Tag Archives: MAGA

Telling It Like It Is

As Americans try to cope with the national lunacy being imposed on us by the cretins in charge of our federal government, two essential elements of our current disaster have become too obvious to ignore.

First, voters did this. Granted, not a majority–most voters cast their ballots for someone other than the cult leader, and a disgraceful number of American citizens didn’t even bother to vote. Trump’s “victory” was razor-thin–but it was a victory, and we are reaping the consequences of that disastrous civic failure.

Second, the overwhelming reason voters supported Trump was racism. Those voters didn’t cast ballots for the destruction of America’s global dominance, or for the evisceration of Medicaid and Social Security; most of them (if they followed actual news and knew what was going on) would oppose measures hobbling the IRS’ ability to audit our billionaire overlords. No–what they wanted, and what the administration is providing, is culture war, an effort to take the United States back to the social arrangements of the 1950s and before, a time when LGBT folks were closeted, no one had even heard the word “trans,” women were in the kitchen, and Black people “knew their place.”

A recent essay from Jennifer Rubin in The Contrarian examined the language MAGA employs in an effort to veil that obvious effort. Prominent, of course, is the administration’s war against “DEI.” (It’s so much nicer to rail against letters of the alphabet than to use the N word…)

As with “CRT,” the MAGA censors, thought police (aimed at rooting out “improper ideology”), Great Replacement paranoids, and outright bigots cannot tell us precisely what “DEI” is—they merely know they are dead set against it. Teaching children to hate America. Making whites feel guilty. Quotas. None of that resembles the “DEI” practices utilized by universities, employers, researchers, and government entities—but that’s irrelevant to them.

Nuanced concepts (e.g., outreach to recruit Americans of all backgrounds, medical trials to ensure women’s physiology is taken into account) do not appeal to people who think Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick epitomize “merit.”

Increasingly “DEI” in the MAGA dictionary has come to mean “Blacks” or “women” or “a convenient scapegoat who represents the ‘other.’” A plane goes down? DEI. A museum pays tribute to the greatness of Jackie Robinson? DEI.

Increasingly, the anti-DEI mission has become an explicit attempt to blame or erase non-whites, females, and other disenfranchised groups. Remember when they used to oppose “canceling” people and policing speech? MAGA ideologues no longer hide their core belief: that white men are inherently qualified, the “true” history of America has been made by white males, and non-white men are to blame for all calamities.

What Rubin correctly calls a “ham-handed effort to bolster white advantage” doesn’t conceal the obvious. The goal is to resegregate America, to return the country to what White Christian Nationalists believe is the proper, “Godly” order of things: dominance of White Christian Males over everyone else. As Rubin notes, if we had any doubts of that goal, Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s Executive Order 11375 gives the game away.

LBJ’s Executive Order “gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to ensure equal opportunity for people of color and women in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, training and other employment practices,” The point was simple; if the federal government was contracting with private firms, it had the right to demand that those firms refrain from discriminating. If the composition of the relevant workforce was markedly different from local demographics, that didn’t necessarily preclude contracting, but the business would need to show that it had taken affirmative steps to recruit a more representative workforce.

In other words, the government wasn’t going to use our tax dollars to reward intentional discrimination.

As Rubin points out,

The anti-DEI crusade seems aimed to repeal the fundamental statutory and constitutional protections that prohibit discrimination and give meaning to “All men are created equal.” After all, if the MAGA crowd really wanted to root out unfairness and promote merit they would insist we reject unqualified white appointees and dump legacy admissions at colleges and universities schools. Instead, the anti-DEI crusade aims to bolster white entitlement and eradicate any sense of obligation to right society’s wrongs.

The war against “DEI” and the effort to make “woke” an epithet are intended to cloak MAGA’S racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism with neutral language, to pretend that efforts to address systemic inequalities are the problem, not the inequalities themselves.

Ironically, in voting their fears and bigotries, MAGA folks voted to retreat from the foundational principles that really did make America great.

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About Those Tariffs

All Americans have been getting an education about economics, and specifically tariffs. Some Americans–those who voted for Trump or who didn’t bother to vote–are also getting a rude awakening. (It turns out that it really does matter who holds political office…)

I have not encountered a single reputable economist who doesn’t agree that tariffs are really taxes on the American public, or who believes that their imposition will revive American manufacturing and provide Americans with good jobs. The jobs promise is particularly obtuse; even if the tariffs did result in more factories being built in the U.S.–which is highly unlikely for a number of reasons–anyone who has been watching the manufacturing sector will confirm that its workers are being steadily replaced by automation.

Perhaps the most concise and convincing case against the stupidity–the insanity– of Trump’s tanking of an economy that was the envy of the globe was this brief talk by Fareed Zakaria. 

Rather than indulge in my usual prolonged rant, I am urging you to click on the link and listen to a calm and convincing explanation of why the world of hurt we are all experiencing isn’t temporary and won’t–can’t–lead to Trump’s imaginary rosy future.

If one of our occasional MAGA trolls happens to be reading this, and discounts Zakaria, who is, after all, not just a member of the hated media, but eminently sane and reasonable (qualities anathema to MAGA), how about listening to Ronald Reagan on the subject?

So much winning…

My own rants will resume tomorrow…..

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Politics And The Cities

Conversations over the last couple of weeks have focused my attention on a troubling aspect of political life that has been receiving less attention recently, due to the Trump/Musk hourly assaults on America’s government and constitution– the social and political divides between urban, suburban and rural Americans.

I recently ran into an old acquaintance who used to live near me, in the heart of the city. She’d subsequently moved to the very edge of suburbia, to an area one might characterize as “rural adjacent,” and in our catch-up conversation, she noted that several of her neighbors were afraid to go downtown (in one case, admitting to a fear of traveling south of 56th Street). Her new neighbors seemed amazed that she’d survived her years as an urban resident, and seemed unwilling to believe her description of urban life as safe.

Paul Krugman recently addressed that mindset. He began by describing a recent “evening out” in New York.

I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.

Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?

Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.

Krugman documented the safety of his city, but he recognized that offering such evidence has become political, because trash talking about cities and urban life has become a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric.

According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.

The data confirms Krugman’s point, which raises the question, why has trash-talking about urban life become a MAGA theme?Krugman says that Trump’s hostility to immigrants impels him to portray urban areas with large numbers of immigrants as  crime-ridden dystopias. While that is undoubtedly part of it, it would be a mistake to ignore a more obvious motive: Trump’s constant efforts to restore White males to dominance over other Americans.

Black people, immigrants and various other “Others” tend to live in cities. Suburban developments and gated communities are slowly becoming more diverse racially, but not economically. Some small towns in Indiana have seen an influx of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, but they are the exception. When someone says they are “afraid” to come into an urban core, they are really communicating a belief that “those people” are dangerous. They might make an exception for the Black doctor who can afford the mini-mansion down the street, but they’re sure that their neighbor is unrepresentative.

There’s a reason that virtually every city in the U.S. with a population of 500,000 and above is Blue on political maps, and virtually every rural precinct is Red. Those of us who live with that dread word–diversity–are comfortable with the varied fabric of life produced by a diverse demography. Most of us celebrate it. We find that our daily lives are enriched, not threatened, by encounters with interesting people who don’t look or pray (or eat) like us. We are less likely than our rural relatives to believe that difference translates to threat, and more likely to enjoy the expanded foods, perspectives and entertainments that those differences offer.

We’re also more likely to accept the necessity of government. I still recall an observation I once read to the effect that when you live down an unpaved road a mile or so from your nearest neighbor, and throw your dinner scraps out the back door for the dogs and other critters, you tend to discount the importance of a government that provides services like roads and garbage collection.

Obviously, not every rural resident is fearful or racist, and plenty of urban dwellers are both–but the Blue and Red of that political map is instructive. MAGA is essentially a rural phenomenon.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the full effect of Trump’s insane economic policies hit the rural folks who have been voting their racial animosities rather than their economic interests.

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The War On Medical Knowledge

This administration is waging a war on all sorts of research, scholarship and expertise.

MAGA Republicanism has long been an enemy of that hated “elitist” devotion to knowledge and empiricism (remember Scott Walker’s attacks on the University of Wisconsin and the “Wisconsin Idea”? He wanted to change the description of the University’s purpose from “basic to every purpose of the (University of Wisconsin) system is the search for truth” to “meet[ing] the state’s workforce needs.” )

If there remains any doubt about MAGA’s animus toward scholarship and the search for truth, one need only look at Trump’s all-out attacks on Universities and the judiciary. The universities’ commitment to empirical fact and the courts’ commitment to “fact-based” analysis are incompatible with the madman’s desire to impose his own prejudices on the American public.

Perhaps the clearest–and most horrifying– example of Trump’s assault on knowledge and expertise has been his enthusiastic facilitation of RFK Jr.’s assault on medical research, including but not limited to cancer research.

As The Washington Post recently reported,

A federal judge might have paused President Donald Trump’s attempt to slash about $4 billion for biomedical research funding through the National Institutes of Health, but the uncertainty created by the administration is already taking an immense toll on science.

Many schools and institutions have preemptively implemented cost-cutting measures in anticipation of losing funding down the line. This will, of course, curtail all sorts of crucial research happening now on disease treatments and preventions. But it will also have reverberations for years to come — potentially affecting an entire generation of future scientists.
 
The NIH has announced cancellation of its prestigious internship program–a program that gave more than 1,000 college students the opportunity to work at the agency each summer–and the National Science Foundation has downsized its research program for undergraduates. Countless doctors and medical scientists owe their careers to these programs.
 
 
Johns Hopkins University said Thursday it had begun laying off more than 2,000 workers across the globe after the institution lost $800 million in federal grants cut by the Trump administration.

As the administration has slashed funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), perhaps no institution of higher education has been hit harder than Johns Hopkins. Among the programs targeted were a $50 million project to treat HIV while experimenting with machine learning in India and a $200 million grant to treat one of the world’s most deadly diseases in thousands of children.
 
Several other media outlets have reported on Trump Administration’s cuts to cancer and Alzheimer’s research funding, including the termination of a $5 million grant to the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. DOGE has listed that amount among DOGE’s “savings.” The vicious cuts to medical research have included pediatric cancer research funding.
 
 
The Trump administration’s effort to reshape the federal government through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is raising fears among public health experts, researchers and advocacy groups of a massive brain drain and dire impacts to public health. 
 
Termination letters hit the inboxes of thousands of workers across health agencies in just the past week as the administration took a sledgehammer to the federal government.  

The employees worked on projects including studying infectious diseases, medical device safety, food safety, lowering health costs and improving maternal health outcomes. All of them are now out of a job.  

“The federal government has a huge footprint. [These layoffs] will interrupt all fields of research. Every phase of our scientific endeavor has been interrupted, including that research that is essential for our national security,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.  

MAGA’s Christian Nationalists evidently want to take us back to the days when “good Christians” like Cotton Mather understood diseases like smallpox to be evidence of God’s displeasure….

To believe the Trump/Musk assault is on “fraud and waste” would require us to re-define those terms. “Waste” in Musk jargon is defined as any program with which he disagrees. The fact that Congress chose to establish a program or pursue a goal is entirely beside the point, as is that pesky Constitutional provision vesting Congress–not DOGE– with exclusive authority over fiscal matters.

If there is one thing that distinguishes MAGA and its White Christian Nationalists from the rest of us, it is a seething resentment of those who differ, and especially those they consider “elitists”–defined not as people with money, (they  worship oligarchs, no matter how obviously ignorant) but people with knowledge and expertise. 

They’re thrilled with Trump’s destruction of our government, and they evidently don’t worry that they’ll get cancer…or measles.

 
 
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What Real Conservatives Understand

Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. He recently penned an essay titled “Democracy Dies in Dumbness”–a take-off the Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That essay made two points I’ve tried to convey here.

Genuine conservatives, like Stephens, are appalled by what is being done by the MAGA radicals who are routinely identified as conservative. MAGA, Trump and Musk are anything but, and to label them such is an affront to actual conservatives. The second point–and the one amply documented in Stephens’ essay– is that the most obvious element of this horrific administration is its profound stupidity.

A lot of people, especially well-meaning “libruls,” strain to find some nefarious logic to the disasters Trump is perpetrating in Washington–some evidence that he’s an “evil genius,” or at the very least operating with some sort of intent, misplaced though it may be. To this I say bullfeathers! He’s ignorant, very stupid and also very clearly mentally ill. (I leave it to each of you to decide what that says about those in his devoted MAGA base.)

Stephens detailed much of the ignorance:

It used to be common knowledge — not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history — that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase “beggar thy neighbor” meant something to regular people, as did the names of Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.

Until Donald Trump. Until him, no U.S. president had been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president had been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice.

Stephens labels Trump “a willful, erratic and heedless president,” and says he’s prepared to risk both the U.S. and the global economy “to make his ideological point.” I disagree with him only on his evident belief that Trump has an “ideological point.”  I really doubt that Trump could spell ideological, let alone that he possess an articulable “point” he wants to make. He acts solely out of grievance, racism, anger and an insatiable desire for attention–as the inconsistency of his impulsive and damaging actions show, there is no coherent belief system motivating any of this.

Stephens does take on the obvious stupidity:

The Department of Government Efficiency won’t end well. It is neither a department nor efficient — and “government efficiency” is, by Madisonian design, an oxymoron. A gutted I.R.S. work force won’t lower your taxes; it will delay your refund. Mass firings of thousands of federal employees won’t result in a more productive work force; it will mean a decade of litigation and billions of dollars in legal fees. High-profile eliminations of wasteful spending (some real, others not) won’t make a dent in federal spending; they’ll mask the untouchable drivers of our $36 trillion debt: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense.

Just as you don’t cure cancer by shutting down cancer research, walking away from NATO won’t achieve greater security for anyone, including ourselves. What passes for Trumpian foreign policy has already done incalculable damage. His “policy”– centered on cozying up to Russia– is monumentally stupid; as Stephens notes, what Trump has achieved internationally is a Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold, and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.

In his last paragraph, Stephens makes a point with which I entirely agree.

Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.

I just hope that there will be a government to salvage when we finally eject Trump, Musk, the clown show they’ve assembled and the sorry bunch of Christian Nationalists and elected invertebrates who continue to enable them.

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