The Real Christians

I grew up in Anderson, Indiana, in one of a handful of Jewish families then living in that small town.  Anti-Semitic incidents were not infrequent, and when they occurred, my mother would reassure me that “a real Christian is a Jew’s best friend.” It was just too bad that there were so many faux Christians around…

In that sense, not much has changed.

Given the persistent hypocrisy and bigotry being exhibited by the Christian Nationalists who are constantly parading their faux piety, it is tempting to simply write off all people who self- identify as Christian. But that would be a mistake, because there are many Christians who take the actual words of the biblical Jesus seriously. I was reminded of their existence when I read that the Episcopal Church had refused to resettle the White Afrikaners who–alone among would-be immigrants–had been welcomed by our racist President and granted a facilitated refugee status.

According to the Religion News Service,

In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday (May 12) that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Donald Trump’s administration.

In a follow-up article, the News Service quoted an Episcopal bishop who characterized assisting with the settlement of the Afrikaners “a Faustian bargain.”

The head of Church World Service–one of several religious resettlement groups currently suing the Trump administration– was quoted as saying “We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement.” 

By resettling this population, the Government is demonstrating that it still has the capacity to quickly screen, process, and depart refugees to the United States. It’s time for the Administration to honor our nation’s commitment to the thousands of refugee families it abandoned with its cruel and illegal executive order.

On his very first day in office, Trump suspended the U.S. refugee settlement program, stranding more than 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement. These were people who had fled war and persecution in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. Most such refugees are nonwhite, coming from what Trump has delicately described as “shithole countries.”

The speed with which the Trump administration facilitated the immigration of Whites, while refusing to consider refugee status for people of color with far more compelling evidence, was stark and obvious confirmation of this administration’s deep-seated racism. 

Not that we needed added evidence. Trump’s war against “woke” and DEI–diversity, equity and inclusion–is an obvious expression of the White “Christian” Nationalism that motivates his supporters. (The lengths to which Trumpers will go to eliminate any concern for equal treatment has led to some ridiculous results: in its zeal to redefine any effort to promote “equity” as an assault on White folks, the administration has suspended a digital equity program established to bring the Internet to underserved rural areas populated by Trump supporters. Evidently, broadband equity is racist.)

Support for my mother’s thesis that “good Christians” are neither racist nor anti-Semitic is emerging. One example is Christians Against Christian Nationalism, an organization that labels Christian Nationalism a “threat to both our religious communities and our democracy.”

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our fellow Christians to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

I encourage you to visit their website, which–among other things– recognizes the overlap between Christian Nationalism’s faux Christianity and its profound and anti-American racism. 

American society has come a long way since my 1950s childhood in small-town Indiana. Trump and his supporters are frantic to reverse the substantial gains made by women and minorities in American culture; the effort by Christian Nationalists to label progress toward equity and inclusion as anti-White, anti-Christian discrimination is an effort to do just that.

It’s comforting to know that real Christians will oppose them.

 
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Borowitz Shames Legacy Media

Sometimes it takes comedy to cut through the fog and propaganda. Back in the day, my husband and I were devoted watchers of The Daily Show–a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert skillfully skewered the pompous and self-important. (Admittedly, these days, we look at those we thought of as the “bad guys” with something approaching fondness. Compared to Trump and his collection of nutcases and incompetents, they look positively cuddly…)

Recently, the satirical Borowitz Report took on the legacy media’s obsession with President Biden’s decline while in office–an obsession fed by a book accusing his staff of “hiding” the effects of aging. His take was perfect.

In a bombshell report that stirred controversy on Tuesday, a prominent conspiracy theorist claimed that Joe Biden concealed his health problems by making the American economy boom for four straight years.

“Biden thought he could hide his health issues by making the U.S. economy the envy of the world,” the conspiracist, Harland Dorrinson, said. “Low unemployment, a surging stock market, and a stable dollar all played their parts in the cover-up.”

Strengthening NATO and bolstering relationships with allies were also key components of Biden’s elaborate scheme to hide his health woes, Dorrinson said.

“Biden kept the media distracted by making the US trusted and respected around the world,” he said. “Trump would never do that.”

The Biden presidency wasn’t perfect, but it was transformational, repairing the international damage done during Trump’s first term and growing the economy “from the middle out” as he liked to say. Perhaps, as he faded, some of those advances were managed by the highly competent people around him, but they were real. The government worked. Rather than focusing on the substantial progress being made, however, the legacy media jumped on every gaffe, every stumble. 

That disproportionate attention to the ravages of age would have been less offensive had the same degree of attention been paid to Trump’s far more obvious mental illness and decline. But the same media that criticised Biden unmercifully has continually sane-washed Trump.

I agree with Robert Hubbell, who finds the differences in coverage maddening and incomprehensible. Noting the recent “tell-all” book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson claiming that Biden’s advisors “covered up” his “decline,” he wrote:

Let’s put aside for a moment that several of the key figures who allegedly witnessed events described in the book have said publicly, “Not true. It didn’t happen.”

Let’s put aside for a moment that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson were writing a book about an alleged “cover up” when they were actively reporting on Joe Biden’s presidency, but never mentioned the “cover up” that they were allegedly discovering through 200 interviews.

Let’s put aside the implausability of the notion that one could “cover up” the cognitive state of a man who was appearing daily at campaign events, delivering addresses to Congress where he outwitted the entire Republican caucus, providing interviews to major media outlets, and guiding America through a period of stable foreign relations and successful domestic policy.

If it was a “cover-up,” it didn’t prevent major media outlets from reporting daily on Joe Biden’s age, stutter, stiff gait, and alleged gaffes.

Hubbell does agree that there was a coverup.

Donald Trump was, and is, cognitively impaired. And that fact is being covered up by the media every single day.

We all know it. The press knows it. His advisors know it. But the media gives a fraction of the coverage to Trump’s much more serious manifestations of cognitive decline than to the anonymous reporting in Jake Tapper’s sensationalized book.

Hubbell is absolutely correct when he says that the coverage media is giving today to claims about a former president who guided our nation through one of the most successful presidencies in the modern era is shameful when compared to the normalizing coverage of an “obviously cognitively impaired president who is violating the Constitution on a daily basis and running an administration that seems to be an open cesspool of graft.”

As Norman Orenstein observed, “I have a hard time watching journalists high five each other over books on WH covering up for Biden. A diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election. False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.” 

Hubbell is entirely correct when he accuses the legacy media of failing America–of failing to provide appropriate coverage of the threat posed by Trump. “And they keep doing it. To their everlasting shame.”

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The “Naughty” List

Santa Claus isn’t the only one who is keeping a list of “who is naughty and who is nice.” Charlie Sykes recently brought some limited order out of the chaos of Trump’s first months–a real service, since most of us have been beaten down by the daily firehose of assaults on decency, the Constitution and the rule of law–the tactic Steve Bannon has called “flooding the zone with shit.”

Sykes assembled his list in order to criticize Chuck Schumer, who has finally graduated from sending “stern letters” and moved to block Trump appointees. Sykes asks “What took you so long? Why didn’t you act when”…and then he provides his list of Trumpian assaults that should have prompted active blowback when they occurred.

Granted, Sykes’ list isn’t comprehensive, so intensely has the zone been flooded, but here are the acts that he says should have triggered action from Schumer when they occurred:

  •  blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, including those who assaulted police officers.
  • his purge of the FBI, targeting agents who had investigated his own misconduct.
  • suspending enforcement of the foreign bribery ban.
  • calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him.
  • firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel who protects whistleblowers.
  • firing the head of the Office of Government Ethics.
  • firing the prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot investigations.
  • slashing the office that prosecutes misconduct by public officials.
  • dropping charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams agreement to work with ICE — a move that led to the resignation of the acting SDNY U.S. attorney and several other federal prosecutors.
  • Trump’s refusal to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. — stating that he could, but wasn’t going to.
  • Trump’s suggestion to the president of El Salvador that he would send “homegrown” criminals — American citizens — to his notorious prison.
  •  Trump’s executive orders targeting individuals who had criticized him — including Chris Krebs, who had challenged his 2020 election lies.
  • stripping the security clearances of law firms who had challenged him. 
  • Trump’s threats to strip licenses from media critics.
  • allowing Elon Musk’s team to access sensitive and protected taxpayer information.
  • when his top aides were caught chatting about military action on Signal.
  • firing six National Security Council officials on advice from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
  • refusing to rule out the use of military force to seize Greenland. 
  • Trump’s purge of top generals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
  • sending masked agents to seize people on the streets.
  • arresting international students for little more than for writing op-eds.
  • when White House aide Stephen Miller said that administration was considering suspending habeas corpus.

Sykes list–which I would emphasize is far from comprehensive–was generated as Americans learned of Qatar’s offer of a “gift”–a plane described as a “palace in the sky.”  The offer was, as Sykes says, “a very visible symbol of Trump’s susceptibility to corruption.” But–as he also reminds us– we have seen countless other examples.

Sen. Chris Murphy, for example, has been banging the drum about Trump’s potential $TRUMP crypto conflict of interest for months. “My hair has been on fire about the meme coin from day one,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “That is a level of corruption that is just absolutely stunning. It was already the most corrupt thing a president has ever done in the history of the United States.”

What didn’t make Syke’s list is the Trump administration’s effort to neuter the other two branches of government.

Under the Constitution, Congress and the courts are “co-equal” with the Executive branch, but Trump and MAGA have bullied the Republicans in Congress into submission. (Given that the GOP is currently in the majority, Democrats have been left with limited options for resistance–a good reason to put those options to maximum use.)

Unlike Congress, the courts–at least, the lower federal courts–have fulfilled their Constitutional role. They have ruled for the plaintiffs in virtually every case challenging Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions–but while Trump has given lip service to obeying those rulings, he continues to ignore a number of them. At the same time, he has increased his threats against judges who dare to rule against him, and MAGA thugs (Trump’s “brownshirts”) have taken to issuing threats against the judiciary and their families.

We the People need to leave a large civic lump of coal in the Trump stocking. Sooner rather than later.

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One More Time

Yesterday, I posted about Trump’s attacks on the basic research that generates medical breakthroughs, and the critical importance of the government grants that fund that research. Medical advances are obviously salient to the general public; we care about cures for the diseases that cause death and suffering, and when we understand the significance of assaults on the research that makes those breakthroughs possible, we oppose them.

What is less well understood is that basic research funded by government has given America its global dominance in technology and innovation.

A recent essay from the Washington Post reminds readers what is at stake as Musk and Trump wreak havoc with those research grants.  reminding us that “we are the nation that spawned the internet and GPS, and has the most Nobel laureates curing deadly diseases, making intelligent machines and shedding light on the dark secrets of the universe.”

Whether they are geeks in garages or eggheads in university labs, American entrepreneurs have built their ideas and fortunes on the back of basic research supported by taxpayers, who then reap the rewards. It’s not an accident of geography or artifact of culture that the United States has bred some of the best inventors of the 20th and 21st century. The hidden engine of the country’s illustrious track record has been the grants given to academic researchers by federal agencies that the U.S. DOGE Service has been decimating and that President Donald Trump proposes to shrink catastrophically in the next budget.

Lithium-ion batteries that power your smartphone and computer, weather forecasts that help you figure out what to wear, wings of airplanes that take you on vacation and all the messaging you do online can be traced to the symbiosis between research funded by government and private industry, the scaffolding for mind-melds of scholars and entrepreneurs. Moderna’s multibillion-dollar coronavirus vaccine that saved millions of lives owes its origins to decades of research on mRNA, viruses and vaccines that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Google arose from a National Science Foundation digital libraries grant that supported then-Stanford University graduate student Larry Page. We have QR codes, barcodes and MRIs today because of basic research investments in mathematics and physics.

The essay explains why the free market will not fill the gap. Corporate and business research understandably has a narrower focus and shorter time horizon than the basic research funded by government. Its timelines are adequate for building a somewhat better gadget, but there is no business purpose to be served for funding open-ended questions with no immediate, obvious payoff–questions that, over time, have yielded the big breakthroughs.

Giving out grants for what might look frivolous or wasteful on the surface is a feature, not a bug, of publicly funded research. Consider that Agriculture Department and NIH grants to study chemicals in wild yams led to cortisone and medical steroids becoming widely affordable. Or that knowing more about the fruit fly has aided discoveries related to human aging, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

We all benefit greatly from what the author calls “America’s innovation engine.” Yet Congress is about to allow the Trump administration to break it, because most of the general public doesn’t yet see–or understand– what’s being lost.

The most profitable companies in the country continue to trade on investments in research made decades ago, while political leaders strip the next generation of the chance to become groundbreaking inventors and innovators. Preventing such entrepreneurs from rising might even protect the big companies’ profits. Little wonder, then, that many of the richest men in the world — men who call themselves innovators — have done little to protect the invention engine from Trump’s havoc. Or that the richest of them, Elon Musk, has even been an architect of its destruction. Meanwhile, Musk keeps boosting his own companies with public funds, proving that at least his private-sector innovation depends on the government he is stripping for parts.

In the late 20th century, the United States invested in knowledge while other countries invested  in infrastructure projects that were more visible and politically palatable. As a result, their growth stagnated while America’s thrived. America’s investments in research built great universities that became magnets for the world’s brightest minds– and for the immigrants who founded major companies in the United States.

As the author concluded,

There is no plainer betrayal of the MAGA promise to restore the nation’s storied past than to destroy this legacy of invention. What we’re losing is far more important, however, than the pride one felt being part of that America. We’re losing the country’s future.­

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Science Isn’t Waste Or Fraud

The daily damage being done by the Trump administration has given rise to a grim debate: how much of the wreckage can be remedied, or at least ameliorated, and how much is irremediable? How many of the attacks on purportedly “wasteful” and/or “fraudulent” expenditures are really based upon the appalling ignorance of those leveling the attacks–their profound lack of understanding of how things work?

Example: The sudden and draconian cuts to scientific and medical research don’t just threaten to cripple US global research prominence. They’ve thrown a wrench into promising research into cures for diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and Cancer. 

Last week, the news media reported on two breakthroughs: the use of advances in gene editing to cure a baby born with a rare genetic disorder; and a new blood test to detect Alzheimers. The exciting aspect of the technique used to cure the 9½-month-old baby is its potential to help people suffering with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases. The blood test makes it possible to detect Alzheimer’s disease much earlier. As one doctor pointed out, the test will allow primary care physicians to order a blood test and, if that test is positive, immediately refer a patient to a neurologist. He predicted that the test will “dramatically change clinical care.”

These advances and others like them didn’t emerge from a few weeks experiments in a laboratory. They built on years of scientific research, much of which had no immediate relevance to the reported advancements.

Most Americans don’t recognize the importance of basic research–it simply isn’t salient to citizens the way cuts in Medicaid or attacks on Social Security are. And very few Americans understand the long-term and disastrous effects of abrupt terminations of multi-year grants.

As Josh Marshall has argued at Talking Points Memo,

Basic and applied research generates huge dividends for a society. But its immediate and salient relevance to the average voter varies greatly. Theoretical physics is very worth funding and has many real world applications. But its relevance to — and just as importantly, its political traction with — a middle income couple in your average community where he’s a bus driver and she’s a nurse may not be crystal clear. Yet everyone knows a family member or loved one or friend stricken with cancer, or conditions tied to aging and dementia, heart disease, or any number of other conditions against which medical science is making steady progress. The point is so obvious it barely merits arguing: People fear death and disease. They look to science for hope of cures and some promise of long and robust lives. For two or three generations, that hope has been tied to researchers, somewhere, perhaps operating with something akin to magic but consistently producing new and wonderful things….

The challenge is that the world of biomedical research is insular. It operates with a system of internal governance and mores that are broadly understandable to people who’ve been exposed to university life, especially in the sciences. But that’s a very, very rarified discourse — peer review, study sections, fundamental vs. applied research, pipelines of new researchers, etc. Let’s start with just the foundational point that almost no one has any fucking idea what any of those terms and concepts mean. And for most things, that’s fine. Society should be well-run and knowledgeable enough to keep its scientists and researchers funded so that they don’t need to focus on the song and dance of making the case for what they do in the public square. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we’re living in right now.

Researchers have an additional and under-ordinary-circumstances very understandable desire not to overpromise or give false hope. This is rooted both in ethical imperatives and the uncertainty-driven empiricism that is the hallmark of any good scientist. But at the moment, it is a big problem because it is providing an unmerited advantage to those who are using lies to shut down medical research in the U.S. 

Marshall’s essay is worth reading in its entirety, but his essential point is that people with big megaphones–those in the various “disease communities”– should inform the general public about what is happening. Loudly. As he says, “The more widely known this becomes, the more salient it becomes, the worse it will get for those people who are pushing these cuts, or at least trying to make them permanent through the 2026 budget process.”

Trump and Musk gave carte blanche to know-it-all interns who have no comprehension of how science or government works. Millions of Americans will suffer unnecessarily as a result.

Welcome to MAGA (Morons Are Governing America) world.

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