We are living through perhaps the darkest days of American history. Americans, despite the high and mighty ideals of their Constitution, are succumbing to base tribal thinking: animosity toward others; preference for naive intuitive thought over rational thinking. On the world stage, the US will never live this down. Someone else, likely China, will lead the world in the 21st century, as America descends into cultural barbarism.
Yet mostly American infrastructure will survive, to the extent that most Americans won’t care about any of this, or even notice.
Shorter items today. Examples.
- The Supreme Court and “emergencies”;
- How Trump reflexively blames Biden;
- And how Trump takes credit for what Biden actually did;
- The confusion over Epstein conspiracy theories;
- Trump wants more factories, but is expelling the workers who might work in them;
- They want Medicaid recipients to replace immigrants in the farms???
- Our $178 billion police state;
- How guys want to burn things, and so resent renewable energy;
- The familiar racism in the NYC mayoral race;
- Robert Reich on how the budget for ICE will just encourage them;
- Where does opting-out undermine public education?
- Another example of conservative who don’t believe in climate change (which is real) but do believe in weather control (which is not);
- The latest example of spreading false Christian Nationalist history.
- And a brief musical thought.
Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 8 Jul 2025: The Bleak Unifying Principle of This Supreme Court Term subtitled “It’s an emergency whenever Trump says so.”Trump gets his way by declaring everything an emergency, and the Supreme Court is obliged to let Trump do what he wants, because, well, it’s an emergency
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CNN, analysis by Aaron Blake, 8 Jul 2025: After disasters like the Texas flood, Trump reflexively blames Biden
Trump (and MAGA) have a very loose grasp of cause and effect. But they’re really good at ducking responsibility.
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JMG, 8 Jul 2025: WH Website Takes Credit For Biden Era Investments
And the flip side. Everything bad: Biden’s fault. Everything good: Trump’s credit.
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Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 7 Jul 2025: MAGA media eat their own after Trump administration denies their Epstein conspiracy theories
I haven’t really kept up with this. As I gather, Trump and his MAGA followers, many of whom are part of the government now, were sure there was a government conspiracy to cover up Epstein’s death as suicide, when he was actually murdered to prevent his “client list” from being revealed, and Musk claimed Trump himself was actually on that list and then withdrew the claim, and now all those conspiracy mongers are saying there’s no list at all? Which version of events is easier to believe?
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Washington Post, opinion by Stephen Moore and Richard Vedder, 8 Jul 2025: Trump can’t achieve his economic goals without more immigrants, subtitled “Without immigration, the U.S. workforce would soon start shrinking.”
And Trump wants to bring back factories back to the US. But he’s deporting the people who might work in them. There are already lots of unfilled factory jobs.
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Meanwhile. Covered everywhere.
MSN, David Badash, 8 Jul 2025: ‘Cartoon villains’: Secretary of agriculture under fire for Medicaid-to-farm-work plan
They want to move 34 million adults from across the nation, in all the cities and towns where they live, to the farm fields of California and Kansas? How is that in any way practical? Not to mention that this would be a kind of conscription.
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 9 Jul 2025: How $178 billion is creating a police state subtitled “A massive funding increase for ICE means more detention camps and more masked agents in the streets”
Let’s see, $178 billion, divided by roughly 350 million residents of the US — actually, fewer taxpayers — works out to some $5000 per individual, more per individual considering those not paying taxes. Is this what you want, American taxpayers? Not only is America turning into Nazi Germany, *you’re paying for it*.
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Of course there’s a psychological element to all this too.
Paul Krugman, 7 Jul 2025: Real Men Burn Stuff, subtitled “The manosphere and the war on renewable energy”
Yet here’s the irony: In the years since Thiel’s lament we have, in fact, seen revolutionary progress in one fundamental physical-world technology, energy production. Yet the people Thiel and his buddies helped put in power are doing all they can to reverse that progress and send America back into the energy Dark Ages.
It’s like all those guys in southern states driving around absurdly big trucks. Do they have something to prove?
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Vox, Abdallah Fayyad, 7 Jul 2025: The astonishing racism in NYC’s mayoral race, subtitled “And 3 reasons that explain it.”
Good old American racism — the kind conservatives either deny exist, or don’t want to talk about.
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Robert Reich, 7 Jul 2025: Now the Second (and Worse) Stage of Trump’s Police State, subtitled “It’s part of the Big Ugly Bill just signed into law, and it will be evident very soon.”
This is about the impact of the massive increase in funding to ICE.
Funding for ICE detentions will exceed funding for the entire federal prison system.
When government capacity is built out this way, there’s always political and bureaucratic pressure to utilize such capacity. Supply creates its own demand.
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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 7 Jul 2025: Help! I’m a Teacher. What Books Will the Supreme Court Let Me Show My Students Now?
Where does this end? This is about the Supreme Court case in which religious conservatives want to “opt-out” their kids from being exposed, in public schools, to books with gay characters. The Supreme Court says, fine. Yet, they also want to avoid the embarrassment of their kids literally “opting-out” in class, stepping out of the classroom while other kids stay. So they just want these books removed from schools altogether. Where does this end? Removing globes from classrooms to protect the lunatic sensibilities of flat-earthers?
Of course this undercuts the entire idea of public education, and the idea that children should understand that they live in a world beyond what they’ve been taught at home.
“Sorry, they can’t participate in this lesson on the Civil War because our religious beliefs tell us that the South should have won. They can’t learn this lesson about evolutionary biology because we think Darwin was the devil and evolution is false.”
And, as I’ve said before, their allegiance to religious myths undermines their ability to understand reason, to understand evidence and conclusions. Anything can be believed — or disbelieved — because of “faith.”
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Another example.
JMG, 9 Jul 2025: Burchett: Weather Control Is “Real And It’s Happening”
No, weather control is *not* happening. It’s been speculated about for decades, but it’s never worked out. If it *did* work, why wouldn’t the government be crowing about, say, defusing this or that hurricane before it reached the mainland? Why do the conspiracy theorists always attribute weather control only to evil-doers?
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Because religious conservatives live by myths, and depend on everyone else to maintain the modern technological infrastructure they depend on to spread their myths.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 8 Jul 2025: Micah Beckwith Spreads False Christian Nationalist History
As Right Wing Watch has notedmultiple timesin the past, one of the defining characteristics of Christian nationalist activists is a willingnessto misrepresent history, astimeafter timetheyspreaddebunked myths and blatantfalsehoodsin defenseof their right-wing ideology.
In particular, they love to cite the myth about Benjamin Franklin urging those gathered for the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to turn to God in prayer for help in drafting the Constitution.
Claims which of course are false.
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Musical thought for the day: both Philip Glass and Bruce Springsteen redeem their excesses through their dark sides.
