Tag Archives: evidence

Data? What Data?

It’s bad enough that a substantial percentage of our fellow Americans reject probative evidence that is inconsistent with their preferred realities. What is arguably worse is the administration’s effort to erase such evidence–its conduct of a war on data that might undercut Trump’s fantasy realities.

The New Republic recently focused on that war.

Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.

As the article notes–and as most academics know–for many years, the government has been one of the best sources of data available; not only has it been an important source of probative, vetted information, it has made that information easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike.  That informational history is under attack by Trump, who–as the article notes– doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his made-up stories.

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

What about the autism claims unsupported by any credible medical research? Or the wild and dangerous claims from Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccines? As the article points out, those vaccine claims will be insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a billion dollars.

It goes on. And on.

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency.

Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s  decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates,  He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.

Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.

Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and his inflationary tariffs.

We also won’t know how children are doing in school after his massive cuts to K-12 education, since the administration gutted the Department of Education’s research offices and the National Center for Education Statistics.

States, universities, and other nonprofits are trying to make up for the loss of the data, but in many cases the information provided by the federal government was irreplaceable.

When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”

If and when we rid ourselves of Trump and the MAGA plague, rebuilding and restoration will take many years…..

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The War On Knowledge

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

In The New Dark Age, Serwer writes

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Serwer enumerates the Trump assaults: threats to withhold funding from colleges and universities that don’t submit to MAGA demands. Sustained attacks on the engines of American scientific inquiry– the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health–and on repositories of America’s history, including the Smithsonian.  Arts organizations and libraries are losing funding. Large numbers of government scientists have lost  their jobs and remaining researchers prevented from broaching forbidden subjects. “Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Serwer describes the attacks on universities. He uses the example of West Point, and the administration’s purge of forbidden texts to reveal what MAGA’s “ideal university” might look like.

West Point initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is broad-based; it isn’t limited to academia. The administration has also singled out and fired government employees involved in research of multiple kinds.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

Serwer enumerates the nature of the cuts and their foreseeable consequences, especially for public health. As he notes, modern agriculture and medicine, and advances in information technology like the internet and GPS were built on the foundation of federally funded research.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.

MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

You really need to click through and read the entire essay–and weep.

Welcome to a new Dark Ages.

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Shades Of Scopes

Christian Nationalists have tried to discredit science ever since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Most Americans know about the Scopes litigation–probably thanks to the movie, Inherit the Wind–but fewer know that Scopes (and science) lost at that Tennessee trial.

It’s comforting, albeit misleading, to think that respect for science, the scientific method and empirical evidence eventually won out.

It’s misleading because the forces antagonistic to scientific research and verifiable knowledge haven’t yielded to logic or evidence. Those forces are alive and well in the Trump administration, and they are rapidly eradicating America’s longstanding global dominance in the creation of human knowledge.

The New York Tmes recently took a “deep dive” into the Trump administration’s war on scientific inquiry. Noting the resignation of the head of the National Science Foundation–a man Trump appointed during his first term–after Trump cut more than 400 research awards from the NSF budget, the report noted the administration has also slashed budgets for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA, and has defunded thousands of researchers.

The explanations offered for this wholesale attack are typical Trump hogwash. “Cost-cutting,” “government efficiency,” and my favorite: “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” It appears that numerous grants were eliminated simply because their descriptions referenced aspects of reality rejected by MAGA morons– climate, diversity, disability, trans or women.

Economists tell us that every dollar spent on research has returned at least $5 to the economy.

Nevertheless, Trump’s administration has defunded studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. It has laid off meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; and black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The Times reports that a next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.

Predictably, American scientists are evaluating their options. France and Canada are among several other countries courting American researchers. A recent poll found that more than 1,200 American scientists are considering working abroad.

What is even more frightening is the administration’s effort to count as “science” only “findings” that accord with the administration’s beliefs–and the National Science Foundation will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ Why? The administration says that efforts to correct lies and disseminate accurate data “could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” And a Justice Department official accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

I am not making this up.

The Atlantic has responded to this insanity with an article titled “This is Not How We Do Science. Ever.”

Since its first days, the new Trump administration has clearly shown where it thinks scientific attention should not be focused: It has attempted to censor federal scientific data, cut billions in government spending on research, and compromised care for some of the world’s most at-risk populations. Now, as the nation’s leaders have begun to encourage inquiry into specific areas, they are signaling that they’re willing not just to slash and burn research that challenges their political ideology but to replace it with shoddy studies designed to support their goals, under the guise of scientific legitimacy.

The article reports on several administration directives clearly intended to confirm Trump’s desired results.

This is consistent with everything Trump and his allies have revealed about their views on science since January: that it is not a means to better understand objective reality, but a political weapon that they must guard against, or deploy themselves. In recent months, Kennedy has accused the expert committee that counsels the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations of being in the pocket of vaccine manufacturers; the administration has also fired from HHS several scientists who were prominent leaders in the COVID-19 response, including a few closely affiliated with Anthony Fauci, whom Trump has ridiculed as a “disaster” and an idiot and Desai derided as one of many “demonstrably fallible ‘experts.’” Last week, administration officials also redirected two federal websites, once used to share information on COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, to a page promoting the idea that the coronavirus pandemic began as a lab leak, rather than Fauci’s “preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.”

MAGA’s revolt against science is an important part of the GOP’s continuing rejection of the “reality-based” community.

A psychiatrist friend defines denial of reality as insanity. (See yesterday’s post…)

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NO NO NO

The Trump Administration may be the pre-eminent example of lunacy in government, but the current super-majority in Indiana’s legislature–aided and abetted by our MAGA Governor and his merry band of White Christian Nationalists–are no less impervious to logic, evidence and sound policy. 

A report from Indiana Public Media focuses on one example. It begins:

A measure meant to better align education in Indiana to the state’s workforce needs is headed to the governor’s desk. It received wide support from Senate lawmakers despite lingering concerns about its effect on colleges, universities and employers.

SB 448 requires the Commission for Higher Education to approve all degrees and programs offered by public colleges and universities every 10 years. It also says those schools must assess and consider their staffing needs when reviewing tenured professors.

Sen. Greg Taylor (D-Indianapolis) said he is concerned programs could be cut if they aren’t considered valuable to the state’s employment needs. Additionally, he expressed concern that requiring faculty tenure reviews to take specific staffing needs for approved degrees or programs into account could be detrimental to other areas of study.

“It can get really dangerous for us to start providing this type of, I don’t know, nose under the tent ideology,” he said.

Taylor has identified the two major flaws in this state over-reach. I’ve repeatedly posted about the first– lawmakers’ refusal to understand what education is, and why it is not job training. Our public schools and universities have two vitally important tasks:  giving the nation’s children and youth the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but the tools to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and equipping them with what I have termed “civic literacy”–enabling them to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship.

Education includes things like art, music, literature and philosophy. Presumably, those studies are unnecessary “frills” when the job of the schools is simply to produce worker bees. 

But SB 448 not only confuses education with job training, it mimics Trump’s efforts to dictate what can and cannot be taught in the nation’s universities, to control and micro-manage institutions of higher education and to “purge” those institutions of ideas with which our overlords disagree.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities has issued a response to these efforts. It began:

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.

The statement notes that the nation’s colleges and universities are diverse. There are “research universities and community colleges; comprehensive universities and liberal arts colleges; public institutions and private ones; freestanding and multi-site campuses.”  Different schools are designed for different students. In order for these institutions to function properly, they must have the

freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.

I encourage you to click through and read the entire statement, which was signed by dozens of university presidents. I doubt it will move the culture warriors in Washington or the Indiana Statehouse, who shrink from “open inquiry” and want to turn our educational institutions into factories spitting out those obedient worker bees. These are limited individuals who view genuine intellectual engagement and inquiry with fear and disdain. 

During this session, Indiana’s terrible legislature has doubled down on its war on education. It has stolen even more critical funding from our public schools in order to increase a voucher program that all evidence shows does not improve educational outcomes, and is in reality a First Amendment “work-around” allowing public money to flow to religious schools. In a prior session, it passed a highly intrusive bill misleadingly described as an effort to protect “intellectual diversity” on state campuses–in reality, an effort to purge those campuses of perspectives of which our radical legislators disapprove.

Ironically, those Blue states governed by legislators who understand the difference between job training and education–and who support, rather than undermine, their universities’ missions–also have more robust economies.

Too bad Indiana’s “leaders” can’t connect those dots….

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Don’t Argue With The True Believers

A recent column by Frank Bruni addressed an issue to which I often refer: the growing gap between GOP rhetoric (and presumably, belief) and that fact-based thing we call reality.

Bruni wrote:

When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”

A post to Daily Kos elaborated on that lack of a tether, quoting Stephen Colbert for the often-repeated line that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” and pointing to the myriad ways in which reality deviates from the preferred Republican version.

Trump really did lose in 2020. But it goes far beyond Trump and and his 30,000+ lies. Slavery really was an unredeemable horror for Blacks. Anti-abortion laws really are killing women. Gender dysphoria really exists. Same-sex marriages really work. Racism really is systemic in the United States. Jews really don’t control the world (if we did, we’d do a better job!). The economy really is doing much better under Biden than under Trump. The Earth (which really is 4.5 billion years old, give or take) really does revolve around the sun.

The post also linked to an article in the Atlantic–behind a paywall–in which the author, son of a preacher, told of the congregation’s outrage when his father’s successor preached a sermon about Christians’ obligation to protect ‘God’s creation’ from climate change. Although many Christian denominations acknowledge the reality of climate change and the need to address it, in churches like his father’s, climate change denial is part of being a “real” Christian.

Fundamentalist Christians used to avoid politics. No more. In fact, in a very real sense, for many of them, being Republican has become their version of being Christian.

The reverse is equally true: large numbers of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans have transformed what was formerly a political identity into a quasi-religious one. Political lies and conspiracy theories have morphed into something akin to theological doctrine. The absence of proof–the lack of any empirical or factual support–is irrelevant. (You can’t prove the existence  or non-existence of God in a laboratory, either.)

I asked a psychiatrist friend to tell me what happens when such people come face to face with well-documented evidence debunking their beliefs. Evidently, the four most likely reactions are: denial (true believers simply deny the facts or dismiss them as false or biased); cognitive dissonance (they experience the discomfort that arises when a person holds conflicting beliefs); resort to confirmation bias (true believers seek out information that supports their original beliefs, or provides an excuse to discount the evidence before them); and what is called the “backfire effect,” in which they become even more entrenched in their preferred version of reality.

Least likely is a change of opinion to accord with the evidence.

Instead, these “true believers” perceive the contradictory information as an existential threat to their identities or world-views, a threat that is much more likely to trigger a defensive response than a change of opinion.

Recent headlines report that some 25% of Americans now believe that the FBI was responsible for the January 6th insurrection. Those Americans are the true believers;  I would characterize such a political opinion–a conviction so divorced from reality and contrary to all available evidence– as quasi-religious. However we characterize such departures from reality, however, we need to understand that those who cling to these beliefs are unmovable. Time spent arguing with them, or showing them evidence to the contrary, is time wasted.

The only way Democrats will win elections in 2024 is by voting in sufficiently large numbers. Poll after poll shows that large majorities of voters agree with Democratic policy positions, and that rational Americans outnumber the true believers.  The problem is: far too many of the inhabitants of the real world–for one reason or another–fail to vote.

We don’t need to waste time trying to convert the denizens of never-never land. We need to put all of our efforts into getting out the vote.

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