The Insurrectionists Within

Posted on Monday 9 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No, Los Angeles is not burning down. Trump and his minions are lying. And whatever is happening recently, they started it. And apparently they have motives to start it.
  • Also, Los Angeles is huge;
  • David A. Graham in The Atlantic: Trump is like a bad parent, “never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to”;
  • Philip Bump on Trump’s incessant need to quash critics;
  • Trump’s view of law and order: “Can’t you just shoot them?”;
  • David French on how America is no longer a stable country.
– – –

To hear Trump and his minions like Hegseth and Bondi (children playing at being adults) you’d think California was as devastated as the Gaza Strip, and Californians should all be grateful to Fearless Leader for trying to save us from our criminal governor.

It’s nonsense of course. Here are James Woods (the actor) and Ted Cruz spreading a photo of a car in flames that is actually from the 2020 George Floyd protests. Here’s Trump saying LA “would have been completely obliterated” were it not for the National Guard he sent it. Tommy Tuberville calls LA “a third world county” with “anarchists” in charge, and Gavin Newsom reminds him that Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California. ICE agents hide behind masks. Biden deported more people than Trump has, proportionately, and didn’t need troops in the streets to do so. (The cruelty is the point, for Trumpists.) And never mind all the civilians who attacked police on Jan. 6th who were *pardoned* by Trump.

Also this. The red circle in this map is downtown LA, where a few streets have been blocked off. (All the colored areas are the city of Los Angeles, which doesn’t include Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Long Beach, etc.) The Home Depot incidents on Saturday were in the small city of Paramount, at the right edge of the lower part of this map (also not part of LA).

The entire city is not in flames. Those who imply it is are lying (and/or geographically illiterate). And it’s not just that Trump lies incessantly — it’s that he’s deliberately trying to incite violence in states he doesn’t like and wants to subdue.

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This is echoes something I just said.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 9 Jun 2025: Trump vs. California, subtitled “The president is bullying states when it suits him and ignoring them when it doesn’t.”

Namely, the first line here:

Under Donald Trump, the federal government is like a bad parent: never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to.

The relationship between Trump and California has always been bad, but the past few days represent a new low. On Friday, CNN reported that the White House was seeking to cut off as much federal funding to the Golden State as possible, especially to state universities. That afternoon, protests broke out in Los Angeles as ICE agents sought to make arrests. By Saturday, Trump had announced that he was federalizing members of the National Guard and deploying them to L.A., over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

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Trump desperately needs to be worshiped. He gains worship from his fans by being mean to the people his fans hate. Serving the nation, or the better good, or the United States’ position in the world, has nothing to do with it, and is of no interest to him.

Washington Post, Philip Bump, 9 Jun 2025: Donald Trump vs. California (and everywhere else), subtitled “What happened in California this weekend was another facet of the president’s effort to quash critics.”

What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. His team, The Post reported, was “asking federal employees to develop rationales for the funding cuts” — perhaps looking at conflicts with his executive orders about cutting costs or ending diversity initiatives.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded by noting that the state contributes far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. But the point wasn’t really the money. The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel, precisely as it had sought to bring elite universities to heel, similarly by contriving reasons the government might strip funding. The methodology was the same because the intent was the same: inflict pain on an entity that Trump viewed as hostile to his presidency.

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Trump’s view of law and order.

AlterNet/The Conversation, 9 Jun 2025: ‘Can’t you just shoot them?’ Inside Trump’s threat to deal with ‘radical left thugs’ in America

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A rehash, with perspective.

NY Times, David French, 8 Jun 2025: America Is No Longer a Stable Country

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight on America’s streets. On Saturday, after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence, the administration reacted as if the country were on the brink of war.

The violence was unacceptable. Civil disobedience is honorable; violence is beyond the pale. But so far, thankfully, the violence has been localized and, crucially, well within the capacity of state and city officials to manage.

But don’t tell that to the Trump administration. Its language was out of control.

Then follow examples from Stephen Miller (“Insurrection”), JD Vance (“invasion”), Pete Hegseth (call in the Marines!), and Trump (“the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”).

Of course it’s Trump and ICE who caused the problem in the first place. They claim they’re enforcing the law, but it’s obvious to everyone who are not MAGAites that they’re enforcing the law very selectively, against black and brown people they don’t think belong in the United States. (And along other fronts, intellectuals they don’t like.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Comments Off on The Insurrectionists Within

Clooney’s Murrow; Trump Calls Out the National Guard

Posted on Sunday 8 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck;
  • Trump calls out the National Guard (what’s next? Martial Law?);
  • Louisiana bans chemtrails;
  • Trump’s big bill prioritizes the religious right (of course)
– – –

First of all. We watched the live stream of George Clooney’s Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck” yesterday afternoon (it began at 4pm West Coast time), on CNN. We’d seen the 2005 film starring David Strathairn. The Broadway version stars George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. I think Strathairn might have been the better impersonation, but Clooney is the more powerful actor. I was impressed by the stage settings: the multiple sets on one stage that the lighting kept redirecting among; the occasional overlapping scenes in different places. But I’ve seen a couple Broadway shows ever; perhaps such stage-work legerdemain is routine. Clooney is very good, though he couldn’t keep his own self from sometimes seeping through — there’s a line half way through about Americans leaving for Europe, and Clooney couldn’t help a self-deprecating smirk.

But most important is the play’s theme of course, and how it’s become even more relevant to current events even since work on this play began a year or two ago. Conservatives in the early 1950s were frightened by Communists and demonized anyone suspected, ruining their careers; today conservatives are frightened by non-whites and ‘woke’ people and cut legal corners to expel them from the country, or at least ruin their lives, as Trump has done by firing so many non-whites from careers they achieved through merit. A concept Trump does not actually understand. He values only loyalty. The play ends with a montage of film clips about history since the 1950s, ending with Musk’s Nazi salute, as Clooney stands in front, ending with a final speech. And a range of emotions on his face.

Clooney’s final speech is worth quoting, but I couldn’t find a source to quote from; the several sources I found quote something slightly different. I liked the passage with four i-words: ignorance, indifference, etc., but I don’t remember it exactly, nor can I find it online. Clooney co-wrote the 2005 film, so of course he’s entitled to tweak his wording onstage… perhaps every single time.

(Most of this posted on Facebook, last night.)

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So this is the weekend that Trump has called out the National Guard against people in Los Angeles protesting the administration’s Gestapo ICE agents from rounding up brown people at a Home Depot. (Remember ICE has targets to hit –3000 arrests *a day* — and aren’t too careful about due process. If they’re brown, assume guilt and fix later if exposed by the media.)

With an unfolding story like this, newspaper and CNN headlines are changing regularly. Here’s an overview from a magazine that doesn’t update quite so frequently.

The Atlantic, David Frum, 8 Jun 2025: For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal, subtitled “Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened.”

Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.

If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.

Note how when California needs help, Trump plays politics. When it doesn’t need help but Trump wants to make a point, he imposes ‘help’ upon them. This is likely to escalate.

But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:

Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.

Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.

Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.

They’ve been contemplating these tactics for some time.

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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 8 Jul 2025: Trump Is Using the National Guard as Bait, subtitled “Don’t give him the pretext he wants.”

President Donald Trump is about to launch yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations, this time in Los Angeles. Under a dubious legal rationale, he is activating 2,000 members of the National Guard to confront protests against actions by ICE, the immigration police who have used thuggish tactics against citizens and foreigners alike in the United States.

By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.

The president and the men and women around him are acting with great ambition in this moment, and they are likely hoping to achieve three goals in one dramatic action.

First, they will turn America’s attention away from Trump’s many failures and inane feuds, and reestablish his campaign persona as a strongman who will brush aside the law if that’s what it takes to keep order in the streets. Perhaps nothing would please Trump more than to replace weird stories about Elon Musk with video of masked protesters burning cars as lines of helmeted police and soldiers march over them and impose draconian silence in one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities.

Second, as my colleague David Frum warned this morning, Trump is establishing that he is willing to use the military any way he pleases, perhaps as a proof of concept for suppressing free elections in 2026 or 2028. Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle. Those are his toy soldiers, and he’s going to get a show from his honor guard in a birthday parade next weekend. In the meantime, he’s going to flex that muscle, and prove that the officers and service members who will do whatever he orders are the real military. The rest are suckers and losers.

…

Third, Trump may be hoping to radicalize the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard. (Seizing the California Guard is also a convenient way to humiliate California Governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, with the president’s often-used narrative that liberals can’t control their own cities.) Trump has the right to “federalize” Guard forces, which is how they were deployed overseas in America’s various conflicts. He has never respected the traditions of American civil-military relations, which regard the domestic deployment of the military as an extreme measure to be avoided whenever possible. Using the Guard could be a devious tactic: He may be hoping to set neighbor against neighbor, so that the people called to duty return to their home and workplace with stories of violence and injuries.

And so on. Nichols ends:

So far, even the Los Angeles Police Department—not exactly a bastion of squishy suburban book-club liberals—has emphasized that the protests have been mostly peaceful. Trump is apparently trying to change that. Sending in the National Guard is meant to provoke, not pacify, and his power will only grow if he succeeds in tempting Americans to intemperate reactions that give him the authoritarian opening he’s seeking.

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Short items.

NOLA.com, 2 Jun 2025: Louisiana Republicans pass bill ‘banning’ chemtrails, which are not a real thing (via)

The Louisiana Legislature has passed a new bill to outlaw “chemtrails,” a made-up and very fake thing that conspiracy theorists and other assorted fringe people believe in.

Because of course.

(What could be next? GOP votes to prohibit alien spacecraft from landing on the White House lawn?)

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Of course it is.

Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 6 Jun 2025: Trump’s Big Bill Packed With Religious-Right Priorities

It wasn’t long ago that congressional Republicans railed against voting for “omnibus” budget legislation, but that was before President Donald Trump demanded support for what he calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” As Trump rants about judges upholding the law and interfering with his efforts to rule like a king, the Republicans’ bill would even limit judges’ ability to enforce their orders.

Republican leaders have stuffed the legislation—passed by the House and now before the Senate—with provisions to please Trump and every corner of the right-wing base. Trump’s Christian nationalist allies are portraying support for the package as a way to push their anti-abortion and anti-equality social agenda under cover of the budget process, along with Trump’s priority tax cuts for billionaires and cuts to social safety net programs.

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Listening to movie score music by Carter Burwell, and Michael Danna, recently…

Posted in authoritarianism, Lunacy, Music, Politics | Comments Off on Clooney’s Murrow; Trump Calls Out the National Guard

Meltdown; Reign of Errors; People Trump doesn’t want to exist; Harari on humans in 1000 years

Posted on Friday 6 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Details of the Trump/Musk meltdown;
  • The Trump administration’s reign of errors;
  • Such as DOGE firing people and quickly hiring them back;
  • The people Trump doesn’t want to exist;
  • Yuval Noah Harari on how humans won’t exist in 1000 years, perhaps not even 100.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson, June 5, 2025, summarizes the Trump Musk public fight. Selection:

Musk’s behavior is erratic in its own right, but if there is anything but pique behind it, it appears he is threatening Trump by making a play to control the Republican Party. In response to a post by conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer suggesting that Republican lawmakers are unsure if they should side with Trump or Musk, Musk wrote: “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder that question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”

…

Economist Robert Reich had perhaps the best summary of the fight today when he noted, “That any of us have to care about the messy breakup of these two massive narcissists—and that they both individually wield such massive power—is an indictment of our political system and further proves the poisonous influence of Big Money on our democracy.”

And then, as Richardson does, she segues to history: to FDR’s fireside chat on June 5 1944, discussing the progress of the war. Rome had fallen to Allied troops.

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Familiar themes, today.

Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 6 Jun 2025: They are not good at this, subtitled “Nearly five months into Trump’s new reign of error, his administration’s mistakes are multiplying.”

Most recently a list released by Kristi Noem about sanctuary cities.

But it immediately became clear that the list of more than 500 states, counties and cities was riddled with errors: misspellings, cities and counties mistaken for each other, and places that don’t exist. Cincinnati became “Cincinnatti,” Campbell County (Kentucky) became “Cambell” County, Greeley County (Nebraska) became “Greenley” County, Takoma Park (Maryland) became “Tacoma” Park, while “Martinsville County” (Virginia) was invented. And so on.

Worse, scores of the “sanctuary politicians” she called out turned out to be leaders of MAGA counties and towns with no sanctuary policies on their books. Complaints poured in from Trump allies across the country. “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document,” said Pat Burns, the Trump-backing mayor of the right-wing stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, mislabeled as a sanctuary city. He told the Associated Press that “somebody’s got to answer” for this “negligent” behavior.

Good luck with that. The only answer was to disappear the list this week, leaving behind a “Page Not Found” error.

Remember, Trump hires only the best people!

The article goes on with more and more examples. RFK Jr’s report with citations that were AI hallucinations. Trump’s list of tariff nations that included an island occupied only by penguins. The Education Secretary who didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Karoline Leavitt unaware of the results of the South Korean election. Noem again and again. She’s the one who wears a cowboy hat indoors and who famously shot her dog. What has American government come to?

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And a big example in particular.

Washington Post, 6 Jun 2025: Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people, subtitled “Across the government, officials are rehiring federal workers who were forced out or encouraged to resign.”

Early this spring, the Food and Drug Administration fired nearly 50 workers in the Office of Regulatory Policy — only to turn around and order them back to the office with one day’s notice.

After dismissing thousands of probationary employees for fabricated “performance” issues, the IRS reversed course and told them to show up to work in late May.

And some staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, dismantled in the first days of the Trump administration by a gleeful Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the U.S. DOGE Service, checked their inboxes this month to find an unexpected offer: Would you consider returning — to work for the State Department?

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

Apparently this is happening so often that most examples don’t make the news.

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Who are the people who support Trump and what his team are doing? Are they unaware of their incompetence? What is it that’s more important to them than competence? They prefer incompetence as long as Trump and his team hate the same people they do?

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For example. This is the essence of fascism, and white supremacy. Why doesn’t this bother more people??

Washington Post, Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell, 6 Jun 2025: Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist, subtitled “Women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community are main targets”

When the Trump administration encounters a group it doesn’t respect or care for, oftentimes it just deletes them — specifically, the very record of their existence.

For example, when the Defense Department was asked to cull all DEI-related content from its websites, it removed approximately 26,000 images. A list of the deleted photos was given to the Associated Press. About 19,000 of them included descriptions, and our analysis found that 4 out of 5 depicted women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities. We recovered a handful of the photos so you can see what’s missing.

The bulk of the piece is an interactive set of photos with captions. Ending:

This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American “golden age.” Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s “missing persons.”

Of course, other categories of people Trump wants to disappear cannot be easily photographed. The scientists. The smart people.

As a gay and as an educated relatively smart person, I would be cancelled twice by the Trump administration, if they got around to finding me.

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Finally for today, a video on Facebook from Yuval Noah Harari, who takes the big picture.

Facebook: What Will Humans Be Like in a Thousand Years?

I’ll copy the description; I don’t have time to transcribe everything Harari says.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari said he believes humans in their current form won’t exist in 1,000 years.

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Beat” with MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, the intellectual discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and how humans will adapt to new technologies. Harari said that humans “absolutely won’t be around” in 1,000 years in their current form.

“If we survive for 1,000 years, we will change ourselves so radically that we will no longer be Homo sapiens, we’ll be something else,” he said.

He said due to climate change, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, future human beings will be of a different species similar to how today’s humans are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees.

This is the perspective that the best of science fiction tries to achieve. And what I’m trying to capture…

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Meltdown; Reign of Errors; People Trump doesn’t want to exist; Harari on humans in 1000 years

They Said It Wouldn’t Last, and It Hasn’t

Posted on Thursday 5 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The Trump/Musk bromance implodes;
  • Hannity lies about the impact of the “big beautiful bill”;
  • Republicans try to discredit experts warning about the cost of tax cuts;
  • David French on Joni Ernst, and how Christianity has become a vertical, not horizontal, faith;
  • David Brooks on world-shifting political movements and how it’s somehow the Democrats’ fault for not properly responding to the current populist movement here and around the world; with my comments.
– – –

And, Jeffrey Epstein!

ABC News, 5 Jun 2025: Trump Musk feud explodes with claim president is in Epstein files, subtitled “Trump has not responded to Musk’s attack regarding the alleged sex trafficker.”

CNN, 5 Jun 2025: Trump and Musk escalate public feud over agenda bill

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Perhaps trivial by comparison. But again: Hannity, on behalf of Trump, just lies. And knows his viewers won’t know any better.

Media Matters, 5 Jun 2025: Sean Hannity grossly misrepresents CBO report about Trump’s “big beautiful bill.” Even Fox’s own website got it right., subtitled “The Congressional Budget Office report said that the “big beautiful bill” would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, but Hannity falsely claimed the report projected it would actually reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion.”

No, *everyone* out of the Trump cult bubble is reporting how the BBB will *increase* the debt. This is what led Elon Musk to condemn the bill — because it completely overwhelms the claimed savings he accomplished with DOGE. Claimed to be some $165 billion, without evidence, so probably much less.

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Trump’s fans will believe anything Trump tells them, apparently. If meteorologists say it’s raining and Trump wants it to be sunny, he will claim the meteorologists are Democrats, or woke, and can’t be trusted. Looking at actual evidence is not an option.

NY Times, Tony Romm, 4 Jun 2025: Republicans Try to Discredit Experts Warning About the Cost of Tax Cuts, subtitled “President Trump and his allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of Republicans’ tax ambitions.”

Listen to this guy, Mr. Smith.

Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday, one of the bill’s chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate.

“I’m skeptical,” Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation’s cost. “Unless I like the number, I’m against the number.”

If he doesn’t “like” the number, it can’t be right.

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One more about Joni Ernst.

NY Times, David French, 5 Jun 2025: Selfishness Is Not a Virtue

French begins by recounting Ernst’s comments, all the way up to her follow-up video extolling Jesus Christ as the solution to Medicaid cuts. Then, here’s the core of French’s essay:

The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.

Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.

But why bring Jesus into it?

America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.

I like that distinction between vertical and horizontal faith. Yet the horizontal faith is usually just tribal.

Then French recalls Wendell Berry reflecting on Christianity in the slave-owning South. The essay concludes:

Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.

But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.

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Is the reactionary response of conservatives to the modern era really the Democrats’ fault? A longish piece by David Brooks, that puts current issues in a larger perspective.

NY Times, David Brooks, 5 Jun 2025: The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think

First, the historical overview:

There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the L.G.B.T.Q. movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.

And then he claims that

The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party.

Which elites? The billionaires that the GOP embraces (for a while at least)? Or the residents of blue states? To think the latter is paranoia. Further, I would say, because it’s easy to invoke simple solutions from simpler times, rather than to wait for the general population to catch up to modern times in an increasingly complex world. Many of us catch up easily and adjust, and marvel at how different things are now than when we were children. Many others, to the extent they notice, resent it.

And so what are Democrats supposed to do?

If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.

…

My second notion is this: Pay attention to Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a Republican president in the middle of the welfare state era. He basically said: I’m going to endorse the basic shape of the New Deal, but I’m going to achieve those ends more sensibly. You can trust me.

And concluding:

For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.

To show that, you have to be willing to take on your activist groups: We’re going to reform schools in ways the unions don’t like. We’re going to reform zoning in a way the NIMBY brigades don’t like. We’re going to reform Congress in ways the incumbents don’t like. We’re going to talk about patriotism and immigration in ways the groups don’t like. We’re going to fix how blue cities are governed in a way the groups don’t like.

Do you really think professional politicians are going to lead the tectonic shifts that are required? That takes intellectuals, organizers, a new generation, all of us. It’s the work of decades, not election cycles. Clear your mind. Think anew.

Or, perhaps, the problem is that actual change is outpacing the rate that many people can adjust to change. But not all. It will happen, eventually. It may take a couple generations.

Also: history, it seems to me, is about progress and regression. Would Brooks have given similar advice in an era of slavery?

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on They Said It Wouldn’t Last, and It Hasn’t

Harvey Milk, DEI, Lysenko, Jesus

Posted on Wednesday 4 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Pete Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from an oil tanker as part of reestablishing “the warrior culture”;
  • Trump fires head of the National Portrait Gallery, because ridding the government of DEI is about “the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.”
  • The administration now wants to regulate science, with Heather Cox Richardson recalling how that worked out for the Soviets with Lysenko;
  • And how Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” is grounded in religion fatalism, and a reliance on belief in Jesus Christ.
– – –

The Trump administration is upfront with its bigotry.

Salon, Blaise Malley, 3 Jun 2025: “Shameful, vindictive erasure”: Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk’s name from Navy ship, subtitled “One defense official told reporters that announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to remove the name of gay rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk from one of its ships.

Per a report from Military.com, the order was passed down in a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan. The memo said that the redesignation of the oil tanker USNS Harvey Milk was an attempt to get into “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.”

Because it’s important that a oil tanker have a name that represents warrior culture? (Warrior culture??) And that’s not the only name:

On Tuesday, CBS News reported that the Navy was looking into changing the names of other ships named after prominent civil rights leaders and icons, including Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriett Tubman, Cesar Chavez and Medgar Evers.

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Which dovetails with this.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 4 Jun 2025: Now the President Is an Art Critic

Last week, President Trump announced that he had fired the head of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

“Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am herby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of D.E.I., which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”

Key line is this characterization of DEI:

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Trump’s disdain for Sajet, given his aggressive effort to rid the federal government of “D.E.I.,” which has turned out to mean the mere presence of nonwhites and women the president doesn’t like in positions of authority.

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Now the administration thinks it knows better about how to do science. (Because it has in mind conclusions it wants, presumably.)

NY Times, Somini Sengupta, 3 Jun 2025: The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to ‘Correct’ Research., subtitled “Thousands of scientists, academics, physicians and researchers have responded to the administration’s executive order about ‘restoring a gold standard for science.'”

[T]he May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.

Of course it does!

Since Mr. Trump returned to the presidency in January, his executive actions have not expressed robust support for science, nor even an understanding of how scientists work.

Among other things, the administration has eviscerated National Science Foundation research funding and fired staff scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, which is responsible for forecasting weather hazards. A government report on child health cited research papers that did not exist.

The article goes on to mention routine scientific standards, like reproducibility and peer review, as if these were things scientists were not already doing. The greatest implied threat:

“As scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing,” the letter reads. “Instead this administration mandates a centralized system serving the political beliefs of the President and the whims of those in power.”

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Heather Cox Richardson discusses this in her column of a couple days ago — June 2, 2025 — and cites the most famous, and tragic, example of government control of science. Referring to an article in The Guardian.

The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.

As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century [[ the science was natural selection and Darwinism ]] in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.

In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.

“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”

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The story still playing out from a few days ago is about Sen. Joni Ernst’s defense of Medicaid cuts. Most of the reports I saw, maybe all, were too polite to mention her closing comments.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 4 Jun 2025: Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” pushes MAGA’s toxic Christian compassion on us all, subtitled “Evangelicals in the MAGA era call empathy a ‘sin'”

“We’re all going to die” she said. Sure. True enough.

Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren’t asking to live forever. They just don’t want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. “But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she smugly declared.

What do we take from this? This is toxic Christianity; fatalism. “She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes.”

This strikes me as a contemptible religion. (And it surely doesn’t align with what Jesus says in the NT, as far as I know.)

Elsewhere I read today: God has a plan, the future is fixed, there’s no point in trying to change your destiny.

But it’s curious how these rationalizations seem to justify those who would cut benefits for the poor, in favor of giving tax cuts to the rich. It always seems to work out that way.

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One more. There is a deep, unpleasant, truth here.

Slate, Susan Matthews, 4 Jun 2025: Finally, a Republican Just Admits It, subtitled “Maybe Joni Ernst is onto something.”

The article discusses Ernst’s apology.

All of that was incredible enough. How interesting to witness this precise breakdown, in real time, of how exhausting it seems to pretend to care about people when you do not (not caring is the entire premise of this second Trump administration). But what was even more remarkable than this video was what came next. Unfortunately, this part was obscene but very not relatable. In response to the backlash she was receiving for her town hall empathy break, Ernst posted an apology that turned out to be a sarcastic nonapology. It is set in a cemetery. Again, it’s worth watching!

Here’s the video URL

The deep, unpleasant truth is how these religious people think everything is fixed by God and so there no point in helping people who are doomed to die no matter what we do. And, again, how this policy happens to benefit themselves.

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Harvey Milk, DEI, Lysenko, Jesus

Feudalism, Suicide, Ignorance, Disease, Conservative DEI

Posted on Tuesday 3 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a round of doom and gloom essays today. This is where we are.

  • The drive toward privatization will lead to feudalism;
  • Max Boot on the suicide of a superpower;
  • Paul Krugman on how we’re no longer a serious country, as the world is noticing;
  • Robert Reich on ignorance and tyranny;
  • Jonah Goldberg on how loyalty to Trump is all that matters;
  • Two pieces about Elon Musk: “a legacy of disease, starvation and death”;
  • Jerry Coyne on how the call for conservative balance in academia is just another version of DEI;
  • And the irony of denouncing antisemitism from an administration driven by white supremacy.
– – –

This is what those who want the shrink the government by privatizing everything would lead to.

The Atlantic, Cullen Murphy, 3 Jun 2025: Feudalism Is Our Future, subtitled “What the next Dark Ages could look like”

[T]he Middle Ages were supposed to stay where they were. But they have not. With the accelerating advance of privatization, they seem to be moving our way in the form of something that resembles feudalism. Medievalists argue over what that word really means, parsing it with contentious refinement. Was it even understood at the time? Stripped bare, though, the idea is simple enough.

In Europe, as imperial power receded, a new system of organization took hold, one in which power, governance, law, security, rights, and wealth were decentralized and held in private hands. Those who possessed this private power were linked to one another, from highest to lowest, in tiers of vassalage. The people above also had obligations to the people below—administering justice, providing protection. Think of the system, perhaps, as a nesting doll of oligarchs presiding over a great mass of people who subsisted as villeins and serfs.

(After this, in my big picture scheme, came principles of the Enlightenment, including American Revolution and Constitution, designed to overcome the worst aspects of authoritarian human nature.)

The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights.

(It worked for quite a while. Now we’re slipping back.)

In the 1980s and ’90s, privatization started gaining traction again, and it had plenty of help. Anti-government sentiment created opportunities, and entrepreneurs seized them. Privatization was also pushed by policy makers who saw outsourcing as inherently more efficient. And besides, the public sector can’t do everything. Case by case, privatization of this or that may well make sense. The problem comes in the sheer accumulation. In the U.S., even before Trump took office a second time, there were roughly twice as many people employed by private contractors to do the federal government’s business as there were federal employees.

And now the current administration is undoing public control and enriching private entrepreneurs.

Oversight more broadly—of the environment, food, drugs, finance—has been drifting for decades into the hands of those being overseen. In their 2021 book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian documented the loss of public control over water, roads, welfare, parks, and much else. The deliberate dismantling of government in America in recent months, and its replacement with something built on privatized power and networks of personal allegiance, accelerates what was long under way. Its spirit was captured decades ago in a maxim of Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum: “Don’t just stand there— undo something!”

Concluding:

Is feudalism our future? There is no “must” in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn’t have a name yet, and it won’t be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem “Middle.” With contentious refinement, historians will parse what “privatization” might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.

It’s been said that one reason Americans are reluctant to tax the wealthy is because every American secretly hopes he’ll be wealthy one day too. And that is a consequence, ironically, of American’s freedom. Unlike the ancient feudal societies, in American society one *can* change one’s social position, and everyone dreams of it. Yet it doesn’t happen as often as people think. The billionaires mostly inherited their wealth. If it were so easy to work really hard and become a billionaire, why haven’t more people done it?

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Suicide of a superpower.

Washington Post, Max Boot, 3 Jun 2025: We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower, subtitled “The president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower status.”

On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy display of U.S. military power will parade through Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.

But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.

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Paul Krugman, 3 Jun 2025: We Are No Longer a Serious Country, subtitled “And the world is starting to notice”

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This line is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan. Whoever said it definitely had a point, and not just about politics. If you’re trying to explain to people, be they voters or bond investors, that you aren’t really as bad or untrustworthy as you seem, you’re already in deep trouble.

So when I saw Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, declaring Sunday that “The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” my reaction was, “Uh-oh.”

And it’s not just me. For generations investors have treated U.S. government debt as the ultimate safe asset. Whenever disaster strikes — even if it’s disaster largely made in America, like the 2008 subprime crisis — bond buyers pile into U.S. Treasuries, because America is a serious country, and the idea that we would fail to honor our debts was unthinkable.

But are we still that country? Markets seem to have doubts.

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A point made time and again.

Robert Reich, 3 Jun 2025: Trump’s Vicious Attack on the American Mind, subtitled “He wants America to be ignorant because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny”

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.

And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.

With five facets of attack:

1. Rewrite history
2. Gut education
3. Dismantle science
4. Suppress the media
5. Attack the arts

Do his fans not care? Or (I suspect) they are simply unaware.

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It’s only about loyalty.

LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 2 Jun 2025: Trump shows that loyalty is all that matters to him

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For once, an honest headline.

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 30 May 2025: Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death [gift link]

And another. I won’t quote; links are free.

NY Times, Louise Perry, 3 Jun 2025: How History Will Remember Elon Musk

Summary: not good. Hubris

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Jerry Coyne on how the call for diversity in academia, i.e. that more conservatives should be represented in academia, is “DEI.” That is, conservatives are against DEI when it involves people other than white Christians, but support it to promote themselves.

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 3 Jun 2025: Should academia practice “political DEI” and hire more conservatives?

Pointing to this Atlantic article from a few days ago:

The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, 27 May 2025: The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun, subtitled “In an effort to attract more right-leaning faculty, some elite universities are borrowing tactics long used to promote racial diversity.”

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One more irony, or hypocrisy.

NY Times, Peter Baker, 3 Jun 2025: Denouncing Antisemitism, Trump Also Fans Its Flames, subtitled “President Trump’s effort to punish Harvard over antisemitism is complicated by his extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbols.”

Posted in History, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Feudalism, Suicide, Ignorance, Disease, Conservative DEI

MAGA Stereotypes, Whataboutism, Monarchy

Posted on Monday 2 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on MAGA hate on New York, and the reality;
  • Beware “whataboutism,” which is easy and wrong;
  • Long New Yorker piece about a reactionary blogger’s call for an American monarchy.
– – –

Let’s see…. is it fair to say that conservatives in general, and MAGA types in particular, are more given to stereotypes, especially mean-spirited ones about how awful other people and other places are, than more enlightened people? That’s certainly consistent with simple-minded black-and-white thinking.

Somebody said recently that the US should be more like Florida and less like New York. This is someone in the MAGA-inspired Trump administration, of course, where MAGA seems to define itself by what it hates.

Paul Krugman, 2 Jun 2025: Hating New York, subtitled “What we can learn from a MAGA obsession”

MAGA and MAGA-adjacent types are very good at finding things and people to hate. They hate immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans), LGBTQ people and wokeness. They hate universities and are doing their best to destroy American science. The New York Times reports that they hate Europe. And they very much hate New York City.

OK, I’m not impartial on this issue. I grew up on Long Island and still think of NYC proper as “the city.” I live in Manhattan now, and my experience is that if you can afford housing — which is admittedly a huge problem — it’s actually a very good life, with an incredible range of things to do either in walking distance or a short subway ride away. Not everyone wants to live this way, but nobody is saying they should. All we ask is that some Americans be allowed to have favorable views of a place that provides the advantages density and, yes, diversity can offer.

But that, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right refuses to accept. New York is one of the safest places in America, yet much of the country insists on seeing it as a terrifying urban hellscape. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, insists that everyone is afraid to ride the subway:

If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a shithole.

Indeed, the subway is such an intolerable shithole that more than 4 million people ride it every day, myself among them.

These are stereotypes of people who’ve never actually been to these places. MAGA politicians hate on San Francisco too, based on reports about a few blocks (the ‘Tenderloin’ district near City Hall) in a 49-square mile city.

As an aside, it’s remarkable that federal officials — who are supposed to work for all of us — feel free to trash-talk major American cities, as long as the cities in question vote Democratic.

Then we get to treasury secretary Scott Bessent:”We want the U.S. to be more like Florida and less like New York.” Why? What does he mean? Then Krugman lays out some numbers, as shown in the chart linked above.

Krugman goes on to discuss several of the points in that chart, e.g.

Start at the top. In my opinion, one important aspect of the quality of life is not being dead, and New Yorkers on average live three years longer than Floridians. Life expectancy is even higher, 81.5 years, in New York City.

Why do New Yorkers live longer? One answer is that city life — which involves a lot more walking than suburban life — is generally good for you.

Another is that New Yorkers are considerably less likely than Floridians to be murdered. In my experience many Americans simply refuse to believe that New York in 2025 isn’t what it was in 1975, that it’s actually a low-crime city. But it is.

And New Yorkers are much less likely than most Americans to die in traffic accidents. Why? In the city and surrounding areas, one main answer has to be that so many people take public transit rather than driving.

And other items about how conservatives, and MAGA in particular, are an incurious bunch, easily comforted by thoughts of how morally superior they are in confusing world full of strange people and places.

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Themes of this blog: beware “common sense.” Avoid black and white thinking, which is what “whataboutism” is about. The world is complex.

The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 1 Jun 2025: Whataboutism Is Rotting Our Brains, Our Consciences, and Our Politics, subtitled “It’s easy, reassuring, and wrong.”

Before we can adequately respond to the frontal assault Donald Trump has launched on our way of life, we need to grapple with whataboutism. It is destroying our capacity to make rational judgments. In the face of an unprecedented defiance of law, tradition, and the Constitution, too many of us find ourselves so mired in polarized thinking that we can’t see straight.

Humans have always been beguiled by black-and-white thinking. Something is either good or bad. You are either with us or against us. Greek or barbarian. Saved or damned. Sigmund Freud coined the term “Madonna/whore complex” to describe the mindset of men who relegate women into one of two categories: pure or sullied. A related error in logic is called “tu quoque” (you too), a form of the ad hominem fallacy because it attacks the person rather than disproving their argument—which should sound familiar to anyone who’s lived through the past few years of American politics.

With some examples.

It’s perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It’s the easiest deflection. What is the proper response to Trump’s iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd’s murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump’s refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage? (Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? What about Joe Biden’s pardons of Hunter and his entire family?

Here again, you can understand this as simple-minded thinking that disregards proportion. No grays. Black or white.

This game can be played endlessly, and it has been played aggressively for the past decade. It’s important to dwell on the consequences. Some people who are caught in a lie, betrayal, or other transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage. That’s how mature people and societies stay civilized.

Truly depraved people don’t take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser (“tu quoque” was pretty much the theme of the 2016 presidential race) but also to breed cynicism. If “everybody does it” then it’s unfair to hold him accountable. And because people who constantly transgress can’t function with the knowledge that they are immoral, they must believe—and teach—that everyone is just as corrupt as they are; that the standards themselves are flawed or at least universally flouted. Does a mafia don tell his daughter that he’s a criminal, or does he explain that the world is composed of killers and losers and that you must choose one or the other?

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Long piece, which I haven’t read, but noted as evidence. Some on the right really do want a monarch to run the country. Which is to say, they reject the principles of American government.

The New Yorker, Ava Kofman, 2 Jun 2025: Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, subtitled “The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.”

In the big picture, this is retrogression to a more primitive form of government than our democracy, easily understood as a resurgence of the tribal instinct.

Let’s quote a bit:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

It’s a very long piece. But even this opening raises the question: what is government *for*? Again see George Lakoff. This guy thinks the government is a business, out to make money. And that’s the least of it.

The alternative is the modern conception of a government as an enabling one, per Lakoff.

Is this just all a matter of taste? Suppose different nations chose their own paths, among the alternatives represented by Lakoff’s opposing ideas. Why not?

And the answer is that most of these people are not thinking globally. Or long-term. This guy, “Moldbug,” is thinking tribally. His solution denies progress and the ability to respond to global threats. And I could go on about this, but I’ve discussed it many times before.

Posted in conservatives, longtermism, Politics | Comments Off on MAGA Stereotypes, Whataboutism, Monarchy

Rubber-Stamps, Clones, Conformity, and Fate

Posted on Sunday 1 June 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Republicans loyal to Trump want Congress to rubber-stamp his every proposal, never mind America’s system of government;
  • Trump thinks Biden was executed in 2020 and was replaced by a robotic clone;
  • Trump has great ambitions to carve up the world, but he’s too dumb (why don’t his fans realize this?);
  • Republicans would ban student clubs, to enforce conformity to the tribe;
  • More about Joni Ernst and “we all are going to die”.
– – –

Following up on yesterday’s item by Peter Wehner about how Republicans no longer believe in the rule of law. (These examples come along every day. This one, though posted a couple days ago, is on the front page of today’s paper.)

NY Times, Anne Karni, 29 May 2025: For These Trump Voters, a Rubber-Stamp Congress Is a Key Demand, subtitled “In a recent pair of focus groups, voters loyal to President Trump judged members of Congress almost entirely according to whether they backed him — and rejected lawmakers who dared to dissent.”

Congress is a coequal branch of government empowered to make laws, control government spending and declare war. But according to Trump voters, the role of the legislative branch is to rubber-stamp the president’s agenda — and they don’t appreciate Republicans who deviate from the party line.

In two recent focus groups that quizzed older Trump voters from across the country about their views of Congress and congressional leaders, participants consistently praised lawmakers who displayed “loyalty” to President Trump and disparaged those whom they viewed as failing to fall in line behind him.

And

Their perspectives offered a striking contrast to the reception that many Republican lawmakers have confronted at raucous town halls throughout the country in recent months. The lawmakers have been grilled and booed by constituents at these events for supporting Mr. Trump’s policies on tariffs, immigration and, most recently, the sprawling domestic policy bill that the G.O.P. pushed through the House last week.

And they help explain why most Republican lawmakers have put aside any reservations they may have on key issues and backed the president — because a critical portion of their party’s base is still demanding that they do so.

“For loyal Trump voters, they’re loving what they see as him ‘doing something’ and don’t want congressional Republicans getting in the way of his agenda,” said Sarah Longwell, the anti-Trump Republican strategist who conducted the focus groups. “And members of Congress have gotten that message loud and clear.”

The trouble is they don’t realize the ‘something’ that Trump is ‘doing’. They don’t understand that he’s tearing down American achievements and infrastructure and its place in the world; or perhaps they do, and approve of his actions against brown people and eggheads.

This is your base human nature, tribal allegiance, “loyalty.” A surrender of thinking to a leader they mindlessly follow. They don’t deserve to be living in a country based on principles they deny.

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This story has been going around today.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 1 Jun 2025: “Soulless, mindless entities”: Trump shares QAnon conspiracy theory suggesting Biden is a clone, subtitled “The president shared a post late Saturday night suggesting Biden had been ‘executed’ and replaced”

“There is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020,” the reshared post reads. “#Biden clones, doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. #Democrats don’t know the difference.”

And

NY Times, 1 Jun 2025: Trump amplified an outlandish Biden conspiracy theory.

President Trump shared an outlandish conspiracy theory on social media on Saturday night saying former President Joseph R. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, the latest example of the president amplifying dark, false material to his millions of followers.

The people who would believe this are simply unhinged from reality. It’s not about politics; it’s about the apprehension of reality. There are no robots capable of replicating a person. Even a biological clone is, at best, a belated twin. Admittedly, a lot of bad science fiction, virtually all in movies and TV, promulgate incorrect, simplistic ideas like this, especially the idea that a “clone” reproduces an adult person complete with memories. It doesn’t work this way.

If for no other reason, among the thousands of reasons we’ve had over the past decade, this completely discredits Donald Trump. What could be worse? Claiming the Earth is flat?

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More evidence?

Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 1 Jun 2025: Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world — or keep it all for himself?, subtitled “Trump longs to revive the imperialist ‘Great Game’ alongside Xi and Putin. There’s a problem: He’s too dumb”

Foreign policy experts have struggled to make sense of the second Trump administration’s incoherent and contradictory approach to world affairs — which in itself ought to serve as a clue. First of all, it suggests that the Trump team is operating without a recognizable or familiar playbook, driven partly by the Great Leader’s famous whims and fancies and partly by competing streams of ideology. Secondly, it illustrates that the generations of think-tankers churned out by the graduate programs of elite Anglo-American institutions are completely at sea in this bizarre historical moment, whether in foreign policy or any other supposed discipline of governance.

I don’t understand why Trump fans don’t listen to this guy and realize how *dumb* he is. Is it because they’re dumb too? Or because they don’t care and support Trump as long as he supports their animosity against brown people and egg-heads?

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More about how conservatives reflect base human nature: suppress differences in favor of conformity to the tribe.

JMG, 1 Jun 2025: Texas Governor Gets Bill Banning LGBTQ Student Clubs

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More about Joni Ernst and “We all are going to die”.

Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Jun 2025: Sen. Joni Ernst defends “we all are going to die” comment with pitch to embrace Jesus, subtitled “Instead of addressing fears of preventable deaths caused by GOP policies, Senator Ernst offered nothing but religion and ridicule”

Hemant comments,

Yes, we’re all going to die. The difference is that (decent) Democrats want to make your life worth living and make sure you have access to free or affordable care, while Republicans like Ernst want to hasten the deaths of those they believe deserve it.

The tone of her voice, though, said even more than that. It suggested that she didn’t give a damn about her own constituents who might die sooner than they might otherwise because she personally helped kick them off Medicaid, leaving them without any kind of social safety net.

Sure, people will die, she said, with the subtext being but isn’t that worth it to make rich people even richer?

The post here doesn’t address this, but I’ve never quite figured out the religious policy about death. On the one hand, death, if you’ve been a good person, leads to paradise. On the other hand, even Christians believe in medicine to prolong life. Why not just let good people die and get to heaven as soon as possible? I’ve no doubt there are numerous casuistic explanations for this. 

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Rubber-Stamps, Clones, Conformity, and Fate

Fareed Zakaria, Peter Wehner, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Anton Bruckner

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Fareed Zakaria on Trump vs. Harvard;
  • Peter Wehner on how Republican principles gave way to Trump;
  • And so now there is justice for Trump supporters, and justice for others;
  • “Happy Memorial Day”
  • Brian Tyler Cohen about Trump’s confusion about “asylum”;
  • And an anecdote about the MAGA thought process;
  • And Bruckner 4, movement 2. The slow movements are the best.
– – –

Fareed Zakaria (whose book I admired here) on the Trump/Harvard situation.

Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 30 May 2025: Trump’s war on Harvard is bizarre — and incredibly damaging, subtitled “He is wrecking American competitiveness.”

When historians write about the challenges to America’s global hegemony, they will point to the rise of China, the first full-fledged peer competitor to the United States in decades. They will also note the return of Russia and its efforts to disrupt the American-led security order in Europe. These are familiar patterns in the rise and fall of world powers. What is new and surprising is that these challenges, far from uniting America, have turned it on itself, with its government tearing down many of the crucial elements of its extraordinary success.

Consider the Nature Index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contributions to the world’s leading academic journals. Its newest rankings show what scientists already know: China is leaping ahead. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, nine are Chinese. But still sitting in the topmost position on that list is an American institution: Harvard. And it is this university that President Donald Trump is trying to destroy.

… The Trump administration’s main weapon — the withdrawal of federal research funds to Harvard — is aimed at the parts of the university that have virtually nothing to do with the “woke ideology” to which Trump objects. More than 90 percent of the funds that the government has threatened to deny Harvard are for research in the life sciences, studying diseases, medicines and other such topics. Denying funding for cancer research will not affect people protesting for Palestinians. It will almost certainly knock Harvard off that Nature Index list.

Mentioning this:

America continues to lead the world in its ability to attract the best students from across the globe. China draws mainly on the talents of the brightest of its 1.4 billion people. But America has had its pick of the best of the world’s 8 billion people.

And concluding on a personal note:

Around four decades ago, when I thought about applying to American universities from India, I was impressed by their reputation in research and teaching. But I was also attracted by the idea of America, a truly free and open society, one that welcomed people from around the world and where, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “our origins matter less than our destinations.” In a competitive world, where other countries have caught up in so many ways, this is still America’s unique advantage — if we can cherish rather than destroy it.

But see my post yesterday. My very provisional conclusion — which I hope will not play out — is that the MAGA forces in America resent the hoity-toity eggheads at universities and would be content to stay within their monocultural communities and let the rest of the world do whatever it wants, never mind America’s reputation and which other nations are setting the way to the future.

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Continuing on a similar note. Republican principles are a thin veneer, it seems, easily overridden authoritarian leaders that play to deep tribalistic human nature. Did conservatives ever really accept Constitutional principles? Perhaps only as long as it gave them an advantage in society.

The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 31 May 2025: The Unconstitutional Conservatives, subtitled “Not too long ago, Republicans believed in the rule of law, limiting the power of government, and protecting individual liberty. Then came Donald Trump.”

Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as “constitutional conservatives.” They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers. They opposed central planning and warned about emotions stirred up by the mob and the moment, believing, as the Founders did, that the role of government was to mediate rather than mirror popular passions. They recognized the importance of self-restraint and the need to cultivate public and private virtues. And they had reverence for the Constitution, less as a philosophical document than a procedural one, which articulated the rules of the road for American democracy.

…One of the reasons Roe v. Wade was viewed as a travesty by conservatives is that they believed the 1973 Supreme Court decision twisted the Constitution to invent a “right to privacy” in order to legalize abortion. The decision, they felt, was driven by a desired outcome rather than a rigorous analysis of legal precedent or constitutional text.

Which is why it’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

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Which leads neatly to the next two items, a theme in recent days.

Washington Post, Editorial Board, 31 May 2025: ‘No MAGA left behind’: The trouble with Trump’s pardons, subtitled “This week’s outburst suggests that America now has a two-tiered justice system.”

A jury convicted Scott Jenkins, the disgraced ex-sheriff of Culpeper County in Virginia, of taking more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputizing rich businessmen so they could get out of speeding tickets and carry guns without permits. Two undercover FBI agents who gave him envelopes of cash after he gave them badges testified at his trial. Luckily for Jenkins, he has long been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump. On Monday, the day before he was due to report for his 10-year prison sentence, Trump pardoned him.

“No MAGA left behind,” tweeted Ed Martin, Trump’s new pardon attorney at the Justice Department, about Jenkins.

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And — “Happy Memorial Day!” —

LA Times, Jackie Calmes, 30 May 2025: In Trump’s version of law and order, judges are demonized, criminals released

You’d think a president who’d endured two assassination attempts would be especially sensitive to the potential threats that other public officials face. Not Donald Trump. Worse, he stokes threats against others.

So it was that, just after 7 a.m. on Monday, Memorial Day, the commander in chief thumbed out 174 words on his cellphone, not one of which paid tribute to Americans who lost their lives in service to the nation. No, Trump addressed his “Happy Memorial Day” greeting (who says that?) “to all, including the scum … trying to destroy our country.” His all-capitalized screed (I’m dispensing with the caps) made clear whom he meant: as usual, predecessor and punching bag Joe Biden (“an incompetent president”), but mainly federal judges — including some of his own appointees — who’ve overwhelming been ruling against his power grabs in numerous lawsuits involving tariffs, federal spending, appointments, retribution against law firms and universities and migrant deportations.

Referring specifically to judges who’ve put the brakes on his lawless efforts to disappear untold noncitizens to foreign prisons and detention centers, Trump wrote that these “USA hating judges” “are on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners from all over the world, in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again.” They’re “monsters who want our country to go to hell.”

And we’re debating Biden’s stability and mental acuity?

Where was that item about how Republican women have a certain look, entailing surgically puffed lips? I can’t help but noticing this guy too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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Trump is a paranoid fantasist, but perhaps so are many MAGA folks. All brown-skinned people are suspect. And Trump is confused about the multiple meanings of “asylum”.

Facebook, Brian Tyler Cohen, 31 May 2025: That’s crazy

Not only is the president of the United States convinced that people claiming political asylum are coming from mental asylums (!) But he is also convinced that ‘millions’ of them have come in.

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One more Facebook post. It’s only an anecdote, but it strikes true.

Facebook, Marty Halpern, today: I was teaching my friend’s daughter…

I was teaching my friend’s daughter that antibiotics don’t work on viruses. Someone next to us said ivermectin works. I politely informed them that it doesn’t and they proceeded to tell me it also works on cancer. I proceeded to tell them that I am a doctor with degrees in cellular physiology and public health and that ivermectin does not do this. Their response? “I bet you have pronouns too.” This is the thought process we are dealing with.

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This past week, I’ve cycled back to Bruckner. The common impression is that the best symphonies are the 4th, 7th, 8th, and maybe the unfinished 9th. But this is the problem with all common impressions; this may be true in a sense, but there are still riches to be found in, in this case, the 3rd and 5th and 6th. Bruckner is best in his slow movements, as, arguably, Mahler is. Here’s the slow movement of the 4th. This YouTube clip is scaled low; you’ll have to turn up the volume to full. And there’s an annoying ad at the end.

Or, just listen to the entire symphony. It’s over an hour, as most Bruckner (and Mahler) symphonies are.

Posted in Lunacy, Music, Politics | Comments Off on Fareed Zakaria, Peter Wehner, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Anton Bruckner

MAGA and human nature; How Trump thinks everything is about loyalty to him

Posted on Friday 30 May 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reconsidering the definition of MAGA, and how it relates to base human nature;
  • Recalling the David Brooks essay from yesterday;
  • Trump thinks an honest economic forecast is “unpatriotic”;
  • A Christian boy band preaches to public school students, and denies it;
  • How RFK Jr.’s battle against autism reveals simple-minded thinking;
  • We’re all going to die anyway, says a Republican defending Medicaid cuts;
  • How Trump makes the immigrant crisis worse by simply redefining legal immigrants into illegal ones;
  • And about that Facebook guy Justin, who asks basic questions of people on the street who cannot answer.
– – –

So perhaps we can refine the working definition of MAGA. It’s coming clearer into focus, though it should have been obvious all along.

What MAGA folks are yearning for is a return to small town life where everyone is like they are, the same race, more or less the same religion. They don’t want to deal with people unlike themselves. And their working view of reality is comprised of myths from one holy book. They don’t want to be bothered with what people from other places tell them about how reality really works. Thus flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and anti-intellectuals in general. And never mind the internal contradictions of their favorite holy book. They make it that much more useful.

MAGA is about loyalty to an authoritarian leader. They prattle about meritocracy, but don’t mean it for a moment; look at Trump’s cabinet. And it’s about purity of the tribe (of America Christian whites). Look at them flouting the law at every opportunity to get brown-skinned “foreigners” out of the country. It’s *so* obvious, that few state it that plainly. They regard the Constitution with veneration similar to that for their Bible, but don’t follow the principles of either; veneration doesn’t entail understanding. Both documents are just markers of tribal bonds. Icons to wave over the crowds.

So this is not, I think, strictly an American yearning. It’s American only to the extent that, by virtue of being an expansionist nation over the past few centuries, that has spread out across a largely empty continent (except for the natives, of course), they have recreated a small town, frontier existence that much the rest of the Western world had already been through, and settled down from.

It’s all about base human nature as evolved over a million years, and the way it struggles to live in the modern environment, which is so different from where that human nature arose.

The Brooks essay I linked yesterday goes into this in analogous detail. Which I’ll quote a bit more of.

If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid. There’s no room for Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory. …

And:

Last, there are at least two kinds of morality. There is a kind of morality based on universal moral ideals, and then there is tribal morality. Deneen and Vance say they don’t think people are motivated by abstractions. They might try reading the Bible. The Bible is built on abstractions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount contains a bunch of abstractions: blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful. Believe it or not, down through the centuries, billions of people have dedicated their lives to these abstractions.

What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.

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Trump, as we see daily, filters everything through a lens of loyalty.

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The economists do their thing and make projections of growth over coming years. They do this all the time.

JMG, 30 May 2025: Trump Rages Over “Unpatriotic” US Growth Forecast

“The Democrat inspired and ‘controlled’ Congressional Budget Office (CBO) purposefully gave us an EXTREMELY LOW level of Growth, 1.8% over 10 years. How ridiculous and unpatriotic is that!

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This big theme explains the self-righteousness of Christians too. Support for the tribe is more important than those wishy-washy ‘woke’ laws meant for other people.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 30 May 2025: A Christian boy band denies trying to win converts at a public elementary school assembly, subtitled “The Davidson County Schools superintendent says he was “hoodwinked” by the 3 Heath Brothers”

Members of a Christian boy band insist they didn’t preach to children during a daytime assembly at a public school even though the district’s superintendent and everything the band has ever said publicly suggest otherwise.

One side is clearly lying and it’s the one that believes you need God to be a moral person.

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Primitive thinking is simplistic thinking, as I’ve discussed time and again. To MAGA conservatives, the world is black and white, and every complex problem has a simple (simplex) answer.

Vox, Dylan Scott, 30 May 2025: RFK Jr. is looking in the wrong place for autism’s cause, subtitled “The autism commission is doomed to fail.”

“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in April when announcing his department’s new autism research project. He argued that too much money had been put into genetic research — “a dead end,” in his words — and his project would be a correction to focus on environmental causes. “That’s where we’re going to find an answer.”

But according to many autism scientists I spoke to for this story, Kennedy is looking in exactly the wrong place.

Surely it’s been explained to him that there is no “epidemic” of autism. The rise in numbers of diagnoses is a matter of changing definitions and changing methods of diagnosis. The article goes on and on about them; nothing new. Conservatives think there is a simple answer for every problem; there isn’t.

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In Lakoff’s take, recall, progressives are about empathy and government as about protection and empowerment, while conservatism is about obedience and discipline (and not empathy).

This has been widely reported.

NY Times, 30 May 2025: Defending Medicaid Cuts, Ernst Tells Iowans, ‘We All Are Going to Die’, subtitled “Senator Joni Ernst’s flip response in an exchange with constituents about the effects of Trump’s domestic policy bill spread quickly online.”

The point being–? Why not spend *nothing* on health care and let everyone die as early as they would have millennia ago? That’s the traditional way.

This reminds me of some of the conservative response to the COVID crisis. Just let grandma die! So the rest of us don’t have to wear masks!

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Once again, MAGA is about white tribalism, white supremacy. “Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat.”

Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 30 May 2025: Trump might become the most pro-illegal immigration president ever, subtitled “The president is rapidly turning legal immigrants into illegal ones.”

You might not have noticed it, but last week the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States surged by 350,000.

Don’t worry, an army of gangbangers and other criminals didn’t charge the border. Rather, President Donald Trump simply decided to turn 350,000 legal immigrants into illegal ones.

Trump has been fearmongering about an “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants for years. Since retaking the White House, he has attempted to manifest those fever dreams into reality through a “de-documentation” campaign. This is not an immigration agenda that targets criminals; it’s one that criminalizes immigrants who have followed the law, by stripping them of their existing visas and work permits.

The 350,000 people de-documented last week are Venezuelans who had permission to live and work in the United States — subject to screening and other conditions — under a program known as temporary protected status. TPS was created in 1990 to shield immigrants from countries experiencing war or other catastrophes that make it unsafe for them to return home.

Given the tribalistic thinking of base human nature… most of MAGA probably agrees that anything that can be done cleanse white settlements of brown people is worth doing. They may not even realize what their motivation; like Trump, they rationalize this by supposing all those brown people are criminals, despite all the evidence otherwise over decades.

And:

Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat. He first tried to cancel protections for Venezuelans in February, and last week the Supreme Court gave him the green light. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called this development “the single largest mass-illegalization event in U.S. history.”

But racist whites from South Africa are welcome immigrants! Because they support Trump. Here we are again.

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I may have mentioned this Facebook guy before, without having a link. Here’s a link.

Facebook, Justin Interview

Justin is a guy who does live interviews in shopping malls, in Times Square, on city streets. He asks people questions with very obvious answers. Their answers are always wrong, and not trying to disabuse them, he always responds “yes!” The significance here is that so many people on the street can’t answer very basic questions. “How many states are there in the United States?” “In what country is the Great Wall of China?” “What language to people in Montana speak?”

It verges on cruelty, to expose these peoples’ ignorance (though they’re all anonymous). And I’m sure that Justin must do hundreds of such person-on-the-street interviews and selects only the very few that reveal their ignorance. So there’s a huge selection bias here. Still: why are there *any* such people? How did they glide through high school and get on in modern life without being aware of such basic things? “Who did we fight in the war of independence?” The lady in the supermarket suggests “…Vietnam?”

And these people vote.

Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on MAGA and human nature; How Trump thinks everything is about loyalty to him