Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

It’s All Out In The Open Now

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the days when our American bigots used to chafe at the “political correctness” that kept them from openly expressing their disdain for those despised “others.” As I have previously pointed out, the most consistent “through line” of America’s current, terrible administration has been its open assault on the civility that once kept people from broadcasting their hatreds; it has consistently conveyed its permission–indeed, encouragement–to voice them.

The Trump administration and Red state MAGA culture warriors enthusiastically attack anything that smacks of efforts to level the civic playing field–going after any program that hints of acceptance of diversity. At the federal level, Trump has fired talented and competent people of color and replaced them with wildly incompetent clowns whose most obvious (and often only) qualification for the job is White skin. Closer to home, our embarrassing and unethical Attorney General is harassing teachers and nonprofit organizations that display any concern for fair play or inclusion (one of the unfortunate teachers who made it onto Rokita’s threatening list of teachers he deems too liberal to be in a classroom is deemed guilty of being “unAmerican” because she included a rainbow flag in her room…).

Recently, media reports that the Trump administration has fired FBI agents who had the temerity to kneel in support of racial justice protests

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.

The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20…

The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

These firings follow others that targeted agents who investigated the January 6th insurrection, or who looked into Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents. Lawsuits stemming from those actions, which were patently illegal, allege that those dismissals are part of an ongoing effort to remove any FBI officers who investigated Trump or his cronies.

There is, rather clearly, also an effort to rid the FBI of officers who display support for racial justice.

In the short time Trump has been in office, he has gutted the Justice Department and turned the DOJ and FBI into compliant tools of his corrupt and lawless administration. Lawmakers and government lawyers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s multiple grifts, allowing him to run the administration like a Mafia boss, and rake in billions of dollars in what are outright bribes. Investigations of Trump allies have been dismissed, while efforts to take vengeance against those who have incurred Trump’s anger have ramped up, leading to meritless indictments (Comey) and invasive and publicized searches (Bolton).

Needless to say, these are the tactics of fascists and autocrats, not the proper activities of an American administration.

And that brings me back to what constitutes the underlying strength of this horrifying, unAmerican cabal: racism (with a side of misogyny). I cannot account for the corruption of the six “Conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, but it has become quite obvious that the Republicans in Congress are completely in thrall to the GOP’s MAGA base–the White supremacists who continue to support Trump because he’s making bigotry acceptable again.

Are groceries more expensive? Is health insurance becoming unaffordable again? Has America’s position and power in the world declined precipitously? Are masked thugs snatching people off the streets? Is public health declining? Is your city struggling due to the federal cutoff of previously authorized funds? Are free speech and the rule of law under attack? Has persistent incompetence and dysfunction caused a government shutdown?

None of that matters to MAGA folks so long as Trump gives them permission to express contempt for those detested “others.”

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Civil And Human Rights In Indiana

I recently participated in a Zoom Consortium convened by the Hammond Human Relations Commission. I was a member of a panel that discussed the current state of of civil liberties and human rights in our state.

Panel members were asked to collectively address two questions; a third “ask” was specific to our particular backgrounds.

The first question was “What legislative measures by this administration have caused greatest harm or generated positive outcomes pertaining to civil & human rights.” I responded that, in my opinion, virtually everything done by this administration has been harmful. (I added that the damage couldn’t have been done without the cowardly acquiescence of GOP legislators.) The Trump administration has declared war on civil rights, civil liberties and the Constitution.

The public is just beginning to recognize the multiple harms done by the awful “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Trump’s multiple ridiculous and unconstitutional Executive Orders, but the worst–again, in my humble opinion–has been the unrelenting assaults on “wokeness” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That federal assault has emboldened state-level culture warriors like Todd Rokita to pretend that good-faith efforts to level the civic playing field are really “reverse discrimination” against straight White men– a patently false excuse for the state’s vendetta against equal rights for women and minorities.

We were next asked if we had observed biases in the way information is disseminated in Indiana. My answer was really a repetition of observations I’ve shared here many times–about the fragmentation of today’s information environment, in which citizens aren’t all getting the same news or occupying the same realities, an environment which encourages people to choose “news” that confirms their biases—if they bother to consume any news at all.

I was then asked to expand on a paper I’d written about the effects of low civic literacy on democratic accountability, and to suggest solutions. (Ah, if only I had solutions…)

 As I explained, scholars attribute the erosion of American democracy to three interrelated causes: ignorance of politics and governance; the growth of inequality— including civic inequality and informational asymmetries—and a resurgent tribalism (racism and White Nationalism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, the urban/rural divide…). Civic ignorance complicates the interactions between citizens and their government, and it exacerbates inequality. Citizens who understand how the political system works are advantaged in a number of ways over those who don’t, including their ability to recognize when elected officials are violating their oath to uphold the constitution.

Americans’ widespread ignorance of the basics of our Constitution and legal system has greatly facilitated the growth of disinformation and propaganda. It has allowed the current administration to obscure the fact that the majority of Trump’s numerous Executive Orders are at odds with the Constitution.

The most obvious was his attack on birthright citizenship, which is explicitly set out in the 14th Amendment. Eliminating birthright citizenship would require a Constitutional amendment—it cannot be done in a petulant Executive Order.

Citizens who’ve encountered the 14th Amendment would know that.

There are many other examples. If citizens knew that the Constitution vests control of spending in Congress—not the executive branch—they would recognize that Trump’s Orders withholding funding formerly authorized by Congress violates the Constitutional Separation of Powers. They would recognize that his “Muslim ban” was a flagrant violation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. They would understand that his various efforts to root out Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs not only violate the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment but are also unconstitutionally vague–and why that vagueness matters.

Long term, the solution is to require a much more robust civic education curriculum in the nation’s schools—a curriculum that doesn’t simply educate students about the Constitution and Bill of Rights but also teaches accurate and inclusive history. (I went all through high school and college and never heard about the Trail of Tears, or the Tulsa massacre, for example.) But efforts to strengthen civics education come up against the far Right’s determination to destroy public education—to use vouchers to send public money to overwhelmingly religious private schools, very few of which offer civics or accurate, in-depth history instruction. Worse, attending such schools operates to reinforce tribal identities rather than inculcating allegiance to an overarching American constitutional philosophy. The effort to replace America’s public schools with religious “academies” was set out in Project 2025—and this administration is clearly following the prescriptions of that document.

Reinvigorating our public schools and requiring appropriate civic education is really the most effective solution to what ails us. If there are other solutions, I haven’t come across them.

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Let Us Count The Ways…

It’s impossible for most of us to keep up with the unconstitutional, corrupt and overwhelmingly stupid actions of Trump and his merry band of incompetents and bigots–so today I thought I’d enumerate just a few of the actions that are taking my country down the path to fascism and global irrelevance. 

Keep in mind that this is a very partial list…..

The FCC has threatened to pull licenses from networks whose coverage of our thin-skinned president hurts his feelings. (What First Amendment?)

Is factual economic news negative? The government will eliminate quarterly reports by public companies, tighten controls on the release of employment data, and delay the release of inflation data, obvious moves to suppress facts and prevent citizens from understanding our declining economic health. As Lincoln Square recently reported,

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) abruptly postponed its consumer expenditures report, the dataset that determines how inflation is measured in the year ahead. No explanation was given. No new date set.

Last year, when the release was delayed, the agency cited an error and announced a rescheduled publication; this year it offered neither explanation nor date. The absence is striking because the report is central to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which shapes interest rates, wages, and the daily cost of living. Critics warn the delay is not accidental but political.

It’s not just economic data. The administration has removed statistics from DOJ websites that inconveniently showed that right-wing violence is by far the nation’s biggest domestic threat. RFK’s HHS is removing data that demonstrates vaccine effectiveness. Etc.

The administration is frantically trying to distract attention from its non-disclosure of the Epstein files. (Pretty much confirms that you-know-who is in those files…)

The administration’s war against education keeps ramping up. Assaults against universities, efforts to destroy public education, demands that museums and national parks scrub the parts of history Trump doesn’t like have recently been joined by administration plans to partner with Christian Nationalist organization Prager U to create a new “Civics Education” for the nation’s children. (Can we spell White Christian indoctrination??)

Does our tech sector rely on recruiting “the best and brightest” from around the world? Hit those “furriners” with a 100,000 fee per visa. 

The corruption of this administration becomes more obvious every day. Not only is Trump making out like the bandit he is with patently illegal grifts, not only has he instructed the Department of Justice to bring phony charges against his political enemies (and fired ethical lawyers who refused to manufacture evidence), his administration has also shut down investigation of his border czar’s bribery–despite the fact that Homan’s acceptance of $50,000 from undercover FBI agents was captured on tape.

As I said in my introductory paragraph, this is a very partial list of the wreckage being done every minute of every day by the idiots and grifters currently in charge of our federal government. As Paul Krugman recently detailed in his Substack, what passes for policy in this administration is insane.

We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.

H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.

Every day, Americans are inundated with propaganda extolling these incredibly harmful attacks on our liberties, our economic well-being and our global preeminence. Thanks to MAGA’s unremitting attacks on those who dare to tell the truth, it gets more and more difficult to separate propaganda from journalism, fact from fiction.

That difficulty is immensely dangerous.

Hannah Arendt said it best, back in 1951, in Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 

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The War Against Facts

I keep thinking of Kellyanne Conway’s remark, during Trump’s first term, about “alternative facts”– because if there is one through line in Trumpism, it is the daily effort to replace reality with the would-be King’s preferred alternative.

The Bulwark, among other media outlets, recently reported on one especially egregious example

The Department of Justice has removed content highlighting a decades-long trend: far-right extremists have carried out the overwhelming majority of ideologically motivated killings in the United States. The removal comes days after the assassination of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, amid a renewed push by the Trump administration to blame the “radical left” for political violence.

Instead, visitors to that government website were informed that official websites were being reviewed, and that “some content” might be unavailable.

One bit of “unavailabe” content was a National Institute of Justice–funded study that documented the fact that far-right extremists have been responsible for the great majority of ideologically motivated killings in the United States since 1990. As the article noted, the study’s conclusion was hardly controversial; it was in line with decades of evidence from the Extremist Crime Database and from watchdog groups such as the Anti-Defamation League.

The study vanished just days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an event the Trump administration used to sharpen its argument that the “radical left” is driving political violence. The contrast was stark: while the data showed a persistent pattern of far-right lethality, the government was simultaneously scrubbing its websites and amplifying a narrative that cast blame in the opposite direction.

Evidently, when the facts don’t support your preferred narrative, the obvious remedy is to bury the facts.

Among the material no longer reachable was research funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), long a sponsor of work by criminologist Steven Chermak and others who study extremist violence. Their Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) has consistently documented that far-right extremists account for far more killings than their far-left counterparts. One NIJ-published article put the point bluntly: far-right violence, it concluded, “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

Independent evidence supports the same pattern. A 2021 ECDB-based study found that, between 1990 and 2020, far-right extremists were responsible for the overwhelming majority of ideologically motivated homicides. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that in 2023, every extremist-related murder in the United States was committed by far-right actors.

The real damage being done by the elimination of officially vetted evidence and facts isn’t that those facts disappear; the independent studies and other sources of information remain easily accessible. The problem is, the absence of an official, neutral and reliable source of information adds to an already massive problem–the internet’s invitation to indulge in confirmation bias. MAGA folks can find plenty of sites offering propaganda more consistent with their desired “facts.” For that matter, so can progressive folks. The absence of an official report, with numbers and data attested to by civil servants not in thrall to a politically desired result, encourages the polarization that has left Americans fragmented, polarized and unable to conduct civil conversations. It is one more step toward constructing alternate–and dramatically inconsistent–realities.

Granted, Trump is hardly the first to attempt to bend reality (although he may be the first President who is clearly unable to perceive or live in it…) As the Bulwark concluded,

Moments of crisis have long been leveraged to redraw the boundaries of legitimacy. Richard Nixon used the language of law and order to denounce protestors; George W. Bush invoked the “war on terror” to consolidate national unity and presidential power. Trump’s rhetoric fits that lineage but also departs from it, casting blame in ways that cut against the weight of evidence. By turning Kirk’s death into an ideological fulcrum, he signals not just how this White House interprets violence but how it intends to shape the nation’s memory of it. The question is whether Americans will accept that framing—or remember the data it seeks to eclipse.

I’ve forgotten who to credit with a quote that seems more apt every day: “Facts don’t care whether you believe them or not.” We do ourselves no favor when we choose to reject evidence in order to reside in a false alternate reality.

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The Assault On Knowledge

Americans who follow the news even slightly, are aware of the daily, major assaults from this administration on the Constitution and our liberties. We’re aware of RFK, Jr.’s insane attacks on medical science and the likely negative effects on our health, the assaults on ships from foreign countries in defiance of international law, the economic damage being caused by Trump’s insane (and illegal) tariffs and his war on immigrants, and the administration’s vicious and escalating attacks on journalism and free speech. 

What most Americans tend to miss are Trump’s entirely illegal refusals to honor spending decisions made by Congress, despite the fact that the Constitution vests those decisions solely in the legislative branch, not in the executive. The sudden cut-offs of thousands of promised grants will hobble all sorts of research for many years to come–including research into cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimers–and the negative consequences will go far beyond medical science research.

A former academic colleague recently shared a notice that the Trump administration is withholding payment of the final year of a four-year grant–a grant to a program at Indiana University that has been continuously supported by the federal government since 1959. That ongoing support was based upon a determination that the program was an important part of the United States’ defense effort, as described in the post-Sputnik National Security in Education Act of 1958, and the subsequent David L. Boren National Security Education Act (NSEA) passed in 1991. 

IU’s program supported students studying several of the foreign languages that enable American diplomats to communicate with and recognize threats from individuals and governments of foreign countries. The grants were intended to “address the U.S. shortfall in experts with critical language and international area knowledge needed for national security,” and were intended to enable students to “study languages and regions vital to national security.”  

The remnants of the Department of Education informed IU that the final year of the grant would not be forthcoming, because “the international and foreign language education grant programs are not a priority of the administration,” and that the programs are “inconsistent with administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.”

As a result of the funding cut-off, a number of graduate students will be unable to continue their graduate studies. It is yet another facet of this administration’s unremitting attack on education at all levels.

How do arbitrary and capricious–and patently illegal–actions like this harm American interests? Let us count the ways…

Rather obviously, the lack of individuals able to understand foreign communications will make it more difficult to conduct international affairs and to recognize threats to U.S. interests. Those interests may not be a “priority” of this administration, but they’ve been a very high priority of previous administrations–and of the legislators who continued to authorize and fund the programs. 

It’s unlikely that most Americans will ever hear of the discontinuation of this particular program, or the negative results that will flow from the significant number of other abruptly terminated education programs and research projects. What we will experience, however, is a steady diminution in national health and in economic well-being, and a substantially reduced ability to protect American interests internationally. 

Of course, as the missive from the Department of Education candidly admitted, the protection of America’s interests are not a priority of this administration. That has been obvious for some time. The clear priority of Trump and his collection of clowns, misfits and grifters is the exercise of power and the ability to line their pockets–the corruption of this administration puts Teapot Dome to shame.

The even clearer priority of Trump’s MAGA followers is reversing the legal and social gains of women and minorities–rooting out efforts to level the playing field for non-Whites, non-Christians and non-males. They neither know nor care that those priorities weaken America.

We need to turn out eleven million protestors for the second “No Kings” Day on October 18th.

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