Tag Archives: MAGA

The Difference Between Red And Blue

Sensible people who follow politics have abandoned what was–in more civil times–reasonable advice. We used to be urged to vote for individual candidates rather than voting a straight ticket based on party. When there was considerable overlap between Republicans and Democrats, and voters could anticipate bipartisan support for policies, voting for the person made some sense.

It no longer does. 

Republican candidates today come in two flavors, and only two flavors: rabid MAGA White Supremacists and spineless suck-ups. Even if  GOP candidate A seems less than enthusiastic about Christian Nationalism, there is zero likelihood that Candidate A will depart from the party line. Any vote for any Republican is a vote for MAGA, full stop.

Permit me to share two relevant examples.

At the very top of the GOP ticket we have Trump and his Vice-Presidential candidate, JD Vance. That Vice-Presidential choice is consequential, because Trump is old, and–in addition to his more and more obvious senility–clearly unhealthy. If he is elected, Vance, who has only a few months of experience in government, would likely become President.

And what do we know about him, other than his opposition to abortion for any reason and his disdain for childless cat ladies? Well, Talking Points Memo recently shared his cozy connection to Neo-Nazis.

Vance has had a six-figure stake in Rumble, an online video platform. The company has played host to Russian propaganda and to far-right personalities like Stew Peters and Tim Pool. It has also featured even more extreme content, including explicitly neo-Nazi images and themes like this song touting the “Reich” and calling for Jews to be placed in ovens from a “dissident rapper” with a dedicated page on the site. The site features a plethora of channels and videos dedicated to the concept of “white genocide,” which is a core belief for white supremacists. It also hosts channels for explicitly white supremacist organizations including VDare and Patriot Front, which has led masked demonstrations around the country. 

Nice guy. Not. (And that lack of niceness–that weirdness— becomes especially obvious when contrasted with uber-nice coach Tim Walz.)

Here in Indiana, we have Micah Beckwith, self-identified Christian Nationalist, on a ticket with MAGA Mike Braun, fellow theocrat Jim Banks and far-right sleaze Todd Rokita.  The entire ticket is terrifying, but–credit where “credit” is due–Beckwith is willing to put his bigotries front and center. On his website, he has posted a diatribe attacking both the LGBTQ+ community and those faux Christians who counsel acceptance of their gay neighbors.

The entire essay, titled HOMOSEXUALITY, MARRIAGE, AND SEXUAL IDENTITY, is breathtaking in its arrogance. 

A reaffirmation of biblical teachings has become all the more urgent because writers sympathetic to the LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender) communities have advanced revisionist interpretations of relevant biblical texts that are based upon biased exegesis and mistranslation. In effect, they seek to set aside almost two thousand years of Christian biblical interpretation and ethical teachings. We believe these efforts are reflective of the conditions described in 2 Timothy 4:3, “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” 

In other words, if mainstream theologians disagree with those who wrote this, well, they’re clearly wrong! Only fundamentalists like Beckwith understand what God demands…The essay asserts that “there is abundant evidence that homosexual behavior, along with illicit heterosexual behavior, is immoral and comes under the judgment of God,” and it continues with several lengthy sections explaining why all gay people are disgusting sinners.

Beckwith has made clear his firm conviction that not only are his religious beliefs the only correct ones, they are beliefs that government must impose on the rest of us. During his brief “service” on a Hamilton County library board, he demanded that books portraying gay people be excluded from the collection, and that other materials in conflict with his rather peculiar notions of godliness be censored. Beckwith rejects the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State.

Vance and Beckwith are entirely representative of today’s GOP. 

The disclosure of Project 2025–produced by multiple Trump allies and lauded by Vance–opened a window into the GOP’s  obsessions and hatreds. Forget e pluribus unum. Forget the Bill of Rights. These are people who firmly believe that American law should privilege their retrograde beliefs–and that anyone who isn’t a straight White “Christian” male should be excluded from the equal protection of the laws. 

In November, voters will choose between the America envisioned by the Founders (Blue) and the theocratic fantasies of MAGA as exemplified by JD Vance and Micah Beckwith (Red).  

Vote Blue.

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What Is Merit?

You’ve got to give Trump “credit” for one thing: he publicly expresses all the most vile racist tropes embraced by the MAGA movement. His attack on Kamala Harris as a “DEI” candidate is on a par with his constant assertions that people of color are either criminals or bums (or “not the finest” people…). Too bad America doesn’t get more immigration from Norway…

One of the most persistent accusations that bigots like Trump level at efforts aimed at erasing the structural effects of decades of discrimination is that such efforts necessarily disregard merit–that attempts to diversify a workforce or a student body inevitably result in a less-effective workforce or a “dumbed down” classroom.

The problem with that accusation is that it rests on a deeply-held conviction that merit is something that “those people” obviously lack, rather than on an accurate understanding of what constitutes merit and how we measure it.

Persuasion recently featured an interview between Yascha Mounk and Simon Fanshawe on just that topic. Fanshawe does a good deal of diversity work rooted in the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and other Enlightenment figures, and Mounk asked him how his approach differs from other diversity efforts. Fanshowe responded that “diversity inclusion” is about trying to understand what people’s different experiences bring to joint enterprises.

What organizations or businesses really have is a bunch of strangers brought together to achieve a common objective, whether it’s making pizzas or teaching a course at university or putting a man or woman on the moon. And my proposition to them is that it’s through their differences, what they each differently bring to that task and its different components—that’s why diversity matters. And one further thing that I would say is that there’s a key difference when we think about this notion of diversity. We think about the deficits. In other words, you can look at data and you could look at where the imbalances are between different groups of people. But there’s another element of this which is the diversity dividend, and that’s what happens when you start to combine the differences. Diversity is absolutely a talent strategy if you’d like to achieve common objectives.

When Mounk questioned him about the widespread notion that diversity efforts necessarily downplay merit-based hiring, Fanshawe’s response was, in my opinion, exactly right.

What I would say is that you need to think about what you mean by merit. In other words, what do you value and what people are able to bring it into organizations? Typically what you have is that merit is largely based on a technical notion, on a professional skill notion. They will bring that technical skill. But the truth of it is there’s a kind of skill threshold when you’re trying to fill a job or create a team. But then the question is, what else is that person bringing? And I’m not suggesting, ever, that people should be recruited because of who they are. I’m saying that, actually, it’s not who they are that matters. It’s what they bring through who they are…

 So what I would say is that if we start to think of merit as being that combination of skill and then also the knowledge of that and the experience you bring through who you are and your personality, then what you start to do is to combine a number of things with other people. So it’s important to recognise that the members of certain groups and certain members of those groups experience disadvantage. But it’s not a uniform experience. It’s not an all-day experience. I often say that the thing about prejudice for lesbians and gays is we might experience discrimination every day, but we don’t any longer experience it all day.

Let’s reevaluate merit, because what you often have in jobs is that people have an assumption about the merit that’s required for the job. They then recruit to that assumption and that assumption is never challenged. And in effect what it can do is cut out people who actually have got enormous amounts of talent they could bring to that job but they’re just not perceived as being suitable for it.

That last paragraph really speaks to the issue of prejudice. Not prejudice for or against certain groups of people, but the “pre-judging” that so often occurs in formulating job descriptions. What are the skills this job really requires? If that skill list is too narrow, the business or organization will overlook applicants who would be enormous assets.

Of course, the MAGA cult doesn’t consider such possibilities.

Like Trump, they define “merit” as White skin, a penis, and a “Christian” label.

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How Conspiracy Theories Work

I have a confession to make. In the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life, my first reaction was suspicion that he’d arranged the whole thing. After all, it would be just like him to produce a scenario where he could play the brave victim…and with the death of the shooter, there would be no evidence…

Okay–not my finest moment. But a cursory scan of my FaceBook page provided evidence that I wasn’t the only person open to similar fantasies, and that, in turn, led me to consider just how America got to the stage where conspiracy theories have more force and impact than facts.

An interesting experiment sheds some light on that inquiry: a while back, The New Republic ran an article detailing a “prank” that illustrated how such theories spread. The article began:

Bird propaganda is everywhere, once you’re trained to recognize it. Since the Cold War, children have eaten their breakfast cereals with Toucan Sam and spent their after-school hours learning at Big Bird’s oversize feet. Television has streamed into our homes and onto our smartphones under the strutting sign of NBC’s rainbow peacock. Penguins gaze out at us from our bookshelves. Eagles, the government insists, are patriotic symbols of strength and freedom. Duolingo uses an earnest but irritating green owl to engineer our digital behavior and shame us into learning rudimentary Portuguese.

As you catch your breath from this unnerving revelation, you should also know that there is a growing movement online determined to reveal the truth: that none of this is benign, none of it accidental. That Americans are being birdwashed into docility and obedience.

Calling itself Birds Aren’t Real, this group of primarily Gen Z truthers swaps ­memes and infographics on social media (the official accounts boast more than 800,000 followers on TikTok and 400,000 on Instagram), challenges the powers that be with combative media appearances, and holds rallies across the country. They explain that the U.S. government secretly ran a “mass bird genocide” starting in the late 1950s, replacing the real avian population with sophisticated surveillance-drone look-alikes. Bird-watching now goes both ways.

The group’s leaders even published a book, in which they “revealed” that the government’s bird genocide plot was hatched by “notorious CIA director Allen Dulles—when he wasn’t spearheading the MK-Ultra mind-control program.” They provided “evidence” of the complicity of presidents from Eisenhower to Biden, and a field guide for recognizing bird-drones in the “wild.”

“Birds Aren’t Real” was an elaborate prank, what the article calls “a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon–an experiment in misinformation. And it demonstrates the elements needed for a successful conspiracy theory. First of all, it offers a “theory of everything”—a way for people to make sense of the world’s complexity and contradictions, to tie up all the loose ends. Good conspiracy theories offer “arguments by adjacency,” meaning that arguably related credible facts are used to “prove” wilder claims, “offering just enough truth to make you wonder.”

Finally, successful conspiracy theories are able to perform a kind of psychic alchemy for their followers. On the one hand, they drain pleasure from everyday life. Nothing can be innocent; everything is wrapped up in the plot. QAnon supporters pull away from friends and family, convinced that the people they most love have become satanic cultists. Birds Aren’t Real tells you that you can’t enjoy simple joys like nature walks and bird-watching, family Christmases (eating turkey is “ritualized bird worship”), or even your pets. People with birds at home are advised “to calmly pack your things in the middle of the night and leave. Make sure your bird does not see you leave.” Your pet bird never loved you, for it was merely a government drone-robot, but at least now the imminent danger has passed.

The article notes that conspiracy theories offer people agency in a world that seems fallen to pieces, and it reports and analyzes the efforts underway to combat them. It’s a fascinating–albeit somewhat depressing–read.

When I thought about the elements needed for wide acceptance of a conspiracy theory, I realized mine lacked them. My reaction was more a suspicion than a theory–it didn’t explain everything (like why anyone sane thinks Trump is fit to be President); the only available “argument from adjacency” is that Trump, who lies constantly, is demonstrably capable of inventing and spreading misinformation. And my theory would hardly offer agency to those of us who are shocked and saddened by realizing that large numbers of our fellow Americans are drinking Trump’s Kool-Aid.

There’s probably a lot of overlap between MAGA folks and those who believe that Birds Aren’t Real….

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Losing My Faith

I used to have faith in the good will and common sense of my fellow citizens. Over the past several years, I’ve lost that faith.

Good will?? The MAGA zealots who have taken over a previously normal political party routinely engage in outlandish accusations and escalating calls for violence. As David Frum recently wrote,

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television…


Common sense??? Chris Lamb is a journalist professor at IU-Indianapolis who has documented (at length) the ridiculous “facts” that Republicans have to believe in order to cling to their insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. 

Lamb began by referencing the Washington Post’s compendium of Trump’s lies–over 30 thousand of them– during his four-year presidency, and linked to the newspaper’s accessible data base of those lies. And as he reminds us, that figure was restricted to public statements.

There is no point fact-checking Trump because he uses no facts.

There is as much evidence that Donald Trump led American troops on D-Day as there is evidence that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.

And yet, as he points out, two-thirds of Republicans say Biden’s win of that election was illegitimate. In a post replete with links to sources of his evidence, Lamb deconstructs that claim, and enumerates the multiple ridiculous assertions that must be accepted as true in order to believe it.

The post points out what should be obvious: for one thing, that the massive award against Fox News for defamation could not have been won had there been any probative evidence of election fraud. (As he writes, “It’s worth noting that the truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. If  news sites – and I use that word loosely – told the truth they would have been immune from defamation lawsuits”). He also points out that a significant number of the sixty-plus cases dismissed for lack of any evidence were heard–and dismissed–by judges Trump appointed.

Lamb’s post provides a meticulous and documented list of the claims MAGA folks have embraced, and copious evidence of their falsity. I won’t recite that whole list–which I encourage you to click through and read–but to say it is discouraging is an understatement.

The unanswered question, of course, is: what percentage of the American population actually believes these things? How many of my fellow Americans have listened to both Biden and Trump, to Democratic and Republican political figures, and actually concluded that Democratic rhetoric has stoked violence? What percentage of American voters truly thinks the 2020 election was stolen, despite a total and complete absence of any corroborating evidence?

And what is wrong with that cohort? Why do they cling to beliefs that are so clearly unsupported by reality?

So yes, until relatively recently, I was confident that most people in this country were people of good will and common sense. Yes, we have always had fringe elements–the bigots of the far Right and far Left, the discontented, fearful and well-armed “Second Amendment” contingent, the scary theocrats like Beckwith and Banks– but I used to believe those people constituted a relatively small part of our body politic.

In the age of MAGA, It’s harder and harder to believe that.

I tell myself that these deluded souls really are a minority; that it is only because they are so loud and “in our faces” that they seem so numerous, but it gets harder and harder to convince myself that the sort of people with whom I regularly interact (on this site and in “real life”)–people who are, by and large, normal, measured and evidence-based –are the real majority.

If they aren’t–if the hordes of angry MAGA Christian Nationalists return Trump to power–the rest of us will lose more than faith in our fellow Americans. We will lose America.

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Deconstructing America

The Founders would be dumbfounded.

Remember what you learned (maybe) in high school government class about the three “co-equal” branches of government? Well, our rogue Supreme Court says that was wrong–that judges should be the imperial, all-powerful arbiters of national life, because they know far better than the experts serving in various government agencies what government can (or really, cannot) do about elements of our common lives like air and water quality, unfair competition…you name it.

I have previously explained what was at stake in a case challenging what is called “the Chevron doctrine.” But Robert Hubbell’s Substack letter explains better than I could the appalling, immensely negative consequences of Friday’s decision over-ruling that doctrine, and I am going to quote liberally from his explanation/diatribe.

You will be able to tell your grandchildren that you lived through a judicial revolution that rewrote the Constitution to suit the financial interests of corporate America and the social agenda of an extremist minority that fetishizes guns, hates government, and seeks to impose their narrow religious views on all Americans. The open question in 2024 and beyond is whether we will reverse that revolution. The first step is to understand the earth-shaking consequences of the Court’s ruling…

The Roberts Court has anointed the judiciary as the ascendant branch of government. The person of the president—not the executive branch—is nearly omnipotent in Roberts’ schema. Congress has been neutered…

The US economy is the largest in the world by a wide margin. That size is attributable in no small measure to (a) the orderly markets and business conditions created by federal regulations and (b) the comparatively corruption-free nature of the US economy (also attributable to federal regulations).

Managing and maintaining the immense US economy is a monumental undertaking. We need regulations that control how and when fish stocks can be harvested, where medical waste can be stored, how thick concrete must be on bridge spans, what type and color of insulation must protect electrical wires, what temperature meat must be kept at when being transported across the country, and what type of information can be collected and stored in a retail transaction.

Multiply those issues by a million, and you will have a vague sense of the complexity and scale of the US economy….

Those millions of regulatory decisions demand broad and deep expertise by career professionals with advanced degrees and years of experience in their field of regulation. That expertise resides in the federal agencies housed in the executive branch under the president..Businesses hate federal regulation because they impose a trade-off: protecting the health and safety of Americans by reducing the maximum profits unrestrained businesses could earn in the short term in an unregulated economy.

The so-called “administrative state” of federal agencies has been wildly successful. It is why all international airline pilots speak English when flying between countries across the globe. It is why the US dollar is the world’s currency. It is why the world’s science, technology, and innovation hubs are located in the US. It is why every Chinese corporation that goes public in China has the goal of transferring from the Chinese stock exchanges to the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, and the Chicago Options Exchange as soon as possible…

As Hubbell writes, Friday’s decision dramatically reduces the power of Congress by requiring that legislation be as specific as an instruction manual. Under Chevron, when Congress directed the Executive Branch to achieve a desired goal, agency personnel with deep expertise in the relevant area would determine how best to reach that goal. If a regulation was challenged, the Court could strike it down if evidence showed it was unreasonable, but absent such evidence, the courts  deferred to the agency’s interpretation.

Hubbell provides an example:

If the Court requires Congress to specify the precise number of salmon that can be taken from the Klamath River each year rather than saying that the NOAA Fisheries Department shall establish fishing quotas to maintain healthy fish populations in inland waterways, Congress’s work will grind to a halt. Members of Congress have neither the time nor expertise to determine a healthy fish population for each inland waterway in the US. In the absence of “the administrative state,” Congress (or the courts) must serve as the regulators of the millions of daily transactions governed by federal regulations.

In the future, when a business challenges a regulation, federal judges rather than agency experts will interpret and apply–or more likely, overturn– the regulation. We’ve seen the arrogance and fact-free behavior of recent, ideologically-driven judicial appointees. 

The Trump judges on the Supreme Court have accomplished things near and dear to the Rightwing heart. In addition to dramatically undermining the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, they have substantially deconstructed the checks and balances of the Founders’ government structure. They certainly aren’t “originalists” in any sense that matters.

At best, it will take years–generations–to undo the damage. At worst, a Trump win in November and implementation of Project 2025, would foreclose any possibility of enlarging or otherwise restraining this rogue Court and beginning to reverse the enormous damage it has caused.

What is truly terrifying is how few Americans seem to understand the stakes.

This election is a choice between an elderly man who has been an exemplary President but a poor debater and an equally elderly man who, in service to his own monumental ego and his rabid White Christian Nationalist base, is intent upon destroying America as we know it. 

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