{"id":28052,"date":"2026-06-16T17:33:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T00:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=28052"},"modified":"2026-06-22T16:14:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T23:14:45","slug":"americas-continued-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2026\/06\/16\/americas-continued-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"America&#8217;s Continued Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Michelle Goldberg on the garish spectacle at the White House;<\/li>\n<li>Will Leitch about its absurdity;<\/li>\n<li>Conservatives are trolls;<\/li>\n<li>US science is also in decline;<\/li>\n<li>Paul Krugman&#8217;s theory of the vulgar class;<\/li>\n<li>And music: Hans Zimmer&#8217;s &#8220;Chevaliers De Sangreal&#8221;, a great piece of conceptual breakthrough music, from <em>The Da Vince Code<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\">&#8211; &#8211; &#8211;<\/div>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/17\/multimedia\/15goldberg-pzkm\/15goldberg-pzkm-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, yesterday<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/15\/opinion\/ufc-freedom-250-fight.html\">A Garish Spectacle of American Decline<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America\u2019s decline this way.<\/p>\n<p>Think of it: On the 250th anniversary of our country\u2019s founding, America\u2019s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran. Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire \u201cIdiocracy,\u201d which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if \u201cIdiocracy\u201d captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump\u2019s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\\<\/p>\n<p>Even the participants had their qualms.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/16\/multimedia\/15leitch11-tqvb\/15leitch11-tqvb-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>NY Times, guest essay by Will Leitch, yesterday<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/15\/opinion\/trump-ufc-fight.html\">Trump\u2019s Fight Night Was as Absurd as Promised<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you found it bizarre, surreal and downright flabbergasting to witness the spectacle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship holding a massive event on the White House lawn, with sweaty men being escorted from the Oval Office to a glowing octagon to go punch each other as the president and his war cabinet cheered them on, you were not alone. You should know that the fighters and many people in the U.F.C. appeared to feel the same way. Maybe even more so.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI have seen some surreal things in my life \u2014 this is the most surreal. It doesn\u2019t seem real. None of it seems real. It\u2019s so crazy,\u201d said Joe Rogan, the color analyst on the broadcast, almost hyperventilating, as President Trump walked out at the beginning of the event, alongside the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White. The former U.F.C. champion Daniel Cormier said: \u201cI just can\u2019t believe that we\u2019re at the White House, watching U.F.C. fights. Dude, I\u2019m so filled with, like, testosterone, I want to kick someone in the chest, it\u2019s crazy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The essay ends,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThis is the next chapter in America\u2019s fighting spirit story,\u201d the U.F.C. broadcaster Brendan Fitzgerald said with a big goofy smile that implied he knew something we didn\u2019t. Perhaps he could see the future, and that future looks a lot like this. It was so crazy. It made you want to kick someone in the chest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Conservatives have no principles. They&#8217;re just trolls.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.joemygod.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/gootroll-660x330.jpg\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>JMG, today<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.joemygod.com\/2026\/06\/fox-host-celebrates-ufc-fighters-attack-on-michelle-obama-we-enjoy-it-when-liberals-are-upset-video\/\">Fox Host Celebrates UFC Fighter\u2019s Attack On Michelle Obama: \u201cWe Enjoy It\u201d When Liberals Are Upset<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>More decline.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/dam\/asset\/14de7018-3a11-43b8-8392-6e83ccd5b0a3\/saw070826Roge01.jpg?m=1779983432.668&amp;w=900\" width=\"400\" \/>\/&gt;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scientific American, Adam Rogers, today<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/americas-compact-between-science-and-politics-is-broken\/\">U.S. science is in chaos<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;How did we get here?&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Last June the budget hawks in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/white-house-launches-another-assault-on-science-funding-targeting-nsf-epa\/\">the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)<\/a> pushed NASA into offering a broad package of buyouts, paid leave and early retirement. Over the next few weeks nearly 4,000 NASA employees\u2014about a fifth of the workforce\u2014took the deal. Reynolds\u2019s AXIS team lost 20 people. The engineer designing the heaters to keep the x-ray mirror at a constant temperature: gone. The lead project manager: gone. William Zhang, the astrophysicist who invented the telescope\u2019s mirror technology: gone. \u201cWe were literally left with their PowerPoints, trying to figure out what they\u2019d done and where we were with aspects of the design,\u201d Reynolds says.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" data-block=\"sciam\/paragraph\">Around the same time <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/proposed-federal-budget-would-devastate-u-s-space-science\/\">President Donald Trump\u2019s budget proposal came out<\/a>\u2014with massive cuts to science funding. In the U.S., private money funds vast amounts of scientific development research, and philanthropy contributes a bit, but something like 40 percent of all the funding for basic, blue-sky, exploratory research comes from the federal government. The program that would have funded AXIS was zeroed out entirely.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\\\\\\<\/p>\n<p>And Paul Krugman.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!l0iH!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8987001e-23f2-4232-b6b2-c3db19eda0f7_768x468.png\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Paul Krugman, today<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/paulkrugman.substack.com\/p\/the-theory-of-the-vulgar-class\">The Theory of the Vulgar Class<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80<sup>th<\/sup> birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it \u2014 especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial \u2014 were a desecration of America\u2019s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.<\/p>\n<p>That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued <a href=\"https:\/\/paulkrugman.substack.com\/p\/meet-the-new-bosses-worse-than-the\">yesterday<\/a>, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He goes on to compare our situation to an 1899 book by Thorstein Veblen called <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/833\/pg833-images.html\">The Theory of the Leisure Class<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\\\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Music. Revisiting Hans Zimmer&#8217;s <em>The Da Vince Code<\/em>, which, never mind the historical nonsense of the film&#8217;s plot, has beautiful music and one of the great pieces of conceptual breakthrough music of all time. You feel the world opening up.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Chevaliers De Sangreal (From The Da Vinci Code Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CpHkMZxNLV0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The sound level here is very low; you have to turn up your computer&#8217;s volume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michelle Goldberg on the garish spectacle at the White House; Will Leitch about its absurdity; Conservatives are trolls; US science is also in decline; Paul Krugman&#8217;s theory of the vulgar class; And music: Hans Zimmer&#8217;s &#8220;Chevaliers De Sangreal&#8221;, a great &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2026\/06\/16\/americas-continued-decline\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,18,17,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives","category-lunacy","category-music","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28052"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28082,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28052\/revisions\/28082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}