- Assessing American literacy, and the claim that being able to read a New York Times article puts you into the “hyper-literate educated elite”;
- How Trump doesn’t read, at all.
- How powerful tech oligarchs think introspection is dumb;
- The new homophobia is part of yet another swing of human nature, which reading and empathy and introspection might overcome, if conservatives did not reject them;
- Short items: Hegseth rejects women and blacks from promotions; MAGA promises to outbreed the “hideous” left; Trump gets another bogus award.
- Rufus Wainwright, “Go or Go Ahead,” studio version.
Facebook, 25 Mar 2026: D.J. Grothe’s post
If you have the basic literacy skills to read and comprehend a New York Times article, you’re in a “weird, out of touch, elite bubble.” Widespread low levels of literacy are bad for our republic and make people vulnerable to the worst sorts of people taking advantage of them. (I’ll also say that algorithmic attention capture, as well as epistemic collapse — or what political scientists call “truth decay” — where there’s widespread declining agreement on basic facts, and a public sphere where social media competes with the institutions that used to provide the public basic information about the world, make it very hard for a society yo govern itself, although both of these are supercharged by lower levels of literacy even as they also promote lower levels of literacy, in a vicious cycle.)
His source seems to be a Matthew Yglesias post, but that post is for subscribers and I can only see the top. However the image above seem to be a screenshot from that post.
So, out of touch with what? The semi-literate MAGA majority?
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This item is about that fact that Trump only knows what’s going on in Iran via the selective videos he’s shown by his staff of things blowing up. As noted two days ago.
AlterNet, Nick Hilden, today: ‘The president doesn’t read’: Why Trump’s illiteracy is a ‘disaster’ for Americans
As the war on Iran inflicts harm around the globe and the domestic political situation continues to spiral, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie asserts that President Donald Trump’s illiteracy has played no small part in creating a “disaster.”
“He doesn’t really read,” said Bouie, pointing out the widely reported fact that during his first term, Trump rarely managed to read and receive his daily presidential briefings. At the time, his aides even began to “trick” him into reading them by including lots of pictures and peppering documents with his name.
This situation has only worsened since then.
“Trump has obviously deteriorated cognitively since his first term,” says Bouie. “And it’s clear that Trump today is even more reluctant to read anything that requires the expenditure of mental energy.”
As evidence of this, Bouie points to reporting earlier this week indicating that rather than a detailed report on the situation in Iran, the president is being shown 2-minute montages “all about American success. They’re not really about the larger strategic picture.” To make matters worse, “he had to ask his own generals and officials about whether videos and things he sees online are AI or not.”
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And this may be related.
The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams, today: The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb, subtitled “For some of America’s tech oligarchs, looking inward seems to be a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things.”
William Shatner, the nonagenarian actor, stood beside Jeff Bezos in the desert, trying to explain his despair.
It was 2021, and Shatner had returned moments earlier from a voyage on one of Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness,” Shatner would later write. “All I saw was death.” He concluded that reflecting on humanity’s relative insignificance could help us “rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.”
Shatner was attempting to relay these impressions to a grinning Bezos. Then the billionaire turned from him, mid-sentence, and called for a champagne bottle, which he shook and sprayed on a group of celebrating women.
Then,
The clip went viral in part, I imagine, because it seemed to confirm a widely held suspicion: America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective. From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.
That thesis received further confirmation earlier this month when the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that he engages in “zero” introspection—or at least “as little as possible.” Andreessen, a billionaire AI evangelist, was speaking to the podcaster David Senra, who enthusiastically approved. Senra explained that he had learned introspection was useless by reading 410 biographies of entrepreneurs. “Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self,” Senra said, referring to the Walmart magnate. “He just woke up like, I like building Walmart; I’m gonna keep building more Walmarts, and just kept doing it over and over again.”
The writer discusses comments from Thiel and Andreessen. Then,
As many have pointed out to Andreessen, this is spectacularly wrong. Probing one’s own beliefs and limitations has been seen as the basis of wisdom for millennia, going back to the ancient Greek inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi instructing its reader to “know thyself” and Socrates’s recognition of his own ignorance. Marcus Aurelius, the self-scrutinizing author of Meditations, was once the most powerful person in the world. Napoleon Bonaparte read and reread Goethe’s emo masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther. Thomas Jefferson felt tremendous guilt for reducing men to slaves. (Introspection is no guarantee of benevolence, as the examples of Bonaparte and Jefferson show, but it certainly doesn’t prevent anyone from doing stuff.)
And then about how Andreessen and Stephen Miller selected read Nietzsche to support their base motivations. (Also, whatever happened to “The unexamined life is not worth living”?)
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My take: if you can’t indulge in introspection, you leave yourself slave to base human nature, without being able to consider whether its biases and prejudices and short-term thinking make any sense in the modern world, if they ever did.
Two examples.
The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber, today: The Surprising Reason for the New Homophobia, subtitled “Americans are burned-out, frustrated, and hunting for scapegoats.”
Beginning with the current state of Shia LaBeouf. Then,
Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.
But then things changed in the early 2020s.
This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.
But of course this is only part of a bigger picture.
But although transphobia overlaps with homophobia, Charlesworth and Finkel argue that trans backlash is not the primary reason for rising anti-gay sentiment. Instead, they suggest that one factor explains the rise in all kinds of identity-based biases: the same blend of economic anxiety and anti-establishment sentiment that’s driving so much of American politics. They write, “Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken.”
That is, human cultures swing back and forth in their expression of various shades of human nature. As with authoritarian politics, social sensibilities in the US are currently becoming more conservative and regressive. These things will never go away, but optimists might hope that introspection, empathy, and reading books (and education in general) might eventually quell base motivations. But of course those are all things conservatives hate. (And thus justify their prejudices and bigotry by citing the Bible, which at best they’ve likely read only in bits.)
The articles goes on and on with examples, about toxic masculinity and Clavicular and looks-maxxers and Nick Fuentes and on and on.
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Brief takes.
- NYT, today: Hegseth Strikes Two Black and Two Female Officers From Promotion List, subtitled “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s highly unusual decision to remove officers from a one-star promotion list has spurred allegations of racial and gender bias.”
- Two of them are Black and two are women.
- This comment has been widely cited: “Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.”
- And this is the key: “Mr. Hegseth came to the Pentagon last year focused on undoing the work of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, who pushed to diversify the military’s top ranks, which had long been the domain of white men.”
- Sounds like white (male) supremacy to me.
- JMG: Benny Johnson: MAGA Will “Outbreed Hideous Left”
- Pure tribal bigotry. And, expand the tribe at any cost.
- And mindless bigotry: “We’re just gonna out-breed the left! You ever met a lib? They’re hideous. Nobody wants to have sex with them!”
- Comic Sands (via George Takei on Fb): Republicans Just Created Yet Another Bogus Award To Give To Trump — Because Of Course They Did
- It’s called the “America First” award.
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Rufus Wainwright’s “Go or Go Ahead,” studio version. Which really is better than the live performance linked earlier.
