Why is MAGA obsessed with voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting? A NYT essay suggests as a rationalization for Trump losing in 2020, despite lack of evidence, or rationale;
While Heather Cox Richardson sees it as a reaction to the losing appeal of white nationalism and ICE, a ploy to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate;
An essay about the “edgelords” of the GOP, trying to rationalize the destruction of progressive ideas;
JMG on Trump’s Columbus statue and obsession with watching out for missiles;
And the opening movement of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha.
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Two items today about why MAGA are obsessed with the idea of illegal voting. Despite the lack of evidence.
Jerry Coyne on prayer, triggering off Savannah Guthrie news;
How Jeff Bezos is destroying The Washington Post just as Trump has done with America;
Short takes.
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It’s only getting worse. We’re succumbing to our worst instincts. Our idealistic institutions to overcome those worst instincts are being torn apart by the current administration.
Conservatives do this with books too, which is why NYT bestseller lists put asterisks on ranking titles with evidence of “bulk” sales; because they’re not sales to people who buy the book because they want to read it.
New Hampshire Republicans have proposed a constitutional amendment that would elevate Christianity over all other religions and allow local communities to elect public school teachers… who presumably share their Christian faith.
The goal is to turn the state into a full-blown Christian theocracy.
I could comment about their defiance of the Constitution — but we’ve been there. What’s notable here is that this is evidence that the most aggressive religions are those they tend to predominate. It’s a kind of natural selection, driven not by evidence of truth, but by aggressive proselytizing. Verifiable truth has nothing to do with it.
Satire. On the heels of the conservative upset over the Grammy Awards, including the mere existence of Bad Bunny, and accusations against Netflix as being too woke (e.g. here), this is entirely plausible.
Decrying the un-American nature of any activity intended to provide amusement or the slightest bit of diversion, conservatives across the country announced an immediate boycott Tuesday of all forms of entertainment. “The insidious liberal bias in music, movies, literature, and television is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Nashville, TN, resident Drew Cardona, one of the millions of conservatives nationwide seen dragging trash cans overstuffed with books, laptops, and artwork to the edge of their driveway, not to mention others observed in groups setting fire to piles of game consoles.
There’s more. But it’s exactly true. The arts, from music to movies to video games, are always about exploring the norms of any one era, and then challenging the norms and overturning them to create new norms. This is how humans create, how they learn. It’s been true in science fiction literature; it’s been true in pop music; it’s been true in movies; it’s been true in every artistic form. And that’s why conservatives are uncomfortable with all of them. They look back in time to when music or movies were great, unlike anything now, but they are only regressing to their childhoods. And they accuse change as being leftist. Whereas change is inevitable. They just can’t handle it.
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A couple more serious pieces. First, on a theme I’ve noted repeatedly.
The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 3 Feb 2026: WWJD in Minneapolis, subtitled “We are fighting the regime not on the grounds of power but of legitimacy—and it’s a Christian struggle.”
This goes to the insularity of Christians, who think themselves at the very center of all creation, the reason for all being. I’ll quote a bit.
I’m sorry to break it to you, MAGA Christians, but America isn’t a Christian nation.
In fact, God doesn’t bless it, either.
That’s not how this works.
Now, I know this blows up the convenient narrative you’ve been selling for the past 250 years (and pretty violently the last year or so), but honestly, that nasty bit of heresy is straight-up of the devil, and it needs to go.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I know it isn’t from the Bible.
Your beloved John 3:16, which you always have ready to throw out like a grenade, is pretty darn clear.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
God loves the world.
The planet.
Like, everyone here.
Everyone.
God is in the world-loving business, not the America-blessing business.
And later:
There’s no way America could be a Christian nation, and that’s really good news for you.
You wouldn’t want America to be a Christian nation anyway (if such a thing were even possible). That would mean you’d be living in a country that embodied Jesus’ teachings; a country where the hungry would be fed and not shamed or starved; where the sick would be made well without needing to earn it or justify themselves.
If America were a Christian nation, that would mean that the assailed would receive rest and refuge, that the foreigner would be warmly welcomed, that every human being would be treated like a treasured neighbor made in the image of God, and that you would be compelled by your faith to make sure this all happened.
Posted inconservatives, Psychology, Religion|Comments Off on Christian Hypocrisy: The Beatitudes, vs. the Reality in Minneapolis
The Kennedy Center was doing just fine until Trump slapped his name on it, and more and more performers cancelled their engagements to avoid any association with him. Trump pretends something else is the problem — it’s a “tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years” — in order to deflect from the obvious circumstances.
Michael Shermer has a new book out called TRUTH, which re-visits topics and themes from his earlier books (I’m half way through it.) Those topics and themes are still important. Here’s what isn’t said to be an excerpt, exactly, though it might be.
As I’ve said, and as David Brin and others keep saying, the evidence that strange things in the sky are alien visitors is no better now than it was in the 1950s and ’60. The photos — even those presented by the US government a few years ago — are just as blurry, despite the overwhelming preponderance of pocket phones with great cameras over the past couple decades. That fact, combined with the psychological needs of some people to want to see UFOs as aliens, explains them away. But it takes people like Shermer to keep reminding us of the situation.
I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.
He goes on to address the evidence. Very few sightings qualify as unidentified. According to astronauts, the space environment is prone to optical illusions. Shermer addresses three ideas, that UFO and UAP sighting are
1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) [or] 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).
And concluding that most sighting are in the first category. The second?
That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies.
The third?
It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.
What’s actually going on
is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials.
And finishing,
I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.
Aside from the last point, that’s what I concluded decades ago. And what most scientists and rational people have done. I’m not so sure about the “deities for atheists” part, unless it’s purely unconscious.
This article goes to the larger issue of human perception, and how scientific ideas are accepted or rejected to extent that they support or challenge primitive tribal myths.
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Another thought piece for today. Zakaria takes the big picture.
Donald Trump, JD Vance and other MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is “civilizational erasure,” which they claim is happening in Europe: Through its dangerously misguided approach toward identity and immigration, Europe is destroying the West’s distinctive legacy.
But the West’s defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity — that describes most of the world. The West’s precious, almost unique, achievement has been the limitation of state power. Since Magna Carta in 1215, the West gradually placed constraints on rulers — through rights for citizens, independent courts, a sovereign church and the sanctity of private property. That inheritance is what made the West democratic and prosperous. It is also what made it stable: Citizens could dissent, businesses could invest and civil society could flourish because power was bounded by law.
The second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions.
With examples. My comment: most people won’t notice or care.
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And then, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Atlantic, Hillary Rodham Clinton, 29 Jan 2026: MAGA’s War on Empathy, subtitled “This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement.”
Long piece. I confess that when I link pieces like this, I don’t always take the time to read them through thoroughly. I skim them over a minute or two trying to find their essential point, and some quotable bit (whether it supports my preconceptions or not).
A couple samples from this piece:
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.
“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.
And
I know empathy isn’t easy. But neither is Christianity. When Jesus called on us to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us, it was supposed to be hard. We fail more than we succeed—we’re human—but the discipline is to keep trying.
It’s especially challenging to feel empathetic for people with whom we disagree passionately. I certainly struggle with this. You may remember that I once described half of Trump supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about people drawn to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—you name it. “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable,” I said. I still believe intolerance and hatred are deplorable. Slandering a peaceful protester and cheering his murder is deplorable. Terrorizing children because their parents are undocumented is deplorable. But as a Christian, I also aspire to see the goodness in everyone and believe that everyone has a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.
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Listening this evening: Bruckner 4.
Posted inCulture, Music, Science|Comments Off on Shermer, Zakaria, Clinton, Bruckner
What is the war on vaccines really about? Just after the New Year, like someone racing to fulfill a resolution, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA alliance at the Department of Health and Human Services released a radically revised federal vaccine schedule, bypassing the usual procedures and abruptly cutting the number of diseases for which shots are recommended from 17 to 11.
The new guidelines certainly look like the frontal assault on vaccine science many Americans have been fearing for a year. But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country’s threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country’s weak and vulnerable suffer and die.
“I mean, people will trust you more if you say, ‘you know what? I did not get that one right.’ The moral of the story is wait until the investigation is over, as hard as it is, no matter where you are in law enforcement, let the facts lead your talking.
“Do not talk and then hope the facts match up later on. It’s OK to say ‘I don’t have an answer to that question right now,’ in fact, it’s preferable.” – GOP rep turned Fox host Trey Gowdy.
But the pattern is that conservatives are eager to jump to conclusions, because they just know that anyone who opposes their regime must be evil, left-wing agitators. Trump, in particular, never admits to being wrong, and never apologizes.
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