- Trump wants national parks to reflect only patriotic history;
- You’re either with Trump or you “hate America”;
- Yet another example: Beware “common sense”;
- Short items: Atheists in prison; Trump official reverse ICE guidelines, again and again; Brian Karem on how we’ve become a failed nation-state in just 150 days.
Again: everything, for conservatives, must be reduced to simplistic terms, black and white, good and evil. And American must always have been good. Also: another snitch line!
LA Times, 19 Jun 2025: Trump bans ‘negative’ signage at national parks, asks visitors to report text deemed ‘unpatriotic’
In his ongoing war on “woke,” President Trump has instructed the National Park Service to scrub any language he would deem negative, unpatriotic or smacking of “improper partisan ideology” from signs and presentations visitors encounter at national parks and historic sites.
Instead, his administration has ordered the national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums supervised by the Department of the Interior to ensure that all of their signage reminds Americans of our “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”
Those marching orders, which went into effect late last week, have left Trump opponents and free speech advocates gasping in disbelief, wondering how park employees are supposed to put a sunny spin on monuments acknowledging slavery, Jim Crow laws and the fight for civil rights. And how they’ll square the story of Japanese Americans shipped off to incarceration camps during World War II with an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”
Of course the Trump administration, in its cluelessness, is the current impediment toward “advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”
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Yet again: for conservatives everything is either black or white.
Washington Post, opinion by Monica Hesse, 10 Jun 2025: Trump’s lazy insult for liberals is deeply confusing, subtitled “Who gets to define patriotism?”
You hear this over and over again from Trump: if you don’t support him, if you’re not part of MAGA, you must “hate America.” Demonstrating over and over what a simpleton he is. And his fans.
“These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our country,” he wrote on Truth Social last weekend. “This is people that hate our country,” he said in a speech last week about protesters. Every time I flip on Fox News, a host or commentator is talking about how liberals hate America, and the insult always takes a beat to register, because — who, me? I’m the dork who has a National Parks Passport to get stamped when I visit the Indiana Dunes.
This has become a central political division in our country. The right accuses the left of hating the United States; the left responds that protest is American (but also, is Finland accepting expats right now?).
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Another running theme on this blog: beware “common sense.”
LA Times, Voices, Veronique de Rugy, 18 Jun 2025: So regulators can just make rules by gut instinct now?
If you think federal regulators care about data-driven, evidence-based policymaking, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will leave you scratching your head.
The case involves a terrible Biden administration regulation driven by Big Labor. In defending this regulation, which mandates that crews on freight trains include at least two people, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Transportation leaned heavily not on data or evidence, but on “common sense.”
This, of course, is about a lot more than trains. It’s a microcosm of a much larger issue.
Study the history of science and technology, and you quickly realize that “common sense” is an appeal to the familiar and the known. It’s reliable only as a rule-of-thumb in applying experience with everyday situations. But when dealing with new knowledge, it can be misleading at best. The advancements of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution came from dealing with new evidence at face value, not to the extent it conformed with something already familiar.
You might agree that two is better than one, but if “common sense” is the new legal standard, then anything goes.
What’s next? Regulating package-delivery drones because “it feels safer” to keep humans on some kind of joystick? Requiring every grocery store to have cashiers at every checkout lane — even if 90% of customers use self-checkout — because “it feels more secure” to see someone behind the counter?
Safety and security are obviously important. That’s exactly why we should demand real evidence.
Because, to belabor the point, evidence often challenges intuitive “common sense,” especially in novel situations.
The essay goes on to explain the political motivations of the current challenge to the rule.
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Short items.
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We’ve heard this one before:
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 20 Jun 2025: In 2025, atheists make up only 0.07% of the federal prison population, subtitled “Newly released numbers show self-identified atheists make up a mere fraction of federal inmates—far below their share in the general U.S. population”
Which is to say… believers are getting locked up for crimes more than non-believers are. Following a (supernaturally-based) religion does not make you more moral, to the extent that morality relates to breaking the law.
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Look! He’s changed his mind again!
Washington Post, 16 Jun 2025: Trump officials reverse guidance exempting farms, hotels from immigration raids, subtitled “ICE agents have been told to continue conducting enforcement operations at agricultural businesses despite concerns about negative effects on the food industry.”
Oh but this was several days ago. And judging from headlines, he’s changing his mind a couple more times since.
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More from the commentariat.
Salon, Brian Karem, 19 Jun 2025: We’ve become a failed nation-state in 150 days, subtitled “From chaos and political violence to Israel and Iran, Trump’s latest actions have sealed our fate”
A ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden, and giant flagpoles are just the superficial indicators.
