Category Archives: Random Blogging

As If We Needed Confirmation

The Washington Post recently published an article with the shocking news that “Republicans are abandoning pluralism.” Forgive my language, but no shit, Sherlock!

Let’s take an honest look at what the MAGA cult–the 21st Century version of the Confederacy– has accomplished in its effort to remake the United States into a country dominated by White men.

Thanks largely to Mitch McConnell, the GOP successfully managed to subvert the Supreme Court–to replace dispassionate judges with submissive pawns willing to jettison constitutional precedents and eviscerate the Separation of Powers in a wholly unAmerican effort to take the country back to the days when White Christian males ruled the roost, and women and minorities were decidedly unequal.

MAGA has always been about one thing and one thing only: Making America White Again. Good people frequently express astonishment over the cult’s devotion to Trump–an odious gangster unfit for any office, let alone the presidency. What they fail to see–or perhaps resist acknowledging–is the racist basis of that support. As we’ve seen with the passage of the horrific “Beautiful Bill,” MAGA folks are willing to deprive themselves of healthcare, willing to accept a lower standard of living, willing to bend the knee to masked ICE brownshirts, if they can thereby assure themselves of the continued social dominance of men with white skin.

MAGA emerged to confront their existential dread of a society in which women, Black folks, Jews and Muslims–not to mention gay folks–could consider themselves civic equals. When rational people scratch their heads and wonder why poorer Americans are “voting against their own interests,” they fail to recognize where those interests truly lie–and it isn’t in the pocketbook issues where Democrats (understandably but erroneously) believe those interests lie. Their interests are cultural, not financial.

Only people who are intentionally blind can fail to see the anti-DEI hysteria for what it is. Efforts at equity and inclusion are seen by MAGA as an assault on their privilege. In the racist mind, equality and inclusion of the previously marginalized is simply discrimination against White guys.

The cited essay by Philip Bump includes a report I’ve seen elsewhere, about a sixth-grade teacher who had hung a banner in her classroom, one that many of us have seen elsewhere: it shows a range of heart-holding hands, each in a different hue. The banner has a single statement: “Everyone is welcome here.” As Bump notes, “It’s an anodyne sentiment, at worst, but also a celebration of multiracial community. And for that reason — and explicitly that reason, as a school official explained in an interview in March — the banner was determined to be unacceptable.”

Saying that “everyone is welcome” has become a political statement in the way that “science is real” has become one. Not because these statement themselves are political or even particularly controversial. No, they are now tainted with politics because they reject the right’s rejections of both objectivity and pluralism.

It isn’t only race, of course. Misogyny and homophobia are part and parcel of the White Christian Nationalist worldview.

Bump notes, for example, that Republican support for same-sex marriage has fallen since 2022, when most Republicans supported it. Now, only 4 in 10 do, a level not seen since 2016.

CNN released polling last month that illustrates another shift centered largely among Republicans. Conducted by the firm SSRS, the poll asked Americans whether “having an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities in the U.S.” was threatening or enriching to American culture. Most respondents said enriching — though Republicans were about evenly split between the two.

Notably, the pollsters asked the same question in 2019. Since then, Republicans have gotten 25 percentage points more likely to say that American diversity is threatening to our culture. Among White people, the increase was 16 points.

Bump shared polling that showed Republicans much more likely than others to say that White people face discrimination.Research also shows that most Republicans don’t see discrimination as having anything to do with economic inequality. Instead, Republicans are likely to attribute those inequalities to a lack of hard work and “will power” by Black Americans.

MAGA is filled with fearful, angry people desperately clinging to the evaporating tribal privileges that Trump is promising to restore. They’ve made a lot of progress while the rest of us weren’t paying attention, and it is going to take a monumental, concerted effort  to defeat them.

Comments

Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

Comments

There’s Good News Too..

Yes, things are bad. Yes, we are facing a not-so-slow-rolling coup. Yes, we are being governed by unprincipled and profoundly ignorant people. Yes, Trump’s horrific bill narrowly passed the Senate. But if we look, there’s also evidence that good people–good citizens–are fighting back. Effectively.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Americans of Conscience transmitted a long list of positive news items, “wins” for democracy, including everything from a town council in Barrington, Rhode Island unanimously voting to declare their town a sanctuary  for transgender people, to Tulsa, OKlahoma’s announcement of a $105 million reparations package for the 1921 Tulsa massacre, to the thousands of people in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Charlotte, San Diego, Boston, Houston, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Worcester, MA, and elsewhere showing up to support neighbors facing unjust ICE raids, detainment, and deportation, to the successful EarthJustice lawsuit requiring the USDA to restore deleted information about climate change from the government website.

There were dozens more.

Then there was the welcome news that the Senate Parliamentarian had tossed numerous provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” for violating the Byrd rule limiting what can be included in reconciliation bills. Among the provisions that were deleted:

A provision selling off millions of acres of federal lands
A provision to pass food aid costs on to states
A proposed limitations on food aid benefits to certain citizens or lawful permanent residents
Proposed restrictions on the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders
A proposal for a funding cap for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and for slashing pay of employees at the Federal Reserve
A proposal to slash $293 million from the Treasury Department’s Office ofFinancial Research
A plan to dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
An effort to repeal an EPA rule limiting air pollution emissions of passenger vehicles
An item allowing project developers to bypass judicial environmental reviews if they pay a fee
A measure deeming offshore oil and gas projects automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act
A modified version of the REINS Act, which would increase congressional power to overturn major regulations
A scheme to punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal grants
An increase on Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees
A measure seeking to extend the suspension of permanent price supportauthority for farmers
A requirement forcing sale of all the electric vehicles used by the Post Office
A change to annual geothermal lease sales and to geothermal royalties, June 24)
A proposal for a mining road in Alaska
Authorization for the executive branch to reorganize federal agencies
New fee for federal worker unions’ use of agency resources
Transfer of space shuttle to a nonprofit in Houston from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

And that is only a partial list. The ruling deleted at least some elements of this obscene effort to rob the poor to further enrich the plutocrats–at least from the Senate version.

As Simon Rosenberg recently reminded readers of his “Hopium Chronicles,” Trump is struggling and unpopular. Despite his efforts to wag the dog, his poll numbers have steadily dropped. Overall, his approval is down 20 points from week one, but perhaps more significant is the evidence that his incursions into the Black, Latino and youth votes are dissipating. In week one, 29% of Black voters approved of him; that number is now 12%. Hispanic approval has fallen from 42% to 30%. And the  approval of those between the ages of 18 and 29 has gone from 48% to 28%.

Rosenberg credits the thousands of grassroots groups that have emerged across the country, and the creation of 
new media organizations like Meidas Touch and COURIER Newsroom. (He also notes that Substack is becoming a powerful new platform for our politics–part of the way that news and media consumption habits have changed in the past year.) 

We’ve also seen the emergence of an entire new network of pro-democracy legal organizations, focused on defense of the Constitutional order, and increased pro-democracy activism by the nation’s 23 Democratic Attorney Generals.

New leaders are emerging, rising to the moment, breaking though (Newsom, Pritzker, Crockett, Murphy, Frost, AOC, Booker, Slotkin, Mamdani, etc)

We are communicating who we are right now through our opposition to Trump and our work to prevent his assault on the middle class, weakening of our health care system and abandonment of the Constitutional order. I think these fights are helping connect us to the core of who we are – champions of every day Americans, proud patriots who love this country and are willing to fight for it.

The good news is that good Americans are making what John Lewis called “Good Trouble.”
 

Comments

The Loss Of The Lie Detector

As the country I thought I inhabited continues to disintegrate, I’ve become more and more convinced that what I’ve called our “information landscape” is a major contributor to our civic woes.

We have created a world that allows us to “curate” our realities, to engage in what we used to call “cherry picking.” Want to believe that science is a scam and vaccines are mechanisms for inserting Microsoft chips in our bodies? A bit of Internet “research” will locate “news” sites that confirm your suspicions. Want to believe that the deranged ignoramus in the Oval Office actually knows what he’s doing? Ditto.

The media we now refer to as legacy outlets were far from perfect. “If it bleeds, it leads” dominated decisions about what was front-page news, and even outlets with a professional devotion to the obligations of gatekeeping overlooked important events and misread others. But at their best, they acted as lie detectors–and public figures who feared that function were careful to moderate their misinformation, or at least cloak efforts at misdirection in ambiguities.

The Internet’s Wild West, where social media echoes and promotes the proliferation of Rightwing propaganda sites, is liar’s heaven. A buffoon as ridiculous as Trump, with his constant crazed, childish and misspelled posts, would never have ascended to the Presidency when actual journalists were the primary gatekeepers.

Cult leaders (Trump is the Jim Jones of MAGA) have always been able to bamboozle a slice of the population; a portion of humanity is demonstrably impervious to fact and logic. A healthier information environment would not diabuse the True Believers, who see Trump as the champion who will kill “woke-ism” and return straight White (Pseudo)Christian men to dominance. But the current fire hose of competing versions of reality is having the effect desired by autocrats everywhere–it paralyzes much larger segments of the population, who gradually despair of determining what is true, and simply check out.

Megan Garber addressed the issue in a recent essay in the Altlantic.

She noted that Trump had been reelected despite–or perhaps because of– the Big Lie, and she mused that, these days, false assertions evidently aren’t liabilities but selling points, “weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.”

For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.

Garber quoted Walter Lippman’s classic book, Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy is a task of data management. American democracy “is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.”

The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be….

In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile.

As Garber quite accurately notes, every lie Trump tells, no matter how consequential or petty (and Trump is nothing if not petty), erodes people’s ability to trust any and all information.

Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.

As the zone is flooded with bullshit (in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase), citizens check out. And the liars cement their power.

Comments

Is It Time To Be Good Germans?

Wow…just wow.

A recent essay from the Bulwark really shook me. It reminded me of a long-ago discussion with my mother. We’d been watching a TV mini-series on the Holocaust, and my mother said something to the effect that she would never have been one of the compliant Germans who put their heads down and went along with the brutal Nazi assaults. As I told her then, I wish I could be certain that I would stand up under such circumstances–but it’s not easy to predict what you’d do if your livelihood or liberty or children were at risk.

How many of us really would chance public resistance in such a threatening environment?

The Bulwark essay raised that question, albeit somewhat obliquely. The author, Jonathan Last, began by sharing a message he’d received from a friend.

Are you absolutely sure that as Christians this isn’t the time to hide Anne Frank? Shouldn’t I be willing to help migrants avoid deportation/detention at whatever legal perils await me? If not now then when . . . when it gets twice as bad or three times as bad or ten times as bad?

Sorry if this sounds weird, but everyone likes to think that given the opportunity they would be Mississippi freedom riders or on the bridge at Selma. Well what if it’s that time for me?

Last writes that his first reaction was denial–that bad as things are, the U.S. is not near an “Anne Frank” moment. But then, he began to think about it–and while his certainty didn’t evaporate, it certainly moderated.

Let’s say you’re an immigrant with questionable legal status. You’re married and your spouse is the same. You have lived in America for many years, paying taxes and whatnot, and own a house. You have two kids and they are American citizens—for now.

You and your spouse show up for a routine court date and are snatched by a group of men in masks who claim (without showing identification) that they are agents of the state. You are put in jail. And let’s assume that you are deported. Perhaps to El Salvador.

What happens to your children in the hours after you are arrested? Who picks them up from school? Who feeds them? Where do they sleep?

What happens to your assets?

If you own a home, what happens to it? Is it sold? By whom? Through what process? Where do the proceeds of the sale go?

What about your bank accounts? Do you have access to your savings?

How about your property? Your car, the furniture in your house, your clothes, your computer. What happens to all of that?

Last says he would be surprised if theoretical legal procedures–assuming they exist– are being applied to property rights, since these immigrants aren’t even being given their more basic due process rights.

Worse, even if you are a MAGA bigot who considers everyone who came here illegally a hardened criminal by definition, Last reminds readers that this administration has actually created “illegal immigrants” by arbitrarily changing the status of people who previously had legal status. It has revoked student visas (without bothering to inform the visa holders), and terminated Temporary Protected Status for refugees from Venezuela and Afghanistan.

It was Trump who made their presence “illegal.”

So when we ask these questions about the people that masked ICE thugs are rounding up– taking them off the streets and out of scheduled immigration meetings– when we ask what happens to their property, money and other belongings, we don’t get satisfactory answers. We don’t get answers at all. As Last says, we’re may not be at Anne Frank territory, but “we’re awfully close to the period in which German Jews were having their businesses seized.”

We have masked, unidentified agents of the state snatching people off of the streets. We have the government attempting to skirt due process. We have people being deprived of their property. We have an attempt to revoke birthright citizenship.

Maybe we’re not in Anne Frank territory. But also: Maybe the hour is later than we think.

Maybe it’s time to decide not to be compliant Germans….

Comments