The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 26 Feb 2026: Behind the MAHA Veil, subtitled “It’s not about transparency or choice. It’s not even about ‘natural health’ It’s about making everyone else take their quack cures.”
The other day I mentioned in passing that anyone who puts “anti-woke” at the center of their ideology is trying to camouflage their real beliefs.
I think that’s become pretty obvious in recent years with the journey of Bari Weiss, Elon Musk, and most of the famous anti-woke, “free-speech absolutists” who, it turns out, were just shy MAGAs who preferred not to cop to their real allegiances.
Then he mentions this item, which has been in the news and on Fb today.
By the same token, one of the reasons I’ve been out of step with mainstream Americans on trans stuff is that I don’t believe that the anti-trans movement is actually about women’s sports. Lo and behold: Yesterday the Kansas legislature passed a law invalidating the driver’s licenses of transgender citizens, beginning today.
I’m sorry but there is no way—absolutely none—to explain this action as anything but punitive. Enacting this law with no grace period gives the game away. The entire idea is to turn trans people into a criminal class.
“Please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials. That means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credentials will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential,” read letters mailed by the Kansas Department of Revenue’s vehicles division and dated Monday.
This isn’t about “women’s sports.” It never was. That was just camouflage to hide the real agenda.
Again, that statement from Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point.
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Cue:
AlterNet, Matthew Rozsa, 26 Feb 2026: Ex-GOP congressman says one word explains why Trump’s GOP will lose in November
President Donald Trump is doomed in the upcoming midterm elections, says an ex-Republican congressman — and the reason may surprise you.
“This is the biggest reason why Trump and Republicans in November are gonna get their a—- handed to them” in the midterms, former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois said on his Substack on Thursday. “I’ve been saying this for a year now. One word: cruelty.”
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Spelling out what Trump supporters believe.
John Pavlovitz, 25 Feb 2026: Lessons Trump Supporters Are Teaching Their Children (Whether They Know It or Not)
One thing you learn as you raise children is that they’re always watching, always listening, always learning; that you are forever teaching them something even when you’re unaware: about what you value, about the way to treat people, about how to be a human being.
I wonder if people supporting Donald Trump and this Administration realize what they’re teaching their children; what boosting his words and applauding his tantrums and celebrating his assaults on vulnerable people is telling them.
Whether they realize it or not, they’re teaching them…
Then a list of things, with a paragraph for each item. I’ll just list the items.
Diversity is dangerous.
Compassion is a flaw.
Women are less-than.
People don’t matter.
Whiteness is better.
Religion is a prop.
America is the world.
Never apologize.
It’s all about you.
Cheat to win.
Convictions are for sale.
Laws don’t apply to you.
When in doubt, lie.
Then he invites Trump supporters to dispute these assertion, because the President’s own words and actions support them.
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Spelling out what the Trump administration is trying to do.
Timothy Snyder, 26 Feb 2026: Cabinet Apocalypse, subtitled “A News Review in an Imagined Conversation”
Satire. But it rings true. As I’ve been saying.
Donald Trump, president of the United States. “Calling this meeting to order. That was a long speech that I just gave. State of the Union. Long speech. Not going to stand up and do that again next year. So let’s hear it. Plans to make sure I don’t have to. Plans to end the United States by a year from now. Around the table. Go. Start us off, Linda.”
Linda McMahon, Education. “Thank you, sir. Nothing is more important for the country than public schools. So we are destroying them by directing tax money away from public school parents and towards private education scams.”
Russ Vought, Management and Budget. “The republic depends on its institutions. As you know, sir, we are wrecking our civil service by firing those who are qualified and replacing them with political hacks. I don’t want to overstate my case, sir, but these are not just normal hacks. They are hackety-hacks, sir. They will use what remains of the government to hasten the process of its destruction. Hackety-hack, sir.”
Trump. “Good. Hack. Good. But maybe something faster.”
Scott Bessent, Treasury. “A government works on the basis of tax revenue. From the beginning of your administration, sir, we have been overseeing a shift whereby people who actually have the money won’t pay any taxes. Indeed, our oligarchs will be the happy recipients of whatever tax money we can scrape up from the middle and working classes. This wealth shift from the population at large to the wealthy few is inconsistent with the survival of a republic. This will help speed along the change Russ is talking about.”
It goes on: Lutnick, Bondi, RFK Jr., Burgum, Zeldin, Rubio, Gabbard, Noem, Hegseth.
Snyder concludes:
The conversation is fictional, of course. In essence, though, this is little more than a review of the news of the last few days and weeks.
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Yet there’s an increasing problem.
AlterNet, Thomas Kika, 26 Feb 2026: Trump’s problem isn’t his agenda —it’s that voters don’t believe a word he says: analysis
Despite some signs of improvement for Americans under Donald Trump’s second term, his approval ratings continue to plummet, and according to a new analysis from The Hill, it all comes down to voters not trusting him.
Well, plenty of us have not trusted him, or believed anything he says, for years. The mystery is why so many people do trust and believe him. I perceive this as an unfortunate atavism of human nature. Perhaps, after all these years, some of those people are coming to their senses.
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Short items about their mindset from JMG.
- (From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) Vance Blames Rural Hospital Closures On Biden. No, it was cuts by Trump.
- (From Daily Beast) Homan Offers To “Educate” Pope On Catholic Doctrine. Conservatives always know better.
- Newsmax Host: “Headphones Are Making The Kids Gay”. Revealing in so many ways.
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A familiar issue, the ante upped.
NY Times, Aubrey Clayton, 26 Feb 2026: America, We Have a Math Problem
Candidates for quantitative jobs — like those on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley — are sometimes asked offbeat questions such as: How many Ping-Pong balls fit in a 747? Called Fermi problems, these questions are not meant to elicit a precisely correct answer but rather to test an interviewee’s reasoning ability. The candidates must use mathematical relationships of scale and dimension to arrive at a reasonable guess: If the volume of a Ping-Pong ball is roughly X and that of the airplane roughly Y, then the sought-after quantity is Y divided by X. The problems enforce the basic discipline of combining what is known and observable with rigid mathematics to make sensible statements about the unknown or the unobservable.
The example of a Fermi problem that I first heard about is to estimate how many piano tuners there are in the city of Chicago. You have to estimate the total population, the percentage who own pianos, and frequency those pianos would need to be tuned, and so on. I think Fermi gave students credit if they were within an order of magnitude of a plausible answer.
In the past year, President Trump and members of his administration have shown that they would fail miserably in such interviews. Many administrations boast about their successes and perhaps exaggerate. But Mr. Trump and others have made quantitative claims that stretch not only the bounds of factual truth but of mathematical possibility.
And it goes on with how Trump keeps claiming he’s reduced prices by hundreds of percent, and how Howard Lutnick tried to rationalize that. and Pam Bondi’s claim of lives saved through seizures of fentanyl.
These claims mark an escalation in the use of statistics as rhetorical decoration rather than as support for arguments constrained by shared rules. From the perspective of a math educator, this is not a minor abuse of statistics but a failure of epistemic responsibility, one that undermines the possibility of public reasoning itself.
Mr. Trump’s claims do not invite debate; they short-circuit it. …
Whereas, the writer goes on, in the real world of mathematics (and science, I’d add), people really do change their minds based on persuasive arguments.
Those habits of thinking — humility before evidence, respect for shared definitions and a willingness to revise — are what can make disagreement productive rather than insurmountable. When leaders abandon them, numbers lose their power to clarify and instead become cudgels to use against opponents, leaving the public without a common basis to judge competing claims.
Are Americans, like Trump, dumb, or just uneducated?
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Here’s a substantial piece that seems to rely on a dubious take on history. That is, it’s been floated before and discredited; it amounts to superstition.
Vox, Lee Drutman, 26 Feb 2026: US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again., subtitled “America has remade itself every few decades. Are we due?”
Donald Trump is not forever.
There will be an after. It’s hard to see from the present, where everything feels frozen in place. But from history’s vantage, change is the only constant. American democracy has been remade several times — dramatically, unexpectedly, and often in ways that looked impossible until they arrived.
The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform.
Underneath the paralysis, pressure is rising: institutional distrust at historic lows, economic dislocation spreading, AI transforming work, and a generation increasingly locked out of housing, economic security, and political influence. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re locked in battle with each other, fighting the last war.
Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are.
That’s the history of American democracy. And it is about to continue.
A long piece, divided up into: How reform happens; Why the Progressive Era [the 1890s] is the most like our own; The 1960s: The pattern repeats; Our Current Moment; and finally What kind of reform?
I’ll quote the Key takeaways sidebox.
- American democracy has been dramatically remade roughly every 60 years: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s. Each time, reform came when ambitious insiders recognized the old order was dying and switched sides before it collapsed on them.
- Today’s dysfunction matches the historical preconditions almost exactly: institutional trust near historic lows, and both parties fighting the last war while new pressures accumulate with no political home.
- The question is not whether reform is coming but what kind. Previous eras tried to work around parties and got hollow institutions captured by whoever was already organized. The next reform needs to change how parties themselves work.
Things change, and it’s not always because of simple progressive vs conservative forces. More often it’s about changes in the world and how we deal with them. More thoughts later.
