- Mike Lofgren on the nonsensical cult that now rules America;
- Peter Wehner on how Trump is gaslighting us;
- Rachel Maddow points out how Peter Navarro’s go-to expert is fake;
- And about critical thinking;
- Two short items about how insurers are among those alert to the effects of climate change, and how foreign tourists are now avoiding visits to the US.
Visiting one of my running themes. Humans are good at creating imaginary worlds and living in them for centuries, as long at their beliefs don’t actually violate reality. But eventually they will.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 5 Apr 2025: Goose-steppers in the name of freedom: The nonsensical cult that now rules America, subtitled “Trump’s followers have embraced so many absurd, illogical contradictions they have no way back to reality. Do we?”
Long piece. He begins with the essence of cognitive dissonance.
Credo quia absurdum: “I believe because it is absurd.” This is the common paraphrase of an argument by Tertullian, an early church father. It has been repeated through the centuries in various forms by religious apologists, and exemplifies a thought-terminating cliché: an idea that is ridiculous on its face, but stated in such a boldly counterintuitive and in-your-face manner that arguing against the proposition is futile.
It may be an exaggeration, but hardly an extreme one, to say that virtually all religions, ideologies, worldviews and self-help philosophies are by definition absurd, containing every kind of unprovable axiom, self-contradictory tenet, illogicality and appeal to blind faith. They only gain a semblance of self-evident truth through age and familiarity, as the legend of John Frum illustrates.
He goes on with the familiar story of John Frum and the cargo cults. Then:
A belief system that may have the highest proportion of logical inconsistencies, irrational dogma, failed prophecies and broken promises of all major worldviews is one now on the upswing in the Western world. Why it should do so now, in a manner similar to the witch delusions that periodically swept medieval Europe or the Dutch tulip mania, has been much debated. Why it should infect nations that are prosperous, ostensibly well educated, and with civil societies that have supposedly developed beyond tribal superstition is a mystery that has never been explained.
I am referring to extreme right-wing or fascist ideology, which for all its local varieties has a common core of beliefs or, more accurately, attitudes and poses. In the multiparty systems of Europe, it is usually represented by recently created parties to the right of traditional conservative parties. In the U.S. two-party system, it has swallowed one of the two existing parties, usurping the role of conservatism and exploiting traditional party loyalties.
…
What are the properties of conservative ideology under Trump, and how is it that their logical inconsistencies and self-contradictions make them not less, but more attractive to American conservatism’s followers?
First I’ll list his properties.
Exaggerated but brittle nationalism
Populism: Instrument of rule by billionaires
Competence and the reality principle
Freedom and the Führerprinzip</>
The “culture of life” — and the death instinct
The sleep of reason breeds monsters
His analyses examine the contradictions or paradoxes in each of these themes. I’ll quote some from the third.
In the 1960s, the waning days of America’s liberal reform movement, Republicans presented themselves as the flinty-eyed bearers of realism. Medicare, then a brand-new program, was simply unaffordable. Urban violence was presented as proof that antipoverty programs didn’t work. Erstwhile liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan began flirting with conservatism, in his case proclaiming that the best antipoverty project for Black urban residents would be the government’s “benign neglect.”
[…]
Over time, the constant repetition of these themes (embraced even by Democrats like Hart, Tsongas and Bill Clinton) achieved a kind of cultural hegemony affecting popular thinking. For decades, Americans have consistently believed that Republicans are better on the economy than Democrats.
Republican performance in office is a different matter. Multiple sources make clear that economic growth has been substantially better under Democratic presidents than their Republican counterparts. The New York Times estimated in 2021 that since 1933, average yearly GDP growth was 4.6 percent under Democratic administrations and 2.4 percent under Republicans. Are the American people blind to these facts? Apparently so.
Far from operating according to the reality principle, Republican economics, like so many of their positions, is based on magical thinking. Their stridently held belief that tax cuts produce more revenue, a notion dating from the late 1970s, should have been a tipoff: By that reasoning, reducing taxes to zero should produce infinite revenue. But teaching math never was the strong suit of the American educational system. Nor, apparently, was elementary logic: How many people voted for Trump believing that foreign companies, rather than they themselves, would pay the tariffs on imports?
Near the end:
Very well, people are irrational. But what will happen when Trump’s policies really begin to bite? I have discussed this with several political pundits who say that when Grandma’s Social Security check fails to arrive, or when the Iraq vet finds the VA clinic closed, or when Bubba in Pascagoula is sitting in the wreckage of his house with no FEMA on site, a time of reckoning will arrive.
Possibly, but I wouldn’t bet on it. A Trump voter whose newly-married wife was detained as an undocumented immigrant says he still doesn’t regret his vote. Farmers were hammered by retaliatory tariffs during Trump’s first term as badly as the rest of us will be damaged in his second; farm bankruptcies soared, as did Farm Belt suicides. That did not prevent farmers from voting overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020 and 2024.
Facts are stubborn things, but so are faith and illusion.
… People, or too many of them, will still believe in the very illusions that caused their world to collapse in ruins about them. They believe because it is absurd.
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And this.
The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 5 Apr 2025: Trump Is Gaslighting Us, subtitled “Trump is an agent of chaos, and chaos has a human cost.”
Beginning with the size of his inaugural crowd, to most recently his calumny against The Atlantic magazine and its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.
“He is, as you know, is a sleazebag, but at the highest level,” Trump said of Goldberg. “His magazine is failing.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who shared the most sensitive information on the group chat, wrapped his attack on Goldberg in layers of lies: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” He added, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.” One high-level person after another insisted that the story was much ado about nothing. The information that had been shared, they assured us, was nothing that was dangerous to disclose.
Except that it was.
And recalling the film Gaslight, from 1944, and its theme, for anyone who has not heard about them after all this time. And concludes:
I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value.
At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.
The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
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Apparently this was exposed years ago, but here is Rachel Maddow pointing it out again.
JMG, 5 Apr 2025: Maddow: Tariffs Plan Began With Navarro’s Fake Expert
“You’d think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on Earth, but that’s not how it’s working out. Turns out, it doesn’t take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together. In all of his books, Peter Navarro has cited an economics expert to justify his views, and the economics expert he cites is somebody named Ron Vara.
“The problem is, Ron Vara doesn’t exist, he never has. The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he’s so gung-ho on tariffs, this person, Ron Vara, is a made-up person. He is a fictional person. Peter Navarro invented Ron Vara as his expert source, so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books.
“Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name.”
Navarro was exposed for inventing “Ron Vara” by the New York Times in 2019. As recounted by Maddow, Navarro first came to Trump’s attention when Jared Kushner searched Amazon for books that would support Trump economic policies and came across one of Navarro’s books.
To be pedantic, searching for books to support a preconceived position is the essence of motivated reasoning.
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Another familiar idea — a fundamental idea. To maintain fantasy worlds and gaslighting, you have to prevent children from understanding the legacy of Western civilization, from the Greeks through the Enlightenment onward, about how to think.
LGBTQNation, Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 5 Apr 2025: Critical thinking is the key to education. Donald Trump wants to destroy it., subtitled “That type of thought could jeopardize the status quo and, therefore, authoritarian power and control.”
The Trump administration has assaulted the entire institution of education in its attempt to silence dissent against its tyrannical MAGA agenda.
… Authoritarian regimes throughout time have attempted to restrict not only the free stream of information, but more importantly, have used every imaginable means of preventing the enhancement of critical thinking skills among the populous, since that type of thought could jeopardize the status quo and, therefore, authoritarian power and control.
The piece goes on with the author’s “life in social justice education.” Fascinating.
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Two short items.
Click image for enormous view.
The Guardian, Damian Carrington, 3 Apr 2025: Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer, subtitled “Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure”
The people who stand to lose money from the effects of climate change are the ones paying attention, despite any amount of denial from those who would lose money by taking ameliorative actions against climate change. One of these sides will win.
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The Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem, 5 Apr 2025: Foreign Tourists Are Taking Trump at His Word, subtitled “Deliberately insulting other countries is bad for the U.S. economy.”
And there are various news stories about how tourist flights from other countries, especially Canada, are significantly down this season, compared to last. The US has become a pariah.
