The Political Divide

Posted on Tuesday 13 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Eric Levitz at Vox on the “fiction” of the Left/Right divide, and how core principles nevertheless do divide the parties;
  • Brief items about ICE recruiting and the right presuming the worst about everyone;
  • Noting the death of Erich von Däniken, and what Carl Sagan said about him.
– – –

Long piece I saw yesterday.

Vox, Eric Levitz, 12 Jan 2026: The fiction at the heart of America’s political divide, subtitled “The uncomfortable truth about ‘the left’ and ‘the right.'”

I’ll quote some of this piece’s thesis…

America’s most impassioned Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much. Ask the inhabitants of Bluesky and Truth Social whether a fetus is a person, or undocumented immigrants are a scourge, or trans women are women, or climate change is a crisis, or Covid vaccines are toxic, or taxes are too high, or welfare spending is too low, or AR-15s should be banned, or the federal bureaucracy should be gutted, or the police discriminate against Black people, or universities discriminate against white men, or Donald Trump is a fascist, or Joe Biden is the reanimated corpse of a man who died in 2020, and each group is liable to provide warring answers.

If staunch Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, however, it’s that their myriad policy disputes all follow from a deeper philosophical conflict — the centuries-long clash between progressive and conservative conceptions of political justice, truth, and human nature.

But some political scientists, social psychologists, and philosophers say this is, to use a technical term, “bullshit.”
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Their Core Priority: Make Money

Posted on Monday 12 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Busy day so a quick post for now and no time to dress up yesterday’s post. Today I have a couple long items that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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There may be a tie in all this to the so-called masculinity crisis. As a couple commentators have mentioned, nothing upsets a macho MAGA guy more than thinking a woman is laughing at him, or not taking him seriously. And if that guy has a gun…

Salon, Andi Zeisler, 12 Jan 2026: In Renee Good’s killing, ICE’s misogyny isn’t a side note — it’s the point, subtitled “The words of the man who shot Renee Good speak to the Trump administration’s fixation on masculinity”
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Our Era of 21st Century Villains

Posted on Sunday 11 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Just the headline will do here.

Washington Post, Letters to the Editor, 11 Jan 2026: MAGA justice: Shoot first, don’t even ask questions later

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NY Times, 10 Jan 2026: F.B.I.’s Inquiry Into ICE Shooting Faces Doubts After White House’s Remarks

First para:

The Trump administration blocked Minnesota officials from investigating the death of the woman shot on Wednesday by a federal agent, then quietly offered this explanation: Local investigators simply could not be trusted to conduct a fair inquiry.

This is, of course, exactly upside down. It is the Trump administration that cannot be trusted to conduct a fair inquiry, because it’s already passed judgment about the victim as some kind of left-wing agitator who deserved what she got, within a mere couple hours after the incident, and before exculpatory videos came in.
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Does Human Morality Progress, or Not?

Posted on Saturday 10 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Apropos of nothing else in this post, but anyone following social media will understand.

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The big story of the week, which I’m not quite letting go. This could be a growing story that actually has consequences. Unlike so many scandalous incidents by Trump and his MAGA acolytes, that they just get away with.

This Christian lies.

JMG, 10 Jan 2026: Christian Site Mocks “Toxic Empathy” For ICE Victim

Quoting Ryan Helfenbein in the Christian Post: “This tragedy was entirely avoidable, but because a mother decided her duty to obstruct law enforcement, try to flee, and accelerate straight at them superseded her duty to comply, she is now dead.” Then he quotes scripture, where you can find justification for absolutely anything you want to believe.

She did *not* “accelerate straight at them.” It’s there over and over, in the videos. Why does he lie? Because religious ideology trumps evidence and reason; and everyone not on Trump and MAGA’s side is assumed to be evil and culpable?

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The Paradox of MAGA

Posted on Friday 9 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

My fascination with this ICE killing in Minnesota is, again, that it’s a perfect example of the paradox of MAGA, if not of conservatives in general. They claim to be Christians, and to revere the Constitution and the US Founders, yet behave in ways that utterly contradict those philosophies. Rather, they act like xenophobic tribalists to whom everyone else on the planet is evil or subhuman. I conclude that the Bible and the Constitution are to them merely totems that mark tribal solidarity; they don’t actually understand, or follow, them.

Sampling today’s posts.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 9 Jan 2026: They Didn’t Even Need a Deepfake, subtitled “A.I. was going to be what broke our shared reality. It turns out, it wasn’t needed.”

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ICE Thugs

Posted on Thursday 8 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Today’s posts are about the Minnesota ICE killing and the responses, from Trump and Vance to Jesse Bering, Jonathan V. Last, and others.
  • An essay by Elay Shech about why we should trust science even though it keeps changing. (Because there is no alternative.)
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So yesterday an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her SUV in Minneapolis, and the usual suspects were quick to say the shooting was justified because the woman was obviously a left-wing radical terrorist, or something, without of course having any evidence to support that charge. Fortunately there were people there who took videos of the event — in fact there are volunteer groups who attend ICE raids specifically to capture evidence of what they’re doing — which undercut the knee-jerk accusations of Tramp and Vance and others. Here’s a current status:

CNN, analysis by Aaron Blake, 8 Jan 2026: JD Vance just sharply undercut the Trump team’s ICE shooting narrative
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Our Outlaw Nation

Posted on Wednesday 7 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

This popped up on Facebook, but I don’t subscribe to the magazine and can only see this much of the article. It’s about the new book by Johan Norberg, which came out in September. It’s on my TBR shelf.

The Economist, 1 May 2025: How golden ages really start—and end, subtitled “The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA”

The way to start a “golden age” is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In “Peak Human”, Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.

Just in case anyone still has delusions of grandeur concerning MAGA, or Trump.

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Five Years Since a Day that Will Live in Infamy

Posted on Tuesday 6 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Articles about the anniversary of January 6th.
  • MAGA cognitive dissonance.
  • Loyalty over expertise — CBS Evening News.
  • Headlines about whether narrative defeats reason, conservative hysteria over Chick-fil-A and a gay couple, and the Pentagon’s petty attack on Sen. Mark Kelly.
  • Umberto Eco’s list of traits of fascism.
  • And Springsteen’s “Soul Driver.”
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Once again, the MAGA crowd, and their glorious leader Trump, don’t care about law and order or principles, only tribal loyalty.

Slate, Russel Payne, 6 Jan 2026: We learned nothing from Jan. 6, subtitled “Evidence Trump tried to overturn the election 5 years ago is ‘overwhelming.’ There haven’t been any consequences”

After a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it appeared the attack would result in a rare moment of reckoning in American politics — at least for a moment. Even hardline GOP politicians had distanced themselves from Trump, then President Joe Biden was in charge and Congress and the Department of Justice were investigating both the attack and the plot to overturn the 2020 election behind it.

Five years later, any accountability, political or legal, that Trump and his allies faced has been erased.

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A Return to the Original Mission: Impossible Presumption

Posted on Monday 5 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservatives want to see media — now CBS — that tells them what they already believe;
  • How Trump has made fools out of his populist supporters;
  • How the “Donroe Doctrine” is now in effect;
  • And how all of this reflects the theme of the original 1960s “Mission: Impossible.”
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Slate, Jill Filipovic, 5 Jan 2026: The Big Problem With Conservatives’ Favorite Criticism of the Media

Beginning:

In 2026, there’s one easy resolution we should all commit to: Be better consumers of media.

Traditional media is in crisis, thanks to a combination of Trump administration attacks, corporate takeovers, and technological innovations. Social media sites compete for our attention by offering us addictive little bites: outrage-bait tweets and short-form shock-value TikTok videos, served up according to algorithms that track how long we linger and feed us more and more of what keeps us locked in (which is often what makes us angry).

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Where We Are, 4 Jan 2026

Posted on Sunday 4 January 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Several headlines about America’s attack on Venezuela;
  • Trump’s peculiar animosity against the Kennedys;
  • And two ideas about patriotism.
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The State of the Union.

Just some headlines. American seems never to overcome its historical sins.

The Guardian, Tiago Togero, 3 Jan 2026: ‘Naked imperialism’: how Trump intervention in Venezuela is a return to form for the US, subitled “Most of the Americas have suffered from interference from their powerful northern neighbour – and are usually the worse off for it”

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