Category Archives: Random Blogging

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

As regular readers of this blog know, I don’t suffer what I consider foolishness (or worse) in silence. At times, as I survey the political landscape, words positively spew out. But every once in a while, I read something that captures my perspective so perfectly–that so eloquently captures my angst, anger and perspective– that it deserves copious quotation.

That’s the case with a recent essay from Lincoln Square, titled “The Complicity of the Gutless, Self-Gelding Beltway Barnacles.”

The tirade perfectly expresses my feelings about the non-“true believing” Republicans who have enabled America’s flight from democracy and rational government–the GOP elected officials like Indiana Senator Todd Young. No one sane expected anything better from the crazy “Christian” MAGA morons like our other Senator, but–as the author, a former Executive Director of the Michigan Republican Party writes–our current situation can be firmly laid at the feet of the quislings who know better.

Permit me to share some of his diatribe, with which I entirely agree.

This is a pox on every current or former Republican elected official, every D.C. policy wonk, every think-tank libertarian, every “principled” conservative, every consultant and operative, every comms flack who flinched at Trump in 2016, held their nose in 2020, and now in 2025 are all-in, pretending they never saw the flames. They saw the incompetence. The ignorance. The corruption. The racism. The appeals to violence. The fascist cosplay. They watched Trump mismanage a pandemic that killed a million Americans. They watched him try to shake down Ukraine. They watched the tear gas fly at Lafayette Square. They watched January 6th.

After Trump lost to Biden, he writes,

They let the tumor grow back. And now that he’s returned to power — with a vengeance, a vendetta list, a castrated Congress, and a perverted and retributive Justice Department in his pocket — they’ve decided to go along to get along. Because “we need to win,” because “it’s about judges,” because “Biden was too old,” because their taxes will be lower, because “Harris was too progressive,” because of some freshman DEI policy at Oberlin College or the University of Michigan…

There is no Trump 2.0 without these Vichy collaborators. He doesn’t have the IQ or impulse control to govern without them. They write the policies. They run the agencies. They polish the lies. MAGA isn’t a grassroots movement — it’s a fascist aesthetic wrapped around a cynical, calculating elite that knows exactly what it’s doing: Dismantling democracy for profit and power.

Look around. The Department of Justice is now a MAGA war room. News agencies are threatened with being frog-marched into courtrooms for asking the wrong questions. State National Guards have been federalized — and active duty Marines deployed — to occupy Los Angeles. And those “respectable” Republicans? The ones who were “uncomfortable” with Trump before? They’re writing op-eds praising his “leadership.” They’re spinning the gutting of civil liberties as “order.” They’re appeasing tyranny but collecting paychecks.

These aren’t rubes at a rally in Sheboygan or the MAGA meth chorus from Bumfuck County. These are the guys in the green rooms and boardrooms, at the Capitol Hill Club, in the donor retreats and Capitol cloakrooms. They know better. They knew better.

This piece isn’t about the true believers. It’s about the Quisling converts. The ones who once winced when Trump called the press “enemies of the people,” and would now cheer if he arrests them. The ones who once said, “This is not conservatism,” and now insist, “This is what the people want.”

If and when we emerge from this dark time, the most important question we’ll need to ask won’t involve the manifest pathologies of Trump. It won’t even focus on the intellectual and emotional deficits of the MAGA faithful–after all, numerous humans in every generation have joined cults, clung to their tribal affiliations and hated the “other.” What is new–or at least seems unprecedented to my inaccurate historical memory–is the wholesale defection of an entire cohort of public figures from anything resembling integrity.

There was, of course, the author’s absolutely accurate reference to quislings, the French who submitted during WWII, a term defined as a citizen or politician of an occupied country who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. It is a perfect description of today’s GOP lawmakers. If any reader is aware of a psychological profile of those collaborators, I hope you will point us to that scholarship in the comments.

As the author notes, “They were in the house. They saw the fire. And instead of helping us put it out, they grabbed a lawn chair and roasted hot dogs. ” What explains that reaction?

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Media Fragmentation And Minority Voters

I know I keep harping on the subject of our media environment, but as more research becomes available, I become more and more convinced that an enormous amount of political and voting behavior is the result of the fragmentation facilitated by the Internet–a fragmentation enabling people to occupy a chosen bubble of “news” that reinforces their ideological beliefs and prejudices.

The Washington Post recently ran a lengthy article that probed the much-discussed rightward movement within minority communities. 

That phenomenon in recent U.S. elections has mirrored voter movements elsewhere, and the research was an effort to determine whether those movements had causal commonalities. The scholarship cited was all interesting, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirely, but one conclusion stood out. The article noted that Trump’s inroads into the Black and Hispanic communities was tied to the nature of the media sources those voters consulted.

The declining influence of television news, for example, has been stark. As the article noted, Democrats have always done well with U.S. minorities who follow political news on television, and they still won 73 percent of those voters in 2024. But their support among those who didn’t follow the election on TV was only 46 percent.

And, for perhaps the first time, the share of Americans following the presidential election on TV began to fall in 2024. It dropped from 85 percent to 81 percent. We don’t know what’s replacing it, though we do know that the share who got political news on TikTok soared from 22 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024 — and that TikTok is the only medium through which U.S. minorities were more likely to follow politics compared with Whites.

Similarly, a March poll from the Pew Research Center found that 30 percent of minority voters who supported Trump got at least some of their news from “The Joe Rogan Experience” — putting the Trump-endorsing podcast behind only Fox News in that group. (To be sure, other sources were also close enough to be within the margin of error, and Pew’s Elisa Shearer cautioned that our media choice can be an effect of our political views as much as it is a cause of them.)

Minority neighborhoods traditionally tended to coalesce around a given candidate when residents of those neighborhoods got their news from similar, predominantly mainstream, sources. But as the media environment has balkanized, the electorate has split into smaller and less predictable units.

Over the last decades, as culture war has consumed American politics, minority voters who are culturally conservative but economically liberal —a cohort that includes many working-class minorities and immigrants — have begun to base their votes on cultural issues rather than economic ones. That trend has been supercharged by what the article called the “algorithm-driven fragment of the media,” the social media platforms that turn cultural concerns into cultural outrage by constantly amplifying moral- or emotional-based messages, a practice that encourages user commitment to the platform. (Yes, follow the money…or in this case, the business model.)

As one scholar explained it,

“Social media can subtly shape people’s information diet because algorithms are attuned to what people are engaging with online…. “So if someone’s paying attention to content that leans a little more socially conservative, the algorithm will feed you more and more of that. And before you know it, you’re in an informational ecosystem that’s pretty different from what you’d see tuning into mainstream media.”

In other words, the dramatic changes we have experienced in our media environment have fostered ideological, educational and gender divides, splintering communities that were once defined first by racial or cultural identities.

I have no idea what can be done about the balkanization of the media. I am very afraid that we can’t put that genie back in the bottle– allowing government to determine the content of internet sites would be even more dangerous than today’s  environment of propaganda and disinformation. Fact-checking sites are only useful for people who care about facts, and that is an unfortunately small percentage of the population.

Perhaps legislation dictating what algorithms can and cannot do would avoid violating the First Amendment, but from where this digital novice sits, it’s unclear how such a law would be framed or how it could be enforced.

We live in a world where people who desperately want to believe clearly untrue things– that climate change is a myth, that vaccines cause autism, that “chemtrails” are poisoning us, that “woke-ism” is the reason they missed out on that promotion–can find confirmation of those beliefs in the Internet’s growing never-never land.

Members of minority communities aren’t exempt.

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Tools

Accurate information is the most important tool at citizens’ disposal. We know that a functioning democracy requires an informed citizenry–meaning a citizenry in possession of factual information, not one misinformed by tribal propaganda. The centrality of reliable information to the democratic process explains the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy the institutions that provide that information: especially the legitimate media and the nation’s universities.

Contemporary Americans are confronting the very real threat of losing both our constitutional republic and our common sources of credible information. The thus-far unanswered question is what role our scattered and fragmented internet landscape will play in this ongoing drama. How many Americans will opt for visiting the numerous sites offering vetted and valuable data, and how many will choose to occupy the preferred “reality” offered by the equally numerous sites devoted to reinforcing their misconceptions and prejudices. 

And then there’s the “sixty-four thousand dollar” question, the one that keeps me up at night: when the inhabitants of a country occupy wildly different realities, when each of us can choose to inhabit a preferred political or social construct, is rational governance even possible? In such a world, is there even a We the People to be governed?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do recognize the vast educational potential of the Internet. There are literally millions of sites that offer insights into the world we inhabit, sites that simply describe what we know about “what is.” Perhaps the continued development of AI will introduce some order to the Internet’s wildly fragmented sources of information,  misinformation and disinformation.

Who knows? Certainly not this elderly blogger….

That said, I recently stumbled across a fascinating website that triggered these observations.

MAP describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit think tank,” working to create a “thriving, inclusive, and equitable America where all people have a fair chance to pursue health and happiness, earn a living, take care of the ones they love, be safe in their communities, and participate in civic life.” It seeks to advance conversation and achieve policy change through the presentation of information based upon rigorous research and strong, collaborative partnerships.

MAP produces (duh!) maps. Democracy maps. Equality maps.

The democracy maps track the election laws and policies of each state, to create what the site describes as a “detailed roadmap of how states can optimize civic engagement and protect the security, integrity and independence of our elections.” The maps track more than 50 aspects of state election and voting laws, and make it easy to see which states are providing an environment protective of democracy, and which states are falling “woefully short.” It was fascinating to see the significant differences across the states in access to voting and the ability of citizens to mount referenda. Each state is awarded a “Democracy Tally”–based upon the number of laws and policies within the state that help create a secure and healthy election system. 

The site also tracks state-level equality for LGBTQ+ citizens. Those maps score the laws and policies affecting the gay community within each state– the laws affecting things like relationships, nondiscrimination, religious exemptions, LGBTQ youth, and access to health care, among others. (It will come as no surprise to Hoosiers that our state is one of the 17–representing 32% of the U.S. population– with the very lowest level of equality for our LGBTQ+ neighbors.) 

The site offers a wealth of information, and does so with easily understood graphics. It also has copious citations to academic and other resources, allowing any visitor to confirm the accuracy of the data provided. I really encourage you to click through and browse the informative maps and charts that paint a visual picture of America’s patchwork democratic and equality landscapes.

Every so often, I come across a website like this one that offers rigorously vetted and understandable information about a wide variety of subjects–everything from environmental analyses to medical breakthroughs to criminal justice trends. Other sites offer sweeping overviews of, or deep dives into, specific aspects of world history, of philosophical movements, of the development of the arts… We are the first generation to have this enormous trove of scholarship and information literally at our fingertips. 

We could use all that hard-won information to educate and inform ourselves, and to make the world a better place.  

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Democrats Govern; Republicans Rule

It’s so easy for sane Americans to focus on the horrible, terrible, cruel and unbelievably stupid things that MAGA Republicans are doing daily. A recent example is the devastation in Texas, where inadequate warnings in advance of the weather–a result partially attributable to massive employee cuts to the Weather Service– cost over 85 people their lives.

What is frustrating is that it was so foreseeable: When the mindless, reckless cuts were being made, Scientific American ran a story headlined “How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives,” warning that “staff cuts at the National Weather Service that have been made by the Trump administration are a danger to public safety as tornadoes, hurricanes and heat loom this spring and summer.”

The GOP has given rational Americans so many targets at both the state and federal levels that there is an understandable tendency to spend our time pointing and complaining. But as the new Chair of the Indiana Democratic Party has reminded us, complaining neglects the most important story, which is that–unlike the GOP– Democrats understand the obligations of governing, and we need to remind voters that all Americans, not just wealthy White ones, do better when Democrats are in charge.

I agree, so I wrote the following:

What happens when Americans elect Democrats? People do better.

When Democrats are in charge, states like California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or higher.

Democrats in Blue states act to protect health coverage (Washington State even created a public health insurance option—the only one in the country) and pass laws requiring paid family and medical leave.

Blue states—including Oregon, California, Washington, Colorado and New York—make it easier to vote, expanding early voting and passing election reforms like automatic voter registration and same day registration.

Democrats support public education, and Blue states like New York, California and Oregon offer tuition-free college programs.

Indiana’s neighbor, Illinois, is a good example of the difference between Democrats who govern for We the People and Republicans who govern for the donor class. This July, Illinois Governor Pritzker signed the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Act, limiting unfair pricing practices and supporting independent pharmacies, along with four bills to help high school students afford college. In January, Pritzker signed a bill forbidding payment of less than minimum wage to disabled workers.

And the Republicans?

In Red Indiana, they’ve kept the minimum wage at 7.25 since 2009, when they grudgingly had to raise it to match the federal rate.

In Red Indiana, Republicans are throwing people off Medicaid using stricter eligibility checks, work requirements, and enrollment caps, erecting barriers that hurt the most vulnerable populations. 

Red States have made it harder for their citizens to vote– cutting early voting, requiring specific government-issued IDs, and throwing out ballots with minor errors. Polls in Red Indiana and Kentucky close at 6– earlier than any other state—making it harder for working people to cast ballots.

From education to gun safety, from climate and the environment, from education to worker protection, Democratic lawmakers work to make citizens’ lives better and fairer, while Republicans wage culture wars and make it harder for middle-class Americans to earn a decent living.

Which approach really makes America great?

Indiana’s neighbor, Illinois, is just one example of the difference between government for We the People and government for the donor class. Just this month, Governor Pritzker signed the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Act, limiting unfair pricing practices and supporting independent pharmacies, along with four bills designed to help high school students get into and afford to pay for college in Illinois. In January, he signed a bill forbidding payment of less than minimum wage to disabled workers.

There’s much more.

From education to gun safety, from climate and the environment, from education to worker protection, Democratic lawmakers in Blue America are working to protect the right to vote and the right to fair treatment. Meanwhile, Republicans in Red America are rolling back their citizens’ rights, making it harder to vote and harder for middle-class Americans to earn a decent living.

Which approach really makes America great?

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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.

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