Like Living in Someone Else’s Fantasy Novel

  • Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days and puts events into context;
  • (With asides about having read Fail-Safe and watched the movie, this past week; and a Facebook meme about Emperor Hirohito bombing Pearl Harbor and then expecting peace);
  • Trump’s God-talk;
  • And Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch spelling out why MAGA hopes the Israel/Iran conflict will bring about the End Times.
– – –

First of all, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days, and puts things in context that at a glance might not have anything to do with one another. But many people have noticed this pattern over the years: Trump diverts attention from a relative failure to something new and outrageous.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: June 22, 2025

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

A meme post has gone around on Facebook in the past couple days, which mimics and mocks Trump, from Emperor Hirohito:

We have completed our very successful attack on Hawaii. All planes are now outside of America air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Pearl Harbor. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great Japanese Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Richardson:

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

(An odd coincidence of my own, as mentioned previous post, is that I re-read the book Fail-Safe this past week, and watched the movie version last night; a 60-year-old story about the United States dropping atomic bombs for the first time in history. In that case, by accident.)

Moving on with Richardson. Trump’s next standard move, yet again, is to walk back his claims.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

Trump, of course, is berating any reports that cast any shadow of a doubt of his claims of total victory.

And then the story of the past couple days takes a weird turn into God talk.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

*Everyone* thinks God is on their side. After patriotism, it’s the refuge of the scoundrel.

And yet, MAGA seems split on these events. Richardson again:

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

Some right-wing extremists are condemning Trump for starting a new war, more or less, since he vowed to stop the endless wars started by previous presidents.

JMG, 23 June: MTG Accuses Trump Of “Complete Bait And Switch”

This is especially rich:

Salon, Alex Galbaith, 22 Jun 2025: “Back then we had dumb presidents”: Vance explains key difference in current Middle East war

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There’s something analogous between the cluelessness and myopia of the current administration, beholden as they are to conservative ideologies despite evidence about the real world, and the cluelessness and myopia of the religious, even the intellectually religious, despite the same.

Recent examples of the intellectually religious include stories about William F. Buckley (e.g. in this post), who denied intellectual freedom as “superstition” because he felt the Catholic religion of his childhood was the absolute truth of the universe, and that recent Ross Douthat book in which he advised that religion is good but especially *his* religion because that’s the one that’s true.

The bridge:

The Daily Beast, Catherine Bouris, 22 Jun 2025: Trump’s Strange God Talk Has People Concerned, subtitled “The president’s multiple mentions of ‘God’ in his Saturday address raised eyebrows among his critics.”

And then this, as noted before, several times. Why are so many Americans obsessed with defending Israel?

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 20 Jun 2025: MAGA Evangelicals Expect The Israel/Iran Conflict To Bring About The End Times

..[R]eligious-right activists have been nearly unanimous in their demand that the Trump administration lend its full support to Israel in the growing conflict.

The reason for this is that Trump’s evangelical base believes that the Bible commands them to support Israel in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ and the End Times, as former Rep. Michele Bachmann explained during a recent “World Prayer Network” program.

“This is the one thing a president can’t get wrong according to the Bible, according to Joel 3,” Bachmann said. “A president can’t get Israel wrong. They can’t. This is the one most decisive issue that will either take down a presidency or it will lift up and create great promise for a presidency.”

“This is a spiritual battle,” she continued. “Israel’s at her greatest hour of need right now, every nation on Earth should thank Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. We should all kiss the ground and be so grateful that Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister and that he had the guts to take on this greatest evil terror state that has defined plans. And so the United States, in my opinion, we need to be decisive. This is not a negotiation. It can never be a negotiation.”

As neither a Christian nor a Jew, I find this dangerously nonsensical. Every religion thinks it’s the only one that possesses the absolute truth. Now the world is on the brink of war, perhaps nuclear war, because of rival supernatural claims to the ultimate truth.

It’s like living in someone else’s fantasy novel.

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Locus Awards and Being Busy

Locus Awards; publisher prospects; recent reading.

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It’s a truism that the busier one is, the less time one has to jot notes in one’s journal, or write posts on one’s blog. The past few days have been busy, but the business — busy-ness? — is all over now, so I have time this Sunday afternoon to catch up.

Family from LA arrived on Thursday (with a day’s notice): my partner’s younger son and his wife, expecting their first child in July. Their last trip to the Bay Area to see us and various friends and cousins before the baby comes. Dinners out, lunch with cousins, visits to esoteric coffee shops. They left for home this morning, Sunday, after a trip to Boichik Bagels on 6th St. in Berkeley.

Then the Locus Awards were yesterday, Saturday, at the now usual venue, Preservation Park in downtown Oakland. The event was recorded and posted on YouTube:

The highlight might be, early on in the show, a 5-minute video from Connie Willis, who for years hosted the event, but could not attend this time, and so provided a video recap of past years’ events, from signed bananas to Hawaiian shirts. The event proper unfolds like any other awards show: lots of categories, readings of the “nominees,” announcements of the winners, most of whom are not in attendance. Peter S. Beagle was, and the winner of the Best Science Fiction Novel, one Alexander Boldizar, was. I confess I don’t follow (read) most of the current SF/F writers, but I’m *aware* of most of them; yet the winner in this SF Novel category hadn’t even registered with me.

As it happens, which I will reveal here since it’s academic now and no one reads my blog anyway, I saw the complete list of Locus Awards winners as to be published in the July issue of Locus Magazine when Locus HQ sent me a PDF of the issue on Friday, some 10 days before publication, and a day before the awards ceremony. Given the timing, that issue had the full list of Locus Awards winners. And my reaction was, on seeing the winner in this category, who? What book is this? Well OK, I’ll check it out.

And then, quite coincidentally, entering the hall where the awards were to be presented, and seeing a table run by Tachyon publishers Jacob and Rina Weisman full of books to sell at the back of the room, I saw a copy of this Alexander Boldizar book on display. Only one copy. I bought it. It was already signed, and the author attended, but I did not have time to track him down to personalize it for me, as Rina suggested I might.

Nor did I tell anyone why I’d bought it.

Here is my post about about last year’s event. Gail Carriger and Henry Lien were there, and Bob Blough, Jacob Weisman, and Tim Pratt, who has apparently become Tim Melody Pratt, presenting one of the awards.

But Gary K. Wolfe, long-time Locus reviewer, was there, with his partner Dale Weatherwax Hanes, who seemed to remember meeting me, though not vice versa. We all sat at the same table together, as the buffet began (dumplings and rice from some place in the city, not great), and chatted about his reviews, and the editor and publisher I’m currently working with. I think the result of that conversation is that I will have difficulty finding a publisher for my book for any but a very small prospective audience. McFarland, perhaps, which is where Gary Westfahl publishes. Other respectable folks have published there — David Brin, Howard Hendrix. But McFarland pays nothing to contributors, and publishes only 300 copies for sale mostly to libraries.

Here’s McFarland’s page for the book in which my essay will appear, now scheduled for October: Reimagining Science Fiction, subtitled “Essays on 21st Century Ideas and Authors”

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Meanwhile, this past month I’ve been reading and rereading several classic SF novels, especially a couple dystopian novels that in the last year or two have taken up near-permanent residence on the extended bestseller lists: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In between those, three others about nuclear apocalypses: Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, and Burdick & Wheeler’s Fail-Safe. I’d read all of these once before except for the Shute. I plan to wrap up with the Atwood this coming week, and then get back to sfadb updates, and blog posts about reading these books and others.

Posted in Personal history, science fiction | Leave a comment

No Shades of Gray

  • Trump wants national parks to reflect only patriotic history;
  • Trump thinks if you’re not on his side then you “hate America”;
  • Yet another example: Beware “common sense”;
  • Short items: Atheists in prison; Trump officials reverse ICE guidelines, again and again; Brian Karem on how we’ve become a failed nation-state in just 150 days.
– – –

Again: everything, for conservatives, must be reduced to simplistic terms, black and white, good and evil. And America must always have been good. Also: another snitch line!

LA Times, 19 Jun 2025: Trump bans ‘negative’ signage at national parks, asks visitors to report text deemed ‘unpatriotic’

In his ongoing war on “woke,” President Trump has instructed the National Park Service to scrub any language he would deem negative, unpatriotic or smacking of “improper partisan ideology” from signs and presentations visitors encounter at national parks and historic sites.

Instead, his administration has ordered the national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums supervised by the Department of the Interior to ensure that all of their signage reminds Americans of our “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

Those marching orders, which went into effect late last week, have left Trump opponents and free speech advocates gasping in disbelief, wondering how park employees are supposed to put a sunny spin on monuments acknowledging slavery, Jim Crow laws and the fight for civil rights. And how they’ll square the story of Japanese Americans shipped off to incarceration camps during World War II with an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

Of course the Trump administration, in its cluelessness, is the current impediment toward “advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

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Yet again: for conservatives everything is either black or white.

Washington Post, opinion by Monica Hesse, 10 Jun 2025: Trump’s lazy insult for liberals is deeply confusing, subtitled “Who gets to define patriotism?”

You hear this over and over again from Trump: if you don’t support him, if you’re not part of MAGA, you must “hate America.” Demonstrating over and over what a simpleton he is. And his fans.

“These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our country,” he wrote on Truth Social last weekend. “This is people that hate our country,” he said in a speech last week about protesters. Every time I flip on Fox News, a host or commentator is talking about how liberals hate America, and the insult always takes a beat to register, because — who, me? I’m the dork who has a National Parks Passport to get stamped when I visit the Indiana Dunes.

This has become a central political division in our country. The right accuses the left of hating the United States; the left responds that protest is American (but also, is Finland accepting expats right now?).

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Another running theme on this blog: beware “common sense.”

LA Times, Voices, Veronique de Rugy, 18 Jun 2025: So regulators can just make rules by gut instinct now?

If you think federal regulators care about data-driven, evidence-based policymaking, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will leave you scratching your head.

The case involves a terrible Biden administration regulation driven by Big Labor. In defending this regulation, which mandates that crews on freight trains include at least two people, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Transportation leaned heavily not on data or evidence, but on “common sense.”

This, of course, is about a lot more than trains. It’s a microcosm of a much larger issue.

Study the history of science and technology, and you quickly realize that “common sense” is an appeal to the familiar and the known. It’s reliable only as a rule-of-thumb in applying experience with everyday situations. But when dealing with new knowledge, with new situations, it can be misleading at best. The advancements of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution came from dealing with new evidence at face value, not to the extent it conformed with something already familiar.

You might agree that two is better than one, but if “common sense” is the new legal standard, then anything goes.

What’s next? Regulating package-delivery drones because “it feels safer” to keep humans on some kind of joystick? Requiring every grocery store to have cashiers at every checkout lane — even if 90% of customers use self-checkout — because “it feels more secure” to see someone behind the counter?

Safety and security are obviously important. That’s exactly why we should demand real evidence.

Because, to belabor the point, evidence often challenges intuitive “common sense,” especially in novel situations.

The essay goes on to explain the political motivations of the current challenge to the rule.

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Short items.

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We’ve heard this one before:

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 20 Jun 2025: In 2025, atheists make up only 0.07% of the federal prison population, subtitled “Newly released numbers show self-identified atheists make up a mere fraction of federal inmates—far below their share in the general U.S. population”

Which is to say… believers are getting locked up for crimes more than non-believers are. Following a (supernaturally-based) religion does not make you more moral, to the extent that morality relates to breaking the law.

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Look! He’s changed his mind again!

Washington Post, 16 Jun 2025: Trump officials reverse guidance exempting farms, hotels from immigration raids, subtitled “ICE agents have been told to continue conducting enforcement operations at agricultural businesses despite concerns about negative effects on the food industry.”

Oh but this was several days ago. And judging from headlines, he’s changed his mind a couple more times since.

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More from the commentariat.

Salon, Brian Karem, 19 Jun 2025: We’ve become a failed nation-state in 150 days, subtitled “From chaos and political violence to Israel and Iran, Trump’s latest actions have sealed our fate”

A ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden, and giant flagpoles are just the superficial indicators.

Posted in conservatives, History, Psychology | Leave a comment

Girls and Boys and Evolutionary Psychology

  • Apparently there’s a worldwide shift in preference for baby girls over baby boys, reversing an age-old bias;
  • The article cited doesn’t explain the evolutionary rationales for these shifting preferences, but I will;
  • And it reveals reasons why girls, in their own way, are smarter than boys;
  • And music by Jocelyn Pook.
– – –

Is this real? What would explain it?

Vox, Bryan Walsh, 15 Jun 2025: The stunning reversal of humanity’s oldest bias, subtitled “Everyone wants to be a girl dad now.”

This piece discusses the evidence, which seems legitimate enough, without at all wondering how the bias toward boys arose in the first place, or why it would be changing now. It begins:

Perhaps the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl.

Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially “missing” — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren’t.

Pause right here. Why would a bias for boys exist in the first place? This an easy question given any understanding of human evolution, and of evolutionary psychology. (Which I’ve explored in many books discussed on this site.) First: boys can, potentially, have many more children than girls can. Just think it through. Second, especially in primitive societies, men were valued for their strength and aggression… against men from other tribes. (Tiptree captured this thought well in one of her stories.) And even in more advanced societies, men are regarded as relatively expendable. Women and children are to be saved first. Because, spelling this out, if humanity, or even one tribe, were reduced to just a handful of members, it would do better with several girls/women and one boy/man, than the reverse. (There’s a genuine rationale for the society in Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, even if it’s abhorrent by our current society’s standards.)

Moving on:

But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios.

There’s the link to the Economist article, but I’m not a subscriber so I can’t see it.

And then there’s this:

So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society?

For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits.

Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men.

One more bit:

Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth.

Now, all of this is *very* interesting, and it’s another reflection of how humanity’s environment has changed from the ancestral one to the modern one. The world is filling up; people in wealthier countries realize they don’t need to have as many kids as the ancients did, in part because of higher childhood survival rates. (Because science.) This has been recognized for some time. Further, to the extent that tribal warfare is diminishing, the value of men as aggressive fighters is diminishing, though of course men might deny that. (They transfer their aggressions to sports, perhaps.)

Most fascinating is how, once social strictures are eliminated, women do better at intellectual topics than do men. It’s easy to speculate why. Raising a child is a far more demanding, intellectual task, than the things men do, which are fathering children, and fighting other men.

Again, this article misses the underlying rationales for these demographic shifts. It ends:

But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls’ lives saved. And maybe one Father’s Day, not too long from now, we’ll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.

Sure, fine.

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Jocelyn Pook. Some of this music was used in Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which is how it came to my attention. (Alas, this YouTube video include commercials.)

Posted in Evolution, Music, Psychology | Leave a comment

Police Uniforms and Masks; Humor vs. Anger

    • How fake police wear uniforms, and secret police (ICE) wears face masks;
    • Robert Reich on the most regressive bill in history;
    • The lack of conservative humor;
    • Becoming aware of Rebecca Solnit;
    • And short items about how Trump cut the suicide prevention hotline for gay people; how support for Israel, no matter what it does, is justified as “Biblical”; and how “deeply religious” is an alarm bell.
– – –

So last week a man dressed up as a policeman shot several Minnesota Democrats and killed two of them. Meanwhile, ICE goes around nabbing people off the street while wearing no uniforms at all, providing no credentials of being law enforcement, and masking their faces. The situation is getting worse. Trumps fans, not paying close attention, presumably think this is what they voted for.

Slate, Sam Adams, 17 Jun 2025: Does America Have Secret Police Now?, subtitled “Of all the things this Trump term, the rapid normalization of masked law enforcement disturbs me the most.”

This is partly about yet another arrest of a politician.

…I watched the video of federal agents handcuffing New York City Comptroller Brad Lander inside an immigration courthouse in lower Manhattan after he demanded to see a judicial warrant for the migrant man they were attempting to arrest. Lander, who is also running for mayor in New York’s Democratic primary, is a familiar face around the courthouse. The agents knew exactly whom they were taking into custody: Minutes beforehand, a reporter heard one asking another, “Do you want to arrest the comptroller?” But who those agents were, or even who they worked for, is more difficult to pin down. Because, in what has become a familiar—and, if you spend enough time on the internet, practically daily—sight, they were hiding their faces behind masks. Even as the New York Times’ story on the situation carried the headline that Lander had been “arrested by ICE,” in the body of the article, the reporter hedged his bets, identifying the individuals only as “several men who appear to be law enforcement officers.”

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Similarly, is this what Trump fans voted for? I continue to think that conservative voters are being snookered into supporting Republican politicians who pander to their religious scruples, while the priorities of the politicians are to get elected and cut taxes for the wealthy, their biggest supporters.

Robert Reich, 16 Jun 2025: The Most Regressive Bill in, well, History, subtitled “Trump Republicans want to take from the poor and working class and give to the rich”

Friends,

The giant Trump Republican bill now before the Senate — Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” — cuts taxes for high earners and reduces benefits for the poor and working class.

This would make it more regressive — harming low-income Americans while benefiting high-income Americans — than any major tax or entitlement law in many decades, if not in history, according to new estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

Now, when you look at this graph, it looks alarming. Such high and low spikes. But the height of the spikes may be an artifact of graph software (like that on my Apple Watch that adjusts the scale of steps watched whenever the range includes an unusually high number of steps on a given day) and not malicious intent.

Reich has a point. Republicans manage to advantage the rich and disadvantage the poor, every single time. But when you think about it, 2.3% or even 3.9% will probably get lost in the noise. People won’t notice.

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One of my Facebook friends posted this today:

Thinking about the No Kings marches of last weekend. I was struck, as always, by the happy number of clever signs, everything from poetry to puns — but I don’t remember seeing anything comparable from right-wing gatherings.

Am I missing something here?

I’ll quote (anonymously) two of the comments:

It strikes me that right-wing people have both (1) little creative ability at the level of protest signs and activities, and (2) absolutely ZERO sense of humor. All I ever see when driving past right-wing demos or seeing them on TV is just hate, hate, hate.

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I think conservatives are driven more by fear and emotion than by logic and intelligence. It’s awfully hard to be witty when you’re scared and angry. Their humor tends towards insults and slurs as a result.

I’ve noted the parts about lack of sense of humor before. Trump, e.g., only smiles when he’s smirking or sneering. He’s never actually happy or joyful.

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I am gradually becoming aware of Rebecca Solnit, whose posts I now see on Facebook. She’s a writer of a couple dozen books; Wikipedia says “She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.”

She’s just started a new newsletter at Meditations in an Emergency (not at Substack, for what that’s worth).

She was interviewed on KQED’s Forum this morning: Rebecca Solnit on Approaching These Times with Hope, Imagination and Perseverance.

I mention this because in the radio interview she discusses her distinction between “isolationists” and “interconnectionists.” And said many profound things. The former aligns with conservatives who think they can live alone and don’t need government. The latter align with those who see the world globally and understand that global problems cannot be solved locally. It’s another perspective on the great divide in the expression of human nature. I’ll check back to see if KQED posts a transcript, and/or figure out which of her many books might discuss this topic.

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Salon, Garrett Owen, 18 Jun 2025: “Devastated and heartbroken”: Trump cuts LGBTQ+ youth services on 988 suicide hotline, subtitled “The Trump administration ends the option for LGBTQ callers to speak with specialists in LGBTQ mental health”

They removed the Press 3 option. Conservatives seems not to mind if gays commit suicide.

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Once again, support for Israel is rooted in Biblical theology — despite any atrocities the modern state of Israel might be committing.

JMG, 18 Jun 2025: GOP Rep: US Must Defend Israel Because “It’s Biblical”

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And this situation rings true.

The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 18 Jun 2025: The Growing Threat of Homegrown Religious Extremism, subtitled “The alleged Minnesota assassin was known as a ‘deeply religious’ Christian man. That should be an alarm bell for all of us.”

Because “deeply religious” means irrational. And deeply tribal, and antagonistic to people unlike themselves.

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions, and Godlike Technology

  • EO Wilson on the real problem of humanity;
  • Conservatives think you can command thing into existence, despite the evidence of the real world; re: Trump’s tariffs on aluminum;
  • With my comments about modern technology and globalism;
  • How the Minnesota killer was deep into a Christian movement about spiritual warfare and demon-possessed politicians;
  • With my comments about religion as community vs religion as faith in supernatural claims;
  • And how America, if it was once “exceptional,” isn’t anymore, because Trump.
– – –

Things come around again. It’s all one world. Here’s a quote from E.O. Wilson that I read years ago in one of his books, and now appreciate anew given my recent readings in human nature and politics. He understood.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

I find it stated in his book THE ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY from 2017, reviewed here. Though he might well have stated it earlier.

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Once again (a running theme): conservatives think you can command things into existence. They don’t do evidence.

Washington Post, Ed Conway, 17 Jun 2025: Trump’s tariffs are running up against the limits of nature, subtitled “U.S. geography makes it difficult to produce more aluminum — even with a 50 percent tariff for motivation.”

There is, on the face of it, a clear logic behind President Donald Trump’s decision this month to raise the tariff on imported aluminum from 25 percent to 50 percent. He thinks the United States is too dependent on imports and that China is too dominant in the production of this essential metal. In theory, a tariff might spark renewed production in the U.S.

Unfortunately for Trump’s ambitions, the deeper you delve into the weird and wonderful world of aluminum, the more you realize there are physical limits that make a resurgence of U.S. production unlikely.

The article goes on to explain why.

This is another example of how the United States cannot zip itself off from the rest of the world, and insist that it manufacture everything here. Any more than a single state can decide to charge tariffs on products ‘imported’ from other states, and manufacture everything in-state.

Hundreds of years ago, people *did* make due with whatever was at hand. Trains and ocean shipping gradually made trade easier among nations, and across continents. The complexity of the modern world with its magical technology is the result of an interconnected globe. That’s how we have everything from cheap bananas year-round to iPhones made from rare earth minerals mined in China.

Reject globalism, and you’re back to localized existence and a smaller, isolated world. That has an appeal for many people; recalls the TV series Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons. And the key issue is modern politics, is that that’s want many people *want*. Or say they want, using their iPhones. Or their PCs, using a global internet enabled by satellites orbiting a world some of them think is flat.

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Let’s get back to that Minnesota killer.

The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen, 17 Jun 2025: The Minnesota Suspect’s Radical Spiritual World, subtitled “Before Vance Boelter was accused of killing a Democratic state lawmaker, he had an active, even grandiose, religious life.”

The emerging biography of Vance Boelter suggests a partial answer, one that involves his contact with a charismatic Christian movement whose leaders speak of spiritual warfare, an army of God, and demon-possessed politicians, and which has already proved, during the January 6 insurrection, its ability to mobilize followers to act.

And

To some degree, the roots of Boelter’s beliefs can be traced to a Bible college he attended in Dallas called Christ for the Nations Institute. A school official confirmed to me that Boelter graduated in 1990 with a diploma in practical theology.

Little known to outsiders, the college is a prominent training institution for charismatic Christians. It was co-founded in 1970 by a Pentecostal evangelist named James Gordon Lindsay, a disciple of the New Order of the Latter Rain, one of many revivalist movements that took hold around the country after World War II. Followers believed that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way, raising up new apostles and prophets and a global End Times army to battle Satanic forces and establish God’s kingdom on Earth. Although Pentecostal churches at the time rejected Latter Rain ideas as unscriptural, the concepts lived on at Christ for the Nations, which has become a hub for the modern incarnation of the movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR ideas have spread far and wide through megachurches, global networks of apostles and prophets, and a media ecosystem of online ministries, books, and podcasts, becoming a grassroots engine of the Christian Right.

Sigh. How to account for religion, any religion? Another theme of this blog. It’s a cultural artifact, it’s a tribal mechanism for enforcing solidarity, and it accounts for the psychological tendency, especially in childhood, for perceiving causes in nature.

I think most modern people who profess to follow religions do so in a social sense. They like the feeling of solidarity within a like-minded community. They like the feeling of shared values, however vaguely defined. And most of them — as Steven Pinker has observed — do not actually believe in the literal truth of the supernatural claims in the Bible, or other religious books. The evidence of the actual world around us is enough to dissuade them of that.

The problem comes with those who do.

“Everyone brings faith to their life and the things they do—the question is, in what ways does your faith inform your actions and your decision making?” he told me. “Without knowing exactly what motivated the shooter, we can say that being oriented into this kind of NAR thinking, to my mind, it’s just a matter of time before an individual or group of individuals take some kind of action against the enemies of God and the demons in their midst.”

No, everyone does *not* bring “faith” — belief in imaginary things — to their lives. It’s those who have not who have built our modern world, which has not depended on “faith.”

\\\

If American was once “exceptional,” it isn’t any more. Because Trump.

Washington Post, Gene Sperling, 16 Jun 2025: The worst thing Trump is doing to the economy isn’t tariffs, subtitled “Fidelity to blind justice and institutional integrity made the U.S. economy exceptional. No more.”

A major component of this American economic exceptionalism has been our demonstrated fidelity to serious economic norms, nonpolitical economic institutions and the rule of law.

I should leave it there. Read it again. This is what MAGA and Trump are doing away with.

But there’s a great ending here, about what investors in the US would be thinking now.

Consider what a multinational CEO contemplating new production in the United States must consider: Will they be subject to lawless executive orders that cancel federal contracts based on political resentment? Will defying the whims of administration policy trigger the kind of relentless government attack now facing Harvard? Will refusing to let the White House dictate pricing and production choices lead to the president threatening a company-specific tariff rate — as we are now seeing with Apple? With Trump accepting a luxury plane from Qatar and openly hosting a “pay to play” dinner for a family-owned company, will what Griffin called a “terrifying” swift rise of “crony capitalism” mean subtle or even coercive pressure to enrich the president’s family? With the president suggesting he’s willing to flout the law and have the IRS revoke the tax-exempt status of certain U.S. institutions — and with a House reconciliation bill that would allow the president the power to raise taxes by 5 to 20 percentage points on foreign investors if he finds their home country has engaged in “discriminatory” taxes — will any company with foreign headquarters still believe they will receive impartial tax treatment from our government? Will such companies send their best talent to help run U.S. facilities if their executives and family members could get locked up for weeks on end, as has already happened to several individuals with valid work and travel visas?

If American exceptionalism meant one thing, it was not having to ask these questions. Restoring the nation’s economic brand will require congressional and business leaders, along with dedicated citizens, to demand that a national commitment to serious economic policy norms and the rule of law is not a thing of the past.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Human Progress, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Are Trump and MAGA intending to ethnically cleanse Democrats? Signs Point That Way

  • Paul Krugman and Guardian on how the parade was a flop, while No Kings Day was a hit;
  • Photos from Trump’s military parade;
  • Motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories about the Minnesota shootings, even though the facts are apparent enough (and implicate a right-wing, religious, shooter);
  • Bigger picture: Trump takes aim at states’ rights — at least, blue states’ rights;
  • And he wants VA doctors to refuse treatment to Democrats (!?);
  • Is this building up to some kind of ethnic cleansing of Democrats?
  • Adam Serwer’s “tyrant test”;
  • And Fox News.
– – –

First, just to restate the situation.

Paul Krugman, 16 Jun 2025: Trump’s parade flopped. No Kings Day was a hit.

America is no longer a full-fledged democracy. We are currently living under a version of competitive authoritarianism — a system that (like Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey) is still democratic on paper but in which a ruling party no longer takes democracy’s rules seriously. As a result those in power

violate those rules so often and to such an extent … that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.

Trumpists, however, haven’t yet fully consolidated their hold. America still has a chance of reclaiming itself from the grip of brazen corruption, mindless destruction, and contempt both for the rule of law and for our erstwhile allies. We don’t have to become a country bullied into submission.

But we’re teetering on the edge, and one of the most important ways we can step back from that edge is for ordinary Americans to engage in mass protests.

\

Another view.

The Guardian, J Oliver Conroy in Washington, 15 Jun 2025: Trump coveted a military spectacle but his parade proved underwhelming: ‘Just kind of lame’

Subtitled “Trump’s army parade was neither the totalitarian North Korean spectacle that critics had grimly predicted, nor the triumph of Maga nationalism fans craved”

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And a few of my Facebook friends have reposted this item from a group called The Trumpland Diary:

I WATCHED THE ENTIRE MILITARY PARADE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO, with a long description and several photos, including one of a very disgruntled looking Trump.

Here’s that image.

And while I realize that Facebook posts from random unknown people aren’t worth much, I saw another today, several times, about how the US Army “phoned it in.” Not marching in step, and so on.

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Back to the shootings in Minnesota.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 16 Jun 2025: Conspiracy theories about Minnesota shooter aren’t just deflection. They’re dangerous, subtitled “False counter-narratives signal to other terrorists that MAGA has their back”

Since the tragic events in Minnesota on early Saturday morning that left two dead and two others in critical condition, state authorities have painted a clear picture of what Vance Boelter, 57, is accused of doing. They say Boelter murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and also shot State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., called the shootings “a politically motivated assassination” targeting Democrats. Police recovered a list of around 70 potential targets, including politicians, community leaders and abortion providers. All the listed politicians were Democrats. According to the New York Times, Boelter’s roommate and longtime friend says the suspected shooter voted for Donald Trump. Boelter’s online activities show he is a right-wing Christian who opposes abortion and denies that LGBTQ identities are real. While we don’t yet have the text of the manifesto Boelter left behind, it’s fairly obvious what’s likely to be in it.

Motivate reasoning is taking every new fact as evidence, no matter how twisted, for one’s preconceived narrative.

Despite these facts, it didn’t take long for MAGA forces online to snap into action with a false counter-narrative: that Boelter is a left-winger and Republicans are the real victims. Trump’s traveling companion Laura Loomer falsely claimed Boelter “was friends with Walz” and was associated with the “No Kings” protests. “The organizers of NO KINGS and @GovTimWalz need to be detained by the FBI and interrogated,” she demanded. Dating “guru”-turned-MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich also blamed Walz, claiming the governor had Hortman — who was actually Walz’s friend — “executed” for voting one time with Republicans on a bill. “MORE DEMOCRAT TERR0RISM!” screamed Nick Sortor, a far right influencer with over a million followers on X. Glenn Beck, Breitbart and other far-right outlets went to work on Facebook, suggesting to their audiences that Walz was responsible for the shooting, even though he was on the list of Boelter’s targets. Charlie Kirk of Turning Points USA blamed the shooting of Democratic lawmakers and their family members on anyone who objects to rising fascism.

I think that subtitle is significant: “False counter-narratives signal to other terrorists that MAGA has their back”

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Other details.

PolitiFact, 15 Jun 2025: How conservative X accounts promoted wild theory implicating Gov. Tim Walz in lawmaker’s killing

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Whereas the facts seem plain. (Omitting photos from these pieces.)

AP News, 16 Jun 2025: Friends say Minnesota shooting suspect was deeply religious and conservative

And

NPR, 16 Jun 2025: The suspect in the shooting of 2 Minnesota lawmakers had a ‘hit list’ of 45 officials

Authorities in Minnesota said Monday that the man arrested in a Saturday attack that killed one state lawmaker and left another wounded had a “hit list” of 45 elected officials — all Democrats.

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Stepping out to the big picture.

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 16 Jun 2025: Trump takes aim at states’ rights, and the Constitution, subtitled “”The once hallowed GOP concept is under threat by a would-be king”

Conservatives defend states’ rights when they want to excuse their own behavior, but deny such rights to blue states that Trump and MAGA want to control.

The current example is Trump’s redirection of ICE to target blue states: “In a Sunday night rant on Truth Social, he ordered ICE to step up its raids in cities and states that are run by his political enemies…” But I won’t quote Trump.

It’s not about law and order, or even immigration.

Trump is being very clear here about why he’s targeting these cities. It’s not because of immigration, although he’s using that as an excuse. After all, two of the three states with the largest populations of undocumented people are the red states of Texas and Florida. And in recent days, Trump has exempted the agriculture, hospitality, and meatpacking industries, which apparently aren’t part of the “Democratic Power Center.” (The construction and manufacturing sectors better get on the ball and start doing some serious bootlicking.) No, he sees this as a way to start a conflagration in these cities, giving him the excuse to supersede the power of elected state and local officials by sending in troops, whether it be federalizing state National Guards or sending in active duty Marines.

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And then there’s this, today.

JMG, 16 Jun 2025: New Order Lets VA Doctors Refuse To Treat Democrats

Quoting The Guardian, 16 Jun 2025: ‘Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans, subtitled “Department of Veterans Affairs says the changes come in response to a Trump executive order ‘defending women’”

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

(Why are the “unmarried” a target? I’m guessing they think that’s code for “gay” because they don’t realize that gays can get married. Until the Supreme Court repeals that one too.)

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Adam Serwer is the author of The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America, a book in my TBR stack.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 16 Jun 2025: The Tyrant Test, subtitled “A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern.”

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So what is this all adding up to? Trump targets blue states and blue cities, he wants to deny healthcare to Democrats! Protesters against authoritarianism are often accused of over-reacting. (“Trump Derangement Syndrome”) It won’t be that bad. But maybe it will be. If Trump and MAGA wanted to literally disappear the left, the Democrats in blue cities, the scientists in elite universities, wouldn’t these be their first steps? It’s happened before.

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This is hilarious.

JMG, 16 Jun 2025: Fox Host: “No Kings” Protesters Were “Green-Haired, Soy-Fed, Bitter, Disgruntled, Vampire-Looking Leftists”

While this Fox host Tomi Lahren has her long blond hair carefully draped forward over her shoulders. As so many of them do. And anyone who does not conform to the current conservative standard, is weird, in one way or another. This is another measure of a cult.

Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

Say Black Is White, and Some Will Believe You

  • The ‘No Kings’ demonstrations yesterday were a huge success, the parade in Washington DC less so;
  • How the White House lies about those demonstrations;
  • How MAGA and Musk are somehow blaming the *left* for the shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota;
  • With thoughts about the upside-down world of MAGA conservatives.
– – –

As widely covered in the new media, hundreds of “No Kings” demonstrations were held across the country yesterday, Saturday.

A gallery of photos.

Salon, Alan Taylor, 15 Jun 2025: Photos: ‘No Kings’ Protests Across America, subtitled “Yesterday, according to estimates by event organizers, millions marched in protest against the Trump administration, including its recent controversial immigration-enforcement raids. Hundreds of ‘No Kings’ demonstrations took place in cities and towns throughout the U.S.”

San Francisco (above), Des Moines, Ocean Beach in San Francisco, Chicago twice, Cincinnati, Boise, Asheville, Charlotte, near Mar-a-Lago, Boston twice, Jackson, Nashville twice, St. Paul, Los Angeles twice, San Francisco again, Los Angeles again, New York City (with Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon), Philadelphia, Atlanta, Louisville, Philadelphia again, and Portland OR.

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So naturally, in the spirit of “alternative facts” and the size of Trump’s 2017 inauguration crowd, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung denied the evident facts, and misrepresented, or misunderstood, what those demonstrations were all about.

JMG, 15 Jun 2025: WH Declares “No Kings Day” Protests To Have Been “Complete Utter Failure With Minuscule Attendance”

The JMG post displays White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, and then quotes CBS News:

Demonstrators crowded into streets, parks and plazas across the U.S. on Saturday to protest President Trump, marching through downtowns and blaring anti-authoritarian chants mixed with support for protecting democracy and immigrant rights.

Organizers of the “No Kings” demonstrations said millions had marched in hundreds of events. Governors across the U.S. had urged calm and vowed no tolerance for violence, while some mobilized the National Guard ahead of marchers gathering. Confrontations were isolated.

Huge, boisterous crowds marched in New York, Denver, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, some behind “no kings” banners. Thousands of protesters across L.A. — where demonstrations have occurred in the past week over immigration raids — were largely peaceful throughout the day.

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As for “minuscule attendance”…

Attendance at the parade was far smaller than anticipated. Sure, sure, the threat of rain may have kept some away. But one of the photos I saw was of Trump, looking very perturbed. Apparently the parade didn’t meet his expectations.

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Meanwhile, without any evidence whatsoever:

JMG, 14 Jun 2025: Musk Blames “Violent Far-Left” For Minnesota Shooting

from

The Daily Beast, 15 Jun 2025: Musk Slammed for Calling Anti-Abortion Dem Killer ‘Far Left’, subtitled “The suspect in the murder of a Minnesota lawmaker reportedly had a target list that included Democrats like Governor Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar.”

Elon Musk is getting dragged online after he tried to blame the “far left” for the murder of a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker—a claim even his own AI chatbot debunked.

“The far left is murderously violent,” Musk wrote on X, reposting a user who claimed that multiple recent high-profile killings—including Saturday’s assassination of Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband—had been perpetrated by “the left.”

However, early evidence suggests the suspected gunman in Hortman’s killing, identified as Vance Luther Boelter, was actually targeting figures who are frequently branded as belonging to the “far left” by detractors.

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Again and again, it strikes me that conservatives, including MAGA, live in an upside-down world in which evidence is frangible and stories and ideologies prevail. And they are constantly accusing their other side of the tactics that they themselves use. Because it’s never about verifiable facts. It’s about who can make the biggest social media splash. Also, as discussed a post or two ago, there is so much information in the world that most people simply can’t keep up, to assess a balanced understanding; and so most people restrict their sources to those that support their worldview. In the examples in this post, some people will believe Steven Cheung, and Donald Trump, because they don’t look at any other news sources and so don’t know any better. They will never hear about the extent of the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations because Fox News and Daily Wire and NewsMax will downplay them and other right-wing sites will ignore or deny them, as Cheung has done. They’ve become committed to those sources, and couldn’t think of doubting them now.

We are living in a set of parallel realities. The one that most aligns with actual reality will eventually prevail.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Say Black Is White, and Some Will Believe You

Trump and MAGA’s War on California

  • 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 news they like that fits their preconceived narrative. Of course you could accuse me of doing the same thing. Except that I try to dismiss what seem to me are spins on events from people who claim to believe so many things that are objectively untrue.

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.”

Not only does the right-wing believe many things that are not true, when the evidence doesn’t suit the their agenda, they just make stuff up, now using 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 strove 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 the winning 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.


Posted in authoritarianism, Politics, Religion, Tribalism | Comments Off on Trump and MAGA’s War on California

It’s Not Even About Deportation

  • 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.

<

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.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on It’s Not Even About Deportation