The key theme of our age, at least in the US: the retreat from the achievements of the Enlightenment, both political and scientific. Back to tribalism and intuitive superstition.
Actually, these forces have probably never gone away. The difference now is they’re being driven by the current US administration.
NY Times, Thomas L Friedman, 18 Nov 2025 (in today’s print paper): On Republican Neo-Nazism, Hamas and Israel: An Epidemic of Moral Cowardice (gift link)
Beginning:
I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum. Our last biological epidemic — Covid-19 — was a tiny invisible pathogen that made us physically sick. This epidemic of moral cowardice is right in everybody’s face and it’s eating away at the civic bonds that hold societies together.
Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
The first of them is in US news every day.
While this may seem an odd grouping, its elements have more in common than you might think. The neo-Nazis in the Republican camp want a white Christian America from sea to shining sea — empty of as much diversity as possible. The radical settlers in the West Bank want a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — empty of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. And Hamas jihadists also want an Islamic state in Palestine from the same river to the same sea — empty of as many Israeli Jews as possible.
Those three examples have other things in common. One is they just don’t care anymore about hiding their excesses or their agendas. It’s all out there online or on YouTube. They are not embarrassed.
And the bigger picture…
Put them all together and it becomes obvious that we are watching a broad breakdown in the liberal, humanistic order that dominated Western democracies after World War II. It’s the wholesale uprooting of what I call our societal “mangroves” — the unwritten norms that are necessary to restrain, filter and buffer aberrant behaviors and hatemongering, even when technically legal.
The same story Heather Cox Richardson has been telling. Friedman goes on to discuss those Young Republicans who were in the news a few weeks ago and JD Vance’s defense of them; Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes; Vance’s and Trump’s lack of criticism.
[Trump and Vance] undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.
That’s where the Republican party is.
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On the second point.
The Morning Heresy, CFI, Jeff Dellinger, 21 Nov 2025: “No Longer a Trustworthy Source” – Chaos at the CDC…
We begin today where, unfortunately, we must: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest act of anti-science vandalism to America’s public health infrastructure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its website to contradict the long-settled scientific conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism, shocking career scientists, delighting anti-vaccine activists, drawing a rebuke from a key Republican senator and sparking an uproar among medical professionals and autism advocates who questioned whether the agency’s credibility is now gone.
The Post notes that the changes were made without consulting (or even informing) “career scientists at the agency responsible for information about vaccine safety and autism.” In a statement published yesterday afternoon, CFI blasted the move as “a shameful dereliction of the CDC’s public health mission that should be reversed immediately.”
William Matthew London, who curates the HHS Watch resource page for CFI’s Quackwatch, was unsparing: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with its leadership and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices appointed by Secretary Kennedy, is no longer a trustworthy source of health information.”
The CDC move drew intense criticism from a chorus of public health scientists and medical experts, with the APHA writing:
Amplifying this claim and encouraging unnecessary investigations only worsens parents’ fears; it will not lead to better therapies, improved support for caregiving families, or changes in health care, education, and society in ways that would help children with autism thrive.
And this:
JMG, 21 Nov 2025: RFK Flack: “Vaccines Cause 80% Of Autism Cases”
“Mary Holland, CEO of Robert Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, celebrating the latest change to the CDC’s website.”
“For thirty years, parents have been gaslit because of pressure from pharma and the government, because they’ve been pushing these shots and they’re very lucrative. And, so, it is so wonderful that we now see the start of HHS and CDC telling the truth. …
Wait, wait, I thought you guys determined that *tylenol* caused autism. So which is it? Get your story straight!
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Short items to be noted tomorrow (or Sunday) will be about job approval ratings and Fox News, Chinese spying through baby monitors, a Mexican beach, changing their minds about swastikas, and making bad news disappear.
