump might let taxes rise for the rich to cover breaks on tips.” Semafor: “Trump told Republican senators he’s open to raising taxes on highest earners.”)

The gist here: Republicans have from time to time over the years floated the idea of raising taxes on the rich. But they never do.

\\\

Via a post on Facebook, something by Michael Hobbes, a journalist and podcast host with considerable background, and 174K followers, whom I’ve not been previously aware of, and this post on BlueSky.

Michael Hobbes on BlueSky, 21 Apr 2025.

The conservative movement has turned against reality on every scientific issue of our time, from gun violence to climate change to epidemiology.

If campuses are ideologically homogeneous, it’s not because academia has ostracized conservatives. It’s because conservatives have ostracized academia.

Followed by comments, including numerous follow-up remarks from Hobbes:

The entire concept of “ideological conformity” applied to academia makes no sense. Is the belief that the Earth is round a type of conformity? On some level, yes: Everyone thinks the same thing.

But sometimes everything thinks the same thing because that thing is true! This is how science works.

—

I expect that the field of geology does not have a lot of Scientologists. Is this evidence that there’s a culture of “stifling conformity” among geologists? No! It’s evidence that humans didn’t emerge from fucking volcanos.

—

When Republicans take power do they expand “viewpoint diversity”? No. They purge scientists, delete data and promote their own mediocre minds. If you support Trump you are signaling membership in a movement that *hates* science, science is not obligated to pretend otherwise.

\\\

Short items.

Boing Boing, Rob Beschizza, 22 Apr 2025: J.D. Vance killed the pope, at least according to memes

Some numbers.

PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson, 21 Apr 2025: RFK Jr. exaggerates share of autistic population with severe limitations

The highest figure we found for people with autism severe enough to pose significant challenges to daily living was about one-quarter of the autistic population. More frequently, academic estimates for this group are in the range of 10% of people on the spectrum, or lower.

Conservatives are obsessed with shielding their children from the reality of the world.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 17 Apr 2025: Arkansas Republicans just fired the state’s Library Board to please one Christian Nationalist

And

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 16 Apr 2025: Christian Nationalist Jason Rapert Topples The Arkansas State Library Board

Sigh.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

The War Against Intelligence

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s rage against smart people;
Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us;
Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age;
Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges books based on word searches; Hegseth, one of Trump’s “best people,” keeps blundering; and how a former beauty pageant contestant is in charge of removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian.

– – –

Trump’s war against war against intelligence and expertise isn’t strategic; it’s personal.

Paul Krugman, 21 Apr 2025: Trump’s Cultural Revolution, subtitled “The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry”

First he quotes Trump’s Easter Day outburst, which begins with his version of Christian charity… Well it’s shown here as an image, so I’ll just retype a bit, complete with gratuitous caps.

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.

When Trump goes on to say Biden was, quote,

…our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing

He is, of course, projecting. The description fits Trump, not Biden.

Krugman:

Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.

It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.

Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.

If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Thus the photo above. (Some of that was visualized in the opening minutes of the TV adaptation of Cixin Liu’s THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM.)

Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.

The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.

This synchs with a big piece on The New Yorker’s website today. Again, most people don’t realize what benefits they’ve been getting in better health care over the decades. It came from investing in universities.

The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, 21 Apr 2025: The Cost of Defunding Harvard, subtitled “If you or someone you love has cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or diabetes, you have likely benefited from the university’s federally funded discoveries in care and treatment.”

(My grandmother died of Parkinson’s disease, in the early 1970s. And I have cardiovascular disease. Or had? I had a heart transplant.) Gawande is the author of Being Mortal, among other books.

With U.S.A.I.D., President Donald Trump proved willing to impose catastrophic consequences, including widespread death and financial waste. But that was for people and investments far away. His attacks on universities involve lives and investments here at home.

These attacks are part of a broader assault on America’s health-and-science infrastructure. More than ninety per cent of the nine billion federal dollars for Harvard that are now in danger supports life sciences, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. The university itself receives only a fraction of this funding. Three-quarters of it goes to five independent Boston hospitals affiliated with its medical school: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The threatened defunding, if implemented, would choke off science and research across all of them.

With examples of patients he’s treated. MAGA seems to think any part of government spending they don’t understand should be slashed, without realizing that that spending is supporting real people, who are working to improve the lives of real people — including themselves.

\\\

Several people today on Fb are posting a piece by one Lauren Thompson, an historian specializing in US history from the late 19th to the early 20th century. (This era has recently been dramatized by the HBO series The Gilded Age.)

Here’s one example of a post about this: Nigel Sellars: One fool’s great era is another, better educated person’s horror

Here’s the relevant part of Lauren Thompson’s post.

Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money’s supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.

There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day.

Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women’s purity. Creating instability in the Philippines, the Caribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women’s suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.

Sound familiar?

Here’s an appropriate cue for the famous George Santayana quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Short items.

As we’ve seen much evidence of, conservatives including Christians feel entitled to lie, despite one of those commandments, because they feel they have some higher cause.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Apr 2025: ‘They Do Not Deserve The Truth’: Andrew Isker Praises Trump/Vance For Lying About Their Position On Abortion

They revise history by word search. Simpletons.

LA Times, Michael Eric Dyson, 21 Apr 2025: Hegseth purged two of my books on race. Did he actually read them?

Well *of course* he didn’t read them.

After yet another blunder, by the former Fox News host, Pete Hegseth is apparently being shown the door. Because Trump hires only the best people!

NPR, 21 Apr 2025: Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

Yet another example of only hiring the best people.

Washington Post, 21 Apr 2025: She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it., subtitled “Who is Lindsey Halligan, the attorney assigned to help remove “improper ideology” from a major cultural institution?” (via)

Answer: she’s a former beauty pageant contestant. Really. Seriously. And she’s going to stroll through the Smithsonian and override the decisions of professional historians, according to her provincial values. This is where we are.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Culture, Politics | Comments Off

Trump 100

Chris Mooney, THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE

Who’s Happiest and Why?

Tribal Warpaint

History Rhymes? Will Humanity Ever Advance?

The Cowboy Myth, Presidential Corruption, and Disingenuous Cuts to Science Research

Conservative Intellectuals, and the Wrong Way to Do Science

The Latest Cultural War Conservatives are Losing

What Conservatives Mean by the Deep State

The War Against Intelligence

Mark R. Kelly

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Meta