We keep hearing complaints from conservatives about how they are under-represented in universities. The reason why is obvious.
NYT, Letters, 2 May 2026: What Is Higher Education For?, subtitled “Readers respond to Bret Stephens’s column about the recent Yale report on reforming academia.”
Richard Seager, a research professor at Columbia, says in part:
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, there were many conservatives and Republicans in the earth sciences institute where I work. They are hard to find now. What happened was the shift of the conservative movement and the Republican Party away from a belief in evidence-based policy, scientific inquiry and following the facts.
Conservatives want to impose ideology over evidence and facts. They’re doing quite well in the current administration. Reality has stressed their faith-based worldview too far, and they’re fighting back. Thus:
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The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch, today: The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over, subtitled “For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.”
And it’s not new. The precursor of today’s Fox News was the “yellow press” mentioned here, over a century ago. The essay begins:
Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.
But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
In other words, Trump’s naive, tribal, superstitious intuition. The modern world didn’t get built using his methods. It’s only being torn down using his methods. He’s a child tearing down what adults have built that he doesn’t understand.
I am not familiar with Habermas. The article provides much background. He lived long enough to see the internet age. I’ll close with how Kirsch closes:
Habermas was in his 90s when he wrote about social media, and if anything, he underestimated the challenge it poses—not just to liberal democracy, but to his own thought and worldview. The most sinister effect of the internet on today’s politics isn’t just that it foments division. It’s that the weightlessness of online existence breeds a kind of gleeful nihilism. Instead of discourse, social media encourages trolling—the principle that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as people pay attention to you.
Habermas was right to call Trump autocratic, but what makes him a strongman for the social-media age is his maddening frivolity—the way he doesn’t seem to know or care what he’s doing or what he will do next. Because he doesn’t take anything seriously, he makes it almost impossible to take him seriously, even as he inflicts entirely serious damage on people and institutions. This quality makes Trump an enigma to political theorists, but a star on social media—a medium where “all that is solid melts into air,” to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx. When cruelty and carelessness can be such a politically effective combination, it’s clear that the era of rational discourse—the era of Jürgen Habermas—is well and truly over.
I appreciate that idea of weightlessness, and the Karl Marx phrase. In a trivial way I’m frustrated by that every day, just scrolling through Facebook. Wait, what was that article? Can I scroll back and find it? Can I capture the link? Usually not. Facebook reinvents itself every minute or two, if you stop scrolling. (And searching on a keyword of what I’m trying to find only rarely works.) There’s no there there.
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I think the subtitle of this piece explains everything. There have been countless examples over the years. Conservatives are hypocrites.
The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 28 Apr 2026: Calling Trump a Tyrant Is Not a Call to Violence, subtitled “Conservatives want to police how we talk about Trump—while excusing how the president talks about everyone else.”
Republicans forget all the times Trump called for this or that person to be hanged, or shot.
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Briefly noted.
- The Week, 2 May 2026: Saturday Wrap. The item lower-left on this page titled “Murder, Inc.” Subtitled “The true-crime industry is booming. But there’s a cost to repackaging tragedy as entertainment.”
- I’ve mentioned this before, in two ways. First, Americans think crime is rampant partly because they see so much of it on TV — more than happens in real life. Second: *why* do they like watching depictions of crime on TV (or reading crime dramas in books)? Maybe because humans are primed to rehearse potential risks. Just as children “play” to rehearse adult situations.
- “But critics argue that true crime gives Americans a misleading picture of real crime. Serial killers, a favorite of the genre, are exceptionally rare.”
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- Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, today: An arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe? Hitler wanted that too, subtitled “Tyrants and dictators often dream of building gigantic monuments to themselves. It usually doesn’t work”
- Trump is just another would-be tyrant and dictator.
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- NY Times, opinion by Christopher Caldwell, today: America Is Officially an Empire in Decline
- Happy, MAGA? This is what you wanted, right?
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- JMG, today: Blanche: “Every Time You Walk Into A Restaurant, You Have To Show ID, How About Doing That For Voting?”
- What world are they living in? This is flatly not true. They’re just searching for excuses to disenfranchise voters who wouldn’t vote Republican.
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The Guardian, Robert Tait, today: ‘This is just disarray’: alarm inside Pentagon after Hegseth staff purges, subtitled “Insiders portray defense secretary as increasingly isolated after officers with impeccable reputations forced out”
When things aren’t going right, this administration just fires people. Over and over again, we’ve seen how Trump only hires the “best people” only to fire many of them a few months or years later. Do his MAGA fans not notice?
