- RFK Jr. is a cynic, not a skeptic;
- Conservatives would rather punish California than deal with the climate crisis;
- Paul Krugman on how Trump has no plans, only yes-men;
- Why the decline of DEI is a worry;
- Peter Thiel now apparently really believes the conspiracies he’s been floating;
- MAGA is getting an oligarchy, not lower grocery prices;
- Trump found two, even three, MAGA allies in Hollywood to give made-up positions to;
- The common good vs. putting conditions on California wildfire aid;
- Crossing the 1.5 degree mark and the descent into nationalism.
It’s always been necessary to clarify the difference between a skeptic and a cynic. RFK Jr. pretends to be the former, but is really the latter.
NY Times, Paul A. Offit, 13 Jan 2025: Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic.
The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.
Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.
…
When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.
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Similarly, in the way conservatives deny reality:
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 13 Jan 2025: Republicans see the LA wildfires as an opportunity to punish California, subtitled “People who refuse to do anything about the real crisis we’re facing, climate change, pounce straight to punishment”
But I confess that I am shocked at the monumental lack of grace, empathy and compassion coming from the right as this horrific emergency unfolds. … [T]the right-wing media, influencers and Republican politicians have been stunningly callous about this ghastly event, even for them.
Simplistic reactions.
Where does this madness come from? As historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in this piece from back in 2016, Trump likely got it originally from conspiracist Alex Jones. More recently, as you can see from that speech, it was former congressman and current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social media platform Devin Nunes who apparently filled his head with a simplistic tale about a big “valve” that Newsom (and Gov. Jerry Brown before him) refused to turn on to fill Southern California with all the water it could ever want because they want to save a “little fish.” (This piece at Vox lays out what this is really all about if you’re interested but suffice it to say that nothing Trump, Jones or Nunes said applies to Los Angeles or these wildfires.)
And from Trump:
Not one word of sympathy for the victims of the fire or any promise to follow through on federal help for the area. And one lie after another.
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Paul Krugman: Trump still has no plan.
Paul Krugman, 15 Jan 2025: Trump’s Team of Economic Yes-Men, subtitled “Or, why he still has no plan”
Donald Trump won in November because many voters believed that he would bring down grocery prices; Republicans apparently still think he will, even though he himself admitted — after the election, of course — that it would be “very hard.” Here’s a clearer picture, via Briefing Book, showing that while Democrats, like most economists, expect inflation to rise under Trump, Republicans believe that he will somehow stop it dead in its tracks:
But what will he actually do? Even though he will take office in just a few days, we have almost no idea.
That’s not because the Trump team is keeping its plans closely held, nor is it because there are major factional fights. All the evidence suggests, instead, that Trump’s economic team still doesn’t have any plans, or even concepts of plans. All it has are some half-formulated thoughts about how to cater to Trump’s prejudices without doing massive economic damage.
He never had a plan for replacing Obamacare, either.
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Conservatives going backward, that’s what they do. Just let white men run the world, things will be fine!
Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr., 15 Jan 2025: We should be very worried about the decline of DEI, subtitled “It’s another indication that the United States is going backward, only four years after the George Floyd protests.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion was never the whole solution. But it was a small part of the changes we need to create a country where Black lives, lesbian lives, female lives and others are truly valued and respected. That DEI is dying as Trump is set to begin his second term isn’t an accident but part of the same story. America’s moral arc is not bending toward justice — and I don’t know when it will again.
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Case study of the flaws in human nature that result in commitment to things that are not true.
The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, 15 Jan 2025: MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World, subtitled “Peter Thiel is the latest pro-Trump luminary to take a conspiracist turn.”
The essay opens with this open secret (to those outside the MAGA cult):
Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.
Then:
Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.
Peter Thiel and JFK, the coronavirus, Jeffrey Epstein’s death. And how the writer came to realize that Thiel really believes this stuff.
The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands.
We see this every day, as I keep pointing out; everything out of the ordinary must be *caused* by some conspiracy. Things can’t just happen. It’s all about narratives, how everything must happen for a reason. Concluding:
What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.
The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.
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Now you’re just getting an oligarchy, MAGA fans. Not lower grocery prices.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 16 Jan 2025: Tech billionaires expose MAGA’s “populism” con job, subtitled “MAGA ‘populism’ was always an inch deep — Trump’s billionaire-palooza proves it”
The entirety of Donald Trump’s con artist schtick to bamboozle his followers was perfectly illustrated in one recent photograph. In it, the president-elect sits grinning maniacally next to fellow rich white guy James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola. Clutched in Trump’s famously short fingers is an expensive, specialty-made “commemorative” Diet Coke.
…
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will all have prominent seats on the platform at Trump’s inauguration. The symbolism is unmistakable. Those seats are usually reserved for family members, former presidents, and prominent politicians. Giving those seats to billionaires signals loudly that this is a new era of oligarchy, without even an attempt to feign allegiance to pre-Trump notions of government for and by the people. President Joe Biden was alarmed enough to make this issue the focal point of his final speech in office.“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said in his 17-minute farewell address from the Oval Office Wednesday night.
There was a section of Lakoff’s book, the one I recently reviewed, about “privateering,” a concept that’s apt here. Let me follow up on this another time.
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Great subtitle.
Salon, Alex Galbraith, 16 Jan 2025: Trump nominates Voight, Stallone, Gibson as ambassadors to Hollywood, subtitled “Will the last Californian ally Trump calls to serve in a made-up position please turn out the lights?”
Donald Trump has always been a showman, but he’s looking for a little help to break through in Tinseltown.
The president-elect and former game show host gave in to his “Apprentice”-honed instincts on Thursday, kicking off a mad dash of Cabinet nominations on Thursday with a bit of razzle-dazzle. Trump tagged actors Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight to serve as his ambassadors to Hollywood, hoping the trio of MAGA allies could help usher in a new “Golden Age of Hollywood.”
Being a cosmopolitan kinda town, Hollywood has very few prominent right-wingers (slash conspiracy theorists), and Gibson and Voight are by far the two most prominent. Stallone is a borderline case, as the article explains, but perhaps three positions are better than two. Note how it’s always about recapturing a lost “golden age.”
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Trump identifies all the fellow tribalists he can find, and declares everyone else the enemy.
Robert Reich, 17 Jan 2025: The LA fire and the common good, subtitled “Are we all in this together or are we on our own?”
When conservatives are in charge?
Trump has spent much of the past week complaining — and lying — about California’s water policies, falsely claiming that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to deal with the fires. (The actual problem is that hydrants haven’t had enough water pressure to deal with the huge, sudden demand.)
Trump is now blaming the fires on migrants. He posted a claim this week that taxpayer “funds are diverted to illegal immigrants,” and then “an illegal immigrant comes and sets your house on fire and the fire department doesn’t have the resources to put it out.”
Now Republicans are talking about putting conditions on federal aid for wildfire relief — as if the Biden administration put conditions on southern states for hurricane relief, or as if some senator from Nebraska knows better how to prepare for wildfires than actual firefighters in California.
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The root cause of the fires is staring us all in the face, but conservatives would rather blame people they don’t like. (And/or they simply don’t understand the evidence and the conclusions the evidence implies.)
Slate, Eric Holthaus, 13 Jan 2025: Last Year Was the Hottest Year in Recorded History. Buckle Up., subtitled “Crossing the 1.5 degree mark isn’t as bad as you think. It’s worse.”
To me, the real consequence of crossing 1.5 degrees isn’t that any one thing breaks at 1.5 degrees. It’s that we’re slipping away from an era in which the community of nations came together for the common good of humanity—and moving toward an everyone-for-themselves descent into nationalism. It’s that any urgency we’ve felt so far, any actions we’ve taken, hasn’t been enough.
