- Pete Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from an oil tanker as part of reestablishing “the warrior culture”;
- Trump fires head of the National Portrait Gallery, because ridding the government of DEI is about “the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.”
- The administration now wants to regulate science, with Heather Cox Richardson recalling how that worked out for the Soviets with Lysenko;
- And how Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” is grounded in religion fatalism, and a reliance on belief in Jesus Christ.
The Trump administration is upfront with its bigotry.
Salon, Blaise Malley, 3 Jun 2025: “Shameful, vindictive erasure”: Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from Navy ship, subtitled “One defense official told reporters that announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to remove the name of gay rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk from one of its ships.
Per a report from Military.com, the order was passed down in a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan. The memo said that the redesignation of the oil tanker USNS Harvey Milk was an attempt to get into “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.”
Because it’s important that a oil tanker have a name that represents warrior culture? (Warrior culture??) And that’s not the only name:
On Tuesday, CBS News reported that the Navy was looking into changing the names of other ships named after prominent civil rights leaders and icons, including Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriett Tubman, Cesar Chavez and Medgar Evers.
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Which dovetails with this.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 4 Jun 2025: Now the President Is an Art Critic
Last week, President Trump announced that he had fired the head of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
“Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am herby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of D.E.I., which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”
Key line is this characterization of DEI:
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Trump’s disdain for Sajet, given his aggressive effort to rid the federal government of “D.E.I.,” which has turned out to mean the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.
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Now the administration thinks it knows better about how to do science. (Because it has in mind conclusions it wants, presumably.)
NY Times, Somini Sengupta, 3 Jun 2025: The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to ‘Correct’ Research., subtitled “Thousands of scientists, academics, physicians and researchers have responded to the administration’s executive order about ‘restoring a gold standard for science.'”
[T]he May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.
Of course it does!
Since Mr. Trump returned to the presidency in January, his executive actions have not expressed robust support for science, nor even an understanding of how scientists work.
Among other things, the administration has eviscerated National Science Foundation research funding and fired staff scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, which is responsible for forecasting weather hazards. A government report on child health cited research papers that did not exist.
The article goes on to mention routine scientific standards, like reproducibility and peer review, as if these were things scientists were not already doing. The greatest implied threat:
“As scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing,” the letter reads. “Instead this administration mandates a centralized system serving the political beliefs of the President and the whims of those in power.”
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Heather Cox Richardson discusses this in her column of a couple days ago — June 2, 2025 — and cites the most famous, and tragic, example of government control of science. Referring to an article in The Guardian.
The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.
As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century [[ the science was natural selection and Darwinism ]] in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.
In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.
“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”
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The story still playing out from a few days ago is about Sen. Joni Ernst’s defense of Medicaid cuts. Most of the reports I saw, maybe all, were too polite to mention her closing comments.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 4 Jun 2025: Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” pushes MAGA’s toxic Christian compassion on us all, subtitled “Evangelicals in the MAGA era call empathy a ‘sin'”
“We’re all going to die” she said. Sure. True enough.
Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren’t asking to live forever. They just don’t want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. “But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she smugly declared.
What do we take from this? This is toxic Christianity; fatalism. “She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes.”
This strikes me as a contemptible religion. (And it surely doesn’t align with what Jesus says in the NT, as far as I know.)
Elsewhere I read today: God has a plan, the future is fixed, there’s no point in trying to change your destiny.
But it’s curious how these rationalizations seem to justify those who would cut benefits for the poor, in favor of giving tax cuts to the rich. It always seems to work out that way.
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One more. There is a deep, unpleasant, truth here.
Slate, Susan Matthews, 4 Jun 2025: Finally, a Republican Just Admits It, subtitled “Maybe Joni Ernst is onto something.”
The article discusses Ernst’s apology.
All of that was incredible enough. How interesting to witness this precise breakdown, in real time, of how exhausting it seems to pretend to care about people when you do not (not caring is the entire premise of this second Trump administration). But what was even more remarkable than this video was what came next. Unfortunately, this part was obscene but very not relatable. In response to the backlash she was receiving for her town hall empathy break, Ernst posted an apology that turned out to be a sarcastic nonapology. It is set in a cemetery. Again, it’s worth watching!
Here’s the video URL
The deep, unpleasant truth is how these religious people think everything is fixed by God and so there no point in helping people who are doomed to die no matter what we do. And, again, how this policy happens to benefit themselves.
