All weekend. Yesterday we attended a birthday party for grandson Nicholas, at a park in Alameda, despite weather predictions of light rain. The rain mostly let up by noon (we were there at 11) but resumed with drizzle before we packed up and left. Today, more shifting forecasts of rain this afternoon, changing every time I looked at the weather app on my phone. As I did earlier in the week, by chance, I went out for a walk during what turned out to be the lightest drizzle of the day; now, despite earlier forecasts, it’s not just drizzling, it’s raining.
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Several substantial leftover items from the past week.
Are religions by their nature fascist? Is this a dumb question, or an impertinent one?
I’m recalling the nutshell definition of fascism in Heather Cox Richardson’s book (review begins here).
…The US has an actual history of struggles, leading to the idea that all people are equal. Fascism, in contrast, was based on the idea that some people are better than others, and deserved to rule.
And a common theme among the world’s religions is the idea that their followers are God’s “chosen people.” Certainly the OT Hebrews thought that, and now the modern American Christians and white supremacists think that.
Recently we noted this item at Right Wing Watch: Ed Rush Says Christians Are ‘To Be In Charge Of Everything’
The guy said,
“That’s not Christian nationalism, that’s just Christian internationalism,” Rush declared. “So I think, we might as well get started now.”
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Now we have a similar item.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 24 Oct 2025: Jesse Leon Rodgers Calls For Muslims To Be Banned From Holding Public Office
Earlier this week, right-wing pastor Jesse Leon Rodgers released a promotional video for his City Elders organization, which is a Christian nationalist group that seeks to “establish divine order in spiritual and civil governance” by bringing local pastors together with elected officials and religious-right activists.
In the video, Rodgers proclaimed that the Democratic Party is quite possibly “the most wicked institution” in world history, while also calling for Muslims to be banned from holding public office.
OK, this is primitive, black and white thinking (“wicked”!), easily dismissible. But is religious identity just an anodyne manifestation of the tribal instinct (Us=good, Others=bad) serving to prevent defectors and protecting the tribe’s resources? Doesn’t religion slip into fascism when it actively puts down outsiders as wicked and deserving of oppression? I suppose the term has mostly applied to racial or nationalistic groups, but surely Richardson’s bare-bones definition would apply to religious groups as well.
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Here’s a recent take on an ongoing issue.
Friendly Atheist, 23 Oct 2025: The Republican war on science is rapidly becoming a public health emergency, subtitled “Republicans at the state level have introduced over 420 anti-science bills, endangering lives while advancing right-wing conspiracy theories”
It’s easy to see this issue as a consequence of the religious beliefs that the special people of the world deserve to impose their ideology and mythology on everyone.
There was a time when the biggest science controversies in America revolved around how to deal with science, not whether we should accept science itself. When the teaching of evolution was being targeted by Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates, for example, even they just wanted their myths taught alongside real science. When the George W. Bush administration was debating whether to fund scientists studying embryonic stem cells, even they didn’t say the research itself was the problem. They acknowledged that the research was important. Those fights were heated, but they at least took place within a shared reality.
How quaint. These days, we’re not debating the edges of scientific ethics or curriculum choices. We’re watching a full-scale assault on science itself. The current Republican administration isn’t just undermining a few topics of study. It’s gutting the entire infrastructure that makes scientific research and education possible.
And when the federal government declares open season on expertise, state legislatures follow suit.
The result? A nationwide campaign to replace evidence with right-wing ideology.
Going on about RFK Jr., those 420 anti-science bills, laws about the Ten Commandments, and so on.
Republicans are turning science into a bogeyman because evidence is the enemy of their agenda. Every time they convince voters to distrust scientists, they make it easier to sell fear, to silence dissent, and to profit off ignorance. It’s easy to make people feel empowered by telling them that they—not doctors—should decide if or when to get vaccinated, and it’s easy to scare them by pretending there’s a link between vaccinations and autism (there isn’t). Or that raw milk is more beneficial because there are no chemicals involved. Or that a word they can’t spell shouldn’t be in your water because it’s somehow tainting it.
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Certain kinds of old-fashioned common sense held germs of truth.
NY Times, 20 Oct 2025: Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows, subtitled “Doctors have long recommended that infants avoid peanut products. But in 2017, experts officially reversed that guidance, and food allergies decreased sharply.”
The old-fashioned common sense being the idea that it was good to let children play outside and get dirty. It turns out that exposure to the world is necessary to build up immunities to local threats. So to with being exposed to different kinds of food. The article opens:
Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanut products, a study has found.
For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanut products to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80 percent. In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.
The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.
This supports one of the themes of Lukianoff & Haidt’s THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, reviewed here, which discusses three Untruths. My summary of the first:
The first Untruth involves the rise of “safetyism”: how peanut allergies rose precisely because parents began protecting their children from peanuts back in the 1990s. The immunity system requires stress in order to grow. As do personalities.
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One more for today. This indirectly concerns some guy named Graham Platner, who I am not following. Here’s his pic.
I’m interested in the central section of this piece, as an attempt to pin down the definition of a common term that simple-minded conservatives conflate with communism and Marxism and evil in general.
The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 16 Oct 2025: What Is Socialism?
There’s no useful way to define socialism in the American context because the Cold War turned “socialism” into one of the dirtiest words in politics. The Soviets were the bad guys and they were “socialists”—it said so, right on the label. For eighty years the easiest way to score points was to call your political opponent a “socialist.”
That dynamic began to break down after 1989, partly because the Russkies folded and partly because Americans reached a rough consensus about “socialism.” The consensus went something like this:
Democrats were fully onboard with capitalism, albeit with an interest in government regulations around the margins. And Republicans were fully onboard with Social Security and Medicare, albeit with concerns about budget-balancing and costs.
Conceptually, both sides were in broad agreement about how American economic life should be ordered.3
Hooray for the Uniparty!
Going on with:
But over the last decade the two parties have diverged from that consensus.
The Democratic divergence is a growing belief that health care should be universally provided by the government. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be a good idea—I don’t want to litigate that today. I simply want to note that “Medicare for All (Who Want It)” would have been pretty out-there in 1996,4 but today it’s a mainstream policy goal.
And
Republicans used to want deregulation so that businesses could be as red-in-tooth-and-claw as they wished. Today, Republicans want businesses to be completely beholden to the government.
We should be clear about this: Having government control of the marketplace is not “socialism,” exactly. It’s closer to the Chinese system of command economy.5 And when I say “Republicans want” I am not talking about what MAGA influencers say on X. I’m talking about the policies enacted by the Republican-controlled White House and Congress.
