- Trump’s rage against smart people;
- Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us;
- Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age;
- Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges books based on word searches; Hegseth, one of Trump’s “best people,” keeps blundering; and how a former beauty pageant contestant is in charge of removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian.
Trump’s war against war against intelligence and expertise isn’t strategic; it’s personal.
Paul Krugman, 21 Apr 2025: Trump’s Cultural Revolution, subtitled “The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry”
First he quotes Trump’s Easter Day outburst, which begins with his version of Christian charity… Well it’s shown here as an image, so I’ll just retype a bit, complete with gratuitous caps.
Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.
When Trump goes on to say Biden was, quote,
…our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing
He is, of course, projecting. The description fits Trump, not Biden.
Krugman:
Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.
And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.
It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.
Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.
If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Thus the photo above. (Some of that was visualized in the opening minutes of the TV adaptation of Cixin Liu’s THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM.)
Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.
The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.
The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.
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This synchs with a big piece on The New Yorker’s website today. Again, most people don’t realize what benefits they’ve been getting in better health care over the decades. It came from investing in universities.
The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, 21 Apr 2025: The Cost of Defunding Harvard, subtitled “If you or someone you love has cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or diabetes, you have likely benefited from the university’s federally funded discoveries in care and treatment.”
(My grandmother died of Parkinson’s disease, in the early 1970s. And I have cardiovascular disease. Or had? I had a heart transplant.) Gawande is the author of Being Mortal, among other books.
With U.S.A.I.D., President Donald Trump proved willing to impose catastrophic consequences, including widespread death and financial waste. But that was for people and investments far away. His attacks on universities involve lives and investments here at home.
These attacks are part of a broader assault on America’s health-and-science infrastructure. More than ninety per cent of the nine billion federal dollars for Harvard that are now in danger supports life sciences, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. The university itself receives only a fraction of this funding. Three-quarters of it goes to five independent Boston hospitals affiliated with its medical school: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The threatened defunding, if implemented, would choke off science and research across all of them.
With examples of patients he’s treated. MAGA seems to think any part of government spending they don’t understand should be slashed, without realizing that that spending is supporting real people, who are working to improve the lives of real people — including themselves.
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Several people today on Fb are posting a piece by one Lauren Thompson, an historian specializing in US history from the late 19th to the early 20th century. (This era has recently been dramatized by the HBO series The Gilded Age.)
Here’s one example of a post about this: Nigel Sellars: One fool’s great era is another, better educated person’s horror
Here’s the relevant part of Lauren Thompson’s post.
Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money’s supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.
There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day.
Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women’s purity. Creating instability in the Philippines, the Caribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women’s suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.
Sound familiar?
Here’s an appropriate cue for the famous George Santayana quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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Short items.
As we’ve seen much evidence of, conservatives including Christians feel entitled to lie, despite one of those commandments, because they feel they have some higher cause.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Apr 2025: ‘They Do Not Deserve The Truth’: Andrew Isker Praises Trump/Vance For Lying About Their Position On Abortion
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They revise history by word search. Simpletons.
LA Times, Michael Eric Dyson, 21 Apr 2025: Hegseth purged two of my books on race. Did he actually read them?
Well *of course* he didn’t read them.
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After yet another blunder, by the former Fox News host, Pete Hegseth is apparently being shown the door. Because Trump hires only the best people!
NPR, 21 Apr 2025: Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary
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Yet another example of only hiring the best people.
Washington Post, 21 Apr 2025: She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it., subtitled “Who is Lindsey Halligan, the attorney assigned to help remove “improper ideology” from a major cultural institution?” (via)
Answer: she’s a former beauty pageant contestant. Really. Seriously. And she’s going to stroll through the Smithsonian and override the decisions of professional historians, according to her provincial values. This is where we are.
