Rather, they embody the essence of primitive tribalism.
- A Ben Shapiro host renounces the Statue of Liberty and it’s “stupid” poem;
- The disappearance of Navajo Code Talkers on government websites, and MAGA as a white supremacy movement;
- Shameless lies about Canada and fentanyl;
- DOGE cancels weather tracking, the EPA’s scientific research arm, and positions at NASA — all about short-term thinking, with recollections about conservative resistance to the space program in the 1960s;
- The reality of how Trump’s plans are sinking the global economy, and the fantasy by his supporters think that the bad is actually good.
- And another example of how conservatives try to deny reality by passing bill, in this case about trans people.
Anecdotal, but significant. In case it hasn’t become obvious, MAGA, or at least a portion of it, has never accepted the ideals of the nation they supposedly revere.
JMG, 18 Mar 2025: Shapiro Host: I Don’t Love The “Pagan, Liberal” Statue Of Liberty, Remove That “Stupid Poem Off The Bottom”
The host is one Michael Knowles.
“The Statue of Liberty is literally a pagan symbol. It’s the goddess Libertas, though it’s the pagan symbol understood in the revival of classical paganism that came up in the Enlightenment, so it’s got all these liberal Enlightenment ideas associated with it.
“We should just rededicate it. Let’s take it take that stupid poem off the bottom of it that the libs always used to justify mass migration. Ignore the Constitution, ignore federal statute. There’s that stupid poem on the bottom that says, give me your poor unwashed masses. That means that the entire world can come into America regardless of the law.”
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Again, MAGA and Trump want to disappear anyone who’s not white. MAGA is a white supremacy movement.
Axios, Erin Alberty, 17 Mar 2025: Exclusive: Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order”
Why it matters: From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo Code Talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
- They were critical to securing America’s victory at Iwo Jima.
Driving the news: Axios identified at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers that had disappeared from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense websites as of Monday.
How it works: The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
- The Internet Archive shows the deleted Army pages were live as recently as November, with many visible until February or March. None are shown with error messages until Trump took office.
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More absurd, shameless lies.
Timothy Snyder, 16 Mar 2025: Blame Canada, subtitled “Our warmongering, drugged-out conspiracy theory”
Cut to the chase:
Big lies today? That Canada attacked the United States first by sending masses of fentanyl across the border. And also that Canada also does not really exist.
Beginning at the beginning:
When Trump announces an aggressive policy, he attaches to it a grotesque justification. The nonsensical fiction is supposed remain in our minds, as a button to be pushed, so that we accept violence. We will have trouble questioning lies later if we accept them when offered, because that would challenge our own sense of ourselves as not being idiots.
This is the magic of the big lie, as Hitler explained in Mein Kampf. Tell a lie so big, advised Hitler, that people will not believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. His biggest lie was that of an international Jewish conspiracy: something that could always be blamed, something that would always relieve you of responsibility. In 1939, he and his propagandists piled up the fictions about Poland. They pretended that Poland did not really exist as a state, but also that Poland was the aggressor and had started the war.
One more bit out of a long piece. About how addicts blame others.
Vance’s message? We must understand our own addictions as an attack from outside. It is important to understand the psychology of this. An addict will tend to blame others rather than himself. In our domestic politics, we have elevated this irresponsibility to a national verity: someone besides Americans must be to blame for America’s additions. This has now become our foreign policy. We are blaming someone else for our problems, and flailing for ever more nonsensical stories: like that Canada is to blame.
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The inmates running the asylum. These are stupid, short-sighted people who don’t understand the long-term damage they’re doing.
NY Times, opinion by Jonathan Mingle, 17 Mar 2025: DOGE Is Making It Harder to Track Extreme Weather. What Could Go Wrong?
Extreme weather is getting worse, due to the climate change that Trump and MAGA don’t believe in. Reality will catch up with them.
As Trump administration operatives from what has been called the Department of Government Efficiency race through federal agencies firing staffers, freezing funds and canceling leases on facilities — purportedly to eliminate waste — they are effectively powering off systems that track mounting environmental dangers, from weather balloons to air pollution monitors to radar stations to atmospheric observatories. Their chain-saw-waving approach to cost-cutting will only leave us blind as we head deeper into the 21st-century maelstrom of supercharged hurricanes, extreme heat waves and toxic wildfire smoke.
And this:
NY Times, 17 Mar 2025: Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm, subtitled “More than 1,000 chemists, biologists and other scientists could be laid off under a plan to dismantle the Office of Research and Development.”
Better not to know, they figure, and let the next generation pay the damages.
That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.
Even if they think the government *is* a business, why don’t understand that it’s better to invest now in order to avoid much greater long-term costs? (Well, as I’ve suspected before: they only care what they can wring out of the system until the next election.)
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And this.
NY Times, Kenneth Chang, 10 March 2025: NASA Eliminates Chief Scientist and Other Jobs at Its Headquarters, subtitled “About 19 positions will be cut, including those in offices focused on technology policy and diversity, equity and inclusion.”
(More on this topic at Google News.)
Of course conservatives have *always* been against NASA and the space program, all the way back to the 1960s. Irrelevant boondoggles, they said; spend the money on Earth, they said (of course, it *is* being spent on Earth, there are not bucketloads of cash being literally dumped into orbit); solve the problem of poor people first, they said (which conservatives don’t want to spend money on either). Never mind the technological advances gained; never mind the social status of the US in the world for being the leader in space exploration; and never mind the purely scientific interest in spending perhaps 1% of the national budget to advance human knowledge. That kind of spending doesn’t bring the price of eggs down, MAGA would think.
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Reality:
Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 18 Mar 2025: Two forces are sinking the global economy. Both trace back to Trump., subtitled “Forecasts are now predicting slower growth and higher prices — thanks to Trump’s policies.”
They dismiss data as fake news.
On Monday, the OECD, an international research and policy organization, released its updated economic forecasts for 2025. Compared with its previous report, issued in December, the outlook has deteriorated significantly. Forecasts for both U.S. and global growth were downgraded and inflation predictions ratcheted upward.
Many factors affect these analyses, but the OECD blamed two major forces: rising uncertainty and escalating trade wars. Both have been instigated by Trump.
Fantasy:
The Atlantic, Scott Lincicome, 17 Mar 2025: How Republicans Learned to Love High Prices, subtitled “Donald Trump’s allies have pivoted from denying that his tariffs will hurt consumers to insisting that consumers should welcome the pain.”
Sour grapes.
After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a “one-time price adjustment” from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, “We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters.
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To this:
The Atlantic, David Frum, 18 Mar 2025: he Trump-Tariff Advice: Eat Less
Subtitled: The policy’s real message is “Tax my voters; enrich my donors.”
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Again, conservatives would prefer to simply iron over the world and make it all flat, black and white.
JMG, 18 Mar 2025 (via Tennessee Lookout): Tennessee GOP Bill Declares Trans People Don’t Exist
They are besotted by the lore of the ancients.
We have a real issue in our nation, folks don’t understand that when God created us, Genesis 1:27, he created male and female, end of sentence. There is no such thing as gender,” Rose said. “That is something that’s made up by mankind.
No, that’s something tribalists denied, or didn’t understand.
