I like to think that this blog isn’t about politics, per se, but about following current events and trying to make sense of them in larger contexts, especially the broad contexts both of history and of what science fiction explores. Though again today, I am cramped for time, so let’s note these items relatively quickly. And obviously I don’t have any final answers.
AlterNet is essentially a consolidation site (as JMG is), and this item is based on an MS Now (formerly MSNBC) piece by Paul Waldman (formerly of Washington Post).
Is this not obvious or do I need to quote? OK I’ll quote.
Trump can’t just shut off all federal funding to states he doesn’t like. But no one doubts he would if he could — or doubts he’s trying to. This is more than bloviation. Something important and dangerous is happening. The Trump administration is engaged in a comprehensive war, and its enemy is half of America. This war is being waged in rhetoric and regulation, budget cuts and violence. Its aim is to tear the country in two.
There is no precedent in modern times for this; one might make an analogy to Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War, in which the federal government forced the South to accept democracy. But that was for the best of reasons, and Trump’s attempt to bend blue states to his will is for the worst.
More evidence of the cluelessness of the folks in the Trump administration. This concerns the debut of a new Trek series called “Starfleet Academy,” which I haven’t seen.
Because ‘woke,’ to the modern conservative, means acknowledging the existence of anyone who is not (human), white, straight, Christian, and male.
The irony is that the original 1960s Trek was *extremely* ‘woke’ by the modern definition, even though that term wasn’t used then. But Trek reflected the idealism of both science fiction and 1960s culture: that the future would be multicultural, and problems were solved by investigation and understanding, and not by demonization or bigotry. Look at that bridge crew! An Asian, a black woman, later a Russian, not to mention a Vulcan! (I recall my grandmother being puzzled by the Vulcan? Why would they let such a creature there?)
And how many passionate speeches were there by Kirk about the need for exploration and understanding and pushing the boundaries. The very first filmed episode of the series, “The Corbomite Manuever,” included such a speech, and a rebuke to a young navigator who — like a modern conservative — was certain that Spock was a traitor.
To be fair, the idealism of TOS, the original series, has not been maintained over all the subsequent series and movies, especially in the movies produced by those not familiar with TOS. Later shows and movies became focused on space battles, and villains like the Klingons and others, and soap opera among the regular cast, with very little “exploration” or “new life and new civilizations.” But to also be fair, I haven’t watched most of those later series or movies. TNG was fine, and the recent “Strange New Worlds” was fine until a point. But I haven’t made a career of watching Star Trek, even as I revere the original series for partly molding my own philosophy of life. As happens with whatever one is exposed to at age 11. Given to revisions.
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Is anything a coincidence anymore? I’ve been reading books this month by Hoffman, Tong, and now Azarian, and Facebook showed me a link to this video on Psyche, a site I’d never previously visited, yet which is oddly relevant to the themes of those books. Perhaps I am naive about the extent which Facebook and Google and everyone else is monitoring my computer for whatever I type about, even without posting…
Psyche, interview of Anil Seth at University of Sussex, by Nigel Warburton, 16 Jan 2026: How we build perception from the inside out, subtitled “Perception is a process of inference, not an account of ‘reality’”
This is an audio interview, with this description.
It’s easy to mistake our conscious experience for an ongoing, accurate account of reality. After all, the information we recover from our senses is, of course, the only window we’ll ever have into the outside world. And for most people most of the time, our perception certainly feels real. But the notion that our senses capture an objective external reality can be dispelled by considering something as fundamental as colour, which can be culturally influenced and, even within a single culture, leave the population split between seeing the same picture of a dress as black and blue or white and gold.
In this Aeon Original, Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK, puts our imperfect relationship with reality in perspective. In conversation with Nigel Warburton, consultant senior editor at Aeon, Seth argues that it’s not just that our perceptions provide flawed accounts of the outside world, but that our brains aren’t in the business of recovering the outside world to begin with. So it’s more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that we’re incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning – a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
That reference to The dress is apt. The way we perceive the world depends on our circumstances. The books I’ve been reading go further, claiming that we do not perceive reality at all, but only what we’ve learned to perceive given the senses we’ve developed given our position on a particular planet with particular sunlight, and so on. In one direction, these ideas recall the philosopher Berkeley, who said that when we look away, the object we just saw does not exist (which can be true only given particular definitions of those words); in another direction, these ideas extend ideas of learning, of evolution, of Bayesian inference, even of AI learning, into a cohesive explanation of reality, beyond the reductionist explanations by physics of the cosmos as it has evolved. I’ll explain more clearly, I hope, once I’ve finished reading Azarian, and related books.
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One more think piece, by Jerry A. Coyne on Quillette.
Quillette, Jerry A. Coyne, 26 Dec 2025: Can Art Convey Truth?, subtitled “Ways of feeling are not ways of knowing.”
Of course this relates to the previous item, and my presumption that there is a difference between objective truths, which are true for everyone, and subjective truths, which depend on circumstance and background. The frequent claim about so-called “other ways of knowing” begs the question of knowing *what* — something objective, or merely subjective?
As a scientist, I tend to get labelled an anti-art bigot when I tell my friends that, unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth. My assertion is greeted with an eyeroll and a shrug of the shoulders, or, by humanities professors, with disdain and opprobrium. To them, I’m just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school. For example, a discussion of the topic at the Heterodox Academy in June resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane. I’m writing this essay to explain my position.
Like so many philosophical debates, the issue depends on what you means by the words. Coyne defends his appreciation for the arts, then says:
Let me stop here and define what I mean by “truth.” I am referring to propositional truth, which The Oxford English Dictionary defines as “something that conforms with fact or reality.” Such truths can in principle be shown by empirical study to be either true or false, like the claims that “evolution happened” or “James Joyce was born in Dublin.” Such truths are the main component of “knowledge,” widely defined as “facts verified by a consensus among qualified people.” In contrast, subjective knowledge consists of personal feelings and beliefs that are valid for only one or a few people and can’t be verified empirically (e.g., “this painting is beautiful”). Perhaps we should simply distinguish objective from subjective knowledge. And subjective knowledge is not truth.
Again: well, maybe subjective knowledge is truth about the kinds of things that humans perceive and *think* are true. But that’s a truth about human nature, and not about any objective reality that exists independent of human nature.
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We’re heading out this evening to a concert at Zellerbach Hall with the Chicago Symphony, conducted by Ricardo Muti, doing Brahms’ 4th and other pieces. Here’s the Brahms 4 by Carlos Kleiber.
Controversial US political commentator Candace Owens claimed in a recent episode of her podcast that the late activist Charlie Kirk told her that he was a “time traveler,” and knew that he would die young.
“It is an absolute fact that Charlie Kirk thought that he was a time traveler. He told me he was a time traveler. Repeatedly,” she claimed.
So this is saying that Charlie Kirk thought he was a time-traveler? Is it also saying that Candace Owens believed him? Either way this is lunacy of course, another example of conservative disconnect from reality, presumably because they live in some kind of fantasy world derived from religion and pop culture.
On Wednesday, Jack Hibbs—a far-right anti-LGBTQ pastor, conspiracy theorist, and Christian nationalist who was invited by House Speaker Mike Johnson to deliver a prayer to the House of Representatives last year—held an event at his Calvary Chapel Chino Hills church to promote the campaigns of Steve Hilton and Michael Gates, who are running as Republicans for governor and attorney general in California, respectively.
Hibbs, who has been a vocal supporter of Hilton’s campaign from the beginning, used last night’s event to declare that Democrats are “evil” and that he doesn’t want anyone who votes for them anywhere near his family.
(There are many links in this text at the link, which I’m not reproducing.) Once again, Christians are anxious to define themselves as people who refuse to get along with people unlike them. Also, the fantasy world: he doesn’t want contact with anyone who might puncture his bubble. Also, projection: their “conduct is dangerous.”
More evidence about how Trump is destroying the world order of the past 75 years, and more evidence of conservative short-term thinking. And so America is being increasingly disregarded. Zakaria concludes:
For decades, the global order was built on an American platform. Trade flowed through U.S.-designed institutions. Security rested on U.S. guarantees. Crises were managed, for better or worse, by Washington. The global agenda was set in Washington. That platform still exists — but the world is no longer building on it. It is building around it.
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They lie by rote. They know they can get away with it. Even when someone has evidence that they lie, Trump’s base doesn’t care.
Three days ago, Slate published an article I wrote titled “You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.” The article details how I, in an effort to learn more about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s hiring practices, applied for a job at ICE—and ended up getting a job offer. To say that I was surprised would be an understatement: For one, I’m a vocal online critic of ICE and the Trump administration. More saliently, I skipped many of the steps required for the application. It’s a wild story—I’d encourage you to read the whole thing—and one that does not reflect particularly well on ICE or its parent organization: the Department of Homeland Security.
Such lax procedures should be a concern.
This administration, however, took a different approach. “This is such a lazy lie. This individual was NEVER offered a job at ICE,” DHS said Wednesday through the administration’s most official communication channel: X (formerly Twitter). “Applicants may receive a Tentative Selection Letter following their initial application and interview that is not a job offer. It just means they are invited to submit information for review, similar to any other applicant.”
But she took screen grabs of her application status, that proves them wrong.
The writer finds, in a New York City flea market, a diary of a German soldier from the early 1940s. And was struck by how it was filled ordinary, day to day, events. No awareness of what was going on in the larger world.
To me, what was most notable was what I didn’t find: There were no photos of death camps, or mass graves, or starving prisoners. Instead, there was one of him with his parents in front of their house. Proud.
I shook my head at what I saw as this man’s almost pathological ability to compartmentalize the madness he likely played a role in and the quaint, pastoral life he led at the same time. It reminded me of something I was told as a child.
“How could people do such things?” I often asked, around age 9 or 10.
That’s Germans, I was told by my parents and teachers. They were evil. It was in their blood. The only good German is a dead German, they would say.
And the point of the essay is that Americans are just as complacent about what’s going on in our own nation. ICE, Renee Good, Trump. Are Americans really different? The writer hopes so. But,
Alas, my comfort was short-lived, as I made the mistake, then, of sinking into social media. There I encountered ordinary Americans who believed the Trump administration without question. Ordinary Americans who blamed Ms. Good, who repeated the things they learned from the government, like that she was a paid agitator, a far-left radical who got what she deserved. Ordinary Americans who said the armed agent who killed an apparently unarmed woman was a hero, defending his nation from undesirables. Ordinary Americans who, soon enough, lay the blame for the whole thing on Democrats, antifa, Gov. Tim Walz, Jews, women and gays.
One can understand without approving. Each of us contains dark elements of human nature, a nature that has survived for millions of years.
And I wonder if someday, at some distant flea market, a young man will chance upon an old iPhone from 2026, and scrolling through it — through pics of the owner’s friends, vacations, festive dinners — will wonder how this unbothered American went about his normal life as the country was descending into fear-induced psychosis at the hands of an autocrat.
“Thank goodness,” he will comfort himself, “we’re not like them.”
It is too tiring to keep up on the daily outrages. I have things to do. But we can’t become complacent. So headlines today, with minimal comment.
Items about gaslighting, Bari Weiss, Trump not as fascist but as tyrant, winking at white nationalists, giving a pass to a red state’s welfare fraud, Trump’s Greenland delusion, the reversal in cutting funds to mental health and addiction services, more gaslighting, RFK Jr.’s plan to bankrupt vaccine manufacturers;
Re: Heated Rivalry: how Russia treats gays the way MAGA treats the left; and how the world keeps warming while conservatives are apparently unable to understand this.
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 15 Jan 2026: Trump is something worse than a fascist, subtitled “We’ve been using the wrong word to describe the president and his approach to ruling” The better word is “tyrant.”
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 14 Jan 2026: Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe, subtiteld “His irrational fixation on Greenland could lead to widespread conflict.” Because Trump, misled by Mercator projection maps, thinks Greenland is much bigger than it actually is.
The New Republic, 15 Jan 2026: Transcript: Mike Johnson’s Gaslighting on ICE Takes Truly Vile Turn, subtitled “As the House Speaker offers disgusting comments about ICE and Renee Good, a scholar of the religious right explains how it is that evangelicals like him see no evil whatsoever in ICE’s violent attacks on Americans.”
Washington Post, 15 Jan 2026: How RFK Jr. plans to bankrupt vaccine manufacturers, subtitled “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to flood the vaccine injury compensation program to hurt vaccine access in the U.S.” Again, it’s as if someone is deliberately sabotaging the US.
A Pew Research poll reveals partisan division over U.S. scientific leadership, with Democrats far more concerned about losing ground than Republicans.
The report comes as officials confirm that 2025 was Earth’s third-hottest year on record, pushing it closer to breaching the Paris climate agreement’s 1.5-degree limit.
The Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and cut federal funding for science and climate programs.
Because conservatives/Republicans, if they can’t see it right in front of them, they don’t believe it. They don’t do evidence or inference. Another running theme on this blog.
Another woman turning onto a street filled with ICE agents. And therefore doomed.
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The Trump administration is about retribution against people they don’t like. Fishing expeditions to find dirt. Jerome Powell, the wife of Renee Good, senator Mark Kelly. It’s not about justice or law.
Because the MAGA yokels believe everything he says. And because the moves, however baseless, intimidate others. The NYT writer says:
I know of a few officers who are hesitant to speak out against Trump or his policies precisely because they fear retribution—and lack the access to resources, high profile, and legal protections that Kelly enjoys as a member of Congress. There is also a disposition among many officers, bred in them from their days as cadets, to steer clear of political activity, even if it’s meant to protest the politicization of the military.
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Business interests are always favored; i.e. making money.
They are undoing progress towards the goals of health and equality in favor of white supremacy and saving money on undesirables. (This recalls the reactions of some conservatives about COVID: just let the grandmas die.)
Subtitled: In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all.
And parents home-schooling their kids or attacking public school curricula are part of the problem. They are eroding the common knowledge of human civilization, in favor of their own particular religious myths.
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.
According to such thinkers, there are no coherent principles that bind the left and right’s various positions. No timeless precept compels conservatives to be both anti-abortion and pro-tax cuts — or progressives to be both anti-gun and pro-environment.
Rather, in this view, it is contingent historical alliances, not age-old moral philosophies, that explain each side’s motley assortment of issue stances: In the mid-20th century, Christian traditionalists happened to form a coalition with libertarian businessmen inside the GOP. Conservatives consequently discovered that banning abortion and cutting taxes were both indispensable for preserving America’s founding values.
It goes on with further examples. OK, sure, some elements of each coalition came into alignment by happenstance — think of the great conservative switch (from Democrat to Republican) in the ’60s, driven both by racism (the civil rights movement) and big business resentment of regulations. But surely there’s something fundamental at the heart of each ideology that differs on matters of human nature and truth (distinguished largely by religion); that’s what I’ve been tracking here in this blog for years.
This theory of what divides our parties — and ails our politics — has its insights. But it also takes its case too far. The left and right’s policy disputes are not all manifestations of one ageless moral conflict. But it does not follow that progressives and conservatives are divided by nothing more than arbitrary alliances and tribal psychology.
Long piece, as I said; it goes back to how the ideological spectrum was born in France in 1789. But I’m going to skip to the end. There *are* differences of worldview.
Ideologues surely overestimate the philosophical unity of their commitments. Rid the Earth of such confusion, however, and much of the enmity between America’s left and right would remain. The devotees of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have genuinely different worldviews. Progressives aren’t wrong to perceive this White House as a threat to their conceptions of both democracy and social justice. And conservatives aren’t mistaken in thinking that the Democratic Party is hostile to their convictions about the nature of gender, economic liberty, and the metaphysical status of the unborn.
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The left and right hold some distinct principles. But neither can derive answers to all of today’s governance challenges from their broad moral precepts. You cannot discern whether zoning restrictions reduce housing affordability — or whether gifted programs harm disadvantaged students — merely by deciding that you care a lot about inequality. Nor can you determine whether tariffs or mass deportation will raise American living standards, simply by deciding that the government must put “America first.”
Yet ideological essentialism invites the opposite impression by casting all policy debates, even the most technical, as referenda on bedrock moral principles. This framework is attractive to partisans, as it reduces the cognitive burdens of political advocacy: It is much easier to decide how you feel about one philosophical premise than to carefully adjudicate dozens of technocratic claims. Further, when a policy argument is understood as a gauge of moral character — rather than a test of empirical propositions — it becomes a better vehicle for partisans’ self-expression and communal bonding.
OK, that’s not the end, but it’s enough. This is a sort of perfect-enemy-of-the-good argument. OK, here’s the very end:
In other words, for progressives or conservatives to develop anything resembling a perfectly principled platform, they must first recognize that none exists.
Maybe no perfectly principled platform exists. But core principles do differ between the two camps. It’s right there — “empirical principles” vs “bedrock moral principles” which for conservatives means things that cannot be challenged. Progressives learn; conservatives reject anything that would challenge the so-called wisdom of their ancestors. That’s the principle divide.
Perhaps I’ll note the death of Erich von Däniken, a popularizer of alien visitation conspiracy theories back in the 1960s and ’70s, by quoting Carl Sagan.
Von Däniken was one of those writers I read in that era, my early teens, along with Frank Edwards, until my contemporaneous reading of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan disabused me of their thinking. Here’s Carl Sagan, quoted in this piece:
The astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of Mr. von Däniken: “Every time he sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet.”
And this principle, I think, goes to many conspiracy theorists, and, for that matter, religious apologists. They don’t understand the complexity of the world, and so presume that someone, or some One, must be behind it all.
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…
Moments before she’s killed, Good is on video speaking directly to Ross: “It’s okay, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross’ response comes only after he fires three shots into Good’s face as she attempts to turn her car away; Ross still has the phone in his hand when a man’s voice — presumably his — utters two words: “F*cking b*tch.” Conservative onlookers celebrated the video: To them, the disdain in Ross’ voice wasn’t evidence of guilt, but confirmation that a woman who challenged the authority of a man in uniform got exactly what she deserved.
But even before the recording surfaced, Good had been condemned by conservative onlookers in language that was terrifyingly familiar: She must have done something to provoke him. Why didn’t she just do what she was told? It’s too bad, but she brought it on herself. These are phrases that have been used to explain away assault, rape and domestic violence against women since time immemorial. They are also, apparently, how the MAGA crowd now identifies women whose desire to help neighbors avoid being deported offends their sensibilities, as talk-show host Erick Erickson established when describing Good with the acronym AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) in a now-deleted post on X.
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And, of course, you see this attitude from Fox News.
“There’s a weird kind of smugness, by the way, in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority. Most guys learn early in life that every confrontation has a sort of escalation chain. A joke, a push, an argument can eventually turn to violence.”
But it’s violence from men! Cain also claims:
This comes — in this press conference today — comes as we’re getting new witness video of Renee Good before the shooting. She can be seen in her vehicle blocking agents for several minutes, even dancing to the tune of her own car horn. You know, all the behavior of a legal observer.
First, some of these new videos are AI. I saw one today on Fb showing the ICE agent standing directly in front of her car — which no peace office is supposed to do — but taken from on high. By a drone? If there were drone videos of the incident, wouldn’t we have seen them by now?
Second, this is all about conservatives taking the worst possible interpretation of any incident, and of anyone not like themselves.
She was just a woman who had dropped off her kid at school, was driving home, turned onto a street filled with ICE agents, and tried to do a 3-point-turn to leave the scene.
There’s a German rebuke to unsolicited advice from RFK Jr., which I thought I saw from Heather Cox Richardson, but now I can’t find the link. I’ll find it tomorrow.
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But the insight is: everything the Trump administration does is to favor big business. Cut regulations that would improve the climate, because such regulations would hurt big business. It’s all about short-term gains, and never mind long-term consequences. Rearrange the food pyramid to favor big meat. And so on and so on. This must have been obvious to everyone except me, since I keep looking for deep explanations. It’s all about making money. Which is what Trump and his family have done all along.
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.
Mr. Trump had already declared the shooting justified. Vice President JD Vance has asserted that federal agents had “absolute immunity” from prosecution. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, has spoken about the incident as if it were a closed case: Ms. Good had “weaponized” her S.U.V. to kill agents, she said, even though video analysis by The New York Times suggested it was more likely that she was turning her car away from officers.
The media owes JD Vance, and all of America a big apology. The Minneapolis ICE shooting is literally Covington 2026. The video clearly shows the ice officer getting hit by the car. She comes right at him. It doesn’t get more conclusive than that.
This is absolutely not true. The video clearly shows something different. Do these people think they can get away with lying to everyone, all the time?
He begins by setting the context. George Floyd, Michael Brown Jr., the beating of Rodney King in 1992 in LA.
The King case was a preview of our modern dilemma. How do political leaders respond when video evidence causes the public to make up its own mind — regardless of what any judge or jury might have to say?
The terrible divisiveness of police violence is why responsible leaders respond to every incident with extreme care. You lament the lives lost, you promise a fair and thorough investigation, and you call for calm. You do not prejudge the case. You do not set up an expectation that justice will be done only if your side’s interests are vindicated. And you definitely don’t send out allies and subordinates to whip up public anger.
… But Trump isn’t a responsible leader, and he’s at his absolute worst in a crisis. He lies. He inflames his base. And — most dangerous of all — he pits the federal government against states and cities, treating them not as partners in constitutional governance but as hostile inferiors that must be brought to heel.
That’s exactly what has happened in the hours and days since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good on the streets of Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Instantly, the administration’s narrative locked in.
… But if you watch videos of the shooting, one thing is clear: No fair-minded person could watch that incident and conclude that Good was a “domestic terrorist” on a mission to run down ICE agents. The administration’s claims of terrorism are false — absurdly so.
But we’ve learned not to believe anything Trump or his administration says already; this is just another reason why. The problem is that there is apparently a large segment of the population, who only glancingly pays attention to the news, that *does* believe him, by rote. And they are as culpable for this administration’s bad behavior as anyone.
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Another broader perspective.
Paul Krugman, 9 Jan 2026: The Mad King’s Madness Deepens, subtitled “Trump wants war, war and more war – even against Americans”
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.
So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
And so Maduro and Venezuela. And then Minneapolis.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
And so Trump changes the topic by announcing a huge increase in military spending. Just what dictators need. Krugman concludes:
And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Here’s another long-term perspective, a new thought today. Everyday politics is driven by inattention and ignorance and short-term thinking. The longer-term view will be written by historians and captured by novelists and filmmakers. And in their view, Trump will go down as perhaps the greatest villain in American history. He’s perverted American ideals and undercut its ambitions and ruined its reputation in the world. Like Hitler, in German history. Hitler didn’t “win,” and neither will Trump.
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One more take.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: January 10, 2026
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone.
She describes the video in more detail than I’ve seen anywhere else. Then:
What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.
As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”
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I have some comments about the new “food pyramid” and how it reflects interests other than science, but keep putting them off in favor this latest scandal.
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 this 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.
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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Stepping out, but illustrating the same broad point.
The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, 6 Jan 2026: MAGA’s Foundational Lie, subtitled “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”
Which is as I described yesterday.
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Stepping out even further.
The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman, 10 Jan 2026: What Stephen Miller Gets Wrong About Human Nature, subtitled “The Trump adviser’s assertions about the ‘real world’ reflect a deep misunderstanding of Thomas Hobbes’s dog-eat-dog worldview.”
Once again, there’s the famous dichotomy about the views of human nature as stated by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
The 17th-century philosophers each offered a picture of human nature in its rawest form, and they came to different conclusions. Locke, whose ideas were central to the birth of modern democracy, thought that people were capable of reason and moral judgment. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that we were vicious creatures who needed to be protected from ourselves by a powerful king. Whether a leader is Lockean or Hobbesian really does set the table for the kind of government they want.
And, once again, it’s not one or the other. Humans like to divide issues into bipolar opposites, one or the other. Whereas reality is always a mix of the opposite patterns that humans perceive. (This is the subject of Rutger Bregman’s HUMANKIND, who takes Locke’s side; and Steven Pinker’s books, who considers both sides, but especially how Hobbes’ Leviathan brought order to the world.)
One way to understand the head-spinning nature of being an American over the past couple of decades is that this debate—one that history seemed to have settled in Locke’s favor—is alive again. Barack Obama was a Lockean through and through—insisting, repeatedly, that if citizens were just given accurate information and a fair hearing, they would converge on something like the common good. Then came Donald Trump, Hobbesian extraordinaire, who has often portrayed life under anyone’s leadership but his own much as Hobbes describes the state of nature: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Nasty is even one of Trump’s favorite words.)
Comments this week from Stephen Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff often cast as the president’s “brain,” only reinforced this impression. Miller might have been Hobbes in a skinny tie as he confidently articulated what he understood to be the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” His monologue was like something out of the English philosopher’s 1651 political treatise, Leviathan: “We live in a world, in the real world,” he said, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
But his is the dog-eat-dog world that the idealists, from Jesus to the Founders, sought to overcome. There *can* be a better way. Yet base human nature is never going away.
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.”
Cf. the Jessie Bering quote yesterday. Covered here: partisan loyalties. The rewrite of January 6th.
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There was another video of the event released today.
She was cheerful, before she drove away, despite the order to “get out of the fucking car.”
There is no rule of proportionality in the MAGA universe: Any left-leaning protest activity or civil disobedience is grounds for assassination.
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The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 8 Jan 2026: First the Shooting. Then the Lies. subtitled “The Trump administration has perfected the smear campaign.”
There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.
Among their base, today’s GOP is trying to drum out any natural impulses toward compassion, such that there is no imperative to feel—let alone express—any dismay at the killing of an ideological adversary. If Good wasn’t on Trump’s side, the party line goes, she got what was coming to her. The rush to defend Ross is more than a political move to justify Trump’s personal militia run amok. It’s another round in the right wing’s mounting war on empathy.
For the past few years, influential Christian conservatives have been loudly proclaiming that empathy is toxic, a sin, and a tool of the devil. In their view, progressives use the human inclination sas already caused the deaths of 500,000 children worldwide. The innate desire among well-adjusted people to wish their neighbors happy, healthy lives is a political liability for the party of Medicaid cuts, SNAP freezes, ICE raids, refugee bans, and forced childbirth. Elon Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”
My eternal question is, why don’t the MAGA folk realize that Trump is lying to them all the time? Because they’re paranoid and think the mainstream media is out to get them? Or simply because they’re dumb?
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Let’s try to get this bad MAGA taste away. And find a couple positive stories.
First, getting back to the ancient argument about whether people are basically good or basically bad — Christianity assumes the latter, unless they’re “saved” — and despite the presumption in Hollywood films and TV then when society fails, everyone will turn savage (because that’s more dramatic) — real-world evidence suggests the former. (Again, I’ve read that book by Rutger Bregman, HUMANKIND, that I haven’t written up here yet.) Obviously attitudes are situational. But, despite the conservatives who assume the worst in other people, civilization has in fact advanced through cooperation among larger and larger groups. That’s why we have a de fact world culture.
The daily news cycle, with its bias toward negativity, seems to have its own implicit question: How bad can people be? It’s an easy story to tell, because outrage quickly spreads across the social media landscape. But, if you pay attention — really pay attention — another story keeps surfacing, stubbornly, in the margins: the stories of people who run toward danger. They don’t workshop it. They don’t calculate odds. They don’t ask if they’re the “right person” to do something. They just move, on instinct, because someone else’s life is suddenly in front of them.
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And despite the conservative that everything worth knowing was known centuries ago and captured in the Bible, human culture does, in fact, keep discovering new things, and making society and life better every year.
A list, with links. “In a year defined by slop, we hope these nuggets of reality inspire some genuine awe.”
Items about how women’s hands are more sensitive to warmth than men’s, sterile flies, a new color called “olo”, how potatoes are descended from an ancient tomato plant, how AI is 92% of American’s GDP growth, how insects make up more than half of all animals species yet most of them have never been documented, how tennis players live longer than swimmers, cyclists, and joggers.. and much more.
