Yearning and Discontent

Posted on Monday 24 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

[draft]

I’m thinking this piece aligns with Tom Nichols and James Marriot, whose comments I’ve noted recently. Is there something vaguely or not so vaguely discontent with the ease of the modern world? A yearning for conflict and autocracy that aligns with base human nature?

Washington Post, Shadi Hamid, 25 Feb 2025: Why half of America is cheering for chaos, subtitle “The fight isn’t between the left and right anymore. It’s a clash over the system.”

The main divide in American politics today isn’t between liberals and conservatives or left and right. It’s between those who believe in the system and those who don’t. And sometimes it really does feel like a matter of belief. It’s a visceral divide about whether basic institutions of American life — from the federal bureaucracy and financial markets to academia and the mainstream media — are working or broken. But it’s more than a feeling, and it’s not entirely new.

Again, American institutions were constructed, in part, to implement the ideals of the Founders, which in turn were based on the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. (And not, need it be said yet again, any particular religion.) And many people seem not to have the patience for them anymore. Break everything down into small enough pieces that they can understand them, they apparently are thinking. The world should be simple, should be black and white.

The writer goes on with how priorities of the two parties have shifted back and forth in recent decades. And says this:

For much of the 2024 campaign, Democratic leaders and economists brought out the charts to tell Americans that if they thought the economy was struggling, they were wrong. The economy was doing just fine. As Biden tone-deafly put it before he dropped out of the race, “I don’t think America’s in tough shape.” More recently, the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was still insisting that “by any normal standard we are very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right.”

This was nothing less than gaslighting. Every day, ordinary Americans were still suffering from inflation. They could see as much every time they went to the grocery store. Yet, Democrats were telling them not to believe what was right in front of their very eyes.

The problem with broad generalizations like this is that Trump won by only 1.5% of the popular vote — nothing like a “mandate.” More deeply, this is an issue about perception, about psychology. No matter how great the US becomes, there will *always* be people who feel disadvantaged and sure that nothing is going right. The writer concludes:

As difficult as it may be, my hope is that we can find ways to acknowledge both realities — that the system has worked for some while failing others — without succumbing to the certainties of either side. Perhaps there is wisdom in standing in the uncomfortable middle, even as others rush to opposite sides of the bus. I realize that this answer won’t be satisfying to many. In some sense, it’s not even an answer. It’s more of a question. Joining the “party of the aisle” doesn’t exactly provide a clear path of action or a set of readily available policy prescriptions. But it does provide its own kind of clarity. After all, the ability to hold contradictions — to believe in institutions while remaining clear-eyed about their failures — is a skill and sensibility to nurture. And it’s one I’m trying my best to embrace.

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One more big-picture perspective, from Jonathan Rauch (whose essential book I reviewed here and in two following posts).

The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch, 24 Feb 2025: One Word Describes Trump, subtitled “A century ago, a German sociologist explained precisely how the president thinks about the world.”

A word I have not heard before. I’ve bolded it.

What exactly is Donald Trump doing?

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

The writer discusses a book by two professors…

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Yes, this is what I’ve been calling tribalism, or the base state of human nature.

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

It goes on; long piece. Ending:

Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

Do the Democrats need a positive message of their own? Sure, they should do that work. But right now, when they are out of power and Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

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Short items.

JMG, from Washington Post, 23 Feb 2025: DOJ Deletes Database On Misconduct By Federal Cops

Why would they do this??

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Slate, Jill Filipovic, 24 Feb 2025: Project 2025 Makes Trump’s Goal Chillingly Clear

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Vox, Nicole Narea, 24 Feb 2025: 4 conspiracy theories that have driven policy under Trump, subtitled “The federal government is now subject to the whims of Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr.”

They are: 1) No, USAID didn’t secretly bribe media outlets for pro-Democratic coverage; 2) FEMA didn’t blow millions on luxury hotels for migrants; 3) RFK Jr. is doubling down on conspiracy theories about childhood vaccines; 4) Trump’s offer of asylum to South Africa’s white minority is based on conspiracy theory.

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It’s been debunked, but Kari Lake keeps spreading the lie about those 150-year-old social security recipients.

People for the American Way, 21 Feb 2025: Kari Lake Spreads DOGE Propaganda While Hoping to Lead Voice of America

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RawStory, by ProPublica, 24 Feb 2025: ‘Completely untrue’: Trump mercilessly shamed for single lie that stands out from many

The lie: “Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.” It’s untrue.

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Republicans keep doing this over and over again. They’re beholden to the wealthy. Who want to be able to cheat on their taxes. This has been a Republican priority for decades.

NY Times, 24 Feb 2025: Trump Just Fired 6,700 I.R.S. Workers in the Middle of Tax Season. That’s a Huge Mistake.

If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.

Yet the private sector leaders advising President Trump on ways to increase government efficiency are deploying this exact approach by targeting the Internal Revenue Service, which collects virtually all the receipts of the U.S. government — our nation’s accounts receivable division. Last week, the Trump administration started laying off about 6,700 I.R.S. employees, many if not most of whom are directly involved in collecting unpaid taxes.

Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed. Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the I.R.S.’s collection capacity. Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: “We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.”

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It’s long been speculated that Putin has something on Trump, and Trump is being blackmailed. In the past few days there have been stories, let’s call them rumors, that Trump was hired as a Russian agent in 1987, nicknamed #Krasnov, but these stories don’t seem legitimate enough to have reached the mainstream media. And yet, they would explain so much.

Salon, Charles R. Davis, 24 Feb 2025: Trump administration refuses to back UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subtitled “The US joined Russian allies Belarus, Hungary and Nicaragua in voting against a condemnation of the 2022 invasion”

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NY Times, Frank Kendall (secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration), opinion guest essay, 24 Feb 2025: America Has a Rogue President

This is about this:

President Trump’s decision to fire senior military leaders without cause is foolish and a disgrace. It politicizes our professional military in a dangerous and debilitating way. What frightens me even more is the removal of three judge advocates general, the most senior uniformed legal authorities in the Defense Department. Their removal is one more element of this administration’s attack on the rule of law, and an especially disturbing part.

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I’m struggling to find the right words. Neanderthal? No, that’s a discredit to Neanderthals.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gaslighting Reality

Posted on Sunday 23 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s lying reaches new levels; and Musk’s DARVO strategy. (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender)

– – –

NY Times, Peter Baker, 23 Feb 2025: In Trump’s Alternate Reality, Lies and Distortions Drive Change, subtitle “Condoms for Gaza? Ukraine started the war with Russia? The president’s manipulations of the truth lay the groundwork for radical change.’ [gift link]

Hardly new news, but it seems to be getting worse.

The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.

Mr. Trump has long been unfettered by truth when it comes to boasting about his record and tearing down his enemies. But what were dubbed “alternative facts” in his first term have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world.

And:

Taking his real-estate hucksterism and reality-show storytelling into politics, Mr. Trump has for years succeeded in selling his version of events. The world according to Mr. Trump is one where he is a master of every challenge and any failure is someone else’s fault.

He claimed to have built the greatest economy in history during his first term so many times that even some of his critics came to accept that it was better than it really was. He dismissed intelligence reports that Russia intervened in the 2016 elections on his behalf so often that many supporters accepted his denial.

Most significantly, Mr. Trump has waged a four-year campaign to persuade Americans that he did not lose the 2020 election when in fact he did, making one false assertion of widespread fraud after another that would all be debunked yet still leave most Republicans convinced it was stolen, according to polls.

Familiar authoritarian tactics. Say something, no matter how outrageous, often enough, and people will believe it’s true. It’s what everyone’s saying, everyone says.

“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and a historian at New York University who specializes in fascism and authoritarianism. “Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.”

Dr. Ben-Ghiat said what made Mr. Trump’s “easily refutable lie” about the 2020 election so remarkable was that he was “working not in a one-party state or authoritarian context with a controlled media, but in a totally open society with a free press.”

But she and other scholars said some of Mr. Trump’s themes resemble those seen in authoritarian states. “The kind of propaganda and disinformation that we see now is not particularly new and not dependent on the internet,” said Benjamin Carter Hett, a historian of World War II at Hunter College. “Exactly the same kind of thing happened in the very diverse and lively German press of the 1920s and 1930s.”

With examples of how Trump or his staff misunderstands or distorts something, and then not only clings to the lie or misrepresentation (remember: they never apologize, never explain), but forces everyone under him to endorse the story too.

Again, an old story. My own thought along these matters is how many MAGA Trump fans are also religiously devout, and how belief in religious fables, especially from early childhood, simply undermines the ability to think rationally. You are taught from an early age to accept certain stories as absolute truths, not to be questioned, no matter how implausible in terms of the ways the world apparently works today, no matter how obviously such stories make sense in historical and psychological terms (Dawkins addresses this in his last chapter.) So, if you believe those stories, you’ll believe anything, including all the stories Trump tells you, in spite of all the objective and circumstantial evidence against them. (And thinking long term, this could be what cripples the human species into not dealing with existential crises, and by extension, an explanation of the Fermi paradox. Intelligence has its limits, and is burdened and undercut by tribal thinking.)

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Something similar is going on here, in the way a simplistic narrative, or psychological strategy, is blanketly applied to diverse real world situations. And people.

Slate, Denise Cana, 21 Feb 2025: I’ve Pinpointed the Psychological Phenomenon at Play in Every Elon Musk Move

Last Friday, tens of thousands of public servants were fired.

The nation lost the dedication and service of these individuals, their communities have lost the security of a reliably employed core of families needing services, and the federal workers and their families have been catapulted into uncertainty, many into serious financial turmoil.

The mass terminations, led by the Department of Government Efficiency, were likely illegal. They were certainly cruel. And they clearly had nothing to do with the “performance” of the individuals let go.

Meanwhile, the daily assault on federal workers’ credibility, professionalism, and patriotism continues. We’re “crooks” who have “forgotten” our oaths to the country and the Constitution. We’re told we cannot share research results, investigate public health threats, start new projects, conclude old projects, continue to work on projects initiated under the previous administration (or even projects initiated during the administration before the previous one). We’re directed to work more efficiently with little direction as to what is allowed and what will be deemed insubordination by paranoid agency leadership teams.

And here’s the strategy.

Those with the misfortune of having seen cycles of abuse recognize the administration’s framework for governance by its acronym from psychology, DARVO: Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.

First: Deny. Any and all claims of wrongdoing are derided as false. They’re baseless lies, slander, misinformation.

Next: Attack. The accuser is cast as the enemy. The people pointing out missteps and misconduct? They’re not trustworthy, they aren’t properly virtuous, they’re too stupid to understand the situation, or they’re so gullible they’ll believe anything.

Finally: Reverse the positions of victim and offender.

DARVO is the pathology of a narcissistic abuser. It’s a small-minded and petty ploy, but it’s a dangerous one. And it is the go-to move at every level of this administration.

Examples:

Presented with mounting evidence of and growing public concern for institutionalized racism, the administration says, No, you’re the racist! And then it sets about dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs with a doth-protest-too-much fury.

Called out by reporters for demonstrably spreading misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories, the administration insists, No, you’re spreading misinformation. Or, an oldie but a goodie: No, you’re selling fake news.

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These are the adult tantrums of “I know you are, but what am I?” bullies, vacuous but vicious. And they have the desired effect of confusing the story, forcing onlookers to choose a side based on whom they trust rather than the evidence.

Beware simplistic narratives, especially those that target the opponents of the narrative-tellers. It’s alarming how large the proportion of the population is that continues to fall for these.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Narrative, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

Outdoing Themselves Every Day

Posted on Saturday 22 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Musk lays off government workers overseeing his car company;
  • Musk asks federal employees to justify their jobs or be fired;
  • Trump issues an EO stating that only he can interpret the meanings of law;
  • Adam Serwer on how MAGA is about reversing the civil-rights movement.
– – –

It gets worse and worse.

For example, this makes a kind of sense.

AP, 22 Feb 2025: Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the auto safety agency overseeing his car company (via)

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees Tesla and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving his company’s cars.

Musk has accused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations and recalls.

In addition to investigations into Tesla’s partially automated vehicles, NHTSA has mandated that Tesla and other automakers using self-driving technology report crash data on vehicles, a requirement that Tesla has criticized and that watchdogs fear could be eliminated.

As JMG notes, “Earlier this month an analysis found that Tesla’s Cybertruck is 17 times ‘more deadly’ than the infamous Ford Pinto.”

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But that’s peanuts compared to this.

CNN, 22 Feb 2025: Federal employees told to justify jobs in email or Musk says they face dismissal

and

NY Times, 22 Feb 2025: Musk Says Government Workers Must Detail Their Workweek or Lose Their Jobs, subtitled “Elon Musk has drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of X, then known as Twitter, as he works to overhaul the federal government.”

Elon Musk threw federal workers into further confusion and alarm on Saturday when he ordered them to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.

Shortly after his demand, which he posted on X, civil servants across the government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”

The missive simultaneously hit inboxes across multiple agencies, rattling workers who had been rocked by layoffs in recent weeks and were unsure about whether to respond to Mr. Musk’s demand. His mounting pressure on the federal work force came at the encouragement of President Trump, who has been trumpeting how the billionaire has upended the bureaucracy and on Saturday urged him to be even “more aggressive.”

In his post on X, Mr. Musk said employees who failed to answer the message would lose their jobs. However, that threat was not stated in the email itself.

(As an aside, no one except Musk thinks his takeover of Twitter was a success.)

This is astonishingly irresponsible. What kind of imbecile would threaten to fire virtually the entire government —

The email was received by workers across the government, including at the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to copies seen by The New York Times.

— for not responding to his arbitrary whim? (Not to mention, who’s going to evaluate the tens or thousands of responses from those employees who might comply?) Can he not imagine what will happen if the US government simply disappears? How is this demand any different from that of an invading force bent on destroying the US and its government?

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That one competes with this one for worst of all. From a few days ago.

Slate, Frank Bowman, 21 Feb 2025: Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday

Over the past month, many have warned that President Donald Trump is trying to make himself king or dictator. Trump’s defenders wave off such warnings as hysterical hyperbole. The past week has shown that they are very much not.

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The defining attribute of a dictatorship, as well as of kingship in its ancient and absolute form, is the assertion that law—its making, interpretation, adjudication, and enforcement—is an emanation of the will of one man.

To the point:

In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president’s control) “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch” and that:

No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

In short, Trump is declaring that in all questions of either making law in the form of regulation or interpreting any law whatever—regulatory, statutory, or constitutional—the only executive branch opinion that matters is his.

If Trump opines, for example, that SEC regulations do not bind Elon Musk, then that is the authoritative position of the executive branch, from which no SEC commissioner may dissent.

So then, isn’t this evidence that Trump wants to be king, or a dictator? In contrast to living within the balance of powers built into the US government?

On the other hand, that the major news sources have not covered this more prominently is perhaps a sign that this EO is just another gesture, and has no teeth. (Many of Trump’s EOs face legal actions.)

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Stepping out a bit. The true motivation of MAGA, and Trump, is to return to an era, say the 1950s, in which white (Christian) men ruled everything in America.

The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 22 Feb 2025: The Great Resegregation, subtitled “The Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are aimed at reversing the civil-rights movement.”

I’ve discussed the broad social trends that might have brought us to this reactionary era. But another is the xenophobia and racism that resides in base human nature, uneducated and uncultured, in all those small towns across the land.

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

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

Incompetence and Restlessness

Posted on Friday 21 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Wired on the incompetence of DOGE;
  • Thoughts about why all this is happening now;
  • Heather Cox Richardson quotes James Marriott of The Times about how the post-World War II liberal order has allowed the seeds of its own destruction to flourish;
  • With a note about Tom Nichols’ latest book, which I’ll write up here soon.
– – –

Wired, Brian Barrett, 20 Feb 2025: The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug, subitled “A series of mistakes by DOGE shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.”

Beginning with a list of the things DOGE has recently done.

This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.

Then about what probationary employees are.

Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they’re gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period—from one year of service to two—in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation.

It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)

And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.

Once again my recurring point: the government is not a business.

(I just subscribed to Wired, partly to see this article, and because I’d been thinking about it anyway. Originally a techie magazine beginning 1993, which I bought off the newsstands for a while, these days it’s increasingly regarded as a reputable news source, especially on current political matters. So I’ll give it a try; it’s just $12 for the first year.)

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I’m always curious about the big picture: why is all this happening now? What broad currents of history, in the past few decades, have led to this undermining of democracy and the Enlightenment worldview, with its concepts of equal rights, rule of law, empiricism, the scientific method, and secularism combined with religious freedom? My provisional conclusion so far is that democracy and reliance on the scientific method (as opposed to intuitive superstition or received religious tradition) are fragile things, that each generation is born anew with a base human nature and has to be trained in these ideas, and if they are not, society will fall back on traditional tribal forms of government. But… why now?

So here’s one idea.

Heather Cox Richardson, February 20, 2025

On Monday, James Marriott of The Times, published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain “an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists.”

“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable,” Marriott writes. “Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States “have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government.”

She then segues into the current measles outbreaks in five Texas counties. Then, how the stability of the “U.S.-backed international rules-based order” has meant that people, including politicians, cannot imagine what it was like in the before-times (so to speak; my phrase).

At home, the relative stability of American democracy in the late twentieth century allowed politicians to win office with the narrative that the government was stifling individualism, taking money from hardworking taxpayers to provide benefits to the undeserving.

Although the actual size of the federal workforce has shrunk slightly in the last fifty years even while the U.S. population has grown by about 68%, the Republican Party insisted that the government was wasting tax dollars, usually on racial, religious, or gender minorities. That claim became an article of faith for MAGA voters and reliably turned them out to vote. Now, political scientist Adam Bonica’s research shows that the firings at DOGE are “a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as…left-leaning.”

And ending:

The reason Americans created the government that the Trump administration is now dismantling was that in the 1930s, they knew very well the dangers of authoritarianism. On February 20, 1939, in honor of President George Washington’s birthday, Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, which was held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Just two years later, Americans went to war against fascism.

Over the next century they worked to build a liberal order, one that had strong scientific and political guardrails.

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I note this piece in particular because I’ve just read Tom Nichols’ OUR OWN WORST ENEMY, published in 2021, whose central thesis is counter-intuitive. Namely, that our current problems are precisely because “we’ve never had it so good.” (See Pinker, Rosling, et al.) People remember only the good parts of the past, and forget the bad parts — disease, discrimination, and so on — and so don’t realize how much better life is now than 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. And *because* life is so easy now, people are restless, and uncomfortable. I won’t say any more about Nichols’ thesis until I write up the book, in the next week.

Posted in History, Human Nature, Politics | Leave a comment

Sea Change: Living in History, and Most People Not Noticing

Posted on Thursday 20 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • By supporting Putin and demonizing Ukraine, the US is withdrawing from the post-World War II world that it created and has supported for 80 years;
  • With comments from Heather Cox Richardson, Nicholas Kristoff, Slate’s Emily Tamkin, and NYT’s Peter Baker;
  • And my observation that most people don’t realize that history is happening around them, and haven’t throughout history.
– – –

Heather Cox Richardson, February 19, 2025

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

And in effect conceded that the US will let Russia keep the Ukrainian territory it’s captured, that Trump now parrots Putin’s talking points, and that the US will focus on China and leave Europe alone — i.e. to let Russia do whatever it wants.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

Richardson is too disciplined to sound genuinely alarmed at all this. But many observers draw the straightforward conclusions: Trump is Putin’s puppet, not for any political reasons but simply because Trump admires dictators and wants to be one; Vance thinks Europe should become as dominated by extreme right-wing groups as the US now is. (Because treating people who are not white Christian men as equals “weakens” the nation.) This is pure xenophobic tribalism. The arc of history is twisting backward. But Richardson does take the long view.

To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.

Ending:

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.

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Nicholas Kristoff is more blunt about all this.

NY Times, opinion by Nicholas Kristoff, 19 Feb 2025: With Trump’s Prostration to Putin, Expect a More Dangerous World

I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.

He’s shattering it. He’s making the world more dangerous. He’s siding with an alleged war criminal, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and poisoning relations with longtime U.S. allies. The trans-Atlantic alliance is unraveling.

“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values — largely put in place by America since the Second World War — which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity,” Chris Patten, the former British Conservative Party chairman and European foreign affairs chief, told me.

The title of this piece in print today is “A Humiliating Month to Be an American.”

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This has all happened before. Thinkers thought it wouldn’t happen again. But humanity, except for a few individuals, seems incapable of learning, and avoiding past mistakes.

Slate, Emily Tamkin, 20 Feb 2025: Where Trump’s Ukraine Lies Are All Too Familiar, subtitled “He wants us to disbelieve our own eyes and memories. Ukraine’s neighbors have seen it all before.”

“I’m afraid we’ve never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength’ before.” —Vít Rakušan, Czech minister of the interior, on X after U.S. President Donald Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine

The writer reviews the same events of this past week as the others have done. And concludes,

And down is not up. We can see that with our own eyes. We know what just happened. Zelensky and Ukrainians lived through it, and the rest of us did, too. To say otherwise isn’t disgraceful; it’s to insist that, for all the power that Trump has, he does not control what’s true.

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An analysis of yesterday’s news.

NY Times, Peter Baker, 19 Feb 2025: Trump Flips the Script on the Ukraine War, Blaming Zelensky Not Putin, subtitled “As he seeks to negotiate a peace deal with Moscow, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.”

When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.

Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a “dictator without elections” who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.

Mr. Trump’s revisionism sets the stage for a geopolitical about-face unlike any in generations as the president embarks on negotiations with Russia that Ukraine fears could come at its own expense. By vilifying Mr. Zelensky and shifting blame for the war from Moscow to Kyiv, Mr. Trump seems to be laying a predicate for withdrawing support for an ally under attack.

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I think there’s an historical truism here. Most the events that historians write up in their textbooks are events that didn’t affect very many people at the time. Most people live their mundane lives without being affected by changes in governments or policy that turn out to have long-term effects.

Heather Cox Richardson, I think, manages both to be matter-of-fact about daily events, while keeping a perspective on what current events mean for the long-term.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Leave a comment

A Continual Stream of Lies and Gaslighting

Posted on Wednesday 19 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump claims Ukraine started the war; Zelensky accuses him of living in “disinformation space”;
  • Musk, corrected about the lie that 150-year-old people are still receiving Social Security, keeps spreading that lie;
  • Tom Nichols on Trump and Musk and Hannity, who have no idea how American democracy works;
  • Thomas L. Friedman on how the world is complex, and how conservatives do not understand this;
  • Dahlia Lithwick realizes DOGE is a protection racket.
– – –

Today’s outrageous statement by Trump, made so casually it’s hard to believe it was a red herring meant to distract the media for a news cycle so they would not notice how Musk continues to dismantle the government; more likely it’s Trump gaslighting the world, sure that whatever he says will be believed by his followers. We’re in Orwell territory, again.

Politico, 19 Feb 2025: Trump blaming Ukraine for Putin’s war leaves Europe reeling subtitled “The U.S. president called out Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a diatribe against Kyiv.”

Donald Trump’s statement that Kyiv “started” the war Russia launched on Ukraine has left Europeans dumbstruck, with one British government aide simply responding, “Jesus.”

On Tuesday night, the U.S. president claimed that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a poor negotiator, saying it’s his fault that his country — which Russia has been attacking for a decade now, including a full-scale invasion in 2022 — is being left out of negotiations over a potential peace deal.

“Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal,” Trump said.  The U.S. president also reiterated his interest in forcing Ukraine to hold elections as part of a deal to end the war.

Also:

CNN, 19 Feb 2025: Trump calls Zelensky ‘a dictator’ after Ukraine’s leader accuses him of living in ‘disinformation space’

NY Times, 19 Feb 2025: Trump Falsely Says Ukraine Started the War With Russia. Here Is What to Know., subtitled “A look at how the war in Ukraine began, the state of the peace talks and why the country isn’t holding elections.”

But it’s no surprise that Trump is ready to throw Ukraine under the bus in order to cozy up to Putin. They’re two of a kind.

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Musk has been corrected (it’s all about Cobol) but keeps spreading the lie. Trump and Musk both deliberately lie, over and over. Don’t their fans realize this?

Washington Post, opinion by Philip Bump, 19 Feb 2025: The tactical ignorance of Elon Musk, subtitled “Musk’s claims of widespread fraud in the Social Security system merit skepticism.”

After a “cursory examination of Social Security,” he said, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” This, he added, was “a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess. Or should be very famous. One of the two.”

Musk, you will recall, is a tech guy. And it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both.

But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.

“There are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote in a response to a question about his allegation. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”

Musk’s numbers were still wrong or deceptive or, again, both.

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They’re simpletons, like many conservatives.

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 18 Feb 2025: Who Is Running the United States, Musk or Trump?, subtitled “In an interview with Sean Hannity, three men demonstrated that they have no idea how American democracy works.”

Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multibillionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, which would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained that the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.

In other words, it was an hour of conversation among three men who have no idea how American democracy works.

Nichols describes how the interview went, given Trump’s “inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch.”

A few other news flashes from the interview: The president of the United States thinks that the government should not pay its bills in full. It should lowball its contractors and force them to accept half payment, he said. Former President Joe Biden was going to leave two American astronauts marooned in space for “political reasons,” according to Musk. Also, Biden wrecked America in every possible way, but they’re fixing it. Musk said he has never seen Trump do anything “mean” or “wrong,” while Trump claimed that he’s always respected Musk. Musk added that he’s never asked Trump for anything, ever, and that if a conflict should arise in his DOGE efforts, he’ll recognize it and recuse himself. (Earlier today, when asked why DOGE and SpaceX employees are working at the FAA and DoD, agencies where Musk has contracts or regulatory relationships, Trump said: “Well, I mean, I’m just hearing about it.”) Finally, Trump and Musk expect to find a trillion dollars of fraud and waste in the government.

(Aside: I’ve read Nichols’ latest book, OUR OWN WORST ENEMY, and will be writing it up here soon.)

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Here’s an excellent opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman about the complexities of the world that Trump (along with many conservatives) doesn’t understand.

NY Times, Thomas L. Friedman, 18 Feb 2025: Why Trump’s Bullying Is Going to Backfire [gift link]

The scariest thing about what President Trump is doing with his tariffs-for-all strategy, I believe, is that he has no clue what he is doing — or how the world economy operates, for that matter. He’s just making it all up as he goes along — and we are all along for the ride.

As I’ve noted, most politicians, and certainly most conservatives who operate out of knee-jerk ideological principles (cut taxes for the wealthy, spend more on the military, etc.), never identify conceptual goals and then identify steps to reach those goals.

I’d love to see the plan. As in: Here’s how we think the global economy operates today. Therefore, to strengthen America, here is where we think we need to cut spending, impose tariffs and invest — and that is why we are doing X, Y and Z.

That would be real leadership. Instead, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on rivals and allies alike, without any satisfactory explanation of why one is being tariffed and the other not, and regardless of how such tariffs might hurt U.S. industry and consumers. It’s a total mess.

Then he comes to the broad issue.

My favorite tutor in these matters is the Oxford University economist Eric Beinhocker, who got my attention when we were talking the other day with the following simple statement: “No country in the world alone can make an iPhone.”

Think about that sentence for a moment: There is no single country or company on earth that has all the knowledge or parts or manufacturing prowess or raw materials that go into that device in your pocket called an iPhone. Apple says it assembles its iPhone and computers and watches with the help of “thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions” who contribute “their skills, talents and efforts to help build, deliver, repair and recycle our products.”

We are talking about a massive network ecosystem that is needed to make that phone so cool, so smart and so cheap. And that is Beinhocker’s point: The big difference between the era we are in now, as opposed to the one Trump thinks he’s living in, is that today it’s no longer “the economy, stupid.” That was the Bill Clinton era. Today, “it’s the ecosystems, stupid.”

And this is precisely, as I’ve noted before, why all these isolationist efforts to “buy American” and tax via tariffs foreign goods are misguided. They’re not possible, as in the iPhone example, and in the long run they will only hurt. We’re a global culture now and there’s no going back.

Another example:

As NPR noted in a recent story about the auto industry, “carmakers have built a vast, complicated supply chain that spans North America, with parts crossing back and forth across borders throughout the auto manufacturing process. … Some parts cross borders multiple times — like, say, a wire that is manufactured in the U.S., sent to Mexico to be bundled into a group of wires, and then back to the U.S. for installation into a bigger piece of a car, like a seat.”

Trump just waves off all of this. He told reporters that the U.S. is not reliant on Canada. “We don’t need them to make our cars,” he said.

Actually, we do. And thank goodness for that. It not only enables us to make cars cheaper, but also better.

…You cannot make complex stuff alone anymore. It’s too complex.

More examples about vaccines, and microchips, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Concluding:

If you stand back and look at the big sweep of economic history, Beinhocker explains, “it is really a story of scaling up our networks of cooperation to harness and share knowledge to make more complex products and services that give us higher and higher standards of living. And if you are not part of these ecosystems, your country will not thrive.”

And trust is the essential ingredient that makes these ecosystems work and grow, Beinhocker adds. Trust acts as both glue and grease. It glues together bonds of cooperation, while at the same time it greases the flows of people, products, capital and ideas from one country to the next. Remove trust and the ecosystems start to collapse.

Trust, though, is built by good rules and healthy relationships, and Trump is trampling on both. The result: If he goes down this road, Trump will make America and the world poorer. Mr. President, do your homework.

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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, 18 Feb 2025: I Just Figured Out What Elon Musk’s DOGE Really Is, subtitled “That it’s a protection racket should have been obvious all along.”

Beginning with all these government cuts.

[White House press secretary Karoline] Leavitt tried to soothe these vital institutions and programs with the promise that anyone who was worried about their own parochial interests should just pick up a phone and call the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to ask for special favors and exemptions. As Leavitt described it, she had been in contact with Vought that very morning, “and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board, and if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies.”

The line struck me at the time as a strange and ominous admission: Sure, we have arbitrarily defunded the government as you have come to understand it, but just hop on the phone with the as-yet-unconfirmed OMB director (he has since been confirmed), plead your case, and he might just do you a little favor. In the blur of the will-they-won’t-they OMB memo rescission and the subsequent lawsuits, it was easy to miss that mobsters dole out services in precisely this fashion. Governments typically do not.

Remember the first scene in the first Godfather movie?

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And there’s still JD Vance’s speech in Europe, in which he encouraged nations like Germany to give more credence to their far-right, i.e. Nazi, constituents. More tomorrow.

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Infrastructure notes: I spent some time a couple days ago upgrading and polishing posts from the past several weeks, inserting ‘more’ tags and fixing broken image links. I now realize that you can’t use image links from Facebook posts; those links are perhaps dynamic, and disappear in a few days or weeks. So: I download the photos, and installed those into my WordPress posts, in several places.

 

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Personal history, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

How Soon Will This Madness End?

Posted on Tuesday 18 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

I keep thinking this has to implode, sooner rather than later. Trump and/or Musk will do something so egregious, so dangerous, that *someone* will step up to reign them in, even if very carefully, behind the scenes, so as not to upset the clueless MAGA supporters.

  • The Trump team keeps firing essential workers, perhaps by “accident,” now officials working on bird flu, and FAA employees despite several recent plane crashes, and earlier, the nuclear stockpile team.
  • Trump speaks like a true dictator about saving the country;
  • Trump and Musk’s claims of abuse have no evidence;
  • The immigrant taking away American jobs is… Elon Musk;
  • They want to throw people in jail;
  • How evil is the absence of empathy;
  • Measles outbreaks are linked to religious schools;
  • Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or August Caesar? Both;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the “liberal consensus” and how the majority of Americans don’t actually want to get rid of government programs.

Examples of the first item today and yesterday.

NBC News, 18 Feb 2025: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them

Also:

NBC News, 17 Feb 2025: Hundreds of FAA employees are let go as Trump’s mass layoffs continue, subtitled “Nearly 300 Federal Aviation Administration employees were fired just weeks after a midair collision over Washington, D.C., killed 67 people.”

Not to mention the Delta rollover plane crash in Toronto yesterday.

How bad does this have to get? Not to mention everything else they’re doing.

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He’s penalizing the media for not using Trump-ordained language. Paging Orwell.

Salon, Brian Karem, 15 Feb 2025: Trump, sensing a lack of solidarity, pushes the press down a slippery slope, subtitled “Donald Trump demands the Associated Press bend a knee — while the rest of the media falls back”

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Spoken like a true dictator.

JMG from NYT, 16 Feb 2025: Trump: Saving The Country Does Not Violate Any Law

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PolitiFact, 13 Feb 2025: Trump, Musk claim government ‘fraud’ without showing proof. How common is federal fraud, abuse?

On Feb. 12, during a White House press conference, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for evidence of fraud.

“I love to bring the receipts,” Leavitt said. She cited three contracts for $36,000 for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, $3.4 million for the Council for Inclusive Innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and $57,000 related to climate change in Sri Lanka.

But these are not fraud of course, these are merely initiatives that Trump & Co. don’t like. They’re conflating very different issues. And of course Trump fired numerous Inspectors General whose jobs it was to ferret out fraud. Their claims about fraud are a ruse.

Alas, the PolitiFact piece gives several examples of where fraud *has* been found, but no quick easy answer to how “common” such fraud is. (In every human institution, I suspect, there are individuals who try to take advantage of the system. That’s what people do; it’s part of the dual human nature in which individual survival is balanced against group survival.) That doesn’t mean the system is fraudulent. If anything, our system of government is extremely robust, with its balance of powers, even as Trump and his acolytes try to skirt them.)

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Yes, there are immigrants taking away American jobs!

Boing Boing, Carla Sinclair, 17 Feb 2025: Jasmine Crockett zings Elon Musk with heartfelt ‘apology’ to MAGA: ‘You were 1000 percent correct’ on immigrants

“There’s an immigrant taking people’s jobs,” the Texas lawmaker conceded in a social media post, repeating MAGA’s favorite refrain, before getting to the punchline. “…his name is Elon Musk.”

“He’s snatching farms, government jobs (even those in which they manage our national security), and definitely those whose jobs are to root out fraud (inspector generals), & those that are keeping us safe (FAA), meals on wheels workers, head start, and the list goes on,” Crockett acknowledged, calling out the South African billionaire for firing approximately 10,000 U.S. workers in his mission to demolish the nation’s federal government.

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How authoritarians and dictators love to just throw people into jail.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 17 Feb 2025: “They deserve a long prison sentence”: Musk joins Trump in trashing “60 Minutes”, subtitled “The head of DOGE lashed out over a segment on the slashing of USAID funding”

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I saw this today on Facebook, but here’s an independent source for the quote.

Reddit Quotes: “Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy” – Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.

Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

Again, recall George Lakoff’s characterization of liberals being driven by empathy, while conservatives (like Trump) are indifferent to empathy, being obsessed with obedience, responsibility, discipline, and loyalty.

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What a surprise.

JMG from Austin Statesman, 17 Feb 2025: Growing Measles Outbreak Linked To Religious Schools

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It’s happened before, and most people didn’t realize it at the time, and most people don’t realize it now.

Salon, Jim Sleeper, 17 Feb 2025: Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? Honestly, it’s both, subtitled “An aspiring dictator, fueled by popular resentment, overthrows a failing republic. We’ve seen this show before”

Donald Trump’s destruction of America’s 249-year-old constitutional republic and civic culture follows a historically familiar pattern that includes two especially striking precedents — one ancient, one modern. In both of these, an aspiring dictator overthrows a tottering republic while promising its frightened, gullible and/or opportunistic citizens that he is rescuing it even as he drains it of its remaining legitimacy and power.

The precedents I have in mind rose and fell on elements of “human nature” that also drive what’s befalling us now. We Americans often consider ourselves transcendent of such dark elements, triumphant over them and even innocent of them. But the precedents I’m going to sketch suggest that every time Trump tells us that one of his accomplishments is so great that “you’ve never seen anything like it,” he’s marching people who believe him one step closer to the same abyss that swallowed Augustus Caesar’s ancient Roman Empire and Adolf Hitler’s modern German Reich. This time is no different. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman was right to warn Guardian writer Robert Tait that this is “dictatorship … a shattering assault on the foundations of the Constitution.”

Again, we are beholden to base human nature. Human institutions, like the US Constitution, have been designed to regulate, if not overcome, the tendencies of base human nature that are least appropriate in the modern world. But they’ve failed before, and seem to be failing now.

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Finally for today, here is Heather Cox Richardson, reiterating her characterization of the “liberal consensus” from her book DEMOCRACY AWAKENING (that I reviewed over three posts, ending here) that dominated mid-20th century US politics, and how that’s working out.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, 15 Feb 2025: February 15, 2025

Beginning:

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.

With some history, including Reagan’s welfare queen.

Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.

That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.

Most of what people think is wrong, as I keep observing.

When asked, Americans say they don’t actually want to get rid of government programs.

…
Nonetheless, Trump is echoing forty years of Republican rhetoric when he claims to have a “mandate” to slash government and to purge it of the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hold the playing field level for Black Americans, women, people of color, and ethnic, religious, and gender minorities.

Ending:

For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.

A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.

Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, History, Human Progress, Politics | Leave a comment

Mark Lilla, IGNORANCE AND BLISS

Posted on Monday 17 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “On Wanting Not to Know”
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 2024, 239p, including 12p notes and acknowledgments)

This is a little book published just a couple months ago that appealed for a couple reasons. First, I read the author’s previous book, THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERAL (review here), which was a decent-enough summary of various political matters, if not especially revelatory. And second, this book suggests it might inform associated themes about disinformation and fake news, about why people would prefer conspiracy theories to objective truth.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Philosophy, Psychology | Leave a comment

Today’s Political Readings from Facebook and Substack

Posted on Saturday 15 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Musk’s boys don’t know Cobol; Robert Reich accuses MSM of being wishy-washy about the coup; Paul Krugman on the Trump administration suppressing health information; Connie Willis on Trump’s “massacre” of attorneys who resigned rather than drop charges against Eric Adams.

– – –

First, a possible explanation for that bizarre claim by Musk that he’d found 150-year-old Social Security recipients.

Facebook post by Christopher Rowe, 14 Feb 2025:

Most of Musk’s stuff is done out of simple hatred and naked ambition, but one shouldn’t overlook the great percentage that comes from simple incompetence. (This isn’t even to get started on his hypocrisy, such as implementing drug testing on federal employees who’ve never had them imposed under any administration–the guy has bragged about doing hallucinogens and smoked pot during an interview). These people have done more to spit on the US in six weeks than Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson did in eight years.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics | Comments Off on Today’s Political Readings from Facebook and Substack

What They Mean By Traditional

Posted on Saturday 15 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Family arriving today for the weekend, so just a few quick items for now.

  • DOGE is about putting “traditional” Americans back in charge;
  • Where Nazi flags are fine, and Pride flags are banned;
  • Musk is about purging federal workers to replace them with theocrats and fanatics;
  • RFK Jr.: it takes an engineer to build a bridge but any a-hole can blow it up;
  • Conservatives were outraged over Obama’s executive orders, not so much about Trump’s;
  • Trump officials “accidentally” fired people in charge of US nuclear weapon security;
  • Trump wants to destroy all academia, not just the woke parts;
  • Republicans are just fine with letting Musk gut the government;
  • Actual judicial sleaze is Trump’s A.G. trying to get those charges against Eric Adams dismissed.

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Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilly, 14 Feb 2025: What the DOGE Takeover Really Means, subtitled “In the dark corners of social media where Elon Musk and the people who aspire to work for him live, it’s clear: This is about putting ‘traditional’ Americans back in charge.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on What They Mean By Traditional