Nothing mattered, in the end

First of all for today, this handy timeline.

NY Times, updated 9 Feb 2025: All of the Trump Administration’s Major Moves in the First 20 Days

I assume this will continue to be updated daily. The top of the page has buttons to filter by category, and by type of action or announcement.

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Here’s a fun imagine floating around on Facebook.

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Here’s another item being passed around on Facebook. I’ll quote some, but here’s a link to the full piece.

Facebook, We the People Under Siege, 16 Jan 2025: Written by the highly respected Canadian journalist, Andrew Coyne

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rap.ist and serial sex.ual preda.tor, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Pvtin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trvmp and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

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And here’s another image from Facebook.

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Just as Trump fired Inspectors Generals who had investigated *him*, now he’s shutting down the agency fighting financial abuse. Do his fans not realize what’s going on?? How is this not obvious??

CNN, 9 Feb 2025: Consumer watchdog ordered to stop fighting financial abuse and to work from home as HQ temporarily shuts down

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The essence of conservative selfish, short-term, irresponsible thinking.

Washing Post, Cass R. Sunstein, 5 Feb 2025: The high price of scrapping the social cost of carbon, subtitled “On climate policy, the new administration is entitled to recalculate this metric — but it cannot act arbitrarily.”

(Sunstein is the author of numerous books, including Nudge with Richard H. Thaler.)

With the deluge of executive orders in the initial weeks of the second Trump administration, an important directive flew under the radar. It requires the federal government to consider abandoning “the social cost of carbon,” potentially undercutting all climate policymaking.

That is a technical way of signaling something simple and false: Climate change is not real. If the social cost of carbon is treated as zero, then greenhouse gas emissions inflict no damage. Regulations that reduce those emissions have no benefits, which suggests that those regulations should be eliminated.

The social cost of carbon has often been described as the most important number you’ve never heard of. The metric is meant to capture the harm caused by a ton of carbon emissions, making it a foundation of national climate change policy. A lower value would justify weaker regulations, while a higher one would warrant more aggressive policies.

This is one of those long-term costs that you’d think a government, especially if run like a business, would keep track of. Unless the government/business realizes it’s going to be around for only four years.

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Many of us understand ‘populism’ much better than populists understand anyone besides themselves.

NY Times, David French, 9 Feb 2025: The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.

I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”

I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.

If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the “man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.

Because the populists do not read books or watch documentaries or listen to podcasts. They listen to each other, in town halls, at bars, in churches.

And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.

So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.

And that’s exactly where we are today.

French goes about the rural South, Andrew Jackson, the Farmers’ Alliance, and so on. Long piece. A few more bits:

In fact, populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.


Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. Lots of people have lived rather messy lives, and they can see themselves in the politician who doesn’t hide his warts — and sometimes even in the politician who revels in his transgressions.

They’re seen as real, while even the most honest politician can seem fake for coming across as too polished.


If you watch populist media or listen to populist politicians, there is very little ambiguity or nuance. Stories are mapped out in terms of good versus evil (or friend versus enemy). “They” are always wrong. “They” are worse than wrong — “they” are callous, uncaring, even evil.

A well-informed population is less vulnerable to the demagogue. Even if informed voters are not political obsessives, they’re aware enough of the limits of the president’s power to know that he or she can’t truly fix anything alone. If they’re even somewhat aware of the complexity of the economy, or of health care, or of foreign policy, they know that the political savior narrative is suspect.

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Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

  • How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature;
  • Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag;
  • Plastic straws, racist speech, inmates in charge of the asylum;
  • WaPo shows you some webpages deleted by the Trump administration;
  • Perhaps Musk’s motivation for attacking USAID;
  • NY Times Editorial Board: Now is not the time to tune out.

A couple phrases have been deployed to describe Trump’s deliberate (or not) strategy upon taking office of moving quickly with lots of executive orders. One is “shock and awe” after Bush’s strategy for invading Iraq; another is Steven Bannon’s “flooding the zone with sh*t” by which he meant spewing so much garbage so quickly that no one could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Another strategy that I saw today on Facebook (I didn’t capture a link) was that Trump treats each day like a media contest. He gets up in the morning and thinks of something outrageous to say on Truth Social, then depends on the news media (who Bannon and his acolytes think can only focus on one topic at a time) to be distracted by that while Trump goes about his real work relatively unnoticed; yet his goal is to ‘win’ the news cycle each day.

So what to do? Dismiss the outrageous things that will never happen, like making Canada a 51st state? Or bring up the casual cruelties? (Such as Trump firing a former Coast Guard leader — for DEI excuses but likely simply because she was a woman — thus giving her three hours to vacate her government-provided home. NBC.)

Or, as I try to do, look at the bigger picture. What does each action by Trump or Musk or his minions reveal about their motivations? About what they believe about the world? Taking an almost psychiatric, certainly psychological, approach. The answers are usually apparent, and they’re not kind. They’re evidence of a very basic, primitive, survivalist, mode of human nature.

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More about Trump taking over Kennedy Center.

Variety, Katcy Stephan, 7 Feb 2025: President Trump Says He Will Fire Kennedy Center Board Members and Name Himself Chairman

Turns out it’s because he objects to drag shows.

Trump went on to attack drag programming mounted at the performing arts center, adding, “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

Drag shows put on at the Kennedy Center in 2024 included “Broadway Drag Brunch” and “Dancing Queens Drag Brunch” on the venue’s Roof Terrace Restaurant, “A Drag Salute to Divas” on the South Millennium Stage, “Bertha: Grateful Drag” in the Terrace Theater and “Dixie’s Tupperware Party” in the Family Theater.

Of course base, survivalist human nature priorities expansion of the tribe, and especially in the ancestral environment in which human nature evolved and infant mortality was high, discourages to the point of condemnation any behavior that does not lead to the production of more babies. Thus, drag shows might confuse young people about sexual roles. Thus, the sins of the Old Testament, from homosexuality to onanism. And in the modern age, condemnation of birth control and abortion.

Base human nature is no longer appropriate; in fact, it’s counter-productive. Human sexual urges may endure, but having more and more babies is a danger to the survival of the race given the limitations of the planet. To advocate this is irresponsible.

So then, what would Trump then do? Ban all those classic movies involving drag and cross-dressing, like Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Mrs. Doubtfire? I wouldn’t put it past him. He probably just hasn’t thought of it yet. The right already loves to ban books. Why not movies too?

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Headlines:

Yahoo!news, 7 Feb 2025: Trump slams paper straws, vows ‘back to plastic’

He has no clue what the problem with plastic straws might be. Short-term convenience at the expense of long-term ecosystem damage.

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Vox, 8 Feb 2025: The real lesson of the DOGE racist tweets scandal, subtitled “Musk and Trump say they promote free speech. They seem to only defend racist speech.”

Having a history of racist tweets is just fine with the current administration. Because….

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Yet another example of putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

NY Times, 8 Feb 2025: Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters Now Runs Office That Investigated Them, subtitled “Ed Martin, a loyal Trump soldier, oversees the U.S. attorney’s office, which is likely to help turn the investigative powers of the government on several of the president’s perceived enemies.”

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Authoritarians always try to shape reality to their liking. So much for freedom of speech.

Washington Post, 7 Feb 2025: A sample of the government webpages Trump doesn’t want you to see, subtitled “When President Donald Trump took office, dozens of government webpages disappeared as part of his plan to reshape the U.S. government to his liking. Not even NASA was spared.”

Everything on the internet is archived, by someone, usually web.archive.org. There is no deleting the past, for better or for worse. The piece here shows current and archived pages from various organizations including DHS, EPA, FDA, USDA, Census, DOJ, NOAA, and many others. Why? Conservatism is always about reducing options. You should only know what your government wants you to know. You should behave in the way conservatives believe you should behave.

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Apparently USAID was instrumental in taking down the Apartheid regime in South Africa… where Musk is from. He’s now ornery that whites in South Africa are being discriminated against, and striking back. Which is to say, he’s not about government efficiency, he’s about seeking revenge against those who reduced his white privilege.

From Facebook: Horsey, The Seattle Times.

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Concluding with

NY Times, Editorial Board, 8 Feb 2025: Now Is Not the Time to Tune Out

Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people and the very concept of diversity itself; the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords; and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.

Places where Americans can’t afford to turn away:

  • Elon Musk’s Executive Takeover
  • The Administration vs. Public Officials (a.k.a. Trump’s Enemies)
  • The President’s Imperial Bluster and Attacks on Allies
  • Public Health Imperiled
  • The President’s Anti-Civil Rights Blitz

Do kids these days have any idea what’s going on?

America faces a new reality, and it demands wisdom, endurance and courage. The United States is now led by a president who appears willing to stampede over any person, law, congressional statute or country that stands in his way. He is driven by impulse and is disinterested in rules, history or reality.

How Americans and the world handle such a president will determine much about the next four years, and it will ask much from all of us. We must meet the moment. Mr. Trump won the election fair and square, but his position is that of president, not king or god-emperor. Every time Congress allows him to exceed his constitutional role, it encourages more anti-democratic behavior and weakens the legislature’s ability to check further erosion of the norms and values that have helped make this nation the freest, richest and strongest in the world.

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Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE

Subtitled “Climate Change from A to Z”
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook
(Ten Speed Press, 159pp, c2023, published March 2024) <Amazon>

This is a book I bought on the basis of the author’s name (I quite admired her book of a decade ago, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, reviewed here) without quite realizing that it isn’t a book of essays so much as a book of illustrations with short essay accompaniments; a book for casual readers, or perhaps for young adults. As the subtitle says, the book outlines issues concerning climate change in 26 topics, from A to Z.

I sat down to read this looking for something light, as I was coming down with a cold, yet wondered about if given the kind of book it is, how much will I really learn that’s new? Yet curious to find out what her hope for optimism, if any?

Each essay is half a page, or a full page or two, or even three pages. With a couple full-page illustrations for each, and a 2-page break between each letter. That said, Kolbert rather cleverly manages to choose topics for each letter that make the book a kind of narrative.

So: A is for Arrhenius. A Swedish scientist who first constructed a climate change model, in 1895, predicting that the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise temperatures by three or four degrees C… over 3000 years.

B is for Blah Blah Blah, the way political leaders and Greta Thunberg keep talking, and sound optimistic, yet virtually nothing has gotten done. C is for Capitalism, essentially why nothing has gotten done. D is for Despair, which is unproductive, and a sin.

There are stories about some specific efforts to combat dependence on fossil fuels. F is for Flight, about an electric airplane called Alia. G is for Green Concrete, made without cement, which takes a lot of energy to make, usually from coal.

H is for Hope, as there are plenty of similar efforts. J is for the Jobs those efforts could create. Leapfrogging is how India, for example, might jump from having very few phones in 1989 to everyone having cellphones now, jumping over the phase of everyone having landlines, and how similar advances might occur.

And yet. O is for Objections, how the optimistic forecasts make unreliable assumptions, ignoring feasibility limits. R is for Republicans, implicated only by noting that virtually no Republican voters in a 2022 poll considered climate change an important problem facing the nation.

X is for Xenophobia, whereby the costs of climate change may be borne by those who have contributed least to the problem — e.g. tiny Pacific islands, and Bangladesh. And how people from such affected areas will try to migrate, and be despised wherever they go, vilified by right-wing politicians, creating a feedback loop of racism and xenophobia. Will the world come together, or will nationalism and fear intensify?

Z is for Zero. The author tours Hoover Dam, built with a promise of unlimited power. But the area has been in drought since 1998; the water level is low, and a bathtub ring is visible on the canyon walls. And tour guides don’t want to talk about it. And so (despite the title of the book) the author ends thus:

Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” thought these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.

The short ‘further reading’ pages include titles in my library (some of which I’ve read) by Smil, Bjornerud, McKibben, Gates, Oreskes & Conway, and Wallace-Wells. The book echoes the grim tone of Wallace-Wells: it won’t be getting better any time soon; we are living in a time of irreversible change.

So: worth reading? Sure, in part as a refresher on some of the basic parameters of the climate change problem, and in part as a reminder of the seriousness of a problem we too often push to the back of our attentions. (Of course, at the moment, Trump and his minions are making everything worse.)

Posted in Book Notes, Science | Leave a comment

DEI and NASA

  • David Wallace-Wells on the sabotage of the American government;
  • Paul Krugman on “autogolpe” and the Musk/Trump chaos;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Republicans have, ever since Reagan, convinced voters that there’s an enemy “deep state” out to destroy their country;
  • Nicholas Kristoff on his experience with USAID and how now “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children”;
  • Brief items about MAGA’s Politico scandal, and supposed “anti-Christian bias”;
  • And a NASA reporter reflects on DEI and how inclusion is the point of the work NASA does.

Breaking News: Trump Takes Over Kennedy Center. Presumably he’ll tell them to play only pretty music. By white men.

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This piece is by the author of a book about the consequences of climate change, which I reviewed here, whose first sentence was “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 5 Feb 2025 (in today’s print paper): This Isn’t Reform. It’s Sabotage. [gift link]

It is, so far, worse than I feared. Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research. Next to go dark was the website of U.S.A.I.D., which Elon Musk announced that he would be working to shut down entirely, after several staffers resisting agency takeover by the billionaire were abruptly put on leave. (When the agency website later popped back online, it featured an announcement that all overseas personnel would be placed on leave and ordered to return.)

This is after the new administration had already suspended the country’s most successful global-health initiative, PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives globally. The State Department later issued a PEPFAR waiver, but the program appears to have been rendered effectively inoperative by staff cuts; if the pause holds for even 90 days, it would result in over 135,000 additional children being born with H.I.V. The Famine Early Warning System Network was shut down, too.

Musk and his minions either don’t understand what these agencies do, or they don’t care. The writer goes on about Musk and his minions.

“There are many disturbing aspects of this,” the political scientist Seth Masket wrote over the weekend. “But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government.” Indeed, to the extent he enjoys any formal authority, at the moment, it is through a loose executive order broadly understood to authorize the initiative only to upgrade government I.T. systems and protocols. “Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices,” Masket went on. “That is not efficiency; that is a coup.” Other relatively sober-minded commentators have called it “ripping out the guts of government.” Still others a “Caesarist assault on the separation of powers” and a “constitutional crisis.”

As in yesterday’s post, the theme here is the destruction of the American common good.

The war on public health is just one facet of this ugly diamond, but through it you can see both the breadth and the cruelty of the whole assault — and how it often hides behind an alibi of reform.

All of a sudden, last Friday, you could not view C.D.C. data about H.I.V. or its guidelines for PrEP, the prophylactic treatment to prevent H.I.V. transmission, or guidelines for other sexually transmitted diseases. You couldn’t find surveillance data on hepatitis or tuberculosis, either, or the youth-risk behavior survey or any of the agency’s domestic violence data. If you were a doctor hoping to consult federal guidance about postpartum birth control, that was down too. As was the page devoted to “safer food choices for pregnant people,” presumably because that last word wasn’t “women.” Throughout the pandemic, conservative critics of these institutions complained that their messaging was unequivocal and heavy-handed. The new message seems to be: You are on your own.

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Paul Krugman identifies an underlying motivation.

Paul Krugman, 7 Feb 2025: Autogolpe, subtitled “What’s really happening beneath the Musk/Trump chaos”

My very first post after I left the Times and brought this newsletter out of dormancy was about DOGE, the not-a-government-agency created by Donald Trump and run by Elon Musk (Vivek Ramaswamy has been run out of DOGE.) The supposed goal of DOGE was to save taxpayers huge sums by going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” I argued that this effort was doomed to failure as Musk and his cronies appeared completely ignorant about how and why the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.

While everything I said was true, I would like to offer a mea culpa. What should have been clear to me even then, and is unmistakable now, is that everything Musk and Trump say about what they’re doing is false, including what they say about their motivations. The ignorance and chaos are real, but you should never lose sight of the underlying thrust of their actions.

For what’s happening in America right now is an attempted autogolpe.

Which is:

An autogolpe is literally a “self-coup” — when a legitimately elected leader uses his position to seize total control, eliminating legal and constitutional restraints on his power. Are Musk and Trump trying to pull off an autogolpe here? Of course they are. And they are doing so with, as far as I can tell, the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.

You should look at everything they do through that lens. Yes, we can ask whether a policy move makes sense in terms of its announced goals. But you should also always ask, “How does doing this serve the autogolpe?”

(Another version of follow the money, I would say.) Displaying the graph shown above, Krugman goes on:

Take, for example, DOGE’s obsession with finding ways to lay off federal workers. This makes no sense as a priority if you know anything about where the taxpayer dollar goes.

The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower.

But making “headcount reduction” a policy goal is a way to purge civil servants who remain loyal to the law and the Constitution and replace them with Trump and Musk loyalists.

Folks who complain about the size of the government look only at raw numbers, without taking into account the increased size of the entire nation over the past century.

Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI.

It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an integral part of the autogolpe. And so, obviously, is the terrifying attempt of Musk and his acolytes to seize control of the Treasury payments system and give crucial power to rewrite the code to a 25-year-old who turns out (surprise!) to be a racist and eugenicist.

Krugman goes on with recommendations: to acknowledge the reality, but not to despair; the bad guys haven’t won yet. And this:

For those writing or talking about what’s happening, it is important not to get distracted by Trump’s bright, shiny objects. No, Trump isn’t going to take over Gaza, annex Canada, try to retake the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. But Trump’s bizarre announcements are a feature, not a bug: they distract from the ongoing autogolpe.

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My running thesis: conservatives are those who largely believe things that are not true.

Heather Cox Richardson, February 6, 2025

Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it.

She relates how the Trump administration is “gaming” Google to create an illusion that there are more mass deportations than there actually are.

But the Republicans’ vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

As with the items below, MAGA gets all a-flutter about trivial issues that they misunderstand, deliberately or not. They are chaos agents, and panic agents. The CBS interview of Kamala Harris; the payroll of Politico (see below); condoms to Hamas; plane crashes due to DEI; delivering water to California. She recalls:

Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.”

Performative victories over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power?

And the balance of this long piece speculates what else the administration will do.

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Among other things, this is an example of how conservatives don’t seem to understand investments in the future. (Or ‘soft’ power.)

NY Times, Nicholas Kristoff, 5 Feb 2025: The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children [gift link]

The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the United States Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it “into the wood chipper.”

By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth. Just since Donald Trump’s election, Musk’s personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of U.S.A.I.D., which in any case accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F. Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic.

Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.” He added: “Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.”

Perhaps that’s why Russia has praised Trump’s move.

In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on American humanitarian assistance.

Going on with examples of USAID aid that Kristoff has seen around the world. Then concludes,

Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?

If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?

Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because U.S.A.I.D. was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing health care and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.

To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.

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Relatively trivial, but typical.

Slate, Jim Newell, 7 Feb 2025: The Most Ridiculous “Scandal” Yet of the New Trump Era, subtitled “The rage about this is absurdly misplaced.”

On Tuesday morning, the D.C.–area news publication Politico missed payroll. The publication chalked it up to “technical error,” and employees were paid later.

But in certain corners of the Elon Musk–owned social media platform X, this administrative matter required further investigation, and the investigators worked backward from the assumption of corruption.

Since USAID had been shut down, the ‘investigators’ leapt to the conclusion that Politico missed its payroll because USAID had been funding it. Nonsense, as this piece explains. My impression is that everything MAGA flies into rages about is this kind of paranoid conspiracy mongering.

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And

Friendly Atheist, 7 Feb 2025: Trump’s task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” is a complete waste of time, subtitled “His executive order didn’t cite a single credible example of anti-Christian bias”

My reaction is just as the article begins:

What anti-Christian bias?” You would think the people who make up the most popular religion in the country, and 87% of Congress, and 98% of elected Republicans are doing just fine. Complaining that Christians have it rough is like saying the problem with racism in America is that it really hurts white people. If Christians are the victims, I’m sure non-Christian groups would be thrilled to swap places with them, at least with regard to how much persecution they receive and how much political power they have.

And when you read Trump’s executive order on the subject, it’s clear whoever wrote it couldn’t think of any examples of this so-called bias. I’m not saying there are no good examples of it. I’m saying there are no examples of it.

It’s long been a cliche that Christians just love feeling persecuted. Presumably the motivation here is to remove any recognition of any other religions at all. Or, as the article suggests, it’s about people who were breaking crimes and happened to be Christian. To arrest them amounts to Christian persecution, in their eyes.

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On a more upbeat note, and considering a perspective conservatives will never understand.

Slate, Shannon Stirone, 7 Feb 2025: The Real Point of Space Exploration, subtitled “It’s not about collecting data, or making scientific advances. It’s bigger than that.”

“What’s the function of a galaxy?” the speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin once asked. “I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.”

While most of us go about our days, immersed in the minutia our lives, we remain very much a part of something bigger than ourselves, and even bigger than humanity. Right now, as you read this, you’re on a rocky water-covered planet (an average one) orbiting around a star (also pretty average) that is busy fusing hydrogen into helium.* Our solar system is nestled on the third arm of the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy that is, yes, average: just one among 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.

We exist here on our planet together, each with our different stories, different backgrounds, beliefs, preferences, and routines. That is what makes our small home quite special.

We know so much about our broader home—the cosmos—because people across centuries have devoted their lives to asking questions about it. Today, some explore planets like Mars and Saturn. Some use telescopes to discover other planets in whole other solar systems. Some obsess over galaxies and the beginning of the universe. Still others think about the end of the universe, how it will happen and what it will mean. And some are really passionate about the stories rocks have to tell us—rocks have all the secrets. Together, the work of all of these scientists gets at why any of this stuff—in space, on our home planet—exists at all, why it turned out the way it did, and what that means for us.

This is about DEI.

I’ve spent a decade reporting on NASA. Employees at the federal agency recently received a directive from their headquarters to remove specific words from their websites, including “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.),” among many others. Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on DEI is upsetting on a number of levels. When it comes to NASA specifically, I can say that inclusion is part of the entire point of the work that they do.

With examples from her career. And concluding,

What’s happening with DEI is horrible. But the thousands of people who work for NASA will continue to climb mountains to peer through telescopes, study the big bang, drive rovers on Mars, and ask the big questions. The administration cannot take what makes NASA out of NASA by deleting websites or removing the words “women” or “diversity” or “people of color.” NASA is special because it takes all of us to do this work, to take it in, and to make meaning from it.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Cosmology, Lunacy, Politics | Leave a comment

A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them.

  • How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business;
  • How Trump creates problems he then claims to fix;
  • How the assault on DEI is about resegregation;
  • How California farmers, who supported Trump, don’t want to talk about what he did to their water;
  • Timothy Snyder about what makes a country, and what we can do now to fight back against tyranny.

Slate, Derek W. Black, 6 Feb 2025: “Back to the States”, subtitled “Trump’s Department of Education plans go against our country’s long history of federal support for schools”

All these moves are supposedly justified by the idea that the federal government does not play a legitimate role in education. But founders like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison would be confused, if not outraged, by the current administration’s disdain for public education and the federal government’s role in it. Our Founding Fathers knew that democracy could not survive without an informed population, and at every turn they called for federal government support of public education. And that support, more than once, has helped transform our democracy for the better.


Federal leadership on public education predates the Constitution itself. During the Revolutionary period, the Founding Fathers were animated by the idea that public education was an essential ingredient of America’s radical experiment in self-government. James Madison quipped: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” The cure, John Adams proposed, involved extending public education to “every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest.” Thomas Jefferson seconded the idea and warned that representative government would be the tool of “tyranny” unless common people were equipped with the skills to resist it.

The piece goes on with much historical background. The basic problem with eliminating the DoE, it seems to me, is the same as the reason you don’t run the government like a business. Businesses are about making money. About cutting off bad investments and products that don’t return on investments. Then recall that blue states like California pay much more taxes into the government that they get back, and that red states get much more money from the government than they pay in taxes. Cut the Feds out of education, let each state fend for itself, and the poor states will have less to spend, proportionately, on education than the rich states.

And this recalls Lakoff’s idea about the government having a moral mission to provide protection, and empowerment. (See this post.) But that’s Lakoff’s take on the progressive view; conservatives don’t believe this at all. Conservatives are just in it for the money, apparently.

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Trump creates problems and then pretends to fix them and claims victory.

Salon, Brian Karem, 6 Feb 2025: Our republic’s arsonist: Trump lays the groundwork to claim a Pyrrhic victory, subtitled “He’ll return to claim credit for putting out the fire — but not before the United States gets burned”

With examples of withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, and his crazy plans for Gaza. My favorite example is also cited:

That would also explain why Trump started a fire by issuing tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports, only to pull them back less than a day after issuing them. He said he did it because both countries had capitulated to his demands — but in fact they just committed to actions to which they’ve already agreed.

That is, first Trump blustered about using tariffs would solve all sorts of problems, but all he got out of his threats were promises by Mexico and Canada to take various actions that… they were already doing. Trump didn’t know or didn’t care; he trumpeted their ‘capitulation’ as a great success, and suspended the tariffs. At least for now.

The piece goes on and on, about USAID, the California fires, and the scrubbing of science (especially about climate change) from federal websites, with threats to the NOAA, which tracks weather systems around the world.

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This is obvious.

Washington Post, Karen Attiah, 6 Feb 2025: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation., subtitled “The GOP leaders attacking inclusion programs want to go back to an era when White men ran everything”

Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.”

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Don’t need to quote from this; the title will do.

Politico, 6 Feb 2025: Trump dumped these farmers’ water. They’d rather not talk about it., subtitled “President Donald Trump followed through on his promise to unleash California’s water — only the water he released belonged to the very farmers he’d promised to help.”

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From Timothy Snyder, author of the short book ON TYRANNY (reviewed here), which is lately back on bestseller lists. That book leads with his now oft-cited rule “Do not obey in advance.” He’s on Substack too.

Timothy Snyder, Thinking About…, 2 Feb 2025: The Logic of Destruction, subtitled “And how to resist it”

This piece ties to the JD Vance issue about primitive vs enlightened morality, to Lakoff, to Reich, to Richardson’s definition of fascism.

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

The end of his piece offers ideas for how to respond, from which I will quote selected passages…

If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else.

Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution.

Those considering impeachment should also include Vance.


Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.


Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.


What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

Shades of Morality

  • Trump’s crazy Gaza redevelopment plan;
  • How conservatives use “corruption” (without evidence) as an excuse to undermine institutions they don’t like;
  • And they would go after Wikipedia, if they could;
  • Then a long sequence about JD Vance on Christian love, various responses, and my take;
  • With a relevant quote by Bertrand Russell.

First, items about the Current Craziness.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Feb 2025: This Trump Plan for Gaza Is One of the Craziest Things I’ve Ever Heard

He proposed not only that the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza leave their homeland—because, he said, it’s “a hellhole” and always will be—but that the United States take it over, “own it” (he dropped that phrase a few times), and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Yes, he really said that.

And typical, I would say. He sees every situation as a potential opportunity to make money. And he has not the slightest concern for any of the people he would displace.

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The excuse they use is always corruption or abuse. Anything to their disliking must be due to one or another, while the real reason is that conservatives disapprove of the governments’ project. And that’s their excuse to attack.

Slate, Stephen Harrison, 5 Feb 2025: Project 2025’s Creators Want to Dox Wikipedia Editors. The Tool They’re Using Is Horrifying., subtitled “The Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it accuses of antisemitism.”

In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats. Revealing an editor’s personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user’s being permanently banned from the site. Although this behavior is strictly prohibited by Wikipedia’s rules, Heritage has endorsed these scorched-earth tactics in response to what it perceives as antisemitism among certain editors covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on Wikipedia.

They already have their Conservapedia, where they can live in their fantasy world in which relativity and evolution a merely conspiracies. Isn’t that enough?

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Also this:

The Atlantic, Lila Shroff, 5 Feb 2025: Elon Musk Wants What He Can’t Have: Wikipedia, subtitled “Musk and other right-wing tech figures have been on a campaign to delegitimize the digital encyclopedia. What happens if they succeed?”

Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack.

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Expanding the theme outward a bit, here’s a post several of my Fb friends have shared.

The point of interest is the comment by one Pastor Brandon, which I will quote in full:

As much as I don’t want to touch this one, JD Vance stepped inside the “love God and love others” conversation, so I felt compelled to respond.

Vance’s statement might sound like a Christian concept, but it’s actually the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. Nowhere in Scripture does Jesus command us to prioritize love based on proximity, nationality, or citizenship. In fact, He repeatedly destroys that kind of thinking.

In Luke 10, when a lawyer tries to justify who he’s required to love, Jesus responds with the Good Samaritan—a story where the hero is the very outsider Jewish society despised. The point? Love isn’t about who’s closest or most familiar—it’s about who needs it.

In Matthew 5-7, Jesus obliterates tribalism. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). No caveats. No hierarchy.

In Luke 4, Jesus stands in His hometown synagogue and reminds them that God has always shown grace to outsiders—and they try to throw Him off a cliff for it.

Vance’s “Christian concept” isn’t Christian—it’s a survivalist model. It’s what we were taught in disaster relief: start with family, then widen your circles outward. That’s practical for triage, but it’s not biblical love. Jesus doesn’t command us to rank our compassion. He commands us to love without restriction.

This isn’t a theological mistake by JD—it’s gaslighting and politically distorting scripture and the heart of Jesus. Christians are now being told that Jesus’ radical, all-encompassing love is actually a misinterpretation, and that the real Christian way is to love selectively, starting with your own tribe. That’s not the Gospel—that’s nationalism wearing a cross like a fashion accessory.

… and a comment to that comment from one Mei-Ling Johnson Eckman:

Tell me you didn’t actually read Thomas Aquinas or Augustine without telling me. Ordo Amoris – was not meant to be applied to a nation state, but to an individual.

So I Googled “Ordo Amoris” and found links to a bunch of sites, all religious sites, with variously tortured interpretations of what Christian love means.

The first one is inspired by the same JD Vance comments:

Catholic News Agency, 4 Feb 2025: What is the ‘ordo amoris’? JD Vance’s comments on Christian love spark debate

My first reaction is bemusement about how so many people can cherry-pick and stretch the words of the Bible into whatever they want them to mean, and to claim, for instance, that you can’t understand what the Bible meant without reading all these later interpreters, like Aquinas. (I don’t care what Aquinas said, except possibly as literary history. Was everyone who lived before Aquinas wrong, until he came along to set them straight?) And to notice that Vance, at least, is arguing in bad faith (and ad hominem) when he says, according to this CNA piece,

“A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

Or, maybe they assumed Americans can take care of themselves, while others around the world need more help. It’s not as if Republicans are doing anything to advance assistance to the poor in the US, and they’re certainly not interested in helping those overseas. They are apparently endorsing Vance’s insular morality.

Not being a nit-picking Christian scholar, I can nevertheless align these attitudes with the range in human nature that has been recognized by the psychologists and biologists and other scholars in recent decades, and as I’ve read about in books by Wilson, Pinker, Greene, et al. And which I’ve tried to track here in this blog. On the one hand is what I’ve been calling “tribal morality,” which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to maintain the endurance and stability of small groups, the tribe. (Which Pastor Brandon calls “a survivalist model”.) The OT Ten Commandments are clearly best understood in that context, e.g. “that shalt not kill” didn’t apply to other tribes. On the other hand is the relatively advanced morality that has emerged, almost by necessity, as the world’s tribes have grown and interconnected and meshed into a global society, where you won’t get along and prosper if you don’t understand how to treat people in other tribes as ‘equals.’ This was the explicit intention of the US Constitution — “all men are created equal” (not all Americans) — which modern conservatives are apparently now rejecting.

And yet base morality hasn’t died, in most people, which is why so many want the 10 Commandments posted in schools, and not what Jesus said, which in this context advises his followers to take a wider view and treat everyone equally outside one’s tribe. So my takeaway from all this is that the OT represents basic, tribal human nature; and what Jesus said was to try to break out of that tribal mindset and take a more worldly view.

Which is urgent and vital in our modern world. Or we will all go down together.

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Here’s a relevant quote from Bertrand Russell

“All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Morality, Philosophy, Religion | Leave a comment

Living in History

[draft]
Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with.

  • Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an un-elected billionaire run the government;
  • Why Trump is shutting down USAID;
  • And withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council;
  • And wants to “clean out” Gaza;
  • How the coup is deleting data it doesn’t like;
  • And how if what’s happening here happened in any other country, we’d be calling it a coup.

Here’s what I think is a key point. There are always people like Trump, in every society, and their followers. They are driven by base human nature tribal values. Disregard for anyone outside their tribe, in this case white men, who say out loud that people of other races, and women, cannot be trusted. The question now is whether our American society, built on Constitutional principles designed to overcome those prejudices and claim equality, can survive someone like Trump. And it seems increasingly uncertain that that can happen.

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Let’s start with a summary from Heather for today.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: February 3, 2025

I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.

But they are not doing that.

Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.

The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.

It’s almost like Republicans don’t believe in, or understand, the US system of government.

But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.

But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.

At least some of the Democrats are speaking up, but only through legal means. What else can they do? Play the Republicans’ game?

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The worldview of Trump, and Republicans apparently, is insular, selfish, and irresponsible.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 3 Feb 2025: Why It’s a Huge Deal That Trump Is Trying to Shut Down USAID

So, what is going on here? What does Trump have against USAID? And why does USAID have a room full of highly classified information?

USAID was created in 1961 through an act of Congress proposed by President John F. Kennedy to consolidate all U.S. foreign-aid programs in one quasi-independent agency. Then and now, it runs or funds thousands of programs in food aid, disaster relief, technical and financial assistance, environmental protection, and long-term socioeconomic development. It also has special departments to promote democracy.

Its spending allotment for this year, $31 billion, amounts to just half of 1 percent of the total federal budget. Yet it is the principal instrument for U.S. “soft power” and has done much, over the decades, to mold America’s image—to the extent it has one—as a beneficent country.

Bottom line:

There’s the problem in a nutshell: As Trump has demonstrated in the first two weeks of his return to the White House, more than ever, the president is no fan of “soft power.” Nor does his concept of “America First” include the notion of helping foreigners in need. Some may view foreign aid as enlightened self-interest; Trump sees it as a game for suckers.

Trump also doesn’t care for USAID’s pro-democracy activities. Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and a forthcoming sequel, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, thinks that Trump and Musk want to destroy USAID “because it promotes democracy in nations like Hungary”—a source of huge annoyance to Viktor Orbán, one of Trump’s favorite foreign leaders and Hungary’s autocratic prime minister.

Trump is not on America’s side.

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On the same matter.

Vox, Dylan Matthews, 4 Feb 2025: The worst thing Trump has done so far, subtitled “Tens of thousands of people will die if Trump’s war on USAID continues.”

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Nor is he on the side of human rights. He’s out only for himself.

NPR, 4 Feb 2025: Trump withdraws the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council

Why? Perhaps to show support for Israel, as the subtitle here suggests.

Politico, 3 Feb 2025: US to again withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council, stop UNRWA funding, subtitled “The actions come one day before Trump is set to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.”

Don’t Palestinians have rights too? Apparently not.

CNN, 27 Jan 2025: Trump wants to ‘clean out’ Gaza. Here’s what this could mean for the Middle East

About two and a half months ago, I wrote a piece about what foreign aid might look like in the second Trump term.

We are now in that incredibly dark reality. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) became one of the first targets of the Trump administration, starting with an Inauguration Day executive order freezing aid programs for 90 days. This was impoundment in action, the usurpation of the power of the purse from Congress.

The article notes,

Foreign aid has never been popular, and while some of that is perhaps due to misunderstandings of what “foreign aid” means, most Americans just generally don’t like helping people in other countries. (It doesn’t help that past surveys have shown that the average American thinks the US spends a quarter or more of its total budget on foreign aid — the real figure is less than 1 percent.)

Because what USAID has done includes saving 50,000 lives from malaria every year, and saving a million-plus lives from HIV/AIDS. But those are all foreigners, and so Elon Musk, in this case, doesn’t care. And Trump says, fine!

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The coup is deleting data it doesn’t like.

Slate, Lizzie O’Leary, 4 Feb 2025: Unfortunately, the Economy Runs On the Data Trump Is Trying to Delete, subtitled “The gutting of government statistics is a recipe for chaos.”

On Friday, at 8:29 a.m., markets across the world will slow what they’re doing to wait for data—specifically, the monthly jobs report, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases at 8:30 a.m. It’s not an exaggeration to say that trillions of dollars (U.S. equity markets alone are worth $62 trillion) turn on what the BLS says. The stock market, bond market, and Federal Reserve act and react based on this report.

But Friday’s release, which covers the month of January, also has the unfortunate distinction of relying in part on government data that was taken offline this week and is, as of this writing, inaccessible to the public. Economists, business owners, and even everyday people are entitled to understand the full picture of who lives and works in this country, and the Trump administration just made that harder.

Allow me to wonk out for a moment here. The report is technically called the Employment Situation, and it’s a monthly picture of who was hired, who was fired, what race and gender they are, which sectors they work in, what education they completed, even whether they could find only part-time work that month. The BLS collects data in two ways: from employers and from households. And once a year, it revises that data based on a bunch of different factors (I’m grossly simplifying), including details on the U.S. population according to census data. That is the report we’re expecting Friday—a 30,000-foot view of the American population and labor force over the year. And this week, census.gov went offline, to try to comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders on gender and sex, diversity, and foreign aid. (The main census site is back now, but not all the census datasets are.)

Bottom line:

But here’s the thing about casting subtler doubt on data, making it hard to find, or removing it wholesale. It could quietly erode the very foundations of our economy—and our trust in public agencies. “There are many ways to undermine trust in public data if that were someone’s goal,” said Kolko. “Depriving the federal agencies of money, encouraging their staff to quit—these are all ways that could end up undermining trust in public data.” And that should worry us all.

We’re doomed.

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Once again, in any other country….

Slate, Dahlia Lithcwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 4 Feb 2025: Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup, subtitled “If this were happening in any other country, we’d be calling it a coup.”

The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump’s blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk’s team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress’ explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing out principled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage.

What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up. Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected, is now attempting to restructure the government around his own whims, vendettas, and obsessions. He is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines. Musk seems to reject basic aspects of the nation’s constitutional democracy, replacing the separation of powers with the rule of an autocrat. Many of his offensives appear to reject the legitimacy of any legal limitations that stand in his way, treating federal statutes and precedents as mere suggestions he can take or leave at will.

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I saw a Facebook post, just a casual observations, that said people living in a dictatorship go on about their daily lives much the way people in democracies do. It’s only when options begin to disappear — certain services no longer available, certain books no longer for sale or in public libraries — that anyone might notice. And most people won’t notice.

But in the history of the world, the dictatorships are dead ends. The cultures that encourage diversity and exploration expand humanity’s reach, and understanding, and control. And move humanity forward. Yet most people don’t care.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

Easier to Destroy than to Build

Or: The Anti-America Americans.

Latest about the coup:

  • Today Trump has suspended the tariffs he’d said would go into effect *today* on Mexico and Canada. Familiar pattern? He’s flailing.
  • Musk and his gang of college kids have compromised the financial records of everyone in America, as Musk is unilaterally deciding which government programs no longer need funding.
  • And probably something else I missed.

Today’s items.

  • Some of them say it out loud: white men should be in charge;
  • Conservative Wall Street Journal calls the tariffs (now postponed!) “the dumbest trade war in history”;
  • How Trump and his current acolytes only learn how things work by breaking them; aligned with Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending;
  • How Trump’s Gitmo detention center would be bigger than history’s worst concentration camps;
  • And Franklin Foer on how Trump is enacting the long-standing conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.

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They really say it out loud. (Realize that Boing Boing can be a bit sarcastic.)

Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 3 Feb 2025: New pick for high-level State Department job: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Rolling Stone reports that on January 6, while other MAGA patriots were smearing their doo doo on the wall to prove their superiority, Beattie was busy telling Black people to “learn their place” and “bend the knee to MAGA.” Nothing says “I’m definitely not racist” like telling Ibram X. Kendi to “learn his proper role in our society.”

This walking Dunning-Kruger graph actually claimed that working-class white men have it worse than Uyghurs in China. Yes, the genocide-experiencing Uyghurs. Beattie has it worse than them. Poor guy! Not sure how he got so fat and sleek on a starvation diet, but I guess his white guy superpowers are extra special at calorie conservation.

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This may be moot by now, but this is from the conservative Wall Street Journal. (Without a subscription you can only see the first few paras.)

Wall Street Journal, The Editorial Board, 31 Jan 2025: The Dumbest Trade War in History, subtitled “Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.”

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As with terrorists, conservatives find it easier to break things than to build them.

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 31 Jan 2025: The Second Trump Presidency Will Be a Golden Age of Involuntary Civics Education, subtitled “Look on the bright side! You only really learn how something works after it breaks.”

One benefit of getting older and having a family and a house to take care of is that you learn a little bit about How Things Work. Usually this is because a basic Thing you had taken for granted stops working, like the washing machine spin cycle, or the boiler that heats the house during the winter, or the combination of shingles and wood that is supposed to prevent rain from traveling directly from the sky to the ceiling of your daughters’ bedroom and creating multiple enormous patches of discoloration that look like something from the poster for The Ring. In the panic that results, you are forced to learn basic facts about plumbing, electricity, or home construction in order to guide the process of getting your life out of the 19th century.

Apparently, this is what the United States has voted to do for the next four years, but at the level of society as a whole. It’s been 11 days since Donald Trump was sworn into office, and the list of usually taken-for-granted things that have been broken, or are in the process of being broken, is already long—as is the resulting file of “Huh, didn’t know that’s how they did that.”

With examples of Medicaid portal, Meals on Wheels, air traffic controllers, and so on.

And examples of Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending:

NY Times, 19 Dec 2024: Assessing Elon Musk’s Criticisms of the Government Spending Deal, subtitled “The world’s richest man posted or amplified inaccurate claims about the bill’s provisions for congressional salaries, a football stadium and biological research.”

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Just saying.

Slate, Pedro Gerson, 2 Feb 2025: Trump’s Gitmo Detention Center Would Be Bigger Than History’s Worst Concentration Camps

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This resonates with Heather Cox Richardson’s post that I quoted yesterday.

The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, 2 Feb 2025: Trump’s Campaign to Dismantle the Government, subtitled “The president is pursuing the long-standing conservative goal of neutralizing the federal bureaucracy.”

Over the decades, the American right has deployed violent imagery to describe its highest ideological goal: drown government in a bathtub, starve the beast, slash and burn. In less than two weeks of organized chaos, the Trump administration has realized these fantasies, but by deploying tactics both more subtle and more sinister than the movement’s old guard ever imagined.

Rather than eliminating departments wholesale or depleting the budgets of agencies, it has relied on menacing gestures. By arbitrarily placing civil servants on probation, reclassifying bureaucratic positions as political appointments, freezing grant spending, floating a “deferred resignation” offer by mass email, and firing high-profile federal prosecutors and inspectors general, the administration has created the impression that it is making preparations for a mass purge of the government.

A nice essay, but I can’t quote all of it. The theme of its opening is very familiar: it’s the traditional American dream of the frontier, the little house on the prairie, of living off the land, and wanting the government to leave you alone. It’s not the dream of the Constitution, which conservatives say they venerate, without apparently understanding it, or following it.

Foer ends:

Nobody would invent government institutions as they currently exist, but that’s their strength. Their culture emerges from the long histories of organizations, developed organically over time, prodded by moments of legislative reform, largely resistant to the fads of the moment. This is not something that returns with an orientation session or even the next change of administration.

The wrecking ball should inspire humility. In an afternoon, timeless fixtures of a landscape can be reduced to scrap and dust. What’s destroyed in a flash of ideological fervor, at the behest of a president who abhors dissent, can’t be so easily replaced, if at all.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Leave a comment

People Are Saying… It’s a Coup

Another sleepy day with a cold, and it’s gloomy and drizzly outside today too.

Let me summarize the latest outrages via columnists I follow.

Connie Willis on Facebook, 2 Feb 2025: IT’S A COUP–Trump Moves to Completely Take Over Government

First, during the campaign, Trump assured us he had no intention of seeking retribution on his political enemies. Now he has:
–fired everybody who worked on the January 6 investigation.
–fired everybody who worked for Jack Smith.
–fired all the top officials at the FBI.
–fired every prosecutor who worked on any investigation into Trump.
–instituted a mass purging of professional law enforcement–dozens and dozens of agents.
–dropped charges against Republican Representatives Jeff Fortenberry and Andy Ogles. (“In a dictatorship there will be those who the law binds but does not protect and those who the law protects but does not bind.”)
–Trump dismissed all 51 agents who said Hunter’s laptop was tampered with and contained Russian disinformation.
–Trump then signed an order preventing them all from entering federal buildings.
–88 FBI agents who worked on Trump cases were physically escorted out of Washington field offices this weekend.
–At least three different FBI senior officials, including Brian Driscoll, the acting FBI head, “forcefully resisted” the firings.

Second:

Trump has handed Elon Musk the car keys to our entire government:
–While Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-lago golfing, Elon Musk and his cronies demanded (and forcibly took) access to all the federal employee data systems at the Office of Personnel Management.
–According to Reuters, “Elon Musk’s team has hijacked massive datasets of government worker dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, length of service, performance evaluations, revoking access of the OPM officials.”
–The guy in charge, David Lebryk, the Acting Head of the Department, tried to fight them, then quit (or was removed) over their demand for access and his refusal. Update: According to the New York Times, he resisted, then was put on leave by Trump and then forced to resign Friday. (It’s a coup, people.)
–Senator Ron Wyden: “NEW: Sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE ‘full’ access to this system. Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it.”
–Musk aides locked federal employees out of the system, which contains the personal data of millions of federal employees, including dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service of government workers.
–Senior career employees have had their access revoked to the department’s data systems.
–Musk’s team moved in, installed sofa beds, and is working around the clock to do whatever it is they’re doing. Nobody knows what that is because there is no oversight. One official said, “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems. That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

Much more detail. Ending with:

Best line of the day, from Tea Pain: “Name one thing Trump has done since elected that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t approve of.”

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Heather Cox Richardson, 1 Feb 2025: February 1, 2025

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

First,

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

She then recounts some of the details that Connie did, and many others.

Second,

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

And third,

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

There’s a story here about why all the supposedly smart people in Silicon Valley have turned so right-wing and now support Trump, that I haven’t seen a good explanation for. They’re simply greedy? They’re being extorted? There’s also a story here about these guys’ fetish for science fiction scenarios which seem increasingly less and less plausible, to those of us who follow them.

Concluding,

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump’s MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

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An aside, perhaps, but an illustration Trump the moron. The photo at the top goes with this story.

LA Times, 31 Jan 2025: Acting on Trump’s order, federal officials opened up two California dams

• The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers abruptly increased the amount of water flowing from two California dams.
• The federal agency made the decision after President Trump signed an order calling for increased water deliveries.
• Local water managers, who were caught off-guard by the decision, said they convinced Army Corps officials to release less water than originally planned.

Problem is, the water just flooded nearby farm fields, and did nothing for Southern California. And the farmers need that water for later in the season.

Trump, meanwhile, shared a photo on X of water pouring from a dam, saying: “Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California.”

“Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!,” Trump wrote. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”

He thinks water from reservoirs in the north will flow to southern California because… on a map, south is down, and water flows down? That would be my guess.

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I’ve noted that some (on the left) accuse the mainstream media papers of being too diplomatic, too even-handed, in any story with a political angle. The evidence are occasional pieces I see about how political events are covered in other countries. Here’s an example that someone on Facebook linked, from a site calls Doomsday Scenario. The source isn’t the point; the language is.

Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graff, 1 Feb 2025: Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government, subtitled “Imagining how we’d cover overseas what’s happening to the U.S. right now”

Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices
February 1, 2025
By William Boot

WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.

The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state. Trump is a convicted felon with a long record of family corruption and returned in power in late January after a four-year interlude promising retribution and retaliation against foreign opponents and a domestic “Deep State.” He had been charged with attempting to overthrow the peaceful transition of power that had previously removed him from office in 2021, but loyalist elements in the judiciary successfully blocked his prosecution and incarceration, easing his return to power.

Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.

The mentally declining and aging head of state, who has long embraced conspiracist thinking, spent much of the week railing in bizarre public remarks against the country’s oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, whom he blamed without evidence for causing a deadly plane crash across the river from the presidential mansion. Unfounded racist attacks on those minorities have been a key foundation of Trump’s unpredicted rise to political power from a career as a real estate magnate and reality TV host and date back to his first announcement that he would seek the presidency in 2015, when he railed against “rapists” being sent into the country from its southern neighbor.

It goes on and on. The source has enormous links on many of the terms that I didn’t copy.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, History, Politics | Leave a comment

What They’re Trying to Wipe Out

Under the weather the past few days, with an ordinary cold, mostly a scratchy-throat driven cough. Today: light reading, and naps.

  • At an FBI facility, someone is literally painting over a wall of value words, like “fairness,” “diversity,” “leadership,” and “Constitution”;
  • The Pentagon is ‘rotating’ out, via some newly-invented policy, press offices to NBC, NPR, and NYT to make room for right-wing venues;
  • Jonathan Chait hits the nail on the head: “The president is promising a return to meritocracy — while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”
  • And a sample of comments about the ongoing coup from my Facebook friends.

The Daily Beast, 1 Feb 2025: Trump Admin Paints Over FBI’s DEI Values in Viral Photo

A photo from the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, has gone viral as a grave symbol of the Trump administration’s push to strip diversity, equity, and inclusion values from all facets of the federal government. The image, which has racked up millions of views on social media, shows a man painting solid gray over a colorful mural that highlighted the agency’s core values, such as “diversity,” “fairness,” “compassion,” and “integrity.” The photo was obtained by The New York Times and posted to X by pastor Zach W. Lambert. “If a picture is usually worth a thousand words, this one is worth millions”…

Not to mention, apparently, the word “Constitution” at the bottom.

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Salon, Alex Galbraith, 1 Feb 2025: Defense Dept. evicts NBC, NPR, NYT from Pentagon offices to make way for Breitbart, OANN, subtitled “The major news outlets were ordered to vacate their offices as part of a newly instated ‘media rotation program'”

It’s not that any press credentials are being revoked, it’s that the occupants of a limited number of press offices inside the Pentagon are being given new occupants. Ring-wing occupants. Because of this new policy they just invented.

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This hits the nail on the head.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 30 January 2025: Is There Anything Trump Won’t Blame on DEI?, subtitled “The president is promising a return to meritocracy—while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”

The purpose of Trump’s wild finger-pointing appears to be twofold: first, to avoid taking any blame for a disaster; and second, to exploit the tragedy while it is in the public’s mind, using it to advance the notion that his administration is replacing favoritism toward minorities with pure, race-blind merit. “As you said in your inaugural, it is color-blind and merit-based,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining Trump at the press conference. “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air-traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his former sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

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Comments from some of my Facebook friends, over the past 24 hours:

Istvan Csicserty-Ronay: It’s a coup now. There’s no other way to explain it

Linking this:

Wired, 31 Jan 2025: Elon Musk’s Friends Have Infiltrated Another Government Agency, subtitled “Elon Musk’s former employees are trying to use White House credentials to access General Services Administration tech, giving them the potential to remote into laptops, read emails, and more, sources say.”

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Rob Latham: I’ve read a lot of books about the fall of the Roman Empire, but they don’t really prepare you to live through the collapse of a civilization in real time.

(One lesson might be: most people won’t notice, or care.)

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Jeff VanderMeer: Destabilization of reality in the US is about to reach surreal heights. Protect your mind. Monitor stress levels. Do not doomscroll–it does not help. Be selective about when and how long you expose your brain to this. Do what you can when you can.

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Don D’Ammassa: If there is anyone out there who expects to just ride this out and re-emerge in four years, don’t fool yourself. This is already the end of the US we grew up in and potentially even worse.

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Rob Latham: Everything that’s happened so far is consistent with this interpretation. Appoint a drunk to run the Pentagon. Appoint a foreign asset to run national intelligence. Appoint a crazy anti-vaxer to run the health system. Decapitate the DoJ and FBI by driving out experienced prosecutors and agents. And so on.

With a cartoon about Trump as a Trojan Horse.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on What They’re Trying to Wipe Out