Category Archives: Random Blogging

Jimmy Kimmel And The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman addressed what had been my own somewhat optimistic “take” on Disney’s retreat during the Jimmy Kimmel episode.

Krugman began by acknowledging Trump’s efforts at autocracy–and noted that, as his poll numbers have fallen, he has amped up his efforts to intimidate, secure in the knowledge that “craven congressional Republicans and a complicit Supreme Court” will continue to abet his destruction of democratic safeguards. The administration’s demand that Kimmel be removed from the airwaves was part and parcel of that autocratic ambition.

But as Krugman also points out, thanks to American public opinion, Trump’s efforts to mimic Putin and Orban are failing.

When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept. As David Frum says, this means that he is in a race against time. Can he consolidate power before he loses his aura of inevitability? Will those who run major institutions – particularly corporate CEOs – understand that we are at a crucial juncture, and that by accommodating Trump they have more to lose than by standing up to him?

To put it bluntly, is the Jimmy Kimmel affair the harbinger of a failed Trumpian putsch?

When Putin and Orban began their respective takeovers, they enjoyed several years of popularity–mostly by improving the economic postures of their countries. Thanks to Trump’s incredible ignorance (and his insane belief in tariffs), he took the robust economy he inherited and is in the process of tanking it. Krugman shared the widely available poll results that document Trump’s unpopularity–he is in deeply negative territory, and the people who strongly dislike him vastly outnumber those who strongly approve of him.

If we had a working Congress, unpopularity at this scale would already have turned Trump into a lame duck, but as Krugman notes, he has instead been able to operate as a quasi-autocrat, thanks to a “party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does.”

As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. But the fact is that Trump has not yet locked in his autocracy. Timid institutions are failing to understand not only how unpopular Trump is, but also how severe a backlash they are likely to face for surrendering without a fight.

And so we come to Trump’s thin-skinned assault on comedians–most recently, Jimmy Kimmel.

Krugman says the signs were there, but Disney ignored them. There were several such signs: Target’s effort to appease Trump by ending its commitment to DEI–an effort that led to a large decline in sales and a falling stock price; capitulating law firms that lost clients and partners to law firms that didn’t. And of course, Tesla…

And yet,

Disney was evidently completely unprepared for the backlash caused by its decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, a backlash so costly that the company reversed course after just five days — too late to avoid probably irreparable damage to its brand…

It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

So how can we make a Trump implosion more likely? The public can help by doing what Target’s customers and Disney’s audience did — make it clear that they will stop paying money to institutions that lend aid and comfort to the authoritarian project.

Big corporations and fancy law firms may fold. Republican legislators may lack integrity and spines. Supreme Court justices may be unfathomably corrupt. But the effort to silence Kimmel has once again confirmed that We the People have the power to remind all of them that we are Americans who value our liberties more than our access to consumer products or entertainment.

The public response to the Jimmy Kimmel episode may well be the light at the end of our current dark tunnel…..

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Memorize This Paragraph!

A recent paragraph in a Lincoln Square newsletter really–really–struck me. Here’s that paragraph:

The Republican Party in 2025 is locked in a state of sycophantic paralysis. MAGA is not just Trump’s mood swings; it’s a tribal identity. Step out of line, and you get exiled. That’s why even senators with Ivy League résumés suddenly sound like they’re auditioning for a spot on a right-wing podcast — they’re terrified of losing the mob’s loyalty. And here’s the uncomfortable truth Democrats keep sidestepping: a huge chunk of MAGA voters are perfectly willing to suffer. They’ll put up with higher prices, worse health care, collapsing schools, potholes the size of moon craters — and they’ll smile through it — so long as the pain lands harder on someone they hate. Call it recreational spite or political CrossFit: the pain is the point, and the workout “counts” if the libs hurt more. That’s the dynamic behind why they support him.

There’s a substantial body of research confirming that puzzling observation. Illogical as it seems, people who harbor bigotries–people who hate those they label “other”–really are willing to overlook damage they suffer personally if they believe that “those people” are being hurt even more.

Bizarre as that finding is, it explains a lot.

The author quoted Lyndon Johnson, who made the statement as he was signing the Civil Rights Act. Johnson acknowledged that he was signing a measure that would cost Democrats the votes of much of the South (this was back when Southern Democrats were the racists; Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act probably was a factor in the defection of those racists from the party and their migration into today’s White Christian Nationalist cult, aka the GOP.) Johnson quite accurately noted that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

As the author noted, “MAGA is basically the LBJ theorem in a red hat. The cruelty isn’t the glitch, it’s the subscription plan — the down payment on the fantasy that at least you’re not on the bottom rung.”

Philosophers and theologians, not to mention psychiatrists, can theorize over the deficits in personality and humanity that lead otherwise normal humans to detest those “others” to such a degree that they will accept considerable personal privation if only they can be convinced that those others are suffering more…

The essay referenced the psychological research that explores–but doesn’t explain–this phenomenon.

There’s actual scholarship that explains why this kind of thinking has such a grip. Relative deprivation theory tells us people don’t measure life by absolutes; they measure by comparisons. You’ll tolerate your own struggles as long as your neighbor isn’t doing better; the second you think they’re moving up, resentment flares. Then comes the darker twist. In 2009, Combs and colleagues documented partisan schadenfreude — the perverse pleasure people feel when the “other side” suffers, even if they’re collateral damage themselves. That’s the political equivalent of the Joker in The Dark Knight setting a mountain of his own stolen cash on fire just to watch Gotham panic. Or think of Cartman, South Park’s eternal bully, who will happily wreck his own life if it means making someone else miserable — and still ends up the kid everyone hates. That’s the mindset: voters cheering their own decline as long as someone they despise loses more.

Once I read this, I began to recognize how it works in Trumpland.

Are those tariffs making groceries and everyday items more expensive? Are even immigrants who are in the country legally terrified of the ICE masked bullies who are rounding up anyone with dark skin? Is the war being waged against science–very much including medical science–making it more likely that you will contract a disease, or that a cure for what ails you won’t be forthcoming? Those and other negative consequences of official corruption and stupidity are bearable, because Trump is keeping his promise to go after “those people.” If there has been one through-line in this administration, it has been the unremitting effort to stamp out the progress made by women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, and to elevate White psuedo-Christian males to their former (albeit unearned) social dominance.

File under “pathetic.”

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Don’t Disregard The Good News

Virtually all of my conversations with friends and family these days eventually descend into “gloom and doom” focused on the state of our politics,  the erosion of American liberty and the effect of the administration’s insane policies on the country’s economic health. All of those reasons for despair–and more–are very real, and the need to be persistent in our fight to reclaim the American Idea is urgent, but we really shouldn’t let our obsession with the forces of repression and regression obscure the fact that there are also lots of good things happening.

Take, for example, some welcome news about the nation’s public schools. A recent study focused on the emergence of “community schools”–a movement that has shown great promise in both educational outcomes and community support. The introduction to the study explains what makes a public school a community school:

Community schools are public schools that use the community school approach to transform into a place where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. They provide services and support to fit each community’s needs, guided by the people who know students best— families, teachers, and the students themselves. They often partner with outside organizations and local governments to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, well-fed, safe, and in a better position to learn.

The researchers included a number of examples of community schools that have improved student educational outcomes, increased attendance, improved peer/adult relationships and attitudes toward school, and reduced racial and economic achievement gaps. They estimated that for every dollar invested in a community school, the community received $15 back in improved economic performance and well-being, and they offered a collection of stories about community schools that are transforming the way they function and demonstrating progress on a wide variety of outcome measures.

It isn’t only education. The Trump administration may deny the reality of climate change and be intent on enriching fossil fuel companies, but environmental engineers and scientists around the world are announcing breakthroughs every day.

For example, concern about climate change requires significant attention to construction materials. (The concrete and steel industries together are responsible for as much as 15% of global C02 emissions.) But there has been real progress in this area.

Researchers in Australia have created cement from the hundreds of thousands of tons of glass that is no longer being processed in a failing recycling system. They report that the resulting cement is cheaper, stronger and lighter than traditional cement and delivers functional insulation, fire-resistance and a lower emissions threshold. Other researchers are using brown seaweed to create unfired clay bricks as an alternative to conventional fired bricks and concrete blocks, and Swiss researchers are also moving cement-bonded wood products into the realm of weight-bearing wood-based concrete. There are several others.

There’s also good news in the effort to electrify air travel. One solar-powered around-the-world-flight already took place in 2016. And although replacing larger fossil-fuel powered airplanes probably won’t be a reality until at least 2050, there are already electrified short-range planes built for a small number of passengers.

A really exciting innovation is solar glass– windows and doors that can provide electric power to homes and buildings. Researchers at the University of Michigan have invented a solar glass for windows, doors, skylights and other building-related glass applications.

There’s much, much more. We humans continue to demonstrate real brilliance in solving our more technical and environmental problems. I wonder what it would take to apply that brilliance to our political and social life.

That said, even on the political front, there’s encouraging news. The national resistance is growing, and in Indiana, where we’re all too aware of the problems created by one-party rule, an emerging phenomenon is a sign that MAGA can’t take residents of Red states for granted.  Indiana has seen a surge in independent candidacies, and those Independents are winning more often than many people realize—52% of those who made the ballot in 2023–24 were successful.

Nearly half of Indiana’s voters identify as independent, and a growing number of Republicans are repelled by Republican candidates who are increasingly MAGA and Christian Nationalist zealots. (Too many of them still can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, but evidently they will vote for an Independent.)

I’m actually going to meet some of these officials and hear why they chose to run as Independents. A group called Independent Indiana is hosting a panel discussion Monday night in Indianapolis, and I plan to attend.

We need to cling to those rays of sunshine in our dark times…..

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Old People In A New World

Okay–I know that I rarely exhibit sympathy for MAGA types, but a recent experience has reminded me that the pace of change–particularly, the rate at which the world is becoming digital–can be especially disorienting for older folks. Maddening, actually. And I say that as someone who has a smartphone and uses a computer daily.

My husband works out at our local Y with a couple of older men who still use flip phones. They’re deeply suspicious of all the newfangled technology, and they are also vocally MAGA. I’ve come to believe that–while it seems like a stretch– suspicion and disdain for the tech miracles of our brave new world and being receptive to oversimplified and racist world-views may go hand in hand.

A recent stay at a “chi chi” new hotel in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, has made me a bit more sympathetic to what must seem to some folks as an unwelcome and uncomfortable plunge into a science-fiction future.

Bear with me here.

I checked in and went to the elevator, which failed to open. After waiting for a brief time (and repeatedly pushing the button), I went back to the front desk, where the young man explained that the elevator would only work from lobby if you scanned your room key on a device mounted between the elevators before pushing the button. Nice safety feature–but there were no posted instructions that explained that. Evidently, younger folks found it intuitive.

When I got to the room, it became immediately obvious that the hotel didn’t cater to anyone one lacking a smartphone. There was no telephone in the room on which to call the desk or housekeeping, no printed materials with information about the hotel or its surroundings. What there was was a small plastic stand on the desk with QR codes, and a tiny message alerting guests that they could reach hotel services by texting a specific number.

Older guests unfamiliar with QR codes, or (unthinkable!) guests without smartphones would be unable to access hotel information. Worse–if your phone was out of juice and you’d forgotten to pack a charger (guilty as charged), the hotel didn’t have chargers (I asked). There was also no clock in the room, so if you lacked an operating phone, you didn’t know what time it was.

To say that this was all very frustrating would be an understatement. I tend to think that this particular hotel has gotten ahead of itself, but the experience did force me to recognize that I haven’t been very understanding of the people in my general age cohort (old) who encounter similar frustrations every day.

Noting the accelerated pace of change has become a cliche, obscuring the very real disorientation that so often accompanies it. America is full of people who reached adulthood before computers became ubiquitous–people who grew up with telephones firmly affixed to wires and walls, who drove cars that lacked computer screens and syrupy directions from a female GPS voice, who watched one of three networks on their televisions and read the local news on newsprint delivered to their doors daily. Etc.

Those same Americans have grandchildren for whom the avalanche of technology is intuitive–they grew up with it. Those grandkids are fixated on their screens, comfortable in a world that seems increasingly alien to their grandparents. Add to that the old folks’ daily encounter with the massive increases in America’s diversity, the contemporary prominence of women and people of color in positions of authority and celebrity, and older folks can be forgiven for feeling adrift, if not alienated, in a strange new world.

That alienation helps to explain–although it doesn’t excuse–their willingness to support a movement that blames nefarious “others” for their discomfort.

I realize that I need to be less judgmental, but it’s hard when people ignore the actual reasons for their discomfort and instead look for someone to blame…

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Political Violence

As I write this, the initial accusations about the murder of Charlie Kirk have been confirmed–in an ironic way. The immediate–and not unreasonable– reaction was the assumption he’d been targeted for his beliefs. And evidently, he was–but not by  “evil” Lefists. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the even-farther “groyper” Right that believed Kirk was insufficiently radical.

Obviously, as repulsive as some of Kirk’s beliefs were, they are no excuse for violence. Freedom of speech, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, is not meant to protect only those who agree with us, it also extends to those expressing the “thought  we hate.”

Following the shooting, denunciations of political violence came from across the political spectrum. And predictably, MAGA folks expressed outrage that was entirely missing when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was nearly killed, and when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated. 

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, pundits and commentators have rushed to offer their perspectives. One that I found particularly insightful was an article by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. As he began,

Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.

We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.

Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself.

Last then reminded readers that this was not a “one off.” As he wrote, it had only been twelve weeks since Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home, sixteen weeks since Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were assassinated outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, ten months since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan.

And one could list other examples of near-assassinations from recent years—like the brutal beating of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the shots fired at an ex-president campaigning to return to office.

It is important to understand that these acts all emerged from a culture of political violence that has been waxing for nearly a decade.

Last acknowledged the presence of political violence in the past, specifically enumerating the attacks on Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK and MLK, and the vicious attacks on Black citizens during Jim Crow. But he pointed to a crucial difference in the way public officials responded.

The difference is that until recently, elected high officials condemned political violence as a matter of course. Their condemnations were not always sincere, but they were nearly universal. They understood that political violence is a wildfire. It spreads. And if it breaks containment, it cannot be controlled. Once unleashed, it burns everyone.

I found one paragraph in Last’s brief essay to be both undeniably true and chilling. As he wrote,

We don’t have to rehearse the litany of how we got here; we can leave that to another day. But we all know what we know. Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment.

That “plain political reality” is what keeps me up at night.

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