Author Archives: Sheila

The REAL “Great Replacement”

We’ve all heard about MAGA’s “Great Replacement” theory–the conviction among conspiratorial bigots that “the Jews” are plotting to flood the U.S. with (gasp!) dark-skinned immigrants who will replace “real” (White) Americans. (Why we Jews would want to do that–what possible benefit would accrue to those who masterminded this bizarre plot–remains a mystery. But then, most of the Right’s fever dreams are–how shall I put it–wacko.)

There is, however, a different and far more worrisome effort at “replacement” being pursued by the Trump administration; it’s the replacement of facts, accurate reporting and scholarship with propaganda. The multiple assaults on education, on news media, on reliable statistics. on museums and cultural institutions are all part of that effort to replace reality with an alternative narrative preferred by MAGA autocrats.

The defunding of NPR and PBS are central to that effort.

As educators know, public media has been an important educational tool. It isn’t just Sesame Street. Content for children reaches some 15 million kids a month, and educators and students across the country get free access to PBS LearningMedia, a K-12 digital learning service. Affiliate stations produce educational resources for PBS LearningMedia, and engage in other outreach to educators, providing professional development services and updated trainings on best practices. As the American Prospect recently noted, especially in rural and low-income communities, these services are often a lifeline for teachers.

So how does MAGA propose to replace those services?

If you guessed that Rightwing ideologues have a candidate, you’d be right: PragerU. A Prospect newsletter recently described PragerU:

FOUNDED IN 2009 BY ALLEN ESTRIN and right-wing radio talk show host Dennis Prager, PragerU has been a major player in the movement to do away with “divisive” and “inclusive” educational curricula. Although its name sounds like an academic institution, PragerU is a registered nonprofit advocacy group that rakes in millions each year from donations. In 2024, PragerU reported receiving $66,693,281 in contributions from donors, accounting for 95 percent of its total revenue ($69,710,136). Its largest benefactors? Conservative and right-wing foundations. In its early stages, PragerU was supported by funding provided by hydraulic fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who have donated millions to far-right political initiatives and provided early funding to The Daily Wire.

PragerU’s financial support is certainly reflected in the media it produces. Right-wing luminaries such as Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro have made appearances in its videos. Its most controversial project is PragerU Kids, an educational programming initiative that produces content for kids as young as three. Although it is marketed as “the leading network offering educational, entertaining, and pro-America content for students of all ages,” PragerU Kids has a very specific point of view.

“PragerU Kids is right-wing propaganda; it presents right-wing propaganda as ideologically neutral education and it serves as a gateway into extremism through its attempts to define issues for children at a very young age,” said John Knefel, a senior writer at the research group Media Matters for America, who has conducted significant research into PragerU Kids’ educational content. He explained that PragerU has displayed a commitment to cherry-picking and watering down the tragedies of the past, particularly in videos highlighting U.S. history. “The goal of these videos taken as a whole is to defend an unequal status quo, and to defend existing hierarchies from progressive activists, academics, and teachers who are seeking a more just society,” Knefel said.

PragerU is just one element of the real “Replacement” being pursued–MAGA’s effort to replace truth with fiction.

 
 

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Standing Up For Science

In February of this year, a new organization was formed to combat the anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge MAGA administration: Stand Up for Science. 

The organization has three policy goals, the most important of which (in my view) is the first: ending censorship and political interference in the conduct of science. As the website reminds readers, science can only thrive when there is open inquiry and evidence-based decision-making. Stand Up for Science therefore demands an end to government censorship, including restrictions on the topics of scientific research that are eligible for federal funding, the restoration of public access to the scientific information that has been scrubbed from federal websites, and full public access to primary scientific sources.

In addition, Stand Up wants legal safeguards against political interference to preserve the integrity of federal research and communication and a commitment to freedom of scientific expression– protection of scientists’ rights to communicate their findings freely, without fear of retaliation or suppression.

The organization also wants to protect government funding for scientific research, and wants the government to continue prior efforts to ensure that citizens of all backgrounds have an equal opportunity to become scientists.

The site describes several activities that citizens can take to display support for unbiased, rigorous scientific research. Most do not require a science background–just a belief in the importance of intellectual honesty. But perhaps the most significant effort currently being launched is Stand Up’s demand that Congress impeach and remove RFK, Jr. for lying to Congress under oath and for failing to uphold the mission of the department under his charge.

You can read the organization’s entire letter to Congress on its website. A couple of paragraphs will convey the tenor:

Since being sworn in as HHS Secretary, Kennedy has falsely claimed that the Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes death, terminated $500 million in mRNA research contracts, canceled studies in vaccine hesitancy, dismissed all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and dictated changes to vaccine recommendations and timelines without scientific evidence. The list below—which we update daily—outlines key evidence supporting our charges.

During his brief tenure, Kennedy has continued a years long disinformation campaign promoting pseudo-science that has resulted in preventable deaths, the disruption of the world’s preeminent biomedical research ecosystem, violation of medical data privacy statutes and regulations, billions of dollars in economic losses, removal of public data, ethical and research misconduct in the production of government reports, the adoption of public health policies and guidelines that are in direct opposition of scientific evidence, and the unlawful termination of thousands of dedicated public servants.

I spend a lot of time on this platform advocating resistance. I realize that it isn’t always easy to find opportunities to participate in that resistance, but supporting groups like Stand Up for Science by adding one’s name to their declaration is clearly one such opportunity.

It’s probably too much to hope that the invertebrate Republicans currently dominating Congress will actually act in the people’s interest and rid our government of this massively unfit and dangerous conspiracy theorist, but the louder the calls for his removal and the wider the promulgation of information about why he poses such a threat to the well-being of all Americans can only help Democrats dislodge those poor excuses for legislators during the midterm elections.

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The Choice Really is Simple

Every day, in every conceivable way, the Trump administration is waging war against equality–rooting out that hated effort to replace tribalism with acceptance of diversity and difference. Media outlets report on “DEI” assaults daily; the mediocre (and worse) White males of the administration are busy scrubbing government websites of evidence of the accomplishments of women, gay people and non-Whites and issuing discriminatory edicts. It is impossible for any fair-minded observer to miss the ferocity of their White “Christian” Nationalist effort to roll back any movement toward civic equality.

MAGA’s hatred of “others” recently manifested itself in an executive order barring transgender people from the military. As a soldier who is a self-described Evangelical described that order in an op-ed for the New York Times,“The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.”

I may not be the sort of person you would expect to oppose a ban on transgender troops. I am a conservative evangelical Christian and a Republican. Though I have deep compassion for people who feel they are in the wrong body, I do not think that transitioning — as opposed to learning to love and accept the body God gave you — is the right thing to do in that predicament. But my views are irrelevant to the issue of transgender troops.

This soldier understands–as so many do not–a foundational principle of American democratic governance: individuals have the liberty to believe as we choose, but no right to impose those beliefs on our fellow citizens. 

The executive order barring transgender troops is a legal command that provides cover for bigotry. It delivers hate in the guise of a national security issue, dressed up in medicalized language.

The meek compliance of military leadership with the ban sends a chilling message to all service members — namely, that our ranks are open only to those who fit a specific ideological mold, regardless of their ability to serve. Equally concerning is the message that military compliance sends to policymakers. If officers accept this kind of unethical order, where does it end? I fear that the White House will ask members of the military to perform increasingly loathsome tasks.

And indeed, since publication of this op-ed, the military has been asked to perform other loathsome tasks–and it has obeyed, as citizens of LA and Washington, DC, can attest. This soldier resigned rather than allow his continued participation to serve as implied concurrence with a policy he found morally reprehensible. As he concluded:

I am just one officer in a large military organization. I do not expect my resignation to persuade the president or the secretary of defense to reconsider the policy. I do hope, however, that my actions will prompt some reflection among military leaders about what it would take for them to disobey a lawful but unethical order. Most important, when my children grow up and look back at this moment in history, I want them to see an example of someone who chose the harder right over the easier wrong.

And there we have it. That–in a nutshell–is what each of us must decide, and sooner rather than later: where we draw the line between resistance and accommodation. Between the American Idea and “blood and soil” fascism.

It’s depressing to see how many people are willing to “go along to get along.” History will not be kind to them.

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An Inexorable Decline

It gets harder and harder to read (or listen to) the news. Every day, there’s a new outrage–a new front in Trump’s war on reality, a new offense to the Constitution and the rule of law. When federal troops are, in essence, being sent to invade cities with Black mayors, when museums and cultural centers are being stripped of historical facts offensive to the Mad King, when a once-storied and proudly independent Justice Department has been turned into the personal tool of a would-be dictator, when the National Institutes of Health reject sound science in favor of voodoo medicine, when the Presidency has become a mechanism for corruption and graft…When everywhere you turn, something horrific is happening, it begins to seem as if we are all living in a dystopian nightmare.

Given the “firehose” nature of the information we waken to daily, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the most important losses we are suffering, or the thread that connects the assaults. When you stand back, when you try to assess the overall motivation of this retrograde MAGA movement, you do see a pattern. There is, of course, the deep-seated racism that forms the basis of Trump’s appeal and that prompts the administration’s daily efforts to erase information about the contributions and tribulations of women, gay people and Blacks. But MAGA’s animus against social progress is even more deep-seated.

MAGA is an all-out assault on knowledge. “Owning the libs” is shorthand for “we’ll get rid of those smarty-pants elitists who think they’re superior because they know stuff.”

That deep-seated resentment against scholarship and knowledge–against things like evidence and fact and the scientific method–is what has motivated the war on America’s universities. And if that war is successful, America’s decline will be inexorable.

A recent article from Time Magazine was prophetic. It was written by an academic who is leaving an America that is no longer hospitable to intellect and sound research.

I was returning from Marseille, France after participating in a workshop in March that I co-organized at the Iméra research institute on climate change and religious conflict during the Little Ice Age. The topic is now effectively banned from federal funding after the Trump Administration stripped support for scientific research that mentions the word “climate,” amid a broader purge of “woke” keywords in the federal government….

For months, I have watched coordinated attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Institution, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Fulbright Program, Woodrow Wilson Institute, U.S. Institute of Peace, Kennedy Center, USAID, Department of Education, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies that support academic research and education.

As the author notes, when politicians—rather than professionals— select the research to be funded, the entire pursuit of knowledge is corrupted.

So when Aix-Marseille Université (amU) decided to launch a “Safe Place for Science” program, I became one of the 298 researchers who applied. After all, I was already due to spend one year there as a visiting professor, and the initiative promises three years of research funding. The university has invested €15 million for the program and is lobbying the French government to match that amount, so it can double its planned hires to 39 people.

Europe has seen an opening and is taking advantage of it. The European Commission recently unveiled a €500 million program to make the continent a “safe haven” for researchers. France has committed another €100 million. And American scholars–including many of our very best– are applying in large numbers. As the author writes,

Packing up and relocating to France, or any other country, will be an adjustment. But it is clear that an era of U.S. brain drain is beginning, as researchers and scientists seek opportunities in places where academic freedom and research are still valued.

If MAGA’s war on knowledge continues–if it succeeds in ridding this country of those detested “elitists”– America’s decline will be irreversible.

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When Data Can’t Be Trusted

In the wake of the last report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics–a report reflecting the effect of Trump’s insane approach to economic matters–the Mad King responded by firing the chief labor statistician, Erika McEntarfer, a highly respected expert.

Trump has now nominated one EJ Antoni to be the chief labor statistician for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Robert Hubbell reports that Antoni would be leaving his job at the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, “where he specialized in generating economic propaganda that had only a passing acquaintance with economic reality. In other words, he is a perfect candidate to create fake reports about the imaginary performance of the US economy.” As Hubbell notes, although it’s rare for members of a profession to criticize one another publicly, Antoni has been an exception; he’s drawn withering criticism from numerous respected members of the economic community. 

Should average Americans care who heads up the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Or for that matter, which government pooh-ba is put in charge of determining whether government should fund development of a vaccine against, say, bird flu? How much are our everyday lives affected by obscure government agencies that are charged with determining the outlines of our shared reality? 

That seemed like a good question to ask Chatgpt, so I did. The AI pinpointed a number of consequences, including misguided monetary policy, with the Fed raising or lowering interest rates inappropriately, risking recession or runaway inflation.
Also, in normal times, Congress and the White House rely on BLS data to design stimulus programs, tax changes or spending cuts. (These, of course, are not normal times. Bad numbers lead to bad decisions, and we can expect some terrifyingly bad decisions as a result of this latest attack on facts and real-world evidence.)

The AI also noted that it isn’t just government that relies on the data generated; private companies use BLS data to forecast demand for their products, to set wages and to make hiring and location decisions. 

There was a lot more, but the bottom line was that “inaccurate BLS data can ripple from policy boardrooms to factory floors, from Wall Street to Main Street, and from short-term market moves to long-term structural harm. Even though BLS regularly revises its data to correct errors, the damage from bad initial reports—especially in fast-moving markets or politics—can’t always be undone.” In other words, even good-faith efforts by competent analysts will sometimes generate inaccurate results, and those errors can damage the economy. How much more damage can fanciful numbers manufactured for political reasons do? (Don’t look now, but we’re about to find out…)

Trump’s assault on the Bureau of Labor Statistics is consistent with MAGA’s other frantic efforts to ignore and reject much of contemporary reality. Unfortunately for these angry, unhappy people, replacing accurate economic data with propaganda will not magically usher in a more robust economy, just as jettisoning sound science will not make Americans healthier, and rewriting American history will not return White “Christian” men to social dominance.

It will simply destroy the American experiment.

If I decide that gravity is just a “theory” and jump off a tall building, my rejection of that “theory” won’t save me. Fudging the numbers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t help Americans find jobs or afford groceries. No matter how desperately MAGA folks want to bend reality to their will, it just doesn’t work that way.
 
 
 

 

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