Long essay.
The Atlantic, Yair Lapid, today: American Loneliness, subtitled “It’s not an epidemic—it’s an immune system.”
He begins:
Driving on I-79 south from Pittsburgh toward Charlottesville, I started composing this birthday card in my head—a love letter to America on its 250th birthday. The hills of Pennsylvania were blanketed in glittering white snow from which bare-armed trees rose like the locals: lean, weathered, lined and stained like the earth. In a frozen sales lot beside the road, 50 John Deere tractors stood in formation, their booms raised toward the sky like eaglets waiting to be fed. At the crest of one hill, someone had planted an old shipping container painted with large letters: TRUMP. I drew closer, and more words appeared: GUNS. LIFE. JESUS. LOVE.
The writer talks about making random car trips a couple times a year. He gives examples. This is what caught my eye:
And what I’ve learned is that the standard account of the current era is entirely wrong. The conventional wisdom is that the United States is violent, dispirited, trapped inside an identity politics of its own making—conspiracy theories, algorithms, incel forums, pornography, immigrant hatred in the land of immigrants, social networks that are a pathetic imitation of human society. The world has been turned upside down: Conservatives now want to change everything, while progressives want everything to go back to the way it was. Americans went looking for the light and were caught in the selva oscura, Dante’s dark wood.
Everything has already been said about this dystopian portrait, except perhaps one thing: It is not true. The eulogies for America are not insight; they are more closely akin to malicious gossip. Perhaps it is easier to see this from the outside. America is not the pale boy who pulls the hood over his disheveled hair and then opens fire in a schoolyard. America is all of the other children. The ones who shield smaller kids with their own body, the ones who block the classroom door at the risk of their life, the ones who stand, embracing, at a funeral, talking about a new beginning.
Part of this is due to the nature of the media, even the relatively non-biased media, since their job is to highlight what’s unusual. Now matter how unusual. Now matter how rare.
The media world in which you live plays on an endless loop the story of a toxic and corrupt America—but is that also your immediate experience? Is that how the people you know, the people you work with, behave? It does not describe Bob and Earl, who fixed my flat tire in Tucson and refused to take money. Or the oiled-skin bodybuilder at Venice Beach who cheerfully taught me tricep exercises. In the real world, do you actually know any liberals who support ISIS? Have you ever actually met a conservative with a Hitler poster in his basement? Even the claim that families are being torn apart by political polarization—how anchored is it in the reality of your own life?
And part of this is due to the intuitive, tribalistic nature of conservatives, who fear the other, who assume the worst about everyone, who would eject anyone non-white from the United States, if they could. That not everyone feels this way is the progressive evolution of morality within the human race.
Again, long article, and I haven’t even skimmed the rest of it. (I figure, if you can get one significant thing out of any article, or even book, that’s OK. Time is short. Let’s move on. I can always come back to it.)
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Tribalists lie, in the name of their stories and their survival. They’ve cited this same invalidated study before.
LGBTQNation, Jason Van Ness, today: Campaign to overturn Obergefell uses 14-year-old junk science to ‘prove’ gay people are bad parents, subtitled “This movement is especially heartbreaking considering the thousands of children in foster care who are waiting to be adopted.”
Leading up to the 2015 landmark Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage equality a federal right, sociologist Mark Regnerus published controversial research titled the “New Family Structures Study”. Regnerus, who is forthcoming about the fact that his Catholic faith shapes his practice as a social scientist, published the study in 2012 in the journal Social Science Research.
The study purported that children raised by a parent in a same-gender relationship are at greater risk of negative psychosocial outcomes in adulthood compared to children raised by straight parents. The study was funded primarily by The Witherspoon Institute and The Bradley Foundation, both far-right interest groups that actively lobby against LGBTQ+ rights, and was viewed by many political commentators as a blatant effort by both groups to influence the Supreme Court’s decision in several high-profile cases, including Obergefell v. Hodges.
I cited the discredited Regnerous study as far back as 2014, in this post, as an example of false witness.
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Catching up on recent links quickly.
—Base morality; religion; tribalism—
JMG, yesterday: Trump Again Endorses “Christian Values” Candidate Accused Of Adultery, Sexting, Swinging And Threats
It’s so difficult to figure out what Christian values are.
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Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 10 Jul 2026: Indiana’s Lt. Gov. says Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to have “public calls to prayer”, subtitled: Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith falsely claimed America’s “Christian heritage” allows the government to suppress Islamic religious expression
Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to publicly worship because “Judeo-Christian principles [are] our heritage.”
It’s the latest in a long line of hateful, bigoted, unconstitutional remarks he’s made since taking office.
I’ve never been in any city where I could have heard Muslim calls to prayer. If they did in my neighborhood, I might object on secular grounds. But that’s not what’s happening here.
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Pete Hegseth’s pastor.
NPR, 7 Jul 2026: The pastor who wants to repeal voting rights for women is becoming more mainstream
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Another day, another…
Right Wing Watch, 9 Jul 2026: David Barton Continues To Distort And Misrepresent American History
This goes to the need for tribal validation, vs. what’s true about the world.
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PolitiFact, 9 Jul 2026: What Trump’s communism claims miss about Democrats and democratic socialists
Nonsense.
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JMG, 9 Jul 2026: MAGA Pastor: Jesus Wasn’t Effeminate, He Was Butch “With Six Packs, The Most Ripped Guy You’ll Ever Meet”
People see what they want to see. It’s all imaginary.
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LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 8 Jul 2026: Why is the right so obsessed with banning Pride flags?, subtitled “The right has been waging an outright war on Pride flags. Why does a colorful piece of cloth make them so mad?”
This answer is obvious.
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— Reality Illiteracy —
At some point you just have to call them out: they’re idiots.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 10 Jul 2026: Dinosaurs on Noah’s ark? A MAGA theme park clings to creationism, subtitled “Kentucky’s Ark Encounter turns 10, and its founder Ken Ham is as bitter as ever”
Creationism hasn’t generated much coverage in the mainstream media over the past decade. The days when fundamentalists challenged scientists to “debates” over evolution now seem quaint in the era of Donald Trump, whose belief is that you never need to persuade when beating your opponents into submission is an option. Under the president’s leadership, the right has shifted from arguing about dinosaur bones and carbon dating to making more blunt demands for book bans and even stripping women of the right to vote.
Well, not just idiots exactly. They’re devoted to their tribalist religious stories and don’t understand how the world works and how implausible the whole idea of Noah’s Ark is. The human mind works in mysterious ways, and it is not about rationalism or understanding the real world. It is about tribal survival. Just *believe*.
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As much as the human species learns about the universe and our place in it, there will always be people like this. Native intuition prevails, without education. The universe is far vaster than naive human intuition suggests.
Facebook, I Love the Universe, 4 July 2026: But Australia would be upside down!
“But Australia would be upside down!”
It’s one of the most common arguments from flat-earthers… and it comes from a simple misunderstanding of what “down” actually means.
There is no universal “down” in space. If you could travel far away from Earth and look back at our planet, there would be no top, bottom, left, or right. Those directions only make sense relative to where you are standing.
On a spherical Earth, down means toward the center of the planet.
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One more.
JMG, 3 Jul 2026: Jan 6 Organizer: “Someone With An Extreme Case Of TDS Geoengineered This Weather In Washington DC”
Also here on Facebook, 3 July, Brian Tyler Cohen: BREAKING: MAGA is now saying that Democrats have “geoengineered” the weather to be extremely hot in DC this weekend.
No. They are scientifically illiterate, and superstitious, and tribalistically hostile.
Just think, if there were such a thing as climate engineering, what else would be happening? Think it through.
