- Four years since my heart transplant;
- David Brooks on loyalty to home vs loyalty to abstractions; human nature; and how Trumpism is an attempt “to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”;
- Thus: Trump fired the historians whose job was to oversee an unbiased account of US foreign policy;
- RFK Jr defends his report via fabricated studies;
- And how even some Trump supporters are realizing that Trump is losing it (and Elon seeing his DOGE efforts undercut by the massive new GOP budget);
Four years since heart and kidney transplants, so another round of annual tests this week, including blood draws. Everything’s fine. The cardiologist says, he loves seeing us guys (my partner Y always goes with me), because you have so few problems! We sit in the office and chat about where the kids are going or have gone to college… This time’s most alarming incident: I got a bruise on my left arm a few weeks ago. They did a scan. It’s fine.
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What is the difference between tribal and advanced morality? Loyalty vs. principles, I’d say.
NY Times, opinion by David Brooks, 29 May 2025: I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge. [gift link]
When I was a baby pundit, my mentor, Bill Buckley, told me to write about whatever made me angriest that week. I don’t often do that, mostly because I don’t get angry that much — it’s not how I’m wired. But this week I’m going with Bill’s advice.
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.
In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
But, ya know, the whole Constitution is a set of abstractions. About life, liberty, and so on. About rule of law. About balance of powers. It’s not about Mafia-style politics, and it’s not about defending your neighbors against the evil tribe one town over. That said, this essay is another example of my running theme contrasting the moral sensibilities of our ancestors, who lived for hundreds of thousands of years on the Savannah, in small tribes… and the moral sensibilities that work best in the modern world full of interconnected tribes and involving issues that must be solved globally.
So: yes in fact most people do think tribalistically, and of course you’re loyal to your family and your comrades. But modern societies were designed to achieve something higher and greater: to build nations that institutionalized abstractions and to overcome the selfish. Yet human nature remains. So the examples that made Brooks upset are not entirely wrong. As Brooks acknowledges and pushes back against. They’re just incomplete.
Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.
But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.
And the last sentence there is the point.
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Thus most of what the Trump administration does.
Washington Post, Petula Dvorak, 29 May 2025: These historians oversee unbiased accounts of U.S. foreign policy. Trump fired them all., subtitled “The volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States have been written since Abraham Lincoln’s time.”
Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold — and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made.
There is a dispatch from Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.
There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union.
And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world. … It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”
An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.
President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.
Because authoritarian tribal leaders want to rewrite history in their favor. To protect their tribe. It’s happened over and over, throughout history. See Orwell. An honest civilization would acknowledge its failings and work toward avoiding them, as some science fiction imagines. Conservatives dismiss such attempts as “woke.”
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And
Salon, Blaise Malley, 29 May 2025: Source? I made it up: RFK Jr.’s MAHA report cites fabricated studies, subtitled “An analysis of the report found falsified studies, broken links and mischaracterizations of conclusions”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again commission released its first report last week, which it called a “groundbreaking assessment” of the drivers of childhood chronic diseases. Close study of the publication found one little problem in MAHA’s analysis, however: several of the studies it cited do not exist.
A report from the political news site NOTUS found that MAHA misrepresented findings of existing reports and outright fabricated several others. NOTUS found multiple instances of named reports that contained links that did not work, were not findable through online searches, and were not published in the issues of the journals listed in the MAHA report. In some cases, the listed authors or the institutions for which they work said that they had never written the cited studies.
Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes was cited by the MAHA Report to back up claims of widespread anxiety and depression among adolescents. When reached by the outlet, she said she’d never authored the study.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes shared..
Once again, science does not work by formulating your conclusions first — this is another way of the tribal mind working to enforce its worldview, despite actual evidence — and misrepresenting actual evidence to support it. Even such an incident at this would be supremely embarrassing to any government that has not committed so many similar infractions.
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Are more and more people realizing this, which many of us have seen all along? Or is this wishful thinking? This relates to the story today about Elon Musk thinks his DOGE efforts have been completely undercut by the massive budget the Republicans are now trying to pass. (It was never about saving money. It was about cutting government programs that interfered with the rich getting richer.)
Salon, Brian Karem, 29 May 2025: Trump 2.0 falls apart before our eyes, subtitled “The president is losing it”
On Wednesday, Donald Trump went nuts when a reporter asked him about a Wall Street acronym mentioning him and his tariff policy: “TACO” or “Trump always chickens out.”
The president had threatened to raise tariffs on European goods last Friday, but later backed off. “It’s called negotiations,” Trump hissed at a reporter who asked him about it Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question.” Those who witnessed Trump’s meltdown were not overly impressed. His past behavior is filled with worse tantrums in front of reporters.
“I really think he lost it a long time ago,” a pool reporter said.
Apparently, it only took Elon Musk, who officially left the Trump administration on Wednesday, 128 days with the president to come to that same conclusion. A true genius.
