- Why does MAGA hate science?
- Why do right-wing folks think democratic policies have failed?
- And Paul Krugman on the top 10 political websites on Substack.
A significant essay, for my concerns.
Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 19 Jul 2025: Why MAGA hates science so much, subtitled “Billionaires hate the rest of us — and Trump’s loyalists would rather suffer, even die, than face the truth”
Against all the evidence of horrific, devastating weather around us, climate change is still a “hoax.” A measles outbreak sparked by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists now extends beyond Texas to 34 states. Republicans are doing all they can to shut down funding for medical research.
Why does MAGA hate science? Shall we count the ways?
Because scientific advances don’t discriminate between the “worthy” and those considered unworthy, and because some in the billionaire class think they deserve to live much longer than you do.
(Coincidentally, I’ve finally gotten back to reading the latest by Harari, NEXUS, and he puts into a larger context the motivations we see in politics about MAGA and science and religion. But I’ll put off my discussion of his ideas, except for a couple asides…)
Here’s the gist of this piece:
But it’s not just the small — and small-minded, and small-hearted — wealthy libertarian or right-wing elite. Working people who choose to wear MAGA red caps hate science for their own reasons: It tells them things about disease and environmental destruction and, say, women’s reproductive health that they cannot bear to face. Scientific findings often do not jibe with their religious beliefs. If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and were never taught how to distinguish between faith and knowledge, you’re naturally going to have a testy relationship with science.
(My aside: MAGA is a kind of faith that relies on a “story” about who they are their place in the world. It’s subjective. Science is not.)
By its nature of openness to new ideas, scientific inquiry exemplifies the secular worldview of liberals. Science levels the playing field. It’s woke. Scientists discriminate about the significance of evidence, but they do not discriminate about the significance of different human beings. (That is what the MAGA faithful think their religion is for — because Republicans have spent a long time perverting Christianity, too, to justify their greed and bigotry.)
(My aside: Every nation and religion has its own “story,” and it doesn’t matter whether they’re true or that they’re all different from one another, because the function of stories is to bind the tribe, or the culture. Science threatens the veracity of those stories, which they think threatens the basis for the tribe’s, or culture’s, existence.)
Beyond the historical friction between science and religious beliefs (for which earlier scientists could be imprisoned or burned at the stake), the main reason MAGA hates science is human-caused global climate change. Al Gore famously called global warming an “inconvenient truth,” but Donald Trump persists in calling it “a hoax,” while defunding climate research, green technology, NOAA and FEMA. The COVID pandemic gave MAGA followers many more incoherent reasons to distrust science, while watching “their favorite president” politicize every aspect of the response.
Apparently, millions would rather suffer mightily — or even die, as many willfully unvaccinated people did — than admit they were wrong. It’s a sad aspect of human nature to feel we have such sunk costs in our often-wrongheaded opinions that we are willing to perish for them.
The piece goes about the psychology of MAGA.
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Glimpses from the other side.
Robert Reich, 15 Jul 2025: Jamie Dimon’s Last Stand (Hopefully)
Republicans and Democrats seem to have different standards for what succeeds or fails. I’m tempted to characterize them as subjective vs. objective. Here’s Reich:
A few days ago, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the United States, said at an international forum in Dublin, Ireland, the tax-haven capital of Europe:
“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed.”
Failed how? Reich responds:
Failed? Like the Affordable Care Act? Medicare and Medicaid? Social Security? Spending on basic research and infrastructure? On protecting Americans from dread diseases? On protecting workers from death and injury on the job? On protecting the environment?
As distinct from policies rolled out by the Republicans? Such as their subsidies to Big Oil? Their racist attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion? Or Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that will take $1 trillion out of Medicaid, cause over 11 million Americans to lose their health coverage, and increase the national debt by more than $3 trillion — all to cut the taxes of the ultra-wealthy, such as Jamie Dimon?
Because I think conservatives and progressives have such different worldviews (see Lakoff) that their standards for which policies succeed or fail are entirely different.
At a time in this nation’s history when our most influential business leaders need to stand up loudly and clearly — for the rule of law, for democracy, for decency, for America’s moral authority in the world, and against Donald Trump — Jamie Dimon is calling Democrats “idiots” and otherwise staying silent in the face of Trump’s cruelty and brutality.
Dimon is the quintessence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous admonition: “The silence of the good people is more dangerous than the brutality of the bad people.”
This is how fascism takes root and spreads.
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I’m noting this Paul Krugman post mostly for his list of websites.
Paul Krugman, 18 Jul 2025: Inequality Set Free, subtitled “And other self-referential stuff”.
I’m familiar with many of these, but not all. Krugman comments:
For people telling me that I should quit Substack because it’s a right-wing site, look at the top 10. Two are right-wing; seven are either center-left or Never Trumper; and Nate Silver has a bad word for everyone.
I’m familiar with several of them, but not all; I’m not sure who are the right-wing sites in the top 10.
