NY Times, opinion by David Wallace-Wells, 28 Jan 2026: The Real Reason MAHA Hates Vaccines
Stated right up front.
What is the war on vaccines really about? Just after the New Year, like someone racing to fulfill a resolution, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA alliance at the Department of Health and Human Services released a radically revised federal vaccine schedule, bypassing the usual procedures and abruptly cutting the number of diseases for which shots are recommended from 17 to 11.
The new guidelines certainly look like the frontal assault on vaccine science many Americans have been fearing for a year. But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country’s threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country’s weak and vulnerable suffer and die.
And
On a recent episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” the new head of the federal vaccine advisory panel, the pediatric cardiologist Kirk Milhoan, said flatly that his goal was to make “individual autonomy,” rather than “public health,” the top priority of the country’s public health apparatus. As part of that mission, he questioned whether we should even be vaccinating for polio.
This is consistent with conservative ethics that claim if people are poor, it’s their own fault, and how some floated the idea of sacrificing grandma rather than endure Covid restrictions. And of course, their entire lack of of concern for any kind of common good. Theirs is a Hobbesian world, never mind anything Jesus might have said.
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ICE is all about retribution against people who didn’t vote for Trump. Title says all.
JMG, 29 Jan 2026: Trump Issues Threat To Reluctant Donors: “Are You A Proud Citizen Or Does ICE Need To Track You Down?”
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John Scalzi posts about Protest Music From Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg
My aside: A book was published last year called ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS. It’s by Omar El Akkad and it’s about Gaza, but the title just as aptly anticipates what will happen if MAGA madness goes away and everyone comes to their senses. Trump voters won’t admit to having voted for him. It’s happened before.
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And yet, some people just have a loose grip on reality. These tend to be the passionately religious, whom from an early age apparently never learned how to draw conclusions based on reasons; because religion is a kind of fantasy world in which believing nonsensical claims is a feature, not a bug.
The Advocate, 10 Apr 2025: Tennessee far-right pastor fears ‘gay beam’ airport scanner will make him queer, subtitled “Just when we thought we’d seen it all from the far right.”
And
JMG, 29 Jan 2026: Benny Johnson: Demons Behind Stolen 2020 Election
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They will never get over this. It just bothers their intuitive sense of right and wrong — an intuition, ironically, driven the evolutionary drive to reproduce, which homosexual behavior would seem to undermine. (It does not, for reasons they surely would not understand.)
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 29 Jan 2026: Right Wing Coalition Officially Launches Campaign to Overturn Marriage Equality
I won’t quote here. But I will quote from here:
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 29 Jan 2026: The “Greater Than” campaign claims loving gay parents are the real threat to kids, subtitled “Inside the evidence-free campaign to roll back marriage equality and revive Christian grievance politics”
While the Trump administration terrorizes children, causes measles outbreaks by downplaying the efficacy of vaccines, and blocking federal funding for child care, a coalition of Trump supporters have launched a campaign to save kids from what they believe is the biggest threat to their safety: Gay parents who love each other.
Yesterday, 47 groups—including Christian ministries, anti-abortion zealots, and state-based conservative organizations— announced the “Greater Than” campaign, suggesting that children deserve better than marriage equality under Obergefell and calling for the overturning of the Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
This Katy Faust person provides no evidence, only bromides:
“Since the redefinition of marriage a decade ago, we’ve seen the consequences: parenthood treated as replaceable, and children deprived of the unique love and guidance only a mother and father can provide,” Katy Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us and a spokeswoman for the campaign, said in a statement Wednesday.
In fact, studies show that children raised by gay couples are just as well-adjusted, just as smart, as any other children, perhaps even more so, since gay couples separate or divorce at lower rates that straight couples.
And this:
LGBTQNation, Greg Owen, 28 Jan 2026: Influential GOP think tank unveils new attack plan targeting gay families, subtitled “The Project 2025 authors want to punish and erase same-sex parents.”
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Let’s close on an upbeat note.
The Atlantic, George Packer, 27 Jan 2026: What Should Americans Do Now?, subtitled “We need a mass movement for basic decency.”
The current situation:
The administration’s automatic lies about the killings and slander of the victims are less a cover-up of facts than a display of utter contempt for them. Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other top officials seem to invite incredulity as a way to flex their power: We say black is white. Agree or you’re a criminal. When Stephen Miller recently claimed that geopolitics is ruled by the “iron laws” of “strength” and “force,” he was expressing the administration’s approach to domestic governance as well. Those words are iron laws on American streets.
Moving to the proposed solution, and concluding.
In Minneapolis, as the scale and intensity of oppression increased, the answer to “What can I do?” evolved from protest to something riskier and more demanding: nonviolent resistance.
…
Nonviolent struggle carries serious risks. It can lead to social ostracism, legal harassment, state intimidation, prison, injury, and, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, death. One sign of the authoritarian depth to which the U.S. has sunk under Trump is that none of these risks is hard to imagine. Examples accumulate every day. A movement of resistance against an illegitimate regime has a chance of succeeding only if it remains strictly nonviolent and avoids the familiar trap of sectarianism. It has to be democratic, patriotic, and animated by a sense of basic decency that can attract ordinary people—your TV-watching mother, your apathetic teen, your child’s teacher, the retiree next door, the local grocer.
I keep asking myself whether it’s wise to even consider these things. I don’t want to sound alarmist, or delusional, or needlessly provocative. For an American who grew up in the postwar order with its apparently permanent rules, in a democracy with obvious flaws that nonetheless seemed on a course of gradual, inevitable progress, I find it extremely hard to assess the peril. I’m tempted to believe that the country will somehow return to normal, because I want it to be normal. We’ve never been here before, and either the nervous system overreacts or the imagination fails. After Minneapolis, I fear the latter more. Trump is taking the country on a path to tyranny. The first obligation for each of us is to see it and name it. The next is to figure out what to do about it.
